“I know I haven’t explained very much to you,” Susan said. She was stirring the batter briskly as she talked. Her back was to me.
“Plenty of time,” I said.
“Dr. Hilliard has impressed upon me that I can’t keep talking about everything, that I need to set some boundaries on myself, do you understand that?”
“No,” I said. “But I don’t need to.”
She lifted the whisk from the batter and watched carefully as the batter dripped back into the bowl. Then she shook her head and began to whisk it some more.
“When you came to San Francisco last year, I began to draw away from Russell.”
She held up the whisk again and watched and made a small nod and waited while the batter drained off it into the bowl.
“I couldn’t leave him but I tried to distance the relationship as a start.”
I got up and came around the counter and got some more coffee.
“And Russell knew at once what I was doing and he… he hung on tighter. He put a wiretap on my phone. He had some people watch me. He wouldn’t let me come to New York last winter to watch Paul perform.”
“How’d he stop you,” I said.
Susan greased the inside of a loaf pan, using one of those spray cans. She shook her head as she sprayed it. Then she put the can down and the loaf pan and turned and leaned her hips against the counter with her hands resting palm down on it. Her lower lip was very full. Her eyes were very blue and large.
“He said no,” she said.
The connection between us was palpable. It seemed almost to seal away the rest of the world, as if we were talking inside one of those sterile rooms that immune deficient children grow up in.
“That simple,” she said. “I couldn’t do something he told me not to.”
“What if you had?”
“Gone away? Even though he’d said no?”
“Yes. Would he or his people have prevented you?”
I could see Susan’s top teeth, white against her tan, as she worried her lower lip. I drank some of my coffee.
“No,” she said.
She stirred her batter once and then poured it into her loaf pan, scraping the sides of the bowl to get it all.
“That’s when I went back to Dr. Hilliard,” she said.
“Back?”
“Yes. I started seeing her not long after I left Boston. But Russell didn’t like it. He doesn’t approve of psychotherapy. So I stopped.”
Susan held the loaf pan as she talked, as if she’d forgotten it.
“But when I couldn’t go to New York, and I realized I couldn’t leave him and I couldn’t move in with Russell, and I knew that I couldn’t give you up, I went back to her.”
She looked down at the loaf pan and stared at it for a moment, and then opened the oven and put the pan in and closed the door.
“And Russell?” I said.
“He was angry when he found out.”
“And?”
Susan shrugged. “Russell loves me. Whatever he may be elsewhere he has always been loving to me. I know you have other opinions of him, but…”
“Both our opinions are rooted in our experience,” I said. “Both of them are true, it’s just that we’ve had different experiences.”
She smiled at me again. “It can’t be pleasant for you to hear me tell you that he’s loving,” she said.
“I can hear what is,” I said. “All of what is. Whatever it is.”
Susan took a Cranshaw melon from the counter and began cutting it into crescents.
“Dr. Hilliard has shown me that what I feel for Russell, and what he feels for me, is not simply affection. When I met him he appealed to me most because he was so entirely in love with me. Anything I wanted, anything I said. He was like a child. He just loved me to death.”
“Sort of dangerous child,” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. “It was part of his appeal.”
“The kind of love you deserved?”
Susan nodded.
“You found a way to both leave me,” I said, “and punish yourself for leaving me.”
