The Girls He Adored

12

With his left wrist cuffed to the chair, the prisoner extended his right hand across the table. Irene shook it without thinking, but when she tried to pull away, the prisoner's hand tightened around hers. She had a moment to think about how much stronger the slender man was than he appeared to be; then he loosened his grip.

“I did,” he said.

“Did what?”

“See you in my dreams.”

There were dozens of ways to handle a patient's aggressive transference; for some reason Irene couldn't remember any of them. Instead she was mortified to hear herself ask, “What was I wearing?”

“Not much,” replied the prisoner, opening his mouth to laugh. His jaw dropped and kept on dropping, his face became impossibly elongated, and when he bared his teeth she noticed for the first time that there was something inhuman about them. Too small, too sharp, too many. She felt around under the desk in a panic- there should have been an alarm button-and touched his foot instead. He had extended it under the desk and was sliding it between her thighs.

She grabbed it to push it away; a soft black slipper came off in her hand, and she realized that the foot nudging her thighs open was hard, cloven, and hairy-a hoof. She cried out, jerked her hand away; the back of her hand collided with the alarm button. A distant buzzer sounded. At first she could scarcely hear it over the prisoner's laughing, but it grew louder and louder…

Irene opened her eyes and saw that it was her alarm clock making all the noise. She stumbled into the bathroom, performed an abbreviated toilette, pulled a pair of sweatpants and a Stanford sweatshirt on over her jogging bra and panties, laced on her new Reeboks, and set out for Lovers Point on foot.

Lovers Point, formerly Lovers of Jesus Point, is a rocky spit of land topped by a manicured lawn, with a shallow bathing cove at one end and a great heap of boulders tumbling into Monterey Bay at the other. Barbara Klopfman was already down by the seawall doing her stretching exercises. Behind her, upthrust boulders jutted from the water like the raw material for Easter Island statues; beyond the rocks, an otter floated on its back in the kelp, picking with clever, childlike paws at an abalone shell balanced on its chest.

“Didn't think you were going to make it,” called Barbara. Then, squinting in Irene's direction as Irene drew closer: “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Not much.” Irene stretched with her shorter, darker, plumper, and immeasurably more Jewish friend and therapist for a few minutes, then they set out on their waterfront jog, trotting side by side where the path was wide enough, Irene taking the lead where it narrowed. Across the bay the sun was rising over Moss Landing; the light on the water was dazzling.

“I did a psych evaluation of the man who murdered that girl in his car the other week,” Irene began. Below them to the right, the tide was low enough to uncover the deep green moss of the tidepool rocks. White western gulls wheeled and screamed; fat harbor seals, brown and mottled gray, climbed onto the offshore rocks to begin their hard day's basking.

“That what kept you up?” Barbara was already breathing hard. Neither of them had been a runner for long; between Barbara's weight problem and Irene's cigarette habit, their pace was necessarily unhurried.

“More or less. I kept having these erotic dreams about him.”

“Do tell, do tell.”

By the time Irene finished her story, the two women had rounded Point Pinos, the rocky outcropping where John Denver's plane had gone down two years earlier, and collapsed, winded, on a concrete bench.

“Well, what's the verdict?” asked Irene, when she had caught her breath. Below them the Pacific waves were pounding themselves into misty foam against the rocks; a flight of pelicans crossed in front of the sun in a straight line.

“Verdict?… Odd choice of… words. Feeling… guilty about something?” Barbara said between gasps.

“It's only a figure of speech.”

“Yes, Irene-and a cigar is only a smoke.” Barbara mopped her face with the hem of her oversize T-shirt. “Listen, honey, it's not all bad.”

“Tell me the good news first.”

“You're obviously starting to reconnect with your own sexuality. And not a minute too soon, in my opinion. How long has it been, three years?”

“Three and a half. But why him?”

“Because on the one hand he radiates sexuality, with a whiff of danger, and on the other hand, being a patient and being behind bars, he's relatively safe to fantasize about.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“The problem is, he's not safe to fantasize about. The way you've described him to me, he sounds like a charming, attractive, intelligent, and extremely manipulative sociopath who's trying to get under your skin. And doing a pretty good job of it, apparently.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

Barbara patted Irene's knee. “Put up your psychic shield, wrap up this evaluation as quick as you can, then let me play shadchen and fix you up with some guy who's not a patient, is not going to be behind bars for the rest of his life, and is hopefully not a psychopathic multiple either.”

“Where's the fun in that?” said Irene-but she did feel better. Somehow talking to Barbara always made her feel better.

When the sheriff's deputy showed Irene into the interview room via the visitor's door around eleven o'clock, the first thing she did was examine the desk. She was relieved to be reminded that it did indeed have a solid front, as she'd vaguely recalled-at least she wouldn't be spending the entire interview worrying about Max playing cloven-hoofed footsies with her under the desk.

A few minutes later the prisoner was led in through the inmate's door, and they exchanged perfunctory greetings. As soon as the deputy left the room, Irene took out the pack of Camels she'd bought for the prisoner, slit the cellophane with her manicured thumbnail, shook one out, tamped the end expertly, placed it between his waiting lips, and fired it up with the jade-and-silver lighter Frank had given her for their last anniversary.

“Try one,” he urged her, his face wreathed in smoke as she placed a brown plastic battery-powered smoke-sucker ashtray in front of him. “See what a real cigarette tastes like.”

“Some other time. I have a few follow-up questions I wanted to ask you.”

“I thought you might.” Holding the Camel in one side of his mouth, he worked a shred of tobacco out of the other with the tip of his tongue, which was unusually pointed and, like his lips, a surprisingly dark shade of red.

“To begin with, how did you know my first name?”

“Educated guess. The monogram on your briefcase. How many women's names begin with the letter I?” Then, in an exaggerated brogue: “Especially colleens with the map of Oirland writ large across their loovly countenance.”

Irene thought back-it was true, he hadn't used her name until after she'd set the briefcase on the desk while packing up at the end of the session. And her heritage was Irish as Paddy's pig on both sides.

Feeling somewhat relieved, she took the Dictaphone out of her briefcase, set it on the desk, and turned it on. Rather than ask him outright if he had DID, she tried an indirect approach. “Next question: yesterday you told me about coming to in the car next to the young woman's body. Has this ever happened to you before?” Recurring fugue states and time loss were classic markers for DID.

Max cocked his head, amused. “No.”

A sociopath with an above-average ability to manipulate standardized psychological tests, then. Irene felt curiously disappointed. “I see.”

“That's no, I've never come to in a car next to a young woman's body. Good lord, Irene, you've had nearly twenty-four hours to frame that question, and that's the best you can do?”

The shred of tobacco still clung to the corner of his lips-when he stuck his tongue out to lick it off he accidentally pushed it farther onto his cheek, where he could no longer reach it. Irene found a tissue in her purse, reached across the desk (she was wearing a summerweight cotton turtleneck under a navy blue blazer today), and removed it for him. He thanked her with a winning grin; she made a mental note that along with his need to feel mentally superior, as exemplified by his last statement, he also seemed comfortable with being infantilized.

“I'll rephrase the question. Have you-”

“The answer is yes.”

“I see. Have you ever heard voices?”

The amused cock of the head again. “You mean other than, say, yours, now?”

“I'll rephrase: I mean voices that no one else can hear, originating from either inside or outside your head.”

“Yes-inside. But you know what's even scarier than hearing somebody else talking inside your head?” He'd been speaking out of one side of his mouth, squinting against the smoke; now he leaned forward and carefully placed the cigarette in the ashtray with his mouth.

“What's that?”

“It's the feeling that there's somebody else listening.”