She looked for his house, that she might inflict her final act of justice. She made her way up and down the gorges of the Hancock veldt; it’s a matter of time, she told herself, till I find him. Behind the windows of the mansions people danced like the cartoon characters of music boxes. Several times she peered in; often they saw her. She continued looking for his house but to no avail. Once she thought she’d found it, a red brick house with white edgings, but it was all wrong, all different, the windows and the door in the wrong places. She continued looking until she was beginning to recognize houses passed before; and when she came to the red brick house again, about a week and a half later, it was even more different. The faces of the houses were changing, she realized: caught up in an America where people knew their faces, she now attributed to those faces the very chameleonlike qualities that others attributed to hers. Before I leave America, she told herself, I’ll replace the face of my treason with the face of my destiny. Only when she saw her reflection one night in the window of another house did she understand both faces were one and the same. This was the window through which she hurled a rock, shattering glass and reflection and peace of mind and the patience of local law enforcement, everything but her futility.
Then she had a dream: she again walked a beach on a night of moon, a peculiar and vaguely felt city ribboning the edge of the earth, her hands filled with what she now knew to be the knife with which Coba peeled fruit on his boat. Down the beach in the light of the moon, just beyond the water, Llewellyn knelt on his knees in the sand. As usual he would not look at her as she came to him. As usual he would not look at her as she stood right before him. Had he raised his face to her, everything would have been different. Had he raised his face to her, she couldn’t have done it. Instead he turned away, and she said to herself, Your turning from me is more obscene than all the faces that never turned; it’s a denial by which you believed you might own me. It’s an ownership by which you believed you might save something. It’s a salvation by which you believed you never betrayed yourself. Not another moment will I be the sacrifice by which America pre tends its dreams have never changed. My knife chimes in the moon.
She was watching his head sail off into space when she saw a boat drifting by and on its deck another man watching. He looked rather like the man who lay at her feet. Before she woke she said to herself, My life, it’s nothing but sailors.
She wandered the Hancock veldt two months of nights. On the evening she decided to leave America she woke to a red sky alive with a thousand flesh spiders. From horizon to horizon they spun silver webs that shivered with pain. Beneath these strange skies she left the veldt and traveled the road east to the border. She crossed Western Avenue and soon came to the swirling map in the sky that read Ambassador Hotel, where she remembered the morning she met Richard. On this evening the hotel was bustling with more activity than usual: a line of limousines stretched along the northern wall, and near the lobby were the white holes of television lights and the chrome and black of cameras. Guests shuffled with hotel management. Several security guards dashed back and forth. Catherine walked up the long drive and resolutely through the throng, through the doors she had passed before.
She walked with the throng down a long corridor lined with shops: ticket agencies and barbers, boutiques and small post offices, rental services and magazine stands. She went up the stairs at the end of the corridor into the lobby, where many chandeliers glittered above a fountain of water in the middle. There were also two elevators, a dining hall and a lounge. At the front desk the management was coping with a flurry of check-ins. To the left was a cavernous ballroom. No one danced in the ballroom, and the sullen dark was scarred with candlelight; across walls that held no windows hung curtains that reached the ceiling. The bar in the corner aspired to near invisibility. Only a few people were present but more brushed past Catherine in the doorway, and as the room filled, nothing changed but the presence of silent faces; no laughter was raised or discussion exchanged; people groped for facsimiles of discretion. The candles were kept burning as though to mask the smell of decay. When a flame went out it was urgently relit by someone in a hotel uniform assigned to no other purpose.
Catherine turned from the doorway and went back into the lobby. A number of people were noticing her and looking at her, including the manager behind the front desk. He kept his eye on her as she walked the
