Dressed to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

say, That’s confused thinking, Kate. The more you tell me, the more esteem you should feel. It takes a little courage to be honest. Or didn’t you know that? )
    Courage. She wished she had enough of it to stop coming here.
    Elliott watched her in silence for a moment. She was conscious of sunlight, sliced by the open slats of the blind, falling on his meticulous fair hair. He had a handsome face but sometimes she saw something blindingly cold in the blue eyes, something analytical and calculating. The eyes of a judge, maybe. But he’d never made any judgements of her, he’d never passed down any moral law, any code of ethical behavior. Why did she keep expecting him to?
    He picked up a silver-plated letter opener, turning it in his hands. He had good hands, she thought. Firm, long fingers, clipped nails. She couldn’t imagine him chewing on those nails. But then she couldn’t imagine him worrying over anything or slipping into anxiety. Maybe that was it, maybe that’s where her feelings lay. She looked at Elliott and what she saw was a kind of perfection, something that highlighted her own inadequacies.
    He put the letter opener down and leaned across the desk towards her. “What’s been happening since the last time we talked?” he said.
    She glanced at him, then down at her hands. Gloves—why was she wearing gloves? Nobody wore gloves these days. Elliott would think: She’s covering something up. She looked at his face, which was blurred by the stripes of sunlight.
    “Nothing much,” she said. Feeble. Weak. You can do better than that.
    Elliott smiled. “It’s funny how you always begin with that phrase. ‘Nothing much.’ Maybe you think of your visits here the way you’d think of a dentist.”
    “No—”
    “You put me in the position of having to pull teeth, Kate.”
    She got up from the chair, took off the gloves, walked to the shelves of books. She felt blank. If I say something now, she thought, it’s going to be incoherent.
    Elliott said, “How are things with Mike?”
    She shrugged. “Mike? There’s a kind of status quo.”
    “Like how?”
    “I pretend . . .”
    “Pretend what, Kate?”
    She stared at the book titles. A number of them were in German, French, Italian. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen. Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Archivio generate di Neurologia, Psichiatría e Psicoanalisi. She had the frightening thought of millions of people all over the world being analysed in foreign languages. The Tower of Babble.
    “What do you pretend?” Elliott asked.
    “I fake orgasm. I fake tenderness. I fake love.” There, it was out in the cold now. “I fake everything, just about.”
    “Why?”
    “I guess it makes him feel good.”
    “Forget about him, Kate. What makes you feel good?”
    She went back to her chair and sat down, closing her eyes, listening to the sound of Elliott’s steady breathing, the sound of her own heartbeat. The dream, she thought. The dream makes me feel good. She said nothing for a long time. Elliott sighed.
    “You don’t have an answer for that?” he said.
    She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lighting it with a lighter Thomas had given her years ago, a silver one with her initials engraved on the side. There was a clean ashtray on the table beside her chair. She watched Elliott get up and open the window slightly. Of course, the smoke bothered him. She’d forgotten how much. Why didn’t he just hang a NO SMOKING sign on the wall?
    “I shouldn’t have married him,” she said.
    “That doesn’t exactly answer my question, Kate.” He returned to his chair and rocked back and forth slowly, waiting. The chair creaked. The noise irritated her.
    “I don’t know how to answer your question,” she said.
    “Okay. Okay. Why did you marry him anyway?”
    “You get lonely,” she said. “You begin to see yourself through the eyes of other people. You look, you see a widow, you see a widow with nothing left to mourn over, you see