The Outsider Ch. 28

The second summer he spent alone, taking classes and writing parking tickets. That summer was as bleak and hopeless in Mike's imagination as its predecessor was full of hope. It was the absolute opposite of the previous year. And yet, the despair he had felt was no more warranted than the hope he had felt only a year before. Within a few months his friendship and love for Ruthie would salvage his spirit, just as the end of his romance with Lisa had broken his spirit the previous year.

Now Mike was starting a third summer. What lay ahead? He had no way of knowing, but his life was destined to be very different from what he could have envisioned from the perspective of either of the other two summers.

He knew that his time with Ruthie had changed him every bit as much as he had managed to change her. She would always be a strange and difficult partner, but Mike already had spent so much time with her that he could not imagine what life would be like without her. Yes, she was the woman of his present and his future.

Mike was convinced that he knew Ruthie precisely because he loved her so much. She was content to leave him with that illusion, because she did want to maintain her relationship with him. She tried her best to convince him that she loved him as well and did what she could to make his daily life pleasant.

She was frustrated, however, because there was so much that Mike did not understand about her. It was not because she was trying to hide anything: it was just that he only saw what he wanted to see. Ruthie's problems in bed and the spanking incident in San Francisco should have given him important clues about what really was going on, but he remained oblivious.

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Throughout June Mike and Ruthie visited Mr. Sinclair and had dinner with him at least once each week. Mike was determined that, no matter what Colleen had said, eventually he would figure out how to get his father out of his depressed mood. He was convinced that talking would bring his father to his senses and that after listening to Ruthie's constant complaints and morbid speculations, dealing with him would be a snap in comparison.

Ruthie always went along when Mike visited his father. Partly she went because she had nothing better to do, partly to support her boyfriend, and partly because she actually liked Mr. Sinclair. Mike's father enjoyed her company because the two were able to relate to each other. They talked a lot about their fears for the future of the US in general and central California in particular. They fed on each other's pessimism; both of them pleased to have found a compatible conversation companion.

However, each time Ruthie talked to Mike's father, she felt very strongly that she was talking to a man who was very close to death. In many ways he reminded her of her grandmother during the final weeks that she was dying but still lucid. In other ways Ruthie saw a lot of herself in Mr. Sinclair: a person who hated his reality and wanted nothing more than to escape. He was forced to live in a world that no longer needed him or wanted him, so his existence had no point. He repeated the line that had so offended his wife and daughter, that most people live too long and "don't know when to call it quits". Ruthie clearly understood what he meant: that he planned to commit suicide. She knew that Mike hoped that getting his father to talk about what was on his mind and "get things off his chest" would be therapeutic. Indeed it was, but not in a way that could change Mr. Sinclair's life or alter his fate. Mike's problem was that he was too close to his father to really understand what was going on in the man's mind.

As they drove back to Davenport, Ruthie tried to explain to her boyfriend how she saw his father's situation: that he had sunk into an irreversible depression because his life no longer had any purpose. She became nervous and couldn't express her thoughts coherently. Finally she tried using the analogy of animals going extinct as a result of environmental change. Mike snapped at her, deeply offended that she was comparing his father to extinct animals. She forced herself to apologize. However, inwardly she knew that she was right.

You'll figure it out soon enough, Mike; thought Ruthie to herself, when your father is dead. Then you'll find out that I do know what I'm talking about.