—You’d think the manufacturer would have used a famous piece of music, Wilander said.
—Maybe it is famous. The wallpaper’s Chinese. Some Chinese music sounds all fractured. Atonal.
He shifted so he could lie propped on an elbow, looking down at her body, her belly and breasts pale and unblemished, but the rest of her, even the insides of her thighs, patterned with freckles, a patterning so heavy and distinctly stated in places, it made him think of a leopard’s spots.
—What sort of music do you like? she asked.
—I’m not much of a music lover.
—You must like something.
—I don’t mind music, I just can’t relate to it the way other people do. He pointed out the window, indicating the faint music from the bar. But I like hearing it from far away. Even if it’s just a bar band, it seems to promise something good.
After an interval she said, But when you get close, it’s not so good?
Alerted by a fretful hesitance in her voice, he said, That’s right. What I said…it’s a metaphor for how I relate to everything, not just music. Places, people. At a distance they’re fine, but up close—he made a sour face—eventually they become intolerable.
—Don’t tease me!
—Weren’t you trying to read that into what I was saying?
Another pause, and then she said, I know so little about you. Most of what I know doesn’t apply anymore. You don’t drink, you don’t work in finance.
—The last months haven’t counted for anything?
—Of course they have. But ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been going through some change or another. I’ve never seen you solid.
—I’m not sure anybody’s ever solid.
—Solid’s your term. When you said you wanted to stay aboard Viator awhile longer, you said you weren’t feeling solid yet…or something like that.
—I was speaking about relative solidity.
—Okay. I haven’t seen you relatively solid.
He laid his head on her belly, looking past her pubic tuft toward the freckles that spread across her the tops of her thighs, tiny brown splotches like, he thought, the remnants of an island continent flooded by a milky sea. He felt the heat of her sex on his cheeks. He studied the freckles, wondering whether—if he were to stare at them long enough—an image might emerge, as from the splotchy walls of the ship.
—Thomas?
—Yes.
—What do you want after you leave Viator?
The prospect of leaving the ship seemed silly for an instant, like the idea of unscrewing one’s arm or building a house out of cheese, and he thought he must feel this way because his time aboard Viator had permitted him to gather sufficient strength and confidence to look beyond himself once again, to be here, now, with this woman, and to recognize her needs and his responsibilities toward her—it was daunting to (consider) doing without the perspective Viator had afforded.
—Is this something you have to think about? she asked.
He moved up beside her and threw an arm across her chest. Not the way you mean.
She angled her eyes toward him, waiting for him to go on.
—Nothing’s changed, he said. I want to be with you. If things were different, I might choose to live somewhere less desolate. But that’s not a real issue.
—You haven’t spent enough time in Kaliaska to know it. You only know the post, the pizza place, the bar.
—There’s more? He chuckled, gave her a squeeze. Kaliaska has a secret life? A hidden culture?
—There’s the people, for one thing.
—Oh, yeah. The people. I talked to a couple of the people this afternoon.
—You can’t judge everyone by Roogie and Cat, especially when they’re on a drunk.
—They’re not the only drunks in Kaliaska.
—Certainly not. People drink, they do drugs, they fight. When the fishermen come back after the season, it gets worse.
Seduced by the smell of her hair, Wilander inched closer, sinking back into a heady post-coital torpor; he rubbed the nipple of her left breast between his thumb and forefinger. She stirred at his touch and he wondered what she was feeling—she was ashamed of her breasts, thought them too large and pendant, insufficiently firm, incompatible with the slimness of her body, and was at times discomforted by his attention to them, but he loved their soft, crepey skin, their heft, how they dangled when she was astride him.
—Why do you like it here? he asked.
—Because I know where I am. When I lived in Detroit, I was always confused about what was happening around me. Anxious all the time. Now I’ve been here for a while, I understand the same things go on in Kaliaska that went on back in the States. Detroit’s just a big Kaliaska. People coming in from all over. The difference is, in Detroit I’d never think to talk to those people. I wouldn’t want to, I’d be afraid of them. There were too many people. I couldn’t get a feeling for them, and so I didn’t trust them. Here the ships drop anchor, ships from everywhere. Japan, Russia, Norway. The crews come ashore for a day or two, maybe a week if the weather’s bad, and they tell me about themselves. It’s a richer life. And it’s less confusing, less fearful. Everyone’s so frightened down in the forty-eight. Maybe they’re right to be frightened. Life is frightening. But here…Okay. She turned onto her side, facing him, earnest, one hand touching his chest. Sometimes when they wheel out the big TV at the Kali and show a movie, I’ll be sitting there surrounded by thirty or forty people. Some don’t like me, because we’ve had business problems or whatever; some of the guys like me a little too much. But I know what to expect. I’m not worried. Knowing where I am, having that clear a view…It gives me a freedom I never felt in the States. It allows me to appreciate the people around me in a way I couldn’t before. And they’re not all like Roogie and Cat.
—No, some are like Terry.
—Terry’s a good kid. You have to get past the attitude. Look, I’ll admit the range of people here isn’t what you get in a city, but some of them are remarkable. It just takes time to see it.
—You’re very persuasive, he said.
—Apparently not. I can’t persuade you to come live in town.
She tried to make a joke of it, but there was an undercurrent of tension in her voice, and Wilander, recalling what Roogie had said about Arlene needing a commitment, found it strange that he was unable to give that commitment, because when he looked at her, he felt something that wanted to commit, something that once declared would bind them more tightly, and he saw the clean particularity of her spirit, her soul, whatever you preferred to call the light that flashed from her whenever the incidental clutter of her mind cleared sufficiently to let it shine through, the bright flash of her being, and he knew that despite the superficially facile nature of their connection, lonely man, lonely woman, there was something between them that seemed ordained, something he had encountered only once previously and then with a college girl named Bliss, Bliss Giddings, a tall, slender, quiet brunette who was studying to be an astronomer and was devoted to the poetry of Cavafy; poems that, when he read them to himself, communicated a haughty, defeatist sensibility, but when she read them aloud rang with a lovely sad romanticism, and everything was going splendidly for them, they were inseparable, intoxicated with each other, until one day she vanished without a warning, dropped out of the university and returned home, leaving him shocked, deranged, in agony—she refused to take his calls, refused every effort at contact, and he soon learned that she had married a wealthy businessman, a wine importer twelve years her senior, so no astronomy for her, no meteors, no pulsars, no distant suns, no erudite speculation upon whether the shape of the universe, as recently opined, was similar to that of the Eiffel Tower, shattering the reality of those who had based their faith on the theory that it resembled a football, and there would be no hazy unfathomable astronomical objects named Gidding, no prestigious international conferences in Lucerne, no moments of transcendent solitude at the lens of Palomar, the cosmos spread out before her as if she were a spy for God, just lots of expensive grape juice; unless, to humor her, the importer, one Adam Zouski (the cacophonous sibilance of Bliss Zouski an abomination by contrast to the liquid asymmetry of Bliss Wilander), bought a telescope and placed it on the penthouse roof of the New York City castle where she was kept, allowing her to revisit her quaint, childish ambition; and years afterward, many years afterward, she began to email Wilander, gloomy, self-absorbed emails that professed love for him and dissatisfaction with her life, with her husband, a correspondence that grew over the months in intensity and frequency—they talked on the phone, spoke of getting together, made plans, shared sexual fantasies, yet nothing ever came of it, their plans evaporated, their fantasies remained unreal, the emails and phone calls stopped, and he still could not understand why she had left him; the reasons she gave were so flimsy, as if she herself did not understand, and though it wasn’t until he met Arlene that he was able to put that episode in a drawer and lock it away, though he recognized how rare it was to feel this close to someone, the only way he could think to explain his reticence about moving into town, an explanation that would have a tired ring to Arlene’s ears, was that he was not yet secure in himself, not yet solid. Finally, without attempting explanation, he told her that however the job was going, he would come to her after a month or so, when the first snow fell, early September at the latest. She said, All right, but she wasn’t pleased; he could tell as much from the compression of her lips, the deepening of a frown line, and recognized that his indecisiveness (that, he knew, was how she perceived it) bordered on rejection, and might be more painful for her than rejection. He started to offer an apology, but knew it would sound inadequate.