Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
Dr. Van Horne looked impishly at Mr. Bundle. “And today as I was sitting in my office, it came to me, just came to me, that you had precisely the mirror I needed. Isn’t that extraordinary?”
“Well, it is extraordinary, because just this morning I took possession of some furniture I bought at an estate auction last week,” Mr. Bundle said. “And there’s a mirror very like what you describe.”
“I knew it.”
“Um. Yes. Extraordinary. Will you come back with me to see it?”
Dr. Van Horne nodded and followed Mr. Bundle to the rear of the shop. Here furniture was heaped and piled in crowded disarray, unpolished and untagged. Secretaries and sideboards, leather-topped desks and mahogany dining tables; the leaves for the tables were spread out on a canopied bed. “Now, I haven’t properly priced these things yet, but I imagine we could come to some. . . ?” He cocked an eyebrow at the doctor.
“Oh yes. Oh yes.” The doctor had stopped prowling through the dark clutter of furniture and was staring at the top, visible half of a large oval mirror in an elaborately carved gilt frame. “That’s it. I used to own it.”
“You owned it? It came from the auction I mentioned. The mirror’s French and I date it roughly at 1790, but it may be even earlier. I think one of the Greens imported most of these things himself. They’re all gone now, of course.”
“I owned it,” his customer said.
“Yes. I see, sir.”
As they looked into the speckled surface of the mirror, something greasily dark seemed to move within it, a greasy shadow that made Mr. Bundle widen his eyes and bend forward to see more clearly. But then it was gone.
“Ah, there you are. It recognizes me.”
“Needs a good cleaning,” Mr. Bundle muttered.
7
Patsy pushed the bedroom door open with her hip and carried the tray to the bed where Les lay in a happy clutter of newspapers, boxes of tissues, magazines, and apple cores and peach pits in a bowl. Papers and reports from his office lay across his chest, atop a folded copy of The Wall Street Journal. He peered up at her with a thin and unshaven face. “What’s that?”
“Your breakfast. Whole-wheat toast, cottage cheese, orange juice.”
“You call that breakfast? Cottage cheese?”
Patsy set the tray beside Les. “Your stomach needs something mild.”
“Oh yeah, I know, but Jesus . . . how about a poached egg or something?”
“Eat this and see how you feel. I have my appointment with Dr. Lauterbach in half an hour. If your stomach’s okay when I get back, I’ll poach an egg for you.”
“I do feel pretty weak.”
“You don’t look good,” Patsy said. She sat in the chair in the far end of the room, her feet flat on the floor, her knees apart, her chin cupped in her hand. “In fact, you look terrible.”
“You don’t look so good yourself.” Les spoke almost reflexively, feeling himself under attack, but there was truth in what he said. Patsy looked worn and tired—forlorn, a more sensitive man than Les would have said.
“Why should I look good? I feel awful. And it’s not the flu, Les. Maybe I should just say what I think and admit it’s you.”
“I can’t help getting sick,” Les said. “Half the town’s got the flu.”
“I don’t mean the flu. I mean our marriage.”
Les picked up a memo from the papers on his chest and expressionlessly scrutinized it.
“I suppose that’s an example of what I mean. You won’t even look at me now.”
Les set the memo aside and turned wearily toward Patsy.
“The point is, I don’t think we have a marriage at all.”
“You don’t.”
“I have a husband who doesn’t talk to me, who never wants to do anything with me, and who needs me only when he’s so sick he craps in his pants. Does that sound like much of a marriage?”
“I don’t accept your description.”
“It doesn’t look that way to you? You think that we share things? The closest we ever get is when you decide that you have to knock me around. You’d rather do that than make love. That’s true, you know. You’d rather hit me than screw me.”
“Jesus, you really like to blame it all on me. And your timing’s great too—you clobber me with all this stuff when I’m so sick I can hardly get out of bed.”
“The clobbering is all one-sided,” Patsy said. Against her will, she had become very angry. “We don’t have a marriage. I really don’t see why we live together.”
“Don’t you love me?” Les asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t feel very loving toward you.”
“Well, goddammit, I’m sick,” Les wailed.
Patsy looked at her watch.
“Oh, I know—I get this now. Dr. Lauterbach. You go to this shrink, and you tell him about how miserable I am, and he tells you that you ought to leave me. He probably holds your hand while he’s doing it.”
“I have to go now,” Patsy said. She stood.
“Remind this guy where the money comes from,” Les said, propping himself up on one elbow and letting the papers and the memos cascade onto the tray. “See how fast he decides that I’m pretty damn good after all.”
“Good-bye,” Patsy said, and moved toward the door.
“Good-bye? You mean, for good? You’re just walking out?” He was smiling grimly.
“I don’t know,” Patsy screamed at him. “If I did, at least I wouldn’t have to see you pointing guns at policemen!”
Les was going to shout back at her but he restrained himself. “You know why that happened.”
“Better than you.” Patsy closed the door and went swiftly down to the door. Les was calling something out but she ignored him and descended the steps to the family room and the garage. Fifteen minutes later she was going slowly down Main Street looking for a place to park.
* * *
In fact Patsy had seen Dr. Karl Lauterbach only once. His consulting room was in the Hampstead Clinic where Wren Van Horne had his offices, and on the day of her first appointment Patsy had walked up and down the concrete steps from the parking lot to the modernist huddle of low brick buildings three times. She had arrived half an hour early, and still was not sure she could go through with it. How much of her real life could she admit to this doctor? And how much could she conceal without falsifying her prospective analysis?
Patsy had seen herself on a dissecting table, her mind spread out like a clock under repair.
Finally she let herself into the building and looked at the nameplates on the broad oaken doors. She was still twenty minutes early. She found the door and admitted herself to a small dim waiting room. A receptionist behind a glass window smiled at her. She had spent what seemed an endless time looking at her hands folded in her lap.
Two minutes before the hour, a short bearded man with a stern, searching face had opened the consulting-room door and called her by name. He was no older than she—Patsy thought that despite the deep groove between his eyebrows, he might even have been younger. “Please,” he said, motioning her in and toward the couch against one wall.
“I want to sit up,” she said. “On a chair.”
“Whatever you like. I’d rather you use the couch, however.”
Patsy put herself in a chair before his desk.
“Why did you want to see me?” Dr. Lauterbach asked.
“I’m unhappy,” she had blurted out.
“Everybody is unhappy,” Dr. Lauterbach said, and Patsy knew that it was not going to work. How could this gruff and pessimistic man help her? “I’m unhappy that you want to start out by fighting me. We have a long way to go together, Mrs. McCloud, and we ought to begin with cooperation.”
The analyst’s deep somber eyes met Patsy’s, and on the spot she burst into tears. He knew all about her already, she thought; he had simply opened up her brain with his eyes and seen everything—Les, Marilyn Foreman, her grandmother, everything. Patsy had not been able to stop crying.
Still weeping, she had stood up and left his office.
* * *
She had known that she would never return, and she never did. In a way that curiously paralleled Clark Smithfield’s occupations, Patsy set off every day as if for her appointment but instead did things therapeutic in the simple sense that they made her feel better. She trailed through Hampstead art galleries or had coffee while reading a book at one of the tables in the deli; or walked along Sawtell Beach, feeling as light and irresponsible as a gull; or drove to Woodville and reveled in Bloomingdale’s dress department. Normally Patsy resented shopping and the time spent on it; during Dr. Lauterbach’s hour, she relished it.
But this was not a day for Bloomingdale’s; nor did she feel like walking on the beach. The scene with Les, which had taken a direction she had not foreseen, still knotted her stomach. It was true, what she had said. She really did not know why she and Les were still married. That she loved him had always been the answer to that painful question, and now Patsy wondered if her “love” had been instead a means of never putting the painful question to herself. Since she had seen him pointing the gun at Bobo Farnsworth and the other two, what she had thought of as her love for her husband had somehow curdled. She had seen him as exposed as she had been herself in Dr. Lauterbach’s office, and she could not now ever go back to seeing him in her old way. She realized, and the very realization was the knot in her stomach, that if she never went back to Les McCloud she would not miss him. Les was like someone who had died and was pretending life: no one had killed him, he had killed himself: he had murdered his feelings and intuitions and his generosity because he thought his company demanded it.
Thank you, Dr. Lauterbach, Patsy said to herself, entering the delicatessen.
When she emerged she carried a plastic cup of coffee to one of the outside tables. The men at the other tables momentarily inspected her legs, her breasts, her face. “Oink,” Patsy said, loudly enough for the two men closest to hear, and then took her novel and her diary from her bag. She put the book to one side and began to write.
Men I could go to bed with, she wrote. Richard Allbee. Bobo Farnsworth. Alan Alda. Patsy was amusing herself. John Updike. Ilie Nastase. Sam Shepard. “And Rex, the Wonder Horse,” she said to herself. Patsy closed the book on her pen, smiling, and looked at the potted trees bordering Main Street. Tabby Smithfield was walking toward her from the lower end of the street. Tabby did not see her, in fact he saw nothing; his face was averted, and he trudged as if he were kicking through leaves. Or wading in water ankle-deep. She hoped the boy would not glance up, would pass by, but when he drew up level with her he looked so wretched that she had to speak. “Hello, Tabby.”
He snapped his head sideways and met her with a look of intense gratitude. So he had given her the option.
Tabby came shyly toward her. “Come sit down,” she said, indicating the chair beside her. He sat. He looked at her again, not shyly, and Patsy knew: she said, “You just had another, ah, journey, didn’t you?” and took his hand.
“That’s a good word for it,” Tabby said.
8
He had avoided the Normans as long as he could, knowing that the man they had been speaking to was the thief, but after the first class the twins loomed up beside him in the corridor outside the school library. Because of the unexpected shortage of teachers, Tabby’s class had been divided into two study groups, and he and the Normans were in the group assigned to the library.
“Hey, Tabs,” Bruce said, putting his arm around him, “you were cool. I don’t know what you did, but you did it right.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Tabby said. They stepped out of the line and let the others file into the library. A pungent odor from Bruce’s body floated almost visibly about Tabby’s head.
“That’s always best,” Bruce said, and began to pull Tabby down the corridor toward an exit. “Let’s get out of this place. We got only one more class today anyway, last period. Why should we stick around? Nobody’s going to do anything important, so many kids gone.”
“I suppose,” Tabby said. The Normans were always one step more daring than he would have been himself.
“Bobo didn’t say anything about us?” Dicky asked.
“Hey, don’t be stupid, man, Tabs was cool,” Bruce said. “Let’s just fade on out the door while nobody’s looking, okay?” He drew Tabby along with him, and Tabby could not escape his odor, which was that of a bear. Bruce was excited, and the overpowering bear smell was the odor of violence. He rubbed his hands roughly on Tabby’s back. “Bobo never mentioned our names, did he, Tabs? Nobody at all mentioned our names, did they?”
“No.” Tabby separated himself from Bruce. “He thought I was just walking home.”
Bruce punched his bicep. “My man.” He pushed down the bar on the door, and the three of them went out onto a narrow asphalt path that ran the length of the rear of the school. The air was still and humid. “Pity about the flu,” Bruce said, and Dicky laughed.
They circled the side of the building and began to walk across the parking lot.
“I don’t suppose you would mind making fifty bucks,” Bruce said.
“Nope,” Tabby said. “Depends on what I’d have to do. But I’m not breaking into anybody’s house.”
“No way, Tabs,” Bruce said. “No way at all. Want a ride downtown with us?”
“Okay. But I’m not having anything to do with a burglary.”
Bruce winked at Dicky, and they all climbed into the black car. “We just want you to do some work Saturday night.”
“It’s with that guy,” Tabby said. “He was here this morning, wasn’t he? I saw you talking to him from the bus. I’m not doing it.”
“I’ll tear your fucking ears off,” Dicky said. “No shit.”
“Tabby, you gotta see this is our big chance,” said Bruce. “Dicky’s all excited, and it’s not even happening for four days.”
Bruce drove out of the school lot and turned into a hilly suburban street. Colonials with basketball hoops over the garage doors; Volvo station wagons parked on the driveways; monstrous fleshy rhododendron hedges. “Just think about this, Tabby. Everybody here’s got insurance, right? If they lose something, they get it right back again. Only the insurance companies lose, and they got millions—man, they got so much money they loan it to the government. And why do they get so much money? Because people like these pay it to them just in case they get robbed or lose something. So they might as well get robbed.”
“I can’t do it,” Tabby said.
“Dicky and I’ll give you another twenty-five apiece,” Bruce said. “You’ll go home with a hundred bucks in your pocket. Tabs, we need you. This deal won’t work without you.”
“I can’t.”
“Then I’ll tear your fucking ears off,” Dicky calmly repeated.
“He’s an animal, he means it,” Bruce said. “Look, we got four days. Thursday or Friday we’ll see you at school, okay? All you have to do is sit in the van and see nobody comes up the drive. You got a radio, and if anybody comes, you tell us. But nobody’s going to come. We can put the van under the trees and nobody’ll see it.”
“Where is this going to be?” Tabby asked.
“You’ll find out Saturday. Get in the guy’s van, get a hundred bucks.”
“Or I’ll maul you,” Dicky said. “No shit, Tabs.”
Bruce turned into Main Street. “You want a Coke or something, Tabs?”
Tabby shook his head. He did not see how he could escape Dicky and Bruce and avoid a terrible beating. Breaking mailboxes was bad enough; he had to avoid being made an accessory to burglary. Dicky was grinning at him: he had that bear smell too. Both the Normans would maul him, he knew. They would probably take an ear apiece.
Then he saw his father’s car parked on the street. It looked like a beacon, like a lighthouse. His father would be able to help
“Sure, Tabs,” Bruce said. “Whatever you say.” He pulled over and stopped the car. “You going to hitch home?”
Tabby nodded, left the car, and felt almost safe again.
After Bruce had driven away, Tabby looked in the shop windows closest to the Mercedes. His father was not at the counter in the Camera Center, in Hampstead’s Jewelers, or the Winery. Tabby crossed the street and looked in the windows there. Clark was not visible in the small market, Laura Ashley, or Enfants du Paradise, a store that sold children’s clothing. Tabby walked up the street peering in the windows—County Trust, Rawhide (leather boots and jackets), Waldenbooks. Tabby crossed the street again and entered Anhalt’s. Here were home computers and cameras, stationery and books, records and office supplies. Tabby even looked in the children’s book department, but Clark was nowhere in the store.
And what was his father doing in Hampstead anyhow? Today he was supposed to be in Woodville, then Pound Ridge and Mount Kisco. Tabby hesitated on the canopied sidewalk before Anhalt’s.
If he waited long enough, he’d eventually see his father. All he had to do was sit in the car, and before long his father would come out of one store or another. . . . Tabby suddenly knew that he would not wait in the car. There was one window he had not inspected. This was tinted so dark that it was mirrorlike for anyone on the street side, and red letters spread across it in the rise and fall of an arch: O’HALLIGAN’S. It was the only bar on Main Street.
Tabby dodged between the cars again and took up a position across the street and a few doors down from the bar. He stood in a brick alleyway which led from a parking lot to Main Street, and if he stepped close to the brick wall to his left, someone leaving O’Halligan’s would be unable to see him.