The dust-pale shadow chuckled…
It wasn’t the non-stop horror of the dream that woke her up. It was, of all things, a steady beeping sound. The dream-world and the real world merged then, like lovers hesitant to kiss until one tongue-tip touched the other. Helen’s eyes sprang open, and she jerked bolt upright like a b-movie cliche. A quick jostling to her left startled her nearly to the point of shrieking out loud. The beeping persisted as yet another shadow moved off. But, no, it wasn’t the putty-white specter of the dream. It was Tom.
The beeping pulsed on, then, in another instant, abated.
A beeper, Helen thought. Was it hers? She turned, winced in sweat damp sheets, then groggily checked her Motorola pager. No messages. Tom, she realized then. Of course. It was Tom’s hospital pager that went off.
Helen lay back, sighed. She tried to push the now actively recurrent nightmare from her head. At least, Tom’s pager had wakened her. If it hadn’t, she’d still be dreaming.
Her surroundings, at first, eluded her. Whaaaa… Most nights she slept at Tom’s; hence, she didn’t recognize her own bedroom now. Of course—he’d come to her apartment last night after work. She thought back, tried to remember more.
Tom hadn’t made love to her last night, had he? No, she felt certain. It had been the night before, at his place, when he’d made love to her on the floor and then faltered. Last night, he’d merely crawled into bed, kissed her, and rolled over. Even some rather forward—and uncharacteristic—inducements via her hands and mouth hadn’t roused his interest. “Aw, honey, I’m just not into it tonight, okay?” he said with his back to her. “Tough day, you know? Christ, I had to histologize three brains today, and ship a pineal gland to Berkeley.”
The latter comment had nipped her own interest. She’d shrugged and gone to sleep. So why, now, did she still feel this revenant of sexual arousal? Her fingers touched herself, for proof. They came away wet. Jeeze, she thought.
The dream?
But how could that be? There was certainly nothing erotic about her recurrent nightmare.
I’ll have to ask Dr. Sallee, she supposed, though she hated to think what his answer might be.
“Sure.” A muffled whisper. “Yeah.”
Tom’s voice. He’d gone to the kitchen to answer his page. But—
“Yeah? Maybe I ought to come over there right now and do the job right.”
Helen’s face turned rigid. The old demon returned—it never failed. The demon of jealousy and suspect. A mindless imp of caressing irrationality and jumping to conclusions. It was her “anomaly,” Dr. Sallee had told her. Acting before she would let herself think. Making judgments before surveying the facts. But in such times, her sense of reason stayed in bed.
“I’ll light you up real good,” she heard.
She pulled on her robe and walked very quietly into the front of the kitchen. Tom’s pager lay there, and she didn’t hesitate to pick it up. The message screen read 224-9855. Tom hung up and turned.
“Helen. You’re up,” he said.
Don’t let him lie to you, her not so better half ordered. He’ll probably say it was work calling. Don’t let him lie to you. Don’t let another man make a sucker out of you, goddamn it!
“Who was that?” she asked.
“It was work,” he said nonchalantly, and walked in his shorts to the Mr. Coffee.
“Bullshit.”
Tom turned, frowning. “What?”
“It wasn’t work calling, Tom. Who was it?”
Tom’s eyes rolled in their sockets. “Aw, come on, Helen. Give it a rest, huh? I just got up.”
“You’re lying to me. Who was it?”
Tom leaned against the wall, arms crossed in exasperation. “It was Joycelyn.”
Helen gaped. “Who?”
“Joycelyn, the new pathology intern. She just got a shipment of formalin concentrate at the morgue and she didn’t know if it needed to be refrigerated or not. So she paged me for instructions.”
“‘I’ll light you up real good’?” Helen quoted. “I heard what you said, Tom. You weren’t talking about any goddamn formalin.”
Tom’s expression drooped. “Helen, you were tossing and turning all night, you were having nightmares. Whatever is was you think you heard me say, it wasn’t real. It was from the dream.”
“Bullshit,” she repeated. “You’re sleeping with someone else.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Helen, please don’t start this crap again—”
Helen’s hand raised, as if to emphasize an immediate point. “So you’re trying to tell me it was the hospital that paged you just now?”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit,” she said yet again. It was becoming an important word in her index of lexicon. “The hospital prefix is 266, the prefix on your pager is 224.”
The span of time with which Tom paused at this statement was impossible to calculate. But any pause, even a fraction of a second, was all this aspect of Helen Closs’ psyche needed to be convinced.
“Just get out,” she said
“Helen, it was the annex—”
“Bullshit, bullshit!”
“—where the supply contractor drops off their deliveries!”
Her face, in an instant, turned red. “Get out of my apartment! You’re a lying son of a bitch!”
Tom brushed by her, snatched up his pager, and went to the bedroom. Snippets of self-muttering could be heard: “—you’re absolutely ridiculous—” “—can’t hack this anymore—” “—don’t need the headache—”
Helen tremored from her stance in the kitchen. “If I give you a headache, then take a goddamn aspirin and get the hell out!”
“Don’t worry, I’m going,” his voice griped back from the bedroom.
“No wonder you never want to fuck me!” she bellowed. “You’re too busy fucking some other woman!”
The apartment door slammed so hard the walls shook.
Helen remained where she stood for a full ten minutes. The more she tried to let herself cool down, the hotter she felt. Like meat on a turning spit. Like a sucker goose cooking. Paralyzed—that’s how she felt. Her fists clenched and her teeth grinding. Her temples throbbing till she thought her head might burst.
««—»»
“I— I need to talk.”
“All right.” Dr. Sallee’s voice sounded taut and nasally over the phone. Helen could never put the man’s face to that voice. “You missed your appointment, by the way. Did you get my message?”
“Yes, I did. I’m—I’m sorry I missed it. I was working nighters and when I work nighters I sometimes lose track of—”
“Fine, I understand. But what seems to be the problem now, Helen?”
Tom, the name surfaced. An obtuse thought, strangely alien and surreal. The name sounded the same way something odd and unfamiliar might taste on her tongue.
“Is it Tom?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “I think he’s cheating on me.”
“Helen, you’ve always suspected that every man you’ve ever been involved with has been cheating on you. It’s becoming a paranoic compulsion.”
I know. But this is different. It was always different, though, wasn’t it?
“I caught him this time. Well, I mean, I think I did. The phone number on the pager, the city prefix, the—”
“Helen, I’m not following you, you’re talking too fast. I’m with a patient right now, but I want you to come and see me tomorrow, okay?”