T. Boyle - Riven Rock

It was early the next morning, after they’d made love twice on the satin sheets in her bedroom, and the slow quiet cigarette-punctuated murmur of their conversation had fallen away to nothing, that he thought of Giovannella again. Dolores lay on her back beside him, sprawled like a doll thrown from a cliff, her breasts fanned out on the fulcrum of her rib cage, her legs splayed. She was smoking, the cigarette standing erect between her lips, jetting a stream of smoke straight up into the air, and he was idly stroking the hair between her legs, as relaxed as a dead man except for the accelerating spark of Giovannella in his head.

“Dolores?” he said into the silence of the room.

“Hm?”

“Do you know any doctors? Personally, I mean.”

And though when the sun came up it was Sunday, the Lord’s day, and all the faithful were trotting in and out of the churches whether they were Catholics or Protestants or Egyptian dog worshipers, O‘Kane was on his way to Giovannella’s with the stiff white slip of paper on which Dolores Isringhausen had written a name and address in her looping graceful boarding-school hand, and when he got there he waited round the corner till the shoemaker went out to do whatever it is shoemakers do on Sundays. Then he looked over his shoulder, swallowed his pounding heart, and mounted the swaybacked stairs on the outside of the building.

Giovannella looked startled. Not hopeful, not angry, just startled. “You can’t come here today, Eddie. Guido, he only went out for a walk — he could be back any minute.”

“To hell with Guido,” he said, and he was in the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. And what was the first thing he saw, nailed to the wall in the vestibule in all His crucified agony? Sure: Christ, staring him in the face.

“Eddie. You got to go. You can‘t—”

“I brought you this,” he said, holding the slip of paper out to her.

There was nothing in her face. He watched her eyes drop, her lips part, and there, just the tip of her tongue. She was no reader. “Cy… rose?… Brown,” piecing it out, “one-two, one-two Cha… pala. M, period, D, period.” She looked up. “M.D.? What does that mean?”

“Doctor,” he said, and he shifted on the balls of his feet, feeling sick and evil, “M.D. means doctor. Don’t you know anything?”

Comprehension started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up through the clamped muscles of her jaw to her eyes, and they weren’t loving and kind eyes, not this morning, not any more. She let out a curse, something in Italian, and though he couldn’t appreciate the nuances, he got the gist of it. “You son of a bitch.” she said. “You big cocky son of a bitch. What makes you sure it’s your baby, huh?”

“Because you told me. Because you came to me. Guido can’t make you feel a thing, isn’t that what you told me? That he’s only this big?”

“He’s a better man than you.”

“The hell he is.”

“He is. And didn’t you ever think I might have just said that for you, to make you feel like a big man, huh? Because I did, I did, you son of a bitch. I lied. I lied to you, Eddie. Guido’s hung like a horse — how do you like that? And you’ll never hurt my baby— my baby, not yours. Never!” “

It was Rosaleen all over again, and he had half a moment to wonder about the shifting magnetic poles of love, from Venus to Mars and no middle ground, no place to regroup and sound the retreat, and when she came at him with the ice pick that had been lying so quietly atop the icebox all this time he was only trying to protect himself, and both of them watched with the kind of astonishment reserved for the magician in the cape as the shining steel rivet passed right on through his open palm and out the other side as if there was no such thing as flesh and no such thing as blood.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t shake,” O‘Kane said, nodding a greeting to Dr. Brush at the door and holding up his bandaged right hand in extenuation, Mart right behind him, the string orchestra already playing something light as air and the big new room beyond all lit up and festive. “Ah, and this must be Mrs. Brush,” he said, feeling convivial, ready to break into song, tell jokes, quaff a beer or a cup or two of punch laced with gin. He was about to say he’d heard a lot about her, but then he realized he’d heard nothing, not a word. She could have been a Fiji Island cannibal with a bone through her nose for all he’d heard about her, but here she was, standing right beside her husband at the door, a pinched, rawboned woman with a squared-off beak of a nose and two staring black eyes no bigger than a crow’s.

She reached for his bandaged hand and then drew back as if she’d burned herself on a hot stove, but immediately reached for it again, and then once more, before O‘Kane finally offered his left hand and tucked the bandaged one discreetly behind his back. But the sequel was even stranger, because she went through the same routine all over again, reaching out for his good hand and then drawing back once, twice, three times, and when he looked into her face for an answer she greeted him with a whole battery of facial tics and distortions — enough to make the gone-but-not-forgotten Hamilton look like an amateur. She said something in a loud squawk of a voice, twitching and shaking and jerking her head up and down all the while, before Dr. Brush intervened.

“Gladys, yes,” he boomed, swinging tumultuously round in the entrance hall and slamming the door behind them. “These are the two men I told you about, Edward O‘Kane — we call him Eddie — and Martin Tompkins, er, Thompson. That’s it, dear, yes, go ahead and say hello—”

Mart, thick-headed and slow to grapple toward judgment or even awareness, gave Mrs. Brush a bewildered look and reached for her hand, which she immediately snatched away and hid behind her back. Mart looked to O‘Kane, and O’Kane’s eyes told him everything he needed to know: the psychiatrist’s wife was a nutcase.

And what was she wearing? Something plain and old-fashioned, drab as a horse blanket, and hanging right down to the floor, as if this were the nineteen-oughts still. But she was smiling, or at least that seemed to be a smile flashing through the frenetic semaphore of tics, twitches and grimaces, and that was enough for O‘Kane. He smiled back, offered her his arm, which she took after another whole rigama-role of back and forth and back and forth again, and led her up the six steps and into the big room full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces.

The celebration was both in honor of Dr. Brush’s taking over the reins and to christen the new theater building, built so that Mr. McCormick could have a comfortable place in which to view moving pictures, concerts and plays. It was a grand building, the size of any three houses a normal family would occupy, dominated by the vast two-story-high theater, with offices for Dr. Brush and the estate manager to either side and a bedroom for Mr. McCormick tucked in back in the event he should tire while watching a picture. Everyone felt he needed more stimulation — Drs. Meyer, Hamilton and Brush, Katherine, even the Chicago McCormicks — and the theater house was designed to serve the purpose. It was a short walk from the main house — no more than four or five hundred feet — and the landscape architects had put sprinklers high up in the trees along the path so that Mr. McCormick could hear the soothing murmur of a gentle rainfall as he strolled to and from the building in fair weather, and there was stimulation for you: rain on command. Nor had they overlooked security: all the windows were protected, inside the double panes of glass, with a graceful cast-iron filigree in a handsome diamond pattern, and the doors to each of the rooms were fitted with triple locks, and for each lock a separate key.