Endlessly they came. From the isolated village. From the anxious town. From the dangerous city.

To her.

In a party of four. In a jolly twosome. In outings arranged by the Chamber of Commerce. I’d come alone.

Someone said it was snowing. I ran down her intestinal staircase. It was snowing. Her kilowatted eyes blazed in the storm.

I clung to her great leg. She was cold. Whatever they had made her from (the mysterious alloy, the enigmatical chemicals), she gave no warmth.

I cried: Aurora!

And awoke. The window was open. The snow blew in. The other half of the bed was empty.

39

In the morning it stopped snowing. I went out. Dog piss stained the drifts. Soot pockmarked the snowbanks. Now you heard the shovels.

The stores put rock salt on the sidewalks. The salt got into the little dog’s paws. The little dog whimpered. Now you heard the snowplows.

The ferries were running again. It was possible to get to Hoboken. The cars had been dug out of their graves of snow. Where a car had been there was a space a car’s length long in the banks of snow. Now you heard the carchains.

She couldn’t have stayed. I knew that. Nevertheless, there was a flare of anguish. I had sustained too many losses. It was useless to go after her. To wait. Outside the University. Argue. Plead. Threaten. Demand. It would do no good. It was useless to go downtown. To stand. Outside Michael’s. Staring at the blind wall. Waiting for her to come down the stairs. I had done that before in my life: it would do no good. She was gone. Nevertheless, I went. And stood. Outside the University. Hoping. Nevertheless, I went. And stared up at Michael’s brownstone. The studio had no window fronting on the street. It was almost a secret room. Stood. Across the street. At the railing of an Episcopal church. Staring up. Suffering. It did no good. I’d been given the one night. She was gone. I walked to the corner and whistled for a cab and it came to me, spraying dirty snow.

In the lobby of my hotel, nobody looked as though they understood the uselessness of it. The women had furs and the men attaché cases. I went to the cigar stand and bought a paper. One said: Going up? I went up. In the corridor I went by the carts with their bitten, half-devoured sandwiches. Their stained napkins, their coffee urns. I put the key into the lock of my hotel door.

As soon as I entered, I knew she had been in the suite.

On the writing desk was the key I had given her.

And on the coffee table, in front of the couch, was my album of photographs. And in the album, green as foliage, the money.

Then I knew that Michael had been there, too.

I opened the album.

Oh, they hadn’t defaced anything. Not really. Not scrawled on or obliterated or mutilated me. I was still there: in all the photographs. All my successive selves. The series that turning forward aged, that riffling backward younged. What they’d done, and it was funny, I could see them laughing, it did look funny, what they’d done, together, and quite artistically I thought, was cut out of the stacked bills, not all of course, just enough, the presidential portraits that adorned the nation’s currency, and with care, oh, infinite care, over the young middle the finally aging face that I had through the years turned toward the kind or the cruel camera pasted mounted superimposed the distinguished heads of Washington Lincoln Jackson Grant all the presidents of money.