“Too sick to misbehave?”
His eyes were lazy, but he understood. “You’ve been reading novels. Serves me right.”
“What does it really feel like?” she asked. “Do you hallucinate?”
“No,” said Lewis. “I just feel so sick I don’t mind giving up. I used to look for opium or hashish—why not be in a trance?—but I don’t want to leave now.”
Dulcy asked Irving to bring some broth and watched it put Lewis to sleep. She sorted through a box of books he’d shipped from New York and decided she wanted to read all of them. She poked through the piles that dotted the room—she could date the trips taken by the top of each mound, a train ticket or a newspaper. One stack of tropical linen, layered with a stack of torrid letters postmarked from Bozeman, seemed oldest. She made herself tuck them back, mostly unread, but skimmed through fond notes from his sisters, asking about his health, talking about plays and scandals, a dead girl they’d all known, a runaway car.
“Dulcy, are you there?”
He thought he was cold even though he was burning up. She undressed and lay down next to him, wet towels in a basket for later. When he was asleep, she reached for a thick notepad near the bed and read through dated pages of fragments, beginning the summer before:
Fever dream: birds bleeding onto the ground as they flew overhead.
Samuel needs to find a larger town for his appetites.
Chicago after a pipe, watching a girl’s head bob. She seemed to be ten feet away, but she was having an effect.
What he thought about: not nice things, but honest, and it was all him, fresh and violent and bored and depressed, ill without being in any way languid, and she buried herself into it enough to not hear the lock. She was half covered, propped up on an elbow, when she looked up at Irina in the doorway, hand to her mouth. “I thought he might need help,” Irina squeaked.
“You do this all the time?” asked Dulcy. “Walk into this bedroom?”
Irina shook her head, eyes locked on the scene: a feverish man on a bed with haphazard covers, arm wrapped around the equally naked Mrs. Nash. “I heard Samuel say he was ill.”
“Go away,” said Dulcy. “We’re fine.”
Which was true, all in all. She imagined Irina’s voice streaming across town and wondered how she’d play the idea that she’d let herself into a man’s room, thinking she could help.
Dulcy picked up the notebook again.
Sometimes, another human comes on you like a vision. You feel you already know her, you’re familiar with the line of her cheek, or the way she looks away, the way she studies a menu. You don’t know her, of course, anymore than you know a Venus in a painting, but because you have that sense you decide you will now, and it will make all the difference in your life. It’s the American Way.
Lost and found: the West as a place to disappear or a place to be reborn.
Beginnings disappear here, but endings are dramatic. People come here to remake ruin or to drop into emptiness.
Poor Rex, Poor Samuel. Dulcy is fine, all silk skin and good mind and appetite. The question is not how to be happy but how not to ruin it.
She began to have the sense that he really only cared about staying alive, and enjoying life, rather than being a great writer; this meant that the snippets he put down were easy and loose.
“What did the lovely Irina want?” asked Lewis, as if he’d just heard them speak.
“To inquire after your health.”
“I never fucked her.” He reached out for a cup of water, and Dulcy watched his whole arm vibrate. He looked at what she was reading, lay back, and shut his eyes. She turned back to his notes, probably from about April—he was guilty of lists, too: laundry , moderation , talk sense into Samuel , $ and goodbye to P.
P was possibly Priscilla, the Bozeman mistress. Dulcy decided to face the clippings she’d glimpsed labeled Leda R., glued down near handwritten notes from February:
A girl in the dining car, the blank look of an open future. Pale and dark and tired. She seemed stunned by the landscape, by other travelers who rambled on (the look on her face while she watched the man who brayed at me about politics), by books that bored her. I remember her because she was pretty but odd—faced, and I liked her shape. Sometimes her expression fell away, snapped like an icicle.
No one leaves a train and what he or she loves in life for any one reason. She was distracted, dressed in bereaved black. She was, moreover, dealing with another girl who seemed to be her sibling, and who was evidently difficult, or at least ill and petulant. We did not talk. How did I know about the father’s body? The blowhard conductor.
But I recognized her. I knew already: the fallen man on the sidewalk, while people gawked. And so knowing—hindsight is cheap—that this might be the Remfrey girl, I am on the one hand surprised, and on the other not at all. I could not swear to recognize her in a group of similar women, in a different season, in different light and mood; I’m not sure that I didn’t want to create a drama around a face. But I remember the face as I last saw it, as I left the train, and it was filled with energy or fear or the excitement that comes from having made a decision.
She flipped to the last entries, started to avert her eyes from scribbled accountancies, then gave up her selective morality. He’d made a good sum on his journalism and the Cope book, and he had some sort of family income. Geometric doodles, a sketch of a crooked house, a naked girl in profile scattered around lines like this:
She can die, or she can die to her old life. The argument after the fact is annoying. She wanted to disappear. Running away from something, running into something. There would have been so many easier places to land.
And:
What was it like to grow up with such a father? No lightweight eccentric.
I told myself I wasn’t sure because I wanted her.
I don’t want to write this anymore.
She lowered the notebook to the floor and reached for the pile of New York newspapers and clippings, probably untouched since his return at the end of May: business scams, digs at Clark, a car accident that had killed two Columbia graduates, and this small corner item:
Family Requests that Girl Be Declared Dead
On the occasion of what would have been her twenty—fifth birthday on May 26, the family of Leda Remfrey has requested she be legally declared dead after months of fruitless searching. Miss Remfrey’s brothers, Walter and Winston, bankers of the city, maintain that their sister, lost from a Northern Pacific train on January 15 or 16, flung herself to death from a train window somewhere in Montana or North Dakota. A small service will be held next week in the city, the location and time to be announced, and a stone will be placed in the family plot in Westfield, New York. This ends a tragedy that began when Walton Remfrey, Miss Remfrey’s father, died in early January.