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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 A
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 A
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 ca
At home, as soon as I lay back on my bed, I suddenly remembered–I didn't remember, I saw–A
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 awe-struck 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 A
A