She glanced at him, surprised yet not surprised after all. She appreciated the invitation all the more because of the reluctance with which it was given. It wasn’t easy for him, he’d be a lot happier if she refused, but the offer was genuine. In a lot of ways he was a very nice man. A nice man with a sweet bitch for a wife who owned his baffled loyalty. He’d stopped loving her years ago but to this day wouldn’t admit to himself that he didn’t even like her. Julia didn’t know the woman but some years back when she’d met Jim over the tangled lives of several of his charity patients, she’d heard more than she wanted about her. He was going through a phase where he was unable to stop talking about her whenever he could find a receptive ear. Her name was Elaine. She was a slim dark woman with a natural elegance and much charm when she chose to exercise it. He never spoke of intimate things, that was a matter of taste for him, bad taste to take such things outside the home, but she gathered there was a wall between him and his wife he couldn’t penetrate. Because he was wholly uninterested in anything beyond the diseases and disabilities in the bodies he examined, yet had a sensitivity to nuance he couldn’t quite suppress, Elaine had him in a ferment of misery and guilt which she seemed to take a certain satisfaction in creating. Julia had sufficient good sense not to tell him what his wife was doing to him, sufficient perception to see that being shut off from nine-tenths of his life had driven her to this, and not enough sense to avoid comforting him as much as she could. While they worked out the tangles of the cases, they worked themselves into a brief affair. He clung to Julia with an urgency that troubled her; she wasn’t in love with him, or so she thought, but she liked him very well indeed. And she was grateful for the need that brought him to her. The casework was getting to her more and more, eroding the hope and humanity out of her, sucking her dry of all feeling but a generalized impatience with the self-defeated souls she was trying to help. Even the ones with the capacity to break out of the morass had so many defeats ahead of them, so many leeches battening on them, that after a while they ran out of energy, they simply had no strength left to climb over the next barrier that folly, greed and prejudice raised before them. In those last days before she quit, it was a kind of race to see if she could manage to leave before she was fired. She began working as her clients’ advocate rather than as an impersonal conduit for services; she bent the rules more and more savagely as they (the anonymous gray they in offices she never visited, never wanted to visit) threw the worst cases at her, then reprimands for sidestepping regulations. She tended the chinks in the system and did her best to help her people through them; she brought her work home with her. She couldn’t write. She began to feel brittle, dry, as if the least blow would shatter her to powder. She lost her laughter and the thing she’d never thought to lose, her rush of delight in the sudden beauty of small things. Somehow, by loving her and needing her, Jim breathed life back into her. Only a handful of meetings, yet they triggered in her a healing flow that she couldn’t tell him about because he would never understand the only words she could find to express what had happened to her. She did manage, by tact and indirection, to give him ways of dealing with his wife and earned his profound gratitude by easing the sex out of their relationship as soon as she realized how unhappy and uneasy he was about what they were doing; he had no idea how to stop without hurting her and he was unwilling to hurt her. Though the change was rather more painful for her than she’d expected, nonetheless she was happy enough with the affectionate committed friendship they’d shared afterward. She owed him something else too, a debt she hoped he’d never discover. He and his troubles with his wife had formed the basis of the one novel she’d come close to getting on the best seller list, the novel that had won a fairly prestigious award, that had brought her enough money to quit the job, enough recognition to make her next two novels sell almost as well and to get the first into paperback.
She reached over, touched his face with reminiscent tenderness, shook her head. “They wouldn’t let me out, Jim. They need their objects of scorn. Though I thank you for the offer.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Go somewhere. Fight them somehow. As long as I can.”
He ran a hand through fine, thinning hair. “Suicide, Julia. And it’s unnecessary.”
“By whose terms?” She shrugged, the tape around her ribs tugging at her. “These days there’s only one solution to the problems of poverty. Can’t make it? Too bad. Go curl up and die, preferably at the city dump so no time or money has to be wasted carting you away. I’d rather make them shoot me. At least that’s over fast. And no, I won’t kill myself. I don’t think I could, anyway that’s giving in to them. I’ll never give in to them.”
“You oughtn’t to be alone, Julia.” He looked at her, worried. “I don’t like the way you’re talking. “It’s not…”
“Not healthy? I know. The times are out of joint, my friend, and there’s nothing I can do to set them right. Did I tell you? No, I’m sure not. Publisher rejected my last book, wants his advance back. No, don’t worry about me, I won’t be alone. A boy from down the hall is there waiting for me. My little band of brothers visited him after they left me. Broke his friend’s neck. An excess of zeal, no doubt. Kicked him about too, but seems a corpse made them nervous so they were a trifle half-hearted in the beating. He can still move.” She got into the car as he held the door open for her, sat with her head against the rest, her eyes closed. When she felt the seat shift, heard the other door close, she said, “Don’t mind me, Jim. Gloom and doom’s all I have in me right now. I’ll be back to my usual bounce and glow given a night’s rest. I’m just tired. That’s all. Just tired.”
Suicide. She brooded on that during the struggle up the stairs. The lumps had started showing up on x-ray plates though she still couldn’t feel them. Bigger but operable. She did have a bit of hope again. If she could get across the border and up to Caledron, if she could manage to get some sort of papers, Jim had promised to ease her into a hospital there. Money. It was going to take a lot of money. If I have to rob a bank, she thought and grinned into the turgid light about the stairs. She leaned for a moment on the rail and rested, then started up again. It might take something like that. Been honest all my life, she thought. Proud of it. She sighed. I’m going to make a lousy criminal. Have to use my connections. She giggled, caught her breath as she clung to the rail. A drop of water plonked on her head, another hit her shoulder. Oh hell. She started on again. Scattered among the beaten-down, the frantic, the wistfully hopeful, the ignorant, greedy, despairing, lazy, energetic, damaged and ambitious mixture that made up her files were a few whose sons, husbands, boyfriends or girlfriends she’d met on home visits when they’d learned to trust her enough to show up-burglars, pimps, whores, conmen and women, a bankrobber or two and a charming forger who took an artist’s pride in his work. He’d be useful if he was still out of prison-or out again, as the case might be. And there was old Magic Man. He knew everything about everybody. If he hadn’t been rounded-up and shoved into a labor camp. Probably hadn’t, he looked too decrepit to do anything but breathe. He loved ripe apricots; she always took him some, even when she couldn’t afford it, she enjoyed so much watching him enjoy them. Sometimes he helped her with her books; more often than not she just went to hear his stories. He had a thousand stories of places he’d been, things he’d done and he never told them the same twice. He’d worked for her father a couple summers, helping with the haying, milking the cows, disappeared as quietly as he’d come until he’d showed up one day on her client list. He hadn’t forgotten her, recognized the girl in the woman without any prompting, talked to her a lot about her father after that, something she’d been needing for a long time. Thinking about him she forgot about her body and went round and round the stairs until she almost blundered past her floor. She stopped, put out her hand to the wall to steady herself, a little dizzy with her exertions and her sudden return to the unpleasant here and now. She pushed the bar in, grunting as the effort caught her in muscles that were getting stiffer and more painful as the hours passed. The door thumped to behind her as she started down the hall, the sound making her jump, reminding her just how nervous she really was. The hall was empty. The worn drugget was full of holes and so filthy she couldn’t see what color it was, couldn’t remember either. I stopped noticing things, she thought. When I stopped being a writer. She looked at her watch. Almost eight. Weariness descended on her. She stood, resting against the wall a moment, then made off toward her apartment.