The Thanatos Syndrome

couples’ counseling. You could do it and you’d be helping yourselves while helping others. Was I being sarcastic? Not altogether. They’d been battling so long, they knew all the tactics of marital warfare. Ex-soldiers, after all, keep the peace better than politicians. Look at MacArthur in Japan, Eisenhower in Washington.
    We laughed. And they did! And they got so involved in other couples’ fights, they stopped fighting each other. They started something called Beta House out in the country. I talked Enrique Busch into letting them have a great barn with stables at the time Enrique was quitting polo and taking up golf. I did it by lying, that is, by not telling Enrique who Debbie was, that is, an ex-Maryknoller from El Salvador, or telling Debbie who Enrique was, a member of the famous fourteen families—they would have wanted to shoot each other on the spot—but by telling Enrique that Debbie’s father had founded the White Citizens’ Council in Feliciana, which he had, and by telling Debbie that Enrique had deep feelings for the people of El Salvador, which he did.
    So Beta House was founded in a barn, the stables converted to intimate bedrooms for estranged couples, the loft to an encounter room. Painted on the side of the barn was the logo they’d agreed upon, a yin-yang centered between two hearts, the yin-yang a concession to Kev’s Eastern leanings, the two hearts expressing Debbie’s notions about dialoguing and centeredness. Two hearts centered on a yin-yang.
    So here they are three years later:
    They’re pleased to see me and I them. There is no space of irony between us. I wish them well and they me. They’re as lovey now as they were fractious before. They sit side by side on my couch, holding hands and feeling each other up—which generally gives me a pain but doesn’t now because it’s an improvement over the mayhem.
    â€œHow does it go?” I ask them.
    â€œWow,” they say; both, I think. They look at each other and laugh. Then, putting on serious faces, they utter little noises of gratitude, not sentences, but exclamations: “Dear Doc,” “Our Doc,” “Oh boy, Almond Joy,” and suchlike. It seems I saved their marriage. It seems I get credit for the barn and Beta House, even though I only made a single, not quite serious suggestion, mainly to get rid of them. No more talk of Wicca.
    â€œVery good,” I say presently. “I’m glad things are going so well. You both look fine. But what can I do for you? I can’t imagine that you need anything further from me.”
    Secret looks between them, more laughter, again an instant sobering up, and they make their request.
    Do you know what they want from me? A prescription for Alanone, the new Smith, Kline & French polyvalent vaccine which confers some immunity against both the lymphadenopathy virus of LAV-III and the glycoprotein D of Herpes II.
    Without turning a hair and in the same smiling voice of our newfound friendship, I ask them why they need it. “I thought you were running a couples’ retreat.”
    â€œCouples’ community,” they both correct me. Kev makes certain noises of demurral, but Debbie says quickly and as if she were reading it, “It is also an open community. We do not discourage creative relationships across stereotypical bonding. We find that open relationships, entered into maturely, enrich rather than impoverish the traditional one-on-one bonding.”
    I do not say something derisive as I might have two years ago, but merely reflect a moment, sigh, and reach for my PDR, the physicians’ big red book—what do I know about creative relationships or pills and vaccines?—and write them a prescription for— How many do you want? “Three hundred,” says Kev; “Four hundred,” says Debbie. I make it four hundred. After all, better not to have than to have LAV-AIDS and Herpes II.
    Somewhat abstracted, I forget to run the simplest test on them, a dominant-eye test or an out-of-context language test, like: Where is Ketchum, Idaho? (They’d know, because the Bhagwan had hung out there.) I have no doubt that either would have told me instantly and as merrily as a four-year-old, eyes rolled up to consult their interior brain maps. I’ll test them later.
    Absently, I receive their hugs and thanking noises and watch from the windows as they depart in their old Econoline