Dangerous Laughter

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Dangerous Laughter Page 6

by Steven Millhauser


  One afternoon as we were playing the game of objects, Isabel said, “Now hold out your hand palm up, this is a tricky one.” I was instantly alert; something in her voice betrayed a secret excitement. Holding out my hand as she had instructed, I heard some movement on the bed. A moment later I felt a softly hard, heavyish object lowered slowly onto my palm. A confusion came over me, I began to close my fingers over it, suddenly there was a wild laugh near my ear and she snatched the strange object away, crying, “Couldn’t you guess? Couldn’t you guess?” but I had already recognized, lying for a moment in the palm of my hand, Isabel’s warm forearm.

  As the evenings became hotter, I found it difficult to sit at my desk doing homework in the light of my twin-bulb fluorescent lamp. I had always found it pleasing and even soothing to complete homework assignments: the carefully numbered answers, the crisp sound of turned pages, the red and yellow and green index tabs, the clean white notebook paper with its orderly rows of blue lines and the pale red line running down the side. Now it all irritated me, as if I were being distracted from the real business of life. Through the screens of my partly open windows I could hear the sounds of my neighborhood at dusk: low voices in a nearby yard, the rising and falling hum of a distant lawnmower, dishes clinking from an open window, the slam of a car door, a girl’s high laughter. I began memorizing the sounds and collecting new ones, so that I could report them to Isabel: footsteps in another room, which might be my father going into the kitchen for a box of crackers or my mother coming in from the back porch; the sound of a garage door being lowered; the wheels of a passing bicycle rustling in the sand at the side of the street. The sounds pleased me, because I could bring them to Isabel, but at the same time they disturbed me, for it was as if the world that separated me from Isabel were growing thicker and more impenetrable as I listened.

  At night I kept waking up and falling asleep, as Isabels tumbled through my mind. In the mornings I felt sluggish and heavy-headed, and sometimes during the day I would catch my mother looking at me in the way she did when I was coming down with something.

  One afternoon toward the middle of June, Isabel seemed a little distracted. It was hot in the attic room and the darkness seemed thick and soft, like wool. I could hear her shifting about on the bed, and then I heard another sound, as of fingers stroking cloth, but silkier. “What are you doing, Isabel?” “Oh, brushing my hair.” I imagined the brush I’d half glimpsed on the bureau as it pulled its way through stretched-out hair that kept changing from dark to blond to reddish brown. I heard the clunk of what I thought must be a brush on a table and suddenly she said, “Would you like to see my room?” My hands clutched the arms of the chair—I imagined a burst of light, like a blow to my forehead. Isabel laughed; her laughter sounded cruel; I knew nothing about this girl in the dark, who was suddenly going to reveal herself to me in some violent way; I could feel an Isabel rising in my mind, but her head was the head of some girl in my English class, which faded away and was replaced by another head; something touched my arm. “Get up,” her voice said, very close to me.

  Holding my wrist in her hand, she led me through the dark and placed my hand on cool wood surfaces, roundish knobs, soft protuberances, velvety edges. Images of drawers and padded seats and velvet jewel boxes floated in my mind. After a while I felt against my palm the familiar back of my upholstered chair with its row of metal buttons. “Is the tour over, Isabel?” “One more item of interest.” She took a step and, still holding my wrist, placed my hand on a rumpled softness that felt like a sheet. “Tour over,” she said, and released my wrist. I heard a creak, a rustling, silence.

  “So how do you like my room?” she asked, in a voice that came from the other end of the bed.

  “It’s very—it’s very—,” I said, searching for the exact word.

  “You probably ought to lie down, you know. If you’re tired.”

  I climbed tensely onto the bed, pressing my knees into the mattress, and began crawling across it toward her voice. “Nnnn!” I said, snatching my hand away as something moved out of reach. The bed seemed long, longer than the entire room, though I was moving so slowly that I was almost motionless. “Are you there?” I said to the dark. Isabel said nothing. I patted about: a pillow, another pillow, a sheet, a turned-back spread. “Where are you?” I asked the dark. “Here,” she whispered, so close that I could feel her breath against my ear. I reached out and felt empty air. “I can’t see you, Isabel.” Deep in the room I heard a burst of laughter. “Can you fly, Isabel? Is that your secret?” I listened to the room. “Are you anywhere?” Still kneeling on the bed, but raising my upper body, like a rearing horse, I swept out both hands, my fingertips fluttering about, stroking the dark. From the pillow and sheets came a fresh, slightly soapy scent. I lay down on my stomach, pressing my cheek into a pillow and inhaling the scent of Isabel. In the darkness I closed my eyes. Somewhere I heard a sound, as of a foot knocking against a piece of furniture. Then I felt a pushing-down in the mattress. Something hard pressed against the side of my arm. I felt the hardness with my fingertips and suddenly understood that I was touching a face. It pulled away. “Isabel,” I said. “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.” Nothing was there. In the thick darkness I felt myself dissolving, turning into black mist, spreading into the farthest reaches of the room.

  III

  REVELATION

  On a brilliant afternoon in July, under a sky so blue that it seemed to have weight, the beach towels on the sand reminded me of the rectangles of color in a child’s paint box. Here and there a slanted beach umbrella partly shaded a blanket. Under the wide umbrellas, thermos jugs and cooler chests and half-open picnic baskets stood among yellow water wings and green sea monsters. On my striped towel, in the fierce sun, I leaned back on both elbows and stared off past my ankle bones at the place where the rippling dry sand changed to flat and wet. Low waves broke slowly in uneven lines. The water moved partway up the beach and slid back, leaving a dark shine that quickly vanished.

  People were walking about, sitting up on blankets, running in and out of the water. A tall girl with a blond ponytail and coppery glistening legs came walking along the wet sand. Her bathing suit was so white that it looked freshly painted. Her sticking-out breasts looked hard and sharp, like funnels. A small rubber football flew spinning through the bright blue air. In the sand a gull walked stiffly and half lifted its wings. Down in the shallow water a thick-chested senior in a tight bathing suit crouched on his hands and knees, so that I could see the blond hairs glowing on his lower spine—suddenly a lanky junior with hard-muscled legs came running down the beach into the water, flung his hands onto the back of his kneeling friend, and flipped gracefully into the air, landing in the water with a splash. Tilted bottles of soda gleamed here and there in the sand beside beach towels, a girl in a turquoise two-piece stood by the foot of the lifeguard stand, looking up and shading her eyes, and high in the sky a yellow helicopter seemed stuck in the thick blue heavy summer air.

  Laughing, whooping, running their hands through their wet hair, Ray and Dennis came striding toward me, kicking up bursts of sand. They picked up their towels and stood rubbing their chests and arms. Water streamed from their bathing suits.

  “So guess who I ran into down by the jetty,” Ray said, laying out his towel carefully in the sand. “Joyce. She said Vicky thinks you’re mad at her.” He threw himself facedown on the towel.

  “I’m not mad at her. I just want—I just need—”

  “Ah just want,” Dennis said, holding up his hands as if they were poised over a guitar. “Ah just need.” He strummed the guitar.

  Summer had come, season of sweet loafing. I spent long hours lying on the beach, playing ping-pong in my shady garage, and reading on the screened back porch, where thin stripes of sun and shade fell across my book from the bamboo blinds. Even my job at the library seemed a lazy sort of half-dreaming, as I wheeled my cart slowly between high dim shelves pierced by spears of sun. But as I lay on the beach running my finge
rs through the warm sand, as I bent over to retrieve a ping-pong ball from a cluster of broken-toothed rakes and shiny red badminton poles rusting at the bottom, all the time I was waiting for Isabel. She slept until one or two in the afternoon. No one was allowed to visit her till the middle of the day. Wolf himself never rose before noon and seemed amused at what he called my peculiar habits. “The early bird catches the worm,” he said, “but who wants the worm?” I found myself rising later and later in the morning, but there were always hours of sunshine to get through before I arrived in the dark.

  “Up so soon?” my father said, glancing at me over the tops of his eyeglasses as he bent toward his lunch in the sunny kitchen.

  Sometimes, to pass the time, I took long drives with Ray and Dennis, when Dennis could borrow his mother’s car. My plan had been to get my license as soon as school was out, but I woke each day feeling tired and kept putting it off. We would drive along the thruway until we saw the name of some little town we didn’t know. Then we drove all over that town, passing through the business district with its brick bank trimmed in white and its glass-fronted barbershop with the slow-turning reflection of a striped pole before heading out to the country lanes with their lonely mailboxes and their low stone walls, and ended up having lunch at some diner where you could get twenty-two kinds of pancake and the maple syrup came in glass containers shaped like smiling bears. Dennis wore sunglasses and drove with one wrist resting on the wheel. In his lamplit room with the drawn shades, Wolf had told me how he’d taken the written test six months ago without once opening the boring manual. “And?” I asked. He smiled, raised a finger, and drew it across his throat.

  And at last I made my way up the wooden stairs and disappeared in the dark. “Isabel,” I would say, standing by the chair, “are you awake?” Or: “Isabel, are you there?” Sometimes I felt a touch on my arm and I would reach out, saying, “Isabel? Is that you?” as my hand grasped at air. Then I would hear her laughing quietly from the bed or across the room or just behind me or who knew where. She would say, “Welcome, stranger,” or “Lo, the traveler returns,” or nothing at all. Then I would make my way over to the bed and pat my way along the side and lie down, hoping for a fleeting touch, hoping she would be there.

  I visited her every day. When I wasn’t working at the library, I rode my bike to her house at three in the afternoon; in Isabel’s room I would forget the other world so completely that sometimes when I came downstairs I was startled to see the lamps in the living room glowing bright yellow. Through the front window I could see the porch light shining on black leaves. Then I would phone my parents with apologies and ride my bike home to a reheated dinner, while my mother looked at me with her worried expression and my father asked if I’d ever happened to hear of a clever little invention called the wristwatch. At night I could hear my mother and father talking about me in low voices, as if there were something wrong with me.

  On the three afternoons a week I worked at the library, I would ride over to Wolf’s house after dinner and not return until after midnight. Sometimes Wolf’s mother, who liked to stay up late watching old movies on a little ten-inch television in the darkened living room, offered to drive me home. I would sit with her on the couch for a while, watching a snippet of black-and-white movie: an unshaven man in a rumpled suit stumbling along a dusty street in a Mexican town, a woman in a phone booth frantically dialing as she looked about in terror. Then I would load my bike into the trunk of the car and sit with Wolf’s mother in front. On the way to my house, along dark streets that glowed now and then under the yellow light of a streetlamp, she would talk about Wolf: he’d failed three subjects, could you believe it, he was smart as a whip but had always hated school, she was worried about him, I was a good influence. Then with her long fingers she would light up a cigarette, and in the dark car streaked with passing lights I would see her eyes—Wolf’s eyes—narrow against the upstreaming smoke.

  At times it seemed to me that I inhabited two worlds: a sunny and boring day-world that had nothing to do with Isabel, and a rich night-world that was all Isabel. I soon saw that this division was false. The summer night itself, compared with Isabel’s world, was a place of light: the yellow windows of houses, the glow of streetlamps, the porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the ruby taillights, the white summer moon in the deep blue sky. No, the real division was between the visible world and that other world, where Isabel waited for me like a dark dream.

  One afternoon as I stood by the chair I felt something press against my foot. “Isabel, is that you?” In the blackness I listened, then bent over the bed. I patted the covers and began crawling across, all the way to the pillows, but Isabel wasn’t there. I heard a small laugh, which seemed to come from the floor. Carefully stepping from the bed I kneeled on the carpet, lifted the spread, and peered into blackness, as if I were looking for a cat. “Come on, Isabel,” I said, “I know you’re there,” and reached my hand under. I felt something furry against my fingers and snatched my hand away. I heard a dim sound, the furry thing pressed into my arm—and closing my hand over it, I drew out from under the bed an object that wasn’t a kitten. From the top of the bed Isabel said, “Did you find what you were looking for, David Dave?” but ignoring her I pressed the thick, furry slipper against my face.

  Sometimes I tried to imagine her in the world of light. She lay next to me on the beach, on her own towel, with a thin line of sand in between—and though I could see, in my mind, that thin line of sand, and the ribbed white towel with a blue eyeglass case in one corner and a bottle of suntan lotion in another, though I could see a depression in the towel where she had kneeled, and a glitter of sand scattered across one corner, though I could see, or almost see, a wavering above the towel, a trembling of air, as if the atmosphere were thickening, I could not see Isabel.

  But in the dark there was only Isabel. She would touch me and vanish—a laughing ghost. Sometimes, for an instant, my fingers grazed some part of her. She allowed me to lie down on the bed beside her but not to reach out. I could hear her breathing next to me, and along my side I could feel, like a faint exhalation, her nearby side, so close that my arm-hairs bristled. These were the rules of the game, if it was a game—I didn’t care, felt only a kind of feverish calm. I needed to be there, needed the dark, the games, the adventure, the kingdom of her room. I needed—I didn’t know what. But it was as if I were more myself in that room than anywhere else. Outside, in the light, where everything stood revealed, I was somehow hidden away. In Isabel’s dark domain, I lived inside out.

  Meanwhile I was getting up later and later. One day after lunch my mother said to me, “You’re looking tired, Davy. This friend of yours…Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed home today?” And looking anxiously at me she placed on my forehead the cool backs of her fingers.

  “Don’t,” I said, jerking my head away.

  One afternoon I found Isabel in the dark. Instead of walking to the right of my chair, as I usually did, I changed my mind at the last moment and walked to the left—and suddenly I stumbled against her, where she’d been crouching or lying, and I fell. I disentangled myself in a great flailing rush, and as I did so I felt for an instant, against my ribs, a slippery silky material that slid over something soft that suddenly vanished.

  Because she had asked me about the beach, I began to bring her things: a smooth stone, a mussel shell, the claw of a small crab. I collected impressions for her, too, like the dark shine of the sand as the waves slid back, or the tilted bottles of soda beside the beach towels. The soda itself looked tilted, against the slanted glass, but was actually level with the sand. She always wanted to see more—the exact shape of a wave, the pattern of footprints in a sandbar—and I felt myself becoming a connoisseur of sensations, an artist of the world of light.

  But what I longed for was the dark room, the realm, the mystery of Isabel-land. There, the other world dissolved in a solution of black. There, all was pleasure, strangeness, and a kind of sensual promise t
hat drifted in the air like a dark perfume.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said. “One hand. Come on. Guess.”

  In my palm I felt a soft, slinky thing, which filled my hand slowly, as if lowered from a height.

  “Is it a scarf?” I said, rubbing it with my thumb as it spilled over the sides of my hand.

  “A scarf!” she said, bursting into wild laughter.

  One day Dennis said to me, “So what’s with you and Vicky?” We were sitting on my front steps, watching people on the way to the beach, with their towels and radios.

  “Nothing’s with me and Vicky.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Jesus.”

  Sometimes I had the sense that Isabel was revealing herself to me slowly, like a gradually materializing phantom, according to a plan that eluded me. If I waited patiently, it would all become clear, as if things were moving toward some larger revelation.

  “You’re so good for me,” she said, whispering near my ear. I felt her hand squeeze my hand. In the dark I smelled a faint soapy scent and a more tangy, fleshy odor. When I reached out I felt her pillow beside me, still warm from her head.

  On the beach one day as I lay thinking of Isabel, I overheard a girl saying, “…August already and he hasn’t even sent me one single solitary…” Something about those words troubled me. As I pressed my chest and stomach against the hard-soft sand under my towel, trying to capture, for Isabel, the precise sensation of hard and soft, it came to me: what troubled me was the knowledge that time was passing, that it was already August—August, the second half of summer, August, the deceitful month. Still the hot days seem to stretch on and on, just as they did in July, but you know that instead of a new summer month shimmering in the distance, there’s no longer any protection from September—and you can almost see, far off in the summery haze, the first breath-clouds forming in the brisk autumn air.

 

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