The Venus Fix

Eighteen

On my way home that night, I stopped at E.A.T, the too-chic takeout/bakery/restaurant around the corner from our apartment, and picked up some tomato-basil soup and a seven-grain roll. It was more expensive than it should have been, but I was tired, and the last thing I wanted to do was cook.

Upstairs, I turned on the news, sat down on the couch in the living room and ate my dinner.

After the first two political stories, the anchor spent three minutes on the case Noah had told me about on Monday night: the young woman in Chelsea who had died on Saturday night while doing a Web cast. After that, he segued into a sidebar about Internet pornography, including information about how popular it was among teenagers.

I ate the last bite of the roll and finished the last spoonful of the soup. I was home, off duty, I had to leave the office and stop thinking. After changing into jeans and a sweatshirt, I turned off the TV, turned on the CD player and retreated to my tiny sculpture studio-really just a table and a cabinet for my tools in the corner of the den. My work is amateurish, but it’s how I disappear. The sounds of the mallet drown out the patients’ voices inside my head. Carving was the only thing I’d ever found that made me forget about the people who laid their confusions and their sorrows at my feet.

I swiveled the piece around and inspected it from all sides. The pale blue marble I’d been roughing out for the past few weeks was finally starting to take shape. One more night or two and the wing I had envisioned bursting out of this stone would be clearly visible.

Using the mallet, I tapped the wooden base of the chisel, and the blade dislodged the first infinitesimally small sliver of stone. Another tap. Another chip flew. Another tap. Another chip. There was solace in being in control of the shape in a way I could control nothing else. Even if I was barely competent, each piece served its purpose. I worked for almost two hours before I left to pick up Dulcie from the theater.

When I walked into her dressing room at ten-fifteen that night, Dulcie hadn’t yet started to take off her makeup, and was just removing the wig she wore to play Mary Lennox.

She smiled and stopped long enough to let me give her a kiss.

“How was the play tonight?”

“It was good.”

“Yeah? Anything new?”

“Maybe.”

“Out with it.”

A knock on the door interrupted us. Did she look relieved?

“Yes?” I called out.

“It’s Raul, can I come in?” Raul Seeger was the play’s director.

“Sure.”

Dulcie watched him in the mirror. When she saw that I was looking at her, she turned away.

When she’d first started rehearsals, she’d developed a crush on Raul, but I’d thought she was over that. Now I wasn’t so sure. I stole another surreptitious look at her: She was wiping off her eye makeup. Very slowly. Too slowly.

“Morgan, there was a scout here tonight,” Raul said. “He was very impressed with Dulcie’s performance.”

I looked back at my daughter. Now she kept her eyes straight ahead as she continued to clean her face with the thick cold cream.

Even from where I stood, across the room, I could smell the oily scent of the makeup remover. My olfactory sense is overly developed so that smells other people hardly notice can make me nauseous or give me intense pleasure. I keep rolls of peppermints in all my bags and pockets, so if a smell becomes overwhelming, I can pop one into my mouth and the aroma will neutralize everything else. I once helped save a patient’s life by recognizing an obscure scent. Every once in a while, a whiff of a fragrance can throw me deep into the past. For a few seconds, I wasn’t in Dulcie’s dressing room anymore but was a seven-year-old lying in my mother’s bed, late at night, way past my bedtime, watching her taking off her makeup.

She always let me sleep with her during the year that we lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side, where she was hiding from my father. I’d wake up when she came into the bedroom to get undressed, and I’d watch her from under half-closed eyes.

Unless she came home with a man.

Those nights she’d come and get me, wrap me up in blankets, and tuck me in on the living room couch, with an old black-and-white movie to lull me back to sleep and to keep any stray sounds from reaching my ears.

“A scout for what?”

“His name is Hank Riser. He’s doing a television series loosely based on the play and is looking for his lead.”

I glanced back at Dulcie for the third or fourth time in less than five minutes. Now her attention was openly on Raul, and she was nodding ever so slightly.

“He wants to fly Dulcie out to L.A. at the end of the month to test for the pilot. As much as I don’t want to lose her, I don’t want to stand in her way, either. This is a great opportunity, Morgan.” He held out the scout’s card.

I didn’t take it.

“We went through this two months ago. Dulcie’s working too hard on this play to add anything to her plate.”

“This isn’t adding TV. She’d have to quit the play. They’ve got a commitment for thirteen episodes. It would be full-time.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not sure I like that idea.”

My understatement was lost on Raul. It even surprised me that I was capable of sounding so rational and calm about something that set off an emotional avalanche inside me. My pulse started to race and my jaw muscles tightened. I didn’t bother to look at Dulcie again, no longer sure how I’d react to her. She’d known what was coming. She’d known how I’d respond. We’d been through this over something much simpler. If I’d said no to three weeks of TV work, why would I agree to thirteen weeks of it?

Raul hadn’t taken back the card, still extended toward me. So quickly that I wasn’t prepared for it, Dulcie was up and out of her chair, and she’d grabbed it.

“I’m completely excited,” she said. “It would be amazing. To do a whole season of a TV show!” All this had been directed more to Raul than to me.

I watched my thirteen-year-old daughter as she casually tucked away the small white paper rectangle, without letting on that she might as well have been pocketing a bomb.

We got into the town car that the theater provided for us every night. It wasn’t a limo, nothing that fancy, just a black four-door sedan that waited at the theater exit to take Dulcie and me home-or Dulcie and her father, depending on which of us she was staying with.

“Mom, this is something that matters to me.”

The car moved away from the curb and headed east. I had no intention of having a serious conversation until we were home. Not the feedback she wanted, Dulcie turned away from me and stared out the window. Her overly dramatic response would have made me laugh if we’d been talking about something else. But this was where we clashed and what all our battles were fought over.

We were catching all the lights and making good time, and the closer we got to the apartment, the more my resolve increased. Beside me, I knew Dulcie’s did, too. My kinetic connection with my daughter was in rare form and I was picking up on what she was feeling. No one has ever meant as much to me as Dulcie. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her, and I would happily sacrifice whatever it took to ensure her happiness.

But I was not, under any circumstances, going to allow my baby to audition for a TV series. She knew that. Yet she had taken the card anyway.

My daughter was thirteen.

As a therapist, I knew what the teenage years were going to be like in today’s society, but there is a difference between knowing it professionally and living it as a mother. And the reality was testing me. Daily, it seemed.

As soon as we stepped into the foyer, before I had a chance to speak, Dulcie turned on me, and in a more adult voice than I’d heard from her before said: “You’re not going to say no to this because of something that happened to my grandmother fifty years ago. I gave in over the other part because it was no big deal. But this is a big deal. I want to do it, Mom, and it would be grossly unfair of you to try and stop me again. If you do, I’ll do it anyway.”