Part 7 (1/2)

She shakes her head. He waits, but she doesn't say anything.

He asks what she'd like for dinner. ”I was thinking I might make us an omelet.”

”You go ahead. I'm really not hungry.”

He should try to get her to eat, especially if she didn't have lunch. Then he thinks: Wait a minute, she's a grown woman; if she lived alone she wouldn't have anybody pestering her to eat. ”Would you like your door open or closed?” he asks instead.

”Open,” she tells him. She likes the feeling that he is nearby, likes hearing the clink of dishes in the kitchen.

She lies there, staring at the ceiling. She left her husband's letter in the den after reading it this morning, but she remembers parts of it-they keep jabbing her. It's a real letter, the first one he's actually mailed from this trip, postmarked from Segovia two days after the tour ended in Barcelona.

”Your news from New York is wonderful. Here is ours from Spain,” it said. He pa.s.sed her request to the Infant-”but now must call Infanta, because in Spain. She will be happy to lend cat for unhappy love affair.”

She imagines him and the Infant walking the bleached streets of Segovia, or sitting over a bottle of wine in a whitewashed restaurant, laughing and spurring each other into wilder, frothier notions about the cat's pa.s.sions. She knows how it feels to walk down a street late at night, stumbling into each other, giddy with laughter.

”Also has idea that maybe you will put in pictures of dancers dancing with cats-thinks would be very funny, and willing to pose.”

It went on, exuberant, bubbling over with joy about her book, full of suggestions-with his syntax and his excitement, she couldn't tell which ideas were his and which the Infant's. She sees that he is radiant with relief that now there will be a place where the three of them can all exist together. She wishes she'd never dreamed up this book. Or thought it necessary to prove her own sophisticated magnanimity by inviting the Infant inside. She feels as if she's asked someone into her house who has tracked mud on all the floors and then broken every stick of furniture in the place. It's an accident, the guest didn't mean to do it, but there's the dirt and there are the splinters.

And there is her husband, mistaking her desperate good manners for a genuine wish that the guest might visit more often-or even move in.

And there is she herself, standing in the wreckage thinking that the only thing to do now is to put down white carpeting and set out some even more precious, fragile chairs.

”Just checking to see if you need anything,” Malcolm says from the doorway.

”I'm fine,” she says.

Clearly she's not fine. He goes back into the kitchen and absently puts the other half of the omelet-the one he'd hoped she would say she was hungry for, when he looked in on her just now-into the refrigerator and carries his own plate into the living room.

He eats, reading The New Yorker but not remembering a word of it; he is just a pair of eyes moving down a page. He is imagining Europe, which he finds he can't do. Museums, buildings, languages, food-what is all that? It's an expanse, a vista he can feel the magnitude of without seeing clearly what it will be like; something inside him has gotten larger at the thought that he's going to go there. All he can actually picture, for some reason, are the Impressionist paintings he's seen in the Metropolitan of cafe scenes, the women in bustles and feathered hats, the whiskered men in evening clothes. Where would he be, in those paintings?

He thinks of Tim. The warm thing that he already feels like he's flying toward.

I wish he were smarter. I wish he loved me more.

Those things are true, but they don't matter. You don't want to go to someone because of a list-tall, red-gold hair, a kind of careless princely ease in the world-and there is no list that can stop you from wanting to go.

The apartment is very quiet.

The apartment is quiet. What is Malcolm doing out there? She wants him with her and she doesn't want anyone with her. She wants obliteration. She calls out, ”Malcolm.” When he comes, she asks him to bring her some brandy.

On an empty stomach? she hears him thinking. The other aides (not de-carca.s.s anymore, not now, anyway, she's so tired of her own peppy humor) would have said it, the Fraulein (no, her real name was Katie) with a quaver; and Betty, with dramatic relish.

Malcolm goes out and comes back with the drink.

He's poured it generously, not wanting to appear to be rationing her. ”Would you like a drink too?” she asks. He hesitates for a moment. This has never come up before. He wants to be sharp, to be able to take care of her; but he doesn't want to seem prudish. And also: he'd like a drink.

”Bring it in here,” she says. ”Come sit for a while. And Malcolm?” she says, and he looks back at her questioningly.

”There's a letter on the desk. Can you go in and read it? And then come back, but please don't say anything about it.”

When he returns after a few minutes with his own gla.s.s of brandy, she looks at his face and then looks away so she won't start crying.

After a while she asks for more, and he brings it. Why should she not get drunk if she wants to?

She asks him to turn out the light. They stay there together without talking. Finally he sees that she is asleep, and he goes to the living room and sits on the couch and falls asleep also. In his sleep he hears her calling his name over and over; and then he is awake and she is still calling him, screaming his name.

He runs into the bedroom, flipping on the overhead light so that the room is suddenly, starkly illuminated, the whole scene.

She is sobbing, he has never seen her cry before. ”It's all right, it's all right,” he says, already pulling the covers off the bed, running to the bathroom to fill a basin with warm water and grab some washcloths. The sound of her crying pierces him like nothing ever has; his hands are shaking as he cleans her; his voice shakes as he tells her again and again that it's all right.

”I'm so ashamed,” she manages to say at one point.

”It's not your fault, it was the brandy on an empty stomach, it could happen to anyone,” he says, and she cries: ”No, I don't mean this,” waving a hand to encompa.s.s the mess.

”All right, all right, all right,” he continues to murmur.

He leaves her once he's cleaned her up, to run into the bathroom and set up the contraption so that he can rinse her. But when he wraps her in a clean sheet and carries her in there and she sees it, she starts to cry again. ”No, please, no.” She is s.h.i.+vering.

”All right,” he says again. He carries her out of the bathroom and lays her gently on the floor of the hallway, with a folded towel under her head.

Lying there, she watches him leaning over the tub, detaching the hose from the tap and then lifting the contraption and folding it. The door half shuts while he replaces it on the hook where it lives, and then the door swings inward, opening again, so that she can see him going over to the tub and turning on the water. A bath-is he going to give her a bath? She hasn't had one for years. They tried it a few times, in the early days, her husband and an aide; but the tub is surrounded by tiled walls on three sides and there is no way for someone kneeling beside it to keep her neck and shoulders from sliding under without putting her in a stranglehold. After a few attempts that left her with bruises, the idea was abandoned; and as with all these failed experiments, she hasn't wasted time on regrets.

But hearing the hot water thundering into the tub, seeing the steam rise, she is suddenly filled with longing. She wonders how Malcolm will manage it, while knowing that he will. He's sitting on the edge of the tub, with his hand under the running water, as if testing the temperature, and his body twisted away from her. She can't see his face. After a while he stands up. She watches as he takes off his s.h.i.+rt and steps out of his trousers. He leaves on his briefs. She looks at his body, which is tall and very beautiful, as beautiful as the body of any dancer. He is neither looking at her nor looking away.

He is very calm, not worrying about any of this even though it is so far outside anything he has ever done. He knows it will be all right. When the tub is full he turns off the water and then goes to her and leans down to unwrap the sheet. He carries her to the tub and steps in. He lowers himself, still holding her crosswise, and then turns her so that she's lying on her back on top of him, her body resting along the length of his. He has his arm across her chest, supporting her; his hand is just beneath her right breast, which looks very white around the nipple's pink bloom. He has never looked at her body in this way-it's the thing he takes care of, and anyway, he wouldn't-but lying here beneath her, he feels himself getting hard. It doesn't matter, she can't feel it so it won't scare her; and it doesn't scare him. They rest together in the hot green water.

There's the warmth of the water-acutely lovely where it envelops her upper body; but also, surprisingly, something she can feel in her legs, without having any other sensation there. There's the weightlessness. There is the warm, p.r.i.c.kly, solid support of Malcolm's body against her upper back and shoulders. There's his brown arm lying across her whiteness, his hand near her breast: the a.s.surance and gentleness of it. There's his chin resting lightly on the top of her head. There's the sight of their bodies in the s.h.i.+mmering water, her own nakedness stretched out so lightly along his. She has not felt like this in a long time; and some of it is new to her, tonight.

After a while she asks him if he'd like to hear a story.

”Yes,” he says.

”This is one my husband tells. I think it's my favorite,” she says; and it seems normal and relaxed, too, that she should speak of her husband.

Once, she begins, there was a fisherman who lived by the River Volkov. There were many pretty girls in his town, but none so beautiful as his lovely little river. At night the fisherman sat on the bank and played his mandolin and sang love songs to the river.

One night, when he'd had too much to drink, he fell asleep for a little while, and when he woke in the moonlight he saw a great blue-green head rising out of the river: the Tsar of the Waters. The tsar said, ”My daughters and I have enjoyed your singing. Will you promise to come and visit us someday?”

”I promise,” said the fisherman.

”I would like to give you a present,” said the tsar. ”When I am gone, cast your net into the river.”

The tsar's head sank beneath the surface, and the fisherman threw in his net and felt it grow heavy. He pulled it out and there was a chest, and when he opened it he saw that the chest was full of jewels.