The Rules of Dreaming (8 page)

At that moment she was every woman who ever lived, and I was every man.  Naturally I agreed.

Chapter 8

Dubin’s phone rang as he was stepping out of the shower.
It was Susan Morgan and she didn’t bother to introduce herself.  “Avery’s gone to Washington for the day,” she said with an air of authority.  “Can you come over about ten o’clock?”

“At ten o’clock I’m still sobering up from the night before.”

“Then get good and sober and come over at eleven.”

The Morgan estate looked the same, only quieter.  No kids, no au pair.
Even the golden retriever seemed to have taken the day off.  Susan came out to greet him, wearing a white tennis dress that displayed her legs to good advantage and a sun visor that kept her cold eyes in the shadows.  He followed her into the barn where they had talked before.  She led him into the little furnished apartment in the back and invited him to sit down at an oak kitchen table.

“I just made some coffee,” she said.  “Would you like a cup?”

“That sounds like a great idea.”

She set two coffee mugs on the table and sat down across from him, watching him spoon sugar into his coffee. 

“Well,” she said, as if she was disappointed that he didn’t have more to say.  “Have you got anything?”

“Only this.”  He pulled her $5,000 check from his shirt pocket and pushed it across the table.

“No,” she smiled, pushing it back to him. “I mean have you found anything?”

“Only this check,” he repeated, returning her smile.  “It’s the closest thing I have to a smoking gun.”

She gazed at him in ironic incomprehension.

He said, “I don’t know whether to tear it up or put it in my safe.”

“Why don’t you just cash it?”

“I haven’t earned it.”

“That’s very ethical of you.”

“I know.”

“Considering your line of work.”

Dubin nodded, as if agreeing with her skepticism.  He folded the check and put it back in his pocket.  “The question is why did you give it to me?  I didn’t have any information to sell.  I still don’t.  Until you called this morning I thought it might have been to make me go away.  But that wasn’t it either, was it?”

She shook her head.  “I knew it would cost more than that to make you go away.  In the meantime maybe I wanted to see what you could come up with.”

“So you could use it against your husband?”

“It’s like insurance.  You buy it hoping you’ll never need it.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes sipping their coffee.  She fixed her gray eyes on Dubin, smiling girlishly as if to say that she wasn’t as cynical as she seemed.  He stood up in an attempt to change the subject.  “Could I take another look at that upstairs studio?”

“Sure.”

Climbing the stairs behind her, he kept her muscular thighs at eye level and she seemed to be doing her best to make them worthy of his attention.  Once through the door at the top of the stairs she stepped to one side like a weary real estate agent waiting for a client to make up his mind.  Dubin’s earlier tour of the studio had been quick and impressionistic.  Now he took his time and went from one end of the long room to the other making careful mental notes of everything he saw.  He examined each of the portraits, prints, and posters that lined the walls—one poster that grabbed hi
s attention, from the Salzburg Marionette Theater, depicted an array of haunted, bug-eyed marionettes that all looked furniture he found an upright piano, a music stand, a high wooden stool, a CD player and an old record player with a turntable on a wobbly platform with half a dozen boxed sets of long-playing records—Offenbach’s
Tales of Hoffmann
, Tchaikowsky’s
The Nutcracker
,  Delibes’s
Coppélia
—filed on the shelves below.  And on the wall there were more shelves containing more records, tapes and CDs, and dozens of dusty books, many of them in German or French.

Susan waited by the door, looking bored and ironic.

“Are you an opera lover?” he asked her as he pawed through the books looking for a title he had heard of.

“Only if you include soap operas.”

Dubin laughed.  “Everything here is Hoffmann.  Hoffmann this, Hoffmann that. Who the hell was Hoffmann anyway?  Was he a composer?”

“A writer, I think.”

“She must have been obsessed with him.”

Susan nodded in agreement.  “
Maria’s method of preparing a role was to get obsessed with whatever opera she was rehearsing.  She’d surround herself with books, pictures, music, whatever she could find that took her into the role.  ‘Get obsessed and stay obsessed,’ she used to say.  I guess it worked.”

Dubin thought of the Stephen Witz catalog he’d found at the library—in which someone, less than a year ago, had circled the Offenbach letter about
The Tales of Hoffmann
—and wondered if Maria Morgan’s obsession had somehow outlived her.  “So you knew her then?”

“Sure I knew her.  I lived here.  I was the babysitter.”

Dubin was taken aback.  “You were the babysitter for the schizophrenic twins?”

“They weren’t schizophrenic then,” she said, “or if they were I didn’t know it. 
Maria told me they had learning disabilities.  Mrs. Paterson was the one who really took care of them and gave them their medications.  I was just an extra hand, mostly for when they were traveling.  Mrs. Paterson doesn’t like to travel.”

“Did your husband buy an autograph letter by Offenbach within the past year?”

“Fortunately he doesn’t include me in his collecting mania.”

“You don’t know whether he bought the Offenbach letter?”

“What Offenbach letter?”

Dubin stood peering out the small gable window that looked over the duck pond behind the barn.  “There’s something about all this that doesn’t make sense to me.”

Susan watched him expectantly.

“Here’s
Maria Morgan,” he said, turning toward her.  “Talented, still young, headed for a glamorous, exciting future.  What was she doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated.  “I don’t know if I can say this without being offensive.”

“Oh,” she said, looking away.  “You mean Avery.”

He nodded.

She raised her eyes to meet his.  “You mean, what would a woman like that be doing with Avery?”

“Forget it.  I’m sorry I opened my mouth.”  He wanted to escape downstairs, out of this dusty mausoleum and back into the world of the living.  He stepped toward the door, but she stood in his way.

“She probably felt the same way I do,” Susan said.

Dubin said nothing.

“It’s a mistake to marry someone who’s that much older than yourself.”  Her eyes were still gray but they were no longer cold, no longer bored or cynical.  Vulnerability spread across her face like the freckles she carried from childhood.  Dubin smiled, hesitated, then slipped around her and headed down the stairs.  She brushed his hand as he passed.

At the bottom of the stairs she was blushing.  “Would you like more coffee?”

“I didn’t realize you were the babysitter,”  Dubin said as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into his coffee.

She sat on the edge of the bed, looking past him.  “I know what you’re thinking.  It’s what everybody thought—that Avery and I were already an item before Maria died and then we just waited a year and got married.  But that wasn’t it at all.  It was so innocent and stupid.”

“You were young.”

“I still am.”

“Sorry.”

She stood up and rinsed the coffee maker in the sink.  “Seven years and three kids later it all seems pretty long ago.”

“You felt sorry for him.”

“I did then.  But I don’t feel that sorry now.  Not for him, at least.”

Back outside the barn, her innocence and vulnerability seemed as quaint as last season’s fashions.  “Avery’s very upset,” she told Dubin, fixing him in her gray eyes.  “He knows you’re a blackmailer—he’s done some research about you—and he thinks you’ve got him in your sights.”

“He could be right about that.”

“He says you used to be a journalist.”

“He is right about that.”

“What happened?”

Dubin opened the door to his car and climbed inside.  “It was one of those scandals a few years back.  News stories written by reporters who weren’t anywhere near the scene of the action, that type of thing.  I wasn’t the main attraction and I was only guilty of cutting a few corners here and there, but I got sucked in along with everybody else and when I got spat back out I didn’t have a job or a future.”

“So.”  She was trying to be polite.  “It was time for a career change.”

“Not really. When you write for a paper, ninety percent of what you write never gets printed.  Why?  Could be lack of verification, lack of space, lack of interest.  Or it could be that whoever the story was written about wanted to make sure it never saw the light of day.  Maybe that person made a gift to the editor or a well-timed political contribution to the candidate of his choice.  And maybe that’s why you were researching the story in the first place.”

“Wow.”

“You can call me a blackmailer if you want to,” Dubin smiled.  “I like to think of myself as pursuing journalism by other means.”

Before he drove away, he asked Susan one last question.  “Why is Avery so worried about me?” 

She raised her eyebrows in a sly reference to what had almost happened in the barn.

“I mean, what does he think I have on him?”

“He says he’s afraid you’ll make up evidence that’s not really there.”

“Some people—the cops, for instance—might do that.  But I wouldn’t, and he’d know that if he’d done his homework.”

“You’re an honorable blackmailer, then.”

“There’s nothing honorable about me.  But I work on my own terms, and they’re very specific.  To attract my attention you have to be very rich, rich enough to buy your own justice. And to be liable for my fee, you have to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Your fee?” she laughed.  “I love that.”

“That’s how I think of it.”

“You took my check.”

“Yes, but I still haven’t cashed it.”

“I guess that’s a good sign.”

“Yes,” he admitted.  “It means that anything can still happen.”

*   *   *

Shortly before noon on the day scheduled for Nicole’s next follow-up visit, I happened to glance out the window near the nurse’s station on the second floor and saw Nicole walking up to the main entrance below.  She wore a white sun dress and sandals, and with her red hair burning in the midday sun she looked like an angel on a mission of mercy.  Since it was two hours before her appointment, I assumed that she would be having lunch with Hunter and Antonia.  This was something she often did—just the day before, I’d caught a glimpse of her following the twins into the dining room—and I could only speculate about its significance.  In our last session, I recalled, she had related her fantasies about Robert Schumann and his quest for madness in the “spirit world” imagined by a German Romantic writer named Hoffmann (who may or may not have ever existed; I made a mental note to look him up), and I assumed that today she planned to start where she’d left off, with some more literary nonsense fueled by her fantasies about me.

After a few minutes I found myself drifting down to the dining room, where I purchased my usual lunch (a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast), and without being observed I found a seat behind a canvas screen that partitioned the patients’ dining room from the employee lounge.  On the other side of this screen sat Nicole, Hunter, Antonia, and Mrs. Paterson, and without any particular effort I was able to overhear every word they said.  Hunter’s conversation was the usual indecipherable gibberish, and Antonia of course said nothing beyond an occasional asthmatic sigh.  But Nicole and Mrs. Paterson were in the middle of an animated discussion, which I soon realized was about me and my relationship with Olympia.

“He goes to her room every night,” Mrs. Paterson was saying, “when he thinks everyone’s gone to bed—”

“Does he spend the night there?” Nicole asked.

“I don’t know, honey.  To tell you the truth,  I never hung around long enough to find that out.”

“Then what—”

“But oh, Lord, the noises that come out of that room!”

“Oh my God.  Noises?”

“Uh-huh.  Some nights she keeps the whole building awake.”

I wanted to push my fist through the canvas screen and cram my chicken salad sandwich down Mrs. Paterson’s throat.  Instead I coughed conspicuously and she lowered her voice, which I
immediately regretted.  Now all I could hear were murmuring and short bursts of laughter and I couldn’t be sure who they were coming from.

Jeff Gottlieb stumbled up to my table carrying a plastic tray laden with pizza and french fries and lemon meringue pie.  “Mind if I join you?”  Without waiting for an answer, he deposited himself across from me and filled his mouth with pizza.

Suddenly Mrs. Paterson’s voice came through the screen loud and clear.  “They’ve been fighting over her like a plaything all her life,” she was saying.  “The same way they used to fight over her mother.”