Dying Inside

“You look awfully peaked though.”

“Just hungry, Jude.”

“I’ll fix that in five minutes.” Sounds of water running. She says something else; the sink drowns her out. I look idly around the bedroom. A man’s white shirt, much too big for Judith, hangs casually from the doorknob of the closet. On the night-table sit two fat textbooky-looking books, Analytical Neuroendocrinology and Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. Unlikely reading for Judith. Maybe she’s been hired to translate them into French. I observe that they’re brand new copies, though one book was published in 1964 and the other in 1969. Both by the same author: K. F. Silvestri, M.D., Ph.D.

“You going to medical school these days?” I ask.

“The books, you mean? They’re Karl’s.”

Karl? A new name. Dr. Karl F. Silvestri. I touch her mind lightly and extract his image: a tall hefty sober-faced man, broad shoulders, strong dimpled chin, flowing mane of graying hair. About fifty, I’d guess. Judith digs older men. While I raid her consciousness she tells me about him. Her current “friend,” the kid’s latest “uncle.” He’s someone very big at Columbia Medical Center, a real authority on the human body. Including her body, I assume. Newly divorced after a 25-year marriage. Uh-huh: she likes getting them on the rebound. He met her three weeks ago through a mutual friend, a psychoanalyst. They’ve only seen each other four or five times; he’s always busy, committee meetings at this hospital or that, seminars, consultations. It wasn’t very long ago that Judith told me she was between men, maybe off men altogether. Evidently not. It must be a serious affair if she’s trying to read his books. They look absolutely opaque to me, all charts and statistical tables and heavy Latinate terminology.

She comes out of the bathroom wearing a sleek purple pants-suit and the crystal earrings I gave her for her 29th birthday. “When I visit she always tries to register some little sentimental touch to tie us together; tonight it’s the earrings. There is a convalescent quality to our friendship nowadays, as we tiptoe gently through the garden where our old hatred lies buried. We embrace, a brother-sister hug. A pleasant perfume. “Hello,” she says. “I’m sorry I was such a mess when you walked in.”

“It’s my fault. I was too early. Anyway, you weren’t a mess at all.”

She leads me to the livingroom. She carries herself well. Judith is a handsome woman, tall and extremely slender, exotic-looking, with dark hair, dark complexion, sharp cheekbones. The slim sultry type. I suppose she’d be considered very sexy, except that there is something cruel about her thin lips and her quick glistening brown eyes, and that cruelty, which grows more intense in these years of divorce and discontent, turns people off. She’s had lovers by the dozen, by the gross, but not much love. You and me, sis, you and me. Chips off the old block.

She sets the table while I fix a drink for her, the usual, Pernod on the rocks. The kid, thank God, has already eaten; I hate having him at the table. He plays with his plastic thingy and favors me with occasional sour glares. Judith and I clink our cocktail glasses together, a stagy gesture. She produces a wintry smile. “Cheers,” we say. Cheers.

“Why don’t you move back downtown?” she asks. “We could see more of each other.”

“It’s cheap up there. Do we want to see more of each other?”

“Who else do we have?”

“You have Karl.”

“I don’t have him or anybody. Just my kid and my brother.”

I think of the time when I tried to murder her in her bassinet. She doesn’t know about that. “Are we really friends, Jude?”

“Now we are. At last.”

“We haven’t exactly been fond of each other all these years.”

“People change, Duv. They grow up. I was dumb, a real shithead, so wrapped up in myself that I couldn’t give anything but hate to anybody around me. That’s over now. If you don’t believe me, look into my head and see.”

“You don’t want me poking around in there.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “Take a good look and see if I haven’t changed toward you.”

“No. I’d rather not.” I deal myself another two ounces of rum. The hand shakes a little. “Shouldn’t you check the spaghetti sauce? Maybe it’s boiling over.”

“Let it boil. I haven’t finished my drink. Duv, are you still having trouble? With your power, I mean.”

“Yes. Still. Worse than ever.”

“What do you think is happening?”

I shrug. Insouciant old me. “I’m losing it, that’s all. It’s like hair, I suppose. A lot of it when you’re young, then less and less, and finally none. Fuck it. It never did me any good anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Show me any good it did me, Jude.”

“It made you someone special. It made you unique. When everything else went wrong for you, you could always fall back on that, the knowledge that you could go into minds, that you could see the unseeable, that you could get close to people’s souls. A gift from God.”

“A useless gift. Except if I’d gone into the sideshow business.”