The Venus Fix Read Online Free Page B

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.”

Seven
     
    I t wasn’t a blizzard, at least not yet, but it was bad enough that a lot of people were shutting down their offices early. Kira Rushkoff, a senior partner at Forrest, Lane and Graffe, had walked fifteen blocks in the snow without anything on her head before she found an empty taxi.
    A