Peter Beagle - A Fine and Private Place

"Wonderful," the girl said. "We'll have to do it again."

When they were gone, Michael sighed and said, "Hooked. What an all-purpose weapon the carrot of sex is, in good hands. Poor bugger."

"I think she loves him," Laura said. "She never once took her eyes off him."

"Of course not. When a cat's stalking a nice, fat bird, it isn't interested in the scenery. She knows all about eyes. 'Harry, look at me. Look at me.' Hypnotism combined with mild asphyxiation. When she dragged him down into her breast, he was still fighting. When he came up out of it, he was gone. Beaten. Sure, she loves him. But they've got two different ideas of love. He wants to dance with her on a terrace with a full moon and a thirty-six-piece orchestra; he wants to go singing through storms with her, like Gene Kelly. She knows about thirty-six piece orchestras. You have to feed them, and then there's nothing left for the children."

People were going to work in the city. Almost at the same time, they spilled out of their houses and into the empty streets, getting into cars, waiting for buses, going down into subways, marching along the gray sidewalks. In time the streets, empty a minute ago, full now, would be empty again, as the blotter of the city absorbed the men. And in time it would give some of them, most of them, back, providing that it were wrung enough and squeezed enough and torn enough between now and then.

"I sat like that with a man once," Laura said.

When Michael did not answer, she went on, "I put my arms around him, the way she did, and held him just as she did. Not quite for the same reason, but I held him the way she did and said the same things. Say something quickly, Michael, because I had forgotten this, and I'm saying it as I remember it."

"You never told me," Michael said. "I don't know what to say. Has he ever come here?"

Laura laughed. "Good God, no. That was a long time ago, when we sat together." Again she stopped and waited for some reaction from him. "Say something, Michael."

"What can I say?" He was angry now. "Stop making me your echo chamber. Talk about it, if you want to. You had a lover. Okay. So?"

"A lover," Laura said. "That was the word I used. It's a beautiful word. I was in college then. I used to sit at my desk and close my eyes and say to myself, I have a lover. Laura has a lover. I'd look at all the girls sitting near me in their spring dresses, with their mouths a little open as they listened to whatever it was they were all listening to, and I'd say to them in my mind, When this class is over, some of you will go home, and some of you will go to another class, and some of you will go other places. But I will walk out of the room and go to meet my lover. You have boy friends, dates, steadies. I have a lover. We are different."

"They were probably all thinking the same thing," Michael said. "Speaking as a teacher."

"I know that now. But they'd always had lovers, however they thought of them. This was my first. We sat under a tree one evening, and he got all choky and self-accusing, and told me he wasn't good enough for me. And I put my arms around him—no, I grabbed him around the neck, really—and pressed his face into my inconsequential bosom and went, 'There, there, I love you, don't worry, I love you.' Maybe you're right about that girl, Michael, because I grabbed him as if I'd been lying in wait for a chance to hold him like that. It felt very nice. I think he even cried a little."

In the street below them a mother screamed at her child in wordless rage and love. "What happened then?"

"He went away in the summer. It lasted a very short time. But it seemed long then, and it still seems long when I think of it. It took the longest time to stop saying, 'Laura has a lover,' whenever I had a few free minutes."

She moved a little on the wall, as insubstantial and evanescent as poetry, and as lasting. The cars jostled and swirled in the city, bellowing.

"The funny thing is this. Before that spring and ever afterward I used to pride myself on being sensitive and understanding far beyond the range of most people. I marked out the lost and tongueless for my own, and I used to think, I understand them. I know what it is to do a pitiful evil because of knowing oneself unloved. I may be unloved myself, but boy, am I empathetic. Sometimes I even wrote about it."

Michael felt no tightness in his nonexistent throat, and no syrupy food of pity through himself, but he heard no sound except Laura speaking.

"But for that little while," she said, "I forgot all about the emotionally undernourished. I became arrogant. I was loved, I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy. I gorged myself on being loved until it came out of my ears, and when it was over I didn't realize it for a time because I was living off my fat. Proving—"

She stopped and seemed to be very interested in the cheap headstones at the bottom of the hill, made so much alike and stacked so closely together that a ruler could have been laid across them to the iron gate.

"Proving?" Michael asked quietly.

"Proving nothing. Proving that everyone—meaning me— has her price. Proving that it's easier to love the downtrodden and lonely of the world if you yourself have never been loved. I've been spoiled for it. A man said, 'I love you,' to me. I made him say it a great many times. And so I feel a little above the unloved because of that, until I realize how far above me are the loved and still loving. Forget it, Michael. I'm getting all complicated. But I know what I meant."

She looked away, anywhere but at him, and Michael, looking at her, saw her more clearly than he ever had. He saw the wide mouth and the nose that was all wrong and the eyes that went no more with the other features than the nose and mouth and skin went with one another. He saw the black hair falling across the lowered neck, and even the favorite dress, gray and unbecoming, but so carefully remembered that he could see the weave of the threads and the one loose button in the back. Still no pity, no soupy sorrow, but a feeling very close to tears, a feeling that could not possibly be forced into words without breaking. But he tried, because he was Michael Morgan and he trusted no feeling that could not be spoken.

"I love you," he said.

It sprang from his mouth without editing, and it came out very badly. He emphasized the I too much, and what he had said sounded almost truculently protective. He knew how clumsy it must have sounded to Laura.

"Not like that," she said a little sadly. "My mother used to say it like that. I don't want to be defended, Michael."

"I love you," he said again, and it was better this time. "Me. I. Morgan. Not your mother. I love you, Laura."

"I love hearing it," Laura said. "I could never get used to the sound. Say it again. As often as you like."

He was about to say it again when he checked himself. "Meaning that I can say the words as often as I like, but you won't believe them."

"Michael, you don't know me. You've never even really seen me. If we were both alive and we passed each other one day, or you came into my bookshop to buy something, you wouldn't look twice at me. If we were introduced at a party, you'd shake my hand, say 'How do you do, Miss Uh,' and forget me before you were through saying it. You're affectionate, and you're used to being loved, and you're lonely now. Don't practice on me. Don't say you love me because part of being alive is loving someone. It won't make you a living man again, and it won't make death any easier for me."

Funny, he thought. We sit here and talk about emotion in totally emotionless voices, like two neighbors getting whatever little nourishment they can out of fourth-hand gossip. Can we feel things, we dead, or is that also recalled with effort? If she loves me, will I be happy? If she does not, will I be hurt? Will I even know the difference?