OPENING THE DOOR TO his room ten minutes after Janet called, he left it open, and every time the elevator stopped he looked out to see if it were she, and every time when she did not come he felt reprieved. The urge kept building in him to leave the notebook on the bed—the door open—and himself to flee. He could see her in this room, sitting with the notebook beneath the reproduction of autumn colors in Brown County—trying perhaps to decipher the words he had scratched out. The fact remained that he had not killed Peter. For all the crossing out that he had done, the unexpected truth pared down to in his scrutiny of self was that the man he killed was Eric Mather … who now was simply taking a long time dying. Agamemnon died tonight: how aptly he had spoken in that grandiloquent cry of self-recrimination!
Janet when she came took him by surprise. Deeply sunk in his own thought, he had not heard the elevator. She stood in the doorway, her coat open, purse and gloves in hand, like a young girl who had been running. He leapt to his feet and crossed the room. Then both of them just stood facing each other as though a phantom wall rose up between them. He opened his arms, a gesture of helplessness, but Janet crashed into them. He held her close then, freeing one hand just long enough to close the door behind her. He brushed her forehead with his lips. She smelled of fresh air, of cleanness.
“I am alive,” she said over and over again, “and I want to live.”
Finally she pushed gently away from him and studied his face—as he did hers. Her eyes were deeply circled, the more blue for the darkness under them.
“You too have suffered,” she said, touching her fingertips to his cheek. “I hope Peter didn’t.” She looked away, saying it. “He could never bear pain. Sometimes I’ve thought you like it.”
“It has served me—in the absence of other things.” He turned and made a vague motion toward the corner chair. “Would you like a drink?”
“No.”
“I haven’t eaten,” he said. “Not that I care.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. “Why are you here, Eric?”
He shook his head and smiled a little.
“Why am I here—in this room?” she said then. “The family has gone to bed—except John. He’s gone to see a patient. He dropped me off here.”
“No questions?”
“None of the Bradleys ever ask that kind of question,” Janet said.
“Pride?”
“Of a certain kind, I suppose.”
He sat on the floor at her feet, his elbow on the bed, his hand where she could touch it if she wished. “I should always be asking questions of you, Janet, wanting you to tell me more, and again more.”
She smiled, a little color creeping into her cheeks. “I needed that kind of love,” she said quietly.
“I worship you, Janet. I haven’t the worth or the right, but it is so nonetheless, and I’m too weak not to say it to you now.”
“Do not worship me, Eric. I worshipped Peter … and it wasn’t a satisfactory substitute for love.” She leaned back and spread her hand on the bed. “I didn’t want to hurt him, so I fought—myself—in every way I knew. I asked him not to leave me—the night he came home from Athens. But I knew in my heart it was false. I wanted him to go … and you to stay. If you had come back, Eric …” She looked down at him, through him, seeing the supposed lost moment, and then beyond it. “And worst of all, I’m not at all sure now he didn’t know.”
“No wonder he went so willingly then, God damn him!” Mather cried, embracing the insight she suggested, and with it bursting the bonds of guilt in which he had tried to bind himself.
“Eric, Eric.” She tried to reach him, but he drew back from the touch of her hand.
“Didn’t he laugh in your face?”
“He would have been too kind for that—too civilized.”
“But he went all the same, didn’t he? He had nothing to fear from his friend Eric—Eric the cripple!”
Her sudden fury matched his own. She struck him hard across his face. The sound of it seemed to linger in the after-silence. She said: “I have never allowed anyone to say that of you in my presence, and you will not say it either.”
His anger fled and he knew he had again sought justification where actually there was none. One’s guilt was one’s own: nothing qualified it. “Oh, Janet, dearest woman. If only faith could make man whole.” He leaned his head on the bed beside her. She stroked it gently, her hand cool where it lingered on his forehead, his cheek. It smelt faintly of cologne.
“We aren’t any of us ever whole, Eric. It’s only in love that we come close to wholeness—and even that takes two to make one whole.”
“I don’t think I have ever loved before,” he said.
“Are you afraid?”
“No. Not at the moment.”
“Then you won’t ever be afraid again.”
“You don’t know,” he said. “I wish you never needed to know.”
“I don’t. I’ve never been one who had to start things from the beginning. I think photography has taught me that the ‘now’ carries enough of the past to answer all we need to know.” She rested her fingers at his temple. He seemed to feel her pulse in them. It was his own, beating against her touch.
They did not speak for a time. Then she said: “Will you go back tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go together?”
“No. I think not. I must go alone on the first flight.”
“Will you come to me—or shall I come to you?”
“I’ll come … as soon as I can.”
“Eric?”
He raised his head and looked at her.
“You want to—don’t you?”
“With all the soul that’s in me.”
She smiled. “Don’t move now. Not till I’ve gone.” And leaning down, her hand beneath his chin, she kissed him softly but lingeringly on the mouth.