Love's Executioner Read Online Free PDF Page A

deliberately, in a bitter, forlorn tone, but there were no more tears. I thought that now she was closer to ripping or gouging than to crying.
    “I never could find out why—why it was over, just like that. In one of our last talks he said that we have to return to our real lives, and then added that he was involved with a new person.” I suspected, silently, that the new person in Matthew’s life was another patient.
    Thelma wasn’t sure whether the new person was a man or a woman. She suspected Matthew was gay: he lived in one of San Francisco’s gay enclaves, and was beautiful in the way many gay men are, with his neatly combed mustache, boyish face, and Mercury-like body. This possibility occurred to her a couple of years later when, while taking an out-of-town guest sightseeing, she warily entered a gay bar on Castro Street and was astounded to see fifteen Matthews sitting at the bar—fifteen slim, attractive, neatly mustached young men.
    To be suddenly cut off from Matthew was devastating; and not to know why, unbearable. Thelma thought about him continuously, not an hour passing without some prolonged fantasy about him. She became obsessed with why? Why had he rejected her and cast her out? Why then? Why would he not see her or even speak to her on the phone?
    Thelma grew deeply despondent after all attempts to contact Matthew failed. She stayed home all day staring out the window; she could not sleep; her movements and speech slowed down; she lost her enthusiasm for any activities. She stopped eating, and soon her depression had passed beyond the reach of psychotherapy or antidepressive medication. By consulting three different doctors for her insomnia and obtaining from each a prescription for sleeping medication, she soon collected a lethal amount. Precisely six months after her chance meeting with Matthew in Union Square, she left a goodbye note to her husband, Harry, who was out of town for the week, waited until his goodnight phone call from the East Coast, took the phone off the hook, swallowed all the tablets, and went to bed.
    Harry, unable to sleep that night, phoned Thelma back and grew alarmed at the continual busy signal. He called his neighbors, who banged, in vain, on Thelma’s door and windows. Soon they called the police, who stormed into the house to find her close to death.
    Thelma’s life was saved only by heroic medical efforts. The first call she made upon regaining consciousness was to Matthew’s tape machine. She assured him she would keep their secret and pleaded with him to visit her in the hospital. Matthew came to visit but stayed only fifteen minutes and his presence, Thelma said, was worse than his silence: he evaded any allusions she made to their twenty-seven days of love and insisted on remaining formal and professional. Only once did he step out of role: when Thelma asked him how the relationship with the new person in his life was going, Matthew snapped, “You have no need to know that!”
    “And that was that!” Thelma turned her face directly toward me for the first time and added, in a resigned, weary voice, “I’ve never seen him again. I call to leave taped messages for him on important dates: his birthday, June 19 (our first date), July 17 (our last date), Christmas, and New Year’s. Every time I switch therapists, I call to let him know. He never calls back.
    “For eight years I haven’t stopped thinking about him. At seven in the morning I wonder if he’s awake yet, and at eight I imagine him eating his oatmeal (he loves oatmeal—he grew up on a Nebraska farm). I keep looking for him when I walk down the street. I often mistakenly think I see him, and rush up to greet some stranger. I dream about him. I replay in my mind each of our meetings together during those twenty-seven days. In fact, most of my life goes on in these daydreams—I scarcely take note of what’s happening in the present. My life is being lived eight years ago.”
    My life is being lived