Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

“So how do you like my room?” she asked, in a voice that came from the other end of the bed.

“It’s very — it’s very—,” I said, searching for the exact word.

“You probably ought to lie down, you know. If you’re tired.”

I climbed tensely onto the bed, pressing my knees into the mattress, and began crawling across it toward her voice. “Nnnn!” I said, snatching my hand away as something moved out of reach. The bed seemed long, longer than the entire room, though I was moving so slowly that I was almost motionless. “Are you there?” I said to the dark. Isabel said nothing. I patted about: a pillow, another pillow, a sheet, a turned-back spread. “Where are you?” I asked the dark. “Here,” she whispered, so close that I could feel her breath against my ear. I reached out and felt empty air. “I can’t see you, Isabel.” Deep in the room I heard a burst of laughter. “Can you fly, Isabel? Is that your secret?” I listened to the room. “Are you anywhere?” Still kneeling on the bed, but raising my upper body, like a rearing horse, I swept out both hands, my fingertips fluttering about, stroking the dark. From the pillow and sheets came a fresh, slightly soapy scent. I lay down on my stomach, pressing my cheek into a pillow and inhaling the scent of Isabel. In the darkness I closed my eyes. Somewhere I heard a sound, as of a foot knocking against a piece of furniture. Then I felt a pushing-down in the mattress. Something hard pressed against the side of my arm. I felt the hardness with my fingertips and suddenly understood that I was touching a face. It pulled away. “Isabel,” I said. “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.” Nothing was there. In the thick darkness I felt myself dissolving, turning into black mist, spreading into the farthest reaches of the room.

III

REVELATION

On a brilliant afternoon in July, under a sky so blue that it seemed to have weight, the beach towels on the sand reminded me of the rectangles of color in a child’s paint box. Here and there a slanted beach umbrella partly shaded a blanket. Under the wide umbrellas, thermos jugs and cooler chests and half-open picnic baskets stood among yellow water wings and green sea monsters. On my striped towel, in the fierce sun, I leaned back on both elbows and stared off past my ankle bones at the place where the rippling dry sand changed to flat and wet. Low waves broke slowly in uneven lines. The water moved partway up the beach and slid back, leaving a dark shine that quickly vanished.

People were walking about, sitting up on blankets, running in and out of the water. A tall girl with a blond ponytail and coppery glistening legs came walking along the wet sand. Her bathing suit was so white that it looked freshly painted. Her sticking-out breasts looked hard and sharp, like funnels. A small rubber football flew spinning through the bright blue air. In the sand a gull walked stiffly and half lifted its wings. Down in the shallow water a thick-chested senior in a tight bathing suit crouched on his hands and knees, so that I could see the blond hairs glowing on his lower spine — suddenly a lanky junior with hard-muscled legs came running down the beach into the water, flung his hands onto the back of his kneeling friend, and flipped gracefully into the air, landing in the water with a splash. Tilted bottles of soda gleamed here and there in the sand beside beach towels, a girl in a turquoise two-piece stood by the foot of the lifeguard stand, looking up and shading her eyes, and high in the sky a yellow helicopter seemed stuck in the thick blue heavy summer air.

Laughing, whooping, running their hands through their wet hair, Ray and Dennis came striding toward me, kicking up bursts of sand. They picked up their towels and stood rubbing their chests and arms. Water streamed from their bathing suits.

“So guess who I ran into down by the jetty,” Ray said, laying out his towel carefully in the sand. “Joyce. She said Vicky thinks you’re mad at her.” He threw himself facedown on the towel.

“I’m not mad at her. I just want — I just need—”

“Ah just want, ” Dennis said, holding up his hands as if they were poised over a guitar. “Ah just need. ” He strummed the guitar.

Summer had come, season of sweet loafing. I spent long hours lying on the beach, playing ping-pong in my shady garage, and reading on the screened back porch, where thin stripes of sun and shade fell across my book from the bamboo blinds. Even my job at the library seemed a lazy sort of half-dreaming, as I wheeled my cart slowly between high dim shelves pierced by spears of sun. But as I lay on the beach running my fingers through the warm sand, as I bent over to retrieve a ping-pong ball from a cluster of broken-toothed rakes and shiny red badminton poles rusting at the bottom, all the time I was waiting for Isabel. She slept until one or two in the afternoon. No one was allowed to visit her till the middle of the day. Wolf himself never rose before noon and seemed amused at what he called my peculiar habits. “The early bird catches the worm,” he said, “but who wants the worm?” I found myself rising later and later in the morning, but there were always hours of sunshine to get through before I arrived in the dark.

“Up so soon?” my father said, glancing at me over the tops of his eyeglasses as he bent toward his lunch in the sunny kitchen.

Sometimes, to pass the time, I took long drives with Ray and Dennis, when Dennis could borrow his mother’s car. My plan had been to get my license as soon as school was out, but I woke each day feeling tired and kept putting it off. We would drive along the thruway until we saw the name of some little town we didn’t know. Then we drove all over that town, passing through the business district with its brick bank trimmed in white and its glass-fronted barbershop with the slow-turning reflection of a striped pole before heading out to the country lanes with their lonely mailboxes and their low stone walls, and ended up having lunch at some diner where you could get twenty-two kinds of pancake and the maple syrup came in glass containers shaped like smiling bears. Dennis wore sunglasses and drove with one wrist resting on the wheel. In his lamplit room with the drawn shades, Wolf had told me how he’d taken the written test six months ago without once opening the boring manual. “And?” I asked. He smiled, raised a finger, and drew it across his throat.

And at last I made my way up the wooden stairs and disappeared in the dark. “Isabel,” I would say, standing by the chair, “are you awake?” Or: “Isabel, are you there?” Sometimes I felt a touch on my arm and I would reach out, saying, “Isabel? Is that you?” as my hand grasped at air. Then I would hear her laughing quietly from the bed or across the room or just behind me or who knew where. She would say, “Welcome, stranger,” or “Lo, the traveler returns,” or nothing at all. Then I would make my way over to the bed and pat my way along the side and lie down, hoping for a fleeting touch, hoping she would be there.

I visited her every day. When I wasn’t working at the library, I rode my bike to her house at three in the afternoon; in Isabel’s room I would forget the other world so completely that sometimes when I came downstairs I was startled to see the lamps in the living room glowing bright yellow. Through the front window I could see the porch light shining on black leaves. Then I would phone my parents with apologies and ride my bike home to a reheated dinner, while my mother looked at me with her worried expression and my father asked if I’d ever happened to hear of a clever little invention called the wristwatch. At night I could hear my mother and father talking about me in low voices, as if there were something wrong with me.