Pressure Drop Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    But there was no other subject. Nina picked up the bill, Suze insisted on paying her half and they left a few minutes later, parting at Wang’s door; Suze headed for the Auschwitz Cadillac, Nina for home.
    She walked all the way. She’d been doing a lot of walking since Monday, but it didn’t seem to tire her. Jules let her in.
    â€œNice night,” he said. She hadn’t noticed. There was liquor on his breath. She poured some for herself when she got inside her apartment.
    It was a nice apartment. It had cost her two hundred thousand dollars five years ago. The furnishings and rugs were nice too, and the art was nice as well, thanks to Suze. The Lifecycle was nice. The bed was nice. She lay in it, and pulled up the covers.
    Soon she was crying. She cried for a long time. She had never missed her mother more than she did that night.

4
    The Human Fertility Institute was a marble-faced palace on the Upper East Side. It sported excrescences from various architectural periods and a sign attesting to its status as a national landmark. It had a leather-padded front door which Nina could barely force open and, in the lobby, an oil painting of a pink-cheeked man who might have been a nineteenth-century robber baron except that his suit was too modern and his chin too weak.
    A Christmas tree stood under the portrait. The people around it had drinks in their hands. The Chipmunks were singing their Christmas song, the one in which Alvin hopes for a hula hoop. It didn’t sound very danceable, but a few couples had rolled back a huge Persian rug and were dancing to it anyway. Nina approached a woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit. The woman turned from a long buffet table, dropping ice cubes into a glass of pink zinfandel.
    â€œI’ve got an appointment with Dr. Crossman,” Nina said.
    The woman raised her eyebrows. “You do?” Clink.
    Nina nodded. “Can you tell me where to find him?”
    â€œDid I call you?”
    â€œNot that I know,” Nina said.
    The woman sighed. “Second floor,” she said, gesturing with the wineglass. “Third door on the left.” Pink zin slopped over the rim and onto her white shoes. “Oopsie-doo,” she said.
    Dr. Crossman’s door said: RUSSELL R . CROSSMAN , M . D ., DIRECTOR . It was half-open. Nina tapped on it, stepped inside and found herself alone in an outer office. She glanced at the VDT on the secretary’s desk. “List,” it said. “Mom—stockings. Benny—Prince CD? Jennifer—stockings. Joanne—stockings. Melissa—stockings?”
    â€œPuts and calls,” said a man’s voice. “That was your big idea, if I remember.” Nina looked through an inner doorway.
    A man sat at the kind of desk a good props department might have furnished for a Mussolini biography. On the wall behind him hung a photograph of the weak-chinned man wearing a white dinner jacket and standing beside a palm tree. The man at the desk had a slightly stronger chin and a neat mustache with a faint red tinge. He wore a chalk-striped banker’s suit, a silk rep tie and a green conical party hat with silver moons. “A big if,” he said into the telephone. He saw Nina. His eyes flickered up and down. “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll take two. Bye.”
    He hung up the phone and looked at her.
    â€œDr. Crossman?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œI have an appointment.” She introduced herself.
    Dr. Crossman consulted an appointment book. “Not today,” he said. “All appointments were cancelled for today.”
    â€œNo one told me.”
    â€œSomeone should have. We’re really not open. It’s the Christmas party.”
    â€œI thought it might be the usual state of affairs.”
    â€œThe usual state of affairs?”
    â€œAt a fertility clinic,” Nina explained. Dr. Crossman’s brow furrowed. “It doesn’t