Carrying Rain's bag into the guest house, he was amazed by its lightness, yet apparently everything she needed for her days in Hawaii was in it. He thought of looking, just to see what the girl regarded as necessities, but he resisted, slightly disgusted by his impulse.
After lunch he worked among his flowers, feeding his gardenias and washing the leaves with a soap mixture where they were covered in smut from the aphids and ants. It was strange the way the ants kept the aphids as domestic animals on the shrub, but this ant-farm arrangement, fascinating though it was, crudded and killed the leaves. And this year the flowers were beautiful, with a piercingly sweet fragrance.
As he washed the leaves, bringing the green back, he looked out for Rain. To hear her approach better, he turned the Vivaldi off.
It was rare for him to know a day without music. But he had a reason today — he did not want Rain to be locked out. The security system had been designed to exclude anyone from casually entering. So there was
no music. He needed to hear the bell or she would be left standing in the street, perhaps for hours.
There was no music, but there was no silence either, for silence was unknown on a hot afternoon on the North Shore of Oahu. A thousand birds loudly contended, in addition to the whine of insects and the distant growl of a descending plane. He heard doves cooing, the whistling of bulbuls, and the complex song of the shama, which Rain had commented on. Most people were deaf to birdsong.
"Hello."
How had she gotten in?
She seemed to understand that he was flustered, even to divining the reason. "I came through the side gate."
"That's the service entrance. It was locked."
"I guess it wasn't."
"It's supposed to be locked. And there are motion sensors."
Rain was smiling. "Well, here I am!"
Lionberg felt insecure and outwitted, but the girl was looking around once again.
"What do you call those trees?"
They were tall and weedy-looking, with slender trunks that popped up everywhere, and especially flourished in the gully that lay between the hedge around Lionberg's garden and the perimeter fence.
He said, "To tell you the truth, they're a nuisance. Christmasberry. Brazilian pepper. Schefflera. Gunpowder trees."
"They're so green."
He was holding a newly washed gardenia bough in his hands, but she said nothing about that.
"I've put your bag in the guest house. I think you'll be comfortable there."
"Hey, thanks." She started away.
She was graceful-looking yet had no grace. The young could be so abrupt.
"Dinner's at eight."
"That's okay, I won't be eating," she said. "I got some bananas at Foodland and ate them coming up the hill."
Lionberg said, "We were expecting you to have dinner, I'm afraid. I think the chef made something special for you."
Had she seen a look of disappointment on his face? He hoped not, because he knew that he was not disappointed. It was simply that the guest, like the host, had certain obligations.
"Okay, I'll come. Hey, that's real sweet of the chef."
He repeated the time. He said there was no dress code. But he thought: Why did I insist on her coming? Why did I mention the chef? He had never done that before. He had always been happiest eating alone. And by the time dinner was ready, he had stopped being annoyed with himself and begun to resent the girl for making him feel so ill at ease in his own house.
51 Dinnertime
"Here I am again," Rain Conroy said, sounding so willing, though he knew she was there because he had insisted. Yet she seemed convincingly enthusiastic, and as always her voice sounded cheery. There was something wholehearted and uncomplaining about her, and even the way she looked tonight reassured him. She wore a simple black dress that showed off her long legs, which were beautiful. The dress was so small and insubstantial Lionberg imagined plucking it off her by its spaghetti straps and cramming it into his pocket.
The skirt was riding up her thigh — she was leaning, peering into the side room, Lionberg's study. "Calla lilies," she said eagerly, and looking closer, she walked into the room.
Who had ever before entered Lionberg's study? The maid, a carpet layer, a cable installer. They had no idea where they were. It was a source of pride to Lionberg that no one other than a handful of employees or laborers had ever seen the room in which he worked, had ever seen the place in which he used his mind, had ever seen his desk, his scattered papers, the books that mattered most to him, his favorite paintings, everything he regarded as revelation. Even his handwriting, which he was sensitive, even a bit vain, about — he wanted no one to see it, no one to know him through it, did not want to hear any comments about it. He
sensed that if someone saw it, he would be exposed and would lose something of himself.
And here was Rain Conroy with her hands on his desk, smiling at the painting.
"Georgia O'Keeffe. An amazingly introspective image, I always think."
"I used to grow them," she said. She wasn't listening.
"I can't tell you the number of museums that have pestered me for it. I wouldn't part with it. I never get tired of looking at it."
"They love fish fertilizer, nitrogen especially," she said. "You can tell when they're happy. They get very white. And when they're not looked after, they get all limp and sort of rot."
"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds," Lionberg said.
"That's really true, you know."
"Shakespeare. Sonnet Ninety-four." She didn't hear that, either.
Lionberg turned some papers over. Not that the girl was looking at them, but seeing his handwriting made him self-conscious.
"This is my study," he said. "I do my work here."
"What kind of thing do you do?"
"I am a man of leisure," Lionberg said. "A little writing. Some gardening. Some beekeeping."
She was in his room; he had revealed what he did there. She could see his papers, the pictures — not just the O'Keeffe but the Matisse sketch of a footbridge and the photograph of himself at age ten, posed on the porch of his parents' house. Anyone could see that he had been a deeply unhappy child; he had sorrowful eyes. Lionberg pitied the child when he looked at it. She was unimpressed by everything except the flower — not the painting but the species.
"Isn't this sketch incredible?" He decided not to say it was Matisse. "Pencil."
"Anyone could erase it," she said.
He decided to surprise her by switching on the old jukebox, which had been in shadow in a corner of the room. She laughed at the red and blue and yellow lights, the flashing lights inside its fishbowl top, where the black plastic records shimmered. The light was on her face.
"We've got one just like that at the diner where I work," she said.
Lion berg switched off the lights.
Rain was still smiling, moving forward. The study led to a lanai, which was attached to his bedroom. She commented on the palms in the colorful Sicilian vases, the plants — strawberries in terra-cotta pots, herbs in a planter. At the edge of the lanai sat several large Chinese water jars, glazed red, that held fish and water lilies and greens mats of hyacinth.
"Those are nice."
"When I can't sleep, which is often, I come out here and shine a flashlight in and look at the fish."
"I have the opposite problem. I have trouble waking up."
He realized that she had seen nearly everything on this floor of the house. Walking back to the dining room, she glanced to the side and said, "That's the second-biggest TV screen I've ever seen."
She meant the television set in his bedroom, which she had glimpsed through the lanai window. It was his secret that he often lay in bed and watched old movies on the screen that took up most of one wall. No one had seen it because no one had been on his private lanai, which was accessible only from his study.