CHAPTER SIX

There are times when it is impossible to tell a story blow by blow. Sometimes several things are happening over the same period; and sometimes these same things are not so much happening as evolving, each of them the cause of the others in certain ways, each of them the others’ effect, as well. Spring Break was a descent into a valley of swirling mists, where landmarks seemed to change shape or position—or simply vanish—by the moment. For this golden hour, Celine and Meg and I were eating in a public place as merrily as three sailors on leave in Paradise. For that gray hour, I found myself walking with Celine’s hand in mine and yet unable to follow her gaze or understand her lengthy silences. For a black hour without name or number in the dead of night, I sat wide awake in my bed at home after bolting, cold with sweat, out of a dream, wondering if I would ever see Celine again, yearning to race instantly over to her apartment. Who could be surprised that we were both topsy-turvy? Meg was a blessing to us… but my mother had laid her unspoken curse upon our union. We had finally broken somewhat free of malignant parental influences… but what other friends or relatives did we have in the world? I understood Celine’s past infinitely better after Mona had filled me in, and I had helped Celine to see the pitiful delusion behind my mother’s animosity… but what chance had we of ever bringing peace where so much frustration had festered for so long? We had perhaps learned too much too quickly. It was paralyzing, terrifying, oppressive, and… and something else, something we certainly didn’t expect and something no theorist of the human mind has ever touched on, as far as I know.

We were aroused, physically. We began to want each other as never before—to want to possess and be possessed by each other’s bodies. In the afterglow of Meg’s angelic descent into our complicated lives, we restrained ourselves; but later, on Monday or Tuesday evening, our golden threesome now a star abandoned in another hemisphere, the two of us began to grow intense. We groped and wrestled, and our hands traveled everywhere. Celine had often been a somewhat uneven collaborator in our kisses: she would sometimes seek me out and draw me in, but she would more commonly just throw her head back and offer her lips to me. Now she searched as she surrendered and took as she gave. She was on fire, and she set me on fire. We both struggled like pearl divers at the bottom of the sea, mere seconds away from blackout, our eyes three-quarters closed and useless in the murk, our fingers ransacking shadows for the prize. And when we came back up for air at last, there was no joy in our hearts, but exhaustion and an indescribable sweet sadness.

This will all strike any citizen of the contemporary world as comic, and I won’t deny that it has that dimension when viewed at a distance. Parental rejection as an aphrodisiac: what a delicious irony, and what a biblically ancient one! But ancient as it is, it remains, as I’ve said, undiscussed with any seriousness as part of today’s great social crisis. At least, I myself would never have suspected how my parents’ spurning of my fiancée could end up whetting my appetite for her. As long as I could see Celine and me harmoniously following the pattern of my mom and dad, I regarded her with that quasi-mystical reverence that I’ve already described. We no more needed sex education or sexual exploration than generations of ancestors before us: they had always found out how to keep the line alive, and we would, too, once formally admitted into their ranks. The continuity of history made sexual rebellion, above all else, ugly. We were waiting (or I was waiting) for absorption into the beauty of marriage as a natural cycle, a music of the spheres. We would unite in a fertile explosion perfectly on cue as long as the rhythm was observed on all sides.

But this era had banished rhythm. Even my immovably wedded parents had failed miserably to recognize the importance of physical chemistry to spiritual union. They seemed to think (or my mother seemed to think, with Dad pleading no contest) that I could be reasoned out of my present attachment and persuaded to hold out for more money, better social connections. In an atmosphere like this, sex has always run wild outside marital bonds. Celine, of course, had even less cause than I to hear any mystical harmony descending through the ages. Her parents’ marriage had labored almost from the start, as I learned from Mona by the end of the week, and I had known for some while that she felt herself excluded from her mother’s second marriage. The institution was anything but a picture of permanence to her: it was, on the contrary, the kiss of death to loving ties. Had she sometimes held back ever so slightly, so subconsciously, from my kisses because she felt them drawing her up to some kind of pedestal rather than down to instant gratification? That gratification would have brought the death of desire, true… but it would have been an honest, straightforward death, and seldom (she could hope) a permanent one. Desire could always revive. The fall from the pedestal, however, would be far and catastrophic. The pieces would never fit back together again. Much as she wanted a family and stability, she had a fear of marriage which very much resembled a fear of heights.

And so she caught fire as she felt me heating up, and I caught fire, in return. This, I realized, was the kind of love she had known with men before—especially with Richard, that other Richard. I knew it would end up drawing her back into the fatal cycle of fleeting joys and ultimate disillusion—not that I would ever have wearied of her. But I could sense that I myself was being drawn into a ride down the maelstrom whose circles were ever narrower, and I was not quite vain enough to believe that I might not end up bearing the other Richard’s image in some way that I could neither foresee nor—once it overtook me—deny. The mere appearance that I, too, was mining her sweet body for all the pleasures I could wring from it might cause Celine to supply the rest of the similarity from her imagination. She was good at doing that. Over the years, I have often noticed that neurosis is, from a certain perspective, an overdeveloped inclination to find pattern. The paranoid is a highly creative person in the reverse of what we consider an artistic sense. Rather than finding rich diversity where the rest of us perceive only humdrum routine, he or she finds the same old thing where the rest of us see confusing variety. I was falling into the wrong pattern—the one that Celine knew all too well, not the one bequeathed by centuries of civilization which our era had all but forgotten. Even if I hadn’t the equipment then to assess the dangers as soberly as I do now, I knew better, all the same. Why did I get so close to the edge?

People will say, "Well, you were young. The hormones were running high!" But that kind of explanation is even more obtuse than it is crude. Sex is a less basic motive force than anger or fear, in my opinion. Men can be so consumed by rage or terror that they forget all about sex for days or weeks or months. I’ve seen it happen. At the same time, anger and fear produce certain physiological effects—accelerated heartbeat, raised blood pressure, muscular contractions—which sex can magically relax. Men borne away by battle fury sometimes rape their way through a country village after wiping out its military defenses. Men on the fearful eve of a great battle often fling themselves into the arms of prostitutes. My parents had delivered Celine and me to just these emotions. Anger dominated in my case. I was fearful of losing Celine, all right, to another severe depression… but I was absolutely furious with my mother, and little less so with my dad. Naturally, they had adopted the tried-and-true "see no evil, hear no evil" posture throughout that week. What else would they have done (speaking of neurotic submission to pattern)? The days of my break ticked away, one by one—and never another word on the subject of Celine! If a judge had sentenced me to community service for being drunk and disorderly, and I had wandered to the supper table each night fresh from my garbage-picking duties, the wall of silence could not have been more complete. It made me furious. After Tuesday, I simply ceased trying to eat in their midst. I would stop by the grocery store, show up on Celine’s doorstep with a brown bag of TV dinners, and sit down in an atmosphere where I could actually swallow. But I also brought over all that nervous tension. We broke a couple of plates once when I attacked her at the sink.

On her side, Celine was quivering like a leaf beneath those distracted gazes and numbed silences because (as I can say now, after having seen the whole cycle dozens of times) she was frightened half to death. She was sleeping poorly again—I could see the weariness in her drooping lids, in her contracted lips, in the constant pallor of her cheeks. The lethal idea had taken hold of her that we would never be married, never have a home together—that she would only ruin the home I already had with my parents. Despite all my assurances, she couldn’t believe that she was enough to compensate me for that loss. She could tell that I thought she would be… but that only turned up the tension several more notches. What if I sacrificed everything for her, and then discovered—too late to redeem any of it—that she wasn’t all I had expected? And how could she be all that I expected? She had never been sufficient to hold anyone’s interest before—not her father’s, not her mother’s, not that miserable swine whose name I had "inherited". If Mona had not held her captive by means of a paycheck, she perhaps would even have found a way to back out of her "surrogate mother’s" life. Back out… yes, she was backing up, backing out. Not looking where she was going, just shrinking away from where (as she was convinced) she could not go. But she was also putting up the best fight she could, because she wanted all those things—me, a home, a family, Meg visiting her, Mona cajoling her. Hence the fear. While she fought, she feared, because you only fight while there is something worth winning, and you only fear while there is still something to lose. Eventually, though, fear itself can betray you to the enemy. Lack of sleep and lack of reinforcements wear you down, and you end up slitting your own throat before the enemy is even over the wall. Despair. Despair releases you from fear by releasing you from life. If the fear grows powerful enough, it renders despair overpowering. That’s what Celine was fighting: her fear of fear—her fear of when the fear would be too great to resist. My poor Celine!

And that’s how a young woman who has been discarded in sexual relationships before flings herself right back into the sexual whirlwind. Fear. The sex is a release from the fear, even though, in some subtle but inexorable manner, it is also a path to the fear’s most dreaded nightmare. Looking back, I can recognize in those feverish kisses and caresses (I still remember them well) the struggle of electrified nerves to be rid of fear, if only for a moment. So I fought to suffocate my anger, and Celine toiled to slip loose from her fear, and the two of us ended up pushing our bodies to the very edge of consummation.

I have referred to "the edge" twice now. No, I never actually went over it during that week. What an incredible admission that seems to me now—no legendary medieval knight ever scored a greater victory over a fire-breathing dragon! How did I do it? Youthful idealism, I suppose (aided, of course, by complete inexperience). For besides not wanting Celine ever to believe that I was just using her for pleasure—that it was all "just sex" to me—I also felt the restraint of what I can only call religious scruples. Anyone alert to such matters will have noticed that I seldom spent my Sunday mornings in church. A "born again" movement was sweeping over the land at that time as the heyday of televangelism was dawning, but young men of my stripe were not very attracted to it. I had briefly flirted with a "charismatic" group as an undergraduate, as a matter of fact (praying my guts out, I recall, over that ice queen whose ire I roused with my roses). It was a wholly profitless debauch of humiliating my intelligence which ended, when all my prayers failed, in my frantically concluding that God hated me. I quickly pulled myself together. I needed to believe with my mind, as I soon figured out, and the services of those days were moving in the opposite direction. All the same, I retained a very firm belief in certain things (by the grace of God). More than anything on earth, I wanted my union with Celine to be holy. I wanted it to take place under a veil of mystery and sacrifice, where my anger and her fear would both be infinitely subordinated to that perfect being into whom we had vowed to grow for the rest of our natural lives. If all that doesn’t sound like a belief of the mind, it’s because the intellectual has been so debased by the carnal in our time; for what could be more logical, really, than the insistence on an end beyond logic? Without that end, all must die. The greatest love must die in sexual fatigue, and the greatest devotion must die in mounting boredom. I didn’t want Celine and me, as a couple—as a spiritual unit—to die. I strangled my appetite at the last instant to give us a chance at eternity.

I know those are pretty black-and-white terms; and I have learned, of course, that reducing spiritual struggles to such terms, even with the best of intentions, can often lead to diabolical arrogance. It would reflect very unflatteringly upon my mature faith if I were now to say that I think people go to heaven or hell on the basis of whether they do or do not perform some specific act or say some specific oath. But for a young man in his twenties, surrounded by peers who hadn’t the least respect whatever for any kind of restraint, such rigor, I think, is a testimony to high character. I salute that young man. He had kept his mind in control of his passions, but he had also elevated over his understanding a purpose which can never be fully understood. I haven’t seen that a lot—not in any of my decades on earth.

If it’s comic relief you want, you would have found it in my anguish then. There were times when my strangled appetite very nearly strangled me, in return. I remember rolling off Celine’s sofa on one occasion and pounding her carpet. Sex education, indeed! What I needed was about ten consecutive cold showers. On another occasion, I needed the shower less than the washing machine: I made a royal mess of my undergarment. I won’t dispute anyone’s right to smile at such adventures. I’m smiling right now myself.

I only ask for the concession that such ribald little comedies as these can conceal great tragedies at work. For what I couldn’t feel as I flailed about in the quicksand of my own feelings was Celine’s response. Perhaps it’s foolish to expect a young man to go beyond self-absorption in matters like these… but I often wonder if I should have thought more about Celine’s new sense of eagerness, and even urgency. "It’s all right," she would whisper in my ear at crucial moments. "You can go ahead, if you want." A single Rish-aard appended to that whisper would have brought me on… but she seemed to want me to make the last move. And when I didn’t… why did I not ever look up from my folded arms, my clenched fists, to see how she was taking my retreat? All I can remember is—when I finally did lift my eyes to hers—the sadness. As I reconstruct that response now, I see it, not as sensual frustration over a stimulus removed before maximum effect—that would be the "what women really want" claptrap of a Don Juan or a Stendhal. No, I see fear. Every time I refused to bring our union to a climax and scored one of those spiritual triumphs, Celine felt, far more than a wilting of the flesh, a trembling of the spirit. She felt my triumphs, and they terrified her. Even when faced with my parents’ rejection of her and with the uphill battle of creating a household out of pocket change, I continued to resist the plunge with her into the sweet, dark, forgiving, forgetting shadows. I continued to insist that she join me atop that pedestal. Women talked a lot about pedestals back then, always in voices ringing with indignation. In them, too, though—in all of them—it was fear. Fear of the spirit, of high places, of the infinite. They wanted to find themselves rather than to lose themselves… but they didn’t stop to consider that the self they would thus find would have to be something capable of being fully found: the flesh, the finite, the mortal. What a flight to the finite it all was back then! Even the "born agains" with their "I found it!" bumper-stickers… what, after all, could they so confidently have found? For the only thing worth finding is how to lose yourself—how to find that part of you in which you fully become a mere part, or that merely visible reflection of an inconceivable whole. How terrifying. Better to find the limits—to feel them, caress them, and fold them around oneself like a winding sheet. My poor Celine.

I wonder how many people will consider my portrait of Celine completely self-contradictory when I write down that she took me to church on my last Sunday? Actually, the suggestion that we might go to any church of her choice had come from me on Saturday. I suppose I was exhausted by our struggle against drowning all our sorrows in sensual intoxication. Even if we should haggardly emerge from that struggle in a few more hours without having cheated our wedding night, our final kiss safely exchanged at my car door, I suppose I knew that something critical had slipped from our kisses as they heated up. I suppose I thought church might be a way of refocusing, before we had no more time to refocus. After all, we would be married in a church, wouldn’t we? Did that mean nothing whatever? If it meant something, then why not pay our respects to the something on the last day when I would be in town?

So I offered to go with her—just to make the offer, not expecting much of a response. To my surprise, Celine wanted to go to early Mass. We could go before breakfast, she said, and then she would feed me at her place. The cathedral would seem almost empty then, she said (she had the Catholic church downtown in mind): the kneeling boards would be cold and hard, the liturgy’s words would dissolve over the empty pews, the chalice and the platter would distantly clink, and the freshly risen sunbeams would spin horizontally through the stained glass. I am not really embellishing her words, or not much; and these were indeed words of anticipation—perhaps a kind of vision, perhaps a distillation of many lonely hours in that cathedral—because they scarcely described the scene that awaited us. (The morning was overcast, and, thanks probably to Easter’s proximity, the pews were about a third filled even at eight o’clock.) I already knew that Celine had a delicate eye for beauty, but I had never before noticed this seamless fusion of taste and spirituality. There was a poet in her, and perhaps a mystic—and, just maybe, a true believer. I felt ashamed that I had assumed these doors of her life to be closed; and I also felt delighted to be so thoroughly put to shame. For the first time since I had introduced her to Meg a week earlier, I found reason to start hoping again.

My parents took for granted that I had slipped away so early on Sunday morning to bid my china doll an infatuated farewell. Naturally, my final departure for the big city would be launched from the warm nest where I had been raised. Naturally. I didn’t disabuse them. After finishing breakfast at Celine’s, I came back home for a few hours to pack my things and say my good-byes. I had never properly sat down and talked with Roger about his major, and I begged him to give me a rain-check until the summer—or else to write me a letter. I felt pretty disgusted with myself as I patted him on the shoulder: it was the one moment I passed at home that week when I really did feel guilt. But Meg brightened us up, and we all three chattered a bunch of nonsense while I stuffed my car’s trunk, then determined that I needed to lighten the load. After all, I was supposed to be clearing out of my apartment at the end of May. I shouldn’t be hauling records and headphones across the state just to bring them back in two months crammed beside a lot of other junk. (But I ended up taking the records: I decided to sell them on the sly for my "grub stake".)

Dad wandered out as we were trimming the fat off my cargo. He overheard the talk about vacating my apartment, which he silently digested for a while. (It was the kind of decision I had always reached with his help before: I’m sure that fact occupied some of his thoughts.) Then he began to question me, without a trace of antagonism, about my degree work and summer plans. Yes, I said, my Master’s degree was well in hand. I would have completed the required courses by the end of this semester. My thesis would surely be finished by September as long as I could get all the books I needed on library loan. I explained that our local branch in the university system would honor my student card and give me certain privileges.

"So you’ll be moving back in at the beginning of June?" he murmured, watching Meg and Roger drift back into the house. "It’ll be nice to have you home."

No it won’t, I corrected him in my mind, but thanks for the courteous gesture. "As a matter of fact," I said, "there’s a chance I may be moving into one of the dormitories down there on McClain. I’ve applied for a job as a house steward, I think they call it."

"Riding herd on freshmen," he laughed gently, "is that the sort of thing?"

I contributed a smile to his laugh. "Yeah, that sort of thing. It doesn’t pay much, but… every cent counts, and I’ll be close to the library." And close to Celine’s place of employ—but I was now beyond inserting her name into conversations wherever possible. What was the point? "Trouble is, there’s not really an opening right now, and they don’t expect a lot of summer students. I won’t know anything definite until after registration. The one thing I’ve got going for me is my qualifications to do some formal counseling. They said there might be a position where I would be… well, mentoring a lot of the underclassmen. ‘Mentor’ is the big word right now."

"You’ll be a good one."

"I don’t know. I’ve done a lousy job of mentoring Roger this past week. He’s been trying to talk to me the whole…."

And then something came over me. I guess I realized that we were right back in the thick of it—Celine, my afternoons and nights away from the family, all the bad blood simmering away under our roof. Roger had been a casualty of the tension, and I was sure my dad could understand that. Perhaps he had also just glimpsed the unflattering truth that my having neglected Roger was about the only thing caught up in those events which caused me any remorse. If my implied lack of repentance irritated him, however, it didn’t show.

"It’s good that you can help Roger. College has changed a lot since I went on the GI Bill. Everything’s changed. I can’t believe they have some of these majors… and who am I to tell him what to do? I have no idea what’s going to make him a living in this crazy new world."

"Well, it would be easy as pie to help him if I got on that campus in some official capacity and could figure out just what they’re trying to do."

"You really want to work there? I mean, not as a… steward, but… eventually, as something a little more respectable?"

"Right now, I’d be happy with house steward, and even that looks like a long shot."

Dad raised his index finger dramatically, then smacked it three times on the firm bridge of his nose. "Don’t be so sure." I was to remember that gesture several months later, and in circumstances where I allowed Dad’s generous attempt at a peace offering to be overshadowed by my personal sense of humiliation.

I arrived back at Celine’s a little after noon. We went for a walk in the park—that same park where I had hugged her tight to chase away the cold a few nights before Christmas. Now my sleeves were rolled up, and she was wearing slacks and a peach blouse with flounces around the cuffs. I always felt proud—so proud—to be seen with her in public. In the back of my mind, the thought would replay itself incessantly: "Who would ever have believed that a guy like me would be holding hands with a girl like this?" Even under all the recent pressures which had beset us, I was never too far from feeling like the class egghead who gets a date with the homecoming queen. Even with all of our excessive familiarities on her sofa (as the Old Guard still considered them—as I considered them in my calmer moments), that schoolboy wonder of her person never completely left me. Simply to bend my fingers around hers never stopped being magic.

She made me a sandwich later, and then I lay down on her sofa for a rest. Finally, at about four, she walked me down the stairs to my car. We had said little enough during our stroll in the park: now we said nothing. Why did we hold each other so long—was it just because we loved each other so much? Could it not also have been, perhaps, because we both had felt Celine’s spirits sagging and both dreaded a six weeks’ separation which probably concealed a fearful trough just around the bend?

"Come with me," I said, pushing my lips from her temple into her hair. "I’ll help you get some things. We’ll just toss them in the back seat. You can call Mona and explain—she’ll understand. Get your birth certificate. Tomorrow we’ll go down to the courthouse after my classes. We’ll get a marriage license. Come with me and let’s get married."

"We don’t even have the rings yet," she laughed into my shirt. "We can’t afford them."

"I’ll sell something," I said. "Anyway, you don’t need a ring at the courthouse, do you? And anyway… you’ve already given me a ring."

"Did you ever figure out who Joe D is?" she laughed a little higher up, her nose nudging my chin.

"With Mona’s help. It took me a while."

"I knew you wouldn’t know! It’s not in any of your books! I’ll tell you all about it some time."

And then she hugged me tighter than ever. I understood. It wasn’t that we physically could not do just what I had proposed. It wasn’t even that our hearts weren’t in it—on the contrary. But though our bodies were still in the same objective space, our spirits had already embraced solitude. Perhaps if I had made that very suggestion in those very words as we walked in the park… but now the tide had gone out on our resolution, and even the park was probably too late. Obstacles which would have been easily surmountable with a little energy soared invincibly over us in the growing shadows. Mona could hardly grant Celine a two-month holiday out of the blue, staunch friend though she was… and what would Celine do, if not work for Mona? Get another job in the capital as I finished my semester? But I was supposed to come back here for the summer: I had already applied for several jobs. How would we pay our joint expenses with neither of us working and our "household" without roots in either of the cities which held our light baggage? Impossible to elope? No, of course not. Yet we both knew that we couldn’t go through with it. We were too shaky, too emotionally raw, to generate such sudden bursts of determination. Even if some sinister axe were descending upon us (and I secretly regretted mentioning her father’s ring, which had signaled our last decline into the pit), we lacked the vigor to raise a hand. All we could do was hold on to each other, as tightly and for as long as we could. And, at last, we had to surrender our holds, as well.

Of course, my misgivings were not immediately justified. I didn’t expect them to be. I had already learned that Celine’s descents could be very gradual. At the same time, I took heart in recalling how well things had gone over the first part of the semester. (Or, maybe, I just allowed myself to latch on to a shallow reason for optimism: being worried all the time doesn’t help you do your work, even when the worries are well founded.) Perhaps separation was just the thing, I told myself. Now we could go back to writing letters and talking twice a week over the phone. We had shared a lot of secrets and nourished a lot of hopes by that method while tuning down the tension almost to nothing. What had succeeded for us once could succeed again… why not?

In fact, our twice-weekly phone conversations seemed warmer than ever. Celine would now chatter on and on until I had to remind her, laughing with every word, that we would run out of dimes this way. I really don’t recall if I let myself have any suspicions at all of this new effusiveness. Probably not. I was very busy finishing up my course work, and happy answers to questions I couldn’t influence right at the moment, anyway, were just the kind I wanted. In looking back, however, I think I see what was happening. Celine wanted to reassure both me and herself, and the best way to do so was to bubble over when we talked. She could neatly accomplish this by steering the conversation into trivial matters at the office, most often—an area where she might have consumed hours without running out of gossip and where I never had enough knowledge to mount a significant intrusion. Subjects like wedding plans or preferred house designs were not given a sufficient opening to rear their frightful heads. We were somehow just supposed to stay in a holding pattern around those objectives—they’d already been agreed upon, hadn’t they?—while accepting that our higher phone bills proved a greater degree of intimacy than ever.

In the letters, however, such self-deception was hard to hide. Any self-deception is hard to hide, in a letter. When you write an observation down, you take time over it; and when you take time over it, you end up analyzing it, whether you want to or not. If anything penetrated my thick wall of see-no-evil optimism that spring, it was Celine’s letters—hers and mine both. For her part, she wrote less often and not as lengthily. When she did write, she would begin with an apology for not writing, explain tediously (in her telephonic style) what was taking up her time, and then abruptly end with something amounting to: "Oops! I’ve taken up all the time I have by telling you why I have no time!" I stopped pretending early on that I took much pleasure in such wasted space—though, of course, I didn’t rebuke Celine for her sorry effort. How could I? Mine wasn’t much better. I meant to tackle the big questions, all right: to force certain issues like our wedding date or our guest list. But I backed off, every time. I chickened out. I didn’t want to stare a major crisis in the face right at this time, so I kept telling myself that discretion was the better part of valor. If we could just limp and stagger our way to the summer with these feather-weight exchanges, I’d be back home, and I could go head to head with all the problems till I beat them black and blue. Just squeeze out a little more time. At least we were talking and writing, however awkwardly. That was forward motion, wasn’t it?

Well, apparently it wasn’t. Apparently it was backward motion: I wasn’t even holding my own with the truth, since its sudden appearance completely blind-sided me. The first hint I received—or should have received—was the "conference". About three weeks from the semester’s end, Celine told me during our Wednesday evening chat that Mona had booked her on a flight to Chicago later that week, where some sort of conference for small business owners was to take place for the next several days (exact number not specified). Was there ever any conference at all? Probably: Celine had enough details that Mona must have shown her a brochure accompanied by some such remark as, "I wish I could afford to send you to that." But did Celine actually go anywhere? Of course not. Mona would have made the arrangements for such a major trip well in advance, and Celine would have told me about them weeks ago. Besides, conferences never last over Sundays and into the new week—I knew that—yet Celine had implied that she might be gone almost indefinitely to participate in some special seminar. How could I have swallowed such patent nonsense? How? By liking where I was—by not wanting to see the imminent danger. Also by loving Celine "not wisely but too well"—by wanting irresistibly to trust her and wholly surrendering to the exceptional tenderness in her voice. That tenderness in itself should have sounded another warning. Not since Spring Break had Celine talked so haltingly over the phone, offered me so many pauses, and filled them in herself with so many "I love you’s" and "thanks for loving me’s". She was fixing the tones of my voice, the fervor of my words, in her memory. She was signing off.

And, naturally, I had seen it all before. Over Christmas. The trip, real or feigned, which would account for her not being home to pick up the phone; then the quick fade into oblivion, as if I could be so morally callous or intellectually dull as to forget her after one evening of unsuccessful calls. When I failed to draw an answer throughout Sunday afternoon and evening, I guess I was supposed to think that she had indeed stayed over in the Windy City for further tutelage; and, throughout that one evening, I did. I hadn’t the time to think anything else: an important oral presentation in my toughest class was coming up the next day, and I had to get all my ducks in a row. But when I got no answer on Monday night or Tuesday, I finally declared an official end to my stupid, costly tranquillity.

Official? Well, yes, it was almost as though a gavel descended upon me, in a way. It was like the bell which calls a child in from recess, or the alarm clock which announces that a new day on the grind has begun. I suddenly grew very serious—grimly serious. Part of the grimness, the oddest part, was that I felt almost none of the nervous panic I remembered from just after Christmas. This time I knew exactly what was going on: I guess I’d known all along, really. I guess I hadn’t been so much deceiving myself as letting myself catch a little sleep. That week, my nights of sweet dreams ended… not that I burned the midnight oil pacing the floor. On the contrary, I put my time to good use. Especially on Wednesday night, I immersed myself in my work, finishing some papers early and getting as far ahead of every syllabus as I could, since I didn’t know what next week might bring—and since, of course, I had to distract myself from the phone. I was determined not to call. This was Celine’s night to call. Let her call if she dared, if she won some major battle over her conscience or her suffocating self-contempt. I knew damn well she wouldn’t. If I paced a lot that night (and I won’t deny that I did), it was mostly with a book in my hand or to take a short break from the typewriter.

And Thursday… Thursday I did something the like of which I’d never attempted before. I became unscrupulously, aggressively devious: I did some spying. Over Christmas, I had grown so wildly suspicious that I had spent several hours on a bus stop bench behind a newspaper—but that was sheer madness. Now I was downright clever. I schemed. Celine knew perfectly well that I would never call her at work about anything delicate between us. She had actually mentioned that to me at some point before Spring Break—I mean, that it amazed her how I had respected her job obligations during our "break-up" over Christmas and had not called her at the office. It was the only reference she ever made to that week of hell—and it was flooded with more sincere admiration and gratitude, perhaps, than she had ever shown me. I’m sure she was counting on my not invading her "job space" this time, either. She knew that I knew that she couldn’t function at the simplest level if she were afraid to answer her work phone. She knew that I knew that breaking this taboo would submit her to extreme torture—and she knew that I wouldn’t torture her, no matter how much she deserved it.

I had a few friends around campus—not many, not enough that counting them would have required a second hand. But I really only needed one to help me confirm the truth beyond any doubt. Rebecca worked as a secretary in our department. She was quiet, competent, discreet, and wholly unaffiliated with the prevailing lunacy which hummed around her. She just typed and answered phones: it wasn’t part of her job description to liberate the working classes or dazzle the bourgeoisie. She and I had often had brief, ironic conversations about the protracted adolescence of the grad students—and some of their professors—as I checked my mailbox. She was a pretty girl, despite being overweight and wearing rather thick glasses. She had beautiful dark eyes behind the glasses, and her skin was as white as milk. If I had met her a year sooner, and if her being Jewish hadn’t foreshadowed certain problems with my mother, I would have asked her out.

Instead, I asked her to make a phone call for me—a long distance call for which I would pay. It had to be made before lunchtime, I said, but it would consume no more than ten seconds. We would place the call, I would listen for the voice that answered, then I would quickly pass the phone to her and she would sweetly announce that she’d dialed the wrong number. She was entirely cooperative, as I’d known she would be. She told me to come back after ten o’clock, when Dr. Shelton would be out of his office at a meeting. She said not to worry about payment—that wrong numbers were dialed all the time, and that trying to pay for this one would make far more trouble than it would avert. I was convinced.

At 10:05 on Thursday morning, I dialed Images Unlimited back in my hometown. Celine’s voice answered in the perfunctory chirp which she would have used from the guillotine if required to field a call for Mona. I passed the phone to Rebecca, who begged off in an equally professional manner—except that she first uttered a "hello" into the receiver, which would have drawn a second, perhaps more nuanced greeting from Celine. Was that on purpose? I was too embarrassed to tax her with it after she hung up. The look of infinite sympathy which poured upon me through those thick lenses was the first thing that week which had brought me close to breaking down; and, when she said after I’d thanked her and turned to leave, "She has a really nice voice," I couldn’t bear to do any more than nod my head on the way out.

On Thursday evening, I finished my most important paper and threw a few things into my smallest traveling bag. I felt at peace now. It was not a comfortable peace—or no more comfortable than a combat pilot’s who has inspected his plane, assembled his gear, gone over his flight plan, and signed his will. When I finally went to bed that night, I shared the pilot’s deep, dreamless sleep—a sleep without hope, a sleep needed to give the mission the ghost of a chance. I was ready to live or to die: in that respect, it was like Christmas all over again.

I imagine that Celine must have entered an ambiguous peace something like mine. She would have written her "bombshell" letter on Wednesday evening after realizing that I had desisted from calling her She would have inferred… well, who knows what? Probably that I had finally had enough of her, that I was now safely free of her and permanently disgusted with her. Which was just what she wanted—what she needed to achieve her peace of utter hopelessness. Just to nail it down, and to occupy the once sacred hour when we would converse over the phone, she would have written the following letter—which she would have mailed Thursday morning, just in time for me to retrieve it Friday afternoon from my apartment box on the way to my car.

I want you to know first of all that I love you and will always love you more than you can ever know. You will not understand how I can love you after reading this, but I promise you it is the truth. I swear before God that you have meant more to me than anyone I have ever known. I only wish that were more of a compliment. But among the men I have known, especially, you are in a category by yourself, so it doesn’t mean much for me to compare you to them. Maybe they have all made me the way I am—my mother first and foremost, and then all the others, men and women, except for Mona. Maybe that’s why I just cannot reach you way up high where you are, and why you cannot imagine me way down low where I am, where I really am. Richard, because you are so honest and decent, you cannot imagine what dangers might lurk for you in a life with someone like me. You have always thought the best of me, and I am deeply grateful to you for that. But I just cannot live up to that best. In the end, you would be bound to be deeply disappointed in me, and I know I couldn’t bear that. The pressure of knowing how high you rate me and how much respect you give me is making me unravel, darling. It keeps me awake at night and takes my appetite away. It terrifies me sometimes until I start to shake all over. I’m a nervous wreck, all because I can’t stand the thought of failing you—and knowing that I will. I am already failing you just by writing this letter. I know how you will read it, how it will hurt you, and I hate myself for writing it. But it is better to save you from me, darling, before I hurt you more deeply. It is my prayer that you will see that someday.

Dearest Richard, could it be that I actually love you more than you love me? I love you the way you are, and you love me the way you picture me in your mind, a bright little wife making you a happy home. But I would make your home a living hell with my dark spells and these moods that I can’t shake off. I wonder how I would even raise a child? What a terrible mother I would be! And you would not have your own mother to turn to because I would have driven her from you. Richard, my darling, someday you will understand how much better it is this way. Please understand, Richard, and try not to hate a pitiful girl who loves you a thousand times more than herself.

 

I read this letter virtually without emotion as I sat behind the wheel, my traveling bag in the passenger seat. It was just what I’d expected, once I had allowed myself to expect the worst, the obvious. I reinserted it into the envelope—how elegant was the handwritten address, yet how apologetically pinched together!—and I started the car.

As I slipped on my glasses, fitted shades to them, and fought the lowering sun to reach the traffic’s mainstream, I nonetheless felt something begin to fester in me. It was that claim about my expecting her to be something she wasn’t. Damn it! Every robber and murderer in prison might as well plead that he was being unfairly punished for fulfilling his God-given nature rather than society’s expectations! Did she think that I found it easy to scrap and save, to battle with my family, to plan a future while trying to earn an advanced degree, to postpone our marriage rites until our marriage night? Did she think that I enjoyed all this—that it was just how I was made, that my idea of a good time before I met her was hitting my head with a hammer? I was expecting one hell of a lot from myself, too—couldn’t she see that? What was I supposed to have done over Spring Break that I didn’t do? Show up at her place with an armload of six-packs and some weed, strip her clothes off, and come up for air at the end of the week? Would that be putting the bar low enough? My grad school peers had all chosen about that level of difficulty: was that what she expected out of me? No goals to shoot for, no ideals to live up to, no expectations, no pressure, no strain. No hope. As easy as pie… no problem.

Of course, at the red-hot core of this emotional lava flow was my argument with Mom about her squeezing me into a certain image. Celine’s letter had unwittingly accused me of treating her as I had accused my mother of treating me. That stung me to the quick, even though Celine couldn’t possibly have known that she was framing a charge of hypocrisy. (I had never given her any of the details about the blow-up with my mother in March.) The charge had just a grain of truth in it, perhaps—and no false accusation is more searing than the one that isn’t one hundred percent false. I was my mother’s son, and I went through life carrying high expectations. I knew it wasn’t the same thing with the two of us: I knew Mom expected success, prosperity, comfort, even glory—whereas I expected fairness, honesty, and other things that would often sabotage what my mother most admired. Still… there was a certain rhetorical sameness. And it ate and ate at me, all the long drive home.

I had tried to time my arrival at Celine’s apartment for a few minutes before five. That way I could see her come home from work and overtake her just as she was reaching her door. I was too late. A wreck had backed up traffic, and I turned into the parking lot well after 5:30. Celine’s car was already parked in its space. I found an empty space from which I could study her window. She might only just have walked in: I didn’t want to be stuck at her unresponsive door because she was in the bathroom and couldn’t hear me. In fact, I decided that the best course was to wait until it grew pitch dark (still about an hour away), when I would surely see a faint haze of light showing through her drapes. I wanted not only to be absolutely certain that she was inside (and where else could she be with her car right in front of me?), but also that she would know her presence was apparent to anyone who came calling. I didn’t want her to be able to pretend that she wasn’t at home. Whether or not she would have tried such a maneuver, I had no idea. The possibility didn’t seem far-fetched, considering that she had played the same trick several times when the phone was ringing. I had no other fears than this one: it entirely preoccupied me—even (as I caught myself rattling my keys, then thumping the floorboard) consumed me. I had to see her face to face, and if she wouldn’t let me in… what would I do? Break the door down? Wait until morning, or until a security guard chased me off? No, I wanted her knowing that she had given her presence away. Even though she could hardly think I would show up within hours of receiving her letter, I wanted such signs of activity in that apartment as would force her to concede herself spotted once she had spotted me through the drapes. She wouldn’t have the nerve to pretend after that. I knew her too well.

This became one of the most frustrating waits of my life. It seemed even longer than that morning I had spent at the bus stop across from Images Unlimited. Then I had wanted not to be seen, not to speak to her. This time I had no bone to chew on, no dominant thought to mull over. I really had no notion whatever of what I was going to say, if anything. If I could only see her—physically, visually see her and be seen by her… and if I couldn’t, then I could think of no next step. I wasn’t going to my parents. I wasn’t driving two hours back the other way. At what point would some cruising squad car shine a flashlight in my face?

My anxiety rose as darkness fell without being resisted by any light behind the drapes. There were plenty of lights and noises elsewhere: it was Friday night, and most of the tenants were exiting in high spirits. Occasionally, tires squealed on the street in front of the complex, and once I heard a glass bottle shatter to a chorus of male laughter. Celine’s room seemed the only one on her floor which had not betrayed a single sign of life since my arrival. I finally got out of the car and walked across the street to a gas station. I relieved myself there, coaxed some peanut butter and crackers out of a vending machine, and overheard a minute of some serial thriller Roger always watched from a TV by the cash register. It was odd to think of Roger sitting in front of that show not twenty minutes from here, of Meg taking off with her friends and Mom doing the dishes and Dad perhaps classifying old photos while listening to a jazz record, maybe Harry James or Pete Fountain… all of them entirely out of my reach, no less so than if I had been on the dark side of the moon. It was a lonely feeling.

As I crossed back over toward my car, I thought about climbing the stairs and listening at her door. I hesitated, pacing the lawn instead. What could I possibly find out—and what if a neighbor should see me lurking about suspiciously and call the police? What would I tell a cop—would a cop, perhaps, force her to come to the door and vouch for me?

About then, a car turned into my nook of the complex. Its motor purred like a tame cat, and its black silhouette was low. The engine was cut, the headlights died almost instantly, and I heard two doors slam in my temporary blindness. Even before my eyes grew readjusted from the lights, however, I knew that one set of footsteps belonged to Celine. The other was a man’s.

A man. Celine had been out on Friday night with a man. It was the most obvious, most prosaic of explanations, yet I would never have believed it if I had not been standing there in the grass as they clambered up the stairs. My fiancée. As I stood there gaping upward—as the two dark figures partially emerged in the dim light at the top of the stairwell—I did not really register anything that could properly be called belief. I could not have been any less reflective at that moment if I had been a small frog staring wide-eyed from the mulch around the manicured shrubs. If there is a God in heaven, he will bear me witness that I did not even feel any anger, any resentment—not one scintilla. I was overcome with wonder. I did nothing but apply my pupils to the two figures, the two angels on a cloud, the two devils in a pit. Celine was wearing a light coat, probably camel-hair or alpaca, its cinnamon color accenting that thick, compact hair of hers which glinted richly in the light every time the man’s shoulder moved. I paid him little attention. His back was to me—all I noticed was that he kept breaking off my line of sight to Celine. The interruptions were actually rather staccato: they lasted briefly but came often. Perhaps that impression, in all its oddity, was what faintly roused me from my daze. I could comprehend now that Celine was pushing him off, thrusting his hands away from her. I don’t know what was in my mind as my feet started to move beneath me. I have examined my memory under the microscope, and I still do not recall the slightest tinge of anger. Yet some instant of fury might well have exploded if I had turned up the second flight of steps and still found him pawing her. I have heard people describe many such incidents since then. They have no inkling of what’s coming—they feel almost torpid inside: and then, in a white flash whose heat sears away all reason and all memory, they commit acts of mayhem.

Fortunately, the man was just springing off the final stair as I reached the sidewalk. He had shot down in mere seconds, and now he lunged into the darkness so quickly that his shoulder actually rubbed against mine. I didn’t even turn to watch him go, yet I had the strangest sensation of having seen him before. It was the first conscious moment of reflection that had reanimated my mind since the two of them had stepped from his sports car. I know that man!

I got to the top of the stairs somehow—I got to Celine’s door somehow. Perhaps that one reflection which I had lavished upon the dark figure brushing past me had overloaded my numb mind. Now I found myself, as if waking up, right before the bronze digits of Number 31. A light had switched on inside. I could see its luminescence down the central slit in the drapes. I froze for a moment. If I had been in fuller possession of myself, I would perhaps have panicked—but I was already too far gone for a plunge into this abyss to disorient me further. If I had known where I had been for the last hour or two, I would have been horrified now to see that I was nowhere. It was bad enough, just to see my "nowhere" suddenly intensify. No fiancée, no girlfriend, no friend. No common, ordinary decency of the most common, ordinary sort. Just betrayal, just shut doors. Just nullification, the nullity of everything… nothing real but a dirty forty-Watt bulb over my head, a dead cricket on dirty concrete at my foot, and a tacky set of drapes that didn’t fit properly. All else had been a fantasy.

I reached out at the door now less in terror than in a bid for some kind of lifeline. In this corridor-comradeship with decaying insects, I felt that I might throw myself over the rail just any second.

She opened almost at once. My third feeble tap had hardly sounded.

On the drive over, I guess I had expected to create something of a shock at Celine’s door, unlike the time over Christmas when I had materialized in this same spot. We had been less intimate then—half a state hadn’t separated us, either. Now here I was, within forty-eight hours of the weekly call she had refused to make, within six hours of receiving her letter. I shocked her, all right—but it was a delayed shock, a shock whose jolt was bizarrely postponed. She looked right at me through the opening door without batting an eyelash, for a full two seconds. Only then did her lips part speechlessly her fair green eyes widen (seeing them after any lapse of time always made me catch my breath: it did so even now). Two seconds can be an eternity. How could she have peered out into the night, found my face, and studied me almost in weariness for a full two seconds before registering that her dead lover had come to life?

"Richard!"

If someone can be described as fleeing who never turns her back, then Celine fled from me—or cringed, or shrank (for her whole body drew up)—into the apartment. Her evening coat was still on. She had just uncinched the belt which had locked it in a hug around her trim waist. The high collar and epaulette-like straps across the shoulders continued to emphasize the golden-red sheen of her short, thick hair in the lamplight.

I shut the door quietly behind me. Obviously, I must have come in, though I had no consciousness of any movement in my body—of any life, I might say. Even my tongue could not move. I stood there with my collar open, my jacket half-zipped, my hands dangling from my sleeves, just gazing at this woman who held absolute power of life and death over me, for whom I had sacrificed so much, for whom I would sacrifice whatever remained to me and of me in an instant, and who had just barely resisted the embrace of a strange man a few feet from where I now stood, a mere minute before I arrived.

If her shoulders had cringed and her hands were so squeezed together that their bare bones stood out, the clearest sign of Celine’s flight was nevertheless her eyes. I watched them run farther and farther from me, searching the deepest shadows along the most remote walls. Almost imperceptibly, like a flitting ghost, her body gravitated toward the same dark spots. The lamp nestled on the counter/partition between den and kitchen was almost at her back. A single ray of light caught on the finely molded ledge of her lower lip, where I saw no sign of trembling: just the frozen glaze of open-mouthed muteness. At last she came to rest on the far arm of the sofa—the arm where we never sat, thrust far into the room’s most lifeless corner. There she perched herself, leaning her right shoulder into the wall.

I have no idea how long we stayed this way, awkwardly suspended in time and space—for it did indeed seem a complete arrest of time, a balancing act where a kind of nightmarish stasis had been achieved. Nor do I know what finally broke the spell enough to start her talking. If the cue came from me, it was neither any spoken word nor any rustling motion of the body. Can you hear a man staring at his hands—a man who isn’t even breathing, who has to look at some part of himself just to be sure that he still exists?

"I had to let you go," she confided to the wall in a tiny voice utterly drained of tone. "I had to let you go. I got to where… there was no other choice. You told me it would destroy you, if I let you go. You told me that after Christmas. That it would destroy you. Well, I got to the point… the point where I was more sure of destroying you if I held on. More than if I let you go."

You don’t usually remember sighs with crystal clarity, especially after years and years. I can still hear the sigh I gave then—probably the most enormous of my life. Suddenly I couldn’t stand up any longer. I shut my eyes and reeled backward, almost falling into an armchair set against the opposite wall. There I thrust my hands deep into my pockets, as if I were suffering from a chill, and marveled at the lamplight’s sickly yellow color on the carpet. I had never before seen a color that made me feel nauseated. The edge of everything, the boundary line of nothing—the limn of outer darkness—is that shade of yellow.

"You don’t know. You just don’t know. And it would kill me if you did. If we… if I held on to you, you would find out. If you are going to be destroyed by me… at least this way, you won’t find out. The worst thing your mother could think about me… believe me, that would be nothing beside the truth. Even your mother. Even if she would tell you the worst thing she could think… it would be nothing. She… she has the right idea. You need to listen to her. You need to let her have her way. Mothers are always right. Even I was right, maybe, when I…. She’s more right than she will ever know."

The pronouncements of this telegraphic drone must have cost her several minutes to deliver. Yet the silence which followed them was immensely longer. I remember no door slamming anywhere, no footsteps falling anywhere, no car engine growling by in the lot below. I was deaf… but even the deaf can feel the blood pulsing in their own ears. I had no pulse: I had no breath. From somewhere very, very deep within me, I was dredging up that old sensation from last Christmas—that feeling that, null as the possibilities within this small room appeared, there could most certainly be nothing beyond them. This was the antechamber to oblivion. What sense could time have, after all, when all ties to the beyond have been severed? There was no hope or fear for me—no one expecting me, nothing awaiting me—beyond Celine’s front door… so how could I feel any strain of time not used? I believe I could have sat in that chair until I starved without ever noticing daylight come and go at the drapes. I simply sat and watched the old sensation come creaking up from the depths, like some muddy, amorphous terror of the ocean bottom whose sheer dead weight tautens heavy cables almost to the snapping point as its unclean shadow grows and grows. I dredged it up, I reeled it in… or rather, it sucked me down.

From somewhere under those fathoms where no green life lives, I found a word. "Talk," I said gently. "Talk some more."

She tried to, several times. I heard her try rather than watched her try. I heard her draw a breath, hold it to carry forth some few words—a sentence—and then let it go at last, unused. I heard her alpaca coat grind discreetly against the plaster wall. I waited. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing else I could possibly say. Unless she talked some more, the two of us would drown in silence.

"I thought it would be all right. Maybe. After Christmas."

In my mind, I watched the thin filament drift toward me through the soupy murk. It wasn’t a rescue line, but it was a strand. "It was all right," I murmured.

"Yes. It was all right. For a while."

I turned slightly and looked—with my physical eyes—back up the sickly trail of lamplight, as if I might have missed something swimming there or might find something torpidly floating there. Something to knead, to shape, to combine. But I still saw only vacancy, nullity.

She inhaled again, and again the breath escaped without a message—or so I thought. But at the last instant, she caught its tail. "If you hurt yourself… I’ll kill myself."

I received this without moving a muscle. Finally, very slowly, I nodded over it as my eyes infinitesimally seesawed between the yellow mist and darkness. "That… that would be one way."

"No!" I heard her cry. It was the first emotion I had detected in her voice, and it drew the single short syllable out like the groan of a trauma patient whose ruptured organ the doctor has just pressed. In spite of this response, I couldn’t seem to move my eyes, even to blink them. I don’t know if she turned to me or not. I only know that I heard a rustle from her corner.

I thought perhaps she was going to cry, or perhaps to shout or plead. But more minutes went by, more breaths were roughly drawn and roughly exhaled, until again I could hear nothing at all. Even violent motions did not create much of a ripple at these depths.

I was almost a little startled when she started to talk again—I had almost passed into some sort of trance, I think. "It was Spring Break. It was… it wasn’t so much your mother. It was you. It was you… honoring me. Treating me… like I was something I’m not. That was when it really started to hit me. That I couldn’t be that. Not that. What you wanted. Your dreams… they go so high. Someday you’d be sure to wake up. I would wake you up, and you’d ask me… you’d ask me what I did with Celine. With your Celine. But I can’t be your Celine. I never was. You have this image of me, which you honor… but the honor… the honor… the honor was crushing me. It kept keeping me up all night. It wouldn’t let me sleep—"

The last word was never finished: her voice suddenly gave out. Her head thumped the wall audibly, and then was still. I don’t know how she held it down for so long, but at last the moist remnant of a sob fluttered through our renewed silence. I could still not rouse myself to speak, but something was definitely stirring within me now. My eyes widened over it—my physical eyes, turned intently within me. That word "image"… I remembered using it bitterly when arguing with my mother. Of course, every line of Celine’s letter (which we never mentioned a single time that night) came back to me in one hot red flash. All the protests that had seethed in me during my two-hour drive started to simmer once more. My mother’s inhuman image of me… and Celine, all unknowingly, now writing and saying that I was doing the same thing to her—that I was forcing her into an image’s straitjacket! Everything in me began to shout foul. I felt my teeth start to work. Was there no difference, then, between an image which suffocates all the soul’s life out of it to make a nice appearance and an image which calls a soul to fresh new life? From the fingertips, I felt myself starting to tremble.

"You… you’re better off," she concluded, once more dry and toneless. "I could have been… some things for you, if you had let me. Made your meals. Done your shopping, bought you nice things. No one ever buys you nice things, and you would look so good, so handsome, if I could dress you up. Why doesn’t your mother do that? I could do that for you!"

There was a sudden strange warmth in these sentences, which were the longest she had yet pronounced. I actually looked over at her, looked up at her. In fact, I no longer took my eyes off of her. Between the thawing tenderness in her words and the smoldering indignation in my heart, I was able to look at her very directly.

"And share my bed?" I whispered. "As long as we weren’t married, you could share me bed?"

She crumpled against the wall, her gaze following it back into the dark line where it guttered into the rug. "There," she said, once more in a tiny drone. "You see? I’m no good for you. The best that I can offer… it’s so vile to you."

I was bursting to say, The worst that you can offer—that you can dish out to me and yourself—makes me want to fight back, for both of us! But I only trembled a little more. I was going to say something to all this, though. I was going to say something. I felt it slowly rise, so slowly. The voice in which I said it was as hollow and muted as hers. "So that’s the real reason. Because we… never went all the way, you decided that I was… worshiping you."

"Yes."

"And you couldn’t take any more of it."

"No."

"So you… what did you do then?"

"Then?"

"Yes. What did you do then?"

"I…." Her perfect chin suddenly reared from its grave of shadow, and I saw her Adam’s apple work in a thin, supple throat bared from the heavy alpaca collar. "I had to get some sleep."

"So what did you do to get some sleep? How did you get some sleep?"

"I… I still haven’t… I’m still sleepless. This past month, especially this past week…."

"What keeps you awake? Since you already had decided… was it fear of me, of what I would do?"

"Yes. No. It was fear. Again. It was the fear again."

"Fear of what, Celine?"

"That I couldn’t… you know, that I couldn’t keep with the decision." Her "you know" carried a brief turn of the head in my direction which sent a glinting shudder through her rich hair. It also carried a catch in her voice. "I knew I couldn’t have you… but I was afraid you’d come back. Just like this. I was afraid I couldn’t…"

"That I would talk you back into being with me."

"Into being with you. Yes. Into being… honored, adored. And then…"

"And then?"

"And then it would start all over again. The fear. I was afraid of the fear—of it starting up again. When you love me, you put so much… worship into it. And that terrifies me. Because I’m… if you only knew!"

We were going over old ground, digging our heels through the same infinitely slick and shifty mud of the ocean bottom. But her voice was starting to crack frequently now: there were hairline fractures running through every brief sentence she released.

"So… what did you do? You had to sleep."

"I had to sleep."

Within my pockets, I felt my fingers tightening into fists. It was now that those two seconds at the front door reappeared to me—Celine’s look of easy recognition which had dissolved almost at once, but not at once. And I was beginning to see a face on that man who had brushed me in the dark. "Who was that just now who brought you home, Celine?"

"I thought if I closed the circle… if I brought things back to where they were before I met you. That way… if I closed the circle, it would all be over. None of it would ever begin again."

I had risen to my feet. Yet my voice, if anything, was lower and duller than ever. "Who was that, Celine?"

And she looked straight at me then with her beautiful pale eyes—the eyes which ancient Irish poets compared to dewdrops in the rising sun. "I had to go back to how it was. I had to close off all the hope. Hope is the most frightening thing in the universe, Richard."

"Richard." I don’t think my lips even moved. I repeated—stated flatly, for the record, "It was Richard."

Then I started for the door. Don’t ask me why—I haven’t the slightest idea where I intended to go, since anywhere beyond this apartment was annihilation. I guess I intended to accept my annihilation, whatever that means. I don’t know. I can only remember myself unpocketing one hand and gripping the doorknob as you would remember some dramatic gesture from a play or movie. I have to believe that I was about to go out the door.

"Are you leav—"

The word was again unfinished. Her voice had again died on her, this time along the ragged edge of something like a shriek. I looked back at her and found all that wooden composure gone. The mesmerized detachment which had spellbound her for… who knows how many minutes?—that was all gone now without a trace. Her face was a mobile portrait of anguish, a sculpture in jelly. Her eyes had opened as big as screams: even though several strands of hair had slipped down over the left one, I could see its white outline clearly. They glistened, glistened until they throbbed, despite the shadows. But her lower face was yet more distorted. Her chin, her jaw kept quivering in such an intricate chaos of vibrations that her lips had entirely lost their beautiful contours. She seemed at the same instant to be biting them back and about to unleash from them some one last word, or some cry that would never end.

Am I leaving? I thought. Isn’t that what you want? I thought about saying. Instead, I let the knob slide from my fingers and walked over to her. When I stopped, my free hand was within a foot or two of her face, yet I made no effort to lift it and touch her tears. I was far, far above the threshold of understanding that she didn’t know what she wanted, perhaps would never know. I understood fully, too, that I could never want anyone but her, and that if she had determined the Celine I loved to be non-existent, then I wanted nothing, and was dead. I understood that I might well be dead at this very moment, just waiting for the blood to stop. But in the unspeakable calm which that understanding gave to me, a calm which allowed me to stand over Celine without even trying to touch her, I found that I remained curious. I wanted to take one last measurement and see if, just maybe, the two of us were not entirely dead. That was what I wanted, all I wanted. It would perhaps be the last thing I would ever want.

"There’s just one thing. Why? Why did you push him away just now when he tried to come inside?"

"Why?"

"Yes. Why?"

She made no effort to mop away the moisture spilling through her lashes. With her head now feverishly erect, the liquid rounded the ridges of her cheeks in more or less identical curves, washed over the two high, broad summits of her upper lip, then soaked her lower lip until it sparkled. The bath seemed to redefine her face’s wondrous harmony and to lubricate her tongue for what few words she found. One more breath, and she would tell me… what? The last thing I would ever hear from her? The last thing I would ever hear from anyone on earth?

"I… I went to him."

"Yes. You went to him. When was that?"

"That was… I don’t know. Yesterday. It was yesterday. I went during lunch. To his office… his new office. On the fourth floor, at the… downtown. I…"

"You saw him?"

"Yes. No. I saw him, but… he didn’t see me. He was with someone. Someone else. He was with someone else. She was beautiful, and… and she loved him. Or she wanted him, anyway. You could tell. And you could tell she had him. He never even looked my way. When I slipped up to his office, they said he’d stepped out for lunch. I… I said, ‘With his fiancée?’ They laughed, in that way that… people laugh. You know. When someone’s sleeping with someone else. I… I must have given my name when I first walked in. I don’t remember. Either I did or he saw me leave. He called me that night… last night, that would be. But I said no. Then he came around tonight, early tonight. Just after five. I’d just gotten home. I went to the door, and… at first I thought it was you. Just as I thought just now, when you knocked… oh. That was cruel. God, that was cruel!"

"So he took you out."

"Yes. Out to supper. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then we came back, and he wanted to come in. He said he’d missed me. He wanted… you know what he wanted."

"And you, too, Celine. You wanted to close the circle. Richard and Richard around me like two bookends, the beginning mistake and the—the end where you know exactly what’s going to happen. Where you’re left in pieces again, and he steps over them all without getting any on his shoes."

"Yes." There was amazement in the gaze she turned on me, amazement whose intensity started to dry and focus her pupils. "Yes."

"So why? Why didn’t you close the circle?"

"I…." Now she was confused. She shook her head distractedly. "I couldn’t."

"Why not?"

"Because of her."

"The other woman—the woman who had him?"

"Yes. Do you think I wanted to help him do to her what he had done to me?"

"Why not? You don’t owe her anything."

"I… I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to someone else."

"You’re right. You couldn’t, because she had him, and you never had him. You couldn’t have made him do to her what he did to you—"

"No, you’re wrong. I know him. He wouldn’t leave her for me, but… he wouldn’t stay with her. Once I started him off, there’d be others. Even if I just had him one night."

"And you think there won’t be others now?"

"I… I don’t know. But I won’t start him off. She deserves a chance. They both deserve a chance."

"Why? Did you get a chance? Did he give a chance to you? Do you think they deserve anything?"

She was growing agitated. Her right shoulder, rumpling the alpaca coat up around her chin, rolled against the wall, and she reached her feet unsteadily.

"Don’t you deserve a chance at sleep? That’s not asking much, to be able to sleep. Why not just kill off the last ounce of hope…"

"No! No! I… I couldn’t do that to anyone…"

"I’m talking about doing it for yourself. Why not just borrow him for one night?"

"Because he ruined my life! Do you think I want to ruin someone else’s life the same way?"

"Even if it costs you your sleep?"

She looked up at me with a flash of something like indignation. "Even if it costs me my life!"

"But Celine!" I grabbed her wrists just then, my own hands all at once wildly animate, and I shook her back and forth. "You don’t do things like that! You’re no good! You don’t sacrifice yourself for other people! You’re worse than anything I could imagine, or my mother could imagine!" And my hands leapt from her wrists to her shoulders (so thin within the plush coat), and once more I shook her and shook her. "You’re no good! Why would someone like you throw away her only chance to be rid of fear for the sake of a complete stranger—a person whose name she doesn’t even know? You can’t do things like that! That’s beyond honorable—that’s noble! That’s like Christ!"

"No!" she cried, horrified. "No!"

"Why not? Are you afraid? Afraid of all the choices—all the new chances to screw up?"

"I will!" she wailed. "I always do!"

"And you don’t want me, either, because you don’t want to ruin my life, either…"

"No!"

"Because I deserve a chance."

"Yes!"

"So if I take you right now, it’ll ruin your chance to give me a chance…"

"No… yes!"

"If I just take you, just have you all for myself, all of you, right now…."

And I devoured her—her lips, her chin, her cheeks, her eyes. I swept her coat off and flung it across the room in one motion: in the next, I lifted her and lay her on the sofa. I squeezed her into that end where we never used to nestle when we watched TV, the end which thrust itself into the room’s darkest, most doubtful corner. When I saw, as I looked back up from her bared waist, that the lamplight was in her eyes, I peeled off my remaining shoe and backhanded it across the room. The night immediately exploded black around us in a frail tingle of glass; but as I brought her head up on the sofa’s arm, turning it with my chin, I could see the glint of her teeth in the pallor misting through the drapes.

Afterward, we must have slept a while. I remember fishing around in the dark at the sofa’s far end for her quilt. When I returned with it, tucking it up over those thin shoulders as smooth as wet ice (and little less cold), she was awake, or partly so. She said into my ear, "Rish-aard!" I rolled her over onto my chest, thinking we would go back to sleep. It was then that she whispered, "I may not be able to have children. Or not many. The doctor said not to hope for too much. It was… something that happened to me a while back, and… I got hurt, and now…. Well, you kept talking about children, about a big family, and I had a check-up just after your break, and… so I asked."

As I felt her moist warm breath on my neck and felt her fine dense hair on my lips, I watched the whole evening, the whole week, the whole last month reassemble itself in the night above my head. Why couldn’t she just have told me straight out? Why did she have to whisper the most important things into the midnight? I said nothing for a minute, but my palm never stopped running up and down her bare spine. Finally, when I could tell by her breathing that she was clinging to wakefulness for an answer, I put some order in my thoughts.

"I’m sorry, Celine. I’m sorry I put you through that. It doesn’t matter, not in the least. You should have told me…"

"But it does matter! I want children… I want to give you children!"

Another passionate non-sequitur to ease around. "He said… the doctor… that it would be hard. That having a large family would be a long shot. But… so we’ll be grateful for the one or two."

"Yes, but… even that might be hard."

"We’ll really work at it!"

Suddenly I had to have her again. I picked her up in my arms and carried her to her bedroom. When we had made love before, our appetite had been blended from anger and terror—from sleeplessness and raw nerves. This time it was the sheer joy of release—of getting the drawbridge up before the devils on our heels could follow, and watching them whirl and caper furiously below from our turret in the clouds. We loved long and deep, and when it ended at last, sleep had already stretched one wing over us. For me, part of the joy was actually realizing that a doctor’s visit had been behind much of this week’s hell. That was something I could grapple and wrestle down. Its facts could be addressed individually, and its prognosis could be courted with drugs and treatments. After all, our bodies were young and healthy. We had our whole lives ahead of us.

But when I woke up the next morning, Saturday morning, and quietly plumped up my pillow so that I could watch my sweet Celine, my Celine, sleep away… shoulders up, shoulders down, the tips of her upper foreteeth just barely visible, a stray wisp of hairs arching over her upturned nose… I think I began to suspect what hobgoblins lurked in the hard medical facts. We had not raised the drawbridge quite in time, after all. Some of these demons would ride on our shoulders forever, or until a miracle waved them off. Some of them were camped in Celine’s womb. Scar tissue from an abortion… wasn’t that it, how she "got hurt"? This was the very first time I ever actually entertained such a thought about Celine—and it only crossed my mind then because I recollected my best friend in college grieving to me one night over his sister’s virtual sterilization by a bad abortion. Somehow, an abortion would make a lot of pieces fit which had always seemed loose to me before. How could she have gone crazy over the loss of this Richard? Was Richard, then, a man to die for—a lying traitor like him? But to lose a child… and, in losing a child by choice, to discover later that you would lose other children against your choice…. I also recalled at some point, propped against my pillow, that curious unfinished remark last night hidden among Celine’s praise of mothers: how they were always right, how I should listen to mine. What was it she had said? "Even I was right, maybe, when I…"—when she what? When she had an abortion? When, as a would-be mother, she chose to spare her unborn child the misery of having her for a mother?

I brushed the wayward strands of hair off her nose as gently as I could. My mother, of course… Celine was right to think that my mother would stomp her foot and hurl high damnation down upon her if knowledge of the abortion were ever to come out. But me? How could she think I would refuse to forgive her? But how could I forgive her if I must never know?

Or if I told her that I knew and forced my forgiveness upon her, how could I convince her that I wasn’t offering another sacrifice to the flawless image, the Perfect Celine in my heart’s temple? How could I make her accept being forgiven? For that matter, I had nothing to forgive, unless the sons and daughters whom we would never have… and I had already faced that loss by taking her as mine. But how could I ever persuade her to forgive herself? They say that God forgives… what does he do, then, when someone won’t believe herself worthy of his offer?