Passion and Affect (7 page)

After this was revealed to me, I wondered if I had never asked her anything because I would have hated to know. When I did ask her, it was in Alden's study, not mine. He and Hattie had gone to Maine for two weeks. I, of course, had a key, and Alden had asked me to check his mail and water the plants. Lilly obviously had a key too. When I let myself in, I heard typing from the study and thought that Alden had delayed his trip. But it was Lilly, as pale as the paper she was typing on, as bland as bread. I wondered if she had trained herself not to look up at the sound of someone at the door.

“I could have been a burglar,” I said. “You didn't even look up.”

“Looking up wouldn't make much difference to a burglar,” she said, above the clacking of the typewriter. Watching her, it seemed to me that she was either totally innocent or totally insane, or had perfected a style of evasiveness so intense it nullified her. It was horrible—but I had let it live beside me.

I spun her swivel chair around. Her eyes fixed on my mouth, as if she were a deaf mute priming to read lips.

“Lilly, listen to me. I don't know what you're after, but I want to know. You can't live like a specter, appearing at odd hours. You don't love me, you don't know anything about me and I don't know anything about you. Would you please tell me what has been going on.”

“If you don't want me to come around, just say,” she said.

“I want to know why you came around in the first place.”

“I was looking for Anwar,” she said. “And he wasn't home.”

“Anwar?”

“Your roommate. I didn't know he was your roommate. He said it was someone called Filipo.”

And then she told me that she had spent nights with Anwar while I slept down the hall, that she had gone from one bed to the other the afternoon I found her in my room.

“Does Anwar know this?” I said.

“He never asked,” Lilly said. “How would he know? You can tell him if you want.”

“Don't you care?”

“Not especially,” said Lilly.

That was the last contact I had with her. She stopped working for Alden. If I think about it, it is like a dark fairy tale in which the magic word is said and the riches disappear, except there were no riches to disappear. After that conversation, her visits stopped.

Anwar's ladies troop in and out. Alden and I work on his book and I follow my schedule. Thursdays I have dinner with Alden and Hattie. Jane Pinkham, the American girl, is coming to New York from Paris, she writes, and I am to meet her at the airport.

Sometimes a streak of terror goes past me, like a shooting star, close enough to singe my coat. I think: what did Lilly want? Was she only mute, as mute as I was? Did I misunderstand, perform a cruelty? Was she in some state of acute distress, and I unable to help her?

But then I think that spilling my vase and leaving my books where they did not belong were only a short step away from carnage and chaos, and that my waking nightmare was the logical conclusion of what she was up to.

She must still work around here, since I have seen her on the street several times. We salute each other formally, with a diminutive flick of the head.

the water rats

I
N THE BEGINNING
of the spring, geese flew in V formation. Max watched them from the bay window. He looked out over the water and saw the first of the small craft battling its way to an old mooring. On the weekends he liked to sit by the bay window and watch his part of the Sound. It soothed him, and it gave him a sense of propriety to see the latticework gazebo, firm on its slope. A family of barn swallows was building a nest in its thatched roof. The spot Max watched was ringed by dense firs where the Sound was squeezed into an inlet. The wind made the water choppy and there were white tongues on the tops of the waves.

Recently, Max had discovered that there were water rats in his part of the Sound. His four children played by the shore and reported that they had seen brown cats swimming there. Max called the Town Commission and the commission secretary suggested poison, but in the summer his babies swam face down, splashing and lapping, and Max asked if there was anything else he could do.

“I don't know what to tell you, Mr. Waltzer,” the secretary said to Max. “There's a poison that kills only rats and is safe for children and pets, if you want to use it.” But Max said he didn't want poison in his water.

That Saturday, Max consulted Eddie Crater, the local vegetable man, who was known to be an occasional hunter. Every Saturday he drove his truck up the Waltzers' driveway—Olivia Waltzer had a standing order for lettuce and tomatoes. Eddie was a large, tall man, about as tall as Max, but he didn't slump as Max often did. Max took him aside and told him about the rats and his reluctance to use poison.

“I think you'll have to shoot them,” Eddie said. “I can understand how you feel about poison.”

“I don't have anything to shoot them with,” said Max. “I haven't fired a gun in years.”

“I've got two rifles. I go after ducks sometimes during the season.”

“They make a hell of a lot of noise,” Max said. “I don't want the kids to be frightened.”

“Look,” Eddie said. “There was a bunch of wild toms in the woods behind our house, fighting with our cats and tearing them to shreds. I had to shoot them. My wife took the kids to her mother's and that was the last trouble we had with toms. You get the kids out and call me and we'll take care of things. It's probably one nest, but it might be a whole pack. Anyway, you call.”

Late one Sunday afternoon, Eddie Crater arrived with his guns. Olivia had taken the children to the city for the day and the house was flat and silent without them. Max had turned on all the lights but it was dim without his family. The air was wet and heavy as Max and Eddie walked down the slope to the water. Max looked back at his house. It was twilight and the upstairs windows were yellow with light. The water was still and the rats made soft, slapping sounds as they swam in circles.

At the first crack, Max was startled. He had forgotten what guns sounded like. It was Eddie's shot and the hit rat was knocked into the air. Then it fell abruptly into the water, trailing blood. They shot four rats in all, and the water was brown and purple with blood. Max and Eddie scooped the bodies up with crab nets and dumped them into a plastic bag. They put the bag into the trash and went into the living room to have a glass of beer.

“You keep an eye out,” Eddie said. “I don't know if we got them all. We may have frightened off the rest of them and they could come back.”

When Eddie went home, Max paced the length of his large, empty house. Alone, he felt suspended between restlessness and calm. Even when Olivia and the children were there, he thought about them constantly. He felt that they lived in his heart. At times when he was stretched on the sofa reading or gazing at the water, he felt his life was filled with a loveliness so intense he wondered how he contained it. His children spoke and laughed and shouted and sang: they were four boys with dark-blond hair, and he couldn't get over them. When he went to their rooms to kiss them goodnight, he was overwhelmed by the tiny veins in their translucent foreheads. Before he and Olivia went to bed, he stood at the thresholds of their rooms. Then he would go in and kiss them while they slept. They would be slightly damp, smelling of talcum and milk. When he went to his own bedroom, Olivia would be reading. She read the way little girls in old-fashioned novels are drawn reading: the book was open on her lap and she bent down to it.

Max was tall and pale. He walked with his shoulders slightly bent and his head a little bowed as if he were expecting to walk through a low door. He had pale-blond hair and amber-colored eyes set in a wide, mild face. His father had owned an unsuccessful glass bottle factory to which he had been devoted, and when he died Max took over the business. He liked glass: he liked the shape of the chunky green bottles coming off the line. In the fifth year of his ownership, Max had invented a shatterproof glass that was extremely thin, and it had made him rich—rich enough so that six years ago he and Olivia had bought the huge stone house for more money than Max had ever dreamed he would have. It was an old house and had been in the same family for many years. Max had it gutted and stripped, making large, graceful rooms out of the cramped, tight spaces. Huge panes of glass, Max's shatterproof glass, formed the bay windows at the back of the house. Then Max and Olivia and the boys—Hamish, Sandy, Paul, and Scottie—moved in.

Max was still in love with the house. Six years had not dulled his amazement that he owned it. He was in love with his wife and his babies. Looking at his sons, watching their bright heads move as they played, caused him to count his blessings with a sense of pain: he did not understand why all this was his, and he treasured it.

The summer went by placidly. The babies splashed and played in the Sound. Hamish and Sandy built forts around the inlet and staged Indian raids on the lawn. Scottie, the youngest, held tea parties in the gazebo for his imaginary friends. Paul began a collection of birds' eggs that he displayed on sweat socks in the potting shed. Sometimes in the mornings they played on the front lawn with the Tanner boys from down the road. When the babies went swimming that summer, Max or Olivia or both of them went along to watch for rats. After lunch, Paul and Scottie napped and Hamish and Sandy disappeared into the woods. A beautiful quiet filled the house. Olivia played the piano and Max lay on the sofa listening. She played Chopin and Soler. He would lean back against the cushions and let the music mix with the quiet. It seeped into him and he felt it was another gift.

When autumn approached, Max began patrolling for rats. They hadn't reappeared all summer, but Max waited by the water with Eddie Crater's shotgun in his arms. Often he patrolled late at night after Olivia and the babies were asleep. The first frost had come and the grass was brown and trampled. He was warm and sleepy. He was not sure what was driving him out of his bed, into his clothes, and out to the cold Sound. It wasn't restlessness, but he couldn't sleep. He was being compelled. Once he got to the water, he felt a sense of calm. It seemed to him that what he was doing was right. It was part of his life, like getting up in the morning and going to work. He remembered his first days in the house; what a happy fool he had been, splattered with plaster, paint-stained. The workmen had teased him and smiled as they went over the plans. What a halo everything had had around it. He walked several times around the inlet and then back to the house. Inside he savored its sweet smell, the way the walls gleamed as he climbed the stairs. It was worth a walk in the cold to appreciate this. The house seemed to sleep as he walked quietly to the bedroom and got into bed carefully so as not to waken Olivia.

In December, Max patrolled the water's edge three times a day: before he went to work, when he came home, and once before he went to bed. He knew Olivia was disturbed by this. When he put on his hunting jacket and boots and went to the cupboard for Eddie Crater's shotgun, she watched him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. But she said nothing and Max knew her silence was a form of trust. He thought of these patrols as brisk, fifteen-minute walks. He found that he liked the night patrol best, when nothing stirred, when the lights from the house expanded on the water, when everything was his. He liked being out when everything was asleep and the water breathed evenly. At times the silence was broken—a dog barking, something snapping in the woods, a dead limb cracking off a tree. Max waited for these punctuations. Sometimes he stood looking at the house which contained everything he loved. He stared at it as if it satisfied a hunger.

As the winter went by, Max's patrols got longer. At night he often stayed out for two hours. There was a flat stone by the water's edge and Max sat there with the gun on his knees. It was a cold, wet winter and the sky was constantly gray and swollen. Finally there was a storm and it snowed for two days. Huge drifts piled up in the front of the house and the back lawn was thick with it. The foam on the Sound froze and ice crusted the sand. Patrolling, Max kicked lumps of icy seaweed with his boot.

In February there was a brief thaw and then an ice storm. Flu broke out in the boys' school and Olivia began to talk about going to Bermuda. She took the children there every year, and Max, if he could get away, came down for a long weekend, but this year he decided that he had too much work. The night before Olivia and the babies left, Max patrolled early. Olivia was sitting on the bed waiting for him when he came in. He took off his boots and his jacket which was stiff with cold.

“I don't want to leave,” Olivia said. “I'm worried about you.”

“There isn't anything to worry about,” said Max. “I'm concerned about all this flu.”

Olivia had fine straight hair that was scopped into a coil at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were gray and very steady. She lowered her eyes and asked Max if he were having an affair.

“How can you possibly ask?” said Max. It was like an assault.

“I know you're not,” said Olivia. “But I had to ask. I've been desperate about you.”

“But nothing's changed between us.”

“Max, every morning, every night. For God's sake, it's too cold for dogs to be out, let alone rats. I don't know what's on your mind. I don't understand at all. It upsets me all the time.” She began to cry and Max held her in his arms. There was no one in his life except her, and he knew it was something she had to ask. He held her and comforted her, but there was no way for him to explain himself.

“Livvie, Eddie Crater told me I had to be on the lookout. Rats are a serious problem. I don't want them to come back this spring with the kids swimming and all.”

“I just don't understand,” Olivia said, sobbing. “I understand you all the time, but not this.”