But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.
A pity. Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.
He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.
Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store-any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town's mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unselfconscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls-the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple-a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes-walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo's between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis's steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. "Look at that old rascal," Walter Barnes might say, "at it again." His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.
For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion-he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him-consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want Sturm und Drang; Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he'd simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.
But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.
When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but-
The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.
Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.
What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror-now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.
"When you fall off a horse, you get back on," Lewis told himself. "You get right back on that mother." What had happened? He had heard-voices? No; he had heard himself thinking. He had spooked himself by remembering too exactly Linda's last night alive. That and the nightmare-Sears and John advancing toward him-had bamboozled his emotions so that he behaved like someone in a Chowder Society story. No evil stranger had stood behind him on the path back home; you could not walk through the woods without being heard. Everything was explicable.
Lewis went upstairs to his bedroom, kicked off his loafers and pushed his feet into a pair of Dingos, pulled on a sweater and a ski parka and went back down and out the kitchen door.
His morning footprints were already filling with new snow. The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple; light snow continued to come down. If he could not go coon hunting with Otto Gruebe, he might be able to get in some skiing before long. Lewis walked across his brick patio and stepped onto the path. Above him the sky was dark and scattered with shining clouds, but clear gray light filled the day. Snow on the pine branches gleamed, particular and white as moonlight.
He deliberately set off on what was normally his return path. His own fear surprised him, tingling in his mouth and belly like anticipation.
"Well, I'm here, come and get me," he said, and smiled.
He felt the presence of nothing but the day and the woods, his house at his back; he realized after a moment that even his fear had vanished.
And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book-not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed-drawn in black ink-to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path.
It was the clarity which gave it mystery. Each bare and spiky branch, each tangle of wiry stalks, stood out separately, shining with its own life. Some wry magic hovered just out of sight. As Lewis went deeper into the woods, where the new snow had not penetrated, he saw his morning's footprints, and they too seemed haunting and illustrative and part of the fairytale, these prints in snow coming toward him.
Lewis was too restless to stay inside after his walk. The emptiness of the house proclaimed that the house held no woman; for some time, there would be no woman, unless Christina Barnes came out for one last scene. A few jobs around the house had been waiting for weeks-he had to check the sump, the dining room table was badly in need of polish, as was most of the silver-but these jobs could wait a while longer. Still wearing the sweater and parka, Lewis prowled his house, going from one floor to another, never settling in one room.