The Delilah Complex

Forty-One

My visit to Nicky and Daphne that Thursday started off badly.

The two of them were sitting on opposite sides of the room, not looking at each other and not looking at me.

Sometimes you really can smell emotions. I’ve always thought that the body emits scent to warn other members of a group-the way that wild animals do.

In that pretty sunroom, filled with the benign still lifes of fruit and flowers Daphne had painted before she’d discovered her talent for the male nude, I smelled fear, anger and lust.

It was an effort to get them to tell me what had happened before I got there.

“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” I asked Daphne first.

“Because no matter what I tell you, Nicky is going to twist it.”

“How about you let me worry about that.”

She got up and walked to a hanging basket that held an oversized fern. I watched her pinch off a dead, withered frond. “Daphne?”

She turned, playing with the feathery and brittle leaf.

“I think it would be a good idea if you stayed seated. I know this is your house and that it seems normal to you to get up and move around, but it would be beneficial if, during our sessions, you remained seated. Just as if you and Nicky were in my office in the city.”

Without saying anything, she sat down in the same spot on the end of the settee. She didn’t look at Nicky. He didn’t look at her.

“Daphne, you were going to tell me what happened before I got here.”

She sighed. “Nicky tried to get me to have sex with him.”

“Tried?” Nicky blurted out. Then he looked at me. “She came to the door ready for me. She ordered me to go upstairs with her. She knows that I respond to that kind of talk.”

“You see?” Daphne said. “He’s twisting it.”

“Daphne. What happened when Nicky came to the door? How did you feel?”

“I was happy to see him. I love him. I want him here.” She was shredding the fern into small fragments, letting them drop onto the pristine floor.

“Okay. So he came inside. You felt good about him being here. What happened then? Did you kiss him hello?”

“Of course I did. He’s still my husband.”

“She opened her lips. It wasn’t a simple kiss. She’s not telling you that.”

I shifted in my seat so that I was facing Nicky now. “It might be better if you let Daphne tell me what happened first. Without interrupting her. After she’s finished, you can tell me what you think happened. Do you see there’s a benefit to working that way?”

“Yes. I do want to work this out. But she’s playing games with me and-”

“Nicky?”

He stopped talking, took a deep breath, blew the air out of his mouth and settled back on the couch, prepared finally to let Daphne tell her version of the story.

The two stories they told were, not surprisingly, very different. Daphne’s version was that Nicky made it clear as soon as he got there that if she wanted him to make love to her, he would be happy to accommodate her. She’d agreed and taken him upstairs. They had embraced. Begun to undress. He’d taken off his shirt. That’s when she saw the scratches on his back.

“I asked him if he’d been to the society in the past few weeks. He lied and said no. At least, at first he did. He just wanted to have sex. He didn’t care about the rules. About the promises. About how I felt about it.”

When it was Nicky’s turn, he said that Daphne had not asked him if he’d been to the society outright. She’d tricked him into telling her a lie of omission. And that was not the same thing as outright lying.

“What do you mean, a lie of omission?”

“She didn’t ask me if I’d been to the society. She asked me if I loved her. I told her I did. Then she asked me if I really deserved to be let back into her bed. She didn’t tell me that she’d seen the scratches. She set me up.”

“He is taking his life in his hands every day that he goes back there,” Daphne interrupted. “I know it and he knows it. But he’s got some crazy death wish.”

By the time the session was over, I’d managed to get them to stop reacting to each other’s accusations and to allow each other to express anger. If they didn’t at least do that, I explained, they’d continue to respond with knee-jerk reactions and their resentments would just keep growing.

“Before I go, Daphne, instead of using the old language, tell Nicky how you feel.”

“I’m scared for him,” Daphne said.

Nicky looked at her, smiled, and told her that mattered to him a lot. “I’m careful. Nothing is going to happen to me,” he said.

“Do you really think that Philip wasn’t careful?” Tears were running down her cheeks. “Or Tim?”

Putting her head in her hands, Daphne wept.

Nicky got up, went to her and took her in his arms. He held her and let her cry and rubbed her back and smoothed her hair.

I wished that I could do more and do it faster. Not for the first time as a therapist, and not for the last, I wished that I had more to work with than words and insight. I wanted a magic wand that I could wave over this couple so that they could act on the positive feelings they had for each other instead of tormenting themselves with desires and needs that were only keeping them apart.