Nightlight (7 page)

He left the police station feeling refreshed. And manly, too. He had seen a cop. The cop had listened seriously. The cop had said other cops would listen seriously and be equally friendly. The cop had wished him a good day, and meant it.

He would not bother these police, with their shotguns and shortwave radios. He felt confident, now, and strode back to the motel room, oblivious to the rain.

Lise rubbed a towel into her hair. “Where'd you go?”

He shrugged his shoulders to ease the clammy shirt off his skin for a moment. “I dropped into the police station.”

“Oh?”

“Just thought I'd check in with them. Let them know what we were up to.”

“What did they say?”

“Not much.” He swaggered around the room. “I mean, what could they say? My cousin is obviously just a silly twerp who's off in the woods doing something city people do. Taping ghosts. Or screwing goats.” He laughed.

She gave him a steady look.

“Well, I just thought I'd check in with them.”

He felt less confident now. The macho glow faded from him, and he wished that she were as buoyant as he had been, just to make him feel better.

He should call the sheriff, he thought. The thought hit him like a slap. As foolish as it sounded, it was the right thing to do.

They breakfasted in a café with a long counter crowded with men in straw cowboy hats. Most of them seemed to know each other, and it took a long time to get served. The coffee was tasteless, the sort of coffee of which it is said, “tasteless but hot.” But it was too hot at first, and rapidly cooled.

The hash browns were leathery, and Paul recalled horror stories of hash browns that were dried and packaged, and reconstituted with water just before use. He wasn't sure what had happened to these hash browns, but they were grim. The eggs were watery—sunny-side-up does not mean raw. The sausage was as sad a length of gut as Paul had ever seen.

“I've never hit on the right breakfast to order at a place like this. Pancakes, maybe, but they always make me feel peculiar. Too full, too jittery. The syrup, I guess. And thirsty. But you can't really ruin pancakes, can you? Or griddle cakes, as they call them on this menu.”

“What will we do if we get there and there's no food?”

Paul put down his fork. “Of course there will be food. Or a grocery somewhere.”

“You believe that when we get there your cousin will be frying lambchops in the kitchen with some sort of muscular lover. He'll be put off at first, but gradually happy to have us.”

Paul didn't know what to say. This had, in fact, been his fantasy. Or that perhaps he would have cameras set up all over the grounds of the place, whatever it looked like. But that certainly he would have food.

“It's a terrible thing to take food.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It's an admission that he might not be there. If he's not there, we have problems.”

“If he's not there, we stay and wait. We'll have a vacation.”

That seemed a little coldhearted, but the thought appealed to Paul. “He'll be there,” he said.

He peeled back the covering of a plastic tub, very small, filled with a liquid jam. It slid off his knife, so he poured it over the piece of pale toast.

He found himself hoping that there was something terrible going on at the cabin. Something challenging. Something—he bit into his toast—disturbing. Like so many people he doubted his own courage. Not that he was a cowardly person. He had simply never been tested. This little visit to the woods might turn out to be exactly the right sort of test.

A man in a green plastic poncho strode into the café, water trailing him in a ragged line of glistening drops. He greeted the man behind the counter, and they both agreed that it was indeed raining.

Perhaps, Paul thought, it was foolish to want to be tested. He chewed his toast. He did not often indulge in self-analysis. He knew too many people who thought about themselves constantly. They pondered their religious beliefs, or lack of same, their sex lives, or lack of same, and as a result they couldn't think about anything concrete. They had opinions instead of thoughts. When he talked to them he could tell they were poised on the edge of speech, ready to leap forward with a comment of their own, not listening at all to what was being said.

Paul listened. He tasted. He paid attention to the details around him. He tried to be a glass the world passed through without change in color or form. He prided himself on his objectivity, and on his interest in the world around him. He was curious, in a world of people who had little interest in anything but themselves.

It was annoying the way the world had begun to repeat itself. People he had never met before said the things he had heard too often, smiled the same cocky smiles, shook hands in the same way, self-assertive and painfully likable, laughing too quickly, too quick to admire the canapés.

People were greedy for money and power, but also for something even more elusive: more of themselves. More good looks, more comfort, a better view. So that they could own more of a human life than before, as if they were characters on television whose destinies led them into higher levels of self-assurance, and nothing more.

A glass between them was crammed with paper packets of sugar. Paul extricated one from the clutch. It was decorated with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. He knew that if he examined the others he would see views of different landmarks. Already he could see the Grand Canyon, and a white plume which had to be, he guessed, Old Faithful.

“Will there be anything else?” asked the waitress.

Why did Paul think, “Yes, there will be much more. I never want to leave this place”?

He said simply that he did not want anything else. Men at the counter laughed and blew on their coffee and drank it, and outside the rain covered the street with a white stubble that shifted and rippled, like a vision of something that was not real.

10

Lise handed Paul a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Tuna the color and consistency of peanut butter grinned at him from between the slices of bread. Paul sidled close to her, not wanting anyone else in the grocery store to hear him. “Can't we get something a little better than this?”

“I want to have a picnic.”

“We can't have a picnic. It's pouring!”

“We'll huddle somewhere.”

It almost sounded inviting, Paul admitted to himself, admiring the way she replaced one orange and selected another. “I've been on some great picnics,” said Paul. “There can be problems, though. Pine needles always fall on something you're eating.”

She plucked the sandwich from his hand. She tossed it onto a pile of identical, sealed packages of white bread and gluey filling. Paul picked it up again. “I'm sorry. If you want to have a picnic, we'll have a picnic. I'll find some cheese. One of those nice Camemberts they make around here. And a wine of some sort. We can—” He pictured them huddled in the rain. “We can find someplace where it's not raining so hard.”

“We are supposed to be having a vacation, after all,” she said.

“That's right. And everyone knows you have picnics all the time on vacations.”

“I was reading the Song of Solomon last night. ‘O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine.' And I wanted to have a picnic. And there's no reason to be chained by the weather. We can do whatever we want to do.”

“Do you often read the Bible?”

“I read everything I can get my hands on,” she answered. “I read Freud in the sixth grade, hiding the book from my parents and the teacher because it mentioned things like vaginas and masturbation. And, of course, the phallus.”

Paul glanced around. One did not, exactly, say “vagina” or “phallus” in a grocery store in Calistoga. A wrinkled man in a straw cowboy hat sniffed the end of a cantaloupe.

“And recently working on Donne's sermons, I've read a good deal of the Bible. King James, not that claptrap Revised Standard stuff.”

She was an amazing countryside of knowledge. He felt ignorant, and hefted a bunch of bananas to recover his self-assurance. Surely he could not ask such an amazing creature to marry him. He wasn't a total idiot. Far from it. But she had depths. He was a shiny, sparkling stretch of water children could wade in, and sail paper boats. She was a river of unexplored shoals and depths.

She looked into his eyes, impossibly beautiful. “The Bible is so self-contradictory. I think the most important things are.”

Paul nodded thoughtfully, and selected a slender bottle of rosé.

He drove to the edge of a vineyard, and then, carefully, very nearly into it. He turned off the engine, and the rain was loud on the car roof.

They did not get out of the car, but they opened the doors so that it felt like a picnic. Paul gouged the cork with the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife. Bits of cork bobbed in the wine by the time he wrestled the bottle open, and he reminded himself never to use that particular corkscrew again.

The Camembert was barely ripe, but it suited the wine. They sipped from Styrofoam while a blackbird stared at them from the chimney of a smudge pot, then looked away, as if they belonged exactly where they were.

“See, these sandwiches aren't so bad,” Lise said, chewing happily.

Paul swallowed a mass of mucilage, flavored faintly with tuna.

“I love picnics,” she breathed. “I suppose it's the only speck of romanticism in me.”

“This is what they call a pointed rebuke.”

“No, it's the truth.”

The wind gusted rain into the car for a moment. The grass among the grapevines was neon green, and a crow crawled slowly across the sky.

“Besides,” Paul said, “there's a lot of romantic in you.”

“Not as much as you think.”

“Not as little as you think. That's what I like about you. You're a little bit of everything, but not in a sloppy, tossed-together way. You're very accomplished.”

“I took piano lessons once,” she mused. “I hated them.”

“Everyone hates piano lessons. I suppose even great pianists hate actually sitting down and practicing. It's something they have to do to do what they like.”

“Which is?”

Paul chewed his sandwich, and chased it quickly with a gulp of rosé. “Performing, I suppose. What do I know about pianists?”

Perhaps it was the feeling that she was enjoying herself, or the flush of wine so early in the day, or the fact that he didn't really mind sitting in a small car in the middle of a vineyard, but he chose that moment to unravel the subject he had been keeping to himself. “We've been seeing each other for a couple of years,” he began.

She rolled the sandwich wrapper into a ball, and sipped her wine.

“Off and on,” he continued.

“Mostly on,” she said, in what sounded like an encouraging tone.

“Mostly.” Except for a man built like a bear, a bearded astronomer she had gone rafting with once. Paul didn't think anything significant had passed between the bear and Lise, which is to say he couldn't imagine them in bed.

Paul couldn't talk. It wasn't going at all well. He should have begun talking about it last night, or much later, before a crackling fire. But he had begun, and he had to continue.

“And I've decided,” he said in a rush, “that it might be best if after all this time seeing each other we actually went ahead and got married.”

He could not look at her. Rain drooled down the windshield, and a crow laughed slowly in a stand of trees.

The nakedness of what he had said coiled between them. Paul wrapped what was left of his sandwich, and looked away from her, watching water drop gently off the snaking branches of the grapevines.

Her hand was on his hand, and then she held him, as well as she could with the gearshift jabbing them like a robot's erection. She breathed into his ear, and he held her, but then she drew back. “I knew you were going to ask me,” she said. “I don't know how, but I could tell.” She was blushing, and he had never seen her blush before. He thought it was with pleasure.

“What do you think?” he asked, hoarsely.

“It's wonderful that you should mention it,” she began.

Paul held his breath.

“And in a very strange and wonderful way, I feel honored.”

Paul waited.

“Because certainly if I were thinking of marrying anyone, it would be you.”

Paul exhaled very slowly.

She looked away, and he followed her gaze through the bleary windshield toward the perfect gray sky. “A long time ago I decided how I was going to live my life. I was just a girl, walking home from the library with books that I really wasn't going to understand very well at all. Darwin. Milton. Melville. Anything I could get my hands on that I had heard grown-ups mention, or had read about in the encyclopedia, I wanted to read. And I decided that someday I would be a scholar, and know practically everything there was to know.”

The steering wheel was cold, and the chill that surrounded the car breathed slowly into it.

“Naturally, it was difficult. Both of my parents were basically undereducated. High school, period, and not very sophisticated high school. I don't think college is the only way to get an education, but my father doesn't even know who Milton, or Keats, or Dickens were. Never even heard of them. And my mother's idea of good writing is a little collection of Hallmark inspirational verse, the sort of book with cartoon lambs cavorting in it, and butterflies with smiling faces. Butterflies, for Christ's sake. Smiling insects!”

Paul opened his mouth to stop her, but words fled him.

“Neither one of them was at all interested in my going to college, and I had to work my way, as you know, hauling linen out of motel rooms, and pouring coffee for lechers. I'm not complaining. But I finally got a grant to do graduate work and nail a PhD, and nothing is going to stop me.”