“I wouldn’t be happy to see you go either time,” he said as if he hadn’t heard. He had taken the cigarette case he carried — it was too old and scratched and beaten to seem like an affectation — from his inside jacket pocket and was selecting a Kent from among what appeared to be several plump joints. “But I could let you go in June if we look like we’re getting on our feet. If Enders swings the axe, I’d like you to stay on until the end of the year and help me wind things up in orderly fashion.” He looked at me with something in his eyes that was very close to naked pleading. “Except for me, you’re the only sane person at Zenith House. Oh, I guess none of them are as crazy as General Hecksler — although sometimes I wonder about Riddley — but it’s only a matter of degree. I’m asking you not to leave me alone in this purgatory, and that’s what Zenith House is this year.”
“Roger, if I could — if I—“
“Have you made plans, then?”
“No…not exactly…but—“
“Not planning to go out and confront her, in spite of what this letter says?” He tapped it with a fingernail and then lighted his cigarette.
“No.” The idea had certainly crossed my mind, but I didn’t need Ruth to tell me it was a bad idea. In a movie the girl might suddenly realize her mistake when she saw the hero of her life standing before her, one hastily packed bag in his hand, shoulders drooping and his face tired from the transcontinental flight on the redeye, but in real life I would only turn her against me completely and forever or provoke some sort of extreme guilt reaction. And I might very well provoke an extreme pugilistic reaction in Mr. Toby Anderson, whose name I have already come to cordially hate. And although I have never seen him (the only thing she forgot to include, the jilted lover said bitterly, was a picture of my replacement), I keep picturing a young cleft-chinned man, very big, who looks, in my imagination at least, as if he belongs in a Los Angeles Rams uniform. I have no problem with landing in traction for my beloved — there is, in fact, a masochistic part of me which would probably welcome it — but I would be embarrassed, and I might cry. It disgusts me to admit it, but I cry rather easily.
Roger was watching me closely but not saying anything, merely twiddling the stem of his drink glass.
And there was something else, wasn’t there? Or maybe it was really the only thing, and the others are just rationalizations. In the last couple of months I’ve gotten a big dose of craziness. Not just the occasional bag-lady who rails at you on the street or the drunks in bars who want to tell you all about the nifty new betting systems with which they mean to take Atlantic City by storm, but real sicko craziness. And being exposed to that is like standing in front of the open door of a furnace in which a lot of very smelly garbage is being burned.
Could I be driven into a rage at seeing them together, her new fella — he of the odious football-player name — maybe stroking her ass with the blast unconcern of acknowledged ownership? Me, John Kenton, graduate of Brown and president of the blah-blah-blah? Bespectacled John Kenton? Could I perhaps even be driven to some really irrevocable act — an act that might be more likely if he did in fact turn out to be as big as his odious name suggests? Shrieky old John Kenton, who mistook a bunch of special effects for genuine snuff photos?
The answer is, I don’t know. But I know this: I awoke from a terrible dream last night, a dream in which I had just thrown battery acid into her face. That was what really scared me, scared me so badly I had to sleep the rest of the night with the light on.
Not his.
Hers.
Ruth’s face.
“No,” I said again, and then poured the rest of my drink over the dryness I heard in my voice. “No, I think that would be very unwise.”
“Then you could stay on.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t work.” I looked at him with some exasperation. My head was starting to buzz. It wasn’t a very cheerful buzz, but all the same I signaled the waiter, who had been lurking nearby, for another. “Right now I’m having trouble remembering how to tie my own shoelaces.” No. Wrong. That was hip and it sounded good, but it wasn’t the truth — my shoelaces had nothing to do with it. “Roger, I’m depressed.”
“Bereaved people shouldn’t sell the house after the funeral,” Roger said, and in my state of buzziness that seemed extremely witty — worthy of H. L. Mencken, in fact. I laughed.
Roger smiled, but I could tell he was serious. “It’s true,” he said. “One of the few interesting courses I ever took in college was called the Psychology of Human Stress — one of these nifty little blocks they give you to fill up the final eight weeks of your senior year after you’re done student teaching—“
“You were going to be a teacher?” I asked startled. I couldn’t see Roger teaching — and then, all of a sudden I could.
“I did teach for six years,” Roger said. “Four in high school and two in elementary. But that’s beside the point. This course took up human stress situations like marriage, divorce, imprisonment, and bereavement. The course wasn’t really a Signposts for Better Living sort of deal, but if you kept your eyes open you couldn’t help but notice a few. One was this thing about living out at least the first six months of a really deep bereavement in the house where you and your loved one were living when the death occurred.”
“Roger, this is not the same thing.” I sipped my new drink, which tasted just like my old drink. It occurred to me that I was getting fried. It also occurred to me that I didn’t care in the slightest.
“But it is,” He said, leaning solemnly toward me. “In a queer way Ruth is dead to you now. You may see her from time to time over the years, but if the break is as final and complete as that letter sounds, the Ruth we could call your Lover-Ruth is dead to you. And you are grieving.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was full of shit, and then I closed it again because he was at least partly right. That’s what carrying a torch really means, isn’t it? You’re grieving for the lover who died — the lover who is dead to you, anyway.
“People tend to think of ‘grief’ and ‘depression’ as interchangeable terms,” Roger said. His tone was a good deal more pedantic than usual, and his eyes were rimmed with red. It occurred to me that Roger was getting fried, too. “They’re really not. There’s an element of depression in grief, of course, but there are a whole slew of other feelings as well, ranging from guilt and sadness to anger and relief. A person who runs from the scene of those feelings is a person in retreat from the inevitable. He arrives in a new place and discovers he feels exactly the same mixture of emotions we call grief — except now he feels homesickness as well, and a feeling of having lost the essential linkage which eventually turn grief into remembrance.”
“You remember all of that from an eight-week psychology block course you took eighteen years ago?” Roger sipped modestly at his drink. “Sure,” he said. “I got an A.”
“Bullshit you do.”
“I also banged the grad student who taught the course. What a piece of ass she was.”
“It’s not my apartment I was planning to leave,” I said, although I had no idea if I intended to leave it or not…and I know that wasn’t his point anyway.
“It wouldn’t matter whether you left that two-room cockroach condo or not,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about here. Your job is your house.”
“Yeah? Well the roof is sure leaking,” I said, and even that seemed sort of witty to me. I was getting fried, all right.
“I want you to help me fix the leak, John,” he said, leaning forward earnestly. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s why I asked you out tonight. And your agreement is the only thing capable of mitigating what is undoubtedly going to be one of the most beastly hangovers of my life. Help us both. Stay on.”
“You’ll pardon me if all of this sounds just a little bit self-serving and fortuitous.”
He sat back. “I respect you,” he said a trifle coldly, “but I also like you, John. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be breaking my ass to keep you on.” He hesitated, seemed on the point of saying something more, then didn’t. His eyes said it for him: And humiliating myself by damn’ near begging.
“I just don’t understand why you’re trying so hard,” I said. “I mean, I’m flattered, but—“
“Because if anyone can bring in a book or create an idea that will keep Zenith from going belly-up, it’s you,” he said. There was an intensity in his eyes I found almost frightening. “I know how fucking embarrassed you were by the whole Detweiller business, but—“
“Please,” I said. “Let’s not add insult to injury.”
“I had no intention of even bringing it up,” he said. “It’s just that your very openness to such an off-the-wall proposition—“
“It was off the wall, all right—“
