Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

On the three afternoons a week I worked at the library, I would ride over to Wolf’s house after dinner and not return until after midnight. Sometimes Wolf’s mother, who liked to stay up late watching old movies on a little ten-inch television in the darkened living room, offered to drive me home. I would sit with her on the couch for a while, watching a snippet of black-and-white movie: an unshaven man in a rumpled suit stumbling along a dusty street in a Mexican town, a woman in a phone booth frantically dialing as she looked about in terror. Then I would load my bike into the trunk of the car and sit with Wolf’s mother in front. On the way to my house, along dark streets that glowed now and then under the yellow light of a streetlamp, she would talk about Wolf: he’d failed three subjects, could you believe it, he was smart as a whip but had always hated school, she was worried about him, I was a good influence. Then with her long fingers she would light up a cigarette, and in the dark car streaked with passing lights I would see her eyes — Wolf’s eyes — narrow against the upstreaming smoke.

At times it seemed to me that I inhabited two worlds: a sunny and boring day-world that had nothing to do with Isabel, and a rich night-world that was all Isabel. I soon saw that this division was false. The summer night itself, compared with Isabel’s world, was a place of light: the yellow windows of houses, the glow of streetlamps, the porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the ruby taillights, the white summer moon in the deep blue sky. No, the real division was between the visible world and that other world, where Isabel waited for me like a dark dream.

One afternoon as I stood by the chair I felt something press against my foot. “Isabel, is that you?” In the blackness I listened, then bent over the bed. I patted the covers and began crawling across, all the way to the pillows, but Isabel wasn’t there. I heard a small laugh, which seemed to come from the floor. Carefully stepping from the bed I kneeled on the carpet, lifted the spread, and peered into blackness, as if I were looking for a cat. “Come on, Isabel,” I said, “I know you’re there,” and reached my hand under. I felt something furry against my fingers and snatched my hand away. I heard a dim sound, the furry thing pressed into my arm — and closing my hand over it, I drew out from under the bed an object that wasn’t a kitten. From the top of the bed Isabel said, “Did you find what you were looking for, David Dave?” but ignoring her I pressed the thick, furry slipper against my face.

Sometimes I tried to imagine her in the world of light. She lay next to me on the beach, on her own towel, with a thin line of sand in between — and though I could see, in my mind, that thin line of sand, and the ribbed white towel with a blue eyeglass case in one corner and a bottle of suntan lotion in another, though I could see a depression in the towel where she had kneeled, and a glitter of sand scattered across one corner, though I could see, or almost see, a wavering above the towel, a trembling of air, as if the atmosphere were thickening, I could not see Isabel.

But in the dark there was only Isabel. She would touch me and vanish — a laughing ghost. Sometimes, for an instant, my fingers grazed some part of her. She allowed me to lie down on the bed beside her but not to reach out. I could hear her breathing next to me, and along my side I could feel, like a faint exhalation, her nearby side, so close that my arm-hairs bristled. These were the rules of the game, if it was a game — I didn’t care, felt only a kind of feverish calm. I needed to be there, needed the dark, the games, the adventure, the kingdom of her room. I needed — I didn’t know what. But it was as if I were more myself in that room than anywhere else. Outside, in the light, where everything stood revealed, I was somehow hidden away. In Isabel’s dark domain, I lived inside out.

Meanwhile I was getting up later and later. One day after lunch my mother said to me, “You’re looking tired, Davy. This friend of yours…Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed home today?” And looking anxiously at me she placed on my forehead the cool backs of her fingers.

“Don’t,” I said, jerking my head away.

One afternoon I found Isabel in the dark. Instead of walking to the right of my chair, as I usually did, I changed my mind at the last moment and walked to the left — and suddenly I stumbled against her, where she’d been crouching or lying, and I fell. I disentangled myself in a great flailing rush, and as I did so I felt for an instant, against my ribs, a slippery silky material that slid over something soft that suddenly vanished.

Because she had asked me about the beach, I began to bring her things: a smooth stone, a mussel shell, the claw of a small crab. I collected impressions for her, too, like the dark shine of the sand as the waves slid back, or the tilted bottles of soda beside the beach towels. The soda itself looked tilted, against the slanted glass, but was actually level with the sand. She always wanted to see more — the exact shape of a wave, the pattern of footprints in a sandbar — and I felt myself becoming a connoisseur of sensations, an artist of the world of light.

But what I longed for was the dark room, the realm, the mystery of Isabel-land. There, the other world dissolved in a solution of black. There, all was pleasure, strangeness, and a kind of sensual promise that drifted in the air like a dark perfume.

“Do you know what this is?” she said. “One hand. Come on. Guess.”

In my palm I felt a soft, slinky thing, which filled my hand slowly, as if lowered from a height.

“Is it a scarf?” I said, rubbing it with my thumb as it spilled over the sides of my hand.

“A scarf!” she said, bursting into wild laughter.

One day Dennis said to me, “So what’s with you and Vicky?” We were sitting on my front steps, watching people on the way to the beach, with their towels and radios.

“Nothing’s with me and Vicky.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Jesus.”

Sometimes I had the sense that Isabel was revealing herself to me slowly, like a gradually materializing phantom, according to a plan that eluded me. If I waited patiently, it would all become clear, as if things were moving toward some larger revelation.

“You’re so good for me,” she said, whispering near my ear. I felt her hand squeeze my hand. In the dark I smelled a faint soapy scent and a more tangy, fleshy odor. When I reached out I felt her pillow beside me, still warm from her head.

On the beach one day as I lay thinking of Isabel, I overheard a girl saying, “…August already and he hasn’t even sent me one single solitary…” Something about those words troubled me. As I pressed my chest and stomach against the hard-soft sand under my towel, trying to capture, for Isabel, the precise sensation of hard and soft, it came to me: what troubled me was the knowledge that time was passing, that it was already August — August, the second half of summer, August, the deceitful month. Still the hot days seem to stretch on and on, just as they did in July, but you know that instead of a new summer month shimmering in the distance, there’s no longer any protection from September — and you can almost see, far off in the summery haze, the first breath-clouds forming in the brisk autumn air.

It was about this time that I noticed a little change in Isabel. She was growing restless — or perhaps she was only searching for a new game. Now when I arrived she was almost never in bed, but was somewhere else in the room, standing or moving about. One afternoon when I entered the dark I could hear her in an unfamiliar place. “Where are you?” I said. “Over here. Be done in a sec.” I heard a wooden sliding, a creak, a rustling, a slide and thump, as of a closed drawer. There was a ripply, cloth-y sound, a snap, more rustling. “There!” Isabel said. “You can come over now.” I advanced slowly, holding out an arm. “Sorry!” I said, and snatched my hand away. “Fresh!” said Isabel. “So! How do you like it?” She seized my wrist and placed my hand on her upper arm and then for a moment on her hip. “It’s a new dress,” she said. “Stockings, too. Or scarves, according to some people.” I heard scritch-scratchy sounds, as if she were rubbing her knees together. “So! Can you dance?” A hand grasped my hand and set it on her waist. On the fingers of my other hand I felt the grope of a closing hand. Fingers seized my waist. “ One two three one two three!” she chanted, as she began to waltz in the dark — and I, who had taken dance lessons in the eighth grade, led her round and round as she hummed “The Vienna Waltz,” till she smacked into something and cried, “Don’t stop!”—and as I turned round and round in that room, knocking into things that fell over, I felt her hair tickling my face, I smelled a faint perfume that made me think of oboes and bassoons, I pressed my fingers against the hard, rippling small of her back as she hummed louder and louder and something went rolling across the room and burst against a wall.