“I don’t want you to work anymore,” he told Cheryl. “Stay in and sleep. This new girl is going to support both me and you. She’s our new ticket.”
That was if John really meant what he said, and Cheryl knew that could be a fool’s assumption. She’d learned there was usually a grand scheme behind whatever he said.
Right off, Cheryl hadn’t liked the way John was acting around the new girl. And she didn’t like the new girl’s attitude. She didn’t need to look at the new girl’s license to tell she was from the suburbs. The new girl is a snobby bitch, she thought. Dawn acted as though she was too good to talk to anybody but John. One night in bed Cheryl confronted him.
“How come you pay more attention to her than me? Maybe you should invite the bitch into your bed.”
That night John moved her stuff out of his room.
“Fuck you, then,” Cheryl told him. “Then you ain’t gettin’ none of my money or none of my drugs.”
And he didn’t. Cheryl’s drug binge ended several weeks later at a stop sign near downtown. The last thing she remembered was using the rear-view mirror to inject heroin into her jugular vein. A squad car found her there, passed out at the wheel. Between that and a slew of outstanding prostitution tickets, she served seventy-one days in jail.
When she got out, it was her twentieth birthday. To hell with John, she told herself. She turned a few tricks and bought herself a cake, the size someone buys for a banquet. She had the baker top it with twenty blue roses and “Happy Birthday Cheryl.” She visited a hair stylist and bought a new dress and new set of earrings. She bought a bunch of birthday cards.
“Here, you sign this, and then give it back to me,” she said, distributing them to people in the neighborhood.
She thought she was going to spend that night alone with her cards and blue roses. John and Dawn weren’t around. They were busy moving to the Homewood. Then John’s younger brother, Jim, came over with a friend, a couple of joints, and a bottle of Asti Spumante.
She was glad they did. She was afraid of what she might have done alone that night.
Cheryl knew what her problem was then. She knew what it was now as she walked toward the Homewood. There was a part of her that still loved John. She couldn’t understand it, considering the way he had used her. She wished she knew how to make the feelings stop.
When Cheryl reached the apartment building, she resolved she wasn’t going to let him see she still cared. John didn’t argue about her staying. He said she could have the couch, but she could see Dawn wasn’t happy with the idea.
“We’re like family anyway,” John told both of them. “You know I’d do anything for family, mon. You know me well enough to know that.”
Cheryl guessed otherwise. It had little to do with family, friendship, or the love she thought he once had for her. All good ol’ Cheryl is to John Fry, she thought, is a couple of extra packs of dope. For now, that would work just fine.
15
Bobette Gray was stunned, then furious.
“Come on, Bobbi, everyone knows this but you,” said her husband’s best friend. “You are one of the smartest women I know. You can’t figure this out? I’m telling you again, Bobbi, your husband Jeff is gay. Homosexual, you know?”
Gay. An ex-drunk. And basically a pain in the ass, she thought. And she had suspected. But the source of her rage wasn’t her husband or his sexual preference. It was her psychologist and marriage counselor—W. Alan Canty.
Bobbi Gray punched the buttons on her kitchen phone as though her finger was a sewing machine needle. The words of Jeff’s friend filled the pauses between the rings. “Bobbi, Jeff told Alan Canty he was gay at his first session two years ago.”
She was a big woman with a wit matched only by her appetite. But she was neither hungry nor in the mood for jokes. She didn’t bother to identify herself when Canty answered.
“Dr. Canty, I have just found out what everyone in the world knows. And that includes you, and you’ve known it for damn near two years! My husband is gay, a goddamn homosexual. I feel like a fool, like you two guys have made a fool out of me. I’ve been acting like an idiot.”
There was silence, then that calm, resonant voice she knew so well.
“I can explain this, Bobbi. Can you come on your regularly scheduled time and we’ll talk about it? We can handle this problem.”
Explain it? She didn’t see how. But yes, she’d be there. She wanted to see Alan Canty handle this one. And then she was going to tell him where to put the handle.
Bobbi was mad at herself for not following her instincts. For twenty-five months she had put herself and what was left of her marriage in the hands of the therapist. She should have guessed something like this would happen. She had grown sick of hearing those same words from Canty: “Something is happening between you and Jeff. You have to be patient.” Bobbi Gray wished she had fifty dollars for every time he’d said it. She could have moved to Windmill Pointe Drive and walked to see her therapist.
It hadn’t started out that way. Al Canty seemed an exception in a profession she suspected was full of oddballs. In fact, that’s how she found Canty. Before Al, she and Jeff were seeing an eccentric psychiatrist who had some pretty screwy suggestions. When he told her to “go have an affair” she went shopping for a new therapist. She asked the Michigan Psychological Association for a referral in Grosse Pointe, someone close to home. Alan Canty said he was quite willing to see her at seven o’clock every Wednesday night in his home office. It was only a five-minute drive.
Bobbi liked Canty’s unpretentious style, and soon Jeff was going in a separate session. In those first sessions, Canty wanted Bobbi’s version of her life. Most of her memories had to do with being fat. She was a zeppelin at two. Her first day of school she learned the meaning of “tub o’ lard.” Her last year she discovered what it felt like not to be able to shop for a size sixteen prom dress. Weight had been the great constant in her life.
There wasn’t anything unique about her obesity. “I eat because I’m unhappy,” she told him. “And I’m unhappy because I’m fat.” She was sick of diet books and reading about herself in the lifestyle sections of newspapers. She didn’t need Canty to tell her she was compulsive and suffered from low self-esteem.
“I have had a lot of success with your type of personality,” Canty told her. “Things look really bright for your future.”
But then there was Jeff. She knew when they first met at work he was the perfect loser for her.
“Jeff didn’t even know his own shoe size when I met him,” she told Canty. “And behind every man is a woman who knows his shoe size. It’s not like men were banging down my door. I took what was available.”
The marriage worked pretty well until the two of them hit their thirties. They pooled their thirty-thousand-dollar incomes and moved into Grosse Pointe Park. They were like a lot of white middle-class couples who worked their way into the smaller homes. They came for the top-flight school system and crime-free streets. They had a girl, aged two, and a boy, aged seven.
Jeff liked to drink. By the time he was thirty, he needed to drink. For a long time, she blamed herself. She took care of him when he got sloppy drunk and covered for him when he was off on a bender. Then one day he left her. He got sober a week later and stayed sober. He moved in with his mother but still showed up every night for dinner, and for support when he got moody.
That was the situation when the two of them began counseling with Canty.
“This marriage can be saved,” Canty said confidently. “When he comes home make him feel at home. Make it comfortable in his home. If he’s home for an hour, make it wonderful for that hour.”
And Bobbi Gray did. She cooked Jeff’s dinners, washed Jeff’s clothes, and patted Jeff’s back as he walked out the door. She loaned him money. She paid the bills, including the $110 their therapy was costing each week.
“I think he’s getting ready to come home, Bobbi,” Canty kept saying. “I think he’s getting read
y. Jeff and you are perfectly matched for each other. He belongs home.”
Over time she thought she grew close to Alan Canty. He always gave her a big hug at the end of each appointment.
“Think of me as your good friend,” he often said.
Canty also loved her jokes. At times he seemed downright childish about it. If she got off a good one-liner, he would jump up and run out the door of his home office to tell the wife he called Jan-Jan.
“That’s so funny, Bobbi,” he’d say. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go tell that to Jan-Jan.” She’d hear his voice fading as he scurried off into the big Tudor: “Jan-Jan, listen to what Bobbi just told me …”
In some ways, Al Canty seemed an odd duck. He struck Bobbi as the kind of guy who probably got teased to death in school. She could just see him as a scrawny kid with glasses taking crap from his classmates. She knew the feeling well.
And Al had funny little habits. He always brought his thermos of coffee into their sessions and drank the stuff as fast as she chain-smoked her cigarettes. He often was in the same Ban-Lon sport shirt and khaki pants. She watched the shirt fade from green to yellow from repeated washing. She didn’t consider Al a good-looking man. But she never questioned why he had such a young, pretty wife.
“In Grosse Pointe, you learn,” she told one friend, “the ugly spouse is the one with the money.”
Sometimes Canty’s obviously fat income bugged her. Often, Al and his Jan-Jan were still eating dinner when she arrived for her session. They ate standing in the kitchen, as though there was no time for a sit-down meal. It seemed they had lamb chops a lot. The aroma irritated Bobbi. She was sick of eating hamburger because Jeff had drained her budget dry.
Once, Canty interrupted a session and unwittingly revealed the kind of spending money he had around. It happened on a particularly bad day.
“I’m going to kill Jeff,” she’d told Canty earlier on the telephone. “I’m going to kill him today. The only way to help him is to murder him. There’s an old black saying: He needs to be dead, and that’s the only thing that’s going to help.”
At the very least, she was going to file for divorce. Canty was concerned. He summoned her to the Fisher Building to talk. But in the middle of the session he took a long phone call from an antique car agent who had found him a Cord roadster. She listened to him arrange to meet the man at a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Buddha.
“I’ll bring you the sixteen thousand dollars,” she heard him say. “We’ll meet. You bring your wife, and I’ll bring mine, and I’ll be happy to treat you to dinner.”
Then Al ran into another room in his suite and returned with a magazine picture of a white Cord with chrome exhaust pipes.
“This is what it will look like, Bobbi,” he said excitedly. “Of course it’s just a shell now. Of course you realize it doesn’t even work and it’s in pieces. Sixteen thousand dollars. But this is what it will eventually look like.”
Lamb chops, Cord cars, and hamburger. That night she really laid into Jeff.
“You realize what you’re worth to me dead,” she told him. “You’re worth double the child support in Social Security payments, plus all the life insurance, plus none of this aggravation. I know a dozen kids in the ghetto who will do it for five bucks. It’s that easy, sweetheart.”
Canty’s little office in the big Tudor on Berkshire at one time had served as a good place to cry and carry on. But she’d cried herself out many months ago. She no longer feared being alone. More importantly, Bobbi Gray now knew she wasn’t crazy. With two kids, the bills, the house, and her job, she didn’t have time to crack up.
She wondered, why hadn’t Al Canty told her about Jeff? Why hadn’t he saved her two years of marriage counseling, a hundred loads of Jeff Gray’s laundry, and the wrenching emotions of hoping for the impossible? Damn it, she thought. I suspected. I asked Al several times if Jeff was gay.
“No, no, no, Bobbi,” Al always said.
She’d wanted to believe him. Now that she thought about it, she’d also wanted to believe Jeff wasn’t an alcoholic, when anyone in his right mind could see he was a drunk. Funny, she thought, how someone can be so blind to bold facts when they think they love someone. Or maybe she was just afraid what the truth would say about her. After all, she picked him as a husband.
Al and Jeff must be some kind of buddies, Bobbi Gray grumbled. Her husband was leading a double life. But she couldn’t understand why Al Canty had helped him do it.
16
Jan Canty was disappointed Al couldn’t meet her for lunch. The proximity between the Fisher and her clinic at the Detroit Medical Center had always made noon get-togethers a nice option. When she pushed him for another day, he made it clear the lunch hour was no longer his own.
“It’s the parolee evaluations, Jan,” he said. “There’s considerably more work than I anticipated. It looks like my lunch hours are going to be filled for some time.”
Why, she wondered, would he so easily forfeit the only respite he had in his long days? Had she missed something? Were they having financial troubles?
“Oh no, Jan-Jan, everything is fine,” he assured her. “It’s just very important they have consistency in these things. It goes with the territory when you take on court work.”
She had no reason to think Al would not tell her if they were overextended financially, but for some time she had felt a growing need to be more cognizant of their money matters. For years she’d never protested his handling of the household budget. Al had obviously performed the job well. He was so determined to shoulder the responsibility, and she had so little time. To simplify matters she kept her own checkbook for her fellowship earnings and he kept his own accounts for the practice and the household. Virtually all his bills and statements were mailed to his office. Any time she needed money, Al always had plenty of cash on hand. As for clothes, he enjoyed accompanying her on shopping trips and footing the bill.
But she was beginning to grow uncomfortable with the arrangement. It was time for her to act less like a dependent student and more like a professional. And what if something happened to him? What if there was an emergency? Would she know what to do?
Jan had brought up those questions a couple of times in recent months. Al agreed but said all the paperwork involved would take considerable time to accumulate and explain. He’d get to it when he had “the free time.”
That, she suspected, was getting to be a precious commodity in their lives again. For now she would just have to trust him. There was no reason not to. After nine years, she ought to know whether or not she married an honest man. Only a fool, she thought, wouldn’t have realized that by now.
17
“Listen, Cheryl,” John said, “With this trick, we’re going to play brother and sister, just over here visiting Dawn.”
What else, Cheryl thought. They were roles the two of them knew well. For days she listened to briefings about the new trick named Dr. Al Miller who had fallen in a big way for Dawn Spens.
It started to get real good, John said, when he began coming to the apartment—usually around noon, sometimes in the early evening. Each visit brought a minimum one hundred dollars, but often more.
John got caught up in the research, asking other girls how to milk a sugar daddy. Then he’d pass the expertise on to Dawn, who alone dealt with the trick. She nicked him for rent money, her grocery budget, utility bills, and any other expenditure John and Dawn could inflate or fabricate.
Dr. Miller supposedly wanted Dawn to think of the money as his way of helping. He didn’t expect anything in return. With him in the picture, she didn’t need to work the streets, he said. Once he got through some financial difficulties, caused by the death of his wife, he wanted to move her out of the Corridor, set her up in an apartment. Then he’d pay for college if she wanted.
“Dawn, you know you’re college material,” he said.
Soon he planned to have a private practice, he told her. She could come to work as his recept
ionist. Some days he rambled on about his work, telling hospital stories from the Detroit Medical Center.
On others he was just content to relax at the kitchen table, sip coffee, and read the newspaper. He seemed to be satisfied just being in the same room with her. Dawn later said she often just tuned him out.
Several times he surprised them all in the morning. Dawn took his packages at the door as John scrambled from sight. They were treats like chocolate milk, donuts, and orange juice.
“I just thought you could use some things,” he said, grinning. Then he hustled back to his Buick.
One day Dr. Miller brought over what he called his “special blend” of coffee. John had to admit it, the stuff was pretty good. Dawn brewed a fresh pot whenever the trick stopped by.
John theorized the regular was trying to elevate the relationship, at least in his own mind, beyond what it really was. The pattern was all pretty typical, Cheryl thought. Some regulars got quite caught up. It usually never lasted long—a few weeks, sometimes a few months.
“Get all you can right now” was John’s advice. “Tricks are unpredictable. You treat every date like it’s the first and the last. One day they just don’t show, and they’re gone—and they don’t announce it ahead of time.”
But John also wanted to keep a good thing going. He said the trick wasn’t to know that he and Dawn were sleeping together. The guy must be stupid or blind, Cheryl thought. John’s clothes were in the apartment. But John was adamant. When the black Buick pulled into the Homewood parking lot, Cheryl followed John out of the apartment arid they disappeared. It’s just good business practice, John said.
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