blink, from her to him.
Tweaked and crinkled, the inscrutable smile of Closterman rose Cheshire-like in Dusty’s memory.
45
From dreamless sleep, the doctor woke late, refreshed and looking forward to the day.
In the fully equipped gym that was part of the master suite, he completed two full circuits on the weight- training machines and half an hour on a reclining, stationary bicycle.
This was the sum of his exercise regimen, three times a week, yet he was as fit as he had been twenty years ago, with a thirty-two-inch waist and a physique that women liked. He credited his genes and the fact that he had the good sense not to let stress accumulate.
Before showering, he used the telephone intercom to call the kitchen and ask Nella Hawthorne to prepare breakfast. Twenty minutes later, hair damp, smelling faintly of a spice-scented skin lotion, wearing a red silk robe, he returned to the bedroom and retrieved his breakfast from the electric dumbwaiter.
On the antique sterling-silver tray were a carafe of freshly squeezed orange juice kept cold in a small silver bucket full of ice, two chocolate croissants, a bowl of strawberries accompanied by supplies of brown sugar and heavy cream, an orange-almond muffin with a half cup of whipped butter on the side, a slice of coconut pound cake with lemon marmalade, and a generous serving of french-fried pecans sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon for nibbling between other treats.
Though forty-eight, the doctor boasted the metabolism of a ten-year-old boy on methamphetamines.
He ate at the brushed-steel and zebrawood desk where a few hours ago he had studied his father’s disembodied eyes.
The jar of formaldehyde was still here. He had not returned it to the safe before retiring for the night.
Some mornings, he switched on the television to watch the news with his breakfast; however, none of the anchor-men or anchorwomen, regardless of the channel, had eyes as intriguing as those of Josh Ahriman, dead now for twenty years.
The strawberries were as ripe and flavorful as any the doctor had ever eaten. The croissants were sublime.
Dad’s gaze settled languishingly upon the morning feast.
A formidable prodigy, the doctor had completed all his education and opened his psychiatric practice while still in his twenties, but though learning had come easily to him, well-heeled patients had not, in spite of his Hollywood connections through his father. Although the film-business elite loudly proclaimed their egalitarianism, many harbored a prejudice against youth in psychiatry, and they were not ready to lie down on the couch of a twenty-something therapist. To be fair, the doctor had looked much younger than his age — still did — and could have passed for eighteen when he hung out his shingle. Nevertheless, in the movie biz, where the sight of someone wearing his heart on his sleeve was more commonly encountered than the name of even the most spectacularly successful fashion designer of the moment, Ahriman had been frustrated to find himself a victim of such hypocrisy.
His father had continued to provide generous support, but the doctor had been increasingly reluctant to accept his old man’s largesse. How embarrassing it was to be dependent at twenty-eight, especially considering his considerable academic achievements. Besides, as open as Josh Ahriman’s wallet had been, the allowance that he provided was not sufficient for the doctor to live in the style he desired or to finance research he wished to conduct.
Only child and sole heir, he killed his father with a massive dose of ultrashort-acting thiobarbital combined with paraldehyde, injected into a pair of delicious chocolate-covered marzipan petits fours, for which the old man had a weakness. Before torching the house to destroy the mutilated body, the doctor performed a partial dissection of Dad’s face, searching for the source of his tears.
Josh Ahriman was a spectacularly successful writer, director, and producer — a genuine triple threat — whose work ranged from simple love stories to patriotic tales of courage under fire. Diverse as these films were, they had one thing in common: Audiences the world over were reduced to tears by them. Some critics — though by no means all — labeled them sentimental hogwash, but the paying public flocked to the theaters, and Dad picked up two Oscars — one for directing, one for writing — before his untimely death at fifty-one.
His movies were box-office gold because the sentiment in them was sincere. Although he had the requisite ruthlessness and duplicity to succeed big-time in Hollywood, Dad also possessed a sensitive soul and such a tender heart that he was one of the championship criers of his time. He wept at funerals even when the deceased was someone for whose death he had often and fervently prayed. He wept unashamedly at weddings, at anniversary celebrations, at divorce proceedings, at bar mitzvahs, at birthday parties, at political rallies, at cockfights, on Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July and Labor Day — and most copiously, bitterly, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, when he remembered it.
Here was a man who knew all the secrets of tears. How to wring them from sweet grandmothers and labor racketeers alike. How to move beautiful women with them. How to use them to purge himself of grief, pain, disappointment, stress. Even his moments of joy were heightened and made more exquisite with the spice of tears.
Thanks to a superb medical education, the doctor knew exactly how tears were manufactured, stored, and dispensed by the human body. Nevertheless, he expected to learn something from the dissection of his father’s lacrimal apparatus.
In this he was to be disappointed. After trimming away Dad’s eyelids and then gently extracting his eyes, the doctor discovered each lacrimal gland where he expected it: in orbit, superior and lateral to the eyeball. The glands were of normal size, shape, and design. The superior and inferior lacrimal ducts serving each eye were likewise unremarkable. Each lacrimal sac — seated in a groove of lacrimal bone, behind the tarsal ligament and tricky to tease out intact — measured thirteen millimeters, which was the median size for an adult.
Because the lacrimal apparatus was tiny, composed of very soft tissue, and damaged in the doctor’s limited autopsy, he had not been able to save any of it. He had only the eyeballs now, and in spite of his diligent preservation efforts — fixative, vacuum-packaging, regular maintenance — he could not entirely prevent their gradual deterioration.
Shortly after his father’s death, Ahriman had carried the eyes with him to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he believed that he would be better able to become his own man beyond the great director’s shadow, in which he would always stand if he remained in Los Angeles. Out there on the high desert, he achieved his initial successes and discovered his abiding passion for games of control.
From Santa Fe to Scottsdale, Arizona, the eyes came with him, and most recently to Newport Beach. Here, little more than one hour south of Dad’s old stomping grounds, the passage of time and his own numerous accomplishments had brought the doctor forever out of that patriarchal shadow, and he felt as if he had come home.
When Ahriman bumped the leg of the desk with his knee, the eyes rolled slowly in the formaldehyde and seemed to follow the progress of the last fried pecan as he conveyed it to his mouth.
He left the dirty dishes on the desk but returned the jar to the safe.
He dressed in a sartorial-cut, double-breasted, blue wool suit by Vestimenta, a custom-tailored white shirt with spread collar and French cuffs, and a figured silk tie with a plain but complimentary pocket square. From his father’s flair for period dramas, he had learned the value of costume.
The morning was almost gone. He wanted to get to his office as much as two hours ahead of Dustin and Martie Rhodes, to review all his strategic moves to date and decide how best to proceed to the next level of the game.
In the elevator, descending to the garage, he thought fleetingly of Susan Jagger, but she was the past, and the face that most easily came to mind now was Martie’s.
He could never wring tears from multitudes, as his father had done time and again. Delight could be found, however, in the drawing of tears from an audience of one. Considerable intelligence, skill, and craft were required. And a vision. No one form of entertainment was more legitimate than another.
