“I am sure she really meant that last, but her blessing seemed to have no great warmth, and the sunniness of her letter was marred somehow — here we are, back to that. The sunshine in her letter was like sunshine on a day when you see those mackerel-scale clouds that mean it’s going to rain like hell soon.
“All this good news — hearts and dog and cleaning woman and new novel — and yet she was too intelligent to really believe he was getting well again… or so I believed, even in my own fog. Reg had been exhibiting symptoms of psychosis. Psychosis is like lung cancer in one way — neither one of them clears up on its own, although both cancer patients and lunatics may have their good days.
“May I borrow another cigarette, dear?”
The writer’s wife gave him one.
“After all,” he resumed, bringing out the Ronson, “the signs of his idee fixe were all around her. No phone; no electricity. He’d put Reynolds Wrap over all of the switchplates. He was putting food in his typewriter as regularly as he put it into the new puppy’s dish. The students next door thought he was a great guy, but the students next door didn’t see Reg putting on rubber gloves to pick up the newspaper off the front stoop in the morning because of his radiation fears. They didn’t hear him moaning in his sleep, or have to soothe him when he woke up screaming with dreadful nightmares he couldn’t remember.
“You, my dear” — he turned toward the writer’s wife — “have been wondering why she stuck with him.
Although you haven’t said as much, it’s been on your mind. Am I right?”
She nodded.
“Yes. And I’m not going to offer a long motivational thesis — the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you only need to say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about the why.
Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway… particularly the ones who say they do.
“But in terms of Jane Thorpe’s own selective perception, things had gotten one hell of a lot better. She interviewed a middle-aged black woman about the cleaning job, and brought herself to speak as frankly as she could about her husband’s idiosyncrasies. The woman, Gertrude Rulin by name, laughed and said she’d done for people who were a whole lot stranger. Jane spent the first week of the Rulin woman’s employ pretty much the way she’d spent that first visit with the young people next door — waiting for some crazy outburst. But Reg charmed her as completely as he’d charmed the kids, talking to her about her church work, her husband, and her youngest son, Jimmy, who, according to Gertrude, made Dennis the Menace look like the biggest bore in the first grade. She’d had eleven children in all, but there was a nine-year gap between Jimmy and his next oldest sib. He made things hard on her.
“Reg seemed to be getting well… at least, if you looked at things a certain way he did. But he was just as crazy as ever, of course, and so was I. Madness may well be a sort of flexible bullet, but any ballistics expert worth his salt will tell you no two bullets are exactly the same. Reg’s one letter to me talked a little bit about his new novel, and then passed directly to Fornits. Fornits in general, Rackne in particular. He speculated on whether they actually wanted to kill Fornits, or — he thought this more likely — capture them alive and study them. He closed by saying, ‘Both my appetite and my outlook on life have improved immeasurably since we
began our correspondence, Henry. Appreciate it all. Affectionately yours, Reg.’ And a P.S. below inquiring casually if an illustrator had been assigned to do his story. That caused a guilty pang or two and a quick trip to the liquor cabinet on my part.
“Reg was into Fornits; I was into wires.
“My answering letter mentioned Fornits only in passing — by then I really was humoring the man, at least on that subject; an elf with my mother’s maiden name and my own bad spelling habits didn’t interest me a whole hell of a lot.