What’s the matter? I said.
Because if this is about Molly then all I can tell you is you’re acting like a petulant idiot. Get over it. I realize this is a strange situation for you, it’s a strange situation for all of us, but it’s just what’s happened. I mean you might as well tell me now: do you still have feelings for her?
No, I said. I don’t.
Then what’s the problem?
We have a history.
Yes? Mal said. And?
And when he said that, somehow all the air just went out of me. Maybe he’s right, I thought: what difference does it make? Why should I think that what matters to me would matter to anyone else?
Okay, I said. Fine. I’ll fly out to Spokane tomorrow.
Mal relaxed. Well, you don’t have to look so glum, he said. It’s three days at the most. You have to be back Thursday for Jean-Claude’s thing.
Though in fact I wanted to be back for the debut of Milo’s Palladio piece, there was something about the way Mal said I had to that caught my attention.
Why? I said. You’ll be here for it, won’t you?
He smiled coyly. No, actually, he said. I’m leaving tomorrow too. I’m flying to Rome.
Rome?
He nodded. I’ll have to catch one of the subsequent performances.
I have to tell you, Mal, some of the clients we have flying in will be pissed when they get here and—
You can handle them, John, he said.
I couldn’t see why he was being so cryptic. Did I know about this? I said.
Actually, no one knows about it. I’m going back to Umbria, for the final renovations on the house. A week at the most.
He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. He stood up from his chair and leaned forward across the desk. In his tone of voice, in his every movement it was clear that he wanted to find some way to restore the old intimacy between us.
I want to spend my honeymoon there, he said to me. When I come back I’m going to ask Molly to marry me.
* * *
THERE WERE NO phones on planes back then. I tried once from the Newark airport and got my own voice on the machine. Of course, it was two in the afternoon, California time; you could have been anywhere. So then I spent another six hours, just as I had on the way out east less than a week before, in a kind of furious, helpless anticipatory limbo, knowing that you were below me somewhere, unable to communicate with you without actually finding you and holding you still. I still believed, I still believed, that I would find you back in our apartment, waiting for me. What is this power you have, to make me believe? I thought you’d have an explanation, a typically strange rationale for your odd behavior, and that I would have a right to demand that explanation. Not out of anger; never out of anger, where you were concerned. Maybe that was my mistake: you would have loved me more, or at any rate taken me more seriously, if instead of trying to talk you out of your own self-contempt I had shared in it, reinforced it, at least when provoked. But I wanted that explanation purely in the spirit of furthering my understanding of you.
There isn’t much else to tell. I took a cab straight from the San Francisco airport to our door, the last twenty bucks I had, by the way. The place was empty. I stood in the kitchen until a distinct visual memory of your leaving popped into my head through sheer force of desperation — a picture of you with a green canvas duffel bag with handles on it. I ran to the bedroom closet, but the bag wasn’t there. I looked under your bed, in the bathroom, in the hallway. Nothing was conclusive enough for me.
Then I sat and called your parents, back in Ulster.
Hello?
Mrs Howe? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s John.
Who?
I swallowed. John Wheelwright. Molly’s friend. I was just there.
Right. (There was a shuffling sound, as she sat up in bed I suppose, and she said quite clearly to her husband, No, it’s that friend of hers.) Sorry. It’s late here, you know. I was sleeping.
Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me, but it was past midnight there by then.
Where are you? she said.
Back in Berkeley.
Oh. (This with some distaste.) Can you put Molly on?
What?
Molly, Kay said. Is she there?
No, I said. I was calling to see if she’d come home yet.
Home here?
Yes.
No.
No word from her?
No, Kay said, a little impatiently. I don’t know where she is. We went and picked up the car today, it was where she said it was, but beyond that I have no idea. I guess she’s left again.
There was a long silence.
All right then? Kay said; and she hung up.
So that was that. You were nowhere, and I had no idea what had happened to change what existed between you and me. Whatever existed, actually, was unchanged; it still existed; here it was — our kitchen, our phone, our furniture, our bed. It only needed you to come back and take your place in it.
I say that was that, but of course it took me a long time to come to terms with the finality of it, to admit that to myself. And anyway, before I could even begin those endless skeptical inner repetitions of the fact that you really were gone, start wondering what that meant for me, how I could move forward from there — how I could move at all, in any direction! — there was one more thing to try.
I sat in a restaurant on Telegraph, drinking coffee in a plush threadbare armchair which I had turned around to face out the window, until a young man in a red shirt and khakis appeared across the street, holding a stack of pamphlets in one hand and carrying an old plastic milk crate under the other arm. He plopped the crate down in the middle of the sidewalk and stood next to it for a minute or more with his eyes closed, in what I gradually understood was a prayer. Then his eyes fluttered open and he hopped nimbly on to the crate and immediately went into a loud harangue of some sort (I couldn’t hear it — I was still in my chair across the street) with his eyes focused sharply on the empty space before him, a foot or so above the heads of the pedestrians. Those with the bad luck to be passing just as he started to speak could actually be seen to jump in surprise, and to turn around resentfully or curiously as they picked up their normal stride; within just a few seconds, though, the voice had blended into the street scene, and no one paid any attention to the preacher’s words at all.
I got up and walked across the street. It was Berkeley, so the cars just coasted to a stop and waited for me even though I was crossing in the middle of the block. The preacher had reddish-blond hair, already beginning to recede from his large, unlined forehead. His features were small and round, piggish you could almost say. He didn’t seem to see me, even when I came to a stop in front of him, right at his feet.
Are you Richard Howe? I said.
He didn’t so much as glance at me; he must have heard me, I thought, but then again maybe not — maybe he was in some kind of a trance state. Look around you, he shouted, addressing the crowd without really seeming to see it. Is this the life you wanted for yourself? The years on earth are over in the blink of an eye!
Are you Richard Howe? I said again. I have to talk to you. It’s important. It’s about your sister.
Where are you rushing to? To the office? To a store, to buy things?What are you rushing toward, really? Death, my friends, death! It will be here in the next instant! Beyond it lies eternity! Is there anything more worth preparing for than that? Does money matter, in the end? Do nice clothes matter? Jesus says …
And on like that for nearly an hour and a half. No one, I reasoned, could keep that volume and pace up indefinitely; so I sat on the pavement with my back up against the used-record store and waited. He never turned around. If I’d had a hat, I could have put it on the pavement by my feet and probably made a few bucks, which I needed.