Nothing but the Night

by John Williams

  He shook his head and grinned still more widely, untroubled by the knowledge that he was unable to control his thoughts. Like so much thistle tossed into a mild breeze they floated erratically in his mind.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ Claire questioned him sharply, rather defiantly.

  He composed himself with a start. He inclined his head toward her with unsteady graveness.

  ‘Nothing. I mean—’ Then, with the surprise of discovery, he said, ‘Why, I’m having a good time.’

  Her defiance evaporated and she fell into his mood of tipsy gravity.

  ‘Oh. I see. You’re having a good time.’

  ‘Yes. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ she said vaguely. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I hope you’re having a good time,’ he said. His voice was almost shy. ‘I want you to have a good time.’

  She looked at him with lazy quizzicality. ‘I can’t see you. Come over here. Closer.’

  He scraped his chair nearer. His knee touched her leg lightly. Deftly, she pressed nearer to him.

  ‘Is that better?’ he asked.

  She smiled her lazy, absent smile. ‘Yes. I can see you better now. You’re nice. What did you tell me your name was?’

  He told her again, hardly aware of her questioning, hardly aware of his answering. He groped for her hand beneath the table. His fingers brushed her thigh and he jerked away quickly; but with a swift, darting movement, her hand caught his, imprisoned it, pulled it back until it rested once again on the hard warm smoothness of her leg.

  Her face did not change its expression and her voice flowed effortlessly on. It was as if the small byplay were a thing entire and apart from their minds and voices, a thing of which they were only half-aware.

  ‘Arthur. That’s a nice name. I like you, Arthur.’ But she looked away from him at that instant as she asked, ‘Where is that damned waiter?’

  With his free hand, Arthur waved. The waiter, who had been regarding them patiently, nodded his understanding and disappeared from their view.

  ‘Who were you waving at?’ Claire asked incuriously.

  ‘The waiter. He’s bringing our drinks.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good. I didn’t know who you were waving at. That’s the reason I asked.’

  There was a moment of silence. The waiter shuffled up to their table and put the drinks down. They repeated the automatic ritual; with their free hands they lifted the glasses, toasted silently, drank. Arthur set his glass on the table and let his long fingers caress its cold contours.

  Claire was looking at him intently.

  ‘Do that some more,’ she said.

  He looked at her blankly.

  ‘Your hand,’ she said, pointing. ‘Move it some more. I like your hands.’

  He raised his hand until it lay on a horizontal with his eyes, and he stared at it for a long while as if he found it difficult to believe that it really belonged to the rest of his body.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You mean my hands.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She reached up swiftly, caught and drew the hand down until it rested laxly on the table, the fingers spread out, the palm up.

  ‘A very nice hand,’ she continued. ‘I always notice people’s hands. That’s the first thing I see. Some people look at eyes and some at faces and others at hair, but I always look at hands.’

  While she spoke, her eyes were held in murky concentration on the graceful blob of flesh that hung from his left wrist. For that was what it seemed to him now as, following her gaze, he looked and could hardly recognize a part of his own anatomy. He wriggled the fingers experimentally. They both were delighted by the ensuing movement.

  ‘Like snakes,’ she said. ‘White snakes. But I like snakes. I’m not afraid of them.’

  They were like snakes, he thought: long, white, jointed snakes with hard pink heads. The thought had a certain quality of pleasant horror.

  ‘What do you do with your hands?’ she asked. Her voice was blurred but quite appealing: the accents were soft and deliberate, warm and vibrant. ‘You must do very nice things—do you paint pictures? Play music? What do you do with your hands, Arthur?’

  He smiled at her affably. He felt power mounting inside him. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m a parasite.’

  ‘I’m sure you do it nicely,’ she went on, as if he had not spoken. ‘With hands like yours, you must do it very nicely.’

  Then, at that very moment, there came an inevitable flood of affection for the dark, lovely girl who sat beside him. He knew that he could analyze it away; he knew that if he considered it, he might discover that it was a result of the brandy, a maudlin reaction from too much alcohol. But even that instantaneous realization could not detract from the intensity of his emotion. He felt in his inarticulate way that there was something very kind and good and generous about this girl; something which went deeper than the ordinary words she spoke, deeper, indeed, than he had words to explain to himself.

  ‘Look,’ he blurted suddenly. ‘Listen, I want to tell you something. I’m pretty tight, maybe; but, anyhow, I—I think you’re all right. I—I like you. You’re beautiful and—But that isn’t what I mean. I mean, that’s part of it, but—’ Then, with a swirl, self-pity descended, and he said, ‘I never have much fun. Do you know what I mean? Not much—fun. But—tonight—now I’m having fun. I’ve never had so much fun since I can remember.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s all because of you. If it hadn’t been for you tonight, I—Well, I just wish everything could go on like this. And it’s all because of you.’

  He halted, settled back in his chair, burning with a furious yet pleasant embarrassment, the part of him which spoke visibly affected by his own words and their sincerity. But another part of him, the listener, the detached, burned with a different sort of embarrassment as it realized the inadequacy and the clumsiness of what he said.

  ‘You’re nice.’ Claire considered him with half-closed liquid eyes. ‘I like you when you talk like that.’ Beneath the table, he felt his hand gripped more tightly. ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you? You won’t go off and leave me, like the other one did?’

  He swallowed. ‘I’ll stay with you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good.’ She closed her eyes and swayed nearer to him as if suddenly exhausted. ‘I’ll be lonesome if you go away.’

  Then he, included in her lassitude, also closed his eyes, rolled them up into their sockets contentedly. And he experienced a compelling need for darkness, warm solitude, and silence; a need for a place where he could relax and touch her body softly, not with immediate purpose or intent, but with lazy, satisfied comfort. Really, he wished himself blind and sightless; for only in that way could he know to the fullest degree that most dulled and blunted of all our senses, that of touch.

  How fortunate are the blind, he thought; the blind who have no traffic with the brutal impact of sight: who exist alone and entire in a personal world of dark beauty; who, when desiring knowledge of a physical thing’s meaning, may examine, know its shape and feel without that visual deception which so often leads knowledge and understanding astray.

  There in that room desperate with glare and clamor, he wished himself sightless and dumb, a warm mass of sensitive flesh that could feel and understand and yet not know; an inert, receptive substance, unseeing, unhearing, unspeaking.

  He clenched his eyelids more tightly, trying to shut out the glaring spectacle of this room; but he could not. Although the shapes and forms were blotted, he was still aware of movement and shifting light. A roseate glow refused to be squeezed from his vision; the glare penetrated the thin skin of his eyelids and, no matter how desperately he tried, he was unable to exorcise that disturbing sensation of light.

  His hand still nestled beneath Claire’s fingers. Through the thin stuff of her gown, he could feel her soft smoothness of thigh. The skin was warm, almost hot, and he could feel the whiteness of it. He thought he could sense the vibrant, eager pulsing of blood, the hidden tremors beneat
h the flesh.

  He breathed deeply and opened his eyes. The room spun dizzily about his head. He closed them quickly.

  Claire’s voice broke into his imperfect darkness.

  ‘What are you thinking about? Why do you have your eyes closed?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He smiled. ‘I always close my eyes when I’m happy.’

  ‘But you can’t see me. Don’t you want to see me?’ There was no vanity in her voice, no injury: only a flat, blunt curiosity.

  ‘I can feel you. That’s better.’

  She giggled. It was like fresh water tumbling over the rocks of a sunlit stream.

  ‘I like your hand there. It’s such a nice hand. Is that an awful thing to say?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. It’s a lovely thing.’

  Still he had not reopened his eyes. The slow movement of her fingers upon his hand filled him with a lethargic sensuousness whose consummation was the act of stroking itself; nothing more was needed or desired. It was almost as if she, too, were blind, as if she were memorizing with her fingertips every curve and hollow of his hand.

  And again the desire to convey to her his utter contentment overwhelmed him. But there was the barrier, always the barrier of words; and that which he now felt was beyond words, deeper and more meaningful. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, and said nothing.

  For at that moment he realized that this understanding which he so desired was a thing that must come from between them, inviolate and alone, unasked and unacknowledged. And he thought for a moment that he had discovered the secret.

  This was the thing that drew men and women together: not the meeting of minds nor of spirits, not the conjunction of bodies in the dark insanity of copulation—none of these. It was the tenuous need to create a bond, a tie more fragile than the laciest ribbon. It was for this that they strived together, ceaselessly and always really alone; it was for this that they loved and hated, gathered and threw away. For only the little thread which they could never test for the fear of its destruction, for only the delicate thread which they could never secure for fear of breaking it in two.

  How alone we are, he thought. How always alone.

  Claire looked at him with hazy surprise; and he furiously realized that he had spoken his thought aloud.

  ‘Alone?’ Her voice was puzzled. ‘Oh, we’re not alone.’

  He forced himself to laugh. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. It was something else. I was thinking of something else, something entirely different.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why think of something else?’

  ‘Exactly. Why?’

  He waved his hand at the waiter. He was suddenly and marvelously exhilarated again. He did not feel drunk at all, not actually; there was only the ecstatically numb and warm sensation suffusing and relaxing his body. He had hardly any trouble in the articulation of his words.

  Then, while his hand was still waving excitedly in the air, the room began to darken before his eyes. He felt a quick instinctive thrill of fear, as if it were the fog of death closing about him; then his reason told him that the lights of the place were being dimmed. He turned questioningly to Claire.

  ‘Wait,’ she told him. He could see that her eyes were unlidded now; she looked at him directly, still not seeing him, with something like excitement shining there.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Volita.’

  ‘Volita?’ he repeated stupidly.

  ‘Of course. Didn’t you come here to see her?’

  ‘Why—no. Who is she?’

  ‘You don’t even know who she is? Everyone comes here to see her.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said uncomprehendingly.

  ‘That’s the only reason they come.’

  It was almost completely dark when they stopped talking. Claire edged closer to him. He could feel her shoulder against his chest and the slight movement of her body as she breathed.

  Then, as the room became a rectangle of vast, dim shadows, a hush fell upon the occupants. The air was pregnant with a murmuring expectancy. When his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, he could make out a featureless sea of faces caught motionless and hung unbelievably in space.

  The now invisible orchestra started playing. First, a slow unearthly air from a woodwind; then the strings which gave body and tone; and swelling up, insidiously, insistently in the background, the liquid tom-tom-tom of a drum; and at last the orchestra seemed one instrument emitting a sensuously suggestive strain of melody.

  And as the music built, a light began to glow from somewhere in the heights of the room, shining down upon the bare floor. One could see nothing at first; but as the music swelled, the light became brighter.

  Then bursting upon sight, spread motionless in a waiting crouch, unearthly and still, was Volita.

  There was a small stir of straining forward as the audience moved forward to look more closely at her.

  Her skin was a warm golden brown. She was clad briefly in a length of gauze-like material which hung loosely about her hips. Her deep breasts protested against another such strip. About each of her ankles was a slender garland of hibiscus. She wore nothing else.

  A profusion of hair irregularly framed her wild face. It was a visage devoid, seemingly, of thought: heavy salved lids drooped over tempestuous eyes: a thin nose flared surprisingly at the nostrils: heavy sensual lips, slightly open, showed sharp white teeth.

  The first motion he detected was the small convulsive writhings of her hands. They moved, not as if they were dependent upon Volita for existence, but as if they lived and breathed only in the hot pulse of the music. So leisurely that it was almost torture to follow it, the movement traveled up from her fingertips to her wrists, up her arms, thence to the smooth shoulders. Beneath her oiled skin, he could see the delicate play of muscle, graceful and fluent as the turning of many serpents. Gradually her whole body began to tremble in accord with the breath of melody.

  Yet it did not seem that she moved with the music. It was as if she were impelled by a devilish force other than her own, against which she struggled vainly. The strings of music pulled her, and, although she resisted the force with all her trembling strength, she could only move and turn as it directed her. Effortlessly, infinitesimal inch by inch, the music pulled her up, while her bare arms flowed and undulated in their separate spheres. Resisting less and less, her body swayed gently to and fro, appeasingly, hesitantly, the arms continuing their other dance in their other life to the wild undertones of rhythm.

  In the merciless glare of the spotlight, her body gleamed and shone as if it were faceted when she moved. He strained forward in his chair, over the table. He was hardly aware of anyone beside him in his concentration upon the strange creature who swayed wantonly in the center of the room.

  The music’s tempo grew more frenzied; and throwing away the last remnant of resistance, she flung herself into the embrace of her rhythmic lover. She danced and whirled about the room as one possessed; and that possession captured and included the occupants of the room, and they breathed more swiftly, audibly, like a heavy night-breeze, and their fleshes tingled at the abandoned sight of her.

  It was a thing entire and apart from the dancer, this dance. The flashing of her limbs and the shining of her flesh, the perfect and mindless movements, the pulsing beat-beat-beat which was the blood of the music—these blended and merged until they were almost an element, independent of each lesser part which formed the whole.

  And still the dance grew wilder and wilder. Volita’s lips were drawn back, pressed hard against her pale teeth. Her eyes were closed, and she was lost in this masochistic struggle, these writhings of self-torture. Her breasts strained until it seemed they must rip the thin cloth which covered them. The smooth muscles of her belly turned and twisted; her body throbbed uncontrollably in effortless spasms.

  Now so swift and mad were her gyrations that she was a flashing blur. Etched for fractional instants upon the plate of his seeing were quivering glimpses of
rolling thigh and breast. His ears were filled with the slow voiceless sigh which circled the room. And he too was caught in a common net, he was tense and attracted as he leaned forward, desperately intent upon catching the last important moments of the dance.

  Then, with a shrieking clash of music, it was over. And with that final discordant beat, Volita spanned the width of the floor in one tremendous, exultant leap and landed with panther-like grace and ease only a few feet in front of his table.

  Upon her face there was an expression of deep, exultantly fierce, almost mad ecstasy. And he was instantly unaware of his surroundings. His eyes were compelled and frozen by that face before him which grew and grew in his vision, swelled to an unbelievable proportion, menacing and insatiable.

  Blindly he rose to his feet. He thought he heard someone cry out as if in unendurable pain. It might have been himself. He did not know.

  For suddenly it was the face of his mother that he saw; and that was very strange, for it was not like her at all, this dark and hot and wild visage. But there was something— something there, something he recognized without knowing how or why he recognized it, something he had seen before, something—

  And then he remembered.

  He reached across the darkness, pierced the barrier of untrammeled applause, surmounted the obstacle of present sight, remembered and knew why it was that he saw his mother’s face in the senseless vapidity of the shape before him, how he saw her calmness in the rapt, challenging ferocity of this face; and at the moment of remembrance, he was not half-crouching above a table in a hot night club; for none of this existed; it was only a nightmare of the present; and suddenly it was gone, and he was transported back into his own reality . . .

  . . . And there before his eyes was the sweeping terraced lawn and the long drive lined with maple trees. The lawn and the drive sloped up and on the crest of this subtle hill stood the house as he remembered it, pale and remote, luminous in the moonlight. For in his vision it was night, and the moon bathed this scene with a dimly exquisite glow, imbuing it with an ageless and impossible beauty.