Windows dark. No point looking out. Will sleep. Motors deafening. Men in front still playing cards; crew has joined them. Plane lurching. All the signs are on. Family vomiting. Card players have ordered more drinks; screaming their bids. Windows dark. Can’t sleep. Motors seem to have stopped. Silence. Something wrong with my ear...Crew still drinking. We’re not moving. The motors have stopped. Such stillness...
• •
On the street before his apartment house a lobster-faced doorman shovels the flying snow. It is he who slips the letters under his door. He who smiled as she entered when it was spring, the same old man who shall greet her when it shall be spring again. With a smile of greeting and thankfulness, swiftly she steals past him in a white flurry, her lids glued down with snow. In the elevator a slender Puerto Rican dozes on the stool. To the roof. Could you please take me to the roof. Yawning, he turns the lever a full half circle.
• •
“Just a quick kiss...” But he clasps her face. “It’s so nice to have you here.”
“Don’t stop working,” she says. “I am happy just being quiet together.”
But he isn’t working. He lifts her up, leads her leaping around the room—where? On the roof. On top of the desk, in the tub, on the rug, into bed. A naked man crouches over her, his knees hold her clinched by the waist while he bends over for matches on the floor. He lights two cigarets, puts one in her mouth, bites her chin. He won’t let her go. But maybe she’s had enough?
“Oh no...” She wonders how long they can keep this up. Of course she loves it when he locks his arms around her like a cage. She is just worried about his work.
“Work is a dirty word,” he says. “Don’t you know nothing I do is work?”
“Still, shouldn’t we...” She doesn’t know any more what.
“Stop?”
“No. Please.”
How can she worry about resuming normalcy at such a moment. “But will we ever?” Not that she wants to.
“Wait. You’ve just arrived. It will be over all too soon. Didn’t you know I was like this? Lazy. Sensual. Foolish,” he tells her softly, then laughs. “You look so surprised.”
“Everything is still so new.”
“Are you sorry you came? Your voice sounds so sad.”
“I’m sleepy,” she murmurs, “in Paris it’s five hours later.”
He puts out the light. But she can’t sleep.
“What is it?” he asks.
“To think that I almost didn’t come because I wasn’t sure how you felt. I had no idea it would be like this.”
“Did you doubt that I love you? How could you doubt—?”
“Then why didn’t you come to Paris?”
“I went to Paris three years ago to see a girl I loved. I couldn’t do it again. Don’t you see? I thought I told you. It’s a crazy story.”
She listens to him tell how a young man arrived in Paris three winters ago...
• •
The air is mild as they sit on the roof. It must be almost spring. He has brought out some blankets and a bottle of Scotch.
“Everything is so right,” she says.
“I was just thinking that,” he says. “Everything except me. I don’t see how I can be right for you. Aren’t you worried?”
She smiles, deaf. A woman in Paris worries. Their tongues, changed back into loving seals, frolic and laze. Her head is solid marble.
“The fact is that you shall leave me,” he pursues. “Who cares as to the reasons. There are always reasons.”
“They’re your reasons.”
“Laws,” he says. He speaks of facts, fate and laws. But she is not listening. Such a sense of vastness love gives; the night running up the Hudson River, what bays and inland lakes lie in this embrace—Alaska is her palm.
“Can you see me in ten years?” he asks.
Even with her eyes shut she can’t see further than his face. The space behind his back is a night dotted with foreign places and dates, equally past and future.
“I am asleep,” she mumbles.
“No you’re not. Why won’t you let me see your eyes? I know you’re wide awake. Open your eyes. I want to see your crazy eyes.”
• •
Weeks before the day when Sophie Blind walked up the ramp into the upholstered belly of a jet prop, weeks before she made her flight reservation, before she wrote her lover what she wanted, back in January when Paris was leafless, a bleak wet wash, and New York as bleakly wind-swept; in January at the unrecorded hour of its birth, her naked desire had started walking toward him.
• •
She stands on the terrace outside his window. It has stopped snowing. She sees him at his desk in the brightly lit room. It cannot be, she has realized. She will leave without knocking, as perfect love commands. But she can’t move from the window. The white of his shirt holds her enthralled, the cloth right next to his skin and the clean edge of the collar; she yearns for its delicate taste of heart of lettuce. She will leave. One glimpse of the wild green of his iris and she will leave.
He looks up suddenly, his eyes on the pane. Has he glimpsed the blurred face with its pupils pierced back into the outer darkness and the space between the parted lips running into the endless night? No matter, she is inside now. A figure detaching itself from the frost-grizzled pane, she glides boldly into the room.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she says, filling the room; her hair bristles in all directions, a shimmery halo of snow, very bridal. But it’s all melting very fast. She embraces him hurriedly, looking for something to cover herself with.
“You look great,” he says. “Of course it’s respectable. The gods always go nude.” She has come all this way to tell him something and now she can’t remember what it was she came to tell. There is no need now that they are together. He apologizes for the cold turkey; he wasn’t expecting her.
