“Nothing happened.”

I said it stiffly.

Glaring at him now.

Well now, I hadn’t taken Aurora to my hotel to discuss Greek hexameters, had I?

She’d told him about the bath. She’d probably told him about the album. She’d undoubtedly told him of opening the lapel of my kimono. He had the dossier. Information was accruing. Against, evidently, the day he’d need it.

I wasn’t trying to take his girl. If she was his girl. Besides, I doubted if he really loved her.

“Zat so?”

That idiot game: the Visible Woman. She wasn’t the sum of seventy-nine parts. You didn’t assemble love. Maybe I did feel a thing for Aurora. I wasn’t going to deny it. Not to a little foul-mouthed snot who didn’t appreciate what he had.

And I did?

Yes.

Good old appreciator, Asher.

He hadn’t, I said, the slightest conception of what love was. Oh, he knew all the four-letter words, precise or not, but he hadn’t, I said, the slightest idea of what love was beyond the words.

“Zat so?”

“Yes.”

He was loaded with love.

“Bull shit.”

Was I acquiring his vocabulary or had he inherited mine?

Never mind the vocabulary. A little rat was a little rat.

Well: a little rattiness ran in the family, didn’t it? Scions of. Descendants from. A dynasty of them.

What in God’s name (here I shook my head, all incomprehension, all superior pity) did Aurora see in him?

Would I like him to describe, positionally, what she saw?

Oh, Christ. He was flattering himself.

“Zat so?”

Yes. He wasn’t such hot stuff, if he’d forgive my antiquated slang.

True.

A mock self-denigration.

A girl like that. As young. As beautiful. My God. She didn’t need him. Even I’d be a funnier roll in the hay.

Not funnier. Please. I wasn’t to take that away from him, too. Not funnier.

I’d had enough. I stood up. I felt old and sick; I felt helpless with rage and ashamed of myself; I couldn’t understand how or why I had permitted myself to become so embroiled with the boy. I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of trading blows as vicious as those, sitting there, myself twice his age, I had traded with him. I was shaken by hate. But I didn’t hate him; I insisted to myself I didn’t hate him. What was it then? Where had this hate, that tasted like hate but which I swore to myself was not hate, come from? What cauldron, what pit? I turned and walked out of the Automat. He sat there, eyelids lowered, thin, dark, dropping a broken cigarette into the cold coffee in his cup.

28

She howled. Oh, if she’d been there. Oh, if she’d only seen it. All the marvelous fights took place when she was somewhere else.

I said, stiffly: “I don’t see why you go on seeing him.”

Didn’t I?

No.

“But I love him, Asher.”

She always said it in a sort of bemused way as though it fascinated her, too: that she did love him.