After a stretch of time long enough to be embarrassing, even to a man alone, he relented, his punctures already congealed and crusting over in the unnatural manner they always did. This was the only pain he actually felt, which actually registered, the sear of the too-swift healing. His exhaustion was fed less by exertion than frustration, the closed loop of his thwarted rage, and he fell against the roots and lay staring up at the stilled canopy, the sky dimming to indigo behind the web of gnarled black limbs. The sight was vaguely Eastern in aspect, like a beautiful silk-screened panel, but then lovely for nothing, and he thought that this was the diseased tableau of his life: forever there to witness splendor, while death coolly drifted upon everything else. Up the hill only the chimney of the cottage loomed. If she cried out, if she called for him, would he stay silent? And if she didn’t see the morning, would he simply leave her in the bed for the huntsman to find, or else bury her, as he had buried so many others, dig the necessary hole, his best dark talent among all his dark talents?
THIRTEEN
JUNE SLEPT MOST OF THE NIGHT and on waking realized that Hector was gone from the cottage. She panicked and stumbled onto the floor and nearly hurt herself, but when she stepped outside she spotted him up the hillside from the hunter’s cottage, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. She practically ran up the rutted drive and would have leaped for the bumper had he accelerated but as she drew near she saw that he was asleep.
It was the first time she had seen him so, since they’d flown from the States, and she could study him for a moment. His seat was slightly reclined and his face was turned toward the window, his reddish-brown locks untouched by a single strand of gray. His complexion was a wonder to look at, even after all these years and despite his roughness and obvious disinterest in caring for himself. He glowed like a saint in some Renaissance painting but the rendering here was of a man clearly fallen, marked by the most subtle of colorations, an incipient, brooding shade. He was a shockingly beautiful man. She had always thought him so, from the moment they crossed paths that first day on the refugee road, even if his radiance had meant nothing to her. And yet there was something definitely restorative in simply regarding him now, a momentary suspension of the sentence on her body, her demise. She had always considered beauty more perilous than useful, and yet, when it persevered, it became its own element and property, indivisible, original. Something to have faith in. She should have left him undisturbed for a little longer but she was made irrationally anxious by the fact that he was literally in the driver’s seat and could easily motor away, and when she roused him with a tap on the glass he shivered ever so slightly, as might a child, the sight of which only honed her guilt.
She asked him to put the cabin back in order as best he could, and she added money to what he had left on the table for the owner, writing Mi dispiace across the top banknote with a grease pencil she’d found in a drawer, the sentiment of regret seeming more fitting than one of thanks. If anything, she was grateful to Hector for having made her stop and rest; she was definitely stronger today, or at least after waking him she was, the ground not shifting or rolling beneath her feet as it had been most of the last two days, her eyes able to look at an object without fixing on it so forcefully that everything else whirled about its axis in a furious, breakneck orbit. Among the many dozen complications and eventualities that Dr. Koenig had listed in his imperious fount-of-the-Maker tone was vertigo, a case of which she’d suffered once long before the cancer and was likely now not a simple disturbance of the inner ear but a sign that there might be tumors in her brain.
Of course she knew that the longer she survived, the more any extension would mean something like this, that the cancer would duly migrate and settle and prosper, and if during the past rounds of treatment she had yielded completely she would certainly give herself over now for as long as possible, endure the role of host to the last. In her painfully sentimental dreams of late, like the one she had had last night, the tumors were wards of her nursery and she was naming them as she would children, these eager clumps in her bones, in her lymph nodes, speckles on her liver and lungs, all racing to see which of them would bring her its final gift: You’re darlings, she said to them, in a warm, matronly voice. She was dressed in white burial garments, just as her great-grandmother had been enrobed as she lay on her funeral bier. She pressed her hands against the length of herself, her still-sturdy body.
Ah, thank you, thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Singer!
After closing up the hunter’s cottage they went back up to the car. She lost her footing on a stone while walking up the steep driveway and Hector offered to carry her up and although it wasn’t really necessary she let him. He lifted her easily, his arms girding her fragile spine, her fragile knees, and as her hand curled around his taut neck she drew herself close. She let her cheek lean on his shoulder and neck. He smelled grassy and sharp and there was a denser scent rising from under his shirt, like of a worked horse, and she wondered how long it had been since she’d been this close to a man. It had been David, of course, but he was admittedly overattentive to his hygiene and regularly used her body lotions and powders, and as he was remarkably smooth of skin and hairless (especially for a Jew, as he pointed out to her more than once) she would sometimes imagine when embracing him that it was a woman in her bed. Before David it was Nicholas, during his adolescence, when the air of his small bedroom was fetid and gymlike with soiled socks and clothes, and she’d briefly hold her breath on entering, and sometimes even when Nicholas hugged her. She didn’t feel guilty at the time-what guilt had she felt at all, in those days?-but the regret was now keen and though it would have been fitting for Hector to repel her it was nothing like punishment at all, quite the opposite rather, and now a welling arose low enough in her belly that she could almost believe it was not a pang of the illness.
“I’m sorry you had to sleep in the car,” she said to him. He was driving them slowly about the switchbacks of the wooded hillsides, braking and accelerating gently enough to minimize the tug of the turns. “When I woke up I realized there was no place for you to sleep.”
“I was only in the car for an hour or two.”
“You were awake the whole night? What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You weren’t drinking more?”
“I’m always doing that.”
“You weren’t thinking about driving off?”
He didn’t answer her.
She said, “You must be tired, anyway. I shouldn’t have woken you.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
And to look at him was to see that he was okay, at least on the surface, the only difference this morning being that he hadn’t shaved. Besides the drinking, it seemed to be his only habitual practice. He had shaved every morning they had been together (at least when they were housed in regular lodgings), which struck her as odd for a man who otherwise appeared willfully ensconced in a life so down in the mouth. But strangely enough the shadow of a day’s growth on his face made him seem only more respectable, not less, for in the new, still-creased denim shirt he’d changed into (one of a half-dozen she’d bought him on landing at the airport), he could easily be one of David’s square-jawed colleagues at a country home on the weekend, driving to the hardware store for a pet project in the yard.