The Girls He Adored (52 page)

He hurriedly tore the pack open, stripped the foil off two pieces, shoved them both into his mouth. “Will you come back to see me some time?” he asked her indistinctly.

“Perhaps some day, Lyssy,” she said, crossing to the door, which opened as if by magic. “I do live sort of far away.”

“Too bad,” he said. “You're nice.”

Irene turned in the doorway. “Why, thank you, Lyssy. You're nice too.” She took a backward step; the door closed.

“Well?” asked Dr. Corder, beaming.

“I'm impressed,” said Irene, stepping up to peer through the one-way glass. Maxwell was still sitting on the bed, motionless save for the steady movement of his jaw as he worked at his gum.

“But not entirely convinced?”

“ ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ He's already fooled me once, Dr. Corder.”

“Please, Dr. Cogan, call me Al.”

“In that case, call me Irene.”

“It'd be my pleasure,” said Corder, offering her his arm. “Now how about that lunch?”

“Sounds great.” Irene took his arm, and together they strolled back down the salmon-colored corridor. Were they flirting? she wondered. She certainly hoped so.

Ulysses Maxwell sat motionless on the bed for another ten minutes. When he was sure they were gone, he spat his gum out onto the floor. Then his carriage changed dramatically. He lowered his shoulders and arched his neck, cocking his head slightly to the side.

“ ‘Why, thank you, Lyssy,’ ” he said aloud, forming the words carefully, almost primly, at the front of his mouth, and speaking with just a trace of a lisp—Irene's lisp. “ ‘You're nice, too.’ ”

He rose, crossed the room with only a ghost of the limp he'd put on for Irene, sat down at his desk, and with the black crayon swiftly sketched the outline of a nude woman on the top sheet of the pad. No stick figure this time: she was reclining in a modified odalisque, her hands behind her head, her small breasts tipped pertly. Then he put the black crayon back in the box and took out several other shades, peach, melon, red-orange, orange-red, apricot, and carnation, with which he sketched in first a few sparse pubic hairs, just above the triangular space between her slender thighs, then a luscious head of shoulder length, strawberry blond hair.

“Much better,” he said, admiring her for a moment, then tearing the picture into narrow strips, and the strips into tiny pieces before depositing it in his wastebasket. “That Princess Di shade was all wrong for your complexion. Miss Miller would never have approved.”