"Stop it," he said angrily. "She has to plead something."
Laura kept laughing at him. He looked over at Mr. Rebeck. "She can't plead guilty—and she wouldn't if she could. They'd put her in jail for life."
Laura stopped laughing quite suddenly, and where her laughter had been there was the glossy silence that hangs in the air after a train has gone by. "And if they find her guilty now?" she asked.
But Michael was thinking of Sandra in prison, and he said nothing.
"They'd kill her," Laura said, "the way they do. It's quite a gamble, if she's guilty."
Michael still said nothing, and Mr. Rebeck stirred and got up. "Maybe she'd rather be dead," he said slowly. "She might not want to go to prison."
"Nobody does," Laura said impatiently. "But women don't just throw their lives away like that. Women are real gamblers. They only bet on sure things."
She looked again at Michael, who would not look at her. "Wouldn't it be funny," she said thoughtfully. "Here we've got Michael Morgan, running back and forth in his grave, stamping his feet, telling everybody he loved life so much that they had to amputate him from it. A murdered man, crying for justice. Everybody within the sound of his voice is suitably impressed." She laughed again. "Me, too. I thought he was a fool, but he howled so loudly and made so much fuss that I began to wonder. And now, after all—"
"Shut up!" Michael said. "Just shut up. You don't know what you're talking about."
"And after all," Laura went on, "it turns out that maybe he performed the operation himself. Well, fine. Hurray. Good for him. A consummation devoutly, and so on. You done good, boy."
"Sandra," Michael said huskily, "I mean Laura, shut up and leave me alone. I didn't kill myself. Before God, I didn't kill myself."
But Laura's voice skimmed on, not laughing now; even shaking a little, but clear and pitiless, and he could no more stop it than the strongest wire fence can stop the most casual breeze. "And now he's terribly embarrassed about the whole thing. He wants out. He figures if he shouts loud enough, maybe he'll wake himself up." She essayed to laugh again, but the quaver in her voice tripped it up. "God damn you, Michael, for a little while, maybe only a few minutes, you really had me going. You were a symbol of the indestructibility of life or something. A real Greek challenge to death. Man Against The Night. Wherever you go, darling, I'll be with you. Curtain. Everybody files out, uplifted, and the orchestra plays the big tango number from the second act." She sighed. "Oh, well, never mind, Michael. You just locked yourself out, that's all."
She got up and brushed her hands down the sides of her dress, although no grass clung to it. "Good-by, Mr. Rebeck. Thank you for talking to me. Good-by, Michael." She began to walk away, and sometimes her feet touched the ground and sometimes they didn't.
"Woman!" Michael's shout bounced, burst, and bloomed inside Mr. Rebeck's head and hurt a little. "Damn and blast it, I didn't kill myself! I had no intention of killing myself. I was too bloody arrogant for suicide. It would have been like murdering God or drawing mustaches all over the Sistine Chapel. Why should I have killed myself? That's what she can't get around, that's what they'll get her on. We had a nightcap, we went to bed, and I woke up dead. That may be indigestion. It's not suicide."
Laura had stopped walking when he first shouted, but she did not turn. Michael made an abbreviated gesture of head-scratching and said suddenly, "Anyway, my grave is in church ground. I was a Catholic, you know. Not a very good one, but I never left the Church. I think I was too lazy. Would they have buried me here, in hallowed ground, if they thought I'd committed suicide?"
Then Laura did turn. "I don't know," she said slowly. "I hadn't thought of that."
Michael took a few steps toward her and stopped. "I didn't kill myself. I know that as well as you can know anything in this place, where all your thoughts crumble and go. It's just not the sort of thing I'd do."
"As the mother said when her son ran amuck and chopped up two old ladies, a bus driver, and the head of the fire department."
"No, not like that. Listen to me, Laura. When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree."
He smiled a little at the silent Laura and turned slightly to get Mr. Rebeck in too. "And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. Until finally, before I lost everything, I said, 'All right, I'm sorry. I was young and I had a girl and I didn't know any better. It's not easy to stay properly ignorant. I apologize. Leave me a few things to know, just enough to get home on, and I'll be content with these and not bother anybody. I've learned my lesson. Maybe I'll write a book.'
"And then the little went too, and I found myself alone in the middle of the world, without a doubt the most stupid man that ever scratched his head. All the things I thought I knew about people, about myself, they were all gone. All I had left was a head full of confusion, and I wasn't even sure what I was confused about. Nothing stayed still. So I said, 'What the hell, I'm a fool,' and that seemed reasonable enough. So I went home and became a teacher."
"Because you couldn't do anything else?" Laura asked. "I've heard that before. I never really believed it."
"No, because I felt safe. It was nice being back in college. I knew about colleges. I figured that I'd stay for a while and teach and try to learn a few things. And when I was whole again, and wise, why then I'd be off again to wherever it was I was going.
"Only I got to like it. I liked it very much. And so I stayed. I compromised, I suppose. You can say that, if you choose. But I felt comfortable, and after a while I felt wise enough to find my way home at night. There were always books to read and plays I hadn't seen, and in the summer Sandra and I—" he caught himself, hesitated, and went on—"we'd drive up to Vermont. I used to write articles during the summers, sort of historical essays. I was going to make a book out of them. And sometimes I'd make up poetry in the bathroom."
He waited for Laura to say something, but she was silent, and he continued, "So I had something to do, something I'd done, someplace to go, and something to look forward to. That's a reasonable way to live. I enjoyed myself living. I had a good time. How much else can you ask for?"
"A lot more," Laura said softly, "if you're greedy. I was greedy once."
"So was I, but that was a long time ago. You're greediest when you're born, and after that it's downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn't demand anything.
"Live to be two hundred and you couldn't use anything."
They were looking directly at each other now and paying no attention to Mr. Rebeck. But he leaned against a tree and watched them. He dug his fingernails into the bark of the tree, and little shreds of it came away under his nails. An ant ran over his shoulder and disappeared into a crack in the bark.
"I'm going to say something a little cruel," Michael said. "I don't mean it that way, but that's how it's going to sound. Do you mind?"
"What difference does it make? Go on."
"Well, here you are," Michael began. He tried to cough, but he had forgotten how it felt and it came out as more of a whistle. "I mean, you seem happy. Happier than you were. Or, putting it another way—what I'm getting at is, you didn't have the hell of an exciting life, did you?"