“Yeah, I’d love to, but right now, the fact is, I’m running too scared to take on anything else, and anyway Billy’s about to come home.”

“Sometimes he hangs around Burger Bliss for hours. Ollie thinks he’s getting bad habits.”

“Yeah, how is old Ollie? You and he getting together at all?”

She lets her hand down from her hair; the lapel covers her again. “Sometimes he comes by and fucks me, but it doesn’t seem to bring us any closer.”

“Probably it does, he just doesn’t express it. He’s too embarrassed at having hurt you.”

“That’s how you would be, but Ollie isn’t like that. It would never enter his head to feel guilty. It’s the artist in him, you know he really can play almost any instrument he picks up. But he’s a cold little bastard.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of cold too.” He has stood in alarm, since she has come closer another clumsy step.

Peggy says, “Give me your hands.” Her eyes fork upon him, around him. Her face unchanging, she reaches down and lifts his hands from his sides and holds them to her chest. “They’re warm.” He thinks, Cold heart. She inserts his left hand into her bathrobe and presses it around a breast. He thinks of spilling guts, of a cow’s stomach tumbling out; elastically she overflows his fingers, her nipple a clot, a gumdrop stuck to his palm. Her eyes are closed—veins in her lids, crow’s feet at the corners—and she is intoning, “You’re not cold, you’re warm, you’re a warm man, Harry, a good man. You’ve been hurt and I want you to heal, I want to help you heal, do whatever you want with me.” She is talking as if to herself, rapidly, softly, but has brought him so close he hears it all; her breath beats at the base of his throat. Her heartbeat is sticking to his palm. The skin of her brow is vexed and the piece of her body her bathrobe discloses is lumpy and strange, blind like the brow of an ox, but eased by liquor she has slid into that state where the body of the other is her own body, the body of secretive self-love that the mirror we fill and the bed we warm alone give us back; and he is enclosed in this body of love of hers and against all thought and wish he thickens all over tenderly and the one-eyed rising beneath his waist begins.

He protests “I’m not good” but is also sliding; he relaxes the hand that is holding her breast to give it air to sway in.

She insists “You’re good, you’re lovely” and fumbles at his fly; with the free hand he pulls aside the lapel of the bathrobe so the other breast is free and the bathrobe belt falls unknotted.

An elevator door sucks shut in the hall. Footsteps swell toward their door. They spring apart; Peggy wraps the robe around herself again. He keeps on his retinas the afterimage of a ferny triangle, broader than his palm, beneath a belly whiter than crystal, with silvery stretch-marks. The footsteps pass on by. The would-be lovers sigh with relief, but the spell has been broken. Peggy turns her back, reknots her belt. “You’re keeping in touch with Janice,” she says.