Of course, I couldn’t insist she didn’t see Michael: all I could really do was to rather pompously say I had no intention of seeing him again. And to hope it wouldn’t affect our relationship. She said it needn’t. I said she was important to me.

Was she, really?

Yes.

She liked that. Being important. How was she important?

Oh, being there.

“Asher?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to bed with you, you know.”

I knew.

“I mean it.”

I knew she meant it.

“If it’s dinner, all right. Or a movie: all right. And being friends. All right?”

“All right.”

We sounded like ventriloquists.

She laughed.

“Oh, golly,” she said. “If I’d only seen it. Was Michael vicious?”

That was the least he was.

“Can he be vicious,” she said. And laughed. “You’d like to strangle him. Did he sneer?”

“Expertly.”

“Can he sneer,” she said. And laughed. “I’m going to shoot him some day. I’ve told him that. Some day he’s going to get me so mad I’m going to shoot him right in his gold-plated cojones.”

“Are they?”

“What?”

“Gold-plated?”

And laughed.

“Michael thinks they are.”

“You wouldn’t actually shoot him?”

“Ha. Wouldn’t I? I told you: I’m a classic dago. Get me mad enough I’ll do anything. Or . . .”

She stopped

“Or what?”

And smiled. Charmingly.

“Or if it’s fun enough,” she said.

I didn’t doubt it: mad enough, or fun enough: those would be the reasons.

29

I had taken to brief naps in the afternoon. After fifty, I suppose my dentist would have said, you take to napping in the afternoon. The naps, I suppose, too, get longer and longer. It probably ends in a kind of nap.

Anyway, I’d lie down on the couch, loosen my tie, remove my shoes, and nap. One afternoon, about a week after I had quarreled with Michael, Aurora let herself into my suite with the hotel key I had given her. I had asked her to use it whenever she wished to. She could study, or rest, or shower whenever she was uptown. During the week that had passed, I had studiously avoided talking about Michael. The truth was that, despite the fact that I blamed him for the quarrel between us, I found I missed him; not acutely, not importantly: but enough to feel somewhat duller. When I had spent my mornings walking through the city with him I hadn’t napped in the afternoons.

Aurora looked at me asleep. There was a bowl of fruit on the coffee table among the scattered magazines I’d bought, and she took an orange and sat down in the big armchair near the window and waited for me to awaken. She took her shoes off. She looked out of the window. Dusk was over the park. The trees were almost Japanese in their leaflessness. She peeled the orange. She ate one of the slices. The orange was dry. She spat the orange pips into her hand and then got up to put the pips into the wastebasket. She looked into the mirror over the couch on which I lay asleep. I hadn’t shaved. I had loosened my belt. She looked quite pale in the mirror. She had for the occasion used very little make-up. She went back and sat down in the armchair.