by Ed McBain
“How does he know her, anyway?” he asks.
“Biblically,” Helen says.
“I mean …”
“They work in the same office.”
“And she’s up here for the summer?”
“No, she’s a houseguest. Every weekend,” Helen says, and raises her eyebrows. “Hmm?”
“Well …”
“Mmm,” Helen says.
“Do you think Danielle invites her?”
“I have no idea. Maybe Danielle has a boyfriend of her own. Maybe Danielle doesn’t care what Harry does under the table or behind the barn. Danielle is French, my dear.”
“Oh, come on, Hel. She’s been in America for twenty years. In fact, they’ve been married that long.”
“So have we,” Helen says. “I can’t believe you forgot to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“About going to identify that boy.”
“Well, it was a busy week. Everybody just back from the long weekend …”
“I’ll bet they were rattling their cages.”
“Anxiety levels were high, let’s put it that way.”
“Was this a lineup?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The precinct. They have a room.”
“Was the girl there, too? The one he hit?”
“Yes.”
“What was her name again?”
“I forget.”
“She identified him, too, huh?”
“Oh, yes.”
“So they’ve really got him then.”
“Oh yes.”
“Kate,” she says. “It was Kate.”
“Right. Kate.”
“Done,” she says, and puts down the brush.
“How do you do that?”
“I’m a fucking phenomenon,” she says. “Speaking of which,” she adds, and swivels toward him on the bench.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he says.
Making love to her tonight, he remembers the way she looked that autumn day when first he laid eyes on her, sitting on a riverbank bench, head bent, totally absorbed in the book she was reading. On the Charles, a sculling team from Harvard was tirelessly rowing, he can still hear the megaphoned voice of the coxswain calling the stroke, still recall everything that happened that day as if it is playing back now in wide screen and stereophonic sound.
Leaves are falling like golden coins everywhere around her. Her straight blond hair cascades down her back, well past her shoulders, she wears it longer back then, she is still a college undergraduate, though he only suspects that as he stands rooted to the river path, staring. Woolen skirt and moss-green sweater, string of tiny pearls. A shower of leaves twists in the gentle breeze, silently floating, drifting, seeming to fall out of sunlight as golden as her hair. He has never seen anyone quite so beautiful in his life. And to think he’s here only to pick up a book at the Coop.
Making love to her tonight on ocean-damp sheets, he recalls all this. Sees it clearly in his mind’s eye. Remembers.
“Hello?” he says. “May I join you?”
She turns to look up at him.
Eyes as blue as a searing flash of lightning.
He is twenty-six years old, a recent graduate of Harvard’s medical school, and he is sporting a mustache because he thinks it makes him look older and therefore, he hopes, more authoritative in the Emergency Room at Mass General, where he is interning. He has already decided he will become a psychiatrist, but he won’t begin specializing till next year, Mom, and meanwhile he’s treating people who are bleeding, biting, babbling, bawling or merely broken in a hundred pieces, all flowing through the E.R. doors in a constant stream designed to instruct him in the basic truths of medicine, fundamental among which is the knowledge that any mistake he makes can prove fatal. He guesses this gorgeous blond goddess sitting here with her legs crossed and an open book in her lap doesn’t know much about life and death, the way he does. He guesses she is four or five years younger than he is—actually, it turns out to be six—and he hopes as he sits beside her that the mustache doesn’t make him look too much older or wiser, although the way her blue laser glare seems to focus in on the mustache leads him to believe she doesn’t much care for “an hairy man,” Esau notwithstanding.
“I’m David Chapman,” he says.
He resists adding “Dr. David Chapman” because the title still seems strange to him, even though he is now officially a doctor, more or less, otherwise why is he allowed to treat all those maimed and wounded people who swarm into the E.R. day and night?
The way she keeps looking at him also leads him to believe she’s unaccustomed to strange mustachioed men sitting beside her uninvited on a public bench. Out on the river, the scullers keep rowing past tirelessly. Here on the bank of the Charles, the leaves fall softly, gently, even romantically, an appropriate backdrop, he feels, for this first momentous encounter, though she doesn’t seem to be sharing the same keen sense of History in the Making.
“I don’t want to intrude on your privacy,” he says.
Then why are you? her look asks.
“But … I’d like to know you,” he says.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because … you’re so beautiful,” he says.
Lamely.
“That I know,” she says.
The scullers are out of sight now. Pedestrians are idling across the Longfellow Bridge to Alston. On the other side of the river, he can see automobiles rumbling along Storrow Drive, and beyond that the big Coca-Cola sign near the entrance to the Mass Pike. The leaves continue falling silently. She has returned to her book again.
“So what do you think?” he asks.
“About what?” she says without looking up.
“About let’s walk over to the Square and have a cup of coffee.”
“I have a class in twenty minutes,” she says, without even glancing at her watch.
“Then I guess we’ll have to sit here and talk,” he says.
She looks at him again. His daughter Annie will one day inherit her mother’s intent gaze and direct manner, but he doesn’t know that as yet, of course, he isn’t thinking that far ahead, he isn’t even thinking past her scented proximity on the bench (Tea Rose, she will later tell him) or the bee-stung temptation of her lips, pursed now in seeming displeasure, he can’t imagine why. He wonders if she’s noticed the stethoscope sticking out of the right-hand pocket of his jacket. If so, does she think it has perhaps been stolen from an attending physician on a psychiatric ward someplace? The reason he wonders this is because her look somehow implies he may be an escaped lunatic.
“I have a test in twenty minutes,” she says in dismissal. “I don’t wish to appear rude, Mr. Chapman …”
His opportunity.
“Dr. Chapman,” he says.
“Dr. Chapman, do forgive me. But I have to …”
“A test in what?”
“Irrelevant,” she says. “I have to study. Please.”
“Can I call you sometime?”
“Why?” she asks again.
“So I can get to know your mind?” he suggests, and grins so broadly that she bursts out laughing.
The first time they go out together, Helen advises him to “lose the mustache” because together with the eyeglasses they make him look as if he’s wearing one of those trick disguises you put on with the big nose and the shaggy brows and the glasses and mustache, though he doesn’t have a big nose at all and his brows aren’t shaggy. It’s just that she can’t imagine ever kissing anyone with a mustache, which, if not exactly an open invitation, does seem an opportunity he shouldn’t ignore, so he kisses her for the first time and stars fall on Alabama—for him, at least. She says this sort of thing has got to stop. He shaves his mustache that very night.
The reason this sort of thing has got to stop is that Helen Barrister—her name, and an appropriate one in that both her parents are lawyers and both are of English ancestry—is engaged to someon
e named Wallace Ames who happens to be going to school in California, which technically makes him a GUG, shorthand for a Geographically Undesirable Girl or Guy (a Guy, in this instance), but Helen doesn’t yet realize this. At the moment, she is a straight 4.0 student at Radcliffe, concentrating in journalism and hoping one day to become editor in chief of The New Yorker, her favorite magazine, although he suspects she reads Vogue as well, witness the dandy outfits she wears during this blazing Massachusetts autumn while he diligently pursues her, stealing a kiss here or there, hither or yon, when not busy stanching wounds or delivering babies, three of them by Christmas alone.
David feels certain his mother would be a solid Wallace Ames supporter if she knew of his existence, or even of Helen’s existence, for that matter, since he hasn’t yet told her about the radiant blue-eyed beauty he stumbled upon one bright October day. Knows without question that his mother would agree Wallace is really the man this nice young girl should marry, why don’t you concentrate on your work, David, on becoming a good doctor, David, instead of sniffing around a blond, blue-eyed beauty already engaged to a surfer?
To the surfer’s credit—and anyway he isn’t a surfer, but is instead seriously studying film at UCLA—it is he who decides to end this long-distance engagement to a girl he “hardly knows,” as he puts it in a Dear Helen letter which she receives on New Year’s Eve, great timing, Wally. Two weeks later, this still being the lewd, lascivious, obscene and pornographic seventies, David and Helen consummate their budding romance on a single bed in a rented room on the Cape. To his mother’s credit, she accepts Helen without a backward sigh.
There is a history here.
It is a record as complex as the computer banks of their separate minds, storing and recalling memories solitary or shared, before or since. It is as pervasive as the waves gently lapping the shore beyond the sliding screen doors in this room where they make quiet love lest they wake the children, reckless love in that they cannot quite muffle their ardor.
He has shared with this woman a thousand hopes and aspirations, small triumphs, bitter disappointments. He has laughed with her and cried with her, fought with her, hated her, loved her again, abjured her, adored her again. When Jenny was born … oh dear God … and the obstetrician told him Helen had gone into shock … no, dear God … and he might … he might … he might lose her, he prayed long into the night to a deity he had not acknowledged since he was eighteen. He knows every facet of this woman’s mind, every nuance of her body. He has savored each forever, and has never tired of either. He still believes she is the most beautiful woman he has ever known.
Then why, he wonders.
Why?
It is raining on Sunday morning.
Annie wants to go to a movie.
“That’s what you do when it rains,” she says and shrugs in perfect logic.
Together, she and Helen go into the kitchen to call the movie houses in Vineyard Haven. David is playing chess with Jenny in the living room. She is a whiz at the game he taught her when she was Annie’s age, and she plays with intense concentration, forcing him into moves that enforce and encourage her master plan, all the while keeping up a running conversation, much as her mother does when administering her fifty magic strokes each night.
“Check,” she says. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to tell Mom or Annie?”
“I promise.”
“Especially Annie.”
“Yes, darling, I promise.”
Jenny lowers her voice. On her sweet solemn face, there is a look of such trust that he wants to hug her close and tell her he would never betray a secret of hers as long as he can draw breath. Blue eyes wide, she leans over the chessboard and whispers, “Brucie loves me.”
“Who’s Brucie?” he whispers back.
“Di Angelo. Next door.”
She gestures with her head.
“How do you know?”
“He gave me a ring,” she whispers, and pulls from under her T-shirt a tiny gold band on a golden chain. “You know what else?” she whispers, quickly sliding the ring out of sight again.
“What else?” he whispers.
“I love him, too.”
“That’s nice,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, and nods happily. “Your move, Dad.”
The sun is shining when they come out of the theater at a quarter past three. His plane will be leaving at six-fifteen this evening, and will get into LaGuardia at seven twenty-nine.
“Why don’t you go back tomorrow morning instead?” Jenny asks.
“Cause that would be a hardship,” Annie says. “Besides, Dad’ll be here forever next weekend.”
They are taking a last long walk up the beach before it’s time to head to the airport. He and Helen are holding hands. The girls are running up the beach ahead of them, circling back occasionally to hug them both around the legs, skipping off again, skirting like sandpipers the waves that gently rush the shore.
“Right, Dad?” Annie says, turning to look back at him.
“Right, honey,” he says, and squeezes Helen’s hand.
“Forever, right?”
“Forever,” he says.
Annie leaps over someone’s abandoned sand castle, lands flat-footed and crouched on the other side of it.
“Boop!” she says.
And in that moment, he decides to end whatever this thing with Kate might be.
He is in the study reading when the doorman buzzes upstairs at five minutes to nine that night. Puzzled, he pads barefoot through the apartment to the receiver hanging just inside the front door.
“Hello?” he says.
“Dr. Chapman?”
“Yes?”
“Pizza delivery.”
“I didn’t order any pizza,” he says.
“Young lady says thees pizza for you.”
“Oh. Yes, I … yes, send it right up.”
She is wearing black shorts, a red T-shirt, a red beret, red socks and black high-topped thick-soled shoes that look like combat boots. She does indeed look like someone who could be delivering a pizza, which she is in fact doing. From the looks of the carton, it is a good-sized one.
“I got half cheese and half pepperoni,” she says, “I hope that’s okay. Are you hungry?”
“No, I ate a little while ago.”
“I’m starved,” she says. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“The plane was late.”
“I’m glad you’re here. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
“Kate …” he starts.
“Before I die?” she says and moves into his arms.
He kisses her, and then breaks away gently but almost at once, fearful that somehow Helen, all the way up there in Massachusetts, will know there’s another woman in their apartment, will know he has just kissed a woman who’s brought him a pizza at nine o’clock at night, will know this is the woman, the girl, he’s been sleeping with, talk about euphemisms, and that she is here in their apartment right this very minute, now, dressed like a delivery person in a red beret and combat boots. As he takes the pizza carton from her and carries it into the kitchen he fully expects the phone will ring and Helen will yell, “Who’s that with you, you bastard?”
But, of course, the phone doesn’t ring.
“Nice,” she says, looking around.
“Thank you,” he says.
He is still very nervous. More than nervous. Apprehensive. Frightened that Luis … was it Luis at the door when he got back from dinner tonight? If it was Luis who passed her in, will he remember that this is the same girl who left a washed and ironed handkerchief downstairs two weeks ago, have they been sleeping together for only two weeks? But, of course, the handkerchief was in an envelope, so he wouldn’t have known it was a handkerchief, as if that makes any difference, sly Luis with his big macho Hispanic grin and virtual wink, clever Luis who accepted the “leetle” package from a beautiful redheaded girl at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning two weeks ago, but this is now
nine o’clock this Sunday night, and Mrs. Chapman is enjoying the seashore up there in Massachusetts, verdad, señor? Will Luis remember? If it is Luis downstairs? Will Luis remember—and destroy him even after he has ended it? But, of course, he hasn’t ended it yet. Not quite yet. He has only decided to end it.
“We should put it in the oven,” Kate says.
She seems blithely, and somehow infuriatingly, unaware of his discomfort. Doesn’t she know that Helen has a nose like a beagle and that the perfume she’s wearing, while admittedly seductive though inappropriate to the delivery boy guise, is the sort that will permeate upholstery and drapes and be sniffed in an instant when Helen and the children walk through the front door on the fifteenth of September, which is when the lease on the Vineyard house runs out? Bending from the waist like the dancer she is, she slips the pizza carton into the oven, turns to smile at him, and blows a kiss on the air.
“Kate,” he says, “we have to talk.”
“Sure,” she says, and familiarly adjusts the dial on the oven, as if she has warmed pizzas in this oven in this kitchen forever, as if this is her kitchen, in fact. “But aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
“Of course,” he says, but he is thinking he wants to get this over with, talk to her, tell her it’s over, eat the goddamn pizza, get rid of the carton, end it. As he leads her into the living room, she looks around appraisingly, studying the paintings on the wall, and the silk flower arrangement on the hall table, and the furniture, and the small piece of sculpture he and Helen brought back from their trip to India three years ago, her green eyes roaming, “Nice,” she says again, and sits on the couch facing the bar unit, crossing her long legs in the short black shorts and the incongruous combat boots. She knows her legs are gorgeous …
I’ve always had great legs, even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely …
… knows she can take outrageous liberties with them, probably figures as well that the shorts and the boots are an exaggerated echo of the green nylon running shorts and Nike running shoes she was wearing on the day they met.