Searches & Seizures

The Making of Ashenden

I’VE BEEN spared a lot, one of the blessed of the earth, at least one of its lucky, that privileged handful of the dramatically prospering, the sort whose secrets are asked, like the hundred-year-old man. There is no secret, of course; most of what happens to us is simple accident. Highish birth and a smooth network of appropriate connection like a tea service written into the will. But surely something in the blood too, locked into good fortune’s dominant genes like a blast ripening in a time bomb. Set to go off, my good looks and intelligence, yet exceptional still, take away my mouthful of silver spoon and lapful of luxury. Something my own, not passed on or handed down, something seized, wrested — my good character, hopefully, my taste perhaps. What’s mine, what’s mine? Say taste — the soul’s harmless appetite.

I’ve money, I’m rich. The heir to four fortunes. Grandfather on Mother’s side was a Newpert. The family held some good real estate in Rhode Island until they sold it for many times what they gave for it. Grandmother on Father’s side was a Salts, whose bottled mineral water, once available only through prescription and believed indispensable in the cure of all fevers, was the first product ever to be reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, a famous and controversial case. The government found it to contain nothing that was actually detrimental to human beings, and it went public, so to speak. Available now over the counter, the Salts made more money from it than ever.

Mother was an Oh. Her mother was the chemical engineer who first discovered a feasible way to store oxygen in tanks. And Father was Noel Ashenden, who though he did not actually invent the matchbook, went into the field when it was still a not very flourishing novelty, and whose slogan, almost a poem, “Close Cover Before Striking” (a simple stroke, as Father liked to say), obvious only after someone else has already thought of it (the Patent Office refused to issue a patent on what it claimed was merely an instruction, but Father’s company had the message on its matchbooks before his competitors even knew what was happening), removed the hazard from book matches and turned the industry and Father’s firm particularly into a flaming success overnight — Father’s joke, not mine. Later, when the inroads of Ronson and Zippo threatened the business, Father went into seclusion for six months and when he returned to us he had produced another slogan: “For Our Matchless Friends.” It saved the industry a second time and was the second and last piece of work in Father’s life.

There are people who gather in the spas and watering places of this world who pooh-pooh our fortune. Après ski, cozy in their wools, handsome before their open hearths, they scandalize amongst themselves in whispers. “Imagine,” they say, “saved from ruin because of some cornball sentiment available in every bar and grill and truck stop in the country. It’s not, not…”

Not what? Snobs! Phooey on the First Families. On railroad, steel mill, automotive, public utility, banking and shipping fortunes, on all hermetic legacy, morganatic and blockbuster bloodlines that change the maps and landscapes and alter the mobility patterns, your jungle wheeling and downtown dealing a stone’s throw from warfare. I come of good stock — real estate, mineral water, oxygen, matchbooks: earth, water, air and fire, the old elementals of the material universe, a bellybutton economics, a linchpin one.

It is as I see it a perfect genealogy, and if I can be bought and sold a hundred times over by a thousand men in this country — people in your own town could do it, providents and trailers of hunch, I bless them, who got into this or went into that when it was eight cents a share — I am satisfied with my thirteen or fourteen million. Wealth is not after all the point. The genealogy is. That bridge-trick nexus that brought Newpert to Oh, Salts to Ashenden and Ashenden to Oh, love’s lucky longshots which, paying off, permitted me as they permit every human life! (I have this simple, harmless paranoia of the good-natured man, this cheerful awe.) Forgive my enthusiasm, that I go on like some secular patriot wrapped in the simple flag of self, a professional descendant, every day the closed-for-the-holiday banks and post offices of the heart. And why not? Aren’t my circumstances superb? Whose are better? No boast, no boast. I’ve had it easy, served up on all life’s silver platters like a satrap. And if my money is managed for me and I do no work — less work even than Father, who at least came up with those two slogans, the latter in a six-month solitude that must have been hell for that gregarious man (“For Our Matchless Friends”: no slogan finally but a broken code, an extension of his own hospitable being, simply the Promethean gift of fire to a guest) — at least I am not “spoiled” and have in me still alive the nerve endings of gratitude. If it’s miserly to count one’s blessings, Brewster Ashenden’s a miser.

This will give you some idea of what I’m like:

On Having an Account in a Swiss Bank: I never had one, and suggest you stay away from them too. Oh, the mystery and romance is all very well, but never forget that your Swiss bank offers no premiums, whereas for opening a savings account for $5,000 or more at First National City Bank of New York or other fine institutions you get wonderful premiums — picnic hampers, Scotch coolers, Polaroid cameras, Hudson’s Bay blankets from L. L. Bean, electric shavers, even lawn furniture. My managers always leave me a million or so to play with, and this is how I do it. I suppose I’ve received hundreds of such bonuses. Usually I give them to friends or as gifts at Christmas to doormen and other loosely connected personnel of the household, but often I keep them and use them myself. I’m not stingy. Of course I can afford to buy any of these things — and I do, I enjoy making purchases — but somehow nothing brings the joy of existence home to me more than these premiums. Something from nothing — the two-suiter from Chase Manhattan and my own existence, luggage a bonus and life a bonus too. Like having a film star next to you on your flight from the Coast. There are treats of high order, adventure like cash in the street.

Let’s enjoy ourselves, I say; let’s have fun. Lord, let us live in the sand by the surf of the sea and play till cows come home. We’ll have a house on the Vineyard and a brownstone in the Seventies and a pied-à-terre in a world capital when something big is about to break. (Put the Cardinal in the back bedroom where the sun gilds the bay at afternoon tea and give us the courage to stand up to secret police at the door, to top all threats with threats of our own, the nicknames of mayors and ministers, the fast comeback at the front stairs, authority on us like the funny squiggle the counterfeiters miss.) Re-Columbus us. Engage us with the overlooked, a knowledge of optics, say, or a gift for the tides. (My pal, the heir to most of the vegetables in inland Nebraska, has become a superb amateur oceanographer. The marine studies people invite him to Wood’s Hole each year. He has a wave named for him.) Make us good at things, the countertenor and the German language, and teach us to be as easy in our amateur standing as the best man at a roommate’s wedding. Give us hard tummies behind the cummerbund and long swimmer’s muscles under the hound’s tooth so that we may enjoy our long life. And may all our stocks rise to the occasion of our best possibilities, and our humanness be bullish too.

Speaking personally I am glad to be a heroic man.

I am pleased that I am attractive to women but grateful I’m no bounder. Though I’m touched when married women fall in love with me, as frequently they do, I am rarely to blame. I never encourage these fits and do my best to get them over their derangements so as not to lose the friendships of their husbands when they are known to me, or the neutral friendship of the ladies themselves. This happens less than you might think, however, for whenever I am a houseguest of a married friend I usually make it a point to bring along a girl. These girls are from all walks of life — models, show girls, starlets, actresses, tennis professionals, singers, heiresses and the daughters of the diplomats of most of the nations of the free world. All walks. They tend, however, to conform to a single physical type, and are almost always tall, tan, slender and blond, the girl from Ipanema as a wag friend of mine has it. They are always sensitive and intelligent and good at sailing and the Australian crawl. They are never blemished in any way, for even something like a tiny beauty mark on the inside of a thigh or above the shoulder blade is enough to put me off, and their breaths must be as sweet at three in the morning as they are at noon. (I never see a woman who is dieting for diet sours the breath.) Arm hair, of course, is repellent to me though a soft blond down is now and then acceptable. I know I sound a prig. I’m not. I am — well, classical, drawn by perfection as to some magnetic, Platonic pole, idealism and beauty’s true North.

But if I’m demanding about the type I fall in love with — I do fall in love, I’m not Don Juan — I try to be charming to all women, the flawed as well as the unflawed. I know that times have changed and that less is expected of gentlemen these days, that there’s more “openness” between the sexes and that in the main, this is a healthy development. Still, in certain respects I am old-fashioned — I’m the first to admit it — and not only find myself incapable of strong language in the presence of a lady (I rarely use it myself at any time, even a “damn” even a “hell”) but become enraged when someone else uses it and immediately want to call him out. I’m the same if there’s a child about or a man over the age of fifty-seven if he is not vigorous. The leopard cannot change his spots. I’m a gentleman, an opener of doors and doffer of hats and after you firster, meek in the elevator and kind to the help. I maintain a fund which I use for the abortions of girls other men have gotten into trouble; if the young lady prefers, I have a heart-to-heart with the young man. And although I’ve no sisters, I have a brother’s temperament, all good counsel and real concern. Even without a sister of my own — or a brother either for that matter; I’m an only child — I lend an ear and do for other fellows’ sisses the moral forks.

Still, there’s fun in me, and danger too. I’m this orphan now but that’s recent (Father and Mother died early this year, Mother first and Father a few days later — Father, too, was courteous to women), and I’m afraid that when they were alive I gave my parents some grisly moments with my exploits, put their hearts in their mouths and gray in their hair. I have been a fighter pilot for the RAF (I saw some action at Suez) and a mercenary on the Biafran side, as well as a sort of free-lance spy against some of your South American and Greek juntas. (I’m not political, but the average generalissimo cheats at cards. It’s curious, I’ve noticed that though they steal the picture cards they rarely play them; I suppose it’s a class thing — your military man would rather beat you with a nine than a king.) I am Johnny-on-the-spot at disasters — I was in Managua for the earthquake — lending a hand, pulling my oar, the sort of man who knocks your teeth out if he catches you abusing the water ration in the lifeboat and then turns around and offers his own meager mouthful to a woman or a man over fifty-seven. Chavez is my friend and the Chicago Seven, though I had to stop seeing them because of the foul language. (I love Jerry Rubin too much to tear his head off, and I could see that’s what it would come to.) And here and there I’ve had Mafiosi for friends — wonderful family men, the Cosa Nostra, I respect that. And the astronauts, of course; I spent a weightless weekend with them in an anti-gravity chamber in Houston one time, coming down only to take a long-distance phone call from a girl in trouble. And, let’s see, sixty hours in the bathysphere with Cousteau, fathoms below where the ordinary fish run. So I have been weightless and I have been gravid, falling in free-fall like a spider down its filament and paid out in rappel. And in the Prix de this and Prix de t’other, all the classic combats of moving parts (my own moving parts loose as a toy yet to be assembled), uninsurable at last, taking a stunt man’s risks, a darer gone first, blinded in the world’s uncharted caves and deafened beneath its waterfalls, the earth itself a sort of Jungle Gym finally, my playground, swimming at your own risk.

Last winter I fought a duel. I saw a man whipping his dog and called him out. Pistols at fourteen paces. The fellow — a prince, a wastrel — could get no one to act as his second so I did it myself, giving him pointers, calling the adjustments for windage, and at last standing still for him as one of those FBI paper silhouettes, my vitals (we were on a beach, I wore no shirt, just my bathing suit, the sun, rising over his shoulder, spotlighting me) clear as marked meat on a butcher’s diagram, my Valentine heart vaulting toward the barrel of his pistol. He fired and missed and I threw my pistol into the sea. He wept, and I took him back to the house and gave him a good price for his dog. And running with the bulls at Pamplona — not in front of them, with them — and strolling at two a.m. through the Casbah like a fellow down Main Street, and standing on top of a patrol car in Harlem talking through the bull horn to the sniper. And dumb things too.

Father called me home from Tel Aviv a few weeks before he died.

He was sitting on a new bed in his room wearing only his pajama tops. He hadn’t shaved, the gray stubble latticing his lower face in an old man’s way, like some snood of mortality. There was a glass in his hand, his one-hundred-dollar bill rolled tight around the condensation. (He always fingered one, a tic.)

“Say hello to your mother.”

I hadn’t seen her. Like many people who have learned the secret of living together, Father and Mother slept in separate suites, but now twin beds, Father in one, Mother in the other, had replaced Father’s fourposter. A nightstand stood between them — I remembered it from Grandmother Newpert’s summer house in Edgarton — on which, arranged like two entrenched armies, were two sets of medicines, Father’s bright ceremonial pills and May Day capsules, and Mother’s liquids in their antique apothecary bottles (she supplied the druggist with these bottles herself, insisting out of her willful aesthetic sense that all her prescriptions be placed in them), with their water glasses and a shiny artillery of teaspoons. Mother herself seemed to be sleeping. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed her, or perhaps it was the angle, Father’s bed being the closer as I walked into the room. Or perhaps it was her condition itself, sickness an effacement. I hesitated.

“It’s all right,” Father said. “She’s awake. You’re not disturbing her.”

“Her eyes are closed,” I said softly to Father.

“I have been seeing double in the morning, Brewster darling,” Mother said. “It gives me megrim to open them.”

“Mother, you naughty slugabed,” I teased. Sometimes being a gentleman can be a pain in the you-know-where, to oneself as well as to others. Well, it’s often fatuous, and in emergency it always is, as anything is in emergency short of an uncivilized scream, but what can you do, a code is a code. One dresses for dinner in the jungle and surrenders one’s sword to the enemy and says thank you very much and refuses the blindfold. “Shame on you, sweetheart, the sun up these several hours and you still tucked in.”

“It’s cancer, Son,” Father said in a low tone not meant for Mother.

“Lazybones,” I scolded, swallowing hard.

“Oh, I do want to see you, Brewster,” Mother said. “Perhaps if I opened just one little eye—”

“Not at all, you sweet dear. If you must lie in bed all day I think it best that you do some honest sleeping. I’ll still be here when you finally decide to get up.”

“There, that’s better,” Mother said, opening her right eye and scowling at me.

“Please, honeybunch, you’ll see double and get megrim.”

“Brewster, it’s lovely. It makes you twice as handsome, twice as tall.”

“Please, Mother—”

“Let her, Brew. This is a deathbed.”

“Father!”

“Why are you so shocked, Brewster? It had to happen someday.”

“I think I’ll close it now.”

“Really, Father, a deathbed…”

“Since it upsets him so.”

“Well, deathbeds then.”

“But I reserve the right to open it again whenever I choose. If a cat can look at a king…”

“Father, aren’t you being — that’s right, darling, shut it, shut it tight — the slightest bit melodramatic?”

“Oh, for Lord’s sake, Brew, don’t be prissy. Mother and I are going, she of cancer, I of everything. Rather than waste the little time we have left together, we might try to get certain things straight.”

“When Father called you back from overseas he arranged with Mrs. Lucas to have these twin deathbeds set up in here.”

Mrs. Lucas is the housekeeper. She used to give me my baths when I was a child. I always try to remember to bring her a picnic hamper or some other especially nice premium from the bank when I come home for a visit. Over the years Mrs. Lucas has had chaises longues, card tables, hammocks and many powerful flashlights from me — a small fortune in merchandise.

“What were you doing in the Middle East in the first place? Those people aren’t your sort, Brew.”

“He did it for you, darling. He thought that by putting both deathbeds in the same room you wouldn’t have to shuffle back and forth between one chamber and the next. It’s a time-space thing, Noel said. Isn’t that right, Noel?”

“Something like that. Yes, Nora.”

“Father, the Jewish are darned impressive. They run their military like a small family business. The Arabs can’t touch them.”

“Arabs, Jews. In my time a country club was a country club. I don’t understand anything anymore.”

“Don’t quarrel, Noel, Brew. Brew, you’re the reason we decided to have deathbeds in the first place. Well, my family has always had them, of course. None of this hole-and-corner hospital stuff for them. I don’t speak against hospitals, mind you, they’re all very well if you’re going to get better, but, goodness, if you’re really dying it’s so much more pleasant for the immediate family if they can be saved from those drafty, smelly hospital corridors. Grandmother Oh herself, though she invented the oxygen tank, refused the tent when her time came if it meant going to a hospital.”

“Brr.”

“Are you addressing me, Father?”

“What? No, no, I have a chill.”

“Let me help you.” I lifted his legs into the bed gently, took the glass out of his hand and set it down, unpeeling the $100 bill as if it were a beer label. I placed his head back on the pillow and, smoothing the sheets, started to cover him when he grinned.

“Close cover before striking,” he said hoarsely. That broke the ice and we all laughed.

“Nothing important ever gets said in a hospital,” Father said after a while. “There’s too much distraction. The room, the gadgets, the flowers and who sent what, the nurses coming in for one thing or another. Nothing important gets said.”

I nodded.

“Mother’s right, Brewster. The deathbed has been a tradition in our family. This twin bed business is a little vulgar, perhaps, but it can’t be helped. We’ll have a deathbed vigil. It’s a leisure thing. It’s elegant.”

“Please, Father, let’s not have any more of this morbid stuff about dying,” I said, getting the upper hand on myself. “It’s my notion you’re both goldbricking, that you’ll be out on the links again in no time, your handicap lower than ever.”

“It’s heart, Brew,” Father said gloomily. “It’s Ménière’s disease. It’s TB and a touch of MS that hangs on like a summer cold. It’s a spot of Black Lung.”

“Black Lung?”

“Do you know how many matches I’ve struck in my time?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, Father, if there were another slogan in you yet. ‘I Would Rather Light an Ashenden Match Than Curse the Darkness.’ How’s that?”

“Too literary. What the smoker wants is something short and sweet. No, there’ll be no more slogans. Let others carry on my work. I’m tired.”

“There’s this Israeli ace,” I said as a stopgap, “Izzy Heskovitz, who’s…”

“What’s this about a duel, Brewster?” Father asked.

“Oh, did you hear about that? I should have thought the Prince would have wanted it hushed up, after what happened.”

“After what happened? He thinks you’re mad. And so do I. Exposing yourself like that, offering a target like a statesman in an open car, then tossing your pistol into the sea. It was irresponsible. Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“It was a question of honor.”

“With you, Brewster, everything is a question of honor.”

“Everything is.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

“I’m looking for myself.”

“Brewster, you are probably the last young man in America still looking for himself,” Father said. “As a man who has a certain experience with slogans, I have some sense of when they have lost their currency.”

“Father, you are probably the last old man in America to take to a deathbed.”

“Touché, Brew. He’s got you there, Noel,” Mother said.

“Thank you, Mother, but all I intended was to point out that obsolescence runs in our family. I am the earth, water, fire and air heir. Let the neon, tin and tungsten scions prepare themselves for the newfangled. I have pride and I have honor. My word is my bond and I’ll marry a virgin. And I agree with you, Father, about the sanctity of the deathbed, though I shall continue, out of chivalry and delicacy, to maintain the imposture that this…these”—I took in the twin beds—“is…are…not that…those.”

“You’re marvelous, Brewster. I…”

“Is something wrong, Father?”

“I…we…your mother and I…”

“Father?”

“I love you, Son.”

“I love you, sir,” I told him. I turned to Mother. She had opened one eye again. It was wet and darting from one side to the other like an eye in REM sleep. I understood that she was trying to choose my real image from the two that stood before her. In a moment her eye had decided. It stared off, focused about four yards to my right. I smiled to reassure her that she had chosen correctly and edged slowly to my right, an Indian in reverse, unhiding, trying to appear in her line of sight like a magician’s volunteer in an illusion. “And all I have to say to you, you great silly, is that if you’re not out of bed soon I’ll not answer for your zinnias and foxgloves. I noticed when the taxi brought me up the drive that Franklin, as usual, has managed to make a botch of the front beds.”

“Franklin is old, Son,” Mother said. “He isn’t well.”

“Franklin’s a rogue, Mother. I don’t know why you encourage him. I’m certain he’s going to try to trade Mrs. Lucas the three hundred feet of lovely rubber garden hose I brought him for her Scotch cooler so that he can have a place to hide his liquor.”

Mother closed her eye; Father grinned. I wrung out Father’s hundred-dollar bill and handed it back to him. Excusing myself, I promised to return when they had rested. “Brr,” Father said.

“Were you speaking to me, Father?”

“It’s the chill again,” he said.

I went to my room, called up their doctors and had long, discouraging talks with them. Then I phoned some specialist friends of mine at Mass General and a good man at Barnes in St. Louis and got some additional opinions. I asked about Franklin, too.

I kept the vigil. It was awful, but satisfying, too, in a way. It lasted five weeks and in that time we had truth and we had banter, and right up to the end each of us was able to tell the difference. Only once, a few days after Mother’s death (her vision returned at the end: “I can see, Brewster,” she said, “I can see far and I can see straight.” These were not her last words; I’ll not tell you her last words, for they were meant only for Father and myself, though I have written them down elsewhere to preserve for my children should I ever have them) did Father’s spirits flag. He had gotten up from his bed to attend the funeral — through a signal courtesy to an out-of-stater, the Governor of Massachusetts permitted Mother to be buried on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground near the Old North Church in Boston — and we had just returned to the house. Mrs. Lucas and Franklin were weeping, and I helped Father upstairs and back into his deathbed. He was too weak to put his pajamas on. “You know, Brew,” he said, “I sure wish you hadn’t thrown that d____d pistol into the ocean.”

“Oh Father,” I said, “never mind. Tomorrow when you’re stronger we’ll go to town and buy a fresh brace and stroll the woods and shoot the birds from their trees just as we used to.”

He was dead in his own tree a few days later. I sensed it coming and had moved into the room with him, where I lay next to him all night in the twin bed, only Grandmother Newpert’s nightstand between us, Mother’s effects — the lovely old apothecary bottles and her drinking glass and medicine spoons — having been cleared away. I was awake the entire night, hanging on his broken breath and old man’s groans like a detective in films on the croaks of a victim. I listened for a message from the coma and tried to parse delirium as if it were only a sort of French. Shall a man of honor and pride still searching for himself in his late thirties deny the sibyl in a goner’s gasps? (I even asked one or two questions, pressing him in his terminal pain, pursuing him through the mazes of his dissolution, his deathbed my Ouija board.)

Then, once, just before dawn, a bird twittered in the garden and Father came out of it. For fifteen minutes he talked sense, speaking rapidly and with an astonishing cogency that was more mysterious somehow than all his moans and nightmares. He spoke of ways to expedite the probating of the two wills, of flaws in the nature of his estate, instructing me where to consolidate and where to trim. He told me the names of what lawyers to trust, which brokers to fire. In five minutes he laid down principles which would guarantee our fortune for a hundred years. Then, at the end, there was something personal, but after what had gone before, I thought it a touch lame, like a P.S. inquiring about your family’s health at the end of a business letter. He wished me well and hoped I would find some nice girl, settle down, and raise fine children. I was to give them his love.

I thought this was the end, but in a few moments he came round again.

“Franklin is a rogue,” he said. “For many years now he and Mrs. Lucas have been carrying on an affair below stairs. That time during the war when Mrs. Lucas was supposed to have gone to stay with her sister in Delaware she really went away to have Franklin’s child. The scoundrel refused to marry her and would have had money from us to abort the poor thing. It was Mrs. Lucas who wouldn’t hear of it, but the baby died anyway. Mrs. Lucas loves him. It’s for her sake we never let him go when he screwed up in the garden.”

Those were Father’s last words. Then he beckoned me to rise from my bed and approach him. He put out his right hand. I shook it and he died. The hundred-dollar bill he always held came off in my palm when the final paroxysm splayed his fingers.

The grief of the rich is clubby, expensive. (I don’t mean my grief. My grief was a long gloom, persistent as grudge.) We are born weekenders anyway, but in death we are particularly good to each other, traveling thousands of miles to funerals, flying up from Rio or jamming the oceanic cables with our expensive consolation. (Those wires from the President to the important bereaved — that’s our style, too.) We say it with flowers, wreaths, memorial libraries, offering the wing of a hospital as casually as someone else a chicken leg at a picnic. And why not? There aren’t that many of us — never mind that there are a thousand who can buy and sell me. Scarcer we are than the Eskimaux, vanishing Americans who got rich slow.

So I did not wonder at the crowds who turned up at Mother’s funeral and then went away the long distances only to return a few days later for Father’s. Or at the clothes. Couturiers of Paris and London and New York — those three splendid cities, listed always together and making a sound on the page like a label on scent — taxed to the breaking point to come up with dresses in death’s delicious high fashion, the rich taking big casualties that season, two new mourning originals in less than two weeks and the fitter in fits. The men splendid in their decent dark. Suits cunningly not black, off black, proper, the longitudes of their decency in their wiry pinstripes, a gent’s torso bound up in vest and crisscrossed by watch chains and Phi Beta Kappa keys in the innocent para-militarism of the civilian respectable, men somehow more vital at the graveside in the burdensome clothes than in Bermudas on beaches or dinner jackets in hotel suites with cocktails in their hands, the band playing on the beach below and the telephone ringing.

And all the women were beautiful, gorgeous, grieving’s colors good for them, aloof mantles which made them seem (though I knew better) unattainable, virgins again, yet sexy still as secret drinkers. God, how I lusted when I was with them! I could barely put two words together for them or accept their condolences without feeling my importunate, inopportune blood thicken, my senses as ticklish as if Persian whores had gotten to them. Which added to my gloom, of course, because I was dishonoring my parents in their death as I never had while they lived.

Only the necessity to cope saved me from some sacrilege. (Oh, the confidence of lust! Surely that’s the basis of its evil. The assumptions it permits one, glossing reality like a boy in the dark, touching himself and thinking of his mother’s bridge guests.) Somehow, however, I managed to see my tailor, somehow got the arrangements made, somehow wrote the necessary checks and visited the near-at-hand safe-deposit boxes before they were red-flagged, somehow got through the inventories, spoke to the obituary people at the Times, prepared the eulogies somehow, and fielded all the questions of the well-meaning that are asked at times like these.

“Will there be a foundation, do you suppose, Ashenden?” asked an old friend of the family who had himself been an heir for as long as we had known him. (And oh, the effect of that “Ashenden”! It was the first time one had been thus addressed, at least officially, since one’s roommates at boarding school and college, thinking of their own inheritances, had used it.)

“I don’t know, sir. It’s too early to tell. I shall have to wait until the estate is properly probated before I can be certain what there is.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, “but it’s never too soon to start thinking about a foundation, fixing your goals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me give you a little advice on that score. The arts. There are those who swear by diseases and the various social ills, but I’m not one of them. And of the arts I think the performing arts give you your best return. You get invited backstage.”

“I’ll have to look into it.”

“Look into it.”

And one of Mother’s friends wondered if marriage was in the offing. “Now you really are eligible, Brewster,” she said. “Oh, you were before, of course, but now you must certainly feel a bit of pressure to put your affairs in order and began to think about the next generation.”

It was a rude thing to say (though something like these had been almost Father’s last words to me), but the truth was I did feel it. Perhaps that was what my shameful lust had been about, nature’s way of pointing me to my duty. My search for myself seemed trivial child’s play now. Honor did subsist in doing right by the generations. I know what you’re thinking: Who’s this impostor, this namby with no will of his own? If he’s so rich, why ain’t he smart? Meaning glacial, indifferent, unconscious of the swath of world he cuts as the blade of what it leaves bleeding — the cosmos as rich man’s butter pat. Listen, disdain’s easy, a mug’s game, but look close at anything and you’ll break your heart.

I was inconsolable, grave at the graveside, beside myself like a fulfillment of Mother’s prophetic double vision.

“People lose parents,” a Securities and Exchange Commission cousin told me. (Yes, yes, it’s nothing, only nature bottoming out.) “Sons lose mothers,” he said, his gray hair trimmed that morning, wet looking. “Fathers die.”

“Don’t look,” I said wildly, “shut an eye. I am beside myself.”

I keened like a widow, a refugee from hardest times, a daughter with the Cossacks, a son chopped in the thresher. I would go about in black, I thought, and be superstitious. My features will thicken and no one will know how old I am.

“There, there,” he told me, “there, there.”

“There, there. There, there,” said this one and that.

My pals did not know what to make of me.

“My God, Ashenden,” one said, a roommate from boarding school, “have you seen the will? Is it awful?”

“I’ve been left everything,” I told him coolly.

He nudged me in the ribs. I would have called him out had I not been in mourning.

Only the sight of Mrs. Lucas saved me. The thought of that brave woman’s travail enabled me to control myself at last. I no longer wept openly and settled into a silent, stand-offish grimness, despair like an ingrown toenail on a man of fashion.

The weekends began.

All my adult life I have been a guest in other people’s houses, following the sun and seasons like a migratory bird, an instinct in me, the rich man’s cunning feel for ripeness, some oyster-in-an-r-month notion working there which knows without reference to anything outside itself when to pack the tennis racket, when to bring along the German field glasses to look at a friend’s birds, the telescope to stare at his stars, the wet suit to swim in beneath his waters when the exotic fish are running. It’s not in the Times when the black dinner jacket comes off and the white one goes on; it’s something surer, subtler, the delicate guidance system of the privileged, my playboy astronomy.

The weekends began, and the midweeks and week- and two-week stretches in the country. I was very grateful to my friends’ sense of what I needed then. Where I was welcome before, I was now actively pursued. My friends were marvelous, and not a mean motive between them. If I can’t say as much for myself.

In the luggage now with the bandboxes of equipment, the riding boots and golf clubs and hiker’s gear, was a lover’s wardrobe: shirts like the breasts of birds, custom ties that camouflaged themselves against their backgrounds or stood out like dye in the sea, ascots like bunting for the throat’s centennial, the handmade jackets and perfect trousers and tack room leathers. I dressed to kill, slay should I meet her, the mother of my children. (These were my mourning togs, mind.) And if I brought the best that could be had, it was not out of vanity but only respect for that phantom girl who would be so exquisite herself, so refined and blessed with taste that it would have been as dangerous for her to look at the undistinguished as for another to stare directly into the eclipse. So it was actually humility that made me dress as I did, simple self-effacement, the old knight’s old modesty, shyness so capitulative that prostration was only a kind of militant attention, a death-defying leap to the earth. And since I had never met her, nor knew her name, nor had a clue to where she might be, I traveled alone, for the first time taking along no guest of the guest. Which my friends put down to decency, the thirty- or sixty- or ninety-day celibacy of the orphaned. But it wasn’t that.

It was a strange period of my life. My friends, innocent of my intentions and honoring what they supposed to be my bereavement, omitted to invite any girls for me at all, and I found myself on this odd bachelor circuit, several times meeting the same male guest I had met at someone else’s house a few weeks before. We crossed each other’s paths like traveling salesmen with identical territories. And I rode and hunted and fished and stayed up all hours playing whist or backgammon or chess with my hosts or the other male guest, settled before fires with sherry and cognac, oddly domestic, as if what I owed the generations was a debt already paid, a trip in the time machine, keeping late hours in libraries until the odor of leather actually became offensive to me. On the few occasions I retired early it was at my host’s instructions. (I am an obedient guest.) The next morning there was to be an excursion in the four-wheel drive to investigate property he had acquired in backwoods forty miles off — a lodge, an abandoned watchtower, twice an old lighthouse. And always, nodding my approval if the purchase had been made or giving my judicious advice if it hadn’t, I had this sense that I’d had the night before in the library: that the property in question was my property, that I was already what I was dressed to become.

I was not bored; I was distraught.

A strange thing happened. It occurred to me that perhaps my old fastidiousness regarding the inviolability of a friend’s wife was wrong, morally wrong. Had not these women made overtures, dropped hints, left doors ajar so that returning to my room with a book I could see them in nightgowns beside bedlamps; hadn’t they smiled sweetly and raised arms? Perhaps I had been a prig, had placed too high a value on myself by insisting on the virginity of my intended. Perhaps it was my fate to figure in a divorce. I decided that henceforth I must not be so stand-offish with my friends’ wives.

So I stroked their knees beneath the whist table and put down their alarm to surprise. I begged off going on the excursions and stayed home with them when my friend and the other guest climbed into the jeep. I followed the wife all about the house and cornered her in stairwells and gardens.

“I’m no prig,” I told Nan Bridge, and clasped her breast and bit her ear.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, buster?” she shouted.

“Four months ago I would have called you out for that,” I told her lamely and left her house that afternoon and went to the next three days early, determined to be more careful.

I was staying with Courtney and Buffy Surface in Connecticut. Claiming a tennis elbow, I excused myself from the doubles early in the first set. Courtney and I were partners against Buffy and Oscar Bobrinage, the other houseguest. My plan was for Buffy to drop out and join me. I sat under a wide umbrella in the garden, and in a few minutes someone came up behind me. “Where does it hurt? I’ll rub it for you.”

“No thank you, Oscar.”

“No trouble, Brewster.”

“I’ve a heating pad from Chase Manhattan in my suitcase, Osc,” I told him dejectedly.

That night I was more obvious. I left the library and mentioned as casually as I could that I was going out for a bit of air. It has been my observation that the predisposition for encounter precedes encounter, that one must set oneself as one would a table. I never stroll the strand in moonlight except when I’m about the heart’s business, or cross bridges toward dawn unless I mean to save the suicides. There are natural laws, magnetism. A wish pulls fate.

I passed the gazebo and wondered about the colors of the flowers in the dark, the queer consolidation of noon’s bright pigment, yellow sunk in on yellow a thousand times as if struck ’ by gravity. I thought of popular songs, their tunes and words. I meant for once to do away with polite conversation should Buffy appear, to stun her with my need and force. (Of all my friends Buffy was the most royally aloof. She had maddening ways of turning aside any question or statement that was the least bit threatening.)

I heard the soft crunch of gravel. “Oscar?”

“No, it’s Buffy. Were you looking for Oscar?”

“I thought he might be looking for me.”

“Voilà du joli,” Buffy said. She knew the idioms of eleven modern languages.

I gazed into her eyes. “How are you and Courtney, Buffy?”

“Mon dieu! ¿Qué pasa? Il est onze heures et demi,” she said.

“Buffy, how are you and Courtney?”

“Courtney’s been off erythromycin five days now and General Parker says there’s no sign of redness. God bless wonder drugs. Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen.”

“Do you ever think of Madrid, Buffy?” Once, in a night club in Madrid on New Year’s Eve she had kissed me. It was before she and Courtney met, but my memory of such things is long lasting and profound. I never forget the blandest intimacy. “Do you?”

“Oh, Brewster, I have every hope that when Juan Carlos is restored the people will accept him.”

“Buffy, we kissed each other on New Year’s Eve in Madrid in 1966 before you ever heard of Courtney Surface.”

“Autres temps, autres moeurs.”

“I can’t accept that, Buff. Forgive me, dear, but when I left the game this morning you stayed behind to finish out the set against Courtney. Yes, and before that you were Oscar’s partner. Doesn’t this indicate to you a certain aberrant competitiveness between you and your husband?”

“Oh, but darling, we play for money. Pisịca blândă pgarịe raŭ. Didn’t you know that? We earn each other’s birthday presents. We’ve an agreement: we don’t buy a gift unless we win the money for it from the other fellow. I’ll tell you something, entre nous. I get ripped off because I throw games. I do. I take dives. I go into the tank. Damit kannst du keinen Blumentopf verlieren. Isn’t that awful? Aren’t I terrible? But that’s how Courtney got the money together to buy me Nancy’s Treehouse. Have you seen her? She’s the most marvelous beast. I was just going out to the stables to check on her when I ran into you. If you’d like to accompany me come along lo más pronto posible.”

“No.”

“De gustibus.”

“That’s not a modern language, Buffy.”

“People grow, darling.”

“Buffy, as your houseguest I demand that you listen to me. I am almost forty years old and I am one of the three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world and I have been left a fortune. A fortune! And though I have always had the use of the money, I have never till now had the control of it. Up to now I have been an adventurer. The adventures, God save me, were meant to teach me life. Danger builds strong bodies twelve ways, I thought. Action and respite have been the pattern of my existence, Buffy. Through shot and shell on hands and knees one day, and breakfast in bed at the Claridge the next. I have lived my life a fighter pilot, beefed up like a gladiator, like a stuffed goose, like a Thanksgiving turkey. I am this civilized…thing. Trained and skilled and good. I mean good, Buffy, a strict observer till night before last of every commandment there is. Plus an eleventh — honor thy world, I mean. I’ve done that. I’m versed in it, up to my ears in it as you are in idioms. I was an environmentalist a decade before it was an issue. When I first noticed the deer were scrawnier than they’d been when I was a boy and the water in the rivers where I swam no longer tasted like peaches.

“I’ve been a scholar of the world — oh, an amateur, I grant you, but a scholar just the same. I understand things. I know literature and math and science and art. I know everything. How paper is made, glass blown, marble carved, things about furniture, stuff about cheese. This isn’t a boast. With forty years to do it in and nothing to distract you like earning a living or raising a family, you can learn almost all there is to learn if you leave out the mystery and the ambiguity. If you omit the riddles and finesse the existential.

“No, wait! I’m perfectly aware that I’m barking up the wrong tree — do you have that idiom, my dear? — but looky, looky, I’m speaking my heart. I’m in mourning, Buff. Here’s how I do it. By changing my life. By taking this precious, solipsistic civilization of mine — Buffy, listen to me, dear; it’s not enough that there are only three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world—this precious civilization of mine and passing it on to sons, daughters, all I can get.”

“Was ist los?” she said miserably.

“Time and tide.”

“Pauvre garçon.”

“Buffy, pauvre garçon me no pauvres garçons.”

She looked at me for a moment with as much feeling as I had looked at her. “Jane Löes Lipton.”

“What?”

“Jane Löes Lipton. A friend of my sister Milly.”

“What about her?”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“She’ll be Comte de Survillieur’s houseguest this month. Do you know the Comte?”

“We did a hitch together in the Foreign Legion.”

“Go. Pack. I’ll phone Paris. Perhaps Milly can get you an invitation. In bocca al lupo.”

I missed her at the Comte de Survillieur’s, and again at Liège, and once more at Cap Thérèse and the Oktoberfest at München. All Europe was talking about her — the fabulous Jane Löes Lipton. One had only to mention her name to elicit one of those round Henry James “Ah’s.” Nor did it surprise me that until the evening in Buffy Surface’s garden I had never heard of her: I had been out of society for three or four months. These things happen quickly, these brush fires of personality, some girl suddenly taken up and turned into a household word (if you can call a seventy-room castle a household or “Ah” a word). Once or twice I had seen an old woman or even a child given this treatment. Normally I avoided such persons. When their fame was justified at all it was usually predicated on some quirkishness, nothing more substantial than some lisp of the character — a commitment to astrology, perhaps, or a knack for mimicry, or skill at bridge. I despise society, but who else will deal with me? I can’t run loose in the street with the sailors or drink with the whores. I would put off everyone but a peer.

Still…Jane Löes Lipton. Ah. I hadn’t met her, but from what I could gather from my peers’ collective inarticulateness when it came to Miss (that much was established) Lipton, she was an “authentic,” an “original,” a “beauty,” a “prize.” And it was intriguing, too, how I happened to keep missing her, for once invited to the Comte’s — where I behaved; where, recovering my senses, I no longer coveted my neighbor’s wife and re-dedicated myself to carrying on the good work of my genes and environment in honorable ways — I had joined a regular touring company of the rich and favored. We were like the Ice Capades, like an old-time circus, occasionally taking on personnel, once in a while dropping someone off — a car pool of the heavily leisured. How I happened, as I say, to keep on missing her though we were on the same circuit now, going around — no metaphor but a literal description — in the same circles — and it is too a small world, at our heights, way up there where true North consolidates and collects like fog, it is — was uncanny, purest contretemps, a melodrama of bad timing. We were on the same guest lists, often the same floors or wings (dowagers showed me house plans, duchesses did; I saw the seating arrangements and croquet combinations), co-sponsors of the same charity balls and dinners. Twice it was I who fell out of lockstep and had to stay longer than I expected or leave a few days early, but every other time it was Jane who canceled out at the last minute. Was this her claim on them, I wondered? A Monroeish temperament, some pathological inability to keep appointments, honor commitments (though always her check for charity arrived, folded in her letter of regret), the old high school strategy of playing hard to get? No. And try to imagine how this struck me, knowing what you do about me, when I heard it. “Miss Löes Lipton called to say she will not be able to join your Lordship this weekend due to an emergency outbreak of cholera among the children at the Sisters of Cecilia Mission in Lobos de Afuera.” That was the message the Duke’s secretary brought him at Liège.

“She’s Catholic?” I asked.

“What? Jane? Good Lord, I shouldn’t think so.”

Then, at Cap Thérèse, I learned that she had again begged off. I expressed disappointment and inquired of Mrs. Steppington whether Miss Lipton were ill.

“Ah, Jane. Ill? Jane’s strong as a horse. No, dear boy, there was a plane crash at Dar es Salaam and Jane went there to help the survivors. She’s visiting in hospital with them now. For those of them who have children — mostly wogs, I expect — she’s volunteered to act as a sort of governess. I can almost see her, going about with a lot of nig-nog kids in tow, teaching them French, telling them the Greek myths, carrying them to whatever museums they have in such places, giving them lectures in art history, then fetching them watercolors — and oils too, I shouldn’t doubt — so they can have a go at it. Oh, it will be a bore not having her with us. She’s a frightfully good sailor and I had hoped to get her to wear my silks in the regatta.”

Though it was two in the morning in Paris, I went to my room and called the Comte de Survillieur.

“Comte. Why couldn’t Jane Löes Lipton make it month before last?”

“What’s that?” The connection was bad.

“Why did Miss Löes Lipton fail to show up when she was expected at Deux Oiseaux?”

“Who?”

“Jane Löes Lipton.”

“Ah.”

“Why wasn’t she there?”

“Who’s this?”

“Brewster Ashenden. I apologize for ringing up so late, but I have to know.”

“Indians.”

“Indians?”

“Yes. American Indians I think it was. Had to do some special pleading for them in Washington when a bill came up before your Congress.”

“HR eleven seventy-four.”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“The bill. Law now. So Jane was into HR eleven seventy-four.”

“Ah, what isn’t Jane into? You know, I think she’s become something of a snob? She has no time for her old friends since undertaking these crusades of hers. She told the Comtesse as much — something about finding herself.”

“She said that?”

“Well, she was more poetic, possibly, but that’s how it came down to me. I know what you’re after,” the Comte said roguishly. “You’re in love with her.”

“I’ve never even met her.”

“You’re in love with her. Half Europe is. But unless you’re a black or redskin, or have arranged in some other way to cripple yourself, you haven’t a chance. Arse over tip in love, mon cher old comrade.”

We rang off.

In the following weeks I heard that Jane Löes Lipton had turned up in Hanoi to see if there weren’t some way of getting negotiations off dead center; that she had published a book that broke the code in Oriental rugs; that she had directed an underground movie in Sweden which despite its frank language and graphic detail was so sensitive it was to be distributed with a G rating; and that she was back in America visiting outdoor fairs and buying up paintings depicting clowns and rowboats turned over on beaches for a show she was putting together for the Metropolitan entitled “Shopping Center Primitive: Collectors’ Items for the Twenty-Third Century.” One man said she could be seen in Dacca on Bangladesh Television in a series called “Cooking Nutritious Meals on the Pavement for Large Families from Garbage and Without Fire,” and another that she had become a sort of spiritual adviser to the statesmen of overdeveloped nations. Newspapers reported her on the scene wherever the earth quaked or the ships foundered or the forests burned.

Certainly she could not have had so many avatars. Certainly most was rumor, speculation knit from Jane’s motives and sympathies. Yet I heard people never known to lie, Rock-of-Gibraltarish types who didn’t get the point of jokes, swear to their testimony. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. If most was exaggerated, much was true.

Ah, Jane, Candy Striper to the Cosmos, Gray Lady of the Ineffable, when would I meet you, swap traveler’s tales of what was to be found in those hot jungles of self-seeking, those voyages to the center of the soul and other uncharted places, the steeps and deeps and lost coves and far shelves of being? Ah, Jane, oh Löes Lipton, half Europe loves you.

I went to London and stayed in the Bottom, the tall new hotel there. Lonely as Frank Sinatra on an album cover I went up to their revolving cocktail lounge on the fiftieth floor, the Top of the Bottom, and ran into Freddy Plympton.

“She’s here.”

“Jane Löes Lipton? I’ve heard that one before.” (We hadn’t been talking of her. How did I know that’s who he meant? I don’t know, I knew.)

“No, no, she is, at my country place. She’s there now. She’s exhausted, poor dear, and tells me her doctor has commanded her to resign temporarily from all volunteer fire departments. So she’s here. I’ve got her. She’s with Lady Plympton right this moment. I had to come to town on business or I’d be with her. I’m going back in the morning. Ever meet her? Want to come down?”

“She’s there? She’s really there?”

“Want to come down?”

There’s been too much pedigree in this account, I think. (Be kind. Put it down to metaphysics, not vanity. In asking Who? I’m wondering What? Even the trees have names, the rocks and clouds and grasses do. The world’s a picture post card sent from a far hotel. “Here’s my room, this is what the stamps in this country look like, that’s the strange color of the sand here, the people all wear these curious hats.”) Bear with me.

Freddy Plympton is noble. The family is old — whose isn’t, eh? we were none of us born yesterday; look it up in Burke’s Peerage where it gets three pages, in Debrett where it gets four — and his great estate, Duluth, is one of the finest in England. Though he could build a grander if he chose. Freddy’s real wealth comes from the gambling casinos he owns. He is an entrepreneur of chance, a fortune teller. The biggest gaming palaces and highest stakes in Europe, to say nothing of hotels in Aruba and boats beyond the twelve-mile limit and a piece of the action in church bingo basements and punchboards all over the world, the newsprint for which is supplied from his own forests in Norway and is printed on his own presses. Starting from scratch, from choosing odds-or-evens for cash with his roommate at Harrow, a sheikh’s son with a finger missing from his left hand — he was left-handed — which made him constitutionally unable to play the game (“He thought ‘even,’ you see,” Freddy explains), taking the boy, neither of them more than fourteen, to the cleaners in the third form. It, the young sheikh’s deformity, was Freddy’s initial lesson in what it means to have the house odds in your favor and taught him never to enter any contest in which he did not have the edge.

Freddy has one passion, and it is not gambling. “Gambling’s my work, old bean,” he says. (He uses these corny aristocratic epithets. They make him seem fatuous but are as functional to his profession as a drawl to a hired gun.) “I’m no gambler at all, actually. I’m this sort of mathematician. Please don’t gamble with me, please don’t accept my bets. We’re friends and I’m ruthless. Not vicious — ruthless. I will never surrender an advantage. Since I know the odds and respect them, to ignore them would be a sort of cheating, and since I’m honorable I couldn’t think of that. Don’t play with me. We’re friends. I was never the sheikh’s friend, never the friend of any of those feet-off-the-ground Fleugenmensch sons of rich men I lived with at Harrow and Cambridge and who gave me my stake. Where I was meditative they were speculative. I like you, as I like anyone who doesn’t confuse his need with his evidence. Let’s never gamble. Promise. Promise?”

So he has a passion, but it isn’t gambling. It’s animals — beasts, rather. Duluth contains perhaps the most superb private zoo in the world, a huge game park, larger than Whipsnade and much more dangerous. Where Whipsnade hedges with moats and illusions, at Duluth the animals are given absolute freedom. An enormous, camouflaged electrified fence, the largest in the world, runs about the entire estate. (“We control the current. The jolt merely braces the larger animals and only stuns the smaller, puts them unconscious. I’ve installed an auxiliary electrical plant for when there are power failures”) Although from time to time a few of the animals have fought and occasionally killed each other, an attempt has been made to introduce as near perfect an ecological balance as possible, vegetarians and carnivores who find the flesh of the beasts with whom they must live inimical, some almost religious constraint in the jaws and digestion, some once-burned, twice-sorry instinct passed on from generation to generation that protects and preserves his herds.

It was an ancestor of Plympton’s who began the park, and as a result of the care he and his successors put into selecting and arranging the animals, some of the most incredible and lovely juxtapositions in the world are to be found there. (Freddy told me that Henri Rousseau painted his “Sleeping Gypsy” while he was a guest on the estate.) From the beginning a single rule has determined the constituency of the zoo: all the beasts collected there must have appeared on the Plympton heraldry. Lions, bears, elephants, unicorns (“a pure white rhinoceros actually”), leopards, jackals (“One old boy helped to do in Becket, old boy”), pandas, camels, sheep and apes. The family is an old one, the list long.

Though Plympton and I had known each other for years — we’re the same age — this was the first time I had been invited to Duluth. I drove down with him the next morning, and of course it was not of the fabulous game park that I was thinking — I was not sure I even approved of it — but of Jane. I gave myself away with my questions.

“She’s ill, you say?”

“Did I? I thought I said tired. What she told me, anyway. Looks ruddy healthy, in fact. Tanner than I’ve ever seen her.”

“Is she alone?”

“What, is there a man with her, you mean? No, no, Ashenden. She’s quite singular.”

“How did she happen to drop in on you?”

“I’m not in it at all, dear chap. I’m a businessman and gamekeeper. My life’s quite full. I suppose that may actually have had something to do with it, in fact. She called from Heathrow day before yesterday. Said she was in England and wanted someplace to rest. Lord, I hope she’s not put off by my bringing you down. Never thought of that aspect of it before.”

“I won’t bother her.”

“No, of course you won’t,” he said smiling. “Sorry I suggested that. Just thinking out loud. A man concerned with animals must always be conscious of who goes into the cage with whom. It’s a social science, zoology is, very helpful in making up parties. I suppose mine, when I trouble to give them, are among the most gemütlich in Europe. Indeed, now I think of it, I must have realized as soon as I saw you last night that you’d be acceptable to Jane, or I’d never have asked you. Have you known her long?”

“We’ve never met.”

“What, never met and so keen?” I smiled lamely and Freddy patted my knee. “I understand. I do. I feel you hoping. And I quite approve. Just don’t confuse your hope with your evidence.” He studied me for a moment. “But then you wouldn’t, would you, or I’d not be so fond of you.”

“You do understand quite a lot, Freddy.”

“Who, me? I’m objective, is all. Yearning, I can smell yearning a mile off.”

“I shall have to shower.”

“Not at all, not at all. It stinks only when untempered by reason. In your case I smell reason a mile off, too. Eminently suitable, eminently,” he pronounced. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he added seriously, and I felt so good about this last that I had to change the subject. I questioned him about Duluth, which till then I hadn’t even thought of. Now, almost superstitiously, I refused to think about Jane. Every time he gave me an opening I closed it, choosing, as one does who has so much at stake and success seems within his grasp, to steer clear of the single thing that is of any interest to him. We spoke trivially the whole time, and my excitement and happiness were incandescent.

“How many miles do you get to the gallon in this Bentley of yours, Plympton?” I asked, and even before he could answer I turned to look out the window and exclaim, “Look, look at the grass, so green it is. That’s your English climate for you. If rain’s the price a nation must pay to achieve a grass that green, then one must just as well pay up and be still about it. Who’s your tailor? I’m thinking of having some things made.”

When we left the M-4 and came to the turnoff that would bring us at last to Duluth I put my hand on Plympton’s sleeve. “Freddy, listen, I know I must sound like a fool, but could you just introduce us and give me some time alone with her? We’ve so many friends in common — and perhaps other things as well — that I know there won’t be any awkwardness. My God, I’ve been pursuing her for months. Who knows when I’ll have such an opportunity again? I know my hope’s showing, and I hope — look, there I go again — you won’t despise me for it, but I have to talk to her. I have to.”

“Then you shall,” he said, and we turned onto the road that took us across the perimeter of the estate and drove for five miles and came to a gate where a gatekeeper greeted Lord Plympton and a chauffeur who seemed to materialize out of the woods got in and took the wheel while Freddy and I moved to the back seat, and we drove together through the lovely grounds for another fifteen or twenty minutes and passed through another gate, though I did not see it until we were almost on it — the queer, camouflaged electric fence — and through the windows I could hear the coughing of apes and the roar of lions and the bleating of lambs and the wheezes and grunts and trebles and basses of a hundred beasts — though I saw none — and at last, passing through a final gate, came to the long, curving, beautiful driveway of the beautiful house and servants came to take our bags and others to open doors and an older woman in a long gown — Plympton kissed her and introduced her as his wife, the Lady Plympton I’d never met (“She came with guanacos on her crest, dear fellow, with the funny panda and the gravid slug. I married her — ha ha — to fill out the set”), and he bolted upstairs beckoning me to follow. “Come on, come on,” he said, “can’t wait to get here, then hangs back like a boy at his first ball,” and I bounded up the stairs behind him, and overtook him. “Wherever are you going? You don’t know the way. Go on, go on, left, left,” he called. “When you come to the end of the hall turn right into the Richard Five wing. It’s the first apartment past the Ballroom of Time. You’ll see the clocks,” and I left him behind, only to come to the door, her door, and stop outside it.

Plympton came up behind me. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he said, and knocked on the door gently, “Jane,” he called softly. “Jane? Are you decent, darling?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was beautiful.

“Shall I push open the door?”

“Yes,” she said, “would you just?”

He shoved me gently inside, but did not cross the threshold himself. “Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,” he said, and turned and left.

I could not see her clearly. No lights were on and the curtains were still drawn. I stood in the center of the room and waited for a command. I was physically excited, a fact which I trusted the darkness to shield from Jane. Neither of us said anything.

Then I spoke boldly. “He’s right. I trust he’s right. I pray he is.”

“He?”

“Plympton. ‘Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,’ he said.”

“Did he? That was presumptuous of him, then.”

“I am Brewster Ashenden of the earth, air, fire and water Ashendens and this moment is very important to me. I’m first among eligible men, Miss Löes Lipton. Though that sounds a boast, it is not. I have heard of your beauty and your character. Perhaps you have heard something of mine.”

“I never listen to gossip. And anyway hearsay is inadmissible in court…ship.”

I knew she was going to say that. It was exactly what I would have replied had she made the speech I had just made! Do you know what it means to have so profound a confirmation — to have, that is, all one’s notions, beliefs, hunches and hypotheses suddenly and entirely endorsed? My God, I was like Columbus standing in the New round World, like the Wrights right and aloft over Kitty Hawk! For someone like myself it was like having my name cleared! I’m talking about redemption. To be right! That’s everything in life, you know. To be right, absolutely right, one hundred percent correct in all the essentials, that’s all we want. And whoever is? Brewster Ashenden — once. I had so much to tell her.

I began to talk, a mile a minute, filling her in, breathlessly bringing her up to date, a Greek stranger’s after-dinner talk in a king’s gold palace on an inaccessible island in a red and distant sea. A necessary entertainment. Until then I had not known my life had been a story.

Then, though I could not see it in the dark room, she held up her hand for me to stop. It was exactly where I would have held up my hand had Jane been speaking.

“Yes,” she said of my life, “it was the same with me.”

Neither of us could speak for a time. Then, gaily, “Oh, Brewster, think of all the—”

“—coastlines?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “yes. All the coastlines, bays, sounds, capes and peninsulas, the world’s beaches scribbled round all the countries and continents and islands. All the Cannes and Hamptons yet to be. Shores in Norway like a golden lovely dust. Spain’s wild hairline, Portugal’s long face like an impression on coins. The nubbed antlers of Scandinavia and the great South American porterhouse. The French teapot and Italian boot and Australia like a Scottie in profile.”

“Asia running like a watercolor, dripping Japan and all the rest,” we said together.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “God, I love the world.”

“There’s no place like it.”

“Let me wash up on seashores and eat the local specialties, one fish giving way to another every two or three hundred miles along the great continuous coasts like an exquisite, delicious evolution. Thank God for money and jet airplanes. Let me out at the outpost. Do you feel that way?”

“What, are you kidding? An earth, fire, air and water guy like me? I do, I do.”

“Family’s important,” she said.

“You bet it is.”

She giggled. “My grandfather, a New Yorker, was told to go west for his health. Grandfather hated newspapers, he didn’t trust them and said all news — even of wars, heavy weather and the closing markets — was just cheap gossip. He thought all they were good for, since he held that calendars were vulgar, was the date printed at the top of the page. In Arizona he had the New York Times sent to him daily, though of course it always arrived a day or two late. So for him the eleventh was the ninth or the tenth, and he went through the last four years of his life a day or two behind actual time. Grandfather’s Christmas and New Year’s were celebrated after everyone else’s. He went to church on Easter Tuesday.”

“Easter Tuesday, that’s very funny.”

“I love the idiosyncratic; it is all that constitutes integrity. Difference, nuance, hues and shade. Spectra, Brewster. That’s why we travel, perhaps, why we’re found on all this planet’s exotic strands, cherishing peculiarities, finding lost causes, chipping in to save the primitive wherever it occurs—”

“Listen to her talk. Is that a sweetheart?”

“—refusing to let it die, though the old ways are the worst ways and unhealthy, bad for the teeth and the balanced diet and the comfort and the longevity. Is that selfish?”

“I think so.”

“Yes,” she said pensively. “Of course it is. All taste’s a cruelty at last. We impede history with our Sierra Clubs and our closed societies. We’ll have to answer for that, I suppose. Oh, well…Brewster, do you have uncles? Tell me about your uncles.”

“I had an Uncle Clifford who believed that disease could be communicated only by a draft when one was traveling at high speeds. He wore a paper bag over his head even in a closed car. He cut out holes for the eyes, for despite his odd notion he dearly loved to travel and watch the scenery go by. Even going up in elevators he wore his paper bag, though he strolled at ease through the contagion wards of hospitals dispensing charity to the poor.”

“Marvelous.”

“Yes.”

“Brewster, this is important. Do you know things? People should know facts.”

“I know them.”

“I knew you knew them.”

“I love you, Miss Löes Lipton.”

“Jane,” she said. Jane.

She was weeping. I didn’t try to comfort her, but stood silently in place until she was through. I knew she was going to tell me to open the curtains, for this part of the interview was finished.

“Open the curtains, Brewster.”

I went to the bay and pulled the drawstring and light came into the room and flooded it and I turned to the chair in which Jane was sitting and saw her face for the first time. She looked exactly as I knew she would look, though I had never seen a photograph of her or yet been to any of the houses in which her portraits were hung. All that was different was that there was a darkish region under her eyes and her skin had an odd tan.

“Oh,” I said, “you’ve a spot of lupus erythematosus there, don’t you?”

“You do know things, Brewster.”

“I recognized the wolflike shadow across the eyes.”

“It’s always fatal.”

“I know.”

“The body develops antibodies against itself.”

“I know.”

“It’s as if I were allergic to my own chemistry.”

“I know, I know.” I went toward her blinded by my tears. I kissed her, her lips and the intelligent, wolfish mask across her beautiful face. “How much time is there?” I asked.

Jane shrugged.

“It isn’t fair. It isn’t.”

“Yes. Well,” she said.

“Marry me, Jane.”

She shook her head.

“You’ve got to.”

“No,” she said.

“Because of this fatal disease? That doesn’t matter to me. I beg your pardon, Jane, if that sounds callous. I don’t mean that your mortality doesn’t matter to me. I mean that now that I’ve found you I can’t let you go, no matter how little time you might have left.”

“Do you think that’s why I refused you? Because I’m going to die? Everyone dies. I refuse you because of what you are and because of what I am.”

“But we’re the same. We know each other inside out.”

“No. There’s a vast gulf between us.”

“No, Jane. I know what you’re going to say before you say it, what you’re going to do before you do it.”

“No.”

“Yes. I swear. Yes.” She smiled, and the wolf mask signal of her disease made her uncanny. “You mean because I don’t know why you refuse me? Is that what you mean?” She nodded. “Then you see I do know. I knew that it was because I didn’t know why you refused me. Oh, I’m so confused. I’m — wait. Oh. Is it what I think it is?” She nodded. “Oh, my God. Jane, please. I wasn’t thinking. You let me go on. I was too hasty in telling you my life. It’s because you’re pure and I’m not. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?” She nodded. “Jane, I’m a man,” I pleaded. “It’s different with a man. Listen,” I said, “I can be pure. I can be again. I will be.”

“There isn’t time.”

“There is, there is.”

“If I thought there were…Oh, Brewster, if I really thought there were—” she said, and broke off.

“There is. I make a vow. I make a holy vow.” I crossed my heart.

She studied me. “I believe you,” she said finally. “That is, I believe you seriously wish to undo what you have done to yourself. I believe in your penitent spirit, I mean. No. Don’t kiss me. You must be continent henceforth. Then…”

“We’ll see?”

“We’ll see.”

“The next time, Jane, the next time you see me, I swear I will have met your conditions.”

I bowed and left and was told where I was to sleep by a grinning Plympton. He asked if, now that I had seen Jane, I would like to go with him on a tour of the estate.

“Not just yet, Freddy, I think.”

“Jane gave you something to think about, did she?”

“Something like that.”

Was ever any man set such a task by a woman? To undo defilement and regain innocence, to take an historical corruption and will it annulled, whisking it out of time as if it were a damaged egg going by on a conveyor belt. And not given years — Jane’s disease was progressive, the mask a manifestation of one of its last stages — nor deserts to do it in. Not telling beads or contemplating from some Himalayan hillside God’s extensive Oneness. No, nor chanting a long, cunning train of boxcar mantras as it moves across the mind’s trestle and over the soul’s deep, dangerous drop. No, no, and no question either of simply distributing the wealth or embracing the leper or going about in rags (I still wore my mourning togs, that lover’s wardrobe, those Savile Row whippery flags of self) or doing those bows and scrapes that were only courtesy’s moral minuet, and no time, no time at all for the long Yoga life, the self’s spring cleaning that could drag on years. What had to be done had to be done now, in these comfortable Victorian quarters on a velvet love seat or in the high fourposter, naked cherubs climbing the bedposts, the burnished dimples of their wooden behinds glistening in the light from the fresh laid fire. By a gilded chamber pot, beneath a silken awning, next to a window with one of the loveliest views in England.

That, at least, I could change. I drew the thick drapes across the bayed glass and, influenced perhaps by the firelight and the Baker Street ambience, got out my carpet slippers and red smoking jacket. I really had to laugh. This won’t do, I thought. How do you expect to bring about these important structural changes and get that dear dying girl to marry you if the first thing you do is to impersonate Sherlock Holmes? Next you’ll be smoking opium and scratching on a fiddle. Get down to it, Ashenden, get down to it.

But it was pointless to scold when no alternative presented itself to me. How did one get down to it? How does one undefile the defiled? What acts of kosher and exorcism? Religion (though I am not irreligious) struck me as beside the point. It was Jane I had offended, not God. What good would it have done to pray for His forgiveness? And what sacrilege to have prayed for hers! Anyway, I understood that I already had her forgiveness. Jane wanted a virgin. In the few hours that remained I had to become one.

I thought pure thoughts for three hours. Images of my mother: one summer day when I was a child and we collected berries together for beach plum jelly; a time in winter when I held a simple cat’s cradle of wool which my mother was carding. I thought of my tall father in a Paris park when I was ten, and of the pictures we posed each other for, waiting for the sun to come out before we tripped the shutter. And recollected mornings in chapel in school in New England — I was seven, I was eight — the chaplain describing the lovely landscapes of Heaven and I, believing, wanting to die. I recalled the voices of guides in museums I toured with my classmates, and thought about World’s Fairs I had attended. The ’36 Olympics, sitting on the bench beside the New Zealand pole vaulter. I remembered perfect picnics, Saturday matinees in Broadway theaters, looking out the window lying awake in comfortable compartment berths on trains, horseback riding on a fall morning in mountains, sailing with Father. All the idylls. I remembered, that is, my virginity, sorting out for the first time in years the decent pleasures of comfort and wonder and respect. But — and I was enjoying myself, I could feel the smile on my face — what did it amount to? I was no better than a gangster pleading his innocence because he had once been innocent.

I thought impure thoughts, reading off my long-time bachelor’s hundred conquests, parsing past, puberty and old fantasy, reliving all the engrams of lust in gazebo, band shell, yacht and penthouse, night beaches at low tide, rooms, suites, shower stalls, bedrooms on crack trains, at the carpeted turnings of stairs, and once in a taxi and once on a butcher’s block at dawn in Les Halles — all the bachelor’s emergency landing fields, all his makeshift landscapes, propinquitous to grandeur and history, in Flanders Fields, rooms with views, by this ocean or by that, this tall building or that public monument, my backstage love-making tangential as a town at the edge of a map. Oh love’s landmarks, oh its milestones, sex altering place like sunset. Oh the beds and oh the walls, the floors and bridges — and me a gentleman! — the surfaces softened by Eros, contour stones and foam rubber floors of forests, everywhere but the sky itself a zone for dalliance, my waterfalls of sperm, our Laguardias of hum and droned groan. Recalling the settings first, the circumstances, peopling them only afterwards and even then only piecemeal, a jigsaw, Jack-the-Ripper memory of hatcheck girl thigh and night club singer throat and heiress breast, the salty hairs of channel swimmers and buttocks of horseback riders and knuckles of pianists and strapless tans of models — sex like flesh’s crossword, this limb and that private like the fragments in a multiple choice. And only after that gradually joining arm to shoulder, shoulder to neck, neck to face, Ezekielizing my partners, dem bones, dem bones gon’ walk aroun’.

Yes? No. The smile was still on my face. And there in that Victorian counting house, I, lust’s miser, its Midas, touching gold and having it gold still, an ancient Pelagian, could not overcome my old unholy gratitude for flesh, and so lost innocence again, even as I resisted, the blood rushing where it would, filling the locks of my body. “Make me clean,” I prayed, “help me to make one perfect act of contrition, break my nasty history’s hold on me, pull a fast one at this eleventh hour.”

A strange thing happened. The impure thoughts left me and my blood retreated and I began to remember those original idylls, my calendar youth, the picnic and berry hunts, and all those placid times before fires, dozing on a couch, my head in Mother’s lap and her hands in my hair like rain on the roof and, My God, my little weewee was stiff, and it was stiff now too!

It was what I’d prayed for: shame like a thermal inversion, the self-loathing that is purity. The sailing lessons and horseback rides and lectures and daytrips came back tainted. I saw how pleased I’d been, how smug. Why, I’m free, I thought, and was. “I’ve licked it, Jane,” I said. “I’m pure, holy as a wafer, my heart pink as rare meat. I was crap. Look at me now.”

If she won’t have me, I thought, it’s not my fault. I rushed out to show myself to her and tell her what I’d discovered. I ran over it again to see if I had it straight. “Jane,” I’d say, “I’m bad, unsavory from the word go, hold your nose. To be good subsists in such understanding. So innocence is knowledge, not its lack. See, morality’s easy, clear, what’s the mystery?” But when I stepped outside my suite the house was dark. Time had left me behind. The long night of the soul goes by in a minute. It must have been three or four in the morning. I couldn’t wake Jane; she was dying of lupus erythematosus and needed her rest. I didn’t know where Plympton slept or I would have roused him. Too exhilarated by my virtue to sleep, I went outside.

But it was not “outside” as you and I know it. Say rather it was a condition, like the out-of-doors in a photograph, the colors fixed and temperature unfelt, simply not factors, the wind stilled and the air light, and so wide somehow that he could walk without touching it. It was as if he moved in an enormous diorama of nature, a crèche of the elements. Brewster Ashenden was rich. He had lain on his back on Ontario turf farms and played the greens of St. Andrews and Burning Tree, but he had never felt anything like Duluth’s perfect grass, soft and springy as theater seats, and even in moonlight green as billiard cloth. The moon, perfectly round and bright as a tennis shoe — he could make out its craters, like the eternally curving seams of a Spalding — enabled him to see perfectly, the night no more than the vaguest atmosphere, distant objects gyroscopically stilled like things glimpsed through the whirling blades of a fan.

What he saw was like the landscapes behind madonnas in classical paintings — one missed only the carefully drawn pillars and far, tiny palaces — blue-hilled horizons, knolls at the end of space, complex shores that trailed eccentrically about flat, blackish planes of water with boulders rising from them. He thought he perceived distant fields, a mild husbandry, the hay in, the crops a sloping green and blue debris in the open fields, here and there ledges keyholed with caves, trees in the middle distance as straight as the land they grew from. It was a geography of eclectic styles and landscapes, even the sky a hybrid — here clear and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

He walked away from the castle, pulled toward the odd, distant galleries. His mood was a fusion of virtue and wonder. He felt solitary but not lonely, and if he remembered that he walked unprotected through the largest game preserve this side of the Kenyan savannah, there was nothing in his bold step to indicate this. He strode powerfully toward those vistas he had seen stretching away in every direction from the manor. Never had he seemed to himself so fulfilled, and never, unless in dreams, had such seeming distances been so easily negotiated, the scenery changing every hundred yards or so, the hills that had appeared so remote easily climbed and giving way at their crests to tiny valleys and plains or thick, sudden clots of jungle. This trick of perspective was astonishing, reminding him of cunning golf courses, sudden doglegs, sand traps, unexpected waterholes. Everything was as distinctively charactered as foreign countries, natural borders. He remembered miniature golf courses to which he had been taken as a child, each hole dominated by some monolithic feature, a windmill, perhaps, a gingerbread house, a bridge, complicated networks of banked plains that turned on themselves, culs-de-sac. He thought that Duluth might be deceptively large or deceptively small, and he several miles or only a few thousand feet from the main house — which had already disappeared behind him.

As he came, effortlessly as in any paradise, to each seamed, successive landscape, the ease of his arrivals added to his sense of strength, and each increment of strength to his sense of purity, so that his exercise fed his feelings about his heart and happiness. Though he had that day made the long drive from London, had his interview with Jane (as exhausting as it was stimulating) and done the hardest thinking of his life, though he had not slept (even in London he had tossed and turned all night, kept awake by the prospect of finally meeting Jane) in perhaps forty hours, he wasn’t tired. He wondered if he would ever be tired again. Or less gay than now. For what he felt, he was certain, was not mood but something deeper, a stability, as the out-of-doors was, as space was. He could make plans. If Jane would have him (she would; they had spoken code this afternoon, signaled each other a high language of commitment, no small talk but the cryptic, sacred speech of government flashing its secret observations over mountains and under seas, the serious ventriloquism of outpost), they could plan not to plan, simply to live, to be. In his joy he had forgotten her death, her rare, personal disease in which self fled self in ultimate allergy. Lupus erythematosus. It was not catching, but he would catch it. He would catch her. There was no need to survive her. Together they would grow the wolf mask across their eyes, death’s big spreading butterfly. It didn’t matter. They’d have their morality together, the blessed link-up between appropriate humans, anything permissible between consenting man and consenting woman — anything, any bold or timid configuration, whatever the one craved and the other yielded, whatever whatsoever, love’s sanctified arrangements, not excluding the deathbed itself. What need had he to survive her — though he’d probably not die until she did — now that he had at last a vehicle for his taste, his marriage?

He was in a sort of clearing. Though he knew he had not retraced his steps nor circled around, it seemed familiar. He stood on uneven ground and could see a line of low frigid mountains in the distance. High above him and to his right the great tear of the moon, like the drain of day, sucked light. At his feet there appeared the remains of — what? A feast? A picnic? He bent down to investigate and found a few clay shards of an old jug, a bit of yellow wood — like the facing on some stringed instrument and a swatch of faded, faintly Biblical cloth, broadly striped as the robe of a prophet. As he fingered this debris he smelled what was unmistakably bowel.

“Have I stepped in something?” He stood and raised his shoe, but his glance slid off it to the ground where he saw two undisturbed lumps, round as hamburger, of congealing lion waste. It came to him at once. “I knew it was familiar! ‘The Sleeping Gypsy.’ This is where it was painted!” He looked suspiciously at the mangled mandolin facing, the smashed jug and the tough cloth, which he now perceived had been forcibly torn. My God, he thought, the lion must have eaten the poor fellow. The picture had been painted almost seventy-five years earlier, but he understood from his reading that lions often returned to the scenes of their most splendid kills, somehow passing on to succeeding generations this odd, historical instinct of theirs. Nervously he edged away, and though the odor of lion dung still stung his nostrils, it was gradually replaced by more neutral smells. Clearly, however, he was near the beasts.

He turned but still could not see the castle. He was not yet frightened. From what he had already seen of Duluth he understood that it was a series of cunningly stitched enclaves, of formal, transistorized prospects that swallowed each other transitionlessly. It seemed to be the antithesis of a maze, a surface of turned corners that opened up on fresh surprises. He thought of himself as walking along an enormous Möbius strip, and sooner or later he would automatically be brought back to his starting point. If he was a little uneasy it was only because of the proximity of the animals, whose presence he felt and smelled rather than saw or heard.

Meanwhile, quickening his pace, he came with increasing frequency to experience a series of déjà vus, puzzling at first but then suddenly and disappointingly explicable. He had hoped, as scenes became familiar to him, that he was already retracing his steps, but a few seconds’ perusal of each place indicated otherwise. These were not places he had ever been, only places he had seen. Certainly, he thought, the paintings! Here’s Cranach the Elder’s “Stag Hunt.” Unmistakably. And a few moments later — I’ll be darned, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s “A Game of Hot Cockles.” And then Watteau’s “Embarking for Cythera,” will you look at that? There was E. Melvin Bolstad’s “Sunday in the Country” and then El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo. Astonishing, Ashenden thought, really worthwhile. Uh oh, I don’t think I care for that Constable, he thought; why’d they use that? Perhaps because it was here. Gosh, isn’t that a Thomas Hart Benton? However did they manage that odd rolling effect? That’s really lovely. I’ll have to ask Plympton the name of his landscaper. Jane and I will certainly be able to use him once we’re settled. Now he was more determined than ever to get rid of Franklin.

And so it went. He strolled through wide-windowed Wyeths and gay, open-doored Dufys and through Hoppers — I’ll have to come back and see that one with the sun on it — scratchy Segonzacs and dappled Renoirs and faintly heaving Cézannes, and across twilled Van Gogh grasses and faint Utrillo fields and precise Audubon fens, and one perfect, wild Bosch dell. It was thrilling. I am in art, thought Brewster Ashenden, pleased to have been prepared for it by his education and taste.

He continued on until he came to a small jewel of a pond mounted in a setting of scalloped shoreline with low thin trees that came up almost to the water. It was the Botticelli “Birth of Venus,” which, like El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo, was without either Venus Zephyr, Chloris, or the Hour of Spring. Nevertheless it was delightful, and he took a seat on a mound of earth and rested, thinking of Jane and listening to the sea in a large shell he had found on the beach.

“I’m glad,” he said, speaking from the impulse of his mood now that his wanderings were done and the prospect of his — their — death had become a part of his taste and filled his eyes with tears, “I’m glad to have lived in the age of jet travel, and to have had the money for tickets.” He grew contemplative. “There has never been a time in my life,” he said, “when I have not had my own passport, and never a period of more than four months when I was not immune to all the indigenous diseases of place for which there are shots. I am grateful — not that I’d ever lord it over my forebears — that I did not live in the time of sailing ships. Noble as those barks were, they were slow, slow. And Dramamine not invented. This, for all its problems, is the best age to be rich in. I’ve seen a lot in my time.”

Then, though he couldn’t have told you the connection, Ashenden said a strange thing for someone at that moment and in that setting. “I am not a jerk,” he said, “I am not so easily written off. Profound guys like me often seem naive. Perhaps I’m a fool of the gods. That remains to be seen. But answers are mostly simple, wisdom is.” He was melancholy now and rose, as if by changing position he hoped to shake off this new turn in his mood. He looked once more at the odd pool and spoke a sort of valedictory. “This is a nice place. Jane would enjoy it. I wish I still had those two folding chairs the Bank of America gave me for opening an account of five thousand dollars. We could come here tomorrow on a picnic.”

He did not know whether to go around the pond or cut through the thin trees, but finally determined not to go deeper into the forest. Though he suspected the animals must be all around him, it was very quiet and he wondered again about them. They would be asleep, of course, but didn’t his presence mean anything to them? Had their queer captivity and the unusual circumstances in which they lived so accustomed them to man that one could walk among them without disturbing them at all? But I am in art, he thought, and thus in nature too, and perhaps I’ve already caught Jane’s illness and the wolf mask is working someplace under my skin, making me no more significant here than the presence of the trees or the angles of the hills.

Walking around the other side of the pond, he noticed that the trees had changed. They were sparser, more ordinary. Ahead he spied a bluff and moved toward it. Soon he was again in a sort of clearing and here he smelled the smells.

The odor of beasts is itself a kind of meat — a dream avatar of alien sirloin, strange chops and necks, oblique joints and hidden livers and secret roasts. There are nude juices in it, and licy furs, and all the flesh’s vegetation. It is friction which rubs the fleshly chemistry, releasing it, sending skyhigh the queer subversive gasses of oblique life forms. It is noxious. Separated as we are from animals in zoos by glass cages and fenced-off moats, and by the counter odors of human crowds, melting ice cream, peanut shells crushed underfoot, snow cones, mustard, butts of bun — all the detritus of a Sunday outing — we rarely smell it. What gets through is dissipated, for a beast in civilization does not even smell like a beast in the wild. Already evolution has begun its gentling work, as though the animals might actually feel compunction, some subtle, aggravating modesty. But in Plympton’s jungle the smells were uninhibited, biological, profane. Their acidity brought tears to Ashenden’s eyes and he had to rub them.

When he took his hands away he saw where he was. He had entered, he knew, the last of the pictures. Although he could not at first identify it, much was familiar. The vegetation, for example, was unmistakably Rousseau, with here and there a Gauguin calabash or stringy palm. There were other palms, hybrid as the setting itself, queer gigantic leaves flying from conventional European trunks. The odor was fierce but he couldn’t leave. At his feet were thick Rousseauvian candelabras of grass, and before him vertical pagoda clusters of enormous flowers, branches dangerously bent under the weight of heavy leaves like the notched ears of elephants. Everywhere were fernlike trees, articulated as spine or rib cage, a wide net of the greenly skeletal and the crossed swords of tall grasses. There were rusts and tawns and huge wigwam shapes and shadows like the entrances to caves, black as yawns. The odor was even more overpowering than before, and had he not seen the vegetation he would have thought himself at the fermented source of the winish world. Yet the leaves and grasses and bushes and flowers were ripe. He reached out and touched a leaf in a low branch and licked his hand: it was sweet. Still, the place stank. The smell was acrid, actually hot. Here the forest was made impenetrable by its very odor and he started to back off. Unable either to turn away from it completely or to look at it directly, he was forced to squint, and immediately he had a striking perception.

Seen through his almost closed eyes, the trees and vegetation lost their weird precision and articulation and became conventional, transformed into an ordinary arbor. Only then, half blinded, he saw at last where he was. It was Edward Hicks’s “The Peaceable Kingdom,” and unquestionably the painter had himself been squinting when he painted it. It was one of Ashenden’s favorite paintings, and he was thrilled to be where lion and fox and leopard and lamb and musk ox and goat and tiger and steer had all lain together. The animals were gone now but must have been here shortly before. He guessed that the odor was the collective conflagration of their bowels, their guts’ bonfire. I’ll have to be careful where I step, he thought, and an enormous bear came out of the woods toward him.

It was a Kamchatkan Brown from the northeastern peninsula of the U.S.S.R. between the Bering and Okhotsk seas, and though it was not yet full grown it weighed perhaps seven hundred pounds and was already taller than Ashenden. It was female, and what he had been smelling was its estrus, not shit but lust, not bowel but love’s gassy chemistry, the atoms and hormones and molecules of passion, vapors of impulse and the endocrinous spray of desire. What he had been smelling was secret, underground rivers flowing from hidden sources of intimate gland, and what the bear smelled on Brewster was the same.

Ashenden did not know this; indeed, he did not even know that it was female, or what sort of bear it was. Nor did he know that where he stood was not the setting for Hicks’s painting (that was actually in a part of the estate where he had not yet been), but had he discovered his mistake he would still have told you that he was in art, that his error had been one of grace, ego’s flashy optimism, its heroic awe. He would have been proud of having given the benefit of the doubt to the world, his precious blank check to possibility.

All this changed with the sudden appearance of the bear. Not all. He still believed — this in split seconds, more a reaction than a belief, a first impression chemical as the she-bear’s musk — that the confrontation was noble, a challenge (there’s going to be a hell of a contest, he thought), a coming to grips of disparate principles. In these first split seconds operating on that edge of instinct which is still the will, he believed not that the bear was emblematic, or even that he was, but that the two of them there in the clearing — remember, he thought he stood in “The Peaceable Kingdom”—somehow made for symbolism, or at least for meaning. As the bear came closer, however, he was disabused of even this thin hope, and in that sense the contest was already over and the bear had won.

He was terrified, but it must be said that there was in his terror (an emotion entirely new to him, nothing like his grief for his parents nor his early anxieties about the value of his usefulness or life’s, nor even his fears that he would never find Jane Löes Lipton, and so inexpert at terror, so boyish with it that he was actually like someone experiencing a new drive) a determination to survive that was rooted in principle, as though he dedicated his survival to Jane, reserving his life as a holdup victim withholds the photographs of loved ones. Even as the bear came closer this did not leave him. So there was something noble and generous even in his decision to bolt. He turned and fled. The bear would have closed the gap between them and been on him in seconds had he not stopped. Fortunately, however, he realized almost as soon as he began his sprint that he could never outrun it. (This was the first time, incidentally, that he thought of the bear as bear, the first time he used his man’s knowledge of his adversary.) He remembered that bears could cruise at thirty miles an hour, that they could climb trees. (And even if they couldn’t would any of those frail branches already bowed under their enormous leaves have supported his weight?) The brief data he recalled drove him to have more. (This also reflex, subliminal, as he jockeyed for room and position in the clearing, a rough bowl shape perhaps fifty feet across, as his eye sought possible exits, narrow places in the trees that the bear might have difficulty negotiating, as he considered the water — but of course they swam, too — a hundred yards off through a slender neck of path like a firebreak in the jungle.) He turned and faced the bear and it stopped short. They were no more than fifteen feet from each other.

It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps the bear was tame.

“Easy, Ivan,” he crooned, “easy boy, easy Ivan,” and the bear hearing his voice, a gentle, low, masculine voice, whined. Misconstruing the response, recalling another fact, that bears have weak eyesight, at the same time that he failed to recall its corollary, that they have keen hearing and a sharp sense of smell like perfect pitch, Ashenden took it to be the bear’s normal conversational tone with Plympton. “No, no, Ivan,” he said, “it isn’t Freddy, it’s not your master. Freddy’s sleeping. I’m Brewster, I’m your master’s friend, old Bruin. I’m Brewster Ashenden. I won’t hurt you, fellow.” The bear, excited by Ashenden’s playful tone, whined once more, and Brewster, who had admitted he wasn’t Plympton out of that same stockpile of gentlemanly forthrightness that forbade deception of any creature, even this bear, moved cautiously closer so that the animal might see him better and correct any false impression it might still have of him.

It was Ashenden’s false impression that was corrected. He halted before he reached the bear (he was ten feet away and had just remembered its keen hearing and honed smell) and knew, not from anything it did, not from any bearish lurch or bearish bearing, that it was not tame. This is what he saw:

A black patent-leather snout like an electric socket.

A long and even elegant run of purplish tongue, mottled, seasoned as rare delicatessen meat, that lolled idiotic inches out of the side of its mouth.

A commitment of claw (they were nonretractile, he remembered) the color of the heads of hammers.

A low black piping of lip.

A shallow mouth, a logjam of teeth.

Its solemn oval of face, direct and expressionless as a goblin’s.

Ears, high on its head and discrete as antlers.

Its stolid, plantigrade stance, a flash as it took a step toward him of the underside of its smooth, hairless paws, vaguely like the bottoms of carpet slippers.

A battering ram of head and neck, pendent from a hump of muscle on its back, high as a bull’s or buffalo’s.

The coarse shag upholstery of its blunt body, greasy as furniture.

He knew it was not tame even when it settled dog fashion on the ground and its short, thick limbs seemed to disappear, its body hiding in its body. And he whirled suddenly and ran again and the bear was after him. Over his shoulder he could see, despite its speed, the slow, ponderous meshing of muscle and fat behind its fur like children rustling a curtain, and while he was still looking at this the bear felled him. He was not sure whether it had raised its paw or butted him or collided with him, but he was sent sprawling — a grand, amusing, almost painless fall.

He found himself on the ground, his limbs spraddled, like someone old and sitting on a beach, and it was terrible to Ashenden that for all his sudden speed and the advantage of surprise and the fact that the bear had been settled dog fashion and even the distance he had been sent flying, he was no more than a few feet from the place where he had begun his run.

Actually, it took him several seconds before he realized that he no longer saw the bear.

“Thank God,” he said, “I’m saved,” and with a lightning stroke the bear reached down from behind Ashenden’s back and tore away his fly, including the underwear. Then, just as quickly, it was in front of him. “Hey,” Ashenden cried, bringing his legs together and covering himself with his hands. The tear in his trousers was exactly like the inside seam along the thigh and crotch of riding pants.

“,” said the bear in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Brewster scrambled to his knees while the bear watched him.

“.”

“All right,” Ashenden said, “back off!” His voice was as sharp and commanding as he could make it. “Back off, I said!”

“.”

“Go,” he commanded. “Go on. Shoo. Shoo, you.” And still barking orders at it — he had adopted the masterful, no-nonsense style of the animal trainer — he rose to his feet and actually shoved the bear as hard as he could. Surprisingly it yielded and Brewster, encouraged, punched it with all his considerable strength on the side of its head. It shook itself briefly and, as if it meant to do no more than simply alter its position, dropped to the ground, rolled over — the movement like the practiced effort of a cripple, clumsy yet incredibly powerful — and sat up. It was sitting in much the same position as Ashenden’s a moment before, and it was only then that he saw its sex billowing the heavy curtain of hair that hung above its groin: a swollen, grotesque ring of vulva the color and texture of an ear and crosshatched with long loose hairs; a distended pucker of vagina, a black tunnel of oviduct, an inner tube of cunt. Suddenly the she-bear strummed itself with a brusque downbeat of claw and moaned. Ashenden moved back and the bear made another gesture, oddly whorish and insistent. It was as if it beckoned Ashenden across a barrier not of animal and man but of language — Chinese, say, and Rumanian. Again it made its strange movement, and this time barked its moan, a command, a grammar of high complication, of difficult, irregular case and gender and tense, a classic of aberrant syntax. Which was exactly as Ashenden took it, like a student of language who for the first time finds himself hearing in real and ordinary life a unique textbook usage. O God, he thought, I understand Bear!

He did not know what to do, and felt in his pockets for weapons and scanned the ground for rocks. The bear, watching him, emitted a queer growl and Ashenden understood that, too. She had mistaken his rapid, reflexive frisking for courtship, and perhaps his hurried glances at the ground for some stagy, bumpkin shyness.

“Look here,” Ashenden said, “I’m a man and you’re a bear,” and it was precisely as he had addressed those wives of his hosts and fellow guests who had made overtures to him, exactly as he might put off all those girls whose station in life, inferior to his own, made them ineligible. There was reproof in his declaration, yet also an acknowledgment that he was flattered, and even, to soften his rejection, a touch of gallant regret. He turned as he might have turned in a drawing room or at the landing of a staircase, but the bear roared and Ashenden, terrorized, turned back to face it. If before he had made blunders of grace, now, inspired by his opportunities — close calls arbitrarily exalted or debased men — he corrected them and made a remarkable speech.

“You’re in rut. There are evidently no male bears here. Listen, you look familiar. I’ve seen your kind in circuses. You must be Kamchatkan. You stand on your hind legs in the center ring and wear an apron and a dowdy hat with flowers on it that stand up stiff as pipes. You wheel a cub in a carriage and do jointed, clumsy curtseys, and the muzzle’s just for show, reassurance, state law and municipal ordinance and an increment of the awful to suggest your beastliness as the apron and hat your matronliness. Your decals are on the walls of playrooms and nurseries and in the anterooms of pediatricians’ offices. So there must be something domestic in you to begin with, and it is to that which I now appeal, madam.”

The bear, seated and whimpering throughout Ashenden’s speech, was in a frenzy now, still of noise, not yet of motion, though it strummed its genitalia like a guitar, and Brewster, the concomitant insights of danger on him like prophecy, shuddered, understanding that though he now appreciated his situation he had still made one mistake. No, he thought, not madam. If there were no male bears — and wouldn’t there be if she were in estrus? — it was because the bear was not yet full-grown and had not till now needed mates. It was this which alarmed him more than anything he had yet realized. It meant that these feelings were new to her, horrid sensations of mad need, ecstasy in extremis. She would kill him.

The bear shook itself and came toward him, and Brewster realized that he would have to wrestle it. Oh Jesus, he thought, is this how I’m to be purified? Is this the test? Oh, Lord, first I was in art and now I am in allegory. Jane, I swear, I shall this day be with you in Paradise! When the bear was inches away it threw itself up on its hind legs and the two embraced each other, the tall man and the slightly taller bear, and Brewster, surprised at how light the bear’s paws seemed on his shoulders, forgot his fear and began to ruminate. See how strong I am, how easily I support this beast. But then I am beast too, he thought. There’s wolf in me now, and that gives me strength. What this means, he thought, is that my life has been too crammed with civilization.

Meanwhile they went round and round like partners in a slow dance. I have been too proud of my humanism, perhaps, and all along not paid enough attention to the base. This is probably a good lesson for me. I’m very privileged. I think I won’t be too gentle with poor dying Jane. That would be wrong. On her deathbed we’ll roll in the hay. Yes, he thought, there must be positions not too uncomfortable for dying persons. I’ll find out what these are and send her out in style. We must not be too fastidious about ourselves, or stuck-up because we aren’t dogs.

All the time he was thinking this he and the bear continued to circle, though Ashenden had almost forgotten where he was, and with whom. But then the bear leaned on him with all her weight and he began to buckle, his dreamy confidence and the thought of his strength deserting him. The bear whipped its paw behind Ashenden’s back to keep him from falling, and it was like being dipped, supported in a dance, the she-bear leading and Brewster balanced against the huge beamy strength of her paw. With her free paw she snagged one sleeve of Ashenden’s Harris tweed jacket and started to drag his hand toward her cunt.

He kneed her stomach and kicked at her crotch.

“.”

“Let go,” he cried, “let go of me,” but the bear, provoked by the pleasure of Ashenden’s harmless, off-balance blows and homing in on itself, continued to pull at his arm caught in the sling of his sleeve, and in seconds had plunged Brewster’s hand into her wet nest.

There was a quality of steamy mound, a transitional texture between skin and meat, as if the bear’s twat were something butchered perhaps, a mysterious cut tumid with blood and the color of a strawberry ice-cream soda, a sexual steak. Those were its lips. He had grazed them with his knuckles going in, and the bear jerked forward, a shudder of flesh, a spasm, a bump, a grind. Frenzied, it drew his hand on. He made a fist but the bear groaned and tugged more fiercely at Ashenden’s sleeve. He was inside. It was like being up to his wrist in dung, in a hot jello of baking brick fretted with awful straw. The bear’s vaginal muscles contracted; the pressure was terrific, and the bones in his hand massively cramped. He tried to pull his fist out but it was welded to the bear’s cunt. Then the bear’s muscles relaxed and he forced his fist open inside her, his hand opening in a thick medium of mucoid strings, wet gutty filaments, moist pipes like the fingers for terrible gloves. Appalled, he pulled back with all his might and his wrist and hand, greased by bear, slid out, trailing a horrible suction, a concupiscent comet. He waved the hand in front of his face and the stink came off his fingertips like flames from a shaken candelabra, an odor of metal fruit, of something boiled years, of the center of the earth, filthy laundry, powerful as the stench of jewels and rare metals, of atoms and the waves of light.

“Oh Jesus,” he said, gagging, “oh Jesus, oh God.”

“û(r)m,” the bear said, “wrnff.”

Brewster sank to his knees in a position of prayer and the bear abruptly sat, its stubby legs spread, her swollen cunt in her lap like a bouquet of flowers.

It was as if he had looked up the dress of someone old. He couldn’t look away and the bear, making powerful internal adjustments, obscenely posed, flexing her muscular rut, shivering, her genitalia suddenly and invisibly engined, a performance coy and proud. Finally he managed to turn his head, and with an almost lazy power and swiftness the bear reached out with one paw and plucked his cock out of his torn trousers. Ashenden winced — not in pain, the paw’s blow had been gentle and as accurate as a surgical thrust, his penis hooked, almost comfortable, a heel in a shoe, snug in the bear’s curved claws smooth and cool as piano keys — and looked down.

“OERƏKH.”

His penis was erect. “That’s Jane’s, not yours!” he shouted. “My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing!”

The bear snorted and swiped with the broad edge of her fore-paw against each side of Ashenden’s peter. Her fur, lanolized by estrus, was incredibly soft, the two swift strokes gestures of forbidden brunette possibility.

And of all the things he’d said and thought and felt that night, this was the most reasonable, the most elegantly strategic: that he would have to satisfy the bear, make love to the bear, fuck the bear. And this was the challenge which had at last defined itself, the test he’d longed for and was now to have. Here was the problem: Not whether it was possible for a mere man of something less than one hundred and eighty pounds to make love to an enormous monster of almost half a ton; not whether a normal man like himself could negotiate the barbarous terrains of the beast or bring the bear off before it killed him; but merely how he, Brewster Ashenden of the air, water, fire and earth Ashendens, one of the most fastidious men alive, could bring himself to do it — how, in short, he could get it up for a bear!

But he had forgotten, and now remembered: it was already up. And if he had told the bear it was for Jane and not for it, he had spoken in frenzy, in terror and error and shock. It occurred to him that he had not been thinking of Jane at all, that she was as distant from his mind at this moment as the warranties he possessed for all the electric blankets, clock radios and space heaters he’d picked up for opening accounts in banks, as distant as the owner’s manuals stuffed into drawers for all that stuff, as forgotten as all the tennis matches he’d played on the grass courts of his friends, as the faults in those matches, as all the strolls to fences and nets to retrieve opponents’ balls, the miles he’d walked doing such things. Then why was he hard? And he thought of hanged men, of bowels slipped in extremis, of the erectile pressures of the doomed, of men in electric chairs or sinking in ships or singed in burning buildings, of men struck by lightning in open fields, and of all the random, irrelevant erections he’d had as an adolescent (once as he leaned forward to pick up a bowling ball in the basement alley of a friend from boarding school), hardness there when you woke up in the morning, pressures on the kidney that triggered the organ next to it, that signaled the one next to it, that gave the blood its go-ahead, the invisible nexus of conditions. “That’s Jane’s” he’d said, “not yours. My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing.” Oh, God. It didn’t. He’d lied to a bear! He’d brought Jane’s name into it like a lout in a parlor car. There was sin around like weather, like knots in shoes.

“What the hell am I talking about?” he yelled, and charged the bear.

And it leaned back from its sitting position and went down on its back slowly, slowly, its body sighing backward, ajar as a door stirred by wind, and Ashenden belly-flopped on top of it — with its paws in the air he was a foot taller than the bear at either end, and this contributed to his sin, as if it were some child he tumbled — pressed on its swollen pussy as over a barrel. He felt nothing.

His erection had withered. The bear growled contemptuously. “Foreplay, foreplay,” Brewster hissed, and plunged his hand inside the bear. I’m doing this to save my life, he thought. I’m doing this to pass tests. This is what I call a challenge and a half.

The bear permitted the introduction of his hand and hugged him firmly, yet with a kind of reserve as though conscious of Ashenden’s eggshell mortality. His free hand was around her neck while the other moved around inside the bear insinuatingly. He felt a clit like a baseball. One hand high and one low, his head, mouth closed, buried in the mound of fur just to the side of the bear’s neck, he was like a man doing the Australian crawl.

The bear shifted. Still locked together, the two of them rolled over and over through the peaceable kingdom. For Ashenden it was like being run over, but she permitted him to come out on top. His hand had taken a terrific wrenching however, and he knew he had to get it out before it swelled and he was unable to move it. Jesus, I’ve stubbed my hand, he thought, and began to withdraw it gently, gingerly, through a booby-trapped channel of obstacle grown agonizing by his injury, a minefield of pain. The bear lay stock still as he reeled in his hand, climbing out of her cunt as up a rope. (Perhaps this feels good to her, he thought tenderly.) At last, love’s Little Jack Horner, it was out and Ashenden, his hand bent at almost a right angle to his wrist, felt disarmed. What he had counted on — without realizing he counted on it — was no longer available to him. He would not be able to manipulate the bear, would not be able to get away with merely jerking it off. It was another illusion stripped away. He would have to screw the animal conventionally.

Come on, he urged his cock, wax, grow, grow. He pleaded with his penis, taking it in his good hand and rubbing it desperately, polishing it like an heirloom, Aladdinizing it uselessly. Meanwhile, tears in his own, he looked deep into the bear’s eyes and stalled by blowing crazy kisses to it off his broken hand, saying foolish things, making it incredible promises, keeping up a lame chatter like the pepper talk around an infield.

“Just a minute. Hold on a sec. I’m almost ready. It’s going to be something. It’s really…I’ve just got to…Look, there’s really nothing to worry about. Everything’s going to work out fine. I’m going to be a man for you, darling. Just give me a chance, will you? Listen,” he said, “I love you. I don’t think I can live without you. I want you to marry me.” He didn’t know what he was saying, unconsciously selecting, with a sort of sexual guile he hadn’t known he possessed, phrases from love, the compromising sales talk of romantic stall. He had been maidenized, a game, scared bride at the bedside. Then he began to hear himself, to listen to what he was saying. He’d never spoken this way to a woman in his life. Where did he get this stuff? Where did it come from? It was the shallow language of two-timers, of drummers with farm girls, of whores holding out and gigolos holding in, the conversation of cuckoldry, of all amorous greed. It was base and cheap and tremendously exciting and suddenly Ashenden felt a stirring, the beginning of a faint lust. He moved to the spark like an arsonist and gazed steadily at the enormous hulk of impatient bear, at its black eyes cute as checkers on a snowman. Yes, he thought, afraid he’d lose it, yes. I am the wuver of the teddy bear, big bwown bear’s wittle white man.

He unbuckled his pants and let them drop and stepped out of his underwear feeling moonlight on his ass. He moved out of his jacket and tore off his shirt, his undershirt. He ran up against the bear. He slapped at it with his dick. He turned his back to it and moved the spread cheeks of his behind up and down the pelt. He climbed it, impaling himself on the strange softness of the enormous toy. He kissed it.

Pet, pet, he thought. “Pet,” he moaned, his eyes closed now. “My pet, my pet.” Yes, he thought, yes. And remembered, suddenly, saw, all the animals he had ever petted, all the furry underbellies, writhing, inviting his nails, all the babies whose rubbery behinds he’d squeezed, the little girls he’d drawn toward him and held between his knees to comfort or tell a secret to, their hair tickling his face, all small boys whose heads he’d rubbed and cheeks pinched between his fingers. We are all sodomites, he thought. There is disparity at the source of love. We are all sodomites, all pederasts, all dikes and queens and mother fuckers.

“Hey bear,” he whispered, “d’ja ever notice how all the short, bald, fat men get all the tall, good-looking blondes?” He was stiffening fast. “Hey bear, ma’am,” he said, leaning naked against her fur, bare-assed and upright on a bear rug, “there’s something darling in a difference. Why me — take me. There’s somethin’ darlin’ in a difference, how else would water come to fire or earth to air?” He cupped his hand over one of its cute little ears and rubbed his palm gently over the bristling fur as over the breast buds of a twelve-year-old-girl. “My life, if you want to know, has been a sodomy. What fingers in what pies, what toes in what seas! I have the tourist’s imagination, the day-tripper’s vision. Fleeing the ordinary, crossing state lines, greedy at Customs and impatient for the red stamps on my passports like lipstick kisses on an envelope from a kid in the summer camp. Yes, and there’s wolf in me too now. God, how I honor a difference and crave the unusual, life like a link of mixed boxcars.” He put a finger in the lining of the bear’s silken ear. He kissed its mouth and vaulted his tongue over her teeth, probing with it for the roof of her mouth. Then the bear’s tongue was in his throat, not horrible, only strange, the cunning length and marvelous flexibility an avatar of flesh, as if life were in it like an essence sealed in a tube, and even the breath, the taste of living, rutting bear, delicious to him as the taste of poisons vouchsafed not to kill him, as the taste of a pal’s bowel or a parent’s fats and privates.

He mooned with the giant bear, insinuating it backwards, guiding it as he would a horse with subtle pressures, squeezes, words and hugs. The bear responded, but you do not screw a bear as you would a woman and, seeing what he was about to do, she suddenly resisted. Now he was the horse — this too — and the bear the guide, and she crouched, a sort of semi-squat, and somehow shifted her cunt, sending it down her body and up behind her as a tap dancer sends a top hat down the length of her arm. With her head stretching out, pushing up and outward like the thrust of a shriek, cantilevering impossibly and looking over her shoulder, she signaled Ashenden behind her.

He entered her from the rear, and oddly he had never felt so male, so much the man, as when he was inside her. Their position reinforced this, the bear before him, stooped, gymnastically leaning forward as in the beginning of a handstand, and he behind as if he drove sled dogs. He might have been upright in a chariot, some Greek combination of man and bear exiled in stars for a broken rule. So good was it all that he did not even pause to wonder how he fit. He fit, that’s all. Whether swollen beyond ordinary length himself or adjusted to by some stretch-sock principle of bear cunt (like a ring in a dime store that snugs any finger), he fit. “He fit, he fit and that was it,” he crooned happily, and moved this way and that in the warm syrups of the beast, united with her, ecstatic, transcendent, not knowing where his cock left off and the bear began. Not deadened, however, not like a novocained presence of tongue in the mouth or the alien feel of a scar, in fact never so filled with sensation, every nerve in his body alive with delight, even his broken hand, even that, the nerves rearing, it seemed, hind-legged almost, revolting under their impossible burden of pleasure, vertiginous at the prospect of such orgasm, counseling Ashenden to back off, go slow, back off or the nerves would burst, a new lovely energy like love’s atoms split. And even before he came, he felt addicted, hooked; where would his next high come from, he wondered almost in despair, and how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, and what awfulness must follow such rising expectations?

And they went at it for ten minutes more and he and the bear came together.

“ ouhw ouhw nnng,” said the bear.

“” groaned Ashenden, and fell out of the bear and lay on his back and looked at the stars.

And he lay like that for half an hour, catching his breath, feeling his nerves coalesce, consolidating once more as a man, his hard-on declining, his flesh turning back into flesh, the pleasure lifting slow as fever. And thinking. So. I’m a sodomite. But not just any ordinary sodomite with a taste for sheep or a thing for cows, some carnivore’s harmless extension of appetite that drives him to sleep with what he eats. No. I’m kinky for bears.

And then, when he was ready, when at last he could once more feel his injured hand, he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The bear was gone, though he thought he saw its shape reclined beside a tree. He stood up and looked down and examined himself. When he put his clothes back on, they hung on him like flayed skin and he was conscious of vague withdrawal symptoms in his nuts. He moved into the moonlight. His penis looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Had it still been erect the blood might perhaps have gone unnoticed, a faint flush; no longer distended, it seemed horrid, wet, thick as paint. He cupped his hand beneath himself and caught one drop in his palm. He shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t just screwed a bear, I’ve fucked a virgin!”

Now his old honor came back to chide him. He thought of Jane dying in the castle, of the wolf mask binding her eyes like a dark handkerchief on the vision of a condemned prisoner, of it binding his own and of the tan beard across his face like a robber’s bandanna. Ashenden shuddered. But perhaps it was not contagious unless from love and honor’s self-inflicted homeopathy. Surely he would not have to die with her. All he had to do was tell her that he had failed the test, that he had not met her conditions. Then he knew that he would never tell her this, that he would tell her nothing, that he would not even see her, that tomorrow — today, in an hour or so when the sun was up — he would have Plympton’s man take him to the station, that he would board a train, go to London, rest there for a day or two, take in a show, perhaps go to the zoo, book passage to someplace far, someplace wild, further and wilder than he had ever been, look it over, get its feel, with an idea of maybe settling down one day. He’d better get started. He had to change.

He remembered that he was still exposed and thought to cover himself lest someone see him, but first he’d better wipe the blood off his penis. There was a fresh handkerchief in his pocket, and he took it out, unfolded it and strolled over to the pond. He dipped the handkerchief in the water and rubbed himself briskly, his organ suddenly tingling with a new surge of pleasure, but a pleasure mitigated by twinges of pain. There was soreness, a bruise. He placed the handkerchief back in his pocket and handled himself lightly, as one goes over a tire to find a puncture. There was a small cut on the underside of his penis that he must have acquired from the bear. Then the blood could have been mine, he thought. Maybe I was the virgin. Maybe I was. It was good news. Though he was a little sad. Post-coitum tristesse, he thought. It’ll pass.

He started back through art to the house, but first he looked over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the sleeping bear. And he thought again of how grand it had been, and wondered if it was possible that something might come of it. And seeing ahead, speculating about the generations that would follow his own, he thought, Air. Water, he thought. Fire, Earth, he thought…And honey.