The Widening Gyre
Page 14
"He should. Or he should find professional help. For both of them."
I nodded.
We were both quiet with our book and our magazine in abeyance.
"How are you?" Susan said. I knew she didn't mean my leg.
"I'm all right," I said.
"And how are you feeling about me?"
"Pretty good," I said.
"Better than you did?"
"Yes."
We were quiet again.
"The thing is," I said, "that to be what I am, I need to feel the way I do about you. No matter how you feel about me."
"I feel good about you," she said. "I do love you, you know."
"Yeah. But even if you didn't. The way I feel about you is my problem, not yours. And it's absolute. It can't be compromised. It could exist without you."
"Dead or alive," Susan said. In her face was that quality of serious amusement that so often invested her,
"Probably," I said.
"I wonder what you'd be like as an adult," Susan said.
"I'm post-pubescent," I said. "I can prove that,"
"Even with a bullet wound?"
"Sure," I said. "It's almost healed."
Susan dog-eared the page in her book and put it on the nightstand beside her.
"Show me," she said, and edged over beside me and closed her eyes.
Later, early Christmas morning, I was still awake, and Susan was asleep, on her back, with her mouth open slightly. I looked at her face. Her eyes moved slightly behind her eyelids. I watched her sleep; watched her while she dreamed in some remote incorporeal place away from me; watched her with the growing certainty that some of her would always be remote, away from me, unknowable, unobtainable, never mine. Watched her and thought these things and knew, as I could know nothing else so surely, that it didn't matter.
***
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