“Who are you?”
“Call me the Woman in the Dark.” Mona was the fiction she offered all the other men, the one that had been claimed by the black giant who lived in her flat on the other side of the neighborhood; and she looked around her as she said it because though the giant wasn’t here she knew he was watching from her flat, peering at the living map he’d painted across the walls where she lived. If she’d thought there was any corner of the Arboretum that was hidden from sight in the walls of her flat, she might have taken Etcher by the hand and led him there. Or she might not. It might have been that any violation of her relationship with the men she danced for was too monumental, though of course it had already been violated by the man who lived in her flat. It never crossed her mind to fuck Etcher. She wasn’t sure it crossed his either. But she supposed that finally she’d found a man to whom, in some dark cold corner of her life, she might say, “Keep me warm,” and it would mean something entirely different from what it had always meant before. “Keep me warm,” she might say to him, and not feel colder for it. The dead part of her heart in which her father lived might, should she say it to Etcher, surge with the blood of her life, and in the flush she would dance for only one man and obliterate herself at his hands.
Every night he went to see the Woman in the Dark. She did not tell him her name. He drank again now.
Three months after he’d returned to the city the messages came from the north.
The first came from Kara. It was filled with expectation and insinuating pathos. His responses conveyed as much compassion as their obligatory nature could allow. If he no longer loved Kara as he once had, he nonetheless felt bound to love her for what had happened between them; for the source of his defining anguish to dry completely now would be another betrayal by love too profound for him to live with. But even as his answers to Kara became more perfunctory and less urgent, he wasn’t prepared for the simple one-line letter that arrived one afternoon: I don’t ever want to hear from you again. For the first split second he thought it was a joke; but he knew it wasn’t a joke. He thought, for another split second, of answering; but he didn’t answer. And so silence followed until, some time later, another message arrived: Your love was a lie. Then another: You led me on. These memos continued until their terse brutality changed to palpable rage. Now he tried to soothe himself with indignation, that this woman who had rejected him so bluntly and then, after the passage of so many years, beckoned him so summarily could accuse him of leading her on. But it was a cheap indignation, won by logic but without force of argument on the terrain of aging and abandonment and self-remorse: it was easier for her now to believe their love was a lie than to accept the consequences of having once made the wrong choice.
In the midst of these messages came Sally’s.
Now at the age of forty, his father and youth and love all passing at the same moment, he might have seemed comic in his new incarnation. This new role was to embody the recent bitter revelations of beautiful women who had come to assume by the nature of their beauty — even when, as in the case of Sally, they never quite believed in that beauty — that their lives were always to be filled with a hundred romantic choices, any of which could at some point be discarded or undone. Then the moment arrived for one woman after another, Kara and then Sally, when a choice could not be discarded or undone: and Etcher had been that choice for each of them. Because his love had seemed so enormous and his faith so pure they found his betrayal all the more incomprehensible. Now Sally was in trouble. Her life had become destitute and terrifying. She didn’t call Etcher to help her but to love her again. She called on him to promise her hope. And now Etcher could neither promise nor hope. She wrote scornfully in her letters of how he didn’t trust her anymore; he didn’t deny it. She wrote scornfully of how she didn’t trust love anymore; he couldn’t refute it. It infuriated him that she somehow felt love had let her down, when he believed she had let love down. He turned his back on her. His father and youth and love all having simultaneously passed from him, he no longer believed happiness was something pursued timelessly but rather that it was stumbled upon in a moment, seized ruthlessly and sensually with the understanding that it too would pass as quickly as a father or youth or love. But as much as he tried, the one thing Etcher couldn’t pretend was that he didn’t love her anymore. He couldn’t stop the dreams of her. He couldn’t stop the voice in his head that spoke to her, or her voice in his head that spoke back.
Then the correspondence stopped and the dreams changed. In the new dreams Sally was sick again, something in her again fluttering for release. As two years before she was in bed dying, the black bloom of her turned livid by fever. At first he thought these dreams were just old memories until in one of them he stopped to look around and saw he wasn’t in her old unit in her old circle but in the house far to the north in the Ice where he’d been chained to her bed while police rampaged across the rooftop. He told himself the dreams didn’t mean anything. He told himself they were a conspiracy of heart and conscience to provoke him into some kind of flight to her, into rushing back to save her again when he couldn’t save anyone anymore. Gann, after all, was there. It wasn’t as though she were really alone.
But one night not long after this dream, Etcher saw Gann in a corridor of the Arboretum.
He glanced up from Mona’s feet to catch sight of him just beyond the Fleurs d’X door, making his way to the stairwell that held the sound of the tide and led up to the surface; and at that moment he knew something was wrong. Sally was up there alone in the Ice after all, with no one but Polly. A cold dread passed through him. Suddenly oblivious of the Woman in the Dark, he rose to hurry after Gann, dropping his money on the stage and leaving the club behind. He had gotten down the corridor and was beginning to climb the stairs when he felt someone behind him.
The large hands on his back tore him from the stairs and hurled him against the wall. Etcher fumbled to try to catch his glasses as they flew off his face. In the force of his collision with the wall of the corridor, as he slipped bloodily to the floor, he was aware of nothing but that his glasses were somewhere in the hall where he couldn’t see them; in the vertigo of his blind haze and the smell of blood around him he was reminded not of when he’d smashed his glasses before the priests but of how far from the grace of love’s power he’d fallen. He called out to Gann in his mind, thinking, Something is wrong and I have to find Gann. But what he said out loud, what everything came down to, as it had all come down to since the first moment he saw her, was her name.
He was vaguely aware of someone at the end of the hall. He might have recognized her as the Woman in the Dark if in the light she hadn’t been transparent. If he could have seen anything he might still not have recognized the big black man from the church lobby years before, since the big man was more naked than the woman. Etcher reached to his mouth to touch his blood. It glistened from the blur of his hands. He was still saying her name when the large man placed his glasses in his hands and ran down to the other end of the hall.
All the way back to his unit he held out his hands before him and said her name, as though the blood were the medium of their communication and he spoke to her now through his wet fingers. All through the night he lay on his bed with his hands open at his sides. He could tell his hands were still wet with blood in the wind that came through the crack beneath his door. Something’s wrong, he told himself over and over; he did not sleep so as not to dream, because he couldn’t bear to dream of Sally dying alone in the Ice. It was as well that he didn’t catch up with Gann, he tried to tell himself: what would he have said to him anyway? “Gann, I’ve been having dreams.” Now as he lay on his bed he shook himself awake each time he thought he might fall to sleep. He didn’t change positions because he didn’t want to wipe the blood from his hands onto the sheets beneath him. He had almost slipped to sleep when there was a knock on the door.