"Nothing," said Janet. The soundless blows of the snowflakes against the glass.
Laur sat down at Janet's feet ("Shall I tell you something?") and explained an old fantasy of hers, snow and forests and knights and lovelorn maidens. She said that to anyone in love the house would instantly seem submarine, not a house on Earth but a house on Titan under the ammonia snow. "I'm in love," she said, reviving that old story about the mythical man at school.
"Tell me about Whileaway," she added. Janet put down her magazine. Indirection is so new to Miss Evason that for a moment she doesn't understand; what Laur has said is: Tell me about your wife. Janet was pleased. She had traced Laur's scheme not as concealment but as a kind of elaborate frivolity; now she fell silent. The little girl sat tailor-fashion on the living room rug, watching us.
"Well, tell me," said Laura Rose.
Her features are delicate, not particularly marked; she has a slightly indecently milky skin and lots of freckles. Knobby knuckles.
"She's called Vittoria," said Janet-how crude, once said!-and there goes something in Laura Rose's heart, like the blows of something light but perpetually shocking: oh! oh! oh! She reddened and said something very faintly, something I lip-read but didn't hear. Then she put her hand on Janet's knee, a hot, moist hand with its square fingers and stubby nails, a hand of tremendous youthful presence, and said something else, still inaudible.
Leave! (I told my compatriot)
First of all, it's wrong.
Second of all, it's wrong.
Third of all, it's wrong.
"Oh my goodness," said Janet slowly, as she does sometimes, this being her favorite saying after, "You are kidding me."
(Performing the difficult mental trick of trying on somebody else's taboos.)
"Now then," she said, "now then, now then." The little girl looked up. She is in the middle of something terribly distressing, something that will make her wring her hands, will make her cry. As a large Irish setter once bounded into my room and spent half the day unconsciously banging a piece of furniture with his tail; so something awful has got into Laura Rose and is giving her electric shocks, terrifying blows, right across the heart. Janet took her by the shoulders and it got worse. There is this business of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self. Laur was weeping with despair. Janet pulled her up on to her lap-Janet's lap-as if she had been a baby; everyone knows that if you start them young they'll be perverted forever and everyone knows that nothing in the world is worse than making love to someone a generation younger than yourself. Poor Laura, defeated by both of us, her back bent, glazed and stupefied under the weight of a double taboo.
Don't, Janet.
Don't, Janet.
Don't exploit. That little girl's sinister wisdom.
Snow still blew across the side of the house; the walls shook, muffled.
Something was wrong with the television set, or with the distance control, or perhaps some defective appliance somewhere in suburban Anytown sent out uncontrolled signals that no television set could resist; for it turned itself on and gave us a television salad: Maureen trying unsuccessfully to slap John Wayne, a pretty girl with a drowned voice holding up a vaginal deodorant spray can, a house falling off the side of a mountain. Laur groaned aloud and hid her face against Janet's shoulder. Janet-I-held her, her odor flooding my skin, cold woman, grinning at my own desire because we are still trying to be good.
Whileawayans, as has been said, love big asses. "I love you, I love you," said Laur, and Janet rocked her, and Laur-not wishing to be taken for a child-bent Miss Evason's head fiercely back against the chair and kissed her on the mouth.
Oh my goodness.
Janet's rid of me. I sprang away and hung by one claw from the window curtain.
Janet picked Laur up and deposited her on the floor, holding her tight through all the hysterics; she nuzzled Laur's ear and slipped off her own shoes. Laur came up out of it and threw the distance control at the television set, for the actress had been telling you to disinfect the little-mouse "most girl part" and the set went dead.
"Never-don't-I can't-leave me!" wailed Laur. Better to cry. Businesslike Janet unfastened her shirt, her belt, and her blue jeans and gripped her about the hips, on the theory that nothing calms hysterics so fast.
"Oh!" said Laura Rose, astounded. This is the perfect time for her to change her mind. Her breathing grew quieter. Soberly she put her arms around Janet and leaned on Janet. She sighed.
"I want to get out of my damned clothes," said Janet, voice unaccountably breaking in the middle.
"Do you love me?"
Dearest, I can't because you are too young; and some day soon you'll look at me and my skin will be dead and dry, and being more romantically inclined than a Whileawayan, you'll find me quite disgusting: but until then I'll do my best to conceal from you how very fond I am of you. There is also lust and I hope you understand me when I say I'm about to die; and I think we should go to a safer place where we can die in comfort, for example my room which has a lock on the door, because I don't want to be panting away on the rug when your parents walk in. On Whileaway it wouldn't matter and you wouldn't have parents at your age, but here-or so I'm told-things are as they are.
"What a strange and lovely way you have of putting it," Law said. They climbed the stairs, Laur worrying a bit at her trailing pants. She bent down (framed in the doorway) to rub her ankles. She's going to laugh in a minute and look at us from between her legs. She straightened up with a shy smile.
"Tell me something," she said in a hoarse, difficult whisper, averting her gaze.
"Yes, child? Yes, dear?"
"What do we do now?"
XIV
They undressed in Janet's bedroom in the midst of her piles of materiaclass="underline" books, magazines, sources of statistics, biographies, newspapers. The ghosts in the windowpanes undressed with them, for nobody could see in at the back of the house. Their dim and pretty selves. Janet pulled down the shades, lingering at each window and peering wistfully out into the dark, a shocking compound of familiar, friendly face and awful nude, while Laur climbed into Janet's bed. The bedspread had holes in it where the pink satin had worn thin. She shut her eyes.
"Put out the light."
"Oh no, please," said Janet, making the bed sway by getting into it. She held out her arms to the little girl; then she kissed her on the shoulder, the Russian way. (She's the wrong shape.) "I don't want the light," said Laur and jumped out of bed to turn it off, but the air catches you on your bare skin before you get there and shocks you out of your senses; so she stopped, mother-naked, with the currents of air investigating between her legs. "How lovely!" said Janet. The room is pitilessly well lit. Laur got back into bed-"Move over"-and that awful sensation that you're not going to enjoy it after all. "You have lovely knees," Janet said mildly, "and such a beautiful rump," and for a moment the preposterousness of it braced Laura Rose; there couldn't be any sex in it; so she turned off the overhead light and got back into bed. Janet had turned on a rose-shaded night lamp by the bed. Miss Evason grew out of the satin cover, an antique statue from the waist up with preternaturally living eyes; she said softly, "Look, we're alike, aren't we?" indicating her round breasts, idealized by the dimness. "I've had two children," she said wickedly and Laur felt herself go red all over, so unpleasant was the picture of Yuriko Janet-son being held up to one breast to suck, not, it seemed to Laur, an uncollected, starry-eyed infant but something like a miniature adult, on a ladder perhaps. Laur lay stiffly back and shut her eyes, radiating refusal.