But the expression that Daphne had caught in this man’s face wasn’t an act. He was gazing at a woman with such desire that it pained him, and he was willing to do anything he had to do-no matter how much it demeaned him-in order to get what he wanted. And he wanted it right then, urgently, and for a whole host of reasons both right and wrong.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
This not from Nicky, but from the artist herself. It surprised me, too. It was not arrogance. Not bragging this time, either. She had separated and become a spectator looking at a stranger’s work.
I answered carefully but honestly, watching her reaction. “Yes, it is very powerful.”
“Before I joined the society I’d never understood much about sex. It was dark and removed and secretive. I learned about need and perversion and fantasy, and even though the sex stayed secretive, I was able to at least understand it. I tried out so many ways of expressing myself sexually, and that impacted me. It fed my work and made me creative in a way I’d never been. It became part of me. Or I became part of it.”
“And you still needed to keep going there?”
“To see this kind of look on the men’s faces. Over and over.”
I wanted to know where she was still seeing this kind of look if she had stopped going to the society a year ago. Who was she painting now? Who posed for her this way? But it was not the right time to ask that yet.
I turned to Nicky to gauge his reaction to what his wife had said. He was looking at Daphne with the same naked expression as the man in the painting. Obviously, he was very attracted to his wife. Either because she was no longer available to him, or because she was talking about her sex life before she married him, or just-and this was not only the simplest but also the least possible of reasons as far as I was concerned-because he was in love with Daphne, in awe of her talents and wanted to be with her.
Twenty-Seven
On the drive back to the city, I replayed the mental tape I’d made of the session, knowing that there were more questions raised than answered. And there were several things disturbing me. Most important of them all, I wasn’t certain that Daphne was telling me or her husband the truth about the agoraphobia.
I returned the rental car to the garage and got home by four-thirty. I had to be downtown at the rehearsal studio at seven for a meeting for all the parents and young actors, but I had some time. In the kitchen, I made coffee in the French press-this being one of the very few food preparations that I did not mess up-and took a mug into the den.
The tape that Shelby Rush had given me was on the bookshelves, behind a row of psychiatric textbooks that I knew Dulcie would never look at. I pulled it out, slipped it into the machine, hit the play button, then the mute button, and sat in my comfortable east-side apartment watching a few dozen women act like predators.
I found what I was looking for within minutes.
Daphne was on the tape. I hadn’t known who she was when I’d first watched the video, but she’d looked familiar to me when I walked into the sunroom. Here she was at the gala, in a teal-blue gown, with a sequined blue mask covering her eyes. But the hair was not hidden. The long lean body and the heart-shaped face and the stunning neck weren’t disguised.
She stood in front of a line of tuxedo-clad men, appraising them and finally making her choice. Putting one hand on a tall black man’s shoulder, she nodded to him, turned imperiously without looking back to make sure he was following her, and walked off screen.
The tape played on as I sat and sipped my coffee, mesmerized by the sex play.
Even though I could list every perversion and fetish, had heard men and women sit in my office and admit the most intimate details of their sex lives, had instructed sex surrogates on how to do their jobs, had studied hard- and soft-core pornography, I had never seen real people play these kinds of sex games.
I didn’t relate to the women’s aggression, but I was affected by the men, by their willingness to perform, by their lack of self-consciousness at being treated in this way, by the striptease from tuxedo to underwear to full nudity in front of such a big audience, for no other reason than that they knew it was what the women were demanding of them and they wanted to please their audience. That their pleasing aroused them aroused me.
I had never ordered my husband to strip for me or walk around a room naked or get down on his knees in front of me. I had never demanded anything of him sexually. We had made love without any role-playing and our sex life had been satisfying without being obsessive, mysterious or spiritual. I’d never minded. Firsthand, I’d seen that kind of passion break and cripple people, destroy relationships.
The more I learned about sexuality in graduate school, and in therapy after that, the more I realized that my own sex drive was average and that my fantasy life was not very fertile. But we don’t try to solve things that we don’t perceive as problems. Since I was never sexually frustrated, I never thought about being bored with Mitch. I didn’t focus on my own libido.
I’m not proud to admit this, but I worked with so many patients who were disturbed by some aspect of their own sexuality that, if anything, I was pleased that mine was low on the list of issues I focused on. I even felt slightly superior about it.
I know now that I was wrong, but for so many, many years, I really believed that if I did not care too much about sex, I’d never be disappointed by it.
That lasted until Mitch and I separated.
In the months after that, I realized how little effort either of us had made to explore each other. For two people who were so creative with their own careers, we were dull to the point of being destructive with our relationship.
I didn’t know why. It was something I had yet to figure out. When I had the time. When I wanted to deal with it. When I wanted to rehash the past to see what I could learn that might help me in the future.
That time hadn’t come yet.
The screen had gone to black and I was about to hit the stop button when a new scene came up on the monitor. I hadn’t watched past this point the first time I’d viewed the tape. I hadn’t known there was any more.
I turned up the sound and watched a room lined with books fade in. There were six rows of chairs filled with women whose backs were to the camera. A makeshift stage stood at one end of the room. There, Shelby Rush stood behind a podium.
“And now we have number 3-Tim,” she said.
From camera left a man walked onto the stage. He was shirtless and shoeless, wearing only a pair of faded jeans. His shoulders were broad and his chest was buff. He stood, humbly, his palms face out.
“Tim, would you take off your jeans?” Shelby asked.
As if he fully expected the request, he complied without any sense of embarrassment, and within seconds was stripped down to his underwear.
“Would you please make yourself hard?”
Without any trepidation, Tim obeyed. Reaching down, he rubbed his crotch through the cotton briefs. Watching the audience watching him, he smiled slightly as his hand kept up its steady motion.
It took less than thirty seconds for the bulge to appear and the underwear to tent out.
“And now, show us.”
Tim stepped out of his underwear.
His body was beautiful. Strong and sculpted.
“Does anyone want to test Tim before I start the bidding?”
“I would” came a voice from the audience. A short redhead stood up.
In a culture where so many men, and now women, relied on an array of prescription drugs to replenish desire that had disappeared, been destroyed, or was pushed down so deep they were afraid to find out what was inhibiting it, the raw and real appetites of these women was mesmerizing.