Tami Beethoven

He found it hard to concentrate on the buttress after that. Some time later he called Tami to say he would be working late. He hated lying to her. Fortunately it was on the phone. One should never lie to Tami, after all the lies she had been told, and lying to her face would just be impossible.

At seven o'clock, with a feeling of foreboding that had become overwhelming, Rod stepped into the office that used to belong to that old dignified German guy, Dr. Schnitzler. His successor, Dr. Abu Jamal, of a different race and culture but equally diginifed, greeted him. The room was just like before, portraits of old guys with beards, red textured wallpaper, elegant upholstered furniture, a small bar with brandy snifters to the side. He sat on the plush cushion of the Louis XVI style armchair.

Seated next to Dr. Abu Jamal's desk was Dr. Kantor. It was he who spoke.

"Mr. Sykes. . . Tami's allergy is advancing. Significantly."

Part 49

Rod felt his shaved scalp prickle. Tami's allergy -- advancing? How is that possible? She already was allergic to the tiniest scrap of clothing. She couldn't even put one foot into a flip-flop.

Dr. Kantor, a tall white man of about 60 with a closely-trimmed white beard, brought out a laptop and switched it on. "We have been monitoring Tami's GSR, that's galvanic skin response, twice a week. I think you were actually at one of these sessions, as I remember." Yes, he was, once. It was a disorienting experience, seeing Tami standing on a lab table, clutching a metal bar overhead, while Dr. Kantor and a couple of assistants passed loops of fabric around her.

On the screen of the laptop appeared a close-up of the top part of Tami's body, her face down to her breasts, nipples puckered up and even harder than usual. Her arms were evidently stretched out to the side, as if they were tied to posts. The background was gray and metallic and misty, like she was in a sauna maybe. Her face was passive, eyes closed, her hair tied back. Oddly, her face and breasts and bare shoulders had a purplish tinge. In the lower right corner, a little graph that looked like an equalizer graph you see on recording equipment, low vertical bars that were a placid green.

The image was disturbing, especially when he saw Tami's breath come out in little clouds and now an insulated gloved hand drew in front of her with a little swatch of what looked like fur. The room she was in was not hot but actually bitter cold!

"This is imitation fur," Dr. Kantor said, "used because of its ability to afford warmth."

Rod was a bit angry. "She's -- cold -- "

"Yes," Dr. Abu Jamal broke in, "to accentuate the natural desire for covering, we have held many sessions in our cryogenic chamber."

Dr. Kantor chuckled, "Commonly known in the restaurant trade as a walk-in freezer. Of course, it's easier to get grant money for a 'cryogenic chamber'. During this session the temperature was, I believe, minus ten degrees Celsius."

"But -- " Rod was about to protest when he saw Tami's breathing get heavier as the fur was drawn closer to her left nipple. The clouds shot out from her nostrils, then her mouth. In the corner, the little bars leapt up into the yellow zone and then, briefly, into the red. Then the gloved hand drew away the fur and Tami heaved as if in relief. During all this time, her eyes remained closed as if she were in a dream, or maybe trying to think of being on a nice hot beach.

Now the image changed. Tami's bare feet on a block of ice! Her spread toes were very flushed. A contrast with the heavy boots and pants around her. Again, a mere wisp of fake fur was placed near her foot by a gloved hand. The toes spread even more and twitched. He supposed it was an allergic reaction, but one also imagined the freezing toes were agitated and frustrated by the presence of something they so desperately craved.

"I hope she was all right," Rod said.

"Of course," Dr. Kantor said. "You know, of course, that Ms. Smithers is acclimatized to the cold. We were in that chamber for only fifteen minutes."

Now the image changed again to a rainy forest scene, melting snow here and there. The researchers stood in their lab suits and coats, safely dry under umbrellas, as the naked girl carried a large rock on her shoulder up an incline leading to the huge trunk of a tree. It was clearly a strenuous task even for someone of Tami's strength. Rod thought of some guy from Greek mythology, he forgot who, carrying a rock up a hill. Sisyphus? Atlas?

Tami leaned forward under the strain as her bare feet, covered with mud and small twigs, carefully scaled the hill without slipping. She had been out in the rain for a while; her hair was soaked and plastered to her back. Despite his concern Rod could not hide his admiration for the perfectly toned, evenly tanned body, sleek and wet in the rain, and his great luck that this most gorgeous of female creatures should be his wife.

Now another image, the same scene, only this time Tami was carrying a somewhat smaller rock, with a cloth tied around it. She struggled more up the incline this time, then straightened up as if arrested from behind and dropped the rock in front of her. She breathed heavily, her concave tummy heaving in and out as the rain continued to pour onto her hair and drip from her chin and her nipples.

"I think you can deduce what is happening here," Dr. Kantor said, putting the video on "pause". "Tami has an allergic reaction to clothes, as we know. This has been carefully monitored. There have been fluctuations which we first could not explain, but turned out to be due to barometric pressure, academic stresses, even to an extent sunspot activity. But even taking these into account, in the past few months the GSR reactions have gotten noticeably more intense, as well as the loss of strength when cloth approaches her."

"Let me ask you, Rod." Dr. Abu Jamal said, calling Rod by his first name for a change, "Have you noticed any... changes recently."

"Um, no... Wait, yes. One time, a few weeks ago, she tried to touch a towel when coming out of the shower and it was, like a shock. She had to drop it. She said the towel felt like fire."

The two Chalfont doctors looked at him as if expecting to hear this, and expecting more.

"Also, she felt sick and didn't want to sit on the couch. She felt better sitting on the tile floor in the kitchen."

He looked at the still picture on the laptop, Tami standing upright in the rain, looking down past her dripping nipples and muddy feet to the cloth-covered rock in front of her, in front of the clothed researchers. As he continued looking at this freeze frame, he decided she appeared to be in the middle of shrugging her bare shoulders.

"Tami doesn't look too concerned there," Rod said.

"No, she seems to enjoy being naked," Dr. Kantor said. "As you know, any sense of shame was burned out of her long ago, at least to all appearances."

"She doesn't think of herself as naked," Rod said. "She thinks of her hair, that her hair is her clothes." He forced himself to add: "Even her... pubic hair, she thinks she's covered up down there."

Like Brigid, the majorette in those crazy dreams he'd been having. A "uniform" consisting only of tiny circlets barely covering her nipples, a minimal G-string below, skimpy sandals, yet feeling fully dressed and proud to wear her Tunemasters uniform. A modest girl who seemed to have no idea how naked she was. He had been trying to interpret those dreams. Brigid clearly symbolized Tami, and now he saw a similarity. Naked yet not an exhibitionist, in a world of clothed people. Brigid doing difficult twirling routines in the freezing cold while damn near naked, with everyone else's uniforms affording full coverage and with thermals underneath. Tami doing grounds crew work naked and barefoot in the wind and rain while people around her trudged by in their overcoats and boots.

He knew these doctors, at least some of them, were psychiatrists too, and had a fleeting thought of asking them these dreams could mean, what they might say about his own hopes and frustrations and desires.

Dr. Kantor interrupted Rod's thoughts to say, "It's natural that Ms. Smithers would think her hair was her clothes. Seems like a reasonable adaptation, or perhaps rationalization. Young women tend to, if anything, obsess on clothes. They care about how their bodies are adorned and presented to the world. We tested Tami's psychological makeup and it is basically that of normal young woman, so she would be no different."

Dr. Abu Jamal broke in. "But the Chalfont Institute bears a heavy responsibility for the incredible misfortunes that befell Ms. Smithers in her freshman year." Rod could not know this, but at the moment the Pakistani doctor was thinking of how he probed and examined Tami's anus and pussy with Dr. Harridance as she lay spread-legged and naked on that cold steel table in the bright clinical light of Lab 13 upstairs, the terrified and mortified young girl afraid to protest or let slip any evidence of her burning shame. He had never gotten over his guilt and to compensate he was determined to get Tami's allergy cured. In fact, it was he who kept ordering Dr. Kantor to press onward even though no progress was being made. "Ms. Smithers may be happy as a naked woman at Campbell - Frank, a rather protected environment, but she will be under a crushing disability after she graduates."

"Yes." Tami could not fully see that, or maybe was pretending not to see that, but Rod could. He was glad the doctors and he were on the same page.

"It's not just cloth," Dr. Kantor added. He hit a few keys and now the laptop showed a bizarre scene. Tami, standing up on the table, arms at her sides, with a series of metal hoops encircling her, apparently supported by a metal post behind. The hoops were open-ended, the first around her head, then at six-inch intervals, the lowest around her ankles. As Tami stood there in her nakedness, eyes closed, someone twiddled knobs at a console and the hoops slowly closed around her, touching her skin, then opened again, at a regular pace, maybe once a second. It looked like she was being zapped with current, a strange electrocution torture, though her face remained impassive and she stayed motionless.

Now Dr. Kantor typed something and the equalizer bars appeared in the lower right again. They rose almost up to red as the hoops closed, then relaxed to green as they opened.

"You certainly have measured her carefully," Rod said.

Dr. Kantor did not detect the hint of venom in Rod's voice. "It's very important, from a treatment perspective, to get accurate readings. Fortunately Tami's lack of modesty makes it easy to... well, I know I'm sounding like McMasters..." The white professor blushed in embarrassment.

Rod let the silence punish the man for a few seconds before he decided that it was unfair. Kantor hadn't been involved in the McMasters horrors. Tami had once told him so. What they were putting Tami through was with the best of intentions. "You mentioned treatment."

Dr. Abu Jamal said, "It appears that Tami's allergy is to anything covering her or fastened around her, not just to fabric. This indicates that the allergy is not physical but psychological."

"Well that's clear isn't it?" Rod said, challenging them. "How can you treat her if you don't know the cause of the allergy?"

Dr. Abu Jamal and Dr. Kantor looked at each other and then at Rod.

"Actually," Dr. Kantor said, "we now think we do."

Part 50 "This is good coffee, thank you," Rod said. Indeed it was. Better than that swill he had to drink at the trailer.

The three of them -- Rod, Dr. Abu Jamal, and Dr. Kantor, were sitting in the lower part of Dr. Abu Jamal's spacious office, in elegant upholstered chairs around the little table upon which Dr. Abu Jamal's secretary, an older woman named Grette, had placed the coffee set.

"As you pointed out," Dr. Abu Jamal said, "Tami's allergy is psychogenic." Rod felt strange. He did not doubt the sincerity or good intentions of these men, but it was odd for the three of them to be sitting here, in their business clothes, in this elegant setting, discussing their proposals on what to do to a naked girl, someone who did not have a stitch of clothes or shoes to her name.

He pushed these thoughts aside as he forced himself to listen as Dr. Kantor took up what was evidently a well-rehearsed presentation. "The allergy certainly has something to do with the trauma of her freshman year. Tami seems on the outside as a normal girl, I mean young woman, but there is something about her that is unknowable, hidden. Almost Sphinx-like. This is perhaps what everyone senses. I believe it is not simple projection on our part, but an objective reality. In other words, it's not us, it's her. She really IS a little like a Sphinx."

Rod nodded. It was good to know someone else felt the same way.

"The extent of the shame and mortification that Tami endured is almost beyond the comprehension of a normal person. Imagine being brought to orgasm against your will, and forced to look someone like Henry Ross right in the eye at the climactic moment." As Dr. Kantor spoke, Rod remembered that DVD, and closed his eyes and shook his head. "And that is aside from the shame of being forced to walk around naked in public, and on top of that, not being able to show any sign of being shy about it."

"Yes, I know, I know." Rod did not want to be reminded of Tami's trauma, which only reminded him of his guilt at being so blind to it and possibly increasing it unwittingly.

"How could that not have something to do with her allergy?" Dr. Kantor asked rhetorically. "Perhaps it is evidence of a defense mechanism. Either a form of suppressing the shame, or adapting to it, a kind of 'sweet lemon' reaction."

"Sweet lemon?"

"The opposite of 'sour grapes'. 'I'm given this nasty fruit, but actually it's pretty good.'"

"Oh."

"One obvious piece of evidence in support of the 'sweet lemon' theory is her interest in fashion, in designing clothing, even though she can never wear any."

"I think she would admit that. The, uh, psychodynamics are real obvious." Rod felt pompous using such a word, but in this company it seemed fitting.

Dr. Abu Jamal said, "One can also deduce, perhaps, psychic pain from her orgasmic capacity and frequency, which we understand is quite incredible."

"What?" This was hard to follow. "She comes so much because she's in pain?"

The Director of the Chalfont Institute stirred his coffee, sipped it, and set it down. "I speak as a man. Tami has, quite in abundance, the gift that women have for multiple orgasms. I've always been quite jealous of that capacity that women have."

Rod nodded. He barely knew these men, had nothing in common with them, except of course that they were all men. Maybe that explained why they seemed to be, surprisingly, on the same wavelength as he.

"Forgive me for being so intimate, but a man experiences orgasm, ejaculates, and then is quiescent, unable to go further. But women... I ask you to imagine experiencing such an intense climax, and then, a few seconds later, experience another one just as intense? And yet another, a few seconds after that?"

Rod, a little embarrassed, looked down as he nodded.

"I simply cannot imagine how that must feel, after the intense and final catharsis, to continue to be aroused and experience another explosion of pleasure, another final catharsis." Dr. Abu Jamal, stilted and formal, was getting downright eloquent and flowery. Indeed he had always felt a little jealous of Tami's orgasms, a jealousy that competed with guilt knowing that so many of them had been unwanted. "It seems to me like eating a huge chocolate bar, then another, then another. After one bar, I would not want anything sweet for a while.

"But even among multiply orgasmic women, Tami is special. Understandably, given her past, she does not like her orgasms to be counted. But we are aware that there is a small, shall we say, club of female undergraduates who devote themselves to her pleasure."

"Yes, I know," Rod said. He decided to volunteer information which might be helpful. "They're called the, uh, Tami Lickers. Or the 'TL's' for short."

Dr. Abu Jamal and Dr. Kantor nodded, as if they already knew.

"At any rate," Dr. Abu Jamal continued. "We deduce that Tami experiences perhaps thirty orgasms a day, each one considerably longer and more intense than is reported in the literature as average. It could be that her unfortunate imprisonment in the equipment in Lab 6 increased her desire and her capacity. But maybe there is something else going on. Maybe after the chocolate bar, she eats something salty or bitter, so that the next chocolate is welcome, and then she eats something salty again, making her desire another chocolate..."

"I don't follow you."

"Maybe Tami suffers constant, if unconscious, psychic pain. Pain caused by the memory of her freshman year, or perhaps by frustration at not being able to wear clothes, or ongoing shame at being naked which in fact was never burned out of her, which in fact continues to this very day. That would be the salt. And each orgasm is a relief from that pain. That would be the chocolate. Another woman would get to a certain point and say, 'OK, enough orgasms.' But Tami still wants more."

Rod shook his head. "I find this idea of 'unconscious pain' hard to believe."

"As you walked to this meeting this evening," Dr. Kantor said, "you were not conscious of your feet stepping forward, one after the other. Just as one can perform physical actions without being aware of them, one can think thoughts, or experience feelings, without being aware of them."

After pondering this, Rod said, "So you think her capacity is an attempt to get rid of the pain, like an alcoholic who drinks to, uh, banish some memory."

"Not a conscious attempt, but an attempt. Another analogy is, an average woman versus a drowning woman. The average woman paddles as she swims. Each paddle is an orgasm. The drowning woman paddles much faster. A lot more orgasms."

"You think Tami is... desperate, trying not to drown?"

"Unknown," Dr. Kantor said. "Only in-depth psychoanalysis would reveal her inner dynamics. They would be brought to the surface and she would become conscious of them. And that is the comprehensive key to treatment. Find out how her freshman year trauma caused the allergy, and you likely find the solution to curing it. But we dare not. We just dare not."

"Why not?"

Dr. Abu Jamal said, "In the course of therapy one would rip away Tami's defenses. In a sense those are her only remaining vestige of clothes and we would be stripping her even of those. She would once again feel all that shame from her freshman year, a shame that obviously she has suppressed. And what if our guesses are wrong, or there is more going on than we thought to address, and the allergy does not abate at that point? Tami would be naked and ashamed of being naked -- and still not able to put on clothes."

Dr. Kantor said, "To use a surgical analogy, you don't cut someone open unless you know you can sew her up again. Psychotherapy would be a disservice to Tami because we are not sure we have the sutures to sew her up. At worst she would end up a frightened, dysfunctional creature, possibly descending into psychosis, desperately trying to put on clothes she cannot touch without an anaphylactic reaction." Rod had heard that word before used in connection with Tami's allergy. A person could die from an "anaphylactic reaction".

He remembered buying Tami that expensive dress, early in her sophomore year after Ross had left and Jorgon had gotten fired and she was freed of having to pretend she was a nudist. And Tami's pitiful, pathetic reaction as she told him for the first time that she had developed an allergy. "Clothes... please God... clothes..." she had whimpered, falling to the floor and stroking the forbidden fabric. Now, he pictured her in a padded cell, unable to wear a strait-jacket, flailing about, out of her mind, eyes rolled back in her head as she screamed herself hoarse as doctors in their coats and suits watched helplessly through the little window. "CLOTHES! CLOTHES! PLEASE! CLOTHES!!!"