The Hanged Man by Walter Satterthwait Page B

Justine. Thanks very much.”
    â€œYou’re leaving?”
    I stood up. “People to do. Things to see.”
    Still sitting, she smiled up at me. “Are you sure you don’t want to try a regression? It wouldn’t take long.”
    â€œLike I said, maybe some other time. Thanks anyway.”
    Slowly she unfolded herself up from the sofa and slowly, in profile, her eyes shut like a cat’s, she stretched her long slim body. Arms stiff, hands balled in fists below and behind her hips, breasts thrusting outward. She sighed a long weary sigh, slowly rolled her shoulders, and then opened her eyes and saw me watching her. She smiled and turned to face me. “You’re sure?”
    â€œYeah. Thanks.”
    She shrugged. “Your loss.”
    The elderly woman in the floral swimsuit had pulled herself up the ladder and padded away, panting happily. The power stroker had burst from the water and swaggered off, dripping elaborately, looking for telephone books to rip up and pig iron to chew on. Or vice versa. The teenage girl still kept up her steady, sturdy crawl, and looked as though she could keep it up from here to China. A few new people had joined us, but I hadn’t paid them much attention. I was too busy thinking about Justine Bouvier and why I had disliked her so much.
    She was as predatory, in her way, as a coyote, although she probably lacked a coyote’s depth. For all her talk of spirits and mysticism, she seemed to me about as deep, and as substantial, as a Burger King ashtray. She was selfish. She was a bigot.
    But I had met selfish, shallow people before. I’d met bigots before—even, occasionally, in the mirror. And I didn’t usually react so strongly against them.
    I had reacted so strongly against her, I realized, because I’d reacted so strongly toward her. She was a woman who wanted men to be aware of her sexuality—needed them to be aware of it. And they would be. There was too much promise for them not to be: in the big brown eyes, the knowing smile, the lithe, limber, available body. And probably, if accepted, the promise would be kept. Probably she would be skilled and she would learn exactly what you liked and she would do it exactly as you liked it to be done. That would be important to her. She defined herself, I suspect, and she defined men, by their reactions to her. Their inner lives, and finally her own, didn’t really matter.
    And yet, despite her emptiness, perhaps even partly because of it, I’d found myself attracted to the package that held it. She might be, ultimately, dislikable. Probably she was. But that wasn’t why I’d disliked her. I’d disliked myself for the attraction, and I’d projected the dislike onto her.
    I’ve never thought that I would one day achieve a total lack of flaws. But occasionally I find myself thinking that it might be nice to stop discovering new ones.
    Bennett Hadley lived to the west of town. From Fort Marcy, I took Washington to Paseo de Peralta, turned right up the Old Taos Highway, slipped between the traffic onto St. Francis, then quickly slipped off at Camino La Tierra. This area was newer even than the east side, and the homes were bigger and farther apart, riding the ridges of the rolling hills like castles and palaces. The sky was an upturned porcelain bowl, pale blue, its rim running all the way around the distant horizon. Patches of snow lay in purple shadows beneath the gnarled pinon and juniper. In the clearings, damp gray grasses lay flat against dark brown earth.
    I drove on pavement for a couple of miles, then turned left onto a road that in better times would be dirt, but that today, with the thaw, was mud. The Subaru began to drift, and I flicked it into four-wheel. The engine coughed. I came to another mud road and turned right.
    Bennett Hadley’s was one of the newer houses. Although broad and handsome, it was a bit less grand than most of the others, and,