In later years he will remember that he laughed. She too will remember that he laughed. It was the nearest they came, she will tell him, to breaking up.
Quaid believed in laughter. The importance they accorded laughter was the reason he had wanted to interview the sacred clowns of Taos. Like many practitioners of laughter, they didn’t laugh much themselves. Like many philosophers of laughter, Quaid didn’t laugh much either. ‘I am not a great ejaculator of hilarity,’ he had warned Lily in the days they were laying their cards on the table. ‘Or a great employer of the vernacular,’ Lily had replied.
He laughed at that, in moderation. For the Koshare, laughter was a job, strictly limited as to time and place. Away from their work, clowns are not good company. For Quaid, laughter was an idea. The idea was noble. Laughter released humanity from its tyrannies, whether from authority or the self. It welcomed men and women to the great communal dance of life. But the sound, when philosophers of laughter were able to release it, as often as not did the opposite.
What Lily heard after she’d told him she’d murdered someone was mockery.
‘What you heard was the shock of disbelief,’ Quaid said.
‘I know what I heard. Why didn’t you believe me?’
‘I didn’t think you could have murdered anybody.’
‘Why not? People are murdered every hour.’
‘But not by you.’
‘Then why did you tremble to put your life in my hands? Were you only pretending?’
‘I was part pretending, yes. Weren’t you?’
‘Were you pretending to love me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Wasn’t something dangerous between us at the heart of that love?’
‘What does “something dangerous between us” mean?’
‘Isn’t it a bit late in the day to be asking that? I saw terror in your eyes, Sam. And the more afraid you were, the more you told me you loved me. In those moments you begged me to tell you I didn’t reciprocate your love – something it wasn’t easy for me to do – your life hung by a hair. You wanted to die rejected by me. You were never sure whether I would take you at your word. Neither was I. How far dared I go? You didn’t know. I didn’t know either. In the cold light of day of course we had limits. But we weren’t living in the cold light of day. In the dark heat of the passion we brewed up together, I was your executioner.’
‘I shouldn’t have laughed,’ Quaid agreed.