“Should I proceed, Krantz?”
“Proceed.”
“We’re in charge of torture tonight. The regular torturers are relieved.”
Breavman swung the head smartly against the inscribed stone. The smack of living tissue was louder than all the traffic.
“At least that stuns it.”
He laid the frog on the white sheets and secured it to the book with pins through its extremities. He pierced the light-coloured abdomen with the scalpel. He withdrew the scissors from his kit and made a long vertical incision in first the upper and then the lower layer of skin.
“We could stop now, Krantz. We could get thread and repair the thing.”
“We could.” Krantz said dreamily.
Breavman pinned back the stretchy skin. They pressed in over the deep insides, smelling each other’s alcoholic breath.
“This is the heart.”
He lifted the organ with the small edge of the scalpel.
“So that’s the heart.”
The milky-grey sack heaved up and down and they stared in wonder. The legs of the frog were like a lady’s.
“I suppose I should get on with it.”
He removed the organs one by one, the lungs, the kidneys. A pebble and an undigested beetle were discovered in the stomach. He exposed the muscles in the delicate thighs.
Both of them, the operator and the spectator, hovered in a trance. And finally he removed the heart, which already looked weary and ancient, the colour of old man’s saliva, first heart of the world.
“If you put it in salt water it’ll keep on beating for a while.”
Krantz woke up.
“Will it? Let’s do it. Hurry!”
Breavman tossed his text-book together with the emptied frog in a wire trash-basket as he ran. He cupped the heart in his hand, afraid of squeezing. The restaurant was only a minute away.
Don’t die.
“Hurry! For Christ’s sake!”
Everything had a second chance if they could save it.
They took a faraway booth in the bright restaurant. Where was the damn waitress?
“Look. It’s still going.”
Breavman placed it in a dish of warm salt water. It heaved its soft weight eleven more times. They counted each time and then said nothing for a while, their faces close to the table, immobile.
“It doesn’t look like anything now,” Breavman said.
“What’s a dead frog’s heart supposed to look like?”
“I suppose that’s the way everything evil happens, like tonight.”
Krantz grabbed his shoulder, his face suddenly bright.
“That’s brilliant, what you just said is brilliant!”
He slapped his friend’s back resoundingly. “You’re a genius, Breavman!”
Breavman was puzzled at Krantz’s tangent from depression. He silently reconstructed his remark.
“You’re right! Krantz, you’re right! And so are you – for noticing it!”
They seized each other’s shoulders and pounded each other’s backs over the Arborite table, bellowing compliments and congratulations.
“You genius!”
“You genius!”
They spilled the salt water, not that it mattered. They turned over the table. They were geniuses! They knew how it happens.
The manager wanted to know if they’d like to get out.
3
The heavy gold frame of his father’s picture was the first thing he noticed. It seemed like another window.
“You’re wasting your life in bed, you’re turning night into day,” his mother shouted outside the door.
“Will you leave me alone? I just got up.”
He stared for a long while at his bookshelf, watching the sun move from the leather Chaucer to the leather Wordsworth. Good sun, in harmony with history. Comforting thought for early morning. Except that it is the middle of the afternoon.
“How can you waste your life in bed? How can you do this to me?”
“I’m on a different cycle. I go to bed late. Please go away.”
“The beautiful sun. You’re ruining your health.”
“I still sleep my seven hours, it’s just that I sleep them at a different time than you sleep yours.”
“The beautiful sun,” she wailed, “the park, you could be walking.”
What am I doing arguing with her?
“But mother, I walked in the park last night. It was still the park then, in the night.”
“You turn night into day, you’re using up your time, your beautiful health.”
“Leave me alone!”
She’s in bad shape, she just wants to talk, she’ll use any maternal duty as an occasion for lengthy debate.
He rested his elbows on the window sill and let the landscape develop in his thought. Park. Lilacs. Nurses in white talking together beside the green branches or pushing dark carriages. Children launching their white sailboats from the concrete shore of the blue pool, praying for wind, safe journeys or spectacular wrecks.
“What do you want for your brunch? Eggs, scrambled, salmon, there’s a lovely piece of steak, I’ll tell her to make you a salad, what do you want in it, Russian dressing, how do you want your eggs, there’s coffee-cake, fresh, the refrigerator is full, in this house there is always something to eat, nobody goes hungry, thank God, there are oranges imported from California, do you want juice?”
He opened the door and spoke carefully.
“I’m aware how fortunate we are. I’ll take some juice when I feel like it. Don’t disturb the maid or anybody.”
But she was already at the banister, shouting, “Mary, Mary, prepare Mr. Lawrence some orange juice, squeeze three oranges. How do you want your eggs, Lawrence?”
She slipped the last question to him like a trick.
“Will you stop shoving food down my throat? You can make a person sick with your damn food!”
He slammed his door.
“He slams a door at a mother,” she reported bitterly from the hall.
What a mess! His clothes were everywhere. His desk was a confusion of manuscripts, books, underwear, fragments of Eskimo sculpture. He tried to shove a half-finished sestina into the drawer but it was jammed with accumulated scraps, boarded envelopes, abandoned diaries.
What this room needs is a good, clean fire. He couldn’t find his kimono so he covered himself with The New York Times and ran across the hall into the bathroom.
“Very pretty. He wears a newspaper.”
He managed to creep downstairs, but his mother ambushed him in the kitchen.
“Is that all you’re having, orange juice, with the house filled with
