Lying on the Couch (43 page)

n Friday afternoon, before locking his office, Marshal surveyed the things he loved. Everything was in its place: the gleaming rosewood cabinet that contained the twisted-stem sherry glasses, the glass sculptures, the Golden Rim of Time. Yet nothing lightened his dark mood or eased the tightness in his throat.

As he closed the door, he paused and tried to analyze his disquiet. It did not emanate solely from his anticipated rendezvous with Shelly at Avocado Joe's in three hours—though, God knows, that was worrisome enough. No, it was about another matter entirely: Adriana. At the beginning of the week she had, once again, not shown for her appointment and not phoned to cancel. Marshal was baffled. It simply didn't compute: a woman of such excellent breeding and social presence simply does not behave in this fashion. Marshal paid himself another two hundred dollars out of the cash Peter had given him, this time without much deliberation. He had phoned

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Adriana immediately and left a message asking her to contact him as soon as possible.

Perliaps he had made a tactical mistake in agreeing to treat her, even for brief therapy. She may have harbored more reservations about marriage than she had acknowledged to Peter, and perhaps felt awkward discussing them. After all, he was Peter's ex-therapist, he had been paid by Peter, and he was now an investor with Peter. Yes, the more Marshal thought about it, the more he suspected that he had made an error in judgment. That, he reminded himself, is precisely the problem with boundary violations—the slippery slope: one slip begets another.

Three days had passed since his call to Adriana, and still no response. It was not his style to phone a patient more than once, but Marshal unlocked the door, went back into the office, and dialed her number again. This time he was told that the line had been disconnected! The phone company could give him no other information.

As Marshal drove home he considered two diametrically opposed explanations. Either Adriana and Peter, possibly with the provocation of her father, had had a severe falling out and she wished nothing to do with a therapist connected with Peter. Or Adriana had gotten fed up with her father and impulsively jumped on a plane to join Peter in Zurich—she had hinted during her last session that it was going to be difficult to remain apart from Peter.

But neither of these hypotheses accounted for Adriana's failure to phone him. No, the more Marshal thought about it, the more certain he became of something deeply portentous. Illness? Death? Suicide? His next step was obvious: he had to phone Peter in Zurich! Marshal glanced at his Rolex, accurate to the millisecond. Six p.m. That meant three A.M. in Zurich. He would have to wait until after his rendezvous with Shelly and call Peter at midnight—nine A.M. Swiss time.

As Marshal opened his garage door to park, he noted that Shirley's car was gone. Out for the evening. As usual. It happened so often now that Marshal had lost track of her schedule: whether she was working late at her clinical internship, taking one of her few remaining clinical psychology classes, teaching ikebana, participating in some ikebana exhibition, or sitting for meditation at the Zen Center.

Marshal opened the refrigerator door. Nothing there. Shirley was still not cooking. As usual she had left a new flower arrangement on

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the kitchen table for him. Under the bowl was a note stating she'd be back before ten. Marshal glanced quickly at the arrangement: a simple motif containing three calla lilies, two white, one saffron. The long graceful stalks of a white and a saffron calla lily were entwined and separated by a dense growth of crimson nambia berries from the third lily, which swooped away as far as possible from the other lilies and leaned dangerously far over the edge of the crackled lavender ceramic basin.

Why did she leave him these flower arrangements? For a moment, just for a moment, the thought occurred to Marshal that Shirley had been using saffron and white calla lilies a great deal lately. Almost as though she were sending him a message. But he dismissed the thought quickly. The time spent on such evanescent nonsense galled him. So many better ways to use one's time. Like cooking dinner. Like sewing some buttons on his shirts. Like finishing her dissertation, which, flaky as it was, had to be completed before she could start billing patients. Shirley was very good at demanding equal rights. Marshal thought, but was good also at giving her time away and, as long as her husband was around to pay the bills, was content to postpone indefinitely the moment of entry into the adult, billable world.

Well, he knew how to use time. Pushing the flower arrangement out of the way, he unfolded the afternoon Examiner and calculated his daily stock profits. Then, still tense and jittery, he decided on a nautilus workout, grabbed his gym bag, and headed off to the YMCA. Later, at the restaurant at Avocado Joe's, he'd grab a bite.

Shelly whistled zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay all the way to Avocado Joe's. He had had a dynamite week. Playing the tennis of his life, he had carried Willy to the California senior doubles championship and a shot at the national championship. But there was more, much more.

Willy, riding a crest of euphoria, had made Shelly an offer that, with one quick stroke, solved all Shelly's problems. Willy and Shelly had decided to stay in Southern California an extra day to catch the races at Hollywood Park—Willy had a two-year-old named Omaha running in the feature race, the Hollywood Juvenile Derby. Willy was hot on Omaha, as well as the jockey riding him; he'd already bet a bundle and urged Shelly to do the same. Willy bet first, while

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Shelly lingered behind in the clubhouse, doping out a show horse for a second bet on the race. When Willy returned, Shelly left to place his bets. However, Willy, after viewing the horses in the saddling paddock and admiring the sleek black muscular haunches of Omaha and noting, too, that the race favorite was sweating heavily— "washing out"—suddenly rushed back to the betting window. He had just put down another five thousand when he saw Shelly placing his bets at the twenty-dollar window.

"What gives. Shelly? We've been going to the races for ten years and I've never seen you hit anything but the hundred-dollar window. Here I am, swearing by my mother, my daughter, my whore, on this horse and you're at the twenty-dollar window?"

"Well..." Shelly blushed. "Cutting down . . . you know ... for marital harmony . . . little belt tightening ... job market bad ... of course, lots of offers, but waiting for the right thing . . . you know, money only small part of it—got to feel I'm using myself in the right way. Tell you the truth, Willy, it's Norma . . . uptight, very uptight about my gambling action when she's the family honcho earner. We had a big blowup last week. You know, my income was always the family income . . . her big salary she always considers her money. You know how the broads bitch and moan about not getting opportunities, but as soon as they get them they ain't so crazy about the burden."

Willy slapped himself on the head. ''That's why you weren't at the last two games! Shit, Shelly, I must be fucking blind not to have figured—whoa, wait, wait, they're off! Watch Omaha! Watch that fucking horse fly! Number five, McCarron's wearing the yellow jacket, yellow hat; he's gonna stay with the pack on the outside till the three-quarter pole and then shift that horse into another gear! Now, here, they're coming up to it now—Omaha's making his move—taking off. Look at those strides—he's barely touching the ground! Have you ever seen a horse move like that? The place horse looks like it's running backwards. He's pumped up—I tell you, Shelly, he could do a second mile."

After the race—Omaha paid eight eighty—when Willy returned from the festivities at the winner's circle, he and Shelly went to the clubhouse bar and ordered Tsingtaos.

"Shelly, how long you been out of work now?"

"Six months."

"Six months! Christ, that's awful. Look, I was going to sit down

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and have a long talk with you soon, and it might as well be now. You know this big project I own in Walnut Creek? Well, we been going through the city council for about two years trying to get the go-ahead to condominiumize all four hundred units, and we're just about there. All my inside sources—and I'm telling you, I'm spreading a lot of money around—say we're a month away from approval. Our next step is to get the go-ahead from the residents—of course we've got to offer them first rights at deep discount prices—and then we start conversion construction."

"Yeah, so?"

"So . . . the bottom line is: I need a sales manager. I know you haven't done real estate, but I also know you're a fabulous salesman. A few years ago when you sold me a million-dollar yacht, you did it so smoothly I left the salesroom actually feeling you had done me a favor. You're a fast learn and you've got something going for you that no one else can duplicate: trust. Total trust. I trust you one thousand percent. I've played poker with you for fifteen years—and you know that bullshit we throw around that if the roads are ever closed by an earthquake we could still play poker on the phone?"

Shelly nodded.

"Well, you know what? That's not bullshit! I believe it—we may be the only poker group in the world who could do that. I trust you and all the guys—eyes closed. So, go to work for me. Shelly. Shit, I'm going to have you on the tennis courts for so many hours training for the nationals, you'd get fired from any other job."

Shelly agreed to go to work for Willy. At the same sixty-thousand-dollar salary he had in the last job. Plus commissions. But that wasn't all. Willy wanted to protect the game, wanted to insure that Shelly could continue to play.

"You know that million-dollar yacht? I've had some good times on it, but not million-dollar good times, not like the good times I've had in the game. It doesn't compare. If I had to give one up—the yacht or the game—the boat would be history in a flash. I want the game to go on and on and on, just like it's always been. And I'll tell you the truth, I didn't enjoy the last two games as much without you. Dillon took your place—he's tight, squeezing his cards so hard the queens were crying. Ninety percent of the hands he drops without even staying for the flop. Dull evening. Some of the life was gone from the game. Lose one key guy like you and the whole thing col-

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lapses. So tell me, Shelly—and I swear to God, this is between you and me. What do you need to play?"

Shelly explained that a forty thousand stake had carried him for fifteen years—and would be carrying him still if not for that card streak from hell. Willy readily offered to bankroll the forty thousand—a ten-year, renewable, interest-free loan to which Norma would not be privy.

Shelly hesitated.

"Let's call it," Willy said, "a signing bonus."

"Well..." Shelly waffled.

Willy understood and instantly sought a better way to offer the money without compromising their relationship.

"Wait, a better suggestion. Shelly. Let's cut ten thou off your official salary, the salary Norma would know about, and I'll give you a forty thousand advance—hidden in a Bahamas offshore account— and we'll be square in four years. Commissions gonna outweigh your salary anyway."

And that was how Shelly got his stake. And a job. And a ticket to the game forever and ever. And now even Norma could not deny the business advantages of his little social poker game. What a day. Shelly thought after their talk, as he stood in a long line to collect on his twenty-dollar win ticket. A near perfect day. Only one blemish: if only, if only, this conversation had happened last week! Or yesterday. Or even this morning! I'd be standing in the hundred-dollar line with a fistful of tickets. Eight-eighty! Goddamn, what a horse!

Marshal arrived early at Avocado Joe's, a large neon-gaudy casino with a flaming red Mazda Miata convertible on display just inside the front entrance—a promotional prize to be given away next month, the doorman explained. After plunging ten or fifteen steps deeper into the dense cloud of cigarette smoke. Marshal quickly looked around, then backed out immediately and returned to his car. He was seriously overdressed, and the last thing he wanted to do was to call attention to himself. The best-dressed players at Avocado Joe's were wearing San Francisco Forty-niner warm-up jackets.

Marshal cleared his lungs with a few deep breaths and then moved his car into a darker corner of the well-lit parking lot. After making sure there were no observers, he climbed into the backseat, pulled off his necktie and white shirt, opened his gym bag, and

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slipped on the top of his warm-up suit. Still not right, with polished black shoes and navy slacks: he would call less attention to himself if he went the whole way. So he put on his basketball sneakers and squiggled into his warm-up pants, hiding his face from two women who had pulled into an adjacent spot and whistled as they peered into his car.

Marshal waited till they had gone, took one last breath of clean air, and plunged back into Avocado Joe's. The enormous main gallery was divided into two gaming rooms, one for western poker, the other for Asian gambling. The western room contained fifteen green-felted horseshoe-shaped tables, each illuminated by a hanging imitation Tiffany light, and each ringed by ten seats for players and a central dealer's seat. Coca-Cola dispensers filled three corners of the room, and the fourth contained a large vending machine full of cheap dolls and stuffed animals. For four quarters you could purchase the privilege of maneuvering a large set of pincers in an attempt to clasp one of the prizes. Not since he was a kid walking the boardwalk of Atlantic City had Marshal seen one of those.

All fifteen tables played the same game: Texas Hold 'em. They differed only in the size of the bet permitted. Marshal strolled up to a five- and ten-dollar table and, standing behind one of the players, watched a hand. He had read enough of the booklet Shelly left him to understand the rudiments of the game. Each player got two down cards. Then five communal cards were dealt face up, the first three all at once ("the flop"), the next two singly ("fourth street" and "fifth street").