Valediction

CHAPTER 3

When Paul Giacomin arrived I was still sitting at the counter. The champagne bottle was full of flat champagne and the two glasses, half drunk, were beside it. I was drinking coffee. Outside, the rain fell with undeviating purpose.

Paul put his suitcase down and came over. "How are you," he said.

I shook my head. "Susan gone?" he said.

I nodded. "Last night," I said.

He started the burner under the hot water. "You sleep?" he said.

"No."

"You understand this?" Paul said. The water heated quickly because I had just used some. He poured the boiling water into a cup and added a spoonful of coffee, and stirred. He always made coffee that way.

"Yes," I said. I stood and went and looked out the window in the living room. It was raining out there too.

"I'm willing to listen if you want to talk about it," Paul said. "Or I'm willing to shut up if you want to do that."

"Talking may be overrated," I said.

"Maybe," Paul said. "But you'll think about it. Whether or not you talk is just whether or not you share what you're thinking."

"Smartass college kid," I said.

The morning was a dark background on Marlborough Street, people going to work carried colorful striped umbrellas, students going to summer school wore blue and green and yellow slickers, the flowers in the small yards glistened in the rain and the street itself gleamed wetly. The traffic was mostly cabs and the cabs were mostly yellow.

"When she went to Washington," I said, "and did her predoctoral internship she got a taste of being a full person, nobody's wife, nobody's girlfriend, nobody's employee, but a full professional person whose worth was in her knowledge and her insight and her compassion."

Paul sipped his coffee. I leaned my head against the window and watched the street glisten.

"She couldn't be that with you?" Paul said.

"I think she's trying to find out what she can be," I said. "I have . . . I have a view of the world that is pretty fully formed . . . and I cling to that view pretty hard. It doesn't leave Susan too much room. Or you."

"I don't think Susan disagrees with too much of what you hold to be self-evident," Paul said.

I shrugged.

"On the other hand, perhaps she'd like to arrive at those truths herself."

"Yes," I said. "Or maybe think her own thoughts and not have to compare them with mine."

Paul came and stood beside me and looked down at Marlborough Street with me.

"You wondering if maybe you've been a little too rigid?" Paul said.

"I'm considering the possibility that there are ways to be a good person that I hadn't thought of," I said.

"Might help loosen things up for you," Paul said. "It must always have been hard being you."

"Not as hard as this," I said.

"I know."

The wind had strengthened coming off the river and the flower petals began to litter the sidewalk, limp and wet.

"I won't quit on this," I said.

"Pressing her will make it worse," Paul said.

"I know."

"So what will you do?"

"For now I'll wait."

"Then what?"

"I don't know."

Paul nodded. "Hard," he said. "Hard as hell not to know."

We were quiet. There wasn't anything to say. Below me some of the wet flower petals on the sidewalk washed into the gutter. And the rain kept coming.