He left Chicago the way he’d arrived, sitting halfway down the length of a Greyhound bus with his single suitcase under his feet. This was his great American talent. The bus sailed southward. It had to stop constantly, but he knew by now that the bus was a humble way to travel and he loved its stops and its exhausted refuelings, the dramas of departure and reunion, the ragged end of someone else’s travel trailing past him down the steps. He moved happily amid the ever-changing ranks of the brotherhood of smokers. They stopped in the buggy pools of light of small towns and in the antiseptic white glares of small cities. Wherever they were he bought a fresh pack of cigarettes and walked the small island that the bus spread beneath itself, its outer limit defined by the sound of the bus’s motor idling. The gravel by the sides of roads was gray, veined, quartz; the people he saw were suspicious or distracted or, like him, they were exalted. He paced with his nose down, his cigarette unraveling, gazing. So many decisions that cannot be endured sink out of sight, but they persist, carving subterranean channels for themselves, dropping their silt, growing clear and defined. He had awakened one morning at the end of such a journey and now his body was repeating it, hungrily.
After seventy hours the bus—it was not the same bus, or the same driver, but it was, it was a segment of a vein of a system that embraced the world and to be inside the vein was to be all of it, an atom touching each part of the whole, like the oceans of the world, like the air—passed over the Lake Pontchartrain bridge and arrived in New Orleans. He had not slept more than a few accidental hours at a stretch. He didn’t want to sleep, he didn’t want to be robbed of his part in the whole. He hadn’t bathed or shaved or eaten anything apart from the cellophane-wrapped confections in the bus station vending machines, the festively nomadic candied peanuts and marshmallow pies. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got off the bus. He trusted the subterranean movements to which he’d sacrificed all his prior thoughts and hesitations, like the great explorer who allows his discovery to remake him. He got off the bus and walked into the hot waiting room, full of flies, sticky pools of Coca-Cola, the taut beginnings and the ragged ends of travel, and sat down in one of the pews, sliding his suitcase beneath his feet. He was a fearless, invisible citizen of these places now. With no bus to climb onto again his mind relaxed its vigilance and he plunged into sleep, his head dropping onto his chest.
He was awakened by a man in shirtsleeves, who pressed his shoulder insistently. “Hey there. Hello.” His voice was flat, northern. “Can you get up and come with me, please? Can you wake up now?”
He lifted his head with tremendous effort and peered at the man through a narrow fissure in the weight of his slumber. For a moment he had no idea where he was. He frowned.
“Speak English? Speakee English?” the man asked him loudly. Another man stood behind him, wearing a jacket, looking overheated and weary.
“Yes,” he said.
“Can you come with me, please?”
He followed the men into a back office of the station, pulling a hand through his hair. He had cut it very short in Chicago because it was always filling with dust from the books. Now it stood off his head in greasy tufts. The office was hardly larger than a closet. A janitor’s pail and mop leaned in a corner, giving off a sharp smell of mold. The jacketed man went to the one window, which was closed, and fought with it irritably, as if this was something he did often. The window was swollen shut. A ceiling fan stirred the air. The shirtsleeved man pointed to a chair and he sank into it, clutching his suitcase. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “I just come here. I have just come here.”
“Where from?”
“Chicago.”
“Chicago,” the man repeated, flatly. “How did you travel?”
“On the Greyhound bus.”
“Do you have your ticket?”
“No,” he said. The ticket had been a thick accordion, Chicago-Champagne, Champagne-Cedar Rapids, Cedar Rapids-St. Louis, every leg commencing with the achievement of shedding one layer, and in Jackson, Mississippi, he had joyfully surrendered his last printed card—TO NEW ORLEANS—like tumbling over a cliff. “No, you give it in on the bus.”
“Are you a Chinese national?” the man asked him. “Are you familiar with the Port Security Program? Are you an able-bodied seaman?”
“A what?”
“Are you an able-bodied seaman?”
He shook his head in bafflement. He thought he’d never been so hungry. The flies threw themselves against the closed window and fell stunned to the floor. “Are you a member of the Communist party?” the man asked him. “Are you or have you ever been associated with a known member of the Communist party? Do you have family or friends in New Orleans? Is someone expecting you here?”
She was sitting in her garden, toying with a string of columbine, pulling off the blossoms and eating them. They looked like jester’s caps. And then a thin shadow blunted the daylight glare, and she saw that the clear sky had begun clouding over. A wind kicked up, shirring the surface of the birdbath. Within minutes the storm twilight was complete, the undersides of the clouds were dark as soot, and a thunderclap exploded overhead. She dropped her book and as she bent to lift it the dark stains from the first drops burst open all over the walk, as big as quarters. She heard Mary Frances running toward her as the load of rain fell, all at once, straight as harp strings, and a rock-splitting sound shook them; tucking the book under her arm she grabbed Mary Frances’s wrist and they ran together back to the house. Mary Frances stood heaving and wide-eyed, rivulets of water streaming off her. “My Lord! I didn’t want to shout for you because she’s sleeping—she’s finally sleeping!—but then I wouldn’t have been heard anyway.” Mary Frances wrung Katherine’s hand so excitedly Katherine threw her arms around her. “The moment the sky started lowering I thought uh-oh, we’re gonna have a crasher, and then she closed her eyes and nodded off so sweetly! When the phone rang I nearly screamed I was so mad, but she didn’t wake up. It’s the cool air. It’s delicious.” Katherine took the phone and it nearly slid out of her hand. “Yes,” she said. Then she threw back her head as if she would shout at the ceiling, Mary Frances exaggeratedly hushing her. She recovered, found her sober tone of voice. “Yes he is,” she said. “Yes. I can vouch for that.” When she’d hung up she still had her arm hooked around Mary Frances’s neck and she gave Mary Frances a great hard kiss on the forehead. “Whoa now. What has happened to you?” Outside the storm’s noise repeatedly ebbed and then flared, with the sound of fat hitting a skillet. Katherine went and got her raincoat from the closet and struggled it over her wet clothes. “You must put on dry things,” Mary Frances said, doubly indignant now. “Where are you going?”
“Run upstairs light as a feather and make sure she’s still sleeping. Go on. Put a wiggle in it.” Mary Frances went upstairs, blindly obeying the spirit of urgency, and reemerged signaling Yes.
She bloodied a finger pulling the top of the car up, cursing the stiff accordion of canvas, wrestling the hooks, and she came into the bus station still squeezing her fist around it. The blood was thinned with rainwater. He could see it welling up between her fingers. She had to wedge her way into the room, which was already barely able to contain the two men standing with their arms folded, looking beleaguered, misunderstood, underappreciated, their single cluttered desk and the chair in which he sat. She was afraid to look at him; driving there she had kept thinking, ridiculously, What if it isn’t him at all? What if it’s some other Oriental transient, assuming his name? She stepped around his chair carefully as she introduced herself to the two men, the two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then there was nowhere else to go. The back hem of her damp coat touched his shin. Heat poured off his skull and stored itself in his shorn, greasy hair. The man in shirtsleeves offered her his hand but she didn’t take it. She stood holding the hurt finger tightly, and the idea of that injury bore down on him. “It’s just that I’ve cut my finger putting up the top on my car,” she was explaining. She smiled dazzlingly at them.
“Do you need something?” said the jacketed man. “I have a hankie.”
“Oh, I’m all right. Thank you so much. It’s mending up fast.”
“What’s the car, British make?”
“As tiny as they come.”
“Hope this storm doesn’t float her away.”
“I hope so, too!” she exclaimed.
“We won’t keep you long,” he grinned back at her.
“I can tell you this isn’t the person you’re looking for,” she said. “He’s a law-abiding gentleman.”
“I have no doubt—” Jacket began, as his partner interrupted, annoyed.
“This is routine questioning, miss. We have a problem with Chinese Communist agents infiltrating American harbors. Ships from Communist China are barred from every port in the U.S. except New Orleans, this is their one point of entry, for their goods and their agents. Their agents recruit in this port. Among seamen. And then you’ve got mutinies. Communist seamen and Communist mutinies.”
“But he isn’t Chinese,” she said.
He studied her a moment. “Are you familiar with the Port Security Program?”
“I’m afraid that I’m not.”
“Are you a Communist yourself?”
“Me?” Katherine exclaimed, and then they all, even the irritable shirtsleeved man, burst out laughing, and laughed together a long time while he looked on amazed. She would have to give a guarantee, of his citizenship in a democratic nation, his occupation as a student, his anti-Communism, and the depth of her acquaintance with him. “This is something you’re signing your name to, miss,” Shirtsleeves said. “Please be sure.”
“I understand,” she said. “My finger’s still bleeding. I guess I will need that hankie.” The jacketed man crossed behind his partner and gave it to her, and as she turned to accept it he could finally see her face, amusement flashing beneath her polite smile, as she wound the handkerchief around her cut. Everything around him wove and faded and broke into coarse grain. The room was a bunker against the storm outside. Its air was stifling. Shirtsleeves had pulled the document out of a file folder and smoothed it on the desk in front of her; even so, its edges curled slightly from the dampness in the room. “Read, please,” he said, as she bent over it. Her swaddled finger struggled with her thumb to hold the pen. “We’d rather question all of them and make a mistake than miss one of them. Err towards caution,” the jacketed man was saying apologetically.
“That’s very reassuring,” Katherine said. She began to write and clumsily flipped the pen onto the floor. The jacketed man leaped to retrieve it. When she bent to try again he placed the pen in her hand and they signed her name together, in a large messy scrawl. Chuck felt the blood in his temples rising like the plume of a fountain, suspended in the air for a moment before crashing and spreading to his body’s far reaches, so that he suddenly leaped to his feet, and at the same moment, she withdrew her hand from the man’s grip and took up his suitcase, and he reached after it, trying to prevent her, and they collided and stared at each other with the wide-eyed panic of two people who had never met before. “Thank you very much,” she called back, as they tripped over each other leaving the small room, and slid across the mud-streaked floor of the station, crashing through the doors into the pelting rain. “What have you done?” she shouted, as they ran, arms shielding their faces, across the swiftly flooding lot. “What happened to Chicago?” The car sat being battered, the water thrumming on the rag top and singing loudly off the hood. When they reached it she turned to him breathlessly, the color high on her cheeks, and he dropped his suitcase with a great splash onto the pavement and took hold of her hand, unwound the man’s handkerchief and flung it into the gutter, although the cloth was pink with her blood. He put his lips to the cut. They both jumped with shock, feeling the warmth of his tongue meet the warm bead of blood.
The inside of the car was ruined with water. Crooked windings down the insides of the windows from where the top didn’t fit had made a rising pool in each seat, marshy floorboards, every surface slippery and the windows thick with steam. They were hidden but the space was so small every contact was a struggle. They strained together, kissing hungrily until the cool tastelessness the rain had washed them with was gone, and they could taste each other’s mouths. His hands touched her neck, the soft place beneath her jaw that might have never seen the sun, the cleft of her sternum where she was warm with sweat that hadn’t rinsed away. He felt her inhaling the stink of his hair, pushing her tongue into his waxy, bitter ear. The storm’s strength was dropping. As its noise subsided they heard their own quick breaths rising and falling, and the voices of recent bus station arrivals venturing out of the building at last and beginning to make their way across the lot toward the street. They broke apart and she found her keys. “Come on,” she whispered, stamping on the gas pedal. The car started with a spluttering roar. She turned back to him triumphantly and he held her face again and kissed her even as he saw the people in the lot drawing closer, and the car’s windows running with clear water, their brief shelter having dissolved.
They drove slowly along the flooded avenue, its surface chopping gently. The gutters were roaring with chocolate-colored water, tree-trash, colorful city debris. The engine gurgled as they moved, pushing a lip of water ahead of them and leaving a long V-shaped wake. They opened the windows all the way and a sultry breeze rolled across them. He smelled a rich odor of vegetable decay. When they turned onto a street lined with elevated sidewalks and storefronts, Katherine pulled to the curb. “Wait here,” she said, kissing him quickly and leaping out of the car. The sun had emerged and a new day seemed to beat down on them, bright and unremitting. He looked around cautiously. The street was filling now with post-storm promenaders. A woman with a motley group of children stood talking with a man in a duster drenched black from the backs of his knees to the long hem, where it brushed his boot heels. “Our line is on the ground!” he heard her say. “A live wire laying right there in the water. Every one of these dumb kids was gonna get cooked.” After she had vanished with her brood the man turned and walked up the street, splashing carelessly through the half foot of water that still ran through it. When he came level with Katherine’s car he stopped and stared. Chuck’s scalp prickled, and his armpits. He sat with his eyes trained ahead but feeling the man’s gaze on him like a wash of unpleasant heat. Katherine came out of the store with a paper sack dangling from one hand and rushed back to the car, passing by where the man stood. Chuck felt the gaze harden further. His own heart was pounding. “Now where shall we go?” Katherine asked, smiling at him. Over her shoulder Chuck saw the man turn slowly and begin walking, frequently looking back. “Are you all right?” She touched his mouth gently. “Hungry?”
He pushed his hand into his pocket and felt the wad of money there, all his earnings in the world, plus the sharp-edged hundred-dollar bill, slightly damp. “What is a nice hotel here, where it’s people from around the world stay?”
“The Charles,” she said, without stopping to think.
They drove there, each of them for different reasons becoming more and more nervous, so that by the time they arrived they were wordlessly shy. The storm turned out to have been the outer arm of a hurricane brushing the city, and the hotel was full of well-heeled people who had just fled their estates near the coast, which were now flooded and had no electricity. They stood holding their cocktails in the lobby and swapping stories of adventure and deprivation. Chuck was given a room despite the circumstances, as he had gambled he would be. In the world of the rich, displeasure at the sight of a stranger was overruled by breeding and protocol. He paid for a week in advance, and felt a pang of excitement and terror. The desk clerk smiled a thin, artificial smile. The bellhop took his rotting, stained suitcase without the slightest flicker disturbing his inactive face, and led them to the room. When they were alone they ate the sandwiches and drank the cider she’d bought, sitting side by side on the bed in a state of near paralysis. “I can’t believe it was a hurricane,” Katherine said. She was talking rapidly and ceaselessly, a nervous habit he had learned to recognize. “I never see the papers anymore. I never even listen to the radio news.” The afternoon was ending and the room had already grown dark. Katherine turned her watch around and around on her wrist, and he realized he had carried this gesture with him ever since the night he’d first seen her do it, when they sat together in the kitchen of Strake. “Isn’t it amazing? To have come here to the city from Sewanee, and ended up even more, in a way—” He kissed her hard in the middle of her sentence and they fell backwards together across the bed, their mouths making a complicated language, like a semaphore they urged against each other. They inched themselves steadily, earnestly, undeterrably up the length of the bed, their shoes and the sandwich wrappings and the cider bottles with the last sloshing inches undrunk kicked onto the floor, the difficulty of their clothing where it clung, clammy and wretched, like a no-longer-useful skin that cannot bear to be discarded, and the difficulty of the tightly made bed. They wordlessly united their efforts, pulled the bedclothes from their tuckings and wrenched them aside. He had lain face down on his hard, slanting mattress in his North Clark Street room without moving, hardly breathing, as if an effort of his will could transport him. He’d had so little then, just the feel of her hand as it traveled his neck, or her arms around his waist as he reeled up the stairs, but those things had been singular, and total.
The evening was as long as Glee could make it. She was up from her nap, blinking keenly at everything. “We thought you’d been swept out to sea,” she remarked, when Katherine came to the table. “Your hairstyle is unique, as usual. Very orphan-in-the-storm.” Katherine bent to her soup bowl and emptied it by half while Glee watched, eyebrows elevated. “Have we dispensed with grace?”
Katherine sat back with an uneven sigh and took a long draught of her drink. “We never had grace.”
“Well, maybe we ought to. Maybe it’s time we had some kind of religion.” Glee looked around for Mary Frances, who was audibly in the kitchen, lit herself a cigarette and almost immediately put it out. She picked with mild interest at her plate. “I have some ideas for tonight, Kitty. I have a magazine article I would like to hear, and I have some correspondence to do, and there is next week’s menu and our trip to plan.” Glee’s face darkened. “Maybe you and your brothers have got your wish and my little house is gone.”
“I doubt it,” Katherine snapped, thinking of the evening and the trip and every other duty angrily.
She didn’t get away until near midnight. At last there was no more to be done, not a magazine article Glee could stand to have read to her, no endurance for another cup of tea, Irish-style, as Glee said blandly, tipping the bottle. Inevitably Glee found her refusal to be left alone overridden by the unpleasant restlessness of Katherine’s company, and she let Katherine go, down the hall in the nightgown and robe she’d put on to her bedroom, where she dressed again and waited. Glee’s lamp blinked off. Katherine stole down the stairs, into the kitchen briefly, then out the back door, like a bad schoolgirl, running swiftly and noiselessly along her avenue’s tunnel of trees in bare feet to the place she’d left her car.
When she turned the key in his door he shot upright and gasped. A rectangle of bald light stretching in and someone coming toward him. “Hah!” he yelped. Where he was? “You’re all right,” she said, grabbing hold of him, and at her touch he almost leaped off the bed. He waved his arm around behind him, groping for the lamp, and with that intuitive motion his memory returned. He saw her, intently looking at him. “You were dreaming,” she said. “It’s all right.” She touched him again and he took the hand and held it too hard, trying to purge it of that electricity. The hand he held hers with was wet. He let go, and scrubbed his hair thoughtfully. “It’s okay. I went in a deep sleep.” His heart was still hammering: toktoktoktoktok. He wondered whether she could hear it.
He didn’t sleep that night. For a long time he tried, turning his eyes to the ceiling and counting his own breaths, waiting for the numbers to climb to the point at which he had some difficulty keeping track of them. Doing this he often passed out cold in the three-digit range, his mind too preoccupied to stop him, and awoke in the morning thinking happily, five hundred two. From deep within the bowels of the hotel, he heard the hiss of a tap. He envisioned the riser moving through the suffocating tranquility of this hour, reaching the washroom sink, handling the water. He realized he did not want to let himself sleep. Carefully he brought the alarm clock that sat on the bedside table close to his face, turning it this way and that in the imperfect darkness. When he deciphered three A.M. his chest tightened. He hadn’t passed one of those lost, black nights, from which he would awaken with the sense that the marrow had been sucked from his body, leaving him to wobble bonelessly and ecstatically from the bed in a state of true sedation, since before the day he’d read Addison’s letter. That had been in yet another universe. Every muscular connection of his body, the bands holding his skull to his shoulders, and his shins to his kneecaps, and his eyes to their sockets, were stretched to their limits. He reached for the clock again, and saw three twenty-two. This night would never end. There was no certainty that he could sleep without dreaming, and no chance he could dream without betraying himself. Every dream, no matter how benign at the outset, eventually took the same turn. Katherine tossed sideways suddenly, violently, and he took her sadly in his arms and felt her sleeping weight, so much greater than the sum of her. Asleep she gave off waves of slumberous heat, and a sweet baking smell. She seemed to have yielded herself to alchemical changes. He knew suddenly, his shock dulled by the inevitability of the realization, that he would leave in the morning. He stared at the grip of his arms around her. His body seemed craven. He would take it, and hide it.
At last he could see a slight change in the space around him. He watched the bleak shapes of the furniture emerge. She stirred and lifted herself to look down at him, and his eyes flooded suddenly.
“Oh, my dear.” She touched his lids gently. She could see he hadn’t slept.
“Do you still get married?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. I’m a bad, faithless woman.”
“And I am a thief,” he said.
He failed to leave that morning, and kept failing, in spite of knowing that there was no other right thing to do. He could give way to blind momentum, descend with her until he touched a subterranean current to which he might entrust himself heedlessly, but in the end it always fell away. He was left with the dearth of his prospects. In Chicago his attempt to will her from his thoughts had resulted in her immanence in everything, his sense that she was watching from afar, with a constant and transforming attention, as if his life were an American movie and she were his audience. He’d felt ennobled and remade. Yet he was full of immutable stuff. Holding her he could think only of the unsee-able space his own body contained, like being slammed against a threshold, again and again. He might tear himself open and never see anything. The interval that began with her hesitant withdrawal from him, her fingers moving through his hair, her palms touching his jaw, the quick kiss because she was always late, and that ended, finally, with her face leaving him, obliterated by the closing door, after which he was alone in the hot room again, cast its shadow wider and wider. His heart began pounding as soon as she stirred against him, the outer edge of the tide of gray light just appearing at the top of the blinds, and gained speed all through their slow untangling, and over the course of days, not because he could not endure her leaving but because he was waiting for the morning he wouldn’t endure it. After she was gone he would lie listening to the sounds of the hotel slowly coming to life. He found a little sign in his desk drawer that allowed him to decline housekeeping, and hung it on his door. Then he tracked the sad progress of the maids moving their linen carts down the hall. He would hear their gradual approach, room by room, sometimes the deep note of the vacuum cleaner, felt more than heard. One door would click shut and the one nearer him gently open. At last the cart whispered smoothly past his door. He carefully lifted the long, slightly curving hairs off the pillow, and dropped them in the desk drawer. He would find some kind of reliquary for them.
If she woke in the middle of the night he was sitting in his chair at the window, the small ember of his cigarette floating before him. His night vigilance never flagged, and it had gained such strength, like a motor burning infinite fuel, that he couldn’t even sleep in the daytime, while he was alone. He would lie in a cool bath as the afternoon grew hot, watching the distortions his body made under the water, or he would lie in the bed, amazed by the fumes of her, held there. But when she was asleep in the bed he could not bear to lie down beside her. He would feel her vast distance from him, and think what he thought every night, that the next day he would go. He had nothing to give her. The things he had to hide weren’t even things, he’d realized. They were a nothingness, but capable of damage. He felt already that so many people, people he had hardly known, who had done nothing but collide with his life in an effort to help him, had wound up his casualties. If he told her what pained him, she might care for his pain, and gain nothing. He did not know what happiness she could have with Addison. He felt sure she could not be happy with him at all. Yet he knew his own situation was not better than that man’s, and he suspected it was very much worse. He was just a poor student. And not even that now, but a drifter.
She felt him leaving, and knew it was more and more urgent she make a decision. She had always sensed the transience that lay beneath his obedient Sewanee demeanor, and she’d always thought one day he might vanish. Her sense of him now was no different. Every night she braced herself for a stripped room, and no note. Then she saw him coming out of the chair to meet her halfway, carelessly crushing the package she held as they stood kissing slowly, like people reunited on a train platform, or on a pier beside a steamer. Even then she could feel a resistance in him, growing larger. “Why don’t you sleep?” she asked. When he realized that she was awake he came and sat on the edge of the bed, and she lay her head in his lap and shared his cigarette with him.
“I worry on things,” he said honestly.
“Are you afraid of your dreams?”
“Ah.” He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. “I am,” he said.
“What do you dream about?”
He had never meant to tell her anything. But he wanted her so much to understand, to be happy somehow, when he left her. “I dream of the war in my country.” Their voices were so quiet in that room, no louder than a dry hand brushing on cloth. And the nimbus of the streetlight, and the breeze pushing in. “I dream of being there.”
“What happens?”
“Mostly I am running. Soldiers come behind me and I run, run, run.” His hand moved slowly through the air. “Then I hear a shooting.”
“This is when you wake up.”
“No.” He took the cigarette back from her, pinching it carefully. It was almost burned down. He examined the tip, its bright heart. “I feel the bullets come in me.”
She was silent a long time. At last she said, “Did this happen to you?”
“No.” He smiled into the dark suddenly. It was very strange, indeed. “No. This is never what happened to me.”
Glee’s health lapsed steeply again and she returned to her bed, weaker and more restless than before. She scowled at every meal brought to her, and greeted Katherine with a look of plain hatred one evening at dinnertime. Katherine set the tray down and touched her mother’s shriveled eyelids, brushed her lips against the stiff, too-large ear, stroked the flannel of her mother’s girlish nightgown. Her body was voracious for sensation and relief. She drove back from the hotel in the dawn twilight with one hand pressed between her legs; in the afternoons she locked herself in the washroom and ran baths so that she could open her legs under the pounding tap and be yanked into coming too quickly, muffling her scream with a wet fist in her mouth. When she bent to kiss Glee, her smell and her distracted, lazy gestures seemed so dissolute that Glee’s tolerance snapped. “You reek,” she said. “You reek of duplicity.”
“You’re tired, Mother.”
“You’re a liar. There isn’t a true fiber in your body.”
“It doesn’t make you feel better to be ugly to me.”
“Where are you going at night?”
“Nowhere.”
“Liar. Is he here?”
“He is not here.”
“Tell him to come and look me in the face. He can’t. He’s a coward who boosts himself up with weak people. He did it with your father. He patronized your father, he thought he was as stupid as a brick but he flattered him and kept him nearby to boost himself up and your father loved him. And it’s the same with you, you stupid girl.”
“He’s not here and I’m not going anywhere.”
“I lie awake all night and I can account for every minute. I know you leave. You could never keep a secret.”
She walked out of the house without waiting for Glee to be done with her meal. When she arrived at the hotel an event was under way. The lobby was incandescent, as if the chandeliers’ bulbs had been cleaned, or the missing ones replaced. Band music drifted in from the ballroom. A little overflow bar had been set up amid the potted palms and the deep chairs and a trim crowd of graying men in summer suits and wives in armless evening dresses trailed across the carpet in pairs toward it, or sat resting with their drinks. It had the look and sound of a charity ball, she thought. Her parents would have been at this party, if this had been another time. She might see them coming across the plush carpet, her father’s easy, rolling gait and her mother’s flawless angularity, her thin arm passed through the meaty bend of Joe’s elbow and her step light even though she was wonderfully drunk. Katherine wondered if this event’s invitation had been one of those she’d vetted, or if Glee had finally lost her place in the New Orleans social register of couples, and been quietly reclassified as “widow.” Glee had always taken such pleasure in being part of a sought-after pair. Katherine suddenly understood what it must mean to her mother, to have lost that arena. She stood uncertainly at the lobby’s edge, looking across the busy space which she had grown used to seeing sunk in a dawn twilight, its only occupant a night clerk asleep at the desk. Then she crossed to the telephone box, cutting straight through the palms and the milling partygoers, and pulled its door shut. “It’s me,” she said, when he answered. “It’s Katherine.”
“I was beginning to wonder.”
“The phone lines were downed in the storm.”
“Were they?”
“Everything was down for a while.”
“I was a bit worried about you. Katherine in the tropics.” She heard his voice lighten, that moment of deep irritation, coloring into suspicion, having already passed. Her heart raced with fear, and excitement. She’d had a deep intimation suddenly, when Glee had told her she could never keep a secret. No, she’d thought. You’re wrong about that. From what seemed a great distance she heard him say, “What on earth have you been doing?”
“Nothing, really. It’s dull. A good bit of reading.” She remembered this. She remembered when deceit had been ecstatic. It was nothing to be proud of, but she’d felt so brave, plotting stratagems and telling lies, running risks and losing all the while, but only growing more determined, like a martyr. She had been testing her own powers for the first time, feeling herself presented with the first great abyss to leap across, and she’d leaped. And had never done it again. She had needed to believe that he loved her, but the thing that truly thrilled her was herself in love, determined to give as much of herself as she could force someone else to accept. And he’d always wanted less than she wanted to give.
He was cheerfully saying, “I don’t think you miss me at all.” I love your lightness, I love that intelligence matched with such lightness, I love it when you tell me your stories, I love that about you. He had never said he loved her. He had only ever told her what he loved, to impart the way he wanted her to be. Intelligent, but light. Never brooding or demanding. He had loved her independence so that she never could have needs, he had loved her stories because they meant that her real life lay elsewhere and in no way relied upon him. The loss she’d grieved for all these years wasn’t that of some ideal Charles but of herself when she’d first striven toward him, shortsighted and rash but absolutely impelled by her love. A girl in that condition might lie, just to feel her secret. She might say, “I do miss you,” and feel the words like a wedge dropped between them as she hung up the phone. And then there were all those ways to lie that bridged the gap and made it possible to move, brash shows of false confidence that muscled themselves forth and turned true, reckless bluffing, their lives as a confidence game. “We can stay here,” she said, bursting into his room. “I’ll tell Charles. I’ll tell him everything, and we’ll stay here. There’s no reason not to. There’s a house on the coast we can have, a little house with a dock and a porch.”
“This isn’t possible,” he said. She knew it wasn’t. That particular thing wouldn’t ever be possible. But when they lay together in the room and he traced the curve at the small of her back, remembering her hair tumbling toward him, her head bent beneath the low tent-top of the car, her skin sealed to his with their sweat and the edges of the room rocking like a boat, or turning slowly like a wheel, because he was so tired that even the air around him had become a hallucination, they pretended it might be. There was no way of being in love without imagining that place, situated so near in the future that they were both exactly the same, but on the far side of a miraculous era of countless impossible changes. She held him in her arms, describing. The Gulf Coast was a great marsh of grass, with the sky lying unobstructed and hot blue everywhere above you. In the distance if you saw a small black cloud this was a lone tree, its trunk invisible from a distance, floating above the horizon. The long grass was furred silver on one side and exquisitely tuned to the wind. It endlessly rippled and parted and the sound it made cured sleeplessness. Below it was the sleepy tow of black water. You could sail anywhere through the grass, pushing your boat with a pole, although the grass broke into islands with glittering channels between them. Herons coasted the length of these, every beat of their wings like sails billowing. The severe little German-looking bird was a kingfisher, hunched on a bent bow of grass. The scholar bird, he murmured. He always looked so fastidious and so lonely.
“Our house is in the middle of the ocean,” she said, and then she felt him falling, his hand slid from hers and dropped onto the sheets, and he was finally asleep.