Voices in the Night Read Free Page B

had the sense of a sky darkening before a storm. “Can’t,” I thought I heard her say, so softly that I wondered if she had spoken at all; or perhaps she had said “Can.”
    “What did you—” I breathed out, barely able to hear my own words.
    “I can’t,” she said, and now there was no mistaking it. “Such a perfect day. And now—this.” She raised her arm in a weary sweeping motion that seemed to include the entire room, the entire universe. In the mirror her reflection playfully swept out her arm. “I can’t. I tried, but I can’t. I can’t. You’ll have to—you’ll have to choose.”
    “Choose?”
    Her answer was so hushed that it seemed barely more than an exhalation of air. “Between me and—her.”
    “You mean…her?”
    “I hate her,” she whispered, and burst into tears. She immediately stopped, took a deep breath, and burst into tears again. “You don’tlook at me,” she said. “But that’s not—” I said. “I have to go,” she said, and stood up. She was no longer crying. She took another deep breath and rubbed her nostrils with the back of a bent finger. She reached into a pocket of her skirt and pulled out a tissue that crumbled into fuzz. “Here,” I said, holding out my handkerchief. She hesitated, took it from me, and dabbed at her nostrils. She handed back the handkerchief. She looked at me and turned to leave. “Don’t,” I said. “Me or her,” she whispered, and was out the door.
    During the next week I flung myself into my work, which was just complicated enough to require my full attention, without interesting me in the least. At 5:00 I came directly home, where I felt soothed in every room. But I was no child, no naïve self-deceiver intent on evading a predicament. I wanted to understand things, I wanted to make up my mind. From the beginning there had been a deep kinship between Monica and me. She was wary, trained to expect little of life, grateful for small pleasures, on her guard against promises, accustomed to making the best of things, in the habit of both wanting and not daring to want something more. Now Miracle Polish had come along, with its air of swagger and its taunting little whisper. Why not? it seemed to say. Why on earth not? But the mirrors that strengthened me, that filled me with new life, made Monica bristle. Did she feel that I preferred a false version of her, a glittering version, to the flesh-and-blood Monica with her Band-Aids and big knees and her burden of sorrows? What drew me was exactly the opposite. In the shining mirrors I saw the true Monica, the hidden Monica, the Monica buried beneath years of discouragement. Far from escaping into a world of polished illusions, I was able to see, in the depths of those mirrors, the world no longer darkened by diminishing hopes and fading dreams. There, all was clear, all was possible. Monica, I understood perfectly, would never see things as I did. When she looked in the mirrors, she saw only a place that kept pulling me away from her, and in that place a rival of whom she was desperately jealous.
    I felt myself moving slowly in the direction of a dangerous decisionI did not wish to make, like someone swerving on an icy road toward an embankment.
    It wasn’t until another week had passed that I knew what I was going to do. Summer was in its fullness; on front porches, neighbors fanned themselves with folded newspapers; sprinklers sent arcs of spray onto patches of lawn and strips of driveway, which shone in the sun like black licorice; at the top of a ladder, a man in a baseball cap moved a paintbrush lazily back and forth. It was Saturday afternoon. I had called Monica that morning and told her I had something important to show her. She was to meet me on the front porch. We sat there drinking lemonade, like an old married couple, watching the kids passing on bicycles, a squirrel scampering along a telephone wire. A robin was pecking furiously at the roadside grass. After a while I said,