She took a deep breath. She picked up a pink sponge from the sink and wet it and wrung it out and wiped off the table and put the sponge back. She walked into the living room and looked out the window. Then she walked over to the couch and sat on it and put her feet on the coffee table. I turned in my chair at the table and looked at her.
“First, you understand. I love you,” she said.
I nodded. She took her feet off the coffee table and stood and walked to the window again. There was a pencil on the window ledge. She picked it up and carried it back to the sofa and sat again and put her feet back on the coffee table. She turned the pencil between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
“My relationship with Russ is a real relationship,” she said.
She turned the pencil between her hands.
“It didn’t start out that way. It started to be a gesture of freedom and maturity.”
She paused and looked at the pencil in her hands and tapped her left thumb with the pencil and sucked on her lower lip. I was quiet.
Susan nodded. “It’s hard,” she said. “The work with Dr. Hilliard.”
“I imagine,” I said. “I imagine it takes will and courage and intelligence.”
Susan nodded again. The pencil turned slowly in her hands.
“You have those things in great number,” I said.
Susan stood again and walked to the window. “Growing up…” She was looking out the win dow again as she spoke. “You don’t have any siblings, do you?”
“No.”
“I was the youngest,” she said.
She walked from the window to the kitchen and picked up the bowl of oranges and brought them into the living room and put them on the table. Then she sat on the sofa again.
“When you came back from California and asked more from me, needed me to help you recover from failure, needed the support of a whole person, there wasn’t enough of me for the job.”
I sat without moving in the imitation leather chair across from her.
She stood again and went to the kitchen and got a glass of water and drank a third of it and put the partly full glass on the counter. She came to the entry between the kitchen and the living room and leaned against the entry wall and folded her arms.
“You did help,” I said.
“No. I was the thing you used to help yourself. You projected your strength and love onto me and used it to feel better. In a sense I never knew if you loved me or merely loved the projection of yourself, an idealized…” She shrugged and shook her head.
“So you found someone who didn’t idealize you.”
She unfolded her arms and picked up the pencil again and began to turn it. Her throat moved as she swallowed. She put her feet up on the coffee table and crossed her ankles.
“You can’t have us both,” I said. “I’d be pleased to spend the rest of my life working on this relationship. That includes the damage your childhood did you, the damage I did you. But it doesn’t include Russell. He goes or I do.”
“You’ll leave me?” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said.
“If I don’t give up Russell?”
“Absolutely.”
“You could have killed him in Connecticut.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know as much as you know, about civilization and its discontents. But I know if you are going to be whole, you’ve got to resolve this with Russell, and if he dies before you do, you’ll be robbed of that chance.”
Susan leaned forward on the couch, her feet still on the coffee table, like someone doing a sit-up. She held the pencil still between her hands.
“You do love me,” she said.
“I do, I always have.”
She leaned back on the couch. She swallowed visibly again, and began to tap her chin with the eraser end of the pencil.
“I cannot imagine a life without you,” she said.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “If Russell’s in your life I won’t be.”
“I know,” she said. “I can’t give him up either.”
“I can’t force you to,” I said. “But I can force you to give me up. And I will.”
Susan shifted on the couch.
She said, “I’ll have to give him up.”
