Not a Creature Was Stirring(89)

“And?”

Deep breath, ten count, deep breath again. It was so hard to keep going. “I wanted to play,” he said. “I didn’t have any money, but I wanted to play. So I went to Penn Station, and I stood outside the front doors, and I tried to panhandle—”

“Oh, dear Lord.”

He turned around. “Bennis, what do you think I do? How do you think I live? This isn’t the first time—”

“But they let you borrow so much money—”

“They let me borrow until they get nervous and then they don’t let me borrow any more. But I still want to play. I still have to play. Bennis, I want to go out and play now.”

“Stress,” Bennis said.

“I don’t care if it’s astrology. I thought about it last night. If Daddy hadn’t done all that with the money, and I’d come in for—what would it have been? Fifty million dollars? I could have gone through it in five years.”

Bennis looked down at her cigarette. It was smoked to the filter. She dropped it into the ashtray. “I think we should deal with the seventy-five thousand,” she said. “For the moment.”

“Deal with it, if you want. I’ll be grateful. But it’s really not what I came here for.”

“What did you come for?”

“Bennis, I want to borrow the money for a shrink. Don’t—I know how you feel about shrinks. I don’t mean some Viennese guy in an office in Beverly Hills. There’s a place in Vermont. For people who do what I do.”

“A sanatorium?”

“I guess you could call it that. A former friend of mine—former because he doesn’t play anymore, he goes to Gamblers Anonymous—this former friend went there. He calls it Camp Boredom.”

“Would it be any good to you, if it made you bored?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I could use some boredom. The last five years or so, all I’ve been is scared. And stoned. This place is expensive, Bennis.”

“I’m not worried about expensive.” She got out a new cigarette and lit up again. She always chain-smoked when she was tense. Christopher thought she’d probably been chain-smoking since the moment she walked into Engine House. She took a deep drag and blew the smoke into the air. “Let’s clean up the seventy-five thousand first,” she said again. “Let’s do that today—or at least let me make the phone calls today. I’ve got a couple of things on, but I can make time to call my bank.”

“I don’t want to tap you out, Bennis.”

“You won’t tap me out. I just signed a new contract.” She smiled. “Three million dollars a book, after agents’ commissions. Michael says I’m bound and determined to make as much as Daddy would have left me and then come back and thumb my nose at him. Or Michael used to say that. I don’t know what he’d say, now that Daddy’s dead.”

“I’m impressed,” Chris said. “I had no idea so many people wanted to read about unicorns.”

“I think it’s the sex, myself.”

“Will you loan me the money to go to Camp Boredom?”

“Yes,” Bennis said. “But thumbs first, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I know you think what you’re doing is terrible,” Bennis said, “but we can fix it, Chris. At least we can fix this part of it. I was up all night, thinking about Emma. That was what got to me. That there was no way to fix it.”

“Maybe your Mr. Demarkian can fix it,” Chris said. He stood up. For the first time since he’d woken, he felt as dirty as he probably was—sweaty, sticky, foul. He had to take a shower.

“Let me go throw myself under some water,” he said. “Then we can meet in the hall and go down to breakfast together. That ought to scare Anne Marie off.”

Bennis’s face lit up for the first time in days. “Let’s go down and pretend I’m going to become a Rastafarian,” she said. “Let’s drive Anne Marie straight into cardiac arrest.”





2


Myra Hannaford Van Damm wanted to do something drastic Of course, Myra always wanted to do something drastic—and she didn’t mean breaking into Bobby’s house, or taking a lover, or even divorcing Dickie Van Damm. She certainly didn’t mean smoking one of Bennis’s cigarettes when she had Dickie on the phone. That was what she had been doing for the past half hour, from seven-thirty to eight. Actually, she had smoked five of Bennis’s cigarettes, one right after the other. The first had been an act of defiance. Smoking was the one thing Dickie could get himself worked up about. He literally screamed when he saw a cigarette in her hand. The other four had been simple, addictive need. Like a woman who has been starving long enough to lose her appetite and is given a little food, hunger was suddenly the only thing in her life—nicotine hunger, in her case. Sometimes Myra thought hunger was the defining emotion of her existence. Sometimes she thought Teddy had had a point, the other day, when he’d said Bennis’s life was perfect. Whatever was going on with Bennis, she certainly seemed to be at peace.