of blood. Her voice returned with a gasp that was pain, real physical pain ripping her throat. “The things you’ll do! All the things!”
“What in God’s name do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. I’m afraid I do. Oh, my darling, it’s nothing wrong. Intimacy is natural and good and necessary for men and women in love. It was meant to be that way.”
“Not with him!”
“I’m the one to decide that.”
“Not with him, Stella! Not with him!”
In the darkness, her hand caught between hot, clutching hands, Stella drew a deep, ragged breath, feeling confused and frustrated and bitterly compassionate, and she thought to herself, I’m making too much of it, I’m giving it too heavy a touch, because she’s little more than a child, and a child needs the light touch and laughter, to be shown with sympathy how foolish she is.
So she said with a smile in her voice, “Who, then? Have you chosen someone for me?”
And it was a mistake. It was a question that shouldn’t have been asked, because, although it was never answered, the answer was naked and understood in both their minds, stripped by the question itself, and it was too late to pretend ever again that the answer didn’t exist.
Stella released her hand and stood very still, looking at the naked thing in her mind. She felt ill and, in a vague, unformulated, undiagnosed way, a disturbing sense of guilt. What have I done? she thought. Or what have I not done that should have been done? How does one see these things in time, and what does one do about them when they are seen?
She spoke very carefully. “Felix and I are being married, darling. Tomorrow. In the city. We are driving to the city tonight, and will be gone a few days. Bertha will be in tomorrow as usual. She’ll prepare your meals and take care of the house. If you want her to stay nights with you, I’m sure she can arrange it. When we get back, we’ll talk this all out. We’ll see together how foolish it all is. You and I, darling. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”
There was no spoken answer to this question, either, though it, too, might have been considered implicit if one had had the courage to consider it at all, and Stella turned and walked to the door. She turned there and looked back for a moment, and because she was a warm and generous woman, she was filled with sorrow and compassion and the sense of guilt.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, and she went out.
After a long time, the door opened and closed below. The Cadillac started in the street. Kathy sat in the chair above the roses and prayed.
God, let him die, she prayed. Oh, God in heaven, let him die tonight. Let him die, God. God, God, God, let him die, die, die.
The moon climbed slowly the arc of the sky and quit looking in the window. The roses stirred and shook their scent loose in the night. The street light at the corner inscribed a yellow circle on the dark earth. Time quit being one day and became another. Kathy quit praying and went to sleep.
In her chair above the roses, she slept.
Out on the highway, Felix Brannon died.
Stella didn’t.
Stella lived for several hours.
CHAPTER 7
She was caught in the centrifugal action, whirled around and around the circumference of the conical world. Then she was flung out of the whirling mass in a great, high dizzy arc, and she was standing alone at a great altitude on an arid lip of rock. Below her was the world, and the world was no longer a whirling spiral of many colors but was now a colorless and desolate cup of perfect stillness. Above and beyond her, outside the world, there was a sound like rollicking thunder, and pretty soon she identified it as the laughter of God. God sat on an electron with His feet on a proton and held His sides and laughed and laughed and laughed with the rollicking, thunderous laughter. Leaning forward from the lip of rock, she stuck a finger into the cup of the world and found that it was dry. She pushed the cup away from her and said to God, “Fill it up. Fill up the cup of the world.”
“Lady,” said the bartender, “you’ve had enough. Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
She looked at the bartender, and he was not a man. Neither was he a woman. Neither a he nor a she was he. He was an It. It was an It. How beautiful and considerate was the English language to have the neuter gender, a wonderful and wide and pacific category that was neither one thing nor the other. Other languages weren’t like that. Some other languages. Spanish, for example. She had studied Spanish in high school, and she had hated it because nothing was neuter, everything was he or she. Even pens and pencils were he and she. El and la. She was very clever to remember that from away back in high school. Good morning, Mr. Pencil. Good morning, Miss Pen. No neuter. Never any beautiful It. The neuter was a green and quiet little island in a stormy sea, and you swam and swam in the stormy sea until your arms and legs were like lead, and the soul inside you was exhausted and indifferent, and just when you decided to quit swimming and sink into the dark water, you came to the little neuter island, and you climbed up onto it and rested, and after a while your muscles and your soul were ready to swim again.
She said to the bartender, “The cup of the world is empty, It. Fill up the cup, It.”
“Please, lady,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”
“Enough?” She looked at him slyly and laughed. “Yon are so right, It. I’ve had enough. I’ve had more than enough, if you only knew it. Do you hear that sound? If you listen very closely, you can hear it. It’s like thunder a long way off. Do you know what it is? It’s God laughing. It’s God laughing because I’ve had enough.”
“You just take it easy, lady. I’ll tell you what. You get back in the booth, and I’ll bring you some nice black coffee.”
She clapped her hands softly. “That’s a good idea. Oh, that’s a fine idea.” She leaned forward across the bar and whispered, “Tell me, It, is God an It?”
“I don’t know anything about God, lady. I don’t like to talk about things like that.”
She laughed gleefully and clapped her hands again, “Things. Things, you said. A thing is an It, isn’t it? Of course a thing is an It. So you answered my question. Of course you know something about God. Everyone knows about God, and everyone talks about God, but no one does anything about God.”
She took time to think about that last bit, and to laugh a little more. It struck her as being a very clever thing to say, even if it wasn’t exactly something she had thought of entirely by herself. It was a kind of twist on something someone had said about the weather, but it required a certain amount of cleverness just to remember things and make twists on them. Things like that just came into her mind. Like Macbeth and Shakespeare and the bit about sleep. Like the color of the hair.
She quit laughing and said, “What color is God’s hair?”
“I wouldn’t know, lady. I’ve never seen God.”
“That’s too bad. It would be very interesting to know the color of His hair. Do you suppose he’s bald, like you? Do you understand that you’re very fortunate to be bald?”
“I
