AS HE RAN TOWARD her she lay in the half-light like a woman with her throat cut—body arched, knees blasted apart, splayed toes digging the ground. The patch between her legs reared at him, black and creased pink, a bearded mouth rolled sideways. When men were hanged they erected. When women were hatcheted, what went on down below? No morgue had ever instructed him.

Alive. Grossly alive. The neck’s whole. Her smile is what gapes, the way he saw it in labor once, stretched like a smaller vagina, the lips rose-wet and muscular. Her eyes were wide. Their substance seeps from them.

Bending, he saw his self-portrait in them.

She’s awake. Leaning over her is the forgotten face. But her feet aren’t in the birth-stirrups anymore. She moved them experimentally. Grass. A good place. Her legs slide down. Arms fanning winglike, she caressed the ground, head lolling. He had nothing to do with it. Not this time.

She sat up, feeling her mouth. Her jaws ached with health. “Did I scream?”

What a look on him.

“No. You didn’t.”

What a look on her. She’s measuring him.

The way he’s holding himself down there. Crotch-sprung. Like a man who’s—been to more than Monte Carlo. Her lip twitched. “Somebody kick you?”

His hands left off their nursing; his head hung. Not too soon for her to note that its features had always been too neat for her.

“Excuse me.” He turned and ran down the river-bank.

She could hear him down there, hawking. She tore off grass and wiped her mouth with it. He’s still sick, then. Maybe that’s for the best. Allowing the two of us to just slouch off from each other, in grunt and slur. Like trained apes out to spoil the documentary set up for them. Too smart to talk.

Down on the beach he was coughing it all up. So it was her up there in the hall, behind him and Chess. When he’d caved in, the air knocked out of him. Out of the corner of his eye, a white figure, merging at once back into a doorway. Whom he took to be Charles, in his old white ducks. Always falling asleep in them. Roused him a hundred times.

But could it have been her? Sleeping raw the way she did, even into November. In the hot nights stealing out of bed, down the hall onto the upstairs porch, and onto the black hill. Coming back in to tell him “It’s like swimming in the dark.” Or to butt her head against him, a bitch with her pup, nosing him. Whispering into his chest “Her light’s still on.”

Down the backstairs and out again that way, she could have gone. If she saw them. Out one of the doors of that ever-accommodating house—always so proud she is, that we’ve never kept them locked. Out to show the world her nakedness.

He moved downstream, as if the river might pool his vomit, and slapped water on his face. The Hudson flowed upstream here and was salt. What’s that on the mudscarp? A shoe, a woman’s. A pair of them draining with tide, filling with it. Twitting their pointy toes at him: All that goes on here silts away—no other answer, dearie. Maybe it was her; maybe it wasn’t. It’s all of them you’re mourning, isn’t it—even Maureen. All of them standing blindly aware, one to a doorway. In the silting house.

He went up the bankside almost lightly. So much has been lost.

She sat up at once. To show him how it was with her. This is the way it is, Ray—without pearls. But it sticks in her throat. “So you’re back.”

She stared up at him as of old, from under eyelids sulked to the purple of her old dressing-gown. The exact division of her body always amazes him. As if some polymath, richer in anatomical lore than he could ever be, had scored her in three parts and each time deeper—once at the girdle-of-Venus line at the neck, twice at the underarc of the breasts, and last at the pale, visibly powerful slope of the stomachline. What is there about her nudity that’s almost painful to him? That he must protect her from? “Do stand away from that window,” he’d snapped on their honeymoon—and knows she’s never forgiven him. Despising him forever, as a puller-down of shades.

My sister equates nudity with honesty—James once said. It isn’t her self-display. It wasn’t our mother’s either.

Agreed—Lexie replied to the air. But what really bugged you, James, and Daddy too—what bugs all of you—is when we reject our nudity as household art.

“Yes, I’m back,” he said. “But not for long.”

His eyes are sunken, but in a younger face. It’s now plainly a face which always hurt somewhere, but could never say. She can see more clearly now that those cells which speak must have been left out of it, or have been crushed. How she used to plead with it, quite pitifully. How it used to anger her, always to have to be the one to break down their life-tensions into speech.

Now she’s grateful. For whatever will make him unlovable. The way a Sabine woman might feel, when rescued. Looking back at the abductor she’d lived with for years, not unhappily enough.

“Pair of women’s shoes down there.”

“Not mine.”

“I know.” In spite of himself—as she could well see—he took his jacket off and held it down to her. “Here.”

“No thanks.”

It was still very hot of course.

In spite of herself, she reached out to touch one of his new yellow shoes. “Spanish?”

“A gift.”

The jacket dropped to the ground in front of her. He gripped his shirtcollar, easing it. Is he too going to divest himself, at last? To stand here naked also, in silent explanation?

There flashes over her what she always wanted of him. To understand her nakedness—beyond the sexual. To say to her, by those silent means which are allpowerful: I am thy nakedness, too. To have him capable of lying here, her replica. And not for love.

“How long have you been down here like that?” It burst from him.

She shivered. Ah—in that case. An idyll—she mourns it. “Since you left.”

The truth. She wanted to tell him the whole truth. She stared at it.

He’s covered that face of his.

“Ray—.” No, she won’t have this. Old feelers, old mutuals pushing up.

He kneels beside her.

She kneels beside him.

“Look at you.”

“Look at you.”

They rise on knee, hands upraised and spread before each other’s faces. A prison couple, pawing glass. Which one of us is the visitor?

How she’d blossomed. And yet fallen away. He doesn’t dare touch her.

How he’d fallen away. And yet—bloomed. She drew a finger down his gaunt cheek.

“It’s from the disease,” he says. Proudly.

When they cling, the rucked-up jacket slides between them.

I am thy nakedness, she whispers in his arms. But not to him.

“Don’t—.”

“—explain.”

Both have said it. The nearest they’ve ever come, to equal speech.

“Not—anything?” she said.

“Anything.”

“You mean that?”

“You do?” he said.

“I do.”

He nodded. “I mean that.”

They’re in a rhythm. Call it the dawn-rhythm. When two people begin to know they are two.

“Only what we’ll—have to say.” She glanced behind them, in the direction of the house. “Like what we’ll do now. And how.”

“And—where.”

They were quiet for the same minute.

“But no whys and wherefores.” She hesitated. “Unless we—want to.”

He considered. Nodded.

“And no excuses.”

He hesitated. “None.”

They were silent. Would it be the triumph of their life together, if they could hold to that?

“Agreed—” he said. “Then—I’ve just this minute gotten off the bus.”

“Agreed. And I’ve been—lying here. Waiting for it.”

His eyes widen, but hold. This man, long ago rejected in the flesh, is by circumstance her one sharer. From long association able to stalk the underbrush of her mind in all its yallery-greenery of serio-comic reference. Where, as they both know, one minute she’s in vestal command of all the mysteries, but the next is wandering uncommissioned in the semigloom of her kind—as a family professional whose personality, by reason of a work-history only loosely corroborated by others, has to operate at some loss.

His glance slid down her, reinforcing her nudity. In the warm, viscid air, she’d forgotten about it, as real nudists must.

“I see,” he said. “Of course.”

He must think she’s waiting for someone. Stripped, to him she’s erotic only. Fair enough. When that’s how she came to be here. “No,” she should say, “there was someone. But he’s gone.” I heard the car go by.

She resists. In their minds, did all naked women wait merely for them? Not for—other connection.

What did a naked man wait for in the eyes of women? Not for them alone, that’s certain.

She’d equip him. That’s it; she herself always equipped them. Lying in bed beneath or above anyone of them, with his throat and sex bare to her hand, she herself complicitly armed them, even before they did it themselves. Respectfully she hung the powerbag between their legs like a codpiece, and cocked on her pillow their judge’s-hat.

For in her mind they already lie twice as open as she to life’s accounts. Lying in her bed, they waited to rejoin the world. Or in the piercing contemplation of arrows already received. They wait in such busy dignity. In her own mind.

It’s why she can never wholly love or murder them.

“I didn’t mean to ask,” he’s saying.

Granted. But I mean to tell you.

“We were taught only to connect with each other,” she said gruffly.

And we couldn’t. No need to say.

She’s touching his arm. “There’s something more, I’m not sure what. But we chose the village instead. I want to live by my own—.” Her mouth went wry, muting the rest of it. “And I want them to know.”

How many patients had touched him on the arm like that—woman or man. Nobody must know, Doc. Doc, I can’t wait to let it out. The village always chose the village, one way or other—is she just discovering it?

I want to live by my own images. That’s what she said. They all said. And I want the whole village to know.

On a bush behind hers an opulently striped beach-towel unlike any of their own faded ones. In hospital he’d already warned himself of how the house and all in it would have acquired new objects, new facts and new people, a tide which would have swelled over the lump of him. There’s an underground of waterfront sex here. Does she now belong to it?

“You’ll go on as you must.” He said that to all of them. Except himself. He made himself look at her—personally. She deserved it. “You have the right.”

But if she’s going to do what he has a hunch she is, then he’ll have to stand by.

He’s looking at her body, her face too. She’s forced him to. If he could have done that on his own—seen her true and whole in the altogether—how her body too would have smiled for him. Her face trembled, ready to be radiant. The long hysteria’s ending. Even he’s admitting it. She stood up, breasts forward. It was how she stood on her ledge. Would stand, if the children came down here.

But they haven’t come. After adult parties, children sleep late.

“This is the way—.” But it stuck in her throat. The children stick in her throat.

“It’s growing light.” How different the light was here, complicated, offering him back his native life.

What’s this? She’s reaching down for his jacket, drawing it toward her, bent over from the waist straight-knee’d, like a woman digging with a hoe too short for her. She’s slung the jacket over her shoulders, shrugging it close. The most humble gesture he’s ever had from her. Now we can talk, she’ll say though. Now—can’t we talk.

She’s touching his shoe.

Those gift shoes of his. So heavily perforated at the narrow wingtip. At the heel’s a flange reminding where spurs were, once. Not a father’s shoe.

“Oh, they walked me here,” he said down to her. “They’ll—walk me back.”

Her gaze traveled up him. “To the nuns?”

She can feel his shock, vibrating all the way to his shoe. “How come—what makes you say that?”

That’s it, then. What came spuming between the lines of every letter. He’s not a father anymore. He’s receded from it.

She’s careful. “Oh—Bob Kellihy said it. ‘Don’t leave him too long with the nuns.’ Ah well, you know. Catholics. They always think that everyone.”

He was breathing fast enough to remind him how sick he’d been. “Ah, ah, such women—” Sister Isaac said, raising her head from that last letter “—they have time to brood.” On what can take a man four months and three thousand miles to arrive at. With a whole hospital to help.

Where, ward to ward, bed to bed, is as Catholic as he’d ever need to be. Faced with a piece of the public health so simple that even he can manage it. Yes—he’s going back.

The light’s still lifting. The grass is still grass. “Oh yes, the Kellihys” he said from halfway across the world “—how are they?”

“They’re having an affair.” Her voice floated up dryly. “With each other.”

She’d hauled the jacket over her head, so that she had to peer up at him sideways. The nursing nuns, excused from wimples, still tilted their heads on this same slant. Did all woman have nun in them—as Sister said? As all men have monk. Nothing to do with celibacy. Or the red tawn of the penis, or the hanging, clitoral heat. Or even with parenthood. Something not to do with any of it.

Even in that teaser, Bets?

Struggling with her on the Kellihys’ spare-room couch, he’d knocked down some of Arthur’s silver-work; this happened every time. Shhh—she said at once. Below him her broad Cupid’s-bow mouth pouted for its kiss, her long corals swung between breasts—oddly enticing in their flatness—which had dropped. Four kids, was it? Or five? “No, Bob and I have an agreement. I only pet.” A word from his own mother’s archive. It had been the night of the christening party. He’d picked up a silver cup just finished for it, and handed it to her. “Your chaperone.”

“That Bets,” he said now. “The whole teaser apparatus. But she can’t.”

“Really?” Down in the grass she’s plaiting is Betsy, besatined and beery, signing books of photographs she’s not in, tagging after the priests. Saying—as she did say once, and was brushed off for—Lexie—may I attend your class. “It’s all for Bob, you mean.”

“Oh they’re fond—enough. Alcoholics like him can be very adroit sexually. That’s known.”

Yes, it is.

“But behind that front she puts up—oh the senior K’s know by now what they’re buying.”

“What’s that?”

“A mother. Bets is to the mother born. All she really likes is slipping them out.”

“She tell you that? Evenings?”

“Evenings and drunk. When she has a baby, she said. Then she feels her worth.”

Ah poor Bets. Join the class.

“But when she’s had the baby and is drunk. Then it’s the best.”

“Ah—poor Bets.”

Their eyes meet.

He’s half-smiling. “Oh I went for it. The teaser part. I need to be encouraged. As you may recall.”

“I recall.” The shame—cast on her own aggressiveness—that a woman—a girl—doggedly accepts. For the sake of the man. And the sex. Mother-reluctant, that’s what you were, Ray. And yes, I went for you—as young men went for jobs.

He turned to look at the house. He’s a tall man; his legs are much the longest part of him. Seventeenth-century legs she called them during their courtship, awarding his bones the elegance she wanted from life. Looking up them, they’re a tower yet. Until you arrive at the eyes.

“I won’t go in the house. Better just to leave again.”

It’s true then. He wants to hide.

“Put it on the market,” he’s saying. “You never really liked it.”

What can I say? It was where I hid.

“Some people think it already is,” she said. “Some—are still rooting for us.”

“For the practice,” he said. “They get used to the same ear.”

“Oh?” she said. “Oh. Of course.”

“But I want out.”

So he’s said it. This man of few words. While she who has so many is mum. Mother-mum. We don’t leave. We take cars to the bridge. Or tear the shopping-lists apart, face by face.

She got to her feet. “Ray. I thought maybe—. Charlie’ll be on his own by fall. And Royal in hospital. I thought maybe that you and the girls—might like to stay on here for a while.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not—safe.”

She stared. Did they become mothers that quick, from a distance? “You can always lock the doors.”

His hands were making that tic-like routine again. The heel of one, swiped hard on the palm of the other. The other hand reversed it. No, that’s not so great for a doctor. But would James still do as he’d warned her he might? A custody ruling against her? For her own good?

“James will arrange them all right,” she said in fury. “I’ll insist on it.” In exchange for Royal. I know my own force. “But there’s no reason to trust him.” And you haven’t even seen what I’m telling you. That I’m the one leaving. “Ray. I said you could have them. The girls.”

In the dissecting-room nausea used to heave him like this. So that he used to rock, James said, like an old woman in church.

“She knee’d me.” His head flung toward the house. “The way I taught her to.” His teeth scored a thumb. “And because I’m back.”

On the upper road came the yearning siren of an ambulance. She glanced up, counting on her fingers as always. No, all are safe. Were safe. “You were in there?”

Heaving, he nodded. Clasping himself, he dropped to his haunches. The dying siren is still faintly traceable. Like the scream she can never make.

What’s he told her? In the somber precincts which she imagines his mind to inhabit, his automaton patrolled, trained not to observe itself. Or to take clues from others. When these pressed, when she did—it fled. But where?

She dropped to the ground beside him. Arms around him she rocked with him, exchanging the same spongy, adolescent gulps. She’s no better at it than he is. Behind them the tin-voiced psychiatrist, forefinger on lips, stole away with high, exaggerated sickroom steps.

Ray’s jacket, rooted in, turned up a handkerchief, big and European, a red darn in one corner. Tearing from the darn, he took the smaller strip, handing her the other. “I smell. I’m sorry.”

His bedside manner. As cool and distant to himself as to any patient. If he revolts himself, if it’s sometimes human to, he will never realize it. This will always terrify her.

“So do I.” But I can handle it.

Standing up again, she blew her nose with strong tweak, crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it, far.

He watched it disappear. For a moment it floated; it was linen. He crumpled the darned half in his pocket. “Look—I’m going to ship out now. I’ll write.” First to Charles. To all of them in time—I’m no fiend. Charles was the only one he’d miss, but this a father must never say. Let her keep her own illusions about loving all of them.

He’s never looked so canny to her. “And the kids, Ray?”

“Handle it.”

Aie. Relief—like a stomach-blow. Then power, bathing her. They were always mine.

He’s getting up to go. He was never a father.

Then she’s scrambling after him. But I was going to be the one. To leave.

The trilling of the birds began again. Observing them had been his passion once; she never seemed to notice them. He watched her with interest, just as when a boy, eye to the grass, he used to watch the underleaf life. Conscientiously, as if in domestic habit, she seized his jacket from the ground; will she put it on again? No, she’s walking with it, absently whipping it in the wind. Still unseeing, she drapes it on a bush. The night before giving birth, women and dormice houseclean. Always foreshadowing, women are. Dooming themselves. Yet the fluid lines and swells of her have an easeful devotion to the ground and to their own rhythm which stings him with the same envy animals incite; if she were to pad off on all fours he wouldn’t be surprised.

Facing the river, head bent—can she be smiling? Taken by vagary, she reminds him of the way indoor birds, perched in an aviary or hung in a cage at the vets, shift irrationally to the climate, or the visitors or their own innards—with exactly the same innerfixed eye.

Now she’s standing in front of him, her feet planted apart. From going barefoot, her feet have broadened but acquired personae. The right one can pick up sticks; the left one’s still lady-delicate. “So—we’re both leaving. So this is the logical life.” Her breasts jut at him aggressively. “We-ll, will you look at them?” she said, eyeing down at them. “My two jokes.”

The sun is up. Or its forward artillery, gilding her, the hillside, the house, in readiness. She stands tall, triumphant, a column of sunshine, blinding him.

From beyond the hill, again the mad toularou-rou-rou of the ambulance. He tensed. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Tappan. Coming back.”

And over the hill to the hospital. He tracked it. Fading north, to where if he stayed on here he might be meeting it. A gray soothe of abdication closed over it.

“So—both of us,” he said. “Yes, what a surprise. I thought it would only be you.”

She’s speechless. She dropped back on her green hummock. A pillar, collapsed inward from its middle. Speech is her pride. It flashes over her—why. She equates it with getting there first.

“For me to make the break—” he’s saying at her elbow. “At first I thought it was only the disease. You know me. But it was in me to do. All this time.” His face drooped at her in the ultimate shyness. Of self-understanding. “I was never sure you’d be ready to, tell the truth. Maybe I banked on it. James and I both.” His expression is sad, generous. “So I’ll be off soon, eh? I’ll go up the hill and borrow Charlie’s Volks. I know where he keeps the key.” He swallows. “Kept it.”

The grass she was plucking turned to hay as she tore it. But I banked on you. From the beginning so help me, I must have banked on you. To stay. “Well, go on then, why don’t you.” From the bottomless sulk it came, fretful, spiteful—and yet humorous? “Go on, yes.” She looked down at her breasts. “We don’t want you—on our bus.”

“Our?” When he was in his “surgery” his face still refocussed like this. Tightening his best feature, a marked triangularity of the upper lids. In a tender scrutiny not of her or any patient, but of his own inner fund of competence. Early on, this look had roused her like an aphrodisiac; she’d had spells of putting a hand on him at eleven o’clock in the morning in his own waiting-room, or luring him into the trumped-up partitions behind it, where in his first years he’d done his own biologicals. He’d thought her jealous of his trade. What she’d wanted was to sleep with that competence. Blending her envy of it in him, with him. By the time he came to bed, he’d always lost it. Or in the last years, even by merely crossing the little limbo passage which connected office with house. He’d never had the power to diagnose her.

Ah but it was always muddling—the images she had. When that happens—accuse. “That’s what you thought, didn’t you. A man coming for me on it. Who I’m waiting for?”

He shook his head. “No. Or not exactly. What are you? Waiting for.”

So thin a vision. She gripped the ground. “What I said. To be seen.”

“Guess I’ve been alone too much.” He stared away from her. “With the religious. Who’re often very matter-of-fact.”

She heard her own flat laugh. “On the subject of adultery?”

No. On the subject of real thorns, in real flesh. And absolute desert-wanderings. “I thought you meant to board the bus. Or try.”

“Board it.” Her glance swept down over herself. Clearly it had never crossed her mind.

“We’d a case once.” On his balcony he’d sometimes thought of it. “Horrie let her on with the morning crowd without seeing her. Rest were too stunned to say. Bly saw her at the police station later. Said she was perfectly rational.” Just call me a streaker, she’d said. And let my children know.

The sky is pink behind her, silhouetting her dark. “I never heard. You never said.”

Nights you came home from town—from the hairdresser, with your hair electric from bed—how should you hear? Asking me to shake hands with my own sons. No, I never said.

“They hushed it up.”

“Who was she?”

“Those two women I made a call on once? The younger one. The soft blonde. With the puzzled face.” She thinks he never notices.

She didn’t move. “She left her children behind.”

Over at the Kellihys a deep whimpf-whimpf began vibrating through the trees. The largest dishwasher in the world, it sounded like. The Kellihys are cleaning up.

“Party?”

She doesn’t answer. The lawn between her and him, them and the Kellihys, the river and all of them, stretches astrally, giving up the last of the dark.

“Remember that young guy we found on the lawn once?” he said eagerly. “Remember?” Gave him coffee in my office, and offered him a paper examining-robe. No thanks doc, I’m fine, he said. “Been sleeping on a rainbow, for a fact. My belly still feels the arch,” he’d said. And strode off free as air.

He saw she was shivering. Elbow on knee, chin in hand, like Rodin’s The Thinker—though she’ll never in this life resemble it. “I wanted witnesses.” Her voice is hoarse. “When I should want—deeds.” She flung her arms up, to that audience of hers. And rolled over, face flat to the grass.

Should he go now? She always left it to him! To be irresolute.

Spain has made his ears sharp. Beyond the morning sounds thrusting the day up he hears a familiar ping-ping. The paper-boy here is earlier than most; the road’s accepted his zeal. Or the river has. What he himself will remember of this place forever is the barcarolle-ing splash of children in its water, the clickclack pingpong tracery of Charles and himself on the porch, even the muffled thump, impartially muted, of Royal’s foot.

The paperboy’s as slow as he’s early; can’t see him yet through the trees. Or he’s stopping at Kellihys’, though it’s long past the first of the month. Short shrift he’ll get there if they’ve been giving parties. He himself has never sent them a bill. The Kellihys give our parties; they streak for us. But like all true partygivers, never on principle. So it doesn’t help.

She’s still lying there as if she’ll knit herself to the grass. In a cleansing energy.

He’ll remember her as a voice. Always a voice.

The boys? They need no tallying, never have. Unlike as they are, they’re his body natural. Which remembers them.

Add Maureen, dutifully—as the one he always forgets.

And the other one. Don’t name her.

He checks that window. Not there.

A witness is not what he needs. He rubs his face, his hands. Yes brother-in-law. I need to hide. But that’s for later. Before that—a deed.

Done. Such a small deed. He stands watching her.

Eyes closed, lips pressed into weeds, she’s boarding the bus. Mounting its steps in her own skin, that last disguise. What’s the reason for this charade?—ah, she’ll tell them. How it is that women who meant to assert the personal confused it with the female.

Passengers may include a few women who work the early shift at the next town’s paperbox factory, but by and large the aisles would be crammed with commuting men, cleanshaven and breakfasted. She’d stand just past the driver. Schedule-freak that he is, he won’t be stopping. But it wouldn’t help him to keep his head down.

What she wants to tell him and them is what goes on below all the talk-talk, below even the silent screaming—to give them a psychograph of her own dark interior, and what deeply murmurs there. Of how it is to be a Lexie-on-the-hill, waiting for a Ray to find her. In the ultimate sulk—as if she’s always expected the synopsis of her life to be played by some winsome but unimportant movie-star. Of how all her life she has felt the humiliation of having small aims.

Naked on a bus; can’t explain, can’t say a word. Of how in all the exercises of her life—meals to be made, children to be made—she’s dealt only in small patterns concluded. Of how, each morning, a woman had to project her own poem on the populace. A hopeless situation. Yet daily it was done—with a nylon soup-net. Compounding the absurdity, the ego and the humiliation all at once. And the soup. So that while the men before her can go ragged with inconclusiveness—in tragic asymmetry—she’s been allowed the minimal satisfaction of small ambitions quenched. While the men keep for themselves the tors unsealed, the grinding treks which come to nothing—the great, souring inconclusiveness of life.

She raises her head to see who she’s been telling this to. Maybe only one woman, dozing behind her babuska. But all the men are looking back at her, eyes bloodshot with the experience, of keeping women like her. They include: A redheaded man—who goes in early, in order to keep two of them. One Robert Kellihy, Jr., whose four cars are out of gas, whose pocket is out of money but has turned up a one-way ticket—and whose presence in the city is that morning required by his mother, at nine o’clock sharp. And there in the back seat—with his felonious masher’s hands showily on top of his raincoat—is the village molester, gazing outraged on her nakedness.

What did the streaker say, bravura—“I am your Representative”?

And what would she herself say? “This is the way it is, it is. And it has nothing to do with sex”?

Hadn’t she heard the bike? That boy would see her. And him. He stands stooping but tall, his deed done.

Up on the road overlooking their riverbank, the bike stopped. He could feel the boy standing there, in depth-charge quiet. Then the shouted syllables rolled over him, over her, motionless there.

The bike moved on. The boy’s second shout skimmed back through the trees.

She rolled over, luxuriously flat to the sky. Lazily an arm lifted in backward salute, flopped again. “What’d he say?”

“Sin. Sin and damnation.”

“He doesn’t count,” she muttered, stretching sensuously, and sat up. “Ray!”

He felt foolish. Country-suburban devilish—and without a party’s excuse. His naked buttocks are dudes to this air. A good enough frame, and well-hung, but in younger locker-rooms these days his shoulders look rounded. He has left on the shoes.

“Ah he counts with me,” he said, eyes glinting.

A man’s body—husband, father or lover—shouldn’t it look more resolute? All the bodies that had been on hers have been admirable ones. Yet, all male bodies seem to her to be still hunting their armor. Even that chub gladiator the caterer’s boy, shedding his jeans in slit-eyed arrogance, or standing naked in his ten-gallon hat, would be belied somewhere—maybe by a rib slender as glass, or the target hip-plate above the angry sex, or the mutely hollowed clavicle. They’re caves of bone, in which deeds must, must generate.

He’s moving off.

“Where you going?”

“Where’d you think?”

“You going to walk down the road like that.”

He stood still. “No, I’m like you. I never thought of it.”

Some yards further on he was climbing down the bank. “Going in,” she heard him call. “Clean myself off.”

“Take off your watch,” she heard herself call back.

So now were they that suburban couple who merely got up a little sooner than the rest? And lay out in the non-wild, hoping for kicks?

Over the bank the watch came flying at her, landing with a thud.

So we’re not the stuff of legends. Or not yet.

He hates river swimming. But borrowing another person’s gestures—or hers—is useless. He’d tried before this to say silently “I side with you”; he never gets it right. This time, at least she hadn’t laughed. That startled “Ray!” even warms him.

From out here he had a seal’s view of the strip of town. The gently antediluvian houses straggled the waterside and hill in placements which often seemed to follow some conformation or purpose long gone. He could see clearer from here how life-in-general pushed its hollows through the earth, and through people. He could safely regard how he and she came to live in one of those houses. How he’d made them come. Because the city was his rival; he could never have hung onto her there. Bright as she is, she’d never suspected it. People always came to the suburbs because of something. It was travel parodied.

Down in the underwater the Hudson was briny dark. Eel on bottom, shad still to be netted in May, and crab returning, but on the surface utterly trafficless. A summer morning without inflection, holding the land in pause. In the river the great teeming pause which was life. Riverbottom thoughts, one got here. Does she know yet what he does? That men at their best don’t swim in couples but for the planet only?

Carefully he stroked back from the central channel, which was timbreless and very deep. Eyes open to the oily Pleiades ahead, nosing through the brown alluvial shorewater, he was swimming for the planet and with it, like everything else down here. And up above. His fingers grasped land; he vaulted onto its shelf. Not bad—he’d have years yet. Not to live in the future only, always denying it.

Halfway up the bank he turned back again. Hector’s shoes—he’d left them down below; better get them. Airports were prosy about bare feet. For his flight back he’d as soon be thermally protected only, in some friar-stuff of brown or white. It had always half surprised him, that for flights into what just might be forty thousand feet that much nearer God, the air-services didn’t provide even temporary migrants with some such stripped-down uniform. After he’d made clear his intention to work in the ward, maybe Hector, now reduced to his dead brother’s medical black serge, would dig up for him one of the old monk-tunics the Sisters surely had saved.

Up on the roadside again his own clothes are where he’d dropped them. “Conservatively” pinstriped and dotted, they seem to him now a clown’s. But on the undershirt is one of the ward-woman’s crazy red darns, with which half the hospital-gowns were spotted. He put the shirt back on, for affection. Plus his undershorts, against allergy. Poison-oak sprouted here every spring. Chess, who’d inherited his bones, his tender skin—and it might be, the hoarded soma of a lifetime of dreams unrecollected—once swelled to dropsy from it. Lexie, toughskinned as a gypsy, is immune.

Approaching, he saw she’d arranged herself on elbow—and on circumstance. This nonproducing ripple of land he’s provided her with has just enough rise. For much of the day its cranky, offshoot road remains hermetically empty. But shortly a few persons traveling of necessity south will have a champion view—for one camera moment longer than life—of a woman with a river behind her. And he can see how for her to set herself up as signal is appropriate. The bodies of women lurch beyond anatomy. Toward what may be obscure—but artists have spent paint on it.

She’s been disposing of her two extra men, which through all the movie-colored infatuation has been how she’d thought of them and had treated them. One, in spite of his pose of hunting only sex in her, had helped her respect her mind. The other, hungering for other people’s talents as the rich sometimes starved for protein, had given her a candidate’s hopes. Both had shown her that she’s had four kids by a man who, in the pure matters of the body—which run on carnally to the heart—is bitterly and maybe hopelessly shy.

When he sits down beside her the fertile river is shining from him. For a moment she’s almost sure he’s going to cover her with himself; then it passes, in her, and maybe in him. The air’s tingeing peach, pearly acrid as a baby’s sweat.

She sneaked a look at him. Never coarse enough for her? But surely the rape was mutual? Thinking back on how it was with her, she isn’t sure. Youth-sex, hot for immersion, and a young mind already in extremis, in its urge not to be eunuchoid. A matter of the spirit—with the sexual self conniving. Against her abiding fear that all her relationships would be with herself.

But the man beside her is still the mystery she raped. She could slice his throat to raw meat with her armed tongue, before he could tell her what he thinks.

Where’s she walking to? To the high edge of this riverbank, which here falls away in raw fissures and mesas for ants, down to the soggy pebbleline below. No one could build here; what’s he been saving it for?

Her ankles have swollen with the night’s heat; her buttocks are redprinted with weed. The pattern of my wife’s backside changes with the season and the sofa; I must assume a similar swell in her brain. Women and the moon were both oedematous—part of their charm. Stark naked—she’s gone behind a bush to pee.

He recalled how after Charles was born the contour of her back became as he could glimpse it now through the scrawny bush—fatally thickened from the outline of girl. And how this had frightened him, repelled him almost. For as he now knew, this was the most subtle sign of maternity; a woman could become nearly skeletal and still keep that contour. While by the time a faint prolapse in his own belly had occurred, it was age, not fatherhood.

Yet Charles has been accepted at Harvard and Oxford both—and hasn’t yet told her. Instead writing him—in the formal misery which keeps his son untouchable yet keeps them kin—that he can’t decide. “Of course Boston’s conveniently near Chessie’s school.” Then a paragraph down: “Would you mind if I went into medicine too, the mental side of it?” And finally the postscript stopper. “I think I understand what you might be hassling with, Dad. I’m reading William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.”

To be understood like that. Lightly, without moral suasion, by one’s own child. He felt the grace of fatherhood. His son’s heart, firmly transplanted on the pocket-ruin of his own.

Tears haggled for his face.

Relieving herself, she said goodbye to this beloved promontory, its nile weeds and crystal sky. A lookout, a lighthouse even, but conservationist to the end. Up here it all went into the chlorophyll, women like her included. Downriver her city tumbles heavenward, a Chartres of waste. But within it are all the trampoline hills, multi-leoparded. A language-thrill went through her—nonsexual. I never wanted to be ideal—only alive. Joy alone was never my thesis. She saw the winter city as she used to, its darkly scarlet innards—of people, sunsets, chickens—scattered on the stonegray streets. In those iceberg evenings which harshened down on many lines of troubled roof, could her life pursue some thesis, unfinished maybe, but always emancipating from the too pure arch of self? There will they let her be that—objective? Not a gender but a human animal rising?

She stared down at the clump of weed she’d wetted. “Called dock in the vernacular” the children’s flower-book said. “Otherwise snakewort, or adder’s root.” Once it was rumored here that someone had managed to grow a dafora, a plant from a warmer clime and poisonous; when it bloomed was why the woods smelled of shit and sirocco—threatening. Others said it was only a native mulberry dropping its tassels and pulp in some secret acre not yet built upon. There were no real crops here. Yet these mysteries are what she hopes to remember, hopes the children will, when they’re grown. Though from now on with them she must keep to the vernacular. They’ll have enough to bear without her language forcing them to bloom before their time.

She can smell herself steaming up from the shiny leaves. Dogs stunt a path that way. Afterwards turning their backs on their mess, their hindlegs scuffing. Trembling, she tore at a sparrowgrass bush, dropping fronds on the spot where she’d been. She knew the mess her language had made. All she’d meant to do was to carry her family with her, rung by rung, as the pulse of the world flooded her, lifting them along with her, bootstrap insight by insight—but always domestically—as was happening to her. All she’d meant to do was to characterize the world for them. She’d been forging it—her language. But once empowered, there’s no hiding it. At times the woods behind her house must fill with the smell of female dissenter, rank as a new menses. And with the odor of childbloom forced.

Peering through the bushes she saw he wasn’t watching her but the river. How Buddha-quiet he’d grown; that old tee-shirt might already be a monk’s singlet. With one holy darn. Ever-suggestible he is, yet hard. In all their children there’s some of that. Of him.

Be off then, Ray. Will I be the one to go back to the house?—I always am. Yes, leave me. To the self-pity I can never master.

She stole a look at her house. It’s always our house, whether we choose it or not. There you are, nanny-house. Still guarding those loving banditti, my children. Who’ll suck us dry if they have to, because they have to. Because they too are in thrall. To the flesh we’ve given them.

Stay, nanny. Hang on just a little while yet; I’m coming. One village to pass; then I’ll cross the road to you. And what’ll I do then?

She drew a long breath, lifting her. I’ll organize.

Her body’s wealed, scratched, swollen feverish and ever vulnerable. Its bare soles never harden sufficiently. Abusing it helps.

Let him dare laugh, she thought, emerging. He’s clothed.

She’s grinning down on him, half superior, half abject. But with the quick self-ridicule which always rescued her, she shrugged, sweeping a glance over herself—an actress throwing a line away. “This is the way it is, Ray. Without pearls.”

Without his pearls. Cheap hurts she can always inflict. But she can never steel herself to the big ones. Will that still do her in?

He can see her in that city flat he’ll do his best to pay for—maybe one near Royal’s hospital, and also convenient enough to her brother’s so that she can leave in nightly charge Maureen. Who’s suitable to leave, and in the daytime will sweep. In time will her mother find a job—in one of the talking disciplines? In order to become one of those women at her brother’s parties—those evening Statues of Liberty, with their hair in braids instead of spikes? Who more often than not, he’d observed, had a child at home to sweep.

And a string of pearls from the past, now and then wearable. For a couple of James’s black girls, lazily stretching their zebra necks and flower-toed feet in a party-corner, to laugh at.

“No, never trust your brother,” he said. “But I suppose you’ll go on seeing him.”

“My brother?” She smiled, flopping down beside him. Her hazel smile, big-eyed. She can’t help her innocent coloring. “He and I have a mutual friend. Who’s finally made me see what James is to me. Has always been. James is the way I know my own force.” She snapped her fingers, an odd gesture in a naked woman. But that appeared to be the end of James. It would take some odd gestures, that’s for sure—to be rid of him.

“The city’s deep, Lexie. Deep.” He studied the tangling shoreline of the river; he should have known that sooner or later it would lead her there. The river was her lifeline, while she was here.

“Deep?” She flung her exalted, alto laugh at him. “I’m out of my depth—and I mean to stay there.”

He retreated. He knows her depth.

She sneaked a look at his watch, still there on the ground. Soon men will be standing at every river street-corner, with their watches strapped to their wrists. Not a one of them on this road was born here. Ah how good it was to know an environment—any—but in your very grain, dusting your brain dark forever, searing your heart in tannic light. The city’s not deep, only multiple. It might look like a clutch of verticals aiming at God but its history was always horizontalizing, all connection and disconnection going on at once. There I can travel out from what I am, and no one the wiser—except everyone. Maybe to be what I am, without benefit of where? No—that’s poetry.

She wondered what sex Tom Plaut’s baby had been. And Mrs. Plaut’s. Women don’t live by images alone, Tom; perhaps by now he knows. But Plaut’s language was the public one the minute he was born. In the eyes of the world he and it have a continuity of scrutiny, of an altogether different scale. Painful to him at times maybe, but marvelous—to all those who have only voice.

I know that to some I’m all voice; maybe that’s why.

Here’s Ray, who has almost none. And married her for it. “The coloratura’s husband,” James said scathing behind Ray’s back once. And Charles rushed at him.

Listen, all of you. Even Dad, whom I haven’t much thought of in a long time. All of you with whom I’ve had argument. That was Girlbud. This is Lexie speaking. To herself:

Lexie. If a language is so private it makes people stare—then make it public. Make it a deed.

Could I do that, she thought, awed. In some small station of life—which might get to be an outpost—could I be workhorse to an idea? Not a proclamation. Or even a treatise. A little manual of my own. On how it keeps with us. One person’s manifest—on keeping on.

Awareness—yes, she lives for it. But not like Charlie’s philosophers, under world-mandate. Because she has to. Hers being a special case of it, which the world finds ungraspable. She’d have to define it her self—and still not fall in love with it. Only to end up circling that tunnel-of-self love which the world called “sensibility,” and was particularly happy to attach to the awakenings of her kind.

She wonders humbly whether she will have to be an intellectual.

He’s been watching her. Hunched there—the way rebels are? No—though she may think so. In the way of those patients who, after long cures, are signed out. He’s seen it often in those discharged by rule in wheelchairs even if they can walk—this sudden adoration at the door. There’s one scratch on her breast should be seen to.

“Lexie.” His hand touched hers, pressed on its own privates. “Lexie—there’s still time.” To go back across the road and be normal again. Back into the house, both of us.

“Oh, there’s time, time—and thank God for it. Thank you for reminding me.” Ray—thank you for many things.” Her face shone. Out that door. He could tell from her voice. “So wait with me, if you want to.” Her eye flicked once-over him. A wife with her spouse, entering some fete of an importance both are unaccustomed to. “Anyway you want to.”

So they wait, each trailing generosities which fade and return.

There’s a barge on the river now, traveling as they always did, south.

“Look at it.” He pointed angrily. “Piled high with slag. What can the city want with it?”

“They put out to sea.” Her hand clasped her mouth. “All that charnel. That I used to know about. I know none of it anymore. Nothing.”

“Out to sea. To burn it. Or to dump.”

She showed her teeth. “I may want to know damnation too. It’s my right.”

The trilling of the birds began again, that sound which always seemed to her to speak the one road, the true path, when all it meant was that summer—or winter—was done. The house-of-cloud is gone. Gone in like a moon. All the while, it was her house.

Shuddering, she bowed her head. Whatever she is has come about because she sees herself as the irrationally mute half of things. As they see her. So that when she does speak, she screams.

And still she waited, for him or one of them or all of them, every cell in her screaming to be found—to be found tragic, equal, necessary. In equal part.

What’s he whispering?

“It’s like being in the stocks, out here. Isn’t it. Like being put in the stocks.” With each urging word his hands find a purchase on her, clenching her thigh, buttock, abdomen as if she’s cold putty he’s molding. Her neck—in iron hands she’d never felt before. Her hair. “That why you were lying here?” The whisper tongued her ear. Sank by an undisclosed channel into her breast. “Look up there then, Lex. Look.”

No. She knew what he wanted her to see. Ancient wooden stocks, once in the village square, were now preserved in the vestry of the Dutch Reformed Church. Where eight-year-old Chess, malingering after Sunday School, once got herself caught in them. After everyone had gone. No, don’t look up there. Bury your head deep.

Nowhere to put it, except her own fundament. This was why women wore skirts.

Up there. In the bay-window. The figure that’s always there. The girl who’s always cold, and never feels it. The blot-head. Looking down at them.

Feel cold, Mother? Stupidly bare? In the world of those who aren’t you and me, who pull the wool over themselves? What you harbor against little Roy, Mother—that cool tinkle of self-confessed guilt—that’s nothing. Against this other monstrous tenderness which dooms me. To be wombed again with you. Your other monster child.

Dig your fingers into the ground, Lexie. As night beyond night you’ve dug them into pillow, bed, Ray’s breast—against the undertow urge to rush in and put your arms around the girl up there for keeps—to be as murderously sick. To say: Eat me—for putting you into the world with your angry hunger for me. Eat. My nipple is still in your mouth. My brain is your brain. That double counterpart. If we could, we would bed with it. Like sister children, running away. To each other’s wombs.

The figure was gone.

Yes, the stocks. Male and female used to be paired there together. As if their sins could ever be the same, or their damnations either.

His hands worked against themselves, kneading. Water’d done nothing for the slick on them. He held them out to her mutely. Hers were strong with housecraft. Clasping them over his she held their joined hands quiet. “What, what—?” she crooned, absently gentle, as to a child. “Something on them, eh? What, what?”

He bent over that fourhanded fist. Mutual blame. It must be what we yearn to rest from in the afterlife. Or in foreign wards, or vacantly public tasks.

“Parental slime.”

He saw that her body had aged overnight; it had already begun to hoard up their guilt for them. What overpowered a woman in herself, what finally overpowered the men who loved them, was so curiously the same. They interpose their bodies between themselves and all events. He pities her, this lost cohabitant of his planet. With the pity one has for foreigners, in one’s native place. It’s what Hector and Isaac will feel toward him.

She’s thinking that their story was deformed from the beginning; there was no way of telling it classically. Or is there. Two people so unaware, yet they have come to the riverbank in the end.

Or is it the awareness, when it comes—mine—that deforms, since it speaks. The old legends, maybe they were better. Two bowed down and wending their way, as in a paradise lost—but still paradise?

She sat back on her heels, an open palm attentive on each thigh. It’s her condition. Perhaps their story would be only as deformed as human stories are.

“It’s the same, isn’t it,” he said suddenly, loudly. “In any walk of life.”

What can he mean? Is he awarding her one? His face has assembled itself. Where’s the trembler of a minute ago, the father? Sloughed.

Ah, she’d know him anywhere—this other one. This tribe.

“The same,” she breathed, softly mocking. And now indeed, they are separate.

He too sits on his heels, thumbs linked behind him.

How we’ve traveled.

Did she say that aloud? Or not?

Dreaming there, he doesn’t answer. There was something she had to tell the children about him at once. She can’t remember it.

It seems to him that they have had their heart-to-heart. Life has prepared them. Out of their differences awarding them the silence other people found in love.

Is it so strange then that he’s reaching for her with the same engrafting movements those other people find?

As he smoothes that wild hair and scraped breast and mounts what melts toward him, it seems that he and she are rehearsing what would have been their middle age together, even their old age. Who hasn’t seen such couples?—he’s had more scope than most. Two musing at the edge of a bed or across a table, nodding absently at each other’s totems—at the totem the other now is. Each conceding at last the vital process of the other—now that there’s not much of it left.

It’s not that her zones are up, submerging her; physically she’s long since a professional. Or that she doesn’t know—even on the open ground she once craved—that he can never be her nakedness. It’s that what first raped her in him has grown strong on him again.

He climbs on her. The foreigner.

The bus, lumbering out of the cove a mile north to backfire the shot that set off the early-morning race here, hove itself out onto the shore road.

In the same plunged second that he reminded himself where he was, where they were—and held on as he could anyway, she rolled him off.

They sat up, slow-motion, in the bruised, unfinished way one did. In the confusion of not being animal enough.

He picked up his watch, strapping it on, winding it intently. Ashamed—that he can never brutalize.

“Sorry, Lex.”

“Don’t be. Nothing would have changed.”

He saw it square. To him their children have always been the real interruption of the sexual fugue. To her—would it still be the telephone—that unremitting hole which drained his services from her?

She sat on her haunches, airing the rawness between.

How maiden he looks—they look—when this happens. When that long muscle of theirs falls short. Once, at one of these times, she’d rushed to a mirror, to catch the moment of coition still on her face, and was shock-pleased to see that white vacuity. To see her rational self—a self which so often pained her because it so often had to go begging—beaten into dazement.

“Nothing,” he said. “And afterwards anyway—all animals are sad.”

“They are?” How could one know? “Are you?” She waited, for his slow nod. “I’m not. Or not really. It’s not exact enough. For what I feel.”

“An old saw,” he said. He was still winding his watch. “What do you feel. Afterwards.”

How ignorant she is. Many must have recorded that non-personal afterglow—has any of her sex ever tried?

She’ll have to get it right, or else no use to it. Holy ardor toward the act itself—is that what she feels? And toward the natural world that allows it.

“I feel loyal,” she said. “To the situation.”

In her language. Exactly.

But other people stare.

Let them.

She’s folded her arms in the cradle position. A palm under each elbow, like a plinth. As if he’s in there. All his shrunken baby-parts exposed.

“And to the man, if you want the bloody truth.” Her mouth wrinkled, folded into her teeth, opened wide for a taut, oval cry that never came, and fell back smooth as a bud, young. “Loyal to every one of them.”

He saw that he’d broken the watch. But it had been accurate. Bus is on time. Old engine still had the same miss in it, projected far ahead by the wet river air. Quiet now and again. Then it grunted on, in a lurch of gas. Hard-breathing at each corner, it’s picking up a life at every stop. Set lives, as his own had been. But I wasn’t a patient yet. I was only practicing.

The gassy smell was energizing him. What he needs now isn’t blood but the smell of motion. Oh I needed blood though. In sickness we carnify. One haunted message maybe—to a life. To be worn in secret on a sacred thong. All the rest an iridescent fever of the cells—then the dark green mold of the bones going back to the energy scum?

She’s still squatting there. Hearing what?

“Bus is on time,” he said.

“I hear it.” Yammering brassy for each customer. Stuttering on.

This is the brink moment, Lexie, just before the image you nurture is broached to the world. All private images of any intensity are lunatic, until externalized. After that it’s up to you. And the world. Whichever one you choose. Or are chosen by. When enough people chose a same world, then there might be a religion, or the art of piano-playing—neither of which is her icon. Or the fine art of loitering in the Hotel de Ville and letting music in as many registers as known pass through you—which is.

Here it comes down the road, all her village. Gossip binding those in the bus mouth-to-mouth with those there was no room for. Will you stand up in salute, Lexie? Or lie down as you began. With your ear to the ground.

She begins to count off by streetcorners and housenumbers. Every straggle of path and wall is engraved on her, it seems, each house by shape and catalogue—wood of white or brown, or black-shuttered, stucco stained with damp the way old linen does, and the earliest houses here—of clapboard above and undershot jaws of rose-geranium brick. She can stroll the whole prospect, to rearrange a leaf. In allegiance. It’s not leaving her as it should be. This eccentric inlet whose gloss already twangs bittersweet in her ear: Landing Way, Ricer Street, Bitker Terrace, Route Nine—a faraway eddy of a river road I once lived on. What are the streetnames in Tierra del Fuego; what would she find there? Waves of rearing anthracite foaming rabid at all newcomers—but when once lived near, revisiting the beach like native mind?

And I forgot the Village Hall—were any children still sleeping there? Cottage by cottage, by new-plastered bargain and august house with five porches, all rotten, the parents are returned, fast or loose in their beds. But here and there now, one by one a man pops out a door, not stopping for history; everybody knows what commuters do. Why do they keep following her, the fathers, each on his time-wheel, each in his slot?

Except at the Kellihys.

Was that the bus halting; who could it be picking up there? Red spurts of music, white honeysuckle of a breeze in the throat, always the caterers thumping their dogsbody rhythms—when did it stop? Don’t stop the music, Bets. Or the babies either. Take in the paper, Bob. Good neighbors helped pay for it.

What’s the bus waiting so long for at Kellihys’? A caterer’s boy?

Yards away, it can’t have seen her yet. In her bower visible only direct in from the crown of the road. Or from her house. Where, rubbing his black furry arch against one of the stone pillars which mark the path to his doorway, is her cat.

She could go back in there for good. Back alone, to resume her valuable reflections. Or could she persuade him, Ray, that enough has happened in the red-dark of themselves; it need never be externalized? Yes—bright, crude but competently, drawn as a lithograph, she can see the two of them sauntering out of the bushes, hands joined in the approving sight of all. What’s she doing here, except holding herself up to view more literally than most?

Ah no, an education has begun here; she won’t fault it. She’s one of the lucky ones, who wake in time to see the arrow sticking in the morning cereal: Rehearse for Age. A circumscribed life can be useful. Boiling down the evening alcohols, the herbal rages, until you have enough brown stock for dynamite. Even the landscape here has helped, lifting her high on its silver salver, so that she might see moral hints even in a downpour of rain. And images, in their season.

It’s not that the force with which she sees herself is fading. Only that her wretched body is thrashing itself into as many angles and simperings as a woman trying on a hat, a bridal gown, and a pair of blood-proof rubber-pants, all in the same mirror. She sees her vision of herself as she ought to be now. Not this trembling body which has lost its confidence. A Niké, a winged victory—modest class. A woman damaged enough to be classical. Would she have arms—or should these be stumps? May she have a head?

Release me, body. Not from life. Just enough—to slump easy. To be able to just—lurch on through. Release me—body which acts like mind.

She rose on hands and knees, to any eye a whole woman, looking back at her house. Never to be turned to stone by the sight—though she might pray to be. The house recedes, a gothic moth only hovering. Ready still, at a word from her, to hold them all on its wings yet awhile? No, it knew her better than herself, had always known. That she was the face in the pool, terrified but rising steadily. To set fire to her own house.

A yearning pang struck her, straight from the birth-couch. Then it was gone. Prepare to be ashamed now—of being ashamed.

Poor old bus, he thought, getting to his feet, craning to see. On the blink again? In front of Kellihys’. Where Horrie must be having to climb over half of tonight’s story before they’ll let him phone the garage.

Poor Lexie here, behind him. What frail hopes she always floats her images on. On a bus. On me.

There comes Horrie. Bouncing out of Kellihys’ and into the bus again, for one more try. Or to consult. Good old Horrie, the bus’ll be saying; he stays the route. Meaning that we all do.

For, poor Lexie, how we switch bargains on you. How we use you, to fox yourself in, the end. That bus, your village—you’re not merely waiting for it. It’s following you, always following you. To watch how the nude bargain comes out.

What’s that other familiar revving, up the hillside? Between them and Kellihys’.

In Spain, at eleven A.M. every day except Sunday, in the public square under his balcony the same little hunched bug of a car starting up the time-wheel in his head.

Breakfast-time in Grand River, and his son the all-night reader going out for it. Or some of that legion he lends his car to.

No wonder it won’t move, the way they load it.

Smiling to himself though he’ll have to find other transport, he urges on the old rattletrap. Get going, youngsters. Up this early, to wherever you’re off to. There—they’ve got it running. Smooth. There it goes.

Fading. Gone.

“Somebody’s taken out the Volks.”

Did a spasm of maternity plump her cheeks? “Charlie. Going for buns.”

Holy are the meals prepared by children’s hands.

In one of those purses which were her attaché-cases—tucked well down in a bunch of those hieroglyphs of her life which when dumped on a table could be ridiculed both for their insignificance and their inclusiveness—was the flyer the troupe of Chasids once thrust at her on that last solitary city outing; she’d never been able to throw it away. It contained instructions on the mission of women, and girls. Which was—to light the dark world, from the family distance. All its admonitions, crowding Chasidic, were those same ones more commonly directed, without regard for race or religion toward all her kind. But the flyer was more practical. It gave the candle-lighting times for all major American cities. And the procedure by which, in whichever one she found herself, she might cast her holy light to illumine the world—without entering it:

First light the candles…

I do it. A candle as high as a house.

… then cover your eyes with your hands to hide the flame.

I do. Look here.

At this point you may recite the blessing.

I do. I do. I do. In the double language under language, which they never hear:

Airt. Moil. Bast. And Belding’s Corticelli—which is not Betelgeuse. To be a compass, a guide. To toil, to drudge. To be flexible, as bark. And to hang like a star—by a thread.

I recite the blessing, for all my tribe. Which until yours hears it, will infiltrate the children, and hallucinate the world.

But how to say it in a language they understand? The common one.

She lays her ear to the ground, where she can hear the voice of the Thruway, a religion of onward swaying her dais and passing through her, the voice of the many calling to the single without sex or need of translation. We are not alone. We are never alone. Here is the apparatus. This is the contract.

Hurry. Answer. Recite the blessing. The bus must be moving again. Ray had his back to her, and was craning up the road.

It’s what a blessing might be when it’s half banner, half prayer. So that any invoker might stand in a kitchen, or thousands might converge on the Stock Exchange or run to the Champs de Mar to sew it on the air:

KEEP US IN VIEW

And now, let’s be silent. Let’s none of us speak. Let him speak, at the end.

Turning, he saw she’d stopped her thrashing. But he knows the force of that meditation. She’s a woman in a bell-glass, breaking out.

Christ. No—don’t lean on Him. Sister Isaac! Attend! What’s breaking out of there? An image of his own, long nurtured? The enormous hip rising, the breasts that spout, the mouth a babble of rivers, the Maja, blinding the landscape in her slow assemblage of herself—a rotted widow-leg not burned on the Ganges and now whole again, a tenth finger from a small all-female unit in the first factory of Du Pont de Nemours, a marble foot, never compromised, from Greece?

Plus a head. In the bloody trunk of the neck, the arteries, clamped, are now waiting. Surpliced arms reach for the head—his. Sister Isaac, Sister Judas, attaches it.

He’s grinning. Or appears to be. Because she’s on all fours, crawling toward events? Not waiting for them to come upon her?

She stands erect. A dinosaur, in the act of extinction, looking round itself for the last time. The homely lines of river, road and hill are already a landscape printed on the page, untouchable.

So this was Eden. And that is why I am here on the riverbank. I am the rib, leaving it. Be aware—and beware. For a rib may magic itself into anything, to while away the long hours of being a rib.

These are her jokes. Will they wheedle her away from that ultimate seriousness in which she’s the full half of humankind? She’ll have to chance it. What she’ll be up against is the sweet-simple scripture hardening in Everyman’s arteries from the beginning. The exquisite satire embodied in all Edens will always be at her expense.

And here’s the bus, bearing down on them.

Ah Eden, my village. She stretches luxuriously for it, showing the full dimple of herself. Ruined, yes ruined. But only for the suburbs.

He’s not grinning. What he wants to do, he hasn’t been given the face for.

Lexie. Scream for us.

Ah. Ahhhhhhhhh. I give birth to them. The women. Him. All. Awareness—it’s the unnatural, natural act.

And now—I biggen. I recover, from confinement.

But—how to tell the story? Of how people stammer in and out of the dark. In the fiery glades of the families. Into the hairy Everglades of nights that pass into history—knowingly. How to tell the story that’s always about to begin?

In the end, Ray took off his shirt. But left on his shorts. So that those who passed would know this was not Eden.

So we sat. The world was all before us.

Then the green latch opens.

Faces yearn in on us.

Time was. Time is.

And the bus passes.

But what has she baubling her ears, hung twinkling in the septum of her nose, indented gemdeep in the forehead—and rubying the warm navel, and sparkling onyx between the legs, in the cleft blur of hair?

It is her body that shines, an illuminated story—in every pore, hanging in cell-song, that sad jewel, Joy.