“Helping her? You mean finding her?”
“I mean helping her get over her problems with making love.”
“Of course.”
“I think I need to tell you some things about her. If you are going to help her you should know about her stepfather. Do you know about him?”
“I can’t talk about that with you, Elias. I can’t tell you what Cleo told me any more than I can tell the police.”
“But you can listen. You can let me talk about it. And you can tell me theoretically about someone like the person I will describe.”
“I suppose I could do that. But why?”
“Because it will help her.”
I didn’t say anything. He was becoming more and more agitated, and I feared he might be having a psychotic break.
“If someone who was hurt and still angry got over her anger, she might be able to reconnect to her feelings,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. This is what I know about Cleo. When she was fifteen years old, her mother went back to work, which required her to sometimes travel, and that left Cleo alone with him.”
“Elias, I can’t-”
“Just listen.” His voice was suddenly louder. I knew that the best thing to do was humor him. Let him talk it out. So I nodded. I wouldn’t break any confidences with my patient. I’d let Elias talk and then I’d call Simon Weiss and get Elias some help.
“Her stepfather had been her father substitute. He’d been married to her mother since Cleo was five. She trusted him. But she didn’t understand that he was just another disgusting man who followed his cock. So when he came to her, she was confused. She didn’t understand. She was a virgin. She hadn’t even had a boyfriend yet.”
Elias looked as if he might cry. Or scream. He was torturing himself.
“Don’t do this. We don’t need to talk about this now,” I said.
“Yes. We do. We have to talk about it.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
He needed to tell me her story, to unburden himself, to let me know that he knew her horror. As much as I wanted to rely on professional ethics and stop him, I also wanted to hear how she had told it to him. To see if she had told us both the same way. Because it would be significant if she had told it to us differently.
“He was a needy bastard, and what he needed was disgusting. He made her take off her nightgown. He buried his head in breasts that weren’t even fully formed yet. He put his head between her legs. He pushed his thick penis between her thighs. That first time he used her legs tightly pressed together as a makeshift vagina. He didn’t penetrate her. Not the first time. Not the second. Weeks went by. He bought her presents. He was contrite. She was scared. Her mother was away. Excited about her work. They had never been close. Cleo couldn’t tell her. And then he finally did it. He broke her. He pushed through her virginity. He desecrated her. He took her for himself.”
Elias was lost in the telling of this nightmare, which he had obviously often visualized. I looked away. The pain on his face was hard to watch.
I stared at a print of an iris, a blue-black photograph-exquisite, erotic, sensual-that hung on the wall. Not, not on the wall. It hung in the middle of a door that was to the right of the kitchen. The print might have been a Mapplethorpe, I wasn’t sure. But it was that good. The petals of the flowers were pressed tightly together. Like hands in prayer. Like a young girl’s legs pressed together.
“Even though he was committing a mortal sin, he did this selfish thing. He violated a fifteen-year-old girl in her own bed with her stuffed animals next to her,” Elias continued.
I had heard stories like the one Elias was telling me too many times before. And, despite all my professional training, these were the ones that brought up the bile. This was what I could not reconcile. When Noah touched me, it was connected to men like Cleo’s stepfather. It was the same act. Only the intent was different. All my listening had damaged me. Except that, for a few minutes in Noah’s arms, I felt that I could be healed, too. That like Cleo, I could find a new and clean place for my own feelings, untouched by what I knew and what I had seen.
Now I’d never know if I’d been right.
Elias’s voice was like a chorus in the background. I wasn’t sure why I needed to listen anymore. A feeling of ennui flooded over me, as if I were drugged. As if my blood was thickening and flowing more slowly through my veins. He was talking about a little girl. A lost little girl. Only three years older than Dulcie. Only seven years older than me when my mother died.
“How did she feel, Dr. Snow? When he left her in her bed all those nights, sheets damp with his sweat and his semen, her thighs red with the pressure of him on top of her. Please tell me how she felt. How it made her like this.”
“A child would become damaged and angry, furious.” I was giving him textbook answers, but he didn’t seem to care. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, absorbing every word. “She would blame herself for this happening precisely because she was a child. She wouldn’t know better than to think that.”
It was all right. I could talk this one out, because I was not talking about Cleo per se. I would give him generalities. But I knew that it was Cleo we were talking about, and this was key to why she couldn’t separate herself from her trauma and make love to Elias the way he wanted her to. The way she wanted to.
“A young girl who lived through that trauma would have several paths to follow. She could break. Or she could finally tell someone and with help she would be able to deal with what had happened to her,” I explained.
“But what if she didn’t do either of those things? What if she didn’t tell anyone and just went on? Would she, might she, become a prostitute to perpetuate that kind of action?”
“Yes, it would give her control over men. By charging for sex, by having the ability to stop it or start it, she would be in total control. Everything she did in her work would ultimately be insulting toward men. Every time she took another client on she would be getting her revenge.”
“And what would make her better?” he asked.
“In therapy, if she was in therapy, a therapist could bring her through that period of time again, help her get in touch with her rage. Help her recognize she only had limited power as a child, but she is not a child anymore. I’d encourage her to vocalize her anger and give her mother the blame she deserves. We’d work through the trauma.”
“And then?” He was nodding as if memorizing what I was saying.
“Then the need to humiliate men would start to go away. By being a prostitute, by getting paid for sex, she turned it into a job and kept her feelings at a distance. She’d have to learn to reconnect to the positive feelings of sex. Once she realized that she didn’t need that motivation, that angry control over men anymore, she might be able to stop loving from a distance. She’s afraid of being vulnerable. She’s been drastically betrayed. She doesn’t trust intimacy. She can’t share much of her real self. She taught herself not to talk about herself or share her real self. It’s love from a distance.”
“And the book? Why would she be writing a book?”
I couldn’t tell him. But I knew. She’d been writing a book because she was still so angry at men that she needed to expose them.
53
She was listening. To the voice of an angel. To the voice of someone who had come to save her. In the pitch-black confessional Cleo knew that it was up to her. Everything had come down to this. Her stepfather had come to her in the dark. And it was dark again. None of the men she took to her bed had ever asked her why there was always one small light on in the room. They never seemed to care. But she needed it. And she needed the light again. She needed to move. But with her hands and feet bound together it was almost impossible. Behind the duct tape on her mouth she screamed in silent agony. Screaming out the name of the woman on the other side of the door who could save her, who would save her if only she could tell her she was there.