Mercy Page 30

  For the last half hour Dr. Broussard had been in an emotional free fall, a long descent through his own empty grief precipitated by Bernadine Mello’s death—the Asian anchorwoman on the noon news program had said “murder.” He was staggered, but had had the presence of mind to quickly make three telephone calls canceling his afternoon appointments. He had caught two of his clients, but Evelyn Towne had already left her home to have a late lunch with a friend before his appointment. She couldn’t be reached.

  Walking away from the sandwich his maid had prepared for him in the gray light of the sun-room, he had taken his umbrella and in a preoccupied daze had stepped outside. He had intended to go to his studio, but instead was now walking directionless across the lawn until he came to one of the paths that laced his wooded property. He took the first one and followed it. Now, under the canopy of trees, he folded up his umbrella, took off his suit coat and draped it over his left arm, and loosened his tie in deference to the heat and humidity. All about him the rain tapped on the huge leaves of the catalpas; it drummed and roared so that he could not hear his own footsteps crunching on the cinder.

  The Labrador followed him, blinking in the steady rain, the two of them circling aimlessly along the bayou paths until the dog’s hair was matted and Broussard’s own thick wavy hair was kinking, his hand-tailored shirt plastered against his thick barrel chest, where the hair showed through the material made translucent by the rain. Finally he stopped. He looked down the path in front of him, at the leaves glistening and shimmering in the rain. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached out to the trunk of a water oak for support. Slowly he leaned against it, letting it take all his weight, and then he began to cry, a dry, awkward sound at first because he was unused to it. The Labrador sat unquestioningly on the wet path, and with a dense curiosity and a slack tongue calmly regarded the pattern of the rain as it stippled the surface of the brown bayou water in overlapping mandalas. Broussard, overcome by the dizzying effervescence of images bubbling up from his memory, overcome by an unexpected fear of loneliness, a queer selfishness that made him anguish more bitterly for himself than for Bernadine, wept like a child.

  He slumped against the water oak, submerged in his own self-concern until he was entirely soaked, until his clothes were heavy and clinging, until, even in the stifling heat, he felt a chill grow against his spine and settle in across the back of his shoulders. Pushing himself away from the tree, he wiped his hair out of his eyes and continued on the path toward his studio. With the Labrador lumbering along behind him in the mist, he arrived at the office’s back door and paused in an alcove to step out of his soaking shoes. Having left the studio unlocked at noon, he pushed open the rear door which allowed him to come and go to his office without being seen by his clients, who parked in a cinder drive at the front of the building and entered the office from a more formal entrance.

  The equanimous Labrador lay down in the alcove with an overweight sigh as Broussard entered the darkened hallway and turned into his office. The glass wall that looked down to the bayou presented a pointillistic scene of hanging mist, as if Georges Seurat had managed to create a picture that possessed an imperceptible motion, one that could not be seen to move, but that could be seen to have moved. The mist—almost a fog—was thick, then sheer, appearing first before, then behind the trees, allowing the bayou now to emerge and now to disappear into its ghostly drifting.

  Broussard went into his bathroom, shed his rain-soaked clothes, and took a warm shower. He tried to maintain a blank mind as he washed his hair. He did not want to think about Bernadine either in life or in death. He did not want to remember anything about Bernadine. When he got out, he dried himself and dressed in some of the clothes he kept in the studio closet, a fresh pair of gray trousers, a freshly starched pale blue shirt and dark navy tie. He didn’t bother with a jacket. He walked to the liquor cabinet and poured a Dewars and water and was already standing in front of the plate-glass windows when he remembered he was drinking Bernadine’s drink, her beloved scotch. It was nectar to her. She was nectar to him. Jesus. How odd, how surreal, he had felt when he heard, and saw, Bernadine’s name on the bright red lips of the newscaster.

  No suspects.

  He had nearly finished his drink when he heard the front door opening and suddenly realized that he hadn’t turned on lights anywhere in the office.

  “Dominick. Are you here?” Evelyn.

  “Yes, back here,” he called and started turning on his desk lamps, and then the several others in the large office. He had no ceiling light, preferring the more oblique lighting afforded by lamps. He quickly finished his drink as he heard her footsteps in the short hallway, and then she was in the doorway just as he was closing the liquor cabinet.

  She looked at him quizzically. “No lights?”

  “I’ve just come back from lunch at the house,” he said. “I was just turning them on.” There was a split second when he wanted to blurt out the news of Bernadine’s death. But it was only a moment, and when he didn’t do it, he knew he never would.

  Evelyn looked at him and moved across the room to the windows where Broussard himself had just been standing. She looked out to the rainy landscape for a long time, long enough for her silence to attract his attention and long enough for them to become aware of the small sounds that fill silences: the ticking of the mantel clock on the bookshelves, rain dripping from the eaves onto the glass wall, the sound of their own breathing, the inner turmoil of their own thoughts.

  Evelyn Towne was the only one of Broussard’s clients whom he totally respected. It was his opinion that she should not be a client at all, and he had told her so. But she had only laughed and disregarded the remark. Despite the fact that Evelyn (she pronounced it with a long initial E) was a woman of pleasing personality and even temperament, Broussard considered her, as she considered herself, a serious person. A woman of extraordinary intelligence and perception, she was not amused by the solitary sound of her own voice. Propriety was important to her, yet it was not her way to be arch or aloof. Social standing meant nothing to her, but correct behavior did, and she respected it wherever she found it, whether in the demeanor of the Mexican vaqueros who worked her husband’s ranches along the border, or in the attitudes of the powerful men she met circulating among Houston’s social elite.

  At forty-eight she was tall and erect, with handsome chestnut hair threaded with gray and which she kept in a longer style than most women her age. She took care of herself and still wore the same size dress she wore when she was twenty-five. He had never seen her without earrings, and they were always pearls. During the three years he had been consulting with her, he had seen her wear a wonderful variety of them in every color, shape, size, and arrangement. Today they were irregular drops, rather small, and smoky gray.

  Moving with a grace of motion that was bred into her as surely as her eccentric personality, Evelyn turned away from the windows and sat in one of the two leather armchairs. She was one of his few clients who refused to submit to the chaise longue. Broussard sat in his own armchair, crossed his legs, and looked at her. She wore a navy silk jersey dress unbuttoned at her neck just enough to make out the beginnings of a generous decolletage. She wore no necklace. She never did. Her nails were freshly polished, the same shade of red as her lipstick, and when she raised a hand and pushed back a lock of chestnut hair, an antique gold bracelet with bead and reel carvings dangled on her wrist.

  “I’ve had another poem published,” she said, arranging the hem of her dress. In Daedalus.”

  “Congratulations,” he said, trying to sound congenial and undisturbed. “A long one?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “But why do you ask?” Evelyn didn’t like him to be imprecise.

  “The last poem you published was a long one. Seventy-six lines, I think.” She would admire the fact that he had remembered. “Much longer than most of your others. I only wondered if you’d continued to do that
, or if that last one had been an anomaly.”

  She smiled. “This one was fourteen.”

  “A sonnet, then.”

  Again she smiled. “You’re on your toes,” she said.

  “Shakespearean or Petrarchan?”

  “Petrarchan. Do you really know the difference?”

  “Only that Shakespearean ones end in couplets,” he confessed.

  She laughed outright, a good, full laugh that he always enjoyed because it was the only thing about her that wasn’t complicated.

  “Jesus, Dominick. I thought for a moment you actually knew something.” She sobered slowly as she cast an eye over his desk and its crowded collection of small figurines, statuettes, and icons of women from history and myth and religion. Today there was something slightly remote about her, something telegraphed in the brevity of the laugh cut off a millisecond too soon, something in the way her eyes did not altogether relax when she looked at him. Evelyn was not a woman to be understood, only studied. Without seeming to, without exhibiting a transparent reticence, she had held more in reserve from him than any client he ever had. She was still largely an enigma, and even after three years he could not say with any certainty why she had come to him in the first place.

  “What was it about?” he asked. Evelyn had leveled her eyes at him, waiting for the question.

  “Sex and death.”

  Two things: Evelyn was incapable of kitsch, and she wasn’t smiling anymore. Broussard didn’t know how to arrange his face. She rescued him.

  “Sex, because it’s been on my mind a lot lately,” she explained. It was the kind of response that was typical of her: straight to the point, but so provocative that it immediately elicited another question. “And death, because I want to be rid of it. I want it to leave me alone until it has business directly with me.”

  Evelyn’s husband, Gerald, who was twelve years older than she, had been dying of cancer for nearly two years. Broussard knew that she had spent much of her time nursing him, and that rather than having to put him in a hospital she had turned their River Oaks home into a veritable clinic so that he could die at home. Only he wouldn’t die. It had been a sad ordeal that dragged on grotesquely. Then, finally, two months earlier, it ended.

  “Of course, I wrote the poem before he died,” she said. “You know it takes forever for those things to be accepted and published, and by some quirk I wasn’t notified that they’d taken it. Then, yesterday, the magazine arrived. I sat down in a chair in the entrance hall and read the poem on the spot. Oddly, reading it like that, flat out with no emotional preparation, it seemed to finalize Gerald’s death more than his actual dying. Maybe because his death took so long, and the poem,” she averted her eyes again with a preoccupied interest in something unseen, “…only fourteen lines.” Then she looked back to him. “I want to talk about it.”

  “The poem?”

  “About what the poem is about.”

  Broussard waited as Evelyn crossed her legs at the ankles and again adjusted the hem of her navy jersey. It pleased him to remember what was beneath the jersey, though he did not dwell on it with a recall of titillating sexual images as he often did with other women. It hadn’t been that kind of thing with Evelyn.

  “Do you want to hear something absolutely primitive?” she said, smiling oddly, almost affectionately. “Gerald’s ‘cancer’ was syphilis.” She paused and gave a rueful shrug. “Oh, I’d never been in any danger,” she added quickly. And then, “It was called ‘latent syphilis’ and he had had it for years before it was discovered. By then it was in its third and terminal stage.” The fingers of her left hand idly burnished the antique gold bracelet on the opposite wrist. “There was a time when he was importing a lot of cattle for the ranches. He thinks, maybe…on one of his buying trips to Argentina…in Guatreché, perhaps, or Villa Regina…”

  Broussard was astonished, but not by the revelation of Gerald’s syphilis. He knew that latent syphilis demonstrated no signs or symptoms until its final stage, and often it went on for decades before it manifested any physical evidence to its doomed host. Normally it would not be difficult to transmit the disease to another person. Normally. But Evelyn had said she had never been in any danger. So what had been the nature of her sexual relationship with her husband all these years? How could he, Broussard, have talked with her regularly for three years and never have gotten a hint of something so out of the ordinary? He was appalled. He suddenly thought of Bernadine’s revelation. Jesus Christ. Did he know nothing about women? But, of course, he did. Still, there were the few, the rare ones, whose intellects or personalities he found to be truly riveting, and who lived their lives on more dimensions than he could identify. These he studied, these he was drawn to, and even loved, because their inner lives approached the magnitude of the archetypical.

  “I can imagine what you must be thinking,” she said.

  Broussard almost believed she could. Whereas Bernadine’s great attraction for him had been her intuitive and culturally unencumbered appreciation of human sexuality, Evelyn presented him with an equally fascinating personality, but from a position at the other end of the spectrum.

  When he first had begun consulting with Evelyn, he knew immediately that she was an extraordinary woman. She was a regularly published poet, born to wealth and married to wealth, striking in appearance, gracious (if somewhat proper), uninterested in small talk, childless, indifferent to playing any role in that uppermost rank of society where her wealth would have made her an influential player, at times a little distant, a woman of privacy who had sought him out and requested only that she be allowed an altered form of analysis. She wanted no stated objective or therapeutic technique. It was a request that required a loose interpretation of “analysis.”

  Quickly enthralled by her, he had known better than to try to seduce her. Instead he employed his most calculating subtleties to convey that his feelings toward her could be much more serious than what he was presenting. But he persisted in keeping his distance, never making an overt commitment in even the slightest way. Then one morning nearly eight months after they had their first consultation, she came into his office and proposed an affair. A limited one. She would allow him six “occasions,” and he could choose the timing—up to three months. Broussard was dumbfounded. It was the most original proposal he had ever received. But it proved to be only the beginning of his surprises. If Bernadine Mello’s sexual energy was the most unencumbered, the most natural, he had ever experienced, Evelyn’s was surely the most exotic. To his utter astonishment, this proper and mannered woman had proceeded to introduce him to rarefied pleasures, and not only was she electrifyingly creative, but it was soon clear to him that she also was practiced at it.

  It happened during three weeks in August. Broussard’s understanding of her had been profoundly altered, their relationship transformed. It was not only that she had given herself to him in such a singular manner and with such unexpected and undissembling passion that he was overwhelmed and made ashamed of his own cynical design, but that at her own wise choosing what she had given had been all the more dear to him because its duration was predetermined. It had a beginning and an end that were known beforehand, a promise that what they had shared on those sultry August afternoons never would be less than their finest moments. It was a gift, really, of immortality. What they had had together would never age like youth, never fail or fade, never disappoint by becoming something less than what it once had been, as old affairs were wont to do. Evelyn had understood too well the fate that time assigned to all such liaisons, and rather than let it have its way in diminishing theirs, she had cheated it. It had been a sage decision.

  All of this he remembered in a matter of seconds, in the time it took her to pause, and then continue.

  “I don’t know why, really, I decided to tell you this,” she said. “Or why I decided to bring it up in such a silly, circumlocutious manner.”

  “You’re being disingenuous,” he said.

  Letti
ng her eyes go to the images on his desk again, she raised her left arm and rested it on the edge of the desk while her hand arched to touch the buttocks of one of the taller statues, the darkened, greenish-stained bronze of the goddess Laksmi, whose hips were cocked in the typical pose of Hindu statuary. Laksmi’s tightened buttocks were as round as her naked breasts, and Evelyn’s fingers moved over them, circling them lightly.

  “You don’t know much about women, Dominick,” she said. They had had this discussion before, of course, a number of times. Most often these introductory words were delivered in a tone of good-natured baiting, at times with irony, once with a startling bitterness. But always they were a prelude to a revelation.

  “I like to think I have a certain insight,” he said.

  Absently, she watched her own fingers on the smooth mounds of the goddess’s buttocks.

  “A certain insight,” she conceded with a single nod. She let her middle finger go under Laksmi’s buttocks and then stop between her thighs. Her eyes slid to Broussard and caught him looking at what she was doing.

  “How,” she asked, “do you think I reacted to the news that Gerald was dying of syphilis, rather than cancer?”

  Broussard looked at her. “You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head, kept her finger between Laksmi’s thighs.

  “How did you find out?”

  “He told me—after we brought him home from the hospital. The doctors had conspired with him up to that point, up until they knew it was imminently terminal. Gerald then told them he wanted to tell me himself, after he was set up at home.” She pulled her finger away from the statue and rubbed it lightly against her thumb as if drying moisture. Her eyes had lost their focus on him as she remembered.