Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (32 page)

She was the only thing I had ever been able to count on loving the right way. But I wasn’t doing that job very well, either. Her closing barb could be written off as that of any angry preteenager not getting her way. But I wouldn’t do that to her. Just because she was young didn’t dilute the truth of what she had noticed, what she was feeling, reacting to.

When my ex-husband and my daughter were no more than dots of color in the Saturday crowd, I turned back around and tried to think through my reactions to her requests. I knew I was overreacting. But her taking the step into professional acting was a leap that had me worried. It wasn’t only what my mother had done. It wasn’t only how she had been shaped and then malformed by too much success and pressure too fast and
at a critical time in her emotional development. It was also about the insidious culture that we lived in, which heaped so much praise and accolades on its young stars. It was even more intense now than it had been for my mother in the fifties.

If Dulcie had early success, would she be able to deal with later realities if they were not so shiny? If she got a taste of the spotlight, she’d crave it. She would confuse the crowd’s admiration with love. She just wasn’t old enough to make those distinctions.

Upstairs in my office, I put my bag down and brewed coffee.

“Morgan?”

Nina stood in the doorway, smiling at me.

She was wearing jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her usual formal makeup and coiffed, copper hair had been replaced with just some blush and a ponytail. All traces of the head of the Butterfield Institute and renowned scholar erased, she looked about ten years younger than her years.

“Hi. Do you want some coffee?”

She nodded, came in and poured herself a cup. Like me she drank it black with just a little sugar. I probably had learned to drink my coffee like that from her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I wasn’t surprised. She always knew. It was the fact that
Noah
had known that still had me confused.

“Not sure where to start,” I said.

The institute was quiet. It was closed for the weekend and only a few of us had access. And rarely did any of us use it. Nina, who was often writing—she had published three books on human sexuality and therapeutic process—was the only one who could be counted on to be here after hours and over the weekend. Beyond us the hallways were lit but empty, the
office doors shut. The usual low-level hum was missing, and its absence was more obvious than its presence.

“Well, what might be wrong?” she asked.

“Among a million other things, my mothering skills.”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not.” She smiled. Nina was like a grandmother to Dulcie and spent a lot of time with us. “You and your daughter have a wonderful relationship. Dulcie is a very well-integrated and delightful child.”

“She wants to act. Professionally, Nina. She wants me to give her permission to audition for a Broadway show.”

Nina didn’t need me to explain any more than that. She nodded. Looked at me. Searched my face.

“No matter how hard we try, we keep coming back to the same bridge, don’t we? We think we’ve escaped and can move on to other issues, other problems, but the one that haunts us just never goes away. You are going to have to cross it one day, Morgan. Or else it’s just going to keep presenting itself to you.”

“It’s my fault. I must have done something over the years. The way I talked about my mother, the way I missed her, Dulcie must have figured out that it would matter to me if—”

“Hey, that’s a little too powerful a theory for me. You didn’t make Dulcie love acting. That’s taking too much responsibility and being too narcissistic, if you ask me. She’s her father’s daughter, too. How easy for you to forget that. He’s a film director, unless I’m mistaken.”

I laughed, but it died halfway to its end. “Yes, no, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, she wants to do this thing and she is furious with me because I don’t want her to.”

“Are you afraid that if you let her audition you’ll be giving your mother permission to ruin her life all over again?”

“Let’s not do this now.”

“What? Try to deal with an issue you’re resistant to?”

“If that is how you want to see it.”

“It’s what it is.”

“According to you. Not to me. But I guess you are questioning my therapeutic skills, too. Damn. There is nothing that’s working. Dulcie, you. The kind of therapist I am. Well, I’m not a very good one. One of my patients is missing. And I haven’t done anything to help her.”

If Nina had thought my segue from Dulcie to Cleo odd, she didn’t say so. Instead, like the good therapist and friend she was, she pushed me just a little and pursued the thread.

“What do you mean, help her?”

“She’s still missing and there’s no proof that anything has happened to her, so the police aren’t paying attention to her case. All their manpower is on that lunatic out there giving prostitutes last rites and hoping to turn them into saints.”

“How do you know the police won’t get involved in your client’s disappearance, and how do you know the murderer is giving the prostitutes last rites? I’ve been following the case pretty closely and haven’t read anything to that effect.”

If my lunch with Dulcie had been less disturbing, I might have been more careful and more conscious of what I said. Or maybe I’d slipped on purpose. My involvement with the police, with the men at the Diablo, with my own investigation, had been weighing on me. From the first meeting I’d had with Noah, I’d been well aware that Nina would oppose everything I was doing with a vehemence that would be uncomfortable at best.

I sighed. And told her what I’d been doing at the Diablo. Her only reaction was the color of her knuckles on the hand holding her coffee cup. The more I explained, the more they lost color. She was an expert at hiding her emotions, at listening, at not interrupting, at taking it in. She did it with her patients all day long. She’d earned her reputation by her ability to disappear and absorb. It had been her nature before she became a therapist and was why she was so well suited to the
occupation. But it made her a complicated person to have in your life. She was hard to read. Except I knew how to read her. I’d made myself learn. She was my teacher. My mother substitute. My friend. When you study someone and emulate them the way I had her, you figure out things.

“How many of these men have you met so far?” she asked.

“All but one. And he’s Monday night.”

“And the police? You’ve told them about this?”

I shook my head. “No names. No information. Not yet.”

“But you’ve consulted with them?”

“Yes.”

She got up and poured herself more coffee.

“I wish you’d told me what you were doing.”

“So you could talk me out of it?”

“Yes. You are a therapist, not a detective.”

“And as a therapist I am doing what I have to do for my patient. You taught me that. The only way I can protect Cleo’s privacy is to help the police, find out what they know and try to work on her disappearance on my own.”

“You get uninvolved as of this moment. No more calls to Elias Beecher. Or any of those men at the Diablo. And no more involvement with the police.” She reached for her coffee cup and, grimacing, swallowed what was left.

“I can’t stop now.”

She just looked at me. Hurt. Betrayed. I knew my involvement with the police was bothering her more than anything else. I got up and sat beside her on the couch.

“Sam broke the law,” I said.

“He wasn’t hurting anyone.” Her voice was not that different from the way Dulcie’s had sounded at lunch. Small, powerless, hurt.

“But he was breaking the law, Nina.”

I reached for her and she pushed me away. “They…”

“They only did their job.”

“You saw what they did. They were underhanded and conniving. You agreed with me. You hated them as much as Sam did. As much as I did.”

“No. I thought I did. But that was just solidarity.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. Why is it so hard for you to accept that I wanted to be there for you?”

“Because…” she started, then stopped.

I waited. I wanted her to absolve me. To tell me that we were as close as ever. That she could accept everything I’d told her. That she still loved me. That I could tell her a truth she didn’t want to hear, could force her to think about Sam in a way that would demand she face his travesty. But she couldn’t do it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“About what?” Nina’s voice was closer to its usual cadence and objective tone.

“That we are arguing. That you see my helping the police as a personal affront.”

“And why is it you’re sorry we are arguing? Where does that come from, Morgan? Why can’t you argue and feel good about it? Excited by it. You are expressing your feelings. I am expressing mine. Why can’t we do that without you apologizing?”

“You are getting angry again.”

“Yes, but at myself now. I still haven’t helped you see it, have I?”

“What?”

“That people don’t disappear when they are mad at you. That fighting it out is healthy. That not everyone takes pills to fight feelings and that not everyone is going to disappoint you.”

“When did this turn into a therapy session?”

We looked at each other. Both angry for different reasons.
Both confronting what we had not ever really learned to confront, no matter how hard we had worked at it.

“That’s what is so beautiful about human nature,” she said. “The vulnerable, the sad, the helpless, all protected by the wings of hope and determination that we still, in the face of everything, wrap around ourselves and around each other.”

I heard her words. But I was seeing Cleo. She had that determination, that hope, but I was sure she was helpless despite it now.

Things with Nina would be all right. We could get through the anger. We’d get to the other side of it. And I would do that with Dulcie, too. But Cleo had flown beyond my reach, out of sight.

M
onday nights were not as busy as the rest of the week at the Diablo Cigar Bar. As I sat at the bar talking to Gil and waiting, I watched a willowy woman with very blond hair and large green eyes stroke the underside of a man’s wrist with such élan that I started to feel her fingerpads on my own skin. The lushness of the club was so seductive. The deep club chairs, soft lights and piano music, the exotic wood tables, lacquered to such a high gloss that they were like mirrors, and a rug so thick it would suffice as a bed. You didn’t so much go to the club as entered its world and were enveloped by it. It surrounded you, embraced you; it was the first thing that touched you when you walked in. Cleo and Gil had created an alternative universe where there was no sense of time or strife. In the middle of Manhattan, an oasis. The city was filled with spaces like this. Thousands of apartments high above street level, where you looked out of oversize windows down at a silent world that appeared so lovely. When you lived in
this city, you didn’t see the trouble on the street. You didn’t hear screams in the night. You didn’t see the woman who sold sex for a living by getting into a man’s car and giving him a twenty-dollar blow job.

“He’s here,” Gil offered as he put down a fresh club soda in front of me.

I turned slowly and scanned the room. The Slave was a man in his late fifties, trim but short, with a thick shock of gray hair and strong features. He was an ex–Wall Street guy who got out of the market in the late nineties with his fortune intact and became the dean of one of the most prestigious Ivy League schools in the country. He had been one of Cleo’s clients for five years and according to her manuscript, was someone she knew a little too much about.

Gil came around from the other side of the bar and I got up. A little wobbly. Not because I’d had too much to drink—I’d only been drinking sparkling water for the past forty-five minutes—but because my entire body was balanced on the two thin spikes of my stilettos.

“Ed, this is Morgan,” Gil said, introducing us.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, trying for the voice I had practiced and now was using for the fourth time.

He smiled, appraising me.

“Thank you,” he said to Gil. And then to me, “Sit down, please.”

For fifteen minutes we talked about a movie he’d seen the night before that I, too, had seen a few weeks ago. It might have been a conversation between any couple, and that was the point. Cleo’s girls were supposed to be able to handle conversation. But then he picked up one of my hands and held it in his. It was no surprise anymore to me that these moments of physical contact bypassed my brain and went straight to my senses. It was the excitement that confused me. I would have been more comfortable with disgust or fear. But instead,
I was curious. Cautious, but wanting to know more. These men offered a look into a side of sex that till then I had only read about and talked about as a dispassionate observer.

“You have strong hands,” he said.

“Is that good?”

“Yes. I need you to have strong hands. You will need to hold me down. Stop me.”

“Stop you?”

“From getting up, from touching you, from reaching out.”

I nodded.

“Have you ever had a slave?” he asked.

I’d found out from my other interviews it was easier if I told mostly the truth. “No. This is a fairly new gig for me. I’ve only been working here for a couple of weeks.”

His eyes lit up. “You mean at this club or in this business?”

“In the business. I recently got divorced. My financial circumstances have changed. A friend introduced me to Cleo. She’s been working with me for a month. And last week… was my coming-out party.”

He smiled. “Then I’ll have to teach you.”

“Is that something you like? Teaching?”

“Yes. Teaching you how to accept a slave. You have to be strong. And willing to punish me.”

I nodded.

“Cleo was an excellent master.”

My heart skipped a beat. He had spoken about her in the past tense.