At least I thought they had, or was I just imagining that nothing had really changed, that I still loved her because of the way I had loved her then, all those years ago, when I thought I would never see her again and was convinced that my life was as good as over? That night at dinner I thought I was falling in love with her the way I had the first time, but then, after she was gone, I began to wonder how much of it was because of what had happened before, how much of it was because it seemed somehow finally to make sense out of things and to give some meaning to a broken heart. If we had just met, two middle-aged strangers, would there have been any real attraction at all, or would we have just enjoyed each other’s company and not been terribly worried whether we ever saw each other again? I did not want to talk about it. Things were all too tangled up.
“I didn’t intend to get drunk,” I said with a shrug. “It just happened.”
Jennifer looked at me, searching my eyes, a gentle, sympathetic smile floating over her wide mouth.
“It’s all right, Joey. You don’t have to be in love with me.”
The thought, spoken out loud, spoken by her, that I might not be in love with her anymore, gave me a strange, empty feeling, as if I were losing her again, the way I had lost her before.
“No,” I insisted vehemently, “that’s not it. I am in love with you. It’s just that I don’t quite understand it.”
For a while we did not say anything. We sat there, seeing each other the way we used to be, the way no one else had ever seen us, and realized as we did that whatever else had happened there was something about us both that had not changed at all.
I began to talk, but not about us. I told her instead about the things I had done while she was away. I told her about my visit with the widow of Calvin Jeffries and what Calvin Jeffries had done with her help to Elliott Winston.
“He’s been in the state hospital for twelve years?” she asked, horrified. “I told you what happened to me. I was in the hospital, but for only six months, and it wasn’t a state hospital-an asylum for the criminally insane-it was a private clinic where everyone is very discreet and everyone has a private room.” She shook her head. “Twelve years! In a place like that!
“You start to change,” she went on, talking in a clear, calm voice. “Even when you’re there for just a relatively short period of time. You don’t notice it, not at first, and perhaps if you stay there for a long time you never notice it. You have your particular problem, the problem that brought you there, but everyone around you-all the other patients-have problems, too. There is not as much difference between you and the others as there is on the outside. Everyone has a mental illness, and you begin to see that as the normal state of things.”
No matter how hard I tried, I still saw her the way she had been. It was almost impossible for me to think of her hospitalized for depression. Instead of trying to go further into what she had said, instead of inquiring into what she understood as the ambiguous meaning of normality, I denied that she had ever been seriously ill.
“But you’re fine now. Elliott Winston, on the other hand, will probably never be well.”
She started to say something, seemed to think better of it, and withdrew behind a polite smile. She sipped on her coffee for a while and then asked me how I had spent the weekend.
“Nothing unusual. I went into the office Saturday morning, then played chess with a Russian emigre whose father was executed by Stalin in the name of history.”
She was not sure whether I was telling the truth or not.
“Anatoly Chicherin runs a bookstore. He convinced me to play chess with him, though I don’t know why: I could play him for a hundred years and never win.”
“His father was killed by Stalin?”
I leaned against the wall and pulled my knee onto the bench seat. “The irony is that Anatoly became a state prosecutor. He left when the Soviet Union self-destructed. He likes to talk about criminal cases. That’s how we became friends. He’s fascinated by the way we do it here.” I tapped my fingers on the table, watching the way she kept her eyes on me. “He thinks we’re crazy. He says everyone here wants to win; no one cares about justice. He insists he never charged anyone unless he was absolutely certain they were guilty. Imagine! Inside the most corrupt system in the world, and he would not think of charging anyone if he thought there was a chance they were innocent.”
I was showing off, talking about things on a grand scale, though I knew all the time that it had no effect because it made no difference. Talk, be silent, say something halfway interesting, or make a fool out of myself, the way she looked at me would not change.
“Saturday was the first time he told me about his father. We were talking about the Jeffries murder. A second judge-Quincy Griswald-was killed Friday night, and I thought there was a chance that the same person might have done both.”
“You don’t think so now?”
“No. The one they arrested for the Jeffries murder did it, but for a while I wasn’t sure. I was trying to understand how someone might commit suicide over something he didn’t do. That’s what led Anatoly to tell me about his father.”
I looked down at the table and then slowly raised my eyes.
“You look at me the same way you used to.”
Her face brightened. “Good. Tell me about his father.”
I stretched my leg out, pulled up my other knee and grasped it with both hands. “His father believed in Communism. He also wanted to protect his family. He was accused of treason. It was a lie. But he confessed, though he knew it was a death sentence.
In effect, he committed suicide, and he did it because of what he believed and who he wanted to protect.”
I turned my head toward her and then, a moment later, sat up and leaned forward. “An Arab terrorist drives a truck full of explosives into a building and blows himself up and we think he’s crazy, but he thinks he’s dying for Allah and is going to par-adise. How many Christians were burned at the stake during the Inquisition because other Christians thought they were heretics?
Atheists died for the Communist Party because they believed they were acting on behalf of the new god, history. We think all of them were crazy, but what do we believe in? What are we willing to die for?”
“A mother will die for her children,” she said simply.
I was sure she was right. It probably explained why every religion had been founded by a man.
Jennifer reached inside her purse and removed an orange plastic bottle. With the kind of precision that comes with habit, she unscrewed the cap, tapped a single white capsule into the palm of her hand, put it into her mouth, and washed it down with water from her glass. As soon as she swallowed, the cap was back on the bottle and the bottle back in her purse.
“Lithium,” she explained. “I forgot to take it this morning.”
I wondered if she had, or if she had decided to wait to see my reaction. It was not that long ago that someone suffering severe depression was put away, and spent the rest of their days staring at a wall, without the will to move or the power to speak.
Now you took a pill and wondered whether people believed it was no different than taking insulin for diabetes, or whether, deep down, they thought you would never be quite right.
Outside, she took my hand as we walked up the sidewalk, headed for her car. She seemed relaxed, perfectly at ease, almost girlish. Tossing her head to the side, she teased me about the briefcase I was cradling under my arm. “Did anyone ever tell you,” she said, reaching in front of me to tap the cracked leather,
“that you could probably use a new one?”
“It’s the only one I’ve ever had,” I replied. “We’ve been through a lot together.”
Her large wide eyes, painted yellow by the high arching sun, did their light-footed dance, mocking my stiff-legged attachment to what I was used to. “Yes,” she said, “but you’ve survived it.”