Duane's Depressed (51 page)

Duane didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to lie to her, and yet, at that moment, he didn’t know if he would ever come back to her house.

“I’ll come tomorrow if I can,” he said, finally.

“Okay, I’ll take that,” Honor said. “Be careful now. Don’t get run over. Watch out for trucks.”

22

D
UANE HAD NOT BEEN EXAGGERATING
much when he said he was weak as a kitten. He had hardly any strength in his legs and had barely ridden out of sight before he came within an inch or two of doing what Honor had warned him not to do. He drifted into a turn and was almost hit by a teenager barreling up the street in a black pickup. The teenager honked, swerved, and yelled “Motherfucker!” at him. When the pickup passed, Duane pulled up on the sidewalk and got off the bike. If he couldn’t tune in enough to at least see pickups on the street, then he had better not ride at all.

Besides, he had a sharp pain in his side, in a place where he had never had a pain before. He wondered if, in his violent crying jag, he could have broken a rib. He had heard of people coughing so hard they broke ribs, but he had never heard of anyone breaking a rib crying.

But the pain was sharp, he felt very weak, and, though it seemed impossible that he could have any more tears in him, he felt like crying again. There was no question of riding eighteen miles to his cabin—fortunately there was a strip of motels only a few hundred yards up the way. Afraid to get back on his bike, he pushed it to the nearest motel, got a room, and fell on the bed, feeling as tired as he had ever been in his life.

Sometime in the night he woke from a dream in which he and Karla were drifting in a canoe, watching a small plane fly
over the river they were on. The plane sounded like a lawn mower. He went back to sleep only to have the screech of air brakes wake him. The motel was on a crosstown throughway, near the northernmost traffic light in Wichita Falls. Once through that light the big trucks could pour on up the highway, unchecked, to Oklahoma City or St. Louis. Some trucker had considered running the last light, but then had thought better of it and hit his brakes.

Duane opened the curtain a little and sat at the foot of the bed, watching the big trucks pass. In young manhood, right after he got out of the army, Duane had considered being a long-haul trucker. It seemed a romantic life, and the pay was good—at least it was if you put the pedal to the metal and kept rolling. Once or twice he had gone on cattle truck runs to South Dakota, running night and day from Thalia to Sioux Falls.

But then Karla came along and he gave no more thought to the trucking life.

He watched the big trucks pour through Wichita Falls for an hour, as the traffic light blinked red and green and yellow. There was never an end to trucks. They rolled north from the Gulf Coast, from Houston and Dallas, from Mexico. To amuse himself he counted trucks for a while—one hundred passed his motel in less than fifteen minutes, huge trucks, rimmed with lights, their cabs vast as castles. There were hundreds of thousands of trucks, rambling over the prairies where the buffalo had once been.

Duane had an impulse just to step out of his room, stick out his thumb, and get in with the first trucker who offered him a ride. Egypt seemed like a fantasy, but the trucks passing through Wichita Falls were real, and the truckers mostly country boys, men not unlike himself. He had always felt at home with truckers. Even the fact that he had only biking clothes presented no huge problem. Truckers were tolerant of eccentrics, up to a point, and he was country born, whatever clothes he wore. Besides, he had ten thousand dollars in his pocket—he could buy some Western duds at some Wal-Mart or Kmart up the road.

What kept him in the room was the fact that he felt too drained to move, and wasn’t even sure that he was done with
the draining. He still felt tearful. Long ago, if one of the children burst into tears for no apparent reason, Karla would look at them and say, “Who pushed your cry button?”

Something had pushed his cry button, and was still pushing it. What had occurred in the doctor’s office had been a flash flood, sweeping all his defenses before it; now he felt empty and helpless. If Honor Carmichael thought she understood what had made him so sad, that was fine—he himself didn’t understand it or even have the energy to worry about understanding it. A flood had come and swept him away, and he—insofar as he was a personality—was still away. He didn’t reject hitchhiking because of his decision not to ride in motorized vehicles any more—he rejected it because he was too weak to walk to the bathroom and pee.

When the sky reddened and he saw the new sun bracketed by the buildings of downtown Wichita Falls, he walked two blocks to a convenience store and bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and shaving cream. He was back at the motel before he realized he didn’t have a comb. When he showered he just patted his wet hair down as best he could.

Then he lay on the bed in his room, the television off, lulled by the whirr of the air conditioner. It occurred to him that he hadn’t gone home to water his garden, a thought that produced only a slight stirring of guilt: it was the first day he had missed, in all the time he had been attending to the garden.

When he got ready to pedal over to Honor’s office for his appointment he had a nagging sense that something was missing—some component that he usually took to their meetings was not there. He had just turned onto the street where Honor lived and worked when he realized what the missing component was: it was that thing called love. He wasn’t in love with Honor Carmichael anymore. The flash flood of tears that had swept his personality away had taken all romantic feeling with it.

If Duane had had more energy he would have been astonished by such a realization. A sense of being in love with Honor had been the one feeling that had been constant for the last year. Only the day before, on his way to see her, he had been so agitated by love that he could hardly steer his bicycle. So it had
been almost from the first time he had gone to see her. Her image, her way of being, her womanliness had distracted him for more than a year. Honor Carmichael had been his focus almost from the first time he had met her—because of her, he had had foolish thoughts, nursed foolish hopes; and yet now, headed for her house, he felt perfectly calm. He had even recovered his physical stability—he didn’t steer his bicycle in the direction of any pickups. His heart wasn’t pounding; he didn’t hyperventilate as he walked up to her door. He was purged of sentiment, free from the distracting rhythm of anticipation and anxiety that he had usually felt at the prospect of seeing her.

When he stepped into her office he thought he saw some anxiety in
her
face; no doubt he had worried her with his violent tear storm. But then, as soon as he lay on the couch his hands began to tremble—in a minute or two, with nothing being said, he began to cry again. He did not pour tears, as he had the first day: that had been a cloudburst, this was only a shower. Honor didn’t have to get a towel this time—a few Kleenex sufficed. He would think he was all right and start to talk, only to immediately choke up again. At first he could hardly finish a sentence without crying, but finally the tears lessened and Honor led him back to the subject of his father. He mentioned again, as he had once long before, that when he remembered his father he always remembered the smell of his father’s plain cotton work shirts, a smell composed of sweat and starch and tobacco. The shirt Duane’s father had been wearing the day he died hung in the closet throughout Duane’s boyhood—his mother either forgot to launder it or didn’t want to.

“Every time I went in the closet and smelled that shirt, he’d come back to me,” Duane said. “That is, his memory would. If he came off work in the middle of the night he’d always come in and sit on my bed a minute—even if I was too sleepy to really wake up, I’d smell his smell.”

“That smell means love to you,” Honor said gently, handing him another Kleenex. “Your father’s love. You trusted him, didn’t you?”

“I trusted him,” Duane said. “I don’t think I’ve ever trusted anybody that much—unless it’s you.”

“I think you also trusted him not to die, but he died,” Honor said. “The first time you came to me you mentioned your father’s shirt.”

“Seems like a lot’s happened since then,” Duane said.

“Yes, you grew two gardens,” she said, with a grin. “You became a philanthropist—you fed the poor for two years. And yesterday, probably for the only time in your life, you cried your heart out.”

Duane was silent—he was crying again, but not violently. Only a little.

“Here’s a small observation,” Honor said. “Trust and love are a smell to you, the smell of those shirts your father wore when he took you fishing or came and sat by your bed at night. You weren’t aware of how deeply you held on to that memory. We
don’t
know those things until something touches us in a certain way and memory comes flooding back. What happened to you yesterday is not so different from what happened to the young man in Proust who ate the madeleine and was swept back into all the anxieties and insecurities of his childhood.”

“Ate the what?” he asked.

“The cookie,” Honor said. “The cookie dipped in tea. But never mind. You suddenly connected with something you hadn’t allowed yourself to connect with in a very long time. All that pain was lurking there, and suddenly it came out.”

“Was it because I fell in love with you?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps that played a part. It’s generally when people are touched unexpectedly but powerfully that their defenses suddenly crumble completely, as yours did yesterday. Being with someone who doesn’t judge you, or at least doesn’t judge you conventionally, can sometimes bring that about.”

They were silent. Duane had stopped crying, but his hands still trembled and he knew that if he stood up he wouldn’t be very steady on his legs.

“I’m glad you trust me,” Honor said. “I’ve tried rather hard not to play you false—I hope you know that. I didn’t sock you in the kisser when you tried to kiss me, and I didn’t run you off, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that if you really want to be my
patient
, I’m ready to begin,” she said. “We’ve only skirmished and feinted a little, so far. This is only the third time you’ve trusted yourself on my couch. We’ve a very long way to go together, if you’re ready to make the trip.”

“Four times a week, maybe for years?” he asked.

“Four times a week for however long it takes,” she said.

“What do I know, that’s worth years of talk?” he asked. “I don’t even have much of a memory.”

“Memory isn’t really the measure of what we’ll do,” Honor said. “A good analysis will take you to places you don’t know are there. You didn’t know your tears were there, but they were.”

Duane didn’t respond. The thought of being able to see Honor four times a week for several years was appealing. Even though he no longer felt that he was in love with her there was no other woman whose company pleased him so much. Seeing her regularly in the afternoons, in private, would be, in a way, like having a love affair. It would be a love affair only of the mind, it seemed, but that was not necessarily a reason to cast it away. He smiled to himself, at the thought of a love affair of the mind, and Honor saw the smile.

“What’s so amusing?” she asked.

“Just a dumb thought,” he said.

“Tell me,” she said. “What’s dumb to you might seem eloquent to me.”

“Yesterday I was in love with you and today I don’t guess I am,” he said, sheepishly. “I was thinking that coming to see you nearly every afternoon for several years would be kind of like keeping a girlfriend.”

Honor considered the comment. She didn’t seem offended.

“It’s more like keeping a call girl—isn’t that what you were thinking?” she said. “Because of the money involved?”

Duane saw the point. Men paid Gay-lee for the use of her body—he would be paying Honor for the use of her mind. But he thought it was a dumb point. Laying on a couch in a room with an attractive woman wasn’t much like keeping a call girl. It was like seeing a doctor who also, in a way, happened to be a friend.

“Let’s work a little, shall we?” Honor said. “I don’t want those tears you shed yesterday to be wasted. If you could choose one word for the feeling you felt when you parked your pickup and started walking, what would it be?”

Duane couldn’t come up with a word. He could no longer really remember what he had felt at that time.

“I’m just the patient,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I think the word would be ‘disappointment,’” Honor said, without delay. “The reason I made you read Proust is because it’s still the greatest catalogue of the varieties of disappointment human beings feel.”

Duane felt a little irritated by the comment.

“I don’t know what I have to be so disappointed about,” he said. “I had a good marriage. I raised a nice family. I even did well enough in my business.”

“Yes, I know all that,” Honor said, a little angrily. “But the point you’re not considering is that you didn’t get to choose your life. You had your father only for five years. Your mother was very poor—you had to work from the time you were old enough to work.”

“Thirteen,” Duane said.

“Thirteen,” she said. “You made it through high school but college was out of the question, right?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “My mother was in poor health. I thought I ought to see after her, a little.”

“That’s right—you did the decent thing,” Honor said. “You took care of your parent but you didn’t really take care of yourself. You were born with a good brain but you didn’t train it. Then one day you noticed that you were sixty-two and you and your good brain had spent a lifetime riding around in pickups, not thinking about much. You haven’t been to Egypt. You haven’t been anywhere. What you ended up with was hard work and family life. That’s enough for some people but I don’t think you really feel that it was enough for you, Duane.”

There was a silence.

“People who realize they had the capacity to do more than they’ve done usually feel cheated,” she said. “Even if they mainly have only themselves to blame, they still feel cheated when they
come around a curve in the road and start thinking about the end of their life.