‘What’s funny?’ I said.

She laughed again. I got up, crossed the room, and took her in my arms. They felt terribly strong and she panted at their crush and desire.

I watched her stand and take off her clothes, and somewhere out of an earthly past I remembered having seen that face of hers before, that obedience and fear, and I remembered a hut and Sammy telling her to go out and get some wood. It was as I knew it was bound to be sooner or later. She crept into my arms and I laughed at her tears.

When it was all gone, the dream of floating towards bursting stars, and the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling, the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction. I sat beside her as she lay on the divan. I stared at the carpet. I saw the pieces of glass from the broken lamp. And when I got up to walk across the room, I felt pain, the sharp agony of the flesh of my feet torn by my own weight. It hurt with a deserving pain. My feet were cut when I put on my shoes and walked out of that apartment and into the bright astonishment of the night. Limping, I walked the long road to my room. I thought I would never see Camilla Lopez again.

Chapter Seventeen

But big events were coming, and I had no one to whom I could speak of them. There was the day I finished the story of Vera Rivken, the breezy days of rewriting it, just coasting along, Hackmuth, a few more days now and you’ll see something great. Then the revision was finished and I sent it away, and then the waiting, the hoping. I prayed once more. I went to mass and Holy Communion. I made a novena. I lit candles at the Blessed Virgin’s altar. I prayed for a miracle.

The miracle happened. It happened like this: I was standing at the window in my room, watching a bug crawling along the sill. It was three-fifteen on a Thursday afternoon. There was a knock on my door. I opened the door, and there he stood, a telegraph boy. I signed for the telegram, sat on the bed, and wondered if the wine had finally got the Old Man’s heart. The telegram said: your book accepted mailing contract today. Hackmuth. That was all. I let the paper float to the carpet. I just sat there. Then I got down on the floor and began kissing the telegram. I crawled under the bed and just lay there. I did not need the sunshine anymore. Nor the earth, nor heaven. I just lay there, happy to die. Nothing else could happen to me. My life was over.

Was the contract coming via air mail? I paced the floor those next days. I read the papers. Air mail was too impractical, too dangerous. Down with the air mail. Every day planes were falling, covering the earth with wreckage, killing pilots: it was too damned unsafe, a pioneering venture, and where the hell was my contract? I called the post office. How were flying conditions over the Sierras? Good. All planes accounted for? Good. No wrecks? Then where was my contract? I spent a long time practising my signature. I decided to use my middle name, the whole thing Arturo Dominic Bandini, A. D. Bandini, Arturo D. Bandini, A. Dominic Bandini. The contract came Monday morning, first class mail. With it was a cheque for five hundred dollars. My God, five hundred dollars! I was one of the Morgans. I could retire for life.