“What way?”
“The way all lovers talk. You know.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only know before. Before people are lovers, I mean.”
“After, the same.” He propped his head on his fist and looked down at her. “What do they talk of. They say each other’s names. They describe each other, too. To each other, you know?”
“No.”
“They never tire of it. The hair, the eyes. Never tire. They ask each other questions, endlessly, to know more. What do you love, what do you need, what is favorite poem, favorite color.”
Kit drew a cigarette from his pack and held it between her fingers. “My favorite color,” she said. “Is the color in a bottle of Coke when you lift it to the light and the light falls through it. That dark bright red brown.”
He laughed.
“Really. Sorry.”
“The color of your hair,” he said. He put his hand on her hair, his fingers in the curls. “The color exactly.”
She shut her eyes, to feel his hand so strangely light on her. “What do you love,” she said. “What are you afraid of, what do you need.” She lay still, seeming to have become something other than flesh, electricity maybe or pale silk, and wondered what she would do, what would become of her, if he were to answer.
“I need you, Kit,” he said.
When she opened her eyes he was not smiling. She didn’t doubt what he said, not then or ever after; but after a moment she said, “Why?”
“To save my soul,” he said. “Or perhaps only my life.”
Another flicker of fire around the world, and then a pause, and then nearer thunder.
“Why did you say that?” Kit whispered. “What did you mean?”
He was sweating, big drops standing at his brow line and along his lip.
“I’m doing all I can,” she said. “It’s just such a hard language…”
He shook his head quickly, no no. He said nothing more, though she went on listening. She knew that he didn’t answer her because he couldn’t, because for the first time—she thought it was the first time—he didn’t know or didn’t have the words, not yet.
He laid his arm along the couch’s back, which made a hollow for her at his side, and cautiously she entered it, turning into him as though within him or within the circle of his arm were a big far country, whose border only she had so far crossed: she was coming to know how big it was, and that she probably never would go very far within it.
“Rain,” he said.
The storms that rolled over the land unhindered in that month didn’t cool it; it would seem to Kit later on that nowhere she had ever been, rain forest or desert or Asian city, was ever as hot as that Midwest plain could be on a July night when the sun bloodied the west and the temperature did not fall and wouldn’t fall till the dark of the morning. On such nights they drove his convertible into town, to eat at the nearly empty restaurants and go to air-conditioned movies. She took him to see Cocteau’s Orfée at the art theater. They were almost alone there. Beautiful Orpheus in his nice suit received messages from his Muse over the car radio; Falin laughed lightly and crossed his legs impatiently. Only when the Angel of Death took Orpheus to the Underworld, passing through the mirror (a lovely obvious silly trick), did she feel him quiet and attentive beside her.
“Alice,” Kit whispered.
“Who is Alice?”
“She went through a mirror. Shh.”
Chic Mme. Death, like a Vogue model in her black sedan, escorted by two black motorcyclists: and Orpheus looked back at Eurydice in the rearview mirror. Kit heard Falin make a small noise, of appreciation or maybe not.
“I do not much like such grandiosity,” he said afterward. “Eurydice is to me better image of poyt. She who must stay, who cannot return.”
“But nobody can.”
“Yes.”
What he liked better was big expensive Hollywood soap operas, where people lived in houses slung over California ravines or on rocks by the turbulent sea, who were architects or surgeons or best-selling authors, whose wives suffered from too much love or too little, wept and brooded, hardly noticed the glamour of their surroundings or their glossy sports cars or their living rooms larger than churches. For these Falin sat still, his mouth open a little and the portals of his eyes wide; she thought of him as feeding on the rich otherworldly colors, the emerald grasses and pastel coordinated furniture and huge bowls of delphiniums and roses. Like the people she read of who had been hungry in childhood and then ever after hoarded food and had to have more than they could ever eat. But then she thought of him in the library turning the pages of The Saturday Evening Post with the same attention, and what he had said. Happiness.
“Happiness,” she said. She took his arm as they went back to his car, as she often did now, unafraid to, certain it was hers to do, a gesture without force compared to what they had already done together and would do.
“Now you must return to dormitory,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Not tonight. I signed out.”
“What is signed out?”
“It means I told them I wouldn’t be in tonight. I told them where I’d be, and gave them the phone number. You have to do that.”
Her curfew at the Language Institute was the same as the dormitory’s, ten o’clock on weekdays, an hour later on weekends, but supervision was lax; the one older woman in the program who had agreed to proctor the others seemed to enjoy letting her few charges slip in late, get away with infractions, greeting Kit at the door in pajamas and curlers, an eyebrow raised, tapping her foot but smiling too like someone in a movie where nothing really mattered.
“And where,” he said, “did you say you would be?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t call.” He hadn’t started the car. “I just don’t want to go back,” she said. “Not for a long time.”
“Where then instead of back?”
“Far,” she said. “Far forward.” She said it without actually choosing to say it. She’d said the other things in the same way: she’d actually left no number at all with the proctor, that had simply exited her mouth when she opened it and winged toward him. “Go,” she said.
He drove her no farther than their grove of trees above the fields. The weather had changed; the sky was so clear that the stars within it seemed to stand at varied distances from earth, some near, some very far. Kit climbed to the broad hood of the car and stood, feeling the heat of the engine rise beneath her skirt and the breeze move it.
“You can see farther over the earth from up here,” she said.
“How far?” he said. He rested against the car door, lifting a starlike glowing cigarette now and then to his lips.
“Very far.”
“Forever? To the ends?”
“No,” she said. “Because of the earth’s curve. The earth is curved, but vision is straight.”
“Easy to bend vision,” he said. “Easy as tossing a ball, or shooting an arrow. Just let it drop.” He showed with a hand.
“You can?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“What do you see, then? How far?”
“Well. Looking eastward. I see…What are those flames, that orange flare?”
She closed her own eyes. “That must be Gary, or East Chicago,” she said. “The mills, the refineries, burning off gases. They do it all night, high in the air. What else?”
He turned. “Northwestward. Is a city on the plain,” he said. “Many crossing streets, marked with lights, like drops of dew on spider’s web.”
“That’s, um. That’s got to be St. Paul,” she said. “Those lights. Or Duluth.”
“Southwestward too. Another.”
“Des Moines,” she said. “Tulsa.”
“Beautiful,” he said, in his Falin voice, another word of his she would hear ever after. “Beautiful.”
“O Beautiful for spacious skies,” she said. “For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain.”