She wore a gray man's fedora on those cold days, or on colder nights a blue watchcap pulled down low, her chapped lips still sometimes helplessly atremble. Her long narrow beak pointed into the world's wind and her green eyes narrowed often, as though she stood at a helm, or first in a line of explorers, searching for the way ahead. When she went to work at the dealership, she liked a pair of wool bell-bottom pants that might or might not have been real sailors’ wear in some navy of the world, tall morocco-leather boots, and a patchwork jester's jacket of many-colored silks that was the closest she came to finery—he would preserve a snapshot (inward, virtual) of her throwing on this garment, the quick and practiced way she did it, the way everyone pulls on clothes, with mind elsewhere pulls straight the sleeves, tugs the collar loose; and he preserved it because it was the first time he saw in her a human universal, which afterward she would embody; and that was a sign, and one he knew how to read.
She forbade him to call the Corvino house, and instead she met him at the Sandbox or came to the motel on no fixed schedule, driving up in a variety of trade-ins from the dealership. She would break in on him, press him to bestir himself, but then when he had gone along and they went journeying together and he behaved in some way to which she objected, or (more often) he took some stance or expressed some view she thought offensive or inadequate or dumb, she might suddenly and firmly draw away, arms crossed and eyes smoldering, or turn dull, truculent, and unwilling to be pleased, as though it had been he who had done the importuning in the first place, and now she had had it with his presence. He found their incompatibility soothing.
When they'd been seeing each other for a month he knew more of her life and opinions, her deals good and bad, than he'd ever known of Rose Ryder's. And he'd told her more of his: all of it true too. They talked about their parents; they figured out it was in the same year of their lives that their parents had parted, but where she had stayed at home with her father, he'd been taken by his mother to a far place and a family strange to him. He told her why this had happened, though it was something he hadn't known then, and how when he was grown up he'd come to know his father again, as a different person, the person he had probably somehow been all along, though a person the child could not have comprehended, any more than he could have known why he was sent away.
"You loved him.” She seemed to know this. “You see him now?"
"Well. You know. He's a chore. But he's all alone. He needs somebody to listen to him talk."
"Yeah,” she said. “Yes.” Barney, glad-hander, bullshitter, genial kidder with a core of irremediable bitterness that he perhaps didn't even know about, that could hurt you badly if you weren't careful—she returned his banter but she'd stopped listening to him, a lesson long ago learned. “A guy,” she said. “You don't have to listen."
"I'm a guy."
She grinned at him, her snaggletooth smile. “You are so not a guy."
They talked about their old spouses and lovers, with circumspection—each of them guarding, for different reasons, the border of a land neither had as yet received a visa to reach—but they talked about their ghost children too, and without shame: his with Julie Rosengarten, aborted before that was legal even, long ago; her own two. One the child of her husband of six months who, after she split from him and all his pomps and works, had come around to her place one night, found her alone, and coerced her into bed.
"He was a Catholic,” she said. “I didn't tell him about getting pregnant that night. And what happened after. I wanted to, though. Just so he'd know."
He logged both these things: that she'd wanted to, that she hadn't. It was past midnight in the Morpheus Arms.
"So if you divorced,” Pierce said, “I guess he wasn't a good Catholic."
"He wasn't a good anything,” Roo said. “Not a thing about him was good."
"You were never Catholic,” he said. “Right?"
"I'm not anything,” Roo said. “No magic helpers. It just never came up, when I was a kid, and it's too late now."
She lifted herself on her elbows in the lumpy bungalow bed, reaching across him for his smokes. This the only circumstance in which she smoked, and soon she'd cease. Her pale body: like a worn tool, he thought, every part of it showing clearly what it had been long used for, the thickened pads of her elbows, strong tendons behind her knees to pull and foreshorten her legs, and around her neck to turn and point her head. She looked like she'd last forever.
"Actually I've liked the Catholics I've known,” she said, holding the unlit cigarette. “There was a big family that lived near us, like six kids. They were generous. In a way that was—I guess new or different to me. Inclusive. You know?"
"Really."
"They took me to church and stuff. Family dinners. I slept over a lot. Then sneaking out too. A lot of laughs."
"Uh huh."
"Maybe it was just because it was a big family, and I was a singleton. The little ones used to line up for baths at night by age, or size. It was sweet. But that's not all. I think what I liked, or wanted, was something about their being Catholics."
"Yes?"
"Because Catholics,” she said, “have mercy. That's a good thing. They have that."
"Well,” Pierce said, astonished and ashamed, ashamed for his old church, old in its countless sins and its un-mercy. “Well, yes. That's what they say.” Tears had bloomed in her eyes when she said it: mercy. He didn't yet know how easily it happened with her, at the suppressed motions of the soul within her.
"Because justice,” she said. “You can demand justice, but there's an end to justice, when everybody gets their fair share. But there's no end to mercy."
She looked around her at the room, the sad-clown painting askew on the wall, the gas heater, the chenille bedspread sliding to the floor. Him.
"I've got to go,” she said.
"Don't,” he said. “Stay."
The first time they'd shared this bed—after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often—she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking—not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within her seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.
"It's late,” she said, and lay back again on the pillows.
It was late, a night deep in May by now. It was still that time in a love affair (neither of them called it that or thought those words in any hollow of their hearts) when it's hard to sleep together, something always seeming to remain undone or to be continued or gone on with, that wakes you after an hour or two of sleep, to find the other's awake too in the hollow of the bed's deep inescapable center; or that never lets you shut your eyes at all, till dawn's approach at last calms everything. Maybe sometimes too a sense of fighting off something that approaches, or at least preparing to fight. Fight or flight.
"So what was it about?” she asked him.
"What was what about?"
"Your book."
"It was,” Pierce said after a moment's thought, “a historical novel."
"Oh yeah? About what period?"
"About ten years ago."