The volume of the music increases; the front door has opened. A peal of laughter comes from the stoop, and then a woman’s voice. What on earth? it says.
Stanley and Claudio look up. The woman at the door is slender and very tall, dressed in a long flowered dress that looks homemade. Her winged wire-rimmed glasses and her long straight ponytail make her seem younger, and at the same time older, than she probably is. She wears no makeup, and her bronze hair is streaked with gray. Stanley figures her for about forty. Good afternoon, ma’am, he says, putting on his best little-boy-lost front. Is Mister Welles at home?
Yes, he’s here. Are you Stanley? You must be Stanley.
She swoops down the steps, along the path. Her gait is quick and athletic; it’s easy to imagine her playing tennis, or golf. She’s barefoot, and her tan forearms are speckled with what looks like white paint. She’s carrying a steaming cup of tea, and as she reaches the fence she shifts it to her left hand to shake with her right.
I’m Synn?ve, she says. I’m Adrian’s wife. He was so happy to meet you! He couldn’t stop talking about you. Now, who is this?
I am called Claudio, Claudio says. I am greatly honored, se?ora.
Sorry for the mess on my hands. I’ve been all morning in the studio. My word, look at all these cats! What on earth are you carrying?
My friend and I, Stanley says, we went fishing last night, and—
Are those grunion? So early?
Yes ma’am. We wound up with more than we know what to do with, so we thought that maybe you and Mister Welles—
Well, aren’t you both dear! You’ve come at the perfect time, too. I hadn’t a notion of what to do for dinner tonight, and we simply adore grunion. Now, you must both come in at once, before these furry bandits devour you. Come, come! I still have hot water for tea.
Mrs. Welles—Synn?ve?—has a funny accent: Scandinavian maybe, or German, or Dutch. She speaks English like she learned it in England. Adrian! she calls over the music as she opens the front door again. Stanley and Claudio are here! They’ve brought us fish for dinner!
If Welles responds, Stanley can’t hear him over the shrieking hi-fi. He and Claudio set their buckets on the kitchen floor—the fish make shadowy airfoils under the ceiling fixture’s light—and while Synn?ve fixes the tea and chats with Claudio, Stanley takes a look around. The walls and the tabletops are cluttered with weird art: old planks splashed with hot lead, driftwood snared with yarn, burst ceramic eggs that something hatched from in a hurry. As Stanley pokes around, he hears a quiet precise male voice filter from the next room; at first he thinks it’s Welles. Then a second voice joins in, just as Stanley’s noticing the tinniness of the sound: it’s a radio program, coming through a loudspeaker. Why the radio and the hi-fi would be on at the same time he can’t begin to guess. From upstairs comes a creak of floorboards, a scrape of wood: someone moving just overhead.
Stanley, Synn?ve calls, Adrian told me that you’ve come all the way from New York, and that you found his book of poems there. Is that true?
Yes, ma’am, Stanley says. I’m from Brooklyn. I picked it up in Manhattan.
Wonderful! I think it’s what every poet dreams of, in a way. It’s like putting notes into bottles and throwing them into the ocean. I am an artist—when I make something, I know where it goes—so I don’t really understand. Adrian says I don’t. But I must tell you this. Yesterday? When he came home from his office? He went upstairs to his study, and he closed the door. Now? Tonight? It is just the same. He has not written like this in years. Years! It is because of you. He will not tell you this, so I’m telling you. Would you like some milk in your tea? Or sugar?
No ma’am. Just plain. Thanks.
A pale light flickers in the next room—Stanley sees its reflection in the windowglass, and on the glazed curve of a lamp’s base—and he realizes that the quiet voices are coming not from a radio but a television set. He steps across the threshold for a closer look. It’s around the corner to the left: a Philco model, with a twentyone-inch tube in a mahogany console. Stanley’s been around TVs before, plenty of times, but it’s mostly been in shops, not people’s houses. This one’s playing newsreels—old ones, he’s guessing, unless the Nazis are back in power somewhere and Roosevelt’s risen from the grave. Just like always, Stanley has a hard time focusing on the picture: he keeps getting distracted by the texture of the screen, staring until the image disintegrates into a mosaic of tiny pulsing lights. He blinks hard, shakes his head, turns away in sudden revulsion.