“Where am I going to cash a check for five bills?”

“All right. I’ll cash it at the hotel. Will you take her to Jersey? If she’s going to have it done, it should be done now. She mustn’t wait.” I stood up. I was coldly sick. “You don’t give a crap, do you?” I said. “For anything that happens. To anybody.”

The eyes hooded. As though to say: what I give a crap for you’d never understand. It would be a waste of time, the hooded eyes said, here or anyplace else, to explain the private pantheon of what he cared for to me. At the table, the spoon of the soup-eater dipped, lifted. He’d made me conscious of the spoon. A blob, elongated and palely green, fell from the spoon back into the bowl. At the other table were the friends. And the cigarettes, drowned in the saucers. He was right: I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t want, any longer, to try to understand. She’d have the money. I’d see to that. I was used to seeing to that.

32

Then it snowed. It snowed and snowed. Even before you awoke you sensed the snow. The light was different. A kind of white darkness was in the bedroom. I went to the window. Swirls. The air was thick with them. An obliteration had taken place in the night. The sky had fragmented. It was falling down. I felt exhilarated. Evidently I’d been waiting for the snow. I went out. I crunched through the snow. It was difficult to see. New York was blinded. The blizzard looked like it would never stop. The city was silenced. The snow fell on it and soundproofed everything. You felt alone. The snow thickened on my coat. The snow kept falling, more snow than anyone could remember, all the snow there was. Abruptly, an umbrella conjured itself out of the storm. You moved aside; into the drift. The umbrella vanished. You went on, exhilarated and blind. In the kiosks the snow melted; the overcoats smelled wetly. Galoshes crunched. It was marvelous to see all the abandoned cars. Now the ferries stopped. Snow had softened a cornice. Snow padded the metal edges of the neon signs.

Snow.

And in the snow, I thought, early this morning, Michael had taken Aurora to Jersey.

33

I sat in the one chair in Michael’s studio and I listened. She was in the bed.

A Lithuanian: that’s what he was, over in Jersey, she went by tube, ha ha, joke.

And he was dirty: not the instruments; he was careful with those, boiled, sterilized, lifted in a forceps in his gloved hands: not the instruments were dirty but his talk.

“Talk?” I said. “What do you mean, his talk?”

Examines you. You have (probing) a Lithuanian cunt. Chuckle, chuckle. See? Doc’s witty. He knows the nationality of cunts. Spends more time down there than he does up here. Says: a girl came in. English. He looked. She had a Scotch cunt. Repeat chuckle. He could tell. Meanwhile: shaving you.