A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  "Michael, I'm jealous too," Laura said.

  The boy and girl had leaned to kiss each other. Their eyes were shut so tightly that the lids were wrinkled, and it took them a moment to find each other's mouths. They kissed damply and noisily and then sat as close together as they could, hip to hip, arms around each other's shoulders. The girl was still smiling. She nipped at the boy's ear and said, "I think we better go, Harry."

  The boy pushed the plastic kerchief back from her head and plowed his fingers through the lank curls. "You've got soft hair," he said.

  "Baby-fine hair. I'm the only one in my family who's got it. My mother says my grandmother had hair like that. I don't remember her. Harry, we better go."

  Her voice was higher than it had been, and shaky now, for the boy's hand had dropped from her hair to her shoulder, from her shoulder to her waist, and from her waist to her hip, where it remained. There was something tentative about the arch of the fingers, as if their movement or lack of it depended entirely on the girl's reaction. Without even reaching to take the hand off her hip, she slid a little away from it, and the boy promptly let it drop. "Harry," she said, teasing rather than scolding. "Not in a graveyard."

  "Not in a graveyard," the boy said pleasantly. "Not in a living room. Not on a roof. Not in a park. Not in a movie. Not in the middle of the goddam Sahara Desert, right? Right?"

  "Don't shout," the girl said. When he would have turned his head from her, she took his chin in her hand and held his hand still. "Harry, it's just that I don't want to spoil this. I don't want something bad to happen to us because one of us got—you know, grabby."

  "Grabby! Holy goddam, I touch you through a goddam coat and a dress and whatever kind of suit of armor you wear, and I'm grabby. Jesus."

  "Sometimes I'm afraid for us," the girl said. "I really am, Harry."

  The boy wrenched his chin free from her hand. "Goddam," he said. "Holy goddam."

  "Amen," said Michael

  "Harry, Harry," the girl said. "Turn around and look at me."

  "Don't you do it, Harry," Michael warned.

  But the boy had turned, and the girl stretched to kiss his forehead. Murmuring, "Harry, Harry, Harry," she drew his head down to her small breasts and held it there, patting his cheek and curling his hair around her fingers.

  "My Harry," she whispered. "My poor, greedy Harry."

  "And don't baby me, Norma." The boy's voice was somewhat muffled. "Don't baby me. You always do, and I don't like it."

  The girl laughed. "Is this babying you?" She held his head even closer against herself.

  "Yes," the boy said, but Michael and Laura could barely hear him. He was bent forward at a very awkward angle with his head on the girl's breast, and he kept trying to wiggle his legs and rump into a more comfortable position. He said something else, and the girl bent to listen.

  "What did you say, Harry?"

  "I love you." She had stopped holding his head, but he did not straighten up.

  "I know it. I know you love me."

  "Well, I'm telling you again," the boy said loudly. "I love you, Norma."

  "And I love you." She lifted his head, kissed him on the mouth, drew her hand slowly down his cheek, and said, "Let's go, Harry. We'll get some coffee or something and take on my mother. Think you can handle her?"

  "Bring her on," the boy said. He jumped from the wall, landing in a deep crouch. Turning and holding out his arms to the girl, he said, "Jump. I'll catch you."

  "You sure?" The girl beckoned him closer to the wall. "You won't drop me?"

  "I wouldn't drop you," the boy said. "Muscles Harry? Come on, honey. It's all right."

  "Okay," the girl said. She slid cautiously off the wall, and the boy caught her and lowered her safely to the ground. He kissed the corner of her mouth and put his arm around her. As they started back toward the hothouse, Michael and Laura heard the boy say, "Nice night, honey?"

  "Wonderful," the girl said. "We'll have to do it again."

  When they were gone, Michael sighed and said, "Hooked. What an all-purpose weapon the carrot of sex is, in good hands. Poor bugger."

  "I think she loves him," Laura said. "She never once took her eyes off him."

  "Of course not. When a cat's stalking a nice, fat bird, it isn't interested in the scenery. She knows all about eyes. 'Harry, look at me. Look at me.' Hypnotism combined with mild asphyxiation. When she dragged him down into her breast, he was still fighting. When he came up out of it, he was gone. Beaten. Sure, she loves him. But they've got two different ideas of love. He wants to dance with her on a terrace with a full moon and a thirty-six-piece orchestra; he wants to go singing through storms with her, like Gene Kelly. She knows about thirty-six piece orchestras. You have to feed them, and then there's nothing left for the children."

  People were going to work in the city. Almost at the same time, they spilled out of their houses and into the empty streets, getting into cars, waiting for buses, going down into subways, marching along the gray sidewalks. In time the streets, empty a minute ago, full now, would be empty again, as the blotter of the city absorbed the men. And in time it would give some of them, most of them, back, providing that it were wrung enough and squeezed enough and torn enough between now and then.

  "I sat like that with a man once," Laura said.

  When Michael did not answer, she went on, "I put my arms around him, the way she did, and held him just as she did. Not quite for the same reason, but I held him the way she did and said the same things. Say something quickly, Michael, because I had forgotten this, and I'm saying it as I remember it."

  "You never told me," Michael said. "I don't know what to say. Has he ever come here?"

  Laura laughed. "Good God, no. That was a long time ago, when we sat together." Again she stopped and waited for some reaction from him. "Say something, Michael."

  "What can I say?" He was angry now. "Stop making me your echo chamber. Talk about it, if you want to. You had a lover. Okay. So?"

  "A lover," Laura said. "That was the word I used. It's a beautiful word. I was in college then. I used to sit at my desk and close my eyes and say to myself, I have a lover. Laura has a lover. I'd look at all the girls sitting near me in their spring dresses, with their mouths a little open as they listened to whatever it was they were all listening to, and I'd say to them in my mind, When this class is over, some of you will go home, and some of you will go to another class, and some of you will go other places. But I will walk out of the room and go to meet my lover. You have boy friends, dates, steadies. I have a lover. We are different."

  "They were probably all thinking the same thing," Michael said. "Speaking as a teacher."

  "I know that now. But they'd always had lovers, however they thought of them. This was my first. We sat under a tree one evening, and he got all choky and self-accusing, and told me he wasn't good enough for me. And I put my arms around him—no, I grabbed him around the neck, really—and pressed his face into my inconsequential bosom and went, 'There, there, I love you, don't worry, I love you.' Maybe you're right about that girl, Michael, because I grabbed him as if I'd been lying in wait for a chance to hold him like that. It felt very nice. I think he even cried a little."

  In the street below them a mother screamed at her child in wordless rage and love. "What happened then?"

  "He went away in the summer. It lasted a very short time. But it seemed long then, and it still seems long when I think of it. It took the longest time to stop saying, 'Laura has a lover,' whenever I had a few free minutes."

  She moved a little on the wall, as insubstantial and evanescent as poetry, and as lasting. The cars jostled and swirled in the city, bellowing.

  "The funny thing is this. Before that spring and ever afterward I used to pride myself on being sensitive and understanding far beyond the range of most people. I marked out the lost and tongueless for my own, and I used to think, I understand them. I know what it is to do a pitiful evil because of knowing oneself unloved. I may be unloved m
yself, but boy, am I empathetic. Sometimes I even wrote about it."

  Michael felt no tightness in his nonexistent throat, and no syrupy food of pity through himself, but he heard no sound except Laura speaking.

  "But for that little while," she said, "I forgot all about the emotionally undernourished. I became arrogant. I was loved, I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy. I gorged myself on being loved until it came out of my ears, and when it was over I didn't realize it for a time because I was living off my fat. Proving—"

  She stopped and seemed to be very interested in the cheap headstones at the bottom of the hill, made so much alike and stacked so closely together that a ruler could have been laid across them to the iron gate.

  "Proving?" Michael asked quietly.

  "Proving nothing. Proving that everyone—meaning me— has her price. Proving that it's easier to love the downtrodden and lonely of the world if you yourself have never been loved. I've been spoiled for it. A man said, 'I love you,' to me. I made him say it a great many times. And so I feel a little above the unloved because of that, until I realize how far above me are the loved and still loving. Forget it, Michael. I'm getting all complicated. But I know what I meant."

  She looked away, anywhere but at him, and Michael, looking at her, saw her more clearly than he ever had. He saw the wide mouth and the nose that was all wrong and the eyes that went no more with the other features than the nose and mouth and skin went with one another. He saw the black hair falling across the lowered neck, and even the favorite dress, gray and unbecoming, but so carefully remembered that he could see the weave of the threads and the one loose button in the back. Still no pity, no soupy sorrow, but a feeling very close to tears, a feeling that could not possibly be forced into words without breaking. But he tried, because he was Michael Morgan and he trusted no feeling that could not be spoken.

  "I love you," he said.

  It sprang from his mouth without editing, and it came out very badly. He emphasized the I too much, and what he had said sounded almost truculently protective. He knew how clumsy it must have sounded to Laura.

  "Not like that," she said a little sadly. "My mother used to say it like that. I don't want to be defended, Michael."

  "I love you," he said again, and it was better this time. "Me. I. Morgan. Not your mother. I love you, Laura."

  "I love hearing it," Laura said. "I could never get used to the sound. Say it again. As often as you like."

  He was about to say it again when he checked himself. "Meaning that I can say the words as often as I like, but you won't believe them."

  "Michael, you don't know me. You've never even really seen me. If we were both alive and we passed each other one day, or you came into my bookshop to buy something, you wouldn't look twice at me. If we were introduced at a party, you'd shake my hand, say 'How do you do, Miss Uh,' and forget me before you were through saying it. You're affectionate, and you're used to being loved, and you're lonely now. Don't practice on me. Don't say you love me because part of being alive is loving someone. It won't make you a living man again, and it won't make death any easier for me."

  Funny, he thought. We sit here and talk about emotion in totally emotionless voices, like two neighbors getting whatever little nourishment they can out of fourth-hand gossip. Can we feel things, we dead, or is that also recalled with effort? If she loves me, will I be happy? If she does not, will I be hurt? Will I even know the difference?

  "I'd have known you," he said. "I'd have seen you once and known you and married you and lived with you before the party was over."

  "What would you have said to me?" Laura asked. "'Dear Miss Durand, I will love you while I live'? What do you say to me now?"

  "I will love you all the days of my death, however few or many they may be. As long as I can remember love, I will love you."

  " 'All the days of my death,'" Laura repeated softly. "There aren't many left, Michael. Our minds are like torn pockets. Think of all the things we've forgotten and forget every minute. Why should love be remembered any longer than any of the others?"

  "Because we need it more," he said. "Because without it, there is nothing left of us. Loving each other, we last a little longer before we forget even that we lived once. Knowing ourselves loved makes us almost human for a little time."

  "Such a little time," Laura said. "Is it worth it? Is it worth the effort of loving to stay awake a cigarette longer, to listen to another record? If it can't last long enough to make us wonder if it might last longer, if we know how it must end and when, what's the good of it? I'm tired of hope, and I'm tired of gallant lost causes. Shake your fist in the face of the gods and you draw back a stump. Let it go, and leave me alone."

  An ice-cream truck jangled its fool's bells in the city, but only a few children came running because it was too early in the day for ice cream. Over by the housing project, a steam drill coughed and snarled, and the yell of a subway train on a tight curve came faintly through the gratings in the sidewalk. The day must be hot already, Michael thought, for most of the windows that he could see were open, and the workmen had taken off their shirts.

  "Nothing's worth any effort in the end," he said to Laura, "because everyone is going to die and there is nothing in the world that will stop them from dying. Nothing lasts. A few things last longer than most people live, but they go too. Hope goes, and desire and wonder and fear and eagerness. Love lasts a few minutes longer, that's all. A minute or a month or an hour. The paper match burns down until it singes your fingers and goes out, and there you are in the dark again, rubbing your two little sticks together. But this is the last time, the last match. There won't be any more light. No more. And no more noise of things moving or of animals lying down. Only our separate, untouching selves, and soon not even that."

  "Then we'll sit in the dark," Laura said. "We'll sit and wait."

  "Wait for what? Nothing's coming. For God's sake, we spent our whole lives waiting, you and I. Why should anything come to us now that did not come then? There's just this, just this miserable little sketch of love to keep us from being immortal a while longer. Are you ready to be wise, Laura? I'm not. I'd rather love for a day and then be wise, even if it only means saying I love you, as I say it now."

  A sparrow flew down and landed on the wall. Laura reached out to stroke its feathers, and when her hand passed through the bird she tried again. She made the useless stroking motion over and over again, until the bird flew away.

  "It's whatever we can get, then," she said, "on whatever terms we can get it."

  "That's all there is. That's all there ever was."

  "I would have taken that once," Laura said, "when I was alive. If a man loved me I would have talked myself into loving him, and I would have loved him very deeply after a while. I can't do that now, Michael. This sounds stupid, even to me, and stupidly proud, but I won't love you simply because you need me. I want you to love me, even for the chip of time we have, but it has to be as Laura. I know it's a little late in the game for that, but I won't be loved because you see death over my shoulder when you look at me."

  "Then why did you try to make that stone boy love you because he was alone?" Michael asked gently. "Why did you tell him that he had nobody but you?"

  Again he saw the quick shimmer of pain that he had seen in her once or twice before and not recognized.

  "That was different. I didn't want him to love me. I wanted him to talk to me and ask me to stay with him for a while. I wanted him to need me."

  "All love is rhymed need," Michael said. "I need you. I needed you when I was alive. Where the hell were you then. Now I need you, and you're here, and I love you. I'm selfish about it, like poor greedy Harry. I want to give you things and watch you be pleased by them, and that's the final selfishness. I can't bargain with you, Laura. I've left all my beads and mirrors back home. All I can give you is my need. I'll take whatever you can give me and be pleased with it. I love you, Lau
ra."

  "I love you too," Laura said. "Do we sing our duet now?"

  "No. Nothing changes."

  She moved close to him, and the anguish in the gray eyes and wise mouth was like fishhooks across his mind. "I do love you, Michael. But I wish it could be the way I wanted to love you. I've nothing to give you, the way we are. I can only take from you, and I'll hate myself because of it."

  "Don't get carried away," Michael said. "Love me as long as you have need of me. That's the way people love."

  "That's not the way I wanted to love. Love to me is giving whatever you have to give to whomever you love. I can't even touch you. Michael, I wish I could touch you. I wish I could sleep with you. I wish I could please you."

  Michael grinned at her. "Now you know you're not supposed to think like that. You're supposed to be pure spirit, unperturbed by the desires of the corrupt flesh. The idea is to get rid of the body so as to be free to meditate without being constantly called to the telephone. Be a flame, Laura, be a demure blue flame."

  "I'll be that soon enough," Laura said. "What do we do, then, in this short forever we have? How do we love each other? How do we live together and make each other happy?"

  "I don't know, exactly," Michael answered. "I think we have to stay together and not wander too far away from each other. There isn't too much we can do for ourselves or each other, Laura, except be in love because it's a little better than not being in love. Does that frighten you?"

  "Can the dead be frightened? Even the loving dead?"

  "They're more vulnerable. Anything is more vulnerable in love or in rut or whatever than out of it."

  "What does frighten me a bit," Laura said, "is being known. We're going to know each other very well before we lose the earth, my love. I used to think how wonderful it would be if people could simply take the roofs off their minds and let other people look in, instead of trusting their souls to words. Now I'm not so sure. I don't know if you'll love me once you know me."

  Michael laughed. "I'll take my chances. It's like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it's considered a successful marriage."