Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

11

In senior year of high school I fell in love with Diane DeCarlo. I knew it was love because I didn’t only want to touch and be touched by her all over our bodies, I wanted to touch and be touched by her all over our minds. Sometimes I thought of her as a sunny house I wanted to move into for the rest of my life. We read our favorite children’s books to each other, explored each other’s attics, sneaked into each other’s houses at night. Mostly we laughed and went driving around together in my father’s car. One day I took her up to the Place. I’d been going up a lot since Dan Rivers moved away, and though I never saw the lady in white again I felt good up there, as if I could get rid of something for a while. I wanted Diane to see the Place with me, the way I wanted her to see my room, my body, my childhood bear with the missing arm. It was a sunny day in spring, one of those days that make you want to burst out laughing, because it looks as if it’s trying too hard to imitate your idea of a perfect spring day. As we climbed the path, she was taking it all in — the green fields, the wildflowers, a light green grasshopper on a dark green bench. We were holding hands, swinging our arms. When we reached the top she closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun, her cheeks shining in the light as if they were wet. “I love it up here,” she said, and gave me one of her tender, playful looks. “What’s wrong?” she said. I remembered the time I’d come up to the Place with my mother, but things were now reversed: I saw in Diane’s eyes the look that must have been mine as a child, when my mother did not give me her attention. “Nothing,” I said. I understood what a fool I’d been, inviting her up here, where she craved intimacy and I wanted — but who knew what I wanted? I knew only that the Place was not for holding hands and staring out together at pretty views. I felt angry at myself, and angry at the Place, and sorry for her. Under the blue sky we walked uneasily side by side, sat down on one of the walls, looked about. We returned to the car in silence. I continued seeing Diane after that, but I never took her back to the Place, and we broke up two weeks before graduation.

12

Some call it the Great Revulsion. That’s when you suddenly turn against the Place, for no reason you can understand. The stone walls seem to give you a hostile stare; the sky is a hand pushing against your neck. In the stillness you can almost hear voices calling to you from the town. And so you hurry back to the world below, where you laugh with friends, drive out with your wife and kids to the picnic tables at Burrows Park, plan vacations to the seashore. You can’t understand why you ever wasted your precious time at the dead top of a boring hill, while life was swirling down below. Sometimes you forget the Place for a month, for a year. But a time comes when the town begins to irritate you with its familiar roof slopes, its clatter of cups on café tables on Main Street, its shimmering water-jets from lawn sprinklers, its creaking porch gliders. Then you remember the Place, up there, away from it all, and you are shaken: by remorse, by longing, by gratitude.

13

Because the Place is owned by our town, maintained by the Parks and Recreation Department, and paid for by our taxes, it is not surprising that voices are regularly raised in favor of a different use of the land. The Town Board is repeatedly asked to consider business proposals from local groups and outside developers eager to convert the Place to profitable use. One of the more popular plans is for a six-story hotel, with spacious balconies, a farm-to-table menu, and an outdoor café open to the public. Other development projects include a thirty-two-unit town-house-style apartment complex, a private school for girls, a family-owned restaurant with an Irish pub, an assisted-living facility, a recreation center with weight rooms and indoor pools, and a medical building specializing in dementia care. All proposals are presented for voting at town meetings held throughout the year. Those of us who defend the Place against business designs that are clear, well thought out, and of undeniable financial advantage to the town are often hard put to say what it is about the Place that makes us want to maintain it in its unprofitable state.

14

In college I hurled myself into books and friendships as if I had only a few months left to live. I took up fencing, joined the debating club, stayed up till five in the morning arguing about whether happiness is the true goal of human life. I spent the summers at home, working odd jobs and visiting college friends on weekends; I thought of going up to the Place but somehow never got around to it. The Place was like an old board game that I thought of fondly but no longer played. At the same time, it represented a temptation that I needed to resist: the temptation of falling back into a small-town adolescence I longed to transcend. After college I returned home for the summer, during which I prepared my résumé and interviewed for jobs that I thought of as experiments, while I waited to discover my real work, whatever that might be. When I was hired as an entry-level paralegal in a medical malpractice law firm located in a city two hours away, I began making trips to search for an apartment. On the day before I left home, I drove over to the hill. I had been saying my goodbyes, and I suppose this was another. As I walked up the path under the August sun, I asked myself what I thought I was doing. At the top I looked around. Except for a slatted metal bench that had replaced one of the old wooden ones, nothing had changed. It struck me that each blade of grass was in the precise position it had held when I had last been here. That was in the summer before college, when I worked at one of the concession stands at the South Side Rec Field, went swimming at Indian Lake with friends, and mostly stayed away from the Place, with its memories of Diane DeCarlo. I’d last gone up at summer’s end and stared hard, as at something already slipping away. Now I walked about, gazed down at the town, sat against a wall, where the edges of stones pushed into my back, and quickly stood up. I could feel myself waiting for something, without knowing what it was. I glared at the grassy slopes, the distant hills, as if I expected them to speak aloud. And an impatience came over me. Why had I come here? I was starting a new life. This was the old life, the time of childhood birthday parties and family picnics in the park and Dan Rivers and Diane DeCarlo. I remembered the white dress, the blazing room, but that was only a summer dream. The Place held nothing for me; I was so filled with the future that I was barely in a place at all. Still I waited, demanding that the Place give me something, anything — whatever it was I had come for. I felt like bursting into wild laughter, like crouching down and pounding the ground with my fists. I opened my mouth, as if to shout. Then I glanced at my watch and turned back toward the car.

15

Some people say that the Place is the realm of the spirit, as opposed to the realm of the body. Down below, we feed and clothe our bodies, we work at our jobs, we eat and marry and die. Up above, where our bodies are freed from worldly concerns, our spirits can flourish unimpeded, as we enter a place of contemplation, serenity, and quiet exaltation. This explanation, attractive to those who welcome the Place as a spiritual retreat, as well as to those who ignore the Place but accept that it may be of value to others, is not convincing. One of the pleasures of the Place is the sheer delight our bodies feel, high above the strains and tensions of the town below. The air, fresher and cleaner, is drawn deeply into the lungs, the way a thirsty throat receives cool water; the body is invigorated, filled with an energy that feels nourishing rather than restless. At the same time, it’s surely a mistake to think of the town as occupied solely with material things. Down there is where we read, think, go to school, attend piano recitals, make moral choices, experience the ecstasy we call love. If the Place is where we leave the town-world for something else, then we leave all of it, including our most cherished adventures of the spirit. What the Place invites is a withdrawal from all human things — a withdrawal that is like a surrender.