The Widening Gyre

Chapter 33

It was Christmas Eve. Susan lay beside me in her bed at her house in Smithfield. Paul was in the living room with Paige watching Singin' in the Rain on the late late movie.

"Won't Paige's mother and father be mad that she's not home for Christmas?" Susan said.

"They'll drive down tomorrow for Christmas di

"Gee," Susan said. "An empty nest."

"I'll think of something to pass the empty hours," I said.

"Will I like it?"

"Ecstasy," I said.

"Gee, is Bloomingdale's open on Christmas?" Susan said.

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh." Susan was reading a book called The Road Less Traveled. She had closed it on her index finger to hold the place. I was reading a review of the Gail Conrad Dance Company by Arlene Croce in The New Yorker. I was trying to learn about dance. I returned to it. The room was quiet.

I glanced at Susan. She still held her book on her lap, leaning back against the sit-up pillow, looking at me.

"A good Christmas for the Alexanders," she said.

"Maybe," I said.

"And she never knew?"

"Nope. She doesn't know anything about what he knows."

"That's insane," Susan said. "He's got to deal with her. He can't just go on waiting for her to do it again. Wondering what she's doing when she's not with him. That's crazy; he can't do it."

"Yes he can," I said.

"For the rest of his life?"

"Until she does something that makes the papers." I put my magazine down and turned a little on my side toward Susan.

"And then what?" she said.

"Then he drops out of public life, if he hasn't already. And tries to put it back together."

"He doesn't leave her?"

I shook my head.

"How can you be so sure?"

"He won't," I said.

"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.