Time Travail

Fourteen

  After a long respite Harvey returned to his archeological fixation. I’d thought he’d forgotten about unearthing the sites of Forest Hill shops forty years before. I reactivated the research. This time I went to the local paper and on the pretext that I was writing a history of the town was able to dig up photographs of the Forest Hill of the war years. I pondered over them and tried to regenerate the old beneath the new.

  It began to monopolize my brain. I suffered something like a relapse.

  I did a little fieldwork. But most of the archeological research was pursued mentally in bed, my own and Beth’s. I couldn’t get rid of it even there. It was becoming obsessive, trying to peel off the contemporary occupation layer to reveal the underlying deposit of artifacts. She took my distraction for sulking because of the limitations on intimacy she still imposed. Lately I’d been getting urgent. I felt I owed it to her and to my own virile image to be urgent. Not here, my sweetheart, she would say. Where then? Not here, she would repeat, probably referring to this life. I suggested the living room sofa or even the cactus-patterned sofa in the Mexican nook. She found that sordid. I suggested the museum room guarded by Uncle Sam. There was a bed there. She reacted to that as though I’d proposed a church altar with her pope in attendance.

  Then I mentioned that unvisited room at the end of the corridor that she’d referred to as “the guest-room.” No, she said. Why not? Not there, she said. After a while she added: “It’s full of junk anyway.”

  We’d progressed in intimacy by then. It was largely visual. Although I was generally able to sweet-whisper her out of her bra she would gracefully pull out of attempted torso caresses with a kiss and ask me to recite her son’s poems again, I did it so wonderfully. I must have recited the BMT thing twenty times.

  She’d lie alongside me, head thrown back, cupping her breasts out of modesty or shame and listen with intensely closed eyes. Then of course I had him on those photo-albums as well. When the alarm went off I had to sit alongside her on the edge of the bed and pretend interest. With that merciless feminine memory for long-ago trivia involving loved-ones, she recalled the events surrounding this snapshot and that one. He looks mad here because I wouldn’t buy him a third ice-cream cone, chocolate and pistachio. Here, that was the day he nearly fell in the river, I thought I’d die.

  She went on and on and I would end by stroking her downy neck-vertebras with my fingertips and follow them down to the small of her back and the stubborn barrier of her belt. She had a lovely back. Like her small intricate ears and brief nose it hadn’t aged. If I kept it up she was sure to stop and look up and say, bewildered, “Aren’t you interested, Jerry?” And I would stop the sinuous exploration and say, miming candid surprise at her question, “Yes, of course I am. Pistachio and strawberry, you said. What river was that he fell into?”

  But during the period of archeological research I paid less attention to her vertebras. She hinted gently at a slackening of tenderness on my part. Occasionally she’d clasp her hands behind her neck and concede brief access to her rejuvenated breasts. She often asked me if I had something on my mind. I invariably answered yes but she protected it too well. At that she would breathe deeply, squeeze my hand hard and intensify kisses and caresses and became less and less real while I went on displacing shops and buildings in my head. It was a bad symptom.

  It was a bad symptom that reality for me on that bed alongside the half-naked woman was long-ago things some of which I’ll enumerate now but not compulsively and without peril this time I think since I’m on my guard, aware, as I wasn’t enough then, of the trap.

  So, marking my distance from them, holding on to here and now (which is a dark and dank cellar with the pattering of rats and the bite of the time-helmet on my forehead) I recall recalling the primitive grocery-store in the days before the moving black belt and bar-codes, the clear music of the old-time cash-register, recall embracing the big 100% biodegradable Kraft paper-bag with the saw-toothed top tickling my nose and placed the grocery-store on the site of the present video-shop.

  I recall recalling the scarred bloodstained butcher’s chopping block, concave over the years from the cleaver, the hooked carcasses of sane bovines, and that had to be the brand-new bank. Next door (so the computer-store now) the great pants-press lowered with a hiss of billowing steam and a smell of mildew. Much more pleasant was the fragrance of fresh-cut pine-boards from the lumber-store which was haunting the present travel agency. I saw Cohen’s candy-store and outside the soda-drink chest with the built-in bottle-opener and the pattern of bottle-caps on the sidewalk, Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Canada Dry, lots of others I could enumerate but won’t. The furniture-store surely. There’s the taciturn Italian shoe-repairman in his heavy leather apron bent over an archaic machine with leather belts making slapping sounds. Choice Nuts and Dried Fruit now?

  I see the barbershop pole, the giant red-and-white revolving peppermint-stick, an antiquity even then. She went there instead of to the fancy beauty parlor with the women in their ranked electric chairs. She had a practical boyish cut that emphasized her white neck. I knew when she went and sometimes in the mirror she saw me looking through the window and stared solemnly at me, frowning a little and then smiling a little and then frowned and looked away. Harvey was waiting his turn reading a paper along with the other men.

  Out of it. I don’t know where to place it. I didn’t know where to place the barbershop I would tell Harvey if he asked.

  When I submitted my tentative location of the old places I thought my job was over. No, there was another piece of research even more unreasonable than the first. He expected me to come up with everybody’s shopping-habits in those days: the stores, the days, the time. He didn’t individualize “everybody.” I understood: himself, myself, my mother and father, his mother and father, maybe his grandparents. He should have known for his own people and himself but he didn’t. It was his memory again, he said and added that if it kept on worsening he’d stop the chemical and ray treatment.

  There were no libraries or local papers to consult for the ancient shopping habits of obscure people. Most of the individuals involved were beyond consultation. I was supposed to make a deep cerebral plunge and come up with the precious time-barnacled information. Was the big shopping day Friday afternoon or Saturday morning?

  So now I knew what he was after, always the same thing. I should have understood far earlier what with the relay he’d constructed and the reduced second-generation sensors. He’d been preparing this alternate strategy for months now to bypass Beth Anderson’s inaccessible house. I wasn’t really alarmed at first. Rooms were a concentrate of past people in private attitudes. How could the machine help picking them up? But on sidewalks outside shops they would be safely public and diluted among the thousands of other passersby.

  Anyhow I finally came up with what I thought had been the old schedule for my mother and his. They’d shopped together. His father’s I didn’t know, he’d been on the road most of the time. For the days we both went there it was easy, mainly Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. I handed him the paper. He glanced at it for a second. He stared at me.

  “You got. Everybody down?”

  “Everybody I can remember.”

  “Where’s …?” He broke off and seemed to be searching for a name.

  “Where’s Rachel?” he said finally and I recalled that night the year before when she came back and I couldn’t remember her name either. Couldn’t.

  “Why Rachel?” I asked as if I didn’t know why.

  “Didn’t she go. Shopping too? Get her hair fixed? Dresses dry-cleaned? Malted milks? Movie? Dentist?”

  “I forgot about her.”

  “You forgot about Rachel?”

  “I don’t remember when she went into town.”

  “Try to remember.”

  So I said I’d try to remember.

  One of the ways I tried not to remember was by keeping my mind sharply focused on housework when Beth was a
way. But I found I couldn’t do jobs like vacuum cleaning in the old vehement way. They’d become mechanical chores that didn’t require exclusive mental focus. Focus shifted to old things. It was an unhealthy situation.

  One morning as the whine of the vacuum cleaner died away into developing silence I decided to launch into some challenging big-scale project. I wandered all over her silent house.

  Couldn’t the upstairs corridor stand repainting? In the storeroom I found everything for the preliminary job of washing: sponges, rags, pails, even neatly tied stacks of newspapers, some yellowed and a decade old. I avoided looking at them as I spread them out on the floor. The stepladder proved to be too short for comfort. I hunted around but couldn’t find a bigger one. Then I thought of the locked room at the end of the corridor. She’d called it a junk-room.

  I finally found a big bunch of keys on top of the refrigerator. The next-to-the-last one on the ring opened the door with difficulty.

  The room was dim and unbearably stuffy. It was empty except for a cot in the corner. I pulled up the Venetian blinds in a cloud of dust. I nearly ruptured myself trying to open the window. Defeated, I sat down on the cot and thought of the bedroom in the other house, how it had been dusty and suffocating like this room that first night (the night of the old voices) and how I hadn’t been able to force the window up there either. That gave me the idea of doing to this room what I’d done to the other. I gave up the idea of painting the corridor.

  It took three days of clandestine work to transform the junkless junk room. An hour before Beth’s return I’d lock the door, air out the corridor and take a shower with her perfumed soap.

  On the third day as I was doing the second coat on the ceiling I glanced at the window and surprised Hanna dimly staring at me from her bedroom window in the other house. She’d made two clean circles in the dirty panes for her eyes.

  When she left, probably to inform Harvey, those two circles went on staring at me. I let the blinds down.

  The evening of the surprise I held Beth by the waist and guided her down the corridor past her bedroom, past the bathroom. Where are we going? Not there, Jerry, it’s locked. I tell you it’s locked. I lost the key. I know it’s locked, she protested.

  I opened the door and practically had to force her inside with me. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I understood then that something had happened in that room. I was sure it had involved her son. With my experience I could imagine what it was. I tried to convince her that she shouldn’t live in the past all the time. I told her that whatever had happened here was the past. The only reality of this room, I said, was the two of us seated on this cot, me kissing her cheek. I soothed her into sitting on the edge, stiff, upright. Look! I commanded. I got up and pulled the blinds up, like pulling a sheet off a statue, to reveal the room in new sunny glory and saw Harvey across the way standing dimly at the bedroom window, staring at me, past me, through two clean circles in the dirty panes, half a foot under Hanna’s. He looked as though the revelation had been for him.

  I slanted the slats till he vanished. The evening sunshine tigered everything in the room now. Look, I said: a brand-new room. I said I’d junk the old cot and buy another one. I did it the next day. Even so she refused to stay in the room more than a minute. But during the next fire drill she told me to go upstairs and lock myself in that room till the all clear. So it served a useful purpose after all.

  By this time Harvey had finished the work on the second-generation sensors (with a slew of bits and scraps I had to burn three days running in the garden). They had mobility now, he said. The word “mobility” was an overstatement. It depended on who was active behind them. Each was double the size and weight of a car storage battery. But we had Hanna’s brawn to grunt and fart them in and out of the Volvo.

  His real achievement was a powerful relay that filled a third of the station wagon. It was more or less effective within a radius of half a mile of the machine in the cellar. I was cheered when he said we would be operating at the extreme limit of the relay’s pick-up zone and added that nothing could be done about that.

  The four new sensors were connected to the relay in the car by cables that Harvey instructed me to paint pavement-gray in the interest of inconspicuousness. But it struck me as useless cosmetics with four outlandish machines marking out the area of time-search on the sidewalk in front of busy shops. Finally Harvey realized that body snatching would have to be done at lonely hours. Not even mid-morning would do. He chose six in the morning.

  Of course earlier wouldn’t have posed technical problems. In midnight blackness the sensors could capture old sunlight. But operating in the dead hours of the morning might seem suspicious to the police who cruised about the neighborhood regularly since a recent spate of burglaries and two rapes.

  So operating time was to be six in the morning: the beginning of honest daylight and nobody around to ask questions.

  On the eve of the chosen day he impressed on Hanna and me the importance of going to bed early in order to rise and shine at five. The beat-up hearse-like Volvo was packed with the relay, the four sensors, a junked and reconverted portable TV that would enable Harvey to monitor the images from the back-seat and videotape them, the video device itself, the prototype of a time-storage unit, a portable control-panel extemporized from a salvaged length of pine-board, spare cables and tubes, a tool-chest. There were even three chocolate-bars for early-morning hunger.

  But the Volvo didn’t budge next morning. Hanna had been secretly late-late viewing in her room and at 5:00 am couldn’t be moved, no more than Boulder Dam. By the time she emerged, snarling, it was already seven-thirty and the outing had to be postponed.

  The next scheduled day it was Harvey himself who overslept and Hanna strangled with laughter from the top of the cellar stairs. Even that didn’t rouse him. She wanted me to go down and wake him up to enjoy her triumph immediately but I told her to let him go on sleeping. It would do him good, I added, eating my cake and having it too.

  The third day they were both ready on time and hammered on my door. I didn’t answer. Harvey came in. I was sick, I said and turned toward the wall. He harassed me. I’m sick, I said. Leave me (I felt like saying “us”) alone. He went on and on. Finally I turned around and sat up in bed.

  For the first time I made a fundamental criticism of what he was doing. I didn’t trust myself to speak about what was really troubling me. I kept the criticism on a dispassionate theoretical level. All of the people he was trying to resurrect were nobodies to the world at large, I said. I pretended to be revolted at the wasted financial and cultural possibilities of the machine. Why didn’t he record past presidential turpitudes and sell the images to the TV networks? There was a fortune in that. Or he could summon up great men, we could see W. A. Mozart in conversation with J. Haydn or if not that, doing anything, playing billiards even.

  He glanced at his watch impatiently but maybe because he could never resist theoretical speculation he accepted that hypothesis. Very seriously he said that what I’d suggested was within the realm of possibility. If he worked on it there was no theoretical barrier to extending the range of the machine to two hundred years in the past, it was a question of more tubes, more power. You’d need lots more power for that though, a small city’s power plant. And of course the machine would have to be the size of a cathedral and rebuilt on the site of that Vienna house or wherever it had been. But all that would take time and time was what he didn’t have.

  He went back to harassing me and finally said:

  “Don’t you want to see …?”

  Once again his face went blank with the effort to recall the name.

  “Don’t you want to see Rachel?”

  He’d already written the question, the night of the old voices but had never uttered it. I didn’t want to see any of them anymore, I said, diluting her in the others. I said I’d already seen his mother and didn’t want to see my mother and father that way. I had my own images o
f everybody, a hundred times more real and flattering than his poor gray caricatures. I called them up when I liked, not often (and that was my fault), but when I did they were more faithful, a million times more, to what those people had really been than his images were.

  He echoed me weakly but angrily.

  Images? You never understood what it was all about after all this time. You didn’t understand the blue mice, I tried to explain it to you then.

  His voice started going, reduced to a hoarse whisper hard to follow.

  They aren’t images. They’re alive. The way they were back then. No, not the way. Not were. They are. Are alive and it’s not just a question of looking, it’s a question …

  At this point his voice went entirely and I had only his lips to go by. What it was a question of doing was a guess on my part. A question of enjoying them? It corresponded to the lip-movements. But did it make sense? It wasn’t a question of looking at them, it was a question of enjoying looking at them? The promised opposition of clauses wasn’t present in the presumed utterance.

  Suddenly the remembered lip-movements gave:

  Joining.

  It wasn’t a question of looking at them, it was a question of joining them. There was formal rhetorical sense in that, but insanity of meaning.

  I don’t want to see them that way anymore, I said. I won’t stay here another day. To hell with all the money you owe me. And he shouldn’t think that if I left him I didn’t have a place to go. I had a landing-point now, real, not virtual. I said that I was sick of his dirty cracks about Beth Anderson. If he had to talk about her it should be with respect.

  He was instantly conciliatory. He thrust his mouth against my ear. Just harmless little jokes, he whispered, not understanding that my final outburst had been to cover up the other thing. He returned to that other thing. If I wasn’t interested of course I didn’t have to. He’d thought I did want to see her.

  I turned again to the wall and said that no I didn’t want to see her. It all came out and with it the beginning of tears, like water astonishingly from a desert. I didn’t want to see Rachel or my mother or father (dishonest with myself too, I now realize, I again diluted her in the others) or anybody whose death I’d painfully become reconciled to, whom time had eliminated from the broad daylight thoroughfares of my mind.

  He was still hovering over me, lips an inch from my ear. He whispered, OK, of course I didn’t have to look if I didn’t want to. All I had to do were the things that enabled him, Harvey, to look. He said that I was surprisingly emotional for a man my age. He said I should get up now, there was still time.

  I refused to budge from my bed. They’d each had their turn. It was mine now. Except they’d overslept. I was sick.

  You don’t sound very sick to me, he said. I didn’t turn from the wall or answer him. He left.

  I got up at what I thought was a safe ten and took a walk through the weeds. Through the meshes of the fence I saw that some of Beth’s tulips were coming up. Harvey approached under his black umbrella. You don’t look very sick to me, he said. I said, no, I was feeling a little better. Good, he said triumphantly and got Hanna and told us that we’d start recording right now, the hour didn’t matter, we wouldn’t put it off another time. He was anxious to try out the storage-unit.

  It was eleven in the morning when Hanna parked the car, as instructed, in front of the old beauty parlor lurking somewhere beneath a supermarket. She muscled the sensors onto the pavement. They marked off an oblong of about three hundred square feet. I was relieved at Harvey’s bad choice but couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. His memory was really going. Didn’t he remember that boy’s cut of hers that set off the whiteness of her neck? Didn’t he remember it wasn’t the beauty parlor she went to but the barbershop once a month along with him? He’d always had his hair cut there at the same time she did. They’d done so many things together.

  At first I did my job conscientiously. Basically I had to monitor and safeguard the sensors. The needle had to remain within the narrow black zone. When it deviated leftwards into the red I pressed the right-hand button, when rightwards the left-hand one. At the same time I had to keep an eye on the passersby. I ran around geometrically, shooing little kids away from the sensors, protecting them from teenage roller-skaters, apologizing to people who’d tripped over the cables that ran into the Volvo. Painting them sidewalk-gray hadn’t been a good idea. Once I even headed off a tapping blind man at the very last moment.

  Small throngs agglutinated about me. When the onlookers made guesses (“Are you surveying?”) I could always get by with a non-committal, “Something like that.” But when they expected me to supply the explanation I would mutter something incomprehensible or fantastic, things like “pavement tensile resistance measurements.” Some of their guesses (like “laser soundings of sewer-pipes”) were better than that and I used them.

  Finally I lost patience and said over and over that it was a time machine. They grinned feebly and went on watching.

  Pretty soon I didn’t hear or see them anymore. I was sensing almost to the point of vision the multitude of the dead advancing toward me down the sidewalk. They were massing on the verge of materialization, in broad daylight. It was a new stage in the downward spiral of the cyclic sickness. Now distance from the house didn’t count. Blue sky and the crowds of the living weren’t antidotes anymore.

  The thought didn’t come to me that the decay and gloom of Harvey’s house were just B spook-movie properties, that the machine was indifferent to atmosphere. It ground out the time specters wherever they might be and continued to emit those dangerous rays. My brain was just as vulnerable here in the outdoor dead room created by the four sensors as in the indoor one. Tending them at unprecedented close range I’d absorbed a massive dose of the time rays. I turned to the double-parked Volvo. Maybe they were coming through on Harvey’s screen. Maybe he was capturing them and that somehow activated them for me.

  I worked for a brutal end to it. I started practicing passive sabotage. I stopped chasing the little kids away from the sensors. I prayed they would tamper with them, break them, that shoppers would stumble over them, smash the lenses. I even looked up into the sky in the hope passersby would imitate me and barge destructively into a sensor.

  Sharp beeps summoned me to the Volvo. Hanna took over surveying the sensors.

  What the hell was the matter with me? Harvey wanted know. What was I looking up at the clouds for? A kid had nearly smashed a sensor. His sullen pouchy face under the golden curls told me that it wasn’t working as he had hoped.

  I got in the car and viewed what he’d taped. The relay wasn’t doing a good job at this distance from the master-machine in the cellar. The screen showed mainly blurred feet, regiments of blurred feet. Who said they were even ancient feet? Maybe they were no more than half an hour old. Once a dog showed up clearly, motionless. A second dog came and sniffed and humped the first dog. A recent or an authentically ancient hump? Who could tell? The operation in man and beast was timeless.

  Then I saw that he had pulled in really old things on his screen, too old to be dangerous. Male ghosts in straw-hats and female ghosts with feathered felt hats and ankle-long skirts jerked by. The machine was back to random temporal selection.

  Suddenly Miss Forster filled the entire screen ghostly, smiling for some reason. She was much younger than when I’d had her as my teacher at eight in PS 89 and she was badly blurred but it could be no one else with that slight hunch and broken front tooth. She blurred further into mist and the mist vanished. The screen remained empty.

  Finally it must have come back to him, the site of her long-ago haircut, because he asked me where the barbershop was. He couldn’t find it anywhere on my map. I told him I wasn’t sure but thought it might be somewhere in the space occupied by the Ford showcase.

  He had Hanna move the sensors fifty yards further in front of the showcase. She swore. Sweat was pouring down her face. She had to double-park in front of
Ford. I was still in the car.

  An image swam up gray and warped. His relay wasn’t doing a great job. The barbershop was a blur. Figures went past it. No customers went in or out of the blur. Then the lenses slowly focused and in fear I almost expected to see myself looking eyeless through the lettered window at her eyeless in the mirror.

  But the blur slowly resolved not into the barbershop but a funeral-parlor.

  For a while we sat there in silence. Then Harvey had Hanna move the sensors in front of the brand-new bank where the butcher’s had been. I got out of the car and resumed my monitoring duties in deep fear.

  It all came to an end this way.

  A police-car sneaked up. There were two of them inside and they stayed there for a while, scrutinizing. I could feel their stares in my back. They pulled me back into the present, brutally. It was a relief to have to cope with reasonable fear. I’ve always been scared of cops. In my younger days I’d had legitimate reasons.

  Finally the older bulkier cop extracted himself and plodded over to one of the sensors. He stared at it from all angles. Then he moved over to the second one and repeated the operation. Then the third one. Finally he came over to mine.

  “Good morning, Officer,” I said cheerfully.

  He didn’t answer. He squatted and scrutinized the fourth sensor. The funny thing was, his hand never left the immediate vicinity of his holster. It wasn’t really funny.

  I think he was maybe the dumbest cop I’d ever encountered. He had to practically trip over it before he noticed the gray sidewalk-color cable snaking out of the sensor. He hadn’t seen the three others. He stared at it, followed it and found himself before the back door of the Volvo. I could imagine that he saw Hanna snoring away on one part of the back seat, Harvey on the other, absorbed in contemplating on the screen whatever the sensors were pulling in from Schulz’s butcher shop forty years before.

  The cop turned about and marched up to me again. His hand, making no bones about it, was on the revolver butt. It made me nervous.

  “What the hell’s this all about?”

  “Seismic detectors, Officer,” I said promptly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Four, as you can see. For the echo effect.”

  He stared at me for what must have been a minute.

  “A what kind of detector?”

  “An earthquake detector. Tremors, actually.”

  He stared at me bleakly then returned to the police-car and started talking to the other cop. Their eyes never left me. Finally the younger, thinner cop got out of the car and came up to me. He stared down at the sensor at my feet.

  “This is supposed to be a seismograph? And the other three too? All four of them?”

  “Absolutely, Officer.”

  “To detect tremors.”

  “What else?”

  “Quake-detectors. Good thing for you they’re not lie detectors. Come on, what are you trying to hand me? New York’s not in the volcanic zone. Not in the subduction zone either. No mid-plate quakes here. Solid bedrock. Everybody knows that. What are you trying to pull?”

  He looked faintly Jewish. What was he doing on the police force?

  “Look, Officer, I’m doing this for a friend. He has a thing about earthquakes. He once got caught in one. I know it’s not a subduction zone here and you know it’s not but he’s a very nervous man.”

  “How come you’re doing it here? You got a permit to operate on a public sidewalk?”

  “It’s like, I don’t know, bird-watching. Some things have to be done out of doors. That’s where earthquakes happen. I didn’t know you needed a permit.”

  “In front of a bank it has to be done?”

  Sure enough. It was getting dangerous now. I’d been seeing Schultz’s butcher-shop there, his great nazi fist with the cleaver cleaving muscle and bone. I’d forgotten that in the present occupation layer it was a bank. The bank people must have phoned.

  “That your friend in the old station-wagon?”

  I nodded. The cop made me accompany him to the car. He tugged up his blue trousers a little, flexed his knees slightly and peered inside.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. I should have guessed. Who else? We meet again, Mr Morgenstern. We got two more complaints yesterday. Something’s going to have to be done. Aren’t a dozen fines enough? Anyhow you’re getting a ticket for double-parking. OK, I want you to clear the sidewalk of all that junk and fast.”

  The two cops stood there as Hanna and I grappled with the evicted sensors, still and blind now, just dead weight. When we finished I found myself nervously saying, “Goodbye, Officers,” and also, “Thank you” to each of them. They didn’t answer. They stood there, a great blue intensely real presence and behind them what they guarded, equally intense and real: the bank, the supermarket, the video-shop, the Ford showcase.

  That’s how the attempted resurrection of Old Forest Hill and certain of its deceased inhabitants came to an end. Not even the time-storage unit had worked properly it turned out later. All it had retained was the humping dogs and ten seconds of Miss Forster’s marred smile.

  Harvey spent the rest of the day on his back on the sofa in the dead room staring at the apparent emptiness. He didn’t eat or say a word.

  That evening I went over to Beth’s. She had the same intense reality as the two cops. I practically forced her out of the bedroom, away from the ticking alarm clock, the cama de matrimonio haunted by her husband and her son staring down at us. I overcame her resistance at the threshold of the brand-new room with the brand-new cot.

  She consented to total nudity, not enough. At first there was the sharpness of shielding elbows and knees. Finally she went limp. It proved contagious. Her head was turned away from me on the pillow. Her eyes remained wide open and staring far away, as on that sharp-focussed nude photograph her husband had taken fifteen years before. I saw her with her arms raised, brushing her hair, sharp-nippled, the spotlight firing her honey-colored fleece. Suddenly enabled, I worked unassisted to solitary climax, telling her over and over again how much I loved her.

  After, she wept quietly but persistently. I had to tell her to stop and to please never do that again. She went on. I turned away from her on the cot. I was voided of that faint fire. I’d returned the present she’d given me. I was paralyzed by sudden black depression. I felt like crying myself, at my age. Did I? After a while I felt her hand timidly on my cheek. She turned toward me and took my head in her bare arms and pressed it against her chest. She began silently rocking my head, consoling me for what I’d done to her.