The Humbling Read Online Free PDF Page B

was crazy when I said that but sat there listening to my madness as though I were sane. I thank you for that. But a part of me will never be sane again. It can't be. It couldn't be. It shouldn't be. Stupidly I sentenced the wrong person to death."
    The letter went on, a single handwritten paragraph stretching loosely over three more big sheets of paper, and it was signed "Sybil Van Buren." He remembered listening to her story—summoning up his concentration and listening like that to someone other than himself was as close as he had come to acting in a long time and may even have helped
him
to recover. Yes, he remembered her and her story and her asking him to kill her husband, as though
he
were
a gangster in a movie rather than another patient in a psychiatric hospital who, big as he was, was as incapable as she of violently ending his own suffering with a gun. People go around killing people in movies all the time, but the reason they make all those movies is that for 99.9 percent of the audience it's impossible to do. And if it's that hard to kill someone else, someone you have every reason to want to destroy, imagine how hard it is to succeed in killing yourself.

2. The Transformation
    H E'D KNOWN PEGEEN'S parents as good friends before Pegeen was born and had seen her first in the hospital as a tiny infant nursing at her mother's breast. They'd met when Axler and the newly married Staplefords—he from Michigan, she from Kansas—appeared together in a Greenwich Village church basement production of
Playboy of the Western World.
Axler had played the wonderfully wild lead role of Christy Mahon, the would-be parricide, while the female lead, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, the strong-minded barmaid in her father's pub on the west coast of County Mayo, had been played by Carol Stapleford, then two months pregnant with a first child; Asa Stapleford had played Shawn Keogh, Pegeen's betrothed. When the play's run ended, Axler had been at the closing-night party to cast his
vote for Christy as the name for a son and Pegeen Mike as the name for a daughter when the Staple-fords' baby arrived.
    It was not likely—particularly as Pegeen Mike Stapleford had lived as a lesbian since she was twenty-three—that when she was forty years old and Axler was sixty-five they would become lovers who would speak on the phone every morning upon awakening and would eagerly spend their free time together at his house, where, to his delight, she appropriated two rooms for her own, one of the three bedrooms on the second floor for her things and the downstairs study off the living room for her laptop. There were fireplaces in all the downstairs rooms, even one in the kitchen, and when Pegeen was working in the study, she had a fire going all the time. She lived a little over an hour away, journeying along winding hilly roads that carried her across farm country to his fifty acres of open fields and the large old black-shuttered white farmhouse enclosed by ancient maples and big ashes and long, uneven stone walls. There was nobody but the two of them anywhere nearby. During the first few months they rarely got out of bed before noon. They couldn't leave each other alone.
    Yet before her arrival he'd been sure he was finished: finished with acting, with women, with people, finished forever with happiness. He had been in serious physical distress for over a year, barely able to walk any distance or to stand or sit for very long because of the spinal pain that he'd put up with all his adult life but whose debilitating progress had accelerated with age—and so he was sure he was finished with everything. One of his legs would intermittently go dead so that he couldn't raise it properly while walking, and he would miss a step or a curb and fall, opening cuts on his hands and even landing on his face, bloodying his lip or his nose. Only a few months earlier his best and only local friend, an eighty-year-old judge who'd retired some years