Long Made Short

VOICES, THOUGHTS

Gordon hears voices in his head again today. They tell him don’t go out, stay in, don’t bother to make lunch, have a snack, say something nice to your wife next time you see her, don’t be a fake, make sure to give your kids a kiss when you pick them up and ask them what they did, where’re you going? what’re you doing? stay put, get up, run in place a bit, don’t budge, read, nap, think about things, think about Louise.

He thinks about Louise. She was very young when he first knew her, they both were, three, four, five years old. They played together for years. Her house, his. She once let him see her with her panties down. People said they were like husband and wife sometimes. That they were sure to marry each other when they grew up. “Do you want to?” they asked and he said yes. “Do you want to?” they asked her and she said “I don’t know, I think so, it’s not something you can just say, maybe yes.” He took her to his basement. That was one of the places they played. He said he’d give her something, he forgets what, no doubt something he thought valuable and which she would too, and she said “Don’t tell, don’t ever tell or I’ll never play with you again,” and showed, let his eyes stay on it for a few seconds from a few feet away, and when he stuck his hand out to touch, he wasn’t going to go further, he didn’t know there was anything further, she said “Don’t be a pig,” and pulled her panties up and dropped her dress over them. They continued to play together a few more years, but less and then much less. She had her girl friends, he had his friends, all boys. He last saw her when she was around ten. They’d been going to different schools for a couple of years, she to a parochial one, he to a public. She moved off the block. He didn’t know she had till she was gone. That was it, never saw or heard from her or anything about her again.

Think about Willy. His wife passes and says “Really none of my business, but aren’t you going to move from that chair today?” and he says “It’s Sunday, day of resting, and kids are out, so what’s the difference? Besides, I’m thinking,” and she says “Of what?” and he says “Just thinking; I don’t want to break it, so I’ll tell you later.” Willy was his best friend for years. Soon after he first met Willy, Gordon said if he wanted he’d teach him how to box. Gordon thought himself a pretty good boxer. An uncle had given him two pairs of gloves and a mouthpiece and he used to practice in front of his mirror in his undershorts and sometimes punch his pillow across the room. They went to the basement and put the gloves on — he forgets how they were able to tie the last glove; probably Gordon, feeling he had the advantage, left one of his gloves untied and the one he was able to tie he did with one hand and his teeth — and he showed him how to jab, punch, feint, dance, block a punch, keep the face and neck covered, what going below the belt meant, and after a while Willy said “No more, I give up, my face hurts, I’ll never get the hang of it.” A few months later Willy asked for a rematch and Gordon thought this was a good chance to try out the fancy footwork and bolo punch he saw in a movie newsreel of a recent champion middleweight fight, and they went to the basement and Willy outboxed him from the start. Willy hurt his nose — he was about two inches taller and ten pounds heavier and had a much longer reach than him and was now wearing his own mouthpiece — made his lips bleed, punched him silly and danced around and ducked in a way that Gordon, after the first of what were going to be three two-minute rounds, ended up swinging wildly and a couple of times landing on the floor. He never said to Willy “You beat me good, how the hell you learn all that so fast and where’d you get the mouthpiece?” He just stepped back, spit out his mouthpiece and took off his gloves and said “I’m bushed, been feeling weak for days; let’s go out and play.” They never boxed again, never fought, except for a few quick arguments, in any kind of way. They usually walked to school together, met outside after school to walk home, spent time together weekends, did this till they graduated in the eighth grade. Then Willy went to an agricultural high school in Queens — his grandfather owned a farm near Hartford and said he’d give him half of it — and Gordon to a special academic one in Brooklyn, and they didn’t see each other much for a year, and then not at all unless they bumped into each other on the subway going or coming home from school or on the block or in a neighborhood store or movie theater, let’s say. Then Willy’s dad got a super’s job in an apartment building on the East Side, and Gordon never saw Willy again till about twenty years later when Willy was at their favorite Central Park West corner watching spot with his kids for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and Gordon was back with his folks till he got his own place. Willy introduced his girls to him—“This little pip-squeak was one of your daddy’s friends when he lived here.” He said what he did — a printer upstate — and then the parade started and Willy pushed his kids closer to the police barricades and then under them so they could all sit on the street, and when it was over Gordon thought he’d talk some more with him over coffee and juice and English muffins or something for his kids at the Cherry Restaurant on Columbus, but couldn’t find him.

Think of Rachel. Thinks. Standing up in front of her third-story window, and the boys shouting “Take off your clothes, Rachel”—older boys first, then the younger ones joining in—“Take off all your clothes and show us,” and she disappeared and came back without her clothes on — he’d been told she’d done this before — and they all whistled and cheered and an older boy yelled “Put one finger in your mouth, Rachel, and now the other in your peepee hole,” and she did this and they whistled and cheered. Then her mother came to the window, pulled Rachel in, opened the window wider and shouted “You bad boys, you scum of the earth, you’re the worst of the worst, ditches you should dig for yourselves and die in, picking on a poor dumb girl like this, making her do things so wicked. Go home. All of you, I know you and I’m calling your mothers, so they’ll be looking for you to scold and I hope give a beating to, so run home quick, you slime, for I’m also calling the police.” He was scared what his mother would say and stayed away from home till dinner time, and when he got there his mother asked what did he do to Rachel? “Nothing, she was up in her window when I last saw her when I was walking up the block, so what could I have done to her?” and she said “Did you encourage her to do what her mother said you did? — the gang of you, Ben, Willy, Caesar and whatever other morons you have out there, though Willy I’m surprised,” and he said “I had nothing to do with anything, the older boys were the ones who said for her to do what she did, and I just stayed there because they’d stopped and I was walking to the park with them.” She believed him but told him to walk away from things like that from now on and docked him a week’s allowance. His father heard about it later and said he was lying and raised his hand as if to hit him and sent him to bed right after supper and took away his allowance for the next four weeks and barred him from spending any of the money he made on his own. Rachel’s parents took her out of kindergarten and from first grade on sent her by bus—“At a tremendous expense to them too, which they can’t afford,” his mother said — to a religious elementary and then high school.

“So come on, out with it, what are you thinking about so deeply?” his wife says, going upstairs, which means she had come downstairs and passed him twice without him even knowing it. “Though of course if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay too,” and he says “Just some things, decisions, worries — let me first think them through a little more before I talk about them. But lots of things are troubling me, you can probably see that just from the strained look on my face,” and she says “No, you look all right, not smiling but not in any grieved or harried state.” “Well that’s good, but it’s for sure not how I’ve been feeling, for I’ve had thoughts running through like mortality, growing possibilities of sickness, painful illness, lots of nice things to look forward to — goddamn teeth every third week it seems with new problems, not to mention the daily reports of a collapsing globe, and my work, or lack of much satisfaction and completion in it. Kids growing up and leaving home and what they ultimately have to face, though who knows? Maybe they’ll do much better at it than I. And some of the terrible things I’ve done to them — you know, we’ve spoken of it — my anger, outbursts, pushing them hard, physically a few times, once slapping Sylvia’s face, ranting at them a couple of times that I wish they’d never been born or I was dead — that I find very difficult to live with. Well, not as bad as that, and the ‘live with’ and ‘was dead’ must sound funny, but also some deeper philosophical questions if some of those weren’t,” and she says “Like what? I’ve got time,” and he says “Nothing I can really talk about clearly right now — those are just floating around; but I’ll nab the buggers and get back to you with them later, I swear,” and she says “Good, I’ll be interested,” and throws him a kiss and goes upstairs.

Think about Thomas. Thomas was a new kid on the block, they quickly became friends, for a while they also used to meet almost every weekday morning and then pick up Willy in front of his building and all walk to school. Then one day Thomas wasn’t outside his building waiting for him and wasn’t in school that day and wasn’t outside his building or in school the next day and Gordon asked his mother if he could call him and did. “Thomas is ill and won’t be returning to school this whole year,” Thomas’s mother said, “thank you for calling,” and he said “Does that mean after the summer too, since it’s only April now?” and she said “No, he could be back sometime in the fall, though thank you for calling, Thomas will appreciate it,” and she hung up before he could say “Can I please speak to him if he’s not too sick and it’s okay?” He told his mother he wanted to talk to Thomas to say he hopes he’ll feel better, and she said “Possibly she didn’t realize that, I think it’d be all right to call again.” He did, asked Thomas’s mother if he could visit him—“I could do it right now, I’m just a few houses up the block”—and she said “Oh no, my dear, he’s much too out of sorts to see anyone now. Maybe in a month or so, probably more like two,” and he said “Like in June? I hope not July because then I’ll be away in camp for two months,” and she said “If we’re lucky, the end of June. But don’t you worry about him, he’ll be better soon enough and will be delighted you called.” Almost every time he passed Thomas’s building the next few weeks he looked up to the fourth-floor brownstone window where his bedroom was, hoping to see him and wave. A few times he thought he should yell up to him “Thomas, it’s me, Gordon, can you come to the window — is there anything you want — are you okay?” but never did. His mother bought a get-well card for him to sign and leave above Thomas’s mailbox, the class sent him a card they all signed, and he called him once more to see how he was — maybe even get him to the phone, since it seemed to have been long enough — and Thomas’s mother said “He’s feeling a little better, not well enough to come to the phone though, but I will tell him you called — he’s loved all the attention he’s received lately from his teachers and friends.” About two weeks later his mother said she had some very bad news to tell him and he thought “Did I do something bad I don’t know about? Are they planning to move from the city and take me away from all my friends? Is one of my uncles or aunts very sick or did one of them die?” Two of them already had, one on a golf course, the other in a bathroom, and this is how she started to tell him it. She said “Your friend Thomas died two days ago in the hospital — that’s where he’s mostly been the last few weeks,” and he said “Well not two weeks ago, because that’s when I talked to his mother and she said he was home.” “Maybe she was keeping it from you, knowing how you’d feel. He had a weak heart, something he was born with, and it simply wouldn’t work for him anymore.” She was going to the funeral, he said he wanted to, and she said it was during school hours and, besides, he was much too young to go to a young person’s funeral. “They’re much sadder than an adult’s, and it might be upsetting for the boy’s parents to see you there.” He thought it strange she wanted to go; she hardly knew Thomas, didn’t even seem to like him when he was over at the house, but he went along with how she explained it: Since he couldn’t go, it was her way of showing his feelings and the family’s respects. Later that day after the funeral he asked how it was and she said there was a good turnout, she’d never seen such an array of flowers in the chapel, the coffin was open, which she didn’t think was right, till the ceremony began. “I’m glad I stopped you from going. It was the first funeral of a child I’ve been to and was almost too sad for me to take.” He asked if any kids were there and she said “Cousins, I heard, your age and younger, which is all right I suppose if they were close, but nobody from your class.” Just about everytime he walked past Thomas’s building the next few weeks he looked at his window. The shade was always down and then one day it was up and the next day there were Venetian blinds on it. Sometimes, the next few years, he saw Thomas’s parents in the neighborhood or on the block, together or alone, and they always asked how he was and to give their regards to his parents, whom they’d barely met and probably not his father once, and a few times said he was getting tall and seemed to be sprouting a little hair above his lips and was growing up to be a fine handsome young man and asked how school was and Miss O’Brien, his and Thomas’s former teacher. Please give her their regards too. He still, when he visits his mother, occasionally bumps into Mr. Neuman, Thomas’s father, who never recognizes him till he points out who he is: “Gordon Mandelbaum from up the block, number twenty-three, my dad’s the druggist at La Rochelle.” Mrs. Neuman died about five years after Thomas. “Heartbreak over her son,” his mother said. “It had to be that, for just by her looks and build and the type of work she did for a living till that time, I didn’t think there was a healthier woman alive.”

“Gordon,” his wife yells downstairs from the bedroom, he thinks, and he says “Yeah?” and she says “If you’d like to pay me a visit, this might be a good time,” and he says “Why not,” looks at the clock, has about an hour before he has to pick up the kids, “I’ll be up soon,” and she says “If it’s any problem — I don’t want to push you — don’t bother; I’ve plenty of work to do too,” and he says “No, just that I’m this moment involved in something; give me a few minutes,” and she says “I’ll be here.”

Thinks of Vera. He once said something, he forgets what, something about she was skinny, and she grabbed him in a headlock, threw him to the ground — how old could he have been: eight, nine? — sat on top of his chest and slapped his face and said “Don’t ever call me that again.” His cheek stung, he thought maybe he could buck her off him; if he hadn’t doubled over laughing like a jerk right after he’d said it, she never could have got his arms around his head and thrown him. How come none of his friends or hers don’t jump in and stop her or tell her to get off? She held her hand out flat and said “You want it again? So say you won’t say what I said for you not to,” and he said “I’m sorry, I don’t fight with girls so I’m not fighting back,” and she said “You’re not fighting back because you know I’d lick you to kingdom come,” and he thought “lick,” he’d heard how some of the older boys used it, he ought to too with her but that might make her madder and she had him on his back, where, if he couldn’t buck her off, she could really hurt him bad before he got up, slapping again, pulling his hair and kicking him in the nuts when he was starting to get up. She was taller and older, but he hadn’t thought she was as strong as she showed. He said “I just don’t fight with girls, and you’re not a better fighter than me, but let me up, I think you already tore my pants, and my mom’s going to kill me,” for now one of his knees hurt as if it had got scraped through the pants. “If anyone tore your clothes, you did it to yourself for what you said to me, you anus,” and she got off him. He stood up, looked at his friends, one staring seriously at him, other two laughing, probably at what she just called him, he said “She thinks she’s so tough with”—he was going to say “her big filthy trap”—“but she isn’t,” and walked away, didn’t look at his pants till he was in his building’s vestibule, thought why’d she call him an anus? He thinks he knows what it is but what’s it got to do with everything else that happened and all she did? His pants were ripped in a way where he knew his mother couldn’t just sew them, they’d have to be taken to the tailor to weave and that cost a fortune. He washed his knee, put some hydrogen peroxide and a Band-Aid on the cut, changed into another pair of pants, and brought the ripped ones to his mother and said he tore them and put his finger in the hole. She said “How?” and he said he was playing statues on a stoop, “I know it was a stupid thing to do and I won’t do it again, but I fell off it to the sidewalk when I had one foot up and the person who was ‘it’ told us to freeze.” Sometime later Vera was wearing a skirt and socks and a friend of his said someone had told him she had no underpants on and was completely naked underneath and that she also had hair there, “a little of it, like a Hitler mustache, but some.” “How’s he know?” and his friend said “Because he was behind her in their building when she was walking up a steep flight of stairs today and she bent over for something, maybe just to show him, and he saw it. Let’s pretend we’re fighting, you get me on the ground or me you, we’ll roll her way and under her skirt and see,” and he said “Suppose she sees us and minds?” and his friend said “She won’t know, we’ll be fighting and rolling and not paying any attention to her, our eyes looking like we hate each other till we get underneath her skirt.” They did that. “You little pimp.” “You little dick,” the words were all rehearsed, grabbed each other, fell to the ground, started rolling her way. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, they continued rolling, she jumped aside, they changed directions and rolled together where she now was. She said “You’re both asking for it if you don’t stop.” They couldn’t because they were rolling too hard now, and she kicked him in the head and his friend in the back but probably had aimed at his head. He didn’t know what kind of shoe she had on, but it made a gash in his head. He was bleeding all over the place, someone offered him a dirty hanky to stop it, somebody else some bunched-up tissues, he held the tissues to the cut and went home and into the bathroom and put a towel to it. His mother came in and said “Oh my God,” and he said “Don’t worry, Mom, I was running down the block and tripped and hit my head against a streetlight but I’ll be all right, it’s already starting to stop.” She called his uncle, who was a doctor in Washington Heights, and his uncle said it didn’t sound bad enough to drive down for — he wasn’t unconscious, not even dizzy, and the blood didn’t seem to be gushing — just press some sterile gauze to it till the bleeding stops, then ice and later antiseptic on it and if it seems more than a superficial cut and doesn’t stop bleeding in about fifteen minutes, he’ll drive down and sew it up. It didn’t stop for half an hour, but he didn’t want any needles and thread in his head so told his mother not to call his uncle back. About a year later Vera’s dad got a good job in an Ohio factory, and they moved out there.

Feels the scar from the kick, thinks of Horace. Horace was a little kid, about three, standing behind him in the middle of the street when he swung a broomstick at a ball in a stickball game and hit him in the head. Horace went down, he thought he’d killed him, his eyes were closed and he didn’t move except for a little hand-wiggling, some boys ran under Horace’s windows and yelled “Mrs. Rich, Mrs. Rich, Gordon hit Horace’s head with a stick and he’s bleeding badly, he might be dead.” She stuck her head out the window, a car was coming down the street and the boys flagged it down. A man got out and said “I’m a fireman, I know how to take care of things like this.” Other cars were honking behind his. “Lift the kid to the sidewalk so we can pass,” one driver yelled. Mrs. Rich was screaming from her window, then yelled at the fireman “Don’t touch him, nobody move him, back up if you got to go anyplace, I’ll be right down.” She was a big strong woman with a tough mouth, and Gordon thought she’d grab him and swing him around and then slap the hell out of him. She went straight to Horace, listened for his breathing, said to Gordon “Run to your father in the pharmacy and have him give you some boxes of cotton and bandages and also to call Roosevelt for an ambulance, I already did.” The fireman opened Horace’s eyes, looked at them and let them close. “They’re starting to move normally,” he said, “he’ll be okay.” Police and an ambulance were there, and Horace was sobbing by the time Gordon got back with the cotton and bandages, Gordon’s dad called the hospital that night and was told Horace had gone home, he called Mrs. Rich and she said no bones broken, no concussion, just a deep crack in his forehead that took twelve stitches to close. “If you have no objections, Doc, and from someone who’s been a good customer of yours too, I’d like to send you the hospital bill.” He said “If it’s a lot and I’m not covered, maybe we can split it half and half, because though Gordon should have looked around before he got up to swing, your son shouldn’t have been so close to home plate,” then put on Gordon, who apologized as he’d been told to. He saw Mrs. Rich about a week later coming home from shopping, waved in an embarrassed way and wanted to quickly pass her or cross the street but she said she’d like to speak to him. He went over to her, thinking she might drop her bags and maybe smack him. She said “I know how you still feel bad, I would too, since Horace still gets terrific pains in his head and has trouble with his eyes seeing. But I’m not blaming you for what you did; kids aren’t smart your age and accidents happen.” If she had got angry he was ready to say what his father had said to his mom, that what was a three-year-old kid doing in the street without any adult supervision? He felt awful every time after that when he saw Horace with this big bandage and then an ugly scar on his forehead and later on glasses, with the scar getting smaller and smaller it seemed, though he didn’t know and never asked anyone if the accident could have had anything to do with the glasses. Then Mrs. Rich got married and they moved away, and he only thought of Horace maybe every couple of years and usually when he crossed the street near the manhole cover where that home plate was.

“Hello down there,” his wife says, “are you coming up or should I forget it?” and he says “No, I’m coming,” and gets out of the chair, something in him says wait, sit, just another minute, for Lillian, thinks, blue hair, black eyes, he means long black hair and very bright blue eyes, sweet face, lanky frame, ears seemed to be pinned back and were pointy, almost no nose, sits, looks at the clock, has time, studying to be a dancer and, with her hair, clothes and walk, already looked like one. When he was around twelve he wrote her a note and slipped it to her in an envelope, which said he wanted to go out with her, maybe to a Saturday or Sunday afternoon movie or something if she didn’t have dance lessons then and she wrote him a note back, a girl friend of hers handed it to him in gym, that said “I’m too young and you are too and I have a lot of school to go to, let’s only be friends like we’ve been, but thank you, kind sir,” when what he really wanted to do was kiss her in the movie house as they’d done once somewhere else, maybe a date or two later hold her hand and, if he was lucky sometime after that, feel her a little bit on top through her blouse, though she only seemed to have started getting breasts, maybe much later get her to touch his dick through his pants and then outside them someplace and maybe where he could get her to hold it and later shake it till it sprayed and where he could also get to feel her bush if she had one and finger her, for that was what boys his age or a little older said they were starting to do with girls or trying to. Some months before at a birthday party, he kissed her. A couple of the other boys did too, and kissed some of the other girls, though he only got to kiss one, but he didn’t know if they’d done it as hard to her and got as hard a kiss back. They were playing a type of musical chairs in which the one running around when the music was going had to sit on the lap of the person he was standing beside the second the music stopped and kiss her on the lips or, if it was a boy whose lap he sat on, shake his hand, and same thing for the girl running around but instead of shaking hands she hugged the other girl. The music stopped when he was a person away from her, but he made believe by sneaking up a few inches past the boy that he’d stopped in front of her, and he sat on her lap and she said “No fair,” and everyone else it seemed said “Go ahead,” and she said “Okay, but it has to be quick,” and they kissed. Her mouth was slightly open when they did, his closed. He’d never kissed an open mouth and started to open his because he thought she wanted him to but she pulled away and said “That’s enough, I’ve done it even if you cheated,” and pushed him off. After that, just about whenever he saw her in school he imagined kissing her with their mouths open and feeling her up and unhooking her bra and shoving his hand down her panties and going to this special spot in Central Park behind some bushes and rocks near the bridle path where he knew some really older boys went with their girls and getting her on her back, it’d have to be warm out and not right after a rain, and sticking his prick in her, maybe with only pushing their clothes up and down but not taking anything off except the shoes, and then burying the scumbag or just tossing it under the bushes, where he and his friends had found a few used ones but mostly just the rings of them. When he came back from camp that summer he learned she’d moved to some other part of the city and wouldn’t be going back to the same school for eighth grade. He wrote her a letter in care of the school, to be forwarded, held on to it for weeks before he dumped it; he just didn’t think she’d be interested and he didn’t want to get a letter back saying she wasn’t or get no letter back and then one day bump into her or that friend of hers in school who he sometimes bumps into and be embarrassed he sent it. In it he said “If you think we’re any older now, I mean from when I asked you this once, and you have some extra free time from your dance lessons and schoolwork, I’d still like going to an afternoon movie or anything you’d like with you. I hope to hear from you soon, and I hope you like your new school and life. Yours sincerely,” and his first name, with his full name printed underneath, and phone number and address.

He goes upstairs. His wife’s typing at her desk and he says “I’m ready but maybe I took too long and you’re no longer interested,” and she says “Why do you say that?” and he says “Oh, nothing; you know me by now; I can never accept good things gracefully,” and she says “That’s better,” and gets up, he takes off his clothes, she leaves on her panties and bra and they sit on the bed. She likes him to undress her, he thinks, at least the last part, even her watch, which he takes off her wrist and then puts his arms around her, kisses her while unhitching her, and she shakes the straps off and lets the bra drop to the floor, he feels her breasts, she makes some sounds, they lie back and he puts his hand down her panties — now it’s “put,” now it’s “slide,” then it was “shove,” which was probably accurate for the way he did it then or rather would have liked to and then started to a couple of years later — pushes her panties off with her help and thinks of Lillian while their eyes are closed and they’re kissing and playing with each other. He didn’t mean for her to come back again, “again” meaning now, and quickly opens and shuts and opens and shuts his eyes, a trick he uses to get rid of images he doesn’t want, but she’s still there, walking away from him down a busy street, turning around to wave at a passing car, hugging a stack of books to her chest as she leaves school, lying back with her clothes on and holding her arms up to him. Let her stay till she goes away, it won’t hurt things and might even help if he can get her clothes off and see what’s underneath. Then she becomes skinny Mark, body and face, in his old woolen clothes and long wavy hair when the rest of them at that age — eleven, twelve, late spring when he first met him — were wearing shorts and had something bordering on the crew cut, and he blinks repeatedly till Mark disappears. He came over from Europe after the war, lived with his sister and aunt in a Columbus Avenue tenement across from their side street; the rest of his family died in the camps. He thinks he remembers him saying he and his sister survived by his nanny passing them off as Poles. He learned English fast, soon got great grades, skipped out of Gordon’s class but they still stayed friends, got into a special academic high school and moved away, but that was later on. Gordon couldn’t teach him baseball or football or anything like that; his game was soccer and he did fantastic tricks with a basketball with his feet, chest, knees, head, back of his neck. He showed up on the block a year after he left, looking for Gordon; they talked, nothing was foreign about him anymore, not even his speech, and that was the last time he saw him. Did he take down Mark’s phone number and address? Doesn’t think so. Did he expect old friends to always contact him? Doesn’t remember if he had that attitude then. Now, since he likes working at home and doesn’t much like going out for very long or having people over, he hardly sees anyone but his children and wife. “Mark my words about Mark,” one of their teachers said several times, “he’ll be a great mathematician or physicist or something like that in the sciences, which might not seem like much to those of you who don’t even know what a physicist is. But mark my words, twenty years from now you’ll see his face and what he’s doing in the newspapers and you’ll recognize his name.” He wonders what Mark became or just what became of him, has stopped kissing and feeling.

“Something the matter?” his wife says, and he says “Oh, you know, just that heady all-consuming philosophical thinking pushing in again,” and she says “So tell me, I can stop to listen, seeing how you’ve stopped,” and he says “‘To listen’—that’s right, that’s what it is and why I stopped — no, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and all that baloney before about my having deep and demanding philosophical thoughts and also thoughts of big decisions and worries and remorse over how I’m treating the kids and the growing possibilities of disabling and painful illnesses — my teeth, I remember — well, they were all just that, baloney, is what I’m saying,” and she says “Why? How?” and rests her head on his thigh, and he says “What I mean is, it’s just not like me or in me to think philosophically — I mostly just go on and on and don’t stop to think, so I was evading your questions from not now but before, and of course also now, meaning just before,” and she says “Wait, I’m losing you,” and he says “I’m saying that if I do get a philosophical thought it’s usually by accident — I’m thinking of something practical, let’s say, and the philosophical thought just pops up, but it mostly usually comes from something like, if I get a pain in my stomach that wakes me up two consecutive nights and keeps me up, I think maybe I have pancreatic cancer — the one they can’t detect till it’s in an untreatable stage because it was hidden behind some other organs, and that might make me think of my mortality, of how I’d hate to go so fast and leave you and the kids while they’re so young and also the physical pain I’d have before they doped me up with morphine and the emotional pain it would bring the kids of their daddy dying and probably to you too,” and she says “Of course me, what do you think?” and he says “I know, but you could recover after a while — a year, half a year — and marry again, while with them they’ve lost their father permanently, there’s really no one to replace him if he goes when they’re so young — but what was I saying? And truth is, even that wasn’t a good example of a philosophical thought — it wasn’t even one. So maybe I never get philosophical thoughts, or I get them only rarely but never deep ones. But I was saying or was going to say that I didn’t have any philosophical thoughts before when I was sitting downstairs and told you I did, or thoughts of worry and remorse and so on, but only a rush of thoughts with pictures and scenes and the rest of it of kids I knew when I was between maybe five and fifteen. I don’t even know why the thoughts came, or why those particular kids, some of whom I haven’t thought of in maybe thirty years, though maybe the more erotic scenes — one was of seeing a girl’s vagina for the first time when I was four or five, or first time where I remembered it — came in simply because I was feeling amorous and wanted to make love, even if it took me a while to get up here, and so those excited me to it. Anyway, they won’t stop me anymore — I think enough time’s elapsed where I’m done with them for now — and we better get going again since we don’t have much more time,” and runs his hand over her shoulder and across her mouth, and she moves her face next to his and they resume making love.

He’s behind her, place he likes best, her buttocks up and his hands holding her hips, pretty close to the finish he guesses since it hardly ever takes him long when they’re like this, much as he’d like to keep going for her sake, though she was the one who said “Come behind me”—probably because they were so short of time and she was nowhere near done — something he often hopes she’ll suggest and he rarely initiates since she’s said it’s never the best position for her and she does it mostly because she knows how much he loves it. “Not that I’m saying it’s horrible,” she once said, “it’s just that I can’t see you and it’s rough on my elbows and knees and the pleasure isn’t the greatest so it’s simply not one of my favorites,” when he thinks of Bea Fields. Standing in front of an audience, hands cupped to her chest, eyes closed, face transported, moving her mouth as if singing. He liked to sing also and could tell her voice was beautiful with clean tones and a tremendous range though it seemed for her age a little artificial and too trained. Mr. Sisk, the music teacher, said a few times he’d like them to do a duet in front of the assembly, since they had the best voices in school, and he was glad it never got past an idea. She usually snubbed him, seemed to look down on all the boys, maybe because she knew how they felt about her and also because she thought they had no culture and she didn’t think much of their brains. She was homely, big thick glasses, large nose, piano legs they said, messy frizzy hair, big fat breasts before it seemed any of the other girls started to get theirs or only had buds, waist and hips like those women who wore bustles in old-fashioned westerns though she was only twelve or thirteen, ugly dresses and shoes, big lips, little teeth, whiny speaking voice, it was said she never studied for tests but she always ended up with top marks, he and a few others also tried out for Performing Arts but she was the only one to get in. At their graduation ceremony she sang a Negro spiritual, something from a popular operetta and La Bohème, and then, other than for once or twice in the neighborhood, he never saw her again.

He comes, keeps moving as long as he can, then she lies on her stomach and he collapses on top of her. They stay that way, side of face against side of face, her eye closed, probably the other one too, and she’s murmuring while he thinks of Gwynn. The best athlete for a girl he ever played with, and then she lost a leg below the knee because of some rare bone disease her first year in high school. Then she was in a wheelchair without the other leg and last time he saw her was when he was going to a movie alone, it was his first or second year in college, and she was in her chair in front of her apartment building a block from the theater, she must have been left there since it was a walk-up and she couldn’t have got downstairs herself, and he said “Gwynn?” though he knew it was her, and she said “Gordon Tannenbaum, or Mandelbaum?” and he said “Mandelbaum, though no difference,” and asked how she was and she said fine, doing okay, considering, she finally graduated high school with an equivalency diploma by having a slew of special-education teachers come to her home and that she was even planning to go to college, which she bet he was in now and he said he was, but also working, but that was good, her going to college, getting out and around and really exercising the brain, and he thought maybe she’d like to go to the movie with him, he could handle it, wheeling her there and back or she could do her own wheeling if that was the kind of wheelchair it was and she had the strength for it and preferred doing it, and then he’d just ring up her apartment and someone would come down for her and get her up however they do it and he’d even pay her way, treat her at the candy counter and everything, but said “Well, I’ll see ya,” and she said “It’s been nice talking, stop by again,” and he felt bad after he left, and looked back from the corner and saw her talking with an older woman but looking at him. She waved, he waved, he continued going but told himself he would stop by, maybe even phone for her to meet him downstairs or he’d come upstairs to help her down, and later heard, maybe a year after, she’d been sent to a hospital in the Midwest that specialized in her disease and that was the last he heard anything about her. He wonders if these people, the ones who didn’t die, ever think of him. His wife says from under him “You better fetch the kids,” and he says “Right, I forgot,” looks at the clock, gets up and wipes himself and dresses and quickly leaves.