I can be surprised by what I hear-I can even be shocked by it-but I cannot be undone. Passion has its own peculiar pathways and I had walked them with my patients. I’d studied them. I’d heard about them every day for the past six years.
And yet, I had just watched something not in my lexicon of psychological knowledge. I was unaware of any group of women who acted en masse sexually. Men? Yes. But women? No. Women did not gather in groups to engage in erotic activity for their own pleasure, just as traditionally women do not rape.
Scientific evidence presents a theory that the hormonal makeup of men and women is what causes aggressive or passive behavior. Women have more estrogen, which is the hormone that drives us to be nurturers. As a result of survival of the fittest, we are hardwired to be mothers. The best breeders-the more faithful women and those with the highest levels of estrogen, and the men who impregnated the greatest number of women and had the highest levels of testosterone-were the ones whose genes were passed on.
In the 1960s and ’70s, feminists tried to raise boys who played with dolls and were not aggressive, and to raise girls who were aggressive and played with trucks. But it didn’t work. Yes, yes, in individual cases it did. But not in general.
We are our hormones.
Except I was watching a video of women who were acting out male-pattern sexual behavior, and as a sex therapist, that interested me more than anything I’d heard about in quite a few years.
I clicked the tape back on and watched the ritual of other women picking out their dance partners. Their actions were not shy. The only bashfulness I saw was on the faces of the men who were on display, lined up, stiff in their tuxedos, waiting to be chosen and stripped.
If I had not met Shelby Rush, I would not believe that I was watching a real event, but rather an erotic film written and directed by women for the delight of women.
What was so stunning was the total reversal. Not one movement had been out of character for the aggressor. And there were more than a hundred of these women. Some tall and lovely, some short and round, others older, not beauties at all. But there was a freedom and lack of self-consciousness that graced each one’s bearing.
It was a sexual dance of daring that I did not have the information to process.
It took courage to be that open about your desires. It must take enormous self-esteem and a willingness to act the fool. It takes a burning need to be satiated. I would not have been capable of walking into that ballroom, choosing a man and telling him what I wanted.
What must it feel like to not wonder if you are desirable? Not to consider what the other person was feeling or thinking or needing sexually, but simply to know that the act of demanding gave a man pleasure, and that his desire to please made him hard.
What would it be like to know that the fact of being in charge-no matter what I looked like or said or thought or did-was enough to make me desirable?
The tape was still running, but I shut it off and picked up the confidentiality agreement and read through it, looking at the blank space that was waiting for my signature. The first time I’d looked at it, I’d been furious that my professionalism had been questioned. Now I wasn’t sure how I felt. And I didn’t have any idea what to do.
Eleven
Paul Lessor was sitting in his apartment staring at the news on the television with the sound turned off, the light from the monitor the only illumination in the pigsty that used to be his living room. On the coffee table in front of him were piles of newspapers and plates of untouched food. Dried-out English muffins, butter congealed on the plate. Three-quarters of a banana now brown and rotting.
He had no appetite. That was one of the side effects of the medication, and was the least of his problems with the drugs.
What a fucking mess his life was. He was thirty-three. One of the most talented art directors at any publishing house in New York City, with more award-winning covers to his name than anyone else in the business. He’d gotten scholarships to Cooper Union and then the Yale School of Art. He’d had his photographic collages in four group shows. He got offers every year to jump ship from Pigeonhole Press, the small but prestigious publishing company where he worked, and move to the bigger houses, but he didn’t go. He couldn’t go. His boss, Maria Diezen, the fifty-two-year-old editor in chief, had told him that he couldn’t. She told him often. He loved Maria. He loved how strong she was and how tough she was and how angry she could get at him when he didn’t get it right.
And so he listened to her.
She’d been through twenty-four senior art directors in a dozen years when he’d started working for her three years ago. Now he held a record that other graphic designers in the city were in awe of. Everyone at Pigeonhole knew that Maria was a bitch: aggressive, demanding and crazy half the time. But Paul loved her. Worshipped her. Would do anything that she asked of him. Because when a woman like that, with that kind of temper and those kinds of standards, smiles on you, it’s like the whole fucking world is yours.
There was nothing better than their lunch hours, when together they’d walk into the big, noisy, crowded Barnes & Noble superstore on Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, near the office, to look at one of his covers on the new fiction table. Nothing like getting a report back from the head of sales that the big buyers at B & N, Borders, Amazon and all the independents had upped their orders because “with a cover like that, there’s no question the book is going to walk itself out of the store.”
And more times than not, it had.
But as good as his work was, as much as he loved what he did and lived off the high that he got from it, he was fucking falling apart.
He’d gone to the psychiatrist six months ago for the crazy things that were happening in his head: manic mood swings-elation, depression, the sense that he could do anything, the realization that he was powerless.
They’d tried cocktail after cocktail of drugs to get him into some kind of chemical balance. The only thing that worked at all was Thorazine. Except for one little side effect.
He wanted to be able to live with it. Wanted to not care. Anxious to rise above the problem, he told himself that soon he’d get chemically balanced and then the doctor would be able to change the medication and find one that didn’t make him impotent. He had to trust that.
Paul looked at the clock before closing his eyes. A year ago he would not have been home on a Tuesday night at eight o’clock, sitting on his couch, bored out of his brain by television. He would have been naked and fucking some Amazon who shouted out orders, telling him exactly where to put his cock and how to move his hands and what to do with his tongue.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
Not even reliving any of those incredible nights gave him half a hard-on. Not with the Thorazine coursing through his blood, softening his mind and his equipment.
No matter how hard he concentrated on remembering the high points of those months after he’d first been accepted into the Scarlet Society, it was the memories of his last two weeks there that tormented him.
It was depressing.
In its own twisted way, any depression was actually a relief tonight, because if he really was depressed, then the Thorazine wasn’t working and they might be able to try something else. And if they did, then maybe, just maybe, he’d get his sexual energy back.
Now all he had was sexual shame.