Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [13]
“You have streaks,” Ruby said, touching under her own eyes.
“Thank you.” Jody dabbed at her eyes, gulped air in, then started crying again.
To her own amazement, Ruby draped an arm around her psychiatrist’s shoulders. She felt Jody stiffen. She considered removing her arm but didn’t. Instead, she started talking. Reiterating that Jody should call the cops. Jody didn’t move or say anything. After a while, Ruby removed her arm. She felt like an idiot.
“I know what I’m about to ask is probably wrong,” Jody said, “but I desperately need help.” She pushed a long strand of hair off her forehead.
“Okay,” Ruby said tentatively.
“Would you consider coming with me to Tobias’s apartment to look through his things? I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.”
Ruby frowned, confused.
Jody clarified: “We’ve been separated for a while. He has a studio apartment in the East Fifties.”
“Oh,” Ruby said. It was getting really weird. But of course Ruby liked that. “I guess so,” she said.
Jody was still staring right through Ruby and didn’t seem to have heard her.
“So do you want to go now?” Ruby asked.
“Oh,” Jody snapped out of it, “yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“Take? I don’t know.”
“An hour? Two?”
“I don’t know.” Jody seemed frustrated. “I guess this is a bad idea.”
“No,” Ruby protested, “I was just wondering how long it would take. I have to go tend to my horse.”
“Oh, the horse, right,” Jody said. “Yes. Well, two hours tops.”
Ruby had never heard Jody say anything as colloquial as tops.
“All right, that’s fine,” Ruby said.
Jody was staring off into the distance. At what, Ruby didn’t know.
“Should we go then?” Ruby prodded her.
“Oh,” Jody’s eyes focused, “yes, let’s.”
She turned and started walking very quickly toward the parking lot. Ruby, who was a few inches shorter, had to trot to keep up with her.
Jody’s car was an exquisite cream-colored Mercedes sedan from the 1980s. Ruby got in the passenger side, settling into the red leather seat. Jody slammed her door shut and kicked off her shoes.
“I like to feel the pedals,” she said.
This struck Ruby as an overly intimate revelation—that Jody’s liking to feel the car’s acceleration shooting up through her feet somehow meant she was sexually voracious, which wasn’t something Ruby really wanted to think about. Speculating about other people’s sex lives was sometimes entertaining, but when that person was your psychiatrist, the whole thing took on unpleasant overtones.
“Oh” was all Ruby said.
Jody focused on driving, and Ruby was left to her own thoughts. She felt particularly alive at the prospect of helping her psychiatrist look through her husband’s things. She had actively decided to do something unusual and that was making her tingle. Ruby had always been slightly purposeless. She liked life, but she’d let it shove her wherever it wanted and she never pushed back.
“Are you okay?” Jody asked after a ten-minute silence.
Ruby was startled.
“I’m feeling mediocre,” she heard herself say. Yet another thing popping out uncensored. She glanced over at Jody. The Psychiatrist was frowning.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know. How I do so many things but don’t excel at any of them.” The woman was her shrink, after all.
“What brought this on?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I was under the impression you excelled at many things.”
“At what?” Ruby asked, “I don’t have a stressful but stimulating job the way most New Yorkers do. I don’t train racehorses or even do something noble like teach yoga to mental defectives the way my best friend does.”
“You’re not supposed to say ‘mental defectives.’”
“Half the crazy people I know would refer to themselves that way.”
“What about the other half?”
“I wouldn’t use the phrase in front of them.”
Jody arched an eyebrow.
“My husband is a mental defective.”
“What?”
“He was my patient. Initially a suicide attempt.”
“The husband whose leg was …?”
“Only one I’ve got.”
Ruby stared at The Psychiatrist.
“You’re going to need years of therapy just to get over having been a patient of mine,” Jody said then. She let out a small