"If you'd like."
"That would be good, Bernie. You'll come over here at seven?"
"I will."
"You know the address?"
"I do."
"I'll see you at seven, then. Or earlier, if you'd like. Whenever you're ready, just come over. I'll be right here."
She hung up. I sat there holding the phone for a long moment, and then did the same myself.
"I've got to run home," I told Carolyn. "I need a shave and a shower. I've got a date."
"With Barbara? That's great."
"Let's hope so," I said.
Twenty-Nine
It was a little before seven when I mounted the half flight of steps at the brownstone on East 36thStreet. I rang and she buzzed me in, and when I got to her floor she was waiting in the doorway. She wore a dress with a bold geometric print, the kind of thing Mondrian might have done if he hadn't been so firmly committed to the right angle.
I told her I liked her dress. I'd noticed it before, actually, and had admired it then, but it did more for her figure than for a hanger in the closet, which is where I'd seen it. She said she'd taken it to Long Island, to wear at the Sunday brunch, but an informal poll indicated that most of the other women would be wearing jeans or a skirt, so the dress went back in the suitcase. She didn't know where we'd go tonight, but she could put on something else if I thought she was over-or under-dressed.
I was wearing a blazer and gray slacks, and I had a tie in my pocket, so I figured we were all right for just about any setting. I said she looked great, and she did, but there was an uncertain air about her that matched what I'd heard over the phone. She led me into the apartment, and there was a touch of awkwardness, the to-kiss-or-not-to-kiss moment. We'd been to bed two nights ago, but we really didn't know each other, so would it be presumptuous for either of us to expect the other to fall into a clinch? I hesitated, and she hesitated, and I reached for her and she came into my arms and we kissed.
It was a nice embrace, and a lingering one, but when we drew apart she still seemed troubled, and I asked her if everything was all right.
"Yes," she said, and thought about it, and said, "No," and thought about that, and then frowned. "I don't know," she said finally.
"What's the matter?"
"I'm a little scared."
"I can tell. Of what?"
She'd been avoiding my eyes, but now she met them. "Bernie," she said, "have you ever had the feeling that you could be losing your mind?"
"Sometimes I'm not sure I ever had one in the first place," I said. I glanced at her bed, and thought about the time I'd spent not in it but under it. "Sometimes I know I'm doing something that's really nuts, but I can't seem to keep myself from doing it."
"You mean like eating dessert when you'd decided earlier not to have dessert, and you really don't even want it, but there it is and you eat it?"
"Something like that," I said, "but on a grander scale. Like it's a really rich dessert, and I'm a diabetic, and I eat it anyway."
"You're diabetic?"
"No, that's just an illustration of the relative degree of craziness I'm capable of."
"That's what I thought, but I wanted to make sure. Everybody has that sometimes, don't they? But this is different. I really think I might be losing it. First that blackout when I only had two drinks, which can't be a good sign. And then this. Can I tell you what happened?"
"Sure."
"Sit down. Can I get you anything to drink? There's different kinds of soda, or I could make you a cup of tea. Or coffee, but it'll have to be instant."
"I'm fine."
"I wish I could say the same. Bernie, when I woke up Saturday morning I thought about what we'd talked about, about how I brought someone home the night I had the blackout, and how he'd gone through my things but didn't take anything, except for my Lady Remington. And I thought about my missing class ring, and I went through my jewelry more carefully. All my good stuff was there, but I was definitely missing a pair of earrings, and a couple of silver bangle bracelets."
"More souvenirs."
"And nothing I couldn't live without, but it was still disturbing."
"Of course."
"And then I remembered the money."
"In your wallet? You said it was all still there."
She shook her head. "The other money," she said. "I never keep cash in the house, there's no need, not with an ATM two blocks away. But for a week or so I'd had a lot of cash on hand. Well, not a fortune, but I think you could call it a substantial amount. It was over twelve hundred dollars."
"That's substantial. In cash, anyway."
"That's what I mean. It was enough so that I found a place to hide it. I put it in the icebox, in the freezer compartment. I don't know, maybe that's the first place a burglar would look."
Not the first place, I thought, but right up there.
"Why I had the cash in the first place," she said, "is that Alison Harlowe's wedding was coming up, and she was one of the last of our crowd to get married. And she and Scott were torn between a big wedding and a honeymoon in Europe, they couldn't really afford both without going into debt. So word got around, and we all agreed that the gifts would be cash, but not individual gifts from individual friends, because that would feel like the opening scene inThe Godfather, with everybody coming around with envelopes.
"So I volunteered to take the collection, and I got in touch with everybody, and people gave what they wanted, and the average gift was a hundred dollars, and by the time everybody was present and accounted for, the honeymoon fund came to almost nine thousand dollars."
"That's impressive."
"Most people gave me checks," she said, "but more people than I would have guessed gave me cash, and the cash amounted to over twelve hundred. I put the checks in the bank, and I don't know why I didn't do the same with the cash, but there's something about cash, do you know what I mean?"
"Definitely."
"It's like having a secret, or a concealed weapon, or something. It fit neatly into this brown envelope, and I tucked it away in the freezer, and I liked having it there."
"It beats Pop Tarts."
"And it's less of a temptation in the middle of the night than a pint of Häagen-Dazs. I suppose I would have put it in the bank eventually, but for the time being I figured it was fine where it was. And I sort of forgot about it. When I first started checking things to see what was missing, when I checked my wallet and counted the cash in it, I didn't even think of the money in the freezer. Maybe that's a sign all by itself that there was something wrong with me."
"Doesn't sound alarming to me. It slipped your mind, that's all."
"Or maybe it was my mind that was doing the slipping. Anyway, yesterday after I checked my jewelry drawer I thought about the wedding. The way we worked it, I was supposed to write one big check to cover everybody's contribution, and I'd done that, and mailed it in plenty of time so that they'd have it in the bank before the wedding and honeymoon. But getting packed for the wedding made me think about the check, and that made me think of the cash, and I got this sinking feeling in my stomach and went to the freezer."
"I guess it wasn't there, or you wouldn't be telling me about it."
"I took everything out of the freezer, including a beef brisket I never get around to cooking, and it's probably like frozen mastodon meat, it's been in there so long. I really searched, because I so much wanted the money to be there. I mean, I was probably ready for a new electric shaver anyway, and when am I ever going to wear a class ring from Bennett High? But twelve hundred dollars is a lot of money."
"Sure it is."
"And I felt really stupid for keeping it there in the first place. I'd put the checks in the bank right away, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do the same with the cash. But no, I had to hang on to it. Cold cash, frozen assets-God, I was so damn stupid."