Requiem for a Realtor (8 page)

The arrangement had been made over time, little promissory notes from Phyllis when he had kissed around her open mouth while she emitted great sighs, made coy withdrawals followed by alarming advances, telling him that of course they could do nothing there in the house where she had lived with Stanley. Perhaps they should take a page from his book and just go off to a hotel. It had seemed so improbable at first that David had fallen in with the imaginary plan. Only, over time, as such talk became familiar, they seemed to have decided to do it. And now they had decided, and in the elevator she had said that this was a hotel where her husband had misbehaved. Suddenly, David was terrified at what lay ahead.

The swarthy little man at the desk looked at David as if he recognized him and he felt an impulse to take Phyllis's hand and dash back to the rented car.

“I can give you a suite.” He made it sound like an indecent proposal. The name on his lapel was Primo Verdi.

Phyllis piped up, “Does it have a Jacuzzi?”

David was assailed by stories he had heard of hot sheet motels with mirrored ceilings and tubs for two.

“Just a shower.”

David printed a false name on the form Verdi had slid toward him. “I'll need your credit card.”

“I'll pay cash.”

“The card is just in case of incidental expenses. Phone calls, room service…”

With the sense that all the precautions he had taken were rendered useless he handed the manager a credit card. A moment later, the data having been recorded, the card was handed back. It was like receiving evidence.

He fought the impulse to flee and call it quits because he had all the usual instincts of the male; he had known moments of lustful desire, even if he had always hitherto conquered them and been drawn back to thoughts of his vocation. An image of Father Dowling formed in his mind, memories came of their conversations, the topic of which had always been his putative vocation. It had been a pastoral instinct that had gotten him involved with Phyllis in the first place; he had wanted to give her the benefit of his knowledge of the canon law on marriage. He had not had to convince her that she really wasn't married, that a civil ceremony was not what the Church meant by marriage. He had meant to comfort, not seduce, her with this legal lore.

Registered, they crossed the lobby to the elevator.

“Pleasant dreams,” Verdi called after them. He might have been taunting a bridegroom.

The sluggish elevator rose all too rapidly, stopped, and the door slid open. Phyllis took his hand and they started down the hall. She actually giggled and David was frozen with embarrassment. He had trouble with the key and she took it from him and got the door of their room opened. Inside, she tossed the shoulder bag she had brought onto the bed and threw her arms around him. When he bent to her, she swallowed him with her kiss. Then she pushed him away, picked up her bag, and said she'd only be a moment. Before she closed the bathroom door she whispered coyly, “Pull back the covers.”

Then she was gone. He wanted to escape, but that was impossible. He could not bring her here and then just desert her. He waited, fully clothed, in an agony of indecision and guilt.

When she emerged she was wearing a nightie that fell no farther than the tips of her fingers. She hopped into bed and then looked at him.

“Undress.”

“Phyllis…”

“I'll help you.” She was on her feet again, and again she giggled. It sounded horrible, a gurgle from hell. She was undoing his tie but he stopped her. Then she unbuckled his belt. He sprang back.

“No! Phyllis, this was a horrible mistake.”

“Oh, come on. Don't be bashful.”

Everything she said was wrong. How in the name of God had he got into such a situation? He dropped to his knees.

“What are you doing?”

“Praying.”

Expressions came and went on her face but ended with a smile.

“All right, let's pray.”

She knelt before him and again began to work at his belt. He slapped her hand, hard.

“Stop that!”

“What?”

“We have to go.”

“David, we just got here.” She rose to her feet and tried to lift him from his knees. “Everything will be all right. Come to bed.”

He remembered the pathetic Padre Jose in Graham Greene's
Power and the Glory,
the faithless priest, teased by the neighboring kids who mimicked his woman when she called the apostate to bed.

He did sit on the bed then, and she sat beside him while he tried to explain that they must forget what they had been about to do. They had weakened but not fallen. They must remember that God could see them in the Frosinone, too. She listened in silence. Then she got off the bed and went back to the bathroom. When she came out again she was wearing her clothes.

“Let's go.”

“Phyllis, I'm sorry.”

“I know.” But her voice was cold. How could he blame her?

An hour after they came to the hotel, they left. No need to check out. He had paid in advance. But the manager watched them go with an amused expression. Perhaps he would think they were going out for dinner. The bed was mussed up, so the cleaning crew could think they had spent the night. He drove Phyllis home in the rental car, and they parted in silence.

4

The news of the hit-and-run death of Stanley Collins filled Bridget with foreboding. She had no way of knowing if others were aware of the relationship between David Jameson and Phyllis Collins, but such things were never secret for long. Of course, her own certainty that David was up to no good had been gained by the kind of snooping she would have deplored in anyone else. But her concern was for his own good, forget the ruined hope that he would some day learn to see her for the woman and person she was. Ever since Phyllis Collins had become a patient, David seemed to be spinning toward disaster. An affair with a married woman, and such a woman! The death of Stanley Collins, despite the fact that it was portrayed as an accident, seemed the conclusion of some intricate argument that had been formulating itself over the past weeks.

She had tried to write of these events in her diary, but after a few lines she stopped. How could any account spare her or fail to put her in the role of the rejected lovesick old maid? With little other than her hope to go on, she had persuaded herself that David would share her interests. The imagined future had been bathed in romantic tints, but the emphasis had been on their simply being together, enjoying music, discussing the books they had read. Bridget had gone into nursing for completely practical reasons, to finance her real life, her love of music and books. She had imagined David having a similarly pragmatic attitude toward his enormously successful practice. Surely he must be working himself so hard in order to free himself sooner for real life.

When she had spoken with Edna Hospers about David, girl to girl, hardly believing that she was confiding her most intimate secret, she had not pretended that David was interested in her. Of course, Edna had dismissed the thought that David could possibly not see the merits of his nurse.

“Don't doctors always marry nurses?” Edna asked.

“Some do.”

“There you are. You have a running start.”

So she had told Edna about Phyllis.

“You're kidding!”

“I wish I were.”

“That woman is a complete airhead.”

“Well, he finds her pneumatic enough. You know how she dresses.”

Were men really such fools, a flash of flesh, a bit of bosom, and reason went out the window? Of course they were.

“But they get over it, Bridget. Anyway, she's already married.”

“But will she stay that way?”

“He couldn't marry a divorced woman.”

On such slender threads Bridget's hope depended. It was an infatuation from which David would recover, and when he did, faithful patient Bridget would be waiting for him. But the death of Stanley Collins changed everything.

When she heard of the accident on the radio while having breakfast, Bridget's first thought was that an obstacle had been removed from David's path. Now Phyllis Collins was unequivocally eligible. She had half a mind to call in sick. But then she wondered if David would cancel his appointments in order to console the widow, and she could not have kept away from the clinic.

“Has Dr. Jameson come in?” she asked Laura, a silly question given how early it was. But Laura's eyes rounded expressively.

“He's in his office,” she whispered. “He was here when I got here.”

That would have been half an hour ago. Laura arrived early in order, as she put it, to cook the books. The clock read 7:30. David was a creature of habit and usually entered on the stroke of eight, as reliable as a cuckoo clock.

There was a door through which David could emerge from his office into the room where the first of his trio of patients would be awaiting him. Bridget began noisily preparing for the day ahead, glancing at the door to see if he would look out to say good morning. But the closed door seemed to shut her out rather than shut him in. She went to it and knocked, moving her ear close to the panel. There was no indication that he was in there. Could Laura have been mistaken? Had she actually seen him? Bridget pushed open the door and looked into the darkened office. The light from behind her enabled her to see him seated at his desk.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. Turn on the light.”

He blinked when she flipped the switch. He looked terrible.

“Have you been here all night?”

She actually looked around for signs that he had been drinking.

“What a question,” he said, but his indignation died away, and he looked at her like a damned soul. She went swiftly to him and put her hand on his shoulder. To her surprise, he swung toward her and put his arms around her, laying his head on her breast. He burst into tears.

She held him tightly against her, rocking him gently. This was the fulfilment of four years of fantasy. Silence seemed the most effective form of communication. She ran her fingers through his hair while he sobbed.

How long did she hold him in her embrace, comforting him? Whatever was wrong with him, she could not believe that he was this upset over what had happened to Stanley Collins. She stepped back when he began to free himself. He looked up at her as if for the first time.

“You are a good, good woman,” he said.

At the moment she wouldn't have minded stepping out of character. But there was no need to force the moment beyond what it already was. This was the beginning of something new between them.

“Have you had coffee?”

“I'd love some.”

Laura turned questioningly while Bridget poured the coffee.

“Everything's all right, Laura.”

David was on his feet when she went back to him. He seemed to have rinsed his face. He avoided meeting her eyes when he took the coffee. Now she wished she had urged him to talk while she held him in her arms. He was becoming his professional self and she could not bring herself to ask him what was the matter.

“Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself,” he said, his voice odd.

“I know what you mean.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” He did look at her then, soulfully, and Bridget felt placed on a pedestal.

“It was on the news,” she said.

He gave her a puzzled look.

“Stanley Collins's accident.”

“What accident?”

Well, that answered her question whether he was upset because he had heard of the hit-and-run.

“I didn't get the details,” she lied. She did not want to talk about Stanley Collins because that would lead to talk of his silly wife.

“Who's my first patient?” he said, after a long silence.

5

David Jameson pressed his unshaven face against the chaste and starched bosom of his nurse and felt that he had returned to innocence. For a mad moment he imagined telling Bridget everything, confessing his sins to her, seeking readmission to the ranks of the righteous. But how could he tell anyone of that dreadful scene at the Frosinone?

He had been snatched from the jaws of serious sin. They both had. But Phyllis did not respond to his interpretation.

“Take me home.”

He took her home. When she did look at him he felt that he had sinned by not sinning, and that robbed him of the sense of relief.

“I'm sorry, Phyllis.”

“For what?” She turned sideways on the seat. “For making me feel cheap? For treating me as if I were some…” Her voice had risen and she was out of air before she could complete the sentence. She struck him on the arm, hard. Then she began to cry. She cried all the way home.

“Would you like me to come in?”

“No!”

She got out of the car and he scrambled from his side, determined to walk her to the door like a good date. But she ran to the front door and was behind the screen when he got there.

“Phyllis…”

“Good night,” she hissed. “Good-bye.” And she shut the inner door with a bang.

Going back to his rented car, he wavered between regret and the thought that this was a definitive breach, that the interlude of dalliance with Phyllis Collins was at last behind him, through no merit of his own. The second thought was stronger as he drove away. No longer would he waste the daytime hours thinking of Phyllis, wanting to protect her from the cruel fate that had befallen her, rescue her from her husband and make her his own. He knew what others made of his infatuation with Phyllis. Bridget had been explicit at first until he silenced her. Even Laura smiled her disappoval. As for Father Dowling, David had sensed the change in the priest's attitude, though no damning word had issued from him. How could Father Dowling take his clerical aspirations seriously? Would he have laughed if told that David was engaged in pastoral work of a sort? Wednesday after Wednesday he had spent counseling Phyllis, feeding the hope that she could rid herself of Stanley and be in good standing with the Church. It had been a species of wooing. Who knows what might have happened by now if Amos Cadbury had not cast such a pall over things. For Phyllis to leave Stanley—or vice versa—was for her to be cut off from his eventual inheritance. It had been professionally risky for him to assume the role of mediator, going with her to the lawyer's office. And Amos Cadbury was a friend of Father Dowling's! David felt that he had been in the grip of some madness and was now free.