Lost in His Eyes

by Andrew Neiderman

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Andrew Neiderman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Titles by Andrew Neiderman

  DEFICIENCY *

  LIFE SENTENCE *

  DEADLY VERDICT *

  GARDEN OF THE DEAD *

  LOST IN HIS EYES *

  Writing as V.C. Andrews

  INTO THE DARKNESS

  CAPTURING ANGELS

  THE UNWELCOMED CHILD

  BITTERSWEET DREAMS

  * available from Severn House

  LOST IN HIS EYES

  Andrew Neiderman

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world hardcover edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Neiderman.

  The right of Andrew Neiderman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Neiderman, Andrew author.

  Lost in his eyes.

  1. Housewives–California–Fiction. 2. Adultery–

  Fiction. 3. Romantic suspense novels.

  I. Title

  813.5’4-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8542-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-644-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-701-1 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To my wife, Diane

  ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’

  PROLOGUE

  I’m in a deeper silence than I have ever been. Unlike the silence that usually accompanies traditional meditation, I don’t hear the monotonous beating of my heart or the soft sound of my own breathing. Often, nearly a half-hour or so will pass, during which I will not have a single thought, envision a single memory or experience a single daydream.

  It’s a realization that I resisted at first because I didn’t want to become conscious of it. I put up a wall woven out of rationalizations, like so many of my girlfriends who wrap blankets of excuses for their unhappiness around themselves to keep from falling into a well of depression. In fact, I have reached the place where I don’t have any ambition to find ways to identify the problem and explain it away. I won’t see a therapist, a psychologist or psychiatrist, and definitely won’t see my doctor about it.

  However, I am aware that it spells loneliness with a capital L and reminds me I am shrinking in a corner. Like someone caught in a drug-induced hallucination, who imagines herself only inches tall, I’m often afraid that I might eventually be stepped on, and even that would go unnoticed. I’m not dying as much as I’m drifting out of worldly existence. Eventually, I’ll be like a black hole in space, close to invisible.

  Our sixteen-year-old daughter, Kelly, is in her room upstairs. Her walls are covered with movie and rock singer posters that look as if they were splashed up there in a hurricane full of the icons teenage girls worship. I think she’d cover the windows with them if I didn’t stop her. She wears earphones that are plugged into her iPod so she can listen to music while she’s texting a cadre of electronic friends, gossiping in letter combinations that reduce whole sentences to a few symbols on her smartphone. It’s the abbreviation of life, emotions and relationships. When I watch her doing it, I think of the radio operator on the Titanic sending out an SOS. Her face expresses that sort of desperation. There are not enough lifeboats.

  We can go days without saying ten complete sentences to each other.

  Right now, my husband, Ronnie, is in his home office on his computer, forwarding political diatribes and jokes to his ditto compatriots who watch the same television talk shows and listen to the same radio talk show hosts parroting each other in a wide echo chamber. Although I can’t imagine why, it invigorates him. When he finally does come up for air, he has his chest out and a broad butter smile smeared over his face. He looks as if he has accomplished something important, as if he knows something the rest of the world doesn’t know.

  Ronnie can project that sort of self-confidence easily. He’s six feet two, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes that can blaze like the blue light of a Bunsen burner when he’s excited about something. It was what first caught my attention and held it during those days when I was lighting the wicks on my explosive emotions with the frenzy of someone terrified her youth would be full of duds.

  Ronnie rants with the kind of regularity that someone constantly threatened by thought constipation would cherish. Any news event can set off a spontaneous speech. He stores his op-ed pages in the back of his mind with the determination of a squirrel storing acorns. I just listen and nod and never offer up a counter-argument. But don’t misunderstand me. I take my citizenship seriously. I read and always vote. However, lately I envy women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who left all the political bickering to men whose cigar smoke billowed out of their mouths like the puffs around Civil War cannons. They left their exclusive men’s clubs strutting like victorious generals, their lips stained with tobacco and the flavor of cognac, all thinking they were Masters of the Universe.

  Internet chat rooms have become the twenty-first century’s men’s clubs. Technology democratized them. Anyone can bluster on Wi-Fi. He doesn’t have to be some powerful attorney or CEO of some corporation. Sanitation workers circle the electric fire, chanting their slogans and sound bites alongside bank executives. Alone in an office or a den, the new Masters of the Universe can be in rooms that are just as stuffy and create their own clouds of pipe, cigar or cigarette smoke. Ronnie will smoke a cigar occasionally, but, thankfully, no cigarettes. He still thinks seriously about his health, or at least gives it the required lip service, especially because he’s in the commercial insurance business and feels required to recite statistics for all insurance enterprises, including health and life.

  Tonight, the air has a fresh chill suggesting that winter might be introducing himself to our affluent Orange County California community. We don’t have definitive seasons. They’re all far more subtle.
There has rarely been snow, and if it does get cold enough for ice, it’s only a temporary phenomenon. Also, right in the middle of January or February there could be unusually warm days. Legal, card-carrying American immigrants from north-eastern and north-western states laugh at the very idea of it being winter with seventy- and occasionally eighty-degree temperatures. A Santa ringing a bell on Christmas looks far less authentic to children here who are on the brink of losing childhood fantasies at a much younger age than children in other parts of the country. It’s as if the entire state has turned into Disneyland, and every child knows it and accepts it because they have all been force-fed cartoons so long that they believe they live on a movie set.

  Mommy or Daddy can flip a switch and make it stop raining.

  Actually, I socialize with friends who act as if they live within a magical bubble. To a great extent, there’s some truth to that. Unlike most of America, we enjoy the best possible medical and dental care. Specialists of all kinds are peppered over the face of our world like a bad case of acne. We shop in immaculate supermarkets and exclusive boutiques where unattractive people are practically banned from becoming service personnel. If he wanted to live as comfortably and as safely as possible in America, Benjamin Braddock should have listened to that one word of advice he was given at his college graduation party: ‘Plastics.’ That’s what this affluent world is to me: plastic.

  But like him, I’m beginning to suffer from the ennui of near perfection. I long to be threatened, as illogical and maddening as that might sound. There are parts of me that haven’t been challenged for years and consequently have become dull. There are no edges, no cliffs and no deeply threatening potholes on the monotonous road I travel daily.

  My home has become a space station. Neither my husband nor my daughter seems to notice that lately, when I leave it, I come rushing back as if I am running low on oxygen out there. Sometimes, I literally gasp when I step back inside and close the door behind me. It takes a while for my heart to stop racing and my palms to stop sweating. My urge to explore is dwindling. It’s barely a spark.

  However, eventually, especially tonight, the silence in my house gets too deep for me. Television is no companion yet. I’m not old enough to suckle on its glow and bask in someone else’s evocative romantic adventures or their jocular family turmoil devoid of any serious consequences. Even nature in public television shows looks contrived, too well organized. I don’t have the patience brought on by crippling arthritis or familial desertion. I refuse to turn my house prematurely into an adult residence, even if it means spending so much time alone in a world of silence conversing with myself.

  Every clock in the house looks like a spy, ticking and waiting for me to do something or say something unusual so it can sound its alarm. I have the urge to put black sheets over all of them, cover their faces and live in a world without hours and minutes, but I don’t do anything like that. I don’t need to. I’m an expert in avoiding discovery. I can blend into the puppet world of everyday life so well that I wonder why I haven’t been recruited by the CIA.

  When the feeling at the base of my stomach grows too irritating, I rise out of my pool of silence with the energy of a killer whale feasting on air. I scoop my ankle-length dark blue sweater coat off the coat hook in the entryway of our five-thousand-square-foot Normandy-style house, with its breathtaking views of mountains and city lights, and then turn and hurry down the dark oak hallway to Ronnie’s office doorway.

  His shoulders are shaking as if he’s in a bumpy old car going over a dirt road. Sometimes, his office is so stuffy that it smells like a school locker room, so I don’t actually enter it. He’s chuckling over a graphic picture of one of the candidates he opposes locked in a cage with thick bars woven with metal thorns and a floor covered in smiling snakes, pythons ready to crush and swallow up the opposition. He has an opened bottle of beer on the desk. I envision it to be some adult baby bottle with an orange nipple and an orange areola. Men never stop breastfeeding.

  ‘I’m going shopping,’ I announce. I wear my sweater coat so he can visually understand what I’m saying as well. He never hears me the first time, so I repeat and he turns around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going grocery shopping. It’s the best time of day to do it. It’s not crowded and the shelves have been restocked for the morning.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, as if it has just occurred to him that someone actually brings in the food we eat daily and that someone is me.

  There is always the obligatory, ‘Do you want help?’

  ‘No, I’m fine. We don’t need that much,’ I tell him.

  He nods and smiles like a little boy who has been given permission to stay out longer and play. He turns right back to the computer and says, ‘You gotta see this.’

  I don’t reply. I’m walking quickly now, retreating through the kitchen and into the garage like some prisoner in a maximum security institution who just realized there was a way out, moving through the convoluted maze to the exit. I get into my late-model black 535 BMW, press the button to open the garage door and press the button to start the engine. Someday, I think, everything in our lives will be reduced to pressing a button, even for women giving birth. Many of my girlfriends have buttons on their bodies only people like me can see. Their husbands, even their children, know which button to press and when. I pause after taking a shower lately and study myself in the full-length bedroom mirror to be certain that I don’t have those buttons. Not yet. But I’m not fooling myself. I know they are coming any day now.

  There were times when I was tempted to start the engine and not press the other button to open the garage door, but, fortunately, those urges lasted only a few seconds. Buttons are so difficult to ignore, which is why I worry about presidents, premiers, dictators and the like who have their forefingers close to the nuclear launch button.

  I back out and close the garage door, leaving my daughter and my husband in their private caves, and drive off, too fast at first and then slower.

  Suddenly, like that killer whale rising out of the sea, I can breathe. The radio goes on automatically. It’s tuned to an NPR station because the voices are so soothing. Most of the time, I don’t even know what’s being said. The melodic rhythm of calm talk drifts through me like wave after wave of some cool body lotion, relaxing me. Ronnie hates this station. He says it puts him to sleep. He enjoys going to sleep at night, but he hates taking naps. Either he doesn’t want to miss anything or he’s afraid he might never wake up. Once I told him that he thinks like Shakespeare, who called sleep ‘Death’s second self.’ He laughed quickly to wash the terror out of his eyes, and said, ‘You and your damn liberal arts education.’

  Women are supposedly more vulnerable and weaker, but as far as I can tell, men get more frightened at the mere reference to death. If anyone really thinks about it, he or she would readily admit that more young boys are sissies than young girls. It’s no comfort for me to know that. To me, it means that, in the end, more responsibility will fall on my shoulders than on Ronnie’s. Mothers are always more responsible for their children than fathers, and most end up being more responsible for their own and their husband’s parents.

  The supermarket is less crowded this time of night. There are so many available parking spaces that, for a moment, I have trouble deciding which one to choose. Choice can be agony. Few would admit it, but I know they’re relieved when they see they have only one or two possibilities. Too much freedom can nourish anxiety. You can’t help but worry that you’ll make a mistake. I watch people when they have choice, especially with parking spots. They keep looking back and wondering if they should have taken this one or that one because it’s closer or wider and would provide less chance for their car doors getting nicked. You could wake up in the middle of the night from an anxiety attack over how close you had come to a dent because you had been too lazy to park twenty more feet from the supermarket’s entrance.

  When I enter the supermarket, I glanced about
cautiously, choosing my aisles strategically. I hate to meet women I know in the supermarket this late, especially the wives of husbands who work with Ronnie in the commercial real estate insurance company. Invariably, one of them will say something bitingly true like, ‘You’re deserted, too, tonight, huh?’ I just smile or shrug and say something equally inane like, ‘Que sera, sera,’ and move on quickly.

  Tonight I see none of them. I actually begin to concentrate on the groceries we need. I take the time to read ingredients on cans and packages, and I examine the cuts of chicken and meat more carefully. I want to drag this out. I want to go home feeling tired enough to go right to bed, maybe read a few pages of a new novel, take something to help me sleep, and turn over just as Ronnie says, ‘What a night. The country’s coming apart.’

  Why is that so good? Why does that make him so happy? What has he lost of his manhood during this journey into adulthood that needs to be replaced with this macho disparagement of everyone who dares express a contrary opinion? When did he become unrecognizable? Or was I simply too blind to see or unwilling to see right from the start? It’s not impossible. Wasn’t it John Lennon who said, ‘Living is easy with eyes closed?’

  I’m so deep in all this thinking that I don’t realize I’ve collided with someone’s grocery cart until he cries out. A box of his cereal tumbles to the floor.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I say, kneeling down to pick it up. When I hand it to him, I finally look at him.

  His eyes capture me in a way I never thought possible. Whenever I read about such male animal magnetism in my favorite novels, I always smiled to myself, half ridiculing the idea that a man could mesmerize a woman so quickly that she would turn into a fumbling, insecure teenager, struggling to say the right words and not look so foolish.