Not a Creature Was Stirring(88)
“I slept like a log, I just didn’t do it long enough. I guess it was mostly the dope.”
“Are you still smoking dope?”
“I have to do something, Bennis. I don’t smoke anything else. I don’t drink. Last couple of months or so, I don’t even get laid.”
“Shut the door,” Bennis said. “If Anne Marie sees us, she’ll want us to do something.”
Chris shut the door. Behind him, Bennis was sitting cross-legged on her bed, draped in a man’s red football jersey, her hair pinned to the top of her head in a haphazard way that told him she’d stuck it up there to get it out of the way, without looking in a mirror to be sure she got it right. She was unbelievably beautiful—and that made him feel even guiltier than being here. It was the kind of thing he ought to remember about Bennis, but never did.
He came over and sat at the foot of her bed. “So,” he said. “So. Hell. Why do I have this terrible feeling you know why I’m here?”
“You look terrible, Christopher.”
“I could look terrible because Daddy died. And Emma. Especially Emma.”
“You looked terrible before any of that happened. I remember seeing you when you first came in. I thought what Teddy thought. I thought you had AIDS.”
“I don’t have AIDS.”
“I could ask you how you’re sure you know, under the circumstances. But I won’t.”
“Good. And if you want to get technical about it, I don’t know. I just know I’ve got an ulcer—same one I had at Yale—and it’s acting up and I can’t eat. There’s a lot of reasons I can’t eat.”
“How much?” Bennis said gently.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Ouch.”
He stood up. “Believe it or not, I’m not asking you for it. I came in here to ask you for money, but not for that money.”
Bennis brushed stray hair off her neck, impatient. “Don’t be idiotic,” she said. “The problem with you and money for that is that you always start out borrowing it from the wrong people. And I asked Michael about it—round about, don’t worry, I didn’t tell him it was you. He says they really do the things people say they do in novels.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Chris said. “They threaten to do them.”
“Somebody has been threatening to kill you?”
“Somebody’s been threatening to cut off my thumbs. Why would they want to kill me? How could they get paid back out of that?”
Bennis took a long drag on her cigarette. “It’s funny,” she said. “I took this course in college, introduction to psych or something like that, and when we got to all the nature-nurture theories I thought the whole argument was silly. Especially the nurture part. But look at us. The children of a psychopath—”
“You’re not a psychopath, Bennis.”
“Neither are you.”
“I’m something.” He sighed. It was getting harder and harder to talk to her. He went to the windows and looked out. It was snowing out there again. Hard. “I don’t think I’m crazy because I got Daddy’s genes,” he said, “and I don’t think I’m crazy because Daddy warped my mind, either. I think I’m crazy because I’m a jerk.”
“I don’t think that kind of attitude is going to get us anywhere.”
“I think it’s going to get us a hell of a lot farther than the attitude I’ve been taking, which is that I just can’t help myself, no explanations necessary.”
“Oh,” Bennis said.
“Let me tell you what I did yesterday,” he said. “Just so you get the picture.”
Bennis took another drag. He could hear it. “I know about the candlesticks,” she said quickly. “I saw you take them.”
“I still have them. I tried to sell them, but I couldn’t do it. They’re some kind of custom antique.”
Bennis laughed. “They’re that, at least. They’re great-grandmother Eleanor’s Georgian wedding silver. I’m surprised a pawnbroker knew that.”
“Pawnbrokers are not dumb. That’s how they stay out of jail. It’s what I did after I couldn’t sell them that bothers me. You want to hear about my day?”
“Of course.”
He leaned close to the window, letting his forehead touch the glass. “I had about twenty-five dollars on me at the beginning. I went to a house I knew of, a gambling place—”
“This was in the morning?”
“These places never shut down. Anyway, this was a place I knew about from someone else, but not a place that knew me. So I went there and I played my twenty-five dollars and I lost it. When it was gone, I didn’t dare ask for credit. I’ve got too bad a rep, all across the country. If I’d given my name, they’d have made a phone call, and—well, you know the and. So I left.”