The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  There is nothing more difficult than doing the wrong thing for the right reason. I had an obligation to a human being who had entrusted me with her secret. And I had an obligation to try to save a life if it was in my power to do that.

  I didn’t get another break until seven that night, at which point I popped some vitamin C pills, hoping they’d do something for my cold, made some tea and sat down in front of my computer with the CD Amanda had given me.

  The institute was quiet but not empty; two therapists had group sessions in progress and Nina had patients until nine. I shut my door, returned to my desk, looked for the CD icon on my desktop and then clicked on it.

  There’s not much about the Web and pornography that those of us at the institute don’t know about. We have to understand what stimulates our patients. We need to know what their addictions are. I’m aware that there is film online of every kind of perverse and sadistic fetish known to the human imagination. But of all the porn I’ve seen, I’d never wept watching it until I viewed Amanda’s movie. My heart ached for these two beautiful sixteen-year-old girls who were so confused and desperate for the boys at school to notice them that they’d done this.

  There were four segments, each identified simply with a red Roman numeral on a black screen.

  Number one had to be Simone because she had blond hair and Amanda’s hair was dark, almost as dark as Dulcie’s. I couldn’t see any of Simone’s face because she was wearing a red silk mask over her eyes. Her hand was between her legs and she was using a dildo on herself.

  The scene cut and there was Amanda in a blue silk mask, using a dildo.

  I had a frightening sense of déjà vu. I focused. What was bothering me?

  It was the masks.

  I stopped the CD.

  Nina once told me there are no coincidences. But this? It couldn’t be. There had to be other women online who did their Web cast wearing masks. Blythe couldn’t be the only one. As soon as I had watched the whole thing, I’d do a search. There would be dozens of women wearing masks. Besides, Blythe had been very specific, she’d worn a butterfly mask: but these were simple silk eye masks without any anthropomorphic theme.

  I hit the play button.

  The second segment showed both girls kissing slowly, sensually. It was difficult for me to look at these young women, only a few years older than my daughter. I knew they’d started doing this to entice the boys to look at them, a desperate ploy to get noticed, but it had already turned into something more.

  The scene cut and they were massaging each other, smoothing oil over bare backs and long legs, touching each other in intimate places. It was so clear to me that by the time they had made this segment, they were becoming confused by their feelings for each other.

  The first segment had been awkward and forced, the girls reminded me in a sick way of Dulcie dressed up in my high-heeled shoes and my pearls, wearing my lipstick, when she was only six. But now there was an authenticity to Amanda and Simone’s movements. They had forgotten about the Web cam, they had forgotten about the boys who had never noticed them in the first place. These sex-starved, attention-starved teenagers, who had given boys blowjobs but never been kissed, were kissing each other and experiencing sexual tenderness for the first time.

  How could I keep watching?

  I was invading their privacy, spying on a moment that should have belonged only to them. That it had been sent out over the Internet by countless high school boys only made it that much more wrenching. That Simone had killed herself over it made it almost impossible to tolerate.

  At least they had felt this for each other.

  On the screen, they were still touching, their skin glistening in the soft light. A hand on a breast. Fingers grasping fingers. A foot arched against a hip. A neck bent over a stomach. Hair covering a face. Then Simone moaned against Amanda’s chest and orgasmed.

  The third segment was of Simone cutting herself. The razor blade glinted in the light as she tentatively slid it across the front of her thigh. The first time, she didn’t manage to actually make the cut. She didn’t manage it the second time, either.

  For a second, she looked up into the camera, the masked face placid and inhuman. Except for the mouth. It quivered. It gave her away. It looked like a little girl’s mouth.

  I hit Stop again.

  My fingers dug into my temples. My eyes closed. The image remained. I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to look at this poor little lost girl.

  There were so many of them.

  I had treated some, had helped some; others I had failed, the way once upon a time I had failed my mother. With all my heart, I swore my daughter would never be lost like that.

  Had Simone’s mother felt the same overprotectiveness?

  Had Amanda’s?

  Now there were two girls left to save: Amanda and the last Web-cam girl, who was still alive somewhere.

  I hit the play button and let the rest of the cutting scene play out.

  Finally, the fourth segment began. I hoped there would be a clue to who this fourth girl was.

  Simone appeared again, but now her simple blue mask had been replaced with an elaborate butterfly mask and for the first time she spoke, whispering to the camera as she stood there playing with the buttons of the modest powder-blue men’s shirt that was tucked into her tight blue jeans.

  “You’re watching, aren’t you? You’re waiting for me to get undressed for you. For me to show you my breasts and my pussy. I know how much you want to see them. To see me naked and with my legs spread for you. For your cock. Well, you’re going to have to wait. Oh, I’ll get undressed for you. I’ll do all kinds of things for you. But you have to be patient.”

  She undid the top button, and then the next, now revealing a lavender lace bra.

  “Are you touching yourself? Are you sitting there and stroking your cock? Is it hard yet? I wish I could see it. I wish I could lean over and put my lips around it.”

  She smiled a secret smile into the camera. It was the look of a wise and weary hooker. I’d seen it on the women I worked with who were in prison for solicitation, women who know what it is like to give and give and get nothing back.

  I didn’t think that Simone had figured out this script herself. It must have been what the butterfly girl she and Amanda had copied had said.

  Was this what Blythe did online?

  I needed to call her. There were other butterfly girls out there, no doubt. But what if I was right? I wouldn’t tell Blythe how I knew what she did, I’d just ask her.

  Amanda came on the screen and started to strip the same way Simone had. But I didn’t need to see anymore. She’d told me they had copied five girls. One who had used a dildo. Two who had used massage oil and made love to each other. Another who had been a cutter. And the last.

  The stripper in the butterfly mask.

  I dragged the CD icon to the trash, removed it from the drive, and then replaced it in its case. It had been hidden, Amanda had told me. Why hadn’t she just destroyed it, I’d asked as I walked her back up Fifth to find a taxi.

  “It was all I had left of Simone,” she said. “Timothy helped me hide it.” Her tears came again. “I couldn’t take a chance and keep it on my computer. But I needed to know it was somewhere in case I ever wanted to see it again.”

  Now I held it the way she had, close to my chest, carefully.

  I opened my address book and found Blythe’s number. Then dialed it. When the machine answered, I left a message asking her to call me.

  I didn’t tell her it was urgent.

  I wasn’t sure it was.

  I shouldn’t have taken that chance.

  Seventy-Eight

  Nina wasn’t in her office when I went looking for her. The lights were off and her door was closed. I thought she had patients that night until nine. Back at my desk, I called her at home, and then on her cell phone. But she didn’t pick up. Restless, I shut off my own office lights and left.

  The street la
mps cast a soft glow over the snowdrifts. I stood on the steps of the institute and let the freezing air wash over me, breathing it in, letting it dissipate the lingering smell that overheated rooms get in the winter. I knew that I should turn around, check that I wasn’t being followed, but I refused to give in to paranoia.

  I walked to the corner, not sure what I should do. Go home? Get something to eat? Keep calling Nina? Try Noah?

  No. I couldn’t see him or talk to him. Not until I knew what to do about the CD. I wouldn’t be able to hold back from telling him what I’d found out. One look at me and he’d guess that I was keeping something back. I knew I was going to have to tell him, but I needed Nina to help me figure out how I could do that without risking or compromising Amanda.

  I hailed the first cab I found and gave the driver the theater’s address. I knew Dulcie was coming home over the weekend, but I needed to see her sooner.

  I stood in the back of the theater and watched my daughter up on the stage. The Secret Garden was a seemingly innocent story. A child reading it can’t guess at the hidden messages that I, as an adult and a psychotherapist, saw so clearly.

  Did Dulcie understand the metaphor of the overgrown garden, untended, unruly, abandoned? Did she guess that it represented a woman’s sexuality, ignored by all who passed the high, ivy-covered walls?

  Dulcie stood inside the garden set, showing it to the young man for the first time. My daughter’s face shone with delight—a delight that was not hers but belonged entirely to the character she portrayed. How did she do that? What metamorphosis did she put herself through to become the fictional Mary Lennox?

  Against my will and wishes, I wasn’t seeing Dulcie on the stage but Amanda and Simone, undergoing their own metamorphosis.

  The audience broke out in applause for my daughter and she preened.

  What did the boys do for the two girls who stripped down and played at being lovers so well it became true?

  Dulcie didn’t skip a beat as the applause finally died down, and she returned to the scripted dialogue.

  I needed to know I could protect her from what Amanda’s and Simone’s parents had not been able to protect them from.

  Backstage, I wrote my daughter a note, telling her how proud I was of her, how much I loved her performance, how happy I was she was coming home on Sunday, and that I missed her. Beside the note, I laid a bouquet of pink sweetheart roses I’d bought for her at the deli around the corner from the theater.

  Seventy-Nine

  Dulcie called me from her cell at ten-thirty, on her way back to Mitch’s, and thanked me for the flowers.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “I don’t know. But I keep feeling like something is wrong. It’s kind of the way you describe it when something’s wrong with me and you feel it, you know?”

  I nodded. “Yes, honey, I know.”

  “So are you okay?”

  I decided not to wait until the weekend and told her about my wrist. When I was done, I heard her give a little sigh.

  “It was really strange. I kept feeling like something hurt, but it didn’t really.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. That must have been scary.”

  “It was, but kind of interesting, too. Could you do it with your mom? I bet you could. I bet it’s something else we inherited.”

  “I don’t know.” I bit my bottom lip and waited to hear what other amazing thing she was going to say.

  “We’re here, Mom. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Hope your wrist feels okay.” And then before I had a chance to wish her a good night, she clicked off.

  I walked into the apartment and played my messages before I even took off my coat. I was expecting calls from Blythe and Nina. There was only one call and it was from Noah, asking me to call him back. I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself to talk to him yet.

  With nothing to do but wait for Nina to call, I went to the corner of the den where I kept my sculpture. I desperately wanted to chip away at the stone, become lost in the rhythm of the mallet hitting the chisel. But you can’t sculpt with only one good hand.

  I rotated the piece on its base.

  The form escaping was rough and amateurish. That I had less talent than desire for this art form had bothered me once, but not anymore. It had been either accept my limitations or give up the one thing that helped me escape the voices in my head: my patients’ fantasies, fetishes, pains, perversions, deep losses and thwarted hopes.

  I clicked on the television.

  Finally, at twelve-twenty, Nina called.

  She’d been at a concert at Lincoln Center and then out to a late supper. I listened to see if she sounded tired. I didn’t want to tax her, even though I desperately needed to talk to her. Relieved to hear the energy in her voice, I told her what had happened that afternoon with Amanda and about the CD she’d given me and what was on it.

  “Simone?” Nina asked when I finished. “Do you know Simone’s last name?”

  “Alexander,” I said. “I think that’s what she told me. Why?”

  “Do you have the CD with you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to leave it in the office.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Nina, it’s after twelve-thirty.”

  “I have to see it for myself, Morgan. I have to be sure. You don’t know whose daughter she is, do you?”

  I didn’t.

  Eighty

  Nina didn’t waste any time when she walked into my apartment. She didn’t stop to take off her coat or drop her bag in the foyer. She tracked snow in on her boots as she walked across the tile floor and into the den, where she sat down in front of my computer.

  “Put it on, please,” she said.

  I pressed the play button and she leaned forward, still in her coat, still holding her bag.

  Simone came on the screen in her red butterfly mask and I heard a soft “oh” escape from my mentor’s lips. I turned away from the screen and looked at her.

  Nina’s forehead was pulled tight with tension.

  “What is it?”

  Nina didn’t respond. She was riveted to the screen, watching the action on the computer. After the second segment she turned to me. “You can shut it off, Morgan. I don’t need to see any more.” Her voice cracked.

  I knelt down so that I was on her level and put my good arm around her. We did not embrace often—kisses on the cheek, a hand on an arm, but Nina and I were not physical women. Not touchers. I smelled her spicy perfume and felt her body tremble. “Simone Alexander is Stella Dobson’s daughter, Morgan. She died of an accidental overdose last June.”

  “Based on what Amanda told me, I don’t think it was accidental. I think Simone killed herself.”

  And then I remembered something that couldn’t be a coincidence at all. Something both Nina and I had known for weeks, but that hadn’t meant anything until now.

  Stella Dobson was interviewing Blythe for a book she was working on. A book about women and pornography.

  “Blythe—” I started.

  Nina had already thought of it. “There has to be a connection. Blythe is in danger and so is Stella. We have to get to them.”

  I didn’t want to question Nina’s assumption about Stella Dobson. She was a feminist heroine who still mattered in a postfeminist world.

  “How do you know that Stella isn’t the one who—”

  She shook her head. “You’re getting carried away. Stella’s a brilliant, driven woman who has devoted her whole life to helping women. What we have to do, Morgan, is warn her.”

  Eighty-One

  While I made coffee, trying to focus on the ratio of grounds to water, Nina called Stella. It was, by then, almost two in the morning and Stella wasn’t answering the phone. That wasn’t a surprise. Many people let their machines pick up in the middle of the night. My own phone had rung twice since ten-forty-five that night, and while I’d c
hecked the caller ID both times—Noah—I hadn’t answered either call.

  Nina left a message, asking her old friend to please call whenever she got the message. She left her cell number, even though she told me when she got off the phone that Stella already had it.

  I poured the coffee. “We need to talk to the police,” I said.

  “We can’t. You can’t. You know you can’t.”

  I sighed. When it came to the police, Nina took the fine line and then doubled and tripled it, so that it wasn’t that fine at all, but was thick and much harder to cross. We’d been through this before.

  I didn’t want to have an old argument with her again. Not that night. Not at two in the morning. “Nina, three women have died. A fourth almost died. How can you justify my keeping silent?”

  She waved me off. “Amanda is your patient. You can’t call Noah.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “As long as you leave Amanda—and the CD—out of it.”

  “If I don’t give them the CD, they won’t have anything to go on.” My throat hurt, my nose was running. It was late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t give up. There had to be some way to do the right thing without crossing that damn line. “What if we can get Stella to go to the police and tell them about what Amanda and her daughter did?”

  “That we can do. When we see her, when we tell her what’s happening, we’ll advise her to call the police. To tell them about the CD, about Simone, about the Web-cam girls Simone and Amanda copied. All right? Will that work? Isn’t that better?”

  It was a compromise. One that I thought I could live with.

  Friday

  The final day

  Eighty-Two

  Noah Jordain had slept like crap. He’d first called Morgan at ten-forty-five and when she didn’t pick up he’d had a patrol car in her neighborhood check with her doorman to make sure she was upstairs and safe. When they reported back that the doorman had buzzed her and she was okay, he knew what the unanswered call meant. As a very conscientious therapist, she always checked her messages. So that meant she was avoiding him. But why?