Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“That’s where we’re heading,” he said.

“Cool city,” the third boy said.

His name was Tony Giglio and he was here, at his father’s insistence, for a pilgrimage to a town northwest of Naples, a hilltop village called Ruvo del Monte from which his grandfather had emigrated in the year 1900, shortly after la fillossera struck that country’s vineyards and reduced to insignificance its thriving wine industry. Tony was clean-shaven, albeit with shadowy jowls, and he wore his black hair in a slicked-back greaser’s style. He told the girls he would be accompanying Robby and Paul only as far as Amsterdam, after which he would board a plane to Naples, and then take a bus to Ruvo del Monte, so he could “hug all the wop paisans there and contribute five hundred dollars to the fucking village parish, in honor of the fucking local saint.”

Paul Gillis listened to all this without saying a word.

“How long will you be in Amsterdam?” Barbara asked.

“Till it gets boring,” Robby said, and grinned.

His smile gave to his already handsome face a widescreen, movie-star radiance. Lissie suspected, from the way Barbara flutteringly batted her lashes in that instant, that she’d fallen madly in love with him at once, a dismaying insight in that she herself had always been partial to blond boys; hadn’t her only experience been with blond Judd Gordon?

“So what do you say?” Robby asked.

“Is it expensive there?” Barbara said.

“Cheap as donkey shit,” Robby said. “Anyway, we’ll be crashing with some girls I know, more the merrier.”

“American girls?”

“Dutch.”

“Well, how would they feel about...?”

“I told you. More the merrier. The pot flows like wine in Holland, not like that fuckin’ Spain... or even here, for that matter. You find any choice stuff in little old London Town?”

“We’ve been grubbing from other Americans,” Barbara said.

“Different in Holland,” Robby said. “Nobody cares what you do there. The Dutch love hippies. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

“Mm,” Paul said.

“So what do you say?”

“Liss?”

“Sure,” Lissie said.

They had made love twice that afternoon. After the first time, Joanna La Flute recounted to him with surprising anger, considering the fact that she hadn’t been the recipient of the concertmaster’s tirade, what had happened at rehearsal that morning when the first fiddler in the second section was accused of playing over the finger board instead of near the bridge as the rest of the section was doing.

Fillipa, for such was the first fiddler’s name, promptly informed the concertmaster that the words “sur la touche” were clearly printed on the score beside the suspect passage, and that she knew what those words meant even if nobody else in the section seemed to know, and even if the concertmaster himself didn’t seem to know. If he wanted her to play it closer to the bridge, she would most certainly do that, contrary to the composer’s wish for a covered, less piercing, more pastellike sound. But if the concertmaster wanted a suggestion (and here Joanna did a fine imitation of sixty-two-year-old Fillipa who had been playing in orchestras since she was nineteen) perhaps he might prefer them not to bow the passage at all, but to pluck it instead, in which case the concertmaster could go pluck himself.

Joanna La Flute laughed when she repeated Fillipa’s bon mot, but otherwise she’d told the story with a kind of contained professional fury. It was after they’d made love the second time that Joanna Jewish stole into bed and snuggled up close to Jamie and began telling him in detail of what had been her final session with the redoubtable Marvin Mandelbaum.

“It was surprising to both of us,” Joanna said. “I was lying on the couch, studying his tin ceiling and not saying anything as usual, and behind me I could hear the heavy breathing that meant either he was about to make an obscene phone call or else fall asleep, and all at once I said, ‘I’d like to quit, Dr. Mandelbaum,’ and like a shot, he answered, ‘I think you should!’

“I was so surprised by what I’d said, and so surprised by the answer I got, that I sat up and turned to look at him, and he was sitting there with a surprised look on his face, too, everybody in the whole room was surprised. So I said, ‘I mean it, Doctor,’ and now he wipes the glee — Jamie, he looked absolutely gleeful after the initial shock wore off — he wipes the glee off his face, the pisher, and very solemnly says, ‘Do you feel you are now able to cope successfully with your various problems, Joanna?’ Since I was already sitting up, and since I was quitting anyway, I dug in my handbag for a cigarette, and I lit it, and got off the couch and began pacing the room while he sat there in his chair watching me and listening to me. I had the feeling this was the first time anything like this had ever happened in his office. I was making medical history there in his office.

“I told him I didn’t think I had a problem with married men anymore, not if he thought the problem was that I chose married men because I didn’t want to get married. I told him I’d been talking about nothing else hut marrying you for the past eight months now, ever since we met on the Vineyard, so if he figured that talking about someone all the time was a problem , then he was wrong because I figured it was love. I figured if somebody’s in your mind day and night, and you can’t get him out, and you can’t wait till you see him the next time, can’t wait to touch him and kiss him, touch his hair, I love touching your hair, then — what’s that?” she said, and sat bolt upright.

“What?”

“Listen!”

He listened. The room was silent, the house was silent.

“I don’t—”

“Shhh!”

He could hear only the various sounds of the house itself, the ticking of the clock on the dresser (it was precisely 4:00 P.M.), a click someplace downstairs and then the hum of the refrigerator as it began its cycle, the whoosh of the oil burner as it went on. But nothing else. Joanna was virtually bristling, eyes and nostrils wide, nipples puckered, hands opened like radar antennas hovering on the air before her breasts as though hoping to absorb sound through the palms. She knew the noises in this house, knew which were normal and which were not, and now she listened and tried to sift one from the other, tried to separate the sound that had startled her in the first place. There was suddenly the thin sharp glittery crack of breaking glass.

She grabbed his hand.

He felt the bristles go up at the back of his neck, felt his heart suddenly begin pounding in his chest, felt a rush of adrenaline that propelled him over to the dresser where he picked up Joanna’s silver hairbrush and held it by the handle like a hammer. There was the sound of more glass breaking now, but it was a methodical, even sound, the sound of someone chipping away shards before attempting entry, slivers falling to the floor and shattering there. And then silence. He caught his breath. Across the room, Joanna was picking up the bedside phone.

“No!” he whispered.

She looked at him, puzzled for an instant, and then she understood. They could not call the police because when they got here they would discover not only a burglar coming in through the third-floor window where there was a fire escape outside, but also a naked man holding a silver hairbrush in his trembling hand, a man named James Croft who was married to Constance Croft in Rutledge, Connecticut, and who had no more right than the burglar to be here in the apartment of naked, twenty-five-year-old Joanna Berkowitz. She let her hand fall limply from the receiver.