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“Hello,” he said. “Been waiting long?”
It was a silly thing to say, but it was good being silly. He didn’t like the look on Linda’s face. He knew that the more excuses he could make in the next day or so to be out of her sight, the better for himself. He would save money on cigarettes by not being too near her. He would be very solicitous. “What if I run up for a bottle of whiskey, darling?” “Darling, I’m going down to the boat dock to pick up some bait.” “Darling, Sam wants me to golf this afternoon.” Linda didn’t keep well in this kind of weather. There was something a little sour about her already.
The moth beat gently at his face. “You’re pretty damned big,” he said, suddenly feeling a return of the cool chill to his spine, where it had used to be. He hadn’t been afraid in years, now he let himself be just a little, enjoyably, afraid of the white, whispering moth. It tinkled against the light bulb. He washed up, and for the hell of it looked into a booth to see if there was some of that mysterious writing he had once read as a boy. Magic words then, incomprehensible, strange. Now—nothing. “I know what you mean, now,” he said. “Words. Limericks. All the magic gone.”
Somehow, he caught himself in the mirror, the blurred, fuzzy mirror, and his face was disappointed. All the words had not turned out to be half as grand as he had conjured them to seem. Once they had been golden pronouncements of mystery. Now they were vulgar, short, shocks against accumulated taste.
He lingered to finish out a cigarette, not wanting quite yet to return to Linda.
When he entered the cottage, Linda looked at his shirt.
“That’s your good shirt, and why didn’t you put on your coat, it’s all wet.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“You’ll catch cold,” she said. She was unpacking some things on the bed. “Boy, the bed’s hard,” she said.
“I used to sleep the sleep of the innocent on it,” he said.
“Frankly,” she said, “I’m getting old. When they put out a bed made of whipped cream, I’m bait.”
“Lie down for awhile,” he suggested. “We’ve got three hours before dinner—”
“How long will this rain go on?” she said.
“I don’t know, probably just today, and then tomorrow, everything green. Boy, does it smell good after a rain.”
But he was lying. Sometimes it rained for a week. And he hadn’t minded it. He had run down to the gray choppy lake in the needling rain, while the sky over him, like a great gray crock overturned and storming, from time to time took on a crackle glaze of electric blue. Then the thunder knocked him off his feet. And he had swum in the lake, his head out, the lake feeling warm and comfortable, just because the air was filled with cold needles and he looked out at the pavilion where people danced nights, and the hotels with the warm long dim corridors hushed and quiet with running porters, and he looked at the cottage under the Augu
st thunder, him in the lake, paddling dog-fashion, the air like winter above. And he never wanted to come out of the lake, he wanted only to remain suspended in the warm water, until he turned purple with enjoyment.
Linda lay down on the bed. “God, what a mattress,” she said.
He lay down beside her, not touching her.
The rain started again, gently, upon the cottage. It was as dark as night, but a very special feeling, because you knew it was four in the afternoon, though black, and the sun was above all the blackness, oh, very special.
At six o’clock, Linda painted a fresh mouth on. “Well, I hope the food’s good,” she said. It was still raining, a thumping, pounding, never-ending drop of storm upon the house. “What do we do this evening?” she wanted to know.
“Dance? There’s a pavilion, cost a million dollars, built in 1929 just before the crash,” he said, tying his tie. And again he was out of the room, in thought, and under the raining trees, eighteen years ago. Him and Marion and Skip, running in their rustling slickers, making a noise like cellophane, with the rain patting them all over, their faces greased with it, past the play-ground and the slides, along the posted road, and to the pavilion. Children were not allowed inside. They had stood outside with their faces pressed to the screen, watching the people inside, buying drinks, laughing, sitting at the tables, getting up and going out to dance on the dance floor to music that was muted and enclosed. Marion had stood there, enchanted, the light on her face. “Someday,” she had said, “I’m going to be inside, and dance.”
They had stood, with the rain touching around them, in the dark wet night, the rain dripping from the eaves of the pavilion. And the music had played “I Found My Love in Avalon” and things like “In Old Monterrey.”
Then, after half an hour of the rain seeping into their shoes, and their noses chilling, and rain slipping into their raincoat collars, they had turned from the warm pavilion light and walked off, silently, the music fading, down the road back to their cabins.
Someone knocked on the front door. “Sam!” called a voice. “Hey, you two! Ready? Time for dinner!”
They let Sam in. ‘“How do we get up to the hotel?” asked Linda. “Walk?” She looked at the rain outside the door.
“Why not,” said her husband. “It’d be fun. God, we never do anything anymore, you know what I mean, we never walk anywhere, if we have to go anyplace past a block we get in the car. Hell, let’s put on our raincoats and march up, eh, Sam?”
“Okay with me, how about you, Linda?” cried Sam.
“Oh, walk?” she complained. “All that way? And in this rain?”
“Come off it,” the husband said. “What’s a little rain.”
“All right,” she said.
