The Delilah Complex

Sixty-One

My appointment with Nicky and Daphne was a welcome interruption to my week. Since the resurrection of my argument with Nina the day before, I was uncomfortable at the institute. We’d had two-no, three-fights in as many weeks, and each pushed us further apart. I found myself staying in my office. Avoiding walking in the halls. I knew sooner or later we were going to have to figure out how to work out our differences and that my avoidance of her was cowardly and childish, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to confront her. To do that, I would have to confront how I felt about Noah Jordain. And I wasn’t prepared to do that. Not yet.

At least in the car, I’d have forty-five minutes to clear my head on the way up to Connecticut.

I took the North Street exit off Merritt Parkway, drove for ten minutes, took one turn, then another, drove five minutes, and finally pulled up in front of Daphne’s house. I was fifteen minutes early, but I didn’t care.

I parked in the driveway.

There were orchards to the right of the house and I didn’t think that anyone would mind if I took a walk.

Everywhere I looked, a tapestry of leaves obliterated the grass and changed the distant landscape into a fauvist painting.

As we get close to death, we lose our color, we lose our beauty. I had seen my mother, sickly and thin, her hair stringy, her once peach-colored skin gray and ashen when she had become unconscious.

As leaves die, they alone become more beautiful. As they perish, they offer up a palette of screaming colors.

The wind blew and hundreds of lemon-yellow aspen leaves took wing, dipping and soaring on the breeze, flying around me, as colorful and as graceful as butterflies.

It had been slightly overcast when I got out of the car, but the cloud cover had blown away and the sun shone now and illuminated the landscape around me and the house beyond.

I walked toward it, getting closer and closer until, with the sun shining like that, I could see right into Daphne’s studio. There were several large canvases on display. About three feet away, I stopped. No, that’s not accurate. About three feet away, the painting I saw through the glass stopped me.

The portrait on the easel was of a man. Naked. Sitting in a chair. His head lolled to one side. His expression was slack and lifeless. His flesh fell in folds.

The painting was darker around the edges and lightened as it came closer to the center, so that there was a brightness on the man’s midsection. At the very center of that spotlight, displayed the way a diamond is exhibited in one of Tiffany’s windows, was the prize-the most detailed and lovingly painted part of the canvas: the man’s flaccid and very small penis.

Something was familiar about the composition. What? Where had I seen it before? I looked at the next easel. Another portrait of a naked man. He was standing, leaning really, against a wall. His shoulders slumped. He looked out, imploring, begging for help.

Daphne was more than accomplished. She was masterful. She captured emotions and intentions as well as any artist whose work hung in a gallery.

Like the other painting, this one employed a halo effect so that, after being assaulted by the man’s expression, I was drawn to the dead center of his body. His penis was wrinkled, red, shrunken. Impotent.

Overall, Daphne’s style was luminous and detailed, but nowhere on the canvases did she lavish more detail and time and create as much grotesque beauty as with the genitalia.

That was when I saw the third painting.

The nausea rose quickly. I didn’t expect it, so I didn’t have time to prepare myself for the violent way the image struck me. I put my hand out, reaching for a tree branch, and held on while I vomited on the newly fallen leaves.

And then I ran toward the house.