Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,44

so sober, so shocking – telling women exactly what they must do if they get a harassing phone call. Screw it, she thought. It was the first time in a week she had not been concentrating on the baby beatnik in her abdomen. She didn't hang up, not this time. Perversely, she lighted a cigarette and kept talking.

"Why don't you tell me your name?" she said.

"When are you going to meet me in the hay?" the voice said. "When are you going to step out of your step-ins and hop in the old hay?"

"Please, why won't you tell me your name?" she said. "I may be able to help you."

"You've heard of jack the Ripper," he said. "Well, I'm his cousin, Jack the Fucker."

"Why don't you tell me all about it?" Gillian said.

"That's a very interesting name. If you tell me all about it, maybe I can help you."

"You hoooer!" he screamed. "You wanna trap me. You wanna keep me talking just so you can trap me."

"Maybe I just want to talk to you."

Click. It took Gillian a moment to realize that he had hung up on her. He had taken the action she should have taken. Gillian giggled – she had a feeling that perhaps she had just learned a lesson of importance.

Maybe that was the one sure way to get rid of all the nuts in the world – try to understand them. She rested back on the bed and discovered, almost to her surprise, that the call had had a strange effect: It had excited her. She found herself sensually aroused, strangely warm, and perhaps there was a lesson there as well. Gillian didn't dwell on this.

She reached instead for the Three Towns Directory. Hetley, Hetterich… there, Hetterton, Alan, M.D. – office 131 Thompson Lane – KI 1-1377. This time it was the voice at the other end of the line who asked the questions. An operation? Would she care to specify what kind of an operation? No? Would she care to say who had referred her to him? No? Maxine Schwartz? Oh, yes, would Friday evening be satisfactory?

It had not been an easy road that Alan Hetterton had traveled. The road from Kings County to King's Neck was uphill and bumpy. He had known even in medical school that he was not destined to be much of a doctor. The sight of blood saddened him, sometimes reduced him to tears. To this day he was not certain which was the tibia and which was the fibia. But somehow he had stumbled through medical school, finally acquiring the M.D. after his name – the M.D. that his parents had treated with a reverence he could never understand. Most of Alan's classmates went on to postgraduate work, but Alan was not one to press his luck. (At times, even then, he thought he might still go into his father's brassiere business, learning it, as the old man might say, from the inside out.) He settled, instead, for the life of a general practitioner. One of the few on Long Island that found it economically necessary to make house calls. And perform abortions.

In time Alan met Gerda, the sister of a nurse who had helped pulled him through his period of interning. Gerda, tiny and small-boned with fair skin and a large mouth, was everything Alan was not: extroverted, adventurous, bubbling with idle conversation. It was she who had been the aggressor, she who had provided the rubber contraceptive during their first fumbling encounter one night in June on the fourth tee of the Plandome Country Club. But even there he had failed. Four weeks later Gerda tearfully announced that she was "preggy," to use her imperishable term. Six weeks later they were married. Married for eighteen years, eighteen years of relative poverty (whenever Alan encountered a statistical study of average incomes for doctors in the United States he shook his head sadly, wonderingly), and the fruit of their union was an eighteen-year-old boy, who was seriously considering a life as a Country-and-Western vocalist, and a house a mile from the water in one of the less prestigious sectors of King's Neck.

Alan had never actually regretted marrying Gerda – but there were moments. Moments when he was lancing an ugly boil or giving an enema, and then he would reflect on his marriage. What had they in common? Other than a slow-witted long-haired son who fancied cowboy boots with silver spurs – a boy who had perhaps been the