The summer after the last year in college was the worst in her life, a period of chronic melancholia that made the performance of the simplest act, a monstrous burden and a terrifying threat, as if any change in condition at all might destroy her precarious balance and place her in incomprehensible peril, and when she thought back to the summer afterward she could never understand how she survived it and sometimes wished that she hadn’t. Because the summer was so bad, because it was necessary to survival to do something, almost anything, it was quite simple in the end to make the decision about Bella. They met in a park where Lisa had gone because home had long since become intolerable and because the park was simply a place to go that was not home, and their common denominator was something not difficult to establish by simple techniques of approach and response. They met the next day in the same place, seemingly by accident, and the next day after that openly by appointment; and a week later Lisa moved into the apartment on the south side of the city, and Bella was someone to adhere to, an object to give allegiance, the symbol to Lisa of what she considered a definitive decision. She left home after an icy scene with her family in which horror was disguised as anger and everything was understood but not mentioned.
And now, in a strange room in a strange hotel, she realized that the deviate way was a way that had cured no ill and established no peace, and that she would have to return after all to the other way, the way she had thought rejected forever, and she would not return because she wanted to do so for any reason that was essential to her real needs and hungers, but simply because she did not possess whatever qualities were necessary to survival among the perils and oppressions of aberrance.
Rising from the chair, she went to a window and looked out and saw that neither the snow nor the wind had diminished. And at that moment in Corinth, three hundred miles away, Emerson and Ed Page were lying asleep in their bed, each in the arms of the other; and Avery Lawes, in the brick house on High Street, was also lying in bed but was not asleep and in no one’s arms.
Chapter III
Section 1
There was a terrace in the sun, and a swimming pool below the terrace, and beyond the swimming pool, sand and the ocean. Around the pool and on the sand and sometimes in the ocean there were brown men and brown women who were not quite naked, and after a while, after the passing of hours and days, he was able to look at them with practically no feeling of any kind. He sat on the terrace in a bright canvas sling, which was really half sitting and half lying, and the white light was softened by the thin filters of his closed lids to red that sometimes deepened to black, and in the soft red-and-black world behind his lids were a beautiful golden woman who had been dead a long time and a frozen gray man who had been dead a short time; and it was necessary to see them now, if he was to see them ever, without perversion or distortion and in true relationship to himself.
This is how it was, he thought. This was the beginning of awareness, and it was night, and I lay in my room in the house on High Street, and because I was very young I was supposed to be asleep, but I wasn’t. Lying in my bed, I could look out to the east and see the moonlight on the crest of the ridge beyond the river, but I couldn’t see the river itself because it was hidden at the foot of the bluff that dropped away at the lower end of the back yard, and I thought about the river, how it would look silver in the moonlight, and pretty soon I heard a car come up the drive from the street and stop in the portico, and I knew it was my father and mother coming back from wherever they’d been, and I thought it was pretty early for it. I quit looking at the crest of the ridge and thinking about the river and started waiting for the sounds of the door opening and closing in the lower hall, and the heavy steps and the light steps coming up the stairs, and the heavy voice and the light voice talking and laughing and passing in the upper hall, all very softly and subdued because of me, because it was supposed that I was sleeping. This night, though, as I lay and listened, the door opened and closed as usual, and the steps came and passed as usual, but there was no sound of voices, no restrained talking and laughing, and this was not usual and not at all right.
The acoustics of night are very strange. At night you can hear many things that are not heard in the day, the creaks and whispers and sighs of sound, and you can hear voices in a room with a thick wall between. You cannot hear precisely what is said, the significant arrangement of vowels and consonants, but you can hear their inflections and determine their temper and know by their quality if they are spoken in love or amity or anger. As I heard and knew, lying and listening in my room to the hard voices in the room of my parents.
They were very angry, my father’s with a quality of measured fury, my mother’s with a kind of icy and studied contempt. I had never heard them speak like that to each other, or to anyone else, and it made me afraid of the night and the familiar things that the night made unfamiliar, and I wished that I had gone to sleep as I was supposed to and had not heard them come in and begin talking behind their closed door. I tried to quit listening, to ignore the disturbing flow of sound from the other room, and I looked out again at this moonlit crest and tried to picture again the moonlit river that could not be seen, but the angry voices could not be rejected, and now it was my father who was doing most of the talking, and his voice had risen, and this was exceedingly strange and frightening, because he was a man who ordinarily said very little and said that softly. I had never consciously acknowledged a preference for either of my parents, but now I began to have a feeling of resentment toward my father and of alliance with my mother, because she was gay and golden and beautiful beyond description, and if there was something wrong between them, it was surely my father’s fault. I thought that it was not right for him to talk to her that way, with his voice rising on a cadence of fury, and then I began to think that he would certainly stop if I were to go down and open their door, because it was an accepted rule among all people who amounted to anything that parents should not make scenes before their children, and so I got out of bed and went out into the hall on my bare feet and down to the door of their room.
I put a hand on the knob of the door and stood there with the fear in me suddenly rising, afraid of the consequences of intruding on two people who were all at once strangers, and after a silence, his voice resuming its deadly modulation, my father said, “I think that I should kill you, and perhaps I shall,” and my mother laughed and said, “You won’t kill me, and you won’t even divorce me, and you will do nothing at all, in fact, because anything you might do would cause a scandal, and it is unthinkable that there should ever be a scandal in the family of Lawes, which is the first family in Corinth, which is God’s chosen town.” Then I turned the knob and the door swung into the room away from me.