“All right,” Greta said flatly, indicating nothing. Max moved the picture, selected another. He showed her seven, all told. The last four were familiar to Carol; they had been done since their marriage. The last was the one finished the night before, under the special daylight fluorescence.
“All right,” Greta said.
“That’s all I care to show you, Greta,” Max said.
Greta stood up. She walked aimlessly across the studio, tapped a cigarette on the back of her hand, lit it. The lighter made a small click, loud in the silence.
“Do it gently,” Carol pleaded silently.
“I don’t know,” Greta said, her voice oddly thin. “You see, I honestly don’t know.” It was as though she were pleading with Max to understand why she didn’t know. “Your work is strange, Max, and it’s powerful. Those first two or three were nothing. Exhibitionism. Muscle-flexing.”
“That’s why I showed them to you, Greta. I was exploring then. I didn’t really know where I wanted to go. But now... it feels right for me. Not all the way right, of course.”
“It’s a pretty complete break, you know.”
“Five years ago I knew it had to be that way. But I couldn’t do it. Just in the last year.” He walked over to Carol and put his arm around her waist as though in that way he were explaining something to Greta.
Greta lost a lot of her indecision. She turned toward Max. “Just give me a little time. I’ll be back. I know I’ll be back. That flower... neat little people have been doing flowers so long that you forget a flower is actually—”
“—Actually pretty primal,” Max said. “Pretty rough in its own way. All of them a little bit of a Venus’-flytrap, but big enough to swallow a man, if he lies down and looks at it grass-level, forgetting the prettiness, seeing just the meat and life of it.”
“I’ll be back. Until then we won’t talk about it, Max.”
Carol was surprised at the way they shook hands, quite solemnly. They ate on the porch in what was left of the day, and finished when the beach was dusk-purple, the stars beginning to show. It was an odd meal. Carol, in joy at the narrowness of the escape, knew that she was talking too much, but she couldn’t stop.
“Now I must go,” Greta said. “It’s good to know you, Max. Walk me out to the car, Carol.”
They stood by the car in the deep dusk. Max was singing, off key, in the kitchen. Carol could taste sea-salt on her lips. “I don’t know how to thank you, Greta, for understanding what I tried to say. If you’d told him how bad they are—”
Greta gasped. She took Carol’s shoulders and shook her strongly, gently. “What are you trying to say? Bad? How can you know? I don’t know. Good and bad can be determined when you use established rules. Then along comes someone outside the rules.”
“If he could have a show, then...” Carol said, uncertainly, feeling guilt as though in some obscure way she had betrayed Max.
“He’s not ready. He knows it. He wouldn’t permit a show yet. He’s got enough to become a cheap fad right now. A cheap, profitable fad.”
“But I—”
“Carol, dear, look at them sometime. Forget all you think you know. He’s learning to say, in his own way, that this is a wild, mad, wonderful world and every small thing in it shares in the madness and the wonder. What he is saying is coming from a whole and complete man.”
Greta had spoken the last few words in a tense half-whisper. She turned so that what was left of the light touched her face. She smiled crookedly. “I do go on, don’t I?”
“I didn’t know,” Carol said, quite humbly.
Greta kissed her cheek. “In a hundred years you may be in all the biographies. Cheventza’s wife. Or he may never get beyond the point he’s reached. Either way, Carol, I—”
“You what?” Carol asked.
“I envy you with all my heart,” she whispered.
They stood in the dusk-silence and heard the drum of the waves.
“Well, I’m on my horse,” Greta said brightly.
“You will come back?”
“In a year. A year should do it, one way or the other.”
Greta opened the car door and slid behind the wheel. “Take care of him,” she said. She started the motor quickly and drove away. The blue sedan rocked and swayed down the uneven gravel road, twin red taillights glowing.
Carol stood there long after the car had gone. At first she wanted to run in, have him hold her tightly, confess to him her lack of faith in him. Then she realized that her faith or lack of it must not intrude. He had worked well in the face of her carefully concealed skepticism. Now there was more reason than ever for nothing to change. To keep on living as they had — that was the pattern.
There would be days now of warm laughter and kisses that would taste of sea-salt, and night walks on the beach and the strength of his arms. And sooner or later he would slip away to that secret place within him where he worked, unconscious of time.
And she knew that whenever it happened, her loneliness would be no less intense, no less painful. But her pain would not be pointless, either; for if the very act of losing him sometimes was her part, then she would do her part — and make it a piece of the whole that was their happiness. No, nothing must change. Nothing — for this, as it was, was the fact of togetherness.
