The Reflection Read Online Free

discovered the affair; perhaps that was the trigger … It was pointless speculation, I knew—I was drifting away from the facts.
    The woman had stopped talking. D’Angelo pushed some forms across the table for me to sign and I took out my pen. As I went to sign, I felt some vague affinity with Esterhazy. As if his confusion were in some way mine as well.
    “Where are you taking him?”
    “Um. Stevens Institute.”
    “Stevens Institute?” The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t pin down where I’d heard it. “Why not City Psychiatric?”
    “Don’t ask me. That’s what I was told at the station. Stevens Institute.”
    I scribbled a note and signature at the bottom of the forms. “I’m signing him in for forty-eight hours. If they want to keep him longer, the doctor in charge will have to send me a report first.”
    Minutes later, I stood across the road from the building, keeping well within the shadows. I’d refused D’Angelo’s offer of a lift home—for some reason I’d wanted to watch unobserved as he and Esterhazy came out of the building. But after a good quarter of an hour, there was still no movement. Another wave of tiredness hit me. In a way I was glad of it; I’d be knocked out as soon as I got home, too exhausted to be spooked by my own apartment.
    The occasional figure haunted the sidewalk, but it felt preternaturally quiet for Manhattan. I was somewhere on the Lower East Side, a couple of blocks from the water. In the other direction, the shabby street I was on crossed an avenue. I made my way toward it, flagged down a cab.
    “Where to, Mac?”
    “East Fifty-Sixth, corner of First.”
    The driver turned back down where I’d come from and soon we were speeding through an industrial wasteland by the river, its derelict buildings gaping like teeth. I looked at my watch, and was surprised to find that it was not even nine o’clock.
    “Going out or going home?”
    “Home.”
    “Lucky you. Me, I’m on all night.” Silence for a minute or two, then the driver continued: “Trouble is, you never know what the wife’s up to when you work all night, do you? I call her up. Stop the cab, go to a phone booth. Sometimes at one or two in the morning. Nine times out of ten she doesn’tanswer. Says she’s in bed, doesn’t want to get up. But what do I know?”
    I couldn’t tell whether it had been a bit of banter or something else, so I made an indistinct noise by way of reply. The driver lapsed into silence again, and a tension reigned in the cab. I found myself thinking about Esterhazy’s wife, visualizing her. The bruise on the cheek, almost too vivid, but no obvious swelling. The slightly robotic way she’d talked, despite the tears. The barely noticeable twitch in her leg, betraying trauma—or perhaps nervousness. I gazed through the window into a mist of drizzle. Then what seemed like moments later, the cab pulled into the curb. I was outside my building again. It was as if an eternity had passed since I’d last been there.
    Through the iron gates and up two flights of stairs. My front door opened onto a corridor and a small kitchen. An archway led through to the living room, which looked out over a courtyard, and because the building opposite had no windows, it felt very private. A tiny refuge in the vastness of the city. The bedroom was hardly bigger than the double bed, over which hung a painting of a nude that Abby had left there. That was it, as far as decorations went. I hadn’t felt like homemaking after Abby had gone, and then after a while I’d grown to prefer the starkness. A girlfriend I’d once invited over had been shocked by this emptiness—as if I’d only just moved in, although I’d been there years. On these rare occasions when someone visited I realized what a strange place it was for a Park Avenue doctor to end up in. That, in turn, discouraged me from inviting people over.
    I looked about the living room. Everything different, everything the same. I