The Secret Keeping (14 page)

It took over an hour for Helaine to orgasm. Her lover left shortly after that.

_____

It was a terminally ill relationship. No saving it. The middle-aged couple seated before her quarreled as if Dr. Kristenson wasn’t even there, each adamantly digging deeper into their positions. She gazed over their heads at the woman who had just appeared on the fifteenth floor. She was holding herself as she was prone to do this time of day, standing heroically and staring off toward the harbor. Helaine sighed with happiness at the sight of her up there and the sound of it contrasted so sharply with that of the grumbling couple that they ceased their discourse and looked at her quizzically. She smiled back as if she had been with them the whole while and they glanced accusingly at each other and then waited for the good doctor to speak.

She had written the book on all this, which they both claimed to have read. If so, then surely they knew they were in the final chapter. She instructed them to continue their conversation, avoiding, if they could, the use of the word “you” all the time. “Say, ‘I feel’ or ‘I think.’ It’s less accusing.” They tried that for a few seconds.

Their issues were not too exceptional, the usual garden variety stuff. His wife was his infidel. Her husband just needed to get over it. Both of them were heavily entrenched and in serious denial about the unfavorable future disposition of their marriage. In a way, Dr. Kristenson mused as they picked up their debate where they had left off, his wife was more right than he was. He probably should just get over it since she was unlikely to sacrifice her extramarital meanderings, counseling or not. She wondered how the woman would feel if he actually did, if he actually woke up one clear day and took a look around him and saw her at last, who she really was, and quietly walked away.

Dr. Kristenson kept one eye on the woman up in the window across the street. Her name, she had learned last Friday night at Frank’s Place, was Lydia.

She overheard the couple attempting to discuss some of her theories about “working it out” but, in truth, it was rather too late for that. He had the right to quit on her anytime if he could find the strength to do it.

She watched Lydia and listened to their pitched voices, nodding encouragingly at all the right times, urging them to continue whenever they halted their discussion and glanced in her direction.

Lydia.

It was the husband who persisted with these sessions. His perfidious mate only attended in order to placate him, to bury him alive in false hopes and deceive him into believing she was trying to reform. It was clear that this would never happen. She had already wasted a great deal of his time and good faith in this effort to suspend his disbelief. And his money. His money was probably the only thing about the man that his wife still found attractive.

Dr. Kristenson lamented her decision to follow Lydia to Frank’s Place. Not only because it was undisciplined and against the rules to do so, but because seeing the dark-haired woman up close had caused a kind of crisis in her which had yet to subside.

She rose up with the conclusion of the couple’s session and booked them for another one the following week. In her journal beside the entry concerning them she wrote “impassioned” when what she really meant was “impasse.”

_____

She was Lydia. That was all she knew of her. She was Lydia in the fifteenth floor window of the huge investment firm of Soloman-Schmitt. Lydia applying her lipstick. Lydia at happy hour. Lydia with blue eyes.

Lydia at Frank’s Place just down the block where, by coincidence, Helaine liked to eat anyway.

Dr. Kristenson’s day had ended and she was unsure of what to do next.

_____

She was fabulous in bed. If she wanted to be. But even at the start it was in a distinctly mannered way, technical and adept, as if she didn’t actually care to touch or be touched, except in appraisal. Foreplay, too, was a bit of a performance. She kissed very little, almost never held hands, and didn’t have the patience for sweet nothings. At times she emoted so little warmth during the act that it seemed likely she had left her body completely, was floating somewhere above the two of them, hanging up there to get a better view of herself, to see how good she looked at it, or how good she was doing. It was, if Helaine thought about it too much, unnerving to have Sharon always watching like that. There was something strangely voyeuristic about it, a perfidy that went beyond her chronic unfaithfulness.

Still, there was nothing implicitly wrong with the lovemaking and Helaine was never left dissatisfied. It did not usually pay off well to criticize a lover so she never did. Besides every lover was different. It was wrong to compare them. She was optimistic that Sharon’s quirks would eventually be cured, was willing to overlook the minor shortcomings.

But in her silent consent their love life developed into a practiced ritual with Sharon Chambers performing the rites, a consummate priestess in the bedroom. Lots of bedrooms, unfortunately. Sex, it’s just sex, she insisted, a necessary evil, a tool for achievement. Helaine’s objection to her persistent infidelities was always rebuked with that argument. He means nothing. She means nothing. Career, career, career. As if Sharon was the only woman who ever had to work. Helaine had grown tired of debating it. It was something she was expected to grin and bear.

Fate smiled on Sharon in much the same way, permitting her to succeed over it, as well. Her career skyrocketed; there was now, as far as Helaine could see, no reason for the promiscuous behavior to continue.

Yet it did, as if by a sick compulsion.

The legendary over-sexed Sharon Chambers. Her new position: She was simply maintaining her mythical reputation.

Myth then she would be.

In their bedroom, however, Sharon no longer desired to be made love to. She only wanted to fuck Helaine. This version of lovemaking claimed the rest of their sex life and by the time that Helaine finally came to grips with what had happened to them it was impossible to change it. As impossible as getting Sharon to be faithful. Helaine saw herself immobilized, standing in a falling rock zone, her lover wandering recklessly on a path to disaster.

Sharon had had a fine day in the sun, better and longer than most people get out of living. All too soon, Helaine tried to counsel, it would be over and at the rate the model was going she would be destroyed by it in the end. She gently advised her to settle down. But Sharon Chambers did just as she pleased even when it was unpleasant and regarded every near miss as the proof of her indestructibility.

The fiasco in Italy had hit all the international papers even before Sharon had thought to return. Her off-color comments about the controversy as she was departing from Rome, suggesting derisively that her critics were guilty of being “too Catholic,” had bristled a great many shoulders, and, unfortunately for Sharon, many great shoulders as well. There were plenty in the industry who didn’t care for the super-model as it was and she had already begun to stretch her friendships within it a bit too thin.

Sharon lay low for months before leaving town again. During that time Helaine watched as she further alienated herself from the people she needed with her angry long distance diatribes and equally bizarre conspiratorial accusations. To make matters worse, she impulsively fired her longtime agent and she did not know nor trust his replacement. Her extracurricular activities had earned her the added attention she coveted, but the press did not drool over her in quite the same way as they used to and she had frequent run-ins with the paparazzi that now and then trailed after her. She resented the declassé treatment, offended not so much by the ugly coverage, but how it hindered her lifestyle.

That was a surprisingly good excuse for Helaine to keep a low profile, too. She refrained from visiting the waterfront flat since she did, after all, have her own reputation to consider. The handful of clandestine visits that Sharon made to her place did not accomplish much in alleviating the hostilities between them and by the time that Sharon had left for California, Helaine was so fatigued and unhappy that she really didn’t miss her lover for weeks.

“I’ll call you,” Sharon had lied. “Don’t go frigid on me, Dr. Kristenson.”

“Don’t worry, darling. It’ll never happen.”

_____

With a prurient expression the good doctor watched Lydia through the blinds walking to Frank’s Place.

She was shocked to see herself doing this all the time, concerned by Sharon’s insinuations and the methods she had employed against a mere suspicion. In the past few months she had gradually come to the alarming conclusion that, no matter what the circumstances were between them, Sharon would never permit herself to be replaced. There would never be a successor. This had been both implied and expressed in a number of horrifying ways. So it was with great apprehension that Helaine observed herself observing. And in her observations this Friday afternoon she had to finally accept that her heart was not her own anymore. That she did not recognize it as belonging to Sharon, either. That a foolish thing had happened to further complicate her life. Something she must run from or reckon with somehow.

She saw Lydia disappear into Frank’s and her stomach growled. She laughed out loud at the sound of it. It actually growled! She was clinical. The hunger was obviously psychological. Great, and now she was even thirsty! She had to admit that her throat felt dry. She laughed at herself. It was almost funny, finding oneself at the mercy of an unheard bell, seeing herself like Pavlov’s dogs, panting.

It wouldn’t be funny if she fell in love with that stranger, she warned. Her heart leapt at the thought of it, stimulated by its own dilemma.

_____

Another book signing, another lecture, another month. And then another. And another. There was every indication this was the rest of her life. That damn book! Someone wanted her to write a weekly column. She turned it down. She did not want to become a household word, her face in every kitchen like some popular detergent, making the whites whiter or the colors brighter, getting the spots out of all the glasses. She liked things as they were, somewhat confidential.

The rest of her life. It could be spent just like this. Waiting for Sharon Chambers, leering after Lydia so and so, whoever she was. That could go on forever, she worried. Or perhaps in a year it would be someone else. Worse, she could take up the offers of ex-lovers. Go back in time instead of forward. Or hang in the now, in emotional limbo, until her friends desert her.

The future. She wanted that to be a woman named Lydia, as unlikely as that seemed.

Lydia. It had yet to set in with her tall-dark-handsome that the blue-eyed woman had thrown him off.

Helaine watched smugly as he relentlessly tugged at her chain. She still wore it, of course, but she didn’t want to be taken prisoner by him anymore, watching as he flirted with her friends and took lesser women home, waiting until he got the idea to satisfy her. It was over before he knew it. He tugged at the chain in disbelief, pushed at all her buttons, but the woman no longer responded to him. He had lost her.

Good for you, Helaine thought, watching the woman struggle with her broken heart. It probably didn’t feel like it to her, but that was the healthy thing to do. She shouldn’t begrudge him for the heartbreak, though. A broken heart can make a woman out of you. If you’re well meaning, it makes you a tender lover. If you’re not, like poor Sharon Chambers, it makes you hard and cruel.

But it was a sorry thing to see nonetheless. It had taken some of the wind out of the queen’s sails. She sat cheerless with her friends or sometimes stared off into the distance. Helaine felt her eyes on her sometimes when she sat reading in the window seat. Just as Kay had said, she was staring at her, with eyes of a sleepwalker, roaming eyes, something undefined beneath all that preoccupation.

Fleeting fantasies, Dr. Kristenson realized, humanity’s cheapest narcotic. Everyone fell victim to them at some point. Romeo had put the woman up on shelf and in her current state of mind she felt most comfortable there. She was keeping herself from him and a world of similar suspects. That was understandable. She mistrusted her desires now and in repressing them they bubbled up in unexpected places. If she had too much to drink, she dropped her guard and there they were popping up in a fantasy. It was, after all, the safest place to keep them at the moment. Safe excursions, mental joyrides. Helaine had no objection to being her vehicle. She let her look as long as she liked.

_____

Dr. Helaine Kristenson, not only watching but being watched, the sleepwalker from time to time searching her, undressing her with her eyes. Again and again she was stripped bare by her, until her conscience was hardwired for it, until she could feel it happening without even looking. She knew by the flustered expression that appeared on Lydia’s face whenever she looked at her that she was shocked by what she saw herself thinking, so Helaine feigned to be unaware. Yes, it was opportunistic, but she was not going to discourage it. She wanted to be accessible, to pull the woman under a spell as deep as the ocean, to be as warm and comforting as a favorite blanket.

Witchcraft. Those fingers through the hair and subconscious come-hither stares. The young man had left a charm on Lydia. Dr. Kristenson bet the woman hadn’t expected that to happen, that he would leave a spell on her, make her wander restless, leave her heart swollen and ripe for the taking. If she would ever let herself be taken again. IF. But not by him, though. That was obvious.

What an unlucky guy to be born such a fool! Helaine reveled in his misfortune.

_____

“Fatal exception? What’s that mean?”

(Computer problems.)

“That’s the third time this week. We should update this, Dr. Kristenson.”

Four o’clock. Her secretary was hoping to leave early this Friday. She glanced at her watch.

“Leave it until Monday, Jen.” Helaine was hoping, too.

“It doesn’t seem to be having any negative affect,” Jenny offered as she put on her coat. “I’ll look at it Monday.” She was about to leave when the phone rang.