He regarded her for a second with thoughtful dark gray eyes. "Haven't you got enough trouble?" he asked mildly. "You can't help being born a Negro, but who told you you had to be a black dropout pot-smoking sixteen-year-old whore?"
She stared at him, baffled, wondering what she had said wrong. Maybe he had to get himself worked up and whip her first to get his kicks. Or maybe it was the Reverend Davidson bit. He was going to pray over her black ass, reform her, and then lay her. She tried again. She reached between his legs and stroked him, whispering, "Go, baby. Sock it to me."
He gently disengaged himself and sat her in an armchair. She had never been so puzzled. He didn't look like a fag, but these days you never knew. "What's your bag, baby? Tell me how you like to freak out and I'll give it to you."
"All right," he said. "Let's rap."
"You mean - talk?"
"That's right."
And they talked. All night long. It was the strangest night that Carol had ever spent. Dr. Stevens kept leaping from one subject to another, exploring, testing her. He asked her opinion about Vietnam, ghettos, and college riots. Every time Carol thought she had figured out what he was really after, he switched to another subject. They talked of things she had never heard of, and about subjects in which she considered herself the world's greatest living expert. Months afterward she used to lie awake, trying to recall the word, the idea, the magic phrase that had changed her. She had never been able to because she finally realized there had been no magic word. What Dr. Stevens had done was simple. He had talked to her. Really talked to her. No one had ever done that before. He had treated her like a human being, an equal, whose opinions and feelings he cared about.
Somewhere during the course of the night she suddenly became aware of her nakedness and went in and put on his pajamas. He came in and sat on the edge of the bed and they talked some more. They talked about Mao Tse-tung and hula hoops and the Pill. And having a mother and father who had never been married. Carol told him things she had never told anybody in her life. Things that had been long buried deep in her subconscious. And when she had finally fallen asleep, she had felt totally empty. It was as though she had had a major operation, and a river of poison had been drained out of her.
In the morning, after breakfast, he handed her a hundred dollars.
She hesitated, then finally said, "I lied. It's not my birthday."
"I know." He grinned. "But we won't tell the judge." His tone changed. "You can take this money and walk out of here and no one will bother you until the next time you get caught by the police." He paused. "I need a receptionist. I think you'd be marvelous at the job."
She looked at him unbelievingly. "You're putting me on. I can't take shorthand or type."
"You could if you went back to school."
Carol looked at him a moment and then said enthusiastically, "I never thought of that. That sounds groovy." She couldn't wait to get the hell out of the apartment with his hundred dollars and flash it at the boys and girls at Fishman's Drug Store in Harlem, where the gang hung out. She could buy enough kicks with this money to last a week.
When she walked into Fishman's Drug Store, it was as though she had never been away. She saw the same bitter faces and heard the same hip, defeated chatter. She was home. She kept thinking of the doctor's apartment. It wasn't the furniture that made the big difference. It was so - clean. And quiet. It was like a little island somewhere in another world. And he had offered her a passport to it. What was there to lose? She could try it for laughs, to show the doctor that he was wrong, that she couldn't make it.
To her own great surprise, Carol enrolled in night school. She left her furnished room with the rust-stained washbasin and broken toilet and the torn green window shade and the lumpy iron cot where she would turn tricks and act out plays. She was a beautiful heiress in Paris or London or Rome, and the man pumping away on top of her was a wealthy, handsome prince, dying to marry her. And as each man had his orgasm and crawled off her, her dream died. Until the next time.
She left the room and all her princes without a backward glance and moved back in with her parents. Dr. Stevens gave her an allowance while she was studying. She finished high school with top grades. The doctor was there on graduation day, his gray eyes bright with pride. Someone believed in her. She was somebody. She took a day job at Nedick's and took a secretarial course at night. The day after she finished, she went to work for Dr. Stevens and could afford her own apartment.
In the four years that had passed, Dr. Stevens had always treated her with the same grave courtesy he had shown her the first night. At first she had waited for him to make some reference to what she had been, and what she had become. But she had finally come to the realization that he had always seen her as what she was now. All he had done was to help her fulfill herself. Whenever she had a problem, he always found time to discuss it with her. Recently she had been meaning to tell him about what had happened with her and Chick and ask him whether she should tell Chick, but she kept putting it off. She wanted her Dr. Stevens to be proud of her. She would have done anything for him. She would have slept with him, killed for him...
And now here were these two mothers from the Homicide Squad wanting to see him.
McGreavy was getting impatient. "How about it, miss?" he asked.
"I have orders never to disturb him when he's with a patient," said Carol. She saw the expression that came into McGreavy's eyes. "I'll ring him." She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom buzzer. After thirty seconds of silence, Dr. Stevens' voice came over the phone. "Yes?"