Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

Tina exclaimed, “I am not!”

He said, “So is Marcella, the movie star. You practically told me so, over the phone when I was in the hospital. You like having names that begin with L , but you don’t always use them.”

“Lara’s a fairly new one,” she admitted.

“I didn’t know then that it’s the one you store your coat under when you come here—Lara Morgan. I found that out later, after I got back.”

She smiled. “That was clever of you.”

“Thanks. I tried to get a job there, but they didn’t want me.”

“You wouldn’t have been happy if I had been Lora Masterman, because Lora Masterman was your psychiatrist’s receptionist; so I was Lara Morgan for you.”

“Uh huh. Maybe you can tell me about something I’ve been wondering about.”

“What my real name is? No.”

He shook his head. “What was wrong with me when I went to Dr. Nilson to start with? Now it’s you, but what was it then?”

Tina asked, “Don’t you feel good?”

“Yes, I do, Tina,” he said. “I feel wonderful.”

“Depression, mostly. There’s a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn’t be a lover worth having. You were one of those lonely men, whether you would admit it to Dr. Nilson or not.”

“‘I wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept me as a member.’ Groucho Marx said that. I watch reruns a lot.” He shrugged apologetically.

“He put it well. You were an only child, and your parents separated while you were still very young. Your mother was your best friend—in fact, your only friend. After your mother died, you managed to cope for a year or so. But you wouldn’t talk to customers, sometimes, and you were drinking too much. The store you work for sent you to Dr. Nilson.”

“You felt sorry for me.”

“I felt sorry for all of you,” she said. “I still do. You were—you seemed like the best choice.”

“But you didn’t love me.”

“Yes, I did.” She paused so that her next words would sink in. “I loved Captain Hurst, too.”

He had forgotten the locket; he saw it now, lying between their soiled plates, as though he had never seen it before. “Do you really want it?”

“No. I wanted it to remember him by, but that was silly of me and selfish. I couldn’t remember Billy by keeping a picture of myself, not for long; and I think you need it much, much more than I do.”

“His name was Billy?” He was astonished.

She smiled. “It was William, actually. Everyone called him Billy, of course not to his face: Blaze-Away Billy Hurst.” Her hands had been in the purse in her lap; they appeared above the edge of the table clasping a black-bordered handkerchief. “I wish I could cry for him,” she said. “He deserved it. He was brave, and gentle even when he wasn’t sober. But I can’t, not really. I hadn’t thought about Billy for years.”

He snapped the locket shut and dropped it back into his pocket.

Her fingers touched his, then fled. “Would you do me a great favor? Please?”

“Anything,” he said.

“You have Billy’s old desk now? You own it?”

He nodded. “I suppose it must have been his.”

“Then you’ll keep things in it—your papers and so forth. I want you to keep that locket where he kept it. Will you do that for me?”

He nodded again. “If you’ll tell me how he got you to marry him.”

“There isn’t much to tell. We met on shipboard; he was the captain, I was a passenger. If we had merely done what you and I did, it would have been the gossip of the fo’c’sle in an hour. Billy would have done it—he was mad about me—but things would have been very difficult for both of us afterward. There was a parson aboard, so we got him to marry us—a big social wedding, as shipboard weddings go, with the first mate as Billy’s best man and more than half the women as my attendants. It was our celebration of rounding the Cape, too.”

“I see,” he said. “Did one of the passengers paint the picture in this locket?”

Lara shook her head. “It was done in Bombay by the British governor’s wife, after we docked. She was an amateur but really very good.”

“How long did you stay with him?”

“Until he sailed. By that time I had fallen ill and had to be left behind.”

“And I don’t imagine you were still there when he returned. Tina, you’d better go back. Too many people are admiring you.” He picked her up and replaced her in the breast pocket of his jacket.

“No,” Lara said. “What is it you want of me? That I love you? I do already, as much as I’m capable of love; if I hadn’t loved you, I would have stayed with you far longer. That I stay with you for the rest of your life? I can’t do that.”

He told her, “I’ve been thinking about why you picked us—the captain and me; it was because we wouldn’t be believed. If we went through a door and came back to tell about it, nobody would pay any attention to us. Nobody believes sailor’s yarns, and Hurst was a drinker and a hell-raiser from what you’ve said about him. I’m a mental patient, and that’s why you took your job, and why you went back. What is it you want from us?”

“Your love. I want to be loved by a man who doesn’t die because he made love to me. Is that so terrible?”

He shook his head. After a moment he said, “I think you like Billy —like the name. Anyway another Billy told me once that you had a lover called Attis. After I got back, I saw a thing on TV about people down at the library who’d look things up for you. I talked to a woman there, and after she told me about Attis, I asked about books on antiques. I’ve read all of them now, and a few of them three or four times. So I owe you something.”

Lara waved the debt aside.

“Anyway, Attis cut—cut himself for you, because that was what you wanted.”

“No,” she said.

“All right, because he thought that was what you wanted.”

“I wanted him not to die!”

“All right,” he said softly.

“But what is it you want from me? I’ve told you what you can’t have, and I’ve told you that you have my love already. I love you as much as I can—as much as I can afford. As much as the old woman at the next table loves some little dog, possibly. What more?”

He knew that she was trying to insult him, but he was not insulted; instead he was happier than he had ever been before. “I want what that dog wants,” he said. “I want to follow you, when I can, I want to help you, whenever I can be of any help, and I want to hear your voice.”

Her fingers drummed the table.

He waited in patient silence; and at last she said, “We’ll have a test, as such things were tested long ago.” She picked up her wineglass and offered it to him, grasping it between her thumb and forefinger at the rim. “Hold the stem with your left hand.”

He did so.

“Now tear off a crumb of that bread. Not a tiny crumb—a piece as big as a crouton. Don’t squeeze it.”

He pulled a small piece from the soft loaf in the basket by the ashtray.

“Now drop it into the wine. If it sinks, you’re free to follow me as long as you wish. But if it floats—”

“If it floats,” he told her, “I will die.”

She nodded. “You will anyway.”

For a moment it seemed the bit of bread scarcely lay upon the wine. Lara murmured something—a prayer, perhaps, or a curse, that he did not understand. Red as blood, wine raced up the snowy sides of the bread, and it sank like a stone.

“So be it,” Lara hissed. She released the glass, and he nearly let it fall.

He did not understand, and would never understand, how she got her coat without going near the hook where it had hung. He snatched down his own and ran after her, ignoring an angry shout from one of Mama’s sons.