David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Her smile is both mocking and not. ‘So I’m not the only one who’s worried about misunderstanding and keeps trying to head off misunderstanding for emotional reasons.’ But she can tell he is sincere; he is neither yanking her around nor kissing butt. Meredith can feel it. There is a feeling that comes with sitting across from Shane Drinion and having his eyes and attention on you. It isn’t excitement, but it is intense, a little bit like standing near the high-voltage transformer park south of Joliet Street.

‘Can I ask,’ Drinion says, ‘is it projection when you project emotions about yourself onto other people? Or is that displacement?’

She makes another face. ‘He hated those kinds of words, actually. He said they were part of the self-nourishing institution of the mental-health system. He said even the word was contradictory — mental-health system. This was the next night, in the service elevator now, because somebody on the stairs on some other floor heard our voices the night before because the stairwell was all cement and metal and echoey, and Ed got ragged on somehow by the nursing supervisor for encouraging my unhealthy attachment to him that they’d gotten the idea of from how upset I was the time when he was out for two days — it turned out he was right on the edge of getting fired, mainly because he’d started missing the fifteen-minute checks sometimes and one girl was putting her finger down her throat and throwing up dinner and somebody found some of the throw-up and Ed had missed it because he’d been lying in the stairwell and it was harder to get up from lying all the way down with his feet on the stairs, even if I helped him up, and he’d blown off getting up to do checks. Some of the girls had also gotten all bitchy about us having conversations, like I was the favorite or something, and started a whole rumor with the treatment teams that I was always pretending I had to talk secretly to him and dragging him off and trying to make out with him or whatever. A couple of those girls were just beyond horrible, they were such bitches I’d never seen anything like it.’

‘…’

‘And it was also the day I got discharged, or got told that I was getting discharged the next day; my parents had worked it out and there were about seven million papers to sign the next day and then I was going home. There’d been this whole thing with my mom getting some doctor to sign off on outpatient counseling, blah blah. Nobody used the service elevator at night after the supper trays, so he opened it up and we went in there and he sat on the floor, the floor had a metal pattern thing and you couldn’t lie down. It stunk, it was worse than the stairwell.

‘He said it was the last night, the last conversation, and when I said I wanted intense he said it was showtime, we probably wouldn’t ever meet or see each other after this. I said what did he mean. I was totally freaking out, though. I was the one with double motives. It was showtime. I knew I couldn’t pull some kind of scam so I could stay, I knew he’d see through that, he’d just laugh at me. But I was ready to say I had romantic feelings — that I was attracted to him, even though I felt like I really wasn’t, sexually, even though later on it turned out I was. I just couldn’t admit it to myself, how I felt about him, because of my problem. Although I have to say now I’m not so sure,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Being married is totally different than being seventeen and in total identity crisis and idealizing somebody that seems to really see you and care.’ She looks far more like herself now. ‘But he was the first guy that it felt like told me the truth, that didn’t just start having double motives and start performing or being all sweaty and intimidated and was willing to really see me and know me and just tell the truth about what he saw. And he really did know me — remember, he told me all those things about my mom and the neighbor that nobody knew.’ Her face hardens again, somewhat, or tightens, as she looks directly at Drinion, holding the cigarette but not lighting it. ‘Is this one of the parts that you said I repeat over and over?’

Drinion shakes his head a little bit and then waits for Meredith Rand to continue. The hyperattractive POTEX continues looking at him.

Drinion says: ‘No. I think the original subject of the story was you getting married. Getting married obviously assumes a mutual attraction and romantic emotions, so your first mention of a willingness to acknowledge romantic attraction is new information, and very relevant.’ His expression hasn’t changed at all.

‘So it’s not boring.’

‘No.’

‘And you’ve never had romantic attraction feelings yourself.’

‘Not that I’m aware of, no.’

‘And if you ever had them, wouldn’t you be aware of them?’

Drinion: ‘I think so, yes.’

‘So your answer was a little bit slippery, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose it was,’ Drinion says. Later she’d consider that he didn’t seem taken aback at all. It seemed like he was merely absorbing information and adding it to himself. And that (Rand wouldn’t consider this so much as just remember it as part of the sensuous memory of her making a bit of fun of Drinion and the odd way he responded whenever she did this, which she could more or less at will, make fun of him, because in certain ways he was a total nerd and dweeb) the display of different kinds of hats on the rear wall was now completely obscured except for the very tip of the bill of a fisherman’s cap in the upper row.

‘Well, but anyway,’ Meredith Rand says. She has had her chin in the same hand that holds the unlit Benson & Hedges, which looks like the opposite of comfortable. ‘So I do know that that last night, in the elevator, I wasn’t fully listening to him and, like, engaging with him on what he was telling me, because I was wrestling with all these inner feelings and conflicts about attraction to him and also totally freaking out about hearing that I’d never see him again, because the deal was that I was set up for outpatient counseling but that was on the second floor where all the doctors had their real offices, and he was only on on nights on the third floor, which was a locked ward. Just the idea that I didn’t know where he lived freaked me out. Plus I knew he might get fired soon, because he could barely even do checks anymore, and there’d been trouble with one of the vomiters that had been vomiting and he hadn’t checked her, plus I knew he hadn’t told the Zeller people about his health thing, the cardiomyopathy, which had been more or less under control when they first hired him, it sounded like, but had gotten worse and worse—’

‘He still hadn’t told you about the cardiomyopathy, though.’

‘Right, but whatever it was, the Zeller people didn’t know about it, and they just thought that he didn’t take care of himself very well, or he was hungover or lazy, something terrible. So I kept spacing out and thinking about what if I took my shirt off and, like, made out with him right here, would he let me or would he be grossed out or laugh at me, and how could I get him to see me again and still have intense conversations after I got out and had to go back to Mom and Central Catholic, and what if I told him I loved him, and what if he died after I got out and I didn’t even know he died because I didn’t know who he was or where he lived. It occurred to me I didn’t even know how he really felt about me as me and not some girl he was helping, like did he think I was interesting, or smart, or pretty. It was so hard to think that somebody that seemed to understand me so well and tell me the truth didn’t care for me in that special way.’

‘You mean having romantic feelings.’

Rand shrugs a little with her eyebrows. ‘He was a guy, after all. So… and then it occurred to me that I was sort of doing just what he said my core problem was — thinking about him and not losing him and that he could save me and that the way to keep him was through sexual feelings because that’s all I had.