In the Night Room

The untruth disturbed her, and she held the novel in her hands and seemed to look at the blank screen of the television. “Do you know where that street is?”

“I can find out,” I said.

“Were you going to invite me along? I don’t know if I’d be willing to come, though.”

“Will you drive over there with me, Willy?” I asked.

Gently, almost reluctantly, she slid the Muriel Spark novel onto the desk and, without raising her eyes to my face, moved slowly toward me. An inch away, she turned sideways and stepped into me like an uneasy cat in search of comfort, brushing her shoulder against my chest and leaning her head sideways on the base of my neck. I could feel the candy bars in her pocket.

“I don’t want to be here alone,” she said. “But I want you to know, I don’t like any part of this, either.” She turned to face me and looked up, right into my eyes. “Why would you want to talk to her? You’re not going to write a book about her, that was just a story, a pretext. Do you think you can help her? You can’t, you can’t help Lily Kalendar. She doesn’t want your help. She doesn’t even want to see you, really, she just agreed so you’d leave her alone afterward.”

“I might write that book,” I said, knowing I was fudging the truth again. “I don’t know what I’ll do until I get there.”

Meeker Road turned out to be a short cul-de-sac tucked behind the Darnton Woods golf club on the city’s North Side. To get there, we got on the expressway that leads into Milwaukee and stayed on it, hurtling along in a cluster of other vehicles like a wolf in a wolf pack, headlights stabbing and shining out, for about twenty minutes. In the face of Willy’s silence, I turned on the radio and found the local jazz station. The sound of a very familiar alto saxophone playing “Like Someone in Love” in Copenhagen in the year 1958 soared from the speakers, filled with the hand-in-hand mixture of joy and sadness, happiness and grief, that great jazz music conveys.

“We love Paul Desmond, don’t we?” Willy said, and for a few bars sang along with the solo.

I turned off at Exit 17, and tried to remember the directions from the expressway. There are no streetlamps in that part of town, and dense clouds blanketed the night sky. More or less aimlessly, I swung the car past big houses set far back on perfect lawns. Eventually, I saw the sign for Darnton Woods and kept moving along beside the course on Midgette Road until I reached the extensive stand of oaks and poplars that marked the boundary at its back end. The road wandered farther north, and I thought I had somehow missed my turnoff in the darkness. I told Willy we were going to have to turn around, and she told me that it was too soon to give up. “Distances always seem longer in the dark,” she said.

Five minutes later, I saw an old street sign half-submerged by a gigantic azalea bush and knew I’d found Meeker Road. An extraordinary tumult, caused by the most divided feelings I had ever experienced, erupted in the center of my body. I wanted to turn in, I needed to see where Lily Kalendar lived, and I wanted with equal force to keep on driving until I got back to the Pforzheimer, where I could make love to Willy Patrick. She peeked at me out of the side of one eye, and when at the last I turned in to Meeker Road, she braced herself by sitting up straighter in her seat and staring a bit glumly at the windshield.

On Meeker Road, thick trees half-concealed the spacious houses that had grown up at wide intervals between them. Windows glowed yellow. TV sets, some of them wall-mounted plasma screens, glowed and flickered in empty-looking rooms. The basketball hoops above the garage doors wore nets that looked like off-center beards. The numbers on the mailboxes, some of them as big as Santa’s sack and painted with ducks in flight, windmills, sailboats, tennis rackets, went by: 3509, 3510.

Down at the far end of the cul-de-sac, a Bauhaus-influenced house seemed to emerge from the giant trees behind it like a yacht cutting through thick fog. White, bare except for the nautical details, solid and functional, beautiful in its unforgiving way, this had to be Lily Huntress’s house. A plain metal mailbox stood at the end of the driveway, and when my headlights picked it out, we saw, unaccompanied by a name, the number 3516.

I stopped the car and turned off the headlights. Light shone from an upper window on the left side of the house and in a ground-floor window on the right side of the front door. Dimmer light appeared in a round window like a porthole directly above the front door.

“Look what she did,” I said. “Her back is protected by the wall at this part of the golf course, and facing forward, she can see anyone who comes down the street. It’s like taking the farthest seat in a restaurant and watching the door. I bet she has the best security system you can buy.”

“So what?” Willy asked. “She’s scared?”

“She’s dealing with it,” I said. “Like you. She has her whole life brilliantly controlled, so that she can feel safe without turning into a recluse. I know guys who bought houses in the middle of the woods in Michigan and rigged up perimeters of barbed wire and floodlights. Plus a couple of tormented dogs. They had terrible experiences, but Lily Kalendar’s were worse.”

“Are you going to knock on the door, or ring the bell, or whatever?”

“I’m going to sit here and think about it,” I said.

“I hope she doesn’t walk past the window or anything.”

I realized that what Willy dreaded was what I had driven to Meeker Road to see. It would be enough; it would be all I needed. I thought of Lily Kalendar watching out for her patients’ arrival, waiting for her receptionist to confirm what she already knew, then treating the children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her early childhood had never known. Diane Huntress had said, “Now she helps children, that’s her life. I think she thought of it as the most beautiful thing she could do. That’s the way her mind works.” That last sentence offered an implied touch of criticism, to be taken up or not, in the observation that Lily had aesthetic motives for her moral decisions. I saw it the other way around, that her choice of profession was beautiful in a moral sense.

Then the world changed. A woman with bright blond hair that fell to within two inches of her shoulders walked past the window holding an open book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She appeared to be slender; there was a slight stiffness in the way she slipped through the air. The tumult I had experienced when we came upon Lily Kalendar’s street reawakened, amplified to an internal earthquake. The woman’s face was turned from us, and all I could glimpse was the side and back of her head. She wore a dark green blouse, or maybe it was a light cashmere sweater. It was still warm, though not as warm as it had been during the day, and her air- conditioning was running. She liked cold rooms anyhow, I thought. A moment later, we were looking at an empty window.

The thought came to me that I was the one man in the world who could restore what was missing, and make Lily Kalendar whole as she had never been. In the next second I realized that many, many men had known the same impulse, and that none of us could offer her anything commensurate with her beauty, her pain, or her history. To the extent that these had been overcome, it had been done by her own efforts: she had so thoroughly absorbed the cruelty and wickedness visited upon her that they had been rendered all but invisible, and she paid for what she had absorbed with a hundred daily acts of kindness and generosity. I could not rescue her. When devotion still had an effect, she’d had Diane Huntress; after that, she had simply rescued herself, and done it, with her magnificent intelligence, as thoroughly as she could.

Then I remembered the slight stiffness in her gait, the way she had held herself, deliberately turned from the window, and even my bones went cold. Like her father, she hid her face whenever she could; certainly, she wanted no one to look in and see that face. The cruelty and wickedness she had absorbed, and for which she paid with service to her patients, still lived in her—Diane Huntress knew it, she had always known it. That was why she had told us that Lily was the worst person she had ever known. Diane had not rescued Lily; by dint of tireless, selfless, unending devoted work she had half-tamed her. That Lily’s new name was Huntress sent icicles through my bloodstream. Her father, who had loved her, loved her still: it was only by a closely monitored borderline that she restrained herself from going out hunting exactly as he had.

I thought I could hear Jasper Dan Kohle cackling and howling from beneath the trees at the end of the country club.

“All right,” I said. My voice sounded breathy and battered, and I cleared my throat. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

On the way to the Pforzheimer, Tim stopped at the Fireside Lounge, a restaurant he had always liked for its old-fashioned red leather booths and low lighting. Willy said, “I was so preoccupied back there, I forgot how hungry I was.” When she ordered a tenderloin for herself, the waitress pointed out that it was intended for two people.