CAMELOT

       

 

 

 

                              CAMELOT                    

 

     Manny Mahler had to read between the lines. The smugness, the grave pomp any man enjoys bearing fateful news, his urologist reined in. And how much tickle is left after so many repetitions? And the theater?-from what Manny had seen in the waiting room, generally withered codgers or at best men entering the clownish satire of middle age. Some savor to bearing the tidings to a shrink, exposing their ineffectuality. Especially a surgeon might get a second wind flexing their grappling intimacy with the fleshy ogre-an armpit and groin coital clarity-in front of a psychiatrist-sophists all, circumlocution mongers. Basically stenographers to whiners. In professional role, at least, sexually ambiguous, like dance instructors or beauticians, dodging shit storms.  

     No, Manny had to read between the lines. Maybe delivered even more tunelessly than usual in order to educate character into one who has spent his life collaborating with hysteria.   

       Manny felt he was no argument against this view, sitting obediently and chastised with his pointy shoulders and egg-fragile, bald pate, in his urologists cluttered office: cluttered in an anti-bureaucratic, wind-swept way that spoke energetic hurry and the irrelevance of paper and conversation. An office that was just a pit stop on the way to the true arenas of action, the OR's across the street at the hospital.  It reminded Manny of a mechanic's office, shelves of manuals and spiral bound log books, drug logos on clipboards and paper weights and desk clocks, an air of nonchalance and club house mufti manners and rebellion against prissy emotion.  And there hurriedly placed, the weapon's grade torque wrench, the live, vibrating ordinance, in this case crumpled green scrubs resting on a pile of books and papers, a rusty blood amoeba showing.  The urologist paced the room, looking like a bull walking upright with his gleaming black hair and satyr's ripe face, blood coursing just below the surface of his moon glow skin, coloring his lips red as if stained by life's bacchanal.

     His own office was carefully furnished. Its lighting had an amber cast, vaguely over varnished like an old oil painting.  The light was thrown by two widely spaced floor lamps and seemed tailored, like golden thread blended into a tweed. A samovar which squatted on a bookshelf, the light slid about its embonpoint and along gilded picture frames like the bubble in a carpenter's level.  He had overlapping Persian carpets that flopped over the baseboards, following the whispers of a childhood day dream from "The Thousand Nights and a Night", the first sensual contraband he had found cached in children's literature.  Tales told at night in the seraglio, while in the connubial bed.  A book that could be said to presage the psychiatric dynamic, or so he had said on occasion in the shrink's ex cathedra style of brilliant mischief.  His path to psychiatry had actually been less dreamy and ordained, and this thousand and second tale was overly self-conscious, but a seduction into therapy by the siren's voice burnished the aura of hierophant shimmering about his profession.  

     During the fifty-minute hour his boneless, feline posture, his thin, blue-veined wrists, his globular eyes?-somehow his patience seemed timeless and within it might be found, could exist forgiveness, a theological or aesthetic resolution. Expansive tolerance. It had been remarked, enough times during his career that he had come to play off the resemblance-he had a hooked briar, it was not his only pipe but it was the one in his collection he took to operas and symphonies to smoke at intermissions, and his winter wardrobe was heavily biased towards the Victorian-that he looked like Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.  Rathbone, of course, was an actor, and Holmes a literary construct: figures like his, razor slim, aloof, were the primogenitors of the type.  He had not really adopted their style so much as reclaimed stolen property.

     His Barberry overcoat was folded on the chair next to him, and on top of it sat the three-cornered hat with small pheasant plume that he often wore with it, now not a bit wry or witty but only spectacularly ridiculous.  He was defrocked of...illusions, after a half century at his craft, choreographing fantasies.  He hadn't even noticed the continuing romance until it was gone.  Until now he had thought of it as a subtle accrual of wisdom, but it had been thicker and thicker layers of costuming hiding his complete withering.

     He was an old man sitting on a naugahide chair. 

     This was his second visit to the urologist.  For his first visit his blood tests from his G.P. had been faxed ahead, and the urologist had, with proper bravado already misplaced them; lucky the scolding Russian aide de camp who knew the contents of every one of his teetering piles of paper was summoned and dug unerring right to them.  No big deal, anyway, the urologist had indicated, he had more or less memorized the results at the first reading.    Prescription: A split function test across the street at nuclear medicine for an inside look at how much gunpowder was left in the bags.

     Two weeks later Manny had entered the underworld of the nuclear medicine ward.  This is one of the way stations for those with cancer.  It is not all diagnostic here.  Glancing into other rooms, Manny sees the Triassic sized derricks of radio-therapy.  From time to time the benefactors of these treatments are wheeled by on gurneys, clear tubes coming out of their nostrils, seeming comatose, but bundled in sheets tucked up to their necks, perhaps cold, perhaps just the work of a solicitous technician after the abuse this body has received, a quaint tenderness she can bestow.  Inadvertently or obeying that perverse, side show curiosity to look on suffering,  Manny's eyes meet those of one of these patients, a man younger than himself to judge by his dark hair, though these patients, like corpses, seem so distant from life and its calendar that common cues no longer apply.  No, it could not be said their eyes meet.  The man's eyes seem missing; Manny's eyes fall into the holes where they should have been.  It is not that he has no eyes or even that he is blind, but he is so far from looking out that Manny is sucked towards his inner focus, as if he looked through these portals directly into his complete despair.

     Other than light gestates here.

     Behind the reception desk sits a large woman with lush black skin.  She is friendly and her size seems necessary to house the warm maternity in her voice. But he feels should panic and tantrum ever ignite with all its futile, jejeune protest and rotting lividness, she could smother it by enlisting obdurate matter itself, a summons exclusive to her race in our species. After giving her his insurance card and filling in some forms, she directs him to the waiting area, an alcove with six chairs.

     A woman sits with intravenous tube in her arm attached to a bottle hanging from a rolling rack.  She is in a hospital gown and does not notice the drip, except to fidget with it as she might a bracelet or a lock of hair.  She has been in this round of therapy and return to the world long enough to have incorporated its rabidly secular props into idle habits.  An old lady with a gamin's sad, imploring eyes sits down next to him and asks him the time in a thick Spanish accent.  She fingers her stomach tenderly.  He thinks she must have a tumor there, but reconsiders and thinks she looks abandoned.  She is wishing for her children or for her time of fertility.  She speaks in Spanish to the woman with the tube.  He cannot really understand, but the cadence, it is infused with simple bewilderment.  Manny thinks: no one is going to pick her up afterwards.  She is learning how superfluous she already is.  She is fading so quickly it is becoming hard for her to see herself outside of these rooms where under the proof of a doctor's attention she is temporarily distilled around her ailment.  Her presence has become so gentle and effaced the offer of a ride or being accompanied home will never occur to anyone, it will slip their minds.  

     The two women in the alcove, the black receptionist, the Latina technician who injects him (pretty enough to seem only costumed as a technician, and indeed she is coached through the actual procedure by another technician who although Caucasian is, there is a  suggestion, more in his manner-plausible but textbook but rote-his gestures, his way of talking, as if they were translated from another tongue and culture uniquely his own-a suggestion of abnormality, a brush in the womb with a disorder or deformity that will shadow him forever) and the East Indian doctor who oversees the ward(A handsome man with strongly drawn features, lyrical, long-lashed eyes beneath heavy, black eyebrows and against type, the loveliest of accents, possibly a Scottish lilt, but melodious rather than the usual sputtering, bubbling, hobbled syllables Manny thinks of as Sub-continental)  confirm Manny in his belief that the sick are their own lower class, managed by their own made into trustees and hidden from the higher orders. 

     How well he knows that inferno and its spectacles that would gnash against docility as well as the shades composing its mortar.        

     For an hour he lies like a carving on a sarcophagus lid while the hoop behind him records the passage of an isotope through his kidneys, a computer on a desk making distant beeps. He feels both more and then less attached to his body.  Maybe he feels lightened in his body, at risk of evaporating from it.  Maybe he feels the equivocal substance or weight of his consciousness, what he might have named his being.  It seems misty.  That is not the word.  But while his body is being interrogated, he feels irrelevant, and he thinks he can sense a mood of deep melancholy in his body, a mood that it seems might always have been there, a consequence of its being matter, or that then again might be its confession of ailing, a confession of a wish for a resumption of peace it can glimpse.  As if he were eaves dropping on the spiritual essence of his body, its private mantra he had never paid attention to, and which in its turn, never truly wavering, never ceasing in its reiteration, is the keen of matter afflicted with wakening.

     It is all and all, this largely silent, sleep drugged experience, unnervingly seductive, and he only partially emerges from it, feeling as if some quick imperative for the world has molted from him and that he has witnessed a collaboration or tryst entered into by his body and a wish- possible of fulfillment- for an end to struggle.

     Now, three days later, here he is in the doctor's office and the results are equivocal, his kidneys together, not quite in even tandem but neither totally shirking its chores, are able to do about fifty percent of what they should do, and if they can maintain this level, he can continue as he is indefinitely. 

     There was reason for vigilance, but for the time being nothing needed or could be done, except frequent monitoring. If the numbers continued to climb, then steps would have to be taken. He was sentenced to suspense, but Manny had audited his body’s seance in that ward where there was no hope and remembered the nearly choral beauty of it, as if finding itself where there was no chance it had found liberation. He had heard it.  Not singing but emanating the interior of music, the nearly bursting silence that shapes each note around it.  He had no doubts about the path his body had chosen.   

     Manny was winded. He did not trust himself to speak.  Not that he had actually expected anything different, but he had hoped or ignored what he knew.  Now, he had no hope and stupid and childish as it was, it had been an axis for his thoughts, and now they were scattering. Should he manage to snag any one of those thoughts as it wheeled away, it would have some element of that childish hope clinging to it, and what he would utter would be a toddler's plea to reinterpret the verdict in line with his niceness, even as he had three days ago, under the tutelage of this puerile hope, been the sweetest of patients, one who would deserve a gift, a clean bill of health, like those poor children diagnosed with terminal disease, who would never deserve an implacable judgment.      

     "Transplant", he croaked, surprising himself.  Then rising to its piracy resolved in high seas, clearing his throat.

     "Transplant.  Trans-plant." Provocatively, like throwing an expletive at thunder. Not gentle this, not penitent, rage against sober justice, weak flesh, the finish line gratefully spotted.      

     "Manny?" his doctor said.

     "Transplant. Transplant."

     "I'm a surgeon, don't tease me that way.  You're not even sick. Who knows?  You could go on for years like this, die laughing in a whore's bed.  I'm not even recommending a diet, except you shouldn't eat grapefruit, so stay out of Florida.  Don't even think about a transplant."

     Of course, he did not want a transplant, not really, it was a major operation.  Manny was a physician, he had seen too much to rush into surgery, but he did not want to be relinquished to the limbo of a chronic condition.  Better to tilt with the surgeon.  To prod him.  To push himself towards the rash and greedy.  Towards the aspect of life surgery and the surgeon's style represented. Share with him his martial art that was part pillage and rape, that showed up that way in surgeons' humor, who had seen the body supine and the truth of its offal exposed: that it had no right to pretensions of grace but must grab its spoils from death itself whose shape it incubated inside us.             

     There was a sluggish aspect to psychotherapy, a habit of passivity and deference which fit too neatly into his life and disposition.  It had a tempo of inaction that was hospitable to kidney failure, he realized: you absorbed the pollutants of other lives and never flushed them by daring sorties of your own.  They just steeped.  When the kidneys failed one fell from slumber to sloth, a poetic justice in that. 

     The word "transplant" had power. Get the lead out, goose the dame, be transplanted, fly this cheap dive. With this sword in his hand, transplant, transport, travel, movement, escape, he might be lifted out of this purgatory of flesh, out of its sad murmur, and take up arms against it, Promethean.  The word had revolution in it, a satanic willingness to dare freedom over a salvation cajoled by begging.

     "Maybe I won't be shushed.  Deaf to that suggestion."

     "Sorry.  I missed that.  What'd you say?"

     "Grapefruit.  You said avoid grapefruit."

     "Right.  Grapefruit."  

     On his way out the waiting room looked distorted as if time had pooled here, a remainder of lifetimes which would not be spent, a lees of years thick enough in sum when tithed from the patients one after the other-just days and weeks of the common invisible sort-to gel into a kind of paste of regret.

     Manny had shoe-horned his doctor's appointment into the morning of his own crammed schedule.  His urologist's office was only a few blocks from where he lived and it had been his first stop.  He had spared no room for bad news; it would have to arrive with tremendous self-assurance to force its way with preserved resonance into this day that he had crammed with the normal.  He had not specifically planned it that way; this was a usual work day with a doctor's appointment added, but the blood tests were worrisome, a warning, even an alarm, his languor in nuclear medicine as vivid and inassimilable as an hallucination, and his automatic scheduling in the face of them, the lack of catch or glitch after his isotope tests, could be seen as calling on the refutation of his full-winded life.

     He wanted to go home and shower. He wanted to change his clothes.  The Indian summer was over, the air had metal in it and he was chilled by drying sweat.  His first client was due at eleven, down town at the University.  Ordinarily, he would have flagged a cab, but now he finds himself drifting, his ambition seemingly limited to gaining the sunny side of the street. 

     “I am unmoved by Friday, as I shall call this squealing native who’s destiny has been thrown at my feet. Temperamental and superstitious he is mastered by fear, and at the threats of his bone-amuleted tormenters has wrung the ghost from his loins through tears and prostration. For the sum of a palm full of bright beads he has been attached to me; an unattractive epigone of a degenerate race without virtue or hope for grace. What will follow should I place a mirror in his hand?”

     “You are from Brooklyn, a sprint to Red Hook when it was Red Hook. Ya coulda been somebody instead of the intellectual you is. Ya couda’ made sense and took no shit from nobody and died in your prime, shucken the woild’s oyster wit a stevadore’s gaff.”

     New York is not a good city in which to drift.  There is little accommodation for the daydreamer.  Attention is demanded.  It turns out that there is something hierarchical in that required attention, at least Manny is accosted by sights and transient meditations, while the purposeful, driving machinery of the city is constantly startling him on this walk home. It is an industrial, optimistic epoch that he has been evicted from that speeds past him oblivious.  He does not pay attention to the smartly dressed or the quick paced.  Yes he does, but wistfully, with incomprehension.  They are like celebrities, these swift ones, made from solid substance and there is something to imagine about their lives which would not be suited to his own-a shock of energy, a ravenous happiness. They are not saturated by subjectivity and introspection, and they look propelled by a hand bent on procreation and sexuality and appetite, and the substance of their lives, rather than being some slurry of tears and dreams, oh, it looks as if it must be pure element.  Just an hour ago it might simply have seemed egoistic, cruel, or superficial, but not now. It seems without shadowing, natural imperatives strum through them, a force of altitude and spirit existing at an acme.  At that altogether all, of ripeness. 

     They might bowl him over by accident in the rush of their promised hour but more than that, he cringes under the wise gaze of beauty.  His eyes can only find sanctuary where they do not feel rejected, resting on the underground rivulet of the old and unhappy and ailing.  Those drawn with charcoal and ash.  His eye is not tender to them, but his usual look of pitiless comprehension and ennui has been peeled; he is close to horror, to its instinctive, pre-verbal identification and guilt.  He notices the old have ceased to wear expressions, their masks have been removed, underneath are loneliness, panic, a plea for pity.  His nose is being rubbed in the city's unanswered need for compassion.  The portal into the shadows is knocked ajar, out streams greyness to cover the day and hopeless figures returned to the world for this one hour, to drift indifferent through it, all fruits and sights within it, cold to their touch, the motive behind their lost eagerness forgotten.     Refugees in a foreign place. 

     What had slipped away from him-a shadow mime?   Sweet the streets, but sweet with nostalgia, perfect, remote, precious and inviolate as postcard mementoes. Pithed from him was a sense he only remarked by its loss-graininess.  The sure scuff of his step on solid ground.  He had approached these streets in dreams and nearly walked on them, and now, strangely, an anxiety that had always fallen between him and entering had lifted-spellbinding parable and riddle. And he thinks that anxiety was over return. To enter you must jettison the remembrance of how to regain the world. He is seeing with the eyes of someone deceased; to gain these avenues with all their sweetness and beauty and light is to have passed through the looking glass irrevocably and to regard the world with benevolence and muted longing.    

     Teary dysentery this slovenly compassion. A girl in a baseball cap passes going the opposite direction.  She cannot bear his gaze.  She is shrunken, the cap is too large for her; it covers her forehead completely, hiding her eyes. Her nose pecks out under the brim. She is wearing a team jersey that hangs to her knees. She is a cell for sacrifice and penitence, an absolution and punishment for a family which she was formed to serve out. The baseball uniform does not give her age away, there is a languishing senility he has seen costumed this way, a dim efflorescence in the simple-minded who have grown up, and a mild retardation must be part of her affliction, the ill-fitting uniform shows the eager patriotism of the retarded, but there was emotional keenness in the look smuggled out to him before it was eclipsed by the hat's bill, the pinched, meagerness of her quickly hidden features accented it-she had a flinty, malnourished face, chipped out and unfinished-a precocity in apology: The terms of her punishment include the leeching awareness that she is inadequate atonement, that she cheapens their forfeit of the child wished in her place.  Her precocity in apology inspires her movements, she weaves and bobs with plaintive grace; she is a ballerina of abjection. She has nothing but that inspiration, no wider circumference of thought with its alloying of contradictions to smudge the transparent passage from out of her marrow, only that single genius of shame flowing through her.

    She is the quick ghost, a step ahead of the others who have been the Greek chorus in Manny's life. All of them share an exaggerated banality, as if sensing their emergence, he is brushed by a huddle of shoppers exiting a bargain basement dressed in husks peeled from the racks.  They shared the drudgery of feckless homeliness-in spirit, anyway: spirits moldy with the physical whose essence for them was decay.  These members of his life chose to keep life as they had grown used to and fed up with. To have it verified in its futility and drudgery, and were ready to leave it finally with time served.

     Now they can accompany him in this lost city, stay abreast of him. 

     He had served two apprenticeships in self-knowledge and destiny, the second was his residency in the huge mental institutions of the fifties.  One did one's epic, one's crusade, one's duel with the dragon, and afterwards one could establish his own parish of private practice.  He had detested it moment by moment.  He had done his service encased in numbness brought on by disgust and terror.  He would have been as frozen and robotic in a leper colony, or slogging about in hip boots as a pig farmer.  Without carbolic acid all hospitals would smell like sewers, but in these institutions the orderlies, those not already reduced by futility to nihilism, were shoveling against the active will of the patients.  Self-immolation in excrement was universal.  It replaced song as expression of spirit.  There were songs of protest, of labor, of lost love, there were tunes and haunting airs, marches and dirges; the melody behind the words, the river of feeling upon which all music rides, in the institutions this universal wish for union braided into music's fibers, its course back to heart, was converted to excrement, and this escaped with all the surprise and galvanizing possession of song. 

     Manny recited a nagging jingo as he made his rounds: "mental hygiene", "mental hygiene", while smelling the stink and hearing the wails.  It was the best you could do, not for the patients who were beyond help-time alone might heal some-but to stop the contagion.  He was subjected to nausea-inducing self-recognitions, fun-house mirror reflections of family and friends, and sometimes too, treacherously, almost irresistibly, an omniscient siren call with witchery and license in it.  Some of the women during this pre-feminist time, had been thrown there because of female transgressions, nymphomania was one reason-a syndrome that would soon seem quaint and priggish-hysteria was another, and for rages against men or children or motherhood or menstruation or sexual congress-rages that had become deliriums.  They had a prescient, seditious sexuality, a wanton iconoclasm, and a kind of hauteur or vanity.  They could be calculating and could read the secret text of his sexuality, see and become the archetypes he hid in his inner sanctum.  They had dispensed with rationalization and saw through to the terror, the worshipped.  They could be as righteous, imposing even, as political prisoners or religious martyrs, and their cause, their hope for reinstatement, their vindication was the seduction of the staff.  They could impale him with their pure faith and realistic, absolute desperation.  They had mortal dread and had experienced apotheosis, and he pulled away sometimes only as a result of pity on their part or contempt, discarded by the insouciance of the conqueror, having been dangled over hell and teased with salvation. 

     In these madhouses nightmares became literal.  The visionary annunciation was incarnated. The literary dream and melancholy of poets seized bodies.  Here, in the smell of excrement and alcohol, amid the screams and wails, was the stuff of dreams.

     He had felt it back then and run from it, and now he felt it confirmed: That nightmare had been prophesy and now its sentence was being stitched into his skin. The courageous soul is mad. The heroic in love. The normal punitively sympathetic.

     "Good morning, Doctor".  It is the doorman at his building.  He has walked back by rote, like an old horse to its stable, but he would have passed right by in reverie except the doorman is taking the sun on the sidewalk, an ear cocked for the buzz of the switchboard, and Manny has been following the yellow carpet of sunlight and almost walks into him.  An hour and a half ago the doorman greeted him with the same words on his way out.

     Manny's is an old building; the doormen are of the old school.  They stand waiting like coachmen rather than sitting behind a security console watching closed circuit TV's, and they wear a great coat with epaulets and brass buttons.  There are three of them and though Manny has a vague intuition that these positions are usually filled through nepotism, these three regulars are from three different continents.  An African comes on at night who they see when they return from theater. He is Nature's own prince.  A chesty voice, creamy accent and smooth, glowing skin.  He is their favorite.  Florence, Manny's wife, tells Manny that he has several degrees, but Manny wonders if she herself, a liberal, has awarded them to him to mend the injustice of such a figure serving as a doorman.   

     The second doorman is from south of the border, the usual blend of tragic romanticism and military pomp. At first, his barely contained lust for heroism made it uncomfortable to return when he was on duty.  He rushed ahead to the inner door to swing it open, always hoping for a dramatic acceleration in the day.  Luggage, the suggestion of travel, the parade through the lobby on Fridays of tenants dressed for theater or opera, these invigorated him.  He has mellowed over time.  He may be a drinker.  He seems resigned to the pedestrian in this building.

     The doorman today is the one from India or Pakistan, or some outpost of the sub-continent's diaspora.  Wherever it is, maybe it's Trinidad or is it Barbados? He has imported a brittle dignity and snobbery that Manny believes must be the enduring stigma of low caste.  He has a thin, manicured goatee, and is as dark as a Negro, and maybe his manner is a wish to etch his difference from African lassitude.  He is tall and broad shouldered and bony, but fine, almost delicately boned, and especially in his face-his tight lips and pointy chin, his clenched jaw and sharp cheekbones-this parsimony of features gives him an expression of fierceness.  He has the offended, disgusted expression of a zealot whose fervor has cooled into indignation.       

     Although standing outside the building in the pleasant late fall sunlight, he was not allowing his vigilance to melt.  He has kept a critical eye on the street; he has special skepticism for women walking dogs.  He does not think it is an appropriate thing for a rich woman to trail an animal with a poop scooper, and he believes dogs are vulgar; they dangle their genitalia in the air.

     He is the one Manny dislikes and "good morning" has been the extent of their conversations as Manny hoofs it out the door.  

     Manny rushes past to press the elevator call button which is past the ante-room at the back of the lobby. 

     He stands in front of the closed door which has a porthole like a diving bell.  The lobby is done to a more or less Moorish theme: the floor is red clay tiles, and yellow tiles with blue filigree frame archways.  Cast iron chandeliers hang by chains.  It is not exactly a room; it has never been so baptized by use.  More a space or vacuum.  Manny cannot remember ever having a conversation here; he has passed suspended through it. It must look different to doormen who are planted in such places.  They might feel a kind of eminent domain over these no man's lands.  The room has an echo, there is a throw rug rafting a couple of couches and an easy chair, but it is mostly bare walls and low ceiling.  The moment stretches, a discouraging silence continues in the elevator shaft, and Manny feels cornered in this stagnating moment.

     Manny finally hears the dragging of the elevator's chains, and shortly the light appears through the porthole in the door.  An electric motor hummed, a  sound like an elf mining away in the mechanism, and the door slides open and there leaning against the side of the car, basking in the oxbow of time stowed there was the vagabond from the sixth floor.  He was Texan, which was enough on its own to make him a little dangerous, feral. He was a millionaire, all Texans were through some act of violence, and more charismatic than any of that-sufficient on its own in this warehouse of courteous aging, he was a lover.  While in New York he stayed with his "trollop" in her sixth floor apartment which had been occupied by an old widow when Manny moved in.  Over the years the widow had withered until finally she just blew away.  A Caribbean nurse had pushed her about in a wheelchair, a blanket over her brittle legs, her watery eyes gleaming in her powdery face.  She had faded away, that pitchy thread of marrow which stared out of her eyes probably a bit dimmer at the end, but hardly noticeably, and he was not aware she was gone until that gangly, high liver with her open-mouthed laugh had so convincingly replaced her.

     Frankly, she and her Texan were a welcome scandal.  An embrace witnessed in a hallway, wine bottles left outside the door, a garbage bag burst open in the basement revealing gloppy pizza boxes and a stained tuxedo coat, a lurching walk in Japanese kimono and slippers to a local drug store for aspirin, a howl, a slam, a throb of music, these juicy rinds supplemented the Pablum diets of the building's tenants.

     More than twenty years in this building, Manny thinks.  You fade without noticing it until a couple in their fifties are shocking.   

     "Always a pleasure, doctor" and the Texan blocked the door's closing with his arm while Manny entered, and when the door had closed Manny saw him through the portal, his arm around the doorman's shoulders, forcing this disapproving servant to support the harlot's lover in his teasingly exaggerated hangover.

     The Texan has earned the doorman's jealousy because he lives shamelessly and grandly. Manny has no trouble figuring the equation which entitles him to be friendly to Manny.  

     Salsa music is leaking past Manny's apartment door when he steps off on the eleventh floor.  The cleaning lady is here. The place is turned upside down.  Well, it isn't, it just doesn't take much to look that way.  He and Florence have come to live more and more circumspectly in their apartment, almost fugitively.  All it needs to make it look ransacked is the carpet sweeper and vacuum cleaner leaning in the foyer.  He is never home on cleaning day and he does not know what stage has been reached in the process, but from a glance it seems the housekeeper's first step is to pull all the cleaning utensils out of the closets.  There is little for her to do.  Florence takes their dishes immediately to the sink, rinses them, and then loads them into the dishwasher.  She changes their sheets. The house is nearly hermetically sealed, but the cleaning lady hears the whispers of entropy:  Dust gathers and so does complacency.  Places sink out of reach or are not worth the strain to reach and strata of neglect develop a little above and below the line of sight and fallow areas behind objects that are never moved begin to blossom with a verdure of dust balls.  

     Old noses dull.  No telling what Maria, the housekeeper, sniffs when she first enters: ghosts of past meals, resident flatulence.  In the bathrooms and bedroom, the miasma of Florence's cosmetic prophylaxis, the queen's bee wax and other unguents that have become more Rosicrucian and gnostic with the years, and though each on its own is formulated around a fragrance rather than any demonstrable effectiveness, when sniffed together they revert to their generic scent of blanketing deodorant.  And behind all these, the always open sump of age itself.  No wonder Maria throws open what she can to exorcise the stillness, unscrewing the faucets on the radio and pulling back the thick drapes in the living room to rout the old toe-nail colored light offered by the table lamps.

     Still, this aeration is too much for Manny, filled as it is with volatile solvents. The small bathroom is chock-a-block full of pail, mop and plastic jugs.  No chance for him to shower.  No privacy.  Florence has left.  He glances into her study off the kitchen where she writes.  The computer is off.  Manny remembers a time when she palled around with Maria while she cleaned the apartment.  During the evening she would still be echoing Latina, tinker-toy diction.  Then there was the time when she complained that Maria was breaking things, maybe these periods over-lapped.  Florence coached her on the proper way to dust. Apparently, Maria became lost in fetishistic transports, maybe a result of her primitive, Catholic idolatry, but things dropped from her hands and broke.  Weeks later, maybe months, they would discover that an ornamental bowl had been glued back together and carefully placed to hide its cracks.

     Florence must be out shopping or she might be meeting a friend for brunch.  This is fortunate.  He would not have wanted to explain why he was home instead of at work.    

     Maria is in his study, dressed in her custodial fatigues, powder blue cotton dress and huge tennis shoes.  Before leaving, she will wiggle her way into a pair of tight pants.  She is a small woman, about Florence's size which was one basis for solidarity-Florence is a liberal and minority "help" is problematical so she scavenges for connections.  She gives her old blouses and skirts, and not indiscriminately but with an eye to Maria's dignity, to their harmonizing with her aura, that unique, self-expressive blend of light and personality.  Maria is not fat, but she is softening into bagginess, the tight pants are not flattering, she would be better off in some of Florence's hand-me-downs, but Florence reports that she has never seen her in any of them.  In the ultimate seal of sisterhood, Florence, who has spent girlish hours holding blouse's on hangers to her chest to imagine how they would look on Maria, twirling around from time to time to summon Maria's Flamenco essence, has given her some of her shoes, but their final destination is also a mystery.  Instead, she wobbles out on patent leather high heels.

     "Good morning, Maria.  How are you today?"

     "Oh. Doctor."  She holds her hand up to her throat in an operatic gesture of fear.  She had not heard him come in. There is something in most men that never fails to be gratified at being taken for dangerous.  Manny feels tall and imposing, and under his paternal gaze, Maria pats her hair and tugs down her dress.  She comes from an impoverished country that is victimized by disease and climate, but Manny thinks the real tutor of her deferential manner is submission to the male.  Tonight when she leaves she will be dressed for male eyes.  

     "I am sorry. You scare me. I am good. How are you?" she says, with her baroque "r's". 

     "I am well, thank you", conscious of the pedagogical value of his more perfect grammar. "I have forgotten a file, Maria, and so I have had to return to fetch it.  I did not mean to startle you."  Glorying a bit in the synchromesh of tenses available to the native speaker.

     He pulls open one of his cabinets and flips through the files inside and picks one at random, and carrying on the charade sits down at his stocky wooden desk as if to read it.

     Manny has always been loved by women and that is because he understands them and is genuinely kind, as they can tell.  To his left is a faceted crystal jar filled with salt water taffy.  It is Manny's favorite candy by virtue of its appearance alone, the cut-stone look of it, its whirled pastels.  He likes its apothecary glow in the crystal jar.  On the rare occasion when he has one he almost never finishes it; he likes the initial hand-crafted, idiosyncratic lump in his mouth, the sweat of sweetness it gives off before it loses its demure coolness, but when it turns into gooey magma he becomes concerned his fillings will be sucked out, and so he replaces the blob in its cellophane and tosses it in the waste basket.

     "Maria."  She had been moving towards the door to leave him undisturbed.  She halts, and looks as if she is ready to be balled out, what she must expect from most employers or men.

     He opens the jar of taffy.

     He has a rack of pipes on his desk as well.  Florence does not usually enter his study, but there are times when he signals that she is welcome, he walks by the bedroom door on his way to the bathroom or he looks in on her affectionately without saying anything and then returns to his study, and she knows that he is not really working in there anymore, and a few minutes later she will peep in around the open door, and he will be smoking a pipe and leaning back in the ox-blood leather desk chair and she can come in then.  He is in an expansive mood, and she will sit on the edge of the desk or she will even come around the desk and sit on his lap as if she were a little girl sneaking into his study.  He will have finished some paper, he is smoking his post-ejaculative pipe and he wants her company in just that downy, shy, dreamy-drowsy way she has coming from reading in bed.  He has given her the cues and she is to come in unasked.  Once, in this benevolent mood-he had completed a colloquium he would soon read to her-he espoused on taffy.  Taffy was more Viennese than chocolate.  She had made a small moue as if he were being mean.  He could be naughty, in a loveable, precocious way.  Conspicuously gifted.  Sometimes, she had to suffer that, the impatient cruelties of his gifts.   But, wouldn't he try to be careful?  He popped one in his mouth so he looked like he was containing glee, and through the vaudeville of exaggerated chewing, the dignifying pipe willingly surrendered, he added the Viennese have become too ironic about their pleasures.  Chocolate is an acquired taste.  He could say anything because he was still within the nimbus of his creative release.  He was saying anything and it was suggestively erotic and encrypted in the years of their marriage, and he felt as he said it to his wife, who was from Vienna, with his face gone over to clownish, rubbery effort, that he knew how to delight her and make her feel coveted, how to continue to be a treasure to a woman.  

     This room must be a scary sanctum to Maria. One wall is covered by books. There are leather bound medical texts, and psychiatric texts and the amassed production of his long-winded colleagues, journals and in-trade publications.  Their dull spines blot up the light.  And more than half the shelf space is jammed with literature in English and German, the overflow laying on top of the others like lintels.  Manny took for granted that Maria was only minimally literate, the high water mark of her reading being store catalogues and photo novels, and must dust these shelves as superstitiously as she would an altar or arsenal, poor girl.

     He intends to offer her a taffy: water-color candy, glowing maidenly in the submarine hues of his study, he has taken one from the jar.  She waits expectantly at the door.  She is at the age when she has spent her mystery and must trade on availability and sportiveness. She seems to be expecting a sexual come-on, or it is only that her face has been set in that expression as a result of guile and intimidation.  What does that face promise?  Squalid pleasures?  Or a flood of tears and a confession of misery and hopelessness?  Looking at her he feels it is a face nearly depleted, this expression just barely hanging on by habit alone. It could finally sputter out even as he was watching.  

     He coughs, and hastily, he pushes the ashtray towards Maria, and gets up, saying "Done in here, Maria, all yours", and stuffs the candy in his breast pocket.   

     At the end of this first day of living with his diagnosis, Manny is eager to "come home" only to find-and he is not really surprised by this, the estranged feeling he has had at work has been a preview-that the alleged "home" he had thought to hide out in is, of course, purely imaginary and become idealized, and instead there is Florence, vividly older than he remembers her, as if she had renewed her lease on old age while he was at the clinic.

     During the day he succumbed to a superstition.  He had been tossed about by different emotions, and this had been nauseating at first.  He had later tried to acclimate himself  to this volatility by seeing it as a new capaciousness or inspiration in himself, and this led to the comforting thesis he brought back with him to the apartment, that he had found a  purpose in his diagnosis, a lesson he would learn at which point the sentence could be lifted.  But, lifted only if he learned sympathy, tuning those devouring emotions into charity, as in a fairy tale.  Seeing Florence he felt sympathy evaporating.  His criticalness was intact, and he noted again her heavy fatigue and self-pity, and as before her aging form seemed to accuse him of abuse or neglect or disinterest, cementing the justice of his diagnosis and the impossible distance he had to go to be saved from it.

     He will not tell her about his kidneys because the gush of sympathy for him would be no different than for a bad cab ride and the injustice of his illness or its justness, its particularity, its unique edict and absurdity, his persecution and its pointedness would be lost in her handy melancholy for all his complaints.  This reflex of sympathy in her, as easy as indifference, in fact a form of indifference, taking as little from her self-preoccupation as indifference, he now sees has mutated her into this soggy old age.  She is waterlogged by her incontinent tears. 

     Not being able to tell her rankles.  He wants to tell someone. Secrets are gestating in him with all the cabalism of any secret, and they surge towards confession.          

     Florence relates the price of Chicken Angelica and the tale of the lines in the stores, her voice husky with self-pity and a blowzy, debauched drowsiness.  Her sympathy is a somnambulant reflex, like that luscious smacking of lips some people do in their sleep, and at the bottom of it he can always hear a chortle.  It is not sarcasm; it is physical satisfaction in emotions.  That warbling chortle makes him feel culpable and hostile.  It is a remnant of a large sensuality now directed towards self-commiseration, having found no other receptive object, and its going rancid is an accusation.

     She is a small woman, nothing sudden about that, but tonight he views her smallness suspiciously.  If she could not literally have volunteered to be small, she may surely have learned to take advantage of it, to milk the general assumption of victimhood and fetal emotions that accompanies small women, their circle of privileged obliviousness and a toddler's entranced narcissism. 

     She is not diminutive or miniature.  Neither her hands nor feet are exquisite; they are strong and well-shaped.  Her hands are striking, beautiful but in a sculpted, heroic way.  They had been prominently veined like a man's, musician’s hands they might have been, now the flesh has receded and the veins look painful and more purple, livid even.  Her head is large for her body, not freakishly, but she is large boned, a strong little woman.  Her attitude of concern is implacable.  She has the strength to persist.  Eventually, she has out endured him.  The catholicism of her sympathy has defeated his laments.  They are buried in generosity.  It is her's that persist, apparently unassuaged.  Untended.  A distended vulnerability, helplessly bared to the world.  Hers is a huge heart exercised to victorious musculature by shouldering neglect.  

     They ate in the kitchen, at a small blond table surrounded by the primary school colors assembled in kitchens.  A doughy painting of a sunflower by Florence's sister hung on one wall.  The table was on the scale that might be found in a train compartment, and it pushed them close together. They had moved from the dining room years ago to avoid its echoing silence.  This room was bright, the ice box hummed and on its doors were those cartoonish magnets posting notes and photos.  Silence, which was inevitable, seemed less significant amidst the informal clutter and in tighter quarters.  Everything spoke the a.m. hours when the sun is climbing.  Here they could flip on the radio and listen to the news which did not seem appropriate in the dining room where the two of them had huddled at one end of the large table and all the vacant space spoke shrinkage. 

     "You're not eating tonight. You're just looking at me.  It makes me feel boorish. Don't you like it?  It's Chicken Angelica, I thought you did?" Florence said. 

     He had been watching her, especially the labor of chewing.    Eating had become a chore; their appetites had ebbed, and when it was not a chore an old face in gluttonous, solipsistic trance abutted horror.  It made him think of a ventriloquist's dummy stealing a semblance of life, the puppeteer gone, and the ghostless doll of wood and rags performing by rote.

     "I don't feel hungry tonight."

     "I thought maybe you didn't like it."

     "I do like it."

     "Then why aren't you eating it?  I made a mistake, didn't I?  You told me you don't like Chicken Angelica and I forgot.  And you were waiting for me to notice and I didn't."

     They almost exclusively ate take out.  There were gourmet buffets close by and any number of good restaurants that delivered.  Florence had no urge left to cook.  She really had never been much of a cook, feeding the family in the typical American way when the children lived with them: Meat and potatoes, spaghetti, casseroles.  But, the gut bomber of yesteryear had become the epicurean buyer of today.  It turned out that the same parsing judgment that she applied to literature could be used on food, and she had developed a sensibility and a vocabulary that was suited to a connoisseur, which Manny supposed she was, now that she did no cooking herself.  She was a fan of the cooking shows on television, because of the hospitable and buffoonish personalities on them, not for cooking demonstrations.  She liked the assumption of happy gatherings and friendly ties that lay behind them.  Imbedded In her gossip about the food she brought back and her descriptions of the cornucopias where she shopped was an attempt to make an equality between her former cooking efforts and her present alertness whereby her affection for him stayed constant.

     "I was not being subtle.  I'm just not hungry.  I should have said something before we sat down."

     "Do you think I would have eaten alone?"

     "Why wouldn't you?"

     "If I thought you were ill?"

     "I'm not ill."

     "But, if I thought you were, do you think I would have gone ahead and eaten anyway?"

     "What good would it do for you not to eat?  I'm fine, Florence."

     "But I wouldn't feel like it, like now, knowing you weren't feeling well.  I would be concerned.  I always have been, Manny. Sometimes I think you think I'm no longer as concerned."              

     "This is becoming overly complex.  Aren't I entitled to not being hungry without having to worry about the status of your empathy?  Do you know, I'm actually enjoying watching you eat because I like to see you happy. Maybe I can be that simple."

     "Oh, sweetie, you didn't look happy, I don't know what you looked but it made me uncomfortable. This is going back in the frig."

     "Don't do that."

     "I am, because you're being devious.  You're baiting me."

     "Really, Florence."

     "You're trying to prove I neglect you."

     "Well then I say you're trying to prove I'm spoiled.  Okay, I am.  And spoiled brat that I am, I take it for granted, and I'm sorry.  So, go on and eat.  Please.  Don't make me suffer my insufferableness."

     "You thought I forgot you visited Doctor Aparian this morning and that I could look at you not eating and still gobble up my food.  I didn't forget and the chicken's going back in the frig because I can't eat until you tell me what he said. I was putting on a bold face."

     "This is soap opera. Bold face.  There's no need to rise to the occasion here."

     "I'm afraid, Manny."

     "Florence, this is not literature.  It's us, Florence.  Often a mite boring, but that's what we have to get used to."

     "You don't think you can depend on me.  It's not good news.  I can tell."

     She came around the table and put her arms around his neck.  He had never grown used to the balm of physical comforting and had to keep himself from pulling back. 

     "I knew it.  Why us?"

     Us?  It was not "us".  God knows, at their age the secret hope on seeing your aging spouse was that your fates were separating, and her saying this underlined how resented and irritating any call to awaken real feeling was, how hostile or accusing it must be to her.  This was all she had left to give and it should have been enough, and if it were not then the fault lay with him, that the threat to his health was a kind of fitful exuberance, an extravagance, an adultery, that his managing at this stage in his life after having pleaded fatigue and routine for years to come up with a rejuvenated melodrama, was a form of infidelity.  He had harbored resources that he had no intention of using in their marriage, resources that would enable him at this late date to enter into an affair of the heart, all that sturm and angst and self-involvement, which he had saved by never expending it on her.  This tiny, smarmy act of hugging him and meaninglessly declaring a common fate, was enough for the man she had known, all he had ever asked or permitted of her, and he felt that at bottom she did not really believe he had it in him to compose a dramatic death.  He felt she had decided she should not have to make the effort to actually believe him, that she was the wronged party, and she had every right to refuse with obtuseness or glib gesture every attempt by him to push her outside the arrangements they had worked out over nearly five decades. 

     She might improve, be fulfilled as a widow.  The same writer's temperament suited to floating around the house combing for sentiment would be in its element.  She could remain in her nightgown and robe as she often did when writing, not bothering to dress the whole day, cultivating dreaminess.  When he returned in the evenings he often found her reading on the couch and the apartment airless and filled with a genie of enervation.  Didn't she then seem sometimes to be posing, to have arranged herself for his entrance, to find her conspicuously fallow and provoking, available for rescue and rejuvenation if...the right man should return?  Not precisely Sleeping Beauty but a woman who might still entertain such fantasies, whose heart was still young enough to imagine it.  A woman who might suspend disbelief long enough to allow an adolescent fantasy of romance to repossess her, or a woman who could wait in a dishabille that did not seem seedy but was instead still sexual and which could-the poise of her pose, the satiny nightgown like a ballroom gown, a stagy bend at the wrist, a purposely unlikely attention to the book as more than prop, a foregrounding of her shapely calves, a lascivious boredom-make a case for breach of contract, for the invasion of an imposter into her boudoir, not the man contracted with decades before to nurture and appreciate and maintain this houri.  Dressed like a Ginger Rogers ready for a night of ballroom dancing.  Lacking only Fred Astaire, who Manny could have played as well as he ever did Rathbone (raspy name that, while Astaire rhymed with "light as air") so easily, had he only...forgiven her.  Florence with her dancer's calves, unused, waiting and accusing him of...clumsiness. Of tone-deafness.  Him.  For whom perception was stock and trade, and who had entered her life almost solely on their merit and on this distinction from other men.  Entered by these sweet, soft virtues.  What a plenitude of continuous fiction might follow the completion of her widowhood.       

     He dryly patted her hands and she released him and returned to her seat.

     "Not in the least.  No news is good news.  I am to eschew grapefruit, not my doctor's words.  Shouldn't eat that crap would be more like it.  Hardly a staple around here.  We're not models.  I understand they survive on grapefruit and lemon alone.  They sound like unicorns, don't they?  We're more corporal, I don't believe we can subsist on the public's need for our sacrifice.  Even if we volunteered, they wouldn't accept.  They'd think we were being sardonic, and we're not being asked, believe me.  Doctor Aparian insisted I eat like a Pennsylvania Dutch pig, anything else would be affectation.  We have to develop an appetite for offal. That's the road ahead: Intestinal fortitude. 

     "You're being perverse."

     "I am?  I'm sorry.  It's been that kind of day..or life."

     "But, it's good news.  You haven't been so unlucky."

     "And I sounded bitter, didn't I?"

     "A little...Yes.  You said `life', honey."

     "I did, didn't I?  Yes I did.  I'll have to be more careful.  That must have sounded awful.  I mean the whole thing hangs in the balance...It's confusing.  Should I atone?  Repent? Mortify?  But Doctor Aparian has prescribed an offense.  Vulgarity.  He's suited to it, but I don't know, should I feel mis-cast?  But, this isn't tuberculosis.  No hope for martyrdom, only justice, like it or not."

     "Manny, you're rejecting me."

     "What are you saying?"

     "I can tell.  You're being clever, but you are."

     "I don't see how you can say that."

     "Yes you are.  You're teasing me.  You're saying I'm of no use."

     "Well, then I really am being clever."

     "I want to help."

      "Poor girl, you deserve better.  I don't think I'm going to be the patient you should have.  I won't be sick."

     "That's ugly."

     "Give me the chance.  Please.  Wish it for me.  It's not going to be a good sign if I get too domesticated.  Maybe I'll stay hearty and loutish."

     "You've never been loutish."

     "Hopefully it's not too late.

     "You're afraid."

     "There's not going to be succoring tasks.  You will still have complaints and I won't make you ashamed of them.  They'll be justified, which can't be easy, considering I might be passing away, blandly. I'm not going to be doing my best for this project, I know it.  It won't look like courage.  Not by a mile.  The leitmotif is pettiness."

     "Just don't let go."

     "No.  Never.  Never."

     "Stop it."

     "I have examples to guide me."

     "Don't start that. They have nothing to do with it.  There's nobody to blame."

     "But some are more deserving.  They have prospered, don't you think there's a lesson in that?"

     "I'm not going to listen."

     "Especially Max, there's got to be a lesson for me there.

The skinny penitent is the hypocrite.  He carried the cross of looking forgetful right down Central Park West.  And happiness. Of the usual kind.  Have I ever told you how content he seems with inconsequence.  Positively relieved.  Your brother in law is one of the few men I've met who enjoys looking silly.  He's smug about being overlooked. 

     "I'm not listening."

     "Have you ever noticed, he always looks like he's got a chocolate in his mouth? 

     Florence had gotten up from the table and was placing their dinner in plastic containers.   Along with the chicken there was asparagus and pickled artichoke hearts.  Manny went up behind her and put his arms around her waist where she stood at the sink. 

     "Did I ever tell you that he looks like a pony that escaped from a merry-go-round.  It's those tiny prancing steps."

     She unlocked his arms. 

     "You are deeply in self-pity tonight."

     "Which is selfish, and that's just it, I have to learn from them.  Gratitude."

     "Their lives haven't been a picnic, either.  But they don't give up.  They didn't have a thing when they came here."

     "But they did.  Mea culpa.  They had life and were thankful, whatever the conditions.  Look, there are still sun flowers.  Your sister had to notice and say thanks.  There's the picture, yech, but what a putz to notice that.  We're here to thank."

     "We've beaten it to death.  Enough already." 

     She put the containers in the refrigerator and left the room.

     He called after her.

     "None of us should have to set the example of a meaningful life.  One is entitled to one's joy, or whatever, style or whatever.  Whatever." 

Manny continued, talking to himself, and then in an icy, sarcastic, supercilious, nearly English accent he went on,

     "Did I ever tell you we used to operate on babies without anaesthetizing them? Of course, one might be hard put to figure the dose which wouldn't stop their little hearts, given that this gift of life sometimes comes in a broken package that just must be fixed, without provision for a sedative, just gratitude.  But, you must consider, in tallying your chances for any more luck, how much the babies screamed while the procedures went on.  They just screamed, it's a sound you can't ignore, even if it’s over spilt milk, and on they went with their precise cuts, unflinching, with the screaming in their ears.  Well, you had to decide something, and we agreed the babies couldn't feel a thing, they didn't have enough consciousness yet, like a lobster, I suppose." 

     While he was speaking he had returned to the foyer.  He had no idea why.  Still talking he opened the closet where they hung their overcoats, his voice muted in all the heavy wool, its tone changing.  He was staring at his camel hair coat with the same avid aphasia as someone acting on a post hypnotic suggestion. 

     "The whole thing, from the top, once again, lightly", his voice gentle and intimate, "Too late".

     He closed the closet door.  He had left his briefcase on the credenza.   A large mirror in a brass frame hung over it reflecting part of the living room.  

      "Just look at you", he whispered, "Too late.  J'accuse, old man."  With his index finger he traced the creases that ran down his face to the corners of his mouth and the pouchy little jowls.  His finger left a slug’s trail of oil on the glass which Maria had cleaned that day.  He looked into his eyes, red rimmed and puffy with complex, drooping folds in the upper lids.  Much like Florence's. 

     Who would he have wanted across the table tonight?  Who was traced in his imagination before he opened the door?  He could only glimpse their eyes, or sense them inside a wash of nostalgia.  They wore a flat expression, or was it wily? foxy but calm: pale blue eyes with a sparkle in them.  They were jeweler crafted instead of a seamless evolution of vision out of tears.  Flecks from a Byzantium mosaic made of sunlight infused sky without stain from shadows and memory.

     "You know by now.  When they finally get their voice, it's much too late.  You know, yes you do, what they'll say about everything that was done to them, but by then it'll only be complaints. We perfected their little hearts and such clenched fists they will remain, thunder will not awaken them." 

     He snapped open the briefcase.  There it was, the file he had grabbed this morning to validate his visit home to Maria. "Matsui".  When he had seen which it was he had buried it under his current load, but throughout the day he had peeked in and run his thumb over the name.  Now seeing it he took his fingers and poked them into the eyes in the mirror.

     "It was just a reflex, and they weren't going to remember any of it, not before they could talk.  And what would they have said anyway?  Screams are truer.  Good reason to start out wailing, considering our company.  I was able to talk affably with all the surgeons. Made friends with some.  Sorry.  Carried on as usual.  There was nothing really unusual to it. I'd already grown used to this civil aspect in myself."

 

     He took his sleeve and wiped the scrim of oil off the mirror.   Suddenly he remembered Florence and that she might be watching. She must have gone into the bedroom.

     Her eyes were so beautiful at first. 

     He carried the briefcase pressed against his chest as adolescent girls sometimes carry their school books when their breasts are just becoming conspicuous.  Clutching it that way he hustled past the bedroom door glancing in on Florence, but she was in the bathroom with the door closed and he made it into his study unchallenged.  

     He began reading the file.  His saliva felt gluey.  His ears hummed like they would in complete quiet.  Matzui.  He read until he became aware he was sweating and then he closed the file.  He returned the file to the oak drawer and then went to another cabinet where he kept tapes of sessions.  He had recorded sessions from the beginning of his practice.  Mostly, he taped one session right over the last, but in some instances he saved the tapes.  He had with Matzui.  There she was, a box of small tapes, from the age of compact recorders.  He also had wagon wheels from the days of the Wollensack.  There were sound reasons for recording sessions, reviewing a tape before the next visit could keep the therapy on course and always a great deal had been missed in his notes and would otherwise have been forgotten.  And the voices.  He could listen even more intently to the changes, the hesitations and occasional thickening and choking off during the sessions.  There was no devious motive in this practice.  The recorder was in his desk drawer and he activated it before the patient entered.  The microphone was hidden among books on his desk, more to prevent the patient from becoming self-conscious than to trick him, and the voices arrived from across the room, sounding hollow, and because the volume was turned up all the way to capture the speakers at a distance, the microphone picked up the haunting in the vacuum. 

     He felt a pulse in his neck. He began rummaging among the jumble of tapes until he had picked out all the ones labeled "Matsui" and he cleared a place in a corner of the drawer and put them together in a row and then he buried them under the general disorder.  He would listen later.  Following this feeling, letting the fever consume him, he would be inherited by the morbid vitality of a sickness.  His metabolism, like some species of eel leaving sweet water to return to brine, would now be fueled by fermentation, removed from light and air. 

     No wonder he had grabbed this file stuffed anonymously in the middle of the alphabet of a career's worth of patients.  It was the fattest.  He had seen her for less than a year; some patients he saw for a decade, but it was into her file that he had poured enough commentary and reflection to instigate a novel.

     He was shaky walking out of his study and into the bedroom, spent as he might once have time been from physical effort, and he sat down at the foot of their bed and above the smell of furniture wax and newly changed sheets, smells that must have cleared his palette, he could smell himself.  He had been sweating, stirring up the odor that had clung to him all day.  He put his hand on Florence's foot where it made a hillock in the blanket and gave it a squeeze; what he had been doing, the nature of its privacy and illicitness had freshened his sympathy for her or maybe just given him independence.  Her sad eyes watched him suspiciously over her reading glasses.

     "I was looking through some files.  Being morbid, I guess, career in review.  Did Maria mention that I came by today?  I was looking for you, after Doctor Aparian.  I missed you.  Well, I took a candy instead.  And then I didn't eat it.  I missed you. Taffy won't do."

     "We did not run out.  Why did you want to say that?"

     "I didn't say that."

     "We left.  It was a nightmare."

     "I know it was.  I'm not blaming you."

     "Why else would you bring it up that way?  To hurt me.  You succeeded and it’s making me very unhappy that you would do that to me when you're unhappy. I want to help. We didn't run out. We ran away. You've teased me about it before.  I didn't think you would now, when you're in trouble.  It's taking advantage.  All I can do is assure you I won't do it to you as if it's in my blood to.  I have to say I'm guilty.  I was eight years old.  I shouldn't have to say that.  I'm not going to compare it.  You set me up to prove I think this is trivial, and I don't.  Maybe I'm just an old woman but it matters to me and that doesn't mean it’s just a bubameisa."    

     "I've been clumsy all night."

     "I was sea sick the whole way over.  I just wanted to drown.  I was eight.  I had no idea.  Just to not feel so awful I would have picked dying.  I wanted to go back.  When I saw the taxis, because I didn't like the yellow.  If it would've been up to me, we'd have gone back because the taxis were ugly.  But nobody listened.  I don't say it was brave, I didn't know anything, but I certainly didn't run, I just couldn't have imagined any reason good enough to live where there were yellow taxis."

     "I really am sorry.  I've got to shower to get the doctor's office off.  Completely off and then maybe I won't be such an oaf."

     "We shouldn't have to do this."

      "I know."

      He took the taffy out of his breast pocket where it had been all day since he had aborted the idea of giving it to Maria, and he takes Florence's hand from the book and puts the candy in her palm, smiling sheepishly. 

     A full length mirror hung on the door in the bathroom and though its elongating distortion worked in Florence's favor, he looked like a stick figure Don Quixote, or Ichabod Crane, who he assumed was named for his pipe-cleaner legs and spindly neck.  He had not really looked at his naked body in years; he would wait until he was fully dressed to study himself and make those small adjustments to seam and crease and drape that if overlooked would have made it seem he was becoming dotty, otherwise treating himself to the same enlightened disregard he extended to the maimed.  Now he punished his body by staring at it with voluptuous contempt.  His time in the study had only paroled his fantasies.  His bath robe was slung over his left arm.   How debonair, and beneath that steel will for style strutted this ridiculous figure with its huge joints and baggy, mottled skin hanging from points of bone and its pert little pot belly inflated over the brush of pubic hair from which drooped that sad sack, that Killroy-was-here  nosy cartoon, absurd, beaten, spiritless, and extraneous.  Hanging in effigy. 

     "And you stink".  He had been enveloped in fumes when he undressed in the larger bathroom off their bedroom, spoiled old man smells but worse than usual, as if the trip to Doctor Aparian had set him smoldering like a pile of old rags. He reminded himself of mummies he had seen in photos from Mexico, that same evaporation of juices.  Those dried corpses looked as if they had woken up in the grave and dyed howling; one toothy, pinched smile at the caricature in the narrow shouldered wood framed mirror, and the comparison was completed.

    He covered the mirror by hanging his bathrobe from the hook above it.  He had yet to warm up after his visit to the doctor's, even in this old people's house kept hot enough to melt butter.  Maybe, a bath was prescribed.  His eyes rested on the plug dangling from its chain around the spigot.  The bathroom was of the old utilitarian model.  At some point in American history bathrooms had become opulent.  Here the tiles were the same black and white hexagons found in old barber shops.  The bathroom had a masculine air, at least as compared to modern ones, stoic rather than orgiastic.  Maybe that is why he had chosen it over the other one which had been pretty thoroughly colonized by Florence's ointments, soaps and shampoos.  The medicine cabinet was made of wood.  Wood framed its bevelled mirror with Shaker simplicity.  The bath tub was deep and succinct, and it stood high on stubby legs that were in the shape of lion's paws.  The rubber plug fit with this expression of the work ethic, and cleanliness being next to godliness and a terse chore, not a sensual treat.  Its brass chain was from the same school of practical optimism as a pocket watch's chain, like it a home remedy for disorder.

     He pushed the shower curtain along its rod until it was gathered at one end and he hung it over the side. He turned the small capstans of the faucets; the water tumbled out, storming against the hollow porcelain, echoing in the room to the exclusion of all other sound.  He adjusted the temperature, plunging his hand into the ropey sinews of the gush-a feeling of wildness-keeping the flow strong so his hand was batted down, letting the water splatter against his palm and then his knuckles and braiding it through his fingers like a mane.  He stoppered the drain and stepped across the high sides of the tub.

     The water was only beginning to glaze the bottom.  He stood, letting the warm puddle ooze up the sides of his feet while his soles still burned from the cold porcelain, indulging in a mixture of feelings and reverie, and sensations of a Utopian, liberated pissing.  Soon the water began to plunge down onto a deepening pond with a hearty plosh. An anarchic element in the apartment. They should stable farm animals in the basements.  Then, in that barn full of manure where lowing cows were pulling off brooms of gold flax from the manger as cats brushed against their fat udders, a musky id could enjoy a benevolent nativity.      

     These were story book images coming to him.  Memories of bathing were laid down in a childhood stratum.  Its archaic perceptions seeped out like honey.

     He lowered his bottom into the warm cess, slowly bending his rusty knees, assuming an ontogeny of human poses on his deliberate way down, including the Turkish toilet, which he held for a while, bobbing, playing with the oily string of surface tension, sliding the hoop up and down his thighs and buttocks, into the crack of his butt, floating the copse of pubic hairs and poaching his scrotum, feeling it float jelly fish-like, then lifting it dripping from its quick steeping, before finally laying back completely with a groan and donning a necklace of slick warmth while the safety drain slurped and gurgled. 

     What a fakir’s bed we are strapped to in old age.  The hot water dulled the pain.

     Once upon a time getting dressed had seemed onerous and peculiar.  His little naked body was this smooth, pleasing lozenge.  He was enamored with it.  It always surprised him, especially that it was his.  Suddenly, he would notice some part of it, and its separate existence, his surprise in noticing it, this discovery of it, it was discovering himself.  It was like waking up, and each time it happened he seemed to gain.  He had gotten a present.  Once it was his belly button, he could not specifically remember when that happened, but the murmuring from that discovery followed him for years, the private, self-infatuated moment when it had happened made its re-revelation in a bathing suit a flirtation or confession or a plea.  Later it seemed that these awakenings had been the very opposite: They had been first entries into dream.  The first trysts with his ghost.

     A single drip arriving at long intervals was the single sound in the room.  It was like a dilated tick of a clock.  Any movement he made was accompanied by a silky slide and sound of water, and for some reason the watery syllables sounded perfected, rehearsed for years, clairvoyant harmonies purling out of the body.  He recognized certain lyrics.  The one of an eddy near the bank of a stream.  He was amazed that he could conjure it so easily, so exactly, and he did it time after time, making the water fold and whirl about his splayed hand.

     Laying down, the body's castes were toppled.  The ladder mounting to the crown with its increments of given attention was upset and the deeply buried toe nails which had fossilized into horn were unearthed and reattached.  

     He had spent his working life unpackageing symbols.  He had his patients recite their lives to him without the music.  He was one of the few psychiatrists left actually in a position to do psychotherapy, the seance on the couch.  They were liked tipped bottles, his patients, and the thesis held the truth was in the tarry lees at the bottom.  The stories had to spill out until the lumpy clots would follow, but always the recitation was in that hypnogogic drone: The libretto cored of its passionate score.  There was an animal's benighted faith in his feet, an object's peg-in-its hole snug fit in its own being that he missed.  Maybe, something settled towards the bottom throughout life, and what he uncorked in his patients was just gas.  What would it be down here, from the groin down?  It would not seem possible looking at these shanks and baggy, knobby knees, but it might be the lost tune, these bones ability to strum melody out of water, and not settled down here at all, but stopped in its passage upward, a meadow sense extracted by these roots with their floating cilia, a refrain that would have used the throat for a Pan pipe.

     Too late.                               

     He slid up the side of the tub until he was in the posture he would have assumed in a chaise lounge, cloaking his shoulders in a chill that felt tonic, and he raised up his knees and made himself into an archipelago, two volcanoes rising out of a bay where his genitals floated.  He had made this archipelago when he was a boy.  That nearly agape narcissism over his neat little body, his contented solipsism, the treacly glide of water over his glossy skin.  It had been a love of craftsmanship, of the perfect and miniature before the entrance of Eros. His little penis and shelled walnut scrotum, they had been particularly fascinating because uncovering them was nakedness whose taboo he was just memorizing phonetically without getting its sense, vaguely tracing some outline of self which was still in the offing, but they were still a toy, a squirt gun. 

     His mother had bathed him back then.  He did not think he had ever used his nakedness to appeal to his mother as his own children had.  His memory of her was sadder, and he regretted not having this memory of what may have been back then his confidence-in his irresistibility, in her infatuation with this ingot of marmalade amidst the tarnishing in the rest of her life?  A remnant of which would be useful now.

     She had him stand and she buffed him with soap until he was covered neck to knee in wooly lather, and then she filled a pot under the tap and sheared the fleece off with the warm flood.  He thought he was like a samovar.  He shared with it a small faucet, and like the samovar, he was covered in cloudy polish and then brought back shinning.  

     He must have disappointed her by never flirting.  She would hug him while he was still wet.  She sat on the edge of the tub when she washed his hair, but more often she knelt on the floor.  She wanted to scour him, to have to get on her knees and be uncomfortable, and he felt put upon, bothered.  Her ministrations carried a sting.  He squinched his eyes shut when she rinsed the soap out from his hair.  He liked the taste of the vinegar that trickled to his lip, he liked the volatile smell.  He sat pursed up while the vinegar water streamed down his back, feeling his hair float and then gel waxen on his scalp.  She had him tip back his head, there was the threat of the stinging shampoo, a suggestion of drowning.  He held his breath, the water made him deaf. 

     Her need was beyond his scale.

     She wanted to be prostrate.  She wanted the strength of vows.  An iron bond and bond of tears.  Gratitude, but more cabal.  He should know she was lost, paid too much for him.  He had to be worth the price of her life. 

     She hugged him to her still wet so her dress was darkened.  She wanted to stifle his shivers herself.  He failed her. He stood it like a martyr.  She draped him in a towel.  He was so unblemished.  Flesh of her flesh.  And then not a redemption after all, but another accusation, another perishing love, drying into pointiness and abrasion.

     But, for all its impossibility, how sad to consider his fastidiousness which proved sufficient to quash endless love.

     He did not even feel the ebbing of her love and the energy for its expression, its conversion to plot and ploy from gift.  Nor the advent of iciness and sarcasm.  He was too reluctant to get tangled up to risk noticing it, and her resorting to provocation-which he thought was tawdry.  He thought she was morally decaying; she did too.  She became foul-mouthed, but she knew the reason, loathing at not being able to excite sympathy.  Finally to shock him by the end, when she was a repulsive object and felt that keenly, and her abandonment, able then only to haunt, like a poltergeist, when he visited her she would punch him on the shoulder or bump into him as if they were invisible to each other, saying "boo".

     He could not face her death.  When his thoughts drained towards there, an erasing black, like a petit mal, passed over his mind.  He would even put his palm on his forehead like a silent movie actress expressing anguish or about to feint, not his gesture at all, but hers.

     And how many other gestures were hers?  How much of his life determined by the emptiness engulfing her, directed away from it and irresistibly drawn to it as a summation, so that at this break from his un-awakened passage it might appear that every step and swerve was the further pilgrimage of her unsleeping ghost?  Not arrested even with him but passed on to another generation until the debt was quitted, haunted and jinxed gestures and mannerisms of hers bequeathed to his children in the crib before they could protest and so they found themselves under the old curse, some fairy witchery laid on them and forming them so they too felt the straits of her unrequited love and rancor with every inherited action, prodigies of disillusion and grief.   

     Florence knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer pushed it open.  She had to put some shoulder into it because it was swollen with moisture.  She looked around its edge at Manny.

     "You're bathing."

     "Caught red-handed."

     "You never bathe.  I thought you must have slipped."

     They also were never naked in front of each other, undressing in the bathroom and dressing at different times so one was left alone in the bedroom or else behind the closet door where there was another full length mirror, and Manny felt modest with her looking at him. 

     He turned on the faucet to make a distraction and to demonstrate he was engaged in the productive action of bathing, but she entered the room anyway, maybe re-warming the tub could be interpreted as welcoming nonchalance.  There was hardly any space in the bathroom and she closed the cover of the toilet and sat down, putting her a little behind him, about where he would sit if he had a patient on the couch.  He opened the faucet more, and the water started slurping down the overflow drain. 

     "You look forlorn", Florence called out over the healthy spill of water.        

     "I'm just bathing."

     "You look forlorn."

     "This is the way I look bathing, you don't have to watch if it upsets you."

     "It doesn't.  You look kind of fetching.  I want to watch.  I don't know when I'll get the chance again."

     He turned off the water and lay back, bending his leg so one knee poked out of the water. 

     "This will get boring."

     He closed his eyes and then to his embarrassment he farted, which produced a real tuba note underwater and a pleasant tickle of bubbles.  Florence laughed.   

     "A depth charge", Manny said.

     "A depth charge?"

     "Passing wind in the tub.  That's what we called it.  We wuz robbed, Florence."

    Suddenly his voice was choked off and he was fighting tears.        "Excuse me.  A minute.  Just sitting on that balloon.  You might have thought. Just leave it alone.  What possible harm? Everything, to the last penny, if you had it in your palm.  Just pry it open, one shinny penny.  To go after every last thing.  That too? Not even that one little thing."

     And once again his throat closed with that ammonia itch.    Florence kissed the top of his head.  He thought he would burst into sobs, and he waved her off and forced himself to take deep breaths until he could go on.

     "Simple joys got stolen.  Isn't that sad?  The burdens.  Put on you.  On you.  An eight year old girl.  What harm is there enjoying that?  Why does she have to consider if that's enough?   Maybe, she should be insane with pleasure for the single chance she has.  Never flagging, even on grey days, seeing it like Joan of Arc, as a mission, orders directly from god telling her `You for them, all those very sad ones'.  But then, don't be forgetting.  Careful, do the chore of eight carefully when you're right in front of the god damn sacred memory." 

     He slapped the water with his cupped palm, making a concussive ka-boom, and water geysered up and splashed on the floor.  

     "Wait there.  Don't move.  I've got just the thing", Florence said, and  on her way out she pressed down on his shoulder as if he meant to bolt as soon as he was left unguarded.  She returned shortly with a purse-sized wicker basket hanging from her elbow.  Two or three scrawny silk flowers whose usual nest was a vase in the master bathroom popped up from its corner.  She had removed her night robe to expose the luxurious nightgown that had shown as only a purple fringe before-she owned no fewer than a dozen that spanned the full octave of the spectrum from the violets to scarlet, all of them silk-and looked like a Hollywood version of a naiad. 

     "Choose one", and she started removing small, milky colored plastic vials from the basket, reading the label of each candidate and placing it in a group on the toilet lid. 

     "Lavender.  Rose.  Apple.  Cinnamon and spice.  These are yummy.  Peaches and cream?  Yes?  I think so."

     "Florence, I'm shriveling up in here."

     "Manny, we've got to be born again."

     "What are your talking about?"        

     She tipped the bottle and `Peaches and Cream' in miserly, precious drops was added to the tub. 

     "Agitate, Manny, agitate.  It's supposed to be added with the water running, you've got to stir it up to get the effect."

     She frailed her hand in the water and bubbles started to materialize and fan out in a wake, making a crinkling sound, light sparkling in their crystal orbs.  A smell, perhaps redolent of peaches and cream but accelerated with some additive that made it nearly as volatile as vinegar, began rising in the damp air in the room.

     "Listen.  It crackles like gift wrap.  Do you see the rainbows?  They're coming for you."

     "They certainly are."  At least the piles of zany bubbles were covering his nakedness.

     She was staring down into the tub, a little smile on her lips, day dreaming or mesmerized or just satisfied with the magic appearance of bubbles out of the clear water. 

     "I've wanted to."

     "To what, Florence?"

     "To be baptized."

     "In champagne?"

     "In a white nightgown."

     "You're making a comedy."

     "We have to...We should have a long time ago."

     "Florence, listen.  This is nothing more than ridiculous, there's no need to invest sincerity in it.  Anyway, you're not in a white nightgown."

     "That's another cross I have to bear", and she burst out laughing. 

     "Manny.  I just remembered.  Tongue in cheek.  Aren't you proud of me.  I'm thinking like you.  It's Freudian.  They read out loud."

     "Who are we talking about?"

     "Don't, I'll lose my train of thought.  The gentiles.  They read out loud and so its tongue in cheek.  So we can do it, too.  It was an inspiration and I'm losing it.  What was it?  The white nightgown.  Getting all wet.  And I've seen this, they lean their heads back and the preacher holds their nose and dunks them.  They know what they're doing.  Holding your nose right at that moment...What was it?  Method in their madness!  Manny there's method in their madness."    

     "Eureka.  Talking in tongues-in-cheek, but, the water's getting cold."

      She actually lowered herself onto her knees on the fluffy bath mat, a feat that did not go unnoticed by Manny who attributed it to her self-indulgence: her faith in the truth of her emotions was her self-indulgence, or it took self-indulgence and drama like she exhibited now to keep the fiction of this faith active in her life.  Her eyes were level with his and she was pushing floes of bubbles about with her hand, and she had become serious again, dreamy in an exaggerated way, even pious.

     "I could fit right here.  The advantage of being small, and we could be born again together, twins."

     Using a method she must have practiced in her own bath she threaded three glistening orbs from these drifts of clear roe on three fingers.

     "It sparkles.  I buy it from a boutique.  Journey to Eden.  They sell wind chimes and crystals and these potions.  But, they can't do business.  It feels like I'm giving to a good cause.  A little bell tinkles when you walk in and I always think I'm waking them up.  They're reading.  Female writers.  Manny, they are without harm.  They can hardly speak they are so free of guile.  They all have stammers.  I shouldn't wake them into this cruel world.  The soap is made from honey and mist, by fairies.  You can't just buy these things.  They talk to you, in their way.  You have to believe, otherwise they just drift off.  They leave you standing until you feel so foolish you walk out.  I returned shyly.  I waited several days.  I'm sure they recognized me, but they forgave me.  I was so lucky."                              

 

     Her eyes filled with tears, and then extravagant crier that she was, her nose began to run. 

     "I don't know what to do.  I'm just trying to raise our spirits."       

     "If I can still rise out of this tub, you've been a success.  Please don't worry so much.  I'm going to be all right."

     "I'll give you a hand."

     "No, no.  I'd rather you didn't see me crawling out like a shipwreck survivor.  I'm going to be all right, Florence.  I'm sorry I'm worrying you.  Look at you, on your knees.  You make me feel guilty when you believe me so much."

     She touched his cheek.  Her short squall of tears had seemed to melt her features.  A complete purge from a tempest in a teapot.  He squeezed her hand fondly.

     "Just a few minutes and I'll come to bed.  Don't worry.  Go on."  

     In the time he lagged behind in the bathroom, Florence had already fallen asleep.  Sleep is gerrymandered and ransomed in old age. It would steal up on them in early evening, throwing a shadow over them as they lay reading in bed, or placing a hood on Manny when he sat at his desk in the study, causing him to doven.  At these times it was a sweet luxury, as if he had drunk Sauterne rather than hemlock.  They usually slept deepest during those first few hours after being spirited away.  Sleep thinned by two or three in the morning until it was only a sheer shroud laying over their faces, and they would stumble to the bathroom and stumble back to bed, their limbs logy and their senses cottony, to lay like castaways on the shore of a sea of dreams and memories.  But, Manny could not help thinking there was unseemly haste in her rapid exit; she had exhausted her emotions and had jumped into sleep, relieved to be done with this day.  What fortunate, sweet dreams might be awarded her?

Surely, the strength of the psychic machinery in place to perpetuate her innocence could churn out a bunting's worth of gift wrap.   

     They each had cantilevered desk lamps on their sides of the bed.  The halogen bulb threw a pitiless, interrogative light on her sleeping face.  Her nose cast a shadow and the bridge was sharpened.  A croon's beak.  Her eyes looked sunken and there were shadows in their hollows.  She did not look at peace; she looked disdainful or supercilious, some stale, embittered expression.  Different light would engrave her differently, leave her less bled and carved out, but that would only be a brief stay.  Strange that rather than showing decay from excess, she seemed stamped by deprivation.  This was the face left after scouring, the bedrock under expression. And that face, even Florence's face, was offended and sad and unsatisfied, no matter the diet enjoyed in dreams.

     From birth he had been held responsible for an aging woman's feelings.  There had been an interval when Florence was young  and all her emotions might be driven by her passionate high color that the labor had eased and the drama had seemed quick with life, but now, once again what had not been consumed in a long life showed itself rancid to him. 

     He turned off the lamp that was whittling her so mercilessly.  Less and less sleep atones or restores to the body its pilgrim nakedness, the saintly lamination which used to descend onto it, but even so a fey courtesy tutors movements in its presence.  In the dark he listened to the tea kettle whistling of her breath.

     He lay down beside her.  Before he slept his mind's eye was bathed in the light of an evening in Indian summer.  It was Connecticut and he was walking from the train station.  The light a pale gold in the warm air, and as he approached their house it looked enchanted, a perfected mirage, the lights already on indoors though the sun had barely set and was still pulling silk gowns of daylight behind it, and the light in the house in the glowing field of the twilight hour was made thin as onion skin.  He heard a piano playing and the notes penetrated Manny along with the light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                     The Kiss or Kiss-met

 

    

    

     Had he ever loved Florence?  Yes, and still did, damning by faint praise if this chaff left in age was sufficient fodder to feed it. Roughage included for winged breasts are ashes and husks, stoicism and endurance, calloused emotions, the stuff of brick and mortar, home and hearth, ink and vows.  

     And memory any more, or life? His profession fattened on coherence. Could the dustpan be sifted to discovery? Exegesis in refulgence. That the Nazis continue to amaze and stir libido shows no more than Existentialism’s lack of imagination, and literature’s fatigue. We are remembered for gas and a mole, and are overly redeemed by the million martyrs to distraction. Yiddish and klazamir, the many species of tears answering.

     He could not remember his first sight of Florence. It was not love at first sight, let heaven and nature sing. No, the phone an alarming ring on New Year’s Day.   

     She was dating a doctor friend of his he had met during his internship.  Sotto voice so he did not recognize him at first, thought at this hour it must be a trick or wrong number.  New Year's Day, eight a.m., a humid whisper saying "Mad Sex", a hand over the mouthpiece, then, "Thought I heard some life back there.  Manny, insane sex.  All night.  Shocked myself.  Got to know if I'm all right.  Does four orgasms in one night sound normal.  In what, five hours?  We didn't even get here until after two.  What time is it?  I may have killed her.  She bit off more than she could chew, so to speak.  She's a hell cat.  Lost her head.  Me too.  I've got to be more careful.  My penis should be registered with the police.  It's too big.  She couldn't get her hand around it.  She improvised.  Jesus, she should be in the circus, all three rings. Trapeze.  What?  Lion tamer? and sword shallower.  I don't know why I'm calling you.  I need an osteopath.  Ssh." 

     The receiver clumps down on a table.  Manny hears the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night sounds that come through a dangling phone. 

     "She's still dead to the world.  Looks like a train wreck in there.  Clothes all over.  We ripped them off each other.  She looks sweet laying there.  She pulled one of the sheets over her when she was sleeping, closing the barn door after letting the horse out..and in, and out, and..innn, but it looks sweet, with her tittes flopped out in the morning light.  She's one of those droolers. That's Ok.  It's little girly.  She stuffed the sheet between her legs.  I feel like a butcher.  I think she's in pain.  Manny, I am not normal.  What's the matter with me?  The poor girl, she bucked too hard. She got up on me and just took the bit between her teeth and now she's suffering.  She rode too hard and now her saddle's sore.  What do you guys call me?  I just talked myself into it again. What a heartless bastard.  I'm going back in Manny.  Ready or not, here I come."                 

     When he met her in February it was as if he had first seen her naked and it was a vision he could not forget.  He looked for the harlot to spill out.  He imagined her nipples, "They fill my mouth when I suck them" his friend had reported.  "I want to enter her ass in the county fair", he studied the way she walked to trace the outline of her famous butt and the lively suppleness of her waist which had been reported as "She's like a Picasso, I screw her, I don't know if she's profile or full face, she twists like a pretzel, I'm behind her and she's looking right at me.  I think we're reinventing this thing".  His friend's reports were an addiction to him.  He did not want them, but he listened, and when they did not come, he egged him on.  Not because of Florence before he met her, but to win some iconoclasm for himself, to gain experience, to be toughened, and then once he had met her, so she would not make him nervous, although the stories only made it worse.  He looked at her mouth.  Her lips were puffy, he imagined this came from the described abuses.  She seemed to kiss her words as they came through her lips, it was from their cushiness and a relish she took in company: he could not help it, he thought: the pleasure she gets from social intercourse.  Her mouth was as wet as he had been promised, with glee in its own appetites, and just before she laughed he could hear her sucking in her saliva, a sound he should have been disgusted with as he had been with the image of the pillow cases translucent with drool, the stripes on the pillows glowing through, but which was sloppy-girlish and restored her some innocence and relieved him.

     His friend insulted and teased her in public.  Her metabolism seemed ordained for baiting: her emotions coursed about just beneath the skin, she blushed easily, her eyes verged on tears and rapture.  Her mouth often trembled as if she had been made speechless or were ready to cry or yodel; it was eagerness and nervousness, a constant expectancy or over-readiness.  She needed the moment to fill up, she was watching it reach the brim with eyes wide open, always, and she seemed to exude a honey of estrogen, of female, besotted feelings.  His friend paraded her surrender and sensual intoxication.    

     Manny became her confident.  They met for coffee.  She called him.  His friend telephoned too, with news of other conquests.  He had a lot left over after Florence.  Manny did not relay that to her, he defended his friend from her charges of neglect even though he did not really believe what he was saying.  He hung up the phone or walked away from the cafe feeling a drizzly sorrow in his chest, but defending his friend was the only nobility he had left.  Otherwise, he would have felt sneaky, an Iago.  He remained pious and obtuse.  On the occasions when she squeezed his hand in thanks or kissed him in an excess of feeling, having been encouraged to hope and to try again, he let his hand rest woodenly in hers, and gallantly turned his cheek.

     His friend could not get rid of her, no matter how crude or cruel he became.

     Then one night she called Manny and he could hardly make out what she was saying but she had to see him right away, and when he arrived on West End Avenue she was waiting at the corner of her block, in shadows, pacing back and forth, and their eyes met as he pushed past, but they did not recognize each other.  He thought she was an old lady, her hope was so completely doused.  For her part, she did not recognize Manny behind his mask of religious self-denial.  Just before he reached the entrance to her building, he heard a wail from behind him, "Manny." She was standing with the electrocuted frozenness of someone who has just been soaked, she was even shivering, because he had just passed her, him too. 

     She just ran at him then, her face misshapen from crying, and buried her head in his chest, rocking him on his heels; he was a thin man and it was like two poor ice skaters hanging to each other for balance.  She nuzzled into his arm pit, and he thought of something his friend had said about her while he stood not knowing what to do, beginning to pat her gingerly and self-consciously because he could think of nothing else to do, feeling he was a prop, that there was nothing else he could be, that he had no natural response, and that he had allowed himself none, now or ever.  He saw himself awkward, stony, isolated forever, even while a whole flood of feelings was rising in him, and either these emotions would have their own head, or it seemed they would remain so unfamiliar to him they would leave to search for handier instruments.  Her tears.  Their abandon to feeling.  He was the closest he had ever come to a woman in the throes of feeling.  It was an aphrodisiac to him.  The turmoil, and her life, its living feelings, extending through her body until that body was nothing but those feelings, this in his arms, the closest he had come to a woman possessed by her love and he standing woodenly while she snuggled beneath his arm, her hair tickling his chin, all this, and he frozen in place with painfully idle time in which to recall his friend's words along with the idea of his greater knowledge and svelte, deft expertise, "She has a nose for trouble".  He had meant it just this way, that she had a taste for musk, she liked rotten ripeness.  He quoted her saying "This room smells like sex", which certainly his friend could corroborate, it did, smelled like a locker room or a hospital corridor beneath the carbolic acid and deodorizing detergents, and she said it with the same luxurious contentment as entering a good restaurant, he had told Manny.

     She pressed into him tightly and when she finally looked up there was apology and coyness in her face.  She rubbed his sweater with her sleeve, cleaning it, proprietary.  "My nose is all runny."  She looked up at him through her lashes, biting her lips.  She looked like she might giggle.  She pulled at his sweater, looking away from him, rocking her hips a little.

     "He doesn't want to see me anymore", and from their ripe bladders, her tears flowed again and she hugged him again.  And with the same effect: Her rawness alarmed him.  He was not prepared, he was callow in spite of his title and ashamed of it,  and was even more ashamed of his specific ignorance of the femaleness of her grief, of a limitlessness abandon in it and faith in it which she had; egoism  and petulance in it.  A punishment inflicted on her, and undeserved, an insult, a slight, mendable and not tragic, and then, too, woeful, true grieving, endless grieving and profound, a parcel with female destiny and part of its inheritance and competence and realm, and of its necessary and preemptory seduction.  Because she pressed against him and she had stopped sobbing and her cheek was pressed into his chest and she rolled the wool of his sweater between her fingers and looked him in the eyes and then turned away seemingly grown pensive, because her tears had aroused him. The ruins of her passion, her shamelessness, her red eyes, her quivering lips, the motley splotching  of red in her face, her vulnerability, had aroused him, and she pressed against him, and then resolved on something, she took his wrist and pulled him along behind her.

     Maybe she believed he was her boyfriend's best friend, or maybe it could have been anyone, not for vengeance but to heal, or maybe it was him, he would never know.  It would refract differently for him at different times; hurt most that it might have been his naivety, that it had always been conspicuous to her and that by it he was reduced, completely comprehended, and that it might have allowed her to be considerate and not much more, that other considerations she might have to have had with someone else, risks, rejection for one or just a jaded take-what-comes-along attitude of tepid collaboration, could be ignored in the light of his altogether exclusion from contest and nuance, because of his romantic entrancement, a kind of emergency even, if she wished to see it that way, that she must relieve him from a total disappointment, a truly grand, touching hope that only he could still have held.  Relieved him that is of what she was to him at this moment, or could have been had she pretended not to know, but either way it was his innocence that allowed her that premeditation while he was held in place.  Walked him down the side street towards the park, past the high stone apartment building her family lived in that looked like a seat for a government bureaucracy. 

     She was twenty-two.  Did she stop at Riverside Drive to give him his first kiss, had she led him down the block-as he thinks-led him mutely, tripping along, while she did not look back?  Or, did she just tip her tear softened face up to his at the corner where she first grabbed him?  Certainly, she led him into kissing, expertly it seemed to him, compared to him, inside a trance of virtuosity, running her fingers through the hairs at his temple, assessing it seemed. She was twenty-two, she was no accomplished siren.  She had been rejected.  She was surprised, she was ardent, she was child-like, easily appeased, easily heartbroken.  She was a mystery to him, complete mystery, all mysteries.  She had recovered her mystery with him, completely and all at once; she had been plumbed and found wanting, but now she had gotten it all back, this was part of it, her feeling of being irresistible, there to be seen in the way she leaned back to look at him and ran her fingers through his temples and let the irresistible pull of a kiss build until he was shaking: To know she had gotten it back, to feel it moving him, opening her mouth as if in surprise so he swooned towards her, and then turning away a few times to feel the sinew in the air tugging him.  But, she was surprised herself to have gotten it back, until that was the least part of it-the surprise-because it was forgotten, perhaps, she was alive again and she could hardly if at all tally the gush of her senses.  She pressed her mouth to his and seemed to drink him.  She clung to him, he could feel her fingers in his back, but she softened with the kiss, she seemed to go to sleep standing with him, nursing on his mouth.         

     The strange wand tap of his arousal and his first kiss. 

     There was a wind on Riverside Drive.  He felt it more completely than he could remember feeling a wind.  Everything seemed unwrapped.  Cars rushing by on the sinuous avenue seemed each one to have been taken out of a glaze of motion and set out on their own, to have their own speed and weight and to be free of the drag of the motor vehicle code, to be polished and sharp. He heard the cumulative keening sing-song of tire and spinning bearing joining into a river wash and the engine's labor, and the corner stones of the buildings were ripe with the weight on them.

     She was taking him across the avenue. Her arm around his waist; she melted against him. The side she pressed against floated.  He had never felt a woman's weight being subtracted from him, how they change the nature of the body and its center of gravity, and how their own weight, somehow both lighter and heavier than a man's, would lift the insinuation of falling from his shoulders. 

     She guided him along the cobblestones; there were drifts of leaves banked against the wall.  She led him down a flight of stairs and onto a path that ran beside the high stone wall. Into some bushes. The ground was strewn with empty liquor bottles and trash, and smelled of piss and dog shit and wet leaves. 

     The legend of her skills had been told to him.  This was to be an example of them, and if so, then hard for him to forgive, if practiced skill, whatever smug satisfactions the exercise of skills gives and the objectivity and solicitous witness they provide is what she experienced: The drab stretch of regular time, or a bit more, but distinctly not carried away, a virtuoso monitoring her talent, in any case, considering what she knew, what had been reported about her, not possibly to have lost her head over this truncated sexual detour.  While he was in the transports of nervousness, unhinged, all his lynch pins pulled out, shivering, flinching, wobbling, with a cool hand she unzipped his trousers, without snag or mishap, nudging aside his erection and then threading it through the gap with the literal skill of a seamstress, while at each dry, hooded touch through the gabardine he moaned, and at the naked touch of her palm rooting him out from the tangles of his underwear he gasped.

     Difficult to forgive the greatly uneven balance of the act, its concreteness to her or at least its discreet enclosure in a few minutes of an autumn night whose date had not slipped her mind(while the night bled into infinity for him) nor a consideration of when she was expected  back home, having left in a state, proof of her punctuality being that having milked him and after a short epilogue of hugs and smooches, she had him walk her back to her lobby, he limping not from any particular injury but a re-materialization of inner matter, a tingling re-amalgamation of exploded structure, while she spoke in an almost angry tone, compact and intense and tough, anyway, about the requirements of living with her family and when she could see him again, which was not to be for a few days, though not more, enough for her to arrange a respectable transition for her parents and a plausible story. Maybe, of reconciliation with her boyfriend and their relationship evolving under that cloak to be presented finally as already happened with accompanying tale of gradual discovery, or maybe happenstance. She was not putting him off or whetting his appetite or regaining his respect, but his place in an existing hierarchy was apparent to him and demeaning. He wanted to be earth-shattering, at least un-reconcilable with her past, unprecedented and irrational-she was not manipulating him, it was an era when such games lent a girl an illusion of sophistication, it was a city for that and has not changed and she was only twenty-two, but all she really needed was time to catch her breath, not even a decent interval but some few minutes to aim herself, knowing herself, that there would be no time later, that she was ready to be gone and then in no one's eyes would there be a chance to explain or placate, once she was rolling again. As she would be, and as she did when she skipped dinner with him only three days later and ran them back to his apartment to lose herself in passion, the girl she knew herself to be, who was afflicted with this and could make herself hesitate only so long and could not ever match the calculation of her friends. Let it just be that this time just before falling helplessly in love that she set herself up for the fall like a diver, make the approach graceful and hope she was lucky with Manny, when eyes shut, she depended on him to catch her.

     How easily she found him and undid him.  Entered his privacy and laid it waste.  He kissed her while she held him in her hand.  He rested his hands on her shoulders. He could not have stood otherwise; he palsied spastically. She was holding him back. He was so saturated by his stoppered orgasm that no space was left to him. He squeezed around himself with feeble gestures: he would trace her jawline with his fingertips.  She was branded on his eyes with the force of an after-image, that alchemical usurpation of the vitreous of the eye, but it was a pre-image.  She had an after-image's gleaming autonomy, but from before, from before he had seen her, rising up.  

     Later, he would not forgive his transparency, his simplicity, and that she had held him at bay to expose him, to force his confession from him.  Though he should have learned at some point, three days later even, a year later if he must wait that long to forget himself long enough so he could see her crying after making love, stabbed through the heart each time, that it was for her she held him, held him for herself, to cleave: that all acts of love were to be alone and to be all to him, to have this life, his life inside her, this was how she held him.  But, he did not forgive how forthrightly she unzipped his pants, her self-assurance, her aplomb, her certainty of not being rebuffed.  Nor the cozy pleasure she took which although he would not have thought he had even perceived it, haunted him, hovering about, her domestic thrift, her pocketed experience, her charity receiving kisses, her anticipation of his wail of pure, dreadful loneliness when for the pause of a breath, she removed her hand so that he would feel the absoluteness of this grace which was theirs, together, and learn that he was susceptible to it, to him at least, in reflection later, that he was especially susceptible to it and had to be, susceptible to it, liable to it, made to confess to it for his own sake, and their sake, because he would have pulled away, so it seemed, maybe to himself, because it might have seemed to himself he would have pulled away, he had to be made to ask, to take her hand back, because he had been saying "no,no" and might have believed it and that he had been taken or forced.  Did he not believe it anyway? but he could not then completely, he had to admit, he took her hand and placed it back on him, but she knew even that about him, had felt it, knew him that completely, amidst the smelly bushes, the car lights moving through the crown of trees overhead, that in this near sewer, beautiful grace was descending for them, amidst smells of urine and feces and glare it was descending and welling up from them, that they were beautiful, all forgiven, exalted in stature, religious and ecstatic and deeply mournful together, we are, so he grabbed her wrist and replaced her hand, he kissed her hand first, might he have licked it?, that he will not remember, did she see him that way that night?   Even as he was brought to his release he moaned "no,no" don't let go perhaps, not again, but no longer alone or able to be again, completely, "no, keep me" unable to ever slip away again even now at this moment, no longer private but a shared grace and she consoled him.  

     Not that Manny remembered it that way or much at all.  We cannot memorize the essence of these events. Only on their own or in service to chthontic powers do they occasionally take possession of the body, or perhaps it is during these times that they loosen their hold, shift their grip before clutching again, as a worker's hand does, to flex a cramp out of his fingers before taking up the handle again, allowing not a view of them but a breath of the liberation from their absence, their vanished heft deduced.  Then once again they alloy themselves with our very grain.

     Their marriage lay over the event.  It was an accumulation of convenience, he would never have said that but would have prided himself on it, a structure he had built with all its elaborations over the occurrence he could not even remember and this edifice was more important.  The marriage had a history and children and his career and his published books and a few minutes in a park was insignificant, actually impossible.  Impossible that a house in Connecticut containing a piano and the sheet music to all of Mozart's sonatas and the Broadway shows of Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hart and Hammerstein, and Irving Berlin with a view of conifers, those ascetic, lodge pole trees, could balance on a few minutes through all these decades, or that the Florence of bathetic fret and easy bruising, and chastely luxurious eating habits-a pastry crumb collector off empty plates and rapt licker of the spit dampened, basted finger-could have once thrashed in bed like a halibut dredged from the abyssal depths, and risen morning after morning from their bed with a pentimento of black and blue marks, blooming and fading, one over the other.  Over all this was laid pellucid sediments of reason, that somehow, like coats of superlatively clear varnish too thickly done, dried into an opaque nacre.

     Florence was not his first kiss.  His first was a rose.  Its thorn prick had never scabbed and to this day dripped a single incarnadine bead.

     He was nine years old. He had skipped two grades and would graduate from Grammar school in June. He was obedient and fastidious, smaller than his classmates and so of no possible use as friend and conspirator.  He was serious and prompt, precociously resigned. It was always autumn or evening. Where had he misplaced the summers?  Watching pigeons, perhaps.  Their vertiginous lives fascinated him.  He projected himself into their world of shifting axis and syncopated gravity.  He wished for himself their colonialization of ledges, the pristine, unreachable city suspended in the vertical, their looming of light and shadow during their careering flights.  He liked too the single drop of amber that was their eyes, their red feet, and their iridescent collars.  His childhood seemed drawn in charcoal.  He looked in lit windows at other families, numinous and perfected. 

     His parents were in their forties when he was born.  Having no children was the favor they did for each other or their accusation at each other.  It was what made the marriage bearable, a chasm and proof of chasm they could keep between them, and a reason to stay together, to assure the just extinction of the other and each's futility.  It had become the one meaning the marriage had, till death do us part without residue, completely expiated and quitted of the sentence. For the rest it was largely a rictus of recrimination.        

     He dismayed them.  He was a re-whetting of the punishment.  Neither would quite accept blame for him.  He was the product of an adultery with hope each thought the other had committed. 

     (When she became obviously pregnant, she would no longer let his father see her naked.  Before, she had forced a particular view of her nudity on him, its testimony to her suffering.  She gave up all modesty.  It was not as if he was not there, he was not ignored; she forced him to bear witness to the renunciation he had forced on her, the traducing of her nakedness because of him.  Forced her sober eyes onto him.)

     She would not give him the satisfaction she thought he would take in seeing her ripen.  She would not give him this vanity.  She beheld her own body with growing revulsion, even horror.  She was sure the pregnancy would kill her at her age.  After the morning sickness, which she had misinterpreted as spiritual nausea and the onset of an early, incriminating menopause, she entered the blissful second trimester and color blossomed in her checks and her features softened and a pubescent tenderness began in her breasts.  Her loathing grew.  She did not think these were the fruits of health.  She thought she was the butt of a dirty joke from her husband, that he had planted inside her his fermenting sarcasm, that her color and ripeness that he would enjoy, the darkening of her nipples and inflating to jovial proportions of her belly, was she as he had always wanted her, faithful to an idea of himself as provider and source, a view of her he kept secret, that the foundation of her relentless resentment of him was hysteria, a psychosomatic aversion to thriving under his care in order to refute it as inadequate. 

     She was now forced to carry his stifled glee, to feel it ripen and bear proof of itself, to have his decades of slandered silence and righteous rages, his willful stupidity-a doggedness in him which included a dumb, pathetic and abused affection like a dog, whose purpose was to shed her nuances off his thick skin-have all of this which in total had before been bound into unforgivable cruelty, into retreats into actual hate, into a kind of bestial glaring and growling from a corner, an obdurate sneering at subtlety and fineness, at degrees of meanings, be transformed into child, renewal, vindication, paternity.  That his brute heart had forced a love-making after all.

     They had already gone grey or there was enough grey to make them lackluster, the light was gone from their lives, they were already smeared in ash and soot.  Manny came out of an act of violent grief, a flagellation, a roll through embers.  She was in mourning, in ash, unkempt, her hair left long, a widow she would have him know, pacing the apartment or standing by a curtained window in zinc-toned light; listlessly she returned to bed from the bathroom, bare feet on the cold wood floor, pale as a ghost, her pointed shoulders stooped, sad flesh draped over her bones, her belly withered, her heavy step confirming the silent fall to cloaca and fallowness.  A romantic once, a dramatist still, at the least, who could be seen as asking for it-he could never atone for the enormity of her marriage to him, obviously, too obviously, too protested, in fact, over done even.  Why take too seriously a crime against immaturity and baleful dreaminess, a carelessness perpetrated on miserly fantasies?  What enormity?  What cataclysmic act of fate, what skewed destiny?  For that matter, what accident, what faux pas even, falling between the union of melodrama and heavy hands, this being what it was, the clumsy man-handling of his hands upon her privacy she was protesting, not really anything more, when, to be objective, the craft of her expression could have been hacked out by lumberjacks or hauled out in bales by stevedores, what cruelty his crudeness compared to her own exaggeration?  Asking for it almost as if, as close as this could be done by a forty-three year old woman, the very best she could do in these circumstances, as a virgin would, as close to recovering her virginity as she possibly could-a virgin's saintly mortification in beauty, her protest and languor inside it, at forty something limited to mortification, a revisited intensity of estrangement and captivity, and to languor, of a sort, stale to be sure, passivity and neurasthenia.  He would grab at her, bracelet her wrist with his hand and force her to sock herself, not hard but humiliatingly, her fist balled in impotent rage, as is done to children, Manny for one when his turn arrived, saying, "Stop hitting yourself, I can't stop you, you're too strong" making her tap her forehead.  Thus he refutes the gothic pretension.

     Her stringy hair spread over the pillow, she looked like an actress in silent movies or Yiddish theater.  Poked her with his stiff fingers and then dragged her under him like "a schmuta to keep from soiling the sheets" she said, and lifted her hips and pumped her against him, "Enough, enough, mercy, you" he jibbed at her, in a state of moral dissolution, of venal sin (an act that left him face to face with himself, far short of the sight of god, just a tawdry act that seemed to him, typical of himself) and in a state of panic because of his exile from splendor or even hope of it, and from the awful retribution of splendor or love or infinite reach that attaches to this act and exterminates by unholy isolation when it is absent.  The retribution completed and executed by a sardonic savoring of the antimonies and bile pumped up during this bastardized act, a wallowing in acidic self-pity and spoiled humors, a punishment served on ingratitude and unworthiness for life.  Rage, sarcasm, contempt, stronger than love, more illuminating, less fogged, more love than love, a precipitate of amour, a recapitulation of its origins in dread, in dread of death, no joy or happiness for a shield, just a mirror of terror staring back at you, at your failure to force faith in life and to couple into affirming union:  Enlisted into her verdict on him until it became completed, her stiff arms braced against his shoulders, a brute repelled by preserved honor though futilely, a brute's emotions held at arms' length, staring unblinking into his face with frozen contempt, thus locked together he would, for her benefit, force his finger up her rectum, for her, to justify her, to realize her, and use this impaling perch to drive her to him, lifting her by those fingers alone, spiked into her.  She would wrap her legs around him, she the butt of his jokes, cling to him for relief, release even, on the horns of a dilemma at least, for there was this part left too, that she would test to see if finally she was released, she would loosen her grip around his waist to know if she must still hold tight, and so rocked between them, repelled by each in turn, sparked alert and spurred into action, not gratefully, but possibly, the only possibility under the smug watch of this brute and her own loathing, the only possible concession and release. 

     From this issued Manny and he spent his childhood in the smoke from this guttering lamp. 

     He was fostered by his mother if not precisely loved by her, or her love for him was skeptical and jaded.  She kept a clear eye turned on him.  He was not an apple in her eye.  She did not have stars in her eyes anymore.  She never thought of him as a product of her womb-that would have admitted union with his father.  He was hers alone, not flesh of her degraded flesh, but a corrective of all that had been amiss before.  He should not have been adequate for the task and was not, but how could he ever have even been considered?  Believing in him was a type of bitter joke for her which he sensed before he was eight. She was carefully arranging him to watch him fall.  What was he supposed to amend?  The gargantuan obscenities of his father?  He could never have the shoulders or blather for that. 

     Her attentions for him were to demonstrate to his father that she was slightly mad and that Manny was her madness.  From now on his father would have to leave her alone because she was demented.  She treated him like a doll to prove she really should not be trusted to child rearing, that it was a form of perversion he forced on her, and the result of a perversion, and it had infected her. It was a sacrilege, too: He had attacked and warped her spirit.  There were religious overtones to her behavior.  Her prattle in his presence had a classical zaniness to it, like literary exposition, as if she were playing madness for theater.  There was high sarcasm in it but it was impenetrable.  She was not insane at all, but motherhood was belittling, its obsession with muck and minutiae and its sentence of patience and soiled toil, there was nothing left over for his father except yammer and loony sweetness. 

     She threw back at him the terms of her oppression. He could not take advantage of her ridiculousness, of her bondage to an actual pastoral-the rearing of a small animal with its pristine, glaring needs, being indentured to cries and mewling, her bedraggled fortitude and provincial, benighted innocence: She confronted him with involution and possession and puerility as if she was the product of a rape, a victim of sin.  And there were months of silence for him as well during which she huddled with the child upon his return home, protecting him from further violence although there never was any and never had been, but he was forced to do penance for the original violence.

     He was bound to fall, and he was only loved as he continued to hum with taut newness, not loved warmly but steeled against temptations, warned of unravelling threads; a talisman and champion against the slur of chance and fate and sex, and capable of only one crime or sin but that one appearing symbolically in almost every action of his: Disappointing.  He sentenced himself to quietude to skirt lapses.  Adopting perfect obedience as a way of anticipating errors, of being tuned to her sorrow.                                      

     Manny's memory begins with the Irish girl. It was love at first sight.  She is light without a rind. 

     The Irish girl's blond hair glowed, her blue eyes shone.  She was a vision.  She was like the rainbows on soap bubbles, or the sorcerer who appeared on them, staring out of his crystal ball at Manny as he stared in, apparitions living in air castles, beings from an illuminated circle of existence.   

     She caught him on the street.  There are always little girls who play tag with kisses, and he must have looked like he was just spoiling for a smack on the kisser.  The perfect target, already with a banker's piety inflicted on him, smarting for a snow ball or a pie in the face.  He was an odd, lonely figure with a look of fever and feebleness.  Maybe, she was not such a promiscuous kisser.  She must have caught him looking at her; she may have felt that telekinetic pull that a loving stare exerts.

     He would come to look almost aristocratically deformed.  His lips and eyes in his pale, somewhat unformed face had a festering ripeness about them, but in his childhood, even into adolescence, he was pretty in a strangely mature way: He looked like a ruined woman.  Some of that was expressions he picked up from his mother, much of it was her mood of bereaved sorrow, but his face was suited to it.  He had shadows under his eyes, his lashes were long and black. His skin was pasty.  He looked as if he had gone to sleep without removing last night's make-up.

     Maybe, she kissed him for more serious reasons.  He was teased enough.  Maybe, she was moved by a girl's pity, that heart-breaking empathy some little girl's seem to have instinctively for suffering.  Or, again that strange morbidity surrounding him.  Perhaps, she dared herself in order to feel the thrill of fear she would have gotten from risking a cellar stairway. 

     She caught him on the streets, it was snowing, and she gave him a buss on the lips, the way little girls suffer a kiss, her lips puckered up into a little spout, her arms stiff at her sides with her hands balled up in her mittens. She was a little girl, her knees still barked and scabbed above her white wool socks.  Scrappy, wiry. Her face was an urchin's face, foxy, not the face of a little princess.  What was a kiss to a game tussle like her? What was a kiss to her?  A shinny whistle?  A bright, clean piercing note, a shrill show-stopper she could carry in her pocket?

     She bumped his lips with her eyes shut.  He had not seen her coming or as usual, was so mortified with shyness that he had pretended not to, and she had snapped off this kiss on him and stopped him dead in his tracks.  The sidewalks were piled with snow, goat trails had been shoveled through, more snow had fallen on these paths and it was cold enough that the snow squeaked under foot.  He does not remember the logistics, but she may have had him pinned on the narrow path, checkmated, cemented drifts on either side.  But, afterwards she rocked back and crinkled up her nose staring him right in the eye, perhaps returning all that peering he had done, and for him it was the first time looking into blue eyes, which may seem fantastic to brown-eyed people, did to Manny, gem-stones, shiny coins, things in some middle astral offing with a different essence.       

     She crinkled her nose so she must have meant it as a tease.  She was not one to pine, she crinkled up her nose and it meant "I got you, so there".  Or it could have been a dumb look, a "what?", even a "Wha-a-a-at?"; at eight she was not masking her emotions, except for perhaps one emotion, that easily befuddled trust her older brothers live to exploit.  She might have been hiding that or even guilt, childish guilt which still is centered around mess but is inconsolable, or it can be about inconsolable things, prophesies that are laid down in omens, and maybe just maybe, that is why she crinkled her nose, or why after that her expression faded through a fermata to a blank, a blank that in children seems expectant, not even when they sleep can the essential of innocence be erased, which is a kind of ear with perfect pitch for a clarion, because Manny covered his mouth in a perfectly mimed gesture of shock and she may have been hit with an unfairness she had done.  Couldn't she?  And even more, could that ear of perfect pitch have heard the crinoline rustle of a whisper's most distant syllables, the ghostly passage of Manny's destiny?  Doesn't a kiss sometimes do that, isn't that the chance that is sometimes taken?, that we will overhear the fates at their whirring wheel, a prattle of croon's gossip and arid wisdom, and might she have played with matches once too often, and ahead of proper schedule heard too much?, as Manny did, overheard  what he overheard and should not have either, but which is the chance lovers take, true lovers anyway, that they shall bind themselves in the others destiny, and only true lovers suffer this, and he did.  He heard his fate as through a fissure in time because she was his true love, all this impossible for an eight year old but not for a seventy year old, to receive through a kiss his destiny of love abridged, a keyhole into the past in which peering he spies his eight year old eye looking back at him with full knowledge of the love shorn seventy year old sadly regarding him.        

     Snow begins falling. The city is draped in grey curtains.  Colors fade.  The city is filled with snow and it is filling with more.  She walks into the grey drapes.  Street lights are pale as the moon through clouds; traffic signals are the only color left, a circle of fresh red or green.  Manny passes his block and walks towards the grey curtains.  The snow is falling in large, drowsy flakes, like ashes.  Cars creep by on muffled tires, ghostly.  Nothing is there anymore.  Manny's eye is like the color in a traffic light, a small circle of brightness hovering above this sunken city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

 

 

 

 

                           A NIGHT AT THE TABLE                              

 

     Manny's numbers remained steady.  He visited his urologist once a month.  Their relationship grew more familiar and coarser.  The doctor had him where the hairs are short.  The remnants of a Bronx accent that Manny had always detected and which Doctor Aparian could have shucked in college and medical school, grew thicker and thicker.  The man was at home.            

     "Steady as she goes, pal.  It's a principle of life.  Cars run on empty foreva'.  You may be immortal.  Me? I wanna go wit' a bang.  An honest to god bang.  During an orgasm.  I already decided Manny, I'm gonna move to Thailand one day, to increase my odds of gettin' my wish.” 

     "I love the body.  I'm Greek.  Don't get me started.  I got my own unified field theorem. The ass hole.  Dat's the black hole.  That's where we come together.  Shrink and plumber.  Anyway, I want ya to answer me next month.  Because, who knows, maybe my knees are gonna go, won't be able to drag my butt to Thailand.  Should this injustice occur, can masturbation count as the real thing?  What do you think?  Will I still be able to reach that moment of supreme grace?   For next month.  Meanwhile, from a urologist, don't piss in the wind."   

     Since his diagnosis, Manny felt he had taken a fork in the road and was now walking along beside his life.  The days felt like the day before he left on a trip; a kind of retroactive memory clouded the city as if he had already left.  He was saturated with the overweening nostalgia and eeriness of borrowed or found time, a cottony vertigo of sudden estrangements and affections. Every peg-legged migration of gas down his bowels brought him up short, a clap on the back by bony fingers, but generally he paced his life from the outside, like a reflection in a train window looking in.  

     He was tangled in a nursery rhymes as he spoke, wondering if he had actually been reciting it all along, the butt of a practical joke, reading automatically from a text that had been printed between the lines of his speech, this simmering diagnosis turning his life into mime around its hollow shape and gaining title to his old age by summarizing its absurdity and decay. 

     "All around the cobbler's bench, the monkey chased the weasel..." skipping along beside the grave strides of his phrases, a harlequin conjugation of nightmares, a childhood grammar which had once cobbled itself into reason out of the whirlwind, now whirling apart into nonsense.  And, alone in his office a calliope is playing in his head, the accompaniment to the nursery rhyme or its actual compulsion, the loony notes, the vulgar, belittled organ with flatulent pipes for a voice.

     "Old age is a whistle stop on the way to aloneness."

     Aphorisms like this have been precipitating out of numbness or agitation for some time now.  The deranged factory whistle plays on, falsetto, pre-pubescent, some damnable abduction of a train whistle by a jester,

     "Save them all, both great and small."

     His office of sedated opulence, stuffy if you must know, finally quite airless, in the final analysis, that is.  A place to catch a little dream as the yids say, no more,

     "Roses are red, violets are blue, angels in heaven, know I love you."

     Some of their faces are like that, nurturing, built on softness and acceptance, large, patient eyes, and in her case-where was she from?  The restaurant, a vegetarian spot Florence had taken them to as if it were a spa, named for an angel or paradise?-a turned up nose, not small by any means, giving her face with that bun of blond hair-the nose was like a little Dutch clog-a German look, which had somehow meant he could trust her appraisal including its predisposition to charity. 

     "Will fade and molder, this is experience speaking, the advantage of years, having seen your kind of kind face disintegrate in a characteristic way until no one would accept any charity from it anymore, if you had any left after seeing how its abused, wiser heads knowing your patience is forced and insincere, you will look like you've been holding your breath until suffocation, sorry to report the flabby cheeks to come and the damp eyes begging for pity, a deep breath, and our amnesia",

     Playing into a Yiddish predisposition, a cultural deprivation as traumatic as the withdrawal of the breast, that gift of heart, which is our lack of Madonnas and surplus of skull headed patriarchs, waiting.

     You and blue.  With regrets, always.  In a small envelope attached to a little box lined with red tissue paper holding chocolate candy,

     "Roses love sunshine, violets love dew, you look like a monkey and smell like one too,

     A glass by the bed holds your teeth, you have bit off more than you can chew, chocolate and otherwise, deceits and denials, a cartload, no less, of detritus, flotsam, refuse, stale hoardings, flues, tonsillectomies, constipations and nausea, a box car full of regrets just for you, let alone your pretensions,

     "If there were but one just man, would you spare the city?"

      A box car full of withered buttocks and breasts and chronic dyspepsia of all kinds esophical, attitudinal, spiritual and excretory, with unscratched space left over for the whole gidella-nightmare, wet dream, vision, scream, growl, yodel and song, but then no more than that, completely contained except for a spill into day dream, bones and glue too, choo choo. Really all you need is a chubby child's hand to pull along the circus carriages of animal crackers, considering the weight.  Less than a feather...of failed miracle, of never,

     "The cow jumped over the moon",

     Of miracle lashed to the cart load of nightmare with regrets tendered to the moon, so blue, for descent into fable when matter had once done.

     No more patients coming here today.  Manny puts his note pad in his briefcase.  He puts it towards the back, in chronological order, for no reason and not really noticing he is doing it, except for a habitual sense of satisfaction awakened by the alto click of the snap sliding into place to seal the day.  Then he takes his over coat from the rack, puts it on left arm then right and shrugs it into place and aligns the collar.  He makes his ingrained rounds of the office to shut off each lamp, starting as always with his desk and then the floor lamp in the corner and retreating to the door from where he can reach the last lamp which rests on a table and throw the room into shadow that he looks into vaguely discomfited.      

     How many minutes fall from us this way over a lifetime?  These supposedly waking hours when we are moving with no more awareness than a puppet?  Who makes a tally until the remainder is small and this trivial patchwork of lost seconds has gathered itself around him into a black eternity, a shadow realm whose long fingers reach back to smother the light?  It has frosted his hair and pulled his face from his bones until past a certain age he does not really recognize himself anymore, or even fully credit that face as his, but sees it as any face hardly noticed in a crowd to which we attribute no interior or spirit of consequence, an obviously anonymous, brief existence for whom the substance of time has changed to ash. Then, standing briefly at the threshold of his darkened office the objects in it enlarged by the dimness as if refracted through water, their borders bleeding into the solution, Manny might, without following the course of his thoughts, might be captured by a metaphor that is abroad in the common night of anonymity, a metaphor which replaces stampeding horses in the depleted heart of the anonymous figure.   It is a train of cattle cars no cow will ever jump, though the moon of longing may still be carried as part of its cargo along with everything else that has accumulated in the place left vacant by departed love.  

     A new Styx on which no living soul has ridden.

     Florence and Manny went to the theater.  They went to concerts and openings at museums and galleries.  They were supporting members of every cultural institution in the city.  They had access to certain private lobbies and received advance tickets to popular exhibits.  They were out two nights a week at one function or another. 

     Manny joked that they could have met their quota on Holocaust memorials alone.  They could not really avoid these functions as Florence was part of the industry.  She wrote novels for teens that were set in Pre-Auschlaus Vienna-novels that Manny read as thinly veiled Sapphic laments to her lost maidenhead with a generous scoop of Anne Frank. 

     The same Holocaust groupies appeared at event after event.  There was one in particular. Manny would feel his gaze and make a point of not responding to it, but eventually he would look around, always startled in spite of himself, to find the fellow materialized across the room and looking at him with amusement. He was tall, elegantly thin and drawn in Presbyterian pastels.  Manny always managed to keep the maze of the crowd between them.  The twinkle in the man's eye warned Manny that the guy thought they were birds of a feather or he was on to Manny, an offensive idea, as this elegant stranger had an air of fatuous conceit Manny associated with failed thespians, and he had that on vacation, will-o-the-wisp, lese majeste aplomb of some aged homosexuals.

     The summer after the diagnosis he finally caught Manny.  A fourteen story building had been gutted and refurbished to house a Jewish cultural center for exhibits and study, and Manny and Florence had just attended one of its baptismal lectures.

     "They did a good job, easy on the grandiosity."

     For the space of a breath Manny thought this voice was an emissary from an addled section of his own mind that was gaining ascendancy.  He had been approached from behind.  Turning, he was looking into pale blue eyes.  His fine hair was nicotine yellow mixed with silver.  He wore a seersucker jacket and white pants, the folkloric garb of some golf clubby county in Florida.

     "Grandiosity?" Manny replied.

     "Righteousness.  Things seem understated here."

     "Very tasteful."  The man stood with one hand in the pocket of his coat, the other holding his drink.  The coat was slightly wrinkled; he had long, long, thin legs.  He was resting most of his weight on one, the other was bent gently at the knee, stork-like, established but nearly weightless.  The model of dapper: Perfectly at home, without effort, always and everywhere.     

     "Tasteful", Manny went on, but maybe not so kind." 

     "Oh", and his fine eyebrows went up in anticipation of a delightful surprise, a bon bon of wit.

     "Coping so competently with the history.  Maybe it should show more effort.  Less confidence and polish.  Very clean."

     "I think it's respectful.  Things shouldn't be shabby.  We deserve better than that.  That's what was taken.  Civilization."

     "Of course, civilization.  I thought it might be their budget.  No money left for gilding.  But, maybe it's civilization." 

     Manny disliked the tone of seriously engaged intelligence and piety that infested these events.  Undoubtedly, Florence would be delighted in this man's subscription to the sacral view of the Shoah.  Without ever directly acknowledging it, Florence had perfected her own emotional responses by courageously dealing with the extermination of the Jews as a personal psychic crisis, refusing the grander vocabulary the crime was hidden in and facing the sadness of each death as a family affair, thus proudly grieving for a few names and ignoring the encompassing catastrophe as arid, even hostile cerebral blather.        

     "Negro lip."

     The dapper stork flinched, and unconsciously covered his  full lips with his hand, the one feature that divided him from complete assimilation into the easy life, catching himself and changing the gesture to a gentle brushing of his mouth as if pondering something.

     "Sorry.  Just thinking out loud.  That's what the boys in my high school called it when they smoked a cigarette without their hands.  Letting it dangle.  Of course they didn't say Negro.  Very sophisticated.  The height of civilization.  Just came to mind.  Jewish kids.  Actually one kid in particular. Hymie Rosenthal.  Good looking.  They all imitated him." 

     The two men were drifting in a big circle around the edges of the lobby, passing by the coat check where the coats were hung on motorized racks, past display panels showing photos of Eastern European shetels and a paltry collection of items from a yeshiva: yellowed books and ink wells, yarmelkes.  All these things, the black and white photos included, seemed mementos of a small, dank, timid world lacking both sun and beauty.    

     "It's just all so sad", Bing said.

     "Very sad", Manny answered. 

     "I hardly listen, exactly.  I just think it's all about killing them.  Whatever facts I hear, they're just to remember.  I don't really care how it's done, just so it makes you sad, just the documentation.  Bearing witness.  Everything that was left, all those things, bearing witness.  Lest we forget.  They moved right in, all of them, Germans, Poles, Russians, as if the Jews had never been there.  We've got to bear witness.  Speak for the silenced voices." 

     They had reached the gift shop which was an explosion of light.  Light bouncing off glass shelves and bright objects, ceramic platters for Passover, silver wine chalices for blessing the wine, folksy jewelry that looked gypsy-like, and Menorahs, Menorahs, Menorahs.  Menorahs of metal, menorahs of clay, of all shapes and sizes.  A celebration of the family in holy light.  And a wall of illustrated children's books telling sweet bible stories and explaining the holidays.

     The golfer was old enough now that it might be acceptable again to call him lovely.  A lovely old man.  Not much upstairs or at least, and this might be what showed, a choice made to swerve from those tools of thought that shredded the decency and generosity of cliche.  Possibly his grace and fineness were rewards from never following introspection to the depth of his nature and there binding truth to ugliness.  White lies.  What harm?  And much more generous.  He had joined the chorus testifying for redemption of all lost and injured souls through temperance and prosperity, and was nodding his head with approval at the accomplishment.  And it was a choice to forget that common voices, even bad voices, when joined in chorus saved each other and soared.  That was hope, and petty to deny it.  Manny was suddenly sad for himself because he was occupied by a disease which never fully left him to his own thoughts and distanced him from the cozy inspirations and rationalizations of his fellow man.  He wanted to keep this guy near him. 

     "Manny", he said pointing to himself, and then extending his hand to be shaken.  "Manny", with studious deliberateness, perhaps as an apology.  He heard his name as a validation of a universal holding, his validation of a common human citizenship, happily impersonal, like his shoe size would be, shared by many Manny's, as first names are, and thereby putting him in a fraternity of Manny’s all of whom supported each other's acceptable presence, or even more widely, into the fraternity of men whose common store of names immerses their individuality in a general contract of mutual jingoism. 

     "Mort. Manny," the newly christened Mort said, shaking Manny's hand.

     "Mort.  So, what do you do?"   

     "I sell trinkets."

     "Trinkets?" a word to which he found it difficult to add weight.

     "Party favors, promotional handouts for businesses.  Key chains, mugs, pens, things like that, with logos on them.  Things like that.”

     "Well.  Ah, they're everywhere, aren't they? 

     "Mostly in the garbage, I'd bet."

     "You can't say that.  People need key chains."

     "I'd be surprised if most of what I wholesale makes it past the first trash bin."

     "Who knows?  Look at all those t-shirts.  And pants.  People like logos", but he did not sound convincing to himself, and quickly covered his tracks with "But, where do you live?"

     And at this question Mort's eyes filled with light.  They had moistened and they were reflecting light from the room.

     "I built it."

     "You did?"

     "I designed it. It was an empty lot.  I got an architect. The ideas are all mine, but, making it stand up?  That takes the technical guys.  Why?  For the egrets.  That's it right there.  It's all windows.  A fortune for the AC.  But, I can pull back the curtains and anywhere I can see the egrets up on the weeping willows.  That's all there was, a channel and those trees with the egrets in them and I built our house there so we could see them.  It's a channel out to the sound.  It's so peaceful watching the water and the egrets in the trees.  I'm eighty.  You'll never guess what I think of when I look at them."

     "Tell me."

     "The Ugly Duckling, the story.  About the little duck that was a swan." 

     Manny found himself coughing to clear his throat.  He could picture clearly the panorama from Mort's windows, the glimpse of Eden with the seraphic Egrets in the still trees, robed in pure white plumes, their slow motioned, visibly miraculous, dream-like oaring through the air.  And Mort staring out the window daydreaming the opening of the chrysalis of old age. 

    They were facing some glass shelves which were in front of a row of windows and the room was reflected in the bare windows, the images of menorahs and chalices diluted by the pink-orange glow of street lamps, the two old men dissolving into transparency. 

     "We're not so lucky.  If they had our luck.  Had slipped away. We know what was in store.  For the crimes of a lifetime.  For nothing more than surviving this long.  Nothing worse than that.  Maybe too careful, guilty of that.  We might have lost it long ago if we'd believed strongly enough, or if our hearts never toughened after our first heartbreak.  Crimes enough on their own. I don't think they were slated to do better, and our punishments.  Relentless.  We don't even think we can know these ones, not since knowing ourselves. We can't even mourn them, not us, except by rote.  But, we won't be so lucky, I don't think.  Won't get that benefit of the doubt.  We're too familiar." 

     Mort looked confused or maybe he was irked.  There was something too private in what Manny had said, or snobbish.  It was tactless, an accusation, or so it could have seemed, a collaboration with-but it just was not clear with what. Maybe some temperance or wistfulness about it was understood by Mort to mean his thinking was crude as were his tactics for reconciliation, though Manny had meant it sympathetically, truly hadn't really volunteered his sentences at all, but had been compelled to speak them or more correctly weakened by sentiment until he could not repress them.  He had become subject to these epilepsies of emotion, usually seized by anger and usually alone, mutters escaping beneath his breath. Sometimes though, these hissing emissions were sweetly melancholic, and then it was like overhearing the whispers of strangers in love, no, not in love and not even strangers, but hearing broken lyrics from songs that lips had been robbed of time to complete.  This was the feeling which had led him, and it held for a long moment and it carried Mort along in its wake as Manny left the room and reentered the lobby. The presence Manny had admitted into the just before routine evening, gentle inspiration though it was with hardly the force to gather words to itself, the precarious assemblies possible for ghosts, appropriate for the two nearly transparent figures in the window. This light stuff which is about the best we can come up with to describe the life inside the body.

     On the cab ride home Florence was nearly silent but she held Manny's hand in both of hers and pulled it into her belly as she had done when she was pregnant.  She always came away revitalized from these functions.  Afterward he would catch her looking at herself in mirrors, her hands balled into fists, a reaction to anticipation he had seen in his daughter and must be a remnant from Florence's childhood.  Days of good writing would follow.  It was easy then to imagine her as a maiden, how she might have been and quite likely how she might like to be again.  Her books were about adolescent girls in Vienna who were lively, avid, innocent, as she might have been in that paradise lost.  The holocaust justifying narcissism, irritating to him, but then again how else, since she had had the good fortune to have been yanked from paradise in her virginity, leaving it and her intact, always glistening with first creation?      

     The city slides past in that unreal, cinematic way it appears through a taxi's window to those unused to driving.  The cab driver is listening to a call-in radio program, Manny can barely hear the wiry little voices.  He looks into Florence's glowing eyes:  My story.  Enough there for both of us, and she squeezes his hand.  The taxi smells of dead air, fried food and solvents used to clean the plastic seats. 

     Made for each other, Manny thinks.  Made for each other, a time outside of time through which they have travelled to each other, passing over centuries, promised the experience of eternity with each other.  But, the real uses of each other.  The desecration.  Betrayed.  Slandered.  Ultimately abandoned.  Not eternal, but inevitable.  None really to blame.  Or everyone.  Demanded, the majestic construction, to build a God gravely longed for, seemingly promised, of a certainty glimpsed. To build him from mud.  The sacred acts done and not one more sacred than the blasphemy of the Holocaust, a huge tower, Babel again, to prod heaven, to redeem the fuck. No not the fuck which is redeemed itself by its fusion with truth, love maybe on occasion salvaged after all by generosity, by true charity, the pain understood, forgiven, embraced, splendor thus attained, but for the fuck as is never done and always longed for, returning as intense as vision, as vocation. Left undone, suspended luminous while the objects of its inspiration are mutilated and cast from grace: Spare that desire from shame, here separate and then united into great heavenly constructions, guard towers and barbed wire, the lonely cri de cour of the asshole to be included with the soul in salvation, nothing less being enough.  Raise us whole after we have mutilated the gift.  Spare the liver which will kill us, the heart, by all means the kidneys, offered up here, this damned tower standing on its head, dug down, and give it what the rest of us will never have who each alone die separately of the decay into offal:  No chance to die cursing.

              

     They gave a dinner party right on schedule.  They gave three a year and one brunch, honoring a tradition as endangered as letter writing. 

     Florence invited her friends over to abet her in feeding her sweet tooth.  They were there for naughty over-indulgence, and Manny's presence was a great assist.  There is an added titillation in misbehaving in front of a psychiatrist, a rebellious frisson.  Chocolate desserts got messy.  People ate with their hands.  Though there were never more than eight guests, enough to make a minion they joked, the parties spilled over the entire apartment.  Wine glasses were always found in the bathroom at clean-up, and in Manny's study.

     Manny met the guests at the door, dressed in his traditional white shirt and dark slacks, padding about just in socks.  He would take their coats amidst an explosion of greetings shrieked to Florence who had remained in the kitchen sorting the food into acts for the drama of serving, removing re-heated meats and vegetables from the oven.  After giving Manny their coats and umbrellas, the guests would parade into the kitchen, some of them bringing coals to Newcastle: pastries from their favorite bakery.  Florence would have been to the beauty parlor that morning, her split ends clipped.  She was up on high heels, and a flowery apron would be covering a filmy gown.  The guests would return to the living room-there was a small attrition, helpers and noshers lagging behind-bearing platters of appetizers, some of them briefly invested with ceremonial seriousness, others in a slapstick mood.  Manny was pouring the drinks.

     In recent years the parties tended to begin promptly at eight, a punctuality they had originally lacked.  But, tardiness is a scandal for old age, and besides, fatigue caught up with everyone by eleven, when the parties used to really warm up, and they ended as punctually.

     The doorman had been informed of their party and told not to bother announcing each guest, so when "Shave and a Hair Cut" played on the front door buzzer, Manny could test his intuition.  Sarcasm masquerading as good spirits: Edith Feldman, one martini already under her belt.  Bingo.  Long years of experience had taught him not to check through the peep hole; Edith would either have pushed her eye up against it so a sparkling blue retina would be staring back at him, or else she would have gotten up on her toes and putting her lips around the peep hole privileged him with a view of her tonsils.  Whatever it took to get his "Manny", that is, his own custom made "Mickey".  

     "Ah, the party pooper,goodness did I say what I think I just said.  You know perfectly well I meant party popper.  He who throws up a party."  She threw her arms around Manny's neck and kissed him on the lips.  "You are so very tall.  And extinguished.  I mean distinguished, you know I do, apologies to Sigmund.  Where's your better half pint?" and brushed past him into the apartment, leaving him with Nathan who was leaning his bulk against the wall, looking formidably relaxed, not tired. He was dressed in blue jeans, black shirt and bomber jacket and Roman sandals but he did not seem affected or costumed, just comfortable.

     When they got in they could hear Edith in the kitchen..."He's barefoot, showing off how tall he is."  She had left her felt shawl and hat on the credenza along with a South American sisal shoulder bag.  She was an enthusiast and always carried along some artifact of her interests.  Florence had met her bird watching in Central Park.  Edith should have had a genius for it.  Her eyes were remarkable, alarming even, blue flashbulbs, and they had a bird's gimlet vacuity, an accident of their color.  Nathan was from Edith's building and was about the same age; that seemed to be the glue that held them together, and the fact that he seemed impervious to her relentless necessity to be clever.  Though he had never been seen to react much to her, there was something symbiotic in their relationship, like that of a rhinoceros with a tick bird. Probably the ponderous weight of surplus masculinity settling into old age needed the contrast of her mania.  A shave under six foot, Nathan had the furnishings of a giant-the deep brow, the oversized limbs, hands and feet, and the wild thickets of curly hair.  Edith's chatter was still flirtatious, and absurd as that was in a woman nearly seventy, it was a pure feminine element with all its leavening power.

     Manny had barely fixed Nathan a scotch when the buzzer sounded again.  Lou and Pearl, and Vera and Julius arrived together having met in the lobby.  Edith came out of the kitchen with the first offering of appetizers.  The closet was already full, Manny gathered coats and carried them to the bedroom.  Old people overdress for the weather.  Spring is tricky, if not actually cruel and malicious, but Pearl and Lou had dressed for the possibility of a squall.  Once, long ago, you tended to take the weather at face value. A blue sky in the morning was sufficient promise for the day.  Now you carried an umbrella, or having forgotten enough of those on sunny days, you could carry a plastic raincoat that could fit in your pocket.  They all looked over the present moment to a predictable pessimistic outcome.  Back then...what was he thinking?  He was thinking you could never have thought that far ahead what with the full plate in front of you and every intention of not leaving a scrap, and if the rain should come, great luck, it could mean that, a ducky thing, just ducky, great paroled mess, or a deep, a ringing liberation, free, free at last, nothing left to lose and only life and song and laughter remaining, or it could be a romantic encounter under an awning, all bets off in the pure element of coincidence the rain had loosed.  

      He looked about quickly into the shadowy corners of the room.  Somebody was here, he could feel that tingle of someone's eyes on him.  Nobody.  Nobody.  He still had the coats in his arms.  He lay them on the bed with the feeling this action would cover up the loopy course his thoughts had taken.  He had done what he had come to do, bear witness to that.  

     Julius had commandeered a plate from the kitchen and piled appetizers on it.  He was saying "shouldn't eat this"  "shouldn't eat this" before dropping another into his mouth.  Julius' appetites are all those of a fat child and he looks like one.  He over ate with a vengeance.  Big voiced and thunderous laughed, he describes himself as Falstaffian.  It was a gourmand description, more of the same self-indulgence.  He meant Shakespearian as well.  He needed a long cummerbund of syllables to circle him, fat man alone would never do. 

    "You sound like the walrus.  Doesn't he sound like the walrus?  Why does he sound like the walrus?" Vera asked.

     "What walrus?"  Nathan said.

     "I'm saying kiddish.  I get away with it if I do that."

     "`Now the time has come to talk of many things” that walrus" Vera said. 

     "Unless it's roughage.  Is this roughage?" Julius held up his glass of bourbon.

     "Because he's a hypocrite", Edith said. 

     "That's a little tyrannical, Edith.  It's aged in wood, twelve years.  Splinters should count, nothing hypocritical there. Closer to courage, like eating that puffer fish.  I bet you wouldn't call a samurai a hypocrite."

     Who were these people?  He was losing the tune but complete recognition did not come to replace it.  It was as if he had been gone a long time.

     The buzzer.  Archie and Alex. 

     "We are fashionably late.  We're not letting our pride decay along with the rest.  Keep up appearances."

     Great dresser, Archie.  Just threw things on, you had to be a Brahmin to get away with it.  Just grab whatever and toss it on.  Of course all of it was beautifully tailored, but still the trick, which you had to be born with or else it was too late to acquire, was to have worn it forever the moment you put it on.  For it to instantly wrinkle into a fingerprint, disappear, for the man to make the clothes.  And Alex, his wife?  She always looked a little dowdy, which is hard to dare.  It was the essence of aging gracefully.  Simply courage.  Speaking of courage, Archie had brought two bottles of scotch courage with him, one already begun, the blue tax stamp flapping.  He gave the unopened one to Manny, this for the inevitable day when he forgot to bring one with him.  Manny had three of them in his liquor cabinet.  The other bottle he hugged to his side in a gesture that conveyed grief more than addiction. 

     During dinner, at one of those statistically inevitable troughs in the conversation, Edith had tapped her glass to get the pulpit, and in a voice of facetious seriousness gave a sermon about Jesus Christ being a psilocybin mushroom.  She must have been trying to embarrass Archie, the resident WASP at this party.  Archie was Episcopalian but at that level of historical guilt that has evolved into public service.  He had a founding father's physiognomy, a combination of stark, bony handsomeness, and inbred exaggeration of features.  He usually had a glazed look that seemed tolerant of folly. 

     "...jabbing their way out of shit, like Calvin.  They're just going to keep doing this Christmas story over and over.  Born in a manger.  Shepherds the first to know.  They're just in a state of denial, it's so obvious once you think about it.  It grows on manure, the shepherds would find it first.  Manna from heaven.  And resurrection to begin with.  This is serious. Consider how it's been covered up."

     "In bullshit, I presume", said Julius.  "Readily at hand."

     "This is serious scholarship" she said, unable to keep from smiling, "these dons are way beyond if it’s true or not. The arguments are over details.  Some think Jesus was the Amanita Muscaria, some Psilocybin Cubensis.  It’s the patriarchy all over again.  It's so obvious.  They're just comparing sizes.  A woman would know right away it’s got to be Psilocybin.  Even if it didn't bleed the blue god light meditators are always going on about, it would have to be.  Jesus was a penis.  Not a great big Amanita Muscaria with its big red head. Christmas was a festival, and then they made it military. But it started with those little babies in the manger with their Oriental hats."

     Edith was Florence's friend, not his.  Florence said she aerated these gatherings.  Manny thought Edith spoke for a cautious Florence, and was especially encouraged to mock analysis.  He had to put up with her and found the best way to do it was to never contest her.   Fortunately, she brought along Nathan; it was a little as if she were accompanied by a New York landmark, one of a species:  The Mysterious Figure.  These figures were the grist for a game a certain class of thinkers played in New York.  The point of the game was to recover hidden clues about the actual being of the City; those things and people who could exist nowhere else and whose presence illuminated within a small circle the city's own ghost.  God was confirmed to be in the details, readers loved that.      

     Years before Edith had brought him, Manny had run across him at street fairs.  He raced tortoises.  Tortoises!  That caught Manny's eye.  And had that not been enough, there was his style.  He did a minimum of barking, although he had a big voice. At these fairs he wore a stripped t-shirt, a red bandanna, and a captain's hat, but he seemed intent on honoring a tradition of the carny rather than parodying it.  These events had become desperately commercial and had no connection to the street where they had managed to finagle an entry.  He was the last note of whimsy remaining, of carnival, but he seemed serious in his vocation, or it took arduous labor to guard whimsy and simple/sage fantasy.  He did not work at gaining an audience, not that there could have been one for these desultory derbies, but he seemed willing to wait, to work in preparing the theater for the particular spectator who was ready for this show.  The illuminati.   

     A turtle race should be drenched in irony, but Nathan was not playing it for laughs.  The tortoises had Roman names, and they wore them well, a lessor name would have slid off.  Claudius and Caesar and Augustus seemed ordained, as if the terrapins in their crenelated helmets were the unearthed skulls of centurions, the metallic and riveted syllables transparent over these leathery juggernauts.  A totem.  The man had Iron Age to him; a quality of the archaic that adheres to splendid failures; they have hammered deeper ores than the average. 

     Manny never expected to get the story, and he never completely did, which was gratifying:  Nathan was the right oracle or median for the city.  He had once been in advertising, either made a bundle there or in stocks, and had quit thirty years ago or so, and not worked since, though this history was mostly a product of conjecture.  It might simply have been an accumulation of idle years, and encrusted, solitary habits, but he pushed what amounted to a cart load of pleasant non-sequiturs and busted transitions ahead of him, like a peddler of fond discards, and it was impossible to imagine how they could ever have been assembled into a steady job and family life or, for that matter, how only thirty years could have been sufficient to reconfigure them so completely.  His mystery and aura secure, Manny got to cobble the story together himself, though according to Florence, Edith scoffed at it when it was relayed to her.  Well, Manny did not believe Nathan would actually confide the truth to Edith or that she would be able to interpret it if he did.

   Manny's fable: Nathan standing in his pirate foc'scle garb with his air of helmsman's mission and remove was piloting towards a particular audience.  Tortoises are an awesome purchase,  bought in whimsy in a whimsical time, these ancient mariners clomp on, the family of squeamish, curious children that poked them and fed lettuce into those iron beaks, have flickered out and vanished, but they march on, armies of the night, un-aging, and maybe, in the judgment day for which they are already prepared, mailed and armored for Armageddon, that same family might re-appear, unchanged, circled back around these hubs of time arrested, and one day one of his children might spot him, and grown but still fixed by anger and sadness in the day that Nathan had left his home, would finally feel it explained.

     Edith's retort:  Manny, you're a sweetheart.  Actually, his wife was a bitch who cleaned him out and he never got back on his feet.  Just killed his confidence, I mean, he's a great moper.  Endless."      

     Alex was speaking.  Manny loved to hear her voice.  It was caramel; smooth, rich and tasty.  The confection which seems to have been born from its name.                    

     "It's the cult of Mary.  We can't blame the men.  Who’s more likely to be recruited by a great big, flaming red stalk, honestly?" she said.

     Time was rusting it, and a cigarette habit about which she was voluptuously repentant, but to Manny, who had always assumed this about aristocrats, it was further evidence she had discarded pretense from her life. 

 

     Manny's children were not beautiful.  Superstitiously, the gauge of passion in the parents is the share of beauty found in the children.  Parsimonious love brings forth pinched offspring.   He could have weathered a beautiful son, now of course that the threat was past he was prepared to weather it better than he might have at the time when such a presence might have unfolded in their midst, but he had withstood him, at the time when the precious cuteness of his son seemed to promise beauty for them, when he was a palette of perfect colors or a kit of perfect parts and the chance was there undefiled for him to blossom into a beautiful lad.  It had not happened, he was a strange looking boy.  Foreign looking, but not magically otherworldly as some children are.  Instead, he looked like he had been outfitted from an attic in redundant and mothballed things.  It was in the angle of his ears or his precocious near-sightedness or a meagerness of limb or some rude hinge of an elbow, such was his genetic kit. There was no wildness to him, no rush and eagerness built in and hurrying towards gallant form for its fruition, only hints of coming sorrow and introversion.  By optical illusion, a spin of his shape through the light, a gesture transliterated through a noodley arm or a tired drawl of pompous certainty attached to "moron" or "dumb", he looked like Manny, spun from the bobbin of his features.

     And what of Andrea, his daughter?  She was not ugly but she was not blessed with plainness either, which if it is not goodness itself, at least it is not aggravating.  A plain daughter would not have distressed him; he conceived plainness as a cognate to demureness, and so, shy, humbled and feminine.  As it was, he got a daughter afflicted with intelligence.    

     There is nothing soothing in the face of an intelligent child; all he could see in Andrea from the beginning of toddlerhood was worry and tentativeness.  Her little face was always fisted up in concentration or wore an expression of appalled disappointment.  He seemed to constantly puzzle or disillusion her. Him alone.  For him alone, from too early an age, she had expectations.  Embarrassing, the transparent nature of those expectations.  Really a deep physical love.  A mature physical love already possessing sympathy.  How could that be in a six year old?  But it was there.  A sympathy that was so comprehensive that it forgave him, knew him entirely and forgave entirely, and blamed itself for its imposition.  A sympathy which took his crabby retreat as a compliment to him, to his fineness and delicacy of feeling, a sympathy which settled on her and never left, so its consideration for his feelings actually molded her posture and manner by the time she was eight: She withdrew abjectly, back bowed, shoulders rounded, having offended.  And knowing herself intrinsically rude for provoking his ire and conscience, she walked on tip-toe in his presence to not disturb him and to appear lighter.  Tiptoe in, tiptoe out, the assumption of his graceful meditations, his primary equilibrium, the necessity of not disturbing a sense of himself which enjoyed his inner world as aesthetic and too delicate to bear the reminder of its selfishness or of any other quality that was simply a reaction-so sadly possible to become self-incriminating and certain to be done so by such a sensitive nature-to crudity which intimidated him.  And she bound her little voice and it stayed trussed.  Infantile, sweet, pleading; the miniaturized voice which was dedicated to his expectations and his disappointment in her engorgement with and by the world, her plumpness, her connection to the burgeoning element in life, this voice that even corseted in falsetto bled emotion and sensuality like a crushed fruit, a lush timbre of feeling vibrating through its thin scales.  

     Eerie and haunting in a six year old to have patient eyes turned towards him and to see resignation there already, not pout or tiff, but tragic resignation, to sense it as he did, to be peeved by it, reacting squeamishly and embarrassed by the effeteness of his reaction, to never follow into it, as it was Andrea's, but to stop at its eeriness and its steady irksomeness alone. Sufficient in a child that she not stare. Find other occupations, games, rather than the obsessed study of her father and longing for him.  Brand it mere boredom, this sufficient in speaking to a six year old, an eight year old too, who has proved constant and loyal and deeply imbedded in love by an undiminishing interest, that admonition to play or read should be sufficient for her and him, and decent and circumspect and even respectful of her feelings by leaving them private. 

     And restrained, too, considering the endless continuation, and the portent in her stare: A chill each time as if older eyes were looking out from her.  Maybe, his grandmother, or her mother or grandmother, some seam of pitch running through the women in his family, pooling in her eyes, an accusation of betrayal or just inadequacy, failure perhaps to appreciate their long suffering patience for male pomp or grandiosity, or just their womanly suffering, failure to notice it, all the left over feeling never used each generation, which might have been used, whose fault lay with him.      

     Never following past those eyes on him to Andrea and seeing there the devouring, bountiful genius of commiseration and consolation pushing through her so that by six, by eight, by ten-it did not stop, it ran relentlessly-she had a woman's desire. She loved like a woman, or like only a woman could but might not ever, which a type of math or arid logic indicates might only occur in such cases of distorted development as in his daughter; things arriving on time being already too cautioned, too sly to love this way by the time the vessel develops that seems meant to hold just such a love. A physical love with this commiseration for flesh and bone.  If this is not mature love, still it was already mature in her. If a mature woman knows better and if such love is a disaster or stupidity or oppressive ideology still she loved this way: Fully. 

     "Hear, hear" said Archie.  "My wife, I'll keep her.  Flaming red stalk.  A lot of fun in this Christianity we've been keeping secret.  Mustn't scare the children.  Tell them about the porno, deary."                  

     Alex: That's not porno, that's a Degas."

     Archie:  You're embarrassing us.                        

     Alex: Well, it's pretty cheesy.  Zank heaven for leetle gurrls.  Or is that culture?  It can be so confusing. 

     A tale of coincidence and blind chance went into the assembling of these parties.  Archie and Alexandria-somehow truly grand Gentile marriages were always sanctified by cute alliteration or clever assonances, maybe they changed their first names as well as their last if necessary-Manny had met through alumni fund raisers for the University, which was Archie's Alma matter. 

     Pearl and Lou they had met through the children's private elementary school before they moved to Connecticut.  Pearl had been Daniel's teacher and then Andrea's.  Julius and Vera they met by the chance of having sequentially numbered season tickets at a theater.  They talked in the lobby and by the second meeting went out for coffee and pastry after the performance. 

     The casts had changed over the years and become more repetitive.  Friends had moved to Florida or left to be near their children or died.  On holidays, his family was now usually represented by the barren, little gathering of Florence and her sister and her husband on holidays, the four of them performing their old roles, her sister defending the primacy of the irrational in art, her husband with his small polished shoes crossed at the ankle, clucking as he hatched nonsensical jokes.            

     Julius: They were all dirty old men.

     Edith:  Look who's talking.

     Vera: Degas is so graceful.

     Julius:  They were all freaks.  Van Gogh had one ear.    

     Lou: Monet had two but they were small.  And Renoir had no ears at all. 

     Alex: You see, sweetie, we really are hip.  Do you feel better now?  We're so rarely credited with mischief."

     Edith: What do you have on your walls, Julius?  Guernica?  Munch? 

     Lou: Julie is not a lightweight.  Auto parts calendars."

     Vera: Photographs.

     Edith: That is so arriviste.  Indian chiefs. Cowboys."

     Julius: They're not Indian chiefs.

     Edith: Then braves. Even gaunter. You shouldn't have been lobbing stones. They are black and white, aren't they?

     Nathan: You decide what you can live with.

     Edith: That’s bourgeois.  What you can't live with is exciting.  Come on Julius.  Americana?"

     Julius: Some of it.

     Edith: Posters. Wild Bill's Wild West Show?  Locomotives?

Julius it's just a boy's clubhouse.

     Vera: We have family up, too.

     Edith: Then it's an identity crises.  Isn't it, Manny? 

     Manny: You want a referee?

     Edith:  An expert.  If we have photos of the bubbas and zedas alongside Mennonites with Willa Cather mud igloos, don't we have an identity crisis?

     Alex: Why are you so hard on club houses? 

     Nathan: We're not talking about the Harvard Club.

     Alex: But it doesn't matter, they're all such heart-breaking places.  And garages, too.  A girl feels like Persephone in those dingy places.  I mean where they fix the cars.  They look like the insides of old wood stoves.

     Florence: That reminds me, oh no, I forget.

     Julius: Don't do that, it's contagious at this age.

     Archie: We pay a price for peeing standing up.  Same mock sympathy. No one to blame but ourselves.  It really was great.  Peeing outdoors.  It's common knowledge that nothing's better.  But no one can meet the expectations.  Bestriding the world like colossus. The thing can't bear perspective. We're set up for potshots.  Be gentler, my girl, really, less gentle, one hates to think he deserves such pity.

     Alex: Oh, deary, you're fixated, and everyone was moving on. 

     Had any of the couples from those old rosters been roped into one of these dinners they would have rolled their eyes and figured out a reason to leave.  They were a group of friends they had made in the tumble of life, people who pulled up at the same way stations, like victims of a flood clinging to the same tree: They were tired and excited, catching their breath, bedraggled, kids and babies with their field kits of diapers and toys and blankets and carriages loaded on them like refugees. People they had met for no good reason but for sweet, more sensible ones, out of fleshy proximity and fleshy mishap and fleshy coziness, friends of the crisis or adventure.  Even a few friends still left over from childhood who were tied to them by the freaky states of physical growth they had gone through together along with neighborhood initiations, present at last, in their twenties, for some earned festival at their finally coming into the august incumbency and donkey ass parody of adult roles.

     Nearly all of those friendships shed when he and Florence had moved to Connecticut, and then deliberately not renewed when they returned because it would have admitted defeat.       

     Florence: New Mexico!

     Julius: Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

     Florence: No. New Mexico. I was thinking of New Mexico before I forgot.  Of all the old men with their potted flowers.       

     Lou: Yes?

     Florence: You'd have these dusty little shacks and there'd be potted flowers everywhere. 

     Julius: This is one for you, Manny. 

     Florence: It is not.  It's how sad it is. 

     Julius: Life?  How sad life is?

     Florence: Garages.  Alex mentioned garages and I thought potted flowers.  These little old men go around to water each one.

     Julius: Maybe that has more to do with Archie's lament on pissing.

     Edith: You're kind of a loose cannon tonight, Jules.  It's a poetic image and don't take it so personally. 

     Julius: Me? I thought you'd be the one flinching.  If I remember right, you had more Mexican plunder in your house than Cortez. All those little gnomes. God knows how many sweet old men had their toys lifted out of their graves. 

     Lou: Like little duckies from the tub.  I can see where you'd be bitter about that if you thought it was going to be that way.  

     Nathan: I will set my turtles free. It's in my will.  They haven't been pets.  They're not going to remember me.  They live a prehistoric day every day.  I'm not a part of it.  A dog might have one of my old socks.  I'm just a coincidence once they're back in the desert. 

     The Jewish women from those days.  All they knew back then were Jews.  These women were the first generation of Americans.  What were they?  Broads?  They could not have been that, but they were broad, expansive.  They took up big droughts of space; they spread themselves out.  Their voices were big, they ranged the octaves, the veins on their throats swelled blue when they talked. They laughed until the veins in their temples stood out.  They mounted chairs, they flung themselves abandoned on sofas, wearing full skirts that swung like bells and summer dresses which exposed their arm pits.

     Pearl, Lou's wife, perhaps epitomized this flagrant woman.  A torch of red hair, a bonfire on her head, busty, with a big smile with lipstick often smeared on her front teeth in her exuberance.  In spite of all her shimmering energy an isle of peace surrounded her.  A sufficient, happy pragmatism.  She attended to her children and helped with cooking and imported pots of her own, all with wide contentment and optimism.  Settled?  Sated?  Trying to describe the state of union Lou and Pearl brought with them along with their kids and the pots and pyrex plates, was a word game Florence and Manny played, sometimes in a four-way hand with other friends, instigated by Florence or another wife who had been inspired to silliness by Lou's dashing looks-he looked like an Italian crooner or gangster-and Pearl's luxurious Buddhist peace, the conversations skidding into puns and silent movie swoons, and guffaws, Manny taking the dare as the shrink and designated lexicographer even while the covens winked and sighed that Pearl had to be one punch drunk woman, lucky girl.

    

     Edith: They're just like little machines.  They go until their crank runs out.

     Florence: I don't think they're like machines.  They're alive.

     Edith: You say that with such verve.  But they haven't got any of that. They exist.  I think it's an unfair appropriation to make them a totem. 

     Florence: Have you made them a totem, Nathan?

     Edith: Of course he has.  Inappropriately. 

     Nathan:  They live for two hundred years. 

     Edith: They last for two hundred years.  Half the time you can't tell if they're alive or dead.  They just freeze.  Where do they go then?  What's the difference?  I don't think it makes a bit of difference to them if they're awake or blacked out, I don't even think they know.  Why is that enviable, Nathan?

     Nathan: I think it's kind of miraculous.

     Edith: It's just stoic.  The male thing.  Solid as a rock.  I prefer the alta cockers pissing in their flowers.

     Nathan: Easy to say.  But, it's a good question: Where do they go?  Or where are they?  If you think about turtles you get elemental very fast.

     Edith: You get nowhere fast.

     Pearl:  Am I the only one thinking politics right now?

     Only Lou and Pearl had survived the Connecticut purge.   They were ten years older than Florence and Manny.  The difference had meant Lou was a war veteran.  Manny had no adolescent envy for war veterans, but Lou had the quality of silence which Manny had found common to many veterans.  It was almost majestic, at least compared to the neurotic frenzy of most Jewish men he knew, and he believed it was the result of a compacting of experience and losing the sense of privilege or destiny, knowing you could end just as you were that moment. Nathan had it too, the stillness, and from the same cause, a lifting of the veil, he thought, but he hardly knew Nathan and more importantly, Nathan had found absurdity-his heroisms were deliberately quixotic and though he was not ridiculous and his immunity from ridiculousness constituted much of his solid presence, still it was emptiness he lived out, and that meant futility and sterility, virile though this isometric blacksmithing on nothing had made him seem-while Lou had found the heart of things and out of that flowed a continuous-what?-love of life?  No, Lou never seemed as rapt as that, better to say that having been to the heart of things, Lou was resolved on living on.  And resigned too in the way resignation is, without hope, that living as a fact without any disputing left, was love.  Not lucky that, but necessary.  Not a bonus but a minimum requirement and somehow not to be celebrated, but endured. 

 

     Lou had not left himself the room or he had never recovered the room to pull back from love and so there was no alternative or wish in it, it was without longing. It would hardly be recognized as love, it would look more like labor.  It required or created heroic bodies like physical labor, but this was no more than we got, as much as we were alive we were heroes, equal to the task simply by living, and with no choice though it appeared you could gold brick and whine or rhapsodize.  Which is to say, though he never said it, that love was no more spectacular than hand or foot, nor less, and if you had hand or foot and the rest you were bound into it and the measure of your realism or wakefulness was how inseparable you were from it, not the feeling which was always loss, but it, the grunt work, the next breath and the next.            

     This worker's union of Pearl and Lou produced a beautiful daughter.  An industrious little girl with a plain mug and stalwart limbs, a digger and mud pie cuisenaire, and bicycle Minoan, with scabby knees and paint stains on her fingers.  A regular proletarian recruit in the progressive elementary school where Pearl taught, until up sprouted a tulip from this muddy bulb. 

     Her name was Laura.  She had inherited only her father’s sultry tones, no trace of her mother's red hair or cinnamon-cream complexion, but the bond between Pearl and Lou glowed again in her.  Her parents' love-making, that labor of love which in them was not lugging skin and bone up a ladder but must have been the curing of perishables into endurance, or was the converting of the splintered planks of endurance and duration into beauty, sanding them and joining them tongue and groove.  Sweat turned into pearl: Daughter of the actual beating heart.

 

     Lou:  Politics don't always have to be a farce or a tragedy.

     Pearl: Since when?  People want soap operas and sit-coms.     

     Alex: Don't be so pessimistic.

     Florence: I don’t trust fat lips in public office. Thin lips are just, but then they look like turtles. Where can we find justice?

     Edith: None of those WASPS have lips.

     Florence: What about that rock singer, from England? 

     Edith: He doesn't have an ass.

     Vera: Honey, you were always too good for them.  Do you know the story, Archie? 

     Julius: Vera.

     Vera:  Well, he's a Democrat.  Aren't you Archie? 

     Julius: It has nothing to do with anything. 

     Vera: Yes it does.  Archie is a righteous gentile. 

     Archie:  Thank you, I've been biting my lips since we started in on the turtles.  I must look like Satchimo by now.

     Lou: What are you doing about the ass?

     Vera: Julius was going to be a judge.  He was going to be a terrific judge.  No mercy.  He's not one to be trifled with.  He's for capital punishment in all cases.  He would have been sensational.  We'd all but sent out the invitations to whatever we do to celebrate canonization, and then they found out he was Jewish.

     Pearl:  A name like Goldberg, they discovered he was Jewish?

     Lou:  Republicans.  They thought "variations".

     Pearl: Vicious.

     Vera: They discovered he was really Jewish.

     Lou: Really Jewish.  That is hard to swallow.  You are really Jewish, Julie, no getting around it.  It doesn't do you any good to try to hide out as a Republican.

     Florence: I thought everybody in New York was really Jewish.

     Pearl: No, they can be really Irish, too. 

     Florence:  I meant if they're Jewish, they're going to be really Jewish.

     Lou: So's you'd notice.

     Vera: Isn't that what you said, smoochie?  It only sounds silly when I say it. 

     Julius:  I never said that.

     Vera: You did too.  You implied it.  Archie will understand.            

     Archie: As a donkey or a turtle?

     Julius:  I believe I said they were stupid, brown-nosing, hypocritical chicken shits, more or less.

     Vera:  Your words exactly dear. And by that you meant gentile by another name, didn't you?  It was the `hood talking, the old schettle-banger. 

     Julius: It was a man in full possession of his senses. 

     Florence: Why are old Mexican men silly? 

     Manny: All of us with rolled trousers are tarred by the same brush.

     Florence: I still believe in wisdom.

     Julius:  You must click your heels now. 

     Archie:  Mexicans?  That was about the flowers, wasn't it?  What does the good doctor have to say about flowers?

     Manny: Cigars of a sort. 

     Alex: What's a putz?  I know it's not a compliment.

     Lou: It's a mushroom.

     Alex: Oh.

     Manny: Like Jesus. 

     Edith:  Not at all.

     Nathan: He has a famous father. 

     Edith: Sometimes a putz is just a putz.

     Julius: But, you're a red, so it doesn't count.

     Pearl: She is not a red.

     Julius: She went to Nicaragua.

     Lou: Shopping.

     Edith: I picked coffee. 

     Julius: No grave robbing? 

     Alex:  You were with the Sandinistas?

     Edith:  I volunteered.

     Alex: That's..

     Julius: Chic. 

     Vera: Stop that, Julie.

     Julius: It happens to be true.  The Republican dandies went to Afghanistan.  The air heads to Everest. 

     Archie:  Reds.  I suppose that's marvey.  I didn't know you knew reds, Manny.

     Lou: It's the Passover slander, Arch.  We're everywhere.

     Archie: Et tu, Lou?

     Alex: With the Sandinistas?

     Julius: Sandinistas in the mist.  Is it true she slept with one of the gorillas?

     Pearl: That's geur-i-yas. 

     Julius: I meant the other one.

     Vera: Which one?

     Julius: The one who slept with a gorilla.  I heard she did.

     Vera: You don't have to answer that, Edith.

     Julius:  The other one.  She lived with them.  Gave them names.

     Vera: Fay Wray? 

     Julius: Well, did you Edith, or did you just share capuccino with them?

     The dinners were not pot luck anymore.  Florence could no longer be found in the kitchen on the day of the feasts her eyes glued to a rough edged square of paper torn from the food section of the Times and thumb-tacked to the cabinet, moving in lock step to its cues.  These dinners, like their own, were purchased at gourmet food stores.

     The wings of the table were pulled out and the food was laid out at the center.  Guests' plates were relayed around the circumference, nearest person serving.  At least that was the plan.  However, before long, the orderly line of dishes at the center had been broken and a bowl of potatoes would be at one corner, a pate near someone's elbow.  Julius was a sure short stop for any dish, and the joke was to pass it around behind him, but there was always too much food, vigilance slacked, and by the end of the meal if anybody wanted one last taste of anything, he would have to petition Julius, or smarter yet, one of his neighbors, to pass it along, since all the dishes had been collected there and Julius become deaf.  He was spearing morsels from them with his fork, a genius at crowding them all into a space within arms' reach, stacking them one on top of the other; right at the end divining the presence of tidbits beneath congealing gravy. His concentration was adamantine.  

     When the meal was over groggy anarchism reigned, and the guests drifted off to the living room in tangles of conversation or sat alone, nodding lordly in their chairs.  Florence and a Pearl cleared the mess-in the case of Julius pulling the dishes from "my cold, dead hands" as he said-and after shoveling the left-overs from the plates into a garbage bag, brought out a new set of girlish sized dishes and silverware.  Then came the procession of desserts. Cakes and fruit torts and chocolate truffles and a platter of melons and strawberries and a silver coffee pot with a swan-neck spout.            The guests return to the table, load their plates, pour coffee and then retire again to the living room to take the monkey intelligence test of balancing dish and fork on a knee while holding a coffee cup.  Lou requests an album, Manny puts on Rosemary Clooney.  Edith and Julius remain in the dining room.  She has a bone to pick with any lawyer.  Her ex-husband is a lawyer, and Julius has no intention of deserting all this unguarded treasure.  Two presidents have come and gone since he was passed over for a federal judgeship.  It was easy to imagine him as a potentate in black robes.  He behaved much like an enthroned figure now, theatrically. But, he had been passed over. By Republicans!  Political men, not daydreamers.  Gourmand pleasure seekers like him with a generous and scoffing view of the world. And Julius carried a grudge-he had the suspicious, bereaved eyes of the miser.  He wanted nothing to be taken from him.  He sat with his legs spread a chicken breast in one hand, cake in the other; his paunch fell over his lap and the apron of lard made his crotch look immature or hermaphroditic.                       

     Manny is returning from the bathroom, he hears Edith say to Julius, "Sometimes you shouldn't be proud of not being guilty." 

     Florence is talking with Pearl.  Pearl is holding her hand.  Pearl had been a primary grade school teacher and could accommodate the inner child.  But, there was nothing doting in Pearl's face.  It had been a progressive elementary school, a euphemism for socialist which was in turn a euphemism for the truly unmentionable, and she had eventually become its principle. Her face seemed equal to the job of chief administrator and guardian of ideals or dogma, and equal to the cosmological and ward politics needed to win the post.  Time had not minced its strokes working on it.  She was carved as bold and crude as a cigar store Indian.  She had been a kohl-eyed siren, sharp-edged inside a round body, and it was this to-the-point dare or readiness which had been unsheathed.  Her face was two profiles, like a ship's bow she broke through towards you.  She might even be more beautiful now than when she was young, part of her beauty holding a threat, a challenge to sincerity or unanimity, while before that ethical query or ideology had been softened.

     Manny poured himself a glass of wine and stood behind them.  The way the two women were sitting, hand in hand.  Manny wondered what intimacy Florence would be sharing; what intimacy she would not share with him or which he had ignored. 

     Florence: I dread her calls.  She pounces on me.  She saves it up.  That's my biggest worry.  She must be so unhappy.  She's completely alone.

     Pearl: Do you think she'd be better off here?

     Florence: No, the east coast is a house on fire to her. Her words.  I don't know where she can be happy. She blames me for that. 

     Pearl: She never seems unhappy to me. 

     Florence: She thinks she always was.  And she's not proud of it.  That makes it harder for me, she's completely unromantic about it.  She thinks it something petty she got from me.  I don't understand what she means.  She can imitate me so well.  She puts on this voice.  It's supposed to be me.  Everyone agrees it is.  I don't think so.  I hope not.  Do I sound that self-pitying? 

     Pearl: She makes you sound self-pitying? 

     Florence: Just soggy with tears.  It's so abusive and then it's talking down to me.  When words fail, my fault again, then she's left with the voice.  She's accusing me, and I think I'm supposed to compare myself to her.  If only she could cry, if she could just be me and feel sorry for herself but I didn't give her that indulgence.  Appropriated all that for myself.  She can make me feel so selfish.  

     Pearl: Laura accuses me of being heartless.  She remembers being shunted aside as a child in favor of politics.  I tell her: You know honey, you really didn't have it that bad. So then she thinks I'm bringing in the starving masses, which she thinks is my life strategy.  Avoidance.  And she throws back the black baby sitter.  She remembers her in detail.  I had no idea everything she had confided in her.  She never told me about her kid in jail.  It's not bad enough I abandoned her to a nanny, she knows I'm hardened on that one, it's my exploitation of Louise I hear about.  That was my contribution to the cause: One broken black family sacrificed to clean my house.  This is nearly half a century ago, a continent away.  We were in a bungalow in California.  She had all of five rooms to clean.  But, of course there were the overnights.  How could I ever justify them?  Two families sacrificed with one fell blow. She remembers me talking with a southern accent when Louise was around, I cringe, but she's right.  She lets me know that hypocritical identification only made it worse. She labors on the personnel.  She's got her father's endurance. She belabors the personnel.  She cleans her toilets with a sponge. Can you imagine that?  She puts on a glove and gets on her knees and scours it clean.  She made sure I saw that one when I visited. A home-body, bless her.  Thank god for Brent.  She married an artiste and she's found out it's not just the political who're self-preoccupied.  Did you ever meet him?  They should name hurricanes only after him.  So much for attention to the heart.

     Pearl was talking about Laura.  Manny felt his face redden.  

     Florence: I just wish she were happy. It would be such a relief.

     Pearl: You know, Florence, she is too intelligent to just be happy.  I can't imagine sailing off to Portland myself but it would have been the same anywhere.  I don't think a moral person is going to be gay in this world.  If she can blame you for anything it's educating her, and she has enough native intelligence I don't even think that would have made a difference.  I think you might tell her to count her blessings.  That always worked on Laura.  She could never believe I'd stoop so low.  It really made her worry.  Is mother falling apart?  Blessings?  Is she recanting?  Try it, she'll think you're hiding something terrible from her.  A buried child.   

     Lou and Nathan are seated facing each other on the long couch, their knees nearly touching, the opposing arm of each thrown across the soft pillows of its back rest.

     Lou: I used to go the races. After the war.  Back in California.  Golden Gate, then we moved to L.A. and I went to Santa Anita.  About until I could get a regular poker game going.  Hard to beat the settings.  Santa Anita especially.  A Hollywood Western.  The hills.  Shakes the claustrophobia right out.      

     Nathan: Ever go here?

     Lou:  Couple of times. But it was different for me when I got back here.  Busier.  I didn't need the leisure anymore. The poker, but the charm was in fitting it in.  I liked being snug in the pocket.

     Nathan: We could go some time.

     Lou: You?  

     Nathan: I'd like to go commercial.  I want to get my message out.  Once I figure out their secret, I'll put horse racing in the museum.  Our markets overlap. They've cut me off from my base.  Turtle racing is not for kids.  People come off badly compared to horses.  They feel better about themselves if they root for turtles.  I owe them that.  After spending twenty years selling them deodorant and hair dye.    

     Manny:  I always thought it was less of a sermon than that.          

     Nathan:  Oh no, it's always been a crusade.  Hard to kill the old marketeer, got to convert him.  I've got my experience to give here. I come to this through the back end.  I dealt in horseshit. 

     Lou: I once thought about trying aquaculture.

     Nathan: In Fish Kill?               

     Lou:  We've got a place on Block Island.

     Manny:  It's a wonderful place. I remember one spot where you walk up a slope and it's like jumping off into the sky. 

     Lou:  The southern bluffs.

     Manny: It felt like stepping into thin air.  Where clouds are made.  Impossible.  Like floating.    

     Nathan:  Never been.  There was a time back there we made the guest list for Nantucket.  We kind of had a temporary visa.  We probably could have homesteaded the Vineyard; there were chances then.  But the locals gave me the willies.  Bitterest bastards I've ever come across.  Like biting dogs.  No bark.  Just skulking and sly.

     Manny:  Up on the bluffs, you called them, Lou?  

     Lou:  Must have been.  It's the only place with any altitude on the island.  The bogs are even below sea level.

     Manny:  They are?  Doesn't seem possible.  The island would sink, wouldn't it? 

     Lou:  That's just the bogs.  And the ponds. They are salt water.  Some of them.  Lagoons. 

     Manny:  I remember the ferry to the island.  We were fog bound all the way, and then the fog lifted a little, and there was the island, very thin, looking like a fog bank itself. I thought it was at first, but it wasn't, some color gave it away, some white sand.  It materialized.  But, the trip out there, I shouldn't have been so surprised by the time on the bluffs because the whole ferry ride lost in the gray, it could have been climbing. It would have been the same.  Floating, either way.

     Lou:  You might see it differently when it’s rough.  You can get sea sick.  Those last few rides before they close down the service for the season. 

     Manny:  I'm sure it would put an end to daydreams. I salted their tails anyway.  I'm not sure I'm ready yet for that little walk into the blue.  I thought I was filling up with blue, but I wasn't sure all the drivel could be expelled, and I thought it's going to pull me down.  It's been a mistake, this is for someone else or another time.  It was so sudden.  Out of the blue."   

     Lou: You were a tourist.  I live there.  The house leaked and all the electricity had to be rewired, and we've added rooms.  Smashed my thumb on numerous occasions.  And swore like I would anywhere.  I haven't been to the bluff for years. 

     Manny had let several sentences dangle in the hope that Lou might take over the wheel and steer them to a place he could not arrive at alone, thus the words "sky" and "floating" and "blue" had been hung on the higher note of a question, but Lou had not taken the hint, and so a wisp of hope was lost for Manny.  A hope in a secret he thought Lou must have, a secret which may turn out to be nothing more than a persistent literalness which Manny probably could never share and so never hope to use to escape his sentence.  And lost with this refusal of his invitation to suppose was a chance for an agreement about something else, a chance for Lou to confirm the endurance or actual material existence of a dream, to hint a knowledge of it, and that should it have never left a mark during the course of a lifetime, having never obtruded physically on another, surely will perish in privacy along with the body.  No, Lou would not remember the walk. He had not been with him, and must never have been told. And he had noticed no change between the man who had left and the one who returned from the blue vault. Nothing had been agreed, no assent between souls that time must not run out with events.         

     Edith and Julius entered from the dining room, Julius balancing a tower of cake slices.  Edith starts talking over every other conversation, and Archie is trailing in, he must have been in the dining room too, and he has a drink in his hand and leans against the doorway looking drunk and elegant at the same time, so it was possible to wonder if he was not better off tipsy, his joints oiled so to speak.

     Manny half hears, but he is not really paying attention.  

     He is thinking: The island is more beautiful for being small.  A few steps and adieu.  All dew fresh lifting.  The rose hips near the lagoon...oblivious to the mining of the waves twenty yards away, and the humming of bees there, that summer day pitching its tent at the edge. What these wisps were trusted to...And at the time it was these less than vapors that seemed solid and the material world by its unconsciousness that seemed already perished, buried in blank infinity, while intimations of love seemed to pierce a veil into eternity...The north of the island ends in a sandbar.  The sand polished slick and glassy as a whale's back by the continuous ebb and flow of the silky brine, the seas there unzipping and closing again as if over a whale's humpy spine.  Andrea was with me.  The water tugged at my ankles and whisked away my footing as if I stood on this mount as it breached and then swiftly sounded into the swells.  Andrea raced out on the quicksilver ridge.   The water would close up to her waist and although the water was shallow there, it looked as if she was far out in the wide sea, and a seal approached her, floating on the heave.  Two young things in the peaceable kingdom of innocence where Leviathan had just sounded, peaceable kingdom forever already there and beckoning.  

 

     Edith:  Julius knows his name, I've purposely forgotten it.  He's at Haavaad, dahlinks but he's a putz.  Don't tell them who it is, Julius, I'll have to spit if you say it.  He's all chutzpa.  A paragon of obnoxiousness.  Julius, cue me, it was very important.

     Julius:  It's Alan...

     Edith: Stop.  Don't breathe it.  He's another one of those lawyers.  But, I think he embarrassed the shit out of Archie.   He was speechless.  It's so diabolical.  He's such a weene, Julius disagrees but he can't see it from a woman's standpoint.  He's one of those guys with the body of a toddler who like to walk around the house naked, eating.  They eat in bed and think they're hedonists.  And then here he goes and he shames poor Archie.  He's stormed Haavaard and hasn't changed his stripes a bit. He looks like a child prodigy, he wants to, pasty and nasty with buggers, and he's teaching a curse..a course, my slip is showing, on The Old Testament as Law.  In the law school. Have any of you ever smelled those Yeshiva bochers?  Roquefort dipped in old socks.  It's too lovely.  And poor Archie is completely flabbergasted, weren't you, Arch?  Admit it, you were bothered by the impudence.  He's a dwarf with a pot belly, one of those little iron bellies, and red hair he can't comb, to look like a genius, and he talks like this, a mile a minute without taking a breath, ever.  He has the personality of a fly, you can't push him off.  And then he exploded this bomb under Archie, who is absolutely tolerant, thought Archie, and way past all that religious stuff, except Archie believed until five minutes ago that Jesus was godly.  That was Archie's secret.  Jesus was perfect, and now he's going to have to re-think all that. He has to because he can't do without it, and this imp, he's been doing interviews on Calvary in Aramaic, which Archie can't speak and wouldn't but Jesus did, and do you know what Jesus said?  Well, it wasn't all that personnel, nothing special between a kid and his dad.  It was a standard psalm.  He was begging to be fixed.  And no forgiveness for his enemies if he'd just get out of this mess, not in that psalm.  And it's going to take some fixing, for poor Archie, to get his god back, and here he thought he was ready to forgive us, we have been officially forgiven, and then bubble butt goes and assassinates his character again.               

     Archie: I was not speechless. 

     Edith:  You were. You know you say things like "safe home", you all do, and they're lovely but useless.

     Archie: I will bite my tongue before saying "safe home". 

     Edith:  But you've got to swear. 

     Archie: A promise will do.

     Edith:  Curse, Arch. 

     Julius:  Leave Archie alone. 

     Edith:  He can take care of himself.

     Julius:  He's too appalled. He's protecting you. 

     Edith:  I don't need..

     Julius:  Safe home, Edith.    

     Archie:  I swear like a sailor.

     Edith:  Like a yachtsman.  Your breath has to stink afterwards. 

     Archie:  Like a drunken sailor.  I don't spare anyone.

     Alex:  You're not going to get sad now are you?

     Archie:  I might. 

     Alex:  It's not the time, lovey.

     Archie:  I don't want to leave such a good impression.  I called my mother the bitch of the east.

     Julius:  Christ, Edith what the hell is that?

     Florence:  She's choking.

     Julius:  She deserves to.  She spit up all over your rug.

     Edith:  None of you heard how contrite he is.  Archie that's so Archie. 

     Julius:  She's possessed.

     Lou:  Breathe from the diaphragm. 

     Lou:  Manny, isn't there some restaurant exorcisism you can do?  A psychiatric Hemlicher?

     Edith: Balls. You're so cute, Archie.  You've never forgiven yourself.  No big deal, Arch.  Slut.  Cunt.  Not enough to build character, not for us.  Give me a title, too. What grandeur you've got.  I want to reign over the whole east, like the wicked witch. 

     Archie:  I shouldn't have brought her up just like that.

     Alex:  It's nothing.

     Archie:  Three pieces of silver.  I'm sorry I ever said it.  She was weak.

     Alex:  Archie?

     Archie:  That's not a crime.  You can't blame someone for it, they really can't help themselves.  They simply don't have the strength to resist.  She didn't expect it from me.  The last person she would have expected it from.  I'm sure she depended on my precocity, she didn't have a choice, and it's not fair, but she expected my understanding.  That's really what she thought.  That I'd believe her.  From eight years old when I answered the phone, people would ask her what man she was harboring in the house.  She told me that.  That's more than a broad hint, I think.

     Alex:  Ah well, fiddle-de-dee. 

     Archie:  I should have kept my mouth shut.  It cost her more than me.

     Alex:  Lovey, you're mumbling.  Don't do that, it makes you sound dyspeptic. 

     Archie:  You mean dipsomaniacal.  And there you see I've pronounced it perfectly.  I think I pass the driving test.

     Alex: I was being tactful, lovey, don't be surly. 

     Archie:  We leave behind broken vases.

     Alex:  Oh no, he's becoming archeological.  Dear it's time for us to leave, so we just leave behind these vases. 

     Archie:  Carpus diem.  Good bye.  We're leaving.  Too late.  And when we did, there was so much damage.  We know where all those arrows went now.  Every one of them hit a heart and we shot them so gaily.  I promise to be more careful next time, lovey.  You'll remind me?

     Alex:  I promise.

     It is too small a party to survive the departure of even one couple, and everyone leaves within a few minutes of each other.  Manny accompanies his guests when they retrieve their coats from the bedroom where they are piled on the bed, the hall closet is stuffed to the gills with their own coats.  Each time he has the feeling something is forgotten or missing, and the feeling grows as the pile shrinks until he is in the darkened bedroom with the light falling through the doorway looking at the empty bed and realizes what has been exhumed by removing the coats is the absence of sleeping children.  They used to sleep in their baby carriages with their mushroomy cheeks melted over their collars, their little noses wheezing and their pink lips pouting.   

     He waits out in the hall for the elevator with Lou and Pearl.  They are bundled in coats that are too warm for the weather.  Pearl probably does this in solidarity with Lou.  Lou's face is gaunt.  It has been twenty years since his heart attack when he was brought back from the dead, but he will never look fed again.  The shrinking took place overnight.  The day before he had been muscular and glowing with health, his remaining hair jet black, two raven wings from temple to occipital.  When Manny visited him in the hospital the next day he was pale and gnawed out.  Half his heart had been surrendered to death during his brief stay there.  The coronary ward could not possibly be as Manny remembers it, steeped in tropical lassitude, lemony autumn light draped from high windows like mosquito netting.  There were six beds, this too seems unlikely, a subjective construction made of his feelings that dead time was the common tenant there, bedded in common as if in a poverty mission or a penal colony.

     He remembers the ward as a bell tower, the walls fading to transparency in the falls of lemony light.  An aerie of seismic voices, a steeple made spectral by its stabling the invisible whose suspenseful absence is stronger than the presence which remains.  The patients lay on their gurneys living in the suspense between heart beats, each stroke perhaps, or each space between strokes, as eternally perishing as the clang of bells spaded in the air.      

     How small they both looked even bundled up, old and shaky.  Pearl's feisty courage just an empty bark.  He was afraid for both of them.  When the elevator arrived he did not want to let them go.  He hated to trust them to the churning city and to the forces of night now loose in it.  Each exit of theirs now seemed to serve impatient machinery.    

     He thought of the return on the ferry from Block Island to New London and as the elevator door closed on them, he tried to actually remember it, to recover the sensations while standing in the airless hall.  It had been crystal clear, a wind was blowing, the sun glinted sharp and transparent and all around the ferry was a procession of sailboats, and sea gulls coasted in the wind.  All were airborne.  Escaped on rafts as beautiful as swans.