suckered by the planet-friendly name of the company— Green Footwear.”
“You’re gorgeous, Dotcom, but you’re still a geek.”
For a long while, they talked about nothing important, which sometimes can be the best kind of conversation.
Samantha drifted into sleep, a golden vision in the lamplight, and Ryan soon traded the soothing sight of her for dreams.
Dream changed fluidly into dream, until he was in a city in the sea, at the bottom of an abyss. Shrines and palaces and towers were lit by eerie light streaming up domes, up spires, up kingly halls, up fanes, up Babylon-like walls. He drifted through flooded streets, drowned in deep-sea silence … until he heard a bass throbbing full of melancholy menace. Although he knew the source of the sound, he dared not name it, for to name it would be to embrace it.
He woke in low light. The dread that weighed him down was not of an imminent threat but of some monumental peril he sensed coming in the weeks and months ahead, not the failure of his body but some worse and nameless jeopardy. His heart did not race, but each beat was like a heavy piston stroke in some great slow machine.
Although Samantha’s alluring scent clung to the sheets, she had risen from the bed while Ryan slept. He was alone in the room.
The digital clock on the nightstand read 11:24 p.m. He had been asleep less than an hour.
The light that came through the half-open door called to mind the strange glow in the submerged city of his dream.
He pulled on his khakis and, barefoot, went in search of Sam.
In the combination dining room and living room, beside an armchair, a bronze floorlamp with a beaded-glass shade provided a brandy-colored light, dappling the floor with bead gleam and bead shadow.
The kitchen was an extension of the main room, and there the door stood open to the deck on which they had sat for dinner.
The candles were extinguished. Only faint moonlight glazed the air, and the branches of the old tree were tentacular in the gloom.
The mild air was slightly scented by the nearby sea, more generously by night-blooming jasmine.
Samantha was not on the deck. Stairs descended to the courtyard between the garage and the house.
Murmuring voices rose from below, leading Ryan away from the stairs to a railing. Looking down, he saw Samantha because a shaft of moonlight devalued her hair from gold to silver and caressed her pearl-white silk robe.
The second person stood in shadows, but from the timbre of the voice, Ryan knew this was a man.
He could not hear their words, and he could not discern their mood from the rhythms of their conversation.
As in the butler’s pantry the previous night, when he tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on a whispered discussion in the kitchen, he was overcome by a creeping unease, by a tantalizing suggestion of hidden dimensions and secret meanings in things that had heretofore seemed simple, clear, and fully understood.
From a tonal change in the voices, Ryan inferred that the pair below had reached the end of their discussion. Indeed, the man turned away from Samantha.
As the stranger moved, shadows at first clung to him, but then relented. The lunar glow was illuminating yet at the same time misty and mystifying, veiling as much as it revealed.
Tall, slim, moving with athletic confidence, the man crossed the moonshadow-mottled lawn toward the alleyway behind the garage, his hair white and punk-cut, as though he wore a jagged crown of ice.
Spencer Barghest, reputed lover of Rebecca Reach, compassionate and eager guide to the suicidal, was visible for only a brief moment. Moonlight shrank from him, and shadows took him in; the intervening limbs and leaves of the California pepper blocked him from further view.
Below, Samantha turned toward the steps.
Ryan backed barefoot off the deck and through the open door. He turned and hurried out of the kitchen, across the front room.
In the bedroom, he stripped off his khakis. He draped them over the arm of a chair, as they had been, and returned to bed.
Under the covers, he realized that he had not thought through this retreat, but had instinctively chosen to avoid confrontation. In retrospect, he was not sure that he had taken the wisest course.
Feigning sleep, he heard Samantha enter the bedroom, and heard the silken rustle of her robe discarded.
Under the covers once more, she said softly, “Ryan?” When he did not reply, she repeated his name.
If she believed that he was faking sleep, she might suspect that he had seen or heard something of the assignation under the pepper tree. Therefore, he said sleepily, “Hmmmm?”
She slid against him and took hold of what she wanted.
Under the circumstances, he did not believe that he could rise to the occasion. He was surprised—and dismayed—to discover desire trumped his concern that she was guilty of dissimulation if not duplicity.
The qualities he found most erotic in a woman were intelligence, wit, affection, and tenderness. Sam had all four and could not fake the first two, though Ryan now worried that her intelligence was of a kind that facilitated manipulation and fostered cunning. He wondered if in fact she loved him and wanted the best for him, or had all along been disingenuous.
Never before had he made love when his heart was a cauldron of such wretched feelings, when physical passion was detached from all of the gentler emotions. In fact, love might have had nothing to do with it.
When the moment had passed, Samantha kissed his brow, his chin, his throat. She whispered, “Good night, Winky,” and turned away from him, onto her side.
Soon her open-mouthed breathing indicated that she slept. Or pretended to sleep.
Ryan pressed two fingers to his throat to time his pulse. He marveled at the slow steady throb, which seemed to be yet another deception, the most intimate one so far: his body pretending to be in good health when actually it was in the process of failing him.
For an hour, he stared at the ceiling but in fact examined, with memory’s eye, a year of loving Samantha. He sought to recall any incident that, from his new perspective, suggested she had darker intentions than those he had attributed to her at the time.
Initially, none of her actions through the months seemed in the least deceitful. When Ryan considered those same moments a second time, however, shadows fell where shadows had not been before, and every memory was infused with an impression of hidden motives and of secret conspirators lurking just offstage.
No specific deceit occurred to him, no example of her possible duplicity prior to the last few days, yet a cold current of suspicion crawled along his nerves.
The tendency to paranoia that infected contemporary culture had always disquieted him. He was ashamed to be indulging in the self-delusion that troubled him in others. He had a few disturbing facts; but he was trying to manufacture others out of fevered fantasies.
Ryan rose quietly from bed, and Samantha did not stir.
A window invited moonlight, which fell so lightly in this space that he could not have perceived the positions of the furniture if he had not been familiar with the room.
More than half blind, but with a blind man’s intuition, he found his clothes, dressed, and silently navigated the bedroom. Without a sound, he closed the door behind him.
Familiarity with the floor plan and dark-adapted eyes allowed him to reach the kitchen without a misstep or collision. He switched on the light above the sink.
On the notepad by the telephone, he left her a message: Sam, manic insomnia strikes again. Too jittery to lie still. Call you tomorrow.