Without the rain, Arlene realized how loud the night was, how unserene and wild. She loved the peepers over by the marina, riotous, screaming away like frightened birds, the cicadas keeping time in the trees. As Rufus neared the dock, frogs plopped into the shallows, a musical handful of stones, and there, as the trees gave way to the oily calm of the lake, the sky opened up, a bowl of stars.
Arlene stopped and tipped her chin, gawked at them like a child, openmouthed with delight. There were things in life that had a power over her, things that could not be denied—autumn, Schubert, a child who wanted to learn. They restored her faith, she supposed, the same way the Institute had refreshed her mother every summer. This was why they came to the lake, why they muddled through all the crossness and soft water, the lumpy pillows and rainy days. She wanted to run back to the cottage and drag Margaret out to see it, this proof of goodness or reward, but knew that would ruin the feeling, send it fleeing like the brief illusion it was.
On the dock, Rufus waited for her, stock-still, as if she might take off and ditch him.
“You just hold your horses,” she said, and stepped onto the boards, a much different proposition than during the day.
The wind was mild and it was hard to see the water. Rufus went ahead, his nails tapping.
“Oh, now you can’t wait for me,” she said, but he kept going, sure of their destination.
The bench was wet. She slicked off a spot with the palm of one hand, but still it soaked cold through her trousers, making her sit up straight and clench a breath. She lit a cigarette and tucked her other hand in her armpit for warmth.
The moon threw a surprising amount of light. It lay puddled on the water, cast shadows of the pilings across the motorboat. Perhaps she’d go out with them tomorrow if there was a spare seat. When Henry first bought it, the three of them used to boom up and down the lake, taking turns at the wheel, leaping wakes and skidding through turns, waving a rooster tail of spray. He stood up to drive, peering over the windshield, bare-chested and wearing his Ray-Bans, a can of beer in one hand. They’d come in sunburnt, bleached blond, the roots of their hair throbbing from the wind. She’d wanted Walter to see her like that, the ravishing beach bunny, but of course he couldn’t come up. She told Henry about him, sure he would keep their secret, even if he disapproved, and he did—both disapprove and keep it.
“I think you’re kidding yourself,” he’d say, or “In my experience, that’s not how it works,” or “Don’t let Emmy hear you say that,” but he stayed out of her affairs.
He would have been within his rights. Their love had been improper. She’d been Walter’s teaching assistant, the two of them sneaking around campus, meeting in his dark office after the rest of the department had gone home. She could still bring back the thrilling strangeness of being stretched naked across the cool leather inlay of his desk, the patterns the flowered border left on her skin. He had a phonograph he played when they made love, and weekends when he was occupied with his wife and daughter, she haunted the record stores, trying to find a piece that described how she felt about him.
She’d brought a copy of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges that last Monday. They never listened to it. He took her to the Ramble instead, clasped his hands behind him as they walked through the ankle-deep leaves. Back in her apartment she dropped the unopened record in the garbage and smoked most of a pack before calling Henry, only then giving in to tears. All that fall he checked in on her, making her eat and holding her while she wept, and not once did he remind her of how silly she’d been.
Rufus sighed and she looked up, movement drawing her eye. What she thought was a satellite resolved itself into two dots and then three, an invisible airplane blinking across the stars, small and high up enough to be silent, tiny compared to the vast backdrop. The summer sky was fixed with the season, had been with her since she was a girl here, quietly abiding the turning of the world, the wars and great changes. She felt lifted out of herself, as if she could look down on the dithering old woman who sat on the dock, and the trees and dark cottages along the shore, felt buoyed up towards the larger question of the stars and the earth and eternity.
She could not see Henry in her mother’s version of heaven, a place not much different from the Institute, with beveled hedges and Mozart lilting from the woods, the inhabitants robed and earnestly discussing philosophy like the ancient Greeks. She hoped there was a time in his life when he was happy with everything that he would return to, like those mad, breathless days she thought Walter could be hers.
She had no real idea of heaven, she thought, even less than the cottonball clouds and harps a child would have: a carless small town blessed with good weather, houses lifted from fairy tales. That didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She couldn’t believe Henry was just gone, lost.
Her mother would scoff at her apostasy, see it as prideful and selfinflicted, one more useless thing she’d learned, but it wasn’t. Her whole life had been dedicated to giving others the courage to say “I don’t know” and then go further, the search for truth itself a sacred rite. It made no sense to stop now just because she found herself faced, in the end, with her mother’s favorite questions.
Behind her, a car glided down Manor Drive, its headlights picking out the sides of houses, its taillights painting the leaves. A truck, chugging, probably a fisherman on his way to the marina. Her neck hurt, and the stars had lost their majesty. She was almost done with her cigarette, and it was too chilly to wait for the bell to ring.
She did not plan on going to heaven. She would simply no longer be, just as, in a minute, she would no longer be on this dock. The bell would ring anyway, as it would next week and next year, when they were no longer here. The stars and the earth would turn, the cottage fall down. It was not a mystery. Someone would take over her apartment and stalk the small rooms, pace from the kitchen to the front door the same way she did, set their plants on the fire escape to take the sun. All she would leave behind were her scrapbook, a few pieces of her mother’s jewelry, a stack of fading snapshots. She would be the old woman in the video they strained to name, a difficult trivia question, their great-grandfather Maxwell’s sister, the one who never married. What disturbed her most was not the idea that they would think her a lesbian (though she’d fielded that one more often than she cared to remember) but unhappy, that even in death she would have to defend her choices and, as in life, inevitably lose to the opinions of those who didn’t know her.
She stubbed out her butt on the piling behind her, smearing the ember, then scratching at it with the filter.
“You ready, old man?” she said, and Rufus grumped and struggled to his feet.
She could see easily now, the water a silvered, reflective black like the waxed finish of a limousine. As they approached the bank, the frogs dove for safety. Rufus stayed obediently at her heel until they reached the grass, then loped over to the kitchen door, lobbying for a treat. In the woods, the locusts screamed, eternal as the stars. The night was full of sex and predators—life, Arlene thought. Near the stairs, Rufus wagged his back end, prancing frantically.
“All right, all right,” she said. “I see you.”