The Delilah Complex

by MJ Rose

  Her use of that one word seemed out of place in this genteel house. Was she being rebellious or angry?

  “He’s told me three or four times that he’s quit, but he can’t stay away. I’m willing to accept that he has an addiction and work with him on it, but I can’t just shrug my shoulders and let him go there two or three nights a week, play the pussy pansy and look the other way.”

  If she wanted a reaction to that expression, I wasn’t going to accommodate her. “Do you think shrugging your shoulders is a solution?”

  “It’s Nicky’s solution. He wants to be married to me and have a family with me, and on the side get naked and be treated like a—”

  “Let’s focus on you and what you want,” I said. “We’ll let Nicky speak for himself when it’s his turn.”

  In her lap, Daphne fussed, clasping and unclasping her hands. Her nails were short, unpolished, not manicured. The skin was rough and red. Seeing me look, she smiled and held up her hands to make it easier for me to see. “Painter’s hands. The turp does damage.”

  That must have been what I’d smelled.

  “I’d like to see your work.”

  “Are you an art lover?” she asked.

  “I am, albeit an uneducated one.” That was true, but it wasn’t why I wanted to see her paintings. I was curious about what they would reveal about her.

  “That’s the best kind. Someone who just looks at the work and decides if she likes it or not based on how it touches her, not based on what some asshole professor or critic tells her to think.”

  Hostility now. I was curious to pursue that line, but couldn’t afford to go that far afield from Daphne and Nicky’s relationship in the first session. I turned to him. “Nicky, would you tell me if you agree with Daphne’s assessment of what’s going on between the two of you?”

  He nodded. “I can’t give up what she wants me to.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Are you willing to try?”

  “I have.”

  “Are you willing to try again?”

  Before he could answer, Daphne did. “No—he’s not. He thinks it’s up to me to change. He thinks that since I was once part of that vile club, I should be understanding. But I want my husband to be faithful.”

  “I am faithful, Daphne. What goes on there is not about love or even affection.”

  “What is it about?” I asked him.

  “Sex.”

  “Sex isn’t about love?”

  “It can be. But it can also just be sex. It’s a physical activity. Like playing tennis, or going swimming.”

  Daphne let out a long peal of laughter that surprised me with its nasty edge. “He is so full of shit. I know what he wants and—”

  “Time out,” I interrupted. “I don’t want either of you to assume what the other wants. Just answer for yourself. Daphne, tell me about the Scarlet Society. How long ago did you join?”

  “Years ago. A friend of mine was a member and she told me about it.”

  “How often did you go?”

  “About once or twice a month. Usually with her.”

  “What did you enjoy about it?”

  “I don’t see why this shit is important to—”

  “Because it has to do with your marriage. The society is what you say is getting in the way of you and Nicky having a good marriage. I need to find out more about that.”

  She thought for a minute, and in the quiet of the room I heard the steady drone of machinery along with the beat of a hammer, hitting its mark every five to ten seconds.

  “What did you ask me?”

  Was she buying time or had she really forgotten what I’d asked?

  “I asked you what you enjoyed about being a member of the Scarlet Society.”

  “It was like painting in another artist’s hand. I do very realistic paintings. It was as if suddenly I could paint like an abstract expressionist. I wasn’t myself there. Or at least not the self I’d always known.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “It was exciting…also confusing. For the first time in my life, I was in an environment where no one knew who I was, who my parents were, what kind of life I had. We don’t talk about ourselves. You know that, right?”

  I nodded.

  “There was a real sense of freedom. Until then, I’d only known a world where there are right ways of behaving. And wrong ways. Everything about the Scarlet Society was the wrong way of behaving. It was the best damn thing that ever happened to my art.”

  I hadn’t expected that. “What do you mean—the best thing that happened to your art?”

  “My father was a Supreme Court judge. My mother was a member of the Junior League and the DAR. I am one of three sisters. By the time I was twenty-five, they were both married with kids. And they’re younger than me. My painting was an indulgence that my parents thought I’d outgrow. It was fine that I studied art—as long as I did it at Radcliffe. It was all right that I painted as long as my studio was in the apartment they’d bought for me on Park Avenue. The society was something that would have freaked them out. They would never have approved.”

  “And you only did what they approved of?”

  “It never occurred to me to cross them. You just didn’t do that.”

  “When you were very young, how did they handle it when you did something that angered them?”

  Her answer came fast, delivered in a low voice that was almost a whisper. “They stopped talking to you. Completely. Depending on your crime, for hours or for days. You were treated like you were invisible. Until you apologized. Until you repented.”

  “Did you feel guilty about what went on at the society?”

  “No. I wasn’t me there. I didn’t even use my real first name. It was totally separate from the rest of my life.”

  “Some people might find that difficult. To balance two such different lives.”

  “Really?”

  There was something very naive about that question, which alerted me to watch out for other instances of an ability to distance herself from reality.

  “For some people it might be.”

  “Well, it wasn’t for me. And it was good for my art. That was the best part.” She clasped her hands tightly together.

  “How so?”

  She smiled and her face was transformed from a serious, troubled visage to a child’s face, full of wonder. “It would be easier to show you.” She stood.

  I wasn’t sure we should interrupt the session at that point, but her enthusiasm was important.

  “Is that okay with you?” I asked Nicky.

  “Hell, yes, it’s fine. I told you I wanted you to see Daphne’s work.”

  I followed Daphne as she led me around the sunroom, showing me four still lifes of flowers and fruit that she said she had done in her early twenties. They were bright and bold and very well done. A combination of Matisse’s colors and Cézanne’s blocking but without either’s originality or verve. So unremarkable that I hadn’t even noticed them while we were sitting and talking.

  “This was the kind of work I was doing after college. Competent. Uninspired. I couldn’t get the attention of any serious downtown gallery. A safe, old-fashioned Madison Avenue gallery took me on.” She laughed. “But that turned out to be because my parents had guaranteed the sales for each of my shows.”

  “When did you find that out?”

  “A few years ago. My mother died and I inherited this house. All of the paintings that I thought had sold to clients from all of my shows were still in their shipping crates in one of the rooms in the basement.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “It was such a kind thing for them to do. I felt grateful.”

  “No anger?”

  “I suppose it might have made me angry if I hadn’t broken out by the time I found them. I don’t need any help selling my work now. There’s a waiting list for my paintings.”

  There was a tone in her
voice—this wasn’t self-confidence; it was bragging. Was this her usual way of talking about her work, or was it for my benefit?

  “Take a last look around, Dr. Snow.” She waited a few seconds. “Now, let me show you how I evolved as an artist.”

  Daphne led the way out of the room. We walked back through the living room and foyer. In front of us was a large and curving grand staircase. Daphne walked toward and around it.

  Behind the stairs was a hallway with a glass-paned ceiling. We walked through a breezeway into a large artist’s studio in what seemed to be a separate building.

  The walls were painted a stark white. Large skylights flooded the room with natural light. Here, the smells of turpentine and oil paints, which I had only been slightly aware of in the sunroom, were more intense.

  In the middle of the room was an easel. The painting on it was facing away from us. Daphne sauntered over to it and turned the easel around.

  The canvas was more than four feet wide and at least as tall. The colors were deep and luminous. The paint was thick and heavy. I was looking into a cavelike room. The light source was beyond the edge of the canvas but it lit up the painting, warming the skin tones of the naked man who lounged on a velvet couch, sporting an erection. Strangely, he had been feminized in a way that suggested submission rather than homosexuality. It was subtly done—I certainly didn’t know how she’d done it.

  I forced myself to look away from the erotic painting and back to its creator. She was smiling, her eyes shone and her lips were parted. The pleasure she experienced watching me encounter her work was palpable and sexual.

  I looked back at the painting.

  That the woman standing next to me, of the pearl and the horse-country set, had created the painting would have been hard to believe if not for that edge to her words and the glare in her eyes. She was a fine painter, but what gripped me and kept me staring at the painting was its very real sexuality—as provocative as the video of the society that I’d watched ten days earlier.

  You see an expression on a man’s face like the one Daphne had captured only in the privacy of your own bedroom. You try to memorize it because you know it isn’t one you will see often. Many people never get to see anything exactly like it, ever.

  That she had painted it said much about Daphne. It was past voyeurism to paint this portrait of this man. It was almost sacrilege to portray the inner depth to his want.

  Actors making love in movies do a good job of expressing passion, and if you get caught up in the story on the screen you don’t notice the subtle false notes. They aren’t important.

  But the expression that Daphne had caught in this man’s face wasn’t an act. He was gazing at a woman with such desire that it pained him, and he was willing to do anything he had to do—no matter how much it demeaned him—in order to get what he wanted. And he wanted it right then, urgently, and for a whole host of reasons both right and wrong.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  This not from Nicky, but from the artist herself. It surprised me, too. It was not arrogance. Not bragging this time, either. She had separated and become a spectator looking at a stranger’s work.

  I answered carefully but honestly, watching her reaction. “Yes, it is very powerful.”

  “Before I joined the society I’d never understood much about sex. It was dark and removed and secretive. I learned about need and perversion and fantasy, and even though the sex stayed secretive, I was able to at least understand it. I tried out so many ways of expressing myself sexually, and that impacted me. It fed my work and made me creative in a way I’d never been. It became part of me. Or I became part of it.”

  “And you still needed to keep going there?”

  “To see this kind of look on the men’s faces. Over and over.”

  I wanted to know where she was still seeing this kind of look if she had stopped going to the society a year ago. Who was she painting now? Who posed for her this way? But it was not the right time to ask that yet.

  I turned to Nicky to gauge his reaction to what his wife had said. He was looking at Daphne with the same naked expression as the man in the painting. Obviously, he was very attracted to his wife. Either because she was no longer available to him, or because she was talking about her sex life before she married him, or just—and this was not only the simplest but also the least possible of reasons as far as I was concerned—because he was in love with Daphne, in awe of her talents and wanted to be with her.

  Twenty-Seven

  On the drive back to the city, I replayed the mental tape I’d made of the session, knowing that there were more questions raised than answered. And there were several things disturbing me. Most important of them all, I wasn’t certain that Daphne was telling me or her husband the truth about the agoraphobia.

  I returned the rental car to the garage and got home by four-thirty. I had to be downtown at the rehearsal studio at seven for a meeting for all the parents and young actors, but I had some time. In the kitchen, I made coffee in the French press—this being one of the very few food preparations that I did not mess up—and took a mug into the den.

  The tape that Shelby Rush had given me was on the bookshelves, behind a row of psychiatric textbooks that I knew Dulcie would never look at. I pulled it out, slipped it into the machine, hit the play button, then the mute button, and sat in my comfortable east-side apartment watching a few dozen women act like predators.

  I found what I was looking for within minutes.

  Daphne was on the tape. I hadn’t known who she was when I’d first watched the video, but she’d looked familiar to me when I walked into the sunroom. Here she was at the gala, in a teal-blue gown, with a sequined blue mask covering her eyes. But the hair was not hidden. The long lean body and the heart-shaped face and the stunning neck weren’t disguised.

  She stood in front of a line of tuxedo-clad men, appraising them and finally making her choice. Putting one hand on a tall black man’s shoulder, she nodded to him, turned imperiously without looking back to make sure he was following her, and walked off screen.

  The tape played on as I sat and sipped my coffee, mesmerized by the sex play.

  Even though I could list every perversion and fetish, had heard men and women sit in my office and admit the most intimate details of their sex lives, had instructed sex surrogates on how to do their jobs, had studied hard- and soft-core pornography, I had never seen real people play these kinds of sex games.

  I didn’t relate to the women’s aggression, but I was affected by the men, by their willingness to perform, by their lack of self-consciousness at being treated in this way, by the striptease from tuxedo to underwear to full nudity in front of such a big audience, for no other reason than that they knew it was what the women were demanding of them and they wanted to please their audience. That their pleasing aroused them aroused me.

  I had never ordered my husband to strip for me or walk around a room naked or get down on his knees in front of me. I had never demanded anything of him sexually. We had made love without any role-playing and our sex life had been satisfying without being obsessive, mysterious or spiritual. I’d never minded. Firsthand, I’d seen that kind of passion break and cripple people, destroy relationships.

  The more I learned about sexuality in graduate school, and in therapy after that, the more I realized that my own sex drive was average and that my fantasy life was not very fertile. But we don’t try to solve things that we don’t perceive as problems. Since I was never sexually frustrated, I never thought about being bored with Mitch. I didn’t focus on my own libido.

  I’m not proud to admit this, but I worked with so many patients who were disturbed by some aspect of their own sexuality that, if anything, I was pleased that mine was low on the list of issues I focused on. I even felt slightly superior about it.

  I know now that I was wrong, but for so many, many years, I really believed that if I did not care too much about sex, I’d never be disappointed by it.


  That lasted until Mitch and I separated.

  In the months after that, I realized how little effort either of us had made to explore each other. For two people who were so creative with their own careers, we were dull to the point of being destructive with our relationship.

  I didn’t know why. It was something I had yet to figure out. When I had the time. When I wanted to deal with it. When I wanted to rehash the past to see what I could learn that might help me in the future.

  That time hadn’t come yet.

  The screen had gone to black and I was about to hit the stop button when a new scene came up on the monitor. I hadn’t watched past this point the first time I’d viewed the tape. I hadn’t known there was any more.

  I turned up the sound and watched a room lined with books fade in. There were six rows of chairs filled with women whose backs were to the camera. A makeshift stage stood at one end of the room. There, Shelby Rush stood behind a podium.

  “And now we have number 3—Tim,” she said.

  From camera left a man walked onto the stage. He was shirtless and shoeless, wearing only a pair of faded jeans. His shoulders were broad and his chest was buff. He stood, humbly, his palms face out.

  “Tim, would you take off your jeans?” Shelby asked.

  As if he fully expected the request, he complied without any sense of embarrassment, and within seconds was stripped down to his underwear.

  “Would you please make yourself hard?”

  Without any trepidation, Tim obeyed. Reaching down, he rubbed his crotch through the cotton briefs. Watching the audience watching him, he smiled slightly as his hand kept up its steady motion.

  It took less than thirty seconds for the bulge to appear and the underwear to tent out.

  “And now, show us.”

  Tim stepped out of his underwear.

  His body was beautiful. Strong and sculpted.

  “Does anyone want to test Tim before I start the bidding?”

  “I would” came a voice from the audience. A short redhead stood up.

  In a culture where so many men, and now women, relied on an array of prescription drugs to replenish desire that had disappeared, been destroyed, or was pushed down so deep they were afraid to find out what was inhibiting it, the raw and real appetites of these women was mesmerizing.