OMEGA–6

I KNEW THE VOICE BEFORE I COULD UTTER THE NAME. “CHLOE,” I SAID.

“I hate to call you like this,” she began. A full amateur’s pause followed, as if only now had it even occurred to her—“Can we talk?” she asked.

Was guilt still skewing my senses? I had the notion that Kittredge was stirring in the bedroom. “Yes, we can talk,” I said. But my voice was low enough to assure her we could not.

“I’ve got to see you. I wanted to call you hours ago, but I didn’t know if it was okay.”

“How is the weather back in Bath?” I make no excuse for saying this. I might have said anything to purchase a moment. Then, I added, “Aren’t the roads bad?”

“My four-wheel-drive happens to be a big fat lemon on the ice, but it will be all right. Harry,” she said, “something has happened. I’ve got to see you. Tonight.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s nothing open now.”

“I want to come to your place.”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re certainly welcome, but you could never find it.”

“Oh,” she said, “I know your place. I know the road. I lived near Doane one winter.”

“You did?”

“Sure,” she said, “I was shacked up for a while with Wilbur Butler. I lived in the double trailer down the highway.”

I saw those car carcasses rusting in the front yard.

“How is it I never had a sight of you then?”

“I just lived with Wilbur for a couple of months. He never let me out of bed. I used to watch through the window when you drove by. ‘Boy, he’s cute,’ I used to say to Wilbur. Did he get to hate you!”

I thought again of the malevolence in Wilbur’s eye when we passed on the road. “I guess he did,” I answered. I could hear her breathing. “Chloe,” I said, “it is not at all a good idea to come here tonight.”

“You’re spinning your wheels,” Chloe said. Her voice showed the same anger she brought to carnal junction. “Now!” she always said at such times. “Harder, you son of a bitch! Harder!” Yes, the echoes were there. “Harry, it’s got to be tonight,” she said.

“Why? Why tonight?”

“You’re not safe.” She paused. “I’m not safe,” she said. She paused again. “Have they gone through your house?” she asked.

“No.”

“They went through mine.”

“What?”

“While I was out having that last drink with you. They went through every last thing in the trailer. They cut open the stuffing in the furniture. They broke into my picture frames. They took apart my gas stove. They slit my mattress. They dumped the bureau drawers.” She began to cry. She cried like a strong woman who has just received news that a relative was maimed in an accident. “Harry, I sat there for an hour. Then I went through what I own. I was prepared for the worst, but they didn’t steal a thing. They even put my costume jewelry in a neat pile on the bed. And my bikini panties. And my red and black bra. Right next to it, what do you think? They laid out one roach. I toked a little marijuana last New Year’s Eve and hid the roach at the bottom of my drawer. They laid it right next to my costume jewelry. I hate them,” she said.

“Them?”

“If it had been thieves, they would have taken my TV, my microwave, my stereo, my clock-radio, my Winchester with the walnut-burl stock, my chain saw. These have to be cops.” She thought about it. “Special cops.” She asked, “Harry, what were they looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it connected with you?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“What kind of work you do?”

“I told you. I write and edit.”

“Harry, come on. I’m not dumb.” She dropped her voice. “Are you in secret work?”

“Not at all.”

This mistruth set her weeping again. I felt one pang of pure sympathy. Chloe’s things poked and grabbed, tossed about; here was I lying to her.

“Wilbur’s father, Gilley, used to say, ‘The Hubbard family may be in the CIA, but that don’t make them better than you or me.’ If he was drunk, he would say that. Every time you drove by.”

It had never occurred to me that our Maine neighbors had any notion of what we did. “I can’t talk about it, Chloe.”

Now her voice began to rise. “Do you have any understanding of me at all, or am I just one more suck-and-fuck?” Yes, her voice was on the rise.

“The mark of how much I feel for you,” I said as slowly as I could, “is that I love my wife, do you understand, I do love her, yet I still see you.”

“That’s elegant,” she said. “I’ll keep the change.”

Are not all such conversations the same? We went on for five more minutes, and then another five, before I could hang up, and when I took my hand from the phone, I was full of misery. Any shield of detachment I had managed to fashion about my double life had been smashed by the phone call. It was now crucial to go back to our bedroom, to Kittredge, and I suffered this thought with so much intensity that I had to wonder if something I could not yet name had come near, so near that I raced up the stairs by twos and threes to the upstairs hall. Outside our bedroom, however, my will turned in on itself, and I began to feel as weak as a man sitting up with a fever. I even had one of those fantasies that appear to rise from our limbs themselves when they are aching with illness but curiously happy. I was able to conceive of Kittredge asleep in her bed. She would be in deep slumber—so went my thought—and I would ensconce myself in a chair and watch over her. With all the care incumbent on maintaining such an image, I took the last steps to our bedroom door, looked in, and indeed she was asleep even as I had conceived. What relief to possess this much of my wife; her unspeaking presence was superior to the loneliness of being without her. Could I take that as a sign? For how many years had no more than the sight of her freckled forearm holding a tennis racquet been my passport to happiness?

I stared at her as she lay on the bed, and enjoyed the first sense of relief since I had come home, as if in truth I was again virtuous. I loved her again, loved her as I had on the first day, no, not on the first day of our affair, but in the hour I saved her life.

That was the most notable achievement of my life. During a bad day, I would wonder if it was the only achievement. I had, when all was said, a simple notion of grace. I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as a reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, had succeeded in stirring the power of creation. Therefore, if I felt love now, I might not be wholly unredeemed. The apathy I had suffered before was but a clue to the great fatigue of my soul. I was not a burnt-out case so much as a wholly belabored one, my own morphine for holding off loss. I was not, however, void of grace, no, not if my love for Kittredge still lived in that rose arbor where sorrow rises from the heart.

I dimmed the lights so she could sleep, and sat beside her bed in the near dark. How long I was there I cannot say—a few minutes or was it more?—but a tapping on our picture window intruded at last on the simple gathering of my peace, and I looked over at the smallest and most astonishing sight. A white moth, its spread no more than the width of two fingers, was fluttering against the pane. Had I ever seen a moth outdoors before on a March night? Its wings on the other side of the glass were as white as Melville’s whale.

I crossed to the desk, picked up a flashlight, turned it on, and held it against the glass. The moth attached itself to the other side of the pane as though to absorb the small warmth offered by the bulb. I looked at its trembling wings with the respect one gives a true creature, whatever the size. Its black pupils, each comparable in diameter to the head of a pin, looked back at me with the same bulging intensity of expression one finds in the eyes of a deer or a lapdog, yes, I could have sworn the moth was staring back at me, creature to creature.

I slid my flashlight along the picture window and the moth followed the light. When I came to a casement that I could open, I hesitated. The prize was a moth, after all, not a butterfly. Like a maggot was its white body, and its antennae were not filaments, but brushes. I let it in all the same. There was such entreaty in that beating of wings.

Once inside, like a bird studying the place where it will alight, it circumnavigated the room before descending into a fold of Kittredge’s pillow.

I was about to go back to my chair, but had the impulse to place my flashlight against the window again, and by the movement of its beam along the ground, there out in that silvery penumbra between the last of the light and the dark of the woods, I saw nothing less than the figure of a man. He darted so quickly behind a tree, however, that I, in my turn, stepped back quickly, and turned off the flash.