by Julie Smith
She removed a foot-high pile of magazines from a director’s chair and parked herself. “Sonny didn’t give you as a reference. We’re like the CIA; we pry.”
Rob was fiddling with a coffee-maker. “Can’t have crazies taking care of crazies.”
“You got it.”
“Well, what if they’ve got a crazy in the family? Does that disqualify them?”
“You mean you?”
“The Gerards think so. Next to me, ol’ Sonny ought to look like a paragon of stability.”
“He does next to anybody.”
“You want some coffee?”
“No thanks.”
Rob poured himself some and turned to face Skip. She saw that the blue eyes were serious, looked sapphire now, deep with trouble, and there was pain etched in his face. “He’s had a hard life.”
“Sonny has?”
“He’s the pleaser in the family. I’m the rebel.”
“No kidding.”
“I never get to talk to anyone about my little brother. Anybody who’ll listen, anyway. Everybody thinks he’s the greatest thing going.”
“And you don’t?”
He looked around, could find no available surface, finally sat on the floor. “Are you kidding? Who doesn’t? He’s perfect. He does everything right. You’ll love him to death.”
“I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”
“Are you a shrink or are you from personnel?”
She sensed he wanted a shrink, not a personnel officer. “Both, actually. Personnel sends out a psychologist to do the evaluations.”
“Pretty elaborate. I didn’t know DePaul was that good.”
Skip tried to look insulted. “We do the best we can.”
“Well, tell me something, Doctor…”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Tell me something anyway. Can I paint you?”
“That’s not what you were going to ask.”
“All that pleasing can’t be good for a person. It’s got to be eating him up inside.”
“You sound like you really care about him.”
He mimicked her: “You sound like you took shrink lessons. Well, listen. Take ol’ Sonny on. Baby brother’d be great. Nobody in the world’s got more patience. Nobody’s got more stability. If you’re worried about somebody falling apart when the crazies do, it’ll never be Sonny. You could trust Sonny with a baby. And another thing. Nobody’s got more compassion. Kid weeps when he sees a wounded animal. Or used to. He’s a med student now—probably toughened up. I think that’s really why he became a doctor instead of mere bowing to family pressure. He hates to see suffering.”
“We’ve got a lot of that at DePaul.”
“Sonny probably thinks he can fix it. And you know what? He probably can, to some extent. He’s never failed at anything yet.”
“Why do I detect a note of irony? Don’t you two get along?”
“We don’t speak, but it’s nothing personal. None of the Gerards speak to me. Word came down from on high.”
“I hear the Gerards have been doctors for generations. I take it you didn’t bow to family pressure.”
“Hey, we needed a secretary.”
“What?”
“You know, a scribe. Somebody had to chronicle the family history.”
Puzzled, Skip looked around her. Most of the paintings were like the one outside. Dark; disturbing; more or less abstract.
“We grew up in the same place, you know. And this is what it was like.” His moving hand took in the panorama of ugliness he’d created. “But he’s perfect. You’re a shrink—explain it, okay?”
Skip talked for ten minutes on codependency, amazed she could do it and enjoying every second. Deep in her heart, though, she knew a real shrink would have kept her mouth shut.
Rob took the news without shouts of “Eureka! The secret of life at last!” Instead he said, “You want to have lunch or anything?”
To her surprise, she did. She definitely didn’t want him to paint her—she was hideous in purple—but she found herself hating to leave him.
“Sorry,” she said. “Already booked.”
Very sorry.
He was like her—a native who was really an alien. No wonder Conrad thought he was weird.
* * *
Abe had chosen the restaurant carefully. He had agonized over it and had finally come up with Arnaud’s. Probably Missy had only an hour, and probably she didn’t drink, but perhaps she could be persuaded to linger, to have a Bloody Mary, maybe even a glass of wine. He had chosen Arnaud’s partly because she was young and it was old; it would seem stable, maybe even intimidating. He would seem to be treating her with great care. And it was the sort of place that lent itself to a leisurely time, a gracious time; more of her time than she wanted to give if he was lucky.
He knew she would bore him, that she wouldn’t have anything to say to him, but he liked to look at her and he knew how to talk to her. He’d feel okay with her—not the stupid, awkward way he felt with Skip, so huge and so … what?
Self-confident.
He didn’t care much for self-confident people. Why the hell had he asked Skip out anyway?
Because 1 ask them all out.
Every fifth or sixth one went. He’d had no idea Missy would.
She came in wearing a peach miniskirt that showed off a mile of leg and a matching short top that kind of swung loose at the waist. Sometimes when she leaned a certain way you could almost see skin. He sucked in his breath.
She was looking all around, confused. He waved, realizing she didn’t really know him.
“Abe?” She still wasn’t sure it was he. “Am I late? I’m so sorry. I had a client and”—she shrugged—“it just went over. The time, I mean.”
She was as nervous as he was.
“Thank you for coming. Would you like a drink—a sherry, maybe? Just a tiny little something.”
“No thanks. But you go ahead.”
Damn. If she’d drink, she’d lose track of time, forget she had to be back.
When they’d ordered he thanked her again for coming. “I was feeling really down and you made me feel so much better with your share the other night.”
She blushed. “I guess that’s what the program’s for.”
It really was a good way to meet women, but he wished to hell they were less sanctimonious women. “Sometimes I don’t really feel like I can say what I need to in front of the whole group.”
“Really? I find the group incredibly supportive.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m shy.”
She looked shocked. “Shy?”
“Maybe I just don’t have as much recovery as I thought I did.”
He watched her face change from puzzled to sympathetic, shift before his eyes into codependent gear. A useful word, he thought. I love it to death. You go to the group, the group defines what it takes to make them take off their clothes; and you go out and do it.
He said, “I’ve just been feeling really vulnerable lately.”
She said nothing, being far too busy melting.
“Do you have kids?”
“No, but I really want them.”
He smiled, a sad smile as if through tears. “They’re life’s greatest pleasure. Really. You just can’t know till you have them.”
“How many do you have?”
“Two. Two girls.” He clenched a fist. “God, I miss them!”
“Miss them! What’s happened to them?”
This time he went for brave nonchalance, spreading his palms, shrugging. “Oh, the usual thing. Divorce. She got custody. It’s the American way.”
Her eyes burned, her cheeks flamed. “I think that’s so wrong! A father is just as much a parent as a mother.”
“I just feel so helpless.”
“Are you working the steps?”
“I try,” he said. “It’s so hard.”
“You’ve got to let your higher power take over.”
He loved it. She didn’t
have a shitload of “recovery,” that was obvious. Ten minutes flat and he’d manipulated her into giving advice. In a way this was almost more fun than getting them in bed—watching them fell all over themselves trying to do what they were going to the damn group to avoid doing.
“Oh, Missy, you’re right. You’re really right. It’s just so damn hard to let go.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
She looked so terribly sad, so young, so much like one of his daughters that he forgot to feel triumphant as he took her hand and squeezed; as she let him touch her for the first time.
Who in the hell was this Di—a gypsy fortuneteller or Scarlett O’Hara? Sonny had actually found the courage to ask when he saw the place—the weird living room and the bedroom like something out of Tara.
Di had laughed.
Her silky, velvety, satiny, silvery, golden laugh had come to haunt him; it came to him in dreams and sometimes he thought he heard it in the street, on the wind, perhaps. It was the oddest, loveliest laugh he’d ever heard; an elf laugh, a fairy laugh, the mirth sound of a butterfly.
She had laughed and said she’d been a gypsy in another life, but not a Southern belle, never for a moment; she didn’t have a submissive bone in her body.
The bed was hung with mosquito netting, he supposed, though he’d never seen any; at any rate something like gauze was wound around the four-poster bed, almost casually, yet he knew it had probably been done with the greatest of guile. The whole room was white—white and airy, like something in a dream. A full-length mirror, instead of being bolted to the wall, had been placed at a slant, a strategic slant so that you could see what was happening in the bed, you could watch yourself undress your lady love. It was the bedroom of a queen, perhaps a goddess. He wanted to worship her.
In his church you knelt to worship and he knelt before her now. Unzipped her shorts. Pulled them off. Worshipped until she nearly lost her balance, till he had to pull her even closer into his face, digging his fingers into her soft buttocks. So soft; so amazingly soft after Missy’s young hard ones. He loved digging his fingers in, loved her silky feel, loved the look of her thighs, not smooth—no cellulite, of course, but dozens of tiny little wrinkles. He wanted to lick each one.
He picked her up finally, and laid her gently on the bed. She crossed her hands over her stomach till he pulled his T-shirt over his head and, while he was doing it, pulled off her own, took off her bra as he got out of his jeans.
Gently, the ceiling fan ruffled the mosquito netting. Everything was so peaceful, so incredibly beautiful.
As he leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her abdomen was scarred. She had lovely breasts, perfectly sculptured, but he knew what he had to find under them. He took one in his mouth, sucked, licked the nipple that he knew was tattooed. It was pink; she had chosen pink like the nipples of a teenager, though the originals had undoubtedly been brown (he knew she had grown children, she talked about them in the group). Gingerly he caressed the other breast, reaching underneath, and felt the diamond-shaped scar.
He felt a sudden wave of nausea, swallowed. What was wrong with him? He was a doctor. Or he was almost one. Plenty of women had mastectomies, had reconstructions, and this one was quite sophisticated, beautifully done. In a few years he’d be learning to do it himself, he’d do hundreds of them in his career. He turned away from her.
“What is it? It’s my scars, isn’t it? You find me repulsive.”
“No—” He looked back and saw that she’d covered her stomach, had left her breasts outside the sheet. How could he tell her it wasn’t the scars, it was the cancer? It was that she’d come close to death. Maybe not very close, but close enough to make him think about it. He felt tears well in his eyes. “I was thinking of you sick—I can’t stand to think of you sick.” He buried his face in her neck.
She said, “I feel so mutilated.”
“You’re not mutilated. You’re beautiful. Your breasts are beautiful.”
“That’s what he said.” Her voice was hard and ugly, unlike her voice, nothing like the voice of Diamara, the nymph (or possibly the goddess Diamara). It wasn’t only her voice. He couldn’t take in the fact that she’d spoken of another man while she was in bed with him.
“What?”
“Nothing. They are, aren’t they?” She cupped them in her hands. “They’re beautiful.”
She kissed him, her breath like all the spices of the East. She rolled over on him and felt for his penis. It was limp. She took it in her hand, rolled it between her fingers as expertly as if she’d been taught in a harim. It was delicious, a rain of sweet fruits and exotic perfumes, everything strange and heavenly, even the frustration, the hideous frustration of it.
She took him in her mouth and it only got better, and a thousand times worse.
When she finally gave up, she was on the verge of tears. “I’ll bet you’ve never been impotent before in your life.”
“Di—I’m under stress. I’m really stressed out.” His voice sounded like it was coming from a tunnel. He knew he didn’t sound sincere. He didn’t sound anything. His voice had no expression at all.
“You think I’m ugly.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
He threw the sheet off, intending to go down on her again, to make her happy after all, to show her how much he cared. Along with the scar, there was an ugly lump on her abdomen. He sucked in his breath, touched it, felt its hardness, its wrongness.
“What’s this?”
“That’s what he did to me. He botched it. He destroyed my body.” She turned her head away, sunk in a sadness that seemed nearly as deep as his own, biting her lip.
She meant her doctor, and she was right. He had most assuredly botched it, botched it horribly. In a way that almost made Sonny remember what he could be, what he could do, if he could just get past this damn ER rotation. He knew himself well enough to know that he would never in his life screw up a woman’s body like this. This gorgeous woman really thought she was ugly because of the butchery some amateur had performed on her. In a weird way this was giving him courage, making him want to finish what he’d started, to do his job properly.
“He didn’t destroy your body,” he said. “There’s enough of it left to kiss.” In a few minutes she was moaning as if the unfortunate incident had never occurred, once more a goddess properly worshipped.
SIXTEEN
“NOW, THAT ONE sounds interesting. I’ve always thought so.” Cindy Lou meant Alex.
“Interesting how? Like he could be a murderer?” Skip had talked her into going to see Di’s mother and was grilling her on the way.
“Lively but childish. Like he might be fun on a date. Except that I never go out with anyone in my field.”
“Is there some special reason for that?”
She thought about it. “Naah, I don’t think so. I think they just don’t like me.”
Skip tried to take it in, found she didn’t know what to ask. Who wouldn’t like Cindy Lou?
“I guess I’m too sharp-tongued,” Cindy Lou supplied.
“I can see that. I’d say this was the kind of guy who went for bimbos if he didn’t seem to go for anything that walks.”
“Yeah, that’s his rep.”
“You mean you’ve heard of him?”
“Oh, chile, everybody’s heard of him. The man’s a bestseller.”
“He says not.”
“He’s close enough so the nearest competition’s wild with jealousy—or was. Sounds like his career’s pretty much over, though. Burned-out case.”
“But you don’t see him as a suspect.”
“I didn’t say that. I just kind of like his style. The hog and all. You can still be a murderer and have a lot of testosterone.”
“They usually do, right?”
“It makes them aggressive.”
But her tone was light. It seemed to Skip she was taking neither Alex nor the others very seriously as suspects. “So,” said Skip, “this is the official
consultant’s view, as I understand it: Di, harmless crackpot; Missy, unmitigated wimp; Sonny, obsessive medical nerd; Abe, thoroughgoing asshole; and Alex, cute.”
“No, no, no. You got it all wrong. That’s just gossip. Personally, I think they all sound dangerous. Di doesn’t sound like she’s got a real good grip on reality; Missy and Sonny are wound way too tight for comfort; and Abe and Alex are hostile as hell.”
“I thought you wanted to date Alex.”
“Yeah, but I have truly terrible taste.”
Di’s mother lived in Kenner, just outside the city, in Jefferson Parish. It was a fairly nice bedroom community, if a little on the colorless side, the sort where families with children lived. It wasn’t especially where you’d expect to find an older woman living alone. And Mrs. Breaux wasn’t what Skip expected, seeming far too ordinary to have spawned so exotic a daughter.
She had none of Di’s gypsy looks, just smallish brown eyes and brownish hair, lightly touched with gray. It was cut short and curled tightly around a face that wore a thousand and one wrinkles and a heavy coat of orangy powder. Her legs were paper-white beneath a pair of loose pink pants that stopped slightly below the knee. She looked like any old lady from a small Southern town.
As arranged, Cindy Lou did the talking. She gave her real name and real credentials, claiming Di had applied to Tulane in some sort of therapist’s capacity and they were checking her out—the Rob Gerard ploy slightly modified. She introduced Skip as her colleague.
The thing not only worked, Mrs. Breaux apparently couldn’t have been more delighted if the Queen of England had come calling. For a while she bustled about, settling them into a formal living room with glasses of iced tea. Then she sat down herself, snuggling well-padded posterior into wing chair and making no bones about the fact that her day was made.
“You have a very nice house, Mrs. Breaux,” said Cindy Lou.
“Isn’t it lovely? It was Jackie’s, of course—Diamara’s, I mean. I got it in the divorce settlement. She likes the action down in the Quarter and I like the quiet out here.” A shadow came over her face. “Or I thought I would. I never lived anywhere quite so fancy. Sometimes it gets a little too quiet.”