Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

“When will they film at the zoo?”

“Maybe next week.” He was glad he had called the zoo and offered the infrared film: Dandridge might check.

“It’s a great zoo. I went with my sister and my niece when they came to help me move in. They have the contact area, you know. I hugged this llama. It felt nice, but talk about aroma , boy… I thought I was being followed by a llama until I changed my shirt.”

This was Having a Conversation. He had to say something or leave. “How did you come to Baeder?”

“They advertised at the Reiker Institute in Denver where I was working. I was checking the bulletin board one day and just happened to come across this job. Actually, what happened, Baeder had to shape up their employment practices to keep this Defense contract. They managed to pack six women, two blacks, two chicanos, an oriental, a paraplegic, and me into a total of eight hirings. We all count in at least two categories, you see.”

“You worked out well for Baeder.”

“The others did too. Baeder’s not giving anything away.”

“Before that?” He was sweating a little. Conversation was hard. Looking was good, though. She had good legs. She had nicked an ankle shaving. Along his arms a sense of the weight of her legs, limp.

“I trained newly blind people at the Reiker Institute in Denver for ten years after I finished school. This is my first job on the outside.”

“Outside of what?”

“Out in the big world. It was really insular at Reiker. I mean, we were training people to live in the sighted world and we didn’t live in it ourselves. We talked to each other too much. I thought I’d get out and knock around a little. Actually, I had intended to go into speech therapy, for speech-and-hearing-impaired children. I expect I’ll go back to that, one of these days.” She drained her glass. “Say, I’ve got some Mrs. Paul’s crab-ball miniatures in here. They’re pretty good. I shouldn’t have served dessert first. Want some?”

“Um-hmmm.”

“Do you cook?”

“Um-hmmm.”

A tiny crease appeared in her forehead. She went into the kitchen. “How about coffee?” she called.

“Uh-huh.”

She made small talk about grocery prices and got no reply. She came back into the living room and sat on the ottoman, her elbows on her knees.

“Let’s talk about something for a minute and get it out of the way, okay?”

Silence.

“You haven’t said anything lately. In fact, you haven’t said anything since I mentioned speech therapy.” Her voice was kind, but firm. It carried no taint of sympathy. “I understand you fine because you speak very well and because I listen. People don’t pay attention. They ask me what? what? all the time. If you don’t want to talk, okay. But I hope you will talk. Because you can, and I’m interested in what you have to say.”

“Ummm. That’s good,” Dolarhyde said softly. Clearly this little speech was very important to her. Was she inviting him into the two-category club with her and the Chinese paraplegic? He wondered what his second category was.

Her next statement was incredible to him.

“May I touch your face? I want to know if you’re smiling or frowning.” Wryly, now. “I want to know whether to just shut up or not.”

She raised her hand and waited.

How well would she get around with her fingers bitten off? Dolarhyde mused. Even in street teeth he could do it as easily as biting off breadsticks. If he braced his heels on the floor, his weight back on the couch, and locked both hands on her wrist, she could never pull away from him in time. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, maybe leave the thumb. For measuring pies.

He took her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned her shapely, hard-used hand in the light. There were many small scars on it, and several new nicks and abrasions. A smooth scar on the back might have been a burn.

Too close to home. Too early in his Becoming. She wouldn’t be there to look at anymore.

To ask this incredible thing, she could know nothing personal about him. She had not gossiped.

“Take my word that I’m smiling,” he said. Okay on the S. It was true that he had a sort of smile which exposed his handsome public teeth.

He held her wrist above her lap and released it. Her hand settled to her thigh and half-closed, fingers trailing on the cloth like an averted glance.

“I think the coffee’s ready,” she said.

“I’m going.” Had to go. Home for relief.

She nodded. “If I offended you, I didn’t mean to.”

“No.”

She stayed on the ottoman, listened to be sure the lock clicked as he left.

Reba MeClane made herself another gin and tonic. She put on some Segovia records and curled up on the couch. Dolarhyde had left a warm dent in the cushion. Traces of him remained in the air – shoe polish, a new leather belt, good shaving lotion.

What an intensely private man. She had heard only a few references to him at the office – Dandridge saying “that son of a bitch Dolarhyde” to one of his toadies.

Privacy was important to Reba. As a child, learning to cope after she lost her sight, she had had no privacy at all.

Now, in public, she could never be sure that she was not watched. So Francis Dolarhyde’s sense of privacy appealed to her. She had not felt one ion of sympathy from him, and that was good.

So was this gin.

Suddenly the Segovia sounded busy. She put on her whale songs.

Three tough months in a new town. The winter to face, finding curbs in the snow. Reba MeClane, leggy and brave, damned self-pity. She would not have it. She was aware of a deep vein of cripple’s anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her determination to wring all she could from every day.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night-light; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering “Is this all?”

She knew that she would never have the light, but there were things she could have. There were things to enjoy. She had gotten pleasure from helping her students, and the pleasure was oddly intensified by the knowledge that she would be neither rewarded nor punished for helping them.

In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few – the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

Involved. Reba knew that she was physically attractive to men – God knows enough of them copped a feel with their knuckles when they grabbed her upper arm.

She liked sex very much, but years ago she had learned something basic about men; most of them are terrified of entailing a burden. Their fear was augmented in her case.

She did not like for a man to creep in and out of her bed as though he were stealing chickens.

Ralph Mandy was coming to take her to dinner. He had a particularly cowardly mew about being so scarred by life that he was incapable of love. Careful Ralph told her that too often, and it scalded her. Ralph was amusing, but she didn’t want to own him.

She didn’t want to see Ralph. She didn’t feel like making conversation and hearing the hitches in conversations around them as people watched her eat.

It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn’t worry about her.

Francis Dolarhyde – shy, with a linebacker’s body and no bullshit. She had never seen or touched a cleft lip and had no visual associations with the sound. She wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because “blind people hear so much better than we do.” That was a common myth. Maybe she should have explained to him that it was not true, that blind people simply pay more attention to what they hear.