“No.” He gave a little laugh.
He grew quiet, filled with excitement, and yet filled with worry though every word she spoke gladdened him and made him feel that this anxiety would lift any second.
He found himself looking off to the mirror at the far end of the room, and seeing their tiny reflection there, and the repeated chandeliers, caught in the two mirrors, marching on, countless, in a blur of silver light, to eternity.
“Do you like loving me?” she asked.
“What?”
“Do you like it?” Her voice had a decided tremor in it for the first time.
“Yeah, I love loving you. But it’s scary, because you aren’t like anyone else I’ve ever known. You’re so strong.”
“Yes, I am,” she said thickly. “Because I could kill you right now if I wanted to. All your manly strength wouldn’t do you any good.”
“No, that isn’t what I meant,” he said. He turned and looked at her, and for one moment in the shadows her face looked unspeakably cold and cunning, with her eyelids at half mast, and her eyes gleaming. She looked malicious the way she had for one instant in the house in Tiburon in the cold light coming through the glass into a darkened room.
She sat up slowly, with a soft rustle of cloth, and he found himself shrinking from her, instinctively, every hair standing on end. It was the hard wariness you feel when you see a snake in the grass two inches from your shoe, or you realize the man on the next bar stool has just turned towards you and opened a switchblade knife.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he whispered.
But then he saw. He saw she was shaking and her cheeks were blotched with pink yet deathly white, and her hands reached out for him and then shrank back and she looked at them and then clasped them together, as if trying to contain something unspeakable. “God, I didn’t even hate Karen Garfield,” she whispered. “I didn’t! So help me God, I … ”
“No, it was all a mistake,” he said, “a terrible mistake, and you won’t ever make that mistake again.”
“No, never,” she said. “Even with that old woman, I swear, I didn’t really believe it.”
Desperately he wanted to help her but he didn’t know what to do. She was quivering like a flame in the shadows, her teeth stabbing her lower lip, her right hand clenching her own left hand cruelly.
“Stop, honey, stop-you’re hurting yourself,” he said. But she felt like something made of steel, unbending, when he touched her.
“I swear, I didn’t believe it. It’s like an impulse, you know and you don’t really believe you can possibly … I was so angry with Karen Garfield. It was outrageous, her coming there, her walking into Ellie’s house, so stupidly outrageous!”
“I know, I understand.”
“What do I do to neutralize it? Does it come back inside me and burn me from within?”
“No.”
She turned away from him, drawing up her knees and peering out into the room dully, a little calmer now, though her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her fingers were still working anxiously.
“I’m surprised you haven’t hit upon the obvious answer,” she said, “the one that is so clear and so neat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe your purpose is simple. It’s to kill me.”
“God, how could you think of such a thing?” He drew closer to her, brushing her hair back out of her face, and gathering her near to him.
She looked at him as if from a long long distance away.
“Honey, listen to me,” he said. “Anybody can take a human life. It’s easy. Very easy. There are a million ways. You know ways I don’t know because you’re a doctor. That woman, Carlotta, small as she was, she killed a man strong enough to strangle her with one hand. When I sleep next to any woman, she can kill me if she wants to. You know that. A scalpel, a hat pin, a bit of lethal poison. It’s easy. And we don’t do those things, nothing on earth can make most of us ever even think of them, and that’s how it’s been all your life with you. And now you find you’ve got a mutant power, something that exceeds the laws of choice and impulse and self-control, something that calls for a more subtle understanding, and you have that understanding. You have the strength to know your own strength.”
She nodded; but she was still shaking all over. And he could tell that she didn’t believe him. And in a way, he wasn’t sure he believed himself. What was the use of denying it? If she didn’t control this power, she would inevitably use it again.
But there was something else he had to say, and it had to do with the visions and the power in his hands.
“Rowan,” he said, “you asked me to take off the gloves the first night we met. To hold your hands. I’ve made love to you without the gloves. Just your body and my body, and our hands touching and my hands touching you all over, and what is it I see, Rowan? What do I feel? I feel goodness and I feel love.”
He kissed her cheek. He kissed her hair and brought it back off her forehead with his hand.
“You’re right in many things you’ve said, Rowan, but not in that. I’m not meant to hurt you. I owe my life to you.” He turned her head towards him and kissed her, but she was still cold and trembling, and far far beyond his reach.
She took his hands and moved them down and away from her, gently, nodding, and then she kissed him gently, but she didn’t want to be touched now. It didn’t do any good.
He sat there for a while, thinking, looking at the long ornate room. Looking at the high mirrors in their dark carved frames, and the dusty old Bozendorfer piano at the far end, and the draperies like long streaks of faded color in the gloom.
Then he climbed to his feet. He couldn’t sit still any longer. He paced the floor in front of the couch, and found himself at the side window, looking out over the dusty screen porch.
“What did you say a moment ago?” he asked, turning around. “You said something about passivity and confusion. Well, this is it, Rowan, the confusion.”
She didn’t answer him. She was sitting crouched there, staring at the floor.
He went back to her and gathered her up, off the couch and into his arms. Her cheeks were still splotched with pink, and very pale. Her lashes were dark and long as she looked down.
He pressed his lips against her mouth softly, feeling no resistance, almost no awareness, as if it were the mouth of someone unconscious or deep asleep. Then slowly she came back to life. She slipped her hands up around his neck, and kissed him back.
“Rowan, there is a pattern,” he whispered in her ear. “There is a great web and we’re in it, but I believe now as I believed then, they were good, the people who brought us together. And what they want of me is good. I gotta figure it out, Rowan. I have to. But I know it’s good. Just as I know that you are good, too.”
He heard her sigh against him, felt the lift of her warm breasts against his chest. When at last she slipped away, it was with great tenderness, kissing his fingers as she let them go.
She walked out towards the center of the long room. She stood under the high broad archway that divided the space into two parlors, and she looked up at the beautiful carving in the plaster, and at the way the arch curved down to meet the cornices at either end. She seemed to be studying this, to be lost in contemplating the house.
He felt bruised and quiet. The whole exchange had hurt him. He couldn’t shake a feeling of misery and suspicion, though it was not suspicion of her.
“Who gives a damn!” she whispered as if she were talking to herself, but she seemed fragile and uncertain.
The dusty sunlight crept in from the screened porch and showed the amber wax on the old boards. The motes of dust swirled around her.
“Talk, talk, talk,” she said. “The next move is theirs. You’ve done everything you could. And so have I. And here we are. And let them come to us.”
“Yes, let them come.”
