Dressed to Kill (4 page)

She knocked lightly, then she went inside.

He was sitting at his worktable. In one hand he was holding a smoking soldering iron, in the other a printed circuit board, a jumble of skeletal lines that meant nothing to her. He didn’t look up, didn’t even seem to be aware of her standing in the doorway. She stared at his black hair, unruly, ruffled, and the way his spectacles gleamed in the sunlight that came through the window. Suddenly it seemed to her that he was a replica of Thomas: the angle of the head, the lips pursed in concentration, the brow lined. A fifteen-year-old replica of a dead man. She felt a dry thickness in her throat, a pulse beating faintly in her skull like some dying bird’s wing. A dizziness, a feeling she’d known before when she saw Peter in a certain light from a certain angle.

We buried Thomas just before the snows came, she thought. On a day the color of slate. We buried him just as the frigid dark of winter was covering everything. Another Vietnam statistic. One of the late ones . . . She remembered a blur of things suddenly, the terrible telegram, the feeling of a scream locked up in her heart, the way she’d held Peter as if nothing were more precious to her now than the dead man’s son. It came back, it came back like a black flood. She held the side of the door, waiting for the dizziness to ebb away from her. Eight fucking years, she thought. A widow with a seven-year-old son. Eight miserable fucking years ago. The lonely empty nights when the hunger was dreadful and all she could think about was the flesh decaying in the ground, and she’d understood the way to madness lay in that direction, that she was making a descent into the crazy inferno of her own macabre imagination. Dreams. Dreams of Thomas putting his foot down on a land mine. Dreams of explosions, the sky filled with rage, with the redness of blood, the tendrils of torn flesh.

She shut her eyes for a moment. It would pass, she knew. Once, she would have gone for the Valium or the Equanil or whatever salve Elliott might think fit to prescribes—but now she’d learned to control it without chemicals. It would pass. All you had to do was hold on.

Peter looked up at her. “I didn’t see you come in,” he said.

There were small dark circles under his eyes. She said, “You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?”

He nodded. “I’ve got to get this thing finished. The science exhibit is next week.”

“I know. You keep telling me that. As an excuse, kid, it’s pretty threadbare.” But she couldn’t bring herself to scold him; she lacked the cutting edge in her voice. And he knew it, because he was grinning at her. “What’s your secret, Peter? You ever sleep? I mean, like us common folks, you ever settle your head on a pillow and kinda close your eyes and just drift off into the land of nod, huh?”

She stood over him now, putting her hands on his shoulders, massaging him very gently. He said, “Who needs sleep? I read someplace we spend about one third of our life in bed. Can you imagine that? I mean, one third of a whole lifetime
spent in bed?
It’s a waste of time.”

She smiled down at him. “What’s that you’re doing anyhow? Cracking an atom or something?”

“It’s a microprocessor,” he said. “You wouldn’t really understand.”

She was amused at the way he sometimes patronized her. What the hell, he was right. She wouldn’t know a microprocessor from an acorn. She stared at the printed circuitry, then at the tangle of things on his table. Insane, like a mad scientist.

“Suppose, egghead, you explain to me.” She folded her arms under her breasts and stood in the manner of somebody who has been waiting years for an explanation.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “Unless you understood the game of chess. Unless you also understood the nature of memory function in a microprocessing unit.” He took off his glasses and folded them, and all at once he seemed like some juvenile professor, a prodigy, about to deliver a lecture to an august body. She wanted to laugh but she didn’t—how could you laugh when his whole face was so goddamn
intense?

“If it was checkers, I might be prepared,” she said.

“Checkers,” he said, barely able to keep the tone of disgust from his voice. He stared at the soldering iron for a moment. “Basically what I’m doing is reprogramming an electronic chess machine by adding to its repertoire of programmed openings. So I’m enlarging the capacity of this hundred-buck unit by adding a whole set of openings.” He twisted his head and looked up at her. That gleam in his eye, she thought. Sometimes it seemed wild to her.

“Okay. Enough, enough. I don’t understand a word of it, but I’m proud of you anyhow.” And she leaned over, kissing the top of his head, then ruffling his hair with the flat of her hand.

“Hey, it’s simple, the machine as produced doesn’t have the English Opening or the Dutch Defence in its memory, and all I’m doing is adding—”

“English, Dutch.” She shrugged. “I just don’t want you to pull any more all-nighters, okay?”

“Okay.” He sighed, but it was a pretend sigh, a part of the game they played out between one another—a game of affection, of mutual understanding. Something Mike couldn’t grasp, couldn’t get a handle on, like a secret he was locked out from.
You indulge that kid too much, Kate. You spoil him rotten.
Maybe, she thought. But if love was spoiling, then she was going to spoil. Sometimes, in her innermost darkness, she felt that Peter was all she had. All she would ever have.

“About lunch,” she said.

“What lunch?”

“We’re having lunch with Mike and his mother—”

“No,” Peter said. “Do I have to?”

“You mean you don’t
want
to?”

He smiled at her. “She reminds me of an ice cube.”

“Are you being fair to ice cubes, Peter?”

“Please,” he said.
“Please?”

She relented. What the hell—he’d only irritate Mike at the lunch table, playing with the saltshaker or the peppermill, spilling something, scribbling on a napkin, or retreating into one of his sullen silences. And she’d see Mike’s annoyance grow and grow, like some invisible balloon being puffed up, across the table.

She said, “Okay. But only if you promise me—no more all-nighters, right?”

“Right. Cross my heart.”

“I’m not altogether sure you mean it. But I’ll make your excuses for you.”

He rose and put his arms around her. “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

3

Somehow she didn’t look forward to the sessions with Elliott any more. At one time she’d found some kind of comfort, solace, in sitting in his office and opening up to him, but not now. It had something to do with Mike, his attitudes towards what he called “trick cyclists.” He had a wonderful talent for making her feel guilty about analysis.
Look at these bills,
he’d say.
You really think you need this guy? I mean, what’s he doing for you? And what the hell is wrong with you anyhow?

In the back of the cab she folded her hands in her lap, looking down at the skirt of her pale gray suit, the matching gloves. I don’t know what’s wrong, she thought.

Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I can’t define it for you, Mike, and even if I could you wouldn’t want to understand. Satisfaction. Contentment. A sense of passion. These things are missing from my life. Call it by any name you like, it comes down to a certain
emptiness.
A place where everything is dark, like the inside of an impossibly long tunnel. And Elliott tries to find some way to get me out of that place, that’s what he does. He listens.

But he isn’t really helping she thought.

What you need,
Mike had said once,
is a priest. A father confessor. They come cheaper.

She stared through the window of the cab, twisting her fingers together. She wondered how many other patients began to resent their analysts, began to feel inferior and vulnerable because they’d talked too much, given away too much of themselves with wild generosity, knocked down all their own defences and barriers and received nothing in return except for empty suggestions and occasional prescriptions. You couldn’t tell with Elliott what he was thinking as he listened, whether his mind was someplace else, whether he had developed a certain professional glaze so that he could look interested when he was really dreaming of other things.

The cab was pulling into the sidewalk now. She paid, stepped out, conscious suddenly of the immensity of the buildings around her, almost as if they seemed to leap higher and higher in the clear sunlight, thrusting upwards into the heart of the sun. She felt tiny, threatened by the massive architecture, imagining for a moment that the buildings would collapse around her. A mild form of agoraphobia, Elliot had once said. A fear of public places. She went to the private side entrance of the brownstone, glancing at the brass plate with his name on it, then pushed the wooden door open and entered the lobby. She thought:
A neurotic housewife.
It felt like the tag appended to the toe of a corpse in the cold room of the morgue.

She went inside the reception room of Elliott’s office. She was perspiring a little, a thin web of sweat forming in her armpits. There was noboby at the reception desk. The receptionist’s typewriter had a black dust cover over it. The waiting room was empty. For a moment she was at a loss. The tiny missing cog in the machine: where was the girl? How would Elliott know she’d arrived if there wasn’t anyone to announce her? She looked round the room.

A tidy stack of magazines. The polished surface of a coffee table. A couple of sofas. You could go straight through, she thought. Knock on his door, step right into the inner sanctum. Oh, shit. She gazed at the magazines. Pick one up. Read it. Wait. Something will happen sooner or later.
Harper’s. Better Homes and Gardens.
Something she’d never heard of before,
Games.
Why didn’t they ever have things like
Screw
or
Hustler
in waiting rooms? Why did they always assume you wanted to flick the pages of
Harper’s
and read bitchy reviews or stare at the vacuous living rooms of the ultrarich, rooms in which it was clear nobody really lived, smoked cigarettes, picked their teeth, fornicated on those deep white rugs set in front of vast unlit fireplaces?

She didn’t hear Elliott open his door. She didn’t hear him come into the reception room.

“Kate.”

She turned. She wondered at the strong sense of relief she felt on seeing him. He was smiling at her. Do I depend on him as much as this? she thought. She hated the notion, beset again by a feeling of vulnerability, as though she were a thin sheet of glass he could see through at a glance.

He said, “My receptionist is on vacation. I have to do the honors myself.” Still smiling, he turned towards the open door of his office. “I’m not very good at it,” he added.

She followed him through. He closed the door after her. This room, she thought, this room with its comfortable chairs and its casual sense of disorder, its overwhelming familiarity—God, she disliked this room so much. She sat down, watching Elliott go around his desk to the damn rocking chair he always sat in. Maybe this is how a junkie feels about his connection, she thought. The whole love-hate deal, the sense of need struggling with the remnants of independence, self-reliance. Self-esteem, Christ. She’d opened herself up to Elliott so many times in this damn room—how could she have any self-esteem left? (He’d say,
That’s confused thinking, Kate. The more you tell me, the more esteem you should feel. It takes a little courage to be honest. Or didn’t you know that?
)

Courage. She wished she had enough of it to stop coming here.

Elliott watched her in silence for a moment. She was conscious of sunlight, sliced by the open slats of the blind, falling on his meticulous fair hair. He had a handsome face but sometimes she saw something blindingly cold in the blue eyes, something analytical and calculating. The eyes of a judge, maybe. But he’d never made any judgements of her, he’d never passed down any moral law, any code of ethical behavior. Why did she keep expecting him to?

He picked up a silver-plated letter opener, turning it in his hands. He had good hands, she thought. Firm, long fingers, clipped nails. She couldn’t imagine him chewing on those nails. But then she couldn’t imagine him worrying over anything or slipping into anxiety. Maybe that was it, maybe that’s where her feelings lay. She looked at Elliott and what she saw was a kind of perfection, something that highlighted her own inadequacies.

He put the letter opener down and leaned across the desk towards her. “What’s been happening since the last time we talked?” he said.

She glanced at him, then down at her hands. Gloves—why was she wearing gloves? Nobody wore gloves these days. Elliott would think:
She’s covering something up.
She looked at his face, which was blurred by the stripes of sunlight.

“Nothing much,” she said. Feeble. Weak. You can do better than that.

Elliott smiled. “It’s funny how you always begin with that phrase. ‘Nothing much.’ Maybe you think of your visits here the way you’d think of a dentist.”

“No—”

“You put me in the position of having to pull teeth, Kate.”

She got up from the chair, took off the gloves, walked to the shelves of books. She felt blank. If I say something now, she thought, it’s going to be incoherent.

Elliott said, “How are things with Mike?”

She shrugged. “Mike? There’s a kind of status quo.”

“Like how?”

“I pretend . . .”

“Pretend what, Kate?”

She stared at the book titles. A number of them were in German, French, Italian.
Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen. Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Archivio generate di Neurologia, Psichiatría e Psicoanalisi.
She had the frightening thought of millions of people all over the world being analysed in foreign languages. The Tower of Babble.

“What do you pretend?” Elliott asked.

“I fake orgasm. I fake tenderness. I fake love.” There, it was out in the cold now. “I fake everything, just about.”

“Why?”

“I guess it makes him feel good.”

“Forget about him, Kate. What makes
you
feel good?”