I crawled out of the bush away from the window and I started to run. My only safety lay in flight. I knew if I stopped I’d howl. Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl into the night. But I didn’t howl.

35

I sat quite still. There was pity in her eyes. My throat was dry. How nice it was to have the snow on the skylight, the room so warmly lit. She got up abruptly from the bed.

I was alarmed. She still had, I thought, the medicated pad packed into her. The doctor had said she was to remain in bed. She mustn’t risk a hemorrhage.

“A hemorrhage! Oh, Asher,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

The color she’d had seemed to have faded. She wore a nightgown. She started to walk about the studio.

Something tightened in me: I was suddenly and unaccountably scared. I couldn’t understand why. But something, obscurely, was warning me.

She stopped. She was in the far end of the room where the skylight slanted into the wall and she stopped as though something had occurred to her. I said: “Darling, you’ve got to get back in bed.” She ignored me. She went to Michael’s desk. I was sitting near the desk. She opened a bottom drawer and reached in and found a manila envelope. She opened the envelope and looked into it. I was near the desk and I was watching her. The envelope was empty. She hadn’t, I could see, expected to find it empty.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”

Now she went rapidly to the closet. The closet was near the stairs as you came up into the studio. It was closed with a hook-and-eye. I could still feel the tight anxiety in me: what was going on I knew was connected with me. She had opened the closet. There was on the shelf in the closet pushed back a cardboard box. Such as one got in a department store. The box was tied with string. She tore off the string. I was all tight now. She opened the cardboard box. She took something out and shook it free and held it up.

It was a Japanese kimono.

Possibly I should have known. From the beginning. Possibly not. I may not have wanted to know. They played complicated games. Why did I assume I would not be an object in a game they had decided to play? But I had confessed my own abasement. I had not thought anything could follow my confession. I’d gutted myself. There I was, on the bloodied board. Nothing could follow that.

The kimono was not quite the shade mine was, and the pattern wasn’t exactly identical. But it was close enough.

“He promised he wouldn’t,” she said. “He swore he wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Touch the money.”

She meant the manila envelope secreted in the drawer of the desk. Oh, what a fool she’d been. She should have known. But he’d sworn he wasn’t going to touch it. It was just really to see if I’d give it to her. To see, really, the expression on my face.