Dead Time

by Stephen White

  I didn’t want him to be right, but suspected he was. I said, “For what it’s worth, Merideth’s place is in West Hollywood, not Beverly Hills. And Lauren and Grace are in Holland, not Denmark.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

  Sam wasn’t about to let me get away with having uttered them. He said, “As though the first part is consequential to anyone who doesn’t work for FedEx, and the last part matters to anybody but the Dutch—or on a slow news day, maybe the frigging Danes. I got two questions. Why didn’t Merideth tell me she had a damn condo? That’s one. Two is, did you have that drink?”

  “I came close to saying yes.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I’m telling you what was going on in my head.”

  “The part of your anatomy we’re discussing is not your head. You either did or you did not have that drink.”

  We were officially talking sex, not beverages. “We didn’t.”

  “You were tempted?” Sam asked.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to explore the temptation equation—I found comfort in the illusion that deeds and desires were the most distant of relatives. I said, “I was tempted, Sam.”

  Confessions, I knew from years of listening to them in psychotherapy, often come in bunches. The first is only the initial splash that springs from a siphon as the vacuum gets sealed. From then on, new admissions of guilt tend to keep cascading until the source vessel is empty. Sam, no doubt, had learned the same lesson in his years of interrogating perps.

  He waited. Once I’d finished spitting out the first mea culpa I went on to the next. I said, “Not for the first time lately. I was tempted with Kirsten, too. Last spring.”

  My avowed sexual attraction to a woman who had been my patient in the distant past and whose most recent role in my life was as my defense attorney caused Sam to go silent for a protracted moment. Then he said, “Can’t relate to that. Kirsten. Don’t get me wrong—she’s…a lovely girl. But I’ve never found myself attracted to a defense lawyer. Not even once, not even a little. It’s almost like a cross-species thing for me. Has to be something God never intended. Don’t ever recall actually seeing one naked, but I’m not even a hundred percent sure the parts would fit.”

  Sam was giving me room, making it clear that any confession by me was not going to be coerced by him. “There was a woman in New York. Couple weeks ago. I sublet her apartment. She let me know she was…available…the night before she left on vacation. I kind of asked her out.”

  “You did?” No judgment in his question. Maybe a little wonder, but no judgment.

  “We didn’t go.”

  “She turned you down?”

  “She said yes. I could tell what was on the dessert menu.”

  He went quiet again. I could hear him breathing until he said, “Lemon meringue pie?”

  I laughed. “Something like that,” I said.

  “So you stood her up?” When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, “You can make me ask a ton of questions here, Alan, or you can just tell me what the hell happened. I got nothing but time. My tank’s half full, you’re on speaker, and there’s paved highway in front of me as far as I can see.”

  “I canceled. But I wanted to see her. I’m trying to be honest.”

  “Can I interject a thought? Maybe I’ve been missing something, hanging with you all these years, but it certainly seems to me that you’re suddenly much more willing to walk up to the roulette wheel and bet your marital future on red/black than you used to be. You aware of that?”

  I recalled his Grand Canyon metaphor. The drip-drip of erosion versus the drama of cataclysm. The last year of my life had taught me about erosion. I was toying with lessons about cataclysm. I said, “At some level I was tempted.”

  “You’re focusing on what’s tempting, not why you’re tempted. That’s the trap. Been there. Doesn’t work out.”

  “Go on.”

  “You might be the relationship expert, but I’m the fucking-up-relationships expert. Tempted’s a lesson,” he said. “With women, I mean. And lessons are what they are. God, they are. But it sounds to me like you’re looking for solutions in places where you ain’t got no problems.”

  Country song? I thought. “Which means what?”

  “From where I sit, your problem is at home. If that’s the case, you can’t solve it in New York or L.A. by letting the WMD out of the bunker with some hottie. That’s when things go south. For tonight at least, you avoided that. You did? Alan?” Without offering me much latitude for a timely response, he added, “Right?”

  “I did.”

  “Got to feel good about that, yes?”

  Any initial reticence that Sam might have felt about having this kind of conversation with me had evaporated. He was officially into it. I was aware the conversation felt a little like psychotherapy. I was not in the role of doctor.

  I said, “I guess.”

  He pressed, “You said she’s young? Tonight’s woman. Amy.”

  “Kirsten’s almost my age, Sam. So was the woman in New York. Ottavia. The temptation isn’t about age.”

  “Ottavia? Oooh, her name sings. Has to be a story there. If it’s not about age, what is it about?”

  It was a good question. Sam’s spinning roulette wheel image hadn’t exited my consciousness. I wished it would. Was I really intent on gambling my marriage on red/black? I said, “I don’t know.”

  Sam knew. “Tonight wasn’t about Amy,” he said. “You barely know her. What did you say, that she’s cute? You’re fucking beguiled?”

  I didn’t bite. I was proud of myself. “She is cute. But no, it wasn’t about Amy.”

  “New York wasn’t about Ottavia?”

  I wanted to tell Sam about Ottavia’s scent, and how it made me catatonic in the hallway of her flat. I said, “It wasn’t.”

  “Quick answer,” Sam said. “Too quick.” I thought he tried to make the question that he tacked on next sound more casual than it really was. “Other than Ottavia—what is that by the way, Greek? Italian?—any other temptations? I’m thinking Merideth. She press any of your buttons?”

  “Not one, Sam.”

  “No urge to jump in the sack with her? Déjà vu? Old times’ sake?”

  “No.”

  “That would be significant.”

  “Nothing.”

  He digested my denial. “Sometimes something happens even when nothing happens. Other times nothing happening is exactly what it sounds like. I have a friend in the mental-health field who would tell me that at times it can be difficult to tell those two things apart.”

  I was that friend. Sam was good at this. I might have been surprised. But I wasn’t.

  He said, “Forget everything I just said if you’d like. Really. I’m no genius about this shit. I’ve screwed up everything that matters in the past couple of years.”

  “Except Simon.”

  “Except Simon.”

  I said, “Maybe you’re wiser than you know.”

  “This is easy. Listening to your problems. Doing color commentary on your situation.” He paused. “I ever tell you how I think about psychotherapy, what you do every day?”

  “I don’t think so. Not in so many words. Do I want to hear this?”

  He didn’t care whether I wanted to hear it. “Seems to me doing psychotherapy is like looking over somebody’s shoulder while they play solitaire. You point out shit that they miss, simple shit, stuff they can’t see for some funny reason even though they’re staring right at it. ‘You need to put the black ten on the red jack.’ Like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Solitaire’s always easier when it’s somebody else’s game. Ever notice that? It’s not hard to see what card somebody else isn’t playing.”

  “Is that what we’re doing now? You’re looking over my shoulder, spotting the card I’m not playing, pointing out my mistakes?”

  “Hope not. Nobody likes the wiseass looking over their shoulder while they�
�re playing solitaire. I’m no therapist. I’m a schlub.”

  Sam turned up the sound on his radio. The twang of a country ballad—female, contemporary, and completely indistinguishable from fifty other laments I’d heard involuntarily in recent years, often in his company—blared in my ear.

  For the first month after Adrienne’s death my personal musical tastes were stuck in an Edith Piaf rut. If malaise had a soundtrack, at least one or two tunes would be from Ms. Piaf’s opus. I was relieved when I’d emerged from the extended Edith Piaf runnel. But I still wasn’t ready for Sam’s country tastes.

  “I like this song,” Sam said, apparently entertaining the delusion that I had devolved musically to share his dubious fondness for contemporary country. “Know what? I need to pee. Maybe I’ll top off the tank. Get some ethanol, or whatever the hell they sell in this state. Know what else?”

  With that prelude, I didn’t want to know what else.

  “I’m craving a patty melt. You like patty melts?”

  I was having trouble keeping up with him. The truth was that my mind was still stuck on Kirsten and Amy—okay, both Amys—and Ottavia and Thousand Oaks and erosion and cataclysm and WMDs and roulette and temptations and solitaire and whoever the hell it was singing the song that was playing on Sam’s radio that I wished would just stop.

  “Rye bread, fried onions, good old American cheese, and a cheap hamburger—all smashed together and toasted up golden brown on a griddle that tastes a little bit like this morning’s pancakes. I like it best if the rye has seeds in it. Know what I’m talking about? Is there a better meal to have on the road? I mean, if you’re not in the South. If you’re in the South, then…” His voice turned wistful at some gustatory memory of a Dixie road trip. “Turns out there’s a truck stop ahead that seems like it’s just what the doctor ordered. As long as the doctor in question is neither my internist nor my cardiologist. We’ll talk tomorrow, Alan. Oh shit, gotta go.”

  “What?”

  “I have another call. You take care. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  I could hear him laughing before the call went dead.

  Behind me, on the other side of the screen door, Merideth’s phone started ringing.

  THIRTY-NINE

  It rang anew every few minutes.

  I kept my butt planted on the terrace. The fixed-ass solution was proving an effective strategy for hobbling the urge to chug chilled vodka. That night the process took about ten minutes, and more willpower than I considered ideal.

  I spent most of that interlude musing on Sam’s provocative suggestion that I needed to be more honest with myself about what I had been risking with Ottavia and Amy. The whole time, some primeval part of my brain kept insisting that the introspection could be better accomplished with increased levels of ethyl alcohol circulating in my blood.

  I covered a lot of ground during my muse, but I reached no conclusion other than that Lauren and I had a lot of work to do when she got home from Europe. In the meantime, I had to find a way to deal with my temptations. All of them.

  When I finally felt it was safe to go back inside the condo, I switched off the ringer on Merideth’s landline.

  I indulged in one more long shower. It was a sybaritic, not a hygienic, act. All those heads. I was aware it was a less-than-ideal substitution for the cocktail—in its broadest denotation—that I had not had earlier in the evening with Amy. And for the vodka I hadn’t had alone afterward.

  I found some spare bedding in the linen closet and got ready to convert the long part of the sleek sectional sofa in the living room into a makeshift bed. I knew exactly how the bed in Merideth’s bedroom would feel—the perfect mattress would be encased in linens so soft I would swear the threads had been spun from clouds. But I was determined not to spend a night with any of Merideth’s pheromones banging around like pinballs in my brain.

  A light rapping sound distracted me from the bed-making. I paused and listened. The sound was repeated five seconds later. I threw down the sheets and checked the peephole.

  A young woman. Red eyes.

  Carmel.

  It turned out I did recognize her.

  FORTY

  I asked her to wait. After I threw on some clothes—the Spicy Pickle T-shirt and pair of jeans I’d stripped off before the shower—I invited her inside.

  “Mel?” I said.

  “Dr. Gregory.”

  “Alan, remember?” I offered my arms for a hug. She leaned into me, I thought gratefully.

  She took a step back, nodded, kicked off her shoes, and glided across the room. She perched cross-legged on the sofa right beside the pile of linens, immediately pulling the pillow to her chest. “Nice,” she said, looking around.

  “I’m a guest,” I said.

  “That’s what I hear. Guy downstairs.”

  She had a fleck of a diamond stud impaled through the otherwise pristine skin of her left nostril. The wavy brown hair she’d had as long as I’d known her was streaked with maroon highlights in unexpected places. Her wardrobe seemed designed to feature her surprising—to me, at least; I hadn’t seen Carmel in many years—curves in ways that I had no doubt would make my old friend Wallace lose sleep at night.

  “Should I call you ‘Mel’? ‘Cara’? What works?”

  “Mel. I guess.”

  I sat across from her. “Something to drink?” She shook her head. I asked, “How did you get past Hector downstairs? I find him kind of intimidating.”

  She grinned. “He called you about letting us come up here. You didn’t answer the phone. We tried you on your cell, but you didn’t answer that, either.”

  I heard the “we”—if Cara knew where I was staying in L.A., she had learned it from Amy, her roommate. I looked across the room and saw the missed-call indicator light flashing on my mobile. I had indeed received a recent call.

  “I was in the shower. Long shower.”

  She shrugged. “Amy kind of distracted the doorman. That’s Hector? I slipped by him. Rode up the elevator with a guy who lives on fifteen. He said he works at CAA.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him I was surprising my boyfriend on our six-month anniversary. Hector’s probably pissed.”

  I agreed that Hector was probably pissed. I didn’t know what CAA was.

  Mel shrugged again. Her attitude? Hector would just have to get over it.

  I pointed to Merideth’s phone. “Should I call downstairs and tell Hector to send Amy up? Or do you want to talk in private?”

  “No, invite her up,” Mel said. “She’s cool.”

  I called Hector. He pretended he wasn’t annoyed. I was becoming more enamored of doormen all the time.

  Merideth would learn the whole story from Hector before breakfast. What would she make of it? Only God knew. Merideth had more important things to worry about. Neither Sam nor I was getting any closer to finding out what had happened to Lisa or to the baby she was carrying.

  Once Amy made it upstairs, the three of us sat around in the living room. The girls talked shop—a curious mix of industry-speak and bitching that was probably no different from the kind of unwinding that two nurses might do after a day in the OR. Since the inside-Hollywood gossip was meaningless to me, I sat back and observed.

  After fifteen minutes I suggested to Mel that we retreat to the balcony. She excused herself to the bathroom. Amy asked if it was okay with me if she made herself a drink.

  “Whatever you find in there is yours,” I said. “There’s some vodka. A few beers. Nothing fresh.”

  I sat on a Plexiglas stool at the island while I watched her assemble the components for a martini. She was wearing the outfit she’d worn to dinner.

  The top still popped. The roulette wheel was still spinning. I remained beguiled.

  Jesus.

  Amy filled one martini stem with ice to chill the glass and held up a second toward me. She said, “Happy to make you one too.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  It was my night for temptations. Amy
had great intuition about the best bait to use.

  She had made cocktails once or twice before. The refrigerator door was stocked with condiments, including a jar of olives of indeterminate age. Even tempered by the antiseptic properties of the vodka I could not think of any circumstances under which I would have imbibed the juice in that jar, but Amy seemed fine dribbling some of it into her vodka and vermouth. She winked at me as she carried her drink to the living room, where she curled up on the sofa and grabbed the remote control to Merideth’s big flat-screen television.

  “That drink,” she said without looking at me. She raised her glass. “From earlier? Didn’t think I’d be having it alone, watching TV.”

  With a quick flick of her thumb she found SportsCenter.

  I moved outside onto the terrace.

  Yes, Sam, fucking beguiled.

  I stood at the railing. The bank of diluted fog I’d watched earlier had breached the 405 and was threatening West Hollywood. The leading edge of the mist was infused with an aroma suggestive of petroleum by-products.

  The evening was cool, a welcome change to the day. Mel joined me outside. She said, “My God, it’s gotten cold.” She shivered once, retreated inside, returning seconds later with a throw that she wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. She lay down on the solitary chaise, propping herself on her side with her knees curled up to her waist. I selected one of a pair of hard teak chairs and faced it in roughly the same direction as the chaise. Though I was confident that Merideth had tasteful cushions for the chairs stashed somewhere inside her condo, I didn’t know where to look. The naked wood wasn’t comfortable. Not even close.

  “You didn’t need to come out here,” Mel said after about a minute of silence.

  She meant California, not the balcony. I’d anticipated that she would say something like that at some point in our conversation.

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But your dad thought it was important. He’s worried about you. The Grand Canyon thing.” I caught myself just before I added a comment about how much I respected her father, or how much I owed him. I hesitated because I didn’t want my feelings about Wallace to determine the tone of the talk I was having with Carmel. The therapist in me knew that as soon as I inserted my transference about her father into the equation, I would be limiting Mel’s freedom to express her transference about him with me.