Chance (17 page)

It was the primary concern of the chubby duo that Thaddeus not lose his license to operate a motor vehicle as his mother was counting on him, primarily for rides to and from the store where she liked to purchase her movie star magazines, newspapers, and cigarettes with food stamps provided by the state. As to any concerns the couple might have shared over future instructions from the car’s radio and their effect upon young Thaddeus, both were at pains to state, in a manner that might only have been taken for upbeat, that,
in general,
Thaddeus was quite able to say no to such suggestions.

Chance’s great and single contribution to this tale of woe had been, by way of a series of letters and phone calls, to keep the dim-witted
fatass from regaining his place behind the wheel under threat of house arrest. Mind-boggling that no one had done this previously but there it was, your tax dollars at work. Needless to say this had not sat well with mother and son who now used every opportunity to lobby hard for the immediate reinstatement of Thaddeus’s privileges and would no doubt have continued to do so on the day in question had Chance consented to give them a hearing.

Lucy put her head in a short while later to say that she had pushed the appointment to the following week. “Excellent,” Chance told her. “And thank you. The day’s visit was not to be borne.”

She stood a moment longer in the doorway to his office. “Are you
sure
you’re all right?” She actually looked worried. Chance assured her that he was. She took a last long look around, as if expecting to find something he’d hidden there, Jaclyn Blackstone perhaps, and left him alone. Sometime after lunch, which he also skipped, he put in a call to Carl Allan of Allan’s Antiques but the old man was out. He left a long, possibly incoherent, message on the business’s answering machine and hung up.

There were a number of incoming calls throughout the remainder of the day but Chance declined to take them. Lucy came on two separate occasions to check in on him. He continued to assure her that everything was A-OK, finally sending her home early at just before three o’clock.

When she was gone he continued to sit at his desk, which, like the pieces so recently sold, was an antique of similar vintage but worth considerably less, housing at one of its corners the small bust of Nietzsche he had acquired as a student abroad, a trip undertaken as a break from the study of medicine, the latter being not so much the dictate of the heart as a thing that had been required of him by his father. Well, he thought now, watching the golden light and late wind play havoc with the clouds above the rooftops, he had been the good son, at least to a point. Twenty-odd years in the practice of medicine and it had gotten him here, to something very much resembling the oft-cited life
of quiet desperation, unfulfilled in his work, divorced and indebted, half in love with an impossible woman, a potentially malignant blip on another man’s radar. If that wasn’t the shits he didn’t know what was.

While doing nothing to advance the workings of his office, he did feel inclined to call Janice Silver. He was still operating on the assumption that, whatever else happened or didn’t, they would find a way for her to continue with Jaclyn, and he wanted her to know about the perfume.

“Do you mind my asking what she was doing in your apartment?”

He told her about the meeting in the restaurant and Jackie Black. This was followed by a moment of silence. A trolley rattled past on the street below.

“I don’t know, Eldon,” Janice said at length. “I don’t think this sounds so good.”

“I saw a soul in distress. I made a decision to help.”

“I guess we both did. And now we may be finding out firsthand why they warn against it. My God, what are you going to do when this man . . . the husband, comes looking for you?”

“It’s not my intention to start
see 
ing her,” Chance said. “Socially
or
professionally. I was hoping to
arrange
something, find a way for her to continue therapy while I look for this guy’s Achilles’ heel.”

“And how are we coming with all of that?”

“To be honest with you, I’m not sure.”

There was another lengthy pause. “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing here,” Janice said at length. “On two counts. There’s her and now there’s him. I say this as your friend. As far as therapy is concerned, I’ll go along with this to a point. I’ve a friend whose daughter is having trouble with her algebra. So we can try that. But as you know, any progress she may make is pretty much dependent upon her getting out from under the relationship that has given rise to her problems.”

“This is true. But what I’m also thinking . . . this guy may not be the alpha and omega of her problems. Has she ever said anything that would have suggested abuse from an earlier time?”

“She thinks her childhood was wonderful.”

“Her thinking it might not make it so.”

“And one needs, as you well know, in the current climate, to be cautious in suggesting that.”

“Both parents are dead, as I recall, limiting their ability to bring suit. There was something in her reaction to that scent that is simply hard for me to ignore. It suggests something buried, something she has yet to speak of, maybe even to become aware of herself. . . . She fled immediately. There was already a cab waiting in the street. It was hardly something I could pursue but I think you might. I’d be happy to provide the perfume.”

“That’s your domain, Eldon, but let me think about it.”

“It’s interesting that the scent in question was a woman’s scent. You would think, given what we know of her history, that if anything was going to elicit that kind of flight response, it would be a man’s scent.”

To which Janice only sighed before going on. “She and I met exactly six times. Most of the work we did was along behavioral lines . . . strategies by which she might say no to her husband.
My
point being . . . there is very little that we actually
know
about her history.”

“Maybe that’s something we could work on.”

Janice sighed once more. “Yes, Eldon, maybe it is. But right now . . . I have a patient waiting.”

When they’d hung up, Chance went back to his initial report on Jaclyn Blackstone and read it one more time. The thing ran for a mere six pages. She had been referred by the Stanford Neurology Clinic for complaints of intermittent memory loss and difficulties in concentration. Biographical information was scant. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, graduated from high school in San Jose, California, with high marks, college in San Diego, where she had majored in applied mathematics, both parents deceased, married three years to Raymond Blackstone. There were no children, at least none she had admitted to in the report, although she did claim to have been pregnant once at the age of thirty-two. The pregnancy had ended in miscarriage. Chance
had of course seen all this before, but that was back in the day. Jackie Black had upped the stakes.

In the wake of the miscarriage, she had seen a therapist, a Myra Cohen, for a period of one year, at which time Dr. Cohen had died suddenly. There was no more to it, at least not here, meaning she had volunteered nothing more at the time of their initial meeting and he had not asked. Still, it was in reading about Dr. Cohen that he saw something he had until now overlooked.

He had always assumed her seeing the therapist was in response to depression following the loss of her child. What he saw now was that this was not exactly the case. Depression had been a factor but there was more to it. Buried in her talk of depression and the loss of her child were also “vague paranoid feelings” as might, he concluded, be expected in someone beset by repressed memories.

Jaclyn had claimed Jackie Black as a response to Raymond Blackstone. This was, as Janice had pointed out, atypical. Dissociative disorders of the type thus far in evidence were generally thought to arise out of
childhood
abuse and were often associated with repressed memories. Coupled with this were a number of interesting if not disturbing questions. How had Detective Blackstone known to come to the restaurant? Had he intercepted a message, overheard a conversation, or was it a game Jaclyn played, an unconscious game but a game nonetheless, the pitting of one man against another, the new knight against the old?

The control mastery theory of psychotherapy is predicated on the idea that all people do through life is try, in unconscious ways, to master early trauma, that all relationships take on meaning in reference to feelings of shame and helplessness versus control and domination. Life itself becomes an expression of the will to power, to do to others what was done to you. Locked into such a pattern, the victim may become a predator out to ensnare predators from whom to be rescued, preferably by yet one more predator. Could that be the dance and Jaclyn the caller? If Jackie Black had found him once she would find him again. Distancing himself might not be so easy as he’d once imagined. The lives of certain very fucked-up types were like that after all. It was a blood in and blood out kind of thing. One exit strategy might be to go
at it head-on, to seek out the earlier trauma in the hopes of effecting a cure, to bring the hidden patterns of behavior out into the light and so end the dance once and for all. It was to this end, he concluded, that it might be of interest to look into the death of Dr. Cohen, surely a matter of public record. Perhaps, if they were lucky, there would be medical records as well, maybe even the doctor’s notes. Might any of these have survived? Might one track them down? Would he entrust this to Janice Silver or engage in the hunt himself ?

There were, of course, any number of things with which one might engage. Effort would be required, a “heave of the will” worthy of William James. Jaclyn Blackstone was after all only one of his troubles. There was also the matter of Carl Allan. One really
ought
to go see the old bird face-to-face. One
ought
to do something about a certain check in a certain safe-deposit box not a block from where he sat. Awash in the day’s complexities, Chance remained at his desk, the six pages of Jaclyn Blackstone scattered across its surface, his beloved Mahler on the sound system, staring across city rooftops made faintly luminous in the afternoon light.