Later, she drove me around the village, to show me it again. The yards seemed emptier and larger than I remembered, the houses farther apart and glum, though pretty. A couple of times we got out and walked. There was no one on the street. The old sidewalks sparkled with quartz until we hit a part that had been repaired or replaced with newer clayey squares. When we drove by my old house, it seemed ungainly and obscene in its strangeness; in my mind the proportions of the house were warmer, different; in my mind it wasn’t this. It seemed alien. It seemed confiscated. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. The roads were country roads, still wooded and full of longing and despair and that search for something, anything going on; they were roads of rumor — curvy, restless roads that seemed for moments to stretch forward but then just turned back in on themselves, like snakes snacking on their own tails.
Back at her house, in the cool snap of the Adirondack night, Sils and I got into pajamas and collapsed sleepily on her water bed, which was heated and huge, a thing I might have found tasteless somewhere else but here was some perfection of calm and form, a dead man’s float on still water, while she spoke of getting a postal route in Hawaii.
“You can do that?” I asked.
“Sure.” She spoke some more of her life here, its trapped routines. Her mother had died. “She slaved away at that motel, and then she just died, without ever even a postcard from my dad.” Her brothers had moved to Texas and formed a band called the Jackhammer Hamsters. “Ever heard of them?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“They’re getting a little old,” she whispered, and offered up a gentle wince.
She loved Hawaii. She’d been there once — with a guy named Mel — and had bought a big coffee-table book called Hawaiian Song in the airport. She got up from the bed to fetch it, spread it out on the billowing quilt, showed me some of the photographs: bright beaches and skies. Not an Adirondack in sight. “I’ve been on a postal transfer list for three years,” she said.
“It’s just a matter of time, then.”
“Probably.”
“Gee.” I sighed.
“Yeah.” She smiled in a bittersweet way.
I browsed through my mind, thinking about all the things I wanted to say, might say, could say. “Guess what?”
“What? I don’t know!”
“I’m engaged.”
“Get out of town! You are?” she exclaimed eagerly. “Where’s your ring!”
“We’re doing a cheap and easy minimalist thing: no rings, no wedding. Just — marriage.” I sighed.
“How Modern!”
“Yeah. Instead of saying ‘I do,’ we’re just going to say ‘Here.’ ”
“And what’s Mr. Here’s name?” “Daniel Hiawatha Bergman.”
“That’s his real name? Get out!”
“I swear to God.”
“Is he a good guy?”
A good guy. It sounded so Martha and the Vandellas. But it was Horsehearts. That was the way Horsehearts sounded. “Yeah. He’s a good guy.”
“Great, Berie, I’m so happy for you. You deserve a good guy.” Now she sighed. “And I always knew you’d get one. I always thought you’d end up with the best husband of all of us.”
“You did?”
“Of course. You had no idea. But of course.”
For a fleeting moment, as anyone can, I imagined I felt the poverty of my future, all its unholdable surfaces; I felt inexplicably ungrateful and sad. It was a moment of stillness in which one looks around and ruefully sees only the rocks and searing sun and cheap metal. “You wanted an adventure and instead you got Adventureland,” Sils herself used to say. I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed — I wanted it back! — those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.
Pièce—French for room, I remembered, the strangeness of night and this one upon me like a drug.
“You guys going to have kids?” asked Sils. She wriggled her way under the covers.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“That’s great,” she said. But something haggard suddenly entered her face. “That’s great.” She gave a yawn. “I suppose we should go to sleep.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“Good night, Berie,” she said, turning out the light. In the dark she added, “Congratulations! Thank you. I love you.” She paused. “Is there anything I missed?”
“Good luck,” I said. “Drive safely. Wipe your feet. Happy Birthday and Have a Nice Life. There’s a lot you forgot.”
“Many happy returns,” she said sleepily. “And Good Fate. That’s the real one.” She turned with the sheet clutched to her breastbone, the water beneath us rolling gently. I lay in the dark next to her, feeling like a creature that had entered through a damp cranny or a bad shingle in the roof: a bat that could swoop silently about in her house. Why not? Bats, I knew, were sentimental. They returned to where they once lived, even when shut out; they sought their own smell. I couldn’t sleep. I was lying on top of the covers, which made it easy to get up. I rolled out of bed, stepped ashore, out into her house, and roamed through the rooms, touching things. I couldn’t really see what they were, but I could feel them: a needlepoint pillow, a pile of newsprint shoppers, little ceramic statues of cats — discovering these cats, I felt less shocked than puzzled and disappointed — a large, foil-wrapped chocolate egg, a basket of hair ties and barrettes.
I went into the bathroom. I touched the towels and towel bars and washcloths. I flicked on the light and opened the medicine cabinet: Q-Tips, nail files, and dark beeswax soaps. I opened the pill bottles and took an aspirin and a Tylenol. I dabbed cologne on my wrists, stripped naked, then got into the shower, where I washed my hair with her shampoo — an apricot-walnut one that smelled like her. I stayed there for a long time — used her back scrub brush and her creme rinse and let the bathroom fog up with steam. I lathered myself with a muddy scrap of beeswax soap I clawed out of the shower caddy. I felt close to her, in a larcenous way, as if here in the shower, using her things, all the new toiletries she now owned, I could know better the person she’d become. All evening I’d been full of reminiscences, but she had seldom joined in. Instead she was full of kindnesses — draping her own sweater around my shoulders, bringing me tea. How could I know or hope that she contained within her all our shared life, that she had not set it aside to make room for other days and affections and things that now had all made their residence and marks within her? Of course, I knew there were no reassurances. Or, there were only reassurances. She had offered them. “This place is just not the same without you,” she had said twice that afternoon. But I was greedy. Three was the magic number. I’d wanted her to say it one more time.
I got out, wrapped a towel around me, and went back to bed, where she lay still asleep, curved in a pale paisley, the sheet about her like an old tricot curtain. I slipped quietly under the covers, my hair wet, feeling the water bed give slightly beneath me like something gelatinous and alive.