The Delilah Complex

Seven

I was sitting in the makeup room of the Today show on that Friday morning in early October, nursing a cup of strong black coffee while a young woman stroked my face with a wet sponge, adding a warm tone to my pale skin. It was seven-thirty and I still had to have my hair done. I wasn’t due on the set for another forty minutes, but that wasn’t why I was nervous.

Even though I knew the topic we’d be discussing, I didn’t know exactly what the questions were going to be. Whatever I wanted to impart to the public about when to see a sex therapist and why, I’d have to do it in less than five minutes.

I drank more of the coffee and stared into the mirror, watching the makeup artist work her magic on my face.

No matter how well you understand how fear works, how adrenaline flows into your bloodstream and how it makes you feel, it’s still unnerving to know you are going to be on national television, and that your face and voice and words are going to be seen and heard by more than eight million people.

I would have rather been almost anywhere else, but I was there for one of those eight million people: a thirteenyear-old girl who was sitting glued to a TV screen at her father’s apartment, waiting to see her mother on television.

Daily, Dulcie had been asking me about nervous reactions. While the debut of the Broadway production was months away, there was a preview in a few weeks, in Boston. We talked about stage fright often, from the chemicals your body releases when you are in a situation that gives you the jitters to dry mouth, and various remedies like slow, steady breathing. Dulcie needed me to show her that, with no training and no desire to be onstage, I could do it. “If you can when you don’t even want to, then I can do it, too. After all, Mom, I’m the one with the passion for an audience.”

The makeup artist told me to close my eyes, and I felt a brush follow the line of my eyelid.

My mother had gone through this every day. It was part of what had seduced her. Acting. Accolades. Attention. Applause. Starting when she was sixteen, she co-starred in a popular TV series. The Lost Girls was a drama about two orphaned teenagers who were taken in by a married couple-both professors at an Ivy League school in Boston.

The girls always got into terrible trouble until one of them-either my mother or her co-star, Debi Carey- would solve the problem and save the day. Meanwhile, the charming but clueless elderly couple never guessed how close the girls had come to danger, and sometimes death.

When the show went off the air after three years, my mother’s career stumbled. She turned first to marriage and motherhood, and when neither satisfied the ache from missing the limelight and she failed to land another substantial role, she turned to drugs and alcohol and affairs to fill the emptiness.

My mother died of an overdose when I was only eight. Her star had lit up early and then burnt out too fast: her greatest legacy being the damage she did to her loved ones.

Where are you going? When are you coming back? I used to ask her when she went out smelling of roses, lemon and lavender, dressed up in her high heels and short skirts. She was so beautiful, no matter how sad and sick she was. She was one of the lost girls even if she was a woman with a child.

A lost girl.

Not the first one I had tried to save.

Not the last one I would fail.

Now I was faced with her granddaughter’s stage lust. History was not going to repeat itself. I was going to keep Dulcie grounded even if her star lifted off and shot her out into the stratosphere.

The makeup artist added a final stroke of blush, brushed on more mascara and finished up with an apricot-colored lipstick. I was soothed by the sensations of the sable and the soft powders. Another woman combed out my hair and sprayed it in place.

In the mirror I saw a small woman, coiffed and made up, who only resembled me. A doppelgänger, more sophisticated and embellished than I ever was.

Done, I was escorted to the greenroom, where a halfdozen people milled around, nibbling on the elaborate array of fruits, cheeses and breakfast bakery goods. I refilled my coffee.

The producer came in to get the next guest-a willowy novelist named Lisa Tucker-and checked on the rest of us, asking if we needed anything.

I watched the show on the monitor for a few minutes, and when the screen went to commercials I picked up the newspaper that the novelist had left on her seat. Unfolding it, I scanned the front page.

There was a photo of a politician who’d made a speech at the UN, another photo of a sports figure who’d broken a world record, and a shot of the destruction left behind after a freak storm had hit New Jersey. But it was a small shot of the soles of a man’s feet, with the number 1 written on them, that drew my eye. The headline read: Financier Assumed Dead.

Even before I started to read the story, three words popped from among all the black-and-white type. A name in the last paragraph of the article. The name of a man. Detective Noah Jordain.

I sighed and read past the headline.

Philip Maur, 41, the youngest chairman in the history of Grimly and Maur,the prestigious Wall Street investment firm, is assumed to be dead after a series of photographs of his body were delivered to the offices of this paper yesterday morning.

Maur’s wife, Cyn Maur, said that her husband had been missing for five days. “He went to work on Friday morning and told me that he’d be home late because he was going to be attending a dinner meeting.”

Maur was in his office all day Friday and left at 6:00 p.m. His secretary said he did not tell her where he was going and had not asked her to make any reservations for him that evening, which was not unusual.

Cyn Maur contacted the police on Saturday morning after not hearing from her husband all night. She’d tried his cell phone repeatedly but he had not answered, which she said was not like him. “He’s a very responsible father and husband. He’s never out of reach for more than an hour or two. Our daughter has juvenile diabetes and Philip is devoted to her. He’d never just go away without telling me. He’s never stayed out all night before. I knew something was wrong.”

A missing-persons report was filed at eight-thirty Saturday morning. There was still no information as to Maur’s whereabouts on Tuesday morning, when the photographs were received by the New YorkTimes. The photograph shown above and two others, which are now in police custody, were not accompanied by a note. There was no information alluding to the whereabouts of Maur’s body.

“I don’t have any comment at this time except to ask anyone who might have seen Philip Maur on Friday evening, or at any time since then, to contact our office,”said Detective Noah Jordain of the city’s Special Victims Unit.

The fact that Jordain is heading the investigation implies that there is a sexual component to the murder. The graphic photographs this paper received reinforce that suggestion.

The police have requested that we not print all of the photographs, due to the ongoing investigation.

My pulse was racing. My hands felt clammy and I cleared my throat. Seeing Jordain’s name on the page had done that to me. I tried to slow down my heartbeat by concentrating, but the name had been like an electrical shock.

I hadn’t known I was still that susceptible. It was silly. But it was the truth.

It had been four months since I’d seen him. Four months since I’d stood him up and then called him-when I’d known he wouldn’t be home-and left a message on his answering machine, apologizing and explaining that it was just too soon after my divorce for me to think about dating anyone.

That had been a lie.

It had not been too soon.

I was scared of the detective and what I felt when I was with him.

Noah Jordain had walked into my office one afternoon and my heart had skipped a beat. His searching blue eyes had looked right into my dark brown ones and he’d dared me to look away. A police trick, I’d thought. Did he even know he was doing it? I dared him to look away first. A therapist’s trick. He didn’t. We were evenly matched. He held out his hand and I shook it, aware of it being large, pleasantly dry, but not too rough. I could tell he had enormous strength in his fingers but that he was aware of it and was being careful. And then the impact of him hit me. Like a blast of steam. For a minute nothing mattered and I lost my bearings. This had not happened to me with anyone I’d ever met, and it shook me to my core. I know better than to attribute instant attraction to anything but past psychological association-someone who looks like someone else whom you liked a lot-or a hormonal, pheromone, chemical reaction between two mammals.

It hadn’t been that simple for us.

Faster than seemed possible, better than any shrink could have, he’d psyched me out and gotten under my skin. And that scared me. I don’t like things I can’t put a name to, or explain by some science or therapeutic logic. We might have been good together but, more likely, I think we would have destroyed each other. Neither of us was willing to keep from going too deep into the other’s psyche. It all happened too fast and…I ran.

After that I’d promptly forgotten about him.

So seeing his name that morning in the greenroom, I was surprised at my reaction. Obviously, he’d made a stronger impression than I’d thought.

Bullshit.

I’d known exactly how strong an impression he’d made. That was why I’d run. He was overpowering. Sure of himself. A little arrogant, but kind. Caring. And. And. And. Sexually powerful. Jordain made me think about getting naked, about skin on skin, about lips locking. I looked at him and remembered his lips on mine, on my breasts, pulling on my nipples, nuzzling between my legs. I leaned into him, smelled him, and couldn’t think of anything but putting my hands under his shirt, undressing him and doing whatever he wanted me to do. I wanted to surrender to that power. To let it take me over and see where it would lead. I had never thought about those things before I’d slept with him.

I had heard them from patients. I had dreamed them. I had even been thankful I did not feel that with my husband. It was too absorbing. I didn’t want to surrender to any emotion, to any passion. Ever.

Jordain had too much intuition about me. About what I thought. About how to touch me. About how to make my body curve to his. About how to blow on the spot where my neck met my collarbone with breath so hot I had to close my eyes and hold on to his arms with tightened fingers.

He would have weakened me.

And that was not the worst he could have done.

A flush of heat warmed the back of my neck. My celery silk shirt was suddenly sticking to my back and my olive gabardine jacket felt as if it was a whole size too small.

Turning from the paper, I took another sip of the coffee, which by then was lukewarm. And another. I looked down at the ring on my right hand-a butterfly made of white gold, paved with tsarvorite in the wings and just a few tiny diamond chips in the body. It had been a birthday gift from my daughter and her godmother-my surrogate mother, Nina. I touched the tips of the wings, which were almost, but not quite, sharp enough to hurt. They had surprised me with the present just days after the Magdalene Murderer had been apprehended.

Just days after I’d almost been killed, along with one of my patients.

Just days after the last time I spoke to Detective Jordain.

“Dr. Snow? You’ll be on as soon as this news break is over. Would you come with me, please?”

The air was freezing in studio 1A and I shivered as we walked down the hall, aware that I was cold over a layer of heat that was, like a memory, holding its own beneath the surface of my skin.

This was the last thing I needed to think about minutes before the camera focused on me.

“Do you need anything before you go on?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine.”

But that wasn’t true.