Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

“Not too much, actually.”

“Oh good, then you can make me up. Isabel, or The Mystery of the Haunted Chamber. Hoooo, I’m feeling tired. Will you come back and sit with me again, David Dave?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will. Definitely.”

I heard a long yawn, and a mumbled phrase that sounded like “See ya later, alligator,” and then I felt Wolf’s hand on my arm and he was leading me out of the dark room and shutting the door carefully behind him. We walked in silence down the wooden steps and the carpeted steps into the gloom of the living room. Evidently it was time to go. Maybe he didn’t want me to question him about that little game of his, up there in the dark. If he wished to be enigmatic, that was fine with me.

“She likes you,” he said at the front door, standing with his forearm up against the jamb and his other hand clasping his raised shoulder. He lowered his voice to say, “Don’t worry about anything.” “Okay,” I said, “I won’t,” and walked down the front steps to my bike, with its dented wire basket filled with books. I kicked up the stand, swung my leg over the seat, and gave a wave as I started down the winding drive. At the bend I glanced back at the house, rising in a kind of twilight, then whipped around to watch the shade-darkened drive as I rushed downhill between the high fence and the hedge, and when I burst onto the street I had to tighten my eyes in the sudden harsh light of the afternoon sun.

II

ADVENTURES IN THE DARK

All the way home, along hot streets printed with the curved shadows of telephone wires, I saw the high dark house, the cave of books, the black chamber. It all reminded me of something, and as I rode through the shade of the thruway overpass and broke into the sun it came to me: the darkness of the movie theater, the sun-striped lobby, the emergence into the glare of a summer afternoon. I had always liked that moment of confusion, when your mind is possessed by two worlds at once: the hard sidewalk with its anthills and its silver gum wrapper, the sword-fight in the high room with the crimson curtain. But soon the grainy sidewalk, the brilliant yellow fire hydrant, the flash of sun on the fender of a passing car, the jewel-green traffic light, become so vivid and exact that the other pictures grow dim, and you can hardly summon up the vague dark house, the book piles on the floor, the dim voice in the dark. I had the feeling that if I turned my bike around and rode back I’d find nothing at all — only a winding road lined with trees and a few dark posts with red reflectors.

At home I greeted my mother in the sunny kitchen, where she held up her hands to show me her flour-covered fingers and smoothed back a lock of hair with the back of a wrist. In my room I tossed my books on the bed and slumped down next to them with my neck against the wall and my legs dangling over the side. My wooden bookcase, painted a shiny gray, filled me with irritation. Here and there among the books were spaces given over to other things — old board games, a wooden box of chess pieces with a sliding top, two collections of stamps, a varnished bowl I had made in woodshop in the seventh grade. On top was my display of minerals, each with its label, and then came a globe on a brass stand, an electric clock with a visible cord, and a radiometer with vanes spinning in the light. Even the books exasperated me: they stood in neat rows, held tightly in place by green metal bookends with cork-lined bases.

On the beige wall and part of my bureau, long stripes of sunlight, thrown from the open slats of my blinds, lay tipped at an angle.

That night I woke in the dark. But I saw at once that it wasn’t dark: light from a streetlamp glimmered on the globe, on the leather edges of the blotter on my desk, on the metal curve of the shade of the floor lamp beside my reading chair. Suddenly I thought: The attic was empty, no one was there — and I fell asleep.

The next day I saw Wolf in English, French, and American History. I passed him twice in the halls, saw him leaving the cafeteria as I entered, and spoke with him briefly after school, checking my watch as we stood on a plot of brownish grass near the bridge that crossed the railroad tracks and led to the center of town. I had to get over to the library and work my two-hour shift. Wolf stood smoking a cigarette with his thumb hooked in his belt and his eyes narrowed against the updrifting bluish smoke. He said nothing about his house, nothing about Isabel, and as I walked down toward Main Street I felt a ripple of anger, as if something had been taken away from me. I could forgive the deception but not the silence. On the second floor of the library, where I stood removing books from a metal cart and studying the white Dewey decimal numbers on the back before placing the books on the shelves, I recalled his book-mad room and wondered whether I had fallen asleep there, in that stumpy armchair, and dreamed my visit to his invisible sister.

It was like that for the rest of the week: a few meetings in class, a few words after school. It was as if he’d invited me on an adventure and changed his mind. I felt like the victim of an unpleasant joke and vowed to stay out of his way. That weekend I set up my ping-pong table in the garage and called up my friends Ray and Dennis. My mother brought out glasses of lemonade heavy with ice cubes and we ate fistfuls of pretzel sticks and ran after the white ball as it rolled down the driveway toward the street, where kids from next door were playing Wiffle ball with a yellow plastic bat and a man with a strap around his waist stood leaning away from the top of a telephone pole. Afterward we sat on the screened back porch and played canasta on the green card table. On Monday I worked again at the library, and on Tuesday, a day off, Wolf invited me to his house.

It was still there at the top of the curving drive, less dark than I had remembered it, the clapboards distinctly white in the broken shade of the pines and Norway maples. As we walked through the living room toward the stairs, a tall handsome woman in khaki Bermuda shorts and a white halter entered from the kitchen, carrying a trowel in one hand and wearing on the other a grass-stained glove. I saw at once that she was Wolf’s mother — saw it by something in the cheekbones, in the eyes, in the air of careless authority with which she inhabited her body. She thrust the trowel into the gardening glove, reached out her long bare hand, and shook hands firmly. “I’m John’s mother,” she said. For a moment I wondered who John was. “Sorry for the mess. You must be David.”

“He is, and then again he isn’t,” Wolf said, and throwing an arm across her shoulders he added, “What mess?” As she turned to him with a look of loving exasperation, she raised the back of her hand to her temple and smoothed away a piece of dark hair — and suddenly I imagined a world of mothers with hands dipped in work, raising their wrists gracefully to smooth back their hair.

In his room with the drawn shades he sat in the legless armchair with his feet up on the bed, while I lay across the bed with my neck against the wall, one foot on the floor and one ankle resting on my knee. He spoke only about Isabel. She was shy, extremely shy — hence the meeting in the dark. Whenever she met someone new — an ordeal she preferred to avoid — she insisted on the condition of absolute darkness. Thick curtains hung over the windows of the attic room. But don’t worry — when she got to know me better, when she got used to me, he was sure she’d come out of the dark. Besides, she didn’t only stay in her room — sometimes she came down for dinner or walked around the house. It was only strangers who made her nervous. He appreciated my willingness to visit her, she needed to see people, god did she need to see people, though not just any old moronic people. As soon as he’d met me, he’d been sure. Truth was, about a year ago she’d had some kind of — well, they called it a breakdown, though in his opinion her nervous system had discovered a brilliant way of allowing her to do whatever she wanted without having to suffer the boredom of good old high school and all the rest of the famous teenage routine. She hadn’t attended school for the last year, but the board of education had allowed her to study at home and take the tests in her room. She was much more studious than he was, always memorizing French irregular verbs and the parts of earthworms. She was a year younger than we were. He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he’d prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn’t even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him.