He laughed, and shifted to face forward again as he said, “How did you ever meet up with him, anyway? It’s so unlikely.”
“More unlikely than you know.”
“Really?” He was ready to be interested, amused. “How’s that?”
So she told him about the vodka contest, and the trip to Moscow, and the completely unexpected cocktail party thrown there by an organization she still didn’t know anything about, and the strange little waif-man who’d showed up and talked with her; and then the round-half-the-world phone calls to her cousin at NYU Medical Center, and getting Grigor’s passport, and permission for him to leave Russia, and his strange jokesmith occupation since Chernobyl had killed him; and still doing it, still faxing those unfunny topical jokes to the Russian Johnny Carson, even while the disease ate away at his body like a child licking an ice cream cone.
Andy Harbinger asked questions here and there, showing his interest, encouraging her to expand on the-story, and half the trip went by as she talked. But finally there was nothing more to say, not on that subject, and after a little silence he said thoughtfully, “It isn’t just pity, though, is it? What you feel toward him.”
Pity? There were moments when this man seemed very intuitive and sensitive, and yet other times when he was just so bluntly wrong, almost cruel — life is unfair, it isn’t just pity — that it was impossible to know how to react. Didn’t he know how dismissive he sounded, as though life and emotion didn’t matter?
She really didn’t know how to answer him, and the silence stretched between them, she unusually aware of her own breathing, and then he said, much more softly, “I know what it really is, Susan. You’re in love with him. And you wish you weren’t. And you hate that wish.”
So here was the sensitive Andy Harbinger back again. And he’d defined the problem, all right; she knew she shouldn’t feel about Grigor the way she did, she shouldn’t lash herself so securely to a man who would be dead within the year. But the very knowledge made her guilty, as though she couldn’t forgive herself for even that much dispassion, didn’t believe in her own right to see the pit she was falling into. “I can’t talk about it,” she whispered, and it took all her effort to concentrate on the driving, not just to close her eyes and let events take her away.
“Stop the car,” he said.
“What?” She’d clenched the steering wheel so hard her hands ached, but she couldn’t make them let go.
“Pull off the road and stop,” he told her, his voice calm and authoritative, like a doctor in the examining room. “Until you relax a little. Come on, Susan.”
She obeyed, her right leg made of wood as she forced it off the accelerator and onto the brake. The car wobbled, not entirely under her control, but slowed as she steered it off the pavement and onto the rough dirt surface of the shoulder. It stopped and she shifted into park, and then all at once she was trembling all over, but dry-eyed. Staring hopelessly out at the hood, as aware of the traffic whizzing past on her left as she was of the man listening to her on her right, every sense painfully alert, she said, “It’s so awful, and it just keeps going on. I come up every week, and every week he’s worse, and how much worse can it be? He gets thinner and thinner, and he just...” She shook her head and lifted her aching hands from the steering wheel to gesture vaguely her despair.
“He doesn’t die,” Andy Harbinger said.
“Oh, God.” She hadn’t talked about this with anyone before, not even very much with herself; maybe what it needed was a stranger, somebody she wasn’t already connected with in the usual web of history and knowledge and opinions and shared experience. “I don’t want him to die,” she said, her throat aching as though she had a terrible flu. “That’s the truth. If he could live forever, if he could — well, not forever, nobody lives forever, but you know what I mean.”
“A normal life span.”
“Yes. Normal. So I could—” There was no way to even think this last thought, much less express it.
But Andy Harbinger knew, anyway, what she couldn’t describe. “So you could decide for yourself,” he said gently, “whether or not you’d like to spend that normal life with him.”
“Oh, I suppose so.” She signed through her burning throat. “To be able to do it all normally, let it grow in a normal way instead of, instead of this water torture. I hate blaming him, but I do, I can’t help myself, and then I can’t stand myself, and then I don’t even want to come up here any more, go through it all any more. We’re all so trapped. And then I say, ‘Well, it won’t last much longer,’ and I feel satisfaction.”
“The truth is,” he said, “it actually won’t last much longer, no matter what you do or how you feel or whether or not you feel guilty. It all doesn’t matter.”
“Which doesn’t help,” she said stiffly, responding to that cold side of him again. “It doesn’t help because I can’t just shrug and be indifferent, as though I was in one of those cars there, and this was an accident here, and it wasn’t anybody I knew, and I just drove on by.”
“Of course not,” he said. “But you can’t take on yourself the responsibility for things going wrong in other people’s lives. We’d all like life to be milk and mell, but it just isn’t, not all the time, there’s bound to be some—”
She frowned at him, distracted. “What? Milk and what?”
He was confused for just a second, obviously trying to remember what he’d just said. “Milk and honey,” he finally decided. “I said we’d all like life to be nothing but milk and honey, but there’s bound to be acid, too, along the way.”
“Is that what you—?” She frowned, trying to recall his earlier words. “It sounded different.”
“Well, I don’t know what I said,” he told her, beginning to get impatient. “The point was, it’s natural for you to want this trouble you’re going through to be over with, and it doesn’t mean you’re unfaithful or cold to Grigor when you feel that way. You know that, in your head, but your emotions won’t listen.”
She had to smile at that phraseology, and nod, looking at him at last. The tears were starting now, after the attack, but not out of control. She blinked them out of her eyes, saying, “Emotions never listen, that’s the way they are.”
“So we just do our best, okay?” He smiled at her, warm and concerned. “And we try to think about things other than Grigor.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“And we don’t feel guilty when we succeed.”
“That,” she said, “is the hard part.”
“I know.” He shifted in the seat, clearly ready to move on to other things. He said, “Do you have any idea how good Italian food is when you’re an emotional wreck?”
Now she had to laugh. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “It’s a miracle I don’t weigh eight hundred pounds.”
“I know a great place in the Village,” he said. “Let me take you there.”
Doubtful, afraid, she withdrew from him, saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I haven’t been...”
“Dating?” He grinned at her. “This isn’t a date, this is dinner. Believe me, Susan, I’m not gonna try to compete with a tragic hero.”
Ananayel
Foolish. Foolish. Mell! It isn’t mell now, it hasn’t been mell for hundreds of years. It’s honey now, I know that as well as anybody.
I was distracted by having to deal with my little Judas ewe, that’s all, and for just a second, I forgot the situation, the time, and made that slip. The problem is, I am not living in time in the same way the humans are, so I don’t have the same temporal relationship with their languages. I have in my mind and at my command all of English, from its earliest guttural beginnings in the fifth century, when speakers of Anglo-Frisian first crossed the then-unnamed stormy water from the European continent to the British Islands, and took up residence there, so that their dialect began to alter away from its Dutch, Frisian, and Low German cousins in the Plattdeutsch family, down through its endless changes to this ultimate moment. (I know it into the now-canceled future as well, all the way to its final commingling with pan-Mandarin.)