The Venus Fix Read Free Page A

couldn’t be?”
    “Me. Going online—” He stopped midsentence.
    I gave him a few seconds to continue. Then a few secondslonger. We were at a critical juncture. I knew how careful I had to be to push but not too far.
    “Did you say anything to her?”
    “I tried to talk to her. I told her it was not a big deal. That I’d just stumbled on the Web site. I lied.”
    There it was. That odd elation in his voice when he said he’d lied. I felt a rush of adrenaline. It doesn’t always happen that a set of circumstances occurs in your patient’s life at exactly the right time in his or her therapy to create an opening like this.
    “Bob, how did you feel when you were lying?”
    “Terrible.”
    He didn’t. I knew he was lying. I could hear it in his voice, see it in the way he clasped his hands suddenly, hiding the wedding ring with the fingers of the other hand.
    “Really? Terrible?”
    “Yes. Lying is horrible. To lie to your wife…”
    “Yes, but just because it’s horrible doesn’t mean it has to feel terrible.”
    He was nodding. He knew. Was he going to tell me?
    “It didn’t feel terrible, did it?”
    He shook his head.
    I lowered my voice. “How did it feel, Bob?”
    He shut his eyes. He couldn’t do it. That didn’t matter. I knew he had consciously thought it. We’d get there. He was so close to understanding that he’d felt real pleasure.
    “Did she believe you?”
    “No. And she told me she didn’t. She asked me how often, and I lied again. I told her I mostly did it when she was out of town. I didn’t want to hurt her. It was killing me to hurt her. I love her.” It was a plea for me to stop, but I wouldn’t. Quickly now, before he could think about it, I asked again. “How did you feel lying to her?”
    “Elated.” Once the word was out of his mouth he seemed confused by it.
    I let out my breath. We’d just jumped a new hurdle.
    “Why?”
    “Why did it feel good?”
    I nodded.
    “I don’t know. Can’t you tell me? I tortured her and got pleasure from it? What kind of sick fuck does that make me? I broke every single rule and I didn’t care. I don’t understand.”
    He rarely used the work
fuck.
He was using it a lot today. “You don’t have to understand everything now. You just need to be open to feeling it.”
    He couldn’t tolerate his feelings, though. Even before he said a word, I knew he was stepping back. His expression and posture changed again.
    “It is really very obscene.” His sounded as if he were observing the scene from a great distance. “My wife was standing in front of my computer, staring at a woman who was thrusting a dildo in and out of herself in time to some stupid rock song. When I reached out to shut it off, she yelled at me to leave it. For some insane reason I did. She stood there like a soldier and took it. Like she was being sentenced. I couldn’t stand it. Me. I was doing this to her. To my wife.”
    I ignored the non sequitur and tried to follow where he was leading. “What happened then?”
    “She leaned in, over my shoulder, and in a very low voice, she said,
‘Bob, you don’t think you fooled me, do you? I’ve known about what you do in here for weeks. For weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’m going to kill you for this.’”

Five
     
    D etective Noah Jordain, of the NYPD Special Victims Unit, leaned against the Jefferson Parish courthouse. His cell phone was wedged between his ear and shoulder while he sipped a cup of real New Orleans coffee and waited for his partner, Mark Perez, to get back on the phone.
    Watching the street traffic, he squinted against the sun’s brightness, put the cup down on the stone ledge of the building, pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, and put them on.
    Coming back to New Orleans, his hometown, had always been bittersweet, but since the hurricane it was also surrealistic. How could so much have changed? So much still be left to do? And yet feel the city’s spirit so alive?
    Across the road a