we had.”
He pulls his shirt out to show me the line. He grins. He is invincible. It’s like a game of chess in which his pieces continually overpower me, but we have long ceased to contest.
He begins to wander around the room while he talks. His clothing is scattered everywhere. He goes into the bathroom and discovers some lotion which he slowly rubs into his face, especially around his mouth. He lies down again. That lean face, dark as a farm boy’s. It has an edge to it. The bones seem able to cut right through me. He gets up again and begins to look through his suitcase. There’s an apple among his clothes. He offers me half.
“No, thanks. Didn’t you eat?”
“No. Just lunch.”
He lies supine, the pillow doubled beneath his neck. I listen to the moist explosion of his teeth in the hard flesh.
“I’m too tired to eat,” he says.
“Come on. I haven’t had anything.”
“I’m really not hungry,” he says.
He picks around the core, getting the last flecks with little incisions of his teeth. When he finishes, he lays it on a magazine. He stares at the ceiling.
“I may be leaving,” he says.
An enormous silence which I am finally obliged to break.
“Oh, really?”
“I think so.”
“Where will you be going?”
“America,” he says. “Home.”
“I see. Alone?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “I mean, I’m coming back.”
“I see.”
I can’t think of what to say.
“Well…” I begin.
“You know, I just have to go home for a while. I don’t have any money. I’ve been hanging on ever since last fall, and I can’t any more. You get to the point where you just can’t. So I have to go back and…” he sighs, “…talk to my father. Well, more than that. I have to organize myself a little. I’ve even been thinking about going back to school.”
“Back to Yale?”
“Oh, I couldn’t get back in. Some smaller college. NYU maybe.”
“Smaller?”
“Well, I didn’t mean it that way,” he says. “I really haven’t thought about where.”
“No.”
Then, as if commenting, he allows himself the briefest of laughs.
“The only thing is,” he says, “uh, I’m a little short of money.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t have quite enough for the ticket.” He pauses. “So, I was wondering…”
“How much would it be?” I ask.
“I’d leave you the car, you know, if anything happened …”
“The car? But it’s not your car,”
“Yes, it is,” he says.
“I thought it belonged to some friend.”
“No, no, he gave it to me. I can even get a letter from him if I have to.”
I know it’s not true. He’s simply out of money, like a gambler, and he must be supplied. I hurriedly try to think of a phrase to help me refuse him, but I can’t. If I were to deny him … anyway, it wouldn’t make that much difference. He would go on. Besides, I cannot make such a decision. He isn’t subject to judgments of mine—and I have the money.
“I need about three hundred dollars,” he says.
“Three hundred.”
“Can you let me have that much? I mean, against the Delage, of course.”
“Well… Yes, I guess so.”
“Oh,” he says, his head falls back, “listen, you’re a great guy.”
Yes, and I find myself believing it even though I am helping prepare his escape. The act is somehow criminal. It is something I will be ashamed of later. I am only exchanging his disgust for my own.
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly don’t. Not long. Maybe a month or so, I’m not sure.”
“Well, if you really go back to school…”
“That’s right, it would be much longer. Of course, that’s only a possibility.”
“…you wouldn’t be back.”
“Oh, don’t worry. If that happens, I’ll send you the money. I mean, I can get it easily enough. Even if I had to take it out of tuition or something. It wouldn’t make any difference.”
“I’m not worried. It’s not that. The whole thing surprises me, that’s all.”
“You thought I was getting married,” he says.
“No.”
“I might.”
“Really?”
“I’ve thought about it,” he says.
“I suppose so.”
He jumps up. The promise of money has given him an appetite. We go down towards the Champ, walking along the blank streets. Autun is silent, but it sleeps like an ancient woman. It hears every scrap of sound without even waking. It is ageless. It can see in the dark.
Buried among other buildings deep in the town—there are alleys one can pass by, cats know the way—above the level of trees and black foliage, the mysterious fragrance, the movement of branches, in a room filled with this same cool air of evening she lies asleep, her pale arms fallen, her lips apart. The varnished, orange doors of the
I even have a premonition that we are going to meet her as we walk down for a sandwich. It frightens me. I’m sure she could read what we have done in my face. I am ready to confess it all, I haven’t the slightest instinct to escape or he, but Dean, ah, he would greet her with a smile. The whole difference lies in that. I am not strong enough to love her. One must be selfish.
Watching him eat, I am plagued by this. Gradually I sink into a fine, a delicate hatred. I no longer hear what he says. I am only conscious of my own thoughts and the sound of his teeth chewing bread. He reeks of assurance. We are all at his mercy. We are subject to his friendship, his love. It is the principles of his world to which we respond, which we seek to find in ourselves. It is his power which I cannot even identify, which is flickering, sometimes present and sometimes not—without it he is empty, a body without breath, as ordinary as my own reflection in the mirror—it is this power which guarantees his existence, even afterwards, even when he is gone.
[34]
HE WILL RETURN FOR her. Silence. She looks at him. Then a single word,
“
