Weird Girl, page 22
So, she got to know her new city. Two months of shopping had taught her a lot of the geography, but not much about the experiences that San Francisco could offer. Cleo rode the trolley, and did the Alcatraz tour (although she asked so many questions that the tour guide started ignoring her), and ate ice cream at Ghirardelli Square, and watched the sea lions chatter on the shore. She visited every art museum, and watched street performers in Union Square, and listened to stoned poets in Haight-Ashbury coffee shops. Once the touristy stuff had been crossed off her list, Cleo took sailing lessons and worked her way through the menu of an authentic restaurant in Chinatown, where nobody spoke English and the food sometimes still moved on her plate. Sometimes, she would wander behind groups of gawking tourists, picking their pockets to keep in practice and eavesdropping on their conversations. Once, she followed a Portuguese family for two hours, not caring that she couldn’t understand a word that they said. She liked trying to figure it out by their body language and tone.
Soon, though, even these things lost some of their appeal. Except for the eavesdropping—it was one of her favorite ways to relax, sitting at a table, drinking cappuccino and scribbling someone else’s conversation into a notebook. But, the restlessness that she had managed to hide away now came back, rearing its head and vibrating through her entire body. By the time spring crept back to San Francisco, Cleo felt lost. So, she systematically broke into every apartment in her building, getting to know the neighbors, so to speak. But rather than soothe the beast within, this only amplified her edginess. As she was poking through the Cranford family’s medicine cabinet, only half of her brain was with her. The other half was already planning the next break-in, and her fingers would start to tingle with anticipation. It was a “grass is greener” kind of moment. From the moment that the tumblers clicked and the door swung open, Cleo would immediately think, “Meh—the next apartment’s probably more interesting.” She had always loved B&E, but now it seemed so essential that she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She never took anything, and still occasionally left money in pockets or in the dryer. It was as though she was searching for something very particular, some specific feeling or sensation, but she didn’t know what it was or how to find it. Every day, she would come home and sit in the dark, watching the lights twinkle over the bay, and try to identify this thing in her chest that seemed desperate to claw its way out.
Using the hypothesis that maybe she needed personal human contact, she started going out at night, often dancing until 3am under the anonymity of strobe lights and fog machines. Or, she would listen to jazz musicians in dark, moody nightclubs and flirt with men in pinstripe suits and fedoras until they sent a drink her way (nobody ever carded Cleo). Occasionally, she allowed a cheesy pick-up artist to take her back to his place, thinking that sex would take the edge off of her unrest. She tried speed dating, but the impulse to lie was so overwhelming that it made the exercise useless.
Speed Dater #3: “Hi, I’m Todd. I’m an electrical engineer, a Virgo, and I love to cook. Tell me about yourself.”
Cleo: “My name is Kiki, I sell makeup door-to-door, and I only eat uncooked spaghetti noodles and organic peanut butter.”
Speed Dater #15: “Hi, I’m Chris. I work at the Museum of Modern Art and love to dance. I’d love to know more about you.”
Cleo: “I’m Rainflower. How would you feel about being bathed in lamb’s blood under the light of the full moon?”
Speed Dater #27: “My name is Sam, and I’m a stockbroker. I just got out of a really crazy relationshi—“
Cleo: “Don’t look now, but I think she just came in the door. Beautiful, well-dressed, heading your way…Oh my God! She’s got a knife! Hahaha. Just kidding. You can come out from under the table, Steve.”
Speed Dater #27: “My name is Sam.”
Cleo: “Well, Sam, I’m just looking for a one-night stand, but only if the sex is going to be good. I fully intend to crawl out of your bed after you fall asleep, rifle through your medicine cabinet, raid your refrigerator, and walk out of your life forever. Are you game?”
Speed Dater #27: “Let me go get the car.”
Later, she left Sam softly snoring on his stomach, the sheets tangled around his hips, and quietly plundered his apartment, sniffing his shampoo and lightly running her fingers down the sleeves of his suit jackets in the closet. Figuring that the poor guy didn’t need any more reminders of his ex, Cleo also helped herself to a small assortment of jewelry from a porcelain dish on the bathroom counter. She sat in the living room, naked but for a black and red striped blanket loosely wrapped around her body, and listened to the muffled sounds of the city filtering through the windows, the ticking clock on the bookshelf, the slow drip of the kitchen faucet, wondering what it would be like to feel attached to somebody. It wasn’t that she was incapable of bonding—she had felt a mild affection for Nick when they were dating, and of course there had been Achillea, all those years ago—it was that she wasn’t sure if she would ever have a real connection, that true understanding when two people just click. Since she had never had it, she wasn’t really sure that she was missing out on something. All she knew was the restlessness that had plagued her for months (or, if she was honest, years). A memory nudged her with its fingertips, a vague flash of dark laughter riding a wave of peppermint. She finished off the beer that she had pilfered from Sam’s refrigerator and got dressed in the darkness of the bedroom, replacing the blanket exactly as it had been before silently letting herself out.
***
She should have called a taxi, but Cleo had never known fear, only curiosity. And right now, she wanted to walk the steep hills of her city before night gave way to dawn. She inhaled the fishy air and put her hands in her pockets, leisurely strolling past sleeping derelicts and stray dogs, listening to the mournful sound of a distant barge and the whispers of San Francisco shadows. She was halfway to her apartment before she realized that she was being followed.
The footsteps matched her own so closely that it could have been an echo. But she felt it at the nape of her neck, and in the pit of her belly, and once, when she stopped suddenly, her echo took an extra step. Most women, alone at five in the morning, another fifteen minutes away from home, would have been terrified. Cleo was intrigued. As far as she knew, she had never been followed before. After a brief pause, she walked on, maintaining the same leisurely pace. Her echo did the same, all the way to Cleo’s street. And then it stopped, a polite distance behind her, and she went into her building alone, rushing up the stairs to look out the window. No one was there. Cleo’s heart was racing, but she wasn’t afraid. She felt—happy.
Cleo went for a late night walk the next night. And the night after that. She walked by the waterfront, past Telegraph Hill, through Chinatown. She breathed in the bay air, and listened to her echo, about fifty yards behind her. She never turned around.
30
One night, Cleo stopped suddenly. Her echo took an extra step, but then froze. On a whim, Cleo crept up the steps of a pink Victorian house, pulled out her lock picks, and let herself in. She had never broken into a house at night while people were sleeping. It was impulsive, and exciting, and she wanted her echo to see her in action. She crept through the shadowed parlor, and into a kitchen that smelled faintly of rye bread. Upstairs, snores floated underneath two closed doors. A third was partially cracked, and a wedge of moonlight beckoned her to the doorway. A girl was sleeping on a frilly pink bed, a teddy bear wedged under her chin like an extra pillow. Cleo tiptoed back downstairs and sat on the worn sofa, leaning back against a crocheted afghan and trying to make out the shapes and shadows of tchotchkes and family photos. After an hour, she relocked the front door behind her and skipped down the steps, immediately resuming her original path. The echo started behind her, and she smiled the whole way back to her apartment.
Cleo and her shadow played their nighttime game well into the summer, until she became more focused on the footsteps behind her than the footsteps in front of her. Gleefully pulling out her lock picks, she crouched on one knee and slid a thin piece of metal into the lock on a grand Nob Hill house. The door popped open and she stood up, stepping over the threshold…and bouncing off a man standing just inside the darkened foyer, a suitcase in one hand and a briefcase in the other. They stared at one another in absolute surprise, and then he reached out and pushed a red button on the alarm panel by the door, lunging for her just as she turned to run. He wrestled her to the floor and kept her pinned there until the police arrived.
If she hadn’t been distracted by her game with the echo, she would have realized that a Nob Hill house would have a security system. It wouldn’t have mattered if the man had been leaving for the airport at 4am, or if the house had been empty. She would have set off the alarm just the same. It was stupid, and careless, and she was furious with herself.
Still, she hadn’t stolen anything. In fact, there was speculation that she even successfully picked the lock at all, since the man remembered turning the doorknob just as the door opened. Attempted breaking and entering is small potatoes compared to the murders and armed robberies working their way through the justice system, and her attorney insisted that she had just been there on a dare. Why else would an eighteen-year-old rich girl, who owned her own penthouse, be breaking into a house at four in the morning? Still, the judge saw something strange in Cleo. Frankly, he was weirded out by the way she scribbled in her notebook the entire time she was in court. So, she didn’t go to jail. She paid a $500 fine, and was told to visit a court-ordered psychiatrist, with the mandate that she attend therapy sessions until the doctor would attest that she was not a threat to the city, or to herself. Which would have been great, except that she ended up almost killing him.
***
She started seeing her therapist in September, two weeks after her nineteenth birthday. Dr. Davis was around forty-five years old, with salt and pepper hair and black rimmed glasses. He wore a Rolex and liked to tap his pen on the desk while she talked, and she suspected that he rarely listened. As an experiment, she once spent fifteen minutes talking about penguins, and all he did was nod and smile. Cleo found it somewhat relaxing at first, to slip off her shoes, tuck her feet underneath her legs in the plush leather chair, and ramble about nothing for fifty minutes. Four weeks in, the experience had lost its shine. One day, after a particularly long monologue about her time with the Peace Corps (entirely fictional), he told her that she might consider joining an organization that would allow her to devote her excess time to building schools or cleaning up after natural disasters, to which she replied, “No shit, Sherlock” and rolled her eyes. At this point, Cleo had begun to lose interest in therapy. She began to wonder why one little non-robbery should warrant this many weekly sessions with a man who never even asked about her childhood.
In fact, he would have signed off on her court sheet after three or four sessions, if not for the day that she showed up for therapy wearing a red jersey dress that hugged her curves, her chestnut hair hanging in waves down to her shoulder blades. The view that was offered when she leaned forward to put her shoes back on was nothing short of miraculous, and Dr. Davis now had new motivation to keep her around. So, she kept going to therapy, and Dr. Davis kept cashing her checks. Except, instead of ignoring her, he now spent fifty minutes a week trying to seduce her.
She caught on to what he was doing after a couple of weeks, but figured it could only help her get out of therapy faster, so she batted her eyelashes, and smiled like she had a secret, and laughed whenever he was clever (and often when he wasn’t). He moved her appointment to the last evening slot, and served her champagne to help her relax, and asked her to tell him about her dreams. Unsurprisingly, he interpreted every single one as an example of her sexual repression, and he would massage her shoulders and tell her to imagine herself in a bed with white linens and candles all around it.
***
One evening in December, while he was massaging and she was pretending to imagine the stupid bed, his fingers started dipping lower and lower, to her collarbones, and then barely inside the neckline of her dress. “What the fuck are you doing?” Cleo asked conversationally. The fingers froze. Several seconds of silence passed, until Cleo sighed and said, “Look, what will it take to get that paper signed so I’m done with mandatory therapy shit?”
“Have sex with me,” said Dr. Davis. He gulped and waited for her to scream, but instead she just shrugged and said, “Alright.”
Cleo stood up and turned to face him, laughing at the uncertainty on his face. “Are we doing this, or not?” she said. Reaching for his tie, she tugged him closer and kissed him on the mouth. That one moment of contact ignited a fire within him, and in half a second, he had pushed her on her back across his desk and was hurriedly unbuckling his belt while kissing her jawline.
She recovered from her initial surprise and wrapped her legs around his waist to ease the strain on her torso. “So, one time and I get my papers, right?” she said.
He ignored her, nibbling her collarbone and unbuttoning his shirt. So, she slapped him on the ear and repeated: “One time and I get my papers, right?” she yelled. He nodded and took off his pants, tripping over the shoes that were still on his feet and nearly falling over in the process. Cleo sighed and waited for him to get back to business.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he growled as he began kissing her earlobe, down her neck, and across her left clavicle. Suddenly, he buried his face in her cleavage and laughed.
“What?” she asked, gasping a little as his hands ran up her thighs.
“I signed your papers two months ago, but I couldn’t send them in” he said, his voice muffled by her breasts. Then he giggled. “I just had to have you,” he gasped. Then, he jerked her neckline and bra cup aside and groaned before grabbing and squeezing her with one hand, while the other reached under her dress in search of her underwear.
It took her four or five seconds to process what he meant. “You mean, I could have quit coming a long time ago?” she asked, her voice holding the first hint of anger.
He giggled again, his fingernails scratching her hip as he tried to hook the waistline of her panties. Cleo thought about it for a few more seconds. “So, what you’re telling me is that you’ve made me come here, for months, holding me hostage, just because you wanted to get laid?”
“Oh, God, Cleo” he groaned as he directed his attention to freeing her other breast. They were the last words he uttered before she reached for the bronze bust of Oedipus behind her head and brained him with it.
His face froze in a moment of utter shock. Then, as the blood trickled down, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his body went limp on top of her.
She took a deep breath and shoved with both hands, not caring when his head bounced off the corner of the desk as his body crashed to the floor. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” she screamed, kicking him hard in the balls.
He lay there, not moving, one eye partially open. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or not, and the adrenaline surge that had fueled her anger moments before was now causing her to hyperventilate. The blood was rushing in her ears, and all she could do was look from the wound on his head, now almost black as the blood congealed, to the bronze Oedipus, bloody streaks trailing down from his hollow eye sockets. The phone on his desk began to ring, but it sounded very far away.
It rang until the answering machine picked up, and then the person hung up. And called back. And hung up. And called back. It was a struggle for Cleo to pay attention to the ringing because of the pounding in her head. Finally, the answering machine picked up and a man said, “Miss St. James, there is a car waiting for you downstairs. Gather your things, and leave now.”
Cleo stared at the phone like it had spontaneously started dancing and singing showtunes. The phone rang again, and this time the man said, “Miss St. James, this will all be taken care of. Please get your things and go to the car.”
She looked once more at Dr. Davis, his shirt unbuttoned, his plaid boxers bunched and twisted, his pale, hairy legs leading to dark socks and dress shoes. When the phone rang again, she jumped into action, adjusting her clothing and smoothing her hair. She slipped her feet into her black leather heels and dropped the Oedipus into her purse before stepping over the body and letting herself out. Outside, a black car was idling at the curb. As she stepped out of the doctor’s office, a man got out of the car and held open the rear door for her. She got in without hesitation, and they pulled into evening traffic.
The driver parallel parked in front of her building and sat, polite in his silence, until Cleo came out of her daze and realized that she was home. Without even thinking to ask his name, or why he had come to get her, or how he knew where she lived, she pulled a hundred dollars out of her purse, dropped it over the front seat, and got out of the car on shaky legs.
***
She barely managed to steady her keys enough to unlock the door to her apartment. Dropping keys and purse on the floor, she kicked off her shoes and stood in the dark, forcing herself to breathe deeply as her heart rate slowed down. Suddenly, a man’s arm reached over her shoulder, clamping a hand across her mouth and yanking her back toward a solid chest in a single, elegant movement.
