“I don’t need a—”
“Then I’m calling the police, you sonofabitch. You’re not fit to be running around loose.” Dr. Harley reached for the telephone again.
“Wait a minute!” George stood there, thinking. He had almost thrown everything away, but now, miraculously, he was being given a second chance. “All right. I’ll see a psychiatrist.”
In the far distance they heard the wail of a siren.
She was being rushed down a long tunnel, and colored lights were flashing on and off. Her body felt light and airy, and she thought, I can fly if I want to, and she tried to move her arms, but something was holding them down. She opened her eyes, and she was speeding down a white corridor on a gurney being wheeled by two men in green gowns and caps. I’m starring in a play, Eve thought. I can’t remember my lines. What are my lines? When she opened her eyes again, she was in a large white room on an operating table.
A small, thin man in a green surgical gown was leaning over her. “My name is Keith Webster. I’m going to operate on you.”
“I don’t want to be ugly,” Eve whispered. It was difficult to talk. “Don’t let me be…ugly.”
“Not a chance,” Dr. Webster promised. “I’m going to put you to sleep now. Just relax.”
He gave a signal to the anesthesiologist.
George managed to wash the blood off himself and clean up in Eve’s bathroom, but he cursed as he glanced at his wrist-watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. He hoped Alexandra was asleep, but when he walked into their living room, she was waiting for him.
“Darling! I’ve been frantic! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Alex.”
She went up to him and hugged him. “I was getting ready to call the police. I thought something terrible had happened.”
How right you are, George thought.
“Did you bring him the contracts?”
“Contracts?” He suddenly remembered. “Oh, those. Yes. I did.” That seemed like years ago, a lie from the distant past.
“What on earth kept you so late?”
“His plane was delayed,” George said glibly. “He wanted me to stay with him. I kept thinking he’d take off at any minute, and then finally it got too late for me to telephone you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, now that you’re here.”
George thought of Eve as she was being carried out on the stretcher. Out of her broken, twisted mouth, she had gasped,
“Go…home…nothing…happened”. But what if Eve
died? He would be arrested for murder. If Eve lived, everything would be all right; it would be just as it was before. Eve would forgive him because she needed him.
George lay awake the rest of the night. He was thinking about Eve and the way she had screamed and begged for mercy. He felt her bones crunch again beneath his fists, and he smelled her burning flesh, and at that moment he was very close to loving her.
It was a stroke of great luck that John Harley was able to obtain the services of Keith Webster for Eve. Dr. Webster was one of the foremost plastic surgeons in the world. He had a private practice on Park Avenue and his own clinic in lower Manhattan, where he specialized in taking care of those who had been born with disfigurements. The people who came to the clinic paid only what they could afford. Dr. Webster was used to treating accident cases, but his first sight of Eve Blackwell’s battered face had shocked him. He had seen photographs of her in magazines, and to see that much beauty deliberately disfigured filled him with a deep anger.
“Who’s responsible for this, John?”
“It was a hit-and-run accident, Keith.”
Keith Webster snorted. “And then the driver stopped to strip her and snuff out his cigarette on her behind? What’s the real story?”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss it. Can you put her back together again?”
“That’s what I do, John, put them back together again.”
It was almost noon when Dr. Webster finally said to his assistants, “We’re finished. Get her into intensive care. Call me at the slightest sign of anything going wrong.”