Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (20 page)

           
Forty-five minutes later, Susan was
alone in the car with Andy Harbinger, driving south on the Taconic, heading
toward
New
York
.
How it had worked out that way she still didn’t quite understand.

           
Grigor had taken charge of Mrs.
Auston at the hospital, which was a research center, not a regular hospital at
all, and so without an emergency room. The doctor Grigor finally rounded up for
the task of examining Mrs. Auston’s wound and then bandaging it was wildly
overqualified for the job, but took it in good spirit. That was no surprise;
the entire hospital staff was friendly and supportive and indulgent toward
Grigor.

           
Meantime, one of the other doctors
had taken Susan aside and told her that tomorrow’s outing with Grigor would not
be possible.
^cc
Grigor doesn’t know it yet,” this doctor said, “but
we’ll be starting a new therapy in the morning, and generally it’s going to be
unpleasant for him for a few days. He should be in better condition by next
weekend, but tomorrow he’s going to be quite sick.”

           
“Oh, poor Grigor.”

           
“You know this routine by now,
Susan,” the doctor said.
^cc
We make him very sick from time to time,
because the other option is that he dies.”

           
“You don’t want me to tell him about
tomorrow?”

           
“Why give him a sleepless night?”

           
So she had lied to him—“See you
tomorrow!” “See you tomorrow!”—hating it but knowing it was better than the
alternative, and then as she was heading for the exit Andy Harbinger appeared
and asked if she was driving back to the city today, and if so, could he hitch
a ride, since he felt no need to see any more of today’s demo. It was
impossible to say no, and in fact Susan didn’t particularly want to say no. She
was feeling glum, and the two-hour drive back to the city could get boring.

           
Then there was Mrs. Auston. She
wanted nothing but to get back with her protest group, so Susan brought her
along as well. The three of them left: the hospital and drove together as far
as the power plant entrance, which was much calmer than before, the TV crews
having all left, though the demonstration continued. Mrs. Auston, a strange
self-absorbed woman, left the car with only minimal thanks to her rescuers, and
then Susan and Andy Harbinger drove on down the road to the Taconic entrance
and headed south.

           
Once they were on the highway, streaming
with moderate traffic toward the far-off city, the late afternoon sun reddening
ahead and to the right, Andy Harbinger broke into Susan’s fretful thoughts
about Grigor by saying, “Susan? Do you mind if I interview you?”

           
“What?” At first, the words made no
sense at all; she frowned at him, ignoring traffic, finding it hard to see his
face clearly in the orangey sunlight. “I’m sorry, what?”

           
He smiled, his manner easy,
non-threatening, friendly. “I’m always working,” he apologized. “I can’t help
it. And I noticed, when Mrs. Auston and I first got into the car, when you
thought I was one of the demonstrators, you disapproved of me.”

           
Feeling the heat of embarrassment
rise into her cheeks, Susan faced the road again, gazing steadfasdy through the
windshield as she said, “Disapprove? That’s a funny word. I didn’t say anything
like that.”

           
“You didn’t
say
anything, but it was in your expression and the tone of your
voice.” Harbinger grinned at her. “I’m not trying to get you mad, Susan,” he
said. “It’s just my professional nature. You’re good friends with that Russian
guy. With that illness of his, I’d think you’d be on the side of the
demonstrators.”

           
“Until they get ugly,” Susan said,
and then was sorry she’d been prodded into giving any reaction at all.

           
Because of course now he burrowed in
a little more, saying, “Ugly? I guess they are, sometimes. But isn’t it because
they feel powerless? They’re trying to make themselves heard. It isn’t easy.”

           
“No, I know it isn’t,” Susan said,
uncomfortable at having to defend a position that even to herself sounded
prissy, narrowminded, irrelevant. “And I
do
agree with them. It’s... it’s when there’s violence, then I can’t stand it.
When people are doing violent things, they
make
themselves wrong, even if they were right to begin with.”

           
Gendy, he said, “And if there’s no
other way?”

           
“There’s always another way,” Susan
insisted, even though she wasn’t herself sure that was true. Then she thought
of something to bolster her argument and added, “Gandhi always found another
way.”

           
He chuckled that off the field,
saying, “Gandhi was a saint.”

           
“Then we should all be saints.”

           
This response seemed to capture him
in some way she didn’t understand. Looking at her more openly, twisting to put
his right shoulder blade against the door so he could face her more fully, he
said, “You keep surprising me, Susan. You really do.”

           
If he’s trying to pick me up, she
thought, it’s a very weird method. She shot him a quick glance, trying to read
beneath that open friendly face, and when she looked away from his impenetrable
smile, out at the road again, he was reminding her of somebody or something.
Who? What?

           
Mikhail. Whatever his name was,
Mikhail something, the nice economist at the party in
Moscow
, where she’d first met Grigor; where all
this started.

           
As though reading her mind, he said,
“Your Russian friend— Grigor, isn’t it?”

           
“Yes, Grigor”

           
“Do you think
he
agrees with you? About the protestors. That they should give it
less than their all.”

           
“That isn’t what I said! Not give
their all, what do you mean?” She was really annoyed with him, for twisting her
words like that.

           
“I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to
smile the offense away. “I apologize, that was careless phrasing. All I was
trying to ask, really, was do you think Grigor would disagree with the
protestors if they resorted to violence?”

           
Reluctantly, but having to be
honest, Susan said, “No, I don’t think so. I think he’d agree. Before you got
into the car, he even said so. When we were driving down toward the
demonstration, he said, ‘They’re right.’” She looked over at him again, seeing
concern and sympathy now on his face, and she told that face, “Grigor’s almost
never bitter, you know. He’s amazing that way. He has so much to be bitter
about.”

           
“Life is unfair,” he suggested.

           
Ignoring the coldness in that, “It
shouldn’t be,” she said.

           
He laughed, and shifted to face
forward again as he said, “How did you ever meet up with him, anyway? It’s so
unlikely.”

           
“More unlikely than you know.”

           
“Really?” He was ready to be
interested, amused. “How’s that?”

           
So she told him about the vodka
contest, and the trip to Moscow, and the completely unexpected cocktail party
thrown there by an organization she still didn’t know anything about, and the
strange litde waif-man who’d showed up and talked with her; and then the
round-half-the-world phone calls to her cousin at NYU Medical Center, and
getting Grigor’s passport, and permission for him to leave Russia, and his
strange jokesmith occupation since Chernobyl had killed him; and still doing
it, still faxing those unfunny topical jokes to the Russian Johnny Carson, even
while the disease ate away at his body like a child licking an ice cream cone.

           
Andy Harbinger asked questions here
and there, showing his interest, encouraging her to expand on the^story, and
half the trip went by as she talked. But finally there was nothing more to say,
not on that subject, and after a little silence he said thoughtfully, “It isn’t
just pity, though, is it? What you feel toward him.”

           
Pity? There were moments when this
man seemed very intuitive and sensitive, and yet other times when he was just
so bluntly wrong, almost cruel—life is unfair, it isn’t just pity— that it was
impossible to know how to react. Didn’t he know how dismissive he sounded, as
though life and emotion didn’t matter?

           
She really didn’t know how to answer
him, and the silence stretched between them, she unusually aware of her own
breathing, and then he said, much more softly, “I know what it really is,
Susan. You’re in love with him. And you wish you weren’t. And you hate that
wish.”

           
So here was the sensitive Andy
Harbinger back again. And he’d defined the problem, all right; she knew she
shouldn’t feel about Grigor the way she did, she shouldn’t lash herself so
securely to a man who would be dead within the year. But the very knowledge
made her guilty, as though she couldn’t forgive herself for even that much
dispassion, didn’t believe in her own right to see the pit she was falling
into. “I can’t talk about it,” she whispered, and it took all her effort to
concentrate on the driving, not just to close her eyes and let events take her
away.

           
“Stop the car,” he said.

           
“What?” She’d clenched the steering
wheel so hard her hands ached, but she couldn’t make them let go.

           
“Pull off the road and stop,” he
told her, his voice calm and authoritative, like a doctor in the examining
room. “Until you relax a little. Come on, Susan.”

           
She obeyed, her right leg made of
wood as she forced it off the accelerator and onto the brake. The car wobbled,
not entirely under her control, but slowed as she steered it off the pavement
and onto the rough dirt surface of the shoulder. It stopped and she shifted
into park, and then all at once she was trembling all over, but dry-eyed.
Staring hopelessly out at the hood, as aware of the traffic whizzing past on
her left as she was of the man listening to her on her right, every sense
painfully alert, she said, “It’s so awful, and it just keeps going on. I come
up every week, and every week he’s worse, and how much worse can it
be?
He gets thinner and thinner, and he
just...”

           
She shook her head and lifted her
aching hands from the steering wheel to gesture vaguely her despair.

           
“He doesn’t die,” Andy Harbinger
said.

           
“Oh, God.” She hadn’t talked about
this with anyone before, not even very much with herself; maybe what it needed
was a stranger, somebody she wasn’t already connected with in the usual web of
history and knowledge and opinions and shared experience. “I don’t
want
him to die,” she said, her throat
aching as though she had a terrible flu. “That’s the truth. If he could live
forever, if he could—well, not forever, nobody lives forever, but you know what
I mean.”

           
“A normal life span.”

           
“Yes.
Normal
. So I could—” There was no way to even think
this last thought, much less express it.

           
But Andy Harbinger knew, anyway,
what she couldn’t describe. “So you could decide for yourself,” he said gendy,
“whether or not you’d like to spend that normal life with him.”

           
“Oh, I suppose so.” She sighed
through her burning throat. “To be able to do it
all
normally, let it grow in a normal way instead of, instead of
this
water torture.
I hate
blaming
him, but I do, I can’t help
myself, and then I can’t stand myself, and then I don’t even want to come up
here any more, go through it all any more. We’re all so
trapped.
And then I say, Well, it won’t last much longer,’ and I
feel
satisfaction
.”

           
“The truth is,” he said, “it
actually won’t last much longer, no matter what you do or how you feel or whether
or not you feel guilty. It all doesn’t matter.”

           
“Which doesn’t help,” she said
stiffly, responding to that cold side of him again. “It doesn’t help because I
can’t just shrug and be indifferent, as though I was in one of those
cars
there, and this was an accident
here, and it wasn’t anybody I knew, and I just drove on by.”