The Girls He Adored

10

Irene Cogan often brought her work to bed with her. There was plenty of room: the other side of her king-size BeautyRest had been unoccupied-screamingly unoccupied-since Frank had passed away three years ago. Finding a warm male body to fill it wouldn't have been difficult-at forty-one Irene was an attractive woman-but finding a man was by now beginning to seem darn near impossible. A man like Frank Cogan, anyway.

She and Frank had both been scholarship students at Stanford. He was a big guy-six-four, with gorgeous wavy blond hair and an athletic physique. They'd married in college; he'd given up his own dream of becoming a painter and dropped out of school a year shy of his degree to support them. He'd gone into construction, and worked his way up from hod carrier to owning his own construction company in Sand City. Neither his hair nor his physique had lasted-Frank was too fond of beer and pizza-but his good humor had never failed him, and though untrained by Irene's standards, his was a first-rate intelligence.

Even three years after his death it was still possible for Irene to pretend that Frank was only in the bathroom, washing up, that any minute the bathroom door would open and there he'd stand in those ridiculous pajamas she'd bought him as a joke one She stopped herself. Thinking about Frank and falling asleep were mutually exclusive activities. Irene felt a quick flash of anger-at Frank, for dying; at herself, for still missing him; at God, for the whole mess of existence. Then it passed; she picked up the prisoner's file and went through it again from the first page, a copy of the arrest report, to the last, a copy of the sheriff's department incident report on the Cortes assault.

Irene tried to picture the slight, boyish man she'd interviewed performing the atrocities attributed to him in the report, but she couldn't do it. Had the stress of being threatened brought out Max's homicidal alter, the persona who had filled out the second MMPI? If so, was there a possibility she could evoke this other personality by threatening him, or otherwise provoking a stress response? It might be worth trying, as long as the prisoner was in restraints.

Eventually Irene dropped off to sleep, which is not to say she got much rest. Her first dream took place in the basement office where she and the prisoner had met. Max was led in, fettered and cuffed. It wasn't until after the guard left that Irene realized that they were both nude. Max explained to her that it was a new type of therapy. She said that she was the doctor and that it was her job to determine the proper treatment.

Not anymore, said Max, coming around the side of the desk, his hands raised in front of him, palms down, thumbs touching in the classic strangler's pose.

Irene looked down and found herself handcuffed to her chair. She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of choking her, he knelt and gently, without a key, unsnapped her cuffs. He helped her to her feet; naked, chest to breast, they embraced.

Then she heard the applause. For the first time she looked up and saw that she was in a packed operating theater-tier upon tier of masked and gowned figures were applauding the two of them. Max-or was he Christopher now? — dropped to his knees again and began kissing her belly, then worked his way down just the way she liked it, just the way Frank used to do it. The applause deepened; it was deafening now, a roar like the surf as the waves of orgasm began to overtake her….

According to an article Irene had read in the Journal of Human Sexuality, although damp dreams were not uncommon among women, only a relatively small percentage reported actually dreaming to climax. But it wasn't so much the orgasm that bothered Irene, who up until a moment before awakening had gone without one, sleeping or waking, for three years, it was the identity of the partner her subconscious had chosen.

Fortunately, she had an appointment with Barbara Klopfman, her own shrink (and her best friend: not an arrangement the American Psychiatric Association would have approved of, but it worked for them), on the jogging trail at 7:00 A.M. She and Barbara always managed to fit in either a little gossip or a little therapy when they ran-tomorrow morning it would be a bit of both.