At this period I was leading an extremely solitary life. I stayed up all night, went to bed at six or seven in the morning, and slept until three in the afternoon. I avoided my parents as much as possible and began eating dinner alone in the kitchen long after they were through. These strategies, developed at first to enable me to proceed undisturbed with my various projects, now permitted me to spend a great deal of time with Olivia. She was particularly vivid to me after eleven o’clock, when my parents went to bed and the whole summer night lay open before us. I would imagine her opening the front screen door and the front wooden door, making her way through the moonlit living room past the mahogany bookcase, past the round mahogany table with the old chain-pull lamp…Or I would creep down the attic stairs and down the carpeted stairs and through the moonlit living room into the warm dark-blue summer night. Olivia would be waiting for me. I would see her sitting in the front yard against a fencepost that divided her face into moonlight and shadow, or perhaps waiting around a corner under a sugar maple. And we would set off on a long, detailed, scrupulously imagined walk.
All streets pleased us: the ranch house neighborhood with its rows of identical basketball posts that cast long precise shadows ending in parallelograms, the rural lanes shaded by tall sycamores and Norway maples, the small center of town with its red and yellow window displays: a basket of cheeses wrapped in bright green cellophane, a luminous arrangement of volley-balls and gleaming tennis rackets and exercise bikes, a watch rising and falling in a glass of water, a mannequin with tight black curls, yellow bikini, and silver sunglasses. Olivia studied these displays avidly. She liked to seek out some incongruous detail, like the white plastic spoon resting on the shiny black seat of an exercise bike. She always waited till the last moment before ducking into doorways at the approach of car lights, a habit that made me uneasy; my uneasiness made her impatient. I was calmer on dark rural roads in the north part of town, where crickets shrilled in the long spaces of dark between the light-pools of solitary streetlights. It was understood between us that I was in love with Olivia and that she did not love anyone.
One hot evening as I lay on my bed in the dark and awaited the adventures of the night, I heard a faintly creaking footstep on the attic stairs. I sat up instantly. It was much too early for Olivia, who at that very moment was brushing her hair on the other side of town with a tortoiseshell hairbrush that had recently sprung into existence. The hairbrush bothered me. I didn’t like things springing into existence, but there it was and I couldn’t get rid of it. Another footstep sounded. It was unheard of for my mother or father to intrude on my privacy. After a pause there was another footstep higher up, and in this intermittent and ghostly manner the footsteps ascended, sometimes creaking and sometimes failing to creak, as if the climber were fading in and out of existence. As I imagined the foot rising to the topmost stair in preparation for entering the cold part of the attic, there was a startling knock on the door. “Come in!” I half shouted. The door stuck in the jamb, hesitated, and flew open.
Framed by attic light, my shadowy father loomed in the doorway. He was smoking his curved pipe and wearing his robe and slippers. The room was dark except for the light coming from the open door, and as my father hesitated I said, “I wasn’t asleep, just resting. You can turn on the—”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said dryly, shuffling forward in the half-dark and stepping over books standing in knee-high piles on the ragged rug. A pile of books toppled softly but my father kept coming.
“I see you’re working,” he remarked. “No, don’t get up, I’ll be only a minute. There?” He pointed with his pipe at the shadowy armchair wedged into a corner near the head of the bed. He sat down heavily, removed his pipe, and looked down at the bowl. I could hear him breathing heavily from his climb. “I’m afraid what I have to say is drearily predictable.” He thrust the pipe into his mouth and sucked rapidly, covering and uncovering the bowl with two fingers. “Terrible draw. You wouldn’t happen to have a pipe cleaner. Never mind.” He removed the pipe from his mouth, brought it close to his eye, and lowered it to his knee. “Trite scene, the elderly father admonishing his wayward son. However. I want you to come to a definite decision about your future. I have no objection to supporting your”—here he made a fluttering motion with one hand—“curious way of life, but I cannot do so indefinitely. I understand of course that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I certainly hope so. But it isn’t so much my philosophy I’m thinking of as my bankbook. You don’t happen to have a match. Deuce take it. Never mind. Your mother and I are in agreement, a remarkable fact in itself and one worth pondering. Sooner or later you’re going to have to make your own way in the world and I suggest you give the matter some serious thought. Fortunately for you, my pipe has gone out. Bear in mind that this interview is as disagreeable to me as it is to you. It is, however, over. Oof, these old bones. No no, please. Sit still. I prefer to be thought of as a ghost. Well then, Rob. Have a profitable evening, or should I say morning. Life is — well, yes: life. Night.”
Slowly he shuffled from the room, stepping with exaggerated care over bookpiles and strewn underwear. In the light of the doorway he looked massive and wild. A thick ruff of iron-gray hair circled his skull. I listened to his footsteps creaking intermittently down the attic stairs.
Now this was a triply unwelcome intrusion. In the first place, I had been looking forward eagerly to my night of roaming with Olivia, and my attention was now scattered. In the second place, I had carefully put aside the tedious consideration of my ludicrous future. And in the third place, I hadn’t been paying much attention to my aging father, whose sudden appearance struck me with all the force of a haunting. He had been more or less reasonable with me, in his ironic way — a brilliant maneuver, for it had undermined my capacity to feel indignation.
That night Olivia was waiting for me in one of the Scotch pines in the side yard. She climbed down, shaking the branches, and brushed the needles from her blouse and skirt. Olivia was like that: despite her quietness, her air of remoteness, she had bursts of mischievous gaiety. “This is for you, Robert,” she said, and handed me a pinecone. I was unused to her voice, which struck me as a little ghostly. “And this is for me.” She thrust a pinecone in her hair. “Tonight I’d like to go to — oh, Paris. Why don’t we go to Paris? That way.” She pointed down the road. Her playful mood unnerved me, and fevered me too, for she had more dash and daring than I; that night we wandered farther than ever before, beyond the parkway at the north end of town, and returned only when the streetlamps grew pale against the graying of the sky.
Am I understood? Am I? To be with Olivia was for me a serene exhilaration, a fierce peacefulness. Our intimacy was that which only a creator and creature can know. Unable to imagine my life without her, I began to wait for her each night with a harsh, a hectic impatience that only her appearance could soothe away.