But tonight Ben told her he was tired of the way she always left as soon as they were finished in bed. He wanted her to move in with him.
Gillian thought he was kidding, she really did. She laughed and said, 'I'll bet you say that to all the girls, after you've fucked them twenty or thirty times.'
'No,' Ben said. He wasn't smiling. 'I've never said it before.'
All day long Ben had had the feeling that he was about to either lose or win, and he couldn't tell which it would be. He put on a show at the hospital this morning, and one of the children, a boy of eight, wept when Ben made Buddy disappear into a large wooden box.
'He'll be back,' Ben assured this most distraught member of his audience.
But the boy was convinced that Buddy's reemergence was impossible. Once someone was gone, he told Ben, that was the end of him. And in the case of this boy, the theory was irrefutable. He'd been in the hospital for half his life, and this time he would not be going home. Already, he was leaving his body; Ben could see it just by looking at him. He was disappearing by inches.
And so Ben did what a magician almost never does: he took the boy aside and revealed how Buddy sat quietly and snugly within a false bottom of the disappearing box. But the boy refused to be consoled. Perhaps this wasn't even the same rabbit; there was no proof, after all. A white rabbit was an everyday thing, you could buy a dozen at a pet store. And so the boy continued to cry, and Ben might have wept right along with this child had he not been lucky enough to possess the tricks of his trade. Quickly, he reached to pull a silver dollar from behind the boy's ear.
'See.' Ben grinned. 'Presto,' he announced.
The boy stopped crying all at once; he was startled out of his tears. When Ben told him the silver dollar was his to keep, this boy looked, for a brief instant, the way he might have if awful things had not happened to him. At noon, Ben left the hospital and went to the Owl Cafй, where he had three cups of black coffee. He didn't have lunch; he didn't order the hash and eggs that he liked, or the bacon, lettuce, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitresses watched him carefully, hoping he'd soon be up to his old tricks, setting the salt shakers on end, starting fires in the ashtrays with a snap of his fingers, snatching tablecloths from beneath their place settings, but Ben just went on drinking coffee. After he'd paid and left a large tip, he drove around for hours. He kept thinking about the life span of a mayfly, and all the time he had wasted, and frankly he wasn't willing to waste any more.
Ben has spent his whole life afraid that whoever he loves will disappear, and there'll be no finding her: not behind the veils, not in the false bottom of the largest wooden box, the red lacquer one he keeps in the basement but cannot bring himself to use, even though he's been assured he can drive swords through the wood without causing a single wound. Well, that had changed. He wanted an answer, right then, before Gillian got dressed and ran back to the safety of her sister's house.
'It's very simple,' he said. 'Yes or no?'
'This isn't a yes-or-no kind of thing,' Gillian hedged.
'Oh, yes,' Ben said with absolute certainty. 'It is.'
'No,' Gillian insisted. Looking at his solemn face, she wished then that she'd known him forever. She wished that he had been the first one to kiss her, and the first to make love to her. She wished she could say yes. 'It's more of a thinking-it-over kind of thing.'
Gillian knew where this argument would lead. Start living with someone, and before you knew it you were married, and that was a human condition Gillian planned to avoid repeating. In that arena, she was something of a jinx. As soon as she said 'I do,' she always realized that she didn't at all, and that she never had, and she'd better get out fast.
'Don't you understand?' Gillian told Ben. 'If I didn't love you I'd move in today. I wouldn't think twice.'
Actually, she's been thinking about it ever since she left him, and she'll keep right on thinking about it, whether she wants to or not. Ben doesn't understand how dangerous love can be, but Gillian certainly does. She's lost at this too many times to sit back and relax. She has to stay on her toes, and she has to stay single. What she really needs is a hot bath and some peace and quiet, but when she sneaks in the back door she finds Antonia and Kylie waiting up for her. They're frantic and ready to call for an ambulance. They're beside themselves with worry. Something has happened to their mother, and they don't know what.
The bedroom is so dark that it takes Gillian a while to realize that the lump beneath the blankets is indeed a human life form. If there's anything Gillian knows, it's self-pity and despair. She can make that particular diagnosis in two seconds flat, since she's been there herself about a thousand times, and she knows what the cure is, too. She ignores the girls' protests and sends them to bed, then she goes to the kitchen and fixes a pitcher of margaritas. She takes the pitcher, along with two glasses dipped in coarse salt, out to the backyard and leaves it all beside the two lawn chairs set up near the little garden where the cucumbers are doing their best to grow.
This time when she goes to stand in Sally's doorway, the jumble of blankets doesn't fool her. There's a person hiding in there.
'Get out of bed,' Gillian says.
Sally keeps her eyes shut. She's drifting somewhere quiet and white. She wishes she could shut her ears as well, because she can hear Gillian approaching. Gillian pulls down the sheet and grabs Sally's arm.
'Out,' she says.
Sally falls off the bed. She opens her eyes and blinks.
'Go away,' she tells her sister. 'Don't bother me.'
Gillian helps Sally to her feet and guides her out of the room and down the stairs. Leading Sally is like dragging a bundle of sticks; she doesn't resist, but she's dead weight. Gillian pushes the back door open, and once they're outside, the rush of moist air slaps Sally in the face.
'Oh,' she says.
She really does feel weak and is relieved to sink into a lawn chair. She leans her head back and is about to close her eyes, but then she notices how many stars are visible tonight. A long time ago, they used to go up to the roof of the aunts' house on summer nights. You could get out through the attic window, if you weren't afraid of heights or easily scared by the little brown bats who came to feast on the clouds of mosquitoes drifting through the air. They both always made certain to wish on the first star, always the same wish, which of course they could never tell.
'Don't worry,' Gillian says. 'They'll still need you after they're all grown up.'
'Yeah, right.'
'I still need you.'
Sally looks at her sister, who's pouring them both margaritas. 'For what?'
'If you hadn't been here for me when all that happened with Jimmy, I'd be in jail right now. I just wanted you to know that I couldn't have done it without you.'
'That's because he was heavy,' Sally says. 'If you'd had a wheelbarrow, you wouldn't have needed me.'
'I mean it,' Gillian insists. 'I owe you forever.'
Gillian raises her glass in the direction of Jimmy's grave. 'Adios, baby,' Gillian says. She shivers and takes a sip of her drink.
'Good-bye and good riddance,' Sally tells the damp, humid air.
After being cooped up for so long, it's good to be outside. It's good to be here together on the lawn at this hour, when the crickets have begun their slow, late-summer call.
Gillian has salt on her fingers from her margarita. She has that beautiful smile on her face, and she seems younger tonight. Maybe the New York humidity is good for her skin, or maybe it's the moonlight, but something about her seems brand new. 'I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything.'
Sally wishes she could reach out and touch the moon and see whether it feels as cool as it looks. Lately, she's been wondering if perhaps when the living become the dead they leave an empty space behind, a hollow that no one else can fill. She was lucky once, for a very brief time. Maybe she should just be grateful for that.
'Ben asked me to move in with him,' Gillian says. 'I pretty much told him no.'
'Do it,' Sally tells her.
'Just like that?' Gillian says.
