John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

“Pretty good, I think. You did a good job.”

“Sit down. I’ll take a look,” she said firmly.

I lowered myself obediently into my patients’ chair and felt her delicate fingers part my hairline to examine the skin closely. It felt comforting, like a tiny, unobtrusive massage, and my tight shoulder muscles unwound a little.

“Looks like the head’s healing nicely. How’s your mind doing? That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

“Still in bad shape,” I said.

She sat opposite, in the chair I used during therapy. I found it unnerving to be observed from there, especially by her.

“I heard a rumor that the psych department was upset with you. You’re going to be okay, aren’t you? You’re not in trouble?”

For a split second, I thought of confessing the truth to her. It was the end of a long day, one on which I’d started out feeling resolved that I would tell the truth to power but had finished with power setting me straight. I felt alone, and she more than anyone else would understand. But I was lost in a maze of half truths and half secrets that Greene’s death had uncovered, and I couldn’t think of where to start.

“I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me. It’s been a bit of a palaver, but it’s all okay now,” I said. “It’s nice to see you. We should have a drink.”

“We should. Let’s do that,” she said as vaguely as I had proposed it, and slipped out of the room again.

I examined my shelves for a bit, pretending to be sorting out books, as if I could deceive myself with appearances in the same way I might fool someone else. Then I gave up and sat at my desk unhappily. Somewhere along the way, she’d let me go.

In the stygian gloom of the subway below Hunter College, I waited for the 6 train to carry me home. I could see the lights of one approaching along the tunnel, glowing dimly in the distance. It arrived with a rattling shudder, crammed with bodies, and I pushed myself on board. As the doors closed, I saw a man stick his arm through them farther down the carriage and lever them apart. As he struggled to gain access, the passengers by me groaned and the announcer cried hopelessly, “Stand clear of the closing doors.”

Finally, he pushed his way through and I looked along the carriage at him. All I could see as he grabbed a pole and the passengers arranged themselves around him was his peaked cap-I couldn’t glimpse his face. The train pulled away and we shot southward under Lexington Avenue. At Fourteenth Street, I escaped from the bodies onto the platform. It wasn’t yet full summer, but the stations were already warm-it was a choice between the air-conditioned crush of the trains or the spacious heat of the platforms. A bundle of people burst out of the train, and the troublemaker hurried ahead to my exit.

I couldn’t see him when I got to the surface. It was dusk, and as I walked down the street toward my apartment building, I glanced behind me twice-my experience in Central Park had made me wary. There was no one in sight. Bob was standing by the front desk and gave me a watchful nod as I entered. Does he have something to tell me? I wondered, but he stayed silent. As I got to the middle of the hallway on my floor, I saw a glint of light under my front door. I waited, with my heart racing, before edging forward.

The door was unlocked and I pushed it ajar, then stood listening.

“Who’s there?” I called.

There was no reply, and I took two paces inside, my heart beating, ready to turn and run. A man was sitting in an armchair, reading my copy of The New York Times with a glass of my whiskey at his side and listening to a Mahler symphony.

“Christ,” I said. “You scared me half to death.”

“I thought I’d surprise you,” my father said.

I still had a job, at least temporarily, and I turned up to do it the following day, having fixed to meet my father that evening. He hadn’t been forthcoming about why he’d arrived out of the blue, although he’d mentioned that Joe had called him. The day went by unremarkably, with nothing further from Duncan or Jim. It almost felt as if the Shapiro affair had been a dream. I nodded through forty-five minutes of Arthur Logue and then waited for Lauren.

The minute hand clicked around the wall clock. Five minutes after five, ten minutes after five. She’ll be getting out of the Town Car now , I thought. Walking through the lobby and showing her ID to the guards . With two minutes to go, I started listening for the sound of her heels clicking down the hallway. I knew little of her beyond what she’d told me the previous week, but she was the only connection I had left to Harry. Everyone else-Anna, Nora, even Joe-had spurned me. I hadn’t even heard from Felix in a while.

Only when the hand clicked past five fifteen and kept descending did I realize. She wasn’t coming. That shocked me more than it should have. It wasn’t unusual for patients to fail to show up and she’d hardly been entirely truthful with me, yet I’d been so sure that she’d come. Why did I have such faith in her? I wondered as I sat there, feeling spurned. It was because she seemed so unafraid. If she’d decided she didn’t want to see me again, she’d have told me to my face. But when the hand reached five thirty, I knew there was no point in waiting. I gave her two minutes’ grace and then called her cellphone on the off chance she’d been in an accident. She wouldn’t have forgotten.

“Ms. Faulkner, this is Dr. Cowper. I was expecting you for our appointment. I hope nothing is wrong,” I told her voice mail.

I sat for another few minutes, feeling abandoned. “Fuck,” I said softly. I had no one left to talk to except Baer and Pagonis. The previous day, I’d felt elated by my decision to tell the truth about Harry, but now I was desolate. This was it-the end of the line. My last patient of the day was on vacation so that was the end of my duties. I unclipped my red-and-white badge and went to find my father.

He was at a table in a corner of the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, with a large martini in front of him. Behind the bar, the Maxfield Parrish mural of the monarch grinned as inscrutably as Harry in Riverhead. It’s fine for you, with your pipe and your slippers, and your fiddlers three , I thought. If I had your job, I’d be merry, too . The waiter brought a glass of wine and my father clinked his own, brimming with bulbous green olives, against it.

“Here we are again. Cheers,” he said.

I studied his face as he sipped. It was sallow in the soft bar light, and the lines around his eyes were deeper. The heart attack had aged him-he looked older than the undaunted image I carried in my head. He’d lost some weight and his legs had looked stick thin as he’d padded around my apartment in a dressing gown in the morning. I’d given up my bed for him and slept on a couch. In the early hours of the morning, I’d woken to hear his raspy snores from the bedroom, like a foghorn in the night.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” I said.

“Joe’s worried about you. He says you’ve been under a lot of strain and you haven’t been telling him everything. He thinks you could be in trouble. I’m due in D.C. later in the week so I thought I’d take a detour, see if I could help.”

I looked around the bar, which was filling with an early evening throng. Waiters passed among tables with trays bearing drinks and silver bowls of nuts and snacks. Opposite, a white-haired tycoon sat alongside a pale-faced beauty-perhaps his daughter, perhaps his mistress. I should have been grateful to my father for flying on this mission, but it irritated me-I was too exhausted to be angry. Why play the concerned parent now, when he’d never bothered to do it before? He’d arrived at the exact moment when it was too late.