XI

The interior was not what he expected at all. There were no astrological charts, no incense burners, no healing crystals on the table. The large room she brought him into was sparsely but comfortably furnished, the walls a calming beige and bare but for a family photograph. The only other decoration was a vase of camellias set on the sill. The window was open a little way, and the breeze sweetened the room with the scent of the blooms.

“Please sit down,” she said. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Some water would be just great. Thank you.” She went to get it, leaving him to settle into the comfort of the sofa. He’d no sooner done so than an enormous tabby cat leaped up onto the armrest—his nimbleness belying his bulk—and, purring in anticipation of Will’s touch, vamped toward him.

“My God, you’re quite a piece of work.” Will said.

The cat put his head beneath his hand, and pressed itself against his palm.

“Genghis, stop being pushy,” Bethlynn said, returning with the water.

“Genghis? As in Khan?”

Bethlynn nodded. “The terrorizer of Christendom.” She set Will’s water on the table, and sipped from her own glass. “A pagan to his core.”

“The cat or the Khan?”

“Both,” Bethlynn said. “Don’t be too flattered. He likes everyone.”

“Good for him,” Will said. “Look, about Pat’s party: It was my fault. I was in one of my contrary moods, and I’m sorry.”

“One apology’s quite sufficient,” Bethlynn said, her tone warmer than her vocabulary. “We all make assumptions about people. I made some about you, I’ll admit, and they were no more flattering than those you made about me.”

“Because of my pictures?”

“And some articles I’d read. Maybe you were misrepresented, but I must say you seemed very much the professional pes-simist.”

“I wasn’t misrepresented. It was just . . . a consequence of what I’d seen.” Despite his best efforts, he felt the same idiot smile she’d met on the doorstep creeping back onto his face as he talked. Even in this almost ascetically plain room, his eyes were bringing him revelations. The sunlight on the wall, the flowers on the sill, the cat on his lap—all sheen and shift and flutes of color. It was all he could do not to let the threads of his sober exchange with Bethlynn go, and babble like a child about what he was seeing and seeing.

“I know you probably think a lot of what I share with Patrick is sentimental nonsense,” Bethlynn was telling him, “but healing isn’t a business for me, it’s a vocation. I do what I do because I want to help people.”

“You think you can heal him?”

“Not in the medical sense, no. He has a virus. I can’t make it curl up and die. But I can put him in touch with the Patrick that isn’t sick. The Patrick that can never be sick, because he’s part of something that’s beyond sickness.”

“Part of God?”

“If that’s the word you want to use,” Bethlynn said. “It’s a little Old Testament for me.”

“But God’s what you mean?”

“Yes, God’s what I mean.”

“Does Patrick know that’s what’s going on? Or does he think he’s going to get better?”

“You don’t need to ask me that,” Bethlynn said. “You know him at a far deeper level than I do. He’s a very intelligent man. Just because he’s ill doesn’t mean he’s lying to himself.”

“With respect,” Will said, “that’s not what I’m asking.”

“If you’re asking have I been lying to him, the answer’s no. I’ve never promised him he’d get out of this alive. But he can and will get out whole.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean once he finds himself in the eternal, then he won’t be afraid of death. He’ll see it for what it is. Part of the process. No more nor less.”

“If it’s part of the process, why did it matter if he looked at my pictures or not?”

“I wondered when we’d get to that,” Bethlynn said, easing back in her chair. “I just . . . didn’t feel they were a positive influence on him, that’s all. He’s very raw at the moment, very responsive to influences good and bad. Your pictures are extremely powerful, Will, there’s no question about that. They exercised an almost mesmeric hold on me when I first saw them. I’d go as far as to say they’re a form of magic.”

“They’re just pictures of animals,” Will said.

“They’re a lot more than that. And—if you’ll forgive my saying so, which you may not—a lot less.” On another day, in another state of mind, Will would have been rising to the defense of his work by now. Instead he listened with an easy detachment.

“You disagree?” Bethlynn said.

“About the magic part, yes.”

“When I say magic I’m not talking about something from a fairy tale. I’m talking about working change in the world. That’s what your art’s intended to do, isn’t it? It’s an attempt, a misdirected one, I think, but a perfectly sincere attempt to work change. Now you could say all art’s trying to do that, and maybe it is, but you know the forces your work plays with. It’s trying for something more potent than a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. In other words, I think you have the instincts of a shaman. You want to be a go-between, a channel by which some vision that’s larger than the human perspective—perhaps it’s a divine vision, perhaps it’s demoniacal, I’m not sure you’d know the difference—is communicated to the tribe. Does any of that sound plausible to you or are you just sitting there thinking I talk too much?”

“I’m not thinking that at all,” Will said.

“Has anybody else ever talked to you about this?”

“One person, yes. When I was a kid. He was—”

“Don’t,” Bethlynn said, hurriedly raising her hands in front of her as though to ward off this information. “I’d prefer you didn’t share that with me.”

“Why not?”

She got up to her feet and wandered over to the window, gently pinching a dead leaf from the camellias. “The less I know about what moves you the better for all concerned,” she said.

Her voice had an artificial equanimity in it. “I’ve enough shadows of my own without inheriting yours. These things pass along, Will. Like viruses.”

Not a pretty analogy. “It’s as bad as that?” Will said.

“I think you’re in an extraordinary place right now,” she said. “When I look at you I see a man who has the capacity to do great good, or . . .” She shrugged. “Perhaps I’m being simplistic,” she said. “It may not be a question of good and evil.” She looked round at him, her face fixed in a mask of impassivity, as though she didn’t want to give him a clue to how she was feeling.

“You’re a bundle of contradictions, Will. I think a lot of gay men are. They want something other than what they were taught to want, and it—I don’t know what the word is—it muddies them somehow.” She stared at Will, still preserving her mask. “But that’s not quite what’s going on with you,” she said. “The truth is, I don’t know what I see when I look at you, and that makes me nervous. You could be a saint, Will. But somehow I doubt it. Whatever moves in you . . . Well, to be perfectly honest, whatever moves in you frightens me.”

“Maybe we should stop this conversation now,” Will said, putting Genghis out of his lap and getting to his feet, “before you start exorcising me.”

She laughed lightly at this, but without much conviction.

“It’s certainly been nice talking with you,” she said, her sudden formality a certain sign that she was not going to reveal anything more.

“You will keep working with Patrick?”

“Of course,” she said, escorting him to the door. “You didn’t think I was going to give up on him just because we’d had a few sour words? It’s my responsibility to do whatever I can do. Not just for him, for me. I’m on a journey of my own. That’s why it’s a little confusing when I meet someone like you on the road.” They were at the door. “Well, good luck,” she said, shaking Will’s hand. “Maybe we’ll meet again one of these days.” And with that she ushered him onto the step and, without waiting for a reply, closed the door.