A Strange Sky

WHEN a Southern gal loses her man she’s committed to a sort of ritual, maybe you’d call it a grand old tradition. She’s expected to hang her head and spit her tobacco juice between her big toe and the second one, making a dark spot in the dust. Then she’s supposed to take up the banjo and entertain the whole damned town singing Lover Come back to Me to the tune of Possum up a Gum Stump while the old family retainers hum in the background, with voices rich as moonlight, something that sounds like Cotton-eyed Joe or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

But where I’m concerned the citizens of Somerton are all in for a big disappointment. I’ll see them in hell before I’ll crawl.

The miraculous damned thing is the way he all of a sudden decides he’s too good for Somerton. It sets me wondering what it was that hit him all at once, after all these years.

“Patsy Jo,” he’d say. when his face was still in pimples and his hair was a series of cowlicks, all the color of dishwater, taking my hand he’d say, “I’m going to be the best lawyer in the South.” But that was before he discovered he didn’t have to be, while his old man was still alive, pumping him full of fairy tales about honest sweat and just rewards. And his old man was just guessing, because he never sweat an honest drop himself. Anyway, Denny Smith would hold my hand and gaze into the distance, like something tied on the end of a calf rope, and finally turning to me he’d say, “And I’ll take you with me.”

But the farthest out of town I ever got with Denny Smith Sneed were the nights after prayer meeting was over. We’d leave the church with Draw Me Nearer still echoing like a song will, after you’ve been singing it, in that chambered silence of your memory. Or maybe still humming, inwardly, I Am Thine, O Lord. Then we got as far as the graveyard out the old Buckeye Pike, or later, after he was in college and had taken on refinements, the Pine Wind tourist cabins. Afterwards he always took me home like nothing had happened, and we parted with a few brave words from the South’s best lawyer-to-be. It wouldn’t be fair to say the subject of marriage never came up, but it was always something away off in the hazy distance of his “future.” He always was a dreamer, or maybe his old man had put him wise to that one too.

But when you take it all in and believe it, maybe because his old man has the bank, a few buildings on Main Street, and the property west of town, and mostly because the Sneeds have been here since Acuff County got its boundaries — I say, when you take it all in long enough, it becomes love. And in the end, if you happen to be anybody, it means something. No matter if you never get a promise, or if you make a quiet fool out of yourself while the others talk about their babies at Thursday night bridge. Still it doesn’t matter, not as long as he’s coming by on Sunday afternoon, smelling like shaving lotion and fresh dry cleaning.

BAD news always seems to come when you’re busy as a six-fingered piano player and doing something else besides expecting it. It was July and hot enough to burn the parts off a brass stallion, and there I was clerking my heart out, giving my rock-bottom all for Herman Gold and the Somerton Bargain Store. It was during the midsummer sale. The women lined the counters like big pink balloons, sweating where their dresses made a V at the neck and showing a wide damp place below the armpits, a sign they’re fretting to buy. I had one almost hooked. “Wrap it up?" I asked. She had a face like strawberries and was so big she had to turn sideways to go between the counters. She was clucking to herself like an adding machine.

I waited the standard ten minutes while she quizzed her soul. She held the dress in both hands, and it was like the dress was holding her right back. She wanted to put it down, but she couldn’t.

The iron was hot, so I struck and explained it was the only one left in stock that would fit her, the sale being nearly over and the size being popular here, although they might call it an oversize in the Memphis stores.

“Honey,” I says, “this one is real cute. The blue goes with your eyes.”

She took it then. I couldn’t have hit her any harder if I had mauled her over the head with a sledge hammer. Out of a black purse that looked like maybe it had been buried for a while, she dragged a big wad of mossy-looking bills. I cranked the cash register and watched her fade through the door like a big cloud to the sidewalk, where she vaporized. And then Mattie French, white legs thin as pipestems, made an entrance like the Queen of Sheba just off the golden barge. Her little eyes snapped, and her chewing gum went a mile a minute. That’s what air-conditioning the jewelry store has done, I says to myself, it’s given the biggest amateur whore in town a chokehold on life.

“Feel like a fountain drink?” she says, without letting up on the gum.

Templeton’s drugstore was air-cooled. I glanced at Herman Gold, wrapping something to beat sixty at the back counter. He nodded my way with a look of despair, and we went out. Templeton’s felt like going to heaven.

Mattie stuck her chewing gum under the counter and poked at the ice in her drink.

“Mama saw Denny Smith Sneed in Memphis yesterday,” Mattie says. That’s how she started it, right to the point. As always, my heart was looking in another direction.

“Oh, yeah,” I says, still comfortable, “Denny’s down there quite a little bit here lately. It’s a regular sight the way he always has some deal or other working.” There was a new kid jerking soda. I watched as he dug gobs of ice cream out of the wells and jammed them on the cones.

“You and Denny Smith still going together?” I caught the mock surprise in her voice, just the way she knew I would. She was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. Right then I knew she had me. There was no mistaking the shine to her eyes, their cruel triumph. And I thought: Seventeen years, you’ve dated him seventeen years, and now here it comes. It was like taking down your pants before an audience.

“The last time I heard, Denny Smith and I were still going together.” Then I looked at her hard and said, “Who is she, Mattie?”

I waited, taking the straw in my lips and watching it turn dark when I sucked on it. The cold hit the roof of my mouth and sank into my vitals. As I looked down at the ice in the bottom of my glass it came to me that it would have been too much to expect that Denny Smith would tell me himself. No, that would be too painful — for him. He had taken the easy way. It was easier to let someone like Mattie gut me with it, and my prickling scalp told me Mattie French was about to trail my entrails all over that drugstore. I didn’t look at her. I looked away. I watched the kid’s arm down in the well, up to the shoulder after ice cream. But there was no way to escape her voice, a little nasal now. Triumph and excitement were bursting inside her. Mattie French had been heavy with it, and it caught me like a rain, like a sudden gully washer, a chunk floater; and I kept thinking: You whore, you miserable little whore.

“Not that I’d want to brew up trouble between you and Denny Smith,” she says, “but Mama saw him. At a parking garage in Memphis. You know how you have to wait while they bring your car down? Well, he was there, and Mama had already spoken before she realized he was with someone else, this blonde, this Miss Williams or something; a real cute little blonde, you know, and . . . and she —”

“Get on with your frog strangling,” I says.

“She had a real pretty ring, a sort of obvious diamond, maybe three carats, on the finger.”

I began to get the picture. Holding to the black marble edge of the counter, I steadied myself and took a long sip.

“Everybody knows I’m not married to him,” I says. “I don’t have any more claim on him than the next woman.” But at least, I thought, she hasn’t kept it from me for any length of time. Then I remembered he couldn’t have been in Memphis the day before because it was his rent collection day and he attended to it personally, since nobody else could be trusted to collect fifteen dollars and make out the receipt for ten (contribution of the University of Tennessee Law School to the reduction of Denny Smith Sneed’s income tax).

“You didn’t mean to say yesterday?” I says, looking hard at her now, the way you look at a worm when you mean to step on it.

She avoided my eyes. And then she remembered, remarked in fact how silly it had been of her to forget! And I knew then, at least, that Somerton wasn’t breaking any customs on my account. The cross had been hoisted up on my shoulders. The good citizens were going to hike up the hill, beside me every step of the way. “Well, thanks for telling me,” I says. Mattie had known about it a week.

She was contented now; it was a softness in her face, like the folded-under paws of a cat beside a saucer empty of milk. I left her and went out the door, a little dazed.

WHEN I got back to the Bargain Store I had to tell somebody, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else, so I took it to Herman Gold. He finally got a chance to go with me to the curtainedoff stock room at the back of the store. Away from the sale and the customers and the other clerks it was quiet. I got a little comfort from the leathery smell of new shoes and the dusty smell of cotton yard goods. Herman wiped off his face with a white handkerchief and listened. He was wheezing a little. He put the handkerchief away with a deft movement of his little hand, still listening, and not quite looking at me. He looked a little to one side of me, like there were some things he did not enjoy viewing in the middle of his mind. He nodded.

“He’s engaged to some gal in Memphis,” I says.

“You might say I seen it coming,” he says. “You have to face it, he’s low-down. When I seen him the first time I knew he would steal pennies off a dead man’s eyes. It ain’t like you could reason with him, like you could talk to him and say to him what the hell is he trying to pull.”

“No,” I says, “it wouldn’t help. What you’re saying is I let myself in for it. Isn’t that right?”

Herman was getting bald. I could see where the top of his head was pink from the heat. He was a little dazed, too, because my bad news had come when he didn’t expect it either, and he stood there a minute like a man trying to gather his thoughts together, only they were scattered all over the place like goods on a bargain counter and needed a little sorting beforehand. And finally he says, speaking slowly: “What I mean is there are different men look at things different ways. Denny Smith Sneed is strictly business, which would be okay only he is all business, which means what-is-there-in-it-for-him or he ain’t got no use for it. Being a Jew, I can appreciate what he is. I like to make money so I can give it to my family, and when I close the store, why, I close up the Herman Gold that’s strictly business inside the store. I lock him in this here safe overnight. It’s why I rattle the front door after I’ve locked it and look back inside. I’m looking back to see if that guy I don’t want to take home with me is locked up safe inside here.”

“And Denny Smith takes that part of him home,” I says.

“Yes,” says Herman Gold. “And I don’t know what you could do about it. Your papa, being the type of man he is, would shoot him dead before Denny Smith could swallow spit, if you told him to do it.”

“I thought of that,” I says.

“But even killing him wouldn’t change him.”

“No,” I says, “dead he would be just the very same way.”

Herman sighed. “A nice appealing girl like you, a real person throwing it all away on a damn yo-yo like him!”

“I’m a fool, Herman, and I know it.”

“Nice,” he says, patting my shoulder, “such a nice gal. I always liked you.” He was looking away into the middle distance again. “It ain’t anything you can do, Honey, just only forget him. You got to try to get over it.”

I nodded, biting my lip. Herman was right. I was feeling dizzy, and I hung my head a little.

“Look,” he says finally, “you take the rest of the day off. Me and the gals will handle it.”

He didn’t have to beg me. “Thanks, Herman,” I says, and I left him standing beside the old iron safe, studying his folded hands. I went out the back door.

Trash was burning behind the drugstore, sending flecks of ash up into the sky. Chimney swifts were wheeling so high they looked like gnats, and there wasn’t a cloud anywhere. I had left my car parked by the Baptist church, where there weren’t any parking meters, and I had to go down the alley to Thirteenth Street and then left past the barbershop. Just knowing what Denny Smith had been up to in Memphis made me boneweary. The barbershop had customers pushed clean out onto the sidewalk, and going by I had a whiff of hair oil and heard the clippers buzzing. The men didn’t say anything, but their eyes were on me like hands, and I knew they were thinking how if I would with one guy and now he was getting rid of me, then why not with another and another. Here comes another Mattie French, they were thinking. It gave me a sudden sick little feeling.

There was a phone booth ahead of me on the corner. I searched a dime out of my purse, and then I hesitated, shaking all over a little. While I stood outside the booth with the sun pressing its heat against me a flock of pigeons rose from the slate roof of the church. I could hear the pop of their wings in the hot silence of my uncertainty. There must have been a dozen of them, gray-blue, circling over the post office as they rose, now veering an instant in confusion before they finally settled out in the direction of Main Street. I stepped inside the phone booth and gave the operator Denny Smith’s number. In Somerton you drop in your dime after your party answers, and so he knew I was calling from a phone booth. It surprised him. He had just that minute gotten in from Memphis, he said.

“Your business down there is going pretty good, I guess.”

“Oh, fine,” he says. “I had a right successful trip.”

I told him Herman had given me the rest of the day off, and —

Swell! Was I coining out? The water looked great to him from where he was standing. He was thinking, in fact, of a swim.

Yes, I thought. I wish you’d go out and soak your head under the surface for about thirty minutes. But the booth was hot.

“I’ll be out in a little,” I told him. “I want to hear all about Memphis.”

There was a pause. In the hum of the wires I could almost hear him wondering if I knew, wondering if someone had told me. It had to be soon now, and he would have been wondering every day when it would happen, expecting the little painful scene. He was a man who hated unpleasantness. Finally he said, “Okay, Sugar,” and kissed into the phone, the way he always had. I kissed back before I could stop myself, cursing the part of love that is just sheer habit, and hung up the receiver.

I STEPPED out of the booth. Crossing the street, I saw a carefree little girl collecting water in teaparty cups from the drinking fountain in the churchyard. She had an apron of mud on herpink dress. I stood beside my car, for a moment envying her that deliberate preoccupation with mud pies and the blue innocence of the ribbon on her hair.

Inside my car was like a furnished room in hell. I started up and rolled down the windows. I picked up speed, and at the corner the tires made that summertime squeal as I swung around it.

Outside town the black top was jammed with dusty cars and trucks, and I honked the horn and went by while kids hung out the windows and dropped a confetti of candy wrappers into the wind. When I cut off the highway the dust was like a wall of earth. It filtered in at the window above my elbow and settled out on the floor board only to be blown up again when I finally decided to pass the cars even if I couldn’t see ahead. I was almost to the wooden bridge, with the road now lying clear and straight almost a quarter of a mile to the next curve. I began to breathe deeply once more, and the last bridge after the last curve batted beneath the tires. From where the road met the edge of the lake I saw him. He jumped off the diving board. Even from a distance he didn’t look like a man who could dive like that, almost without a splash. I drove on up the hill and parked my old car beside his brand-new one.

I ran into the house, from habit I suppose, and took my bathing suit out of his closet, leaving my clothes on his bed. The scent of him was in the cool air of the room. I pulled on my bathing suit and then went out, running again, running down across the lawn toward the water. He pulled himself out on the raft and sat with his feet dangling just under the surface of the water. I stopped running and walked slowly, trying to catch my breath, thinking: Yes, you have only to wait, and here I come, like the dog you never even have to whistle for, and you just watch. He had watched me drive around the edge of the lake and run inside the house. Now he watched while I climbed the ladder to the diving board.

At the top it came to me that I had done this so many times before that it was more than a habit, more than just part of me. This was all of me, blood and bone of me. Before me the board stretched in his direction. I had only to walk its length and fall. But I stood holding the curved hand rests, with a prickling sensation in my belly, and looking down I saw the wet footprints of him leading to the board’s edge and droplets of water that had fallen from his body, drying in the sunlight.

From across the water the quiet sound of him came, the single word flattened on the humid interval of distance between us, so that for a moment at least I wondered if he had really said it. “Well?” he says. I looked up. He sat in the same position, and I could think only: Memphis, Memphis, Memphis. And I yelled at him then, yelled back “Yaaa!” as loud as I could. I yelled it again and walked to the end of the board and went in, went down buried in coolness. But if you could stay down forever, I thought, would he move, would he ever move, even then? When I came up he was still there.

Denny Smith Sneed knew that he had only to wait. I swam toward him, telling myself all the things I would say. I swam slowly, planning every word:

“So now it’s somebody else, a new little somebody. One wasn’t enough, so you decided you had to have a pair, is that it? Don’t I know by now the way that high-minded brain of yours operates?”

And when that one had clabbered in him 1 would ask him just who did he think he was, and did he think he could break it off in me, just like that, after all these years? Because if he did he might just as well try warming his feet in the moonlight.

I swam out until I could touch his foot and look up into his face. It was the baby-doll face you want to kiss but don’t believe in, like the ones in the carnival, where the pitchman hands three baseballs to your beau and then holds his coat while he tries to knock the solid milk bottles off the pedestal where they’re glued or maybe nailed down. And when your beau finally gives up and you walk away on his arm, the dolls are still there, row on row of them and each smile like the other one, and the pitchman is handing the baseballs to the next couple. When the carnival is gone and the colored lights are forgotten and the dust is finally out of your nose and washed from your ankles, the baby-doll faces are still with you.

FOR the first time that day I was comfortable. My legs were cool.

He reached down and took my wrists and pulled me out of the water onto the raft beside him. What took me so long, he wanted to know. I lay on my back and let my breath come through my mouth. My hair was pasted to my shoulders, and water ran onto the hot boards beneath me.

There was all the distance there is in that sky above me. There was a certain comfort in looking up and thinking that if you didn’t hit a star or something you could go in that direction forever, and there didn’t have to be anything except the same old comfortable distance, and no heaven, nor any time.

“Did you miss me?” I says, thinking what a snake he was. Thinking: I should know it by now. And he came between me and the sky, down over me. He wore green trunks, and above them there was a fold in his stomach. “You got a spare tire around the middle,” I says, and thought how long ago it was when he was slim. And he kissed me. He kissed again, he kissed my ear. I looked up at the sky again, and there was nothing there, and he kissed and I kissed. “Did you miss me?” I says again.

“I will always miss you. ” he says.

“It’s not me you miss, Denny Smith.”

“Whatever it is, I missed you. Let’s go in the house.”

“No,” I says, and he kissed, He leaned away, and when he came back I put my hands against him and looked at my fingernails, like red fruit growing in the hairy midst of his chest. I pushed and dug my nails in his flesh.

“Inside, we’d better go inside,” he says.

I said I wanted to swim. “You don’t,” he says. But I pushed from under him and crawled to the edge of the raft and fell in the water. I floated with my face down and my hair behind. I heard him splash, and then he came near me and pinched my leg gently under the water. I pulled up and breathed. “You’re not swimming,” he says. And I swam toward the diving board, thinking what a snake, remembering the sly, the sneaking look of him, part-way snake and partway suck-egg dog. But like I say, it gets to be love, and you can’t make yourself forget it all the time because there is no controlling the memory.

I didn’t feel like it, but when I got to the diving board I climbed up the ladder and dived again from the end of the board. He was coming from the raft when I came up. Nobody but Denny Smith Sneed would side-stroke that way, like a preacher in for a Saturday swim, maybe pondering his sermon. He swam like it was all for his health and not what he had on his mind.

We got out, and he got the towels off the chairs, and I rubbed my hair and tied it in a towel. I sat in a low-slung deck chair and leaned back against the warm canvas while he went to the house. Before he came back I saw the old Negro woman, the one that kept house for him, walking fast down the road, and I knew he had told her she could go early. He came back with the drinks and we had three, until the gnats were too bad. Then we went inside.

He always could be grand when he wanted to be. Would I like a salad? I said yes, and he went back in the kitchen. I watched the lake through the picture window for a while. The sun was setting beyond the puffy rim of saplings on the far shore. The sky held a mystery of fading stillness, and in its last light crows were flying across the upper end of the lake, where it was shallow, and swooping at last into a refuge of trees. I went back and took off my bathing suit and let water in the tub for a bath. I was through and had put my robe on when he came and said the salad was ready. “You rotten snake,”I says. He laughed. The air conditioning made it too cold in the breakfast room, and he went back and turned it down. It was always that way. When I wanted to be mean he was sweet and perfect, always doing just the right thing; and when I wanted to be sweet he was crude and made me hate him.

THE wall of the breakfast nook was glass brick, and the last of the outside light came in, making everything dusky and soft. He put candles on the table and lit them. I was barefooted. The tiles were cool to my feet. It was like being a kid again. Barefooted I walked past their old house when I was little, the house where the Sneeds lived, three stories high with a tower like a place for witches. In the tower there was a stainedglass window. I wanted to go inside the house. And sometimes when I passed it, looking at the tower, I thought of myself playing in the house and of all the far things that could be seen looking out of that high window. After I was in high school and Denny Smith began to date me I remembered the window, and one day I climbed the steps to the landing where the window was, expecting it to be high, expecting to see all over town. But the window was stuck and Denny Smith couldn’t open it, and the only way to look out was through one of the glass panes that had been broken out, about the size of your fist. But when I looked through the hole it was a disappointment because there was a tree in the way, and then I knew it would never have been possible to see all those far things I had imagined.

After I had looked out awhile he led me up the steps from the landing to the third floor, where the ballroom was. It was the part of the house they never used, and they never had a dance up there that I know of. There were benches all around the walls, and to one side there was a large storeroom where they kept broken furniture and the kind of junk you always expect to see in attics. I had never felt so alone with him before, and we took off our shoes because he said if we made too much noise somebody might come up the stairs. There was an old gray velvet couch, and when he wanted to lie down on it I ran out in the ballroom, barefooted, and Denny Smith came after me. He tried to put his arms around me, and I gave him a quick push so that his socks slid on the floor, and he fell. We stopped breathing and listened, but no one came, and I ran again and he chased me.

I says, “Why did you bring me up here?” And he, “Because you wanted to come.” And I, “Just the tower, I just wanted to see it.” The little determined grin was on his face, and he says, “Well, you saw it. Now let’s look around in the closet a little bit.”

I said no, but we went to the closet anyway, and then he said just lie down, that was all, and when I did he unscrewed the light bulb and it was pitch-dark. I made him fix it again, and he was mad and called me a silly little bitch. With that I let him have the working girl’s protection right across the mouth.

It shook him clean down to the taproots. He drew back into that dumfounded instant of astonishment which is just the length of time required for one of his breed to size up the situation all over again. But being young I took it he was whipped. A voice from the stairway interrupted his calculations, and I heard his breath suck with another little sigh of surprise. “It’s Mama,” he whispers. “Wait a minute.”

She called again, and I heard her climbing the stairs. She’d take three steps and call. He got up and ran out across the ballroom to the head of the stairs. I heard them talking, and I knew what she would think. “We’ll be right on down,” he says, and then she said something else and I heard her steps trailing away, back down the stairs.

When he came back I said he could lie down beside me just for a minute. He lay down beside me on the couch, lying still, his lip swelling, and I was sorry. He saw it right away, and right away he tried to unbutton the front of my blouse.

“Hey, what are you doing?" I says, pushing him away.

“Don’t worry, she’s gone to the market.”

“But she’ll come back.”

He gave a little laugh then, a dry little sound. “Yeah,” he says, “but, see, she can’t climb those steps anyway, not all the way up here.”

“What?” I says.

“It’s her heart. She’s afraid to try it.”

And that’s the way he figured everything, just the way he had mentioned the lake when I called on a hot afternoon, knowing how I’d come right out. It was a sure thing, and for him life was a series of them, because he always figured beforehand.

HE LOOKED across the table at me and grinned. Behind it he was thinking about Memphis, probably congratulating himself now on how well he was handling his affairs. More salad? He extended the bowl. “No thanks,” I says.

He got up and came back with the coffee and poured it.

“You got it all figured out, don’t you?” I says. He set the percolator on the glass-top table by the wall. There was a vine growing out of a brass planter on the wall above the table, and it trailed down, dark as a serpent in the candlelight, the leaves looking brown instead of green.

“What’s that?” he says.

“Life,” I says.

“For example?” he says, trying to test the wind.

“Well, you’re a big lawyer, and you have this little shack here, you wear nice clothes. After a hard day in Memphis you come back here, and you have a nice swim and a few drinks, and your girl comes out to furnish the everything else.”

He got up from the table, looking like a little prize fighter in his white bathrobe. He took his coffee and went by me toward the living room.

“I don’t know what all this is leading up to,” he says from the living room, and then I was sure he knew exactly what I meant.

I left my coffee on the table and followed him. He was hunting records out of the blond-oak cabinet under his high fidelity set.

“It must be pretty nice to live out in the country this way and order it like you get a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sent over from the drugstore.”

“You’re right.” He was still squatting, not turning his head, the records clattering like plates as he dropped them on the carpet. “It’s awful damn convenient,” he says.

“You rotten bastard,” I says. There was a lot more inside me to say, but I choked it back. I went to the window. Beyond the glass was darkness. I looked down. There was a crystal bowl on the window ledge, half filled with water. A white flower floated inside it on the surface. It turned slowly, fanned by my breath, beautiful and white, like a bride’s bouquet. They’d be out at the country club tonight, those girls I had grown up with, dancing with their husbands and the other husbands, all safe and sweltering beside the jukebox. And the records that played would be the same records that had been playing two months ago, but no one would notice. Why should they care? Back when Denny Smith Sneed started going steady with me they had their steady beaux too, but the difference was they got married and I stood by and reached for that bride’s bouquet, fighting for it at first, because when you’re eighteen you can’t know when there’s no use fighting at all. And finally, by the time I was twenty-five, when I didn’t want it, they were aiming it straight at me. I caught it for the last time one June night, and they were all married.

Denny Smith continued to court me while his hairline moved back a little and the pimples cleared away and he gained a little more weight. But it was all so slow, like trying to detect movement in the hour hand on a clock face, or trying to know the moment when the trees all turned green in April. It was a spinning sensation, like a slow entry into a whirlpool, until, when you finally realize what has you, it’s too late. It’s too late and you’re being drawn under the surface, spinning. But looking down at the flower it came clear to me now, clear as crystal, the endless depths all clear beneath me now.

I say they ought to hang signs on all males above the age of fourteen saying, “WARNING! If you sleep with this thing long enough it will become love.”

I was feeling miserable. He started the music and stretched out in a chair that tilted him back like the ones in a dentist’s office, until all he could see was the ceiling, and the music rumbled out of the record player. Denny Smith might have been dead the way he looked. I walked across the carpet, cool and thick and, like grass, comfortable under my feet. His brown hairy legs stuck out from under the robe, and his slippers had dropped to the floor.

He’d die now before he’d come up behind me like any other man and put his arms around me and ask what was the matter. Instead he digs out the saddest music he can find and tilts back in the oddest chair in the whole room, staring like a frog, straight at the ceiling, hardly blinking his eyes. And to beat it all, he’s too good for Somerton now, after all these years.

I pulled the chair down so it sat him up, and he looked in my face. There was a strangeness there I hadn’t ever seen before. It came to me that he really didn’t care, and it was like he had never known me. It was everything that had gone before suddenly washed away. It was the place you used to know when you were a kid and that later you tried to find but couldn’t. It was coming back after a long time to something you have dreamed about returning to and finding a filling station where the house had stood and a road where there had been green fields, with new people, new sights, and a strange sky.

I turned around and walked slowly back to the window. I looked out and tried hard to see the lake, but it was too dark. I was numb all over. Nothing — none of it would ever be the same. I slipped my fingers inside the bowl and lifted it up. I threw it hard against the wall, and it burst there, exploding into white petals and little pieces of glass. I turned to look where he was. He hadn’t moved. The music filled the whole room, drumming like rain against an awning.

If only he would move, I thought. If only he would do something.