(1987) The Celestial Bed Read Free

I’ll double-check the criminal code, but I’m absolutely certain it’s not against the law. Arnie, this is freedom land. I guarantee it. Now, let’s get going.’
    It worked. It went smoothly. Every aspect of the move worked out.
    Today, four months later, Dr Arnold Freeberg could sit comfortably in his high-backed leather swivel chair behind the wide oak desk covered with a custom-fitted black felt blotter and listen to the muffled sounds of hammering outside the entrance downstairs. The workmen were putting into place the blue and white sign that read, in block letters: FREEBERG CLINIC. The sign was being mounted over two glistening glass doors that led to the reception area.
    Today, too, early this afternoon, Freeberg would be briefing the five new sex surrogates he had selected out of the six he would be using. He wished that his sixth surrogate, his most experienced, the one he had employed in Tucson, could also be here right now. Gayle Miller had agreed to join him, go on with him, in a few weeks, after she had graduated from the University of Arizona. Then she would apply for graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles to get her master’s degree and doctorate in psychology. The imminent appearance of Gayle Miller gave Freeberg confidence. He was certain the new surrogates would be good, but Gayle was a gem — young, attractive, serious, and experienced. She’d been his sex surrogate on all five cases in Tucson and she had been faultless. Every problem male had been discharged to go forward with a normal sex life.
    Absently gathering his notes together, notes he had jotted down in the past few days to remind himself of points he wanted to cover in addressing the new surrogates, Freeberg’s gaze roamed around the walls of his spacious office. There was still the pungent, stinging smell of the fresh paint on the walls. The oak wainscot
    had been stained deep brown to give it a rich panelled look. Hung from the walls, in cream matted frames, were Freeberg’s impressive panoply of idols: Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Theodore H. van de Velde, Marie Stopes, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
    On the nearby wall there was a decorative mirror and Dr Arnold Freeberg’s eyes came to rest on that and on the reflection of himself. Sheepishly he inspected himself - high comb of wiry black hair, somewhat stiff and unruly, thick horn-rimmed spectacles over small myopic eyes, hooked nose, full dark moustache and short beard encircling his fat lips. Fleetingly, closed in by his predecessors, he felt embarrassed. He didn’t measure up to them. Not yet, not yet. But one day soon, perhaps. He believed and he would try.
    His eyes moved to the silver-framed photograph on a corner of his desk. His wife, Miriam, attractive in her mid-thirties, and their smiling son, Jonny, a delight. Freeberg became conscious of his own years, his late fortyishness, late to have a first child, but not really, not actually.
    Giving his head a shake, he drew his notes closer and tried to concentrate on them. Quickly, he skimmed them, then pushed them aside. He knew them all by heart and would not need them for reference when he spoke to his new surrogates.
    He still had fifteen minutes to spare before his five surrogates appeared, and almost as a relaxation he began to review the events of the last four months that had brought him to these moments. He relived those four months in the present.
    Within two weeks of Freeberg’s initial phone call from Tucson to Roger Kile in Los Angeles, Kile had finished his investigations and found the location. Not in Los Angeles proper, as it turned out. Los Angeles was too heavily populated with sex therapists, Kile had learned, and furthermore centrally situated properties were overpriced. But following expert advice - Kile had always been a clever investigator, even in law school at Columbia, and although a tax attorney, his knowledge and interests