Louisa Hall - Trinity

But he never came. And by then it was June, and after that it was July, and though the war in the Pacific had dragged on for months, we all knew it would end soon.

I felt my time running out.

I felt it slipping away, while the wife beater and I ate at the lodge, and I informed all the wives about where on the mesa to buy the best spinach, or how to get letters out past the censors.

Sometimes, to pass the time after dinner, we’d go to somebody’s house and drink cola and gossip about the most important scientists. One night, for example, one of the explosives’ wives told me that Oppie was under the thumb of the army.

I looked at her closely. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a soft face. Then I leaned forward and whispered: “Do you know about the weapon?”

And she went instantly pale, and started fiddling with the glass throat of her cola, which meant that she didn’t know any details, so either her husband wasn’t important enough to have high-level security clearance, or he did, and he still hadn’t told her.

Then I forgave her for having a husband, and let her go on with her story, and she told me she’d heard that Oppie had committed some sort of gross indiscretion. They’d followed him when he went to San Francisco to visit a woman, she said. And he didn’t want that to come out. So they had him up against a wall. They were using it as psychological leverage, she said, so he’d cooperate on other fronts.

Like what, I said.

Like informing on spies, she said. And persuading the scientists to finish the weapon.

LATER, WHEN I WALKED BACK TO MY DORM ROOM WITH MY NEW BOYFRIEND,I felt inexplicably mean.

I thought about Jack, and how he and Oppie were close. Then I wondered how much Jack knew about that trip back to San Francisco.

I wondered whether Jack knew and didn’t tell me, or if he didn’t know, despite acting like he understood all the secrets that were kept on that mesa.

Then I thought about Oppie in that chapel, saying we were scientists, and a scientist’s duty was to know, and to understand how the world worked, and later, when the wife beater was making love to me in my cot, I couldn’t stand it anymore and suddenly bit him.

He pulled back abruptly and stared at me from above.

Then I moved to bite him again, but he pushed me back down on the mattress.

“Don’t,” he said, in a strict and somewhat frightening voice.

I almost grinned. But then, regretting his tone, the wife beater kissed me on the forehead, and smiled somewhat goofily, as if he was embarrassed, and afterward, when I’d come back from cleaning myself out in the bathroom, I found him sitting propped up on the pillows.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“OK,” I said.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I care about you. I respect you.”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I kissed him, and turned out the lamp, and while I was trying to fall asleep for the night, I thought I was so tired of people keeping their weapons secret until the very moment they decided to kill you.

THAT MORNING, WHILE THE WIFE BEATER SHOWERED, I STOOD AT THEsink, brushing my teeth and watching him through the clear Plexiglas door.

He kept his eyes closed under the water, so he couldn’t see me while I inched closer, until I was standing just outside the door, examining him while he soaped off his chest, and it was then that I realized that I didn’t care to know what he was thinking.

I looked at his body—his chest, the dark hair that grew there, and on his forearms, and even on his delicate wrists—and it was so opaque, an impenetrable collection of physical features, a form full of inaccessible thoughts, and I realized that it didn’t perturb me.

And how many nights, I thought, watching the wife beater lift one arm and soap his armpit, had I lain awake, wondering what Jack might be thinking?

When he’d slept with me that last time, for instance, and when I’d resisted, pleading with him to stop, had he imagined it was a kindness to finish? Had he felt there was some final sweetness in the way he stroked my back until I relaxed, the way he held me close until the moment he’d finished?

Or had it been something else? Had he felt, after those weeks when I kept myself apart, the desire to punish me for my independence? Or, alternatively, listening to me while I explained about the mice on the ceiling, had he felt an urge to sever our connection completely, and was that last time, when he slept with me in his bed despite all the fears I’d so clearly expressed, a final and definitive strike: the only possible break from the unpleasant system we couldn’t otherwise seem to escape from?

I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure it out, no matter how many nights I stayed awake, trying not only to know what Jack was thinking, but to feel it inside my own skin, to enact the whole scene again, this time playing both parts, feeling the desire in both of the bodies.

And now here I was, peering through the glass door at my new boyfriend’s face, and I didn’t care to know what he was thinking. I had not even the faintest passing curiosity about the thoughts beyond his closed eyelids. And that’s what I was wondering at when suddenly the wife beater swung the door open.

Surprised by a sharp edge, I staggered back, only to be surprised again by another sharp pain behind me. And because I’d been attacked on both sides, I had nowhere to run, and could only buckle at the knees like a goat, or a woman begging for mercy, and I think I may have blacked out for a moment, because when I came to again, the wife beater was helping me back up to my feet, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

There was a cut crossing my cheekbone. And when I lifted my hand to my head, I felt warm blood matting my hair.

Then, slowly, I started laughing.

“Are you OK?” the wife beater was saying. “Do you think you need stitches?”

But I couldn’t stop laughing.

The wife beater gaped. “What’s so funny?” he said.

“Nothing,” I managed. “Nothing is funny,” but tears were still spilling out of my eyes, and I still found it hard to contain my weird laughter.

IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I THINK, THAT THE BRUISE AND MYnew boyfriend and I all went to Oppie’s house on Bathtub Row.

And though the last time I’d seen Jack was when I made that joke in poor taste, this time I was perfect.

“Watch what?” I said, smiling lightly when Jack touched my cheek in the hallway. And then I sailed off, and his eyes followed behind me.

It was the bruise, I’m sure of it, that made it so he couldn’t resist me.

Because, of course, can a woman you’ve already killed get a bruise? Can you worry for a dead woman’s physical safety?

No. You only worry for a woman still living. So I moved around that party with the vitality conferred on me by my bruise, and I didn’t find myself awed in the least by those thick copies of Dostoyevsky and Proust, not even by the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit.

Indeed, standing there, perusing the bookshelf, I wondered whether Jack only liked Dostoyevsky because he knew that Oppie did also. That made me smile. I felt so blithe, moving around that well-furnished room. I even smiled at those Native American tchotchkes. Child of an immigrant, I thought to myself, trying to make himself feel like a Native.

Because of course though Oppie was the mayor of Shangri-la, his father, like my own parents, had come over from Europe, and they might have been rich, but I, too, knew what it was like, to sit at the table with your immigrant parents, listening to them while they struggled with English.

I thought of Oppie as a little boy at that table, and then I saw his collection of rocks, and the hawk’s feather he’d placed in a glass, and I thought: Such incomplete children they are, these powerful men.