fellow up.”
“You enjoy sarcasm, Mr. Chambers.”
“I confess I do. I know it’s not fashionable these days, the humor of the weak and all that, but it does seem to fit the question quite often.”
“It fits when you’re trying to deflect the question.”
“I agree,” he says, “I’m deflecting your question.” To disarm someone, just agree. They will move on.
“What do you expect to happen when you find the man?”
“I’ve given up expecting a long time ago. It’s a waste of time, and we only get so much of that.”
“So you came to Red Paint to find the man you hold responsible for the trauma in your wife’s life, and you came to me before confronting him?”
“Bad idea? Should I have just sought out the rapist directly?”
“Were you hoping I’d stop you?”
“Can you do that?”
“I think you know what I mean. Did you come to me expecting—or hoping, if you prefer—that I might help you find some way of coming to terms with your wife’s rape and suicide that doesn’t involve confronting her attacker?”
“No,” Paul says, brushing lint off his pants. Where does lint come from? Does it just float in the air till a man in black pants sits down to receive it?
“Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know.” How could he know what God has in store? No one does, perhaps not even God. Perhaps He’s winging it, like every human being on earth. We’re made in His image, after all. “Maybe I should leave,” Paul says as he gets up. He could hand over her fee in cash again, be gone. Better, perhaps, for both of them.
“That’s up to you,” she says, staying seated herself. “But whether with me or someone else, at some point you need to address the unresolved issues around your wife’s life and death.”
Addressing unresolved issues—is that what revenge is called these days?
“You’re smiling?”
“That not allowed?”
“I’m just trying to understand your reaction.”
“Don’t read anything into it. I smile at inappropriate times. People tell me that all the time.” She doesn’t seem to smile at all herself, appropriately or inappropriately—an uncommonly serious woman.
“What would you like to achieve by confronting the man who raped your wife?”
He finds it awkward looking down at her and sits again. “I want him to confess,” he says. She nods as if that is a reasonable objective, giving him a moment to expound on the subject, which he is always ready to do, any subject at all. “Did you know Martin Luther was obsessed with confessing? He’d confess for hours on end, then get up to leave, sit down again, and confess for hours more. He thought Satan had intruded into his daily thoughts.”
“Do you think Satan has intruded into your daily thoughts?”
“Satan, God—it’s difficult to tell who’s speaking to you.”
“Are you saying you hear voices?”
“I hear my own voice. Of course, I could be fooled. God can do that. Satan, too.”
“What is your inner voice telling you?”
“That confession isn’t really a penalty. In fact, confession can be good for the soul—it absolves the confessor. What I think is that the rapist should feel what it’s like to be raped himself.”
She nods again, perhaps just a habit. Surely she couldn’t be endorsing the natural interpretation of his statement. What kind of therapist would do that?
“You want validation on behalf of your wife’s experience,” she says, “how it affected her life and yours, and you think you might achieve that by having the man who committed the rape feel some sense of what it’s like.”
He stares at her. So many words. Too many words.
The Weekly Quotation read, “A bell cannot be unrung, but it can be smashed to bits so that it never rings again.” Simon reread the quote, trying to discern if the violent image was yet another expression of his assistant Barb’s postdivorce anger or, in a curious way, the beginning of her taking control of her life. The afternoon sun from the Common flooded in the large windows as he stood at his desk assessing the latest edition. The quotation, he decided, was a good sign, and he turned inside. Police Tranquilize Black Bear on Porch read the top headline in the Police Log on page two. Carole always led with an animal story, if one was available, and there always was. He flipped through the half pages of Religious News and Civic News and School News till he reached the Obituaries. There was just one this week, and when he saw it he couldn’t stop the words coming