334

1

Summer mornings the balcony would fill up with bona-fide sunshine and Boz would spread open the recliner and lie there languid as something tropical in their own little basin of private air and ultraviolet fifteen floors above entrance level. Just watching, half-awake, the vague geometries of jet trails that formed and disappeared, formed and disappeared in the pale cerulean haze. Sometimes you could hear the dinky preschoolers on the roof piping their nursery rhymes in thin, drugged voices.

A Boeing buzzing from the west brings the boy that I love best. But a Boeing from the east…

Just nonsense, but it taught directions, like north and south. Boz, who had no patience with Science, always confused north and south. One was uptown, one was downtown—why not just call them that? Of the two, uptown was preferable. Who wants to be MOD, after all? Though it was no disgrace: his own mother, for instance. Human dignity is more than a zipcode number, or so they say.

Tabbycat, who was just as fond of sunshine and out-of-doors as Boz, would stalk along the prestressed ledge as far as the rubber plant and then back to the geraniums, very sinister, just back and forth all morning long, and every so often Boz would reach up to stroke the soft sexy down of her throat and sometimes when he did that he would think of Milly. Boz liked the mornings best of all.

But in the afternoons the balcony fell into the shadow of the next building and though it remained almost as warm it didn’t do anything for his tan, so in the afternoon Boz had to find something else to do.

Once he had studied cooking on television but it had nearly doubled the grocery bills, and Milly didn’t seem to care whether Boz or Betty Crocker made her omelette fine herbes, and he had to admit himself that really there wasn’t that much difference. Still, the spice shelf and the two copper-bottom pans he had given himself for Christmas made an unusual decorator contribution. The nice names spices have—rosemary, thyme, ginger, cinnamon—like fairies in a ballet, all gauze wings and toeshoes. He could see her now, his own little niecelette Amparo Martinez as Oregano Queen of the Willies. And he’d be Basil, a doomed lover. So much for the spice shelf.

Of course he could always read a book, he liked books. His favorite author was Norman Mailer and then Gene Stratton Porter. He’d read everything they’d ever written. But lately when he’d read for more than a few minutes he would develop really epic headaches and then be a complete tyrant to Milly when she came home from work. What she called work.

At four o’clock art movies on Channel 5. Sometimes he used the electromassage and sometimes just his hands to jerk off with. He’d read in the Sunday facs that if all the semen from the Metropolitan Area viewers of Channel 5 were put all together in one single place it would fill a medium-sized swimming pool. Fantastic? Then imagine swimming in it!

Afterwards he would lie spread out on the sofa that looked like a giant Baggie, his own little contribution to the municipal swimming pool drooling down the clear plastic and he would think glumly: There’s something wrong. Something is missing.

There was no romance in their marriage anymore, that’s what was wrong. It had been leaking out slowly, like air from a punctured Baggie chair, and one of these days she would mean it when she started talking about a divorce, or he would kill her with his own bare hands or with the electromassage, when she was ribbing him in bed, or something dreadful would happen, he knew it.

Something really dreadful.

At dusk, in bed, her breasts hung above him, swaying. Just the smell of her is enough, sometimes, to drive him up the walls. He brought his thighs up against the sweaty backside of her legs. Knees pressed against buttocks. One breast, then the other, brushed his forehead; he arched his neck to kiss one breast, then the other.

“Mm,” she said. “Continue.”

Obediently Boz slid his arms between her legs and pulled her forward. As he wriggled down on the damp sheets his own legs went over the edge of the mattress, and his toes touched her Antron slip, a puddle of coolness on the desert-beige rug.

The smell of her, the rotting sweetness, like a suet pudding gone bad in a warm refrigerator, the warm jungle of it turned him on more than anything else, and way down there at the edge of the bed, a continent away from these events, his prick swelled and arched. Just wait your turn, he told it, and rubbed his stubbly cheek against her thigh while she mumbled and cooed. If only pricks were noses. Or if noses …

The smell of her now with the damp furze of her veldt pressed into his nostrils, grazing his lips, and then the first taste of her, and then the second. But most of all the smell—he floated on it into her ripest darknesses, the soft and endless corridor of pure pollened cunt, Milly, or Africa, or Tristan and Isolde on the tape recorder, rolling in rose-bushes.

His teeth scraped against hair, snagged, his tongue pressed farther in and Milly tried to pull away just from the pleasure of it, and she said, “Oh, Birdie! Don’t!”

And he said, “Oh shit.”

The erection receded quickly as the image sinks back into the screen when the set is switched off. He slid out from under her and stood in the puddle, looking at her uplifted sweating ass.

She turned over and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, Birdie, I didn’t mean to … ”

“Like hell you didn’t. Jack.”

She sniffed amusement. “Well, now you’re one up.”

He flipped the limp organ at her self-deprecatingly. “Am I?”

“Honestly, Boz, the first time I really didn’t mean it. It just slipped out.”

“Indeed it did. But is that supposed to make me feel better?” He began dressing. His shoes were inside out.

“For heaven’s sake, I haven’t thought of Birdie Ludd for years. Literally. He’s dead now, for all I know.”

“Is that the new kick at your tutorials?”

“You’re just being bitter.”

“I’m just being bitter, yes.”

“Well, fuck you! I’m going out.” She began feeling around on the rug for her slip.

“Maybe you can get your father to warm up some of his stiffs for you. Maybe he’s got Birdie there on ice.”

“You can be so sarcastic sometimes. And you’re standing on my slip. Thank you. Where are you going now?”

“I am going around the room divider to the other side of the room.” Boz went around the room divider to the other side of the room. He sat down beside the dining ledge.

“What are you writing?” she asked, pulling the slip on.

“A poem. That’s what I was thinking about at the time.”

“Shit.” She had started her blouse on the wrong buttonhole.

“What?” He laid the pen down.

“Nothing. My buttons. Let me see your poem.”

“Why are you so damn hung up on buttons? They’re unfunctional.” He handed her the poem!

“It’s lovely,” she said. “You should send it to Time”

“Time doesn’t print poetry.”

“Some place that does, then. It’s pretty.” Milly had three basic superlatives: funny, pretty, and nice. Was she relenting? Or laying a trap?

“Pretty things are a dime a dozen. Twelve for one dime.”

“I’m only trying to be nice, shithead.”

“Then learn how. Where are you going?”

“Out.” She stopped at the door, frowning. “I do love you, you know.”

“Sure. And I love you.”

“Do you want to come along?”

“I’m tired. Give them my love.”

She shrugged. She left. He went out on the veranda and watched her as she walked over the bridge across the electric moat and down 48th Street to the corner of 9th. She never looked up once.

And the hell of it was she did love him. And he loved her. So why did they always end up like this, with spitting and kicking and gnashing of teeth and the going of their own ways?

Questions, he hated questions. He went into the toilet and swallowed three Oralines, one just nicely too many, and then he sat back and watched the round things with colored edges slide along an endless neon corridor, zippety zippety zippety, spaceships and satellites. The corridor smelled half like a hospital and half like heaven, and Boz began to cry.

The Hansons, Boz and Milly, had been happily unhappily married for a year and a half. Boz was twenty-one and Milly was twenty-six. They had grown up in the same MODICUM building at opposite ends of a long, glazed, green-tile corridor, but because of the age difference they never really noticed each other until just three years ago. Once they did notice each other though, it was love at first sight, for they were, Boz as much as Milly, of the type that can be, even at a glance, ravishing: flesh molded with that ideal classic plumpness and tinged with those porcelain pink pastels we can admire in the divine Guido, which, at least, they admired; eyes hazel, flecked with gold; auburn hair that falls with a slight curl to the round shoulders; and the habit, acquired by each of them so young that it could almost be called natural, of striking poses eloquently superfluous, as when, sitting down to dinner, Boz would throw his head back suddenly, flip flop of auburn, his ripe lips slightly parted, like a saint (Guido again) in ecstasy—Theresa, Francis, Ganymede—or like, which was almost the same thing, a singer, singing

Three years and Boz was still as hung up on Milly as he had been on the first morning (it was March but it had seemed more like April or May) they’d had sex, and if that wasn’t love then Boz didn’t know what love meant.

Of course it wasn’t just sex, because sex didn’t mean that much to Milly, as it was part of her regular work. They also had a very intense spiritual relationship. Boz was basically a spiritual type person. On the Skinner-Waxman C-P profile he had scored way at the top of the scale by thinking of one hundred and thirty-one different ways to use a brick in ten minutes. Milly, though not as creative as Boz according to the Skinner-Waxman, was every bit as smart in terms of IQ (Milly, 136; Boz, 134), and she also had leadership potential, while Boz was content to be a follower as long as things went more or less his own way. Brain surgery aside, they could not have been more compatible, and all of their friends agreed (or they had until very recently ) that Boz and Milly, Milly and Boz, made a perfect couple.

So what was it then? Was it jealousy? Boz didn’t think it was jealousy but you can never be sure. He might be jealous unconsciously. But you can’t be jealous just because someone was having sex, if that was only a mechanical act and there was no love involved. That would be about as reasonable as getting uptight because Milly talked to someone else. Anyhow he had had sex with other people and it never bothered Milly. No, it wasn’t sex, it was something psychological, which meant it could be almost anything at all. Every day Boz got more and more depressed trying to analyze it all out. Sometimes he thought of suicide. He bought a razor blade and hid it in The Naked and the Dead. He grew a moustache. He shaved off the moustache and had his hair cut short. He let his hair grow long again. It was September and then it was March. Milly said she really did want a divorce, it wasn’t working out and she could not stand him nagging at her any more.

Him nagging at her?

“Yes, morning and night, nag, nag, nag.”

“But you’re never even home in the morning, and you’re usually not home at night.”

“There, you’re doing it again! You’re nagging now. And when you don’t come right out and nag openly, you do it silently. You’ve been nagging me ever since dinner without saying a word.”

“I’ve been reading a book.” He wagged the book at her accusingly. “I wasn’t even thinking about you. Unless I nag you just by existing.” He had meant this to sound pathetic.

“You can, you do.”

They were both too pooped and tired to make it a really fun argument, and so just to keep it interesting they had to keep raising the stakes. It ended with Milly screaming and Boz in tears and Boz packing his things into a cupboard which he took in a taxi to East 11th Street. His mother was delighted to see him. She had been fighting with Lottie and expected Boz to take her side. Boz was given his old bed in the living room and Amparo had to sleep with her mother. The air was full of smoke from Mrs. Hanson’s cigarettes and Boz felt more and more sick. It was all he could do to keep from phoning Milly. Shrimp didn’t come home and Lottie was zonked out as usual on Oraline. It was not a life for human beings.

2

The Sacred Heart, gold beard, pink cheeks, blue blue eyes, gazed intently across twelve feet of living space and out the window unit at long recessions of yellow brick. Beside him a Conservation Corporation calendar blinked now BEFORE and then AFTER views of the Grand Canyon. Boz turned over so as not to have to look at Jesus, the Grand Canyon, Jesus. The tuckaway lurched to port side. Mrs. Hanson had been thinking of having someone in to fix the sofa (the missing leg led an independent existence in the cabinet below the sink) ever since the Welfare people had busted it on the day how many years ago that the Hansons had moved in to 334. She would discuss with her family, or with the nice Mrs. Miller from the MOD office, the obstacles in the way of this undertaking, which proved upon examination so ramiform and finally so formidable as very nearly to defeat her most energetic hopes. Nevertheless, some day.

Her nephew, Lottie’s youngest, was watching the war on the teevee. It was unusual for Boz to sleep so late. U.S. guerillas were burning down a fishing village somewhere. The camera followed the path of the flames along the string of fishing boats, then held for a long time on the empty blue of the water.

Then a slow zoom back that took in all the boats together. The horizon warped and flickered through a haze of flame. Gorgeous. Was it a rerun? Boz seemed to think he’d seen that last shot before.

“Hi there, Mickey.”

“Hi, Uncle Boz. Grandma says you’re getting divorced. Are you going to live with us again?”

“Your grandma needs a decongestant. I’m only here for a few days. On a visit.”

The apple pie colophon, signaling the end of the war for that Wednesday morning, splattered and the decibels were boosted for the April Ford commercial, “Come and Get Me, Cop.”

It was a happy little song, but how could he feel happy when he knew that Milly was probably watching it too and enjoying it in a faculty lounge somewhere, never even giving a thought for Boz, or where he was, or how he felt. Milly studied all the commercials and could play them back to you verbatim, every tremor and inflection just so. And not a milligram of her own punch. Creative? As a parrot.

Now, what if he were to tell her that? What if he told her that she would never be anything more than a second-string Grade-Z hygiene demonstrator for the Board of Education. Cruel? Boz was supposed to be cruel?

He shook his head, flip flop of auburn. “Baby, you don’t know what cruel is.”

Mickey switched off the teevee. “Oh, if you think this was something today you should have seen them yesterday. They were in this school. Parkistanis, I think. Yeah. You should have seen it. That was cruel. They wiped them out.”

“Who did?”

“Company A.” Mickey came to attention and saluted the air. Kids his age (six) always wanted to be guerillas or firemen. At ten it was pop singers. At fourteen, if they were bright (and somehow all the Hansons were bright), they wanted to write. Boz still had a whole scrapbook of the advertisements he’d written in high school. And then, at twenty …?

Don’t think about it.

“You didn’t care?” Boz asked.

“Care?”

“About the kids in the school.”

“They were insurgents,” Mickey explained. “It was in Pakistan.” Even Mars was more real than Pakistan and no one gets upset about schools burning on Mars.

A flop flop flop of slippers and Mrs. Hanson shambled in with a cup of Koffee. “Politics, you’d try and argue politics with a six-year-old! Here. Go ahead, drink it.”

He sipped the sweet thickened Koffee and it was as though every stale essence in the building, garbage rotting in bins and grease turning yellow on kitchen walls, tobacco smoke and stale beer and Synthamon candies, everything ersatz, everything he’d thought he had escaped, had flooded back into the core of his body with just that one mouthful.

“He’s become too good for us now, Mickey. Look at him.”

“It’s sweeter than I’m used to. Otherwise it’s fine, Mom.”

“It’s no different than you used to have it. Three tablets. I’ll drink this one and make you another. You came here to stay.”

“No, I told you last night that—”

She waved a hand at him, shouted to her grandson: “Where you going?”

“Down to the street.”

“Take the key and bring the mail up first, understand. If you don’t… ”

He was gone. She collapsed in the green chair, on top of a pile of clothes, talking to herself or to him, she wasn’t particular about her audience. he heard not words but the reedy vibrato of her phlegm, saw the fingers stained with nicotine, the jiggle of sallow chin-flesh, the MOD teeth. My mother.

Boz turned his eyes to the scaly wall where roseate AFTER winked to a tawdry BEFORE and Jesus, squeezing a bleeding organ in his right hand, forgave the world for yellow bricks that stretched as far as the eye could see.

“The work she comes home with you wouldn’t believe. I told Lottie, it’s a crime, she should complain. How old is she? Twelve years old. If it had been Shrimp, if it had been you, I wouldn’t say a word, but she has her mother’s health, she’s very delicate. And the exercises they make them do, it’s not decent for a child. I’m not against sex, I always let you and Milly do whatever you wanted. I turned my head. But that sort of thing should be private between two people. The things you see, and I mean right out on the street. They don’t even go into a doorway now. So I tried to make Lottie see reason, I was very calm, I didn’t raise my voice. Lottie doesn’t want it herself, you know, she’s being pressured by the school. How often would she be able to see her? Weekends. And one month in the summer. It’s all Shrimp’s doing. I said to Shrimp, if you want to be a ballet dancer then you go ahead and be a ballet dancer but leave Amparo alone. The man came from the school, and he was very smooth and Lottie signed the papers. I could have cried. of course it was all arranged. They waited till I was out of the house. She’s your child, I told her, leave me out of it. If that’s what you want for her, the kind of future you think she deserves. You should hear the stories she comes home with. Twelve years old! It’s Shrimp, taking her to those movies, taking her to the park. Of course you can see all of that on television too, that Channel 5, I don’t know why they … But I suppose it’s none of my business. No one cares what you think when you’re old. Let her go to the Lowen School, it won’t break my heart.” She kneaded the left side of her dress illustratively: her heart.

“We could use the room here, though you won’t hear me complaining about that. Mrs. Miller said we could apply for a larger apartment, there’s five of us, and now six with you, but if I said yes and we moved and then Amparo goes off to this school, we’d just have to move back here, because the requirement there is for five people. Besides it would mean moving all the way to Queens. Now if Lottie were to have another, but of course her health isn’t up to it, not to speak of the mental thing. And Shrimp? Well, I don’t have to go into that. So I said no, let’s stay put. Besides, if we did go and then had to come back here, we probably wouldn’t have the luck to get the same apartment again. I don’t deny that there are lots of things wrong with it, but still. Try and get water after four o’clock, like sucking a dry tit.”

Hoarse laughter, another cigarette. Having broken the thread of thought, she found herself lost in the labyrinth: her eyes darted around the room, little cultured pearls that bounced off into every corner.

Boz had not listened to the monologue, but he was aware of the panic that welled up to fill the sudden wonderful silence. Living with Milly he’d forgotten this side of things, the causeless incurable terrors. Not just his mother’s; everyone who lived below 34th.

Mrs. Hanson slurped her Koffee. The sound (her own sound, she made it) reassured her and she started talking again, making more of her own sounds. The panic ebbed. Boz closed his eyes.

“That Mrs. Miller means well of course but she doesn’t understand my situation. What do you think she said I should do, what do you think? Visit that death-house on 12th Street! Said it would be an inspiration. Not to me, to them. Seeing someone at my age with my energy and the head of a family.my age! You’d think I was ready to turn to dust like one of those what-do-you-call-its. I was born in 1967, the year the first man landed on the moon. Nineteen. Sixty. Seven. I’m not even sixty, but suppose I were, is there a law against it? Listen, as long as I can make it up those stairs they don’t have to worry about me! Those elevators are a crime. I can’t even remember the last time … No, wait a minute, I can. You were eight years old, and every time I took you inside you’d start to cry. You used to cry about everything though. It’s my own fault, spoiling you, and your sisters went right along. That time I came home and you were in Lottie’s clothes, lipstick and everything, and to think she helped you. Well, I stopped that! If it had been Shrimp I could understand. Shrimp’s that way herself. I always said to Mrs. Holt when she was alive, she had very old-fashioned ideas, Mrs. Holt, that as long as Shrimp had what she wanted it was no concern of hers or mine. And anyhow you’ll have to admit that she was a homely girl, while Lottie, oh my, Lottie was so beautiful. Even in high school. She’d spend all her time in front of a mirror and you could hardly blame her. Like a movie star.”

She lowered her voice, as though confiding a secret to the olive-drab film of dehydrated vegetable oil on her Koffee.

“And then to go and do that. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him. Is it prejudice to want something better for your children, then I’m prejudiced. A good-looking boy, I don’t deny that, and even smart in his way I suppose. He wrote poems to her. In Spanish, so I wouldn’t be able to understand them. I told her, it’s your life, Lottie, go ahead and ruin it any way you like but don’t tell me I’m prejudiced. You children never heard me use words like that and you never will. I may not have more than a high school education but I know the difference between … right and wrong. At the wedding she wore this blue dress and I never said a word about how short it was. So beautiful. It still makes me cry.” She paused. Then, with great emphasis, as though this were the single unassailable conclusion that these many evidences remorselessly required of her: “He was always very polite.”

Another longer pause.

“You’re not listening to me, Boz.”

“Yes, I am. You said he was always very polite.”

“Who?”

Boz searched through his inner family album for the face of anyone who might have behaved politely to his mother.

“My brother-in-law?”

Mrs. Hanson nodded. “Exactly. Juano. And she also said why didn’t I try religion.” She shook her head in a pantomime of amazement that such things could be allowed.

“She? Who?”

The dry lips puckered with disappointment. The discontinuity had been intended, a trap, but Boz had slipped past. She knew he wasn’t listening but she couldn’t prove it.

“Mrs. Miller. She said it would be good for me. I told her one religious nut in the family is enough and besides I don’t call that religion. I mean, I enjoy a stick of Oraline as much as anyone, but religion has to come from the heart.” Again she rumpled the violet, orange, and heather-gold flames of her bodice. Down below there somewhere it filled up with blood and squirted it out into the arteries: her heart.

“Are you still that way?” she asked.

“Religious? No, I was off that before I got married. Milly’s dead against it too. It’s all chemistry.”

“Try and tell that to your sister.”

“Oh, but for Shrimp it’s a meaningful experience. She understands about the chemistry. She just doesn’t care, so long as it works.”

Boz knew better than to take sides in any family quarrel. Once already in his life he had had to slip loose from those knots, and he knew their strength.

Mickey returned with the mail, laid it on the TV, and was out the door before his grandmother could invent new errands.

One envelope.

“Is it for me?” Mrs. Hanson asked. Boz didn’t stir. She took a deep wheezing breath and pushed herself up out of the chair.

“It’s for Lottie,” she announced, opening the envelope. “It’s from the Alexander Lowen School. Where Amparo wants to go.”

“What’s it say?”

“They’ll take her. She has a scholarship for one year. Six thousand dollars.”

“Jesus. That’s great.”

Mrs. Hanson sat down on the couch, across Boz’s ankles, and cried. She cried for well over five minutes. Then the kitchen timer went off: As the World Turns. She hadn’t missed an installment in years and neither had Boz. She stopped crying. They watched the program.

Sitting there pinned beneath his mother’s weight, warmed by her flesh, Boz felt good. He could shrink down to the size of a postage stamp, a pearl, a pea, a wee small thing, mindless and happy, nonexistent, utterly lost in the mail.

3

Shrimp was digging God, and God (she felt sure) was digging Shrimp: her. Here on the roof of 334; Him, out there in the russet smogs of dusk, in the lovely poisons of the Jersey air, everywhere. Or maybe it wasn’t God but something moving more or less in that direction. Shrimp wasn’t sure.

Boz, dangling his feet over the ledge, watched the double moire patterns of her skin and her shift. The spiral patterns of the cloth moved widdershins, the flesh patterns stenciled beneath ran deasil. The March wind fluttered the material and Shrimp swayed and the spirals spun, vortices of gold and green, lyric illusions.

Off somewhere on another roof an illegal dog yapped. Yap, yap, yap; I love you, I love you, I love you.

Usually Boz tried to stay on the surface of something nice like this, but tonight he was exiled to inside of himself, redefining his problem and coming to grips with it realistically. Basically (he decided) the trouble lay in his own character. He was weak. He had let Milly have her own way in everything until she’d forgotten that Boz might have his own legitimate demands. Even Boz had forgotten. It was a one-sided relationship. He felt he was vanishing, melting into air, sucked down into the green-gold whirlpool. He felt like shit. The pills had taken him in exactly the wrong direction, and Shrimp, out there in St. Theresa country, was no aid or comfort.

The russet dimmed to a dark mauve and then it was night. God veiled His glory and Shrimp came down. “Poor Boz.” she said.

“Poor Boz,” he agreed.

“On the other hand you’ve gotten away from this.” Her hand whisked away the East Village roofscape and every ugliness. A second, more impatient whisk, as though she’d found the whole mess glued to her hand. In fact, it had become her hand, her arm, the whole stiff contraption of flesh she had managed for three hours and fifteen minutes to escape.

“And poor Shrimp.”

“Poor Shrimp too,” he agreed.

“Because I’m stuck here.”

“This morning who was telling me it isn’t where you live, it’s how you live?”

She shrugged a sharp-edged scapula. She hadn’t been speaking of the building but of her own body, but it would have taken too much trouble to explain that to blossoming Narcissus. She was annoyed with Boz for dwelling on his miseries, his inner conflicts. She had her own dissatisfactions that she wanted to discuss, hundreds.

“Your problem is very simple, Boz. Once you face it. Your problem is that basically you’re a Republican.”

“Oh, come off it, Shrimp!”

“Honestly. When you and Milly started living together, Lottie and I couldn’t believe it. It had always been clear as day to us.”

“Just because I have a pretty face doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, Boz, you’re being dense. You know that has nothing to do with it one way or the other. And I’m not saying you should vote Republican because I do. But I can read the signs. If you’d look at yourself with a little psychoanalysis you’d be forced to see how much you’ve been repressing.”

He flared up. It was one thing to be called a Republican but no one was going to call him repressed. “Well, shit on you, sister. If you want to know my party, I’ll tell you. When I was thirteen I used to jerk off while I watched you undress, and believe me, it takes a pretty dedicated Democrat to do that.”

“That’s nasty,” she said.

It was nasty, and as untrue as it was nasty. He’d fantasized often enough about Lottie, about Shrimp never. Her short thin brittle body appalled him. She was a gothic cathedral bristling with crockets and pinnacles, a forest of leafless trees; he wanted nice sunshiny cortiles and flowery glades. She was a Dürer engraving; he was a landscape by Domenichino. Screw Shrimp? He’d as soon turn Republican, even if she was his own sister.

“Not that I’m against Republicanism,” he added diplomatically. “I’m no Puritan. I just don’t enjoy having sex with other guys.”

“You’ve never given it a chance.” She spoke in an aggrieved tone.

“Sure I have. Plenty of times.”

“Then why is your marriage breaking up?”

Tears started dripping. He cried all the time nowadays, like an air conditioner. Shrimp, skilled in compassion, wept right along with him, wrapping a length of wiry arm around his bare, exquisite shoulders.

Snuffling, he threw back his head. Flip flop of auburn, big brave smile. “How about the party?”

“Not for me, not tonight. I’m feeling too religious and holy, sort of. Maybe later perhaps.”

“Aw, Shrimp.”

“Really.” She wrapped herself in her arms, stuck out her chin, waited for him to plead.

The dog in the distance made new noises.

“One time, when I was a kid… right after we moved here, in fact…” Boz began dreamily.

But he could see she wasn’t listening.

Dogs had just been made finally illegal and the dog owners were doing Anne-Frank numbers to protect their pups from the city Gestapo. They stopped walking them on the streets, so the roof of 334, which the Park Commission had declared to be a playground (they’d built a cyclone fence all round the edge to give it a playground atmosphere), got to be ankle-deep in dogshit. A war developed between the kids and dogs to see who the roof would belong to. The kids would hunt down off-leash dogs, usually at night, and throw them over the edge. German shepherds fought back the hardest. Boz had seen a shepherd take one of Milly’s cousins down to the pavement with him.

All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you just forget them, one after another. He felt an elegant, controlled sadness, as though, were he to sit down now and work at it, he might write a fine, mature piece of philosophy.

“I’m going to sail away now. Okay?”

“Enjoy yourself,” Shrimp said.

He touched her ear with his lips, but it wasn’t, even in a brotherly sense, a kiss. A sign, rather, of the distance between them, like the signs on highways that tell you how far it is in miles to New York City.

The party was not by any means a form of insanity but Boz enjoyed himself in a quiet decorative way, sitting on a bench and looking at knees. Then Williken, the photographer from 334, came over and told Boz about Nuancism, Williken being a Nuancist from way back when, how it was overdue for a renaissance. he looked older than Boz remembered him, parched and fleshless and pathetically forty-three.

“Forty-three is the best age,” Williken said again, having at last disposed of the history of art to his satisfaction.

“Better than twenty-one?” Which was Boz’s age, of course.

Williken decided this was a joke and coughed. (Williken smoked tobacco.) Boz looked away and caught the fellow with the red beard eyeing him. A small gold earring twinkled in his left ear.

“Twice as good,” Williken said, “and then a bit.” Since this was a joke too, he coughed again.

He was (the red beard, the gold earring), next to Boz, the best-looking person there. Boz got up, with a pat to the old man’s frayed and folded hands.

“And how old are you?” he asked the red beard, the gold earring.

“Six foot two. Yourself?”

“I’m versatile, pretty much. Where do you live?”

“The East Seventies. Yourself?”

“I’ve been evacuated.” Boz struck a pose: Sebastian (Guido’s) spreading himself open, flowerlike, to receive the arrows of men’s admiration. Oh, Boz could charm the plaster off the walls! “Are you a friend of January’s?”

“A friend of a friend, but that friend didn’t show. Yourself?”

“The same thing, sort of.”

Danny (his name was Danny) grabbed a handful of the auburn hair.

“I like your knees,” Boz said.

“You don’t think they’re too bushy?”

“No, I like bushy knees.”

When they left January was in the bathroom. They shouted their good-byes through the paper panel. All the way home—going down the stairs, in the street, in the subway, in the elevator of Danny’s building—they kissed and touched and rubbed up against each other, but though this was exciting to Boz in a psychological way, it didn’t give him a hard-on.

Nothing gave Boz a hard-on.

While Danny, behind the screen, stirred the instant milk over the hot-coil, Boz, alone in all that double bed, watched the hamsters in their cage. The hamsters were screwing in the jumpy, jittery way that hamsters have, and the lady hamsters said, “Shirk, shirk, shirk.” All nature reproached Boz.

“Sweetener?” Danny asked, emerging with the cups.

“Thanks just the same. I shouldn’t be wasting your time like this.”

“Who’s to say the time’s been wasted? Maybe in another half-hour …” the moustache detached itself from the beard: a smile.

Boz smoothed his pubic hairs sadly, ruefully, wobbled the oblivious soft cock. “No, it’s out of commission tonight.”

“Maybe a bit of roughing up! I know guys who— ”

Boz shook his head. “It wouldn’t help.”

“Well, drink your Koffee. Sex isn’t that important, believe me. There are other things.”

The hamster said, “Shirk! Shirk, shirk.”

“I suppose not.”

“It isn’t,” Danny insisted. “Are you always impotent?” There, he had said the dreaded word.

“God, no!” (The horror of it!)

“So? One off-night is nothing to worry about. It happens to me all the time and I do it for a living. I’m a hygiene demonstrator.”

“You?”

“Why not? A Democrat by day and a Republican in my spare time. By the way, how are you registered?”

Boz shrugged. “What difference does it make if you don’t vote?”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I’m a Democrat actually, but before I got married I was Independent. That’s why, tonight, I never thought, when I came home with you, that—I mean, you’re damned good-looking, Danny.”

Danny blushed agreement. “Get off it. So tell me, what’s wrong with your marriage?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Boz said, and then he went through the whole story of Boz and Milly: of how they had had a beautiful relationship, of how that relationship had then soured, of how he didn’t understand why.

“Have you seen a counselor?” Danny asked.

“What good would that do?”

Danny had manufactured a tear of real compassion and he lifted Boz’s chin to make certain he would notice. “You should. Your marriage still means a lot to you and if something’s gone wrong you should at least know what. I mean, it might just be something stupid, like getting your metabolic cycles synchronized.”

“You’re right, I guess.”

Danny bent over and squeezed Boz’s calf earnestly. “Of course I’m right. Tell you what, I know someone who’s supposed to be terrific. On Park Avenue. I’ll give you his number.” He kissed Boz quickly on the nose, just in time for the tear of his empathy to plop on Boz’s cheek.

Later, after one last determined effort, Danny, in nothing but his transparency, saw Boz down to the moat, which (also) was defunct.

When they had kissed good-bye and while they were still shaking hands, Boz asked, as though off-handedly, as though he had been thinking of anything else for the last half-hour: “By the way, you wouldn’t have worked at Erasmus Hall, would you?”

“No. Why? Did you go there? I wouldn’t have been teaching anywhere in your time.”

“No. I have a friend who works there. At Washington Irving?”

“I’m out in Bedford-Stuyvesant, actually.” The admission was not without its pennyworth of chagrin. “But what’s his name? Maybe we met at a union meeting, or something like that.”

“It’s a she—Milly Hanson.”

“Sorry, never heard of her. There are a lot of us, you know. This is a big city.” In every direction the pavement and the walls agreed.

Their hands unclasped. Their smiles faded, and they became invisible to each other, like boats that draw apart, moving across the water into heavy mists.

4

227 Park Avenue, where McGonagall’s office was, was a dowdy sixtyish affair that had been a bit player back in the glass-and-steel boom. But then came the ground-test tremors of ’96 and it had to be wrapped. Now it had the look, outside, of Milly’s last-year dirty-yellow Wooly© waistcoat. That, plus the fact that McGonagall was an old-fashioned-type Republican (a style that still mostly inspired distrust), made it hard for him to get even the official Guild minimum for his services. Not that it made much difference for them—after the first fifty dollars the Board of Education would pay the rest under its sanity-and-health clause.

The waiting room was simply done up with paper mattresses and a couple authenticated Saroyans to cheer up the noonday-white walls: an

Alice

and:

or

or

Fashionwise, Milly was doing an imitation of maiden modesty in her old PanAm uniform, a blue-gray gauzy jerkin over crisp business-like pajamas. Boz, meanwhile, was sporting creamy street shorts and a length of the same blue-gray gauze knotted round his throat. When he moved it fluttered after him like a shadow. Between them they were altogether tout ensemble, a picture. They didn’t talk. They waited in the room designed for that purpose.

Half a damned hour.

The entrance to McGonagall’s office was something from the annals of the Met. The door sublimed into flame and they passed through, a Pamina, a Tamino, accompanied appropriately by flute and drum, strings and horns. A fat man in a white shift welcomed them mutely into his bargain-rate temple of wisdom, clasping first Pamina’s, then Tamino’s hands in his. A sensitivist obviously.

He pressed his pink-frosted middle-aged face close to Boz’s, as though he were reading its fine print. “You’re Boz,” he said reverently. Then with a glance in her direction: “And you’re Milly.”

“No,” she said peevishly (it was that half hour), “I’m Boz, and she’s Milly.”

“Sometimes,” McGonagall said, letting go, “the best solution is divorce. I want you both to understand that if that should be my opinion in your case, I won’t hesitate to say so. If you’re annoyed that I kept you waiting so long, tant pis, since it was for a good reason. It rids us of our company manners from the start. And what is the first thing you say when you come in here? That your husband is a woman! How did it make you feel, Boz, to know that Milly would like to cut off your balls and wear them herself?”

Boz shrugged, long-suffering, ever-likable. “I thought it was funny.”

“Ha,” laughed McGonagall, “that’s what you thought. But what did you feel? Did you want to strike her? Were you afraid? Or secretly pleased?”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

McGonagall’s living body sank into something pneumatic and blue and floated there like a giant white squid bobbing on the calm surface of a summer sea. “Well then, tell me about your sex life, Mrs. Hanson.”

“Our sex life is pretty,” Milly said.

“Adventurous,” Boz continued.

“And quite frequent.” She folded her pretty, faultless arms.

“When we’re together,” Boz added. A grace note of genuine self-pity decorated the flat irony of the statement. This soon he felt his insides squeezing some idle tears from the appropriate glands; while, in other glands, Milly had begun to churn up petty grievances into a lovely smooth yellow anger. In this, as in so many other ways, they achieved a kind of symmetry between them, they made a pair.

“Your jobs?”

“All that kind of thing is on our profiles.” Milly said. “You’ve had a month to look at them. A half hour, at the very least.”

“But on your profile, Mrs. Hanson, there’s no mention of this remarkable reluctance of yours, this grudging every word.” He lifted two ambiguous fingers, scolding and blessing her in a single gesture. Then, to Boz: “What do you do, Boz?”

“Oh. I’m strictly a husband. Milly’s the breadwinner.”

They both looked at Milly.

“I demonstrate sex in the high schools,” she said.

“Sometimes,” McGonagall said spilling sideways meditatively over his blue balloon (like all very clever fat men he knew how to pretend to be Buddha), “what are thought to be marital difficulties have their origin in job problems.”

Milly smiled an assured porcelain smile. “The city tests us every semester on job satisfaction, Mr. McGonagall. Last time I came out a little high on the ambition scale, but not above the mean score for those who eventually have moved on into administrative work. Boz and I are here because we can’t spend two hours together without starting to fight. I can’t sleep in the same bed anymore, and he gets heartburn when we eat together.”

“Well, let’s assume for now that you are adjusted to your job. How about you, Boz? Have you been happy being ‘just a husband’?”

Boz fingered the gauze knotted round his throat. “Well, no … I guess I’m not completely happy or we wouldn’t be here. I get—oh. I don’t know—restless. Sometimes. But I know I wouldn’t be any happier working at a job. Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.”

“Have you ever had a real job?”

“A couple times. I hated it. I think most people must hate their jobs. I mean, why else do they pay people to work?”

“Yet something is wrong, Boz. Something is missing from your life that ought to be there.”

“Something. I don’t know what.” He looked downhearted.

McGonagall reached out for his hand. Human contact was of fundamental importance in McGonagall’s business. “Children?” he asked, turning to Milly, after this episode of warmth and feeling.

“We can’t afford children.”

“Would you want them, if you felt you could afford them?”

She pursed her lips. “Oh yes, very much.”

“Lots of children?”

“Really!”

“There are people, you know, who do want lots of children, who’d have as many as they could if it weren’t for the Regents system.”

“My mother,” Boz volunteered, “had four kids. They all came before the Genetic Testing Act, of course, except for me, and I was only allowed then because Jimmy, her oldest one, got killed in a riot, or a dance, or something, when he was fourteen.”

“Do you have pets at home?” McGonagall’s drift was clear.

“A cat,” Boz said, “and a rubber plant.”

“Who takes care of the cat mostly?”

“I do, but that’s because I’m there through the day. Since I’ve been gone Milly’s had to take care of Tabby. It must be lonely for her. For old Tabbycat.”

“Kittens?”

Boz shook his head.

“No,” Milly said. “I had her spayed.”

Boz could almost hear McGonagall thinking: Oh ho! He knew how the session would continue from this point and that the heat was off him and on Milly. McGonagall might be right, or he might not, but he had an idea between his jaws and he wasn’t letting loose: Milly needed to have a baby (a woman’s fulfillment), and Boz, well, it looked like Boz was going to be a mother.

Sure enough, by the end of the session Milly was spread out on the pliant white floor, back uparched, screaming (“Yes, a baby! I want a baby! Yes, a baby! A baby!”) and having hysterical simulated birth spasms. It was beautiful. Milly hadn’t broken down, really broken all the way down, and cried in how long? Years. It was one hundred per cent beautiful.

Afterwards they decided to go down by the stairs, which were dusty and dark and tremendously erotic. They made it on the 28th floor landing and, their legs all atremble, again on the 12th. The juice shot out of him in dazzling gigantic hiccoughs, like milk spurting out of a full-to-the-top two-quart container, so much they neither could believe it: a heavenly breakfast, a miracle proving their existence, and a promise they were both determined to keep.

It wasn’t all sweetness and roses, by any means. They had more paper work to do than from all the 1040 forms they’d ever prepared. Plus visits to a pregnancy counselor; to the hospital to get the prescriptions they both had to start taking; then reserving a bottle at Mount Sinai for after Milly’s fourth month (the city would pay for that, so she could stay on the job); and the final solemn moment at the Regents office when Milly drank the first bitter glass of the anticontraceptive agent. (She was sick the rest of the day, but did she complain? Yes.) For two weeks after that she couldn’t drink anything that came out of the tap in the apartment until, happy day, her morning test showed a positive reading.

They decided it would be a girl: Loretta, after Boz’s sister. They redecided, later on: Aphra, Murray, Algebra, Sniffles (Boz’s preferences), and Pamela, Grace, Lulu, and Maureen (Milly’s preferences).

Boz knitted a kind of blanket.

The days grew longer and the nights shorter. Then vice versa. Peanut (which was her name whenever they couldn’t decide what her name really would be) was scheduled to be decanted the night before Xmas, 2025.

But the important thing, beyond the microchemistry of where babies come from, was the problem of psychological adjustment to parenthood, by no means a simple thing.

This is the way McGonagall put it to Boz and Milly during their last private counseling session:

“The way we work, the way we talk, the way we watch television or walk down the street, even the way we fuck, or maybe that especially—each of those is part of the problem of identity. We can’t do any of those things authentically until we find out who we really are and be that person, inside and out, instead of the person other people want us to be. Usually those other people, if they want us to be something we aren’t, are using us as a laboratory for working out their own identity problems.

“Now Boz, we’ve seen how you’re expected, a hundred tiny times a day, to seem to be one kind of person in personal relationships and a completely different kind of person at other times. Or to use your own words—you’re ‘just a husband.’ This particular way of sawing a person in two got started in the last century, with automation. First jobs became easier, and then scarcer—especially the kinds of jobs that came under the heading of a ‘man’s work.’ In every field men were working side by side with women. For some men the only way to project a virile image was to wear Levi’s on the weekends and to smoke the right brand of cigarette. Marlboros, usually.” His lips tightened and his fingers flexed delicately, as again, in his mouth and in his lungs, desire contested with will in the endless, ancient battle: with just such a gesture would a stylite have spoken of the temptations of the flesh, rehearsing the old pleasures only to reject them.

“What this meant, in psychological terms, was that men no longer needed the same kind of uptight, aggressive character structure, any more than they needed the bulky, Greek-wrestler physiques that went along with that kind of character. Even as sexual plumage that kind of body became unfashionable. Girls began to prefer slender, short ectomorphs. The ideal couples were those, like the two of you as a matter of fact, who mirrored each other. It was a kind of movement inward from the poles of sexuality.

“Today, for the first time in human history, men are free to express the essentially feminine component in their personality. In fact, from the economic point of view, it’s almost required of them. Of course, I’m not talking about homosexuality. A man can be feminized well beyond the point of transvestism without losing his preference for cunt, a preference which is an inescapable consequence of having a cock.”

He paused to appreciate his own searing honesty—a Republican speaking at a testimonial dinner for Adlai Stevenson!

“Well, this is pretty much what you must have heard all through high school, but it’s one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel it in your body. What most men felt then—the ones who allowed themselves to go along with the feminizing tendencies of the age—was simply a crushing, horrible, total guilt a guilt that became, eventually, a much worse burden than the initial repression. And so the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties was followed by the dreary Counter-revolution of the Seventies and Eighties, when I grew up. Let me tell you, though I’m sure you’ve been told many times, that it was simply awful. All the men dressed in black or gray or possibly, the adventuresome ones, a muddy brown. They had short haircuts and walked—you can see it in the movies they made then—like early-model robots. They had made such an effort to deny what was happening that they’d become frozen from the waist down. It got so bad that at one point there were four teevee series about zombies.

“I wouldn’t be going over this ancient history except that I don’t think young people your age realize how lucky you are having missed that. Life still has problems—or I’d be out of work—but at least people today who want to solve them have a chance.

“To get back to the decision you’re facing, Boz. It was in that same period, the early Eighties (in Japan, of course, since it would surely have been illegal in the States then), that the research was done that allowed feminization to be more than a mere cosmetic process. Even so, it was years before these techniques became at all widespread. Only in the last two decades, really. Before our time, every man had been obliged, for simple biological reasons, to deny his own deep-rooted maternal instincts. Motherhood is basically a psychosocial, and not a sexual, phenomenon. Every child, be he boy or girl, grows up by learning to emulate his mother. He (or she) plays with dolls and cooks mud pies—if he lives somewhere where mud is available. He rides the shopping cart through the supermarket, like a little kangaroo. And so on. It’s only natural for men, when they grow up, to wish to be mothers themselves, if their social and economic circumstances allow it—that is to say, if they have the leisure, since the rest can now be taken care of.

“In short, Milly, Boz needs more than your love, or any woman’s love, or any man’s love, for that matter. Like you, he needs another kind of fulfillment. He needs, as you do, a child. He needs, even more than you do, the experience of motherhood.”

5

In November, at Mount Sinai, Boz had the operation—and Milly too, of course, since she had to be the donor. Already he’d undergone the series of implantations of plastic “dummies” to prepare the skin of his chest for the new glands that would be living there—and to prepare Boz himself spiritually for his new condition. Simultaneously a course of hormone treatments created a new chemical balance in his body so that the mammaries would be incorporated into its working order and yield from the first a nourishing milk.

Motherhood (as McGonagall had often explained) to be a truly meaningful and liberating experience had to be entered into whole-heartedly. It had to become part of the structure of nerve and tissue, not just a process or a habit or a social role.

Every hour of that first month was an identity crisis. A moment in front of a mirror could send Boz off into fits of painful laughter or precipitate him into hours of gloom. Twice, returning from her job, Milly was convinced that her husband had buckled under the strain, but each time her tenderness and patience through the night saw Boz over the hump. In the morning they would go to the hospital to see Peanut floating in her bottle of brown glass, pretty as a waterlily. She was completely formed now and a human being just like her mother and father. At those moments Boz couldn’t understand what all this agonizing had been about. If anyone ought to have been upset, it should have been Milly, for there she stood, on the threshold of parenthood, slim-bellied, with tubes of liquid silicone for breasts, robbed by the hospital and her husband of the actual experience of maternity. Yet she seemed to possess only reverence for this new life they had created between them. It was as though Milly, rather than Boz, were Peanut’s father, and birth were a mystery she might admire from a distance but never wholly, never intimately, share.

Then, precisely as scheduled, at seven o’clock of the evening of December 24, Peanut (who was stuck with this name now for good and forever, since they’d never been able to agree on any other) was released from the brown glass womb, tilted topsy-turvy, tapped on the back. With a fine, full-throated yell (which was to be played back for her every birthday till she was twenty-one years old, the year she rebelled and threw the tape in an incinerator), Peanut Hanson joined the human race.

The one thing he had not been expecting, the wonderful thing, was how busy he had to be. Till now his concern had always been to find ways to fill the vacant daylight hours, but in the first ecstasies of his new selflessness there wasn’t time for half of all that needed doing. It was more than a matter of meeting Peanut’s needs, though these were prodigious from the beginning and grew to heroic proportions. But with his daughter’s birth he had been converted to an eclectic, new-fangled form of conservatism. He started doing real cooking again and this time without the grocery bills rocketing. he studied Yoga with a handsome young yogi on Channel 3. (There was no time, of course, under the new regime for the four o’clock art movies.) He cut back his Koffee intake to a single cup with Milly at breakfast.

What’s more, he kept his zeal alive week after week after month after month. In a modest, modified form he never entirely abandoned the vision, if not always the reality, of a better richer fuller and more responsible life-pattern.

Peanut, meanwhile, grew. In two months she doubled her weight from six pounds two ounces to twelve pounds four ounces. She smiled at faces, and developed a repertoire of interesting sounds. She ate—first only a teaspoon or so—Banana-food and Pear-food and cereals. Before long she had dabbled in every flavor of vegetable Boz could find for her. It was only the beginning of what would be a long and varied career as a consumer.

One day early in May, after a chill, rainy spring, the temperature bounced up suddenly to 70°. A sea wind had rinsed the sky from its conventional dull gray to baby blue.

Boz decided that the time had come for Peanut’s first voyage into the unknown. He unsealed the door to the balcony and wheeled the little crib outside.

Peanut woke. Her eyes were hazel with tiny flecks of gold. Her skin was as pink as a shrimp bisque. She rocked her crib into a good temper. Boz watched the little fingers playing scales on the city’s springtime airs, and catching her gay spirits, he sang to her, a strange silly song he remembered her sister Lottie singing to Amparo, a song that Lottie had heard her mother sing to Boz:

A breeze ruffled Peanut’s dark silky hair, touched Boz’s heavier auburn curls. The sunlight and air were like the movies of a century ago, so impossibly clean. He just closed his eyes and practiced his breathing.

At two o’clock, punctual as the news, Peanut started crying. Boz lifted her from the crib and gave her his breast. Except when he left the apartment nowadays, Boz didn’t bother with clothing. The little mouth closed round his nipple and the little hands gripped the soft flesh back from the tit. Boz felt a customary tingle of pleasure but this time it didn’t fade away when Peanut settled into a steady rhythm of sucking and swallowing, sucking and swallowing. Instead it spread across the surface and down into the depths of his breast; it blossomed inward to his chest’s core. Without stiffening, his cock was visited by tremors of delicate pleasure, and this pleasure traveled, in waves, into his loins and down through the muscles of his legs. For a while he thought he would have to stop the feeding, the sensation became so intense, so exquisite, so much.

He tried that night to explain it to Milly, but she displayed no more than a polite interest. She’d been elected, a week before, to an important post in her union and her head was still filled with the grim, gray pleasure of ambition satisfied, of having squeezed a toe onto the very first rung of the ladder. He decided it would not be nice to carry on at greater length, so he saved it up for the next time Shrimp came by. Shrimp had had three children over the years (her Regents scores were so good that her pregnancies were subsidized by the National Genetics Council), but a sense of emotional self-defense had always kept Shrimp from relating too emphatically to the babies during her year-long stints of motherhood (after which they were sent to the Council’s schools in Wyoming and Utah). She assured Boz that what he’d felt that afternoon on the balcony had been nothing extraordinary, it happened to her all the time, but Boz knew that it had been the very essence of unusualness. It was, in Lord Krishna’s words, a peak experience, a glimpse behind the veil.

Finally, he realized, it was his own moment and could not be shared any more than it could be, in just the same way, repeated.

It never was repeated, that moment, even approximately. Eventually he was able to forget what it had been like and only remembered the remembering of it.

Some years later Boz and Milly were sitting out on their balcony at sunset. Neither had changed radically since Peanut’s birth. Boz was perhaps a bit heavier than Milly but it would have been hard to say whether this was from his having gained or Milly having lost. Milly was a supervisor now, and had a seat, besides, on three different committees.

Boz said, “Do you remember our special building?”

“What building is that?”

“The one over there. With the three windows.” Boz pointed to the right where gigantic twin apartments framed a vista westward of rooftops, cornices, and watertanks. Some of the buildings probably dated back to the New York of Boss Tweed; none were new.

Milly shook her head. “There are lots of buildings.”

“The one just in back of the right-hand corner of that big yellow-brick thing with the funny temple hiding its watertank. See it?”

“Mm. There?”

“Yes. You don’t remember it?”

“Vaguely. No.”

“We’d just moved in here and we couldn’t really afford the place, so for the first year it was practically bare. I kept after you about our buying a houseplant, and you said we’d have to wait. Does it start to come back?”

“Mistily.”

“Well, the two of us would come out here regularly and look out at the different buildings and try and figure out exactly which street each of them would be on and whether we knew any of them from sidewalk level.”

“I remember now! That’s the one that the windows were always closed. But that’s all I remember about it.”

“Well, we made up a story about it. We said that after maybe five years one of the windows would be opened just enough so we’d be able to see it from here, an inch or two. Then the next day it would be closed again.”

“And then?” She was by now genuinely and pleasantly puzzled.

“And then, according to our story, we’d watch it very carefully every day to see if that window was ever opened again. That’s how it became our houseplant. It was something we looked after the same way.”

“Did you keep watching it, in fact?”

“Sort of. Not every day. Every now and then.”

“Was that the whole story?”

“No. The end of the story was that one day, maybe another five years later, we’d be walking along an unfamiliar street and we’d recognize the building and go up and ring the bell and the super would answer it and we’d ask him why, five years before, that window had been open.”

“And what would he say?” From her smile it was clear that she remembered, but she asked out of respect for the wholeness of the tale.

“That he hadn’t thought anyone had ever noticed. And break into tears. of gratitude.”

“It’s a pretty story. I should feel guilty for having forgotten it. Whatever made you think of it today?”

“That’s the real end of the story. The window was open. The middle window.”

“Really? It’s closed now.”

“But it was open this morning. Ask Peanut. I pointed it out to her so I’d have a witness.”

“It’s a happy ending, certainly.” She touched the back of her hand to his cheek where he was experimenting with sideburns.

“I wonder why it was open, though. After all this time.”

“Well, in five years we can go and ask.”

He turned, smiling, to face her, and with the same gesture, touched her cheek, gently, and just for now they were happy. They were together again, on the balcony, on a summer evening, and they were happy.

Boz and Milly. Milly and Boz.