Thirty-One
Dearest,
Two more candles burning makes three lights altogether, and tonight the smell of the wick is just a little bitter and the scent of the wax is just a little sweet. I pass my finger over the flame, feel the heat, and it shocks me. That I can feel anything shocks me. The women with their naked arms and legs, with their hungry eyes and mouths, they felt heat and passion and pain and they felt sick. And I watched them, even smiling while I watched them, and was someone unfamiliar to myself. I was a stranger in my own skin. They burned with pasted-on passion, but my passion was real, it is a need even I can tell is desperate, a need for revenge that has entered into the cracks of my psyche like some slippery ooze, filling, then expanding, turning those cracks into ever-widening chasms.
I had room for no one but you. Why didn’t you understand that? I had love for no one but you. I’m talking about real love, of course, and I do know what real love is. I would slit my own throat and drown in my own blood to prove to you how real that love is. How could you not know that?
The secret of what happened to you has turned me into someone that you would not recognize. Inside of me, where I loved people-you most of all-and cared about what happened to them, I am now hollow.
Three of them have been punished and there are only two left. Are my efforts, working like sandpaper and rub, rub, rubbing at my skin, getting past the top surface, to the muscle, to the bone, to the deep center where I used to be, doing any good?
I have found the edges of my mind and I have touched the corners of my own hell. It is a small room, and on every wall there are mirrors, but when I look into them, I do not see myself reflected back, but you.
I never saw myself in your eyes staring back at me, but now I see your eyes, accusing me.
You were wrong, you know, you didn’t understand-you were all I had and all I ever wanted.
One woman died last night and the other lingers on in a hospital, in critical condition, according to the news. I watched them touching each other. Slathering on massage oil-oil I had sent them-acting out their disgusting scenario for the hundreds of thousands of hungry eyes. I watched them touch each other with sure fingers, not for the sensations it gave them but for the titillation they gave others.
You wrote that I didn’t know how to love, that it wasn’t you I loved, but some idea of you. How could you ever think that? I would cut my hands off at the wrists and my feet off at the ankles to tell you how much I loved you.
Last night I proved it again. I watched and then I held my breath, and they vomited and flushed bright red and broke out in sweats and fell to the floor. This, I whispered to the computer screen, this is what you get for doing what you do. This, I whispered, as the blond one crawled on the floor to reach for the phone, trying to save her own life, mocking our lives, mocking what happened to our lives, this I do for you.
Monday Eleven days remaining
Thirty-Two
Bob was on time for his appointment but he looked even more tired than he had the week before. He lay down on the couch and flexed and unflexed his fingers. While I waited for him to start speaking, I drank some of the bitter, lukewarm coffee in my mug.
The coffee had been so much better in New Orleans.
The sun broke through the clouds, and for a few seconds my office was filled with light. Maybe the snow outside would start to melt. New York City had gone for more than a week without a single full hour of sunlight.
New Orleans seemed very far away.
“My wife has been using my computer again,” Bob said. “She’s been snooping around and going to all the sites I visit.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Of course not. She forgot to erase the cache of where she’d been while I was at work. Her whole little trip was right there for me to see. She left tracks.”
“Did you confront her?”
“I didn’t have a chance. She confronted me. You know I’ve been unfaithful to her in the past. I had a few affairs over the years. It seemed to me that this was so much more acceptable. So much safer. Less threatening. I don’t know these women. Don’t talk to them. They just stimulate me. And they’re there whenever I want them. Beautiful, sexy women who don’t want anything from me.”
“Nothing?”
He looked at me. “What do they want from me?”
“You can’t think of anything?”
“No.”
“What do you give them?”
“Nothing. They aren’t real.”
“Bob, they are real.”
“I just meant that they aren’t actually interacting with me. We don’t have a relationship. They are anonymous to me, I to them. I pay them to-” He broke off.
“Go on.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”
“Bob, what do they want from you?”
He laughed bitterly. “Better my money than what women usually want.”
He’d gotten there. Good.
“What do they usually want?”
“They want to get inside your head. They want to own you. And to be the only woman that you think about. As if there could ever be only one woman that I think about.”
“But there’s a difference between thinking about someone and acting out your sexual urges, isn’t there?”
“There is, but that’s what the Internet is good for. I’m only thinking about these women. I’m not with them.”
“But you’re not with your wife, either, are you?”
“No.”
“Why, Bob? Why aren’t you having sex with your wife?”
“Because she’s the same. I know everything she is going to do and everything she is going to want. I know how she is going to make me work on her for anywhere from twelve to fifteen minutes before she can come, and then once she has, she’ll be willing to let me have my turn.”
We had talked about this before. Several times, in fact, Bob had described the dry and tedious sex life he didn’t enjoy with his wife. But to date, he hadn’t broken through and connected to his anger at his wife’s lack of interest. He hadn’t gotten emotional about it. He simply accepted it and used it as a way to justify his Internet habit. Until he allowed himself to feel how furious he was that his wife was not interested in exploring a richer sex life with him, and until he talked to her and let her know how it made him feel, he wouldn’t be able to begin to work on the addiction he had come to see me about.
“Have you heard about those two girls?” he asked, his voice suddenly low and conspiratorial.
Not wanting to assume anything, I asked him what he was talking about.
“The two Web-cam girls. The one who died, the one who’s still in the hospital.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking for a moment about being woken up when Noah got the call.
“This is very freaky, but I saw them on Saturday night.”
“You saw it happen?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, then his fingers started to do their march on the leather armrest. “I was watching them, and then I heard my wife get up. I heard her go into her office. It was late. About midnight. I thought she was asleep. She’d told me she was going to sleep at ten-thirty. Some nights her antidepressant keeps her up-it had the night before, and she was tired.”
“What did you do when you heard her?”
“I turned off the computer and went to bed.”
“How did you feel?”
He thought about this-as if it had not occurred to him that he had any feelings about it. “I was angry.”
“About what? What made you angry, Bob?”
“I wanted to keep watching those girls. I’d seen them before. The Saturday Night Specials, they called themselves. Only worked on Saturday nights.”
“And you couldn’t watch them because of your wife?”