The Delilah Complex (12 page)

“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.

O
n 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.

What was different about them that allowed for a suspension
of social mores? Wanting to be part of a couple regardless of how unfulfilling it may be, so many women I’ve worked with have chosen a life of compromises over the alternative. They deny, even in the privacy of their minds, their most creative fantasies, choosing instead to borrow from the sex scenes they read in softfocus fiction. They are afraid to search the twisting tunnels of their own ids to discover what would be arousing—be it talking out loud, role playing or pursuing pain.

And yet this group had overcome all inhibition to indulge in their cravings. To create a solution despite how unconventional it was. Was what they craved unusual? Yes. Was it dysfunctional? It might be for some of them and not for others. Judging them wouldn’t help me to understand how they could be in touch with the darkest and most private parts of their sexual selves. But I could wonder at it. Especially here, in my own home, watching them act out their fantasies for one another to see.

On the monitor, the naked man walked off the stage and toward the woman, whose back was still to the camera. The camera pushed past her pale gray gown, angled down and zoomed in for a close-up of her manicured fingers reaching out and testing the heft of Tim’s testicles. Then she wrapped her hand around his cock, holding it as if it was a leash, and led him out past the all-female audience.

The video cut to a darkened bedroom. Tim’s bare back filled the frame and the woman’s now-naked legs were visible on either side of his body. Her toenails were painted a deep blood red.

“Don’t go fast,” her disembodied voice demanded. “Take your time.” Her fingers clutched at his back, pressing into his flesh, leaving deep, moon-shaped marks.

Soft, ambient light gleamed off his back as he moved in a slow-motion dance.

“You understand this is not for your pleasure. I don’t want you to have any release. Not now. Not at all. Do you think that you can hold back?” Her words weren’t just instructions; she was excited hearing herself speak. “Can you stay hard for me? For as long as I need it?”

“Yes.” His voice was thick and low. Obedient. Without any trace of theatrics. He seemed sincerely respectful.

The only sound for the next few seconds was the stinging noise of his skin slapping against hers.

“Tell me how you can hold off. Doesn’t it feel good?” She whispered so softly I had to lean forward to hear. I could see the sweat on his shoulder blades now, and the way his buttocks flexed, relaxed, and then tensed again.

“It does. It feels too good. But I want to please you.”

“Why?”

“Because I want my reward.”

“The longer you can wait, the more you can give me without giving anything to yourself, the more I’ll reward you. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Please.”

“Won’t it make you crazy when I start to buck under you? When I start to come? And you can’t?”

“Yes, it will.”

“But you’ll be able to hold off?”

“Yes.”

I sucked in my breath.

“How will you hold yourself back from coming, from spewing out, from shooting into me?” She was lost in her own sex play, speaking now not for him at all, but to heighten her own delight.

“Because it’s what you want me to do.”

As her breath came faster, she made small sounds of delight. His breaths were shallow. The muscles in his back were tensed and delineated. The effort was obviously painful.

Meanwhile, the camera held, motionless.

The man moved in rhythm to the woman’s moans and sighed softly. She shouted out, “No. No. Do you hear me?”

I held my breath.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you can do this?” Her voice sounded urgent.

“Yes.”

A long, slow arc of sound escaped from her and, before it was over, the scene changed and we were back in the library. Tim was on the stage again. Still erect. With his head bowed.

“Now that Tim has passed his first test, let’s get the bidding started.”

I was in an erotic fog, but before I could understand why, I was overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. There was no one I could expend my energy on. No one I could even confess to about how watching a group of women assess a man and test his prowess had gripped me with a want completely unfamiliar to me.

No. That wasn’t why I was melancholy.

There was someone. Even though I’d been with him only once, I was certain—even in that very hazy moment—that Noah Jordain would have understood what I was experiencing. That if it were possible for me to tell him about the video and my reaction to it, he would give me his slow smile that looked the way his voice sounded, take his hand, put it on the side of my face, look right at me, and tell me that he’d play a game with me if that was what I wanted. Any game I
wanted to try. That yes, he’d even be happy to stand in front of me naked and do my bidding.

Like a burst of unwanted morning light when you are craving more sleep and darkness, I saw Noah, not in my daydream, but standing in front of that wall of hideous pictures at the station house. All the feelings stirring and swirling through my body and brain were wiped out with one sudden realization.

The man I’d just been watching on the tape, who had stripped down, made himself hard, preformed on command, and then allowed himself to be auctioned off, was the second victim of the killer Noah was hunting.

Tim. Of course. Timothy. Timothy Wheaton. Healthy, bronzed and almost unrecognizable as the gray corpse in the photos at the police station.

With a shaking hand, I pressed the rewind button on the remote, listened to the whir of the tape spinning backward, hit Stop, and then Play. I’d overshot the section so fast-forwarded, all the while watching the sensual footage running by too quickly like bad slapstick.

Finally, I found the section I was searching for.

Tim, standing bare-chested in his jeans, posing for the hungry women.

Tim taking off his pants, and after that his underwear.

Tim showing off his erection, leaving the room with the unidentified woman.

I shut my eyes to recall, as clearly as I could, the photographs on Jordain’s wall. I pictured the face of the man in the shots the newspaper had not run. He was pale, naked and without any life in him, but he was absolutely the same man who was on the tape.

It had been terrifying that one man who had been connected to the Scarlet Society had been killed.

But two men?

That could not be a coincidence.

Two men had to be a pattern.