“Why?”

“Well, they’re damn explicit.”

“Yes, aren’t they?”

“He sure likes the good old four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, doesn’t he?”

“Michael says they’re good old four-letter Bronx.”

“They strike me as a little silly.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The insistence, I guess. On a kind of pornographic truth.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“So it’s a pornographic truth. So what?”

I was irritated.

“Oh, come on, Aurora,” I said. “It’s not that public yet. You wouldn’t lay Michael in Grand Central Station, under the big clock, during the Christmas rush, would you?”

“At Christmas? During the rush? No.”

She went out of the bathroom.

I got out of the bath, dried myself, put the kimono on. I combed my hair. In back the gray was very visible.

She was sitting in a corner of the couch. She had my album. She was looking at the photographs.

The photographs were all the things I’d been. Or imagined I’d been. I leaned over her shoulder.

“Is this when you were in the army?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Pompeii.”

I was squatting on my heels. Mendenhall was beside me. The House of the Vettii, I think it was, was in the background. I was very dark, very thin. I vaguely remembered the photographer, a little wizened man saying: Ridi, signore, ridi! Because I’d looked so grim. After the war, Mendenhall sold International Harvester machines.

“And this?”

“Palm Springs.”

A mountain. A white convertible. Myself, in slacks. A bit stouter. Not so dark. Not so grim.

“Is she the one you married?”

“Yes.”

She squinted at the picture. Picked up her purse. Extracted her glasses. Put them on. She wanted a good look.

My wife was blonde, small, tight-mouthed. She wore a dirndl. She ran an efficient house.

“I don’t like her.”

“Nor do I.”

“Why did you marry her?”

“Oh. She was a very competent bitch.”

“She was your second wife, wasn’t she?”

“I do everything twice.”

She turned the page.

“Japan!”

“Yes.”

I was feeding the pigeons. It was the porch of a shrine in Kyoto. I was definitely older. But I didn’t look unhappy. Nor finished. There were no pictures of me finished. Not yet.

She closed the album.

Took her glasses off.

Considered me.

“Poor Asher. So many pictures.”

“Aren’t there.”

“Don’t be depressed.”

“I’ve forgotten what not being depressed feels like.”

“Come here.”

“Where?”

“Beside me.”

I settled on the couch beside her.

“You’re funny.”

“Am I?”

“Will you take me to the movies?”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“All right.”

“An old movie.”

“I’ve never seen any other kind.”

“I mean a real old movie. Like they made in the thirties or the forties.”

“From my time.”

“Yes.”

The smallest of silences.

“You can put your head in my lap,” she said.

I did.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

She pushed aside the lapel of the kimono.

“You have gray hairs on your chest,” she said.

“So I have.”

“May I touch them?”

“The pleasure’s mine.”

She touched them. I wasn’t all gray. A few: half a dozen, perhaps. Evidences of the oncoming winter. The beginnings of a general whitening. They could declare me open for skiing soon.