The Comedy is Finished

view, leaving the double garage and the utility room at the featureless windowless front, facing the Pacific Coast Highway. The bedroom in which they’d put Koo was over the garage, with another suite of rooms behind it, facing the ocean, opening onto a large deck built on the roof over the living room.

Her voice low and hurried, Joyce said, “Did you watch it?”

“I don’t understand,” Larry said. “How could they all...give up like that?”

“You should talk with Peter. He’s closed himself in downstairs with that man Ginger, I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Looking over her shoulder at the stairs extending downward, she said, “I don’t like Ginger. I don’t trust him.”

“He’s all right. He just didn’t expect to be dragged into this, that’s all.”

“Go talk to Peter, Larry. Find out what he wants to do.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I promised Koo I’d stay with him.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?”

“He’s afraid of Mark, and I think he’s right.”

“Mark’s outside somewhere,” she said. “He didn’t even come in to watch the program.”

“He’s going crazy; Koo’s right. Also, I think there’s something else between them, some problem Koo won’t tell me about. He was going to tell me, but then that program came on and all he’d say was, ‘I’m done for now.’ ”

Joyce reached out to hold his forearm in both hands, looking up at him with an intensity he found disquieting. She said, “Larry, what’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s all gone wrong. Mark’s gone crazy, Liz just stays inside her shell down there—”

“The Eric Mallock thing; that must have been hard for her to take.”

“I’m afraid of what Peter and Ginger might decide together. That’s why I want you to go down there.”

“I can’t leave Koo.”

“Oh, it’s getting so hopeless. Maybe we should just let him go.”

“Peter wouldn’t agree, that’s one thing certain.”

She sagged forward against his chest, putting her arms around him, sighing, “Nothing’s going the way we thought.”

He stroked her hair, remembering this feel and smell of Joyce, surprised to realize how long it had been since they’d physically touched. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

“We aren’t a family anymore.” She was holding him tighter and tighter, burying her face in his chest, her words muffled. He felt the trembling of her shoulders beneath his hand. “We aren’t together anymore.”

“After this is over—” But there was no way to end that sentence; it had become impossible to think about life after this was over.

She raised her head, and he saw tears on her cheeks. “Make love to me,” she whispered.

He wanted to, suddenly, overpoweringly; she had to be aware of the physical manifestation. But he turned his head toward the closed door to Koo’s bedroom: “Where—”

“In here,” she whispered, leading him by the hand to the bedroom on the opposite side of the landing. “We’ll leave the door open, you’ll be able to see that door.”

The bedroom was in darkness, with the view of the ocean a kind of unfinished empty diorama seen through the wall of glass doors on the opposite side. Low massive furniture, indistinguishable in the dark, hulked like sleeping beasts on the wall-to-wall carpet. The room was large, muffled, quiet.

Larry wanted her achingly, demandingly, in waves of concupiscence; his hands trembled with the need of her. He’d been away from active thoughts of sex for such a long long time, and now sexual desire was like a revelation. He touched her breasts through her clothing, the shape of her body exciting him further. “Take everything off.”

“Yes. Yes.”

They pulled off their clothing with great haste, but then stopped and looked at one another, smiling slowly together, like old acquaintances unexpectedly meeting, who learn they can still be friends. Joyce was surprisingly voluptuous naked, with a long-torsoed body and full breasts, mysterious in the dim indirect illumination from the small chandelier at the head of the stairs. Larry cupped the side of her right breast with his hand, touching the hard berry of nipple with the ball of his thumb. Her face was wide-eyed and solemn in the shadows. He pulled her close, kissing her, rubbing himself against her.

“Yes. Oh. Don’t hurt me.”

“Down,” he whispered.

He held her hand, helped her lower herself to the carpeted floor, then knelt between her legs. Memory now only increased the novelty of this desire; had she always been so serious, so grave, and yet so open and warm and pliant in her lovemaking? Penetrating her, he would have lowered onto her breast but she held him up with her forearms under his shoulders, whispering, “I want to see you.”

“Yes. Good.” The posture was awkward for him, hands splayed on the floor, but he maintained it. Below, their bodies moved together, rolling in the tidal motion, while their somber faces remained still. He watched her in wonder, the shadowed eyes, the soft smooth skin of her face, the parted lips, stray shards of light glinting from her moist teeth, her hair fanned on the carpet beneath her head and curling around her small ears. A door was opened in his mind, and he saw that for all these years he had been in love with Joyce. In personal exclusive demanding love with one individual human being; as though nobody else existed. He had spent years denying it, refusing to distract himself from his concern with all of humanity, refusing to recognize the awful jealousy in the early days when she would go to bed with Peter or Mark or any of the others who were still with them then; and all this time had successfully hidden from himself the truth.

Years ago, in college, he had memorized a portion of Pope’s An Essay on Man, thinking it expressed his own beliefs better than he ever could, and only now understanding he had always misunderstood it. In a murmuring voice, slowly, in time with their lovemaking, he recited:

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great: with too much knowledge for the skeptic side, with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, he hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; in doubt to deem himself a god or beast; in doubt his mind or body to prefer; born but to die, and reasoning but to err; alike in ignorance, his reason such, whether he thinks too little or too much.”

“Don’t think,” she whispered, and the hint of a smile touched her lips in the semi-dark. “Larry, don’t think at all.”

“I love you.”

“Oh, don’t say that. Not now.” Then, her expression fierce, she clamped his face between her hands. “Come in me.”

Yes. Still holding him so she could see his face, her own face suffusing, the eyes losing focus, she strained and pulsed beneath him, and he could feel the surge of her body just before his own final, demanding, insistent thrust. “Forever,” he cried, forgetting silence and noise, and collapsed atop her.

The darkness was comforting. Their bodies were warm together, her hands and arms were soothing as she stroked his back, the warm suspiration of her breath beside his ear was reassuring. His lower body trembled, spending itself, the aftershocks of orgasm rippling through him, but his head at least was at peace, drooping downward, forehead touching the friendly roughness of the carpet. A long stretch of Nontime went by, and then Joyce sighed, shifting beneath him, and he knew they had to go forward again. Lurch forward, into the impossible. He echoed her sigh, and lifted himself onto his elbows, feeling the sudden chill air on his chest.

“Larry.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Let him go.”

Larry closed his eyes. It was the other impossible goal; first to love Joyce, second to be finished with Koo Davis. “We can’t,” he whispered. “Peter would never allow it. Not now, not when he’s been humiliated.”

“Will he kill him?”

“No.” Larry was certain of that part, he’d thought it out before. “That’s just another way to admit defeat. Peter will want to make up for it now, to get his dignity back.”

“The longer we go on, the worse it is for us. For us.”

“It’s already too long,” Larry said, and kissed her, and rolled off onto the floor.