Sign Languages

EMOLLIENTS

Her chapped hands, dipped in the lavatory, turned the water pink. “Jesus,” she said, and held them there as she looked at herself in the unlighted mirror. Pushing her nose close to the cool glass, she turned her head. Where has the wind harmed me? she asked, and looked at lips, temples, cheeks. I am beautiful, she said with her eyes at their reflection.

And she is telling the truth.

But just in case, she applied a half-dozen oils and lotions. The consistency of Todd’s semen, she thought. Warming it on her fingertips, she glistened eyelids and chin. She perused her olive face. I’m half Indian, she told them all at work and before in college and on down to when she had found out. On your mother’s side, her mother had said. Because her father was pale, always twenty-eight, and in uniform in the photograph on the chest of drawers in the pink light of her girl’s room. And now here, on the other side of this very wall.

She saw, as she rubbed her warming dark skin, the pores healthy and small-grained like the finest paper at work where she was immensely popular. The men took her to lunch, the women did too, or she treated them. There were no hard feelings; they were all the same age. Everyone in the office was. And so were the clients she opened up houses for or office fronts in strip malls.

She closed her brown eyes but remembered them and saw herself seeing Todd’s body on her sheets, his smooth penis encircled by a pink ribbon she’d tied there. Happy Birthday to us all, they’d said earlier at the party. We’re all twenty-six. Marvin Waters was thirty-three and owns us all, they’d laughed. Old Marvin, the old sport. Himself thin and muscular — that exciting combination. And opening her eyes, going to lie down for a moment, her face covered with herbs in some fantastic decoction of mint and chervil and gelatin from sheep’s feet and glacier water, she saw Marvin’s penis too. Thicker like the pony’s she’d once seen. That before nine and therefore with her handsome but pale father before he failed to float to safety in Laos.

There was Madelaine Woo at the office. Such power in the moon face. Like some brown full platter. All cheeks and such hair. Brilliant and coarse as the pony’s.

She left the mirror and now she lay still in her warming bedroom. It is almost dark, she said to herself, and looked outside at the sugar-fine snow on branches.

She would not read anything on her bedside table; she didn’t turn to the magazines or poems from newspapers her mother clipped and mailed. They were alike, so why think about her now? There’s her picture, too, beyond my bare but hosed feet. Nice toes, he’d said. On a bus trip once, his fingers beginning there. You two are like twins, people said. And they were. Olive. Browns in eyes and hair. Once they’d changed roles at home for a whole weekend. Like that movie Freaky Friday, except there were no misadventures. She liked that word from one of her magazines. For her there never were. She knew she was only a bit too tall at five eleven. And a half, okay? A half. Not at all fat. Not thin, though. Not the anorexia of those hideous models.

We are just right, aren’t we, she told the photographs as she flexed her toes.

And she turned on the bed when Ms. Bojangles leapt to the window ledge, meowed through the double glass. “Not now,” she said. I’m going to rest. And yet once turned on her side away from the darkening day, she smiled. Comfortable in her clothes, the skin perfect now from mare’s butter and summer savory. Smiled because we’re alike, Ms. Bojangles and me here in my warming room. Not curious, that’s all silliness. But active, energetic. But now after work, she decided not to drive this Friday night to exercise, and not to feed the cat now or herself, though on the edge of sleep that flowed like an exotic liquor Todd offered or like semen or some full-page ad all colors and promise, she remembered her duties and answered them like she always had — who had taught her that? — with miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. Then, his house is in the village though.

Now there was a knock far away and she turned on her back and tried to listen for her own snore. That’s what he’d joked. Like a bunkhouse. And she’d remembered movies. Old and distasteful men. Her grandparents dead long ago in a car wreck. She’d never seen them in photographs; oh, perhaps. But they were in their twenties and wearing fantastic clothes.

At the side door she said “Yes?” to the head made level with her waist by the three cement steps down to the carport. She pulled the thick robe around her, felt the chill on her ankles and up her calves.

“Hello, Nancy. Sorry…,” he said, and as he turned his face up into the light weakened by the filter of the screen door, she saw it was his unfamiliar face. The skin rough, raw on his left cheek, the one now turned north. The dark spots heightened by the cold. They looked at his hand on the doorknob. His other one at his collar, closing the material over white hairs like the snow-dusted grass near his feet. A large crumpled shopping bag sat on the bottom step.

“Sorry to bother you. I’ve left something in the shed. It’s okay, I have a key.” He dug in his pocket and lifted it. Shook it as if they were both deaf. Or children. Though she, nodding, saw he wasn’t. Go away, she thought. And nodded vigorously, the updraft all over her now and robbing her of a lot of work on knees and buttocks.

Someday she would buy her own house, she thinks, and closes him out. I am a realtor after all. They turn back-to-back and she won’t bother to watch him walk down the hill to the shed. Because she doesn’t now consider him at all. Mr. Warrant. Her landlord; this house’s owner. And later, eating something ultralight and microwaved though she always agrees, one, she doesn’t have to watch her weight and, two, they really don’t do food justice, she despises him and this rented house. Todd says live in the country. There he has a house and two ferocious fighting cocks. Why not uptown? Madelaine Woo asks. Forget a car and parking hassles. But this was truly one of the best deals in the city. And though it was a small house, the location wasn’t so bad. She had moved here four years ago from college and only occasionally considered moving.

Later, the TV off, all the house gone from toasty to chilly, the red eye of the electric blanket reflected off mother’s faces, father’s face, everyone at the office in exotic costumes as bears and pigs all in great fun. The day someone said you can get your pussy tightened on group insurance and they’d laughed though she’d wondered if it were all a joke. She awoke and considered Mr. Warrant. And got up and out of bed and walked past the snoring Ms. Bojangles.

Wrapped in bathrobe and leg warmers and mittens, she hurried across the frozen yard and fumbled the shed door unlocked. She had never been curious. In school she was polite and attentive and knew, though such things weren’t important really, she only loved activities that brought her to the attention of people — a few, a hundred at pep rallies. I was always beautiful, she knew, taking the flashlight from her robe pocket. And that was only eight years ago, less than eight really. Her fuller hips and breasts filled the robe now as she didn’t wonder, wasn’t curious about her curiosity about Mr. Warrant. Though there in bed in the chill far warmer than this dark shed, she remembered that he hadn’t lived here in years and years. Before she had rented there had been the Squires, then someone else. He’d told her once — and now she surprised herself by recalling it — how he only had this and one other rental house. What had he done for a living? she thought, hurrying the beam over her scant holdings — yard tools she had bought once and now let the black boy use in the spring and summer. But what would he have left and now needed? She stepped gingerly over rakes and cakes of mud, the smell all frigid oil and metal. Old, she thought, disgusted with greasy red shop towels and the yellowed refuse of newspapers someone had used for moving plates and vases. Maybe me, she thought. On a shelf at the back, the wind on her face through a knothole worrying her — she felt it on her drying lips; she envisioned spreading cracks, the deep furrows at too early an age — there was a box opened and empty. The gray duct tape having taken off layers of cardboard with it.

In the bathroom later, she looked at her face and decided on an emollient. And in bed she was as sure as she could be, having paid little attention to all that “out there,” as she referred to it when the cute little black boy showed up biweekly, the box was his and had once been sealed tightly. She felt very tired. I’ve taxed my brain tonight, she said. She wished for someone. She moved in bed feeling, seeing, their two bodies all muscle and motion. His tanned skin on hers. The long shiny tube slowly inside. All oil and cream, sex the smell of spermicide, redolent of hospital corridors.

A week later there had been more snow and it had fallen wet and thick. Then there was a northern blast. From the top of the world, they’d said on TV. She liked that phrase. And there was a new man at the office. He was young and lonely. His hair lay on his neck in gorgeous tight curls. She talked to him and so did the others. Madelaine Woo almost swallowed him whole once at lunch.

But now with the thought of him, his body all beribboned in her mind, she took the River Road ramp and the Mill City Road instead of going her usual way from near the stadium to the office. “Nancy…?” she said out loud and turned off the Cocteau Twins, the sound of it tiresome to her for the first time. She’d have to move on to another group.

Surely he’s home, she said as she used her knowledge of the city, though there were never houses they handled over here past the cement plants. And, of course, heavy industries weren’t their concern at all. As she glided past chained gates, she wondered how one sold those monsters. Old, blackened, rambling. No good lines, nothing clear and distinct. She imagined all the equipment inside and came away with only the vaguest outlines. Towering, greasy. She thought of the shed the other night and said the address where she mailed the rent checks. No ring to it. 718 Gilchrist Road. Mr. William Warrant. William. Bill. Billy. And she laughed and slowed to cross some train tracks.

There was nowhere to start really. He stood at the door, she, below, on the walk. She knew what he saw, his eyes all over her, his voice worried, disturbed. “Is there anything wrong at the house?” he asked. “No, nothing.” And may I come in and yes, of course.

She had little time to focus; they walked through darkened rooms: furniture heavy, covered with chenille bedspreads, their tiny tassels and balls touching a monochrome, thick shag. Oh Jesus, she considered trying to sell all this. Saw it as a buyer she had ushered inside would, though in that case, she would have known everything already. She always did her homework, that’s what they all said.

His eyes were a milky blue. From disease? she wondered, pausing before putting the cup of strong coffee to her lips. This afternoon the liver spots against the pale skin like ink on parchment.

“What was in the box?” she asked. You are so honestly straightforward, they’d always said. Yes, that’s me, she answered. She saw herself, felt her neck arch. Looked down her nose so theatrically, they laughed.

He poured more coffee. From somewhere in cabinets he handed down a package of cake donuts all powdery like cocaine. That she avoided. And now these offerings all dry and, she knew, long past the freshness date she attempted to locate.

“Why?” he asked. She shrugged. And he took it up all naturally. There were no looks, tones in his voice. No reluctance. No fear of the unknown. These she had painstakingly learned to recognize in buyers. Clients. People she served. My, you are good at this, the middle-aged men would say. And she knew that without these wives they would have said so young and attractive.

But not this old. Face sunk. Hands rough. He had been a foreman in one of those mills, she remembered, proud of her memory.

He told her about his wife. And how last week, “out of the blue,” he said, he’d remembered the collection of mugs. See, look, and rising slowly, he brought them down from somewhere in the vast cabinets made of pressed wood. She saw their weak magnet locks. They clicked shut, the sound of Ms. Bojangles’s claws on linoleum. And before her he spread out an array of heavy graceless mugs from all fifty states. Where we traveled together, you know. Oh, not all fifty, of course. We cheated a little. His laugh raspy and short. “I’d forgotten them, left them.” And she’d loved them, too. And Nancy turned her listening away from the tone his voice took. It was outside her recognition. She nodded; she thought of them both living in this house. But she shook it out. A person simply can’t picture most things. I’m all energy and light, she knew. No one ever said full of imagination. What good would that be? she asked herself. Know your strengths, everyone’d said.

But she listened some and drank too much bad coffee. Folger’s, already ground. She tried thinking of it as espresso. Now that helped, made it better.

She had died ten years ago. Almost to the day last week. January 17. A Thursday. Almost to the day. “Ain’t it something, Nancy?” He spoke her name and she was startled from her half reverie. Yes, you thought of the cups then. Lovely, she said, and touched the one from Texas, an oil derrick spouting oil.

From some deep back room he brought the picture of her at fifty. And there she was in her soft hands. Old, turning plump. The cheeks heavily powdered. The hair cropped close to her head. She remembered an awful, masculine picture of Gertrude Stein in some college textbook. All face and dikey. Women filling women’s pussies.

But he talked on; she listened. She concentrated some. She focused herself. She decided, for some reason she wasn’t at all curious about, to pay attention. And he told this and that. Someone dead in Korea. Illness. Travel. His wife did this, he said that.

All until it was dark early. You know how darkness comes on in January in the northeast. And she was too quickly ready to leave. Or not quick enough. Perhaps he was tired out, at the end, considering why all this had happened. Felt violated or foolish. She almost fled; he almost pushed her out and down the steps. They were terribly embarrassed. Full of civility and politeness of words and gestures. Agreed on the lateness, the cold, the need to drive carefully and quickly past the barren mills.

“Well, well,” she said. You are quite a surprising girl. Ms. Bojangles would be speechless. She’d tell Madelaine Woo. No, she’d tell the new man at lunch in the art gallery cafeteria on Friday before the De Chirico exhibit and, she hoped, just hours before she tied lovely ribbons around his penis.

But you know that’s not what happened at all. And no one in the world would have guessed it. Except her father, the only person who intuited things about her, who had skimmed along just above the jungle canopy with the smell of electrical fire in his nostrils, his face averted from flashing lights, the lightness of descent lessened only by the dead man behind him. At that moment, before the sea-green trees proved unlike waves, as hard as jade, he remembered her eight-year-old back ramrod straight at the piano stool, angry but unrelenting, demanding the keys obey her. And only he knew about her, understood everything that would take place without him. It’ll end bad, he said to himself. But at that moment in October of 1969, it is impossible to know his exact reference.

So in two days she was back at Mr. Warrant’s. It was Monday afternoon; there had been more snow, a deeper, bone-level cold. She knocked, using her left hand, the other arm full of groceries. As she shopped she had said, he’ll like this and maybe this. And soon she’d collected eighty dollars’ worth of exotics: pickled quails’ eggs, a rare Tuscan cheese, the greenest, most expensive olive oil in the city.

But there was little surprise on Mr. Warrant’s face. He led her to the kitchen. She chatted about the terrible weather. He told about his bad knee. “Here, right here,” he said, and raised his pants leg. Without reservations. His shin discolored and hairless. As shiny as if he’d hot-waxed it. She looked away. Instead she cut onions into the olive oil, the expensive oil perfuming this room where they stood together. Until he sat and bent over a stack of crossword puzzle books.

Later he turned his nose up at the plate, complained about the small portions though he ate almost nothing at all. There was exotic salad, exotic pasta. She promised she’d bring over her new pasta machine. Then, at the table, at that second, her face toward his which looked away, his eyes on the crossword puzzle book on the table, at his elbow, she saw a lover she’d forgotten who’d run dough through a machine as he stood naked in the kitchen.

It’s like he expects all this, she thought, eating demurely, pretending she was in a restaurant with music and candles and aquariums built into the walls. Here, really, it was too warm and awfully humid as if their bodies, the cooling oil, pasta, salad, puzzle books gave off water, sweated into the air. She watched droplets stream down the door behind him that opened onto some room or yard she’d never seen, that she didn’t want to see. There at the table she promised she’d never learn about a yard or room or garage or if there was a car or anything else at all.

She took an interest in Mr. Warrant’s puzzles. In some other room removed from the kitchen, where there were no odors of expensive oils and seasonings, they sat at a card table in the middle of furniture covered with chenille bedspreads. Onstage like chess champions, she thought. But a ghost audience.

“You’re a smart one,” he said. “Yep, you are a smart one.” And she was surprised at his limited vocabulary. Vocabulary, she said to herself, and realized it was a word from school, further surprised she could fill out the puzzles with ease. But they’re easy, of course. While he suffered over them. “No, don’t tell me now. Keep quiet.” His voice a command. Like Todd in throaty, aroused tones, telling her to roll onto her stomach.

She smelled him, imbibed him. What is this but age? And she couldn’t place any of it exactly. Not among the most narrowly focused recollections. Not leather she’d smelled in France. Or fabrics in shops. Or the smell of any man anywhere before. Wasn’t it a house whose door she had just unlocked? On a tree-lined street, broken sidewalk a disadvantage. She saw clients stepping over it dramatically, arching eyebrows. A house on the edge somewhere in Pittsfield maybe. Almost a dozen things. Fashionable, ghetto, expensive, cheap. But the air when she opens it first, alone, doing her homework. God, she’s devoted, hard-driving, a hell-of-an-agent. Agent, she liked the word. A secret agent. Words and puzzles; she breathed in again. She’s not wearing underwear, you know. The young office boys talked at the cooler under the aerial view of the city they sold off piece by piece. She bends over for fun. To tease. But no, she never teased. Or not really.

The odor of this very old man. Only a little like walls in houses that almost sell but never do. They talk about nothing at all. She cleans up but leaves her watch on the window ledge as the excuse for coming back she doesn’t need. He sleeps at the card table a deep, dead sleep. There is no snoring, no movement. He is dead, she thinks, and cannot touch him; not the weak-muscled arm, even the shoulder under the thin shirt. She goes out and home and takes a long, hot shower, smells her skin, and ladles it with balm of peaches and placenta.

But every night she is there, at the door. Mr. Warrant’s face expressionless. I am a social worker, she thinks. That’s what it’s like to him.

She moves about the house. It is unsalable. It is huge and amorphous, shifting and dark with those high, narrow windows people sold and bought once which look out into tree-tops and sky sliced by power lines. Add to that the weakness of his small-wattage bulbs. But no, she says, I’ll make do with it all like this. Exactly. Though from room to room she is lost. And turning back around, finds the door to the kitchen or the room with him at the card table. As if there were fifteen kitchens and rooms with card tables. All off a room dreadfully dark, the furniture towering. Like her images of the barren mills. His house a closed factory, without production. Waiting for nothing at all. The odor of the shed, of its newspapers and grease, confined her for a time to the two rooms where every night they worked their way through endless puzzles. “You are bright.” I am also beautiful with perfect hips, she told herself. Not many can say that — perfect hips. Absolutely perfect. Sculpture, one had said. Brown. Delicious. Some foreign fruit. A soufflé. Risen to perfection.

Often he dozed profoundly. She straightened the kitchen, put her graceful fingers into deep and obscure cabinets. The cups, those mugs, the plates dulled by a century of bacon grease.

They watched TV, “Wheel of Fortune.” He called her Joyce. “Who?” she’d turned to ask over the card table scattered with puzzle books. “What?” he answered her. “Joyce ‘who’?” His eyes snapped back to the expensive gifts for the winning contestant. As exotic and foreign to him as sapphires and camels — an animal she’d ridden with pleasure in Cairo; a gem she’d been given more than once.

She read her magazines, her magnificent suit attracting the chenille to it, mixing with Ms. Bojangles’s yellow hair. Even you could never sell this house, she told herself. What did I just say? Joyce, who?

Then she stayed the night. She planned nothing. Why? What do you plan? Planning was for work. She had slept with Marvin again. He had eaten strawberry jam off her clitoris. She had screamed for the first time some sound that had sent Ms. Bojangles tearing down the hall to sit near the heat vent and had jerked Marvin’s head up. In the dark his eyes like Negroes’ in old movies. Feets do yo stuff. “Nancy, my god, did I hurt you?” But she lay perfectly still, speechless. At first it was because she had no reason to give him, then it was a game, finally she couldn’t bear to talk. He dressed and drove away, the rumble of his Lancia like thunder through frozen February air at three in the morning.

They had eaten bacon sandwiches and played the puzzles. She was getting worse; he was improving. They watched “Wheel of Fortune” and, after scouring the ancient black iron skillet, she shook him gently, averting her eyes from the thick strand of saliva connecting the corner of his lip to a liver spot on the back of his hand the shape of Chile. Let’s go there, the German lover had pointed at a poster in a window. Santiago de Chile. The street full of assured brown faces.

She led him through the darkness from the card table to the bedroom she had guessed at but never been in. And inside it was the same dark towering furniture, a room from Dickens, she thought, surprising herself with an image of some woodcut from a high school library book.

She undressed in a frenzy, upsetting herself a little. This isn’t like me at all. Hurrying is spoiling it, she thought. But she turned off the light, left her clothes in a pile, and slid between the covers. The sheets were clammy, they felt as if they’d never warm. She rolled side to side and finally lay still, turned her eyes to Mr. Warrant, who sat heavily on the opposite edge of the bed. Slowly he took off his slippers. Still sitting, he removed his pants. And in the twilight from some outside light through the half-opened blinds, she shuddered. The more he took off — old-fashioned undershirt like Madelaine Woo wore to picnics, her nipples huge rosettes, the billowing boxer shorts — the smaller he became until lying next to her, letting out a heavy sigh, he was nothing at all. She was the weight in the bed. And when she turned toward him, he rolled to meet her. And the instant they touched his whole body twitched as if he’d been electrified like those TV patients with paddles to their chests.

“Nancy!” he said. “What is this? My God, girl. My heavens. This isn’t…” But he didn’t finish. And neither could she, though, her hands on his thin leg, her mind snagged the sentence and tried to complete it. This isn’t. But positive as always — as they always said, she took the lemons of life and made lemonade — she ran her freshly oiled fingers up his thigh.

Her graceful fingers found his penis and massaged it carefully. She located its thick undervein and followed it with long reassuring strokes. But there was no length to it. His scrotum was a thick still bag in her palm. And when she ducked her head under the covers, her tongue ready to moisten, coax, he held her head still. In the absolute dark her nose touched his hairless chest and she breathed in all the unusual odors. She felt his chest heave in spasms and she listened to him cry through the heavy damp quilts. For a long time she rested, his hand having released her hair, and she heard his stomach rumble from the bacon. She smelled his age like all old things that weren’t people. Her own grandparents had died young. She had never sold a nursing home. Old people never came up to her on the streets. Distant grandchildren always put their useless houses on the market.

She came up from the covers into the twilight and listened to Mr. Warrant, on the edge of deep sleep, on the precipice of years of dreams that combined and recombined, mumble about Joyce and his wife and someone else, Bob or Rob, or maybe not that name at all. The tides at Inchon. Her own name, Nancy, called out once as if it were punctuation, an exclamation point. Or was it a question mark? Nancy? This isn’t…

She lay stretched out next to him and didn’t strain to listen, to decipher his weightless words as airy as his body next to hers. She was substantial, lotioned, perfumed, ready for anything. But slowly she saw herself right in this room lighted by the streetlight she passed every afternoon now when she drove straight here from work. “Hey, I’ve been phoning you,” Marvin said. The newest man, too. Your machine broken? Yes, it is, she said. And brought Ms. Bojangles and put her out of sight in a far room where they were both sure of mice, the chenille balls offering unlimited entertainment.

Then she was eager for it all to be done with — the dinners with little variation between fried foods; endless puzzles; television — so in the twilight she could listen to his weightless digressions and fill herself with his odor, the pungency of the room, the licorice smell of all the photographs, the gray underwear. The carpet full of pieces of paper; underneath the bed, the exposed springs a jungle of cobwebs and lint. There must be remnants of her in there, Nancy said to herself. For now, in the afternoons, before fried pork chops, strips of mealy steak, she would come in here and raise the blinds, her one act of alteration, and examine drawers and closets.

But there was nothing left of hers except a closet of empty hangers wrapped in yarn, cloth flowers entwining the crooks. And empty bureau drawers; his dingy clothes all in one shallow top drawer. Under pajamas never out of their wrappers, she found a pistol but jerked away from it. The chill on its handle like the cold of all inanimate metal. She recalled the shed, the gloom of all the closed factories lining her route here.

She drank in everything, you know. Her father wouldn’t have been a bit surprised; her mother, always out of mind, would have been properly scandalized. Her fellow workers remarked on her calm. Someone thought she was pregnant; impossible given the impossibility of such from the small soft penis she only cupped as he told her about the drowned boy at Inchon; the brother who’d stolen his girl when they were teenagers and who lived for thirty years in a VA hospital because he lay down on the outskirts of Metz and refused to advance or retreat, to take any further actions against the enemy.

Madelaine Woo said, “You look tired,” and they both saw her face left unpampered. The emollients, placentas, balms of tarragon, and avocadoes at home in the empty house.

She took herself a history. She forgot Ms. Bojangles in the far room living off mice and quickly forgetting about people. The boy at Inchon became her lover. The penis in her hand swelled in her mind and took her so huge it filled her anus too. Sometimes she moaned as Mr. Warrant talked. At puzzletime she brought out yellowed ones she had found and carefully erased. So that the answers were references to men and events thirty years ago. Mr. Warrant was surprised because he thought everyone had forgotten. “My God,” he’d say. “Nancy, look at this. Nancy, see here?”

She moved more slowly. Sensuous; she’s practicing for something, someone, they’d said at the office. She dropped out of fashion but they all opened their mouths in excitement. She is beautiful, they all agreed. She is magnificent. Her hips are perfect. A delicious soufflé.

In the mirror she examined her face. She scrubbed away the makeup. She had passed a point somewhere recently, she knew. Once, without it, she was a child, a featureless girl. But now she was almost eyebrowless and a painful plain. I’m this way now. Belonging to this mirror and this unsalable place. I do my work, but I move more slowly. I think, but often I am there waiting for twilight and the absence of his body. I have always had the passion of pursuit, so I’ll pursue this. All of this. This isn’t… she remembered. But now nodded at these eyes in the mirror and said “Yes, it is” out loud.

She discovered the cat and called it Ms. Bojangles again. She abandoned the plates high in the dark towering cabinets to all the up wafting grease. She cut her hair too short. They were surprised. Her father slammed into the treetops in 1969 and wished her luck, never thought of his wife, cried out a moment before dissolution at his daughter’s terrible purposefulness which could always give pain.

And here’s the contrast: As limbs whipped the metal to shreds, he only wanted to live. And live everything again at once — to be her age, younger, older, older than anyone he’d ever met. Be an ancient man protected from harm on a screened porch. The very last thought the amorphous face, constantly changing in some movie he’d seen once.

But not Nancy, not now. Now she came to Mr. Warrant’s and fried foods, worked puzzles, watched TV, lay next to his minute body, her own body more weightless from not soaking in herbed butters and comfit of womb of lamb.

What is she doing? they began to wonder. Did you notice too? And Madelaine Woo nodded her flat moon face like the affirmation of an Asian goddess. Her clothes aren’t straightened. And no one but the two “gopher” boys talked about her odor. The smell of sour milk or of meat grease poorly doused with Chanel.

Marvin believed it might be drugs but didn’t say that to anyone; instead he turned his attention to someone in the accounting department. Only Madelaine asked and, receiving a vacant stare, didn’t ask again for over two months until she cajoled Nancy to lunch at a new restaurant full of aquariums and gorgeous waiters in tight Italian pants that zipped up the side.

“What is wrong? What’s happened? Are you ill? You had a mammogram last month… is that it? Nancy, can I help? Everyone’s worried sick about you.”

And on and on until she had stopped, her face flushed, her eyes full of tears. Real tears for me, Nancy thought, and patted Madelaine’s hand and told her everything would be fine soon. Only a temporary personal problem. “It’s my mother… she’s terribly sick,” she told her. And added the threat of cancer since Madelaine had mentioned the mammogram.

And later in one of the rooms, her rumpled suit collecting cat hair, chenille threads, the odor of pork sausage and eggs for supper, she was sorry for lying, for sacrificing her mother, and wondered what if it were true.

But she breathed in the age, was, to her mind, older than her mother, than the man she slept next to every night. Once he had reached for her, his small hand running up her thigh. But she had brushed him away and felt sincere and elevated by her dismissal. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she whispered into his deaf ear. “Huh?” “Not now, later,” she spoke up, her voice muffled by carpet, drapes, afghans.

She still did well at selling houses. She’s lost almost all of her beauty, the newer man said. The newest woman had never seen it. “But not her touch; no, she’s still got that magic touch.”

I’m learning everything, she thought. About it all. And she took on the older clients, men who wanted to rub up against her in narrow doorways in empty office buildings. Their wives in other cities. And she stayed still for them, her eyes averted, until they both passed into long corridors scuffed by mailing carts.

By now she had practically emptied her house. There were a few clothes, all the photographs, the answering machine all lighted up, the tape crammed with voices and whining beeps.

She never altered a single thing at Mr. Warrant’s. She tucked her underwear in the drawer below his, she drank disgustingly thick whole milk. She delighted in the filtered light through the blinds. She roared her car past the destroyed mills; it rocketed over the uneven tracks.

Until a Saturday morning when she brought the heavy pistol from the drawer and sat on the bed. Their bed, she said to herself. It was like a movie pistol, the barrel long and octagonal. She counted its sides more than once.

She recollected a photograph whose absence or perhaps presence somewhere else — at her mother’s, not in albums but in shoeless boxes? — worried her. It wasn’t her father but a friend of his in uniform wearing a pistol in a waxy brown scabbard. “A fellow officer,” she heard him say. His voice was a young man’s voice in her ears.

She believed it was unloaded, thought she’d seen the cartridges in a drawer or in a jar in some other room. But she couldn’t be sure and so quickly brought the barrel up to her lips and opened wide. “Ouch, your teeth!” the German had shouted. And a joke, long ago though only in high school, wasn’t it? About the desire for fold-back teeth in a woman. This thickness on her tongue and mouth like lava, or an animal burrowing in the throat.

She sucked the metal of it. All greasy and shedlike. Garages and body shops. The litter of unsalable things.

But you know she didn’t bleed until almost sixty hours later. It was a little before two in the morning when she sat up and said “Oh Jesus” because she had never done something like this.

“What’s wrong? Nancy?” And his back’s joints popping, Mr. Warrant sat up. “Goddammit,” he shouted and pulled away from her.

They fumbled in the dark, their legs sticky from her blood until he thumbed on the light, its three-way bulb only working on low, barely illuminating the two of them there, the covers flung back and Nancy’s panties the chocolate red of refused blood.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” she said, and stood and surveyed the damage, her mind full of the necessity for towels, sheets, had it gone through to the mattress? Thinking, there really is no other bed.

“Good God,” Mr. Warrant said looking up at her, past stained clothes, his eyes wide.

She came around to him and sat, taking his shoulders, forcing his face away. He thought it was his blood, she said to herself. “It’s all right… it’s okay… it’s mine. I’ll go get some towels and clean sheets.”

“No, no,” he mumbled, his lips still thick from sleep. Both their breaths the concoction of the days’ odors.

“I didn’t remember the blood, you know.”

Nancy nudged him out to arm’s length. His wispy hair like a baby’s, his face discolored on one side. “It’s been thirty years I guess. All that… all of that.” She watched him look at her differently. She believed he wanted to grab the covers up or flee. His face was full of fear, and she knew hers was too. She believed they sat there looking exactly the same. She clenched his shoulders, her fingers dug into his flimsy flesh.

Nancy worked quickly for almost half an hour until she finished and they slept. She had refused to leave. She wouldn’t dare go to the convenience store near the loop, out past the foundries. Instead she had folded one of his undershirts into a roll and pulled it between her legs.

“She’s changed,” the newer man said. But they never knew what they meant by that. And once, overhearing Marvin talk about the new girl he’d slept with, she had stepped around the corner just to shut him up for a moment. The triumph, she knew, only lasted until she was out of earshot.

She went back once a week for over a month, but the doors were locked, and she never knocked, and though she had keys, she never put them into any of the locks.

Her clothes came in boxes left in her carport or on the tiny front porch. They came over a period of weeks. One she recognized as the carton that had held the mugs. Later, she’d gone out to the shed and unlocked it and saw he had taken all the boxes.

She handled some houses better now. She found she was less afraid when she saw buckled sidewalks and walls patterned by the bright squares from removed pictures and photographs.

“You scared me,” he had printed on the lid of one of the first boxes with a felt-tipped marker. She pictured his hand working a puzzle.

Two months later she phoned him and his voice was as she remembered it, but now she knew he had never talked to her much and had never, she believed, looked her in the eyes until the night she had bled on them both.

“Hello, Mr. Warrant,” and she was pleased his voice was firm and not surprised. Neither hung up because of any of a dozen unarticulated thoughts that rushed like cold air, then hot, through both their minds. But though she begged him, he refused to take any rent at all and, until she moved downtown with Ms. Bojangles and across the courtyard from Madelaine Woo, he returned every month’s check in a brown envelope with the return address of some company carefully marked through.