“I’ll be down to get you in a taxi, honey,

You better be ready ‘bout a half past eight . . . ‘ “

And by the time he had learned, they sat on the edge of the bed, breathless, hugging one another, and they vowed to be friends forever. Soon they were lying on the bed in a close embrace, body against body. The boy’s mouth was pressed into the hollow of her shoulder and he could feel her hands traveling across his body, on his shoulders and on his back. They exposed to one another secrets of body even more profound than any of the talk had been. For a moment, like children who had not learned shame, they were apart, with only the contact of eyes, and then they were close once again. When Clinton’s body had entered hers, there was a moment of perfect stillness in which he prayed for death, an end of time. But this stillness gave place to motion, and the motion repeated itself again and again, and soon they had created a subtle and amazing rhythm of closeness and pleasure, closeness and pleasure, closeness and pleasure, until there was no lavender bedspread, no bed at all, no room, no hotel, no island, no earth. Only this closeness. Followed, too soon, by the sudden terrible knowledge that he had not died. This creation of senses, of nerve and blood and flesh, so exquisitely wrought that the world itself and all time were dissolved by it, had now itself dissolved. The closeness slipped away.

A person is born in the grips of this hunger for closeness; he seldom achieves it and never can keep it for long, but he learns to be grateful for a letup in the hunger itself, even when the letup is brief. Some are always too young to have learned this, and others too old and foolish. Clinton was young. His blood remained high in him. And in a few minutes they began again, he and the woman, his first woman, to build another of these brief universes, perfect and beautiful, and doomed. They built it and for a moment it was there, and then it collapsed. They witnessed the return of the world, the lavender panda, the iron bedstead, their two bodies lying close; and all of it illuminated by the sharper than ever sword thrusts of sunlight through the shutters.

Shirley rose suddenly from the bed. She covered herself with the pajama top and, hiding her face from Clinton, she ran into the bathroom and closed the door. It occurred to him that she might have been crying. He called to her, “Something wrong, Shirley? You okay?” But she did not answer. For a moment he lay on the bed, studying his body like some startling new possession. Then he realized that for perhaps an hour or more he had not given one thought to Berry-berry and his search for him. His notebook lay on the trunk at the foot of the bed, all but forgotten. He moved quickly to it, and made this entry: