Ben was also contemplating trees. He was considering the arrangement of trees in part of the garden, and how the sunlight fell on them.
To Ann lighting was everything. She liked to place frayed and beloved objects in careful positions, making sure the surfaces of scuffed old tables, worn rugs and torn chairs were never lit bleakly from above but always illuminated gently by sconces and floor lamps containing bulbs of dim wattage. She avoided bright lights both at home and in public places.
Recently she had refused to go to a home store with him. It made her feel bleak, she had told him. She often looked at the others standing in line to pay for their hardware products: here fat Stan with his two-by-fours, paint thinner and level, there Larry with the ear tufts holding his drill bits and royal-blue air conditioner filter, swaying and moaning as they plodded heavily in single-file down a dull concrete road, cheap home-improvement wares piled up high in their carts like the spoils of a sad war.
He asked her why she felt this way at the home store but not buying groceries. She said the grocery store was better because it held the prospect of giddiness, impulse and lightness.
Men felt that way buying hardware, he had said.
Her lighting arrangements were directed toward soft handling. She had to flatter things, manmade things that fell short, as they almost all did. The ugly had to be treated gently, as though it was sick.
She kept walking even after she was soaked, touching her arms in their wetness, fingers against the cold slick skin. She felt bereft of ideas except for one that said Move forward.
After an hour she turned back shaking, her hair ropy and dripping down her back. She picked her way over tree roots gnarled and jointed like bones on the muddy trail.
She thought now, instead of Move forward, only Be warm and dry again.
When she got to the car she turned on the heater full-blast. She drove back down the mountain, teeth chattering, and toweled off at home, in the bedroom. She changed clothes, bundling herself in wool and denim. But she was still afraid she would begin to think morbidly: morbid thoughts would come to her unbidden. That she could not control what she thought was horrifying to her, though it had never been before. With all that was external and beyond control it seemed at least that thoughts should be a modest self-determined privilege, but no, not even there was relief. Everything overlapped and nowhere was privacy.
Finally she called Ben and left a message on his cell phone, asking him to meet her when he got off work. Then she got into the car again and drove to an expensive restaurant, frequented by tourists but owned by a friend.
It was late afternoon and the cocktail-hour crowds were beginning to wander in. She warmed herself by the fire and then sat on a stool at the slick, varnished bar and ordered a glass of wine. John, the owner’s son, was behind the bar; she told him what had happened. He took her hand in both of his, which she did not mind although she was not overly fond of him. But then he made a suggestion about her chakras and she was required to be tolerant. Her hand itched and felt like a prisoner.
When he moved away to pour drinks she sipped her wine slowly, red this time. She could feel the spreading heat from the hearth, and the rain steady overhead.
She was about to ask for a second glass when she noticed a man sitting a few stools down. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans, and a belt with an ungainly silver buckle. The clothes hung on him; his body was gaunt. He was in his early forties, she guessed, with a prominent, aquiline nose, close-cropped dark hair and large, light eyes under his thick eyebrows.
He had a martini at his elbow, and was smoking a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes beside him on the counter as he paged through a large-format, square paperback book. The book seemed to her to be compelling him almost unnaturally, so rapt was he as he read it, so hunched over and beadily focused. When he glanced up he reminded her of a gangly baby bird—an ostrich maybe, though he was elegant, not absurd.
—May I trouble you, John, he said, and fingered the stem of his martini glass.
—Sure.
He had a nervous, angular charm. His clothes were shabby and the colors on the shirt struck her as slightly garish but despite this he seemed genteel, with an air of easy privilege. She noticed the title of the book he was reading: Oppenheimer.
But in fact it was not until later that she thought consciously of the name in her dream and connected the book with the dream. At the moment of seeing the title, Oppenheimer, she felt only a faint flick of recognition.
As he turned back to his book his eyes moved past her face and she looked away quickly. But he paid no attention to her; he had caught sight of someone coming in the door and was beckoning him over. It was a compact, balding man who brushed past her in his wet trench coat, sat down on the bar stool next to the martini drinker and began to speak rapidly in Italian.
The first man listened closely, nodding, until the Italian calmed down and paused in his speech, looking around for the bartender. Then he said to him, in English —I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, anyway.
They were quiet, and then the first man went on —For the rest, I don’t know, Enrico. I have no idea. If I were a strictly religious man
