Steven Millhauser - Dangerous Laughter

I arrived at Isabel’s house toward three in the afternoon. At the door Wolf’s mother appeared in green shorts and a yellow halter, with a pocketbook over her shoulder and car keys hanging from her hand. “Go on in,” she said, “I’m in a rush,” and hurried down the steps. In the driveway she turned and called, “John’s out. She’s expecting you.” I passed through the cool dim living room, climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor, and looked at the familiar hall with its closed doors before climbing into the attic. At the top of the stairs I passed through the sun-striped darkness into the second hall and quietly entered Isabel’s chamber.

“Oh there you are,” she said, with a mixture of impatience and excitement.

“I went to the beach,” I said, looking around at the dark. Parts of it were more familiar than others — the part that held the chair, the part that held the bed — and I wondered if I could memorize the different parts by concentrating my attention.

“I’m very excited!” cried Isabel, and I heard her do a little dance-step on the carpet.

Slowly I walked over to the bed and lay down.

“What are you doing, what are you doing?” Isabel said, stamping her foot.

“Doing? Just lying here, Isabel, thinking how peaceful it is. You know, I went for a swim this morning and I’m—”

“You’re such a tease!” she cried. “You can’t just lie there,” she said, much closer, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. “You have to get up.”

“Isabel, listen. Do you really—”

“Oh what are you talking about? Come on! Come on!” She tugged again and I followed her into the dark. I could feel her excitement like a wind. She drew me across the room and abruptly stopped. I could hear her patting the curtains, groping for the drawstrings. The curtains sounded thick and softly solid, like the side of an immense animal. I imagined the brilliant light outside, raised like a sword. “There!” Isabel said. I heard her tugging, jerking stubbornly, moving her hand about, like a maddened bird trapped in the folds. Something gave way, the top of the curtains began to pull apart, sunlight burst through like a shout, for an instant I saw the slowly separating dark-blue folds, a swirl of glowing golden dust, an edge of raised sleeve, before I flung a hand over my eyes. Thrusting out the other hand, I made my way blindly across the room toward the door as she shouted, “Hey, where’re you—” Behind me I heard the curtains scraping back, through my fingers I could feel the room filling with light as if a fire had broken out. I pulled open the door and did not look back. As I fled through the attic and down the first flight of stairs, I saw, beyond the edge of my vision, in that instant before I covered my eyes with my hand, a raised reddish sleeve with a slight sheen to it, slipping down along a ghostly shimmer of sunlit forearm, vague as an agitation of air. At the bottom of the second stairway I waved to Wolf’s mother, who turned out to be a jacket on the back of a shadowy chair, hurried through the living room, and escaped through the front door. Only when my bicycle was speeding down the curving drive between the high fence and the hedge did I turn to look back at the house, forgetting that, from this angle, I could see only the pines, the maples, the sunny and shady driveway turning out of sight.

School began three days later. Wolf was in none of my classes and I couldn’t find him in the halls. I had never called his house before — somehow our friendship had nothing to do with telephones — but that afternoon I dialed his number. The phone rang fourteen times before I hung up. I imagined the house in ruins, ravaged by sunlight. I looked for Wolf in school the next day, but he wasn’t there. No one knew anything about him. That afternoon after school I called in sick at the library and rode over to Wolf’s house on my bike. At the top of the curving drive it was still standing there, in shade broken by brilliant points of light. Wolf’s mother, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and holding a pair of pliers in one hand, answered the door. In the darkish living room she sat on the couch and I sat in an armchair, holding a glass of iced tea that I forgot to drink, as she told me that Wolf was attending a special boarding school in Massachusetts. Hadn’t he mentioned it? A liberal curriculum — a very liberal curriculum. As for Isabel, she’d gone to live for a while with her aunt in Maine, where she usually spent her summers and where she was now attending the public high school. Her year off had done her a world of good. Wolf’s mother thanked me for being so nice to Isabel, during her convalescence. At the front door she looked at me fondly. “Thank you for everything, David,” she said, and reached out her hand. She gave my hand a vigorous shake and stood watching me from the doorway as I rode off on my bike.

That fall I threw myself into my classes, but all I could think of was the room in the attic. It was as if I were missing some part of myself that I had to have but couldn’t find anywhere. In mid-October I got my driver’s license and began driving around on the weekends in my father’s car. I took up with my semiofficial girlfriend and went to dances and football games. One Saturday afternoon I drove into Wolf’s neighborhood, but though I slowed down at his driveway, with its scattering of yellow leaves, I passed it without going in. Often I wondered what would have happened if I had turned to look at her, the day the curtains parted. And I saw it clearly: the sun-filled air, the dust swirling in shafts of light, the bright empty room. No, far better to have turned away, to have understood that, for me, Isabel existed only in the dark. Like a ghost at dawn — like the princess of a magic realm — she had to vanish at the first touch of light. So I drove around in my father’s car, waiting for something that never came. By spring of senior year I was caught up in so many things that I had trouble remembering what had happened, exactly, in that dark room, in that vague house, on that winding road on the other side of town. Only now and then an image would rise up out of nowhere and make me thoughtful for a while — an ivory sage bent over his book, a furry earmuff, and that slow, lazy smile, with its little touch of mockery.

FEW OF USnow recall that perilous summer. What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live — to die — to burst into flame — to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning — and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

The game began innocently and spread like a dark rumor. In cool playrooms with parallelograms of sunlight pouring through cellar windows, at ping-pong tables in hot, open garages, around yellow and blue beach towels lying on bright sand above the tide line, you would hear the quiet words, the sharp bursts of laughter. The idea had the simplicity of all inspired things. A word, any word, uttered in a certain solemn tone, could be compelled to reveal its inner stupidity. “Cheese,” someone would say, with an air of somber concentration, and again, slowly: “Cheese.” Someone would laugh; it was inevitable; the laughter would spread; gusts of hilarity would sweep through the group; and just as things were about to die down, someone would cry out “Elbow!” or “Dirigible!” and bursts of laughter would be set off again. What drew us wasn’t so much the hidden absurdity of words, which we’d always suspected, as the sharp heaves and gasps of laughter itself. Deep in our inner dark, we had discovered a startling power. We became fanatics of laughter, devotees of eruption, as if these upheavals were something we hadn’t known before, something that would take us where we needed to go.