Valentine, page 7
Dr. Philbin smiled. “So, do you want to marry him?”
Jill shrugged, uttering a small, bemused laugh. “I honestly don’t know. Tara thinks I’m crazy, of course. She hasn’t had much luck in the romance department, which is weird when you consider how nice she is, not to mention gorgeous. She has that famous ‘all-the-good-ones-are-married-or-gay’ philosophy about men, and she may be right. Nate just introduced her to a friend of his—apparently a widower and apparently not gay—and they’re having dinner together tomorrow night, so maybe she’ll get lucky. Anyway, she thinks I should grab Nate.”
The doctor smiled. “And what do you think?”
Jill was silent a moment, considering. At last she said, “I think I’d better think about it. ‘Decide to decide.’ I may not have much time.”
Dr. Philbin noticed the sudden change in Jill’s tone. She leaned forward, studying her client’s face.
Jill met her gaze and nodded. “I haven’t told him. I haven’t told anyone, not even Tara.” Then, for the first time in the three weeks she’d known about it, she spoke the words aloud.
“I’m pregnant.”
The two men walked out of the gallery and headed down Spring Street toward the little pub at the end of the block. Henry Jason was all set to join them until a last-minute phone call from a hysterical agent had sent him back to his office with a grim scowl.
“This could take hours,” he’d muttered, waving to them as he went. “Next time, boys.”
A chilling wind whipped down the little Village street, causing them to huddle in their coats and hurry the last few steps to the inviting dark warmth of the pub. They straddled barstools, greeting the familiar bartender and the familiar lush on the farthest stool—the only other patron at this hour—and calling for draft beers. Two foam-topped mugs materialized before them. They relaxed in their seats, and Doug lit a Marlboro and exhaled a stream of smoke.
“So,” Doug said, “when do I get a preview of ‘Conditions?’ ”
“Oh, drop by anytime. In fact, Thursday Jill is coming over to my place to see the paintings. She’s contributing the catalog copy. Don’t tell Henry—he thinks I do it myself. Why don’t you join us?”
Doug thought a moment. “Can I bring a date?”
“Sure! We’ll all have dinner, and then I’ll give you a private showing. I hope you like Ukrainian food.”
“I’m not sure I know what Ukrainians eat, but, hell, I’ll try anything once. Let me see how Tara and I hit it off tomorrow night. If everything’s cool, I’ll ask her about Thursday.”
He studied Doug Baron’s face, smiling at the calm expression that so obviously concealed a fit of first-date jitters. The cigarette in Doug’s hand was trembling slightly. “Hey, Tara’s a nice woman. You’ll be fine.”
Doug smiled and nodded. “I know. I just have to get used to this. It’s—it’s been a while.”
“I’m sorry, Doug,” he said quietly. “About your wife. I didn’t know till you mentioned it the other night.”
“Yeah,” the photographer whispered. “It’s been three years now. Anyway, you didn’t have much trouble finding the perfect woman.”
“You’d be surprised. But you’re right: Jill is pretty wonderful.”
Doug Baron nodded slowly, not meeting the other man’s gaze.
“She sure is, Nate,” he murmured. “I’m really looking forward to seeing her again.”
He picked up the mug in front of him, drained it, and lit another Marlboro.
The phone was ringing when Jill came into the apartment. She dropped her purse and the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter and hurried into the office before the machine clicked on. She hesitated a moment before picking up the receiver, as she had found herself doing for the last several days. Then, bracing herself, she answered.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hello again, Jill, it’s Dr. Philbin. I was reading over your file after you left my office, and I think—I think I may have found something. I’d like to talk about it with you.”
Jill was confused. “What do you mean?”
There was a slight pause on the line. Then the doctor cleared her throat and said, “Well, I’d rather not discuss it on the phone, but—it’s about something you told me during a session a few years ago. Let’s see . . .” Another pause, and Jill could hear pages rustling. “Are you free Friday afternoon? One o’clock? I have an opening then.”
“Yes, that would be fine. But, please, what is this about?”
She could almost hear the doctor thinking, choosing her words with care. “It’s about—I mean, it might be about these cards, about what’s been happening to you.”
“You have an idea?”
“I—I think I might. Friday, then. One o’clock.”
“Dr. Philbin,” she cried before the woman could hang up. “Please, what is it? What have you found?”
Another pause. Her heart was racing: she felt as if she could scream. Then, at last, the voice. “Well, the only reason it caught my eye was the fact that you mentioned Valentine’s Day. It’s something you told me about, something that happened to you in college. Do you remember a young man in Hartley College, a young man named, umm, Victor Dimorta?”
She stared blankly down at her computer for several moments before the name registered. Then her eyes widened.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God!”
The moment the two women hung up, he reached up slowly to remove the headphones. He’d arrived back here from Spring Street just in time to catch the call. He crushed out his Marlboro and rubbed his stinging eyes. He gazed out the window from his armchair, watching as Jillian Talbot came back into the living room and sat down on the couch. She was facing him: he could see her expression clearly.
Yes, he thought. She’s thinking. Remembering.
The plot thickens. . . .
Earth, Wind, and Fire
SIXTEEN YEARS AGO
They called themselves Earth, Wind, and Fire after their favorite rock group, but the other students simply referred to them, collectively, as the Elements. Their real names were Sharon Williams, Belinda Rosenberg, and Cass MacFarland, and they were the three prettiest—and richest—young women in the tiny college on the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont. When they inducted the shy, introverted English major into the club, they assigned her the name of the fourth element. This was a great joke for them, as she had never learned to swim and was deathly afraid of water.
There was nothing they enjoyed as much as a great joke, preferably at the expense of others. But they were the prettiest, and therefore the most popular. The other girls were respectful, the boys attentive, the professors indulgent. They ruled the campus, three little martinets made powerful by their formidable intelligence, their biting wit, and their facility with lip gloss and blow-dryers. She knew they were not very nice. But after her relatively lonely childhood in New York, her bookish lack of popularity in high school, and her all-too-recent confrontation with her drunken stepfather on the kitchen floor, she felt a sudden need to be part of a group—any group. She had never lived away from home before, and the attention of these three, sarcastic as it was, was comforting. She soon learned that their true interest in her was due to her excellent knowledge of math, and her willingness to “help” them with their calculus homework, the bane of their existence. This, of course, translated into her actually doing the homework for them, but she considered it a small price to pay. She was accepted by them; she was in a clique; she was Somebody.
It didn’t last very long.
She remembered that first meeting, at the beginning of the second semester of her freshman year. A chilly day in the first week of February. The three senior girls—blonde, brunette, and redhead—sitting at the best table in front of the large glass wall and the dramatic view of the snow-carpeted campus, in their tight jeans and form-fitting sweaters with fur coats draped dramatically around them, smoking cigarettes, laughing and calling out as she came so tentatively into the cafeteria, clutching her tray.
“Oh, Jill! Jill Talbot!” This from platinum Sharon. “Come sit with us, honey. We want to talk to you.”
“Yeah,” added Belinda the brunette. “A sort of proposition.”
Sly glances all around.
She’d felt profound surprise, followed immediately by a rush of warmth, of happiness, as everyone in the room turned to watch her step forward to join the Most Important Table. Redheaded Cass—the only nice one, really, when she was away from the others—merely smiled as Jill approached, letting her fellow empresses do all the talking. They grinned, made room for her, and offered her her very first—and last—cigarette.
When the coughing fit had run its course, amid much raucous laughter and slaps on her back, Sharon/Earth plucked the cigarette from her shaking fingers, crushed it out in a dish of Jell-O, and said, “How’d you like to be a member of our little sorority?”
“Oh, yes!—umm—yes, I’d like that,” she’d stammered when she’d found her voice, trying mightily not to sound too eager or—worse—too uncool.
“Faboo!” cried Belinda.
“You’re gonna love us, kid,” added Sharon. “And you’ll be one of us. And you know what that means—right, girls?”
“Too! Too! Very! Very!” the three shouted in perfect unison.
“That’s our watchcry,” the blonde explained, “because that’s what we are. Stick with us, and that’s what you’ll be, too!” Then, lowering her voice, she continued. “So, we take it that you wish to apply for membership with the Elements?”
“Uh, sure,” she whispered again, still recovering from the thrill, from the overwhelming glamour of it all.
“Faboo!” Belinda repeated before leaning forward and lowering her voice. “But, you know, there is one thing. In order to become a member, you have to pass a little—test.”
“An initiation,” Sharon said.
“Yeah,” said Belinda as Cass smiled on. “An initiation.”
Thus, it had begun. . . .
At eighteen, Jill felt that she was a late starter in the development department. She was too tall, too thin, too flat-chested. Her hair was fairly long then, down past her shoulders, but to her it was dull and lifeless. Everything about her seemed wrong: a graceless conglomeration of sharp angles and plain features. She would stand before the mirror, staring at her face and figure, trying to will them through sheer concentration into some more interesting, more pleasing mold. The fact that she was the only one who held this opinion did not occur to her. Her first semester at Hartley College was a protracted millennium of fear and uncertainty: she sat in the classrooms and wandered the campus, oblivious of the appreciative looks of the men and the envious looks of the women, never suspecting that her presumed mousiness existed only in her own imagination. She didn’t know that she was beautiful.
She missed New York City. She wrote long letters to her mother, who was still recovering from her recent divorce from Brian Marshall, and to her high school girlfriends at other colleges around the country. She missed the ballet classes she’d taken once a week for four years, and she lamented the fact that she hadn’t chosen a college that offered them. But her favorite high school English teacher, Mrs. Worth, had assured her that Hartley was the right place for anyone with her facility for writing. She had never entertained any serious aspiration to a career in dance: she wasn’t really that good at it. She’d known for a long time that she was destined to be a writer.
So here she was at Hartley. The first semester dragged on, highlighted only by her two English classes, world literature and creative writing. She kept mostly to herself, and she was not invited by any cliques, to say nothing of the various sororities and societies that made up the campus social scene. The only group she joined was the English Club, an unofficial gathering of the brightest students who read a current book a week and came together on Friday evenings to discuss it. She would sit in the campus coffee shop with five or six others, her fellow misfits, listening as they droned on about Robert Stone and Toni Morrison and John Updike and Nadine Gordimer, acutely aware that everyone else was at parties and sporting events or roaming in herds through the nearby mall.
When that fall semester finally ended, she got on the train and went home for the intercession. Christmas was a drab and rather sad time that year: her mother was still not feeling well and her few New York friends were busy elsewhere. She sat in her bedroom those first two weeks of January, writing depressing poems and short stories. Toward the end of the holiday, she realized with genuine surprise that she was looking forward to going back to Vermont. The isolation of the college suddenly seemed more inviting, more appealing than the isolation of the apartment on Central Park West.
The second semester began more promisingly than the first. Once she returned to the college, Jill realized that she was tired of being alone, and she began to take more notice of the activity around her. She forced herself to interact more with her classmates, and she made an effort to sit with them in the library and the cafeteria instead of seeking out the only empty table in the place. Some of the other students were friendly, and she got along well enough. But it was in this time that her attention was first drawn to the Elements, the three beautiful women who ruled the place.
She would watch them from a distance, studying their dress and makeup and mannerisms, trying to analyze just exactly what it was that made them so popular. She noticed that the dark-haired one, Belinda Rosenberg, had her hair cut attractively short in the latest fashion. One day in the cafeteria, she even went over to their table by the window, introduced herself, and asked Belinda where she got her hair done. Belinda told her—in exchange for a little “help” with the calculus homework she was hastily completing over lunch, minutes before it was due. The following Saturday, Jill went to the salon at the mall and had her own hair cut in Belinda’s style.
By that first week of February, when the Elements called her over to their table, she was only too eager to join them.
“He is such a creep!” Belinda exclaimed.
“Totally!” agreed Sharon, the blond ringleader. “Always leering at us. I swear, he stares at every woman on this campus as if she wasn’t wearing any clothes. He’s a complete gross-out.” She paused for dramatic effect, then added, with a gleam in her eye, “And we are going to do something about it!”
Jill looked up from a calculus problem to stare at her new friends, wondering what they had in mind. It was now the second week of her tenure as an Element, and she was already beginning to wonder if joining them had been a mistake, She didn’t like the gleam in Sharon’s eye any more than she liked the general air of conspiratorial mischief that permeated Belinda’s dorm room. And two weeks of doing their math homework was beginning to wear. Had she been any other kind of girl—more poised, more sure of herself—she would have gotten up from her seat at the foot of Belinda’s bed and left the three of them to their own devices. Instead, she smiled halfheartedly around at them and waited for instructions.
The boy they were talking about, Victor Dimorta, was all they said he was, and more. She herself had recently had a run-in with him, dodging his clumsy, foul-breath advances in a suddenly empty classroom a few days before. The tall, skinny, pale young man with the acne scars pockmarking his face and the limp, greasy brown hair had attempted to engage her in conversation. When she’d smiled at him and edged toward the door, he’d taken her involuntary kindness as encouragement and tried to kiss her. The rough feel of his strong hands on her arms still sent a shiver through her. She pushed him away and ran down the hall, her pounding footsteps eventually drowning out his desperate, rather angry cries.
“Wait a minute! I just want to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you. Jill? Jill!!”
Now, in Belinda’s bedroom, they were planning their revenge for that and several similar infractions.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” Sharon said as her fellow Elements watched her face in anticipation. “Belinda, this room will be perfect. I want candles, incense, red lightbulbs in the lamps—we are talking complete and total whorehouse, dig?”
“Faboo!”
“Okay. Cass, you’re in charge of the video. I want this place totally bugged. You’ll be in that closet over there, filming.”
“Do you really think—?” the essentially good-hearted redhead began.
“Don’t interrupt me!” came the quick retort. “You film. Period! B’lin, you set the stage.”
“Sure,” Belinda said. “And what are you contributing, Sharon?”
The beautiful blond girl slowly smiled. “My dear, I am the bait! And we, ladies, are going to take care of Mr. Victor Dimorta—Mr. Victory Over Death!!—once and for all! That’s what his name means in Italian, you know. ‘Victory over death.’ Can you believe? Fifty million gorgeous, sexy Italian men in the world, and we get the only dud! But we are going to fix his wagon, make no mistake!”
