Стивен Кинг - The Plant 3

“’Before long his tears were mingled with mine’?” he said in a low just-talking-to-myself voice. “’Each word has been like a lash across my heart’? Jesus, I wonder if she’s ever considered writing bodice-rippers. There just might be something there.”

“Cut it out, Roger. That isn’t funny.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said, and looked at me with an expression of sympathy that was at the same time deeply comforting and deeply embarrassing. “I doubt if much of anything seems very funny to you now.”

“Not even slightly,” I agreed.

“I know how much you love her.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Yeah, I could. It’s on your face, John.”

We drank without saying anything for a little while. The maitre d’ came bearing menus and Roger waved him away with barely a look.

“I have been married three times and divorced three times,” he said. “It didn’t get better, or easier. It actually seemed to get worse, like bumping the same sore place time after time. The J. Geils Band was right. Love stinks.” His new drink came and he sipped it. I half-expected him to say Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em! but he didn’t.

“Women,” I said, beginning to feel like a figment of my own imagination. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”

“Oh yes you can,” he said, and although his eyes were on me he was quite clearly looking somewhere else. “You can live without ‘em quite easily. But life without a woman, even if she’s a shrew and a nag, sours a man. It turns an essential part of his soul into a pimple.”

“Roger—“ He held up one hand. “You may not believe it, but we’re almost done talking about this,” he said. “We may get drunk and maudlin and run our gums on the subject, but we’ll only be talking about how we’ve got a skinful, which is the only subject drunks ever talk about, really. I just want to tell you that I’m sincerely sorry Ruth has left you, and I am sorry for your pain. I’d share it if I could.”

“Thanks, Roger,” I said, my voice a little hoarse. For a second there were three or four Rogers sitting across the table from me and I had to wipe my eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome.” He took a sip of his drink. “For the moment let us leave what I’m helpless to reverse or alleviate and talk about your future. John, I want you to stay with Zenith House, at least until June. Maybe until the end of the year, but at least until June.”

“I can’t,” I said. “If I stayed I’d just be another millstone around your neck, and I think you’ve got enough of those already.”

“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.”