“Why wouldn’t I be staring at you?”
Avery laughed. She could hardly believe . . .“Why are you coming on to me like this?” she said, her voice suddenly quieter. “You just got out of bed with my girlfriend.”
“What makes you think I’m coming on to you?”
“Are you serious? Why wouldn’t I be staring at you?” She mimicked his suggestive tone.
The refrigerator clicked on loudly and rumbled for a second before settling into its white-noise hum. “All I’m saying,” Grant said, “there was something happening with you, something special about you. Even through the drinking, it was there. I could see it.”
“What was there?” Avery shrugged as if she had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t have a clue.”
“Yes, you do,” he said, and then he appeared to suddenly turn off, as if a switch had been thrown in some internal circuitry. His face turned hard and impassive, and he went back to looking at the ceiling.
Avery watched him. His feet were still floating effortlessly six inches off the floor. His eyes were fixed on a spot directly above him, though he obviously wasn’t seeing a thing. He was so inside himself it was as if he had disappeared. “Can we try again?” she said. “I’m Avery. I’m a student here, in the Art Department. What about you? I don’t know a thing about you. You could be . . . anybody.”
He said, “I’m here spending a couple of weeks with a friend.” He turned to look at her. “He used to be a street performer. Now he’s a professor. It’s like—The guy wears a jacket to class.” He seemed amazed at the unlikeliness of it. “It’s—Man. Who are you?”
“What do you mean, street performer?”
“The thing that got him famous—” Grant let his feet drop. He turned on his side and propped his head on one hand.
“How long could you have done that?” Avery asked. “Keep your legs lifted like that.”
“Forever,” he said, uninterested, and then went back to the subject of his friend. “One of the things that got him famous, anyway. He stabbed himself in front of the Met. A Sunday afternoon in spring. Beautiful weather. French Impressionists show. Tourists? Coming out your ears.”
“He literally stabbed himself?”
“Once in the chest, once in the stomach. Screaming some shit or other about art.”
“And he teaches here?”
Grant nodded.
“So. But. That was it? He stabbed himself? That makes him an artist?”
Grant looked away, as if momentarily annoyed. “He’s a performance artist,” he said. “He’s in the Theater Department.” When he looked back at her, he said, “Do you want to go for a ride?”
“Now?” Avery leaned forward, partly taken aback and partly, to her own surprise, excited. “It’s four in the morning.”
“We could watch the sunrise. There’s a lake not that far from here.” He sounded as though he were merely putting a proposal on the table, as if he were curious whether she would take him up on his offer.
“So, what?” Avery said. “You’re a professor too? You were teaching here?”
“Just visiting,” he said. “Are we going?”
Avery looked over her shoulder at Melanie’s closed bedroom door. As if Melanie sensed her attention, a small sleep sound issued from the room, a soft groan and a rustling of sheets. Avery waited, and when the sound was followed only by silence, she turned back to Grant. “You know,” she whispered, “if Melanie finds out that I went for a ride with you at four in the morning . . .”
“I’ll have ruined your reputation,” Grant said.
“I’ll have to find another place to live is what I was thinking.” Avery got up, about to go back to her room to change. “I have no idea why I’m doing this.” She hoped her expression conveyed at least a little of her genuine amazement.
Grant said, “Wear something warm and put on a jacket. I ride a bike.”
Avery said, mostly to herself, “Should have figured . . .”
Once she closed the door to her room, Avery turned off the lights, as if she needed the help of darkness to think. In the softest of whispers, but aloud, she said, “What are you doing, Avery?” and she pulled off her T-shirt and sent it sailing over the bed. No answer came immediately to mind, but a small voice out of some corner of herself urged her to change her mind, to go back out into the living room and tell him she was just too tired, or, even better, to just go to bed and leave him waiting; and as that quiet voice spoke to her, she got out of the rest of her clothes and then turned on the lights and rummaged through her dresser. While she was putting on her jeans and finding a clean blouse and then searching through the closet for her best buttery black leather jacket, she continued to entertain the possibility of not doing it, of not taking a four A.M. motorcycle ride with a guy who’d just gotten out of bed with her best friend after she’d just gotten out of bed with another guy. It was too crazy. She couldn’t do it; and then, a few minutes, later, she was dressed and out on the streets of State College with Grant, heading for town.
His motorcycle was parked in a lot behind the Days Inn. A sleek machine that looked as much like a missile as a bike, its compact black body soaked up light, a kind of shadow tilted cockily to one side. Grant had her wait while he went up to his room and returned with a pair of black helmets with black Plexiglas face masks, and a moment later they were riding into the night, slowly at first through town, then flying over lonely state routes faster by far than she had ever experienced before, trees and road rushing by in a dark blur, her arms wrapped around Grant’s waist, her head pressed into his back to block the wind. When what seemed to be a half hour or more had passed and they were still speeding over unfamiliar roads, farther and farther from civilization, she felt the first creeping traces of uneasiness working their way through her, and, later, as the ride went on and on, part of her turned unambiguously frightened—though another part of her, perhaps the bigger part, was thrilled. The dark flew by all around as she held tightly to Grant, her arms around his waist, her body against his. She leaned into the turns with him, hurtling over the road only a few feet off the ground, nothing to protect her but him, his solid body piloting a sleek shadow through shadows.
When they came to a stop, eventually, on the wooded shore of Raystown Lake, it was still dark, but morning and sunrise couldn’t be far away. She climbed off the bike and pulled off her helmet, and then they both moved toward a fallen tree at the edge of the water. The lake was glassy and quiet, dark and unmoving as a sheet of black plastic. She sat on the log and looked at the opposite shore, where trees crowded a hillside and descended to water. The early-morning air was crisp against her skin, and it smelled of pine and something else she couldn’t name, something rank that seemed to rise up from the water’s edge. The earth at her feet was covered with an inch-deep layer of moss that extended halfway to the lake like a blanket, and on a whim she pulled off her boots and socks and pressed her toes into the cool moist ground. She heard the crack of a breaking branch, and then Grant stepped over the log and sat beside her holding a small tree limb in his hands like a fishing pole—and at the sight of the fishing pole/tree limb, her dream came back to her and her head snapped back to the lake as if she might see herself floating away from the shore in a small boat, a strand of her hair stretching across the water.
Grant said, “Did you hear something?”
She shook her head, dismissing him, and continued staring out over the water, where again she saw the lake from her dream—the strand of hair her father was holding connecting her to him and to the shore, and then the strand snapping and then her drifting away. While she stared out over the black water of the lake, the dream’s images shifted into a flurry of memory and feeling, and a breeze slid over the water and