“I thought I’d heard it.”
“No. The story of my real life, not my real life.” Her enunciation made all this clear.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Well, once upon a time there was a woman who lost a pearl in the ocean, and started scooping up the water, one cup after another. A sea-sprite saw the tiny eddies she was raising and swam over to her and said, ‘When will you stop?’ The woman said, ‘When I’ve scooped all the water from the sea and found my pearl on the bottom.’ The sea-sprite was so moved she retrieved the pearl and brought it to the woman with thanks.”
There was a long, late-night silence.
“That’s your real story?”
“Yes. You’ll see.”
“Which are you, the woman or the sea-sprite?”
“Which do you think?”
“Both.”
“Smarty-pants. You’ll get into Harvard for sure.”
Maybe this woman with her head on his lap was actually the pearl.
“My grandfather tells me stories,” he said.
“You never told me about him.”
“Grandpa Jacobo. He lives in Italy.”
“You travel to Italy?”
“Unh-uh.”
“He writes you?”
“Not really.”
“Then how does he tell you stories?”
“Through my knee.”
“What?”
“Through my left knee. Here, move your head over. Put your ear over here, over my scar. Press hard. I’ll ring him up.”
Arnold tapped three times on his kneecap and three more times on the top of Billie Jo’s skull.
“OK, go ahead. Avanti.”
A pause.
“Can you hear him?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s in there? You can hear him?” said Arnold, more surprised than she.
“Yeah. He has an accent.”
“He does. It’s true. What’s he saying?”
He waited in reality-warp.
“He’s talking about the ‘Talmud.’ What’s that?”
“A Jewish book. He’s Jewish. How did you know he talks about the Talmud?”
“Cause he’s talking about it now, dummy. He says the Talmud loves silence more than anything in the world.”
“He’s saying that?”
“Yeah.”
This, all in whispers. Silence. Darkness.
“That’s it. He hung up or something.” She sat up. “You know, I agree. You know how you always want me to talk when we have sex and I can’t—don’t want to? Like that. Silence is golden.”
“You’re putting me on. You didn’t hear Jacobo in my knee. You just want me to shut up when we make love.”
“I did too hear him. That’s what he said. How’d I know he had an accent? How’d I know he was Jewish?”
“I told you.”
“How’d I know about what do you call it, the Talmud? I never even heard of it before.”
“Tell me another.”
She sprang up from the couch.
“You don’t believe me?”
“Shh. You’ll wake Chris.”
More quietly: “You don’t believe me?”
He had never seen her angry; he was confused.
“No, I believe you. Come back.”
And after a moment, she did.
When she had known him long enough, she played him the first movement of Beethoven Op. 28. If he hadn’t been in love with her before, he was, by the tenth measure, helplessly, irreversibly ensnared. The pulsing low bass stopped his breath as he stared, enchanted, at this being of straight spine and closed eyes while the long, lovely chordal melody spun out its tension and release. That those hands, those very hands that had held—his penis!—that those hands could now call forth another such mass of beauty . . . He wanted to have those hands, to possess them, to possess the possessor of those hands. Her head lifted at the first cadence, and his eyes discovered, as if for the first time, the loveliness of her neck, the supple bridge between her mysterious heart and perspicacious brain, the tunnel for nerves that fed those hands, the miraculous electrochemistry of her! At the second theme, a second miracle, this time of emergence. He watched her hands again, amazed. He watched them moving back and forth, rocking, thumb to pinky, sagitally, symmetrically around her long third fingers. It was the kind of hand motion one might associate with the octave tremolos of old, out-of-tune pianos accompanying silent films. Yet what emerged was not some rinky-dink whorehouse tune but an inner melody of such beauty, a melody so embedded in its harmonies as to be beyond all accompaniment: It was melody and harmony at once, a fusion of functions out of reach of bodies, of physical human bodies, but somehow accomplished in this sea of sounds. And those hands—her hands!—were bringing this miracle forth, a miracle upon a miracle—that mere matter—molecules of flesh and wood and steel—could bring to birth such infinity. Three miracles happening there, right in front of him. All this and her breasts, too, there under her shirt, suspended above the field of play, waiting, hoping perhaps, for his caressing hands, bony visitors from another world, admittedly, but also a connection between worlds. As her hands were to the music, so were his to her breasts, and through them to her soul and the soul-ineffable sound. The great pain of the great joy: it was more than his being could bear. He had to withdraw.
“Isn’t that nice?” she said when she had finished.
“Yeah.”
“Did you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like me?”
“Yes. I love you.”
“I thought you’d never say it.”
Billie Jo was thus Arnold’s gateway and guide to the world of Art, twenty minutes north. Dallas, for Arnold, had hitherto meant one thing: the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day. Now it came to mean the symphony at Meyerson Hall, the Theater Center, the Shakespeare Festival at Grand Park, and the theatrical experiments at Southern Methodist University. And she paid. Or rather, he was the frequent replacement for missing members of the family subscriptions. But his favorite venue was, coincidentally, the place they went to sans famille, an art movie house, happily located at Inwood Road and Lovers Lane, across from the SMU campus.
And lovers they were, though technically virgins, lovers of each other and of the amazing tour they had booked together: from concert to film to play to film to reading to film to museum to film, a rondo in which film was the fundamental; never were two people better served by the Inwood.
Arnold saw his first foreign film in February of 1966. It was an eye-opener of such force and brilliance as to divide his life—before and after The Seventh Seal. Until that time, his movie fare had consisted of Saturday matinees at the Farr Best Theater on Broad Street, with noisy white kids downstairs and noisy black kids up in the balcony. He had been two or three times at night with his parents: the noise level was lower, but the films were the same—mostly Westerns and grade-B unmemorables with the occasional Marty or Ben Hur.
But The Seventh Seal was