It was this hot summer afternoon, one of these summer afternoons when all time and motion seem suspended and there is the softest, sleepiest kind of drone in the air that must come from thousands of small things that can’t be located, and I thought it would be pleasant to sit in the garden swing by the bluff, and I went down there. I sat in the swing and felt very drowsy, and after a while I was conscious of the sounds from the arbor over to my right, and the sounds seemed to be a kind of rustling and heavy breathing. I listened and looked over at the little house, which had lattice walls with very narrow cracks that you couldn’t see through from a distance, and after a minute or two I got up and went over close enough to see inside, and there they were on the floor. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t, and I stood there until it was all over, and then I turned and walked away very quietly, and I have thought later that that must be the way the world will end, not in noise and fire and physical pain, but with everything disintegrating in an instant in utter silence.
And now, remembering deliberately after all this time, I am still sick and not cured. I am sick with the thought of gasping passion and the cruel hunger. Catharsis futile.
She was sick too, of course, in her own way, and in the end she found her own cure. One balm for many fevers; who wrote that? Someone wrote it, and the balm of death, and it was the balm and the cure she found. It should have been anticipated; it was forecast in the quality of her personality in her last years, which should have been among her early years, in the intensity of an overt gayety possessing the shading of despair and in the fierce activity that was like the product of delirium And I have wondered if my father did not actually expect it and look forward to it and consciously do nothing to prevent it. However that may have been; she came home one night and went into her room and took something and lay down to die. She was dead in the morning, and my father found her there and locked the door and went downstairs to call the doctor. The doctor came, and he was a friend of the family, of course, and it was all hushed up, the way she had done it, just as unpleasant things were always hushed up when they happened to a Lawes. I didn’t see her myself until the funeral, when the warm, hungry flesh was bloodless and cold, and we buried her; and in the cemetery my father stood at the edge of her grave with no grief or relief or regret apparent in his face, as if nothing had ever begun or ended.
So she is dead, and my father is dead, but I am not. That’s the point. That is what it comes to. I am not dead and do not want to die. Not wanting to die, I must therefore arrange to live. It’s that simple. It is really very simple indeed. One must think it through logically, that’s all. It is quite clear, for instance, that I am sick and dying, though I wish to live, and that my sickness is abhorrence and rejection of women in the basic function of woman, and that this abhorrence and rejection has become, through a kind of psychic diffusion or something, an abhorrence and rejection of life itself. It follows that I must cure the one in order to cure the other. To reduce it to simplest terms, I must learn to love. Surely this is something that can be done.
How warm the sun is. How softly it touches the body. It seems a long time from the gray days that get inside you and become part of you. It seems a long, long way from the cold and snow of Corinth. Was it only Saturday that I was there? Was it only a few days’ ago that Em Page drove me home with a load of Scotch? Oh, Christ, what a fool I made of myself! I wonder what in hell Em must think of me? I must remember to get that card off...
Section 2
The room’s ocean side was all glass. Accommodations at the hotel, she thought, even though it was not one of the extremely expensive places, were surely costing Carl quite a lot, and she considered it additional evidence of the remarkable depths of kindness and generosity in him that she had never suspected before. She stood in front of the wall of glass with her back to the room and looked out over terrace and sand and not-quite-naked bodies to the glittering blue water spreading out to the remote blue sky. She was very tired from her trip, and her bath had not refreshed her as she had hoped, and what she really wanted and needed was a very strong drink. Her eyes followed the line of junction of sky anti water, and she was not particularly depressed at that moment, in spite of the tiredness, but she wished that Carl would come for her and take her down to the bar.
As if in answer to the wish, he knocked on the door. She knew that it was he, because there was no one else who could possibly have a reason for knocking, and so she turned and called across the room to him to enter. He came in and stopped and looked around and rubbed his hands together like a man coming upon something suddenly and finding it unexpectedly pleasing.
“Very nice,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”
“Comfortable is hardly the word for it. The room must be quite expensive.”
“Oh, nonsense. I can afford it, you know. You’re looking lovely, Lisa.”
“Do you think so? Thank you very much.”
She was, as a matter of fact. After her bath, she had put on a thin black sheath dress that gave rather startling; emphasis to her pale skin and hair. With her small breasts and narrow hips, she looked much younger than she actually was, possessing an almost adolescent; charm.
“You look about sixteen,” he said.
“No, Carl, really. Don’t exaggerate so.”
“Well, a slight exaggeration, maybe. But only slight. You never showed your age, Lisa. I remember that you always looked much younger than you were. I came to see if you would care to go down for a drink.”
“Yes. I was just wishing that you would come and ask for me.
“That’s good, then. Do you suppose I will have trouble getting you into the bar?”
“Why should you?”
“Because of your age, I mean. No minors allowed.”
It was a joke and he laughed at it, his tired and ill-looking face creasing and opening around a soft expulsion of air. He was obviously determined to resume an earlier relationship, to proceed from this point in the pretense that it had never been interrupted, that there had been on her part no betrayal, no desertion, no aberrance. She had again for a moment the feeling inside her of dry and silent weeping, all that apparently was left to her of the relief of tears, and she laughed with him at his joke, feeling no laughter at all within.
“I’ll carry my birth certificate,” she said, and they went downstairs feeling quite at ease with one another, for the first time as if they were really beginning a holiday. The bar was not large and was crowded with patrons and humming with the subdued confusion of conversations against a background of muted music, but they found a table in a corner and sat down, and after a while a waiter came and stood beside the table.
“What would you like?” Carl said.
“A daiquiri, I think.”
“Frozen?”
“No, not frozen.”
“Good. I could never see the sense in a frozen daiquiri.” He looked up at the waiter. “Two daiquiris,” he said.
The waiter went away and returned pretty soon with the daiquiris. They were cold and tart and very good. Lisa drank some of hers and felt the rum begin to work. “When would you like to have dinner?” Carl asked.
“I don’t know.” She listened for a moment to the voices and the music. “Not for quite a while, really. I’m not at all hungry.”