The Venus Fix (2 page)

“It’s not…I don’t think. What if it’s not an emergency?”

“We have a car on the way to your house. Are you hurt?”

“No. It was a mistake, it’s not an emergency.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. It’s not me. I thought someone…I thought someone was breaking in…but it wasn’t… I was asleep.”

“The police are on their way. They should be there in less than thirty seconds.” The operator’s voice eased and softened.

Timothy heard the intercom buzz in the kitchen, hung up, ran out of his room and down the hall, the panic rising like bile in his stomach.

He pressed the button.

“Yes?”

“Timothy, the police are here,” the doorman announced. “They said it was an emergency. I’m sending them up.”

“No,” he shouted at the doorman. “No. Let me talk to them.”

There was a pause. Then: “Timothy Marcus? This is Officer Keally. Is there something wrong up there?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You called 911.”

“Yeah, but by mistake. I was asleep, dreaming, thought I saw…heard something, but it wasn’t real.”

“Are you sure you don’t want us to come up and check things out?”

Timothy actually hesitated. Should he tell them and face
the consequences? Deal with whatever his parents would do to him? He had seen something weird on the computer, hadn’t he? She was sick, wasn’t she?

Or had some weird fucker convinced Penny to act out his perverted scenario?

“I’m sure,” he said into the intercom.

Monday
Eighteen days remaining

I
t was going to start to snow again, soon. I could smell it. Snow had always been magical to me. Something that, until I was ten, I thought I owned because my last name is Snow. Morgan Snow.

The sky was gray and the trees were dusted white and my breath came out in visible puffs. I had been mesmerized by that when I was a child, and like me, my daughter, Dulcie, had found it equally absorbing.

“Ghost breath,” she’d say, then suck in a great gulp of air and blow it out again. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mommy?”

I did, but not in a way that my then eight-year-old would have understood. How could I have explained that the ghost of my mother lived inside of her? And that there were also the ghosts of the secrets that my patients told me that could, in the midst of a moment of my own pleasure, surface—interrupting and demanding acknowledgment. That it was in between all those moments that I hoped it would all be okay, that we’d all be okay.

At the corner of Sixty-sixth Street, I stopped for a red light. A woman in a black fur coat shifted impatiently from her right
foot to her left. “I hate this weather,” she said. Not quite to me, but not to herself, either. I nodded, and then the light changed.

We crossed and went in opposite directions.

The Northeast was suffering a severe cold spell but I didn’t mind. I liked to bundle up in layers of sweaters and fleece-lined boots, wrap a big scarf around my head, and walk the mile from my apartment on Eightieth Street and Madison to my office.

At Sixty-fifth, I turned the corner and trudged toward Park Avenue. Side streets don’t get as much traffic as the major avenues so the snow never melts as quickly. The early twentieth-century limestone maisonette where I work was halfway down the block. The building’s facade is elegant: Ionic columns support an overhang that shelters the patients while they wait to be buzzed through the wrought-iron door into the most progressive sex clinic in the nation—the Butterfield Institute.

In the country, the snow stays pristine and is so clean you can reach down, scoop some up in your hands and eat it. But in the city, the exhaust from the thousands of cars, buses and trucks turns it gray within hours.

Near the gutter, on the sidewalk in front of the institute, there were filthy mounds of snow smeared with black soot, but close to the building, where I was standing, it was still white, and would be for at least a few more hours.

M
y ten o’clock had just left and I was about to make a phone call when the patient I knew only as “Bob” walked in, early and unannounced.

“I had an awful weekend,” he said in a tense voice as he strode across the threshold.

Bob, who normally had ramrod-straight posture, looked weighed down. Behind him Allison, the receptionist, explained that she had tried to stop him from barging in but that he refused to wait once she’d told him that my last patient had already left.

I was sitting in the oversize chair that faces the couch where my patients either sit or lie down. I glanced at the clock to my right.

“Your appointment isn’t until eleven o’clock,” I said to Bob, and then told Allison she could go.

While I waited for him to sit down, I drank some tea from the mug I was holding. Jung at Heart, it read. Green letters on a white background. It was one of a set of six that Dulcie had made for me, each emblazoned with a psychoanalytic pun. It amazed me how many patients saw me using one of
those mugs week after week, and then one day suddenly said,
How funny—when did you get that?

That was an important moment. It meant we were making progress, that my patient was noticing his or her surroundings, and was no longer absorbed just with the self. Bob had not reached that point.

He hadn’t even progressed to the point where he would tell me his real name. I’d had patients who wanted to protect their privacy before, though never anyone as secretive as Bob, who was bright and charming, intense and secretive, and desperately in need of my help.

“These fifteen minutes between sessions are my only breaks. It’s not okay to just barge in.”

Bob wasn’t at the point where he could think about anyone but himself. “I’m very upset about my wife. No matter what, I love her. I just can’t stand this.” Usually he folded his jacket carefully, but as he talked he dropped it on the edge of the couch, and when it fell to the floor he didn’t notice.

“What happened over the weekend?”

Bob was in his early fifties, about six feet tall, and had the build of someone who worked out religiously. His suits were always pressed and his shoes were shined. Incongruously, a blue New York Yankees baseball cap always covered his head. His black owl-rimmed glasses had tinted lenses that hid his eyes.

I didn’t know if his efforts to disguise himself were working or if he simply wasn’t as well known as he thought he was, but I did know he was paranoid about being seen at the Butterfield Institute. Over and over, he reminded me how bad it would be for his career—and his wife’s—if his “issue,” as he referred to it, was to be discovered.

He didn’t pay his bills by check or through his insurance company. Rather, twice a month, ten minutes before Bob arrived, he was preceded by a man named Terry Meziac, who
wore a business suit and carried a briefcase and gave me an envelope containing crisp hundred-dollar bills, and then swept my office for bugs.

He never found any. I never expected him to. But since his third visit, when I noticed the gun in his waistband, I had occasionally wondered if, as the receiver of Bob’s confessions, there was a chance that my own life was in danger.

In ancient Egypt, the architects of the pyramids, the only men who knew the entrances and exits through the stone puzzles, were killed once the monuments were completed, so the secrets died with them.

I wasn’t that disturbed by the gun. I dated a detective. I lived in Manhattan. A lot of powerful people had bodyguards. What did disturb me was that Bob was so paranoid about being in therapy. He even used our hidden entrance, which links to the basement of the building next to ours. We don’t generally encourage our patients to take advantage of it because it causes logistical nightmares for Allison, who has to keep track of all the appointments and make sure no two people show up next door at the same time. In the previous six years, only one other patient had asked to use it.

We keep secrets at the Butterfield Institute. Hold them tight and protect them the way we protect our own children. That is what we promise our patients, what we swear to, what we stake our reputations on. Because our currency is secrets, nothing on the outside of the building proclaims its status as a prestigious sex therapy clinic. But still patients sometimes worry that they will be seen walking through the wrought-iron-and-milk-glass doors.

Three, four minutes had gone by and Bob remained quiet. Only his fingers, tapping a code on the leather of the sofa, broke the silence in the room. I judged his level of anxiety by
the tempo of the tapping. Today was one of the worst in the three months since he’d been seeing me.

“I don’t know how to save my wife and myself, too. And I have to save her.” His voice softened.

“Why is it up to you to save her? Can’t she save herself?”

“Yes, yes, but I’m the one that put her in this hell.”

“We’ve talked about you taking all the blame.”

He frowned. Bob had never allowed me to even suggest anything disparaging about his wife. She was above reproach. She was an angel. She was innocent.

“She’s not the one surfing the Internet, jerking off to pretty little girls who whisper dirty words to me in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe…” he said, and then stopped again. Outside my second-floor window a car horn honked.

“Yes?”

“Maybe I need to find another therapist.”

This didn’t come as a surprise. Often a frustrated patient imagines another doctor will be the solution.

“We can talk about that. But first, tell me what’s going on at home.”

“My wife is having…she’s gone into some sort of new crisis. It’s not just a depression anymore, it’s a meltdown. And it’s completely my fault. She’s erratic. Volatile. Angry one minute, crying the next. I can’t stand it. I’ll do anything to stop it. To make her happy.” He hesitated. “If I can. I’ll do anything I can.”

“I know you think it’s your fault, but—”

“I don’t
think
it is, Dr. Snow. I know it is.”

“Explain that to me.”

“Do I need to spell it out?”

Spelling it out
was Bob’s code that he’d broken his fast and gone online again. Since he’d been seeing me, the longest he’d been able to go without a fix was five days, and he’d done that
twice. The previous Wednesday, he said he was ready to try to quit again and had already abstained for two nights.

“No. You don’t have to spell it out if you don’t want to, but I’d like to hear what happened.”

“Bad boy that I am, I went online. I tried not to. I hadn’t for two days. Just like I told you last Wednesday morning. But Thursday…I don’t know…I was home, by myself. I went online to read my e-mail and…I clicked over…no big deal…just for a few minutes. Anyway, I didn’t hear her come home. I was so deep into the fantasy and the goddamn fucking pleasure that I didn’t hear her, and she walked in on me. She fucking saw me at the computer. I hadn’t heard her. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Bob stood up, walked to the window and put his hands against the glass, as if he might push it out and escape.

“Can anyone see in? Is this glass treated?”

“No, it’s not.”

Quickly, he turned around. For a second he looked as if he didn’t know what he was supposed to do next. Stand? Sit? Leave?

“Bob, you need to come sit back down, or lie down.”

He nodded and did as I’d asked.

Silently again on the couch, he clasped his hands in his lap and then stared at his white-gold wedding band.

“Bob, when you talk about going online, you refer to yourself as a bad boy. Tell me how it feels to be bad?”

“Horrible. Despicable. Out of control. How else would it feel?”

“Well, the expression on your face when you said it made me think being bad was exciting. Thrilling, maybe. Is that possible?”

He seemed startled. “No. That’s crazy. Why would I like breaking rules? Rules, laws, are what separate us from savages.”

He was disassociating. It wasn’t the first time. His posture had become more rigid. His hands relaxed. He spoke as if he were addressing a group of people, rather than just me, somewhere other than here in my office. I had to bring him back.

“How do you feel about your wife finding out about you going online?”

“I didn’t want her to know. I’m not a sadist. You know that, don’t you?” He looked directly at me, imploring me. This was when he reached me, when his childlike need to be acknowledged broke through the professional veneer.

“No, you’re not a sadist. But let’s get back to the question. Is that the only reason you didn’t want her to know?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Yes. But I’m not sure it’s the only reason. Think for a minute, Bob. Why didn’t you want her to know?”

“Why can’t you tell me? I don’t understand what would be so detrimental to the therapy for you to make a suggestion here and there. Use an example about another patient—without names, of course—to illustrate a point?”

This was something Bob often did, interrupting the therapy to try to understand the theory behind it. Occasionally it was a deadly tactic, but often I knew it was a deep-seated need to understand the precepts of the process. He was highly intelligent, and I’d found that if I answered him, he became more responsive.

“In this case I don’t have an answer. But something makes me think that even if you aren’t conscious of it, there’s another reason. I need you to find it.”

He sat. Thought. Seemed to accept my rationale.

“Okay. Now. Why didn’t you want your wife to know?”

His brow furrowed and then relaxed. He’d thought of something.

“Tell me.”

“Her knowing ruins everything.”

I nodded but didn’t speak. I waited. I knew there was more. After ten years of being a therapist you learn when the end of a sentence signals more to come, or when the patient has closed up again and you need to find another way in.

“It’s not mine anymore. Even if it’s hell, it’s been my hell. Something that she wasn’t part of. Now that she knows, she can lie in bed and imagine me watching my pathetic little Web-cam girls, with my dick in my hand and she can laugh at me and my dependency.”