“What a bitch you can be, Vivian. What a goddamned snob.” He said it without rancor, as if he knew why I said those things, why I needed to hurt him back. He opened up the cigarette case and took one out. “So you think I wanted the money, did you?”
I let myself tumble onto the sofa and retracted my legs under my robe like a turtle. I couldn’t look at him straight. I couldn’t look at his symmetry, his lovely body in its thick herringbone overcoat, because if I did I’d remember how he looked without it. How just this morning, that body had huddled with mine in the tiny shower cubicle, had kissed me with its bacon-and-coffee mouth, had soaped me all over, inspecting each knob and spindle of me, describing its tip-top healthy-pink condition and its scientific Latin name. How he had wrapped me in a towel and laid me on the bed and kissed his way down my backbone, identifying each vertebra, and I’d thought how handy it was to have a doctor for your lover, you were really in the best of hands.
And now. This. Like your heart had been carved from your rib cage with a scalpel.
I said, “I admit, money was the logical conclusion. Don’t tell me it was true love after all?”
“No, it was the money, all right.” He lit the cigarette and raised it to his mouth. “A week ago I got a little package in the mail. I won’t tell you what was inside. Pops had gotten himself in deep at a casino in Vegas.”
“You don’t say. How deep?”
“Just over three hundred.”
“Dollars?”
“Thousand.”
All right, my toes went a little cold. Even if he were lying, that was a lot of bread to be tossing around so casually in a ramshackle Village apartment. “Well. So what were you planning to do with the other two hundred?”
“You don’t believe me.”
I held up my hands. “Look, whatever you say. Your pops had debts, Lightfoot had a deal you couldn’t refuse. I mean, who am I to stand in your way?”
Doctor Paul picked up the vodka bottle from the center of the table and threw it against the opposite wall. I didn’t even jump.
“You have no idea, do you? No idea what it’s like to have no money, no way on God’s earth to beg, borrow, or steal it. No idea what it’s like to have no choice. No idea what it’s like to sit there and stare at the bare walls and realize you’ve got to do something, and whatever you do, it’s the wrong thing. You could take some money, propose to a girl, and break her heart later, and in so doing lose the love of the single most breathtaking woman you’ve ever met, the love of your lonely godforsaken life. Or you could let your father get his fingers and nuts cut off by the Vegas racket . . .”
“Oh, come on. You could have called the police.”
He turned to me. His pale head shook back and forth. “You are such an innocent, Vivian. Call the police. This is the Vegas racket, baby. You don’t even want to know what they do after they cut off his nuts. And do you know what they do when they’re all done? They hand the body over to the police for a decent burial in the Hoover Dam, that’s what they do.”
My chest had stopped moving. “You could have told me. I could have helped,” I whispered.
“And do what? Could you have come up with three hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills within forty-eight hours?”
I shook my head.
The door to my bedroom squeaked open. Tibby appeared, all tousled up, made to order. “Everything all right here?”
Doctor Paul swung like a bat. “Who the hell is this?”
“A friend.”
Without a word, Doctor Paul took in Tibby’s gaping buttons, his ruffled hair, his absent necktie. He turned back to me, and his face was stone. Tibby’s strip of marigold Brooks Brothers silk screamed from the arm of the sofa, next to my toes. I took the ends of my robe and drew them closer together.
“I see,” he said. “You’ve never heard that revenge is best served cold?”
“Patience is not my favorite virtue.”
“All right.” He found his hat and put it on. “Like I said, I didn’t expect you to forgive me. God knows I won’t forgive myself. I just wanted to explain things a little.”
“Well, thanks for the explanation. It’s all pretty clear now.” I made no move from the sofa. I couldn’t. My bones had turned into iron.
The telephone shrilled again. I could have sworn the ring sounded more urgent this time. Doctor Paul glanced at it.
“Ignore,” I said.
We stood there, eyeing each other, while Gogo trilled eagerly through the cigarette haze.