Valediction Part 16

"So how could you be with him?"

"Maybe if he came with me." She frowned. "No," she said. "That wouldn't be fair. He could still be a dancer if I could be in my church."

"Any other men in your life?"

"There are men in the church I care about, but we never . . ."

I nodded. "Okay. Want to go to the studio?"

"Tommy's studio? No." She shook her head vigorously. "No."

"Okay," I said. "Neutral ground. My office." She nodded.

We walked down across the Common to my office. When we went in I looked automatically across the street at Linda's office. She was there but her back was to the window. I stared at her for a moment, feeling something very much like need tugging at my stomach. Then I sat down in my chair and called Tommy Banks.

He arrived a half hour later, his face tight, his movements constricted, like a man walking over a slippery spot on a winter street. Sherry stood when he came in. They looked silently at each other and then she stepped to him and kissed him lightly. He put his arms around her, but she stiffened and leaned her hips away from him. He knew it at once and took his arms away quickly. They stood back from each other, hurt showing in Banks's face.

"Same old pa.s.sionate Sher," he said. It had the sound of an ancient refrain. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

"Tommy," she said.

"You ready to come back," he said.

She looked at me. I remained silent. "Tommy, I can't come back and be a dancer."

"G.o.d won't approve?" he said.

"Isn't there another way for us to be together?"

"You want me to move up in your f.u.c.king commune?" Tommy said. "Mumble beads all day or whatever you do?"

"That's not what we do," she said.

"Does it have to be either or?" I said.

Having done such a swell job on my own love life, maybe I could start spreading it around.

"What do you mean?" Banks said.

"She does church work, you dance, but you share each other's evenings or whatever."

"She's a dancer," Banks said, "so am I. I won't let her throw her life away on some f.u.c.king superst.i.tion."

"It's my life, Tommy."

Banks turned toward her and his intensity trembled in the room.

"Your life is my life. I'm you and you're me. There's no my-life-your-life with us."

"Tommy," she said, and her voice was pressed and despairing, "I can't be with you all the time. But we could be together some, often, but not always. I'm not a dancer anymore, Tommy. You can't ch.o.r.eograph me anymore."

Banks's breath was heaving. He opened his mouth and closed it and the tears began to run down his face. At his sides his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists.

"Separate people can still love," Sherry said.

"Them," Banks gasped. "Them or me."

"Don't," Sherry said. "Don't do that, Tommy."

They stood silently two feet apart. I felt the knot tighten inside me as I sat. I looked out my window. Linda wasn't there. I turned back, feeling a little sick.

"Them," Banks said as if he were spitting. He turned and walked out of the office, leaving the door open, and I heard his footsteps recede down the corridor. Sherry turned toward me and we looked at each other silently. She sat suddenly in my client chair and her body sagged and she put her face in her hands and cried. After a while I got up and went over and stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders a little and tried to think of something to say.

CHAPTER 36.

I was at my apartment eating bean soup with Paul when Susan called. Her voice was small. "h.e.l.lo," she said.

"h.e.l.lo."

"How are you?"

"Still here," I said. "How about yourself?"

"I'm as far from you as I can get," she said.

"Not true," I said. "You could get a job in Hong Kong."

"I don't mean it that way," she said. "I mean I can't give you up. I can't altogether leave you."

"Can you come back?"

"No."

"Getting any pressure from your guy friend?"

"Yes."

"He wants to move in?"

"Yes."

"You can't do that either."

"No," she said. I had never heard her voice so small, so wounded. For the first time since she left I felt her pain too.

"So you have two men in your life," I said, "and you can't give yourself completely to either one."

"Six years ago," she said, "on a beach on Cape Cod you asked me to marry you, and I said no. I said that you wouldn't fit in my world or me in yours and we were better as we were."

"I remember."

"That wasn't it," she said. "It was simply that I couldn't."

"And you still can't."

"Yes," she said. "I thought maybe it was just you, your intensity, your force. It has always scared me even when it attracted me."

"And . . ."

"But it's me too. I couldn't live with my husband. I can't live with my friend either."

"Even though you love him."

The line was quiet. "I love you too."

"When I came back from L.A.," I said, "I had just failed more completely than I ever have. I betrayed you by making love to Candy Sloan. . . ."

"You had the right," Susan said. "That wasn't betrayal."

"Yeah, I told Candy that, too, but it was. I disapproved of me for it. And then I let them kill her."

"She got herself killed," Susan said.

"And I started getting scared that I wasn't everything. And I started needing you to make me complete, and that was when things started going to h.e.l.l."

"I can't complete you," Susan said. "More important, you can't complete me. I have to do that myself."

"I know."

"Everything you've achieved you've achieved through strength, through force, through will. This you can't force. This you have to permit."

"It's your line of work," I said.

"Yes," Susan said. "Physician heal thyself, huh?"

I nodded.

Susan said, "Are you still there?"

"Yes."

"It will take a while," Susan said, "but we will resolve this."

"Yes."

Susan said, "I don't know how it will resolve, but I know this. I know in my bones that I love you, and that I cannot conceive of a life without you."

"Me too," I said.

"I will call you again soon," Susan said. Her voice was barely there.

"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

I hung up.

Paul came into the living room and said, "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not all right," I said. "But I won't die."

Paul's face was hard. "You've got to get off of this," he said. "If not for yourself, for me. You're losing Susan, I'm losing Susan and you."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," I said, "you get as much as I have left. This is all there is of me now, there isn't any more. You won't lose me, but this is all you can f.u.c.king well have of me right now."

Paul's face was hurt and angry. "It's not selfishness," he said, "you've got to get off of Susan. There is a life ahead for you. Even if you don't lose her, you've got to get off of her. You are, for crissake, obsessive."

I felt my anger flare. And I looked at Paul's determined face and saw that there were tears in his eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm doing what I can. There will be more of me in a while. This thing will resolve."

Paul nodded.

"Now I have to go to work," I said.

"Don't be careless," Paul said.

"I won't be," I said. "I want to be around to see how this turns out."

CHAPTER 37.

"It's like early congregationalism," Sherry said. We were sitting in the dining hall at the Middleton headquarters drinking coffee at a table where the morning yellow sun made a pleasing yellow splash on the s.p.a.ce between us. "We meet once a week on Tuesday evenings right here and decide on church business. I'm council chairman."