a man. Perhaps if Martin had been here he would have said: 'I told you so, Elliott.
You were looking for her all the way along.' Maybe, Martin. Maybe. But how could you or anyone else have predicted this! Okay. All that was marvellous. And she had busted us out of The Club in a violent, spontaneous, and romantic fashion just as I had hoped the first night. But it was clear there could have been three reasons, just as I suggested when I tried to talk to her on the bed in the Monteleone when she fell asleep. Either she loved me. Or she was having a nervous breakdown. Or she was just really having a fling. I mean if The Club is where you lived for six years, you are really into acting out your fantasies, right? Or are you? But whatever the case, she was not going to tell me. When I had told her I loved her, her face was as vulnerable and responding as I could want it to be. But she hadn't answered. She didn't commit. She didn't explain. She either wouldn't or couldn't cop to what was going on inside. Okay. So what was I going to do? The funny part is that even stubborn and silent and thinking, I was just as charged with love for her and with the madness of the whole thing as I had been when I was talking and kissing. Nothing went sour or dim. But what was I going to do? It seemed to me, by the time we left Oak Alley and the limo rocked its way out of the drive onto the river road, that the situation was pretty much what men say they want: sex and fun without a commitment, an affair with no strings attached. And here she was the one acting like the man. And I was the one acting like the goddamned woman, wanting her to tell me where we stood. And I was pretty sure that if I pressed her, if I took her by the arms and said, 'Look, you have to tell me. We can't go one more step without your telling me where we stand,' I had a fifty-fifty chance of destroying the whole thing. A fifty-fifty chance. Because she just might tell me something so disappointing and simple that I would come totally apart. Okay.
It wasn't worth it, not as long as she was with me. Not as long as she was snuggled up against me, and I could kiss her and fuck her and love her and talk to her like this. And think silently that she just might be altering the course of my entire life. So I made up my mind to go on loving her and not say anything more. It was sort of the way I'd felt the first drunken morning when I'd said that she was going to hurt me, and that it was okay. Sort of. Except I was too excited now and too many things were occurring to me, for me to think of it in that sentimental way. My mind was getting busy. I should call the real estate agents about that house for sale in the Garden District. I had to give my dad a call and see if he was alive, or if he'd killed my mother.
I had to get another camera. What was all this? I wouldn't even ask her why we were not going back to the hotel, what we were really avoiding, what The Club was likely to do. But when we left Oak Alley and she told the driver to go into the bayou country to St. Martinsville, I knew we were definitely 'running away from home.' We stopped in one of those big, purely American roadside discount stores and we bought cosmetics and toothbrushes and the cheapest clothes you can probably find anywhere in the States. At the motel in St. Martinsville we put on khaki shorts and white T-shirts and then we went walking together, arm in arm like lovers, into damp, green depths of the quiet and endless Evangeline State Park. This was another haunted place, because there are three- and four-hundred-year-old oak trees here; leaning their great, enormous and beautiful elbows on the ground, which are true wonders of the world. The grass is velvet, and the sky comes right down through the trees like bits and pieces of polished porcelain glimmering through the clumps of leaves,