The Venus Fix

Monday Eighteen days remaining
Three

It was going to start to snow again, soon. I could smell it. Snow had always been magical to me. Something that, until I was ten, I thought I owned because my last name is Snow. Morgan Snow.

The sky was gray and the trees were dusted white and my breath came out in visible puffs. I had been mesmerized by that when I was a child, and like me, my daughter, Dulcie, had found it equally absorbing.

“Ghost breath,” she’d say, then suck in a great gulp of air and blow it out again. “Do you believe in ghosts, Mommy?”

I did, but not in a way that my then eight-year-old would have understood. How could I have explained that the ghost of my mother lived inside of her? And that there were also the ghosts of the secrets that my patients told me that could, in the midst of a moment of my own pleasure, surface-interrupting and demanding acknowledgment. That it was in between all those moments that I hoped it would all be okay, that we’d all be okay.

At the corner of Sixty-sixth Street, I stopped for a red light. A woman in a black fur coat shifted impatiently from her right foot to her left. “I hate this weather,” she said. Not quite to me, but not to herself, either. I nodded, and then the light changed.

We crossed and went in opposite directions.

The Northeast was suffering a severe cold spell but I didn’t mind. I liked to bundle up in layers of sweaters and fleece-lined boots, wrap a big scarf around my head, and walk the mile from my apartment on Eightieth Street and Madison to my office.

At Sixty-fifth, I turned the corner and trudged toward Park Avenue. Side streets don’t get as much traffic as the major avenues so the snow never melts as quickly. The early twentieth-century limestone maisonette where I work was halfway down the block. The building’s facade is elegant: Ionic columns support an overhang that shelters the patients while they wait to be buzzed through the wrought-iron door into the most progressive sex clinic in the nation-the Butterfield Institute.

In the country, the snow stays pristine and is so clean you can reach down, scoop some up in your hands and eat it. But in the city, the exhaust from the thousands of cars, buses and trucks turns it gray within hours.

Near the gutter, on the sidewalk in front of the institute, there were filthy mounds of snow smeared with black soot, but close to the building, where I was standing, it was still white, and would be for at least a few more hours.