For a moment he was tempted to just give in and believe Houston – the sanity and rationality in his voice, no matter how exasperated, were comforting.
Then he thought of Hopley turning the Tensor lamp so that it shone savagely up onto his face. He thought of Hopley saying I'd kill him very slowly – I will spare you the details.
'No,' he said. 'They can't help me at the Glassman, Mike.'
Houston sighed heavily. 'Then who can? The old Gypsy?'
'If he can be found, maybe,' Halleck said. 'Just maybe. And there's another guy I know who might be of some help. A pragmatist, like you.'
Ginelli. The name had surfaced in his mind as he was speaking.
'But mostly, I think I've got to help myself.'
'That's what I've been telling you!'
'Oh – I was under the impression you'd just advised me to check back into the Glassman Clinic.'
Houston sighed. 'I think your brains must be losing weight, too. Have you thought about what you're doing to your wife and daughter? Have you thought about that at all?'
Did Heidi tell you what she was doing to me when the accident happened? Billy almost blurted out. Did she tell you that yet, Mikey? No? Oh, you ought to ask her … My, yes.
'Billy?'
'Heidi and I will talk about it,' Billy said quietly.
'But don't you -'
'I think you were right about at least one thing, Mike.'
'Oh? Good for me. And what was that?'
'We've gone around the mulberry bush enough,' Billy said, and hung up the telephone.
But they didn't talk about it.
Billy tried a couple of times, but Heidi only shook her head, her face white and set, her eyes accusing him. She only responded once.
It was three days after the telephone conversation with Houston, the one in which Heidi had been sobbing accompaniment in the background. They were just finishing dinner. Halleck had put away his usual lumberjack's meal -three hamburgers (with buns and fixin's), four ears of corn (with butter), half a pint of french fries, and two helpings of peach cobbler with hard sauce. He still had little or no appetite, but he had discovered an alarming. fact – if he didn't eat, he lost more weight. Heidi had arrived back home following Billy's conversation – argument – with Houston pale and silent, her face puffed from the tears she had cried in Houston's office. Upset and miserable himself, he had skipped lunch and dinner … and when he weighed himself the next morning he saw that he had plummeted five pounds to 167.
He stared at the figure, feeling a coldly fluttering swirl of moths in his gut. Five pounds, he thought. Five pounds in one single day! Christ!
He had skipped no more meals since then.
Now he indicated his empty plate – the clean corn cobs, the remains of the burgers, salad, french fries, dessert.
'Does that look like anorexia nervosa to you, Heidi?' he asked. 'Does it?'
'No,' she said unwillingly. 'No, but
'I've been eating like this for the last month,' Halleck said, 'and in the last month I've lost just about sixty pounds. Now, would you like to explain how my subconscious managed that trick? Losing two pounds a day on an intake of roughly six thousand calories per twenty-four hours?'
'I … I don't know … but Mike … Mike says-'
'You don't know and I don't know,' Billy said, tossing his napkin into his plate angrily – his stomach was groaning and rolling under the weight of food he had dumped into it. 'And Michael Houston doesn't know either.'
'Well, if it's a curse, why isn't anything happening to me?' she shrieked at him suddenly, and although her eyes blazed with anger, he could see the tears that were starting up in them.
Stung, scared, and temporarily unable to control himself, Halleck shouted back: 'Because he didn't know, that's why! That's the only reason! Because he didn't know!'
Sobbing, she pushed her chair back, almost fell over, and then fled from the table. Her hand was pressed to the side of her face as if she had just come down with a monstrous headache.
'Heidi!' he yelled, getting up so fast he knocked his chair over. 'Heidi, come back!'
Her footsteps didn't pause on the stairs. He heard a door slam shut – not their bedroom door. Too far down the upstairs hall. Linda's room, or the guestroom.
Halleck was betting on the guestroom. He was right. She didn't sleep with him again during the week before he left home.
That week – the last week – had the consistency of a confused nightmare in Billy's mind when he tried to think about it later. The weather turned hot and oppressive and surly, as if dog days had come early this year. Even crisp, cool, double-knit Lantern Drive seemed to wilt a bit. Billy Halleck ate and sweated, sweated and ate … and his weight settled slowly but surely through it all. At the end of the week, when he rented a car and left, heading up Interstate 95 toward New Hampshire and Maine, he was down another eleven pounds, to 156.
During that week the doctors from the Glassman Clinic called again and again. Michael Houston called again and again. Heidi looked at Billy from her white-ringed eyes, smoked, and said nothing. When he spoke of calling Linda, she only said in a dead, brittle voice: 'I'd prefer you didn't do that.'
On Friday, the day before he left, Houston called again.
'Michael,' Billy said, closing his eyes. 'I've already stopped taking calls from the Glassman doctors. I'm going to stop taking them from you, if you don't cut the shit.'
'I wouldn't do that, just yet,' Houston said. 'I want you to listen to me very carefully, Billy. This is important.'
Billy listened to Houston's new rap with no real surprise and only the deepest, dullest stirrings of anger and betrayal. Hadn't he seen it coming, after all?
Heidi had been in again. She and Houston had had a long consultation that had ended with more tears. Houston had then held a long consultation with the Three Stooges at the Glassman Clinic ('Not to worry, Billy, it's all covered by professional privilege'). Houston had seen Heidi again. They all thought that Billy would perhaps profit from a battery of psychiatric tests.
'I want to urge you most strongly to take these of your own free will,' Houston finished.
'I bet. And I also bet I know where you'd like me to take the tests. At the Glassman Clinic, right? Do I win a Kewpie doll?'
'Well, we thought that was the logical
'Oh, uh-huh, I see. And while they're testing my brains, I assume the barium enemas will continue?'
Houston was eloquently silent.
'If I say no?'
'Heidi has legal recourse,' Houston said carefully. 'You understand?'
'I understand,' Billy said. 'You're talking about you and Heidi and the Three Stooges there at the Glassman Clinic getting together and committing me to Sunnyvale Acres, Basket-Weaving Our Speciality.'
'That's pretty melodramatic, Billy. She's worried about Linda as well as about you.'
'We're both worried about Linda,' Billy said. 'And I'm worried about Heidi, as well. I mean, I have my moments when I'm so angry with her that I feel sick to my stomach, but I mostly still love her. And so I worry. You see, she's misled you to a degree, Mike.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'I know you don't. And I'm not going to tell you. She might, but my guess is that she won't – all she wants to do is forget that the whole thing ever happened, and filling you in about certain details she may have overlooked the first time around would get in the way of that. Let's just say that Heidi's got her own guilt trip to work out. Her cigarette consumption is up from a pack a day to two and a half.'
A long pause … and then Mike Houston returned to his original chorus: 'However that may be, Billy, you must see that these tests are in the best interests of everyone con -'
'Good-bye, Mike,' Halleck said, and hung up softly.