In the night room Page 0,117
don’t you? You want to talk to her.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said, “but I have to go there, at least. I have to see her house, get some idea of how she lives.”
“Why don’t you call her? It’s not that late.”
“I can’t call her.” If I called Lily Kalendar, and she answered the phone, I thought, the sound of her voice would reduce me to a heap of smoking ashes. This was not something I could say to Willy. “I guess I’m too shy.”
The untruth disturbed her, and she held the novel in her hands and seemed to look at the blank screen of the television. “Do you know where that street is?”
“I can find out,” I said.
“Were you going to invite me along? I don’t know if I’d be willing to come, though.”
“Will you drive over there with me, Willy?” I asked.
Gently, almost reluctantly, she slid the Muriel Spark novel onto the desk and, without raising her eyes to my face, moved slowly toward me. An inch away, she turned sideways and stepped into me like an uneasy cat in search of comfort, brushing her shoulder against my chest and leaning her head sideways on the base of my neck. I could feel the candy bars in her pocket.
“I don’t want to be here alone,” she said. “But I want you to know, I don’t like any part of this, either.” She turned to face me and looked up, right into my eyes. “Why would you want to talk to her? You’re not going to write a book about her, that was just a story, a pretext. Do you think you can help her? You can’t, you can’t help Lily Kalendar. She doesn’t want your help. She doesn’t even want to see you, really, she just agreed so you’d leave her alone afterward.”
“I might write that book,” I said, knowing I was fudging the truth again. “I don’t know what I’ll do until I get there.”
Meeker Road turned out to be a short cul-de-sac tucked behind the Darnton Woods golf club on the city’s North Side. To get there, we got on the expressway that leads into Milwaukee and stayed on it, hurtling along in a cluster of other vehicles like a wolf in a wolf pack, headlights stabbing and shining out, for about twenty minutes. In the face of Willy’s silence, I turned on the radio and found the local jazz station. The sound of a very familiar alto saxophone playing “Like Someone in Love” in Copenhagen in the year 1958 soared from the speakers, filled with the hand-in-hand mixture of joy and sadness, happiness and grief, that great jazz music conveys.
“We love Paul Desmond, don’t we?” Willy said, and for a few bars sang along with the solo.
I turned off at Exit 17, and tried to remember the directions from the expressway. There are no streetlamps in that part of town, and dense clouds blanketed the night sky. More or less aimlessly, I swung the car past big houses set far back on perfect lawns. Eventually, I saw the sign for Darnton Woods and kept moving along beside the course on Midgette Road until I reached the extensive stand of oaks and poplars that marked the boundary at its back end. The road wandered farther north, and I thought I had somehow missed my turnoff in the darkness. I told Willy we were going to have to turn around, and she told me that it was too soon to give up. “Distances always seem longer in the dark,” she said.
Five minutes later, I saw an old street sign half-submerged by a gigantic azalea bush and knew I’d found Meeker Road. An extraordinary tumult, caused by the most divided feelings I had ever experienced, erupted in the center of my body. I wanted to turn in, I needed to see where Lily Kalendar lived, and I wanted with equal force to keep on driving until I got back to the Pforzheimer, where I could make love to Willy Patrick. She peeked at me out of the side of one eye, and when at the last I turned in to Meeker Road, she braced herself by sitting up straighter in her seat and staring a bit glumly at the windshield.
On Meeker Road, thick trees half-concealed the spacious houses that had grown up at wide intervals between them. Windows glowed yellow. TV sets, some of them wall-mounted plasma screens, glowed and flickered in empty-looking rooms. The basketball