THE WORLD IS THE HOME OF LOVE AND DEATH
Harold Brodkey

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

The Bullies

Spring Fugue

What I Do for Money

Religion

Waking

Car Buying

Lila and S.L.

Jibber-Jabber in Little Rock

The World Is the Home of Love and Death

Dumbness Is Everything

A Guest in the Universe

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE BULLIES

The hard rain sounds like a heartbeat. The heavy green canvas awnings around the three-sided screened porch buck and grunt and creak; they sag with the hard rain, and they drip, and then suddenly they rise and twist and water splashes out. Inside those passionate sounds, the porch glider squeals and the wicker chair squeaks. Ida Nicholson, Momma’s guest, in expensively crude, heavyish, wrinkled linen and with stylishly stately curls on either side of her head (her hair smells of hot iron even in the rain), sits with bossy nervousness in the wicker chair.

Momma has on rouge and eye shadow; and her lipstick is so bright in the damp air that it shouts in my eye. Ma’s porch grandeur. She is all dressed up. Her eyes are not fully lit; they are stirring like half-lit theaters. The lights never go on, the scenes are not explained. Her nakedness of but only half-lit soul puts a disturbance into the air—I feel shouted at by that, too. Her art is immersed in darkness. The floor of the porch—concrete with an oval straw rug—smells of the rain. Lila’s voice: “Ida, everything that I do on this matter, I do because S.L. loves this child—he’s pretty, isn’t he? You wouldn’t think he was just flotsam and jetsam. You know me: I may vote Republican yet; I’m not the maternal type—the child is S.L.’s pet project. S.L. makes the decisions; if he doesn’t call in a doctor because the child doesn’t talk, there’s an excellent reason: S.L. has thought it out: if the child is real sick, what are we going to do? How long can we keep him? Now he’s doing fine. S.L.’s in no rush: sufficient evil unto the day. I can’t tell you what to think, but I can advise. I recommend it to everyone, Let’s live and let live. I’m not an inexperienced person, Ida; in a lot of battles, I count for more than a man.”

Ida is delicately made but ungainly—that is a kind of sexual signal. It is an indication of will. Her movements and eyes are more for purposes of giving social and political and intellectual messages than sexual ones—this is a matter of pride as well as of defiance, a useful grotesquerie. Her alertness is a kind of crack-the-whip thing—not uncommon in the Middle West but uncommon there to the extent she takes it when she is not being folksy and Middle Western. Her style of dress, expensive and sportif, French, is obliquely sexual in the manner of women athletes of that day, golf players and tennis players, and is without the insolence that marks the project of the arousal of men: she is seriously chic, magisterially so, and that includes a mock dowdiness.

Lila does not try to compete with that: big-breasted Lila, in white with polka dots and a wide patent-leather belt, is sadly heterosexual—theatrical at it—but convincingly real, not even faintly a pretender. She has the gift, or art, or intrusiveness, of apparent personal authenticity.

Ida’s legs are thin—toylike almost—above flat shoes with fringed shields over the laces. Lila’s legs are those of a cabaret singer, in high-heeled patent-leather pumps, very plain and yet noticeable anyway. Ida has on a white-and-blue tie, Lila a white-and-black polka-dotted scarf caught with a diamond pin. Ida’s “polite” inexpressiveness, a powerful quality in her, and her social rank (her position in relation to what others want from her) add up to her being a dry person, someone with a dry wit, a wonderful person, really, and(to go on using Momma’s terms) she was in charge. Who was I? We were nobodies.

Ida has a pronounced quality of command—but it is not local-dowager stuff—it is charmingly in-and-out—taking turns, fair play (Ida’s phrases)—but (Lila said) she was always the referee and the judge (of what was fair).

Ida feels that nothing in the way of feeling or intellect is a puzzle for her. Her omniscience had lapses but she did not overtly confess to them: she could not have run her kingdom then. Her confidence came from her triumphs: her sister married a newspaper-and-magazine potentate in the East (Boston chiefly). She may have influenced the policies of the newspaper. She always said she did. She was a dilettante philosopher in public conversation and good at it. Then, there were her successes in Europe—social ones, with women: the most difficult kind. She divided feelings into those of pleasure—by which she meant feelings of self-love, the acknowledgment of merit and standing, of the powers of the self—and the feelings of emergency: hurt, rage, self-pity, the necessity for fighting.

Knowing Ida meant you were playing with fire. For Ida, incoherence is ill-health: she becomes an invalid from contradiction—in herself, by others of her. The fluctuation in others of contradiction, the foreign actuality of others’ thoughts, plus her ignored feelings when others show their strange thoughts, cause her nervousness. Ida feels as a Christian (lady) that historically the serious work has been done and that certain forgiveness obtains nearby for silliness—forgiveness overall and acceptance: a truce. For her, religion has altered into manners—through manners she has a high-speed connection to what she considers to be the tragic; and she has a tactful attachment to silliness (everything that is not tragic but is merely sad). She hungers for transcendence. This gives her a beauty that Lila is aware of, an ugly beauty of a sort, a real beauty, the kind men don’t know about: Ida is a someone. Ida’s moral illiteracy, her ethical inanity, are not anything unusual—they are the common human matter of power.

When Ida was on her high horse, you could forget she hated everybody and could do anything she liked and when she did it she didn’t apologize: there was a lot to her. If luck had gone her way, who knows what she could have done? She was a brilliant person who was also no good.

Ida—this is in a moment without men in it—asks, converting her full rank into tentative silliness, with a great deal of calm and yet nervous music in her voice, “Well, Lila—” Pause. “What do you think of the rain?”

Lila sits suddenly still on the porch glider. Her face seems to recognize a great many notes and possibilities in the question—this is sort of a joke—and she replies as if carefully, the false carefulness making an ambiguous music, “I don’t mind rain; my hair holds up in the rain. I’m lucky: I don’t get frizzy.”

Ida puffs on a cigarette. Momma suddenly—naïvely—poses as someone who is not watching Ida.

Ida looks at Momma’s hair—the widow’s peak, the shininess above and below and around, past the polka-dot bandanna (and its tail); and she says, “I’m a daughter of the pioneers, Lilly. I have prairie hair—I get frizzy; it’s a bane: I’m just a workaday person—Lilly—”

That’s special Midwestern talk, including Momma’s grade-school name.

Momma has a drink clasped in a ringed hand; she keeps her eyes lowered even when her old name is uttered. Ida has a drink, too, and a cigarette. Momma sighs: so much deciphering—Ida’s clothes and money and voice and the moment—and then Momma shifts her posture and suddenly “gives up,” as if with overwhelmed innocence or naïveté or ignorance: this is her most common tactic with a powerful woman, to give in, give up, and not mean it: it’s a kind of wit—a kind of sexuality. Ma’s face shows she decides to be the hostess—ordinary. There is a question whether Ida will allow it. Will Ida insist on being at home in Lila’s house? Will she treat it like a pigsty? The particular music—the cast of voice, of face—with which Ma gets ready to do this marks her as worthwhile, as not a novice, as having social promise: “Ida, we have some little sandwiches; Annemarie put them together for you: she stayed away from the noisy lettuce you don’t like—I told her what you said that day at the governor’s luncheon. She made them especially for you—I told her you were coming. You impress—her.” Ma rose and walked across the porch—a sort of workaday hostess: a version of workaday to offer Ida a plate of sandwiches. Momma’s dress has birdlike lights in it and rustlings: she is enclosed in a watery aviary of small lights and small noises. She has a sweetish, and slightly sweaty, full-bodied smell—startling. Her red mouth is, too.

Ida blinks and takes a sandwich and tilts her head like a fragile queen who yet has a sinewy strength of mind. She says, in educated, rapid, smart tones of a kind that Lila has never heard from anyone else, never heard a version of in the movies or onstage: “And you, do I impress you?”

Lila recognizes the power and feels thrilled. She feels the “class” thing her way, as beauty and as enmity—the possibility is that she will be hurt; she is game.

But (in Ida’s terms) she is infinitely sly—Momma has her own fairly complete realm of knowledge and she has her own power: she hears not a complete woman (Lila’s term) but a girl bookworm and a woman who doesn’t smell like a rose: someone lonely, wooden, undemocratic, locally solitary—it’s the Christian snobbery: that mingling of truth and the ideal (Momma’s dichotomy), the truth being loneliness and a kind of poverty of life, of soul, and the ideal being a social reality, symbolized by Ida’s Parisian suit, with its man-cut jacket and pleated skirt, the real ideal (Ma’s term) inside the ideal being the satisfaction of the impulses of a woman of rank (in America, in imitation in this case of European examples): satisfactions, consolations, and rank. What Lila understood as the ideal was earthbound, but it was earthbound romance, self-loss—suicidal bursts of love and extravagance with money to make a real story, a legend around here. Not that she practiced that form of suicide, but she played at its edges. So to speak. What Momma meant by the ideal was the most advantageous human thing for a woman. In order not to be aggravated and go mad or give up: when Momma says she is not young, is not nineteen, this is part of what she means.

Ida feels herself to be a Christian warrior, Ida feels she is a vessel by blood, by blood lineage, for illumination and heroism as part of the matter of competing, as a mark of victory—i.e., of government. She is very stubborn about this.

Lila thinks that is banana oil.

But the fact is that at moments Ida is her ideal.

Ida knows that The Ideal Figure is the one that gets loved but not necessarily embraced.

Ida is impatient with reality and minds it that if you solve one problem, that does not solve all problems.

She has a very elevated notion of personal greatness as a social matter and as an aspect and reward of heartfelt, transcendent belief.

So Ida is often afraid she is being laughed at—terror and anger then display themselves at a distance—abruptly she embodies them and then drowns them in her usual courage and willfulness: this makes her vibrate and be nervous; this fills her with disgust and friendliness. (The more she is drawn to someone, the more disgust she feels. I think it is so she will not be pushed around by her feelings.)

Do I impress you?

Lila’s sense of Ida’s question goes deep in her: Why Ida was asking it was the question. Lila says, “It would hurt my pride to answer that—” Lila pauses. Really, if you have the time and a fine enough nervous system you can study what an elaborate pause it is, what detail work is in it. She says, as if she had not paused, “It would be a risk to answer that.”

Her tone is ineffably muted, respectful daring, and with a lot of heterosexual good sportsmanship in it. Homosexual women, in Ma’s experience, substitute gallantry for sportsmanship, and Ma does not like that. And Ma thinks she is attractive to Ida to the extent that she, Ma, is not homosexual. So Ma is maybe emphasizing this side of herself a lot.

Ida shivers. Ida, girlishly (but a ferocious girl), shows on her face that she admires Lila’s courage: it’s not tacked down (Lila’s phrase): nothing is said.

Ida never—never—detaches herself from considerations of power; neither does Ma, differently, starting from a different background. Ida never associates power with evil, although she says she does, but Ma really does. Ma thinks “goodness” is consolation for not taking the risks to be bad and a leader—i.e., wicked—a good conscience is your reward for avoiding leadership if you ask me.…

Both women can be comic. Ida thinks the stuff of this exchange so far is charming: she says, “I should have worn a hat and gloves.”

“Ha-ha,” Momma says. “That’s some song and dance—hat and gloves and pearls.” But her smile indicates she likes it, too.

So far, so good, Momma feels.

Ida’s sexual courage is limited—those shadowy reaches among the other’s desires and gusts of feeling—the robot courage, a boy’s humility is beyond her. Ida is too impatient with such ordinariness to know that stuff—her love of power forbids it. Lila is too ashamed of her physical self now (at the age she is) to be comfortable sexually: she would like to be like Ida.

They smile, eye each other, smile independently and at an angle without looking at each other; they sit and drink and smoke: a certain sort of physical punctuation.

Ida can sense the presence of the other thing in Lila—that aging sexual power—that power fascinates Ida and makes her a student: this is as docile as she gets, a rebellious student of Lila’s sexual reality, which is, according to Momma’s manner, that of someone whose duty is to be sexual—sexually generous.

Lila’s rambunctiousness is Jewish “mockery” of that and not simple and not comprehensible to Ida. It is an ultimate defiance: a (Jewish) sacrilege. Ida trusts that Lila trades, as everyone does, in humiliations, that Lila’s defiance is that of a Jewess.

Ida puffed restlessly on a new cigarette. She sucked smoke in a French manner. She eyed Lila to see if Lila recognized the marvelousness of Ida’s style. She bit into a sandwich. She said, “But these sandwiches are good, Lila.”

“Praise from you is praise and a half and then some—did you taste both kinds? You haven’t tried the shrimp. The shrimp are from New Orleans. My momma says God will punish us for eating shrimp.” Sin. A Jewish woman entering the secular.

“This is a perfect cucumber sandwich. I adore cucumber sandwiches.” Ida is encouraging the secular but is respectful toward religion and does not mention shrimp.

“Oh, I’m a divine housewife,” Lila says, as if she weren’t being shocking about what she ought to be. “I know who to hire. Have you met our Annemarie? She’s a little on the fat side. But she’s a very fine person—she soaks our cucumbers in milk. It’s something she learned in France; she’s from France. She says it gets the acid out—is that important? I don’t know what I think of the acid in cucumbers: probably it’s important to get the acid out—”

“Lila, these sandwiches: I’m your slave.” (That is, lower me to your peasant level: let’s roll in the gutter for a while: No more religious issues. No more social issues. Lila worries that she looks at people too darkly; but she thinks that’s what Ida means by that remark—Ida doesn’t mean she’ll be obedient.)

Ida says, when Lila blinkingly and pointedly says nothing, “Your housekeeper soaks cucumbers in milk? I never heard of that.”

Lila says carefully, without in any way denying the double meaning, “Neither did I. But I guess I go along with it.”

“Really?” Ida says, looking triumphant in the face of Ma’s being a riddle.

“I’m not fooling—I’m not a fooler. I’m honest—you can trust me. I’m always impressed when a woman’s honest, I like to be impressive,” Lila says melodiously, unmocking (maybe) or mocking.

Ida breathes slowly and eats in a way that mingles considerable delicacy with cynical doubt—perhaps about eating and chewing in general but doubt eased maybe by the happiness of the moment.

Lila watches Ida eat, and she says, “You’d be surprised how honest I am. I have to be careful—you know what they say? Why be a martyr? I admit I like an opportunity to shine. I like to show what I’m made of. I like a chance to rise to the occasion.” The look in her face may mean she is saying she can lie, she can keep her mouth shut, she can rise to any worldly occasion, or it may mean something else: maybe she thinks two things at once and that enables her to say things that mean two things at least. She says, “But I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this.” She smiles—Momma had so many smiles that you might say, if you counted contexts, that she had an infinite number of them. “People don’t understand always what honesty is when a woman’s honest.”

“I think of myself as honest,” Ida says with a certain superior curvature of voice; and, having stopped eating, watches Lila through the smoke of another cigarette.

“You can say that—wherever you speak, you speak from a throne room,” Lila said, leaving the question open and yet speaking more directly than before. “A woman can’t say that who only has a porch. People don’t mind when you show your colors: you have two streets in this town named after your family.” It’s up to Ida to speak first about the happiness of the moment and about human affection, Momma means—maybe.

The set of her pretty mouth and unlit eyes means Lila’s both sad and cheerful that people sometimes think of her as a villainess (as not honest).

Ida has that sense of Momma as a pretty Jewish woman, a villainess: clever, ruthless, dishonest—foreign. What does it mean that Momma doesn’t mind? Is it that she’s letting Ida build up a debt and she will get even?

Ida is—naïvely—pleased that Lila knows Jews are unrooted opportunists, sly satirists, thieves of a sort—thieves of one’s comfort with oneself and one’s thoughts.

As well as of money often.

Ida says cautiously, blinkingly, now scoffingly friendly, “Everyone in town puts you on a pedestal, Lila.”

“Oh, that kind of pedestal is nothing,” Momma says in an old voice, watching Ida.

“No, it’s serious,” Ida says.

Her voice is firm—it is not her judgment so much as her temper, her nervousness, that dominates the moment.

The intelligence and shrewdness required to make one’s nervousness a sign of social class and an intellectual plane of discourse and a sign of emotion mark a leader—this is what Ma thinks, and leader is Ma’s term.

Lila said, “If a woman has flashing eyes, she can’t joke, she can’t make jokes, but name a street after me and maybe there could be a little comedy—you think a woman like me’s allowed to make fun? I’m a menace. I suppose you don’t know about me.”

She said it in such tones that flattery of the other woman’s fineness was intended and disparagement of her local standing in politics as a beauty worth listening to.

Her voice was musical. The voice was nakedly peeled; it gently crooned along.

Ida is abruptly amused—it is a matter of eligibility: Momma’s. Holding her head and shoulders and back in a pleasantly angular slouch, Ida says, “The women in my family have a motto: that the only foolish thing is to be frightened.” I.e., class equals bravery. So Momma to show class should offer affection first.

Momma purses her lips and says, very softly, “Well, we say nothing ventured, nothing gained in our family; it’s a good idea to look before you leap.” I.e., you go first: you act so superior.

“I’m a believer in real courage,” Ida said. “My great-grandmother saw her sister scalped; she did not lose courage; she stayed right where she was, hidden in the woodpile; she didn’t let out a peep.”

Momma tried this: “Do you think the world is getting better? Maybe it used to be worse. Or is it the same old thing? My mother thinks it’s still bad and going down—she had to hide in a cellar under rags while the cossacks killed her father. And five brothers. But she peeked. I can’t tell the story: some words put the smell of things right up my nose and I get sick. Those cossacks, they put Momma’s father and the five brothers in the ground up to their necks. Wait a moment: I have to catch my breath.” Momma gasps faintly. “They bury the legs and arms so the men can’t move; the beards are in the dirt. Then the cossacks make their horses gallop. She watched the horses’ feet kick them in the head. The brains would run out. Momma said their eyes fell out onto the ground.”

Ida is listening to the anecdote with an intelligent look—idle but taut and ready to respond although not by making the first move by declaring her interest, or degree of it, to Momma.

Lila says without transition but softly, vulnerably, “Are you always a careful talker? When the sky’s the limit? When the highfliers are around?” Then: “If there are any.”

Ida says—slowly—her voice has curlicues of clear inflection—“I’m a careful speaker. It’s an old habit. I don’t know that I’m so special.” Meaning that she was, since she was modest, meaning also Momma’s wit, of its sort, has made a point (of its sort).

Lila never understood the point of modesty for women. She said, pushily but melodiously, “If I talked like you, what would you think? Do you think I ought to talk like you? Would you like it if I did? You think we ought to talk alike?”

Momma mixed fineness with naïveté—a social brew—and took the lead.

Rather than be a mentor to Momma or ask for a twin or say no directly, Ida, electric, luminous, says, “In the matter of how people talk in this country, we need to be called to order.”

Momma smiles modestly, daringly: “I suppose I’m daring, I’m over people’s heads. I like to take a chance.”

The rainlight grows yellower, as if it were on its way to clarity, but the rain persists windlessly, moderating itself almost not at all in the sudden light.

“I mean in general,” Ida says, veiling her eyes.

Lila says, “In general, I do what I have to do; I prefer to look like a winner. I’m not someone who pleads her case.”

Ida peers at Lila and then quickly stops peering. She is richer, freer, and “smarter” than Lila—she is in command. She is someone who knows what it is to be top of the heap: for her, for both women, winning is equivalent to guiltlessness; victory represents virtue, blamelessness.

Regal and modest, as if simple and self-defined, Ida makes a move (Ma’s phrase). Ida smiles—her smiles tend to be fixed, grammatical—but her eyes shift from interest and bullying (or manipulation) into beauty.

And Ida says, “Lila—” with each syllable cut short and with a smile for each syllable, a differing smile, and a downward flash of the eyes for each syllable and a pause between. And then a still-facedness, almost a smile. It is very intelligent, perhaps it is rehearsed. (You can’t hang someone for how they say your name.…)

Momma sat very still, and then—making the situation mysterious—she said, in a largely unreadable tone, “Ida,” with a very long dwindle of breath.

The degree of irony—knowledge of the world as an activity concerned with self-protection—in Ida’s face altered into friendliness; and she said, “Lila, you are adorable, you know I adore you, I hope you know it—you do know it—Lila—you know I’m someone you can count on—lifelong—Lila—”

Because it had a rehearsed quality—Ida’s speech—Momma thinks she sees the symptoms of the local thing of having-a-go-round with Lila. Ma is ruthless but subject to being ashamed (her term).

Momma sits in a subdued and pale and cautious way, denying the sexual. She wants romance and feeling—Ida on a string. Besides, the movements of feeling between her and Ida have only irony and subtlety and powers of mind in them, only those—Ida has this effect on people often, and so she thinks the world lacks sexuality altogether.

Lila says, “Oh, lifelong isn’t necessary: twenty-four hours is enough for me. Where people are concerned, I’m not demanding.”

Ida says, with a certain twisted loftiness and down-to-earth whine or complaint, “Friendship is usually taken by serious people, Lila, to be something one can rely on.”

Lila says, “I’m someone who takes chances, but I’m a big frog in a little pond. If I ask someone seriously, ‘What are you doing?,’ people don’t ever listen even to the question; I fall flat on my face. I bet that doesn’t ever happen to you. I didn’t finish college, I was too wild, but actually I know a thing or two, even if I don’t get much credit for it. Well, take the cash and let the credit go—isn’t that how you expect a Jewish woman—a Jewess—to talk?”

Ida—knowingly, lyrically—says, “If Ida Nicholson were Lila Silenowicz, she would say here, I have to catch my breath …’ ” She did an imitation of Lila’s voice—one of Lila’s voices—she captured Lila’s mocking politeness.

Lila smiled a soft, plumy smile—dovelike. Then she said, “Ida, I wouldn’t say that: I would say, Ida, you may be too much for me.”

“I’m still an amateur at being Lila Silenowicz,” Ida says with an air of modesty, of wit that isn’t modest: it’s suffocating in its confidence—its confident pleading.

Momma doesn’t want to be darling; she says darkly, restlessly, “I think I probably am a streetwalker at heart.”

“Lila!” Ida waits.

“Look at us—drinking and smoking. Wouldn’t your mother say we were like prostitutes?”

Ida is genuinely puzzled, but she is also genuinely combative—not easily put off. What she sees, though, is someone who passed from initial invitation to some depth or other of guilt. Lila doesn’t seem to Ida to have any moral sophistication (Lila feels that way about Ida). Ida doesn’t know whether to keep matters “social” or not. She says with contemptuous readiness of wit (a further mistake sensually), “Oh, Lila, you? The way you change, it’s like the life of a tadpole.”

Lila feels it’s tomboy seduction that Ida offers—Lila was never a tomboy. She doesn’t speak—she waits to see what will happen (to see what her power is here).

Ida lifts her head and sort of moves it in a nursery way, of pride and mental energy, a brightness of thought. She is convinced of her own sexuality as a matter of argument, no matter what others think.

Lila is self-willed and illiterate, cruel and unstable. She is full of rivalry and caprice now.

“Oh, Lila, you are impossible, you are so brilliant, you are adorable,” Ida says. “Isn’t she adorable?” she asks the rainy air. She is bringing Momma to heel. She is aware Momma is jealous of her.

“My momma has always admired you,” Momma says. “She thinks you probably have tastes in common; Momma thinks men are awful—all except S.L. My husband. You never can remember his name.”

“Initials,” Ida corrected her.

Ida wants Momma to admit Ida’s authority.

Momma wants to be the authority.

“Samuel Lewis—S.L.” Momma thinks she has the authority here.

Ida makes a face. The look on Lila’s face is teasing, and not pierced and corrected by Ida’s power. Ida is inclined to think that the supposed intelligence of Jews is a mistake.

Ida raises her eyebrows and slowly expels cigarette smoke. Her nose and cheekbones are chic. She’s pigeon-chested but handsome-bodied all the same, clean, unwhorish—ungainly. She’s too proud to be pretty.

The damp gives Lila’s skin and her lips and lipstick and her eyes a luster. She sits and judges the silence. Then she puckers her mouth, too—to get a grip on what Ida is feeling. Lila says, “Oh, I’m not adorable; you’re being nice; you’re being too nice; you’re being way, way, way too nice to me.” Momma has pleasure and power shoved inside a-wildness-at-the-moment: “I’ll be honest, I’m out to be fancy today, so if you feel like that, that’s my reward. I like a kind word or three; I’m easy to satisfy; but everybody has their conceit; I certainly have mine; now you know everything: I suppose it’s more than you want to know.”

Momma bends her head down defeatedly—adorably. Momma is as brave as a brave child. She is determined—energetic. With her head down, she pushes her skirt lower on her fine legs. The world isn’t a hard place to have a good time in if you use your head. Play with fire and see what happens.

When she looks up, she has a freed, soft, hot-eyed face. She feels that she is throwing herself on a blade—she is wounded—inwardly startled. Seductive Momma. Momma’s tempestuous assault on the other woman: “I’m what you call reasonable if you decide to reevaluate; I’m a reasonable woman, but I won’t hold you to it, although I’m someone who likes loyalty.”

“Me, too,” Ida said in a giddy winning-an-argument way. Then, as if she’d thought, She’s not good-looking enough to ask this much of me (the defense of the sadistic mind): “I don’t think anyone thinks you’re reasonable, Lilly. Do you think so, that people do? Do you think people think that’s your type, the reasonable type?” She’s drolly shrewd—it’s what Lila calls Ida’s dry way. “I’m reasonable,” Ida says in humble summing up. A sad and modest Victory. Her mind is very quick but she never did anything with it except be quick.

“I don’t know,” Momma says. Momma aims her head, a complicated gun, at Ida: “I’m popular. You know what they say—I have papers, I have the papers to show it; you know what the statistics are. I’m reasonable enough. I shouldn’t be the one to say so, but I’ll take that risk: don’t let on I was the one to tell you, don’t let anyone know I was a fool wanting to make a good impression on you.”

“Fearless! Fearless!” Ida maybe girlishly shrieks.

A sudden, swift look crosses Momma’s face: You can never tell the truth to anyone to their face or ask it, either. Momma would like to belong to Ida, body and soul—up to a point: let’s wait and see. “Yes? Well, who knows which way the cat will jump tomorrow?” My mother is in deep. She is where the lions and the tigers walk. Perhaps what she is saying is clearer than I understand it to be.

Ida’s fondness for women attracted women. Women saw her as an impressive friend humbled by caring for them. She knows this. Ida says, in a highly good-natured voice that is ironically moral, “Lila, I adore you.” She grins, openly foolish, as if declaring a truce on meaning. “And it’s lifelong.” She means it only in a way. She is suggesting laws of affection which she means to enforce.

Momma says, “I know everyone backbites.” She doesn’t mean backbites: she picked something Ida doesn’t do. She means backslides. She means people disappoint you. “I put a sweet face on it, but it hurts me. If you want to hate me, hate me for that, that I’m someone who puts being serious at the head of the list.” She wants to set up what the laws are and what the punishments are. “I’m silly, I know, but who knows how much time anyone has? I haven’t time to waste on getting hurt.”

Ida looks droll but firm: she knows Momma wants her to love her: Ida thinks, Well, this is war, this is war, and I’m a guest. She says in mostly a droll and clowning and smartly foolish way—richly superior, that is: I’m the one who is the lawgiver here—“Well, I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m always a loyal one.”

Momma feels Ida is lying all the time. Momma is drunk with consciousness. And purpose. “I’m a seeker, I don’t think I’m a finder. You know what they say? Still waters cut deep. But I’m telling you too much about myself. It’s a free-for-all. I’m going to ask you to be nicer to me. It won’t hurt you to be nice: you’re a first-family woman and I know I’m not, but there are still things for you to learn.”

“This is my nicest, Lilly. I am never nicer than this—”

“That’s all there is? There isn’t any more? Then you’re boring—if you have limits like that.” Momma says it with unfocused eyes. She thinks, I don’t care.

Ida says, “The jig’s up.” She sits straight, a narrow-backed, nervously elegant woman, cigaretted, alert—plain. “Well, this is—regrettable,” she says. Her eyes are shy and weird, then abruptly bold and fixed.

Momma flinches because she envies Ida her being able to use a word like regrettable without self-consciousness. Nerves pull at Momma’s face, at her eyebrows, at her eyes—her eyes have a startled focus. There’s no inertia in me, there’s nothing inert, and there’s no peace: I always take the High Road. She says, “Well, maybe it’s time I said I had a headache.”

Ida’s face is a shallow egg—with features scattered on it. A potent ugliness. Now she formally sees how proud Lila is, just how fiery (Ida’s word), and Ida’s heart breaks. She is suffused with sudden pain—sympathy—a feeling of grace—emptiness is dissolved—but she substitutes sympathy for herself instead of for women or for Momma, since she is more alone than Momma is; so the emptiness returns but it’s not entirely empty: it has a burning drama in it. Momma is in agony from the work of her performance and of creating feelings in Ida, but Ida is in pain, which is worse, but they are both enjoying it in an awful way, as Ida might describe it in a semi-grownup way.

“It’s raining too hard for me to go home just now, Lilly,” Ida says with a kind of gentle grandeur. Then, for the first time sharing her wit with Lila, taking Lila in as a partner in certain enterprises, Ida repeats from earlier, “What do you think of the rain, Lila?” And she gives a hasty smile and casts her eyes down to the porch floor, awake inwardly with the nervous unexpectedness of her own generosity and feeling it as love of a kind.

Momma wets her lips and says in a haphazard voice, “You know, some religious people take rain as a hint, but you try to have a good time anyway—and give a good time—did it wash away Sodom and Gomorrah, do you remember? Of course you remember, you like The Bible. I have no memory for those things. You know what they say, people and their sins ought to get a little time off for good behavior. I don’t think I know what good behavior is. Well, that’s enough: I’m not good at being silly: I don’t want to be silly in front of you.”

“Silly is as silly does,” Ida says—perched.

Momma says, “It’s not raining violets today—it’s more cats and dogs. The rain—well, the rain—you know these old houses is like arks. Are. All the animals two by two—I have a houseload of people coming in an hour.”

The central active meaning of Mom’s life is that in her, when everything is taut on an occasion that matters to her, self-approval when the evidence is in becomes pervasive in her, lunatic, a moonlight, a flattery of the world, as summer moonlight is. Her pleasure in herself becomes a conscious sexual power—the reflexive self-knowledge of a woman who attracts. For the moment, Momma has a rich willingness to be somewhat agreeable in her sexuality.

For Ida, Momma is the real thing—as if famous and European, of that order but in its own category: self-exhibiting, in some ways discreet; but talkative. Momma can give an impression—breasts and clothes and face—of supple strength and a crouching will and endless laughter and mind and martyrdom: a 1920s thing, from the movies. The drugged catlike weave of shadows on Momma’s belly, her being the extremely fragile and supple huntress—Ida sees this as extreme prettiness and a will to dissipate the megrims, boredom, and ennui, the kind that kill you.

Ida is here for a lot of reasons. Ida is a nervous collector and judge, but she is in Momma’s shoes when she is in Paris: there she has to perform for the women she admires. She feels she attracts as many people there as Lila does—Ida will compete with anyone.

That’s a high value to set on yourself, Ma thinks. Ida seems to Momma to be beautiful in her holding back—women’s beauties and abilities seem fearsome and of prior interest to Momma.

The sight and presence of Ida’s “beauty” (will and courage and freedom) excite Momma, who makes a mad offering of a devoted glance—Ma, who is painfully, flyingly awake with hope, and cynicism.

Ida has gooseflesh.

Ma says, “I’ll be frank; I’ll be brutally frank: I’m nervous, I’m nervous about you. You’re intelligent, you like books, but watch, I don’t have a yellow streak. If I make a fool of myself, I expect you to know you have only yourself to blame; you know where you stand in this town, you have genuine stature around here. It’s more than that: What you say counts. So, if I get tense, blame yourself … blame your own … stature. Will you do that for me?” She is being Brave Like Ida.

“Lila, are you someone who might be a good friend? I see that you might be that. Oh, it is unbearable.”

“I am a good friend. Don’t let the way I look fool you. I have the soul of a good friend.”

“You’re a darling!”

But the world is unbearable: a chill goes through Momma: in Ida’s voice is a quality of unyielding announcement on the matter. Ida is someone who has to run things—I wasn’t good enough for her to hold back and let me speak, too. I think what Momma sees is that her seeing Ida as having a realer “beauty” is not triumph enough for Ida—Ida wants to hurt Momma, so that Ida can know more satisfactorily than in Momma’s being merely temporarily agreeable that she, Ida, is splendid, is the more splendid creature. You can’t call Momma “darling” unless you do it with a note of defeat, or conspiracy, without causing trouble with her. To Ma, what Ida does seems romantically naïve.

This is what I think Momma saw: Ida owns everyone in sight. Momma is sexed angrily and ignorantly and is sexually fired by curiosity. And she did not marry for money. Ida sometimes to Momma seems only to have the shine and edginess and sharpness of calculation of money, and to be hardly flesh and blood at all. Momma feels that Ida is like her, like Momma, but is less well educated in love, that she is at an earlier and more dangerous stage: Ida is sexed ungenerously, like a schoolgirl.

Momma’s romantic standing is not a “safe” thing for her. A woman like me finds out love is a different kettle of fish—I should have been a prostitute. This stuff boils in Momma; it is her sexual temper—it supplies the vivacity in Ma’s sultry, wanting-vengeance prettiness. Tempestuousness and mind—Ma suspects everyone of cheapness when it comes to love—except S.L., her husband. Lila romanticizes his emotional extravagance, his carelessness—perhaps he is romantic.

She is alive and reckless and glowing now and does not seem devoted to remaining at home and being respectable—but she has been that so far in her life; and she feels clever in her choices. I think she is as morally illiterate as Ida, and as unscathed so far: this is what she claims by being so willful—that she is usually right, unpunished. This is what her destructiveness comes from.

Both women feel that women draw you in and are grotesquely lonely and grotesquely powerful in intimacies. Ida has a coarse look. What it is is that Ida has to be the star. Ida’s courage is self-denial and self-indulgence mixed.

Momma’s performance is ill-mounted, since it rests on Ida’s having a heart. Ma has risen from the void of dailiness and nobodyhood to flutter in the midst of her whitish fire, but she flutters burningly in avoid of heartlessness: it is worthless to be a pretty woman, but everything else is worse.

Ida governs herself shrewdly.

Momma is excited-looking: conscious-looking, alive, symmetrical—alight.

Ida “loves” Lila’s temporary brilliance—perhaps only as a distraction. But Ida looks, and probably is, happy for the moment—but in a grim way:This is where the party is. Ida is game. She says, “Oh, Lila, I am happy to be here, deluge and all. Isn’t it nice that we are neighbors? What would life be without neighbors? A desert? A bad Sahara?” She smiles nervously—boldly. A kind of sweat breaks out on her upper lip; she doesn’t care.

Lila, being so pretty, has lived with this kind of drama since early childhood and she has a peculiar air of being at home in it: Momma’s eyes and eyelids consider the speech, the praise. Momma looks selfish rather than surrendering—that means she’s not pleased as she studies Ida’s offer, its number of caveats. What it was was Ida is being careful. She should have spoken extravagantly, but she is too sure that Momma can be bought reasonably. Ma is a marvel of disobedience and a mistress of local manners carefully learned and fully felt. Her face is a somewhat contemptuous wound: comprehension and expressiveness tear her face when she catches on that Ida is smitten but impervious, made of steel, when that shows. It shows that Ida has more class than I do; that’s where the battle lines get drawn, although I will say this for myself: I give credit where credit is due. That’s a lie, often. Often she is destructive and fights the worth in other people. This is a democracy, and who’s to stop me from doing what I think is best for me?

Ida is enamored and is immune to her, superior, la-di-da and all.

Lila arranges her voice: “I’m glad you came to see me.” It’s not her being a femme fatale or whatever, or being amusing anymore—she is holding back. She sounds a little like Ida.

Ida raises her head, blinks, puffs on her cigarette—looks at Ma, level-eyed, looks away.

This is interwoven with Ma shifting her legs, then her torso, and its burden of breasts on the slender ribs.

Both women are controlled—and full of signals—so many that I don’t see how they can keep track of what they are doing in the world, what with all their speed and knowledge and feelings and all the breaths they have to take.

They avoid each other’s eyes, except passingly, for more than a minute—it is as intense as speech. Then they are still. Both have small smiles. This is where the lions and the tigers walk.

Momma has a dark light coming from her. She is a nervous star that gives a dreamer’s light even at this late date.

She says, “Did you come over in the rain to see me for a purpose? You wanted to see me all dressed up for a party, when I was nervous? A ready-made fool? All dressed up and no place to go.”

Ida says at once, “Oh, Lila, no—no lovey-dovey.”

She tramples on Lila’s music—that request for sympathy.“I hate lovey-dovey—lovey-dovey is brutal. It’s terrible.” A love speech, bossy, intent, deep-feelinged: Ida’s sort of deep feelings.

Momma is perplexed by so much intensity, so much style, and all that energy, with none coming toward her—except maybe nibblingly, condescendingly—but directed at Ma’s flirtatious mockery. It was a love speech asking for rough play.

Ida’s personal fires are alight and skeletal. They are not like the expansive whirlwinds and fires in which Momma is trapped and consumed; Ida’s have focus and great style. Momma feels Ida’s unforgivingness as character and strength, but it’s directed toward what Lila is—a beauty of a certain kind, a flirt and willful, a Jew—and that is unforgivable. But that’s how things are. You have to take love as you find it.

Ma’s tolerance and acquisitiveness and Ida’s nervousness—and her courage—are the paramount social factors, the strong movers in the board game, in the scene: both women tacitly agree on that. The soft surrenders (Lila’s phrase) that go with love when it works are what Ida was forbidding in her love speech.

Momma thinks of two bones kissing and sees how what is painful in emotion might be adjudged banal—or tedious—as clattering—and you can get away with it, loving and calling love boring. She isn’t really sure. She is a lively fire of spirit and mood, intention and will, and she can’t really do that herself, take love lightly.

Lila knows how to keep up a social air when things are tough. It is not a new experience for her that there is tragic hatred in the moment; i.e., infatuation, and rivalry, a lot of failure—love of a kind, of all kinds … women deal in love. Momma’s Theory of the Ego (that everyone and her mother thinks she is the Queen of the Earth) now holds, in this flying moment, that Ida cannot bear not being the prime example of beauty in the room, in the world: She only chases me so she can be better than someone like me: she has to be the star; her husband, Ben, is the same way, but he kowtows to her because she has the money and he bullies everyone else.

Momma calls a moment like this, this-kind-of-thing, We’re getting in deep. It is her form of mountain-climbing: exhaustion, danger, despair. The fires of mind and of physical courage in her are a working heat for her getting her own way—according to her Theory of the Ego—but in such an extravagantly putting-on-a-show fashion that it does not seem to her to be of the same family as Ida’s putting on a show, which is more measured, purposeful, meanly hammerlike, tap, tap, tap … She’s like a machine. She has a position to keep up—there are demands on her all day long—she can’t give her all to any one thing—that’s Lila being fair … But she’s a fake: that’s Lila being Lila.

Physical desire in Ida is the trembling of nerves in a strong woman’s frequently disowned body. Ida is warm—or hot—but without dignity in physical negotiation, a rich woman. She maintains her value against Lila’s more and more immodest-seeming glamour: why is this woman still shining at the age she is? (Daddy would say Ma was on a rampage.) A wild pathos and self-pity invest Ida with an air of threat in her desirousness—she feels she deserves erotic reward. Ida’s class, her being superior to Momma in self-control and focus, her sexual abnegation at times, her hardness about defeat and the hurt of others oppress Momma as signs of not being infatuated with her is what I think. Whereas Ida feels love is one substance throughout eternity—that it shouldn’t matter what deformities that will and privilege and folly have forced on the softer tissues of the self in the course of your living the way you live if someone loves you.

Momma feels that love is invented daily and that each person does it differently. Momma, in some wordless way, trusts herself in these matters. She is at home here.

Neither woman intends to be a fool—being a fool is something only men do.

Of course, if you contemplate these attitudes and consider the feelings they have, it is clear that at the moment Ida hates Momma, and Momma hates Ida. But they get along.

Lila thinks of it this way, that Ida puts a quick kibosh on anything she can’t run. Ida does not know just how two-sided the thing of sex is—or how improvised it is. Momma feels that Ida is being “cute,” attractive in her way, even gorgeous—but not in the romantic vein. Momma often says, A truth about me is that I fight back. Momma is a brute. She would like to break Ida’s bones.

To put a cast of reason on Ma’s brutality, she wants to hurt Ida in order to frighten her, so that Ida won’t eat me up alive.

Ma says, “I’m always lovey-dovey. I think I was born that way. Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you, but sometimes when you laugh alone it gets very dark. Look how dark it’s getting—it’s turning into a thunderstorm.”

The rain is getting stronger, brackish and threatening; and wind flings the dampness around.

It genuinely hurt Ida to be cornered—to be straightforward—to admit to having feelings. Her hurt is coldly stormy at the moment.

But she looks Ma in the face and smiles one of her top-grade, friendly, large-area smiles and says in a tragically rebuking manner, “You’re wearing your diamond bracelets—I suppose that means you mean business today.”

Momma says stubbornly, “Did you get wet? Did you ruin your shoes? Coming through the rain to see me? Did you do that for me?”

Ida says, “You don’t show any damage from the rain—you show no damage yet, at all—Lila.”

Ma’s radiance is skittery in this light. I can keep it up until the cows come home. But that’s not true. Some centrally human element gets worn out in these skirmishes. Why does Ida lie—i.e., avoid things? Does Ida know things (about the world) that I don’t know? So Ma gets depressed about herself. The effect of Ida’s will and style on her. When this sort of thing happens to Momma, she becomes ill. She dies. She becomes stern. Perhaps everything will be all right, I can handle this, I’m not nineteen.

Ida is relentlessly enthralled and ruthless still, and makes no promises, even with her eyes; her escape will be part of Lila’s comeuppance.

And this: the beauty Ida feels (and shows) has subsided and is more memory than immediate fact, and that imprisons Ida, who can’t hold back from agonized nostalgia about her own great moments in the same way that Momma can from hers. For a moment, Ida can’t act at all. Ida is not exhausted but she is slain: You have killed me, Lila.

In exhaustion, Momma is partly set free from her own radiance. Momma doesn’t care at all about anything at all, and Ida is stilled in some ways but is nevertheless a restless spirit and unsoftened and is trapped. So the smart and powerful one has become the stupid and powerless one.

Opposites flitter and dance in the fairy light: women’s enchantments are eerie. The story is in their eyelids and in the obscure or clear glances they send to each other. Also, they breathe meaningfully. It seems that Ida will not let someone without much education and breeding, who is wild and careless, run things at the moment. Skinny Ida has a don’t-tread-on-me wonderfulness of carriage, plus Very Good Manners and a Christian cheerfulness. A Christian sense of secular silliness, tender just now but hard-souled, too.

Lila thinks, Ida hasn’t beaten me down. My luck is good. Ida is really very approachable—of course, you have to approach her on your hands and knees.

The two women continue to breathe meaningfully in each other’s company—this is more or less at a level of happiness, but you can never tell (Lila’s phrase).

Ida says, “The rain—it’s all water over the dam.” She has a creaturely tension, like a thoroughbred. She means, Let’s forgive ourselves.

Lila is close enough to sexual giddiness that she blushes spectrally. “It is spilt milk,” Momma says. “Ha, ha, well, well, well, said the hole in the ground—” Momma does a very small version of what she thinks a rich Gentile woman’s intellectual madness coming out as nonsensical talk and a laugh is like.

Mindlessness seems well bred to Ida, but, of course, not in Momma—Ida does, deliciously, voluptuously, hate Momma. Hatred is elegant in Ida.

Momma feels ruthless right back. Momma feels apprehension inside, but she doesn’t show it.

The two women laugh, complicitously.

Lila says, “And more well, well, well—you know me, Ida, I’m a wife and a mother and a devil, a Jewish devil!”

Ida says, “Yes, yes. Don’t be hard on yourself, Lilly. It’s hard enough as it is. We don’t need trouble—isn’t that right!”

Momma says, “Yes, that’s right! That’s just right!”

Ida, a little drunk, says to herself, Lila is a black torch of a woman. Out loud, she says, “You were always pretty …” By her rules—of ego and selfishness and loyalty—never to give Momma an intense compliment is a sign of love. It is keeping things balanced. Ida lives deeply inside her own biography.

But Ma feels she doesn’t have enough money or standing and that she doesn’t have enough power with Ida to be satisfied with that. Momma is “infatuated” but cross; she is drunk—mostly with the ease of being with someone quick-minded, not male. She wants to show Ida how to be magnetic in courtship: “Oh, believe me, I’ll go on record as saying you’re better-looking than I am, in the ways that count. In the ways that really count, you have the kind of looks I admire most. I count you as the best-looking.”

Ida takes that as her due. She doesn’t see that Ma is enraged and being exemplary. She says primly, “You’re interesting-looking, Lila.” Ida thinks that is a witty way to be romantic. Lila feels Ida continues to be not romantic, not a squanderer. She is reading Ida’s mind: she thinks she sees that Ida thinks it an extravagance to care for Momma in the first place, a penniless no one.

This kind of selfish shenanigans dries Momma up physically, but she likes it on the whole. Momma laughs musically, yet she is disgusted. She says, in a mad way, “I have to laugh: What did you think the excitement was all about? What did you come to see me for?” Ma thinks it’s bad taste of Ida not to be more honest—heartfelt. Momma is called by some people The Prettiest Woman in Central Illinois. Ma is lighting up again, but it’s temper, a squall of will. In a frightened and careless and disobedient way (and in a hysterical and cold and experienced way), Momma knows that in a battle for personal power Ida is the local champion; Momma feels the tournament quality of Ida. Momma says again—odd, mocking, and tender, too, “I’ll go on record—you’re better-looking than I am in the ways that count. I wish I looked more like you.”

She means it, but she’s saying it’s better, it’s safer not to have real looks.

She’s praising Ida and saying Ida is trash.

I don’t shut my eyes and give up; I’m not a goody-goody two-shoes.

Ida half understands the category she’s being put in and she thinks: She owes me one for that. She leans down and touches, with one finger, Momma’s shoe, Momma’s foot. Then she sits back.

Momma’s face, brownish, ill-looking, with lines of nervousness on it, now, in her sensitivity, her speed, her strangeness and as a soul in the cosmos and in her strength—and maybe in wickedness and charity—smooths out.

Ida is big-eyed, calm-faced—but sweaty—full of her own fund of fidgety and fanatic self-approval. She crosses her legs—coarsely—in front of Ma’s now obtuse face. She would argue, I don’t deserve this, I have done nothing to deserve this.

Momma’s eyes go from Ida’s eyes to Ida’s wrists (fine-boned) and Ida’s nails (bitten). The trick for Momma as she smiles a little inside her attractiveness at the moment is to show she is really clear about what Ida is worth as a person. “I have a good time now and then,” Momma says, unable to be innocent and awed. She says this with her head tilted.

The force in Ida’s soul makes her surface twitch a little with puffs of waitfulness. “We deserve a good time,” Ida says, not looking at Momma and then looking her full in the face. Ida sinks down in her chair. Then she sits upright. Like a countess—that took strength of will.

Momma says, in a presumptuous and urgent tone, “Around here you’re supposed to go to special cities to have a good time. I’m from the provinces. But I’m having a good time right now—it’s because of you.”

Ida sighs narrowly and says, “You’re not very Jewish; you’re not like Hamlet.”

Not mild? Not moderate?

Ma is determined to tack down a triumph. She says, “I’m always interested when we talk, I’m always interested in the things you have to say.” Mild. Moderate.

Ida looks at her, aslant, smiling—it really is a grin; it would be a grimace if Ida were less clever.

Ma, looking sideways at Ida, says, knowing it will upset Ida, “You’d be surprised what I think of you, you’d be surprised what I say when I’m not afraid of how I sound, what I say behind your back—I don’t think you can imagine it.”

Ida, victimized, girlish—i.e., girlish if victimized—says girlishly, “Tell me what you say about me. What do you say behind my back? I have to know. I have to know things like that—that’s so interesting. It’s important to me. Tell me, you must tell me, it’s not fair what you’re doing—I have to know.”

Ida’s style here is girls’-school stuff from a social class Ma is not in. Ma flinches, because she usually assumes people of that class will hurt her as much as they can, as much as they dare (she’s pretty)—she expects pain from that quarter.

Ma is evasive: “I let people know that you make me think about things in a new way: you have real power over me—I talk about that all the time … Then I have to think whether I want that or not, whether I want you to be such an influence or not, whether I can afford it—a lot of the time, I don’t know. You make me think, but I feel like crying. It’s too hard to say it now. I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not one of your critics—no, I’m not one of your critics at all—”

“Lila, you’re just impossible—you frighten me—” Then: “Tell me what you say about me. Tell me in the same words …”

“Oh, I quote you a lot—you’re interesting …”

“Lila, tell me what you say. ”

“I don’t twist what you say. I listen to you carefully. I feel I understand you. I feel you understand me.”

“I feel that, too,” Ida said decisively. She’s decided Momma boasts about knowing her. Ida decides to accept that. But her glance and manner shift everything from privacy to the Whole World, where she is the richer woman and Lila is the weaker of the two. It is always her deciding it—especially if I was looking good—in the interplay between them. Ma believes Ida doesn’t know how to take turns.

Ma says, “I’m sophisticated in many, many ways, amn’t I?”

Ida directs at Ma a large, cajoling, swiftly childlike (pleading) smile: it’s intent, it is ironic and sincere and clever—it seems to mean Ida does sincerely love Ma in some way even if she’s in control of herself and of the whole thing all-in-all despite Momma’s hard-won upper hand at moments. At this moment, Ma flinches. It makes her feel things, that smile. So Ma is raw, exacerbated, strained—alive—resistant; thinking well of herself is what usually seduces Ma—and she felt proud of herself for having elicited that smile; but she is not yet seduced. She is in control, too—for the moment.

Momma loves women’s responses. Men’s lives don’t interest her—they are out of reach, obscure, obtuse, slow, and wooden.

Momma breathes and resettles her breasts, and her face glimmers and is shiny and knowing—a weird thing. I suppose this is a moment of experienced affection for the two women. Momma hasn’t yet said to many people but perhaps feels, I’m thirteen years past the high-water mark of my looks, when I was the party and that was that; but I’m still going. My mother’s heartbeat was a constant lyric exclamation of ignorance and blasphemy, excitement and exacerbation, beauty and amusement of a kind. Ma “knows, as a matter of common sense,” that Ida believes that on the highest level only a Christian mind can matter.

To Ida seriously, Momma is like a dumb animal, without truth, but an enjoyable woman, fiery and a marvel—coarsely spiritual and naïve—a Jew. Momma, teased and tormented by life, is fascinated in a number of dark ways by being defined in this manner.

Ida is prompted to take charge firmly and openly of the seductive drama in Lila’s shifting glowingness. She jumps up, crosses to Lila in French-schoolgirl style—self-consciously wry—and sits beside her on the squealing glider. Ida is a big-city person, and can’t live in the moments the way Lila can. She abruptly kisses Lila on the temple, then rapidly adds a second kiss to the first, pulls back, looks at Momma’s profile, then sits straight and utters a watchful, shepherding laugh. The style is nervously a woman’s lawlessness that excuses itself as tenderness. A delicate joke. How can you mind it?

The risk and nihilism of stylishness jolts Momma with a sense of pleasure and of the abyss. I mean Ma’s life rests on contracts among women, sacraments between women, and everything Ida does is an example of freedom from that. Ida admits to no such freedom. Ma feels herself fall toward an abyss for what is merely a lied-about romp.

With weird perversity, in a slow voice, very melodic and undramatic, and not moving her body, but softening a little but not enough to be a real welcome, Ma says, “You’re being so nice to me, I feel like the farmer’s daughter …”

“Darling Lila,” Ida says, insulted but still puckered for another kiss: “Me, a traveling salesman?”

The elegance impresses Lila, who, like Ida, then calls on her inner resources—i.e., mostly temper—“Well, you do just breeze in and out—between trips.” But such sympathy is in Momma’s temper, as is not there when she speaks to men, and I cannot doubt that women are real, are vivid to Momma as no man is. Momma’s nerves and mind and experiences comprehend what a woman does, the sounds and tics and implications—the meanings. “Who lives like you?” Momma says. “You pack up and go when you want to go. Some people would kill to have your kind of life.”

It is curious how Ida comes into flower: the slow, cautious, shrewd small-town thing of her background shows first in her opened face, then the boarding-school-mannered thing of being mannerly shows next, and then comes Ida’s rebellion and good, sharp mind (her terms), and then these in a parade with the sophistications of New York and Europe (Ma’s terms) as part of a moment of stillness, of her looking inward while outwardly her appearance glistens and glows with her nervous parade in this manner.

But she is quick to be apologetic (to stifle envy): “It’s empty, Lila. Such emptiness …”

Ma said—crassly in the face of the fatuously self-regarding ego in so automatic a response—“That’s what they all say to me.” I.e., They all come to me to ease their emptiness.

Ida flinches, sits tautly; then Momma, looking Ida pretty much in the eye, touches Ida’s arm, in a way possible only to someone who is physically passionate: inside an intense doctrine of carefulness that implies all the machineries and aches and jealousies and spent bleaknesses of response—and it is pretentious in its way, perhaps self-conscious, like Ida’s elegance, that touch.

Then Momma puts her hand back in her own lap and stares straight ahead and not at Ida. “Look at us, sitting like those pictures of farmers getting married.” A countryside wedding-photograph.

Lila is sort of saying that the two of them are not lovers but are faintly married to one another by means of an American codification of women as neighbors—the idea of neighbors came to her from Ida earlier but she does not remember that. She feels a sacrament was in the nervous subtlety of minor touch that had in it a sincerity of person, the mark of individual sensuality, and that identified it as sacrilege—not a woman’s touch, or a daughter’s touch, or a lover’s touch: rather, it was Lila’s-touch-under-the-circumstances.

Ida is too tempo-ridden, too impatient to do more than guess at that, to do more than come to a summing-up: she knows there is little of ancient virtue or of chastity in Lila or in Lila’s touch—the touch is too minor a thing for her, although she recognizes the pride and knowledge and she saw that it stayed within certain ideal limits of the self. Momma wants Ida to be sincere and victimizable by touch to the extent that Momma is. What Momma senses as Ida’s summing-up is She would like me to be a fiery idiot. Ida wants Momma to be swifter and more allusive—I wish she were smarter.

Ida literally cannot deal with a real moment but runs across it on swift ideas of things: conclusions. She detects the illegal or bandit sacrament Lila offers, and it breaks Ida’s heart—so to speak—but she can’t pause or deal with it. She would say I can’t manage otherwise.

Lila feels at home only among women, but it is always for her as if she were in an earthen pit with them. Lila’s responsive mind and heat and Ida’s intelligence enlarge the space—the pit and its freedoms—with mutual sympathy but with rivalry and a kind of peace that was not the absence of pain or of striving but its being in a feminine dimension and made up of feminine meanings.

(The talk between women on which I eavesdrop is meanly hidden from me except for the musics in their voices and their gestures. I may have everything wrong.)

The rain seems to fall inside my head curtainingly. One must imagine the reality of Momma’s wet hips after a bath, breasts released from brassiere, unpinned masses of hair—this is hinted at: “Sit here by me, do you want to?” Ma says that to the woman who is already sitting there. Ma promises the thing that has already been done. It’s not a trick except in the sense that it makes things smooth, it suggests peace. She says this to the woman who can’t manage otherwise than to think Ma is a fiery idiot. Ma is not patient this way even with me.

Momma wants the ideal thing to be two women being together. “It’s like school and money to be two women,” Momma says in her most musical voice—the music means she is being deep.

Momma means the world of men, the surface of the planet, the topographies of violence and political sashaying around and quarreling are put aside, and one is as in a classroom with an admired teacher, or one is like a rich girl with a nice-mooded housekeeper or with a well-intentioned and intelligent aunt.

Ida, with her tigerish mind (Ma’s image: She has a mind like a tiger), seizes what Lila says (and does); what Ida thinks—in her summing-up way—is that Lila likes her.

Momma is familiar with not being listened to. And if her head droops while Ida now deposits a slew of quick, but sexually unquickened, kisses, safe kisses, boarding-school kisses, temporary, not those of love forever, love for all time, it is not in sadness but in temper and perversity.

“You don’t listen to someone like me,” Ma says despairingly—but like a joke, a parody of something or other—and she pushes Ida but with the side of her arm. Even that blunt touch makes Ma vibrate. Ma does not want kiddie kisses from a woman older than she is.

Ida is used to being punished—her word—for her virtues—her swiftness of mind, her boldness, her money, her social standing. Girlishly, victimized, her frizzed hair frizzier with personal heat now, Ida stiffens but persists boldly with her kisses.

Ma’s lips are twitching as she submits—to Ida’s boldness—as she holds her head where Ida can kiss her cheek, her temple, her brow, her eye.

Ida plants rhythmic, tiny, baby-syllable kisses—like stitches in good sewing in a schoolroom—a sexual baby talk, a parable of innocence, sanitary and commanding kisses. The kisses move toward Momma’s mouth.

Ma feels that the innocence is a bribe; it has to do with money-and-position, with false claims: this is a romance; and it draws Momma in a sad way to be plundered by Ida, who has real money-and-position (which Ma doesn’t have and enviously wants).

The skittery approach to her lips elicits anger sexually because it is not phrased seriously, physically. It is an assault—blind-beggar stuff—childish fiddling. Ma hates being touched if it is not expert—and, furthermore, if it is not an ultimate matter: life and death.

Or if it were innocent and reliable Ma could bear it. But she suspects—in a fundamental way, in her belly—that Ida wants to rip up and demean the actual; the evidence is the compression, the schooled conclusions in Ida, who clearly feels that a kiss is a kiss, when physically, of course, that is not true. Ma is grateful but irritated—and Ida seems absolutely evil to Ma, an evil child, blind, and contemptible—the mean one of the brood.

Ma has no frivolous abandonment in her. Her blasphemy and recklessness are not frivolous; they are costly and serious constructions. Lifelong.… She is tempted socially by Ida and her kisses, and she is repelled by the temporariness and by the sense of the world Ida shows in this kind of kiss at this moment.

Ida is full of temper. Her nakedness of affection has the temper of assault: sweet raping. But rape. Her nerves, her money, her wit back her in this.

Momma writhes and shifts with inner shouts—the seeds of temper, her own—and thinks of turning her mouth over to Ida. But then she can’t do it. She says, “Oh, you are chic. You are someone who travels. I have to catch my breath—”

Ida pants slightly—comically.

Momma, in her small-town privacies inside her, is horrified but resigned. She has never known anyone sexually who was not an astonishment—and in some ways a depressing oddity—animal-like, childish, nurseryish—and she sees in the panting that kind of overt animal mockery of the moment of intimacy. That is to say, she sees how Ida ends her stories: dissatisfaction and the decapitation of the favorite.

Ida wants to steal Ma—abduct her—win her from rivals, own her attention—but not only Ma—I mean Ida has a general theory of doing this—so the moment has a publicly romantic odor to Ma.

Ma looks pleadingly, sweetly, virginally, at Ida, beside her on the glider. Ma can claim sisterliness if she wants: “In some ways, we’re almost twins.”

“Oh, yes,” says Ida, as if delighted. “Twins, certainly.” She grasps Lila’s hand. Such will, such fine-boned will is in Ida that Momma smiles—inside her other moods she feels she is in a schoolyard again, a girl.

Ida’s sense of romance progresses by delicacies of parody—i.e., it is always two steps from the real—toward the heartier implications: commands, exploitations, secrets, alliances, bondages, rages: a display of self, an outbreak of darkness; she wants to bloom as a flower, a woman, a girl, a boy, a man. (Momma wants to bloom like that, too.) Ida names herself parodistically: “I kiss like John Gilbert, don’t I? Don’t you think so?”

Ma ought to say, Oh, yes, and lean back, and so on.

But Momma is not tamed, she is masochistic and flexible, and ashamed of that in relation to men, and crazy and vengeful as a result. Momma is crazy and vengeful freshly at every occasion of wrong. She is doing a thing: she is blooming as someone who cannot be tamed by sweat-mustached Ida.

She can fake being ladylike and distant from things and she can fake being commanding—she can imitate Ida. Her denial, her fakery are comic in her style. She sits facing forward, and she refuses to alter her posture.

A passionate woman being unmoved is funny.

Ida titters.

Momma dislikes comedy because of her sensibility—disgust and inner temper: a heat: distrust—these don’t turn into bearable jokes for her without contempt—for herself, for everyone—and she has too much physical merit still, although less surely, to hold herself, or romance, or the possibilities of a courtship moment, in contempt.

Momma’s outrageous and inwardly wretched comedy taunts Ida, who, childlike, then tugs at Ma’s shoulder.

But the tug is elegant—and startling. How startling Ida tends to be. Self-loving rather than making a gesture that actually included Momma: Ida needs to be loved as the good child whose every move embodies innocence and prettiness rather than as the active doer she is.

Momma resists all force applied to herself. “No,” Momma says. “Absolutely no.” She is not breathing at all. Then she is breathing lightly. Then heavily. She says, gently scathing, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, I caught a Lila by the toe—oh, Ida …” Then, leaning, straight-backed, at a slant away from Ida, a summing-up: “No one can count on you.”

Ida, in her momentum, makes flirtatious offers of obedience: “Everyone can count on me. I am your slave—Lilly—you know that.” Then, owlishly: “You know you can count on me lifelong.” Then: “Ly—fff(i)ff—longgg—” The length she drew the word to was roughly the span of attention before one blinks mentally and registers what is said—it was the equivalent of five or six syllables. Her voice is not torn by love and desire—i.e., by folly. Nothing is implied of any state of feeling other than a sophisticated one—i.e., one in which it is known that attachments come and go. Her promise is a parody of promises, it has no human ordinariness. It has intelligence and cruelty, though, and longing.

Momma straightens her head and does this and that, and then it emerges, as in a charade, that she is listening in an ordinary human way: she listens to the promise—now a memory in the air. She is smiling dimly, unreadably, beautifully.

In the haze of illusions and realisms, female lawlessness and its codes, and female parodies, and female truths give way apparently, and Momma turns her head and smilingly, tacitly listens with the calm maternal-innocent set of her face, which then alters into a lover’s wicked stare—accusing and reckless. This hint at the humiliation of the mother by the lying boarding-school seducer, Ida, is a parody, too; but her being a lover and challenging Ida, that part, is not parody, so it’s all different now: it’s physical and remorseless, like some affairs that kids have in high school.

That makes her vulgar—i.e., blunt and obvious—and sexual. This is rebellion on a giant scale, to be so local with Ida. Ma is claiming to be a more serious person than Ida by bringing in this real stuff in this championship way.

Ida is jocular about rebellion. Ida treats all claims to leadership as childish, even her own. Ida puts a small kiss—shyly—on Momma’s jaw.

A gust of feeling whirls Ma around. But she is not a mother, not a child—those are not sexual beings. In this assignation, Momma’s sense of what is to be done is real; Ida’s taste, and sense of things, prefers the symbolic: the summing-up.

Ma feels that if she is honest with herself, she is, as a person (a sexual body and a quick mind), very little better off, if at all, with Ida’s understanding than she is with S.L.’s.

Ma tugs at the tail of her bandanna. “S.L. may be in the house,” she says, with almost rabid sorrow: she holds up that hoop for Ida to go through.

Ida grimaces—it’s a snarl: that was stylish back then, for a stylish woman to mimic a gangster or something. See, Ma is punishing Ida by invoking “a law” that makes Ida behave. Ida grabs Lila by the elbows and says, “You Garbo!” Elusive woman. Garbo isn’t married. It is Garbo-minus, so to speak, that Momma is. This is in Ida’s face as she moves back to her chair, thwarted, probably enraged.

Lila feels somewhat lower-class, however. Momma says, “I never paid attention in school, so I’m easy to know.” She says, “You want another drink? You want another sandwich?”

Ida says, “Does S.L. drink?”

“He’ll be sober—when he comes around the mountain.” It is truly jolting when Momma breaks her own style open and imitates Daddy with all the depth of knowledge she has of him physically.

Ida stares at her.

Lila says, “I can read your mind. I know what you’re thinking.” She swings her foot.

“What am I thinking?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Momma says it seriously, in a musical voice. Ma does not know how small-town this is, but then—with gooseflesh and a sinking in her stomach and a light beading of sweat along her back—she can tell what a mistaken device it is in Ida’s opinion.

It is Homeric and not Tantric, the way the erotic and the spiritual merge in Ma; but if you use school ideas of things, the erotic is a matter of grasp and idea—that is, a demystification of feelings for the sake of excitement—and it is not spiritual at all: it is merely modern, then. Feelings reside in art and in sex but not in school, unless perceptions and illusions are counted as feelings, which is what Ida does and Ma wants to do—things coming out even, correct answers, being perfect: Ida wants those and the sense of those and the appetite for those to be counted as feelings. Ma is another type, but she has schoolish yearnings.

The reason school is the way it is is that in a classroom there is only one teacher, one power: a tyranny …

In life, there are always at least two people, or you can’t call it life.

“If I said now Ida is my friend, you’d agree, but if I acted on it, woe is me, and that’s where the trouble starts.” Ma says this hastily, as if S.L. might walk in any moment, but then she slows down and finishes saying it in a stately, melodious way. But her mouth and eyes are sultry—are gusty with feeling; she is so complicated now that no scientific theory can be as hard to unravel as her mood is. She is epically grownup in this way.

Ida, with a curious thwacking gesture of her knees against each other, matches Momma in complexity: she may now be the most grownup person in the world. “Let’s not go into what’s wrong. I don’t believe in diagrams,” Ida says. Lightly.

Ma says, “If we were a friend to one another, I could take you for granted and you wouldn’t put up with that for one second.”

Ida does not dawdle when she thinks. She takes the hurdle. “That’s brilliant. Your seeing that. Listen: You can take me for granted.”

“Now?”Now that I am brilliant. Ma thinks Ida ought to, and will, love her better after today.

Ida already “loves” her—that’s all been settled. Ida says in a dignified, faintly disgusted way, “I am your friend.”

Momma says, “Then I have no say in it—” Now she sees the trap clearly.

“Lilly—”

“I say someone is my friend when I say so. If you mean one word of it, tell me—you went to Switzerland with Colleen Butterson—that was the word that went out—what was that all about? Tell me if we’re good friends now.”

“Lilly—” Ida says, in a whole other voice. Don’t be silly. Don’t break the law (of discretion).

Ma bursts into an angry laugh—angry because she doesn’t want to be sidestepped. “You want me to sign a blank check. We have rules around here—and no one makes them up.” She makes them up, is what that means.

Ma knows from experience that the truth now between her and Ida (the atmosphere of rich equality) is that Momma is a fool for trying to impose her own sense of truth on a woman as firm-hearted as Ida.

Ida says, in an intelligently threatening (and wanly disillusioned) voice, “We don’t give pledges, Lilly. We trust each other.” A different law. A notion of law different from Lila’s. Then: “Are we mad?” Ida says, summing up and taking over. “No. Yes.” A witty joke. A party atmosphere. It is clear that in some ways Ida is a nicer person than Lila is. Than my mother.

Momma laughs. “I like the rain,” she says naughtily—it’s an intentionally clumsy imitation of Ida.

Ida doesn’t laugh right away. Momma starts to breathe defiantly; and she says meaningfully (her way), “It makes my pioneer hair frizzy.”

“Oh, Lila,” Ida says, relieved. Then she laughs.

Lila’s self-satisfaction begins to glow again. “I can’t keep up with you,” she complains. A touch of wit, maybe.

Neither has the sought-for command of the erotic at this juncture, but that works out in Ma’s favor, since Ma can live in erotic chaos and Ida can’t.

Momma’s momentum carries her along: “I’ve lived my life in small towns. You have Paris and St. Louis.”

Ida stares for a small second, locating what is meant, getting the point. Ida says, “What is wanting in Alton is naughtiness—madness—but there’s not much more in St. Louis. You’d find it dull, Lila.”

Lila thinks of Ida’s excitements and naughtiness as being open to her now as soon as she learns the passwords If I bother. Momma smiles faintly—maternally. Ma pants: It is an effort to keep up with Ida—she’s a real flier. “I’m not a dreamer,” Momma says aloud, almost idly, commenting on the contest.

Ida says, “It must be terrible to be without daydreams. We would die in this town without our—don’t repeat this—wickedness.”

Momma suddenly blows Ida a kiss. Everyone knows that Ida always gets even. Then Momma rises: a swirl of heat—the thin, finely curved legs, the pale, night-framed face, the paled, used lipstick (from drinking and smoking), the extreme prettiness of the woman—gusts around the porch. Ma hears a thump like that of a car door—she lifts her head toward the porch roof—then she swiftly bends over and kisses Ida on the mouth: light, quick, and real. A real kiss which can break the heart of the one who receives it and of anyone who sees it. “You are a hero, Lila,” Ida says.

With a swish of her skirt, Ma turns and walks back to the glider and sits down. She says, “Well, there, I don’t feel inferior now, no matter how smart you are, Ida.”

Ida moistens her lips for the first time. She smiles dimly—her eyes are filmed or curtained.

“You look Jewish like that,” Ma says.

Ida smiles more widely, complicatedly. Her eyes are in focus.

Ma says, “Let’s wait and see if the house shakes.” She means from S.L.’s footsteps on the wooden floors. She finds the noises men make menacing: they twang at her nerves.

The rain falls weightily.

Ma says, “We have another minute or two to be friends in.”

SPRING FUGUE

The first orchestral realization that something is up: Playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on a spavined CD player. It was a gray day in early February and the sun came out; and I was thinking, “The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners.”

The first crocus: The Sunflower Market, Thai Vegetables and Seeds, 2809 Broadway, February 14th. Spindly and snow-flecked.

First cold, March 19th – April 2nd. My wife and I are on our way to our accountant’s. On the way I see two drunks fighting in front of the OTB on Broadway at Ninety-first; April is the duelists’ month. Tacitly flirting with my wife, I carry two small packets of Kleenex in my pockets—one for her, because of her allergies: she makes a small nifty nasal piccolo announcement of the annual change in her life. I make the second really bad pun of the season: We sound like Bruce Springsteen and accompanist doing Bach’s “The Cold Bug Variations.”

First episode of spring nosiness not having to do with allergies or nose-blowing: I don’t know why the soul’s primary mechanics should consider spying or snooping a natural attribute of renewed life, but in the office icebox I see a small gold-colored can, shaped like a shoe-polish can, of caviar, and I wonder, jealously, who is so happy and so bent on celebration (or self-indulgence), but when I open it, it is empty, and written on the bottom of the can, in pencil, is the phrase Hard Cheese.

First philosophical guess: My guess is that spring is a natural way of suggesting adolescence as something one should start to go through again: genetic duty and genetic activity are romance. Hmm.… Nature is as tricky as any politician.

The thought of George Bush leads to The First Depression of the Season.

First emotional detail: More light on the windowsill.

First piece of strange advice to one’s self: Lighten up.

First symptom of intellectual confusion (on waking after dreams of fair women and of various unspeakable acts with them; memory, those astonishing chambers of lost realities, becomes overactive, leaving a broad sensation of gambling.… Roué-lette): The enumeration of the bedroom furnishings—a nightstand, one-night stand, two-night stands, three-night stands.…

No, no.

In the bathroom, first session practicing smile.

First impulse of active love: A sloppy kiss while my wife is putting on her shoes.

She gazes at me. “Oh, it’s spring,” she says.

Shopping list for first three-day weekend in the country to rent a house for the summer: Contac, Kleenex, Beatles tape, citronella candles (to leave in the rented house if we find it), jump rope (for losing weight), walking shoes, jeans one size too small (to force oneself to diet), a handful of short-lived cut lilac to carry in the car as an aide-mémoire.…

First equinoctial death shudder and racial memory of human sacrifice for the sake of warmth and the return of summer: A roadkill on 32A outside of Saugerties—a no longer hibernating but probably still torpid, thin woodchuck.

Second such event after returning home: Cutting my thumb while using a new, Belgian, serrated-edge slicing knife that slipped on a small Israeli tomato, while I was thinking about Super Tuesday two years ago and whistling Dixie.

Am I unconsciously Angry?

First hysterical delusion: Advertised medicines that come to mind when seeing in a moment of stress spring flowers in the mind—Nuprin-yellow jonquils, tetracycline-colored tulips (red-and-yellow ones). Tylenol-colored clouds (Tylenol is Lonely T spelled backward). Advil-colored dirt. Theragran-M-colored drying blood.

With my hand betoweled and my soul a little mad with pessimism about the current ways we live, and with gaiety, heroism, and the spring wound, I phone my wife at her office. She makes more money than I do.

Advice, sympathy, information from my wife’s assistant while I am waiting for my wife to end a meeting. It is possible that even the assistant makes more money than I do. (I am a schoolteacher.) She says that in the stores is a helping-the-blood-clot-and-disinfectant-and-anesthetic spray; and there are clutch bandages. But: “Beware,” she says, “the spray depletes the ozone layer, and the clutch bandage harms circulation.” The finger may turn Nuprin-yellow, crocus-yellow, coward’s yellow.

The conversation with my wife is out of a melodramatic domestic novel, except that at work she is Nietzschean. I refer to her being possessed by the will-to-power.

My wife says, “How deep is the cut?”

“I think I see the bone.”

She says, “Do you see any white?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the tendon. Bones aren’t white while you’re still alive. They’re not white until you clean them after you rob them from a grave. You may have cut the tendon. Can you move it?”

“No. Yes. It looks like a bone.”

“It isn’t the bone. But there are nerves in there—”

“Is that true? That’s not just hypochondria?”

“You should be able to see only one nerve, unless it’s a really big cut—do you see it?”

“See the nerve?”

“It’s a thing, it’s visible.”

“What does it look like?”

“A thread. Does it make you sick to look at the wound?”

“No. What makes you think that?”

“Well, take a look and tell me what you see.”

There is a silence and then she calls out, “Hey, hey, hey.”

“I fainted a little. I’m sort of on my knees here. Hold on, let me get up. Whoo, that was stupid. What I saw was gray-white; there’s quite a lot of gray-white. I suppose I saw blood but it looked gray-white and blood isn’t gray-white, it’s bluish, I remember, I—”

“You’re in shock. Is there anyone with you?”

“I was cutting a tomato.”

“Yes?”

“Someone is coming over—someone will be here soon. You. But you can’t come home. You’re at work. Should I go get a clotting spray?”

“Go to the emergency room at the hospital. You did this call?”

“I don’t remember,” I say miserably.

“You cut your thumb?”

“Yes. I guess so. Unless this is all a dream,” I say hopefully.

“Did you dial with your left hand?”

“I wrapped my hand in a towel and I squeezed the towel with the other hand. I dialed with my little finger. It’s touch-tone, the phone is.… I think.”

“I forget if there are large numbers on the touch-tone phone or small ones.”

“Tiny, really.”

“Are they stubborn or easy?”

“Stubborn.”

“Then if you dialed and didn’t bleed all over the phone you’re probably O.K.”

“Would you say you were showing sympathy?”

“You may quiver with madness and shock at my saying this, but I promise that if you stay overnight at the hospital I will bring you volumes of Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, so you can see what horror and suffering truly are.”

“Shit.”

“On the other hand, our Maltese doorman’s sister-in-law died of sepsis after a knife cut in her hand which she got chopping beets when she was visiting her mother-in-law in Valletta. Wait for me. I’m coming home.”

My wife is a Spring Goddess. A Nietzschean Nightingale (Florence). “Here,” she says. “Let me look.… A kiss won’t make that well. Let’s go.” A kiss or two later, as we pass a homeless guy who at first I think is me in the third person hailing a taxi, and as my shock begins to lift, I say to her, sadly, “When I was a child, I had a Swiss barometer with a wooden house on it. The house had two doors. Out of one came a boy in shorts and with a Tyrolean hat on, and I think a girl in a dirndl came out of the other. They went inside if it was going to rain.” Nowadays I suppose you might have a homeless person carved in wood and sleeping on a subway grating to indicate good weather and going into an arcade or a subway to indicate rain.

Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb). I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meager udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studios used in John Wayne’s day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn’t want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form—dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.

Blustery, raw, and rare—and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.

So is its spring.

WHAT I DO FOR MONEY

At dawn, in the suffusion of light and return of visibility, in the woods where I camped out on my red-and-blue air mattress in a nylon shed-tent, open in front and partly at the sides and with a now luminous rooflet tied overhead to two guardian trees, I woke. The light and mist among the tree trunks, the near silence of the birds, the biological, organic clutter around me on the ground softened my mood.

I have a streak of biological piety. These are my woods, set high in the northern Catskill Mountains, not very high mountains. They are not very old woods, any more than are the woods in the adjacent state park. All this territory was lumbered over twice in the last two hundred years. In this glade, only two trees are particularly large, and one is a sycamore planted a hundred years ago and one is a pine about the same age.

The light makes the blue nylon a holy color, like a tone in a Bellini painting, like the color of a cloak of the Madonna; it is a glowing, Bellini blue, and it fills me with awe. The side of the mountain that descends, that falls, is on my right. Behind the descending columns of trunks of trees—saplings, and older, bigger trees—is a vast space of now luminous, as-if-new air.… In a harsh world, this silent, glowing beauty, this ordinary, momentary prettiness, is, as I said, a speechless, pagan piety.

Suddenly fully wakeful, straightening my clothes, lighting my spirit stove, I contemplate my situation. I light a cigarette; I am a dying man. I have an inoperable brain tumor. The process of finding this out took nearly two months. And I am being let go at work, in a harsh process—the company has been sold and is losing money or not making enough; the errors have been those of top management, some of whom are being let go as well. I am one step down from top management, and my work on this level has been successful—in the general debacle this has aroused jealousy, rage really, even hatred. I may have been too distracted by the headaches I was having to handle things well. Was I arrogant? No. I was rather meek and apologetic. But I went on being right, and lo, a vicious war.

I am thirty-five years old, divorced, not estranged from my children, but they are turning into people very like my wife, whom I don’t miss. It is a kind of programmatic, thought-out, mind-filled selfishness, a self-willed sort, not shallow, not stupid, not even cold: more like an intelligent Episcopalian tantrum among theories of selflessness and God knows what all. I mean it is this in my ex-wife and children that isolates me.

I don’t know how bad any of this makes me feel. I have a brain tumor. I have sliding films of headache and sporadic interferences with vision. I suppose I have despised my bosses for a long time now, thought them amateur and self-loving, hardly honest in relation to the work of running a large company. I suppose I have despised—and forgiven—my ex-wife for as long. I don’t think I have been disloyal to any of them, not very much, not very often. But I’m not on the whole a careful man, and I become frantic inwardly—it is a moral uproar—when I am, I suppose, conceitedly convinced that I can see the wastage, the extent of the bad decisions, the crude wrecking of lives and possibilities in others—which they are egoistically, obstinately set on causing … that corporate and suburban selfishness.

I am said to be lucky, but the work I do—product design, but at the point where such design is redone to become industrially and commercially practicable—and its quality, the things I’m after, are insulting to some people.… Or perhaps it’s just competition. I have been aware of this, told about this since college. And in college. And long before that, in grade school. I have been able to adjust and to protect myself to some extent until now, but last year I began to slip. The tumor. Destiny melting my mind, maybe. Probably.

Anyway, I am being treated shabbily, filthily by former allies and colleagues. They sweat and tremble, but they say, “We want you to leave.… We don’t think this last idea of yours is any good.” Then they take it back and say, “It’s good, but you’ll have to work with Martin.…” I have never worked with Martin Jones: he’s an ambitious little madman, a cheap thief—of ideas, of office supplies, of money, when he can manage it. He’s the keeper of the little escort book—he’s the upper-echelon pimp. With the bribes he offers and the inside information he gets and his tirelessness and the pity he purposefully arouses—he is always either ill or suffering a domestic tragedy—he is irresistible on a certain level. He is pudgy and pretentious, clever and whiny, repulsive, even loathsome. But he makes even that work in his favor. He himself boasts that he is tirelessly rotten—violent.… That’s his way of saying: Fear me. Everyone in the office does fear him except for the two operating officers at the top. Martin became obsessed with me just before the collapse of profits. He is determined to gain control of my working life—this is the man I have to deal with now. Surely they know this is forcing me out. Does everyone eat shit who earns a salary? Does everyone who eats shit insist that everyone else eat more shit?

Little Phil Moore, the short one, the coked-up one, at one time a friend—I brought him to these woods—he is working with Martin, the horror Pimp, co-opted or willingly. He came to my office and said, “You worked us over.… You’re putting us through hoops.… You don’t like us: you want to leave.” Claiming innocence for him and Martin. He’s just doing his job. And he’s working out his ego in putting the squeeze on me. Well, he’s partly right. I want to leave. But I didn’t initiate my leaving. They have to give me severance.

They are half afraid of me—of the stink I might cause. I am half enraged. Tired. But they are not afraid enough of me, and the negotiation over severance pay has been difficult verging on nightmare. Martin, the horror Pimp, has no fear of lying; he lies to any extent. He farts and talks stupidly and calls me at four in the morning to say he has a discarded memo of mine speaking of my resignation. He speaks in a false voice. He uses being disgusting—and silly—to drive someone like me out of a fight. I lose my will to fight Mr. Protozoan Slime. It is not like tussling with Achilles; there is no honor anywhere in the moments of such a struggle. And he is proud of himself.

He has asked me to give in because we are both Presbyterian. He’s said, “We stick together, don’t we, we white men?” The issue is whether I’ll take less money and vamoose and let him win. Or try to work with him in the time I have left. Or I can sell these woods and hire a severance negotiator. But I don’t want to sell these woods, these moments of light. Ah, Christ.

I actually feel a little rested, refreshed, prepared physically for the day, for anything that happens, for everything that is existent, including death. I feel I understand the violence of the world. Egos are involved … what a dread phrase … in the procedures of unreason. I’ve lived a long time in relation to the weird unreason of others. But this moment is colored by the softness of the morning air, wilderness air, and mountain light, and the odor of trees and rock. I have the energy to be serious or unserious … savagely indignant or mordant…. The energy, the clearheadedness … In the office, as in any sport, I have to be like them, the opponents, in order to do battle or to deal with them, in order to come up with useful tactics and the requisite language noises.

God, office politics. They have eaten up my life. My chief strength in the world (such as it has been until now) is to be snotty and airy toward ugliness, is to skate right by it. It is treacherous toward democracy for me to be snotty and airy about it in relation to my colleagues, although it is patriotic to find America beautiful after all, or before all. Treacherous to my colleagues, whom I despise. I don’t give a fuck about anything they give a fuck about. Except perhaps money.

I am between marriages. I suppose I should think about my two children. I come to the woods in order not to think about them. I don’t know how much of my death I want to share with my children. I don’t like to hide things from them. But I do cold-bloodedly think of and warm-bloodedly feel the massive, tantrum-y selfishness my ex-wife has encouraged in them. Actually, she told me she would do that if I did not return to her. What do I care about them? You know how selfish I am, Hank, she said. Do you suppose she would want me now, on the skids and tumorous? I don’t want to die with her. I can teach charitably or I can charitably empty bedpans for the short rest of my life, if I get enough money from the firm. The life I have left will be better if I accept the need to be sly steadily, with daily regularity: Dearest, tell me, do I look blankly friendly? Can you tell me if I give off a hint of menacing slyness? Do I appear to be a good citizen? My life would go better, but I would sicken and die even faster than I am sickening and dying now, and doesn’t dying free you from the need to accept the world any longer?

I went to a country wedding once—a Methodist minister’s son married a pretty girl in an agonizingly pretentious stone chapel upstate. Built on the shore of a lake in a grove of birches, the chapel was pretty in a horrendously striving, American way—self-consciously Christian, trying for tradition. It had some architectural quality but not a quality of spiritual exercise and no aura from generations of belief. It was not pure with the hope of God, like the wooden churches visible across the lake from it. The morning had been rainy. The rain stopped just as we settled ourselves in church; the sun came out; the turn-of-the-century stained-glass windows began to glow effulgently in a kind of harsh American glory of light.

The first bridesmaid down the aisle had a two-year-old child who would not leave her or let her march without him, and so the woman marched carrying a bouquet in one hand with a child balanced on her hip and held by her other hand—a different bouquet. She marched with a curiously mild, unassertive, consciously lovely, almost sated-but-frantic air down the aisle in the overwhelming light.

Is it a fate to have been happy?

Here is another definition of a life I have not lived. At a night club upstate that wedding weekend, an oldish and overweight, gray-haired woman with an obvious paunch and a white violin and a back-up band sang and fiddled a song that she had written. She sang and chanted that she could get everyone to dance: “I’ll make you wild.…” She sang and chanted it. She had set her amplifiers at some high register and everything she did was loudly amplified, a bit thunderous and a bit shrill with electronic treble, electronic tremble. She was loud, hypnotic, gifted, and her insistence was inspired in its way, that she could make us wild.… Dionysiac. And people did begin to dance. The woman became more and more suggestive, dirty, and commanding, in a somehow Scotch-Irish way that was gypsylike and irresistible. It was also part of the American backwoods, the camp meetings, the harvest festivals.

Everyone in the audience, in the crowd, who was not crippled or arthritic—the drunken midlifers and the eighty-year-olds and the stoned younger ones, countryside working class—danced stiffly wildly. We were whitely and self-consciously orgiastic. In a somewhat consciously traditional way and as rebels as well. The sexual self-revelations, such as they were, suited the room and the lake. And explained the privacy of clubs and summer places. Explained my parents’ summertime snobbery, explained night clubs and lakeside resorts in a new and somewhat comic way, a touching way, with a sense of kinship. All the things I have not lived were present. I never was Dionysian.

Bad news, broken heart, absurd tension. Still, the light among the trees and the fragments of sky, pale, glowing blue like the nylon over my head with the light in it, say it will be a pretty day. Je m’en foutisme—I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism: is that the note I whistle? From the time I was old enough and strong enough to have my own way at least partly, even as a boy, I have insisted on living part of each day, a moment or two, without suffering. And without cold willfulness. A civilized moment or two of freedom and of emotion.

I bought this land last year, five acres; four are wooded and steep and set among gray, lichenous rocks and closed in by a forty-foot rock face and a lower, sloping meadow—small, less than an acre, and ringed with hemlocks—and in the woods between the meadow and these rocks a small, green, wooden, three-room house with three porches and a steep, wood-shingled roof and summer-camp shutters.

I would like to do a tree census—find out how many trees I own, how many branches, how many twigs and leaves. And bugs. A quarter of a million leaves. A million leaves … I am a millionaire of rustling leaves … of grass blades. Of molecules of air … I own the air I breathe at this minute. Cubic yards of air, invisible stones of a luminous temple.

What are the statistics? Seventy-five maples, eighty beeches, seventeen oaks, seven junior oaks, seven hemlocks including one, uh, picturesque giant. And so on. But I am inventing that. Sitting now on a log, drinking coffee, having a death-time cigarette, sitting on my red-and-blue air mattress, I look around at the uneven ground and nearby cliff, the trees that grew against the rock and that are fastened to the rock, leafy pilasters. The scattered and decaying leaves on the ground. The trees I own are not quite singular for me; they are trees, a generalized mass: my trees. Do you suppose God is this way about souls? I haven’t named any of my trees. In the morning light, I look around—the leaner, the life-is-a-beech, the straight-up maple near the boundary line to the east, the birch society, a crooked copse.… Those aren’t names of long-term affection. The feelings I have toward them are half-baked, inchoate, are unlike any feeling I have had toward animals or people or things … the patient, fluttering trees … A wind is springing up, stirs my semi-named, half-nameless trees.… A blur of vegetation, branches thickened to the eye by their motion, the cinder roses of shadow move on the ground.… The terms come from a Spanish poem: the smear of vegetation … cinder roses.… Thought stops. The great invisible chain links of mountain wind lash at my woods. I listen with abrupt, incredible simplicity to the sound of that wind, the forceful and shifting exercise of the morning wind. All around me spread shivering whorls of tethered shadows, an infinity of motions of a million twigs. The world is active and stirs eccentrically and rustlingly, stirs differently in the blond, sunlit upper air and in the more constrained greenish lower air. Nature has said, I will make the tethered trees wild.

Dionysiac release? I suppose so. A rehearsal for the release of seeds. An invisible embrace. The motion of the mountainside.

Clouds, too, are a smear, they move so rapidly in the wind. Capitalism has a spiritual side—a pagan spiritual side and a Christian one, one of self-examination and of values, of truths beyond truths. And it has a civilly spiritual side: a keep-your-house-pretty side, a wear-the-right-clothes side. The responsibility for the condition of the immediate world is clearly placed, whether the community uses its knowledge of such identifiable responsibility with intelligence or not. These trees will outlive me unless I become thoroughly a capitalist or a destructive dying man, rampantly assertive, and have them lumbered.

I control the fate of the trees rustling in a morning wind, in the shudder of the air. The cinder roses of the skidding and fluttering and whirling shadows are sometimes like the splashed gray letters of a restless alphabet slipping over rocks and dead branches on the ground, over wild grass in the meadow, grass stained reddish here and there by reddish seed heads, with yellow and white wildflowers visible among the grasses. A dry stream, over moss, sedum, tansy, goutweed, bluets, wild mustard, and wild phlox, rockets in openings among the trees. Shadows and leaves in their vegetable and aerial life move over me in a profound sweetening of the moment.

My life is a mess; yet I am fairly happy. Perhaps unfairly. I can’t say I understand happiness. In my case it always has an uncaring, what-the-hell element and is a form of dizzied satisfaction that is unfeeling at its center, freed from feeling, almost a cry of enough. The sense of completion is like a satisfaction with its spine of shameful triumph … of peace and escape. It is shallow of me and in my blood—an old traditional thing—and it is the deepest and most savage emotion I ever have, it is the deepest part of me, to be happy. It is based on my ignoring an important number of things, but I have a rebellious nature of this sort. In a pagan sense it is a serious business to be happy.

This is absurd, this sequence of thoughts. How far would I go morally, toward death, how far did I go, to own my so far unnamed, not deeply known trees? If I want money now, I have to think harder about how to negotiate, how to handle cleverly the situations that will establish the amount of money I will have while I die. I have to figure out how to put the fear of God into the pimp-Jones and the rat-Moore.

I will probably do what is necessary—what part of my soul do I want to save at this point? What do I care about? When I was a child, no one told me what life was actually like.… I wish I had been told. Now I am waiting while the wind mumbles and stammers, twitches, as if it were alive and standing still, an immense, transparent ruminant-acrobat, a glass creature resting from its stampede of a moment ago. I wait for it to return, the large, invisible, active, somersaulting mountain wind among the trees in my wood. The brief, embracing wind.

Death? Ugliness? Who gives a goddamn fuck? Who gives a good goddamn fuck? Here it comes, the first transparent steps—and leaps—of the wind among the trees.

RELIGION

In the end I guess at him. I use a-sense-of-things. In a kind of clouded gray space inside my head, I guess at him. I probably can’t do this, guess at him and be right.

We are silent, one day, Jass and I, after doing dares—daring each other to shinny up the pipe-frame of the row of swings in Jackson Park, riding the swing up and over the bar. Then I stood on the ground and held Jass on my shoulders while he threw the swings back over the bars. He was agreeable to us covering our tracks.

We lay sprawled on the itchy grass in that park. It seems too intense to mention the odors of the ground, of the season. Such sensory reality was part of being that age, being boys. Jass’s unreliable comradeship, today’s fate of the world, the fate of the world so far, and us, him and me, lying on the grass and the odors of the grass are mixed together, unalterably.

Intense rivalry is infatuation of a kind, a sensitivity to the whole shebang of the other person because you want to win. I never started conversations or said things without being asked. He seems more bold. He as if moves in a field or meadow or big schoolyard of such holding back in me. He asks, “Are you scared to think about being dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. Imagine yourself buried.”

After a moment: “Naw. I don’t want to.”

I’m not always aware of color. If I relax, I feel a creeping suffusion of color into the day: blue sky, white clouds, oddly various, changeable greens—as if color itself were nervous and changeable—and greenish shadows on largely pinkish-white-beige-ocher Jass, the topography of the boy’s face. I like the existence of language, but aural color is different from visual color. It smacks of magic, and real color is just the world.

I asked Jass, “Are you frightened of being hurt—in the body?”

I had an adolescent voice: an infatuation and uncertainty toward issues of courage.

Then I hear him. First, the sound. Then the hidden mathematician-thinker-spy called memory deals with what he says and makes it orderly.

He said, “I don’t know. I don’t mind it.”

“You don’t get frightened?”

“I’m not afraid of being hurt.”

I recognized that he had a manner of insensitivity and dry boldness, but it was only a manner, and it seemed sensitive and cagey in its way.

It frightened me back then, that he—and other kids—knew what they thought. I had to think a long time to know what I thought.

I said, shielding my eyes, “I’m not frightened about dying.”

I get up. I stand on the sloping and somewhat faintly spinning disklike floor of park grass, tree roots.

“I have to go home.”

In a more clearly sequential movement than mine, he got up. He has a tensed, wry, small smile—nice—friendly-for-the-moment. In real life, if someone wants to talk or walk or whatever with you, it can be very moving.

We walk maybe twenty yards, and then he starts taking giant steps as in Simple Simon. I start to walk with large Boy Scout hiking strides. Then, after a little while, he starts to hop; he hops up a slope in the small park and onto a six-lane boulevard, Delmar. I speed up and push him into the rear of a passing bus, and I hurry on, not worrying if he is hurt or not. I am deep inside my innocence. I hop past stone walls and up a steeply sloping macadam-and-pebble street in front of a stone church in a neighborhood of large houses. Then he passes me. Then we’re running, racing. He’s the faster sprinter. He sprints and slows, sprints and slows. I can outlast him in a mile, but he suddenly sprints far ahead, and I give up and start to walk. He’s ten, fifteen yards ahead of me. He waits for me to draw near him. He’s not breathing hard. I am. We’re near the intersection of two winding, tree-lined, lawn-skirted, large-house-lined suburban streets, a perspectival crucifix, empty of movement. When we cross the street, the scene assumes a faintly wheeling spoked motion. I am partly still out of breath.

Jass holds his arms out in the attitude of the crucifixion. He says, “Do you dislike Jesus?”

I start to count out loud, “Wuhin, tooo(eee), three-uh, foerrrr, fi-i-i(ve)—”

“Whu-it ehr-are yuh-oo dooooinbn Wo/ih/hileeee?” Wiley, my name. It is odd, what actual voices, unidealized, are like in the real air of a real day.

“I’m counting—if I count to seventeen, I get to see God.”

“No shit? Honest to-ooo Gohw-idd—aw-er yew gointa see Gawh-dddd(uh) now?”

“It’s not a swindle, asshole. I’m not asking you for anything.”

Jass believes the world is tricky. “Are you going to see God here—right now—in University City? On Melbourne?” The name of the street.

“Nahuhhhhhhh. I won’t see God if you’re here. Wait: now, there He is …”

“You masturbate too much,” Jass says, and hits me on the arm, the side of the shoulder, hard. This is a very quiet neighborhood. The intersection is silent, is empty. He looks at me from a distance. “Admit it,” he says.

He is notorious for talking dirty in the locker room and for doing dirty things and getting everyone else to do them. I shake my head.

He says abruptly, addressing my (comparative) purity: “You—and Winston Churchill …” Noble and unnecessarily ambitiously disciplined.

Then he jumps me and we are wrestling. He is further into exerting himself to win than I expected—the strained, wrestlingly moving, tensed-and-taut physical weight and will are a shock, are dismaying—he is right on me, right on top, like an animal, his braced haunches and physical mass, the fleshiness, wriggling tautly with wild, would-be-victorious purpose.

I hammer him in the face, saying, “Don’t you ever think about ideals?”

He is forcing my arms down. He looms over me. He demands with a surprising amount of breath and only a little breathlessness, “What are you thinking about now? Are you looking for God?”

I frighteningly turn and twist. We’re leery of the ways we each think the other is a nut. We’re as if dressed in spikes to keep feelings off us. They leap bodilessly on us all the time anyway, feelings that seem like cat-family moods, dog moods, horse moods.

“I have Christian ideals,” he says, still breathless, sitting on me, suffocating me.

I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

I find fighting with someone shocking, dispurifying: it dirties the very air, the very envelope of the world. I half expect birds to fall from the sky, poisoned.

“Shit, get off me,” I said, close to madness. He and I both know I am dangerous despite all my precautions.

He had me pinioned. He watched me in a peculiar way—with a haughtiness-of-a-sort. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. And he gets up.

I see as if down a hallway and through a partway-open door; I see something-or-other in him and me: some of what I see becomes words, although not entirely or clearly. We used to wonder if we would find it easy to kill, to lead others, to be commanders. He said that that was bullshit but he asked, too, if it was bullshit, but he wasn’t asking me.

He was willing to accept the distance between souls. I don’t think he knew yet if such isolation as he felt was incurable. He’s asking for company—companionship—something. But he doesn’t trust me, and he wants to be the winner. Having released me, he stands, and I see the sunlight on his forehead and nose, a subtle armor protecting him from nothing.

“Maybe it is all bullshit, cocksucker” I say.

I admired Jass. I was pretty sure he would be admired anywhere in the world he went—admired and pitied … the beautiful sand-colored one.

I drew on my studies and I said, in order to be nice—a degree of clement attention: “If I combine original and primary … I get originar?. Do you know, does the originary real world matter?”

He shrugged. No one at school ever gave away what he or she really felt (truly thought) to anyone, not really. Or the details of what he or she knew. Jass maybe wanted to play at serious talk or intelligent talk (the latter was the term used by somewhat better-bred kids).

The sport, the actual dimensions of the game here, has to do with power, real power in real sunlight. He wants to know which levers control fear and death and being amused in the world. He wanted to be like me but not completely like me, not a Jew—not haunted. This is a moment of my education that mattered, this knowing myself head-on from him and also from inside me, two ways at the same time, glaringly and with a blur so that I squinted.

His actual face in sunlight—and then the air and light at yet another intersection, at the high point of this enclave of houses, yet another perspectival drooping and curving crucifix lined with well-tended palaces—are part of a moment raw with limited and eccentric friendliness. It wasn’t perfect.

He said, “Do you believe in Heaven?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Silence. He said, “I think Heaven is a great thought.”

“Are you serious?” It was good to be tactful if someone was serious about some pious matter or other.

“I’m serious,” he said with his eyelids half shut—that meant he was lying, but not entirely. So did him having his eyes wide, wide open and fixed directly on you, which he did next.

I asked, “Are you being sarcastic?”

“You’re the one who’s sarcastic.”

“You are! You’re being sarcastic!”

“You’re looking at yourself.”

“No, I’m not.” I started to laugh exasperatedly. He didn’t really know how to talk about a subject.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“Your Adam’s apple is funny,” I said.

The present-tense eyes of the Protestant boy have a quality of well-practiced, frigidly hot attentiveness. His is the best attention I know at this point in school. He takes athletic, picayune, little breaths; he listens with no real movements of his eyes. They have a quality of male will—sort of. Focused, his eyes have, when they look at you, a mocking, American love letter thing—upper middle class, suburban Protestant, deadpan and intelligent.

In the hovering fatedness of any exchange, he says, “Kiss my ass.”

I say to him, “Boy, what crap you hand out.”

Did you ever feel betrothed in your youth to the heat of your present-tense reality, to the slippery and sliding focus on trying to talk—something like that? At yet another intersection, I had a sense of falling, of losing mental control, and my eyes blurred in the all-ways-dimensional now, the mind’s and the world’s great sea, the afternoon light. Real eyes are really real. It is impossible to think your way through moments spent with someone else.

In eight years, Jass will be killed in aerial combat in Korea, because his Sabre jet hadn’t yet been fitted with an afterburner—it was something of a scandal. He had sent me a postcard a month or so before: Dear Smart Guy: Guess what? Now I’m as smart as you …

What do you feel and think when you lose out in an aerial combat for real, when it is going to kill you—is it chagrin you feel? Do you have a sudden knowledge of yourself?

Jass breathes with athletic artfulness. His powers of physical improvisation were really considerable. “Shit,” he says. Then: “Shut up.”

“Sure,” I said, uncertain-eyed, but haughty. I know he likes to hurt people. He likes to play around.

He says, “The way you talk is stupid. Are you an honest person?” I can’t untangle the mockery, or figure out the seriousness.

Syllables in their purposes alight—like geese in a dimly lit yard with a masked whisper and rush, caught air, materialized, aerial—what-he-says—what he said never amounted to much. Interplay blows you this way and that. Meanings, obscene, nonsensical. Incomplete. I can’t handle him.

His rough, mocking gaze drags across my cheeks and eyes. He jumps on me again. We are arguing this way—about beliefs. We are studying affection. This was not particularly intelligent. “Let’s have a truce,” I say. The moment, the smells when he throws me down, the smells of dirt and of grass, have a hotly defeated, presence-of-another-will quality of defeat. Warm, rough, dirty …

He moves off me. And we stand up, and arrange our clothes, and he says: “You’re so fancy. Jews are always so fancy.”

“Cut it out,” I say.

“Scissors, scissors,” he says, nonsensically.

It is all nonsensical. No part of it was ever final enough to make sense.

WAKING

When I was a child, at a certain moment, I woke in a different house made of wood. The slow movement of my eyelids, whispering and scraping, in tiny lurchings, tickled me. A sense of the disorder of the wicked vaudeville, the foul inventiveness of pain kept me uneasy, so that I was as if crouched. I have been ill.

It is almost light. The child is in pain; he lies half in, half out of an abominable breath-bag. The ill child watches in a feverishly illiterate way the slow oozing of the increase in light. Inside the delicacy of the uneducated stare, soft, opened, lightly fluttering, the pallor of consciousness, tampered with by pain, observes, anyway, the shimmer of the advance of the light.

After a while, cool and flighty, mindless cousinhood to sense breaks out—the first time in weeks, but then after a while it passes into spasms of sweaty apprehension, of waiting for the pain—of madness—in its criminal mysteriousness to return and blind me. This continues and doesn’t worsen: that it doesn’t worsen puts a weird and private jollity on his face. The recognized thump and rattle of a window frame, a dull, tremulous bass, and the rapid soprano twitterings of the glass panes in the mullions make the child twitch; then the noise takes on a weight of the familiar; it is beautiful with monotony; it persists.

Then pale-gray and yellow and pink fragments of light appear and slowly unbud, until I am embiered by rose after rose of unlikely light in a room filled with morning. The light is palpably warm. It warms and regulates my soul ungeometric with madness. The child gags and stutters in his breathing. My hand, a childish hand, burns and aches; it has a wind inside it, under it; it moves; it unfurls. The child stiffens in uneasy dominion over this phenomenon of his unfamiliar body. See, he has been ill a long while. The hesitations of thin, unstable, brown-papery, rustling minutes are a matter of steep consciousness for him. Mother-shoulders of air hold pinkish and silvery dabs of light aloft—prismatic dust—and the child persists in his truancy from grief. In the blurred flourish of mind in naming this light as light, as if it were the light in the other house, the child unmovingly romps, dizzied with illness, in a marvelous fluster of intellectual will. Consciousness does not dare call the roll of who is living and who is dead, because the disorganized child-life behind the blindly seeing spy holes of my face is so shaky.

My dead mother was fond of me. Which one of us is lost now? Lila, my adoptive mother, will someday say to me, I used to wonder what was wrong with you; you didn’t die when she did. The penalties are in place whether I die or not. Exhaustion in any act of extended will becomes panic and grief: Many, many times, I’ve thought something was wrong with you, you lived when you shouldn’t. No one thought you would live after she died. When she was alive, she kept you with her every minute; she said, “Why should he be sad? He likes to be with me. I’m strong, I can do two things at once. “ You wouldn’t let anyone touch you but her. No one could see her without seeing you hanging on her like a monkey. You was a pair, let me tell you: anything in you that’s good, it comes from her. If there’s a mind in you, you got it from her. It’s sad she died, but that’s how things are. What can you do about it, I ask you.

The lion breath of grief stinks. The infant is a co-traveler of the light, mad and swift, glancing and unrooted. Is your life grotesque? Are you a grotesque creature, Aaron?

Wiley?

I can’t insist that I am human, that I am licensed. The stale and cruel stench of vomit. I lay stinking and half mad in excrement, in vomit and in tired, perhaps secretly tireless grief and rage … peeking at life but still lost in vileness.

The room, my room, my shell, my outer identity (I did not name it “room”), it ticked and creaked, hummed and tinkled in the wind.

In the bed, constrained by taut sheets and tucked blankets and by chairs set around the bed, I wait. The people here have not yet invested in a crib. Somber conceit: the nearly silent sweeps of sight, the slower blotting up, the sending out on expeditions of sight, the brushing past the sides of sight by things, things in their rays, things brush against or flutter or scurry tickingly by the sides of sight, sight is an imaginary finger or nose: palpings, hesitations: a set of physical hypotheses ranging through the room; things press back, insectlike, itchy, ghostly, real. For a while, any shadow is a wall. That it is my bed …

The woman came to the door of the room, to the edge of the shallows of breath and stink and harsh light and sickness where I am. The confusion of light and the window sounds and wind noises held her and me in the invalid’s observation. The Lost Woman now was shorter and had different eyes. I assumed her prettiness was kindness. I felt the clenching and the whirring of the possibility of the return of madness, because this woman (I thought) had let me suffer and go mad, a single second’s flicker of (mistaken) fact on a tiny fulcrum of a lunatic child’s absurdly clear reasoning. The child was not careful. He said inwardly, Momma. The small boy was rigid and racked with the pulse of diarrhea then.

Lila Silenowicz said, “Oh, my God, you’re worse than a pigeon.” She made a joke for her own amusement.

The woman does not look at the child closely. Around her is a space, a blankness, of coolness, the border where the too difficult heat of shape and identity in someone stops and outline takes over.

Lila has an air of submission to tragedy—this has a domestic tone, scary and alert. I am not exactly visible. I am a sick child. Lila’s tragic and clear-eyed air has a blustery, softish heat, and an immeasurable quality—an absence of boundaries except for her outline—this is part of what identifies her to me as my mother.

My body’s feelings of recall, my body’s interpretations of people are shudderings that seem like magical nonsense to the mind, but they have a profound quality of unarguable sense. Her presence is heavy with heat like real sunlight; my mind manages my body’s uproar by narrowing itself—it is the mind squinting.

Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene, guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padded or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her hands gave the child the un-Euclidean turmoil of doubt. Nothing matches from before. She ostentatiously holds her breath, she disgustedly mops at the bed, she throws the towel into an open hamper—its lid is off; it is a woven, basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.

“Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

“Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.

“Are you looking at me? I can’t tell what you’re up to; you’re one of the crazy ones; you’re a crazy little meshuggener, a meshuggener sheikh. Are you getting better? I think you’re improving. My guess is you’re sitting there and you know what I’m saying: tell me if I’m right.”

She’s bluffing, partly bluffing, mostly bluffing. As she speaks, she stops believing herself, because my eyelids are so unblinkingly dulled—I am masked in lostness in the vividly glaring bathroom light. She has turned on the lights, a bulb overhead, and bulbs alongside the mirror so that reflected everywhere on the white walls are melted foil, blurred gilding, moonish flares. The mirror shines outward, and morning light bulges in at the window. Against my back are her breasts, sleeping, stirring animals, slick lambs vaguely furry with sensations; and, as in a dream, like masses of very pale pigeons or piles of silent whitish leaves.

Her large, moonish female face, with lines and vistas focused with her curiosity about my illness, about me, has a foreign meaning, like paths in a strange garden. She unpins and strips me down below.

I am a half-lifeless drowsiness and limp and boneless, but I am an inward mass of tense amazement. Moving my head, my chin into my chest, I cannot understand what I see down below—myself or her hands.

I am too ignorant, too embarrassed. Sightless with embarrassment, perhaps with rage among unreadable meanings. Although I don’t move, the woman says, “Hold still …” Life and consciousness are hard to bear.

The terrible preliminary sensations of nakedness, tickling birdlike glitter of the nerves, cut the moment into strange shapes and spaces; Momma’s eyes are as large as a sparrow, the sparrow being at an unreadable distance from me in meaning if not in real inches. Fluttering bird breath. Eyelid-bird-wings. A thin fabric shimmer-noose followed by a tube rises over my face and wraps my head—it is smelly; and light pierces the web that, as it ascends, hauls at my eyelids, blocks my nose, and opens my mouth so that I breathe a forced indraft of air—silvery, silent, shiny, bathroom air.

Naked. My amazement and dullness are aflame. I am all hurting pleasure and nauseating pain. My no-longer puritan mother, a lawless sensibility, neat-handed and oppressively new, says, “Are you playing tricks? You’re hiding something from me—believe me, boys playing tricks are not news to me.” This one has a dark-and-light face, a fanatic’s fervor: a form of nervousness: she quivers with distinct but distant shamelessness—like a bird. This is especially distant from me, and is as if holy and wrapped in light, in speculative mercy, this thing of sharing a moment of life.… The only meaning one knows lies in the distinctions between mercy and the limitlessness of mad, veering pain. She is electric and unbridled and she is acuity and an impatient will-toward-mercy, a fanatic of uncertain persuasion.

She is tentatively and then recklessly fearless: she has a fearless prettiness. She is being a disciplined other self—other from her usual self—maternal: of course, a challenge. I do not recognize it, but I can hear the ticking of her waiting for me to recognize her. I have never been seduced before.

My mind moves into and out of thickets of shadow—the changing complexions of liking and not liking are sickly in the motions of the moment: this woman bristled with prettiness; her thin and mobile wrists, the lacquered fingernails, the shaped lines of eyebrows plucked in a very round curve jabbed like love before there was love: I spied on her; I could not look; at moments I did not even spy. I submitted and was angry and mocking and interested, but perhaps only another child would have known that I was interested. I mean, the dictionary had been torn, and while all the words remained, nothing was attached in the same way to anything else, up and down, Momma or me. Meaning was a sharp and even a tearing issue.

The child starts to tremble. The sudden life in his ears, and in his mind, as well as the crawling and swarming creature-thing—things, sensations—on his skin (the porcelain beneath his feet, the shift, geometrical, not fractured, of glare in the mirror when he shifts his head), makes him pale and shuddery—he is a tense shuddering and a fixed pallor.…

“I know you’re sick. See, I’m being careful. I know I’m not real careful: you make me nervous, I admit it: I do things too hard. I pulled your shirt too hard, didn’t I? See, I know what I’m doing—you can trust me. I admire good nursing. You don’t know me, but charity is my middle name. I know some very, very good nurses. They say that with some people you have to treat them like being sick is an honor. I know you’re in the right, but I want you to know I’m not a good nurse first thing in the morning. I just want to know on my own hook, Are you lying to me? Listen, I like your looks—you’re a Baby Sheikh. You’re pretty. If you ask me, it’s a shame what happened to you. I’m all ears—I’m sympathy itself, on a monument.… Tell me, are you snapping out of it or not? I know you’re better. I know you’re a little better.”

The child didn’t know what she meant; he didn’t know her intentions. He sagged immediately; he meant to hide in his illness.

“Be a nice child—don’t play tricks on me,” she said. “Are you back in the land of the living? Tell me. Let me know if you are. Are you going to throw up? You look like it. You better give me some warning. I’m not good about people throwing up. Listen, I’m starting a fuss with you: don’t throw up.”

But she says this in a voice of such intense melody, so supple and enticing, that the child is torn open … He has no formal means for knowing anything about her. His mouth opens wide—it is distorted. No ease controls his reactions. He is as if pushed and yet caught—a small madman in a new galaxy.

“If you throw up, I will, too—” her voice is large and echoey in the bathroom but it curls down into smallness and music, hooks him and then, as an aftereffect, yanks him. His ears hum—his skull shivers. Little packets of skin on his chest vibrate. Bits of his mind explode daintily—he is close to convulsions.

She stops. Blank-faced, this mother, here, has some fear: a sense of shame, calculations about scandal, the aroma of female apocalypse. The garish light and suffering, in the child, the sheer final violence of his disorder in the white, cubelike room, with its chill and pallors and half heats, are convulsed; only his illness-weakened body’s shyness halts the progress of the convulsions. Shyness saves him.

“You look like you’re going to run amok,” she says, getting it wrong. “I’m not good at boys; I hope you’re not too wild.” She used to be, earlier, someone of almost unshadowed strength of opinion. Now she is evasive and blown about, uncertain, subject to fate, playful. Embarrassed.

“Listen: Be smart. Learn to be nice. I don’t use big words, but I like brains. I like it when people are honest with me. I’m heartless, you know, that’s what they all say. The way to my heart is to look, listen, and be nice to me. I have a nice side. I’m not one of those women who make a big thing out of sugar and spice and everything nice; everything doesn’t have to be nice; I do what I do, take me or leave me. I know something’s going on in you. Tell me what’s on your mind, why don’t you?” She asks this in a melodious voice out of keeping with the words but not as much out of keeping when you heard her as when you remembered and puzzled over what you thought she said. This one likes to fool people.

To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain. She poisons my ears with sweetness. The wind inside and under my hands lifts and moves them; they shift like leaves—it is an odd, manual half-smile. And the skin on his tiny, rash-fiery chest stirs and wrinkles … He guesses that her intention is to amuse and to stir hopes and half-hopes, and the child half blindly looks at her. Her voice when it is being particularly pretty is like an odd kiss on the mind under the bone under the hair of my head and on what is in my chest.

“Look at you—you’re shaking—what’s the big idea, will you tell me, please?” She is looking at my body more than at my face, perhaps at the way the bones show. If she sees in his face the loony shifts of lit and slopping and breaking and melting and burning lights which are his mind holding for the moment his sense of her, she avoids it as too difficult to know about and to answer to. She is someone who hates to be mistaken. By looking at my body, she makes us into two people: one is an odd citizen and the other is a liar. “You want me to go ‘Rock-a-bye-baby in the tree-top’! Will you come down? I don’t know what you’re doing and I can’t tell if you’re crazy or not.”

This making a deal is new to me; it is not like before at all. It is racking. Meaninglessness and trickery seem sweet—honeyed.

I wanted to tear her open, I wanted to dive into her and scatter her as one does leaves from a pile of leaves. As one breaks a toy. This came and went in blinks.

“I’ve read that baths are calming, hot baths—they do it a lot in Hollywood. And,” she said half under her breath, “in loony bins. I’ll give you a bath; you’ll like that. Maybe I should give you a bath.

You’ll have to cooperate.” She cheated when she negotiated; it was not a joke. Propping the child with one hand, she went ahead. She says, “Hold still,” and she moves toward the tub, an arm’s distance, and finds her arm is not long enough; and she glances at the trembling child, maybe incurably deranged, and she remarks, “You have a speaking face. Hold still.” And she takes her hand, her face, her eyes, the gorgeous bird consciousness in each of them, away—I am a mass of audiences, distant and near audiences. “I think you know what I’m saying. Now stay still; don’t fall. I’m turning on the water.”

I predicted to myself the sound of water coming from a faucet—part of the continuous sequences, now perhaps partially restored, of the world. An incomplete and strange restoration. My home for a long time now has been—madness. Catatonia. Autism. The movement is open at one end—inconceivably open. Memory hides it that the three walls of consciousness in a present moment have a fourth side open: perhaps I will die now. In memory, I am a child at the door of that room, with the figures in the room mostly stilled.

But in the real moment the child was sitting on the sink and staring unfocusedly at the ghostly distance between the back of her head and my eyes. The pain (of madness) was close and granular; a suffocating delirium. It compressed part of my consciousness so that the distance between sleeping and waking was no distance at all. My mother does not smell of the real belonging of before. Her breath is not one of the decisive terms of companionship in my language. I breathe in a rhythm that I share with no one. Any gamble I made may end in my return to madness: it is part of what gambling is, it is part of the stakes. Madness is at the open edge of the moment. My childhood sense of farce was not a joke but rested on the utter faithlessness of spirit in the flatness of madness and farce: a happy ending of a terrible kind. Vile. But to accept this woman means the absolute has rejected me. I have two mothers.…

Now I suddenly focus and see her, the softened volumes of Lila’s body busying itself with the tub.

I remembered the smell of linoleum and words such as “hot wasser.” This present version of my mother in a white room did not smell like the other one in a brown room. These walls did not smell like the walls in a country house at the edge of fields of mud and snow. The woman’s hair and arms—the softness behind the shoulders (where my hands rest when I am bathed in a sink in some kind of cloth-lined basin: this is from long before) are not the same.

The rhythm of illness and shock and the truth of death are the original terms of my life, and they make a faery music. The glamour and finely made tunefulness of so much oddity line the inside of my eyelids and the inside of my ears and the inside of my mouth with an unfamiliar sensation of newness as home, as the familiar thing now. The sound of water in the tub has, then, its own infinity for me which this woman notices.

“You like water, do you? Are you an Arab in the desert, are you a little sheikh?” The faithless and farcical little gambler stares—and listens.

I did not speak, because speech refers to absent things, and I could not tolerate absence: whatever is real is here, near me. Words are a category of extreme failure in these kidnaper-rooms, chambers of time unexpectedly askew. I was astounded to feel that any pardon extended by me toward the wrong woman caused a certain amount of cure. A state of pardon is unlike a state of illness. But I knew it was blasphemy … I knew it was violently wrong.

The paradoxes of observation heartbreakingly start with dissimilarities. I am wrenched into observing things; this woman is not the same as before. Something has killed me but I am not entirely dead: I have a seed of life in me. The mind’s limits are very clear in childhood. Madness and my mother are perched and gorgeous; one is a horrible bird outside the window and in the mirror about to fly redly in the room. And the other is a strange woman pretending to be the most familiar part of the world for me—this is farce, this is the farcical underpinning of my reality—my reality, such as it is.

Splashingly enormous, the water noise transports me. The sound in the earlier house was never like this. I begin to topple from the sink.

She is not looking at me; she is saying, “See how calm I’m being; some people would say that’s a miracle.” Then she looks and she cries out, “Whoa! Hold your horses!” She half rises and reaches; she restores my balance; when her hand touches me, the mood of prettiness from before makes her touch incandescent. The complications of her identity unlock me, and my openly thumping heartbeat authenticates the circumstance as interesting to me.

She glances at me, and she shoves me—settling a doll in place on a couch. “Now, let’s have a little hot water on the subject. Watch my dust … as they say. Listen, I think you’re just too cunning for words; now it’s your turn to flatter me and be nice and just keep your balance, Mr. Rag Doll,” she says as she tests and alters the proportions of hot to cold in the water.

The noise of the water is louder and steadier than anything I had ever heard; it makes me heave with excited vomit. “You don’t have to throw up; count to ten; put your head down.” But I don’t know what she means.

Still, her voice has ten thousand times the power of my sleep and of my blinking and of my thoughts to think and see and to change things. I listen to her before I think, if you know what I mean. “I have no talent as a nurse, I’m no good with plants, either.” I simply stare at her. And the heaves stop. Her voice is a mixture of brilliant little tones; it is bruisedly soft. “But I’m a real lifesaver, many have said so, and I tend to agree; I don’t mind tooting my own horn: I’m not the worst person to have in your corner.”

I’m a child: I don’t know very much. I can have very odd forms of truth.

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