The statues present were either in partial or complete costume, which gave the wonder-filled room, through the front window of which the yellow submarine was fully visible, the air of a carnival, or, when Cleopatra and the Willow Tree began dancing next to the deep fryers, of a masked ball, so that for a time after his return from the garden, and his only very slightly unnerving conversation with Raimon, whom he had rather liked, Harry’s happiness knew, as they say, no bounds, and when the Oak Tree pulled him up off his feet to dance next to the deep-fryers he did not decline, and for a few minutes he shimmied and whirled with a gusto that probably, at his age, did him no credit, but he would have continued and perhaps even pulled Solange up off her feet had he not, in looking over at her, realized that she was sagging, that the moment, such as it had been, was passing, and that it was time to get back in the submarine and sail off into the night, a course of action that, upon his suggestion, appealed to her, and that was agreeable to Alfonso, and so after finishing their food and saying goodbye, Harry and Solange climbed back into the submarine, though not before catching sight of the connoisseurs, who were just that moment arriving at the gallery, and while they were already in the submarine and rolling when the connoisseurs passed them and bade them each, by name, goodnight, Harry felt Solange shiver for a moment beside him, and, although he knew it was indiscreet, he could not refrain from asking her what it was,
“Nothing, fatigue,” she said,
“I understand,” Harry said, registering, as he did so, that by responding in this way, he had completed a problematic circuit, across the poles of which a bright blue band of falsehood was now crackling—she had not shivered, he was sure, because of a chill, and he had not, strictly speaking, understood anything, even if the unwelcome phrase “death and the connoisseurs” appeared for a moment before vanishing—but Harry also registered that every incipient relationship is at least partially lit by the light of dubious complicity so he simply smiled in the blue light and they continued on their way in silence, Harry thankfully not thinking about the connoisseurs, but about negativity delirium, which just about summed it all, then about different qualities and kinds of illumination, and the structures that best masked or presented them, and Solange about the cold efficiency with which the connoisseurs had told and retold her story—which she suspected Harry had heard, probably from Alfonso, a story addict if ever there was one, because of the gentle way he, Harry, had remarked earlier, before she had actually laid eyes on him, that the last of her tears was gone—but also about the way Harry had probed for a moment, but not pushed, had allowed her her lie of convenience without forcing her to enlarge it, or to ask him to leave well enough alone, the sort of direct statement that, uttered too early, can have unfortunate results, often because of misinterpretation, which, the thought occurred to her, had too often marred her interactions with her young man who, likely because of his youth, which if not extreme had nevertheless been considerable, had gotten it wrong, so to speak, with some frequency, which in the short term had seemed endearing, but over the long term… well there hadn’t been any long term, and whereof, she thought, we cannot speak, thereof we ought to keep our mental mouths shut and reach for the Lucite, or rose petal jam, another jar of which she had purchased that morning and had told Raimon about that night, just after he had told her that if what he thought was occurring with Harry was actually occurring then he approved: she licked her lips, which still had a few flecks of almond butter on them and thought,
“But why don’t I feel more sad?”
“It’s this submarine, plain and simple,” thought Harry, whose mind had been moving along a roughly parallel track, as it had been, or as it seemed to Harry to have been, with the man under the awning,
“It’s like spending time in a hollowed out Twinkie,” thought Solange, who as a foreign exchange student in Lawrence, Kansas had eaten plenty of them,
“The thing even smells good,” thought Harry,
“What a beautiful night,” they both said,
and the coincidence, though startling after so long a silence, didn’t seem as extraordinary as it might have given that what they could suddenly see out of the front grill, the half-lit trunks of palms along the beach and ship lights sparkling here and there across the moonlit bay, was indeed beautiful,
“This is a fine spot and quite safe, I’m going to leave you here,” Alfonso said,
“We can roll it back together,” Solange said, and though both of them were sorry to see Alfonso, who came around and put his smiling, still-golden face in the grill, go, it seemed somehow appropriate that they would now have some time even more alone, even if as it turned out it was just to lie there very close to each other and look out over the glittering bay before debarking and making their slow way home through a night that seemed to rise and fall, enormous, like the sea they had left behind them—the sea, as Solange had called it, of commas, each wave a phrase in a sentence that was never quite finished, that would never quite be finished, until of a dreadful sudden it was—to bask separately in the mystery of what was occurring, this gently promising something that felt like it was happening to them.