She laughed at me for that.
I said, “Oh, you’re wild. You’re light. Even when you’re perfectly still you’re ready to be blown all around by the elements.”
Now she looked shocked. “You did a pretty good job of stammering up till now. But that sounds rehearsed. Either that’s a line of yours, or you’ve been thinking about me. Thinking actual words about me in your head.”
“I dreamed about you last night.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Have you had fantasies about me?”
To get back something of myself, I crossed my arms over my chest. Ten feet away the radio still played jazz. She was still standing. I was still sitting in a chair. I felt like a pupil, a slow one. “You’re a force on the planet, that’s for sure. Where did you get that far-out name?”
“Have you imagined me? Am I your fantasy?”
“All right, yeah. You certainly are.”
“And what have you fantasized, Michael Reed?”
“I don’t know. This conversation is getting pretty close to it.”
“Let me guess what you’re thinking…Okay…And the answer is no.”
“No?”
“No, they’re not redheads.”
“Who?”
“My sisters. They’re brunettes.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“But Goddess bleaches hers out platinum. She’s very L.A. All right — what were you really thinking?”
“I couldn’t possibly remember now.”
“I knew I could make you stop!”
“Okay, okay. I was thinking about your Fourth of July striptease competition. It’s only five days away.”
“Would you like to help me shave?”
“Shave?” That stopped my mouth for two long seconds. “Isn’t it a little early for that?” Although inside I said only, Sweet gah-dam Jesus.
“Come and sit outside.”
And I rose and followed her down the brief corridor, out the back door into the Midwest. She brought with her a small box of light wood — redwood, or cedar — built like a cigar box but naked of any design. When she saw me puzzling over it she opened the lid to show me it held a variety of envelopes, used envelopes, of many different sizes and colors, but generally of the sort for letters or greeting cards. We sat beside each other on the new grass, she with the box in her lap; and she fingered through the envelopes as if searching for one in particular. Her knee lay lightly against my hip. All this was fine, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted something more than mere physical touch. Something unexpected. Something impossible to foresee. I looked at my watch: just past seven, the sun hanging and swelling, the shadows long and cool, though the heat still clung to the land. A banana moon stood above the horizon. Some clouds way to the north; they might disappear or they might bring hail and tornadoes. After these four years in the Midwest I’d learned to expect any kind of weather at any moment. I had rejected the weather, in a way, had walled myself off from any approach of the elements, had made them my enemy after the weather had become, in effect, the murderer of my wife and daughter.
Flower said, “Will you give me a sample of your handwriting?”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. “I’m not sure.”
“Write down a few words for me. A sentence, a phrase, a name, anything.” She closed the box and set it in my lap. “Do you have a business card?”
Here I felt our movement toward the unforeseen, in the direction of something that couldn’t have been predicted. I don’t think I’ll try to explain what I mean by that. Instead I’ll hope it comes clear on its own. I put one of my business cards flat on the lid of the box and pushed the ball point from the pen with my thumb. A phrase? A name? I wrote: the name of the world — across the back of my card and set the box in Flower’s lap.
She looked at my writing and read the phrase aloud. She opened the lid and put the card in one of the envelopes and closed it up with all the others inside their box and held it in her lap again. Her smock was buttoned high, came up just below the cleft of her neck and breastbone. There in her pale skin were one or two unbearably thin blue veins.
Why she wanted to spend this time with me I could only guess, because I was afraid to ask. I sat beside her looking at the daylit moon, wanting to kiss her, but afraid to. Also I had a powerful urge to leave, to get away from her, or from myself in this situation, but that idea scared me, too, because I saw myself five minutes down the road, braking and considering, accelerating and stopping, maybe even turning the car around in the big fields, the only person in the only car from horizon to horizon, and then turning the car around yet once again and heading home, wanting to go back to her, but afraid to.
Now I’m going to interrupt myself, and I don’t know how to signal that except by saying it.
Looking over the pages of this reminiscence, I see I’ve misled. I’ve created the impression that what I’ve been aiming at is the account of a one-night stand, and that the item pending most crucially between Flower and me was my loss of a kind of late-life virginity. I’ve implied I’d had nothing to do with women since I’d lost my wife. That’s not true.
The worst of my disequilibrium had passed in a couple of years. I wouldn’t bore even a highly paid psychiatrist with the details of my love life, my sex life, during this period, except to say that it was quite a lot less than nothing — that is, I couldn’t bear to have so much as a single sexual thought, let a single desire so much as flicker in my mind, during the two years after I was widowed. Not only because my grief made me loyal to my wife, but also because I was grieving for someone who was dead, and death is such a physical thing. I didn’t want physical things. I didn’t even like facts about things, and in a secret way I came to hate the truth itself.
This extra dimension of loneliness, this revulsion for the world and even, at first, for the stuff of which it was composed, seemed unique at the time. But I think I see now that it was completely typical, and that what revolted me above all was the understanding that everything passes away.
So this sad insight didn’t first visit me while I waited with Flower for something to happen between us. And she wasn’t the woman who broke me out of the ice. A month or so after the second anniversary of my widowhood, I went to a prostitute. Or rather, she came to me, came to my hotel room in Washington where I was staying at the expense of the Senate Committee on Ethics, who were conducting hearings. (I was called to Washington, but never called to testify.) A tall woman in her thirties, the only prostitute I’ve ever met as such. I explained my situation to her, and she was very understanding, and she even refused payment, and we made love. At first she refused payment, that is, but afterward she suddenly wondered if I hadn’t been conning her with a sad story, and she wanted her money on general principles. Ultimately she decided I couldn’t have been so false about a part of life so real, and wouldn’t take the money. But I insisted. So she took it. And that is how that went.
I didn’t feel villainous, or soiled, either. I felt like I’d been with a woman, we’d meant something to each other, maybe not very much, and she’d passed along.
So this isn’t about that at all.
Am I making sense in this account? Am I intelligible? Or am I muttering? I think it stands a chance of being useful. That’s the point of writing it all down. It’s not just an aid to private introspection. But am I being too meditative? Too introspective?
The joint of Flower’s collarbones showed in the neck of her smock, and just below it the moles and imperfections in the flesh on her breastbone. To let my wife and child be dead. I didn’t think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower’s skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me.