“Did you notice?” he asked. “I’ve lost six pounds.”
She hadn’t.
He drove to an Italian restaurant housed in a thrusting edifice of steel and reflective glass.
“I’m not dressed for this,” she said.
“Oh, come on. It’s Seattle, and anyway you look great.”
They ordered tasty, oily little pieces of food on large plates. Margot had wine in a deep glass. As she drank, her thoughts leapt this way and that in reaction to this curious sound, to that burst of light.
Patrick talked about depression, about how people were ashamed of it, how some people didn’t even know they had it because they thought it was a mental illness, which it wasn’t. “That’s a very unusual position for a pyschopharm to take, I know. But the kind of common, low-level depression that almost everyone seems to—”
“If it isn’t a mental illness,” said Margot, “why do you treat it with medicine?”
“It’s not medicine, in the usual sense. It’s a consciousness-altering drug, and it’s an appropriate modality considering the nature of what’s happening—I mean, the rate of flux! Everything’s in turn-around all around us, all the time! We aren’t organically equipped to deal. We just aren’t. I take it sometimes. Just every now and then.” He ate a morsel of eggplant. “I was going to suggest that you try a very light dosage of, say, Zoloft. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just that you seem a little . . . I mean, with Roberta and the stressful job, you know.”
He talked about people whose lives had been changed by medication, and his voice was compassionate, as if he were putting a blanket over them. His compassion tickled like a blade of grass drawn slyly across her wrist and woke her memory of the solicitous condescension she had once resisted. He talked as if other people’s pain was one great, sore intimacy that he had seen and comprehended—and yet, Margot was suddenly irritated to think, it seemed he had never really looked at it. She had a cold swallow of ice water. It gave the tannic wine taste an arresting ache.
After Dolores returned from the hospital, she and Margot had gone on a long walk together. It had been a lovely, tender day. Dolores smoked cigarette after cigarette. She walked very slowly, as if she were pushing against something that didn’t want to let her through. “Just a minute,” she said. She paused before somebody’s newly planted vegetable garden and dug around in her purse for another cigarette. The fresh-turned dirt of the garden was dressed in a pretty grid of Popsicle sticks and string.
“My dad came to visit in the hospital,” she said. “It was the first time I’d seen him for two years.”
“Yeah?”
Dolores found a cigarette and lit it. “He sat on my bed and asked me how I was. I said, ‘Daddy, I want you to kill me.’” She flicked the match onto the garden, and they continued walking.
“What did he say?” asked Margot.
“Nothing. He just sat there and licked his lips like a nervous dog.”
Margot wanted to ask Patrick if Dolores had ever told him about this. Instead, she talked about Roberta and the elaborate meditation exercises she had done when she was depressed. Patrick nodded vigorously. “That can work,” he said. His agreement made her irritated again. But the irritation immediately cooled and went sticky. How had her light, heartless, lovely bête noire become this silly man? The raw, breathing spirit of his youthful conceit had gone stiff and perfunctory; whether from neglect or the wear of age, she couldn’t tell. His light voice made her sleepy. The play of movement in the restaurant was a slow, tired fugue of decor and manners. She wanted to go home.
As they walked to his car, a beggar looked at them with wistful half-resentment, as if the sight of them confirmed for him that at least some people were getting what they wanted: dates, restaurants, conversation in low tones.
“A coincidence,” said Patrick. “The same week I saw you I ran into my best girlfriend, Tamara, who I haven’t seen for months.”
“Your best girlfriend? I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned her before now. I mean, you’ve talked so much about Tricia and the other one.”
“Well, Tamara didn’t affect me on an emotional level the way Rhoda and Tricia do. But she was my best girlfriend pound for pound, okay? She was beautiful by anyone’s standard, she was wealthy, and she had a cool job. She wired me flowers from France on Valentine’s Day, you know?”
Her sarcastic thoughts were very loud, but he didn’t hear them.
“Tricia used to stalk me when I went on dates with Tamara,” he said. “She’d sit outside restaurants in her car and watch us through the window. Isn’t that sick?”
“Of whom?”
Their footsteps counterpointed his wiry little silence. He opened the car door for her, and she sat in the stilling plushness. He got in on the other side and sealed them in with a slam. “Her,” he said. “Who else?”
They drove in silence for some moments. She felt something hard in him, something little and gristly. Something that had heard her sarcastic thoughts and strove against them. But then she felt something else, which was generous, flexible, and full of movement. She felt it as surely as if he’d touched her. She’d irritated him, but still he wanted to like her, and that made her want to like him, in spite of everything. When he asked if she wanted to see his CD-ROM, she said that she would.
His apartment was an expensive oblong with a vast, sad view of the city. A large old movie projector stood in one corner. An antique couch, its mauve cushions worn soft and forbearing, was a luxuriant ribbon in the stark room. They sat on it and had cognac in fancy glasses. She noticed a necklace made of huge red beads hanging from a doorknob behind the couch.
“Oh,” he said, “that’s from a long time ago.” With a supple twist, he arched his back and reached for the beads with a long finger. An enshadowed vein showed on his extended neck. He dropped the beads in her lap. She handled them; the startling chunks of red were humorous and stately.
He sipped from his drink with a dainty beaklike gesture. “A minor director who liked me gave it to me,” he said. “It seemed like a welcoming present from the world. We were out drinking one night, and she said a person who could wear this necklace could walk into any room and feel like he belonged there.”
Margot thought of Patrick looking at the director with the same bare, needy eyes she had seen. She thought of the director wanting to console this look, to welcome it. “What a lovely thing to say,” she said.
He frowned. “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I guess her career didn’t go anywhere, either.” There was a beat of silence like a held breath. He turned abruptly and looked at her. She was startled by the intense look on his face. “Do you think I could wear those beads now?” he said hopefully. “Or would I look silly?”
She pictured him entering a room, wearing the red necklace over a cowl-necked shirt, regally flaunting his middle age. “I think you could wear them,” she said. “You’d have to wear the right top. But you could do it. It could look very cool.”
“Yeah?” He looked doubtful. Then he brightened. “Let’s look at that CD-ROM.” He stood and regarded her with a faint seignorial expression so absurd it was endearing. “We have to go in the bed-room, if that’s okay.”
He kept his computer beside his bed. “I don’t sleep well,” he explained. “Sometimes, if I wake up, I like to just put on my robe and get some work done without leaving the bed.” They sat awkwardly sideways on the bed, so they could look at the small screen. Patrick crossed his legs and slouched, pecking at the keys with an expectant air as if he were still delighted by the complicated little machine.