The young woman called Virgil held up her hand. “Ricky, try not to sound so pompous.”
Ricky stopped and stared harshly at the woman.
She ignored this look, and with a small wave of her hand, added, “Zimmerman was elected to become part of the game.”
Ricky must have looked astonished, because Virgil added, “Not so eagerly at first, I’m told, but with an odd sort of enthusiasm after a short time. But I wasn’t a participant in that particular conversation so I can’t help you with those details. My role was different. I’ll tell you who did get involved, however. A middle-aged and somewhat disadvantaged woman who calls herself LuAnne, which is a pretty name, admittedly unusual and not very fitting given her precarious position on this planet. Anyway, Ricky, when I leave here, I think you’d be wise to have a talk with LuAnne. Who knows what you might learn? And, I’m certain you will pursue Mr. Zimmerman for an explanation, but I’m quite sure he will not be so readily available. As I said, Mr. R. is very wealthy and accustomed to getting his way.”
Ricky was about to demand a better clarification; the words were partway formed on his lips, when Virgil stood up. “Do you mind,” she said huskily, “if I remove my raincoat?”
He gestured widely with his hand, a motion that spoke of acceptance. “If you like,” he said.
She smiled again, and slowly unbuttoned the front snaps and unfastened the belt around the waist. Then, in a single, abrupt motion, she shrugged the coat from her shoulders and let it drop to the floor.
She wore nothing beneath.
Virgil placed one hand on her hip and cocked her body in his direction provocatively. She pivoted about, turning her back momentarily, then swung around again, facing him. Ricky took in the entirety of her figure in a single glance, eyes working like a photographer’s camera, capturing her breasts, her sex, her long legs, and then finally returning to her eyes. These glowed with anticipation.
“See, Ricky,” she said softly, “you’re not so old. Can’t you feel blood rushing about inside you? A little stirring between the legs, no? I have quite a figure, don’t I?” She giggled once. “You don’t have to answer. I’m well aware of the response. I’ve seen it before, in other men.”
Her eyes continued to lock onto his own, as if insisting that she could control the direction his vision took.
“There’s always this wondrous moment, Ricky,” Virgil said, grinning widely, “when a man first takes in the sight of a woman’s body. Especially a woman’s body he hasn’t seen before. A view that is all adventure. His eyes simply cascade like water over a cliff, right down the front. Then, just like now, for you, where you’d rather be staring between my legs, there is this guilty bit of eye contact. It’s as if the man is trying to say that he still sees me as a person, looking at my face, but in reality he’s thinking like a beast, no matter how educated and sophisticated he might pretend to be. Isn’t that what’s happening now?”
He did not reply. He realized that it had been years since he’d been in the presence of a naked woman, a realization that seemed to be making a loud, reverberating noise deep within him. His ears rang with every word Virgil spoke and he was aware that he felt hot, as if the day’s heat outdoors had burst uninvited into the office room.
She continued to smile at him. She pivoted about a second time, displaying her figure again. She held her pose, lingering first in one position, then another, like an artist’s model trying to find just the correct posture. Each turn of her body seemed to increase the temperature in the office by a few more degrees. Then she slowly bent down and picked the black raincoat off the floor. She held it out in front of her for a second, as if she were reluctant to put it back on. But then, in a swift motion, she slid her arms into the sleeves and began to fasten it tightly in front of her. As her naked form disappeared, Ricky felt almost as if he were emerging from some sort of hypnotic trance, or, at least, what he thought it must feel like when a patient emerges from under an anesthetic. He started to speak, but Virgil held up her hand, stopping him.
“Sorry, Ricky,” she said curtly. “The session has ended for today. I’ve given you lots of information, and now it’s up to you to act. That’s not something you do well, is it? What you do is listen. And then nothing. Well, those times have ended, Ricky. Now you’ll have to get out into the world and do something. Otherwise . . . well, let’s not think of the otherwise. When the guide points, you have to take the path. Don’t get caught sitting about. Idle hands—blah, blah, blah. The early worm catches the whatever. There’s some extremely good advice. Be sure you take it.”
She strode quickly toward the exit door.
“Wait,” he said impulsively. “Will you be back?”
“Who knows?” Virgil replied with a small grin. “Maybe from time to time. We’ll see how you do.” Then she tugged open the door and exited.
He listened for a moment to the click-clack of her heels in the corridor, then he jumped up and raced over to the door. He pulled it open, but Virgil had already disappeared from the hallway. He paused a moment, then retreated back into his office, heading toward the window. He thrust himself up to the windowpane, staring out, just in time to see the young woman emerge from the front of the apartment building. As he watched, a long black limousine slithered to the front, and Virgil stepped from the curb, into the vehicle. The car slid away down the street, moving too suddenly for Ricky to observe the license plate or any other identifying characteristics even if he had been organized and clever enough to think of doing this.
Sometimes off the beaches of Cape Cod, up in Wellfleet near his vacation home, there are strong rip currents that form, and which can be dangerous, and occasionally fatal. They are created by the repetitive force of the ocean pounding against the shore, which eventually digs a bit of a furrow beneath the waves in the sandbars that guard the beach. When the space opens up, the incoming water suddenly finds a new location for its return race to the sea, pouring back through this underwater channel. On the surface, the rip current is established. When one is caught in the rip, there are a couple of tricks one must adhere to, which make the experience unsettling, perhaps scary, certainly exhausting, but primarily inconvenient. Ignore the tricks, and one is likely to die. Because the rip is narrow, one should never fight the flow. One should merely swim parallel to the shore, and within seconds the fierce tug of the current will slacken, leaving one with a simple haul to the beach. In fact, rips are generally short, as well, so one can ride them out and when the pull diminishes, adjust location accordingly and swim back to the beach. These, Ricky knew, are the simplest of instructions, and spoken on firm ground at a cocktail party, or even standing in loose and hot sand at the side of the ocean, makes it sound as if extracting oneself from a rip current is no more trouble than flicking a sand flea from the skin.
The reality, of course, is significantly harder. Being inexorably swept toward the ocean, away from the safety of the beach, creates panic instantly. Being caught in a force far stronger than any one individual is terrifying. Fear and the ocean are a lethal combination. Terror and exhaustion follow quickly. It seemed to Ricky that he read about at least one drowning every summer in the Cape Cod Times where the doomed swimmer had died only a few short feet from shore and safety.
Ricky tried to grip hard on his emotions, because he felt caught in a rip.
He took a deep breath and fought against the sensation that he was being tugged toward something dark and dangerous. As soon as the limousine bearing Virgil had departed from his view, he had seized his appointment book and found Zimmerman’s number where he’d written it down on the front page, and then forgotten about it, never once having been forced to call the patient. He’d rapidly dialed the exchange, only to be greeted by empty ringing. No Zimmerman. No Zimmerman’s overprotective mother. No answering machine or service. Just a steady, frustrating ringing.
He had, in that moment of confusion, decided he’d best speak directly with Zimmerman. And, even if the man had been somehow bribe
d by Rumplestiltskin to end his treatment, perhaps, Ricky thought, he could shed some light on who his tormentor was. Zimmerman was a bitter man, but not one capable of holding a secret, regardless of what he’d been told to do. Ricky slammed down the telephone in mid-unanswered ring, and seized his coat. Within seconds he was out his doorway.
The city streets were still filled with sunlight, though it was well into the dinner hour. The residue of rush-hour traffic continued to clog the roadways, though the commuting crowds jamming the sidewalks had thinned some. New York, like any great city, even though it boasts of a twenty-four-hour life, still functioned on the same rhythms as anywhere: energy in the morning, determination at midday, hunger in the evening. He ignored the packed restaurants, although more than once he caught an inviting smell as he passed one by. But this evening, Ricky Starks’s hunger was of a far different sort.
He did something he almost never did. Instead of hailing a cab, Ricky set off to cross Central Park on foot. He thought the time and exertion would help him to straighten out his emotions, get a grip on what was happening to him. But despite his training, and vaunted powers of concentration, he had trouble remembering what it was that Virgil said to him, though he had no difficulty recalling every nuance of her body, from the smile playing on her lips, the curve of her breasts, to the shape of her sex.
The day’s heat lingered into the early evening. Within a few hundred yards he felt sticky sweat gathering at his neck and under his arms. He loosened his tie and removed his blazer, slinging it over his back, giving him a jaunty appearance that contradicted how he felt. The park was still filled with folks exercising, more than once he stepped aside to oblige a phalanx of joggers. He could see orderly people walking their dogs in dog-walking designated areas, and he passed a half-dozen softball games in progress. The baseball fields were all laid out so that the outfields overlapped. He noticed that often the right fielder on one team was standing more or less next to the left fielder of another, in a different game. There seemed to be an odd, city-defined etiquette to this shared space, each person trying to maintain focus on his own game, while not intruding on the other. Occasionally a ball struck by the team at bat would invade the premises of the opposite game, and those players would diligently step aside to accommodate the disruption, before resuming play. Ricky thought life was rarely that simple and infrequently that balletlike. Usually, he thought, we get in one another’s ways.
It took him another quarter hour of briskly paced walking to reach the block where Zimmerman’s apartment building was. By now, he was genuinely sweaty, and he wished he’d worn some old tennis shoes or runner’s shoes, rather than the leather wingtips that seemed tight and threatened to give him a blister. He could feel a clammy dampness soaking through his undershirt, staining his oxford blue dress shirt. He thought his hair was matted and sticking to his forehead. Ricky hesitated in front of a store’s plate glass window, trying to assess his reflection, seeing instead of the orderly, composed physician who greeted his patients poker-faced at his office door, a bedraggled, anxious man, caught up in a maze of indecision. He looked harried, disheveled, and probably a little bit frightened, he thought, and he took a few moments to try to compose himself.
Never before, in the entirety of his almost three decades of practice, had he broken from the rigid and formalized relationship between patient and analyst. Not once had he ever imagined going to a patient’s home to check on them. No matter how deep the despair the client might have felt, they traveled with their depression to him. They reached out to him. If distraught and overwhelmed, they called him, and made an appointment to see him, in his office. It was an integral part of the process of getting better. As hard as it was for some people, as crippled as they might be by their emotions, the mere physical act of coming to see him was a critical step. To step outside the confines of the analyst’s office was a complete rarity. It seemed cruel, sometimes, the artificial barriers and distances created by the relationship between patient and doctor, but it was out of those same distances that insight was discovered.
He hesitated on the corner, a half block from Zimmerman’s apartment, a little astonished to find himself in that spot. That his hesitation was not all that different from Zimmerman’s occasional pacing outside the doors to Ricky’s office, was lost on him.
He took two or three steps down the block, then stopped.
He shook his head, and said, out loud, but under his breath, “I can’t do this.”
A young couple passing a few feet away must have heard his words, because the man said, “Sure you can, fella. It’s not that hard,” as if in reply. The young woman hanging on his arm burst into a laugh, then mock punched the man in the arm, as if to chastise him for being witty and rude, at the same time. They continued past him, and on into whatever their evening held for them, while Ricky stood, rocking like a boat tugging at its mooring, unable to move, but being pulled hard by wind and currents nonetheless.
“What did she say?” he whispered to himself.
Zimmerman decided to end his treatment at precisely 2:37 p.m. in a nearby subway stop.
This made no sense.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw a telephone kiosk on the corner. He strode over to the phone bank and stuck a quarter in the pay phone, rapidly punching in Zimmerman’s number. Again the phone rang a dozen times, unanswered.
This time, however, Ricky felt relieved. The absence of a response at Zimmerman’s house seemed to absolve him of the need to knock on the man’s door, although he was surprised that Zimmerman’s mother did not pick up. According to her son, she was bedridden most of the day, incapacitated and sickly, except for the unfettered and nearly inexhaustible supply of angry demands and belittling comments that she delivered nonstop.
He hung up the telephone and stepped back. He took a long look down the block where Zimmerman’s apartment was, and then shook his head. He told himself: You’ve got to take control of this situation. The threatening letter, the child being singled out for pornography, the sudden appearance of a naked and quite stunning woman in his office, had all upset his equilibrium. He needed, he thought, to impose order back on events, and then chart a simple course through the game that he was caught up inside. What he didn’t need to do, he told himself, was to throw away almost a year of analysis with Roger Zimmerman because he was frightened and acting rashly.
Telling himself these things, reassured him. He turned away, determined to head back to his home and start packing for his vacation.
His eyes, however, caught the entrance to the 92nd Street subway station. Like so many other stations, this was nothing more than a set of stairs that descended into the earth, with a modest yellow lettered sign above. He moved in that direction, paused momentarily at the head of the stairs, then stepped down, driven suddenly by a sense of error and fear, as if something was just slowly emerging from mist and fog and becoming clear. His footsteps clattered on the steps. Artificial light hummed and buzzed and reflected off the tiles on the walls. A distant train groaned through a tunnel. A musty, aged odor, like opening a closet that has been shut for years overcame him, followed by a sense of contained heat, as if the day’s temperatures had baked the station, and it was only now starting to cool. There were few people in the station at that moment, and he spotted a single black woman working in the token kiosk. He waited for a moment, for a second when she was not being harried by people making change, and then he approached. He bent toward the round, silver metal speaking filter in her Plexiglas window.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“You want change? Directions? Map’s on the wall over there.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I wonder, I’m sorry this sounds strange but . . .”
“What you want, fella?”
“Well, I was wondering, did something happen down here today? This afternoon . . .”
“You gotta talk to the cops about that,” she said briskly. “Happened before my shift.”
; “But what . . .”
“I wadn’t here. Didn’t see nothing.”
“But what happened?”
“Guy jumped in front offa train. Or fell, I dunno. Cops been here and gone already by the time my shift begun. Cleaned up the mess and gathered up a coupla witnesses. That’s it.”
“What cops?”
“Transit. Ninety-sixth and Broadway. Talk to them. I got no details at all.”
Ricky stepped back, his stomach clenched, head spinning, almost nauseous. He needed air, and there was none inside the station. A train approached, filling the station with a steady screeching noise, as if the act of slowing for the stop was torturous. The sound flooded over him, pummeling him like fists.
“You okay, mister?” the woman in the booth shouted above the racket. “You look kinda sick.”
He nodded, and whispered a reply that she undoubtedly couldn’t hear. “I’m fine,” he said, but this was clearly a lie. Like a drunk trying to maneuver a car through twisting roads, Ricky swerved toward the exit.
Chapter Five
Everything about the world Ricky entered that evening was alien to him.
The sights, sounds, and smells of the Transit Authority police station at 96th and Broadway seemed to him to represent a window on the city that he’d never before looked through and that he was only vaguely aware existed. There was a faint aroma of urine and vomit fighting the harsher odor of strong disinfectant right inside the headquarters door, as if someone had been violently ill and the cleanup had been sloppily and hastily managed in the aftermath. The pungency made him hesitate, just long enough to be overcome with a curious din, the blending of the routine and the surreal. A man was shouting unintelligible word concoctions from some hidden holding area, words that seemed to reverberate around the entranceway unconnected to everything else going on. There was an angry woman holding a crying child in front of the sergeant’s thick wooden reception desk, spilling out imprecations in rapid-fire Spanish. Police officers creaked past him, their light blue shirts dampened with sweat from the day’s lingering heat, their leather weapons belts making an odd counterpoint to the squeaking of their polished black shoes. A telephone rang somewhere hidden, unanswered. There were comings and goings, laughter and tears, all punctuated with bursts of obscenities emanating either from rough-edged officers or the occasional visitors, several in handcuffs, who were swept beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the reception area.
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