“You don't have much to say, do you?” she said.
“Might be I don't.”
“What did you do with yourself since you came out here last?”
“Oh, one thing or another.”
“You're awful secret.”
“You're awful nosy, little girl,” he said. His smile showed that he was using only the top part of himself with her. Clara would have liked to seize him and stare into his eyes, deep into his eyes, to locate the kernel at the very center that was Lowry—why was he such a mystery? Or was he an ordinary man, the way all men would be if they were free and weren't held down? She could half close her eyes and imagine herself moving toward him invisibly, trying to embrace him in an invisible embrace, and Lowry dancing forever out of her grasp.
“Do me a favor?” Clara said.
“What?”
“Look at me serious. Say my name serious.”
He was lighting a cigarette. He stopped sucking at it and said, “O.K. Clara.”
“Is that serious as you can get?”
“Clara. Clara,” he said, the end of his breath making the word droop suddenly into a seriousness that was dismal. It struck Clara that her name, which was the sound for her in people's minds, had nothing to do with her at all and was really a stupid name.
“I wish I was someone else. I mean, had another name,” Clara said. “Like Marguerite.”
“Why that?”
“I heard that name … somewhere.”
Each time Lowry came to visit she had to worry about his leaving too soon. It was a tugging thing, the way he would get restless and be ready to leave even before he had thought of it. Clara always thought of it, dreading it, and ideas came to her of ways to put off that time as long as possible. She might have been in a contest only with herself. “Let's go walk down there,” she said. He was agreeable. His car was parked off the bridge and up on the side of the road, a new car. They passed it without comment and climbed down the embankment. A few feet from the bottom, Clara jumped. A shock went through her when she landed flat on her feet. It did not hurt: the shock was that she had so solid, so responsive a body and that the earth had pressed back so hard against it, yielding up nothing. Lowry came slipping and sliding down, holding the burning cigarette in his hand as if he were a city person awkward in this business but not giving in to it.
They headed for the riverbank. In July there were many kinds of insects, so Clara stepped carefully through the weeds. “It's real pretty here,” she said shyly. “Nicer than up on the bridge.” She looked over to where they had been standing and could not imagine herself and Lowry up there together. “Don't you like how peaceful the river is, Lowry?”
“It's nice.”
As if to ruin its peacefulness, he picked up a flat stone and threw it sideways. The stone skipped three, four times, then sank.
“Did you do that when you were a little boy?”
“Sure.”
She smiled to think of it, even though she could not quite believe he had ever been a little boy. She picked up a flat stone and tried to throw it as he did, slanting her wrist sideways, but it sank with a gulping splash. “Girls can't do that,” Lowry said. He walked on and she followed him. Down by the riverbank there was a path fishermen used. They followed it along and walked away from the bridge. Clara heard, past the noises of the insects, the silence that covered this whole countryside. She felt as if she were walking through it and disturbing it.
“Don't you ever get lonely, Lowry?”
“Nope.”
“Do you do a lot of thinking?”
“Nope.”
She laughed and slid her arm through his. “Can't you say anything but nope?”
“I don't think much,” Lowry said seriously, “but there are pieces of things in my mind. Broken pieces. They buzz around like wasps and bother me.”
Clara glanced up at him as if he'd admitted something too intimate.
“But I don't worry.”
“I don't either,” said Clara.
He laughed and she pressed herself against him. “Look,” she said, “can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“How come you're here with me right now?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
Clara ran from him. She jumped down into the creek bed, where it was dry. “Look at this, Lowry,” she said. It was part of an old barbed-wire fence, lying frigid and coated over with bleached grass. Lowry's look said clearly, So what? Clara said, “You would wonder how things get where they are. This thing here—think where it used to be. Over there's a bicycle tire somebody owned. Wouldn't you like to know how things end up where they do?”
“Maybe.”
“They get in the water, then drift down here.… I'm so happy,” Clara said exuberantly, hugging herself, “but I don't know why. I love everything the way it is. I love how things look.” She actually felt her eyes sting with tears. Up on the bank Lowry sat down heavily and smoked his cigarette. He wore the faded brown trousers he had been wearing all summer and a tan shirt with rolled-up sleeves; he brought his knees up to lean on them and his ankles collapsed themselves in the grass, so that the outside of his feet were pressed flat against the ground. He looked as if he would never get up again and never care to. “You don't listen to me!” Clara said angrily. “Goddamn you anyway!”
His gaze was mildly blue. She saw his teeth flash in a brief smile.
“You think I'm just something you picked up on the road, and when you can't find some bitch to lay around with you come around here and visit!— Oh, Christ,” Clara said, heaving a large stone out into the water. She laughed and her shoulders rose in a long lazy shrug. “What do you think about when you're with them, then?”
“Clara, I don't think about anything.”
“When you're with them?”
“Sometimes I don't remember who they are.”
She liked that, but she did not let on. Instead she picked up another stone and threw it out into the water. It sank at once. “But I'm happy anyway,” she said. “That's because I'm stupid. If I was smart I wouldn't be happy when everything is so rotten.”
“What's rotten?” he said at once.
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” she said, waving to dismiss him. She flicked her long hair out of her eyes. It fell far down her back and she'd washed it the day before, somehow expecting him to come, so she knew it must shine in the sunlight. She knew she was pretty and now she wanted to be beautiful. “When things get better I will be beautiful,” she promised herself. If Lowry would stand still long enough and she could climb up into his arms and sleep there forever, the two of them entwined and not needing to look anywhere else, then she could relax: then she would grow up, she would become beautiful. She was standing now on a large flat rock near the water, which flowed in a fairly rapid stream in the center of the riverbed. She leaned over to see herself. There was a trembling vague image, not hers. She felt as if love were a condition she would move into the way you moved into a new house or crossed the boundary into a new country. And not just this one-sided love, either; she had enough of that right now. But the kind of love held out to her in the comic books and romance magazines she was able now to read for herself, which she and Sonya traded back and forth wistfully: love that would transform her and change her forever. It had nothing to do with the way other girls got pregnant and fat as cheap balloons—that wasn't the kind of love she meant. The only real love could be between her and Lowry. You couldn't imagine any real love between Sonya, for instance, and her boyfriend who was married. They never felt about each other the way she and Lowry would.…
“I remember you that night way back in Florida,” Clara said. “I think about that a lot. Who were you with then?”
Lowry shrugged.
She had thought of it to get her mind rid of that memory of Lowry and everything that came with it: going back to his room with him. If she got her mind stuck on that she would be miserable to him, and maybe he was casting his mind aro
und for some excuse to get away from her earlier—here it was about six o'clock and they would have to get some supper. Clara had told him she would make it herself. A tiny churning sensation began in her stomach and subsided at once, at the thought of the food she had bought that might still be there the next morning. She said, “I'm going to walk in here. It's cool.” The stream of water was deep on her side. She could look right through to its stony bottom.
“You're going to wade in that?”
She kicked off her shoes. Her feet were tough from going barefoot so much in the summer. Clara stepped into the water and was surprised at how warm it was on top. “I like to wade,” she said. “I used to do it when I was a kid.” It was the kind of remark other girls probably said; Clara did not really think of herself as lying. The edginess in her voice must have made Lowry conscious of this, because when she glanced around he was looking at her. “What about you, did you play in cricks when you were a kid?”
“I grew up too fast,” Lowry said.
She moved slowly through the water, staring down at her pale feet. Her legs were wet up past the knee. She pulled the skirt of her dress up higher. At first her legs were cool where they were wet, then the sun got to them and made them burn. She had to keep flicking her hair out of her eyes when she turned back to speak to Lowry. “I grew up fast, too. I'm just as old as you are if you look at it right.”
He made a snorting sound.
“Damn you, don't laugh at me,” she said. She bent to pull something out of the water—a barrel stave encrusted with scum and tiny snail-like things. She dropped it at once.
“Lowry,” Clara said, “did you love your family?”
“I don't know. No.”
“Why not?”
“I don't know.”
Clara lifted one foot out of the water, gingerly. “I loved my family. I couldn't help it.”
“Well, I was born able to help such things,” he said. He shifted around, straightening out one leg. She thought there was something uneasy in his voice but she did not want to be so conscious, so meticulous with him. She walked farther out, gathering her skirt up around her thighs. Lowry flicked his cigarette out from him and it landed on the dry riverbed. “I never could see what it was—things between other people,” he said seriously. “I mean invisible things. Ties that held them together no matter what, like getting flung up on the beach and dragged out again and flung up again, always together. —Don't walk any farther out, you want to fall in? I'm not coming in after you.”
“I'm all right.”
“I'd like to have everything I owned in one bag and take it with me. I don't want things to tie me down. If I owned lots of things— like my father did—then they'd get in the way and I wouldn't see clearly. Once you own things you have to be afraid of them. Of losing them.”
“I wouldn't mind that,” Clara said sullenly.
He did not seem to have heard her. “If I have to kill myself for something, I want to know what it is, at least. I don't want it handed to me. I don't want it to turn into a houseful of furniture or acres of land you have to worry about farming—the hell with all that.”
Clara glanced back at him. He was just far enough away so that she could not see whether those tiny wrinkles had appeared again around his mouth. “You're getting beyond me,” she said, afraid to hear anything more that he had to say.
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, in a different voice, “Clara, are you about done messing around in there?”
She looked up at the sky, feeling her hair fall down long and heavy on her back. In Lowry's voice there was something she had heard once before but now, in her wonder, could not quite recall. She closed her eyes and felt the sun hot against her face.
“Come on out from there,” Lowry said.
“Go to hell. You're bossing me around.”
“Come on, Clara.”
“Now you called me Clara. How'd you know that was my name?”
“You're going to walk where the water's going fast, and fall in.”
“I am not.”
“Well, I'm not going to carry you out, ma'am.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
“We should be getting back.…”
“I'm in no hurry.”
“It might be I am.”
“You aren't, either,” Clara said, letting one shoulder rise and fall lazily. But she stepped out of the water and onto the dried rocks, which had a curious texture now beneath her cold feet, like cloth. She spread her toes on the whitened rocks as if they were fingers grasping at something. Then she saw, between her toes, a dark filmy soft thing like a worm. “Jesus!” Clara said, kicking. She jumped backward and landed on the other foot and kicked again violently. “Get it off, Lowry!” she screamed. “Lowry—help— a bloodsucker—”
She ran at him blindly and he caught her. Everything was speeded up, even Lowry's laugh, and he was still laughing when he picked the thing off. With a snapping motion of his wrist he flicked it away. Clara knew that her face was drained white and that her muscles had let go, as if that bloodsucker had really sucked away all her blood. She lay back, sobbing, and when her eyes came into focus she saw that Lowry was not smiling any longer.
He bent down by her. “You oughtn't to have done that,” he said, not smiling, and Clara stared bluntly into his face as if he were a stranger stopping out of nowhere. He kissed her, and while she tried to get her breath back from that he moved on top of her, and she remembered in a panic that he had done this before, yes, years ago, and it all came back to her like a slap in the face, something to wake her up. “Lowry—” she said in a voice all amazement, entirely removed from whatever was giving him such energy and half-trying to push him away—but everything that might have shot into clarity was ruined by his damp searching mouth and his hand thrust under her, getting her ready in a way she only now realized she had to be gotten ready. In amazement the blue sky stared back down at her, wide and impersonal, deep with the unacknowledged gazes of girls like Clara who have nowhere else to look, the earth having betrayed them; the blue shuddered with a panic that was not fear but just panic, the reaction of the body and not the mind. Her mind was awake and skipping about everywhere, onto Lowry and past him and even onto the Lowry of a minute before who had surprised her so, trying to figure out just what had happened in his mind to make him turn into this Lowry—filling out the gestures of her imagination without having to ask what they might have been. It would never have seemed to Clara that love could be such a surprise, so strange, that she could just lie limp and have it done to her and never be clear enough to anticipate any more even when she had tried to figure out what they would all be years in advance— then her amazement turned into pain and she cried out angrily against the side of his face.
She felt him pushing in her, inside her, with all the strength he had kept back from her for years. She pulled at his shirt and then at his flesh under the shirt, as if trying to distract him as well as herself from what he was doing. Lowry's hot ragged breath came against her face and she caught a glimpse of his eyes, not fixed upon her and not ready yet to see anything, and for the first time the kernel behind those eyes gave a hint of itself. She groaned and tightened her arms around his neck, hard, and Lowry kissed her with his hot open mouth and she gasped and sucked in his breath, squirming with this new agony and waiting for it to end, thinking it couldn't last much longer with a kind of baffled and staring astonishment— until Lowry, who was always so calm and slow and seemed to calculate out how many steps would be necessary to take him from one spot to another, groveled on her with his face twisted like a rag in a parody of agony, and could not control what he did to her. She felt as if her body were being driven into the ground, hammered into it. She felt as if it were being dislodged from her brain and she would never get the two together again. Then everything broke and she felt his muscles go rigid, locking himself to her and waiting, suspended between breaths that must have made his throat ache. A soft, surprised sound escaped him t
hat was nothing Lowry would ever have made, and Clara let her head fall back onto his arm without even knowing she had been holding it up and waiting for him to stop.
He lay on top of her and his chest heaved. Now that the day was clear again she touched his hand, smoothed his hair off his forehead. Between her legs her flesh was alive with a pain that was so sharp and burning she could not quite believe in it. She felt as if he had gone after her with a knife. She felt as if she had been opened up and hammered at with a cruelty that made no sense because she could not see what it meant. That logic was secret in Lowry's body. In her imagination—lying sleepless in her bed at night, or dreaming behind the store counter—she had known everything Lowry felt and had felt it along with him, because that was part of her happiness; but when it had really happened it was all a surprise. He had made love to her and it was all over and she knew nothing about it, no more than this pain that kept her veins throbbing.
“Jesus, Lowry,” Clara sobbed, “I must be bleeding—” He brought his damp face around and his lips brushed hers, but she pushed him away. She tried to sit up. The pain had shattered now into smaller pains that shot up toward her stomach. Lowry wiped his face with both hands and, still breathing hard, lay down beside her. He was like a man who has fallen from a great height. Clara lay back. Tears were running down both sides of her face, into her mouth. Whether the sky was in focus or not she could not tell. Lowry lay beside her, on his back. Her body burned where he had been. She thought that she would never get over it and that he would never be able to do this to her again. So she lay very still with her pain, as if what she felt had more power over either of them than any other feeling she had showed.
Finally Lowry said, “Now you're not a kid, sweetheart.”