[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Finch broke into my files and you came to that party.Very glad." She leaned toward me and put a quick light shy kiss on the corner of my mouth.It was not invitational.It was the kiss a young girl gives her uncle at Christmas.My upright behavior must have intrigued her, because she began to appear at the right places and right times with such uncanny accuracy that we drifted into an affair which lasted not more than a month and was called off by mutual consent.We were able to say the right things, do the right things, satisfy each other, enjoy each other, but there was something lacking.We were friends making love, not lovers making love.The bodies functioned, but the hearts never took to the wild leaping.So it had a faint flavor of the mechanical, an aura of the incestuous.And, also, I had the feeling she was watching both of us with her professional eye, a surveillance guaranteed to chill any alliance.So now, needing advice, I phoned her office.The Noman who answered told me the doctor was with a patient, but she could be disturbed if it was an emergency.I said it was a social call and left my name and number.Laura called back twenty minutes later."Travis! How good to hear your voice.""I've been trying to remember when I saw you last.About four years ago, I think.""Closer to five.We ran into each other at Sears.Housewares.""It's been five years? How are you anyway?""One hundred forty and holding.""Married yet?""Almost was, but I backed out at the very last moment, almost when he was putting the ring on me.Turned chicken.I know you aren't.""How would you know that?""Let's just say that your social circles and my professional clients overlap a little here and there.And sometimes we talk about you.""Favorably?""Sometimes, sure.""The reason I called, I want to pick your doctor brains over dinner.I want to tell you what I know about someone, and you tell me what you can guess about him.I buy the food and the wine."She said she was free that very evening, but she had some dictation to catch up on and had planned to stay in the office for a couple of hours after the last patient, so she thought she had better meet me at the restaurant.She named one of the new French ones.She said she would make the reservation.They are popping up all over Florida like toadstools after a rain.They vary from wretched to superb.The very best one I know, and I think it the best between Miami and New Orleans, is over on the west coast of Florida, at a shopping mall called Sarasota Square.It is outside the mall, in an area containing a Kmart and a supermarket.It is called the Cafe La Chaumiere and is owned and operated by an agreeable type named Alain who used to be a chef at the Rive Gauche in Washington.When I got there at eight, they were all smiles when I said I was joining the Doctor Honneker.Would I go to the table? No, thank you, I would wait luere at this little corner bar.She came in looking elegant in her office business suit.A little heftier in the hip, a trifle thicker around the waist, some horizontal lines across the throat and verticals bracketing the mouth.But a fine figure of a woman, with a lovely green-eyed smile.I carried my drink to the table and we ordered bc-sr one.She told me her practice was booming, alI due mostly to having some luck with the nosecandy crowd: young lawyers, doctors, contractors, merchants, dentists, politicians."I get them of course after they are finally willing to admit they are in serious trouble.So they are pretty well habituated by then, and very jumpy.Have you ever used it?""Tried it twice and didn't like it either time.The great big rush of confidence and well-being is just fine, but when it fades it's hard to remember just exactly what it was like.You just remember you felt real good, and now you don't feel so great.""My reaction exactly.I've been having some luck with diet, drug therapy, and analysis.One thing I am sure of: when I have a patient who backslides and comes back to me six months later, there is a discernable diminution of intelligence and awareness.I'm administering standard intelligence measurements to all my cocaine patients now as standard procedure.If I can accumulate enough data, I'm going to try to do a paper on it."Over the soup she asked me what I wanted to ask her.I had gone through some mental rehearsals."Here is your hypothetical patient, Laura.He is now forty-two.When he was thirteen, his mother died suddenly.He had one sister, five years older.When he was fifteen his father married a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked in his office.She was a very sexy item, with a chronic case of the hots.The father was promoted to a job where he had to travel three and four days a week and stay away overnight.When he was seventeen, after his sister married and moved out, the patient was seduced by his stepmother and they entered into a relationship that lasted perhaps three years.Call it two years, plus the vacations when he came home from college when he was twenty.""That's really a fairly common form of incest, Travis, and-""That's just part of it.After the end of his freshman year, the boy came home from college and they picked up where they left off.The father came home unexpectedly one night, heard them, listened at the bedroom door, got his gun, and stepped in and killed her with one shot to the back of the head, near the nape of the neck.From the evidence at the scene, the woman was on top, her feet toward the doorway.The boy squirmed out from under her, and we do not know what happened next.There was evidence of a struggle.So either he father tried to kill the boy or tried to kill himself.They fought for the gun and the father was shot.He died soon after they found him.A neighbor heard the two shots and saw the boy as he drove away in the father's car.The car was found weeks later at the bottom of a canyon, with nobody in it or near it."She dropped her soup spoon into her shallow bowl and stared at me."Good grief! What was the boy's relationship to his father?""The boy loved and respected his old man.""Worser and worser.What kind of boy was he?""Standard issue.Athletic.Not a great student.Interested in theater, I guess.He was in the drama club.Reasonably good-looking.Big shoulders and hands.""Are you quite sure he's alive?""It is a reasonable certainty.""Is the sister alive?""Yes.He sends cash to her, secretly.He has a way of keeping track of where she is.He's sent her the better part of a hundred thousand dollars over the last fifteen years or so.""Does she condone his behavior?""She says it was all the fault of the second wife.""Is he still a fugitive?""Technically I guess.Nobody is really looking for him for that early shooting.""But they are looking for him for something else?""I'd rather not say yet.What would it do to a person, that kind of history?""I don't think… I don't believe anyone would be strong enough to walk away from something like that undamaged.If he loved his father, then he hated the stepmother.The long history of betraying his father every time they had a chance, that isn't something he could get used to.It would just pile guilt upon guilt, higher and higher.He would have contempt for himself, for being unable to stop.He would feel weak and used and contemptible.""How would it have ended if the old man hadn't caught them?""I don't know.I can guess.The stepmother was turned on by the danger of it, by the 'badness' of it.She was walking a very dangerous tightrope and knew it.One scenario would be for the boy to kill her, to strangle her or beat her to death.That would be an understandable way of seeking punishment for all his sinning.That would give themmeaning society-the excuse to jail him for life, put him away, out of touch with decent people.A less dramatic and probably more plausible reaction would be for the boy to just run away, leave it all behind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]