The Delilah Complex

Eleven

Paul Lessor was sitting in his apartment staring at the news on the television with the sound turned off, the light from the monitor the only illumination in the pigsty that used to be his living room. On the coffee table in front of him were piles of newspapers and plates of untouched food. Dried-out English muffins, butter congealed on the plate. Three-quarters of a banana now brown and rotting.

He had no appetite. That was one of the side effects of the medication, and was the least of his problems with the drugs.

What a fucking mess his life was. He was thirty-three. One of the most talented art directors at any publishing house in New York City, with more award-winning covers to his name than anyone else in the business. He’d gotten scholarships to Cooper Union and then the Yale School of Art. He’d had his photographic collages in four group shows. He got offers every year to jump ship from Pigeonhole Press, the small but prestigious publishing company where he worked, and move to the bigger houses, but he didn’t go. He couldn’t go. His boss, Maria Diezen, the fifty-two-year-old editor in chief, had told him that he couldn’t. She told him often. He loved Maria. He loved how strong she was and how tough she was and how angry she could get at him when he didn’t get it right.

And so he listened to her.

She’d been through twenty-four senior art directors in a dozen years when he’d started working for her three years ago. Now he held a record that other graphic designers in the city were in awe of. Everyone at Pigeonhole knew that Maria was a bitch: aggressive, demanding and crazy half the time. But Paul loved her. Worshipped her. Would do anything that she asked of him. Because when a woman like that, with that kind of temper and those kinds of standards, smiles on you, it’s like the whole fucking world is yours.

There was nothing better than their lunch hours, when together they’d walk into the big, noisy, crowded Barnes & Noble superstore on Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, near the office, to look at one of his covers on the new fiction table. Nothing like getting a report back from the head of sales that the big buyers at B & N, Borders, Amazon and all the independents had upped their orders because “with a cover like that, there’s no question the book is going to walk itself out of the store.”

And more times than not, it had.

But as good as his work was, as much as he loved what he did and lived off the high that he got from it, he was fucking falling apart.

He’d gone to the psychiatrist six months ago for the crazy things that were happening in his head: manic mood swings-elation, depression, the sense that he could do anything, the realization that he was powerless.

They’d tried cocktail after cocktail of drugs to get him into some kind of chemical balance. The only thing that worked at all was Thorazine. Except for one little side effect.

He wanted to be able to live with it. Wanted to not care. Anxious to rise above the problem, he told himself that soon he’d get chemically balanced and then the doctor would be able to change the medication and find one that didn’t make him impotent. He had to trust that.

Paul looked at the clock before closing his eyes. A year ago he would not have been home on a Tuesday night at eight o’clock, sitting on his couch, bored out of his brain by television. He would have been naked and fucking some Amazon who shouted out orders, telling him exactly where to put his cock and how to move his hands and what to do with his tongue.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Not even reliving any of those incredible nights gave him half a hard-on. Not with the Thorazine coursing through his blood, softening his mind and his equipment.

No matter how hard he concentrated on remembering the high points of those months after he’d first been accepted into the Scarlet Society, it was the memories of his last two weeks there that tormented him.

It was depressing.

In its own twisted way, any depression was actually a relief tonight, because if he really was depressed, then the Thorazine wasn’t working and they might be able to try something else. And if they did, then maybe, just maybe, he’d get his sexual energy back.

Now all he had was sexual shame.

The first night it had happened, no big deal. The woman he’d been with-a blonde named Anne-had tried her damnedest, shouting at him and roughing him up a little to get him hard again. But nothing worked.

It wasn’t how the women had treated him, once word started getting around within the society that he couldn’t get it up, that bothered him the most. There were plenty of them who didn’t care that much about penetration and were perfectly happy to have him eat them or stroke their pussies. He thought he’d be able to ride out the soft-cock syndrome, at least until he and his doctor could figure out if the Thorazine was working and whether it was the best solution.

But it was how the men dealt with him that made it so fucking impossible. He was aware of every snicker and sidelong glance at his flaccid penis. He was nothing to them anymore. He was no one. He was back in high school, the skinny guy who wanted to paint and take photographs and be an artist. Who everyone called a fag. In New York City, Paul’s artistic flair might have made him a totally acceptable kid. But in a public school in the suburbs of Detroit, it made him a wimp.

He felt the stare of every guy who watched him walk around the room with absolutely nothing happening between his legs, and knew he was the fag again. It was masochistic to keep going, but he couldn’t stop. He kept hoping that he’d be okay, that the erotic stimulation would overpower the drugs.

He’d get back at them, he’d thought as he walked home from those embarrassing last nights of Scarlet Society visits. He planned what he might do to them to get his revenge. He was nothing if not creative. Hadn’t everything that had ever happened to him been because of how creative he was?

He imagined all sorts of ways of retaliation, from the violent and absurd-literally slicing off the guys’ dicks with a kitchen knife so they could experience what he was going through-to the ridiculous-slipping into the club with a camera phone and taking snapshots of them at their most embarrassing moments and posting the shots on the Internet.

Finally, a few weeks ago, he’d gotten so sick and tired of the guys’ attitudes that he quit. For the first few days he was okay about it, even happy that he was finished with the society. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still the one they were laughing at.

To them, he was still the man who couldn’t get it up. Who was soft and helpless. Like a baby. A wimp. They were probably still laughing about him when they got together.

Paul pulled the paper off the coffee table. He didn’t have to search for the headline. His eye went directly to the upper right-hand corner, where the story and photo had been every time he had looked at it.

Every few hours for the last few days.

Philip Maur was dead.

Now they were starting to get theirs, weren’t they?