by Robert Stone
Did she know she was doing it? How much did she know? Lara had discovered a beautiful young boy hiding near the back stairs to spy on the party. His mother's long face and inky hair, his father's long-lashed eyes. Un mignon, their boy.
An elderly professor sang "The Watch on the Rhine" in German. Lara spotted Michael on his own, making drinks in the kitchen. She went over to him.
"You shouldn't drink so much," she told him. "No wonder you can't sleep."
He turned in surprise, stared for a moment and laughed at her.
"Think that's it?"
"I'm sure of it."
As she watched he put the two drinks he had been making on a tray and poured a straight shot for himself in the nearest available glass.
"In for a penny, in for a pound."
She shook her head in mock sadness as he drank it.
"I'll be your cure for insomnia," Lara said.
He looked quickly through the kitchen door, checking, she had no doubt, for the supervisory presence of Kristin. Lara turned and followed his glance. They were in the clear.
"You were spying on me," she said. "You tried to break my password. You were observed." He looked amazed.
"Couldn't resist, Lara."
"You mustn't." This time it was she who turned to watch their backs. "Don't!" The stern look she gave him was darkened by anxiety.
The sweet singer of Schubert walked into the kitchen for ice water. Lara had a respectful smile ready.
"You have an admirer," Lara told Norman as they drove home.
"Oh yeah?"
"But sure. Kristin Ahearn."
"Get outta town."
"I am not mistaken in these matters, my friend. I'm surprised you haven't noticed it."
"But she's completely a one-man woman," Norman said.
She turned and watched him peer into the freezing night. Columns of tiny flakes whirled beyond the headlights.
"Not interested?"
After a moment he said, "I wish I could believe that."
"Norman, cher ami. Believe it."
He laughed to cover his confusion.
"Hey. Kristin? I don't think so."
When they arrived at her house he made no move to go in with her.
6
ONE DAY they drove as far as the Hunter's Supper Club in Lara's car, so that Michael could get his bottle of Willoughby's and Lara could see the territory. Lara drank Coors from the bottle and played Johnny Cash songs on the jukebox. It was a Saturday afternoon and the place was filling up with locals who had come to watch college basketball. They seemed to huddle at the far end of the bar from Michael and Lara, as if she had reduced them to comic peasants from a Hollywood horror movie. Their mood was restive and hostile but they behaved. For one moment Michael thought he recognized the man he had seen in the November woods among them.
"Honky-tonk," Lara observed, setting her empty beer bottle down decisively. "Charming."
Though Michael had hoped for a glimpse of her, Megan, the barmaid, was not to be seen. An obese woman with thinning hair sold him the Willoughby's. As they walked to Lara's Saab a middle-aged man with fierce sideburns and mustache appeared in the doorway. His face was swollen, pale where it was not florid. He stared at them, licking his lips urgently, at the point of giving voice to some observation. None occurred to him. Lara waved prettily.
"So this is where you come for inspiration, Michael?"
He was driving. The Saab was a treat for him.
"It's where I come for whiskey."
It was farther into the local countryside than Lara had ever been. On the way back he drove a country road, partly unpaved, that ran through Harrison County's scrubby hills and sunken meadows. The day was sunny, snowy and bright.
"My God," she said. "It's so desolate. Desolate, desolate. So far from anywhere."
"You're in Flyoverland, my dear."
"In what?"
"You've never heard the middle of the country called that? Flyoverland. That's what they call our little corner of nothing much. On the coasts." He shifted down as they approached dirt. It was a shame to muddy the car. "At least," he said, "that's what they tell me. No one ever called it that to me."
She laughed. "Flyoverland. And what would you have done if someone had called it that to you?"
"I don't know," Michael said. He thought of the fat thug they had left drooling in the doorway. He remembered the man in the woods with the useless wheelbarrow. "Nothing much." Then he added, "It's how we think of ourselves. We don't expect much."
"But all Americans have the right to happiness, isn't that right?"
"How long have you been out here?" Michael asked her.
She shrugged. "A year."
"Do you have the impression that you're among people who think they have a right to happiness?"
"But yes," she said. "They do think it. It's why they're so unhappy."
"You're mistaken. You need a good history of the settlement."
"Maybe."
"Secrets," Michael said. "Deep melancholy. Sudden death. Those are what we have the right to."
"But no longer."
"Inside, still."
"But they have God."
He glanced at her, to judge how contemptuously she spoke. It was hard to tell.
"We don't presume on God. Now we see Him, now we don't. Mostly we don't."
"No?"
"Sometimes He flies over."
This time, he could feel her glancing at him. As though he were not joking and she might have gravely misjudged him. Thrown herself away.
"Seriously. On His way to Anaheim. From Orlando."
She punched his arm. "You bastard! Teasing me."
"It's fun to tease foreigners. It's another thing we do."
"But Michael," she said, "I'm not a foreigner."
"You're a foreign-type person."
The road beneath them changed from sealed gravel to asphalt and they came out of the poor land. "Listen!"
She turned on the radio and with hardly any trouble found what she was looking for.
"...that we have the promise of Jee-suz that he will come into our hearts and preserve us from sin! That through the day in the workplace in the street in the heart of godlessness he will be present in our hearts and we shall be armed in him and he shall be as a guide unto us..."
Michael leaned over and turned it off.
"That's new," he hastened to insist. "It's from outside."
She inflated her cheeks and puffed and fell silent.
Darkness came down on them still miles from town. He was avoiding the main road on the way in, trying to reach her farmhouse without passing the university and the center of town.
"Desolate," she said again. A sad winter dusk lingered over the snowy fields.
"Looks like prime soybean land to me."
"Did I tell you my brother died last year?"
"No. I'm sorry." He put his free hand on her shoulder.
"It was long expected," Lara said. "So I was ready."
"Are your parents alive?"
She shook her head.
"I'm going to have to go away, down to St. Trinity for the memorial service."
"When?"
"It should be around Easter break. It'll be a special sort of Masonic service. He was very involved in the rites. Then we'll have some property to dispose of."
"Will you be gone long?"
"Well, not really. But things will drag on for a week or so. It was an AIDS death," she added. "A pretty bad one. He had to be brave, you know. And he was."
"I'm not surprised," Michael said. "Was he alone?"
"No, thank God. His dearest friend was with him. A loyal, loving old friend."
"Well," Michael said, "thank God for that."
He did not question her further. When they got to her house he ordered Lara from her own bedroom to call Kristin; he did not want her to hear his lies. In a comic sulk, she picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books and went naked into the bathroom.
&n
bsp; Sitting on the side of the bed, he listened to himself explain his absence from home, to the long silences from the other end of the line, and to Kristin's strangely soft and patient syllables.
"Sure," she said. "OK. No problem. Get here when you can."
When he replaced the phone, darkness came down on him. A loneliness he could not understand.
"It's uplifting," Lara said, emerging from the bathroom. "Sitting on the toilet seat, reading about the élan vital. Want to go home?"
He smiled in despair. "Not now. Hardly."
"You're stuck with me, eh? I'm stuck with you. It's sad."
"This," he said, "is where I want to be."
She stood, a hand on her bare hip, watching him.
"You could come with me," she said.
"What? Where?"
"To St. Trin. When I go for John-Paul. You're a diver, so am I. The diving's as good as Bonaire. When the rites are over we could stay at my family's hotel."
He stood silent, then said, "It's not something I do."
"No, but you could do it. There's time for you to set it up."
She walked over to him. Her eyes were a little wild. "You must," she said. "I need you and we'll have such fun. It'll get me through it."
"All right."
She encountered herself in a door-length mirror.
"And look at me. I'm shameless. What squalor. I'll put something on."
He began to protest, to insist that naked she was perfectly fine, which was true enough. She cut him off.
"Get your good whiskey because I want some. We'll play a game. I'll get you something to cheer you up."
He got up and went downstairs to get the Irish he had bought and left, for reasons of deception, untouched. He put the bottle on a tray with two glasses and a wooden bowl of ice. There was a window at the turn of the stairs and Michael paused to look outside at the first landing. The dark road, snowfields lit by a pale quarter-moon. His excitement felt nearly childlike—anticipation, surprise, guilty fear.
When he went back to the bedroom he did not see her at first. She was in a dressing room beside the closet, an innovation—like the bidet in the bath—that Lara had introduced to the rambling, Yankee elegance of the farmhouse. The holding had been a prosperous one.
"Want to hear about the élan vital?"
He set the tray down.
"Sure. But I don't think I want to talk about it."
"Want to talk about the soul? Are you sure you have one?"
"Not anymore."
"I think you do. I mean have a soul. I don't."
"How can that be?"
"My soul is lost. I think someone keeps it for me."
He could not see her, but it did not sound like a joke to him. It sounded, in fact, distinctly odd and a little frightening. He poured two glasses of whiskey.
"Hear her?" Lara asked. "Marinette?"
"If you like," he said. He found himself listening. "Who's she?"
"She's my godmother, the keeper of my ti bon ange."
"Your good angel?"
"No, love. My soul, my inner life."
She came out dressed for the game. She had made a sleek black helmet of her thick hair. She had a vest of black leather, tight trousers that might have been deerskin or goatskin, only slightly off-white. Black boots.
Where do you get it? was what he wanted to ask her. But that was not how the game was played. Laughing was permitted in some games, not all. Vulgar questions, never. He handed her the drink and she took it, doing a graceful little spin. She was never portentous about it. She had a fairly keen sense of the absurd.
As for Michael, the business did not really incline him to jokes. Her games tightened his throat, shortened his breathing, set him aching. They also consumed him with something like superstitious dread. He had come to love the fantasies she played out—if love was the word for it—but they were rooted in the darkest, most secret and ashamed quarters of his nature. They were made of the things about which he never spoke, which as often as not he put out of his mind as depraved. As crazy. Weird hits from adolescence, narratives departing from some exotic touch, something that might once have taken his attention, derived promiscuously from anything between serious art and the lowest comic strip. Somehow, she knew what got to him.
Marinette? At that moment he was thinking of the Great Whore, the perennial figure. He was thinking of Lara.
She was the great whore of their schemes, The Woman set loose in the world. Out of control. Even in his schemes, in whatever it was he had once believed. But among all the fantasies and lusts, it also occurred to him, only for a second perhaps, that he wanted to love her.
"Come on, Michael. We have something good."
The something good turned out to be cocaine. The stuff was not exactly new to him; he had seen plenty in graduate school in New York. It turned up around the university from time to time, with decreasing frequency as the nineties advanced. But it certainly was not a regular feature of campus dinner parties, not even among the most earnestly bohemian. Or even of campus adulteries.
The coke was staggering and she had a lot of it, along with a couple of bedside spliffs, presumably for afterward. It made him dry-throated and jangling. The jitters somewhat dissipated his lust. He watched her walk away from him, moving quite lightly in her boots and soft-skinned pants. When she turned around she appeared to have a gun. She offered him her profile like a duelist, sighting him down the barrel.
Looking up at her from the bedside, where he had knelt to do his lines, a thrill of fear went through him. It seemed perfectly likely that she would shoot. She was stoned, crazy. Wild in the country. She would shoot them both. Stranger things happened on American campuses.
"Am I boring you?" Michael asked. "Are you going to kill me?"
"Could be," she said. "Could be, eh? Thrill killing." Delighting in the little trills and phonemes.
"Do I have time for an Act of Contrition?"
"Say it," she said. "Repeat after me. O my God, I am heartily sorry..."
"Fuck you," Michael said. "Kindly put the gun down."
She walked over and handed him the weapon.
"You take it."
He weighed the revolver in his hand, then opened it. There was a slug in every cylinder.
"Jesus Christ, it's loaded."
"A gun is no good if it's not loaded."
"I suppose you're a member of the NRA?"
"I'm not even Irish," she said.
He did another line.
"You know," he said, "the folks who tell you to keep your gun loaded? They also say never to point a firearm at someone unless you're going to shoot them."
"What else do they say?"
"I think," he said, "I think they say if you put a gun on the wall it should always be fired."
"How strange of them. The NRA?"
"The NRA," Michael explained, "are always confusing life and art."
"So I've violated all their rules. Will they punish me?"
"Yes," he said. "Now you've had it."
"Am I going to die?"
"I don't know," he said. "I think so. What kind of revolver is that?"
"It's a Belgian FN Special. Thirty-eight caliber. Five chambers. Firing Parabellum cartridges."
"Aha," he said. "What's special about it?"
"We'll find out," she said.
He started by taking her boots off. To take them off correctly he had to genuflect with his back to her, her leg over one shoulder while she pushed against his back with her other foot. His role reminded him of the servant in Miss Julie. Taking off the second boot, he felt cool metal on the back of his neck. It was the gun or it wasn't; either way, he had to admit, with all the goodwill in the world, that it did little for him in terms of erotic excitement.
He tried to remember who got shot in Miss Julie. She did, as he recalled. And what about the boyfriend? Him too? He was always getting Miss Julie mixed up with Hedda Gabler, Strindberg with Ibsen, a pathetic secret lapse for a man so involved w
ith the phenomenon of the Scandinavian female. Even more compromising than his taste for armed women in skin clothing.
He allowed himself to touch the upper curve of the boot. The gleaming leather was discreetly mud-spattered, musky with the leather and the polish. Was Krafft-Ebing one person or two? Lara would know.
When he turned to her, he was relieved not to see the gun. He eased his way along the warm silky leather encasing her long legs, palms against her calves and thighs, fingering the creases of leather where the pants wrinkled behind her knees. She turned with him so he could caress the firm rotundity at the seat of those skin pants, find the cleft under the form-fitting leather.
She said something he could not understand. And how superlative it was to feel her tight turns so exotically sheathed and hear the sound of her voice and have the taste of her mouth, her whole body pressed against him. The entire sense of her concentrated where his hands explored. When she was out of the trousers, in her black bikini pants, already wet, he went down on her, obliging with his tongue the precision she required. And then she on him, and he felt quite in control but avid indeed.
When they came together after that, she had the gun again.
"Shit," said Michael.
"I want it," she said. "I have to have it. You're the only one I can do this with. You love it, I know you do."
"No!"
"Yes, yes," she said, and she guided the gun against her belly and his hand to the trigger housing and all he could think of was the safety, but he had no idea whether the circle around it showed red.
"What if I get what I deserve?" she said. "What if I get the slug there?"
That would be a story all right, long and difficult in the telling. But something—he thought it must be her trembling intensity—made him want it too. Crazy. She touched his prick.
"I'll lose it," he said.
He felt her turn the gun on him. He closed his eyes, terrified.
"You wouldn't die alone," she said.
He reached down and took the gun away from her very gently and put it on the floor. The safety was on. They did what they had done the first time, exploring, probing, penetration. No secrets, no shame. Nothing he had ever done came near it.
