Greg Iles - Sleep No More

Hiding his shock at the age difference, Waters shook hands with Denton and sat down to eat. Because of Mallory’s beauty, he expected her to reveal herself as the vapid creature many Ole Miss sorority girls turned out to be, but he was surprised. She did not gossip or squeal; she conversed with erudition on politics, religion, literature, and sex. Denton was clearly enamored with her, and he seemed amused by Mallory’s attempts to draw Waters out during the afternoon. When they went riding, Mallory cantered alongside Waters while Denton lectured on the lineage of his horses, and all the while Waters felt her appraising him: the way he talked, moved, handled his horse.

When they retired to the house for late-afternoon drinks, Waters’s date asked him to play the grand piano in Denton’s living room. With half a bottle of pinot noir in him, Waters agreed. He had never taken formal lessons, but his mother was a fine pianist and he had been blessed to inherit her ear. He ran through a few songs from the period-mostly Elton John and Billy Joel-singing in a voice made confident by wine, and Denton professed amazement that a third baseman could do anything requiring that much talent. Only Mallory did not compliment his playing, but when Waters glanced up from the keyboard, he saw that she had been profoundly affected by his performance.

During one song, the phone rang, and Denton took the call. Holding the phone against his chest, he told them that Mallory’s ride back to Ole Miss was leaving, and would be by to pick her up in fifteen minutes. Clearly unhappy, Denton asked Waters how he was getting back to school. Waters explained he was driving back in his drafty thirdhand Triumph convertible. Would he mind, Denton asked, driving Mallory back so that they could continue their evening? In that moment, Waters had a sense of massive stones sliding into place somewhere, and he saw a glint in Mallory Candler’s eye that he would see many times over the next two years.

No, he replied. I wouldn’t mind at all ….

Denton treated them all to dinner at a restaurant on the bluff, and then it was time to begin the five-hour journey back to Oxford. In the parking lot of the restaurant, Waters’s date climbed into the doctor’s BMW, and Mallory crammed her suitcase into the trunk of Waters’s TR-6, a symbolic switching of partners that gave Waters a chill.

They began the ride in silence, and the silence lasted forty miles. Occasionally he or Mallory would glance over the console, but their eyes did not meet. Then-at the turn for the northbound interstate-they shared a gaze during which a full conversation took place without words. With Ole Miss still four hours away, Mallory entwined her hand in his and began to talk.

She spoke first of Dr. Denton, how she had accepted his request for a date to prove that “age was no big thing” to her, and also because he was a close friend of her parents. She’d continued dating him because it was fun to shock people and because she liked watching how far Denton would go to win her approval. But he was more a businessman than a physician, she said, and she knew she could never be with “someone like that.” She asked Waters about his relationship with her Tulane sorority sister, and he was cautiously frank. He was sleeping with her, and they had agreed not to see other people. Mallory asked about his family but confided little about her own. She wondered aloud how they had lived in the same town for so long without more than a cursory acquaintance. Waters pointed out that she had attended preppy St. Stephens, while he’d graduated from public school “with the blacks.” Mallory made light of this difference, but that was easy to do when you were from the rich side of the tracks.

Soon she was asking Waters about his dreams, his thoughts on God, his sexual history. As for her own past, she professed one “serious” relationship in high school with an older boy who had known nothing beyond “basic high school football player stuff,” and another in college during which she’d done a lot of experimenting. Her relations with Dr. Denton had not progressed to intercourse; the age difference made him especially solicitous of her, and she’d taken advantage of that. By the time they hit Oxford-at 3:00 A.M.-Mallory said there was really no point in going to sleep. Better to push through till morning and do Monday classes on adrenaline.

Instead of driving to campus, Waters drove out to Sardis Reservoir, a massive, man-made lake held in check by a three-mile-long dam. At one end of the dam was a single-outlet spillway, where a juggernaut of water thirty feet thick blasted through the concrete with earth-shaking force and spent itself in a rocky channel. A narrow catwalk crossed above this spillway, where you could stand above the thundering jet and feel the spray swirl around you like gravity-defying rain as the primal roar filled first your ears and then your mind.

On this catwalk Mallory took Waters’s face in her hands and kissed him with infinitely more passion than he had known in his nineteen years. When she pulled back, he looked into her bottomless green eyes and knew that he was lost. He had a sense of being chosen-by her and also by something greater, something unknowable, the same amorphous force he had felt when Denton asked if he would drive Mallory back to Ole Miss. A sense that his destiny, whatever that might be, was gathering itself around him at last.

After the kiss, they walked hand in hand back to the car. Waters drove back to the campus, but when they reached the sorority house, Mallory simply shook her head. He needed no prompting. He drove to an empty athletic field on a hill above his dorm and parked the convertible in the predawn darkness. Mallory lay across him, and he leaned down to her uplifted face. In the timeless hour that followed, his hands never went below her waist, but the two of them left the physical domain of that car as surely as if they had lifted into the dark with wings. He sensed in Mallory a sexuality of limitless scope, like a man looking through an open door at a closed one, yet sensing that behind that door lay still another, an endless succession of doors, each concealing its own mystery, each mystery folding into another, the inmost circle unreachable, impenetrable, an essentially feminine core that he had no choice but to try to reach and understand.

Waters went through the next day in a trance, wondering if Mallory had felt what he had, whether she had seen that night as a beginning or merely an interesting Sunday diversion for a beautiful woman with nothing better to do. At four that afternoon, his telephone rang. Mallory had slept through all her classes, but she wanted to see him again. His exhaustion left him in a moment. They spent most of that night together, watching a movie, eating dinner, driving for miles, talking, and then not talking.

In the span of two weeks, they became inseparable. A wild euphoria permeated their days, yet it was shadowed by an unspoken reality. Mallory was still technically dating Dr. Denton, and Waters, the girl from Tulane. For this reason, and others, they kept to themselves much of the time, and stopped their impassioned couplings short of intercourse. But by the end of the first month, it was becoming difficult to restrain themselves. One rainy night in Waters’s dorm room, Mallory straddled him, took him in her hand, and guided him to her opening. She started to sit, moaned softly, then sobbed once and got off the bed. While he stared in confusion, she pulled on her jeans and ran from the room. Waters put on his pants and gave chase. By the time he reached the door of the dormitory, Mallory was running up the hill toward the library, her hair flying behind her in the rain. Barefoot, he sprinted after her, dodging cars to cross the road, finally coming within earshot on the library lawn. Under foot-high letters trumpeting Faulkner’s assertion that man would not merely endure but prevail, he screamed for her to stop. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were not red from tears, but filled with wild joy.