“It’s what comes of a healthy life-style. You could take a lesson from it.”
“I surely could, yessir.”
We sat for a moment in a stillness that suddenly made me uncomfortable. I said, “I wish I could start a fire.”
“There’s no more wood in here; you’d have to bring it in from the carriage house.”
“Maybe I will. Want to toast marshmallows?”
That pulled a laugh from him, albeit a small one. “Sure. Then what would we do with them?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just enjoy watching them burn.”
The storm has ended, and I am shivering with cold; my fingers are tingling as they return to life. Perhaps it is a torture I inflict on myself to type while my hands are in this condition. If so, it is stupid. I will wait for a few minutes, then resume.
There. That is better. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that the windows in the typing room (there are two, one facing west and the other facing south) are boarded up. They are covered by thin plywood strips, and not perfectly, so just at the moment, with all the clouds having dissipated as suddenly as they appeared, I am receiving some light from the half-moon, which is cutting through the slats and making a sharp white image across the keys as she sinks. The weather has warmed slightly, but it is still cold, or my fingers should have warmed up sooner; but I am not inclined to start yet another fire and warm myself up thoroughly. I wonder if it would be possible to get the furnace going; it is a hot-water radiator furnace and newer than one would suppose. Does this kind of furnace produce visible smoke? Probably.
I felt that Jill had recovered enough that I could go and see her again, although I made yet another firm resolve to stay away from Susan. She has a very active life, and I didn’t want her to come down with some strange illness that matched Jill’s, and would cause doctors to start paying attention. In a general sense, doctors are the least of my worries, but why should I take unnecessary chances? And I don’t really want to make Susan start missing classes.
So I said to myself.
Heh.
I took myself to the big white house with blue lights in the attic, I entered, and found the living room empty and the inside lights off. I climbed the stairs, nodded to the saint pictured in the stained glass, and came to Jill’s door, which I opened. She was awake, sitting up in bed, I think just staring off into space. She showed no surprise when I came in; just dropped her eyes, then unbuttoned the top of her nightgown, then looked at the wall in front of her and waited.
I looked at her carefully. She was still pale, as from illness, and had unhealthy-looking circles under her eyes. Her hand, outside of her blanket, seemed to tremble slightly. I shook my head, which attracted her attention enough that her eyes returned to me; she looked puzzled.
“Not tonight,” I said. “I have a headache.”
She frowned and shook her head slightly, not understanding. I sighed. “Just rest,” I said. “Eat a lot. You need to recover.”
“But you-?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I can wait. I don’t want to kill you, child.”
“Why not?”
“You are of no use to me dead.”
“Oh.” Her lips formed the word, but I heard no sound.
I thought I would say hello to Susan, so I went over and tapped softly on her bedroom door. She called for me to come in. She was lying in bed, hands clasped behind her head. The bedclothes were down by her waist and she wore nothing. She greeted me with words I cannot now recall. Then, I suppose seeing some expression on my face, she said, “What is it, Jonathan?”
“There is a scent in this room,” I said. “A cologne that I do not recognize.”
“Oh, yes, that is Jennifer’s.”
“Jennifer?”
“A friend.”
There was a burgundy-colored button-up blouse draped over a chair. Susan would not wear burgundy. It came to me that the last time I’d been in her room, there had been a pink sweater hanging from one of the knobs of the closet door, and she wouldn’t wear pink, either.
“What is it, Jonathan?”
And, beyond the perfume, there was the unmistakable odor of sex in the room. Recent sex.
I said, “What did you say your friend’s name is?”
“Jennifer.” And yes, it was there in the way she said her friend’s name, too. Perhaps everyone else called her Jenny, but Susan had needed her version, one that she could say sleepily, while holding her in the warm afterglow of love.
I said, “I just wanted to say hello.”
“Well, hello,” she said brightly.
I smiled, keeping my feelings off my face, and closed the door. I went back into Jill’s room. She hadn’t moved. I took her shoulders in my hands; it came to me, as if from somewhere outside of myself, that if I let myself begin I would kill her; so I threw her back onto the bed. I heard something like a sob escape my throat. Jill was staring at me with a hurt-puppy look that made me wish very much to strangle her; instead I stepped around the bed, to the window, flung it open. Mist poured in like smoke, and I felt the clouds gather above. “Don’t go driving anywhere,” I told Jill. “Winter storm warning,” and I passed out through the window, into the fog and the swirling snow of the storm.
I remember little between the beginning of the storm and my arrival in this room, but my brain is full of images of swirling snow, and of lightning dancing back and forth between clouds, and throwing my rage down on the helpless Earth below me.
The storm cleared as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving me numb, as I sit here before this infernal machine. Now I am no longer cold, but I think I am still numb, and able to wonder, in a distant, abstract sort of way, what sensation will come to fill the void once the numbness has worn off.
I’m feeling about the same as before, although perhaps it isn’t quite as intense. After typing up what happened, I sat very still for a while, then went down to Jim. He said hello, and looked at me for just a moment. He asked me what had happened, and I just shook my head. He waited for a few minutes, and when I still didn’t say anything he took himself upstairs. I realized that he was reading what I’d just written, and that made me uncomfortable at first, but there were so many conflicting passions clamoring for my attention that I finally realized I didn’t care, so I just waited, wondering what he’d say.
When he came back down he asked me to explain it to him. I was not entirely certain that I could, and told him so. He said, “But this can’t be the first time something like this has happened.”
“Something like what?” I said.
He frowned, and I got the impression that talking of such things made him uncomfortable, which, just then, was fine by me; I was still in the grip of some nameless combination of emotions in which anger was, if not dominant, at least a part; I badly wanted to strike out at something or someone. In any case, he said, “Discovering that your lover has someone else.”
“ ‘Lover,’” I said. “Now there’s an interesting word for it.”
He continued to stare past my shoulder, at my chest, or occasionally at my forehead. “What word would you prefer?”
“How about ‘victim.’”
“Susan is your victim?”
“No,” I said, the word out before I actually thought about it.
“Well, then?”
“If she’s a lover, than she’s the first lover I’ve had since…”
“Yes?”
“Since Laura.”
“Kellem?”
“That’s right.”
