heard his footsteps recede down the corridor. Sherry turned toward me and we looked at each other silently. She sat suddenly in my client chair and her body sagged and she put her face in her hands and cried. After a while I got up and went over and stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders a little and tried to think of something to say.
CHAPTER 36
I was at my apartment eating bean soup with Paul when Susan called. Her voice was small. 'Hello,' she said.
'Hello.'
'How are you?'
'Still here,' I said. 'How about yourself?'
'I'm as far from you as I can get,' she said.
'Not true,' I said. 'You could get a job in Hong Kong.'
'I don't mean it that way,' she said. 'I mean I can't give you up. I can't altogether leave you.'
'Can you come back?'
'No.'
'Getting any pressure from your guy friend?'
'Yes.'
'He wants to move in?'
'Yes.'
'You can't do that either.'
'No,' she said. I had never heard her voice so small, so wounded. For the first time since she left I felt her pain too.
'So you have two men in your life,' I said, 'and you can't give yourself completely to either one.'
'Six years ago,' she said, 'on a beach on Cape Cod you asked me to marry you, and I said no. I said that you wouldn't fit in my world or me in yours and we were better as we were.'
'I remember.'
'That wasn't it,' she said. 'It was simply that I couldn't.'
'And you still can't.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I thought maybe it was just you, your intensity, your force. It has always scared me even when it attracted me.'
'And . . .'
'But it's me too. I couldn't live with my husband. I can't live with my friend either.'
'Even though you love him.'
The line was quiet. 'I love you too.'
'When I came back from L.A.,' I said, 'I had just failed more completely than I ever have. I betrayed you by making love to Candy Sloan. . . .'
'You had the right,' Susan said. 'That wasn't betrayal.'
'Yeah, I told Candy that, too, but it was. I disapproved of me for it. And then I let them kill her.'
'She got herself killed,' Susan said.
'And I started getting scared that I wasn't everything. And I started needing you to make me complete, and that was when things started going to hell.'
'I can't complete you,' Susan said. 'More important, you can't complete me. I have to do that myself.'
'I know.'
'Everything you've achieved you've achieved through strength, through force, through will. This you can't force. This you have to permit.'
'It's your line of work,' I said.
'Yes,' Susan said. 'Physician heal thyself, huh?'
I nodded.
Susan said, 'Are you still there?'
'Yes.'
'It will take a while,' Susan said, 'but we will resolve this.'
'Yes.'
Susan said, 'I don't know how it will resolve, but I know this. I know in my bones that I love you, and that I cannot conceive of a life without you.'
'Me too,' I said.
