Model Child_a psychological thriller Page 8

  “One of those nights when you can’t sleep,” she broke in. “When you have the racing thoughts.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Forgiveness fascinates me, mainly because I’m so bad at it.

  I suppose it’s a legacy from my mother, who never forgave anyone for anything.”

  “A legacy you could do without. Take some free advice; get rid of it.”

  “I’m working on it,” she replied dryly.

  They turned their attention to the sushi. “What about you?” Cassandra resumed. “Have you ever been unfaithful to her?”

  He shook his head. “Believe it or not, no.”

  “Why not? You’ve had opportunities, I imagine.”

  “In the course of my work, my own life too, I’ve seen the turmoil that it brings. There’s enough turmoil in life under the best of circumstances. I’d just as soon not add to it.” He rearranged the napkin on his lap. “But there’s something else, something more personal and less noble. I’m a coward when it comes to rejection. I can’t deal with it at all.”

  “What makes you so sure you’d be rejected?”

  “From as far back as I can remember, I’ve always hated the way I look. I’ve always been heavy. I’ve always had unmanageable hair and bad skin. It seems as if I spent half my teenage years in a dermatologist’s office because of acne.”

  She gave her head a quick shake. “That was then, this is now. You’re a long way past adolescence, Hal.”

  “We often carry images of ourselves that have little to do with the present. Let me tell you about a patient I once had. She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. Shoulder-length jet-black hair, glorious blue eyes, lovely features. Twenty-six or twenty-seven, with a figure that stopped men in their tracks. But in her mind’s eye she still saw herself as a skinny, gawky, flat-chested adolescent girl. An ugly duckling that no one would possibly want to be with.”

  He took a sip of iced tea and went on. “Now, in my own case, I no longer think of myself as the homeliest man in the world, but something of the old self-image lingers. At least to the point where I doubt a woman would find me the slightest bit attractive.”

  She regarded him carefully, at length, and then pronounced a verdict. “There’s nothing wrong with how you look.” Case closed.

  “I had an affair with a married man once,” she divulged a few minutes later. “It started shortly after I came here. I’d just turned thirty.”

  Gottlieb wasn’t used to this much candor outside the confines of his office. It was making him feel lightheaded. A bit drunk, almost.

  In his office, he would have known precisely how to follow up. But he wasn’t in his office, and the follow-up came haltingly. “Was it important to you?” he asked finally.

  “Important enough to last awhile. Nearly two years.”

  “What was he like?”

  She looked just past his shoulder. “Older. He’d just turned forty-one when we started out. A professor. Of course he was; who else would I meet? His field was Romance languages. Very gifted linguist. Taught himself Basque for the hell of it. That’s practically impossible. It’s one of the toughest European languages in existence.”

  “But what was he like?”

  She considered. “Agreeable. Funny, how it’s the first word that comes to mind. Agreeable.”

  “You say that . . . I don’t know, almost distastefully.”

  “Well, it makes me uneasy when people are too agreeable. I’m not used to them. He was also very gentle. I wasn’t used to that either. I remember thinking, his gentleness is like a language I don’t understand. Only now am I beginning to understand it. I’m a slow learner.” She continued to gaze just past his shoulder. “It’s interesting. I haven’t thought about him, or us, for years.”

  “What was the whole thing like for you?”

  “To be brutally honest, it was a nice diversion.”

  An answer he hadn’t expected, but his tone remained calm and neutral. “A diversion from what?”

  “You know. From work. From all the day-in, day-out nonsense. Buying food, cooking, paying bills, cleaning the cat’s box.”

  “You still had to do those things, of course.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t seem so onerous.” She tapped her chopsticks. “This may sound callous to you, Hal, but I liked that role. The other woman. I liked the control. I could see him or not as I chose. If I worked around the clock to finish up an article, if I needed to bury myself in the library for three or four days, I could put him on hold. I didn’t have to see him, didn’t even have to answer his phone calls. It’s much harder to do that with a husband.”

  He’d heard other women say similar things but rarely with such bluntness.

  “I had the best of him,” she went on. “The lion’s share of the warmth and charm. The small considerations, the bouquet of flowers or book of poetry sent for no special occasion except to let me know that he was thinking of me. And the gratitude, especially the gratitude. He was so grateful for whatever I gave him! Not just for the sex, which was never as important to him as he thought it was. No, he was terribly grateful for making him feel that he was still special. For listening to all the old jokes and stories that bored his wife silly. For the omelet I’d whip him up on a Saturday morning. For massaging his back when he overdid it playing squash.”

  “Grateful. I can see where he would be,” said Gottlieb, more to himself than to her. “Why did it end?”

  “He began to talk about leaving her for me. That scared me. I didn’t want him on that basis. I didn’t want that much of him. I also didn’t want to hurt his wife. She’d never done a thing to me.” She shook her head vigorously. “And I sure as hell didn’t want to play stepmother to his children.”

  “You say that with a lot of vehemence.”

  “I’ve known several women who’ve married men with children. They come from different backgrounds, they have different careers, but they all agree on one thing. The hardest thing they ever tried to do was to be someone’s stepmother. One of them described it in terms of a chronic illness. Not fatal but incurable, like psoriasis.”

  “How do you feel about having children yourself?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s very important to me, and sometimes it’s the last thing in the world I want. Next year I’ll turn forty. Unless I’m in a serious relationship, which strikes me as unlikely, I may start thinking about artificial insemination.”

  “The prospect of raising a child alone doesn’t daunt you?”

  “Why should it?”

  They finished the sushi and sashimi, and lingered over another iced tea. Conversation skipped back and forth over a wide range of subjects. A review article he was writing on the treatment of chronic sex offenders. Preliminary research for a book she planned, on Joseph Goebbels. Concerns about their mothers’ health. His had arthritis in her back and both knees, could only get around with a walker. Hers had quit smoking too late, and now she had emphysema. His plans to go to a psychiatric conference in Santa Fe the following October; hers to go to Germany in late September, for a sabbatical.

  It feels like I’ve known her for longer than a week.

  The waiter brought their check, and both of them reached for it simultaneously. For a moment his hand rested on top of hers. He felt his cheeks redden. One of her infrequent smiles crossed her face. “It’s all right, Hal, you needn’t blush.” His blush deepened.

  As they walked to the door, he turned to her. “Sometime I’d like to know about why you’re so frightened of going into therapy.”

  Stopping dead in her tracks, she turned to him and shook her head. “Maybe next time.” She spoke very slowly, very softly. “I suppose it has a great deal to do with my Uncle Franz.”

  CHAPTER IX

  T HAT SUNDAY, AS THE JULY SUN BORE down on them, the Gottliebs decided to spend the afternoon at Lake Michigan. Peter agreed to join them, to his parents’ mild surprise. He seemed in good spirits, or so they dared to hope. />
  Sharon and Hal worked together in the kitchen, loading a cooler with sandwiches, coleslaw and carrot sticks, pears and nectarines, cans of iced tea and lemonade. A smaller box held potato chips and pretzels, paper plates and napkins, and plastic utensils.

  Then they loaded up the trunk of Gottlieb’s Saab. The crammed trunk also held a beach umbrella, towels and blankets, suntan lotion, a traveling Scrabble set, and a Frisbee. Gottlieb had spotted the Frisbee in a closet and decided to take it on an impulse, although he and Peter had neglected it for years. It reminded him of better days between them, when the simple ritual of tossing it back and forth had been among his principal pleasures.

  Time passed quickly as they drove to the lake in air-conditioned comfort, oblivious to the ninety-one-degree heat outside. Gottlieb put on a jazz CD, a Count Basie. He could see Sarah in the rearview mirror, swaying back and forth in time to the music; he could hear her humming to herself. Peter liked the CD too, tapping his fingers on the door handle. As he drove, Gottlieb lay a hand on Sharon’s knee. She answered by putting her own hand on top of his. This will be a good day, he made an optimistic prediction to himself. The Lord knows we could use one.

  They headed to their favorite spot, Loyola Beach—a stretch of beach near the city’s northern limit, rarely crowded despite the urban mass migration to the water. Stationing themselves a twenty-second stroll from the water’s edge, they unfurled the umbrella and laid out the towels and blankets. As soon as they finished, they hurried to the water. The lake made them shiver, as always. The temperature might be 110 and the lake would still be cold, to Gottlieb’s inevitable satisfaction.

  Sarah, standing next to her father, was in her glory, jumping up and down in the water, laughing and cooing. Gottlieb turned to his son, a few yards away. “Come on, let’s swing her around.” Peter did as bidden; only briefly did he look put upon. He held on to her feet while Gottlieb held her hands, as they swung her in widening arcs.

  “On three we’ll let her go. Okay, one . . . two . . . three!” With that, she sailed a few feet over the surface of the water, shrieking happily as she landed with a splash. Even Peter deigned to smile. Gottlieb caught a glimpse of him as he’d been a couple of years ago. The doting brother, as smitten with her as everyone else, who liked to give her shoulder rides and read Dr. Seuss to her.

  They swung her around a few more times, and then Sarah headed back to the beach, where she cajoled Peter into helping her build a sand castle. Alone now, Hal and Sharon ventured into deeper water, swimming side by side. Sharon, a strong swimmer, did the backstroke. He watched appreciatively as her legs propelled her with a steady rhythm, as her still-firm breasts bobbed along the water’s surface.

  The scene reminded him of the earliest days of their courtship, in which Lake Michigan had played a central role. They’d met in Chicago. She’d been a graduate student in clinical social work, and he’d been one of her supervisors. Their first date, dinner in a Thai restaurant, had ended with a moonlit walk along the lake. He kissed her for the first time a week later, as they lay on the beach, splayed out on one of his old blankets, no more than five miles from where they were right now. The day, in fact, had been much like this one. A sultry, lazy

  afternoon, not a cloud to be seen or a breeze to be felt. The lake had been witness to their first kisses and caresses, uncertain and tentative (at least on his part). It had been the backdrop to their first lovemaking (the bedroom window in his small apartment afforded them a view of it). They’d swum in its bracing water, walked along its shore as they probed each other’s pasts, shared secrets, confided hopes, and devised dreams.

  One of the many reasons why he loved the lake: in his mind it was closely linked to loving her, as he’d love no other woman, however warm her smile or quick her wit, or spectacular her face and figure. He might lust after other women; he might like them, he might even grow to love them, but not the way he’d loved Sharon.

  These reveries broke off when she flipped over and disappeared into the gray-green water. Alarmed, wondering if she’d had a cramp, he started to go after her. At that point, having doubled back and swum under him, she grabbed his penis and gave it a spirited yank.

  With a gasp, he inhaled equal parts air and water. When he finally stopped coughing, he opened his eyes and saw Sharon standing next to him, laughing. He could only talk in fits and starts. “Why did . . . you do . . . that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just felt playful.” What went unsaid, It’s been so long since either of us felt that way.

  He stood next to her, put an arm around her. “I was watching you swim. It made me think about us. The early days, the way we’d come down here and swim and talk and so forth.”

  “I particularly liked the so forth.”

  His arm hidden by the water, he slipped it around her buttocks, resting his hand on the outer surface of her thigh. “Dear God, I was head over heels in love with you!”

  “I was kind of fond of you myself.”

  “Do you remember how we’d come down here? How we’d talk for hours?”

  She nodded. “I told you things I’d never told another soul.”

  “Same here.”

  “The future looked so bright.” She smiled, a bit wistfully. “We couldn’t conceive of anything bad happening to us! I remember what you said once. You said our future lay ahead of us like a highway paved with gold.”

  “I did?” He could scarcely believe he’d ever used so banal a phrase or been so upbeat.

  “You did indeed, and I loved you for it.” She shifted her stance, positioning herself in front of him, her back pressing tightly against his chest and belly. For an instant, he found himself transported back two decades earlier. They were twenty-eight and twenty-four, their ages when they met. He’d fallen in love for the first and only time. He knew their lives would be rife with pain and pitfalls. He knew they’d be lucky if a fraction of their dreams came true. He knew they’d get old and die, assuming that they didn’t die when they were young. But this knowledge, sterile and unfelt, lay tucked away in some dark recess of his mind. The fact was, he felt immortal. He also felt unspeakably lucky. No ill wind would blow their way; they would always steer clear of the pitfalls. Of course they would. The future was a highway paved with gold. The phrase, however hokey, had been dead on.

  ⸎

  They swam for another fifteen minutes and returned to

  shore. Peter and Sarah had given up on the sand castle. He now read a mystery beneath the umbrella while she waded in ankle-deep water.

  Gottlieb asked Peter if he’d like to toss around the Frisbee, and he acquiesced with a sober nod. The windless afternoon allowed the Frisbee to carry straight and far. Both father and son were awkward and heavyfooted, but still they fell into an easy rhythm. Snap-throw-catch, snap-throw-catch. As his movements became surer after the long layoff, Peter’s throws became longer and more ambitious, arching high and dropping precipitously, circling towards his father from the left and right. He also made a couple of diving catches.

  They kept at it for nearly half an hour. “That was fun,” the boy volunteered as they headed back to the blanket, both of them slightly out of breath.

  “We should do it more often.”

  “Yeah.” The yeah came out less flat than usual.

  All four of them ate ravenously. It was close to two o’clock when they finished, the hot sun combining with the big meal to render Sarah listless and sleepy. She stretched out on one of the blankets and dozed off instantly.

  Gottlieb faced his son. “How about keeping an eye on your sister while your mother and I take a walk?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” No yeah at all.

  Hal and Sharon headed off, strolling just at the water’s edge. He took her hand. “This has been the best family outing we’ve had in ages.”

  “It is,” she agreed. “Not that there’s been much competition. Peter seems—should I say it, happy? I’m almost afraid to talk about it. It’s like jinxing a no-hitter.”


  “Do you remember how patient he was with her when she was little? How he used to read those Dr. Seuss books to her, over and over?”

  “He was a good big brother when he wanted to be.”

  “He will be again, when he’s ready. We saw hints of it today.”

  Her pace slowed and she turned towards him, regarding him quizzically. “You’re an interesting man, Hal. Your optimism can be surprising, especially since you’re usually so serious. Especially in light of what you do. That optimism of yours, I often wish I had it.”

  He shrugged. “It’s easier to be optimistic than despairing.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  The conversation veered away from Peter, touching on

  lighter topics. What movie should they rent next, and did she want to go to Wisconsin on Labor Day weekend, and did he want her to get tickets for a Cubs game late in the season? The afternoon rolled along like a slowly flowing river, and Gottlieb would have been quite happy for it to flow along like that indefinitely.

  When they got back to Peter and Sarah, they were once more hot and sweaty. Enough time had passed since lunch for them to swim again, so all of them headed to the water. Gottlieb left the three of them near shore as he swam farther out alone. An enthusiastic swimmer since his grade school days, he rarely felt as free as he did in the water. He felt almost graceful as he glided along, notwithstanding his girth. Once he’d told Sharon that if he came back to earth as another life form, he’d choose to be a seal.

  By the time he returned to the umbrella, Sharon and Peter had already set up the Scrabble game. Scrabble was the only board game Peter enjoyed, and he played it well. At the age of twelve he’d beaten both his parents, forming xylem on the next-to-last move. Despite his grunts and monosyllables, he’d always had a large vocabulary. His father waited eagerly for it to reemerge.

  They played for just over half an hour while Sarah cavorted in the sand, digging a ditch with her plastic shovel. A close game: only fifteen points separated the three scores. Someone’s dachshund puppy, loose on the beach, came over to them, but only Sarah paid much attention to it. “Mommy, Daddy, look at the doggie! He’s soooo cute!”