CHAPTER 36


I was at my apartment eating bean soup with Paul when Susan called. Her voice was small. "Hello," she said.

"Hello."

"How are you?"

"Still here," I said. "How about yourself?"

"I'm as far from you as I can get," she said.

"Not true," I said. "You could get a job in Hong Kong."

"I don't mean it that way," she said. "I mean I can't give you up. I can't altogether leave you."

"Can you come back?"

"No."

"Getting any pressure from your guy friend?"

"Yes."

"He wants to move in?"

"Yes."

"You can't do that either."

"No," she said. I had never heard her voice so small, so wounded. For the first time since she left I felt her pain too.

"So you have two men in your life," I said, "and you can't give yourself completely to either one."

"Six years ago," she said, "on a beach on Cape Cod you asked me to marry you, and I said no. I said that you wouldn't fit in my world or me in yours and we were better as we were."

"I remember."

"That wasn't it," she said. "It was simply that I couldn't."

"And you still can't."

"Yes," she said. "I thought maybe it was just you, your intensity, your force. It has always scared me even when it attracted me."

"And . . ."

"But it's me too. I couldn't live with my husband. I can't live with my friend either."

"Even though you love him."

The line was quiet. "I love you too."

"When I came back from L.A.," I said, "I had just failed more completely than I ever have. I betrayed you by making love to Candy Sloan. . . ."

"You had the right," Susan said. "That wasn't betrayal."

"Yeah, I told Candy that, too, but it was. I disapproved of me for it. And then I let them kill her."

"She got herself killed," Susan said.

"And I started getting scared that I wasn't everything. And I started needing you to make me complete, and that was when things started going to hell."

"I can't complete you," Susan said. "More important, you can't complete me. I have to do that myself."

"I know."

"Everything you've achieved you've achieved through strength, through force, through will. This you can't force. This you have to permit."

"It's your line of work," I said.

"Yes," Susan said. "Physician heal thyself, huh?"

I nodded.

Susan said, "Are you still there?"

"Yes."

"It will take a while," Susan said, "but we will resolve this."

"Yes."

Susan said, "I don't know how it will resolve, but I know this. I know in my bones that I love you, and that I cannot conceive of a life without you."

"Me too," I said.

"I will call you again soon," Susan said. Her voice was barely there.

"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

I hung up.

Paul came into the living room and said, "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not all right," I said. "But I won't die."

Paul's face was hard. "You've got to get off of this," he said. "If not for yourself, for me. You're losing Susan, I'm losing Susan and you."

"Goddamn it," I said, "you get as much as I have left. This is all there is of me now, there isn't any more. You won't lose me, but this is all you can fucking well have of me right now."

Paul's face was hurt and angry. "It's not selfishness," he said, "you've got to get off of Susan. There is a life ahead for you. Even if you don't lose her, you've got to get off of her. You are, for crissake, obsessive."

I felt my anger flare. And I looked at Paul's determined face and saw that there were tears in his eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm doing what I can. There will be more of me in a while. This thing will resolve."

Paul nodded.

"Now I have to go to work," I said.

"Don't be careless," Paul said.

"I won't be," I said. "I want to be around to see how this turns out."

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