Deadline (29 page)

I was running, gasping for air. I saw from a window how high I was above the city – I had to be on the uppermost level of this house now, it couldn't go any higher, it wasn't possible. The final corridor, the last stretch of rooms. I kept opening doors.

And there she was.

Sondra. My Sondra.

My wife. The woman I loved.

She was sitting up in a big bed. She had a cigarette burning in her hand. She had a sheet drawn up over her, but her shoulders were bare.

She looked at me with an expression I'd never seen before – a chill distance in her eyes I couldn't measure – and said, ‘Is it that time already?'

A door on the other side of the bedroom opened and a man appeared. His hair was thick and black and he was dressed in a green silk robe. The cord was loosely tied. He looked at me, stuck his hands in the pockets of his robe. I knew who he was. Suddenly, I knew everything. The knowledge was as cold as an arctic wind. I shivered and had to put my back against the bedroom wall because I was certain I was going to fall down without some support.

Nardini said, ‘Jerry Lomax.'

He went to the bed and sat.

Sondra reached out to the bedside table and picked up a glass half-filled with red wine. She drank, watching me over the rim, her hair only a shade darker than the wine. She wasn't wearing her wedding-ring.

‘Cheers, Jerry,' she said.

11.10 p.m.

Dennis Nardini rose, went out of the room.
Diplomatic of him
, I thought, and the thought was a bitter one, an acrid cloud in my head. He shut the door. I could hear him in the corridor with Resick, voices raised, arguing.

I went towards my wife. She set her wine down on the bedside table. Her look was challenging. It was:
So-what
? It was:
You never knew me.
It was:
I don't love you.

‘How long?' I asked.

‘Six months.'

‘Since the coke bust?'

She looked away from me. ‘Since that night.'

‘Why didn't you tell me about you and …' I faltered. My insides were tumbling. My heart had gone before. I was hanging on barbed-wire in a wintry field and the earth was black and wet.

‘I thought about it. I wanted to. I wasn't sure how.'

‘This isn't … Jesus, this isn't a terrific way to find out,' I said.

She dropped her cigarette into the wine-glass and it sizzled briefly. I wanted to hold her and say,
I love you, come home with me, we'll move on from this terrible place, we'll seek out that archetypal safe town in the hills and raise a child, a real child this time.

‘Six months,' I said. ‘I didn't
know.
How could I not goddam
know?
'

‘You weren't looking, Jerry. You were busy with your patients. All their crap. All their pains and delusions. You just quit looking.'

She fidgeted with the hem of the sheet. I realized for the first time that the room was scented by her body, but the aroma was altered by another element: Dennis Nardini. The smell of a man. Of sex.

I shut my eyes, sat on the edge of the bed. I wondered when shock would dissipate and pain kick in. The walls of the room were the color of a lime. A green room. In my imagined room, the walls had been a paler shade of green. Like a bleached leaf. Purple grass and pale green walls.

‘This plan,' I said. ‘Who dreamed it up?'

‘Dennis,' she said.

‘Aided and abetted by you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Willingly.'

‘Not at first,' she said.

‘But you came round to his way of thinking.'

‘It made sense.'

‘Bravo,' I said. I couldn't keep the hurt out of my voice. I tried, but it forced itself through. I imagined her and Nardini lying here or in other beds in other rooms, fucking and planning, planning and fucking, locked and rocking in each other's arms. The intimacy of that image was a bayonet into my heart.

‘He used you,' I said.

‘Only to get at your precious Emily Ford,' she said.

‘Precious?'

‘Oh, come on. You spent so much time with that woman I felt we were living separate lives. She drained you. She squeezed you dry. You worked on her problems constantly. It went beyond therapy. You became
attached
, Jerry, the cardinal sin in your profession. And the more attached you were, the more you cut me loose.'

‘I was only doing my job,' I said. ‘Are you suggesting I was having an affair with her or something?'

‘I'm not suggesting anything, Jerry. All I know is, your life orbited exclusively around her problems. You came home, couldn't sleep, sat up into the small hours making goddam notes. And even when she quit being your patient, you still buried yourself in your work. It had become a habit with you by then.'

I couldn't remember devoting so many hours to Emily and her problems, to the moral dilemma of her life, that conflict between right and wrong, between conscious and unconscious, memory and amnesia. Maybe I'd done so without realizing that I was neglecting Sondra. Hunkered down inside Emily Ford's life, I'd forgotten to pay attention to matters of a more personal emotional resonance.

The stuff on my own doorstep.

Sondra lit another cigarette. She'd given up smoking because of the baby, I recalled.
The baby, lovemaking on the deck, and then nothing. Now less than nothing.

‘Nardini's a fucking crook,' I said.

It was a reflex statement, born out of hurt, and she smiled when I said it.

‘You don't know him,' she said. ‘He intrigues me. His world fascinates me. He moves in exciting circles. He isn't sitting in some office, listening to dull people whine about their emotional inadequacies. He isn't pushing pills to gullible Hollywood wives who have too much time on their hands.'

‘That's how you see my work?'

‘It's beside the point how I see your work. Look, this is hard to say. I don't love you, Jerry. That's the only point. It's
more
than not loving you … I used to think it was a form of pity. You were somebody I felt sorry for. You poor man, you had all the cares of the world on your shoulders. But then I realized, no, it's nothing to do with the burden you carry, it's the fact I dislike you, I began to despise you, I couldn't even stand to be in your company, I'd met somebody else who meant more to me than you ever could, and you diminished to the point where my contempt for you became a kind of abstract constant, like a dull toothache that never quite goes away.

‘I hated coming home. I hated small things about you. The fussy way you breathed on your glasses before you cleaned them. The sounds you made when you slept. Truly petty things, like the way you folded the newspaper when you'd read it … It was an accumulation of stuff.'

I don't love you, Jerry
…
I couldn't even stand to be in your company …
was there any statement more devastating that a man could hear from the woman he loved?

Hurt me some more, Sondra. Pile it on. Kill me. But do it quickly.

I reached for her hand, a gesture of hope. She drew it away. I closed my fingers on the empty space where her hand had been. I gazed at her and she looked at me with the defiance of somebody saying:
Get used to this, because this is the way things are.

She was too far gone. I saw that.

She loved this Nardini. She was besotted. That was the hold he had over her: Love, in one of its many varieties. I felt like cracked glass. I was standing on a fault-line on the earth and it was about to break open and I'd vanish inside some deep, hot place.

I looked at the wine-glass, the cigarette butt floating on a disc of red liquid. I wanted to go punch the window out, let night air enter the room and dilute the smell. I experienced the zigzag lines again, the migraine electricity, and my mouth was dry. I needed to lie down in a darkened room and sleep for a week. Then, when I woke out of my dreamless state, amnesia would be hard at work, deleting passages of my memory, excising all the bad things. Later, I'd take off somewhere; I'd pack a bag and drift up a jungle river on a ramshackle raft in search of whitewater.

I'd forget who I was, and the woman who'd been my wife, and the cruelty of this whole pantomime. The inhumanity of it.

‘You knew about the safe-deposit box,' I said. ‘I must have told you about it.'

‘You don't even recall
that
, do you? You're so wrapped up with those freaks that come to your office that everything just kind of slips past you. Sure, you told me about the box, Jerry. You told me the day you opened it. You said you needed a safe-deposit box because you had material you didn't feel secure keeping in your office. Words to that effect.'

‘I remember vaguely,' I said.

But I wasn't sure. I wondered what else had drained out of my mind. What else I'd overlooked because I was buried in the problems of others. I must have lived some of my life at a tangent to everyday concerns, overlooking not only the obvious, but nuances, too, hints, slips of the tongue, behavioral clues. How many times had she lied to me and I'd missed it? Saying she was working late, when in reality she'd been with Nardini? And then all those weekend music industry conventions, those business retreats – how could I have missed a giveaway, a bad excuse, a slyness, an evasion in her manner?

She said, ‘It was at the time when Ford was your patient. So I knew that whatever you stuffed in that box was connected to her. And I knew it had to be big, because you were more worried than I'd ever seen you before. You were jittery. You were prescribing downers for yourself, for God's sake. You were becoming secretive. Paranoid. The sound of the goddam phone made you jump. Remember?'

I didn't recall being jittery back then. But I was jittery now. I got up from the bed. I wasn't sure where to turn, what to do.

I heard Nardini and Resick talking just beyond the door. I watched Sondra blow smoke and I thought how I still wanted her, how love created clowns out of otherwise sensible people. If she got out of that bed and said she'd changed her mind about Nardini and wanted to come back, I'd take her home, and I'd be glad, my heart would come to life again. I stood without moving, half-hoping she'd say just that,
Nardini was a lustful fling, I just wanted his big cock inside me. I wanted to fuck him, suck his dick, I wanted him to screw me from behind, I wanted him to shackle me and fuck me until I bled, whatever. But it's over, let's get on with things, forgive me.

And I'd forgive and be glad even as I knew I was being dumb.

‘Give Dennis what you kept in the box, Jerry,' she said. ‘Just do it. End this thing and let us all move on.'

Move on where
, I wondered.

I listened to Nardini and Resick in the hallway. Nardini was saying, ‘You shouldn't have let him run free through this goddam house, Tod, it's out of hand.' And Resick said something that sounded like, ‘I'm not the one screwing his wife.' This dispute seemed to take place in another world, one that bore no relation to my life and marriage. Two men squabbling. My wife's lover and his sidekick, his junior partner in crime. They were arguing about timing, the fact that I'd been allowed the liberty to discover Nardini in a compromising situation with my wife.

I looked at her. ‘I wasn't supposed to find out about this, was I?' I asked. ‘It was meant to be a straight exchange. I give them whatever I've got on Emily Ford, and you come home with me. Right?'

‘Right,' she said.

‘And then what? How was it meant to play out? You'd have continued to meet Nardini secretly.'

‘Yes.'

‘And?'

‘Dennis and I … we'd wait for the appropriate moment before I walked out on you entirely to be with him. Meantime, we'd take things one day at a time.'

‘Yeah, right, like some fucking twelve-step program, huh?'

‘It's pointless to talk with you, Jerry.'

‘But you'd pack a suitcase at some point in the future and walk out on me because Nardini loves you and you love him?'

She nodded her head slowly. ‘Along those lines.'

I was supposed to play along, thinking my marriage was still a happy one, that my wife loved me. And all the time, she'd be listening for the phone to ring, to hear her lover's voice say,
Come to me now.

‘This isn't you,' I said. ‘You're not Sondra.'

‘People change, Jerry. They choose a different path.'

‘Does he love you?' I asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Has he told you?'

‘He's said so, sure.'

‘He's used the words,' I said. ‘He's said “I love you” because it's expedient.'

‘You're trying to undermine him,' she said. ‘You're hurt. I understand that.'

‘Thank you for your understanding,' I said. ‘And fuck you.'

I stared at her. I wanted to strike her. The urge to do violence was strong and unexpected. If I remained in her presence, I'd hit her. I knew that. I'd hit her more than once. Maybe I'd take her neck between my hands and squeeze.

Kill her.

I turned, opened the door.

Dennis Nardini looked at me.

I had an insight into what Sondra saw in him: a dark attraction, a secret promise in the eyes, a hint of fire, an intimacy that was menacing. He didn't flinch from me, there was none of that embarrassment predictable in situations of exposed infidelity, no quiet apology:
I stole your wife, I'm sorry, these things happen.

Dennis Nardini was the kind of man who never apologized to anyone for anything.

I said, ‘You can have her.' The words were like arsenic in my mouth.

I made to walk past him. He laid a heavy hand on my arm.

‘You're forgetting, you have something we want,' he said. The voice was pure gold liquid, something sweet and honeylike tapped out of a tree trunk. It was rich in a way that suggested power, a world without limitations. I imagined Sondra swooning and drowning in such a voice. I imagined him whispering in her ear,
Spread your legs for me, my love. I want to be deep, deep inside you. As deep as you can take me.