Darker Than Night

36

“You seem relaxed today,” Rita Maxwell said to David Blank.

Blank sat back in the recliner’s soft leather and closed his eyes. “You seem surprised. Even your most troubled patients must have a good day now and then.”

Rita decided to work with what he’d given her. “What in particular is making you feel good today?”

“Fit and finish.”

“Can you be more specific, or are you talking about your car?”

“I’m talking about the cosmos. Today everything seems to fit together precisely in its proper place.”

“And the finish?”

“The colors are perfect.”

“You refer to colors often.”

“That’s because I paint. Landscapes, mostly. Though sometimes figures. Nudes. The different hues on a human body are amazing in their number and subtlety.”

“You mean eyes, hair…?”

“That too. Human flesh, though, if you look closely, if you listen…”

Listen? Color and sound mingled. Cross-sensory perception. Not unusual in a talented artist, though not to such a degree. “What do you hear if you listen, David?”

“Sometimes beautiful sounds. On bad days, when the colors fade or run together, a gray buzzing. Not today, though. I hear a humming like soft music, different with every woman.”

“Only women?”

“I’m not sure. Are you suggesting I’m a repressed homosexual?”

Huh? “No, I’m not.” Blank didn’t seem angry. More as if he were amused. “Do you have issues concerning your sexuality?”

He opened his eyes and laughed loudly. “Issues…I love that! Isn’t that a term for what you’ve given birth to?”

“It can be.” Rita put a touch of amusement in her voice so he’d know she wasn’t serious. He was loose today, all right. In a good enough mood to joke with, and where might that lead? “I think we can assume you haven’t given birth.”

“No, not to anything.” He laced his fingers together. “Not in the conventional sense, anyway.”

She was puzzled. “You mean your art?”

“Of course. There was a woman who posed nude for me, a model named Carol. So beautiful. I worked so hard to capture her tension and all her hues.”

“Tension?”

“In a physical sense. Angle and muscle tension. Not everyone can be a good artist’s model.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“An artist and his model are usually in a strictly business relationship. And that’s how we started out. Then one day, in my apartment studio in the Village, she fainted. I thought I’d demanded too much of her, trying to use every second of the rare and perfect light…. It was golden; you could hear and touch it.”

He gave Rita a sideways glance to make sure she was paying attention. She nodded and wriggled her pencil.

“I felt guilty,” Blank continued. “I was sorry for her. So I picked her up and carried her to my bed, where she could rest, and as I laid her down, she opened her eyes, and the way she looked at me and smiled, I knew….”

He continued his tale of seduction and sexual adventure while Rita pretended to take notes.

“Two people were never closer than we were,” Blank was saying. “We hardly ever went outside the apartment for the next month, only sending out for…”

Rita moved the pencil steadily, noticing that her squiggling, meaningless marks were for some reason beginning to resemble Arabic script. The session with David Blank had settled into its usual pattern, and she was only half listening to him, thinking lies, lies, lies….

Except for the first ten minutes.

When he’d gone, she would rewind the tape and listen to the first part of the session carefully. It hadn’t been so much what he was talking about, but rather the relieved, buoyant tone of his voice, as if some great pressure were no longer exerting its force on him.

Blank still hadn’t revealed the real reason why he was coming to see her, his actual problem. But his wasn’t the usual game of diversion and deflection that tentative patients played. She understood what he was doing: He was setting the riddle out there for her to unravel. And a part of him wanted desperately for her to succeed, because he understood the terrible pressure would return and he was afraid. Buzzing. Order and color. Fit and finish. The psychosis as car. And David Blank knew he was speeding toward another collision.

The cross-sensory perception, now that was interesting. If true.

He did seem sure that Dr. Rita Maxwell was his answer, that she could and would eventually help him, perhaps save him. But first she had to know what he was concealing. Who was Carol?

Sooner or later, Rita would know. However and why ever he’d found his way to her, David Blank—whoever he was—whoever Carol was—had chosen the right analyst.

Patience was in order. Progress was being made. Rita was slowly learning, always learning, and would find the answer to the riddle of David Blank.

Quinn sat on the hard wood and concrete bench just inside Central Park and watched the joggers and cyclists. An attractive woman in her early twenties pedaled past on a mountain bike, something everyone needed in a city as flat as a Monopoly board. Quinn watched her graceful form recede as she stood high on the pedals to pick up speed, her hips swaying with her effort, her long brown hair catching the sunlight. He wondered about her life. She might be a student at NYU, or a young professional, a wife, a mother, an actress, a musician or artist, a hooker or an off-duty cop. The human mystery.

He decided maybe it was time to use the media.

Dave Everson was a journalist with the Times who had long ago given Quinn his direct-line number at the paper. Everson was a journalist Quinn trusted, and he remembered the number. Quinn drew out his cell phone from the pocket of his sport jacket folded on the bench, and for the first time in years he called it.

“I’ll be damned,” Everson said when Quinn had identified himself. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long,” Quinn said.

Everson was no fool; he knew Quinn had something in mind. “So what do you need?” There was the slightest tremor of excitement in his voice.

“Heat.”

Everson laughed. “You’ve already got that, Quinn.”

“For somebody else,” Quinn said.

“Ah…. With conditions, I assume.”

“You’ll be first in line as things break, Dave.”

“And you want to be an anonymous source.”

“No, I want the bastard to know I’m at his heels.”

“Hey, that’ll be a much better story. Mano a mano. I do like you, Quinn.”

“I can be a likable sort. We dealing?”

“Proceed.”

Claire Briggs frowned and checked again for the chemical reaction.

Blue. Again. No mistake.

She was pregnant. So said her home-testing kit.

She had to tell someone, but not before Jubal. He must be the next to know.

At four o’clock Jubal was back from his two o’clock audition for the role of the sensitive hero in the Lincoln Center production of the Vietnam play Winding Road, which was set to open in three months.

“So how’d it go?” she asked, but she knew from his expression how it had gone.

He wore a light blue sweater like a cape, its arms knotted at his chest, though the weather had been too warm for a sweater when he’d left the apartment. Now he unfastened the loose knot and tossed the sweater onto the sofa in a heap.

“It went like shit!” He flung himself down next to the sweater in a similar heap and sat frowning.

“Jubal…” Claire moved toward him as he hung his head and his shoulders began to quake.

Then he looked up at her, grinning. “I got the part!”

Claire stood still and took a deep breath. “Oh, damn, you had me!”

Jubal shrugged, still with the grin. “Well, I can act!” He jumped up and hugged her, lifting her off the floor and spinning her in a dance across the room.

When he put her down, she was almost too dizzy to make her way to a chair and fall into it, gasping and laughing.

“It’s a day for good news,” she said when she could talk without choking or coughing.

Jubal was pacing, too excited to sit. “Actually, it’s only a callback, but I can be sure of the outcome. Everything fell into place, as if I trained all those years just for the part. I was last to audition. I’m one of three choices and the other two aren’t even close. One’s Victor Valentino.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was in Back Alley last year. Guy looks like a thug, but he can act. He might wind up playing the tough sergeant.”

“Who’s the other guy?”

“Randy Rallison.”

Claire had acted with Rallison. He had difficulty remembering his lines, and many in the cast suspected he had a drug or drinking problem. “A zombie onstage compared to Jubal Day.”

“I’m positive the producer feels the same way. He gave me the wink as I was leaving. I’m sure he gave me the wink.”

Claire sighed and rested a hand on her stomach. She couldn’t stop smiling.

“We’re going out for dinner and celebrate!” Jubal said.

“We have more than one thing to celebrate.”

“I know we do! The way your career’s going. And this apartment is great! We’re lucky, Claire. Damned lucky!”

“I’m glad you think so, Jubal. But we’re luckier than you know. I’m pregnant.”

He stopped pacing and stood still. His features rearranged themselves into a mask. She had no idea what he was thinking. Doubt flashed through her mind like a lightning bolt.

“I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.” She heard the quaver in her voice and hated it. Her stomach began to ache. She knew then what she needed, what she had to have.

“You know this for sure?”

“I’ve missed two periods and my home test says I’m pregnant. I’m sure. I feel…different. There isn’t any doubt.”

Now he was grinning. “My God! You’re pregnant!”

He came to her, lifted her gently to her feet, and kissed her.

“We can turn the spare room into the baby’s room,” he said. “We can spoon-feed the kid and change his diapers—”

“Or hers.”

“Hers. And push him-her in the park in a stroller.”

“We can watch her-him take her-his first step.”

“Teach him-her how to grip a baseball.”

“And how to say please and thank you.”

“And not spit the spinach.”

“We can get married,” Claire said.