Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers Page A

later, I said she should go and see a doctor.
    ‘I could tell she wasn’t sure about the idea, but she went along. And the doctor says to her to go and see this other guy, an analyst. So I take her to see this analyst, hoping that
everything’ll work itself out. She’s in there for an hour or so and comes out like she’s been sparring with Max Schmeling. On the way home she tells me that she talked for all
that time, but nothing seemed to make any sense. And then she starts to laugh. She laughs and says, “You know what this crazy man wants me to do? What’s going to fix my broken head? You
ready for this, Charlie? Running!” She starts laughing even more. “All this time and all I needed was to do myself some jogging!”
    ‘I went to see the shrink. He was a tall woolly headed guy. Still, he looked kind enough. Not a crank at least. I waited for him to finish his meetings then followed him out to the parking
lot. I told him what was happening and if there was anything I should be doing. He looked at me for a time and said all that usual stuff about patient confidentiality. Then he held my shoulder and
said, “Get her running.” I thought maybe it was time to get a different analyst.
    ‘But after I left him, I thought maybe it was worth a shot. So I got her a treadmill and set it up in the gym. She looked at me like I was insane. “Charlie,” she said to me,
“that guy’s crazy. Running isn’t going to make me any better.” I just told her to do it for me. I put the machine in the corner of the gym so she could watch me as she ran
and took her down to a specialist running store and bought her running pants and some shoes. I think she knew how hard it was for me too.
    ‘For the first two days I was treading on eggshells around her. Her sadness was filling up the apartment. It was like it was drowning us both. But she put on the jogging suit and the shoes
and did two miles the first day, two miles the second, then three miles on the third. On the fourth day we could feel it come back. It was like a homecoming.
    ‘“That doctor ain’t so crazy after all,” I said. And she kissed me like she had that first time.
    ‘Every day she’d come home from work, change and come join me in the gym. She’d run for as long as I’d train, then we’d have dinner. It was like the old times
again. It was perfect.’
    He was shaking slightly now.
    ‘Feels like I’ve been talking for ever.’ He finished his drink then went to the kitchen and filled up a kettle for coffee.
    ‘It was like that for a few months,’ he went on. ‘Better than ever. Then Leona started to lose weight. At first it was gradual, but then it was hard to ignore. I reckon she
dropped maybe twenty-four pounds in about one month. I couldn’t understand it; but she was so happy there wasn’t any point in saying anything. She was eating, I knew that because I was
watching her. In fact she was eating all the time. I started putting protein supplements in her food, but it wasn’t doing any good. She just got thinner and thinner. She was wasting away in
front of me, but she wouldn’t have me call a doctor. “Charlie,” she’d say, “I’m fine, honey. You always liked your fighters lean, didn’t you?”
    ‘The happiness of those months disappeared as quick as her chest and her ass. When she wasn’t running she was thinking about it. I could tell. It’s like when fighters have been
hit so hard they can’t hear, but they’re still nodding their heads, pretending they understand the instructions.
    ‘One night I woke up. It was three-thirty in the morning and Leona wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t in the apartment either so I unlocked the door and went down into the gym. The
lights were off, but I could hear a noise inside. I called out and heard this scraping, falling sound. I pushed on the light and Leona was lying in a heap by the running machine. I ran over to her
and scooped her up, then called for an ambulance. She was