“Amy needs a sample profile to submit with her proposal, in hopes of getting a contract and an advance,” Susan said. “I said you’d be perfect.”
“Amy’s looking for sexual splendor as well?” I said.
Amy smiled.
“Always,” she said. “Will you talk with me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay, I have a bunch of questions written down,” Amy said. “You can answer them, dismiss them, respond to a question I didn’t ask, anything you want, I’m interested in what you’re like. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Susan, feel free to jump in any time,” Amy said. “You know him better than anyone.”
“Don’t rat me out,” I said, “about the sexual splendor.”
“Our secret,” Susan said.
Amy took a notebook out of her book bag and opened it. She was a professor at Harvard and, faced with that limitation, not bad looking. If she had dressed better, done her hair better, improved on her makeup, and worn more stylish glasses, she might have been good-looking… but then the faculty senate would probably have required her to wear a scarlet A on her dress.
She studied her notebook for a moment. I looked at Susan. She smiled. Zing went the strings of my heart. Then Amy took out a small tape recorder and put it on the table.
“Okay?” she said.
“Sure.”
She turned the recorder on.
“Okay,” Amy said. “Just to warm up a little. Why are you such a wise guy?”
“It’s a gift,” I said.
Susan frowned at me.
“If you’re going to do this,” Susan said, “you have to do it.”
“You didn’t tell me I had to be serious,” I said.
“Well, you do.”
Amy waited. She had a lot of kinetic intensity about her, but she knew how to keep it in check. I nodded.
“I seem to have an unavoidable capacity for seeing a thing and seeing beyond it at the same time.”
“Would you say that you have a heightened sense of irony?” Amy asked.
“I probably wouldn’t say it, but it’s probably true.”
“It is also,” Susan said, “a distancing technique. It keeps people and events from getting too close.”
“Except you,” I said.
She smiled again.
“Except me.”
“Besides Susan, are there things that can get through that ironic barrier?” Amy said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Because?”
“Because if they did,” I said, “I couldn’t do what I do.”
“But if you refuse to care… ” Amy said.
“I don’t refuse to care,” I said. “I refuse to let it control me.”
“How do you do that?”
“It’s a matter of perspective.”
“Meaning?”
“There’s a line from Auden,” I said. “‘The torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.’”
“A poem,” Amy said.
“‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’”
“Life goes on,” she said.
“Something like that,” I said. “Though not for everyone.”
“And you find that consoling?”
“I find it instructive.”
“Perspective,” Amy said.
I nodded.
Amy wasn’t reading her questions now. She seemed interested.
“In such a world,” she said, “do you have any absolutes?”
I nodded at Susan.
“Her,” I said.
“Love,” Amy said.
I shook my head.
“Her,” I said.
Amy frowned. Then she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I see.”
One point for Harvard. The waitress came by, and I had another beer and Susan had another white wine. Amy had more iced tea.
“So why do you do it?” she asked.
“What I do?”
“Yes.”
“Because I can.”
“That simple?”
“I’m pretty simple,” I said.
Amy looked at Susan. Susan smiled.
“He is,” Susan said. “And he isn’t. That will show itself if you talk with him enough. But I warn you, he’s almost never one thing.”
Amy nodded and braced herself with another slug of iced tea.
“So you do what you do because you can,” Amy said. “You’re good at it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you like it?”
“Most of the time,” I said. “It allows me to live life on my own terms.”
“Aren’t there other jobs?” Amy said. “Ones that allow you to do that and don’t require you to carry a gun?”
“Not that many,” I said. “And almost none at which I’d be any good.”
“You say you want to live life on your own terms; what are they?”
“The terms?”
“Yes.”
I thought about it. As the afternoon moved along, more people were coming in for a drink. Maybe several. It was a relatively glamorous crowd for Cambridge. Few if any ankle-length skirts or sandals with socks. I looked at Susan.
“What are my terms?” I asked her.
“He’s being cute,” Susan said to Amy. “He understands himself very well, but he wants me to say it.”
“It’s pretty hard for me not to be cute,” I said.
Susan rolled her eyes slightly.
“He can learn, but he can’t be taught,” Susan said. “He can find his way, but he can’t take direction. He will do very difficult and dangerous things, but he cannot be ordered to do them. Voluntarily, he’s generous and compassionate and quite kind. But he cannot be compelled to it.”
“Autonomous,” Amy said.
“To a pathological extreme,” Susan said.
Amy checked her tape recorder. It appeared to be doing what it was supposed to.
“Can you get him to do things he doesn’t want to do?” Amy asked Susan.
“I’m doing this interview,” I said.
Neither of them paid me any attention.
“Up to a point,” Susan said.
“What is the point?” Amy said.
“I can’t change him,” Susan said. “I cannot make him cease to be who he is.”
“Would you want to?”
“I would prefer he didn’t risk his life,” Susan said. “In a sense he’s risking mine as well.”
“Because?” Amy said.
“I cannot imagine a life without him in it.”
“Do you try to change that?”
“No. It’s part of what he is,” Susan said. “He would not be him if he didn’t do what he does. And it’s the him he is that I cannot imagine life without.”
“Wow,” I said.
“The syntax is perhaps a little convoluted,” Susan said. “But so are you, Ducky.”
“You mean I’m not simple?” I said.
“You are and you aren’t,” Susan said.
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I want to talk more about your relationship,” Amy said. “Since it’s come up. But I’m not sure I have yet gotten a solid handle on why you do what you do, which would be sort of the heart of my book.”
“There are a lot of problems which need to be solved,” I said, “and their solution takes the kinds of skills I have. But because of my extreme pathology, I can’t solve those problems in a structured context: police work, military, Harvard College. So I do it this way.”
“And,” Susan said, “you do it because it allows you to state who and what you are.”
“So who and what is he?” Amy said.
Susan shook her head.
“It has something to do with honor,” she said.
They both looked at me. I looked at Susan.
“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,’” I said, “‘Lov’d I not honor more’?”
She smiled again.
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
“Which makes a nice segue,” Amy said, “back to your relationship. Why have you never married?”
Susan and I looked at each other.
“I don’t really like her that much,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” Amy said. “You’ve been together for years. You seem like the kind of people who would marry. Everyone says you are the two most connected people they’ve ever seen. Why not get married?”