Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (4 page)

I crossed my arms, shivering despite the warm air. I was suddenly scared for Cleo.

Her hips didn’t sway. There was nothing lascivious about the way she held her shoulders or head. What signal did she telegraph, then? What was it that men instinctively knew just from looking at her?

I wanted to follow her, to protect her and to watch her interact. It was one thing to hear her talk about seducing men, but I wanted to see her do it, to note the steps of the process, to study the interaction.

If I was totally truthful with myself, the reason I was so curious about this client of mine was that I wanted to learn from Cleo Thane.

I had been studying human sexual response and counseling patients with sexual problems for years. But living with the same man for almost fifteen years, I had forgotten so much about how to deal with men. Now that I was once again single, I felt naive.

Physician, heal thyself.

If I could have followed her around for the rest of the day, I would have. Even into the darkened rooms where her clients waited for her, desperate to have her work her magic on them.

We want what we don’t have. We take what we have for granted. I was curious about what it would be like to be hungry for someone again. I had not tasted a man’s skin or licked a man’s lips for too long. What would it be like? How easy or how difficult would it be to find that part of myself again?

My husband and I had separated two years before. And for a few years before that we had not been very physical with each other. Early on in our relationship we’d fallen into being friends and parents first, and lovers last and infrequently.

That’s what I mean. You want what you know you cannot have. Cleo didn’t want what I wanted. She had men’s desire. She wanted what I’d had—unconditional love that didn’t depend on sex. That was what my marriage with Mitch had become. What I really still had with him, despite our divorce. We couldn’t generate any heat anymore, but we cared about each other. That was what made our breaking apart so bittersweet.

To be a therapist, you have to go into therapy yourself. I’d started that part of the process when I was a teenager, and over the years I had gone back several times. I knew that I had some issues with control, with wanting to please the people I cared about—sometimes too much. And I knew I’d lost the connection to my own sexual energy. Only in the past few months, once I knew my divorce was imminent, had I started to think about it again: about seduction, passion. About the hot rush of pleasure that I hadn’t felt in a while.

Cleo talked about standing in front of a man and watching his face grow slack with need. Seeing his eyes half close and have him fight his urgency. Listening to him beg her to take him in her mouth or let him slip inside her so that he could, for just a little while, swirl off into that soundless, sightless place where everything falls into waves of blues, greens, reds, yellows, and bursts into feelings. Explosions of sensation. No words.

I wanted to see what she saw.

The man in the street was still twenty or thirty paces behind Cleo, his footsteps not intruding on her shadow. Was he being cautious not to go faster? Was he measuring his steps? Was this someone who just happened to be walking in the same direction she was going? Or was he following her?

I knew about trailing someone, even though it had been more than twenty years since I had done it. I’d followed my mother, sneaked out of the apartment after her, waited on the street corner to see which direction she took and then crept forward, staying in the background. Not to spy on her, but to make sure that she was, indeed, going where she had told me. To make sure she was not going to get more pills or alcohol. Or to meet another man whose name I would never hear.

If you don’t want to be seen, you are careful. The way the man in the street below was being careful.

Cleo had reached the corner, still unaware of him. Men’s glaces couldn’t be important to Cleo anymore. When someone was willing to give you thousands of dollars to look at you, and touch you, and have you touch them, when you were desired that way, a mere look must have been meaningless. There were other things that might have caught her attention, but a man’s attraction?

This guy was good at what he was doing. To anyone else on the street who had not watched the ballet of suspense that I had, there would be nothing suspicious to see.

But I believed she
was
being followed. And I didn’t know what to do with the information. Call her on her cell phone? Warn her?

Except, what if I was wrong?

She turned the corner. And ten seconds later he turned, too.

And then they were both gone.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything.

A woman walked west on Sixty-fifth Street at eleven
o’clock on a Wednesday morning, and a man, who happened to be going in the same direction, noticed her. He hesitated when he saw her, not to hide in the shadows, not to make sure that he wasn’t seen, but to enjoy the lithe body as it moved by. To smile at the shining hair. He was just appreciating her. And the fact that he went in the same direction? Well, everyone on the street has to go either east or west, north or south. It was a meaningless encounter.

It was not the first time my overactive imagination had tried to turn an innocent moment on a lovely spring day into a portent of danger.

Where are you going? When are you coming back?
I would ask my mother, and she would smile and run her fingers through my hair and promise that she’d be back soon, leaving me, again, to wonder if this time my mother was telling the truth or a lie.

Until she went away for good.

T
he officer who was supposed to meet me at the morgue wasn’t there yet, so I sat in the anteroom, trying not to smell the antiseptic harbinger of death and mystery that hung in the air.

Before that spring, my patients didn’t die.

While I deal with the heart, the head and the sex organs, I don’t wield a scalpel or saw. I have never sliced through the top layer of skin, through fat and muscle, to discover the growth that does not belong, find the tear to sew up or cosmetically alter an appearance. I have never immersed my hands in a human cavity to move aside a pulsing organ or feel the heat of blood spurting out of a wound.

Instead, I probe with words for the secrets we learn to keep from others and—even more critical—the secrets we keep from ourselves, buried as deeply as a bullet lodged in bone.

I have never signed a death certificate or had to walk out into a waiting room to find the expectant, anxious faces of a family member clinging past logic to the hope that I could save their ailing loved one.

My office is not in a cubicle in a hospital and does not smell of disinfectants. Rather, I work in a turn-of-the-century building on the Upper East Side in New York City. Nothing about the building’s elegant facade or classic lines suggests that past the Ionic columns and through the wrought-iron door is the most progressive sex clinic in the country.

There is a small brass plaque on the outside of the building, identifying it but giving little else away:
The Butterfield Institute
.

The black cursive letters are etched deeply into the metal plate. Run your fingers over them and you feel the edges pushing into your flesh. Could you cut your skin on those edges and draw blood? Probably not, but even if you did, none of us inside could offer more than a Band-Aid.

There are only those three words on the bronze rectangle. We do not advertise. Not because we are ashamed of what we do—each of us could work twice as many hours and still not see all the patients who are waiting for an appointment—but because we respect our patients’ privacy: their secrets are ours.

Inside the marble-floored foyer a glittering chandelier casts a sparkling light on the reception area. A young woman sits behind the ornate desk, complete with gilded lion’s-claw feet. Behind her you can glimpse the marble fireplace, thick molding around the perimeter of the ceiling and another chandelier. One flight up the stairs are our offices.

That spring there were trees in bloom on the street outside my window, and I had seen them go from tight-pinked buds to lush, provocative blossoms to brown-edged and withering
petals. It had been a glorious, slow seduction, but the trees had come into leaf and the show was over. And I was waiting at the morgue.

“What about Sheba Larcher’s parole officer?” I asked Officer Dignazio as he escorted me into the cold, tiled room. “Why didn’t you call her?”

“Her parole officer is out of town. We wouldn’t have asked you if we had any other choice, Dr. Snow.”

A lab assistant in green scrubs pulled the metal drawer out. The mound under the pale blue sheet looked so small, more child-size than adult.

And then the M.E. lifted a corner and pulled it down.

I didn’t look. Not at first. I had to force my head to turn, propel my feet forward, look down.

Sheba was only twenty. Only eight years older than my own daughter, but aged in ways I prayed my daughter would never be. This girl had still been beautiful, despite the hard edge. Hope could still leap into her eyes when we’d talked about how she was going to leave New York and find another way to make money.

I turned away. Not able to look at her anymore.

“Yes, that’s her,” I said to the M.E.

And then for just a second, under the antiseptic scent, I smelled something else. Not flowery like a woman’s perfume, but heavy and almost a little sweet. And then the sharper astringent odor took over again.

I had seen her last in February. In prison. Four days before she was to be released. She had told me her mother had wired her the money to come home to a small town in West Virginia. That she was all right with giving up the dreams that had brought her to New York. But just in case, I gave her both my phone number and my address. An invitation to use either if she felt the need.

But she hadn’t made contact. And obviously she had not made it home. The next contact I had had with her came from a police officer who called, asking me to come down and identify her body.

Every day for the past five years I had gone to my pale yellow office five days a week, sat in my comfortable chair flanked on my right by an end table on which rested an agate ashtray and an innocuous clock and looked across the room at this patient or that one. I’d elicited secrets and listened as hard as I could to revelations so that I would be able to help heal or restore their sexual wounds and integrate that one aspect of their personality back into the whole, to align love and lust, to balance who they were with who they wished they could be, to bring the passion back after grief or loss or pregnancy or divorce or a loss of self-esteem, to work with the fetish as well as the fantasy.

And no one who had ever come to me for help had died because of my advice.

Until that spring.

Until that spring I had never seen any of my patients laid out on a gurney. Not breathing. I took one last look at the waxen face of the woman I had worked with—all the vitality and expression that had illuminated her gone.

Butterfly collectors trap living creatures and suffocate them. Then carefully, and with precision and a certain obsessive passion, pin these glorious creatures down and lay them out so that in death they can be admired. Even if they cannot flutter or fly, their colors shimmer and shine inside their glass tombs forever. In death, these creatures retain some of their glory.

Not her.

She did not shine anymore. Her hair was limp, her skin was dull, her cheeks bloodless.

She would never shimmer again.

I had started working with prostitutes in prison while I was getting my Ph.D. I was not so naive to think that I could do enough for all of them. Most of them would go back to their pimps, or their e-mail accounts, or worse, the streets. Yet, I kept at it. Hoping that some of them might get away.

Some of them.

She had asked for help and I had gone to see her. She had welcomed me for what was ahead of her. Had wanted to change the direction her life had been taking, to have me light a fire to help her melt the past. None of this would happen. Not ever. She was lost now. To everyone who had known her. To her potential. To her promise.

She was one of
the lost girls
.

Not the first one I had tried to save.

Not the last one I would fail.

I
was back in my office twenty minutes later, sitting at my desk thinking about the still, pallid body, when Nina stuck her head in.

“Morgan?”

I turned, startled out of the moment.

Dr. Nina Butterfield, the owner of the institute, my mentor, my godmother and my friend, stood in the doorway to my office.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

I saw ghosts all the time and she knew that. No answer was needed. And she knew that, too. She spoke to fill in the silence, so that we could move past it.

As if I would ever be able to move past it
.

“Did the paperwork come through?” she asked, referring, I knew, to the divorce.

I nodded.

“Well, weren’t we going to have lunch?” She was watching me carefully, as she always did. “You were hoping I’d forget. That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t want to talk about the divorce and you know I’m going to force you to.”

We both laughed at that.

When Nina laughed she looked much younger than her sixty-two years. She had shoulder-length, copper-colored hair, warm, caramel-colored skin and bright amber eyes that bored into you and dared you to look away. She had sculpted features that would seem masculine in a less sensual woman. Dressed in a honey suede jacket, black slacks and a rust silk shirt, she looked professional, but easygoing. And she was. The most fluid woman I’d ever met. With the biggest heart and the smartest head. She had swooped down and picked me up, opened her wings and sheltered me under them when I was too little to know how scared I was or how much I needed her.