And he—passive as trance, allowing her beauty: to enter him or avoid him, whatever’s to be her pleasure. How shall he be other than mild receiver, filler of silences? All the radii of the room are hers, watery cellophane, crackling tangential as she turns on her heel-axis, lancing as she begins to retrace her path. Can he have loved her for nearly a decade? It’s incredible. This connoisseuse of “splendid weaknesses,” run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope. She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist… each of them, Cherrycoke, Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young Trefoil, even—so he’s heard—Margaret Quartertone, each of them used for the ideology of the Zero… to make Nora’s great rejection that much more awesome. For… if she does love him: if all her words, this decade of rooms and conversations meant anything… if she loves him and still will deny him, on the short end of 5-to-2 deny his gift, deny what’s distributed in his every cell… then…

If she loves him. He’s too passive, he hasn’t the nerve to reach in, as Cherrycoke has tried to… . Of course Cherrycoke is odd. He laughs too often. Not aimlessly either, but directed at something he thinks everyone else can see too. All of us watching some wry newsreel, the beam from the projector falling milky-white, thickening with smoke from briers and cheroots, Abdullas and Woodbines… the lit profiles of military personnel and young ladies are the edges of clouds: the manly crepe of an overseas cap knifing forward into the darkened cinema, the shiny rounding of a silk leg tossed lazily toe-in between two seats in the row ahead, the keen-shadowed turbans of velvet and feathering eyelashes beneath. Among these nights’ faint and lusting couples, Ronald Cherrycoke’s laughing and bearing his loneliness, brittle, easily crazed, oozing gum from the cracks, a strange mac of most unstable plastic… . Of all her splendid weaklings, it is he who undertakes the most perilous trips into her void, looking for a heart whose rhythms he will call. It must astonish her, Nora-so-heartless, Cherrycoke kneeling, stirring her silks, between his hands old history flowing in eddy-currents—scarves of lime, aqua, lavender passing, pins, brooches, opalescent scorpions (her birth sign) inside gold mountings in triskelion, shoe-buckles, broken nacre fans and theatre programs, suspender-tabs, dark, lank, pre-austerity stockings… on his unaccustomed knees, hands swimming, turning, seeking out her past in molecular traces so precarious among the flow of objects, the progress through his hands, she delighted to issue her denials, covering up his hits (close, often dead on) skillfully as if it were drawing-room comedy… .