I’m gonna take you to Rio, he told me. We’ll start a new life there, just the two of us. I asked him if he’d told Barbara. He said he hadn’t, not yet. But I needn’t worry about that because he’d tell her all right. That was a month ago. Barbara came to see me yesterday. She was distraught. She said he’d always talked about me and the conversations I’d had with him.
I first met him a year ago. He was referred to me by a male colleague. He’d come in and talk about what was on his mind. To begin with, I’d mostly just sit and listen. Then one day he came in and told me that he was in love with me. He couldn’t live without me. I explained that this was very common. Freud even had a name for it. He called it ‘transference.’ I call it love, he said. Well, what can I say? He wasn’t what you’d call drop-dead gorgeous, but there was something about him and I suppose he just wore me down. You got the most beautiful breasts I ever seen, he told me the first time we went to bed. He never stinted on the compliments.
It was all just so unexpected, the way he’d disappeared, Barbara said. He’d gone to work one morning two weeks ago, just as usual, only he’d never come home. She wondered if I had any idea where he might have gone. He did talk about Brazil a lot, I said. She sat up in her chair. Brazil? she said. I told her it was a sort of recurring fantasy of his. The idea of just dropping everything and running off to Rio. I didn’t tell her that it was me he was supposed to be running off there with. Barbara began to cry and then she started to look angry. Did I think that was where he was gone, then?
I would have gone to the ends of the earth for him. I was actually prepared to do so. But then he told me he couldn’t do it. I thought I could, he said. But I just can’t. I couldn’t do that to Barbara. And then there were the kids to be considered. That was when I hit him with the ashtray. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I suppose I must just have hit him just right. I took out the joint I’d rolled earlier and lit up. I took a few good long puffs on it, so that the smoke went right down into my lungs and then I passed it to Barbara. She took it and the thought popped into my mind that we were like two American Indians smoking a peace pipe. She took a long toke. This’s good stuff, she said. The best, I said.
And so we sat there on the sofa that afternoon smoking what was left of Dirk.
