“A place like this, with a view like this. Not a big place.”
“Doesn’t have to be. A living room, one bedroom for us and one for
Thomas, maybe a cozy little den lined with books.”
“We don’t even need a dining room, but I’d like a big kitchen.”
“Yeah. A kitchen you can really live in.” She sighed.
“Music, books, real home-cooked meals instead of junk food grabbed on
the fly, lots of time to sit on the porch and enjoy the view-and the
three of us together.”
That was the rest of The Dream: a place by the sea and by otherwise
living simply-enough financial security to retire twenty years early.
One of the things that had drawn Bobby to Julie-and Julie to him-was
their shared awareness of the shortness of life. Everyone knew that
life was too short, of course, but most people pushed that thought out
of mind, living as if there were endless tomorrows. If most people
weren’t able to deceive themselves about death, they could not have
cared so passionately about the outcome of a ball game, the plot of a
soap opera, the blatherings of politicians, or a thousand other things
that actually meant nothing when considered against the inevitable fall
of the endless night that finally came to everyone. They could not have
endured to waste a minute standing in a supermarket line and would not
have suffered hours in the company of bores or fools. Maybe a world lay
beyond this on maybe even Heaven, but you couldn’t count on it; you
could count only on darkness. Self-deception in this case was a
blessing. Neither Bobby nor Julie was a gloom-monger. She knew how to
enjoy life as well as anyone, and so did he, even if neither of them
could buy the fragile illusion of immortality than served most people as
a defense against the unthinkable. This awareness expressed itself not
in anxiety or depression, but in a strong resolve not to spend their
lives in a hurly-burly meaningless activity, to find a way to finance
long stretches time together in their own serene little tide pool.
As her chestnut hair streamed in the wind, Julie squinted at the far
horizon, which was filling up with honey-gold light as the sinking sun
drizzled toward it.
“What frightens Thomas about being out in the world is people, too many
people. But he’d be happy in a little house by the sea, a quiet stretch
of coast, few people.
“I’m sure he would.”
“It’ll happen,” Bobby assured her.
“By the time we build the agency big enough to sell, the southern coast
will be too expensive. But north of Santa Barbara is pretty.”
“It’s a long coast,” Bobby said, putting an arm around her.
“We’ll still be able to find a place in the south. And we’ll have time
to enjoy it. We’re not going to live forever, but we’re young. Our
numbers aren’t going to come up for years an years yet.” But he
remembered the premonition that had shivered through him in bed that
morning, after they had made love, the feeling that something malevolent
was out there in the windswept world, coming to take Julie away from
him.
The sun had touched the horizon and begun to melt into it. The golden
light deepened swiftly to orange and then to bloody red. The grass and
tall weeds behind them rustled in the wind, and Bobby looked over his
shoulder at the spirals of airborne sand that swirled across the slope
between the beach and the parking lot, like pale spirits that had fled a
graveyard with the coming of twilight. From the east a wall of night
was toppling over the world. The air had grown downright cold.
CANDY SLEPT all day in the front bedroom that had once been his
mother’s, breathing her special scent. Two or three times a week, he
carefully shook a few drops of her favorite perfume-Channel Number
Five-onto a white, lace-trimmed handkerchief, which he kept on the
dresser beside her silver comb-and-brush set, so each breath he took in
the room reminded him of her. Occasionally he half woke from slumber to
readjust the pillows or pull the covers more tightly around him, and the