Dressed to Kill (5 page)

She went back to her chair and sat down, closing her eyes, listening to the sound of Elliott’s steady breathing, the sound of her own heartbeat. The dream, she thought. The dream makes me feel good. She said nothing for a long time. Elliott sighed.

“You don’t have an answer for that?” he said.

She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lighting it with a lighter Thomas had given her years ago, a silver one with her initials engraved on the side. There was a clean ashtray on the table beside her chair. She watched Elliott get up and open the window slightly. Of course, the smoke bothered him. She’d forgotten how much. Why didn’t he just hang a NO SMOKING sign on the wall?

“I shouldn’t have married him,” she said.

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question, Kate.” He returned to his chair and rocked back and forth slowly, waiting. The chair creaked. The noise irritated her.

“I don’t
know
how to answer your question,” she said.

“Okay. Okay. Why did you marry him anyway?”

“You get lonely,” she said. “You begin to see yourself through the eyes of other people. You look, you see a widow, you see a widow with nothing left to mourn over, you see an empty bed. I mean . . . Mike came along. He filled a gap.”

“Was that a good enough reason?”

“Obviously not,” she said quickly.

She listened to the silence in the room. Elliott had stopped rocking his chair. She raised her face and looked at him and before she could stop herself she was telling him about the dream. She was telling him about the shower, the man who clamped his hand over her mouth, the gradual yielding of herself to pleasure . . . His expression didn’t change. He listened with his hands clasped on the desk in front of himself:

“Why does he seem familiar to you, Kate?” he asked when she had stopped.

“I don’t know . . . Maybe because I keep having the dream. Not every night. Two, maybe three times a a month. That’s all. I guess I should have mentioned it before, except it seemed so goddamn infantile.”

“Infantile? I don’t think so. I’m interested in why he’s familiar, that’s all. I mean, does he remind you of anyone you’ve ever met?”

“No.” She could feel it now, the direction this was taking, the suspicion she’d entertained before, but it was wrong, horrible, macabre. It was only a goddamn dream, after all.

“Is there something, in the way he touches you?” Elliott asked. “Is there something in the way he
feels,
Kate?”

“I know what you’re thinking—”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

She got up from her chair. “You are . . .”

Elliott sat back again. The chair began to rock. It reminded her of an infallible clock smugly ticking seconds away. She imagined it would go on rocking even after Elliott was no longer sitting in it.

“You’re thinking it’s Thomas, aren’t you? That’s what crossed your mind, isn’t it? You think I’m fucking a dead man in my dream, don’t you? Jesus Christ.”

“I didn’t suggest that. You suggested it. Not me, Kate. If this man in the dream reminds you of Thomas, it’s only because the dream is compensatory. It’s your way out of the bind of the marriage. It’s your way of compensating yourself for Mike’s failure in bed. So you create a lover, a rapist, whatever. And he satisfies you. Thomas, somebody else, it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to feel shame over—”

“I don’t feel any fucking shame!”

“Don’t get angry with
me,
Kate. Where does your anger really lie? Mmm? Where does it really lie?”

She shut her eyes. Christ, how she could hate Elliott.

“Maybe it lies with Mike. And with yourself. Maybe you should explain his failings to him.”

“Tell him he stinks in bed?”

“If you have to,” Elliott said.

She saw him glance at his watch now. The meter was running. The time ticking away. It’s like riding in an expensive cab, she thought. And she felt even more annoyed with him.

“There’s a wall, Kate. Mike thinks he’s satisfactory. You lead him to believe it. Unless you tell him differently, he’s going to go on believing it. And when that happens, the whole situation will deteriorate even more.”

“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” she said.

“Something like that.”

“What am I supposed to do? Look into his eyes and say,
know what Mike, you suck in bed?
Could
you
do that in my position?”

“If I had to.”

If you had to,
she thought. I can’t imagine anything in your life, Elliott, that could create adverse situations. I can’t imagine you out of control, slave to some emotion, I can’t even imagine you taking your goddamn clothes off. So what’s the big secret? I’m paying you enough; why don’t you tell me? How do I become perfect like you, shrink? Where do I get the blueprint for happiness?

“But you don’t have to tell him quite so harshly, do you?” he asked. “You don’t have to be so crude. You could find a gentle way of letting him know that the sexual relationship is lacking.”

The sexual relationship is lacking.
How clinical. How chilly. How utterly pat.
See here, Mike, you don’t fuck me well enough, so I have to get my rocks off in a dream, and the screamingly funny thing is that the guy in the dream died years ago . . .

She looked down at the pattern of the rug. A line from some old Bob Dylan song came into her head, something that didn’t make much sense:
When gravity fails and negativity won’t pull you through.

Gravity. Negativity.

She looked at Elliott. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, not Mike.”

“What do you think could be wrong with you, Kate?”

You name it, she thought. “I don’t know. I don’t attract him, that could be it. I’m not attractive to him.”

“Come on,” Elliott said. “You’re off target.”

“You think I’m attractive?”

“Of course I do.”

“Would
you
want to sleep with me?”

“Yes. In the right circumstances. You’re a very attractive woman.”

“The right circumstances,” she said. “What would they be?”

Elliott smiled and indicated a photograph on his desk, then reached towards it, turning it around so she could see it. His wife, naturally. Kate saw a woman with a face that was both pretty and severe; there was something tired in the faint smile that lay on her mouth, as if it were less an expression than something she’d chosen to wear for the purpose of a picture. What would it be like to be Elliott’s wife? she wondered. Did they sit up in bed at night with their Book-of-the-Month Club selections? Maybe she was more Literary Guild and he Psychology Book Club. She had a sudden picture of Bob and Emily Newhart in their TV bedroom, and she wondered if Elliott’s home life was like that sitcom and all at once she wanted to laugh.

“I’m married,” he said. “Breach of ethics aside, why would I jeopardize my marriage, and you yours, just because we wanted a few minutes in bed? It doesn’t seem worth the risk.”

“The question was hypothetical,” Kate said.
Breach of ethics!

“I know it was.”

“Sometimes I don’t feel attractive . . .”

“Then you’re underestimating your own worth, that’s all. You’ve got to open up to Mike. You’ve got to get through to him. If you don’t, I can’t see any future for the marriage.”

She nodded. “Open up. Right. I’ll try it. I’ll try opening up.”

“There’s no other course, you know that, don’t you?”

She turned her gloves around in her hands. “He’s a bad listener.”

“You’ve got to make him listen, Kate.”

“I’ll rope him to a chair.”

Elliott smiled. “If you have to. But when you make him understand, I think you’ll find the dreams will stop.”

I don’t want them to stop, she thought. Don’t you see that, Elliott?
I don’t want the dreams ever to stop.

“Why don’t we make it the same time next week?” Elliott said.

“Sure,” she said. In and out, like a bird in a cuckoo clock. And what was she left with at the end of a session? The ordeal of talking to Mike?

He walked with her back into the reception room. He looked at his watch again. He said, “I know I’m cutting this short, but I’ve got one of those dreadful professional symposiums to attend.”

“Take it off my bill,” she said.

He looked at her for a time in silence. She noticed a thin line of perspiration on his forehead. (My God, the good doctor sweats. He’s a human being and all the time I was under the impression he was a listening device.) He shook her hand curtly and smiled and went back inside his office.

She walked along the corridor thinking of the time she would have to kill before the lunch date—the dreaded lunch date with Mike and Mother Frost.

Shit. She didn’t like killing time.

4

Beep. Elliott. This is Bobbi. Remember me? I’ve got a new shrink now, Elliott. I don’t need you. I don’t fucking need you. He’s going to help me. Not like you. He’s called Levy. Maybe you’ve heard of him? But we’re not through yet, Elliott. I’m not finished with you yet. I took something from your office today, Elliott. Guess what? Can’t you guess, Doctor big shot shrink? Look in your bathroom. Maybe you’ll get warm.

He had switched the tape machine off.
Look in your bathroom.
He had looked in the bathroom. Just before Kate Myers had come he had looked inside the medicine cabinet, staring at the shelves of drug samples, those little bottles and envelopes left by pharmaceutical salesmen. Every one a wonder drug. Variations on familiar themes—chlorpromazine, vasopressin derivatives, carbamazepine. At first he hadn’t noticed anything missing. Everything had seemed to be in its place. And then it occurred to him, the way you sometimes try to name a phrase of music that drifts through your brain, that something wasn’t in its place. Something. But what?

The razor.

Bobbi had taken his razor.

He’d searched all over for it, panicked, trying to fight the sensation. But nothing. It was gone. She’d taken it. Then he’d listened to the tape again, chilled by the sound of Bobbi’s voice:
I’m not finished with you yet.
The words had stayed in his head all the time Kate Myers had been in the office. Poor Kate. He’d barely been able to concentrate on her problems. Even when she’d asked that strange question,
would you want to sleep with me,
his sense of arousal, his consciousness of her sexual being, seemed distant from himself, out of perspective, like the sensation of another man. Male analyst and female patient, he thought. A slow fuse burning, but you had to throw cold water on the spark . . . He’d make it up to Kate later, maybe with a longer session, but that wasn’t what bothered him now.

It was the thought of that open razor, the blade of cutting steel, in the hands of somebody like Bobbi. And that terrible echo, which came again and again through his mind like an icy tide:
I’m not finished with you yet.

He had to do something.

Something.

5

The museum was an oasis, a floating island of quiet, as if it weren’t a part of Manhattan but some other dimension you entered just by stepping through the doorway and paying the price of admission. Two dollars worth of magic, Kate thought. Magic and silence, a sense of serenity. And if you tried hard enough you could forget the noise of traffic and the blare of the streets. Even in the garden, which was empty save for two Japanese tourists snapping Caro’s orange steel sculpture on the upper terrace, you could contrive to forget that you were enclosed in the city, that it hung in the sky all around you like the bars of some monstrous prison. She watched the tourists a moment, watched how they went around Caro’s “Midday,” as if intent on photographing it from every possible angle. Click, click, click. How many more could they take? She realized she’d never liked that sculpture much anyhow. Too cold. Too mechanical. It wasn’t like midday at all. She always thought of noon as being warm somehow, even the word itself suggested hard sunlight, but the sculpture was cold despite the orange paint.

She paused beside Moore’s “Large Torso.” She touched the arched figure with the tips of her fingers, then looked upwards at the window of her favorite room, the one she always saved for last. “The Water Lilies.” She moved away from the Moore, staring at the fecundity of Lachaise’s “Standing Woman.” Sexual. Huge hips. Large breasts. The earth mother, she thought. You wanted to put your arms around the woman because you knew you would feel safe. Silly, she thought. A sculpture. She went close to it but didn’t touch it. She imagined it would be cold to touch and what she wanted to retain was its impression of warmth. Overhead, churning the air, a helicopter crossed the sky. The whir of the blades slashing irritated her, that and the clicking of the tourists’ camera. God, I’m edgy, she thought. Why am I always edgy when I come from Elliott’s office? Then there was the prospect of lunch.
How are you today, Katherine?
Never Kate.
Mike tells me you’re still seeing an analyst. My goodness. What is he trying to cure you of?
Hell. I could ram a breadstick down her throat. There, mother-in-law, choke on that baby.

She went back inside the building, moving towards the stairs. It was then she realized somebody was following her, somebody was moving behind her; the same person must have been in the garden just beyond her view. No, she thought. That’s so stupid. Nobody is following me. She glanced behind her. A man. A man apparently studying a catalogue in his hand as he climbed the stairs. He isn’t interested in me, she thought. He isn’t following me. She saw his eyes move from the catalogue to her face, then she turned away. Hadn’t Elliott just told you you’re an attractive woman? Why wouldn’t the guy be interested . . .?

Interested in what?

Picking you up?

Then maybe he’s only
pretending
to be interested in that catalogue.

She paused in front of Rousseau’s “The Dream.” A jungle. She thought she could lose herself in that greenery, that lushness, because it didn’t seem remotely menacing to her, more welcoming, as if it were saying:
It’s okay, you can step inside, nothing in this dream will harm you, Kate.

What would you do if he tried to pick you up? Something tremendously Victorian, like slapping his face with a glove? Or would you go along just for the sheer hell of it? She turned slowly and looked around the room. He was still there, several yards away, looking at the catalogue absently, in such a way that suggested he wasn’t really reading it, that he was actually watching her from the corner of his eye. She moved on, pausing in front of Ensor’s “Masks Confronting Death.” This one always frightened her—those blurred faces staring out at you, like they were about to enter hell, like they were inviting you to come along and yet warning you at the same time. She stared at it for a time, then she heard a movement behind her. She turned, looked quickly, saw the guy glance at her. The lock of eyes lasted a moment then he looked away, he looked away as if he hadn’t noticed her at all.