After about forty-five minutes, they see a hotel close to the road, half-hidden between the trees, the lights on the ground floor lit. They turn onto the gravel path that leads to it. They park out in front. Heribert hastens to open the door on the young woman’s side.
It is a little wooden hotel painted white with tables set up on the verandah. On each table a red candle is burning. Heribert finds it strange that they have set up tables outside in that cold. Herundina declares that she is about to freeze. Heribert sits down anyway. Herundina does, too; her breath forms clouds. The door creaks. A kindly old man comes out to serve them. They order a bottle of champagne. He brings it out, with two glasses. Herundina says once again that she’s cold. The man tells them they can go inside. Heribert says it doesn’t matter. Herundina looks at him, taken aback. The man struggles to uncork the bottle, and just before he does, they hear his spine crack. They down the champagne, and it goes right to their heads. Herundina laughs and tilts back and forth on the legs of her chair. An old woman spies on them from the window, drawing the curtain back with a bony head. When Herundina says the champagne has warmed her up, Heribert gets up and suggests going inside. The old woman moves away from the window. The proprietor is running a dishcloth along the countertop. The room is empty.
They order another bottle. He brings it over. As he opens it, Heribert asks if they have any rooms available. He says it suddenly, without thinking, and once he’s said it he thinks it’s an excellent idea. He decides that if Herundina makes a fuss or looks outraged, he will smack her. But Herundina smiles, gazing at him with enormous eyes. The old man tells them that at this time of year the hotel is never full, though in the summer it’s another story since they’re right on the beach.
“All the other hotels (as you must already have noticed) are closed. There’s no business in it. We only open because if we didn’t, what would we do? Our children are all grown, they live in the city, and if we stay open, someone always happens along, like you folks. .”
He gives them the key. They go up to the room with the bottle and the glasses. From the window you can see an endless stretch of woods, blacker even than the sky above it, and to the left, points of light. They must be houses. The place is silent, but the floorboards creak. Heribert fills both glasses with champagne and locks the door from inside. Herundina embraces him. Heribert would have been irritated if Herundina hadn’t wanted to come upstairs, but now that they’re there he feels rather annoyed by the embrace. Too weary to come up with a convincing excuse, he indolently lets her proceed.
•
The heat is up so high that Heribert is sweating and the sheets are sticking to his skin. The sound of a television reaches him from the ground floor. The couple must be watching TV. Heribert glances at the clock. It’s 1:00 a.m. What should he do now? Go right home? Wait for her to wake up? He could grab the cars keys, take off, and leave her there, fast asleep.
At 1:30 he looks at the young woman’s broad back. At 1:57, her slender waist. At 2:07, the shadowy crack between the cheeks of her ass. At 2:30, the whiter triangle that (he thinks at 2:45) must be the negative of the panties she wears when she tans herself under infrared lights or in the snow (he thinks at three o’clock). At 3:45 he thinks that, in fact, all he had felt for Herundina was desire.
It had taken him hours to formulate this thought. When Herundina wakes up, it’s 4:00 a.m. She sees Heribert looking at her. She smiles at him. He isn’t sure whether or not to smile back. She puts her arms around him, and brings her mouth close to his.
One hour later, the old couple waves goodbye from the verandah. Heribert and Herundina take the road back to the city. Herundina wants to go with him to see the two paintings he’s had at the Whitney for a few months now.
They leave the car in a nearby parking lot. They walk arm in arm through the first few galleries. Herundina asks him if he’s been a citizen for long. He says for twelve years. She asks how long he’s lived here. He says since he was four years old. They go up to the second floor. Before two adjoining rooms, Herundina pulls in one direction and Heribert in the other. As he pulls Herundina, without really knowing why, toward the room she doesn’t want to go into, Heribert feels that the building reminds him of the cemeteries he had seen from the car the night before.
“You’re not very nice. Why don’t you want to come see your paintings with me now?”
Eyes closed, as if blind, he accompanies her till she comes to a halt. Then he opens his eyes and finds himself before two walls at an angle. There are two canvases; he finds it hard to identify them as his. When Heribert hears the girl say she’s in love with him, no matter how obtuse, stubborn, and distant he wants to appear, a chill runs up his spine. Feeling lost, he goes over to the corner formed by the two walls and rests against it. What should he say to her? He can tell her that there was a time when he liked her, that, at times, when he was in bed caressing her sister, he would pretend he was caressing her. When he looks up, a figure too dark and mustachioed to be Herundina is standing before him. “Good thing I didn’t think of hugging her with my eyes closed,” he thinks.
Herundina watches as the gallery guard reprimands Heribert. As he apologizes, Heribert considers the thought of lying and telling Herundina he loves her. Where would that lead, though? If he had never lied, he could resolve to commence a new life, always lying without fail, firmly vowing never again to utter so much as a single truth. Even if it were completely false, he would make the woman very happy if he declared his love for her, and in point of fact, it wouldn’t be all that hard. That must be the solution. There can’t possibly be another. They leave the gallery. They walk through the museum without looking at a single painting. Heribert opens his mouth and says, very slowly:
“I love you.”
Herundina’s expression wavers between happiness and stupefaction. Is she not sure whether or not to believe him? All he needed now was for her not to believe him, after the effort he’s put into saying it. Her draws her close to him, takes her in his arms, and kisses her. Kissing is so easy, even if you don’t feel like it. As he kisses her, he sees a girl, who looks vaguely familiar, walk by The Paris Bit by Stuart Davis. “She looks like an Anna, or an Anne. .” He remembers: she was the girl from a few days ago at the bookstore, the one he had involuntarily kept from stealing a book! It would be so easy for him to feel desire for her. . It would be so easy, later on, to stop feeling desire for her. . At that very moment he is feeling it, desire, a faint desire that (if he keeps looking at her much longer) will grow increasingly strong (or weak, or even disappear if he turns his head and looks at one of those paintings, or at the floor, or at the ceiling, and forgets her). What if everything were different with her, though? Maybe he will only be able to grab onto something when he no longer expects anything. He watches the girl vanish into another gallery. He makes a move to follow her.