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

his face haggard. Ben hoped he was a new man, or at least his old self, but all he would say when they got up was that he had come because Leo had wanted him to, that for the march on Washington all three of them had to be together.

—After that, said Fermi, —I’m going home. Can I have a glass of water?

Ben went to the sink and poured him one.

—It’s going to taste like dust, he said as he handed it over. Fermi was still looking at his feet.

—I need slippers, he said, taking the glass with fingers so limp Ben was afraid he would drop it. —They are cold.

Ben was thinking how he had always had a daydream of hotels. He and Ann both had a dream of hotels, about a time in their lives when they would live in a succession of these hivelike buildings, small self-contained cities with grand lobbies and fountains and restaurants. They both had a dream of being eternal tourists, living in buildings with yellow walls and trellises of climbing vines, where responsibility lay with the authorities and the authorities were distant, kind fathers, seamless in their trustworthiness. Yet this trip had not resembled that dream despite the fact that they had stayed in many hotels. They had stayed in many hotels, some of them expensive and luxurious, but they had never found a hotel that resembled the hotel in the dream.

As she walked the sky lightened in the east and cars began to pass her on the street, first few and far between and then in a steady stream. Commuters freshly washed for morning sat at their steering wheels and drank coffee at stoplights as she passed.

She was encouraged by their neatness, by the way they faced the new day with their teeth brushed and their strong and pure coffee. Almost she envied them, the normal life she once had had, going to work and being busy, an arrow of purpose surrounded by leisure and other rewards. She recalled how the hours had been in their place and a place in the hours, nesting.

She had been asked, she remembered, what she was waiting for, what the point was of this long and ceaseless trip. Ben had asked her repeatedly until they agreed to leave it, and more recently she had begun asking herself. She thought of the fact that she was always waiting for something to happen, that she was here because of some unpredictable reversal, some new marvel that was always supposed to occur in the future.

Was there a difference between waiting for enlightenment and waiting to be entertained?

Ben called Oppenheimer’s room and invited him to have breakfast. He did not mention Fermi.

But then a few minutes later he led Fermi into the restaurant, and the hostess pointed them to a leatherette booth at the back where Oppenheimer was waiting. They passed Kurt the Hut and another bodyguard two tables away, no weapons visible on them, sitting rigidly and watching the few restaurant patrons with gimlet eyes as though each one could be suspect.

Oppenheimer rose as they approached, smiling with his arms raised, and Ben was surprised to see the depth of affection in his face when he stooped to clasp both of Fermi’s hands in his own.

—You’re with us again! he said shakily, and Fermi nodded awkwardly, his head bowed.

—He joined us for the march on Washington tomorrow, said Ben, and they slid into the booth. —He’s planning on going back after that.

—I understand, Enrico, said Oppenheimer quickly. —You still need your R&R. But it’s so good to see you.

The morning air had a sharp, clear quality that made her think she could answer questions. For once she had a chance of knowing why she was walking down the street in Greenbelt, Maryland in the fall, thousands of miles from her home, why she had left her job and everything she knew and why her husband was in a hotel with brown shag carpets eating breakfast with a balding and delusional Italian.

For the chance of finding out she kept walking. There was nothing to see but the wide suburban intersections and the residential streets with their rows of neat lawns, fake-Tudor bungalows and Victorian facades climbing up to her left and her right, and the commuters, whom she stared at in their cars with growing longing.

People needed the comfort of routine and she was one of them. That was all.

She had been waiting for something to happen for months now, yet nothing ever did, nothing on a grandiose scale. Events were swiftly part of the past, receding, and the wait was thankless. But more than that it was misguided, she had come to suspect. You could wait for an event all your life but once it came it would only slip into history and be gone. Oppenheimer and the others had come from the past, she thought, and yet she stayed with them because of what she believed was the future: but they were not the future. They were something that had already happened. They were the past bleeding into the present and further, all three tenses collapsed into one.

There was nothing to touch in the future but the past, and so there was nothing to be waiting for. It was not what was going to happen, she saw in a shiver, but what already had.

She knew what she knew, now, she thought, walking back to the hotel. She hoped she could remember the way.

—Enrico! Are you better? crowed Szilard, finding them at a table beside the pool.

Oppenheimer and Ben were both smoking and Fermi sipped gingerly at his coffee. Beside them the pool was covered in plastic, dead leaves and brown water collected in the slack.

—He came because you wanted him to, said Ben quietly. —But he’s going back after the event tomorrow.

—Well, said Szilard, and coughed into his hand. —Thank you, Enrico. Would the two of you like to come with us to see the floats for the