Odette sat up and stared out the windshield into space. Pinky moved the car back out onto the highway and picked up speed.
“We don’t do that in New York,” rasped Odette. She cleared her throat.
“No?” Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh.
“No, it’s, um, the cash machines. You just … you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you’re just always”—her hand sliced the air—“there.”
“PLEASE DO NOT touch the formations,” the cave tour guide kept shouting over everyone’s head. Along the damp path through the cave there were lights, which allowed you to see walls marbled a golden rose, like a port cheddar; nippled projections, blind galleries, arteries all through the place, chalky and damp; stalagmites and stalactites in walrusy verticals, bursting up from the floor in yearning or hanging wicklessly in drips from the ceiling, making their way, through time, to the floor. The whole cave was in a weep, everything wet and slippery; still ocher pools of water bordered the walk, which spiraled gradually down. “Nature’s Guggenheim,” said Odette, and because Pinky seemed not to know what she was talking about, she said, “That’s an art museum in New York.” She had her sunglasses perched high on her head. She looked at Pinky gleefully, and he smiled back at her as if he thought she was cute but from outer space, like something that would soon be made into a major motion picture and then later into a toy.
“… The way you can remember which are which,” the guide was saying, “is to remember: When the mites go up, the tights come down …”
“Get that?” said Pinky too loudly, nudging her. “The tights come down?” People turned to look.
“What are you, hard of hearing?” asked Odette.
“A little,” said Pinky. “In the right ear.”
“Next we come to a stalagmite which is the only one in the cave that visitors are allowed to touch. As we pass, it will be on your right, and you may manhandle it to your heart’s content.”
“Hmmmph,” said Pinky.
“Really,” said Odette. She peered ahead at the front of the group, which had now gathered unexcitedly around the stalagmite, a short stumpy one with a head rubbed white with so much touching. It had all the appeal of a bar of soap in a gas station. “I think I want to go back and look at the cave coral again.”
“Which was that?” said Pinky.
“All that stuff that looked like cement broccoli. Also the chapel room with the church organ. I mean, I thought that looked pretty much like an organ.”
“… And now,” the guide was saying, “we come to that part of our tour when we let you see what the cave looks like in its own natural lighting.” She moved over and flicked a switch. “You should not be able to see your hand in front of your face.”
Odette widened her eyes and then squinted and still could not see her hand in front of her face. The darkness was thick and certain, not a shaded, waltzing dark but a paralyzing coffin jet. There was something fierce and eternal about it, something secret and unrelieved, like a thing not told to children.
“I’m right here,” Pinky said, stepping close, “in case you need me.” He gave her far shoulder a squeeze, his arm around the back of her. She could smell the soupy breath of him, the spice of his neck near her face, and leaned, blind and hungry, into his arm. She reached past the scratch of her own sweater and felt for his hand.
“We can see now how the cave looked when it was first unearthed, and how it had existed eons before, in the pitch dark, gradually growing larger, opening up in darkness, the life and the sea of it trapped and never seeing light, a small moist cavern a million years in the making, just slowly opening, opening, and opening inside.…”
WHEN THEY SLEPT TOGETHER, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.
“When ya going back to New York?” he asked, and because it was in less than four weeks, she said, “Oh, I forget.”
Pinky got out of bed. He was naked and unselfconscious, beautiful, in a way, the long, rounded lines of him, the stark cliff of his back. He went over to the VCR, fumbled with some cassettes in the dark, holding each up to the window, where there was a rainy, moony light from the street, like a dream; he picked up cassette after cassette until he found the one he wanted.
It was a tape called Holocaust Survivors, and the title flashed blood red on the television screen, as if in warning that it had no place there at all. “I watch this all the time,” said Pinky, very quietly. He stared straight ahead in a trance of impassivity, but when he reached back to put an arm around Odette, he knew exactly where she was, slightly behind one of his shoulders, the sheet tight across her chest. “You shouldn’t hide your breasts,” he said, without looking. But she stayed like that, tucked close, all along the tracks to Treblinka, the gates to Auschwitz, the film lingering on weeds and wind, so unbelieving in this historical badlands, it seemed to want, in a wave of nausea and regret, to become perhaps a nature documentary. It seemed at moments confused about what it was about, a confusion brought on by knowing exactly.
Someone was talking about the trucks. How they put people in trucks, with the exhaust pipes venting in, how they drove them around until they were blue, the people were blue, and could be shoveled out from a trapdoor. Past some barbed wire, asters were drying in a field.
When it was over, Pinky turned to her and sighed. “Heavy stuff,” he said.
Heavy stuff? Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then stopped again. Who on earth was entitled to such words?
Who on earth? She felt, in every way it was possible to feel it, astonished that she had slept with him.
SHE WENT OUT with him again, but this time she greeted him at his own door, with a stiff smile and a handshake, like a woman willing to settle out of court. “So casual,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t know. You East Coast city slickers.”
“We got hard hearts,” she said with an accent that wasn’t really any particular accent at all. She wasn’t good at accents.
When they slept together again, she tried not to make too much of it. Once more they watched Holocaust Survivors, a different tape, out of sequence, the camera still searching hard for something natural to gaze upon, embarrassed, like a bloodshot eye weary and afraid of people and what they do. They set fire to the bodies and to the barracks, said a voice. The pyres burned for many days.
Waves lapped. Rain beaded on a bulrush. In the bathroom she ran the tap water so he couldn’t hear as she sat, ill, staring at her legs, her mother’s legs. When had she gotten her mother’s legs? When she crept back to his bed, he was sleeping like a boy, the way men did.