Mercy (11 page)

Broussard went back to the armchair and sat down without putting on his tie. He didn’t believe her. That had never happened. Bernadine could be pitiful sometimes. She was wanting approval of another sort, something more than she was getting through her sexuality, so she was fabricating a story that she hoped he would find pregnant with symbolism. He had never heard this story before. She was so goddamn transparent. Bernadine was so hungry for approval that she would never achieve any significant degree of self-esteem. The only way she knew how to relate to people was by offering herself to be used, and every man she encountered accommodated her. She was beautiful; it was easy to do. Bernadine was going to be pitiful all her life.

He looked at her clothes piled in front of the picture window where he had taken them off her, one piece at a time, and where he had had sex with her, pressing the front of her against the thick glass all the while imagining what it must have looked like from the other side, her heavy breasts, her stomach, her thighs, all the rounded portions of her becoming flat, except for the places where she didn’t touch. Woman in intaglio.

“Sometimes when we have sex I imagine myself being twelve,” she said. She cut her eyes at him. “Just twelve.”

I don’t care, he thought, still looking at her clothes. They were silk, very expensive.

She slid one of her feet up alongside the other leg, stopping with her knee in the air, her foot against the inner knee of the other on the leather chaise. With the index fingers of each hand she traced the two creases across her stomach.

“Raymond,” she said, referring to her husband, “is seeing a woman who has practically no breasts at all.”

Broussard frowned, and took his eyes off the pile of silk. He looked at her. She was already looking at him.

“I hired an investigator,” she explained. “He’s taken pictures of them.” She looked at her own stomach. “The guy’s good. The detective, I mean.”

“Why did you do that?” Broussard was still frowning at her.

“I keep a file. Rather, my lawyer keeps a file. He arranged for the detective. It was his idea. It was okay with me, but it’s humiliating going to his office and looking at them.”

“Raymond’s going to get the shaft?” Broussard stood and stepped over to a door in his bookcases and opened it. There was a liquor cabinet inside. He took ice from a freezer compartment, put a few cubes in a squatty glass, poured gin over the top of the ice, and came back to his chair and sat down, propping his legs up on a hassock in front of his chair. He didn’t bother offering anything to Bernadine, but he knew she was watching him and he knew she wanted him to offer her a drink too, to be nice, and he knew she would be hurt when he didn’t. He touched his tongue to the cold gin.

Bernadine swung her legs over the side of the chaise and stood. She ran her red-nailed fingers around the inside of the elastic on the legs of her panties, adjusting them, and then went to the cabinet herself. Her stomach was not flat anymore. He listened to her behind him: the ice into the glass, the chink of the stopper in the lead crystal decanter, the sloshing of liquor. She came back by him and lay on the chaise again in the same position she had been in before she got up. When he looked he recognized the amber scotch. Bernadine was an alcoholic.

“Probably not,” she said. She put the cold glass against the hollow place of her inner thigh near her groin. She held it there a moment before she lifted the drink to her mouth and sipped.

Broussard waited. Probably not. He bet himself Bernadine was getting ready to double her net worth again.

There was a long silence while they sipped their drinks, and he listened to the soft muffled sound of the ice in their glasses.

“Why didn’t you offer me a drink?” she asked. She was very still when she asked it, and Broussard could tell she had had to work up the nerve to do it. They had been together so many years that her sessions were now pretty matter-of-fact. He no longer pretended at seduction and she no longer pretended at being coy. He no longer even pretended it was therapy, a travesty that he had stoutly maintained for a few years, referring now and again to their “therapeutic alliance” or her “transference resistance” or the necessity of her achieving “insight into the nature of her unconscious forces.” All of that was gone now, and they had long ago settled into a conjugal familiarity that made her analytic sessions more like a bored married couple’s quiet evening at home. She still wanted to be “nurtured” and continued to cling to the idea that he somehow was going to make her life better. It was something that he, too, had once believed, but Bernadine had been one of his few clients whose personality had continued to baffle, continued to refuse to be broken down and dissected. She was as much a mystery to him now as when she had first walked through his doors. His file on her was enormous, for he had continued to compile notes on her even after they had become lovers. She was that kind of woman: she invited exploration, with a smile, almost as if she dared you to try to figure her out. Sometimes he thought he loved her.

“I really didn’t think you should have one,” he said at last.

She fixed her gray eyes on him, looking at him over the rim of her glass from which she had just taken a drink, looking at him as if he had insulted her. Bernadine was easily offended. Batting her eyes, she looked away through the plate-glass wall, through the green haze to the bayou. She let the glass rest on her stomach, directly over her navel.

After a moment she said, “You don’t believe my story about my aunt.”

He didn’t say anything. Being a psychoanalyst had spoiled him. He never wanted to talk, and half the time lately he didn’t even want to listen. It was amazing how powerful silence was. There were certain kinds of people who simply couldn’t tolerate it. They would talk as an antidote, even when they didn’t have anything to say.

“You know what?” she said, and a small, ironic smile crossed briefly over her lips. “It’s true. It happened exactly as I told you.” She raised her glass and sipped the scotch. “It’s true, and you didn’t know it. And it’s significant, and you didn’t realize it.”

Broussard was interested now. “Bernadine, I don’t believe you.”

“Dom, what if I stopped seeing you?” she asked.

Now she had his full attention, but he was careful. He didn’t say anything. Nor did she. He waited, sipping his gin. What the hell was she trying to do? Was this a prelude to something? Was she actually going to stop seeing him? Surprised by his own feelings, he was disconcerted to realize that he was actually hurt by her question. Had he grown…fond of her, this truly disturbed woman whose complexity, whose disarrayed personality was so exceptional that he could count her among the two or three most intriguing cases he had ever had?

“Would you miss me?” she repeated.

“Of course I would,” he heard himself say, and he even heard, to his surprise, an edge of anxiety in his intonation. He was immediately embarrassed by it and was afraid he was going to blush. He frowned at her, tried to put on the face of a scolder in case she should look around.

But she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look around. She stared out the window and rolled the bottom of her sweating glass around her navel, forming a wet parameter.

“Haven’t we been a lot to each other?” he asked, wanting to hear more of her thoughts, the thinking that lay behind her question. He felt oddly defensive, something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. It made him nervous. “It’s not everyone I can relax with like this.”

She looked at him. “Really?” Her quartz eyes, the very symbol of her personality, indefinable, difficult to be understood, capable of being lost in, fell on him. “You don’t do this with others?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” And then he suddenly feared he had said the wrong thing, though he was unsure why it should have been wrong. She studied him, and he had the unusual experience of seeing in her eyes that she was reading the lie. He didn’t think he had ever seen that in her before, and he was taken aback. What was happening with her anyway?

“You don’t sleep with any of your other clients?”

“Bernadine, no, but you don’t have the right to ask me about such things.”

“About what you do with your other clients?”

He nodded.

“Doctor-client confidentiality,” she said.

“Of course.”

“If I didn’t see you any more, would someone else take my place…humping against the glass?” She tilted her head toward the window.

“What kind of a question is that, Bernadine?” It was a vulgar allusion, but Bernadine was earthy, everything about her was elemental. She had the most natural, the most culturally unaffected attitude toward sexuality of any woman—or man—he had ever known.

“It’s a question to find out,” she said. She had been watching him, and now she turned her head and drained the rest of the scotch from her glass. She let her right arm drop to the floor, and set down the glass. She cocked her right leg outward and placed her right hand, cold from the glass, on the indention of her inner thigh where she had held the cold glass before. “Tell me,” she prodded.

“Bernadine,” he said. “I don’t expect ever to meet anyone like you again.” It was a response which, if it did not directly answer her question, definitely was not a lie. She made him wait a minute or two, her leg cocked to the side, her hand still in place.

“Dom,” she said, “come here.”

He hesitated, his wrists dangling off the arms of the chair as he studied her leveled gaze. Then he got up and went over to the chaise. She reached out and he knelt beside her and she put her fingers in his hair and pulled him down and kissed him. With her right hand, she guided his head, his face, his lips to the cool spot on the inside of her thigh.

9

A
ndrew Moser was surprised to hear from her, and he was guarded when she said she wanted to talk to him but wouldn’t be specific as to why over the telephone. He didn’t want her to come to his home, didn’t want to meet her nearby, and didn’t want to leave the house until after the children had gone to bed. Since his wife’s death, he didn’t like to leave the house at nights. They agreed on the 59 Diner on Farnham at Shepherd Drive, just off the Southwest Freeway, at eleven o’clock.

She gathered up the forms she would have to fill out for the FBI and left the office. Even though the Audi had been in the shade of the motor pool parking garage, it was like an oven inside, and she rolled down the windows while she descended the garage ramp and exited out into the compound. She circled the headquarters buildings back to Washington Street and then turned right on Preston, which took her across the northern end of downtown, past the courthouse and the criminal court building and under the West Freeway 59 where Preston Street suddenly became Navigation Boulevard and ran an oblique course into the East End, following the general angle of Buffalo Bayou a few blocks away as it headed toward the Port of Houston Ship Channel.

Palma’s mother still lived in the same barrio where Palma had grown up, in a neighborhood where all the streets had Scottish and Irish names and all the residents were Latin. The barrio had been a neighborhood where extended families often encompassed entire blocks of relatives or near relatives, and the grapevine was so rich that rebellious offspring were kept in check by the sheer fact that they couldn’t find any privacy to work their mischief. But the barrio had acquired a more sullen air with the changing times, and misfortune of one kind or another had become a way of life for most of the population, rather than an occasional grief for only a few. The drug wars were threatening everything, and the flood of refugees from Central America was introducing an ominous element of uncertainty, as if these thousands of war-weary emigres were only the first ripples of an impending human flood tide.

But Florencia Palma had raised two daughters and a son in this neighborhood, and she had buried a husband there. That was enough living to have given her title to the place. It was as much hers as the large stucco house that sat square in the middle of two lots that Palma’s father, Vicente, had purchased in 1941 from a cousin who was moving his family to California. It was as much hers as the catalpas and oaks and mimosas she had planted, as much as the garden and the lush plantains that cooled the walks in the dead heat of summer. Age, Palma had decided as she watched her mother grow old, carried a great entitlement. If you lived long enough, the things most familiar to you became yours by virtue of the worry you had invested in them. They were yours as surely as memories.

She parked underneath the row of Mexican plums that grew the length of the two lots and shaded the front of the dun-colored house from the afternoon sun. The trees still had a few of their white blossoms scattered among their new green leaves, and they reminded Palma of the numbers of springs she and her brother and sister dutifully had stood beneath the rich flourish of creamy flowers while their mother had taken pictures. How many photographs? How many springs? The children were gone now, Palma’s brother to San Antonio, her sister to Victoria, but the trees were still there, and Florencia still took pictures of them every spring. And Carmen still came by to stand obligingly under their white efflorescence to be photographed.

Palma found her mother in the courtyard on the south side of the house, the afternoon sun low enough to cast long, ashy shadows from the massive pecan trees that towered over the opposite side of the house. Smaller than her daughter—Carmen had gotten her height from her father—Florencia was a trim woman with small bones and a face that clearly demonstrated the strain of Tarascan blood in her background, a genetic inheritance that had been dying out for generations and made its last appearance in her handsome sharp features. None of her children carried the distinct characteristics of their mother’s Indian heritage. She wore her gray hair long, past her shoulders, and when she was younger she had tended to it with elaborate care, brushing it, braiding it, washing it, grooming it with a diligence that was almost feline. She had done it partly because she was a naturally fastidious woman and partly, perhaps mostly, because Palma’s father had a special affection for his wife’s thick, dark mane. Now she simply had it pulled back loosely and clasped behind her neck with an ebony wood clasp. It was the only clasp the old woman ever wore now. It had been carved by Palma’s father, a little bit at a time in the evenings during the course of one July when Palma was a little girl.