The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

“No. Personally. When I’m working with a patient I have a good sense of whether her behavior is destructive or not, but I can’t turn my intuition on myself.” She leaned forward and clasped her hands under her chin, focusing her attention back on me. It was slightly affected but charming, and made me feel as if my answer mattered to her very much. It also drew attention away from her eyes and to her mouth.

  “It’s hard to do. Our own neuroses and needs get in the way.”

  “What kind of process can I put myself through to test my decisions and make sure I’m doing the right thing? How can I be my own therapist?”

  I shook my head. If there was an easy exercise, I wouldn’t mind knowing it myself. “You can’t be. That’s why most therapists are in therapy.”

  “I don’t want to be in therapy forever.”

  “You won’t be. Most of us need to be in therapy at the beginning of our careers, but then, like any other patient who has gone through the process, we terminate, knowing there’s always the option of coming back when issues resurface.”

  She seemed to be taking mental notes, nodding her head slightly, studying me with her inscrutable green eyes.

  “I told Stella Dobson I’d do the interview, and I want to do it because I’m curious. I’m flattered. Isn’t that nuts? I’m flattered she wants to interview me about the big secret of my life. I’m excited that someone wants to know about it. But I’m embarrassed about it at the same time. I’m afraid of what she’s going to say if I’m really honest with her. I mean, what is a feminist going to think about the fact that I loved showing off?”

  “What do you think she’s going to say?”

  “That it was wrong of me to crave the attention. That it’s part of what’s wrong with our society. That I exacerbated the problem. Set a bad example.”

  “Do you think you did?”

  “I don’t know. I just loved the idea of the attention. I loved the idea of invisible hands stroking me. Of the eyes staring at my body. Taking me in.”

  “Did you feel powerful?”

  She nodded. “You can’t imagine how powerful you feel when you know you can move men without even being in the same room as them.”

  “Go on.”

  She hesitated, then took a breath. “It’s crazy when you first realize that just watching you can give them a hard-on and make them come. It made me feel so sexy—”

  Another hesitation. “It’s okay. Tell me.”

  “Sometimes…there were some times when the session was over and I’d shut off the Web cam and masturbate for real because I was so turned on. And the…the orgasms I had then were more intense and better than any I ever had with anyone.” She was whispering. Her flawless skin was flushed with pink. Her eyes sparkled. “And then I’d get paid for it, the check would come in the mail, and I’d feel so disgusted.”

  “Why?”

  “It turned it into something else.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into something disgusting.”

  “Is that how you feel about the interview?”

  “I’m worried I will. But I could use the money. Since I’ve given up webbing, I’m strapped. I’ve even asked Nina if she can give me some more patients from the clinic. In the meantime, Stella Dobson is giving me five hundred dollars for this.”

  “ I’ll talk to Nina. If you’d be willing to work another day at clinic, I might be able to make that happen.”

  “Yes, that would be great.”

  “Will that help you decide about the interview?”

  “I’ll probably still do it. I’m excited to meet her, to talk to her, to help her with her book. Although I know it’s another form of showing off. That’s one thing I need to work out. That and wondering how I’m going to feel when she pays me.” She sighed deeply and tossed her hair again. “I’ve been dreaming about being on camera again. I wake up and when I realize it was just a dream I’m so depressed. I miss how it used to make me feel.”

  Her eyes filled with tears but her face didn’t crumble. She contained herself and then started to laugh. “Can you believe this? I must be the only woman in the world who gets weepy at not having to play dirty in front of a Web cam anymore. I hope I don’t do this in front of Stella Dobson next Friday.”

  “Is that when the interview is?”

  “Yes. Can you imagine?” She was excited again. “I’m going to meet her! A real hero.”

  Friday

  Seven days remaining

  Fifty-Six

  It had taken Amanda’s parents forever to leave. First her father was late getting home from the office. Then they’d had a fight about some bill for a new couch that he said cost as much as some people’s monthly rent, and her mother said there was nothing for him to worry about because she was using her money to pay for the redecorating.

  Amanda tuned them out. They always argued about money. She didn’t understand how they could stand to go over the same thing all the time. Her mother shopped too much. Her father got annoyed. Why didn’t one of them change? Why did her father even care? Her mother was a really successful designer. He was a high-powered businessman. What did the cost of a couch really matter to either of them? So what if the apartment never looked the same for more than two years. At least her room never changed. She’d got her father on her side and he’d convinced her mother to let her keep it the way she wanted. Her sanctuary, her father had called it.

  But there were no sanctuaries. That was an adult fantasy about what being seventeen was like. How could he have forgotten what it was like? He was only forty-four. When did you forget?

  She wouldn’t. She’d hold on to it. She’d remember how it was all a gray landscape. A dreary, endless day that was complicated with feelings that didn’t go away and work she had to do for her classes that hardly ever interested her.

  Except for her art classes. She wished she could just take art classes and nothing else. Art and photography and film. She loved the way you could sit down in a theater and relax your shoulders and your neck and your hips and let the chair hold you and let the darkness be the door between what was real and what was more interesting than real.

  She made movies with a digital camera and edited them on her computer. Short ones. They were her private diaries. Images that meant something only to her. Simone had acted in a lot of them. There was only one movie she’d shown anyone else. And that had been the worst mistake she’d ever made, no matter what Dr. Snow had said about secrets. It should have stayed a secret forever.

  Amanda wrapped her long black scarf around her neck as they walked to the corner. It was so cold out. She had a hole in the thumb of her glove and felt the freezing air stinging that one spot of skin. It was snowing, of course, but only lightly.

  “What if you’re wrong?” Timothy asked as they crossed Park Avenue.

  “I’m not.”

  “But we’ll get in so much trouble. And we’re already in trouble. At least, Hugh and Barry and I are.”

  “This is more important.” Amanda’s words came out in a puff of white air. She watched them disappear.

  They walked another block in silence and came to a huge snowdrift on the corner.

  “Can you fucking believe this snow?” He climbed up over the messy pile that was crusted with ice. She followed in his path, using the footprints he had made.

  “It’s snowed every day for more than two weeks.” Amanda’s scarf had come undone and she wrapped it around her neck again as they trudged on. It was a cashmere scarf her mother had given to her last year. She never took it off anymore. Not because she was always cold—well, she was pretty much always cold—but because with her neck swathed she felt protected. Sometimes she’d pull it up and hide her mouth and chin in its soft folds. If she could have hidden her whole face, she would have. As it was, she wore long bangs that partially covered her forehead and eyebrows, and she’d recently started wearing lightly tinted glasses she’d found in her mother’s drawer. They had stupid gold C’s on the edges but she’d gotten black p
aint and covered over them. Her mother hadn’t noticed. As if. She hardly noticed anything Amanda did.

  They continued west on Seventy-seventh Street until they got to Fifth Avenue, and then they walked two blocks north and entered Central Park.

  It was only 8:00 p.m. and there were still people heading home from work, or taking their dogs out for a run. There were also some couples, arm in arm, who just seemed to be strolling.

  “Weird, huh. Why are these people out?” Timothy asked. “It’s so cold.”

  She looked around. There was a full moon and the snow was still falling. Everything was dusted white and sparkling. It looked like a dream. Someone else’s dream.

  The deeper they walked into the park the fewer people there were. After a few minutes it was all quiet, and she could hear their boots crunching on the path. They went west and north. Neither of them hesitated about what direction to take. This was their playground; they’d grown up in the park. They’d been walked here in baby carriages, played in the sandboxes as toddlers, spent afternoons visiting the zoo. Their schools had brought them here for ice skating in winter and softball in spring. Once they were old enough, they’d come on their own to escape from their parents, sitting on the hills or the edges of ponds and fountains, disappearing with their friends into smoky hazes.

  “I’ve never been here this late,” Amanda said.

  Timothy shrugged. “There’re lights everywhere.”

  “People still get murdered in the park, though. It’s always in the news when it happens.”

  Timothy nodded. “But they’re alone. We’re not.”

  A few more steps brought them to the crest of the hill. The pond where kids and hobbyists sailed toy boats was frozen over. The fresh coating of crystalline white on all the trees and benches shimmered. The sky looked like velvet, Amanda thought, suddenly remembering a dress that she’d had when she was eight or nine years old.

  “Amanda, c’mon. Let’s get the damn thing and get outta here.”

  “So, you’re nervous.” She smiled. It felt strange to smile on this mission.

  “No, just cold.”

  “I’m nervous, though. One of them is still alive.”

  Even with the thick gloves they both wore, she felt it when he took her hand. She’d given three guys blowjobs, but this was the first time a boy had ever done that.

  An oversize bronze Hans Christian Andersen held a book in his lap as he read one of his own fairy tales. Tonight his head was dusted white and the pages of the book were hidden under inches of snow.

  As kids, she and her friends had sat at his feet while their teacher read them story after story, each with a happy ending.

  She and Timothy approached the statue.

  Hans sat on a bronze platform atop a large pedestal made of tightly fitted limestone blocks. Or, at least, they seemed tightly fitted, but there was a crack in between the third and the fourth blocks on the right side. Timothy had found it when he was a kid and his second grade class was here racing toy boats. He grew tired of hanging over the edge of the pond watching the stupid toys whizzing across the water, and he’d wandered off on his own.

  “Timothy?”

  Amanda was staring at him, her eyes wide, her cheeks red from the cold. Most of the time, when he looked at her, he forgot about the movie. She looked like any other girl to him. Most of the time.

  He pulled his army knife out of his pocket, extracted the nail file, and inserted it into the crevice. He felt a connection and moved the file forward. The edge of a transparent CD case became visible. He reached for it and pulled it out.

  Timothy held it flat in his hand and Amanda stared down at it, noticing how the moon was reflected in its surface, full and round and silvery. At that moment, it didn’t look lethal at all.

  Monday

  Four days remaining

  Fifty-Seven

  Alan Leightman was sitting on the couch holding a large cup of coffee. I was still having trouble not calling him Bob. He kept wrapping his fingers, first of the right hand, then the left, around the cup as if he were warming himself. But by now, surely the coffee had grown cold. It was the idea of warmth he was in search of.

  “She kept stirring the damn spoon around and around.”

  “That bothered you?”

  “Everything bothered me. My wife—the brilliant woman I’ve lived with for all these years—has turned into a drugged-out zombie who hates my guts.”

  “What happened in the kitchen?” I asked, getting him to refocus.

  “She said her coffee was cold and turned the heat on under the kettle. Once the water was boiling and the kettle was whistling, she did the strangest thing…she reached out and touched it.”

  “What do you mean touched it—to see if it was hot?”

  “Yes, but she had to know it was hot, it was whistling. She was burning her fingers on purpose. Twice. Why would she do that? And then she said she knew something that could help me with the police.” He rubbed his face. “But whatever it was, she said it wouldn’t matter, and she’s right—no one would believe her, she’s my wife. Everyone would assume she’d lie for me.” He shook his head. “She’s punishing me for what I’ve done to her. I deserve it, too.”

  “Deserve it?”

  He nodded. There was anguish in his eyes.

  “Alan, if you want I can talk to—”

  “No.” He was on his feet. “You can’t talk to the police. Do you understand? You can’t talk to anyone.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting I go to the police. Sit down. I was going to say that if you want me to talk to you and Kira together, in therapy, I would.”

  He collapsed back on the couch. “I didn’t write to those women. I certainly didn’t kill those women.”

  “I have no doubt of that. None at all.”

  And I didn’t.

  “Dr. Snow, why was she burning her fingers?”

  “Maybe she wanted to punish herself. Or sometimes inflicting pain distracts a person from a deeper pain.”

  He nodded, twisted his hands in his lap. Crossed one leg over the other. Then uncrossed it. His eyes were darting around the room as if he was going to find answers hiding in the corners and behind the books.

  “She blames herself for my addiction, doesn’t she?”

  “It’s certainly possible.”

  He nodded, nodded again. He was thinking. A moment went by.

  “She takes responsibility for everything. Damn. She takes responsibility for the First Amendment.”

  I was watching him put himself through some kind of difficult process. The pain intensified in his eyes and then he closed them. When he opened them a few seconds later, he seemed as if he’d resolved something, was almost elated.

  “Alan? What is it?”

  “Do you think her moods and erratic behavior could have something to do with her meds?” he asked.

  “Technically, yes. It is not unheard of for medication to have the opposite of its intended effect. Patients being treated for depression can become more depressed. Or more paranoid. Would she allow you to call her doctor and—”

  “Can they become violent? Seriously violent? Delusional?” He interrupted me.

  “Yes.”

  He looked down at his hands. His wedding ring glinted. He covered it with his right hand.

  “She takes those pills because of me.”

  “No. No, she doesn’t.”

  He wasn’t hearing me. I could see that.

  “Alan, are you all right?” I asked.

  He was looking through me, oblivious of where he was or what was going on around him. I waited. One minute passed. And then another. He started to speak and then stopped. Shook his head as if he was having a silent conversation with himself.

  “I’ve made a decision.”

  I waited.

  He didn’t say anything. Then he cleared his throat. I nodded, encouraging.

  “When I leave here I’m turning myself in to the police.”

  “For what?”<
br />
  “I lied to you. To you and to Kira and to the police. I killed those girls, those Web cam girls, and I think… I think it will be better for everyone if I admit it now and prevent an investigation.”

  I might not have known his name until a few days before, but I knew this man’s psyche. “Alan, you didn’t kill anyone.”

  His face was devoid of any emotion except resolve. “Yes, I did. I’m confessing. And I am asking you not to discuss me with the police. Not to tell them whether you think I am or am not capable of murder when they ask.”

  “They won’t ask me. We’ve talked about this. I can’t discuss your therapy with anyone unless you want me to.”

  “Even if you believe that I am a threat to society, you can’t go to the police?”

  “I’m confused. Are you confessing to me so that I will go to the police and help you do this?”

  “No. God, no. You can’t talk to them. Do you understand? I’m turning myself in. You don’t have to protect anyone. The only one who knows I was in therapy with you was Kira. No one else. I don’t want you to tell anyone else. All right?”

  “Alan, why are you doing this?”

  “Dr. Snow, the best thing you can do is to stop asking questions and stop looking for answers. Do you understand?”

  He was staring intently at me and, for a second, I felt a jolt of fear.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes were unflinching, unrelenting. “You won’t discuss anything I’ve told you with anyone?” His jaw muscles tightened and a cord stood out on his neck.

  “No. No, I won’t. But I think we should talk about this before you make a mistake you can’t undo.”

  “I have to go now. Will you call my wife’s doctor? Will you ask him to go to our apartment? To give her whatever she needs? Will you go see her? If you can’t find him, will you go? I don’t want her to be alone when the story breaks on the news.” He was speaking clearly, but he’d begun to disassociate.

  “Alan, listen to me. You are paying me for forty-five minutes, let’s use them. Let me help you. I know you didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even think you are capable of killing yourself. Your ego is too strong. No matter what you’re doing online, sexually, you care about your career. About your wife. You don’t want to do this to Kira, do you?”