nerve endings tingled. I could have stared at her all day, with her broad, angular shoulders, and her huge rounded breasts, and her nipples that crinkled like raisins.
One morning, though, I realized that this couldn’t continue. It was a dream, not reality, and I couldn’t ask her to spend the rest of her life in a dream.
“I have to go back to the States,” I said.
“That’s all right. I’ll come with you.”
“You can’t. I’m sorry.”
“But why not? I want to stay with you forever!”
“You can’t, Jill. It’s too dangerous. You shouldn’t even be here with me now.”
“But you destroyed all the Screechers, didn’t you?”
“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. One thing’s for sure — I didn’t manage to dispose of Duca’s body. Not only that, Duca went into the harbor, and Screechers are always revived by water. The Belgian resistance made that mistake during World War Two. They shot Screechers and threw them into the River Scheldt. They might just as well have given them the kiss of life.”
Jill sat up, naked, and put her arms around me. “I’m not frightened. I want to come with you.”
I looked at her closely. She was absolutely flawless, and I was in love with her.
“All right,” I said, at last. “So long as you know what the risks are.”
The Face in the Mirror
We were married at Kenwood Heights Christian Church on Saturday, April 28, 1962. It was a bright, warm day, and pink cherry blossoms blew over us as we left the church.
I saw a man in a long dark coat standing on the opposite side of the street as we climbed into the wedding car. His face was white and he looked strangely two-dimensional, more like a black-and-white photograph than a real person. I looked at him and he looked back at me, but there was no way of telling if he was a Screecher or nothing more than a curious passerby. But who wears a winter overcoat, on an April afternoon, in Louisville?
The years came and went, and we lived the kind of life that most everybody lives in Louisville — playing golf, eating out at Mike Linnig’s Place, going to Churchill Downs in May and betting against the crowd. I was William Crowe and Jill was Jill Crowe and we were happy. We bought a black Labrador and called him Ricochet.
In March, 1965, Jill gave birth to Mark. He was a quiet, introspective boy who always preferred playing on his own, but he was very clever, and by the time he was eleven years old he could play the piano as well as his grandfather.
I’ll never forget, though, that summer morning in 1977 when he came into my study and stood there for a long time, saying nothing, and the way that the sun shone red through his ears reminded me of Ann De Wouters’s little boy, kneeling in front of the window in Antwerp, all those years before.
He looked so much like Jill — dark-haired and almost too pretty, for a boy.
“What am I?” he asked me. Not “
I looked up from the papers on my desk and smiled at him in amusement. “You’re a twelve-year-old boy. Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately?”
“No, but what am I?”
I leaned back in my chair. “You’re an American. But you’re part Burmese, and part Romanian, and part Irish.”
“I feel as if I’m something else.”
“Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Well, tell me what it’s like, this feeling.”
He frowned. “It’s like being alone. It’s like being different. It’s like being inside somebody else’s head.”
I ruffled his hair. “You’re growing up, that’s all. You’re a boy now, but there’s a young man inside you, trying to get out.”
But I remembered his words three years later. It was just past 11:00 in the evening. I was sitting in the armchair in the corner of our bedroom, trying to finish the cryptic crossword that I had started earlier that day, and cooling off after my shower. Jill was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her hair.
“Do you know what I’d like to do for my birthday this year?” she asked me. “I’d like to go to Mexico.”
“You know I hate Mexican food. All those beans. All those burritos.”
“Molly and David went to Mexico and they loved it.”
“OK,” I said, dropping my newspaper on the floor and standing up behind her. “If you want to go to Mexico, we’ll go to goddamned Mexico.”
I kissed her on top of her head. But it was then that I thought: she’s going to be forty-nine years old next birthday. Forty-nine years old and she doesn’t have a single gray hair or a single line on her forehead. In fact, she looks exactly the same as she did when I flew back to England in 1961, eighteen years ago.
“What’s the matter?” she said, looking at me in her dressing table mirror. “You look like something’s bothering you.”
“Nothing, no.” But then I thought: her figure is just the same, too. She has no cellulite on her thighs, her stomach is flat, her breasts are still big and firm. I had seen men turning around to look at her in the street, and I had always taken it for granted that they were looking at her because she was so attractive. But supposing they were wondering what a woman who had the face and the figure of a thirty-one-year-old was doing with a gray- haired man of sixty-one?
For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I hated myself for being so disloyal, but the thought wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she asked me, over breakfast. “You don’t have money worries you’re not telling me about, do you?”
“No, no. Everything’s fine.”
“But you’ve hardly spoken to me for the past two days, and you keep staring at me in this really strange way. It’s almost like you’ve forgotten who I am.”
I went upstairs, opened up my bedroom closet, and took down my Kit. I looked at it for a long time before I opened it up. I loved Jill so much and this was an act of betrayal, no matter what I found out. But I had to know for sure, or else I was going to spend the rest of my life wondering what I was sharing my bed with.
She was still sitting at the kitchen table when I came down, holding a cup of coffee in both hands, watching television. The sun was shining on her hair and on her pink satin robe. She looked so beautiful that I almost went straight back upstairs, without doing what I had come down to do.
“Bill?” she said. She always called me “Bill” in case she accidentally slipped up and called me “Jim” in front of our friends. “Come and take a look at this.”
“Hold on,” I told her. I stood to one side of the kitchen door and held up the pure silver mirror that I had taken out of my Kit. My hand was trembling so much that at first I couldn’t focus properly. But then I steadied it against the door frame, and angled it so that I could see Jill’s profile.
It took only a split-second glance to tell me what I needed to know. The woman sitting at the kitchen table had hair that was streaked with gray. There were wrinkles around her eyes, and her hands were patterned with liver spots.
I came into the kitchen and sat down next to her. “This is hilarious,” she said. “This woman thinks that her husband is having an affair with another woman, but all the time — ”
She stopped, and stared at me. “Jim?” she said. “Jim, what’s happened? You look terrible.”
“I had to find out sooner or later, didn’t I?” I told her. My throat was constricted, and I found it very difficult to speak.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You had to find out
