The Reflection Read Online Free Page A

remembered how soul destroying it had been, in those first weeks after Abby had gone, to be forever coming back home to find everything exactly as I’d left it.Around the small table were two chairs, the same design but each slightly different. Abby had always sat in one particular chair and I in the other. Even now, ten years on, I used the same one and left the other empty. Similarly with the bed: I always slept on the same side. Once a year or so, I’d have a powerfully erotic dream about Abby—I hoped to God that was finished with now. Eventually I found a couple of sleeping pills in the kitchen cupboard, and chased them down with some whiskey from a dusty bottle I hadn’t touched in months. Even if I was dead tired, I wanted to be sure.

3
    Saturday morning. I lay in bed an hour longer that usual, feeling neither tired nor well rested, wondering what to do with the day. If my workweek was tightly scheduled, weekends were generally free-form—in theory at least. Actually, it occurred to me now, they were no less scripted than my professional life. The day would start with breakfast over the
Times
, always at the same diner on the corner. In the afternoon I’d go to the Park with a novel, if it was fine, or visit a gallery, if it wasn’t. Occasionally I’d have an evening engagement; otherwise I’d go to the movies, or listen to music at home. And that was how it always went. The thought of doing it all over again today and tomorrow—and then next weekend and the one after—filled me with a sense of futility. The weekend routine: that too, it now seemed, was over.
    My thoughts kept circling around Esterhazy and his wife, picking over little details from the night before. D’Angelo appearing at my office. The open door of the apartment. The too-neat, almost coquettish rip in the woman’s dress. Thebroken bottle, with no broken glass. A half-dozen other incongruities. The more I brooded, the odder the events of the evening seemed. I continued in this vein for a while, dreaming up hypotheses, before finally pulling myself out of it. I was overthinking things again. If I drew back a little, broadened my perspective, I could see that nothing about last night was as strange as all that. I recognized within me that desire to enter into the patient’s fantasy, and resisted it. If I were leading the life of a normal man, I reasoned, I wouldn’t be fretting over minutiae like this. I’d simply be getting on with things. Taking my son to the game, perhaps. Or a date out to lunch. Or playing a round of golf with an old college buddy. And yet, that wasn’t the whole of it either. That wasn’t the only reason I was creating these complications for myself. There was Abby. I was using the Esterhazy case to avoid thinking about her.
    Finally I got out of bed. I was ravenously hungry; with everything that had happened yesterday, I’d skipped dinner. As I shaved, I stared at my face in the mirror with more curiosity than usual. For a moment or two, under the intensity of my own gaze, it began to look strange. As if, instead, I were staring at a wax model of myself. It was that same sensation of the unreality of things that had struck me the day before, wandering around Manhattan. But then, in a blink, everything was normal again. The face was mine.
    It was still fairly early, but the street was already mobbed with Saturday shoppers. Stopping outside the diner where I ritually had my breakfast, I felt like an actor hitting his spots. I ordered the same thing every morning, yet each time the waitress would make a point of giving me a menu before taking my order. An awkward charade, but it had always been like that and could never now be different. I’d never developed the kind of bantering, flirtatious relationship that the waitress had with several other male customers. I peered inside,without entering. There she was, chatting to another regular. I must have seen him in there hundreds of times. I even knew quite a bit about