Collected Stories

even when making faces at Wrangel he hadn’t felt harsh—playful rather. How to see such an occurrence: Chief Iffucan, the Indian in his caftan, the old man with henna hackles. Barbarous charm. It was possible for Wulpy to take such a view. The irritation of his scars had abated. He did not listen to Katrina’s next conversation, which was with Ysole. What he was led to consider (again, a frequent subject) was the limits he had never until lately reckoned with. Now he touched limits on every side: “Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.” For the representative of American energy and action these omnipresent touchable bounds were funny-lamentable. What was a weak “barbarian”? Newfangled men needed strength. Philosophers of action must be able to act. Of course, Wulpy had had his intimations of helplessness (the biblical “appointed bounds” didn’t count, those were from another life—theyivrach katzail, “he fleeth as a shadow,” he had studied as a boy). The bad leg had not been a limitation. It had been an aid to ascendancy. As perhaps the foot of Oedipus had been. But no longer than three years ago he had had his mother lying in the backseat of his beat-up Pontiac, serving for the afternoon as an ambulance. An old cousin had telephoned to say that his mother was virtually speechless in the nursing home where he kept her. He had finally gone to inspect this unspeakable tenement. He packed her bag and checked her out of there. That afternoon, a day of killing heat, he drove from one joint to another and tried to place her. He visited nursing homes, locking her in the car (bad neighborhoods) while he climbed stairs—the torment of getting two feet on each tread—to look at bedrooms, enter kitchens and bathrooms, and discuss terms with a bedlam population of “administrators,” otherwise “dollar psychotics,” who tore the money from you. (Not that he didn’t fight for every buck. “Licensed abuse,” he told them. “A horrible rip-off.”) At four o’clock he had still not found the right place for her, that semiconscious regal monument in the backseat of his jalopy. And while he drove around Astoria and Jackson Heights, Katrina—in fantasy—drove her car behind him, tailgating him between red walls of dead brick. This imaginary Katrina wore nothing but a coat, under which she was naked, in a state of sexual readiness. When he parked and hobbled into a building, he imagined that she had pulled up behind, invisibly, and that she was streaming under the buckled Aquascutum coat. That this was a commonplace fantasy, he knew well. But he accepted it. Apparently he needed to imagine the woman-slime odor—that swamp-smell—and the fever that came with it was peculiarly his. At last Wulpy had found a good place, or maybe just gave up, and his mother was carried in while he wrote the check. The old girl seemed indifferent by now. In a matter of months she was dead, leaving Victor with his ideas and his travels, his erotic activities—the whole vivid stir: an important man, making important statements, publishing important articles. Shortly after his mother died, he himself entered Mass. General. There he escaped death, but became aware that it was necessary to consider the appointed bounds. Something like a great river was going to change its course. A Mississippi was about to find a new bed. Whole cities would drown. Mansions would float across the Gulf of Mexico, lifted from their foundations, and come aground on the sands of Venezuela.

“Where are you anyway, Trina?” said Ysole.

“I had to attend a meeting in Schaumburg, and I’m stuck out here.”

“All right,” said Ysole. “Give me that suburban number where you’re at.” When Katrina made no answer, Ysole said, “You never would tell the truth if you could lie instead.”

Look at it this way: There was a howling winter space between them. The squat Negro woman with her low deformed hips who pressed the telephone to her ear, framed in white hair, was far shrewder than Katrina and was (with a black nose and brown mouth formed by nature for amusement) amused by her lies and antics. Katrina considered. Suppose that I told her, “I’m in a Detroit motel with Victor Wulpy. And right now he’s getting out of bed to go to the bathroom.” What use could such facts be to her? Ysole said, “Your friend the cop and your sister both checked in with me.”

“If I’m not home by five, when Lilburn comes, give him a drink, and have dinner there, too.”

“This is our regular night for bingo. We go to the church supper.”

“I’ll pay you fifty bucks, which is more than you can win at the church.” Ysole said no.

Katrina again felt: Everybody has power over me. Alfred, punishing me, the judge, the lawyers, the psychiatrist, Dotey—even the kids. They all apply standards nobody has any use for, except to stick you with. That’s what drew me to Victor, that he wouldn’t let anybody set conditions for him. Let others make the concessions. That’s how I’d like to be. Except that I haven’t got his kind of ego, which is a whole mountain of ego. Now it’s Ysole’s turn. “Are you holding me up, Ysole?” she said.

“Trina, I wouldn’t stay for five hundred. I had to fight Lilburn for this one night of the week. When do you figure to get home?”

“As fast as I can.”

“Well, the kids will be all right. I’ll lock the doors, and they can watch TV.” They hate us, said Trina to herself, after Ysole had hung up. They hate us terribly.

She needed Visine to ease the burning of her eyes. In the winter she was subject to eye inflammation. She thought it was because exhaust gases clung closer to the ground in zero weather and the winter air stank more. She opened her purse and sat on the edge of the bed raking through keys, compacts, paper tissues, dollar bills, credit cards, emery boards.

“You got nowhere with the telephone, I see,” said Victor. He was now standing above her, and he passed his hand through her hair. There was always some skepticism mixed with his tenderness when he approached her, as if he were sorry for her, sorry for all that she would never understand, that he would never do. Then he made a few distracted observations—unusual for him. Again he mentioned the air-conditioning unit. He couldn’t find the switch that turned it off. It reminded him of the machinery he had heard for the first time when he was etherized as a kid for surgery on his leg. Unconscious, he saw a full, brilliant moon. An old woman tried to climb over a bar—the diameter of this throbbing moon. If she had made it he would have died. “Those engines may have been my own heartbeats. Invisible machinery has affected me ever since. And you know how much invisible machinery there is in a place like this—all the jets, all the silicon-chip computers…. Now, Katrina, do something for me. Reach under my belt. Put your delicious hand down there. I need a touch from you. It’s one of the few things I can count on.”

She did it. It was not too much to ask of a woman of mature years. A matter between human friends. Signs of eagerness were always instantaneous. Never failing.

“What about a quickie, Trina?”

“But the phone will ring.”

“All the better, under pressure.”

“In these boots?”

“Just pull down your things.”

Victor lowered himself toward her. To all that was exposed he applied his cheeks, warmth to warmth, to her thighs, on her belly with its faint trail of hairs below the navel. The telephone was silent. It didn’t ring. They were winning, winning, winning, winning. They won!

That was what Victor said to her. “We got some of our own back.”

“We were due for one break,” said Katrina. “Dizzy luck. I’m spinning around.”

“Let’s stay put awhile. Don’t get up. There’s a Russian proverb: If late for an appointment, walk slower. We’re best off just as we are. Kinglake would have rung us if the plane weren’t on its way.”

“Do you think it’s after sundown, Victor?”

“How would we know from here? We’re on the inside of the inside of the inside. Why worry? You’ll be only a little late. They have to get me there. No Wulpy, no festival. It’s a test for them, a challenge they’ve accepted.”

They rested on the edge of the bed, legs hanging. He took Katrina’s hand, kissed her fingers. He was a masterful, cynical man, but with her at times like these he put aside his cynicism. She took it as a sign—how much he cared for her. He enjoyed talking when they lay together like this. She could recall many memorable things he had said on such occasions: “You could write better than Fonstine”—one of his enemies—“if you took off your shoes and pounded the keyboard with your rosy heels. Or just by lifting your skirts and sitting on the machine with your beautiful bottom. The results would be more inspiring.”

Victor now mentioned Wrangel. “He wanted to establish a relationship.”

“He has great respect—admiration for you,” said Katrina. “He said that to him when he came to the Village in the fifties—just a kid—you were in a class with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Meant to be a great man.”

“I was sure he would do lots of talking while I was on the telephone. Well, not to be modest about it, Katrina…” (And what was there to be modest about? They lay together at the foot of the bed, bare between the waist and the knees. His arm was still under her shoulders.) “In some respects I can see… I thought what I would