In Boston
"Yes, Coreen," sighed Ryerson Biergarten, "I realize that I look like a slob. And no, I don't like to look like a slob, and I really would do something about it if I-"
His first wife, who went these days by the name of Coreen Savage, sneered and cut in. "If you wanted to, Doctor." She called him "doctor" now as a kind of prod. When they were married, she called him doctor because he held a doctorate in parapsychology from Duke University, and although no one else called him doctor, because he didn't encourage it, for her, he knew, it had been a title filled with implied status and self-serving pride. Ryerson Biergarten knew many things, not only through the normal processes of education and living, but also because he was an astoundingly gifted psychic. His casual handsomeness and his unparalleled work as a psychic investigator had made him the darling of the popular press, and although he claimed to dislike the popular press, he'd admitted grudgingly that when People magazine had featured him on its cover ten months earlier, it had made him feel very good.
Ryerson-his friends called him Rye-also was a man who made mistakes, a fact with which he would have quickly agreed, and one of his choicest mistakes, he maintained, was marrying Coreen. "The old, old story," he said once, "of the triumph of biology over good sense."
"And what," Coreen whined on, "are you doing with that disgusting dog?"
"I like him," Ryerson protested.
"Well, for heaven's sake, he sounds like he's going to die!"
Ryerson shook his head. "No," he said, and stroked his Boston bull terrier pup, Creosote-so named because Ryerson had found him, shivering and thin and just a lick away from death, six months earlier in a smokehouse in Massachusetts. "He's not going to die, Coreen. He's got asthma. It's a fault of the breed-"
"Breed?" Coreen said incredulously. "Breed, Doctor? Are you saying that that dog has a pedigree?"
Coreen was the quintessential bitch. She was also a knockout. She was tall, buxom, red-haired; she had a small, pouty mouth, huge bright-green eyes, and she possessed the sort of natural sensuality that made everyone turn around and look. She used this sensuality to her best advantage. No one could blame her, least of all Ryerson, who, fifteen years earlier, had been one of its first wide-eyed and willing victims.
He said now, "Did you get the part you were after, Coreen?"
And she answered, from the small gray love seat in Ryerson's Newbury Street row house, "Which one?"
He smiled wearily. Was Which one? merely a pose-Well, you know, Rye, there are literally dozens of producers after me. He could not easily peer into her psyche for the answer. He had never been able to peer easily into her psyche. It was like looking into the head of a wild animal; what he saw was usually a mass of harsh angles and static and snow-it was, in fact, one of the things that he found attractive about her in the first place, beyond her obvious physical attributes. It made her mysterious, unreachable, and thus, at the time-when he was still working toward his doctorate at Duke University-a challenge.
He had quickly found that if he could not easily peer into her mind, it was, sadly, because there was precious little to see. Her concerns in life were basic-food, control, sex, sleep, comfort, and status. The order of those concerns varied from day to day and week to week, of course, as they do with everyone, but control always stayed near the top of the list. She exercised control, of course, with her body and her sensuality. She controlled Ryerson for the three years of their stormy marriage because she got a kick out of controlling him, and Ryerson let himself be controlled because, of course, he loved going to bed with her. It was a pit that he was not about to let himself fall into twelve years later, as she sat prettily on the small love seat, clearly offering herself to him in return for some as yet unasked for favor.
She sighed and let a sad little grin play on her mouth. "Well, actually, Rye"-Ryerson stiffened; she never called him Rye-"I didn't get the part I was after." She'd been auditioning for a part in a big-budget horror movie called Strange Seed, which was to be shot near Boston. She'd charmed the director, the associate director, the assistant director, a few of the camera operators, and even the male secretary to the producer; the part, she felt certain, was hers. She had failed, however, to consider that the world she moved in turned not on sex alone or on money alone, but on sex and money together, and, bedroom favors aside, there were other women better for the part. She added, "Someone else got it. Someone named Irene!" She said the name as if it were a forkful of bad fish she was trying to get out of her mouth.
"My sister's name is Irene," Ryerson said, smiling to himself.
"And she has a face like an owl," Coreen said.
"My sister has a face like an owl?" Ryerson said. "No, she doesn't."
Coreen waved the observation away. "No, not your sister. This person who got my part. She has a face like an owl, like one of those white owls you see on cigar boxes-"
"A barn owl?" Ryerson observed. He stroked Creosote, who gurgled, grunted, and licked happily at Ryerson's chin. "What's the part?"
"The part?" Coreen asked, momentarily confused-which was nothing new-then hurried on. "Oh, the part. Yes. It was the part of a dead woman. Some woman who died and came back to life."
Ryerson shrugged. "Well, it seems ready-made for someone who looks like an owl.
Coreen looked at him. "Is that a joke?"
Ryerson smiled thinly. "Sort of, Coreen." He paused. "Listen, I'm sorry, but if you've come here for a favor-"
She cut in sharply, as if offended. "A favor? My God, Rye, husbands and wives don't do favors for each other. Whatever they do, they do out of love." She gave him a straight and serious look, as if she had just uttered an astounding profundity. Then she smiled coyly. "And since you are, as they say, not without influence-"
"First of all, we aren't husband and wife anymore, thank the good Lord, and secondly, yes-I am completely without influence. I wouldn't want to influence anyone, Coreen, even if I could …"
"All I'm saying is that you know people. And because you know people-"
"No," Ryerson said firmly.
She looked appraisingly up at him from the love seat for a half minute, trying to gauge the firmness of his position. Then, nodding slowly, she went on, "Yes, of course. I understand. But you know, Rye, what makes this world go around-"
"No," he said again.
"Well then, I'll tell you," she said, misinterpreting his answer.
"No," he said yet again, very firmly. "You're not going to tell me what makes the world go around. I know what makes the world go around. Inertia. Not sex or money or whatever it is you were going to say, Coreen. Inertia! Conservation of momentum! We learned about it in high school."
She sighed heavily, in resignation, and stood: She was normally almost as tall as Ryerson; now, wearing very high heels, she contrived to appear even taller. She conjured up her most regal and offended look-chin jutting forward, eyes looking at Ryerson down the bridge of her nose, and she said, "You are weird, Doctor." It was a phrase she had used quite a lot during the breakup of their marriage and Ryerson said now, as he had so often then, "No more than anyone else, Coreen."
She focused on Creosote, who was trying mightily to lick Ryerson's chin. "And so," she finished, "is your disgusting dog!" Then she stomped from the house.
~ * ~
Joan Mott Evans had never been in Boston before and she wasn't sure what she thought of it. She found the Boston accent intriguing, and the people passably friendly, at least the few she'd met-a bus driver, a drugstore clerk, a cop who'd given her directions to Newbury Street. But the aura of the city seemed stiffer than she was used to. She'd lived in Buffalo for the past several months, but she thought of Erie, Pennsylvania, as her real home, and before that, Brockport, New York, home of Brockport State College. She was used to small towns and small concerns, where it was true that everyone knew everyone else's business, but it was also true that if you were in trouble, a lot of people knew about it, and someone was usually willing to help.
Boston wasn't at all like that. How could it be? Crowds made people turn inward, and look for identity within themselves; crowds made people yearn to be something other than just another face, or another body. And what was a city like Boston if not simply a very well-mannered crowd? She grinned self-critically. Or maybe, she decided, she was reading much more into what the city was telling her than she ought to; maybe she wasn't being fair.
She turned her head to look at the number of the row house to her right. "Damn," she whispered, because, as usual, caught up in her thoughts, she'd lost track of where she was and what she was doing. Ryerson Biergarten-whom she'd come from Buffalo to see-lived at a number behind her and on the other side of the street. She pulled his letter from the pocket of her simple rust-colored fall jacket and checked the return address. She repocketed the letter, and, not for the first time, had misgivings about being here, in Boston, on her way to see the most celebrated and successful of the nation's psychics. She thought, also not for the first time, that it was like the criminal hanging around the police station and acting nervous. Sooner or later someone was bound to ask questions, and sooner or later all the terrible answers would come spilling out. Especially if the someone asking the questions was Ryerson H. Biergarten.
She turned around, started back down Newbury Street. She saw Ryerson's house almost at once. It was a two-story white row house with black shutters on long, narrow windows. And there was a tall, attractive woman coming out the front door. Joan caught the woman's eye and the name "Coreen" flashed through her head. Doesn't fit her, Joan thought. She looks like a bitch. But the name, she realized, could have come from anywhere. It could have come from some elderly man sitting in one of the row houses, for instance, his thoughts on a long-dead love affair. That sort of thing had happened before, as if the frequency of Joan's psychic receiver changed at random, so, from time to time, what she received was a burst of something totally unrelated to the moment. She had a quick and urgent desire to call out the name, to see how the woman would react, but within a few moments the woman climbed into a late model LTD Crown Victoria and was speeding away from her, southwest down Newbury Street. Joan sighed; these quick bursts of psychic input were always strangely wearying.
A few moments later she was ringing Ryerson Biergarten's doorbell.