He lay on his back, his limbs as still as certain white bubbles on the black water; and now he allowed himself to remember his last meeting with Victoria.
Will you stay up all night talking with me? she had said. I feel so lonely.
I’ll try, if my stomach doesn’t bother me too much.
Don’t bother if you don’t want to; I don’t care.
I hope you do.
Well, I like the feeling that there’s someone here right next to me. That’s what I always wanted. It didn’t matter who it was. Don’t get hurt; I’d rather have you with me right now than almost anyone—
Who would you prefer? Your children?
No, not them. They’d feel too sad here.
Victoria, what would it be like if I came down to you?
I’d hate it; I couldn’t stretch out. That’s how I always used to feel in college when some man spent too many nights in my bed.
Well, when I die—
I’d hate it, I said!
Then what did you get married for?
Oh, I wanted children. And he was right for me — very soulful, more intelligent than you, generous, a little detached — although he later did become jealous, especially when I took up writing you at the end.
He loved you?
They all did, or thought they did.
You must have been good in bed.
I wasn’t totally sure about men at first. But after I realized I could fake anything, I did as I pleased. If they’d only known! But they gave me what I wanted and it was pretty easy to give them what they wanted, so I used them and never felt used.
Congratulations.
You never got to find out, but anyhow I was very good at it.
I’m glad, he said wearily. I did find out a little, since you and I—
Were you good at it?
Yes. Yes, I think so. I’ve gotten compliments—
Compliments don’t mean anything, Victoria informed him with a smile. They’re just something that women do.
Well, maybe some were more sincere than you.
Please, please don’t get irritated! We’re only chatting—
Were you ever my girlfriend?
Certainly not, the dead woman giggled.
I thought you were…
Listen. I keep telling you: Our physical encounters were very limited. I placed very little emphasis on them, but I came to see that you felt differently. You took them in their proper light, not as a game the way I did.
But since I took them in their proper light, then maybe—
I’ve never cared to feel obligated.
When you talk like that, I can’t decide whether I’m alone with you or just alone.
When we were seventeen, I used to think you never got irritated.
Victoria, how old are you?
Seventeen.
I’m your past, she said after awhile, but you’re almost nothing to me. Why am I saying this? What makes me so cruel? I don’t understand myself anymore.
You didn’t hurt me; I wish I could help you.
I believe in following my heart, even if it’s dead and rotten. Even when I don’t understand myself—
What do you mean?
I don’t know. I see your tumor shining.
What color is it now?
Green. It’s hurting you; you’d better go.
Will you allow me to visit you again?
Thank you for being a gentleman, said Victoria. Yes. I allow you.
Why can’t I make you feel better?
Nothing can change me! laughed the lovely seventeen-year-old girl, her tears shining silver in the moonlight.
I don’t believe that.
Do you want me to claim you?
Then what?
You just lost your chance. When you were seventeen you would have given yourself to me without any questions.
Victoria, you’re such a tease! Do you want me to claim you? I offered to dig you up and keep you in a flowerpot. Didn’t that happen to somebody’s head in the Decameron? But he was murdered. Well, so were you — by cancer…
I want you to lie down with me.
She reached toward him, and he saw moonlight in her eyesockets. He knew that he truly was almost nothing to her, just as had been the case when they were seventeen. All she had ever desired, perhaps, was a partner with whom she could play again at the game of life. So he hesitated. When he began to turn away from her, he felt cold between his shoulderblades, as if something evil might reach for him. But what could harm him now? Moreover, why should her aspirations be judged unworthy merely because he signified little to her? And who had she ever been to him? The girl to whom he had written those morbid poems had certainly not been Victoria, but his own figment. He rose up from her grave. She said nothing, but a cold foul gust blew up around him from behind, stinging and numbing his lips. Now the back of his neck began to tingle as if spiders scurried on it. Perhaps she was angry. What did anything matter? All his memories — of her, Luke, his life and even the moon — resembled midges streaming up out of the sweating grass: at intervals the cloud of them took on certain provisional shapes which might have meant something, whereas the solitary insect which he squashed against his cheek had been so arbitrarily itself that his interpretative apparatus could not distort it into anything. Admitting that his life had been as meaninglessly active as bright green sedges writhing in the river wind impelled him into a consoling valuation of meaninglessness. The women who had passed over him like cool river waves over greenish sand, and certainly Victoria herself, what had they signified — for what did anything, when no life could be seen whole and coherently except by something which outlived it? This thought, self-serving as it might have been, he swallowed like one of his pain pills. Returning to her, he knelt down again, expecting to surrender himself to the mercy of some unclean thing, but there was nobody.