Initial Consultation
by insidemove19
Author's Note: As much as I loved Tarzan, and I *adored* it, I was frequently frustrated by the direction of the storyline. It was a good move to change the title from Tarzan and Jane to just Tarzan, but it seems like that's *all* they did—because the story was still told from her POV, too often JC appeared to be only to be a supporting character. If I ruled the world—or was story editor for the show—I would have concentrated much more on his character. And maybe snuck in a scene like this. Right around Rules of Engagement.
I hope y'all like the following even though it's a little unconventional. 'Cause that's kinda like the moral of the story!
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that the characters of Tarzan, Jane Porter and Kathleen Clayton belong to other people, but that's cool. All I'm getting out of this is personal satisfaction—no bucks. Oh, and maybe some feedback?
Dedication: In memoriam: Dr C
He was the last appointment of the day. I had made sure of that. According to what I'd been hearing from the aunt and the police detective—and it seemed like I spent *hours* on the telephone with them--this was unlikely to be a run-of-the-mill session, and I didn't want another patient pacing in the waiting room in case we went long.
He himself wasn't pacing when I went in there to introduce myself as Dr Libby Gilmore and to escort him into the office. He wasn't even sitting down. Instead I found him standing in one corner of the room looking, if not exactly uncomfortable, then at least somewhat…on guard. Even though I'd believed myself to be prepared, his physical appearance still took me by surprise. I wouldn't be much of a psychiatrist if I couldn't read between the lines—even over the phone—and I could tell that Kathleen Clayton and Detective Porter had been hedging when they both used the same phrase, "good-looking," to describe him. I sensed that they wanted to say something like "beautiful" instead, but felt the need, in speaking to a shrink, to sound rational and objective. And a word like that simply carried too much of an emotional charge.
I was now finding out, however, that in the case of John Clayton Jr that adjective wasn't some girlish, overwrought, subjective judgment--just a woeful understatement. He was stunningly attractive. Yet his was hardly a conventional beauty. If he had only those perfect features, the pale azure eyes, blonde hair, and flowing muscles, the Clayton family problem child would have been undeniably attractive, if something of a pretty boy. But the hair was tangled, the eyes had a soulful depth and that alarmingly muscled body was marked by a couple of exotic scars. Plus—and this was a huge part of his appeal--he projected a total lack of interest in his looks. He obviously never looked in a mirror, brushed his hair with his hands and, when it came time to dress himself, pulled on whatever was handy--today a black sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of khaki cargo pants. And, of course, he had failed to pull on shoes. Both women had taken the time to warn me carefully about the shoeless thing. I guess they were concerned that, unwarned, I might have taken his impatience with footwear as evidence of some extreme psychopathology.
So merely standing there, tousled, muscled, golden, barefoot and brandished with wicked scars, my new patient positively radiated a savage glamour.
No, "good-looking" was way too weak a description.
Kathleen Clayton—who actually made the appointment—had done more than hedge when it came time to give me standard referral information. Instead she had flatly refused to provide it. I never should have taken on her nephew without knowing who had referred her to my practice, but I eventually relented. For one thing, I almost immediately read her as another East-Sider who would pay top dollar and not force me to fill out a lot of insurance paperwork, and ladies like that funded a lot of my after-hours pro-bono work. For another, the John Clayton story, as she breathlessly outlined it to me during our first phone conversation, proved to be absolutely irresistible.
Besides, even if I didn't know in the end exactly *who* had nominated me for this assignment, I more or less knew *why* someone had. Although I'd been in New York for a number of years, I was still considered an outsider, and a rather rebellious one at that. I made a point of not fitting in too well with the prevailing shrink culture, of not abandoning my down-home Oklahoma roots. So I tended to dress more casually than most of my peers; Wal-Mart wear, one of my patients laughingly described a perfectly nice outfit, simply because it hadn't come from a retail outlet of the monolithic style collective I summed up as B&B (Barney's and Bergdorf's). And I made no effort to hide the twang. The whole point was to suggest that I wasn't your typical East Side shrink. (Which I truly wasn't. My office was located in the Village—I couldn't help it if a large part of my patient base seemed to be centered somewhere in the East 60s.) I liked to think that I followed through on that suggestion. I wasn't particularly interested in a lot of the hidebound rules of psychiatric practice—I was inclined instead to take a lot of chances. I was equally notorious for prescribing pain relief for patients who arrived in the grip of migraines, for being quite cantankerous about managed medicine, and for taking phone calls at home from patients who were in no shape to deal with the inevitably pissy answering service.
And so an unconventional psychiatrist had wound up with the ultimate unconventional patient. This ought to be interesting, I thought to myself.
He paused in the doorway as I led him into my office. Almost everyone does—they're not sure where to sit. A fairly large percentage of first-timers actually believe they're supposed to lie down on the sofa. A loveseat really, in a subdued autumnal chintz—hardly the classic Freudian tufted leather couch. Nevertheless, the urge lies deep—it's not just all the stories, legends, jokes; there's more to it than the endless New Yorker cartoons.
We must instinctively feel that certain things have to be done while we're lying flat on our backs.
On the off-chance my new patient felt some collective-unconscious impulse in that direction, I was quick to lead him toward one of the two deeply-cushioned chairs over by the glass French doors. Seating myself, I indicated the other. "You can sit here," I said.
His manner of walking was a little surprising: a plodding, graceless gait. But there was nothing ungraceful about what he did once he reached the chair--he vaulted over the back of it. I winced inwardly, thinking that my poor little chair was in for no small amount of punishment; it was inevitable that at the conclusion of this move, he was going to bang down on it with some force. But his was such a quick, small, efficient motion that he landed light as a feather—and in an unconventional position: his knees drawn up very tightly against his chest, with both arms crossed around them.
I first saw that as a self-protective attitude. He was huddling inside himself. In the end, though, I decided it was probably just a variation of his normal sitting position. From what I understood, he had spent years in the company of the great apes, and this type of semi-crouching posture probably came naturally to him.
He was very obviously waiting for me to make the first move. A good strategy, I thought. It gave him time both to formulate a defense—should one become necessary—and to study me. Very, very carefully. I found myself wondering if he'd noticed *my* scar—the one above my eyebrow that had resulted from a barrel-racing mishap when I was fourteen.
He was probably going to be fairly difficult to out-wait, I decided in the end. OK. Here goes.
Actually, before we could begin, I needed to get a couple of things straight. The first such matter involved his name. When I'd introduced myself to him in the waiting room, he'd shaken my hand, but had said nothing in reply. So I had to ask. "Do you prefer to be called John or Tarzan?"
"Tarzan," he said. "But you will call me John." His voice was soft, pleasant; his sentence structure only very slightly stilted.
"I will?" I had to smile. "That's quite a supposition." I paused to explain. "I mean, you're making a very—"
"I know what you mean." There was no overt change in his expression; however, I could tell that he was disappointed in me. He knew what "supposition" meant, or he could at least guess at its meaning from the context in which I'd used the word. And he didn't like my making suppositions to the contrary.
"Why won't I prefer to call you Tarzan?"
"Because no one does."
"Why is that?" I paused for a moment, and then added, "Do you *suppose*?"
I was rewarded with a quiet smile, but it quickly faded.
"Because no one *likes* Tarzan."
I settled back, hands clasped in my lap. This was already becoming quite interesting. "Why is that?" The oldest trick in the book—keep asking the same question.
"Because Tarzan lived in the jungle. And he did things there that they don't want to think about."
"By 'they,' I assume you mean Ms Clayton and Detective Porter?"
He nodded.
I nodded, too. "Well, that's their choice. I, on the other hand, believe that you have the right to be called by whatever name you prefer, no matter what you did back in the jungle, so *I'm* going to call—
He broke in. "For a long time, blood was my favorite meal."
OK, so I was being given a test. And a pretty good one at that. I guess that sort of announcement would have given Aunt Kathleen the vapors—it might have even grossed out Detective Porter, despite her NYPD background. But not me. My new patient was forgetting something. Or, perhaps, he didn't know.
"I guess blood-drinking *is* a highly disturbing concept to many people," I began. "But, you see, I am a medical doctor and, as such, I had to complete an internship and a residency. And I did them both in big-city hospitals. All it takes is one or two stints in an emergency room, along with a rotation in a psych ward and, I assure you, stuff like blood-drinking just doesn't seem all that shocking. Especially if it's done as a matter of survival, and not as some kind of sexual fetish."
He would get the basic drift of that, I was sure. And I wasn't going to risk his wrath by explaining any of it to him.
"Now that we have the name thing straightened out, *Tarzan*," I looked over at him in order to drive home that message, but his face remained beautifully expressionless, "there's one another matter I'd like to discuss with you before we start. You know that I spoke at length with both your aunt and your friend before you came here to see me."
No comment. No movement. No change of expression. His stillness was now beginning to seem almost inhuman, but then I remembered that he was a hunter. Patience was second-nature to him, and he was probably capable of sitting in that seemingly uncomfortable position for hours at a time, just waiting and watching.
"Does it bother you that they talked to me?"
Finally a response. "No."
In spite of that flat denial, I wondered.
"Well, does it bother you that the two of them got together and made this appointment for you?" I was really trying to goad him into some kind of reaction. Not out of perversity—genuine curiosity was my motivation. I couldn't imagine why this guy was sitting here putting up with me. "I wouldn't blame you if it did. It seems kind of presumptuous of these two women to decide that you need a few lessons in 'lifeskills'—I believe that's the way they put it. Yet you're playing along—you kept the appointment. Why is that?" The question again.
At that point Tarzan shifted his position very slightly. I might have missed that movement on anyone else--most people just naturally fidget and squirm so much that it would have hardly been noticeable. But since he hadn't moved a muscle since vaulting into that chair, even that tiny realignment caught my eye. As a result, I listened very carefully to the statement which followed it. "They're right. I need to learn, and you can help me learn."
For about a minute, I bought it. Survival. He needed help surviving in a new environment and, like any good survivalist, he would use everything he could—even the services of a psychiatrist—to increase his chances.
It was the thought of that telltale shift in body position which made me look deeply into those pale blue eyes. There was something back there…
"You just lied to me," I guessed. Again, his face remained expressionless; however, now I could see near-panic in his eyes. I could tell, though, that Tarzan wasn't fibbing to deceive me. He was simply too fearful to articulate some truth.
What could it be? I began wracking my brain, but shortly realized that wracking was completely unnecessary.
It was the most obvious answer of all.
"You know what psychiatrists *really* do, don't you?"
One look at his face, and I thought to myself, Yeah, that's it.
I wondered if Kathleen Clayton and Jane Porter had ever even considered that possibility. Without much thinking about it, they had probably low-balled Tarzan's IQ, or at least equated his lack of urban sophistication with a certain temporary slowness. In a way, I couldn't blame them. Here was this muscled Adonis who was having trouble readjusting back to civilization, who occasionally had to struggle to remember a vocabulary word and who--probably as a self-defensive rule--was not inclined to reveal much about himself. Plus, his history could have easily had the effect of reinforcing their underestimation of him. Tarzan's endurance of a harrowing ordeal could be seen as the result of brutal, physical effort—and we think of that as the specialty of brutal, physical types. But sitting across from him now, I was beginning to recognize another factor that had undoubtedly facilitated his survival: a significant amount of crafty, strategic intelligence. The kid who nearly died in that plane crash was probably an early reader, an insatiably curious question-asker, an instant puzzle-solver.
Kathleen Clayton had known that child; she should have at least entertained the notion that her very smart nephew had retained a trace memory about psychiatry—or had done some recent asking-around. Yet the jungle and the muscles made it impossible for her to take into account such a thing.
"You know that psychiatrists help people who are in pain, and you need that kind of help."
The panic actually faded somewhat at this point, as both Tarzan and I came to realize that I had arrived at only half the secret. While I now understood why he had cooperated with Clayton and Porter in showing up for this appointment, I still had no idea what hurt he was harboring, what pain he had brought with him to my office.
And I had no illusions that Tarzan was going to be volunteering this information. He'd already displayed a distinct lack of interest in helping me along, and that policy was unlikely to change. I could imagine his original plan: to sit through a few sessions, listening to me prattle on about the benefits of civilized behavior, while deciding whether or not he could trust me with his innermost feelings. Even if he did decide that I was trustworthy, Tarzan probably intended to spoon-feed me hints and clues and maybe even a certain amount of misdirection. The key was to stay in control—he would make the decision to confide in me, and he would control the timetable of those confidences. Now he was faced with a nightmare scenario—I was pushing them out into the light according to my own, highly accelerated schedule. Unfortunately for Tarzan, the maverick shrink had the classic psychiatric mistrust of secrets.
"So what is it, Tarzan? What can I help you with?"
The beautifully solemn face simply stared back at me. Bad enough that he had to give up control, excruciating for it to be on this intimate, sensitive level. For almost Tarzan's entire lifetime, survival had meant displaying, *feeling* a steely invulnerability. Drought, malaria and marauding leopards he could deal with, but not someone prodding him to reveal himself this way. Yet he remained as still as ever—he didn't appear to be on the verge of fleeing my office, of rejecting all these devastating, penetrating words.
Come *on*, Tarzan. You can do it, kid.
I tried again. "You're good at helping people, that's what they say about you. You're a superb protector--you'll risk your own life in order to safeguard people who are in trouble, who are in pain. Don't you see, though? There's nothing wrong with admitting that you need help yourself. That's what *I'm* here for."
He continued to stare at me—there was even now absolutely no change in his expression. But, after years of dealing with patients, with people, I have a sixth sense about when they're about to give it up, and I was willing to bet that this guy was wobbling right on the brink. "So tell me, Tarzan. What's the matter?"
For the first time, he broke eye contact with me, staring out beyond the glass doors to the tiny balcony beyond. It took a while before he could finally speak.
"She won't let me touch her."
The blood-drinking thing didn't even rate an eye-blink, but that revelation—the secret pain that he had smuggled into a psychiatrist's office--*that* rocked me.
I knew immediately what he meant, exactly what he was referring to. Detective Porter had banned all physical contact between them. And it wasn't because Tarzan was making any kind of assaultive advances on her. The poor thing was probably just trying occasionally to stroke her cheek or brush his hand through her hair. But in Porter's confusion over the death of her boyfriend—I'd heard all about the rooftop confrontation—she had outlawed even these innocent gestures.
It was tough for me to give Porter the benefit of the doubt on this one—had she never stopped to think about the effect that such a ban would have on her friend? Tarzan had been deprived of the most elemental of human connection since he was six years old. Nothing had existed for him outside the brute parameters of survival—no music, no mercy, no motherlove.
Despite all that, it had been traumatic for him to leave the jungle—it was all he had ever known. In New York,he was at least relieved of the constant, harsh necessity of earning his day-to-day existence. And it was here that Tarzan had met Jane and felt his world expand in a dizzying way. He must have ached to make the bond between them real by feeling her skin, her hair. And she had pushed him away.
There was no psychiatric calculation going on in my mind about what to say or do next. Instead I blurted out the first thing that occurred to me. "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry."
Tarzan had never turned his attention away from the window but, when he heard that, he literally jerked back to look at me. Those pale blue eyes now reddened and brimmed with tears.
"It must be so hard for you," I said.
With that, the tears began to spill down his cheeks.
I leaned forward and tugged at one of the hands that remained clamped around his knees. I expected it would take quite a effort to get him to let go, but his hand actually fell away quite easily. I hadn't known exactly what I was going to do until I felt how slack his hand was in mine, how willing Tarzan was to do whatever I had in mind.
Again, it was pure instinct that guided me as I pulled him to his feet and led him over to the loveseat. I sat down and indicated where he was to sit. He couldn't believe it, not until I made it clear.
My lap.
I was getting good at reading that still, solemn face—now streaming with tears—and I watched as a jumble of mixed emotions played across it: trust, mistrust, belief, disbelief. But I also knew that the secret was to look deep into those eyes. When I did, I saw something much, much stronger than those temporary feelings: a yearning so deep, so primal that Tarzan must have felt it as a physical pain.
I gave one last tug on his hand and, limp, boneless, he almost fell onto my knees.
At first Tarzan just sat there, kind of sideways to me, but I knew what to do. Reaching around, I clasped him under the arms and pulled him to my breast. If at first he didn't exactly resist, he didn't exactly cooperate either. He did give in eventually, turning to face me, bringing his arms around to hug my back, even—and this was very touching to me—resting his chin on my shoulder. Tellingly, a few moments later, Tarzan wriggled around slightly in order to be more comfortable. I knew then that he was planning on staying a while—I had him right where I wanted him.
Before I myself could get completely comfortable, I had to deal briefly with the fact that I was pretty much pissing all over a number of deeply-held rules about patient-physician contact. Oh, well--I'd always thought of those things as mere guidelines anyway. I'd had to make a lot of snap judgments in my professional life, and within the last few minutes I'd made one about Tarzan. He needed this kind of physical communication, and his getting it from me was not going to create any long-term problems down the line. It was inconceivable that such a maddeningly self-sufficient character would suddenly develop an unhealthy dependency because of a single mumsy-like encounter. So Tarzan was going to enjoy some woefully late, quasi-parental "quality time."
For a mother of two boys, the way he smelled was familiar: that homey aroma of salt and soot, overlaid in his case with the musk of grown-up masculinity. But I've never in my life heard a human heart beat so slow.
"I want to tell you something, Tarzan."
He was waiting, listening.
"You had to endure some very extreme experiences back there in the jungle, and those experiences changed you, made you…different. Not bad, not wrong, just *different*."
I continued, soothingly. "Regrettably, people are not real comfortable with difference, even smart, educated people like your aunt and your friend. That's why they're running around, making doctor's appointments for you and handing down rules for you to live by. They've lost sight of the basic human fact that we're *all* different. But that's *their* problem, Tarzan, not *yours*. Acceptance of difference, of diversity is like Lifeskills 101, and Ms Clayton and Detective Porter need to learn it, not *you*. Got it?"
His voice was a sad, six-year-old croak, muffled by my shoulder. "Yes."
"Now, there's another thing you need to know."
I could feel him tense slightly, as if he thought that I was about to deliver bad news.
"I think you're a good kid."
Tarzan relaxed, and so I had to kind of squirm around in order to hold him tighter. "No, you're more than that—you're a *very* good kid. You didn't just survive those terrible hardships, you came through them with your dignity intact and with a very strong sense of right and wrong. Here in New York, you're continuing to act according to those principles, except you're doing battle against the big-city predators. Now maybe not everyone approves of your methods—" He stiffened a little in my arms and I rushed to take the sting out of those words. "—but I'm not worried about few rough edges here and there. That's the kind of thing you and I can work on. In my opinion, it's much more important that you're in there trying, that you're willing to risk so much for your beliefs. I think that's a rare and wonderful thing. And you know what?"
I was perfectly aware that he couldn't answer, so I didn't wait for a response.
"I'm sure your parents would think so too. I'm sure they would be very proud of you."
I was transported back to a time when my boys were younger, and I would comfort them in this way. Because there was no sound from the little tough guy, but a spreading dampness on top of my shoulder signaled that he was getting the message.
Although it was awkward to lean forward, with this enormous six-year-old in my lap, in order to reach the Kleenex box on the coffee table, I somehow managed. Tarzan somehow managed too, because shortly after I held the bunch of tissues up in front of his face, I heard the satisfying sound of nose-blowing.
I continued. "Will you remember that for me, Tarzan? No matter what Ms Clayton or Jane or anybody else says, will you remember that?"
There was no answer for a minute. He still couldn't say anything, couldn't trust his voice. But then I felt his cheek moving up and down, rubbing against my shoulder, and that mute nod nearly broke my heart.
The two of us sat there for a while, the transplanted Oklahoman psychiatrist and the jungle-bred man-child, exhausted from the joyous pain of revelation. I let him rest and savor the moment until the time came when I knew we had to move on.
"OK, bubba," I said, while beginning to gently disentangle him, "I want you to slide over and sit here next to me for a minute, all right?"
He cooperated, moving aside to perch on the couch next to me. Of course, as I expected by now, he immediately drew both knees up to his chest again. However, I wasn't prepared for what he did next. When he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hands, it was another stab to my heart.
But it was time to be less mushy and maternal, more matter-of-fact. "One last thing," I warned him. He was staring straight ahead, clearly reluctant for me to get a head-on view of his face. Pretty ridiculous, given the state of my shoulder. "Tarzan, look at me," I had to say, and then he did grudgingly turn my way. About what I expected: his face was beet-red, his eyes swollen and the once gloriously tangled hair simply a mess.
"You have to remember something about Miss Jane. At the present time, she happens to be one very confused young lady, so confused that you can't take what she says too personally. It's not that she doesn't like you—I'm sure she does." And if she truly doesn't, the silly thing needs *her* head examined, I thought to myself. "Tarzan, in this respect at least, you're not unlike many, many guys in the big city. Men frequently have to act like hunters—they have to be patient until the objects of their…er…*attention*…" I was really struggling to keep this thing more or less politically correct. "…until they…*cooperate*. That happens all the time. And you can be much more patient than those other guys, because you're a much better hunter than they are. You need to wait Jane out. Give her some space—give her some time. You can do that, can't you?"
When he could only nod, I realized that he was still overcome with emotion.
"I *know* you can, Tarzan. And I'm going to help you. Come back again this time next week, and we'll talk about it how it's going for you, about how you're feeling."
I wasn't surprised when he greeted that supposedly reassuring statement with obvious disappointment. As already noted, Tarzan was no dope, and he'd immediately grasped the boundary-setting implications of what I had said--he was leaving pretty soon, and he wasn't coming back for a while. A patient who has a big cathartic experience the first time around is often unhappy at the prospect of having to wait seven whole days until that monumental high can be repeated. In Tarzan's case, I don't think he was even prepared to uncurl himself from that loveseat anytime soon. "Don't worry," I added quickly. "If something happens in the meantime and you want to talk to me, you can." I had to pause here. My usual policy would be to give patients in this kind of need my pager number, or—-if they were extremely trustworthy--my home phone. I couldn't do that for Tarzan—he wasn't the telephone type. Then I remembered an intriguing thing I'd heard. "Detective Porter once told me that you can find anyone. Is that true?"
He looked at me through the tangle of blond hair. "If I know them," he said, sniffing. "I have to know their scent."
I smiled. "Ah, yes. But you know my scent now, right? I mean, after all this?"
He nodded.
"So, if you want to talk to me before next week, come find me."
Tarzan had to think that one over. "Anywhere?"
"Yes," I said, making a real attempt to sound brisk and straightforward. "If I'm here at the office, that's fine, although you'll have to wait until I'm free. You can't just—" I broke off when I saw the look on his face. For once he was displaying a highly readable reaction to my words—he didn't have to be told not to burst through a closed door. I hurried on. "And if I'm not here, track me down wherever I am and hopefully I can help."
Tarzan had to think it over for a minute. I sensed that there had been trouble about that in the past—people hadn't liked him barging into their lives. In the end he must have recognized that I was telling the truth, that I'd be willing to accept emergency break-ins, even after-hours. So I finally got a grudging nod out of him.
I stood up, the universal shrink gesture that the session was over. "Then, of course, if I don't see you in the meantime, I will for sure see you next week."
At that point he stood up himself. Yet, when I began walking toward the door, he didn't follow in my wake. I had to ask, "Is something wrong, Tarzan?"
He didn't want to say. I decided this time to wait for some kind of signal. As I studied him, I was struck again by the perfection of his form. I'd never seen musculature like that—it seemed to suggest, not only great strength, but also speed, suppleness and agility. I was suddenly reminded of something else Jane Porter had told me, her description of one of John Clayton's more persistent behaviors. "Oh, I get it," I said.
I strode past him, heading back in the opposite direction. Flinging open the French doors with a dramatic flourish, I stepped aside and asked, "Is this how you would prefer to make your exit?"
Like a puppy suddenly snapped off a leash, Tarzan *bounded* in that direction. I was again worried, this time about my little sidetable, about the tchotchkes on my bookcase, not to mention my downstairs neighbors. But Tarzan was so light on his so feet, so incredibly controlled, that nothing was disturbed, and all that hurtling momentum ended, incredibly, with him standing, balanced perfectly, on the very narrow railing of my balcony. Turning around, he said, in that soft voice, "I'll see you soon, Dr Gilmore."
"Take care of yourself, Tarzan. And when you come back, *I'll* take care of *you*."
He nodded, smiling, before making an absolutely astounding move. He jumped off the railing.
Now, both Kathleen Clayton and Jane Porter had regaled me with tales of Tarzan's superhuman physical exploits, but listening to second-hand stories simply does not compare with the experience of watching a man do something death-defyingly impossible right before your very eyes. So, despite all the stories, when I myself made it to the railing, I fully expected to see his body spattered on the sidewalk below. However, there were no corpses to be seen; as a matter-of-fact, there was no sign of Tarzan anywhere. Only then did the tales I'd heard become truly real to me. Standing there on the balcony, my arms propped up on the railing, I found myself wondering how the jungle years had changed Tarzan--what that experience had done to transform him on a neural, muscular, molecular level.
Well, if I was lucky, I might get a few sessions in which we could explore the answer to that exceedingly tantalizing question.
I re-entered the office and sat down at my desk. It took me a while to find a pencil but, when I did, I pulled out my calendar and jotted down the new appointment for next week. Then, chewing on the end on the pencil, I flipped back one page and stared at the notation I had made for the session that had just ended. Feeling that I owed it to the kid, I erased the name "John Clayton Jr," and instead wrote in "Tarzan."
by insidemove19
Author's Note: As much as I loved Tarzan, and I *adored* it, I was frequently frustrated by the direction of the storyline. It was a good move to change the title from Tarzan and Jane to just Tarzan, but it seems like that's *all* they did—because the story was still told from her POV, too often JC appeared to be only to be a supporting character. If I ruled the world—or was story editor for the show—I would have concentrated much more on his character. And maybe snuck in a scene like this. Right around Rules of Engagement.
I hope y'all like the following even though it's a little unconventional. 'Cause that's kinda like the moral of the story!
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that the characters of Tarzan, Jane Porter and Kathleen Clayton belong to other people, but that's cool. All I'm getting out of this is personal satisfaction—no bucks. Oh, and maybe some feedback?
Dedication: In memoriam: Dr C
He was the last appointment of the day. I had made sure of that. According to what I'd been hearing from the aunt and the police detective—and it seemed like I spent *hours* on the telephone with them--this was unlikely to be a run-of-the-mill session, and I didn't want another patient pacing in the waiting room in case we went long.
He himself wasn't pacing when I went in there to introduce myself as Dr Libby Gilmore and to escort him into the office. He wasn't even sitting down. Instead I found him standing in one corner of the room looking, if not exactly uncomfortable, then at least somewhat…on guard. Even though I'd believed myself to be prepared, his physical appearance still took me by surprise. I wouldn't be much of a psychiatrist if I couldn't read between the lines—even over the phone—and I could tell that Kathleen Clayton and Detective Porter had been hedging when they both used the same phrase, "good-looking," to describe him. I sensed that they wanted to say something like "beautiful" instead, but felt the need, in speaking to a shrink, to sound rational and objective. And a word like that simply carried too much of an emotional charge.
I was now finding out, however, that in the case of John Clayton Jr that adjective wasn't some girlish, overwrought, subjective judgment--just a woeful understatement. He was stunningly attractive. Yet his was hardly a conventional beauty. If he had only those perfect features, the pale azure eyes, blonde hair, and flowing muscles, the Clayton family problem child would have been undeniably attractive, if something of a pretty boy. But the hair was tangled, the eyes had a soulful depth and that alarmingly muscled body was marked by a couple of exotic scars. Plus—and this was a huge part of his appeal--he projected a total lack of interest in his looks. He obviously never looked in a mirror, brushed his hair with his hands and, when it came time to dress himself, pulled on whatever was handy--today a black sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of khaki cargo pants. And, of course, he had failed to pull on shoes. Both women had taken the time to warn me carefully about the shoeless thing. I guess they were concerned that, unwarned, I might have taken his impatience with footwear as evidence of some extreme psychopathology.
So merely standing there, tousled, muscled, golden, barefoot and brandished with wicked scars, my new patient positively radiated a savage glamour.
No, "good-looking" was way too weak a description.
Kathleen Clayton—who actually made the appointment—had done more than hedge when it came time to give me standard referral information. Instead she had flatly refused to provide it. I never should have taken on her nephew without knowing who had referred her to my practice, but I eventually relented. For one thing, I almost immediately read her as another East-Sider who would pay top dollar and not force me to fill out a lot of insurance paperwork, and ladies like that funded a lot of my after-hours pro-bono work. For another, the John Clayton story, as she breathlessly outlined it to me during our first phone conversation, proved to be absolutely irresistible.
Besides, even if I didn't know in the end exactly *who* had nominated me for this assignment, I more or less knew *why* someone had. Although I'd been in New York for a number of years, I was still considered an outsider, and a rather rebellious one at that. I made a point of not fitting in too well with the prevailing shrink culture, of not abandoning my down-home Oklahoma roots. So I tended to dress more casually than most of my peers; Wal-Mart wear, one of my patients laughingly described a perfectly nice outfit, simply because it hadn't come from a retail outlet of the monolithic style collective I summed up as B&B (Barney's and Bergdorf's). And I made no effort to hide the twang. The whole point was to suggest that I wasn't your typical East Side shrink. (Which I truly wasn't. My office was located in the Village—I couldn't help it if a large part of my patient base seemed to be centered somewhere in the East 60s.) I liked to think that I followed through on that suggestion. I wasn't particularly interested in a lot of the hidebound rules of psychiatric practice—I was inclined instead to take a lot of chances. I was equally notorious for prescribing pain relief for patients who arrived in the grip of migraines, for being quite cantankerous about managed medicine, and for taking phone calls at home from patients who were in no shape to deal with the inevitably pissy answering service.
And so an unconventional psychiatrist had wound up with the ultimate unconventional patient. This ought to be interesting, I thought to myself.
He paused in the doorway as I led him into my office. Almost everyone does—they're not sure where to sit. A fairly large percentage of first-timers actually believe they're supposed to lie down on the sofa. A loveseat really, in a subdued autumnal chintz—hardly the classic Freudian tufted leather couch. Nevertheless, the urge lies deep—it's not just all the stories, legends, jokes; there's more to it than the endless New Yorker cartoons.
We must instinctively feel that certain things have to be done while we're lying flat on our backs.
On the off-chance my new patient felt some collective-unconscious impulse in that direction, I was quick to lead him toward one of the two deeply-cushioned chairs over by the glass French doors. Seating myself, I indicated the other. "You can sit here," I said.
His manner of walking was a little surprising: a plodding, graceless gait. But there was nothing ungraceful about what he did once he reached the chair--he vaulted over the back of it. I winced inwardly, thinking that my poor little chair was in for no small amount of punishment; it was inevitable that at the conclusion of this move, he was going to bang down on it with some force. But his was such a quick, small, efficient motion that he landed light as a feather—and in an unconventional position: his knees drawn up very tightly against his chest, with both arms crossed around them.
I first saw that as a self-protective attitude. He was huddling inside himself. In the end, though, I decided it was probably just a variation of his normal sitting position. From what I understood, he had spent years in the company of the great apes, and this type of semi-crouching posture probably came naturally to him.
He was very obviously waiting for me to make the first move. A good strategy, I thought. It gave him time both to formulate a defense—should one become necessary—and to study me. Very, very carefully. I found myself wondering if he'd noticed *my* scar—the one above my eyebrow that had resulted from a barrel-racing mishap when I was fourteen.
He was probably going to be fairly difficult to out-wait, I decided in the end. OK. Here goes.
Actually, before we could begin, I needed to get a couple of things straight. The first such matter involved his name. When I'd introduced myself to him in the waiting room, he'd shaken my hand, but had said nothing in reply. So I had to ask. "Do you prefer to be called John or Tarzan?"
"Tarzan," he said. "But you will call me John." His voice was soft, pleasant; his sentence structure only very slightly stilted.
"I will?" I had to smile. "That's quite a supposition." I paused to explain. "I mean, you're making a very—"
"I know what you mean." There was no overt change in his expression; however, I could tell that he was disappointed in me. He knew what "supposition" meant, or he could at least guess at its meaning from the context in which I'd used the word. And he didn't like my making suppositions to the contrary.
"Why won't I prefer to call you Tarzan?"
"Because no one does."
"Why is that?" I paused for a moment, and then added, "Do you *suppose*?"
I was rewarded with a quiet smile, but it quickly faded.
"Because no one *likes* Tarzan."
I settled back, hands clasped in my lap. This was already becoming quite interesting. "Why is that?" The oldest trick in the book—keep asking the same question.
"Because Tarzan lived in the jungle. And he did things there that they don't want to think about."
"By 'they,' I assume you mean Ms Clayton and Detective Porter?"
He nodded.
I nodded, too. "Well, that's their choice. I, on the other hand, believe that you have the right to be called by whatever name you prefer, no matter what you did back in the jungle, so *I'm* going to call—
He broke in. "For a long time, blood was my favorite meal."
OK, so I was being given a test. And a pretty good one at that. I guess that sort of announcement would have given Aunt Kathleen the vapors—it might have even grossed out Detective Porter, despite her NYPD background. But not me. My new patient was forgetting something. Or, perhaps, he didn't know.
"I guess blood-drinking *is* a highly disturbing concept to many people," I began. "But, you see, I am a medical doctor and, as such, I had to complete an internship and a residency. And I did them both in big-city hospitals. All it takes is one or two stints in an emergency room, along with a rotation in a psych ward and, I assure you, stuff like blood-drinking just doesn't seem all that shocking. Especially if it's done as a matter of survival, and not as some kind of sexual fetish."
He would get the basic drift of that, I was sure. And I wasn't going to risk his wrath by explaining any of it to him.
"Now that we have the name thing straightened out, *Tarzan*," I looked over at him in order to drive home that message, but his face remained beautifully expressionless, "there's one another matter I'd like to discuss with you before we start. You know that I spoke at length with both your aunt and your friend before you came here to see me."
No comment. No movement. No change of expression. His stillness was now beginning to seem almost inhuman, but then I remembered that he was a hunter. Patience was second-nature to him, and he was probably capable of sitting in that seemingly uncomfortable position for hours at a time, just waiting and watching.
"Does it bother you that they talked to me?"
Finally a response. "No."
In spite of that flat denial, I wondered.
"Well, does it bother you that the two of them got together and made this appointment for you?" I was really trying to goad him into some kind of reaction. Not out of perversity—genuine curiosity was my motivation. I couldn't imagine why this guy was sitting here putting up with me. "I wouldn't blame you if it did. It seems kind of presumptuous of these two women to decide that you need a few lessons in 'lifeskills'—I believe that's the way they put it. Yet you're playing along—you kept the appointment. Why is that?" The question again.
At that point Tarzan shifted his position very slightly. I might have missed that movement on anyone else--most people just naturally fidget and squirm so much that it would have hardly been noticeable. But since he hadn't moved a muscle since vaulting into that chair, even that tiny realignment caught my eye. As a result, I listened very carefully to the statement which followed it. "They're right. I need to learn, and you can help me learn."
For about a minute, I bought it. Survival. He needed help surviving in a new environment and, like any good survivalist, he would use everything he could—even the services of a psychiatrist—to increase his chances.
It was the thought of that telltale shift in body position which made me look deeply into those pale blue eyes. There was something back there…
"You just lied to me," I guessed. Again, his face remained expressionless; however, now I could see near-panic in his eyes. I could tell, though, that Tarzan wasn't fibbing to deceive me. He was simply too fearful to articulate some truth.
What could it be? I began wracking my brain, but shortly realized that wracking was completely unnecessary.
It was the most obvious answer of all.
"You know what psychiatrists *really* do, don't you?"
One look at his face, and I thought to myself, Yeah, that's it.
I wondered if Kathleen Clayton and Jane Porter had ever even considered that possibility. Without much thinking about it, they had probably low-balled Tarzan's IQ, or at least equated his lack of urban sophistication with a certain temporary slowness. In a way, I couldn't blame them. Here was this muscled Adonis who was having trouble readjusting back to civilization, who occasionally had to struggle to remember a vocabulary word and who--probably as a self-defensive rule--was not inclined to reveal much about himself. Plus, his history could have easily had the effect of reinforcing their underestimation of him. Tarzan's endurance of a harrowing ordeal could be seen as the result of brutal, physical effort—and we think of that as the specialty of brutal, physical types. But sitting across from him now, I was beginning to recognize another factor that had undoubtedly facilitated his survival: a significant amount of crafty, strategic intelligence. The kid who nearly died in that plane crash was probably an early reader, an insatiably curious question-asker, an instant puzzle-solver.
Kathleen Clayton had known that child; she should have at least entertained the notion that her very smart nephew had retained a trace memory about psychiatry—or had done some recent asking-around. Yet the jungle and the muscles made it impossible for her to take into account such a thing.
"You know that psychiatrists help people who are in pain, and you need that kind of help."
The panic actually faded somewhat at this point, as both Tarzan and I came to realize that I had arrived at only half the secret. While I now understood why he had cooperated with Clayton and Porter in showing up for this appointment, I still had no idea what hurt he was harboring, what pain he had brought with him to my office.
And I had no illusions that Tarzan was going to be volunteering this information. He'd already displayed a distinct lack of interest in helping me along, and that policy was unlikely to change. I could imagine his original plan: to sit through a few sessions, listening to me prattle on about the benefits of civilized behavior, while deciding whether or not he could trust me with his innermost feelings. Even if he did decide that I was trustworthy, Tarzan probably intended to spoon-feed me hints and clues and maybe even a certain amount of misdirection. The key was to stay in control—he would make the decision to confide in me, and he would control the timetable of those confidences. Now he was faced with a nightmare scenario—I was pushing them out into the light according to my own, highly accelerated schedule. Unfortunately for Tarzan, the maverick shrink had the classic psychiatric mistrust of secrets.
"So what is it, Tarzan? What can I help you with?"
The beautifully solemn face simply stared back at me. Bad enough that he had to give up control, excruciating for it to be on this intimate, sensitive level. For almost Tarzan's entire lifetime, survival had meant displaying, *feeling* a steely invulnerability. Drought, malaria and marauding leopards he could deal with, but not someone prodding him to reveal himself this way. Yet he remained as still as ever—he didn't appear to be on the verge of fleeing my office, of rejecting all these devastating, penetrating words.
Come *on*, Tarzan. You can do it, kid.
I tried again. "You're good at helping people, that's what they say about you. You're a superb protector--you'll risk your own life in order to safeguard people who are in trouble, who are in pain. Don't you see, though? There's nothing wrong with admitting that you need help yourself. That's what *I'm* here for."
He continued to stare at me—there was even now absolutely no change in his expression. But, after years of dealing with patients, with people, I have a sixth sense about when they're about to give it up, and I was willing to bet that this guy was wobbling right on the brink. "So tell me, Tarzan. What's the matter?"
For the first time, he broke eye contact with me, staring out beyond the glass doors to the tiny balcony beyond. It took a while before he could finally speak.
"She won't let me touch her."
The blood-drinking thing didn't even rate an eye-blink, but that revelation—the secret pain that he had smuggled into a psychiatrist's office--*that* rocked me.
I knew immediately what he meant, exactly what he was referring to. Detective Porter had banned all physical contact between them. And it wasn't because Tarzan was making any kind of assaultive advances on her. The poor thing was probably just trying occasionally to stroke her cheek or brush his hand through her hair. But in Porter's confusion over the death of her boyfriend—I'd heard all about the rooftop confrontation—she had outlawed even these innocent gestures.
It was tough for me to give Porter the benefit of the doubt on this one—had she never stopped to think about the effect that such a ban would have on her friend? Tarzan had been deprived of the most elemental of human connection since he was six years old. Nothing had existed for him outside the brute parameters of survival—no music, no mercy, no motherlove.
Despite all that, it had been traumatic for him to leave the jungle—it was all he had ever known. In New York,he was at least relieved of the constant, harsh necessity of earning his day-to-day existence. And it was here that Tarzan had met Jane and felt his world expand in a dizzying way. He must have ached to make the bond between them real by feeling her skin, her hair. And she had pushed him away.
There was no psychiatric calculation going on in my mind about what to say or do next. Instead I blurted out the first thing that occurred to me. "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry."
Tarzan had never turned his attention away from the window but, when he heard that, he literally jerked back to look at me. Those pale blue eyes now reddened and brimmed with tears.
"It must be so hard for you," I said.
With that, the tears began to spill down his cheeks.
I leaned forward and tugged at one of the hands that remained clamped around his knees. I expected it would take quite a effort to get him to let go, but his hand actually fell away quite easily. I hadn't known exactly what I was going to do until I felt how slack his hand was in mine, how willing Tarzan was to do whatever I had in mind.
Again, it was pure instinct that guided me as I pulled him to his feet and led him over to the loveseat. I sat down and indicated where he was to sit. He couldn't believe it, not until I made it clear.
My lap.
I was getting good at reading that still, solemn face—now streaming with tears—and I watched as a jumble of mixed emotions played across it: trust, mistrust, belief, disbelief. But I also knew that the secret was to look deep into those eyes. When I did, I saw something much, much stronger than those temporary feelings: a yearning so deep, so primal that Tarzan must have felt it as a physical pain.
I gave one last tug on his hand and, limp, boneless, he almost fell onto my knees.
At first Tarzan just sat there, kind of sideways to me, but I knew what to do. Reaching around, I clasped him under the arms and pulled him to my breast. If at first he didn't exactly resist, he didn't exactly cooperate either. He did give in eventually, turning to face me, bringing his arms around to hug my back, even—and this was very touching to me—resting his chin on my shoulder. Tellingly, a few moments later, Tarzan wriggled around slightly in order to be more comfortable. I knew then that he was planning on staying a while—I had him right where I wanted him.
Before I myself could get completely comfortable, I had to deal briefly with the fact that I was pretty much pissing all over a number of deeply-held rules about patient-physician contact. Oh, well--I'd always thought of those things as mere guidelines anyway. I'd had to make a lot of snap judgments in my professional life, and within the last few minutes I'd made one about Tarzan. He needed this kind of physical communication, and his getting it from me was not going to create any long-term problems down the line. It was inconceivable that such a maddeningly self-sufficient character would suddenly develop an unhealthy dependency because of a single mumsy-like encounter. So Tarzan was going to enjoy some woefully late, quasi-parental "quality time."
For a mother of two boys, the way he smelled was familiar: that homey aroma of salt and soot, overlaid in his case with the musk of grown-up masculinity. But I've never in my life heard a human heart beat so slow.
"I want to tell you something, Tarzan."
He was waiting, listening.
"You had to endure some very extreme experiences back there in the jungle, and those experiences changed you, made you…different. Not bad, not wrong, just *different*."
I continued, soothingly. "Regrettably, people are not real comfortable with difference, even smart, educated people like your aunt and your friend. That's why they're running around, making doctor's appointments for you and handing down rules for you to live by. They've lost sight of the basic human fact that we're *all* different. But that's *their* problem, Tarzan, not *yours*. Acceptance of difference, of diversity is like Lifeskills 101, and Ms Clayton and Detective Porter need to learn it, not *you*. Got it?"
His voice was a sad, six-year-old croak, muffled by my shoulder. "Yes."
"Now, there's another thing you need to know."
I could feel him tense slightly, as if he thought that I was about to deliver bad news.
"I think you're a good kid."
Tarzan relaxed, and so I had to kind of squirm around in order to hold him tighter. "No, you're more than that—you're a *very* good kid. You didn't just survive those terrible hardships, you came through them with your dignity intact and with a very strong sense of right and wrong. Here in New York, you're continuing to act according to those principles, except you're doing battle against the big-city predators. Now maybe not everyone approves of your methods—" He stiffened a little in my arms and I rushed to take the sting out of those words. "—but I'm not worried about few rough edges here and there. That's the kind of thing you and I can work on. In my opinion, it's much more important that you're in there trying, that you're willing to risk so much for your beliefs. I think that's a rare and wonderful thing. And you know what?"
I was perfectly aware that he couldn't answer, so I didn't wait for a response.
"I'm sure your parents would think so too. I'm sure they would be very proud of you."
I was transported back to a time when my boys were younger, and I would comfort them in this way. Because there was no sound from the little tough guy, but a spreading dampness on top of my shoulder signaled that he was getting the message.
Although it was awkward to lean forward, with this enormous six-year-old in my lap, in order to reach the Kleenex box on the coffee table, I somehow managed. Tarzan somehow managed too, because shortly after I held the bunch of tissues up in front of his face, I heard the satisfying sound of nose-blowing.
I continued. "Will you remember that for me, Tarzan? No matter what Ms Clayton or Jane or anybody else says, will you remember that?"
There was no answer for a minute. He still couldn't say anything, couldn't trust his voice. But then I felt his cheek moving up and down, rubbing against my shoulder, and that mute nod nearly broke my heart.
The two of us sat there for a while, the transplanted Oklahoman psychiatrist and the jungle-bred man-child, exhausted from the joyous pain of revelation. I let him rest and savor the moment until the time came when I knew we had to move on.
"OK, bubba," I said, while beginning to gently disentangle him, "I want you to slide over and sit here next to me for a minute, all right?"
He cooperated, moving aside to perch on the couch next to me. Of course, as I expected by now, he immediately drew both knees up to his chest again. However, I wasn't prepared for what he did next. When he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hands, it was another stab to my heart.
But it was time to be less mushy and maternal, more matter-of-fact. "One last thing," I warned him. He was staring straight ahead, clearly reluctant for me to get a head-on view of his face. Pretty ridiculous, given the state of my shoulder. "Tarzan, look at me," I had to say, and then he did grudgingly turn my way. About what I expected: his face was beet-red, his eyes swollen and the once gloriously tangled hair simply a mess.
"You have to remember something about Miss Jane. At the present time, she happens to be one very confused young lady, so confused that you can't take what she says too personally. It's not that she doesn't like you—I'm sure she does." And if she truly doesn't, the silly thing needs *her* head examined, I thought to myself. "Tarzan, in this respect at least, you're not unlike many, many guys in the big city. Men frequently have to act like hunters—they have to be patient until the objects of their…er…*attention*…" I was really struggling to keep this thing more or less politically correct. "…until they…*cooperate*. That happens all the time. And you can be much more patient than those other guys, because you're a much better hunter than they are. You need to wait Jane out. Give her some space—give her some time. You can do that, can't you?"
When he could only nod, I realized that he was still overcome with emotion.
"I *know* you can, Tarzan. And I'm going to help you. Come back again this time next week, and we'll talk about it how it's going for you, about how you're feeling."
I wasn't surprised when he greeted that supposedly reassuring statement with obvious disappointment. As already noted, Tarzan was no dope, and he'd immediately grasped the boundary-setting implications of what I had said--he was leaving pretty soon, and he wasn't coming back for a while. A patient who has a big cathartic experience the first time around is often unhappy at the prospect of having to wait seven whole days until that monumental high can be repeated. In Tarzan's case, I don't think he was even prepared to uncurl himself from that loveseat anytime soon. "Don't worry," I added quickly. "If something happens in the meantime and you want to talk to me, you can." I had to pause here. My usual policy would be to give patients in this kind of need my pager number, or—-if they were extremely trustworthy--my home phone. I couldn't do that for Tarzan—he wasn't the telephone type. Then I remembered an intriguing thing I'd heard. "Detective Porter once told me that you can find anyone. Is that true?"
He looked at me through the tangle of blond hair. "If I know them," he said, sniffing. "I have to know their scent."
I smiled. "Ah, yes. But you know my scent now, right? I mean, after all this?"
He nodded.
"So, if you want to talk to me before next week, come find me."
Tarzan had to think that one over. "Anywhere?"
"Yes," I said, making a real attempt to sound brisk and straightforward. "If I'm here at the office, that's fine, although you'll have to wait until I'm free. You can't just—" I broke off when I saw the look on his face. For once he was displaying a highly readable reaction to my words—he didn't have to be told not to burst through a closed door. I hurried on. "And if I'm not here, track me down wherever I am and hopefully I can help."
Tarzan had to think it over for a minute. I sensed that there had been trouble about that in the past—people hadn't liked him barging into their lives. In the end he must have recognized that I was telling the truth, that I'd be willing to accept emergency break-ins, even after-hours. So I finally got a grudging nod out of him.
I stood up, the universal shrink gesture that the session was over. "Then, of course, if I don't see you in the meantime, I will for sure see you next week."
At that point he stood up himself. Yet, when I began walking toward the door, he didn't follow in my wake. I had to ask, "Is something wrong, Tarzan?"
He didn't want to say. I decided this time to wait for some kind of signal. As I studied him, I was struck again by the perfection of his form. I'd never seen musculature like that—it seemed to suggest, not only great strength, but also speed, suppleness and agility. I was suddenly reminded of something else Jane Porter had told me, her description of one of John Clayton's more persistent behaviors. "Oh, I get it," I said.
I strode past him, heading back in the opposite direction. Flinging open the French doors with a dramatic flourish, I stepped aside and asked, "Is this how you would prefer to make your exit?"
Like a puppy suddenly snapped off a leash, Tarzan *bounded* in that direction. I was again worried, this time about my little sidetable, about the tchotchkes on my bookcase, not to mention my downstairs neighbors. But Tarzan was so light on his so feet, so incredibly controlled, that nothing was disturbed, and all that hurtling momentum ended, incredibly, with him standing, balanced perfectly, on the very narrow railing of my balcony. Turning around, he said, in that soft voice, "I'll see you soon, Dr Gilmore."
"Take care of yourself, Tarzan. And when you come back, *I'll* take care of *you*."
He nodded, smiling, before making an absolutely astounding move. He jumped off the railing.
Now, both Kathleen Clayton and Jane Porter had regaled me with tales of Tarzan's superhuman physical exploits, but listening to second-hand stories simply does not compare with the experience of watching a man do something death-defyingly impossible right before your very eyes. So, despite all the stories, when I myself made it to the railing, I fully expected to see his body spattered on the sidewalk below. However, there were no corpses to be seen; as a matter-of-fact, there was no sign of Tarzan anywhere. Only then did the tales I'd heard become truly real to me. Standing there on the balcony, my arms propped up on the railing, I found myself wondering how the jungle years had changed Tarzan--what that experience had done to transform him on a neural, muscular, molecular level.
Well, if I was lucky, I might get a few sessions in which we could explore the answer to that exceedingly tantalizing question.
I re-entered the office and sat down at my desk. It took me a while to find a pencil but, when I did, I pulled out my calendar and jotted down the new appointment for next week. Then, chewing on the end on the pencil, I flipped back one page and stared at the notation I had made for the session that had just ended. Feeling that I owed it to the kid, I erased the name "John Clayton Jr," and instead wrote in "Tarzan."