He hesitated to ask the question in his mind, but he risked it anyway. He said, "What do you hear from Rain?"
"Oh, she's back in her box," Buddy said. "Probably at the diner, and doing her volunteer work."
"Is she still working at the diner?"
Lionberg had said too much. Buddy didn't know anything. He was careless, he was free.
Never before had Lionberg been restless in his house. He was not miserable but discontented. The feeling helped him recall times when, very young, promises were made but were not kept. His uncle saying, "We'll have to get you over on the boat some- time," but it never happened. His mother saying, "If you're good, maybe you'll get binoculars for your birthday." But there were no binoculars. Times of impatience, of being kept waiting, of longing — most of all knowing that no one would give him anything, that he would have to make his own life and fend for himself in this vast, mobbed, indifferent world.
This affair was out of his hands. So he took another look at his possessions and was consoled by them once more. He resented Rain for making him doubt their value. They were his achievement. The Matisse could be restored.
For some days he disliked Rain for making him feel vulnerable and full of doubt. He saw her as shallow, casual, breezy, presumptuous — just young. She had stayed and patronized him. And she was the worst kind of coquette — teasing him, arousing him, putting her mouth on him, sucking him off, saying, "That's not sex," then going away.
Yet he never reflected this way without concluding that she was a perfect flower, that there was nothing to dislike, that all the flaws were his. She was innocent and, even out of her depth, she was buoyant. He longed to see her again. He thought, Yes, love is a girl.
It must have been about this time that he called me. His calling me was such a rare event that I suspected a problem. When he suggested meeting at the hotel bar for a drink, I was sure that something was wrong.
He was early that night at Paradise Lost. He looked as conspicuous to me as he probably had at the airport when Buddy saw him.
"You left a house and a wife and a whole life in London," he said. Not waiting for me to say anything, he went on, "And you started all over again here."
"That's the short version," I said.
"All I mean to say is, it can be done."
"Didn't you know that?"
"I've had a bit of a shock," Lionberg said.
"What kind?"
"I've discovered I'm human."
"Good for you."
He didn't smile. He said, "I mean, I'm not happy."
I wondered then whether this was his way of expressing despair, yet I laughed at him without realizing how wounded he was. But how was I to know?
Lionberg said, "In the months before I left my wife, we still slept together. I mean that — slept, body to body. I would wake up in the middle of the night and think, I am leaving you, and I would feel her body against mine."
There was no possible reply to this. I wanted him to get off this sorrowful subject.
"Flesh can feel so sad, so mute and helpless. It is so fragile. Flesh can feel like clay. You can sense death in it."
"But Royce, that was years ago."
It was as though I were talking someone suicidal off a high ledge.
"Those nights were unbearably sad," he said.
Feeling sad now, he looked back and saw his past as a succession of failures.
I said, "This isn't like you."
"When someone says, 'If I had my life to live over again,' people laugh. It sounds ridiculous. But I've just realized that I want to live my life over. That's what love is. The vital force that gives you the strength and optimism to do it over again."
"So you've found someone," I said.
"I hate writers," he said.
"Is that your way of saying yes?"
"I saw a very plain couple last night on television," he said. "They were holding hands, two chubby people who probably had nothing but debts. They were so happy I started to cry. I envied them."
"So why don't you get it together?"
"Maybe I will."
Touched by a transforming power, he looked haunted and hopeless. He wanted to believe that he had touched her, whoever it was (I was new to this story), and that it meant something.
I was no help to him, and I was uncomfortable with the painful way he enjoyed his irrationality. He was very specific, like a man hurting himself with a fetish. I said I could not bear to see the Matisse sketch he had partly erased. He abandoned me for a While. He called Buddy and paid him a visit at the big disorderly house on the beach. Pinky was sulking, thinner and stranger than ever. She reminded Lionberg of a feral cat, forever twitchy and watchful, possessed by hunger, with feverish eyes.
"Look what she did to my arm," Buddy said. "Bit me again!"
Lionberg instinctively glanced over at Pinky's teeth, which she flashed, reacting to his glance. The teeth seemed large and blunt in her thin face. Then he stared at Buddy's discolored flesh and saw a crescent row of bite marks in the mottled patch.
"Difference of opinion," Buddy said.
They went out to the lanai and sat, watching the sunset. Pinky retreated to her room, somehow squatting in the shadows, still sulking. Sunset was the occasion for Buddy's ritual, a drink in one hand, the heartshaped container of Stella's ashes in the other.
Buddy took off his sunglasses and squinted at the setting sun.
Pinky began to howl softly from her room.
Lionberg wanted to talk about Rain. He began by saying, "What sort of — ?"
"Wait," Buddy said. He raised his arm, and without removing his gaze from the setting sun, he took a drink.
The distant ocean shimmered, the water's surface glazed with fiery light. The sun grew small, it was halved, then it was a dropping dome, and at last it winked and was gone.
"Yes!" Buddy cried out. "A green flash! Did you see it?"
Lionberg said yes, though he had seen nothing.
"That's Stella," he said. "She's talking to me."
Was he drunk? He had finished that glass, whatever was in it. He clutched the container of ashes.
Lionberg said, "Time for me to go."
"Did you want something?"
"No," Lionberg said. He had felt that being near Buddy would bring the thought of Rain near. But it hadn't, and she was even more distant. He left envying Buddy.
After another day of futility, he called her in Sweetwater.
"Hello," she said brightly, and then she told someone — who was it? — "I'll take it upstairs."
A moment later, upstairs, her voice was different.
"Who were you talking to, honey?"
"My mother," she said.
Why did this simple detail cheer him up?
"I'm so glad you called."
"I've been resisting," he said. He had interrupted her. He was confused — wanting to hear her voice, wanting to talk.
"I was going to call you, to thank you," she said.
He said, "I miss you, honey."
"I've been missing you," she said. "It seems crazy. I've been so unhappy. I'm not needy. I'm a strong person. I've never been this way."
Hearing her say that was a consolation, because it was how he felt.
In gratitude he wanted to tell her his secret, that he loved her.
He stammered and finally said, "I really like you, honey."
"I really like you, too."
A tremulous silence swelled in the wire that connected them.
"You once mentioned that you had a boyfriend."
"I still have one," she said. "He thinks I should see a shrink."
"I'd like to be your shrink."
"I'd like you for something else."