It is nearly two a.m. when Gillian gets home from Ben’s house. It’s the last night of the month, and the moon is thin and silvery; the air is turning to mist. Gillian always comes back to Sally’s place; it’s like a safety net. But tonight Ben told her he was tired of the way she always left as soon as they were finished in bed. He wanted her to move in with him.
Gillian thought he was kidding, she really did. She laughed and said, “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, after you’ve fucked them twenty or thirty times.”
“No,” Ben said. He wasn’t smiling. “I’ve never said it before.”
All day long Ben had had the feeling that he was about to either lose or win, and he couldn’t tell which it would be. He put on a show at the hospital this morning, and one of the children, a boy of eight, wept when Ben made Buddy disappear into a large wooden box.
“He’ll be back,” Ben assured this most distraught member of his audience.
But the boy was convinced that Buddy’s reemergence was impossible. Once someone was gone, he told Ben, that was the end of him. And in the case of this boy, the theory was irrefutable. He’d been in the hospital for half his life, and this time he would not be going home. Already, he was leaving his body; Ben could see it just by looking at him. He was disappearing by inches.
And so Ben did what a magician almost never does: he took the boy aside and revealed how Buddy sat quietly and snugly within a false bottom of the disappearing box. But the boy refused to be consoled. Perhaps this wasn’t even the same rabbit ; there was no proof, after all. A white rabbit was an everyday thing, you could buy a dozen at a pet store. And so the boy continued to cry, and Ben might have wept right along with this child had he not been lucky enough to possess the tricks of his trade. Quickly, he reached to pull a silver dollar from behind the boy’s ear.
“See.” Ben grinned. “Presto,” he announced.
The boy stopped crying all at once; he was startled out of his tears. When Ben told him the silver dollar was his to keep, this boy looked, for a brief instant, the way he might have if awful things had not happened to him. At noon, Ben left the hospital and went to the Owl Café, where he had three cups of black coffee. He didn’t have lunch; he didn’t order the hash and eggs that he liked, or the bacon, lettuce, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitresses watched him carefully, hoping he’d soon be up to his old tricks, setting the salt shakers on end, starting fires in the ashtrays with a snap of his fingers, snatching tablecloths from beneath their place settings, but Ben just went on drinking coffee. After he’d paid and left a large tip, he drove around for hours. He kept thinking about the life span of a mayfly, and all the time he had wasted, and frankly he wasn’t willing to waste any more.
Ben has spent his whole life afraid that whoever he loves will disappear, and there’ll be no finding her: not behind the veils, not in the false bottom of the largest wooden box, the red lacquer one he keeps in the basement but cannot bring himself to use, even though he’s been assured he can drive swords through the wood without causing a single wound. Well, that had changed. He wanted an answer, right then, before Gillian got dressed and ran back to the safety of her sister’s house.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Yes or no?”
“This isn’t a yes-or-no kind of thing,” Gillian hedged.
“Oh, yes,” Ben said with absolute certainty. “It is.”
“No,” Gillian insisted. Looking at his solemn face, she wished then that she’d known him forever. She wished that he had been the first one to kiss her, and the first to make love to her. She wished she could say yes. “It’s more of a thinking-it-over kind of thing.”
Gillian knew where this argument would lead. Start living with someone, and before you knew it you were married, and that was a human condition Gillian planned to avoid repeating. In that arena, she was something of a jinx. As soon as she said “I do,” she always realized that she didn’t at all, and that she never had, and she’d better get out fast.
“Don’t you understand?” Gillian told Ben. “If I didn’t love you I’d move in today. I wouldn’t think twice.”
Actually, she’s been thinking about it ever since she left him, and she’ll keep right on thinking about it, whether she wants to or not. Ben doesn’t understand how dangerous love can be, but Gillian certainly does. She’s lost at this too many times to sit back and relax. She has to stay on her toes, and she has to stay single. What she really needs is a hot bath and some peace and quiet, but when she sneaks in the back door she finds Antonia and Kylie waiting up for her. They’re frantic and ready to call for an ambulance. They’re beside themselves with worry. Something has happened to their mother, and they don’t know what.