The Life Before Her Eyes (19 page)

Diana supposed this was the modern-thought part of the medieval sources, but she knew nothing about the Middle Ages and, oddly, even less about modern culture—at least not the modern culture in which Professor McFee and the other students seemed to be living, a culture full of foreign films and experimental novels and surrealist poets.

But every once in a while some piece of what was discussed reached out to her, lifted her, as if she were an injured person lying on her back ... a hand at the back of her neck, repositioning her head, which would change her perspective entirely....

"Sin?" he'd asked. "What is sin? What is evil? What does St. Augustine tell us about sin and about evil?"

No one raised a hand.

St. Augustine, she remembered from the reading, had committed one. As a boy he and another boy had stolen peaches from an orchard. They'd picked as much fruit from the trees as they could, and then they'd thrown the fruit away.

"Why did the boys steal the peaches?"

"Because they wanted the peaches?"

"No," someone answered, "they threw the peaches away."

"Exactly. They stole the peaches simply to be sinful.
That
is St. Augustine's definition of evil."

Her eyes had opened. It was as if she'd been very thirsty and been given a sip of cold water through a straw.

But most of the time in that class she felt as if she were standing between the Middle Ages and modern thought, trying to watch a movie that was being projected directly onto her face. Luckily they'd begun sleeping together before the midterm, which she never took, and by the end of the semester he'd left his wife and she'd moved into the apartment he'd rented for them at the edge of town.

Still, Diana kept her notes, what there had been of them before she'd quit trying to jot them down—a souvenir—and sometimes she'd take them off the bookshelf in her studio, where she kept them, and looked at them and wondered what it was she'd been trying to capture from Paul's lectures, in her strained, girlish writing. Some days she had even taken notes in pink ink....

"Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" he'd asked.

Each soul is a mystery only penetrable by God.

They'd crossed the street from Angel Hall to a coffee shop where candy was sold by the pound ... cappuccino, cucumber sandwiches.

Diana wasn't a coffee drinker yet, so he bought her a bag of toffee and a cup of hot chocolate. A few days later, in her dorm room, his hands had shaken as he tried to unbutton her blouse, and finally she had to do it herself. Then, Professor McFee dropped to his knees and kissed her nipples, her torso, the firm muscles of her stomach, her belly button ... he laughed at her gold ring there ... and then he unzipped her jeans and slipped them down to her knees, kissed the rose at her hip.

Diana lay back on the single bed in her dorm room, which was decorated with stuffed animals and posters of ballet dancers, and as he slid the blouse completely off her shoulders and down her arms, he asked if she was a virgin.

"Yes," Diana said, and suddenly she was.

August is the awful, smothering sister of July....

Even the air-conditioning in their mothers' apartments can't keep August out of their beds at night. It slows down their blood. They don't want to go downtown because of the hot
wet blanket of air in the streets. The stink of it. The fat hand of it across their mouths.

But they also don't want to find themselves alone in the mall again, wandering through the ridiculous echoes of it.

HOTTEST SUMMER ON RECORD,
the headlines say.

One of the girls can see the backyards of her neighbors from her mother's sliding glass patio door. There's an aqua blue pool foil of water down there. It shivers in the sunlight ... watery ribbons like brain waves being measured on the surface.

The houses below her are empty all day.

No one swims in that pool.

There are no cars in the driveways.

She can see it all from behind the sliding glass.

"We could go to the public pool," the other one suggests from her end of the phone line.

"No way. All those little kids."

"But what if we get caught?"

"We'll get yelled at."

"I guess you're right. Nobody goes to jail for swimming in the neighbor's pool."

"A
RE YOU OKAY?
" P
AUL ASKED.
"I
'VE BEEN WORRIED
sick."

"I'm fine," Diana said, touching the place at her temple where the mirror had hit her. There was nothing there. Not even a tender spot. She was fine. She would be fine. The girl she thought she'd seen him walking with, the one with her hand tucked into his back pocket, now that she was here again, face-to-face with her husband, she knew she'd been wrong.

Lately she was often mistaken about what she'd seen and what was really there.

Hormones.

Or maybe her eyes. Maybe she needed not only sunglasses but
glasses.

Maybe she should see a doctor.

Paul smiled as if he were relieved.

Then they heard the scream.

It came from the kitchen—a piercing wail—and they both ran toward it. Paul got to the screen door first, and the door slammed behind him before Diana reached it For a moment she saw everything in the kitchen through the screen ... all of it broken up into molecules, all of it made up of microscopic pieces that could have been taken apart by a physicist and exploded or rearranged.

Emma had dropped her Snow White backpack and was standing with her back to the kitchen counter. One hand was covering her mouth, and Diana could see her eyes. They were large and frightened.

"What?" Paul yelled, taking Emma by the shoulders and shaking her gently. He sounded more annoyed than concerned, Diana thought.

She hurried up behind him and pulled him away from Emma.

"Sweetheart, what's the matter?" Diana asked. She took the hand gently away from her daughter's mouth. Her lips were still blue.

Emma began to shake her head. "No," she said, and tears started in her eyes. "No, no, no."

She pointed to the water and food dishes Diana had left beside the refrigerator for the cat Both dishes were empty.

"What?" Paul snapped, also looking at the dishes.

"I saw it," Emma said. She continued to shake her head. Her blond hair whisked in brilliant strands around her face. The sun was low in the sky outside, preparing to set, and it streamed in through the kitchen window over the sink and lit up each hair on Emma's head and also illuminated the billion specks of dust that swirled around them always, usually invisible—the galaxies and universes that surrounded them all the time, the vast stretches of stars amid which they breathed and ate without noticing at all.

"It's not Timmy," Emma said. She began to sob and then sank to the floor, crossed her legs, and buried her face in her hands. She rocked back and forth, lit up from behind and surrounded by so many dry little stars, and wailed louder.

Paul got down on the kitchen floor and pulled Emma's hands away from her face, then pulled her to her feet. Emma swung an arm at him, which hit him squarely in the chest. He held more tightly to her shoulders, and then she started to kick.

"It's not Timmy!" she screamed. "Get it
out
of here. Get it
out
of here!"

"Of course it's not Timmy," Paul shouted over her screaming. "Timmy's dead. It's just another black stray."

He dropped Emma's shoulders and turned, narrowing his eyes at Diana accusingly. "Did you tell her that the cat was
Timmy?
"

"No," Diana said defensively. "Of course I didn't tell her—"

The cat sauntered into the kitchen then, looking at them calmly, unmoved by the commotion, and glanced down at its empty dishes.

Emma cringed and covered her eyes with her hands again, screaming, "Get it
out
of here."

Then, as if to taunt her, the cat padded across the kitchen floor to Emma, bowed its glossy head, and rubbed its ears against her ankle socks.

Emma opened her mouth, and this time nothing came out She sagged a little. She looked down at the animal rubbing its face on the top of her feet, at her ankles. It was purring wetly, and Diana thought Emma was calming down, that she was seeing the cat for what it was, or wasn't...

But then she sank entirely, mouth still open, blue lips parted, dropping to the kitchen floor, and such a terrible cry came from so deep inside of her that Diana had to cover her ears.

B
ESIDE HER IN THE DARK
P
AUL COULD HAVE BEEN
anyone.

She
could have been anyone.

She'd changed the sheets after dinner, so there wasn't even the familiar smell of their bodies. Instead there was the scent of fabric softener, powdered flowers. Paul turned the light back on beside the bed and said, "Diana, we have to talk."

Diana reached across his body and turned the light back off.

"Diana," he protested.

"We don't need the light on to talk," she said.

Paul sank back into his pillow. In front of her eyes Diana saw flaming cups and saucers where the lamplight had branded stuttering images of itself on her retinas as she'd blinked into it.

She closed her eyes and they appeared on her eyelids ... burning cups and saucers drifting backward into a dark garden of powdered flowers.

A hellish tea party, a tea party in hell.

"About today...," Paul started. "Did you see the girl—?"

He interrupted himself. Diana said nothing. The bedroom ■windows were open. It was a warm night, full moon. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could see the moonlight sifting into their room through the window screen. The sheer white curtains had turned to ephemeral pillars in the stillness, filled with moonlight. From her studio where she'd shut him up for the night with his food and water, Diana could hear Timmy yowling to get out It was a cat's kind of night—balmy, bright, full of shadows and whispers and the smell of catnip in the breeze.

"No," Diana said.

Paul inhaled. She couldn't tell if it was an inhalation of despair or of frustration.

"Well," he said, "I just didn't want you to think—"

"I didn't," Diana said.

Outside their bedroom window she thought she heard something like footsteps in high grass, but the grass outside the window wasn't high.

It sounded like a horse eating hay, or a scythe in the daisies. But when Diana listened more closely, she realized it was just her husband, he'd already fallen asleep—his familiar steady breath beside her.

They know as soon as they slip into it—the clean kiss of chlorine, the silence of the neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon—that it's the right thing to be doing, the only thing to be doing at this moment in their lives:

The water seems to be made of silk and brilliance. They've never felt more naked, as if they've slipped not only out of their clothes but out of their
skins.

At first the girls splash and laugh, and then they grow silent.

They float past one another slowly on their backs.

One of them dives under, and the other watches her smooth flash under the water—blue, then blindingly white.

I
T HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE
D
IANA HAD FOUND HERSELF
lying awake through the night, and it surprised her to realize that the night wasn't quiet. How, she wondered to herself, had she
ever
slept through one ... all the noises outside the house, and in it, above her, below her, on every side—
inside
her—as if the darkness were
made
of sound.

Little wings against the window screens, animal feet in the grass, the faraway sound of a train—no whistling, just locomotion and a rusty rumbling—and beyond that, the freeway, the steady sound of tires and wind over tar. Someone drove down Maiden Lane in a car with bad brakes. As it came to a stop at the end of the block, there was a terrible screeching. And beyond that, the sound of people still awake in their houses all up and down the block, and the cumulative sound of block after block of people sleeping and awake. Blow-dryers, televisions, laughter, snoring ... it rose above Briar Hill as an undulating veil of white noise, and dispersed, then fell back to earth, some of it wafting away on the breeze, and some of it slipping through the window screen into the bedroom, which had its own noises—Paul's breathing, the settling of the floor—as did Diana's body. Heartbeat. Blood. Breath. She swallowed, and even the sound of that would have been enough to wake her if she'd been asleep.

And behind all of it, Timmy...

Yowling.

Timmy, angry in the darkness, scratching at the studio door with his claws, locked up and wanting to get out.

How long had it been since she'd found herself lying awake all night?

Insomnia ... like
birds.
She had forgotten about insomnia. What else had she forgotten to add to the world as she observed it in middle age, in this strange threshold in which she found herself waiting now? Crickets?

Crickets.

The second she remembered crickets, they were back. The incredible electric hum of them in the summer night. The trilling rhythm of them filling up the whole night as if night were a terrible machine made out of a million insects, all calling to one another with their wings.

Diana sat up.

The sound of the crickets drowned out everything else, even the sound of her own breathing.

The sound of the crickets
was
the sound of everything else. How had she forgotten them, or where had they gone, where had
it
gone—the whole lifetime of summer nights filled up with the trilling of crickets? Of
insects?

Butterflies...

Surely she'd remembered butterflies. She knew she'd seen one the other afternoon. Emma had chased a black one out of the yard. Butterflies were insects—although when she was four years old Emma had insisted that butterflies were flowers.

And moths.

Diana had heard moths outside the window screens before she remembered crickets. Before she'd remembered crickets she'd remembered moths and hadn't even realized that she'd
forgotten them, the thin filaments of their bodies, the way their wings seemed made of paper and also made of flesh.