Kill Me (6 page)

TEN

“You’re wrong,” I said to Dr. Gregory. “It will make a difference what I tell you first. Maybe not to you, but to me.”

My therapist said, “Okay.”

I could tell he was far from convinced, but the guy apparently wasn’t much of a debater. I decided to be generous, show some cards. I explained, “I don’t have time for mistakes.”

I said it offhandedly, like I was a busy, important guy, someone who couldn’t waste time on a pedestrian faux pas. He had no way to know that the worst mistake would have been telling him too much, too soon, before I was certain I could trust him. But my nonchalance ended up sounding like arrogance and didn’t exactly suck him in.

“I don’t understand what that means,” he said. “That you don’t have time for mistakes.”

“How could you understand?” I laughed a laugh that Thea affectionately called my “impish chuckle,” before I added, “I mean, how could you? I know all the facts — well, I know most of them — and I don’t understand what it all means. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

“Maybe?”

“I have a tough decision to make. I need help, okay?”

“With?”

“You do have a certain propensity for demanding clarification, don’t you?” I asked, only half-joking that time.

“Therapeutically? I admit that clarity can be overrated,” he said. “But for someone like you, someone who is in some obvious physical distress” — he allowed that dust to settle for a moment before he continued — “and someone who has juggled some things to be here with me, for the time being I’m going to err on the side of caution.

“I’m also aware that you haven’t quite reached a judgment about how much you’re going to tell me. Or how much you’re going to trust me. I think it’s important to acknowledge all that.”

“Well,” I said, in a Jack Benny kind of way.

“Don’t get me wrong; that’s all fair. Your doubts about me, and about this process? Totally understandable, regardless of the other circumstances. About which, I admit ignorance.”

“Thank you for that.” Sarcasm seeped into my words without any conscious intent. That happened a lot with me.

Character defect. One I’ll die with, I’m afraid.

“You’re from out of town,” he said.

Why did he say that? I wasn’t quite sure, so, assuming he was fishing, I went fishing, too. “Is that a question?” I asked.

“Sure. Let’s make it a question. You’re from out of town?” He changed the inflection the second time he said it.

“Yes.”

“Far out of town?”

“Far enough.”

He tried to hide his wry smile, but failed. “You chose to come to see me rather than to see a therapist in your hometown. Why?”

“Because you’re not in my hometown. The shrinks in my hometown are. By definition.”

“Okay,” he said. He said it in capitulation, not in agreement, certainly not to express any satisfaction at having arrived at a point of mutual understanding with me.

“It’s a tautology,” I said.

He digested my astonishing vocabulary for about five seconds before he said, “You’re a wiseass, aren’t you?”

I admit I was shocked. Not by his perspicacity — it wasn’t that difficult to discern that I was a wiseass — but rather by the bluntness of his appraisal. “I beg your pardon,” I said.

He added, “I bet you drive people crazy sometimes.”

Coming from his mouth neither of his two assertions sounded to me like accusations, merely statements of fact. He was right with both allegations — no doubt about that — but I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge that to him, yet. So I asked, “What do you mean?”

“When someone wants to slow dance with you — get a little closer, that kind of slow dance — I imagine you do with them some version of what you’re doing here with me: You pull out a saber and start to fence with them instead. Your fencing is part serious, part comedy — part King Arthur and part Monty Python. Has to drive people a little crazy, especially the ones who care about you, who cherish those occasional moments close to you. Maybe even need those occasional moments close to you.”

“Touché,” I added, staying with the fencing analogy, and garnishing the word with my most impish grin.

“Some of the time — some of that precious time you said you don’t have for mistakes — we could maybe save a bit of it by agreeing to put down the swords.”

“Turns out I like to duel,” I said.

“I’m sure you do. I enjoy a good joust myself. But the more immediate question is whether that is how you want to use our time together. For some self-indulgent recreation.”

“My wife would be applauding you right now,” I said. “People don’t usually call me on my shit.”

He checked his watch. “It’s turning out to be expensive shit. We have half an hour left today. That’s all.”

“I didn’t realize that this sport had a time clock.” Of course I did realize that therapy was a sport ruled by a clock, but I wasn’t about to put down my saber just because he’d asked me to.

He took a long, slow inhale before he responded. “Yes, psychotherapy has a time clock. Each period is forty-five minutes. What I suspect is even more germane is that sometimes the entire season is time-limited, too. But that part of the equation is totally out of my hands. Why? Because you know more about the length of the season than I do.”

I felt that one. It was a clean touch. Were our sabers not tipped with rubber, it would have drawn a spot of blood.

Did he know?
I wondered. I said, “I don’t really. Control the length of the season, I mean.”

He spent twenty seconds, maybe thirty, trying to understand what that meant. Finally, he said, “Tell me.”

“Can you tell that I’m dying?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving mine.

He hadn’t known that I was dying. I was glad about that. I’m not sure why, but I was.

But he didn’t say “I’m so sorry,” or “That’s awful.” He got bonus points for not being saccharine about it. Although my motives for being in his office may not have appeared uplifting to anyone but me, I could most certainly console myself with the truth that I hadn’t flown over the Continental Divide from the Western Slope only to get served a heaping dose of therapeutic pity.

After we fell into thirty seconds or so of silence, I began to think I realized what he’d known since I told him I was dying: Whatever was said next in that room was going to be of some significance, and that he’d decided that the next significant words spoken in the room should be mine.

“Well, I am dying,” I said. “The engines are out, and I don’t know how long this plane is going to glide.”

“My impulse right now is to offer comfort, but I suspect that might be leading you in a direction you wouldn’t choose to go.”

“It’s not that I don’t have options,” I said, arguing a point he hadn’t made. “I can try to find updrafts and stay afloat as long as the currents will allow. I can storm the cockpit and force the damn thing into a dive. Or, I can even arrange to have somebody shoot it down.”

“Your flight?”

“Yes, my flight.”

He seemed surprised. “That’s why you’re here? The decision you have to make? Choosing exactly how to end your doomed flight?”

“That’s just about it,” I said.

“Just about?”

“Ah, clarification again.”

“Yes, I suppose. I was thinking you may want to tell me why you are dying,” he said, a slight knowing grin — but not at all an unkind one — gracing his face.

“Not really,” I said, smiling right back at him, refusing to clarify everything.

Anything, really. Not yet.

He didn’t respond.

I said, “Something ordinary is killing me, unless something extraordinary kills me first. See, there are some complications.”

“Why am I not surprised?” my therapist said.

I sighed. “I am a wiseass.”

“Yes,” he said. “You are.”

ELEVEN

It turned out that New York City was the center of the Death Angel universe. That’s where I had my get-acquainted meeting with Jimmy Lee’s contact, his “guy.” The meeting took place in the interval between my tumble in the Bugaboos and that board meeting in Santa Barbara. Late spring, early summer, 2004. My left wrist was still adorned in a cast. The rest of me had healed nicely, thank you.

Even though I’d been given a hint at what to expect that first time, the reality was disconcerting. In a quick phone call from a taciturn man two days earlier, I’d been instructed to walk slowly down the west side of Park Avenue in Midtown between 53rd and 54th over the lunch hour and to be prepared to be greeted by someone pretending to be an old friend. I should be agreeable, I was told. Jimmy must have warned somebody that I was capable of being less than agreeable.

The “old friend” who approached me on Park Avenue turned out to be a lovely, sophisticated woman a half-dozen or so years younger than me who called my name and pranced up to me on impossibly high heels. She gave me an embrace of the kind of profound exuberance that is usually reserved for airport terminals or wayward grandchildren being reacquainted with bubbes and zadies.

But the woman mashed her chest into mine the way few bubbes ever do and ran her hands up and down my back and tenderly down my sides before her long fingers ended up on my cheeks. All my cheeks. First the southern cheeks, then the northern cheeks. She finally planted a not-quite chaste kiss on my lips. As she pulled away she smelled of spices and flowers and something that made me think of crisp sheets that had been dried in the sun.

I was quite aware that I had just been frisked for the second time in my life, and that I hadn’t really minded it. The first time had been by a razor-burned Oklahoma state trooper on the desolate shoulder of Interstate 35 due east of Enid on a miserably hot July afternoon when I was nineteen years old. My memory’s reflection was that it hadn’t been anywhere nearly as enjoyable an experience as this time had been.

A black Town Car like ten thousand others in New York pulled to the curb next to us. This woman who was my newest, best, old friend opened the back door, smiled, and said, “In.”

I obeyed. She followed me.

“Where are we —”

“Shhhh,” she said, while she used a compact to check her lipstick and, it appeared to me, to look down the street to see if any other vehicles had pulled over to the Park Avenue curb anywhere behind us. When she was comfortable that we weren’t being shadowed and that her perfectly swollen lips were perfectly edged and perfectly glossed, she scooted her perfectly shaped ass next to me on the backseat, and undid the shoulder belt that I’d reflexively fastened across my chest. In a practiced, sultry, last-call voice, she murmured, “My advice? Close your eyes and enjoy this.”

If I thought that I’d been frisked on the sidewalk on Park Avenue, then what I got in the backseat of the Town Car that was carrying us downtown was something much closer to a full-body massage. Was there a part of my anatomy that she didn’t trace or palpate with her probing fingers?

Let me think.

No, there wasn’t.

Not a one.

I took only part of her advice, though. I certainly did enjoy it, but I didn’t close my eyes. She was much too lovely for that.

When she was done with her examination, I said, “Thank you very much. Is it my turn now?”

She laughed a laugh that not only clearly told me the answer to my question was no, but also told me that if I ever got to know her I’d probably like her a lot. The laugh told me, too, that I would never get to know her.

I don’t know why, but I’d already come to the conclusion that she wasn’t my Death Angel. She had a role in all this, but she wouldn’t be pulling any literal triggers. Call it intuition.

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time doing business in New York, and I knew the local landscape and mores pretty well, but I wasn’t an honorary native by any means. Without a neighborhood map in front of me I couldn’t just take a quick look outside the windows of a car speeding toward Downtown from Midtown and tell you at a quick glance whether I’d crossed a boundary line between Tribeca and SoHo, or between Chelsea and Nolita, or between the Meatpacking District and the Village. The Town Car finally pulled to a stop on a nondescript block in one of those places, though I didn’t know which one. Nor, I suspected, was I supposed to know which one.

“You’re here,” she said, and she stepped gracefully out of the car. I followed her out the same door, though not quite so gracefully.

Not
we’re here
.

“Where is here?” I asked.

She made a disappointed face. She was playfully letting me know she had expected more from me.

“You’re not joining me?” I said. “My treat. My pleasure.”

She scrunched up her nose and eyes in a way that she knew was as cute as could be, took my hand, and led me into a crowded restaurant that had a sushi bar on one side. I recognized that she had succeeded in distracting me with her flirtation, which was probably her intent. Admittedly, I’d been paying more attention to the subtle curves of her butt than I had been to the identity of the place I was entering. I didn’t even know what restaurant I was in.

We strolled past the front desk to a table along the wall beyond the windows. A deuce with only one empty chair. The empty chair was the one that faced away from the front door.

“Have a wonderful meal,” she said, offering me one last boob-crushing embrace to remember her by. I couldn’t discern any tactical advantage that she might have gained with the final hug, and I allowed myself the luxury of believing that it was, at the very least, a sincere tease on her part. Pulling back, she air-kissed me on one cheek and then the other, apparently intent on playing out her assigned ruse until the curtain dropped and the house lights came up.

To the man who had stood as we approached the table, the one who was holding a napkin in his left hand, she whispered simply, and deferentially, “Clean as a baby’s conscience.”

The man turned to me and said, “Please, have a seat. Thanks so much for joining me.”

Before I sat, I watched my temporary consort turn at least a dozen heads — both male and female, she was that kind of gal — as she sashayed back out of the room. She’d distracted the attention of anyone who might have inadvertently noted the low-key introduction that had just occurred between my Death Angel and me.

Was this a guy who had a finger on the literal trigger?

My instinct said “yes.”