Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

“It drew me. God, how it drew me! I couldn’t sleep nights. I sat around waiting for that damned class to meet, three days a week, so that I could see her. I had every adolescent symptom you’ve ever heard of, including humility. It took me four months to realize that I didn’t have to wait for class, or skulk around the library and the coffee shop, hoping for a glimpse of her… You aren’t laughing. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I mean, I wasn’t precisely the greatest lover that ever lived, but I’d had some experience; there’s not another woman alive or dead that I’d have dithered over for four months before I got up nerve enough to ask her to have dinner with me.

“After that,” Gordon said softly, “it went quickly. We were married six weeks later.”

He relapsed into silence, staring dreamily at the fire. Michael said nothing. He knew there was more to come.

“Linda’s background,” Gordon said suddenly. “I suppose, if you follow the current theories, that it accounts for what is happening to her now. I can’t see it myself. Maybe I’m too close.

“Her father was a policeman, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill cop on the beat. He was killed in a gunfight when she was thirteen, shot dead on the spot by a nervous burglar he was trying to arrest. Posthumous medal, citation-and a collection taken up by the appreciative citizens which kept the widow and three orphans eating for about six months.

“It seems fairly clear that her father was the only member of the family with whom Linda had any emotional ties, so his death hit even harder than it would ordinarily hit a girl of that age. Her mother I’ve never met; she remarried and moved to some damned hole like Saskatchewan when Linda was sixteen. Linda refused to invite her to the wedding; she showed me the letter her mother wrote when she read of our engagement in the newspapers. It was fairly sickening, full of effusions about how well her baby had done for her little self, and suggestions as to how she could share the wealth with the rest of the family. Linda threw it in the fire. She must have written her mother; an absence of response wouldn’t be enough to choke off that sort of greedy stupidity. Whatever she said, it was effective. We haven’t heard from the mother-in-law since, nor from the two brothers. One is a merchant seaman, the other is in one of the trades out west-carpenter, plumber, I don’t know what.

“That’s what makes the phenomenon of Linda so hard to believe-that she could have emerged from that mess of normal, grubby people. Her father must have been an unusual person. Or else she’s a throwback to something in the remote family past…you never know. She’s always refused to let me look up her genealogy. Not that it matters, of course, but I was curious, strictly from a scientific point of view.

“So, she loved her father and hated her mother; nice, straightforward Oedipus complex. And she married me because I was a good father figure, older, successful, supportive. Christ, Mike, you don’t need to nod at me; I know all this, I’ve been over it, to myself and with professionals, a dozen times. But the reason why psychiatry fails to satisfy me is because it invents its own data. You act in a particular way because you hate your father. You admit you hate him-fine and dandy. You say you don’t hate him, you really love him? You’re kidding yourself, buddy, because I know better; you wouldn’t be acting this way if you loved him. You hate him. But, in a way, you love him, too, because of that thing called ambivalence. What good is that sort of thing to me, Mike? It gives too many answers.”

He waited. This time he wanted a response.

Michael didn’t know what to say. He never did know, when people talked this way. What do you say to a man who has cut his heart out and put it on the table in front of you? “Nice, well-shaped specimen. There seems to be a hole in it, right here…”

“It doesn’t give simple answers,” he said carefully.

“The question is simple.”

“Is it really?”

“Why does my wife hate me?”

Michael made an impatient movement.

“Any question can be stated in simple terms. ‘Why do men fight wars?’ ‘If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we solve the problem of poverty?’ ‘God is good; how can He permit evil?’ That sort of simplicity is a semantic trick. You don’t alter the complex structure of the problem by reducing it to basic English.”

Gordon did not reply, and for some minutes the two men sat in silence, listening to the hiss of the dying fire. That sound, and Gordon’s soft breathing, were the only sounds in the room. Michael realized that it must be very late. He was conscious of a deep fatigue-the sodden, futile exhaustion that resulted from wallowing in other people’s emotional troubles. Too much god-damned empathy, he thought sourly. He thought also of the comfortable guest room upstairs, with its nice, soft mattress and its well-placed reading light. But he couldn’t leave, not while Gordon wanted an audience. And there was something else that had to be said.

“Gordon.”

“Hmmm?” Gordon stirred; he looked as if he had come back from a great distance.

“I’m wondering. Whether I should go ahead with this project.”

“What do you mean?” The confessional was closed; Gordon’s dark eyes were searching.

“Probing the emotional problems of a man who’s been dead for a century is one thing. Obviously I can’t lacerate your private emotions in that way. And I’m not sure that I can do anything worthwhile with your life without considering them, not any longer.”

“I wondered too. Whether you’d say that.”

Gordon stood up, stretching like a big cat. Michael noted the smooth play of muscle and the lean lines of his body, and a fleeting thought ran through his mind: I’d hate to tangle with him, even if he is forty.

“Another drink?” Gordon asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll bet you’re beat. You can go to bed in a minute, Mike. I appreciate all this… But first I want to make a confession, and a request.”

“You want me to go ahead with the biography.”

“Yes.”

“And the confession?”

“I hate to admit it, it’s so childish.” Gordon didn’t look embarrassed; hands in his pockets, he stood gazing down at Michael with a faint smile. “But you are a perceptive devil, Mike. I wasn’t aware of this, consciously; but I guess one of the reasons why I allowed this project to get underway was that I hoped you might come up with some burst of insight into my problem. Something I can’t see because I’m too close to it.”

“Something the best professionals can’t see either?”

“I told you my misgivings about psychiatry. And even if the head shrinkers could help, Linda won’t let them. She’s refused even to see a neurologist.”

“You overwhelm me,” Michael said helplessly. He meant it literally; he felt as if Randolph had just dumped a load of bricks on him. He was flattened and breathless under the heap of responsibility. He was also annoyed. It was too much to ask of any man, much less a poor feeble writer.

“No, no, don’t feel that way. I don’t expect a thing. I just…hope. Look, Mike, I understand your scruples and your doubts, completely. Try it. Just try it. Work on the book for a couple of weeks, a month, see how it goes. Then we’ll talk again.”

“Okay.”

Michael stood up. He felt stiff and queasy and in no mood to argue.

“We’ll leave it that way,” he said. “Damn it, Gordon, I can’t help but feel that you’re exaggerating. Your wife doesn’t hate you.”

“No?” They faced one another across the hearthrug. Gordon, hands still in his pockets, rocked gently back and forth as if limbering up for a fight. His eyes were brilliant. “Six months ago she tried to kill me.”