“What kind of dance? Ballet?”
He shook his head. “Modern dance.”
“Yes, well, I had ballet in school.”
“Did you like it?”
“Not especially, I’m sorry to say. I wasn’t any good at it.”
They were quiet.
Presently, he said, “It’s hard to be good at something you do not like.”
“Well, I wasn’t very good.”
“I was not good in school. My wife helped me study and do better and now she is gone. The woman she is with — I thought this woman was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.” The dope was not making her feel anything. She had no sense of well-being or of the jollity it usually occasioned and, looking out at the seascape before her, she wished for solitude while lacking the will to do anything to achieve it. She sat quite still, her distress having shaded into this drowsy gloom, this sour observing.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “Your voice is different.”
She told him.
“That is in Shelby County.”
“How did you know that?”
“I had a friend I visited in Memphis. The second day terrible thunderstorms came and they kept saying the counties and we listened because it was a tornado and the storm hit Bartlett in Shelby County. I remember that. Because I thought of pears. We watched it on the television. It knocked down trees. I went to Graceland.”
“Almost everyone who visits Memphis goes there. A lot go there because of Graceland.”
He wrote in the sand. “That is my address in Orlando, Florida.”
“Please. I’m really not up for talking.”
“It feels good to carve it in the sand, after today. My place on earth. And I mark it here. Like a sign for everyone to see.”
“People will walk on it.” The idea struck her as funny. She laughed softly.
“Here.” He offered her another hit.
“Okay.”
They smoked. Somewhere behind them was the sound of a steel drum. It went on awhile and then died away. A girl laughed, and a man laughed, too. They spoke in German, and after a few moments you couldn’t hear them anymore.
“Write yours,” he said.
“At present, I have no address.”
He stared.
“All right. Here’s where my grandmother lives.” And as she scrawled the number and the name of the street, she did feel strangely as if she were claiming something in defiance. The idea made her pause. Then she swept her hand across all of it. “This is what happens, isn’t it.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I’m not superstitious.”
He wrote his name and wiped it away. “Neither am I.”
A moment later, he said, “Why do you have no home?”
She told him about leaving the job in Washington and was surprised to find that she felt friendly toward him; something in her nerves, below the level of thinking, was actually responding to the cool night breezes and the quiet talk.
“I have never been to Washington and I would love to see it,” he said.
“You should go.”
“But you are leaving it.”
“I’ve left it. When I get out of here, I’m going back to Memphis. A small truck with all my belongings in it is headed there as we speak. To Twenty-Three Bilders Street, Memphis.”
“It sounds like a number of workers. Twenty-three builders.”
“It does. We have twenty-three builders waiting to build this building on this street lined with buildings.”
He laughed, and it went on. It was the reasonless laughter of dope.
“Lot of buildings,” she said. “Count them.”
“Twenty-three,” he said, and his laugh went off at the night sky.
“It doesn’t have a u in it. Bilders. It’s a man’s name.” She sputtered, nearly choking with her own laugh. “I think he was a banker. So my belongings are headed to this street with a little house on it built by builders, and the whole street has buildings on it now, probably built by this banker named Building. No, Bilders. Off High Point Terrace.”
He paused, wiping his eyes and his mouth with a handkerchief, which he crushed in his fist and jammed into his shirt pocket. “Do you believe in fate?”
It seemed that she couldn’t move the muscles around her mouth. “Explain.”
“That everything was leading to this.”
“And what is this, exactly?”
“We two, here, on this beach.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” she said to him. “So, no. But hey, thanks anyway.”
“I feel something led me here. Something in a past life.”
She flicked the roach off into the sand, and he got to his knees to retrieve it. “It’s done,” she told him. “There’s just the ash left. We’re done. All the fun’s gone out of it.”
He sat back and rolled another and lit it while she watched. The little residue of pleasant feeling had dissolved inside her.
“Do you feel it, too?” he said.
She sighed. “I feel dizzy and full of anxiety. And I don’t want to be with anyone. Please.”
“I only want to help you. And be helped.”
“Let’s talk about something other than ‘fate’ then.”
Behind them someone was crying, and someone else was singing. It struck her all over and yet as if for the first time that she was thousands of miles from home. “Your wife is a dancer, you said.”
“Yes.” He looked absurd sitting there hugging his knees, talking about fate, his dancer wife gone off with another woman. “I cannot help this feeling that I have,” he told her. “That the universe brought you to me.”
She had to suppress an urge to laugh again. She watched him breathe out the smoke. When he offered her still another hit, she accepted.
“I guess it is stupid,” he said.
She took the hit, handed the roach to him, and leaned back on her hands. The clouds over the moon were darker but still quite thin, moving faster than she thought clouds ever moved. The world was spinning. Everything was dissolving, going off.
“I believe the universe intends changes for us all,” he said.
“All us builders?” She giggled, and it took hold and grew deeper.
“I am serious now,” he said. “Hey, I am. I am serious.”
“Sorry. Strikes me funny.”
“I do believe the universe intends changes.” And now he laughed, too.
“This isn’t the best time to talk about the universe, is it. Or maybe it’s the only time to talk about it. Right? Isn’t that it? You get stoned and you talk about the universe? Only I don’t want to talk about the universe, man. Truthfully, I am so fucking averse to talking about the fucking universe.” This brought still another laugh out of her, and she looked at the fact of it, like marking the date.
“I am only trying to divert you,” he said. “I do not like such language.”
“Oh, God. Forgive me. I fucking didn’t mean to say averse. That was very fuckingly rude and vulgar of me. Pure fuckery and I do apologize.”
“I am not prudish.”
“Oh — well, thank you for the smoke.”
“That is helping?”
She saw the anxiety in his face. He was quite good to look at. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Really. I’m sorry, okay? I’m drunk and stoned and sick and panicky and I hope you don’t take it personally but I really don’t want company anymore. So why don’t you leave.”
“You cannot even bring yourself to say my name.”
“Oh, shut up!” She kept laughing.
“Say it, then.”
“Please leave me alone.”
He took another pull, inhaled it deeply, held it in, then sighed it out, offering her yet another hit. She took it. “Okay. Now. Please leave me alone. Nicholas.”