Kind Stranger
Just Dorrie and Statius together
[Outtake from the New Confederacy stories. These stories don’t have a publisher yet; everyone hates them. But I’m thinking about love so much lately — what other subject is there? — and I just adore how Statius takes Dorrie’s drowning-in-love problem as a real metaphysical conundrum rather than a mental health issue. I think he’s right, and I like how he talks her through it, and if anyone else needs Statius-energy in your life right now, you’re very much welcome. We should all look to metaphysics rather than pop psychology to think through our problems. Can I get an amen?]
“You couldn’t get pregnant, I suppose?”
“Not likely. Maybe.”
July 2044. Still a summer of storms. Midafternoon brought thunder and lightning, plenty of noise and just enough rain to raise the humidity without cooling the air. Now the night closed in, hot and clammy.
Statius hadn’t changed his approach to conversation now that Dorrie had started to understand how it worked. Instead, he used indirection to add layers of meaning, never slowing down for her if she missed anything, daring and expecting her to keep up.
Now, for instance, he meant that he knew quite well Dorrie could become pregnant, or might be pregnant now, but he would leave uncontested the fiction that it wasn’t possible as long as she wanted him to.
She appreciated that, but did not want to discuss it or think too closely about it.
She had already taken pills to end two pregnancies. She had also had a few miscarriages. Her periods had gotten very strange — continuous sometimes, then skipping. She never knew when she might be pregnant. She thought she might be nearing menopause, and hoped so. Despite her work with the women’s health service, she had not squared her mind up to the fact that she’d been pregnant for the better part of a year, never getting more than two or three weeks along.
Rain. The fan turned. Statius stroked Dorrie’s hair. “I do think chastity’s best, if people can manage it.”
Dorrie started to answer and found that her lips were trembling. Then her hand. Both hands. Then she was choking for breath, feeling the heavy muscles of her legs lock out. Her throat seemed to close and she panicked. Stop, she told herself, and it worked, but as the tension went out of her body she started crying. Big choking sobs that came out of nowhere, reasonless, soaking her t-shirt.
“My dear girl, my sweet mountain laurel, what is this? You never felt this way before, did you?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know.
“All right, it’s okay. See, here’s my hand. Just hold on. That’s right.” After 15 or 20 minutes he turned up the light. “What a mess, what silliness. Here.”
He reached for his handkerchief on the bedside table — even naked, Dorrie thought, amused despite herself, he was never more than an arm’s length from a handkerchief.
“Blow your nose, you’ll feel better. See, look, what’s this?”
She laughed, choking a little. “Snot and blubber.”
“Snot and blubber. What are tears, what are these bodies, what’s sex, even? A little nonsense, a little snot and blubber and suchlike. You’re breaking your heart over nothing, over a category error.”
She had cried herself into a fever.
“Go get something to drink.”
“Don’t want anything,” she said.
“I’m hot. I want water. Go on.”
She fetched a tumbler of ice water. Statius stripped off the sweaty sheets and pillowcases and put on fresh ones.
“Oh, that’s good,” he said, taking a drink of water and setting the tumbler down.
“Yes, it must be hard work, being pined for … ”
“Yes, exhausting — no tickling, it’s too hot — stop it, you heathen!” Dorrie tickled Statius, who was vulnerable to tickling, right off the bed.
“Ice, then?” She scooped a handful out of the tumbler.
“No ice — I’m warning you — woman, you better get away from my ass! — Drop it now, drop it.”
This time the fight ended up with Dorrie flat on her face on the bed while Statius pinned her arm chicken-wing behind her.
“You’re hurting me.”
“Then drop the ice.”
“Certainly not — why a category error?”
“Drop the ice and I’ll tell you.”
She dropped the ice and they composed themselves again, now much happier. She asked: “Why a category error?”
“Oh — because one pines for things not present, and here you are pining for something you have. Didn’t this conversation start with how much sex we were having and whether you were likely to get pregnant? It’s nonsense to say you pine for something you have in excess.” He handed her the tumbler and she took a drink. “And also, because you’re pining for sex; that’s impossible, one lusts for sex, one pines for home or a missing loved one or some such. A real good, not a bodily urge. You’re pining for something that’s un-pine-able; again, that’s nonsense.” He slid down onto his pillow. “I’ll leave it for the student to draw a conclusion.”
“That I’m pining for something else, of course.”
“Of course. But you couldn’t see it — ”
“Because you’re my whole world. I mean you, like this, your smell, touch, the grain of your voice, being together — there is nothing else.” She was too elated just now to feel it, but the feeling was all around her, closing in. “I don’t know how to make you understand. This is the only real thing. The rest is darkness and emptiness for miles in every direction, for ever and ever.”
“Do you believe in souls?”
“Too tired for metaphysics, try me next time.”
“Well, then — and answer me quickly — do you believe you have a soul?”
“No.”
“Next question, ma’am. Do you believe I have soul? No thinking about it.”
“Yes, of course, yes.”
They frowned at each other. “That’s not possible, is it?” Dorrie asked. “But I think I do feel that way.”
“It’s certainly possible to feel nonsense things, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But how odd. How terrible and how odd. I feel like you’re real and I’m not.”
He pondered this for a while. “Today, just after sunset, I came into the front room and you were at the bookcase, putting away a book, I think. And the room was full of a silver light. That light is you. Not this body — ” he took her wrist — “which is also without flaw, but that light. I’m afraid I can’t explain any better than you can your feelings. But if I go back down the hall, to the kitchen say, I can close my eyes and think about it and know right where you’re standing. And if I went five miles away, it might take longer, but I could still do it.” He felt her wrist bones, then the bones on the back of her hand. “That’s not a metaphor; it’s as best as I can do to describe what I perceive as plain fact.”
“I do understand. I just don’t see it.”
“Dorrie, this is important. I don’t want to instruct you. You’ll try to do whatever I say just because I said it, and I think we have enough of that already. May I talk to you as if I was a kind stranger who has your best interest at heart?”
She nodded and slid down the pillows to join him.
“Think about yourself a little bit. Be in yourself, for yourself. Enjoy the luminous clarity of your own thoughts — haven’t they been companion enough for you before?” He stroked her hair, heavy slow pressure. “Take your husband for granted sometimes. You don’t have to be wondering all the time: Is he good? Is he evil? Do I love him so much I’ll drive him away? If I stay, am I betraying everything I believe in?”
She laughed and sniffled.
“You see, I do know,” he said. “All these things will be answered by the outcome of events. There’s no use worrying about them. You’re breaking your own heart for no reason. I’m with you always — at all times, in all conditions, good, evil, sleeping, waking, near, far, anything you can imagine or name.”
“I told you that one time,” she said sleepily. A breeze came through the window, cool enough they got under the blanket. “I wrote it in a letter.”
“Make me your religion if you have no other. Yes, and I kept your words for you, and now I can share them back with you when you need them.”
The rain picked up.
“Do you believe in God?” Dorrie asked. She had asked that before, she remembered, the night Jerome Pettifleur died. Statius had avoided the question, suggesting instead that they hang out the seventh-floor windows of the old office building. Crazy dares had been their way out of difficult conversations back then.
Tonight, though, he slid his hand down from Dorrie’s head to take her hand.
“Don’t reckon we exist like this by chance.” He now sounded very north Georgia — florid, reasonable, a tad venomous. “You don’t think folks would have ended up like this without an intelligent principle of malice pulling the strings?”
He went on more seriously: “But then I think, how is it that I am created with a heart to love you, and you are created for my heart to love, and both sprang into my awareness at the same instant? Like an eye and its reflection, like music and the ear that hears.”