Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [48]
When Tom gets home, Jackie is waiting up for him. She’s upset and wants to talk. Tom sits down next to her in the bed, and holds her while she cries into his armpit.
“How could this have happened?” she asks.
“Seth was a very disturbed person,” says Tom.
“I know, I know. But it’s just … Was he? Really? And in our pool? Why in our pool?” she moans.
Tom pulls his arm away and swings his legs off his side of the bed.
Jackie kneels behind him and rubs his back. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault.”
Tom recoils. “I know it’s not my fault!” he snaps, and goes to brush his teeth.
Several days pass and Tom is deteriorating. He can’t sleep and on the rare occasions when he does drift off, Amelia is there, whispering something to him that he can’t decipher, coming to him in dreams and nightmares both.
And so, when he can no longer bear it, he knocks on the door of the Victorian. She is wearing a tight skirt, a silk blouse, and high heels—all of them black. Her straw-blond hair is tied up in the style of an earlier decade, and her eye makeup is heavy and dark. Dangling from her ears are two large turquoise-and-silver earrings. The weight of the jewelry stretches her pierced ears, making the holes look like tiny twin urethras.
“Tom?” she asks, without smiling. She is only vaguely surprised, as if she’d known he would come, but hadn’t expected him before noon.
“Hello, Amelia.”
“Come in,” she says, almost as an order, and pushes back the door.
She leads him into the parlor. There’s a Persian rug, a baroque sofa with matching armchairs, a sculpture of Buddha, Flemish-looking paintings, and African pottery. The coffee table appears to be covered in Turkish tiles.
“I see you’ve been doing some traveling,” Tom observes.
“Here and there.” Amelia gestures to one of the chairs. Tom sits, and she perches nervously on the center cushion of the sofa across from him. Couch and armchair, just like the old days.
Tom tries to find his practiced voice of authority—empathetic, but stern. “Amelia,” he begins.
She winces at the sound of her own name. “Marianne, please. I’m going by my middle name these days. I never did like Amelia, it sounds like the name of a rock.”
“All right, then. Marianne,” Tom continues, as if he’s talking to a child who insists on being treated like a grown-up. “I am not going to pretend that I’m not here for a reason.”
“I assumed as much,” she says. She takes out a cigarette.
“You smoke?” asks Tom accusingly.
As an answer, she lights her cigarette. “Look,” she says, “I knew Seth was seeing a therapist, but I didn’t know it was you, okay? I had to read it in the paper.”
It occurs to Tom that now that she’s gotten this out of the way, she expects him to console her with his professional opinion, You couldn’t have saved him, none of us could have, and all the rest. To her, he is still her doctor.
So he asks questions. He makes her comfortable and earns her trust as he would with any patient. This doesn’t take long. It seems that the minute he walked in the door her trust for him was renewed, on principle alone. He indicates that Seth told him about the nature of their relationship and invites her to talk about it. She is immediately forthcoming. So forthcoming, in fact, that Tom is taken aback. She tells him how it began, about the first time they had sex, about many times after that. She goes into great detail. She tells him how Seth was a virgin and how she made him into the lover she wanted.
With every detail she gives, Tom swallows his jealousy like a sword, one after another. He doesn’t know quite how to respond; it was her reckless honesty that had attracted him to her in the first place—her titillating descriptions of her sexual encounters, and her eventual shameless acknowledgment of the tension between them. It’s okay, she