25

But then again it wasn’t all that merry. It wasn’t all that zingy. There were times when Michael frightened her.

“When?”

“Oh: times.”

What did Michael do that frightened her?

Well.

For example.

Take one afternoon

She’d been asleep. In that bed resting on its patient bricks. Then she wasn’t asleep. But she didn’t open her eyes. Michael was squatting beside the bed. She could see him through the flicker of her lashes.

She knew Michael knew she wasn’t asleep. She knew Michael knew that something kept her from opening her eyes. The afternoon light was dying. Her hair was in disorder on the pillow. Her legs were flung wide. The air dried the small sweats on her body. She felt a suspension of things in the room in the dying light.

Michael was listening to her breathe. She became aware of her own breathing. That she did breathe. She knew or she felt that Michael was looking at her breasts as though rose-nippled they were the breasts of a peculiar enemy. That his brows had gone hard. That a ferocity of a kind had come into his eyes. That he was glaring. At the tiny sunken depression of her belly-button. At the tufted mound between her legs.

She couldn’t stand it. It began to frighten her. That ferocious scrutiny. That X-ray silence. She opened her eyes. For a moment it held: the animosity. Mingled with something else. Then he smiled. The white large square teeth smiled at her. He reached over. He plucked gently at a single dark hair.

“The devil tried,” he said, “but even he couldn’t do it.”

“What?”

“To take the curl out of that.”

He was quoting a pornographic poem of Congreve’s.

26

So I had crossed over into the country of the young. I was, of course, there only on a temporary visa. But I flattered myself that I had managed to penetrate the frontier at all. I even supposed the population was friendly.

I told myself that if they seemed to burn so brightly it was possibly because the candle was so short. I told myself that it might just be that they would be the last to be young. That they were all color because the next markings of the species might be leaden or an ashen gray.

Meanwhile, I was somewhat disconcerted to find that the trips in the afternoon had begun to bore me. At first I couldn’t see why. The revived memory took shape, glowed for a moment with some meaning, and then faded again. I existed piecemeal. There really did not seem to be a pattern of any sort, and what I had looked for, or hoped to find, had been a pattern, the figure in my own carpet. There were only so many tenements to be stared at, and I found that staring at them the second or the third time did not make what had once happened in those cold-water or, as I’d acquired a measure of security, hot-water flats any more meaningful. Quite the contrary. The quick color flushing in my mind did not recur as vividly. It had less color and less warmth like a stirred coal in a fire in which really almost all the coal was already burned away.