Buddwing

13

As they moved through their courtship — and he thought of it as that, no matter how brief it was — Buddwing felt himself becoming more and more involved in an intense inner reality that seemed as clearly defined as whatever was happening in the outer space through which he and the girl moved, inexorably pulled toward a conclusion he knew would no longer be valid when they reached it.

This curious dichotomy of logic puzzled them. He knew that this girl whose hand he held was Grace, and that their lives would become inextricably bound together, but he felt a curious futility about their early exploration of each other, as though it would lead only to an inconclusive end. But how could its conclusion be in doubt when everything they did together seemed to prepare naturally and easily for the next thing they did, and then to prepare for what followed that, building toward the only possible conclusion, the inescapable conclusion? And yet, he had the feeling that the end — why did he even consider an end, why did he allow his mind to entertain thoughts of an end when this was only the beginning? — would leave him exactly where he had been all along.

It seemed to him that there were definite echoes of Doris in this girl; she moved like her sometimes, and sometimes she even sounded like her; all right, what the hell, so she was something like Doris. But if a person followed that line of reasoning, he would have to conclude that every woman in his life was simply an echo of the woman who had preceded her. Grace was an echo of Doris, and Doris was an echo of his goddamn cousin Mandy with her piano legs, and Mandy was an echo of the first woman he had ever known, his mother. Well, okay, if a person wanted to get involved with all that Freudian jazz, well then, okay, Grace was an echo of his mother thrice removed, okay? A subtle refinement of the rather coarse and sometimes gross woman who had been his mother, okay? The same blond hair, and the same height more or less — he always thought of Grace as being tall, almost as tall as his mother had been — and the same directness and the same trigger-quick suspicious mind, and the same full breasts; okay, I’m falling in love with my own mother, okay? Well, now, just a minute, don’t draw any hasty conclusions. So you kind of like this girl, fine, you’ve got a little lech for her, fine, she does look a little bit like your dear mother the queen, the same blond hair, but let’s consider all the aspects of this, shall we? After all, if we are going to go searching through the involuted labyrinth of your mind, we must also inspect the possibility that not only does this sweet young social worker remind you of herself, who she most certainly is, this figure of beauty and Grace who she undoubtedly is and is not, and not only does she remind you of your dear late lamented mother with no mouth and blue pom-pom slippers and full and eagerly comforting breasts, and oh yes Mandy with her piano legs, your older cousin full of bursting vigor and sex, oh yes, all of these various and assorted women, but does she not remind you too of another sweet and angelic face, the cherub face on the roof of Il Duomo in Milan, the face that belonged to Beethoven who was machine-gunned to death in the underwater barbed wire off Tarawa? If we are to pursue these separate though tangential paths, where, then, will the conclusion lie? The conclusion will lie in endless repetition and inconclusion, that’s where. The conclusion will lie in the knowledge that you are not yourself at all but merely a collection of neurotic responses to random stimuli.

He remembered again the conversation he and Jesse had had one night aboard the Fancher shortly after the hurricane that had overtaken them on the way to Japan. They were trying to explain a theory to one of their shipmates, a radar striker named Starkey, getting more and more excited by their idea. Starkey would not or could not grasp their meaning.

“Don’t you see?” Jesse was saying. “I say ‘Good morning’ to you, right? But you don’t hear me say ‘Good morning,’ you only hear what you want to hear, and what you hear is ‘How are you?’ So you answer, ‘I’m fine, thanks, how’re you?’ but instead I hear you say, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ and I answer, ‘Beautiful day,’ but you hear me say, ‘Got the sniffles, can’t kick otherwise.’ Don’t you get it? It’s possible. We’re telling you it’s possible.”

“No, it ain’t,” Starkey replied. “Because if we hear only what we want to hear, then by God we’re seeing only what we want to see, too.”

“Why not?” Jesse said. “Why isn’t that possible, too? You trying to tell me we all see things the same way?”

“No, but if we’re both looking at an apple, we know by God it’s an apple and not an orange.”

“How do you know we’re both calling an apple the same thing?” Buddwing asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How do you know an apple isn’t an orange to me?”

“Because an apple is an apple, that’s why.”

“But suppose I just heard you say, ‘An orange is an orange’?”

“That ain’t what I said.

“How do you know it’s not what you said? How do you know you heard what I said?”

“I got ears, ain’t I?”

“Yes, you’ve got a nose.”

“I said ears.”

“Yes, I heard you. You said nose.”

“Don’t you see what he’s trying to do?” Jesse said to Starkey in exasperation.

“Yeah, he’s trying to mix me up, that’s what,” Starkey said.

“He’s trying to explain something, you goddamn fool.”

“He’s trying to explain that what I hear and what I see ain’t what I hear and what I see. Does that by God make sense to you?”

“It makes a whole hell of a lot of sense,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, well, I think you’ve both gone Asiatic,” Starkey said, and he stretched himself out full length in his sack and turned his back to them.

They left the aft sleeping compartment and went out to stand on the fantail. The war was over, the Fancher was running with lights again, they stood in semidarkness near the stacked garbage cans and talked in excited whispers, involved in a highly philosophical discussion for which neither of them was adequately prepared. Looking back on that night now, he recognized just how specious their theory had been. They had, after all, communicated. Moreover, they had both used words that each had readily understood. If they had seriously accepted their own theory, they would have been forced to believe that Jesse was supplying all the dialogue in a conversational stream that was quite different from the one Buddwing pursued, the one in which he was the sole creator. And granting this, it would have been necessary to grant the inevitably following premise as well: that one of those separate though concurrent conversations had simply vanished into air, leaving neither trace nor memory of itself.

Something was eluding him now, too; something had vanished as surely as that second hypothetical conversation. He moved through his courtship with Grace in the midst of a clamoring mingled reality, a disjointed conglomeration of thoughts and images from within and without, pulsating with life, each as real in its shimmering presence as the other. The reality was this girl who went through the exploratory rite with him, but the reality was also Grace, and cross-hatched through these two concurrent truths was another and terror-ridden truth, so that reality upon reality, truth upon truth crossed and recrossed, tumbled and swam. Surely these Saturday night people surrounding him, these pleasure-bound faces, these bodies in their twentieth-century finery, these sleek and shining automobiles, these curving neon tubes, these pavements, these streets, this city, surely these were as real as the girl on his arm. But a more youthful Grace was just as real, a Grace with brighter hair and a firmer body, a Grace in college-girl sweaters and skirts, this was real, too, this lived inside him, he could see her, he could touch her, he could reach out and touch her.

He moves out of the living room he approaches the door he can hear the swishing sound behind the door why should it frighten him he puts his hand on the doorknob it takes forever for his hand to open the door he sees the tile first there is something glittering on the tile.

The motion picture something stupid and shallow Kim Novak and three married men Dan sits beside him clever stupid insipid Dan they do not speak.

“Do you like Chinese food?” the girl asked.

“Well, I was in Chinatown this afternoon,” Buddwing said.

Grace, where are you?

When he and Dan came out of the movie theater the streets are cluttered with the Friday night throng, they buy the little black address book in a novelty shop on Broadway, Dan gives him the number, you won’t forget to call, will you? no I won’t forget, you won’t forget now, will you? no, I won’t forget I won’t forget I won’t forget.

He would not forget, he would never forget.

He would forget immediately.

He would forget almost everything they did the moment they did it, so that their life together would become an unremembered series of incidents leading to a final lapse.

There was in this girl, in Grace; there had been from the very beginning, a contradiction of personality that bewildered and intrigued him. She seemed to be a curious mixture of innocence and guile, of gaiety and brooding intensity, of high-minded purpose and of loose resolve. Perhaps he saw in her a mirror image of the person he had become; perhaps this was why she seemed so enormously attractive. His discharge from the navy had been abrupt and somehow unsatisfactory, a four-day stay at Treasure Island, and then a cattle-car cross-country trip and a whirlwind formal severance at Lido Beach. He could remember taking a bus across the Whitestone Bridge, his eyes drinking in the city in the distance, aware that a woman was holding onto a strap just to his right, but unwilling to give her his seat because then he would not have been able to see the skyline. He took a taxi from Gun Hill Road, and all the while a single thought kept echoing in his head, I’m going home, I’m going home, but he had not as yet given “home” a binding definition — where was “home?” Wasn’t “home” the Whitestone Bridge, and the magnificent skyline in the distance? Wasn’t “home” this familiar stretch of Gun Hill Road? Wasn’t it Evander Childs High School, and Bronxwood Avenue, and the rutted, potholed streets? He paid the cab driver and stood on the sidewalk with his sea-bag and looked up at the frame house and thought again, I’m going home, and the thought lingered in his mind as he walked up the driveway and then into the house, and stayed in his mind as he embraced his mother and his father, they both looked so much older, I’m going home. He sat in his own living room and told them of his adventures in Japan, and all the while he thought, I’m going home, because somehow none of this was home.

Beethoven was dead; none of the boys even mentioned his name. They went to see his mother once, but she wept when they arrived, and they never went again. L.J. had met a girl in Boston, and was seriously considering marrying her. Red Vest said he was bored and was thinking of re-enlisting. They spent the summer at Orchard Beach, reminiscing, but something was wrong, this was not home, these were not the boys he had once known. At the end of August, Red Vest went back into the army. In September, L.J. went to Boston to propose to the girl he had met there, and Buddwing enrolled at N.Y.U.

He first saw her in the small park outside the school in the middle of October. He was sitting on a bench with his back to the sun, watching the front steps of the building. Behind him, he could hear two men playing chess. Someone was strumming a guitar. She came down the steps and a student called, “Hi, Grace,” as she passed, and she nodded and smiled briefly, and then went to sit on a bench at the other end of the park, facing Washington Square West. She opened a book in her lap and began reading. He must have watched her for perhaps ten minutes before he finally rose and walked to where she was sitting. He sat down beside her and immediately said, “Hello, Grace.”

“Hello,” she said, and then at once, “Do I know you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Okay.” She paused. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“I’m studying.”

“That can wait.”

“That’s what you think,” she said, and went back to her book.

“What is that?” he asked.

“What is what?”

“The book.”

“Greek Mythology,” she said. “Hey... uh... you don’t mind, do you, but I’m really trying to study.”

“That’s all right.”

“Yeah, well... huh?”

“I said that’s all right.”

“Sure, but I can’t study if you keep talking to me, you know what I mean?”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Eighteen. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Okay, now may I study?” she asked.

“I’ve got a better idea.”

“What?”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

“And what happens when I flunk Mythology?”

“I don’t know. What happens?”

“I’ll hate you forever, that’s all.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to do that.”

“When were you born?” she asked suddenly.

“January.”

“January what?”

“The tenth.”

“Mmm, that’s Capricorn. Well, that explains it, I guess.”

“What does it explain?”

“Well, never mind,” she said mysteriously. “What’s your favorite month?”

“March.”

“March? Nobody’s favorite month is March.”

“Mine is,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“October.” She shook her head. “March. I never heard anybody say that in my life.”

“March is a good month,” he said, feeling obliged to defend it.

Grace shrugged. “October makes me very sad.”

“Why should it?”

“Because everything dies in October,” she said solemnly.

“If it makes you sad, why should it be your favorite month?”

“Because I’m a very sad person.” She closed the book, and looked at him seriously. “I cry an awful lot. Do you?”

“No, not too often.”

“But you do cry?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“I didn’t think men cried.”

“Well...” he said, and shrugged.

“They used to, of course, when they wore armor. In those days.” She paused. “I think it’s very manly of you to admit that you cry sometimes.” She paused again. “I cry all the time, all the time. I see a bird, I cry. I pick up a saltshaker, I cry.” She shrugged. “My brother calls me The Weeper.”

“Well, we’ll just have to make you laugh, then,” Buddwing said.

“That’s very difficult to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I have no sense of humor,” she said.

“Oh, sure you do. Everybody has a sense of humor.”

“No, I haven’t. Really. Not the tiniest shred. Tell me a joke, you’ll see. Not a dirty one, though.”

“Not a dirty one, hmmmm,” Buddwing said. “Well, let’s see.” He thought for several moments and then said, “I don’t know any clean jokes.”

“Well, as long as it’s not too dirty,” Grace said.

“How about a limerick?”

“Okay.”

“While Titian was mixing rose madder—”

“He spied a young lass on a ladder,” Grace said. “I know that one.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s funny?”

“Well, I think it’s clever, yes, but it doesn’t make me laugh.”

“Mmm,” Buddwing said.

“Yes. I really am The Weeper. My brother is right.”

“You seem... very young,” he said suddenly.

“What do you mean? Younger than eighteen, do you mean?”

“Yes,” Buddwing said.

“That’s because I’m a virgin,” she told him.

“Well, I don’t know if that has anything to—”

“Oh, yes, it’s true. You look around you sometime. The virgins seem very young; that’s because we’re all so pure and innocent, you know, pish-posh,” and she laughed.

“Well, there,” he said. “You laughed.”

“Oh sure, I laugh. It’s just I haven’t got a sense of humor.”

“Oh. I see. Well, would you like to take a walk?”

“I don’t know. Are you going to get serious or anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to fall in love with me? You know.”

“Well, I... well, I don’t know.”

“Because I can’t fall in love with anyone just now, you see.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I want to finish college and then go on for my master’s. Falling in love would just screw everything up, you see.”

“Oh, sure, I can understand that,” Buddwing said.

“But if you want to take a walk, that’d be all right, I guess.”

She smiled briefly and rose from the bench and smoothed her skirt, and he looked at her appraisingly and said, “I think Grace is the perfect name for you, do you know that?”

“No, I’m not at all graceful,” she answered. “And I’m much too short. A girl named Grace should be at least five-seven.”

“You’re about five-four,” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re tall,” he said, and they began walking.

“I really should be studying my mythology, you know.”

“I’ll help you with it, how about that?”

“Do you know mythology?”

“No. But I can use your book.”

“Well, all right,” she said, and she handed him the text.

“What’ll the test cover?” he asked.

“The chapter on the constellations as related to. It’s up front there someplace. This really is a stupid course, you know. I took it because somebody said it was a snap, but it seems to be more work than all the others put together. Are you a good student?”

“Well, I don’t know yet.”

“I’m terrible. I hate to study is what it is. I always say I’m going to make the dean’s list, and then I never do. Because I don’t study, that’s what it is. Anybody can come along and ask me to go for a walk, and I’ll say sure.” She smiled. “Well, go ahead, ask me some questions.”

“All right, what’s the Pleiades?”

“The Seven Sisters.”

“What are their names?”

“Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Taygeta, Maia, Electra, and Sterope.”

“That’s very good. What are they doing up there in the sky?”

“Well, Zeus changed them into doves first, to escape the attentions of Orion, and when that didn’t work, he made them stars.”

“Very good. Do you know the names of the Seven Dwarfs?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Name them.”

“Listen, we’re supposed to be doing mythology,” she said, laughing.

“They’re sort of mythology.”

“Yes, but not Greek.”

“No, Disney. What’s the difference? I’ll bet you can’t name them.”

“Oh, sure I can. Dopey...”

“Everyone says Dopey first, have you ever noticed that?”

“Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy...”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Sneezy, and Sleepy.”

“You said Sleepy twice.”

“Dopey, Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, and...” She paused. She wrinkled her brow. “All right, who’s the seventh one?” she asked.

“Orion,” he said, and she laughed again. “See? You laugh all the time.”

“Well, I guess I find you pretty funny,” she said seriously. “Maybe I ought to go back and study, after all. In the library or someplace.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Well, I have to graduate, you know, and then go on for my master’s.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“So I don’t want to get involved, that’s all.” She shrugged again.

“Walking through Greenwich Village on a nice fall day is hardly an involvement, now, is it?”

“I don’t know, you look like you’re just about ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“And also you’re Capricorn. To tell you the truth, you make me kind of itchy.”

“Mmm. Well,” he said abruptly.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I mean, you don’t make me physically itchy or anything.”

“No, I just make you uncomfortable.”

“That’s right.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, either.”

“How did you mean it?”

“It’s just I have to get my degree, you see—”

“Yes, and go on for your master’s. I know.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You get upset pretty easily, don’t you?”

“No, not usually,” he answered.

“You sure seem upset. You should see your face.”

“Well, a guy doesn’t like to be told right off the bat that a girl’s got to get her goddamn degree and then...”

“Go on for my master’s.”

“Yeah, go on for your master’s.”

“Mmm,” she said.

“You know I’m a veteran, you know that, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, I am.”

“Well, that’s very nice,” she said. “Are you going to school on the G.I. Bill?”

“Yeah.” He nodded angrily and said, “I just thought you might like to know.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“I mean, I’ve been around the world, you know. I just got back from Japan a little while ago.”

“How was it?”

“How was what?”

“Japan.”

“Oh, fine. Fine.” He nodded again and said, “So what I mean is, you know, just because a guy asks you to take a walk, it doesn’t mean he’s ready to marry you tomorrow. I mean, maybe you ought to understand that.”

“Oh, I understand it.”

“Sure. I know how important your degree is, and all that, and your master’s, too, but don’t go running for the hills every time a guy asks you to take a walk, is all I’m saying.”

“Oh, well, sure, I understand that.”

“Well, good.”

“And I’m not running for the hills.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said.

“Did you want to take me out or something, is that it?” she asked.

“Well, I did have something like that in mind,” he said angrily, “but I wouldn’t think of upsetting the entire American system of higher education.”

“When did you want to take me out?”

“I thought Saturday night.”

“I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” she said. “We just met, you know, on a park bench, you know. We’re practically strangers.”

“So?”

“So you don’t have to get so upset, that’s all. I told you honestly what my plans were. I’m going to get my degree, and then—”

“All right, all right, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

“Well, I happen to prefer honesty,” she said.

“All right. What time shall I pick you up Saturday night?”

“I’m not even in the city on weekends,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m only here during the week. I go home every Friday afternoon.”

“Home?”

“Yes. To stay with my folks.”

“So what?”

“It’s a long drive.”

“I’m willing to make it. What time shall I pick you up?”

“I didn’t know it’d been settled.”

“It’s settled,” he said.

She stared at him in silence for a long time, and then she said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Her brother’s name was Dan, and the German shepherd was called Duke. He hated them both on sight. Dan’s hair and the dog’s hair were the same color, a sort of malicious brindled brown. Dan’s eyes were brown and suspicious; Duke’s were exactly the same color, and positively paranoid. Dan spoke in a deep guttural voice that seemed to originate somewhere deep in his bowels. Duke was continually growling accompaniment to anything Dan said, like an echo in a rat-infested sewer.

Sometimes, at night, after he had left Grace and was trying to get some sleep, he would think of Dan and Duke and the two would get mixed up in his mind. Which was the dog and which was the man? Or were they both dog-men? He concocted an elaborate fantasy in which Dan and Duke became secret army weapons, trained to kill all ex-navy men on sight, especially if they happened to be dating Duke’s... Dan’s... sister. Neither was a man and neither was a dog; that was the beauty of the weapon. The victim never knew which of the two would give the kill signal, which would be the one who leaped for the jugular. In his fantasy, sometimes Dan would be stroking Duke’s head and whispering, “That’s a good boy, kill, yes, that’s nice, sic ’im,” and other times it would be Dan lying prone at Duke’s feet while Duke gently scratched his neck and whispered the soothing words of death. He knew for sure that Duke was a son of a bitch; about Dan, he could only guess.

“How old are you?” Dan asked, the first time they met.

“Why do you want to know?” Buddwing said, and Duke growled. He looked at the dog. “What’s the matter with him?” he asked. “Doesn’t he like people?”

“There’s nothing the matter with him.”

“Then why is he growling?”

“That’s not growling, it’s talking,” Dan said. “I asked you how old you were.”

“And I asked why you want to know.”

“Because you’re dating my sister, okay? She’s just a kid.”

“She’s eighteen.”

“That’s just a kid.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, huh? Well, she happens to be my sister.”

“So what?” Buddwing said, and he watched both of them closely, waiting for one or the other to give the kill signal, waiting for one or the other to spring for his throat. “I’m not dating you and your talking police dog, I’m dating her.”

“Yeah, and I think you’re too old for her.”

“I’m twenty-one,” Buddwing said.

“I’ll just bet you are,” Dan answered, smirking. The dog, on cue, smirked at the same time.

“How old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-five, at least.”

“Well, you happen to be wrong.”

“When were you born?”

For an insane moment, Buddwing wanted to lie. With instant death grinning at him from the dog-men, he wanted to say he had been born in 1842 and was really a hundred and four years old. He had been taking secret youth tablets that kept him virile and leching for eighteen-year-old girls. Duke growled warningly, or perhaps it was Dan.

“I was born on January tenth, 1925, how’s that?” he said. On impulse, he added, “I’m Capricorn.”

“This is 1946,” Dan said. “Which makes you twenty-one. If you’re telling the truth.”

“Why wouldn’t I be telling the truth?”

“Look, buddy, you don’t fool me. You’ve been around.”

“So?”

“So my sister hasn’t.”

“You want to know something, buddy?” Buddwing said.

“What?”

“I’m going to marry your sister someday, how about that?”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Buddwing said, nodding. “Talk it over with your goddamn dog.”

The restaurant was on West 56th, small, and French, and not too crowded. They sat at a table near the window and watched the setting sun turn the windows across the street to brass. They could not see the sky except in the reflecting glass opposite. The sky was a broken complex of rectangles, gold and fiery red at first, and then turning to lavender, each rectangle reflecting its own jigsaw segment, a deeper shade of violet now, a thousand windows echoing the subtle shift to purple, the red tones vanishing completely to leave a deeper blue, and then window after window going blind as darkness came and the night was upon them.

They did not yet know each other. They sat at the window table and talked eagerly, anxious to exchange views and backgrounds, pleased with each other’s good looks, smacking their lips over the wine, and telling each other how good the food was, considering each posed question as though life or death depended upon the response. They exchanged deep glances tentatively, touched hands exploringly, laughed a little too loudly at each other’s witticisms, were a trifle too eager to create for each other the image of a present person who was the sum total of a vivid and exciting past, sharing incidents and embarrassments, recklessly revealing all. Their window world seemed exclusive and self-contained, but they consciously played to the other diners as well, willing them to acknowledge their splendor, their total absorption with each other, the fun they were having, terrified that without appreciation their romantic exploration would wither and die.

They ordered brandy after the meal. They rolled the snifters in the palms of their hands, and stared deeply into each other’s eyes, creating a privacy that was instantly destroyed because they demanded acknowledgment of it from everyone in the restaurant. He recognized her performance, and he recognized his own as well, but for him there was something more, which he suspected she did not yet feel, and perhaps would never feel. She understood romance, yes, this was an inherent part of her, the sadness of October, but in her mind romance was still Ivanhoe and Wuthering Heights, the Pleiades and Edna St. Vincent Millay; romance was still an admiring audience who could look at a window-framed couple and appreciate their handsomeness and long for their communication. Romance was still the phony tinsel Hollywood crap, the Lux Radio Theater every Monday night, “This is Cecil B. DeMille, coming to you from Ho-o-o-llywood,” kleig lights glaring, admiring eyes, “My, how beautiful her long blond hair is! How radiant she is!” He shared the romantic notion, and he played to the others in the restaurant because he knew that playing to the crowd was an essential part of romance, without which it could not exist. But he was more than just an actor going through a performance for a preview audience. The thing he felt inside him had to be shared because it was too exuberant to be contained.

He was falling in love.

And because he was falling in love, he wanted everyone in the place to stand on his chair and cheer wildly and throw kisses and applaud. He wanted everyone to know that this rare and foolish thing was happening to him, look at it happening to me, for Christ’s sake, look at it happening, isn’t it marvelous, don’t you want to share it with me? Look! Look!

She did not want involvements. She had said so from the beginning.

“Where would you like to go now?” he asked.

“Let’s take a ride in Central Park,” she said. “In a horse and carriage. Let’s look at the stars. Let’s count the stars.”

“And find the Seven Sisters.”

“Safe from Orion.”

Romance.

“I love you,” he said.

“How much do you love me?” she whispered.

The windows were fogged with steam. The stars were gone, and a sharp wind had arisen; it looked as if it might rain. Grace was in his arms, partially leaning against him, looking directly into his face. The wind howled over the hood of the car in frenzy, as though wanting to tear it apart. In his mind, he could visualize the wind ripping the hood off and sailing it down the hillside where they were parked, two blocks from her house. It would descend over the roofs of the toy houses below, and then skim the Mount Kisco treetops to land solidly upon Dan and Duke where they were taking their nightly stroll. The army would give them both heroes’ burials in Arlington Cemetery, DAN-DUKE, the tombstone would read, SON OF FANG. He watched the hood of the car, fully expecting it to blow off at any moment. He would not be at all surprised if it did; something happened to the damn car every time he borrowed it from his father. Flat tires, motor trouble, burned-out wires, the horn sticking — it was always something. “I don’t understand,” his father said each time. “I never have any trouble with it.”

“Well, how much do you love me?” Grace asked.

“I’ll bet that hood’s going to blow right off,” he said.

“Or don’t you love me?”

“I love you, Grace.”

“Well, how much?”

The question was childish and stupid, Roxane demanding eloquence from Christian. She was nineteen years old now, her breast was resting against his arm on the wheel, her legs were bent under her, the skirt pulled back over her thighs, she felt warm and ripe and bursting in the secret steamed cocoon of the car, and all she wanted to know was how much he loved her.

“I love you more than anything in the world,” he whispered.

“Oh, well, what does that mean?” she said. “That could mean anything.”

“It means I love you,” he said.

She stared at him silently. She kept staring at him, saying nothing, the child’s look slipping away unexpectedly, an uncertain, puzzled, thoroughly adult expression moving onto her face.

“Why...” she started, and then hesitated. “Why do you love me?” she asked.

He did not answer for a moment, and then it was too late to answer.

“I mean,” she said, “why me? Oh please, why me?”

The sound of her voice almost brought him to tears. He heard a vast sorrow in that voice, as though a thousand jacks and skip ropes, pigtails and braces, cotton slips and plastic blue barrettes were falling into the wind, sighing in a broken jumble. He heard in that voice the mystery of alien inanimate things, lipsticks and mascara, garter belts and bras, hooks and eyes, and diaphragms. He heard (I have heard the mermaids singing each to each) beyond, an echo of that childlike, forlorn, sighing sound carried on the wind high and clear and sharp, all the uncertainty of total commitments, all the sudden insecurity of complete and trusting exposure, the fragile splintering of a chrysalis, and he clutched her to him fiercely and joyously, and then was frightened lest her wings dissolve in powder. They were both trembling. He kissed her hair and her closed eyes, and he said, “Ahhh, ahhh,” for in this steamy interior of a clopping horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, in this cloistered private brimming place, though she had said she did not want to become involved, she had suddenly and without warning fallen in love with him.

“I love you, Grace,” he said. “Oh God, how I love you!”

She moved deeper into his arms, and smiled, and sighed, and said, childlike, against his chest, “I love you, too.”

He lost his heart to her completely the summer she cut his hair on the desert sands beyond the valley of Sorek, after he had killed a young lion for her and caught three hundred foxes and slain a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.

It was one of those haze-filtered days when the sun seemed to consume the entire sky, stretching from horizon to horizon in uniform unrelieved brightness, vague in intent, as though it could turn itself to rain or brilliant sunshine with equal ease. They had taken his father’s car out beyond Jones Beach, having to stop only once when the radiator boiled over (“I don’t understand,” Grace said. “I never have any trouble with it.”) and parking it finally on a strip of sand facing Gilgo. The ocean was calm that day, reflecting the opalescent sky in silvery tumidity. The beach was almost deserted. There was no breeze; the sand barely stirred. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, with the bra straps lowered, a curving line of white showing on the slopes of her breasts where her tan abruptly ended, the beauty spot near her left shoulder almost lost in the bronze of her skin. She was reading the Sunday Times through sunglasses, commenting on each world situation as the magazine section revealed it, reading a book review aloud to him, one hand resting on his head, the fingers toying with his hair. “You need a haircut,” she said idly, and then read him passages of an article on Nantucket from the travel section, and then began leafing through the main section — “A man got bit by a shark. Do you think there are any here?” — pausing to examine the advertisements, “Do you like this dress?” sharing the newspaper with him as he lay beside her with his eyes closed against the searing glare of the milk-white sky. “I could cut it, you know,” she said.

“Cut what?”

“Your hair.”

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Mmm, well. They’re already showing the fall clothes, look at that. Do you like tweeds?”

“Yes.”

“Why won’t you let me cut your hair?”

“Because you’re not a barber.”

“You look terrible,” she said. “Shaggy and hairy. Let me cut it. Please.”

“Why?”

“It’s sexy,” she said, and she shrugged.

He turned his head to look at her, the sky bright and glaring behind her, squinting up at her. Her long blond hair was pulled to one side of her head, woven in a thick strand there, tossed carelessly over her shoulder. The sunglasses were perched on the end of her nose, the brown eyes peering expectantly over them, a thin confident smile on her mouth. She sat back on her legs bent under her, rising from the chaos of the New York Times scattered on the blanket around her, blond and sun-limned and sitting bustily erect with her slender hands folded in her lap, patiently waiting.

“When’d you get so sexy, all of a sudden?” he asked.

“The beach always makes me sexy,” she said.

“Mmm?”

“Yeah.”

“Where would we get a scissors?”

“I have one in my sewing basket.” She reached for the basket, and he caught her hand.

“You brought that along on purpose, didn’t you?” he said.

“No, I was going to work on my hanging.”

“Your what?”

“My hooked wall hanging. You know I’m making one, so stop looking so surprised. I’ve been hooking for a long time.” He burst out laughing, and she said, “What’s so funny?”

“Don’t you know what hooking is?”

“No, what is it?”

“It’s something sexy,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You always invent these things, don’t you?” she said. “Just to make me feel very young and innocent.”

“No, really. A hooker is a—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” she said.

She took the scissors from her basket, and he sat before her unprotestingly while she cut a huge hole in the New York Times and then put it over his head like a barber’s apron. She got on her knees behind him, and examined his head with her fingers widespread. “You really have big ears, did you know that?” she said. “They stick out all over your head.”

“Why don’t you just cut them off?” he suggested.

“Well, Clark Gable has big ears, too,” she said, and sighed in resignation.

“He also has a mustache. You think I should grow one?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you’d better take off the ears.”

“Maybe so. What good are big ears without a mustache, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, here we go,” she said.

“Listen...”

“Mmmm?”

“Don’t leave holes.”

“Where the ears were, you mean?”

“No, I mean where the hair was.”

“Stop worrying,” she said. “I think I have a flair for this sort of thing. Really. I think it’ll be a beautiful haircut.”

“Yeah, well...” he started dubiously, and then heard the click of the scissors behind his right ear. He closed his eyes. He heard only the metallic rhythm of the scissors and Grace’s shallow breathing behind him, and somewhere beyond that the distant sound of the ocean, not the usual crashing of an angry surf but rather the cavernous murmur captured in a seashell. Click, the scissors went behind his ear, click, click, he could feel the sun hot on his bare head, click, click, click, gaining more authority now. “Oh, this is going to be very nice,” she said. “Really, it’ll be lovely.” He grinned and felt an odd contentment spreading through him. The steady click of the scissors almost lulled him to sleep. He turned once to look up at her, “Yeah, I almost did get your ear that time, mister,” and saw the intense concentrated look on her face, the sunglasses very low on her nose now, the way his grandmother used to wear her glasses when she was sewing by the front window of the tailorshop in the waning winter light. He closed his eyes again.

“I’m getting hair all down me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Oooh, it itches.”

He turned to look at her. The slopes of her breasts in the scanty top were crosshatched with pen strokes of fallen hair. She brushed them away with the flat of her hand, and then reached into the bra top and made a writhing motion, her face pulling into a grimace.

“You have the most uncomfortable hair in the world,” she said. “Urggh, it’s sticking to the suntan oil.”

“You want some help there?” he asked.

“I can manage, thank you,” she said. “Ick, it’s all over the place.”

“Listen, do you think I can get a shave and a manicure, too? So it shouldn’t be a total loss?”

“Shut up and sit still,” she said. “Boy, am I ever sorry I started this.”

The scissors began clicking again. Grinning, he said, “Watch out for the lice.”

“I am.”

“I don’t want to disturb them.”

“No, I know that.”

“They’ve been with me so long, I’ve begun to—”

“Will you keep quiet, please? I’m trying to concentrate.”

“How’s the hair doing? Still going down there?”

“Where it goes is none of your concern,” she said.

“My regular barber doesn’t have that kind of trouble,” he said.

“No, I should hope not. What’s this sticking up here in the back?”

“In the back?”

“Don’t get dirty, you evil-minded thing.”

“If it’s in the back, it must be a cowlick.”

“I didn’t know you had a cowlick.”

“I have all kinds of secret things you don’t know about.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll learn, I guess,” she said. “Oh, hell.”

“What is it?”

“I cut off a little too much right there.”

“Oh, boy...”

“No, it’s all right. Just a little too much, that’s all.”

“How long is this haircut going to take?”

“Why?”

“I think it’s beginning to cloud up.”

“It was cloudy when we got here,” she said.

“No, really, Grace. I think it’s going to rain.”

They had left the hansom cab and were walking down Fifth Avenue when the first drop struck him in the eye like a hurled egg.

“It’s starting to rain,” he said, and suddenly the sky broke apart like a huge water-filled sack splitting along its weakest seam, dropping its contents in a surprisingly swift deluge for which there had been no real warning. They began to run. They ran blindly because the falling water was everywhere around them and its suddenness had produced a sort of numbed shock that robbed them of everything but instinct. He clutched her elbow and tried to steer her in one direction but she shrieked and turned in the opposite direction, giggling in panic, and then he grabbed her hand and tugged her toward him, and they both almost slipped on the suddenly slick pavement, and threw their arms around each other to maintain their balance, and then ran with their heads ducked, she holding her bag over her head like an umbrella, he tugging at her hand and searching for an awning or a doorway or anything to protect them from this storm that had materialized in vicious fury and was threatening to drown them.

“This way!” he shouted. “Here!” And she shouted, “Where?” And he yelled, “Here, here!” And they ran up the low slippery long flat steps of a gray and solemn church, her heel catching on one of the steps and sending her falling headlong, the fall broken by his supporting hand and arm. The rain lashed about them as he tried to help her up. One of her stockings had ripped from the heel of her shoe clear to the ribbed top. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet and then, still supporting her this way, half walked, half dragged her to the open arched door of the church and into the dimly lighted narthex, where the first thing he saw was the font of holy water.

“Wow,” she said, “what a rain! Where’d that come from?”

“Are you all right?”

“My leg hurts,” she said. “It’ll probably be black-and-blue in the morning.” She pulled back her skirt and said, “Oh, hell, will you look at that? A good pair of nylons.” Then, seeming to remember that she was standing in a church vestibule, she immediately covered her mouth with her hand, as though her mild swearing had been overheard. She pulled her head into her shoulders and stood with her hand covering her mouth, waiting for a holy repercussion. When none came, she shrugged and said, “Could we go inside? I’m freezing in this doorway.”

As they walked out of the narthex and into the church itself, she whispered, “Ick, I’m soaked to the skin,” and he whispered, “I am, too,” and then their whispers trailed because they heard the music coming from above them, and the music, like the sudden storm, seemed to erupt from nowhere as though a wise and knowing, all-powerful, all-seeing deity were handling the world in an avant-God incoherent though orderly-to-Himself way. The music came from somewhere above in the organ loft, and Buddwing recognized it as one of the Bach fugues, just as Grace whispered, “Bach,” and he nodded. There were two men above them in the organ loft, both unseen, one playing the organ in majestic frenzy, the other playing the violin in a burnished rich and somehow pagan response. The music swelled and echoed throughout the church, repetitive and seemingly endless, the mathematical symmetry of Bach resounding from the heavy stone walls of the nave, and rising to the vaulted domes, falling like the pelting rain outside to the altar dimly glowing with the light of votive candles. They backed away down the aisle, striving for a glimpse of the musicians. The unseen men played with a fervor bordering on fury. The organ exposition was vibrant and resounding, the violin answering the theme, transposing it a fifth upward, the rich blend flooding out over the center aisle and the crossing, flowing into the north and south transepts, the organ’s countersubject booming intricately, the violin entering again an octave below, the music reaching out beyond the altar and into the apse and flooding each stone corner of the church. Tongues of fire lashed at wooden stakes, licked the robes of fettered martyrs. Thieves and prophets hung alike in crucifixion, the music soared in wildly ordered abandon, heathens danced by firelight, bodies glowed with sweat and paint.

They had backed down the nave toward the crossing and then past that almost to the altar, but they still could not see the hidden musicians. At the western end of the church, through the narthex and the open arched door, a streak of lightning illuminated the gray wet street beyond, and an old man ran by with a newspaper tented over his head. The votive candles danced in red and green glass cups, thunder boomed its echo above the vaulted canopy, the organ answered in its richly resonant voice, the violin descended in a strident spiral, the final chords of the fugue hung suspended in the air like softly falling dust, echoing, and then the huge stone church was silent.

The silence was as surprising as the earlier rain and music had been. The music still seemed to vibrate within them, their skin still tingled with its resonance; but like a star that had died centuries ago, its light still visible on earth, the source of the sound was gone, and the only true reverberation now was the empty boom of silence. Into the silence, the musicians whispered something to each other, still invisible, their voices carrying across the length of the church.

Buddwing and the girl stood with their backs to the altar, speechless in the whispering vault.

His hand sought hers.

Their fingers locked and were wedded.

This, then, is a consummation, he thought.

This, now, is a consummation on a narrow nuptial bed, the first consummation and the last, a fugue in itself, the overlapping subject and answer, and the endless quest, the parts introduced in succession and following each other in chase, in flight, in Latin fuga. She did not, as she had maintained, have a beauty spot near her left shoulder, but this was an unimportant incidental, he knew, for here on this bed and on the succession of beds to come, the parts introduced, he would learn who this woman was.

The apartment smelled of fresh paint — had he painted it himself only a month ago while she conferred with hovering seamstresses about her bridal gown? The furniture was new and clean, it smelled of the factory, its varnish was unmarred, its fabric unspotted. They had taken it from the packing crates not a week ago. The wood had splintered beneath the clawed end of his hammer as he pulled out the nails in squealing protest. The woman beside him on the sofa bed was new and clean, too, her gown diaphanous by custom, her hair neatly brushed, her eyes studying him in virginal anticipation. They had touched before, they had kissed more often, but they did not know each other yet, and now they would learn. They thought they would learn. Here, in preparation for the coupling that would follow, they brought two separately revolving universes and hoped for collision and knowledge. Viewpoints. The concurrent conversations he and Jesse had discussed, the deaf listener, the egocentric orator.

He smelled a subtle perfume in her hair, a scent of veiled mystery and erotic intrigue; she smelled the faint aroma of his male perspiration; it reminded her of her father’s arms when he used to carry her to the rumble-seated Chevrolet. He felt her feathery blond hair and the paper-thin skull beneath, which he could crush in his hands; she felt the emerging bristle on his jaw, and wondered what it was like to shave, and his hands in her hair were gentle.

Viewpoints.

An apple is an orange.

She knew his kiss, he knew her kiss. His mouth was gentle upon hers, he thought, cushioned by her shy and soft and tenderly inquiring lips. She thought of her own mouth as voracious and thin; she wanted to bite his tongue, and his lips on hers were curiously harsh, his mouth was not at all tender. He touched her breasts and her nipples — he had touched them before — but there was nothing erotic to him about the practiced movement of his hands. He knew the nipples would pucker gently, and his hands worked in a repeated ritual, probing scouts in the employ of a bored and confident mercenary. My breasts inflame him, she thought, and this image of a rampaging, rapacious male animal, unable to control his hands, ripping off her blouse and her bra, violating her nipples, was erotic and stimulating and perhaps transmitted itself unconsciously to him because he found himself becoming erect, and he moved against her and put his mouth on her breast and flicked the nipple with his exploring tongue. She did not know the feel of an erection except as an outward experience, the uncoiling of soft flesh against her thigh; she did not know the inner surge and restless stirring, the mind-coupled anticipation, the flowing rush of passion to a single extending, unsheathed, sensitively expectant part of the body. She knew only the touch of his teeth on her nipples, alternately one and then the other, and whereas his tongue could feel the sudden stiffening, it was she who experienced her flesh distending and enlarging, she who felt that the tips of her breasts would burst through the expanding purple skin and fill his mouth, while only vaguely aware of the probing rigid arch against her thigh, which to him was all-consuming. She seized him more in conditioned response than in counterattack, but to him her grasp was wildly exciting; she became for him in that instant the fictional heroine foisted upon all American males from the moment of their birth, the passionate achingly aggressive female en-flamed by the impending touch and sight of a man, the insatiable nymphomaniac. There was perhaps some of this in her, yes, the knowledge that her hand tentatively contained in curling warmth this live and growing member; yes, this knowledge was exciting and it spread in tingling electric tendrils to her groin where it became a vague and undefined urge. But more exciting to her was the certainty that for now she controlled this pulsing flesh, that it would grow immense at her command, that it was attainable through engorgement, that it could become an encircled, intimately possessed part of her solely because she urged it to. He knew only that her hand tightened on him, and he sought her womb in grasping reciprocation, the wished-for return. The natural ooze of lubrication became to him an imagined torrent of rushing female juices at the mouth of a dark and secret cave awaiting his exploration. Her breasts, her buttocks, her abdomen, the soft wet inner flesh of her thighs, all became targets for his questing hands, all thought of exciting her gone now in his own blind excitement which nonetheless excited her. It was he who at last invaded, and the feel to him was one of resisting wet lips and beyond that of a molten pool, a tunnel with live walls crumbling, a real invasion, yes, the thrust of undisputed force into a yielding and vulnerable interior — but this she did not feel. She felt instead an opening wide of herself, a stretching to receive. She felt on her quivering lips at first a hovering, tentative, round and rigid inquiry. She felt everything moving inward then, he and herself, a turning in; she felt a yearning need to accommodate and adjust to the width and the girth and the length of him, to enwrap, to gather and enfold. This was not to her an invasion. They stood at opposite ends of the same tunnel, seeing entirely different things.

But in his invasion, in the proud masculine power of his attack, there was also the fear of being surrounded, and so he pounded at yielding walls that had already succumbed, and nonetheless felt himself slowly engulfed by their very mucoid unresistance; he would lose himself inside her, he would become an irredeemable part of her oozing interior, he would explode within her and join her by osmosis. Powerless to command, powerless to retreat, he bludgeoned blindly and relentlessly, knowing that in his moment of supreme power, he would be inexplicably weakest. And in her receiving, in her vast and obliging female acceptance, there was the fear of losing control completely, the unspoken and frightening desire to allow this throbbing and engorging force to impale her unmercifully, to use her and abuse her, to pillage after abject surrender, to destroy and overwhelm and absorb, to mock in superiority, to degrade and debase, to turn her cheering street parade into a disorganized undignified rout.

Somehow out of these separately converging, touching, converging viewpoints; somehow out of this vague and mutually ignorant confusion of love and hate; somewhere out of an overwhelming need to satisfy, to give unselfishly; somewhere out of a contradictory urge to control and enslave, somehow, somewhere there arose a true moment of compassion where indeed the universes did collide, where indeed Buddwing and the girl were briefly joined together and wedded as they had promised to be. In this single ecstatic moment of exchange, they became one body, mindless; one driving force, genderless. They shared together a sense of mutual pity and contempt, of guilt and exaltation, of charity and supplication, of abundance and of need. In that moment, they clung to each other in total isolation and heard the echo of a billion sighs lost in the corridors of the night, and felt for the briefest tick of time that they really knew each other, when actually they had learned only that they were human.