Retribution: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) (5 page)

Ann’s inner door was open. I could hear her talking. From the pauses, I figured she was on the phone so I moved to the doorway where she motioned for me to take my usual seat across from her.

Ann is a small woman with a tolerant smile. She likes bright dresses. Her hair is gray, straight, and short enough to show off her colorful earrings.

“No,” she told the person on the phone, “I’ll see you at four… no, you will not kill yourself… I understand… four. Did you read the book?… I gave you a book,
Lost Horizon
… No, I did not want you to rent the movie. I wanted you to read the book… You’ve got a few hours. Start reading.”

She hung up the phone and accepted the coffee and biscotti from me, placing both on the desk to her right, and looked at me.

I knew what she was looking at.

“I got slapped by a woman I was serving papers,” I explained as she examined the side of my face.

“And what did you do?”

“Do?”

“In response to being slapped. What did you do?”

“I got on my bike and left.”

Ann shook her head.

“What should I have done?” I asked.

“Getting on your bicycle is one thing. Getting angry is another. Saying something to the woman.”

“I wasn’t angry,” I said.

“You should have been. You should let yourself feel, but don’t worry. I’m not commanding you to feel. It doesn’t work that way. Here, take this with you,” she said, handing me a copy of
Smithsonian
magazine. “Article in there about gargoyles. Fascinating.”

I took the magazine. There was a grinning stone gargoyle on the cover, just the right gift for a depressed client. Ann
took the lid off the cup of black coffee and dipped the biscotti.

“Can you do it today?” she asked, looking at me as she lifted the saturated biscotti to her mouth.

“Not today,” I said.

She wanted me to speak the name of my wife. I had done it only twice since she had died, once to Sally and two weeks ago when I managed to say it to Ann. Saying her name aloud had brought back images, memories, pain, the empty feeling in my stomach, the sound of my heart madly pulsing blood through my veins, my neck, my head.

“Feel better?” Ann asked when I had said my wife’s name.

“No,” I answered. “Worse. Much worse.”

“Of course,” she said. “This is therapy, not magic.”

I had gone through this opening session ritual four times since then with Ann asking me to speak the name aloud. I had managed it only that one session.

“Can you do it?” Ann asked, biscotti in hand.

I took a deep breath, felt the beat of my heart, closed my eyes, and softly uttered, “Catherine.”

“And you feel how?” Ann asked, redipping her biscotti.

“Sorry I said it,” I said, reaching for my own coffee, which unlike my therapist’s was strongly fortified with half and half and two packets of Equal.

“Of course you are. You are still in love with your depression and self-pity. You’ve held it around you like a child’s comfort blanket since your wife died. If you give it up, what are you left with?”

“We’ve been through this,” I said.

“And each week we become different people,” she said. “Sometimes different people with different answers. This time you said her name.”

“Without my depression,” I said. “The few times anxiety takes over. I shake. I can’t do anything. I walk till I’m exhausted. Even
Mildred Pierce
doesn’t help. I think… you know all this.”

“You would rather be depressed than anxious,” she said, continuing to work on my burnt offering.

“Is that a question or an observation?”

“Your choice.”

“Yes, I would rather be depressed,” I said.

“You owe it to Catherine to live depressed and guilty. You want to hide, not feel and slowly die, a hermit, a saint who does not deserve life.”

“I know.”

“I’m just recapitulating,” she said. “Do they have flavors other than chocolate?”

“Yes.”

“Next time if you remember, bring almond or something,” she said.

“I’ll do that.”

“Change is good, small stimulation from small changes. I just segued from my own taste to a metaphoric reference to your state of mind.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“You were meant to. You wouldn’t be one of my favorite clients if you couldn’t follow what I say.”

“I thought I was your favorite,” I said.

“You are part of an elite group.”

“Am I making progress?” I asked.

“Do you want to make progress?” she asked in return.

Good question.

“I don’t know.”

“You still seeing Sally?”

“Yes, tonight. Why?”

“You can turn in your blanket of depression for something else,” she said. “Like coming back to life with a real person.”

“I’m not giving up my wife,” I said.

“You said her name,” Ann said with a smile, pointing her finger at me. “Progress. I’m not asking you to give her up. I’m asking you to place her gently inside you where she belongs and go on with your life.”

I shook my head and said, “We keep saying the same things.”

“But in different ways and… tell me, Lewis, are you starting to feel different?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And it makes you anxious?”

“Angry.”

“At who? Who are you angry with?”

“You.”

“Say something about her,” Ann said, leaning back.

“What?”

“Your wife. Did she do anything that annoyed you?”

I closed my eyes, and shook my head “no.”

“She was perfect,” Ann said. “Nobody’s perfect. Remember the last line of
Some Like It Hot
? When Joe B. Brown finds out Jack Lemmon isn’t a woman? ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he says.”

“She left doors and drawers open,” I said. “Medicine cabinet, kitchen cabinets, dresser drawers. All the time.”

“And what did you do?” Ann prompted.

“I closed them.”

“Never got irritated?”

“For a while. Then …”

“You liked her having little faults?”

“I guess,” I said. “I think I can remember everything in those cabinets and drawers.”

“Do you want to remember them?”

“No … yes. This isn’t fun.”

“It’s not supposed to be fun. You don’t know how to have fun yet.”

Ann stood up and jogged in place a few seconds.

“Knee tightens,” she said, sitting again. “You showed me her photograph. She was pretty.”

I nodded, seriously considering never coming back here again.

“Lewis, you are not pretty.”

“I know. We … she picked me. We had …”

“Fun?”

“A lot in common,” I said. “Movies, books. We found the same things funny. Monty Python, Thin Man movies, Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

“Moose and squirrel,” Ann said in a terrible imitation of either Natasha or Boris. “What?”

Something must have broken through. I bit my lower lip.

“Sometimes she called me Rocky,” I said. “If I was being
particularly dense, she called me Bullwinkle. I… I called her… No more.”

Ann clapped her hands and rocked forward once.

“Perfect. Are you still going to the beach?”

“When I can.”

“And the gulls, do you still hear them speak?”

“Gulls don’t speak,” I said. “Sometimes their squawk … I’ve told you this… Sometimes their talk sounds like they’re saying, ‘It’s me.’”

“You like the gulls?”

“Yes.”

“And the pelicans?”

“And the pelicans who dive like clumsy-winged oafs into the Gulf literally going blind from the constant collision with the water in search of food.”

“You are getting very literary, very poetic,” said Ann.

“As my friend Flo would say, ‘Bullshit.’”

“You are the gull crying, ‘It’s me.’ You are the pelican going blind while it dives for food.”

“I’m literary. You’re cryptic.”

We went on like that for a while. I glanced at the clock on the wall over her desk. Five more minutes.

“You ever read Conrad Lonsberg?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Compelling, disturbing, elevating. Isn’t that what the reviews said? All true but there was a true despair behind those poems and stories. I met him once, briefly, here in Sarasota. I recognized him from the old photograph on the jacket of
Fool’s Love
. He was more than forty years older than the man in the photograph leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets. But the eyes were the same. I remember. Our eyes met. It was at Demitrio’s on the Trail. Melvin and I were there. Lonsberg was with a young woman. Our eyes met for an instant and he knew I recognized him. I think I smiled to let him know his secret was safe and I would not bother him. I wonder if he has had any therapy. Judging from his books, I would say it would be a good idea as long as he didn’t go to one of the quacks with shingles. Why the interest in Conrad Lonsberg?”

“Remember Adele?”

“Vividly,” said Ann. “There is a connection between this evocation of Conrad Lonsberg and Adele? It is not a simple stream of consciousness, a seeming non sequitur?”

“No.”

“You want to tell me what you are talking about or, rather, what you want to ask me?”

“Too long to tell the whole story,” I said, looking at the clock on the wall. “Our time is just about up and I hear your next client coming through the outer door.”

“Give me the question,” Ann said. “In your eyes, you have a question.”

“Why would Adele, who Lonsberg has been working with, deface her copy of one of his books and not just tear it up or throw it away?”

“You want a two-minute answer, which is the time we have left?”

“What I want and what I get are almost never the same,” I said.

“She is angry with him, very angry, feels betrayed, but can’t bring herself to throw away the book. Something is unfinished. Something went very wrong. In that which we call reality. In the reality of Adele’s mind. Lewis, I would need more information. Ideally, I would need Lonsberg and Adele together in this room. I think that unlikely. Meanwhile, I’ll end with a question. Why did you leap the chasm of thought from being angry with me and identifying with seagulls to Adele and Lonsberg?”

“I don’t know.”

“Next time,” she said, rising. “Think about it. Come with an answer.”

“I’ll try.”

“It’s an assignment,” she said. “Like college. You fail to answer, you get an F and I make you do it again.”

I fished out two tens, Marvin Uliaks’s tens, and handed them to her.

“You should read
Fool’s Love,”
she said as I moved toward the door.

“I did.”

“When?”

“A long time ago,” I said.

“You read it as a boy. Read it as a man. You think it’s hot in here?”

“Maybe, a little.”

“Monday?”

“Monday, same time?”

“Yes,” she said, moving to the thermostat.

In the small reception office, a woman—slim, long blond hair, well dressed, eyes down and covered with thick sunglasses—looked down. I walked past her and out into the sunshine.

I STOPPED AT BRANTS
Book Shop on Brown Street, a short street with Bee Ridge on the north end and the shopping mall with Barnes & Noble on the south. Brant’s is a one-story used-book institution that looks as if a good wind would blow off the roof or an NFL lineman would step through the creaking wooden floor. But there wasn’t much you couldn’t find there.

I picked up a copy of
Fool’s Love
for a dollar and a quarter and walked over to Rico’s, great prices, good food, terrific calamari, nearly perfect lasagna, just like my mother didn’t make. I had a Gorgonzola sandwich on a roll with a diet Coke and watched a court show on the big-screen television. A stern-looking wizened woman in a black robe was calling a stupidly grinning teenager a liar. He seemed like a liar to me too. She ruled against him. I don’t know what he did, kicked a dog, stole a CD player. The girl he had to pay a hundred thirty-four dollars to looked about Adele’s age—thin, dark, pretty, a ring through her eyebrow. I figured she had done some lying too before I started
watching. Almost everybody lies. Everybody lies. Everybody dies.

“I read that,” said the young woman who waited on me, pointing at
Fool’s Love
. She was dark, looked a little like my cousin’s daughter Angela, and smiled.

I didn’t know her name but I had seen her in Rico’s before. At this hour of the afternoon, business was slow. I was the only customer.

“You like it?” she asked, nodding at the book.

“Read it a long time ago,” I said. “I’m thinking of reading it again. You like it?”

“Great book,” she said. “I don’t read books, and that one, they made us read that one in school, Mr. Gliddings at Riverview. You know Pee Wee Herman went to River-view?”

“I heard,” I said.

“Only book they made me read that I liked, you know?”

“Must be good. You know he lives here?”

“Who?”

“Conrad Lonsberg, the guy who wrote the book,” I said.

She stood up straight and her smile broadened.

“He’d have to be a couple hundred years old,” she said.

“No, it’s true. He’s alive. He’s here.”

“I believe you,” she said. “That’s interesting. Want another diet Coke?”

I declined, paid my bill, left her a twenty-percent tip, and got back in the white Cutlass. The drive down Tamiami Trail to Blackburn Point Road took me less than fifteen minutes. I turned right on Blackburn Point, crossed the small bridge over Little Sarasota Bay, turned right again, and kept going on Casey Key Road past houses great and small, many hidden by trees and bushes.

Flo’s directions had been perfect. The walled-in fortress of Conrad Lonsberg was down a paved culde-sac. There was a gate. I parked just past it and walked back. There was no name on the door, not even an address, but there was a bell semihidden in the stone wall on my left. I pushed it, heard nothing, and waited. Nothing. I pushed it again. Nothing. Then I saw the camera. It was on the right at the
top of the wall, its lens pointing straight down at me, camouflaged by a plant with big leaves.

I wasn’t sure if I could be heard but I said, “My name is Lew Fonesca. I’m a friend of Adele Hanford’s. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”