“It’s like walking into another century,” I said.
“You aren’t kidding. Wait till you see the kitchen and the bathroom. My tub has claw feet.”
Two flights up, Noah opened the door to his apartment, turned on the light and let me precede him inside. The ceilings were ten feet high and the walls were wainscoted halfway up in lovely warm oak. The floors, covered with random scattered Oriental rugs, were also oak. The windows, framed in ornate molding, looked over the back garden of a church.
The furniture was simple but classic. Arts and Crafts couches, chairs and table. All upholstered with William Morris patterns. Lithographs and posters from the same late-nineteenth-century period hung on the walls. In one corner stood a baby grand.
There was a small kitchen off the living room with glassfronted cabinets and an old stove and sink that, despite their age, were in pristine condition.
Everything was subtle, subdued and masculine, but beautiful.
“I’m impressed.”
“That I have taste?”
I shook my head. “No. At the quality of these reproductions. These pieces look original.”
“That’s because they are.”
There was no way I could ask him how he managed to afford all this on a detective’s salary, but he knew what I was thinking.
“I’ve actually written a few songs that have been published. I don’t sell much. But what I’ve sold has done well.”
“The pieces you were playing tonight? They were yours?”
“Some of them.”
I shook my head. “You can do that, but you still stay on as a detective?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“May I ask why?”
“Being a detective is a part of me. What my dad did. What I always wanted to do. I play piano real easy. I need it for balance, but first I’m a cop.”
I nodded.
“The same way you need to do those stone sculptures.”
There wasn’t anything to say. I never talked about my sculpture and didn’t think about them in words. The abstract shapes weren’t anything I wanted anyone to judge or question. They were not important once they were finished. It was just that the process kept me sane when little else did.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“No. I’m fine.”
I suddenly felt awkward in his apartment. Inexperienced, tired, not sure of myself. In some strange way, Noah didn’t seem attractive anymore, and being in his apartment seemed like a mistake. I was afraid in a way that I wasn’t even at the Diablo bar with Cleo’s clients.
“Why don’t you sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”
He went into the kitchen. I looked at my watch. If I left now, I could get home and be asleep before eleven.
“You take one sugar, right?” he called from the kitchen.
“Yes, thanks.”
“Would you like some brandy in it? Or Sambuca?”
“No, nothing,” I said.
He brought out two steaming mugs, set them on the coffee table and sat down beside me. I picked up my coffee, took a sip and grimaced. It was too hot. Not sweet enough. I could taste the chicory and it was bitter.
“You know, I should go. This wasn’t a good idea.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded. “Let me drive you.”
“No.”
“I insist.”
“No. That’s silly. It’s just uptown.”
“Okay. Then let me go downstairs with you and get you a cab.”
“Too much trouble. You’re exhausted. There are a million cabs.”
“Fine. But first, tell me what just happened. All of a sudden you seem like you’re ready to jump out of your skin.”
I shrugged.
He leaned forward and kissed me, but this time there was nothing about it that connected us. Two separate sets of lips crashing together but not touching.
Noah was trying to melt my reserve, but it felt like an assault. All the smells, the touches, were an invasion. His skin was rough on my cheek, his warm touch was hot on my hand. Moving away from the kiss and his smell and his hands, I scooted forward on the couch and reached for my coffee.
“I can’t explain…” I started.
“No, it’s all right, Morgan, you don’t have to.”
The surprise must have registered on my face. “I’m not used to people telling me what I don’t have to do.”
“I can believe that. But you’re not out there with ‘people’ now. You’re here. And I like seeing you sitting there. No one has ever sat there that way looking as right as you do. So indulge me. Let’s not have a postmortem on an abortion. Just stay awhile. Let me play you some music. All you have to do is listen. And then I’ll drive you home.”
Noah was smiling at me. Not the kind of look I expected a man to have etched on his face after being rebuffed.
Now that the pressure was gone, I felt I could stay and let him drive me home. It would recement the working relationship. It would dissolve the tension.
He got up, went to the CD player, looked through a pile of cases, then popped out what was already in there and put in new disks.
Soft, heady music, the kind my mother had loved, flooded the apartment. Old-fashioned crooners sang their songs: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. I sipped more of the coffee. I was getting used to the bitterness and starting to think that I actually liked it.
Noah sat on the chair catercorner to the couch, his eyes focused on a point to my right.
For ten minutes he didn’t say anything. And I sat there just listening to the music, forgetting that I should be doing something or saying something or explaining myself.
He took out two glass balloons and poured an inch of brandy into each. Pushing one toward me, he lifted his own, inhaled and then took a sip.
“So, tell me,” he said. “How do you separate what you do from who you are?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You listen to people talk to you about their sex lives all day. About what turns them on that shouldn’t. Or at least they think shouldn’t. About what works for them in bed and what doesn’t. I’m sure you hear all the things I see. Violence, S and M, bondage, autoeroticism, fairy tales without any happy endings, prostitutes who fuck for drug money, for abusive pimps, for Gucci shoes…crap. Nothing that’s very pretty. Six years of being a sex therapist, years of being a general shrink before that. How do you get away from it?”
I looked down at the brandy. “I don’t. I don’t want to.”
“But you need to, don’t you?”
“When I’m with my daughter, with Dulcie, I don’t think about my patients.”
“Yeah, having kids must help.”
I felt something stuck in my throat. I took a sip of the brandy. It was my first sip, and it burned, hard and hot in my throat. I almost gasped. I coughed. He looked at me. Held my gaze.
“But when she’s not there, they haunt you, don’t they?”
“Trying to help them haunts me. The sadness of some of my patients’ problems is hard to walk away from just because the clock says the workday is over. You don’t stop thinking about a woman who wants to be tied down and have her lover wear a mask and use a cat-o’-nine-tails on her. But it’s not just the extremes. There are women who crave pain and men who crave being demeaned. The couples who don’t understand that seduction is as important as sex. Who have lost the art of touch. Who have an easier time spending money than spending time together. Every part of the body is connected to someone’s problems, someone else’s neuroses.”
“So how do you separate yourself from all that?”
“It’s part of your training to know how to leave…” My voice became bitter. Like the coffee. And that surprised me. “I can’t separate myself from it. I see my patients’ lives, like movies, playing out in my mind when I get into bed at night. I try to figure out what I can say to them. What I can suggest. Where I can lead them. How far I can push. It’s what I do.”