Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

playground Mrs. Bradley sat beside him, holding the umbrella over his head and talking to him in a low constant patter whose words they could not distinguish. She was soaked.

Walking away from the continental breakfast with a heaping plate of bite-sized muffins, looking down at the blue and maroon carpet with its pattern of sturdy floral urns, Ben saw the receptionist smile broadly in his direction. He smiled back, wondering as the side door swung closed behind him if it was his gluttony or something else that made her look so fondly on him.

It was good to shed the crowds with their noise and litter. Their numbers had decided every pull to the side of the road, every stop at a gas station, and Ann had forgotten how it felt to be without them.

In the light rain, the wipers clocking back and forth in their reassuring motion, she sat beside Kurt the Hut and watched the road through the windshield. She let her eyes soften on the glistening wet asphalt and the other cars around them with their beaded shining hulks, the tall, boxlike passing buildings with their slick plastic corporate logos that referred to nothing unless you already knew the code. She remembered how she had felt on the train from Tokyo, passing the symbols on all sides of her. In a foreign country you believed it was foreignness that kept you out, but in fact your own country kept you out equally. It only took longer to notice.

She closed her eyes and still the plastic words loomed there, inscrutable. IMMUTEK, SOLIDYNE, MAGNUSON, VIVIDEX. Moving through time was a long string of comparisons, a longing for repetition or novelty, one or the other. It was all a reach, trying to touch the past to the present and the present to the future. Sad that way, how all of experience was a vector with a single ending, in which comparisons dissolved.

At a rest stop in Connecticut she came out of the bathroom and wandered toward the back of the lot, toward a straggly grove of trees and dried grass where she could stretch her legs. But before she reached the corner of the building she was hearing a private conversation between Dory and Oppenheimer, standing a few feet away behind a rhododendron. Dory was crying raggedly.

She jerked back from the corner but then she had to listen briefly. She looked behind her, furtive, to make sure no one else could see her lurking. She was shamed but compelled.

—It’s nothing about you, said Oppenheimer, —I’m very fond of you, as you know. And you have been a great comfort about losing Kitty.

—So you wouldn’t—with anyone?

—I don’t have it in me, said Oppenheimer. —There’s something missing. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s the way I’ve always been since I got here. I simply have no capacity. I’m sorry.

—Are you saying you don’t—what, you don’t even get erections?

Ann turned away cringing, her hands coming up involuntarily, fingers spread in horror, as though someone was speaking lewdly about her own father.

—I have turned from all that, she heard Oppenheimer say painfully as she walked toward the rest room doors again, anything to shut herself in and be out of the way. —It was taken from me.

In the bathroom she stood over the bank of sinks without moving. The room was empty and she was glad. She looked in the smoky mirror, and could barely make out the features of her own face. It had been embarrassing: she had been embarrassed for Dory. But there was an element of relief.

Poor Oppenheimer had no secrets.

Ben was sitting on a white plastic chair beside the motel pool when the two buses pulled into the parking lot. Bradley’s army dismounted through the back doors of a van, hitting the ground hard in their black boots, armed to the teeth.

Szilard and Oppenheimer stepped down from the bus, followed by Ann and Larry, and Ben walked across the pool’s herbaceous border, bent down and kissed Ann over the top of the wire fence.

—How are you, he said, —are you OK? and she smiled up at him.

—I’m not bad, she said. —It’s good to leave the crowd behind. You’ll see.

—Where are they?

—They’re something like sixty miles behind us. Whenever Leo has an event staged we’ll allow them to catch up, but the rest of the time we have privacy.

—Except for Bradley and his boys.

—Except for them.

Later she and Ben made a cigarette run, Oppenheimer in the back seat. He waited in the back of the car while they walked across the street to the convenience store.

Outside its front doors a teenage girl smoked a long cigarette. Heavy blue eyeliner made her eyelids look droopy and knobby knees protruded beneath a suede miniskirt with a fringe. A few feet away a man in bad-smelling clothes foraged in a garbage can.

—I wouldn’t go in there if I was you, said the girl to Ann as she reached for the handle on the front door, and shook her bangs in her eyes. —They’re being robbed.

—Excuse me? said Ben, and craned his neck to see in past the glare on the doors.

—Yeah, this guy’s robbing them with a gun, said the girl, and inhaled.

—Did you already call the police?

She shrugged. —I don’t got a phone.

—I’ll get the cell, said Ben, and headed back to the car.

The man rummaging in the garbage can threw down a soda bottle, which broke on the concrete, and ran away on bow legs.

—You saw someone point a gun at the cashier in there? asked Ann, incredulous, and tried to peer in the window behind her, futile as Ben had been. There were too many signs, cheap phonecards, cheap malt liquor.

—Yeah, I was just going out the door, he didn’t hardly notice me. He’s probably on something.

Ben came jogging back talking on his phone as Oppenheimer followed him.

—Someone’s robbing the store, apparently, said Ann, and Oppenheimer raised an eyebrow.

—It’s disheartening. Would you care for a cigarette? I still have