“That’s what makes the phenomenon of Linda so hard to believe-that she could have emerged from that mess of normal, grubby people. Her father must have been an unusual person. Or else she’s a throwback to something in the remote family past…you never know. She’s always refused to let me look up her genealogy. Not that it matters, of course, but I was curious, strictly from a scientific point of view.

“So, she loved her father and hated her mother; nice, straightforward Oedipus complex. And she married me because I was a good father figure, older, successful, supportive. Christ, Mike, you don’t need to nod at me; I know all this, I’ve been over it, to myself and with professionals, a dozen times. But the reason why psychiatry fails to satisfy me is because it invents its own data. You act in a particular way because you hate your father. You admit you hate him-fine and dandy. You say you don’t hate him, you really love him? You’re kidding yourself, buddy, because I know better; you wouldn’t be acting this way if you loved him. You hate him. But, in a way, you love him, too, because of that thing called ambivalence. What good is that sort of thing to me, Mike? It gives too many answers.”

He waited. This time he wanted a response.

Michael didn’t know what to say. He never did know, when people talked this way. What do you say to a man who has cut his heart out and put it on the table in front of you? “Nice, well-shaped specimen. There seems to be a hole in it, right here…”

“It doesn’t give simple answers,” he said carefully.

“The question is simple.”

“Is it really?”

“Why does my wife hate me?”

Michael made an impatient movement.

“Any question can be stated in simple terms. ‘Why do men fight wars?’ ‘If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we solve the problem of poverty?’ ‘God is good; how can He permit evil?’ That sort of simplicity is a semantic trick. You don’t alter the complex structure of the problem by reducing it to basic English.”

Gordon did not reply, and for some minutes the two men sat in silence, listening to the hiss of the dying fire. That sound, and Gordon’s soft breathing, were the only sounds in the room. Michael realized that it must be very late. He was conscious of a deep fatigue-the sodden, futile exhaustion that resulted from wallowing in other people’s emotional troubles. Too much god-damned empathy, he thought sourly. He thought also of the comfortable guest room upstairs, with its nice, soft mattress and its well-placed reading light. But he couldn’t leave, not while Gordon wanted an audience. And there was something else that had to be said.

“Gordon.”

“Hmmm?” Gordon stirred; he looked as if he had come back from a great distance.

“I’m wondering. Whether I should go ahead with this project.”

“What do you mean?” The confessional was closed; Gordon’s dark eyes were searching.

“Probing the emotional problems of a man who’s been dead for a century is one thing. Obviously I can’t lacerate your private emotions in that way. And I’m not sure that I can do anything worthwhile with your life without considering them, not any longer.”

“I wondered too. Whether you’d say that.”

Gordon stood up, stretching like a big cat. Michael noted the smooth play of muscle and the lean lines of his body, and a fleeting thought ran through his mind: I’d hate to tangle with him, even if he is forty.

“Another drink?” Gordon asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll bet you’re beat. You can go to bed in a minute, Mike. I appreciate all this… But first I want to make a confession, and a request.”

“You want me to go ahead with the biography.”

“Yes.”

“And the confession?”

“I hate to admit it, it’s so childish.” Gordon didn’t look embarrassed; hands in his pockets, he stood gazing down at Michael with a faint smile. “But you are a perceptive devil, Mike. I wasn’t aware of this, consciously; but I guess one of the reasons why I allowed this project to get underway was that I hoped you might come up with some burst of insight into my problem. Something I can’t see because I’m too close to it.”

“Something the best professionals can’t see either?”

“I told you my misgivings about psychiatry. And even if the head shrinkers could help, Linda won’t let them. She’s refused even to see a neurologist.”

“You overwhelm me,” Michael said helplessly. He meant it literally; he felt as if Randolph had just dumped a load of bricks on him. He was flattened and breathless under the heap of responsibility. He was also annoyed. It was too much to ask of any man, much less a poor feeble writer.

“No, no, don’t feel that way. I don’t expect a thing. I just…hope. Look, Mike, I understand your scruples and your doubts, completely. Try it. Just try it. Work on the book for a couple of weeks, a month, see how it goes. Then we’ll talk again.”

“Okay.”

Michael stood up. He felt stiff and queasy and in no mood to argue.

“We’ll leave it that way,” he said. “Damn it, Gordon, I can’t help but feel that you’re exaggerating. Your wife doesn’t hate you.”

“No?” They faced one another across the hearthrug. Gordon, hands still in his pockets, rocked gently back and forth as if limbering up for a fight. His eyes were brilliant. “Six months ago she tried to kill me.”

III

Rain fell, heavily enough to keep the windshield wipers busy and make the oily surface of the highway dangerously slick. The weekend drivers were pouring back into the city. Michael had to pay close attention to his driving. A long night’s sleep had left him oddly unrefreshed; he had started out tired, and two hours on one of the nation’s most expensive death traps didn’t exactly help. By the time he reached his apartment he could barely drag himself upstairs. There were four flights of stairs. The old building had no elevator.

After the Randolph mansion, his two rooms and kitchenette should have looked grubby and plebeian, but Michael heaved an involuntary sigh of pleasure at the sight of his worn rugs and tattered upholstery. His desk was overflowing with unfinished work. He had left the dishes in the sink. Even so, the place felt warm and cozy compared to the atmosphere of the big handsome house in the country.

He selected two cans, more or less at random, from the collection on the kitchen shelves, and started to heat up the contents. Napoleon had been and gone; his dish on the floor was empty, but he was nowhere in sight. The kitchen window was open its usual three inches. It still amazed Michael that a cat the size of Napoleon, the scarred, muscled terror of the alleys, could get through an opening that narrow, but he had seen him do it often enough, sometimes with the speed and accuracy of a rocket.

Once he had tried shutting Napoleon in the apartment while he was away for the weekend. Napoleon had expressed his opinion of that with his usual economy of effort; he had left neat piles of the said opinions every few feet down the hall, through the living room, culminating, in the most impressive pile of all, in the center of Michael’s unmade bed. Michael hadn’t even bothered to speak to him about it. He was only grateful to Napoleon for skipping his desk. After that he left the window slightly open and took his chances with burglars. A closed window wouldn’t deter anyone who really wanted to get in. There wasn’t anything in the place worth stealing anyhow.

When the soup was hot, he carried the pan into the living room and sat down, putting his feet up on the coffee table, which bore the marks of other such moments of relaxation. He ate out of the pan, remembering, with a wry smile, the smooth, unobtrusive service of the breakfast he had eaten that morning, complete with butler and antique silver chafing dishes. Then his smile faded into an even wrier frown, as the thoughts he had successfully avoided all day forced their way into his consciousness.