“It was a good two weeks,” said Bill.
Walter nodded. “It was a very fine two weeks.”
“I sure got tan.”
“You sure did.”
“It’s starting to come off now, though,” said Bill, regretfully. “Wish I’d had time to make it a good permanent one.” He peered over his shoulder at his back and made some gestures at it with elbows bent, fingers clutching. “Look, Walt, this damn stuff is peeling off, and it itches. You mind taking off some of the stuff?”
“I don’t mind,” said Walter. “Turn around.”
Bill turned silently, and Walter, reaching out, eyes shining, gently pulled off a strip of skin.
Piece by piece, flake after flake, strip by strip, he peeled the dark skin off of Bill’s muscled back, shoulder blades, neck, spine, bringing out the pink naked white underneath.
When he finished, Bill looked nude and lonely and small and Walter realized that he had done something to Bill, but that Bill was accepting it philosophically, not worried about it, and a great light shone in Walter instantly, out of the whole summer’s time!
He had done something to Bill that was right and natural and there was no way of escaping or getting around it, that was the way it was and had to be. Bill had waited the summer through and thought he had something, but it wasn’t really there all the time. He just thought it was there.
The wind blew away the flakes of skin.
“You been lying here all July and August for that,” said Walter, slowly. He dropped a fragment. “And there it goes. I been waiting all my life and it goes to the same place.” He turned his back proudly to Bill and then, half sad, half happy, but at peace he said:
“Now, let’s see you peel some offa me!”
THE ISLAND
1952
THE WINTER NIGHT DRIFTED by lamplit windows in white bits and pieces. Now the procession marched evenly, now fluttered and spun. But there was a continual sifting and settling, which never stopped filling a deep abyss with silence.
The house was locked and bolted at every seam, window, door, and hatch. Lamps bloomed softly in each room. The house held its breath, drowsed and warm. Radiators sighed. A refrigerator hummed quietly. In the library, under the lime green hurricane lamp, a white hand moved, a pen scratched, a face bent to the ink, which dried in the false summer air.
Upstairs in bed, an old woman lay reading. Across the upper hall, her daughter sorted linen in a cupboard room. On the attic floor above, a son, half through thirty years, tapped delicately at a typewriter, added yet another paper ball to the growing heap on the rug.
Downstairs, the kitchen maid finished the supper wineglasses, placed them with clear bell sounds onto shelves, wiped her hands, arranged her hair, and reached for the light switch.
It was then that all five inhabitants of the snowing winter night house heard the unusual sound.
The sound of a window breaking.
It was like the cracking of moon-colored ice on a midnight pond.
The old woman sat up in bed. Her youngest daughter stopped sorting linens. About to crumple a typewritten page, the son froze, the paper shut in his fist.
In the library, the second daughter caught her breath, let the dark ink dry with almost an audible hiss, halfway down the page.
The kitchen maid stood, fingers on the light switch.
Not a sound.
Silence.
And the whisper of the cold wind from some far broken window, wandering the halls.
Each head turned in its separate room, looked first at the faintest stir of carpet nap where the wind stroked in under each breathing door. Then they snapped their gazes to the brass door locks.
Each door had its own bulwarking, each its arrangements of snap-bolts, chain-locks, bars, and keys. The mother, in those years when her eccentricities had spun them like tops until their sense flew away, had supervised the doors as if each were a precious and wonderful new still life.