I was on Madison Avenue and Seventieth Street when my cell phone rang. I kept walking as I pulled it out of my bag. If it weren’t for Dulcie and my concern for her well-being, I doubted I’d ever answer the damn thing. It’s wrong that we can never escape from people who want to reach us.
Instead of a name on the LED display, the screen read “private caller,” and because there was a chance-albeit a slight one-that the call was about Dulcie, I answered it.
“Hello?”
I had reached the corner just as the light turned red, and as I waited I heard a man’s voice say my name.
“Morgan.”
It was as if he was trying it out, letting it slide from a thought into a word, as if he had not heard it or said it in a long time and was unsure that he was pronouncing it right, as if it were the name of a foreign spice in a store that has many things you have never heard of.
I looked around for somewhere to go. To get away from the voice, because I really didn’t want to hear it, but there was nowhere to go. There never is when the problem is inside your own head. “Hello, Noah.”
At the other end of the phone, I heard the detective take a breath. Suddenly, I was picturing his face, close up, the way it had looked the one night we’d spent together, months before. How could a man I had not talked to for months cause my hand-the one holding the phone-to tremble? He was just a police detective from New Orleans. Except he played exquisite jazz on the piano, cooked like a five-star chef, made love like some crazy kind of dream come true, and intuited more about me than I wanted anyone to know.
“How are you?” Noah asked.
The sound of his voice reminded me of his fingers stroking my face. Of his arms holding me. How his lips felt. I stopped the deluge of impressions and forced myself to talk. “I’m okay. Overworked.”
“If you are admitting it, even a little bit, it must be extreme.”
I laughed. Had we only known each other for a few weeks? Stop thinking, I said to myself silently. Find out what he wants, then get off the phone. “So, how can I help you, Noah?” I asked, cringing. Why when I spoke to him did I always wind up sounding like I was flirting?
I was impatient for him to state his reason for calling so I could get rid of him as fast as possible. I was instantly exhausted.
“I was wondering if you have some time to meet up with me. Either at my office, yours, or if you happen to be as hungry as I am, for dinner.”
“I meant to call you back,” I blurted out, not realizing it was a non sequitur.
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
I couldn’t argue and so I said nothing.
“Morgan?”
“Yes?”
“Where are you? Let’s grab some dinner.”
I’d stopped walking and was leaning against the red stone wall of St. James Church. The night sky had turned from electric cobalt-blue to a blue-black velvet, and I had the feeling that if Noah kept talking, I’d keep standing there until stars came out and not even notice that any time had passed.
“I’m here.” No, that didn’t make sense. “I’m on the street, actually, Seventy-first. I just left the office.” Not good, I thought. I didn’t sound like I was in control.
“So, where can you meet me? I need to talk to you. I need to ask you in what way you are involved with Timothy Wheaton’s death.”
Twenty-Two
Twenty minutes later the maître d’ showed me to a round table for two in the back corner of Nicola’s, an Italian restaurant that had been a staple for people who lived on the Upper East Side for the past thirty years. I’d had dinner there with my father and Krista at least once a month since I was a child. It was a noisy, friendly, unpretentious restaurant decorated with the autographed book jackets, album covers and photographs of their better-known patrons.
I’d suggested it because it was the least romantic restaurant I could think of in the minute I had on the phone.
Noah had somehow gotten there first and, equally amazing, considering the size of the crowd waiting at the bar, secured one of the few quiet tables. It occurred to me not to ask him how he’d done it-I didn’t want to appear impressed.
As I took the last steps to the table, he looked up from a stack of papers he was reading. His eyes locked on mine. And held. It was a look that went right through me the way a blast of heat does on a winter night.
The waiter pulled out my seat.
“It’s awfully nice to see you,” Noah said in that slow drawl that made each word sound much more exotic than it was. I could see that he’d ordered a bottle of red wine because a glass, already poured, was waiting for me.
“You, too.” I could hear how clipped my own voice sounded. As cold as that winter night. He either ignored it or didn’t notice.
“Have some wine.” He gestured to the glass. “Have some garlic bread.” He held out the basket. “I bet you didn’t eat today. Except for maybe a container of yogurt. Or half a bagel.”
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was right.
“How’s Dulcie doing? How’s the play?” he asked. “It must be opening soon.”
I sipped the wine. Then drank again before answering. “It’s opening in January. And she’s working hard. Too hard, as far as I’m concerned, but she loves it. They’re going to Boston in two weeks for a preview.”
“Is she as nervous about it as you are?”
I’d met him in June and seen him only a half-dozen times, most of them professionally as he tracked down a serial killer, and yet he knew exactly how I was feeling. I hated that about him.
Part of my job with my patients was to keep my emotions in check-not to let anyone guess what my reaction was to what they were saying-and I was good enough at it that not even my ex-husband, whom I’d been with for sixteen years, could figure out what was going on behind the unremarkable expressions I kept plastered on my face.
But Noah knew.
“She is scared. But excited, too. It’s an enormous role. She’s in all but two scenes. She has three solos and six more numbers that she performs with other members of the cast.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I want to happen. If she does well I’m afraid she’s going to want to stick with it, and I hate the idea of the theater-or worse, film-eating up her childhood.” I took another sip of the wine, which was so smooth it felt like velvet in my mouth. “And I’m equally afraid that if she doesn’t do well it will hurt her terribly. She’s at such a vulnerable age. Not yet grown up, but not really a little girl anymore.”
He listened intently, reading my face, my expressions- paying attention to what I was saying and what I wasn’t. That’s what he did. He listened to me. It was how he’d seduced me, by asking me questions no one had ever asked me: about how I felt listening to patients all day long, about what it was like taking in all their pain and confusion and processing it. And for a while, I had luxuriated in his questions. Talked and talked. Frantically. Wildly. Like a butterfly that had been caught in a net for hours and then suddenly let go.
Afterward, I knew if I ever allowed myself to see him again, I wouldn’t be able to hold back anything, and that was such a disquieting, foreign feeling.
It was like getting a box of rich, dark chocolate truffles, and rather than putting them away and having one every once in a while, savoring them, I had thrown the whole box away, because I didn’t trust myself to go slowly. And I had not regretted it.
Or so I thought. Until tonight in Nicola’s.
We looked like all the other couples around us. Men and women who’d had separate days, coming together at night to go over what had happened to them and figure out how to deal with it.
Except we weren’t a couple.
He was a detective in New York’s elite Special Victims Unit who wanted information from me. I was a sex therapist who was not at liberty to discuss anything that transpired in my office.