Lilith (7 page)

“I don’t know. I just like the way it looks. It looks like it would make a wonderful sound.”

She was silent, lifting her handkerchief to pat her throat thoughtfully.

“I don’t think there’s very much opportunity for musicians of any kind,” she said after a moment. “They have a very hard time finding work. And I never even heard of a dulcimer player. I don’t think there’d be any demand for them at all.”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “I haven’t really thought very much about what I want to do. I think my grandfather would like me to go into the restaurant with him. But I promised my mother I’d help people somehow.”

“Well, what would that mean? Wouldn’t you have to study social work, or something like that?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“It seems to me that social work is very highly specialized; I think you’d have to have a master’s degree, at least, to get anywhere. And that’s six years of college. Do you think you could afford to study that long?”

“No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t ask my grandfather for that much money. Maybe I could work my way through, or something. I’m not sure yet.”

When I left her in the evenings we would stand on the front steps in the shadow of the wistaria vine and kiss, shyly and tentatively, holding each other’s arms, but never with the wholehearted passion of our first embrace. I say that our relationship was banal and obtuse, and yet I can remember very clearly the immediate loneliness for her that I used to feel, walking home through the quiet dark streets, and the sense of peace and compensation that the knowledge of her affection for me, and her quiet competence, and our few fumbling moments of passion gave to me.

Yet sometimes I would become fiercely indignant at what I considered the ignominy of our relationship. I was shamed by the lack of vitality of her feelings and because the compassion in which our friendship was founded was not as profound as I felt that it might and should have been. I would not tolerate an intimacy with anyone which was fatuous and conventional.

I broke out in exasperation at her once: “Laura, look at my face—you say you like to look at me.”

“I do. It’s very handsome. Is that what you want to hear? You’re very handsome, Vincent.” She smiled and brushed my lips with a shaft of wheat that she had plucked.

“No, be serious, Laura. Nothing ever seems to—well, to
move
you. I want you to be moved by something. Look at my hands, then. Watch when I move my fingers. Don’t you see? Doesn’t anything ever move you?”

“What’s the matter, Vincent? Are you angry?”

“No. It’s just that I don’t want us to be—well, ridiculous. Can’t you understand that? If we go on . . . courting, or whatever it is that we’re doing, just because we happened to meet each other, and not to be in love with anybody else—well, then it’s ridiculous. Don’t you understand that?”

“No. I think you’re angry. You’re too intense, Vincent. You’ve been alone for such a long time that you’ve been dreaming about girls. But girls aren’t the way you dream about them.”

“What are they like, then?”

She dropped her head for a moment and clasped the back of one hand with the other. I waited for her to answer, but she did not.

“What are they like, then?” I asked her almost angrily. “Are they like you?”

“Some of them are. I am, Vincent.”

It was a cool fall evening, and we were sitting under naked trees beside a stony spring to which we often walked. We had built a fire of oak twigs, and it was dying, the embers glowing bitterly, like a heap of rubies, under the gray ash. I stirred them with a branch, watching the exposed coals bloom into a livid incandescence. She watched the fire for a moment and said, “Do you want to stop, then?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I think it can be different than this. I think we can feel really close to each other. I want us to be really in love, Laura.”

I looked up at her face, which was flushed from the heat of the fire, her brown eyes shining darkly, the glow of the coals buried deeply in them. “Your eyes are so different from the rest of you,” I said. “You seem as if you had somebody else’s eyes.”

“I think you resent me,” Laura said, “because I’m not like the girl you always dreamed you would have. I’m not very beautiful, or talented, or witty, and you resent me for that. You feel as if you’d been cheated.”

I stared into the fire, flushing, for I think, with a sudden pang of remorse, I may have recognized the partial truth, at least, of what she said; and it made my protest and dissatisfaction seem suddenly ignoble and vindictive. And in the spasm of humility which followed this acknowledgment I saw also, with suddenly humbled vision, the vanity of my appeal for love, for a profundity of feeling that could be made to grow—slowly and surely, as it must grow—only by patience, devotion and selflessness.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel like that,” I said. “I don’t think it’s so, Laura; I certainly hope it isn’t.”

She leaned toward me and laid her hand on my shoulder. “I think it’s very nice, the way we are now,” she said. “I don’t want you to be all wild and impetuous and everything. I just want to make you calm, and more sure about things, and more peaceful. I think that’s what you need, Vincent.”

“I don’t want to be all wild, Laura. I only want us to feel really close to each other. I want us to be really in love. I think that’s the only way you
can
feel peaceful.”

“And then what would happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would happen if we were really in love?”

“I don’t know. We would be in love, that’s all. It would mean much more to us that way.”

She took the stalk of wheat from between her teeth and tossed it, like a little spear, onto the coals, watching it flare for a moment and then curl and blacken convulsively, almost instantly carbonized by the heat.

“I have to be the way I am, Vincent,” she said. “If it isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what to do. I said we could stop any time you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to stop,” I said. “I want to be in love with you, Laura. I have to be in love with somebody.”

“Does it have to be me?”

“I want it to be you. I couldn’t be in love with any of those other girls. They don’t think about anything but fraternity pins, and dances, and records, and things like that. I think you know more than they do, and I think you could give somebody more than they could. I guess it’s silly to say these things out loud, though. I guess it isn’t something you can ask for.”

She stood up, brushing her skirt with her palms, and stared into the fire for a moment, her hands laid still against her thighs. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” she said.

What Laura meant by this I did not inquire, for I felt, as always, chastened by her sobriety and also—perhaps more significantly—alarmed by the prospect of surrendering what we had, however insufficient it might seem; for hers was the single relationship I had, outside of my grandparents’, which was not merely social or conventional. And so our friendship continued in its muted, passionless way.

I have never forgotten the beauty of that day, for it was so in contrast to all that happened on it; perhaps it is for this reason that I still very often, on a day of brilliant sunlight, feel a sense of dread come over me, falling lightly and coldly, like a web woven of threads of ice. This was in the early spring of our last year together, a few months before I went away to war. It was a cool April day, very still, with a clear vivid blue sky, almost violet-colored, and pale, intense sunlight which made shadows of extraordinary sharpness, the color of steel. I took my horse out in the midafternoon and rode until evening through the rolling country north of Stonemont. The mare was eight years old at that time and tired easily if ridden hard; but she loved to ramble. I would drop the reins and let her wander at whatever pace she chose down country roads barred with shadow from the rows of tall cedars that lined them and along dirt lanes bordered with fences buried and sagging under clumps of matted honeysuckle.

On the way back I turned off the lane we had been following into open country so that the mare might drink from one of the shallow stony streams that run through the center of the gently sloped valleys between each pair of hills. I could see the water below us, glinting in the sunlight, between the thin poplars of the hillside. The mare stepped down daintily with nervous caution over the stony soil, lurching sometimes from the roughness of the inclined ground. It is excruciating to confess, but I think I was to blame for the dreadful thing that followed; I should have tightened the reins and guided her down the uneven slope, for she was always uncertain of footing on rough ground because of her blind eye. But I did not; I leaned back in the saddle, letting the reins fall loosely, and looked up, smiling, because the maple trees were budding. All above us they spread out a delicate pattern of scarlet buds, like a lady’s hat veil dotted with tiny balls of plush, exquisitely fragile against the clear blue sky. I reached up to touch one as the mare stumbled: a blood-colored, sticky, tender embryo, unclenching slowly in the spring sunlight. A patch of stony rubble slid under her rear hoofs; she lurched forward, stepped on a loose rock that rolled with her weight, and fell heavily sideways. As I hurtled out of the saddle I saw with horror, in that moment of brilliant vision which so often occurs in an emergency, that directly beneath her falling body there was a jaggedly pointed stump of poplar, as thick as a man’s arm and two feet tall, which would impale her. I struck the ground heavily, spinning violently across the stony soil, hearing the sickening blunt thud of the horse’s belly as it plunged down upon the pointed stump, and then, as I leapt to my feet, a second, intolerable sound: the animal’s long, ecstatic, quivering scream of pain. I shall never in my life hear such a sound again. I staggered about among the bare trees, cringing from the cry, my palms pressed hard against my ears to shut it out, running a few steps away from, and then back toward, the writhing, screaming mare in an anguish of shock and indecision. I wanted to run as quickly and as far as possible from that terrible sound, but I knew that I could not leave the horse to suffer. It would take me an hour, at least, to reach the town, and perhaps another half hour to return, by car or bicycle, with a rifle.

Let me recount this as quickly as possible: I found a heavy, jagged rock and bludgeoned the horse to death, crushing her skull until she lay shiveringly still. Then I rose and stood for a moment, shuddering, staring softly into the sunlight.

I began to walk away in stiff, lunging, automatic steps, then more and more quickly as my numbness passed, until finally I was running frantically as I entered the first streets of the town. I went immediately to Laura’s house. It was almost dusk, and I remember that, because of the warmth of the day, she had brought several pots of geraniums up from the cellar, where they were kept “sleeping” through the winter; she was carrying one up the front steps as I came into her walk, and, hearing my steps, she turned, clutching the heavy earthenware pot against her apron, staring at me with a look of growing bewilderment.

“Vincent, what on earth has happened to you?” she whispered.

“I killed my horse, Laura.”

“Oh, my goodness. You’re covered with blood.”

“I know. I had to kill my horse,” I said. “She fell down and got terribly hurt, and I had to kill her, because she was screaming.”

She set the pot down on the steps and came a little toward me down the walk. “I don’t know what to do. I guess you’d better come in and get washed off. Do you feel all right?”

“I guess so. I feel kind of trembly, though.”

“Do you want some brandy? We have some brandy that Daddy takes.”

“I don’t know. I never had any.”

“Well, come on in the house.”

“All right.”

I followed her in through the front door and up the stairs toward the bathroom.

“Don’t touch the banisters.”

“No.”

In the bathroom I closed the toilet and sat down on it with my head in my hands.

“You look awfully pale,” Laura said.

“I know. My hands are all cold. I feel kind of sick.”

“Well, just wait a minute, and I’ll get you some brandy. I think it’ll make you feel better.”

“All right. Thank you.”

I sat with my face in my hands, fighting to suppress the waves of nausea that swept over me, until Laura returned. She brought me in a moment a clean cotton shirt and a tumbler of brandy which I held in trembling hands and drank without pausing. It made me gasp.

“Do you feel any better?” Laura said.

“I think so, yes. It certainly is hot.”

“I brought you one of Father’s shirts. You’d better take that one off; it’s all spattered with blood.”

“All right. Thank you.”

I unbuttoned and removed the blood-soaked shirt, which she dropped into the bathtub.

“I’ll wash it out and you can get it the next time you come,” she said.

“No, I don’t want it. Just throw it away, Laura.”

“All right. Let me wash you off a little. It’s all in your hair and everything. You’d better lean over the basin.”

She soaked a washcloth in hot water and, while I leaned over the white enamel bowl, bathed my arms, neck and shoulders gently, squeezing the cloth sometimes to let the water run in warm rivulets across my flesh. She bent a little over me while she did so, speaking with a softness that I had never heard in her voice before, her hands, when they touched me, expressing an intense and unfamiliar gentleness. I sat leaning across the basin, my arms resting on its edge, my eyes closed, drowsy with comfort, infinitely soothed by the cleanliness and coolness of the sparkling white enamel, the steam, the hot cloth upon my skin, the strong and tender touch of her hands and the nearness of her body. I had never felt such a physical attraction for her before. I was intensely aware of her loose fragrant hair and the warm redolence of her white flesh beneath her clean cotton dress. This idle, languorous sense of comfort grew slowly, then more swiftly, then with startling fierceness, into a passion such as I had never known. I was suddenly possessed with a flaming, trembling, almost demented desire for Laura that made my whole body ache, as if with fever, for contact with her. I raised my head from the basin and took her arm in my hand, pressing my face against the cool white flesh of her forearm. She stood very still.