“Is this verse of your own? Or once again common song?”
“O Beautiful,” she said, “for patriot dream, That sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears.” She was never able to say or sing those lines, those hopes, without her own eyes sparkling. Undimmed by human tears: reminding you of tears, human tears, even while denying them. It was unbearably sad. She looked down to where he stood below her; she lifted her arms, and he opened his, and she leapt into them. He caught her, held her a moment suspended between the hot earth and the cool sky; and when her feet were on the ground he didn’t take his hands from her waist. She lifted her face to him, sure she had guessed right, so certain of it that the little tight hand that had seemed to grip her heart all day let go of it at last, and it beat hard and wildly.
It was a long blind kiss, but then he ended it, with a breath like a sob, and laid his cheek, his rough cheek, against hers. She tried to turn him toward her, nuzzling, her hands on his shoulders. He drew away and looked down at her. How could his face be so alight in nothing but starlight, she could read it as though it were day: great-eyed and plain like an archaic Greek head.
“I’m staying with you tonight,” she said.
“Kit,” he said.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “It’s not like I’m a virgin.”
“But I am afraid,” he said. “You make me so.”
“Well you just…You need to get over that.”
“Kit,” he said again, and seemed to ponder—not what to say but whether he would say it. “I do not think it is…what I am for.”
“Oh jeez,” she said. “Not what you’re for. Well, what.” She swallowed, or tried to; her throat was tightening with the onset of a deep embarrassment or shame. She turned from him, crossed her arms.
“Is not what you want,” he said.
“You don’t know what I want.”
“Perhaps what you do not want. Perhaps I know this.”
“How?”
He didn’t answer, and she wouldn’t turn to look at him.
“You would like to go back?” he said.
Without speaking she went to the door he opened for her, and got in, her arms still crossed protectively, and looked at the night. The eastern sky had paled, and now an amber moon, comically huge and full, rolled up as if with a soft exhalation that could be heard. Big moon, big car, summer night, green corn. How could she have been fooled?
“So I guess, what,” she said. “You think of me as a daughter? Is that right?”
She said it as sarcastically, as fiercely, as she could, turning to face him. As soon as it was said, she heard it herself as he would, as he must; and she clapped her hand to her mouth, too late. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh I’m so sorry.”
“No,” he said. “Not daughter, no. I would not think so of you.”
“How could I say that, how. I’m such a…”
“No, no,” he said. “No.”
His hand covered hers where it lay on the car seat, his hand large and real and cool.
“Just don’t take me back to campus,” she said. “Let me stay.”
“Yes,” he said. “No reason to go there. She is fast asleep now, your guardian there.”
“Oh no,” Kit said, shaking her head. “I bet not.”
“Oh yes. And in her hand her beads, what do you call these…”
“Rosary.”
“Rosary: of green jade. She has not slept without this since day she took First Communion. Believes she could not sleep, if it were lost.”
“Will it be?”
“Yes. Of course.”
He drove them back to his little house and let them in with a key; she hadn’t known him to lock his door before. In the lamplight lay the work they had done that day. She sat on the couch and he made sweet tea. They hadn’t spoken further.
“Now Kit. Here is tea.”
She let the steaming glass sit before her on the low table. She never in her life drank hot tea except when she was sick; tea was to her the drink of solitude and recuperation and a house of blankets, an inner watch kept on a bad tummy or a migraine. Marion gave her tea and aspirin when her periods hurt or devastated her as they did sometimes.
She felt that now: on watch over her body. Because of the tea but not just because of the tea.
And maybe he was right. Maybe it was closed, and wouldn’t have opened. But you couldn’t know, and she had been ready at least to knock: to open to his knock, or try.
With his glass of tea he sat beside her on the couch. She didn’t look at him.
“Do you know,” he said. “It is not easy to say what I have said to you.”
“I don’t know what’s easy for you. Everything seems easy.” She covered her mouth again, stupid again. “I don’t mean that.”
“Anyway not easy to say no to your invitation. So frank too. That I should be one of your lovers.”
She laughed at that. “Oh sure,” she said. “My lovers. There’s only been one. Not even one. I mean, technically, but.” She stopped, and looked into her glass.
“Was it,” he said, “this blond boy you go with?”
She shook her head minutely, not wondering how he knew about Jackie; she had got used to him knowing things he shouldn’t.
“Someone else you loved.”
She shook her head no again.
“Is it perhaps,” he asked, “one of these things about which you think you can say nothing?”
She nodded, so slightly it might not have been seen in the lamplight; but he saw.
“He was then…”
“He was just somebody,” she said. “Not anybody. He was hardly even there. It was just, like, a minute.”
“Perhaps to himself, though, he was there. A somebody.”
“I spose.” She thought how in the mess and blood and the dawning cold of its being over, of its having really been done, Burke had leaned close to her and said to her I love you: as though it were a precious thing, a jewel from inside him that he was obliged to yield up and was yielding up. Hearing it had been even stranger than the touch of his.
What on earth had he thought? What did he think now? What is it, the mystery of it, once inside it did you ever get back to the outside again?
Nothing to say, nothing she could say. She was surprised to feel wetness on her cheeks. Old Goofy Glass. She wiped them rapidly with her hands.
The nameless cat leapt up suddenly from the floor, she hadn’t seen it come near and here it was. She put her hands on it and so did he and it looked with its demon eyes from her to him; and then folded itself up.
Kit told Falin about Burke.
She told him about her brother, and how he had joined the army; she told how he had come home at Christmas, and what had happened then. She told him about what happened after Burke. She told him about her child, and about the Blue Blades, and he took her wrists in his hands as though he had known all along. She told him of Ben’s death and his burial and the lie they had perhaps been told. Sometimes she stopped for a time and slipped again into silence and the gray cat’s fur and its purring. He waited and said nothing till she went on. Telling it she saw that she believed it was all one story, a web knotted at every point, and that at the center of the story was her own blind stupid willful wanting, black spider that had caused it all. And she saw too (she learned it here on this night, in this telling) that one day she would know better. She would know that it wasn’t one story but many, many many, not all of them hers.
“You must one day speak of these things,” he said.
“I did. I just did.”
“In poems,” he said.
But she didn’t reply or assent.
Past midnight he brought her a thin coverlet and a pillow to put beneath her head on the couch.
“I’m still angry with you,” she said. “Really.”
“Yes.”
“You spoiled everything. My whole plan.”
“Yes. Now sleep.”
“Will we ever?” she asked him.