She knows he knows, she opens her eyes, she sees him lying on the edge of the bed, the edge of a precipice, they are on it together, they are about to fall off, she closes her eyes, she is about to fall off: there. Oh. Oh. The bed complains.

Janice sinks back. They say, she read somewhere, some doctors measuring your blood pressure when you do it, things taped to your head how can anybody concentrate, it’s always best when you do it to yourself. Her causing the bed to shudder has stirred Harry half-awake; he heavily rolls over and loops his arm around her waist, a pale tall man going fat. She strokes his wrist with the fingers that did it. His fault. He is a ghost, white, soft. Tried to make a box for her to put her in like they put Rebecca in when the poor little baby died. The way she held it sopping wet against her chest already dead, she could feel it, and screamed a great red scream as if to make a hole to let life back in. The movie returns upon her, the great wheel turning against the black velvet in time with the glorious symphony that did lift her for all her confusion coming into the theater. Floating now like a ballerina among the sparse planets of her life, Daddy, Harry, Nelson, Charlie, she thinks of her coming without him as a betrayal of her lover, and furtively lifts her fingertips, with their nice smell of swamp, to her lips and kisses them, thinking, You.

• • •

Next day, Friday, the papers and television are full of the colored riots in York, snipers wounding innocent firemen, simple men on the street, what is the world coming to? The astronauts are nearing the moon’s gravitational influence. A quick thunderstorm makes up in the late afternoon over Brewer, pelts shoppers and homebound workmen into the entranceways of shops, soaks Harry’s white shirt before he and his father get to huddle in the Phoenix Bar. “We missed you last night,” Earl Angstrom says.

“Pop, I told you we couldn’t make it, we took the kid out to eat and then to a movie.”

“O.K., don’t bite my head off. I thought you left it more up in the air than that, but never mind, don’t kill a man for trying.”

“I said we might, was all. Did she act disappointed?”

“She didn’t let on. Your mother’s nature isn’t to let on, you know that. She knows you have your problems.”

“What problems?”

“How was the movie, Harry?”

“The kid liked it, I don’t know, it didn’t make much sense to me, but then I felt kind of sick on something I ate. I fell dead asleep soon as we got home.”

“How did Janice like it? Did she seem to have a good time?”

“Hell, I don’t know. At her age, are you supposed to have a good time?”

“I hope the other day I didn’t seem to be poking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”