Widow’s Walk

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I sat with Susan and Pearl on the front steps of her big Victorian house in Cambridge, where she had her office on the first floor and her home on the second. I drank some beer. Susan had a martini I’d made for her, which she would sip for maybe two hours and leave half finished. Pearl was abstaining. People went by and smiled at us. Occasionally someone would walk a dog past, and Pearl would give a disinterested bark. Otherwise we were quiet.

“I should be wearing a sleeveless undershirt,” I said.

“The notorious wife-beater undershirt,” Susan said.

“Like Brando,” I said. “In Streetcar.”

“Wasn’t he a wonderful actor?” Susan said.

“No,” I said. “I always thought he seemed mannered and self-aware.”

“Really?”

“Can’t help it,” I said.

“But he was so beautiful.”

“Didn’t do much for me,” I said.

A woman with shoulder-length gray hair walked by in hiking boots and short shorts. Her companion was tall and bald with a combover.

“How you feeling?” I said to Susan.

“Like I failed.”

“The kid who killed himself?”

“Yes. I’m supposed to prevent those things.”

“Didn’t someone say something about the tyrannical ”supposed to’s“?”

“Karen Horney,” Susan said. “The tyrannical shoulds.”

A guy walked past wearing a seersucker suit and one of those long-billed boating caps. He had a tan mongrel on a leash. The mongrel was wearing a red kerchief.

“Stylish,” I said.

Susan nodded. Pearl lay between us on the top step with her head on her paws. The mongrel spotted Pearl and barked at her. Pearl’s hearing wasn’t much anymore. She glanced at the source of what must have been a dim sound, and growled a little without raising her head. Susan patted her absently.

“My office was the only place he was safe,” Susan said. “His parents were appalled that he was gay. His schoolmates were cruel. He had no friends.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He could only be who he was in my office.”

I nodded.

“I couldn’t help him to change who he was. I couldn’t help him to accept who he was. All I could accomplish, finally, for a few hours a week, was to provide a temporary refuge.”

“Not enough,” I said.

“No.”

My beer was gone. I got up and went to the kitchen and got a jar of olives and another beer. I was trying Heineken again. A blast from the past. Susan was having another micro sip of her martini when I came back and sat down beside her. It was still warm, in the evening. The air had begun to turn faintly blue as the darkness came toward us. There was no wind. I plunked a fresh olive into Susan’s martini. She smiled at me.

“If they have something somewhere,” Susan said. “If they are loved at home. If they have a circle of friends. But if it’s no good at home and it’s no good at school… Goddamn it.”

“No place to hide,” I said.

“No place.”

“Any theories why people are such jerks about it?” I said.

Susan shrugged.

“Nature of the beast,” she said.

“There is a high jerk count among the general populace,” I said. “Present company, of course, excluded.”

Four girls from Radcliffe went past us in various stages of undress. They all talked in that fast, slightly nasal way that well-bred young women talked around here.

“Living in a college town is not a bad thing,” I said.

Susan watched silently as the girls passed. She sipped her martini. I could hear her breathing.

“We are both in a business,” I said, “where we lose people.”

“I know.”

“A wise therapist once told me that you can’t really protect anyone, that sooner or later they have to protect themselves.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“After you lost Candy Sloan?”

“Yes.”

“I am wise.”

“Good-looking, too,” I said.

“But god-damn it…” she said.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t feel bad when you lose one.”

Susan nodded.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Feel bad.”

Susan nodded again.

“I’ve been fighting it,” she said.

“And losing,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Give in to it. Feel as bad as you have to feel. Then get over it.”

Susan stared at me for a while. Then she put her head against my shoulder. We sat for a time watching the street traffic. I listened to her breathing.

“That what you do?”

“Yes.”

“Even after Candy Sloan?”

“Yes.”

She fished another olive from the jar and put it in her martini. She had already drunk nearly a fifth of it.

“And,” I said, “there’s always you and me.”

“I know.”

A squirrel ran along Susan’s front fence and up a fat oak tree and disappeared into the thick foliage. Pearl followed it with her eyes but didn’t raise her head.

“You’re a good therapist,” Susan said after a while.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “Maybe we should open a joint practice.”

With her head still against my shoulder Susan patted my thigh.

“Maybe not,” Susan said.