Damp, velvety darkness confuses the streetlights, each pale head in a mist. The river flows turgid, slower than summer, settling iceward. Hugh walks along, thinking not about Burton or Mimi, but about the basement of the gallery. What else has to be shifted down there, in case the foundation crack widens over the winter, floods in the spring.
Slow night-silence parts for his footsteps. As his steps change, mounting the old bridge, he begins to hear a second, syncopated set. He lifts his head to glance behind him. Newell, following.
Hugh stands still.
Such a pretty night, now the rain has let up. The mist, the shining pavements, shining leaves. A moon has risen—a moon? The moon.
Newell reaches the bridge.
“It’s always the same moon,” Hugh tells him. “Are you looking for me?”
“For Burton,” Newell says. “Della’s out here somewhere too. He tore off into the night to catch you, shouting about Hemingway and Wallace Stevens in Florida, about Rimbaud, Gore Vidal—you name it. Hard to say which literary figure he imagines himself to be. Tennessee Williams, maybe. He’s roaming around shouting Blanche’s lines through the blood, and he doesn’t know the town like you do.”
Hugh walks on.
Newell waits for a minute, then runs with long strides to catch Hugh’s hand, his arm.
“Don’t be angry with Burton. He’s such a mess. Can you let it go, for my sake?” His eyes so tired in that noble face.
Impossible or needless to ask why Newell couldn’t report Burton, charge him, even after all these years. All the intimacy of friendship adds up to nothing, except that there are questions you know not to ask, even though you do not ask exactly why you must not ask.
“Can’t live with him, can’t shoot him,” Newell says, and Hugh can’t help but nod and promise, even if it’s not out loud. Newell nods too, and sets off back toward the school.
Hugh carries on across the bridge, to the gallery, home.
Up the porch stairs, key in the lock; up the back stairs, the landing; down the hall to the bathroom.
He vomits for a long time, feeling strangely happy to get rid of everything, everything. If only he could throw up everything that ails him. He washes his mouth, his face. In the mirror, his eyes are bloodshot. He turns off the light and sits on the side of the tub for a moment, happier in the dark.
Happier in his house, his treehouse, than out in the world.
Cleaned her clocks. He ought to have gone over to Mimi’s room. Or go now. But she’ll be drugged out for the night now. He gets up and walks through to the living room, turning off lights as he goes. The afghan Ruth knitted for him when he was twelve. He wraps that around him. The chaise longue is mostly under the half-roof of the deck; he kicks it sideways and climbs into it. Only the footpad is really wet.
Rain falls on the small remaining leaves and on the asphalt surface of the roof. The yard light behind the coffee shop, the one that bothers his eyes, has burned out. That small happiness means a lot.
In bed at the midnight hour, Orion rethinks.
“You look like a young prince out of the Arabian Nights … I want to kiss you just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth.”
Old Burton doing Blanche, mouth smelling like the end of everything. Lying in bed beside Newell by now. Or on the pullout couch in the guest room, if Newell was as mad as he looked. Poor old guy, thinking over what he’s done with his life and the end of it coming, thinking that he will always be able to depend on the kindness of strangers but in fact no, we can’t. All us strangers, strange as anything in individual beds, all thinking like crazy. Newell in the huge bed under the blue silk duvet, thinking how to stop his old pal from coming on to boys in the master class, master of his domain. Or maybe lying spooned behind Burton, comforting the old guy, soft dick pressed against him kindly because he can’t help being kind all the fucking time.
We have to be less kind.
Orion thinks about what he can make out of all this mess: a good part in Sweeney now, a leg up later. That’s it.
He needs more to think about, to find a way into sleep.
He thinks of L, lying in a square of pale light from her attic window, knowing that her father has split, and like Savaya, calculating does she or doesn’t she, re: Nevaeh. And of Jason wondering, wondering if there will ever be one for him, and if he will be ready. Jason’s mother, hands folded on her chest, a raging, corpse-like Sleeping Beauty; his own skeletal mother lying like sticks under her pink blanket, crying, tears sliding down her nose and her yellow cheek. Farther out in the city, rooms full of fathers who have done something awful, something unforgiveable, and have not yet told anyone; men who have a minor operation in the morning and believe they won’t live through it, all the ordinary shallow pains.
Each one of us lies sleeping not sleeping thinking thinking a thousand things and the frets form a net of fears, a net that lies knotted under our continuo humming as we go about the day, and at last the spread wings of dreams release us from the net and take us unto the forbidden country.