(1987) The Celestial Bed Read Free Page A

were widespread — he had found the community in which his friend might prosper an hour north of Los Angeles.
    The community proved to be Hillsdale, California, a burgeoning incorporated city on the coast highway and close to the rolling blue Pacific Ocean. It was a sprawling city of 360,000. There were
    plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists there, but not one sex therapist yet. Roger Kile had been assured, by knowledgeable contacts, that a practice would flourish for any reputable sex therapist who set up shop in Hillsdale with a team of trained and professional sex surrogates. Hillsdale, Kile learned from medical contacts, had more than a fair share of disturbed, troubled, and sexually dysfunctional persons.
    After that, Kile found two well-recommended real estate agents, and they quickly led him to four small office buildings that appeared to be possibilities. Freeberg spotted the perfect building immediately, a vacant two-storey construction abandoned by a clothing store chain, and set in the middle of Market Avenue, three blocks off bustling Main Street. After that, everything fell into place rapidly. Freeberg hired an excellent young architect to remodel the vacant building along the lines of his Tucson clinic. Then Freeberg flew back to Tucson with his wife, to divest himself of the old clinic. Meanwhile, Miriam got rid of their ranch-style house, breaking even.
    They went to Hillsdale four times in the period that followed. While Freeberg stood by to oversee the remodelling of his clinic, Miriam sought a new house and found a wonderful eight-room one-storey residence about three miles from her husband’s offices.
    Immediately, Freeberg began to install the necessary personnel in his clinic. Through an MD nearby, Dr Stan Lopez, a general practitioner that Freeberg had come to respect, Freeberg was able to obtain Suzy Edwards as his personal secretary. Lopez had been using Suzy as a part-time second secretary and knew that she wanted a full-time job. Freeberg interviewed Suzy, a solemn and interested redhead of around thirty. She was eager for the job, and Freeberg had already heard that she was trustworthy. After that he hired Norah Ames as his practical nurse, and Tess Wilbur as his receptionist.
    Next, Freeberg sent personal letters to every medical person around the country that he had met at conventions and seminars, announcing the opening of the Freeberg Clinic in Hillsdale, California, and offering intensive treatment and the use of female and male sex surrogates when they were found necessary. While awaiting responses, Freeberg instigated his search for sex surrogate candidates. To obtain applicants, Freeberg wrote personal letters to psychoanalysts in Hillsdale, and to fellow therapists in Los
    Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Within a few short weeks he received twenty-three applications from those wishing to become sex surrogates, and even as the replies came in, Freeberg received referrals of patients who were in desperate need of his kind of therapy. From these referrals, Freeberg knew that he would require five surrogates, four women and one man, plus the services of Gayle Miller, who would shortly be leaving Tucson for Hillsdale.
    As the surrogate candidates gradually arrived, Freeberg began to screen them, interviewing each personally. Many were short interviews, because the candidates did not qualify. If a candidate gave, for her motivation, that she thought this would be interesting work, she was disqualified. Interesting work was not good enough, not motivation enough. If any candidate showed the slightest concern about being a candidate, or any hesitancy whatsoever, she was eliminated.
    The longer interviews were given over to women who were well motivated. There were divorced women with no children living at home, who’d had sexually inadequate husbands. There were women who’d had problems with lovers suffering sexual dysfunctions. There were women who’d seen