Lisey's Story(5)

Then she was awake and could hear herself in the dark, saying it over and over like a mantra: "I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice."

She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking -- not for the first time -- that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed. She would have thought two years was enough time for the strangeness to rub off, but it wasn't; time apparently did nothing but blunt grief's sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced. Because everything was not the same. Not outside, not inside, not for her. Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

part II. Lisey and The Madman

(Darkness Loves Him)

1

THE NEXT MORNING LISEY SAT tailor-fashion on the floor of Scott's memory nook, looking across at the heaps and stacks and piles of magazines, alumni reports, English Department bulletins, and University 'journals' that ran along the study's south wall. It had occurred to her that maybe looking would be enough to dispel the stealthy hold all those as-yet-unseen pictures had taken on her imagination. Now that she was actually here, she knew that had been a vain hope. Nor would she need Manda's limp little notebook with all the numbers in it. That was lying discarded on the floor nearby, and Lisey put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't like the look of it, the treasured artefact of a not-quite-right mind.

She once again measured that long stack of books and magazines against the south wall, a dusty booksnake four feet high and easily thirty feet long. If not for Amanda, she probably would have packed every last one of them away in liquorstore boxes without ever looking at them or wondering what Scott meant by keeping so many of them.

My mind just doesn't run that way, she told herself. I'm really not much of a thinker at all.

Maybe not, but you always remembered like a champ.

That was Scott at his most teasing, charming, and hard to resist, but the truth was she'd been better at forgetting. As had he, and both of them had had their reasons. And yet, as if to prove his point, she heard a ghostly snatch of conversation. One speaker - Scott - was familiar. The other voice had a little southern glide to it. A pretentious little southern glide, maybe.

-  Tony here will be writing it up for the [thingummy, rum-tum-tummy, whatever]. Would you like to see a copy, Mr Landon?

-  Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!

Muttering voices all around them. Scott barely hearing the thing about Tony writing it up, he'd had what was almost a politician's knack for turning himself outward to those who'd come to see him when he was in public, Scott was listening to the voices of the swelling crowd and already thinking about finding the plug-in point, that pleasurable moment when the electricity flowed from him to them and then back to him again doubled or even tripled, he loved the current but Lisey was convinced he had loved that instant of plugging in even more. Still, he'd taken time to respond.

-  You can send photos, campus newspaper articles or reviews, departmental write-ups, anything like that. Please. I like to see everything. The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road, Castle Rock, Maine. Lisey knows the zip. I always forget.

Nothing else about her, just Lisey knows the zip. How Manda would have howled to hear it! But she had wanted to be forgotten on those trips, both there and not there. She liked to watch.

Like the fellow in the  p**n o movie? Scott had asked her once, and she'd returned the thin moon-smile that told him he was treading near the edge. If you say so, dear, she had replied.

had a little southern glide to it. A pretentious little southern glide, maybe.

- Tony here will be writing it up for the [thingummy, rum-tumtummy, whatever]. Would you like to see a copy, Mr. Landon?

- Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!

He always introduced her when they arrived and again here and there, to other people, when it became necessary, but it rarely did. Outside of their own fields, academics were oddly lacking in curiosity. Most of them were just delighted to have the author of The Coaster's Daughter

(National Book Award) and Relics (the Pulitzer) among them. Also, there had been a period of about ten years when Scott had somehow gotten larger than life - to others, and sometimes to himself. (Not to Lisey; she was the one who had to fetch him a fresh roll of toilet paper if he ran out while he was on the john.) Nobody exactly charged the stage when he stood there with the microphone in his hand, but even Lisey felt the connection he made with his audience. Those volts. It was hardwired, and it had little to do with his work as a writer. Maybe nothing. It had to do with the Scottness of him, somehow. That sounded crazy, but it was true. And it never seemed to change him much, or hurt him, at least until  -

Her eyes stopped moving, fixed on a hardcover spine and gold leaf letters reading U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.

1988, the year of the rockabilly novel. The one he'd never written.

1988, the year of the madman.

-  Tony here will be writing it up

"No," Lisey said. "Wrong. He didn't say Tony, he said  - "

-  Toneh

Yes, that was right, he said Toneh, he said

-  Toneh heah well be rahtin it up

" -  writin it up for the U-Tenn '88 Year in Review," Lisey said. "He said . . ."