Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [97]
Too close to home. Too early in his Becoming. She wouldn’t be there to look at anymore.
To ask this incredible thing, she could know nothing personal about him. She had not gossiped.
“Take my word that I’m smiling,” he said. Okay on the S. It was true that he had a sort of smile which exposed his handsome public teeth.
He held her wrist above her lap and released it. Her hand settled to her thigh and halfclosed, fingers trailing on the cloth like an averted glance.
“I think the coffee’s ready,” she said.
“I’m going.” Had to go. Home for relief.
She nodded. “If I offended you, I didn’t mean to.”
“No.”
She stayed on the ottoman, listened to be sure the lock clicked as he left.
Reba MeClane made herself another gin and tonic. She put on some Segovia records and curled up on the couch. Dolarhyde had left a warm dent in the cushion. Traces of him remained in the air – shoe polish, a new leather belt, good shaving lotion.
What an intensely private man. She had heard only a few references to him at the office – Dandridge saying “that son of a bitch Dolarhyde” to one of his toadies.
Privacy was important to Reba. As a child, learning to cope after she lost her sight, she had had no privacy at all.
Now, in public, she could never be sure that she was not watched. So Francis Dolarhyde’s sense of privacy appealed to her. She had not felt one ion of sympathy from him, and that was good.
So was this gin.
Suddenly the Segovia sounded busy. She put on her whale songs.
Three tough months in a new town. The winter to face, finding curbs in the snow. Reba MeClane, leggy and brave, damned selfpity. She would not have it. She was aware of a deep vein of cripple’s anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her determination to wring all she could from every day.
In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a nightlight; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering “Is this all?”
She knew that she would never have the light, but there were things she could have. There were things to enjoy. She had gotten pleasure from helping her students, and the pleasure was oddly intensified by the knowledge that she would be neither rewarded nor punished for helping them.
In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few – the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.
Involved. Reba knew that she was physically attractive to men – God knows enough of them copped a feel with their knuckles when they grabbed her upper arm.
She liked sex very much, but years ago she had learned something basic about men; most of them are terrified of entailing a burden. Their fear was augmented in her case.
She did not like for a man to creep in and out of her bed as though he were stealing chickens.
Ralph Mandy was coming to take her to dinner. He had a particularly cowardly mew about being so scarred by life that he was incapable of love. Careful Ralph told her that too often, and it scalded her. Ralph was amusing, but she didn’t want to own him.
She didn’t want to see Ralph. She didn’t feel like making conversation and hearing the hitches in conversations around them as people watched her eat.
It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn’t worry about her.
Francis Dolarhyde – shy, with a linebacker’s body and no bullshit. She had never seen or touched a cleft lip and had no visual associations with the sound. She wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because “blind people hear so much better than we do.” That was a common myth. Maybe she should have explained to him that it was not true, that blind people simply pay more attention to what they hear.
There were