“So,” Sally says. “Where’s the good part in anything if you don’t think something good’s coming, or you’re going to get a prize at the end? What’s the good mystery?”
“The good mystery’s how long anything can go on the way it is. That’s enough for me.” The Existence Period par excellence. Sally and Ann are united in their distaste for this view.
“My oh my oh my!” She leans her head back and stares up at the starless ceiling and laughs an odd high-pitched girlish ha-ha-ha. “I underestimated you. That’s good. I … never mind. You’re right. You’re completely right.”
“I’d be happy to be wrong,” I say, and look, I’m sure, goofy.
“Fine,” Sally says, looking at me as if I were the rarest of rare species. “Waiting to be proved wrong, though — that’s not exactly taking the bull by the horns, is it, Franky?”
“I never really understood why anybody’d take a bull by its horns in the first place,” I say. “That’s the dangerous end.” I don’t much like being called “Franky,” as though I were six and of indeterminate gender.
“Well, look.” She is now sarcastic. “This is just an experiment. It’s not personal.” Her eyes flash, even in the dark, catching light from somewhere, maybe the house next door, where lamps have been switched on, making it look cozy and inviting indoors. I wouldn’t mind being over there. “What does it mean to you to tell somebody you love them? Or her?”
“I don’t really have anybody to say that to.” This is not a comforting question.
“But if you did? Someday you might.” This inquiry suggests I have become an engaging but totally out-of-the-question visitor from another ethical system.
“I’d be careful about it.”
“You’re always careful.” Sally knows plenty about my life — that I am sometimes finicky but in fact often not careful. More of irony.
“I’d be more careful,” I say.
“What would you mean if you said it, though?” She may in fact believe my answer will someday mean something important to her, explain why certain paths were taken, others abandoned: “It was a time in my life I was lucky enough to survive;” or “This’ll explain why I got out of New Jersey and went to work with the natives in Pago Pago.”
“Well,” I say, since she deserves an honest answer, “it’s provisional. I guess I’d mean I see enough in someone I liked that I’d want to make up a whole person out of that part, and want to keep that person around.”
“What does that have to do with being in love?” She is intent, almost prayerful, staring at me in what I believe may be a hopeful manner.
“Well, we’d have to agree that that was what love was, or is. Maybe that’s too severe.” (Though I don’t really think so.)
“It is severe,” she says. A fishing boat sounds a horn out in the ocean dark.
“I didn’t want to exaggerate,” I say. “When I got divorced I promised I’d never complain about how things turned out. And not exaggerating is a way of making sure I don’t have anything to complain about.” This is what I tried explaining to smushed-dick Joe this morning. With no success. (Though what can it mean for one’s desideratum to come up twice in one day?)
“You can probably be talked out of your severe view of love, though, can’t you? Maybe that’s what you meant by being happy to be wrong.” Sally stands as she says this, once again raises her arms, wine glass in hand, and twists herself side to side. The fact that one leg is shorter than the other is not apparent. She is five feet ten. Almost my height.
“I haven’t thought so.”
“It really wouldn’t be easy, I guess, would it? It’d take something unusual.” She is watching the beach where someone has just started an illegal campfire, which makes the night for this moment seem sweet and cheerful. But from sudden, sheer discomfort, and also affection and admiration for her scrupulousness, I’m compelled to grab my arms around her from behind and give her a hug and a smoochy schnuzzle that works out better than the last one. She is no longer humid underneath her caftan, where she seems to my notice to be wearing no clothes, and is sweeter than sweet. Though her arms stay limp at her side. No reciprocation. “At least you don’t need to worry how to trust all over again. All that awful shit, the stuff my dying people never talk about. They don’t have time.”
“Trust’s for the birds,” I say, my arms still around her. I live for just these moments, the froth of a moment’s pseudo-intimacy and pleasure just when you don’t expect it. It is wonderful. Though I don’t believe we have accomplished much, and I’m sorry.
“Well,” Sally says, regaining her footing and pushing my cloying arms off in a testy way without turning around, making for the door, her limp now detectable. “Trust’s for the birds. Isn’t it just. That’s the way it has to be, though.”
“I’m pretty hungry,” I say.
She walks off the porch, lets the screen slap shut. “Come in then and eat your bow ties. You have miles to go before you sleep.”
Though as the sound of her bare feet recedes down the hall, I am alone in the warm sea smells mixed with the driftwood smoke, a barbecue smell that’s perfect for the holiday. Someone next door turns on a radio, loud at first, then softer. E-Z Listn’n from New Brunswick. Liza is singing, and I myself drift like smoke for a minute in the music: “Isn’t it romantic? Music in the night … Moving shadows write the oldest magic … I hear the breezes playing … You were meant for love … Isn’t it romantic?”
At dinner, eaten at the round oak table under bright ceiling light, seated either side of the vase sprouting purple irises and white wisteria and a wicker cornucopia spilling summery legumes, our talk is eclectic, upbeat, a little dizzying. It is, I understand, a prelude to departure, with all memory of languor and serious discussion of love’s particulars off-limits now, vanished like smoke in the sea breeze. (The police have since arrived, and the firemakers hauled off to jail the instant they complained about the beach being owned by God.)
In the candlelight Sally is spirited, her blue eyes moist and shining, her splendid angular face tanned and softened. We fork up bow ties and yak about movies we haven’t seen but would like to (Me—Moonstruck, Wall Street; she— Empire of the Sun, possibly The Dead); we talk about possible panic in the soybean market now that rain has ended the drought in the parched Middle West; we discuss “drouth” and “drought;” I tell her about the Markhams and the McLeods and my problems there, which leads somehow to a discussion of a Negro columnist who shot a trespasser in his yard, which prompts Sally to admit she sometimes carries a handgun in her purse, right in South Mantoloking, though she believes it will probably be the instrument that kills her. For a brief time I talk about Paul, noting that he is not much attracted to fire, doesn’t torture animals, isn’t a bed-wetter that I know of, and that my hopes are he will live with me in the fall.
Then (from some strange compulsion) I charge into realty. I report there were 2,036 shopping centers built in the U.S. two years ago, but now the numbers are “way off,” with many big projects stalled. I affirm that I don’t see the election mattering a hill of beans to the realty market, which provokes Sally to remember what rates were back in the bicentennial year (8.75 %), when, I recall to her, I was thirty-one and living on Hoving Road. While she mixes Jersey blueberries in kirsch for spooning over sponge cake, I try to steer us clear of the too-recent past, talk on about Grandfather Bascombe losing the family farm in Iowa over a gambling debt and coming in late at night, eating a bowl of berries of some kind in the kitchen, then stepping out onto the front porch and shooting himself.