A Pleasure to Burn (19 page)

Leahy reached down and ignited the kerosene.

People ran out on their porches all down the street.

 

“W
HO IS IT
?”

“Who would it be?” said Mr. Montag, now leaning against the closed door in the dark.

His wife said, at last. “Well, put on the light.”

“No.”

“Why not? Turn it on.”

“I don't want the light.”

The room was black.

“Take off your clothes. Come to bed.”

“What?”

He heard her roll impatiently; the springs squeaked. “Are you drunk?”

He took off his clothes. He worked out of his coat and let it slump to the floor. He removed his pants and held them in the air and let them drop.

His wife said, “What are you doing?”

He balanced himself in the room with the book in his sweating, icy hand.

A minute later she said, “Just don't stand there in the middle of the room.”

He made a sound.

“What?” she asked.

He made more sounds. He walked to the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the pillow. He fell into the bed and his wife called out at this. He lay separate from her. She talked to him for a long while and when he didn't answer but only made sounds, he felt her hand creep over, up along his chest, his throat, his chin. Her hand brushed his cheeks. He knew that she pulled her hand away from his cheeks wet.

A long time later, when he was at last drifting into sleep, he heard her say, “You smell of kerosene …”

Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. Many nights in the past ten years he had come awake and found her with her eyes open in the dim room. She would look that way, blankly, for an hour or more, and then rise and go into the bathroom. You could hear the water run into the glass, the tinkle of the sedatives bottle, and Mildred gulping hungrily, frantically, at sleep.

She was awake now. In a minute she would rise and go for the barbiturate.

And suddenly she was so strange to him that he couldn't believe that he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, with a woman he had never seen before, and this made him shift uneasily under the covers.

“Awake?” she whispered.

“Yes. Millie?”

“What?”

“Mildred, when did we meet? And where?”

“For what?” she asked.

“I mean, originally.”

She was frowning in the dark.

He clarified it. “The first time we met, where, when?”

“Why it was at—”

She stopped.

“I don't know.”

“Neither do I,” he said, frightened. “Can't you remember?”

They both tried to remember.

“It's been so long.”

“We're only thirty!”

“Don't get excited—I'm trying to think!”

“Think, then!”

She laughed. “Wait until I tell Rene! How funny, not to remember where or when you met your wife or husband!”

He did not laugh, but lay there with his eyes tight, his face screwed up, pressing and massaging his brow, tapping and thumping his blind head again and again.

”It can't be very important.” She was up, in the bath now, the water running, the swallowing sound.

“No, not very,” he said.

And he wondered, did she take two tablets now, or twenty, like a year ago, when we had to pump her stomach at the hospital, and me shouting to keep her awake, walking her, asking her why she did it, why she wanted to die, and she said she didn't know, she didn't know, she didn't know anything about anything. But he thought he had known for her … She didn't belong to him. He didn't belong to her. She didn't know herself, or him, or anyone. The world didn't need her. She didn't need herself. And in the hospital looking down at her he had realized that if she should die in the next minute, he wouldn't cry. For it was the dying of a stranger. And it was suddenly so very wrong that he had cried not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly man, empty, beside an empty woman while the doctors emptied her stomach still more.

And why are we empty and lonely and not in love, he had asked himself, a year ago. Why are we strangers in the same house? That was the first time he had begun to think about the world and how it was made, and his job, all of it.

And then he realized what it was. They were never together. There was always something between. A radio, a television set, a car, a plane, nervous exhaustion, a mad rushing, or, simply, a little pheno-barbitol. They didn't know each other. They knew things. They knew inventions. They had both applauded while science had built a beautiful glass structure, a fine glittering wonder, so precise and mechanical and wonderful that it was glorious, and, too late, discovered that it was a glass wall, through which they could not shout, through which they gestured empty pantomime silently, never touching, never hearing, never seeing really, never smelling or tasting one another.

Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don't know you, who are you, does it matter if we live or die?

That might not have been enough, if the people had not moved next door, with their beautiful daughter. Twelve months ago it had been, hadn't it, he had first seen the dark young girl?

 

P
ERHAPS THAT HAD BEEN THE START
of his awareness. One night, as had become his custom over the years, he had gone out for a long walk. Two things happened as he strolled along in the moonlight. One, he realized that he had gone out to escape the crash of the television set, whereas always before he had put it down to nervous tension. Second, he noted what he had often seen but never thought about, that he was the only pedestrian in the entire city. He passed street after empty street. At a distance cars moved like fire-bugs in the misting darkness, faintly hooting. But no other man ventured upon the earth to test the concrete with foot or cane, in fact it had been so long since the sidewalks were steadily used that they were beginning to lump up and crack and become overgrown with hardy flowers and grass.

And so he walked alone, suddenly realizing his loneliness, exhaling a powdery vapor from his mouth and watching the pattern.

That was the night the police stopped him and searched him.

“What're you doing?”

“Out for a walk?”

“He says he's out for a walk, Jim.”

The laughter. The cold precise turning over of his identity cards, the careful noting of his home address.

“Okay, mister, you can walk now.”

He had gone on, hands in pockets, in such a rage at being questioned for being a simple pedestrian, that he had to stop and hold onto himself, for his rage was all out of proportion to the incident.

And then the girl had turned a corner and walked by.

“Hello,” she said, half turning. “Aren't you my neighbor?”

“Of course,” he said. She was smiling at him.

“We're the only live ones, aren't we?” she said. She waved at the streets. “Did they stop you, too?”

“Walking is a misdemeanor.”

“They flashed their lights on me for a minute and saw I was a woman and went on,” she said. She looked no more than sixteen. “I'm Clarisse McClellan. And you're Mr. Montag, the fireman.”

They walked along together.

“Isn't it like a city of the dead,” she said. “I like to come out and walk around just to keep my franchise on the sidewalks.”

He looked, and the city was like a tombyard, houses dark for television. He did not know what to say.

“Have you ever noticed all the cars rushing,” she said. “On the streets down there, the big ones, day and night. I sometimes think they don't know what grass is or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed them a green blur, oh yes they'd say, that's grass. Or a pink blur, yes, that's roses.” She laughed to herself. “And a white blur, that's a house. And quick brown blurs, those are cows. My uncle drove slow on a highway once and they threw him in jail. Isn't that funny and sad, too?”

“You think about a lot of things for a girl,” said Montag, looking over at her.

“I have to. I have so much time to think. I never watch TV or go to the races or the fun parks or any of that. So I have time to think lots of crazy things. Have you noticed the elongated billboards in the country, two hundred feet long. Did you know that once those billboards were only 25 feet long? But cars started going by them so swiftly they had to stretch them out so they could be seen?”

“I didn't know that.” Montag laughed.

“I bet I know something else you don't know,” she said.

“What?”

“There's dew on the grass in the morning.”

“Is there?” He couldn't remember, and it suddenly frightened him.

“And there's a man in the moon if you look.”

He had never looked. His heart began to beat rapidly.

They walked silently from there on. When they reached her house the lights were all on, it was the only house on the street with bright lights.

“What's going on?” said Montag. He had never seen that many lights.

“Oh just my mother and father and my uncle and aunt. They're sitting around talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. Come over some time and try the water.”

“But what do you talk about?”

She laughed at this and said good night and was gone.

At three o'clock in the morning he got out of bed and looked out the window. The moon was rising and there was a man in the moon, and upon the broad lawn, a million jewels of dew sparkled and glittered. “I'll be damned,” he said, and went back to bed.

He saw Clarisse many afternoons sitting on her green lawn, studying the autumn leaves, or returning from the woods with wild flowers, or looking at the sky, even while it was raining.

“Isn't it nice?” she said.

“What?”

“The rain, of course.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“Believe me, it
is
nice.”

He always laughed embarrassedly, whether at her, or at himself, he was never certain. “I believe you.”

“Do you really? Do you ever smell old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon.”

“Well—”

“Here, smell.”

“Why, it is cinnamon, yes!”

She gazed at him with her clear grey eyes. “My gosh, you don't really know very much do you.” It was not unkind, but concerned with him.

“I don't suppose any of us do.”

“I do,” she said. “Because I've time to look.”

“Don't you attend school?”

“Oh, no, they say I'm anti-social. I don't mix. And the yelling extrovert is the thing this season, you know.”

“It's been a long season,” observed Mr. Montag, and stood shocked at his own perception.

“Then you've noticed?”

“Where are your friends?” he asked.

“I haven't any.”

“None?”

“No. That's supposed to mean I'm abnormal. But they're always packed around the TV, or rushing in cars, or shouting or hurting each other. Do you notice how people hurt people nowadays?”

“You sound ancient.”

“I am. I know about rain. That makes me ancient to them. They kill each other. It didn't used to be that way, did it? Children killing each other all the time. Four of my friends have been shot in the past year. I'm afraid of
them.
”

“Maybe it was always this way.”

“My father says no, says his grandfather remembers when children didn't kill each other, when children were seen and not heard. But that was a long time ago when they had discipline. When they had responsibility. Do you know,
I'm
disciplined. I'm beat when I need it. And I've responsibility, I tend to the whole house three days a week.”

“And you know about rain,” said Mr. Montag.

“Yes. It tastes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on!”

He leaned back and gaped.

“Why,” he said, “it's wine!”

 

T
HAT HAD NOT BEEN THE END OF IT
.
The girl, while only 16, was always about, it seemed, and he caught himself looking for her. She was the only one who had ever given him the dandelion test.

“It proves you're in love or not.

That was the day he knew he didn't love Mildred.

Clarisse passed the dandelion under his chin.

“Oh, you're not in love with anyone. What a shame!”