She sat up as quietly as possible, and still there was no sound. Perhaps they really had left, it came to her. Vanished like nightmares. She rose to her feet and listened. No sound but the steady dripping from the corner of the house; no motion but the pendulum of the clock. Through her stocking feet the carpet felt stiff as the bristles of some animal in a field, long dead. They were gone. She felt mysteriously lucky. It was the way she’d sometimes felt after a night of abandon, when she’d thrown all caution to the winds and made love to some man beneath her husband’s nose—in the kitchen, once, when Will had gone into his cluttered, rabbinical study to work on some papers—and, not caring whether or not she was caught, she had miraculously not been caught. It was as if the universe was in conspiracy with her, which perhaps it was: for there was a law, surely, against men like Will Hodge, or against the conspiracy of Will and Ben and all their plodding, wooden-hearted kind. She was, at any rate, no sneaking pleasure thief: she made no bones about it, confronted the world with as much boldness as her lover of the moment allowed her. A natural force, unconstrained, and not merely ignorant either; prepared for the worst—and sometimes it had come—and she had survived. They were the cosmic outlaws, not she: they lurked in shrubbery, spying in (so Will Jr had told her, Will Sr pursuing an adultery case for a client who wanted a divorce; and Ben had gone with him and they’d parked Will’s car at the edge of the woods where they could watch the house, and there they’d sat all night, waiting, their eyes shining like the eyes of murderers. Will Jr had refused to be a party to it: “For Christ’s sake hire a detective!” he’d said); but no shrubbery for her, no lurking and spying; her lines and life were free, or as free as was possible, she being a woman. That was what was so dreadful in Luke’s stupidity. For him all doors were open, he might have been anything—a man, not a woman—yet he chose to cower, to cringe and hiss, to hide under rocks, though he might have struck down the sun if he’d had the heart.
He still had not moved, and looking at the awful immobility of his wristbone she had a moment’s panic. She quickly overcame it. Better off if he was dead, she thought, safely knowing him alive.
She strained to hear any faintest intimation of movement that would tell her they were still here, but there was nothing. At last she walked toward the diningroom door, still in her stocking feet, and pressed it open. There was only the glitter of the china closet, the heavy old buffet, the lamps and bric-a-brac of the dead Runians. She closed the door again, still listening, then turned toward the kitchen.
Nick Slater sat at the table absolutely silent, motionless except for the fingers turning a cigarette around and around, rolling the ends to points. The pistol lay on the table beside his elbow. He raised his eyes to her.
When she was calm she said, “Where’s your friend?”
“He left.”
She waited a long time, but he was volunteering nothing.
“For good?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“He took Luke’s truck?”
But when she looked out over the cellar door she saw Luke’s pick-up truck still there, and up the hill, in the semidark beyond the open barn door she could see the rear end of the semi. Luke’s coupe was still here too, standing by the gas pump beyond the garage.
She said, “How long will he be gone?”
Nick looked back at the cigarette, and she knew now that nothing she said would make him talk to her. “You should get out,” she said slyly. “You’d have a better chance alone. A man like that stands out like a sore thumb. Everyone who sees him …” She folded her arms to keep her fingers from trembling and looked out toward the road. There were pines where the road and the driveway met, and she had walked there once with her brother Gil, who long after that had killed himself, the best of her brothers. She said abruptly, firmly, “Nick, you must turn yourself in.”
Nothing.
“Nick, listen to me,” she said, “I’m going to call the police. I have to. For Luke’s sake, and Ben’s. I have to. You see that, don’t you?”
She waited a full minute, or pretended to. Waiting had nothing to do with it. If she moved toward the phone his hand would move toward the gun, and if she drove him to it, he would kill her. It was incredible: not terrifying but quietly beyond understanding; she was not waiting for Nick’s reaction but for insight, a parting of the veil. She asked sharply, “What are you thinking?”
He said nothing.
“You make the phonecall,” she said. It came to her that the phone was probably not fixed yet. But she said, “I hear when you give yourself up of your own free will they go easy on you.”
He was turning the cigarette again, his eyebrows lowered so that between the flat of his forehead and the flat of his cheekbones his eyes were like the slits in a medieval helmet. It came to her that she needed a cigarette terribly, and she turned to open the cupboard over the sink where Luke kept his.
Nick said softly, “I killed somebody last night.” The voice seemed to come from very close, as if from inside her. She waited, frozen.
“Three people, that makes,” he said. “The first one completely by accident, the lady in the car. Then the next one a little less by accident. I didn’t know I would do it, but then when it was done I knew I did it, so that it was different from the other. I knew I had a choice, but I only knew afterward for sure. Then last night the third one, only just barely by accident. We heard her coming, and I knew I had the gun and maybe I’d kill her, and I knew I better not, it was bad enough already, but I was thinking, What would it feel like?—wondering if I really could do it on purpose, and he said, ‘You shoot off that gun, boy, and you’ll have the whole city on top of us,’ and I was wrapping it up in the blanket from the bed and all at once she was there and I knew she was going to scream and I had it aimed at her wrapped inside the blanket and I squeezed. I wondered if the blanket would slow the bullet down, but the way she jerked it must have hit her hard.” He broke the cigarette in half and dry tobacco fell from the center, spattered on the tabletop and lay still. He said, “And all the time he was standing there watching me, pulling at his beard with his hand.”
“Jesus,” she said.
He sat holding the cigarette ends in front of him, nothing moving now, not even his eyes. His shoulders sagged and the neck of the white shirt he’d taken from Luke’s drawer was open to show his collarbone and a small brown medal on a chain. The clothes they’d had before, the Sunlight Man had burned. “It was him that said about the three,” he said, “first the lady in the car by accident and then the guard and then last night. We walked out of the house like we owned it and went to where the car was parked—”
“What car?” she said.
“—and he got in and didn’t say a word, just drove off like nobody would think of stopping us, and when we were in the country he said about the three.”
“You’ve got to get away from him,” she said. This time it was no trick. “He’ll destroy you.”
He shook his head.
“Call the police,” she said. “He’ll be back soon. You have to do it now, before he comes.” Then: “Call Ben. Tell him what happened.” But the phone would be dead. If she let herself, she could laugh.
“He said he’d come back, when they took him out of the jail. I never gave it a thought, but he did.”
“Because he’s crazy,” she said. “Would you have done it?”
“I don’t know if he’s crazy.” He thought about it. “Ben Hodge would sit and talk with us, tell us all this shit and we would try to do better for a little while, but he give up on us. I would’ve given up on us.”
“You should call the police.”
He shook his head again. “Go sit in the livingroom,” he said. He glanced up, almost apologetic, but then his face hardened, took on a sullen, bloated look. “Go on.”
She turned away.
She stood at the window staring out at the drab, hot morning, waiting for some sound from Nick Slater in the kitchen, waiting for the be
arded man to return, waiting for Luke to come to. A strange indifference had come over her. She knew for certain now that the phone was still dead—from the storm last night, possibly; or maybe they’d cut the wires. She’d tried it half an hour ago, when Nick ran out in the garage for a moment, startled by some sound there. But the phone was not her only hope. One scheme after another passed idly through her mind, and she watched them pass like images in a dream but remained aloof from them, abstracted. She was afraid, but it seemed more than mere fear. She felt withdrawn the way schizophrenics are withdrawn, indifferent to how it came out. She imagined herself darting out the livingroom door and around the house, across the thirty feet of lawn to the locust grove and then up the narrow, shaded road to the nearest neighbor’s; but she was sure she would not make it. She would turn to look back and the boy would be there, aiming the pistol at her, eyebrows lowered, as if lost in thought, conscious that this time it was on purpose, and to their mutual surprise he would fire and she would fall, faintly astonished. She imagined herself darting to the semi, to the pick-up, to the car; she saw herself hunting for the keys, finding the ignition empty, or turning the ignition on and grinding on the starter to no avail, and he came toward her with his eyebrows lowered, lost in thought, aiming the pistol at her head. She saw herself waiting at the livingroom door with the flimsy poker from the fireplace, and when he came through she struck and he fell, but the gun was still in his hand and he turned to look up at her and raised the pistol slowly, and, as in a nightmare, she could not move. It seemed to her that she’d been through it all before many times. She remembered standing in her room as a girl, looking out over the porch roof toward the yard in front and the well and the highway beyond, thinking how easy it would be and knowing she would not do it, at least not yet. She could hear the thump of the iron on the ironing board downstairs, and now and then her father’s racking cough. Instead, she had said in her mind again and again, “I need to talk to you, Will. It’s important. Please.” She could imagine how it would be, his look of distress and then the rueful smile meant to hide the distress. She knew exactly how it would be, but she could not get up her nerve for it. And then one night, amazed at herself, she had heard herself actually saying it: “Will, I need to talk to you.” It was apple-picking time, and she had come to buy apples from them. He stood in his picker’s bib beside the two-wheeled handcart loaded high with apples, and darkness was coming on. The others were down at the house. You could hear the sorter rumbling, and now and then you could catch their voices. The smell of the apples was beautiful, and she had ridden on the cart when she was a child and her father was here to help with the work, and she too had climbed the pointed ladder and felt its gentle give against the boughs. Tears came, and she felt one going down her cheek, and whether or not they were honest tears she could not have said herself. He looked at her, his squarish lips pursed, his coarse dark hair falling over his forehead, already beginning to recede. “Here now,” he said. “Now wait a minute!” He fumbled under the picker’s bib for his blue and white farmer’s handkerchief and held it out to her. “Millie,” he said. He thought about it, then clumsily laid his hand on her arm. “What’s the trouble?” She said: “I’m pregnant.” Suddenly she was sobbing, turning away from him in terrible shame, only partly a device. “Good Lord!” he said. Full of concern, for whatever else he might be he was a good man, compassionate, quick to forgive a fall. “What can I do?” he said. “How can I help you?” “You don’t understand,” she said, “I’m pregnant by your brother.” “No!” he said. He did not even ask which one. He knew well enough that Ben had been driving her to town night after night, that he had walked with her at times. After a moment he said, almost a whisper, “I’m sorry, Millie.” Then: “Have you told him?” She nodded. He said, “Does he … That is, are his intentions—” She shook her head. He stood blunt-faced and miserable, huge hands buried in the picker’s bib. “He denies it,” she whispered. His face grew stern. She had not judged him wrong. “I’ll talk to him,” he said. But she shook her head. “No, please. I beg you. If he doesn’t want me, I don’t want to burden him. Please, I’m serious.” And then, excitedly, “If I had dreamed you’d take it this way—I mean, think it was your duty to speak to him—oh, please, please, Will! I beg you!” And so he had asked, befuddled, “But then, what—?” She wiped her eyes and calmed her grief. “I just had to tell someone,” she said. “It’s such a terrible thing … all alone. And when I saw you here, and knew I could say—I’m sorry. Forgive me. Perhaps someone—” He waited, wringing his hands inside the bib. She sniffed and said, “I can find someone. I’m not ugly. Am I?” She looked at him. “Oh, Millie,” he said. “Poor, dear Millie! Lord knows you’re not ugly! If there’s anything in the world …”
She stood in the bedroom, hers, not her husband’s, looking out over the bare branches of the new orchard toward the old one where it all had started, gnarled and blasted trees bent like ancient cripples over the snow, icicles like old men’s beards hanging from the dying branches, and thought: I will leave in the spring. But she would not leave, she knew. It was all a stupid play.
He sat half-dozing beside her, beginning to snore, and she poked him with her elbow and hissed, “Pretend to be amused.” He glared. They were so far from the stage she could barely make out the expressions of the actors. He had said they were lucky to get seats at all, and perhaps it was true; he hadn’t the imagination for a lie. Nevertheless, she suspected he’d gotten these seats because he was cheap.
“If you’d read the play maybe you could follow it,” she whispered.
“Hah!” he said. “I can follow it all right.”
She cringed and put her finger to her mouth. “Sh!”
The people in front of them turned to look. She smiled.
It was a new play called The Devils, the first New York production, and even if it was not good (it was brilliant, in fact), anyone else would have been grateful for the chance to see it. Not Hodge. He would rather sit with his Rotary pals, listening to some perfectly asinine speech, or play checkers with the judge with the long red nose, staying down the hall from them at the Washington Hotel (another outrage), or talk about Thomas Dewey with some black elevator boy.
Afterward they went to the restaurant Jeff Peters had recommended, a French place, expensive, with superb wine, and Hodge ate salad with thousand-island dressing. She was boiling mad now—even the dressing seemed a personal affront. “All right,” she said, “so you think you followed it. What did you get out of it.”
“A lot of yammer,” he said. He stared at his plate. “A lot of righteousness.”
She exploded. “Righteousness! For the love of God, Will, that was the point!—the righteousness of those who suppress life!”
“You talk like a book,” he said.
“That would naturally bother you.”
He chewed and held his peace. He ate with his head low, eyelids lowered, as though she had over the years destroyed whatever there might have been in him, just as he had destroyed whatever there might have been in her. His suitcoat hung open, and she could see his wide, gray and white suspenders. A terrible sorrow welled up in her. She pitied him as much as she hated him, and pitied herself as well. “Well,” she said, “it’s an interesting play historically.”
“Hah,” he said.
She put down her fork. “What do you mean, ‘Hah’?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
“That’s largely how it was, you know,” she said. She leaned forward. “For centuries people with stupid theories have been murdering people who try to just live, enjoy life, seize the day and make the most of it. Priest, politicians. Truth is mostly in the sewer. You wouldn’t understand, of course.”
“I understand all right,” he said.
She heard her laugh outside her like crystal ringing. “Really!” she said. “You wouldn’t know a symbol from a cider barrel!”
“That’s different,” he said. “You weren’t talking about sym
bols.”
“What did I say? Repeat exactly what I said.”
“You said—” He pursed his lips crossly. “You said people with theories don’t understand people who have a different theory.”
“No. You see? You can’t even repeat what I said! No wonder you leave trials to other people!”
“In substance, what you said—”
“You tell me about substance!” She stabbed her fork into her steak.
He said no more. She had beaten him, as always. She bit her lower lip to hide the trembling, and her eyes were filled with tears, so that the candles were a blur of yellow and white.
In the car he said, “I didn’t mean to spoil your evening.”
“Never mind,” she said. “The trouble is, you keep trying to control how I think, as though I were a child. It’s insidious.”
“I apologize,” he said flatly.
He took a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel. She rode with her eyes clenched tightly shut—she could have told him the turn, could easily have directed him anywhere in the city—but she was still full of sorrow over forcing him again to admit his stupidity; and it pleased her to see him go wrong, see him knowing he could not get anywhere without her. That night, standing at the window of their hotel room—Hodge in bed already, sleeping with his head under the pillow to close off the light—she had a frighteningly strong urge to jump. How he did it she would never know, but the truth was that by every gesture, every glance, he made her feel worthless, brainless, obscene. She could make a laughingstock of him, turn all his sober arguments to the jabbering of a monkey; her very appearance made him clownlike, bumpkinish; and yet his wordless righteousness, more insidious than anything in the play—a righteousness without rational foundation, indefensible and therefore mute—made a gaudy whore of her. What had she done? Where had she gone wrong? In marrying him in the first place, a fool might say. How simple! One escaped from one jail into another and then to another and another until one escaped to the tightwalled grave. Oh, she might have done better—might have married a man who would not have padlocked her legs together, or anyway tried to, but there was no real escape, not for a woman. And therefore no escape from the guilt of destruction that had nothing to do with the man destroyed—an act of nature, the teeming universe, things and their motions. There was only progression, the old orchard giving way to the new. And was it sane to call the new orchard a betrayal of the old? Yet how well she understood their feeling! It grieved her that the old orchard was old. But she would not be deluded. Her father stood in the church doorway, smiling and holding out his arms to her. “Poor baby,” he said, “my poor, pretty little girl.” Oh, how she had loved him! But she’d grown older, through no fault of her own, a victim of time, like any tree, and he too had grown older, and the vital spirit in him had shrunk, and little by little he had died and had been replaced. And so it had been with Will, too; for whatever they might think, those casual observers so ready to judge, she had loved him with all her heart for a little while, after that night in the orchard. She had schemed to get him, and not for himself but for his name. Nevertheless—and not ironically but inevitably, she understood now—she had fallen in love with him. For all her tears, only partly feigned, she had laughed at him that night, and had been pleased with him and with herself. And later—after they were married, in fact—there had come that same vaulting joy she had felt with Ben—the same yet altogether different. She was lying in bed watching his reflection in the mirror as he undressed, and all at once she had found him, framed by the mirror, to be beautiful. It was a discovery more than physical: an entirely new way of seeing the world, as if, for the first time in her life, she was seeing with her own eyes, not the eyes of other people. Ben was bronzed from his forehead to the line of his belt and from the hem of his shorts to the soles of his feet—bronzed like a figure on a poster. But Will was tanned—or reddened, really: as red as new brick—only where his workshirt, overalls, and boots didn’t cover him: red of face and neck, but below the red V at his collar, white as grade-school paste: and yet not sickly—not at all!—because the muscles of his shoulders and arms were square and awesome, and below his wide chest his waist was (in those days) small, and below his bellybutton the parallel muscles of his abdomen were firm as a boxer’s, and each of his thighs was as thick with muscle as the waist of a young girl. His body hair was black as crows’ wings and curly and thick, and the hair on his head was brownish, bleached by the sun. It struck her with terrific force that his head did not go with his body—seemed more socialized, tamed, more “advanced,” less her secret property, exactly as his thought belonged to her less than his feelings did, or anyway his feelings as her new, loving husband. What he felt on other matters was in those days of no importance. He snapped out the light and came to bed naked, as he always did in those days, and she, naked too, put her arms around him and pressed herself to him and said, “Will, I can’t believe my luck, getting you for my husband. When I think how close I came—” She let it trail off. He lay still, thinking—wondering, she knew, if he could believe her. “I love you very much,” he said formally. She laughed and kissed him, delighted that even with his muscular body tight against hers he could be formal. After a long time he said, “Millie, did you ever … with anyone besides …” Her heart beat lightly and quickly, partly from fright, and she moved her hands gently over his body. At last she said, “Will, will you hate me if I tell you something?” He waited, and she said, “I was lying to you—about Ben. It was you I wanted. Right from the beginning.” And after another moment. “It’s the truth, Will. Can you forgive me?” For all she knew, perhaps it really was the truth. He said nothing for so long she began to be frightened. “Will?” she whispered. Then, as if a dam had broken, a great sob came from him. “All along!” he bawled. “Oh, Millie! Millie!” They had both loved each other from the first. They clung to each other like children and wept and rutted half the night and swore they would always be faithful, and at last they slept. But days passed; seasons; and as Luke, not yet born, would one day howl above the hellfire jangle of his banjo, love grows colder.