At last. But Mr. Wallace cannot whisper. The walls rang with him. What did she think when she heard? Will she cringe again? She came with tea some minutes later and pretended surprise at finding him gone. I had to stare at her until her cup shook. Then I went upstairs to my room.
When all was well begun and seemed well ended, the Wallaces joined the Means. Perhaps the Means read moles better than I do. Better: perhaps they do not know what moles may mean.
The houses here are served by alleys. Garages face them. Trash spills over the cinders and oil flavors the earth. The Wallaces have helped themselves up the Means’ porch steps and day is falling when I begin my walk through the alleys by the backsides of the houses. The house of love is first. The shades are drawn. Who knows when passion may choose to spring from its clothes? I hear the Wallaces moving on the porch — the scrape of a chair. Eternity Tomorrow. It is tacked on the inside of the door. The letters swallow at the light. Their car is parked elsewhere but I resist the temptation to go in. Cracks in the walls net the floor. Beer cans glow. A wagon hangs precariously by its handle to the wall. I am at the entrance and frightened by it as a child is frightened by the cold air that drifts from a cave to damp the excitement of its discovery. Not since I was very young have I felt the foreignness of places used by others. I had forgotten that sensation and its power — electric to the nerve ends. The oiled ash, the cool air, the violet light, the wracked and splintered wood, the letters of the prophecy — they all urge me strangely. Mrs. Wallace hoots. I move on. The lane looks empty of all life like a road in a painting of a dream. I am a necromancer carrying a lantern. The lamp is lit but it gives no light. My steps are unnaturally loud and I tell myself I have fallen into the circle of my own spell. Tin briefly fires. Then I hear the voice of Mrs. Cramm. Her virtuous shoes show beneath the partly opened door of her garage. She stores things there for she has no car. By her shoes are another pair — a child’s. The child giggles and is shushed. I have been loud in the lane yet they have not heard me. Now stock still, I fear to move. The door swings and I back in panic. I jump into the Means’ garage. The door does not close and Mrs. Cramm remains hidden behind it with the child, conversing in low tones. Finally the feet begin to move and I duck deeply into the darkness of the Means. I feel a fool. Steps are coming quickly. Light steps. What a fool. They turn in. The child is in the door, a boy I think — Tim or Ames. I crouch in the dark by a tire, hiding my eyes as if he might see me with them. Fool. Why? Why have I done this? Why am I hiding here like a thief? The child’s feet pass me and I hear a loud clink. Then he comes from the rear of the barn and goes out and his feet disappear onto grass. My courage returns and I follow what my ears have remembered back into the barn but I fail to find what it was he has deposited there. I bark my shin on a cycle. In the lane I put my hands in my pockets. The alley is empty. The light is nearly gone. I realize that I have breached the the fortress, yet in doing so I lost all feeling for the Means and sensed only myself, fearful, hiding from a child. A cat fires from a crack in Mrs. Cramm’s garage and passes silently into the darkness. My stomach burns. I walk forward until I reach the turf and stand by redbud and by dogwood trees. I see her then, utterly gray and unshaped and unaccompanied, a thin gray mist by a tree trunk, and I stand dumbly too while the dusk deepens. Indeed I am not myself. This is not the world. I have gone too far. It is the way fairy tales begin — with a sudden slip over the rim of reality. The streetlights flare on Mrs. Cramm. Her arms are clenched around her. She is watching the Means’ front porch from which I hear a whinny. Unaccountably I think of Hänsel and Gretel. They were real and they went for a walk in a real forest but they walked too far in the forest and suddenly the forest was a forest of story with the loveliest little cottage of gingerbread in it. There is a flash in the ribboned darkness. From the corner of my eye I think I see the back door of the Means’ house close. Mrs. Cramm is fixed — gray and grotesque as primitive stone. I back away. The ribbons of light entangle me. I crawl between garages. My feet slip on cans. Fool fool fool. I try to think what I’m doing. One day Jack went to town to buy a cow and came home with a handful of beans. I slip. There is a roar of ocean like a roaring mob. Have I gone down before the giant? Mrs. Cramm is suddenly gone and I slink home.
It was an experience from which I have not yet recovered. I go back each evening just when dusk is falling and stand by the redbud tree at the back of Mrs. Cramm’s yard. I never see her, yet I know that on the evenings when the Wallaces visit with the Means, she talks to the children. I have lain like fog between the garages and only heard whispers — vague, tantalizing murmurs. Every evening I hope the streetlights will surprise her again. I know where every streak will be. I think I have seen her in the back seat of the Means’ car when it is parked in the barn sometimes — a blank patch of stone gray. Is it Ames who slips out to meet her? Recently, while I’ve been loitering at the end of the alley, taking my last look around, I’ve felt I’ve mixed up all my starts and endings, that the future is over and the past has just begun. I await each evening with growing excitement. My stomach turns and turns. I am terribly and recklessly impelled to force an entrance to their lives, the lives of all of them; even, although this is absurd, to go into the fabric of their days, to mote their air with my eyes and move with their pulse and share their feeling; to be the clothes that lie against their skins, to shift with them, absorb their smells. Oh I know the thought is awful, yet I do not care. To have her anger bite and burn inside me, to have his brute lust rise in me at the sight of her sagging, tumbling breasts, to meet her flesh and his in mine or have the sores of Mr. Wallace break my skin or the raw hoot of his wife crawl out my throat… I do not care… I do not care. The desire is as strong as any I have ever had: to see, to feel, to know, and to possess! Shut in my room as I so often am now with my wife’s eyes fastened to the other side of the door like blemishes in the wood, I try to analyze my feelings. I lay them out one by one like fortune’s cards or clothes for journeying and when I see them clearly then I know the time is only days before I shall squeeze through the back screen of the Means’ house and be inside.
ICICLES
I
It had snowed heavily during the night, but by morning the sky had cleared, deepening the frost. The sun when it rose was dazzling, and at once it began to melt the roofs and window edges, power lines and limbs of trees. Icicles formed rapidly. At first they were thick and opaque like frozen slush, but later, lengthening, they cleared and began to glitter brilliantly like pieces of heavy glass. When Fender left his house he had to duck, sweeping a number away with his arm, they were that long already, and there were more when he returned at five — a row had formed above his picture window. Multiply like weeds, he thought, kicking fragments from his stoop with the side of his foot. Later he sat in his living room eating a pot pie from a tray in his lap and chewing crackers, his gaze passing idly along the streets in the wheel ruts and leaping the disorderly heaps of shoveling. He was vaguely aware of the ice that had curtained a quarter of his window, and of the light from the streetlamps reflected by it, but he was thinking how difficult it was to sell property so suspiciously hidden. This time of year the wind blew over the porches of the houses he was showing. His prospects were invariably shivering before he got them in. He’d say it was no day to trade caves, or some such thing, and they’d nod in a determined way that made him realize they meant it. A faint smile might drift to their faces. Inside there were boots and rubbers and the mess of snow and papers, sellers like shabby furniture, their wan and solemn children staring large-eyed at the strangers, while in-laws, made fat, no doubt, by their wisdom, held their arms like bundles to their chests and stopped up the doorways. There was always frost on the windows, darkening the rooms, and the attics and basements and enclosed porches were cold and grim, and his prospects had stiff, inhuman faces.