“Oh, Arlen! God, you poor thing. What did you do?”
“Wept. Stared at the wall and felt my whole history slipping away from me. Then I made myself read more, hoping for some light, for a change in her feelings, but it was all, all the same. No let-up, no change. I read the whole book in an hour and a half. Those years. All those years I thought we were so close, but page after page in that sweet handwriting I remembered so well… They said the same thing: she hated her life. She thought my father and I were selfish boors and she’d have given anything to escape us. The only time she ever had any peace was when I went away to school.
“And then she died. It was horrible.”
“Did you tell Leland?”
“Yes. He was superb. Told me to put it all into perspective. Talked about how proud she would have been if she could have known me now. How happy she would’ve been to know she’d been so wrong about her daughter. Lovely things, but they did no good. And the fact it happened so soon after Minnie died…” I closed my eyes tightly. “How can these things hurt us after so many years and changes?”
“Because memory keeps them fresh. That’s the trouble with memories—they’ve got a half-life of a thousand years, whether we like it or not.”
“You’re right. But can you see how the whole thing was collapsing? Leland’s sickness, my mother’s diary, the dog. Where was the other side, damn it? The things that might have balanced these horrors? It should have been the love for Leland, but he was a time bomb, a time bomb on the other side of a piece of thick glass. It felt as if everything I knew and loved was either gone or exploding. It was a fucking nightmare.
“What it ended up doing was making me love him more. I thought, Okay, maybe there’s only so much time left for us together, but he’s all I have and the best I’ve ever had. He grew in me till I almost couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“How did he take that?”
“Beautifully. I kept thinking, How can he stand me now? How can he want to hang around someone who’s all pain and has nothing to give?
“But he did, and there came a point when I knew that if he died, I’d kill myself. There was no other way.” I said this calmly because the real truth, however painful, is always calm. “The last blow, the knockout punch, came in a telephone call. You know my friend Rose Cazalet. Next to Leland, she’s my only other real friend. We’ve known each other more than twenty years. Her husband was my agent; I’m godmother to their child. We’re like sisters. Years ago she was raped and badly beaten by a guy she was going out with. It actually happened twice, but the second time she saved herself by knocking the guy’s eye out with the heel of a shoe.”
Wyatt’s hands flew up to cover his face.
“And thank God she did, because she was sure he would’ve killed her otherwise. The guy went to prison, but you can imagine how long it took for her to recover.
“In the same week as the dog and the diary, her husband called me. He said that guy had gotten out of prison, found out where Rose was living, and come for her—”
“Stop! That’s enough! Come on! One week? It’s not possible.”
“The world’s full of people suffering every day of their lives.” I said it so angrily that I shocked myself. Wyatt looked at me and we were both silent.
He sighed and shook his head, then rubbed his hands briskly up and down his legs as if he had suddenly gotten cold. “I know, you’re right. What happened to her?”
“He cracked her skull and broke her arm. She was unconscious, and he must have thought he killed her, because he ran away.”
“Was she—Will she recover?”
“She’s in the hospital in stable condition. She has trouble remembering things. The doctors think it will take some time before she’s all right again.”
“What happened to the guy?”
“He’s still on the loose. Roland called me right after it happened, and I was ready to fly over, but he said I shouldn’t for the time being. It might excite her and that would be bad. I’ve been calling every day, and he says she’s a little better.
“I was so shook up. One week. Everything together in one week. The only thing that kept me sane was Leland. I was terrified, truly terrified, down deep in my bones. What next? What could happen next? And you know what? You start creating things in your head that scare you just as much. Maybe this’ll happen now, or this. You get sick worrying about what little you have left. I didn’t want him to go anywhere without me. I was sure something would happen to him.
“The night before you called I asked him to make love with me. I didn’t care about anything else anymore. Nothing. I just wanted him. He was safety, the only good left. Even before I met him everything was slipping away, only more quietly, like a pulse going out of a body. Now everything in the body was dead except for this one shining light that kept me alive. And that’s all I wanted; that light inside me for a little while so that I could be sure there was goodness in life. What else was left? What else did I have to hold on to, to know being alive wasn’t just… shit?” I sighed and pulled a pillow into my lap. “We talked for hours about it. At first he wouldn’t even listen when I tried to bring it up, but I insisted. He had to listen, had to do it. If he cared for me at all he had to touch me. It was the first time we’d ever fought about anything, but I didn’t care. We both cried, stomped out of the room, came back. At one point he even said yes, but a moment later he slapped his head and said it was crazy.
“It was madness, it was murder, and not in any way necessary, because he’d promised he would stay with me. I said that wasn’t enough. Finally there was nothing left in either of us and we went to sleep.”
“Together?”
“No. He said he had to think and even being in the same bed with me would confuse things. I was too empty to argue. In fact, I was so tired I just put this pillow under my head and stretched out here. He slept on the floor next to me. The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing and it was you, calling in the morning.”
“Great time to call, huh?”
“Yes, it was. I was glad you did, very glad to hear your voice. Hearing it reminded me that there were other good things out there in the world—Wyatt Leonard and The Finky Linky Show, kids, life. No, I was very glad to hear from you. And I was happy when you asked us to dinner. As soon as you did, I knew that was the best thing for us; I’d take a bath, put on some makeup, and we’d go out to dinner with you.”
“What did Leland say?”
“Oh, he seemed very glad. And when we saw you in the restaurant, all my spirits lifted. I had a nice time.” It sounded so poor, a “nice” time. “So we had a nice dinner with you and I felt much better. I didn’t say anything to Leland about sleeping with him, but it was in the air as soon as the two of us left you.
“When we got to the front door of the house, he put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘All right.’ Just that. I closed my eyes and said, ‘Thank God. Thank God.’
“I went straight into the bedroom to get ready. I had a special nightgown I wanted to wear for him. Halfway across the room I looked at the bed and saw it was completely made up with new red-and-yellow sheets I’d never seen before. They had a pattern on them. Roses. Exactly like the ones he’d given me. Obviously he had made up his mind earlier and gone to the store to buy them without my knowing.
“On my pillow, that spanking new, fresh pillowcase, was a big envelope. I recognized it as one of his. The kind he used for his photographs. I was so touched by the sheets and excited about what was about to happen that I wanted to push the envelope away and get going. But I knew that far some reason he wanted me to see what was there before we began, so I sat down and took it onto my lap. He came into the room then and I thanked him for the sheets. I thanked him for being my friend and for whatever was in the envelope.