“I guess so.”
“Someday, you live long enough and you’ll know so.”
“Good night, Mr. Finchley.”
“You get out of them gates before Harold comes.”
Daisy had turned on the radio and the heater in the car, but she didn’t look as though she were feeling any warmth or hearing any music. She said, “Please, let’s hurry and get out of here.”
“You could have come inside the house.”
“I didn’t want to interfere with your work. What did you find out?”
“Not much.”
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?”
“I suppose I’ll have to.”
He told her, and she listened in silence while the car rolled noisily down the graveled hill past the chapel. It was dark. The organist was gone, leaving no echoes of music. The birds of paradise were voiceless. The money on the silver dollar trees was spent; the bougainvillea wept in the fog.
Harold, holding his swollen jaw, watched the car leave and closed the iron gates. The day was over; it was good to be home.
9
Even when she talked of love, her voice had bitterness in it, as if the relationship between us was the result of a physical defect she couldn’t help, a weakness of the body which her mind despised..
The lights of the city were going on, in strings and clusters along the sea and highway, thinning out as they rose up the foothills until, at the very top, they looked like individual stars that had fallen on the mountains, still burning. Pinata knew that none of the lights belonged to him. His house was dark; there was no one in it, no Johnny, no Monica, not even Mrs. Dubrinski, who left at five o’clock to take care of her own family. He felt as excluded from life as Camilla in his grave under the great tree, as empty as Camilla’s mind, as deaf as his ears to the sound of the sea, as blind as his eyes to the spindrift.
“What’s a view good for,” the old man had said, “if you can’t see it?”
Well, the view’s there, Pinata thought. I’m looking at it, but I’m not part of it. None of those lights have been lit for me, and if anyone’s waiting for me, it’s some drunk in the city jail anxious to get out and buy another bottle.
Beside him, Daisy was sitting mute and motionless, as if she were thinking of nothing at all or of so many things so quickly that they had crashed the sound barrier into silence. Glancing at her, he wanted suddenly to do something shocking, arresting, to force her to pay attention to him. But a second later the idea seemed so absurd that he went cold with anger at himself: Christ, what’s the matter with me? I must be losing my marbles. Johnny, I must think of Johnny. Or Camilla. That’s safe, think of Camilla, the stranger in Daisy’s grave.
This stranger had died, and Daisy had dreamed the tombstone was her own — that much of it was explicable. The rest wasn’t, unless Daisy had extrasensory perception, which seemed highly improbable, or a singular ability to deceive herself as well as other people. The latter was more likely, but he didn’t believe it. As he became better acquainted with her, he was struck by her essential naïveté and innocence, as if she had somehow walked through life without touching anything or being touched, like a child wandering through a store where all the merchandise was out of reach and not for sale, and dummy clerks stood behind plate glass and sold nothing. Had Daisy baby been too well disciplined to protest, too docile to demand? And was she demanding now, through her dreams, for the plate glass to be removed and the dummy clerks put into action?
“The stranger,” she said at last. “How did he die?”
“Suicide. His file card was marked sui mano, ‘by his own hand.’ I presume someone thought putting it in Latin would take the curse off it.”
“So he killed himself. That makes it even worse.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps I had some connection with his death. Perhaps I was responsible for it.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched,” Pinata said quietly. “You’ve had a shock, Mrs. Harker. The best thing you can do now is to stop worrying and go home and have a rest.” Or take a pill, or a drink, or throw fits, or whatever else women like you do under the circumstances. Monica used to cry, but I don’t think you will, Daisy baby. You’ll brood, and God only knows what you’ll hatch. “Camilla was a stranger to you, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then how is it possible that you were connected in any way with his death?”
“Possible? We’re not dealing in ‘possibles’ anymore, Mr. Pinata. It isn’t possible that I should have known the day he died. But it happened. It’s a fact, not something whipped up by an over-imaginative or hysterical woman, which is probably how you’ve been regarding me up until now. My knowing the date of Camilla’s death, that’s changed things between us, hasn’t it?”
“Yes.” He would have liked to tell her that things between them had changed a great deal more than she thought, changed enough to send her running for cover back to Rainbow’s End, Jim and Mamma. She would run, of course. But how soon and how fast? He glanced at his hands gripping the steering wheel. In the dim lights of the dashboard they looked very brown. She would run very soon, he thought, and very fast. Even if she weren’t married. The fact dug painfully into his mind as though in her flight she wore the spiked shoes of a sprinter.
She was talking about Camilla again, the dead man who was more important to her than he ever would be, in all his youth and energy. Alive, present, eager, he was no match for the dead stranger lying under the fig tree at the edge of the cliff. Pinata thought, I am, here beside her, in time and space, but Camilla is part of her dreams. He was beginning to hate the name. Damn you, Camilla, stretcher, little bed...
“I have this very strong feeling,” she said, “of involvement, even of guilt.”
“Guilt feelings are often transferred to quite unrelated things or people. Yours may have nothing to do with Camilla.”
“I think they have, though.” She sounded perversely obstinate, as if she wanted to believe the worst about herself. “It’s an odd coincidence that both the names are Mexican, first the girl’s, Juanita Garcia, and now Camilla’s. I hardly know, in fact I don’t know, any Mexicans at all except casually through my work at the Clinic. It’s not that I’m prejudiced like my mother; I simply never get to meet any.”
“Your never getting to meet any means your prejudice or lack of it hasn’t been tested. Perhaps your mother’s has, and at least she’s playing it straight by admitting it.”
“And I’m not playing things straight?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“The implication was clear. Perhaps you think I found out the date of Camilla’s death before this afternoon? Or that I knew the man himself?”
“Both have occurred to me.”
“It’s easier, of course, to distrust me than to believe the impossible. Camilla is a stranger to me,” she repeated. “What motive would I have in lying to you?”
“I don’t know.” He had tried, and failed, to think of a reason why she should lie to him. He meant nothing to her; she was not interested in his approval or disapproval; she was not trying to influence, entice, convince, or impress him. He was no more to her than a wall you bounce balls off. Why bother lying to a wall?