Abandon (26 page)

He trudged over to the nearest telephone, under a fast-rising escalator—could feel himself lifting up a weight again, as seemed to happen so often with her—and then, suddenly, he felt a tap on the back, and turned to see her standing there, as if she’d been waiting there for weeks. It was part of the perverse hopefulness of the place, he thought, kissing her, and smelling the shampoo in her freshly washed hair: the fact she bore no sign now of the haunted woman who’d left him less than two weeks before. The virtue of living in the moment is that old moments can be erased, in an instant; she looked at him as if she’d never heard of someone frightened by a nightmare.

They walked into the multilevel parking structure—her car, encrusted in new dirt, straddling the space next to it—and then he brushed the hair off her face, and kissed her with a new directness. She softened into him, for a moment, as if something had been released in her in his absence, the way, sometimes, one goes to sleep with a question and awakens, mysteriously, with the answer. Around them, people walked past, just released from Mexico, Armenia, Iran, and put all the hopes they’d packed into the backs of cars they’d never seen before, and drove off towards new lives.

Climbing up at last into her cockpit, he leaned over, as she put the key in the ignition, and kissed the space behind her ear, her neck. Something had come free in him, too, and he felt that if he didn’t press the moment it might never come again. Her shoulder blades, partly exposed by the black dress she wore; the top of her chest, flushed with color. Around her throat now, the silver necklace he’d brought back from Jaipur.

“You seem better somehow,” he said. “As if you’ve come to some decision.”

“You’re back,” she said, unanswerable as ever.

“You didn’t have bad dreams?”

“I don’t have to now. You’re back.”

By the time they reached Malibu, night had fallen. It was still blustery and cold, the sea squalling and throwing tantrums, and when it began to rain, fogging up the already dirty windshield, he made things worse by circling and circling, with his finger, the cool parts of her skin, where the sleeves began, taking a finger of her nondriving hand and putting its tip between his lips. He wasn’t sure who it was who had come off the plane, who it was who had met him, but there was a feeling of momentum, as if they’d been freed somehow by displacement.

“We’ve got to stop,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was referring to the vanished visibility of the road, or the suddenly visible, palpable presence by her side. She was going too fast, she might have been saying; she needed to slow down.

She pulled the car into a parking lot beside a bikers’ bar in Trancas, and the wind howled and screamed as they ran into the warmth. Inside, under colored lamps the shape of mushrooms in the Disney movies, a few tall men in ponytails were playing pool in one room, reggae drawling, drifting through the ancient system, while a handful of others—Harley jackets and baseball caps—were sitting at the bar. They sat apart from the regular customers, high chairs around a small round table, and when the drinks arrived, the new him, more decisive, put a finger in his rum and drew it slowly down her throat.

The rain was coming down so hard now that the wooden rooftop of the bar began shaking and the music was almost impossible to make out. Every time the door opened, a great gust of cold damp came in, and it felt as if the whole structure would creak and split and give out. When they had finished eating—he’d told her only about the Taj, the lights burning under the romantic cover—they went out again, through the pelting rain, and sat in the car, breath lost, as if they’d run for miles along the ocean. The windows were fogged up, and the heater gagged and protested when she pushed a button, so they knew it would not cooperate. The space in the front seat was hardly bigger than a confessional.

“You’re sweet,” she said, as if to keep him at a distance; the word put a pleasant cage around the feelings. Outside, brown bags and paper cups blew and skittered across the parking lot. Branches beat against the windows—she’d parked under a tree in the hope of staying dry—and the wind howled and whooshed as if crying to be let in.

“A long way from Jaipur,” he said, as if to acknowledge that some distances remained.

She started the car up and they drove very slowly along the nearly abandoned road, hugging the side and crawling through the short distances that were all they could see in front of them. At the great curves before Point Mugu, boulders lay strewn across the asphalt, and when a car came round the turn towards them, very fast, she swerved and almost lost control. The rain was unrelenting, and he placed a finger on her legs, her thighs, and she held it there as if to say, “Yes. But no more now.”

“Do you know where we can go?”

“Anywhere it’s dry.”

“Big Sur is too far away.”

“Your house is too full up.”

He knew what she meant, and he let her take control. When they got to Santa Barbara, she drove all the way through town, and then up, towards the mountains, as if she knew where she was taking him. The car labored and resisted as they arrived at the steep road, and the way itself was blocked with thick branches here and there, dust and debris fallen down from the slopes. He took a guess at where she was taking him, and why; there were no lights there, and they were edging through the dark.

She felt her way around the curves, tense, alert, he wide awake in his different universe (the sun above the desert in Rajasthan), and then, at last, they saw the grey mailbox by the road, the sudden private road up to the ridge.

When she stopped, he handed her his jacket and she ran, through puddles and dust and branches, to the door they always used. He came after, and within seconds they were in the dry and dark. Silence everywhere around them.

“The one time we need a flashlight . . .” he said.

“No need,” she said, and led him out into the corridor.

They fumbled upstairs, moving slowly in the dark, and then came out into the great open space of the main room. The wind shook the windows and the doors, and the storm was so intense they couldn’t see the lights below, the stars.

“It’s like a place outside the city walls.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I chose it.”

She sat down against the wall, where they’d sat before, and he sat down beside her, the jacket placed beneath them.

“I made a New Year’s resolution,” she murmured, in the dark, not choosing to light a candle as she’d done before.

“What was that?”

She leaned over and kissed him as if every reservation was forgotten. No words, no hesitations.

“You’re sure you want to?”

“This isn’t going to be ours forever.”

She lay down on the jacket, and, in the dark—the rain beating on the roof, the wind sounding like it was throwing over the world—she unbuttoned her dress, and he kissed her throat, down the sides of her, to where the last buttons eased away. A warmth spread through her body, what felt like weeping down below, and when he met her there, she let out a great cry, and then began sobbing, holding him close with her muscles and wrapping him up in her as if he were her winding cloth. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, the sound of something terrible, like fear or loneliness, discharged from her at last. “Thank you, please, yes, thank goodness.” And the cry in her throat so naked, it brought tears to his eyes, too.

They slept. For a long time, so that when he stirred—or knew that he was stirring—he could see that the blackness all around had been replaced by greyness all around. A damp and sogging nothingness, so thick he couldn’t see a tree, a house, the road below. “They’ll be coming soon.” He turned, to where she slept. “We should move.”

“It’s Sunday, remember? We can stay.”

He lay back beside her on the floor, a traveler deposited in a new place he couldn’t quite put words to yet. The old expectations, the way they’d kept themselves going forward for so long, gone now, and asking them what they’d be replaced by.

“So how was the manuscript?” she said at last, as if she saw what he was thinking, and wanted to help him free of it. “What did you find?”

“I found that people put a lot of hope on these things. Stake their lives on things they can’t understand.”

“Like you.”

“Perhaps.”

He drew a hand around her waist, slipped off the blanket she’d unearthed.

“Was it beautiful?”

“Very. Which doesn’t make it old, or authentic, or valuable. But it’s a beautiful thing to have. He seemed a kind man, the right man to have it.”

“And your own manuscripts?”

“The ones I’ve never found, you mean?”

She nodded.

“The same as ever. Incredibly potent because I don’t know what they are. They could contain the secret of the universe.”

When your mind is intent, possessed—when something below your mind is more than intent, possessed—everything you say voices the same theme: anything he said about the poems now, he was saying about her, or them, or whatever it was they’d entered.

“Will you be happy if you find a manuscript that no one’s ever seen before?”

“Probably happier thinking about it. Alex thinks it’s just a device I’ve come up with to keep myself interested.”

“And you—what do you think?”

“I think that these old men, all that time ago, were on to something. The only way we can see God, feel what it means to be beyond thought, protected, loved for what we are—”

“Is right here.”

He nodded, glad that she’d completed the dangerous thought for him.

She sat up, explored the house in the pale light—they’d never really been here in the daytime, and even though the day was all fogged over, they could for the first time see the outline of what it would be, and make out the shapes the rooms would take. For the first time, in the grey new year, the rain dripping from the eaves, puddles on the bricks outside, the few growing things nearby green, green, they could walk through the mind of the man who had designed it.

“Let’s try here,” she said, finding another room, empty, with windows on two sides, closer to the mountains (on a clear day, you could see the ocean from here).

“You think we can stay here all day?”

“Why not? It’s ours, for now. No one can find us here. It’s the space outside all space.”

She loved her games with words, ways to remake the world and give it a different meaning, ways mostly to run away from it, into another universe, where things had symmetry, made sense.

They sat now against what would one day be closets and bookshelves; not the most comfortable place for tired arms and backs, but enticing, somehow, in the thick fog, with the sense of animals— gophers or whatever else lived in these hills—beginning to prepare to come out again.

“I like it when you can’t see the horizon,” she said. “You can’t see to the end of things. It feels safe.”

“Though limited.”

“I like limited,” she said, and he fell silent.

Then, pulling him away from the dangerous topic, “Let’s play a game.”

“What kind of game?”

“The second-best place in the world.”

“Okay. If you could be anywhere in the world, right now, where would it be?”

“In Cortina,” she said. “High up. On a late-spring day. In a meadow, under the sun.”

“You’ve been there?”

“In my head. You?”

“I’d be in Isfahan. Watching the blue so strong it makes your eyes sting.”

“You’d want to go to Iran?”

He felt a sudden hardening in her limbs, as if the relief had gone away from her. “For what I study, it’s the place to be.”

“But they stone women in Iran. They kill writers who don’t say what they want them to say.”

“That’s the government, now. Persia, though, is different. It’s the home of the mystical romance.”

“You can’t mean that,” she said, and already, without moving, she seemed to be edging away. “You don’t know a thing.”

“I know about the restrictions there, I know it’s unfair to women, and to dissidents. I’m just saying that its poems—the gardens and paintings—moved me once upon a time. That’s why I chose to study it.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he went on: “I know what you’re saying. About the Revolution and its dogmatism, the way they believe what they believe with a vengeance. But when I was growing up, in school, it was just the opposite. The one thing we were taught was never to have belief. Or admit to it, at least. It was a sign of weakness, of delusion; you were allowing people to get at you. As long as you didn’t believe anything, you were safely behind the walls of the castle. Nothing could hurt you.”

She looked at him now, where they lay, and he felt the softness slowly return. Outside, the water dripped down and down, from the roof, from the tall trees, the eaves and windowsills. Her lips, even now, were soft, and her breath was sweet. They put the world behind them once again.

The day drifted on, and the clouds showed no sign of lifting. It was as if they could be there forever, outside the reach of anything. There were no clocks or divisions in the house; it held no memories or hopes. Only the walls that kept them from the world outside, the windows, the different spaces, each with its different configuration of light and silence, the small set of provisions—toothbrush, crackers, cookies, towels—she’d brought in her blue bag. Accustomed to staying in places not her own, she had the gift of making anywhere a home.