“I’m improvising.” Simon bowed, his forehead glazed with perspiration. “Plenty of precedent for it. Boys these days don’t want to hear, ‘Youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.’ They know all about that already, they do.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Amelia. She turned to Burling, but her face was a mystery.
“That thou art my own son,” Simon continued, “I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me.”
The wicker squealed beneath Amelia, and Luke forgot his line.
Burling watched from the guest room that night, but Simon padded across the grass to the carriage house alone. Quietly, so as not to wake Luke on the third floor, Burling moved down the hallway to his old room.
“I was wondering when you’d come.” Amelia was sitting in the window seat, blowing the smoke from her cigarette through the corroded screen. “I’d like to talk to you, you know.”
Burling moved closer. The fine features of Amelia’s long face were white from the streetlight. Her cigarette smelled strange.
“What is that you’re smoking?”
“It’s pot. Marijuana,” she giggled. “You want some?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I got it from Luke,” Amelia said.
“You’ve been smoking marijuana with our son?”
“Oh, he doesn’t know I have it. I think he got it from Simon.”
“Bell smokes dope?”
“Apparently so.”
“That can’t be good,” Burling said, sitting down on the slipper chair. Their room, the canopy bed, the sheer curtains, the pastel Tabriz he had bought in Uzbekistan, struck him as an odd setting for what was taking place.
“Apparently people do a lot of things. We were just such good children we missed out on most of them.”
“We weren’t always so good.”
“Yes, that’s true,” she acknowledged in an open-ended tone. “Once upon a time I was known as the wild one. I was Sylvia Plath. I was going to draw or act or write poems.”
“Just the other night you denied that.”
“That was then, this is now. Are you sure you don’t want some?”
“I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”
“So many things have changed, Lucius. For once, I wish you’d come down with us mortals. You’ll lower your standards for April Lindstrom, but not for me.”
“All right,” Burling said, standing up. April’s name seared him. A puff of marijuana would not be the worst thing he’d done.
“Here.”
When he drew on the joint, the ember was so close and hot that he burned his fingers. “Shit!” He coughed and dropped the thing.
“Poor Lucius.” Amelia laughed and came toward him, her arms as wide as an angel in her translucent robe. He coughed, and the blue smoke kept coming out of him in clouds. “You make everything so complicated, don’t you?” The robe fell open, and he could see her small round breasts in her nightgown. Whatever his lungs had absorbed had gone straight to his head, and he was aware of only two distinct parts of his body—the top of his skull, which seemed to have disappeared, and a gradually mounting erection, so strong that it almost hurt. He couldn’t help remembering April in the hotel in Samarkand. “Most husbands just screw their secretaries, but you had to make your affair into some kind of idea as big as you are, didn’t you?”
“Amelia, don’t.”
“I wouldn’t sleep with you for a couple of months because I was having a hard time. My medication was all messed up, Lucius, and I didn’t have Dr. Rose there, so I can understand you might want one night of casual fucking, I wouldn’t even begrudge you that, but instead you come up with some kind of grand design, a mission that befits a man of your great intellectual prowess.”
“Please.”
“You find yourself a hippie whore with an impotent husband, a folie à deux of epic proportions, and what happens? You don’t just get laid, you manage to invoke the soldiers of God—of God!” She looked up at the ceiling and laughed in a way that frightened and thrilled him. Maybe this was how it would be now, a world of sensation and vague paranoia. “They sweep down and murder your pilot and knock you on the head and carry your ideal woman away. She’s probably sitting Indian-fashion in their tent right now, like Scheherazade, part of the king’s harem, telling them stories so they won’t cut her throat.”
“Amelia, your imagination.”
“My imagination! It’s always my imagination. Until it isn’t.”
“I was going to say I always loved your imagination. It’s what made me love you in the first place.”
“Oh, Lucius,” she said, clinging to him now. “Your probity and my imagination. How did they turn on us like this?”
“I don’t know. It’s a dangerous time.”
“You mean our age?”
“Ours, the age of the world, if you know what I mean. That was the problem, that I started to think like that again, about bigger things.”
“And all I could think of was little ones. Boring, tiny annoyances and slights.”
“April.” He couldn’t believe he’d uttered her name.
“Yes, but not just her.”
“She and Jack seemed to come from a totally different world.”
Amelia was crying quietly as he held her and now she began to move her hand down his stomach and under his belt. “Is this what she did?”
“No, sweetheart. You don’t have to talk like that.”
“I can tell stories, too. It’s what I’m good at, you know. That’s what the children loved about me, before they grew up and started hating me.”
“Luke and Betsy don’t hate you,” he said.
“Elizabeth does. You run off with a woman, and all she is is ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ She was furious at me for sending her to camp when she found out you were coming home. But I couldn’t stand her for another second in this house.”
“That’s normal, isn’t it, between mothers and daughters?”
But Amelia had already moved on somewhere else. All along, she’d been pulling him upward with her fingers, scratching him slightly with her nails. “I could tell you a story,” she said distantly. “A story of April.”
“Amelia, don’t. It wasn’t like that.”
“Tell me what it was like,” she said.
“I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“You did, you know.”
“I don’t want it to be that way.”
Awkwardly, tenderly, he took her wrist and moved her to the bed. For an hour then, while the fallen joint smoldered on the chair, and for a month of nights after, Burling made love to his wife in a guilty, solicitous way, always aware that their romance was stolen from time. He often thought of April, in the high desert, riding with soldiers of God. He even let Amelia tell him stories about her, making love with the men to stay alive. For a month, chance and fate were suspended, but the king’s knife glinted beneath