“Why wouldn’t I be telling the truth?”
“Look, buddy, you don’t fool me. You’ve been around.”
“So?”
“So my sister hasn’t.”
“You want to know something, buddy?” Buddwing said.
“What?”
“I’m going to marry your sister someday, how about that?”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Buddwing said, nodding. “Talk it over with your goddamn dog.”
The restaurant was on West 56th, small, and French, and not too crowded. They sat at a table near the window and watched the setting sun turn the windows across the street to brass. They could not see the sky except in the reflecting glass opposite. The sky was a broken complex of rectangles, gold and fiery red at first, and then turning to lavender, each rectangle reflecting its own jigsaw segment, a deeper shade of violet now, a thousand windows echoing the subtle shift to purple, the red tones vanishing completely to leave a deeper blue, and then window after window going blind as darkness came and the night was upon them.
They did not yet know each other. They sat at the window table and talked eagerly, anxious to exchange views and backgrounds, pleased with each other’s good looks, smacking their lips over the wine, and telling each other how good the food was, considering each posed question as though life or death depended upon the response. They exchanged deep glances tentatively, touched hands exploringly, laughed a little too loudly at each other’s witticisms, were a trifle too eager to create for each other the image of a present person who was the sum total of a vivid and exciting past, sharing incidents and embarrassments, recklessly revealing all. Their window world seemed exclusive and self-contained, but they consciously played to the other diners as well, willing them to acknowledge their splendor, their total absorption with each other, the fun they were having, terrified that without appreciation their romantic exploration would wither and die.
They ordered brandy after the meal. They rolled the snifters in the palms of their hands, and stared deeply into each other’s eyes, creating a privacy that was instantly destroyed because they demanded acknowledgment of it from everyone in the restaurant. He recognized her performance, and he recognized his own as well, but for him there was something more, which he suspected she did not yet feel, and perhaps would never feel. She understood romance, yes, this was an inherent part of her, the sadness of October, but in her mind romance was still Ivanhoe and Wuthering Heights, the Pleiades and Edna St. Vincent Millay; romance was still an admiring audience who could look at a window-framed couple and appreciate their handsomeness and long for their communication. Romance was still the phony tinsel Hollywood crap, the Lux Radio Theater every Monday night, “This is Cecil B. DeMille, coming to you from Ho-o-o-llywood,” kleig lights glaring, admiring eyes, “My, how beautiful her long blond hair is! How radiant she is!” He shared the romantic notion, and he played to the others in the restaurant because he knew that playing to the crowd was an essential part of romance, without which it could not exist. But he was more than just an actor going through a performance for a preview audience. The thing he felt inside him had to be shared because it was too exuberant to be contained.
He was falling in love.
And because he was falling in love, he wanted everyone in the place to stand on his chair and cheer wildly and throw kisses and applaud. He wanted everyone to know that this rare and foolish thing was happening to him, look at it happening to me, for Christ’s sake, look at it happening, isn’t it marvelous, don’t you want to share it with me? Look! Look!
She did not want involvements. She had said so from the beginning.
“Where would you like to go now?” he asked.
“Let’s take a ride in Central Park,” she said. “In a horse and carriage. Let’s look at the stars. Let’s count the stars.”
“And find the Seven Sisters.”
“Safe from Orion.”
Romance.
“I love you,” he said.
“How much do you love me?” she whispered.
The windows were fogged with steam. The stars were gone, and a sharp wind had arisen; it looked as if it might rain. Grace was in his arms, partially leaning against him, looking directly into his face. The wind howled over the hood of the car in frenzy, as though wanting to tear it apart. In his mind, he could visualize the wind ripping the hood off and sailing it down the hillside where they were parked, two blocks from her house. It would descend over the roofs of the toy houses below, and then skim the Mount Kisco treetops to land solidly upon Dan and Duke where they were taking their nightly stroll. The army would give them both heroes’ burials in Arlington Cemetery, DAN-DUKE, the tombstone would read, SON OF FANG. He watched the hood of the car, fully expecting it to blow off at any moment. He would not be at all surprised if it did; something happened to the damn car every time he borrowed it from his father. Flat tires, motor trouble, burned-out wires, the horn sticking — it was always something. “I don’t understand,” his father said each time. “I never have any trouble with it.”
“Well, how much do you love me?” Grace asked.
“I’ll bet that hood’s going to blow right off,” he said.
“Or don’t you love me?”
“I love you, Grace.”
“Well, how much?”
The question was childish and stupid, Roxane demanding eloquence from Christian. She was nineteen years old now, her breast was resting against his arm on the wheel, her legs were bent under her, the skirt pulled back over her thighs, she felt warm and ripe and bursting in the secret steamed cocoon of the car, and all she wanted to know was how much he loved her.
“I love you more than anything in the world,” he whispered.
“Oh, well, what does that mean?” she said. “That could mean anything.”
“It means I love you,” he said.
She stared at him silently. She kept staring at him, saying nothing, the child’s look slipping away unexpectedly, an uncertain, puzzled, thoroughly adult expression moving onto her face.
“Why...” she started, and then hesitated. “Why do you love me?” she asked.
He did not answer for a moment, and then it was too late to answer.
“I mean,” she said, “why me? Oh please, why me?”
The sound of her voice almost brought him to tears. He heard a vast sorrow in that voice, as though a thousand jacks and skip ropes, pigtails and braces, cotton slips and plastic blue barrettes were falling into the wind, sighing in a broken jumble. He heard in that voice the mystery of alien inanimate things, lipsticks and mascara, garter belts and bras, hooks and eyes, and diaphragms. He heard (I have heard the mermaids singing each to each) beyond, an echo of that childlike, forlorn, sighing sound carried on the wind high and clear and sharp, all the uncertainty of total commitments, all the sudden insecurity of complete and trusting exposure, the fragile splintering of a chrysalis, and he clutched her to him fiercely and joyously, and then was frightened lest her wings dissolve in powder. They were both trembling. He kissed her hair and her closed eyes, and he said, “Ahhh, ahhh,” for in this steamy interior of a clopping horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, in this cloistered private brimming place, though she had said she did not want to become involved, she had suddenly and without warning fallen in love with him.
“I love you, Grace,” he said. “Oh God, how I love you!”
She moved deeper into his arms, and smiled, and sighed, and said, childlike, against his chest, “I love you, too.”