One day, almost exactly on the six-month anniversary of his appearance, he failed to show for his morning session. Of course I knew instantly what had happened; he had never missed an appointment before. Wondrous, it struck me, that he or his doctors had counted out with such exactitude how many days remained to him. You can, then, imagine my surprise when I played back my telephone messages later that week and heard his voice. “So that was six months, Doc,” he said. “You can go ahead and cash that check you’ve been sitting on!” He’d decided, he said, that if he had any extra time, there were some friends he should visit. He wanted me to know how grateful he was for my help. Maybe he would see me around. “Except probably I won’t. But if you ever think of it, think of Arnold Ullman, will you? He’d appreciate it.” Like some sort of late-night disk jockey, he signed off with a “Thanks for listening.”
That was the last I heard from him. I could search for him in the telephone book or in the obituaries, but I never have. I think: You were a sort of friend, Arnold Ullman. Or could have been, had you not been my patient, had I permitted myself to have friends.
As for the check, it is still in my desk.
—
It was Arnold Ullman I thought of last night as I lay awake. I must have slept because when I arose I knew precisely what the photograph of Clementine had meant to communicate and how simple a statement it was. When I sit down at my desk to look at it again, I do not pick up my magnifying glass, whose bulging eye looks up stupidly from the blotter. Instead, I open the envelope and remove what I had neglected to remove at first: the Yeats poem, or rather what remains of it, copied out on a sheet of paper and torn off, just above the end of the penultimate stanza:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
I am aware once again, more starkly now, how the poem is a clock ticking down, not hour by hour or minute by minute, but marking its own time in other intervals: letter by letter, photograph by photograph, line by line. What time remains is short, it says, short but soon to be shorter, passing faster and faster. But some time still remains. That is what the poem also says.
My earlier obtuseness mortifies me. (Is it, Mr. Abend, that you did not know, or rather that you did not let yourself know?) After all, the photograph is not badly focused, or out of focus at all, for that matter. It is only that the photographer has bracketed carefully, in the picture’s narrow depth of field, not the map but the cover of the magazine, the magazine resting on the chair to Clementine’s left. The magazine (I can read the cover with ease) is a copy of Elle. The cover model stares upward, eyes violet, skin chalked arsenic white, eyes blackened with a band of kohl applied from temple to temple.
By the time I reach the international news seller on Broadway, I already know what I will find there: the same face staring out at me from the racks, that issue of Elle the most recent issue, the date on its cover in fact still in the future. Yes, says the clerk, it has just arrived. I stare at the face as though it might blink in recognition, but those arsenic eyes fix me from a future held ever so briefly at bay, and reveal nothing.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Do we have to wake up?” Miriam asked.
With a clatter of back-paddling wing-beats, the bird had landed on the sill and set to howling.
Through the hot night we had slept with the windows open. The bird on the sill resembled an American pigeon, though more formal in its markings, neck starkly collared, wings sporting sharp bands, its call—half cry, half howl—startlingly loud. Miriam lifted the sheet from between us and pressed herself against me, adjusting my arm to serve as a pillow for her cheek. “Chéri, do we have to wake up?”
We had made no plans. It was a Saturday.
“No plans?” she said. “That’s not what I mean. When must we wake from our little dream?”
We’d have to wake now, if the pigeon had anything to say about it.
“No, not now,” she said, nuzzling her head into my armpit. “And it is not a pigeon.”
Our little dream. Is that what this was? When did she think it would end?
“Not now,” she said. “The end of August. Not now.”
When I awoke again the bird was gone, and Miriam was folding clothes into a small suitcase. She had to leave for a few days. Back to Leuvray, the convent, to meet with Sœur Béatrice, her spiritual advisor. The visit would be her last retreat before she was to arrive as a postulant. It was important this time that she go alone, so they would know she was serious. “Yes, mon ami. This time I go alone. But you must stay here. Promise me you will stay.” And besides, I hadn’t finished the translations I had promised her. I could work in
