The grass on the hillside ripped, the trees knelt. Claire stiffened in Nathan's arms. Then it came in cold sheets, firmer than she expected, like soft wood. Nathan bent to her, but the press of his lips was lost in the weight of the rain. She reached up and pulled his head down to her, and against her ear his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, that side of his face, she felt, the only part of him that kept warm and dry.
When the rain stopped the air was peculiar, empty of sound. Slowly the grass rearranged itself.
She looked to him, his hair a wide dark curtain, face streaked and dripping. A thin veil seemed to drop between them, the feeling of a shared, rural peace, blurring for a moment her suspicions. Nathan hummed. She felt her heart melting.
They skirted down the hill. It was dark then, with dusk this time, the spaces between the trees and the tops of the village roofs more and more blue. Their little shabby house loomed before them.
Nathan tried to light a match for the cigarette he had somehow forgotten to put to his lips, but both were wet, and when he failed to light either he dropped them in the grass, and for a time they confronted each other like two enemy forts, mute, waiting-
The hospital's lobby staff gives Nathan the impression not of paid workers but retirees on social security. The old black guard sitting half-on, half-off a high stool beside the turnstile, his fixed-smile demeanor, his uniform the formal-informal combination of chauffeur's cap and old gray cardigan. Up the elevator, in Nathan's hand always the same scrap of paper with the hospital's address and a room number. On the sixth floor a pail of water and a mop bar entrance to the nurses' station. The long green hallway is silent, two opposing rows of green doors as quiet as linen closets.
Nathan stares wearily at the label outside 614. The name was there last night. It is there now. It might not be next time. That was what he thought yesterday. He thinks it again now: She's still there. Gone, a small harbored hope.
He knocks lightly. No answer. He pauses, then begins to push. But hearing footsteps down the hall he turns his head sharply, catching a glimpse of the heel of a shoe, a dark trouser cuff, pulling into a doorway.
Nathan watches, then walks through, "Jesus Christ," blinking, his nostrils flare against the reek: urine, ammonia, something else, something harder to take. A trash can blooms, soiled paper towels, latex gloves, a crusty syringe. A half-filled bedpan in the sink, the remains of her dirt, listing in a greenish muddy puddle. He is intimate with her shit by now.
But Nathan stands a moment in confusion. He looks at the bedpan, again at the bed. Emaciated, her hair thin and greasy, unwashed for weeks it seems, this woman is not who he expected, no Washington Heights beauty queen stopping traffic on the dance floor of Limelight, but a kind of dishwater blonde, moneyed Upper West Side material. Admiring the chiseled bone structure of the face-yes, Columbus Avenue, linen pants, Museum Cafe now betrayed and plunged into an old woman's crusty death. She stares ahead at the air but does not see it, as though she is asleep or fixed in a trance, perhaps already dead, though her eyes have not gone to stones.
He yanks aside the edge of the bisecting curtain and faces a bank of windows purpling with the twilight. In the office across the street many of the windows are actually alight, whole offices of little desks and drafting tables at which little people sit beneath banker's lamps, flanked by cartons of Chinese food. He steps to the foot of the other gurney where, superimposed on all the deadlines and ambition in the window, stands a transclucent replica of himself haloed by the bright gauze of the curtain behind him.
Once, Nathan was beautiful. He can still remember when he was approached at parties or on the street by someone claiming to work for a modeling agency. Have you ever thought about becoming a model, you'd be great, couple you with some yuppie mom on one of those sun-splashed solarium porches, full page in the New York Times Magazine, a killer wife on your arm, smoking Kools. Or no, a lanky blonde piggybacking, you're laughing so hard having that dreamily great time plastered across bus stop billboards, catching them all over Broadway with those baby blues of yours or are they green? Or Land's End, at the edge of a pier, that dimpled chin of yours, khakis yes, sandals, the water, you like the beach? You ever go to the beach?
The beach. Yes, he likes the beach.
Once he'd actually called the number on the card. He'd had a feeling about her. He'd mentioned he liked opera so she'd suggested Sfuzzi's, across from Lincoln Center. She was waiting at the end of the bar. Long dark hair and a tight black skirt an inch beyond mere allusion and into the region of out-and-out promise. She moved fluidly between subjects. His subjects, what he did, when he did it. Depositions. Trials. She was most curious-fascinated really-about those conjugal visits at Rikers Island she read about in The New Yorker. How does a murderer fuck, do you think? Is he sensitive and generous, does he wait for her, or possibly remorseful? Or does he do it like he wants to kill her? She led him back to her apartment through the snow. There had been no talk of cigarettes or Land's End. She didn't bring up her agency, the subject of his modeling never arose, and before she asked him up to her place it crossed his mind that the feeling he'd had about her was correct. It amused him. He said yes, coffee, fine, a drink, a drink better yet. Why not? he thought. It was a benign sort of trick, the sort he might have played himself.
Within fifteen minutes she'd flung down the Murphy bed with one hand while undressing with the other in a minimal and practiced show of effort. She was all fun, paper-thin, loud, an exhibitionist. He half thought she'd ask him to show her how they did it in jail. As if you'd know, she'd say. And he did. And he kept thinking she wouldn't like it. And thinking, too, about her neighbors on the other side of the wall. How many of her climaxes had they heard over the years, scorecards on the table, that one, that one, no way, faked that one for sure. He'd call again, he said, later, smiling at the door, buttoning his coat with one hand, waving with the other in his own show of minimal and practiced effort. She was expert at saying hello. Nathan the good-bye artist. Even before the doorman let him out he'd forgotten her.
"Nathan"-said with neither surprise nor pleasure.
Maria has been watching him. Maybe watching this, this very thing about the good looks with which he knows he has swindled even her. And maybe she is thinking the same thing he is: What a shame. What a waste.
She waves her scabby lips, shriveled fruit. Her cheeks, Nathan sees, are no longer sunken. There is nothing left to sink, or give. She is picked clean: her eye sockets, protruding through the skin as though they lie atop it, make with the bridge of her nose the figure of a cross. Beneath the covers the body is dissolved, without contours, hardly a ripple across the surface of the blanket. They've cut her hair since yesterday. It is shorn unevenly, mere tufts in places, the scalp bared in others, like a sheep's. It gives Nathan the impression that she has been hurried along an assembly line into some sort of institution, prison, concentration camp during an epidemic of lice; that there are many more just like her on the other side of the walls, others up and down the long corridors, in the wards above and below, shorn and freshly disinfected; and that these people are not ill but mad, the criminally insane. Maria's hair gives Nathan the impression that she has gone bad.
"Nathan." She speaks a full octave below her former voice, as though someone else is speaking for her, a heavy smoker, a whiskey-voiced transvestite, someone who is really expecting him. Maybe-it does actually cross his mind-someone he deserves.
A skeletal arm drops out of her blanket and motions toward the chair at the foot of her bed.