“Come, let’s walk to the lake. Oh, I’m so damn happy to see you!” she said, and squeezed my hand, and together we walked in dazzling sunlight to where the lake lay placid and still. I half expected to witness an arm rising from the water, Excalibur extended to the knight bearing glad tidings, Sarah’s White Knight.
Jake took up a position some hundred yards from us, leaning against the parchment-paper bark of a punk tree.
“It’s so long between visits,” Sarah said. She was still holding my hand. She kept squeezing it, as though reassuring herself that I was real. “When you aren’t here, I dream that you’re walking beside me, I pretend that Brunhilde is really you wearing an attendant’s disguise. When she watches me showering, I make believe it’s you watching me. When I lie alone in bed at night... forgive me, I know I’m saying too much. How have you been, Matthew? I kept hoping you’d call, why didn’t you call? If only you knew how much I was longing for the sound of your voice. You look so nice today, all cool and clean in your seersucker suit. I love your cheerful tie, too, is it Ralph Lauren? Promise me you’ll never change the way you comb your hair. I’d die if you started parting it in the middle, like Gatsby. He did part his hair in the middle, didn’t he? If he didn’t, he certainly should have. Listen to me rattling on, you’d think I loved the sound of my own voice. Do you like the sound of my voice, Matthew? you’ll notice I didn’t use the word ‘love.’ ‘Do you like the way I sound?’ the maiden asked cautiously.”
“I love the way you sound,” I said.
“Rambling like one of the keeners... Ululalia, here I come,” she said, and grinned like a six-year-old. “So,” she said, “what treasure, Uncle? Do you know the scene in Henry the Fifth, where the French ambassador brings him a gift from the Dauphin, and... Exeter, I think it is... opens the casket, and Henry asks, ‘What treasure, Uncle?’ and Exeter gravely replies, ‘Tennis balls, my liege?’ Do you know that scene? I just adore that scene because Henry tells off the ambassador with a sort of controlled rage, do you know the lines?”
She stood suddenly, her back to the lake, sunlight streaming through the white cotton skirt and silhouetting her long legs. She raised one clenched fist to the sky, struck a kingly pose, and said in a deep voice quite unlike her own, “‘We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us. His present and your pains we thank you for. When we have match’d our rackets to these balls, we will in France — by God’s grace — play a set shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.’ And then he really gets sore, Matthew,” she said in her own voice. “Don’t you remember the scene? He tells the ambassador — wait a minute, let me get in character again.” She cleared her throat and struck her regal pose again. In the same deep voice as before, but edged with menace now, she said, “ ‘And tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gunstones, and his soul shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance that shall fly with them.’ ” Her voice became increasingly louder and fiercer, her green eyes seemed to grow a shade darker. “ ‘For many a thousand widows shall his mock mock out of their dear husbands, mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down.’ ” And now her voice lowered to a whisper more threatening than a shout would have been. “ ‘And some are yet ungotten and unborn that shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn.’ Oh God, I love it!” she said in her own voice. “Don’t you love it when people cut other people down for trying to make fools of them? ‘Shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn.’ Don’t you adore the way that rolls off the tongue? Try it, Matthew,” she said. “you’ll see what I mean.”
“ ‘Shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn,’ ” I said.
“See?”
“Yes.”
She sat beside me on the bench again. She took my hand and squeezed it.
“Now tell me,” she said, and grinned again. “Do you think he was making a pun?”
“Who?”
“Shakespeare. When he says, ‘And tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gunstones.’ Does he mean the tennis balls? Or does he mean the Dauphin’s balls? I used to wonder about that all the time. Am I shocking you again?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and sighed in mock relief. “Do you ever think of me?” she asked suddenly. “When you’re not here, I mean. Or maybe you don’t even think of me when you are here, who knows? Maybe right this minute you’re thinking of a legal brief you have to prepare, or a tort — were you tort to prepare torts in law school? Do you think of me?”
“I think of you, yes.”
“A lot?”
“A lot.”
“I think of you all the time,” she said. “All the time. The only thing that keeps me from going nuts like all the rest of them is thinking of you. You have no idea what it’s like being here, Matthew. Anna the Porn Queen telling me day and night about the new movie she’s planning, asking me if I want to star in it, promising me she’ll make me famous, the poor soul. And Herbert the Hibernator...”
“Who?”
“Herbert Hyams. I call him Herbert the Hibernator because he thinks he’s a bear.” She laughed suddenly. “I know it’s hard to accept the notion that a human being can think of himself as a bear, actually believe he’s a bear, but that’s what Herbert believes. He asked all of us to call him Teddy. Not now, not while he’s in hibernation. He won’t be coming out of hibernation till May, which is when he says the winter will really be over and his coat will be nice and thick. Meanwhile, he doesn’t want anyone to talk to him. You can’t talk to a bear when he’s hibernating because it’ll upset his sleep and he’ll lose months and months of growing time. That’s what Herbert calls it. Growing time. If you try to tell him that a bear’s coat is thicker in the winter, when he needs it thick, and not in the springtime, when he comes out of hibernation, Herbert will say, ‘What do you know about bears?’ Totally bonkers, old Herbert.” She tilted her nose snootily, as if she’d just smelled something particularly noisome. “The people one must associate with in a dump like this,” she said, and laughed again.
“You’ll be out of here soon,” I said.
“Oh good, are we planning an escape?” she said, and clapped her hands together. “I’m crazier than usual today, don’t you think?” she said. “You drive me crazy, Matthew.”
“You’d better not be crazy next week,” I said.
“Why? What’s next week? Anyway, how can you tell a crazy person not to be crazy? Do you think we can turn it on and off? You turn me on, Matthew, did I ever mention that to you? Are you really getting me out of here?”
“I hope to.”
“Hope the Hopeful,” she said.
I smiled.
“Ah, he smiles, my champion.”
“Do you want to hear this, or don’t you?”
“Pray tell me, sir,” she said, and rose suddenly and extended her hand to me. I took her hand. We began walking around the lake. And it was summertime in Chicago, and on Lake Michigan there were sailboats on the water and somewhere someone was playing a banjo and I walked holding the hand of a sixteen-year-old girl with long blonde hair and sparkling green eyes and I told her of my dreams and the banjo plinked like splintered sunlight as we walked.