Still thinking of this, a little upset by the seriousness of Polar Bears’ tone, I went upstairs and into the work room and sat before the panel desk. It all felt unbelievably remote, as though another man had removed those diamond-faceted doorknobs and set the flat door upon the trestles. My pitiful notes, my pitiful drafts. I flipped open a folder and read a sentence. “Recurrent in Lawrence’s work is a moment of sexual choice which is the choosing of death (or of half-life) over fully engaged, personalizing life.” Had I actually written this sentence? Uttered stuff like this before students? I bent down and scraped a random lot of books off the floor. I tied them into a bundle with twine and went out of the house and up the path.
“I’ll never read these,” Alison Updahl told me. “You don’t have to give me anything.”
“I know. You don’t have to give me anything either.” She looked at me unhappily. “But at least this was my own idea.”
“Would you mind — would you mind if I gave them to Zack? He’s the big intellectual, not me.”
“Do anything you want with them,” I said. “You’re just saving me the trouble of throwing them away.” I started to turn away.
“Miles,” she said.
“It’s not that I wasn’t tempted,” I said. “I find you extremely tempting. But I’m too old for you, and I’m still your father’s guest. And I do think that you ought to get away from Zack. He’s screwy. He’ll never do anything but injure you.”
She said, “You don’t understand.” She looked terribly unhappy, standing just outside the door on the concrete steps and holding the little heap of books.
“No, I guess I don’t,” I said.
“There isn’t anyone else like him around here. Just like there isn’t anyone like you around here either.”
I wiped my hand over my face. I was sweating like a band drummer on a hot night. “I won’t be here long, Alison. Don’t make me into something I’m not.”
“Miles,” she said, and stopped, embarrassed. Her habit of assertion saw her through. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s too complicated to explain.” She did not reply, and when I looked into her blunt face I saw the expression of another person whose problems were too complex to be fit easily into verbal patterns. I wanted to take her hand, and nearly did. But I could not lay claim to the spurious authority of age which that would imply.
“Ah…” she said as I turned to go again.
“Yes?”
“It was partly my own idea. But you probably won’t believe me.”
“Alison, be careful,” I said, meaning it as much as I have ever meant anything in my life.
I went back to the old house through the sunlight. My hangover had receded to a not unpleasant sensation of light emptiness. By the time I reached the VW parked before the frame garage I realized that the sun was warming my face and shoulders. Twenty yards to my right the mare grazed in the torn uprooted field, pretending for the sake of a full belly that it was a cow like its neighbors. The walnut trees ahead of me were thick and burly, emblems of long health. I wished the same for Alison Updahl and myself. I could feel her back there on the concrete porch, watching me go. I wished that I could do something, something strong and direct, to help her. A hawk swung far above the hills across the valley. Down the drive and across the road stood the birdhouse mailbox on its metal stalk. Tula S. had probably left before the arrival of the mailman in his dusty Ford.
At the box I pulled out a thick pad of folders and envelopes. One after the other I sailed into the ditch letters addressed to Occupant. The last of the letters came in the same envelope as the one addressed to me, and it was written over in the same flowing handwriting. For a moment I thought I read my name on it. Like the previous letter, it had been posted in Arden.
When I finally saw what the envelope said I glanced across the cornfields to the beginning of the woods. No figure stood there gazing with waiting aloof Olympian calm. My hands were trembling. I looked again at the envelope — I was not mistaken. It was addressed to Alison Greening. Care of (my name), RFD 2, Norway Valley, Arden. The sun seemed to penetrate behind my pupils and give me a searing touch. Clumsily, still trembling, I inserted a finger beneath the flap and tore it open. I knew what I would find. The single sheet unfolded itself in my hands. Of course. It was blank. Neither a heart pierced by an arrow nor a black spot nor anything but creamy paper.
Down the road, her handbag pumping at her side, Tula Sunderson toiled toward me. I waited, gasping with emotion, as long as I could and then ran toward her.
“Something come for you?”
“No, yes,” I said. “I don’t know. Mrs. Sunderson, you can’t clean the living room yet. I’m not through in there. You might as well go home. I have to go somewhere.” Remembering the phone call of the morning, I added, “If the phone rings, don’t answer it.” I pelted up the road toward my car.
Smashing the gears, making the VW howl in torment, I shot across the lawn, twisting the wheel at the last moment to avoid the walnut trees. I came rocketing out onto the valley road in the direction of Highway 93. Fat Tuta Sunderson still stood where I had left her; mouth open, she dully watched me zoom past.
But this was not how I wanted to meet Polar Bears, I could not be dragged manacled before him by a slack-faced Arden constable, and I slowed to forty descending the hill past the R-D-N motel. By the time I reached the flat near the high school, I was proceeding at an almost-legal thirty. People were visible on the sidewalks, a cat cleaned itself on a windowsill, other cars trolled before mine: Arden did not have the deserted, eerie look it had had on my earlier visit, but was a normal small town in a normal condition of sleepy bustle. I pulled into an empty spot before Zumgo’s and stopped as gently as a dove. I felt like a man poised on an eggshell. The folded envelope distended my pocket. I knew only one sure way to conquer that awful weightless expectant eggshell feeling. Hearing no wingbeats but the sound of voices, I crossed the pavement to enter Zumgo’s.
Happily, the store had a good crowd of women shoppers. Mostly overweight, dressed in obscene halters and skirts excessively short, they would be the audience for my autotherapy. From them rose a mass smell of compost and barren backyards, of dime taps of Leinenkugel beer and soggy pretzels. I began to drift, in an attitude of abstracted busy specific search, through the aisles and around the tables. The women, including the harridan of my previous visit, scarcely noticed me. I was some husband on some errand. I thought and felt myself into this role.
I am no kleptomaniac. I have a letter from an analyst setting that down in black and white, pica type. I took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and folded it between the second and third fingers of my right hand.
Now it is time for two comments. The first is obvious. I thought that I knew the handwriting on that envelope. I thought that Alison Greening had sent it to me. This was crazy. But it was no crazier than that she would return on the twenty-first of July to keep her vow. Perhaps she was signaling to me, telling me to hold out until that day. The second comment has to do with stealing. I do not think of myself as a thief — except perhaps at a gritty subconscious level that pumps guilt up into my dreams. I hate stealing. Except for Maccabee’s book, I had not stolen anything for at least fifteen years. Thinking of the thefts of my boyhood, I once asked an analyst if he thought I was a kleptomaniac. He said, of course not. Put it in writing, I said. He told me it was my fifty minutes and typed it out on a piece of notepaper. Yet at moments of great unease, I know that I can put my mind right — if at all, if at cost of a wider displacement — by only one means. It is like eating — like stuffing food down your throat long after your hunger has died.