The Venus Fix

Monday Eleven days remaining
Thirty-Two

Bob was on time for his appointment but he looked even more tired than he had the week before. He lay down on the couch and flexed and unflexed his fingers. While I waited for him to start speaking, I drank some of the bitter, lukewarm coffee in my mug.

The coffee had been so much better in New Orleans.

The sun broke through the clouds, and for a few seconds my office was filled with light. Maybe the snow outside would start to melt. New York City had gone for more than a week without a single full hour of sunlight.

New Orleans seemed very far away.

“My wife has been using my computer again,” Bob said. “She’s been snooping around and going to all the sites I visit.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Of course not. She forgot to erase the cache of where she’d been while I was at work. Her whole little trip was right there for me to see. She left tracks.”

“Did you confront her?”

“I didn’t have a chance. She confronted me. You know I’ve been unfaithful to her in the past. I had a few affairs over the years. It seemed to me that this was so much more acceptable. So much safer. Less threatening. I don’t know these women. Don’t talk to them. They just stimulate me. And they’re there whenever I want them. Beautiful, sexy women who don’t want anything from me.”

“Nothing?”

He looked at me. “What do they want from me?”

“You can’t think of anything?”

“No.”

“What do you give them?”

“Nothing. They aren’t real.”

“Bob, they are real.”

“I just meant that they aren’t actually interacting with me. We don’t have a relationship. They are anonymous to me, I to them. I pay them to-” He broke off.

“Go on.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”

“Bob, what do they want from you?”

He laughed bitterly. “Better my money than what women usually want.”

He’d gotten there. Good.

“What do they usually want?”

“They want to get inside your head. They want to own you. And to be the only woman that you think about. As if there could ever be only one woman that I think about.”

“But there’s a difference between thinking about someone and acting out your sexual urges, isn’t there?”

“There is, but that’s what the Internet is good for. I’m only thinking about these women. I’m not with them.”

“But you’re not with your wife, either, are you?”

“No.”

“Why, Bob? Why aren’t you having sex with your wife?”

“Because she’s the same. I know everything she is going to do and everything she is going to want. I know how she is going to make me work on her for anywhere from twelve to fifteen minutes before she can come, and then once she has, she’ll be willing to let me have my turn.”

We had talked about this before. Several times, in fact, Bob had described the dry and tedious sex life he didn’t enjoy with his wife. But to date, he hadn’t broken through and connected to his anger at his wife’s lack of interest. He hadn’t gotten emotional about it. He simply accepted it and used it as a way to justify his Internet habit. Until he allowed himself to feel how furious he was that his wife was not interested in exploring a richer sex life with him, and until he talked to her and let her know how it made him feel, he wouldn’t be able to begin to work on the addiction he had come to see me about.

“Have you heard about those two girls?” he asked, his voice suddenly low and conspiratorial.

Not wanting to assume anything, I asked him what he was talking about.

“The two Web-cam girls. The one who died, the one who’s still in the hospital.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking for a moment about being woken up when Noah got the call.

“This is very freaky, but I saw them on Saturday night.”

“You saw it happen?”

He was quiet for a few seconds, then his fingers started to do their march on the leather armrest. “I was watching them, and then I heard my wife get up. I heard her go into her office. It was late. About midnight. I thought she was asleep. She’d told me she was going to sleep at ten-thirty. Some nights her antidepressant keeps her up-it had the night before, and she was tired.”

“What did you do when you heard her?”

“I turned off the computer and went to bed.”

“How did you feel?”

He thought about this-as if it had not occurred to him that he had any feelings about it. “I was angry.”

“About what? What made you angry, Bob?”

“I wanted to keep watching those girls. I’d seen them before. The Saturday Night Specials, they called themselves. Only worked on Saturday nights.”

“And you couldn’t watch them because of your wife?”

“That’s right.”

“But doesn’t your wife have a right to not have your sexual addiction thrown in her face?” This wasn’t what I thought, but it was what I thought might get Bob one step closer to facing his own reactions.

“My wife has gotten everything she’s wanted. One thing, one stupid thing-letting me jerk off in my own office on my own time-what is the big fucking deal?”

His voice was rife with feeling. Real anger flashed in his eyes. Good, we’d accomplished something. He was still controlled, but he was clearly furious. I was relieved to hear the shift. “Why is it so important that you have this one thing?”

“Because she has everything else. She has always had everything else. She didn’t want children right away, she wanted a career, and she wanted to wait. We waited. She wanted to live on the Upper East Side, even though I wanted to stay in the Village. She wants…she wants…she wants me to keep my dick in my pants, unless she wants me to take it out.” He was shouting and I didn’t do anything to stop him.

We were moving toward a new stage where Bob might finally be able to face how hurt he was. We still had miles of feelings to traverse, but at least we were on the way. I was quiet, waiting, allowing Bob to sit with his emotions, letting the sound of his voice fill the room and then fade away, until there was only the sound of the little clock on the table by my chair, and the traffic outside.

“I can’t stop thinking of those girls,” he said, his voice now low and sad.

“Why is that?”

He didn’t answer me.