It was a favorite of my late husband’s.
Merry Christmas. You will pardon an old woman her sentimentalities.
Mail. He read the letter again, as though there were some clue there. In cartoons, people were always climbing mountains and asking the robed and bearded freaks they met to explain the meaning of life. He would never be able to laugh at that again. How could anyone laugh? “There was no worth in the fashion—there was no wit in the plan —hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran—”
He picked up the money Tina had found for him, counted it, and stuffed it back into the pocket.
Tina was hiding, but it was only that she was hiding. She was in the desk or in the heap of packing materials and boards, or—barely possibly—she had slipped unseen out of the crate and was hiding somewhere else in the apartment. If he went to bed now, she would probably …
No. Tina might hide briefly as a joke, but not for this long; she would not want to worry him like this. Something had happened to her.
She could not be in one of the drawers because every drawer was still tightly taped. He tore the strips of tape away just the same and looked in all of them. He would have pulled them out of the desk if he could, but they were retained, apparently by stops attached before the back of the desk had been fastened in place.
But Tina had not gotten into any of them, anyway. He was behaving like the man in the joke who looked for his wallet on the corner because the light was better there. Tina had pulled loose the tape that had held up the writing board and slipped behind the board. Was it possible one of the pigeon holes had a false back? All of them were deep, and all looked equally deep, but he checked them one by one with a ruler. They were all of the same depth, and that depth was less than the width of the top of the desk by a scant three-quarters of an inch. There was nothing between the bottom of the lower row of pigeon holes and the work surface of the desk.
Or rather, there was nothing but a smooth panel of nearly black wood about three inches high. He tried to grasp it and pull it, but every edge was covered: the top by the bottoms of the pigeon holes, the ends by the sides of the desk, the lower edge by the fixed part of the writing surface.
He shifted the table lamp to the desk and studied the blank wood. How could Tina, under the thick cardboard sheet, have seen something that he could not see even under a bright light? Tina could only have felt the panel; in the pitch darkness behind the writing board, she could not have seen it. Replacing the lamp, he shut his eyes and traced the panel with his fingers. He felt nothing.
Tina’s fingers were far smaller than his, hardly thicker than pins. He retrieved the utility knife and slid its point lightly across the surface of the panel, careful not to scratch it—or rather, not to scratch it more than it had been scratched already by two centuries of use, particularly, for some reason, on its left end.
When the tip of the blade reached that end, it slipped into the crack between the panel and the side of the desk. He pushed gently and felt rather than heard the click as the panel swung a quarter of an inch toward him.
Lunch with Lora
When the waitress had gone, he took out Tina and laid her on the checkered tablecloth.
“A doll?” Lora Masterman stopped fiddling with her chair and took gold-framed glasses from her purse to peer at Tina.
“I bought her because she reminded me of you,” he said.
“That was sweet of you.”
“She can walk around and talk, and even think about things a little bit, when she’s working. But she can’t read or crunch numbers. She’s not programmed for it, and I doubt if she’s got the capacity. If you ask her how much one and one is, she says it’s two or three. When you ask her four and four, she says a lot.” Hastily he added, “I don’t mean that I think you’re like that.”
Lora was still smiling. “I’m sure Dr. Nilson thinks I am, sometimes.”
“I want to tell you about Tina, and about my desk. Is that all right? Do you like antiques?”
“I like them. I don’t know much about them.”
“I do,” he said. “Even the dumbest person knows about some things. Did you ever notice? With me it’s antiques and personal computers. I know about those. When we lived together, it was just personal computers, but now I know antiques too. Computers are good, but antiques are better because there’s more to know.”
Lora said softly, “It was only for a couple of days.”
“I know, but I wanted it to last forever. I wasn’t smart enough or good-looking enough, and I didn’t make enough money. I understand. I’m not blaming you.”
“It really wasn’t any of those things.” Lora took off her glasses and returned them to her purse. “I wasn’t good for you. You were one of Dr. Nilson’s patients, I was working for her, and I was hurting you. After a few days I couldn’t stand that.”
The waitress brought icewater, a basket that held butter and a small loaf of warm Italian bread, and their wine.
“How did you hurt me?” he asked.
“You started blocking. You forgot—I mean on the conscious level—that you were a patient, and that was very bad. You even forgot that we’d met in Dr. Nilson’s office. You talked about us meeting in the park, because we took that walk during lunch. And now—” Lora’s voice had grown fainter as she spoke, until it seemed that she was close to tears, “I’m afraid you’re going to start it again. You’re constructing a delusional system, with me inside.”
