permanent and the windows are imitations of windows and the walls are imitations of walls, and the lovemaking is so real it is like a thunderstorm, whether or not it is in the spotless bed or in the spotless shower or on the deep, spotless, carpeted floor. Off and on we talked. We talked about just the worst things that had ever happened to us, school things, and parent things, and the things we thought were beautiful: paintings, sculptures, music.
But gradually our conversation started to wind away from ourselves. To cling to other subjects. Maybe she was afraid. Maybe I didn't want to say any more until she said something very particular that I wanted to hear, and I was being stubborn. I don't know. We still talked plenty, but it was about everything else. We argued Mozart versus Bach, and Tolstoy versus Dostoesvsky, whether or not photography was an art -- she said yes, I said no -- Hemingway versus Faulkner. We talked like we knew each other very well. We had a horrible fight over Diane Arbus and over Wagner. We agreed on the genius of Carson McCullers and Fellini and Antonioni and Tennessee Williams and Jean Renoir. There was a splendid tension, a magical tension. Like any moment something could happen. Very important something either good or bad. And who was going to tip the scales? Like if we started to talk about ourselves again it would have to go a step further and we could not go that step. But hour by hour, it was remarkably wonderful, remarkably good, remarkably just plain all right. Except when the Warriors lost to the Celtics in a really crucial play-off game, and we were out of beer and room service was taking forever and I was really, really pissed off, she looked up from her copy of the newspaper and said she had never heard a man shout like that over a ball game, and I told her that this was symbolic violence in all its glory and please shut up. 'A little too symbolic, don't you think?' She locked me out of the bathroom and took the longest shower in history. Just to have the final say, I passed out. In the middle of the third night I woke up and I realized I was alone in the bed. She had pulled the drapes and she was standing at the window looking out at the great steel wilderness of Dallas in which the lights never go out. The sky was enormous above her, a deep midnight blue with a panorama of tiny stars. And she looked tiny against the window with her head bowed, and it seemed she was singing something to herself under her breath. Too faint to be sure of.
Like the scent of her Chanel. When I got up, she turned silently and came to meet me in the middle of the room. We put our arms around each other and just held each other. 'Elliott,' she said like she was working up to tell me some dreadful secret but she just laid her head on my shoulder, and I held on to her stroking her hair. Under the covers again, she was shuddering and yielding like a half-frightened young girl. When I woke up later, she was sitting in the far corner away from the bed, with the silent TV turned towards her, so the light wouldn't bother me, I guess, just watching it, the blue light flickering on her face, and she was drinking Bombay gin straight with the bottle next to her and smoking my Parliament cigarettes. The driver said next afternoon that he had to get home. He liked the money and all the travelling and the food was terrific, but his brother was getting married at Redemptorist Church in new Orleans and he had to get back. But we knew we could have let him take the limo back and just rented a car. That wasn't why we were going back. She fell utterly silent at dinner and she looked tragic, which is to say that she looked beautifully, exquisitely, heartrendingly, frighteningly, and wrenchingly sad. And I said, 'We're going back, aren't we?' And she nodded her head. Her hand was shaking. We found a little bar on Cedar Springs where there was a jukebox and we could dance all by ourselves. But she was too tense, too unhappy. We went back before ten o'clock.