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But maybe, I decided later, much later, years later when it didn't seem that it would ever matter again, she had gone up because she had to be alone, to sit by the window in the unlighted room, looking out on the night, or lying on the bed watching the dark ceiling, to accustom herself to her new self, to see if she could breathe the new air, or sustain herself in the new element or dive and lounge in the new tide of feeling. Maybe she went up there to be alone, absorbed in herself the way a child is absorbed in watching a cocoon gradually part in the dusk to divulge the beautiful moth–the Luna moth again, with its delicate green and silver damp and crumpled but gradually spreading in the dusk, defining itself, slowly fa
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But in any case, in her loving she was also re-creating herself, and she had gone upstairs to be in the dark and try to learn what that new self was. While downstairs Adam and I sat in the swing on the gallery, not saying a word. That was the evening Adam got counted out for all the other evenings, and out you go, you dirty dishrag, you.
Everybody else got counted out, too, for even on those evenings when a crowd would get together on the Stanton gallery, or my mother's, to play a phonograph and dance (with some of the boys–some of them veterans back from France–slipping off to take a drink from a bottle hidden out there in the crotch of a live oak), A
Or we would get into the roadster and drive out of the Landing and pull the cutout and tear along, hell-for-leather, or as much hell-for-leather as was possible on the road and with the mechanism of those days, out beyond the houses between the pines and the tidelands, with her head leaned against my shoulder and her hair puffed with the wind and tendrils whipping against my cheek. She would lean there and laugh out and say, "Oh, Jackie, Jackie, it's a wonderful night, it's a wonderful night, it's a wonderful night, say it's a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!" Till I have to say it after her, like a lesson I was learning. Or she would hum or sing a song, one of those off the phonograph–God, what were they then? I don't remember. And maybe let the humming die off, and be perfectly still, with her eyes closed, until I stopped the car at some place where the breeze off the Gulf was enough to blow the mosquitoes away (On nights when there wasn't any breeze, you simply didn't do any stopping.) Sometimes then, when I stopped the car she wouldn't even open her eyes till I had leaned over to kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath. Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, "Boo!" and laugh.. Then she'd be all knees and sharp elbows and little short laughs and giggles and serpentine evasions and strategy worthy of a jujitsu expert when I tried to capture her for a kiss. It was remarkable then how that little seat of the roadster gave as much room for deployment and maneuver as the classic plains of Flanders and how a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that appalling number of cu
You never could tell whether it was going to be the long kiss or the furious swirl of elbows and giggles. And it didn't matter much, for it always came to the same thing in the end, for she would lean back with her head on my shoulder and look up at the sky. Between kisses we might not talk at all, or I might quote her poetry–for in those days I used to read some of it and thought I liked it–or we would talk about what we would do after we were married. I had never proposed to her. We simply assumed that we were going to be married and be together always in a world composed of sunlit beaches and moonlit pines by the sea and trips to Europe (where neither of us had ever been) and a house in an oak grove and the leather cushions of a roadster and somewhere a handful of delightful children who remained very vague in my imagination though very vivid in hers, and whose names, in moments when other topics of conversation failed, we would decide on with great debate and solemnity. All of them would have to have Stanton for a middle name. And one of the boys would be named Joel Stanton for the Governor. Of course, the oldest would be named Jack, for me. "Because you are the oldest thing in the world, Jackie-Boy," A