Escape the Night (30 page)

Phillip's voice rose. “You underestimate Peter. There's a great deal of my father in him, as well as of Charles. He's incredibly complex …”

“Is that why he's started seeing Ruth Levy's brother?”

Phillip paled. From deep in his throat, he asked, “For what?”

“For his memory, Phillip.” Their eyes met. “So,” Englehardt finished gently, “you see how it is.”

“It doesn't matter.” Phillip looked away. “I don't want him harmed.”

“Then he must be removed from the stress of his inheritance—hopefully, even, from analysis.”

“But we're not close.” Reaching for his lighter, Phillip added miserably, “He takes after his father.”

“Suppose he were to fear for Miss Ciano …”

“
No
.”

Softly, like the rattling of a leaf, Englehardt laughed.

“I wouldn't be here, damn you, if …”

“
If
,” Englehardt lashed back, “you'd been John Carey's favored son. It is too bad, Phillip, that he thought so much of Charles.”

Phillip's outrage faded in self-loathing. “Yes, you've been very understanding about that.”

Englehardt shrugged. “There was a certain precedent in my own life. For a moment, Phillip, we were friends.”

Phillip Carey shut his eyes. Trancelike, he repeated, “I thought you were dead.”

“But I'm not.” Englehardt watched Phillip's rigid body; almost tenderly, he told him, “I need you now to be my friend again.”

Phillip's downward stare was silent and appalled.

“No, Phillip.” Slowly, Englehardt shook his head. “There
is
no point in blaming me. You see,
I'm
your face in the mirror. Almost”—he searched for a word; irony mingling with affection, he finished—“a brother.”

Phillip Carey shuddered; the moment passed, and then Englehardt pointed to the telephone. “It's time now,” he said coldly. “Mr. Barth is waiting for your call.”

Nerves shot by coffee and no sleep, Peter Carey bolted another cup and imagined Noelle, flying in the darkness toward El Salvador.

Part of him felt that he had driven her to this assignment; part, that she'd abandoned him …

“
It's
broken
now
. Look,
dammit
—
look at what you've done
…”

Crystal shattered in his memory; in his mind, a faceless stranger stalked Noelle.

He went to the window. In the scattered lights of Central Park, thin silver branches stabbed from a maze of black in which the tunnel waited.

He turned away.

Barth was bent on some elliptical and mad revenge; Carey had drawn him toward Noelle.

Barth; Phillip; a faceless man; an ugly stranger; a voice on the telephone.

Someone was watching him.

CHAPTER 9

“You keep remembering Dewey,” Levy asked. “What do you suppose it means?”

“Nothing.” Peter's voice was like piano wire. “It's nonsense …”

Englehardt forced his nerves to steady. He knew that Peter would not remember: it was the second time that he had listened to the tape …

“Let's go back to Phillip, then. Can you define why you don't trust him?”

For three weeks Englehardt had dangled Phillip in front of Barth, insinuating Martin on Barth's payroll and procuring the resources needed to strip all privacy from Peter Carey: Barth did not know that, four nights a week, Englehardt stood watch over Peter's memory.

“It's more a feeling,” Peter answered. “Phillip, the call about Barth, Dewey, Noelle being followed, the nightmare—at night now, I imagine rushing into the tunnel. None of it adds up …”

As he had hoped, alerting Peter to Barth's past had heightened his sense of danger, but deflected its thrust: Peter could not possibly connect Barth to the time of his amnesia. Now he was staring at a Freudian puzzle with too many pieces missing.

“You seem edgy, Peter.”

“I still haven't heard from Noelle. I keep worrying that somehow I've brought Barth down on her, but there's been nothing from
him
since that goddamned meeting. Even Phil's avoiding me, as if he's afraid.”

He must keep Martin on a tight rein, Englehardt thought grimly; alive, Noelle Ciano was his second means of diverting Peter from his past. And after tomorrow, as a third, he would order Phillip to stay entirely out of Peter's sight.

“Phillip's behavior—do you relate that to your memory?”

Englehardt stared at the unwinding tape: blindfolded but persistent, Levy locked him in a race with Peter Carey.

Peter's voice rose. “How could
I
know?”

“You will, Peter. In time.”

Englehardt looked up at the dirty windows of the loft, and realized it was dawn.

In the morning light, William Levy struggled to connect Peter's fears for Noelle Ciano to the death of Charles Carey.

For three days running, he had taken taxis to his office before dawn, searching for the answer in his notes. A sixth sense told him that the connection was buried with Peter's memory: that Noelle might have been followed did not account for the contradictions he heard in Peter. Under “Noelle,” Levy had long since scribbled, “Afraid to love her, yet afraid she will abandon him.”

Now he added, “Afraid his love will murder her.”

Levy stared down at the words: as with his memory of Phillip, they drove him to uncover the hidden meaning of Peter's nightmare and amnesia, until he, too, could not sleep.

For what seemed the hundredth time he scrawled, “Who is the faceless man?” and scowled; like a medical chart, these jagged notes outlined his deterioration.

The analysis was floundering.

Obsessively, Peter worried for Noelle: on the morning that three Dutch photographers were murdered in El Salvador, he had been tormented by the thought that he had killed her. “She wouldn't have gone,” he kept repeating, “if I'd just
said
something.”

Now, Levy wrote: “Charles → amnesia → Noelle?”

In the last week, he had been snaking toward this question.

The trigger had been Peter's casual story of his sexual initiation with the precocious Tipsy, in the back of an empty bus used to shuttle her classmates to a prep school mixer. Peter recalled being startled by her cries. “Afterwards,” he mused, “she said she'd climaxed because I could make it last. Actually, I was so scared they'd catch me that when she came I was still listening for footsteps. But later I thought maybe I'd stumbled on to something.”

Levy first saw the story as symbolic: Peter could purge his sexual guilt, yet protect the imperative of his self-control, only by the postponement of his pleasure. He had speculated on some primal scene—perhaps involving Phillip, Allie and the child Peter. It would explain so much …

“Tell me,” he asked Peter, “what are your first memories concerning sex?”

“How do you mean?”

“As a child, for example—perhaps of your mother or your father, something you might have seen …”

“I wasn't looking.” Peter's voice was very cool. “My mother doesn't come back to me as a terribly physical person.”

For an unhappy day or two, Levy had pondered the impact of Alicia Carey: he felt her madness in Peter's fear of abandonment. But when Peter at last admitted that his nightmare made him fear to touch Noelle, Levy began to see much more.

Nettled at Levy's sudden interest in his sex life, Peter snapped, “I feel like we're in a locker room.”

“Then humor me,” Levy answered dryly. “I'm older than you, and now
my
memory is fading.”

At first, Peter would catalog only his more bizarre experiences, with the clipped voice of a scientist dismissing failed experiments. There were the English twins he'd taken turns with one night on Fire Island; the Radcliffe freshman who had slapped him when, remarking that his forehand was for tennis, he declined to strike her breasts; the radical feminist who, believing sex was politics, would come only on top; the policewoman with a revolver beneath each pillow; the rich ex-cover girl who'd married her plastic surgeon, a transvestite; the writer who'd asked to photograph his penis; an off-Broadway actress so strung out on drugs that his screams did not awaken her …

“But how did they make you
feel
?”

Peter hesitated. “Sad.”

“Not revolted?”

“No.”

“For whom were you sad, then?”

Peter hesitated. “For them, I suppose.”

“Yes?”

Reluctantly, Peter wove a deeper litany of urban loneliness: the city-worn women who, fearing equally the hostile streets and the silence of their own apartments, fled to smoke-filled bars for sanctuary, to smile at strangers. Talk was cheap, sentiment the barter of one-night stands: Peter, who had an ear for dialogue, recalled the social worker nine years past who took him back to her cramped apartment in Chelsea to say that “a little bit of me died with Robert Kennedy.”

Gently, Peter had responded, “You mean you want to sleep with me.”

She looked angry; then, seeing that his smile was not cruel, said, “Yes. I think I do.”

They went to bed.

Peter did not call her again. He had learned to believe it truth, but not that truth mattered.

Peter Carey had remained alone.

This loneliness, Levy guessed, allowed him to feel its ravages in others. Some women had wished no more from him than pleasure; Peter knew that most, fleeing from their solitude, no longer knew what value to assign to the caresses of a stranger, or even to themselves. He learned to exit with a practiced grace, sorry for their expectations. But he, too, grew weary; weary of sex so interchangeable that it seemed accompanied by the same banal chatter of “relationships” which flowed like an endless soundtrack from night to night; of awakening in strange apartments to unfamiliar street sounds, and bathrooms he could not find; of surrogate mothers who wished to analyze his nightmare over breakfast; of the fear that he was drawing on some emotional capital which would at last be spent.

Yet his lovemaking remained chillingly detached.

He was good at casual sex, Peter knew; what he lacked in joy, he made up in sensitivity to the body of another. But he could not permit himself to feel love, or even pleasure. Listening, Levy had written: “Pattern: fear of attachments …”

And then Noelle Ciano, snapping the picture of a small girl, had stirred a feeling inside Peter Carey to which, because he seemed to fear it, he dared not give a name.

“What was it you first responded to?” Levy asked.

Peter stared at the ceiling. Finally, he answered, “That she could capture feelings without words.”

Levy pondered this. “You fundamentally
like
women, don't you, Peter?”

“I hope so, yes.”

“Do you find it curious, then, that your time with them has been so transient?”

“We printed that book last month, doctor. There
is
Noelle …”

Peter's voice had abruptly fallen.

“You're still frightened for her?”

Peter twisted on the couch. “It's just that I haven't heard from her.”

“You could hardly expect to, could you? Is there perhaps something else that might explain these fears?”

Peter crossed his arms. “Such as?”

“
You
,” Levy had almost retorted; quickly, he switched subjects.

Now, waiting for Peter to arrive, Levy stared once more at “Charles → amnesia → Noelle?”

Slowly, he wrote beneath this: “Does Peter blame himself for Charles's death?”

Peter Carey watched the spider.

“Tell me,” Levy began, “what words come to mind when you think of Noelle?”

Carey fell silent. “Courage,” he answered finally. “Courage—and sensitivity.”

“And what words do you associate with your father.”

Carey felt his body stiffen. “Death, and loneliness.”

“I was thinking of when Charles was alive.” Levy's voice was soft; Carey sensed the analyst leaning forward. “Tell me, would you use the same words you just used for Noelle?”

“‘Love'—my father loved me.” Pained, Carey finished quickly. “And then he died.”

“So now you believe Noelle will, also?”

Once more, Carey imagined the faceless man following Noelle. To speak this fear would make it true …

“Why did you come to me, Peter?”

Carey broke free from the image. “I told you why—amnesia, and this dream.”

“Is another reason that you're in love with Noelle Ciano?”

“I don't know what that means.” Carey felt harassed, cornered. “Look, dammit, the dream comes every night now.”

“Perhaps your subconscious is struggling to explain it. What do you make of it, at this point?”

“I'm not sure.” Relieved to have diverted Levy from Noelle, Carey decided to go on. “The one thing I've come up with is sort of shallow.”

“Yes?”

“The dreams began the same night Phillip said he had no pictures of my father.” Carey hesitated. “
Ergo
, the burning of my father's face is my loss of his pictures. Phillip is the faceless man who stabs out my eyes.”

“Yes,” Levy said carefully. “That
is
the obvious explanation. What do you make of it?”

“I don't trust easy answers.”

“Sometimes they're the right ones. But are there other possibilities?”

“Such as?”

There was silence. Quietly, Levy asked, “Is there any chance, Peter, that
you
might feel guilt concerning your father's death?”

Carey's stomach constricted. “Why should I—I don't remember it.”

“Suppose,” Levy proposed gently, “that you sense the burning face and the faceless man are
both
Charles Carey.”

Carey's knees drew up. “Why would my father blind me?”