He saw her pass several times (he had told Hannah) but never stopped her. He was playing a different and much longer game than mere acquaintance. After school, Billy installed himself at a faded coffee shop about halfway between their home and Hannah’s school. He sat in the window of Café Aurelian every afternoon, smoking elegantly—the way he smoked was always his best trick—glancing at newspapers, entertaining friends, knowing the names and histories of the café’s amused Austrian waiters, whom he spoke to in tourist German. All of it to camouflage the fact that he was waiting for Hannah to pass by.
At first, Billy had not said or done anything at all: he was merely there, every day after school. Hannah told Lila that Billy would look up, lazily, always in another direction than outside, seemingly absorbed in the hieroglyphs of his cigarette smoke. The point, however, was that she did notice him. She learned later that his whole day built up to that one moment of choosing not to look at her, and deciding how best to do it. To preserve an element of randomness, he would ask a waiter for the dice cup and pick two numbers, say eight and three. If they came up, he would not look up at all when he felt her pass, which he described as an outrageous feat of asceticism. If his numbers did come up, then he would look up halfway, just enough to see her in the corner of his eye, but not enough to meet her glance if she should turn. He could tell from blocks away when she was coming, he said. He said he could feel it when she had turned the corner onto Lexington Avenue. When she would actually walk by, when she was right next to him with only a thin pane of glass separating them, Billy told Hannah it was like a wave breaking over him in the ocean. It might have been true, but then again Billy was a fantastic liar.
The shadow play went on for months. Every day Hannah walked by the window, and every day Billy was there in her peripheral vision. She looked straight ahead, and so did he. And then he vanished. Hannah noticed—she wondered about his health. Was he smoking too much? In fact, Billy had been legitimately sick for a few days, but then he stayed away out of despair, thinking he’d somehow lost his chance, squandering the mystery built up over such a long time. Only later did he see absence as a tactic. After a week, Hannah walked inside the Aurelian and drank a citron pressé at Billy’s usual table to gauge how far down the street he was able to see her. She was too shy to ask the waiters about him. Once three weeks had passed, she’d almost forgotten that slight pressure of expectation that came when she turned the corner onto the otherwise barren stretch of Lexington Avenue. The Aurelian’s window had lost its mystery and glamor, and that storefront had retreated, once again, into normal oblivion. And then he came back.
One day passing the window, Hannah looked up out of habit, almost as a reflex, and there he was—staring back at her. She lost all composure, broke off her gaze, and almost ran. That was when Lila first heard about the boy in the window of Café Aurelian. By making eye contact, Hannah had forced herself to admit that she was not indifferent to his presence. Billy was once again there every day, but neither of them looked up again. That first moment of contact had opened a wound that took a period of willful blindness to heal. Finally, passing by one especially cold February day, Hannah looked away until it was almost too late—and then she looked up at the window. What happened next was controversial: Hannah said Billy waved, but Billy said he simply gestured with his cigarette, at someone else. Hannah had waved back. It was a good-natured argument—who’d initiated that crucial wave and set history in motion. Whether Billy had risked everything to make contact, or if (as Billy claimed) it was Hannah who made the leap while he was merely asking for more coffee. Either way, Billy said, at that point there was no doubt. Conversation, love, marriage, children’s names—they were all, he said later, implied in that first unspoken exchange, as the acorn implies an oak.
Lila wondered how it would have started with the serving girl. Despite the immense woods and open spaces on the island, it was not easy to run off alone here. Billy bent down to pick up something from the floor—his napkin—while continuing to talk to Christopher Templeton, two people over from him. Something flashed in Billy’s other hand—what was it? He was twirling a silver butter knife through his fingers, like a drum majorette’s baton.
“Jim, does your father refuse to join our community of saints?” John Wilkie said from the other end of the table, possibly drunk, Lila thought, and somewhat louder than the noise of conversation.
That anodyne question silenced everyone. The Old Man had not come down, which was unusual. He loved ceremonial occasions.
“He sends his regards,” Jim said to the assembled company, as everyone had turned toward him. “The man was not born a sailor.”
“To his better health, then,” Wilkie said, lifting his glass.
“Hear, hear,” Christopher Templeton said, also too loudly.
“Thank you, John,” Lila said. “I know Mr. Hillsinger would agree with me when I say that all anyone needs to be made whole is one night under these roofs, in these beds, in front of these fires. May the Old Man and Seven Island live forever.”
“Hear, hear, goddammit!” Christopher Templeton shouted, now banging on the table. He was agreeing with her, but Lila liked his silence better. She smiled her famous smile—the same one, Wilkie thought, that had brought at least three men he knew to the brink of suicide.
Wilkie raised his glass. He sensed the subterranean reproach in Lila’s toast—she didn’t like it when one conversation dominated a table—but just now he had other things to think about. He was absorbed by Lila’s silent focus on Billy Quick throughout the entire dinner.
For his part, Billy Quick was happy: it was unusual and surprisingly festive for the New House to be invited over. This formal sort of thing was what the Hill House did best. The only awkward piece was Susan the serving girl, who had thrown herself at him behind the barn two nights before. It made for an interesting evening in the open air, although he had probably talked more than was wise. She was not impressed by the details of his mourning.
And then there was Lila. She had stared at him persistently through the whole evening; he wondered if she’d discovered he was avoiding the food, which was terrible. Meanwhile, his unfortunate houseguest Christopher Templeton was drunk and talking too much, and Billy was sure Lila objected to him, too. It was fair enough, but he wanted to catch her at it. He wanted to make her ashamed, but he kept missing his chance. Lila was too crafty, or too fast. Once he thought he had her, but instead she was cheerfully outlining, to Catherine Templeton, the pageantry of tomorrow’s Migration. All of it, Lila said, had been invented from nothing by the Old Man.
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