Dark on the Other Side (8 page)

“Words, words, words,” Gordon snapped; his suave courtesy
had left him, and Michael liked him all the better for it. “A
psychiatrist can think up labels. I can’t. But I know, better than
anyone else can. She’s pulling away, moving back; and now the world
she’s invented is becoming real, for her. She—sees things.”

“Interesting,” Michael said carefully. “How that phrase,
which has a perfectly matter-of-fact meaning, can suggest so much that
isn’t at all matter-of-fact. I gather you mean she has hallucinations?”

Gordon’s swift glance at his guest was not friendly; but
Michael returned it equably, and after a moment the queer empathy
between the two men had reestablished itself. Gordon laughed suddenly
and leaned back, putting his glass down on the table.

“Thanks again. That’s my greatest danger, I
guess—becoming mystical myself. We all do, when catastrophe strikes.
What has brought this curse upon me?—that kind of thinking. And it is,
to say the least, nonconstructive. Yes, she has hallucinations.”

Michael nodded silently. He was afflicted with an unusual
constriction of the brain. Three words. That was all she had
said—groaned, rather—just before she slid through his fumbling hands in
a genuine faint. But those words, coupled with the similar incident in
the grove earlier that day, had told him enough. He was on the verge of
repeating his knowledge to Gordon when something made him hesitate.
After a moment, Gordon went on,

“The hallucinations are only part of the problem, but to
me—and to Hank Gold, whom I’ve consulted—they seem a particularly
alarming symptom. It seems to be an animal of some kind that she
fancies she sees—a dog, perhaps. Why it should throw her into such a
frantic state…”

The black dog.

The words formed themselves in Michael’s mind so clearly
that for a moment he thought he had spoken them aloud. He did not; nor
did he stop to analyze the reasons for his continued silence on this
point. Instead, he said, “It seems to be an animal? Don’t you know?”

Gordon laughed again; this time the sound made Michael
wince.

“No, I don’t know. Don’t you understand? Whatever her
fear is, I’m part of it. I’m the one she hates, Mike.”

It all came out, then, like a flood from behind a broken
dam. Michael sensed that this had been building up for a long time,
with no outlet. Now he was the outlet. He listened in silence. Comment
would have been unnecessary.

“Linda was barely twenty-one when I met her,” Gordon
said. “She was a student, taking the course I taught that one year—you
know about that, I suppose. It was an experiment; I thought perhaps
teaching might give me something I had failed to find in other
pursuits. It didn’t. But it gave me something that meant more.

“She was beautiful. She never knew, nor did any of the
clods around her, how beautiful she really was. You can see it still,
though it’s contaminated now, faded. What you may not realize is that
she was also one of the most brilliant human beings…Oh, hell, that’s
the wrong word; why can’t I find the right words when I talk about
Linda? Intelligent—yes, surely. Original, creative, one of those rare
minds that sees through a problem to its essentials, whether the
problem is social, arithmetical, or moral. But there’s an additional
quality…. Wisdom? Maybe that gives you a clue, even if it’s not quite
right. The quality of love. You know how I mean the word—‘And the
greatest of these…’I know, I’m making her sound like a saint. She
wasn’t. She was still young, crude in some ways, impatient in others,
but that quality was there, ready to be developed, drawing…

“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 motherin-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 goddamned 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.”

III

Rain fell, heavily enough to keep the windshield wipers
busy and make the oily surface of the highway dangerously slick. The
weekend drivers were pouring back into the city. Michael had to pay
close attention to his driving. A long night’s sleep had left him oddly
unrefreshed; he had started out tired, and two hours on one of the
nation’s most expensive death traps didn’t exactly help. By the time he
reached his apartment he could barely drag himself upstairs. There were
four flights of stairs. The old building had no elevator.

After the Randolph mansion, his two rooms and kitchenette
should have looked grubby and plebeian, but Michael heaved an
involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight of his worn rugs and tattered
upholstery. His desk was overflowing with unfinished work. He had left
the dishes in the sink. Even so, the place felt warm and cozy compared
to the atmosphere of the big handsome house in the country.

He selected two cans, more or less at random, from the
collection on the kitchen shelves, and started to heat up the contents.
Napoleon had been and gone; his dish on the floor was empty, but he was
nowhere in sight. The kitchen window was open its usual three inches.
It still amazed Michael that a cat the size of Napoleon, the scarred,
muscled terror of the alleys, could get through an opening that narrow,
but he had seen him do it often enough, sometimes with the speed and
accuracy of a rocket.

Once he had tried shutting Napoleon in the apartment
while he was away for the weekend. Napoleon had expressed his opinion
of that with his usual economy of effort; he had left neat piles of the
said opinions every few feet down the hall, through the living room,
culminating, in the most impressive pile of all, in the center of
Michael’s unmade bed. Michael hadn’t even bothered to speak to him
about it. He was only grateful to Napoleon for skipping his desk. After
that he left the window slightly open and took his chances with
burglars. A closed window wouldn’t deter anyone who really wanted to
get in. There wasn’t anything in the place worth stealing anyhow.

When the soup was hot, he carried the pan into the living
room and sat down, putting his feet up on the coffee table, which bore
the marks of other such moments of relaxation. He ate out of the pan,
remembering, with a wry smile, the smooth, unobtrusive service of the
breakfast he had eaten that morning, complete with butler and antique
silver chafing dishes. Then his smile faded into an even wrier frown,
as the thoughts he had successfully avoided all day forced their way
into his consciousness.