So open, I need a wall: "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson

At the beginning of reading "Wrong Object" by Mona Simpson, I had the same reaction to the story that the therapist-narrator does to her patient, "K": bored, with a side order of contempt. But my interest perked right up at the same moment the therapist's does, which is the moment K, after months of beating around the bush about why he's really there to see a therapist, finally comes clean. He's been saying he doesn't love his wife like he should, but it turns out there's a reason for it, and it drops all at once:

"I'm a pedophile, he said. the problem with my wife isn't...I've never been enchanted with anyone my own age. Which is to say my age."

Boom.

But wait, there's more! Just as you're ready to close the book in disgust, the therapist warns K that hey, you know I have to report this, but here's the real kicker.

"Don't worry, he said. I've never touched a child. I never will. That's not why...he shrugged. Not a possibility. I have too much to lose. And, he paused, it'd be wrong. I get that. I have three kids."

(If my lack of quotation marks around the dialogue is confusing, that's how it is in the original.)

So we have, in his own words, a "nonacting minor -attracted person" who, realizing it would be wrong to act on his attraction, refuses, through sheer willpower, to carry out his feelings. He doesn't even let himself be alone with his daughters (young boys, apparently, do not trouble him).

Now that's an intriguing plot. The therapist feels the same way. Her entire attitude toward K changes. Before, she was bored by his rich person problems, feeling like he looked down on her for coming from poverty and looking down on him in return. The change comes across in how she sees him ("All of a sudden his look entered the lexicon of handsome") and how she sees other people ("People in my coffee shop appeared heroic; I began to believe that many carried damage and made it their purpose not to pass that damage on").

More troublingly, she leaps past her disdain and immediately swings to the opposite pole: "It seemed not only that I could fall in love with this person (the the way therapists fall in love, with the poignancy of renunciation) but that whatever that motion was, like a rope being shaken, it had already begun."

Don't worry, this isn't that story. I thought for a minute we might be headed there. 

Therapist and patient begin to seek a reason for his attraction to young girls, some possible sexual trauma in his own childhood, but they cannot find one. "If it's buried, it's buried deep," he concludes. The desire, if anything, seems to be linked to a kind of Peter Pan syndrome (this is my analysis, not the therapist's). The one girl he ever felt anything with was his sister's friend when he was thirteen. He kissed her in the ocean when they were all on vacation together, and it was perfect, and he's never wanted anything as much since then. He grew up after that moment when he was thirteen, but the girls he wanted didn't. There's a moment when he reveals that he never learned to do laundry. He may be emotionally stunted from having lived a privileged life, or from idealizing a time in his youth, or from both.

The therapist has to resort to the few therapeutic options she can think of. There's arousal conditioning. He can try having sex with his wife, and he can think about his sexual fantasy with a young girl in order to get aroused, but near the end, when it's too late to stop, he should stop thinking about the fantasy and focus on his wife. Each time they have sex, he should try to stop focusing on his fantasy at an earlier point, until he hardly needs to think of it at all. There is also satiation training, which involves masturbating over and over to his fantasy until it no longer satisfies him. K opts for arousal conditioning, but his wife gets tired of having so much sex, and he has to stop.

The therapist's problematic comparison to aversion therapy

The therapist compares herself to a past generation of people who sat in her chair and tried to get gay people to stop being gay. That older generation told gay men they were focusing their drive on a "wrong object" (ROLL CREDITS!) and they tried to get those men to focus their desire on a right object. The therapist realizes she is trying to do the same thing with K, but she wonders if it's possible, because the only thing she's learned from studying that chapter in the history of psychology is "that you could scare people and make them celibate, you could maybe stop them from doing what they had the urge to do, but it was nearly impossible to implant an alternate desire. The arc of gay liberation had a good ending, at least in California. But K's problem never could."

This is probably where the story gets really uncomfortable for a lot of people, including me, as if having a character who is attracted to young teen girls isn't uncomfortable enough already. Comparing homosexual desire to a desire for thirteen-year-old girls is fraught politically and morally. I get why the therapist is doing it--she's really only comparing the two because the past attempt to turn gay men straight teaches us how hard it is to recondition desire. By saying K's story can't have a happy ending, she realizes that desire between two consenting adult males is on a fundamentally different plane from desire by an adult man for a young teen girl. But she doesn't let the comparison go. She continues to think about how therapy in the past let men down, how it did far more harm than good, leading the reader to think that she thinks she is is also doing more harm than good by trying to move him from a "wrong object" to a right one. In other words, by comparing a sexual desire society currently disapproves of to one it used to disapprove of but which has now become normalized, she's moving toward normalizing sexual attraction toward young teen girls.

There are plenty of reasons to suspect the therapist's judgment is clouded. Beyond her own admitted sudden feeling that she might fall in love with this patient, she's keeping it a secret. She says that all therapists cheat on confidentiality a little bit when they need help talking through how to help a patient. However, she also thinks that, "I couldn't tell anyone about K; I didn't want to. I felt pretty sure no one would understand." This is the language a young girl abused by an older man might use. "It's our secret. The world wouldn't understand." Is K working her?

There's reason to suspect he is. She's a new therapist, meaning she may not have developed the keen instincts that come with hearing bullshit from a thousand people. She's also got a sore spot about having grown up poor; she feels hostile to those who grew up wealthy, which is a way of hiding how she also needs their acceptance. She feels comforted when her boss, who went to Stanford and now takes nine-week vacations to Scotland to write novels in verse about his dead wife, tells her he doesn't think less of her for where she comes from.

There's an open ending, and then there's this story

By the end of the story, there are so many possible readings open, it's almost like trying to drive from New York to Los Angeles through a country that is all one giant paved surface. The possibilities are so open, it's actually harder than navigating limited roads with their traffic. I don't mean that as a criticism so much as a description of the story's character.

These open roads are a result of the various ways we might apply the notion of a "wrong object." Since this "wrong object" is the title of the story, I think it's the key image. But who, at the end, is really the one focused on what wrong object? I can think of so many possibilities, I'm left driving in circles.

I really need boundaries sometimes.

To briefly summarize the end, K reports that he has looked at child porn once, and found it awful. The girl is obviously being hurt in it, and the guy is obviously happy about that. "That was never my fantasy," he says. The therapist eventually trusts her boss enough to tell him what is going on with K, and he reports K's viewing of the child porn to the police. The police investigate, find nothing, and K's wife comes to complain to the therapist that she violated K's trust. So K's wife now knows the truth, which the therapist had been hoping for all along, but the therapist also feels like she did actually betray K.

The obvious application of the concept of the "wrong object" is the one that is overt in the story: K is attracted to the wrong kinds of people. How, then, do we interpret what happens in the story? He did the right thing by seeking help. But is he, in the way sociopathic sexual predators are, really good at manipulating people? Did he bring the therapist into his trust, rigging it so that he could look like he was doing the right thing while all the while not doing the right thing? Does he end up looking like a wronged victim with his wife instead of a monster because of how things worked out? Might he have wanted to do that the whole time?

Or is the wrong object the way society is focused on hating someone like K? If it's true that you can't help whom you're attracted to, and the best you can do is try to control it, isn't K's resolve something to admire? He KNOWS it's wrong, even if he can't bring himself to feel it, and his entire life is a process of logic over emotion, of willpower over giving in to what he wants. Shouldn't we get past our "ick" factor and face the reality a person like K presents us in all its inexplicable, human problematizing of our accepted truths?

Or is the wrong object the way the therapist herself focuses on K? Has she picked up a wrong object?

Or is it the way the therapist is focused on getting the approval of others, instead of finding approval within herself? Isn't she too interested in approval from her boss, who is himself focused on a wrong object in his dead wife?

Or is the wrong object the way the wife at the end is focusing her anger at the therapist, instead of her husband?

Then there's what I fear might be the most likely scenario. The wrong object is when I, the reader, empathize with K more than with the children who are at risk from him. It's wrong when I suddenly became interested in a story I wasn't that into because of the big revelation. When K is saying that he finally had to come into therapy because he was--through no fault of his own--teamed up with a fourteen-year-old girl (the boss's daughter) during her internship at his law firm, shouldn't my main concern be for the girl's safety? The fact that the story ends with the therapist thinking about the girls leads me to believe that this is the "right object" for our empathy in the story, not K. And he did, after all, look at child porn, even if we believe his story that he only did it once and he didn't like it. So he's not deserving of our empathy.

This last reading is socially acceptable, and it satisfies the "ick" factor the reader feels throughout. The first priority is to make sure the innocent are not harmed. Nonetheless, I feel like it's a betrayal to what made this story something I wanted to read in the first place. Sexual relations between adults and teens are so objectionable, we have a reaction to the attraction that's as strong as being asked to swallow human waste. But we do need to get past that gut response to be able to talk about it and figure out how to fix it. The story, by giving us K, at once attracted to young girls and also fighting the impulse with everything in him, allows a space to open up in which to get past the gag reflex and talk about the issue. Is there something we can learn from past failed treatment of homosexuals that can teach us what might work and what won't in this case?

But ending on the moralizing "Won't someone please think of the children" note seems, while certainly never a wrong concern, to take something of what made this such a compelling story away at the end. Not totally. Not even close to totally. It's still a great story for the way it throws the uncomfortable at us and makes us puzzle through the hard choices of what the right thing to do is along with the narrator, all the while doubting our own motives like the narrator should doubt hers. After going through the entire story in a place of empathy for K, not even the end removes that. If K has just fooled us all, we've spent long enough under his spell that now we can't go back to the world before we empathized with him. If we've been tricked along with the therapist, we now have to sit and think about what it means for us to have been tricked.