Daphne came home late that night to find Niles lying in bed, lights out, staring up at the ceiling. She entered the room softly. "Well," she said, standing in the doorway. She'd turned on the hall light when she came in, but her shadow, absurdly elongated, fell over Niles' face and chest. She couldn't see his face. She was no more than a black cardboard cutout to him.
"Where did you go?" he asked her, eventually, as she continued to stand there, her shadow flowing into his eyes.
"Drove around a bit," she said, entering and shutting the door behind her, so the room was plunged into darkness once more. "You know." She went to the chest of drawers and pulled open the top one, rummaging for a nightgown.
"Did you go see Mel?"
She shook her head. "I thought about it, but I couldn't." He felt a thin, bitter surge of vindication when she said that. He swallowed heavily against it, as though it were bile. "I didn't think she'd want to see me anyway."
"Probably not now," he said, his tone of voice closing off the subject. She heard that and pushed it, just so as not to let him have his own way.
"I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about eventually. I don't think she wants to see anybody now, but I'll call her when she gets out of the hospital. She and I are in this together, after all."
"Daphne –" Voice tight, tortured. "Daphne, that's wrong. You and I are in this together. You and me."
"No." She closed the drawer firmly, turned to face him, though neither could see the other one. "No, you did this to me, Niles, like you did it to her. We're not –"
"I have it too, Daphne! I'm dying too!"
He ached to see her, to know if she'd wavered when he said that. But the blackness seemed to coalesce, shifting to creep up around her, twining itself up her legs, veiling her face like some sort of perverse blackened bridal garment. A shroud, that was what that was called, he thought.
The pause went on long enough for him to begin putting the final touches on the metaphor when she spoke.
"I know that." Her tone was unreadable.
"Daphne, please –" His voice cracked. "I can't deal with this, Daphne. I can't – I can't go on hurting this way. Please don't hate me." He sounded like a third grader and he knew it.
She stood there, indecisive.
"Please."
As if that snapped the spell, she started and strode towards the bathroom. "Don't beg with me right now, Niles. I don't have the strength for it." The door clicked shut. In a second, he heard the water in the sink begin to run.
He was lying in precisely the same position when she emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown, her day's clothing wadded in one hand. She threw them in the laundry hamper and slid into bed, pulling the covers over her but careful to keep a few feet of space between her and Niles. He turned toward her in surprise.
"I thought you'd spend the night in the guest room."
"Is that what you want?"
"Of course not."
"It wouldn't matter anyway. We christened that a few nights ago." He thought she smiled wanly. "There's nowhere I can go to get away from it, Niles."
"Do you mean get away from having –" A lump caught in his throat.
"AIDS, Niles."
"Yes, do you want to get away from that or from me?"
There was a short silence. "I don't know," she said eventually, and slid a little farther under the covers. But she was still facing him, across the expanse of two feet of linen.
He needed to say something and he had nothing to say. He found himself babbling frantically, meaninglessly. "I'm so sorry, Daphne. Please believe me, I never in a million years –"
She cut him off. "Meant for this to happen. I know. Did you think I didn't know that?"
"I don't know! I just can't –" He fell silent.
"I know, Niles." Her hand crept across the no-man's land of linen, alighted gently on his elbow. He held himself tense, not daring to hope for more. "I know I'm being awful to you right now. I'm just – well, you know. There's so much to – oh, so much to try to take in and understand and come to terms with and I haven't even begun."
"I know. I haven't either."
"I don't want to make you the scapegoat." Then her voice hardened – subtly, but noticeably, as it had been more matter-of-fact than meltingly sympathetic to begin with. "At the same time, you did give me AIDS."
"I –" She stopped him from whimpering, not wanting to hear it.
"Just answer me one question, Niles, because I was driving around for a long time tonight and I think I figured most of it out. I know you didn't know you had it till Mel called you tonight, and I guess you probably got it just before you got involved with her, because I know she made you do a blood test. I thought maybe you cheated on her –" he made a brief negative sound – "but I knew you wouldn't do that. Anyway, so I guess I know when you got it and how you managed to infect both me and her without catching wise, but what I don't know is how the hell you got it in the first place." He was silent. "I'll believe you when you said you gave it to Mel, that she didn't give it to you, but that means there was someone else just before her, and you never told me about anyone else. I thought we told each other everything, Niles." He tried to speak and literally could not. "If you –" She faltered there for the first time, slightly. "If you care about me at all, Niles, tell me."
He worked the lump out of his throat, but he had nothing to say. "I… I'm sorry," he said.
She lay motionless. "You won't tell me?"
"I… I…" Oh, God. "I wish I could," he said, praying she could read the sincerity in his voice.
"Why?" Her voice was rising. "How can you tell me, now, that you're going to hold this back? Do you know what this means, do you know what this has done to us? Now is not the time to start with the secrets game!"
"I know and I'm sorry but I can't! I just – oh, God." He resisted the urge to pull the blanket up over his face.
She said nothing. Both of them knew the ball was in his court.
"Another time," he made himself say. "It's just – not now. I can't, now."
She sighed. "You're just working at driving that wedge between us, aren't you, Niles? One thing after another." There was a pause. "When I came in here, I think I had the idea that we could work this out, over time. Maybe. That we'd be facing it together. Now –" She sighed again, more deeply, a sound so unconscious it escaped melodrama. "I don't know anymore, Niles. I can't do this if you won't talk to me."
A reply would have been appropriate there, and he longed to give one. To be able to wrap this night, at least, up in a neat package. Save the bows and adornments for later, but just for now, there ought to be some conclusion to this. A chapter ending. The idea that things might go on this way, that each night might end just this way, loose and rambling and pointless, terrified him.
He didn't have the words to make the closure, though. Eventually she turned her back to him. In time she fell asleep.
He didn't. He lay awake, watchful, hearing the steady undulation of her breathing. It put him in mind of waves crashing on a shore, and from there – he hadn't changed fundamentally, of course; the literary dilettante still held strong in his soul – to contemplation of Matthew Arnold. "…the world, which seemed/ To lie before us like a land of dreams, /So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night."
He murmured the lines softly to himself, as Daphne's breathing continued to imitate the soft slow dirge of the tide on the shore. Leaving out the part about "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!"
His eyes eventually began to burn with fatigue as he lay there, but he couldn't allow himself to sleep. Instead, he mapped it out in his mind, all the confusion and the hurt, all the terror and the pain. He listened to her breathing and tried to hear the sound of what she'd lost in the rhythm. And through it all he kept gauging within himself. Can I stand it now? …no, I can deal with this. I am dying, Daphne is dying. Can I stand it now? …It hurts like hell but what can I do? I have to stick it out. Daphne lying there, facing me woodenly, telling me we're falling apart. I can't take it, no, I can't take it, but what else can I do? I can take it because I have to be able to take it. Daphne withering away, struck by hepatitis or pneumonia or the common cold. Daphne's eyes trained on him, eyes saying please help me, and then, worse, you did this to me. Daphne sprawled out as Mel had been sprawled out, an empty prescription bottle on the nightstand. Daphne, always Daphne, Daphne dying of AIDS, Daphne dying of the disease which he had given her –
It was almost morning when he came to the calm conclusion that he couldn't stand it anymore. He rose, slowly, so the bedsprings wouldn't rebound and she wouldn't awaken. He dressed quickly, for once paying no attention to what he put on, and left the room. He grabbed his coat and wallet and would have walked straight out the door, but turned back reluctantly to find a pen and a piece of paper. He wrote quickly, briefly, not allowing himself time to think about what he was doing. And he left.
She found his note for her there on the table when she got up in the morning.
Daphne, my love,
The fact that I call you "my love" is no accident but I have to leave. Perhaps I have to leave because I love you. All I know is that I can't stand to stay here and watch the hatred growing in your eyes. I understand that this is unforgivable, but what I've done to you already is unforgivable, and I can't stand to watch it any longer.
I am sorry for all of this.
Love always,
Niles
She read the note perhaps a dozen times in the heatless orange fire of early-morning sunlight.
She recognized the shock from yesterday morning. Yesterday, she had wanted it to pass. On some level no more refined than instinct, she'd needed to feel. This time, she hoped the shock stayed with her till she died. Which, doubtless, would not be a very long time.
As she reread it for the twelfth or thirteenth time her eyes halted on the sentence in the middle. "I can't watch the hatred growing in your eyes."
"Wanted to do it all in one shot, hmm, Niles?" she murmured. The paper fell from her nerveless fingers.
She sat on the couch and stared at the broken glass all over the floor. It was all going to sink in sooner or later, she knew. But perhaps if she didn't move… perhaps if she stayed exactly like this… perhaps the numbness would remain…
Her lips trembled slightly. Raising her eyes from the glass, she stared straight ahead. Her fingers curled convulsively around the edge of a pillow.
The piece of paper on the floor shivered and lifted slightly, stirred by the air from the ceiling fan.