The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [138]
He stopped at Raparound to inform Anne the first night he left Robin with Gretchen. The waitress seemed dubious.
“You haven’t seen her,” he insisted. “I can hardly believe it myself, but it’s real.”
“I could go over once or twice and look in on them.”
“She’d know why you were doing it.”
“Maybe I’d better not, then.”
“The thing is, I don’t think she’d mind. She really has herself together.”
Anne laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so happy for you, Pete.”
“Not as happy as I am,” he said.
But was he happy?
There were irritating moments when it seemed to him that he was not. He could not understand these moments, did not know what might be causing them.
And then he dreamed the dream.
It was more perfectly detailed than most of his dreams. In it, he returned home from an evening at the theater with Gretchen. She had come to watch the show while he lit it. They stopped for a bite of food on the way home, then returned to the apartment, dismissed the baby, sitter, and made sure that Robin was sound asleep.
Then he went into the kitchen and picked up a sharp knife. She asked him what the knife was for but he did not answer. Instead he used it to cut a length of cord from the Venetian blinds. She asked him what the cord was for, and again he made no response.
He positioned a chair beneath the lighting fixture and told her to take off all her clothes. She did so, asking him if he was going to make love to her. He did not answer. When she was naked he told her to stand on the chair. She asked why, and again he failed to answer, and she obediently mounted the chair.
As he wrapped the cord first around her neck and then around the fixture, she asked him very reasonably why he was going to kill her this way. This time he tried to answer but could not form the words. He got down from the chair, and she told him that it was all right, that she could understand the way he felt, that he should not feel bad about it. He tugged the chair out from under her and watched in fascination as she danced on air. The twitching of her legs slowed, then stopped. He turned from her, and in the open doorway stood everyone he had ever known in his life. Their fingers pointed at him, and just then the dream ended and he was awake.
The meaning of the dream was too hideously obvious to him. Dreams should form themselves in subtle symbols, he thought, so that one would not have to bear the brunt of their awful truth.
He wanted her dead. He had wanted her dead when she was insane, and now, although she had recovered, he still wished for the liberation her death would bring him. He did not love her, sane or mad; sane or mad he did not want her.
His immediate impulse was to leave. He loved the child, wanted to be close to the child, but with Gretchen sane and functioning as a capable mother he no longer had an overwhelming responsibility to the child. All he had to do was pack up and go, and surely it was a greater kindness to do that than to go on living with a woman you’d rather see dead.
But if he left, Gretchen would probably go mad again. He could not make himself believe otherwise. And so if he left, Robin would be without him and without an adequate mother at the same time, and—
And he realized, now, why it occasionally had seemed to him that he was not happy.
It was hard for him to know just when he began to suspect that she was not sane after all. More than that—it was impossible to know, because when the thoughts began to come, he brushed them impatiently away. Once again, he was sure, the wish had fathered the thought. It was unthinkable that he not love her if she