Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball Page A

He's going to murder us all, somehow.

    She turned a little pale. That was odd, thought James.

    —What do you think? he asked.

    Grieve said nothing, but looked down at her feet. Her face had gone blank. She had been trying to play a game, but the gravity of it had gotten the better of her. James was sure now. She knew. She knew what her father was going to do. Now if only she would tell him.

    He started to say something.

    She tossed the paper on the floor and slid up on top of him. He started to kiss her, and he could feel the length of her against him. He thought of days then in October when he was a boy and he had seen in the windows of houses candles lit at night, and how happy it had made him. There were waters in the middle of the ocean that met having come great distances, dispersing through great distances but keeping still some character, some inimitable character of water, and then, to have that, and meet, in the midst of a great ocean, water from a far place, and mingle with it in the midst of the ocean's lapsing. He felt her tongue along his chest, her legs wrapped tight around his legs. She tightened and he could feel himself like the sound in a room when a door is opened, rushed out into intervening space, unable to counter anything, accepting all, expanding, meeting, taking upon itself all space, all motion, trembling, entering other rooms, other bodies. Grieve was trembling, and her face was hot against his. She kissed and kissed him.

    —I was lying, she whispered. What can I tell you?

    And then he was inside of her and they were together in the lost deep ground where no one had gone until they, and where no one could go, where everyone had gone, of course, and did go, but not at once, just one pair and then another, never passing one another on the way, each taking of its own accord a seldom path that cannot be found by the eye, but is traced irrevocably in pageants of color and light. She was saying something, talking and talking. He could hear her but he could not.

    And then they slept.

    And afterwards it was late morning, and the light had not left or been made less by clouds. His arms about her, James wondered again if someone was watching. He wondered if someone had been watching the whole time.

    It would have been quite a show, he thought, and pictured Sermon and Leonora Loft kneeling in the small room and winking to each other.

    And also, he wondered, in the broad vagueness of his thought, what did Grieve know? What could she tell him?

 

    A note beyond the door:

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    Meeting canceled.

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    James rubbed his eyes—it was a good thing the meeting was canceled. He'd forgotten to go in the first place.

 

    What was the origin, James wondered, of Grieve's lying? He remembered she had said something about the matter. What had it been? He thought back. They had been standing on the roof of the house. First they had gone up the stairs into the upstairs bathroom. Grieve had gone in. She had waved to him. He had gone in. She had locked the door with a key from the inside.

    —Here we are, he said, in the bathroom.

    It was very small. Just a porcelain sink recessed in the wall, a porcelain toilet with a chain pull, and a window in a roof that slanted down, halving the room. Grieve opened the window with a practiced gesture.

    —This is the way.

    Out then the window onto the roof that proved to be only an initial roof. Many roofs stretched in all directions, some up, some down, most across, all away.

    —I want to have sex with you right now, said James, for Grieve's dress was being blown very tightly against her by the wind.

    —You shall not, she said. At least, not while he's watching.

    James looked over his shoulder. The cat had come up with them, had entered the bathroom unseen, and now was limping across the roof, dragging its hind leg.

    —Oh, Mephisto, she said. What a darling you are.

    She scooped up the cat.

    —I thought its name was something else, said James.

    —Around