Well they went down to this place off Fifth in the wholesale fur district with the skins tied and baled and the peculiar tools they used to cut and scrape and stretch, and she listened wide-eyed and demure while Ben and his friend in the wholesale fur business exchanged pleasantries and the friend looked her over and said, enviously, he’s a picker, that Ben. Then there was a more or less inevitable joke about how it now took the friend all night to do what he had once done all night and then he started to bring out the coats. She fell in love with the muskrat as soon as she saw it. She had to have the muskrat. She said: Oh, Ben, it’s exactly what I dreamed of. She took out the hundred and fifty dollars and put it on the long wooden table on which the skins were cut and stretched. She said: I’ll wear it now.

The friend looked at the hundred and fifty dollars and he looked at Ben, the picker, and then he said to her: Miss, wholesale it’s seven hundred and fifty.

She looked stricken.

She said: Oh, Ben, I told you I wanted an inexpensive coat.

A hundred and fifty dollars for a fur coat, that ain’t inexpensive, young lady, the friend said dryly. That’s impossible.

She looked at the muskrat. She looked at the beavers. She looked at the caraculs. She looked at the sables. She didn’t say a thing about what Ben’s wife wore. Nor what she looked like wearing it.

She picked up the hundred and fifty dollars. The friend looked at it as though it had been printed during the Civil War.

She said: I’m sorry. Ben knows how silly I am. I just thought wholesale . . .

She put the money into her purse. Ignorance never looked more beautiful. She’d wandered into Fort Knox and said: but I don’t really see why I can’t take a sample home. She faced the door and shuddered inside the cloth coat she wore. She looked as though she were about to step out into a howling gale, wearing nothing but a bra and high-heeled shoes. Ben paid the other six hundred dollars.

Here was the fur. Wasn’t it adorable? Poor Ben. She’d gotten tired, finally, of the hot pastrami. She put up the collar. She buried her chin in the soft beige animal fur: over it, her great dark eyes laughed at me. Wasn’t it a love? I looked at her, and something actually turned over inside of me. A love. A love. Well: wasn’t it?

24

As I said: she played games. Complicated games. Both of them did. And they played the games together, she and Michael.

For example: her birthday present. The one Michael bought her on her twenty-second birthday. The thing was called “The Visible Woman.” It was an educational toy.

There were seventy-nine parts. The guarantee covered any defective or missing component. She thought it a marvelous present. It came, Michael said to her, unwrapping the box, with an illustrated instruction booklet on how to put the lady together.