Lisey's Story(43)

"I love you," he says mildly.

"I know. I love you, too. That's not the point."

"It might be," he says. "That you love me, I mean. That might be exactly the point. No one's loved me since Paul." A long pause. "And Daddy, I guess."

She gets up on her elbow. "Scott, lots of people love you. When you read from your last book - and the one you're writing now - " She wrinkles her nose. The new one is called Empty Devils, and what she's read of it and heard him read from it she doesn't like.

"When you read, nearly five hundred people showed up! They had to move you from the Maine Lounge into Hauck Auditorium! When you were done, they gave you a standing O!"

"That's not love," he says, "that's curiosity. And just between me and thee, it's freakshow stuff. When you publish your first novel at twenty-one, you find out all about freakshow stuff, even if the damn thing only sells to libraries and there's no paperback. But you don't care about the child-prodigy stuff, Lisey - "

"Yes I do - " Wholly awake now, or almost.

"Yes, but...cigarette me, babyluv." His cigarettes are on the floor, in the turtle ashtray she keeps for him. She hands him the ashtray, puts a cigarette in his mouth, and lights it for him. He resumes. "But you also care about whether or not I brush my teeth - "

"Well yeah - "

"And if the shampoo I'm using is getting rid of my dandruff or just causing more of it - "

That reminds her of something. "I bought a bottle of that Tegrin stuff I told you about. It's in the shower. I want you to try it."

He bursts out laughing. "See? See? A perfect example. You take the holistic approach."

"I don't know that word," she says, frowning.

He stubs out the cigarette a quarter smoked. "It means that when you look at me you see me top to bottom and side to side and to you everything weighs the same."

She thinks about it, then nods. "I suppose, sure."

"You don't know what that's like. I put in a childhood when I was only...when I was one thing. The last six years, I've been another. It's a better thing, but still, to most people around here and back at Pitt, Scott Landon is nothing but a...a holy jukebox. Put in a couple of bucks and out comes a smucking story." He doesn't sound angry, but she senses he could become angry. In time. If he doesn't have a place to go and be safe, be right-sized. And yes, she could be that person. She could make that place. He would help her do it. To some extent they have done it already.

"You're different, Lisey. I knew it the first time I met you, on Blues Night in the Maine Lounge - do you remember?"

Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, does she remember. She had gone up to the University that night to look at the Hartgen art exhibition outside Hauck, heard the music coming from the lounge, and went in on what was little more than a whim. He came in a few minutes later, looked around at the mostly full house, and asked if the other end of the couch she was sitting on was taken. She had almost skipped the music. She could have made the eight-thirty bus back to Cleaves if she'd skipped it. That was how close she had come to being in bed alone tonight. The thought makes her feel the way looking down from a high window makes her feel.

She says none of this, only nods.

"To me you're like..." Scott pauses, then smiles. His smile is divine, crooked teeth and all. "You're like the pool where we all go down to drink. Have I told you about the pool?"

She nods again, smiling herself. He hasn't - not directly - but she's heard him talk about it at his readings, and during the lectures she's audited at his enthusiastic invitation, sitting way at the back of Board-man 101 or Little 112. When he talks about the pool he always reaches out, as if he'd put his hands in it if he could, or pull things - languagefishies, maybe - out of it. She finds it an endearing, boyish gesture. Sometimes he calls it the myth-pool; sometimes the word-pool. He says that every time you call someone a good egg or a bad apple you're drinking from the pool or catching tadpoles at its edge; that every time you send a child off to war and danger of death because you love the flag and have taught the child to love it, too, you are swimming in that pool...out deep, where the big ones with the hungry teeth also swim.

"I come to you and you see me whole," he says. "You love me all the way around the equator and not just for some story I wrote. When your door closes and the world's outside, we're eye to eye."

"You're a lot taller than me, Scott."

"You know what I'm saying."

She supposes she does. And she's too moved by it to agree in the dead of night to something she might regret in the morning. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," she says. She takes his smoking gear and puts it on the floor again. "Ask me then, if you still want to."

"Oh, I'll want to," he says with perfect confidence.

"We'll see. For now, go back to sleep."

He turns on his side. He's lying almost straight now, but as he begins to drift he'll begin to bend. His knees will come up toward his narrow chest and his forehead, behind which all the exotic storyfish swim, will go to the wall.

I know him. Am beginning to know him, at least.

At this she feels another wave of love for him, and has to close her lips against dangerous words. The kind that are hard to take back once they have been spoken. Maybe impossible. She settles for pressing her br**sts to his back and her stomach to his naked bottom. A few late crickets sing outside the window and Pluto goes on barking his way through another night shift. She begins to drift away again.