What Men Brought With Them
Every man who came through my door brought a lifetime with him. Not as a declared thing—he did not arrive and announce his assumptions or his permissions or the specific prohibitions he had absorbed from the world he came from.
He arrived as himself, which is to say as a man for whom all of those things had long since become invisible, because they were simply the texture of how the world worked. They only became visible in the room because the room was different from the world he had come from, and the difference occasionally produced a moment—a sentence, a gesture, sometimes a specific difficulty around something that required no explanation in my experience of it—where the hidden assumption came briefly to the surface.
I want to be careful here about what I am describing. I am not describing culture in the sense that would produce a generalisation—not saying that men from a particular background behave in particular ways. I have too many counter-examples from my own experience for that kind of claim to hold, and I am wary of the way cultural generalisations tend to produce a category that does the observing for you, in advance of the encounter, so that you see what you expect to see rather than what is there.
What I am describing is something smaller and more specific: the moments when one man, in one room, chose to tell me something about himself that he framed as cultural, and what the framing itself revealed about him that he may not have intended to reveal.
A man of late middle age, Indian, came to see me. He had already told me, at some point during the session, that in his marriage physical affection was not expressed in any visible way—not in the bedroom only, where perhaps there was some room for it, but certainly not beyond it. When the session ended and the question of payment arose, he placed the cash on the table between us. He said: “in my culture, we never hand money directly to another person.”
I had seen Indian clients before and have seen them since, and I cannot say this practice was characteristic of any of them. I noticed that immediately. So whatever the man was describing, he was not describing a shared cultural practice in any observable sense—he was describing something he understood as cultural, which is a different thing.
The interesting word was culture itself. He had not said I prefer not to, or I find it awkward to, or simply placed the money and said nothing, which would have been easy enough to do. He had reached for a framework—my culture—that placed the action outside himself. The action did not belong to him specifically. It belonged to where he came from.
I found myself sitting with this for a long time afterward. Not because of the money—the money arrived and that was that—but because of the framing.
When he attributed the behaviour to culture rather than preference, I found myself wondering what work the explanation was doing for him. He was borrowing an authority that is larger than the self, and placing the self inside it, and suggesting that the behaviour in question is not a choice that could be otherwise but a fact about the world he inhabits.
There may be cases where this is entirely accurate. In this case, I could not verify it, and I found that the unverifiability was itself information about the man. He was in a room where, for once, an explanation seemed necessary. He felt the need to explain. The explanation he reached for was the most distancing one available.
The money, though, was a different kind of difficulty for different men, and most of it had nothing to do with culture in any framed sense. Many men seemed embarrassed by the payment regardless of where they came from, and the embarrassment expressed itself in specific and varied forms that I found consistently interesting.
I collected the fee at the end of the session, which was a deliberate choice. I had considered taking it at the beginning and decided against it—taking it first would have changed the quality of the time, installed the transaction at the opening rather than the close, made the fee the frame rather than the structure underneath. Taking it at the end reversed this. The duration was the thing. The fee completed it. But completing it sometimes produced the embarrassment I mentioned, and the embarrassment found various forms.
Some men handed me an envelope and indicated, with or without words, that I should open it after they had left. I did not. I opened it in front of them, counted the notes, and if the amount was correct I thanked them and said nothing more. If it was not correct, I said so. The envelope itself was interesting—the gesture of wrapping the money in paper, of placing an additional layer between the hand and the fee, of making it so that the money technically did not pass directly from one person to another.
A different kind of culture, perhaps, or no culture at all but the same instinct the Indian man had expressed—the wish to put some distance between the self and the transaction.
The question how much? produced its own version of this. My fees appeared on the website. They appeared on a large poster in the studio, placed where it was difficult not to see. I had designed the arrangement specifically to avoid the need to name the fee in the session, which I found disrupted something. And yet a surprising number of men asked. Sometimes before the session, which I understood—the website might have been read quickly, the number not retained. But sometimes after, or at the end, when the poster had been visible for the whole of their visit. I noticed this without knowing what to make of it. The fee was present in the room the entire time. The question arrived as though it hadn’t been.
I recall with some amusement a man who had overpaid me. I counted the notes at the end, noticed the excess, and attempted to return one to him. He argued. He recounted the notes and arrived at a different total—a total that, by his reckoning, meant no excess existed and no note required returning. I was left wondering whether the over-payment had been accidental or whether the argument about it had been the point—the opportunity to have a disagreement about something that was entirely legible, entirely countable, in a room where most of what had happened resisted counting.
What these moments shared, across all their differences, was the specific quality of awkwardness that money produces in contexts where it is present but not, strictly speaking, the main event.
The fee made the session possible. It gave the session its shape, defined what was inside the arrangement and what was not, communicated the value that each person was agreeing to before anything else was discussed. The fee’s importance to the session did not make it comfortable to handle in the specific moment of handling it, and the discomfort appeared in forms that ranged from the envelope to the cultural explanation to the argument over an extra banknote.
What each form of discomfort had in common was a wish, however slight and however briefly expressed, for the transaction not to be quite what it was. The man who placed money on the table rather than handing it was putting a small distance between himself and the exchange. The man who asked how much, when the amount was displayed, was perhaps doing something similar—making the naming happen between two people rather than silently from a poster. The man who over-paid and then disputed the over-payment was engaging with the money in the most legible way available, at the end of a session where much that had happened was not legible at all.
Whether these were performances of embarrassment, genuine embarrassment, or something else that appeared as embarrassment I could not determine. The money arrived in the end, in all its cases, and the sessions were complete, and the men left. What I kept was the variety of the difficulty, and the sense that the difficulty was not incidental to the work but somehow contiguous with it—part of the same set of questions about what the hour had been, and what it meant to put a number on it, and what the number was supposed to represent once the hour was over.
I have no conclusion to offer. I have the money counted in my hand, and a man at the door ready to depart, and the slight pause before the door opens.
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