glow seeping into the violet sky. The snap and rattle of the streetcars down on Market drifted up to us. The high winter wind made the panes knock in their frames. I had that sense, that sense I often had on nights like this, that Weiss and I were sitting in the one still corner of the cold and frantic world.
Weiss kept a bottle of Macallan in his desk drawer, just as if he were a detective in one of the old novels. He had poured us each a glass of scotch, and now the bottle stood on the desk between us, glowing amber in the lamplight.
I swirled the whiskey in my glass. I drew in the scent of it.
'It's a wonderful thing to imagine,' I said.
Weiss laughed softly.
We were talking about Bishop. He was getting better, stronger, all the time. Two weeks before, he had left the hospital in Phoenix and come back to a rehab center in San Francisco. They held him there for a few days, until the insurance ran out. He was still too weak to take care of himself, so Sissy took him in.
It was, as I said, a wonderful thing to imagine. All the dangers Bishop had faced, all the adventures he'd had, the things he'd done, and the things we thought he might have done-none was more amazing to conjure in the brain than the mental image of him sunk in the white fluffy recesses of Sissy's apartment, lying all but helpless amid white fluffy valentine pillows and a white fluffy comforter while the white fluffy cats made a bed of him.
I admit I felt a little jealous when I thought of it-a little. Sissy would lavish all her tenderness on him, and I knew well how tender Sissy could be. She would coddle and nurse him, feed him and mop his fevered brow until he had to get well just to keep from killing her.
The outcome seemed to me inevitable. Bishop's wounds would heal. His vigor would seep back into him, then flow back in a strengthening stream. Alone with Sissy and with few distractions, he would become increasingly aware of the sweetness of her smile, the delicacy of her features, the whiteness of her skin-the smell of her; she smelled great, as I think I've already had occasion to mention. She would come and go from the kitchen, from the bathroom, bringing whatever he needed for his comfort, and he would watch her come and go. The girlish whisper and the maternal endearments that annoyed him at first would soon come to reveal what was true gentleness in her. He would think: she was really not so bad, not half-bad, after all.
As for Sissy-well, I can't imagine anything so trivial as her experience with me would have lessened one little bit her propensity for the Impossible Man. Bishop's helplessness, his gratitude, his slowly growing realization of her undeniable charms would all work their magic on the pent-up longings of her over-romantic nature. She would begin the familiar process of convincing herself that he was other than he was. She would tell herself that she had overstated his detachment and aggression, unfairly denied his charisma and heroism, and momentarily lost faith in the possibility that a man's personal defects might be reformed by the love of a good woman.
Thus there would come a day-who could help but think there would come a day?-when as she was bustling past his couch to do some errand on his behalf, he would reach for her, his strong fingers closing around her slender wrist. I could see her stopping, looking down-him looking up, his pale, sardonic gaze on her blue eyes.
I could hear her thinking: Maybe he was right in front of me all this time and I didn't see it.
And I could hear him: What the hell? Maybe I'll stick her once before I go.
And so they would continue, as we all continue more or less, each in his or her own way.
That was my imagination of it anyhow. Weiss, of course, read my mind.
'It'll make her forget you in a big hurry,' he muttered into his scotch glass. He laughed.
I laughed too, although not without a stabbing pain in my ego, I admit.
I'm sure Weiss was aware of that too. 'Well,' he consoled me, coming out of his whiskey with a small gasp. He tilted his glass my way. 'You've done all right yourself.'
I smiled, consoled. I tilted my glass back at him.
I had done all right-much better than just all right, as the years would prove-although it was some while after I got back from Nevada before I could finally deal with Emma and her father. It was awhile before I could simply get the various parts of my body to move in some semblance of working order.
When I did, I called Professor McNair. It seemed only fair to go to the old man first. There was no good way to straighten the whole mess out, but that seemed the only fair way to begin. I knew it wasn't going to be easy. I wasn't going to tell him Emma's secret, and I knew he wasn't going to like that. And I was going to have to betray his confidence and let her know he'd hired me to watch her, and I knew he wasn't going to like that either. And if he didn't like that stuff, he sure as hell wasn't going to like it when I explained the reason for it all: that I was in love with his daughter and I suspected she was in love with me.
In the event, it was worse than I could have imagined. I can still remember feeling what seemed like a big iron ball lodged in my throat as I stood on the porch of the small clapboard house in the Berkeley hills, waiting to be admitted. It was Emma's mother who answered the bell. She looked startlingly like her daughter-physically anyway. She had the same long, lean figure, the same heart-shaped face. But any spark that had ever been in her eyes, any hilarious wickedness that had ever appeared in her lips had long since been worried out of her. Every feature, every line and angle of her seemed to have been drawn down, down, down by the gravitational pull of a wearying sadness. I couldn't swear to myself that Emma would never come to look like that, but I swore right then and there that she would never come to look like that on my account.
She led me up the stairs and down a hall. I've seen both those stairs and that hall many times since then, but they somehow were never again as long or as completely overhung with such a threatening gloom. At the end of the hall was a door, and when Emma's mother swung it open, I saw-I thought I saw-a deep and wondrous expanse of a sanctuary with book-lined walls running forever toward a towering oak desk in the far distance. In fact, it was quite a small room as I later found out, with books and files and papers stacked in every corner. But at that moment, I felt as if I'd come into the Library of the World and the Great Librarian himself was rising imperiously behind the Great Circulation Desk of Life.
McNair was as I remembered him-including drunk. Those eyes set in their nest of deep-cut wrinkles had a serpentine dullness, a film of whiskey and pure meanness that made the ball in my throat grow larger, heavier. If I had harbored any hopes that goodwill would somehow transform the discomfort of the situation and put our common errors to some happy use, those hopes sank bubbling to the bottom of my heart as I approached the desk.
Likewise any hopes I had of pity. The bruises I had sustained outside the House of Dreams were healing by then, but they looked even worse than they had when they were in their bruise prime. My cheeks were swollen, purple and yellow; the flesh around my eyes was puffed and livid; my lips looked as if they'd been attacked by an insane plastic surgeon with a syringe full of collagen-which was not to mention the fact that I was bent and limping from all the kicks I'd taken to my ribs and legs.
McNair didn't even mention it. He simply stood behind the desk and waited. He didn't even offer my poor broken body a seat.
'Well?' he said.
Well-I won't tell all of it. He was furious. He swore he would have me fired. When I told him I'd already quit, he actually shook his fist at me, too enraged for words. Then he found the words and railed against my dishonesty and stupidity for going on half an hour. I weathered it. There was nothing else for me to do. Finally he subsided, sinking into his chair, muttering dark imprecations into his sleeve.
'The question is do you want to tell her or should I?' I said.
'Oh, there's no question at all. You'll tell her. You'll tell her. It's your mess, you imbecilic bastard.'
'All right. Well, sir… I hope this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'
'Get out.'
I did-and with no small feeling of relief, let me tell you. But even better than that, I left in the understanding I had been given a great gift. To wit, I was not the man I was. I was not afraid as I had been. All the time McNair was yelling at me, I stood before his desk-I felt his hot, alcoholic breath washing over me; I felt the flecks of his spit pattering against my face-and I was immovable. What could he do to me, after all? He was not an old man, though
