“Here I am,” he said in a seal-like bark far louder than he had intended.
She sat opposite him. “Rum Collins,” she said, and only then did he remember that it had always been the drink they shared, when they had shared things. He demanded of himself, Now why did I have to do that? and answered, You know perfectly well why.
“Is he really all right?” she asked him.
“Yes, Osa. So far.”
“I’m sorry.” She turned her glass around, but did not lift it. “I mean maybe you don’t want to talk about Dick.”
“You’re very thoughtful,” he said, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to see her just for himself. “But you’re wrong. I did want you to talk about him.”
“Well... if you like, Fred. What, especially?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. Isn’t that silly?”
He sipped his drink. He was aware that she did the same. They never used to say “cheers” or “skoal” or anything else, but they always took that first sip together.
He said, “I need something that segmentation or hypnosis or narcosynthesis just won’t give me. I need to flesh out a skeleton. No, it’s more refined than that. I need tints for a charcoal portrait.” He lifted his hands and put them down again. “I don’t know what I need. I’ll tell you when I get it.”
“Well, of course I’ll help if I can,” she said uncertainly.
“All right. Just talk, then. Try to forget who I am.”
He met her eyes and the question there, and elaborated, “Forget I’m his therapist, Osa. I’m an interested stranger who has never seen him, and you’re telling me about him.”
“Engineering degree, and where he comes from, and how many sisters?”
“No,” he said, “but keep that up. You’re bound to stumble across what I want that way.”
“Well, he’s . . . he’s been sick. I think I’d tell a stranger that.”
“Good! What do you mean, sick?”
She glanced quickly at him and he could follow the thought behind it: Why don’t you tell me how sick he is? And then: But you really want to play this game of the interested stranger. All right.
She stopped looking at him and said, “Sick. He can’t be steered by anything but his own—pressures, and they-—they aren’t the pressures he should have. Not for this world.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“He just doesn’t seem to care. No,” she denied forcefully, “I don’t mean that, not at all. It’s more like—I think he would care if he—if he was allowed to, and he isn’t allowed to.” She got his eyes again. “This is very hard to do, Fred.”
“I know and I’m sorry. But do go on; you’re doing fine. What do you mean, he isn’t allowed to care about the world and the way it wags? Who won’t allow him?”
“It isn’t a who; it’s a—I don’t know. You’d have a term for it. I’d call it a monster on his back, something that drives him to do things, be something he really isn’t.”
“We strangers don’t have any terms for anything,” he reminded her gently.
“That’s a little refreshing,” she said with a wan half-smile. “I like...mystified ... people. They make me feel like one of the crowd. You know who’s lucky?” she asked, her voice suddenly wild and strained and, by its tone, changing the subject. “Psychotics are lucky. The nuts, the real buggy ones. (I talk like this to layman strangers.) The ones who see butterflies all the time, the ones who think the President is after them.”
“Lucky!” he exploded.
“Yes, lucky. They have a name for the beast that’s chewing on them. Sometimes they can see it themselves.”
“I don’t quite—”
“I mean this,” she said excitedly. “If I see grizzly bears under every lamp post, I’m seeing something. It has a name, a shape; I could draw a picture of it. If I do something irrational, the way some psychos do—run a nonexistent railroad or shoot invisible pheasants with an invisible gun, I’m doing something. I can describe it and say how it feels and write letters about it. See, these are all things plaguing the insane. Labels, handles. Things that you can hold up to reality to demonstrate that they don’t coincide with it.”
“And that’s lucky?”
She nodded miserably. “A mere neurotic—Dick, for example—hasn’t a thing he can name. He acts in ways we call irrational, and has a sense of values nobody can understand, and does things in a way that seems consistent to him but not to anyone else. It’s as if there were a grizzly bear, after all, but we’d never heard of grizzly bears—what they are, what they want, how they act. He’s driven by some monster without a name, something that no one can see and that even he is not aware of. That’s what I mean.”
“Ah.”
They sat for minutes, silent and careful.
Then, “Osa—”
“Yes, Fred.”
“Why do you love him?”
She looked at him. “You really meant it when you said this would be a painful conversation.”
“Never mind that. Just tell me.”
“I don’t think it’s a thing you can tell.”
“Then try this: What is it you love in him?”
She made a helpless gesture. “Him.”
He sat without responding until he knew she felt his dissatisfaction with the answer.
She frowned and then closed her eyes. “I couldn’t make you understand, Fred. To understand, you’d have to be two things: a woman, and—Osa.” Still he sat silent. Twice she looked up to his face and away, and at last yielded.
She said in a low voice, “It’s a ... tenderness you wouldn’t believe, no matter how well you know him. It’s a gentle, loving something that no one ever born ever had before and never will again. It’s ... I hate this, Fred!”
“Go on, for heaven’s sake! This is exactly what I’m looking for.”
“It is? Well, then ... But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn’t seem right.”
“Go on!”
She said, almost in a whisper, “Life is plain hell sometimes. He’s gone and I don’t know where, and he comes back and it’s just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place—he doesn’t see me, doesn’t answer. Or maybe he’ll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don’t know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or . . . anything, and he won’t leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he—”
She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. “Don’t stop,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Please. It’s impor—”
“I would, Fred,” she burst out frantically. “I’m not refusing to. I can’t, that’s all. The words won’t—”
“Don’t try to tell me what it is, then,” he suggested. “Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that.”
“I suppose so,” she said, after considering it.
Osa took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again.
“It will be hell,” she said, “and then I’ll look at him and he...and he...well, it’s there, that’s all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It’s ... it’s something to love, yes, it’s that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it’s a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there’s nothing else but the— whatever it is.”