All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [168]
Then I thought, quite objectively as though I were observing the symptoms of a total stranger: You are in love.
I was, for a moment, bemused by that thought. That I was in love. And that it wasn’t a bit like the way I had thought it would be. I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars, all lying up there in the bank for him to draw on, or who learns that the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but the enemy. I got out of bed, very carefully, handling myself with awe-struck care as though I were a basket of eggs, and went to the window and stared out into the moon-drenched night.
So the College Boy, who had thought he was such a God-damned big man and knew everything and who had, that evening, looked across the little space of leather cushion and had thought the stale impersonal thoughts almost as a kind of duty to the definition of what he considered himself to be–so he hadn’t reached out his hand across that little space and now as a result of that fact stood buck-naked in a shadowy room before an open window and stared out into enormous moon-soaked, sea-glittering night while off yonder in the myrtle hedge a mocking bird hysterically commented on the total beauty and justice of the universe.
That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn’t need word or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, “Sh, sh,” and smile. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever. Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn’t really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was.
Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the distillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn’t be anything at all. There would be Adam with us often, and sometimes the other people, with books, sandwiches, and a blanket in the pine woods, on the beach, at the tennis courts, on the shadowy gallery with a phonograph going, in the boat, at the movies. But sometimes she would let her book slide down to the blanket and lie back staring up into the high arch and tangle of the pine boughs, and I would begin to spy on her until, in a minute, it would be as though Adam weren’t there. Or on the gallery she would be laughing and jabbering with all the others while the phonograph worked away, and then I would catch sight of her suddenly still and pensive, just for a moment it might be, with her eyes fixed off beyond the gallery and the yard, and again, just for that moment, it would be as though Adam and the others weren’t there.
Or we would go down to the hotel, where there was a high-dive tower, a good high one because the hotel was pretty swank and had exhibitions and races there now and then. Anne was crazy about diving that summer. She would go up high–she worked up higher and higher, day by day–and stand up there in the sunlight poised there at the very verge. Then when she lifted her arms, I would feel that something was about to snap in me. Then down she would fly, a beautiful swan dive, with her arms wide to emphasize her trim breasts, and her narrow back arched and her long legs close and sweet together. She would come flying down in the sunlight, and as I watched her it would be as though nobody else were there. I would hold my breath till whatever was going to snap inside me snapped. Then she would knife into the water, and he twin heels would draw through the wreath of ripple and the flicker of spray, and be gone. Adam sometimes got sore as hell at her for going up so high.