Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (8 page)

I shut the paper but held on to it.

I wasn’t smelling the newsprint anymore. The scent of blood was in my head. We have all smelled it. A bad cut, a birth, our baby’s bloody nose, our periods. Not the violent bloodletting described in the paper. But that didn’t matter. The odor of blood does not change according to why it flows. I watched people passing by, but they didn’t distract me from the imagery of the girl’s death. We have all seen so much violence on television and in the movies that it has become too easy to picture a body on the floor, the pools of blood, the lifeless face.

I wanted more coffee. No, needed more coffee. And stopped at the first Starbucks I passed and ordered a double espresso.

For the past few nights I hadn’t slept well. Not since Dulcie had burned her arm. Not since the divorce had gone through. Even though my daughter hadn’t had any pain, I had kept waking to check on her. My own arm had throbbed worse in sympathy than the actual injury, and the phantom ache had kept me awake. And when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I’d been reading Cleo’s book, but was still a hundred pages shy of finishing.

As she had warned me, Cleo hadn’t done a very good job at disguising the men. While she had given them all nicknames, like Midas or King Henry or Valentino, she had written so much about the businesses they ran or their occupations that I was engaged in playing a guessing game.

No wonder Caesar was nervous about her publishing this book. Once the men she’d written about discovered their private lives were going to appear in ink, there would be a lot of anger and fear among them.

Her exposé was not like one of those bestselling suspense novels by Dan Brown, Doug Clegg or Stan Pottinger that kept me turning pages. Instead, Cleo’s insights into the men who came to see her and her “troupe,” as she called the prostitutes who worked for her, were too rich and complicated to read quickly. If she wanted to become a therapist or a sociologist or write more books on the same subject, she would have no trouble. Her writing style was simple but clear, and her passion for and knowledge of the subject matter came through. Her empathy for the other women who worked in the industry was sincere, and she understood them and explained their lives in a refreshingly unmelodramatic yet dramatic way.

But it was the empathy she had for the men who came to see her that made me stop and reread what she had written.

Cleo seemed to have shut down the part of herself that made judgments. No matter what a man asked for, she understood that his need came from a wellspring that was vital and strong and could not be simply dammed up. Her ability to grasp the reasons for the humiliations that titillated one man as opposed to the physical prowess another needed to believe he possessed impressed me. But her own distance from what she had done disturbed me.

And I was hoping I could get her to talk about that when she arrived for her 10:00 a.m. appointment.

But for the first time, Cleo was late, and when she arrived at ten-fifteen she apologized for the delay but didn’t give me a reason. Sometimes, with patients, I pursued tardiness if I felt there were unconscious reasons for it, but Cleo was so anxious to be in therapy I didn’t think this was the case.

As soon as she sat down, she hauled out a large bottle of water and took a long gulp. And then a longer breath. In previous sessions she had eased into talking about what was on her mind, but this morning she didn’t waste any time.

“Those murders. Did you read about them?”

I nodded, but I did not tell her that the first victim had been one of my patients. All of that was privileged information, details that the police had not yet revealed to the press. None of the specific ways the woman’s body had been defiled had made it into the news. The police were obviously trying to keep it quiet to prevent copycats and to make sure that if they got any leads, they were legit. Only the broad strokes of the killing had been reported.

“That shouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen if prostitution was legal.”

“Did you know the woman who was killed?” I asked Cleo.

She shook her head. “No.” She shook her head again, and for the first time I noticed the tiny pink-diamond cross that
she was wearing on a fragile chain around her neck. It caught the light and gleamed. It looked lovely and expensive.

“The news has made things worse. Caesar is preoccupied with the story. Worried about me. And the last thing he needs is more reason to worry about me. So we had a fight. A bad fight.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It started with the news, then segued into the book again. But it’s really all about me and sex, isn’t it?” She stopped and drank her water as if she had not had anything to drink for days. “He’s confused. And he’s impatient. And I just feel all this pressure to get better faster.”

“Does he know you are seeing me?”

“Yes.”

“Does he think it’s a good idea?”

“Yes, but he also has his own idea of how to cure me.”

“Cure you? His word or yours?”

“His.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“He thinks we should act out a scenario where he is one of my clients. He wants to pay me to have sex with him and play out his fantasy. That maybe this is a way to break down my resistance. To just see him like any other client. Is this making any sense?”

“Does it make sense to you?”

She shrugged. “Not really. But I think I’m willing to try it.”

“What is the fantasy?”

Cleo leaned back against the couch as if she was pushing herself away from me. As if she could disappear into the furniture and avoid the revelation. For the first time I saw a look in her eyes that reminded me of women who are missing from themselves. The lost women. Lost to drugs or alcohol or fear or abuse.

I waited.

She shook it off. “It’s the Caesar and Cleopatra thing.” Now the look on her face was one of embarrassment, but she continued. After reading so much of her book and knowing how little inhibition she had with her clients, her shyness in describing this fantasy that she and her lover had talked about was almost charming. It was also a signal I needed to pay extra attention.

“He wants me to be Cleopatra, brought to him in a carpet, unrolled at his feet. The queen coming to the conqueror. He wants me to playact this potentate willing to give herself up to the Roman. He thinks that if I can get into that role, I will feel real things for him. Sort of what happens to actors in a play. How they fall in love with one another and feel things within the personalities they inhabit.”

“And how do you feel about it?”

“I wanted to ask you that. How should I feel?”

“There are no
should
s.”

She got up and walked over to the window. While I certainly didn’t mind that she needed to move, so few patients do it. There are reasons that patients should remain seated and focused for the whole session, but by no means should they feel as if they are strapped down to the couch.

Cleo roamed. Like a dancer she covered the length of the room in long strides and her eyes took in everything. She glanced at the knickknacks on my desk, looked out one window, then the next. She walked past my bookshelves and ran a finger over the smooth marble egg that rested on my mantelpiece.

I had carved that egg, and as her forefinger ran down its surface, I felt as if she was touching my arm. The physical sensation surprised me. And I knew I’d need to tell Nina about it the next time I saw her.

Sculpture had once been my passion. Now it was only a
hobby. My preoccupation with carving started when my father remarried. I was fourteen and Krista, the woman he married, was a sculptor. She wasn’t maternal, and I never looked to her to fulfill that role—Nina had been offering me motherly sustenance since I was eight.

But Krista did bring her art into my life. When she moved into our apartment, the cool stone pieces that she strategically placed about attracted me.

And still, today, on vacations, or sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull out my tools and work on a reluctant stone.

Cleo sat back down again. “I don’t know if I should act out his fantasy.”

“Why?”

“Does it make sense? Do you think his idea will work? If I do with him what I do with clients, will that make this problem any better? I don’t know if I want to turn into an actress and play a role with him. He thinks that will help me jump the divide, that once I am in character and start to make love with him, I’ll just segue into being myself and enjoy it.”

“And what do you think?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea. All I know is that I feel pretty desperate. The irony of me having a sexual problem with the one man I actually want to sleep with is not lost on me, Dr. Snow. I’m upset. But he’s even more upset. He’s already taking it personally. He thinks he’s not sexy enough. That he can’t turn me on.”

“Do you think it would help if you brought him here with you?”

She shrugged.

“Why don’t you suggest it?”

“I did. He saw someone once. Not too long ago. He said it was a waste of time.” She shrugged and her eyes filled with tears she didn’t make any effort to wipe away.

Crying made her look younger and more vulnerable. Neither of us said anything. She wept and I watched.

It is a very special privilege to be privy to these moments in people’s lives, when their defenses drop and the essence of who they are and what they feel is unmasked. Like watching a butterfly break free from its cocoon. When someone goes into any kind of therapy, if the process works, for a time they are as delicate as that butterfly. You must not reach out and touch their wings or you will destroy the pattern, and the iridescence—the illumination—will come off on your fingers. You can only sit back and wait and hope that you are a goodenough guide to do justice to the gift.

“What are you feeling?” I asked her, speaking softly.

“I wish it could be different.” The pain in her voice was so raw I felt it. The way I felt my daughter’s pain. The same empathetic connection had developed between Cleo and me. And why shouldn’t it have? That is the art of therapy, Nina Butterfield had taught me.

For a time, you as the therapist also have to become vulnerable. By doing so you can connect in a way that builds trust and allows you to understand things that often have no obvious logic but can be sacred to your patient.

Our forty-five minutes were over and Cleo noticed it before I did.

“I have to leave on time. I have an appointment downtown,” she said with a sorry shake of her head that made me think she was off to see a client.

“I’ll see you Wednesday,” she added.

I nodded. “Cleo, maybe you shouldn’t make up your mind about whether or not to do what Caesar is asking until then. Would that be okay with you?”

She didn’t say anything as she gathered her leather bag and straightened her skirt.

“Yes. You’re probably right.”

But she had a look in her eye that reiterated that she was feeling desperate and that she was running out of time.

I wished later that I had taken the look more seriously. I wished I had called out to her and told her to be careful. Be extremely careful. But she had convinced me, by the way she tossed her hair, looking me in the eye with her cool gray eyes, that she knew how to take care of herself.

Eyes had lied to me before.

A
fter Dulcie and I had dinner, we watched
My Fair Lady
on television. Then my daughter went to her room to study the part she’d won in
Our Town
while I stayed in the living room and picked up Cleo’s book.

I read it that night and another hundred pages the next night, and with every page became more and more aware of why she was worried about what would happen to her if she did, indeed, go ahead and publish this book.

I was anxious to see her on Wednesday morning, but for the second time in a row, Cleo was late for her appointment.

During the first fifteen minutes, I assumed she was still on her way. But by ten-thirty, I realized she wasn’t coming.

Had we delved too far in the last session? Had she run scared? I hadn’t expected she would react this way to opening up.

Maybe she just woke up with a sore throat and meant to
call but fell back asleep, I reasoned. Or maybe she got an early-morning call from a client that she couldn’t ignore.

I did some paperwork and made some calls and gave up waiting.

When a patient misses a session without calling, they get charged the full price of the appointment. I don’t call to find out where someone is. At the start of the next session, I ask him or her to explain what happened.

And so I put Cleo out of my mind and left my office at twelve-fifteen. My next appointment wasn’t until two o’clock, and I needed to walk.

It was a lovely June afternoon and I headed into Central Park, crossing by the Bethesda Fountain and going west. I passed nanies with children holding on to toys, their faces smeared with food; dog walkers trotting along at a fast clip, each with a pack of ten or thirteen dogs; and young couples full of the romance of spring, holding hands and walking lazily in the sunshine.

I looked at them and thought of my daughter, thankful that she was two or three years away from her first pass at love. And I hoped it might not happen even that soon. And then, without cosciously being aware of it, I was thinking about Cleo again and her confusion now that she was feeling the stirrings of a powerful emotion she wasn’t very familiar with.

Love isn’t a germ or a virus. We can’t put it under a microscope to examine it. Nor is sexual attraction or desire or lack of desire. Or any of the fetishes and anxieties that haunt us. But I try, along with everyone else at the institute and therapists all over the world, to treat people who succumb to love or passion or lust or any variation of those and who get sick with them.

The wind picked up and debris scattered. My eye caught
the headline on the sheet of newsprint that had snagged on the bottom of the stone water fountain.

No Headway in Hooker Killings.