Jesus, I thought. What if it’s happening to me?
But then—someone was there, in the distant hall, in the next room, plaster grit crisp underfoot.
This was not a winged creature. This was the step of someone human. I recognized this step. But surely, I thought, this is too wonderful to be true.
But maybe I was wrong. I shrank back against the solid expanse of a wall.
Real. She was real.
“That’s exactly where I left you,” she said.
The light, and the shadow, drifted over her. A small woman, dark, shapely. Anyone else would have been startled to find me in half light, but she smiled and put her arms out and held me.
“What happened?” she said. “Strater, you’re trembling.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t. I just got here.”
I kissed her. I held her close to me, and for a long time I did nothing but keep her in my arms.
Then I gazed into her eyes, hungry for the sight of her. She knew how I felt, and responded, kissing my lips, the lids of my eyes, as though curing me of every doubt I had ever endured.
She asked, after a long, intimate silence, “What happened with DeVere?”
“Nothing.” I did not want to talk about DeVere, or about myself. Our time together was precious. “They haven’t decided yet. About the award. The jury’s still considering.”
I could not shake the thought that Nona wasn’t really here, that she was an illusion. I ran my fingertips over her face, her lips, the soft feathering of her eyebrows, like a blind man seeking to reassure himself. “They must be blind,” she said. “There’s nothing to think about. Your work is the best.”
The sound of her voice was medicine. “The airports were a mess?”
“Unbelievable. A strike in one city, and people everywhere are sleeping on airport floors.”
Her finger had healed. I kissed the place where I had put the Band-Aid.
“They loved my proposal,” she said. “They loved it, Strater.” She used my nickname with what sounded to me like special affection. “But I couldn’t get any money out of any of them. Children aren’t in fashion.”
I cupped Nona’s face so I could gaze down into it. “I’m so glad to see you,” I began to say. But the words were not enough. I kissed her yet again.
We went upstairs.
Her hair was dark, not true black but black with a radiance, a reddish tint that caught even the weak moon from the clerestory windows, and held it. Her eyes were dark, too, and when she looked at me there was the strangest glow.
“I fell asleep on the airplane for a couple of minutes,” she breathed. “And you know what I dreamed?”
She unbuttoned my shirt, each button taking far too long. I sensed some awareness in her, some discovery that made her look up at me, into me as though she could see something in my mind.
“You’re trembling like someone who’s gone swimming recently.”
“I’ve given it up,” I whispered.
“It’s suicide,” she said, but neither of us were drawn into conversation now.
She put her lips to my ear. “Do you know what I dreamed?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll show you.”
She was a glow in the darkness. Her lips tasted of cognac, although I was certain that she had not been drinking, and of something else, something unnamable.
Later, downstairs again, I made tea laced with the rum Collie kept in the cubboard with the Earl Grey and orange pekoe. Even in her absence, Collie’s character was a part of the house, in the strong, naval rum, in the way the kitchen towels were folded, tidy and what Collie called “seamanlike.”
Nona wore one of my silk dressing gowns. It flowed over her, and made her look like a sorcerer’s apprentice.
My rooms were usually the picture of hurried efficiency, a marriage of software and oak furniture, ferns and phone proposals. Now each room looked like a quarry in the half light, and white dust, faint and visible only when smudged, covered every surface.
She took in our surroundings. “I thought they were coming to fix all this pretty soon.”
Not even Nona knew the extent of my financial trouble. I nodded, shrugged: me too.
“Jesus, you can’t live like this.”
Nona is a woman who will not suffer delay, or fools. “They said they were running late.”
“Running isn’t exactly the word. What’s the matter, Stratton?”
“It’s you. You vanquish speech.”
She smiled, acknowledging the flattery. But she was a physician. Human frailty attracted her eye. “I’ve never seen you so nervous.”
“I’m worried,” I said, trying to undercut the meaning of the words with a soothing voice. “You’ve never seen me worried before?”
“Not like this.”
“There’s something wrong with Blake Howard.” I gave her the barest sketch of Blake’s mood, my theories, and touched upon the subject of his unanswered phone. I didn’t bother explaining that what upset me at the moment was that I was sure I had heard a winged creature, in this hall, in this room.
What I had really meant to say was: There is something wrong with me.
I was about to tell her about the wings. I parted my lips, dazzled by her, wanting to tell her everything. There were wings, I nearly said. Big wings, feeling the story melt and dissolve, because I knew it was foolish. The rooms were empty. There was nothing here, just as there was probably nothing wrong with Blake.
“They must have had some good things to say about your proposal,” I said, sipping the fragrant tea.
“They loved it. Everyone wants to know more about what they are calling ‘my children’s dreams.’ My children. As though they all belonged to me.”
“They do, in a way.”
“They’re calling it a landmark study of children’s dreams. Everyone says it would be great if we could spend more money on children. They say, ‘We love your ideas, Dr. Lyle.’”
“But they won’t come up with the money,” I said.
“Money’s a different matter altogether.” She stopped herself. “I’m worried about you. Look at your house. Naked pipes. Struts. This is supposed to be your dining room. Stratton Fields’s dining room. You’re a famous man. My place should be a mess. I need malpractice insurance. I need a secretary. You don’t need this. You have things on your mind.”
She held me.
I was used to keeping problems to myself. It was a family tradition. My cousin, the one with the African grays, had been kidnapped outside a casino. He had, family rumor had it, crushing gambling debts. Something went wrong, and negotiations went awry, or perhaps the kidnappers quarreled among themselves. The cousin was found in a suitcase in Lucca, cut into pieces.
I told her the truth, as simply as I could. “I’m having a little financial trouble. A cash shortage.”
She listened to my silence, as though she understood it more thoroughly than she understood my words. “You let things like that bother you?”
“My family has its secrets.” This was understatement, but Nona could read the most brief comment, the gesture, the nervous cough, and see exactly what was being said. I had discussed my family only in the vaguest terms, and Nona was not the sort of person to linger over ancient sorrows.
“The house doesn’t matter,” she said. “Money doesn’t matter. You matter. We matter.”
The cup in my hand was empty, although still warmed by the just-finished tea. Nona took the cup from my hands, and she put it down beside her own empty cup on a dust-glazed side table.
Nona had a way of curing one of my headaches by applying her fingertips very gently to what she called “acupoints.” These were points of her own discovery, I realized once while paging through a volume on acupressure. Her hands now found the pulse in my temple, the tension in my neck. Her fingers found the anxiety in me, and released it.
We were upstairs again, and as we made love I felt the city ar
ound us expand and dissolve, Nona beneath me whispering my name until it was no longer a whisper, but a cry of discovery.
I woke, remembering the sound of wings. This had happened to my mother, and now it was happening to me.
Her voice had been so beautiful. My mother’s soprano was with me, as though, through the sound of Nona’s steady sleep, I could hear my mother. Just like years before. When I had heard her talk. I had worked so hard to forget.
Surely everything would be fine. That was my strongest talent: faith.
I stared upward, into the dark.
10
She woke well before dawn, and she was into her clothes before I could fully stir.
It was that special, freshest part of the day, morning before it has begun to be light. It was night, but a time of night that promises. I could not help myself—I lay there for a long moment enjoying her loveliness, her tousled dark hair even now catching, or creating, auras out of the virtually nonexistent light in the room. She dressed with very little sound, and the dark light made it look as though I imagined her entirely. She was a figure in a dream.
“Do you have to leave so soon?” I asked.
“I hate to. But I have to get to the hospital early,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about them every hour since I stepped onto the plane.”
“I’m sure they missed you,” I said, and I meant: So did I.
It was that simple: I wanted to be with her every day.
“I have time to do everything I want to do,” she said, “if I stop eating and sleeping, and clone myself into about six different people.”
“I can drop by the hospital for lunch.”
She met my eyes. Her voice became serious, gentle. “The children would enjoy a visit. They like you.”
“Would you like it?”
“You try eating lunch with a bunch of surgeons every day. All they talk about is golf and mutual funds. Today is really horrible. I have to meet with the budgeting committee over chicken salad. I need to explain why hypnotherapy is as important as chemotherapy. Doctors forget that their patients have psyches. Sometimes I think half the surgeons on the staff would be just as happy if they treated horses and dogs instead of people.”
“They forget,” I said, “that people have souls.”
Perhaps Nona hesitated with her hairbrush for an instant. “Exactly.” Then she turned to look at me. “You are all right, aren’t you?” she asked hopefully.
Leaping from bed, I hurried into my clothes. “I’ll make some coffee—”
She saw me tucking in my shirttail and gestured that she had no time, a flutter of her hand much like a wave of farewell. “I have a coffee machine in my office that I never use. Morning is so important. The children need special reassurance in the morning, when they first wake up.”
“Dinner tonight?”
“Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want to do,” she said.
“They teach you how to say no in medical school. Just go ahead and say it. It’s a word of one syllable.”
She kissed me, her lips lingering on mine, and on the special place in my forehead, that point where wisdom and peace were supposed to originate. “I know how you feel,” she breathed. “There will be time for us, Strater. Someday.”
“This is only the fifth time that we have even spent the night together. The fifth time in over a year.”
She made a soft groan that I knew was a sincere expression of her feelings. She put her forehead against mine, and we stood as though in a small, confined space, a place of our own making. “I want to change the way we live. There’s just so much to do—”
My feelings made it hard to speak. “I admire your work, Nona. It’s part of why I love you.”
The word love definitely made her pause. “Someday we’ll have day after day together. Someday when I get real support, instead of the piecemeal dollar here and there. Someday, when my projects are funded—”
I kept the disappointment out of my voice. “Someday when there are no more sick children.”
“They don’t even take me seriously, some of them. Some of the men, some of the dinosaurs with fat wallets. They can’t even hear what I’m saying. They look at me and think: Just another hyperactive female. Just another pushy, plaintive woman. Just another lightweight. Besides,” she laughed. “You’d get tired of me. Take my word for it—if you saw me every night you would become bored.”
Day was coming. We could see without difficulty. We walked down the stairs together, Nona holding my hand, my arm trying to slow her down, hold her back.
I found myself wishing, whimsically, that I could visit a seer, a prophet who could tell me succinctly whether or not I would win Nona.
“You have to believe in the future,” Nona was saying, as she reached the front door. She was bantering, refusing to take me seriously, and at the same time she realized how serious I was. “You’re good at believing, aren’t you?”
And I believe in you, I wanted to say. “Call me,” I said, and then she was gone.
With her absence, the frustrations of my life all returned to me. There was simply the raw truth: My family had been wealthy, and now it was not. Nona knew a little, now, but no one beside my brother and I really understood the nature of our finances. Our cash reserves had suffered years of my father’s benevolent mismanagement, money given away to promote everything from better acoustics in opera houses to computers in schools. What my father did not sow, Zeus-like, grand and loving, my mother finished off, but that was a story I did not like to even consider.
I kept up the illusion of brisk wealth, but it was only a pretense.
Collie had made a haven of the kitchen, and even in her absence it awaited her return, spruce and cheerful, like Monet’s kitchen in Giverny, sun-yellow and spacious. Maui onions waited in a tumble on a side table, beside a rope of garlic.
I ground some Jamaica Blue Mountain and called Blake and let the phone ring. Bad thoughts pricked me.
Someone was keeping Blake away from the phone. Someone who was using Blake as bait. This was not a rational theory, and yet it simmered within me as I waited out the dark, the sun crawling across the old, warped glass of the leaded windows.
I turned on the portable Sony beside the teapot. I watched idly, and then cursed myself for turning on the television so thoughtlessly. There was “AM San Francisco,” and our host, an amiable man I knew slightly, a man as mild and agreeably shallow as he looked, was introducing “one of Northern California’s biggest talents, a man you’re going to hear a lot more about, Frederick Peterson.”
Frederick, I thought dully. Everyone I knew called him either “Peterson” or “Fred.” It must be one of DeVere’s suggestions. New clothes, new name, bright new future.
There was Peterson, lean and made up so that he looked more deeply tanned than ever. He wore one of DeVere’s Scottsdale line of sports jackets, one of the so-called Western tweeds. It was not a bad-looking piece of clothing.
Behind the figures on the screen was the usual set, a beige wall, and a circle with a stylized seven—the station’s logo. I had designed a few logos in my career—one or two had been accepted by local companies, a now defunct restaurant supply firm and a stationery store. I found myself wondering why beige was so popular, and if someone from the age of, say, Chaucer would have even recognized the color.
I busied myself with wiping invisible spots on the counter, unable to watch for a few moments. But there was something peculiar. The host’s voice chattered idly, and I had the sense that the show was not moving smoothly. When I looked back Peterson was seated. “You’ve got some big plans for the way our city is going to look,” said the host.
What had seemed self-consciousness now seemed a speech impediment. Peterson opened his mouth and could say nothing.
I felt myself sink into a very ugly realization. I said the words aloud. “Don’t.”
The television made a faint buzz, a tiny electronic reverberation behind the spoken words.
My voice again: “Don’t do it.”
It was a shock. Not long ago, Peterson had been thoughtful, articulate. Now he was a man numbed, lost. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew, but I was helpless, looking on, unable to reach forth my hand and shut off the sight of what was about to happen.
The cohost was a woman, a journalist of considerable intelligence who had retreated to the safety of morning talk shows recently after her helicopter crashed in the Middle East. Her voice accompanied the sight of Peterson’s glazed eyes, his working lips.
“Frederick has some really impressive improvements in mind for the Polo Field at Golden Gate Park, and he has some good ideas for the Shakespeare Garden—”
Peterson spoke. His voice was hard to make out. “I wanted it all so badly.”
The male host beamed and frowned simultaneously, so that he would be sure to have the correct expression in any event.
Peterson continued, his voice a gasp. “I wanted to have something.”
“It certainly looks like you have some very fine plans for San Francisco, Frederick,” said the brisk, female voice, “and in just a moment we’ll be back to—”
“The competition was rigged. DeVere rigged it. Stratton Fields deserves to win.” His words were spoken with the mechanical care of a man confessing after torture. Peterson stood straight in his chair. He fumbled at his sage-brown tweed jacket.
It looked almost comical as the camera panned back, the television crew in a hurry to move away from Peterson, to get him off and move on to someone else. Peterson seemed to take a large piece of chocolate cake from his jacket, put it to his mouth and work his mouth for an instant around the mass of dark color.
It was not cake.
The hand fumbled at the pistol. There was a crack that vibrated the speaker of the portable television, and what looked like cherry juice and chocolate was spattered all over the circle with its stylized seven.
An ad for something, a cavalcade of smiling people, flashed into view before I could stop myself. I seized the television, lunging at it instinctively, forgetting for the moment that what I had before me was an image. I wanted to grab Peterson, but in my embrace merely unplugged the Sony and sent it into blank silence.
The Horses of the Night Page 6