by Rona Jaffe
“You know what I mean. She’ll insist on it. She can’t find out.”
“She won’t.”
“She’d better not.” Was this exciting? Was he exaggerating the danger of Olivia finding out? After all, Wendy hadn’t done anything.
“I’m not expendable, you know,” Wendy said.
“I just meant . . .”
“I’m a human being. I don’t think you want to know me at all.”
“I can’t stay on the phone to discuss this now,” Roger said. “She could pick it up at any moment.”
“Does she make a habit of listening to your calls?”
“Accidentally. She could.”
“What about me?” Wendy said. “You’re supposed to protect me. Not only her. You make me feel like shit. You’re just like all the rest of them.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she said, and burst into tears again and hung up on him.
He pounded the desk and hurt his hand. He sat there inspecting it, thinking how it was his instrument, and was relieved that it was unharmed. He shouldn’t have been so unkind to her. She had made up so many different lives and identities for him that he realized he had lost sight of who the real Wendy was—if he had ever known. Their understanding had always been that he would be kind to her, take care of her. She was like a needy child. He had never heard her cry before. Suddenly he felt like a villain. Maybe he should call her back and make up with her.
He stared at the phone. Had he actually made her feel worthless? What kind of person did that make him? She should never have come here to meet Olivia, not really because it was so risky, but because seeing the two of them together was more than he could handle. Although he had told Wendy he would have to stop seeing her if Olivia found out, he had no idea what he would do. He didn’t even want to have to think about it.
He dialed Wendy’s number. It rang four times and then her recording began to play. “You have almost reached Wendy Wilton. If you leave a message after the beep, maybe you will.”
Beep. “Wendy?” Roger said. “Are you screening? It’s me. Pick up the phone.”
Nothing.
“Wendy?” Maybe she had gone out, stormed out, rather, furious at him. Or maybe she had left the apartment because she knew he would call her back and she wanted to punish him. “Wendy, I’m sorry,” he said into the machine.
“Roger,” she said at last. Her voice sounded weak and slurred.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“What is it?” he asked, alarmed.
“I took . . . pills.”
“How many? What kind?”
“A lot.”
“Wendy, what did you take?”
“We had . . . fun, didn’t we,” she said. Her voice trailed off.
It hadn’t been that long. She must have swallowed a whole bottle to sound this bad. “Wendy,” he said urgently, “stay awake!”
He heard her labored breathing, and then she dropped the receiver into the cradle with such dazed difficulty that he heard it rattling and clicking before it finally fell home.
God! He dialed Olivia upstairs on their private line. “Honey, I’m going to go out for a little bit, to get some air.”
“What do you want to do about dinner?” she asked. “Should I just make something?”
“Sure. That’s fine.”
“Pasta?”
My mistress is dying and we’re talking about what to eat for dinner, he thought. “Great,” he said. He threw on his coat and rushed out into the street and found a cab, cursing the traffic, rubbing Wendy’s keys in his pocket like a talisman. He remembered when she had first offered them to him and he had refused them, and finally had agreed. Now he was so lucky that he had them.
“Dr. Hawkwood,” Wendy’s doorman greeted him pleasantly. Roger nodded as pleasantly, forced a smile, and went upstairs.
He let himself into the apartment. It was dimly lit. He waited for the hated Gregory to spring out at him, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Wendy was in the bedroom, lying on the floor, on her thick, white carpet, dressed in a white satin bathrobe, her silken hair spread out around her pale face. There was an empty bottle beside her that had held sleeping pills. It looked like a tableau of tragic death.
He rushed to her and saw that she was breathing. He knelt to take her pulse. Her pulse was still strong and even. But how could he be sure how many pills had been in the bottle when she had taken them, and how she would be an hour from now? When he tried to pick her up her body was dead weight.
He was terrified, sweating. Maybe he should take her into the bathroom and make her throw up. But even if he did, he was still afraid to leave her. The intelligent thing would be to call the nearest hospital and admit her into Emergency, but if he did that he would have to explain why the hell he was here in the first place. What could he say, that she had called his office because it was the last place she had been before she went home and got suicidally depressed? That he had answered the phone? Bribe the doorman to pretend he had never seen him before? Pretend he didn’t have her keys and that the doorman had let him, despite the fact that he was a total stranger, into her apartment because she claimed she was not feeling well? He supposed it would work—it had to. He didn’t know what else to do.
If he could only rouse her enough to tell him what she had swallowed. “Wake up!” he said, and shook her. Nothing. He picked her up and started walking her around the room like a large rag doll, trying to bring her back, even though it was wasting precious time. She leaned on him heavily, unconscious, but her heartbeat was still strong and even. If only he knew that she could sleep it off, that he wasn’t going to let her die . . . He could hardly think rationally.
He put her down. He would have to call 911. They took forever to come; maybe he should just carry her to a cab and . . . No, that would be worse.
He picked up the receiver and dialed.
The number was busy, of course, just when he needed help. He dialed again, and it rang through. “Hello,” Roger said. “I want to report an overdose of sleeping pills.”
Behind him, Wendy moaned.
He turned around, and saw that she was moving. “Wait a minute,” he said into the phone, and went to look at her.
She was moving, just a little, but just enough so he knew none of this was what he had originally thought. “Never mind,” he said to the operator, and hung up.
He knew her so well, but she had caught him off guard and had actually fooled him. She might have taken one sleeping pill, at the most two, but probably none. He began to tremble with relief, and then with rage.
She had never gone this far.
He tried to figure out what she wanted. It was obvious that she wanted him to save her. But he was in no mood to enter this ill-timed fantasy, and it did not arouse him at all. He cradled her in his arms and kissed her face and her hair and wished like hell she would decide it was appropriate to come back to life again so he could rush home before Olivia got suspicious.
“Darling,” he murmured. “Live, please live. I’m sorry. I love you.” Crazy bitch, he thought.
Wendy’s eyelids fluttered open. She looked at him and sighed. “You saved me,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
She sat up and put her arms around his neck. “Thank you.”
He moved away from her embrace. “Suicide is out of bounds,” he said. “It’s serious. Olivia’s cousin just killed himself. This hits too close to home.”
“But still you were here for me.”
“It doesn’t do it, if that’s what you have in your head. The last thing on my mind right now is sex.”
“That’s all right.”
Suddenly the softness of her flesh was frightening, almost alien. “Then what was this all about?” he asked.
“You don’t g
et it, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I just wanted something for myself,” Wendy said. “Today all you cared about was you. So this was just for me.”
“For you.”
“Yes. For me. For me! You can go home now if you like. I have to let poor Gregory out of the kitchen and then I’m going to have a nice bath and go to sleep.” She sounded so calm, the victor.
“I’ll call you,” he said lamely, backing out.
Did he want to call her? Did he even want to speak to her again?
“And when you do, I’ll be there,” she said, and smiled.
She’s crazy, he thought. She was too reckless, too selfish. She had endangered his entire happiness because of her need to be reassured. He had hurt her, and so she had used him. It was not in the rules of their game.
But on the way home in the cab he wanted her anyway.
12
IN THE SPRING, to Olivia’s amazement, Roger agreed to go with her to Jenny and Paul’s son Sam’s bar mitzvah. Perhaps it was because Cambridge was not that far away; the shuttle to Boston was less than an hour, and even with the long ride to and from both airports, it could almost be considered commuting. It was a far cry from the trips to California he had declined. She wondered if he finally felt it was appropriate to show some kind of family solidarity, not only with her but with her kin. Whatever his motivation, she was delighted to have him with her.
Cambridge was old and historic and pretty. Houses had gardens in front of them, there were cobblestoned streets, and little patches of ice still lurked in the grass, reminding her that they had had a harder winter than the New Yorkers. The cab passed Harvard, ringed with old redbrick buildings, and Harvard Square, filled with college students rushing around. Paul taught there, and Olivia wondered what it must be like to spend your life in a place where fresh young faces came and went, on their way to their unknown future lives, while you just stayed there, getting older.
There were some very good hotels to choose from in the area, but Jenny had put the family into a no-frills hotel none of them had heard of, because she wanted to save them money. The lobby was dark, with a big aquarium for decoration, and even the fish looked dispirited. The halls smelled like an omelette, which was either age or the shampoo that had been used to clean the carpet. The rooms had thin towels and tiny pieces of deodorant soap in the bathrooms. Olivia and Roger’s room was dark too, and had no view.
They had passed some of the other cousins in the lobby, checking in or going upstairs, and none of them had been pleased.
“Motel Six,” Nick said, and laughed. He was there with his wife, Lynne, and their young daughter, Amber. “Don’t you miss the Biltmore in Santa Barbara?”
They were a handsome family; Nick the successful New York ad man, Lynne the vivacious beauty, Amber in her crinolines and little ruffled socks.
“Amber’s never been in a hotel like this before,” Lynne said. “When we got to the room she said, ‘Where’s the fruit? Where are the flowers?’” She chuckled proudly at her daughter’s consternation. “She’s used to the Four Seasons. ‘Where’s the fruit? Where are the flowers?’ ”
“It’s only for two nights,” Olivia said, feeling sorry for Jenny that her good intentions had been off the mark, and hoping Roger didn’t dislike it that much.
They unpacked in their ugly room. “The bed’s good,” Roger said.
“And the room is really clean,” Olivia said.
“I found a shower cap in the bathroom,” he said, “so we know it’s not Motel Six.”
“It’s fine. Don’t say anything to Jenny tomorrow. I know they’ll all complain and upset her.”
He ordered a bottle of inferior red wine from room service—their best—and put a porno movie on the hotel’s pay TV channel. “Let’s pretend we don’t know each other,” Roger said. “This is our first date.”
“Some first date,” Olivia said, laughing. “What am I, a hooker?”
“Call girl,” he said. “You’re much too classy to be a hooker.”
“Okay,” she said, but she couldn’t take it seriously. The movie was more silly than sexy, and the wine, she could tell right away, was going to give her a headache in the morning. They were lying in the big bed. She was wearing the white satin nightgown she wore when she traveled, and Roger was wearing the pajama bottoms he wore when he traveled. Impishly, she poured a little of the wine on Roger’s chest and licked it off. It tasted better on him than it did in the glass, but then she had always liked the way he tasted. He immediately undressed.
Ah, she thought hopefully, and undressed, too. As she was about to kiss him he pulled away and said, “Wait.” With an expression of very serious concentration he poured some wine on each of her breasts and began to lick it off. It felt quite pleasurable, but it was also peculiar. The wine was cold and wet, and even though Roger had been careful, it was running down her sides onto the sheets. They were going to have to sleep in that. She didn’t even want to imagine what previous guests had dumped on this same mattress.
“What did you think when you saw me?” he asked.
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“When you came to the room,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Right. I’m the call girl. Well, I was thrilled. You’re just my type. You are, you know.”
He had dribbled the wine onto her belly now and was licking it off, and she wished he would stop. It tickled. Over his shoulder she could see the actors on the TV screen—three of them, a man and two women—doing things to each other and making appreciative noises. She was sure Jenny would never have dreamed that any of the relatives would be using their hotel room this way the night before the momentous rite of passage, and in spite of herself she started to laugh. Once she started to laugh she couldn’t stop.
There are moments, she thought, and there aren’t. This just isn’t one of them. There was nothing about the porno movie that could turn her on, and right now Roger didn’t either. She felt they were more like two kids playing than lovers. He was so sweet she wanted to hug him. He was her best friend, he was funny. . . .
He looked up and gave her a glance: not amused, as she was, but almost pensive. Oh, sweetheart, she thought, I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For laughing.”
“Well,” Roger said cheerfully, “this room’s atmosphere isn’t conducive to passion.”
“I know. That was the point, wasn’t it?” Olivia said.
“Of course it was.” He clicked off the movie. “I’d better get a towel for these sheets.”
“Then we won’t have enough to take a shower tomorrow,” Olivia said. “Avoiding the wet spots will force us to cuddle.”
“I don’t need anything to force me to cuddle with you.”
“I love you,” Olivia said. She curled into Roger’s embrace.
“I love you, too,” he said. He turned off the light, and after a while they fell asleep.
In the morning they went downstairs to the hotel dining room to have breakfast, which was included in the price of the room. Nick, Lynne and Amber were already seated in a booth and Lynne waved them over.
“It’s so nice to see you,” Olivia said. “It’s been too long.”
“I know,” Lynne said. “We all live in New York and we never see each other. We should make a date.”
“Absolutely,” Nick said.
The waitress came over and took their orders.
“Try the yogurt,” Nick said. “They can’t ruin it.”
“What do you think of the hotel?” Roger asked.
“We’re moving to the Ritz this afternoon.”
“Should we do that, Olivia?”
“Why bother?” Olivia said. “The R
itz is in Boston, it’s too far away. It’s not worth the trouble; we’re here.”
“Olivia has acute separation anxiety,” Roger said. “Even from bad hotels.” They all laughed.
“Who else is here?” Lynne asked, looking around.
“Taylor and Tim, Uncle Seymour, Aunt Iris, Aunt Myra, Kenny probably,” Olivia said. “I wonder if he’ll bring his girlfriend. Melissa and Bill are coming with their kids, aren’t they?”
“Of course,” Nick said. “And my father. He’s been staying with them.”
Anna the Perfect was not coming, because years before when she had given her son’s bar mitzvah she had not allowed Jenny to bring her children. At the time Jenny had only two, and she was insulted. Bar mitzvahs, she had told Olivia, were for family, and cousins should get to know each other. So Jenny and Paul had refused to go, and now, of course, Anna and her family had declined the invitation to come here. They were probably relieved. They, like Charlie the Perfect, had their own busy lives and hardly knew the other cousins; and their children (and Charlie’s grandchild) didn’t know them at all.
The waitress brought their food. “So how is life?” Nick asked.
“The clinic is thriving, we’re fine and we’re going to Paris for a long weekend this summer for Roger’s birthday,” Olivia said. “And your life?”
“Haven’t lost any clients,” Nick said. “The renovation on our new apartment is finally finished. And the next time you see our bank commercial, look carefully at the guy at the end of the line—it’s me. I put myself in for a kick.”
“You wanted to be an actor when you were a kid,” Olivia said.
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do.”
“And I’ve taken up helicopter skiing in Colorado,” Nick said. “It’s what I did last winter whenever I could get away.”
“What is it?”
“A helicopter takes you to the top of a mountain where it’s completely newly fallen snow. Four feet of virgin powder. No one else has been there. It’s so quiet and peaceful and beautiful you can’t imagine. Then you ski down.”
“I’d prefer he had a different hobby,” Lynne said mildly, smiling; but Olivia could see the apprehension hidden behind her smile.