Blameless (16 page)

She stepped briskly, taking in the beautiful wrought-iron grillwork along the street-level windows, feeling the quiet harmony of the tiny enclave. She would go teach her class and then come back and hit James’s files. Gail always contended she was a control freak. Well, now was the time to focus on things she could control.

Diana’s stroll had made her late. She grabbed her notes and rushed from the house, ignoring the blinking answering machine. Feeling better than she had in days, she practiced her lecture on the way to Ticknor. Halfway across Cambridge, she decided that she knew her stuff. She turned on the radio and sang along with an oldies station until she reached Medford.

When she got to campus, the swarms of students that filled the quad between classes were gone, presumably already settled in their seats, notebooks open and pens poised. Diana hurried toward Eaton Hall, huffing from the climb up the steep stairs. She glanced at her watch. Not so late that the students would have left. Twenty minutes was the rule. And it was only ten minutes past ten. Still, her steps lengthened. She hated to keep anyone waiting. Especially one hundred anyones. Especially when she had such a strong lecture to give.

As soon as she opened the door to the building, somewhere, on some lower level of consciousness, Diana felt that something was wrong. Dismissing the premonition as another bout of unfounded paranoia, she bounded up the half-flight of stairs toward her room. But when she reached the landing, she
knew
something was wrong. The hall was too quiet. That many students waiting for a tardy professor would be making an uproar. And there was none.

Moving even more quickly, Diana entered the lecture hall. She stood in the door, frozen with bewilderment. The room was empty. Was it the wrong day? No, she thought, remembering the hearing, today was definitely Tuesday. The wrong time? She checked her watch once again. Then she looked up at the podium. On the blackboard behind the lectern was a large message: “Psych 112 Canceled Today.”

Canceled? She hadn’t canceled class. Diana raced downstairs to the psychology department offices. She ran past a few open doors without taking the time to talk to anyone and headed straight for the secretary’s office. Peg, who knew everything that went on in the university, would surely know what was going on with her class. But Peg wasn’t there. The office was empty.

As Diana turned toward the Xerox room—Peg’s second home—she noticed a copy of the
Boston Inquirer
on top of a file cabinet. She stopped, her stomach squeezing so hard she had to grab the wall for support.
SEX DOC’S DIARY VERIFIES ALL
, screamed a headline so big and so thick that it took the entire top half of the tabloid’s first page. She flipped the paper over so she could read what was written beneath the fold. She stared in stunned disbelief; her own face was staring back at her. The kicker along the bottom of the page said: “Excerpts Inside.”

14

W
ITHOUT CONSCIOUS AWARENESS OF WHAT SHE WAS
doing, Diana grabbed the newspaper and shoved it into her briefcase. Then she turned from the office and ran. When she got to the jeep, she punched the locks and sat staring out the windshield at the rows of cars in front of her, her breath coming in labored gasps.

With trembling fingers, she pulled the
Inquirer
open and turned to the page listed under the headline. When her eyes fell on the first excerpt, she was filled with relief: It was not only relatively mild, it also brought out the whole issue of countertransference.

I know it’s countertransference. I know that I need to feel these feelings to do my job well. That it’s normal, even desirable. But it’s scary. The man is just too sexy—and too crazy about me
.

I look into his eyes and I think thoughts I should never think. I
brush his arm and dream dreams I can’t dream. And yet, I long for the thoughts and yearn for the dreams. When I wake from a James-dream, I close my eyes and try to find the thread that will lead me back to him again. I am being drawn to the forbidden—and I am afraid it is where I want to go
.

But when she turned the page and read the next, her heart plummeted. They had used the first entry as a teaser, a scene-setter, and now they were coming in for the kill.

It is hot. Steamy. But not unpleasantly so. The old air conditioner creaks and labors in the window, rattling the narrow blinds closed above it to hold back the midday sun. We are alone in the dim, hot-coolness of the cavelike room. Sweat beads along James’s collarbone and I ache to touch it. To taste it with my tongue. He speaks, but I can barely hear his words, so focused am I on my need to feel the smooth ripple of the muscles in his arm
.

Then he grows silent and still and his eyes lock onto mine; a bad-boy smile plays along the edges of lips that already appear bruised from love-making. Slowly James holds out his hands. I stand and walk toward him, pulled by an invisible magnet that I know I must resist, that I know I must fight. But I keep walking. Walking forever across the short distance that separates us, the pain growing outward from the center of my being until it consumes and becomes every nerve of my body. The horrible, glorious pain of the forbidden
.

And then I am upon him. And he upon me. The pain both sharpens and abates as we crush together, tasting and touching each other in a ferocity that obliterates all else. It is heaven. And it is hell
.

There were more: the one describing the two of them making love in the parking garage; the one in the lecture hall; one she had forgotten about where she related how she and James had performed gymnastic feats in the hot tub at her friend Susan’s trailside ski condo as skiers rode the chairlift over their heads. As Diana read, panic roared through her. Sweat broke out on her forehead and on her upper lip and on her chest. The back of her blouse was wet. She saw Jill rubbing her hands with glee. She heard Kathleen and Lisa yelling about gender equity and sexism in the media. And she saw Craig, hurt and bewildered, his gentle eyes filled with pain.

As if coming out of a deep slumber, Diana slowly became aware of the frigid chill of the air. She adjusted her coat snugly around her, but the icy cold that emanated from within and her damp clothes made her begin to shiver uncontrollably. A small moan escaped her lips; she bowed her head on the steering wheel and cried.

When Diana pulled onto St. Stephen Street, a man and a woman were lounging against the streetlamp in front of her house. Despite their superficial nonchalance, the couple was alert, scanning the sidewalk, whispering and pointing at something written on a pad the woman held. Sniffers. Through some incredible stroke of luck, neither noticed Diana as she swung her jeep into the alley.

How had this happened? she asked herself for about the hundredth time since seeing the
Inquirer
headline. Valerie had said it couldn’t. Valerie had said until the journal was part of the court record, no newspaper would risk it. It was against the law. But the
Inquirer
had obviously chosen not to abide by the law; they had weighed the cost of a possible suit against the gain of a juicy story and an expanded readership, and had—just as obviously—decided the risk was worth taking.

Driving slowly down the alley, Diana looked right and left, peering around the trash cans and the cars and the sagging planks of wood that roughly demarcated property lines. She even checked the deep sinkhole behind the house next to theirs. No sniffers. No neighbors. No street people rifling the Dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant. Either the reporters hadn’t figured out that there was a back entrance, or, more likely, they were far too mindful of the realities of urban life to risk hanging around in a dim alley—no matter how hot the story.

But despite the stillness, Diana felt the eyes. She felt them on the back of her neck as she pulled into her spot. She felt them watching her from above as she scampered to the house. She felt them poring over her, surrounding her, swallowing her, even as she slipped inside the door.

Her breath coming fast, Diana leaned against the cool plaster of the hallway, pressing her cheek to the wall. Unfounded paranoia, she had called it just a mere hour ago. Founded paranoia was what it was. The mothers on Charles Street and the businessman in front of Jill’s. The elderly woman and the man with the hammer at the Christian Science mall. It was like the old joke: Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t following you.

Diana wrapped her coat around her—whether to warm or protect herself, she did not know—and walked slowly toward her office. Craig. She had to call Craig. And Valerie. She looked at her watch. Valerie might already be on her way to the hearing. The hearing. Diana barked a harsh laugh containing no humor. The judgment she had looked upon as defining her life had been completely voided of its power.

She stood in the doorway to her small waiting room and looked through to her office. She could see the red light blinking on the answering machine. Perhaps Craig had called already. He must have seen the paper by now. She pressed her palm to her stomach. Someone would have showed it to him.

Despite Craig’s unflinching support since James’s death, Diana knew he had never been comfortable with her relationship with James. Even during the first year, before there was any indication of the problems to come, Craig had questioned her involvement. “It seems as if you’re always talking about this Hutchins character,” Craig had said right before James had his memory breakthrough. “Don’t you think you should give your other patients—not to mention your husband—a bit of your time?” he had teased.

But after she had terminated with James, after James had begun to harass them both, Craig had stopped teasing and become angry. About a week before his death, James had sneaked into the backseat of the jeep, jumping up from his hiding place while Diana was driving to Ticknor. She had been so startled, she had slammed on her brakes and skidded into a parked car. She did little damage to either the jeep or the other car, but she was quite shaken—as was Craig. “Either you get rid of that loser, or I’m calling the police and getting a restraining order,” Craig had told her. “You talk to him or I will.” But before she or Craig could do anything, James had gotten rid of himself.

Diana was startled from her reverie by the slight kick of a tiny foot beneath her palm. What was Craig going to think of her relationship with James now? Talking about James was one thing; writing about having sex with him was another. “Oh, little one,” she whispered, “let’s hope your daddy understands.”

She turned and headed up the stairs. On some level, she could appreciate that she was nauseated and terrified and furious. But really, what she felt most was calm. A strange, detached composure, almost as if she were once again acting in a high school play, as if she were both mentally and physically unable to believe that this was really her life.

She climbed up to the great room and, swinging wide toward the back of the house, approached the front window from the side. She pulled the edge of the drape. The sniffers were still
there
Straightening a pillow on the sofa, she wondered how long they would stay and then wandered out of the room. Leaning over the stairwell, she looked through the narrow opening between the balustrades and the landings to the floor two stories below. “I’ll be with you always,” James had told her the day she had terminated with him. “Even when you think I’m finally gone.”

Diana twisted her head and looked up at the clouded, dirty skylight one story above. James’s prescience was definitely spooky. She climbed one more set of stairs, drawn to the small room at the front of the house. To the empty, freshly whitewashed room with three windows at the treetops and a shiny new hardwood floor.

But when she entered the nursery, Diana was jolted from her cool reverie. She raised one hand to her mouth as a small gasp escaped her lips. For there, standing in the corner of the room, his arms hanging limp at his sides, was Craig.

“Craig—” Diana started, and then her voice cracked. She wanted to run to him, to bury her head in his chest, but something about the stiff, uncomfortable way he was holding himself stopped her. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, looking at her hands, unable to confront the hurt on his face. A shiver of apprehension ran down her back: The cold eyes she had felt on her in the alley had been Craig’s. “So sorry.”

“Lionel dropped the paper on my desk as soon as he got in this morning,” Craig said softly. “Then he suggested I take the rest of the day off.” Lionel Lunt was Craig’s boss. He was one of the most powerful architects in the country, and his opinion regularly made—and unmade—people’s reputations.

The full impact of the situation hit Diana like a punch in the gut. “This whole disaster is all my fault,” she said, taking a step toward Craig.

“Don’t.” Craig held his hands up, whether to stop her from coming any closer or to stop her from speaking, Diana wasn’t sure. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, but he didn’t move toward her.

“They canceled my class without telling me.”

Craig nodded, his back pressed to the wall. “When did you see the paper?”

“It—it was in the department office. I went down to find out why the class—why my class was—why it—” She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t get the words past the huge lump in her throat.

“I know you didn’t do the things you wrote about,” Craig said, still not moving toward her. “But it just seems so—so
real
, to read it in the paper like that …”

Diana stood alone and defenseless in the middle of the barren room. She hung her head, thinking of the thousands of people who would read the
Inquirer:
their friends, their family, her colleagues, a sea of opinionated strangers ready to think the worst. “Everyone’s going to believe it,” she whispered.

Craig dropped his arms. “No, they won’t,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s too wild to believe. The stuff at Ticknor. In the parking garage. Susan’s ski house …” Then the images seemed to be too much for him; his tenuous control collapsed and his voice rose. “Why did you have to write it?” He lurched forward and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Why did you have to be so graphic?”