“Ben,” she murmured. “Please. I’m just a flawed, selfish person, like everyone.”
But do you really think that? I wanted to say. Does anyone — but especially you? Her eyes were closed. Are we not all born with wings we take out only in private? Except the beauty scared you, Susan. She was still smiling. She had laid a hand in mine, those delicate fingers, leaned into me, breathing slowly. We are all failed imagoes, earthbound under each other’s weight. I could hear the doves in the dripping trees. We are all scared, Susan, I told her. All scared no one else will find them as beautiful.
She kissed me so I had to stop talking, a kiss at first contained, but that gave in to itself until our mouths pressed together, made a seal, and our tongues sought out the depths or sought to show themselves in pursuit of the depths. We can argue forever about the meaning of a kiss. After a minute she pulled back, a hand on my chest. We looked into each other’s eyes. I wanted to see longing in hers, sorrow, any sign that she needed me, or anything, but she looked only happy, held once again gently within herself, brimming with the seraphic light of some perverse joy.
“I fell in love with you once,” she said. “You must have known.”
“I did,” I said. “It was a dirty trick. It made me love you, and now I’m stuck loving you and you’ve moved on.”
She stopped smiling and the sun passed behind a cloud. It was cold in the car. I started the ignition and pulled us back onto the highway. In no time at all warm air flooded the cabin. And it seemed almost sad to me, that warm air could flood in just like that.
On the radio we heard reports of the storm. It was flirting with a Category 4 off Delaware, gale-force winds with flooding deep into the coast. Millions of people were without power now, states of emergency had been declared everywhere, National Guards called up. The coast guard had suspended rescue operations north of Point Pleasant. A Fujiwara interaction was possible. In my mind I saw the rainbands of the storm, the falcate concentric arms, reach out across a thousand miles to embrace the coast.
The rain had picked up again, a hard, steady downfall. The wind too. On the side of the road it forced the trees together like lousy drunks. I suggested we get gas — although the tank was more than half full — and load up on provisions in case we passed through a large area without power.
“Do you think that’s a worry?” Susan asked.
I said I didn’t know, but not knowing meant it was possible and if it was possible it was a worry. Susan said she meant likely and I said that’s what I didn’t know when I said I didn’t know. We were near Philadelphia. We had missed the 295 bypass in the rain, but when we took the next exit the world we pulled off into was deserted and it was impossible to imagine a city anywhere nearby. The lights were off at the first gas station and the whole strip had an unearthly feel. The gallon prices on the sign were out of date, as though the station had been closed for months, maybe years.
“Maybe we should get back on the highway,” Susan said.
I said let’s go a little farther, how far could a gas station be? The road was empty, narrow, and surveyor-straight, with no more than a bleak-looking house every mile or so. The vegetation had a stunted, marshy look, like we were near brackish water, and then, out of nowhere, we were climbing a bridge, a vast suspension bridge rising up over a river — the Delaware, surely — an immense gray bridge lit at intervals along its cables and frame, where a bright fizz seemed to clothe the steel. The air was alive with water. So much water! Tons no doubt, millions of tons. The forms things take amaze me. Water in the river as waves, in the air as moisture, falling as rain; in my blood, against my skin, dissolving and colluding with salt shorn of rocks, catching light from glowing wires and breaking it into strands and shards of colored light, collecting as clouds above us blotting out the sun; water in the milk my children drank from my wife’s breasts, in the cooling systems of reactors, the turbines of dams, and the forensic patterns of rock on Mars, the afterthought of water, stagnant pools in the waning moon, and then all around us, everywhere, except the bubble of our car. We were the only car on the bridge. At the high point of its arcing roadway I pulled us over and put on the hazard lights.
“What are you doing?” Susan said. I was rummaging around in back for my camera and its waterproof case. “Really, Ben, I’m not sure this is the best idea.”
But I was out of the car as she said it, out and filming into the raging storm. The river rolled heavily below, seething with a whitish foam in which new life, for all I knew, was in the process of constituting itself.
She came out and stood beside me.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.
She stared out into the storm. “It’s strange,” she said, “how terrible things are beautiful when you’re safe from them.”
“Safety first.”
“Ben.” I could hear in her tone that she was tired of this, tired of these conversations. “There’s a pitch you live at, Ben. It’s not a pitch I can live at all the time.”
I can come down! I wanted to shout. I can come down, just ask. But it was a little late in the day for that. And what was I proving out here, chasing the storm, but the opposite? And yet who knows his own capacity to change, her own, or the capacity of two people to change together? Who can ever say where the line falls between I can’t and I won’t?
We saw headlights in the distance coming our way. I turned the camera from the river to Susan.
“I was wrong before, so tell me,” I said. “Why couldn’t you be close?”
I filmed her in profile, watching the car approach over the long, straight road. “There aren’t easy answers, Ben.” She looked so beautiful with the rain streaking her face and hair. “Sometimes you have to grow tough or never leave. Sometimes comfort and independence seem to be at odds. Or maybe you get scared of your own desire to fall in too deep, what would happen if you gave in to it.”
I put the camera down. I couldn’t look at her. “What a stupid way to live,” I said. The car, highway patrol, flashed its lights and pulled up behind us. A trooper got out.
“Sir, ma’am. What’s the trouble?”
I told the officer everything was fine, that we’d been on the bridge and decided to get out for a second to look at the storm.
“I saw the hazards,” she said, not entirely convinced.
“Sorry to inconvenience you,” I said. “We’ll be on our way.”
“All right.” She had her hat off, hair pulled back like wet reeds, a plain face. She considered the storm with us for a minute. “Some people, you know, drive into the storm,” she said. “Thrill seekers. Stubborn folks. Puts us in a bad spot because we’re on the hook for getting them out.”
I said it was selfish and the trooper nodded. “No great mystery what’s there — more storm. Some folks don’t know what’s best for them.”
“But people need to be free, don’t they,” Susan said, “even to make terrible mistakes?”
The officer looked at Susan. I did too. “I guess so,” she said and laughed. “I guess so.” She shook her head.
And I could have kissed them both just then. I could have taken their hands and jumped with them into the frothing river, I thought — would have done so happily and lived my life forever in the swollen moments of that mistake.
We waved to the officer as she pulled away and then got back in our car. I kept on to the end of the bridge. I could feel Susan waiting for me to turn around, I could hear it in the language of her body, tensing, but I refused to turn.