All the King's Men (49 page)

But back then there was always the afternoon. In the afternoon we always went swimming, or sailing and then swimming afterward, all three of us, and sometimes some of the other boys and girls whose folks live down the Row from the Landing or who were visiting there. Then after dinner we would get together again and sit in the shadow on their gallery or mine, or go to a movie, or take a moonlight swim. But one night when I went down, Adam wasn’t there–he had had to drive his father somewhere–and so I asked Anne to go down to the Landing to a movie. On the way back, we stopped the car–I had the roadster, for my mother had gone off somewhere with a gang in her big one–and looked at the moonlight on the bay beyond Hardin Point. The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean the way fire is a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the bright horizon blur.

We sat there in the car, arguing about the movie we had just seen and looking up the swath of light. Then the talking dies away. She had slid down a little in the seat, with her head lying on the top of the back cushion so that now she wasn’t looking out toward the horizon but up into the sky–for the top of the roadster was down–with the moonlight pouring down on her face to make it look smooth as marble. I slid down a little, too, and looked up at the sky, and the moonlight poured down over my face, such as it was. I kept thinking that now in a minute I would reached over and take hold. I stole a look sidewise and saw how her face was smooth as marble in the moonlight. And how her hands lay supine on her lap, the fingers curling a little as though to receive a gift. It would be perfectly easy to reach over and take her hand and get started and se where we wound up. For I was thinking in language like that, the stale impersonal language of the College Boy who thinks he’s such a God-damned big man.

But I didn’t reach over. It seemed a thousand miles across that little patch of leather to where she lay with her head back and her hands in her lap and the moonlight over her face. I didn’t know why I didn’t reach over. I kept assuring myself that I wasn’t timid, wasn’t afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore. Hell, I told myself, she wouldn’t get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn’t sit in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry. I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. “Anne,” I said, “Anne–” and didn’t know what I was going to say.

She turned her face toward me, not lifting her head from the back of the seat, just rolling it on the leather cushion. She lifted a finger to her lip, and said, “Sh, sh!” Then she took the finger away, and smiled directly and simply across the thousand miles of leather cushion between us.

I sank back. We lay there for quite a time, with that space between us, looking up at the moon-drenched sky and hearing the faintest whisper as the water lipped the shingle along the point. The longer we lay there, the bigger the sky seemed. After a long while I stole another sidewise look at Anne. Her eyes were closed, and when I thought that she wasn’t looking up into that expanding sky, too, I suddenly felt alone and abandoned. But she opened her eyes–I was spying and saw that happen–and again was looking up into the sky. I lay there and looked up and didn’t think of anything in the world.

Back then there was a train that passed the crossing just out of Burden’s landing at eleven-forty-five at night. The train always blew for the crossing. It blew that night, and I knew it was eleven-forty-five. And time to go. So I sat up, touched the starter, turned the car around, and headed home. We hadn’t said a word and we didn’t say a word, until we pulled up in front of the Stanton house. Then Anne slipped out of the car, quick as a wink, poised there a moment on the shell drive, said, “Good night, Jack,” in a low voice and with a last flicker of the smile she had smiled at me across the thousand miles of leather cushion two hours back, and ran up the steps of her house, light as a bird. All of this before I had a chance to begin to collect myself.

I gaped at the blackness of the doorway back in the shadow of the gallery–she hadn’t turned on a light when she entered–and listen hard as though I were waiting for a signal. But there wasn’t a sound except that nameless stir of the night which comes even when there isn’t a breath of wind and you are too far from the beach to get the whisper and riffle that is always there, even when the sea is quietest.

Then, after a few minutes, I switched on the motor again, and exploded off the Stanton property with a grind of tires that must have scattered the shells of the drive like spray. On the road down the Row I just pushed the accelerator to the floor board and let all those drowsy bastards up in those white houses have the works. I was letting that cutout snatch them bolt upright in bed like a cannon. I roared on out about ten miles till I hit the pine woods where there wasn’t anybody to snatch up except hoot owls and some stray malarial squatter who would be lying off yonder as God’s gift to the anopheles in his shack on the edge of the tidelands. So I turned the roadster around and eased on back with the throttle cut down to nothing, just drifting along in the roadster, lying back on the leather, like a boat drifting on a slow current.

At home, as soon as I lay back on my bed, I suddenly remembered–I didn’t remember, I saw–Anne’s face lying back, with the eyes closed and the moonlight pouring over it, and I remembered that day of the picnic long back–the day when we had swum out in the bay, under the storm clouds, when she had floated on the water, her face turned up to the purple-green darkening sky, her eyes closed, and the white gull passing over, very high. I hadn’t thought of that since it happened, I guess, or if had thought of it, it hadn’t meant a thing, but all at once, lying there, I had the feeling of being on the teetering verge of a most tremendous discovery. I saw that the moment tonight was just an extension of the moment long back, on the picnic, that this moment tonight had been in that moment all the time, and I hadn’t known it, I had dropped it aside or thrown it away, but it had been like a seed you throw away to find, when you come back that way again, that the plant is tall and covered with bloom, or it had been like a little dirt-colored stick you throw into the fire with the other trash, but the thing is dynamite and there is an awful bang.

There was an awful bang. I popped up in bed like those drowsy bastards when I gave them the cutout. But this was more so. I sat up in bed and was absolutely filled with rapture. It wasn’t like anything that had ever happened to me. It stopped my breath and I could feel my veins swelling to burst as when you take your deepest dive and think you’ll never come up. I felt that I was right on the verge of knowing the real and absolute truth about everything. Just one instant and I would know it. Then I got my breath. “Jesus,” I said out loud, “Jesus!” I stretched my arms out as wide as I could, as though I could grab the whole empty air Then I thought of the image of the face on the water, under the purple-green darkening sky, with the white gull flying over. It was almost a shock to remember that, to have the image come back, for the thing which had, apparently, provoked the rapture had itself been lost and forgotten in the rapture which had exploded out into the whole universe. Anyway, now I saw the image again, and all at once the rapture was gone, and I experienced a great tenderness, a tenderness shot through and veined with sadness, as thou the tenderness were the very flesh of my body and the sadness the veins and nerves of it. That sounds absurd, but that was the way it was. And for a fact.

Then I thought, quite objectively as though I were observing the symptoms of a total stranger:
You are in love
_.

I was, for a moment, bemused by that thought. That I was in love. And that it wasn’t a bit like the way I had thought it would be. I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars, all lying up there in the bank for him to draw on, or who learns that the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but the enemy. I got out of bed, very carefully, handling myself with awestruck care as though I were a basket of eggs, and went to the window and stared out into the moon-drenched night.

So the College Boy, who had thought he was such a God-damned big man and knew everything and who had, that evening, looked across the little space of leather cushion and had thought the stale impersonal thoughts almost as a kind of duty to the definition of what he considered himself to be–so he hadn’t reached out his hand across that little space and now as a result of that fact stood buck-naked in a shadowy room before an open window and stared out into enormous moon-soaked, sea-glittering night while off yonder in the myrtle hedge a mocking bird hysterically commented on the total beauty and justice of the universe.

That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn’t need word or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, “Sh, sh,” and smile. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever. Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn’t really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was.

Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the distillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn’t be anything at all. There would be Adam with us often, and sometimes the other people, with books, sandwiches, and a blanket in the pine woods, on the beach, at the tennis courts, on the shadowy gallery with a phonograph going, in the boat, at the movies. But sometimes she would let her book slide down to the blanket and lie back staring up into the high arch and tangle of the pine boughs, and I would begin to spy on her until, in a minute, it would be as though Adam weren’t there. Or on the gallery she would be laughing and jabbering with all the others while the phonograph worked away, and then I would catch sight of her suddenly still and pensive, just for a moment it might be, with her eyes fixed off beyond the gallery and the yard, and again, just for that moment, it would be as though Adam and the others weren’t there.

Or we would go down to the hotel, where there was a high-dive tower, a good high one because the hotel was pretty swank and had exhibitions and races there now and then. Anne was crazy about diving that summer. She would go up high–she worked up higher and higher, day by day–and stand up there in the sunlight poised there at the very verge. Then when she lifted her arms, I would feel that something was about to snap in me. Then down she would fly, a beautiful swan dive, with her arms wide to emphasize her trim breasts, and her narrow back arched and her long legs close and sweet together. She would come flying down in the sunlight, and as I watched her it would be as though nobody else were there. I would hold my breath till whatever was going to snap inside me snapped. Then she would knife into the water, and he twin heels would draw through the wreath of ripple and the flicker of spray, and be gone. Adam sometimes got sore as hell at her for going up so high. “Oh, Adam,” she’d say, “oh, Adam, it’ll all right, and it’s wonderful!” And up the ladder she’d go. Up and plunge. Up and plunge. Up and plunge. Over and over again. I used to wonder what her face was like just at the moment when she entered the water. What expression was on it.

But sometimes in the day we would be quite literally alone. Sometimes she and I would slip off and go to the pine woods and walk on the soundless matting of needles, holding hands. And then there was a little diving float, with just a single low board, anchored about a hundred yards off the beach, near Stanton slip. Sometimes we would swim out there when other people were pranking on the beach, or when nobody was there, and lie flat on our backs on the float, with our eyes closed, and just the fingertips touching and tingling as though they were peeled skinless with the nerves laid bare, so that every bit of my being was focused there.

At night we were alone pretty often. It had always been Adam and I, with Anne tagging along, and then, all at once, it was Anne and I, and Adam tagging along or, more likely, back up at his house reading Gibbon or Tacitus, for he was great on Rome back then. The change came more easily that I had expected. The day after that night in the roadster I played tennis with them in the morning as usual, and in the afternoon went swimming with them. I found myself watching Anne all the time, but that was the only difference. I couldn’t see any change in her. I began to doubt that anything had happened, that I had even taken her to the movie the night before. But I had to see her that night.

I went up to their house just about dusk. She was on the gallery, in the swing. Adam, it turned out, was upstairs writing a letter he had to get off. He would be down in a few minutes, she said. It was something for their father. I didn’t sit down, though she asked me. I stood at the top of the steps, very uneasy, just inside the screen door, trying to think up what I would say. Then I blurted out, “Let’s go out on the slip, let’s walk.” And added lamely, “Till Adam comes down.”

Without a word, she got up, came to me, gave me her hand–that was her own doing and the fact set blaring and bonging all the fire bells and calliopes and burglar alarms in my system–and walked down the steps with me, down the path, across the road, and toward the slip. We stayed out on the slip a long time. Adam could have written a dozen letters in that time. But nothing happened out on the lip, except that we sat on the end, our feet dangling over, and held hands, and looked over the bay.