Little, Big

kitchen) and began straining the liquid through a cloth into an even bigger cauldron set in the tub. “It’s not touching, y’know? It doesn’t touch your heart.” She started to undress.

“Do you mind,” Auberon said, abandoning as hopeless the imaginary walls and door that separated him from Sylvie, “if I ask you what the hell you’re doing?”

“I’m dying,” she said calmly. Shirtless now, the globes of her breasts swinging gently with their pendular momentum as she moved, she picked up the two parts of the white outfit, looked them over a final time, and thrust them into the cauldron of coffee. Auberon got it, and laughed delightedly.

“Sort of a beige,” Sylvie said, pronouncing the “g” as though it were in “badge”. She plucked from the dish- drainer by the sink the little sock-like cotton strainer—el colador, a boy—which she used to make strong Spanish coffee, and showed it to him. It had turned a rich tan color he had himself often admired. She began stirring the cauldron slowly with a long-handled spoon. “Two shades lighter than me,” she said, “is what I want. Cafe-con-leche.”

“Pretty,” he said. Coffee spattered her brown skin. She wiped it off and licked her fingers. With the spoon in both hands she lifted the garment up, her breasts tautening, and looked at it; it was already deep brown, browner than she, but rinsings (he could see her think it) would lighten it. She dropped it back in, with a quick finger tucked a lock of hair that had got away back under her snood, and stirred again. Auberon wouldn’t ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn’t write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But he had no real desire to write of anything else. He was standing now in the door of the little kitchen.

“Here’s an idea,” he said. “Those soap-operas always need writers.” He said this as though it were a fact he was sure of. “We could collaborate.”

“Huh?”

“You think up some stuff that might happen on the show—coming out of what’s happening now—only better than what they’ll do—and I can write it.”

“Really?” she said, doubtful but intrigued.

“I mean I’ll write the words, and you write the story.” What was odd (he came closer) was that he meant by this offer to seduce her. He wondered how long lovers are lovers before they stop having to plot each other’s seduction. Never? Perhaps never. Perhaps the lures get smaller, more perfunctory. Or maybe just the reverse. What did he know?

“Okay,” she said with quick decision. “But,” she said with a secret smile, “I might not have a lot of time, because I’m going to get a job.”

“Hey, terrific.”

“Yeah. That’s what this outfit’s for, if it comes out.”

“Gee, that’s great. What kind of job?”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you since it’s not for sure. I have to get interviewed. It’s in the movies.” She laughed at the absurdity of it.

“A star?”

“Not right away. Not the first day. Later for that.” She moved the sodden brown mess to a corner of the tub. She poured out the cold coffee. “A producer, sort of, I met. Sort of a producer or director. He needs an assistant. But not like a secretary exactly.”

“Oh yeah?” Where was she meeting producers and directors and not telling him about it?

“Like sort of a script girl and assistant.”

“Hm.” Surely Sylvie, even more alert than he was to such things, would have sensed whether this sort-of producer’s offer was real or mere predation; it sounded doubtful to him, but he made encouraging noises.

“So,” she said—turning cold water full force over the now-tan outfit, “I got to look good or at least as good as I can look, to go see him…”

“You always look good.”

“No, really.”

“You look good to me now.”

She flashed him the briefest and brightest of her smiles. “So we’ll get famous together.”

“Sure,” he said, coming closer. “And rich. And you’ll know all about movies, and we’ll make a team.” He circled her. “Let’s make a team.”

“Oh. I got to finish this.”

Okay.

“It’ll be a while.”

“I can wait. I’ll just watch.”

“Oh, papo. I get embarrassed.”

“Mm. That’s nice.” He kissed her throat, smelling the biscuity odor of her exertion, and she allowed him to, her wet hands held out over the tub. “I’m going to let down the bed,” he said in a low voice, something between a threat and the promise of a treat.

“Mm.” She watched him do so, her hands in the water but her mind not now on her task. The bed, lowered, intruded suddenly into the room, very bedlike but also like the prow of a laden ship that had just come in: had just sailed through the far wall and hove to there, waiting to be boarded.

Nevertheless Spring

In the end, though—whether because she came to doubt that her producer really was one, or because the false spring of that week vanished and March went out like a lion freezing her tender marrow, or because the dyed outfit didn’t ever please her quite (there lingered about it after no matter how many washings a faint smell of stale coffee)—Sylvie never did go to be interviewed for the movies. Auberon encouraged her, bought her a book to read on the subject, but this only seemed to plunge her into further gloom. The klieglit visions faded. She sank into a torpor that alarmed Auberon. She lay till late in a huge tangle of bedclothes, his winter coat atop them all, and when she did rise, mooned around the little apartment with a sweatshirt over her nightgown and thick socks on her feet. She’d open the refrigerator and stare irritatedly within at a container of moldy yogurt, nameless leftovers in tinfoil, a flat soda.

“Cono,” she said. “There’s never anything in here.”

“Yeah? Is that so,” he said with heavy irony from within the imaginary study. “I guess it must be broken.” He rose, and reached for his coat. “What do you want?” he said. “I’ll go get something.”

“No, papo…”

“I have to eat too, you know. And if the refrigerator won’t supply it.”

“Okay. Something good.”

“Well what? I could get some cereal…”

She made a face. “Something good,” she said, with a twohanded, chin-uplifted gesture that certainly expressed her desire, but left him no wiser. He went out into a new-fallen still-falling snow.

As soon as she closed the door on him, Sylvie was swept by a tide of gloomy feeling.

It amazed her that he, brought up the baby boy in a household of sisters and aunts, could be so endlessly solicitous, take so much of their daily domestic life on himself, and bitch so little. White people were strange. Among her relatives and their neighbors a husband’s chief domestic duties were eating, beating, and playing dominoes. Auberon was so good. So understanding. And smart: official forms and the endless paper of an aged and paralytic welfare state held no terror for him. And not jealous. When early on she’d developed a pressing crush on sweet brown Leon who waited at the Seventh Saint, and indulged it a while, and lain then next to Auberon every night rigid with guilt and fear till he’d wormed the secret out of her, he’d only said he didn’t care what she did with others as long as she was happy with him when she was with him: now how many guys could you find, she asked herself in the clouded mirror over the sink, who would act like that?

So good. So kind. And how did she repay him? Look at you, she insisted. Bags under your eyes. Losing pounds every day, pretty soon—she held up a warning pinkie in the mirror—like this.