Part 14 (2/2)

Charlotte went to the kitchen to get dinner ready. The dogwood, she thought, will bloom any day now. Tomorrow morning, even, she might have a glimpse of pink before leaving for work.

Gloria and Arthur Harris were congenial guests.

”I'm glad you asked us over,” said Gloria. ”You know, I've really wanted to get together, but every time I meet you on the street one of us is rus.h.i.+ng off somewhere.”

In the kitchen, scooping vanilla ice cream over the pie, which she had warmed in the oven, Charlotte listened anxiously. Thank heaven the Harrises weren't talking about their work. Arthur Harris was describing their camping trip in Maine last summer. They had had two weeks alone in the woods. Arthur said, ”It was great. We're both so busy all year that this was finally a chance to, well, get away and concentrate on each other for a change.” Then Gloria talked about her family, how she had four sisters scattered all over the United States. Fred asked a few questions. He mentioned his sister, far off too, in Detroit. It was going smoothly. Charlotte, after settling down with her pie and coffee, tried not to lead the conversation. Let Fred see how pleasant it could be, spending a little time with friendly people. They got to talking about articles in magazines and about current novels. That was good. Fred spent whole days reading, which he could do even while the TV chattered. He sounded somewhat scornful of everything he read-she hoped that wouldn't put the Harrises off-but at least he was talking.

Later, while they were having brandy, Charlotte said, ”By the way, have you ever noticed the man who stands in front of that house near yours at night?”

”Noticed!” said Arthur. ”How could we miss him?”

”Then tell me, what on earth is he doing there? I've been wondering for over a year.”

”It's one of those peculiar stories, Charlotte,” said Gloria hesitantly. ”It'll depress you.”

”That's all right,” said Charlotte. ”We're dying to know.”

”Well, he used to live in that house. Some of the older neighbors even remember him from back then, which always strikes me as weird-he's not someone you can picture as young. Anyhow, his wife ran off one day and took the kids. One of those ghastly stories. I don't know the details. He moved out. No one knows where he lives now.”

”But why ... why is he standing there, after all this time?” As she spoke, Charlotte noticed that Fred had picked up a magazine and was starting to leaf through it.

Gloria shrugged. ”Kind of an obsession, I suppose. You know how these things are.”

Charlotte set down her gla.s.s carefully. She was faintly dizzy from the brandy. ”But what about the people who live there now? Don't they mind him just standing there night after night?”

”Oh, there's no one there now,” Gloria said. ”The house is empty. Didn't you know? It has been for years. He never sold it. Hung on to it.”

Charlotte's whole body was trembling. She looked over at Fred again. He had let the magazine drop and didn't appear to be listening. His hands were clasped loosely over his stomach and his eyes were half shut.

”Do you mean to say he stands in front of an empty house?” Her head was pounding. She was remembering all the stories she and Fred had invented about the man, and how far off they had been. They had never thought of the force of memory, of habit, of yearning, nor of madness. And yet she felt it was not really yearning, or madness either. It was something for which she could find no name, a kind of dogged, rooted, purposeless sticking. ... She felt herself starting, childishly, to cry, and felt, too, that she must say something to explain her tears or she would be mortified. ”That's ... that's the saddest story I've ever heard.”

”Ha ha ha,” roared Fred suddenly. His fat belly shook and the bottom b.u.t.ton of his s.h.i.+rt strained, threatening to burst off. ”Ha ha! What an ending!” He laughed raucously, stomping his huge feet on the floor and bouncing his head up and down. He laughed on and on, as if he could not stop, as if he might go on forever.

Charlotte leaped to him and grabbed the gla.s.s out of his hand. It was slos.h.i.+ng liquor all over the rug with every jerk of his body. ”Fred, stop it. It's not funny. What are you laughing at?”

She saw Gloria and Arthur exchange a shocked look. Arthur's formerly bland eyes were alarmed.

”Ha ha! Not funny!” Fred gasped. ”It's the funniest thing I've ever heard!” He slapped his thighs and threw his head back. Old gold shone from his wide-open mouth. Subsiding, he wiped his eyes, and then his shoulders began quivering with another swell of savage laughter.

”Fred!” cried Charlotte. ”Don't laugh like that!”

Gloria Harris put down her brandy gla.s.s and stood up.

Charlotte, sobbing, a fire streaking through her chest, ran downstairs, outside, and buried her face in the dark of the honeysuckle. She wanted to forget the last half hour, forget the dreadful story about the man, forget the years with Fred that had thickened around her like a dense layer of fat. She wanted to be transported back to the time before she ever knew Fred, even before her father had died, when life had stretched before her full of possibility. It was hopeless, she knew, and yet she took deep gasping breaths and dug her teeth into the leaves, trying to bite off and swallow the deadening sweetness.

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT.

ALEXANDER SMITH WOKE TO find himself sitting up in bed. The bedside wall lamp was on. His gla.s.ses were still on, and a book lay open on the blanket, two middle pages peculiarly upright, swaying in the faint fall breeze from the nearby window. The digital clock said the time was 2:47. Odd how the last two numbers were his age, a reminder in the dead of night. ”s.h.i.+t,” he muttered. He hated to doze off reading, which had been happening to him about twice a week lately. He had trouble getting back to sleep, and mornings after, felt jolted out of sequence, as if two days had pa.s.sed instead of one. A small click sounded; it was 2:48. There, he had aged. Staring at the straight-edged, unfriendly numbers, he vaguely recalled a Robert Frost poem that said a solitary clock proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. Yes. That was exactly how it felt in the middle of the night. The time was just a meaningless number with no attachment to events. Alexander felt stranded and forlorn.

He put aside his gla.s.ses, switched off the lamp, and got down under the covers. He felt the warm back of his wife, Linda, turned away from him, her contours familiar and soothing. He hadn't thought to look, when the light was on, to see if she was there. But where else would she be at two forty-eight? A click; he made the correction, forty-nine. Just so, it went by.

Sleep eluded him. To make matters worse, he discovered something quite strange nagging at him. A small shape, dark, yet standing out against the deeper dark, danced behind his closed lids. It looked like a bacillus. Alexander's eyes had been strained lately, since he used them constantly in his work as an architect. Perhaps he needed stronger gla.s.ses. Perhaps he was getting old. Undoubtedly he was getting old. He watched the bacillus dance about, and found that if he rolled his eyes from left to right the spot moved with them. If he rolled them up and down the spot went along too, but the up-and-down motion hurt.

Minutes clicked by, and it would not go away. It made his skin tingly and restless, as if his insides were struggling to escape from their container. He knew what it was, though, and knowledge was rea.s.suring. The spot was an aftereffect of sleeping for two hours with the light on and then waking up to the dim glow and going abruptly back into darkness. It was some optical phenomenon he couldn't explain precisely, but whose broad outlines he felt he understood. As a matter of fact, he felt that general imprecise understanding about a great many things, he realized: the tides, rocket s.h.i.+ps, airplanes, rainbows. Maybe he really didn't know anything thoroughly. What the h.e.l.l, though. He managed, didn't he? Now sleep.

Alexander opened his eyes in the dark. He could see nothing. It was too soon. You had to lie awake for a while in the dark before you could see everything. He saw only the spot, dark against dark, floating through the void like a flying saucer. No longer shaped like a bacillus, it was a small circle with undefined edges, rather like a planet seen through a telescope, with a halo around it. Or a gray star with a gray glow. He closed his eyes; it remained, spinning, creating a haze, a wake of its motion. Horrible. He opened them. He could begin to distinguish the furniture now. The room was s.p.a.cious. There was his armchair against the far wall. Then his bureau drawer on the right; Linda's was on the left. Above Linda's was a mirror, illumined in places where moonlight glimmered in through the window. The spot went everywhere Alexander's eyes went, relentless. It flickered in the jagged beams in the mirror. He couldn't get rid of it. A UFO with a message. Glaucoma. Retinitis pigmentosa. Impending death, beckoning. To ease the panic he moved closer to the warm body of Linda. She was wearing a thin silky nightgown that excited him mildly as its smoothness brushed against his chest and thighs.

He realized he was trembling with fear. Maybe he ought to make love to Linda. That would at least be something to do while he couldn't sleep. She was still turned away from him. He put his arm around her and pulled her closer, testing the strength of his desire. It was nice making love to Linda. He pressed against her. She was usually an eager partner, and if not always totally eager, if some vague, ancient tug seemed to hold her back, she was at least amenable. He put a hand on Linda's breast and eased a knee between her thighs. The spot in his eye throbbed, zoomed forward and back to tease him, taunt him, like the cavorting spot at the end of an invisible laser beam. Did he want to make love to Linda? He queried his body. Actually not very much. He was tired and distressed by the frustrating day and longed to sleep.

But maybe he should do it anyway. It might make him forget about the thing in his eye. Once he started he would want to. He moved his palm around Linda's nipple but she did not stir. G.o.d, what a deep sleep! He envied her. His eyes rolled involuntarily with the motion of his hand, and he noticed that the speck rolled too. It was terrifying. Trembling, he turned over on his other side, leaving Linda. The clock said 3:04. The right-hand numbers of the clock stopped at sixty. Maybe he would die at sixty. Or the next sixty. Actually they stopped at fifty-nine. There was no 3:60. The spot was on the clock, on the upper-left-hand tip of the four. Five.

Alexander began to experiment with the spot. If he could not get rid of it he could at least play with it, tease it back. He stretched out flat and looked up at the ceiling. He blinked. The spot disappeared for the fraction of an instant that his lids fluttered down and up, but immediately reappeared to jiggle on the ceiling. He began to blink to the rhythm of the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and the speck obediently danced. But the fast pace made his eyes ache, so he lowered his lids to rest them. He didn't feel like playing with it. He was exhausted. There was no comfortable way to arrange his body; his pores seemed about to burst open. The speck was an intrusion, undeserved, unbearable. He wanted to cry out in protest, as he would protest to the police if a thief entered his house, but there was no one to protest to. It was his very own speck. He thrashed around in the bed, viciously kicking the covers about him. Then he pressed his fists hard to his eyes and for a moment found relief. Gone! But when he released them it was back, surrounded by colored flas.h.i.+ng dots. They went away gradually but the spot remained. Alexander started to sweat. He hated the spot savagely. It was not in his body-it seemed located in distant s.p.a.ce, yet it controlled his existence like a vital organ, heart or lungs. Then he quieted in surprise, for the way he had just described the spot, distant yet part of him and controlling, sounded like the idea of G.o.d that was taught to children. The speck was G.o.d. G.o.d was paying him a nocturnal visit. A vision.

Alexander couldn't believe it was himself having such alien thoughts. His brain was softening. Premature senility. He ought to laugh; he must be delirious. But it was not funny. Very possibly this was the way people went insane. G.o.d. s.h.i.+t, he thought. He would never read in bed again. His forehead was cold with damp sweat. He went into the bathroom for a drink of water and looked in the mirror, but couldn't really see himself because of the mote in his eye. There was only a haggard, generalized familiar face: anyone's, a good-looking model for expensive Scotch in the pages of a slick magazine, caught unawares in his pajamas, with a hangover. The mote was in the mirror, on the pupil of his right eye. It was a gross distortion of figure and ground. He was the ground and the mote was the figure. Blood surged through him. Furious, he lifted his fist in a violent gesture to smash the mirror, but stopped himself in time. He really must get hold. Maybe he ought to read for a while. But he knew that the speck would move along the words of the page; he knew exactly how it would look, gray, bouncing along the white page, a replica of his eye's movements, and he didn't want to try.

Back in bed, he pressed the pillow hard over his eyes. Thank G.o.d! It was gone. Maybe now he could sleep, if he could find the right position. Soon it would be morning. He peered out: 3:58. The hour was aging. Linda lay calm; she hadn't stirred. Linda was forty-one. He experimented with the pillow; at last, lying on his stomach with his face pressed into it but turned slightly to one side, he could keep the mote away and still breathe.

Sleep did not come, but he was more peaceful. He tried to think of nothing, but events of the day, blueprints, drawings, the faces of his a.s.sociates, ran through his mind. It had been a troubled day: a contract they believed they were sure to get was at the last moment given to a younger, rival firm. Alexander had been ruthless, shouting at his staff and threatening to fire people for not working hard enough. He had felt weighed down with the burden of the business pressing on the front of his head. He thought of women he had seen in Caribbean islands moving gracefully down dirt roads with huge, heavy baskets on their heads. They sailed along, proud and erect. He staggered, clumsy and in pain, beneath the burden. Now he could see that the contract was less important than it had seemed. Perspective. The firm was in no real danger. He shouldn't have carried on so. All right, so he had made a mistake. So he had behaved like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d; more like a frustrated child, actually. Was that a reason to be punished so harshly by this ... thing? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He was a reasonable man, after all. But at least now he had it under control. He thought, in a while, that he might try a little test. Maybe the whole horrid episode was over, gone as mysteriously as it had come, and there was no longer any need to remain uncomfortably in this absurd position. So very gradually, as if afraid of being noticed, he raised his head from the pillow. Christ, it was still there! In a rage, he pounded his fist into the mattress. He wasn't going to get any sleep at all and he would be a wreck in the morning.

How could Linda lie there sleeping so calmly while he tossed in agony? It wasn't fair. She was his wife. She was supposed to share his pain.

”Linda.” He shook her. ”Linda,” he called loudly in a hoa.r.s.e voice. ”Please,” he added more softly.

”What?” She was still sleeping, he could tell. The word was a reflex.

”I can't sleep. ... I have this ...”

She rolled towards him. ”What is it?”

”I have something in my eye.”

”Go to sleep. It will go away.”

”Linda, this is terrible. It's this thing. I can't stop seeing it. I can't sleep.”

”Murine.” Her eyes never opened.

”What?”

”Put in Murine. Drops. Bottom shelf.”

Could she do all that in her sleep? Women were amazing.

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