by Alan Russell
She was prepared for the niceties of his departing, but not his question, and covered up with a moment’s hesitation before saying, “Thank you.”
He retrieved the bottle from the refrigerator, and then inexpertly worked on the cork. She didn’t have a corkscrew, but she had one of those wine pulls he had to figure out. Naturally, he didn’t ask her advice.
“Why is it,” Cheever said, finally finishing with the cork, “that Moses walked around the desert for forty years?”
“I don’t know.”
Cheever poured into her glass. “Because like most men he was too damn stubborn to ask for directions.”
She tried to hide her smile behind the glass, but he saw it. He saw a lot of things.
They sipped their wine for a few minutes. “I can make some coffee,” she said.
“Not necessary for me,” he said.
He reached for the bag of takeout, shook it, then shook his head. “They forgot to include our fortune cookies.”
“That’s just as well,” she said. “I’ve pretty much given up on processed foods.”
“And I’ve pretty much given up on the future.”
Rachel laughed, even if she wasn’t sure where the line lay between his truth and his joke.
“Where’d she go?” Cheever asked.
They kept playing ping-pong between themselves and Helen, kept bouncing back and forth between them and her.
“Deep inside herself. She wants to hide. Helen once had a psychosomatic blindness. She claimed someone had stolen her eye.”
“Her eye?”
“You know how the three Fates are sometimes portrayed as having only one eye, and that for each of them to see they have to pass that eye back and forth?”
He nodded before asking, “What happened with Helen’s blindness?”
“It only lasted a day or two. It was a period in her life where she didn’t want to see. Things weren’t going well.”
“Sometimes her disorder is convenient for her.”
“At times it is a magnification of the human condition.”
“What do you mean?”
“We choose our blind spots. We put on one face, and then we put on another. We pretend we are one person, as if such a thing was possible. We say we should know ourselves, as if there was this one being set in concrete. But to be human is to be multifaceted.”
“We’re all multiple personalities?”
“Not in a diagnostic sense. But you are, or have been, Cheever the father, Cheever the detective, Cheever the lover. You have played, and continue to play, different roles.”
“Just as you do.”
“I think women have to play even more roles than men. In relationships we’re expected to go from Madonna to whore in a blink of the eye.”
“Do you know about Helen’s masks?”
“Yes. There’s a German word: maskenfreiheit. It translates to the freedom allowed by masks. Some of her alters allow her that freedom. Helen doesn’t even need the masks. But consciously or unconsciously she collects them as a metaphor for herself.”
“There’s that part in all of us,” he said, “that wishes we could be at a costume party and be totally anonymous, that wishes we could say and do things as someone else.”
She nodded. Cheever felt like he was talking too much again, but with her he wanted to open up. “What’s that word again?”
“Maskenfreiheit.”
“Gesundheit.”
She smiled. He made her forget her pain.
“Do patients try to hide things from you?”
“All the time.”
“Do they succeed?”
“Not very often. I know how to look for love and a cough.”
“Love and a cough?”
“Neither love nor a cough can be hid.”
As if summoned, Cheever coughed. A piece of food must have caught somewhere in his throat. He coughed again, and she laughed, thinking he was doing it on purpose. Almost, he could pretend that he was.
“I’m in one of her paintings,” Cheever told her.
“Yes. Helen mentioned she was up late painting and told me about your modeling.”
“She’s cast me as Orpheus.”
“Does that portrayal bother you?”
“No.” And then a moment later, “Yes. To go to hell and back for a loved one, and then come up empty, strikes me as a terrible travesty. In some ways I feel I took that same journey for my daughter. And like Orpheus, I failed.”
“Who would you rather she portrayed you as?”
Cheever shrugged. “No one.”
“Unacceptable answer.”
“How about Odysseus then? All he wanted to do was get home again. For twenty years he tried. There was one trial after another for him, but he never gave up.”
“It’s a good thing no one told him you can never go home again.”
“That was the only thing that sustained him.”
She heard the pain in Cheever’s voice, knew of his twenty years of wandering.
Cheever looked at her and felt all constricted inside. He wanted to touch her; he wanted to tell her things. “You bring out this cough in me,” Cheever said.
But he didn’t cough. He reached his hand out for hers, and she reached back. Then he leaned forward and kissed her.
This is madness, she thought, as their lips met. He kissed her a second time. This is irresponsible, she told herself. At their third kiss she was thinking, this is problematic, but her lips met his halfway. And she was the one who initiated their fourth kiss. Her cautionary voices were preaching to a disinterested audience.
You think a thing like this might happen sometime, Cheever thought, but you don’t know. And sometimes at night you wonder if it ever really happened before, or if you just imagined it. And you think certain feelings are gone forever and that the pilot light in your insides has gone out for good. But it was lit now. It was roaring.
They were kissing and groping, moving along like Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu. “Bedroom,” she gasped.
Somehow they made it there, zippers loosening and buttons coming undone along the way. They fell on her bed, and she disentangled herself. “Bathroom,” she managed to say.
He didn’t like it when she left his arms. With her next to him, he had been carried along. It was as if some river had taken him up. Now he felt dropped on a bank. He noticed the room for the first time. If she had still been there, he wouldn’t have seen it. The moonlight, coming in through opened curtains, illuminated the room. Another designer’s showroom, he could see. Cheever wondered whether he should shut the curtains, then decided not to. The moonlight was the best part of the room. Cheever started to take off his clothes, then stopped. Did she want him waiting for her naked? Or would that be presumptuous? He compromised by leaving on his boxers.
As Rachel finished peeing she thought of Denise Jacobson, one of her patients. Denise had a theory about relationships. She said that in the beginning of a romance all Western women went through a “constipation cycle.”
“You’re afraid to go to the bathroom in the same household early on in a relationship with a man,” Denise said. “It’s like you don’t want to admit you have bodily functions. So the more time you spend with him, the more constipated you get. Luckily, the cycle usually passes before you blow up.”
Rachel took off her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. Her left breast had a bandage on it. Very sexy, she thought. And the right breast, the right breast she thought was more her doctor’s than hers...
She hadn’t been with a man since her husband. She was afraid. It wasn’t too late to reconsider.
Her nightgown wasn’t what you would call enticing. It had been so long since she had bought any lingerie that they didn’t even send her catalogs anymore. She put on the nightgown anyway. Maybe he’d just ignore her breasts. Maybe they’d grope in the darkness. She could warn him away from touching her there, say how much her breast hurt, and maybe he wouldn’t touch either one of
them.
Rachel walked out of the bathroom into the moonlight. She went to close the draperies but he intercepted her, rising from the bed with opened arms.
They found each other, and discovered each other anew. They kissed and touched and felt and held. They offered each other sounds without words, and there was that wonderful amnesia of impressions without thoughts.
When her gown came off Rachel froze. Reality returned. She was that deer caught in the light. She tensed as he gently touched her bandaged breast. Then he kissed her left nipple, softly, not sensually, as if bestowing a healing.
He moved over to her other breast. His fingers traced its lines, and then he touched her nipple. She could feel it harden. She knew it didn’t look quite right and didn’t respond in the way it used to. She had the need to say something, anything.
“What’s that expression,” she said. “You take from Paul and give to Peter? I used to have large nipples, but when they reconstructed they took from my left and gave to my right...”
“Shhhh,” he said. He pressed his reassuring lips to hers, and then he went back to her breast. He kissed her right nipple differently than he had the left, working his tongue and fingers and lips around it and her. She felt his passion and responded to it. Instead of being inhibited, she felt a freedom denied to her for so long. Then she heard him say, “You’re beautiful,” and they weren’t words meant to make her feel better, but words offered in wonderment, as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune. And then he coughed, and she thought what a wonderful sound that was, and she found herself crying silent tears because everything felt so good.
Because it was all so good.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
Cheever whistled as he took the elevator up to his workplace. Life had been routine for so long he had forgotten it could be anything else. He was happy even though he didn’t want to admit it, because that would be tempting fate and he knew only too well the ephemeral nature of happiness. Though he hadn’t been celibate over the years, intimacy hadn’t made him content, not like this. He thought about Rachel and hoped she was facing the morning with as many smiles as he was.
It’s not right to feel this good with only two hours’ sleep, Cheever thought, but it was a good tired, a happy reminder of the hours he and Rachel had spent exploring, and talking, and holding one another. He had arisen before dawn so that he could drive home before going to work, and she had seen him to the door. She had offered him some herbal tea for the road, but he drank from her lips instead, a long and passionate kiss that he knew would sustain him more than any herbal tea.
Rachel had made arrangements for a nurse to watch Helen at her house for the day. The plan was for Cheever to relieve the nurse at five o’clock, with Rachel making it home by eight (“If I’m lucky,” she had warned him). Unexpectedly missing a day, she told him, always resulted in “serious payback,” with her working from very early until very late to make up for her canceled appointments.
There were signs that everyone from Team IV had already made it in to work, but Cheever was glad no one was sitting at their desks. He pulled open the yellow pages, found a twenty-four-hour florist, and dialed the number. Speaking softly, so that none of the detectives in the nearby cubicles could hear, he asked that a dozen long-stem red roses be sent out that morning. He gave Rachel’s name and work address, and then was asked for his credit card number and what message he’d like to accompany the flowers. Cheever had to think for a few moments on what he wanted to say.
“Just write, ‘For the doctor of my cough.’ And sign it from Cheever.”
His message was repeated back to him, and Cheever gave his okay, but after hanging up the phone he spent a full minute second-guessing himself. He hoped he wasn’t scaring Rachel off with the roses and talk of his “cough.” It wasn’t like him to be so impetuous, and he was afraid he might be coming off like a lovesick teenager. But what was done, Cheever decided, was done. Besides, it had been so long, so very long since he had felt the desire to send a woman roses that he didn’t want to stifle the impulse.
The pile of paperwork on Cheever’s desk was a deterrent to any more introspection. Mary Beth had come through in her usual diligent fashion. She had attached a sticky atop her handiwork that read: “To Over A. Cheever: Only was able to get you half the years you wanted. Will try to get to other requested years today. M.B.” Mary Beth was known for her stickies. She had one of the great sticky collections of the Western world. Her stickies were never just plain stickies. They always had some saying or pithy phrase. This one read: “This Is a Nice Place to Visit but I Wouldn’t Want to Work Here.”
Mary Beth had sorted by year, had filled each folder with paperwork. Cheever opened one of the folders, saw that it consisted mostly of newspaper articles. And obituaries. Reading about missing and hurt and dead children wasn’t something Cheever was looking forward to doing, but it was a theme Helen Troy was particularly taken with. She had cried tears of blood for Graciela Hernandez even though she had never met the girl, and over the years her art had featured little girls in pain and terror and death. Helen’s pain had a public quality. Cheever had wondered whether there was more than a psychological trail to her tortured psyche. A grievous injury, or a murder, or the disappearance of a child weren’t things easily hidden, and if such had contributed to Helen’s mental state it was possible they had been documented. The articles were another way for Cheever to look back, another haystack for him to search through when he had the time.
Cheever heard Falconi and Diaz before he saw them. They were discussing whether another set of late-night interviews near the gallery was needed. Trailing behind them was Hayes carrying a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper.
“Hey, Cheever, you notice the UT column this morning on the Gill kill?” Hayes asked.
Cheever shook his head. It was usually his routine to arrive at the office early and read the newspaper. “I haven’t read the paper yet,” he said.
Hayes pulled at his walrus mustache and looked at Cheever with feigned surprise. “Hasn’t read the newspaper, and he was the last to get in this morning. Don’t tell me you’re getting a life, Cheever.”
“Yeah, I’ll be joining you real soon at your NRA and Birch Society meetings.”
Hayes called himself a conservative, but that understated it. He thought Rush Limbaugh was a bleeding heart liberal.
“That would do you some good. Clear the liberal cobwebs out of your head.”
“Hayes,” said Diaz, pointing to her head, “all you have in your cabeza is cobwebs.”
“No comprende your foreign talk,” he said. “That’s the problem with this country. It caters to all the immigrants. They think they don’t even have to learn English.”
“You’re the immigrants in this part of the globe,” she said.
Cheever could see that Hayes was warming up for the argument, so he pulled the paper from his hand and scanned the column for the Bonnie Gill piece.
Where have all the flowers gone? Television crews from tabloid TV have invaded San Diego covering the “Carnation Killing” of Bonnie Gill...Speaking of carnations, they’re popping up everywhere, especially at city hall. The fashion trend started when one council member wore a carnation in his boutonniere earlier this week. That prompted fellow politicos to do the same. And now Her Honor the Mayor has been seen sporting a large carnation corsage...Flower Power? Posthumous recognition for Gill is just around the block(s). Word is that redevelopment plans are now referring to the area from Eighth to Twelfth Avenues as the Carnation District...
Cheever tossed the newspaper over to Hayes’s desk. He and Jacoba were just starting in on affirmative action. That was usually good for fifteen minutes.
“You talk with that artist?” Falconi asked Cheever.
“Yeah. I don’t think our murderer was making any art statement other than he didn’t want to get splattered, but as a possible tie-in I’m going to check the gallery records to see if I can find out who boug
ht Aubell’s other paintings.”
Falconi nodded, but didn’t look hopeful. “How’s Helen of Troy?”
Cheever shook his head. “She’s a long ways from the witness stand. She had a breakdown of sorts yesterday.”
“Wonderful.” The sergeant’s frustration showed in the one word.
“Is the mayor really wearing a carnation?” Cheever asked.
“Don’t know,” Falconi said. “But I do know if I see the chief wearing one it’s time to start worrying.”
REUBEN MARTINEZ WAS banging away on a fender. His muscular right arm lifted and lowered itself in strong rhythm. The sound of metal on metal reverberated around the small shop. Part of Cheever’s thoughts was still on a mythological track. He mused about Vulcan hammering at his forge.
Martinez neither saw nor heard Cheever’s approach. When he did notice him he offered a nod but continued with his work for another half-minute before putting down his hammer and extending his hand.
“Afternoon,” he said. “Got us a killer yet?”
“Not yet,” Cheever said. “I just got tired of sitting in the office. It was too quiet.”
“You came to the right place to get away from that.”
“You work the shop by yourself?”
“I got two part-time guys when I need ’em. But business hasn’t exactly been hopping lately.”
“Wish I could say the same thing,” Cheever said.
He looked around the shop and his eyes rested for a moment on the old coffee can that used to hold carnations. The flowers had been removed. At least Martinez wasn’t doing the politically correct thing.
“Your name came up today,” Cheever said. “I was talking with a Detective Lincoln who’s also working the case. He’s been looking into the ReinCarnation Foundation and tells me you’re on the board.”
“Yeah, the B-O-R-E-D.”
“He said you were one of the old-timers, told me you were there from the beginning.”
“Yeah, I tried to tell Bonnie I wasn’t the kind of guy who sat on a board, but she had her own ideas.”
“Are you friendly with the other board members?”
