Free Silent Partner by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

her, wanted to know more about her, to forge an impossible, instant intimacy. She fed me nibbles of information about herself: She was twenty-one, had grown up on the East Coast, graduated
    from a small women's college, come west for graduate school. Then she steered the conversation to grad school. Academic issues.
    Remembering the insinuations of the other students, I asked about her association with Kruse.
    She said he was her faculty adviser, made it sound unimportant. When 1 asked what he was like, she said he was dynamic and creative, then changed the subject, again.
    I dropped it but remained curious. After that ugly session, I'd asked around about Kruse, had learned he was one of the clinical associates, a new arrival who'd already earned a reputation as a skirt-chaser and an attention grabber.
    Not the kind of mentor I would have thought right for someone like Sharon. Then again, what did I really know about Sharon? About what was right for her?
    I tried to learn more. She danced nimbly away from my questions, kept shifting the focus to me.
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    I experienced some frustration, understood for an instant the anger of the other students. Then I reminded myself we'd just met; I was being pushy, expecting too much too soon. Her demeanor suggested old money, a conservative, sheltered background. Precisely the kind of upbringing that would stress the dangers of instant intimacy.
    Yet there was the matter of her hand stroking mine, the open affection of her smile. Not playing hard-to-get at all.
    We talked psychology. She knew her stuff but kept deferring to my superior knowledge. I sensed real depth beneath the Suzy Creamcheese exterior. And something else: agreeableness. A ladylike niceness that caught me by pleasant surprise in that age of four-letter female anger masquerading as liberation.
    My diploma said I was a doctor of the mind, a sage at twenty four, grand arbiter of relationships. But relationships still scared me. Women still scared me. Since adolescence I'd indentured myself to a regimen of study, work, more study, struggling to pull myself up out of blue-collar purgatory and expecting the human factor to fall into place along with my career goals. But new goals kept
    popping up and at twenty four I was still pulling, my social life limited to casual encounters, mandatory, calis-thenic sex.
    My last date had been more than two months ago—a brief misadventure with a pretty blond neonatology intern from Kansas who asked me out as we stood in the cafeteria line at the hospital. She suggested the restaurant, paid for her own meal, invited herself to my apartment, immediately sprawled on the couch, popped a Quaalude, and got peevish when I refused to take one. A moment later the peevishness was forgotten and she was buck-naked, grinning and pointing to her crotch: "This is L.A., Buster. Eat pussy."
    Two months.
    Now here I was, sitting opposite a demure beauty who made me feel like Einstein and wiped her mouth even when it was clean. I drank her in. In the candle-in-chianti-bottle light of the pizza joint, everything she did seemed special: spurning beer for 7-Up, laughing like a kid at the misfortunes of Wile E. Coyote, twirling strands of hot cheese around her finger before taking them between perfect white teeth.
    A flash of pink tongue.
    I constructed a past for her, one that reeked of high WASP sensibilities: summer homes, cotillions, deb balls, the hunt. Scores of suitors...
    The scientist in me snipped my fantasies midframe: total conjecture, hotshot. She's left you empty spaces— you're filling them in with blind guesses.
    I made another stab at finding out who she was. She answered me without telling me a thing, got me talking about myself again.
    I surrendered to the cheap thrills of autobiography. She made it easy. She was a first-rate listener, propping her chin on her knuckles, staring up at me with those huge blue eyes, making it clear Page 51

    that every word I uttered was monumentally