She climbed out of bed, careful not to disturb her husband, and walked over to the window. The light was soft and supple on her bare skin. She was tired of the summer, she thought. The heat and the insects and the rain. The way the air itself seemed to clamor for attention. She looked forward to the smoky haze of fall, the quiet of winter. Just then, something caught her attention, a shape, a glimmer of motion in the yard. And there was Simon Bell coming out from behind the magnolia bush, blinking, drenched, looking up into the sky with squinted eyes. She thought he had been there all along. His pants were plastered to his legs, his shirt so wet she could see his skin. He shook the water from his hands, like it was possible to get dry in the middle of a storm.
She draped an arm across her breasts, covering herself, then realized the foolishness of her modesty and let it fall again. He must have seen her moving, because right at that moment, he looked in her direction and smiled and gave her a ridiculous wave. She wanted to laugh. Her heart felt huge and cramped behind her ribs. While she watched, he tilted his head and his features went soft, his gaze traveling the length of her, his eyes mesmerized, polished-looking in the rainy light, his face composed and serene, as though he were watching a daydream unfold on her body.
She felt the blood coming to her skin, a sudden conscious ache in her lungs that made it difficult to breathe. She stepped away from the window and pressed her back against the wall. The air conditioner raised goose bumps on her stomach and shoulders. Her husband was snoring quietly in the bed. Nothing had happened yet and she wanted to preserve the moment, because in it she could still love them both. She covered her eyes with her hands, the way her mother had, and tried to imagine the future. With surprising clarity, she saw herself pulling on a robe and walking out into the rain and leading Simon home. He would get them each a bottle of beer, and she’d tell him that she wished there was a way to make things different, to take it all back, but she knew it was impossible. So she would tell him the truth. He was the one she was going to have to hurt. They would be sitting on the couch, pool light waving on the walls and skimming around on his face, and he’d ask her if she loved him, and she would be unable to tell him no. But her feelings for him didn’t change anything. She had made promises to her husband, and she didn’t love him any less despite what she had done. While they talked, the rain would stop. The beer would feel sour and warm in her stomach. Simon would turn on the television with the remote and watch for a moment, a commercial for a used car lot—she saw it all that clearly—then turn it off. He would put his hands on her face and kiss her and she would let him. She would give him one kiss full of everything that was in her heart, her sadness at losing him, her resolve that this was the only possible way to make things right. When they were finished, she would say good-bye and sneak back to her husband’s house and slip into bed beside him and listen to him breathing in the darkness for a long time.
And so something very much like what she imagined did in fact come to pass. The details might have been a little different, the way the pool lights played upon the walls or the taste of the beer, the exact nature of the television commercial or the tenor of Simon’s voice when he told her good-bye, but the results of her decision were, in the end, more or less the same.
Part 4
And you my loves, few as there have been, let’s lie and say it could never have been otherwise.
So that: we may glide off in peace, not howling like orphans in this endless century of war.
—Jim Harrison
Pool Lights
It was in the summer that I made love to my next-door neighbor’s wife. She led me by the hand back to her husband’s bed and unbuttoned my shirt, slipping it over my shoulders, her lips on my neck and chest. I was wearing a pair of her husband’s shorts that were way too big, and she pulled them over my narrow hips without having to undo the buttons or the zipper. Both of us thought that was funny and laughed between kisses.
It was summer when I watched her dive from the platform of my father’s pool. Her husband was out of town at some sort of history conference, and it was late enough that we figured the neighbors were asleep. She drifted underwater toward where I was standing in the shallow end and came up blinking and smoothing her hair back on her head, the pool lights giving her a strange, almost magical sheen. We stood there for a long time just looking at each other, not touching, my nostrils stinging from chlorine. A light came on over at Bob Robinson’s house—Bob was always a light sleeper—and we ducked down beneath the rim of the pool and stayed hidden until it went off again. While we waited, my heart knocking against my ribs, I had this crazy idea that if we could just stay where we where, submerged to our chins, Delia spitting pool water from her mouth, shivering a little, her hand finding the waistband of my shorts beneath the water, then everything would be preserved, that perilous moment and the air and Delia’s goose-bumped shoulder beneath my hand.
But we didn’t stay in the pool, of course. Her toes and fingertips wrinkled, and we danced across the flagstone patio and into the house and piled into the shower together. I sat on the edge of the tub and washed her hair. She told me a story about an ice storm in Mississippi of all places. She was hunched forward, her eyes closed against the suds, her belly folding prettily. I thought, just then, that I could imagine her as a girl, going to clean houses with her mother, watching her father play piano at the Ramada Inn on Saturday nights. She still had a knot on her collarbone where she’d broken it pretending to be a gymnast in her backyard and a faint scar across the bridge of her nose from trying to ride a unicycle and crashing into the curb. I told her that I wished I had known her then, instead of now, and she laughed and told me I was crazy.
A few weeks before I moved back into my parents’ house, this friend of mine, Lamont Turner, became separated from his wife. While he was at work one day, his wife went over to the house and took their dog. Portnoy belonged to both of them, technically, but Lamont was lunatic with despair when the dog turned up missing and enlisted me in a plan to get him back. My job was simple, just go over to the house where Ellen was staying and keep her busy while he crept around the back and swiped the dog. I did as he asked, went over there and talked to her, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to why she left in the first place. She said that what she wanted from Lamont was a leap of faith—her exact words—that they’d grown comfortable and complacent, and he wasn’t trying very hard to love her anymore. At that moment, as if on cue, Lamont appeared at the top of the high wooden privacy fence that surrounded the backyard. He was wearing some kind of ninja suit, baggy black pants and gloves and a sweatshirt with a hood. He dropped to the grass in a Kung Fu crouch, scurried across the yard, slung old Portnoy over his shoulder—he’d been dozing comfortably on the patio and didn’t seem all that surprised to see his master dressed in black, running a sub-rosa rescue mission—and hurried back to the fence. I tried to keep myself from laughing, but he was the most ridiculous and pitiful thing I’d ever seen. Ellen, she turned to look where I was looking just when Lamont was cresting the fence a second time. As they were going over the top, Lamont glanced back in our direction, and at that exact moment, the fence gave way beneath him, the crossbars buckling, vertical planks splintering, sending him face first into the pavement. By the time we got out there, he’d managed to roll over on his back, one hand dangling limp and broken from his wrist, his face a mess of blood and tissue, a piece of shin-bone tenting the fabric of his pants. Portnoy was bounding around, licking everybody, probably the most alive he’d been in years. Before he passed out, Lamont croaked, “Ellen?” Though I don’t think that was exactly what his wife had in mind when she asked for a leap of faith, the two of them had been together ever since.
Delia howled when I told her this story. It was the day before my birthday and we were sitting in the living room of my parents’ house, watching the pool lights flicker on the walls. I wasn’t sure why I’d told the story—maybe just to see her laugh—but suddenly, watching her rock b
ack on the couch, it seemed like a sad and lovely thing Lamont had done. It was the only real love story that I knew to tell. I thought about my parents, how they’d stayed together for years after my mother’s affair. How they went on watching horror movies, my father drawing her against him because he knew her fear was real. When she was young, my mother had wanted to be an actress, but she didn’t aspire to serious roles—charwomen and battered wives. She wanted spaceships on her lawn or maniacs in the closet. She wanted to be King Kong’s girlfriend. I wondered if that’s why she’d done it, for the heat of the thing, the madhouse rush, if that’s why she had betrayed my father. I didn’t blame her really. My father was not an easy man to live with. I knew that. And I understood how hard it must have been, as well, to live with what she’d done.
At that moment, listening to Delia laugh in the darkness, I started hearing this strange far-off wind sound in my head, and I felt a pressure in my stomach, like I’d been punched, like I had swallowed a pool’s worth of water. I couldn’t breathe right, and my pulse was jumpy, and I turned away and counted to myself until I’d settled down. Delia wanted to know what was wrong, and I told her nothing. Everything was fine. Everything would always be fine.
It was still summer when she ended things between us. I had, as usual, forgotten to turn the pool lights off, and the walls were green with the reflection. Delia was wearing this white cotton robe that made her shoulders perfect and gathered light to her. She said she wasn’t going to tell Sam about us. She believed that things could go back to the way they were before. I promised her that I wouldn’t try to change her mind. It was as if we were acting out a scene from a movie, some English film where all the characters are very modern and polite and everyone understood why people did the things they do. When she was gone, I sat there a while trying to find some sadness in me. But I was blank, like none of this was real, and I would wake up in the morning, wait for Sam Holladay to leave the house, then steal over to the golf course and find Delia there, and we’d begin all over again.
When I did wake, it was still dark outside and cold in the house from the air-conditioning, and the windows were drenched in condensation. The clock by the bed showed 4:57 A.M. I rolled over and picked up the phone and started to dial Delia’s number before I remembered what had happened. The numbers on the phone were glowing an eerie, fluorescent green. I didn’t feel anything yet, though I knew that it would come. I hung up and pulled on a bathrobe, fixed a glass of beer in the kitchen, and went outside.
The rain had come drifting back, the finest of mists. It muffled sound, giving the street a pleasant silence. I remembered that it was Sunday. My neighbors would be pulling themselves together in a few hours and going to church like good people.
Across the street, the golf course was empty, the tall pines shimmering with moisture. I thought about Betty Fowler down the road, the rain drowning out the quiet in her house. I pictured her in the high-backed chair in her living room, her lips working awkwardly around one of her favorite curse words, and I couldn’t help laughing a little. She was always asking me if I was in love, and I’d think, no, that can’t be right, you don’t allow yourself to fall in love with someone else’s wife. I could almost see her then, curving in sleep toward her husband’s side of the bed. She was alone in the world. I wondered if it was true that her husband had buried a chest of gold coins in the fairway across the street or, even more unlikely, that she could find those coins with her divining rod.
I tried to imagine divining in scientific terms. Tiny particles of intent, passing invisibly, delicately, from the rod into its bearer, leading him toward his intended destination. It was as unbelievable as light. Facts were supposed to be easy. I was standing barefoot on the damp, polished asphalt. The road was beaded with rainwater, the street lights catching in puddles. I was alone. Those were facts, real and incontrovertible.
I’d heard of faith healers and their patients who could believe away illness. There was a newspaper article about a woman so riddled with cancer that she couldn’t lift herself from bed, couldn’t bring a cup of soup to her lips. This was in Texas. A preacher came to her and promised that he could heal her through prayer, and he did it, or both of them did, not just convinced themselves that the cancer was gone but believed it into actual medical remission. The papers called it a bona fide miracle. I was thinking maybe Betty Fowler’s belief, more than anything else, might lead her to the gold. Or maybe there was something in all of us, some built-in radar or biological lodestone, that was leading us always toward a predetermined place in time.
I used to believe in things. When my parents went to church—my father tagged along reluctantly for the first few years of their marriage, then stopped going altogether—they would deposit me, along with the other young children, in a Sunday School class. We would spend the morning learning the mysteries of religion from hooded nuns. They taught us the Trinity and the virgin birth and the Ascension and even such minor miracles as the stigmata. They taught us of St. Francis of Assisi and Anna Emmerich and the Belgian girl, Louise Lateau, all supernaturally marked with the wounds of Christ on their hands and feet, the slash of a sword in their side, even the faint, bloody impression left by the crown of thorns. I believed it, then, or at least was willing to entertain the possibility.
And there was Atlantis, when I was a kid, the magnificent undersea city, light-years ahead of the land bound in technology. I dreamed of finding it on a pleasure dive and stumbling into fame and fortune and a beautiful water-breathing woman who longed to see the stars and sun and moon.
There was, as well, the TV magician who levitated the beautiful woman in a shining evening gown—there was always a beautiful woman—and when he passed the hoops around her, no strings attached, part of me was trying to figure out how he did it and the other part believed, marveled in the realization that he was doing it. Here was the woman, face turned toward the camera, eyes wide in surprise, and there was the hoop passing the length of her, head to high-heeled shoes, and there were no strings and she was flying. It was a joy to watch her fly.
The last night that Delia stayed at my house, I woke near midnight and found her missing. Blue moonlight was streaming through the windows. The air was full of familiar sounds. She was gone. I couldn’t feel her warmth on the mattress or trace the subtle depression of the place she had lain. I thought maybe she’d never really been there at all. I had conjured her into a dream so real as to be barely distinguishable from the truth, one of those dreams that you wake from believing. But at my house, it was still night and the air was humming with summer music, insects and airplanes and cars on the road. I said her name, and she didn’t answer. I went to the window and saw the pool glimmering with light and the next row of houses beyond my fence, lumps of deeper darkness against the sky. Right then, I spotted Delia sitting cross-legged on the grass, wearing my white t-shirt. The shirt was so full of odd moonlight it might have been electric. She stood and walked a few steps, not knowing I was watching her, into a circle of darkness on the far side of the pool. She was gone again, an illusion. She was invisible to me, and I was frightened breathless.
Now, I could make out a light in one of the windows of Bob Robinson’s house. It made me feel a little better to know someone else was sleepless at this hour. One of the children probably had a nightmare and needed to be comforted. I was thinking about how no one ever called my number—in case of emergency, Bob had said—and how I should have been glad about that, but sitting here in the dark, the rain so fine it was like walking through spiderwebs, I wasn’t glad at all.
I watched the light in the window for passing shadows, signs of life, but didn’t see anything. After a while, I realized that there wasn’t a light inside, just a reflection from the streetlamp on the wet glass. They were all sleeping soundly. I was alone. I got to my feet and marched across the road to the golf course, the fairway soaked through, rainwater pushing up between my toes. I could feel myself moving toward something, but I didn’t know what. The rough
was mostly young, sappy pines, pliable and elastic, but I managed to break a limb loose. It was forked with a long shaft, the sort Mrs. Fowler had described. I stood in the middle of the sixteenth fairway with my eyes closed and tried to focus, tried to feel something. How had Mrs. Fowler described it? The memory of a magnetic attraction, a dream of electricity. Walking felt right, just then, so I headed off down the strip of grass, my eyes still shut tight, but I couldn’t feel anything. Mrs. Fowler would have said that I didn’t know what I was looking for. And she would have been right, if she’d been there to say it. I didn’t have the slightest idea.
The grass was slick beneath my feet. I opened my mouth to catch rain on my tongue, eyes still closed, still moving forward, when suddenly I was falling. The ground disappeared, and there was this moment, before I went plunging into the water hazard, when I opened my eyes and I could see my house across the street, lights going in the bedroom and the kitchen, and I could see Delia’s face in my mind as clearly as if she was standing there before me. I remembered sitting in her backyard just a few hours before, the rain drumming on my shoulders, and finding myself unable to leave, as though if I moved from that spot, I might break some marvelous enchantment, some spell that Delia and I had spent the summer casting, all full of blindness and passion and whatever else is necessary to make two people give up a part of themselves. Then I went rolling down the embankment and into the water, sputtering and flopping around like a maniac. It was only a few feet deep, but I kept losing my balance and going ass-backward into the muck. By the time I got myself together, I was drenched, my feet stockinged with mud, my bathrobe heavy as a hundred stones.
As I was making my way back to the road, I heard Bob Robinson’s voice.
“What the hell’s going on out here? Is that you, Bell, you cocksucker? What in God’s name are you doing? Scared me shitless.”
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