Dressed to Kill (3 page)

But the anger was harder somehow.

The anger was harder to fight against.

She took a tube of lipstick from her purse, leaned towards the mirror, made her lips into a funnel, and brushed some color across them. She’d got it wrong. Smeared it. A clown could look like that. She grabbed a tissue and wiped her mouth. She opened the restroom door and went back inside the diner and walked to a telephone located in the corner near the door. She fumbled some coins out of her purse, stuck them in the slot, dialled the number.

He wasn’t there. But then she’d known he wouldn’t be, not at this time of night. Shrinks didn’t work late. An answering machine with the sound of his voice. The noise of the beep irritated her.

Fight it, Bobbi. Fight the anger.

This is Dr. Elliott. I am out of my office at the moment. When you hear the sound of the beep, leave your name and message and a number where you can be reached. Thank you.

Damn him. She hated that cold English voice, the precise way he spoke, like he couldn’t stand the feel of words in his mouth. She gripped the receiver hard.

“Elliott. This is Bobbi. Remember me?”

She paused. Maybe it wasn’t a machine. Maybe Elliott was really listening.

“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. He knows how to help me. Not like you. He’s called Levy. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

She stopped. She stared across the diner. The chef was looking at her, grinning like a dumb jerk. A stupid empty expression.

“But we’re not through yet, Elliott. I’m not finished with you yet . . .” She twisted the cord round her wrist, cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder. “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. Maybe. I’m not going to give you any more clues.” She paused, then she whispered, “Fuck you.” And she put the receiver down hard.

She returned to her table and drank the rest of her coffee. She tried to imagine Elliott listening to the taped message, then searching his bathroom, looking, not knowing what he was looking for. It was funny. She slipped her hand inside her purse, rummaging through the Kleenexes, the battered cigarette packs, the items of cosmetics, until she found the smooth surface.

Smooth, a worn wooden handle. Steel encased in wood. The hard, clean, cold steel of an old-fashioned open razor. She shut her purse.

2

It was a dream, the same dream, and even as it happened Kate knew it to be a dream—at first frightening, then pleasurable, then painful at the end because she knew she would open her eyes and find herself in bed with Mike and nothing would be different; sunlight would be burning through the bedroom windows, motes of dust floating like disintegrating moths, and Mike would reach across the bed for her and make love in his perfunctory way, as if each stroke of sex were a form of calisthenics, aspects of some ritual exercise.

She didn’t open her eyes. She thought about the dream. She thought about it before it finally eluded her, before it faded into a dark alcove of her mind. The stranger in the dream . . . who was he? The man in the shower stall . . . where had he come from? And why couldn’t she rid herself of the odd feeling that his touch, although rough, was somehow familiar to her? But then lots of things in dreams were familiar in a distorted way. You went inside rooms you knew by heart, and you recognized them, but they were altogether different even if you couldn’t say how. Dream rooms. Dream landscapes.

Dream lovers.

She tried to bring the dream back, forcing her mind to the memory.

She steps into the shower. She sees Mike through the frosted glass of the shower door. She turns on the water. Mike sings to himself tunelessly as he shaves. The same tune, always the same damn tune.

And then there was a blank moment. Something happened after that. What happened next? What was the exact order of events?

A hand is clamped across her mouth as the water streams over her. A man’s hand. She feels his breath upon the back of her neck. She feels his arms wrapped tightly around her body from behind. She wants to cry out. She wants to shout Mike’s name. Mike goes on shaving, distorted through the frosted glass. The air is thick with steam. Condensation runs down the glass. Mike shaves, sings. She can’t scream. She can’t move. And then everything is turned upside down and she can feel this man, this stranger, enter her from behind, and the pain is terrible. But the pain only lasts for a second and then she finds herself slowly parting her legs, still trying to call out to Mike, still trying to wrench the iron hand away from her mouth.

It changed then. It changed the way dreams do.

She feels him thrust upwards and she raises herself higher, parting her legs wider, and after that she isn’t trying to call out Mike’s name any more, Mike doesn’t exist except as some surreal imprint on frosted glass, the only real thing is the feeling between her legs, the sensation of waves beginning to churn inside her, warm waves moving at some deep inner level, and how she tries to open her legs wider still, the muscles in her thighs and calves trembling and aching, but the pain isn’t pain any more. It’s like she doesn’t exist now, like some part of her has gone, then the water isn’t falling any more, and Mike isn’t singing, and she’s caught up in some profound silence of pleasure, caught in a place where noise isn’t necessary, where there’s only the quiet savagery of feeling.

And she comes. In the dream, taken from behind by a figment of her own imagination, she comes, and when she does the silence is shattered by the echo of her own screaming; the silence is stained glass broken into a mosaic beyond any conceivable pattern.

And then the dream finished.

She opened her eyes. Coming up from sleep was like slowly floating up from the depths of dark water. But it was only a dream, nothing more. And if the touch of the stranger was familiar, shit, that didn’t mean anything except you’d dreamed him before. Other worlds, she thought. Maybe that was it—like some kind of astral travel bullshit. Dimension hopping. Nightly, the same other-worldly lover awaits.

She tried to push the bedsheet aside, but Mike was watching her.

She turned to look at him. He was saying something about how restless she’d been, how much she’d turned and tossed in her sleep. Then he put his arm over her naked breasts. She moved closer to him and tried to imagine herself back in the dream. She tried to imagine Mike as the phantom stranger. Phantom stranger, she thought. For Christ’s sake. (Elliott would have something to say about this dream. He’d stick it in some neat Freudian box and hand it back to her with ribbons on. He’d drag out those labels so essential to his trade—guilt, anxiety, repression. Damn, those terms were as necessary to Elliott as Tru-Lanol Arterial Fluid and Lyf-Lyk Tint were to an embalmer.) She shut her eyes. She felt Mike’s mouth against her own and she thought: He hasn’t learned how to please, how to make it gentle, lasting, how to make it seem that it really mattered. He climbs on, climbs off, as if I was a blowup doll you could order from Frederick’s mail-order catalogue. (
I’m Kate, five foot three, and I’m built to please.
) She listened to his rhythmic breathing, the steady beat of his stomach against her own. She moaned, twisting and arching her body as he began to come. I should get an Oscar, she thought. I’m expert at making him think he’s good. Sweating, Mike slumped against her, stroking her hair lightly with one hand. It was the Tender Moment. It lasted, on average, fifteen seconds; then he’d get up and go inside the bathroom. And she would feel sore between her legs because he’d bruised her.

She watched him rise now, saw the fixed smile on his face, watched him vanish beyond the bathroom door; then there was the sound of running water. She lay with her hands clenched, the cold sheet drawn up across her body. She didn’t feel angry, sad, upset—only a strange numbness that she understood was connected with the dream in a way she didn’t fully grasp; it was as if she’d left part of herself behind, drawn a dark curtain upon the scene in the shower. Bullshit, she thought. You can’t live in dreams. She threw the sheets aside and stepped out of bed, pulling on her robe, running her fingers through her messy hair.

Mike came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was still smiling, like a craftsman proud of something he’d just hammered together.

“What time are we meeting for lunch?” he asked.

Lunch. She’d almost forgotten lunch. She looked at herself in the dressing table mirror, picking up a brush now, running it haphazardly through her fair hair.

“One,” she said.

“Don’t forget,” Mike said.

“I won’t.” She considered the lunch. A goddamn ordeal, sitting down to eat with Mike and his mother; that frosty face, with its inbuilt expression of suspicion, peering at her across the breadsticks and the wineglasses. Not that
she
ever drank, the old bat; but she made it clear, with her cold eyes pressed into narrow fleshy slits, that she disapproved of alcohol almost as much as she disapproved of her son’s marriage to Kate.
I never believed my son would marry a widow,
she’d said once.
It’s rather like trespassing on a grave, don’t you think?
A widow, Kate thought. It was a weird label, as if you were possessed from beyond the grave. As if you were still the bride of the dead. But that thought hurt, it hurt with more pain than she wanted to carry, so she shoved it aside the way the good Doctor Elliott had told her to. (
Look, you don’t need to carry grief around. It’s excess baggage. If you think of your emotions as suitcases you want to take on an airplane, then you’re going to get charged extra for grief.
) He was good with those sayings, Doctor Elliott. He had a finely tuned ear for the comforting platitude.

“Promise,” Mike said. “You know how she likes punctuality.”

“I know,” Kate said. She turned from the mirror to face her husband.
There.
She caught herself doing it again, making the impossible effort to superimpose the face of Thomas on Mike, but it was like a blurred Polaroid picture, it was like something snapped by a hapless photographer who’d forgotten to turn to the next shot. Thomas is dead, she thought. Thomas had the bad fortune to step on a land mine in a far country and Thomas is therefore dead. Jesus Christ, could she never put that away? Could she never stick that one in some attic of her awareness and forget?

She felt sad again.

She said, “Girl Scout’s honor. One o’clock. Sharp. I’ll be there.”

“Good girl,” Mike said.

She watched him as he began to dress. Then she went to the window and looked down into the street. It was one of those quiet streets that, surrounded by the rabble of New York traffic, by the whines of ambulances and the screaming of cop cars and the honking of taxicabs, takes you by surprise—as if you’d stepped into another country altogether. She watched a yellow cab cruise below. Across the way a uniformed doorman, stepping out from under a dark red canopy, called to the cab. A woman cradling a small dog emerged from the apartment building and, holding the dog in a manner that suggested a mother with a newborn child, stepped inside the taxi. Kate dropped the curtain from between her fingers.

She turned to watch Mike dressing.

He fastened his cuff links. “Will Peter be joining us?” he said.

Peter, she thought. She considered the line of battle between her son and his stepfather, a no-man’s-land where the possibility of a truce, of amnesty, seemed not to exist. Maybe that was all perfectly natural. Peter belonged to a dead father; nothing could change that. Peter’s affections lay buried in Thomas’s grave. And Mike had all the finesse of the proverbial bull in the china shop when it came to relationships with kids, especially a kid like Peter.

She sighed. “I guess so,” she said.

“Make sure he wears something except for those godawful combat jackets,” Mike said. “They make him look like a refugee or something.”

“I’ll try,” Kate said.

“The way that kid dresses . . .” Mike let his voice fade. She knew the rest of the sentence anyhow; he had repeated it until it had the feel of a catechism.
Slovenly. Like some junior hippy, for God’s sake.
She watched her husband for a moment and she thought: It can’t be easy for him either. The shoes of a dead man. A sense of being stalked by a ghost, a specter he saw reflected in Peter’s eyes. The resentment in the boy’s face. (
How could you marry again? How the hell could you do that? I don’t understand!
Peter, with watery eyes, hands clenched, breath coming fast, accusing her of treachery . . .)

She saw Mike go out of the bedroom, then she could hear him in the kitchen. She could hear him fill the coffeepot and, in her mind’s eye, picture him fastidiously spooning out the required amounts of that coffee he drank—what was it? French Market? Bitter and black and tasting of chicory or something. She glanced at her face in the mirror. Lines. Weariness. She shook her head from side to side. And then the dream came back to her in a flash of strange clarity, brief and quick and bright like a bulb popping. She felt the water running over her and the firm grip of the hand over her mouth and the man’s hardness between her legs and she thought: It’s sad when a dream is more real than the world around you. It’s so goddamn sad.

She turned away from her own reflection. Sometimes you saw more than you needed, more than you wanted. Like just then—a hunger in the eyes, a hunger for a return to the dream.

Outside the door of Peter’s room she hesitated. She thought of the alien world that lay inside. Peter’s world, self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, hermetic. A world of gadgets, of experiments in various stages—wires trailing out of boxes whose purpose she couldn’t even begin to guess, batteries, scraps of paper covered with his feverish handwriting, the strange hieroglyphics of whatever he was pursuing; a world of radios stripped down, electronic toys disembowelled, printed circuitry scattered in a haphazard way across the table, strewn over the floor, over his unmade bed.
A fucking little Einstein,
Mike had said when they’d once argued over the kid.
One day I’ll plug the coffeepot into the wall and
—
wham! Frazzle City. You’ll see.
She put her hand on the doorknob, still hesitant to go inside. A mess, a great mother of a mess; and yet there was a curious sense of order about the room, as if the chaos had been planned meticulously, as if the boy had followed a blueprint of disorder.