Pretty soon a nurse came in — not Bella Abzug; a black woman, younger and much more attractive — and announced that I had another visitor. I asked her who it was and she said, “Mrs. Dana Eberhardt. Will you see her?”
“Yes. Send her in.”
Dana entered the room a couple of minutes after the nurse went away. She was three years younger than Eb and me, just turned fifty, but she didn’t look her age; she looked no older than forty. Still slender, except for heavy breasts and wide hips. New hairdo: cut short and curled. There had been gray in the brown hair the last time I’d seen her; she had dyed it away. She looked sleek and fit, despite the gravity of her expression and the dark smudges under her eyes. Life in Palo Alto with a Stanford law professor must be agreeing with her.
“Hello, mug,” she said.
Mug. Her pet name for me in the days when she had tried to play matchmaker and marry me off to a variety of eligible women. “You’re a mug,” she used to say. “You don’t know what’s good for you. Marriage is a wonderful thing.” And now she was living with a law professor, and Eberhardt was lying in a coma with his insides and maybe his head scrambled by a pair of bullets.
I think I hated her a little in that moment.
She came over and stood near the foot of the bed, as if she were afraid to move any closer. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” she said.
“It’s always nice to see old friends.”
I made no effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but she took it without flinching. One of her characteristic gestures was to pick at her chin with thumb and forefinger; she did that. Then she made a throat-clearing sound and wet her lips. They were painted a glossy rust-red color, like drying blood. I had never seen her wear that shade of lipstick before.
“Don’t condemn me,” she said.
“Why should I condemn you?”
“I still care for Eb. I never wanted to hurt him.”
“Then why did you?”
“I couldn’t live my life for him any longer. I needed a change, a new direction; I needed to be me.”
“So now you are.”
“Yes. I’ve been happy these past few months, mug—”
“Don’t call me mug.”
“All right. I didn’t think you minded the name.”
“Well, I do mind it.”
“All right.”
“Listen, Dana, why’re you here? What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” she said. She sounded hurt. “I just wanted to see you—”
“Give me a little sympathy, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Or maybe you’re looking for forgiveness, somebody to tell you you’re not a bad woman and none of this is your fault. Well, I’m not that person. Try a rabbi, if that’s what you’re after.”
This time it got to her and she winced. “That’s not fair,” she said.
“No? Is it fair what happened to Eb?”
She half-turned away from me. But her eyes were clear; she never cried. Maybe that was a significant thing about her, maybe that explained a lot: she never cried.
“Don’t you think I feel badly enough as it is?” she said.
“I don’t know how you feel. Neither does Eb.”
“He must have said terrible things about me. That’s why you’re acting this way.”
“He never said much of anything about you. Except that he thought you were a whore.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“Maybe not. But you still walked out on him for somebody else.”
“It was over between us. He knew that as well as I did.”
“The hell he did. You blew him right out of the water, Dana. You tore him up inside.”
She put her eyes on me again and I watched anger flash in them. “You weren’t married to him. You don’t know how he could be.”
“I’ve known him as long as you have.”
“But you didn’t live with him. You think it’s easy, being a cop’s wife? Waiting for something like this to happen, some crazy with a gun to show up on your doorstep?”
“You put up with it for twenty-eight years.”
“Yes,” Dana said, “and I got tired of putting up with it. I got tired of his long hours and his moods and his silences. We never talked anymore. We never went anywhere. We weren’t going anywhere, can’t you understand that? It was over. It had been for a long time.”
The rage was thick and hot inside me, tightening my muscles, making the wound in my shoulder throb painfully. But it was not really directed at Dana; she was just a handy object. It was blind, all-encompassing. I was angry at everybody and everything and I wanted to lash out, to hurt someone else.
“Leave me alone, will you,” I said. “Go carry on your deathwatch somewhere else. Go back to your goddamn law professor, let him tell you what a poor, misunderstood woman you are.”
She pinched her chin again with tremulous fingers. “Damn you,” she said. “I came in here feeling sorry for you. I thought we were still friends; I thought you’d understand; I thought we could give each other some comfort. But I was wrong. God, how wrong I was.”
“You’ve been wrong before,” I said. “You were wrong three months ago when you moved out of Eb’s life.”
She pivoted from the bed and went to the door in hard, thumping steps. With the knob in her hand, she looked back at me. “I don’t care what you think,” she said. “David is a good man, a kind man, and I love him and he loves me. I’m not ashamed of what I did.”
“David can go to hell,” I said. “So can you.”
That stung her too; I saw the pain register in her face before she twisted her head around. She pulled the door open, went through it. When she shut it behind her there was a click like the hammer of a gun being cocked.
It took me a while to calm down, to get myself tightly wrapped again. Then I thought: You were too hard on her, she’s suffering too. But I could not seem to feel sorry for her. Eberhardt, yes, but I had no compassion left for anyone else. Least of all myself.
My back hurt from lying in one position; I shifted around on the bed until I was resting on my right hip. But the movement aggravated the pain in my shoulder. A yell formed in my throat and I had to clamp my teeth together to keep it from coming out.
There was one of those hospital buzzers attached to the top of the bed. I grabbed hold of it and jabbed my thumb down on the button. Two minutes later, the young black nurse poked her head inside the door.
“I could use some coffee,” I said.
“No coffee. I can bring you some tea.”
“Okay. Some tea, then.” She started to withdraw, but I stopped her by asking, “Is there any change in Lieutenant Eberhardt’s condition?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“He won’t die,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”
She just looked at me.
“He’ll pull through, you hear?”
“I’ll bring your tea,” she said, and when she closed the door it made the clicking sound again — the sound of a .357 Magnum being cocked.
Four
Tuesday.
Greg Marcus came to see me in the morning, alone this time. He still looked haggard and he hadn’t bothered to shave the blond stubble off his cheeks. But he had no news, no fresh leads; he only wanted me to go over things again, on the chance that I had forgotten or overlooked something. Grabbing at straws. The police were dead-ended and he knew I knew it. He did not even try to pretend otherwise.