—That's probably the best argument you can give for the soul's existence.
She laughed softly as she said this, the expression on her face changing in the silk-darkened light, so that the little girl who had been present just a moment before, asking me her naïve questions, instantaneously vanished.
She turned so that she was lying on her side, facing me, the heartbreaking curve of her outer thigh slightly altering its coordinates, and I turned too, our faces inches apart, the smell of her mingling with the yearnings entering the bedroom from the night.
— I thought your view was that the universe took an impersonal attitude toward us—not one that was downright malicious.
— Mmm. I waver between cold indifference and low-down malice.
She smiled, her lips still slightly bruised, and when I reached out my fingers to touch them again she took my hand and opened her mouth and took my fingers into her.
Enchantress of the world.
I watched her face going strange with ecstasy, with a knowledge in her that I could never match, a hidden existence at whose parameters I couldn't begin to guess.
— Mrs. Nathan Martin.
I said it aloud. Her eyes flew open and she stared at me, with a look of violation.
— Why did you call me that?
— It's who you are.
— No. It's not who I am.
— Who are you, then?
— What do you mean?
— / don't know. I don't know what I mean.
— What is it, Justin?
— You were her. You were Mrs. Nathan Martin.
I groaned, the only answer I could make.
— Why does that bother you? What can it possibly have to do with you? It barely has anything to do with me.
She laughed again, her grim laugh. Even her laughter was a painful bafflement to me.
— How can that be? Tell me something about it! Tell me something so I'll know!
And once again she laughed, and grimly.
— Mmm, what can I tell you? Let's see. My husband had terrible views on the foundations of quantum mechanics.
— Dana, please!
— What is it, Justin, what?
Her voice was weary, the slight hiss of it exaggerated.
— I hate the secrets in you. Why is it that prying anything out of you is harder than proving your father's model Lorentz-invariant?
She laughed at me, this time with real conviction, and she took my head between her hands with tenderness, it felt so much like tenderness, and I held my breath with the thought that she was going to give me one of her rare sweet kisses, that her mouth was going to search after mine.
— Don't look at me like that, Justin.
— Like what?
— There's too much of you showing. Don't do that to yourself, don't do it to me. We don't need to know so much about each other. I don't need or want to know.
— But I do. I have to, Dana.
She shook her head at me, disapprovingly, as if to scold me, but there was a film of tenderness still clinging.
— I thought you learned something about Proust from your mother. Didn't she teach you that lovers make each other up! Every lover is an artist, every love object a construct of the imagination. You've been making me up all along.
I felt at a loss at her words, I felt a loss. Something essential was being stolen from me, snatched out of me before my eyes, and a shadow of my hurt must have shown itself. A softness moved over her face, despite the brutal impact of her words, their slight hard hiss:
— It's all right to make me up. You have my consent. You have my active support.
And still she held my head between her hands, and still it felt so much like tenderness. And when she let me go it was to get up from the bed and walk over to the open bay window, kneeling on the bench, her arms on the sill so that she was leaning partly out into the night.
I got up, too, to kneel beside her, listening to the night's soft breaths.
When she began to speak it was in a very low voice, and she cast her sentences out the open window, not looking at me, so that I had the feeling that I was, once again, eavesdropping.
— I went to hear Nathan lecture when he was visiting here. Of course you know his reputation. And he is a wonderful lecturer, brilliant and funny and so marvelously alive. He loves to perform. I'd tried to get my father to come with me, but of course that was out of the question. Listening to a man like Nathan Martin is the last thing he'd ever voluntarily do. I asked him something during the questioning period after the lecture, and Nathan said what a good question it was, that the exigencies of the moment prevented him from
, answering in full, but that he'd like to speak to me at greater length if that was possible.
— He said that publicly?
— Mmm, or something like it. It was perfectly appropri ate, however he said it. Nathan knows how to carry off almost anything. Especially in front of an audience. In any case, I went over to speak to him after the crowd around him had dispersed somewhat, and he was quite wonderful, seeming to take me very seriously as a physicist, even though I was only an undergraduate. Of course, that would be a very effective form of flattery, given my particular sort of vanity. Nathan's terrific at locating a person's mortal weakness.
She turned her head to me and smiled slightly. She was mind-proud and she knew it. It was the first indication to me that she herself knew.
— He asked me my name and when I told him, he asked me whether I was any relation to Samuel Mallach. He told me how much he wanted to meet him. He told me what a great physicist my father was.
Her voice went even softer, fading out at the end into silence.
— And you married him for that!
She laughed, her grimness reinstated.
— Well, there's certainly more to the story, but as a précis, I think you've got it right. I married him for that. It made me trust him. I trusted Nathan, immediately and unquestioningly, because he'd praised my father. I fell into an abyss of trust.
— And he betrayed you?
— Oh yes. I think one could accurately say that Nathan betrayed me.
— And did it hurt you? Does it hurt you still?
— Yes. I'm rather sensitive to betrayal.
— Me, too.
— Mmm, you would be. It's especially hard for people like us, who give our trust so rarely. I trust almost nobody. I don't even trust the universe.
— No. We've neither of us much reason for trusting it. But I do trust my father. I trust him with all my soul, Justin. I love him with all my soul.
We were kneeling naked side by side on the little cushioned bench beneath the window, our arms resting on the sill, leaning forward so that we were suspended half-outside. Her bedroom was in the back of the house, right above the glass-walled room where by day we chased down the properties of light.
We were leaning partly out the window, into the insinuations that were crowding the night, all manner of desires carried weightless in thin air. Beyond the grounds of their home were the woods, filled with deer, and it was toward the woods that we looked. We didn't look at each other.
— I do, too, Dana. I love him, too.
— I know you do, Justin. I know.