In the Night Room (20 page)

“Oh, I love this bed,” Willy said. “I think this is the perfect bed, the one all other beds aspire to be. I’m too tired to think about agency and too fuzzy to contemplate the imponderables of our situation. Here I am, in a bed with Timothy Underhill. Everything is crazy, and nothing makes any sense, not even the slightest, faintest trace. At least I had a complete day, with no parts skipped over.”

She scooted a bit toward me, and I a bit toward her.

“You’ll hold me, won’t you? I think that would be heavenly, and I’m not even going to question why. I’m too bushed. But one thing I will say: in about an hour and a half I’m going to get up and prowl around the parking lot to see if that miserable fucking car is anywhere in sight.”

Her head fell gently on my chest, and I put my arms around her. I stroked her back, her shoulder, the cool, soft, silken length of the arm lying across my torso. Her slim straight leg nestled against my leg, and we lay like that for what seemed an eternity built up of one second after another. My hand moved to the small of her back and stroked the cool skin there. She did not feel like a fictional character; she felt like a lovely human being with a boy’s hips and a woman’s soft, duck-tail bottom, only smaller than most. It had been a long, long time since I had been in bed with a woman, and that had been nothing like this. I wanted to touch every inch of Willy Patrick, to slide into Willy Patrick’s tender body, and I wanted that with a depth of passion I had probably not felt since my twenties.

Her hand slipped down to the band of my undershorts, and my leg moved between hers.

“Oh, God,” she said, and I said, “I know. This is so odd.”

“Where are you?” she said. “Are you there? Ah, I see, you are there. My goodness. Don’t you think you should sort of wiggle out of that stupid thing you’re wearing? You’re so
huge,
you’re going to strangle yourself.”

I wiggled out of the stupid thing, my panting organ even harder for having been so blatantly flattered, and she shed her bra and her little tighty-whity with what seemed one fluid motion, and after that a kind of paradise opened before us. When I entered her, it
was
like entering paradise. Within her, I felt miraculously, blissfully at home—in the perfect place at last. I fell in love—that’s the corniest, most banal, and truest way to say it. Before, I had felt as though I was falling in love, and now I had completed the journey. I was
there.
I wanted to hold her, cherish her, celebrate her for the rest of my life. It happened that quickly: I felt cleaved to Willy Patrick, as if we had one soul. We were like the gods depicted in erotic transport on half-ruined temples lost in the middle of great jungles. In the end, we seemed to flow together, to wear each other’s skin and find ecstatic release as one four-legged, four-armed, two-headed organism.

“God,” Willy breathed. “You’re the author I want when I’m depressed, all right. I’m going to stop fretting about agency. I don’t care, I’ve never been fucked like that before, and I want more of it.”

“I have no idea how this is going to work out,” I said, and kissed the palm of her hand, “but I don’t ever want to lose you.”

“Why should you lose me?” Willy asked. “I’m yours, aren’t I?”

Soon after, she fell asleep. I slipped into my shirt and trousers and went the back way down to the parking lot, where something like a dozen cars, none of them silver Mercedes sedans, slept under the shelter of the looming trees.

What happened in this room is what Cyrax meant when he sent across my monitor in his Arial ten-point font u will have a chance of achieving something extraordinary & incestuous & ravishing unto heart-melt & impossible for every crack-brain author but u!

Now, ravishing unto heart-melt, Willy is raising her head and groping the pillow beside hers, and this crack-brain author is going to put down his pen and let her find me.

24

Willy kneeling on the bed, rummaging in smiling concentration through her bag and offering various items of clothing for his contemplation: she had crammed a lot of stuff into that bag. Blouses, shirts, sweaters, underwear, dresses, skirts, and jeans were displayed to him for comment, then placed beside the suitcase on the bed. “I should wear something comfortable,” she said. “Especially since we’re going to spend all day in the car. How about this sweater and a pair of shorts?” She held up for his approval a little cream-colored cotton-and-silk sweater with long sleeves and a boat neck. It probably weighed as much as a packet of stamps.

“I’d love to see you wear that,” he said, and offered her a fragment of the mosaic she would eventually have to assemble. “Where’s it from?”

“Hmmm.” She held out the sweater, glanced puzzled at Tim, then checked the back of the collar for a label. “I don’t remember where I got it. The label says ‘Grand Street,’ but that must be the brand name. I don’t know of any shop called Grand Street.”

She could not remember where she bought the sweater because it had come into existence only at the moment she had opened her closet and pulled it from a shelf.

“I don’t either,” he said, “and I live on Grand Street.”

“In a loft?”

He nodded.

“That’s nice. I always wanted to live in a loft. If Mitchell Faber hadn’t scooped me up, I think I would probably have left the apartment I had on East Seventy-seventh and looked for a nice loft space downtown.” She began putting her clothes back into her case.

“Would you?” In a way that was quickly becoming familiar, she had surprised him. The woman who had appeared in his life exhibited certain subtle differences from her representation on the page.
His
Willy would never have thought to leave her Upper East Side apartment, but only because he had not understood her well enough. As he had seen in the bookstore, he had underrated his heroine.

“Sure, as long as I felt stable enough to move,” Willy said. “But I was feeling pretty well put together before Mitchell relocated me to Hendersonia. I mean, on the
night
I met him, I wasn’t all that secure, but in general I was recovering pretty well. Once I got to Hendersonia, though, wow, it was like I was in some weird slow-motion dream. I thought I needed Mitchell to protect me, and look how that turned out.”

“We’re going to have to keep an eye out for Mitchell,” Tim said, remembering again that Cyrax had written of a 2ble peril created by Kalendar’s merging with a 2nd Dark Man, a dark dark villain almost instantly to b in pursuit of yr lovely gamine.

“How much do you know about all that?” Willy asked him. “Mitchell, and Hendersonia, and Roman Richard and Giles, and the Baltic Group.”

“A surprising amount, considering that we’d never met until last night. Tom kept me pretty well filled in.”

“Boy, I never realized what a gossip he was,” Willy said.

“He knew I was getting very fond of you.”

“You were? Just from hearing about me?” She smiled at him, then closed her repacked suitcase and swung her legs down on his side of the bed. “How nice. What do you think, do I come up to your expectations?”

“You surpass my expectations,” he said.

“I do?” She slid off the bed, moved quickly across the gleaming dark floorboards, and slipped into his lap. Her body felt as if she were made of balsa wood and foam. She kissed him. “I don’t know about you, but what happened between us last night was extraordinary. People talk about out-of-body experiences, but I think my body left
me.
Talk about surpassing expectations! It was like some kind of religious experience.”

“Maybe it was a religious experience.”

“My whole body feels so
light
—really, I’ve never felt anything like it.”

For a time, he held her with the fierce protectiveness that came from the knowledge that he was going to lose her—as if in her lightness she would float away from him on the spot.

“You must have had thousands of women,” she said.

“Not really.” He smiled, although she could not see it. “Tom Hartland and I have a number of things in common. I haven’t had thousands of anything, but the people I have gone to bed with tended to be men.”

She was already looking up at him with a mixture of disbelief and astonishment. “You? But you—you’re not kidding, are you? You’re actually gay? You can’t be that gay, though. If you weren’t incredibly turned on, I have no idea of what’s going on, anywhere. You were like, I don’t know, like Zeus coming down in a shower of gold.”

She slid around on his lap, straddled him, and moved her head close to his and looked deep into his eyes.

“I thought so, too,” he said. “It was exactly like that. I’m astoundingly attached to you.” He spoke with all the frankness the moment would allow. “There’s a reason for all this, Willy, and you’re going to find out what it is.”

“I certainly hope so.”

She had taken his remark as an attempt at general encouragement. He said, “I’m not speaking loosely, Willy. You do have something to find out, and it’s extremely important.”

She pulled her head back. “Is this whatever Tom kept saying he had to tell me, only the time was never right?”

“No. They’re related, but what Tom was talking about is something else.”

“And you know what that was, that secret, or whatever.”

He nodded.

“So he told you, but he didn’t tell me?”

“Not exactly.”

She cocked her head. “What does that mean? Either he told you, or he didn’t. Which one was it?”

“He didn’t, Willy. It’s just something I know.”

“So this is like general knowledge? If I put in the right terms, I could look it up on Google?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“But now there are two big secrets. I don’t like this. It’s skeevy.”

Skeevy?
Tim thought. Like
agency,
it was a word he would never use.

“What makes Timothy Underhill willing to risk injury, death, and imprisonment on behalf of a woman he just met? Why would he even consider driving her halfway across the country?”

“Timothy doesn’t feel he has much choice.”

He put his arms around her, and the moment of tension passed. They clung to each other as if they were stranded on a rock. Tim kissed her forehead, and she sighed and tightened her grip.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked.

“I guess.” She nestled into him, pressed the side of her head to his chest, drew in her legs. She weighed nothing, and her bones seemed made of water. “Will we get to Millhaven today?”

“I think so, yes. We’ll get to Indiana, then drive north. I want to get there in time to do a couple of things before the reading.” Also, Tim could feel Cyrax as though he were present in the room, and he was saying,
Get to Millhaven, buttsecks, and do yr job! You caused this mess, now you SOLVE it!
It was time for another fragment of the mosaic: Willy had to understand everything before they got to Millhaven.

“What was the name of your second-grade teacher?”

“Who cares?” She unhooked the bra she was wearing and tossed it toward her suitcase. “I don’t even think I remember.”

“Mine was named Mrs. Gross. I remember that, and I’m a lot older than you are. You should be able to remember her name, Willy.”

Willy closed her eyes and put her hands on the sides of her head. Her face tightened into a grimace. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think my second-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Gross, too. Maybe we had the same one. Did you go to . . .” Again, she squinched up her face and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “Ahhh . . . Freeman? Lawrence Freeman Elementary School?”

“Yes, I did,” he said.

“Well, there’s your answer! We went to the same school, we probably had a lot of the same teachers.”

“Kind of funny, though, isn’t it, that the school is right behind the St. Alwyn Hotel, in Pigtown, and the Children’s Home is way over on the north side of town.”

“I’m going into the shower, sorry. Come on, you’re getting hard again, let’s get this guy in the shower and see what he does when he’s wet.”

Tim found both amusement and a kind of wonder in having so underestimated his heroine’s sexual frankness and appetite. They forgot their worries until their hunger brought them back to the world. For Tim Underhill, every time he made love to Willy, his darling and his invention, he became more attached and involved, deepening the process that had started when he had placed her, like a figure on a chessboard, in front of the Michigan Produce warehouse.

At the end of their breakfast in the Swan Room, Mr. Davy told them that he had been visited by the police. Willy had displayed an amazing appetite, eating all four of her pancakes and all of her bacon, and following that with the two pancakes Tim still had left on his plate.

“They were wondering, do you see, if I might have checked in a woman who robbed a bank in New Jersey. They showed me a picture, but I don’t think it really looked like Mrs. Halleden, and I certainly don’t think that Mrs. Halleden ever robbed a bank in New Jersey!”

“I don’t think she did, either,” Willy said. “Will they be coming back?”

“Not until lunchtime. Our police officers have a distinct taste for our sauerbraten and Wiener schniztel.”

“We’ll be checking out in a couple of minutes,” Tim said. “And thank you, Mr. Davy.”

Willy excused herself and stood up. While Tim calculated a tip, the total to be added to his hotel bill, he noticed that his host was closely watching “Mrs. Halleden” on her way to the restroom. In his admiration, he had forgotten that Tim was present. While Tim watched Mr. Davy watching Willy, the little man registered some sort of quick, fleeting shock: his body clenched, and he thrust his head forward. Tim glanced past him at Willy, who was disappearing around the door to the ladies’ room.

Suddenly realizing that he had been observed, Mr. Davy twitched around to face Tim. A faint blush, a faint smile enlivened his cherubic face.

“What?” Tim asked.

“Mrs. Halleden is a striking presence. If I may, sir.”

Tim gestured for him to go on.

“If I might say this without being impertinent, sir, the lady is somehow more beautiful than one takes in at first glance. And I believe she looks younger than when the two of you arrived last night.”

“There’s more. There’s something you’re not saying. What startled you?”

Mr. Davy looked at him sharply. “Startled me, Mr. Halleden?”

“Something made you do a double take. I’m curious about what it was.”

“It was just a mistake, a trick of the eye,” Mr. Davy said. “I’ll be at the desk, sir, should you wish your bags taken down.” He whirled around and was gone.

Tim examined Willy for signs of youthfulness as, evidently considering something she found troubling, she wove her way back to the table. She had always seemed essentially young to him, but he wondered if she did in fact seem a bit younger than she had the day before.

Abruptly, she said, “I have that ‘light’ feeling again. I don’t mean hunger. That’s emptiness. This is
lightness.
It’s like a buzz or a hum going through my whole body. It’s like a thousand hummingbird wings, all beating at once.”

Upstairs, Tim called the Pforzheimer in Millhaven and was assured that he could secure a junior suite for as long as he liked through the end of September. He was a valued customer, and they would treat him right. Then he called Maggie Lah and asked her to FedEx some of his shirts, pants, jackets, and socks to the hotel.

When he put down the phone, Willy said, “Let me pay for our hotels, okay? I won’t feel like such a parasite.”

When he protested, Willy said, “You shouldn’t have to pay for me, I should be paying for you! We could probably live off this money for a couple of years. Let me show it to you.”

As Willy dragged the long, white gym bag toward the bed, the telephone rang. Tim picked up the receiver and heard Mr. Davy say, “Mr. Halleden, please take a look out of your window. It appears that someone is extremely interested in your car.”

“Willy, take a look at the parking lot, will you?” He thanked Mr. Davy and watched her go to the window.

“De nada,”
Mr. Davy said. “Tell me if you or Mrs. Halleden recognize the gentleman. He’s too elegant to be a police officer.”

“Shit,” Willy said. “It’s Coverley. How did he ever find us here?”

Tim moved to the window and looked over Willy’s shoulder. A tall, slender man in a sweater the blue of a gas flame and pale gray trousers was walking back and forth beside Tim’s black Town Car. He had long, well-combed blond hair and the face of a bored priest, and he was stroking his chin as he peered through the windows. The man straightened up and looked around the lot, then checked his watch.

“He’s waiting for Roman Richard,” Willy said. “That soulless murdering prick.”

“Mrs. Halleden does not harbor friendly feelings toward the gentleman,” said Mr. Davy.

“No,” Tim said.

“Would he have any connection to the gray Mercedes sedan parked in front of the hotel?”

“What are you doing?” Willy asked.

“Yes, that’s his partner,” Tim said. “Willy, Mr. Davy and I are working something out.”