The Best American Noir of the Century

Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again — while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting — then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

She was thinking of him at the moment the phone rang. And that helped, too, by its immediacy, by its telephonic answer to her wistful wish of remembrance. Memory is a mirage that fools the heart…

“You’ll never guess what I’m holding in my hand, right while I’m talking to you…

“I picked it up only a moment ago, and just as I was standing and looking at it, the phone rang. Isn’t that the strangest thing!…

“Do you remember the day we stopped in and you bought it…

“I have a little one-room apartment on East Seventieth Street. I’m by myself now, Dorothy stayed on in Rome …”

A couple of months later, they were married …

* * *

They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

But she failed to add: If you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn’t you be unable to know what the whole thing’s about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don’t marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily…

* * *

They spent their honeymoon at a New Hampshire lakeshore resort. This lake had an Indian name which, though certainly barbaric in sound to the average English-speaker, in her special case presented such an impassable block both in speech and in mental pre-speech imagery (for some obscure reason, Freudian perhaps, or else simply an instinctive retreat from something with distressful connotations) that she gave up trying to say it and it became simply “the lake.” Then as time drew it backward, not into forgetfulness but into distance, it became “that lake.”

Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress’s wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don’t show your teeth in remorse.)

One morning when she woke up, he had already dressed and gone out of the room. They had a beautifully situated front-view of rooms which overlooked the lake itself (the bridal suite, as a matter of fact), and when she went to the window she saw him out there on the white-painted little pier which jutted out into the water on knock-kneed piles. He’d put on a turtleneck sweater instead of a coat and shirt, and that, over his spare figure, with the shoreward breeze alternately lifting and then flattening his hair, made him look younger than when he was close by. A ripple of the old attraction, of the old attachment, coursed through her and then was quickly gone. Just like the breeze out there. The little sidewalk-cafe chairs of Rome with the braided-wire backs and the piles of parcels on them, where were they now? Gone forever; they couldn’t enchant anymore.

The lake water was dark blue, pebbly-surfaced by the insistent breeze that kept sweeping it like the strokes of invisible broom-straws, and mottled with gold flecks that were like floating freckles in the nine o’clock September sunshine.

There was a little boy in bathing trunks, tanned as a caramel, sitting on the side of the pier, dangling his legs above the water. She’d noticed him about in recent days. And there was his dog, a noisy, friendly, ungainly little mite, a Scotch terrier that was under everyone’s feet all the time.