Chapter Nine

The next day he went out and bought clothes; he bought them feverishly, as if new clothes, clothes that fit him well, would solve everything. He bought a new, smaller Niques belt as well. He became aware that people had stopped complimenting him on his weight loss; when had that started? He didn't know.

He put on the new clothes. He went to work and came home. He drank too much, ate second helpings that he ,didn't want and which sat heavily in his stomach. A week passed, and the new clothes did not look trim and neat anymore; they had begun to bag.

He approached the bathroom scales, his heart thudding so heavily that it made his eyes throb and his head ache. He would discover later that he had bitten his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. The image of the scale had taken on childish overtones of terror in his mind – the scale had become the goblin of his life. He stood before it for perhaps as long as three minutes, biting down hard on his lower lip, unaware of either the pain or the salty taste of blood in his mouth. It was evening. Downstairs, Linda was watching Three's Company on TV, and Heidi was running the weekly household accounts on the Commodore in Halleck's study.

With a kind of lunge, he got onto the scale.

188.

He felt his stomach roll over in a single giddy tumble, and for one desperate moment it seemed impossible that he would not vomit. He struggled grimly to keep his supper down – he needed that nourishment, those warm healthy calories.

At last the nausea passed. He looked down at the calibrated dial, dully remembering what Heidi had said It doesn't weigh heavy, it weighs light. He remembered Michael Houston saying that at 217 he was still thirty pounds over his optimum weight. Not now, Mikey, he thought tiredly. Now I'm … I'm thinner.

He got off the scales, aware that he now felt a certain measure of relief – the relief a Death Row prisoner might feel, seeing the warden and the priest appear at two minutes of twelve, knowing that the end had come and there was going to be no call from the governor. There were certain formalities to be gone through, of course, yes, but that was all. It was real. If he talked about it to people, they would think he was either joking or crazy – no one believed in Gypsy curses anymore, or maybe never had – they were definitely declasse in a world that had watched hundreds of marines come home from Lebanon in coffins, in a world that had watched five IRA prisoners starve themselves to death, among other dubious wonders – but it was true, all the same. He had killed the wife of the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, and his sometime golf partner, good old tit-grabbing Judge Cary Rossington, had let him off without even so much as a tap on the wrist, and so the old Gypsy had decided to impose his own sort of justice on one fat Fairview lawyer whose wife had picked the wrong day to give him his first and only handjob in a moving car. The sort of justice a man like his sometime friend Ginelli might appreciate.

Halleck turned off the bathroom light and went downstairs, thinking of Death Row convicts walking down the last mile. No blindfold, Faddah … but who's got a cigarette? He smiled wanly.

Heidi was sitting at his desk, the bills on her left, the glowing screen in front of her, the Marine Midlands checkbook propped on the keyboard like sheet music. A common enough sight on at least one night during the first week of the new month. But she wasn't writing checks or running figures. She was only sitting there, a cigarette between her fingers, and when she turned to him, Billy saw such woe in her eyes that he was almost physically staggered.

He thought of selective perception again, the funny way your mind had of not seeing what it didn't want to see … like the way you kept pulling your belt smaller and smaller to hold your oversized pants up around your shrinking waistline, or the brown circles under your wife's eyes … or the desperate question in those eyes.

'Yeah, I'm still losing weight,' he said.

'Oh, Billy,' she said, and exhaled in a long, trembling sigh. But she looked a little better, and Halleck supposed she was glad it was out in the open. She hadn't dared mention it, just as no one at the office had dared to say: Your clothes are starting to look like they came from Omar the Tentmaker, Billy-boy … Say, you haven't got a growth or anything, do you? Somebody hit you with the old cancerstick, did they, Billy? You got yourself a great big old tumor inside you someplace, all black and juicy, sort of a rotted human toadstool down there in your guts, sucking you dry? Oh, no, nobody says that shit; they let you find it out for yourself. One day you're in court and you start to lose your pants when you stand up to say, 'Your Honor, I object!' in the best Perry Mason tradition, and nobody has to say a motherfucking word.

'Yeah,' he said, and then actually laughed a little, as if to cover same.

'How much?'

'The scale upstairs says I'm down to one-eighty-eight.'

'Oh, Christ!'

He nodded toward her cigarettes. 'Can I have one of those?'

'Yes, if you want one. Billy, you're not to say a word to Linda about this – not one!'

'Don't have to,' he said, lighting up. The first drag made him feel dizzy. That was okay; the dizziness was kind of nice. It was better than the numb horror that had accompanied the end of the selective perception. 'She knows I'm still losing weight. I've seen it on her face. I just didn't know what I was seeing until tonight.'

'You've got to go back to see Houston,' she said. She looked badly frightened, but that confused expression of doubt and sorrow was gone from her eyes now. 'The metabolic series -'

'Heidi, listen to me,' he said … and then stopped.

'What?' she asked. 'What, Billy?'

For a moment he almost told her, told her everything. Something stopped him, and he was never sure later what it was … except that, for one moment, sitting there on the edge of his desk and facing her with their daughter watching TV in the other room and one of her cigarettes in his hand, he felt a sudden savage moment of hate for her.

The memory of what had happened – what had been happening – in the minute or so before the old Gypsy woman darted out into the traffic returned to him in a flash of total recall. Heidi had scooted over next to him and had put her left arm around his shoulders … and then, almost before he was aware it had happened, she had unzipped his fly. He felt her fingers, light and oh so educated, slip through the gap, and then through the opening in his shorts.

In his teens, Billy Halleck had occasionally perused (with sweaty hands and slightly bulging eyes) what were referred to by his peers as 'stroke books.' And sometimes in these 'stroke books,' a 'hot bimbo' would wrap her 'educated fingers' around some fellow's 'stiffening member. 'All nothing but wet dreams set in type, of course … except here was Heidi, here was his wife gripping his own stiffening member. And, by damn, she was beginning to jerk him off. He had glanced at her, astonished, and had seen the roguish smile on her lips.

'Heidi, what are you -?'

'Shhh. Don't say a word.'

What had possessed her? She had never done such a thing before, and Halleck would have sworn that such a thing had never crossed her mind. But she had done it, and the old Gypsy woman had darted

Oh, tell the truth! As long as the scales are dropping from your eyes, you might as well drop all of them, don't you think? You got no business lying to yourself; the hour's gotten too late for that. Just the facts, ma'am.

All right, the facts. The fact was that Heidi's unexpected move had excited him tremendously, probably because it had been unexpected. He had reached for her with his right hand and she had pulled her skirt up, exposing a perfectly ordinary pair of yellow nylon panties. Those panties had never excited him before, but they did now … or perhaps it was the way she had pulled up her skirt that had excited him; she had never done that before, either. The fact was that about eighty-five percent of his attention had been diverted from his driving, although in nine out of ten parallel worlds, things probably still would have turned out perfectly okay; during the business week, Fairview's streets were not just quiet, they were downright somnolent. But never mind that, the fact was that he hadn't been in nine out of ten parallel worlds; he had been in this one. The fact was that the old Gypsy woman hadn't darted out from between the Subaru and the Firebird with the racing stripe; the fact was that she simply walked from between the two cars, holding a net bag full of purchases in one gnarled and liver-spotted hand, the sort of net bag Englishwomen often take with them when they go shopping along the village high street. There had been a box of Duz laundry powder in the Gypsy woman's net bag; Halleck remembered that. She had not looked; that was true enough. But the final fact was just that Halleck had been doing no more than thirty-five miles an hour and he must have been almost a hundred and fifty feet from the Gypsy woman when she stepped out in front of his Olds. Plenty of time to stop if he had been on top of the situation. But the fact was that he was on the verge of an explosive orgasm, all but the tinest fraction of his consciousness fixed below his waist as Heidi's hand squeezed and relaxed, slipped up and down with slow and delicious friction, paused, squeezed, and relaxed again. His reaction had been hopelessly slow, hopelessly too late, and Heidi's hand had clamped on him, stifling the orgasm that shock had brought on for one endless second of pain and a pleasure that was inevitable but still gruesome.