Silent Partner (2 page)

Robin at the top.

Then Milo.

He was off with Rick, on a fishing trip in the Sierras. But even if his shoulder had been available I wouldn't have cried on it.

Over the years, our friendship had taken on a certain rhythm: We talked about murder and madness over beer and pretzels, discussed the human condition with the aplomb of a pair of anthropologists observing a colony of savage baboons.

When the horrors piled up too high, Milo bitched and I listened. When he went off the wagon, I helped talk him back on it.

Sad-sack cop, supportive shrink. I wasn't ready to reverse the roles.

A week's worth of mail had piled up on the dining room table. I'd avoided opening it, dreading the superficial caresses of come-ons, coupons, and get-happy-quick schemes. But I needed, at that very moment, to keep my mind tethered to minutiae, free from the perils of introspection.

I carried the stack into the bedroom, pulled a waste basket to the side of the bed, sat down, and began sorting. At the bottom of the pile was a buff-colored envelope. Heavy linen stock, a Holmby Hills return address, embossed silver script on the back flap.

Rich for my blood. An upscale sales pitch. I flipped the envelope over, expecting a computerized label, and saw my name and address printed in extravagant silver calligraphy.

Someone had taken the time to do this one right.

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I checked the postmark—ten days old. Opened the envelope and pulled out a buff-colored invitation card, silver-bordered, more calligraphy:

DEAR DOCTOR DELAWARE,

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO JOIN

DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AND MEMBERS OF

THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY AT A GARDEN

PARTY AND COCKTAIL RECEPTION HONORING

DOCTOR PAUL PETER KRUSE, BLALOCK

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN

DEVELOPMENT,

UPON HIS APPOINTMENT AS

CHAIRMAN, THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1987, FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON

SKYLARK

LA MAR ROAD

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90077

RSVP, THE PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

Kruse as chairman. An endowed chair, the ultimate reward for exceptional scholarship.

It made no sense; the man was anything but a scholar. And though it had been years since I'd had anything to do with him, there was no reason to believe he'd changed and become a decent human being.

Back in those days, he'd been an advice columnist and a darling of the talk-show circuit, armed with the requisite Beverly Hills practice and a repertoire of truisms couched in pseudoscientific jargon.

His column had appeared monthly in a supermarket-rack "women's" magazine—the kind of throwaway that prints articles on the latest miracle crash diet, closely followed by recipes for chocolate fudge cake, and combines exhortations to "be yourself with sexual IQ tests designed to make anyone taking them feel inadequate.

Endowed professor. He'd made only the slimmest pretense of conducting research—something to do with human sexuality that never produced a shred of data.

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But he hadn't been expected to be academically productive, because he hadn't been a member of the tenured faculty, just a clinical associate. One of scores of practitioners seeking academic cachet through association with the University.

Associates gave occasional lectures on their specialties—in Kruse's case that had been hypnosis and a manipulative form of psychotherapy he called Communication Dynamics—and served as therapists and supervisors of the clinical-psych graduate students. A nifty symbiosis, it freed up the "real" professors for their grant applications and committee meetings while earning the associates parking permits, priority tickets to football games, and admission to the Faculty Club.

From that to Blalock Professor. Incredible.

I thought of the last time I'd seen Kruse—about two years ago. Chance passers-by on campus, we'd pretended not to notice each other.

He'd been walking toward the psych building, all custom tweeds, elbow patches, and fuming briar, a female student at each elbow. Letting loose with some profundity while copping fast feels.

I looked down at all that silver writing. Cocktails at four. Hail to the chief.

Probably something to do with a Holmby Hills connection, but still the appointment defied comprehension.

I checked the date of the party—two days from now— then reread the address at the bottom of the invitation.

Skylark. The very rich christened their houses as if they were offspring.

La Mar Road, no numbers. Translation: We own all of it, peasants.

I pictured the scene two days hence: fat cars, weak drinks, and numbing banter wafting across money-green lawns.

Not my idea of fun. I tossed the invitation in the trash and forgot about Kruse. Forgot about the old days.

But not for long.

I SLEPT poorly and woke with the sun on Friday. With no patients scheduled, I dived into busywork: messengering the video of Darren to Mal, finishing other reports, paying and mailing bills, feeding the koi and netting debris out of their pond, cleaning the house until it sparkled.

That took until noon and left the rest of the day open for wallowing in misery.

I had no appetite, tried running, couldn't get the tightness out of my chest and gave up after a mile. Back home, I gulped a beer so quickly it made my diaphragm ache, followed it with another and took the six-pack into the bedroom. I sat in my underwear and watched images float across the TV screen. Soap operas: perfect-looking people suffering. Game shows: real-looking people regressing.

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My mind wandered. I stared at the phone, reached out for the receiver. Pulled back.

The shoemaker's children...

At first I'd thought the problem had something to do with

business—with forsaking the world of high tech for the hand-cramping, poorly compensated life of an artisan.

A Tokyo music conglomerate had approached Robin about adapting several of her guitars into prototypes for mass production. She was to draw up the specifications; an army of computerized robots would do the rest.

They flew her first-class to Tokyo, put her up in a suite at the Okura Hotel, sushied and sake'd her, sent her home laden with exquisite gifts, sheaves of contracts printed on rice paper, and promises of a lucrative consultantship.

All that hard sell notwithstanding, she turned them down, never explaining why, though I suspected it had something to do with her roots. She'd grown up the only child of a mercilessly perfectionistic cabinetmaker who worshipped handwork, and an ex-showgirl who grew bitter playing Betty Crocker and worshipped nothing. A daddy's girl, she used her hands to make sense of the world. Endured college until her father died, then eulogized him by dropping out and handcrafting furniture. Finally she found her perfect pitch as a luthier, shaping, carving, and inlaying custom guitars and mandolins.

We were lovers for two years before she agreed to live with me. Even then she held on to her Venice studio. After returning from Japan, she began escaping there more and more. When I asked her about it she said she had to catch up.

I accepted it. We'd never spent that much time together. Two headstrong people, we'd fought hard for independence, moving in different worlds, merging occasionally—sometimes it seemed randomly—in passionate collision.

But the collisions grew less and less frequent. She started spending nights at the studio, claiming fatigue, turning down my offers to pick her up and drive her home. I was keeping busy enough to avoid thinking about it.

I'd retired from child psychology at the age of thirty-three after overdosing on human misery, had lived comfortably off investments made in Southern California real estate. Eventually I began to miss clinical work, but continued to resist the entanglement of long-term psychotherapy. I deah with it by limiting myself to forensic consultations referred by lawyers and judges—custody evaluations, trauma cases involving children, one recent criminal case that had taught me something about the genesis of madness.

Short-term work, with little or no follow-up. The surgical side of psych. But enough to make me feel like a healer.

A post-Easter lull left me with time on my hands—time spent alone. I began to realize how far Robin and I had drifted from each other, wondered if I'd missed something. Hoping for spontaneous cure, I waited for her to come around. When she didn't I cornered her.

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She shrugged off my concerns, suddenly remembered something she'd forgotten at the studio and was gone. After that, I saw her even less. Phone calls to Venice triggered her answering machine. Drop-ins were maddeningly unsatisfying: Usually she was surrounded by sad-eyed musicians cradling mangled instruments and singing one form of blues or the other. When I caught her alone she used the roar of saws and lathes, the hiss of the spray gun, to blot out discourse.

I gritted my teeth, backed off, told myself to be patient. Adapted by creating a heavy workload of my own. All during the spring, I evaluated, wrote reports, and testified like a demon.

Lunched with lawyers, got stuck in traffic jams. Made lots of money and had no one to spend it on.

As summer neared, Robin and I had become polite strangers. Something had to give. Early in May, it did. A Sunday morning, rich with hope. She'd come home late Saturday afternoon to retrieve some old sketches, had ended up spending the night, making love to me with a workmanlike determination that scared me but was better than nothing.

When 1 woke, I reached across the bed to touch her, felt only percale. Sounds filtered from the living room. I jumped out of bed, found her dressed, handbag over one shoulder, heading for the door.

"Morning, babe."

"Morning, Alex."

"Leaving?"

She nodded.

"What's the rush?"

"Lots of things to do."

"On Sunday?"

"Sunday, Monday, it doesn't matter." She put her hand on the doorknob. "I made juice—there's a pitcher in the fridge."

I walked over to her, put my hand on her wrist.

"Stay just a little longer."

She eased away. "I really have to go."

"Come on, take a breather."

"I don't need a breather, Alex."

"At least stay for a while and let's talk."

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"About what?"

"Us."

"There's nothing to talk about."

Her apathy was forced, but it pushed my button anyway. Months of frustration were compressed into a few moments of blazing soliloquy:

She was selfish. Self-obsessed. How did she think it felt to live with a hermit? What had I done to deserve this kind of treatment?

Then a laundry list of my virtues, of every lofty service I'd performed for her since the day we'd met.

When I was through she put down her bag and took a seat on the couch. "YouVe right. We do need to talk."

She stared out the window.

I said, "I'm listening."

"I'm trying to collect my thoughts. Words are your business, Alex. I can't compete with you on that level."

"No one needs to compete with anyone. Just talk to me. Tell me what's on your mind."

She shook her head. "I don't know how to put this without being hurtful."

"Don't worry about that. Just let it out."

"Whatever you say, doctor." Then: "Sorry, this is just very hard."

I waited.

She clenched her hands, unflexed them and spread them out. "Look around this room—the furniture, the artwork—everything exactly the way it was the first time I saw it.

Picture-perfect—your perfect taste. For five years, I've been a boarder."

"How can you say that? This is your home."

She started to reply, shook her head and turned away.

I stepped into her line of vision, pointed to the ash-burl trestle table in the dining room. "The only furniture that means anything to me is that. Because you built it."

Silence.

"Say the word and I'll chop everything to matchsticks, Robin. We'll start from scratch.

Together."

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She put her face in her hands, sat that way for a while, and finally looked up, wet-eyed. "This isn't about interior decorating, Alex."

"What is it about?"

"You. The kind of person you are. Overwhelming. Overpowering. It's about the fact that you've never thought to ask if I wanted anything different—if I had ideas of my own."

"I never thought that kind of thing mattered to you."

"I never hinted that it did—it's me, too, Alex. Accepting, going along, fitting into your preconceived notions. Meanwhile, I've been living a lie—viewing myself as strong, self-sufficient."

"You are strong."

She laughed without joy. "That was Daddy's line: You are strong girl, beautiful strong girl. He used to get mad at me when my confidence lagged, yelled at me and told me over and over that I was different from the other girls. Stronger than them. To him, strong meant using your hands, creating. When the other girls were playing with Barbies, I was learning how to load a band saw.

Sanding my knuckles to the bone. Constructing a perfect miter joint. Being strong. For years I bought into it. Now here I

am, finally taking a good look into the mirror, and all I see is another weak woman living off a man."

"Did the Tokyo deal have anything to do with this?"

"The Tokyo deal made me stop and think about what I wanted out of life, made me realize how far I was from it— how beholden I've always been to someone."

"Babe, I never meant to hem you in—"

"That's the problem! I'm a babe—a damn baby! Helpless and ready to be fixed by doctor Alex!"

"I don't view you as a patient," I said. "I love you, for God's sake."

"Love," she said. "Whatever the hell that means."

"I know what it means to me."

"Then you're just a better person that I am, okay? Which is the crux of the problem, isn't it!

Doctor Perfect. Ph.D. problem-solver. Looks, brains, charm, money, all those patients who think you're God."

She got up, walked the floor. "Dammit, Alex, when I first met you, you had problems—the burnout, all those self-doubts. You were a mortal and I could care for you. I helped you through that, Alex. I was one of the main reasons you pulled out of it, I know I was."