Dressed to Kill Read online

  2

  It was a dream, the same dream, and even as it happened Kate knew it to be a dream—at first frightening, then pleasurable, then painful at the end because she knew she would open her eyes and find herself in bed with Mike and nothing would be different; sunlight would be burning through the bedroom windows, motes of dust floating like disintegrating moths, and Mike would reach across the bed for her and make love in his perfunctory way, as if each stroke of sex were a form of calisthenics, aspects of some ritual exercise.

  She didn’t open her eyes. She thought about the dream. She thought about it before it finally eluded her, before it faded into a dark alcove of her mind. The stranger in the dream . . . who was he? The man in the shower stall . . . where had he come from? And why couldn’t she rid herself of the odd feeling that his touch, although rough, was somehow familiar to her? But then lots of things in dreams were familiar in a distorted way. You went inside rooms you knew by heart, and you recognized them, but they were altogether different even if you couldn’t say how. Dream rooms. Dream landscapes.

  Dream lovers.

  She tried to bring the dream back, forcing her mind to the memory.

  She steps into the shower. She sees Mike through the frosted glass of the shower door. She turns on the water. Mike sings to himself tunelessly as he shaves. The same tune, always the same damn tune.

  And then there was a blank moment. Something happened after that. What happened next? What was the exact order of events?

  A hand is clamped across her mouth as the water streams over her. A man’s hand. She feels his breath upon the back of her neck. She feels his arms wrapped tightly around her body from behind. She wants to cry out. She wants to shout Mike’s name. Mike goes on shaving, distorted through the frosted glass. The air is thick with steam. Condensation runs down the glass. Mike shaves, sings. She can’t scream. She can’t move. And then everything is turned upside down and she can feel this man, this stranger, enter her from behind, and the pain is terrible. But the pain only lasts for a second and then she finds herself slowly parting her legs, still trying to call out to Mike, still trying to wrench the iron hand away from her mouth.

  It changed then. It changed the way dreams do.

  She feels him thrust upwards and she raises herself higher, parting her legs wider, and after that she isn’t trying to call out Mike’s name any more, Mike doesn’t exist except as some surreal imprint on frosted glass, the only real thing is the feeling between her legs, the sensation of waves beginning to churn inside her, warm waves moving at some deep inner level, and how she tries to open her legs wider still, the muscles in her thighs and calves trembling and aching, but the pain isn’t pain any more. It’s like she doesn’t exist now, like some part of her has gone, then the water isn’t falling any more, and Mike isn’t singing, and she’s caught up in some profound silence of pleasure, caught in a place where noise isn’t necessary, where there’s only the quiet savagery of feeling.

  And she comes. In the dream, taken from behind by a figment of her own imagination, she comes, and when she does the silence is shattered by the echo of her own screaming; the silence is stained glass broken into a mosaic beyond any conceivable pattern.

  And then the dream finished.

  She opened her eyes. Coming up from sleep was like slowly floating up from the depths of dark water. But it was only a dream, nothing more. And if the touch of the stranger was familiar, shit, that didn’t mean anything except you’d dreamed him before. Other worlds, she thought. Maybe that was it—like some kind of astral travel bullshit. Dimension hopping. Nightly, the same other-worldly lover awaits.

  She tried to push the bedsheet aside, but Mike was watching her.

  She turned to look at him. He was saying something about how restless she’d been, how much she’d turned and tossed in her sleep. Then he put his arm over her naked breasts. She moved closer to him and tried to imagine herself back in the dream. She tried to imagine Mike as the phantom stranger. Phantom stranger, she thought. For Christ’s sake. (Elliott would have something to say about this dream. He’d stick it in some neat Freudian box and hand it back to her with ribbons on. He’d drag out those labels so essential to his trade—guilt, anxiety, repression. Damn, those terms were as necessary to Elliott as Tru-Lanol Arterial Fluid and Lyf-Lyk Tint were to an embalmer.) She shut her eyes. She felt Mike’s mouth against her own and she thought: He hasn’t learned how to please, how to make it gentle, lasting, how to make it seem that it really mattered. He climbs on, climbs off, as if I was a blowup doll you could order from Frederick’s mail-order catalogue. (I’m Kate, five foot three, and I’m built to please.) She listened to his rhythmic breathing, the steady beat of his stomach against her own. She moaned, twisting and arching her body as he began to come. I should get an Oscar, she thought. I’m expert at making him think he’s good. Sweating, Mike slumped against her, stroking her hair lightly with one hand. It was the Tender Moment. It lasted, on average, fifteen seconds; then he’d get up and go inside the bathroom. And she would feel sore between her legs because he’d bruised her.

  She watched him rise now, saw the fixed smile on his face, watched him vanish beyond the bathroom door; then there was the sound of running water. She lay with her hands clenched, the cold sheet drawn up across her body. She didn’t feel angry, sad, upset—only a strange numbness that she understood was connected with the dream in a way she didn’t fully grasp; it was as if she’d left part of herself behind, drawn a dark curtain upon the scene in the shower. Bullshit, she thought. You can’t live in dreams. She threw the sheets aside and stepped out of bed, pulling on her robe, running her fingers through her messy hair.

  Mike came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was still smiling, like a craftsman proud of something he’d just hammered together.

  “What time are we meeting for lunch?” he asked.

  Lunch. She’d almost forgotten lunch. She looked at herself in the dressing table mirror, picking up a brush now, running it haphazardly through her fair hair.

  “One,” she said.

  “Don’t forget,” Mike said.

  “I won’t.” She considered the lunch. A goddamn ordeal, sitting down to eat with Mike and his mother; that frosty face, with its inbuilt expression of suspicion, peering at her across the breadsticks and the wineglasses. Not that she ever drank, the old bat; but she made it clear, with her cold eyes pressed into narrow fleshy slits, that she disapproved of alcohol almost as much as she disapproved of her son’s marriage to Kate. I never believed my son would marry a widow, she’d said once. It’s rather like trespassing on a grave, don’t you think? A widow, Kate thought. It was a weird label, as if you were possessed from beyond the grave. As if you were still the bride of the dead. But that thought hurt, it hurt with more pain than she wanted to carry, so she shoved it aside the way the good Doctor Elliott had told her to. (Look, you don’t need to carry grief around. It’s excess baggage. If you think of your emotions as suitcases you want to take on an airplane, then you’re going to get charged extra for grief.) He was good with those sayings, Doctor Elliott. He had a finely tuned ear for the comforting platitude.

  “Promise,” Mike said. “You know how she likes punctuality.”

  “I know,” Kate said. She turned from the mirror to face her husband. There. She caught herself doing it again, making the impossible effort to superimpose the face of Thomas on Mike, but it was like a blurred Polaroid picture, it was like something snapped by a hapless photographer who’d forgotten to turn to the next shot. Thomas is dead, she thought. Thomas had the bad fortune to step on a land mine in a far country and Thomas is therefore dead. Jesus Christ, could she never put that away? Could she never stick that one in some attic of her awareness and forget?

  She felt sad again.

  She said, “Girl Scout’s honor. One o’clock. Sharp. I’ll be there.”

  “Good girl,” Mike said.

  She watched him as he began to dress. Then she went t
o the window and looked down into the street. It was one of those quiet streets that, surrounded by the rabble of New York traffic, by the whines of ambulances and the screaming of cop cars and the honking of taxicabs, takes you by surprise—as if you’d stepped into another country altogether. She watched a yellow cab cruise below. Across the way a uniformed doorman, stepping out from under a dark red canopy, called to the cab. A woman cradling a small dog emerged from the apartment building and, holding the dog in a manner that suggested a mother with a newborn child, stepped inside the taxi. Kate dropped the curtain from between her fingers.

  She turned to watch Mike dressing.

  He fastened his cuff links. “Will Peter be joining us?” he said.

  Peter, she thought. She considered the line of battle between her son and his stepfather, a no-man’s-land where the possibility of a truce, of amnesty, seemed not to exist. Maybe that was all perfectly natural. Peter belonged to a dead father; nothing could change that. Peter’s affections lay buried in Thomas’s grave. And Mike had all the finesse of the proverbial bull in the china shop when it came to relationships with kids, especially a kid like Peter.

  She sighed. “I guess so,” she said.

  “Make sure he wears something except for those godawful combat jackets,” Mike said. “They make him look like a refugee or something.”

  “I’ll try,” Kate said.

  “The way that kid dresses . . .” Mike let his voice fade. She knew the rest of the sentence anyhow; he had repeated it until it had the feel of a catechism. Slovenly. Like some junior hippy, for God’s sake. She watched her husband for a moment and she thought: It can’t be easy for him either. The shoes of a dead man. A sense of being stalked by a ghost, a specter he saw reflected in Peter’s eyes. The resentment in the boy’s face. (How could you marry again? How the hell could you do that? I don’t understand! Peter, with watery eyes, hands clenched, breath coming fast, accusing her of treachery . . .)

  She saw Mike go out of the bedroom, then she could hear him in the kitchen. She could hear him fill the coffeepot and, in her mind’s eye, picture him fastidiously spooning out the required amounts of that coffee he drank—what was it? French Market? Bitter and black and tasting of chicory or something. She glanced at her face in the mirror. Lines. Weariness. She shook her head from side to side. And then the dream came back to her in a flash of strange clarity, brief and quick and bright like a bulb popping. She felt the water running over her and the firm grip of the hand over her mouth and the man’s hardness between her legs and she thought: It’s sad when a dream is more real than the world around you. It’s so goddamn sad.

  She turned away from her own reflection. Sometimes you saw more than you needed, more than you wanted. Like just then—a hunger in the eyes, a hunger for a return to the dream.

  Outside the door of Peter’s room she hesitated. She thought of the alien world that lay inside. Peter’s world, self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, hermetic. A world of gadgets, of experiments in various stages—wires trailing out of boxes whose purpose she couldn’t even begin to guess, batteries, scraps of paper covered with his feverish handwriting, the strange hieroglyphics of whatever he was pursuing; a world of radios stripped down, electronic toys disembowelled, printed circuitry scattered in a haphazard way across the table, strewn over the floor, over his unmade bed. A fucking little Einstein, Mike had said when they’d once argued over the kid. One day I’ll plug the coffeepot into the wall and—wham! Frazzle City. You’ll see. She put her hand on the doorknob, still hesitant to go inside. A mess, a great mother of a mess; and yet there was a curious sense of order about the room, as if the chaos had been planned meticulously, as if the boy had followed a blueprint of disorder.

  She knocked lightly, then she went inside.

  He was sitting at his worktable. In one hand he was holding a smoking soldering iron, in the other a printed circuit board, a jumble of skeletal lines that meant nothing to her. He didn’t look up, didn’t even seem to be aware of her standing in the doorway. She stared at his black hair, unruly, ruffled, and the way his spectacles gleamed in the sunlight that came through the window. Suddenly it seemed to her that he was a replica of Thomas: the angle of the head, the lips pursed in concentration, the brow lined. A fifteen-year-old replica of a dead man. She felt a dry thickness in her throat, a pulse beating faintly in her skull like some dying bird’s wing. A dizziness, a feeling she’d known before when she saw Peter in a certain light from a certain angle.

  We buried Thomas just before the snows came, she thought. On a day the color of slate. We buried him just as the frigid dark of winter was covering everything. Another Vietnam statistic. One of the late ones . . . She remembered a blur of things suddenly, the terrible telegram, the feeling of a scream locked up in her heart, the way she’d held Peter as if nothing were more precious to her now than the dead man’s son. It came back, it came back like a black flood. She held the side of the door, waiting for the dizziness to ebb away from her. Eight fucking years, she thought. A widow with a seven-year-old son. Eight miserable fucking years ago. The lonely empty nights when the hunger was dreadful and all she could think about was the flesh decaying in the ground, and she’d understood the way to madness lay in that direction, that she was making a descent into the crazy inferno of her own macabre imagination. Dreams. Dreams of Thomas putting his foot down on a land mine. Dreams of explosions, the sky filled with rage, with the redness of blood, the tendrils of torn flesh.

  She shut her eyes for a moment. It would pass, she knew. Once, she would have gone for the Valium or the Equanil or whatever salve Elliott might think fit to prescribes—but now she’d learned to control it without chemicals. It would pass. All you had to do was hold on.

  Peter looked up at her. “I didn’t see you come in,” he said.

  There were small dark circles under his eyes. She said, “You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got to get this thing finished. The science exhibit is next week.”

  “I know. You keep telling me that. As an excuse, kid, it’s pretty threadbare.” But she couldn’t bring herself to scold him; she lacked the cutting edge in her voice. And he knew it, because he was grinning at her. “What’s your secret, Peter? You ever sleep? I mean, like us common folks, you ever settle your head on a pillow and kinda close your eyes and just drift off into the land of nod, huh?”

  She stood over him now, putting her hands on his shoulders, massaging him very gently. He said, “Who needs sleep? I read someplace we spend about one third of our life in bed. Can you imagine that? I mean, one third of a whole lifetime spent in bed? It’s a waste of time.”

  She smiled down at him. “What’s that you’re doing anyhow? Cracking an atom or something?”

  “It’s a microprocessor,” he said. “You wouldn’t really understand.”

  She was amused at the way he sometimes patronized her. What the hell, he was right. She wouldn’t know a microprocessor from an acorn. She stared at the printed circuitry, then at the tangle of things on his table. Insane, like a mad scientist.

  “Suppose, egghead, you explain to me.” She folded her arms under her breasts and stood in the manner of somebody who has been waiting years for an explanation.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “Unless you understood the game of chess. Unless you also understood the nature of memory function in a microprocessing unit.” He took off his glasses and folded them, and all at once he seemed like some juvenile professor, a prodigy, about to deliver a lecture to an august body. She wanted to laugh but she didn’t—how could you laugh when his whole face was so goddamn intense?

  “If it was checkers, I might be prepared,” she said.

  “Checkers,” he said, barely able to keep the tone of disgust from his voice. He stared at the soldering iron for a moment. “Basically what I’m doing is reprogramming an electronic chess machine by adding to its repertoire of programmed openings. So I’m enlarging the capacity of this hundred-buck unit b
y adding a whole set of openings.” He twisted his head and looked up at her. That gleam in his eye, she thought. Sometimes it seemed wild to her.

  “Okay. Enough, enough. I don’t understand a word of it, but I’m proud of you anyhow.” And she leaned over, kissing the top of his head, then ruffling his hair with the flat of her hand.

  “Hey, it’s simple, the machine as produced doesn’t have the English Opening or the Dutch Defence in its memory, and all I’m doing is adding—”

  “English, Dutch.” She shrugged. “I just don’t want you to pull any more all-nighters, okay?”

  “Okay.” He sighed, but it was a pretend sigh, a part of the game they played out between one another—a game of affection, of mutual understanding. Something Mike couldn’t grasp, couldn’t get a handle on, like a secret he was locked out from. You indulge that kid too much, Kate. You spoil him rotten. Maybe, she thought. But if love was spoiling, then she was going to spoil. Sometimes, in her innermost darkness, she felt that Peter was all she had. All she would ever have.

  “About lunch,” she said.

  “What lunch?”

  “We’re having lunch with Mike and his mother—”

  “No,” Peter said. “Do I have to?”

  “You mean you don’t want to?”

  He smiled at her. “She reminds me of an ice cube.”

  “Are you being fair to ice cubes, Peter?”

  “Please,” he said. “Please?”

  She relented. What the hell—he’d only irritate Mike at the lunch table, playing with the saltshaker or the peppermill, spilling something, scribbling on a napkin, or retreating into one of his sullen silences. And she’d see Mike’s annoyance grow and grow, like some invisible balloon being puffed up, across the table.

  She said, “Okay. But only if you promise me—no more all-nighters, right?”

  “Right. Cross my heart.”

  “I’m not altogether sure you mean it. But I’ll make your excuses for you.”