of sex and jealousy and spite and wishing the worst kind of pain and slow death on someone who is close.'
'Tell me.'
'I won't tell you. Not even you. Least of all you.'
'I want you to tell me.'
'I won't unless you make me,' she said
Amy had a danceaway manner at times. She had a ritual thing she did, a reflex, not coy but wary and foxy, pulling away from me the more she showed a need, dancing away, eyes bright, her shoulder rounding against my approach. She could be skittish even in the midst of the act, close to pretending we weren't doing this but something else entirely, I don't know, holding hands in a school corridor maybe, and sometimes she turned me down flat, saying, No you can't, or, No I won't, even as we sprawled on the seat screwing.
I thought our faces might flare up and disappear the night in mid-June when we climbed the narrow stepped streets of Bisbee, Arizona, shocked by love, sort of self-erased, after a beer and a sandwich in a dark bar filled with copper miners and their heartworm dogs. I didn't know it was possible to feel a thing like this, and then to feel it together, our heads half blown away and our minds emptied out, lost to everything but love.
She said, 'I know what you do.
'When do you sleep?'
'
'Drive the car.'
'No but did it ever occur to me?'
'Don't look at me when you drive.'
'No but did it ever occur to me that I would know a man someday who tries to follow me into the bathroom?'
'Drive the car.'
She said, 'You wanted to crowd into the gas station toilet with me. I just remembered. I almost forgot. Because you thought you might miss something.'
And once we were passing through Bakersfield, California and the car overheated and we stopped for water at a trailer camp and this was something I absolutely did not know about. All these rows of trailer homes with people cooking hot dogs in a hundred and seven heat. A woman in a bathing suit ironing clothes on an ironing board outside her trailer with small kids riding tricycles in their underwear. And this was a thing I did not know existed, absolutely, or could ever conceive, a thing I had completely missed, people living permanently in trailers, and Amy called me a foreigner from New York.
I was going to Palo Alto, a textbook editor, fledgling, with an outfit determined to change the nature of the classroom, make it open, fluid, casual and Califomian, and she was heading up to Seattle or Portland, she wasn't sure which, or back across to Denver with a master's in earth science and a number of professional connections she wasn't letting on to.
'I don't know what I'm doing here with you. I don't know anything about you. All this time and all this talk and I don't know anything about you, basically,' she said, 'except for the fact that you know how to make me mad.'
'Good. It's good for you. Getting mad cleans the blood,' I told her. 'According to my Irish mother.'
'You have a mother. This is encouraging.'
'Get mad. Be mad,' I told her.
I didn't want her looking at me while she drove but sometimes I looked at her and invited a look back.
'I want everything that happens to happen to both of us,' she said.
'So do I,' I said, and meant it, at the time, truly.
She felt the weight of the gaze and looked across at me on the empty road with a mountain of lavender tailings rising above the old sheds that marked a mineworks and it was a look so intimate and reaching, so deep in things we'd done that it became a crazy kind of dare, a form of drag-strip chicken-which one of us would break the lovers' gaze and look away first to see if the car had wandered into the eastbound lane, with a shiny-eye pickup approaching, half a second from dazzling death.
'Who's strange?' I said.
'You stay awake and watch me when I sleep. I know you do. I feel it in my sleep.'
'I'm strange or you're strange?'
'You followed me into a ladies' room.'
'No, wait wait wait wait. You can feel me watching you while you sleep and you think I'm strange? Who's strange?' I said.
And there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you.
Or, 'You can't make me do this,' she'd say, running her hand up the seam of my fly, and I'm trying to drive the car.
And once when I was alone for a day and a night, not playing the radio or reading the newspaper and driving around aimlessly for hours, I finally stopped and parked and took a walk in a picnic grounds where there were white-barked trees and garbage cans for food scraps and a man who looked disturbed sitting on a bench, outside Fresno somewhere, but maybe he was only deep in thought, or worried about something, and I felt a sadness I could not exactly locate, a feeling that could have been mine or could have been theirs, the little families with food on paper plates, the unhappy man slouched on the bench, the place itself, the bench itself, the trash cans that didn't have lids.
I bought a postcard to send her after she went her way and I went mine, a card that showed a picnic table in the trees, and I slipped it in a book inside my bag until I had time to figure out what kind of message I would write.
4
The first man stood by the window of his stately suite at the Waldorf. He watched the yellow cabs sink into soulful dusk, that particular spendthrift light that falls dyingly on Park Avenue in the hour before people take leave of the office and become husbands and wives again, or whatever people become in whatever murmurous words when evenings grow swift and whispered.
The second man sat on the sofa, legs crossed, looking at Bureau reports.
Edgar said, 'Of course you packed the masks.'
The second man nodded yes, a gesture that went unseen.
'Junior, the masks.'
'We have them, yes. I'm looking at a security memo that's a little, actually, rankling.'
'I don't want to hear it. File it somewhere. I feel too good.'
'Protest. Outside the Plaza tonight.'
'What is it the bastards are protesting? Pray tell,' Edgar said in a tone he'd perfected through the years, a tight amusement etched in eleven kinds of irony.
'The war, it seems.'
'The war.'
'Yes, that,' the second man said.
They were staying at the Waldorf, which was J. Edgar Hoover's hotel of choice during his sojourns in New York, but the party was taking place, the ball, the fete, the social event of the season, the decade, the half century no doubt-the ball was in the ballroom at the Plaza.
Edgar changed the subject, if only in his mind. He gazed far up Park, where the earth curved toward Harlem. Maybe the deep and fleeting light was making him nostalgic, or the noise perhaps, the muted clamor of taxi horns below, a sound at this protected distance that was oddly and humanly happy, little toots and beeps that seemed to
