Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (29 page)

“I fornicated outside the sanctity of marriage.”

“And are you truly sorry for that?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that, my child?”

“Because I debased the sexual act.”

“And why is that?”

“Because the act of sex is reserved for marriage. And it has a purpose. Procreation.”

“Have you committed other sins?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Tell me.”

“I use birth control. I take money for having sex. I sleep with other women’s husbands.”

“How do you feel about these things?”

“I feel guilty. I am being punished. I know this is my punishment.”

She was an actress here. The way she was at work when she did the things her johns required of her and paid her so well for. She was gone, then. The person she was had absented herself from her body. Stepped away. Stood on the sidelines. And some other woman took her place and entered her body and her mind. This other woman, this actress, who had been born thirteen years earlier, when Cleo was fifteen, who had come into being to protect Cleo from her stepfather, had no fear. She just lied.

She lied about how good-looking men were. About how good they smelled. About how well built they were, how smart they were, how funny they were, what good, wonderful, great lovers they were, how well endowed they were, how big and thick they were and how fucking fabulous it felt when they entered her. The actress, she thought, who did not have a name because she had never stepped forward and
claimed one of her own, was here with her now and saving her.

She was pushing forward, and Cleo was slipping backward. Soon she would be gone from this wooden cell that smelled of rich church incense and cedar. And when he left again, the actress would retreat, give Cleo space, let her breathe, and she wouldn’t have to remember any of what had happened tonight. The actress would shoulder that burden.

The actress was talking now. Speaking through Cleo’s mouth. Words that Cleo did not even understand.

“These are your sins and this will be your penance,” he said. “One day you will be so clean a halo will shine above your head. But for now, you are still dirty. You need to pray.”

Cleo didn’t hear anything after that.

N
oah and I walked the four blocks from the restaurant to his apartment at Broadway and Eleventh Street. Streetlight reflected off the brass doorknob set into the ornate wrought-iron door.

“How old is this building?”

“Around 1920.”

I admired the art nouveau design of the door. When we entered, I looked back. You could barely see the design from the lobby. Inside was just as ornate. Parts of the octagonal whiteand-black ceramic floor were cracked, but that didn’t detract from the effect. The walls were papered in a pattern that I recognized as William Morris. Faded now, the blue flowers with small mustard-colored centers and the full green leaves were from another era. The steps were carved from heavily veined white marble, and the center of each was worn.

“It’s like walking into another century,” I said.

“You aren’t kidding. Wait till you see the kitchen and the bathroom. My tub has claw feet.”

Two flights up, Noah opened the door to his apartment, turned on the light and let me precede him inside. The ceilings were ten feet high and the walls were wainscoted halfway up in lovely warm oak. The floors, covered with random scattered Oriental rugs, were also oak. The windows, framed in ornate molding, looked over the back garden of a church.

The furniture was simple but classic. Arts and Crafts couches, chairs and table. All upholstered with William Morris patterns. Lithographs and posters from the same late-nineteenth-century period hung on the walls. In one corner stood a baby grand.

There was a small kitchen off the living room with glassfronted cabinets and an old stove and sink that, despite their age, were in pristine condition.

Everything was subtle, subdued and masculine, but beautiful.

“I’m impressed.”

“That I have taste?”

I shook my head. “No. At the quality of these reproductions. These pieces look original.”

“That’s because they are.”

There was no way I could ask him how he managed to afford all this on a detective’s salary, but he knew what I was thinking.

“I’ve actually written a few songs that have been published. I don’t sell much. But what I’ve sold has done well.”

“The pieces you were playing tonight? They were yours?”

“Some of them.”

I shook my head. “You can do that, but you still stay on as a detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“May I ask why?”

“Being a detective is a part of me. What my dad did. What I always wanted to do. I play piano real easy. I need it for balance, but first I’m a cop.”

I nodded.

“The same way you need to do those stone sculptures.”

There wasn’t anything to say. I never talked about my sculpture and didn’t think about them in words. The abstract shapes weren’t anything I wanted anyone to judge or question. They were not important once they were finished. It was just that the process kept me sane when little else did.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine.”

I suddenly felt awkward in his apartment. Inexperienced, tired, not sure of myself. In some strange way, Noah didn’t seem attractive anymore, and being in his apartment seemed like a mistake. I was afraid in a way that I wasn’t even at the Diablo bar with Cleo’s clients.

“Why don’t you sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”

He went into the kitchen. I looked at my watch. If I left now, I could get home and be asleep before eleven.

“You take one sugar, right?” he called from the kitchen.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Would you like some brandy in it? Or Sambuca?”

“No, nothing,” I said.

He brought out two steaming mugs, set them on the coffee table and sat down beside me. I picked up my coffee, took a sip and grimaced. It was too hot. Not sweet enough. I could taste the chicory and it was bitter.

“You know, I should go. This wasn’t a good idea.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded. “Let me drive you.”

“No.”

“I insist.”

“No. That’s silly. It’s just uptown.”

“Okay. Then let me go downstairs with you and get you a cab.”

“Too much trouble. You’re exhausted. There are a million cabs.”

“Fine. But first, tell me what just happened. All of a sudden you seem like you’re ready to jump out of your skin.”

I shrugged.

He leaned forward and kissed me, but this time there was nothing about it that connected us. Two separate sets of lips crashing together but not touching.

Noah was trying to melt my reserve, but it felt like an assault. All the smells, the touches, were an invasion. His skin was rough on my cheek, his warm touch was hot on my hand. Moving away from the kiss and his smell and his hands, I scooted forward on the couch and reached for my coffee.

“I can’t explain…” I started.

“No, it’s all right, Morgan, you don’t have to.”

The surprise must have registered on my face. “I’m not used to people telling me what I don’t have to do.”

“I can believe that. But you’re not out there with ‘people’ now. You’re here. And I like seeing you sitting there. No one has ever sat there that way looking as right as you do. So indulge me. Let’s not have a postmortem on an abortion. Just stay awhile. Let me play you some music. All you have to do is listen. And then I’ll drive you home.”

Noah was smiling at me. Not the kind of look I expected a man to have etched on his face after being rebuffed.

Now that the pressure was gone, I felt I could stay and let him drive me home. It would recement the working relationship. It would dissolve the tension.

He got up, went to the CD player, looked through a pile of cases, then popped out what was already in there and put in new disks.

Soft, heady music, the kind my mother had loved, flooded
the apartment. Old-fashioned crooners sang their songs: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. I sipped more of the coffee. I was getting used to the bitterness and starting to think that I actually liked it.

Noah sat on the chair catercorner to the couch, his eyes focused on a point to my right.

For ten minutes he didn’t say anything. And I sat there just listening to the music, forgetting that I should be doing something or saying something or explaining myself.

He took out two glass balloons and poured an inch of brandy into each. Pushing one toward me, he lifted his own, inhaled and then took a sip.

“So, tell me,” he said. “How do you separate what you do from who you are?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You listen to people talk to you about their sex lives all day. About what turns them on that shouldn’t. Or at least they think shouldn’t. About what works for them in bed and what doesn’t. I’m sure you hear all the things I see. Violence, S and M, bondage, autoeroticism, fairy tales without any happy endings, prostitutes who fuck for drug money, for abusive pimps, for Gucci shoes…crap. Nothing that’s very pretty. Six years of being a sex therapist, years of being a general shrink before that. How do you get away from it?”

I looked down at the brandy. “I don’t. I don’t want to.”

“But you need to, don’t you?”

“When I’m with my daughter, with Dulcie, I don’t think about my patients.”

“Yeah, having kids must help.”

I felt something stuck in my throat. I took a sip of the brandy. It was my first sip, and it burned, hard and hot in my throat. I almost gasped. I coughed. He looked at me. Held my gaze.

“But when she’s not there, they haunt you, don’t they?”

“Trying to help them haunts me. The sadness of some of my patients’ problems is hard to walk away from just because the clock says the workday is over. You don’t stop thinking about a woman who wants to be tied down and have her lover wear a mask and use a cat-o’-nine-tails on her. But it’s not just the extremes. There are women who crave pain and men who crave being demeaned. The couples who don’t understand that seduction is as important as sex. Who have lost the art of touch. Who have an easier time spending money than spending time together. Every part of the body is connected to someone’s problems, someone else’s neuroses.”

“So how do you separate yourself from all that?”

“It’s part of your training to know how to leave…” My voice became bitter. Like the coffee. And that surprised me. “I can’t separate myself from it. I see my patients’ lives, like movies, playing out in my mind when I get into bed at night. I try to figure out what I can say to them. What I can suggest. Where I can lead them. How far I can push. It’s what I do.”

He nodded. Listening. Leaning forward. “But where are
you
in all this?”

“I don’t think about that.” My voice sounded faint to my own ears.

“What happened to your marriage?”

“I was happy in my marriage. It was Mitch who said it wasn’t fair to either of us to live the way we were living anymore. Sex is great…but animals have sex. Animals don’t talk. They don’t share each other’s pain the way humans can. There is nothing so sacred about sex that you have to break up a family over it.” The words were spilling out like the stupid tears that were coursing down my cheeks. I was embarrassed, but too upset to do anything about it. “The ways that people turn their lives inside out for sex can be dangerous. They forget it’s not just the act, not just the release that matters. It’s the needing and the being needed, too.”

“Do you ever think about someone touching you again?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“But?”

“But what?”

“But why did you freeze the minute you knew I was going to touch you?”

“Every single sex act already belongs to someone else. The women and men who talk to me, they do all those things to each other. And I listen. Nod, take it in. I wade through their bedrooms, invisible and silent, taking notes, filming them and snapping their photographs. And then I go home. Dulcie and I eat dinner, I help her with her homework. We watch a movie, she goes to sleep. I go to my study. And I chip away at a stone.”

“What are you looking for in the stone?”

“An untouched place.”

He put his hand on my arm. It was not a sexual gesture this time. Just a connection. He was making contact.

“When you carve stone, there’s this sound the chisel makes on the marble. It’s loud. Have you ever heard it?” I asked.

“No. How loud is it?”

I could feel his fingers on my hand. The heat came off him in waves.

“It sounds like a jackhammer.”

His hand moved up past my wrist, up my arm, and then with his other hand he pushed the hair off my face. He leaned in. When he spoke now he was almost whispering.

“Does the sound drown out the patients’ voices?”

“Yes.”

He was not kissing me, but I could feel his lips near my ear as he spoke to me. Soft pressure, light rain. His right hand was unbuttoning the cuff of my shirt while his left hand stroked the space behind my ear. Not an erogenous zone. But
bare skin. And it was sending an alarm, a shocking thrill, to the center of my body.

“But the voices come back, don’t they, Morgan? The images start to flood your brain and you hear the patients’ voices in your head again? Touching and kissing and fucking become all words again, all pictures that have other people in them but not you?” His fingers were still on that patch of skin, and they felt more like the wind than someone’s touch. I lost the words he was saying for a moment because for the first time in a long time, sensation was overpowering thought.

“How does all that make you feel?”

I should have laughed at how he was turning the tables on me and asking all the questions. “I get angry. I want to help my patients find their center, be able to make love, to enjoy their bodies, their partners, except I want the same thing for me, too.”

He leaned over and kissed me, but before I could respond his mouth moved down my neck, down farther. He kissed the skin above my bra, moved his mouth back up my neck, trailing kisses, pressing his lips against my collarbone, using his teeth. Shivering, I moved closer to him. He was reaching me somehow, miraculously, after all this time.