The Delilah Complex

Thirteen

The following Monday was exhausting. I’d scheduled back-to-back patients, and even with fifteen minutes between appointments-to get a cup of coffee, inhale a container of yogurt or return a phone call-I was still reeling from the information and emotion I’d dealt with. The most critical reason for those breaks was so that I could get up, stretch my legs, walk to the large windows in my office, look down on the street and change my focus.

Too often, I keep hearing the voices of my patients describing frustration that love has turned to hate, anger at how jealousy corrupts, fear about fetishes, obsession over a need to inflict or receive pain, self-loathing at an inability to become intimate, questions about a hunger that will not abate or an appetite that nothing seems to arouse.

I go over and over the conversations my patients and I have had, looking for alternative solutions, questions I need to ask during the next session, dark corners that need more light.

What I do is fulfilling. I am grateful that I have the kind of career that allows me to interact with people who need my help and want to lead more satisfied lives. But there is another side to my profession, even if I don’t spend much time thinking about it, that can eat at my soul and corrode my own ability to connect to people in my life.

It’s not that I am frightened of what can go wrong between lovers. I was married for a long time and, for most of those years, was content. I simply know too much. I’m too aware of how easily people break and how hard it is to make real, sustaining changes.

By six forty-five that night, I was so tired I regretted having agreed to fit the Scarlet Society into my schedule. In the fifteen minutes I had before they arrived, I got a fresh cup of coffee and called Dulcie.

She was just leaving rehearsal with her father, an independent film director. “Dad’s taking me out to dinner and then to the opening of An Hour Before Dark.” Breathless, she proceeded to tell me who had directed it and who the stars were.

As soon as I hung up, the receptionist buzzed to tell me she was sending the new group in.

I greeted Shelby, who started to introduce me to the other women with her.

“No, that’s okay,” I interrupted. “Let’s get everyone seated before we do the introductions.”

Everything that happens from the moment a patient walks into my office is potential information. I become a camera, watching and listening and trying to remember what I see, sense and hear.

During the day, when individual appointments are scheduled, my office feels spacious. I have a large desk in front of the bookshelves that line the east wall. In front of the desk is a chair. Against the west wall is a camel-colored leather couch, long enough for three people to sit, or for one tall man to lie down comfortably. Facing the couch is my oversized chair. When I have a group, though, I set up a semicircle of eight to twelve folding chairs and I sit so that I can face them. The large room gets smaller, but not uncomfortable.

A woman in a red suit was the first to take a seat, and she chose the one closest to my chair. Her clothes looked expensive, cut so the fabric hugged her slim body. She wore high-heeled black alligator shoes and carried a leather bag, which I recognized as Chanel: the leather and gold chain were unmistakable.

Shelby Rush, in a black pantsuit and high-heeled black suede boots, put her tote on the chair on my other side and then stood, hostesslike, making sure that everyone found a seat.

There were too many faces for each of them to make a distinct impression, but I was very aware of two women. One wore blue jeans, a white man-tailored shirt and a brown suede blazer, and carried a briefcase as worn as the jacket. Her eyes never stopped moving. She looked at me, at each of the others, at the windows, at the floor, at the artwork on my walls. When it came time for her to take a seat, she sat at the center of the semicircle, where she would have the best view of everything going on around her. Her attentiveness didn’t appear to be nervous energy, but rather a need to observe. Her sexuality impressed me, too. She did nothing to hide it.

Like Shelby, there were several women dressed all in black-which is almost a uniform in Manhattan-but one woman was so blond, thin and pale that her black clothes overpowered her. She reminded me of a widow. Moving slowly, she appeared to have a hard time making a decision about where to go or which seat to take, and twice she stumbled over a chair leg. Her sunglasses probably weren’t helping. Large black frames with very dark lenses, they completely obscured her eyes. Without having to ask, I knew that she was in hiding. I just didn’t know if it was from me, from the other women or from herself.

As the rest of the seats filled up, it turned out that six of the twelve women wore sunglasses. One also wore a baseball cap. Another wore a scarf over her hair, tied in a retro “Jackie O” style.

I was used to treating groups who were strangers until I brought them together, choosing them carefully so that their personalities would play off one another. Week after week, I watched them become acquainted, exhibit personality and psychological traits and form a unit. But this was a preformed group, their dynamics already firmly in place. From what Shelby had told me, many of these women had been together in the society for several years. There was a lot of interaction I’d miss seeing acted out, making my work more difficult.

Even after they were all settled, they were oddly silent for people who knew one another well. Once, I had done grief counseling for a corporation where a tragedy had occurred. Even with that catastrophe overpowering them, there had been more conversation than there was with this group now.

As a therapist, I believe nothing is coincidental, no connection is unfounded. There was a reason that the members of the Scarlet Society reminded me of a bereavement group I’d had eight years before. I just had to be patient and discover what the correlation was.