His grin is both weary and frightened. "I bet you're not. And I know I don't want to tell. But it's like getting a shot at the doctor's office...no, worse, like getting a cyst opened up or a carbuncle lanced. But some things just have to be done." His brilliant hazel eyes are fixed on hers. "Lisey, if we get married, we can't have kids. That's flat. I don't know how badly you want them right now, but you come from a big family and I guess it'd be natural for you to want to fill up a big house with a big family of your own someday. You need to know that if you're with me, that can't happen. And I don't want you to be facing me across a room somewhere five or ten years down the line and screaming 'You never told me this was part of the deal.'"
He draws on his cigarette and jets smoke from his nostrils. It rises in a blue-gray fume. He turns back to her. His face is very pale, his eyes enormous. Like jewels, she thinks, fascinated. For the first and only time she sees him not as handsome (which he is not, although in the right light he can be striking) but as beautiful, the way some women are beautiful. This fascinates her, and for some reason horrifies her.
"I love you too much to lie to you, Lisey. I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. I think we're going to be quite a wealthy couple in terms of money, but I'll almost certainly be an emotional pauper all my life. I've got the money coming, but as for the rest I've got just enough for you, and I won't ever dirty it or dilute it with lies. Not with the words I say, not with the ones I hold back." He sighs - a long, shuddering sound - and places the heel of the hand holding the cigarette against the center of his brow, as if his head hurts. Then he takes it away and looks at her again. "No kids, Lisey. We can't. I can't."
"Scott, are you...did a doctor..."
He's shaking his head. "It's not physical. Listen, babyluv. It's here." He taps his forehead, between the eyes. "Lunacy and the Landons go together like peaches and cream, and I'm not talking about an Edgar Allan Poe story or any genteel Victorian wekeep-auntie-in-the-attic ladies' novel; I'm talking about the real-world dangerous kind that runs in the blood."
"Scott, you're not crazy - " But she's thinking about his walking out of the dark and holding the bleeding ruins of his hand out to her, his voice full of jubilation and relief. Crazy relief. She's remembering her own thought as she wrapped that ruin in her blouse: that he might be in love with her, but he was also half in love with death.
"I am, " he says softly. "I am crazy. I have delusions and visions. I write them down, that's all. I write them down and people pay me to read them."
For a moment she's too stunned by this (or maybe it's the memory of his mangled hand, which she has deliberately put away from her, that has stunned her) to reply. He is speaking of his craft - that is always how he refers to it in his lectures, never as his art but as his craft - as delusion. And that is madness.
"Scott," she says at last, "writing's your job. "
"You think you understand that," he says, "but you don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey. And I'm not going to sit here under this tree and give you the history of the Landons, because I only know a little. I went back three generations, got scared of all the blood I was finding on the walls, and quit. I saw enough blood - some of it my own - when I was a kid. Took my Daddy's word for the rest. When I was a kid, Daddy said that the Landons - and the Landreaus before them - split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky. Bad-gunky was better, because you could let it out by cutting. You had to cut, if you didn't want to spend your life in the bughouse or the jailhouse. He said it was the only way."
"Are you talking about self-mutilation, Scott?"
He shrugs, as if unsure. She is unsure, as well. She has seen him naked, after all. He has a few scars, but only a few.
"Blood-bools?" she asks.
This time he's more positive. "Blood-bools, yeah."
"That night when you stuck your hand through the greenhouse glass, were you letting out the bad-gunky?"
"I suppose. Sure. In a way." He stubs his cigarette in the grass. He takes a long time, and doesn't look at her while he does it. "It's complicated. You have to remember how terrible I felt that night, a lot of things had been piling up - "
"I should never have - "
"No," he says, "let me finish. I can only say this once."
She stills.
"I was drunk, I was feeling terrible, and I hadn't let it out - it - in a long time. I hadn't had to. Mostly because of you, Lisey."
Lisey has a sister who went through an alarming bout of self-mutilation in her early twenties. Amanda's past all that now - thank God - but she bears the scars, mostly high on her inner arms and thighs. "Scott, if you've been cutting yourself, shouldn't you have scars - "
It's as if he hasn't heard her. "Then last spring, long after I thought he'd shut up for good, I be good-goddam if he didn't start up talking to me again. 'It runs in you, Scoot,'
I'd hear him say. 'It runs in your blood just like a sweetmother. Don't it?'"