A Fine and Private Place

Chapter 11

It rained all night. Michael and Laura walked through it, watching the rain come down so hard that it bounced when it hit the ground. Toward morning the rain began to let up, and by the time they came to the wall that overlooked the city it had become a heavy mist that sat on the trees and would not be moved by sunrise. Mid-August rain is like that in New York.

"This is nice," Michael said. He stretched, which was, of course, not at all necessary, but it was one of the motions of humanity he remembered very clearly.

"Even though we've done it before?" Laura asked. She sat on the wall beside him.

"Even so. Some things bear more repetition than others. Mornings like this. Grapes. I don't think I could ever have gotten tired of grapes. I used to hoard them. All kinds—green, red, purple, black. Some men can't pass a pool hall without going in. I couldn't pass fruit stores."

"I was that way about bananas," Laura said. "But I wasn't really faithful about it. I'd eat a bunch in a day and then crawl under the sink and be quietly sick. That would cure me for two weeks or so, and then I'd be back on the banana boat. Grapes a little, but bananas most of all."

"Grapes," Michael said firmly. "But you see what I mean. I like this. I like us sitting here and talking, watching the mist burn off and the trucks in the streets. I suppose in a hundred years or a thousand years, I'll be weary unto death with it."

"It won't take that long," Laura said. "A month. Maybe a couple of months."

"All right. I know it. What are you trying to prove? Right now I like watching the morning come. Sandy and I used to do that a lot. We'd sit up all night playing cards and listening to records, and then, just before morning, we'd go out and walk until the sun came up. We'd have breakfast wherever we were and go home and sleep till three or four in the afternoon. Then we'd go through the same routine again, and we never got tired of it."

Laura looked down the hillside as she spoke. "Sometimes I wish Sandra would restrain herself from feather-footing her way into everything we talk about. If I sound petty and malicious, it's because I am."

"I was sorry as soon as I'd mentioned her," Michael said. "I know how it sounds. The most boring thing in the world is another man's girl."

"It isn't that," Laura said a little crossly. "You have a perfect right to talk about her. Every beautiful thing you can remember comes in handy after death. Only—" A plane from La Guardia Airport was thundering tinnily over the city, and she used it as an excuse to leave the sentence incomplete until it was out of sight. Then, still looking away from him, she said, "Only, I wish you'd decide whether you love her or hate her."

"I don't love her," Michael answered. "But all the pleasant things I remember seem to be tied up with her, one way or the other. Not because she was Sandra, but because the good moments were better for someone else's being there. This sounds like women's-magazine philosophy, but some things aren't any good unless they're shared. Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets. You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," Laura said.

"All right. Let it go. The point is made. You know, the raven was right about birds. They do sing just before rain. I was listening."

Michael looked sideways at her. "What's the matter, Laura? Did I say something wrong?"

"Nothing," Laura said. "Nothing's wrong. When you mentioned Sandra, I started thinking about the trial. It must be over now."

"Now? What are you talking about? It's not for a week yet."

Laura smiled for the first time. "What day is today?"

"Good God, I don't know. It's still summer, but some of the leaves are turning brown already. Is it August?"

"It's August seventeenth," Laura said. "The trial was two days ago. I know because Mr. Rebeck told me. The raven's been following it in the newspapers, the way you asked him to."

"Did I ask him? I don't even remember that. I'm losing all track of time, Laura. I thought I'd keep that a while longer."

Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die.

"Does it make any difference?" Laura asked. "What's time to us? What's five o'clock to the dead? We've got no pressing appointments."

"No difference. But it's part of being human, and so I hate to lose it. Didn't I tell you I hung on to things?"

"I remember," Laura said. She looked up at the overcast sky for a sign of the raven. "Anyway," she said, "we ought to know about the trial today."

"I don't care about the trial," Michael said. "It might have meant something to me if they'd tried her when I was newly dead and full of revenge. Now I don't much care. I don't even remember her as well as I used to. She's becoming a stranger who did something to a stranger. I don't wish her any harm. Let's leave it at that. Don't talk about the trial, Laura."

Behind them a tree branch shook like a wet dog and sent its load of rain splashing to the ground. Michael and Laura turned and saw a couple coming past the hothouse and toward the wall.

"Company," Michael said. "And so early."

They were very young, Laura thought. Twenty or twenty-one, no more. The boy's hair was so wet it was almost maroon in color. He wore a raincoat but no rubbers, and the bottoms of his pants legs flapped shapelessly above his equally soaked socks as he walked. The girl also wore a raincoat, but the top button was missing and her wet white blouse clung to her small pointed breasts. She wore some sort of plastic kerchief over her hair, but the rain had seeped in, and what could be seen of her hair was limp and damp. They walked slowly, with their arms around each other's waists, faces turned to each other as they talked. Sometimes, without stopping, they kissed and then stumbled because they were not looking where they were going. Then they would laugh.

"Let's get out of here," Michael said. "I don't want to eavesdrop on them. Let's go somewhere else."

"Wait a little. How wet they are, and how happy."

They heard the boy's voice then. "Sure it's crazy. Been a pretty night all around. Look at it this way. I bet you've had hundreds of guys taking you to movies and skating rinks and dances. How many guys ever took you to a graveyard before breakfast? This way you'll remember me."

"A graveyard before breakfast," the girl said. "All night out in the rain and now a graveyard. You bet I'll remember you, mister." But she was laughing as she said it, and she hugged the boy's waist tightly.

"Think of it like a park," the boy said. "Look at all the statues standing around. Look at all the trees. It's like Central Park."

The girl looked up at him and shook her head, pantomiming exasperation. "A park. Some park. Wait till my mother gets hold of me." She made her voice shrill and old. " 'Where were you, Norma, all night and not a word? What kind of a way is that to treat your mother?' And I'll say, 'It's all right, Ma, it's all right, don't panic. Harry and I had a wonderful time. We went to a movie and when we came out it was raining, and so we walked all night. And in the morning Harry took me to the most wonderful graveyard. Ma, you should have been there. What a night.'" She sneezed.

"God bless you," the boy said. "Honey, you all right? I don't want you getting sick because I'm crazy. I'll take you right home now, you don't feel good."

"No, I'm all right," the girl said. "I'll take a hot shower when I get home. Only let's not stay too long, Harry."

"A few minutes, that's all." The boy pointed toward the wall. "Come on, we'll sit down and catch our breath. Then we'll start back."

As they came on together, Michael said urgently, "Laura, let's get out of here. I don't want to watch them. Neither do you."

"Wait," Laura said. "Wait a little. I thought you were the one who spent all his time observing people."

"Not couples. Never couples. I'm not obnoxiously brave, Laura."

"I'm not brave at all," Laura said. But she remained on the wall, watching the boy and girl approach, and Michael stayed with her.

When the couple reached the wall, the boy stooped and lifted the girl onto it. There was a good deal of puffing and giggling and flopping of wet garments involved. Once seated on the wall, the girl extended her hand daintily, and the boy took it and scrambled, panting, up the ladderlike mortar to sit beside her. He was completely out of breath and tried to conceal it by taking deep gasps of air and letting them out slowly. But the girl looked at him and began to laugh, and it was somehow different from laughing after kissing and stumbling.

"Look at you," she said. "You're all red and breathless."

"You think you're such a featherweight?" the boy said, not without rancor. "Come on, we'll do it over and you carry me this time. Let's see how you look."

"Score one for our side," Michael said to Laura. "I think I'm for him if it comes to shooting."

But the boy reached an arm out, and the girl pushed herself against his side and drew the arm about her like a cloak. She giggled once and then kissed the boy's cheek quickly when he looked sourly at her and started to speak.

"I wouldn't make fun of you if you were weak," she said, and the boy's arm tightened around her shoulders until she winced.

They happened to be sitting almost exactly where Michael and Laura had chosen to sit, in the middle of the wall where the trees on both sides did not block their view of the city. To Mr. Rebeck or Campos, the two figures would have seemed outlined in cobweb by the remembered shapes of the ghosts who sat with them; as if Michael and Laura were only sheaths for the young swords that the boy and girl were. But to anyone else passing there would have been just the two young people sitting on the wall, the girl's wet face pressed against the side of the boy's neck.

"I can see where you live from here," the boy said.

The girl lifted her head from his shoulder. "Where, Harry? Where is it?"

"Way over there, see—a block after the Coca-Cola sign. One thing I know, it's where you live."

"I see it. I even see—my God, Harry, there's a light on in the bedroom! God, my mother must be having baby elephants. She'll kill me when I get in, she'll absolutely kill me."

"I'll come up with you," the boy offered diffidently.

"She'll kill you too," the girl warned.

"I'll come up with you. Your mother doesn't scare me."

"Oh, you're so brave," the girl said. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Sleep your life away," the boy said. "Norma, look. The street lights are going out. Look at them."

"This is nice. You can watch the whole city waking up." The girl was tracing the boy's mouth and nose with a forefinger. "The stores'll be opening soon." She sneezed again. "Harry, if I catch a cold you better catch one too. God help you if you don't."

"Isn't that nice?" Michael said. "What's mine is yours. Love is the sweetest thing."

"The way they look at each other," Laura said. "As if one of them was going to vanish any minute, and they didn't know which one it would be."

"Young lust. Don't tell me you've never seen it before?"

"Of course I have," Laura said.

"Take off your shoes," the boy was saying.

The girl pulled away from him, frowning. "Why? What's the idea?"

"Come on, take your shoes off," the boy said. "You're catching a cold."

"I know I'm catching a cold. Is running around barefoot going to make it any better?"

"Look, your feet are wet. Take off your shoes and socks and I'll dry your feet. Then you can wear my socks until we get home. How's that for thinking?"

The girl began to laugh again. "Harry, you're crazy! What good'll that do, wearing your socks? They're just as wet as mine."

"Oh," the boy said. "Yeah." He poked halfheartedly at his own shoes and socks. "All right, forget it. It was just an idea."

"I mean, it's an awfully nice thing to do, Harry, but there wouldn't be any point to it. I'd just get wet again."

"Yeah, I know," the boy said, still examining his feet. "I just liked the idea of you wearing something of mine."

"That's sweet," The girl touched him lightly on the back of the neck, just where the hair begins. "Harry, that's very sweet."

"Forget it. It was a stupid idea."

"Well, look," the girl said. "Look, we could trade coats. Mine might be a little tight on you, but I guess we could manage it. You want to, Harry?"

"No," the boy said. "I didn't mean it like that. Forget it, Norma."

The girl smiled slowly and vaguely, as though she were trying to remember a dream. Her finger and thumb kept gently opening and closing on the back of the boy's neck. "Harry," she said huskily. "Harry, look at me."

"That's it," Michael said. "That's the ballgame. Look into a girl's eyes, and you see everything you ever believed about yourself. And you can never see her ugly because that would mean that you also are ugly and untrue. Up the creek, up the creek. Look at the poor sucker."

"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 myself, 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, Laura."

"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."

He pointed suddenly into the city. "Look. Aren't they the two who were here this morning? Harry and what's-her-name?"

"Norma," Laura said. She saw the two raincoat-clad figures waiting for a traffic light to change. They had their arms around each other's waists.

"It's too far to tell," she said. "It looks like them."

They watched the couple without speaking until the light changed and the boy and the girl started across the street. They walked so slowly that the light had changed again before they reached the other side, and the cars were sniffing at their ankles.

"Luck, you silly bastards," Michael murmured. "Oh, luck."

He turned in time to catch Laura's smile and looked a little embarrassed. "See?" he said. "You were wrong. Once you feel yourself loved, you become generous, expansive, sentimental. You love everybody, even young couples, and that takes some doing."

Laura smiled and stared happily at him and said nothing.

"I wish I could touch you," he said after a moment. "I think I'd like to hold your face between my hands and look protectively down at you. You'd have very cool skin and light bones against the palms of my hands."

"I'd love it. But I would also flush, and my skin would get hot and very red. It always used to. I wouldn't mind, though, if you didn't."

"I wouldn't mind."

"Big-hearted Morgan," Laura said softly. But she smiled still and sat up straight so that Michael could look at her.

Very suddenly, he said, "Touch me. Try to touch my hand."

"It won't work, Michael." Her voice was very low. "I'll try, if you want me to. I'll break my heart trying. But it won't work. The time for touching is past."

"Try," Michael said. "Please try. Think about it. Think about loving me and wanting to touch me. Think how your hand used to feel, and how you moved it, and what it was like to touch things with it. Stretch out your hand to me, Laura. It might as well be your hand. Big symbol."

"Michael—"

"Once. One try and never again."

He held out his hand, and she reached, without hesitation, to touch it. The sun was hot on the leaves, and the city was full of the noises of cars and children; and Michael and Laura, lovers, reached to hold hands as lovers. There was a point in space where their hands, thin as breath, met and seemed to become one hand, through which the sun shone and a leaf fell. For a little while they stared hopefully at it. Then each gradually lowered his eyes to look at the other eyes with a kind of guilt, but still hoping to see something there that did not look from their own eyes. They did not lower their hands or look away from each other.

"Nothing," Michael said. "I didn't think there'd be."

"I felt something," Laura said, unable to bear the sadness in his voice. "At least I think I did. I might be imagining it—"

"Don't lie to me. Even to please me. We haven't got the time to lie."

"All right," she said. "I didn't feel a thing. It didn't work. We can't ever touch each other. Does honesty make you feel better? It's just as painful as lies to me."

"Never mind, Laura." He let his hand drop to his side. "It doesn't matter."

"It does matter," she cried out. "That's why I can't help envying Sandra, even now. Whatever she took from you, she had at least that much warmth to give you, and I have nothing. Only company and nice words."

"Laura," Michael said. "Laura, Laura. Sandra saw things a little differently. To her, holding each other, sleeping together—that was a kind of taking too. We never made love. I don't know what it was we made, but it wasn't love, and it was always dead by morning."

He laughed. "I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, "The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.' I remember him saying that."

He looked at her for a long while, saying nothing. Once he reached as if to try again to touch her, but he drew his hand back so swiftly that she wondered if she had imagined his moving it. Another leaf fell. It would be an early autumn, she thought.

"You are my own society," Michael was saying. "I looked for you when I was alive. I was careless about it, so as not to be hurt too much by not finding you, and I got tossed into the goddamnedest beds when I got too careless, but I looked for you, Laura. For a while I mistook Sandra for you. My apologies. It was dark, and I'm nearsighted. But it was never Sandra I loved. It was never Sandra's arm I slept in."

"Damn you," Laura said. "What kept you so long on the road?"

"My horse broke down, and I had to eat him. Poor beast. Love me?"

"Yes. Very much."

"I love you. Want to go for a walk? The city can dress itself and eat and go to work without us."

"No," she said. "Let's stay here a little longer. We have the time."

The raven came from behind them, and they turned when they heard the harsh flapping of his wings. He landed between them on the wall, caught his breath, and said, "I been looking all over for you, Morgan."

"I've been here," Michael said.

"I've been up and down the damn cemetery. Rebeck said you might be here."

"It's the trial," Laura said. "The trial's over."

"It's over." The raven looked down and scratched his beak in the spaces between the bricks, where the cement bulged.

"How did it go?" Michael asked calmly. "What happened to Sandra?"

"Crazy trial," the raven muttered without looking up. "Craziest damn trial I ever heard of."

"She won," Laura said. "She won, didn't she? They let her go free."

"Darling," Michael said, "you're not supposed to think of trials as being won or lost. The idea is—"

"They let her off," the raven said hoarsely. "Not guilty."

"Good for her. I didn't want anything bad to happen to Sandra. It would have been wrong to kill her."

"Morgan, you don't get the idea." The raven could not meet his eyes. "The way they figure, if she didn't kill you, you did. Suicide. Her lawyer said you tried to frame her. So they're sending a couple of guys out here to dig you up and move you someplace else. You being a Catholic and so on."

Laura made a small high-pitched sound and was still.

"Laura," Michael said. He turned from the raven to speak to her, but after her name he said nothing.

"It was a crazy trial," the raven said. "I told Rebeck, and he thought so too."