“You’re keeping out demons?” She was no longer laughing, I noticed.
“Unwanted guests of every sort.” I endeavored to sound confident, though I have had little proof of the effectiveness of those old spells. I shut and relocked the door behind us.
“I’m going to have to go out to wash up. I’d like to take a bath.”
“The Hopsacks have only two rooms with private baths, but this is one of them.” I pointed. “We’re old friends, you see; their son and I went to Dartmouth together, and I reserved this room in advance.”
“There’s one other thing. Oh, God! I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a jerk.”
“Your period has begun.”
“I’m on the pill. It’s just that I’d like to rinse out my underwear and hang it up to dry overnight and I don’t have a nightie. Would you turn off the lights in here when I’m ready to come out of the bathroom?”
“Certainly.”
“If you want to look you can, but I’d rather you didn’t. Maybe just that little lamp on the vanity?”
“No lights at all,” I told her. “You divined very quickly that I am a man of no great courage. I wish that you exhibited equal penetration with respect to my probity. I lie only when forced to, and badly as a rule, and my word is as good as any man’s. I will keep any agreement we make, whether expressed or implied, as long as you do.”
“You probably want to use the bathroom too.”
I told her that I would wait, and that I would undress in the bedroom while she bathed, and take my own bath afterward.
Of the many things, memories as well as speculations, that passed through my mind as I waited in our darkened bedroom for her to complete her ablutions, I shall say little here; perhaps I should say nothing. I shot the night bolt, switched off the light, and undressed. Reflecting that she might readily make away with my wallet and my watch while I bathed, I considered hiding them, but I felt certain that she would not, and to tell the truth my watch is of no great value and there was less than a hundred dollars in my wallet. Under these circumstances, it seemed wise to show I trusted her, and I resolved to do so.
In the morning I would drive her to the town in which I live or to St. Louis, as she preferred. I would give her my address and telephone number, with twenty dollars, perhaps, or even thirty. And I would tell her in a friendly fashion that if she could find no better place to stay she could stay with me whenever she chose, on tonight’s terms. I speculated upon a relationship (casual and even promiscuous, if you like) that would not so much spring into being as grow by the accretion of familiarity and small kindnesses. At no time have I been the sort of man women prefer, and I am whole decades past the time in life in which love is found if it is found at all, overcautious and overintellectual, little known to the world and certainly not rich.
Yet I dreamed, alone in that dark, high-ceilinged bedroom. In men such as I, the foolish fancies of boyhood are superseded only by those of manhood, unsought visions less gaudy, perhaps, but more foolish still.
Even in these the demon’s shadow fell between us; I felt certain then that she had escaped, and that he had come to take her back. I heard the flushing of the toilet, heard water run in the tub, and compelled myself to listen no more.
Though it was a cold night, the room we would share was warm. I went to the window most remote from the bathroom door, raised the shade, and stood for a time staring up at the frosty stars, then stretched myself quite naked upon the bed, thinking of many things.
I started when the bathroom door opened; I must have been half-asleep.
“I’m finished,” Eira said. “You can go in now.” Then, “Where are you?”
My own eyes were accommodated to the darkness, as hers were not. I could make her out, white and ghostly, in the starlight, and I thrilled at the sight. “I’m here,” I told her, “on the bed. It’s over this way.” As I left the bed and she slipped beneath its sheet and quilt, our hands touched. I recall that moment more clearly than any of the rest.
Instructed by her lack of night vision (whether real or feigned), I pulled the dangling cord of the bathroom light before I toweled myself dry. When I opened the door, half-expecting to find her gone, I could see her almost as well as I had when she had emerged from the bathroom, lying upon her back, her hair a damp-darkened aureole about her head and her arms above the quilt. I circled the bed and slid in.
“Nice bath?” Then, “How do you want to do it?”
“Slowly,” I said.
At which she giggled like a schoolgirl. “You’re fun. You’re not like him at all, are you?”
I hoped that I was not, as I told her.
“I know—do that again—who you are! You’re Larry.”
I was happy to hear it; I had tired of being myself a good many years ago.
“He was the smartest boy in school—in the high school that my husband and I graduated from. He was valedictorian, and president of the chess club and the debating team and all that. Oh, my!”
“Did you go out with him?” I was curious, I confess.
“Once or twice. No, three times. Times when there was something I wanted to go to—a dance or a game—and my husband couldn’t take me, or wouldn’t. So I went with Larry, dropping hints, you know, that I’d like to go, then saying okay when he asked. I never did this with him, though. Just with my husband, except that he wasn’t my husband then. Could you sort of run your fingers inside my knees and down the backs of my legs?”
I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”
“That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”
“You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”
“Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and beat you up.”
I said that I had heard that before, though I had never understood it.
“You don’t get mean when you’re drunk.”
“I talk too much and too loudly,” I told her, “and I can’t remember names, or the word I want to use. Eventually I grow ashamed and stop talking completely, and drinking as well.”
“My husband used to be happy and rowdy—that was before we got married. After, it was sort of funny, because you could see him starting to get mad before he got the top off the first bottle. Isn’t that funny?”
“No one can bottle emotions,” I said. “We must bring them to the bottles ourselves.”
“Kiss me.”
We kissed. I had always thought it absurd to speak of someone enraptured by a kiss, yet I knew a happiness that I had not thought myself capable of.
“Larry was really smart, like you. Did I say that?”
I managed to nod.
“I want to lie on top of you. Just for a minute or so. Is that all right?”
I told her truthfully that I would adore it.
“You can put your hands anyplace you want, but hold me. That’s good. That’s nice. He was really smart, but he wasn’t good at talking to people. Socially, you know? The stuff he cared about didn’t matter to us, and the stuff we wanted to talk about didn’t matter to him. But I let him kiss me in his dad’s car, and I always danced the first and last numbers with him. Nobody cares about that now, but then they did, where we came from. Larry and my husband and I. I think if he’d kept on drinking—he’d have maybe four or five beers every night, at first—he’d have beaten me to death and that was why he stopped. But he used to threaten. Do you know what I mean?”
I said that I might guess, but with no great confidence.
“Like he’d pick up my big knife in the kitchen, and he’d say, ‘I could stick this right through you—in half a minute it would all be over.’ Or he’d talk about how you could choke somebody with a wire till she died, and while he did he’d be running the lamp cord through his fingers, back and forth. Do you like this?”