Halleck turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs, thinking of Death Row convicts walking down the last mile. No blindfold, Faddah ... but who's got a cigarette? He smiled wanly.
Heidi was sitting at his desk, the bills on her left, the glowing screen in front of her, the Marine Midlands checkbook propped on the keyboard like sheet music. A common enough sight on at least one night during the first week of the new month. But she wasn't writing checks or running figures. She was only sitting there, a cigarette between her fingers, and when she turned to him, Billy saw such woe in her eyes that he was almost physically staggered.
He thought of selective perception again, the funny way your mind had of not seeing what it didn't want to see ... like the way you kept pulling your belt smaller and smaller to hold your oversized pants up around your shrinking waistline, or the brown circles under your wife's eyes ... or the desperate question in those eyes.
'Yeah, I'm still losing weight,' he said.
'Oh, Billy,' she said, and exhaled in a long, trembling sigh. But she looked a little better, and Halleck supposed she was glad it was out in the open. She hadn't dared mention it, just as no one at the office had dared to say: Your clothes are starting to look like they came from Omar the Tentmaker, Billy-boy ... Say, you haven't got a growth or anything, do you? Somebody hit you with the old cancerstick, did they, Billy? You got yourself a great big old tumor inside you someplace, all black and juicy, sort of a rotted human toadstool down there in your guts, sucking you dry? Oh, no, nobody says that shit; they let you find it out for yourself. One day you're in court and you start to lose your pants when you stand up to say, 'Your Honor, I object!' in the best Perry Mason tradition, and nobody has to say a motherfucking word.
'Yeah,' he said, and then actually laughed a little, as if to cover same.
'How much?'
'The scale upstairs says I'm down to one-eighty-eight.'
'Oh, Christ!'
He nodded toward her cigarettes. 'Can I have one of those?'
'Yes, if you want one. Billy, you're not to say a word to Linda about this - not one!'
'Don't have to,' he said, lighting up. The first drag made him feel dizzy. That was okay; the dizziness was kind of nice. It was better than the numb horror that had accompanied the end of the selective perception. 'She knows I'm still losing weight. I've seen it on her face. I just didn't know what I was seeing until tonight.'
'You've got to go back to see Houston,' she said. She looked badly frightened, but that confused expression of doubt and sorrow was gone from her eyes now. 'The metabolic series -'
'Heidi, listen to me,' he said ... and then stopped.
'What?' she asked. 'What, Billy?'
For a moment he almost told her, told her everything. Something stopped him, and he was never sure later what it was ... except that, for one moment, sitting there on the edge of his desk and facing her with their daughter watching TV in the other room and one of her cigarettes in his hand, he felt a sudden savage moment of hate for her.
The memory of what had happened - what had been happening - in the minute or so before the old Gypsy woman darted out into the traffic returned to him in a flash of total recall. Heidi had scooted over next to him and had put her left arm around his shoulders ... and then, almost before he was aware it had happened, she had unzipped his fly. He felt her fingers, light and oh so educated, slip through the gap, and then through the opening in his shorts.
In his teens, Billy Halleck had occasionally perused (with sweaty hands and slightly bulging eyes) what were referred to by his peers as 'stroke books.' And sometimes in these 'stroke books,' a 'hot bimbo' would wrap her 'educated fingers' around some fellow's 'stiffening member. 'All nothing but wet dreams set in type, of course ... except here was Heidi, here was his wife gripping his own stiffening member. And, by damn, she was beginning to jerk him off. He had glanced at her, astonished, and had seen the roguish smile on her lips.
'Heidi, what are you -?'
'Shhh. Don't say a word.'
What had possessed her? She had never done such a thing before, and Halleck would have sworn that such a thing had never crossed her mind. But she had done it, and the old Gypsy woman had darted