Dusk and Other Stories

“Do you have any wine?” Nile said. While she was gone, he continued in a louder voice, “He’s afraid of me. He’s afraid of me because I’ve accomplished nothing.”

He looked up. Plaster was flaking from the ceiling.

“You know what Cocteau said,” he called. “There’s a fame worse than failure. I asked him if he thought he really deserved it all.”

“And what did he say?”

“I don’t remember. What’s this?” He took the bottle of sea-colored glass she carried. The label was slightly stained. “A Pauillac. I don’t remember this. Did I buy it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He smelled it. “Very good. Someone gave it to you,” he suggested.

She filled his glass.

“Do you want to go to a film?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

He looked at the wine.

“No?” he said.

She was silent. After a moment she said, “I can’t.”

He began to inspect titles in the bookcase near him, many he had never read.

“How’s your mother?” he asked. “I like your mother.” He opened one of the books. “Do you write to her?”

“Sometimes.”

“You know, Viking is interested in me,” he said abruptly. “They’re interested in my stories. They want me to expand Lovenights.”

“I’ve always liked that story,” she said.

“I’m already working. I’m getting up very early. They want me to have a photograph made.”

“Who did you see at Viking?”

“I forget his name. He’s, uh… dark hair, he’s about my size. I should know his name. Well, what’s the difference?”

She went into the bedroom to change her clothes. He started to follow her.

“Don’t,” she said.

He sat down again. He could hear occasional, ordinary sounds, drawers opening and being shut, periods of silence. It was as if she were packing.

“Where are you going?” he called, looking at the floor.

She was brushing her hair. He could hear the swift, rhythmic strokes. She was facing herself in the mirror, not even aware of him. He was like a letter lying on the table, the half-read Gogol, like the wine. When she emerged, he could not look at her. He sat slouched, like a passionate child.

“Jeanine,” he said, “I know I’ve disappointed you. But it’s true about Viking.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be very busy…. Do you have to go just now?”

“I’m a bit late.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “Please.”

She could not answer.

“Anyway, I have to go home and work,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back by eleven,” she said. “Why don’t you call me?”

She tried to touch his hair.

“There’s more wine,” she said. She no longer believed in him. In things he might say, yes, but not in him. She had lost her faith.

“Jeanine…”

“Good-bye, Nile,” she said. It was the way she ended telephone calls.

She was going to the nineties, to di

When the door closed, panic seized him. He was suddenly desperate. His thoughts seemed to fly away, to scatter like birds. It was a deathlike hour. On television, the journalists were answering complex questions. The streets were still. He began to go through her things. First the closets. The drawers. He found her letters. He sat down to read them, letters from her brother, her lawyer, people he did not know. He began pulling forth everything, shirts, underclothes, long clinging weeds which were stockings. He kicked her shoes away, spilled open boxes. He broke her necklaces, pieces rained to the floor. The wildness, the release of a murderer filled him. As she sat there in the nineties, sometimes speaking a little, the men nearby uncertain, seeking to hold her glance, he whipped her like a yelping dog from room to room, pushing her into walls, tearing her clothes. She was stumbling, crying, he felt the horror of his acts. He had no right to them—why did this justify everything?

He was bathed in sweat, breathless, afraid to stay. He closed the door softly. There were old newspapers piled in the hall, the faint sounds from other apartments, children returning from errands to the store.

In the street he saw on every side, in darkening windows, in reflections, as if suddenly it were visible to him, a kind of chaos. It welcomed, it acclaimed him. The huge tires of buses roared past. It was the last hour of light. He felt the solitude of crime. He stopped, like an addict, in a phone booth. His legs were weak. No, beneath the weakness was something else. For a moment he saw unknown depths to himself, he glittered with images. It seemed he was attracting the glances of women who passed. They recognize me, he thought, they smell me in the dark like mares. He smiled at them with the cracked lips of an incorrigible. He cared nothing for them, only for the power to disturb. He was bending their love toward him, a stupid love, a love without which he could not breathe.

It was late when he arrived home. He closed the door. Darkness. He turned on the light. He had no sense of belonging there. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. There was a skylight over his head, the panes were black. He sat beneath the small, nude photograph of a girl he had once lived with, the edges were curled, and began to play, the G was sticking, the piano was out of tune. In Bach there was not only order and coherence but more, a code, a repetition which everything depended on. After a while he felt a pounding beneath his feet, the broom of the idiot on the floor below. He continued to play. The pounding grew louder. If he had a car… Suddenly the idea broke over him as if it were the one thing he had been trying to think of: a car. He would be speeding from the city to find himself at dawn on long, country roads. Vermont, no, further, Newfoundland, where the coast was still deserted. That was it, a car, he saw it plainly. He saw it parked in the gentle light of daybreak, its body stained from the journey, a faintly battered body that had survived some terrible, early crash.

All is chance or nothing is chance. That evening Jeanine met a man who longed, he said, to perform an act of great and unending generosity, like Genet’s in giving his house to a former lover.

“Did he do that?” she asked.

“They say.”

It was P. The room was filled with people, and he was speaking to her, quite naturally, as if they had met before. She did not wonder what to say to him, she did not have to say anything. He was quite near. The fine wrinkles in his brow were visible, wrinkles not yet deepened.

“Generosity purifies,” he said. He was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

His face was dark, his features deep. He was part of another, a mysterious race. She was aware of how different her own face was with its wide mouth, its gray eyes, slow, curious, clear as a stream. She was aware also that the dress she wore, the depth of the chairs, the dimensions of this room afloat now in evening, all of these were part of an immersion into the flow of a great life. Her heart was beating slowly but hard. She had never felt so sure of herself, so bewildered by the ease with which it all was opening.

“I’m suspicious and grasping,” he said. He was begi

She asked no questions. She recognized him. In her own apartment the lights were burning. The air of the city, bitter as acid, was absolutely still. She did not breathe it. She was breathing another air. She had not smiled once as yet. He later told her that this was the most powerful thing of all that had attracted him. Her breasts, he said, were like those of black tribal girls in the National Geographic.