Considering how he felt after his call to Carolyn that night, what took place six hours later stunned and mesmerized him; it was as if an orange butterfly had crawled from a black chrysalis, from a small and an inert cocoon that had appeared to be lifeless. He had not told Carolyn the full truth when he had left Tucson. There had been several reasons for that and those reasons had made sense to him. Between his reading of the letter and his departure that night, there had been literally dozens of things that he had had to attend to; even given such a crisis he could not walk out: he had many responsibilities and people to take care of. In the midst of all of them he could not explain everything. That was what he had told himself as he had hurried about. In addition he had wanted to not hurt Carolyn. He wished to protect her feelings as much as he could. He had simply told her that a childhood friend was dying, leaving out the fact that that friend had been his first lover and his first girlfriend; Carolyn had accepted this but he knew her moods, and her mood before his departure had been subdued at best. Therefore he had not called her since his arrival in Ocean View. He dreaded the conversation that he knew that they must have. “Hello,” Carolyn said quietly after the third ring. Her stereo was on in the background.
“Hi, honey, it’s me. I apologize for not calling you sooner.”
“Well, thanks.”
“What’s going on? It’s been horribly busy here.”
“I’m glad that you called me. I was beginning to worry about you.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. Like I said. It’s been very hectic.”
“How is your friend?”
“She’s quite bad. I think she has less than one month left.”
“Dwight, I’m terribly sorry. And you said that she’s your age?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think that that’s tragic. To be dying at only twenty-four.”
“It is.”
“Tell me something. This isn’t any kind of judgement.”
“What is it?”
“Was she more? Was she more than a friend to you?”
He paused.
“She was, wasn’t she? You were with her romantically, weren’t you?”
“Yes, a long time ago. More than what, six years ago now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? It was written all over your face.”
“It was?”
“Of course it was. You can’t hide that much from me.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide from you. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Do you know what hurts my feelings? If you really want to know?”
“What?”
“Dishonesty. When you lie by omitting something.”
“Honey, I was in shock! I was in a daze, all right?”
“I can buy that, partially. I would be in shock myself.”
“I was in a stupor. I am not exaggerating.”
“Like I said, okay. But there is another side to it.”
“What is that?”
“You had twelve hours. You had twelve entire hours to tell me the truth, and you chose, every time that I asked you, to say that she was a friend. ‘She was just a childhood friend,’ you told me three times. You had some volition there.”
“All right, I apologize. There were a lot of things going on.”
“You still could have told me. Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
“Trust you?”
“Sure, trust me. We’ve both had other relationships and we know that we have. What’s so different about this one?”
“Nothing.”
“I can’t believe that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have concealed it.”
“I did not ‘conceal’ it! I am fucking human, for Christ’s sakes!” They had fought bitterly. Despite themselves it had escalated and at last she had hung up. He had shoved up angrily and he had stood for a minute, thinking about all of the things that he had wanted to say to her; he had almost reached for the telephone but he had said “Fuck it” instead, and he had fulminated for four hours about his fiancé’s lack of compassion for him. Later, though, when he went upstairs, he realized something. Part of his anger was due to the fact that Carolyn had gauged him correctly. What he felt for Pamela was more intense than for Carolyn, and the love he felt for his high school sweetheart remained stronger and deeper; Carolyn, with her keen and precise mind, had put her finger on that, on a truth that unsettled him gravely and that he had sought to deny. But as he sat in the guest bedroom the truth filtered in. He loved Pamela with more passion than he had loved anyone. He allowed himself a long time to digest this truth, and as he did so the ocean whispered and murmured and sounded sibilant; a catbird or a mockingbird cackled and whistled outside, and when he checked his wrist watch he was startled to discover that it was midnight. Time had altered in some way that was not linear. He tapped out a Marlboro cigarette and he lighted it. Very slowly his irritations and his angers faded, and he stared toward the glass globe of the lamp on its desk; he lost track of the number of cigarettes that he lighted and stubbed out, and the smoke that filled the guest room wove and glowed in complex patterns. Once again he felt that a veil was present to him. Every time that he encountered the veil it became thinner. It was like a sheet of blue glass with a shimmer to it; and there was something beyond it that he strained to see; there was something that he reached for but that he could not apprehend, and his proper response was silence and an attentive attitude of waiting. He recalled how trails had looked when viewed from the cockpit of her Cessna. His thoughts seemed as thin and as tenuous as those trails had looked. There was something required of him and it was growing closer, and it involved this veil somehow and what lay beyond it; there would come a point, he realized, when he would see clearly, when the veil would disappear or when he would step through it. These were such unusual thoughts that he was astonished. They did not seem logical; they seemed mystical. He was not a religious man and he had never been one, and religious arguments and theories had always tired him; his place was in the physical world and not in a fantasized world, and to think in any other way had always struck him as hubris. Yet the veil shone before him and it was absolutely real. It was as real as the glass base of the lamp or as the mahogany angles of the desk. When he stood at three A.M. and lay on the bed, the veil continued to tremble and to vibrate in the exact center of the guest room; it was a weave of fine blue fibers and it refused to vanish, even when he closed his eyes and tried to think about Carolyn. The catbird or the mockingbird continued to chatter. Finally Dwight was able to sleep but only for two hours.