Affinity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

On Monday, Kath found Paul’s door open by a finger’s width and the whole office charged with a strange atmosphere. Fraught. Some days, her patients told her, it’s better to stay in bed, and she saw the rightness of that view even as she tried to convince them otherwise. Depression had a pedagogy. For one thing, it taught self-preservation. Nothing bad could happen to you if you didn’t leave your bed. That self-preservation was more necessary in some contexts than others—well, teaching that was her bailiwick.

Most days she felt up to it. Not today. She slipped off her clogs—she preferred to work in socks—and padded to the kitchen, where she located her mug, its interior glaze addled with cracks from the stream of hot drinks that lubricated her day. She ran hot water from the dispenser into her cup, dunked a tea bag, and, having girded herself with this ritual, went to look in on Paul.

He didn’t answer her knock. She considered calling out but then retreated to the kitchen, trying not to feel slighted by his lack of response. A tiny practice like theirs depended on the willingness of each partner to understand the other, to provide quick bursts of support. All she’d done was the professional thing, making sure to check in with him when he seemed to be having a rough time. She didn’t deserve the cold shoulder, but then, if Paul was difficult, well, he was just being Paul. She opened a cabinet and became so absorbed in rummaging for a snack that she didn’t hear Paul enter the kitchen.

There was a thing, he said, causing her to jump. Sorry.

That’s all right.

Like a child taught to watch his step, he’d learned the trick of moving noiselessly. She found a bag of pretzels and slid it toward him, the rigid plastic bag crackling. She wanted him to know she wasn’t mad about him creeping up on her, pouncing.

So there was a thing?

The other night at the bar. When you left to use the bathroom.

Oh?

He told her what Stolz had said about Stanley and the older woman who’d accosted him at the home and, in doing so, brought Stanley back to himself, to Stolz, to the world.

That’s how Paul made it sound: like the old woman had accosted Stanley.

Oh, that Stanley, she mused, trying to buy time. It was hard to square Paul’s sour narrative with what she remembered of that night, its density of shared experience, especially toward the end. Her next words bolted from her: The grand old man can’t also be a dirty one, can he?

Who said anything about that?

Sorry, she said, meaning it. How could she have failed to corral that thought? He didn’t reply, and she felt even worse. She watched him leave. She knew this aspect of Paul well enough. Beneath the posturing was a core orientation, a way of being in the world that was as much his own as his fingerprints, yet she knew that this quickness to take offense was more obvious to others than it would ever be to himself.

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