Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Thanks,” I said as she ushered me through the door.

  “You’re the policeman?” she asked.

  “Maria called you? I figured she would. You’re Nancy Lustig?”

  “I am. And you are . . . ?”

  I told her as we shook hands. She took my coat, told me where to put my wet shoes and showed me into an adjoining room. She excused herself, saying there was tea water on the boil in the kitchen.

  The house was less museum-like than I would have expected. All old leather couches and throw rugs, the room I’d been consigned to was cozy enough. The fire in the stone hearth reinforced that feeling. Various family photos covered the walls, but the roughly carved mantle was reserved for photos of Nancy. From birth to bat mitzvah to the present, not the best of them made Nancy look more than plain. To have even called her a cute baby would have required some bending of the truth.

  “Lemon or milk?” she screamed from the kitchen.

  “Just sugar,” I called back.

  “What do I call you: Officer, Detective Prager?”

  “Moe works. You know, I’m not a cop, not anymore. I’m retired. I’m—”

  “You’re looking for Patrick.” Nancy Lustig appeared, carrying a silver tea service on a clear Plexiglas tray. “I hope you find him.”

  “You do? Given Maria’s reaction, I thought—”

  “Maria’s protective of me.” Nancy poured my tea. “Help yourself to sugar. She was my roommate for three years. Somewhere in there she sort of appointed herself the big sister I never had. Really, I saw it more as her George to my Lenny.”

  She was testing me. Was I just a dumb cop? If she was going to tell me her story, whatever that story was, was I going to get it? Would I understand her pain? I decided to take her head on. I got the feeling she’d shut down at the first sign of bullshit.

  “Nancy—can I call you Nancy?” She nodded that I could. “A lot of cops, maybe most, couldn’t name a thing John Steinbeck wrote, but don’t mistake a lack of education for stupidity. Most of the other cops I worked with were pretty smart in their ways. Besides, you’re too short and bright to be Lenny.”

  “Maria’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “I’d hate to have her pissed off at me.”

  Wrong answer. “That’s not what—”

  “She’s pretty sexy, yeah.”

  “I’m not.” Another test.

  “I don’t suppose you are,” I said.

  “If you were at a keg party and saw Maria and me hanging out at the edge of the dance floor, who would you ask to dance?”

  “In this hypothetical do I have two good knees?”

  She liked that. “Sure, two good knees and moves like Superfly.”

  “I guess I’d ask Maria.”

  “Not Patrick,” she said, trying to suppress something that might have been a smile. “He asked me. And he meant it. It wasn’t on some bet or dare. He wasn’t stoned or drunk, though I don’t think it would have mattered if he were. He really wanted to dance with me. Me! I waited my whole life for a boy who looked like Patrick to ask me to dance. I know it’s silly, but . . . can you understand?”

  “I think I do.”

  “And Maria . . . God, it was worth it just to see the look on her face.” Now, as she relived the moment in her head, her smile was in full bloom. “Poor Maria, she didn’t know what to do. You know, Mr. Prager, I’ve had people be jealous over my father’s money, my car, my GPA, but the jealousy that flashed across Maria’s face . . . No matter what happened with Patrick after that, I’ll never forget that moment.”

  “I think we all have moments like that.” I gave her a blow-by-blow description of the first time I beat my brother in one-on-one basketball. And I agreed with her, the look on Aaron’s face was something I wasn’t likely to forget. “He was proud and angry all at once.”

  “Exactly.”

  I had passed her tests. She recounted for me how Patrick had asked for her number, how sharply dressed he had been when he showed up for their first date: Adonis in Jordache jeans. They went to the movies and to some disco out on Sunrise Highway. He had been a perfect gentleman, she said in an oddly disappointed tone.

  “You know, there’s a lot about that night I know I should remember but don’t. My head was just swimming. I was watching other girls watching us.”

  But what had started out on such a high soon settled into a strange, repetitive pattern. There were movies, lots of them. Dancing, always dancing and the occasional dinner. No double dates. Then there was a kiss goodnight at the dorm door. Never an invitation to spend the night.

  “Oh, we made out sometimes.” She got defensive. “He’d rub my . . . Ah, he—”

  I told her I understood. He didn’t seem very experienced. A good Catholic boy, she guessed. He didn’t sound like the good Catholic boys I knew.

  She would do most of the talking when they were out. She talked about everything, about her family, her life. Patrick, on the other hand, never discussed his family. School, mostly. They could have gone on for years, she thought, and she wouldn’t have known him any better than the night they met at the keg party.

  “He was a good listener then,” I prodded, “like a sponge.”

  “No,” she said, “like a wall. It was like he wasn’t listening at all. I don’t know how to explain it. He didn’t ignore me when I spoke. He faced me. He seemed interested. I just got this feeling.”

  She told me that she’d started seeing a therapist at Hofstra. Nancy admitted she could have afforded to go to any shrink in the tri-state area, but didn’t want her parents to know or to control the purse strings. In any case, Nancy and Patrick’s relationship had been a hot topic during her therapy sessions.

  “We talked about how I wasn’t really satisfied with how the relationship was going, so we worked out a strategy for me to talk to Patrick about it. It was to be all very calm. We even rehearsed. I’d made up my mind that I was going to say something the next time we went out. But I was still really, really nervous.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Do you? Look, I want to be clear. It wasn’t that I was nervous about being with a man. I was no virgin. Getting laid wasn’t the issue. You know the old joke. With one of these,” she bowed her head toward her groin, “a girl can get as many of those,” she pointed to my lap, “as she wants. Even girls like me. That’s right, Mr. Prager, I know the look.”

  “The look?” I puzzled.

  “The look the morning after when the boy rolls over, sees me and wonders just how much he had to drink the night before.”

  Out of my own guilt, I let that slide. “So what did happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she laughed nervously. “What I mean to say is I don’t know what got into Patrick. That night when he picked me up at my dorm, he asked if Maria was around. When I said she had already split, he . . . well, we . . .”

  “He took the initiative,” I offered.

  “Yes, he took me and the initiative right there on the dorm room floor. Whether he’d gotten the sense I was going to say something or whether it was coincidence, I can’t say.”

  Though the earth hadn’t exactly moved for her—Patrick had reached the finish line before Nancy had gotten fully out of the gate—it was progress. Enough progress, she thought, to not want to set things back by airing her dissatisfaction with their relationship. All the lines she had so carefully rehearsed with her therapist went unsaid. But the progress just got incorporated into the routine. Now the dancing, dinner and movies came to include sex.

  Sometimes, she said, the sex got rough. Not abusive, no S&M, just rough, desperate almost. She never understood why and he didn’t volunteer any explanations.

  “I never complained. I wasn’t being a martyr or anything. It was just that he’d let me try different things when he was in that mood.” She blushed slightly. “It was more . . . satisfying for me.”

  He still made himself unknowable. And the sex, rather than improving things, had given h
er more to be unhappy about. When I asked her what her therapist had said, Nancy hesitated. She confessed she had begun skipping sessions soon after she and Patrick had slept together for the first time, eventually stopping therapy altogether.

  “It’s called resistance,” she explained. “I didn’t want to confront what I knew in my heart, so I avoided dealing with it. I knew, maybe from the first date, that Patrick and I had nowhere to go. But I just couldn’t let go of that night at the keg party. Even now I . . .”

  “You stopped going to therapy. What did you do?”

  She started crying: “I made an ass of myself.” Thankfully, I didn’t have to ask how. I don’t think I could have. “I tried a solution out of some stupid women’s magazine,” she said after regaining her composure. “I asked Patrick if he wanted to go—No, that’s a lie. I asked Patrick to take me to Club Caligula. It’s a—”

  “I know what it is.”

  Club Caligula, like Plato’s Retreat, was one of the sex clubs that had recently opened in New York City. Such clubs had always existed, usually as underground establishments catering to a very specific clientele. One drive through the meat packing district after dark and you’d know these clubs were nothing new. What did set these clubs apart, however, was their more mainstream appeal. Rather than attract patrons through coded whispers in the dark, these clubs advertised in New York magazine. As such places went, Club Caligula had a bit of a wilder rep than Plato’s. Maybe that’s why she’d picked it. I didn’t ask.

  “It was couples only and single girls the night we went,” she was quick to say. “Once you got inside the rules were simple: You had to strip completely or wear a toga and everything had to be voluntary. Other than that . . .”

  She went on to describe all the different rooms. There were hot tubs and saunas, jungle rooms and beach rooms, even a dungeon. You could rent play toys, buy drinks. There was one guy selling loose joints. The smell, though, was something Nancy said she would never forget. She could smell it now.

  “It was overwhelming, so raw. Dirty and sweet in the same breath.” She was almost wistful.

  “And you and Patrick?” I wondered.

  “The same, only he seemed even more distracted. Then a couple came over to us and . . .” Nancy started clearing her throat furiously, blushing beet red. “Before we could say no, she—She kissed me. Oh God. I ran. I ran to the locker room, changed and got a cab back to school. I think I brushed my teeth and gargled for an hour. God, what an ass I was and such a baby. What did I think was going to happen in a sex club?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe that’s why you went. What happened to Patrick?”

  “We didn’t see each other for a week after that. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, I pretended to be sick and he let me pretend.”

  I could see she was embarrassed by the whole thing, so I dropped it. Besides, the club had been her idea, her faux pas, not Patrick’s. No, there was something else. Maria’s anger had been too real. She couldn’t have sent me to Nancy for this. Whatever the trauma was, its roots had to be deeper than a night of ribaldry gone wrong.

  “I missed my next period.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Either that or the rabbit committed suicide and they tried to pin it on me.”

  Neither one of us found that particularly amusing.

  “So,” I said confidently, “he acted like a jerk, right? He didn’t want anything to do with it. Told you he was too young to get married and said he’d find a good safe clinic with you. He’d pay, of course, and he’d even go with you.”

  Now she was crying so hard her body shook. She ran upstairs. I didn’t follow. After my indelicate pronouncements, I assumed I was the last person on earth she wanted to be comforted by. I was about to go on a treasure hunt for my coat when Nancy reappeared. In her left hand she carried a framed drawing or photograph. As she kept its back to me, I couldn’t tell which. To my amazement, she apologized.

  “If only he had acted that way, Mr. Prager,” she said, falling back into her stuffed leather chair, “you wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Do you know what Patrick did when I told him I was pregnant? He got down on his knees and cried. He took the back of my hand and rubbed it along his cheek. Then he kissed it, stood up and told me he loved me. He loved me! In the eight months we dated, he’d never even said he liked me. And when he kissed my hand, it was the first sign of real affection he ever showed.”

  From that moment on, their relationship bore little or no resemblance to what had come before. Patrick was with her constantly, showering her with gifts. He wanted to meet her family and had finally discussed his own, if only tangentially or in passing. But now it was Nancy who became the silent partner.

  “At first, I sort of enjoyed it. God, who knows, maybe if he had been more like that when we started . . . But it got creepy. It was almost as if he had planned, well maybe not planned, but hoped, for this all along. One night he came to my room and gave me this.” She turned the frame toward me. In it was a nude sketch of Nancy with a child at her breast. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? He made me look beautiful. I should have thrown it away, but I couldn’t.”

  She had broken down when he unwrapped it for her. Later, however, he gave her another gift, a diamond ring. He asked her to marry him.

  “You know what you said before when you thought Patrick had said all that stuff about being too young and not being ready?”

  “I remember.”

  “Okay, you were wrong. But what was weird was that he was too quick to accept things. He never voiced any concern or anxiety. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get crazed at the thought of fatherhood. And here we were unmarried, still in college, different religions. But Patrick just snapped right into this father-to-be thing like he’d been waiting for it. You know what I mean?” she asked rhetorically. “I got the sense that it wasn’t me he loved or even the baby. It was like we were props to plug into this fantasy he had that included a wife, a baby and a split ranch.”

  She confessed that she never entertained the thought of having the baby. She was too young. She wasn’t ready, even if Patrick was. And when she was prepared to discuss the abortion with Patrick, he proposed.

  “What did you do?”

  “Like my Dad says, I punted. What could I do?” she asked, back on the defensive. “I couldn’t tell him about the abortion, not then, and I couldn’t say yes. I told him I was flattered and that I’d have to think about it.”

  “How’d he take that?”

  She rubbed her hands together furiously, tilted her head to the floor and whispered: “He hurt me.” Then, as if wanting to prevent my judging him, she screamed, “He didn’t mean it! I . . . I mean, he . . .”

  Calmly, I asked, “What did he do?”

  “He grabbed my shoulders like this.” She stood and placed her hands on me. “And he shook me so hard he dislocated my left shoulder. The whole time he was yelling at me: ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me!’ Two guys in the next room pulled him off me. But before he left, Patrick took the ring out of my hand and spit on me. He spit on me!” She welled up. “The two guys wanted to report Patrick to campus security, but I begged them not to. They looked relieved and took me to the infirmary.”

  “But you didn’t say no to his proposal,” I wanted to confirm.

  “No, I just said I’d have to think about it. I guess,” she said, “I’d been following the script perfectly up to then. It was like he couldn’t tolerate a rip in the fabric of his fantasy.”

  The doctors, Nancy continued, reset her arm, gave her some pills for the pain and sent her home to her parents. She told them she had gotten clumsy and fallen down the stairs. I winced at that. As a cop I’d had a hundred women repeat that same lie. Spitting blood and broken teeth at my feet, they would stubbornly cling to their stories. Even as I pointed out to them that there were no stairs in their apartments down which to fall, they would r
epeat their lies like a prayer. The doctors hadn’t believed her either, but she refused to involve the police. It took weeks for the bruises Patrick’s fingers had left to fade.

  “When my folks weren’t around, I’d pull my blouse down below my shoulders and stare in the mirror. I’d touch them. It was like he still had hold of me. Sometimes, I think I can still feel them or see them in the mirror,” she admitted.

  She had left school and moved back home. Her parents were more gullible than the infirmary staff and accepted her story about the steps without question. Unfortunately, she had to compound the lie by saying she had been very drunk. Still, she said, it was all she could do to convince her father not to bring suit against the school.

  As soon as the shoulder was better, Nancy had the abortion. Maria had taken her to the clinic. Though she hadn’t told her parents about the abortion, Nancy tried convincing herself through me that they would have understood.

  “They know something’s wrong. My shoulder’s been completely healed for months and I haven’t gone back to campus since last May when I . . . when Patrick hurt me. Sometimes I wish they would just ask, you know?”

  I told her it was moments like these that made me glad I wasn’t a parent. She said she had never seen Patrick again. He had called her the day of the abortion, crying into the phone. He hadn’t said anything, but she knew it was him. He had followed her. But that was the last of Patrick until she read the papers last December. Although she claimed to be glad to be rid of him, I got the sense there were things she desperately wanted to say to Patrick.

  “He taught me a lot, but I guess he wasn’t trying.” She frowned. “I’ll never feel the same way about anything. The abortion did that, I think. In school, everything is an abstraction. It’s point, counterpoint. Now it’s hard for me to see things that way. All the battle lines get kind of blurry when the world is gray. But some good came of it. I think I know what’s important now. The mirror’s no longer my enemy and I think I’ll recognize real love next time, if there is a next time.”