The Snare

2. THEIR SEASON

2. THEIR SEASON "It was you all the time, you all the time," Tommy Arnold repeated, into her hair, kissing her neck, in a tumble of bedclothes , a tangle of limbs. Sleep and waking , caught in the driving storms of midnight and darkness, breathing quietness by the morning sunshine, quiet and knowing as grass and leaves. She didn't give enough, he threatened. Didn't give enough? she repeated. Didn't give enough, he said. "You're a soul-hunter," Julia observed, half-teasing. "Little by little, Tommy." "You're the dark of the moon. It's where you live. I want there too." "You've got your own dark, haven't you?" "That's not the point. You're keeping yours, hoarding it. You're determined to." "Not determined . . . no. I know what you mean. I can't help it, Tommy." "Is it limits I can't reach to? Still dreaming of that damn banjo player?" "Yes. No. Oh, if I don't know, why should it matter?" "Of something before that, then?" "And before that, then, and before that, then?" she half-mimicked. Stirred and angered at once, he almost struck her. Tenderly, she caught his hand. Her soft insistence melted him once more: "When you know everything, Tommy, why then it vanishes . . . youlose it. Besides, how am I to tell you what I can't say, even to you." 372 Elizabeth Spencer 373 Turning her hand, wistful with hope and fear: 'There's future yet," he said. "Of course there is." "Of course there is/' At the same time, something in him waited, she felt, not for revelation but for the action that would bring her over, trap, domesticate, and destroy. Wanting to want was not much good, Julia reflected. She longed to long for what was now again within her grasp, marriage—but this time more of a necessity than ever, bringing with it a father for the child (who but Tommy would be that good?), some certainty in life. The idea of goodness beckons forever to those who can't have it, but once they catch up to it by luck or accident, they immediately feel uneasy, restless, miserable. Playing solitaire with a worn deck, lying on her side on the daybed by the window, Sunday afternoons: 'Til disappoint you, Tommy. I won't do you right." "Oh, you're going to. I've stopped bothering about it. Someday we'll both just find ourselves around the corner and into the church." "I want it that way." "The hell you do. You see how you won't open up enough. The trouble's there." "Open up enough!" Her laugh had a hundred good times in it. "Mind, thoughts, head. You won't trust me." "You can't have everything, not about anybody." "It's not anybody I want." "Just me." She turned to solitaire again. "Okay, someday I'll let you know it all, bore you to death." "When? Now?" "Oh . . . in the fall." She wasyawning. They were, of course, happy, these old acquaintances, happy and lazy. What they argued about, what they decided—it didn't matter much. Tommy Arnold's first 3 7 4 T H E S N A R E fine wave of passion had passed on, diminishing. It returned , from time to time. He had never yet got raving enough, apparently, to hit her over the head and drag her by the hair to the registry office. But that didn't matter anyway, he argued. Name on a paper, ring on a finger, what did it mean? If she eluded him without it, she would do so with it, even more. The idea of him reforming anybody—not really! All the while he knew his own life had turned a page. He did not go back to his old surly ways. The air was fine and the sky above the cathedral spire was soft and blue. "I can't think why marriage is important," Julia said. "You'll notice as soon as people get into it, they want out of it." (Except Uncle Maurice and Aunt Isabel—they never wanted out. Apart they died: was she still away with the Parhams? If so, it seemed the very air was torn in the direction of thinking of them.) Lotus-eating, Julia just out of her shower on a hot afternoon, Tommy Arnold agreed with her. Marriage was not important...