False Memory

savagery. And yet she had not trusted herself with the bottle opener....
    Considering how edgy she was—and how hard she was trying not to reveal that edginess to Susan—she should have been an even bigger loser at pinochle than usual. Instead, the cards favored her, and she played with masterful skill, taking full advantage of each piece of good luck, perhaps because the game helped to distract her from morbid considerations.
    “You’re a champ today,” Susan said.
    “I’m wearing my lucky socks.”
    “Already your debt is down from six hundred thousand to five hundred and ninety-eight thousand.”
    “Great. Now maybe Dusty will be able to sleep at night.”
    “How is Dusty?”
    “Even sweeter than Valet.”
    “You get a man who’s more lovable than a golden retriever.” Susan sighed. “And I marry a selfish pig.”
    “Earlier, you were defending Eric.”
    “He’s a swine.”
    “That’s my line.”
    “And I thank you for it.”
    Outside, a wolfish wind growled, scratched on the windows, and raised mournful howls to the eaves.
    Martie said, “Why the change of heart?”
    “The root of my agoraphobia might lie in problems between Eric and me, going back a couple years, things I’ve been in denial about.”
    “Is that what Dr. Ahriman says?”
    “He doesn’t really direct me toward ideas like that. He just makes it possible for me to... figure it out.”
    Martie played a queen of clubs. “You never mentioned problems between you and Eric. Not until he wasn’t able to handle... this.”
    “But I guess we had them.”
    Martie frowned. “You guess?”
    “Well, there’s no guessing. We had a problem.”
    “Pinochle,” Martie said, taking the last trick. “What problem?”
    “A woman.”
    Martie was stunned. Real sisters could be no closer than she and Susan. Although they both had too much self-respect to share intimate details of their sex lives, they never kept big secrets from each other, yet she’d never before heard of this woman.
    “The creep was cheating on you?” Martie asked.
    “A discovery like that, all of a sudden, it makes you feel so vulnerable,” Susan said, but without the emotion the words implied, as though quoting a psychology textbook. “And that’s what agoraphobia is about—an overwhelming, crippling feeling of vulnerability.”
    “You never even hinted at this.”
    Susan shrugged. “Maybe I was too ashamed.”
    “Ashamed? What would you have to be ashamed about?”
    “Oh, I don’t know....“ She looked puzzled and finally said, “Why would I feel ashamed?”
    To Martie it appeared, amazingly, as though Susan were thinking this through for the first time, right here, right now.
    “Well... I guess maybe because... because I wasn’t enough for him, not good enough in bed for him.”
    Martie gaped at her. “Who am I talking to? You’re gorgeous, Sooz, you’re erotic, you have a healthy sex drive—”
    “Or maybe I wasn’t there for him emotionally, wasn’t supportive enough?”
    Pushing the cards aside without totaling the points, Martie said, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”
    “I’m not perfect, Martie. Far from it.” A sorrow, quiet but as heavy and gray as lead, pressed her voice thin. She lowered her eyes, as though embarrassed. “I failed him somehow.”
    Her contrition seemed profoundly inappropriate, and her words angered Martie. “You give him everything—your body, your mind, your heart, your life—and you give it in that totally over-the-top, all-or-nothing, passionate Susan Jagger trademark style. Then he cheats on you, and you blame yourself?”
    Frowning, turning an empty beer bottle around and around in her slender hands, gazing at it as though it were a talisman that might, with sufficient handling, magically provide full understanding, Susan said, “Maybe you’ve just put your finger on it, Martie. Maybe the trademark Susan Jagger style just... smothered him.”
    “Smothered him? Give me a break.”
    “No, maybe it did. Maybe—”
    “What’s with all these maybes?” Martie asked. “Why are you inventing a series of excuses for the pig? What was his excuse?”
    Hard shatters of rain made tuneless music against the windowpanes, and from a distance came the ominous, rhythmic booming of storm waves hammering the shore.
    “What was his excuse?” Martie pressed.
    Susan turned the beer bottle more slowly than before, and now slower still, and when at last she stopped turning it altogether, she was frowning in evident confusion.
    Martie said, “Susan? What was his excuse?”
    Putting the bottle aside, gazing at her hands as