In another day, Taylor was at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for his Pan Am flight to be called when he saw one of the Parisian dailies screaming headlines about a Prince Alessandro di Contini having survived the two bullets shot into him by his wife. Taylor’s flight was called. He left the small kiosk, aware of the beginnings of yet another headache. He read a bit more, then left the newspaper on the counter. He accepted two aspirin from a flight attendant, leaned back, and closed his eyes, saying his usual prayer that the plane would make it into the air.
He thought of Diane, his fiancée of four months, wondering yet again if it was smart for them to get married. They’d lived together in Diane’s spacious East Side apartment for the past six months. She was rich and he wasn’t. He was a cop and she was trying to talk him off the force, but he was young and arrogant and confident and he didn’t buy it. She’d come around. It was her responsibility. They were good in bed together. His trip to France was his bachelor’s last fling the way he saw it. Diane thought he was nuts because he wanted to vacation by himself, riding a motorcycle all over a foreign country, but she’d only bitched a little bit, content to warn him a good three times not to catch anything with French girls. Everyone knew how promiscuous they were. Taylor didn’t, but he didn’t bother to correct her. He’d tried to explain that it was the country itself that drew him, that he really couldn’t explain it, but when he’d hitchhiked there when he was eighteen, he knew, simply knew that at one time or another he’d lived here, been part of the land, part of the culture. A previous life? He didn’t know, but he did know that he felt wonderful when he was riding a motorcycle beside the Loire River, smelling the ripening grapes in Bordeaux, gazing in awe at the ancient Roman ruins scattered throughout Provence.
He’d be home soon, a couple days early. He wondered when he’d be able to go to France again. There was already the longing for it growing in his gut. He would be twenty-five in two weeks and married in three.
He thought again of the young girl in the emergency room. He knew he wouldn’t forget the rape, nor would he forget her battered face and her screams. Nor would he forget her name, the name beneath the prince’s in that newspaper at the kiosk at the airport—Lindsay Foxe. Not that it mattered, he thought. Not that it mattered.
Lindsay
It was very hot and it was only the beginning of May. Lindsay sat on a stone bench under an oak tree on the Columbia campus. She was wearing loose-legged khaki walking shorts and a short-sleeved white blouse. Reeboks and thick white socks were on her feet. She wore a tennis bracelet on her right wrist, a gift to herself. She admired Martina Hingis enormously. Her legs were already tanned from playing tennis every day for the past two months. She was very good but nowhere near great. Her forehand was a killer, her backhand two-handed but still unpredictable. As for her serve, she got an ace at least one in twenty times. She wasn’t playing tennis until tomorrow morning with Gayle Werth, her best friend from the Stamford Girls’ Academy, also a senior at Columbia, majoring in physical education. Gayle was her doubles partner and the better player.
Lindsay had one more final exam. She would graduate with a B.A. in psychology in two more weeks. From Columbia, a school with a good reputation.
Then what would she do? There had been company reps on campus a few months before, but nothing they had to offer interested her in the slightest, except for the foreign service, which sounded exciting, at least until she’d met the young man who was their primary representative. He couldn’t talk about any place but Italy. Lindsay was never going to Italy.
Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten since the previous night at Marlene’s apartment. Salami pizza with extra cheese and a can of light beer. It had made her sick.
The pizza had been god-awful, but it alone hadn’t done her in. It was also that guy, Peter Merola, a friend of Marlene’s, a classmate. He’d been persistent, and when he’d pretended to accidentally rub his hand against her breast, touching her nipple, she’d bolted to the bathroom and been sick in the toilet. When she’d come out, Peter was coming on to another girl and this one looked interested.
She was safe.
Lindsay rose even as she pulled a sheaf of notes from her large floppy purse. It was fine cordovan leather, soft light brown, and it grew softer by the year, four of them now. She carried everything in it, her cell phone, her books, some tennis balls, a razor, and an extra pair of socks and underwear. She fanned the notes out on her lap. This was her last course and it was taught by Professor Gruska, who was an ardent Freudian, a dying breed, thank God. He had intense eyes, looked like a professor, and lived with his father on the West Side at Eighty-fourth Street. He was at least fifty and had never been married. He was strange, but he thought she was stranger. Dr. Gruska had come to the conclusion that Lindsay was screwed up after he’d read a short play she had written, an assignment showing how members of a family related to each other. Lindsay had made up a family, but Dr. Gruska had probed and prodded. He’d gone so far as to read some of her play aloud in class. Then he’d called her to his office after class. He’d asked her questions about her father, wondering aloud if she had a thing for him. He suggested to her that he could help her sort things out. They could begin right now if she liked.
Lindsay had walked out, saying nothing. She was shaking and cursing and afraid within five minutes of leaving his wretched little office. Time had dealt with the worst of it, but not her intense hatred of Gruska, hatred coated with a goodly dose of fear. She would have never gone back, but she needed the class to graduate. She’d forced herself to apologize two weeks later; it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. He’d nodded, looking grave. He’d said only that she could call him or come to his office at any time. She could trust him. She realized then that he’d probably looked her up in old newspapers, and now he knew she’d been raped by her brother-in-law. She realized then that she wasn’t certain what the papers had reported; she’d refused to read any of them. For all she knew, she’d been the one to seduce Alessandro and to shoot him. She closed off her memories. Now she was taking Gruska’s final—essays, he’d told the class, because they were graduating seniors, psych majors, and reportedly somewhat literate. She read her notes as she walked toward the cafeteria, thinking it was a great deal of bullshit. She’d never had a thing for her father; all she’d ever wanted was for him just to recognize that she was there and that she was his daughter. Was that abnormal? Probably no more abnormal than her choosing psychology for a major because she’d hoped, deep down, that she would gain some insights, some self-awareness, to help her stop trembling with terror whenever a man came close to her. Some courses, some professors, had been helpful. Outwardly, no one would ever be able to guess what had happened to her—she’d filled herself with insights from every psychological theory; she’d grown up; she understood that the prince was mentally ill and she had been just a helpless girl drawn in by him; she accepted her fear of men as not being normal, but quite natural, of course, because of what the prince had done to her. She accepted all of it, took it in mental stride, smiled occasionally with cool objectivity at the idea of anyone being actually afraid of the opposite sex, but in the stillness of the night, when she was alone, the pain of those memories could still overwhelm her, the pain and the humiliation, her own stupidity. But she handled it now. At the very least, psychology had taught her how to handle it. Except handling Gruska, the jerk.