William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow

"I wish I knew what's eating her."

"Maybe nothing. Maybe she's just tired or doesn't feel well."

"Maybe."

"In any case, I doubt if she's the only woman in Logan County that's as cross as a bear this morning."

"There's no pleasing her sometimes," Clarence said, and there the conversation ended. But it had opened up vistas of hope, where before there had been none.

Parting the slit in the front of his underwear, he sent his urine in an arch out onto the frozen ground. It glittered in the moonlight. He was in the shadow of the porch roof, where he could not be seen by anybody driving past— though who would be, before daylight? With one knee bent and his foot braced against the porch railing he stood staring off into the darkness where she was. A minute passed, and then another. The first cock crowed, even though the light in the east hadn't changed. At his back a woman's voice said, "Lloyd, what on earth are you doing out there?" and he turned and went into the house.

He thought his secret was safe until one day when he walked into the kitchen and asked, "Where's Clarence?" and she said coldly, "Why do you keep up this pretense of friendship any longer when you don't like us the way you used to?"

He was dumfounded, and started to defend himself, and then broke off. If he didn't say what was on his heart now he might as well crawl into a hole somewhere and die. His life wouldn't be worth living…

Out it came. Everything. Pouring out of him. He expected to be driven from the house and instead she looked at him the way she looked at her children when they were upset over something — as if, as a human being, he had a right to his feelings, whatever they were. When he took her in his arms she neither accepted his kiss nor resisted it.

Instinct told him that it would end badly.

For a week they avoided each other and accident kept bringing them face to face when there was nobody else around. Each time, they turned away without saying a word, without even touching each other. And got in deeper and deeper. He knew he should be sorry but he was not. Which didn't keep him from grieving for the best friend he had ever had. As if Clarence had met with an accident.

The flood of feeling that informed his heart was like nothing he had ever experienced. If his wife, lying with her back to him on the far side of the bed, knew he was awake she did not show it. Reassured by the sound of her breathing, he lit a match and looked to see what time it was. He had never before not been able to fall asleep the minute his head hit the pillow. Now hour after hour went by and he felt no need for sleep. He felt as if he had just been born.

He lay on his side for a while and then turned, trying not to produce an upheaval in the bed. If things had been different, if they'd met when they were young, before Clarence had come along and… He turned again. He was in the habit of going to his father when he had a problem to deal with that was totally beyond his experience. He went to his father now and said What am I going to do? And his father said Stay on this side of the boundary line till you get over it. Good enough advice but if he didn't get over it? This question his father did not seem to want to answer. But he knew also that if his father had come up with a solution he wouldn't have been interested. He turned again so that he was lying on his back, and tears of gratitude ran down his face, past his ears, through the stubble on his jaw, and were soaked up by the pillowcase, which smelled of sunshine…

The alarm clock went off and ran all the way down and he didn't move. Sleep, when it finally came, had felled him. His wife shook him awake and he was under the impression that he answered her, but all he did was sit up in bed and reach for the matches and light the lamp to dress by. Shaking the grates in the kitchen stove he was aware, suddenly, of how cut off they now were from everybody. And committed to lying.

There was nothing to be done about it. He didn't want to not love her. It was as simple as that. And with the lantern swinging from his hand he went off into the darkness as on any other morning — as he did on the last morning of his life.

Clarence and the hired man started to carry the full milk pails into the shed where the separator was, and when he didn't follow them Clarence turned and said, "Aren't you coming?"

"Not tonight," he said, only to have his excuses brushed aside.

The memory of making love lay like a bandage across the front of his mind, day and night.

He waited for her to tell him where they would meet, and when. And marveled at the excuses she thought up to get to him. No matter what the excuse was, it always worked. No excuse at all worked equally well. He thought, If Clarence comes in from the fields unexpectedly and she isn't there, and he doesn't wonder where she is or go out looking for us.. which didn't prevent him from thinking, also, We can't go on doing this to him. He doesn't deserve it.

Pulling the bridle over the horse's nose he wondered if they were already the talk of the neighborhood.

"I caught Cletus looking at us."

"What do you mean?"

"As if we'd turned into strangers."

"You imagine it," she said, and kissed him.

He found notes in his pocket that she had put there without his knowing it, and that Marie might have found when she went through his clothes on washday. Were there others that he didn't discover in time?

He waited for his wife to say something and she didn't.

He meant to warn Fern about the notes and forgot.

There was no limit to the falsehood and deception, the smiles he made himself smile, and even so he was caught off guard. Walking from the barn to the house he felt Clarence's arm draped over his shoulder and before he could stop himself he moved away to avoid the physical contact. Also to escape responding to it, which would have been to tell Clarence and get it over with. When it was too late, he wished he had.

"Lloyd is preoccupied."

It was the first time Cletus had ever heard the word and apparently it didn't mean what you might think.

"About what?" his mother asked.

"I have no idea," his father said.

She didn't for a minute believe him; his manner and his voice and the look in his eyes all betrayed him. He suspected them. Of how much there was no telling. Of something. Another man would have come out with it. As long as he went on pretending not to know, her hands were tied. Maybe that was his game.

She watched him for two days. On the morning of the third, he asked if there was any more coffee and she said accusingly, "You're not fooling me! I know that you know."

When it turned out that she was mistaken and he didn't know, there was no way she could take the words back. It was as if a hole opened suddenly at their feet and they fell into it.

Over the mirror in the barbershop there is a colored poster, framed, of a woman with a pompadour. Her ample bust emerges from a water lily. She is holding an eyedropper elegantly and advocating Murine for the eyes. On the opposite wall, a whole row of calendars for the year 1921. On the linoleum floor, swatches of straight light brown hair. A minute before, they were part of Cletus Smith. Now they are waiting for the broom. The wall clock says seventeen minutes after two (tick/tock tick/tock) and the odor of bay rum lingers on the air. Sitting in the barber chair, with his head pushed down so that his chin is resting on his collarbone, Cletus can only look sidewise. He sees a shadow fall on the plate-glass window and then withdraw abruptly.

With a wave of his clippers the barber indicates the sidewalk, empty now. "Wasn't that your friend?"

The question is not directed at Cletus but at his father, waiting his turn under the row of calendars. When there is no answer the barber is not offended. People either answered prying questions, in which case you found out something you didn't know before, or they ignored them and if you bided your time you found out the answer anyway. Friend no longer, he remarked to himself. And then his eyebrows rose because of what he saw in the mirror: the boy was blushing.