That night when he went to his dinner meeting (with Sonja), he was still trying to find some logical explanation.
“What’s the matter with you?” Sonja complained after she had rolled the room-service dinner trolley out into the hall. “You haven’t spoken a dozen words since you came in. I ordered your favorite meal, your favorite wine, and I’m wearing the negligee you brought me last week. You haven’t commented on anything or even noticed anything.”
He knew if there was anything Sonja couldn’t stand, it was being ignored. He’d had some disappointing evenings — she had sent him home after about thirty minutes — when she’d been convinced she did not have his absolute and unconditional attention.
“My dear, beautiful girl,” he said quickly, pulling her down beside him on the small flowered-chintz sofa, “forgive me if I sometimes take all this perfection for granted. You see, I’ve come to expect nothing less from you. The way you look, the things you do… you are the ideal in every way.”
The words were so far removed from his usual pattern of conversation or compliments that he felt he was speaking a foreign tongue. It was almost funny, a joke, but it seemed to satisfy, even please her, for she smiled and snuggled closer to him. “Problems at work?” she asked. That, too, was unusual, because they always talked about her, not him.
“No, nothing like that,” he said, and then he decided to tell her. “Nelda has been acting… I don’t know… sort of strange lately. Well, not strange, maybe, but bizarre things have been happening.”
“She’s found out about us?”
“Oh, no. No way that could happen. I’m too careful.” And then he told her about the phone call and the letter and about all the books Nelda had been reading.
Anything Sonja didn’t understand was dismissed with a little shrug and a change of subject. As was this. “All those crazy books,” she said. “That would send anybody around the bend. How do you like my new perfume? Do I smell like Elizabeth Taylor?”
“I don’t know how Elizabeth Taylor smells,” he said, laughing, and from then on, they had an exemplary evening.
It was almost eleven-thirty when he went home. He expected to find Nelda fast asleep in her twin bed, possibly with the bedside lamp still on and one of those nutty books lying open beside her. What he found was Nelda sitting up in bed, her fingers pressed against her temples, her eyes closed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You got a headache or something?”
She opened her eyes slowly and looked around as though coming out of a trance or regaining consciousness after a coma. He almost expected her to say, “Where am I?”
For a long time she didn’t say anything, and then: “Hugh, I have been seeing the oddest thing: a series of pictures in my mind, all in still-life.”
“Nelda, what the hell are you talking about?”
He sat down on his bed and removed his shoes. Kee-rist, he hoped she wasn’t going to start her loony-tune business now. He was wiped out. Sonja had had the agility of an Olympic gymnast tonight. He smiled, remembering.
“I was trying to read,” she said, “but these pictures kept flashing across my mind. Then, I’m not sure what happened, but I seemed to go outside myself. Maybe it was an altered state of consciousness. The pictures became much clearer. Much.”
He’d be damned if he’d ask her what kind of pictures. He didn’t even want to know.
She told him anyway. “I saw a room. It was like a hotel room, a suite, maybe, but it was furnished better than the average hotel room. There were some pictures, family pictures I suppose, on a table, and there was a little sofa or love seat with flowered upholstery, and you were sitting there. You were by yourself, but your mouth was moving as though you were talking to someone. That picture faded and another came on — exactly as though it were being shown on a screen — and you were not alone anymore. There was a woman sitting beside you on the sofa, a very pretty dark-haired woman. Hugh, am I going crazy, or is it… is it the ESP again?”
He was staring at her, his mind in turmoil. “What… what are you talking about?” His voice came out scarcely above a whisper.
“I’m not sure. I saw it so clearly, but I’m not sure what it was I was seeing. Where was your meeting tonight?”
“At the Baxter Hotel. We met in the suite of a visiting architect.” He thought it best to get at least a remnant of truth in his answer.
“That explains it then.” She let out a sigh of relief. “I was seeing the meeting. But I wonder why I didn’t see more than just two people.”
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t.
She plumped her pillow several times and lay down. When he came out of the bathroom, she was either asleep or pretending to be.
But it was nearly dawn before he closed his eyes.
The first thing he did when he got to his office that morning was to call Sonja and tell her she would have to move from the Baxter to the Cromley on the other side of town.
“In your dreams, buster,” she said, furious at having been awakened and even more furious at being told she would have to leave her deluxe digs. “I’m not going to some second-rate fleabag.”
“The Cromley is a first-class apartment hotel, and I’ll see that you have as much space there as you have at the Baxter. I’ll make the arrangements this morning and you can move this afternoon.” He hung up before she could protest further.
He didn’t have a clue what had happened to Nelda or what was going on in her mind, but obviously she didn’t know (or hadn’t seen pictures) of his intimate moments with Sonja. It seemed to be a good idea to move Sonja farther away from Nelda (maybe proximity had something to do with the pictures she saw) before Nelda caught on.
No matter what was happening in her mind, it had made a wreck out of his own. He couldn’t concentrate on work, or even Sonja. All he could do was stare at Nelda when he was with her and wonder and wonder. And when he was away from her he wondered even more…
He was going bat crazy He was obsessed with it, couldn’t get his mind on anything else. He had never believed in all that psychic stuff; it was a hoax, a ripoff, like fortunetellers at a county fair. There had to be some logical explanation for the things that had happened rather than the psychological mumbo jumbo that Nelda kept mouthing. Extrasensory perception, altered states of consciousness, precognition. Horse hockey!
Yet he couldn’t come up with anything that even partially explained how Nelda knew the phone was going to ring, that it would be a wrong number, or that the postman was going to deliver a letter from someone she hadn’t heard from in years, or how — and this was the really scary one — she could describe a hotel room she’d never been in and even see him sitting beside Sonja on the sofa.
Could she have followed him that night, peeped through the keyhole? Common sense said no, that he was becoming paranoid. Nevertheless, he began seeing Sonja at lunchtime on the days when he knew Nelda was either playing bridge or meeting someone for lunch.
For a while, maybe a week, nothing unusual happened — except that Nelda kept reading those damn books. She would sit in her chair by the fireplace, a book in her hands, and every so often she’d look up with a strange little smile on her face, as though she knew an amusing joke on him which he wasn’t privy to.
Then one night the phone thing happened again. He was watching the Bulls go down in inglorious defeat (what could they expect without Air Jordan?) and she was reading a book entitled Authentic Witchcraft. Witchcraft, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t you know?!
The phone rang and he reached for it, but she said, “Don’t bother, it’s for me. Sheila wants to tell me that our bridge game has been postponed until next week because her daughter’s just been taken to the hospital. The baby will be born tonight.”