She was, I thought, having my coffee, enormously impressed with what had happened to the menu, a goddam healthy girl. And then with a shock I thought of how rarely it had seemed to me the girl or the woman I was with had been truly healthy. And how in a dim way I had longed for them to be. More than I wished them to be clever or efficient or even pretty. A perfectly natural, unembittered, untwisted, healthy girl. A girl with sunlight in her and a firm stride and a rich unencumbered laugh. Not off some bloody analyst’s couch. Not some bony thin-cheeked furious-eyed bitch to whom if you handed the world on flat silver it still wouldn’t be enough. Because there wasn’t any bitchiness in Aurora. I was sure of that.

Oh, she acted. She played complicated games. As at the French film. Perhaps she even lied a little. Or teased me a little. Amused herself with me. But why not? I was the damaged one. Damaged by age, damaged by the profession I had chosen, damaged by marriage. She was whole, and young, and there wasn’t anything of value I could really offer her. I wasn’t going to fall in love with her; it would be absurd to expect her to fall in love with me. Besides, there was Michael: she was, in some way they accepted among themselves, by their definitions, his girl. Whatever being one’s girl at the moment meant. I wasn’t really too anxious to find out. I was being, by some consent, allowed to share her. I might hope, now and then, that my share in her might increase: something alter, or even stop, those afternoon bouts in the studio with its skylight; but I didn’t permit myself to enlarge on those hopes. What I told myself was that Aurora was simply a piece of luck for me. To hold her arm, on Fifth Avenue, to feel at least some contact with that vibrancy, to sit, across artificial candles, in some restaurant, to slump beside her in a moviehouse, to watch her, legs tucked under the fantastic skirt, in a chair or on the couch in my hotel suite, turning the pages of The New Yorker or absorbed in the ads, was good for me. It was lucky. It might not have happened at all. I had been, I thought, unlucky for a long time, the disasters had followed each other with a numbing monotony, and the odds-maker, in his mysterious way, might now be posting a price a little in my favor.

23

And she was marvelously candid, I thought.

Take the fur coat.