18
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, I find there is little that is worth recording in the rapidly lapsing life of my self-doomed friend. I say curiously, for deluded Edwin seemed to think that I was eager to record practically everything. In so thinking he was guilty of two grave errors: for not only did he once again reveal his misunderstanding of the biographer’s art, which of necessity is more highly selective than the self-centered novelist’s, since the biographer has an entire rather than a partial lifespan to choose from, but also he failed to perceive that the remaining days of his diminishment held no more interest in themselves than, in the Early Years, the days before Christmas had held in themselves. We strolled, we chatted, we recollected; but really it was all a matter of marking time. Edwin’s various sensations, under the June moon, interested me not in the least. The three-part division of his life had already established itself in my mind, and it was emphatically clear to me that we had passed the middle of Part Three and were mere chapters, mere pages, from the tragic end. He had written his book: now he must bow and depart: all else was in a manner superfluous. At times, I confess, I found myself thinking of Edwin as recently deceased. Perhaps for this reason my memory of that June is less of Edwin than of the attendant moon, which seems to me now to have passed through its phases in rapid motion, as in a science film. But with the end of school (the reader will be happy to learn that on his last report card Edwin received A’s in all his subjects and S’s in all departments of behavior) a new note is struck, as if creative Edwin recognized the propriety of a gentle coda. And so I feel that some mention at least must be made of July, the final month of Edwin’s pre-posthumous life.
Always the days grew longer, pushing back the dark, and the summer moon in the thirsty summer nights began to glow with a cool, fresh brightness, like a lemon-ice.
One hot night I woke from a dream of twisted white animals and sat up in bed. Through the drawn blind over my open window the heavy odor of mown grass mingled with a faint trace of lawnmower gasoline. A beam of moonlight, creeping past an edge of the blind, lay in broken pieces in my room, striping the dark sill, dropping to the floor, rising up the right side of my bed, crossing over my ankles in a wrinkled stripe, disappearing, reappearing suddenly on the seat of a wooden chair to the left of my bed, scattering among the folds of a flung shirt, and lying at last in bright fragments on three different shelves. A branch scraped against the screen, and as it did so a white dog frozen in the snow of my suddenly remembered dream slowly lifted its head and melted away. The branch scraped again, and as I rubbed my tired temples I happened to recall that no branches grew beneath my window. The tallest sunflower beneath my window barely reached the sill. My blurred confusion had just focused into fear, and with a thumping heart and held breath I was straining my ears toward the window, when through my screen I heard the harsh whisper: “Jeffrey. Jeffrey. Jeffrey.”
I flung off my sheet, leaped out of bed, and pulled aside the blind. Edwin’s half-luminous face, falling into shadow on one side of his nose, stared up at me not two feet away. He was standing with his heels on the grass and his toes in the dirt of the moonlit flowerbed; he wore his dark summer jacket, zippered up to his chin. In one hand he held a bright white handkerchief; in the other hand he held a dark paper lunchbag. In the lenses of his eyeglasses I saw my window in its setting of moonlit white shingles. “What, why,” I began, glancing at my clock, which said 2:24, but “Shhh!” said Edwin, motioning for me to come out; and stepping away from the flowerbed he raised his luminous handkerchief to his moonlit nose, holding it there as he glanced about in an excited, secretive, conspiratorial manner. Within minutes I had dressed, crept through the kitchen, closed the back door, and tiptoed down the steps into the side yard, where for a moment I did not see Edwin sitting on a wheel of the lawnmower under the moonlit willow tree toward the front of the house.
As I brushed aside a curtain of willow leaves, Edwin held toward me a partially chewed carrot that had been scraped and salted. I refused it with an impatient gesture. “Is anything,” I began again, and Edwin interrupted with: “I couldn’t sleep. Let’s do something. Let’s go somewhere. Shhh! What’s that?” It was a piece of crumpled waxpaper, uncrumpling slightly with faint creaking sounds. “I don’t really,” I began. Ten minutes later Edwin was bumping up and down behind me and his lunchbag was bumping up and down before me as all three of us rode along moonlit and lamplit Benjamin Street, past dark slumbering houses that had gone to sleep hours ago.
So began the first of those late nocturnal excursions by bicycle that lend to Edwin’s final July its special shade of moon and night — as if, perhaps, he wished to immerse himself more deeply in darkness before taking the final plunge. The first few nights we simply rode along nearby streets, taking fearful delight in our ghostly privilege as the only waking souls in a sleeping world. We would float along past silent moon-enchanted houses guarded by hissing sprinklers and topped by television antennas showing black and sharp against the dark blue luminous sky; past half-built houses with skeleton roofs, high stepless doors, and holes for windows through which pieces of starlit sky were visible; past hillocky vacant lots from which came a steady sound of crickets on six different notes. The entire town seemed a vast department store that we had broken into, its toys and treasures lying in neat accessible rows under the frosted moon-bulb. The sudden distant headlights of occasional cars were the suspicious flashlights of unseen guards; a few dogs howled from kitchens or back porches as we crunched past. We were never caught. After the second night Edwin did not even try to sleep, but simply waited for his parents to fall asleep before sneaking from his house to my waiting window. Soon we were making long excursions to specific places: and it is this, really, that lends to July its unique quality, the quality of a gentle leavetaking.
Our first excursion was to Soundview Beach. I parked at the long deserted bicycle rack, far from the solitary streetlamp I had never noticed in the bright light of the obscuring sun. Removing our shoes and sneakers we walked across the cool black road to the crest of cool sand that rose in moon-illumined folds and creases to a dark azure sky. At the top of the crest we saw the foam of long low waves shooting down the shore in a luminous white line; the water fell back slowly from a strip of dark moon-polished sand. Three solemn lifeguard seats sat watching the show. The nearest one, a few feet to our left, towered over us as a highchair towers over a baby; the farthest one, beyond the black refreshment stand, was the size of a dollhouse chair. At the feet of the nearby towering chair, an overturned lifeboat lay like a vast white seashell. Edwin and I walked down to the water’s edge, where we mingled our feet with the shine and foam. For a long while we stood in silence, staring out at the distant lighthouse whose little yellow light seemed to illuminate the entire horizon, revealing the division between black water and blueblack sky. “I wonder if Penn lives in that lighthouse,” I at length remarked, turning to Edwin. He had disappeared. A row of four precise footprints in hard wet sand walked from the water and vanished in the dry sand above. High up on the beach behind me I saw lone Edwin seated in the lifeguard’s chair, staring out to sea with moonbright eyeglasses and an indistinguishable face; and as I gazed, the odd thought struck me that I had never seen him so distant from his lonely shadow, which lay in sad banishment far up on the moonlit sand, huddled at the end of the long sharp shadow-lines of the lifeguard’s luminous chair.