Silence. The snow swirled. I could feel her move against my hip. The bed was more than warm now.

“Tell me another story,” she said.

“Do you like stories?”

“Uh-huh.”

I looked down. Her hair, blacker than Delores, covered me.

“Well,” I said. “Once upon a time there was a girl who had long hair. Long long black hair.”

“How long?”

“Down to here. Down to there.”

“What happened to her and her long hair?”

“She tripped on it. She got it in her soup. She got it caught in subway doors.”

“How awful. Why didn’t she cut it?”

“She was superstitious.”

“Superstitious?”

“Yes. Then her hair began to fall out. In handfuls. When she combed it. And she was always combing it.”

“And?”

“Her boyfriend . . .”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“An elderly one. But still handsome. In a ruined way. And every morning her boyfriend, when he tottered out of bed, found hair all over the place. On his rug. On the floor of his bedroom. On his pillow. On his monogrammed shirts. All over the place.”

“Where did he live?”

“In a big hotel.”

“That wasn’t very hygienic. All that hair. Did the hotel complain?”

“Constantly.”

“What did he do?”

“He finally traded her in for something more sanitary.”

“I’ll bet he missed her. Sanitary or not.”

“He missed her. But his life was simpler without her.”

“And duller.”

“Definitely. But he was an old man and he liked things dull.”

“What did he do at night after he traded her in?”

“He read. He thought.”

“Was he very much of a thinker?”

“No. Not really.”

“Did he sleep alone after he traded her in?”

“Yes. With the windows wide open. Wide-open windows are very healthy.”

“Was he a healthy old man?”

“Well. He had pretty good windows.”

“Didn’t he miss this?”

“What?”

“This.”

“Oh, that. Yes, he missed that.”

“And this?”

“He missed that, too.”

“I’ll bet he couldn’t live without it even if he had the best windows in town.”

“Well it would be wiser if he tried.”

“Is he going to try?”

“Not just yet.”

“Not for the next hour?”

“An hour? Darling. I’m not a decathlon champion.”

“Oh. An hour isn’t long. A healthy old man. With such strong windows.”

“Aurora.”

“It isn’t long at all. Is it, darling?”

“Aurora!”

“Yes, darling. I’m here. I’m right here. Here I am, darling.”

38

The Visible Woman towered up. She was sixty feet high. Her plasticine hair streamed. She had Aurora’s face.

By chartered plane, by double-decked bus, by through express, they came to see her.

She was the latest and the most bizarre of all the attractions on Broadway.

Admission booths were in her painted toes. Noiselessly the elevators ascended her transparent thighs.

And I was among them. The enchanted tourists. Who’d come to part the pubic doors by which she was entered.

Inside her was distraction and delight: forgetfulness and fun: surcease and simplification.

We drank at her bars. They were in the sockets of her swelling hips. We gambled at the dice-tables in her extended fingers. Sat (small, intimate, compact) in the two cinemas built into her breasts. Listened as, unchanging as a waterfall, irradiating color, her blood coursed and recoursed through her tubular veins. The music to dance by was the beat of her great artificial heart.