The Delilah Complex

Seventeen

Wednesday was rainy. A strong wind ripped the turning leaves from the branches and they lay plastered on the pavement, slippery but brilliant against the concrete streets.

Because of the weather, and because I’d scheduled a consultation with a new patient at 1:00 p.m. and only had a half hour for lunch, I ordered in vegetable soup and seven-grain bread and ate at my desk.

Nicky Brooks arrived on time, only minutes after I finished eating. Once he was sitting on the couch, I asked how he’d found me, assuming it was from the Today show, but it turned out Shelby Rush had recommended me.

“I told her I was looking for someone to help my wife and me. Shelby knows us. Knows what has been going on with us. What the issues are. She suggested you.”

Nicky was in his mid-thirties, dressed well in a navy suit and sky-blue striped tie. He had a high forehead, thick chestnut hair, dimples and a determined chin. He looked like someone who moved through the world getting what he wanted.

“Have you been in therapy before?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“About six years ago.”

“For how long?”

“About a year.”

“You said that Shelby knew you and the kinds of issues you have been dealing with. I’d like to know what they are.”

“My wife and I are separated.” He looked around, taking in the room. I wasn’t sure if it was interest in his surroundings or a way of avoiding looking at me.

“How long have you been married?”

“Eighteen months.” He looked back at me when he answered.

“And how long have you been separated?”

“About four months. Couldn’t even make it through two years.” His voice dipped down, expressing disgust. With himself? With his wife?

“Who instigated the separation?”

“Daphne.”

“Why?”

“We had issues.”

“With what part of your lives?”

“Our sex life.”

The way he said the word “our” made me wonder if, indeed, the problem belonged to both of them.

“I’d like to hear your take on what the problems are. If we go forward with the therapy, I’ll be asking your wife the same question. Do you feel comfortable talking about the problems without your wife being here?”

He seemed surprised, as if it had never occurred to him that there might be anything wrong with talking about it without her. “Daphne and I met at the Scarlet Society almost three years ago. She was a member.”

He was watching for a reaction, but I had been doing this for years and knew how to hide my feelings if I wanted or needed to. Nicky continued, “I’d found out about the society from a woman I’d been seeing who thought I’d enjoy it.”

“And did you?”

“For the first time in my life, I was sexually satisfied.”

“What had happened previously?”

“I’ve been uncomfortable with several of the women I’ve been with.”

“Why, Nicky?”

“It’s embarrassing. To explain what you like. It can turn some women off.”

“What do you like?”

He sat back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. For the first time since he’d come into my office twenty minutes earlier, he was resisting going forward. His body language spoke more loudly than any words. His eyes darkened and narrowed. He lowered his gaze so that he was no longer looking at my face but rather at the cup of coffee that sat on the small end table next to my chair. He crossed one leg over the other.

“This isn’t going to work if I don’t tell you, right?”

“Right. You said you were in therapy before. Did this subject come up?”

“Yeah. But we never resolved it. And then I found the society and stopped therapy. I didn’t need to resolve it.”

“What about the society made that possible?”

He didn’t say anything. It was time for some reassurance.

“I don’t want you to worry about shocking me or embarrassing yourself. I’ve been a therapist for eleven years. The only thing I consider problematic is when a patient’s sexual desires, or lack of them, gets in the way of how they want to live their lives, or if it endangers their partners.”

He let out a long breath. “I’m not hiding anything dangerous. I just like to be told what to do. It’s not such a big deal.” He was arguing with someone who wasn’t in the room with us. Someone who had tried to convince him that it wasn’t normal for a man to enjoy being sexually submissive.

I nodded, encouraging him. “And the society offers you a place to do that without being judged?”

“I don’t like the leather-and-high-heels dominatrix scene. I tried that. Dirty clubs. Expensive services.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be with those women. I wanted consensual sex with women who were like me. Not too far afield. Not taking my money.”

I nodded again. He was finally talking in complete thoughts and I hoped he’d go on.

“I’m a wine merchant. I have more than one hundred employees. I tell people what to do all the time. I’m in charge all the time. So every once in a while, I like to give up being in charge.”

“What is that like?”

He thought for a few seconds. “To have a woman standing there, hungry for you, telling you how to touch her…seeing her mouth part and her tongue slip out…and to hear her breath come faster and faster…knowing your job is to please her before you can please yourself…the wait of that…knowing that if you fail you will be punished-” He stopped, not sure he could describe it to me after all.

“How do you feel about the way you prefer to have sex?”

“Now?”

“Now or before.”

“I’m okay with it. Wasn’t at first. I was frightened by it. By the difference of it. For a while I wondered if it meant I was…gay. But this isn’t about wanting to be with a man, or even wanting to be a woman. I just like having to perform. And being rewarded. I like the exchange and the parameters.”

“Do you ever wish that you weren’t turned on by being submissive?”

This took him aback. He didn’t say anything. He recrossed his legs. He shrugged, but still he didn’t answer.

I waited. The silence continued. I could hear the rain beating on the windows.

“I suppose my life would be easier if I weren’t. But I need to be told what to do.” He looked straight at me, unashamed.

I’d worked with men before who preferred to play a sexually passive role. Some were able to integrate it into their relationships-with wives or lovers-while others acted out with dominatrixes they hired or met in sex clubs. Two previous clients were only turned on by extreme S & M and I had referred them to another therapist at the institute who is an expert at behavior modification. But the Scarlet Society was a sandbox compared to a hard-core S & M club.

“How do your preferences work with your relationship with your wife? You said you met at the society and she was a member?”

“She was. And then we broke one of the society’s rules and saw each other outside of the playrooms. That’s what we call the apartment where the society meets-the playrooms.”

I nodded. “And how was the sex outside?”

“We didn’t do it outside until eight or nine weeks before we got married. We met to do all the things that we weren’t allowed to do at the society. Talk. Go to dinner. To the movies. Hold hands. Sit in the park at twilight and discuss what we’d done that day. Daphne is a painter. Very successful. I posed for her during that time. Naked. She loved to paint me. And that was very erotic. It was as close as we came to having sex. But we saved that for the club. We were living these two lives-three really-and no one knew.”

“Can you tell me about the three lives?”

“In one life each of us was just as we appeared to the world. A wine merchant and a painter. Then there was the secret life we shared at the club. Doubly secret because the society is secret to begin with, and when we were there no one knew that Daphne and I were breaking the rules. The sex during that time was better than ever-with her and with the other women, too. And there was our third life- the two of us together, dating.” His tone of voice was wistful.

Even though I can explain to patients that nothing is a more powerful aphrodisiac than illicit love or illicit sex, I haven’t always been able to extricate them from its grip. Once, a woman whose life was coming apart while she carried on a passionate affair asked me if what she was feeling was real. If that insane high she and her lover experienced when they were with each other was going to last. If the intensity of colors, tastes, sights and sounds she experienced during those first six months they were together was genuine.

It was real in that it was her reality. But no, it could not be sustained. The high thrived on its very impermanence. It was fueled by its own secrecy.

We want what we cannot have. Not because we cannot have it so much as because longing works like an opiate. It magnifies our lives and heightens our senses. Yearning has propelled artists to paint, sculpt, write and compose. Cities have been built out of desire, and governments have been toppled.

Some argue that nothing except the will to survive is as powerful as early secret passion. I don’t know. But listening to patients, I have come to believe it is possible. The sexual union becomes almost mystical in these relationships. The connections that we make in the dark of clandestine assignations are elevated beyond other experiences. Men and women become gods when they steal away to luxuriate in each other. They talk and touch as if they’ve never done either before.

Longing has made this so. For many people, pent-up passion incites the most ardent encounter they’ve ever had.

“Why did you want to get married?” I asked Nicky.

“We figured that there couldn’t be a better match for either of us. Daphne is very strong and verbal. She likes being in control. I need to be dominated. Plus, we shared a love of art, good food and wine. Everything fit. And we knew each other’s secrets. We accepted them.” He didn’t say it, but in his tone I heard the “I thought.” The doubt.

“What happened?”

Nicky looked away from me again and out the window. There were only ten minutes left, according to the clock on the end table next to the agate ashtray. We’d covered a lot of ground in the past thirty-five minutes. If he couldn’t go further, I wouldn’t be surprised.

At that point my phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID. I only took calls during sessions if they were related to my daughter. This one wasn’t. I gave Nicky a few more seconds. If he hadn’t responded, I wouldn’t have pushed him. But he began talking.

“Daphne got pregnant three months after we married. It was planned. Then she lost the baby. About a month and a half in. She barely mourned. She wasn’t depressed. Or so she said. But she started working harder than ever, preparing for her next show. She threw herself into painting with a crazy energy. Day by day she became more and more fanatical about perfecting her paintings. Even though she said she wasn’t mourning the baby, and that early miscarriages were easy enough to get over, I could see how upset she was in the paintings. They were dark-black, blood-red paintings of bundles of torn and ragged bunting. At that point she became preoccupied with death and started going to the temple. She’s Jewish. We both are. Both nonpracticing. Suddenly she was intensely religious. Even studying Kabbalah. Soon she was talking about how we had to rethink our lifestyle. She wanted to try to have a baby again. But first we had to stop acting out sexually and give up the games, and she wanted me to quit going to the society.”

“I don’t understand. You’d broken the rules and you were still going to meetings?”

“No one had found out. Daphne just dropped out without giving any reason. No one even knew I’d gotten married.”

“When did she stop going?”

“When we decided to get married.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Hers. She said that as much as she had enjoyed it, she didn’t need it anymore. At that point she said she thought that she could handle me going. At least, before we got married, she thought that.” A thick layer of resentment underscored his words now. “She claimed that it was okay for me to have different needs than she did.”

“So she stopped going and you kept going?”

“Until she lost the baby. To placate her, I stopped, too. I had to. I couldn’t stand how she was changing. I wanted the woman I was in love with back. And I wanted to start a family with her. I’d lived without the society before. I’d had traditional sex for years before I finally figured out what it was I enjoyed the most. I could make a sacrifice, couldn’t I? A simple sacrifice. Not that hard, right?”

His eyes were filled with pain and anger.

“But you couldn’t?”

He shook his head.

“Did you try?”

He nodded. “Like hell. I stayed away for six weeks.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged.

“Can you connect going back to something that happened in your life?”

He shrugged again, but this time he followed the gesture with words. “I’d been traveling. Went to a large wine auction in England and made a killing. Had one of the most successful trips of my career, came back, got in from the airport and didn’t even go home. Went straight to the society and spent three hours there.”

“Did Daphne find out or did you tell her?”

“I told her,” he said.

I wasn’t surprised. You cannot be punished if you don’t get caught. After his success, he needed to be reminded that, despite his power, he was powerless. If he stayed in therapy with me, with or without his wife, we’d work on his need for punishment-but only when he was ready.

“And now?”

“Daphne wants me back. I want to go. But she’s given me an ultimatum. I have to give up the society. Except I can’t. I need help to do that. And she has to be one of the people to help me. She has to go back to treating me the way she used to sexually. She doesn’t want to. Sex with her is deadly serious now.”

“Is she willing to join you in therapy?”

He nodded.

“That’s good.”

His forty-five minutes were over. I leaned forward, just a little, to be inclusive at the very moment when I had to tell him our time was up.

“Nicky, I think you’ve been brave to come here. And very forthcoming. I also think you’re smart and intuitive. So if you want to work on this-with or without your wife-I’d be happy to help you.”

As he stood, he became the calm, successful man who had walked into my office almost an hour earlier. His armor was back on. He’d lost the scared look he’d had only minutes before.

“You’ll love Daphne,” he said. “She’s the most creative person I’ve ever met.”