Duane's Depressed

by Larry McMurtry

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Now do you see why I said I had crossed the line?” she asked. “You hadn’t been a patient in such a long time that I wavered and asked you to join the reading group for one evening. But I was wrong. You still were a patient, and I should have left it at that.”

  “I think it would have come to the same thing, sooner or later,” Duane said.

  “No, I disagree,” Honor said. “Context very often determines not only how things happen but what happens. In this office I’m your doctor. That may not be what you want, but I think you respect it. What you did last night, in a different context, was normal. We were sharing a friendly moment, you were attracted, you tried to kiss me. It’s not unheard of. Jake Lawton tried to kiss me in the barn this morning, for that matter.”

  Duane wasn’t surprised. He had seen the doctor eyeing Honor, the night before.

  “What’d you do?” he asked.

  “I socked the old fart in the kisser—cut my knuckle on his tooth,” Honor said. She held her hand in front of his face—there was a small cut on the knuckle of her middle finger.

  “It wasn’t the first time Jake’s misbehaved,” she added. “That’s why I felt I had to be emphatic—not to mention that I was mad. But you were very nice. I don’t expect to have to slug you and I would be sorry to see you abandon your therapy just because you’ve run into a little rejection. That would be smallminded, and I don’t think you are small-minded, Duane.”

  Duane didn’t immediately answer. He lay on the couch, looking at the tall green plant in the corner of the room. He wished Honor would talk some more. He liked the sound of her voice, and the reasonableness and courtesy of what she said. He felt she liked him and believed she could help him. Now she was asking to be allowed that opportunity. Everything she said was reasonable. He was sixty-four. He had had a sex life, he thought a fairly good one. Was he really ready to put Honor out of his life because he couldn’t sleep with her?

  Still, there were his feelings, and they were strong enough to have kept him awake most of the night.

  “I think I can do this but it’s tricky,” he said. “Maybe too tricky.”

  “And it’s because you’re in love with me that you think it might be too tricky?” she asked.

  “I am in love with you and that’s going to make it tricky,” he said.

  “All right, so it’s tricky,” Honor said. “Had you rather deal with something that’s legitimately tricky, or would you rather just ride your bicycle, sit in your cabin, walk your roads, and be bored for the rest of your life?”

  Duane didn’t answer. He felt tired and confused.

  “I don’t think this feeling arose just because I invited you to a garden party,” Honor said. “I hadn’t seen you for over a year. If you’re in love with me, when did it start?”

  “Way back,” Duane said.

  But when he tried to think exactly when he had begun to suspect he might be in love with Honor Carmichael he could not really fix a date. He remembered that he had had a sexual dream, and that Honor was the woman in it. But he didn’t want to talk about that with the doctor. In his mind he grew more and more confused about how to think about the woman sitting behind him. In his mind he thought of her as Honor, but she was also Dr. Carmichael. He didn’t know whether it was proper to be on a first-name basis with your psychiatrist. She had not invited him to call her Honor. But Honor was how he thought of her—he thought it was a lovely name, and one that fit her well.

  “Would you try to back up just a bit?” she asked. “Let’s wind the reel backwards until we reach a time when you weren’t in love with me. Will you try to do that?”

  “All right,” he said.

  “You were married—would you say happily?” she asked.

  “Happily,” he said.

  “Well, but even so you were sufficiently depressed that you walked off and began to live in your cabin,” Honor said. “Yet as I recall you didn’t seem to regard this as a criticism of your marriage. It reflected a more general dissatisfaction, right?”

  Duane began to feel very tired. The lassitude that had hit him the first few times he had a therapy session with Honor suddenly came over him. Why was the doctor talking about the past, talking about his marriage, trying to pinpoint the time when he had fallen in love with her? Probably she didn’t take the fact that he was in love with her seriously at all. Many of her male patients probably fell in love with her, or thought they did.

  From overwhelming lassitude Duane sank into hopelessness. He regretted ever coming to Wichita Falls to keep the appointment. Why hadn’t he just got on an airplane and flown away? Why did he have to think about his marriage? He wanted to forget Karla, so he wouldn’t miss her. Now he would have to learn to forget Honor as well. If he could forget her, then he wouldn’t yearn for her and be unhappy all day.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “I can’t do this. I should have gone right on to Egypt. I started . . . to leave . . .”

  Then his lungs seemed to swell, his eyes to tear up. A storm rose in him—it arrived before he could move. He made a motion to get up from the couch but he was too tired, and then he was crying—crying, crying, crying. He was silent about it, but his chest heaved and tears poured out of his eyes, ran down his cheeks and down his neck, wet his collar. He cried so hard that it seemed as if his whole body was crying, that tears were coming out of his pores. It was as if all the sadnesses he had ever felt, and those he had not known he was feeling, had suddenly turned to water, had become tears, a bath of tears, a waterfall of tears, pouring out of him and, it seemed to him, pouring on him.

  In the midst of his crying he tried to get up and leave but Honor Carmichael calmly put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down.

  “No . . . no . . . don’t fight it,” she said. “You’ve probably been fighting this since your father died, and that’s a long time. Now you need to let it come. Just lay there and cry.”

  Duane obeyed—he had no control over the flood of tears. The whole front of his shirt was wet. When he put his hands to his face it was like putting them in a stream.

  “It’s all right, Duane,” Honor said. “Just let it come.”

  He cried, he sighed. Once he stopped and felt the tear storm was over, but then started crying again. He had no idea how long he had been crying. Surely he should try and stop—Honor had other patients. His hour must be up.

  When he tried to say that, Honor just said, “Shush. You don’t have to leave. Nobody’s coming. Just cry until you stop.”

  At first she offered him Kleenex, but when she saw that tissues were going to be inadequate she stepped into the bathroom and got him a small hand towel.

  “You look like you’ve been in a washing machine,” she said. “I think I better loan you a T-shirt.”

  “I’ll dry when I go outside,” Duane said. “It’s hot.”

  “I had a feeling this storm might break,” Honor said. “That’s why I gave you the last appointment of the day.”

  Duane sat up and looked at her gratefully.

  “How could you know it was coming?” he asked. “I’ve never done nothing like this. Not when my wife died. Not when my mother died.”

  “Psychiatrists don’t know everything, but we do know some things,” Honor said. She wasn’t bragging. She just stated it as she would state a plain fact.

  “I better go home,” Duane said. “I’m weak as a kitten.”

  “If that’s true, how do you expect to get home?” Honor asked. “I’m not sure it’s safe for you to be cycling around right now.”

  Duane didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure, himself, that he could ride home.

  “Here,” Honor said, handing him his passport.

  “But how’d you get it?” he asked.

  “Duane, your whole shirt is soaked,” she said. “I slipped it out of your pocket to keep it from getting wet.”

  Rather somberly she walked him to the door of her house. When Nina started
to say something Honor stopped her with a look.

  “You’re a tricky one,” she said, when they were outside, standing on the sidewalk, not far from the spot where, just last evening, he had tried to kiss her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had your passport with you,” she said. “You meant to slip away to Egypt and give me no chance. That possibility occurred to me last night. I was actually a little surprised when you showed up today.”

  “Give you no chance to what?” he asked.

  “No chance to help you understand why you’re sad,” Honor said. “Please don’t do that. Don’t slip away just yet. Those pyramids have been there a long time. They can wait, but this can’t. Please come back tomorrow. It would be good if you could at least give me a few more days.”

  Duane didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to lie to her, and yet, at that moment, he didn’t know if he would ever come back to her house.

  “I’ll come tomorrow if I can,” he said, finally.

  “Okay, I’ll take that,” Honor said. “Be careful now. Don’t get run over. Watch out for trucks.”

  22

  DUANE HAD NOT BEEN EXAGGERATING much when he said he was weak as a kitten. He had hardly any strength in his legs and had barely ridden out of sight before he came within an inch or two of doing what Honor had warned him not to do. He drifted into a turn and was almost hit by a teenager barreling up the street in a black pickup. The teenager honked, swerved, and yelled “Motherfucker!” at him. When the pickup passed, Duane pulled up on the sidewalk and got off the bike. If he couldn’t tune in enough to at least see pickups on the street, then he had better not ride at all.

  Besides, he had a sharp pain in his side, in a place where he had never had a pain before. He wondered if, in his violent crying jag, he could have broken a rib. He had heard of people coughing so hard they broke ribs, but he had never heard of anyone breaking a rib crying.

  But the pain was sharp, he felt very weak, and, though it seemed impossible that he could have any more tears in him, he felt like crying again. There was no question of riding eighteen miles to his cabin—fortunately there was a strip of motels only a few hundred yards up the way. Afraid to get back on his bike, he pushed it to the nearest motel, got a room, and fell on the bed, feeling as tired as he had ever been in his life.

  Sometime in the night he woke from a dream in which he and Karla were drifting in a canoe, watching a small plane fly over the river they were on. The plane sounded like a lawn mower. He went back to sleep only to have the screech of air brakes wake him. The motel was on a crosstown throughway, near the northernmost traffic light in Wichita Falls. Once through that light the big trucks could pour on up the highway, unchecked, to Oklahoma City or St. Louis. Some trucker had considered running the last light, but then had thought better of it and hit his brakes.

  Duane opened the curtain a little and sat at the foot of the bed, watching the big trucks pass. In young manhood, right after he got out of the army, Duane had considered being a long-haul trucker. It seemed a romantic life, and the pay was good—at least it was if you put the pedal to the metal and kept rolling. Once or twice he had gone on cattle truck runs to South Dakota, running night and day from Thalia to Sioux Falls.

  But then Karla came along and he gave no more thought to the trucking life.

  He watched the big trucks pour through Wichita Falls for an hour, as the traffic light blinked red and green and yellow. There was never an end to trucks. They rolled north from the Gulf Coast, from Houston and Dallas, from Mexico. To amuse himself he counted trucks for a while—one hundred passed his motel in less than fifteen minutes, huge trucks, rimmed with lights, their cabs vast as castles. There were hundreds of thousands of trucks, rambling over the prairies where the buffalo had once been.

  Duane had an impulse just to step out of his room, stick out his thumb, and get in with the first trucker who offered him a ride. Egypt seemed like a fantasy, but the trucks passing through Wichita Falls were real, and the truckers mostly country boys, men not unlike himself. He had always felt at home with truckers. Even the fact that he had only biking clothes presented no huge problem. Truckers were tolerant of eccentrics, up to a point, and he was country born, whatever clothes he wore. Besides, he had ten thousand dollars in his pocket—he could buy some Western duds at some Wal-Mart or Kmart up the road.

  What kept him in the room was the fact that he felt too drained to move, and wasn’t even sure that he was done with the draining. He still felt tearful. Long ago, if one of the children burst into tears for no apparent reason, Karla would look at them and say, “Who pushed your cry button?”

  Something had pushed his cry button, and was still pushing it. What had occurred in the doctor’s office had been a flash flood, sweeping all his defenses before it; now he felt empty and helpless. If Honor Carmichael thought she understood what had made him so sad, that was fine—he himself didn’t understand it or even have the energy to worry about understanding it. A flood had come and swept him away, and he—insofar as he was a personality—was still away. He didn’t reject hitchhiking because of his decision not to ride in motorized vehicles any more—he rejected it because he was too weak to walk to the bathroom and pee.

  When the sky reddened and he saw the new sun bracketed by the buildings of downtown Wichita Falls, he walked two blocks to a convenience store and bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and shaving cream. He was back at the motel before he realized he didn’t have a comb. When he showered he just patted his wet hair down as best he could.

  Then he lay on the bed in his room, the television off, lulled by the whirr of the air conditioner. It occurred to him that he hadn’t gone home to water his garden, a thought that produced only a slight stirring of guilt: it was the first day he had missed, in all the time he had been attending to the garden.

  When he got ready to pedal over to Honor’s office for his appointment he had a nagging sense that something was missing—some component that he usually took to their meetings was not there. He had just turned onto the street where Honor lived and worked when he realized what the missing component was: it was that thing called love. He wasn’t in love with Honor Carmichael anymore. The flash flood of tears that had swept his personality away had taken all romantic feeling with it.

  If Duane had had more energy he would have been astonished by such a realization. A sense of being in love with Honor had been the one feeling that had been constant for the last year. Only the day before, on his way to see her, he had been so agitated by love that he could hardly steer his bicycle. So it had been almost from the first time he had gone to see her. Her image, her way of being, her womanliness had distracted him for more than a year. Honor Carmichael had been his focus almost from the first time he had met her—because of her, he had had foolish thoughts, nursed foolish hopes; and yet now, headed for her house, he felt perfectly calm. He had even recovered his physical stability—he didn’t steer his bicycle in the direction of any pickups. His heart wasn’t pounding; he didn’t hyperventilate as he walked up to her door. He was purged of sentiment, free from the distracting rhythm of anticipation and anxiety that he had usually felt at the prospect of seeing her.

  When he stepped into her office he thought he saw some anxiety in her face; no doubt he had worried her with his violent tear storm. But then, as soon as he lay on the couch his hands began to tremble—in a minute or two, with nothing being said, he began to cry again. He did not pour tears, as he had the first day: that had been a cloudburst, this was only a shower. Honor didn’t have to get a towel this time—a few Kleenex sufficed. He would think he was all right and start to talk, only to immediately choke up again. At first he could hardly finish a sentence without crying, but finally the tears lessened and Honor led him back to the subject of his father. He mentioned again, as he had once long before, that when he remembered his father he always remembered the smell of his father’s plain cotton work shirts, a smell composed of sweat and starch and
tobacco. The shirt Duane’s father had been wearing the day he died hung in the closet throughout Duane’s boyhood—his mother either forgot to launder it or didn’t want to.

  “Every time I went in the closet and smelled that shirt, he’d come back to me,” Duane said. “That is, his memory would. If he came off work in the middle of the night he’d always come in and sit on my bed a minute—even if I was too sleepy to really wake up, I’d smell his smell.”

  “That smell means love to you,” Honor said gently, handing him another Kleenex. “Your father’s love. You trusted him, didn’t you?”

  “I trusted him,” Duane said. “I don’t think I’ve ever trusted anybody that much—unless it’s you.”

  “I think you also trusted him not to die, but he died,” Honor said. “The first time you came to me you mentioned your father’s shirt.”

  “Seems like a lot’s happened since then,” Duane said.

  “Yes, you grew two gardens,” she said, with a grin. “You became a philanthropist—you fed the poor for two years. And yesterday, probably for the only time in your life, you cried your heart out.”

  Duane was silent—he was crying again, but not violently. Only a little.

  “Here’s a small observation,” Honor said. “Trust and love are a smell to you, the smell of those shirts your father wore when he took you fishing or came and sat by your bed at night. You weren’t aware of how deeply you held on to that memory. We don’t know those things until something touches us in a certain way and memory comes flooding back. What happened to you yesterday is not so different from what happened to the young man in Proust who ate the madeleine and was swept back into all the anxieties and insecurities of his childhood.”

  “Ate the what?” he asked.

  “The cookie,” Honor said. “The cookie dipped in tea. But never mind. You suddenly connected with something you hadn’t allowed yourself to connect with in a very long time. All that pain was lurking there, and suddenly it came out.”