“You’re not interested in getting married, are you?” He says it abruptly, once they have returned to the Land Rover. He says it in French, his language for problems, reasoning, and resolution. He hears his own terror and looks irritably away from her. It is six months since they met.
“No, I’m not,” replies Elizabeth. She is embarrassed by the fatuous promptness with which the words bound out, like a grade-school recitation. Yet she hadn’t prepared them. She hadn’t prepared anything. They are bouncing across stubble, and to the west, where the evening light is stronger, a few green patches shine with weird intensity among the autumn browns: barley fields planted this month to be harvested in January or February. On the horizon, below a small, spiky gray cloud, a bright planet regards them equably. Without another word, Edo stops the motor and reaches over to unzip her jacket and unbutton her shirt. With the same rapt, careful movements he used in approaching the geese, he bends his head and kisses her breasts. Then he straightens up and looks at her and a strange thing happens: each understands that they’ve both been stealing pleasure. For a second they are standing face-to-face in a glass corridor; they see everything. It’s a minor miracle that is over before they can realize that it is the most they will have together. Instantly afterward, there is only the sense of a bright presence already departed, and the two of them faltering near the edge of an indefinable danger. As Elizabeth buttons her shirt and Edo turns the ignition key, they are already engaged in small, expert movements of denial and retreat. The jeep pulls out onto the darkening road, and neither finds a further word to say.
A tumult of wind and dogs greets them as they pull up ten minutes later to the house. Dervishes of leaves spin on the gravel beside the rented Suzuki that Nestor and his cousins used to get to that day’s shoot, near Guthrie. Both Elizabeth and Edo stare in surprise at the kitchen windows, where there is an unusual glow. It looks like something on fire, and for an instant Edo has the sensation of disaster—a conflagration not of his house, nothing so real, but a mirage of a burning city, a sign transplanted from a dream.
“What have they gotten up to, the young jackasses?” he says, climbing hurriedly out of the jeep. But Elizabeth sees quite clearly what Nestor and his cousins have done and, with an odd sense of relief, starts to giggle. They’ve carved four pumpkins with horrible faces, put candles inside, and lined them up on the windowsills. She interprets it as a message to her, since yesterday she and Giangaleazzo, who went to Brown, had been talking about Halloween in New England. “It’s Halloween,” she says, in a voice pitched a shade too high. She feels a sudden defensive solidarity with the jumble of young men in the kitchen, who are drinking Guinness and snuffing like hungry retrievers under the lids of the saucepans.
“Jackasses,” repeats Edo, who at the best of times defines as gross presumption any practical joke he hasn’t thought up himself. In this mood, his superstitious mind is shaken, and he can’t cast off that disastrous first vision. He hurries inside, telling her to follow him.
Instead, Elizabeth lets the door close and lingers outside, looking at the glowing vegetable faces and feeling the cold wind shove her hair back from her forehead. She wills herself not to think of Edo. Instead she thinks of a Halloween in Dover when she was eight or nine and stood for a long time on the doorstep of her own house after her brothers and everyone else had gone inside. The two big elms leaned over the moon, and the jack-o’-lantern in the front window had a thick dribble of wax depending from its grin, and she had had to pee badly, but she had kept standing there, feeling the urine pressing down in her bladder, clutching a cold hand between her legs where the black cheesecloth of her witch costume bunched together. She’d stood there feeling excitement and terror at the small, dark world she had created around herself simply by holding back. It’s an erotic memory that she has always felt vaguely ashamed of, but at the moment it seems curiously appropriate, a pleasure she’d enjoyed without guessing its nature.
Edo opens the kitchen door and calls her, and she comes toward him across the gravel. For a moment before he can see her clearly, he has the idea that there is a difference in the way she is moving, that her face may hold an expression that will change everything. Once, thirty years ago, in Persia, he and his brother Prospero saw a ball of dust coming toward them over the desert, a ball of dust that pulled up in front of them and turned into a Rolls-Royce, with a body made, impossibly, of wicker, and, inside, two young Persian noblemen, their friends, laughing, with falcons on their wrists. He and his brother and the gunbearers had stood there as if in front of something conjured up by djinns. He watches Elizabeth come with the same stilling of the senses as he had that afternoon in the desert. When she gets closer, though, the dust, as it were, settles, and his wavering perspective returns to normal, there on the doorstep of his last, his favorite house, in the cold October night. He thinks of the unspoken bargain she has kept so magnificently for a woman of her age, for any woman,
