Chance (4 page)

The first was a chance meeting with Jaclyn Blackstone on the streets of Berkeley. It was quite unplanned and took place in a trendy little shopping district at the northwest side of town. He was still trying to figure out what to do about his furniture and Carl’s offer and Big D and all of that and was poking about in the Art and Architecture store on Fourth Street, looking through a book on French Art Nouveau furniture, when he caught sight of Jaclyn Blackstone among the aisles. It was scarcely two months since she’d visited his office yet he was struck by how different she looked. At the time of his evaluation she had worn a shapeless sweater over an old-fashioned blue print dress, her hair pulled loosely back, held by the kind of small white combs a little girl might use. She had looked all of her thirty-six years and then some, matronly, he had thought at the time. In the store she wore jeans and running shoes and a leather jacket over a yellow T-shirt and was anything but matronly. Her hair was different too, shorter, trendier. The fact was, she had caught his eye and it was only upon closer scrutiny that he realized who it was. The recognition was followed rather quickly by the thought that maybe this was not Jaclyn at all, but Jackie, and he wondered if she would see him and if she did, would there be any sign of recognition, though he also understood that even as Jaclyn she might not be so eager to say hello given the circumstances of their original meeting. He was therefore a bit surprised when, as their eyes met and after only a momentary delay, she favored him with a rather shy smile and a little wave of the hand.

Their paths crossed at the end of the aisle. They were both holding books. “Don’t you love this store?” she asked.

“I do. What are
you
reading?”

She held up a rather small book with a picture of two wooden chairs on the cover. “I like to find old pieces of furniture that I can strip and redo.”

“Antiques?”

“Nooo. Junk.” She produced an iPhone, pulled up her photographs, then scrolled around a bit before finding something for him to look at,
half a dozen straight-back wooden chairs that had not only been rather gaily painted with pastel washes but bore as well the likeness of movie stars reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened portraits.

“Madonna and Marilyn,” she told him. “I call them my icon chairs.”

“These are quite good,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Yeah?” She found two other chairs that had pictures of dogs on them. “I like dogs too,” she said.

“Me too. Do you have one?”

She looked away. “I did. But I lost him,” she said. Her smile of only moments before had given way to a look of profound distress.

“I’m so sorry. It’s sad to lose a pet.”

She nodded. “I have a cat.” Her eyes clocked to his book. “What do
you
have?”

He showed her the book on French furniture.

“Well, see . . .” she said. “Yours is fancier than mine. But then you’re the doctor.” It was the first reference either had made as to why they were even standing here talking.

“Yes, well . . . I have some furniture kind of like this that I’m thinking of selling.”

“Well don’t think too long,” she told him.

He laughed. “Now why would you say that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like good all-purpose advice. One could say it about so many things.”

It was almost as if she were flirting with him. He was even beginning to wonder if she’d lied. Maybe there were more than two of her. He was also enjoying her company and in a short while discovered that he had moved with her into the checkout line at the register where he felt somehow obliged to buy the book he carried even though it was more money than he’d wanted to spend if for no other reason than to prolong the pleasures of the moment.

Minutes later, on the sidewalk in front of the store, the absurdity of it all descended on him for the first time. In the twenty years of his marriage he’d been faithful to his wife, raising his daughter, building a practice. He’d seen no one since the separation. That he was suddenly standing here, amped like some schoolboy in the presence
of an attractive woman he just happened to have seen as a patient, that he just happened to know was possessed of at least one secondary personality willing to engage in rough sex with an estranged spouse, by all accounts a dangerous psychopath, was enough to render him at least momentarily speechless. The really disturbing part was that he was also trying to decide if he should invite her to coffee as there was one of those upscale little East Bay coffee joints almost directly across the street from where they stood. Mercifully, she spoke first and thereby, he would conclude later, saving him from God only knew what horrors. “I just want you to know that I’m seeing the therapist you recommended,” she said. “It’s changed everything.” When next he spoke it was as what he was, a doctor addressing a patient on the occasion of a chance meeting in a public place. “I’m so glad to hear that,” he said. “And you’re feeling better?” He might have added that she looked like a million bucks but decided against it.

“I am,” she said. “I’m feeling better than I have in a long while.”

They stood for a moment with this.

“Well . . .” Chance said.

“Sometimes I use numbers,” she told him.

Chance just looked at her.

“On the furniture,” she added. “Formulas, sometimes, or geometric shapes. But sometimes just numbers.”

“Ah.” He recalled that she was also a teacher.

“I substitute,” she corrected. “I started doing it again, after the separation . . .” She allowed her voice to trail away, as if from the subject.

“You’re looking well,” Chance said, acting suddenly on his earlier impulse. If he’d hoped to put the smile back on her face he was successful.

“Am I?” she asked, and in doing so managed somehow to shift the tone of their meeting ever so slightly once more.

Was it him, he wondered, or did she really know how to play it so well? Or perhaps he was not according her the benefit of the doubt. He’d seen therapy turn people around. Why not Jaclyn Blackstone? “You are,” he said finally. “I almost didn’t recognize you there in the store.”

“Well,” she said, and she offered him a hand. “I am glad we ran into each other just now.”

He took her hand. “So am I. And I wish you the best.”

She seemed to take this as his way of saying good-bye, and perhaps it was. It certainly should have been. Still, in letting go of her hand he experienced a pang of remorse.

“Well . . .” she said once more. And he really did feel that they were both reluctant to break it off. “Enjoy your book. And good luck with your furniture, whatever you decide.”

He smiled and nodded and like that she was gone, or so it seemed. So conflicted had he been at just that moment in trying to decide if he should not have added something more, that in thinking back on it later, he could not quite recall if they’d even said good-bye. He concluded they had not. He had nodded. She had smiled. He had been left to stand there as she moved off down the sidewalk, pausing at the window of some store half a block away before moving on and out of sight, for good as far as he knew, so that what he was left with in the end was that very particular ache he had not felt in many years, the exultation of wanting in combination with a certain knowing, that the object of such desire is forever unavailable, that and the wonderful curvature of her spine as she posed like a dancer before a shop window, the afternoon light on her ash-blond hair.

Any such feelings of romantic ambiguity as may have washed over him in the immediate aftermath of this meeting were, in the days that followed, replaced by a profound relief that he had not succumbed to the absurd temptation to involve himself further in her affairs and he had returned to the contemplation of what to do about his furniture. He felt no great sense of urgency in this regard. It was his nature to view a thing from as many angles as possible, to imagine any and all worst-case scenarios. His wife and daughter had often accused him of being overly cautious in such matters, ganging up on him without mercy as Chance spent days on end lost in the evaluation of some apparently trivial decision or purchase, but then Chance was a believer in caution.
He supposed such traits were drummed into him by his father, provost at a small Bible-based college on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, who, like the Master for whom the school had been named, was a lover of parables. His father had favored those in which some youthful indiscretion leads inexorably to a life of pain and deprivation. And while Chance declined entrance to his father’s school, he could not say the old man’s words had failed to dog his tracks. Nor had his own work as a doctor served to make him any less wary. He’d spent far too many days with people for whom everything had changed in the time it took to draw a breath . . . because they’d turned left instead of right, failed to see the light or hear the horn, or those like Jaclyn Blackstone, guilty of little else save the kind of poor judgment that would place the heart above the head, now at Mercy General Hospital in downtown Oakland with an orbital blowout fracture on the right side of her face awaiting surgery to relieve pressure on an entrapped inferior rectus muscle, and that was the second thing that happened.

He’d heard the news from Janice Silver. She’d called because Jaclyn had come to her by way of Chance and she thought he would want to know. She was also angry and wanted someone to vent to and lastly, as Jaclyn was without insurance and in a county hospital, she was wondering if Chance might be willing to look in on her, to evaluate the extent of her injuries himself.

Chance said that he would. He was seated in his office, the very book he had purchased in Jaclyn’s presence open on the desk before him, the buildings outside his window losing definition to a creeping afternoon fog. “This is the work of the ex?” he asked.

“I can’t believe it’s not.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“She’s not saying.”

Chance watched the fog. He heard Janice sigh, the anger in her voice. “She had been doing so well,” she told him. “You know this bastard had been coming to see her once a week. She’d begun to say no. It was working. Jackie was staying out of the picture. It
had
to be him.”

“What does she say?”

“She says she surprised an intruder on the patio of her condominium.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Janice echoed, “anything is possible. Let’s not rule out alien abductions.”