Woman in the Window (18 page)

“Oh, Natalie …”

“Pals, kiddo. It’ll be okay. More or less.”

They laughed.

Natalie was horrified by the whole stupid mess, but she was hiding it, drawing strength from trying to help out, from giving strength. There was no point, no point in telling her about the man on Saturday night, about D’Allessandro’s revelations.

Everything seemed to be coming apart, just spinning out of control.

Rory Linehan was waiting for her at the office.

So much for her stately, controlled resolution.

“Ah, my dear Miss Rader,” Linehan said, struggling to his feet. He was wearing a shabby corduroy jacket with a plaid shirt and striped tie. She wasn’t sure if she was actually smelling Bushmills or if it was a particularly nasty trick of memory.

“Feeling better, Mr. Linehan?”

He looked puzzled. “Why I’m fine—”

“Not the last time I saw you,” she said.

“And that’s what’s on my mind, dear lady. Perhaps we could discuss—”

“Why don’t you just apologize and be on your way?” Natalie could hardly believe what she was saying. It felt good.

Linehan shuffled his feet nervously, ran his fingers back through his slick gray hair. “Now, now, no point in holding a grudge.” He flashed a deathly grin, a man who needed a drink. She thought briefly of E.T. Here was an Irishman, alone, a million miles from home and afraid—he’d have sold his sainted granny for a double shot of Bushmills. He looked at Lisa behind her desk, licked his puffy lips. “Ah, could we go into your office?”

“Lisa,” Natalie said, “I’m really pressured today.” A lie, she supposed. “So give us ten minutes and buzz me.”

In her office she sat down and stared at him, waited. She felt all the anger and impotence and frustration bubbling within her, everything she’d been storing up. She nearly laughed, watching him: if he’d had a forelock he’d have tugged it. Should she squander it on him?

“About the other night,” he began. He rubbed his red nose like a man caressing his last valuable possession. “It was all in fun, we’re hoping you understood—p’raps we sometimes go too far, Moira and old Rory. Money worries, Christmas, coming, a wee bit too much to drink … all in good fun.” He gasped a laugh.

“It was despicable. Let’s just forget it—a bad idea all around. Now, I really have lots to do—”

“You’re still my agent?”

“For the moment, yes.”

“Now looky here, there’s no use in threatening Rory Linehan.” He shuffled his feet again, like an actor in a bad play well on his way to running out of gestures. “It was all Moira’s fault, always is, long as I can remember—”

“Please, Mr. Linehan, just leave. There’s no need for this scene.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He coughed, rubbed that awful exploded nose again. “There’s explaining to be done—”

She shook her head. “No, there really isn’t.”

“I just want you to know, it’s Moira. She’s got terrible problems, and, well, maybe you and I could have a drink someday and get to know each other.” He spoke like a schoolboy reciting a memorized piece. “Just the two of us.” His face was gray, like a bum’s stubble. He looked shaky and she didn’t want him to faint. She got up and opened the door.

“Anything is possible, Mr. Linehan. Thanks for coming by.” She waited, holding the door, looking at the floor while he thought it over and finally went into the hallway.

“I won’t bring Moira. Just the two of us.” His eyes were dull and wouldn’t come back to life until he got his fist around a drink. “Till then,” he said.

She watched him wander down the hall, touching the wall with one hand, turn the corner, out of sight.

What was that all about? She went back to her office, closed the door, suddenly drawn to the window with its view of the construction site where it had all begun, where things seemed to have started going crazy.

But of course it hadn’t begun with the sight of the man with the gun. You never really knew where anything had begun unless you took it all the way back to the beginning, being born and looking around for the first time. Neither had it begun with the breakup of her marriage and the collapse of nerves she’d experienced in the aftermath. No, it had all begun a long time ago. She didn’t suppose she’d ever really understand it, and maybe it was just as well that way. …

The rubble of Moira and Rory Linehan’s life had set her on a retrospective course and she found herself thinking about her mother and father. It had been a messy relationship that she had observed and withdrawn from all through her childhood. It had been possible to be close to both her parents, but never when they were together. Together they seemed to form a third creature, curled in upon itself, feasting on anger and frustration and closing out the little girl who would he in bed listening to the raised voices, clapping her hands over her ears, pretending she was the heroine of
Rebecca,
who last night had dreamed she’d gone back to Manderly. …

She’d been through enough self-analysis, acres and acres and years and years of it, she’d traipsed back and forth past the effigies of her mother and father, talking, talking, talking, crying until she couldn’t cry anymore. Maybe it had begun then, buried in the fears of her childhood, maybe that was where everything began and maybe the shrinks were right on the money. And here she was, thirty-seven, still wondering, still striving to understand and solve and move on.

She remembered her mother. Elizabeth. She, too, had been small and dark but had lacked the sturdiness of Natalie’s hips and thighs. She had been a slight, almost wispy woman with shining dark eyes deep in the sockets, long black hair that had streaked with gray when she was still a young woman. A fondness for cameos, anything set in burnished, glowing gold. A thin voice that seemed to come softly from her forehead … Stylish, always dressed in the best, the most expensive, always ready for a shopping trip, always bandaging over the wounds, her own wounds, with an application of money. She used to tell her daughter, “Never marry a man who can’t keep you in good shoes. Everything else will follow, dear, if he doesn’t mind the shoe bill.” Elizabeth: a weepy, neurotic woman, pretty, sharp-featured, lovely hands with exquisite rings and bracelets, wholly dependent on her husband, hysterical if she felt she’d been caught in a mistake or a failure or any act she imagined was unladylike—the worst sin. Putting up a shiny, moneyed front to disguise her frustrations, her sadness, her despair.

Side by side they stood, in her memory, Elizabeth and Ray Mitchell. Ray, looking like Jimmy Cagney, short and dynamic and busy, always incredibly busy without a moment to spare, full of expectations—of himself, of Natalie, of Elizabeth. Bustling, full of energy, surrounded by other men like himself. Work, golf, work, duck hunting, work … Self-centered, successful, almost unaware of the feelings of others, utterly confused by his wife’s desperation and dissatisfaction with their marriage …

Side by side they stood like two sad-faced figures on a crumbling, dried-out, fly-specked wedding cake, until the lady began slipping off, running away from home for days at a time, no way to find her, and coming back—what had the doctor said, that night so long ago? Ah, yes,
a wee bit under the influence.
…

In the end she did it with Glenlivet, a quart of the best, and about forty sleeping pills, according to the doctor, and poor Ray had been quite broken up about it. He’d taken a month down in Pinehurst with his chums consoling him.

And Natalie, far away at Northwestern, had come back for the funeral, which had been carried off under something of a cloud, what with the rumors behind the explanation of a sudden cardiac arrest. Then, Daddy off to Pinehurst with his golf clubs and Natalie back to school, never having cried.

“Hang on, Tiger,” he had said. “She was a troubled woman with a mighty load of anxiety. Forgive me, but maybe she’s better off now. At rest, you know.”

He had kissed her goodbye at the big house in Rye and patted her fanny and the limo had taken her to LaGuardia.

Two years later, having chipped to within four inches of the pin—his cronies seemed to find that awesome, what a way to go!—he had keeled over in a sandtrap on the seventeenth. A real heart attack.

Anxious Mommy. Daddy playing to an eight handicap.

Gone.

She was brought back from the past by Lisa buzzing her. Natalie punched line two.

“Mrs. Rader, I’m dreadfully sorry about intruding on your workday. This is Alex Drummond … I’m a friend and colleague of Dr. Lewis Goldstein. He may have mentioned that he’d referred you to me, or me to you, anyway you get the point.”

“Of course, he told me. You’re on my call list—”

“Well, I had a free moment and thought I’d go the extra step at Lew’s urging. And, of course, we’re having trouble with our telephone line this morning, incoming calls are being routed to a woman in Brooklyn. I’m lucky I’m not particularly paranoid. You did want to see me, according to Lewis.” He was all business, just short of brusque.

“You must be a wise man, Dr. Drummond.”

“Oh, I am, off and on. But how did you know?”

“Because with my schedule I’d probably have put off calling you—”

“You’re certainly under no obligation, Mrs. Rader. I’m doing Lewis a favor, that’s all.”

“You remind me of a song. Something about rushing in where angels fear to tread—”

“I’m afraid I don’t know the song. Ought I to be alarmed?”

“Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread,” she murmured softly, remembering the smoke and the blue light on the singer, Susannah Something, at Lulu’s, eons ago. “… And so I come to you, my heart above my head, though I see the danger there … something, something, something.” She laughed.

“No danger here. Unless you fall off the couch.”

“Analysts should have seatbelts. Couchbelts.”

“Well, to the point.” He seemed uncomfortable with the chitchat, unlike Lew, and she felt as if she’d been babbling. “Lewis suggested we might have a talk soon. I’m sorry to say this is a bad week for me. The painters are doing the office, I’ve rearranged appointments. …” He sighed. “But, forgive me, none of this is your concern, is it? If you could come down to my office tomorrow at ten we can try to cope with the fumes.”

“Sure, why not?” She didn’t bother to consult her diary for the morning.

“I will have to ask you to be prompt, Mrs. Rader. I have a lecture at eleven. I’m on Tenth Street, just off Fifth. Do you have a pen?” He gave her the address twice and warned her about the telephone problem again.

The anxious psychiatrist,
she thought, grinning.

Then it occurred to her: would she have to tell him about her Saturday-night visitor?

Oh, Christ.

As she hung up she knew she would have put him off had it not been for D’Allessandro’s story about MacPherson. The fact was, she felt not only disillusioned but betrayed. By MacPherson. The illusion he had created, smashed by the intrusion of reality.
Betrayed and, admit it, Natalie
—
bereft …

S
HE HAD JUST FINISHED
an agonizing conversation with an editor at Harper & Row, desperately trying to rearrange an author’s payment schedule without revealing just how hard up the poor bastard was, when Tony’s call came through. She sighed, put her stockinged feet up on the file drawer, and leaned back, wondering why she was glad to hear his voice. He’d been such an ass the last time she’d seen him … or did she have that backward? She vaguely remembered feeling guilty afterward at not having been more sympathetic to his problems. It was hard to keep everything straight.

“Look, Nat, I want to get back on your good side,” he said. “I know I behaved like a prick up at the Carlyle the other night. I had a lot on my mind and it was your birthday and I wanted it to be nice for you, and you know me, I fucked it all up—anyway, I have got—repeat,
got
—to see you pronto. Like now, for lunch. Don’t bullshit me about being busy, you told me you’ve cut your lunch schedule back to nothing. So, let me buy and make up for being a jerk. Really, Nat, I promise to be good.”

“Okay, okay, lunch it is.” She touched the Tiffany silver diamond dangling between the points her nipples made in the sweater.

“Orsini’s, then. Meet me at Fifth and Fifty-sixth in half an hour.”

A light snow was falling, the flakes clinging to her black, double-breasted coachman’s coat, staying in her thick black hair. She could hear the brass quintet from a block away, and when she got to the appointed corner she looked up at the players on the ledge set back a couple of stories above Fifth Avenue. They were wrapped in mufflers and surrounded by Christmas lights with the Trump Tower rising jaggedly above them. New York wrapped up in a single image: the world’s most expensive piece of real estate and the clear, crystalline sound of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” floating among the swirling snowflakes, drifting like tinsel on the shoppers below. My God, how she loved it, how she loved her awful, wonderful city. …

Tony took her by surprise, touched her arm, looked down at her with that carefree smile that hallmarked one of his customary moods. He was wearing some kind of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
fedora and a heavy Burberry trench coat with the camel-colored liner. He looked handsome and chiseled and happy, but nothing could ever erase the vacant spaces behind his features, the lack of depth or density or weight, whatever it was he lacked. Still, he looked cute and sort of silly in his hat and his snazzy coat, and it occurred to her just at that moment that he was wildly out of place in New York, had always been. He was pure Los Angeles. All these years he’d been a displaced person and neither of them had ever realized it. He wasn’t quite real in a real city like New York. In Beverly Hills, on Rodeo Drive he’d have fit perfectly.

Orsini’s glittered quietly behind the simple Fifty-sixth Street door. All mauve and pink and loveseats rather than chairs, fashionable, full of East Coast movie executives and rich, lovingly overdressed women. Tony couldn’t wipe the smile off his face once they were at their table. He ordered an overpriced white Bordeaux that was very good, indeed, and toasted himself.