Desperate Asylum

Chapter VII

And it ends, as it began, with Emerson Page, a nice guy who never quite knew what it was all about.

He lay beside Ed, lying very still so as not to disturb her, and he tried to figure it in his mind, how it had started and grown and come at last to the end it had come to, but it made no sense to him whatever, it would never make any sense to him as long as he lived, and what disturbed him profoundly, in addition to the sorrow he felt as a compassionate man, was the thought that he might himself have been in some measure responsible. He knew in his heart that this was not so, that it could not possibly be so, but there was still to remember the horror of last night, her savage attack that seemed now in retrospect to have been a supplication, and the final venomous words that were the last he would ever hear from her and that he now heard like an echo above the breathing of Ed.

He listened to the voice and the breathing, and he was grateful for Ed’s warm body so near him, but for some strange reason he did not want to touch her or have any physical contact with her at all, and this was the first time he had ever felt such a reluctance. It was something that would soon pass, he knew that very well, but at this moment it existed for the first time, and he would not have thought it possible.

He could not sleep, and he wanted a cigarette, and he wondered if he could get up and get one without disturbing Ed. Very carefully, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up on the edge, and he was immediately aware, even before she spoke, that Ed was not asleep and had not been asleep, but had been lying quietly, like him, staring up into the darkness.

“You’re still thinking about it,” she said.

“I know. I can’t help it. Both of them that way. Shooting her and then himself.”

“Darling, you had better forget it.”

“Can you forget it?”

“No, but it would be better if I could.”

“I keep wondering why.”

“Darling, you had better quit wondering.”

“There was something wrong between them, Ed. I keep thinking I might have helped.”

“You know what was wrong between them, and there was no way you could have helped.”

“I guess so. I guess you’re right. Would you care for a cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

He got up and found one for himself and lit it and went out of the bedroom into the living room and across the living room to the front window. He stood there smoking the cigarette and looking down into the street of Corinth, and the street was narrow and lifeless and splotched with dirty light, and he remembered it suddenly as he had seen it three-quarters of a year ago with the snow slanting out of the night and a strong wind blowing between the buildings. It seemed to him that everything had begun that night, the whole sad and confusing business of Avery Lawes and the woman who had become Lisa Lawes briefly and to no good purpose, but he knew that this could not really be true, that nothing actually began and ended in so short a time. All things come from many times and sources, and there is no short and simple chronology to the bad end.

The smoke of the cigarette was hot and harsh in his throat and lungs. He finished it and went back to the bed and lay down beside Ed with the space between them.

“Roscoe and I drank a toast to them,” he said. “Good bedding, good breeding, good fortune. I guess they didn’t have any of it.”

“Don’t keep thinking, darling.”

“Roscoe said I was worried about Avery. He said it; was like I was afraid he’d never have the good luck I wished him.”

“Don’t, darling.”

“What could a man do but wish?”

“Please don’t, darling.”

He reached over and put his hand flat on her warm thigh, and her arm crossed his in a duplicate gesture, and nothing that was wrong became right, but everything that had been right was still right and would always be. They lay in the warm intimacy of mutual appeal and acceptance, and the dark room was again, or still, because of them and what they were and felt, one of Earth’s good places.

Eventually they slept.