heading toward land, rising like Venus from the water, naked, noticing him, startled by his presence, apprehensive for a moment but then immediately making the best of it, relaxing, smiling, standing unashamed shin-deep in the chilly shallows and inviting him to join her for a swim.
These recollections of that first contact and all that ensued excite him terribly, for this person before him is at once the Elizabeth he loves, familiar, joined to him by the bond of shared experience, and also someone new, a complete stranger, from whom he can draw fresh inputs, that jolting gift of novelty which his Elizabeth can never again offer him. He stares at her shoulders and back with fierce, intense hunger; she turns toward him with the glasses of wine in her hands, and, before he can mask that wild gleam of desire, she receives it with full force. The impact is immediate. She recoils. She is not the Elizabeth of the Sierra lake; she seems unable to handle such a level of unexpected erotic voltage. Jerkily she thrusts the wine at him, her hands shaking so that she spills a little on her sleeve. He takes the glass and backs away, a bit dazed by his own frenzied upwelling of emotion. With an effort he calms himself. There is a long moment of awkward silence while they drink. The psychic atmosphere grows less torrid; a certain mood of remote, businesslike courtesy develops between them.
After the second glass of wine she says, “Now. How do you know me and what do you want from me?”
Briefly he closes his eyes. What can he tell her? How can he explain? He has rehearsed no strategies. Already he has managed to alarm her with a single unguarded glance; what effect would a confession of apparent madness have? But he has never used strategies with Elizabeth, has never resorted to any tactics except the tactic of utter candidness. And this is Elizabeth. Slowly he says, “In another existence you and I are married, Elizabeth. We live in the Oakland hills and we’re extraordinarily happy together.”
“Another existence?”
“In a world apart from this, a world where history took a different course a generation ago, where the Axis lost the war, where John Kennedy was President in 1963 and was killed by an assassin, where you and I met beside a lake in the Sierras and fell in love. There’s an infinity of worlds, Elizabeth, side by side, worlds in which all possible variations of every possible event take place. Worlds in which you and I are married happily, in which you and I have been married and divorced, in which you and I don’t exist, in which you exist and I don’t, in which we meet and loathe one another, in which—in which—do you see, Elizabeth, there’s a world for everything, and I’ve been travelling from world to world. I’ve seen nothing but wilderness where San Francisco ought to be, and I’ve met Mongol horsemen in the East Bay hills, and I’ve seen this whole area devastated by atomic warfare, and—does this sound insane to you, Elizabeth?”
“Just a little.” She smiles. The old Elizabeth, cool, judicious, performing one of her specialities, the conditional acceptance of the unbelievable for the sake of some amusing conversation. “But go on. You’ve been jumping from world to world. I won’t even bother to ask you how. What are you running away from?”
“I’ve never seen it that way. I’m running
“Toward what?”
“An infinity of worlds. An endless range of possible experience.”
“That’s a lot to swallow. Isn’t one world enough for you to explore?”
“Evidently not.”
“You had all infinity,” she says. “Yet you chose to come to me. Presumably I’m the one point of familiarity for you in this otherwise strange world. Why come here? What’s the point of your wanderings, if you seek the familiar? If all you wanted to do was find your way back to your Elizabeth, why did you leave her in the first place? Are you as happy with her as you claim to be?”
“I can be happy with her and still desire her in other guises.”
“You sound driven.”
“No,” he says. “No more driven than Faust. I believe in searching as a way of life. Not searching
“But that was Faust’s moment of supreme happiness.”
“True. When he attains it, though, he loses his soul to the devil, remember?”
“So you go on, on and on, world after world, seeking you know not what, just seeking, unable to stop. And yet you claim you’re not driven.”
He shakes his head. “Machines are driven. Animals are driven. I’m an autonomous human being operating out of free will. I don’t make this journey because I have to, but because I want to.”
“Or because you think you ought to want to.”
“I’m motivated by feelings, not by intellectual calculations and preconceptions.”
“That sounds very carefully thought out,” she tells him. He is stung by her words, and looks away, down into his empty glass. She indicates that he should help himself to the wine. “I’m sorry,” she says, her tone softening a little.
He says, “At any rate, I was in the library and there was a telephone directory and I found you. This is where you used to live in my world too, before we were married.” He hesitates. “Do you mind if I ask—”
“What?”
“You’re not married?”
“No. I live alone. And like it.”
“You always were independent-minded.”
“You talk as though you know me so well.”
“I’ve been married to you for seven years.”
“No. Not to me. Never to me. You don’t know me at all.”
He nods. “You’re right. I don’t really know you, Elizabeth, however much I think I do. But I want to. I feel drawn to you as strongly as I was to the other Elizabeth, that day in the mountains. It’s always best right at the beginning, when two strangers reach toward one another, when the spark leaps the gap—” Tenderly he says, “May I spend the night here?”
“No.”
Somehow the refusal comes as no surprise. He says, “You once gave me a different answer when I asked you that.”
“Not I. Someone else.”
“I’m sorry. It’s so hard for me to keep you and her distinct in my mind, Elizabeth. But please don’t turn me away. I’ve come so far to be with you.”
“You came uninvited. Besides, I’d feel so strange with you—knowing you were thinking of her, comparing me with her, measuring our differences, our points of similarities—”
“What makes you think I would?”
“You would.”
“I don’t think that’s sufficient reason for sending me away.”
“I’ll give you another,” she says. Her eyes sparkle mischievously. “I never let myself get involved with married men.”
She is teasing him now. He says, laughing, confident that she is beginning to yield. “That’s the damnedest far-fetched excuse I’ve ever heard, Elizabeth!”
“Is it? I feel a great kinship with her. She has all my sympathies. Why should I help you deceive her?”
“Deceive? What an old-fashioned word! Do you think she’d object? She never expected me to be chaste on this trip. She’d be flattered and delighted to know that I went looking for you here. She’d be eager to hear about everything that went on between us. How could she possibly be hurt by knowing that I had been with you, when you and she are—”
“Nevertheless, I’d like you to leave. Please.”
“You haven’t given me one convincing reason.”
“I don’t need to.”
“I love you. I want to spend the night with you.”
“You love someone else who resembles me,” she replies. “I keep telling you that. In any case, I don’t love you. I don’t find you attractive, I’m afraid.”
“Oh. She does, but you—don’t. I see. How do you find me then? Ugly? Overbearing? Repellent?”
