Dancing After Hours (3 page)

His room extended forward of the rest of the house, so that, from his bed, he could look through the window to his left and see the living room and Connie’s bedroom. He rolled on his back and pulled the sheet up to his chest. He could hear crickets outside his window.

He flexed his right arm and felt the bicep. It seemed firmer than it had in June, when he started doing pushups every night. He closed his eyes and began the Lord’s Prayer and got as far as
Thy kingdom come
before he heard it.

Now it was not the crickets that he heard. He heard his own breathing and the bedsprings as his body tensed; then he heard it again, somewhere in front of the house: a cracking twig, a rustle of dried leaves, a foot on hard earth. Slowly, he rolled on his left side and
looked out the window. He waited to be sure, but he did not have to; then he waited to decide what he would do, and he did not have to wait for that either, because he already knew, and he looked at the far corner of the room where his rifle was, though he could not see it, and he looked out the window again, staring at the windows of the living room and Connie’s room, forcing himself to keep his eyes there, as if it would be all right if the prowler did not come into his vision, did not come close to the house; but listening to the slow footsteps, Kenneth knew that he would.

Get up. Get up and get the rifle. If you don’t do it now, he might come to this window and look in and then it’ll be too late
.

For a moment, he did not breathe. Then, slowly, stopping at each sound of the bedsprings, he rolled out of bed and crouched on the floor beneath the window. He did not move. He listened to his breathing, for there was no other sound, not even crickets, and he began to tremble, thinking the prowler might be standing above him, looking through his window at the empty bed. He held his breath. Then he heard the footsteps again, in front of the house, closer now, and he thought:
He’s by the pines in front of Connie’s room
. He crawled away from the window, thinking of a large, bearded man standing in the pine trees thirty yards from Connie’s room, studying the house and deciding which window to use; then he stood up and walked on tiptoes to the chest of drawers and moved his hand over the top of it until he touched the handful of bullets, his fingers quickly closing on them, and he picked up the rifle and took out the magazine and loaded it, then inserted it again and laid the extra bullets on the chest of drawers. Now he
had to work the bolt. He pulled it up and back and eased it forward again.

Staying close to the wall, he tiptoed back to the window, stopping at the edge of it, afraid to look out and see a face looking in. He heard nothing. He looked through the windows in the opposite wall, thinking that if the prowler had heard him getting the rifle, he could have run back to the road, back to wherever he had come from, or he could still be hiding in the pines, or he could have circled to the rear of the house to hide again and listen, but there was no way of knowing, and he would have to stand in the room, listening, until his father came home. He thought of going to wake Connie, but he was afraid to move. Then he heard him again, near the pines, coming toward the house. He kneeled and pressed his shoulder against the wall, moving his face slightly, just enough to look out the screen and see the prowler walking toward Connie’s window, stopping there and looking over his shoulder at the front yard and the road, then reaching out and touching the screen.

Kenneth rose and moved away from the wall, standing close to his bed now; he aimed through the screen, found the side of the man’s head, then fired. A scream filled the house, the yard, his mind, and he thought at first it was the prowler, who was lying on the ground now, but it was a high, shrieking scream; it was Connie, and he ran into the living room, but she was already on the sunporch, unlocking the back door, not screaming now, but crying, pulling open the wooden door and hitting the screen with both hands, then stopping to unlatch it, and he yelled: “Connie!”

She turned, her hair swinging around her cheek.

“Get away from me!”

Then she ran outside, the screen door slamming, the shriek starting again, a long, high wail, ending in front of the house with
“Douglas, Douglas, Douglas!”
Then he knew.

Afterward, it seemed that the events of a year had occurred in an hour, and, to Kenneth, even that hour seemed to have a quality of neither speed nor slowness, but a kind of suspension, as if time were not passing at all. He remembered somehow calling his father and crying into the phone: “I shot Douglas Bakewell,” and because of the crying, his father kept saying: “What’s that, son? What did you say?” and then he lay facedown on his bed and cried, thinking of Connie outside with Douglas, hearing her sometimes when his own sounds lulled, and sometimes thinking of Connie inside with Douglas, if he had not shot him. He remembered the siren when it was far away and their voices as they brought Connie into the house. The doctor had come first, then his mother and father, then the sheriff; but, remembering, it was as if they had all come at once, for there was always a soothing or questioning face over his bed. He remembered the footsteps and hushed voices as they carried the body past his window, while his mother sat on the bed and stroked his forehead and cheek. He would never forget that.

Now the doctor and sheriff were gone and it seemed terribly late, almost sunrise. His father came into the room, carrying a glass of water, and sat on the bed.

“Take this,” he said. “It’ll make you sleep.”

Kenneth sat up and took the pill from his father’s palm and placed it on his tongue, then drank the water. He lay on his back and looked at his father’s face. Then he began to cry.

“I thought it was a prowler,” he said.

“It was, son. A prowler. We’ve told you that.”

“But Connie went out there and she stayed all that time and she kept saying
‘Douglas’
over and over; I heard her—”

“She wasn’t out there with
him
. She was just out in the yard. She was in shock. She meant she wanted Douglas to be there with her. To help.”

“No,
no
. It was
him.”

“It was a prowler. You did right. There’s no telling what he might have done.”

Kenneth looked away.

“He was going in her room,” he said. “That’s why she went to bed early. So I’d go to bed.”

“It was a prowler,” his father said.

Now Kenneth was sleepy. He closed his eyes and the night ran together in his mind and he remembered the rifle in the corner and thought:
I’ll throw it in the creek tomorrow. I never want to see it again
. He would be asleep soon. He saw himself standing on the hill and throwing his rifle into the creek; then the creek became an ocean, and he stood on a high cliff and for a moment he was a mighty angel, throwing all guns and cruelty and sex and tears into the sea.

C
ALL HER CATHERINE. WHEN HER HEART
truly broke, she was thirty-seven years old, she had two teenaged girls, and her husband loved another woman. She smelled the woman’s love on his clothes; it was a perfume she could name but did not. Even the woman’s name, when she learned it from her husband’s lips, was not large enough, only two words for the breath and flesh and voice and blood of only a woman, only part of what she had traced by smell on his sweater one night, his jacket another, and traced by intuition and memory when he was with her and when he was away at his normal times and when he was away on the evenings and weekend days he lied about; and what she had not traced but simply known long before she smelled another’s love on him. Had simply known,
as a person with a disease may know without giving it a name or even notice, long before its actual symptoms and detection.

The woman’s name could not encompass what was happening. Nor could the words
love
and
lie
and
sorry
and
you
, nor could her own name on his tongue, on the night he told her in the bright light of their kitchen the color of cream, while upstairs their daughters slept. Nor could tears, nor any act of her body, any motion of it: her pacing legs, her gesturing arms, her hands pressing her face. The earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her. Stars fell. That was a song, and music would never again be lovely; it was gone with the shattering stars and coldly dying moon, the trees of such mortal green; gone with light itself.

These words in the kitchen, these smoked cigarettes and swallowed brandy, were two hours of her life. What began as the scent of perfume on wool, then frightened and sorrowful ratiocination that led her beyond his infidelity, into the breadth and depth of the river that was their sixteen years of love—its falls and rushing white water and most of all its long and curving and gentle deep flow that never looked or even felt as dangerous as she now knew it truly was—ended with not even two hours of truth in the kitchen, for truth took most of the two hours to appear in the yellow-white light, and the gray cirrus clouds of blown and rising and drifting smoke, or perhaps took most of the two hours to achieve. Then it was there, unshadowed, in its final illuminance.

Two hours, she figured with pen and paper and numbers, sitting at one in the morning in the kitchen,
weeks later, adding and multiplying and dividing, smoking and drinking not brandy but tea: one hundred and twenty minutes that were six ten-thousandths of one percent of her life from the day of her birth until her husband turned his pale and anguished face and walked out the door, into the summer night.

She never again perceived time as she had before, as a child, then an adolescent: a graceful and merry and brown-haired girl, in infinite preparation, infinite waiting, for love; and as a woman loved and in love: with peaceful and absolute hope gestating daughters, and bravely, even for minutes gratefully, enduring the pain of their births; a woman who loved daughters and a man, would bear her daughters’ sorrow and pain for them if she could, would give up her life to keep theirs; and loved him with a passion whose deeper and quicker current through the years delighted her, gave at times a light to her eyes, a hue of rose to her cheeks; loved him, too, with the sudden and roiling passion of consolable wrath; and with daily and nightly calm, the faithful certainty that was the river she became until it expelled her to dry on its bank.

For weeks, months, seasons, she was dry, her heart was dry, save with her daughters. Their faces, their voices, their passing touch in a room or hall of the house, their ritual touch and kiss of the days’ greetings and good-byes, brought for an instant the earth back to her, and for an instant restored balance to time. Looking into the eyes of a daughter, she actually said to herself, but silently, as though reading the words even as she wrote them in her brain, her heart:
I am here. Now
. Then above the girl’s eyes, beyond her head and shoulders, she saw through the window the large green willow,
and the darkened grass beneath its hanging branches, and the blue sky. Clearly saw those, and the hazel light of the girl’s eyes looking into her own, and listened to the sounds of the girl’s voice, giving shape to words about school or a date or a blouse.

This happened often enough with her daughters; then in that first year it began to happen with certain friends: women—one of them, then a second, then a third. Only those three, and not often with them; for most of the time she was with her friends as she was with herself, feeling as though she stood somewhere beside or behind her body, never in front of it. She listened to the sentences she spoke in a low voice that did not rise toward breaking, watched her fingers’ patience as they pinched the handle of a cup, spread to hold a cigarette, and did not tremble. In bed at night she lay beneath the weight of herself, held her body up so it would not sink, as it wanted to, into the mattress. She closed her eyes and breathed.

In the eighth month, on a night of gently falling snow, she went to dinner with the three women. The restaurant was expensive and darkened, and her three friends were all happy on the same night, and that was as uncommon as their dressing prettily to go without men to an elegant place. She drank two martinis, then wine, then two cognacs, and everyone was funny and laughing. Then at home she brushed her teeth, watching herself in the mirror, tasting mint foaming with the flavors of garlic and wine and brandy; and she looked at the light in her eyes and the flush of her cheeks, then knew that for the first time in eight months she had had fun. But after that night she was cautious again about drinking, and sipped a glass of wine while cooking and
brought it once replenished to dinner, and many nights she drank nothing at all. For she could no longer trust drinking simply to relax her; it could loosen the hold she had on herself; it could break her.

She devoted much of her tenacity to being a good divorced mother. This was the bank of the river. She tried never to malign him before her daughters; sometimes she failed, and apologized. She gave him whatever time with them he wanted; their family life was now one of doors: those of her house, of her husband’s car, opening for her daughters’ departures and returns. One morning in late winter they went to his wedding.

This was in New England. In April, snow thawed and rain fell and the earth was mud, the sky gray, and the trees and their new growing leaves were dark in the pale light. She wore sweaters and a down vest and boots. Then for two or three days, then for a week, the sky was blue, and the dry sunlit air brightened the leaves and grass. She sat on the patio, drinking a soft drink without sugar, and knew that she longed for spring even as she watched it; she was last April’s leaves fallen in autumn, then frosted, then frozen under snow, and in March wet again and becoming part of the earth, while spring was moving before her eyes, leaving her with the other dead it gave life to a year ago, when not only her skin but her heart felt the touch and light of the sun.

For two days in May she turned the soil of a sunlit rectangle of her lawn and planted vegetables and herbs because she wanted to kneel sweating in the dirt and probe it with her fingers and place seeds in it, and she wanted in summer to watch the green plants grow,
white and pink radishes push upward into light, tomatoes green, then yellow, then red on the vines.