Chapter 63

“How’s my favorite Pookie-bear?” Linda asked as she crawled onto Eric’s lap.

“Pookie-bear?” Dan asked incredulous.

“I’m just fine, Love Muffin,” Eric answered just before giving her a kiss.

“Love Muffin,” Dan repeated closing his eyes.

“Can I get a little snuggle from my Pookie-Wookie?” Linda asked rubbing her nose against Eric’s.

“Oh, God, they’re going at it again,” Dan said putting his hands over his ears.

He hoped that this little exchange of romantic small talk didn’t last too long. This was the reason why he always tried to meet with Eric when Linda wasn’t around. They never got any work done when the two of them were together.

The action between Linda and Eric was just heating up when the telephone rang. Linda climbed off Eric’s lap and said, “I’ll get it.”

As she ran off to get the telephone, Eric watched her walk away with a grin on his face. He said, “She’s so great.”

“I’m sure she is,” Dan said noticing that the lovey-dovey Linda had switched off with the ringing of the telephone to be replaced by a business-oriented Linda. He frowned while watching her walk away.

Eric turned to study Dan for a minute and then said, “You don’t like her, do you?”

“She’s fine,” Dan said. He didn’t really know her, but he did feel that her displays of affection were artificial. It was as though her emotions were over acted. He would never say it without more proof, but he thought she was playing his friend like a fiddle. Eric was wealthy and there were some women who were willing to use any means possible to get access to that wealth.

Eric frowned and stared at Dan. After a minute he said, “I’m going out for about a half an hour. Talk to Linda and get to know her.”

“There’s no need to do that,” Dan protested.

“You need to know her,” Eric said. He was going to marry Linda and he would prefer that Dan was friends with her.

“She’s your girlfriend, not mine,” Dan said.

The last thing he wanted was to have to deal with Linda for a half an hour without Eric around. To him, it was a recipe for disaster. Linda returned and Eric rose from his seat.

He kissed her and said, “I’m going out for a half an hour, my little love dove. Entertain Dan while I’m gone.”

“Okay, my smoochie-moochie,” Linda replied brightly. She leaned over and whispered something in Eric’s ear.

He leaned back and looked at her with a hurt expression on his face. He said, “No.”

Pleased with his answer, Linda jumped up and hugged him. She kissed him as she said, “I love you so much, Pookie-Bear.”

“I love you too, Love Muffin,” Eric said.

The goodbye session at the door took five minutes. Dan sat in his chair wishing that he was anywhere else. He found this whole farce sickening. He’d come over to Eric’s house to discuss business, but after forty minutes they hadn’t gotten around to it. He had just about decided to leave when Linda returned and sat down in the chair that Eric had vacated.

She said, “You don’t like me.”

“I don’t know you,” Dan said not wanting to have this discussion.

“I know,” Linda said with a sigh. She sagged down in her seat feeling tired. She said, “You think I’m a gold digger.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this,” Dan said.

Linda got out of her chair and left the room for a few minutes. She came back with a magazine and tossed it at Dan. As he fumbled the catch, she said, “Turn to page 34. You’ll see a picture of me there.”

It was a men’s magazine filled with pictures of young naked women. He flipped through to the page she had mentioned. There, in all her naked glory, was Linda. She was much younger in the picture, but it was definitely her. As far as Dan was concerned, it was far too much information.

He closed the magazine and looked up. His mouth dropped open upon finding that she was standing in front of him with her shirt raised over her head. The woman in the picture had beautiful breasts. The chest of the woman in front of him was a scarred mess. He knew that she was a breast cancer survivor, but he hadn’t expected her to show him the results of her battle with the disease. He didn’t know what the results of mastectomy should look like, but he didn’t think it should look that bad.

He said, “Lower your shirt.”

“You’re disgusted, aren’t you?” she asked as she lowered her shirt.

Shaking his head, Dan answered, “No. I just feel like I’m trespassing in something that should be private between you and Eric.”

Based on the expression on his face, Linda knew that he was telling the truth. She dropped into her chair and gestured at the magazine. She said, “When I posed for that magazine I knew I could get any man I wanted. I was sexy. Thousands of men jerked off to those pictures of me. I could go to a bar and men would line up to buy me drinks. I was hot stuff and I flaunted it.”

She looked at Dan to see his reaction. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “When I was twenty-three I was diagnosed with breast cancer.”

In an angry voice, she said, “I was just twenty-three fucking years old. Who gets breast cancer at that age? No one!”

She took a long breath to calm down and said, “The doctors lobbed off both breasts. I went through chemotherapy and lost my hair. I looked like shit, but I recovered. My hair grew back and I regained my weight, but I knew that I was a freak. Every time I changed my top, I could see proof that I was a freak.”

“You didn’t believe that,” Dan said. He couldn’t see how someone who had survived a deadly illness would consider themselves a freak as a result of it.

Linda shook her head and said, “I don’t think you understand how much my self image was wrapped up in my appearance. My looks were everything! I had plans on how to use my looks to get fame and fortune. You see, I was a gold digger. I had been looking for a man that wanted a little arm candy and was willing to pay for it. I was going to go to Hollywood. If Hollywood didn’t work out, I’d go into porn films and suck and fuck my way to the top of the heap. I had a body and I was going to use it to get every dollar I could.”

Dan frowned and shook his head. He found it sad that someone had actively sought out that kind of life. He didn’t need to comment, she could see from the expression on his face what he thought. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “That was before the mastectomy. Afterwards, it was an entirely different matter.”

Dan asked, “In what way?”

Linda answered, “I was damaged goods. I tried every trick in the book to get a man who would take care of me. I’d take men to bed and keep my shirt on so that they couldn’t see my lack of breasts. It would work a time or two, but men love breasts. They’d rather get a hand job and play with a woman’s tits than bang her without the tits. No matter what I did, they’d be trying to pull my top off. God, you should seen the looks of horror on their faces when they saw my chest for the very first time. They’d run off so fast that they’d leave with their trousers bunched around their feet. It was pathetic.

“I tried to find a man who would look past the scars. You can not imagine my desperation. I told myself that I would do anything that a man asked of me. It didn’t matter to me how degrading their demand would have been. I would have had sex with an army if that was what it took to keep a man. Nothing happened. No man materialized to make demands of me.

“Every night for seven years I fell asleep crying. Unloved, unwanted, and ugly, I knew I faced a future alone. Let me tell you something, there is no future when you know that you’ll live it alone. Each day drags by. Every night is endless. You can guess what I decided to do about it.”

Dan asked, “Suicide?”

“Yes. I took some pills,” Linda answered. She stared at the floor for a minute and then asked, “Did you know that God is a practical joker?”

“No,” Dan answered rather surprised by the question.

“He is. He has a sick sense of humor. Not one man had stepped across the threshold of my door in three years. I take a bottle of two dozen pills, and a SWAT team comes bursting into my apartment thinking they were about to take down the drug dealer that lived next door to me. I might have objected if I had been conscious, but I wasn’t,” Linda said shaking her head.

“One morning while I was in the hospital, I wake up and there’s this guy sitting there next to the hospital bed looking at me. I mean, he’s just looking at me. I’ll admit that it was a little unnerving, but no man had looked at me in years. Angry at being alive, I raised my hospital gown and told him to stare all he wanted. I expected him to run off, but he just sat there blinking his eyes real quick. It took him a minute to say something to me. Do you know what he said to me?”

“No,” Dan answered knowing that the man sitting by her bed had to have been Eric. He had no idea how Eric would react when faced with that kind of pain.

“‘Is there anything I can do to ease your pain?’” Linda said.

She had answered that he could get rid of breast cancer from the world. She had never realized what consequences her answer would have. Ignoring the fact that there was already a very effective organization dedicated to eliminating breast cancer, he had charged out to start his own.

“That sounds like Eric,” Dan said with a small laugh.

Shaking her head, Linda said, “When we talked about it later, Eric told me that he had sat there trying to figure out what to say to me. He says that he thought about how you would react and that was the only thing he could imagine you saying.”

Dan said, “Eric tends to have an idealized image of me.”

“I don’t think so. Eric is pretty perceptive,” Linda said. She knew that he came across as somewhat of a goofball, but he paid attention to everything.

“So what happened next?” Dan asked wanting to change the subject.

“He asked me out on a date. He asked me out on a date knowing that I was a freak,” Linda said. She smiled and said, “And after that date, he asked me for another one.”

Dan nodded his head thinking that it was a nice story and was to end with ‘they lived happily ever after.’ He didn’t buy it. He said, “So you got your man.”

“Yes and I’ll do anything to keep him,” Linda said. She was still willing to take on that army if that was what Eric wanted.

Knowing what she expected him to ask, Dan asked, “Do you love him?”

“Yes,” Linda said.

“Is it love or is it desperation?” Dan asked knowing it was the kind of question that could destroy a friendship.

She had feared that he would ask that question. Late at night, when Eric was off doing his EMS thing, she frequently asked herself that same question.

Finally, Linda answered, “I fear that it’s a bit of both.”

Dan didn’t say anything although it was the only answer that he would have accepted. She watched his impassive face and said, “I don’t blame you for not believing me. There are times when I don’t believe it myself.”

“I’ll tell you what bothers me,” Dan said looking at her.

“What?”

“Your behavior with him looks forced and your affection seems artificial,” Dan said.

Linda was silent for a while as she thought about his comment. It was true. Her behavior was forced and the displays of affection were artificial, but that wasn’t her choice.

She said, “In a lot of ways Eric is still a kid. Did you know that I’m his first girlfriend?”

“No,” Dan answered although he could believe it.

“I am. He doesn’t know how to act with me around other people. He has this high school image of couples calling each other by pet names and advertising their relationship with public displays of affection. What you saw was the equivalent of us making out by the lockers in the hallway of high school,” Linda said raising her hands as if to say, ‘What can I say?’

“Oh,” Dan said. Now that she had mentioned it, the scene he had witnessed did remind him of high school dating.

“The first time we went out in public, Eric was hurt when I didn’t perform little displays of affection. I was shocked, but he was being very honest with me. He was on the verge of tears. He felt that I didn’t care for him because I wasn’t crawling all over him and acting like a high school girl. I do it for him,” she said. She wished it didn’t have to be that way.

“How do you feel about it?” Dan asked.

“I hate it. The only reason I do it, is because that is what he wants. It’s worth it, though. The moment we’re alone everything is different. He acts like the Eric that I think you know. We laugh and talk about things. He’s so laid back that you’d think he was stoned until he finds something he’s interested in,” Linda said.