Escape the Night (16 page)

Behind them, Noelle suppressed a smile. Peter received this information with fitting gravity. “Okay,” he ruled, “we'll let Marty come, too.”

Talking quietly, they sailed the boat; Noelle still remembered Peter's profile—perfect as that on a Roman coin, blond hair glinting in the sun—as he knelt next to the boy. “I have to get back to my friend Noelle. Can I tell her your name?”

“Jeffrey.”

Peter smiled. “You're a good sailor, Jeffrey.” Rising, he touched the boy's shoulder, nodded to the nanny, and walked off. When they turned to wave, the boy was smiling after him.

Peter put his arm around her waist. “A kid's world is funny,” he remarked. “To Jeffrey, it was perfectly reasonable that I know Steven Birnbaum.”

“That's 'cause you were good with him.”

“He wanted to talk.” Carey's eyes grew distant. “I wonder where the old man is—split, dead …”

“Maybe just not much of one.” To break his mood, she added, teasing, “Although
you're
certainly prime material.”

“Epic,” he said dryly. He looked at her with an affectionate sideways grin. “I don't mind practice, though. You free?”

“If there's a boat in the bathtub.”

They had walked back to his apartment, laughing.

More than anything it was this sweetness that kept her with him, for what it was and what it promised. As months passed, despite a job that disrupted the flow of her friendships, Peter became her closest friend. Her passport was always ready: she might disappear for two weeks, on two hours' notice, yet Peter met her smiling at the airport. He would nurse his two martinis when she was hours late for dinner, and still be curious about the assignment that had kept her. They had fun. They drank Cinzano at the Museum Café, watching passers-by from its glassed-in porch; drifting through Zabar's, they would smell the aromas changing with each section, buying Gruyère, salami and chilled white wine to spread on the floor of his apartment and eat by candlelight, or with the
Times
, on Sunday. They gallery-hopped in SoHo after brunch, choosing prints for her apartment. They listened to rock on his stereo, then took picnics to Sutton Square and watched the river. That summer they drove Peter's Jaguar to Long Island Sound, and sailed; they skied Mount Snow in winter. Noelle enjoyed these luxuries; Peter, who took them for granted, scoured Manhattan for neighborhood restaurants and good cheap wines from Hungary or Spain, free from the taint of chic. They composed mental lists of things they “didn't get”: Noelle's included Bloomingdale's, so Peter bought her a hat there. They went to concerts of Baroque music, and old Garbo films. He looked at each photo she had, asking how she felt when she had taken it; she read the manuscripts he edited. They walked the city for blocks, went to jazz and after-hours clubs, to see who came there. She taught him to develop pictures: one fall weekend they drove to New Hampshire to photograph leaves and churches, and make love. They moved by subway between their two apartments. Each morning they ran. At night Peter would enter her, tenderly and without haste, until she came, shuddering, and then he cried out in his sleep.

The train screeched to a stop beneath 42nd Street, jolting her from thought.

Noelle stepped off, mind on autopilot, and moved up the ramp and steps to emerge at the corner of Eighth Avenue. Horns blasted. She took the sidewalk toward Times Square, weaving through dull-eyed men and beneath bright billboards touting sadism on film and sex organs that ran on batteries, imagining Peter's day. For Phillip's sake, she hoped that Peter would not lash out at him: whatever Phillip wanted, he had already paid too high a price for not being Charles Carey.

For herself, and for their future, she hoped that Peter would decide to face his memory.

He could not do this by himself. Against his nature, he would have to trust a stranger; only a psychiatrist could restore a sleeping memory or dispel a dream. But the dreams grew more frequent with every month they stayed together, and his defenses were a wall between them. She knew that the memory might be searing; yet only that, she was somehow certain, could give him peace with Phillip, and with himself.

Then he might cease at last to fear the gentleness which made her love him, and she could tell him how she felt. Walking amidst the noise and neon, she smiled, alone within her secret.

Following, Martin lit a cigarette.

Eight.

Peter Carey sat by the telephone, staring at the number Ruth Levy had slipped into his hand.

In his mind, Charles Carey still raced after him …

Central Park was green with spring; he was a six-year-old boy, running with a toy yacht in his hand, laughing as his father fell behind. Once more he felt his heart pump with the excitement and security of knowing that Charles Carey would catch up to him, hold him in his arms …

And then he ran into the tunnel of his nightmares, where his memory went black.

He stared down at the number.

He could not understand the nightmare; its terror had grasped him first when he was seven, asleep in Phillip's home. But its constant repetition argued that his memory, shrouding the weekend of his parents' death in darkness, had done so out of mercy.

He feared to see his father die.

For all his conscious life he had run from this. But the dream pursued him; angry, he would climb, or sky dive or drive at insane speeds, as though straining to outrun it. His memory stayed buried with his childhood; at night the dream caught up with him.

Defenseless, he blamed Phillip Carey.

The possible reasons made him squirm: that Phillip did not save his brother; that Phillip did not die with him …

That Phillip was not Charles Carey.

His sense of this unfairness made his response to Phillip erratic and irrational, alternating currents of dislike and self-contempt, of rudeness trailing into mumbles of apology—a distrust for which he found no reason, and yet could not prevent.

Sometimes Carey suspected that Phillip had not rescued him, but exploited his amnesia to tell lies …

Carey shook his head.

He despised his own suspicions; he could not imagine parading them for a psychiatrist, dependent and revealed. Ruth had looked at him so strangely.

Paranoid.

He read it in each probing of Noelle's dark eyes: at his distrust of Phillip; at his fear of her affection; at the sense she would abandon him …

And at the way he would reach out to her in the middle of the night, and then freeze at the faint tinkling sound of crystal shattering, in a memory he could not place …

He closed his eyes, and the tinkling sound receded.

Noelle must never know what he feared most.

Carey had known since their first trip together. They had driven through Vermont; returning, on the afternoon when they had made love in the grass, his contentment felt like music. He had dropped her in the Village, and driven home; he was sitting on the sofa with a brandy, savoring his thoughts, when the phone rang.

At that instant, Carey knew that Noelle Ciano had been killed.

The call was a wrong number; from that moment, the fear had never left him.

That night his dream had come once more.

Carey could not explain this fear for her, any more than he could explain the dream. He was not sure he wished to try. He had not let his nights control his days; on the sense that his life since six had been an accident, he imposed a rigid order. He tried to see the child Peter as someone else, whose pain could not be his; often, he succeeded. Over time, he had adjusted to his scars, as other people adjust to theirs.

He thought of Noelle Ciano, and knew that this was wrong.

His bed was hollow with the imprint of her body; the borrowed shirt still lay beside it.

Carey liked the smell of her hair when they awakened in the morning; the lean, smooth feel of her skin, the tenderness obscured by her quick, impatient movements, until he saw it in her eyes; the way each room in his apartment seemed stamped with the slant of her head, or the skillfulness of her hands. He admired her sheer nerve: Noelle had learned to walk among people maddened by death or famine, knowing she might be killed, without apology for the work she'd come to do. The work made her curious. She could prowl the city for hours, charming strangers, then sit cross-legged in Carey's living room, utterly still, and talk of the faces they had seen. She lacked pretense or any patience with it. “Liars are bores,” she announced to Carey, after stalking from a cocktail party where a tiresome ad man was denouncing modern art without much knowledge. “We're both an hour closer to being dead, and for what?” Yet at other times he was sure she knew exactly how it was to be an old man, or a small child, or even Phillip Carey …

Noelle.

Paranoid.

Slowly, Peter Carey reached for the telephone.

CHAPTER 2

William Levy started at the jangle of his telephone, then answered: “Dr. Levy speaking.”

“Hello,” the flat voice said. “This is Peter Carey.”

Levy stiffened. “Yes?”

“I'm Charles Carey's son.”

“Yes, I know.” Levy could not decide what to call this stranger, his dead friend's son; something in the voice disturbed him. “It's pleasant to hear from you,” he finally added. “We haven't met since you were a child.”

“I'm afraid this is professional.” Now the flatness carried a faint sardonic undertone. “I have nightmares.”

The voice was Charles Carey's.

“Might I ask,” Levy ventured quietly, “how you came to choose me?”

“You were my father's friend.” Peter Carey paused. “The nightmares concern my father.”

“What kinds of nightmares?”

“Repeated, of my father's dying.” The voice softened. “I can't make sense of it. You see, I remember nothing of that weekend.”

“And you wish to?”

The belated answer was softer yet. “I think I'd better.”

Levy stared at the empty chair where Charles Carey once had sat. At length, he said, “I can see you tomorrow—at nine if that's all right. After that we can discuss what's best. Having known your father complicates it, from the analyst's point of view.”

“At least you'll remember what he looked like. In the dream …”

“We'll see what to do.”

“Thanks.” Peter's tone was once again crisp. “See you at nine,” he finished, and hung up.

Levy cradled the telephone in his hand.

As Peter Carey entered the Grill Room to meet his uncle, his mind felt clear again.

Talking to his father's friend, Carey had heard the discomfort others took for arrogance; afterwards, he had wished to be alone.

He had called Phillip to explain that he would meet him at the restaurant, and then switched on his answering machine. He lay on the couch for over an hour, with Bach playing in the background, picturing a pool of bright water he had found once with Noelle, in New Hampshire. A fall leaf, crisp and scarlet, swirled in its ripples. It reminded him of his grandfather …

By the time he had put on a pin-striped suit and begun his forty-minute walk to the restaurant, he felt composed.

Except that all this mental preparation was for one lunch with his uncle, who dueled with Bloody Marys and
bons mots
…

Phillip Carey waved from a table on the main floor. “Over here, Peter.”

Carey moved reluctantly forward. The Grill Room was the glamour spot for literary lunches, with twenty-foot windows, redwood walls lacquered to a fine sheen and lined with potted birches, a four-sided bar on the main floor with slim pieces of polished teak suspended overhead like the components of some third-world xylophone and, best of all, tables sufficiently separate to permit private conversations that could still be witnessed by all the other publishing types having private conversations.

Phillip grinned up at him. “Splendid, isn't it—the only restaurant in Manhattan that dares to waste space.”

“Ostentation with taste.” Carey slid into his chair. “If our authors saw how much advertising money was pissed away on sixty-dollar lunches, they'd tear down Van Dreelen and Carey and drag us howling to the guillotine.”

“Let 'em eat cake,” Phillip muttered between still smiling teeth, waving to the usual tables of agents and editors in the vanguard of publishing's brave new world, in which bad writers got rich as their betters met death in chain bookstores. Carey felt uneasy at the stares. In the chatty mini-world of publishing everyone knew everyone else or talked about them, anyhow: Black Jack Carey was legend, and the legacy of strife between his second son and his grandson was freely gossiped about by editors who changed houses like gypsies but kept the same bars. Carey, who was bored by gossip and disliked being known, half suspected that Phillip picked the Grill Room as a place sufficiently public to broach bad news.

“After all,” Phillip continued sotto voce, still waving, “how can capitalism be so bad, when all these idiots can spend all this money?”

Carey's smile was thin. “That depends on who's asking the question.”

Phillip gave him a quick, sharp look. “You're a bit of a Puritan, Peter. I'm constantly mystified by your appeal to someone as passionate as Noelle.”

“As am I.” Carey cocked his head. “So what's up, Phil?”

“Drinks, before all.” Phillip's determined cheer dropped a notch. As always, he was impeccable, silvering hair trimmed perfectly to cover the tops of his ears. But years of affected languor, concealing what Carey sensed was inner turmoil, left him more spent-looking than mere dissipation would account for. His eyes were sunken, his face too thin, like that of an aging actor whose time was quickly passing. Imagining his uncle's life alone, with neither wife nor child, Carey felt a guilty flash of sympathy.

“Bloody Mary?” Phillip was asking.

“Gin martini, thanks.”

Carey watched his uncle order drinks: his smile at the waiter was almost too ingratiating, as if his place in life were rented and not owned. Phillip's cologne wafted across the table like a memory of childhood.