Outwardly, he was controlled. It was his job to know the language of eyelids, jaw muscles, lips, and it was his special skill to make them mute. He rose slowly as his nurse ushered her in and while she took the three short paces to meet him. He studied her with an impassive ferocity.
He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild . . . free, rather . . . but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine. And indeed she still did so; somehow that hurt him more than anything else could.
She stopped before the desk. He moved his hands behind him; her gaze was on them and he wanted her to look up. He waited until Miss Jarrell discreetly clicked the door shut.
“Osa,” he said at last.
“Well, Fred.”
The silence became painful. How long did that take—two seconds, three? He made a meaningless sound, part of a laugh, and came around the desk to shift the chair beside it. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake.”
She sat down and abruptly, for the first time since she had entered the office, she looked directly at him. “You look— you look well, Fred.”
“Thanks.” He sat down. He wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come readily to his lips was: “You’re looking well, too”—such a patent lie that he couldn’t tell it. And at last he found something else to say: “A lot has happened.”
She nodded and her gaze found a corner of the tooled-leather blotter frame on the desk. She studied it quietly.
“Five years,” she said.
Five years in which she must have known everything about him, at first because such a separation is never sharp, but ragged, raveled, a-crackle with the different snaps of different threads at different times; and later, because all the world knew what he was, what he had done. What he stood for.
For him, five years at first filled with a not-Osa, like a sheet of paper from which one has cut a silhouette; and after that, the diminishing presence of Osa as gossip (so little of that, because anyone directly involved in gossip walks usually in a bubble of silence); Osa as rumor, Osa as conjecture. He had heard that Richard Newell had lost—left—his job about the time he had won Osa, and he had never heard of him working again.
Glancing at Osa’s cheap clothes now, and the new small lines in her face, he concluded that whatever Newell had found to do, it could not have been much. Newell, he thought bitterly, is a man God made with only one victory in him and he’s used it up.
“Will you help me?” Osa asked stridently.
He thought, Was I waiting for this? Is this some sort of reward, her coming to me for help? Once he might have thought so. At the moment, he did not feel rewarded.
He sat looking at her question as if it were a tangible object, a box of a certain size, a certain shape, made of some special material, which was not to be opened until he had guessed its contents.
Will you help me? Money? Hardly—Osa may have lost a great deal, but her towering pride was still with her. Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen.
Not money, then. Perhaps a job? For her? No, he knew her well. She could get her own jobs. She had not, therefore she didn’t want one. This could only mean she lived as she did for Newell’s sake. Oh, yes, he would be the provider, even if the illusion starved her.
Then a job for Newell? Didn’t she know he couldn’t be trusted with any responsible job and was not constituted to accept anything less? Of course she knew it.
All of which left only one thing. She must be sure, too, that Newell would accept the idea or she would not be here asking.
He said, “How soon can he start therapy?”
She flickered, all over and all at once, as if he had touched her with a high voltage electrode—the first and only indication she had evinced of the terrible tensions she carried. Then she raised her head, her face lit with something beyond words, something big enough, bright enough, to light and warm the world. His world. She tried to speak.
“Don’t,” he whispered. He put out his hand and then withdrew it. “You’ve already said it.”
She turned her head away and tried to say something else, but he overrode that, too.
“I’ll get paid,” he said bluntly. “After his therapy, he’ll earn more than enough—” (For both of us? For my bill? To pay you back for all he’s done to you?) “—for everything.”
“I should have known,” she breathed. He understood. She had been afraid he wouldn’t take Newell as a patient. She had been afraid, if he did take him, that he might insist on doing it free, the name of which was charity. She need not have worried. I should have known. Any response to that, from a shrug to a disclaimer, would destroy a delicacy, so he said nothing.
“He can come any time you say,” she told him. This meant, He isn’t doing anything these days.
He opened a desk book and riffled through it. He did not see it. He said, “I’d like to do some pretty intensive work with him. Six, eight weeks.”
“You mean he’d stay here?”
He nodded. “And I’m afraid—I’d prefer that you didn’t visit him. Do you mind very much?”
She hesitated. “Are you sure that . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m sure I want to do it,” he said, suddenly rough. “I’m sure I’ll do everything I can to straighten him out, bar nothing. You wouldn’t want me to say I was sure of anything else.”
She got to her feet. “I’ll call you, Fred.” She watched his face for a moment. He did not know if she would want to shake his hand or—or not. She took one deep breath, then turned away and went to the door and opened it.
“Thank you . . .”
He sat down and looked at the closed door. She had worn no scent, but he was aware of her aura in the room, anyway. Abruptly he realized that she had not said ‘Thank you.”
He had.
Osa didn’t call. Three days, four, the phone ringing and ringing, and never her voice. Then it didn’t matter—rather, she had no immediate reason to call, because the intercom whispered, and when he keyed it, it said in Miss Jarrell’s clear tones, “A Mr. Newell to see you, Doctor.”
Stupidly he said, “Richard A. Newell?”
Bzz Psss Bzz. “That’s right, Doctor.”
“Send him in.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Send him in,” said the doctor. I thought that’s what I said. What did it sound like? He couldn’t remember. He cleared his throat painfully. Newell came in.
“We-ell, Freddy-boy.” (Two easy paces; cocked head, half smile.) “A small world.” Without waiting to be asked, he sat down in the big chair at the end of the desk.
At first glance, he had not changed; and then the doctor realized that it was the—what word would do?—the symphonic quality of the man, the air of perfect blending—it was that which had not changed.
Newell’s diction had always suited the clothes he chose and his movements were as controlled as his speech. He still wore expensive clothes, but they were years old—yet so good they hardly showed it. The doctor was immediately aware that under the indestructible creases and folds was a lining almost certainly frayed through; that the elegant face was like a cheap edition printed from worn plates and the mind behind it an interdependence of flimsy parts so exactly matched that in the weak complex there was no weakest component. A machine in that condition might run indefinitely—idling.