The Halo Effect

44

Noah and I walked the four blocks from the restaurant to his apartment at Broadway and Eleventh Street. Streetlight reflected off the brass doorknob set into the ornate wrought-iron door.

“How old is this building?”

“Around 1920.”

I admired the art nouveau design of the door. When we entered, I looked back. You could barely see the design from the lobby. Inside was just as ornate. Parts of the octagonal whiteand-black ceramic floor were cracked, but that didn’t detract from the effect. The walls were papered in a pattern that I recognized as William Morris. Faded now, the blue flowers with small mustard-colored centers and the full green leaves were from another era. The steps were carved from heavily veined white marble, and the center of each was worn.

“It’s like walking into another century,” I said.

“You aren’t kidding. Wait till you see the kitchen and the bathroom. My tub has claw feet.”

Two flights up, Noah opened the door to his apartment, turned on the light and let me precede him inside. The ceilings were ten feet high and the walls were wainscoted halfway up in lovely warm oak. The floors, covered with random scattered Oriental rugs, were also oak. The windows, framed in ornate molding, looked over the back garden of a church.

The furniture was simple but classic. Arts and Crafts couches, chairs and table. All upholstered with William Morris patterns. Lithographs and posters from the same late-nineteenth-century period hung on the walls. In one corner stood a baby grand.

There was a small kitchen off the living room with glassfronted cabinets and an old stove and sink that, despite their age, were in pristine condition.

Everything was subtle, subdued and masculine, but beautiful.

“I’m impressed.”

“That I have taste?”

I shook my head. “No. At the quality of these reproductions. These pieces look original.”

“That’s because they are.”

There was no way I could ask him how he managed to afford all this on a detective’s salary, but he knew what I was thinking.

“I’ve actually written a few songs that have been published. I don’t sell much. But what I’ve sold has done well.”

“The pieces you were playing tonight? They were yours?”

“Some of them.”

I shook my head. “You can do that, but you still stay on as a detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“May I ask why?”

“Being a detective is a part of me. What my dad did. What I always wanted to do. I play piano real easy. I need it for balance, but first I’m a cop.”

I nodded.

“The same way you need to do those stone sculptures.”

There wasn’t anything to say. I never talked about my sculpture and didn’t think about them in words. The abstract shapes weren’t anything I wanted anyone to judge or question. They were not important once they were finished. It was just that the process kept me sane when little else did.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine.”

I suddenly felt awkward in his apartment. Inexperienced, tired, not sure of myself. In some strange way, Noah didn’t seem attractive anymore, and being in his apartment seemed like a mistake. I was afraid in a way that I wasn’t even at the Diablo bar with Cleo’s clients.

“Why don’t you sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”

He went into the kitchen. I looked at my watch. If I left now, I could get home and be asleep before eleven.

“You take one sugar, right?” he called from the kitchen.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Would you like some brandy in it? Or Sambuca?”

“No, nothing,” I said.

He brought out two steaming mugs, set them on the coffee table and sat down beside me. I picked up my coffee, took a sip and grimaced. It was too hot. Not sweet enough. I could taste the chicory and it was bitter.

“You know, I should go. This wasn’t a good idea.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded. “Let me drive you.”

“No.”

“I insist.”

“No. That’s silly. It’s just uptown.”

“Okay. Then let me go downstairs with you and get you a cab.”

“Too much trouble. You’re exhausted. There are a million cabs.”

“Fine. But first, tell me what just happened. All of a sudden you seem like you’re ready to jump out of your skin.”

I shrugged.

He leaned forward and kissed me, but this time there was nothing about it that connected us. Two separate sets of lips crashing together but not touching.

Noah was trying to melt my reserve, but it felt like an assault. All the smells, the touches, were an invasion. His skin was rough on my cheek, his warm touch was hot on my hand. Moving away from the kiss and his smell and his hands, I scooted forward on the couch and reached for my coffee.

“I can’t explain…” I started.

“No, it’s all right, Morgan, you don’t have to.”

The surprise must have registered on my face. “I’m not used to people telling me what I don’t have to do.”

“I can believe that. But you’re not out there with ‘people’ now. You’re here. And I like seeing you sitting there. No one has ever sat there that way looking as right as you do. So indulge me. Let’s not have a postmortem on an abortion. Just stay awhile. Let me play you some music. All you have to do is listen. And then I’ll drive you home.”

Noah was smiling at me. Not the kind of look I expected a man to have etched on his face after being rebuffed.

Now that the pressure was gone, I felt I could stay and let him drive me home. It would recement the working relationship. It would dissolve the tension.

He got up, went to the CD player, looked through a pile of cases, then popped out what was already in there and put in new disks.

Soft, heady music, the kind my mother had loved, flooded the apartment. Old-fashioned crooners sang their songs: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. I sipped more of the coffee. I was getting used to the bitterness and starting to think that I actually liked it.

Noah sat on the chair catercorner to the couch, his eyes focused on a point to my right.

For ten minutes he didn’t say anything. And I sat there just listening to the music, forgetting that I should be doing something or saying something or explaining myself.

He took out two glass balloons and poured an inch of brandy into each. Pushing one toward me, he lifted his own, inhaled and then took a sip.

“So, tell me,” he said. “How do you separate what you do from who you are?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You listen to people talk to you about their sex lives all day. About what turns them on that shouldn’t. Or at least they think shouldn’t. About what works for them in bed and what doesn’t. I’m sure you hear all the things I see. Violence, S and M, bondage, autoeroticism, fairy tales without any happy endings, prostitutes who fuck for drug money, for abusive pimps, for Gucci shoes…crap. Nothing that’s very pretty. Six years of being a sex therapist, years of being a general shrink before that. How do you get away from it?”

I looked down at the brandy. “I don’t. I don’t want to.”

“But you need to, don’t you?”

“When I’m with my daughter, with Dulcie, I don’t think about my patients.”

“Yeah, having kids must help.”

I felt something stuck in my throat. I took a sip of the brandy. It was my first sip, and it burned, hard and hot in my throat. I almost gasped. I coughed. He looked at me. Held my gaze.

“But when she’s not there, they haunt you, don’t they?”

“Trying to help them haunts me. The sadness of some of my patients’ problems is hard to walk away from just because the clock says the workday is over. You don’t stop thinking about a woman who wants to be tied down and have her lover wear a mask and use a cat-o’-nine-tails on her. But it’s not just the extremes. There are women who crave pain and men who crave being demeaned. The couples who don’t understand that seduction is as important as sex. Who have lost the art of touch. Who have an easier time spending money than spending time together. Every part of the body is connected to someone’s problems, someone else’s neuroses.”

“So how do you separate yourself from all that?”

“It’s part of your training to know how to leave…” My voice became bitter. Like the coffee. And that surprised me. “I can’t separate myself from it. I see my patients’ lives, like movies, playing out in my mind when I get into bed at night. I try to figure out what I can say to them. What I can suggest. Where I can lead them. How far I can push. It’s what I do.”

He nodded. Listening. Leaning forward. “But where are you in all this?”

“I don’t think about that.” My voice sounded faint to my own ears.

“What happened to your marriage?”

“I was happy in my marriage. It was Mitch who said it wasn’t fair to either of us to live the way we were living anymore. Sex is great…but animals have sex. Animals don’t talk. They don’t share each other’s pain the way humans can. There is nothing so sacred about sex that you have to break up a family over it.” The words were spilling out like the stupid tears that were coursing down my cheeks. I was embarrassed, but too upset to do anything about it. “The ways that people turn their lives inside out for sex can be dangerous. They forget it’s not just the act, not just the release that matters. It’s the needing and the being needed, too.”

“Do you ever think about someone touching you again?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“But?”

“But what?”

“But why did you freeze the minute you knew I was going to touch you?”

“Every single sex act already belongs to someone else. The women and men who talk to me, they do all those things to each other. And I listen. Nod, take it in. I wade through their bedrooms, invisible and silent, taking notes, filming them and snapping their photographs. And then I go home. Dulcie and I eat dinner, I help her with her homework. We watch a movie, she goes to sleep. I go to my study. And I chip away at a stone.”

“What are you looking for in the stone?”

“An untouched place.”

He put his hand on my arm. It was not a sexual gesture this time. Just a connection. He was making contact.

“When you carve stone, there’s this sound the chisel makes on the marble. It’s loud. Have you ever heard it?” I asked.

“No. How loud is it?”

I could feel his fingers on my hand. The heat came off him in waves.

“It sounds like a jackhammer.”

His hand moved up past my wrist, up my arm, and then with his other hand he pushed the hair off my face. He leaned in. When he spoke now he was almost whispering.

“Does the sound drown out the patients’ voices?”

“Yes.”

He was not kissing me, but I could feel his lips near my ear as he spoke to me. Soft pressure, light rain. His right hand was unbuttoning the cuff of my shirt while his left hand stroked the space behind my ear. Not an erogenous zone. But bare skin. And it was sending an alarm, a shocking thrill, to the center of my body.

“But the voices come back, don’t they, Morgan? The images start to flood your brain and you hear the patients’ voices in your head again? Touching and kissing and fucking become all words again, all pictures that have other people in them but not you?” His fingers were still on that patch of skin, and they felt more like the wind than someone’s touch. I lost the words he was saying for a moment because for the first time in a long time, sensation was overpowering thought.

“How does all that make you feel?”

I should have laughed at how he was turning the tables on me and asking all the questions. “I get angry. I want to help my patients find their center, be able to make love, to enjoy their bodies, their partners, except I want the same thing for me, too.”

He leaned over and kissed me, but before I could respond his mouth moved down my neck, down farther. He kissed the skin above my bra, moved his mouth back up my neck, trailing kisses, pressing his lips against my collarbone, using his teeth. Shivering, I moved closer to him. He was reaching me somehow, miraculously, after all this time.

“What do you do when you get angry?” He began to work the rest of the buttons on my blouse. And then slipped it down my shoulders and pulled it off my arms. The fabric sliding over my skin was yet another embrace, as if he had imbued the shirt with erotic powers so that the very movement of the silk was some sort of lovemaking.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“You can tell me about it, Morgan.”

“I just want to find my own images again.” I wasn’t thinking about my words but about how this man’s hair was soft against my chest. How his breath was hot on my stomach and how his hands were kneading the knots out of my shoulders.

What were we doing with this odd combination of bloodletting, massage and seduction? I didn’t want to stop to figure it out. My body was quivering. I couldn’t get close enough to him. My hands finally, after all this time of him touching me, moved up to his arms, and I gripped his muscles.

“Tell me all about the things that have gone wrong in your life, about the things that you’ve rationalized because you’re too smart to get mad, Morgan.”

“I don’t rationalize.”

“Bullshit.”

Almost immediately, my fists came up, curled tight, and attacked him. It was easier than I could have imagined to rain punches on him while he kissed me.

As hard as I was hitting him, his kisses were gentle. His tongue barely grazing mine, playing a hide-and-seek game, holding back as much as he was giving.

His hands were on my back, holding me tight against him. I didn’t want that; I wanted to push at him and knock him down, and I wanted to hurt him, to crash against him.

I stopped long enough to unbutton and unzip my pants, pull them off, then go to work on his, struggling with the buttons and his fly. He did not help. He made me work at it on my own. I moved with the angry energy that had been building up for so long. The passion that I had not found any outlet for exploded. Feelings I had been so sure didn’t exist in me anymore erupted.

As soon as we were both naked and lying on the floor, the whole length of our bodies was in contact, and his hands moved like butterflies alighting on my skin. Hundreds of electric shocks shot through me, and he made me give him more of what was buried inside me.

“This is something. It’s real now,” he whispered.

“Isn’t it?” The anger was moving out of me, replaced by something hot and thick and sweet that pulsed through my body.

This was just want. Not love or even something as sane as lust. This was just want. Everything was gone now. There were not even memories of this in me from some long-ago college night or early courtship. My mind was not running in a logical path. I pulled back to look at him, to take it in with my eyes this object that was under me. This thing that I wanted so badly.

I slid down his body. With both hands I held his foot, then I bent down and used my teeth and lips and tongue to work my way up, tasting his skin, smelling his body, stopping to touch myself between my legs, then moving my wet fingers up his leg. I was marking him in some primitive ceremony, and when he saw me do it once, he took my hand and made me do it again. Touching myself, taking my own slickness, I finger-painted him. His thighs. His stomach. His chest. His nipples. His erection. The scent was around me, a smell that I had never immersed myself in before. My own smell. On a man. All over a man.

He picked me up, saw my startled face and laughed.

“I’m not used to this,” I said.

“Good.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Too bad.”

“You have all the control,” I complained as he carried me into his bedroom.

“Yes.” He laughed again. Deeper in his throat. The kind of intimate laugh that I have heard other couples share at a dinner party when they think no one else is listening. “It’s such torture. Poor Dr. Morgan Snow is not in control. That’s what it will be like with me. You’ll have it. Then I’ll take it back. We will be intimate. And that is the worst thing you can think of, isn’t it? You won’t like it, will you?”

“No, I won’t like it.”

“Shh.” He kissed me quiet and lay me down on his unmade bed, which was redolent with his scent. I rolled over on the cool cotton sheets and buried my head in his pillow, feeling the cold air from an air conditioner bathe my back. Luxuriating in the bouquet of smells in the pillow, I lost him for a minute. Forgot about everything, breathing in a whole other world.

And then, from behind me, he lowered himself onto me. His arms on my arms, his chest on my back, his stomach on the small of my back, the top of his thighs on the back of my thighs. I was blanketed by him and there was no more cool air, only skin, warming me…no, heating me…as he slid inside of me…and a long, slow, aching moan slipped out from between my lips. A “Yes” that was so stretched out that it was a sound, not a word.

He moved like jazz. He riffed inside of me. He made some bluesy kind of music out of movement. Never fast, just easing along, changing the rhythm, the cadence and the tone. I danced under him to music that I hadn’t ever heard.

We were wet, sweating despite the cold, moving so intensely together, striving not to get to the end of the song, letting each note play out long and slow, touching some of the keys with intensity and others much more softly.

When I thought I was going to stop breathing and just break apart, he turned me around, carefully, and then he just looked down at me.

We were both panting. He took a glass of water from beside the bed, drank from it, and then put his head close to mine and fed me water from his mouth. The shock of it didn’t diminish the pleasure.

“More…please…”

I didn’t know what I was asking for. More of the water? More of the jazz? More of him playing me?

He took more of the water, but this time, instead of putting it in my mouth, he dripped it on my chest, on my breasts, on my neck. And at the same time he started to move in me again. Slowly, beating out a new rhythm that was more insistent and less gentle than the one before. It was still too slow for me. I was in a hurry and I thrust up at him, but he wouldn’t let me change the pace.

“No control, Morgan.” He smiled.

I gave up then. Just let go. Stopped being. Whatever thoughts still lingered were lost in the sensations flooding my insides. He went so slowly that it turned into some kind of pain. And there was real pain, too. Because I was reaching up, kissing him on his shoulders, his neck, using my teeth, gnawing his flesh, and he was biting on mine. He found a spot where my neck met my shoulder-by accident, because he knew, because our bodies were mirror images of each other’s, because I had found this spot on his body without knowing it. It didn’t matter, he found this spot, this two-inch-wide circle, and he kissed it and then bit into it and I arched up and screamed. It was as if the feeling between my legs and the sensitivity of this spot were connected by a live wire and he was jiggling it. Shocks. Fire. Pain. Bursts of cold, spasms of hot. Sounds. Long, held-out notes. Music. Circles circling on one another. There was nothing anymore at all. Eyes shut. Skin. Teeth. Full up inside. So full, too full, and too much sensation, lifting me up, taking off, spinning, pain, no control, his hair on my cheeks, falling on me, his lips on my lips, then back at that spot while he spun inside of me, and I was circling again and again until the circles widened and I let go, shuddering and crying out and digging my fingers into his back to get him in me farther still, and then farther, so that I might split apart and finally get to the heart of the feeling. But it wouldn’t come. I kept reaching for it. How do you have this much feeling after so long and let it go?

He knew that, too. He waited for as long as he could. Noah strung out every second of sensation, like the longest note you have ever heard on a piano. And then he just stopped moving. There was no sound. Neither of us breathed.

There was nothing but that bed and our bodies and the empty fullness I felt. Brain drained, satiated. We were both waiting. Still connected by the tip of him hovering on the edges of me. Holding back, holding out. He was up on his elbows, looking down. I opened my eyes and he caught me in his glance.

Waiting. More silence.

Then he smiled like a little kid with a secret.

“Now, Morgan. With me, now,” he whispered in a musical kind of singsong invitation.

He swooped down and slid in, and the surprise and quickness and the heaviness and tightness and fullness, along with the intense, pure pain of it after so many hours of being teased toward it, was all it took. And I did let go. Finally.