“I lost track of time is all. I slept.”
“Good,” he says. Softly.
They stand where they are. They don’t move.
“I was just leaving.” he says.
“All right.”
“My office …” he begins, but he doesn’t finish the thought. He tries to decide whether to speak the thing that struck him a short time ago, as he was preparing to leave his life in this house, in this marriage. Ever since that terrible early evening in the Quarter, he has said nothing, asked nothing, about what happened to make her go to another man. It happened. She sought it. The other man ended it. The last thing Michael wants to do — it would be impossible for him — is to do anything to persuade her to stay with him. It’s a thing the woman who is his wife either wants for herself or she doesn’t. His life is built on advocacy, but he realized as soon as he forced back those initial tears that for him there can be absolutely no advocacy in this circumstance. She has to want him freely, with no persuasion, or she doesn’t want him at all. Prima facie. And what he would say right now could be misconstrued as a kind of persuasion, and that’s why he is hesitating. But he wants her to know. “My office,” he says, “seems cleaner than it should be.”
“I haven’t touched a thing,” Kelly says
“I’m not suggesting you have.” His hands flare open before him. And of all things to think about right now, it strikes him that the gesture he just made has some deeply instinctive link back to the caves, a show of having no weapon. He’s thinking a little crazy now. He drags his mind back to this thought he had while emptying his office. “I was just realizing,” he says. He stops again. What has he realized? “I just realized that I never spent as much time working at home as I thought I would.” He should never have begun this. He knew not to say anything, he knew just to let her go, but now he’s sounding crazy, as well.
But Kelly knows what he’s trying to say. “That was never an issue,” she says. And if she has some inclination — some — yes, of course she has some — if she is in any way open at last to saying the things she could not say before, now that she isn’t asking for them anymore, now that she has herself burned down this life they’d made together, now that it makes no difference anyway if he actually loves her enough to say so freely and explicitly — if she has any impulse to explain how all of the unspoken things became a deep river-current that eventually swept her away, it vanishes abruptly with this cluelessness of his. She had sex with a man she hardly knew and in doing so destroyed the inner life of this marriage, and he thinks it might be about where he did his paperwork?
He’s not answering.
“Do you think it was about that?” she says, and she sounds to herself as if she’s speaking while choking.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“How?” Her throat has suddenly cleared and her voice rings loud around them both.
He keeps his own voice low but firm. “You had an affair and it’s the last thing in the world I expected and you said the marriage is over and we’re not talking about it and I’m fine with that but …”
“I’m sure you’re fine with that.”
“But I can’t be blamed …”
“Of course we’re not talking.” And Kelly is shouting.
And Michael wants to shout but he doesn’t, he finds the same control of his voice he finds in a courtroom, and he says, “I can’t be blamed if I’m wrong about some of the things …”
“So blame me,” she cries. “I deserve it. If you can’t love me then at least hate me.”
And he doesn’t say a word. He moves past her and he opens the front door and he goes out and he doesn’t think to close the door and she watches for a moment as he goes down the walk, and then she turns her face away from him and her hands were too slow, her hands wish now they’d clawed at his face as he passed, just to get him to do something in return, anything.
∼
And Michael says nothing in response to Laurie’s declaration of love. Not that there’s a recoil in him. He simply does not hear it for what it is. For Michael, it is a woman’s rhetoric. These are simply words. Easy currency for a woman. For him, she’s here and he’s here with her. That’s so because they find things in each other they each seem legitimately to enjoy. They’re going to their cottage and they will be naked together and they will join their bodies and they will unjoin them. They will fall asleep together. They will wake and they will rise in the morning. Good morning, how’d you sleep. Fine. They will eat breakfast in the restaurant that was once the living quarters for the post-war field workers. Are you enjoying yourself? Yes. And you? And now and then he will think about the retired Navy captain and also about Monday afternoon and jury selection for a pro-bono who will be tough to protect from bias. While Michael is with Laurie, he will think of no other woman in the same way that he is thinking of her. He will try to think of no other woman at all, particularly the woman at the center of a considerable pain in him. He will be open to the possibility of many more nights of joining and of sleeping and of waking with this woman he has just kissed. For him, that too is considerable. And his response to her rhetoric is to let his hand fall to the small of her back and to turn her and move them off toward the cottage. And for now, this gesture — particularly his hand in the small of her back — is sufficient for Laurie.
As they cross the last hundred yards of tarnished-silver ground to the cottage, Michael tries to stay focused on the present moment with this young woman, and it is true that the soft clinging of her, and the moon-shadow of pressure remaining on his lips from the kiss, and the imminence of their nakedness are beginning to rustle in his body. And her silence now. Her silence is part of this readying of his body and mind for the first night of full togetherness with a new woman. After a long while, after many years, it is made new. He fends off the past. There has already been too much of that. But the things he responds to in women in what feel to him like instinctive ways are running strong in him, things he has, however, learned from a multitude of memories that are too small individually and happened too long ago for him ever to recall.
His mother moving silently in the dark next to him, just that, along a street thick with the early heat of a Florida spring night and the smell of Confederate jasmine, porch lights lit, passing distantly, and his mother at his side keeping still, and he wakes and leaps from bed as blood flows from the ceiling, a moment ago from a deer hung for dressing but from the ceiling now, from the light fixture and into his bed and she takes him in her arms and his father’s silhouette fills the doorway and Michael does not know that the man has moments ago put his hand roughly on her arm to prevent her going in to a boy who needs to be a man and she defied her husband this time, for once, and he warned her at least not to say anything, not to prattle on like usual, and she agreed to that so he would let go of her arm — though his hand had loosened already, it had not yet let go — and she did go in and Michael never knew any of this occurred outside his door as he pants heavily, as if his heart will stop, still making sounds that he knows shame the shadow in the doorway — that shame his father — and his mother comes to him and she holds him and then she leads him back to bed and she sits beside him and his heart slows and the blood is gone, the blood was never there, and it’s all right, and he takes in her silence, he rests now in her silence, and he too has come to prefer this, from when he was very small, from the sharp sideways looks and abrupt shushings from his father to his mother when Michael was just beginning to gather the momentum of his own words, when he was hearing the rhythms and flow of his mother’s voice in his own head, when he was open to imitating them, and she always fell silent when commanded, teaching Michael how to learn what’s right and good, by yielding to this man, and she moves beside him along a street on a spring night and they are going somewhere together just the two of them and the air is sweet and he loves his mother and these memories are long vanished from Michael in all but the dark and the sweet rustle of a woman and the silence.