9

Well, I thought, Michael Bey baby, that was that. But it wasn’t, because in the morning when I awoke I was ashamed of myself. Contrition set in: one of the milder infections I suffered from. I’d been (padding about tousled in the suite with a stale taste of myself in my mouth, looking somewhat haunted) unkind, a snob, and after all he was young (as youth went nowadays) and I owed something to his youth. It was not clear precisely what I owed his slender wrists or sullen eyes but I could feel somewhere in myself, now in the soft glare of the morning, buttering my toast, this undischarged debt. And there was, of course, Aunt Dora: he’d tell her; the story of his cold visit would make the family rounds. Asher, void of family feeling; Asher, preoccupied and encased in his success, even though the success was bogus and I had fallen from a state of professional and marital grace. The monstrous paralysis had lifted: the world was somehow less bleak the following morning, and I felt less maimed. Besides, I’d been frightened. The immobility, the almost total withdrawal, the paralysis into which I had fallen, had frightened me. Was I drifting out of human sight? The room had darkened: I had vanished, the boy had vanished: I did not want everything to vanish. Later in the day, when I felt I could talk almost humanly to someone else, I telephoned Aunt Dora. She had a number for Michael at the place he lived in downtown. The old lady was delighted. Blood was thicker, etc. One hand, etc., should help the other. If he ever took it out of his pocket. What I thought I would do was apologize to the boy (I had, after all, been wrong and should make some amends) and explain to him that I had been exhausted by the plane trip east. If he’d like or if he’d care to, we’d have cocktails. I suggested the Pine Room downstairs in the hotel. At about five. Five seemed the fated hour for Michael Bey and myself. Over the phone (was there again in his voice that faint derisiveness? that shadow of a jeer?) he agreed.

10

The girl swore that was her name. Her actual name. She was with Michael. It was five o’clock and we were in the Pine Room.

“But nobody has a name like that. Strippers, maybe. Are you a stripper?”

“No.”

“Aurora d’Amore. The dawn of love? Impossible. Unless your mother’s a classical scholar.”

“My mother’s a classical dago. Isn’t she, Michael?”

“Her mother has wens.”

“Wens?”

“And plays poker.”

“Does she?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful? She got me instead of an inside straight.”

“She’s got two uncles, too. Uncle Carmine. And Uncle Angelo.”

“What do they do?”

“Scare shit out of me, mostly,” Michael said.

The girl laughed.

“What are the books?”

Two thick books lay on the table beside the foamy Alexander she had ordered.

“Law books,” she said.