Vapor

Chapter Five

The drive out was pleasant and uneventful. Damon asked about my social life, my friends. I didn’t tell him about Chriskate Turschicraw, or about my lunch with her. I only said I had had a miserable day, and that I didn’t want to think about it. In a little over an hour we arrived at his driveway, a long dirt road winding into the woods. The house was large and slightly elevated. A dozen steps led to the front door.

He grabbed my bag and his, and asked if I could get a small bag out of the trunk. I sensed that this request was intended to postpone me, to allow him to get to the house first, because as soon as I went for the small bag, he sprinted up the steps and disappeared inside the house, leaving the front door open. Maybe he wanted to make sure the place was presentable, turn the lights on, or whatever.

A few moments later I slowly followed him and found myself standing alone in a small entrance hall. Extremely small, for such a big house. It was in fact a little room, completely enclosed, with a door straight ahead. There was a chair against one wall, and I was trying to decide if I should sit or knock on the door, or just open it. I felt like a frustrated Alice in Wonderland, because the signs were missing; it seemed to me that if the chair were not going to wear a sign that said “Sit on me,” then the door should have one that said “Knock on me.” Or vice versa. I was about to knock on the door, when Damon opened it and stood in the doorway, against a background that was astonishing.

He was looking at me very intently, scrutinizing my reaction, while smiling in a shy, sheepish way. He seemed happy and alive, brimming with vitality. I, on the other hand, turned white; inwardly at least, and I’m pretty sure outwardly too.

Behind Damon was a huge room with not much furniture, and the little of it I could see seemed to be made of marble and glass. But what was noticeable about the room, and let me stress that this was very noticeable, very visually striking, was that there were clouds in the air of it. Big clouds. About seven of them. There was one just to the left of Damon, shoulder level. And another, further back, was bigger than me.

Damon stepped aside to let me in, but I didn’t budge.

“This is a bit unsettling,” I explained. “You didn’t warn me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you uncomfortable? I didn’t anticipate this reaction,” he said, shooing away the closest cloud with a few waves, like a smoker realizing his smoke is disturbing another person. “The reason I didn’t warn you was that I wanted to surprise you. In a pleasant way. But come in. Don’t be afraid.”

My footsteps echoed on the marble floor. “Is this what you’ve been working on this week?” I asked.

“Is what?”

“Making these big clouds?”

“No. I’ve had clouds like these for a long time. Size was the first thing I figured out; it was the core of my invention. This week I was taking care of other matters.”

I looked around, still nervous. There was a blue vinyl couch on the right, which I hadn’t seen from the doorway, and there was a glass clock against a wall. The room looked to be straight out of a Magritte painting. There was a staircase at one end, with a cloud halfway up the stairs, or halfway down; I couldn’t tell where it was going, if anywhere. There was another close to the window, as if looking out nostalgically. Another one’s top was popping out from behind the couch. Two floated near the ceiling. Some were very white and dense, like cotton; others were more loosely knit and see-through. They were all relatively motionless at this moment. I didn’t know names of various clouds, but one of them was sort of stringy and fibrous; sickly looking (the kind that looks majestically feathery in the sky, but obviously less so in a house). Most of the others looked plump, like well-fed sharks.

I became aware of a strange sound, music actually, coming from a large object, or sculpture, standing in a corner. On closer look it seemed like a fountain, dripping drops on various surfaces, each one producing a different note, and each note sounding ethereal. The notes were not random; there was a definite melody. It was probably preprogrammed, like a mechanical piano.

Before I had a chance to ask him about this musical fountain, Damon said he wanted to take me for a row in the boat on his pond while it was still light out. We went.

He was beautiful, rowing in the late afternoon light. And he was calm. Not at all nervous, for someone who was hopefully on the verge of making a move on me. His shirt was transparent, like a sweating man’s shirt, except he was not sweating. His chest was heaving from the effort of rowing, and yet there wasn’t the slightest sound of breath. His full lips were slightly parted. He looked at me, looking at him, and I looked away. At least I think he was looking at me, with his white-blue eyes, but it was hard to be sure because of the hair hanging in front of them.

He raised his face to the breeze and closed his eyes. The wind swept his hair aside. He then looked straight at me. I looked at the oar.

I wished I, too, had hair hanging in front of my face, to hide me. As I contemplated the oar traveling through the murky transparency, something suddenly struck me as odd, as not quite … realistic, about Damon’s rowing: There was no sound to it. Not even the sound of a ripple when the paddles entered the water. Yet I was not hard of hearing; from this boat, I could hear the birds in the forest. If Damon had been rowing slowly, the silence would have been somewhat more conceivable, but we were advancing swiftly, and his movements were powerful. I don’t mean to sound corny, but it was as if he and the water were one, as if he knew it as well as himself, knew how to touch it without disturbing it, without clashing with it.

He was still looking at me, and instead of allowing myself to wallow in self-consciousness, I decided to be courageous. I looked back at him and did not look away. After a moment, he smiled slightly. I reciprocated, almost imperceptibly, and I felt myself relaxing. It wasn’t so hard.

I hated the idea of destroying this thrilling, loaded silence, but I couldn’t resist venting my new boldness.

“You look like a ghost,” I said.

“How?”

“Your rowing is so quiet. You make no sound with the water.”

“If you ever, one day, know something well, it won’t make any sound either.”

I chuckled, a bit disappointed by the silliness of that statement.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “It’s true. What you know well grows silent.”

“True of everything?”

“Yes.”

“Even of people?”

“Most obviously of people.”

“How sad.”

“No. But what’s more interesting for you is that it is also true of art.”

“Even of music?” I asked, wanting to trap him.

“Yes. Great composers make very little sound with their music.”

“You mean good music is minimalist?”

“No. I mean good music is silent.”

“No notes?”

“Yes, it has notes.”

“So you mean metaphorically silent.”

“And also literally.”

“How?”

“Oh, come now, Anna, you know what I mean. No matter how loud a piece is, no matter how many notes it contains, it is silent if it is great: it is pure, it is essential, it is wholly itself, and it makes no sound.”

At the risk of irritating him, I said, “I take it you don’t like music.”

He stopped rowing and came toward me, crouching low, like a lion stalking its prey, which may not have been an intended effect; I think he was just trying to avoid rocking the boat. He sat down next to me, straddling the bench. “I like music fine,” he said softly, so close to my face that I could feel his breath on my cheek. We stared at each other for a while. He said, “Look up.”

I looked up, while his eyes remained glued to me.

“Are there any clouds?” he asked.

“A few.”

“Do they please you?”

“Yes,” I said, looking back at him, wondering if this meant he had made those too.

“More than mine?”

I looked back at the sky and said no.

“Why not?”

“Yours are inside a house.”

His face became cold, as if disappointed. He looked away.

I quickly added, “And, your clouds are also more substantial, more dense, some of them, and more … puffy-like.” I made some gestures to illustrate just how puffy and cottony his clouds had struck me. “And their color, also, is more beautiful, more bright, more sharply white.”

He laughed, affectionately I believe, even gratefully.

“Thanks,” he said.

He rowed us back to shore, and we went for a walk in the woods.

We treaded over slightly rough terrain. He led the way, parting the branches, and was considerate about not letting them whip back in my face. A couple of times, his flimsy shirt and pants got caught on some thorns and I helped deliver him. I could see he was not in his element here, like he had been on the pond. But soon we arrived at his element. A river. Along the edge of which we sat.

First moves are an interesting subject. A male friend of mine once told me that the first move between himself and his girlfriend was made when they were sitting on a bench and it became more awkward to not make a move than to make one. Damon and I were sitting on a rock and I waited for the move that would make the situation less awkward rather than more. He must not have shared my outlook, however, because no move was made. I could have done it myself, of course, but wanted to give him a chance to do it first. The evening was still young and I was still optimistic.

“Dinner must have arrived by now,” he said, after a while.

We walked back to the house and went in through the living room’s sliding glass doors. Damon walked straight through to the front door. He unlocked it and entered that horrid, instructionless entrance hall I had waited in earlier. Now waiting for us on the chair and on the floor was what, in a moment, was revealed to me as our dinner, in large paper bags that Damon took to the kitchen, saying he’d be back soon.

I didn’t mind being left to myself, to relax and feel unselfconscious, after a whole afternoon of his intense presence. Few activities in life are as tiring as that of hoping to be liked. I felt like a smile, frozen for hours by politeness until it twitched from exhaustion. My charm muscles, wherever they were located, were aching.

After impersonating a jewel all afternoon and aiming my sparks of brilliance at Damon’s heart, mind, and groin, I was dying to stop.

In case it isn’t clear what sparks of brilliance I’m referring to, I must explain that some people’s attempts at being charming consist in not doing many of the things they would normally do; in other words, repressing large portions of their personality. I was such a person. Taking this route to charm, I realize, is misguided. At least in my case I think it is. I hope it is. But it’s also instinctive. So when I refer to my sparks, I largely mean my few repressed words and gestures. If such a phenomenon were to exist in physics or cosmology — and maybe it does — I imagine it might be called something like: positive absences.

I paced the living room, itching to vent my lack of inhibition before Damon came back. First off, I hummed “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music,” to draw pleasure from the room’s reverberation, followed by a tune from “The Double Life of Veronique”—always my favorites when it came to testing the resonance of a hard, bare, and promisingly resonant room. As I walked around, I kicked my heels on the marble parquet and increased the loudness of my humming. I was surprised at how good it was, the reverberation; I had almost expected the clouds to act like carpet, absorbing and ruining the echo.

Still wound up, I ran my fingers along the back of the couch to make sure it was as awfully vinyl as it looked. It was. The kind that likes to stick to your skin. I opened my mouth a little, and my eyes a lot, to give the couch the gaping treatment such an unworthy fabric in such a beautiful living room deserved. At least it was a rough, textured vinyl, so it did not shine. I scraped my fingernails across it, producing a menacing, grating sound. I kept this up a little longer than one would expect.

Having entertained myself sufficiently for now with the couch, I directed my attention to my next object of fascination (other than the clouds, which I didn’t want to harm or dishevel): the musical fountain. I stuck my finger under one of the drops to block its fall. As expected, I pierced a hole in the melody. I watched the drop tremble on my fingertip, fragile and vulnerable, like a tear, crushed it against my neck like perfume.

“A poetic end for a musical drop,” said Damon, watching me from the doorway. “Dinner’s outside.”

I followed him onto the terrace, trying to console myself with the thought: better to have been caught catching one of his drops than using his couch as an emery board.

Outside, a table was set for two. The food had been ordered from a nearby restaurant; a practice he often indulged in, he informed me. A very good restaurant, I decided, after my first bite.

I didn’t like how much I liked him. It frightened me. I didn’t want to be in such a vulnerable position. I was in no mood to suffer over love; that most frivolous yet most potent source of suffering.

I stared at Damon and tried to find defects. I looked for a flaw in his face. The problem was, he looked like a model. I tried to find that unattractive. Some women did. I didn’t see why I couldn’t: that typical charming smile. So … typical of gorgeous men.

The physical plane wasn’t working. Perhaps I’d have more luck on the intellectual one.

For example: Good music makes no sound. What rubbish. Unfortunately, it was not entirely uninteresting rubbish.

Why not then try coming down on his mannerisms. Yes, mannerisms are a good thing to pick on. I searched. His were so … They were perfect, actually.

No. Don’t give up. There had to be a flaw. Try harder. I held my breath and clenched many muscles and stared at him hard, until I felt my eyes bulging.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, just as I found what I was looking for.

“No.”

“You look a little flushed.”

“I don’t feel flushed.”

What I had found was a slight popping out of the jawline on both sides when he chewed. I latched on to that for dear life, as onto a life buoy. But it was a very flimsy buoy that could only keep me afloat while he was chewing; as soon as the slightest wave came along, such as one of Damon’s ordinary charming or surprising comments, the buoy and I would sink. And there were other waves as well, such as the fact that everybody’s jaw does that when they chew. I fought the wave: just because everybody’s jaw does that doesn’t mean it’s not unattractive. I held on to the buoy.

But it and I were no match for him. He was simply so prodigious, in every way. At least in my eyes.

Before dessert, I grew cold.

We moved indoors and sat at the end of a long glass table and ate a floating island. A dessert I had never heard of or seen before, it consisted of a large bowl of warm liquid custard, with whipped egg whites floating in it. After serving me and himself, he pushed the large bowl to the side.

We ate slowly and talked, and I was smoking, and I noticed absentmindedly that my cigarette had never produced so much smoke. So absorbed was I by our conversation that it took me a while to notice that I could barely see Damon’s face behind the smoke. This phenomenon was gradually becoming more pronounced, which I found extremely strange, and I wondered what could be wrong with my cigarette. I was about to remark on it when I realized my cigarette contributed only slightly to the effect. We were not sitting in a cloud of smoke, but in a cloud, period. It must have drifted onto us. I interrupted our conversation to briefly express my delight.

Damon nodded slowly, smiling, and we continued talking, bathed in this mysterious foggy atmosphere that endowed our every word with depth and perfection. Or so it seemed.

I was suddenly distracted by a pitter-patter coming from the dessert bowl. Drops of God knows what, from God knows where, were splattering onto the liquid custard. The floating island was sinking under the weight of what I soon realized were raindrops. This foundering made me nervous.

“I don’t mean to interrupt you,” I finally said, “but the cloud is raining on the dessert. And sinking it.”

Damon leaned toward the bowl and looked. “So it is,” he said. He covered the bowl with a plate.

Raindrops started falling on me as well.

“It seems the rain likes desserts,” he remarked. “Shall I cover you with a plate too? Or should we just get out of the rain and take a walk in the woods? The weather tonight is worse indoors than out. There’s a section of the woods you haven’t seen. I saved it for after dinner because it’s particularly pretty at night. I have a warm coat you can wear.”

He opened a closet and took out a large down coat. “I haven’t worn this in years. I no longer wear opaque clothing.” He said this with the same finality, with the same entirely justified self-righteousness as the people who say, “I no longer wear fur.”

We entered the woods from another side of the house, but this time we did not walk randomly through uncleared foliage; we followed a beautifully manicured path made of stones, grass, and moss, with flowers along the edge. Lamps were hanging from tree branches at regular intervals, lighting the way. We passed iron benches, some black, some white.

We arrived at a small clearing and sat on a white bench. We listened to the crickets and the rustling leaves. I wrapped the coat more tightly around me. And I waited. I leaned my head back. He did too. We couldn’t see the stars because a lamp was shining near us. Damon got up and turned off the lamp. We were now in the dark, and the stars were bright. I was a little nervous, and optimistic, expecting him to turn toward me and make his move at any moment. He sort of had to. It would be just too silly of him not to.

Time passed. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he was up to just sitting there, doing nothing. I decided I would not do anything to make the situation less awkward; I didn’t want to make it easy for him to get away with doing nothing. So I sat, absolutely motionless and rigid.

That didn’t seem to work. So then I sighed impatiently, sort of a huff.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered meekly.

If he didn’t find this awkward, why should I?

After about fifteen minutes, he turned to me and said, “It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“What was?”

“Walking into the woods and sitting here.”

“Yes.”

We got up and walked back to the house; I was dazed. I looked at my watch. It was 11:00 P.M. He had an hour left to make his move, and if he didn’t do it by twelve, then I would have to, in time to catch the last train, depending on the outcome. My stomach flipped with unease as I realized that it would be like “Cinderella,” in reverse. By midnight, instead of escaping, I would be pouncing.