it was, but when she saw me she stopped. She had on a different dress this time, of another color at least, but an identical shapeless sack of cheap cotton too large for her, and she was still barefoot.
“Doris,” I said. “I—” The words quit on me and I stood there foolishly with the clumsy box in my arms. She said nothing at all. Still standing unmoving in the center of the room with her arms down at her sides, she stared at me with the fixed intensity of someone in a trance.
“I brought you another vine, Doris,” I said idiotically, not knowing what to do with it now that it was here. “You see, it’s very green and fresh. I think it’ll live.” When she still made no move, I shifted it awkwardly to my hands and set it on the dresser.
She spoke then, though her voice was still little more than a whisper. “Why?”
“Well, I—I mean, the other one was dying.”
“No,” she said in the same strained and tightened voice. “Why did you come back?”
I stepped toward her and still she did not move. She watched me with that tortured intensity of the eyes, like someone suffering pain or grief and trying not to show it. The dark hair, uncombed but still lovely in its disarray, framed and intensified the paleness of her cheek, and her face, tipped slightly up to look at me, was blank, tightly held, as devoid of emotion as the hot, choking, and explosive silence about us in the room was devoid of sound.
“I came back,” I said quietly, “because I had to. It wasn’t because I didn’t try. There wasn’t any way I could stay away from you. You don’t have to tell me what I’m doing, I know what I’m doing.”
I reached out and took her by the arms and then began to go wild. I had my arms around her and was kissing her. She held onto me like someone drowning, and I could feel the trembling of her arms about my neck.
Her face was against my shoulder and her voice was muffled, but through the wildness of it I could hear her say, “Not here. Please, not here,” the voice breaking as if she were crying.
Eight
We lay on old leaves in mottled shade, very close together, touching but not talking, the lake a sheet of stainless steel seen here and there through openings in the trees and time arrested and held motionless across the dead center of noon. Her head was on my arm, her face turned toward mine with her eyes closed, and I brought up a hand and ran it spread-fingered through the dark disorder of her hair.
There had been little talk between us, no need for talk, or thought of it. There were still the thousand things about her I wanted to know, but they seemed far away, things I could ask her later, after we had been pulled out of the spent and languid backwater and caught up again in the running current of time. Lying there, I thought about it and tried to remember if it had been real or only a dream, that fantastic and unbelievable thing of two people supposedly or at least otherwise sane, walking without a word or a sign, wooden-faced, not even holding hands or whispering, straight out of the house and across the clearing in silence and while sunlight without any cajoling or pleading on the one part or that age-old simulation of reluctance on the other, without any necessity for communication, as if the whole thing had been planned and discussed for months and rehearsed like a big wedding. And when we had reached this place she had stopped and turned. That was all.
I thought of a fire burning for a long time inside a house with all the doors and windows closed, consuming the interior but still contained, until at last the roof caved in and it burst out with uncontrollable fury. Why? Was it just the loneliness?
There had been no reproach afterward, no silent accusation in the eyes or any mention of my coming back after she had told me to stay away. She had cried once, but only for a minute, with her face muffled against my arm, and then it had gone away, unmentioned and unexplained.
She opened her eyes. They were very near, and looked enormous and deeply blue and quiet while she studied me as if she had never seen me before. Reaching