The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  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.”

  “Why do
you think she’d laugh at you? Has she laughed at you before?”

  “No.” Sharp. Decisive.

  “Then why now?”

  He shook his head.

  “Anything that comes to mind.”

  He shook his head again. We’d get back to that. Or I’d find another way in.

  “What happened after she saw what you were doing?”

  “She smiled at me.” Now he shook his head as if he was trying to shake away the image. “It was crazy. A crazy smile. Like she’d really lost her mind for a second. She just kept smiling. It was horrible. But the worst part was that even though I wanted to get up and hold her and promise her that I’d never do it again, I didn’t. I just sat there.”

  Something was happening to Bob. His eyes were not as intense. His muscles were relaxing into a professional mask again.

  “It couldn’t be more ironic,” he said in a more imperious, less-emotional voice.

  “What couldn’t be?”

  “Me. Going online—” He stopped midsentence.

  I gave him a few seconds to continue. Then a few seconds longer. We were at a critical juncture. I knew how careful I had to be to push but not too far.

  “Did you say anything to her?”

  “I tried to talk to her. I told her it was not a big deal. That I’d just stumbled on the Web site. I lied.”

  There it was. That odd elation in his voice when he said he’d lied. I felt a rush of adrenaline. It doesn’t always happen that a set of circumstances occurs in your patient’s life at exactly the right time in his or her therapy to create an opening like this.

  “Bob, how did you feel when you were lying?”

  “Terrible.”

  He didn’t. I knew he was lying. I could hear it in his voice, see it in the way he clasped his hands suddenly, hiding the wedding ring with the fingers of the other hand.

  “Really? Terrible?”

  “Yes. Lying is horrible. To lie to your wife…”

  “Yes, but just because it’s horrible doesn’t mean it has to feel terrible.”

  He was nodding. He knew. Was he going to tell me?

  “It didn’t feel terrible, did it?”

  He shook his head.

  I lowered my voice. “How did it feel, Bob?”

  He shut his eyes. He couldn’t do it. That didn’t matter. I knew he had consciously thought it. We’d get there. He was so close to understanding that he’d felt real pleasure.

  “Did she believe you?”

  “No. And she told me she didn’t. She asked me how often, and I lied again. I told her I mostly did it when she was out of town. I didn’t want to hurt her. It was killing me to hurt her. I love her.” It was a plea for me to stop, but I wouldn’t. Quickly now, before he could think about it, I asked again. “How did you feel lying to her?”

  “Elated.” Once the word was out of his mouth he seemed confused by it.

  I let out my breath. We’d just jumped a new hurdle.

  “Why?”

  “Why did it feel good?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know. Can’t you tell me? I tortured her and got pleasure from it? What kind of sick fuck does that make me? I broke every single rule and I didn’t care. I don’t understand.”

  He rarely used the work fuck. He was using it a lot today. “You don’t have to understand everything now. You just need to be open to feeling it.”

  He couldn’t tolerate his feelings, though. Even before he said a word, I knew he was stepping back. His expression and posture changed again.

  “It is really very obscene.” His sounded as if he were observing the scene from a great distance. “My wife was standing in front of my computer, staring at a woman who was thrusting a dildo in and out of herself in time to some stupid rock song. When I reached out to shut it off, she yelled at me to leave it. For some insane reason I did. She stood there like a soldier and took it. Like she was being sentenced. I couldn’t stand it. Me. I was doing this to her. To my wife.”

  I ignored the non sequitur and tried to follow where he was leading. “What happened then?”

  “She leaned in, over my shoulder, and in a very low voice, she said, ‘Bob, you don’t think you fooled me, do you? I’ve known about what you do in here for weeks. For weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’m going to kill you for this.’”

  Five

  Detective Noah Jordain, of the NYPD Special Victims Unit, leaned against the Jefferson Parish courthouse. His cell phone was wedged between his ear and shoulder while he sipped a cup of real New Orleans coffee and waited for his partner, Mark Perez, to get back on the phone.

  Watching the street traffic, he squinted against the sun’s brightness, put the cup down on the stone ledge of the building, pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, and put them on.

  Coming back to New Orleans, his hometown, had always been bittersweet, but since the hurricane it was also surrealistic. How could so much have changed? So much still be left to do? And yet feel the city’s spirit so alive?

  Across the road a light-skinned man wearing jeans, a short-sleeved white shirt and sunglasses walked down the block for the second time since Jordain had been standing there. Something about the way he swaggered alerted the detective.

  It was most likely nothing, but he couldn’t be too sure. The Hatterly trial had made a lot of people angry five years earlier, and now that the defendant’s lawyers had won an appeal, those same people were getting angry all over again. Much of it was directed at Jordain, whose incriminating testimony had been critical to the prosecution before and would be again.

  To be more precise, which Jordain always was, the papers were reporting that he’d been the nail in Louis Hatterly’s coffin. Everyone expected that same nail to be driven back in again.

  Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Perez got back on the line and continued describing the brand-new nightmare where he’d left off. “All over the country, 911 operators started getting calls. According to the guys watching the Web cast, one minute she was playing with herself, the next she was sick. That lasted for about a quarter of an hour. Some of them were more specific about what sick meant, some less, but it sounded pretty brutal. Then she dropped offline.”

  “How many calls were there?”

  “Over 150. Jersey City operators took twenty-two. Dallas took thirteen. Syracuse, twelve. Eighteen in New York. You want me to keep going?”

  “I don’t know, you want to keep going?”

  “Not unless you have a while,” Perez quipped. “The calls started on Thursday night. Most of them were logged by Friday a.m. A few are still dribbling in.”

  “Four days later?”

  “Guilty consciences.”

  “If calls were taken all over the country, we’re handling this out of New York why?”

  “A few of the guys described the top of a building they could see out of her window. Three of the New Yorkers identified it as the Met Life tower.”

  “And it took us until today to get this because…?”

  “You don’t really want to go into that now. You’d much prefer I keep filling you in on the more important information. It’s just bureaucratic crap that will raise your blood pressure, and you have to go on the stand in a few minutes. Instead, I’m going to tell you that no one has any idea who the girl is or where she is or anything about her except for the URL where the guys went to see her little show.”

  “You getting details?” Jordain asked.

  It was his most oft-repeated phrase and there were cops both in New Orleans—where he’d worked until five years ago—and in New York who called him Detective Details.

  “The URL is registered to a porn site registered to a holding company, which is owned by another holding company, which is owned by a corporation in China, and communicating with them is taking some work. It’s all going to come back to some guy sitting in an office right here in Manhattan or L.A. or New Jersey. You know it is. But we have to circle the world first.”

  “Is there anything
that suggests foul play? Could the woman have just been sick? Or could it be suicide?”

  “The descriptions of how the illness was presented suggest poison. Self-inflicted is possible, but unlikely. Add that to the sex angle and we hit the jackpot. Besides, they know that we have absolutely nothing else to do.”

  “Funny, funny man. Okay. I’ll be finished here by two and should be on a five o’clock—” Jordain broke off. The stranger in the cap was walking down the street again, now for the third time. “I’ll call you and see if you need me to come in.”

  “No need tonight. We don’t have enough.”

  “Yet.”

  The man crossed over and was heading toward him. Jordain’s hand moved to his waist and rested on his gun. It was an unconscious move.

  Nothing happened, though. The man sauntered by, not even glancing at him. But while Jordain had been paying attention to the man in the glasses, he hadn’t noticed the woman who was now standing right in front of him.

  “You aren’t ever wrong, are you, Detective?” Mrs. Hatterly, the defendant’s mother, was in her sixties, with white hair pulled back off a face that was deeply etched. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she was trembling. She stood so close to him that he could smell her sweet perfume.

  “Perez, gotta go.” Jordain snapped the phone shut. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to go through, Mrs. Hatterly.” His New Orleans drawl made the word sorry stretch all the way out.

  “What I’ve had to go through is nothing. It’s my son who is suffering. Because of you. Because you are so sure you’re right. Don’t you realize that your being right is what got my son convicted—”

  A young man came over and put his hand on the woman’s arm. “Mom, let’s go inside.”

  But Mrs. Hatterly wasn’t done with Jordain yet. “You’re so sure. But what if you are wrong? Haven’t you ever been wrong? Haven’t you—”

  Her son pulled her away just before her angry fists reached Jordain’s chest.

  He sighed. Other cops claimed they got used to people’s pain, and he envied them for that. But becoming hardened took its toll in other ways.