Child of Darkness (21 page)

"My cousin arranged for me to have my first piano lesson Saturday night."
"Saturday night? Who has a piano lesson on Saturday night?"
"I do, apparently."
"Hey," he said. "I'm warning you, and you can warn your cousin. I'm not giving up on you. No one has ever dried my clothes better."
I laughed.
"Let things calm down," I told him.
"Things can. I won't," he vowed. "See you tomorrow," he said.
"Okay."
I was still smiling after I hung up. Was I getting a crush on him too quickly? Was Ann right about my inexperience and vulnerability?
It wasn't all that long ago that whenever I was confused or frightened about something, I could resurrect Noble and have someone who loved me help me. Dr. Sackett made me believe it was only another part of myself, born out of insecurity and fear. Maybe that was true, but at least I didn't feel as alone as I did now, I thought.
How silly, I told myself. Just cope with your problems like any other mature person.
Shutting my ears to any voice but my own, I returned to my homework and read as much as I could to get myself tired enough to fall asleep quickly.
I was already in bed when I heard a soft knock on my door.
"Come in," I called.
Ami opened the door partway and gazed in at me. She was already in her nightgown.
"Just checking to see how you are."
"I'm okay," I said.
"Good. You did real well at dinner. We're going to be real pals. You'll see," she said. "Sweet dreams. Once I start you on the pills, you'll have fewer nightmares, believe me."
She backed out and closed the door softly.
Was that what she was doing? I wondered. Taking the pill perhaps without Wade knowing? Had she promised to stop and not stopped? Suddenly their intimacy was of great interest to me. Like a little girl who couldn't imagine her parents having sex, I had difficulty seeing them in a passionate embrace.
Wade might still be wearing a shirt and tie, I thought, and giggled to myself.
I looked across the room at the shadows in the corner. They seemed to take Noble's form. How I wanted a companion. If I cart out to him, he'll be there, I thought, and then. . . then it could all begin again.
I shut my eyes hard, shut them like someone locking a pair of jewelry boxes. I could almost hear my eyelids slam closed. I fled into sleep.
Despite the obstacles standing in his way and mine, Trevor was true to his word the following day. He spent every possible moment with me at school. It got so we sat alone in the cafeteria, and twice he managed to find a secure place in which to kiss me. He pulled me into the empty science lab once, and the second time he stopped walking, let the people behind us go ahead, and then pulled me behind the door to the English classroom. Of course I was nervous about being caught, but that just seemed to make his kiss sweeter and my heart pound fast and harder.
The remainder of the week, Ami was right there at the end of the school day to pick me up promptly, rushing me off so I would not be late for my driving lesson. On Thursday, she even came into the building, which prevented me from walking with Trevor to the front entrance. Of course, she was continually asking me about him.
"Is he still after you?" was her initial question. "Pouncing on you every chance he has?"
"You make it sound like a hunt or a chase," I replied.
"That's exactly what it is at your age, Celeste. You're prime prey for them," she insisted. "And what do you think would happen once he has his way with you? I'll tell you," she said before I could even think of an answer. "He'll drop you like stale fruit, because that's what you'll be in his mind."
"Why?" I asked. Was she right? Was she as wise about the relationship between men and women as she claimed?
"Why? Because the mystery of you is gone. That's what intrigues them. They all think there's something different about this girl or that, something that will give them a wondrous orgasm.
"That's right," she said, blushing a little herself. "That's what men are hunting for, the mythical wondrous orgasm, because they don't have what we have."
"What's that?"
"The ability to have multiple orgasms during intercourse," she explained in the tone of some health and science teacher. "For them it's more important. They just can't start immediately on another one.
"Weren't you taught any of this?" she asked. "Ever? I can't believe you weren't exposed to something."
"A little," I said. It was one thing to learn about reproduction in biology class and another to learn what would actually happen to you personally.
"Well, now you know more, and you can understand more why I'm so concerned, right?"
"Yes, Ami," I said, but not with the enthusiasm she hoped for. I could see the disappointment in her face, but I really didn't sense these sort of base motives in Trevor, and I had always depended upon my own instincts when it came to people. They had always proven reliable for me when I was younger and confronting one sort of threat after another at the orphanages. Of course, I was afraid my therapy had taken me far away from those abilities. I had long ago stopped being Baby Celeste, the gifted little girl. Perhaps I truly was as vulnerable as anyone else.
"You'll come to appreciate me," she predicted, more to herself than to me, I thought.
That Friday we dressed in what she called our "killer outfits,", and she took me to dinner at a restaurant nearly thirty miles away. She explained that Wade never liked driving that far just to eat.
"To him it's simply eating. To me, it's an evening out," she explained. "He'd be just as happy going to some diner, believe me."
Once again, I saw that the maitre d' knew her and told her he would hold a good table for us. The restaurant was an upscale Oriental restaurant, featuring Thai food as well as Chinese and even some Continental dishes involving steaks and lobster. There was a very busy bar where we went first to have our cocktails. For a moment I thought they would insist on checking my identification, but Ami slipped the waiter some money, and he brought the two
Cosmopolitans. She ordered two more and had them delivered to our table when it became time to eat.
Before that, just as she had done at the Stone House, she flirted with some single men, giving them the impression they might be able to pick us up and then, just as before, at the last moment flashed her wedding ring. I realized that she had slipped it off and then slipped it on, and that was probably what she had done at the Stone House.
"Don't you think they might get very angry at you one time and make lots more trouble?" I asked after she had justified herself the same way she had before, claiming she just wanted to have fun and see if she could still "run with the bulls," as she called it.
"No," she said. "They won't bother. They'll just turn to another target, believe me," she said. "I know men."
She saw I wasn't happy with the answer, and I couldn't help thinking about Wade. Being Ames partner during all this made me feel guilty.
"What's the matter?" she asked, a little impatient at the way I was playing with my food and looking down. "Aren't you having a good time?"
I thought a moment and then decided to tell the truth.
"No," I said. "I keep thinking about Wade. I'm sure he would be hurt if he knew about all this, no matter what he pretends. It doesn't seem right to be such a tease, anyway," I told her. I didn't care if she accused me of being a prude, or being too much under the influence of the nuns at my orphanage.
"Oh, Wade," she said, sighing deeply. She looked away for a moment. When she turned back, I saw there were tears in her eyes.
"You think I'm just some tease, some sick flirt, just like Basil says I am, is that it?"
"I don't feel comfortable doing it with you, Ami," I admitted. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I do have the experience to know enough that men call women names like tease when they do what you're doing and what I'm doing when I'm with you.
"I mean it's like someone putting her finger close to a candle flame and pulling back just before it gets burned. First, you tell me to be extra cautious, and then you bring me to places like this and attract all sorts of men to us, just to shoo them away. I'm sorry," I said, realizing how harsh I sounded. My heart was thumping, too. Maybe she would just throw me out of her house now.
She looked at me long enough for me to realize she actually was making some major decision. Did she want to send me back to the orphanage, tell me I was hopeless after all? I girded myself for rejection. It was, after all, something I had lived with ever since I had been brought to my first orphanage. I was no stranger to it. At times I thought we were old friends, in fact.
"All right," she said, "I'll tell you something. It's my biggest secret, and I wanted to wait until we were even closer, but I'll rely on your promise to keep everything between us locked in your heart. Can I?"
"Yes," I said, holding my breath. Was she going to tell me she was having an affair? What would I do if she did, and what would I say? How could I hide that from Wade? He'd see it in my face for sure, I thought.
She sipped her drink and sucked in her breath. Then she straightened up and looked at me hard.
"The reason I was late picking you up that rainy day was because I ran over my time with my therapist. That's right, I see a therapist. We were making significant progress, according to her, and she didn't want to end it even though my hour was long over. I was so involved in what we were doing that I didn't pay any attention to the clock.
"Anyway, these nights out alone, this flirting I do, it's all part of my therapy," she claimed.
"What? How could this be therapy?"
"I know you'll find this hard to believe. but I've always been quite bashful and introverted. I didn't tell you the truth exactly when we first met. I exaggerated and made things up just so you would think more of me and we could get to be friends faster. I didn't really have that arm-long list of boyfriends. Actually, they were my wish list of boyfriends."
I shook my head in disbelief.
"I can see you don't believe me because I know so much and I'm so good at what we do now, but it took a lot of therapy to get me to be this selfconfident. I do this flirting just to reinforce myself. It's really harmless, but it boosts my ego and reinforces my self-image."
"I don't understand. Why would you need to boost your ego?" I asked. "You know everything about style. You know you're beautiful. Men are always looking at you."
She laughed.
"Right, now they do. I was quite a thin and gangly girl growing up. My nice features didn't develop until late in my adolescence, and my mother did little to help me develop any self-confidence. She had this stupid expression, 'You have to play with the cards you're dealt.' That was like telling me, You're not pretty. You'll never be pretty. Boys will never be interested in you, so face it and live with it. I didn't go out on a real date until I was a senior in high school! Well, you can just imagine what effect all that had on me. I told you how my father always called me Mon Ami, as if I was a friend and not a beautiful daughter.
"I saw the way other fathers doted on their daughters, treated them like little princesses and told them how beautiful and precious they were every chance they had. That wasn't my father's way. Between the two of them, I felt like your famous ugly duckling."
"But didn't you tell me you were a debutante?"
"Yes, and that was some disaster. The only reason my mother insisted I do it was to get herself on the society pages. We actually had a hard time filling up the guest list. I hated every moment of it. Wade wasn't aware of all this when we first met, and as he wasn't exactly a lady's man himself, it was easier for me to put on an act. To this day he believes I was the most popular girl at school. It's all right. Your husband should have some illusions and fantasies about you."
"Does Wade know you're in therapy now?" I asked.
"Yes. It was actually his idea," she said.
"But . . . I don't understand. If he still believes you were so popular, why would he want you to be in therapy?"
"There's more to my story," she said, waving the waiter away as he started to approach to see if we wanted anything more. "Because I was so desperate to be accepted and wanted, I let myself have a very bad experience."
"What kind of experience?"
"It's complicated," she said. "I've confused you enough, and you've been exposed to enough nittygritty in your life. Just know you can stop worrying about Wade. Worry about me or. . . actually, you don't have to worry about either of us. We're both fine. I'm fine," she insisted. "I hope you don't think that because of my own insecurity problems, I don't know what I'm talking about when I give you advice. One thing has nothing to do with another. It's like teachers often say, 'Do what I teach, not what I do.' And besides, I have learned so much in the process of becoming assured and confident that I really can give you the benefit of great wisdom. Understand?"
I didn't, but I nodded.
"It's all right. Believe me. I'm fine now. I have a wonderful therapist. She's brought me a long way. It wasn't easy being the way I was and living with Wade and having Basil around. You can imagine how Basil would treat a woman with my kind of insecurity."
She paused.
"You're not shocked, are you?" she asked me. "Anyone can have these sort of problems, and lots of people see therapists these days."
"No," I said. "You know that as a child and even a teenager, I was in therapy, too."
"Yes, I do know that, and that was why I thought you and I would get along so well. We both know what it means to place all your trust in someone, someone who is really a stranger. Because of what I see in you, I have no problem placing my trust in you. You are a very sincere person and I know you mean it when you say you won't hold any of this against me, even the flirting."
"Thank you," I said, and she smiled.
"Yes, that's what I hoped to hear. You are a wise young lady. We're going to be great friends, forever and ever." She reached over the table to take my hand into hers, squeezed gently, and then, as if she had said nothing, began to talk about a couple to our right, complaining about the way the man was looking at every other woman but the woman he was with.
"They always think the grass is greener somewhere else. Men," she said disdainfully.
Knowing all this about her now actually made me appreciate her behavior more. I would never have guessed this was a woman in therapy for insecurity when it came to men, and I was sure no man, not even Basil, would be able to guess it.