As she flipped the page and began to fill the next with additional jottings, the ink ran out in her pen. She gave it a shake and tried again, but no, nothing. She pawed at the folders on the desk, moving everything, looking for another pen and in the process, revealing the beautiful picture of George, with his toothy grin, his strong, sharp teeth prominent in his mouth. He had been so wonderful. She gently touched the frame and smiled softly.
Then Laura rose and walked toward Kevin’s den. It was his home office and he had a similar setup to what was at work, with duplicates of all the desk toys. In the room were other, larger items, a mini putting green, a mini basketball hoop. Basically it was a college dorm room but with fewer books and no pictures of pro cheerleaders or minor actresses.
Before she could enter the room she heard his voice, at a whisper, but nevertheless audible. He was talking to someone he shouldn’t be. Laura knew what to expect but she stopped anyway, waiting to hear what he was saying.
“All I have to do is think of you and it happens,” he whispered. Then after a pause, he continued, “No it’s you. I’ve never wanted a woman this much.”
Laura shook her head as she heard Kevin’s end of the conversation and easily inserted what was being said on the other side. The only thing she didn’t know was whose voice it was, but how did that matter. Some version of this conversation had been taking place for years in her marriage and the woman on the other end of the line never was Laura.
Peculiarly he said next, “I wouldn’t even have to stop for the fudge. Got a jar in the car.”
Fudge, thought Laura. What on earth was his game now? This was definitely a new angle.
“That game will go on for hours,” insisted Kevin and then imploringly, “Let me come over.”
Laura bowed her head, a sad but wry expression on her face. It never ended. Yet she never did anything about it. To her this was a personal indictment and it made her feel rotten about herself even more than about Kevin, even more than about their marriage, which clearly was long dead, just not yet buried.
Then Kevin snickered, “You kidding—she wouldn’t even notice. Let me worry about my wife.”
Despite her desire to be a wry sophistocate who could take this betrayal in stride because she’d already had so much practice, a look of pain crossed Laura’s face. As she began to creep away she heard his last comment.
“He’s not the saint you think he is.”
Dirty and jubliant, Bill and Will burst through the door carrying baseball equipment and looking like they’d just come in from winning a war. “Girls!” shouted Bill, “We won! You missed a great game.”
Chrissy, feeling apprehensive about Bill, tense about what might transpire that evening, and guilty about having eaten a massive three bites of lasagna, approached him tentatively. He grabbed her like a swashbuckling Errol Flynn, of whom she’d never heard, and kissed her with bravado. Not enjoying the sense that she was being toyed with, Chrissy tensed up and became even more withdrawn. Her voice cold and angry, she said, “You reek!”
Bill laughed and hugged her, oblivious to the mini drama that was playing inside her mind. “Yeah, we need showers.”
Scowling ever more deeply, she said, “Of pizza.”
Observing this, Will headed for his room as Bill said crossly, “For God’s sake. I’m going to shower. We can talk after.”
Talk! Bill had said talk. Chrissy knew what that meant—it was obvious what was coming. Her head began to pound again, not that it had ever stopped. Pacing and beginning to hyperventilate, she reached for the phone and while dialing, she bent over, placing her head between her knees. If she’d had a paper bag, she would have been breathing into it.
She performed the usual ritual in attempting to recall Ben’s number, dialing 1-800-shrinkk several times before she got it correct and ultimately got the phone to ring. When Ben answered, her voice was truly mournful, “Hi, it’s Chrissy again. It’s over, I know it’s over. He wants to talk. What am I supposed to do now?”
As Ben’s voice came through at the other end of the line, she resumed pacing, hearing only part of what he was saying, politely waiting until it would be her turn again to speak. “I tell you I won’t go back to Godiva. I won’t! I can’t! No. Never again.”
Then she paused and almost considered Ben’s question, to which she replied, “No, he didn’t say that.” And again a pause and a reply, “No, I didn’t try that.”
Her pacing heated up and as she listened to what was an attempt on his part to calm her down, she walked to her purse and began digging it in, but couldn’t find what she sought, so she dumped the contents out and began pawing through them. There were mini exercise gadgets, empty prescription bottles, which she opened although she knew their contents were long ago used up, and just for good measure, she gave them a shake before hurling each one down. With trembling hands, she opened a lipstick, applied it without a mirror, then twitched and freaked out a bit more, shook her head, then rubbed the lipstick off on the back of her hand. Wondering was it too late to take her over the counter diet pills, she shrugged with intense frustration and downed several.
Interrupting Ben, she said, “And you’re absolutely sure psychologists can’t prescribe drugs?” It didn’t matter how many times previously she’d asked that question, she continued as though it had never before been expressed, “But that doesn’t include Valium, right?”
Bill had showered and tucked the kids in for the night and by this time was in the bed, a thick stack of medical journals on his bedside table. Instead of reading, he was holding a small, framed photo of his wife and kids. He gazed at it peacefully, now and then running his finger across the glass.
Bill spotted Chrissy entering the bedroom from their bathroom and hastily stashed the picture back in his bedside drawer as she stopped to spritz herself with some perfume.
Tense and still overwrought, it was her plan to seduce Bill, to remind him of all the things about her he loved, even though she couldn’t enumerate any of them at the moment. She was wearing a beautiful peignoir set which any man would like and she knew exactly what to do. She clicked on the stereo, turning the volume low, and launched into her plan of attack.
How many evenings had she worked out on the treadmill while Dancing with the Stars was on television? She didn’t know how many, but a lot. How many times had she seen those lithe TV dancers perform the Rhumba, the dance of love? Also a lot. So this was her chance to writhe and wriggle her way back into Bill’s heart—and his pants.
Bill looked up, quite surprised to see Chrissy squirming along in the room, doing some sort of new exercise maneuver. It didn’t look like Yoga exactly, but it did involve some hip thrusts and several leg kicks. This was getting serious. Now she was dressing in seductive lingerie to work out. She never stopped working out. Her movements became jerkier and jerkier and Bill began to wonder would she dislocate a hip or a shoulder. There was something that looked like a squat thrust. Terrified to keep watching, but too entranced to glance away, Bill watched with a combined expression of confusion and horror.
Finally the workout ended, and Chrissy climbed into bed without even having broken a sweat. She grabbed Bill in some sort of wrestler’s hold and began kissing his neck so strenuously he began to wonder had she somehow converted to vampirism during the day. Kindly he encircled her shoulders and gave them a squeeze, hoping to calm her a bit.
“We need to talk,” he said softly.
Chrissy lurched to a sitting position and gazed all about the room, clearly growing more and more frantic. “I knew it. I knew it,” she said repeatedly.
“I’m worried about you,” said Bill in a concerned voice that gave new meaning to the term bedside manner. “You’re overdoing the diet. You’re not yourself. Laura told me you forgot to pick up Candy.”
Hearing that name drove Chrissy into an even deeper frenzy. She was nearly beyond words and could only say “Laura!” with a tone normally reserved for the names of traitors in cinematic thrillers.
“You’re half hysterical all the time lately,” said Bill.
“It’s the Koush Koush,” she replied, unable to devise any other line of response. “I can’t believe you won’t get it for me. If I were your patient, you would. What’s the point of living with a doctor if he won’t….”
Bill tensed and his face grew stormy. “This nonsense has got to end.”
End! Chrissy had heard the word end and was terrified. “Okay, okay,” she said, climbing on top of Bill and wriggling a bit.
Bill responded to her kisses for only a few moments, realized he didn’t have the energy for anything more, then gently maneuvered her off of him. “Honey, I’m just too beat. I got up at six. Here, c’mere.” Thinking they could snuggle down beneath the covers and drift off peacefully to sleep, Bill turned off the light and took Chrissy in his arms.
She lay there, wide awake and clenched within his embrace, her heart pounding with stress, her face worried and suspicious, but of course by then he was asleep.
- THREE -
Kevin observed with some small degree of scorn Bill busily scribbling notes on a collection of patients’ charts. He was always such a boy scout. “Hey, buddy!” said Kevin, a touch too effusively, causing Bill to gaze up only moderately perplexed. Unfazed, Kevin continued, “Playing in the softball game on Sunday?”
Bill pondered the idea briefly then shook his head and said, “Nah, think I’ll take the family to the zoo or something.”
Ever so nonchalantly Kevin extended his hand toward Bill and handed him Angie’s card. “Thought you might want this. For the party I mean.”
Bill accepted the card and observed Kevin as he continued his coolly delivered speech.
“Don’t think Laura knows her. She’s a patient and apparently a fabulous caterer,” said Kevin, maintaining his rehearsed level of nonchalance. “She’s hot too. Likes older men. If I weren’t married….”
“That was the kid who was hanging all over you yesterday?” asked Bill.
In his most sincere voice Kevin said, “Yeah. Actually a bit of a problem for me. Maybe you should take over her case. Doesn’t have much weight left to lose.”
Bill nodded. “No problem. We don’t want any more trouble around here.”
Kevin was preparing for a clean getaway, but then Bill said something that provoked an intense response.
“Ever thought of getting another dog?”
Kevin’s face cycled through a range of emotions as Bill watched bemused. There was disgust, consternation, jealousy, fear, and apprehension. All he wanted to do was exit Bill’s office but he couldn’t resist turning to answer his partner before moving back to his own domain. “That damn movable rug was the cause of everything.” His voice grew more and more heated. “That incident. With you-know-who. George’s fault.”
Bill laughed incredulously. How remarkable that Kevin was blaming his infidelity on a dog. “Oh come on,” said Bill.
Kevin quickly grew enraged. He strode right up to Bill’s desk and though they were inches from each other, his voice grew louder. “He was always in the middle. He understood her. He was a soulmate. And what was I? What was I? I’ll tell you what I was. I’ll tell you. Yes siree. I was just the chopped liver in the bed on the other side of George. That’s what I was. And we all knew it. And he loved it that way.”
“Go on—that’s nuts,” said Bill gazing almost clinically at Kevin. What could possibly be the genuine source of this insane rivalry? He had no clue.
“I come in here to do you a favor,” said Kevin, his blue eyes flashing, “And this is how you treat me, deliberately plunging a dagger into my heart and twisting it. Some friend you are.”
“Kevin, you’re starting to scare me. Can you hear yourself?”
“Oh I hear myself all right. But do you? Do you hear me? If you knew everything you pretended to you wouldn’t know half of what you should. Get it?”
“Not even a little bit,” said Bill.
Muttering to himself, his comments an inaudible but clearly cranky rumble, Kevin strode back and forth in the office, now and then raising a warning finger toward Bill, who watched him as an adult observes a child mid-tantrum. Eventually Kevin decided to return to work, but as he exited Bill’s office, he turned one more time and wagged the warning finger at Bill, who just looked perplexed.
Leaning into the office once more, Kevin said, “You know I’m allergic to dogs.”
“No you’re not,” said Bill.
Kevin’s face was stormy and his voice was filled with righteous outrage. He wagged his finger yet another time and said “Well I could be.” Then as Bill laughed right in his face—well, at his face—Kevin strode from the room, thinking Bill would get his, delighted to feel completely justified about the plan he had sent into motion. And for years he’d thought of him as a friend—he should have known better.
Chrissy, exhausted after having made an attempt to be Suzy Homemaker and scramble eggs for everyone’s breakfast, which admittedly met with some smiles and thank you’s, needed to talk to someone, so she’d automatically headed to Zero Tolerance, where there would be someone on a treadmill who wouldn’t mind a conversation. They weren’t exactly her friends, but more like strangers who’d become casual familiars.
Today she was happy to see the Dominant/submissive couple whom she’d often chatted up before, but whose names escaped her. In her mind they were always labeled as Butch and Wimp. About her age, Butch was a masculine looking woman who carried a riding crop at all times. At this moment the crop sat on the book rest of the treadmill where Butch worked out next to Chrissy. On Butch’s other side, Wimp, six years younger, a slender, relatively effeminate looking male, who was working out in a pair of studded leather shorts and a kind of erotic looking pair of studded leather suspenders, which Chrissy knew were not suspenders, but she didn’t know what these chest straps were called. They served no purpose as far as she could tell and looked rather comical. As Chrissy talked, Butch and even Wimp listened with rapt attention, although now and then Butch would feel compelled to stop for just a second and whack Wimp on the thigh so he would increase his pace on the treadmill.
Chrissy spoke as though her heart had been completely broken. “I spotted him with his partner’s wife. I can’t tell you—so humiliating,” she sighed.
“Ahh, honey,” said Butch with kindly sympathy, whacking Wimp even harder.
Wimp yelped briefly, then swallowed hard as though he were trying to subdue an inappropriate level of arousal there in the gym. “Did you confront him?” Wimp asked.
Chrissy shook her head sadly, “No, but Bill mentioned her, just like it was so cool, so casual, so nothing. But I knew what it was—a dig, aimed right at me.”
Whacking Wimp on the back of the thigh, Butch signaled that she wanted him to lift his legs higher as he marched on the treadmill, then said to Chrissy with utter disgust, “Flinging it right in your face like that.”
Delighted to be heard and understood, something not even her shrink had provided lately, Chrissy nodded intensely. “Exactly! And I gave up a career for him, to be there with him and his kids, and those kids are vipers half the time.”
Wimp continued what appeared to be a quasi-Nazi goosestep on the treadmill but spoke softly in a way that was either paternal or maternal, Chrissy couldn’t decide. He said, “Can’t really blame the kids, though.”
Chrissy considered this for a while, cycling in her mind through all the insults hurled at her by those little monsters and then said, “No, I guess not, of course not. I think he’s been putting them up to it though. Can’t figure why. Makes no sense.”
Butch, whacking Wimp once again and looking with some satisfaction at the streaks of red on his slender thighs, said sternly, “Stop lagging, lazy,” then she continued, “Psychological dominance, of course.”
Hearing that, Chrissy grew even more concerned, a few tears forming in the corners of her eyes, and then as she continued, she began to sob. “I can’t even tell you about t
he sex. Last night….” Her sobs grew more pronounced as she said, “What was I thinking. I don’t know anything any more. And he thinks I don’t know what’s in that drawer. I know. I know.”
Butch and Wimp shared knowing glances. They could picture precisely the sort of deviant torture devices this monster had hidden in a drawer, all without the consent of his partner. That was against the rules. It felt a little erotic to them, but they knew the rules.
“Oh you poor thing,” sighed Wimp, who jumped only slightly when Butch cracked the crop against his ass.
Plaintively Chrissy said, “I tell him what I need…yeah…in one ear.” For how long had she been begging for Bill’s help, for this drug only he could provide, this drug that would be the answer to everything. And what did he do for her? Nothing.
“What a user,” said Butch, clearly enraged.
The tears rolled down Chrissy’s face. “I’ve given him the best year of my life.”
“He’s just begging for it,” said Wimp. “Somebody should teach him a lesson.”
Butch nodded vigorously, “Yes—then we’d see how quick he puts his foot where his mouth is.”
Butch and Wimp drove through the streets of Beverly Hills in their black, Honda CR-V, a popular SUV owned by many people. Both wore black leather and dark glasses. They had been having a serious discussion for several days as they drove around in search of Chrissy’s house, but both knew what the outcome would be—whatever Butch decided they should do.
“It must be right around here,” said Butch. “I’m sure she said right around here.”
“And you’re absolutely certain we should be interfering,” asked Wimp for about the fiftieth time. “This could turn back around on us. We could get in trouble.”
“Look,” said Butch, rather exasperatedly, “I know you went to law school for a semester before you opened the flower shop, but we are not going to be persecuted for this. We should be given a medal for this. We’re rescuing a woman. We’re teaching an abuser a lesson. We’re heroes.”
Hungry for Love Page 5
