by MJ Rose
It was depressing.
In its own twisted way, any depression was actually a relief tonight, because if he really was depressed, then the Thorazine wasn’t working and they might be able to try something else. And if they did, then maybe, just maybe, he’d get his sexual energy back.
Now all he had was sexual shame.
The first night it had happened, no big deal. The woman he’d been with—a blonde named Anne—had tried her damnedest, shouting at him and roughing him up a little to get him hard again. But nothing worked.
It wasn’t how the women had treated him, once word started getting around within the society that he couldn’t get it up, that bothered him the most. There were plenty of them who didn’t care that much about penetration and were perfectly happy to have him eat them or stroke their pussies. He thought he’d be able to ride out the soft-cock syndrome, at least until he and his doctor could figure out if the Thorazine was working and whether it was the best solution.
But it was how the men dealt with him that made it so fucking impossible. He was aware of every snicker and sidelong glance at his flaccid penis. He was nothing to them anymore. He was no one. He was back in high school, the skinny guy who wanted to paint and take photographs and be an artist. Who everyone called a fag. In New York City, Paul’s artistic flair might have made him a totally acceptable kid. But in a public school in the suburbs of Detroit, it made him a wimp.
He felt the stare of every guy who watched him walk around the room with absolutely nothing happening between his legs, and knew he was the fag again. It was masochistic to keep going, but he couldn’t stop. He kept hoping that he’d be okay, that the erotic stimulation would overpower the drugs.
He’d get back at them, he’d thought as he walked home from those embarrassing last nights of Scarlet Society visits. He planned what he might do to them to get his revenge. He was nothing if not creative. Hadn’t everything that had ever happened to him been because of how creative he was?
He imagined all sorts of ways of retaliation, from the violent and absurd—literally slicing off the guys’ dicks with a kitchen knife so they could experience what he was going through—to the ridiculous—slipping into the club with a camera phone and taking snapshots of them at their most embarrassing moments and posting the shots on the Internet.
Finally, a few weeks ago, he’d gotten so sick and tired of the guys’ attitudes that he quit. For the first few days he was okay about it, even happy that he was finished with the society. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still the one they were laughing at.
To them, he was still the man who couldn’t get it up. Who was soft and helpless. Like a baby. A wimp. They were probably still laughing about him when they got together.
Paul pulled the paper off the coffee table. He didn’t have to search for the headline. His eye went directly to the upper right-hand corner, where the story and photo had been every time he had looked at it.
Every few hours for the last few days.
Philip Maur was dead.
Now they were starting to get theirs, weren’t they?
Twelve
“Working with the Scarlet Society could dovetail perfectly with the paper you’re working on,” Nina Butterfield said the next afternoon as she pulled books off shelves. Three of the walls in her office were lined with bookshelves that had been built in the 1930s. The art deco theme continued with the large walnut desk, two Ruhlmann elephant chairs and a deep, overstuffed couch. A Chinese carpet from the same era covered the floor—brilliant blues and greens depicting a sailing ship. I always thought it was a great metaphor for what went on in her office.
That afternoon, the rug was covered with piles of books; by the time Nina was done, there would be more than a hundred ready for adoption by the staff of the Institute. This book cleansing was a twice-yearly ritual. No one devoured more literature about therapy, psychopharmacology and medicine than Nina did.
“You’ll blow everyone out of the water when you make your presentation if you have a clinical case study like this backing it up. Women acting out in a sexual group situation! You’ll be learning about sexual aggression. Role reversal. Female sexual power. Subjects that almost no one in the therapeutic community knows very much about. And you’re not sure you should accept these clients? Morgan, what you will learn from this group will get you the attention you deserve. Finally.”
“I’m not so sure I want attention, much less deserve it,” I said, and then added what I hadn’t said since she’d started on her crusade, but had wanted to. “Ever since the Magdalene Murders, you’ve been pushing me like crazy. Like suggesting me to that producer from the Today show. What’s up?”
She turned, arched her reddish-brown eyebrows, and stared at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. But Nina had known me my whole life. She’d been my mother’s best friend. They’d met when they were students at NYU and lived next door to each other in their Greenwich Village dorm. My mom only stayed in school for a year—she couldn’t balance college and her acting—but she and Nina had formed a bond that lasted.
After my mother died, Nina had stepped in to help my father take care of me. Even after my father remarried, Nina remained the most important woman in my life.
“Don’t deserve the attention? Why would you say that? You’ve done an incredible job with client after client. You saved a patient’s life using nothing but your skill and your chutzpah. If you really don’t understand how good you are, this might be an issue we need to work out. Is it?”
Nina believed that therapists and psychiatrists should periodically return to therapy for what she called tune-ups. Especially when they went through life crises. My four-month-old divorce and involvement with a serial killer definitely put me in the running, but I hadn’t felt the need for counseling.
“Do you think I need therapy?”
“That’s the question I asked you.”
“No.” I said, annoyed that she was playing therapist by answering my question with her own. Oh, I knew she was just trying to look out for me, like she always did, but this time it bothered me. I had a fleeting feeling that there was something I did need to talk about, deal with, but I didn’t dwell on it. I was better at denial than any patient I’d ever had. I knew how to insulate myself from my feelings. “I’m fine, Nina. Sleeping. Eating. Not experiencing any overwhelming anxiety.”
“Do you feel lonely?”
“Aren’t most recently divorced women lonely?”
She nodded. “What about feeling apprehensive about Dulcie?”
“Nina, she’s thirteen. What mother of a thirteen-year-old girl isn’t somewhat apprehensive? This is about what it’s about. No undercurrents. No hidden agendas. I’m just not sure that I want the kind of attention you think I should have.”
“I’d prefer you did have a hidden agenda rather than be so self-effacing. Not every therapist should have a public persona, but damn, Morgan, you should. I want you to get attention because you are that good at what you do and deserve more credit than you get.”
From the way she pursed her lips, I knew there was something she wasn’t saying. The one thing I especially wanted to hear. “And?”
She gave me a knowing smile. “And I want it because you would be a good face for the institute.”
“If I’d wanted to have a public face, I would have gone on the stage. I would have—”
“Morgan, I’m not talking about you being an actress—God forbid,” she said with mock theatrics and a laugh. Whenever Nina’s face lit up like that, it was easy to forget that she was sixty-two years old. Everything she’d lived through—two divorces, a scandal with the institute in the late nineties, being widowed by her third husband, Sam Butterfield—fell away, and she was just a sexy, incredibly smart and energetic woman with a great sense of humor who was enjoying herself and the people around her.
“Can we get back to the question at hand?”
“Yes, sweetheart. Sit down and tell me more about the S
carlet Society.”
She put down the last three books she’d pulled off the shelf, stretched, ran her hands through her shoulder-length, copper-colored hair, and sat down on the couch. I sat on the chair opposite her, and described the part of the tape I’d seen.
Nina was all warm tones. She had tawny skin and bright amber eyes. Dressed in a pair of chestnut pants and a toffee-colored sweater, with a rope of amber beads doubled around her neck, she looked professional but easygoing and kind. And she was. Despite being so maternal, so caring, Nina had never had children. Because of my daughter and me, she claimed she never regretted it. We were her family, she always said, but she was also my boss, and it was important for us to keep our roles separate in and out of the office. We didn’t always succeed.
Once I finished describing the tape, I handed her the confidentiality agreement. She read it. Leaning forward, she focused on me. “I believe, even more than I did before, that the Scarlet Society sounds like a perfect group for you to work with. I know you, so I know that nothing will be as satisfying to you as helping these women. And if in the process you wind up identifying a new trend, a syndrome, or a complex that no other therapist has noticed yet, it will give you even more gratification. This is what gets your blood moving.”
I nodded. She did know me best. “But what about the confidentiality agreement? Isn’t it insulting?”
“No, it’s just naive.”
“But they’re going into this not trusting me.”
“Do you blame them? If this organization is as you’ve described, what you learn could be explosive. Of course they are worried about confidentiality. Besides, Rush is a lawyer.” She looked back at the piles of books. “Do you want to go through these? See if there is anything you want?”
I shook my head. “No, I have my own stack of books waiting to be read. Too many books, not enough time.”
Nina scooted forward so she could put her hands on my knees. I could smell the spicy, Oriental scent she always wore. To me it was familiar and comforting, even if to everyone else it was sexy.
“Are you scared of working with these women, Morgan?”
I nodded. “But I don’t know why.” I was surprised that it came out as a whisper.
“You don’t need to know why. Not yet. You do your best work when you are scared. Sign the paper,” Nina advised.
Thirteen
The following Monday was exhausting. I’d scheduled back-to-back patients, and even with fifteen minutes between appointments—to get a cup of coffee, inhale a container of yogurt or return a phone call—I was still reeling from the information and emotion I’d dealt with. The most critical reason for those breaks was so that I could get up, stretch my legs, walk to the large windows in my office, look down on the street and change my focus.
Too often, I keep hearing the voices of my patients describing frustration that love has turned to hate, anger at how jealousy corrupts, fear about fetishes, obsession over a need to inflict or receive pain, self-loathing at an inability to become intimate, questions about a hunger that will not abate or an appetite that nothing seems to arouse.
I go over and over the conversations my patients and I have had, looking for alternative solutions, questions I need to ask during the next session, dark corners that need more light.
What I do is fulfilling. I am grateful that I have the kind of career that allows me to interact with people who need my help and want to lead more satisfied lives. But there is another side to my profession, even if I don’t spend much time thinking about it, that can eat at my soul and corrode my own ability to connect to people in my life.
It’s not that I am frightened of what can go wrong between lovers. I was married for a long time and, for most of those years, was content. I simply know too much. I’m too aware of how easily people break and how hard it is to make real, sustaining changes.
By six forty-five that night, I was so tired I regretted having agreed to fit the Scarlet Society into my schedule. In the fifteen minutes I had before they arrived, I got a fresh cup of coffee and called Dulcie.
She was just leaving rehearsal with her father, an independent film director. “Dad’s taking me out to dinner and then to the opening of An Hour Before Dark.” Breathless, she proceeded to tell me who had directed it and who the stars were.
As soon as I hung up, the receptionist buzzed to tell me she was sending the new group in.
I greeted Shelby, who started to introduce me to the other women with her.
“No, that’s okay,” I interrupted. “Let’s get everyone seated before we do the introductions.”
Everything that happens from the moment a patient walks into my office is potential information. I become a camera, watching and listening and trying to remember what I see, sense and hear.
During the day, when individual appointments are scheduled, my office feels spacious. I have a large desk in front of the bookshelves that line the east wall. In front of the desk is a chair. Against the west wall is a camel-colored leather couch, long enough for three people to sit, or for one tall man to lie down comfortably. Facing the couch is my oversized chair. When I have a group, though, I set up a semicircle of eight to twelve folding chairs and I sit so that I can face them. The large room gets smaller, but not uncomfortable.
A woman in a red suit was the first to take a seat, and she chose the one closest to my chair. Her clothes looked expensive, cut so the fabric hugged her slim body. She wore high-heeled black alligator shoes and carried a leather bag, which I recognized as Chanel: the leather and gold chain were unmistakable.
Shelby Rush, in a black pantsuit and high-heeled black suede boots, put her tote on the chair on my other side and then stood, hostesslike, making sure that everyone found a seat.
There were too many faces for each of them to make a distinct impression, but I was very aware of two women. One wore blue jeans, a white man-tailored shirt and a brown suede blazer, and carried a briefcase as worn as the jacket. Her eyes never stopped moving. She looked at me, at each of the others, at the windows, at the floor, at the artwork on my walls. When it came time for her to take a seat, she sat at the center of the semicircle, where she would have the best view of everything going on around her. Her attentiveness didn’t appear to be nervous energy, but rather a need to observe. Her sexuality impressed me, too. She did nothing to hide it.
Like Shelby, there were several women dressed all in black—which is almost a uniform in Manhattan—but one woman was so blond, thin and pale that her black clothes overpowered her. She reminded me of a widow. Moving slowly, she appeared to have a hard time making a decision about where to go or which seat to take, and twice she stumbled over a chair leg. Her sunglasses probably weren’t helping. Large black frames with very dark lenses, they completely obscured her eyes. Without having to ask, I knew that she was in hiding. I just didn’t know if it was from me, from the other women or from herself.
As the rest of the seats filled up, it turned out that six of the twelve women wore sunglasses. One also wore a baseball cap. Another wore a scarf over her hair, tied in a retro “Jackie O” style.
I was used to treating groups who were strangers until I brought them together, choosing them carefully so that their personalities would play off one another. Week after week, I watched them become acquainted, exhibit personality and psychological traits and form a unit. But this was a preformed group, their dynamics already firmly in place. From what Shelby had told me, many of these women had been together in the society for several years. There was a lot of interaction I’d miss seeing acted out, making my work more difficult.
Even after they were all settled, they were oddly silent for people who knew one another well. Once, I had done grief counseling for a corporation where a tragedy had occurred. Even with that catastrophe overpowering them, there had been more conversation than there was with this group now.
As a therapist, I believe nothing is coincidental, no connection is unfounded. There was a reason that the m
embers of the Scarlet Society reminded me of a bereavement group I’d had eight years before. I just had to be patient and discover what the correlation was.
Fourteen
“Let’s go over the few rules that I ask everyone to follow when they’re here. You all have a right to talk and an obligation to listen. We don’t judge one another, but we do discuss how one another’s comments make us feel. Even if those reactions are negative. Especially if they are. My job is to help you explore how you deal with one another. And consider behavior that is detrimental to the group as a whole and to its members individually—but I’m not your mother, your friend or your teacher.”
I looked from one woman to the next as I explained how the group worked. There was an apprehensive energy in the room, which I was certain was not a reaction to my instructions. These women were scared of something and deeply disturbed; I could see it in the way they shifted in their seats, played with their hands or the straps of their bags, or looked around.
“When I ask you a question, there is no right or wrong answer. We’re here for you to talk about your feelings or your problems expressing those feelings. For those of you who have been in a group-therapy situation before, this is probably familiar. For those of you who haven’t, please ask me to explain anything that’s unclear. Any questions so far?”
I waited, but no one spoke.
“Okay, why don’t we go around the room so you can introduce yourselves to me and tell me a little bit about why you, personally, are here and what you hope we will accomplish.” I turned to my right, knowing I would be frustrating the woman in the red suit to my left who, judging from her movements, wanted, expected and perhaps even needed to go first.
Before the woman on my right could speak, Shelby interrupted.
“Dr. Snow, I think we should just introduce ourselves and then I can tell you what the problem is. But first we need the confidentiality agreement I sent you with the videotape. You told me on the phone you would sign it.”