Raveling by Peter Moore Smith Page A

her, a satellite dish ready to receive.
    “I also find you attractive.” She immediately realized she shouldn’t have said it. But she felt as though she had waded too
     far in now to back out—she had to swim to the other side.
    “Really?”
    “It must happen to you all the time,” she said hurriedly, “being a brain surgeon and everything.”
    “Not as much as I had originally hoped.” Eric wiped his hands on his paper napkin. “But I have met my quota of doctor groupies.”
    “My father was a doctor,” Katherine said.
    “That’s usually the case.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “Is it?” She tried to affect a look of modest offense, but the truth is that she was embarrassed.
    “Girls want to marry their dads, don’t they?”
    “I thought I was the only psychologist at this table.”
    “Then you tell me.” Eric touched his napkin to his lips, his whole face a question. “Don’t girls want to marry their fathers
     and boys want to marry their mothers? Isn’t that the—”
    “That’s what Freud maintained. Sort of.”
    “Wasn’t he right?”
    “I don’t think so, not entirely.”
    “Not entirely?”
    “Will you pass me that bread?”
    “Are you trying to change the subject?”
    “You’re an extremely interesting conversationalist,” Katherine said, using her green eyes to subdue him.
    Eric nodded. “I have a lot of interests.”
    “Do you want to marry your mother?”
    Eric looked at the ceiling again and said, “Good point.”
    Katherine kept on smiling. Too long, she thought later, way too long.

    In the spare
enclosure
overlooking the highway Katherine scolded herself. She’d been too flirtatious. It was probably the cheap wine. She’d downed
     three glasses of it before Eric had arrived and then, stupidly, pretended not to have been drinking anything at all, sipping
     ice water the rest of the meal. Of course he knew she’d been drinking. He was a fucking brain surgeon. He could see it in
     her eyes—the dilation of the pupils, a slight relaxation of the facial muscles, blood congestion in the cheeks. Was she slurring
     her words, for Christ’s sake? The truth was, Katherine was afraid of mybrother. The truth was, she had never been asked to dinner by a man that handsome.
    She’d panicked. It had suddenly occurred to her that Eric would find it even more unprofessional—his brother’s therapist drinking
     wine at a barbecue restaurant.
    At home she undressed, pulling off her gray slacks first, then unbuttoning her blouse. She hadn’t shaved her legs in weeks.
    In her tiny bedroom she rushed out of her clothes and threw them on the floor of her closet. Her underwear went in the laundry
     pile in the corner of the room. She didn’t even have a hamper, not even a trash can. She’d left Mark with everything. He’d
     wanted it all, too. “You’ll come back,” he’d said. “You’ll come back, and it will all be here, just the way you left it.”
     So melodramatic.
    “Mark, this is not a soap opera.”
    “You’ll realize how much you love me, that you can’t make it on your own without—”
    “
Mark,
” she’d said, “this is not an argument.”
    He had brooded then, sulking around the apartment, arms folded.
    Katherine
was
sorry, had been sorry. She’d be sorry for a long time, in fact. She was well aware of that. She knew she didn’t love Mark.
     She had never loved him. And then Michele. What else could she do but leave? Katherine didn’t know what the experience of
     love was, really. She only knew that she’d never had it. She looked at her naked image in the full-length mirror on the back
     of her bedroom door. She was as beautiful as she was ever going to be. Her flesh was getting softer. Her breasts hung slightly
     lower than they had five years ago. There were lines around her eyes. This was it. She wasn’t going to get any better.
    Katherine was five feet five inches tall, exactly. She had measured herself so many times as a teenager, hoping