The Venus Fix

Six

At noon, Nina Butterfield popped her head into my office. She was dressed in a three-quarter-length, copper-colored fur coat that matched her hair, and was holding up a pair of ice skates, swinging them in the air.

“You want to take a break?” she asked, her amber eyes sparkling.

I did but, preoccupied with Bob, told her I didn’t think I should.

“You never need to get out more than when you don’t think you should. I know these things. I’m a therapist. Now, come on. I cleared your schedule with Allison. She said you’re free.” It sounded like a suggestion but it wasn’t. More often than not, she knew what was best for me. More often than not I recognized that.

At least twice a week Nina and I went out together at lunchtime. Sometimes to eat, but usually to walk, either in Central Park, which was only two blocks west of the institute, or wherever we wound up, exploring stores that we’d never noticed before, taking in exhibitions at museums or shows at art galleries. In the winter, when strolling in the street wasn’t as enticing, we went ice-skating.

Outside, we pulled on our gloves and buttoned up our coats. Someone else might have turned back because of the snow and gray sky. Not Nina. She was fearless about venturing out into a potential storm.

She’d taught me how to skate when I was an eight-year-old without a mother and she was a childless divorcée who hadn’t yet realized she’d inherited me. Then years later, she’d taught my daughter.

“Dulcie hasn’t been skating at all yet,” I told her as we walked into the park and headed west toward the rink. Since my daughter had been appearing in The Secret Garden all of our old routines had changed.

“I’d imagine with six performances a week on Broadway, she’s overwhelmed.”

“Do you really think it’s a good idea that a thirteen-year-old works so hard? She’s missing out on so much.”

“Is she happy, Morgan?” She sighed.

“She seems happy,” I said, and heard the wistfulness in my own voice.

“You’d know if she wasn’t.”

Since she was a baby, I’d sensed Dulcie’s emotional and psychic temperature even if we both weren’t in the same room, or the same building as each other. Miles away, I’d get a sudden pain in my stomach or hand or back, only to find out when I arrived home that she’d been sick, cut herself or fallen. When something wonderful happened, I’d feel a sudden lightness for no reason. It had been going on so long that none of us found it odd.

Nina glanced over at me. She had it too-that sense when something was wrong with me-but in her case, it was exceptional insight as a therapist.

“Are things back to normal?”

Weeks earlier, my daughter and I had an argument about her being offered a three-week part in a television series. She’d wanted to do it and I’d been adamant that appearing in a play six times a week was more than enough work for her. We fought. And then, of course, she brought her father into it. I’d already talked to Mitch, and he had backed me up on the decision. Nevertheless, when I’d gone to pick her up from his apartment that weekend, she’d refused to come home with me. She said she knew that if I’d said yes, her father would have said yes, too. That he was more fair. That he wanted her to have a career. That I wanted to hold her back. And finally-the coup de grace-that she wanted to live with him.

Legally, at the age of thirteen, she had the right to make that decision, and there was nothing I could do.

She’d stayed at her father’s for almost four weeks, until we worked out a cease-fire.

“The drama queen seems to have forgiven me. But I’m still furious at her emotional-blackmail techniques. She’s too damn intuitive.”

“What’s holding on to the anger about?”

“You know that?”

“Probably. Do you?”

We laughed. “There’s nothing worse than two therapists having a conversation. Especially two who have known each other forever. Yes, oh master, I know. As long as I focus on the anger I don’t have to focus on how scared I was that she wasn’t coming back. I know it’s not about her. It’s some crazy thing where I’ve confused her and my mother in my head. But the loneliness was real. And it stung.”

“And-”

I interrupted Nina. We’d had this conversation before and I knew where she was headed. “I know she’s not going to follow in my mother’s footsteps: a star at sixteen, lost by twenty, dead at twenty-nine. I know Dulcie isn’t my mother. She might have her talent, but she’s had a secure and healthy childhood. She’s had Mitch and me as parents.”

“I love it when you do all my work for me.” Nina smiled.

We’d arrived at the Wollman Rink. Inside, we got a locker and put on our skates. Then side by side, we glided across the ice in time to a Schubert waltz. Probably due to the light snow, Nina and I had the whole rink to ourselves for the first twenty minutes, until an explosion of laughter and shouting preceded a group of twenty or thirty kids. All the private schools in the area used the park as an escape from indoor gymnasiums.

A flash of a shocking-pink parka crossed my path. A turquoise scarf fell on the ice. A boy in a heavy black sweater, one cherry-red glove and one forest-green glove sped by and scooped up the scarf without stopping.

Along with Nina, I watched them with delight, and then I noticed two of the boys smirking as one of the girls spilled onto the ice, her legs spreading wide as she spun out.

Four boys took off from one end of the rink, racing one another, their blades sending shavings up into the air. It looked like an updated Norman Rockwell until one elbowed another viciously as he skated too close, and the kid went crashing into the handrail.

Two girls took each other’s arms and danced across the rink. Sweet friends, until they came up behind a third girl and started whispering about her, clearly making fun of her and the way she was skating.

We don’t treat kids at the institute, but a few months earlier, as a favor to a friend of Nina’s-the principal of one of the city’s prestigious private schools-I’d taken on a once-a-week group session with eight fifteen- to eighteen-year-old boys who were seriously addicted to Internet porn, as well as four girls who were involved with them and affected by it.

Seeing these kids skating, seeing the subtle messages beneath their easy exuberance, reminded me of how I felt in the room with my group: knowing there was something worse than their problems with pornography going on deep beneath the surface of what they showed me, anxious to get to it.

Just as Nina and I were leaving the rink, the snow started to fall heavily. These were not the soft flakes that had been floating down before but a heavy, wet snow that caught in my eyelashes and made it hard to see.

There are landmarks throughout the park, but the easiest ones to use to orient yourself are above the treeline. At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted had designed the park’s hills and valleys so that, no matter where you stood, you couldn’t see any of the city in the sky. More than a hundred years later, there were buildings on all four sides, their spires and roofs standing tall, and you could always tell where you were by looking up.

But this snow was so dense that not only couldn’t we recognize any landmarks within the park, we couldn’t see into the distance to get our bearings. Peering into vague whiteness, Nina and I set off.

No problem. Up ahead was a fork. We knew to take a right. Straight. Another right.

Then nothing looked familiar. It should have-we’d walked this route so many times-but nothing was visible other than soft mounds of white.

“We should be coming to a left,” Nina said after a few minutes.

But we didn’t. Somehow we’d gotten turned around. For two New Yorkers, it was a strange experience. We were lost in our own backyard.

Nina pointed to an overpass. “Do you know which footbridge that is?”

“Not a clue.” I peeled my glove back and peered down at my watch. The face was clear only for a second before flakes obscured it. We’d been walking long enough that we should have been at a park exit if we’d gone in the right direction.

We both had patients waiting for us. We had to find a way out.

It was silly to panic. The city was all around us. There were people and taxis and traffic and noise and stores and lights and sidewalks just hundreds of yards in any direction, but we were circling inside a storm. Every tree, rock, pond and bridge had become part of an unfamiliar landscape. We just had to trust that since we’d done this so many times before, our instincts would lead us home.

But what if we really were lost? Could we be lost in Central Park?

Square breathing, I thought. The way Nina had taught me long ago. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four. Nina must have heard my inhaling and exhaling. She glanced over. “We can’t be lost for long if we just keep going in the same direction. It’s kind of fun, isn’t it? Not knowing where you’re going for once?”

Before I could answer, she said, “No it isn’t, not for you.”