the dictionary though. It’s an old book, a textbook it looks like, dog-eared and inky. Before showing it to me he thumbs through it, contemplative, reminiscent; then, “Here,” he says, laying it open on the desk in front of me.
What I see first is a picture: the Venus de Milo, in a black-and-white photo, with a moustache and a black brassiere and armpit hair drawn clumsily on her. On the opposite page is the Coliseum in Rome, labelled in English, and below a conjugation: sum es est, sumus estis sunt. “There,” he says, pointing, and in the margin I see it, written in the same ink as the hair on the Venus. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
“It’s sort of hard to explain why it’s funny unless you know Latin,” he says. “We used to write all kinds of things like that. I don’t know where we got them, from older boys perhaps.” Forgetful of me and of himself, he’s turning the pages. “Look at this,” he says. The picture is called The Sabine Women, and in the margin is scrawled: pim pis pit, pimus pistis pants. “There was another one,” he says. “Cim, cis, cit …” He stops, returning to the present, embarrassed. Again he smiles; this time you could call it a grin. I imagine freckles on him, a cowlick. Right now I almost like him.
“But what did it mean?” I say.
“Which?” he says. “Oh. It meant, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ I guess we thought we were pretty smart, back then.”
I force a smile, but it’s all before me now. I can see why she wrote that, on the wall of the cupboard, but I also see that she must have learned it, here, in this room. Where else? She was never a schoolboy. With him, during some previous period of boyhood reminiscence, of confidences exchanged. I have not been the first then. To enter his silence, play children’s word games with him.
“What happened to her?” I say.
He hardly misses a beat. “Did you know her somehow?”
“Somehow,” I say.
“She hanged herself,” he says; thoughtfully, not sadly. “That’s why we had the light fixture removed. In your room.” He pauses. “Serena found out,” he says, as if this explains it. And it does.
If your dog dies, get another.
“What with?” I say.
He doesn’t want to give me any ideas. “Does it matter?” he says. Torn bedsheet, I figure. I’ve considered the possibilities.
“I suppose it was Cora who found her,” I say. That’s why she screamed.
“Yes,” he says. “Poor girl.” He means Cora.
“Maybe I shouldn’t come here any more,” I say.
“I thought you were enjoying it,” he says lightly, watching me, however, with intent bright eyes. If I didn’t know better I would think it was fear. “I wish you would.”
“You want my life to be bearable to me,” I say. It comes out not as a question but as a flat statement; flat and without dimension. If my life is bearable, maybe what they’re doing is all right after all.
“Yes,” he says. “I do. I would prefer it.”
“Well then,” I say. Things have changed. I have something on him, now. What I have on him is the possibility of my own death. What I have on him is his guilt. At last.
“What would you like?” he says, still with that lightness, as if it’s a money transaction merely, and a minor one at that: candy, cigarettes.
“Besides hand lotion, you mean,” I say.
“Besides hand lotion,” he agrees.
“I would like …” I say. “I would like to know.” It sounds indecisive, stupid even, I say it without thinking.
“Know what?” he says.
“Whatever there is to know,” I say; but that’s too flippant. “What’s going on.”
XI
NIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloudcover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket. I wish I could see in the dark, better than I do.
Night has fallen, then. I feel it pressing down on me like a stone. No breeze. I sit by the partly open window, curtains tucked back because there’s no one out there, no need for modesty, in my nightgown, long-sleeved even in summer, to keep