Death in The Life
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey . . . Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror on Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times on A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker on The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times on The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted . . . A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times on A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal on The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave
A Julie Hayes Mystery
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
For Lucy, friend and abettor
1
W
HAT AM I DOING HERE?
What
am
I doing here…? There’s a fly upon the wall, how I wish that he would fall. A fly in Doctor’s office? Never. A mote, a beam. There’s a crack in the ceiling. It gets bigger and bigger every session. Twenty-one floors of psychoanalysts are going to come down on top of me. Julie à la Freud.
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“What’s going through
your
mind at this minute?”
“What do you think is going through my mind?”
“That I’ve got skinny legs and no breasts.”
“What about no breasts?”
“But I do have breasts. When I sit up and lean over I can see them myself. I often look. Is that narcissistic?”
“What do you think?”
“I think… yes. I’m very fond of myself or I wouldn’t be here.”
“So. You want to be here?”
“I want to be here because Jeff thinks I should and he pays the bill.”
“If he didn’t pay the bill would you want to be here?”
“Mother…”
“What about Mother?”
“I was going to say if he didn’t, Mother would, but Mother’s dead and I wasn’t really thinking of her. Of you, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“You.”
“So?”
“I’m twenty-five years old.”
“And?”
“I want to run away from home.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Out. On the street.”
“So you want to be a streetwalker?”
“Very funny, Doctor. I want to… What do I want to do? I want to drive a taxi. I want to write a novel or a poem or a play.”
“It’s very hard to drive a car and use the typewriter at the same time.”
“That’s my whole trouble, isn’t it? I want to do everything and I don’t do anything. I’m lazy. I’m just plain lazy.”
Silence.
“I’m spoiled and I’m lazy.”
Silence.
“But I’m not really. My mother used to say there wasn’t a lazy bone in my body. Only in my head. You’ve got a good head if only you’d use it. Jeff says he married me for my brains. That’s a joke. But so’s our marriage. I don’t feel married. Maybe that’s good. But I don’t feel unmarried either.”
“How long has he been away?”
“Let’s see. Just after Christmas—three months. I hope he isn’t trying to be faithful to me. Did you see his article in Sunday’s paper?”
“What about it?”
“Crazy, a man like that married to me. I mean he’s brilliant, right? Brains. With my brains and his looks, disaster. I don’t really want a child. I want to want one but I don’t. And I don’t really want to want to, that’s crap. Conventional crap. I esteem Jeff. That’s what it is. A steam roller. But every time I get flattened I get up and walk away. I don’t even feel flattened until afterwards. I could curl up right here and go to sleep. I am lazy. I’m spoiled and lazy.”
Julie looked around at Doctor Callahan.
“Why do you look at me?”
“I thought you might be yawning.”
The doctor released the brake to her chair and brought it to an upright position. “You may get up now.”
“Is it time?” Julie swung her legs off the couch and ran her fingers through her hair where it was pressed in at the back of her head.
“Not quite time, but I want to say something which I think you are waiting for me to say. I think we should stop these sessions for the time being, at least. Not necessarily today, but soon. Therapy is a cooperative process. It isn’t an afternoon’s chat. Not every doctor is right for every patient. I don’t know whether I am right for you or not, but I don’t think I am at present. I don’t think any doctor will be right for you until you want to come to them, until you want to change badly enough to make the effort. I have been urging you—For how long? A year almost?—to get a job. It is the only real direction I have tried to give you. That is also conventional crap. But when I do something unconventional it is because I think it is the only thing that will help a patient. I have many patients I can help, patients who need me, but there are only so many hours in every day.”
“You’re firing me!”
“Call it a temporary layoff.”
“That’s great. Just great.” The tears welled up in Julie’s eyes. She fought them back, but they came anyway and she reached for a tissue from the box at the side of the couch. She waved it at the doctor before using it. “I might as well get my money’s worth.”
“I understand that you are hurt.”
“You understand everything. Don’t you feel anything?”
“I understand,” the doctor repeated.
“Well, I don’t… Yes, I do. It’s because Jeff pays you, and you’re worried you’re not giving him his money’s worth.”
“My dear, I have no idea what his money’s worth would be… to you, and it is you for whom I am concerned.”
“Thanks for telling me. Oh, hell. Let me get out of here. Today for keeps. I don’t know what I’m crying about. Deep down, I’m glad I’m free.”
“Nobody is free, Julie. To be free is to be dead.”
“Oh, boy… Hey, you called me Julie. For all these long months I’ve been praying. Let her say my name. Let me hear if she knows it even.”
“There is good reason.”
“But you never tell me the reason.”
“Finding out the reasons for yourself is part of therapy. When you decide to do something for yourself, and when you do it, if you want to see me again, call me and we will try to work out a new schedule.”
“What if I find another doctor?”
The corners of the doctor’s mouth twitched, the suggestion of a smile. She was a handsome woman with quick dark eyes that could sometimes be merry. More often they were the eyes of an observer, as noncommittal as the questions she asked in answer to questions. Her wit, like her wisdom, was under a tight stopper, but when she released it now and then it was to the veritable enchantment of her patients. At least, this had been the case with Julie Hayes.
“There are many doctors in New York. One of the others may suit you very well.”
“Do you really believe that, Doctor?”
“I can be convinced of it when it happens.”
“Me too,” Julie said and blew her nose. She took another tissue from the box which she put in her skirt pocket along with the used one.
“You are recovering from the shock?”
Julie nodded.
“And was it such a shock?”
Julie shrugged.
“You are right. Answers don’t always tell the truth, only what seems to be so at the moment. They are not as important as the questions.” The doctor put her feet on the floor, a little looseness in her hose showing at a nicely shaped ankle.
“Do you ever wear slacks, Doctor Callahan?”
“Why do you ask if I wear slacks?”
They were both amused that the reflexive process carried beyond the couch and chair.
“I do wear slacks, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I think, What can you expect, sitting on your backside all those hours every day of the week?”
“You are human,” Julie said.
“My dear, if I were any more human I would be a monster. I am going to leave your next regular appointment in my book. You may change your mind, but if you don’t want to come in, let me know by Thursday morning.”
“Thanks. Thanks very much.” The feeling of abandonment and its consequent resentment were setting in again.
“And I am here in an emergency. You have many talents, I am sure. Prove just one of them.”
“You bet.”
The doctor went to the door with her, but neither of them offered the other her hand.
Julie walked a quick and random mile from the doctor’s office, her thoughts swinging from one extreme to the other: She’s right; she’s dead wrong. She began to think up emergencies:
rape,
a crippling psychological experience,
sic.
Divorce… suicide. Which was so remote a possibility, it took her out of her despondency into fantasy. She had traveled from Central Park West in the Nineties almost to the Plaza, which, she thought, if she was going to commit suicide, would be a lovely place for it. She would check into a suite and say her luggage would be coming on later. “Coming on later,” like from London or Istanbul. It was a phrase Jeff often used. Of himself sometimes. When he was home and they were to go to a party or a reception, even to the theater, he often sent her ahead with the assurance that he would be coming on later. At first she thought it might be a sort of training in “presence” he had laid out for her. He greatly admired “presence” in a woman (he was rather fond of absence, too). But now, on such occasions she felt like a kind of female John the Baptist sent in from the desert with news of the Big Man’s coming.
Julie stopped long enough at the Plaza to use the powder room and there she remembered that she had intended to go to Bloomingdale’s after her session. Her subconscious no doubt had pointed her that way from the time she left the doctor’s. Damn her subconscious. It was her conscious that needed the hypo, her consciousness. What kind of a job could she get that wouldn’t horrify Jeff? My wife the waitress, my wife the check-out girl at Gristede’s, my wife the Revlon demonstrator… The job is for you, not for Jeff. The job, if the truth be told, would be for Doctor Callahan.
While she waited for the light to change on Fifth Avenue she watched a man handing out flyers. He peeled off one after another with such a graceful twist of the wrist you’d have thought he was scattering rose petals. Marcel Marceau. When he came to her she said, “It’s great, the way you pass those out.”