As Judith wept, her unhappiness seemed to expand and grow more generous. She wept for the lovers on the sunflooded cliff, who did not know what lay ahead. She wept for the elderly couple, who perhaps woke in the night, trembling with death fear. She wept for the dark woman, who in the arrogance of her sadness had developed cruel gifts of divination. Judith felt herself dilate with unhappiness; and as she wept, her sorrow grew rich and darkly lovely, a black flower, opening petal by velvet petal.
For a while it seemed as if she would sleep. But again it struck her, shaking her like an illness. She got up from the bed and walked weeping around the nearly dark room. She felt ugly with sorrow, as if her tears were wearing lines into her face. Damn the witch. She was too tired for this.
She lay down, exhausted, and it flashed in her that this would end. It was bound to end. Everything ended. Tomorrow she would be sitting in sunshine on her red bench. She would eat dinner early, take the limousine to the bus station, and ride toward the city in the dark. In the morning she would be at her desk. There were letters to dictate, a meeting at ten with the three new trainees, and a luncheon appointment with the author of a college math text that proposed to teach the concept of number by using the history of number systems in different cultures. She wouldn’t have a minute to spare for sorrow, and if the thought of the tears now pouring from her came into her mind, they would seem as dreamlike and implausible as her father’s explanation, when she was a child, that the lawn on which they were standing was part of a great globe that was not only turning round and round but was rushing along like a ball shot out of a cannon.
But it was ugly; humiliating. She was helpless against it. She lay on the bed, utterly given over to grief. Her grief seemed to be growing stronger, as if it were gaining confidence. It was not ennobling, it was not even interesting. People suffered the way they loved — not with their hearts but with their stomachs. It bored her. But still it went on.
And again it struck at her, the ugly and humiliating thing. It overmastered her, ranging through her at will. Judith lay weakly on her pillow and felt herself slowly give up. She tried to remember if she had ever felt peaceful, and it seemed to her that long ago, in some other life, she had sat in sunlight. She no longer existed; she was only a lump of ugly suffering. She had no respect for these tears, these shakings. Weak, weak, she was weak. Weak! She despised weepy women.
The thought came to her that she might be having a breakdown. At the thought a terror came over her; calmed for a moment by terror, she forced herself up from the bed.
She walked over to the window and pushed aside the shade. She was startled to see her shocked face staring at her from the dark glass. Through her face she saw black hills and a dark blue sky rich with stars. Once when she was a child her father had taken her out at night to the top of the driveway and let her look through his telescope at the moon and stars. The telescope stood on a tripod and he had lowered the legs for her. He had told her that a long time ago people believed the sky was a bowl filled with little holes, and that the stars were those little holes, through which the sun was shining. He had explained gravely and carefully what the stars really were, but she had come away knowing that the night was a bowl with the sun shining through the holes.
A coolness flowed from the glass. Judith leaned forward toward the coolness and saw her pale face bowing to meet her. She pressed her burning forehead against the cool glass. The room seemed stifling, unbearable. The whole room was filled with sorrow. All at once she released the shade; it clattered as if she had hurled it against the glass. She went over to the bed and began to put on her hiking boots.
Struggling to pull her arm through a sweater she stepped into the hall. Her head ached and tears burned in her eyes. At the top of the stairs she stopped to button her sweater; it was black with black buttons. She placed her hand on the smooth wood of the banister and watched the hand slide down alongside her as she swiftly descended. At the bottom the hand swept up over the wooden globe of the stairpost and joined her again. From the lobby she passed into the empty lounge, where a single lamp dimly glowed. An old woman was asleep in a chair. Judith stepped through the side door onto the dark veranda, hurried down the steps onto the gravel path, and stopped.
The moon shocked her: it was burning white. It had burned the blackness out of the sky, leaving a radiant dark blue. She felt like breaking off a piece of the moon and pressing it against her forehead, plunging it into her mouth. She felt crazed. Tears streamed along her face.
She had come out with no plan except to escape the sorrow in her room, but as if she knew where she wanted to go she did not hesitate. The moon would light her way.
The twisting downward path was speckled with pale patches of moonlight. A stone cast a sharp shadow. She could see leaf shadows printed on the path. Overhead the night was so deeply blue that she refused to believe it; she was reminded of the fraudulent and enchanting skies of night scenes in old Technicolor movies. A nearby crackle startled her. She had read that there were possums, raccoons, and deer in the woods. Judith had never seen a possum. What if one leaped out at her? She wouldn’t even know what it was.
When she reached the bench at the bend of the path she stopped in surprise. It had no color, though the moon shone on part of it — it was only darkness and light. There, where she had been peaceful, she sat down.
On the brilliantly moonlit cliff the gazebo cast a hard-edged shadow. There were many parallel stripes and criss-crosses. Through the pale, radiant beams of the gazebo she could see diamonds and parallelograms of dark blue night. Near the pointed roof-shadow something gleamed, and she recognized the beer can. It threw a long shadow. At the very edge of the cliff, brightness turned into darkness. She tried to see the precise place where the brightness stopped.
She raised a hand to her face and was startled to feel wetness there. She remembered that she had been crying. The woman had hurt her. And at the memory it began again: something rose in her and she was shaken with it, she wept and bent her face into her hands. She took deep breaths, as if she had to reach far down to find strength for her sorrow. Her body shook, her ribs ached, her shoulders hunched old-womanishly.
She could not stop. She wept as if some deep restraint of pride or breeding had given way in her. She wept beyond shame, crudely and obscenely, as if grief were a form of ugliness she could no longer escape. She had no sympathy for the grief that filled her and shook her, that seemed too large for her, as if it did not fit her insides correctly. Her grief was the wrong size. It spilled out of her and left her far behind. It was larger than the Mountain Lodge, larger than anything; and it seemed to her that she had left her room and come out into the night because only the night was large enough.
Sick with sorrow, twisted with grief, Judith stumbled from the bench and struck for the path leading to the cliff. She wanted to run away from her unhappiness, to leave it behind. Trembling and weeping she emerged from the trees into a brilliance of moonlight. The moon hurt her tear-burned eyes. Now that she was out of the woods Judith advanced slowly, as if her hair had become tangled in the brilliance of the night sky — in twigs and branches of light. The moonlight tore at her hair. The blazing beer can stunned her, distracted her. She looked up at the moon. It burned out her eyes. She came to the edge of the cliff, where the dark place began.