The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  He watched until she was gone from sight, and then he, too, headed toward the courtroom.

  It took some effort. And not because it was so hot out and the air was so heavy. He loved that air. No, that wasn’t why. This case had been bad enough the first time. Having to go through it all again was bringing back ghosts, because during the last trial, his father, Detective André Jordain, had died.

  Jordain had been back to New Orleans often since moving to New York. He’d been to the cemetery where his dad was buried. But this was different.

  He couldn’t stop the memories from washing over him. The defendant’s mother had shook him up, and whenever he was unnerved, the dam he’d erected to keep the past from seeping into the present leaked.

  Jordain passed through the cool lobby and proceeded to the courtroom. He stopped in the hallway and looked in. Five years earlier, Jordain had been on that stand when his lieutenant had walked in and stood, as if at attention, at the back of the room. Noah had wondered why he was there. But he didn’t find out until after he had finished his testimony: His father had died.

  He stared at the spot where he’d been when he’d heard. The ghosts were demanding their time.

  Six

  At noon, Nina Butterfield popped her head into my office. She was dressed in a three-quarter-length, copper-colored fur coat that matched her hair, and was holding up a pair of ice skates, swinging them in the air.

  “You want to take a break?” she asked, her amber eyes sparkling.

  I did but, preoccupied with Bob, told her I didn’t think I should.

  “You never need to get out more than when you don’t think you should. I know these things. I’m a therapist. Now, come on. I cleared your schedule with Allison. She said you’re free.” It sounded like a suggestion but it wasn’t. More often than not, she knew what was best for me. More often than not I recognized that.

  At least twice a week Nina and I went out together at lunchtime. Sometimes to eat, but usually to walk, either in Central Park, which was only two blocks west of the institute, or wherever we wound up, exploring stores that we’d never noticed before, taking in exhibitions at museums or shows at art galleries. In the winter, when strolling in the street wasn’t as enticing, we went ice-skating.

  Outside, we pulled on our gloves and buttoned up our coats. Someone else might have turned back because of the snow and gray sky. Not Nina. She was fearless about venturing out into a potential storm.

  She’d taught me how to skate when I was an eight-year-old without a mother and she was a childless divorcée who hadn’t yet realized she’d inherited me. Then years later, she’d taught my daughter.

  “Dulcie hasn’t been skating at all yet,” I told her as we walked into the park and headed west toward the rink. Since my daughter had been appearing in The Secret Garden all of our old routines had changed.

  “I’d imagine with six performances a week on Broadway, she’s overwhelmed.”

  “Do you really think it’s a good idea that a thirteen-year-old works so hard? She’s missing out on so much.”

  “Is she happy, Morgan?” She sighed.

  “She seems happy,” I said, and heard the wistfulness in my own voice.

  “You’d know if she wasn’t.”

  Since she was a baby, I’d sensed Dulcie’s emotional and psychic temperature even if we both weren’t in the same room, or the same building as each other. Miles away, I’d get a sudden pain in my stomach or hand or back, only to find out when I arrived home that she’d been sick, cut herself or fallen. When something wonderful happened, I’d feel a sudden lightness for no reason. It had been going on so long that none of us found it odd.

  Nina glanced over at me. She had it too—that sense when something was wrong with me—but in her case, it was exceptional insight as a therapist.

  “Are things back to normal?”

  Weeks earlier, my daughter and I had an argument about her being offered a three-week part in a television series. She’d wanted to do it and I’d been adamant that appearing in a play six times a week was more than enough work for her. We fought. And then, of course, she brought her father into it. I’d already talked to Mitch, and he had backed me up on the decision. Nevertheless, when I’d gone to pick her up from his apartment that weekend, she’d refused to come home with me. She said she knew that if I’d said yes, her father would have said yes, too. That he was more fair. That he wanted her to have a career. That I wanted to hold her back. And finally—the coup de grace—that she wanted to live with him.

  Legally, at the age of thirteen, she had the right to make that decision, and there was nothing I could do.

  She’d stayed at her father’s for almost four weeks, until we worked out a cease-fire.

  “The drama queen seems to have forgiven me. But I’m still furious at her emotional-blackmail techniques. She’s too damn intuitive.”

  “What’s holding on to the anger about?”

  “You know that?”

  “Probably. Do you?”

  We laughed. “There’s nothing worse than two therapists having a conversation. Especially two who have known each other forever. Yes, oh master, I know. As long as I focus on the anger I don’t have to focus on how scared I was that she wasn’t coming back. I know it’s not about her. It’s some crazy thing where I’ve confused her and my mother in my head. But the loneliness was real. And it stung.”

  “And—”

  I interrupted Nina. We’d had this conversation before and I knew where she was headed. “I know she’s not going to follow in my mother’s footsteps: a star at sixteen, lost by twenty, dead at twenty-nine. I know Dulcie isn’t my mother. She might have her talent, but she’s had a secure and healthy childhood. She’s had Mitch and me as parents.”

  “I love it when you do all my work for me.” Nina smiled.

  We’d arrived at the Wollman Rink. Inside, we got a locker and put on our skates. Then side by side, we glided across the ice in time to a Schubert waltz. Probably due to the light snow, Nina and I had the whole rink to ourselves for the first twenty minutes, until an explosion of laughter and shouting preceded a group of twenty or thirty kids. All the private schools in the area used the park as an escape from indoor gymnasiums.

  A flash of a shocking-pink parka crossed my path. A turquoise scarf fell on the ice. A boy in a heavy black sweater, one cherry-red glove and one forest-green glove sped by and scooped up the scarf without stopping.

  Along with Nina, I watched them with delight, and then I noticed two of the boys smirking as one of the girls spilled onto the ice, her legs spreading wide as she spun out.

  Four boys took off from one end of the rink, racing one another, their blades sending shavings up into the air. It looked like an updated Norman Rockwell until one elbowed another viciously as he skated too close, and the kid went crashing into the handrail.

  Two girls took each other’s arms and danced across the rink. Sweet friends, until they came up behind a third girl and started whispering about her, clearly making fun of her and the way she was skating.

  We don’t treat kids at the institute, but a few months earlier, as a favor to a friend of Nina’s—the principal of one of the city’s prestigious private schools—I’d taken on a once-a-week group session with eight fifteen- to eighteen-year-old boys who were seriously addicted to Internet porn, as well as four girls who were involved with them and affected by it.

  Seeing these kids skating, seeing the subtle messages beneath their easy exuberance, reminded me of how I felt in the room with my group: knowing there was something worse than their problems with pornography going on deep beneath the surface of what they showed me, anxious to get to it.

  Just as Nina and I were leaving the rink, the snow started to fall heavily. These were not the soft flakes that had been floating down before but a heavy, wet snow that caught in my eyelashes and made it hard to see.

  There are landmarks throughout the park, but the easiest ones to use to orient yourself are abo
ve the treeline. At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted had designed the park’s hills and valleys so that, no matter where you stood, you couldn’t see any of the city in the sky. More than a hundred years later, there were buildings on all four sides, their spires and roofs standing tall, and you could always tell where you were by looking up.

  But this snow was so dense that not only couldn’t we recognize any landmarks within the park, we couldn’t see into the distance to get our bearings. Peering into vague whiteness, Nina and I set off.

  No problem. Up ahead was a fork. We knew to take a right. Straight. Another right.

  Then nothing looked familiar. It should have—we’d walked this route so many times—but nothing was visible other than soft mounds of white.

  “We should be coming to a left,” Nina said after a few minutes.

  But we didn’t. Somehow we’d gotten turned around. For two New Yorkers, it was a strange experience. We were lost in our own backyard.

  Nina pointed to an overpass. “Do you know which footbridge that is?”

  “Not a clue.” I peeled my glove back and peered down at my watch. The face was clear only for a second before flakes obscured it. We’d been walking long enough that we should have been at a park exit if we’d gone in the right direction.

  We both had patients waiting for us. We had to find a way out.

  It was silly to panic. The city was all around us. There were people and taxis and traffic and noise and stores and lights and sidewalks just hundreds of yards in any direction, but we were circling inside a storm. Every tree, rock, pond and bridge had become part of an unfamiliar landscape. We just had to trust that since we’d done this so many times before, our instincts would lead us home.

  But what if we really were lost? Could we be lost in Central Park?

  Square breathing, I thought. The way Nina had taught me long ago. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four. Nina must have heard my inhaling and exhaling. She glanced over. “We can’t be lost for long if we just keep going in the same direction. It’s kind of fun, isn’t it? Not knowing where you’re going for once?”

  Before I could answer, she said, “No it isn’t, not for you.”

  Seven

  It wasn’t a blizzard, at least not yet, but it was bad enough that a lot of people were shutting down their offices early. Kira Rushkoff, a senior partner at Forrest, Lane and Graffe, had walked fifteen blocks in the snow without anything on her head before she found an empty taxi.

  A half hour later she arrived home. Upstairs, she didn’t remember to take off her coat or her dripping boots. She didn’t turn on any lights or make herself a cup of the English breakfast tea she liked so much.

  In her husband’s dark study, she sat down at his desk in front of the computer. Alan never shut it off. The screen saver twinkled with stars in the cosmos. Tentatively, as if she didn’t know whether she was reaching into a treasure chest or a snake’s nest, she put her hands on the keys.

  She hit the H key but it could have been any key. The screen saver disappeared, replaced by the desktop. The brighter glow made the diamonds in her wedding band glint hypnotically, and she stared at the silver-white bright shine for a second, distracted.

  Each time she had done this, she’d felt the same overwhelming exhaustion at first. A feeling so heavy her shoulders sagged under its weight. That this was morally wrong should have mattered to her. At least as a concept. Only four months earlier, she would have found her actions abhorrent. Was it possible that she had become this person, living this life, doing these things, in only sixteen weeks?

  Her fingers typed out his password.

  It was an accident that she knew it. She’d barely been paying attention that night. They’d been here, talking, and he’d wanted to show her an e-mail from one of his students, so he’d typed out the seven letters. She’d hardly been aware that she was watching his fingers move on the keyboard, but when the time came that she decided to go searching for the truth, the password was there in her mind, teasing her with its irony.

  J-u-s-t-i-c-e.

  All around her, leather-bound legal volumes with gilt lettering on their spines stood at attention on their shelves, mocking her actions. Alan had seen to that. He had chosen as his little hobby—the single most insulting pastime he could have, considering who she was and what she did and how she felt about it.

  Yes, she defended porn kings and smut dealers because there was no greater test for the First Amendment. Each and every time she won a case, she got satisfaction that she was tightening the screws on the protective glass over the Constitution.

  The last big civil case—between her client, a pornography king, and well-known feminist Stella Dobson—had garnered more media attention than she’d ever had before. Even though public opinion was with Dobson, the law was clearly on Kira’s side. She’d won.

  But at what cost? she asked as she lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, not able to sleep, seeing the faces of the women she betrayed—feminists and trailblazers and reformers. Women like her own mother, who struggled so her daughter could go to law school. Women who’d made a difference, like Judy Wilson, Emma Michaels. Like Dobson herself. All women she knew and admired, versus these men who were in it for the dollar. Not for principles. She talked to, met with, worked with, defended and saved the hides of businessmen who brokered in some of the most disgusting images she’d ever seen. And it was justified because she was proving and protecting inalienable rights. Except…

  She couldn’t think about that now. She had work to do before Alan came home. He couldn’t find her invading his privacy. Even though he’s done worse to you, the strident voice in her head whispered. The voice talked to her all the time now and said there were no more excuses and there was no more time for weakness. There was too much to do.

  The computer made a slight humming noise, like a bee circling overhead. The keys clicked in a rhythm that was slightly off kilter. It was easy enough to check where Alan had been the night before. Since he didn’t suspect she had access to his computer, he didn’t empty his cache, and the last twenty Web sites he had visited were right there for her perusal.

  Three different women.

  He’d spent the night with three women.

  When she was lying in their bed by herself.

  Kira had promised herself that all she was going to do was collect the Web addresses and the names of the women Alan had seen. She was not going to go look at them, but like a reformed smoker lighting up, Kira hit the key that pulled back the curtain and showed her the still photo of the last woman Alan had watched perform last night via her Web cam.

  This was a new one. She was blond. Green eyes. Clear skin. Young. They were all young. She read the description of what this one did.

  To date, Kira had watched every one of the women that Alan had visited. Studied their moves. Examined the way they looked at the camera and acted out their little sexual plays. She’d watched a brunette strip down, slowly, letting one piece of silk clothing after another drift to the floor, watched how the woman used her hands to touch herself. If anything, she’d been a little demure. Kira hated herself, but as long as Alan was addicted to having some kind of virtual fuck session with these women, she was addicted to looking at them, burning their images into her mind, hating them.

  To the right of the computer, on Alan’s desk, was a framed photo of Kira posing for him on a beach twenty years earlier, when they had first started dating. She was wearing a two-piece suit and standing in the water, the waves lapping at her ankles, one hand on her hip, the other blowing him a kiss.

  Dearest, it said in her handwriting, Dearest, I will love you always. That was the picture that Alan could see, that was the inscription he could read while he was jerking off to these strange women’s bodies.

  She picked it up. She wanted to protect it. To put it in a drawer in her bedroom, between soft cashmere sweaters, where it would be hidden. Laying it facedown next
to her, she planned to take it with her when she left. But then Alan might notice, and she’d have to come up with a reason for taking it, along with a reason for being in his office in the first place. She wasn’t ready for that yet. It was too soon to make him suspicious. But when the time was right, he’d know everything.

  Gingerly, she put the photo back in its place on the desktop and got up. At the door, she lingered. She’d loved this room. His study. His lair. Alan looked so handsome in here, sitting at the big oak desk, or in the leather armchair. He was relaxed in this room, surrounded by his books, the photos of their life and their families on the mantel. She wanted to run her hands over the back of his chair and cry.

  Crying, she told herself, was not going to help. Crying was what women did who had no life apart from their husbands and their children. Who had no self-respect. She was a success.

  Alan’s weakness was not due to any fault in her.

  But the tears came.

  He was the one with the fissure running through his soul. With the sickness. With the problem.

  Not her.

  She had not sent him out of their bed or rejected him or stopped wanting to make love to him. That had been all his doing. He had lost interest in her. So long ago, it seemed now. She remembered exactly what it had been like to be with Alan. What they were like in the beginning, when he couldn’t keep his hands off her. When she would wake up in the middle of the night to find his arms wrapped around her, holding her close to him, his knee pushing her legs apart, his erection pressing into her hip.

  She slammed the door on her way out, not hearing the crash of the frame as it fell onto the wooden floor and shattered.

  Eight

  The plane had landed two hours late due to the weather, and the cab didn’t drop Noah at Broadway and Eleventh Street until ten that night. Upstairs, he threw his suitcase on the floor and dropped his coat on a Stickley chair. He wanted to call Morgan, but first he had to get the day out of his system. He poured two ounces of Maker’s Mark into a crystal tumbler and sat down at the baby grand piano.