Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (6 page)

Chapter One

The room is in a five-star hotel. It could be any one of the luxury hotel rooms in any one of a dozen cities in the United States that have such hotels. At least four hundred dollars a night. Sometimes five hundred. Often six hundred. And so the rug is thick and the linens on the bed are from France or Italy and have thread counts as high as the cost of the room.

It is nighttime. The only light in the room comes from the lamp on the desk. The drawn curtains hang, heavy and rich, and their hems pool on the floor.

The wallpaper is pale blue with a slight diamond pattern. The furnishings are ornate and gilded. The man is about forty-two years old. He has dark hair, slicked back, and a slightly receding hairline. He is in decent shape. You can tell because he is practically naked. His arms are muscled—he probably plays tennis every weekend and goes to the gym at least twice a week. And with his arms pulled above his head, the muscles are bulging against the awkward position. His chest is broad. Good skin. A slight tan. You are surprised that he is good-looking, aren’t you? She isn’t. She wets her lips, not to be purposely provocative but because she needs them to be wet, and then she leans down and puts her face very close to his, so close that if he reached up he could kiss her. But they are not playing at romance. This is seduction. And there is a difference.

“Wet enough?” she asks him.

He shakes his head no.

She lubricates her lips more.

“Now?”

He nods.

“Don’t move.”

“I won’t.”

“No, you won’t. If you do, you know I’ll stop.”

He nods again. But he does move, he stretches out his legs just a little against the ties constraining his ankles.

The man who is tied up is waiting for her to put her lips on his nipples and suckle him. First he feels the tips of her hair tickle the smooth skin of his chest. He wants to arch up, to get her mouth on him sooner, but he knows that if he does she will stop. And he doesn’t want that.

The sound of her wet lips on his skin is the melody he is paying her to play. It fills his ears. He shuts his eyes. Her tongue swirls on his skin, her teeth pull at him, taking small nibbles. The muscles in his back are pulled tight and he can feel the heat moving from his fingers, toward his elbows, toward his chest and traveling down, meeting the heat that is traveling up his legs. Everything converges dead center in his body at his erection.

Her hair is fanning his chest now. She raises her face to him and shows him how she is licking her lips once more and then she bows down again before him to take his other nipple in her mouth.

She sucks on it as if she is a baby and starving and he does not even realize, so focused is he on her sucking, that milk of another kind does flow from him, spurting out, arcing over his body, wetting his chest, and her arm and the back of her neck.

She feels it and lessens her hold on his nipple. Slowly she straightens up, still smiling. There is an art to disengagement.
She does not just stand up the minute the man has ejaculated and say, “Well, that’s done now, so I’ll be taking off.”

She finesses the rest of the encounter without breaking the fictive dream. She is a poet, and even if she is writing disturbing poetry full of putrefied images that make some people want to vomit, she has to finish the poem. She has to complete the last stanza.

After all, this man has paid for this evening in this chic hotel. And he has been paying for evenings like this for the last two years. He is the son of a man who owns a very large media empire. He is the second in command there, appearing on the cover of the annual report next to his dad.

She knows this because as a bonus last year he gave her stock in this company, and two months ago the report arrived in the mail. Despite a fluctuating market, the stock has performed.

The least she can do is to stay awhile and have something to eat or drink and show her real appreciation. Because this man likes to show off and brag a little. He likes to tell her about what the company is doing so she will be impressed. So she asks as she works the knot, “How’s business?”

“We are starting a new magazine,” Clark Kent says as she unties his left hand. This is not his real name, but this is what she has named him. After Superman, after the mild-mannered reporter who is other than he seems.

“It is aimed at women who aren’t going to stop working no matter how many kids they have.”

She unties his right ankle.

“The demographics show that this is the largest part of the workforce.”

The knot on his left ankle is harder to untangle.

“We were thinking of putting—” he names a celebrity she has seen often on television “—on the cover. But instead, I had an idea that the cover should be made of Mylar so that the woman who picks up the magazine sees herself.”

He is free now and he sits up and reaches for the white terry-cloth robe that the hotel provides guests. It is pristine.

“Would you like a drink?” she asks. He nods. She makes him a dry martini the way she knows he likes it from the tray room service has provided, and then she settles down to talk business with him, helping him to forget that she knows things about his business that he does not want her to know.

This is how she earned her living last night.

I
closed the manuscript. Felt the goose bumps on my arms. I had been so deep into what I was reading that for a second I was disoriented. Cleo had transported me to the hotel room. My lips had been on her client’s nipples. I was feeling his muscles stretch. And I was uncomfortable.

Looking out the window, I saw that we were already at Seventy-eighth Street. The rain had stopped, leaving the sidewalks glistening and giving the air a loamy scent.

I usually used the time it took to get home to morph from a therapist into Dulcie’s mother. I always came down more slowly than I’d like from my professional role to settle into mother mode. Perhaps because I’d had to learn mothering secondhand.

Some women became the mother their mother was. I did not have that luxury. Even before mine died, she was not the kind of parent that I wanted to be. There was no road map; I did this one blind. Too many mornings I woke up thinking,
I’ll get it right today. I’d been doing it for so long I should have been comfortable with it by now. It will all flow naturally today, I’d tell myself. But it didn’t always.

Why did you have to go so soon? I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t old enough. Why couldn’t you have stayed with me until…until when? There never was a good time to become motherless
.

Part of me was always watching from the wings, looking at the woman who I was, interacting with her daughter, judging, questioning, comparing this mother to another who was not as steady on her feet and a daughter who had grown up too fast.

The cab pulled up to the curb.

I thrust the manuscript back in its envelope, shoved it under my arm and reached into the side pocket of my bag to get my wallet.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a glass of iced tea, about to begin reading more of the manuscript, when I heard the front door open. I saw the flash of blue jeans and white shirt as Dulcie walked by the kitchen on her way to her room.

“Hon? I’m in here.”

She doubled back, came in and dropped her bag on the floor. My eyes flew to the stark white bandage on her arm.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing major. I burned my arm.”

I got up and went to her. “How?”

“Stupid hot soup at lunch. Gretchen tripped, her soup, tomato soup, went flying. My arm was in the way.”

“Let me see.”

As she lifted her arm I saw splotches of blood on her white shirt.

She saw my eyes widen. “Mom?”

“Is this blood?”

“Soup. I told you. Gretchen’s tomato soup. Don’t spiral over this, okay?” I ignored her exasperated tone.

My daughter was at the age where no matter how controlled my concern was, it was still overbearing.

I bent to inspect the bandage. “Does it hurt?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“A little when it happened. But not enough that I cried or anything. It’s just a burn.”

“Okay.” I reached out and hugged her, carefully avoiding her arm. She let me hold her and then pulled back. I brushed her bangs off her face and let my fingers linger on her skin just a moment longer than I needed to.

She went to the refrigerator.

At twelve, Dulcie’s chest was still flat and her hips were still narrow, but there was a grown-up look in her eyes that hadn’t been there six months before and an impatience with me that went with it. I wasn’t sure if it was just her age or a reaction to her father and me separating or both.

“Maybe we should go see Dr. Kulick and have him look at your arm.”

“It’s not a big deal. I really am fine.” She opened the top of a container of blueberry yogurt. She let the fridge door slam and grabbed a spoon from the utensil drawer. “The nurse gave me a note to give to you,” she said between mouthfuls.

She fished in her backpack and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper with a prescription stapled to it.

I read it quickly once and then read it again more slowly. The drama school where Dulcie was spending the summer had a doctor on call. He’d come over and inspected Dulcie’s burn, said that it wasn’t serious, but had prescribed an antibiotic cream and some painkillers if Dulcie needed them.

My daughter looked at me with her huge eyes—the same
cornflower blue as my mother’s eyes—and touched my hand as if she felt just the littlest bit sorry for me.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, and tossed her head. Her hair, almost black like mine, was long and straight and gleamed in the overhead light.

I watched her eat the rest of her snack, searching for clues as to how she really felt, but she didn’t seem to be in pain or crisis. Her eyes weren’t swollen, there were no tearstains on her cheeks. I took her emotional temperature whenever I came into her presence, checking my daughter for signs of distress or sadness. And I was always mildly shocked that she rarely showed any. Despite everything I must have done wrong, my daughter was a secure and mostly happy preteen. Smart, charismatic and more than pretty enough, she had a large, extended family and friends circling around her, ensuring she was traveling through childhood with relative calm.

Dulcie plopped down beside me. “Is Gretchen a klutz or what?” She picked up Cleo’s book.

“Don’t,” I said, taking the manuscript from her.

“Why?”

“It’s not mine. It belongs to a patient.”

Dulcie nodded. One thing she understood was the sacrosanct relationship between a doctor and patient. She needed to trust something about me. Know, at least, that her mother never broke that commandment between her patients and herself. Maybe if she knew this, she would believe other things that I would not be so good at showing her.

“Oooh. A patient,” Dulcie said sarcastically. “One of Dr. Sin’s sinners.” And then she laughed. I joined in. Even if I wanted to be angry, I couldn’t. I understood her too well. I appreciated her too much.

My daughter was not unhappy with what I did for a living. She just wished it was more noble. “She’s a doctor,” I’d
hear Dulcie tell her friends, not admitting what kind of doctor I was and what kind of help I offered my patients.

I looked from the white bandage on my daughter’s arm to the white first page of the book. For all the pieces of information I had added to my already crowded brain that day, the last two were twisting up like some double helix. Interwoven with my fear of what had happened to Dulcie was my fear for Cleo, and I flashed on the image of the tall man following her down the street.

Dulcie got up and fussed with the CD player, then put on something that she liked and that I could tolerate. She was sensitive that way, and it made me smile. I noticed the bandage again and thought it looked too large on her slim arm.

Suddenly a name popped into my head. Barry Johnson. He had to be the man lying on the bed in the hotel room who had paid Cleo two thousand dollars to tease him to orgasm. It shouldn’t have been that easy for me to figure out who he was, but I had. A media mogul who was in business with his father. In his forties.

“Besides the arm, how else was your day?” It was our routine. To go over the day. Usually we did it at dinner, but I was doing it now. The rule was we had to state one good thing for every bad thing. As many bad things as you wanted. But always a balance.

“Besides the arm…well, we had auditions for
Our Town
.” Her eyes grew wider. She’d been looking forward to these twelve weeks at the American Academy of Dramatic Art’s summer program since she’d been accepted back in February. It didn’t even matter to her that she hadn’t had much of a break between one school ending and the next one starting.

“I love this play, Mom.”

I smiled at her, picked up the manuscript and put the stack of papers in my briefcase.

“It’s a wonderful play, isn’t it. What part are you trying out for?”

“The main character. I didn’t think I should, but Mrs. Harte said she thought I was ready for it.”

I leaned over and kissed her. “I’m proud of you.”

My daughter preened. And then she picked up the thread of the game.

“And you, Dr. Sin? How was your day?”

The divorce papers dissolving your father’s and my marriage came today. You hurt your arm. You called me Dr. Sin, twice. I had to go to the morgue to see one of my ex-patients, a girl not even ten years older than you, laid out and cut open. And I figured out who one of my patients’ clients was and not because Cleo had told me herself, but because her description of him had been too clear
.

But I couldn’t tell Dulcie any of those things. Not just because she was not old enough to hear them, but because I couldn’t think of anything at all that was good to counter them with. And the rules were the rules. You could only tell the bad if you found some good.

Later we took a walk together to the drugstore to get the antibiotic cream. I didn’t fill the prescription for painkillers. My daughter had my high tolerance for pain. And short of being masochistic, I encouraged it. Prescription painkillers were a godsend, but they were also a far more dangerous drug than I wanted to expose her to if I didn’t have to. Some people have a physical propensity for addictions. There was no reason to test my daughter’s ability with a codeine derivative when she wasn’t even in enough pain to take an extrastrength ibuprofen.