the head again, and maybe try to find out what was going on when he did it. I was thinking of writing about him, about the eczema and everything, and . . . I just ended up staying and talking for a couple of days.â
âAs one does.â
âPlease, Katie. I donât know how to talk about this. Donât make it hard.â
Why not? I want to ask. Why shouldnât I make it hard? How often have you made things easy for me?
âSorry,â I say. âGo on.â
âHe doesnât say very much. He just looks at you with these piercing eyes and listens. Iâm not even sure whether heâs very bright. So it was me who did all the talking. He just sort of sucked it all out of me.â
âHe seems to have sucked everything out of you.â
âYes, he did. Every bad thing. I could almost see it coming out of me, like a black mist. I didnât realize I was so full of all this stuff.â
âAnd what makes him so special? How come he can do it and no one else could?â
âI donât know. He just . . . He just has this aura about him. Thisâll sound stupid, but . . . He touched my temples again, when I was talking to him, and I just felt this, this amazing warmth flood right through me, and he said it was pure love. And thatâs what it felt like. Do you understand how panicky it made me feel?â
I do understand, and not just because David is an unlikely candidate for a love bath. Love baths are . . . not us. Love baths are for the gullible, the credulous, the simple-minded, people whose brains have been decayed like teeth by soft drugs, people who read Tolkien and Erich Von Daniken when they are old enough to drive cars . . . letâs face it, people who donât have degrees in the arts or sciences. It is frightening enough just listening to Davidâs story, but to undergo the experience must have been terrifying.
âSo now what?â
âThe first thing I thought afterwards was that I had to do everything differently. Everything. What I have been doing isnât enough. Not enough for you. Not enough for me. Not enough for the kids, or the world, or . . . or . . .â
He grinds to a halt again, presumably because even though the laws of rhetoric and rhythm require a third noun, the reference to the world has left him with nowhere to go, unless he starts babbling about the universe.
âI still donât understand what you talked about for two days.â
âNeither do I. I donât know where the time went. I was amazed when he told me it was Tuesday afternoon. I talked about . . . about you a lot, and how I wasnât good to you. And I talked about my work, my writing, and I found myself saying that I was ashamed of it, and I hated it for its, I donât know, its unkindness, its lack of charity. Now and again he made me . . . God, Iâm embarrassed.â A sudden thought â it may or may not be a fear, Iâll have to think about that another time â comes to me.
âThereâs nothing funny going on, is there?â
âWhat do you mean?â
âYouâre not sleeping with him, are you?â
âNo,â he says, but blankly, with no sense of amusement or outrage or defensiveness. âNo, Iâm not. Itâs not like that.â
âSorry. So what did he make you do?â
âHe made me kneel on the floor and hold his hand.â
âAnd then what?â
âHe just asked me to meditate with him.â
âRight.â
David is not homophobic, although he has expressed occasional mystification at gay culture and practices (itâs the Cher thing that particularly bewilders him), but he is certainly heterosexual, right down to his baggy Y-fronts and his preference for Wrightâs Coal Tar soap. There is no ambiguity there, if you know what I mean. And yet it is easier for me to
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