Strangers (28 page)

Kim had pushed open the rear door and was racing toward the house. Marcy followed at a walk.

“I love you, Michael,” Beth said.

Michael waggled his eyebrows dramatically as he slipped the car keys into the side pocket of his sportcoat. “That’s always fine to hear,” he said, “but could I ask what prompted it?”

She knew she couldn’t explain all of it, but she summed it up with, “You’re a good man.”

He was, he was,
she
knew he was. He was warm and considerate and loving, and any other feeling she had about him was sheer idiocy.
Michael, her Michael, a stranger?
Please… and, let’s face the truth, Beth Louden. You isolated yourself from him, sealing yourself inside a shell of unhappiness and crazy imaginings, and then you blamed him!

“Michael, kiss me,” she said.

He did, leaning down to her, his, hands on her shoulders.

“Uh,” he said, “I believe we’re expected for dinner.”

“Yes,” Beth said. She shivered. “Let’s try to get home early, Michael. I want to make love.”

Michael clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Honey, seven minutes after we finish dessert, we’re out the door!”

Beaming, Vern greeted them. “Enter, enter and welcome! If the adults will accompany me to the family room…”

“Huh!” Kim interrupted, “you’re going to have drinks, I bet!”

“Indeed,” Vern laughed. “We’ll partake of a potable while Laura finishes preparing the repast, and if you young ladies would like, it so happens there’s a new cartridge in the
Atari,
awaiting the touch of a youthful hand on the joy-stick.”

“Is it
Ms. Pac-Man?”
Kim asked.

“Far better,” Vern said, “an outer-space adventure in which you get to blast meteorites, missiles, and many-headed monsters.”

“Sounds like an educational game,” Michael said.

Vern guffawed. “It’s good for the kids to have a chance to create their own television violence.”

In the family room, the electronic sounds of asteroids and spaceships being blasted floating down the hall, Vern mixed Beth an old-fashioned, Michael a Seven and Seven, and himself a whiskey and soda. “Beth, Michael,” Vern said quietly, “I know there’ve recently been some rough times for you, so”—Vern raised his glass in a toast—“to better days, and to the friendship that gets us all through the bad days.”

Clicking her glass against Michael’s and Vern’s, Beth wished she could somehow take them all in her arms right now—embrace all the people she loved: Michael and Marcy and Kim and Vern and Laura and Mom…

She dipped her head so they couldn’t see the tears. “Vern,” she said, “we can’t thank you enough for looking after the girls this weekend.”

“Hey,” Michael said, “remind me to get their suitcase out of the trunk before we leave, okay?”

“They’re beautiful children and we’re glad to help,” Vern said. He squeezed Beth’s upper arm. “You know, well, Laura and I always wanted children and we could never…” Vern suddenly turned away, facing the huge stone fireplace, his back to them. “Let’s say we feel very close to
all
the Loudens, all right?”

The door chimes rang. From the kitchen, Laura called, “Vern, get that, please! I’m busy.”

Vern turned back to Beth and Michael, setting his glass on the copper-topped bar. “That has to be…”

The chimes sounded again and Laura called out, “Vern!”

“Excuse me,” Vern said, and he left the family room.

“I don’t know,” Michael said in answer to Beth’s unspoken question. “Vern didn’t mention they’d invited anyone else this evening.”

“I’m sure you remember…” Vern said when he returned with the new arrival.

“Of course, the Loudens,” Jan Pretre said. “We met at the party over Labor Day. It’s Beth and Michael, right?” He shook their hands.

“That’s right, Dr. Pretre,” Michael said.

“Please, call me Jan,” he said.

Beth recalled how interesting and easy to talk to she had thought the psychiatrist when she’d first met him. Now he seemed a different man, tense and brooding. He was holding himself stiffly, as though he didn’t feel right in his blue suit, and his eyes were sunken with weariness. The sharply trimmed salt and pepper beard that she had originally thought gave him a distinguished appearance now made him look weathered and aging.

“A drink, Jan?” Vern offered.

“Scotch rocks,” Jan Pretre said. “A hefty one, please. I need it.” He leaned an elbow on the bar and when Vern handed him the scotch, he took a good swallow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to come in here like Captain Gloom, but I just had some disturbing news. That’s why I was late.”

“What is it, Jan?” Vern asked.

“I lost one today,” Jan Pretre said flatly. “He was seventeen, a nice kid. Super-bright, played guitar and wrote poetry. I really thought we were making headway. He was getting himself together.”

Jan Pretre paused to drink. Then he tiredly said, “He had a one o’clock appointment. We talked about a girl he was dating and his decision to apply for admission to Yale. He told me things were working out. He thanked me for working with him. Then he went home and took a razor blade and slit his wrist. It wasn’t your typical teenage play for attention. There was no one else home. He didn’t just nick himself for a bit of blood and a lot of melodrama. It was a long cut, lengthwise down the vein. He was serious and now he’s dead serious.”

Jan finished his drink. “So chalk up one more for Freud, Jung, Adler, and yours truly.”

Vern refilled Jan’s glass without asking and then insisted on “freshening up” Beth’s. He patted Jan on the shoulder. “You can’t consider it your fault, Jan.”

“Why, of course not,” Jan said bitterly. “As a psychiatrist I’m supposed to be objective and uninvolved. That’s what it says in the “How to Be a Headshrinker’ book. But it doesn’t work that way, Vern. A young man came to me, trusted me to set him right, and now he’s dead.”

“Jan,” Beth said, “I
know
you’re a very good psychiatrist.”

Jan Pretre’s brow furrowed. “What makes you say that, Beth?”

She’d surprised herself by speaking. She knew she was at an emotional high, more open than she ordinarily would be, and in addition the old-fashioned was a potent tongue-loosener; one more might be a
tongue-twister
! Still, she wanted to say something to Jan.

“You give a damn. I can tell that. People matter to you. That’s the kind of person I’d want to be my psychiatrist…”

She laughed at herself then and then everyone else was laughing, too. She felt silly and felt it was okay to feel that way with these special people. Michael kissed her on the nose. “You ever think you’re Napoleon, honey, we’ll ask Jan to fix you right up.”

The tension Jan Pretre had brought with him seemed broken but if any of it did remain, it was left behind in the family room as Laura Engelking summoned everyone to the dinner table.

They were in the family room. The door was closed. It had been, as Vern said, “a veritable banquet:” French onion soup, tossed salad, prime rib and double baked potatoes, and a glazed peach tart. Beth and Laura were doing the dishes while the men, as Vern put it, “withdrew for brandy and talk of Parliament, the troubles in the colonies, and other such matters of interest to highborn gentlemen.”

Michael sipped his
Courvoisier
and then, shaking his head, said to Jan Pretre, “That was some sad story about the kid’s suicide. I mean
,
I was almost in tears.”

Framed by his beard, Jan Pretre’s teeth shone white in a predator’s smile. “It was a goddamned tragedy. The poor prick came to me with his penny-ante problems. All he needed to hear from me today was that he shouldn’t kill himself. Well, let’s say he didn’t hear that. I gave him a push, a nudge, led him to gawk at a mirror and see a useless piece of shit staring back and I knew he was gone. I talked him into suicide and he obliged.”

They all laughed. “That’s it, you know,” Jan Pretre said. “That’s why I became a nut-doctor. Society hands you a license granting you power over its nothing people. You haul them onto the rack, you twist them and bend them and listen as they scream and cry, and you’re a fine guy because you’re
helping
them.

“That’s why so many Strangers wind up as cops or social workers or preachers or surgeons. Or dentists. Or chiropractors. You see John Doe and Jane Dip when they’re hurting like hell and you can make them hurt even more if you handle it right. John and Jane don’t suspect a thing. Cop Stranger who blasts the ass off an old bum in an alley gets a commendation for stopping an armed robbery and Doctor Stranger who slices away three-quarters of your guts becomes ‘the wonderful man who saved my life.”

Vern’s laughed boomed. “Conventional folk wisdom: the surgeon loves the knife.”

“So do we,” Michael said. There was silence for a minute. Then Michael said one word—the question: “When?”

Jan Pretre answered the question with a question. “Growing impatient, Michael?” His tone was chiding.

“No,” Michael said, and then, more quietly, changed it to, “Yes.”

“Don’t,” Jan Pretre said, and now he was speaking in a warning voice. “Don’t get impatient, Michael.
Impatient means careless.
Careless means you don’t think like you should. It means you do things you shouldn’t and you don’t notice what you had damned well better notice. Do you understand me, Michael?”

“Yes, Jan.”

“Michael, Michael,” Jan Pretre said, his tone changing again. “It was so many years ago when we met, when I first saw the blood-fire around your head. I told you who you were, Michael, told you that you were not alone and that you’d have to wait, wait for Our Time, wait and never let the nothing people have a hint of who you were. That’s just what you’ve done, Michael. Only a little while longer, a single tick of the Eternity Clock, and the waiting is ended. You will be with us
then,
Michael, if you stay completely in control of yourself, not losing patience or forgetting caution.”

“I understand, Jan,” Michael said.

“That’s good, Michael. That’s fine.”

A half hour later, Michael and Beth went home.

At eight o’clock Saturday evening, he stepped out of his home office. There was work he’d had to do: write a memo about a new oil absorbent, a note to the Indiana sales rep expressing his disappointment at the drop in last month’s sales, a letter to go to the clients of the late Herb Cantlon stating that it had been Superior Chemical’s pleasure to serve them and that it was hoped that… It was meaningless make-work, he thought, the banal
time-wasting
he had to do.

He walked down the hall. The washroom door was closed. Beth was bathing. She was happily singing in a childish, off-key soprano, “She’s a maniac… Mane-EE-Ack!” the main theme from the movie
Flashdance.

Beth was back to her old self, he thought, loving Wifey Dear. In fact, you could make that ultra-loving WD. In bed last night she had been burning for him. He hadn’t heard her squeal and moan that way since…hey! Maybe since
ever!

It was easier for him if Beth weren’t acting as though she started the day with a glass of vinegar. Let her keep on smiling a
Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval smile right up until…

The light was on in Marcy and Kim’s room. Michael glanced in. In a quilted blue and white housecoat, Claire Wynkoop was seated on Kim’s bed. Her right arm seemed confined in an invisible sling, the fingers rigidly curled. With the slow, exaggerated blink of an animated cartoon character, she looked at Michael.

Michael stood in the doorway. “Are you doing all right, Mom? Anything you’d like me to bring you?” He doubted Claire Wynkoop even understood the question. All day she’d been little more than a clumsily animated mummy without its wrappings.