“It’s warm in here,” she said, smiling. “Fix me another drink and I’ll take my clothes off for you.”

His hands shook so much that he spilled gin in the sink, on the floor. But he mixed the drink somehow, not looking at her. He could hear the sound of silken clothes, of stockinged legs rubbing together. He looked up at the Kliban Cat Calendar over the stainless steel sink: “June, 1980” it read. In the morning he would have an appointment with his dentist. Isabel would be home from the museum in three hours. His penis ached. His whole body trembled.

When he turned, holding the drink out to her, he almost dropped it. She was still leaning back against the refrigerator but now her dress lay on the floor. She was wearing a beige silk chemise over her breasts—the breasts that had nursed him—and a matching silk half-slip, so short that the place where her garters stretched her stockings above her thighs was visible. She had kicked off her shoes and her legs and feet were beautiful.

She looped her thumbs under the waist of the slip as he stood there holding out the Gibson. Then she paused. “Set the drink on the counter, Barney,” she said. She looked him over thoughtfully. “You know, Barney,” she said. “My father was a tall man like you. And rich, like you are now.”

“I know,” he said, in almost a whisper.

“He always bought my clothes for me. Never Mother. Always Daddy.”

“And you bought mine,” he said.

She smiled. “That’s right.”

“Take your slip off, Mother,” he said.

“Do you know, Barney?” she said. “You’re old enough, right now, to be my father.”

He thought about that a moment, here in this nice kitchen with its European fittings, its gray slate floor, its flawless white dishes. His trembling subsided, but not his penis. He began to take off his belt, unbuttoned the top button of his jeans. “Well, Mother,” he said, as something in his chest seemed to open to the bright light in the kitchen, into the splendid vision of Eros in front of his gaze, “love always finds a way.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice trembling, bending her young body to pull down her slip with slim fingers. “Oh, yes.”

DADDY

Barney came back out on the terrace. After their half hour together, Mother was asleep on the living room couch, regressed to an infant.

“Daddy,” Barney said. “Why didn’t you come and see me in the hospital?”

Daddy shifted his weight uneasily in the deck chair. “Which hospital?” he said gruffly, not looking toward his son. He had never, when alive, looked toward his son while speaking to him.

“Oh, come on, Daddy,” Barney said. There was bravado in this familiarity; Daddy’s edge was not easily overcome.

Daddy said nothing. He was looking in the direction of Central Park.

“It was the Children’s Hospital, Daddy. Where they gave me the heat treatment for rheumatic fever. Where they almost killed me.”