Chance (15 page)

He let her use the apartment to make herself presentable while waiting for a cab. “This is where you live?” she asked. She had expected something on a grander scale. He told her about the divorce. She washed her face. He made coffee. He was curious as to how Jackie had gotten his address. “I guess you’ll have to ask her,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t always remember. There are blank spots.” She saw his laptop in the kitchenette, open on the table. “You were still up,” she said.

“That little bit at the restaurant . . . sleep didn’t feel like an option. What happened after you left? What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He can be like that. He’s a control freak. He likes to keep people off balance. He likes suspense and high drama. I haven’t seen him since we left the restaurant. At least that’s how I remember it.” She touched a key and woke his computer. “The axiom of choice,” she said, and the shadow of a smile played across her face, half flirtatious, like she’d been that day in the bookstore. If only she had not been so alluring. It would all have been so much easier.

“Mathematically speaking,” Chance told her, “an axiom is a proposition that is assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow from it. You
could
say that’s how we live. Life presents us with choices. We’re defined by the choices we make yet we make them in uncertainty. In hindsight our choices will often seem arbitrary.”

She appeared to give this some thought. “I’m not sure what a mathematician would say,” she said, her face clouding. He had the feeling she was not altogether comfortable with his take on the matter. “I mean,” she went on, “they sometimes have different meanings for words; like
arbitrary.
” She seemed to be posing this as if it were a question.

“Certainly. There’s a language of mathematics and I am not conversant. Words are what I have and it’s the words as words that interest me.”

“It’s words as words I like to escape now and then,” Jaclyn Blackstone told him.

Chance could hear his neighbors in the apartment below. Gratefully, they were neither arguing nor making love. The voices were low and indistinct, probably, he thought, still talking about what had happened outside their door, and for a short time that was all he and Jaclyn had to listen to, the distant murmuring of other voices in unseen rooms.

“I didn’t know he was violent,” Jaclyn said. He assumed it was Raymond Blackstone they were about to discuss. She told him about the stalker, Raymond’s response to her call for help. That was how it had started. Eventually he’d asked her out. It was only
after
the marriage that she saw the violent streak. There was another time lag between her seeing it and his directing it at her. That had come one afternoon amid the rolling hills of West Marin. They’d gone for a drive in the country, out to the coast to see the lighthouse at Point Reyes. Coming back there had been a flat tire. They’d both gotten out of the car. He had set about exchanging the flat for the spare. It was true they’d both been tired, the sky darkening at the end of a long day. On the bluff overlooking the lighthouse they had shared a bottle of wine. He had lifted the car on the jack without first loosening the lug nuts, which meant only that he would have to lower it again in order to do so. It was a minor mistake, of little consequence. But she’d said something, a joke perhaps? It was lost to her now. He’d struck her in the face with the jack handle. Just like that. “Like being struck by lightning,” she said. “Out of nowhere on a cloudless day.” Later he’d apologized. He invented a story for the emergency room doctors, but afterward, driving her home from the hospital when it was clear that she was no longer responding to his words, he had pulled the car to the side of the road and he had let her know how it was, how it would be, if she ever told anyone, if she ever tried to leave. Incongruously, it had seemed to her at the time, he had wanted sex when they got home.
He liked seeing her beaten up, she guessed. He’d gotten off on it. It was at some point in and around that time that Jackie Black had made her first appearance.

For some reason, and one could not rule out the elevated levels of alcohol in his bloodstream, he elected to disclose his plans for infiltrating the Oakland DA’s office, for making a friend in the department. Feeling himself on a roll, he went so far as to tell her about the Jollys.

She stared at him aghast. It was hardly the reaction he had anticipated.

“What?” Chance said.

The downstairs neighbors had ceased their murmurings. A hush had fallen over the apartment. Jaclyn had begun to pace. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said. It wouldn’t make any difference if he
were
in jail. They could put him away for the rest of his life . . .”

“Jaclyn . . . He’s not omnipotent. He’s not God. There
are
limits.”

“It won’t stop,” she told him. “Not till he’s dead, him or me.”

He just looked at her. “But I told you on the phone that I had come up with something that might work, with a plan. . . . Why did you agree to hear it if that’s what you think?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said.

When it was clear she was not going to say more, Chance went on. “I am not willing to accept this as a problem that cannot be solved.” It was no more than a rehashing of the plan he’d already so much as abandoned, but then her presence did seem to warp things. She was possessed of her own gravitational field, he thought, like some stellar phenomenon, capable of bending the light. “Nor . . .” Chance rambled, rather like an empty boxcar on a downhill run, “do I think making a friend in the DA’s office is such a bad idea. This is a dirty cop we’re talking about. If he’s dirty in one way, he will be dirty in two. He doesn’t have to get caught for what he’s done to you. That’s the beauty of the thing.”

“Of your plan.”

“It’s like Al Capone,” he said. “They didn’t get him for all the people he murdered. They got him for tax evasion.”

“Umm.”

A car stopped in the street.

“Probably your ride,” Chance said. He went to the window.

A car from the East Bay Cab Company had indeed pulled up in front of the apartment. He turned to find that she had risen from her chair. “You can’t lose faith,” he said. He was overcome by the desire to tell her something. He wanted to take her in his arms is what he wanted to do. She was, in her own way, as seductive as Jackie, if not as dangerous. Or maybe she was. The conventional goal of therapy in treating dissociative disorders was to integrate the personalities into a unified whole, and he found himself, in his still somewhat inebriated state, giving way to a brief meditation on just what an integrated Jaclyn/Jackie might be like. “We will find a way,” he told her.

She nodded slightly.

“And what if there was a way for you to continue with Janice? It wouldn’t be in her office. We’d find a cover, someone you could visit as a math tutor. Janice could meet you there . . .”

“You’re my knight,” she said suddenly.

“That’s what
she
said,” Chance told her.

She was only momentarily put off.

“You should probably go down.”

“She was right then.” It took him a moment to realize she too was talking about Jackie Black. “You
do
know that . . . that you should think of all these things . . . that you stood up to him in the restaurant.”

“I hardly ‘stood up to him.’ ”

“Oh yes you did.” She let a moment pass. “And don’t think he didn’t notice. You’ll be on his radar now.”

His phone began to ring. “That’s got to be your cab,” he said. “Will you think about Janice?” He lifted the phone, told the driver they would be down shortly, and hung up without waiting for a reply. He looked once more at Jaclyn Blackstone.

“Are they really the Jollys?” she asked.

It was on her way out that she noticed the cabinet Chance kept stocked with perfume bottles. She paused to look. “My God,” she said. “What’s all this?” There was something playful in the way she’d said it, like when she’d asked about the Jollys, not quite Jackie Black but not quite the other one either, the huddled creature from the street.

“I’m interested in the connection between our sense of smell and our recollection of past events. It’s a little hobby of mine. At least it used to be.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “I was thinking that maybe I should check your closet before I leave.”

“Nothing there,” he assured her. “No evening gowns or spiked heels. I envisioned once a kind of olfactory Rorschach test that might be particularly useful in helping individuals with certain types of amnesia.”

“But you don’t anymore?” she asked, reaching for a vial.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t thought about it for a while, you want the truth. We really should go down,” he said, but she’d already dabbed a bit on the back of her hand and he looked to see what she had chosen, a male scent from France. “What do you think?” he asked.

“The desert, after a rain. It’s nice. Can I try one more?” She pointed to a particularly ornate bottle.

It was, he saw, another of the male scents. He took it from the cabinet. “Try it like this.” He took one of his smell strips from a drawer beneath the perfumes, dabbed it with the scent, and passed it to her.

She tried it then made a face and pushed it away. “Too much,” she said.

“Too much in what way?”

“It’s right on top of you.” She returned the stick, the fingers of one hand pressed to the hollow of her throat. “It’s like the funeral home, when they close the lid.”

He might have asked about funeral homes and past associations. He chose instead to talk about smell’s direct access to the limbic system. “All other pathways run through the thalamus. Cognition modulates sensation. Olfactory input has one less filter. Sensation influences cognition. Which is why visceral, emotional reactions to scent can be
so immediate and powerful in ways that other forms of sensory input cannot. Most people in my business tend to ignore this.” He stopped and looked at her. “Boring?”

“Are you joking? For me you read about the axiom of choice.” She was holding his eyes with her own. In the dim light of his apartment he could feel her heat in the air between them. “Why?” she asked. “Why do they ignore it?”

“It all has to do with Freud’s relationship with a guy named Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who fucked with Freud’s nose somewhere in about 1895.”

“Oh come on, you can’t stop with that.”

“There
is
a car downstairs.”

“How long can it take?”

In fact, he thought, there was something kind of fun in this little game she had started. It felt safer than what had gone before. With a car waiting, how far could they really go?

“Well then . . .” he said at length. He was still just drunk enough to play along. “Okay. The salient points . . . In the 1880s, as Freud was formulating his thoughts on the role of sexual trauma, real and imagined, in the development of hysterical symptoms, he was for a time quite interested in the role of smell. He said that he had often suspected an
organic
element in repression involving the abandonment of what he called the ‘ancient sexual zones’ linked to the changed role of olfactory sensations, meaning that the importance of smell in shaping behavior changed when we began to walk around on two legs instead of four. Formerly
interesting
sensations emanating from the ground became repulsive. Those were
his
words. And he went further.
Memory,
he said, now gives off the same stench as an actual object. Just as we avert our sense organ from stinking objects, so the preconscious and our conscious apprehension turn away from painful or unpleasant memories. This is what we call repression.
But,
and this is where it gets interesting . . .”

“I think you’re interesting,” she told him. “I like it when you talk like a doctor.”

Christ, he thought, she really could get away with things. He
reminded himself that she was about to go and carried on. “He never systematically explored the sense of smell in relationship to hysteria, the neuroses or the psychoses. And the
reason
for that . . . was Fliess, who for years lectured and wrote about what
he
considered to be a physiologic relationship between the nose and the female genitals. He
conceptualized
a number of somatic ailments as
nasal reflex
neuroses.
To treat these
neuroses
Fliess either applied cocaine to, or cauterized, the nasal mucosa
or
surgically removed portions of the nasal turbinate bones.”

“My God. Talk about the Dark Ages.”

“Now Freud fell in with this guy. And he also, at the time, just happened to be suffering from recurrent nasal infections. Fliess prescribed cocaine and operated, on two separate occasions, on Freud’s nose. And finally, at Freud’s request, Fliess traveled to Vienna to operate on one of Freud’s patients, a woman suffering from certain ailments that Freud was willing to interpret as the kind of nasal reflex neuroses Fliess had imagined. Fliess operated and went home. The patient developed a severe postoperative infection and nearly died. It was later discovered Fliess had left packing gauze in her nose.”