Marion Zimmer Bradley - Claire Moffatt 01 by Dark Satanic

Author:Dark Satanic
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-23T22:15:51+00:00

Chapter Nine

Park Avenue in the upper eighties is elegant and bears, still, something of the nineteenth-century sophistication of city life, before the problems of the twentieth turned city life into urban problems. Barbara walked between the tall, gracious apartment buildings, her coat wrapped grimly around her, looking for the number in her handbag.

Oh, she had handled it wretchedly. It served her right, to find herself on the way to a psychiatrist. She had let migraine, premenstrual tension, and just plain jitters stampede her into revealing everything. She should have been calm, sensible, matter-of-fact, charming, as Dana had been charming. All the hold-your-man women’s books warned her that jealousy and scenes never got anyone anywhere. She should have been sweet and compliant, not blunt and honest. She should have pretended cordiality even to Dana, then taken Jamie off alone and shown him the obscene little bag she had found in their bed.

This morning she had waked with the remnants of the headache (she still had them, damn it!), and confused memory of the scene last night had made her submissive with Jamie and carefully polite even to the elder Mrs. Melford. She wished she could have found some psychiatrist other than the one Jamie’s mother had recommended, but she had told herself roughly not to be paranoid. She had surreptitiously looked him up in the Manhattan phone book: he had an excellent Park Avenue address; he had the proper letters after his name; and everything seemed perfectly in order. He had even sounded, when she telephoned for an appointment, a little reluctant to see her, promising only to work her in because of a cancellation, so why should she think of him as someone eager to get his claws on her in order to tell her what a good person her mother-in-law was and demand that she immediately snap out of all this neurotic nonsense?

The building was growing old graciously, the gilt on the doors and the gingerbread carvings looking neither decrepit nor obtrusively restored. The signboard in the lobby was filled with the names of doctors, dentists, and, Barbara assumed, probably the odd psychologist. The name she had been given was on the second floor. As she climbed to it, she saw, at the head of the stairs, a woman emerging from one of the doors, a woman in the last stages of pregnancy. Barbara felt a sharp, sick pang of envy, an almost physical pain. Right where the burn was in the picture. Oh, God, is that why I haven’t been able to get pregnant!

Inside the office from which the pregnant girl had emerged, a pleasant feminine voice said, “Leave the hall door open, Mrs. Gardner. I’m not used to this much heat, I’m afraid.”

Barbara shrank against the wall as the pregnant woman, walking carefully, passed her on the stairs, On the landing three doors faced one another across the stairwell, and Barbara thought to herself, I’m an idiot, I didn’t even realize: this doctor must be all right; he’s right here in the same building with Dr.

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