There were two things on my mind, but I was only ready to talk about one of them. I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the information I had about Timothy Wheaton and Philip Maur, but Nina and I had already fought once in the past few days about my talking to the police, so I chose the safer issue and told her about my daughter’s request that I not go to Boston for the preview.
There was a lot of pedestrian traffic that afternoon since it was one of those energizing fall days when everyone who lives in cities like New York and Paris and London takes to the streets. If only it could stay like this, we all say to one another about the bracing air and vibrant trees.
“Being a motherless daughter makes me question every damned decision,” I said as we walked downtown on Madison Avenue, too engrossed in the conversation to do any window-shopping.
“Is that it? You didn’t have a mother for long enough, so you don’t know what to do?”
“Why can’t that be it?”
“Well, even if you’d had a mother for your whole adolescence, you still wouldn’t be prepared for this particular problem.”
“I’d have road maps.”
“You might. But that’s too obvious. I think something else happens when Dulcie exerts her will like this.”
I sighed. I really couldn’t expect less of her, could I? Nina was first and foremost a therapist. “What?”
“Morgan, when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go with her, do you remember how you felt?”
“I just concentrated on how to react. On what to say to give her support and make her feel that I would take her seriously, that I love—”
“Stop. You can make me so mad sometimes. Are you listening to yourself?”
We’d gotten to the gray granite building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The art deco lines, clean and sleek, were from an older time, and the familiarity was comforting. The parts of New York that never change are landmarks for those of us who have lived here all our lives. The hamburger shop on Madison Avenue and Sixty-third Street where my mother took me when I was six was still there. So was Saks Fifth Avenue, where my father used to take me on my birthday for shopping sprees. The Christmas tree that arrived every year at Rockefeller Center brought back memories of each Christmas when I took Dulcie to the lighting. There were other places, too, but some were gone, torn down to make room for new buildings. I missed those signposts of the past.
I sighed. “Do we do this on the street, right now, Nina?”
“No. Right now we go into the store and act very civilized and enjoy the rarefied air, but we continue this after we’ve picked up your gift. What is it, anyway?”
To celebrate Dulcie’s lead in The Secret Garden, I’d ordered a monogrammed gold key on a chain, symbolizing the one Mary Lennox found that led her into the hidden space that had been abandoned for a decade.
“A necklace.”
We walked through the glass doors and into the quiet hush of the jewelry store. Little blue boxes from Tiffany, with their white satin ribbons, were a luxury that I wanted Dulcie to enjoy as much as I had when my father had given them to me. My sweet sixteen present, my high school graduation gift, my college graduation gift, had all come from Tiffany. As had my wedding ring. And Mitch’s. Dulcie’s baby rattle and her first baby cup.
Nina stood by while the salesman showed me the gold key, carefully pointing out the inscription on the back: the date of the opening along with “To Dulcie. Love, Mom and Dad.”
On our way back to the office, Nina and I stopped at an espresso bar, where we sat at a small table that had just been vacated. We ordered cappuccinos and small sandwiches.
“Okay, let’s get back to it,” she said after the waitress had left.
“Do we have to?”
She nodded.
“I don’t remember where we were,” I lied.
“I know you too well for that, Morgan. You have never forgotten where you were in an interrupted conversation in your life. What I asked was how you felt when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go to Boston with her.”
I started to think. Nina interrupted.
“No, no thinking. Just tell me. Fast. How did you feel?”
“That she didn’t want me.”
“Who didn’t want you?”
“That my mother—” I stopped. Shocked. Even with everything I knew about psychoanalysis and with all the psychotherapy I’d had, I hadn’t made the connection myself.
“Dulcie going into acting is bringing more of your memories of your mother to the surface, isn’t it?”
My throat tightened. I nodded.
“She loved acting so much,” Nina said, her voice softening as she, too, thought about her old friend.
“I remember how she used to get dressed up to go to tryouts. I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch her meticulously apply her makeup and spray on her perfume. I’d wait for her to come home, too. She was always so excited when she got back, telling me about everything that had happened and how sure she was about getting the role and that when she did, we’d move into a bigger apartment but …” I was remembering too much now and didn’t want to go on. I’d thought of something I’d never realized before. “Nina, she wasn’t going to tryouts, was she? She was going to bars, right? She was trying to pick up guys so they’d pay for her drinks and her drugs.”
She nodded.
“And they lived happily never after,” I said, repeating the line that had made my mother famous for a few heartbeats and that ultimately had done more damage than good, spoiling her for a life that would never live up to what it had been before. She’d been seduced by her brief stint at stardom and nothing ever came close: not her marriage, not her family, not her friends, not even me.
And I was letting my daughter step into that same spotlight.
I shuddered.
Nina took my hand. “Dulcie isn’t your mother, sweetie. She’s your daughter. And she has a mother. She has you.”
Thirty-One
The following Monday evening the group from the Scarlet Society was silent and somber as they gathered in my office. It was our second meeting and I still didn’t have a handle on them.
“Did you see the newspapers on Friday and over the weekend about Timothy Wheaton?” Shelby asked me even before everyone was seated.
I nodded.
“He was someone else we knew. From the society.”
“Really? That’s very disturbing. And probably very frightening for you.” I had guessed at what she was telling me but acted as if I didn’t. How could I explain prior knowledge? “I’m very sorry about Timothy. About your loss,” I said, addressing the whole group.
Shelby nodded, accepting the condolences.
“Should we get started?”
No one said anything for a few seconds. They looked at one another. Anne spoke. “There’s no way that this could be a coincidence.” Once again she was all in black and wearing the oversize sunglasses that hid so much of her face.
“How does that make you feel?”
Ellen answered with a hostility that surprised me. She wore a forest-green suit that looked like Chanel, and a large emerald ring gleamed on her left hand. “How are we supposed to feel? We knew these men. Intimately. For years we shared something private with them. Something that was special. And amazing.”
“In the paper, the police said that they haven’t yet discovered where their bodies are,” Davina said. Her voice was not as robust as I remembered it from the week before.
“That’s just a matter of time,” said Liz, who once again was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, soft brown suede blazer and boots. Her briefcase was in her lap and her elbows rested on it.
Bethany, who had been mostly silent throughout the first session, spoke up. She had a slight southern accent and looked familiar to me from the tape now that I had seen it more than once. “You just don’t have any emotional attachment to this.”
Several of the other women sa
t up straighter in their chairs. Davina leaned forward. Ginny uncrossed her arms. They were preparing, but for what?
“Exactly what is that supposed to mean?” Liz asked in a voice laced with acid.
“That you don’t care about any of this the way the rest of us do. You were angry with them all, anyway. You’ve been complaining for months,” Bethany explained.
“Angry?” Liz laughed.
I didn’t interrupt. This interaction was important—not just for them, but for me. I needed to have them act out their relationships so that I could learn how they related to one another.
“You told me you were,” Bethany said.
“That was a private conversation.”
“It might help if you talked about it with all of us, Liz,” I suggested.
She didn’t say anything.
“Why were you angry at Timothy and Philip?”
Liz remained quiet.
Ellen started to speak, “I think that what Liz means—”
“I think it would be better for Liz to explain herself,” I interrupted, then refocused my gaze on Liz. “Now that we know you were angry, why don’t you tell us why? I know it’s very difficult to be angry with someone only to have them suddenly die. We’re left with feelings that we don’t know how to process. Regrets and guilt are difficult to deal with on your own.”
“Regrets?” Liz’s high-pitched laugh verged on hysteria. “Everything is fine with the whole concept of the Scarlet Society as long as the men want you. But when they don’t, all the same old shitty problems of being a woman are right there, waiting for you, taunting you. It’s no different than in society at large.”
No one said anything for a minute.
“What are you talking about?” Anne finally asked in an empathetic voice.
Liz crossed her arms over her chest as if she was going into hibernation and didn’t answer. I let a full thirty seconds pass.
“What if someone is stalking the men from our group?” Shelby asked, directing her question at me.
“Why are you changing the subject?”
“I think we need to talk about this.”
“Why, Shelby? Do you think that’s what is happening?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Liz sat immobile, her face rigid with anger.
“Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the men who are part of our organization have been killed in the same way, do you?” Shelby asked.
“On more than one level, no. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“And other than members of the society, no one knows who we are,” Martha said. “Hell, we don’t even know who one another is. Not really.” She wore tinted glasses that evening, not dark enough to hide her eyes, but blue and large enough that they altered her appearance. She was dressed casually in black jeans, a pale blue sweater and a herringbone jacket. “How could someone figure out who the men were, short of them having revealed it?”
“Philip wouldn’t have told anyone,” Anne said. “He had a wife and children and a public life that mattered to him. He wouldn’t have told anyone. The only way he could have both us and his career was to keep our secret.”
“We all feel that,” Davina said.
“All of us,” Ginny echoed.
The room lapsed into a moment of silence.
“What are we supposed to do now, though?” Anne asked. “Should we keep going to meetings? Should we close the society?”
“No.” Shelby was adamant, and shook her head as she spoke. “No.”
Around the room others nodded, agreeing with her.
“You seem so certain,” I said.
“We have to trust one another,” Shelby continued. “Everything about the Scarlet Society is based on trust. We are stronger than any outside force. What we do is our right. No one can scare us into giving up those rights.”
When she made statements like that, I could feel the collective body sway in her direction. They didn’t look at her with blind devotion. Shelby was not a guru to them, but she was their chieftain. And they—women who were stronger than most in their hunger and their need for power—yielded to her.
“The newspaper didn’t say anything about them belonging to the group,” Liz said grudgingly. “How do we know that their deaths are connected through us? Isn’t it possible for two men to have been killed in Manhattan without it being a conspiracy?”
“It might be helpful to talk about your individual feelings for Philip and Timothy instead of trying to figure out who perpetrated the crimes,” I said, addressing the group. For one thing, I wanted to get them back on track. The purpose of our sessions was to help the women involved deal with their emotions over the deaths. Feelings that they had no other outlet for except in this room.
They waited, all of them, for someone to go first. And I waited with them. Finally, Martha spoke.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Just talk about them. About what was special about them. What you remember.”
She stared at me for a time. “Philip could—” She broke off.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Whatever I say, it’s all going to be about sex. About how he was so happy when you told him what to do, when you pushed him to hold off on coming, the longer you forced him—see? It’s wrong. We can’t talk about them like that, about what they were like to fuck.”
“Why?”
“Because …” But she didn’t have a reason.
Next, Shelby tried. “Timothy had very strong arms. He worked out. He could lift you up and keep you in the air and while he was doing that he would be high up inside you.” She shook her head. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be.”
“Why do you feel that it’s wrong to talk about these men the way you knew them best? You had sex with them. Did you know them any other way?”
“I talked to them—both of them,” Anne said. “Often. About what they liked, about why they liked it. That’s part of how I was with them. To hear them talk about what it felt like to be powerless. To have me be the one in charge. But how do you talk about a lover after he’s died when he wasn’t in any other part of your life?”
“I think they were both full of shit,” Liz said.
All heads turned to her.
“They were supposed to be willing to do whatever we wanted. But they couldn’t. Not with all of us.”
“It’s awful for you to say that,” Anne said.
“Why is it awful?” I asked. “Tell Liz why what she said bothers you, describe how it makes you feel. Don’t judge her.”
“You don’t understand,” Ellen said to me in a strident voice. “She’s jealous of us. She thinks that since she’s older than most of us, the men aren’t interested in her. But it’s not that. It’s her attitude. The way she demeans them.”
“I do not demean them.” Liz’s mouth had disappeared into a thin, angry line.
“Of course you do. To you it’s not just about power and control. You ask them to be your slaves. You want them to cower at your feet. You want them to be afraid of you and some of the things you ask them to do are disgusting.”
“How do you know what I ask them to do?”
Ellen smiled. Wickedly. It occurred to me that she had been waiting to say this for a long time.
“Mark told me. He said that you asked him to go into the bathroom with you and to—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Liz shouted.
Anne started to cry. Martha got up and took Anne in her arms. Ginny was saying something to Liz, but over the rest of the commotion I couldn’t hear it.
“Everyone, please sit down. Shelby, Ginny, sit down. Let’s wait till everyone can hear you—”
Liz stood, her bag slung over her shoulder, her briefcase under her arm. “Are you leaving?” I asked her. “We still have forty-five minutes left to the session.”
“I don’t know why I came in the first place. I’m an outsider here. They all play at this game. They don�
�t take it for real. They think they are being powerful, but it’s like little girls playing at growing up.”
“Liz, it would benefit everyone if you sat back down and stayed. You all are going through this together and leaving isn’t going to be helpful, not for you or the group.”
She continued to stand, hovering above the rest of them. The light cast shadows on her face and the furrows in her brows seemed deeper. She certainly wasn’t pretty. Her hard features were jagged and too large. But her eyes, which were deep green with long lashes, were catlike and mysterious. Her hair was blond, thick and curly, but for some reason didn’t seem to fit her personality or the rest of her looks.
“These men debased themselves for us,” she said. “They came to us because they wanted us to abuse them. Order them around. Treat them worse than they had ever or could ever treat any women. We like to pretend that what we do is fine. It isn’t. It’s perversion. I’m not happy about it, but it’s the way I want my sex. I don’t want to be grabbed—I want to do the grabbing. I want to tell a man to walk to me holding his cock in his hands and begging me to let him get closer. So what if I wanted to see what it would be like to have them as slaves? Isn’t that what men have had women doing for them for years? Love them? Admire them? Eulogize them? None of us can do that. We used their hard cocks and versatile tongues. We didn’t love them. We didn’t get to know them. We made them do our bidding. They liked being surrounded by hot women wanting hot sex. They liked looking at tight asses and high tits. You don’t know what it’s like when you look at them and they look away.” Liz focused on Ellen, then Anne, Ginny and finally Shelby. “You don’t know what it’s like when you see them hoping that you don’t pick them because they aren’t so sure that they can perform for you.” She was choking back tears, not the way a woman does, but the way a man will refuse to allow himself the luxury of weeping.
The others watched, some with compassion on their faces, others with contempt. Only Shelby, who was closer in age to Liz, got up and went to her. She took her by the hand and, without saying a word, led her back to her seat.
“It doesn’t matter. You belong here. With us. We have to hold on. Especially now. All of us.”
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