One More for the Road (30 page)

“I love you,” I said, and it was the truth.

“Oh, yes!” came the ardent voice again. “And this time is it really true? By the way you say it; true? Dear God, take my soul! With those words, let me die!”

“But—” I exclaimed, and stopped.

You are already dead, I thought.

“Oh,” the voice went on in breathless haste beneath her name and face, “is there anything more beautiful than love? To love is to live forever, or die and recall love for eternity. We never tire of hearing it. There is no burden. One rises up with each time it is said. So, please …”

“I love you,” I said.

And from within the tomb, a trembling pulse, a knock of life against the downpressed lid.

“Yet,” her quiet voice said, “we must speak of other things. Since last we met and talked, what?”

One hundred and seventy-one years? I thought.

“It is a long while,” I said. “Forgive me.”

“But, why did you run away? After that, I didn't want to live. Did you go round the world and see places and forget?”

And returned, I thought, to find you here, and built your tomb.

“And what will you be doing now?” her voice said.

“I am a writer,” I said. “I will be writing a story about a graveyard and a beautiful woman and a lost lover returned.”

“Surely not a graveyard? Why not somewhere else?”

“I'll try.”

“Love,” said her voice, “why so sad? Let me comfort you.”

I sat on the edge of the tomb.

“There,” she whispered. “Take my hand.”

I placed my hand atop her folded hands.

“Oh, your hands are so cold. How can I warm them?”

“Say as I said to you.”

“‘I love you'?”

“Yes.”

“I love you!”

A moment and then, “That's better. Warmness. And yet there is something you haven't told me. Say it now.”

“A long time ago,” I said, “you were eighteen. Now, more than a century later, you are still eighteen.”

“How can that be? Eighteen?”

“There is no age, no time, where you are. You will always be young.”

“Where am I then that keeps me young?”

I could hardly breathe, but managed to go on: “Touch above you, below, and around. Then you will know what keeps you.”

In the following silence, the very last of the sun faded from Père Lachaise. More leaves fell.

The faint heartbeat beneath the lid grew ever fainter, as did her voice.

“Oh, no,” she mourned. “And is it true?”

“It is.”

“But you have come to save me!”

“No, dear Diane de Forêt, only to visit.”

“But you said you loved me!”

“And I do. Oh, yes, God yes, I do.”

“Well, then?”

“You still don't understand. I am not who you think I am. But you are someone I hoped to meet one day.”

“Impossible!”

“Yes, which is why it is so wonderful.”

“You were waiting all these years, just as I was waiting?”

“So it seems.”

“Are you glad you waited?”

“Now, yes. But it was lonely.”

“And from now on, what?”

“You still don't understand,” I said. “My age.”

“What has that to do with us?”

“I am,” I said at last, “seventy-three years old.”

“That much?”

“That,” I said.

“But your voice is young.”

“Because I am talking to you.”

There was a sound beneath my hand upon her hands. Was she weeping? I waited and listened.

“Dear one,” she said at last, “how strange. We are on opposite ends of a balancing-board. I rise, you fall, you rise, I fall. Will we ever truly meet?”

“Only here,” I said.

Her voice quickened. “Then you will come back? You won't lie to me again and leave?”

“I promise.”

“Come close,” she whispered. “I cannot speak. Help me.”

I bent near to let my tears fall again on her face. Her voice, refreshed, said, “While you still have tears to help me speak, it's time.”

“To say goodbye?”

“Seventy and three years? Do you have someone beyond the gate to go to?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Then, you will return. And bring your tears?”

“They will not stop.”

“Come again. There is much to tell.”

“About Death?”

“Ah, no. Eternity. All. All of it. Eternity, dear friend. Eternity. I will teach you. Your tears have stopped. So must I. Goodbye.”

I rose.

“Farewell, Diane de Forêt,” I said.

A leaf fell shadowing her face. Farewell.

I ran to shake the gates and call the guards, half wishing to be free, half hoping to stay here forever.

Just in time, the guards arrived. They unlocked the gate.

T
HE
C
RICKET ON THE
H
EARTH

 

T
he door slammed and John Martin was out of his hat and coat and past his wife as fluently as a magician en route to a better illusion. He produced the newspaper with a dry whack as he slipped his coat into the closet like an abandoned ghost and sailed through the house, scanning the news, his nose guessing at the identity of supper, talking over his shoulder, his wife following. There was still a faint scent of the train and the winter night about him. In his chair he sensed an unaccustomed silence resembling that of a birdhouse when a vulture's shadow looms; all the robins, sparrows, mockingbirds quiet. His wife stood whitely in the door, not moving.

“Come sit down,” said John Martin. “What're you doing? God, don't stare as if I were dead. What's new? Not that there's ever anything new, of course. What do you think of those fathead city councilmen today? More taxes, more every goddamn thing.”

“John!” cried his wife. “Don't!”

“Don't what?”

“Don't talk that way. It isn't safe!”

“For God's sake, not safe? Is this Russia or is this our own house?!”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There's a bug in our house,” she whispered.

“A bug?” He leaned forward, exasperated.

“You know. Detective talk. When they hide a microphone somewhere you don't know, they call it a bug, I think,” she whispered even more quietly.

“Have you gone nuts?”

“I thought I might have when Mrs. Thomas told me. They came last night while we were out and asked Mrs. Thomas to let them use her garage. They set up their equipment there and strung wires over here, the house is wired, the bug is in one or maybe all of the rooms.”

She was standing over him now and bent to whisper in his ear.

He fell back. “Oh, no!”

“Yes!”

“But we haven't done anything—”

“Keep your voice down!” she whispered.

“Wait!” he whispered back, angrily, his face white, red, then white again. “Come on!”

Out on the terrace, he glanced around and swore. “Now say the whole damn thing again! They're using the neighbor's garage to hide their equipment? The FBI?”

“Yes, yes, oh it's been awful! I didn't want to call, I was afraid your wire was tapped, too.”

“We'll see, dammit! Now!”

“Where are you going?”

“To stomp on their equipment! Jesus! What've we done?”

“Don't!” She seized his arm. “You'd just make trouble. After they've listened a few days they'll know we're okay and go away.”

“I'm insulted, no, outraged! Those two words I've never used before, but, hell, they fit the case! Who do they think they are? Is it our politics? Our studio friends, my stories, the fact I'm a producer? Is it Tom Lee, because he's Chinese and a friend? Does that make him dangerous, or us? What, what?!”

“Maybe someone gave them a false lead and they're searching. If they really think we're dangerous, you can't blame them.”

“I know, I know, but us! It's so damned funny I could laugh. Do we tell our friends? Rip out the microphone if we can find it, go to a hotel, leave town?”

“No, no, just go on as we have done. We've nothing to hide, so let's ignore them.”

“Ignore!? The first thing I said tonight was political crap and you shut me up like I'd set off a bomb.”

“Let's go in, it's cold out here. Be good. It'll only be a few days and they'll be gone, and after all, it isn't as if we were guilty of something.”

“Yeah, okay, but damn, I wish you'd let me go over and kick the hell out of their junk!”

They hesitated, then entered the house, the strange house, and stood for a moment in the hall trying to manufacture some appropriate dialogue. They felt like two amateurs in a shoddy out-of-town play, the electrician having suddenly turned on too much light, the audience, bored, having left the theater, and, simultaneously, the actors having forgotten their lines. So they said nothing.

He sat in the parlor trying to read the paper until the food was on the table. But the house suddenly echoed. The slightest crackle of the sports section, the exhalation of smoke from his pipe, became like the sound of an immense forest fire or a wind blowing through an organ. When he shifted in the chair the chair groaned like a sleeping dog, his tweed pants scraped and sandpapered together. From the kitchen there was an ungodly racket of pans being bashed, tins falling, oven doors cracking open, crashing shut, the fluming full-bloomed sound of gas jumping to life, lighting up blue and hissing under the inert foods, and then when the foods stirred ceaselessly under the commands of boiling water, they made a sound of washing and humming and murmuring that was excessively loud. No one spoke. His wife came and stood in the door for a moment, peering at her husband and the raw walls, but said nothing. He turned a page of football to a page of wrestling and read between the lines, scanning the empty whiteness and the specks of undigested pulp.

Now there was a great pounding in the room, like surf, growing nearer in a storm, a tidal wave, crashing on rocks and breaking with a titanic explosion again and again, in his ears.

My God, he thought, I hope they don't hear my heart!

His wife beckoned from the dining room, where, as he loudly rattled the paper and plopped it into the chair and walked, padding, padding on the rug, and drew out the protesting chair on the uncarpeted dining-room floor, she tinkled and clattered last-minute silverware, fetched a soup that bubbled like lava, and set a coffeepot to percolate beside them. They looked at the percolating silver apparatus, listened to it gargle in its glass throat, admired it for its protest against silence, for saying what it felt. And then there was the scrape and click of the knife and fork on the plate. He started to say something, but it stuck, with a morsel of food, in his throat. His eyes bulged. His wife's eyes bulged. Finally she got up, went to the kitchen, and got a piece of paper and a pencil. She came back and handed him a freshly written note:
Say something!

He scribbled a reply:

What?

She wrote again:
Anything! Break the silence. They'll think something's wrong!