Desperate Asylum

Section 1

There was a terrace in the sun, and a swimming pool below the terrace, and beyond the swimming pool, sand and the ocean. Around the pool and on the sand and sometimes in the ocean there were brown men and brown women who were not quite naked, and after a while, after the passing of hours and days, he was able to look at them with practically no feeling of any kind. He sat on the terrace in a bright canvas sling, which was really half sitting and half lying, and the white light was softened by the thin filters of his closed lids to red that sometimes deepened to black, and in the soft red-and-black world behind his lids were a beautiful golden woman who had been dead a long time and a frozen gray man who had been dead a short time; and it was necessary to see them now, if he was to see them ever, without perversion or distortion and in true relationship to himself.

This is how it was, he thought. This was the beginning of awareness, and it was night, and I lay in my room in the house on High Street, and because I was very young I was supposed to be asleep, but I wasn’t. Lying in my bed, I could look out to the east and see the moonlight on the crest of the ridge beyond the river, but I couldn’t see the river itself because it was hidden at the foot of the bluff that dropped away at the lower end of the back yard, and I thought about the river, how it would look silver in the moonlight, and pretty soon I heard a car come up the drive from the street and stop in the portico, and I knew it was my father and mother coming back from wherever they’d been, and I thought it was pretty early for it. I quit looking at the crest of the ridge and thinking about the river and started waiting for the sounds of the door opening and closing in the lower hall, and the heavy steps and the light steps coming up the stairs, and the heavy voice and the light voice talking and laughing and passing in the upper hall, all very softly and subdued because of me, because it was supposed that I was sleeping. This night, though, as I lay and listened, the door opened and closed as usual, and the steps came and passed as usual, but there was no sound of voices, no restrained talking and laughing, and this was not usual and not at all right.

The acoustics of night are very strange. At night you can hear many things that are not heard in the day, the creaks and whispers and sighs of sound, and you can hear voices in a room with a thick wall between. You cannot hear precisely what is said, the significant arrangement of vowels and consonants, but you can hear their inflections and determine their temper and know by their quality if they are spoken in love or amity or anger. As I heard and knew, lying and listening in my room to the hard voices in the room of my parents.

They were very angry, my father’s with a quality of measured fury, my mother’s with a kind of icy and studied contempt. I had never heard them speak like that to each other, or to anyone else, and it made me afraid of the night and the familiar things that the night made unfamiliar, and I wished that I had gone to sleep as I was supposed to and had not heard them come in and begin talking behind their closed door. I tried to quit listening, to ignore the disturbing flow of sound from the other room, and I looked out again at this moonlit crest and tried to picture again the moonlit river that could not be seen, but the angry voices could not be rejected, and now it was my father who was doing most of the talking, and his voice had risen, and this was exceedingly strange and frightening, because he was a man who ordinarily said very little and said that softly. I had never consciously acknowledged a preference for either of my parents, but now I began to have a feeling of resentment toward my father and of alliance with my mother, because she was gay and golden and beautiful beyond description, and if there was something wrong between them, it was surely my father’s fault. I thought that it was not right for him to talk to her that way, with his voice rising on a cadence of fury, and then I began to think that he would certainly stop if I were to go down and open their door, because it was an accepted rule among all people who amounted to anything that parents should not make scenes before their children, and so I got out of bed and went out into the hall on my bare feet and down to the door of their room.

I put a hand on the knob of the door and stood there with the fear in me suddenly rising, afraid of the consequences of intruding on two people who were all at once strangers, and after a silence, his voice resuming its deadly modulation, my father said, “I think that I should kill you, and perhaps I shall,” and my mother laughed and said, “You won’t kill me, and you won’t even divorce me, and you will do nothing at all, in fact, because anything you might do would cause a scandal, and it is unthinkable that there should ever be a scandal in the family of Lawes, which is the first family in Corinth, which is God’s chosen town.” Then I turned the knob and the door swung into the room away from me.

My mother was sitting at her dressing table with her back to me, and she was holding a brush behind her head as if she had just finished a stroke down the length of her shining hair, and I could picture her sitting there brushing her hair all the time my father was saying all those angry things to her and answering him back with the cold contempt in her voice, and I had to admit in justice to him that it was something that would probably make anyone furious. I could see the reflection of her face in the mirror, and she could see me in the mirror too, and her eyes widened and she slowly laid the brush or, the glass top of the dressing table and reached up automatically with the other hand to clutch the top of her robe. She turned on the bench to look at me directly, and my father turned also in his position between us, and the two of them looked at me together.

Finally my mother said in a normal voice, “What are you doing up, darling? I thought you were asleep hours ago?”

“I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t,” I said. “I was watching out the window, how the moonlight was and everything.”

“That’s very nice, but perhaps you could have gone to sleep if you had closed your eyes and tried a little harder. Did we disturb you when we came in?”

“You didn’t exactly disturb me, but I could hear you talking.”

“Why did you get up? Are you frightened?”

“You sounded angry. I thought maybe you would stop being angry if I came down and opened the door.”

My father came over and put a hand on my head. “We were talking about something that caused us to lose our tempers with each other. That was pretty foolish, wasn’t it?”

“Why did you say you might kill Mother?”

“Did I say that? I certainly didn’t mean it. It shows you how foolish it is to become angry.”

“Why did Mother say you wouldn’t divorce her? Did you say you would do it?”

“Your mother said things she didn’t mean, just as I did. You mustn’t think about it any more or let it bother you in the least. Now you had better go back to bed.”

“I would like for Mother to come with me.”

“Is that necessary?”

My mother stood up and walked over to us. I could see the shadow of her body under her thin robe, and she was wearing a scent that I have never forgotten and can still smell, even at this moment, though I have not wanted to remember it, and she put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Of course I will come with you. Come along, darling.”

We went to my room together, and I got into bed again, and she sat on the edge of the bed beside me, and it was then still a great pleasure to look at her and touch her and smell the scent of her.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “The moonlight on the ridge, I mean. I can understand why you stayed awake to look at it.”

“I didn’t stay awake on purpose,” I said. “It just happened.”

She sat there looking out the window with a soft light on her face that seemed like it was coming through from the inside, and I lay there thinking that it was more beautiful by far than the moonlight on the ridge, or even on the river, and after a while I went to sleep, and she went away.

That was the beginning of awareness, but not yet of knowing, and my mother and father lived in a cold compromise that lasted for months, and whatever was wrong between them that night went right on being wrong, and it looked like it was going on forever, and then it changed. Something happened, and I don’t know what it was, but there was certainly something, because they were gay with each other again, and went out together at night, and came home talking and laughing, and slept in the same room and all that. It was late in the summer of that year that we went to Mexico City, and I remember Chapultepec Park as clearly as if it were yesterday but nothing else, and everything was fine until the Mexican musician. (Oh, God, that reminds me of the other night in Em Page’s bar, and at home later, and what a thundering, bloody bore I must have made of myself! I must send Em a card and apologize, but I suppose he hopes devoutly that I never enter his place again, and I can’t blame him if he does.)

I didn’t know at the time that it was because of the Mexican that we came home so soon, of course, and didn’t know it until years later, after my mother was dead and my father told me about that and other things so that I would understand why everything in our life had gone sour, but I knew that it was because of something bad, something wrong between them again, and by the time my father finally got around to telling me I already knew how my mother had been, that she liked to sleep around, and a lousy Mexican musician more or less didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference one way or another.

The cold compromise, following Mexico City, was resumed and was complete and was never afterward violated, and the compromise seemed to be that they would maintain the appearance of marriage without the substance, and for a long time, because I was very young and knew nothing, I was sure that my mother was good and right for no other reason than that she was incredibly beautiful, and that the wrong between them, whatever it was, was his. Later, after the day I saw her with the man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers, I assumed the other extreme and thought that that fault was all hers, and I hated her and was sickened by her and could not stand her near me. My revulsion was something I could neither hide nor explain, and it is possible that it contributed to the sum of factors that caused her to kill herself, and if it did, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. Now, looking back, I can see that it was either the fault of both or the fault of neither, and I believe really that the latter is true, that she could no more help what was in her blood or brain or glands, or wherever it was, than he could help the peculiar social cowardice that made it easier to suffer a life-long private degradation rather than to suffer even briefly a public one. The creed of the Laweses, the God-damn cowardly creed of the Laweses, and I suppose that I am as faithful a subscriber to it as any of the others before me, and as great a coward.

This man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers. I can’t even remember his name, and this is probably one of the things that I’ve repressed and deliberately refused to remember. But I can still see him quite clearly in my mind as he was when he worked for us, his tall strong body burned brown by the sun, his white teeth flashing in his dark face with a bold arrogance that seemed to remind you that he might be only a kind of handyman in the yard and gardens, but that he had his own points of superiority if you cared to notice. He worked for us in the spring and summer and early autumn of two years, and it was in the summer of the second year that I saw my mother with him in the arbor by the bluff above the river, and it is now time to think about it clearly, long past time. Here in this warm sunshine, on this bright terrace, it is time to bring it out of the dark into the light and to see it for what it was and nothing more, illicit and wanton and a breach of fidelity but basically normal just the same, nothing at all to sicken a life for more than two decades.

There was this garden swing in the deep back yard, and I liked to sit there in the summer and look down into the bottoms at the gray ribbon of river that had come a thousand miles to this place, and beyond the river was the rich bottom land running east to the ridge. I liked to sit there in the swing and look at the ridge and river and think about how it must have been when there were Indians here, and Conestoga wagons crossing the river on rafts on the way west, and my father said that this hadn’t actually been so long ago, but it seemed to me that it surely must have been ages and that he only thought otherwise because he was himself so old. At that time he must have been all of forty, give a year or two either way, but there was already in him a chill grayness that made him seem much more.

It was this hot summer afternoon, one of these summer afternoons when all time and motion seem suspended and there is the softest, sleepiest kind of drone in the air that must come from thousands of small things that can’t be located, and I thought it would be pleasant to sit in the garden swing by the bluff, and I went down there. I sat in the swing and felt very drowsy, and after a while I was conscious of the sounds from the arbor over to my right, and the sounds seemed to be a kind of rustling and heavy breathing. I listened and looked over at the little house, which had lattice walls with very narrow cracks that you couldn’t see through from a distance, and after a minute or two I got up and went over close enough to see inside, and there they were on the floor. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t, and I stood there until it was all over, and then I turned and walked away very quietly, and I have thought later that that must be the way the world will end, not in noise and fire and physical pain, but with everything disintegrating in an instant in utter silence.

And now, remembering deliberately after all this time, I am still sick and not cured. I am sick with the thought of gasping passion and the cruel hunger. Catharsis futile.

She was sick too, of course, in her own way, and in the end she found her own cure. One balm for many fevers; who wrote that? Someone wrote it, and the balm of death, and it was the balm and the cure she found. It should have been anticipated; it was forecast in the quality of her personality in her last years, which should have been among her early years, in the intensity of an overt gayety possessing the shading of despair and in the fierce activity that was like the product of delirium And I have wondered if my father did not actually expect it and look forward to it and consciously do nothing to prevent it. However that may have been; she came home one night and went into her room and took something and lay down to die. She was dead in the morning, and my father found her there and locked the door and went downstairs to call the doctor. The doctor came, and he was a friend of the family, of course, and it was all hushed up, the way she had done it, just as unpleasant things were always hushed up when they happened to a Lawes. I didn’t see her myself until the funeral, when the warm, hungry flesh was bloodless and cold, and we buried her; and in the cemetery my father stood at the edge of her grave with no grief or relief or regret apparent in his face, as if nothing had ever begun or ended.

So she is dead, and my father is dead, but I am not. That’s the point. That is what it comes to. I am not dead and do not want to die. Not wanting to die, I must therefore arrange to live. It’s that simple. It is really very simple indeed. One must think it through logically, that’s all. It is quite clear, for instance, that I am sick and dying, though I wish to live, and that my sickness is abhorrence and rejection of women in the basic function of woman, and that this abhorrence and rejection has become, through a kind of psychic diffusion or something, an abhorrence and rejection of life itself. It follows that I must cure the one in order to cure the other. To reduce it to simplest terms, I must learn to love. Surely this is something that can be done.

How warm the sun is. How softly it touches the body. It seems a long time from the gray days that get inside you and become part of you. It seems a long, long way from the cold and snow of Corinth. Was it only Saturday that I was there? Was it only a few days’ ago that Em Page drove me home with a load of Scotch? Oh, Christ, what a fool I made of myself! I wonder what in hell Em must think of me? I must remember to get that card off...

Section 2

The room’s ocean side was all glass. Accommodations at the hotel, she thought, even though it was not one of the extremely expensive places, were surely costing Carl quite a lot, and she considered it additional evidence of the remarkable depths of kindness and generosity in him that she had never suspected before. She stood in front of the wall of glass with her back to the room and looked out over terrace and sand and not-quite-naked bodies to the glittering blue water spreading out to the remote blue sky. She was very tired from her trip, and her bath had not refreshed her as she had hoped, and what she really wanted and needed was a very strong drink. Her eyes followed the line of junction of sky anti water, and she was not particularly depressed at that moment, in spite of the tiredness, but she wished that Carl would come for her and take her down to the bar.

As if in answer to the wish, he knocked on the door. She knew that it was he, because there was no one else who could possibly have a reason for knocking, and so she turned and called across the room to him to enter. He came in and stopped and looked around and rubbed his hands together like a man coming upon something suddenly and finding it unexpectedly pleasing.

“Very nice,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Comfortable is hardly the word for it. The room must be quite expensive.”

“Oh, nonsense. I can afford it, you know. You’re looking lovely, Lisa.”

“Do you think so? Thank you very much.”

She was, as a matter of fact. After her bath, she had put on a thin black sheath dress that gave rather startling; emphasis to her pale skin and hair. With her small breasts and narrow hips, she looked much younger than she actually was, possessing an almost adolescent; charm.

“You look about sixteen,” he said.

“No, Carl, really. Don’t exaggerate so.”

“Well, a slight exaggeration, maybe. But only slight. You never showed your age, Lisa. I remember that you always looked much younger than you were. I came to see if you would care to go down for a drink.”

“Yes. I was just wishing that you would come and ask for me.

“That’s good, then. Do you suppose I will have trouble getting you into the bar?”

“Why should you?”

“Because of your age, I mean. No minors allowed.”

It was a joke and he laughed at it, his tired and ill-looking face creasing and opening around a soft expulsion of air. He was obviously determined to resume an earlier relationship, to proceed from this point in the pretense that it had never been interrupted, that there had been on her part no betrayal, no desertion, no aberrance. She had again for a moment the feeling inside her of dry and silent weeping, all that apparently was left to her of the relief of tears, and she laughed with him at his joke, feeling no laughter at all within.

“I’ll carry my birth certificate,” she said, and they went downstairs feeling quite at ease with one another, for the first time as if they were really beginning a holiday. The bar was not large and was crowded with patrons and humming with the subdued confusion of conversations against a background of muted music, but they found a table in a corner and sat down, and after a while a waiter came and stood beside the table.

“What would you like?” Carl said.

“A daiquiri, I think.”

“Frozen?”

“No, not frozen.”

“Good. I could never see the sense in a frozen daiquiri.” He looked up at the waiter. “Two daiquiris,” he said.

The waiter went away and returned pretty soon with the daiquiris. They were cold and tart and very good. Lisa drank some of hers and felt the rum begin to work. “When would you like to have dinner?” Carl asked.

“I don’t know.” She listened for a moment to the voices and the music. “Not for quite a while, really. I’m not at all hungry.”

“Do you want to eat here or somewhere else? Perhaps we should ask about the good places.”

“I’d just as soon eat here. It’s very nice here.”

“It is, isn’t it? It was recommended to me by a fellow in Midland City who was down a year ago. I should have come myself much sooner. Long ago.”

He sounded reflective and wistful, as if he were reviewing the lost chances of his life. He was thinking, probably, that he had had very little fun out of living. And he looked as if he hadn’t, his face appearing older than it was, even in the soft and flattering light of the bar, thin skin gray and dry and loose on its bone structure. He had never at home, Lisa remembered, reacted to anything at all with excitement or sign of genuine pleasure, and she felt now that she had somehow contributed to this inadequacy, this effect of flatness, and she was suddenly oppressed by her recurrent conviction of guilt. For a moment she was absolutely certain that she should never have come here with him, that it would never work for good but only for disaster; and that she was not only peculiarly vulnerable herself to corruption and misery but was also a kind of carrier of these things, a source of contagion for everyone who had anything to do with her. She thought that it would be a kindness to him if she were to get up without a word and walk away and never again see him or speak to him or have any contact with him of any kind, and the compulsion was very strong to act upon the thought, but she merely lifted her glass instead and looked at him over the edge.

His attention had been diverted, and he was staring intently at someone who had come in and got onto a stool at the bar. Following the direction of his gaze, she saw a slim back in a white jacket and, beyond in the glass, a blur of features in a narrow frame.

“That fellow there,” he said. “I’d swear that I know him.”

“Maybe he’s someone from Midland City.”

“No. I don’t think so. If he were from home, I’d remember. I have quite a good memory for names and faces. Well, never mind. Probably he only resembles someone I know. Are you ready for another daiquiri?”

“Yes, please.”

He signaled a waiter. The waiter came and picked up their glasses and carried them away. The muted, canned music went on and on. King Cole singing something. Later there would be a live entertainer, a young woman who played the piano and sang unusual songs that you couldn’t hear just anywhere, but now it was King Cole canned. The waiter brought the fresh drinks and Lisa drank some. She was losing her feeling of guilt again, her compulsion to run. Here was the world with her in it, and things were this way or that way, and there was no need to torture yourself about them.

“Avery Lawes,” Carl said.

“What?”

“His name is Avery Lawes.”

“The man at the bar?”

“Yes. I knew him in college. Classmates. I suppose it’s been eight, nine years since I’ve seen him.”

“Really? It’s remarkable that you should recognize him so quickly.”

“Well, I have a good memory for names and faces. But I said that, didn’t I? He lives in Corinth. Used to, anyhow. Corinth is a town across state from home. Not a large place. About thirty thousand, I think.”

“I know.”

“It’s a nice town. Prosperous. Lots of money in Corinth. Some good families there too. I guess the Lawes family was about the most prominent of them all. Still is, I suppose. Money and background. There was a Lawes served a term as governor about twenty years ago. Avery’s grandfather, I think.”

“To hounds, to hunt, and away.”

“What?”

“Never mind. I was just making a joke.”

“Oh.”

He stared at her blankly, obviously trying to see the humor of it, in what way it was a joke, and she was ashamed of the impulse that had made her say it, her irritation; and she reminded herself again of his enormous kindness and generosity and, above all, of his sincere efforts to understand her and reclaim her. She did not deserve such consideration and was not at all sure that she could respond to it, or at least sustain her response indefinitely to it, or even for any considerable length of time.

“It wasn’t funny,” she said.

“Well, perhaps I’m a little dull. Never was able to appreciate irony and things like that.” He lifted his glass and took a small swallow and set the glass down again. “I’d rather like to speak to Lawes. Do you mind if I do?”

“Not at all. Do as you like about it.”

“Excuse me, then?”

“Of course.”

He got up and walked toward the bar, and she picked up her daiquiri and drank it quickly and signaled the waiter to bring her another. She would have to be careful about her drinking, she thought. She had quite a capacity for it and did not get drunk easily — not sloppy, out-of-control drunk, anyhow — but there was the very important matter of mood to consider. If she drank too little, the alcohol acted only as a kind of irritant, and she was likely to become nasty and say things she would afterward be sorry for; and if she drank too much she became terribly depressed and started thinking about everything that had happened to her and that it would be much better for her and everyone else if she were dead. And so drinking became in the first place the delicate operation of taking just enough to get the proper lift, the rather lilting feeling of compatibility with herself, and in the second place the even more delicate operation of taking just enough thereafter to sustain the feeling, which was a very difficult thing to do and required lots of practice.

The third drink arrived, and she tasted it, approaching now the delicate point of sustenance. With a pleasant sense of detachment, she watched the action at the bar, the pattern of diffident action and reaction occurring when one person undertakes to renew with another an acquaintance that had been interrupted long ago and had been no more than casual in the beginning. She could not hear what was said, of course, but she could have supplied almost literally the words to go with the observable expressions and gestures and hesitations. “Excuse me, old man. Aren’t you Avery Lawes?”

“Yes,” lifting his head and twisting on the stool, “yes, I am.”

“Sheridan. Carl Sheridan. I’m afraid you don’t remember me.”

“No. No. Sorry.”

“The University. Old what’s-his-name’s class in Investments. Remember? We graduated together.”

“Oh, yes. My God, yes. Sheridan. Carl Sheridan. Inexcusable of me not to have remembered immediately. Well, it’s been a long time.”

“Certainly has. How have you been, old man?”

“Fine, fine. Working and getting older.”

“Still living in Corinth?”

“Yes. No place on earth to live but Corinth, you know. Family’s been there for eons.”

“I’ve been right in Midland City myself. Hardly ever get away. Just down here now to recuperate from a spot of pneumonia. Doctor said I ought to come. Takes something like that, I guess, to jar a man loose.”

“Yes. Seems like it. Will you have a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’d like to, but I have one waiting for me at the table over there. Have my sister with me.”

“Sister? Not married yet, then, I take it.”

“No. Never had the time for it. That’s my story, anyhow. Truth is, women don’t like me.”

Laughter. Polite laughter for the little joke.

“Glad to hear it. It’s a relief to learn that I’m not the only bachelor left of the old crowd.”

“Really? Not married yourself? I should have bet you’d take the plunge long ago.”

“Not I. Hopelessly inveterate, I’m afraid.”

“Are you expecting someone?”

“To meet me here? No. I’m strictly on my own.”

“In that case, why don’t you have a drink with my sister and me at our table?”

“Oh, I don’t want to intrude.”

“Nonsense, old man. We’d love to have you. If you really aren’t committed, I’m going to insist.”

“Well, if you’re sure it won’t be an intrusion.”

“Quite the contrary. Be a genuine pleasure. You know how it is between a brother and sister. All right for a while, but eventually it gets pretty dull. Especially for the sister. Come along, old man. Just bring your glass with you.”

Now Avery Lawes stood up, glass in hand, and came with Carl across the room to the table, and Lisa, watching them come, could see that Lawes was a slim, erect man with a graceful carriage and a rather narrow, good-looking face. His nose was finely shaped, and there was about his mouth a softness and sensitivity that indicated not so much weakness as vulnerability. Lisa noticed these things objectively, with no emotional accompaniment except that of a vague reluctance to emerge from her semi-isolation and engage in a routine of sociability with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. “My sister Lisa,” Carl said. “Lisa, this is Avery Lawes.” Lisa smiled and held out a hand, and he took it briefly and released it. His fingers were dry and hard, with very little flesh on the bones, and the touch of them was not offensive. He bent forward slightly from the hips. “How do you do, Miss Sheridan,” he said.

She said that she was doing fine. “Won’t you sit down?” she said.

He took a chair across from her. He drank from his glass, and she saw that it was Scotch he was drinking. On the rocks. It followed, she thought. First family of Corinth and all that. High class stuff. Why did high class stuff almost always drink high class Scotch?

“Carl tells me you were in the University together,” she said. She laughed. “You can see that we were talking about you.”

“Convinced I knew you the moment you came in,” Carl said. “Just took me a minute or two to place you.”

“It’s remarkable that you remembered me at all. After so long a time.”

“I have a good memory for names and faces.” Realizing that he had said this twice before, Carl shot an almost ludicrously contrite look at Lisa. “I mean, it’s just one of those little knacks a person has sometimes. Would you like to have that drink freshened?”

“It’s Scotch. I’ll finish it and have another.”

He finished it. Carl finished his daiquiri. Lisa, nursing her third for sustenance, said in response to Carl’s inquiry that she was not ready yet. The waiter came and left and came back, and everyone was beginning to feel pretty good, not drunk but just temporarily dissociated from the three people they would recover later in the night or wake up with in the morning.

“That class in Investments,” Carl said. “The professor’s name. I’ve been trying to remember it. It was Barnsdorf.”

“That’s it. Barnsdorf. It was Barnsdorf, all right.”

“I kept thinking Barnswell and Barnstorm. It was Barnsdorf, though. Wacky old boy. There was a fellow at the frat house who did a perfect imitation of him.”

“Yes. Nutty as a peach orchard bore, they used to call him. I never knew why a peach orchard bore was considered particularly nutty, but that’s what they called him. Not so nutty at that, though, I guess. I understand he made over a million dollars just playing the market.”

“I’ve heard that myself, but I never quite believed it.”

“You never can tell about these odd old boys. Supposed to be all theory and no common sense, but sometimes they’re pretty shrewd. Sometimes they surprise you. Wonder if old Barnsdorf is still living?”

“Oh, I should think so. Been some publicity if he’d died. Especially if he’d left over a million dollars.”

“That’s right, isn’t it? That’s a way to tell if he really has it. All we have to do is wait for him to die.” Avery turned to Lisa. “Is this your first time in Miami?”

“Yes. We only arrived today.”

“Is that so? Only been here four days myself. Are you staying long?”

“I don’t know, really. Carl has been ill. He came down to rest and get some sunshine.”

“So he told me. Hope you didn’t come along for the same reason. Have you been ill too?”

She felt all at once a strong and dangerous compulsion to tell him. Yes, she wanted to say, I have been ill too, I have been ill for many years with an illness that is a result of learning something wrong at a time when it should have been learned right, or perhaps of not learning at all something which should have been learned naturally in the normal process of ceasing to be one phase of person and beginning to be another, and still again, perhaps it is something you are born with and can’t help, and the simple truth is that no one actually seems to know what causes it, or what to do about it, least of all the person who has it. You were talking about the old professor at the University, Mr. Lawes. You said he was odd. That is the name of my illness, Mr. Lawes. I suffer from the illness of oddness. For instance, would you believe it, I can look at you and talk with you and ever touch you without revulsion, but I cannot possibly understand how any woman on earth could get excited about the prospect of sharing your life or your bed, even in return for the privilege of becoming a Lawes of Corinth. On the other hand, I can remember a girl named Alison from a long time back, and a woman named Bella from a very short time back, and I can remember others in between these two, and for these I had, and have now in remembrance, a feeling that would astonish you. Isn’t this odd of me? Isn’t this very odd? There is a name for this oddness, Mr. Lawes, and the name derives from the name of an island where a woman named Sappho once lived and wrote poetry and was, they say, very beautiful. It is a name for those with this illness of oddness, the illness that I have, and it is not pleasant to be odd in a way that is different from the oddnesses that are accepted, like that of the old man who was only good for laughs and possibly a million dollars. If you are odd in a way that is not accepted, you are quite likely to suffer for it. Do you understand me? It is this conflict, this threat of massive retaliation, that is never lost entirely from the consciousness, even if it is never executed, that nourishes a sickness of guilt and diffuse fear and in the end quite possibly destroys you. So I have been ill too, and I am still ill, and I have come to Miami to sit in the sun. My brother has brought me here, and I know very well what he is thinking. Would you like to know? He is thinking with great innocence that a husband would cure me. He is thinking that if I deliberately adopted the form of normalcy the substance of normalcy would develop in its own time. He is thinking that I am really a very pretty woman with a good background and that it is his duty to guide me to an eligible man and to encourage my cultivation of this man. Object, matrimony. A kind of desperate asylum, if you follow me. And do you know something? Being aware of this, I am inclined to submit. Rather, let us say, I have been driven to submit. Not because I am convinced that it is the cure he thinks, but because I am convinced that there is at least no other. And I will tell you something else. Though he wouldn’t admit it and probably doesn’t even realize it, Carl is at this moment thinking of you, and I am thinking myself that you are, of all the men I’ve known or am likely to know, quite possibly the least offensive. Do you hear that? Do you understand me?

Better run, Mr. Lawes. Better get up at once and run as if the devil were after you, for it may be that he is.

“No,” she said, “I have not been ill.”

“Good. Are you ready now for another daiquiri?”

“Yes, please.”

“Carl?”

“All right.”

They had two new daiquiris and a Scotch, and Lisa sustained the lift, and it became night. Avery and Gail talked about things that had happened at the University when they were there and about things that had happened to them since they’d been there, and Lisa listened for a while and then began to think about things that had happened to her, but this threatened the lift, so she began listening to the canned music and watching the formulistic people. And after quite a while Carl asked her if she would like to have dinner, and she said she thought that she would.

Carl turned to Avery. “You’ll have dinner with us, of course.”

“Oh, no, thanks. I’ve intruded long enough.”

“It’s no intrusion at all. We’d love to have you, wouldn’t we, Lisa?”

“Of course.” Carl and Avery were both looking at her as if something more were expected of her, so she added, “Please join us. We’re only going into the dining room here.”

“Well, I’ll accept on one condition. I pick up the check.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Carl said.

“I insist. I can’t accept unless you agree.”

“All right.” Carl shrugged and finished his last daiquiri in a gulp. “If you put it that way.”

They got up and went out of the bar and into the dining room and were escorted to a table. An orchestra was playing something with a Latin rhythm, and a few couples were dancing at one end of the room on the small dance floor directly in front of the elevated place where the orchestra sat. The opposite end of the room was open to the terrace, and a few couples were dancing out there too.

“What are you going to have?” Carl said.

Lisa looked at the menu, and Avery said, “I’m going to have the pompano. It’s very good.”

“I think I shall too,” Carl said. “It’s something different. You don’t often get pompano at home.”

“There’s a place in Corinth that serves it now and then. Em Page’s restaurant.”

“Really? That’s rather surprising. It must be a pretty good place.”

“It is. Em built it up from practically nothing, and he’s very proud of it. It takes pride to make something good.”

“Come to think of it, that’s true. Pride works wonders.”

“I’ll also have the pompano,” Lisa said.

Looking up from the menu, she saw that Avery was watching her with an odd intentness. He was apparently on the verge of saying something to her and was struggling against an impediment of some kind, just as a stammerer will hang up sometimes on a particular sound. The orchestra had begun a medley of tunes with a simple rhythm that required no mastery of intricate steps, and she understood suddenly that he was about to ask her to dance, and she wished that he wouldn’t. Not, however, that she really felt strongly about it. She would prefer not to dance, but if he asked her, she decided, she would accept. She was feeling, as a matter of fact, quite assured. The certainty that she could cope with the small initial contacts of a normal routine filled her with inordinate pride.

“Would you care to dance?” he said.

“If you like. I’m not very good, though.”

“Neither am I. I can only manage the simplest steps. If the orchestra gets off on a mambo or anything like that, I’ll have to capitulate.”

They stood up and threaded their way among tables to the dance floor and began to dance. He held her loosely, their bodies brushing lightly, and she was grateful for this. Neither did he try to talk with her, and she was grateful for this too. She moved gracefully, following his lead with ease, but in her grace there was a kind of paradoxical rigidity, as if it developed from the movement of her body as a unit and not from a harmony of parts. When the music ended, they returned to the table and found Carl beginning on his salad.

“Thank you,” she said to Avery.

“Not at all. It was my pleasure.”

Which was not true. He had obviously not enjoyed the dance and had only asked her out of courtesy. She recognized this and was not in the least disturbed by it.

They sat down and began eating their own salad. After a while the waiter brought the pompanos on a little cart and boned them beside the table and poured melted butter over them. Carl had ordered a bottle of sauterne. The waiter poured the sauterne and served the pompanos and went away. The sauterne was mediocre, Lisa thought, but the pompano was very good. It worked, however, against the lift. As a kind of depressant. She was beginning to feel imperiled, her assurance slipping, and she wished for another drink. As a drink, the sauterne was unsatisfactory. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and wished for a strong daiquiri.

“Won’t you reconsider your condition?” Carl said. “About the check, I mean.”

Avery shook his head. “No. I insist on the terns of the agreement.”

In response to a signal, the waiter brought the check and left it on the table on a small tray. Avery picked up the check and examined it and put it back on the tray with a bill. He always tipped about fifteen percent and knew that the bill would just about cover it. His ability to compute rapidly in his head was something he was secretly proud of, and at the same time he was secretly ashamed of the pride. It was such a little thing, after all, to feel so strongly about.

“How about a drink on the terrace?” he said.

“No, thanks.” Carl pushed his chair back. “I’m pretty tired, really. Guess I’m not fully recovered from the pneumonia. I think I’ll go up to bed, if you’ll excuse me. Perhaps I’ll read for a while.”

He was clearly making no impromptu excuse. His tiredness was evident in the ravishments of his face, the ruts and shadows and gray flesh, and even in the quality of his voice, which had developed a soft windiness, each word expelled with an effort on a slight burst of breath. Standing, he brushed a hand over his thin, fair hair. Avery stood too and helped Lisa.

“Must you run off too?” he said. “Could I interest you in another daiquiri?”

She did not want to remain alone with him, but on the other hand she wanted the drink very badly. She said that she would stay because the drink and the company seemed in present circumstances to be concomitants.

“If it’s all right with you,” she said to Carl.

“Of course. I want you to enjoy yourself.”

He looked at her in a way that seemed to suggest a significance under the surface of his words that was vastly greater than their literal meaning, and she thought, after he had said good-night and was walking away, that he had meant to be subtly compelling, that he was actually urging a conversion from aberrance to orthodoxy. She wondered if he understood the enormity of such a conversion, the perils entailed, and she was sorry for him and frightened for herself, and again she was conscious of a dry inner weeping.

“I would like that drink very much,” she said.

They went into the bar and got the drinks and carried them out onto the terrace. The beach and the ocean were bright in the moon, and on the bright beach between her and the bright ocean were the appropriate bright people. Washed in moonlight, they were like characters in a phantasy. They were not real, she thought. They did things to one another and with one another and were very gay in their phantasy world, and they filled her, in spite of their quality of unreality, with fear and a conviction of proximate personal disaster. She had completely lost her recent assurance, and she wished suddenly and bitterly that she had stayed in Midland City with Bella. With Bella there was no security and no salvation, but there was at least the semi-peace of acceptance and submission.

She finished her daiquiri quickly and said, “I am tireder than I thought. I think I had better go upstairs after all.”

“Must you really?”

“I think I had better.”

“In that case, I’ll see you to the elevator.”

“No. Please don’t bother. I thank you very much for everything.”

“Not at all.”

“Well, good-night, then.”

In unconscious conformity to accepted ritual, she held out a hand, and he accepted it briefly, and she was aware again of the dry, hard inoffensiveness of his touch. Turning, she crossed the terrace and the lobby inside and went up in the elevator. In her room, she undressed and wished for another drink and thought that she would remember to buy a bottle to keep in the room tomorrow. Lying in bed, she could not see the bright sand and water below, but she could hear the roar of the surf, and the sound without the sight had a mood of its own and its own effect upon the mind, and after a while she thought of a phrase she must have read somewhere at some time: the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The words had the quality of poetry, and they repeated themselves in her mind, but she could not remember where they came from or who had written them, and eventually she went to sleep.

Section 3

Down the beach a fat woman was sitting in a canvas chair under a large umbrella. The chair and the umbrella were matching pieces with alternating stripes of crimson and yellow. The woman was reading a book through the dark lenses of a pair of sunglasses, and every once in a while she would look up from the book and lift the glasses a little and stare out under them at a small girl who was playing in the sand about fifteen feet away between her and the water. The child was a skinny little thing with an incredible number of points and sharp edges. She had sparse red hair, a very light shade of red, almost pink, and it had been curled to make it look thicker than it was, but the effect had been only to make it look frizzled and brittle and no thicker at all. She was building little mounds of sand to represent buildings and tracing a path among the mounds to represent a road, and she was obviously bored with it and wishing for something more exciting to do. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing and look down the slope of the beach to the water, and then she would turn and look up the slope of the beach to the woman, but every time she looked at the woman, the woman was reading, or pretending to read, and the child would return to the buildings and road. Her imagination could instill no reality in them. They simply bored her, and what she really wanted was to go swimming in the ocean.

After quite a while the child got to her feet and walked up the beach to the woman and stood looking at her. She had learned from experience that this was an almost infallible technique in securing attention, and that the person so stared at would eventually respond, though not always in a way to be desired. The woman continued to look at her book, obviously trying to ignore the child, but signs of irritation were quickly apparent in a tic-like twitching of one corner of her mouth and in a turning of pages much more rapidly than they could possibly have been read. Conceding defeat, she lay the book face down in her lap and lifted the dark sunglasses, staring back at the child. She had difficulty sometimes in believing that this thin, homely girl was actually her daughter, had actually been conceived and nourished and issued in and by her own lush body, and if it had not been for a memory of pain that she had vowed would never be repeated she would have discounted the possibility entirely. Was it possible, she often wondered, that they had mixed things up in the hospital nursery?

“Yes, darling?” she said.

Her voice was heavy with imposed patience. The impossible child stared at her solemnly and kicked sand. “May I go swimming now?” she said.

“No, darling. You know I won’t permit you to go swimming by yourself. You might be drowned.”

“You could come with me.”

“Not now, darling. Perhaps later.”

“That’s what you said a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t a long time ago. It only seems like it.”

“Well, that’s the same thing. It’s the way things seem that’s important.”

“Please, darling. Don’t argue.”

“I’d like very much to go swimming. I wouldn’t drown. I’d stay in the shallow water.”

“No, darling. You know how Mother worries.”

The woman lowered the sunglasses over her eyes and her eyes to the book. She stared at the open pages, comprehending nothing, conscious of the girl staring at her. After another minute, the girl turned and walked away, and the woman sighed with relief. The symbols on the pages resumed their assigned meaning, establishing relationship with one another, and she began to read.

The girl returned to the place where she had been, playing in the sand. Deliberately, with one naked foot, she leveled the buildings and obliterated the road. Turning, she looked up the beach at the man who was lying; there in the sun on his back with one arm bent up and over to protect his eyes. The man had come there about twenty minutes ago and had lain down and had been lying there without moving ever since. She wondered if he was asleep. If he went to sleep in the hot sun, he might be badly burned. He looked nice. He was not very young, but on the other hand neither was he very old, which was quite apparent in spite of the gray in his hair just over his ears. His body was slender and lightly tanned and didn’t have any ugly overlap of flesh at the belt of his swimming trunks. She wondered if he would be willing to talk with her if she were to go up and introduce herself. Quite apart from that, however, it was possibly her duty to go and see if he were actually asleep and in danger of being badly burned. She threw a look over her shoulder at her mother and then walked up to where the man was lying. She stood looking down at him, and she began to think that the technique was not going to work for once, that the man was actually asleep, because it took him such a very long time to respond.

Eventually, however, he did. He stirred and lowered his arm and opened his eyes and looked up at her, and she waited patiently to see if he was going to be annoyed or indifferent or friendly. As it turned out, he didn’t seem to be any of those things. He seemed merely curious.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Eugenie.”

“Is it? Mine’s Avery.”

“Were you asleep?”

“No. I was just lying with my eyes closed.”

“I thought you might be asleep. You hadn’t moved for so long, I mean. It’s dangerous to sleep in the sun.”

“I know. It was kind of you to be worried about it.”

“Well, to tell the truth, I wasn’t. Not very, anyhow. I just thought you might be willing to talk with me.” He sat up, brushing the sand off his shoulders with one hand. Taking this as an invitation, or at least a kind of concession, she sat down in the sand facing him.

“Why do you want to talk?” he said.

“Because I’m bored.”

“Bored? I didn’t think girls your age ever got in than condition.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I’m very frequently bored.”

“That’s too bad. Can’t you find anything to do?”

“What I really want to do is go swimming.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Because my mother won’t let me. She’s a terrible coward about the water. She’s afraid I may be drowned.”

“That isn’t very likely if you stay in shallow water.”

“I know. That’s what I tell her, but it doesn’t do any good. She said she might go with me later, but she probably won’t. She always says that just to get me to stop asking, but she hardly ever does. She doesn’t like the water.”

“Is that your mother under the umbrella?”

“Yes. Reading the book.”

At that moment the woman looked up and lifted the sunglasses. Missing the girl, she sat up suddenly. “Eugenie,” she called.

The girl turned her head in the direction of the voice. “Here I am, Mother.”

“You mustn’t bother the gentleman.”

“I’m not bothering. He said he would like to talk.” This wasn’t quite the truth, and she looked quickly at Avery from the corners of her eyes to see if he would support her in the small lie, and was relieved to see that he was looking at her mother and nodding his head.

“It’s quite all right,” he called.

Satisfied, the woman settled back in her chair again. She lowered the glasses and lifted the book. The girl turned back to Avery.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“It wasn’t quite true, you know. You didn’t actually say you would like to talk.”

“Didn’t I? I want to, just the same. I guess I was getting bored myself.”

“Do you get bored frequently?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes.”

“I do. I get bored very frequently. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Neither is Mother.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She was married once but isn’t any longer. She’s divorced.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Do you think so? I don’t. I live part time with her and part time with Father. It makes things a little more interesting. It’s not so boring when you change off.”

“Where does your father live?”

“In Baltimore. That’s in Maryland. My mother lives there too, but not with my father. They’re divorced.”

“I know. You told me that.”

“I have a bad habit of repeating myself. Mother says I do, and I guess it’s so. Why aren’t you married?”

“I guess I just never found a girl who would have me.”

She looked at him judicially, her head cocked to one side.

“I don’t believe that’s the reason at all. You’re very good-looking you know.”

“Well, I didn’t know, as a matter of fact. Thank you for telling me.”

“Do you intend to get married?”

He was quiet for a long time, looking beyond her and far out across the glittering water. She was afraid for a minute that she had offended him. Her mother often told her that she was far too inquisitive. She did not want to offend him because she would then have to go back to being bored, and she wished there were a way to retract the question, but of course it was too late, just as it was almost always too late to do anything about something you’d put your foot in. She was vastly relieved when he laughed quietly and did not seem to be offended after all.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said.

“When?”

“I really haven’t decided. I haven’t even asked anyone. Soon, perhaps.”

“I don’t ever expect to get married myself.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because I don’t suppose anyone will ever want me. I’m too plain.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, if you wouldn’t, it’s just because you’re kind. It’s true, however. I’m very plain, but I’ve learned to accept it. I’ve even learned to like it, rather. Being plain has advantages, you know. People don’t expect so much of you.”

“How old are you?”

“Ten. Why?”

“I just wondered. To tell the truth, I think a great deal should be expected of you. For ten, you’re pretty precocious.”

“Precocious? What does that mean?”

“It means that you act older than your age.”

“Oh. My father has said the same thing, only he didn’t use that particular word. Would you care to go swimming?”

“I thought your mother wouldn’t let you go.”

“That was alone. I’m sure she’d allow it if you went too. Then she wouldn’t have to take me later, you see. She hates going into the water.”

“All right, then. You run over and ask, just to be certain.”

The girl got up and went over to her mother, and Avery stood and watched the sequence of small actions between the two of them, the girl standing and waiting for attention, the mother lifting her eyes and lowering her book and glancing quickly, after listening for a moment, in his direction. Finally, the short nod of her head that signified assent, the relieved retreat to the book.

The girl returned and said, “I told you. It’s perfectly all right.”

“Good. I’ll race you to the water.”

She turned and ran down across the sand on thin, stem-like legs, and he followed more slowly, letting her stay ahead. When she reached the water, she went straight in, throwing her negligible weight against massive fluid resistance, and he increased his speed, catching up with her when the water was already above her waist.

“Can you swim?” he said.

“No.”

“Then I don’t think we’d better go any farther out.”

She looked up at him. The salt water had splashed up and wet her hair, darkening the shade of red a little but making it look thinner than ever, and he thought that she was indeed an extremely homely little girl, but at the same time there was a strange, inquisitive charm about her.

“It would be all right if you were to carry me,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose it would.”

“If you’ll just squat down a little I can get onto your back.”

He turned and squatted down to make his back available, and she climbed quickly aboard. Her thin arms around his neck felt as if they had no flesh whatever on them. They were like flexible bone. He walked on out against the resistance of the Atlantic until only his head and neck were above water, and then she slipped off his back, retaining a hold on one arm.

“Help me float,” she said.

She floundered over onto her back and began to sink, and he put a hand under her and raised her to the surface, and she lay there as rigidly as a body with rigor mortis, floating on the light touch of his fingers. Her weight, which was little enough normally, was hardly anything at all in the water. Apparently all she wanted to do was to lie on her back and look up into the sky, and she lay there on his fingers without speaking or moving, except as she was moved by the motion of the water, for what seemed to him like a very long time. Eventually he glanced toward the beach and saw the fat woman, her mother, standing at the edge of the water and gesturing for them to come in.

“Your mother wants you,” he said.

“Yes.” She closed her eyes and made a face at the sky. “I thought it must be about time. She never lets me stay in longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. It’s a ridiculous idea of hers.”

“Shall we go in, then?”

“I suppose we have to.”

She flopped over onto her stomach and regained her hold on his arm. From there she clambered onto his back again, and he waded in with an exhilarating sense of power rising within him in a kind of counter-action to the descent of the water on his body. He felt like a god or something. Or like a saint. Saint Christopher rising from the water with a child on his back.

The mother, seeing them approach, had returned to her chair and was preparing to leave the beach. Avery deposited the girl on the sand and said, “It looks like you’re going to have to go. Thank you for letting me go swimming with you.”

“Did you really enjoy it?”

“Yes. It was fun.”

“Mother will say I’ve made a nuisance of myself again. She says I bother people.”

“In my case, that isn’t so. You tell your mother that.”

“I’ll tell her, but she won’t believe it. You’re very nice. I hope you marry a nice girl.”

“Did I say I was going to get married?”

“You said you were thinking about it.”

“Yes. So I did. I remember now.”

He looked down at her, at her small ugly face beneath the ridiculous pink hair, and she assumed all at once in his mind a monstrous and unreasonable importance, as if he were suddenly certain through intuition that she was a kind of strange oracle by the sea who had come to him for a purpose which he must at this moment, before it was too late, recognize and exploit.

“Tell me,” he said. “Do you think I should get married?”

“Yes.” She gave him again her judicial stare. “Because you’re kind. Women like kind men. In the end it’s more important than anything else.”

The woman called sharply before he could answer, and the girl turned and started up the slope of the beach. Without stopping, she turned her head and said to him over her shoulder, “Good-by. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again,” and he stood and watched her go until she reached her mother, and continued to stand and watch as she and her mother, the fat woman and the thin child of points and edges, went away together. What had she called herself? Eugenie? Was it possible that the child really had such an inappropriate name? He wanted to laugh. Sustaining the sense of exhilaration and power that had risen within him as he emerged from the water, he felt uplifted and assured. Everything was so simple, really. All the complexities and distortions and doubts and fears were susceptible to dispersion by the answer of a child, and everything was, after all, so very, very simple.

He lay on the sand again and thought of Lisa. With this one, he thought, it would be possible. Because her flesh is pale and cool and quiet to the touch, devoid of fevers and hot adherence, it would be possible with her and time and resolution to establish and sustain an adequate relationship. One thing is certain. It must be done now and with this woman, or never and with no one. How I know this is not clear, but it is quite clear at any rate that it is true, and I even believe that this odd, ugly child Eugenie was sent this afternoon to establish it. Lisa. Lisa Sheridan. Lisa Sheridan Lawes. I can give her my name with a thought of intimacy and feel no more than the slightest revulsion. And even this will pass. Even this vestigial scar of early trauma and distortion will pass in time, and it will pass in the brick house above the river on High Street in the town of Corinth, in the place where trauma happened and distortion began and grew. It is all a matter of forgetting and learning, and it is not too late, though it would be too late after this last chance, and I am certain that it can be begun now and accomplished hereafter with this one woman with the pale, cool flesh.

But capacity? Diminishment and depletion of revulsion is one thing, a good thing but a negative thing, and capacity is quite another, because capacity is a positive rather than a negative, something that must be felt and done rather than simply not felt and not done. This is different. This is vastly more difficult. But it can be learned. I am sure that it is all a matter of learning, once you have unlearned all that formed the impediment to learning in the first place. One thing at a time. First one step and then the next. Like learning to walk. It will not do to consider all problems and perils together. One at a time. One after another as they are met. Who was it said that we would all be overwhelmed and terrified if we were conscious of all the deadly perils that threaten us every minute of every day in even the most commonplace affairs? It was Schopenhauer, I think. Yes, I am certain of it. It sounds just like him, the gloomy bastard, and I will not think any more about Schopenhauer, either, because he depresses me. I cannot at this moment think of anyone who ever lived who could possibly be worse for me to think about than Schopenhauer.

I will think, instead, about last night. She was quiet and remote in an aura of physical frailty, and it was not bad, it was not bad at all in the lounge and later on the terrace, the best of all the nights in the last two weeks of nights, each a little better in its turn, each in its turn holding a little more securely the quality of peace and rightness and growing ease. A lot can happen in two weeks. It is remarkable how much can happen. In two weeks of nights, nations can fall and families can break and a man can enter, after a fashion, into a new relationship with himself. A man can lie, after that much time, on the hot sand under the hot sun and consider dispassionately, as he was not able to consider before, the social and biological essentials involved in the procreation of his kind and the preservation of his name. He can think of a certain woman and decide definitely to marry her.

Hot. He was enveloped in heat that fell upon him from the sun and rose around him from the sand. It was time to move. If he did not move, he would be burned, as the girl with pink hair, the ugly little oracle Eugenie, had come to tell him quite some time ago. Getting to his feet, he walked up across the beach to the terrace of the hotel and saw Carl Sheridan sitting at a table with a tall cold glass in his hand. He went over and sat down at the table. Carl looked across the table at him and smiled and made a small tintinnabulation with glass and ice.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello. What’s that you’re drinking? It looks good.”

“Just a Tom Collins.”

“Gin. I never cared much for gin.”

“It’s all right when it’s hot. When the weather’s hot, I mean, not the gin. It’s refreshing.”

“I think I’ll try one.”

He started trying to catch the attention of a waiter. After a while he caught it and gave the order.

“Have you been swimming?” Carl said.

“Yes. I took a little girl out. Her name was Eugenie.”

“Someone you know?”

“No. She was on the beach with her mother. She cane over and started talking with me and asked me to take her out.”

“You look a little red, old boy.”

“Do I? I lay on the sand for a while. Too long, I guess.”

“You ought to be careful about that. You can get burned before you know it.”

The waiter brought the Tom Collins. Avery picked it up and drank some of it. The glass was cold in his hand, and the Collins was cold in his throat, and Carl was right about it. It was pretty refreshing.

“We’re leaving Saturday,” Carl said. “Has Lisa told you?”

“No. She hasn’t said anything about it.”

“Oh? I thought perhaps she had.”

“No, she hasn’t said anything.”

“Well, that’s right. Saturday.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Sorry to leave, for that matter. But all good things must end, as the saying goes. I want to get home before Christmas.”

“Are you feeling better now?”

“Oh, yes. Much. Quite thoroughly recovered.”

“Lisa will go back with you, of course.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Lisa and I have been together quite a lot since you introduced us. Every night, as a matter of fact.”

“I know. I’m sorry to break it up, old boy.”

“She’s very charming.”

“Do you think so? She’ll be pleased to hear it.”

“I have been thinking that I’d like to marry her. As her brother, would you object to that?”

“Not at all. Quite the contrary. I’m familiar with your background, of course. Your family and situation and all that. Have you asked her?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Have you definitely decided to do so?”

“Yes. I’m not returning to Corinth until spring. Plan to go on to Mexico City in a couple weeks or so. I’d like to take Lisa with me.”

“Marry her here, you mean?”

“That’s right. Before you go back north, naturally.”

“Well, it’s up to her, old boy.”

“I have your permission to ask her, then?”

“Certainly. And best of luck.”

“Thanks.”

Avery finished his Tom Collins and stood up.

“See you later,” he said.

He went inside and up in the elevator. So this is the way you do it, he thought. This is the way you refute the past and imperil the future. In a few minutes. In a few words. As if it were nothing at all.

In his room, he showered and shaved and dressed. Already regret was working at him, the grave, reflective doubts. He thought of the odd little oracle of the afternoon, but she was now no more than an ugly child with no authority, and he went for his Scotch and found the bottle empty. Going to the telephone, he ordered another bottle and sat down to wait for it. When the bottle arrived in the hands of a bellhop, he paid the bellhop and poured three fingers and sat down again. He drank the Scotch a finger at a time and began to feel better.

Section 4

She was lying on the bed, just lying there quietly on her back and looking up at the ceiling and trying not to think about the wrong things, when someone knocked on the door. She continued to lie without moving until the knocking had stopped and started again after an interval, and then she got up and took an empty glass and a half-empty bottle of whiskey off the bedside table and carried them into the bathroom. Returning without them, she went to the door and opened it, and Carl came in.

“How are you, Lisa?” he said.

“All right. I was resting.”

“I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“You know I didn’t mean that.”

He could smell the whiskey on her breath, and it bothered him. If she drank to excess in the bar or in company, he thought nothing of it, but when she drank in her room he immediately began to worry, because it seemed to him that solitary drinking was a bad sign. He walked over to the glass wall and stood with his back to her.

“I’d like to talk honestly with you, Lisa.”

“I’ve been honest with you, Carl. I made up my mind to be, and I’ve been.”

“I know. I believe you have. How are you feeling?”

“Most of the time I feel good. Sometimes depressed. Not for any particular reason. It’s just something I can’t help.”

“Are you depressed now?”

“A little.”

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Nothing much. I’ve been trying not to think at all.”

“We’re returning north Saturday, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“What will you do when you get there? Have you thought about that?”

“I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know. I guess I’ll get an apartment and a job and go on living.”

“I’ll help you financially, of course. But that isn’t the first consideration. Will you be safe?”

“Safe? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. I mean, will you go back to the other life?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish you would be a little more certain about it.”

“I would be more certain if I could, but I can’t. I don’t know.”

“I am willing to pay for a psychiatrist if you think it will help. Do you think it would?”

“I don’t know about that, either. It might help, but I don’t know.”

He turned away from the window and came over and took her by the arms from the front and looked into her eyes.

“I love you, Lisa. I have always loved you in spite of everything, and I’m very worried about you.”

“I know that. I didn’t know it before, but now I do. It makes me want to cry, but I find that I am no longer able.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Would you be willing to follow my advice?”

“I would be willing to try.”

He released her arms and went over to a chair and sat down.

“I was just talking to Avery Lawes on the terrace.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve been seeing Avery often, haven’t you?”

“Every night. Sometimes in the day. I thought you wanted me to. I know you never said it, but I had the feeling you wanted it.”

“So I did. I had the idea you would benefit from a normal relationship.”

“That’s what I thought you thought.”

“Well, how do you feel about him?”

“I don’t feel anyway about him. Neither one way nor another.”

“You aren’t repelled by him?”

“No. He’s all right to be with. He doesn’t disturb me.”

“Perhaps that’s a good sign.”

“Perhaps.”

“It might be the beginning of something more positive, I mean. He comes from an extremely good family.”

“That’s what you said.”

“He’s quite wealthy, I believe. He’s the last of the family, too. He lives by himself in a large house. His father died only last summer.”

“He told me that.”

“Yes. Well, as I said, I was just talking to Avery on the terrace. The truth is, he is going to ask you to marry him.”

“When?”

“Probably tonight. He wants the marriage performed before I leave on Saturday. How do you feel about it?”

“Terrified.”

“Why? There’s no need for that.”

“Isn’t there?”

“Oh, I know what you mean. You mean you will not be able to function as a wife. But you will. I’m convinced of that. At first it will be only a matter of submission, of compelling yourself to accept him passively, but later you will learn to find pleasure in him. In your relationship. It’s normal, Lisa. It’s the way men and women are supposed to be. Surely, if you give yourself the chance, it will be easier after a while to be normal, the way you’re supposed to be, than to be the way that was never intended. That’s only common sense.”

“If only it were so simple.”

“You must have a chance, Lisa. And to have a chance, you must take a chance. You would have wealth and a fine home. You would have a high position in society and would be respected automatically. It would be a kind of asylum for you. It would give you a chance to make the necessary conversion and to become well.”

“We’re forgetting something, aren’t we?”

“What?”

“Avery. Doesn’t he deserve some consideration? It seems like a dirty trick to play on him. To use him this way.”

“He’s asking of his own will.”

“That’s not the point, Carl. You know it isn’t.”

“It won’t be a dirty trick if you make him a good wife.”

“I’m not at all sure I can make him a good wife.”

“You can. You must believe that you can.”

“He will know something is wrong the first time we are together.”

“Nonsense. He will only think you are frightened and inexperienced. Perhaps somewhat frigid. Many women are like that at first.”

“I don’t know, Carl.”

He got up and took her by the arms again.

“I will tell you something. I will be perfectly frank. I don’t really care a damn about Avery. I am not concerned about him. It is you I’m concerned about. I am willing to ruin him if it is a means of saving you. However, I do not think he will be ruined. I think it will work out for both of you. It is your chance, Lisa, your best and maybe your last chance for the asylum that is necessary in the beginning. You said you trusted me. You said you would try to follow my advice, and now I am asking you to try.”

“Marry Avery?”

“Yes. Will you do it?”

“If you want me to.”

“I do.”

“All right. I will do it for you.”

“Not for me. For you. That’s the way you must think of it.”

“For me, then. I will do it for me.”

He leaned forward suddenly and kissed her on the cheek. His lips on her cool flesh felt dry and hot. “Perhaps I shall see you later downstairs,” he said. Turning, he went over to the door and let himself out, and she walked into the bathroom and got the glass and the whiskey and brought them back and poured some of the whiskey into the glass and drank it. Then she lay down on the bed again and tried to relax completely and make her mind a blank. She was not able to accomplish this completely, but was at least partially successful, and she lay there for a long time, well over an hour, before she got up and went into the bathroom again and stripped and took a cold shower and then, after drying herself, brushed her teeth thoroughly with a dentifrice that was supposed to kill all odors on the breath, including the odor of whiskey.

When she was dressed, she went downstairs and out onto the terrace and stood by the balustrade looking down across the beach to the ocean. The hard glitter of the day was gone, and the air was softening and darkening, and the water beyond the beach was a vast shadow shifting uneasily in the cavities of the earth. She was cold, very cold, but the coldness was something that originated inwardly and had nothing to do with the descent of the sun, and was nothing that she could do anything about, except, perhaps, to get a drink as soon as possible. She did not go into the bar, however, but remained standing by the balustrade until Avery came up from behind and stood beside her.

“Here you are,” he said.

“Yes. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Am I late?”

“No. I don’t think so. I came down early.”

“Would you like to have dinner?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m sure I couldn’t eat a thing. Don’t let me interfere with your own dinner, though.”

“It’s all right. I’m not hungry, either.”

“Really? I’ll go and sit with you if you wish.”

“No, really. I’m not hungry at all. I’d prefer not to eat.”

“In that case, I would like a drink.”

“How would you like to go someplace different? I have been to a place I liked. A small place. It’s quieter.”

“All right. But first I would like one for the road.”

“Fine. That’s a good idea.”

They went into the bar and had a drink and then went out into the lobby and waited until the Caddy was brought around. In the Caddy, they started for the other place he’d been to and liked. She sat in her corner of the seat and said nothing and reminded herself over and over that she had made a promise to Carl and that it was necessary for her own sake, as well as for the sake of abstract ethics, to keep the promise. The drink she’d just had was of some value in helping her face this necessity, but it was inadequate on the whole and wouldn’t last and would soon need the assistance of another.

They came to the place they were going to, and it was small, as he’d said. And as he’d said, quiet. There were some tables and chairs and half a dozen booths and a bartender and a waitress and very little light. It was obviously a place to go and drink and talk if you wanted to, and if you had anything in mind besides drinking and talking, it was much better to go someplace else. They went in and got across from each other in a booth and began drinking, and pretty soon they began talking. “Have you talked to Carl?” he said.

“At lunch.”

“Not since then?”

“No,” she lied. “Not since lunch.”

“I saw him on the terrace of the hotel this afternoon. Late. I had just come up from the beach. He told me you are returning north this Saturday.”

“Yes. He wants to be home by Christmas.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I would like to stay here all winter.”

“In Miami?”

“Not particularly in Miami. Somewhere in the sun and the warmth. I would like never to have to live in the cold again.”

“I’m going to Mexico City soon. Did you know that?”

“Carl may have mentioned it. I don’t remember.”

“Have you ever been in Mexico City?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t get as warm there as it does in Miami, but on the other hand it doesn’t get cold, either. The nights are cool, and a topcoat is necessary, but the days are pleasant.”

“You sound as if you’d been there.”

“I was there once. A long time ago.”

“Did you see a bullfight?”

“No. I was only a child. All I can remember is Chapultepec Park.”

“I don’t think I’d want to see a bullfight.”

“I guess they’re pretty brutal.”

“It’s not so much that. I think they would be dull.”

“They sound interesting enough in Hemingway.”

“Everything sounds interesting in Hemingway. It’s the way he writes.”

“Perhaps I’ll see one while I’m there. It would be interesting to find out, anyhow.”

“Do they have them in winter? Is there a season for them, or do they have them the year around?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it, to tell the truth.”

“How long will you stay there?”

“Until spring.”

“Will you go home then?”

“Yes. Back to Corinth. Have you been in Corinth?”

“Once. I don’t remember much about it.”

“There’s not much to remember. It’s not much of a place.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Well, it’s just a town. I was born there, and I’ve lived there all my life, and I expect I’ll die there. My mother is dead, and my father is dead, and I live alone in a brick house on High Street above the river that my family has lived in for four generations. I’ve thought about going away to live in some other house in some other town, but if I did I’d probably spend the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t and wanting to go back.”

“You could go back if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“Of course. And I would. So it’s much simpler not to go away at all. Except for a while at a time, like now. I’ll go to Mexico City and see Chapultepec Park again, and maybe a bullfight, and then I’ll go back. Some other time I’ll go some other place. And back. Always back.”

Their glasses were empty, so he signaled the waitress, and she came and took them away and brought them back full. He took a drink and looked at her and thought how cool her pale flesh looked and how her loveliness was something almost detached, something related in only the most incidental way to flesh and bone and the arrangement of features.

“I’ve been wondering something,” he said. “I’ve been wondering if you would care to come with me.”

“To Mexico City?”

“Yes. And then back to Corinth. I’ve been wondering if you would care to marry me.”

“I doubt that you want me to marry you, really.”

“I do, though. I’ve thought about it very carefully, and I’ve decided.”

“It’s a fine compliment. Thank you very much.”

“Does that mean you will do it?”

“If you’re sure it’s what you want.”

“I’m sure. I tell you I’m sure.”

“Perhaps, before we make it definite, I had better tell you something about myself.”

“Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“But I want to. I want to tell you that I will make a very unsatisfactory wife. This is because I have no desire for you. If we are married, I will try to learn to desire you, but I doubt that I can ever learn. It is not only you, you understand. It is a deficiency in me in relation to all men.”

“You mean you are frigid?”

She considered the truth but could not tell it, and so she told the lie.

“Yes. I’m sorry. And now you can retract your proposal, and we will have some more drinks and forget all about it.”

He looked down into his glass, and she could see that his shoulders had begun to shake, and she thought with horror that he was crying, but then after a moment she saw that he was not crying but laughing, and this only increased her horror because the laughter contained this arid agony of hysteria and was far worse than the crying would have been. Without thinking, in her urgent need to stop him, she reached across the table and laid the fingers of one hand against the side of his face, and he looked up at once, the laughter dying in his throat.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

“Forgive me. I was laughing because I’m a coward and have been relieved of the necessity of acting with courage.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I would still like very much for you to marry me.”

“In spite of the way I am?”

“It doesn’t matter. The way you are and the way I am are things that may change or may not change, but in the meanwhile we will go to Mexico City and back to Corinth, and eventually we will find out.”

She could not look at him any longer. She folded her hands on the edge of the table and looked down at the hands and listened to the sound within her of the dry weeping.

“You are very kind,” she said.

Which was an echo of the oracle, he thought.

Women like kind men, the oracle had said. In the end, she had said, it is more important than anything else.

He wondered if it was true.

Section 5

The night was alive, and all things in it. He lay in the center of the living night and was the focus of the living things. They crouched and waited and watched in darkness, and he rose and fell in silky, sickening motion on the breast of the breathing bed, and nothing happened, nothing at all.

Getting up, he moved among the living things and lit a cigarette and opened the blind at the window and admitted the slanting light of the circling moon. His body was wet, and the wetness evaporated in the air, and he was cold. Turning, he saw the other body, the white body in the white light, and it was perfectly still and from appearances might have been dead.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not all right,” she answered. “It never will be.”

“Eventually it will. It is something we can learn.”

“You don’t know. It’s not the way you think it is.”

“I know that we must be patient with each other.”

“Do you really think it is so simple? I shouldn’t have married you. It was a dirty trick that you didn’t deserve.”

“No. You told the truth. As you now know, that is more than I did.”

“You think I told you the truth? Oh, well, it is too late to worry about that. It is too late for anything.”

“You’re just feeling depressed. Futility is always depressing, but you will feel better tomorrow. Can I get you something? A cigarette? A drink?”

“No, thank you. Nothing.”

He left the window and lay down beside her on the bed. The living things had quit living and watching and waiting and had become the dead fittings of the room. Outside, the moon moved on.