Last Night Part 3

- But Deems is my friend, my very closest friend.

- Who is he? Ardis asked Irene in the kitchen.

- Oh, he's a poet. He's married to a Venezuelan woman and she runs off. He's not always this bad.

They had quieted him down in the other room. Ardis could see her husband nervously pushing his gla.s.ses up on his nose with one finger. Deems, in a polo shirt and with rumpled hair, was trying to guide Brennan toward the back door. Brennan kept stopping to talk. For a moment he would seem reformed.

-I want to tell you something, he said. I went past the school, the one on the street there. There was a poster. The First Annual Miss f.u.c.k Contest. I'm serious. This is a fact.

- No, no, Deems said.

- It's been held, I don't know when. Question is, are they coming to their senses finally or losing them? A tiny bit more, he begged; his gla.s.s was empty. His mind doubled back, Seriously, what do you think of that?

In the light of the kitchen he seemed merely dishevelled, like a journalist who has been working hard all night. The unsettling thing was the absence of reason in him, his glare. One nostril was smaller than the other. He was used to being ungovernable. Ardis hoped he would not notice her again. His forehead had two gleaming places, like nascent horns. Were men drawn to you when they knew they were frightening you?

She could feel his eyes. There was silence. She could feel him standing there like a menacing beggar.

- What are you, another bourgeois? he said to her. I know I've been drinking. Come and have dinner, he said. I've ordered something wonderful for us. Vichyssoise. Lobster. S. G. Always on the menu like that, selon grosseur.

He was talking in an easy way, as if they were in the casino together, chips piled high before them, as if it were a shrewd discussion of what to bet on and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the dark T-shirt were a thing of indifference to him. He calmly reached out and touched one.

- I have money, he said. His hand remained where it was, cupping her. She was too stunned to move. Do you want me to do more of that?

- No, she managed to say.

His hand slipped down to her hip. Deems had taken an arm and was drawing him away.

- Ssh, Brennan whispered to her, don't say anything. The two of us. Like an oar going into the water, gliding.

- We have to go, Deems insisted.

- What are you doing? Is this another of your ruses? Brennan cried. Deems, I shall end up destroying you yet!

As he was herded to the door, he continued. Deems was the only man he didn't loathe, he said. He wanted them all to come to his house, he had everything. He had a phonograph, whisky! He had a gold watch!

At last he was outside. He walked unsteadily across the finely cut gra.s.s and got into his car, the side of which was dented in. He backed away in great lurches.

- He's headed for Cato's, Deems guessed. I ought to call and warn them.

- They won't serve him. He owes them money, Irene said.

- Who told you that?

- The bartender. Are you all right? she asked Ardis.

- Yes. Is he actually married?

- He's been married three or four times, Deems said.

Later they started dancing, some of the women together. Irene pulled Deems onto the floor. He came unresisting. He danced quite well. She was moving her arms sinuously and singing.

- Very nice, he said. Have you ever entertained?

She smiled at him.

- I do my best, she said.

At the end she put her hand on Ardis's arm and said again, - I'm so embarra.s.sed at what happened.

- It was nothing. I'm all right.

- I should have taken him and thrown him out, her husband said on the way home. Ezra Pound. Do you know about Ezra Pound?

- No.

- He was a traitor. He broadcast for the enemy during the war. They should have shot him.

- What happened to him?

- They gave him a poetry prize.

They were going down a long empty stretch where on a corner, half hidden in trees, a small house stood, the gypsy house, Ardis thought of it as, a simple house with a water pump in the yard and occasionally in the daytime a girl in blue shorts, very brief, and high heels, hanging clothes on a line. Tonight there was a light on in the window. One light near the sea. She was driving with Warren and he was talking.

- The best thing is to just forget about tonight.

- Yes, she said. It was nothing.

Brennan went through a fence on Hull Lane and up on to somebody's lawn at about two that morning. He had missed the curve where the road bent left, probably because his headlights weren't on, the police thought.

SHE TOOK THE BOOK and went over to a window that looked out on the garden behind the library. She read a bit of one thing or another and came to a poem some lines of which had been underlined, with pencilled notes in the margin. It was "The River-Merchant's Wife"; she had never heard of it. Outside, the summer burned, white as chalk.

At fourteen I married My Lord you, she read.

I never laughed, being bashful . . .

There were three old men, one of them almost blind, it appeared, reading newspapers in the cold room. The thick gla.s.ses of the nearly blind man cast white moons onto his cheeks.

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired b.u.t.terflies are already yellow with August

Over the gra.s.s in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

She had read poems and perhaps marked them like this, but that was in school. Of the things she had been taught she remembered only a few. There had been one My Lord though she did not marry him. She'd been twenty-one, her first year in the city. She remembered the building of dark brown brick on Fifty-eighth Street, the afternoons with their slitted light, her clothes in a chair or fallen to the floor, and the damp, mindless repet.i.tion, to it, or him, or who knew what: oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d. The traffic outside so faint, so far away . . .

She'd called him several times over the years, believing that love never died, dreaming foolishly of seeing him again, of his returning, in the way of old songs. To hurry, to almost run down the noontime street again, the sound of her heels on the sidewalk. To see the door of the apartment open . . .

If you are coming down the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you.

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

There she sat by the window with her young face that had a weariness in it, a slight distaste for things, even, one might imagine for oneself. After a while she went to the desk.

- Do you happen to have anything by Michael Brennan? she asked.

- Michael Brennan, the woman said. We've had them, but he takes them away because unworthy people read them, he says. I don't think there're any now. Perhaps when he comes back from the city.

- He lives in the city?

- He lives just down the road. We had all of his books at one time. Do you know him?

She would have liked to ask more but she shook her head.

- No, she said. I've just heard the name.

- He's a poet, the woman said.

ON THE BEACH she sat by herself. There was almost no one. In her bathing suit she lay back with the sun on her face and knees. It was hot and the sea calm. She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that.

She came out of the ocean and dried herself like the gypsy girl, ankles caked with sand. She could feel the sun burnishing her shoulders. Hair wet, deep in the emptiness of days, she walked her bicycle up to the road, the dirt velvety beneath her feet.

She did not go home the usual way. There was little traffic. The noon was bottle-green, large houses among the trees and wide farmland, like a memory, behind.

She knew the house and saw it far off, her heart beating strangely. When she stopped, it was casually, with the bike tilting to one side and she half-seated on it as if taking a rest. How beautiful a lone woman is, in a white summer shirt and bare legs. Pretending to adjust the bicycle's chain she looked at the house, its tall windows, water stains high on the roof. There was a gardener's shed, abandoned, saplings growing in the path that led to it. The long driveway, the sea porch, everything was empty.

Walking slowly, aware of how brazen she was, she went toward the house. Her urge was to look in the windows, no more than that. Still, despite the silence, the complete stillness, that was forbidden.

She walked farther. Suddenly someone rose from the side porch. She was unable to utter a sound or move.

It was a dog, a huge dog higher than her waist, coming toward her, yellow-eyed. She had always been afraid of dogs, the Alsatian that had unexpectedly turned on her college roommate and torn off a piece of her scalp. The size of this one, its lowered head and slow, deliberate stride.

Do not show fear, she knew that. Carefully she moved the bicycle so that it was between them. The dog stopped a few feet away, its eyes directly on her, the sun along its back. She did not know what to expect, a sudden short rush.

- Good boy, she said. It was all she could think of. Good boy.

Moving cautiously, she began wheeling the bicycle toward the road, turning her head away slightly so as to appear unworried. Her legs felt naked, the bare calves. They would be ripped open as if by a scythe. The dog was following her, its shoulders moving smoothly, like a kind of machine. Somehow finding the courage, she tried to ride. The front wheel wavered. The dog, high as the handlebars, came nearer.

- No, she cried. No!

After a moment or two, obediently, he slowed or veered off. He was gone.

She rode as if freed, as if flying through blocks of sunlight and high, solemn tunnels of trees. And then she saw him again. He was following-not exactly following, since he was some distance ahead. He seemed to float along in the fields, which were burning in the midday sun, on fire. She turned onto her own road. There he came. He fell in behind her. She could hear the clatter of his nails like falling stones. She looked back. He was trotting awkwardly, like a big man running in the rain. A line of spittle trailed from his jaw. When she reached her house he had disappeared.

THAT NIGHT in a cotton robe she was preparing for bed, cleaning her face, the bathroom door ajar. She brushed her hair with many rapid strokes.

- Tired? her husband asked as she emerged.

It was his way of introducing the subject.

- No, she said.

So there they were in the summer night with the far-off sound of the sea. Among the things her husband admired that Ardis possessed was extraordinary skin, luminous and smooth, a skin so pure that to touch it would make one tremble.

- Wait, she whispered, -not so fast.

Afterward he lay back without a word, already falling into deepest sleep, much too soon. She touched his shoulder. She heard something outside the window.

- Did you hear that?

- No, what? he said drowsily.

She waited. There was nothing. It had seemed faint, like a sigh.