Point Masses

Anthologized in

Whispers from the Universe

Summer 2020

Hannah has a few stories of those days, tame ones. Living in Atchison, Kansas and stuck in a trailer and a marriage to a plumbing sub-contractor, chances to march or chant or carry a sign were few and far between, and so she, along with her red-necked husband and all the Republicans she felt surrounded by, had to watch on TV as everything happened out there. Angry protesters crowding the Washington Mall and wagging signs and fingers at the White House, shouting, singing, lighting candles. Telling him about what she'd watched on TV made her sound like a no-magic Cinderella who missed the ball and had to stay home with the mice. It all happened somewhere else, she’d said, and I missed it.  

"Do your kids know about all that?" he asks Lorna.  

"Oh sure. They think it's a hoot." 

But Hannah did manage one very small and insignificant act, as she’d put it, which was to drive to Lawrence one frigid winter day to take part in a campus march. There, with six-month-old baby Trilby bundled to sweating and strapped to her back papoose-style, she and the other misplaced Atchison anti-war wife and mom had joined up with several hundred orderly university students and hippies, and anybody else mad enough to add to the crowd and let Nixon know just what they thought of his bombing of Hanoi. Tame and all but meaningless, but at least it was something at the time, to me, she'd said, her wistful sigh telling him far more than her words ever did about that part of her life. Perpetually cloaked, it was one of the few times she’d allowed him a peek into those years.    

"All three of 'em think their parents are living legends or something." Lorna plows fingers through her hair, then tries for a fluffing. "And that Jerry Rubin and Joan Baez clones were called to life out of a natural history diorama to give birth to them." She laughs here, quietly, maternal again suddenly, affection for her children obvious. 

Unflappable, what will she tell him next? She's broken from type for sure and is pure surprise now, and her surprises are like strong little magnets pulling in the iron filings of his curiosity. "So, were you arrested?" He makes the question as casual-sounding as possible, though he really does want to hear. He can't guess what she’ll answer.

Wide-eyed and innocent, her look asks: Who me, arrested? Then, "So where's my steak?"  

She reminds him of a famished survivor plucked off a mid-sea life raft, and he sees her the night before bolting down a burger, the Deluxe, piled up with tomatoes and sautéed onions and mushrooms and lettuce and cheese, smeared and dripping with mayo and mustard. Back in the kitchen they call those things Garbage Cans. "Your steak’s coming," he tells her and looks around the corner towards the kitchen. "Rare takes longer." He winks but keeps eye contact, waiting for the answer.  

"Okay, yeah. Five times."  

"No kidding?" He looks at her across the bar and the years and her five arrests and three children and suspects maybe he isn't quite as far along in a life as he's thought.    

"But no convictions." She says this breezily and as if it negates everything.  

"What about Bob?" The tree scientist. He wonders, for the first time, what Bob really does for his living.  

"Ah, now for Bobby there's no counting arrests. But only two," and here she flips up fingers in the old peace sign, "convictions. No felonies, misdemeanors only."

He can't begin to say why this is so much fun. Ole Bob! He loves Bob now, whatever he does, and his multiple arrests. Then his own name is called from the kitchen and he goes for Lorna's steak. He’s thinking Jerry Rubin, not entirely sure who he was, and Joan Baez now. In the old days, he knows, looking at the plate in his hands, Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell were Hannah's Big Three. They changed my life, she told him once. Lorna’s sirloin is smallish but the potato is big, big as a brick and steaming. She eyes it like treasure as he carries it towards her.

Fascinated, last night he’d watched the spectacle of her eating that burger, caught somewhere between awe and horror as she gobbled it down, obviously loving every bite of the USDA choice ground round and the mustardy grease that ran back down her fingers. Tonight, she’s going at her food in the same way, happy, he thinks, to have to lick her fingers. Nothing like Hannah and the way she also sometimes licks her fingers. Usually just her right thumb, though, happy too, but in a different way, saying she loves the taste of things much more than the eating of them. A maintenance eater, Hannah picks and pokes her way through any meal, taking small portions onto her plate and rarely eating all of anything. 

This is when, as he watches Lorna search for a clean corner of the cloth napkin, he goes on framing for Hannah the story he started last night. He pictures them sitting together with beers out in the shade under the oaks the next day.

“That wallet I told you about? She came back. Truly championship story material!’ he’ll say. ‘Drank down Salty Dogs like a dog-catcher chasing a rabid pack.’ He will fashion the silly image, the way Hannah likes him to. She seems to crave the stories from the smoky bar she won't enter, the more ornamentation on them the better. Her vicarious thrills, he figures. ‘Well, this one had a sexual encounter sitting right at my bar,’ and here he'll pause in the telling to let the rope pay out as Hannah's eyes narrow and her nose crinkles up its last, few faded freckles in the way he loves. ‘Yeah?’ she'll say as she waits and works her waiting into anticipation. ‘Yeah? Man or woman?’ ‘Oh, woman,’ he'll say, ‘and what a woman! Did it right there in front of me and everybody else.’ ‘Get outta here’ she’ll say, doing her part. ‘Really,’ he'll make that slow, a little bit coy, nod, eyebrows as high as they'll go. ‘Sitting right there, all by herself, got off on a medium-rare Garbage Can the first night. Then came back for another go last night.’

"You won't believe it, but I can't," Lorna says when he starts talking dessert. "Just have to Jimmy-Carter this one." And to his mystification she says, "Oh, you know: just lust after it in my heart."  

He nods, scrambling. Jimmy-Carter it, of course. He’d been a clueless sophomore in college back then, only passingly aware of campaign politics, which now leaves him feeling again like a rookie in the world of grown-ups. Caught up, he shakes his head knowingly, says, "Spirit's willing, but the flesh...?"

"Hey, this flesh is always willing! Capacity's the problem tonight."

He pours her a cup of coffee and moves off to begin the shift-end restocking. The other bar customers, a couple of quiet, no-fuss regulars, settle their tab and clear out. Lorna seeing them go, glances at her watch and says with a sigh, "Guess it's time for me to mosey on back over to the fabulous Hotel Riviera."  

"I'm out of here in ten minutes," Clark says. She’s listing to her left a little and looks spent. "Why don't you wait and I'll drive you over there. I doubt those four salted puppies," and he scoops up her last rocks glass, drained even of the scent of vodka, "would be much good at crossing that highway in the dark."    

She waves him off. "I been crossing highways on my own for decades!"

But Lorna doesn't leave. She sits, silent, watching, as he replenishes the bottled beer supply, checks well liquor levels, snaps plastic lids onto the bins of fruit garnish, restocks straws, napkins and dish washing solution. She watches, he thinks, as if there is something for her to learn from his performance of these simple tasks or as if there might be significance in the arrangement of the straight, stacked rows of highball and rocks and liqueur glasses. Markers on some map. He does a final swab of the bar and breakfront, seeing her watch him, tallies his guest checks for the night and rubber-bands them together, then calls downstairs to let Jay know he’s ready to go. Jay, the night manager, will take the bar duty himself for the last two hours. But this week, with business so slow, Clark figures he’ll lock the doors early and get out of there himself. 

When he comes back from punching his time card, swatting an open palm with his Royals cap, Lorna says, "Let me buy you a drink, James.” She shrugs. "This is the last night of my furlough, you know. Back to domestic paradise tomorrow afternoon!"

Jay, behind the bar now, gaunt and on edge and bothered like everybody else by the slow week, only nods when he hears their order and sets to mixing immediately. Centering both drinks on white napkin squares, he nods to Lorna, barely looking at her, and says to Clark, "There you go, Captain. Smooth sailing for you now." Then with a shake of the head and a half-grim look, he gathers up the short pile of the night's guest checks. “Some week, huh?" he mutters, instead of one of his usual Keep-the-old-tiller-tilling send-off lines, and moves to a table to start sorting, ordering and totaling. Lisa’s long since been cut loose and gone home.    

Kahlua smoothing the way for the vodka, his Black Russian settles comfortably into his empty stomach and starts work on his tired back and legs. Sitting now, the cigarette tastes good, better as luxury than necessity, and he enjoys the simultaneous rush and loll of being done and off his feet, a worker no more this day and the next. He feels like sitting right here, doing nothing but nothing, with company, and figures he will. 

Lorna orders another round.

"Thanks, Ms, uh, Baez was it?" he says, straightening his back against the faux-leather of the bar chair. Into the second Black Russian, he’s finally relaxed, ready to roll, can go home and probably sleep right away. "My turn to treat you now – to a taxi ride. I’m sure Mr. Rubin doesn’t want you running across the mean streets of K.C. in the middle of the night."        

Without lifting her jaw from its supporting palm, Lorna looks at him sideways and says, sounding deeply weary and slightly hostile, "James, you have no idea what Bob wants." Then she straightens up, folding one forearm over the other.

He feels small again and young and silly sitting at his own bar just then, and wants to be gone. "Come on," he says, standing. "My car's out back." Somewhere in a suburb of Chicago, Clark thinks, Bob is sleeping soundly on his acre and a half.    

"Hey, James, I'm sorry. That wasn't nice. I didn't mean. . ."

"I know," he says and steps back to give her room. He does know, too. Like everybody else, she packs the rest of her life around with her, no matter what. No matter how many trips or drinks or smokes or steaks she tries to stuff in as insulation.  

"I'd appreciate a lift," she tells him, sounding defeated.

He wants to put his arm around her and tell her it’s okay, that they’re pals and have had had a great time together, share a brief, colorful and completely meaningless history now, and it doesn't matter. None of it. Nothing. He’s just a chemist-turned-bartender, he feels like telling her, and she’s a visiting social worker and their lives will go on as they have, as they will. Truth is, he can’t add but would like to, she doesn't have to worry about offending James Clark, graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill; there’s no way to offend him. But he doesn't put the arm around her, doesn't touch her at all as he catches Jay's eye and nods towards Lorna. "I'll run her over to the Riv." 

"Good idea," Jay says from his table in the corner. Flaherty's never likes the idea of hotel customers crossing those four lanes on foot. No flat wallets, they all like to say, and at one time or another a number of them have driven people across in the chill of early morning hours. "’Night, Jim. ‘Night, ma'am. Come back and see us."          

The old Mustang idles steadily, its headlights illuminating the 199 on her hotel room door. "Thanks, Lorna," he says as if she's driven the car and given him the lift. He feels the words becoming bigger, filling in empty spaces. It’s not just for saving him from another night of dreary monotony that he feels thankful, but beyond that he can't immediately identify the nature of his gratitude. 

"I'da died for sure trying to get across," Lorna says, tilting her head and looking over at him, not sounding a bit drunk now.  

Her look soaks in, coloring his vision, as if some kind of translucent nightshade liquid is pouring from her eyes into his, flooding the sockets, coating pupils and irises and everything behind them, changing the color of everything he sees. Inside, it drips down, drops falling onto every organ and into each cell, saturating all he knows or feels. He hears his own voice then, or the two stiff Russians, sounding liquid, saying, 'It isn't safe for you in the dark." The reflected light in the car has become bluish and otherworldly.

  "Well," she says after a long silent moment, "I could turn on a light." Then, "There's powdered coffee and a couple a tea bags in there."

He stretches from his seat to hers, hands suspended in air, to kiss the tea bags from her lips, and from the beginning he feels the electric response. His fingers find her face and run along her chin until he’s gripping her whole jaw in his two hands, holding her as firmly as if she were resisting. He’s falling into her then, leaving all behind, knowing nothing but the pull of her mouth and body.

"Can't breathe." She twists away, but only enough to take a breath.  

Her chest heaves. He slackens his hold some to back off more, but she comes at him then, clutching at his sleeve, his arm, a shoulder, her mouth hunting his. They pull at each other and clamp themselves into another kiss. He has never known this before, with anybody, an acute and mindless loss of control and its explosion of passion.

Behind her the car door opens and she slips back and out; on his knees he follows her, clumsily, over the shift lever, the passenger seat and out her door. In this moment there is nothing else in the world, no other people, nothing happening anywhere. 

Standing now, they lace themselves together, feet, knees, thighs, arms, tongues, his insistent erection.  

She gives against his pressing and backs up against the Mustang, whispers hoarsely, "Inside."

And that’s exactly where he wants to be, to feel the giving layers of her insides, find within her a place past knowing, reason and memory.

"Key's in my purse." She’s quick to find it and unlock the door, then close it up behind them.

III/Point Masses

From the kitchen floats up the far away sounds of a chair rubbing floorboards, the momentary hush of water through pipes. Then a lapse back into silence, the resonant, palpable quiet of her waiting. In the center of their bedroom, Hannah's bedroom, he stands looking around, hoping for some token of comfort or a helpful sign. Her books line this room, like buffers he thinks, or insulation, standing along the mantle, two rows deep, across the back edge of her dresser and his, stacked in piles like squat battlements around the ottoman and overstuffed reading chair. Hannah, who is always hungry for more information. To help her live better in this world, she once told him when he'd asked why. But all the repetitions and permutations of the story of betrayal printed in their pages haven't been sufficient to keep this from her life, and not his either. No way to skip ahead to a happier day, he knows, no rewrite possible here. Finally, though sick with dread, staying here with his thoughts looping nonstop he can no longer bear to be alone with himself. 

Barefoot, hesitant still, and avoiding known creaky spots, he descends the front stairs and heads through the house for the kitchen. Where he knows she waits, with no idea of what.  

Around him he sees that, despite the single act that has turned him and all things in his life upside-down, there are no signs of knowledge or change. No indications of coming disaster. In spite of the earth having twisted on its axis, everything seems the same here. Hannah's house and every piece of furniture in it, the coveted shelter of their quiet, stands undisturbed. Even the heat, uniformly ugly and consistent throughout the last few weeks, has pressed on, no more and no less intense today in the wake of what he's done.  

One thing is different about the house though, out of character and unbelievable; it reeks of fried bacon. He smelled it upstairs too, impossible to miss anywhere, and recognized it as no minor gesture on Hannah's part, a gift, maybe her way of luring him down to her. On any other day, an uncomplicated twenty-four hours back in time, she would have hit the big bull’s-eye with her bacon and he’d have showered and been down the stairs in a pork-bent heartbeat. But not today. Today the smell is foul and slows him more, and shivering under a sudden sweat he glimpses himself gagging over a plate of bacon and over-easy eggs.  

Beneath his bare feet the wide pine planks alone feel cool. Hannah has fried bacon for him and he slept with a wallet.  

That first day, a year ago, after a couple of hours drinking beers and talking, he’d gestured to the black-bellied bar-b-que, reassured then emboldened by its ordinariness and presence in her back yard, and said, I could grill us a couple of steaks? Here was a mortal after all, he’d thought, a woman with a Weber grill just, same as his, the smallest one. More than anything right then, he'd wanted to cook for her, eat with her, plates on their laps, fanning flies from the food. There in the thick shade of the fat oak, he sat thinking how the grill belonged to her, like this house and the grazing horse and the green peacefulness of it all And he recalled how only a few nights before, a span of hours he could easily count up in his head but hardly remember living through, he had explored and caressed and kissed and savored every particle of her. 

I don't eat meat, she’d said through a funny, lopsided grin.  

That surprised him. Owned a house and a horse and a business, slept with a man she didn't know, but she didn't eat meat. 

Above the yellow halter, her collarbones defined faultless ridges and shaded hollows which rose and fell with her breathing. Looking at him, she waited expectantly. What?   

Nothing, he said, and everything. 

The smell of meat cooking makes me sick.  

He’d known to save his homo-sapiens-as-hunters-and-not-just-gatherers speech for some other time in some other universe; he wouldn't risk offending. Or not cooking for her. It was impossible to imagine sitting across from any other earthly human being at the next meal. That watching her eat, he felt was imperative and, he thought, more than a little crazy. Vegetables, then? he’d said brightly, sounding to himself like someone else.  Marinated? On skewers? 

Now several steps from the kitchen threshold, he stops and holds his breath, letting the rectangle of the doorway frame Hannah sitting at the table. Her innocence is heartbreaking. Against the field of ultra-white refrigerator and stove, he sees her caught in the privacy of a domestic moment, with her mass of wiry, fly-away hair piled up and away from the heat on a head pitched forward over the spread-out morning news of the world. He watches as the fingers of her two hands tap percussion on the underside of her chair, accompaniment to a tune she alone hears in her head, and he knows.  

Long after they'd eaten those grilled vegetables – peppers, squash, tomatoes picked right out of her garden – and when it was quite dark, he’d followed Hannah through the dusky house up the stairs to her room, believing he remembered every detail of her body and his together from their first night. The way her hair felt as it brushed the skin of his chest, the infinitesimal contrast his fingertips found between soft skin and freckle, the peaks and ridges of the bones of her face, shoulders and ribcage, along her spine. Their grace at the moment of entry. It was the unrelenting magnetism of those memories of that night that had drawn him to search out a street, a house, her. But then, in bed with her once more, her willing skin against his, he discovered he'd forgotten it all in a way he hadn't known possible. Memory was nothing beside renewed reality, which offered discovery all over again. 

It is the combination this morning. In catching Hannah sitting unaware at the kitchen table like this, his standing before the intent incline and perfect line of her back, he knows he loves her no matter what. In this he finds some relief, and though he still has no idea of what last night means to their life together, at least there is no questioning the love itself. Somehow, he tells himself, he'll find his way through and make things right.     

Knowing how easily she startles, he brushes the doorframe, breathes, waits a beat for the sounds to register, and then he produces a raspy, "Good morning."

Hannah turns with a welcoming smile and shyly hunches her shoulders. "Caught me!" The music and percussion are never for anyone but herself. "And Bob Marley."  

He sees she’s wearing shorts and one of his Chiefs t-shirts untucked over them. He’s dressed almost identically. KC Summer Uniform, they call it, and he knows at once how long and hard this will all be. Sometime in that half-hour between waking and dragging himself from bed, he has shifted from first thinking he'd have to haul his unspeakable guilt out the window and sneak away, to intending to come clean on every detail. He foresaw it, the confession of his breach of trust, their tears, shouting maybe, certain disappointment and shame, the leaving or the staying, however that would go, but what he hadn't anticipated was this looming myriad of seemingly insignificant physical details. Everywhere, they wait for him in ambush. They are imprinted in the faded lettering of old shirts and hang among the fringed threads of cut-offs, settle into the cracks of his favorite mug she has thoughtfully set at his usual place at the table. That it is his place. These are the things that can take him down, he realizes, one waiting sniper shot after another. Firing silently, they are ready to shoot him full of holes until there is nothing left at all. He is bereft, feels lost and already defeated. "Hey," is all he can manage still standing, leaning now in the doorway.

"Well, come on in, you," she says, closing up the paper. "Ole Bob won't bite." 

He makes it to his chair and stands petrified there, hands gripping white-knuckled the spindle tops of the chair back like a sailor at the wheel in the tropical madness of an open-sea storm. "Uh, Ole Bob?" With no idea what she means, he’s light-headed at the emergence of that other, more real Bob as, behind his eyes, the image of Lorna flares like a torch. 

“Marley,” she says quietly, giving him a funny look.      

"Hannah. . ." Things, something, happened, he wants to say and slides to sitting, thinking he might never be able to get up again. From a watery and what seems an unclosable distance, he follows Hannah’s movements as she folds up the paper, then carries his cup to the counter. The full reality of last night pours into him as hundreds of tons of dark, dank sand, ship-wrecking him on this island that has created itself from the inside out. From the outside press waves of heat and cooking smells and guilt, and he fears, almost hopes, he will go under before having to say a word.        

Hannah places steaming coffee before him and says, "You slept really late," and bends to kiss his head. She’s glad to see him, he thinks, in spite of what he knows she considers wasted time.  

Perfume, soap, and under that so faintly, her permanent scent of hay and horse start his insides turning. "I. . ."

"Stayed later than you thought you’d have to, huh?" She stands still beside him, her hand combing through his still-damp hair. The wet against his skin is cold and makes him shiver. "I didn't hear you come in."  

There in the kitchen, sitting with Hannah still standing beside him, he remembers how in a single moment last night his self split, with one part dead-set on getting what he wanted. 

Just inside the motel room, his back against the door, they set at each other again, hard, pushing and pulling. With tongues like mallets they kissed as if trying to prove something. At half-voice he said to her, “I know you,” and his fingers laced into the curls of her hair, pulling her in to him. And from the crush of their bodies and mouths he thought he heard an answering laugh with its echo of her saying to him, James Clark you have no idea and momentarily resented the arrogance of her assumption. 

He flipped his hands under Lorna’s sweater and took a quick hold of the extra flesh he knew would be riding the ridge of her waistband, felt her startle and then shudder in withdrawal. He figured she thought him headed for her breasts, but he fanned fingers across skin, around her waist. Pressing against tissue and bone he heard her low, dry moan, and in response the resentful, proving part of him settled with satisfaction and it had occurred to him to stop. His body muted the laughing echo, and that seemed enough. He knew he should back off and away and not go through with the rest. Should get into the Mustang and run to beat hell. But even as those thoughts formed, he knew the thing had already happened. The force of another part of him, the split that didn't give a damn about knowing, his, her, proof or anything else, had displaced all else with want. For all of her, all of himself, all of everything in the world. The want expanded exponentially with the knowledge it was all his already. 

She was pushing back into him then. He felt arms and legs folding him in, the mania of her own want now inflating and closing around him, and he heard himself say deep into her ear, “See, I do know you.” Because by then there was no question, no answering echo, no sound at all; only touch remained to them. Only soft and noiseless places to her, no solid surfaces at all for the raising of solid sounds. He sent fingers up her back, all along the rubber knobs of her spine; he kept on, wanting more too, pressing into her giving flesh and the economy of two nights' knowledge.

He was so far from any familiar place that the construct of lost was lost. In place and time both, he felt himself to be some sort of celestial body hurtling through the vast, dark beyond. Harrowing, yes, but not unwelcome. He wondered vaguely if she had any idea where they were, and then, in a slim triangle of light, he glimpsed her face and saw that Lorna didn't know, or care. She was with him out there in no-man's space, blind too, and rocketing on; empty of direction and distance, her eyes registered only speed and motion. For the rest, she was no more than hands and mouth traversing his body. There were no places she did not explore, no lobe, nail or shallow crease left untouched. It seemed that to her his body was a previously undiscovered world to be charted and mapped, and he, through the seizures of his own breathing, began to fear he would spin out of orbit and lose consciousness before staking claims of his own.  

“James,” Lorna murmured, and he felt his name and her mouth in the flesh of his belly, and knew that outside surfaces were no longer enough.       

He wrenched her shoulders from the mattress and rolled with her, arms and legs and chin pleating her in to him; he felt and heard, inhaled, her willingness, then rooted himself far, far down inside. And for a moment even that didn't seem enough; he sensed they might turn themselves inside-out to get more, everything, the insides and out of the other.

Hannah’s hand rests on his shoulder. "Yeah, it was late," he says into her cottony smells of perfume and hay. He has only to lay his head against her now to feel the curve of her breast against his cheek and hear the workings of her heart. What she wants, probably. Intends. But he can’t. Doesn’t deserve to be this close to this woman in this way.    

“So, you ready to make up for lost time?" she lightly taps two fingers against his head. "I’ve already spent too much of this day with a buddy of yours. Now I want you."

He starts, puzzled, and swings around to look at her as she points toward the folded newspaper. A book lies half exposed beneath it. It’s the Poincaré biography, which he didn't notice before. “I like Jules and all, don't get me wrong.” She’s mugging, not much like herself, or like the Hannah he’s come to think he knows. Or it could be himself and his own bent antennae that are distorting in-coming signals.  

"I'm glad you introduced us, for sure." She dips a shoulder forward slightly.  

This coquettish Hannah seems absurd.  

“But let’s us have some fun with our double days off, Clark-o, whatdya say?”  

He swallows, hating himself. Yesterday this buddy routine would have been cute. Today though, Jesus, today it’s ripping away fistfuls of his gut. He sees how it will be as long as he knows and she doesn't. Everything, every motion of hers, every word, will be distorted or corrupted, passing filtered through the scrim of his guilt, and he sees clearly that he and Hannah are now on different trajectories. Except she doesn't know it.   

She walks her fingers down the side of his head, grazing eye and ear, the coquette abandoned. "You okay?"   

He feels her skim stubble along his chin line, feels his jaw clenching. "No." Feels he'll never be okay again.  

"Hey." Her palm cups his jaw, pressing his head into her.

He sees how giving in would be easy here. One effortless step into the morass of her solicitude and his newfound and spreading weakness and he'll be a goner. Make love to her here in the kitchen and he can go on, easily, dishonestly, from there. And that act, the counterpart to last night's, would decide things completely, finally; irrevocably define him, show him exactly what he has become – a person he’s never wanted to be, a being he’d have to learn to live with. And in doing so, he understands, he would be changing her as well. "Hannah, I'm. . ." He finally pulls his head free from where it has no right to be.  

"Yeah?"

"Sick." He is, and knows he'll never feel any different, not without coming clean. 

To avoid eye contact, he looks up quickly and away, and for the first time sees the crisp, perfect rashers of bacon over on the stove, blotted dry and waiting on paper towels. Evidence of her good intentions. And what, exactly, are his, how good and how honorable? Sinking even deeper he remembers how lately he’s been toying with the idea of proposing to her.

Solicitous now, Hannah touches his cheek with the backs of her fingers, then settles a palm on his forehead. But she steps away immediately, saying, "God, it's just so hot, who can tell fever from this heat?" Then she cocks her head for a more diagnostic look. "Maybe that's why you're sick? The heat?"

  "I don't think so."

"Did you feel bad last night?"

Not nearly as bad as he should have, he thinks. He lifts his mug and skims off some coffee, looks over to the paper.

"Too many smokes?"

"Yeah, maybe." He stares hard, ordering himself to decipher upside-down headlines in an attempt to offset the roiling within.

It was several moments before his pulse slowed enough so that he recognized where he was, using the flat, nothing surface of the motel room’s ceiling to restore his equilibrium, until finally he thought he recognized himself, if not the woman next to him. The moon shining in through the window, past curtains they hadn’t closed, half-illuminated the room, and the chunky pieces of furniture looked, in the moonlight, like the shadows of hunched animals. Next to him, breathing deeply, Lorna lay on her side, curled in towards him, but with an arm flung back and onto the wide swath of bedspread. With her eyes closed, her face was washed of line and expression, but not life. He wondered how his own face would look, what someone might read there and figured how easy the reading would be. He felt a giddiness to his body, in his legs, arms, toes, fingers. Everything unfettered and as weightless as hollow shafts of straw, ready to lift up and be blown about in the stirring of any breeze at all. 

At the kitchen table he fastens his eyes on Hannah’s folded up newspaper. Never any good at reading upside-down, he has to start by identifying letters of headlines individually and sequencing in reverse, letter by letter and word by word: P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T  T-H-R-E-A-T-E-N-S  But despite this mandatory concentration, the thought pushes through that he has to get started or descend into full-blown cowardice. T-O  V-E-T-O You aren't a coward or not, he realizes, nothing so simple as that. It occurs to him there are stages, like sizes of headline typeface. P-A-C-K-A-G-E Making love with Hannah here in the kitchen would represent a swift drop to a very low stage; large, bold-type material from which he'd never be able to climb up. But, he sees, there are other intermediary stages, descended to by lower-case degrees of weakness, and he knows it won’t take much to get himself down to the same awful bad-news place by such half-steps.   

He sees how easy it would be to proceed from the shaky ground where he’s standing now, saying nothing. C-O-N-G-R-E-S-S-I-O-N-A-L  L-E-A-D-E-R-S  He sees himself trudging back up to bed and hours of black sleep, followed by tomorrow's long day shift during which he'd begin to rationalize Lorna, reduce and encase her within a slick shell, then route the thought of her by the most indifferent pathways into distant recesses of consciousness. F-U-R-I-O-U-S  Ultimately to be dropped from memory altogether. He wonders if that’s what he wants then, what is best: to forget and go on as before.  

But maybe these are actually steps towards the high road, he thinks, hope spiking. Or maybe, flat again, just another couple of cowardly half-steps down. Or maybe, and this thought seems to materialize out of the kitchen's humid air, it is his first step out.  

“Did you sleep at all?” Hannah is standing a couple of steps back now, hands on hips, looking at him intently. “Cause you know, you don’t look so good.”

"I slept." He hears barbs sharpening along the edges of his words and winces. "But not much." He modulates this last, eyes closed, asking himself if that could really be what he’s after here. Lorna, his ticket out? He breathes deeply, knowing Hannah’s watching, and wants badly to be away from that gaze and her goodness, his unreasonable anger and from the spectacle of his cowardice. Here is a crossroads. He knows it as the place for deciding more than whether to come clean or not, stay or go.

Letting his head roll backwards, he opens his eyes to see the hourglass egg timer in its show place over on the old maple hutch. In the house he grew up in they had no furniture as fine as what is everywhere in Hannah's place, but his grandmother had exactly the same timer, kept it handy on the kitchen window sill and used it daily for boiling their eggs. Jimmy, honey, evoking familiar words and tone, he conjures her image to stand beside the hutch and this hourglass, do the right thing. Which is, he believes without question what she would suggest, to begin by saying: Hannah, I have betrayed you.       

It was past three by the digital clock beside the motel bed.  

“I need to get going,” he said. He was able to push himself up to sitting and swing his feet to the floor. “Lorna. . .”

“Of course you do. It's okay.” She pulled the bed’s coverlet around her chest, folding it in under her arms, and leaned back against the headboard. In the musty dark of the Riviera room, the air conditioning pumped, working hard; it was cold. He'd never seen the inside of one of these rooms before.   

He sat on the side of the bed, the mass in his gut so heavy he couldn't stand. What he wanted was to be talking with her again, slip back into the easy chatter, the earlier fun if not the closeness of what had brought them to this place.    

“You're thinking of her right now.” Lorna said this softly, lacing it with understanding and acceptance. It irritated him; she thought she knew it all, but she couldn't begin to guess what he was thinking. “James Clark, go home. Marry your girl.” She paused a moment, then went on. “What we've had here is something, sure.” She leaned towards him, cupped his shoulder in her palm. “But, honey, it's a very small something.” Again he felt the irritation; he could do without the patronizing.      

She let her hand fall forward over his chest and come to rest in its patch of woolly hair; he felt her breasts against his back. And, in spite of his indignation felt a tightening in his groin and again was stirred; momentarily he thought to turn and have her again, then winced at his own thought, the words. Have her. Take her. But he knew she'd probably respond, maybe was after that. He'd do it only, he realized, if it were only his wish, only if she thought them finished, if she’d had enough. I am not who I thought I was, he said to himself. 

Lorna grew still, though she didn’t move away from him. “It's so small a something that when you compare it to something, it becomes nothing.”  

And that makes it okay, he believed he heard in the reasoning behind her words. She was talking about Bob, he knew, and about Hannah too. She was handing him her philosophy, telling him why and how all this was fine for her, and offering to sell him a share of it as well. A Salty Dog, a steak and potato, a pack or two of cigarettes. A bartender. “Eat a lotta steaks, do you?” he’d said.    

“What?”

“I asked if you eat a lot of steaks?” 

She was silent then but began again with her hand, and, against the drone of the air conditioner and the cars speeding out on the four lanes in the middle of the night, he began to pick out the rhythmic sound of her fingers rubbing his chest hair. Her hips moved closer in to him.    

“This?” He heard the word as a rushing, like wind in his ears, as his hand described an arc around the room. It came to rest on the bed against her buttocks, defining not pinning her, but he was angry again.      

“Oh.” Her voice wilted but she did not remove her hand from his chest. Her fingers continued to move in circles, fanning wider, again covering territory, but her body slackened beneath his arm when she said, “Steaks regularly, yes.” He heard her take a deep breath. “This, James, no. I didn't mean this was nothing. It's just not,” her palm on his cheek, “everything.”  

"Clark?" From Hannah’s voice he thinks she must know.

"We have to talk," he says and looks over to see her slip back into her chair, hands spreading flat on the table before her. But when he makes himself look into her eyes he sees that she does not know but is waiting to hear the worst. Tell her the truth, you son of a bitch. "Hannah, I love you."  

"Oh, God." Her words blow out breathy and small, and he sees that her freckles stand out darkly, severe against the sudden liquid pallor of her skin. Chin pitched forward, she has gotten herself ready. "What?"  

He looks away, then down to their two sets of hands on the table, hers splayed like tree roots, his anchored to the mug. On the inhale he says, "I’ve been thinking about asking you to marry me," and sees her long fingers retreat, curling into themselves at the word marry. But for him, despite everything, saying the word out loud momentarily thrills and encourages him. Exhaling, “And not take no for an answer.” He lets go of the mug but grabs it right back again because on their own in space, his hands don’t know where to go or what to do.    

"Ah." She shifts slightly and laces the fingers of both hands into one tight ball. "But now?"  

Though heartened to find that his resolve has survived, he is unable to look her in the eye again. The couplings between thought, feeling and words have disconnected themselves, leaving speech unavailable.  

"Not anymore?"

"I. . . " As if perched high up on the hutch top, watching from a china face etched in among silent flowers on one of the grandmotherly plates displayed there, Clark can see the two of them below. Hannah straight and still in her chair, staring hard at him. Himself gripping his mug, his last hope, head hanging. "I don't think I can now. I. . ." He hears the tremor in his voice and knows she must be trying hard to follow the flimsy thread of his meaning. "Don't deserve to."  

Through an excruciating moment Hannah is silent, and he waits, still unable to look into her face. And when he is sure she will finally speak, the silence persists, first surprising then informing him. What he sees from his high spot on the hutch is that now she must understand completely, getting only Lorna's age and face and build wrong in her mind's eye.  

"Deserve is a curious word," she says finally, sounding miles away, "in this context."  

Again he is aware of barest movement, the slight outward physical consequence of her body breathing in, then exhaling. She is waiting. "I slept with someone," he says.  

"Clark." 

Hannah’s hands, no part of her, have moved at all. "Just someone at work," he pipes, having found words again, but panics at what he's said with them. "I mean, no one!" He does look at her now and sees the green eyes level with his, but he looks away again before letting himself read what’s there. Quickly, forcing calmness, he adds, "Not one of the waitresses. Nobody I know." Having said it without looking at her, he doesn’t know if the last has made things better or worse. But still he adds, with a jerky shake of his head, "A customer." And in saying that much, he vows to be no more specific and sinks lower under the nameless weight that has come on him and settled in his spine, his hips, as a fulsome heaviness in the entire lower half of his body. Though incapable of retrieving even a faint image of the other’s face, his insides remember, explicitly, everything else, and for a wild second he thinks the memory might drop him through the floorboards into the root cellar below.    

Lorna: he summons the name now, timidly forms the word but detains it within the bony bounds of his skull, for control.  

He looks again at Hannah's hands, one motionless plane layered over the other, and hears the catch in her throat as she swallows. He should look up now, he knows, wants to, but can't manage it. "To get you out," she says finally, flatly. Then her hands separate, her fingers fanning out on the tabletop, roots again, back to where they started. "To save you from yourself and this marriage idea?" He sees her body leaning, hears the tone of her voice telling him to look at her.  

He does look quickly, then away again. "No!" Then back. "Hannah, I don't know why." Then looking anywhere else, he sees the bacon, a clean, waiting plate nearby on the counter. Frying pan for eggs ready on the stove. Out the window and inside the kitchen, nothing but white, withering mid-day light. "It just happened."    

He watches her now, not looking at him but around the kitchen, gathering herself and her thoughts. She reaches for the old library book and pulls it in to her, covering its surface with her fingertips as a blind woman might who is seeking meaning in Braille letters. Her expressionless face is impossible to read. “Hannah. . .”      

"I know."

He raises the mug to drink, for something to do, and finds the coffee cold, his lips gone dry, knows he didn't want it anyway. Water is what he wants, one drink of water. For his tongue, which is sour-tasting and raw, scorched by dozens of cigarettes from the night before and another woman's mouth.

After, headlights on the door: 199. The Riv. Hands shaking. Shoulders shaking too. He looked away and down the line of room numbers on identical doors. Like cupboards, closeting sleepers and dreamers and lovers. He shuddered again, not the person he believed himself to be. Noses to curb, one car to a door, a file of surreal sentries extending in both directions. To still his hands he grabbed the steering wheel and felt its knuckle-like indentations. The gear-shift handle was cool to the touch, while in the mirror there was dun-colored nothingness behind. He wasn't sure if he was ready to drive. The Mustang's alien-looking dash lights glowed, ready, and he wondered if he'd spent his readiness and now lived committed to some world not of reason but of impulse. This thought welled in his gut as fear. 

Things he'd thought he knew. Had the social worker been on to him all along? Seen through the Chapel Hill chemist to the lying Kansas City bartender? He started up the Mustang, backed cautiously, and his headlights shone into the dark lot and across the silent hulks of parked cars, glinting, leering. Now, in this after-light he saw that he probably had known her too, better than he thought. She'd given it away, he saw, offered that knowledge up to him from the moment she sat down. It was himself he now saw who had been their object, both of them. All along. No doubt but she'd gotten what she was after; he'd probably been wearing a list of instructions pinned to his lapel. Put them there himself without knowing, wore them daily, for anyone's use. And he'd thought himself such a private person.  

He was driving now, had to since the car was moving and he was inside, but he wasn't sure where to go. Was now unsure of any place he'd ever been in his life. 

Hannah, holding the book in close to her chest now, says, "It's like Poincaré, isn't it?" He thinks she might be talking to herself, but then she looks right at him, says, "You explained it all to me yourself last week."    

He is at a loss. "What?"

She taps a fingernail against the hard cover. "You know," and opens the book at random to flip through several pages, searching, but too fast to be reading, "his three-body deal." Her voice sounds thin and constricted, in a way he's never heard before. Finally, with a tense heave of all the pages together, she turns to the index. He watches her run a finger down the listings till she finds what she wants. "Here," she says, "point masses," and pages back to the place and reads. But not aloud.  

Through the tense reading silence, Clark goes back to the night she means, when they'd gone to check on a restless Dutch – probably the fox that lived and operated in the immediate neighborhood, they decided – and then stood out in the dark of a quarter-moon to gaze at the night sky. For a long time after that, sitting on the screened porch, lights out, they talked summer stars and planetary movement, Poincaré. She’d listened as he explained how, according to his undergradutate understanding of the 19th Century Frenchman’s thesis, two celestial bodies would forever balance and maintain the other in orbit until a third was introduced. With that addition, all continuity was lost. Orbits would or would not disintegrate, but the thing was, he'd explained, after that nothing could be predicted, counted on. She’d soaked it in easily and asked questions that showed him how interested she was, and how quick her mind. But now, he knows because he can see it in the intensity of her reading and feel it radiating out in waves, she is launching herself from simple thesis far on out into a synthesis of stars and man.  

She looks up and at him directly, and he knows she knows he understands where she’s headed.  

"Hannah, it isn't that." He wants to say that Poincaré was talking astronomy and didn't know a thing about the late 20th Century. Their lives. His feelings. How will played into it all. But he doesn't dare because he isn't so sure. "Listen, here's what I know. That. . ."

"Oh, Clark," she says, interrupting, now sounding weary, maybe not talking to him again, "what you don't know." 

"I know a lot of things." That last Poincaré point notwithstanding, he does. For him a shade, drawn down last night, has snapped back up this morning and he can see out again, clearly and far. He knows what matters. He thinks he remembers from that years-ago classroom lecture that orbital disturbance doesn't necessarily imply deterioration. "I know that I love you." He sees her eyes close. "And that we’re good together.”

Her eyes open as she asks, again in that flat voice, "First time?"

"Yes!" Offended, the word explodes between them. He restrains himself from adding the hurt-juvenile tag: And the last.  

But she seems to hear what he hasn't said. "You can't be sure."  

"Of course I can."

"Ah."  

"We belong together." He wants to run around the table and shake her. "We do!" 

"Another funny choice of words, belong. Who is it making all these judgments?"

"Me."  

"For both of us, huh, just like that?"    

He holds back; she looks so tired suddenly. The urge to shake her has passed.  "Hannah. . ."    

"You've never been married, Clarksville, so how would you know?"

"Not fair."  

"Maybe not, but still."

He looks away, angry again, resenting the condescension in her experience and world-weary assumptions. She doesn't know everything.  

He’s about to point out that she hadn't known about Poincaré, when she says, "Sometimes you just know it's best not to close the door." She looks away from him and down to the table. "Better to leave it ajar."

He’s seen the possibility of marriage to Hannah as a door opening, an entrance into what could be a better life for them both. He’d like to say that, but he hesitates. Knowing so few details of some parts of her life, like her marriage, makes him cautious. "So tell me," he says, hoping to sound encouraging and trustworthy, "what did he do that was so awful?"        

Hannah pulls back from the table, and she sits for a while staring both at him and beyond him as if gauging the relative weights of two potential throwing stones. "Oh," she says at last, "he didn't do anything but live, really. He was an okay guy." She's decided which stone to throw. "Just too simple. Or too good for me, or too, I don't know, not right." Having decided, she is mechanical-sounding now. "Okay, so let me tell you about me, Clark." She levels her eyes on his. "I was the one with the problem."   

"Like what?"  

"Like sleeping with anyone who'd have me." She doesn't look away but sits as if assembling the words she needs. "He was just kind of your average nice-enough Joe — his name was even Joe, for godsake. Did you know that?"

He shakes his head no and waits for more.  

"He worked plumbing and construction, paid his bills, wanted his life on the couch watching TV. But I didn't pay any attention to that," shakes her head slowly, “you know, before we were married. I paid attention to how he looked with a Henley showing from under his faded blue work shirts. I was a sucker for that look, and he had gorgeous eyes that matched the shirts." Her machine is assembled and working now, cranking out words and pictures. "He was big and lean and hard as a rock and said I could plant whatever I wanted on his two little acres, live in his trailer, drive his pick-up, do whatever I wanted. I thought I was crazy about him. Those eyes, the shirts, what we did in that trailer. Only thing was, Joe was a little old fashioned: he wanted us legal." Her voice ratchets the last word an extra turn tighter. "I was eighteen, had been no where in my life but to the greenhouse and back in the company of two old people." She shrugs. "I jumped at the chance." Shakes her head again. "Two acres in Atcheson seemed like the Land of Exotica compared to the Junior College of K. C., which is what my grandparents had in mind for me. I wanted to go to Missouri, just down the road in Columbia? Not that fancy, but a real school, a university where I could really study. But they wouldn't hear of it. It was JC or secretarial school, take-your-pick, so I picked Joe Scranton and the trailer." She pauses and surveys the room, as if to make sure nobody else has slipped in. Satisfied that it is still just the two of them, she switches the machine back on. "Well, so I planted every vegetable I could think of out there. I irrigated and I weeded and I fertilized. Harvested it all and figured out how to can it." A small, bitter laugh escapes. "Kept me busy anyway." Then comes a sigh. "And then Trilby came along before it was time to plant again." Here she takes a long, shaky breath. "And I couldn't stand it. I tried, but I couldn't." Several seconds pass in silence, and when she begins again her voice is thinner, more brittle sounding. "My way out took a path through the beds and backseats of every half-horny man I came across in greater metropolitan Kansas City. I was a scumbag hussy, Clark." Her green eyes have darkened and hardened to look like dull jade. "And I was lucky Joe Scranton ever let me see my child again." Then there are tears, but she does her best to hold them in, shaking her head at them or herself or him. "Nah, I found out a little too late that I wasn't so good at living with the doors closed."  

Thunderstruck, silent, he sits watching as she refuses to let herself cry. He has no idea what to think.   

"I'm not saying you'd do the same," she says, more composed, looking at him cautiously, "or that I would again. I like to think," and here her voice shifts, as if she’s speaking only to herself, "I've grown up and changed. But there's still no way,” then back to him again, "that I want to be married again."      

He doesn't doubt her honesty, but there seems to be something wrong with it, some lapse in its logic. If she grew up, as she claims, and changed, then why wouldn't she consider marrying? Him? He knows she loves him. Her exercise of caution might be for him, which makes what she’s doing now just what she's accused him of earlier, judging for both of them.   

And if he simply accepts those terms, her terms, that marriage would never be an option, then he doesn't much like what it says about him. That he has no say. That in the heft of Hannah's full life, his doesn't weigh any more than what he can carry into or out of it – his attached to hers as some sort of no-vote appendage.  

She sits back in her chair now, looking spent, the only movement the flying strands of hair around her face. He watches as she hugs herself, as if the room's temperature has suddenly plummeted instead of spiked another ten degrees, and it occurs to him that maybe Lorna's done him a favor. It wouldn’t take much now, he sees: some talk of uncertainty and consideration of individual needs, a proposal of space and time apart. Not so hard with all the words people use these days, drawn from the specialized lexicon to make leaving easier. Hannah would know just which words to say in response when it came her turn to talk. Everybody knows the lingo. They could make it very easy on themselves. And the logistics of splitting would be painless too, because he has so little of his own. A couple of suitcases and an old trunk's worth of clothes, the good cassette player and the collection of tapes he’s so proud of, some books, maybe one other carton of miscellaneous stuff. He’s done it before, can do it again. Throw everything into the trusty rust-free Mustang and pull away out of the driveway without looking back. He knows how, has had practice. Always easy for him before because he's never wanted to stay.  

Till now. 

"What's wrong with what we have?" she asks. The pain in her eyes and voice is acute.    

"Nothing." He shrugs. But he thinks he wants more.

They sit in silence, Hannah's disastrous marriage and the ‘more’ he wants suspended in the hot and cold air they breathe.

"I was going to make waffles." She laughs, a small stilted and unnatural thing. She actually seems nervous. "Glad I didn't."  

"Me too." He wants a break. "Hannah, I'm sorry. I just don't. . . " He stands up, finding it easier than he'd thought, and carries his mug to the sink, dumps his cold coffee and stares out the window into the back yard and beyond to see Dutch standing sleepily in the shady corner of his corral. "I gotta get outside for a few minutes." When he turns for the back door she nods but doesn't move.  

"Clark, nothing has changed really." He stops at the door and looks back. "Not for me," she says. His turn to nod. 

He carries a lawn chair to the shadiest spot, under the same oak where he and Hannah had sat talking for hours that first afternoon while they watched Dutch graze, where later they'd eaten their grilled vegetables and rice as the light faded into deep blue. When he'd known with such certainty his life had changed forever. Where in the world, he wonders now, did that conviction come from? How do we ever know what we know? Good start-up question for sophomores. Epistemology 201.

Rolling his head, he glimpses the clotheslines strung between two wooden lattice ends on which roses climb and bloom. It’s the original one her grandfather built with the house in 1920, which they still use. Constantly, this summer. In the heat, he or Hannah have been changing the bedding every couple of days, bearing like tribute the heavy basket of wet sheets out to the line and neatly clothes-pinning them there to dry in the relentless sun. One day, sharing the task, Hannah talked of her childhood, the one period of her life she’ll speak of freely, and brought herself to life for him as a little girl running between the rows of drying sheets. He remembers her saying how much, then as now, she loved the wet snap of hanging wash and smelling the smell of sunshine baked into cotton. It’s the smell of something right in the world, something absolutely good, she said that day, smiling, looking almost shy at letting slip that bit of her personal philosophy. She was right, he’d told her, agreeing completely though none of that had ever occurred to him before.  

Now it comes to him that maybe those are the only kinds of things a person can ever possibly know.  

What he thought he knew: himself, Hannah. He feels his pocket for cigarettes, pulls them out and lights one up. And Lorna.  

He wonders who she really is, the social worker, but he doesn't know that either. Seeming to be one thing at first, she'd shed a skin to show another, then finally exposed herself to be another entirely. Where did the shedding stop? According to Hannah's meta-Poincaré theory of stars and man, Lorna would figure as the errant, omniscient celestial body cruising the universe, the one who’d swooped in, sized him up from the first and decided to bump him from his smug little orbit. Show him first-hand how the cosmos truly worked. Or, more realistically, more likely, she'd probably given him no thought at all.

He blows smoke and watches it hang in the humid air, remembers his vow to stop smoking if he and Hannah were to marry. He’d actually once imagined it, proposing, imagined how the scene would play. He replays it now.

‘It's like...  Well, like when you got Dutch,’ he was going to say.

‘Oh? How's that?’

‘Think about it.’ He’d put them right here under this tree, with Dutch dozing just where he is now, weight shifted to his right, left hind foot cocked. ‘You could've just kept him and never said boo about it to anyone. That riding teacher didn't know where he was after the fire and probably didn't care. But you found the guy and paid money for your horse, official money. So that later no one could come and claim him.’

‘And you think someone's going to come along and claim me away from you?’

‘Don't be so literal.’

‘I'm not.’ But here she would smile and soften, wooed by the struck-home wisdom of his love and logic. Then she would say something like, ‘You got your hundred bucks stashed away, huh?’

And he would stretch his legs out, wiggle his toes in the grass, smiling but not looking at her, and say, ‘Yep. Right here in my back pocket.’

‘Oh Clark, you’re so old-fashioned!’ Her laugh would be warm and affectionate, and he would know for sure they were on the way.  

From inside his complacent cocoon of self-knowledge, that's what he'd let himself imagine. Now, he knows being old fashioned is not a plus, and he finds it impossible to imagine anything beyond more heat and discomfort.  

But this isn't about what one or the other of them wants anymore. They have to operate strictly in the present now, in this new reality for both of them. The best he can do for himself in this is call up the faint echo of Hannah's saying that nothing has changed for her. Really. He isn't sure he believes that. And he isn't sure what her story means either. Well, he thinks, blowing smoke, if they don't get married at least he doesn’t have to give up cigarettes. 

From the corral he hears a shuffling and looks through a bluish haze to see Dutch moving, coming to stand at the nearest fence for a closer look at him, maybe as curious as he is about what his next move will be.