“He did,” I said. “How nice.”

“In Charleville.”

Fascinating. In Charleville. It was on a private map. One of the holy places.

I said: “Did Rimbaud use a sling, too?”

He shook his head. My irony was lame. “The sling was my baby,” he said.

Ten years ago. I stared down into the river. On the deck of the moored oilbarge a man in a pea jacket appeared, scouring a frying pan. Ten years ago I’d dissolved one marriage, begun another: and been caught, ten years later, coming out the door I’d entered. The river went by like time. But I still didn’t know why he had bothered, or why Rimbaud bothered, with something called Merlin the Enchanter. Unless they were both going to make a musical of it.

“Merlin had a wife,” the boy said. He was being patient. “Her name was Viviane.”

“Really?”

“They spent their honeymoon reading a book of magic.”

I waited.

There had to be a punchline. The wick of the wizard. Something.

“And?”

No punchline. He’d made his point. They went to Niagara Falls. The wizard and the beautiful girl. And took along their book. In some remote drive-in they read it together. On the nuptial bed. Dark heads joined. I saw the book. They opened it gently. Magic was inside. And all the great spells. I got the point.

We turned away from the river. It was late afternoon. On the bus, crosstown, I did finally ask him. It had been there, all day, in my mind. Of course, I’d said to myself: why? Still, the muezzin cried in his tower: and we knelt toward the city of young girls. Perhaps that was reason enough. But I wanted his consent. Now that I recall the moment, in the bus, he didn’t say no, but then he didn’t say yes, either. Not a generous yes. What he did say, somewhat enigmatically, when I did finally ask him if he’d mind my seeing Aurora (the seeing being, also, a carefully neutral word) was: “Well, there ain’t but the one spoon,” as though I’d asked myself to dinner and what was on the table was something in a big family dish. Then he turned away to stare at the city, wearing not the white rather boyish smile I’d liked at the river, but the other smile he had, the one that slanted a corner of his mouth and hooded his eyes and made him seem, again, the spy.

18

I sat in the park and I waited for Aurora. It was ten minutes to two. I expected her at two. The sky was overcast. A pigeon strutted close. There were no children in the playground. In the street, in front of one of the administration buildings of the University, a crane, painted yellow, was hoisting a galvanized cabin to the roof of the building. A girl in a cape went by. Someone now had come into the playground and was swinging in a swing. But it wasn’t a child. The pigeons swooped among the leafless trees.