“Look,” he said. “About your sign. I’m sorry. But I can’t keep out.”
“All right. I know.”
She hunched her shoulders, staring out over the fields to the distant freeway. The running metal thread of cars flicked and stabbed the sunglare back. “It doesn’t belong to me. Mostly I cant even get there any more.”
They set off across the fields.
“I get here about five-thirty in the morning, usually,” he said.
She kept silent.
“But I can’t get to the town on the mountain and back before work…” He was thinking aloud, slowly. “Next weekend. Labor Day. I get Sunday and Monday off. I can come then. They were—It seemed like they were asking me to come back.”
“They were.”
“O.K. So I could come then and stay a long time.” He mumbled off into silence again, then said abruptly, “So if you want to.”
After fifteen or twenty paces he said, “You helped me get out.”
Irene cleared her throat and said, “O.K. When?”
“Six in the morning all right? Sunday.”
“Fine.”
As they came up the bank below the gravel road he turned right.
“My car’s parked this way.”
“O.K. So long then.”
“Hey!”
He went shambling on.
“Hey, Hugh!”
He turned.
“You want a ride? You said you were late. Where do you live, anyway?”
“Kensington Heights.”
“O.K.”
As they walked toward the paint factory she said, “That must be a long walk from here. You don’t have a car?”
“Rent on the crappy apartment costs too much,” he said with sudden lucid violence.
“My stepfather’d sell you a car for fifty dollars.”
“Yeah?”
“It’d run all week.”
He didn’t get the joke, such as it was. He was dumb with fatigue. In her car he sat hunched up in the deathseat. He was bigger than anybody who had ever ridden in the car with her, it was full of him. He smelled of dried sweat, rank fear-sweat. The hair on the backs of his big, white hands was brassy gold. His thighs were thick. She said nothing to him as she drove except to ask directions. She let him out at the sixplex apartment house he showed her, and drove away relieved to be rid of the crowding bulk and presence. She had not told him where she lived although they had driven past the farm. Did she live there? She didn’t live anywhere else at the moment. For all she knew Rick and Patsi had made it up again by now, but screw them. Her mother wouldn’t mind having her home again for a while, and it would be O.K. if she could just keep out of Vic’s way so no trouble got started. She would be sleeping with Treese and that might discourage him. Or maybe not. But anyhow there was nowhere else to go until she found a place of her own. Maybe downtown. Did her mother need her nearby or was she just clinging to her mother? She ought to try. If only there was somebody who wanted to share an apartment downtown. At a stoplight she reached back to pick up and look at the alarm clock that lay on top of her stuff in the carton in the back seat. It was two-fifteen. She could go home and dump her stuff, and wash and eat something, and then start looking for an apartment. Maybe there would be something she could afford by herself. The Sunday papers were good for finding rentals, and there would still be time to go look at a place. Maybe she would find a place to live today, and not have to sleep at the farm at all, if she was lucky.
5
It was as if he had been blind and she had come to him, and his eyes had cleared to see her. Seeing her he saw the world, for the first time; there is no other way to see. Each act and object had its meaning, now, for when she had touched him her touch had taught him the language of life. Nothing was changed, but now it made sense. Apples three for twenty-nine and the canned snack pudding on sale eighty-nine for the first sixpack, all right, but that was the numbers and the words, and now he understood the equations, the grammar: the beauty of the world. The faces he had never seen before, because he had been afraid to look at the beauty of the world. People stood in line at his checkstand, restless and docile, obedient to hunger, their own hunger, their children’s. Mortal creatures have to eat, so they were here, in the lines, pushing the wire baskets. So they would come to die. They were very fragile. They were spiteful, hateful when they were tired out and their money couldn’t get them what they wanted or even what they needed; he felt their anger but it no longer angered or frightened him, for all things now contained the idea of her and were transfigured by it. The face of a little boy carried through the checkline by a tired mother, the dignity and patience of the little face and the heavy, unconscious grace of the mother’s holding arm, made him want to cry out, as if he had cut or burned his hand. Things hurt. He had been numb. The anesthetic had worn off, he was alive, feeling pain. But within the pain, the reason for the pain, was joy. Beneath every word he said or heard, within everything he saw and did, lay her name, and around her name like a halo, an armor of light, the unshaken joy.
He looked at every blonde woman who came through the store. None had hair like hers, soft and pale, finely curled like a fleece, but he looked at them with tenderness and liking because they resembled her by so much at least, by being blonde. But there would be no woman like her, here. No woman here could speak her language. Her voice was clear and soft. His last day of the three days in the town on the mountain she had worn a green dress, a soft, narrow dress fitted to her round, slight body. Her wrists and neck were delicate and very white. In her all other women were beautiful, but there was none like her. There could not be, for she was alone, there, in the other land, where the soul became itself.
In books, men said that they could die for such and such a woman. He had always thought it made poetry but no sense, a mere habit of words. He understood it now as meaning exactly what it said. He felt in himself the longing, the yearning to give so greatly to the beloved that nothing was left, to give all, all. To protect and guard her, to serve her, to die for her—the thought was unendurably sweet; again he caught his breath as if a knife had gone into him, when that thought came to him.
“You haven’t gone and joined that Swami Maha-Jiji or whatever it is, have you, Buck?”
He laughed.
“You got that sort of cross-eyed look they get, those hairy krisheners,” Donna said.
She teased him in all sympathy, and he could not long resist her. He told her as much of the miracle as he could. “I met this girl,” he said. Donna said, “I knew you did!” with delight and satisfaction. But of course she wanted to know more, and he regretted having said even so much. It was wrong. He could not talk about anything from the evening land here. There was no way to say it. “I met this girl” was not true. The truth was that he had seen a princess, that he loved her, that he would give his life for her. How could Donna understand that?
She was kindhearted. She seemed to realise that he was unhappy at having said anything, and she stopped teasing him or even asking questions. But when she looked at him there was a glint in her eye, a cheerful twinkle of complicity. He did not want to see it. Donna was O.K., Donna was a very nice person, but how could anybody like that understand what had happened to him?—the strangeness, the mystery, the tragic fear; the fair, imperiled woman whom he loved in silence, the silence of worship, the silence of the unchanging twilight of the forests of that world.
This world of daylight and the night was strange enough, all that week. He had expected his impatience to return to the town on the mountain would make the waiting hard, but it was not so. Indeed, he savored and treasured these days when, at work or walking home or at home, he could cherish the thought of his princess and let her name fill his mind, instead of standing clumsy and tongue-tied in her presence, unable to speak to her and only guessing what she said.