Hatcher sits on the running board of the Duesenberg, with Mary Ellen’s twisted, broken body a few feet away, and he waits for her to reconstitute. If he had a pack of cigarettes, he’d smoke one now. This is taking an unusual length of time, with her not showing any signs whatsoever of snapping back. After the initial recognition of who she is, he hasn’t quite looked at her. Finally it all feels terribly familiar: he hurts her and then doesn’t really look at what’s happened; he just waits for things to go back to normal.
He makes himself see her. Not her crumpled, jackknifed body, but her face. He angles his head to the left, sharply, and still more, until his face and hers are aligned across this space between them, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. She looks young. As she was when he was courting her at Northwestern. Suddenly her eyes open. But it’s not clear to Hatcher that she is seeing anything. A moment later her eyes close and they begin to move beneath her lids, as if she is dreaming.
And within Hatcher: She and I stand on the tiny beach at the curve of Sheridan Road near Fisk Hall, the lake the color of car exhaust, the air stinking from the alewives that mysteriously die in large numbers every spring and wash up along the shore, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, she and I, but not holding hands, and we’re expecting something from each other in light of our imminent graduation, and in light of all the sweet times sneaking her up to the third floor of my rooming house in the still prudish early sixties and clinging to each other very quietly in my narrow bed with the tops of the red maples outside, and I say, “Your folks will be down?” and she says, “You asked that this morning,” and I say, “I’m not thinking clearly,” and she says, “I’m not either,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and she says, “We need not to think,” and I accept this and I say, “Since we’re not thinking, let’s get married,” and she laughs, low, and I let the back of my hand touch the back of hers and her hand is warm and she turns it and I turn mine and we hold hands and the gesture is like a scarlet leaf on the maple outside my window in October and it’s the first one to fall and you’d think that would be the most beautiful secret moment of all for the tree — its quaking with red leaves like it’s on fire and this first leaf letting go and floating away, free — but it really means that winter is coming in and all the beautiful things will fall away and die and the tree will soon be stark and cold.
And behind Mary Ellen’s closed and dream-restless eyes: Twilight is coming on and he and I are standing on the little beach near the J-School building and we’ve never said a word about it but the time is now nearly upon us when we either go on together or we don’t, and the lake is dark, nearly the color of his eyes and as deep, and he smells of the drug store aftershave he adores — bay rum, the clove smell of an old man — and I know he will someday get a thing like that right without my having to suggest it, and he says, “Your parents will be down?” and I say, “You keep coming back to that. What’s really on your mind?” and I turn my face to him and he turns his face to me and he takes my hand and we both look out to the water and he says, “It’s not a matter of my mind,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and he says “No we don’t,” and this makes me happy and then he says, “I want to marry you,” and I lift his hand and I kiss it and it smells of rubber cement from him cutting and pasting his final story for the newspaper, and if I was thinking clearly I’d know this is as good as it’s going to get and I should just kiss that hand one more time and let it go and walk on down the beach and out into the lake and just keep walking till I vanish.
She opens her eyes. She finds her body restored and the promise of more pain perched on the running board of an old automobile. She sits up.
Hatcher rises. Mary Ellen has reconstituted, but her face has turned old, as old as she was when she finally let it all go in the Caribbean Sea. Hatcher makes a vague gesture to help Mary Ellen to her feet, but she waves it off. She stands.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?” she says.
“Running you over.”
“Which time?” she says.
Hatcher shrugs. Not from indifference, but she can’t see that, of course.
“Right,” she says.
“Please,” he says. “Any time. All the times. That’s why I’m here.”
“We’re in Hell, my darling,” she says. “It’s a little late for anything like that.”
“Can’t we talk a bit?” Hatcher says.
Now Mary Ellen shrugs, wishing to be indifferent. That she isn’t, she takes simply to be fresh torture in the afterlife she’s living. She turns and walks off along her street. Hatcher follows.
The street narrows abruptly into an alleyway of tenements not unlike his own. The outside corridors stacked at the back of the buildings are crowded with women wandering singly up and down or coming together into small groups and then breaking apart, filling the air with cries of “After all I did for them!” and “I’m a person too!” and “This isn’t Hell, I know from Hell already!” But as Hatcher moves along behind Mary Ellen, a murmur starts up, and by the time she begins to ascend one of the circular iron staircases with Hatcher following, all the women above are nudging each other and leaning out over the railings and pointing at him. Now they are crying “He’s on TV!” and “What’s a man doing here?” and “Who’s that motherfucker?”
When Mary Ellen reaches her corridor, she steps out of the staircase but instantly pauses and waits for Hatcher to emerge. She steels herself and offers her arm for him to take. “Stay close,” she says. “They’ll tear you to pieces. They kept a lot inside in that other life.”
Hatcher looks at the gauntlet of faces before him, some once beautiful and some not but all of them leveled now by jowl and wrinkle and blotch and pallor and by the utter ingratitude of men who moved on and children who moved on. Mary Ellen guides Hatcher forward and he takes the pinches and the spit and the hissed words with “Sorry” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m very sorry” until she pulls him in at a doorway and they enter a cramped little room with its walls covered by empty snapshot picture frames. They sit down shoulder to shoulder on a tattered couch that smells, to Hatcher, like dead fish and has always smelled, to Mary Ellen, like bay rum.
“You’re chock-full of apologies down here, aren’t you,” Mary Ellen says.
“Lately,” Hatcher says. She’s right and this surprises him, but he lets it pass.
“Is that why you’ve come to me?”
“Sort of.”
“Of course. It’s a clever torture, isn’t it?”
“I don’t intend to…”
“In all your self-important arrogance, that’s one of the weirdest examples, right there. What do your intentions have to do with it? You think I’d assume you’re the one devising the tortures in Hell?”