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?"
"No," said Laura. Her smile was too tolerant, Mr. Rebeck thought, too wise, too tout comprendre est tout pardonner. "Not very exciting. Dull, if you like. It doesn't hurt."
"Well," Michael said. He tried again. "Well, but just the same, you didn't kill yourself, did you? You didn't go running to meet that truck as if it were the mailman—or a lover, for that matter. And when you saw it coming, no matter how bored you were, no matter how damn dull everything was, you tried to save yourself, didn't you?"
The smile was sliding off Laura's face, like mascara in the rain. She started to say something, but Michael went on, without noticing. "You threw yourself away from death, not at it. That's the human instinct. You didn't make it, but that's not the point. The thing is, when it came down to die, yes, or die, no—and you had time to choose—you tried not to die. With less reason to live than a lot of other people, you chose life. Right?" He winked triumphantly at Mr. Rebeck and would have jammed his hands in his pockets except that he had long since forgotten what pockets were like.
Laura stood quite still. She seemed, Mr. Rebeck thought, a little less sharply outlined than she had been, a little fainter to the eye, a little more wind-colored. She turned away, pivoting on one foot the way a bored child will, and now there was nothing in her moving of the skipped stone or the paper airplane.
"I don't know," she said. Michael could barely hear her. "No. I wouldn't—I don't know."
"Let it go, Michael," Mr. Rebeck said under his breath, or perhaps he only thought the words and did not say them. Michael did not seem to hear him at all.
"You wouldn't have killed yourself," he said. "Oh, I'm sure you thought about it. People think about everything in their lives. But you put it off until morning, and in the morning you had to get up and go to work. People do that. Me too." He made a sweeping, generous gesture with his arms. "But I never found myself alone at the right moment. And neither did you."
"I don't know, I don't know," Laura said. There was a moment in which she and Michael stood still, poised and waiting but immobile, like weathervanes on a bland summer morning, and Mr. Rebeck leaned against the tree and felt the rough bark under his light shirt and willed them and himself just so forever. Then forever passed and the enchantment expired, and Laura began to run.
There was no sweep to her flight, and nothing feathered or hoofed about it. She ran like a woman, from the knees down, her hands a little in front of her, and her shoulders slightly stooped. And as she ran she seemed to grow fainter, like a soap bubble blown at the sun.
Michael shouted her name, but she kept running until the foliage of a cherry tree caught her up. Then he was silent. His right hand kept closing and opening, and he stared at the cherry tree.
Presently he went over to Mr. Rebeck's tree and sat down. "All right. Be fatherly. What did I do?"
"I don't know," Mr. Rebeck said. "She's very upset."
"That's fine. I'm upset too." He thought of the Thurber cartoon and grinned. "We're all upset. But how come she's more upset than I am? She didn't kill herself."
"Are you sure? She isn't."
"Of course I'm sure. That kind don't kill themselves. They live in hope, waiting for a phone call, or a telegram, or a letter, or a knock on the door, or running into someone on the street who will see how beautiful they really are. They think about killing themselves, but then they might not be able to answer the phone."
"I wonder," Mr. Rebeck murmured. "Surely some of them—"
"Oh, sure, some of them do. They get tired of second-class mail with the address mimeographed and pasted on. But not that one. She wouldn't kill herself. She can afford to play with the idea because nobody's trying to prove she did. Now me, I've got troubles. If anybody's got a right to be upset, I do."
Mr. Rebeck turned his head to look down at him. "Michael, are you still sure your wife poisoned you?"
"Sure? Hell, I'm just surprised she used poison. Sandy always impressed me as the meat-cleaver-type."
"What happened? Do you remember?"
"Up to a point," Michael said. "We went to a party that night, I think. I don't remember who gave it, but I'm pretty sure there was a party. I don't think it went too well. When Sandra and I got to snapping at each other we didn't care where we were. Once we had a real throat-grabber at the Met and they threw us out. Very politely."