to hit her, she sees it, fist up and his face, and backs away. “Don’t worry, I never would. Never you. Not that precious face. Oh no, I couldn’t,” and smashes his fist through a panel of the closet door. She says “Now who’s going to pay for that?” “Fuck it, you moron, your goddamn door.” “All right, I will fuck it. I’ll fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, you fucking fucking curser. You crazy man. For the first time, though you’ve given signs, I’m truly afraid of you,” and goes into the bathroom and locks it. He listens at the bathroom door. “You crying in there? Well if you are, cry all you want; just think of what you’ve done to me,” and runs water over his hand, wants to put antiseptic on it but that’s in the bathroom, wraps it with a dishtowel and leaves. Calls her at work and says “Sorry about the door. Tell Mrs. Young I fell with such force or something that my head went through it, but that I’ll pay for it.” “I saw blood in the kitchen. How’s your hand?” “My hand deserves what I did to it, so don’t worry. I also want to say, if it’d help things, and I don’t think it’d be a bad idea for me — I’m interested in it and I need — you saw — some additional spiritual discipline in my life like this — I’ll convert to Science.” “Do it only for yourself, not me. It won’t change anything between us. It’s not the issue. Be Jewish; even be Orthodox Jewish.” “But I need you to stay with me and guide me in it. I’m serious about it. It’s not just for you.” “Go to any Science church other than mine and ask them for advice. But nothing related to me.” “Ah, you just don’t love me, that’s all. You maybe did a little once — now and then — but not enough.” “Anyway, I’ll stay somewhere else tonight and you can start moving out. I’ll give you till around six tomorrow. But please go? And promise you won’t wreck anything else or take whatever’s not yours?” Gets an apartment. Gets drunk a lot. Calls her late at night a lot, for anything. “The Auden book I said I didn’t want? I need it back. Not only because I’m starting to love his work again but there’s something in it I have to find and copy down to go into my own writing.” “I’ll send it.” “I have to have it by morning. Can I come right down?” She’s on her stoop with the book. “Here. Please don’t bother me with little things like this again. You want anything more of yours I might have, tell me now and we’ll go upstairs and get it and that’ll be all.” They go upstairs. He grabs her on the third-floor landing to kiss her. She puts her hand between their mouths. “Please. I feel nothing but sympathy for you now.” “Fuck you, you rat. You can have whatever I’ve left up there, or throw it out the window for all I care. Plus this book,” and heaves it downstairs, kicks it out of his way as he leaves the building. Weeks later wishes he hadn’t; one about Yeats and another about suffering he wanted to go to; also the shortie where children die in the streets. He was drinking and in a sad serious mood. Meets her two years later at an art gallery she’s working at. Saw the review and that afternoon had nothing to do. “Fancy this,” he says and she looks up from a textbook and that smile and big hi. “I didn’t mean to just spring up on you. You’re I swear a complete surprise.” She’s no longer a Christian Scientist, is living with an artist who exhibits here but nothing of his up this moment, courses in anthropology, paleontology, ancient Greek, given up theater for good. News quit him when the show went off the air and he’s living on unemployment and writing a book. They kiss each other’s cheeks good-bye. “Wait a sec, I haven’t even looked around,” does, says he wasn’t disappointed and it’s a nice walk back through the park. “By the way,” and invites him for dinner. Accepts but hour before just can’t see himself there, sitting, wanting, coming back, and calls to say he suddenly got a stomach flu. The artist answers, says she’s in the can now, he’ll relay the message. “Too bad, it would’ve been interesting. Most of our pals can’t talk anything but dealers or painters, when they’re not descanting on Chinese food and movies. In fact I’ve tried to bring some writers onto the scene to change that, but another time, hey? and feel good,” and he says “That’s very kind, thanks.” Months later goes out of his way to pass their building. Looking through all the store windows around there just in case and sees her on one of the checkout lines of the supermarket on her block. Goes in, says he was heading for the subway, looked left just for a second and couldn’t believe his eyes. “Watch out,” she shouts as the conveyor belt moves her food and she jokes how she sometimes thinks her hand’s going to move with it when she’s thinking about something else and disappear under the belt. “Who knows what’s under there; I imagine teeth.” Laughs, at the same time realizing he’s being phony since he doesn’t think it funny. Invites him upstairs for coffee; Ricardo’s in Germany for an opening of his work. Carries both bags, despite her protests, and remembers shopping with her when they lived together; always liked it. Coffee’s rich, ground just for this brewing; king- or queen-sized mattress on the floor behind a screen. Very little furniture, all the lighting fluorescent except for two student lamps by their bed pillows, most of the place seems to be his studio. “Where do you work when you’re home?” and she says in bed or at the kitchen table. “Ricardo pays the bills and is the at-home artist and it was his place so gets most of the space.” Lots of expressionistic nudes, still lifes, sunsets or rises over some Mediterranean fishing village it seems with mountains in the back and big storms boiling behind them. None of the nudes look like her except a little in the face: heavier breasts, larger aureoles, bigger bushes, darker hair, thinner legs, squarer buns. “Interesting; nice; good; exciting; terrific color, any of you?” and she says “Zillions, in every kind of pose, clothed and unclothed, including some frankly pornographic ones and a few unerotic nudes with him—’Artist and His Model’—but they go straight into the gallery or on the road. These are all early works to hide the cracks.” Books piled up against the walls, bunches of tiny dried flowers throughout the loft, bathroom smells from her soap; in it a life-sized mirror-image self-portrait, he supposes, looking as if he’s about to break the mirror with his brush; dark, handsome, bearded, angry, long fat semierect penis; only painting so far he really likes. “That him in there?” and she says “It’s embarrassing, that one. I like to tell people it’s his nonexistent identical-twin brother, but maybe that doesn’t help,” and he laughs when she does, again thinks he’s a phony. Wants to throw her down and rip her clothes off and rape her. Give her time only to put her diaphragm in if that’s what she still uses — looked for the case in the bathroom but didn’t find it — but to tape her mouth if he has to and flatten her to the mattress, grab her ass from behind with both hands and push her up to him as far as she can go and to come fast and for the whole thing to be over with forever. Maybe for them to stay locked like that for a few minutes but without him looking at her and then if he can to come again the same way or with her turned over. To go to jail for it, long as they’d want to stick him in it — he wouldn’t give any resistance. Kiss on the cheeks good-bye. “We really should do dinner,” she says. “Ricardo would enjoy meeting you.” “Sure he would.” “Why wouldn’t he? He’s interested in anyone with a serious purpose, doesn’t have to be art, and says the two of you are much alike. He’s punched his hand through a door and wall a few times too.” “I only did it that once and would like to forget about it.” He calls and they meet twice in the next two years, for coffee, the next time lunch. Ricardo sold the loft and went to Paris to live and work and she’s following him in a month. She’s studying art history now, also figure drawing. He says he’ll take her to the airport by bus; she says she does have a lot of luggage so it would be a great help. In the flat she’s staying at when he picks her up he says he has something he doesn’t know if he should tell her. “Paris has evaporated,” she says. “I’m still madly in love with you, I’m sorry,” and chokes up. She looks consoling while busily getting last-minute things together. “I didn’t know that and wish it weren’t true. We’ve become good friends and I’d hate for anything to spoil it.” “Don’t worry, nothing will; I’m not about to make a move on you.” Kisses her hands, just before she’s going to board he hugs her good-bye. She keeps her head stretched to the side so he can’t get at her lips when he kisses her. “Oh, I forgot,” though he intended it for now, and pulls out of his coat two gift-wrapped paperbacks and a jar of instant tea and she says “Gosh, where am I going to stash these? I haven’t an inch of space left,” and he says he’ll send them to her and takes them back. They correspond about once every other month. Tells her he’s coming to Paris to live, always wanted to and isn’t it the thing for a young writer to do? and he can’t take another day of substitute teaching in junior high schools but put away enough money from it; maybe he’ll get to see her, take her to lunch. Who you kidding? he tells himself. He’s going because she’s there and in her last letter she said things weren’t going well with Ricardo; their relationship’s often been tempestuous but now it was getting uncivilized. He thinks: she’s usually broke, has no job there, they’ve been living outside of Paris and not going in much, she’s written, so maybe she’ll want to move into the hotel with him and let him support her awhile. At the least, if she’s living off him, she’ll let him screw her from time to time and maybe eventually something deeper might develop and maybe right away. Certainly if he learns French fluently, which he plans to, and gets a job there with some American firm or French firm needing Americans in editing or news or something like that — just writing anything — things will even get better for them. He calls her day after he gets there and Ricardo says she left today for New York and is probably this minute at the Luxembourg airport. He calls Icelandic there, they get her and she says “I didn’t leave because you were coming, though I knew you were and wanted to see you, but because Rick and I had the worst fight of our lives and I didn’t want to be in France or even Europe another second.” “Cash in your ticket, get your luggage off the plane if it’s already on. And if you can’t, don’t worry, I’ll buy you new clothes and reimburse you for your ticket some way if they don’t refund it, but come stay with me at my hotel here or in your own room at the hotel — I’ll take care of all of it for as long as you want and I won’t make any kind of demands on you.” “Write me,” she says. “It’ll give me surrogate pleasure reading about the wonderful experiences and people you’re meeting in Paris.” Doesn’t know anyone there, writes a little, walks around a lot, studies French at the Alliance Francaise every morning but gets to meet no one in his classes — Bulgarians, South Americans, Israelis, who only want to be with one another, and Africans who only want to meet girls-goes to bars young Americans and Scandinavians hang out in but can never open a conversation and nobody starts one with him. Calls Ricardo a month after he gets there and says he got a letter from Janine “and she said what a great cheap area yours is to live in, so I’m coming out by train to look around and wonder if I could stop by to get advice on what the good blocks are and so on,” which is all a lie: no letter so far and only wants to see where she lived, bed she slept in, guy she slept with, any new paintings of her, just any trace of her, and maybe Ricardo will also introduce him to some people, or give him names and addresses of Americans in Paris, who could become acquaintances or friends. Ricardo’s short — he thought him tall from his self-portrait — muscular, rough looking, talks tough, New York, paint clothes, paint flecks in his hair and on his nose, place smelling of oils, polite, laughs loud, gives him a beer, bisquits, hard salami, the best chair, hovel a mess, parakeet flying in and out of its open cage, two pussycats she took in and left behind, says “She’s a complex creature — we both know that — with no ambition or focus, which I didn’t mind — did you? — since it meant she was always here for me when I was hungry or horny or hungover or boorishly talkative or things like that — but which other men might not like, her always waiting on or for them, and she hated. That the case, she should’ve stuck in acting; she could’ve made a potful and name at it with her magnetism and face — the eternal childknockout — and she was superb at it I heard. Anyhow, years of my shit, she wanted someone gentler, quieter, she said, and who’d ultimately want to marry and give her little snotnoses and help her raise them, and I guess I fooled around on the side a little too much too, even giving her crabs once, but put that burning lotion on you and you get rid of them quickly enough, and she knew that part of me from the start but it all must’ve built up. She’s something though, right? — great cook, great in the sack, intuitive and ethereal and bright as they make them and with that right zing of cheer and throaty voice that gobbles you up — no wonder men at bars punched one another out and in every language just to have the privilege of buying the next bottle of mineral water for her.” No new paintings of her since for a year now he’s only been doing old or decrepit nudes and mad people and idiots of both sexes when he isn’t doing imaginary cityscapes. Wants to take Howard to a bar where she used to play darts and pinball and write poetry but he pretends to have a stomachache, “I think something to do with the water at my hotel which the