Evening II

They lay on his coat on the moss and she felt the sticks and roots which she had not felt before as he was crashing over her. The grass by her cheek and the same as her cheek and the same as the air and all of it was part of the universe and his hand by her chin air and all of it was part of the universe and his hand by her chin and his face curved on her neck was part of it too.
Maybe I will after all.
What?
Have your baby.
He pulled her closer. I'd love that, he said. They could say anything now.
Might not be so simple, she said.
No.
With you married to someone else.
It would be ours, he said. That's how bad I am, I would like it.
But you would stay with her.
He didn't answer. She still had the conviction of his hands on her and did not yet feel the misery which she knew was coming. Misery was just outside the circle around them, waiting in the darkness. They held each other and his weight was more real than his going away.

There were things she'd not asked him and things she'd not said and she did not wonder what she knew or what she had learned but merely felt what had happened and felt what it meant. She did not need to explain it, she simply had it. He was asleep in her arms and the stars which had been spilling and spilling had stopped and were motionless and she knew that what they'd had was not enough but believe it would have it be.

Then the white ceiling opened like an eye and she saw what the ceiling might have seen, how she'd never put words to it.

All her life she'd listened to talk, life was full of talk. People said things, true and interesting and ridiculous things. Her father used to say they talked to much. There was much to say, she had said her share. How else was one to know a thing except by naming it? But words now fell so far from where life was. Words fell on a distant shore. It turned out there were other tracks on which life registered where things weren't acknowledged with words or given attention to or commented on. It might have been said, These two had a story. One might have said she'd found in him a great thing, that she'd found more than herself which was everything and found more than life. And even saying that she would not bring back what was gone. She did not know if it had been the same for him. She would never know. She only knew for herself. Nowhere did it show. Without being shared, what they knew had faded into a kind of mirage. It became One of Those Things. She could not let what passed between them matter too much afterwards so that when the memory tried to assert itself it had been pushed down by reason and habit and time, eventually becoming no more than a scruffy hidden sear on a scruffy hillside. She had worked to rub it out. That this had been forgotten once and would be forgotten again suddenly seemed worse to her than her own life ending.