“I’m sitting looking at my beautiful Christmas tree. There’s one big log burning in the fireplace. I’m drinking a Scotch and water. I’m reading a manuscript—”
“What are you wearing?”
She recognized the question: from the past, from men who had cared for her, wanted to visualize her while they talked. But suddenly it seemed an invasion, full of innuendo. She shivered. “Nothing special.”
“I’m sure. Leather tunic, boots, and a whip?” He laughed softly.
“Not exactly. Scruffy old terry robe, with a coffee stain, a granny nightgown dating approximately from the time of my granny, and white gym socks.”
“Anything interesting befall you since yesterday afternoon?” He sounded almost as if he expected something, as if he knew. …
“No, nothing at all.”
“Good.” He paused, said, “Are you all right? You sound funny—is someone with you?”
“No. I’m fine. I told you what I’m doing. I’m going to bed very soon.” She knew he was right: she sounded so remote, even to herself. Damn D’Allessandro! “How was your day?” she added halfheartedly.
He yawned. “I’m bushed. Had to suffer through the Giants losing on a field goal with three seconds left—my mother nearly had a stroke. Then the drive back in the snow took forever plus fifteen minutes. You’re okay, though? Everything all right? No mysterious men following you around or showing up with guns?”
She tried to laugh it off.
He wasn’t entirely satisfied. “You really do sound just a little off, Natalie.”
“Oh, you’re just being a suspicious cop. Or you’re getting too close to me, know me too well. Maybe you’d better concentrate on some other ladies in peril who need Christmas trees.”
“What’s bothering you, Natalie? That doesn’t sound like—”
“Really, it’s nothing. Just drop it, okay? Got my period today and the cramps are sort of rotten, that’s all. Menopause, where are you when I need you?”
He laughed. “You’ll just have to wait another decade or so, I’m afraid. Look, I’ll give you a call tomorrow. And call me if you have anything that’s bothering you. And get a good night’s sleep.”
“All right.”
“We’re going to make some headway this week. Hang on. You got that?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll call if I need help. I promise.”
He told her to sleep tight, and she hung up the telephone with a weary sense of disappointment. Her head was suddenly splitting.
Chapter Seventeen
IT WAS STILL DARK when she awoke at six, but half an hour later, when she had left the bathroom and gotten dressed, made the coffee and seated herself by the window, the sky was gray with just a sliver of pink to the east where the sun was threatening to make an appearance. She turned on WNEW to hear Ted Brown, her own personal “morning man.” She smiled rather fixedly as she made a list for the day, which she was somewhat disconcerted to discover included a television appearance on one of the five afternoon chat shows—half-news and half-nonsense. On this program, she recognized, Natalie Rader fit firmly into the nonsense portion. She wished Jay hadn’t insisted that she accept the invitation to go on and be trendy, hot, and full of crap, which was of course precisely what they—the TV people—wanted. Still and all, she concluded her list with “TV at 5” and looked at the day from a fairly aggressive posture. Very determined to advance on the week with stately, controlled resolution.
Quite unexpectedly, as she was deciding to get to the office by seven-thirty for some peace and quiet before the telephones began their constant bitching, there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find Julie in her bathrobe, a Band-Air on her left cheekbone and looking generally as if she’d gone a brisk fifteen with Sugar Ray Leonard. One eye was well blackened, there was a bruise on her forehead, the Band-Aid on her cheek.
“What in the name of God happened to you?”
Julie charged into the room swearing under her breath and stomped down the stairs into the kitchen, where Natalie heard her banging a coffee cup. She reappeared, went to the table by the window, and stood staring at the Christmas tree.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s called a Christmas tree. What happened to your face?”
“When did you get it?”
“Saturday. It’s MacPherson’s doing. I told you … and I’m not going to ask again, Julie—”
“You’re right. MacPherson. God, I’m losing my memory! The romantic sergeant … honest to God!”
“Your face, Julie! It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I want to know about your face!”
“Oh, that old thing …” She sat down and began to cry, gritting her teeth and biting back the noise as tears coursed down her cheeks. Natalie went to her, knelt beside her, took her hand, murmured to her until the tears had subsided.
“Now let’s have it,” she said softly, patting the cold hand and giving her a handkerchief from her purse.
“An adventure. One of my adventures. Stupid, so stupid really. Christ, it was a hellish day, Nat, it really was a hellish day. Yesterday I met a guy at Scandals. Turned out to be the wrong man—stupid, so stupid. You’ve always warned me. Scoop—you were right. But, as you might guess, he seemed like such a nice guy. Quietly dressed, good taste, sort of preppie but about forty or forty-five. Nice conversation. I went back to his place with him. Very nice, good pictures, reassuring furniture, no glitz … but once home on his own ground he struck me as a little spooky. I don’t know why—I’ve tried and tried to think it through and I can’t sort it out. But I got to thinking no, I’m not going to bed with this guy. If he likes me, it won’t make any difference, and if all he wants is a fuck, then I’m not interested anyway—turning over a new leaf and all. But when we’d had a couple of drinks and listened to some music and chatted and I said I had an early day coming up and really should be going home—then he went sort of vaguely crazy. Well, not vaguely. I tried to leave and he turned out to be a tough guy. Thus, my kisser. I finally got him in the nuts with a paperweight.” She smiled and winced at the memory. “And away I went.” She dabbed at her nose with the handkerchief. “I got a cab, and the driver, he was a nice young guy, pointed out to me that I was bleeding, a bloody nose, and insisted on taking me to Lenox Hill Hospital.” She sighed at the absurdity of the situation, made fists. “Emergency room, yet. They huffed and puffed and fixed me up, I talked them out of an overnight stay and police reports, God knows what else, and the cabbie brought me home.” She sniffled. “God, it was all my fault, I suppose. …”
“It was what?”
“My fault. I’d had a lousy day, believe me, one bitch of a day and I probably was bugging the guy—”
“This is not a question of your fault,” Natalie said, managing to keep her temper. Only just. “It’s not a question of bringing something on yourself, not a question of bugging some idiot—it’s a question of assault and battery!”
Julie kept talking, alternately crying and laughing at what seemed to strike her as a bleakly, blackly comedic situation. “But listen, forget the punchout. That’s nothing, old stuff. I had some tests last week and … oh, shit!” She sniffed, wiped her eyes. “Yesterday morning, Sunday, I called my doctor in the morning—poor bastard—and made him raise hell with some people at a lab somewhere about some tests, but they weren’t biting. So I yelled and moaned at him to get some kind of an opinion and he finally told me yes, I’d say you’ve got it, Miss Conway, you have almost certainly got it!” She broke off, blew her nose, wiped at tears.
“What? Got what? Cancer? Oh, God, Jules, you haven’t got cancer—”
She began to laugh through the sobs. “Herpes! Not cancer, herpes! He said it was an epidemic, told me to find consolation in that. Me … herpes, for God’s sake. And here I was with this guy, he said he used to play with the New York Philharmonic. Under Bernstein … and there I was, worried that I might give this virtuoso herpes! I was probably acting nuts, I don’t know. And he beat me up. Oh,
Natalie, what the hell’s going on?”
Natalie held her on the couch for an hour, comforted her as she would a child. Finally the crying was over.
“Look, the guy didn’t kill you, which he might well have done. And you had an angry doctor you were bugging on a Sunday morning make a guess at something only lab tests will show—you don’t know if you’ve got herpes! So just relax, calm down, and we’ll deal with it when we know. And if you don’t stop saying it was your own fault, I’ll personally kick you out in the snow. Look, let me call in to your office for you. You just sit here and recuperate and watch TV or whatever you like to do—take a day off, do Valium, do whatever you want. When I come back tonight I’ll bring cold lobster and we’ll talk it through. Okay, Jules?”
“Oh, Natalie …”
“Pals, kiddo. It’ll be okay. More or less.”
They laughed.
Natalie was horrified by the whole stupid mess, but she was hiding it, drawing strength from trying to help out, from giving strength. There was no point, no point in telling her about the man on Saturday night, about D’Allessandro’s revelations.
Everything seemed to be coming apart, just spinning out of control.
Rory Linehan was waiting for her at the office.
So much for her stately, controlled resolution.
“Ah, my dear Miss Rader,” Linehan said, struggling to his feet. He was wearing a shabby corduroy jacket with a plaid shirt and striped tie. She wasn’t sure if she was actually smelling Bushmills or if it was a particularly nasty trick of memory.
“Feeling better, Mr. Linehan?”
He looked puzzled. “Why I’m fine—”
“Not the last time I saw you,” she said.
“And that’s what’s on my mind, dear lady. Perhaps we could discuss—”
“Why don’t you just apologize and be on your way?” Natalie could hardly believe what she was saying. It felt good.
Linehan shuffled his feet nervously, ran his fingers back through his slick gray hair. “Now, now, no point in holding a grudge.” He flashed a deathly grin, a man who needed a drink. She thought briefly of E.T. Here was an Irishman, alone, a million miles from home and afraid—he’d have sold his sainted granny for a double shot of Bushmills. He looked at Lisa behind her desk, licked his puffy lips. “Ah, could we go into your office?”
“Lisa,” Natalie said, “I’m really pressured today.” A lie, she supposed. “So give us ten minutes and buzz me.”
In her office she sat down and stared at him, waited. She felt all the anger and impotence and frustration bubbling within her, everything she’d been storing up. She nearly laughed, watching him: if he’d had a forelock he’d have tugged it. Should she squander it on him?
“About the other night,” he began. He rubbed his red nose like a man caressing his last valuable possession. “It was all in fun, we’re hoping you understood—p’raps we sometimes go too far, Moira and old Rory. Money worries, Christmas, coming, a wee bit too much to drink … all in good fun.” He gasped a laugh.
“It was despicable. Let’s just forget it—a bad idea all around. Now, I really have lots to do—”
“You’re still my agent?”
“For the moment, yes.”
“Now looky here, there’s no use in threatening Rory Linehan.” He shuffled his feet again, like an actor in a bad play well on his way to running out of gestures. “It was all Moira’s fault, always is, long as I can remember—”
“Please, Mr. Linehan, just leave. There’s no need for this scene.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” He coughed, rubbed that awful exploded nose again. “There’s explaining to be done—”
She shook her head. “No, there really isn’t.”
“I just want you to know, it’s Moira. She’s got terrible problems, and, well, maybe you and I could have a drink someday and get to know each other.” He spoke like a schoolboy reciting a memorized piece. “Just the two of us.” His face was gray, like a bum’s stubble. He looked shaky and she didn’t want him to faint. She got up and opened the door.
“Anything is possible, Mr. Linehan. Thanks for coming by.” She waited, holding the door, looking at the floor while he thought it over and finally went into the hallway.
“I won’t bring Moira. Just the two of us.” His eyes were dull and wouldn’t come back to life until he got his fist around a drink. “Till then,” he said.
She watched him wander down the hall, touching the wall with one hand, turn the corner, out of sight.
What was that all about? She went back to her office, closed the door, suddenly drawn to the window with its view of the construction site where it had all begun, where things seemed to have started going crazy.
But of course it hadn’t begun with the sight of the man with the gun. You never really knew where anything had begun unless you took it all the way back to the beginning, being born and looking around for the first time. Neither had it begun with the breakup of her marriage and the collapse of nerves she’d experienced in the aftermath. No, it had all begun a long time ago. She didn’t suppose she’d ever really understand it, and maybe it was just as well that way. …
The rubble of Moira and Rory Linehan’s life had set her on a retrospective course and she found herself thinking about her mother and father. It had been a messy relationship that she had observed and withdrawn from all through her childhood. It had been possible to be close to both her parents, but never when they were together. Together they seemed to form a third creature, curled in upon itself, feasting on anger and frustration and closing out the little girl who would he in bed listening to the raised voices, clapping her hands over her ears, pretending she was the heroine of Rebecca, who last night had dreamed she’d gone back to Manderly. …
She’d been through enough self-analysis, acres and acres and years and years of it, she’d traipsed back and forth past the effigies of her mother and father, talking, talking, talking, crying until she couldn’t cry anymore. Maybe it had begun then, buried in the fears of her childhood, maybe that was where everything began and maybe the shrinks were right on the money. And here she was, thirty-seven, still wondering, still striving to understand and solve and move on.
She remembered her mother. Elizabeth. She, too, had been small and dark but had lacked the sturdiness of Natalie’s hips and thighs. She had been a slight, almost wispy woman with shining dark eyes deep in the sockets, long black hair that had streaked with gray when she was still a young woman. A fondness for cameos, anything set in burnished, glowing gold. A thin voice that seemed to come softly from her forehead … Stylish, always dressed in the best, the most expensive, always ready for a shopping trip, always bandaging over the wounds, her own wounds, with an application of money. She used to tell her daughter, “Never marry a man who can’t keep you in good shoes. Everything else will follow, dear, if he doesn’t mind the shoe bill.” Elizabeth: a weepy, neurotic woman, pretty, sharp-featured, lovely hands with exquisite rings and bracelets, wholly dependent on her husband, hysterical if she felt she’d been caught in a mistake or a failure or any act she imagined was unladylike—the worst sin. Putting up a shiny, moneyed front to disguise her frustrations, her sadness, her despair.
Side by side they stood, in her memory, Elizabeth and Ray Mitchell. Ray, looking like Jimmy Cagney, short and dynamic and busy, always incredibly busy without a moment to spare, full of expectations—of himself, of Natalie, of Elizabeth. Bustling, full of energy, surrounded by other men like himself. Work, golf, work, duck hunting, work … Self-centered, successful, almost unaware of the feelings of others, utterly confused by his wife’s desperation and dissatisfaction with their marriage …
Side by side they stood like two sad-faced figures on a crumbling, dried-out, fly-specked wedding cake, until the lady began slipping off, running away from home for days at a time, no way to find her, and coming back—what had the doctor said, that night so long ago? Ah, yes, a wee bit under the influence. …
I
n the end she did it with Glenlivet, a quart of the best, and about forty sleeping pills, according to the doctor, and poor Ray had been quite broken up about it. He’d taken a month down in Pinehurst with his chums consoling him.
And Natalie, far away at Northwestern, had come back for the funeral, which had been carried off under something of a cloud, what with the rumors behind the explanation of a sudden cardiac arrest. Then, Daddy off to Pinehurst with his golf clubs and Natalie back to school, never having cried.
“Hang on, Tiger,” he had said. “She was a troubled woman with a mighty load of anxiety. Forgive me, but maybe she’s better off now. At rest, you know.”
He had kissed her goodbye at the big house in Rye and patted her fanny and the limo had taken her to LaGuardia.
Two years later, having chipped to within four inches of the pin—his cronies seemed to find that awesome, what a way to go!—he had keeled over in a sandtrap on the seventeenth. A real heart attack.
Anxious Mommy. Daddy playing to an eight handicap.
Gone.
She was brought back from the past by Lisa buzzing her. Natalie punched line two.
“Mrs. Rader, I’m dreadfully sorry about intruding on your workday. This is Alex Drummond … I’m a friend and colleague of Dr. Lewis Goldstein. He may have mentioned that he’d referred you to me, or me to you, anyway you get the point.”
“Of course, he told me. You’re on my call list—”
“Well, I had a free moment and thought I’d go the extra step at Lew’s urging. And, of course, we’re having trouble with our telephone line this morning, incoming calls are being routed to a woman in Brooklyn. I’m lucky I’m not particularly paranoid. You did want to see me, according to Lewis.” He was all business, just short of brusque.
“You must be a wise man, Dr. Drummond.”
“Oh, I am, off and on. But how did you know?”
“Because with my schedule I’d probably have put off calling you—”
“You’re certainly under no obligation, Mrs. Rader. I’m doing Lewis a favor, that’s all.”
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