The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  ‘No, no. Don’t be. I was just surprised, that you—’

  ‘That I what?’

  ‘Wanted to kiss me.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  This time it was Max who blushed.

  Juliet felt a stirring of sexual excitement, a thrill at the possibilities to come, at the potential the evening held for intimate acts with this likeable man. But events had their own momentum; passion its own choreography. What would happen would happen. Trying to rush it would just make things awkward. In the candlelight, the attraction of his green eyes was so absorbing that she had to drag her own gaze away from them.

  She glanced around her apartment. It was inviting, gorgeous; it was hers. Something struck her, a feeling more profound than mere gratitude. She let out an audible sigh of contentment.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It feels like what I used to look at, always from the outside. Other people’s houses. Warm, safe, home. And you did it for me.’ There were tears in her eyes. She breathed out a slightly ragged breath. Emotion was costing her composure, but she didn’t much care. Composure was for the Emergency Room, for colleagues and the patients in her care. Max was a friend and very soon might become her lover. It could happen at any moment.

  ‘You’ve made me secure,’ she said. ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  He did not add to that, he didn’t need to. She could hear the satisfaction, almost the relief in his voice, at what he had done for her. It mattered to him. She sensed with certainty that his emotions ran far deeper than his willingness to express them.

  The moment came when all the food was eaten, the decanter drained, the coffee drunk. The candles were guttering as Max finally rose to go. Juliet opened the door for him and they paused and lingered in a moment of shared sexual tension.

  ‘Landlord,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Tenant.’

  ‘Messy …’

  She closed the door on him. She stood for a moment leaning her weight against it. She turned and looked through the peephole but there was nobody there. She bit down on her lip and then opened the door and looked down the hall at her retreating guest. He had heard the door open and now he turned and paused, a questioning look on his face. Quietly, Juliet said, ‘Come back in.’

  He was still for a beat of time. The physical pause was so long that she didn’t think he was going to do it. And then he walked back along the hallway, through the door, into her arms and her devouring kiss.

  Eventually the kiss broke. They stared at one another, their eyes burning with desire. She began to unbutton her blouse. She had dexterous surgeon’s hands, but her fingers felt clumsy in the passion and nervousness of the moment.

  Max strode across the room and he lowered the blind. Juliet slipped her blouse from her shoulders letting it fall, then unhooked her bra and shrugged out of it. She stood semi-naked in the candlelight, her breathing heavy, almost coarse, her skin tingling, exposed.

  Max had been rooted to the spot by the window for a moment, before he walked over to her, unable to keep his hands from reaching out and touching her. He examined her with his fingertips and his eyes, seeking and discovering her with a rapt look of wonder on his features. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said.

  She took off his shirt, running her hand up his arms, along a latticework of tiny scars etched on to his fore-arms. His expression changed when she did this and she could not tell whether her doing it pleased or angered him. The latter she thought; it was turning him on, as he pushed her down and continued to stroke her. She could feel his heat and the tensile strength of him and hear his breathing grow more rapid and shallow.

  She started to feel uncomfortable. There was something frenzied about the way Max was touching her. His absorption was too intense to allow her to relax with him.

  ‘Max.’

  But he did not respond.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Juliet said.

  The expression on his face did not alter. Max did not appear to understand what she was saying. It was as though she had not said anything at all and her body stiffened with alarm.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she said again. ‘I can’t get him out of my mind.’

  Max stopped touching her. She was aware of his harsh breathing, his heat and intimate proximity. His voice, when it came, was guttural. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Jack.’

  Max got to his knees. He got to his feet. ‘I was going too fast,’ he said.

  ‘I still only know his smell,’ Juliet said. ‘The way he touches me.’ His sound and rhythm, she thought, his tender, intuitive confidence. His gentle strength. In the presence of this stranger, she missed the intimate attentions of the man she loved. ‘I don’t want it to be this way,’ she said.

  Max swallowed hard, bringing himself under control. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You get it, right?’ Relief made her voice eager. She did not want to hurt someone who had been so kind to her, someone whose vulnerability she had sensed was really quite raw.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Max said. Calmly he walked out of the front door and closed it quietly but firmly behind him. She gathered her clothes and put them back on.

  Juliet sat on the floor, hugging her knees up against her chest, shaken and suddenly insecure. The home that had felt so comforting earlier suddenly felt like a stranger’s domain, an alien place crammed with odd trinkets and props and mysterious keepsakes, and items of furniture from a history more frightening and more unsettling than she could ever imagine.

  Eighteen

  MAX BELIEVED THAT perspective was a very important influence in determining events and their out-come. He had studied people. He had watched them intently and learned from his observations. He knew their weaknesses and fallibilities, their appetites, their vanity and their greed. He knew that people were often governed by fear. He considered himself something of an authority on the subject of fear.

  By and large, people believed what they wanted to believe. But if you could dictate their perspective, you could make them believe what you wanted them to. It was quite an easy trick to pull off. And anyway, he had practised it to the point where it was second nature to him.

  He had taken great pains to eliminate chance from his life. He was risk-averse, cautious, the opposite in temperament of a gambler. He did not enjoy spontaneity or feel comfortable with the notion of surprise. He had been surprised in his childhood by an event so awful it had made him dread anything he could not predict or manipulate. He was deliberate and methodical. It was important to him to be in control. His intelligence and his meticulous preparation generally overcame any variables and put him several steps ahead of what was happening at any given moment.

  It was chance he had to thank, though, for his first encounter with the woman who would later become his tenant. Had his grandfather not taken ill at that particular moment, had he not been obliged to take him to the hospital on that specific night, he might never have laid eyes on Juliet Devereau.

  He had caught her at the time of her greatest vulnerability, when desperation drowned out any suspicion she might otherwise have had. He was therefore doubly grateful to chance. And his gratitude was deep and sincere because that brief and wordless study of Juliet had been more than just the snapshot of a glamorous professional absorbed by her work; it had been love at first sight.

  He had never felt the emotion before. But he knew it was not simple lust he felt. He had never felt the need for love, never, to his knowledge, suffered from its absence in his life. For Max, romantic love was more than slightly hazardous. Love of this sort was often prefaced by such adjectives as ‘hopeless’, ‘endless’ and ‘bottomless’. It was an impossible emotion to control.

  But if you could manipulate a person, cleverly and completely and without them knowing you were doing it, you could make them reciprocate the feelings you had for them. And then love wasn’t hazardous at all. You were not its victim; you were its beneficiary.

&nbs
p; The night that he first laid eyes on Juliet a door separated the two of them. He was in the waiting room, patiently waiting for word on his grandfather’s condition from the physician who had wheeled him away to examine him. He had been there almost an hour. Waiting was what you did in waiting rooms.

  She was in a room beyond it and all, to his untrained eye, was chaos in there. The door kept opening and closing on medics rushing in and out, their scrubs heavily smeared with the deep crimson of arterial blood. There was the glimpse of the patient, a boy chained to a bed, bleeding profusely from what Max gathered were gun shot wounds. There was the boy’s mother, hysterically weeping for her son, restrained by a capable nurse.

  Juliet was calm and lovely and Max did not yet know her name. He saw her look down at the wounded boy with an expression of compassion on her beautiful face. He distinctly heard her say, ‘I’m going to take care of you.’

  Not ‘we’, the hedged bet of collective responsibility, but ‘I’. This woman was going to take it upon herself to save the patient’s life. Her skill would determine the outcome and if he died, she and she alone, would shoulder the responsibility and face the recrimination of his grief-stricken relatives. She was slightly built for so heavy a burden, but strong-willed, Max could tell. He was impressed. More than that, he was beguiled.

  She introduced herself to the hysterical mother who was praying in Spanish, a language Max recognised, but didn’t understand. ‘I am Dr Devereau,’ she explained. Her calm, her tranquillity, seemed contagious. She took the woman by the arm and said, ‘We need to operate immediately. I need you to hold back so that I can do my best with him. You must try to remain in control of yourself for as long as there is hope.’

  The woman nodded. She was open mouthed, staring at the splashes of her son’s blood on Dr Devereau’s white coat.

  To the nurse, the doctor said, ‘Let’s go.’ The medical team, grim-faced, Dr Devereau unquestionably at the head of them, wheeled the boy swiftly out towards the Operating Room. There were bottles of plasma and blood attached to brackets above the gurney he was on, and an oxygen mask over his face. He was unconscious and his complexion had a bluish tinge. To Max his prospects did not look good. The patient was evidently far closer to death than he was to life.

  Max was left alone. There were other people waiting there, but they did not count. After the dramatics of what he had just witnessed, after an encounter with Dr Devereau to which she had been oblivious, he felt flat and empty. He was indifferent to the fate of the wounded boy. He had enjoyed the drama though, and relished the performance of its star.

  Max endured a vigil that lasted most of the night. He had brought his grandfather to the hospital unconscious. He knew they would not bring him around abruptly. If they did so, the shock might stop his heart. They would wait until he revived to assess his condition. Communication was a part of the procedure. He had learned that through previous visits. They would ask his grandfather questions. Max wondered would August be capable of coherent speech after this latest episode. The decline in him was rapid and seemingly relentless.

  A few minutes before dawn, he looked up to see August being brought towards him in a wheel chair. The old man looked pale and very elderly and frail and there was sweat beading his forehead. He seemed alert, but also pained. Max took a handkerchief from his pocket and gently dabbed at his grandfather’s brow.

  The doctor pulled Max to one side, out of his grandfather’s hearing.

  ‘It’s another stroke, isn’t it?’ Max asked.

  ‘No. It was a panic attack. He lost consciousness because he fainted.’

  ‘But he thought he was dying.’

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said, ‘but he also thought he was going crazy.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Max said.

  ‘These are normal signs of panic disorder. I’ve called in a script for Klonopin. He should probably see a psychiatrist. Does he get much mental stimulation? Does he interact with people his own age?’

  ‘He values his privacy. He interacts with me.’

  The doctor looked unhappy with this reply. ‘I know it can be difficult, dealing with a semi-invalid.’

  ‘Do you? Have you done it? Do you do it every day?’

  ‘There are agencies. There is a support network. Without stimuli, people suffer mental atrophy. I can give you some contact numbers.’

  Max was suddenly distracted. Through the swing doors towards the OR, Dr Devereau had reappeared. She was in her swabs, a surgical mask loose around her neck, just out of surgery and talking to the shot boy’s mother. The doctor looked tired and drained and gorgeous. She was a creature with the power to restore life to someone from whom, but for her skills, it would certainly have slipped away.

  He could not hear the conversation, but Max watched attentively until he saw the mother raise her hands to her face and begin to cry and he knew the tears were her expression of joy and relief. He could not help but smile in admiration at what the beautiful doctor had accomplished.

  He heard the doctor attending his grandfather say something to him. He repeated it, ‘Are you OK?’

  Max snapped out of his reverie. ‘Yes, thank you. I’m absolutely fine.’

  ‘Should I get you those contact numbers?’

  ‘Don’t bother. When he is well, my grandfather has all the stimulation he can handle. But he is not what you would call a garrulous individual. He has no gift for friendship. He prefers his own company. I’m grateful for your efforts and I am sure the medication will help, but your advice is misguided.’

  Max turned and wheeled August away and out the door. In the corridor beyond, he saw a bulletin board full of notes and ads. The name Devereau was printed prominently among the cards and papers pinned there and of course, it caught his eye. It was not all that common a name after all. If it was her, she was seeking an apartment and if the size of the hand-printed letters on the card was an indication, she was doing so quite desperately. At the bottom of the ad there were several hanging tabs with her surname and the same phone number written on each.

  What happened next happened in slow motion for Max. He made a decision that would take him into territory he had never attempted to explore before in his life. He would plan every step of his expedition with meticulous care. He was a meticulous man; attention to detail was one of his distinguishing characteristics.

  With calm and excitement competing in him for ascendancy, he unpinned one of several identical cards advertising a cab company from the board, took a biro from his shirt pocket, flipped the card over and, in neat and precise capitals, wrote, ‘APARTMENT FOR RENT’.

  Nineteen

  THE FIRST PART of Max’s plan worked perfectly. There was a moment, just after she had moved in, when he thought that his grandfather might expose him and ruin everything, but in the end the moment had worked, to his advantage.

  It had been the afternoon after the one on which she questioned him about the gift basket left outside her door. August had been ill and shaky and the shakiness had made him truculent and difficult, and there had been the possibility that he might have become, in his truculence, disastrously indiscreet.

  Max prepared a syringe of medication for him. Sweating, jittery and angry, August waited for the needle to be plunged into his arm. He said, ‘Is this how you get your women now? What is wrong with you?’

  Max just looked at his grandfather. He hoped the look was vulnerable. Vulnerable, at that moment, was exactly how he felt. So much depended upon the old man’s cooperation. He had already invested a great deal emotionally in successfully luring Juliet to live there. He did not want anything to arouse her suspicions. He wanted her to remain in blissful ignorance.

  She had to think that it was her idea. The possibility of romance had to occur to her without his obvious influence. His was a passive role in the proceedings. He knew that she had been too badly hurt to welcome a sexually aggressive approach. She was ripe for the method of seduction that perfectly suited his character and inclinat
ions.

  ‘I know what goes on in this building,’ August said. ‘Just like I know what goes on in your head. You think I don’t understand how your brain works? You’re just like your father.’

  On the August scale of insults, and Max was wearily familiar with the entire list, this was a severe one. August had despised his son-in-law.

  ‘I’m your daughter’s son,’ Max said. ‘Your blood runs through my veins.’

  ‘More the pity,’ August said.

  Max dug his nails into the flesh of his arm. Crescents of blood oozed where the skin broke with the savagery of his grip on himself. It was an unconscious gesture, a nervous reflex. He was oblivious to the pain it caused, but the habit had scarred his forearms with tiny curves of pale skin raised in hardened bumps.

  August said, ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself, present yourself to people like a normal human being?’

  Max didn’t respond. He could not even begin to know the answer to the question, which he thought unfair and pointless. Things were what they were. He had been shaped by circumstance. He was, for better or for worse, what his world had made him.

  ‘You’re jealous and perverted like your father,’ August muttered.

  Something snapped in Max. ‘That’s enough!’ he said. ‘I take care of you. You depend upon me. I do not ask for gratitude. I do what I do for you out of loyalty. I don’t deserve your abuse.’

  ‘My contempt is what you have,’ August said. ‘And you have earned all of the contempt I possess.’

  Max did not reply. He had gathered control of himself again. His grandfather’s slights could do him no real harm, so long as they were confined to this private dialogue.

  ‘She was beautiful,’ August said. ‘Your mother was gentle and generous. She was my only daughter and she married a weak man. She married a weak man and then she compounded her sin when she gave birth to another.’ He clenched a shaking fist and hit Max with it feebly against the chest.