Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

“Ah.”

They sat for minutes, silent and careful.

Then, “Osa—”

“Yes, Fred.”

“Why do you love him?”

She looked at him. “You really meant it when you said this would be a painful conversation.”

“Never mind that. Just tell me.”

“I don’t think it’s a thing you can tell.”

“Then try this: What is it you love in him?”

She made a helpless gesture. “Him.”

He sat without responding until he knew she felt his dissatisfaction with the answer.

She frowned and then closed her eyes. “I couldn’t make you understand, Fred. To understand, you’d have to be two things: a woman, and—Osa.” Still he sat silent. Twice she looked up to his face and away, and at last yielded.

She said in a low voice, “It’s a ... tenderness you wouldn’t believe, no matter how well you know him. It’s a gentle, loving something that no one ever born ever had before and never will again. It’s ... I hate this, Fred!”

“Go on, for heaven’s sake! This is exactly what I’m looking for.”

“It is? Well, then ... But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn’t seem right.”

“Go on!”

She said, almost in a whisper, “Life is plain hell sometimes. He’s gone and I don’t know where, and he comes back and it’s just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place—he doesn’t see me, doesn’t answer. Or maybe he’ll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don’t know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or . . . anything, and he won’t leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he—”

She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. “Don’t stop,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Please. It’s impor—”

“I would, Fred,” she burst out frantically. “I’m not refusing to. I can’t, that’s all. The words won’t—”

“Don’t try to tell me what it is, then,” he suggested. “Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that.”

“I suppose so,” she said, after considering it.

Osa took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again.

“It will be hell,” she said, “and then I’ll look at him and he...and he...well, it’s there, that’s all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It’s ... it’s something to love, yes, it’s that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it’s a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there’s nothing else but the— whatever it is.”

She wet her lips. “It can happen any time; there’s never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small-talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he—I’m sorry, Fred—he makes love to me then and that’s . . . Oh, dear God, that’s . . .”

“Here’s my handkerchief.”

“Thank you. He—does that other times, too, when there’s nothing loving about it. This—this thing-to-love, it—it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it’s what I wait for and what I look back on; it’s all I have and all I want.”

When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, “It’s as if some other—some other personality suddenly took over.”

He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted, “No!” and was startled herself.

She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the cafe. “I don’t know why,” she said, sounding frightened, “but that was just—just awful, what you said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you’ll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but it just isn’t so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick, but it’s Dick, not anybody or anything else. I know that’s so, that’s all. I know it.”

Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again.

At last, “The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick could be such a—a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It’s—it’s a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is.”

“Does he show it only to you?” He touched her hand and released it. “I’m sorry, but I must ask that.”

She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. “Only to me. I suppose that’s intuition again, but it’s as certain as Sunday.” The pride disappeared and was replaced by a patient agony. “I don’t delude myself, Fred—he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn’t something I wonder about. I just—know.”

He sat back wearily.

She asked, “Is all this what you wanted?”

He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her eyes filling with tears.

“It’s what I asked for,” he said in a flat voice.

“I see the difference.” She used his handkerchief. “May I have this?”

“You can have—” But he stopped himself. “Sure.” He got up. “No,” he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. “I’ll have something better for you.”

“Fred,” she said, distressed, “I—”

“I’m going, forgive me and all that,” he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. “The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don’t think I’d better see you again, Osa.”

“All right, Fred,” she said to his back.

He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way.

He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it? Some saw about the sanctity of personality. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn’t read it:

ONLY MAN CAN FATHOM MAN

It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor’s answer to the inevitable charges of “push-button therapy.” But he wondered now if the word “Man” was really inclusive enough.

He shook off the conjecture and let himself into the building.

Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter’s body between rounds. He opened the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” said Miss Thomas.

“Why?”

“Just in case.”

Without answering, he went to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. Then he looked at Miss Thomas in the big chair. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to.