When she started up again, it was as though she were answering a question that I had never asked. Silence does that sometimes.
“What was it like to be there? I wanted to fall in love that night. I wanted to fall in love that night, and Sterling was there. He was handsome. He was charming. Oh, Sterling’s not really tall enough to be my dream man, and I’d always fantasized that I’d end up with a guy with darker hair, but… that night he let me be there, but not be there. He let me dip a toe in the water-of, of that world-but he didn’t throw me in the pool. He stayed with me almost the entire night while I tried to find out exactly where I might fit.
“That’s not easy when you’re nineteen and you’re on a yacht in St. Tropez, right? Knowing where you fit?”
She found some affirmation somewhere in my impassive face, and she went on.
“There were other… you know, people for him on the boat. Plenty of them. Prettier than me. More adventurous than me, that’s for sure. But… he didn’t… go with them. He stayed with me. We danced. We kissed a little. Okay, we kissed a lot. And… you know. We watched a… little. But we didn’t… So I guess that’s why he was the one I…”
I was aware of the disconnect I was feeling. Despite the hour, despite my aversion to true sex adventures, the erotic escapade that Gibbs was spinning was actually interesting to me. I pushed myself hard against the cushion of my chair. It was a way of telling myself to take a step back. A way of reminding myself that whatever it was that was happening right then in my office, it was about Gibbs, not about her interlude in St. Tropez with Sterling.
My job was to ignore the fireworks and focus on the night sky.
To use my night vision. Not to be blinded.
“Anyway, he did call,” she went on. “He actually called my parents’ house the following Christmas Eve. I was home from school for the holidays. He came over, and we stayed out almost that whole night, just talking.”
Instinctively, I guessed what was next.No sex,I thought.He played it cool. It was just like St. Tropez, sans the yacht and the Mediterranean.
“We didn’t have sex then,” she confirmed. “We just talked. But the whole night I felt like I was back on that yacht with him. It was that sensuous, that romantic, you know? I felt an anticipation, a sense of I-can’t-wait, I-can’t-wait, that I hadn’t felt on Christmas Eve since I was eight years old. But of course it was different. And that’s the charge I feel-still feel-when I see Sterling.”
Mental note: She said “feel,” not “felt.”
The slope Gibbs was on suddenly changed. I experienced it as a physical sensation. Her momentum slowed as the gravitational forces eased. She pulled into herself, squeezing her biceps against her upper body. The effect was to force her breasts together, accentuating her previously modest cleavage.
Was that her intent? And was it conscious or unconscious? That was my call to make. It was why I was paid the big bucks.
But I didn’t know.
“We had sex the first time a week later, on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “We were at a party, at a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. You know, in L.A.? Some friends of his lived there. We ended up doing it on the balcony. The night wasn’t that different from the party in St. Tropez. People were having sex all over the place. I could see another couple going at it in the bedroom next door while we were doing it outside.”
She flicked a glance at me. If she could have read my mind, she would have known that I was musing that she and I had certainly spent our youths being invited to different parties.
What was she hoping? That I’d find her tale titillating? Scandalous? Mundane? I couldn’t guess. I didn’t like that I couldn’t guess.
“That was the first time he said ‘catch me.’ ”
“ ‘Catch me’?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “ ‘Catch me.’ He said it again last night. It brought me back, reminded me.”
I adopted a studied silence, waiting, wondering where Gibbs was going to go with her story of erotic adventure. It was clear that she wanted me to know that she’d made love to her husband the night before.
Was that it? Was that all?
What did thecatch mestory mean?
She matched my quiet. I set my sensors for defiance but wasn’t sure exactly what I was detecting.
During the ensuing interim of silence I had a revelation-a slap-across-the-face kind of revelation.
My insight permitted me-hell, it compelled me-to finally ask the question I should have asked three days before, when Gibbs had first waltzed into my office and revealed that she believed her husband, Sterling, was a killer.
“Why did you come to see me, Gibbs?”
“What do you mean? We had an appointment.”
My question had ambushed her, and her reply was more concrete than an interstate highway.
“Not this morning. I’m wondering why you came back into therapy with me.”
She blinked twice in rapid succession. She parted her lips. But she didn’t respond.
Finally I felt I knew something. Suddenly the therapy wasn’t as amorphous as it had been.
What is it that I know?
I knew I had asked the right question. It wasn’t much, but at that moment it felt pretty darn good.
So why had she come to see me?
SEVENTEEN
Twenty long seconds passed.
“I don’t know what you mean. Why did I come to see you? I need your help to… get the situation with Sterling taken care of.”
“Really?” I said. Her defenses had stiffened and become awkward as she tried to parry my thrust. My compassion for her swelled. With my simple question I was trying to sound dubious. It wasn’t too difficult.
She dissembled. “What else could it be?” Gibbs asked. “I can’t live with-what he’s done. What else could it be?”
A tough question, one I was not prepared to answer.
I knew she wasn’t, either.
I asked myself another tough question:Well, Doctor, if this isn’t all about sex and murder, what is it about?
Something else.
Deep in my gut I believed that Gibbs Storey was distracting me. First with her tale of murder. Then with the suggestion of serial murder. And now with sex in St. Tropez. I had to give her credit. As distractions, those were good hooks. Major league hooks. And yet I’d taken the bait for only three days.
Not too bad. For me, anyway. Skilled sociopaths had been known to suck me in and drag me along in their off-Broadway dramatics for months at a time. Diane liked to say that when sociopaths had me for lunch, they didn’t spit out the bones until bedtime.
Diagnostically I didn’t think Gibbs was a sociopath, but her diversion ammunition was as high quality as anything I’d run across recently.
The fact that I thought Gibbs was setting up psychological screens with me didn’t mean I no longer believed her contention that Sterling was a murderer. And it didn’t mean I no longer believed her tale about the summer thing on the yacht in St. Tropez. Nor did it mean I felt her efforts to dissemble were consciously driven.
My conclusion about her psychological deke-that’s one of Sam’s hockey words-wasn’t even a hundred percent firm. From a therapy perspective, I wasn’t prepared to put it to her in the form of an interpretation, or a confrontation. But it was my new working hypothesis: Gibbs was talking about murder and sex as a way of distracting me-and yes, possibly herself-from something that felt even more psychologically dangerous to her.
So what was more dangerous than extramarital sex and a husband who was a murderer?