Gould

Evangeline

She put an ad in the newspaper of the university he’d been a grad student at: “Garden and lt. handyman work for room and bd; 2 months minimum, 3 preferred.” He calls, says that if she does take him he can only give her two weeks. That he was driving to New York with a friend in the friend’s car and his apartment lease will be up in three days and he’ll need a place to stay. She won’t even have to provide him bed linen; he has a sleeping bag and pillow and pillowcase, though he would like a real bed or mattress to sleep on and to have his own room to write in a few hours a day before or after he does the work she wants done.

She says to be honest the ad’s been running for several weeks and no one’s answered it so far and she’d like to get the work started, so could he come by for an interview and to see if he’d like staying here? She has a young son; he has nothing against children, does he? and he says “No, why ever would I?”

He bikes over that afternoon, rings the bell, nobody answers. Walks around the house calling her name. “Mrs. Tylic? I’m here, Mrs. Tylic — Gould Bookbinder, at the time you said.” “In here,” she says when he passes a screen door at the back of the house. The laundry room. A beautiful blond boy, around two years old, is sitting on top of the washing machine, stretching inside for clothes and dropping them into the laundry basket on the floor. She pretty, girlish-like; in shorts, T-shirt, long hair in pigtails, thin, almost no breasts, though a bra on, small, five-two at the most, bright blue eyes, black hair, pale skin, holding clothespins, one in her mouth which she takes out, shy smile, very white teeth and perfectly formed it seems, slender muscular legs, high behind, young, twenty-two, twenty-four. They talk while she sticks certain clothes in the dryer and hangs on a line above his head other clothes: man’s sweatshirt, seems an extra large; two bras, several small underpants, but a woman’s, not a kid’s, and all with bloodstains in the crotch; leotard, the boy’s socks, which he’d think would go in the dryer. She says another reason she’d like a man here is for her son, since he’s missing even a semi-steady male image with his father almost never around. He points to the boy, shakes his head a little and she says “Bronson knows; his biological pa, B-senior, pops in every third month for lunch to bitch as to how much of his inherited dough he’s given us and to spin Brons-J around in his newest nifty sports car. Now it’s a psychedelic-painted Lotus; that goofer’s loaded.” She doesn’t work, for the time being takes marketing courses at a community college and is also trying to sculpt and pot, lives off the little money her ex-husband is forced by law to give their son and what she manages to pad on the kid’s medical and daycare expenses, which her ex also pays; the house was bought with the money she got from the divorce settlement. “So I don’t have much; the meals will be skimpy. Lots of pasta and canned tomato paste and jug wine, unless you feel like springing for the real McCoy and also one night treating us to a restaurant meal. I need lots of work done that I can’t afford anyone to do. I don’t expect major plumbing repairs but I do want simple electric jobs beyond just changing light bulbs, and the fence fixed, some bamboo dug up from a friend’s property and replanted here, and if there’s time, help in wallpapering the two bathrooms, besides all the ugly old rose bushes removed. Their roots go deep, I want you to understand before you sign on.”

She takes his references, calls that night to say they all checked out and could he start in two days? and he says “As I said, my residence is only a single small room in a large house full of other small rooms filled with rowdy grad students and at night their loud mates, so I can even move in tomorrow. I’ve almost nothing to pack and I can use the sleep too before the long mostly sleepless drive back to New York.”

Years later, maybe twenty, she writes “Why are you still writing me? I don’t think our correspondence is healthy. It’s been enjoyable hearing from you. You always wrote interesting and occasionally witty letters, not that I was ever interested in anything that happened in your rat nest of a city or thought that wit was such a great thing to have. I prefer sincerity and plain-spokenness and not to think of cockroaches and rowhouses. But you’re married now and your wife probably resents your writing me and I don’t want to be the cause for any strain in your marriage. I know I’d resent a husband who was getting letters from a former lover he says he was once in love with and almost married to.” He wrote back saying “Sally accepts what I say, that we’re only friends now. And how often do we exchange letters, three times a year? I get the feeling the main reason you want to end the correspondence is because there’s nothing in it for you; in addition, you don’t like the act of writing: it takes too much of your energy and time. The phone would be far simpler and less physically taxing if all you want to know about is what’s happening and not what I’m thinking. So okay, I’ll stop, and a long good life to you and of course always my love to B-J.” She sends him a postcard: “That was extremely UNFAIR!!! Don’t be the louse and bastard you once were; I thought you had climbed out of that. And sure: ‘good life’ to me but ‘love’ to Brons. You couldn’t be more obvious. You’re a fuck!” He sends her a picture postcard of the New York skyline, and says “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I apologize; I swear my remark on the physical cost of letter writing was only a little dig I was giving and I meant no deep harm. As for the good life instead of my love, I thought saying anything approximating affection to you would be inappropriate after what you said about it. I hope this clears it up. Best ever, Gould.” She doesn’t write back, so her postcard was the last he ever heard from her.

Thinking about it soon after, he was glad to be through with the correspondence. He always answers when anyone writes him, so he felt stuck in it. But she was cutting him up too much in her letters and for no reason he could see and he’d wanted to say something about it but hoped she’d stop on her own. “You were usually such a sourpuss and at times acted like a fruity prude. Everyone we knew here felt that but they also thought there were decent and worthy things to you too. . You bitched too much when we were together, but about everything (especially the music and movies I liked and what I read and how I was raising B-J) and I’ve been wondering if you complain as much now to your wife. Nothing was ever good enough for you and I doubt that anything will ever be. You thought California culture the dimmest but you never convinced me that your depressing falling-apart East was superior or even its equal. And as for Europe: oh, you loved that place despite its fastidiousness, oob-la-la-ness, long serious faces and cruddy toilets and all their bloody wars and what they did to your poor Jews.

Our weather was always too beautiful for you, our shores too uninhabited and pristine. The people around here too open, good-natured and lighthearted and just all-around easy to be with and relaxed. You craved New York nastiness, impoliteness, uptightness, backstabbingness and hardships of every sort and snow so cold your skinny balls froze till they cracked. Things shouldn’t be so ‘naturally good.’” He doesn’t remember saying that, nor does he see himself as ever saying it, since he never believed it, so if she wasn’t quoting him why’d she put it in quotes? “I’m delighted you’ve finally found a woman to marry — not ‘delighted’; that was one of your fake poofy words. I’m just glad you’re getting married and I hope it works and changes you for the better (like helps you mature) as every marriage should. But honestly, I thank all the stars there are that I didn’t become your bride and that you’re no longer hassling me. . Brons doesn’t consider you his second father anymore. He became disappointed and then disgusted with you when you refused to fly out here for a week in what had become your ritual annual visit. You said you couldn’t afford to any longer because the plane fares had gone up, but do you know what it did to that kid? Now he’s too busy making money to be interested in anything you do: your work, who you marry and what’s on your mind. If there’s one person you can bet will be a multi-m man by the time he’s thirty, it’s our junior B. Why deny things for yourself so much? You were the same skinflint with us too. True, you only had menial jobs then and were basically supporting us — your ‘family’ as you liked to say (that I appreciated) — but you still could have treated yourself to something when you had a little money, or not been so penurious (cheap, man, CHEAP!). What I’m saying is that you inherited your cheapness from your father and because it is genetic it’s probably impossible to eradicate.”

Years before, maybe two or three after they split up and he moved back to New York, he wrote “I’m no longer in love with you, you’re for sure no longer or never were in love with me. And you’re with someone, I’m with someone, and you constantly gripe about me in your letters and occasionally say how much you hate my guts. So would it be okay if this is my last letter to you and I don’t get one in return? Give my love to B-J

I’ll of course keep in touch with him and try to see him when I can.” “Give Brons your nothing,” she wrote back. “Keep in touch with your nothing, you great bullshit artist. Besides, although I’ve rarely bad-mouthed you to him, he said ‘If he’s against you, Mommy, then he’s against me, and I never want to talk to him again.’ I told him that his relationship with you is his business and apart from me, but he doesn’t see it that way. So I’m sorry but he doesn’t want to be bothered anymore with my passing on your feeble greetings and bogus love. For a little unurban kid, he’s hip to your schemes.” He got a letter from her two years later (he’d written Brons a few letters during this time but got no answer) saying an old letter of his popped up from behind a file cabinet she was giving to Goodwill because she’s redoing her house outside and in (“I’ve come into some family money and this savvy stockbroker fellow I know pretty well invested it for me and I made a killing”) and she read it and thought of the days they were close and how good he was for Brons at such a vulnerable age and for so many years and she harbors no ill will to him anymore and just wanted to know how he was, and the correspondence resumed and Brons wrote and called that he wanted to see him, so he flew out, stayed in her guest room for a night and in her bedroom the rest of the week. Or a few years after that he remembered one of the many things he’d left behind in her house — a drawing several centuries old he had when he met her and hung on her wall but had never given her and now wanted — and included in the letter more than enough money to send it special delivery and apologized for the inconvenience this would cause her and swore he’d never ask for anything else of his again and she wrote back “Why not fly out to pick it up personally plus the rest of your little art treasures — none of them fit in with anything I own anymore — and see Brons along the way? He’s dying to see you but is too shy to ask and can’t face the hurt if you refuse. As for me, I’m comfortably with someone now (if I can be juvenile for a second: the coolest, cutest dude I’ve ever flipped over, and he’s nine years younger than me), so I’ll make and receive no demands. In other words, if you think I’m encouraging you to come because I’m lusting after you, you’d be nuts. This is all for Brons.” So he’d fly out and the new guy had gone backpacking in the Sierras for two weeks and he’d sleep with her after the first night. “Why not?” she’d say each time he came out. “We were always great together in bed and I’d only get horny in a few days knowing you’re in the next room beating your meat.” Or she’d call after a year and say “I was thinking of the three of us in Portugal and Spain, hitchhiking along back roads — people there had never seen such a gorgeous towheaded boy before, it seemed, the way they kept mussing his hair. And I wondered what you’ve been up to, working at, reading and yes, even though she disliked me — I liked her, by the way, or admired her — how your mom was holding up too. .” Anyway, always resumptions in their correspondence, overtures to fly out from both of them, he’d scrape up the dough to go, for a few years, annual visits in June and the same arrangements at her house every time. Till she wrote that last letter, his to hers, their postcards, then it all stopped.

So he was immediately drawn to her in the laundry room. The day? — sunny and dry. And her hair up or down? — now he’s not sure. Up, he thinks. Down, he thinks. Either way, she looked great. Through their entire relationship she had bangs, so she had bangs that day, but wore the rest of her hair many different ways. And she seemed vulnerable in the room, also protective of her son, more so with both those at the same time than he thinks he ever saw since, for a while clutching Bronson’s shoulders from behind, using him as a shield or device of some kind — well, literally to hold on to and hide behind — because she felt so discomposed or shy, and saying “shield” and her placing Bronson between them or keeping him there would make her less protective of him than he just said, and she also seemed interested, even attracted to Gould. Of course, the vulnerability and shyness, which he noticed when she first met other men she was attracted to, but it was probably mostly an act. And was it shorts she had on or long pants? Jeans, tight . not jeans but these thin summerweight cotton pants, he just remembers, red, and tight to her skin, and he now thinks a yellow tank top. But long solid legs on the small short body, but perfect legs, it seemed, and if the pants were long — they were long — then he could see the outlines of her skin through the cloth. “So-and-so” (she mentioned a well-known West Coast writer a little younger than Gould) “once said my legs were the most amazing and dazzling — lots of z’s — on earth. ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘I haven’t eyed out every woman’s legs, but there are just so many kinds and I doubt any pair could be better than yours.’ Am I sounding too conceited and slight?” and he said “It’s okay, what else did the big brain say?” and she said “That I ought to model them. Or have a fashion photog take black and white shots of me only from the top of the thighs down and to blow up the best one to poster size, stencil the word ‘legs’ below the photo and to make a half-million copies of it and have someone market them to poster stores. That men would want to marry me just for my legs or pay five dollars for a thirty-second peep at them in some sideshow or porno place where just my legs were visible. Then he got really gross about my legs, where he’d like them in regard to him — he was pig rich from his novel by then and had big strong arms and a wrestler’s neck and chest and beautiful bushy blond hair but an ugly face on the largest head I’ve seen on someone who wasn’t a sad idiot and decrepit breath could that be the right word?” and he said “If you mean ‘stinky,’ no, but I get the point.” “And would I mind if he told his best pal about me — the Playboy of the Potato World, he called him: a fat cat from Idaho, you see, or son of one, and all from tubers — since he thinks I’ll fall for him madly and he wants to know someone who’s seen my legs with nothing above or on them in bed. ‘Tell whoever you want,’ I said jokingly, and his pal — Brons Sr., though without the S just yet — shows up at my place a day later, says who he is and that he’s selling eros but not from door to door, just to mine, and swore he never used that line before,” and he said “Why, did he think it a good one?” “And I tell you we flashed on each other right there and were on the floor in five minutes with not even the front door closed — that must be a record — with him lapping my legs up and down and around till they were greasy from his spit, and in a month we were married and with kid. Really, I don’t know what the big fuss is with men over legs. What are they, at their very best, but shapely sticks to walk on and cross. You guys get gunned up by everything. Even some with my poor chest: they must think of it as a pubescent girl’s and that turns up the heat. Or they see me as a boy or something in between, the creeps, where they then get both. But I’m being too egocentric again, aren’t I?” and he said “No, I swear, I love your stories.”

He liked to lie close to her in bed while she slept, or pretended to, and stare at her face if there was any moon or room light on it. Beautiful from all sides and the front and from in back too: the head shape and little perfect ears poking through the hair. Hair what he already said: long, black, bangs, different styles, etcetera. Eyes, small nose, chiseled lips, he’s so bad at descripts, tiny waist, didn’t mention that before but it was probably assumed and he’d wanted to say “minuscule,” slim hands, small delicate feet or delicate hands and small slim feet, flat muscled tummy, and so on the works. “This writer also said I had the best-looking ass for a woman my size he’d ever seen, so a qualified compliment but one he still thought I should appreciate. That there’d be men there too who’d want to marry me just for it. But through him I hooked up with Brons-S and from that I got J, so something good came from the legs-and-ass man.” He loved her ass too. Turning her over in bed — no, that doesn’t sound right. If she was on her back, then sort of encouraging her to get on her stomach and she’d say “Why, what do you have in mind?” and he’d say “Nothing, really . you know,” and massage her shoulders and neck and rub her back and legs and butt and then, or after some preliminaries with his fingers with at first a number of quick furtive forays, lift her butt up and try to get in her from behind. Hold the porno. “I’m a little small down there,” she said several times, “and I’m sorry if I can’t accommodate but it hurts too much that way,” and then “What are you doing? — you know it hurts,” and finally “Jesus, you rat” or “Schmuck” and once even “Hyena,” “Will you stop that! You know I can’t do it and unless something with age happens to my cunt, I never will. Try it next time and I’ll tell you to get lost for good.” Only one position she liked. He on her right, both on their backs side-by-side, her right thigh raised, he in her that way. Tries picturing it and it seems right, though remembers it always took a bit of twisting and doing, he never went in easy and straight. Became frustrating, unexciting sometimes, even uncomfortable, and humdrum too — more than three years of it and, when they weren’t fighting or sulking, they did it about four days out of five. He wanted the variety of positions two people living together for a long time would do and she kept saying she didn’t have the anatomy for anything but the double-back one and that sometimes even then it was only a little more pleasurable than painful for her, though about once every couple of months she let him come in her a different way. One time, when he knew better, after about a half hour of pleasant foreplay, he got on top of her when she was still on her back and she said “Get off, you tub.” Another time, on an unusually hot humid night for that part of California, they didn’t even own a fan, and she was naked on her back and seemingly asleep from the heat as it was around nine and they’d been reading in bed just to be on cool sheets, he said her name and she didn’t answer and he repeated it and her eyes stayed closed and he slowly bent her legs up at the knees till her heels almost touched her thighs and her vagina opened, smeared his penis with saliva and positioned himself above her without touching any other part of her body and tried gliding it in and she opened her eyes, winced from pain but calmly said “I’m not going to fight you. You’re halfway in and it already hurts like hell. But fighting you will end up hurting worse than allowing you to proceed, but I’m warning you I might be capable of doing a lot more to you when you’re done than just ordering you out of the house and cutting up all your precious things,” and he withdrew.

She once lunged at him with a steak knife after he’d made what he knew when he was saying it and even a few seconds before was a cruel remark about her. He flinched, the knife whisked past the place his face would have been if he hadn’t moved back, and then he jumped behind the table — it was in the dining room, they’d been clearing off the dishes after dinner — and said “What’re you, crazy? You just almost killed me,” and she said “I didn’t, I knew exactly when to pull back. I’ve got plenty of reserves; you’re the one who hasn’t, in anything. You’re fantasizing again, thinking I’d waste my time trying to stab you and then the next twenty years of my life wasting away in prison because I did. Please, get your freaking things together and leave the house now,” and he said “Don’t tell me you didn’t try to stab me. You did, so of course I’m going — how could I trust you again?” and she said “Listen, you’re raving, but do what you want,” and her face said she was trying to forget the incident and he wondered what to do. She put the knife and a couple of other utensils back on the table and looked at a photo on the wall of the three of them in a rowboat, Bronson and he rowing, she looking as if she was barking comical orders to them through cupped hands, and then left the room. He cleared the rest of the dishes, washed them in the sink, continued wondering what to do, leave? stay? What would he say to Brons? “Your mother and I just don’t get along. We do some, but not enough. It’s a pity too, because I love you, but I’ll see you and we’ll do things if I stay in the area, you and I, but that’s the way it is, I’m sorry to say, though it’s nothing you’ve done that’s sending me away.” She came into the kitchen and he expected her to say “What are you still doing here?” but she started drying the dishes. “How do we pile up so many dishes and pots and stuff for just three people and a simple dinner?” and she said “We’re extravagant,” and he said “Oh yeah, that’s us.” Then he called Bronson if he wanted to carpetsweep the dining room as he did last night—“You did a great job. And it needs sweeping badly, kiddo; lots of everyone’s crumbs,” and Brons said from his room “If it’s okay, can I not? I’m busy playing,” and he looked at her and she smiled and said “He’s playing; what a life,” and he said “So, what about that thing before? — our argument. Does it mean we’re over it? Fine by me if we are, but you don’t want it discussed?” and she pressed her cheek to his chest and put her arms around his waist and her hands went under his shirt till they were on his lower back and he kissed the top of her head and said “Your hands are wet, but you can keep them there,” and she said “I’d never try to hurt you like that, never. If it looked like it then that can only be because when I was pretending to wield the knife, but with no intention of coming close, I must have stumbled frontwards a bit, though I don’t remember that. But I’m sorry and it’s finished, the incident, all right?” and he said “I’m sorry too if I misjudged the distance of the knife from my face, if that’s what I did,” and she said “It had to be, or like I said, it was all to sort of scare you a little, more like a harmless jolt, but I got too close by accident or mistake.”

He left her house for good a few times — three or four — but always came back and stayed. Phone call to her about something — Brons, important mail he’s expecting and if it came, though he was probably hoping she’d ask him over — and she said “What are you doing now, want to come by? Brons is at a friend’s for the night,” or he took Brons for the day, dropped him off and she said, which he was hoping she would, “Want to stay for dinner, even spend the night? Brons will love it if he sees you in the morning and I’ll be honest — one of us has to — I haven’t had sex for weeks and from what you’ve indicated about all the women you’re not seeing, you’ve been dry for a while and could use it too,” and he said “That’d be okay if that’s all it’d be, a deal?” and stuck out his hand and she looked at it and said “Oh sure, we’re gonna shake.” It was Brons. Fine, for that night he wanted to get laid as he was as horny as she said — hadn’t been with anyone since the last time he slept over a month or so ago — but he loved that boy and wanted to live with them again almost solely because he didn’t want to just see him once a week or every other for a few hours that day. Once she called his deep feelings for Brons as bordering on the sick and he said “Why? I think of him, though I have no illusions about this, as like my son. One would think you’d be pleased he has someone who feels that way about him besides you,” and she said “Sometimes I am but other times I think it’s carrying it too far. He has a father. And even if they rarely see each other now, I feel in five years or less Brons-S will grow up to the point where he’ll discover what he’s missing and he’ll want to see him as much as J wants to see him now. And so they’ll see each other a lot and if you’re still around, you’ll be in the way, and maybe even J will go live with his dad. That’s how it often turns out, not that I’d love the idea. But you and I? Come off it, we’ll never stay together and we’ll be lucky, the way we hack out at each other sporadically, if we last another two months. Then when you really leave — and it might be the next time or the time after that. But when every one of your books is with you and you have a rented apartment instead of a cheap room and nothing of yours remains in this house, the boy will be clobbered the hardest by you so far. Maybe double what it was with his father, as he’s older now and remembers more than he forgets and this bad shit tends to get etched into kids his age permanently, but anyway, that for the second time he’s been blown off by the big man in his life. How this will affect his future relationships, male and female — you never liked my psychological speculations but here it is — don’t even ask.”

Used to imagine her with normal-size breasts or just ordinary small breasts but not completely flat. Sometimes he’d suck one up by the nipple, close his other eye so as not to see the second breast and look at the distended part and think is it really possible that if she had breasts like this one he’d feel much better toward her, might even want to try sticking it out with her for life? He wanted a few times to get her pregnant just to see her breasts enlarge, also to have a kid. She’d said she loved — wait a minute. What he means by that “also” remark is that even though he knew they’d never marry, or chances were slight, and that he’d probably end up living apart from her and their child — or maybe they would marry now that they’d had that kid and it could even be that their relationship would get infinitely better because of it — he was thirty, a little past, and felt he should be a father by now. Not the attitude he’d take today, almost thirty years later, if he still didn’t have a child, though who knows. And she’d said she loved being pregnant with little Brons because not only was her marriage then as close to being euphoric as it ever was (“Nobody believes this, but between periods of contractions we made love right up to the moment we drove to the hospital to have the baby”) but because for a few months, till she went dry a few weeks after the delivery, she had breasts, she said, that could fill a small-cup bra and even gave her cleavage when she wore an evening dress once and a man could hold on to, and so on. Brons-S took lots of photos of her breasts then with and without clothes and might still have some, and if Gould wants he should write him for a few; she’s sure he would appreciate the craziness of the request and part with them gladly or make dupes if he still has the negatives and send those. But most times he’d tell himself “What’s the difference? Big breasts, no breasts, middling breasts, if there’s anything there it’s just fat and flesh, and she has a cunt, small too, she says, but most times sexually okay and adept in the limited way she’s set for it, and the sweetest little horizontal hairline right above it but no other hair around (she swore she didn’t shave the area and it never felt that she did), and one that never smells of anything — urine, sweat, soap, deodorant, perfume (no chance of contraceptive jelly since she was on the pill) — or that’s how she prepares it before she comes to bed: maybe just water and a washrag, and a beautiful ass and great legs and all the other things, and she does have normal nipples and aureoles and he does what he can with these, more than he thinks he would to a woman with more heft to her breasts. “I should wear a shirt to bed, I’m so ashamed of my top,” she said in different ways a number of times, her hands covering her chest, and he said “No, your nipples are gorgeous, the red circles around them exciting, I love when they’re erect, sucking on them and the rest,” and she said “You’re just compensating,” and he said “So what, but my feeling is you get what you get, both of us, me with that, you with my hairy shoulders and back, so make the most of it, though I don’t know what you could do with my furriness.”

Night before he’s to come to her house he rides his bike into a pole on a bicycle path. The pole’s there to keep cars off the path. It once had reflectors but someone had smashed them, or what? When he went back with her a few days later to photograph the pole for insurance purposes, the reflector frames were still nailed to the pole but the reflectors were gone. So he doesn’t see the pole in the middle of the path — he’s biking by flashlight, sky’s dark and moon’s not up and path runs through a grove of eucalyptus trees — the smells, he remembers, well, not then, but other times and perhaps especially at night — and bike’s front wheel hits it, he flies over it and breaks his shoulder and cracks his head. Drags the mangled bike about a half-mile to his house and then, when he realizes how hurt he is, calls a friend to take him to a hospital’s emergency room and next day calls her and says he broke his shoulder and has a concussion and he’s sorry but it’s obvious he won’t be able to do any two-handed heavy manual labor or garden work for a while — he doesn’t even see how he can help his friend drive to New York in two weeks — so he guesses their arrangement’s off, and she says “Deal’s a deal. You can still get on your knees and pull up weeds, can’t you? And instruct me with repair work around the house, if you know how, and look after my son while I’m out, and so forth. I can’t be paying for your food now, though — your labor won’t cover it. We can go fifty-fifty, or forty for you, sixty for me, since I have the little boy, but all depending on your appetite. If it’s enormous — you’re not the biggest guy but you might have a high metabolism — it’s back to fifty and maybe even you’re the sixty. Actually, maybe you should be, since I bet I weigh a little more than half what you do and I’m not much of an eater. As for your room, it’s here and costs me naught to keep up. But maybe you can also go in on the laundry detergent, just to be absolutely fair, and help me hang the more delicate wash on the umbrella clothesline outside, something I was also going to have you dig a deeper hole for and reinstall.”

She went to Portugal with another man and her son, by this time he’d left her for the last time and was living in New York. She called from Oporto and said “Why don’t you join us? We always said we wanted to stomp around the Iberian Peninsula, so now we can all do it together. Brett said he wouldn’t mind sharing me with you so long as he gets to stay with me two consecutive nights out of four. We can do it that way, always getting two bedrooms. And the one who doesn’t sleep with me shares his room, and if there’s only one bed in it, then his bed, with Brons,” and he said “But he still wets it sometimes,” and she said “Don’t worry, he’s just a kid with a wee bladder, and I brought a pad.”

He’d left from her house, driven a U-Drive-It car to Indiana, flown from Indianapolis to New York. Called her every day along the way. “I’m in Nevada now, in the middle of a desert, I swear half the cars driving past are going at least a hundred-twenty miles per, but from this phonebooth I can see the mountains I’ll be camping in tonight. I miss you, isn’t that stupid?” and she said “Enjoy yourself, explore the wild, curl up with a coyote or bear.” “I’m on the outskirts of North Platte, Nebraska, and from this rest stop I just saw the most stunning sunset in my life and an hour ago a tornado. To catch what promises to be a glorious sunrise and to save some cash, I think I’ll sleep in the car here. I still miss you, maybe not even out of loneliness on the road, and more than I did yesterday. It’s ridiculous, because when we said good-bye we both never wanted to see the other again,” and she said she missed him too and would love for him to fly back soon as he unloads the car in Indiana. “We wouldn’t work anything out but we’d have a helluva hot and heavy few days. Brons began peeing in his pants day you left. He says he can’t sleep knowing you’ll never come back,” and he said “Tell him I’ll see him at least once a year, though probably twice that. I’ll send for him when he gets a bit older but meanwhile I’ll fly out there just to be with him and starting a few months from now and one to two weeks at a time,” and she said “You tell him because if I do then when you go back on your pledge he’ll blame me.” “Hi, Gould. I miss you, I love you, I want to hold you in my arms forever and ever. When are you driving back? Where are you now? Will you be away long?” “Oh, my little boy,” he said and started sobbing and Brons handed the phone to her: “I think he’s crying. I didn’t do anything bad, did I?”

Flew to Lisbon (cashed in the savings bonds his mother had bought him twenty years before), slept with her that night and it went well for a while. He had her for two nights, Brett for two, they bussed and trained around Portugal and Spain together. Then Brett hooked up with an old girlfriend for a week and he and Evangeline and Brons hitched from Salamanca to Zaragoza, where Brett met up with them. Then it was time for those three to leave; he still had a week. They had a chartered flight back; his was regular round-trip fare. Why’s he think all this info’s essential? And he’s never been good with facts, stats and grammar and things like that; he knows where people were in a room and what they did and generally what they said. He got angry a few hours before they were to go to the airport, said some things, she said some; he remembers the scene vividly: she was sitting in the sink peeing, he was packing Brons’s things, Brons was napping on their bed (they’d made love on the floor while he was asleep), Brett was in the adjoining bedroom. They argued (she jumped off the sink, wiped herself and put on her pants); he jostled her (more a tap), she hit him (fist against neck), he grabbed her chin and squeezed it and said “You fucker (bitch, bastard, stupid cunt), why do you think I should take that without heaving you across the room?” She spit in his face and said “Oh so brave; let me see you just try it.” He squeezed her chin harder till she screamed. (He knew what he was doing was all wrong, that he should apologize, say he doesn’t know what the hell came over him, that he doesn’t even know what started the goddamn argument, anyway, forgive him, and then leave the room and walk around the city for an hour, buy them going-away presents, etcetera.) By this time Brons had his arms around his legs and was trying to drag him away from his mother. Brett burst into the room. “Ladies, gentlemen, please,” and pried Gould’s hand off her chin. “You maniac,” she said to Gould, “we’re going just at the right moment,” and he said “You’re right, on everything, just as I’m wrong on them. But why am I bothering with any of you? This has all been a dopey sham. A woman shouldn’t be shared — that’s my problem or what set it off. We’ve been so freaking hip about it. Oh, you get to stick it in her, oh, I get to do it next, two for you, three in column four, oh aren’t we all so nouveau classe.” “What?” she said. “Every time you hit the sack with her,” to Brett, “it drove me nuts. Now I went over the peak. I couldn’t stand your goddamn sounds through the wall. You had to make them, knowing I was in the next room sleeping right up against your wall? You had to shout, you had to say ouch, ouch? She’s a slut, we’re both pimps, the three of us are flaming exhibitionists, and you’re a dumb asshole for agreeing to the arrangement in the first place. Once she left with you she should have stuck with you. It hasn’t been good for Brons besides,” and she said “And what you’re saying now is? As for who’s the loony hypocrite, we won’t even vote.” “Shut up, you bastard (fucker, bitch, slut, stupid cunt, A-I manipulator). Shut up, shut up!” She spit at him again, punched his chest. “Ladies, gentlemen, please.” He grabbed her chin. Brett said “Jesus, did you have to?” and jumped on him, threw him against the wall. Brons was bawling. “This is so sad,” Gould said, “I’m such a wreck, everything couldn’t be worse. How’d I get to this? I’m sorry, sorry, forgive me,” and got on his knees and rested his head against Brons’s shins. “Get off me. You’re crazy,” and he said “I know, I’m so ashamed, to you most of all, but to all the rest. Ah, enough,” standing up. “I’m hopeless. I hate everything. Deals, contracts, egos, appetites, it’s all getting to me. Nobody else here may be a sham but I certainly am.” He punched the wall and when Brett said “Stop, you’re gonna cost us a fortune,” he threw a radio across the room, ashtray to the floor, picked up a chair to smash it against something but put it down and sat on it. Manager was called. He said “It’s all because I don’t want to be so solely alone again.” Didn’t know why he said it. Never really minded traveling alone. Had been looking forward to it after they left: Granada, Seville; they hadn’t been there and he’d wanted to go. Toledo, the Prado, to sit in what he’d heard was a small square room there filled with tall El Grecos. He yelled “The freedom of the open road is hell. Ah, that’s so asinine,” and clenched his eyes closed and grabbed his head. “He was never like this,” she said to someone. “Never melodramatic; in fact, bewailed that state. A schmuck sometimes but never so sophomoric. Maybe cracking up was the best thing for him; he was always too judgmental and tight.” “That’s unfair,” Brett said and she said “You’re probably right. Please get our bags downstairs. You help him, Brons. No good-byes, let’s just go. He’ll pay for everything he breaks,” to the manager. “Otherwise, we’re all paid up.” She quickly threw the rest of her and Brons’s things into a duffel bag, made for the door, said “Wait, I can’t leave him like this,” and he thought She’s going to say she wants him to come to California soon as he can. That it wasn’t all his fault and she takes most of the blame. That she still loves him and he doesn’t have to think this is the end of them. Even if she won’t mean most of it, it’ll give him hope through the next week. “Please get a hold of yourself, Gould. I feel somewhat responsible for you but not that much where I’d miss my flight. I don’t have that kind of cash to blow. And if you didn’t like the arrangement, you always could have said. Take care. I don’t quite know why it happened today, but like you I think it stinks,” and left. “Bye, Gould’s” from Brons and Brett at the door. The manager, with a young nervous elevator operator on both sides of him, said “Pardon us, sir, but we don’t wish you to remain. The radio was old so we won’t ask and we’ll also excuse the glass. Now, can you go?” He’s reached an age, he wanted to say to him, where he should have his own children. You, a Spaniard, know about that. One’s own children and a good wife can stop a man from unacceptable behavior like this. A job like yours too: full-time, relatively well-paying, respectable. He’s become a leech on people for lots of things: money, emotion, having a kid. Something snapped that won’t again. His life’s become ugly and he must start changing that today. Okay, settled, he knows what’s the problem but he’s not sure how to carry out the solution, but one thing at a time, yes? and ran past the manager and his men — should have said he was sorry to him; he’ll do it later, but everything can’t come that fast — out of the hotel, walked around for hours, had lots of coffee and saw some sights, they were gone now, plane had taken off, were probably still discussing him, but don’t let that stop you, went back to the hotel to pick up his things, someone had packed them for him, asked for the manager, he’d left work for the day so Gould wrote a note: “My apologies, señor, my deepest and most respectful. Thank you for being so courteous, understanding and just plain nice about the whole matter. I’m completely ashamed and shan’t repeat that behavior again.” Changed his departure flight from Madrid to Marseilles. Bussed to Aix-en-Provence; met a woman there on vacation for two weeks and started sleeping with her. He was getting healthy; when the woman said that as much as she adores him this is only a summer fling and she’ll return to her husband in a week and never see him again unless she comes to America on business or they meet by chance, he said he understands, that was the arrangement from the start, he’ll regret when they separate but it’s been a wonderful few days so far and it isn’t over yet. “What a marvelous disposition,” she said in French; “so clear and clean and where there’s no rancor or stain. Normally, a man would demand I stay till he has to go, that I lie to my husband why I’m delaying my return and then desert me in a few days, having won an uncontested contest with my husband and triumphed over my compunctions and better instincts or make a tearful tirade and spectacle when the time came for me to leave.” “I used to,” he said, “but learned.” They went to museums and concerts and chapels designed by artists and restored homes of famous painters and composers, discussed art, philosophy, religion, books, music and the more serious European movies; Evangeline never wanted to talk about things like that; thought all conversation about art was “for faggots” and that America made the best movies and subtitles ruined your eyesight and good music started with Dixieland and jazz and books were for falling in love with and not trumpeting your highfalutin views and philosophy was unreadable when it wasn’t laughable to read and religion you should just shut up about even if you’re a believer and looking at art in books was better than on walls because you didn’t have to tramp around huge stuffy buildings and try to peer over people’s shoulders to see it. “That’s because of your height,” he said; “so get in front, no one would mind.” He’s never been so nuts, he told himself repeatedly, so let that be a lesson to him: it was terrifying and painful. Sure, when he was eighteen he was a depressed kid on and off for a year and contemplated suicide, or entertained that idea but was never serious about it and it was probably more romantic and hormonal than anything else, because it suddenly disappeared, and when women broke up with him when he was in his twenties he used to make some terrible scenes, punching doors, throwing things across rooms, once even threatened to slap the woman he’d been briefly engaged to when she called it off, but doesn’t think he ever felt so icy and hollow inside and partitioned from the world as he did that day: there were voices in his head for hours that said “You’re crazy, that’s all there is to it, good-bye, cuckoo bird, you’re now never gonna get out of your cage, mission accomplished: over the line for all time because an enormous wall’s been built on it that you can never climb over, you’ll have to be attended to forever or stay on powerful calming drugs but always in locked institutions where your keepers occasionally beat and bugger you and with no chance to be playful and creative and sexual with women again, all that’s been erased or will be, so what can one say: it’s too late and you shoulda seen it coming.” The preventive solution? Forget what he came up with that day, that was only to get him through it. You just got to be aware of what you do and say and work your darndest at what you like pursuing and don’t make unfair demands or expect success or the good things to last and bad ones never to happen and better to be hurt than hurt someone and gratitude is good too and politeness and genuine kindness and living alone has its pluses and drawbacks but things change, try not to have too many illusions and preconditions and musts, just be someone — well, he was going to say be someone others can come to and count on rather than warded off by his often being frazzled or on the border line of falling apart, though for the time being best he just take care of himself. It’ll all take time; you can’t be razed or destroyed in a day except by some devastating drug. Also the job, his own place, living normally or just quietly and simply but not obsequiously and never greedily, and independently and eventually the wife and kids will come. Why’s marriage so important? Oh, for most of the old reasons and he knows so little and so much is too complex to make all the decisions himself and he’s also tired of going out looking and even hunting, and kids he’s always loved.

During the trip she said “This isn’t easy to say but if you and Brett are getting weary of the two-in-a-row routine and want to do it to me together and at the same time even do things to each other, I won’t object.” He said “Never. It’s got to be one-on-one with me or if there’s a third, then a woman only.” “I think that’s what I prefer too,” Brett said and she said “You’re both scaredy-parrots,” and Gould said “No, I just don’t want to touch another man that way,” and she said he was lying and probably Brett too and he said “I don’t get it. What good’s it do you having me screw around with a guy, maybe stick it in his rear and get shit on my prick and then put it in you — but especially the guy you’re going back to California with and say you’ve loads of affection for?” and she said “You ever hear of soap? And it’d turn me on, for one thing, just as it would you seeing two young chickies going at it. And for another, it’d be good for you both, free you . heck, I’ve fooled around a couple of times with girls, when we were all zonked but I knew what was happening and could get into it, and I still really most like doing it exclusively with men and the same would happen with you. Just think if you ever wound up in prison; you’d be a little happier there than if you had never done it or at least not so afraid. I think though I’ll always be a woman where one man will never be enough. You’ll probably say that’s because of my size and build and I’m trying to compensate for something, but you don’t know how far off you’d be. Usually when either of you is finished, even if I’ve had my display, I still want to continue and wish I had the same, and if I can’t, then another guy’s joint in me. My number-one fantasy — one of you has heard it — is an orgy with just me and six to eight guys. But each a gentleman, nobody rough, and strong and sexy and a couple of them funny and making quips and two of them beautiful and even one guy very hairy and all of them no older than you two are and they also have to be at least nice-looking and big-muscular to wiry or lean. And each one gets to fritz me my way, but while one is, the rest are kissing and fondling and sucking me every which way and maybe one of them’s doing it to himself and two others to each other, but I wouldn’t know how to arrange such an event. And I suppose I shouldn’t think I should, since it’d kill my poor little pussy for good. But I wonder, with enough jelly and breaks, and if I told them only to go in a little, not too deeply, had them swear not to, if I could pull it off. How about just one of them entering me that way and the rest at one time kissing and sucking me all over and that sort of stuff, things I’d never dreamed of. It’ll all never happen, of course, and I’d get too oddball a sex rep and after a while there could be guys lined up five-deep outside my front door whom I’d never want to mess with. Though maybe it actually could happen with two or three good guys or even four, but that would be the max.”

First night he’s to stay there his shoulder’s in a sling. They have dinner, some wine, she puts her son to bed, he says “He’s a cute kid, I like him, very sharp, you can tell,” and she says “He’s the love of my life. I’d die if anything disastrous happened to him and would become violently insane if he was seriously mistreated, know what I mean?” and he says “Hey, don’t look at me, absolutely the wrong pervert,” and she says “Just saying, which I’d do to my father if he ever slept over or baby-sat, and as far as I’m able to remember he never did a filthy or untoward thing to me, but I was a girl,” and he says “Personally, I’d think you’d be overstepping your anxieties there or honesty or outspokenness or something, if your father had never shown any inclination or sign, etcetera, or done anything along those lines to any sex or age. But do what your want, that’s your business,” and she says “No, I like that, you’re right out there and put it well in a fumbling way,” and they sit on the floor playing a board game she suggested while listening to records of her favorite music, free jazz, which he’s never heard and now doesn’t much like but she keeps closing her eyes and smiling and bobbing her head to, and she looks at him — she’s killing him in the game, mostly because he’s still learning how to play, or maybe she’d always win that well anyway: it was the only time they played — and it’s the look of someone wanting to be kissed and she’s pretty but small, very small, her body, he wonders, if it ever got that far, if she’d even be able to take a guy his size, he never made love with someone so short and slight and thin and he thinks Give it a go, why not for two weeks? though maybe he’s wrong about the look and says “What?” and she says “Did I say something?” and he says “Your look . okay,” and thinks Just forget it, don’t want to press and based on a misperception get berated for it, and she leans forward with that look and he thinks It must be, and moves to it and it’s just a peck but once she pulls her face away she brings it back to within an inch of his and puts her arms around him and he says “Oy, watch the shoulder, it’s separated bad, they think it could even be a break,” and she says “I don’t want to make asinine double-trouble remarks and say ‘I’ll be gentle.’ I’ll just play it safe and keep my hands off,” and he says “Sorry,” puts his left arm around her and rubs her back but recoils his hand when he feels the bony knobs, but maybe it’s the way she’s bent forward that they’re sticking out like that and rests his hand there and she grabs his penis through the pants and says something and he didn’t hear what and wishes he did but won’t ask her to repeat it, that’d be stupid, and puts his left hand on her shorts and then inside them and so on and she says “We can rip at it anytime, you know; you don’t have to worry. But won’t this make your shoulder worse?” and he says “We’ll stay off it.”—shoulder hurting like hell now but he doesn’t want to say, she might think it’s too dangerous for him and stop — and she says “What position would be the best for it?” and he says “Let’s wait till we get to the bed before we decide, unless you want to do it here,” and she says “On the floor? Or the couch? No support underneath for the former and the latter with no room? What could be less appealing,” and he says “All this talk,” and she says “You’re right,” and when they get to the bedroom he takes his shirt and socks off and lies on the bed with her and says “We don’t have to do it immediately, but probably — wait, the door’s okay?” and she says “He sleeps for the first few hours like a stone, then has to pee or has peed in his bed and I have to get him up either way,” and he says “Then probably if you got on top for me, though only when you’re ready and if it’s okay,” and she says “No good for me; the way I’m built. Would side-by-side be all right?” and he says “Fine,” and she says “It shouldn’t hurt you — we’ll make sure your right shoulder’s not involved — and if it does, we won’t continue it. Later, if we like each other and want to do it again — not tonight, so much, but another time — we can do it once the way you like; but for now my way till I get the hang of you, is that all right?” and he says “Again, what’s good for you, though you’ll have to show me what you mean, I haven’t a precise picture of it . may I?” and slips off her shorts and underpants and starts taking off her shirt and she says “I have petite breasts — I hope you don’t mind too much; some men do; or my being concerned about it. You might not even think I have breasts when I get my bra off. I don’t want to scare you, there’s nothing freakish there or any scars, and I promise I’m not a boy,” and he says “What are breasts anyway? I mean, I like them—” and she says “All right, okay, thank you,” and he says “I was about to say I like them but I don’t think they’re essential to my liking a woman,” and she says “Good, for the truth is mine are practically nonexistent. They’re there, of course, two dots and circles, but they just don’t bulge. Everything else is in place and relatively normal, although I love sex inordinately, do you?” and he says “Inordinately? I don’t know. But I like it, sure, what else am I to say at this moment?” and she says “I love it, love it, with the right person and setting, though it’s always good. And you look like — you even felt like, little I was allowed to feel, as if you have a nice body for it,” and he says “What are you saying? That I’ve something against you touching me?” and she says “No, even if we didn’t play around too long. But by nice body I mean that you’re not too soft or fat or small or crooked,” and he says “Crooked? And small I’m not, which you saw when I was standing up. I’m average, maybe a little above, and she says “I meant in the joint department,” and he says “‘Joint.’ You said that word before and I guess it means—” and she says “Yeah.”

Screams, thrashes, pulls his hair, feet bang against the bed, does all that, digs her nails into his back till he says “Hey, lay off, your fingers, it’s excessive, and it’s not just my shoulder.” A little later he says “Listen, I’m tired, my shoulder really aches — I have to get some aspirins or, if you have, something stronger. Besides, I don’t have to prove anything to myself or you that I can do it three times in an hour. I can’t; too bushed and maybe I put almost everything into the first and what’s left into the second and a third’s virtually impossible for me so soon. Anyway, twice is fine, even for the first time, and should be more than enough,” and she says “There’s always the chance you’ll change your mind after you snooze awhile; men have,” and he says “It isn’t a question of my mind. And snooze a lot. Really, I’m out till daylight unless we’re much further north than I was in my room last night and daylight comes an hour earlier here,” and she says “You’re getting too abstruse for me which I don‘t like because it sounds so phony. But I do tend to ask for too much in almost everything and I’m sorry,” and kisses him and holds him as she dozes off. He listens to her as she sleeps; she breathes so quietly through that small nose. He’d like to take her arms from around him so he can put his sling back on and get the aspirins and go to sleep, but doesn’t want to disturb her yet. Is this what he wants? Her body; so scrawny. And nice and smart as she is most times so far, he bets she can be a bitch and anti-intellectual, snapping at him in the bitch mood, if he comes and she doesn’t, and demanding he go on till she does. Well, just for two weeks, and for that time, even if it turns out he doesn’t like it here much, he’s sort of stuck.

A year later they all went to New York. Acting was what she’d decided to do. She’d study it, he’d work as a per-diem sub in junior high schools, Brons would go to a cheap preschool, they’d live simply and frugally. She sublet her house for two hundred a month more than it cost to keep up, so barring any sudden expenses for it, that would be her contribution to their living in New York. It had come to her in a dream. She was acting on stage, a period piece she said — she was in a long dress and twirling a parasol — the performance ended a minute into the dream and there were lots of whistles and applause, people in the audience tossed flowers at her and shouted her name and yelled Brava, Bravísima—“I know this is mostly what’s done at the end of every act of an opera, no matter how corny the opera is and dumbly performed and poorly sung, but this was my dream”—and when she awoke she said “I’ve never wanted to be anything in my life — not even a nurse or schoolteacher when I was very young — no professional till now. I want to be a stage actress; not movies or TV, just stage. I love great plays — Shakespeare, Lillian Hellman, the one that Carousel was based on — and have a clear strong voice for speaking and singing, a decent-enough face — a couple of photographer acquaintances have even called it an exceptionally photogenic one — and lots of ambition and spunk. I want to give myself two to three years to make good, but only one in New York studying it. If I flop, back to the same old shit till the next inspiration; I won’t continue something that’s obviously coming to nothing and paying off with zero funds. But this is how things get done: you get a wild idea, make a quick decision and do it; all that holding-your-head deliberative stuff and plugging away for decades to get a toehold in your field is for losers. Will you come with us?” and he said yes because he wanted to return to New York, spend time with his parents and friends there, and the West Coast, or areas he’s lived in or seen, was too relaxed and unexciting for him. He wanted to walk along jammed city streets — he got some of his best ideas when he did — and to be stimulated the way only a place like New York or Paris can — let’s face it, he was a city kid — and for the first time to live in one with a woman, and he loved her son and wanted to show his friends what a good surrogate father he was, and living there would make her grateful for what he’d call his urban expertise in that city and also more dependent on him. Now whether she could be an actress? He didn’t think she had the looks, voice, projection, personality and literary intellect for the roles she wanted to play and he never thought she was that good at mimicry or in even recounting incidents that happened to her or someone else or telling jokes. But you never know.

Several months later she said she wanted to move back to California. “New Yorkers are miserable and cruel. Your folks dislike me. Your friends all think they’re superior and so smart and because I’m from the West I’m a hick and dummy. The air stinks. I want to smell clean air, see a blue sky with nice white clouds and later some stars. I don’t want to go to the park just to see rotting trees and dirty grass or brown or ripped-up patches of ground. I want my old house back, my own backyard. I hate the walls of apartments and our so-called neighbors are the biggest creeps that ever lived. This one overdrinks, this one plays her loud music all night, this one looks as if he’d steal my kid, this one has caged birds that squawk all day, this one has an apartment that stinks as if it hasn’t been cleaned of its cat shit for seven years. The view through our dingy windows is putrid. People on the street try to run you over even on their bikes. Nobody here has any respect for old people — few of the old people even do — or warmth for kids. I’m tired of car alarms at two in the morning, garbage trucks at three, hotheads bashing out their windows at four in the morning, someone being robbed on the street at five and the cops not showing up till six or seven. Branson’s made no friends. The kids in his school are too competitive, aggressive, argumentative, Jewish,” and he said “First of all, if you didn’t know it, I’m Jewish, goddamn you,” and she said “They’re not Jews like you. These kids are like their parents, I’m sure: pushy, angry, obsessed with money and just very Jewish, even the Christian ones,” and he said “Will you stop using the word Jewish like that? You’re not seeing and you’ve no sense of history, recent or otherwise,” and she said “Listen to me, I’m not made for this craphole — you are; you go and buy milk that’s twenty cents a gallon higher than in California and which turns sour in two days, not me. Get cheated and insulted by store workers all day if you like. But Brons and I were made for the more peaceful and reasonable and civil West Coast where there aren’t depressingly deteriorated faces mooching money and digging through trash containers at every subway entrance and bus stop,” and he said “This city isn’t entirely what you sum it up as by any stretch. And have you figured how much it cost us to settle here? There’s the month’s security on the apartment which we won’t get back and if the landlord doesn’t find a replacement tenant we’ll be legally responsible for the rent till the lease expires in a year. I happen to, in spite of all its, okay, annoyances and difficulties, like this city and to dislike most of California for the very tranquility and civility you talk about. Okay, not the civility. But your area’s too suburban, dull and uniform for me. There’s no real change of seasons except maybe a few falling leaves and some sweater weather for two months, and the rest of that, mostly about art and culture — that California’s twice as far from Europe as New York is — which are sort of my argument clichés to match yours,” and she said “People clean up after their dogs in my town, that’s why you don’t like it. You like dog shit on my kid when he rolls around in the park, or on your shoes and when you come into the apartment, to stink up the floor with it. You like lunatics tossing bricks down at you from building roofs,” and he said “When was that?” and she said “In the newspaper, not five blocks from here. You like bus drivers intentionally riding over mud puddles to splash you or parking twenty feet away from the curb so you have to jump over those puddles, and subways screeching till you can’t hear.” “Most of that’s unusual,” and she said “The mud-splattering isn’t typical, I’ll admit, though it happens too frequently, and same with buses stopping that far away to pick passengers up. But the subway screeching and express trains roaring through our local station happens every time, always, and will turn this into a neighborhood of deaf-mutes.” “If it’s too loud, you put your hands over your ears, that’s all, but it never bothered me.” “That’s because you’re already deaf by it.” “That’s a dumb old joke.” They argued more, voices got stronger, she slapped him, he grabbed her chin. This was before Spain. In Spain when he did it she said “What is it with you and my chin?” Here she knocked his hand away and said “Forget it, I’m done with you, your rough stuff, your quirks, now your insanities; I’m moving back home,” and he said “Just because you found you weren’t much of an actress — oh yeah. You really gave it a lot of time,” and she said “If you want to know, I found I hated acting. It’s a completely fake profession. It’s for phonies who are even more vain than I am . much more. I look in the mirror a great deal, but these people live in it and can’t talk of anything but themselves or the famous or influential people they know or hope to know or know people who know,” and he said “That’s a cliché on a very familiar type; if you’re going to present an argument about such a subject, go jugular,” and she said “It isn’t a cliché; you don’t go to my school. If it sounds surface it’s because they are surface. You met a few of them for an hour and they’re so simple and sweet and interested, but playing that role. They don’t know who you are yet; you could be a producer. But that’s what they know how to do and are always practicing for in all their social contacts outside the theater: roles. Actors have no interest in being real people in real situations, and not even in real acting quality. They’re unrelievedly jealous, in fact, of true talent and wouldn’t give a snitch of credit to anyone who showed it, unless the person was dying or dead, the few times they’re actually able to recognize that talent. They only want parts. I thought that at least — the very least — that having a small lean body would mean nothing on the stage. Look at the two Hepburns and a couple of others before they went movie-land for good. But they’re the exceptions, for some reason, because every theater man I met, and men control it, let me tell you, is obsessed with wraparound breasts, legs and behinds, if he isn’t sticking his hands on men’s flies. I know I’ll never even get a walk-on role in twenty years because of mine, nicely formed as my behind and legs are, or maybe a walk-on if I screw one like mad for several nights. It was a stupid move on our part—mine—and from a dream, goddamnit, and you let me go ahead with it, but all right. But at least I know when I’ve made a mistake, you don’t,” and he said “What mistake did I make, moving here? I like this city, I’ve told you. If there was any mistake, not that I’m blaming you, it was first moving in with you, but my dick has always ruled me,” and she said “You’re sick and sordid, do you know that? Sometimes I only think you moved in with us—” and he said “Oh, we’re on that again? Why, because I feel for the boy more than I ever felt for you and even love him more now than I used to, which is natural, for that’s what time does to it if the kid stays as great as he always was,” and she said “Then as I also said, you maybe love him too well. But don’t get any ideas you’ll be number one with Brons for too long. His real father isn’t so much waiting in the wings now but he’s there, smoking a cigarette or joint and looking at the beautiful actresses and their undulant hips and behinds, but he’ll soon come on and do his part,” and he said “Oh boy, are you ever into the metaphor or analogy or whatever the freaking figure of speech for it is. But you missed ‘miracle play,’ ‘domestic tragedy,’ ‘comedy of errors,’ ‘theater of cruelty’ and ‘of the absurd,’ and ‘farce,’ ‘burlesque,’ ‘slapstick’ and ‘swan song’ and so on.”

“He misses you, pines for you, has returned to wetting his bed every now and then,” she said on the phone week after she and Brons left. “When are you coming back? We both need and miss you. My bed wants you. The whole house is groaning for your return. Just skip out on the future rent and let them follow you to California if they’d ever do that,” and he said “Can’t do, it wouldn’t be right. If I come, then I first pay them what I owe,” and she said “Dummy, nobody in New York would and the landlord knows and expects that.” She wants him, he thought, so she can have someone pay the bills. Maybe in three months, just so he can save some money from substitute teaching every day and also to give him time to get someone to take over his lease.

His mother said “My advice is not to go. She doesn’t seem the right girl for you. She’s not soft, her background’s too different, I’ve a feeling she’ll end up bossing you around and treating you like a schmo. You were always such a proud and independent guy but something’s happened to you.” His father said “She’s a pig, no personality, ugly as sin and with brains to match. She treats you like a doormat. Her son’s not yours but you play around birdbrain-like that he is, and this is going to ruin your future life and keep other women a hundred miles from you. Get rid of her fast. Don’t waste your money calling her anymore, don’t write, for sure don’t go back. Get a real woman who looks like one and not like a boy and who has a body that can have babies after you marry her. This one’s an operator and schemer, cagey as they come and only thinks of herself and her gorgeous garish clothes and layers of makeup, as if she’s a rich princess who all the eligible men adore, when she’s more like a witch. How can she walk on such pin legs and breathe when she has no nose? You two look stupid together — Mutt and Jeff, she’s so short — and she also has no respect for your parents when she knows you love us and we’ve been good as gold to you. She comes in here, always wanted to be waited on, never once said thanks, and when she left, ‘good-bye’ was a dirty word to her, and no note since for the two weeks we put her up and the mattress her son ruined.” His mother said “Not true, the no-thanks part. She was usually polite, had very nice manners, cleaned up after herself and her son, and the boy is a darling. If she could raise him to be so good, even if I bet some of that the last year had to do with Gould’s contribution, then there’s a lot to be said for her. She simply isn’t right for him though. There doesn’t seem to be that necessary thing between them, the lights and respect, nothing. Maybe because they were financially strapped here, but they were usually backbiting, fighting — in front of us — almost never agreeing on any one thing.” “She’s flighty,” his father said. “Had a husband devoted to her—” “He wasn’t so devoted,” Gould said. “Then had a husband, period, and leaves him in a week or so after the boy’s born and takes up with who knows what and eventually you. Now she wants to be an actress, or that’s finally over. What did she want to be before?” “The part about taking up with other guys right away is wrong, all wrong.” “When you were in California you wrote us she was going to be an interior designer, before that a furniture designer and before that an architect,” and Gould said “Those things were momentary aspirations; more ideas to think over and discuss the possibilities of than anything concrete, and I did her a disservice by mentioning them. I suppose I wanted to — you know — build her up to you.” “Just because you felt you had to do that shows how little you thought of her,” his father said, and he said “That’s not how I see it. Anyway, theater, an actress, becoming one, that was the first serious thing she really wanted to do and you have to give her credit for uprooting her life to pursue it. That it didn’t work out . . and his father said “It didn’t because she couldn’t act to herself alone in front of a mirror if you gave her two hours to. And she was never pleasant, always that sour mug of hers, or something where you had to tickle her silly to get out the simplest smile. So what was there to her? Tell me, I’m asking. Did men stop dead in their tracks on the street for her?” “Yes, as a matter of fact, sometimes.” “Bull. And if there’s one thing a girl ought to have, if she doesn’t have good looks and personality and a great job or lots of promise and there’s no big family money around, which anyhow you don’t care about — money, hoo! what does it mean to you — is brains. And for you especially she should have this and maybe most important: an intellect, to be a member of the intelligentsia you aspire to, and that she also lacked, take it from me,” and his mother said “I found her to be quite smart, well read and full of interesting insights into life. It’s the chemistry between them that I think was missing,” and his father said “Chemistry and brains, then, but a lot else wasn’t there. If her only attributes were that she was an all-star in bed and a good mother, big deal — you can’t live off the first forever and the second shouldn’t affect you much if the kid isn’t yours. I think you’re only going back for the boy, and a greater mistake couldn’t be made. You aren’t his father, you’ll never be his father, and no matter how much the boy loves you now and you feel close to him, in ten years — in fifteen, you name it, if his real father doesn’t grab him first — he’ll be out of the house and in college and then you’ll be stuck alone with her.” “We could have other children,” and his mother said “I’d advise against hanging your hat on that. She told me a number of times that having Bronson was the worst experience she ever had — throwing up violently for three months and then the long delivery, which nearly drove her mad with pain till they put her out — that she’d never want to have another child.” “I overheard that too,” his father said, “since of course she’d never say it to me. She never said boo to me. She knew I was on to her the moment she stepped into our house. And that despite all her primping and painting — toenails, fingers, face, eyes and hair, the whole can of worms — what I also thought of her looks.” “Some people think she’s beautiful,” Gould said, “everyone at least thinks she’s pretty. But what are we talking about, for the one thing we haven’t mentioned so far and is more important than anything is that she’s a very good person inside,” and his father said “In my eyes she isn’t, and the ones who think so or see that ought to get their eyes and heads examined. She’s got a homely face and a shifty mind and a heart that’s like a stone. There’s a combo for you, one only an idiot would go for,” and his mother said “That’s not so — not even near the truth. Though there were some things I questioned about her, she has many fine qualities,” and on it went, till his father said “Enough; nothing’s going to sink through his hard head. And besides everything else, as if I have to say this, I’m not well, your mother can’t do all the taking care of me at her age, and I’ll probably get a lot worse before I get a little better, if I don’t drop dead in a year, so it should be easy for you to see we need you here or just around the city for sudden calls,” and he said “I wish I could; honestly, there’s nothing I’d want to do more; but I can’t be in two very far-apart places at the same time and I’m going out there. If you really need me — a sudden emergency, or just some help for a couple of weeks — which I’d hope not because I’d hate for you to get worse — I’ll fly right home.”

Years later he was standing at a bar with a friend who said “You know, you might not want to hear this. But since you brought her name up before or maybe you do, now, or wouldn’t mind, when it’s so long after the fact, but I never knew what you saw in that California broad — Angel, or Evangel, or Angelina. She wasn’t—” and he said “Evangeline. She never liked it shortened or would tolerate any nickname,” and his friend said “Evangeline, then. But just that, that she wouldn’t, with such a mouthful of an uncommon name. But she wasn’t smart or sharp or good-looking. Her body was like a board. She didn’t like one person you knew, me most especially, I think because I was your closest friend. She in fact looked on everyone we knew as if she wanted to spit great wads on top of their heads. She hated the city, was afraid of everything, and treated you like shit. She wouldn’t even cook part of the dinner when Beverly and I came over — you had to do it all because we were your friends, not hers. What possibly could have possessed you? Usually your taste in women was pretty good,” and he said “You sound like my dad there, may his soul, etcetera, and the rest of him . . ” and his friend said “Then your dad was right. He knew a looker; look at your mom. He also knew — I could tell, even sick as he was the last times I saw him and with not much use for talking because of his paralysis problem — what was up and who was phooey and what in life was hype or gauze or fake.” “There was something between her and me that can’t be explained. But I’ll try, right? That’s what I usually do. If you don’t think she was good-looking or smart or anything like that.

Wait, did you say anything about her not being smart?” and his friend said “She wasn’t, was she? — not too much.” “Anyway, nothing I can do about that. Eyes, taste, your own handicaps or prejudices or just that you never engaged her in a deep conversation, or that she didn’t fill your bill in the bones and flesh categories But we had lots of fun together. I mean, where I really went hysterical with laughing, both of us together, and not from pot. And she had a very good mind. Would read a difficult novel, poetry or as much as she hated the subjects, an article on philosophy or some literary criticism I handed her — unlearned, you see, never got through high school — but would understand it more incisively than I most times and more than lots of scholars could. Why? Intuitive knowledge, instinctive, common sense, saw through things and could read between the lines and so on — incisiveness, as I said, all easy and natural. So we discussed things like that — long discussions, no fancy words or references or quotes from literary big shots or other books — and movies and plays we went deeply into too. And we both adored her son. Another plus. You don’t have a kid or want one so you’re shaking your head it’s nothing, it’s nothing, but you don’t know what you’re missing,” and his friend said “The art bullshit sessions don’t interest me either,” and he said “I know, it’s not what you like or appreciate — movies, you do, even talking about them at length. She also made a nice home for us. Very nice things; she had great taste, picked up treasures in Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul; I felt very comfortable there. You’re a slob so this doesn’t mean anything to you, stinky jockey briefs in the kitchen sink, greasy pots piled high in the toilet bowl,” and his friend said “Thanks a lot; you really know me.” “I like things neat and attractive and a house in order and uncluttered, with serious paintings or prints on the wall, nice light fixtures, and that’s what she did, with a little help from me. In ways our tastes in many things were almost identical; that doesn’t hurt a relationship. And she was good in bed. Now your eyes light up. ‘Good, bed, fuck, ug,’” and his friend said “Looking at her, I wouldn’t’ve thought it; but knowing how much you like sex, it sort of makes sense.” “She always put out for me when I wanted — not something every woman did — or most of the time. Handed me her body almost, or turned around with her backside to me, as if saying ‘Here, I’m sleepy, not even up to performing, do what you want with it’—but with restrictions of course. Though I think I have her mixed up with someone else. Sorry. She, actually, couldn’t be persuaded to do anything she didn’t want to. And sure, she was a tremendous ballbreaker too and we wouldn’t do it for weeks at a time sometimes because we loathed each other and wanted to live any way but together and even did the separate rooms bit,” and his friend said “So why didn’t you leave? If something like that happened to me with some girl, I’d say ‘Man overboard,’ and jump,” and he said “Good question. I never understood why, several times, I didn’t leave absolutely and indisputably and unreturnably for good. It was during my needy way-down-on-myself period maybe. Maybe I got too comfortable in her house and with her kid and in being to other people a much-admired pretend father. The pleasures of predictably recurrent sex once the enmity ends. That I was a poor lonely putz but at least had a nice house and some family life. Also, I was going nowhere so at least for the time being was somewhere, and so on — you need more reasons? When it was good it was almost okay, blah blah. She needed me lots of times too and when I was out of her life no one missed me more, till the last time when she was giddy at my being gone and stayed that way. ‘Aren’t we better off now?’ she’d say on the phone — I forget who called, probably me with some lame excuse for calling. ‘Isn’t life really better for you now that we’re split?’ If I said ‘Well, I guess so, but still .’ she’d say ‘No, it is for me and if it isn’t for you yet it will be. Wait, my new beau wants to talk to you.’ But sometimes, before that, I thought we broke up just so we could get back together again in a month and for a few days, or a day or two, have the wildest most uninhibited and saddest — cries, tears, whoopees — time a couple could. In other words — well, in other words what? I can’t think; Elephant beer we had to order. But I found her beautiful — I shouldn’t forget that as a reason for staying. I’d look at her nose, eyes, the lips, everything. Tout le face. The most gorgeous I’d ever seen in a woman I was close to,” and his friend said “That’s nuts,” and reeled off names. “And they had tits, these women, gigantic to big to medium to only a little bit small, but something there you could squeeze or push your face into,” and he said “Tits. Why’s it matter so much? You need them to feed off of? But I’ll never win on that with you. Some guys are like that and some — a few — could care less. None could care nothing, I suppose, but you have to understand there are many other things in a woman, physical and emotional and so on, to supersede if not go way way beyond them. Just as if one guy has an enormous dick and the others don’t, big deal, there are so many other things in those men that should be important to a woman, or one would hope they’d be there. Believe me, after the first few days with Evangeline, they didn’t—” and his friend said “Bullshit.”

His mother’s younger brother came out to California on business and took them to dinner. They got a baby-sitter. “If the sitter costs a lot,” his uncle said, “since I know how expensive services can be in California and how financially short you two are, I’d like to take care of it,” and Gould said no. She laughed a lot at the table, especially at some of the remarks his uncle made and jokes he told. Held his uncle’s hand as he walked them to their car, gave him a big kiss and hug good-bye, waved to him as they drove off. She seemed sincere in all this. During the drive home: “I had the most wonderful time tonight, best in ages, and I know why. It was that man. He’s so unlike your mother — anyone in your family. Extremely funny, smart, successful, gentle, self-effacing, mannerly. Dashing, even — clothes he wore, things he said, way he spoke, how he handled himself with the overbearing headwaiter and waiters, as if educated at the best prep schools and then at Princeton or Yale and later a year at Oxford or someplace. A very generous and big-hearted person. It was a great evening, thank you,” and he said “The food was good too,” and she said “Food, food; yes, it was good, excellent, but those things don’t make an evening. If the food had been lousy and the service terrible it still would have been a great evening because of him,” and he said “I didn’t know you went for older men,” and she said “Don’t be stupid.” “I’ve never met anyone quite like her,” his uncle said on the phone a few days later when Gould called him in New York to thank him for the dinner. “She bowled me over. She’s a knockout from the word go, a dear young woman too, and intelligent? Oh my gosh. I should have a few like her working on my staff. What does she see in you, I wonder? — only kidding, my boy. You’re one lucky stiff. Don’t lose her for anything or ever ruin it by becoming a scoundrel or pretending to be a fool,” and he said “Say, when I’m through with her, or vice versa, or by some magic it’s mutual, I’ll give you her number, though I don’t know what Aunt Dee would say,” and his uncle said “Excuse me, Gould, and I don’t want you to take this as harsh criticism, but as far as foolish behavior’s concerned, what you said is exactly what I meant.”

Bronson was asleep when Gould passed her room on his way to his and said goodnight to her. She said “May I detain you for a moment?” and he said “Sure, what?” and stood by her door. “Despite all our previous differences, I have to say it’s nice having you back, if only for a few days. For all the turmoil and shit we threw at each other, we had plenty of fun too, am I right?” and he said “I’m not complaining.” She was in her nightgown, sitting up in bed, holding a book with one hand, other was under the covers on her crotch, it seemed, and seemed to be rubbing or scratching it. “I’ve seen lots of guys since we split up — you know me — but so far no crushing inamoratos or permanent live-ins,” and he said “Oh yeah? I’m surprised,” and she said “Nobody who interested me that much — I’m so pick-and-choosy as you well know. But there are plenty of single men in the area, not to mention a million college studs who perhaps have become a mite too young for me, and things will eventually work out,” and he said “I’m sure.” “Do you like my new bed? I bought it a few months ago. Cost me a bundle but I figured if I don’t have a live-in to be comfortable with when I sleep, might as well have a great bed, am I right?” and he said “It’s what I’d do if I had the dough. The bed in the apartment we sublet is mostly lumps. We sort of sleep around them,” and she said “Yours here isn’t that comfortable either — I’ve never slept in it but I have slept on it — but you’ll get a good night’s sleep if you’re tuckered out from your flight,” and he said “I hope so. I don’t know which time switch is supposed to be harder on your system, east-west or west-east, but I’m all in.” “You know, I might as well come to the point why I stopped you, other than to reacquaint ourselves cordially with a pleasant chat. I’m dying to get fritzed by some guy. So if you’d like to, not for old time’s sake but only because you’d want to, I’d be willing. Some nights I’m just randier than others and this is one. It could be because you’re here and old memories float up — you think that’s it? And we were always compatible in the sack, when we weren’t pissing each other off famously,” and he said “Really, I’m living with someone now and I’d just feel funny about it. And will you please stop whatever you’re doing with your hand under the covers? It’s distracting, in a way,” and she said “I’m scratching myself, my leg, so what’s bugging you? I’ve a bad itch. You want me to put some cortisone cream on it, I will. As for your decision, good, you’re entitled, and your girlfriend will be proud of you when you report back on your abstinence, especially when I practically offered myself to you on a saucer, and I’m not going to get testy about it. I’d probably feel the same if I were seeing someone steadily and was a guest of yours in New York, even though wild horses and a million bucks wouldn’t drag me to that city, and you were living alone and put the make on me. But what I’d wish now is that you weren’t here so I could place a call to some guy to come over; there are a couple who would,” and he said “Do it then, I don’t mind,” and she said “It’s not a question of your minding,” and he said “I mean I’ve no hold over you. I’ll keep my door closed; if I have to pee, I won’t even go to the bathroom, I’ll do it in a jar in my room. And you can explain to the fellow who I am or was and that I won’t be disturbing the two of you and if he wants we can all even have a coffee and bagel together in the morning, since I brought a dozen of them with me, and that’ll be the routine. Go ahead, call,” and she said “Tomorrow, soon after I get Brons to school, I don’t want you around here. I want you out, completely, so I can create a little space for whatever choices I might want to make for myself later on,” and he said “Listen, you’re making it very tough for me, and Brons. He asked me to come. You agreed to it. I’m supposed to be here a week. If I can do it I’ll change my reservation to five days, even four. But you knew I couldn’t afford a hotel and it cost me some to fly out here,” and she said “You’re being paid for not working this week, aren’t you? so that wouldn’t have happened without us,” and he said “I took a week’s vacation, which means I’ll only get one week this summer instead of two. And I put in more than ten unpaid extra hours last week at work just so I could get away. And the flight — the money for it — that’s where this week’s salary went, for I don’t make much, I’ve told you; it’s a crappy job. But if you insist on acting the bitch, then I don’t know what. I’ll stay with someone a few days, I don’t know who, but that’ll mean I won’t see Brons as much as he expects me to,” and she said “You keep writing and calling him as if he’s your real son. ‘Oh damn,’ the kid would say,’ a second week’s gone by and he didn’t contact me.’ Three weeks and it’d be like you disowned him and he’d go into a funk. So then he naturally asked you to cut the whole pineapple and be his dad here for a week. Stop tantalizing him, encouraging him and he won’t ask you to come out anymore; that is, after he goes through a month’s depression getting over you,” and he said “Okay, that’s next week, but what do we do about this one? But I’m tired, want to sleep — the east-west, west-east. I don’t want to argue; no bad feelings or for Brons to hear us. What do you say we talk about it some more tomorrow?” and she said “You’ve become so reasonable. When you were last here it would have been all shouts, insults, lots of go-fuck-yourselfs to me, plus under your breath ‘you scrawny cunt,’ but no discussion. It must be your new girlfriend’s influence. Go to bed; and go fuck yourself, you son of a bitch,” and picked up her book and resumed reading and he didn’t say anything and went to his room. A half hour later he was awakened by something scratching on his door. Scratching stopped and he lay his head back on the pillow and a few seconds later it started again. Went on like that: started, stopped, started, stopped, till he was sitting up in bed. Do they have a cat? Didn’t see one today and neither of them spoke of one but he thinks Brons mentioned a cat in one of his letters or on the phone. This might even be the room it most likes to sleep in; a kitty litter box could be somewhere around, under the bed, though there’s no smell of one, and wouldn’t one of them have told him that the cat might come in for it? It could even be Brons scratching, pretending he’s a cat, but so excited he’s here, wants to sleep in the same room with him and even has his sleeping bag with him. He said from the bed “Yes? Anyone there?” “Excuse me,” she said, “I hope I didn’t wake you, but I was wrong before and want to apologize, may I come in?” and he said “Sure, it’s your house,” and she opened the door and said “Say no if you don’t want me in here; it’s all right, guests get special privileges, which is just one of the things I want to apologize for,” and he opened the covers, since he knew it’d really get bad between them if he didn’t screw her and then maybe indicated it was what he’d wanted since he got here, and said “You probably can’t see it, but I’ve turned back the covers for you on the left side of the bed — my left — so if you want to join me, come on, it’s late,” and she got in bed, hugged him and said “I’m not so bad and you’re kinda keen,” and pulled off her nightgown and they started to make love. A minute later she took her lips off his and said “Don’t you have anything to say?” and he said “About what?” and she said “That you really don’t want me here and are only cooperating because you think I’ll be a shrew to you the next few days and you have no other place to stay,” and he said “You got this from my kissing? Not at all. We’re doing it, I’m enjoying it, so let’s continue till we’ve finished it. And though you usually felt that talking during it, or muttering or howling some sexy or bawdy words—‘sexy, bawdy, lips, toes, fingers, ears’—heightened it, I never did,” and she said “Okay, we’ll be silent for now.” “Still side-by-side on our backs?” when they got to that point and she asked “The bed’s too narrow for it?” and he said “That too; but the truth is it’s never been my preferred position for the ultimate thing. So I’m asking if you still insist on it?” and she said “That part of my body hasn’t changed since you left. And you used to get off on it, so what are you looking for, rockets, red glares? Maybe it is the bed. Why don’t you sleep in mine with me while you’re here,” and he said “How would Brons take it? He thinks I only came out for him, and she said “He can still think that. But he’s hip to all the shit older people do and lay on each other and their demanding needs and is also able to separate what you mean to him and what you and I do together as an adult team. He hasn’t the hangups you eastern idiots do at his age and I’ve done everything I can to help him avoid them. Believe me, if he happened to barge into my room tomorrow and saw us screwing away he’d say something like “I knew you two would end up doing that,” but know that if it makes me happy then it’s gotta be okay and can only benefit him with my bettered temperament. You forget what he was like.”

He’s sleeping with her the morning after they first made love when Brons wedges himself between them, finally pushes him apart from his mother — he’s been holding her from behind with one arm, other’s back in the shoulder sling — and curls up to her with his arm over her shoulder and falls asleep. She has her nightgown on — must have got up sometime after they first fell asleep to do it — and Brons is in diapers and rubber pants and T-shirt. Gould doesn’t like the feel or smell of him in bed — the kid must have peed in his diapers — and gets up, dresses, shoulder’s killing him and he takes aspirins, wants to make coffee but doesn’t see any grounds or a pot (turns out she only drinks herbal tea; for guests: instant coffee or Sanka, both of which he can’t stand), wants some toast (only bread here is packaged sliced white; rolls he brought for dinner they finished last night), has a cracker and glass of water (juice in the fridge is apple and much too sweet and he hasn’t drunk milk for twenty years) and sits in the kitchen reading a book (would have liked starting the day with a paper; she’d said she has one delivered and he went outside to look for it; turns out it’s the local afternoon daily she gets) and waiting for them to get up. He doesn’t know how she lives like this: sliced white, instant coffee or tasteless tea, kid in her bed (turns out Brons has been coming into her bed almost every morning for months and despite Gould complaining about it, continues for another half year) stinking of piss. Two Siamese, looking like twins, both crosseyed and with dark coloring and skinny sinister faces, meow at him, probably for food. He finds a box of cat Kibble, replenishes their food bowl and gives them fresh water and they hiss at him and don’t eat or drink and one swipes at his ankles with its claws out. He wants to toss what water’s left in the glass at them but she might later ask how’d they get wet and if he told her — oh, he could make up an excuse but he thinks she’d see through it — bad things could start between them and he wants to stay the two weeks. House is nice, sex good and she’s lively and bright in her way and funny sometimes and good-looking.

He was going out there again two years later and called a few days before he left. “I’ll be in the area, staying for two days at a hotel in San Francisco, and thought, if you and Brons were going to be around, I’d rent a car and drive down, would it be okay?” and Brons got on the extension while she was saying “I don’t know, let me look at my schedule,” and said “You haven’t been here for years, Gould, and you promised. If you don’t want to see me, say so, and you won’t have to come all the way here,” and he said “I wanted to see you — a lot — but didn’t have the money to. This time my job’s sending me, but if you’re really that angry with me and don’t want—” and Brons said “I didn’t say that; I do. It’d be interesting,” and she said “Sure, come; Brons wants to check you out and see if you lost any more hair. Funny, because we were talking about you last night,” and Brons said “Two weeks ago, Mommy,” and she said “A few days ago then, but mostly about hereditary and your hair,” and Brons said “She said I’m never getting bald like you because of her and my dad.” Drove down; she had a frame shop now and barely got by. Took them out to dinner. After it Brons said “Stay the night? We can play together and tomorrow you can have breakfast with me before I go to school or maybe I don’t have to,” and she said “You have to. Gould staying overnight is all right though, and I’ll make no demands,” and Brons said “What, having sex with him?” and she said “That’s not even a question. I meant I won’t ask him to do any repair work for me, which I need dearly.” Later, after reading to Brons in his room and then sitting in the dark talking to him till he was asleep, he knocked on her door and said “Goodnight, Evangeline, sleep well,” and she said “Open the door and see what I’ve done to my room; you haven’t even looked.” “It’s okay,” and she said “Please, I’ve remodeled it entirely at a terrific expense that wiped me out financially for a year. I’m such an ignoramus about such things, but you know me and aesthetics and where I have to get the absolutely right thing,” and he opened the door, she was in bed nude from the waist up, rest of her under the covers so maybe she was nude there too, four-poster with drooping canopy that looked as if it was going to fall in, flowery wallpaper, the flower parts furry and raised, gas lamp fixtures and globes on the wall, textiles and fabrics gracefully draped over much of the furniture, electrified kerosene lamps and Oriental rugs, thick blood-colored curtains that dragged on the floor. “What do you think? — Oh, my chest; I thought you’d never notice.” He quickly looked around the room for one he must have missed. “As you can see I’m no longer self-conscious about my tits. People have taken me for a boy so long that one day I just said ‘screw it’ and I’ve even sat around like one on the beach and nobody seemed to know the difference. So that’s where I am. Feeling much better about my bod. Next time a ladies’ room is jammed and I’m wearing pants and I have to go bad, I’m going to comb my hair back and pee in the men’s john. Not even a bra anymore. It was presumptuous of me all these years to wear one, and I’ve begun to appreciate the freedom of nothing swinging there and it’s a big help when I run. Which I do a lot these days — I didn’t tell you. I’m even getting to the marathon stage and Brons occasionally alleviates the boredom of it by bicycling beside me, although there I always wear a top. But you haven’t said yet what you think of my room. You look numb-struck.” All this talk and her breasts — her goal? even if it wasn’t — got him excited and he said “Nice, I like. Not a single guy’s room perhaps, but handsome, in good taste, well designed. Almost like a stage set, and the comparison meant in the best sense, you understand — for a Chekhov play maybe if one of them had a scene in a bedroom. And maybe that’s what you should go into — study and later work at — stage designing, but I’ll leave that up to you,” and she said “No, the stage, my biggest bust. Oops, I didn’t mean that, I swear,” and slid under the covers to her neck and suddenly he caught on and laughed. “By the way, and I can see your erection through the pants, or did a minute ago, so it’s not like what I’m about to suggest is coming out of nowhere or you should feel obligated to be taken aback by it—” and he said “Really, Evangeline, it was fun last time but ultimately didn’t work out. Brons later wrote me—” and she said “That little conniver was only putting the screws on you, hoping it would make you feel guilty enough to fly right back. But fine, no pressure, though I want you to know there are no preliminary preps for it anymore or chance I could ever get pregnant. I had my tubes tied, another move to free myself completely. Such a relief to be able to luck without inserting anything right before and that stinky cream or taking potentially risky pills or slowly getting bled to death by those intrauterines or having a man snap on one of those deadening balloons and then clog up my toilet with it when he later drops it in,” and he said “The bags don’t do that, do they? I mean, once they’re off, they’re so small and pliable they’d just go down,” and she said “It happened once or else the plumber was teasing me, and he even said he’d show me it in a pail. Anyway, I suppose you have to leave tomorrow, so tonight’s gotta be the night,” and he said “It’s not that I don’t feel like it. But there’s also this woman in New York who I’ll probably end up marrying — that’s how far it’s gone,” and she said “Oh come on, what’s one time? If it’s only her, you don’t say anything, and if you have to tattle on yourself, she’ll understand we were once like man and wife so it’s sort of natural we’d do it. If it’s also Brons, we’ll be quiet and discreet, barely a peep from me and from you just a muffled groan. And soon as we’re done, you scoot to your room. Or even if you’re done and I’m not even halfway there, though I hope that won’t happen — you scoot. So what do you say? It’s just something I really feel like doing now and I’ll try never to ask it of you again,” and sat up and held out her arms for him, covers fell to her waist, and he shut the door, undressed, said “Maybe I should pee first,” and she said “In a jar or something in the room, but no going down the hall again and waking Brons,” and he said “I always feel it’s better with an empty bladder and that I can stay up longer, but okay,” and got in bed. She was naked, immediately grabbed his penis and said “Now you’re cuffed and going nowhere for a while, you got that?” and they laughed and kissed and in a few minutes he was ready to come and frantically grabbed her to get inside her and just did when he was done and she said “If I was brand-new at this, I’d have to ask ‘Is this all there is to it? What was all the hoopla over losing it for?’ You wouldn’t rest a little and then start again, just so I could get even close to halfway there?” and he said “I better not, we were pushing it as it was,” and she said “Then give me something to wipe myself with; it feels like your girlie hasn’t let you do it to her for weeks,” and he got up, gave her his handkerchief, she used it and turned over and said “Before you leave, shut the light.” Just then Brons knocked. “What are you two doing in there? That’s not fair. You said you only wanted to see me, Gould,” and he said “That was the main reason, why do you think different?” putting on his pants, kicking his sneakers and socks under the bed. “I was fixing something for your mother — the curtain, it was falling off,” and went to the window while he slipped on his shirt. “Come in if you don’t believe me,” and Brons came in and Gould tugged on the curtain, one eye cocked to the top of it and said to her “I think it’s okay now. This thing come down on you, oh boy, it’s so heavy it could have smothered you, or at least him. How’d you ever get a rod strong enough to hold it?” “You bullthrower,” Brons said. “All you wanted was to do sex with her, that’s why you stay with us,” and ran to his room and slammed his door. “What should I do?” he asked her and she said “Like everything: deal with it, make an excuse. You’re an adult, so think of something winning and convincing. Lie your head off if you have to, or tell him the truth, that we’re adults and this is something we sometimes feel the need to do, even when we’re not on the greatest terms with each other: screw,” and shut the light. He went to Brons’s room, knocked, no answer, went in, room was dark, said “Brons? Brons?” and sat on the floor, felt around the bed for a hand and took it and put it to his cheek and Brons pulled it away and Gould took it again and just held it. “You know I love you more than I do any kid there is. If you lived in New York I’d want you to stay with me. Your mom wouldn’t like it, she’d want you with her, of course, but it’s what I’d want most of all. I’d send you to school. I’d be there every day when you got home. I’d arrange my work schedule around you. I’d have to get a better job, meaning a steady one rather than the freelance junk I do now, but I’d do it for you. But we got these three thousand miles between us, and I don’t know what .” and Brons said “Then what are you saying?” and he said “I’m glad you weren’t asleep,” and Brons said “I asked you a question,” and he said “That it makes things so tough,” and Brons said “Besides, I have a father. He sees me when he can and he mostly lives in California or is always driving through here and Evangeline says he’ll be with me much more in two years. I don’t need you and I never want to see you again,” and Gould said “Don’t say that,” and Brons said nothing and Gould said “Have it your own way then but it’s certainly not what I want,” and thought of going to his room but felt that’d hurt Brons so he stayed on the floor holding his hand, wanting to say something that’d make things better between them or just leave Brons feeling good but not coming up with anything, till he was sure Brons was asleep. When he was in his own room he thought Funny I didn’t think this, it would have made me feel better while I was there, but all the time I was on the floor he didn’t pull his hand out of mine. Though maybe he was too tired to. Next morning he got up early to go to the toilet, flushed it when he was done, Brons shouted “What’s that?” and Evangeline yelled from her room “You moron, Gould. Didn’t it occur to you the flushing would wake him? Now he’ll never get back to sleep and he got to bed late last night because of you,” and he said “I flushed it because there was crap in the bowl,” and she said “So what! We can live with crap, even yours. It won’t stink up the place right away. First one in later would have flushed it down. It’s you effete faggoty Easterners who can’t live unless you flush everything down at once, even just a drop of pee. But there’s a water shortage now,” and he said “There’s always a water shortage here,” and she said “But this is a real drought going on and we’re supposed to be conserving water, something you wasteful New Yorkers wouldn’t know of because you have all the water in the world. The water goes to the wrong people,” and Brons said “Mom, I’ll try to get back to sleep; I’m still tired,” and he said “Brons, excuse me, but I’m going to be leaving shortly,” and Brons said “So? Leave,” and she said “Just don’t make noise slamming the front door either, and make sure it’s locked. We never had to do that till you people started settling out here in droves,” and he said “My people?” and ran to her door and said “My people! What about them? If they can afford it they can’t live where they want?” and she said “I said ‘you people,’ not yours. I didn’t mean Jews this time. I meant people from out of state the last five years, and mostly not from the West Coast. Good-bye, Gould, and don’t forget your sneakers,” and turned over on her side, away from him. He got his sneakers and socks, shut her door because he didn’t want her hearing him talking to Brons, dressed and went into Brons’s room and said “Your mom would kill me for this, my waking you up again if you’re asleep, but one last kiss good-bye?” and got no answer and Brons’s eyes stayed shut and he repeated the last part about the kiss good-bye and got no answer and he left.

She took a dance class one night a week and once he peeked into the teacher’s dance studio to watch. It was dark, not even a moon, Brons was sleeping in the car, slight smell of fall: decomposing leaves, smoke from a nearby fireplace, crisp air. She was in a leotard and tights, hair pinned up, thin face radiant, lively eyes, forehead wet and sweat dripping down her neck, barefoot. She danced so well, terrific leaps, bounds, twirls, strides, whatever the steps and things dancers do are called, it seemed she had the perfect body for it, even the neck was right, hair, long thin fingers and arms, legs looking more solid in the tights, square shoulders with a little knob on top apiece, her hard rear, small waist, the chest. She should have been a dancer, he thought. In the car, for he’d come to pick her up, he said “You should’ve been a dancer,” and she said “Were you playing voyeur before? Themis hates when people look in,” and he said “No, just that you look and move like one, so graceful, athletic. And the way you’re still even breathing hard, which shows what you must have put into it, and you seem to love it so much,” and she said “You really think so, you’re not just saying? Because I’ve been thinking the same thing, but no ‘I should’ve.’ Even if I’m past twenty-five I thought there’s still time. Not to be a lead dancer or anything like that. I’d be happy simply to be in the corps or maybe a little past it — a small ensemble role, you know the kind: all six together doing the same steps — of a good company. If I got into the San Francisco Conservatory would you move with me there if it became too difficult to commute?” and he said “Sure, I like that city and always wanted to live in it,” but that was the last he heard of it from her and he never spoke of it again. But something about her looks and outfit, sweaty serious expression, yellow leotard and black tights, bare feet, hair up, hands on her hips and one leg sort of pointing out as she listened to the teacher, hand on one hip as she stretched on the barre in front of the long wall mirror, everyone applauding her, it seemed, after she did one piece of dancing where she raced across the room several times and made lots of big leaps, head bent down afterward modestly acknowledging the applause, that made him feel he was never so much in love with her as at that one time. Looking through the window, no light on him and hidden on both sides by bushes, he thought if he were a stranger looking in now he’d love to get to know that woman. She’s beautiful, serious, unpretentious, seemingly intelligent, talented and with one of the supplest most agile little bodies he’s ever seen. She said in the car “You’re a real dearie for saying things I occasionally need to hear, but meaning them, not just to please,” and pulled him into a dreamy kiss. “The kid,” he said, thumbing to the back and she said “Another real dearie, still fast asleep.” They drove home holding hands most of the way, he steering with his left and only when the car was lurching back and forth or about to stall, taking his other hand from hers to shift gears with the floor stick.

He was once very high, thought he was going crazy, was seeing and hearing eerie things he couldn’t make out, then he was a bug with his head clamped between another bug’s legs, next he was in a dark cell, his arms and legs chained to the wall, rats crawling through the ceiling grate and chewing his shoes off and then biting his toes, she talked to him, said what he thinks he’s experiencing really doesn’t exist, he was home, in the living room, on Euclid Avenue, right next to the Presbyterian church, the choir’s practicing right now but you don’t seem to hear, Brons is sleeping in his own room and please don’t wake him with your groans and yells, walked him around the house for an hour, fed him coffee and aspirins and a couple of tranquilizers and then called a friend who drove over with a combination of stronger pills that would bring him down and make him sleep, she got him into bed and held him, saying things like “It’s okay, nothing to worry about, only a bad trip that’s ending, last time for that, right? — we’re off that junk for good because it can happen to anybody no matter how stable and placid you’ve been till then. I’m here for you always, my baby, and tomorrow you’ll be up and at ‘em and bouncing around as usual. Now shut your eyes, it’s all going away from the medicine you took or will soon. Rest, rest,” and rubbed his forehead and stroked his eyelids and put her head on his chest and they slept like that till late morning, Brons awaking much earlier and looking in, he said, and seeing them asleep and knowing it was Sunday from the church bells tolling, got his own breakfast and then played outside with his Tonka steam shovel and trucks.

He couldn’t stand her smoking and she was constantly giving it up. He once dumped her last packs into the trash can outside when she asked him to and she ran out a few hours later to retrieve them and smoke from one. She smoked before she went to bed, sometimes in bed while he was reading, first thing when she woke up, in restaurants over their food, in the car with the windows up, on their walks and the one camping trip they all took, spoiling the fresh air, on the beach when she’d ask him to help her light one because of the wind. He told her that his mother, when he was a boy, always seemed surrounded by cigarette smoke. “Two packs a day, sometimes three, and these extra long ones — Pall Malls; the smell in the house was execrable; even my father, who smoked a lousy cigar at night, complained of it and her breath, though his smoke I didn’t seem to mind that much and for some reason quickly dissipated. To kiss her I felt I had to wave a wall of smoke away just to see her face. She kidded me about it but I hated the stench and I don’t know how many times I got burned by her or one of her cigarettes left around. It kept me — I’m sure of this — from getting closer to her even emotionally and I didn’t even want to use a towel she’d used, because of the cigarette smell on it, or get too near the clothes she had on.” She laughed and said “So it at least stopped you from having a too-comfortable relationship with her and becoming a mama’s boy or from even marrying your mother — a good thing, I’d think,” and he said “The truth is — and of course what you say about my mother and me is absurd — that I could never marry a woman who smokes,” and she said “Why in hell would you ever think I’d marry you, if you were referring to me?” “So I should cross that possibility off my list, is that it? But if it doesn’t remain one then I don’t see how I can hang around here that much longer. I eventually want to get married to someone, have my own kid, maybe a second,” and she said “Yes, for certain, cross it off with me. I’ve had my child. To me one’s more than enough, to have and to handle. I want to do things, not just bring up babies. You want to have one, two, as many as you want — many bedrooms filled with them; I don’t want many bedrooms; two’s fine and a third for guests — do it with someone else or several women. You could still live here while you’re off inseminating, I wouldn’t mind, unless you took one of these reproducers too seriously and I wasn’t getting my time’s worth from you and began to look like a fool. And when the baby’s reached a certain age, long past being toilet trained in both departments and a good clean eater. What I’m saying is no big messes on the floor and in its pants and broken bowls. When it gets into kindergarten or first grade, really, so is out of the house a minimum of six hours a weekday, it can come live with us, if its mother doesn’t mind, and permanently if she wants to give it up to its dad. I think I’d like a second child that way, and by that time, but only with your assistance and financial support, and because Brons should pretty well be on his own by then, there wouldn’t be that much work to do for it, so it’d be something I could manage while doing all my other things,” and he said “But your smoking, and I’m being serious here — you don’t think you could do something about it? At least cut it way down and try to keep it out of my food and hair and the room we sleep in?” and she said “Giving it up entirely or cutting back on it is something I’d only do for myself. And after all my starts at it and quick stops, it’s obvious I’m not ready yet. I suppose I can keep it out of the bedroom and blow it away from your plate, but that’s probably as far as I can control it for now.”

Soon after she awakes she says “Goodness, I just remembered, I have a lunch date with an old girlfriend. Do you want to join us or do you think I can leave Brons with you here?” and he says “What do you prefer? It seems like you want to go alone, which is understandable,” and she says “No difference. You certainly won’t embarrass me and I feel confident, short a time as I know you, that you won’t jump the first gorgeous friend I introduce you to, and even if you did — well, that’d save me a whole lot of aggravation later on,” and he says “Actually, my shoulder hurts, from last night, I think, so I’d like to stay put today,” and she says “Then I can leave Brons with you? You won’t doze off and let him run into the street?” and she tells him what Brons might like for lunch, “though he can be a fussy eater and there’s no guarantee he’ll open his mouth,” that he still takes naps once or twice a week, “so if you’re lucky, this may be the day,” gives him books to read to Brons if he gets too wild or bored, “or really anytime, he loves them,” and goes and he asks Brons what he wants to do while his mother’s gone, “play alone awhile, maybe?” and Brons says “Play,” and he says “But alone, by yourself, here, in your room, what? Because if you do then I have things to do myself,” and Brons says “Play,” and he says “Okay, I know, but where, I’m saying, and with whom? Yourself, alone, with me, here or some other place, outside or in? You have to understand, Brons, I’m not familiar . I don’t know how to take care of kids I haven’t done it before, though you’ll be safe with me, that you also have to understand, but I really don’t even know how to talk to them kids, I mean, little boys and girls like you. So once again, what do you want to do? Because if you just want to stay in your room alone, or here, and play by yourself awhile—” and Brons goes into his room and Gould says “Okay, fine, but I’ll be here, and if you need any help in the bathroom, call me,” and gets his typewriter out and Brons comes back with a box of blocks and empties it at Gould’s feet and they start building things, later draw with crayons, dress several stuffed animals, go outside and he pushes Brons around in the bed of his big dump truck, puts him into his high chair and the food in front of him on the chair tray and Brons stares at it and he says “Want me to feed you? Your mom said you might and she even instructed me how. Showed me how to do it. With a spoon, only a spoon, you’re too young yet for a serrated knife and pronged fork. Well, all forks have prongs — that’s the pointy part — and I’m only kidding . . just the spoon, and a special one, I see, with Daisy Duck on the handle. Where’d you get it? Because you look like a Donald fan, but that’s sexist . . you know what that means. Nice applesauce, so open, open wide. Do I sound like a dentist about to extract a tooth rather than a surrogate mother wanting to shove food in?” and Brons laughs and Gould says “For my own information, because maybe it’s something I can use with you later on, but what was it particularly that made you laugh?” and Brons just looks at him deadpan and he says “Why did you laugh? — you know, ha-ha, ha-ha,” and makes a face as if he’s laughing and Brons laughs and he says “But why, before?” and Brons says something that sounds like “I dunno,” and sticks his spoon into the bowl and bringing it to his mouth half the applesauce on it goes to the floor and Gould takes the spoon and feeds him the applesauce and a mashed-up hard-boiled egg mixed with mayonnaise and later he says “So, that was easy; my motto should be ‘Yuck it up, feed the pup,’ right? no?” and Brons starts raising the chair tray and Gould helps him out and down and they walk to the market a few blocks away, get pastries and bread and lettuce for tonight and a juice for Brons now and after Brons drinks it Gould says “Listen, first thing before we head home, and maybe I shouldn’t have given you that juice till we got there, but do you have to make caca or pee pee or whatever you call them? Because I remember seeing a boys’ room in the market,” and Brons points to his pants and says “Wet,” and he says “Oh great okay, but we’ll deal with that later . I guess you’ll just take your underpants off and put on another pair of whatever you wear. Why didn’t your mother warn me about this, or why didn’t I ask her?” and Brons says something again that sounds like “I dunno,” and then something accompanied by motions that seems to mean he can’t walk home, too tired, and Gould says “I’m afraid you have to. I’ve a bad shoulder — this part — and it hurts like the dickens, very bad, very bad. I think I broke it. Break, like you break a stick — smack!” and demonstrates with his fists, “and I can’t carry you, okay?” and Brons looks as if he’s about to cry and he says “You really can’t walk home?” and Brons says no and he gets on one knee and moves him onto his good shoulder sidesaddle and carefully stands so as to put all the pressure on that shoulder and carries him this way, every half block or so getting on the same knee and letting Brons off and saying “Can you walk now? All rested?” and Brons saying no and looking as if he’s about to cry, so Gould continuing to carry him. At home Brons says “Ead,” and he says “Eat?” and Brons shakes his head and says “Ead, ead,” and he says “What?” and Brons takes his hand and leads him to the pile of books Evangeline left and Gould says “Oh, so which one do you want me to? wait, your pants, you said you were wet,” and Brons says “No I am,” and he says “Excuse me, but do you mind?” and sticks his hand down the back of Brons’s shorts — cloth diapers — doesn’t want to put his hand inside but the outside of them feel dry and he says “You think you should go to the potty now?” and Brons shakes his head and he says “You know, to pee pee, or even caca; just so you don’t do it in your pants,” and Brons says “Ead,” and they sit on the couch and he reads to him and explains each illustration and during it Brons gets on his lap and then holds Gould’s hand and he thinks it’s such a small hand, those fingernails, it’s like a little dog’s paw and puts it against his and says “See how much bigger mine is? I’m not boasting, but some day—” and Brons says “Ead, ead,” and he finishes the book and starts another and Brons almost falls off his lap reaching for the first book and puts it in front of Gould and says “Again.” Evangeline comes home while he’s still reading and he says “This kid’s such a sweetheart, I can’t tell you, he couldn’t have been better,” and she says “I’m glad you two got along,” and he says “More than that and I’m not saying it to impress you. Ask him. Just one thing though; he didn’t urinate once since you left. Not in his,” and points behind Brons to his shorts, “or in the WC, though I didn’t walk him there. I hate to be a worrywart but I was wondering if it could be some kind of urological problem,” and she says “It’s okay, I like it that you’re worrying. But he’s probably done it by now, or if you felt in his pants you just didn’t dig deep enough. I’ll change him,” and when she comes back he says “Truly, I never knew a kid that age could be so charming,” and she says “A lot can, some are even more advanced than that, but I’m glad it’s him,” and he’s not sure what she means but doesn’t ask her to explain: she might think him dense.

She liked taking baths with him—“Gould, I’m in the tub, want to join me?” or “Want to take a bath together?” and he said “I already showered today,” and she said “So take it just to relax”—sitting on him with her back to his chest and his penis floating or sticking up between her legs. “So this is what I’d look like with one,” she said the first time. “But I’d like mine clean, I never see you really wash your cock — go on, show me how you do it,” and he said “Come on, what am I, Brons? I’m the cleanest guy around, often to the point of manic-compulsiveness,” and she said “Your hands, yes, but I’m serious about this: I want to know how clean something is that goes so deep inside me,” and he washed it with his hands and then splashed the soap off and she said “That’s washing it? You didn’t scrub; you missed several parts. What about all those folds there and the hole? You don’t open it to wash inside?” and he said “That’d burn; what I did was enough. I’ve been doing it like that most of my penis’s adult life and never had a rash or sore or anything like that on it and no smell or smegma ever,” and she said “Will you permit me?” and grabbed it and he thought she was going to play with it and he lay back and rested his head on the top of the tub and shut his eyes and she washed it hard with a soapy washrag—“Hey, take it easy!”—seemed to get at almost every part but the eye, and then she said “What about the balls?” and he said “Leave them alone,” and she said “Do you ever wash them? Because silky and clean as they might feel, they’re just as liable to be dirty. And though they don’t go in me they do often sleep against me or at least roll around on the sheet and there’s hair on them and hair collects germs like nothing does,” and he said “I do wash them, but in my own way: very gently. I know just the places where if I washed them even a little less than very gently, it’d hurt like mad. So never touch them, or if you do, then very lightly, but never the balls parts — only the top of the scrotum without the balls, okay? No, best you never touch them at all; a woman could never know how sensitive they are,” and just with her hand this time she washed his penis but the way she was doing it with the soap it seemed more to get him hard and then tried putting it in her but it didn’t work and the two or three other times they tried doing it in the tub like this it didn’t work and she said one of those times “I wonder why men can’t keep it stiff in water,” and he said “What about women, not that I’ve truthfully ever tried doing it in a tub with anyone else, but are you so slick and open inside?” and she said “I think so,” and raised her rear above the water and he felt her and she was. “Well then I’m sorry, it must be the warm water,” and she said “Cold would make it worse even,” and he said “Then maybe we should try something in-between,” and they let the cold water run till the tub was lukewarm and then tried doing it and it still didn’t work and then let the water get cool and it didn’t work and he said “I’m sure there are some men who can do it in any temperature or some who are better at hot than cool and so on, but I’m just not one.”

The tiger outfit she liked to wear and wore it till it was threadbare. It went from her neck to her ankles, one piece, long-sleeved, fastened with a couple of hooks near the neck in back, black and faded orange stripes, some material like muslin, bought for a buck at Goodwill. She never knew what to put on her feet with it—“Tiger in sneakers? Sandals, socks? Better I go barefoot,” but she only did around the yard or house. When she wore it to the local supermarket or in town people would occasionally stare and a few times she quickly mussed up her hair till it was like a mane and raised her hands into tiger’s paws and growled at them and once snapped. “Listen,” he said, “people just haven’t seen an outfit like this, so what are you doing that to them for? It’s embarrassing, unpleasant; not like you,” and she said “It’s the skin that’s making me do it. Anyway, nobody really minds. A pretty girl, you once said, can get away with almost anything like that, and a pretty tiger, but a small domesticated one, well maybe even more so,” and he said “I find the scene ugly. Just don’t ever bitch at me when I get stupid and rude,” and she said “Oh brother, you sure have a nice way of putting it,” and slid her nails across his cheek. She usually wore nothing underneath it, at the most a bikini brief, and she liked saying to him when they got home, if Brons was at someone else’s house or sleeping in the car seat, something about how tiger and man should mate, and she continued pretending to be the tiger in bed, moving around on all fours, bounding over him, landing with her hands on his chest, scratching, hissing, snarling, rolling over playfully, ending up on her back with her arms and legs in the air and saying something like “Now’s the optimum time, tiger’s in extreme heat, take it any vaginal way you like, it won’t bite off your head, whatever interdictions it had to the other customary positions are temporarily suspended.”

For the first month after they left his parents’ apartment they couldn’t find any other place to live in New York but a single room in a halfway house. To pay for their room and board he did odd jobs for the woman who owned it: washed dishes, bussed tables, painted rooms, applied some sulfuric acid solution to the five flights of marble steps to take out the stains in them from about fifty years. Then they got an apartment and the woman claimed they owed her eighty dollars in back rent and he said he’d worked off the entire four weeks’ room and board and she even owed him some dough for all the hours he put in at minimum wage and the woman said she’d take him to small claims court if he didn’t pay and he said “Okay, I don’t want any trouble or bad feelings between us, I think you’re wrong but I’ll come up with the money some way,” and back in the room Evangeline said “Like hell we’ll pay. What do I have to do, teach you how to talk back and get what’s due you? Your father, for all his ugliness to Brons and me and his cheap picayune ways, would have known what to say: ‘Eat pig meat, you bloodsucking bastard, and all the junk carts you rolled in on.’ Because she’s cheating you blind. You worked hard, at slave wages, scarred your fingers through the gloves on that lethal acid and maybe your lungs too, when she could have got a much safer but more expensive cleaner. She knew a jellyfish when she caught one but she’s not going to bulldoze me,” and he said “Better we go along with it than risk a court case and have to pay double, is what I heard those judgments against you can be,” and she said “Horsecrap. This is what we do,” and they told the woman they’d pay the day they left, “Say around eleven or noon we should be all finished,” he said, and Evangeline asked an actor friend to drive by at six that morning, there was a blizzard going, ten or so inches already and the actor was an hour and a half late and could barely get his car down the street through the snow, the woman was shoveling a path on the sidewalk and she said “Mr. Bookbinder?” when she saw him carrying some things to the car and he said “Just loading up for the first trip, Mrs. M. I’ll see you when I get back, if I can make it in this snow,” and she said “No funny business now. I’ve seen all kinds, you know,” and he said “Don’t worry, I’m leaving my family behind as collateral,” and after the car was packed and the actor was at the wheel and the motor was running he went back to the room and said “This is terrible, and really bad for the kid to see, let’s just pay her,” and Evangeline said “No, we’re going. Just keep walking and I swear, if she tries stopping us I’m going to push that woman, I don’t care if she slips and breaks a leg,” and he said “No pushing,” and they left the building and started down the long stoop, which Mrs. M. had just cleared but it already had what seemed like a half inch on it; she was at the second-story window and threw it open and yelled “You come back here, Bookbinders; I’ll have the police after you by the time you get there,” and as they drove away he said “Let’s go back; I’ll write her a check. It’ll be my money, not yours. She’ll find us through our new phone number and we can be thrown in jail for beating out on the rent. Or I can — you, they’ll say you’ve got to take care of your boy,” and she said “She’ll never chase after us for eighty smelly bucks. And serves the greedy yid right — I wish she had come at me and broken a leg,” and he said “She isn’t Jewish; what is it always with you? This is New York; you’re not in the foothills. And she’s Irish or something, maybe Welsh or Scottish, judging by her name. What’s Macreedy?” he asked the actor and the actor said “Could be anything like you said but not Italian,” and she said “Jewish, don’t tell me. Maybe not the name, but she is. Macreedy’s probably her husband who ran away from her like us, and in a hateful snowstorm also, but thirty years ago. Or she took the name out of a phonebook so she wouldn’t be known as Jewish. But who can’t see what she is by that big flabby nose and the Shylock way she treats people, pound of your foreskin or half pound of your balls,” and he said “I don’t know who I dislike more now, you or her. I’m sorry, Brons, and I’m sorry, whatever your name is, driver, actor,” and the actor said “Go ahead, say your spiel, don’t mind me. What I’m doing today’s a favor I owe Ev, so what’s between you’s between you,” and he said “Why, what’d she do for you?” and the actor said “Another favor, friend to friend, but enough for me to stick my car’s neck out in this blitz. Gray,” and shook Gould’s hand and Gould said “Gould,” and to Evangeline in back “Anyway, you’re going to have to tell me you know how wrong it is what you said about Mrs. M. and that particular religious thing in general,” and she said “You don’t know what you’re talking about now, so why should I?” and he said “You mean you’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about,” and she said “Yes, subject closed.”

Books he read and then gave her that she got more out of than him. When friends seemed to intimate to him she was pretty or beautiful but not too smart he said “She’s a much better reader than I. You should see her. Books I had trouble with, sometimes had to work hard to finish, she winged through and had insights into I never approached. Her intelligence is natural; she’s shortchanged herself in not going through and past high school, but you can’t say she doesn’t speak well.” She said she couldn’t stand poetry, it wasn’t that she didn’t get it, though some of it no one could get; it was that most of it was useless and precious and made for fairies or textbooks and she was ashamed whenever he took a book of poems along with him when they went out, except the ones in both English and German or French or Spanish, because then people would think he was just trying to learn the language. “As for the others — keep them in your pocket, read them in the car in secret or when you’re alone on the bus or just at home, but don’t take them out in restaurants while we’re waiting for a table or on the movie line. If you have to read anything at those places, why not history or stick with your good fiction, though to really please me I wish you’d take to books on investing money or how to repair my house.”

Brons wanted a dry cereal the New York halfway house didn’t provide and Evangeline said they were out of toothpaste and dental floss and while she was at it they could also all use new toothbrushes and he said he’d go out to buy them and she said “I didn’t mean you had to do it tonight,” and he said “Ah, I want to take a walk, this house is sometimes like a prison.” At the market he got the cereal and a box of animal crackers for Brons, went to the drug section and saw that except for the floss the dental stuff was expensive. He held three toothbrushes, put back the one he’d chosen for himself, dropped the floss into the basket with the cereal and crackers and then thought Screw it, do it, you just don’t have the cash and Evangeline will like you got everything she needed, and after quickly looking up and down the aisle and only seeing an old lady facing the other way, slipped the brushes and toothpaste into his side coat pocket. Oy, God, what’d he do? why’d he do it? and looked up and saw the woman staring at him, hand to her mouth as if horrified at what she’d just seen, or maybe not and she was only staring that way because of how he looked: messed-up hair, rather shabby clothes, face which for a few moments must have gone pale and looked sick and frenetic — but she seemed to have seen him, he was almost sure of it — now she was turned away, facing shelves with cleaning and diaper things for babies and feminine hygiene — the look one has when catching someone in the act like that but one you’d never do yourself, but if she did see him he didn’t think she’d tell anyone in the store while he was still there, she was old, frail-looking, very thin and short, she’d be afraid, for instance, she’d by chance bump into him on the street one day and he’d recognize her and knock her down, something he’d never do but maybe his appearance to her said he might. Should he put the brushes and toothpaste back? “Oh look at me,” he could say to himself aloud, hoping she’d turn around so he could say it half to her too, “I’m so absentminded, I don’t know where my head is today, excuse me,” putting the brushes and toothpaste back in the racks, “I don’t know if you saw them with me before but if you did I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea, it was just a stupid mistake,” or say all this but first look befuddled and slap his pocket and say “Holy shit — excuse me,” and take the things out and put them in the basket and then walk around casually for a while, get one more thing — cheap bag of chips — and pay for all of it. No — something about what she was doing now, keenly interested in a row of different shampoos on the top shelf — she didn’t see him and he had an idea and said “May I help you, ma’am?” and she turned to him and looked a bit startled but didn’t back away, which he should take as a good sign — it was just his appearance; he also needed a shave — and he smiled and said “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you, but I was just thinking, you need any help there . reaching?” and she said “No thanks, I was only comparison shopping,” and he said “Prices better here? Where else do you shop? I thought this was the only large market in ten blocks,” and she said “Associated, on Ninth Avenue, two blocks west, but they’re much more expensive on almost everything and the quality isn’t as good,” and he said “Oh yeah? That’s good to know; I’ll tell my wife,” and from the way she smiled and said good-bye — neither seemed fake — he was almost sure she hadn’t seen him but he’ll still, just in case she did and only tells them after he leaves, not go by the front of the store for a week or in it for two or three, or he might never have to go in again, since by then he and Evangeline will have their own place uptown. He got a bag of chips, two oranges on sale and went to the shortest checkout line, one with only one person on it. Everything seemed all right, business as usual, till he noticed the checkout man eyeing him sort of suspiciously while bagging the groceries of the customer who’d just paid, and turned around and saw a man behind him without a coat and holding two loaves of bread — what was the man doing coatless when it was so cold out? snow was predicted tonight, temperatures dipping into the teens and there were already freezing winds. Maybe he worked in the café a few doors down, or the one on the next block and he didn’t bother with a coat because he was so close and was buying the loaves because they’d run out of the bread they had delivered early each day — Gould had seen the tall bags of them lying up against the café doors at seven or so when he went out for the paper or a run or else they got him, and his stomach went cold. Well, shit, Jesus, too late if they did have him, for what could he do now, take the stuff out of his pocket and drop them into the basket? But wasn’t he only imagining the worst again, which he often did, for he already explained the suspicious looks: his clothes, appearance, and he wasn’t a regular here — had only been in the store three times in two weeks and always for just a couple of small items, and in this city, or just this kind of poorer neighborhood, if they don’t know you they don’t trust you, or something like that, but nobody’s going to jump him just because he might fit the profile of what they think’s a potential thief. He was fine, so long as nothing dropped out of his pocket or the pocket flap didn’t open and someone could see right inside, and once out of here and around the corner he’ll stick the stuff into his supermarket bag and go home, maybe even run with the bag he’d be so relieved, and in the room have a glass of wine or shot of scotch, even if Evangeline complained about him drinking late at night — said it did something to his stomach, made him toss around in bed, keeping her up. “Next,” the checkout man said, and he put the things in the basket onto that rubber runway, man rang everything up, wasn’t looking suspiciously at him anymore, guy behind him was looking at the clock above the front window, the old woman was now on the next checkout line, three customers away from being taken — his would have been the best line to get on: just he and the guy with his two identical loaves, and he was almost done, and one of the people in front of her had a shopping cart of maybe fifteen items. She didn’t look at him when he looked her way, maybe that was why she didn’t get on his line: didn’t want to talk to him anymore, felt their conversation — attention he gave her in the health-and-body-care aisle — was too much or had gone far enough or else she didn’t want to be on his line because of the trouble she expected on it . but then she wouldn’t have gone on any line, right? She would have stayed away from the checkout area, wouldn’t have wanted to be seen and eventually blamed by him. The checkout man said what Gould owed, he paid, his stuff was bagged and handed to him, he said “Thanks,” man said nothing and looked hard at the guy behind Gould in a way that suggested “What do we do next?” and Gould thought “Oh shit, get out of here,” and started for the door and just as he had his hand on it to push it open, someone grabbed him from behind — the coatless man — the checkout guy ran around the counter and shoved his hands down both Gould’s coat pockets and Gould said “Hey, what the hell you doing? — get off me, get off,” and tried slapping the man’s hand away from the pocket with the things in it but his arms were held tight, tried wriggling out of the grip and got one arm loose, checkout man yelled “Cliff Hugo,” and two young men with store aprons on ran to help the coatless man hold him, and he started dragging them all through the front door, wanted to get outside, once on the street they couldn’t touch him, or was it the other way around, they couldn’t grab you inside? — but he wrenched and tugged and grunted and lunged them along with him till he was past the door, on the street, still holding the bag, he suddenly realized, and dropped it and got his other arm free and slashed his hands in the air, whirling round and round as he did till there was nobody within fifteen feet of him, then felt his pocket — wait, the guy already took the stuff, but one of the brushes was still in it — and the checkout man said “You bum, you thief, these what you looking for?” and held up a toothbrush and the toothpaste. “You’re lucky we don’t hold you for the cops. Don’t ever come back here, you creep, and take what you paid for,” pushing the bag of groceries toward Gould with his foot, “that’s the last you’ll ever get from us,” and Gould kicked the bag and said “Stick it you know where,” and the coatless man said “Up our asses? Up yours, you dope. Feel good we didn’t bash the bejesus out of you, which we could have — we’d the legal right to — defending ourselves against a bona fide thief. You’re worse than a fucking street hooker,” and Gould said “That so? I am? Well you forgot this, mister,” and took out the other toothbrush and threw it on the ground to them and the checkout man said “Oh, bravado, or bravo — whatever they call those heroics — but just what we needed from the jerk. Forget him, we got work to do,” and picked up the brush: “Every little bit appreciated,” and laughed and they all went in, the two young men laying dirty looks on Gould before they went through the door. People on the street had stopped and were looking at him but keeping their distance and he said to a group of them “It was for my kids . I didn’t hardly have the money for everything,” in an Irish brogue and what he thought were the words and the way the Irish would use them, though why he went into it he didn’t know. “The big store’s gotta make its extortionate profit, that it? So what’s a poor father to do? And three kids, not two, and I wanted them to have clean teeth after they finished their overpriced store cereal, they’d have to be sharing a single toothbrush between them anyway, but have you seen what even the cheapest toothbrush and toothpaste cost today? An arm and a leg it is, an arm and a leg.” By now everyone but what looked like a bum had walked away, some shaking their heads at him and giving him that expression and he yelled “Where you going? Why you running? It’s the godawful truth that I’ve been telling ya, but what am I wasting my breath on you for?” and started down the street to the house — maybe so they’d have more trouble pointing him out some day later: “No, couldn’t be the shoplifter; that one was dressed like a beggar and was loony as they come and had this thick Irish accent”—a few large flat snowflakes were now slowly falling and he thought “Perfect, just what the scene called for,” and slapped at the flakes and said “Fuck it, I don’t care if any of the store people are there, what’s mine’s mine and like they said I paid good money for,” and ran back for the bag. The bum was standing over it and Gould said “That’s mine, sorry,” and picked it up. It was wet and torn, an orange had rolled out of it to the curb and he stuck it into his side coat pocket, put the other orange into the other pocket, folded up the bag best he could with the rest of the things he bought, had to hold it from the bottom so it wouldn’t split apart. When he got back to the room Brons was asleep in his cot, Evangeline was sitting up in bed drinking tea and reading, he wasn’t going to say anything about what happened but she said “My goodness, look at you, you’re a mess,” and he said “It’s beginning to snow, flakes falling so lazily, but sort of a cross between snow and rain — more like a floating slush, if that’s possible — so I suppose my hair got a little wet,” and she said “It’s not that. The collar of your coat’s torn, you have a scratch on your forehead that’s still bleeding, you look roughed up — what did you do, get mugged, fall?” and he said “No,” patting his forehead with a tissue, “but do I have those?” and looked at the tissue and said “Ah, it’s more slush than blood. I didn’t even know. Though I actually got close to being mugged, but didn’t want to say anything,” and told her what happened, didn’t embellish or hold back, right down to the Irish brogue: “Don’t ask me why; maybe to get them off my trail and so they wouldn’t think the thief was Jewish,” and she said “Oh stop. And the whole thing’s horrible. Why’d you ever do it?” and he said “I could make up a lot of excuses but I just didn’t think I could afford all the things you wanted or that I’d get caught, even if I knew how dumb it was,” and she said “Was it ever. Suppose they had reported you or held you for the cops? You’d have gone to jail. It would have disrupted our lives so much that I’m sure I would have had to quit school for a few weeks. And we would have been thrown out of here, since the landlady has this rule about that kind of behavior — it’s written right up there on the common dining room wall — and then where would we have lived till we get our place? I couldn’t have slunked back to your parents; and also think what it would have done to them and to Brons,” and put her finger over her lips. “If we needed toothpaste that bad,” she whispered, “we could have borrowed someone’s here, though we still have enough in the tube to roll it up and get a couple more brushings from it. And I only said we needed new toothbrushes, not that we were out of them,” and he said “This will sound stupid too, and I’m not saying it to elicit any sympathy, but I thought you’d like that I brought everything back that you asked for,” and she said “I would have if you had paid for it. And a brogue. You’re not an actor. You can’t even tell a story in two different voices. Let me hear it,” and he whispered in what he thought was close to the same brogue “For my poor kids I did it, my three little dear ones and their sweet mother, whose teeth are rotting to the quick because they’ve no toothpaste to use and I can’t afford a proper dentist,” and she said “It stinks. You were probably as bad at fooling them with it as you were at taking their goods. Please, I beg of you, for Brons and me and yourself too, and because shoplifting’s wrong, all wrong, no matter how bad the situation gets — don’t ever do it again,” and he said “I hate this life — here, this freaking craphole and so little money. But you’re right; I’m a flop at everything I do — I know, you didn’t say that — and I never want to be forgiven for it. And whatever you do don’t tell Brons till he’s all grown up, and only if you have to, for some reason,” and Brons said from the cot “I already know, Gould. That was real dumb what you did. It’s the only good store around here. Now I won’t be let in because of you,” and he said “Yes you will. I’ll just have to stay outside.”

She had orgasms where she said she saw heaven. In one she said she met up with her dead brother on a cloud and there was a great light all around them and he put out his hand and she looked surprised at it at first but then shook it and he grinned as if he was in total bliss and then the scene ended and Gould said “Was his arm straight out when you shook it?” and she said “Yes, the way people shake,” and he said “What could it mean then, except for the immediate obvious? Anyway, I’d be suspicious of it,” and she said “How, suspicious? And what do you mean ‘the immediate obvious’?” and he said “I don’t want to talk about your brother in regard to it. He’s dead, and that, if what I’m saying about the dream’s right—‘dream is right,’ I mean—” and she said “It wasn’t a dream. I wasn’t asleep. I was in ecstasy here, mentally removed, yes, but not unconscious,” and he said “Well, it was like a dream — you were put into this almost otherworldly or immaterial state — so I’m looking at it as one. And to me it was just typical dreamlike projection, innocent because you were in this state, of what any sibling, same sex or different, but especially the opposite sex, would dream of if it was a dream or have images of if you’re in this ecstatic displaced condition,” and she said “What, though, what? You started it, so say, and not just that I-don’t-want-to-go-into-it gibberishness and then more unintelligibleness piled onto it,” and he said “Okay. Did your brother — you know — do certain things physical to you when you were a girl, like get you to masturbate him or try to or fingerfuck you or hint at one of those or both with the hope you’d do it or allow him to or even just expose his erect penis to you or just expose himself, erect or not, but where you knew it was just for exposing?” and she said “I’m sure he didn’t on most of those. The hints, naturally, I wouldn’t remember, but I don’t think any of what you said happened. Though he was two years older, he was sickly almost from birth, so always, once I was seven or so, around six inches shorter than me and then, when I was twelve and he was fourteen, which is when he died, almost a foot shorter. And he was always very immature for his age, not only physically but emotionally — that’s what my folks have said and sort of what I recall — my younger brother, I used to think of him as, starting when I was around eight — that he might have died long before he was old enough to get erections he was conscious of or know what to do with one to get relief, though I could be wrong. Maybe, in the secret of his room, it was his only pleasure; I’d like to think he at least had that, but I doubt it because I don’t even know if he was strong enough to do it. No, I guess anyone could, if the hands aren’t paralyzed and the genitals are developed and the nervous system’s working, but what I’m saying is I don’t think the last two were for him. He barely had hair under his arms and no little sprouts on his chest and face. And once I saw him getting out of this special sitz bath installed for him in the bathroom and when he was . well, this might have been a few months before he died and there was only the littlest of mustaches there and his prick, if it hadn’t been tremendously shrunk by the heat of the bath, was more like a boy’s half his age,” and he said “That bathroom scene—” and she said “Don’t make anything more out of it. I walked in by mistake. He was as embarrassed as I was and quickly covered himself up with his hands. Do me a favor and don’t refer to him in that way again or try to analyze my orgasm making something like mystical experiences right after we’ve had sex. Your judgment’s impaired because your mind’s still fixed on the sex subject. Also because he was the dearest person there ever was to me, always so sweet and mild-mannered and shy and self-insulting and so on. But the most loving of boys — he used to clean up my room for me when I was at school and he was home getting special ed, take my dinner dishes to the sink, follow me around whenever he could — so the person I miss most and feel worst about and appreciate meeting up with any way I can. And if you put too unseemly a meaning to my encounters with him it might do something to my head where I never see him again, not even in my dreams,” and he said “Okay, will do, but one more thing, if you don’t mind, and this may be way off in fact, maybe I shouldn’t say it,” and she said “Better you don’t then, if it concerns him,” and he said “It’s mostly about you. Did you, maybe, ever try to fool around with him? . oh, that was dumb, wasn’t it, you already said how embarrassed you both were at that sitz bath scene. But you’ve also said you’ve been sexually aware since you were eight and active since you were thirteen, so I thought there might be a slight possibility — is this really too off the mark?” and she said “Yes, but it’s not one of your worst questions, given what I’ve said about myself and the reasonableness of looking at this sex thing from both sides. But I told you: after awhile he was like my younger brother, to be protected and not taken advantage of, besides that I’d never do anything that perverse, even then when my morality code wasn’t quite formed. All right? But enough,” and he nodded and after about a minute she said “So what do you think, you’re rested yet? Because I feel I could reach that plateau again, or come near. I’d like to at least try to and then who can say what I’ll see if I get there. Maybe my brother again who I can apologize to for my little chat with you before,” and he said “Honestly, I must have turned some irrecuperable corner in my sex life, if that makes any sense, but I’ve been feeling the last few weeks I need more time between them and now with this one that maybe what we did could be my limit for the day,” and she said “Don’t tell me; all any girl has to do is wait fifteen minutes and then play with you,” and he said “I don’t know, and certainly not that soon, but that’s how I feel now.” She screamed during some orgasms, even when Brons was home though asleep, and cried after about every fourth one of them and then usually clung to him, sometimes all night, face burrowed into his neck or armpit till he had to force it out if he wanted to get some sleep. “I don’t know what it is with sex and us,” she once said, “but it sure is a major plus in our arrangement and it could be the thing that keeps us together most along with your love for Brons. I don’t like that but I’ll take it for the time being. I got off with lots of other guys, of course, or did till you moved in and will no doubt do again once you’re gone from here. But with you, I don’t know what it is but like with no one else I actually see things like the birth of the universe or a disconnected star field forming into a constellation I can recognize like a dog or crab and other phenomenal or historical occurrences. Whole Mayan or Aztecan villages — I forget which culture was the one in Mexico and which not — with ceremonial dances and drum-beatings and men in spooky headdresses and codpieces and women with their big boobs showing and kids at their teats and huge beautiful buildings and entrance gates and those things they call ziggurats, I think, but no one on top of them getting his head chopped off. Sea creatures, for instance, one time, a pair of them slithering out of the sea and in quicktime developing teeny legs to walk on land with. And a couple of times — all right, once — I touched but just barely the hand of what seemed like a gentle God, though He had a twinkle in his eye, the old geezer, knew what we’d just done and what I was still in the midst of and that He might even be interested in having a turn with me Himself, so maybe He was only one of God’s more trusted helpers — I was going to say ‘advisors,’ but God wouldn’t have that — a couple of seats down from the ones who sit on either side of God’s throne. It could be that our genitals are a perfect match, in spite of the differences in your length and my depth. And maybe also something about our respective ages and health and the area we live in and this great California air and that my house sits next to an enormous church and the feelings we have for each other at the time, like the last one — I felt very good about you before and during it. And where we both are in our general all-around erotic development, or just I am, since you never seem to have these incredible comes and highs after, unless you’ve been muting them and controlling the body quakes. It’s possible I’m at my absolute peak in all this, that the last one or one of the near future ones will be the highest I’ll ever reach and then they’ll slowly start peaking lower, though I’d hate to believe it. But I’m even worse at figuring these things out than you are, my dear dummy, so why should we try?”

So it could have been that small thin bony body that had as much to do as anything in keeping them together, that’s what he now thinks. Ninety-six pounds, sometimes up to ninety-eight, but evenly distributed, nicely proportioned, and muscular from the waist down. That he could lift her body up as he would a kid’s, hold it in the air by the buttocks and thighs and set it down on top of him, the few times she let them do it in that position, turn it around even when he was on his back and she was completely off the ground, lift it up and down on him repeatedly and without her moving on her own once till they came and if she did first, then still bob her up and down till he came, and if he did first, then he couldn’t go on and she bounced up and down on him but it didn’t work and after he flopped out she complained, but his arms hardly getting tired during any of it, and it wasn’t that he was a strong guy, though his shoulders were pretty big. Also that her body was so limber, hard and quick. Meaning, what he liked about it. And what she wore in the bedroom sometimes — he’s saying what also got him excited: sheerest of outfits, tiniest of briefs, rarely any socks, stockings or bra and never a watch, and all he had to do was see the small line of pubic hair on top — was she lying when she said she never razored it to get it that way? He didn’t think so, since she also said she wished it was bushier so at least in that area she didn’t look like a pubey girl — and he’d make a move. He also liked picking her up, cradling her in his arms and carrying her to bed that way or to a chair or wherever they’d do it, once on a covered toilet seat, she sitting facing him and flushing the toilet when she started making noises or before she sat on him would turn the sink faucet on and let it run, because her son was playing in his room down the hall. And he never had to suggest twice that they make love. He’d raise an eyebrow a certain way — cock it like a fop; she knew the signal — or would only have to say “So, what do you say?” or give a particular smile, more like a dumb grin, that only meant one thing to them and she usually said “Sure, I’m game, give me a minute,” or “I’m ready, are you?” for he mostly said it or gave these signs when he thought she’d be interested, since she often gave little hints herself: smile more seductive than her others, brushing past him making sure their hips touched when it was obvious she could have more easily gone around — and she’d whip all her clothes off, sometimes letting the underpants dangle on the end of her raised foot before she flipped it into the air and caught it, get under the covers and pull them down on his side, maybe plump his pillow in the middle, say “How much time we have?” if it was before he was going to work or they had people coming over or one of them had to pick up her son at nursery or he was returning from school on the bus or expected back soon from a friend’s home.

She used to say that most of the jokes he made were coarse, foolish and old or just made no sense but certainly weren’t funny except perhaps to an immature twelve-year-old boy who also wasn’t too bright, which was why she seldom laughed at them. That most of the books he read were written not to be read but only to be written about they were so obscure, pedantic, longwinded and dull. That all his tedious hard work at the typewriter was going to go for nothing because he wrote about people he hadn’t the clearest idea of, like what went on in their heads or how they felt or what their jobs or home life or history were about, besides that she was sick of him stinking up her sewing room all day with his body sweat when he typed. That almost all the so-called suggestions and advice he gave her son were the opposite of what she wanted the boy to know or do. That he was the worst driver she’d ever seen and every time she got in a car with him she took her life in her hands as well as her son’s if she was dumb or desperate enough to bring him with them. That he ought to grow a mustache to make his bland face more interesting, and when he did, that he should grow a beard to wipe out the devastating effects of the mustache, because he now looked a little like Hitler or Groucho Marx or someone else she didn’t like — anyway, awful, much worse than before and she was sorry she first encouraged him to grow it and now that he’d got to like that bush. That he was getting a big pot belly and also seemed out of breath half the time and he ought to run or exercise more and also dance a lot if he didn’t want to keep looking ten years older than he was and ridiculous in pants and shirts that were now four sizes too small for him. That he had to find a better-paying job or just two of the same-paying ones if he wanted to continue living with them, because she just couldn’t take any more, always being so close to broke. That the only thing he was really good for now was sex and more sex and that for sure wasn’t enough for what she wanted in a man and in fact was probably the easiest thing for her to find. That she did appreciate that he’d been there for her son at a time when he most needed a man and for the music he listened to sometimes that she occasionally liked and the dishes he’d concocted and introduced her to, like a simple vinaigrette dressing and slicing up raw mushrooms into the salad and beef Strogonoff and that vegetable curry with all the extras, things she never knew existed not that she couldn’t have lived without them. That he was a terrible baby sometimes, jumping back when a mouse darted across the room and being too afraid to chase after it with a broom, not jogging through certain streets because dogs there once ran after him and snarled. That he drank too much, talked too much and was so damn opinionated, as if nobody on the West Coast ever had a brainy idea but him or did anything with any taste, and he wore clothes that were completely wrong for this area and climate, railed against petty things that other people would just say “That’s life, what can you do?” to and swallow. Talked and made noises in his sleep to the point where she wanted to wear earplugs when she went to bed, but if she did who’d hear Brons if there was some kind of emergency and he needed them, since he also slept as if nothing in the world could awake him. His voice and choice of phrases and words sometimes were so vedy English that he sounded like the classic closet pansy. All the coffee he spilled on her rugs that he’d never in a year have the money to get professionally cleaned. His smelly bowel movements, the urine drops he left on the toilet seat, his body and head hair all over the bathroom floor and stuck in the shower soap. Why’d he stay with her for years? he thought. Why didn’t he leave after a few months or go those times she asked him to rather than cajole her to let him stay? She was right, a little into their relationship, when she said he only continued to live with her and claim he loved her and wanted to marry her because of her son. He took Brons to nursery most times, picked him up whenever he could too, had snacks with him after, made him lunch every day for school, got him up for school and made him breakfast while she slept and stayed with him at the corner till the school bus came, helped him with his spelling words for the weekly first-grade spelling tests, read books or told stories to him almost every night, played board games or cards with him when he was too tired to and wanted only to lie on his bed and read a book or had important other work to do but just because the boy asked him to. Did whatever he could for Brons. It was true the kid had him around his little finger, as Evangeline liked to say, but he didn’t think he ever did anything that was wrong or bad for him. Spoiled him, Evangeline said, but so much that Brons might never be the same after Gould finally left, because no one would ever give in to him that way again. Sat with him and the humidifier under a makeshift tent on the bed when Brons had a bad respiratory infection and trouble breathing. Spent the night on a mattress on the floor in Brons’s hospital room when he had his tonsils removed. Hoisted him onto his shoulders, hoisted him onto his back, ran or bounced around with him like that, the two of them pretending they were all sorts of things, cowboy on a bucking bronco, desert warrior on a camel, Bellerophon on Pegasus when he killed the Chimera, but mostly knight errant on his obedient horse, till they both dropped. Stayed by his bed most nights till Brons was very sleepy or asleep and a couple of times said to him because he liked to hear the answer to it—“Tell me,” “Tell you what?” “You know, what I am to you,” “You’re in my head forever and wherever and ever, so help my heart.”

One night she threw a glass of wine in his face. It was his wine, he’d been holding it, but he’d put it down to make a call on the kitchen phone. The wine sprayed all around him — cabinets, ceiling, floor; glass flew out of her hand by mistake, she later said, and hit his face and cut him but smashed against the wall. She’d overheard him making the call. He was telling a woman he’d known before he’d met Evangeline that he was going to pack his essential things right away and somehow get to her place in Berkeley, and if the buses weren’t running this late along El Camino and then from San Francisco or no friend would drive him to the Greyhound in Redwood City or all the way, he’d even splurge his last buck on a cab, for that was how much he wanted to get away. He and Evangeline had had a terrific fight that night, he then said he was leaving; she said “Shut up, you’ll wake the kid,” he said “What do you think our row was doing, and don’t you think he should know by now how we really feel about each other?” she said “Great, couldn’t be better, what a deal I won’t pass up: get your ass out of my house, you filthy bastard; disappear for good.” The woman said she could put him up for a few days, or more if it worked out between them, but they’d see. He said he should be there in a couple of hours if he made good connections, less if he got a ride right to her. “Anyway, don’t wait up; put the key behind that brick, if you still use it and it’s still a safe spot. I have your address and I think I remember where it is. Just tell me, does the key turn to the left or right?” Then the wine came and next the glass and then the threat not to use the phone again to call a friend or she’d get the cops. Knapsack and typewriter packed, he’d wiped the wine off the cabinets, ceiling and floor, looked in on Brons but didn’t bend down to kiss him or touch his head, knocked on her bedroom door and said “Just want you to know, I’m going now. I’ll try to catch the last bus at the stop. If I don’t make it, don’t worry, I’m not coming back. I’ll slide the keys under the front door after I lock it, and tell Brons I’ll call him tomorrow afternoon or night and of course that he had nothing to do with my going and that I absolutely love him,” and she said “Why are you telling me all this?” and he said “I thought it was important, especially that I wasn’t leaving the front door unlocked; so, I’ll see ya,” and she said “Hold it, will you?” and opened the door and she was crying and he said “What the hell are you crying for?” and she said “Please don’t be obtuse,” and he said “Okay, and I didn’t mean it that way,” and he cried and then, maybe the tenth time since he started living with her — about to go, his things on his shoulder and in his hands, his things by the door, his things on the other side of the door and once on the sidewalk while he waited for a cab he’d called to take him to a friend’s place — they made up and went to bed. He called the woman first and said he was staying, Evangeline and he had worked it out, and she said she was disappointed but understood and probably it was for the best—“No doubt it was, if you patched it up so fast; though after what you said happened tonight and what I could make out from her in the background in our first call, who can say if you’re not risking your life by staying another night — excuse me, because you probably love her.” “Do you think we get into these uncontrolled howling brawls just to have the greatest times in bed?” Evangeline said after and he said “I don’t think so; I hope not. They’re real, unfortunately, at least on my part; I truly hated you and wanted to flee,” and she said “Then flee, nothing’s holding you: no kids or contract or dues,” and he said “That what you want?” and she said “You can see that right now it’s not, but who can say for later if we have another mad brawl. We should try to work out what causes them. I know we’ve said that before, but this time to really work at it: therapy together, speaking to people whose judgments we trust, reading about it; whatever helps. Even if it doesn’t result in any long-standing arrangement for us with the whole caboodle kit of wedding rings and children thrown in, we’d find out for future relationships, and some perhaps of longer standing than ours, what bugs us about living with someone. And for the time being just to make it better for each other and Brons, since our fights damage him.” She’ll change her mind, he thought; if he just does his best to keep things smooth between them for a year and goes along with everything she says about helping them stay together and learning why they’re at each other so much, she’ll want to get married and have a kid with him and then maybe a second one, when she sees how helpful a husband and good a father he is with the first one, and even three kids if her body can take it. Three’s the number he wanted for years, he thought, but of his own. “What I’d love,” he said in bed that same night, “is just to have one good solid no-great-spats year,” and she said “That’d suit me. But I have to admit that another side of me says it wouldn’t be altogether healthy, or right for our natures, not getting things out fast and furiously that way, and think of those terrific screws we’d be missing right after we made up again. But we’ll work toward it. More than anything, there’s Brons to consider, as I said. You’re my dear.”

They drove to Washington State to visit her folks. Another of his old cars, this one a station wagon he bought for a hundred dollars and had to keep filling up with oil, backseat down, she and Brons sleeping most of the way on a double-bed mattress. “Where’d you ever find that goof?” he overheard her father say to Evangeline. They were in the kitchen, he was upstairs in the guest room just for him — her parents had given them separate rooms — and heard it through the floor. “The nose, the jug ears, the beefy lips and he’s half bald; he’ll be hairless as an egg in five years, and he looks like a bath is an on-and-off thing with him, or maybe that’s because his clothes are so old and unkempt and the half-assed way he shaves. Not at all attractive. If I was a girl and had to face that face every day, I’d puke,” and she said “Some people would disagree with you.” “Who? He’s also got no personality or bite. He’s all brains, I’ll give you that, but of the useless kind — clever remarks and bon mots and facts and dates no one else cares a zig for. He’s a full-fledged dud as far as I can tell; nothing compared to the men you used to date here and even the shitheel you married,” and she said “Gould and I knew you wouldn’t like him that much, which is why I didn’t ask. Let’s say I don’t want to discuss it and it’d be too futile to defend his good qualities to you. I only wanted you two to meet, even if just once — Mom already has — and for Brons and I to see you both again, and I couldn’t afford the plane,” and her father said “You should have told me. If I knew what you were bringing, I would have come up with the fare gladly if you had left him behind.” “Is he fey?” he overheard her father ask her mother from the same room. “She leads such a crazy life in California, who can say what she goes after these days. The new kick down there might be to try and get a homo to do it to you, and they’re supposed to be plenty sensitive, aren’t they? So maybe that’s it too: they know a woman’s needs and aren’t demanding and rough,” and her mother said “He’s good to our grandson and that’s something. And they seem to get along together, and she says they have a good time in bed — don’t you breathe a word of this to anyone — so it can’t be that fey silliness you say. And when I stayed with them he was all over her house doing nice things for her, besides being attentive and considerate to me: getting her coffee, even heating up the milk for it because she liked it in the morning café au lait. Cooking good dinners from scratch and working hard at his own job but tending a lot to Bronson too.” “That’s all she probably thinks of,” her father said, “—sex, and hooking up with another man who’s worth a million, which this dud will never have. It won’t last, that’s my prediction, but if it does then she’s more lost than I thought,” and her mother said “I hope you’re right, because I also know — remember, not a word of this! — that there’ll be no tears from her once he’s gone, not even the onion kind.” Evangeline introduced him to her cousins and friends still living in the area. Friendly but uninformed people, he thought, and unsophisticated and dull and a couple of them fairly dumb and with not a single funny thing said by any of them and not one interested in anything he was. “I fart on art,” one guy said and she laughed and the guy said “Should I make one, to emphasize my point?” and lifted his leg and this really cracked her up and later Gould said “How could you laugh so hard at that idiotic art-fart remark?” and she said “Because it was hysterically funny, why else? — I’m no phony. Not only what was said and the way he combined those words to make a rhyme and then with his leg like he was about to lay one, but also because I knew how it’d annoy you. They’re great fun, my old chums. Fun and real people, earthy, homey, plain-speaking, unheld-back and direct, and you can’t tolerate anyone who doesn’t babble on about high culture and character and ethics and farty art and all that and who also isn’t a gasbag and cryptic nitpicker to go with it. I’m sorry, but to me this is humor. What you pass off for it is intellectual chitty chatchat told to tickle and riddle,” and he said “God, what am I doing with you? And stuck in this nowhere land no less,” and she said “That’s what I’ve been asking myself too. If you want, Brons and I can stay a few extra days and take the plane back and you can set out early tomorrow morning,” and he said “Yeah, I heard, your big daddy will come up with the fare and there won’t even be any onion tears from you when I’m finally gone. Won’t he be glad to see me go, but I’ll be ecstatic. Your mother, I’ll admit, I like a lot and have from the first time I met her; a real mensch,” and she said “Oh, aren’t you nice; she’ll be so happy to hear what you said, and the particular word you used.”

The summer before he knew her she was on a two-month bus trip to almost the northern tip of Alaska and back where just about every new hallucinogenic drug known at the time was used aboard. Brons was left with her parents, her ex-husband was the driver and paid most of the costs of the trip, some West Coast writers and artists and a couple of well-known beatniks from the East joined the bus for a few days at a time, “I think I banged every guy on the bus at least twice, including my husband, though I didn’t know it was him both times till after we woke up. That’s the kind of adventure it was, free and fun and powerful and out-and-out unpredictable and outrageous and the most lovingly communal of moving communes, where you made peace and even sweetly balled the ones you once loathed. You would have freaked out in a day if you were on it, no matter how many chickies you could have laid, and pissed everyone off with your stodgy worries and complaints and morning regimens and needs like exercise and a newspaper and coffee and if you didn’t shit by ten A.M. every day you’d get frantic,” and he said “I wouldn’t have minded the sex with the different women, if they were clean. But I doubt I could have done it with anyone else if you were along, maybe because I wouldn’t have even needed to — would that be the same with you?” and she said “Of course not. That’s what the trip was about. To lose it for a week or month or however long you’re aboard; but all the conventional ways of living, I’m saying, which are okay for when you’re home,” and he said “Anyway, the drugs, since I’ve a predisposition to bad trips — I blame it on my hyperactive imagination — would have driven me close to insane if I’d taken them. So I never would have chanced going on it and you would have had the bus to yourself, not that any of your friends would have invited me.” A twelve-hour psychedelic movie was made of the trip, a great deal of it financed by her ex-husband, and they occasionally went to parties where parts of it were shown, once with a group in the room accompanying it with flute, drum, bell and saxophone music and another time where a woman did shadow puppet theater against the images on the screen, and each excerpt was so slow, set-up and preachy about the delights of various drugs and their individual medical, therapeutic and dietary uses and incompetently shot and edited that even though she was in a lot of it, mostly high and looking silly and acting amateurishly and dressed in costumes and paper hats and masks and things but a couple of times in a more somber, natural mood and just holding a lit cigarette or iced tea and talking normally about how she enjoyed the long trip and being with her friends and seeing the interesting and dramatic scenery but missed her kid, that he usually, without popping any pills or smoking pot like the rest of the people watching it from mattresses and pillows on the floor, soon fell asleep.

He once awoke in the morning to her going down on him. He once awoke late at night to her and some guy he’d never seen humping on the rug by his bed. He loved seeing her standing on the heat register outside their bedroom during some of the colder winter days, her light nightgown billowing above her knees from the air coming up, hugging herself. That smile of hers then, the little girl again, when she caught him looking at her. “I’d say come, come to me,” she once said, “but that’d mean taking my arms from around me to open them to you and I’m just too cold.” She could balance herself over a sink and pee in it without any threat of collapsing the washstand, when their one toilet was taken or clogged. She was the fastest woman he’d ever known, dashing to the store a mile away for a single item and racing back in a total of something like twelve minutes. She beat him in races and he was fast, and she was also a terrific swimmer and could do lap after lap for an hour straight and come out of the pool breathing evenly. She taught him the butterfly stroke, the scissor kick, the butterfly kiss, how to part his hair with his fingers but where it stayed parted the whole day, to blow into a leaf’s seedcase and get a loud toot and a few times a quick tune, to fix a wall switch, replace a pane of glass, unstop a toilet, and once, something he could never do and when the plunger he used wouldn’t budge it, she shoved her hand into the toilet bowl hole and pulled out her son’s shit-smeared toy seal, and also insisted that when they drove together or when he was alone with Brons that he keep his hands in the ten-to-two position on the steering wheel, something she said her ex-husband insisted she do “and he used to race cars at Indianapolis and was so skilled at the wheel that I once saw him drive blindfolded for half a mile.” One of the front wheels blew on the car she was driving and the car spun around, ripped through a fence on the right side of the highway and flipped over and landed on its roof, and neither of them was hurt though they both couldn’t sleep or slept very little for weeks. “We got out alive,” she said the next day, “because I steered into the spin rather than away from it, which is what I want you to learn to do for slick roads or something like what happened to us, till it becomes automatic,” and he said “But we ran off the road, car was completely out of control, and landed on our heads and were lucky we didn’t get killed, so why do you say your way’s better than any other?” and she said “If I had tried correcting the skid the way most people instinctively do we’d have ended up in oncoming traffic and got creamed for life.” Every other month or so she’d put on garageman’s overalls her father had given her and change the oil in her car and lube it more thoroughly, she said, than any service station ever would. She had a cat she trained to sit up and beg and jump on and off stools and run down piano keys and ring, she swore, to get someone to come to the door to let it in, though he always thought it was by accident, since there was a ledge right under the bell so all the cat had to do was touch it when it wanted to rub against something. She had an art show at a reputable gallery in San Francisco just for the framings she did of old etchings and prints and some of them where there was no picture of any sort inside and one reviewer called it the rarest and most rewarding of exhibits to witness: the start of a new art form the artist invented and another reviewer said her work amounted to little more than a simple pastime she’d become as accomplished at as a hundred other hobbyists in the Bay Area and would her next project involve putting together ribbons, pine cones, juniper berries and leaves into charming seasonal wreaths? She became so depressed by the second review that she quit making and selling the framings, dismantled the remaining ones and gave the frames to Goodwill and converted her art studio into a sewing room. She also succeeded in getting him to say “Excuse me” and “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and “God bless you” or “Gesundheit” and expressions like that to people at the appropriate times, which he must have been taught to do as a boy and possibly even practiced for years but only when she pointed it out did he realize he hadn’t done it for a long time before he met her, or not as a rule, and to answer the phone with a hello rather than a “yeah?” or “yuh?” or grunt. She was always planting flower bulbs, rearranging flower beds, cutting flowers and turning them into bouquets and placing them in vases and jars around the house, and when some of the petals fell to the floor or table, putting them in a saucer of water on the kitchen windowsill. And other things and glimpses, but does any of this explain, once it was clear to them they should break up, why he did everything he could not to? He was doing relatively little during the time he was with her — odd jobs, full-time jobs, but none of them paying much — and had no idea what he’d do in the future, and living with her in her comfortable home in a pleasant community and with an interesting enough group of friends around her and for the first year having her car to drive till he was able to afford his own, gave him some stability, he could call it, or permanence of some sort, or grounding in a way, even if he had to work hard at all those jobs to keep it going, or just a place to sleep and eat and a woman to be with and lay and whom he truly loved for a while, and her child. Finally she said “I want to start seeing other men in a more serious vein, not simply a night here and escapade there when I’m fed up with you or want to take revenge because of something you did or said or am just turned on for a day or two to another guy, so I want you out of here for good and that’s the last time I’m going to say it,” and he said “Maybe things can still work out between us, they always have, and if they really work out you won’t feel you need to see anyone else, just as I never have, and I won’t have to leave,” and she said “We’ve tried and tried and for the most part it’s been wretched year after wretched year and it’s never going to work and you know it, besides that you didn’t hear much of what I said,” and he said “I heard, I was listening, and you’re right, of course, about almost everything, so why am I acting so desperately now? But what about Brons — won’t my going hurt him?” and she said “He’s of the age where it’ll hurt for a short time and then, with all his other interests and activities and because I’m here for him and I’ll make sure his father calls and shows up more, he’ll get over it quicker than you think. It’s also possible, because you can be so cloistering—” and he said “You probably mean ‘cloying,’” and she said “I probably mean both, but what are you implying, that I’m not good with words? Anyway, what I was saying is that Brons will ultimately feel, because of your way of engulfing anyone you love, immensely relieved,” and he said “Is that what you think I was with you, engulfing? And also that ‘relief business; you’ll feel that way about me too once I’m out of here?” and she said “I wasn’t even thinking of them for myself.” So he left, drove to New York in a U-Drive-It car, later saw them and her new boyfriend in Spain, felt he went crazy there for a few days, maybe over her, maybe it was other things — he forgets now — but quickly recovered, and that was the last he saw of them except for brief visits to California because Brons asked him to come — two? three? — and a business trip when he only saw them for a day. And now he didn’t even have a photo of her, though when he was living with her he had a few, including a topless shot of her and several other women from the bus trip she took to Alaska, and one with her, Brons and him mugging four times in a New York City photo machine, but he did have several of Brons, one a newspaper photo, which the Chronicle photographer sent him the original of when he wrote to him for it: Brons on his shoulders: “Father and Son, Gould and Bronson Bookbinder, Enjoying the First Spring Day in Golden Gate Park”—“Why didn’t you tell them his real last name and that he was my son, instead of claiming he was your own?” and he said “I thought it’d be too much trouble getting that across to the photographer and that the paper wouldn’t run the photo if they thought Brons and I weren’t related and I was living with his mom. But I guess also because I liked the idea of it written that way”—others of Brons at his birthday party three years straight, graduating nursery school, entering first grade, on Stimson Beach making a huge sand sculpture of some sea animal with a shovel and pail, he and Brons in a rowboat on the Stanford University lake, the two of them fishing off a cliff near Tarragona, Brons sitting in the driver’s seat of his father’s sports car and pretending to steer, and which Gould occasionally looked at if he didn’t mind getting up on a chair in front of his open bedroom closet and taking out the shoebox of them and most of his other photos, some dating back to the time he was a boy himself.