“I love you.”
“You do?”
“I sure do,” she said. “James is listening to me and pointing to himself and saying, ‘Me too.’ ”
“Oh, my lord,” said Lucien.
Emily turned off the television and looked at Lucien coming into the living room. “I just saw you with all those dwarfs on TV. What country is that, for crying out loud?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You can tell they’re foreign as hell,” said Emily “But that’s the first time I saw how you’d fixed up the spring. I mean, I expected a lot, but you’ve been a busy beaver, haven’t you?” She smiled at him fixedly. The room was filled with her perfume, a smell Lucien remembered as a fragrance favored in the big cities of Central America. “Have you turned over a new leaf?”
“Why are you wearing so much eye makeup?”
“Answer mine first.”
“Yeah,” said Lucien. “I have.”
“Well, it’s sort of a new me too. The best of the old and the best of the new. If you’re not crazy about it, you get a refund at the door.”
“At the door?”
“At the door.”
She went into the downstairs bedroom and began throwing things into piles on the floor. “I want to take a dip in my old swimming hole. Es posible?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that’s fine, because I do want to do that. Maybe later, after the dwarfs are sleeping.”
“They’re just small. They’re not dwarfs.”
“Shall we measure them? Where’s your sense of humor! Lucien?”
“You can have everything back,” said Lucien. “You can have it all.”
“You sound exactly like a man coming out of surgery,” Emily laughed. She looked ravishing in this off-center attempt to appear cheap or to be in disguise, which was more likely what it was. “Besides that, I just can’t figure where all this fits in. You’ve made so much of yourself.”
The moon came straight down through the skylight, and the pool was empty except for Emily and Lucien, who swam in its depths. “I want it like poison,” Emily said. “That’s how I want it and that’s how I’m going to get it.” Her silvery hair was almost invisible floating out against the surface. She tilted her head back and looked straight through the skylight. “After that, I want you to give me a room right here at my old swimming hole.”
20
The band was playing “Red River Valley.” Lucien sat with the mayor and the rest of the party, nearly forty people including the convocation from their sister city. Flatware accumulated with course after course of Henchcliff’s food. The little people were eating with their hands and radiating a rare and genial mood that affected the earnest citizens around them. Wick Tompkins was there too with the grin of a sprite. He tried their eating methods and praised them. Lucien called down the table to Wick, jumping his eyebrows in a gesture meant to break the ice. He said, “I have to talk to you.” The little people stared around in incomprehension. Their elder, who spoke English, cried out, “Party time!” with a hopeful smile. Lucien went down to Wick’s end of the table.
“Emily’s here.”
“I thought something was the matter with you.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Have yourself a couple of belts. You’ve got a speech to make.” Wick was wearing a striped suit, and his face was as blank as that of a bystander at an excavation. “I’m afraid you’re all alone on this one.”
“The trouble is, I still have some feeling for Emily.”
“No, Lucien,” said Wick. “You love Suzanne and little what’s-his-name, little four-eyes.”
“Speech! Speech! Speech!” They were clapping their hands and repeating the imprecation while looking straight at Lucien. He returned to his seat and stood for a moment until it was quiet. Then he spoke of his town and his country and his life. He was not afraid of losing his listeners. He knew he still had them as he talked about children and the next world. When he sat down they applauded while the elder and his closest aides cried out, “Top brands!” with such merriment and accord and humanity that in it was a kind of sacrament between them all. Lucien couldn’t imagine where it was coming from.
When the meal was finished and the milling began, Lucien returned to the house and went upstairs. Emily was stretched out on the bed with her hands over her forehead like a cloth. He couldn’t see her eyes. “I hope that you can appreciate that I am coming off an extremely checkered year.”
“I understand,” said Lucien, aching with sympathy.
“Did the sad tale of W. T. Austinberry make it this far north?”
“Yes, it did.”
“A sad tale for all.”
“Yes,” said Lucien, shocked.
“I shot him with this.” She held up the pistol. It was a polished, thin, flat thing. Lucien felt a fleeting, mad regret that he hadn’t found a way of exchanging W.T. for Kelsey. Then he knew it was crazy. It was alarming to feel the desire to go on rescuing Emily.
She reclined on her side. He found himself staring. “And don’t imagine you’re the only one who wonders why I am back. I had a vivid, I’m telling you vivid, life among those special American people who cannot return to the country. It is a superb club composed of the most interesting people that our society produces. You ought to look into it. Membership usually requires doing something awful, but where is it written life is to be easy? We even had a couple of Nazis. Not that I approve. But they were gentlemanly in all respects, and more than anybody else in the group, they seemed to know how to dress fashionably in the tropics. You know? The rest of us were rolling up our sleeves and gleaming with perspiration. I can only imagine we must have seemed pathetic. But that life down there takes time to learn. As I speak of it, Lucien, I grow more and more nostalgic. Obviously W.T. didn’t fit into any of that. Till my dying day, I will see W.T. wearing cowboy boots on those beautiful beaches. And believe you me, whoever said the ones in the big hats are the premature ejaculators had that one right.”
“Why weren’t you tried?” Lucien asked.
“Some very good American friends found me one of those countries you can spit across, and we went there in a sport-fishing boat. And that little country was just full of people who couldn’t go back to their little countries. So I found myself in a society that was entirely less attractive than the one I had just left. But if it could have been proven that I killed W.T., it was because in his desperate, misguided adoration of me he began to behave just exactly as my husband had, though he never quite reached the heights of beating me, slamming my hands in car doors, selling my piano and all but kenneling me. In short, I have not had clear sailing. Do you think I have?” She was crying, her rage and grief showing all at once.
Lucien was tormented. He had to get out of there. He told Emily that he had to be at the spring by closing time and went out of the house, leaving her upstairs with the curtains blowing.
The bar was still nearly full of customers. When Lucien walked in, Wick cried out from a bar stool, “ ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and sore vexed. For ofttimes he falleth into the fire and oft into the water.’—Matthew seventeen.”
“That’s nice,” said Lucien coldly. “Everyone should read the Bible. It’s not getting the play in bars it once did.”
“Are you gonna stand there till you fall to China?” said Wick drunkenly. “Or are you gonna drink?”
“Drink.” Lucien sat at the bar.
“Lucien,” said Wick, “there’s a time to try and a time to fly and a smart bird knows why.”