into multiculturalism-you know, noble savages and all that. Then there's the postmodern stuff; I guess that's the latest-everything's relative, there's no truth, words don't mean anything. And of course atheism-that was always there, that was a given. You couldn't really have the rest of it without that.'
She spoke all this into that distance between the trees. My eyes went over her profile as she did. I was struck again by the rightness of her, by my certainty that we were meant to be together. I had never known anything as surely as I knew that my best life depended on her. I loved her.
Now she turned to look up at me again, the filigree of shadows shifting on her heart-shaped face, holding her within the texture of the garden. 'One thing I couldn't help noticing after a while, though? Brilliant as he was, every thing my father believed in turned out to be untrue. I mean, people don't really have Oedipal complexes, not usually anyway, and labor doesn't actually produce capital. Women are born different from men, some cultures are better than others, and on and on. And then, on top of being wrong all the time, he's also miserable. Drinks morning to night, hates his marriage, treats my mother like garbage. I sometimes think miserable people shouldn't be allowed to have philosophies at all, you know. I sometimes think they should have to find happiness first, then at least they can tell us what worked for them.' She waved the thought away with her hand. 'Anyway, the point is, after a while it made me wonder. The fact that all these deep convictions of his turned out to be, you know, just false, made me wonder about the other thing, the God thing. Well, it's a long story.'
I drew my hand along the side of my jaw. I had to admit, it didn't seem as silly as it did when she was praying. 'What about this?' I said, gesturing toward the house. 'All this hush-hush stuff. Is this the catacombs or something? You have to come here to do this in secret?'
Emma seemed about to object. I wouldn't have blamed her. It was none of my business, for one thing. Plus we both knew I owed her more answers than she did me. Still, she seemed to want to explain, to get it out of the way, maybe, before we got down to discussing the real topic of the day, which was why the hell a creepy scummy slimebag like me was following her around and spying on her.
Emma looked toward the house, gave a fond half smile. 'It's not secret. It's just private, that's all. The people who come here are mostly in the same boat as I am. You know, it's a university town. We all have parents or boyfriends or girlfriends or bosses or whatever who are academics or intellectuals or radicals or journalists-you know, people who have very, very strong convictions that just happen to be untrue. And like most people who have convictions like that, they get very angry at anyone who disagrees with them. Some of us are afraid of losing our jobs or our lovers. Some of us don't want to stop getting invited to the hip parties. Some of us-like me-I just don't want to break the heart of someone I love. It's not being secretive exactly. Most of us aren't the sort of people who would fit in at the mainstream churches anyway. So we organized this and it's private and it gets the job done.'
She finished. She went on looking fondly at the house as the preacher's voice drifted to us and the voices of the people answered. I stood over her, expecting her to say more, expecting her to turn to me, ask me straight out: Why hadn't I called her after that first night in Carlo's? Why was I spying on her now? She didn't. She didn't say anything. She just went on looking at the house.
'Well, it all sounds almost reasonable when you explain it like that,' I said.
She gave a laugh, a sad little laugh.
'Ah, Emma.' I plunked down next to her on the wrought-iron bench. 'I'm not some kind of creep, I swear it.'
She nodded, still without looking at me. 'I know that. I know what you are. I think I know what you can be anyway.'
'Emma, from the second I saw you…' I stopped. I couldn't. I didn't have the right.
'I know that too,' she said. She did turn now, brought her face half-around, glanced at me sidelong. It was an awfully nice face. Pug nose, arching brows. Thin lips, but soft, very soft-looking. I couldn't believe I had stayed away from her so long just to avoid this moment, just to avoid telling her the truth.
'That night we met at Carlo's,' I said. 'I went back to the city after and stopped to pick something up at the house of a woman I work with.' Emma shut her eyes, waiting for it. 'I was gonna call you the next day, but… we, this woman and I, we… started up together.' Emma's soft-looking lips scrunched into a trembling frown. I sighed. 'I keep thinking I'll get out of it. I want to get out of it. But I haven't been able to and… I didn't want to call you until I had.'
A tear hung crystal on her eyelashes and fell. She opened her eyes. For the first time, there was a flash of anger in them, an angry tension in her voice. 'Then why are you here?' she said. 'Why are you spying on me?'
Painfully, I forced the words out. 'I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I'll find a way to make it right. So help me God, I will. But right now-I just can't tell you.'
Emma opened her mouth. She made a noise. A whispered sob, I guess. Another tear fell from her eyes and then another ran down her cheek. She pressed her lips together. She shook her head. 'That,' she said, 'is not fair.'
'I know, I know.'
'You're taking advantage.'
'I know.'
'You're taking advantage of the fact that we were meant for each other.'
I seized her hand convulsively in both of mine. I brought it up and pressed it against my forehead. 'Emma!'
She gently drew the hand away. As tightly as I held on, I couldn't keep it. She stood up. I couldn't look at her. I bent forward with my elbows on my thighs, my hands still pressed against my brow.
They began singing in the house again. Knuckleheads. What the hell were they constantly singing about?
'I'm not the new kind of girl,' Emma said. The way she said it, the way she had to work to keep her voice steady-well, it would've broken my heart if my heart had not already broken. 'I'm an old-fashioned girl. I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don't come back until you are one.'
The air came out of me as if she'd punched me. I wished she'd only punched me. It was several long moments before I could lift my head.
When I did, she was at the gate again, slipping through the gate, closing the gate behind her. She walked away, up the path, out of sight, back to the house, where they all continued singing.
23.
The canyon highway curled through the barren hills, came out again into barren flatland, wilderness to the horizon. Swaths of gray cloud covered the sky, as if it were a ceiling painted slapdash. Daylight broke through in places as the sun began to rise, but the clouds also gathered and the light slowly died behind an iron monotony. The color of the distance died with the light. There was nothing ahead but the brown of dust and tumbleweed, a faint hazy blue of mountains far away.
Weiss drove wearily. He'd slept badly. He'd had bad dreams. All night in the motel, in a boxlike room bare yards from the highway. Tangled in sweat-gray sheets, mere inches beneath the surface of sleep. Trucks had thundered past, headlights had flashed over the ceiling-and in his dreams, the dark was split by lightning and there stood the Shadow-man. It was the man from Hannock, the man in the suede windbreaker whom Weiss had spoken to at the base of the driveway. But in these dreams, the killer leaped suddenly at him out of the split darkness-and he had no face. That was the worst part of it. That was the thing that haunted Weiss even after he was awake. The killer had no face. Even here, now, no matter how hard he tried, Weiss couldn't remember what the man had looked like. He had slipped away, had slipped even out of his memory.
' Boof, ' he said aloud. Just thinking about it gave him indigestion. He rubbed his gut with one hand as he steered toward Reno with the other.
At eight he saw the city catch the sun. Wind with a hint of rain in it had thinned the clouds by then. The light came down in beams. The oasis of hotel towers and casinos was held in a pink glow, set apart from the backdrop of white-blue mountains. It looked like a fine place from here.
But with every mile Weiss drove, a little of the luster of the city seeped away. Soon the dreary outskirts
