habitat groups. Here in the stale and cavernous dark was a thrilling sense of permanence. Here were landscapes, seasons, moments in time that had not changed by a leaf or a flake of snow during my life. The flamingoes flew exactly as they had flown when I was a child. The rutting mooses were still locked, antler to antler, the timber wolves still slinked through the blue snow towards the pane of glass that separated them from chaos and change, and not a leaf of the brilliant autumn foliage had fallen. The Alaska bear still reared at the end of a corridor that seemed to be his demesne and it was here that I found her, admiring the bear.
'Hello,' I said.
'Oh, hello,' she said.
That was quick. Then she took my arm and said: 'I have the most marvelous idea. Why don't you take me to the Plaza for lunch.'
We walked across the park towards the Plaza. 'I don't think I have enough money for lunch,' I said, 'and there's no place around here where I can cash a check.' I counted the money in my wallet. I had seventeen dollars. 'But seventeen is enough to take me to lunch,' she said. 'I mean you could miss lunch for once in your life, couldn't you?' That's what we did. She ordered a full lunch and a bottle of wine. I explained to the waiter that I had already lunched but I did drink a glass of wine. She said goodbye to me in front of the hotel. 'I have to get back to Blenville in time to buy Grandfather's groceries,' she said. 'Back to my prison, back to my jail…' I had a hamburger and an orange drink at the corner and drove back to Blenville myself.
I was over there the next afternoon at around four. She answered the door. She was wearing a gray dress with a white thread on the shoulder. 'Did you get anything to eat?' she asked.
'I had a hamburger.'
'I'm sorry I spent all your money.'
That's all right. I've got more. Why don't you come over to my house?'
'Where do you live?'
'I bought Dora Emmison's place.'
'I'll get a coat. I feel like a prisoner here.'
Back at my house I lighted a fire, made some drinks and we sat in the yellow room while she told me her story. She was twenty-three and had never married. She had lived in France until she was twelve when her parents were killed in an accident and her grandfather became her guardian. She had gone to Bennington. When her grandfather moved to the country she took an apartment and got a job as a receptionist at Macy's. She was bored and lonely in the city and had come out to Blenville in the autumn with the hope of finding a job, but the only industry in Blenville was the motel and she didn't want to be either a prostitute or a chambermaid.
While she was talking there was a loud crack of thunder. Thunder was unusual at that time of year-the late winter-and at the first explosion I thought a plane had broken the sound barrier. The second peal-rolling and percussive-was unmistakably thunder. 'Dammit,' she said.
'What's the matter?'
'I'm afraid of thunder. I know it's absurd but that doesn't make any difference. When I was working at Macy's and living alone I used to hide in the closet when there was a thunderstorm. I finally went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything and he said the reason I was afraid of thunder was because I was a terrible egocentric. He said I thought I was so important that the thunder would seek me out for extermination. All of this may be true but it doesn't keep me from trembling.' She was trembling then and I took her in my arms and we became lovers before the storm had passed over my land. 'That felt good,' she said, 'that felt very good. That was a nice thing to do.'
'I've never had it better,' I said. 'Let's get married.'
Six weeks later we were married in the church in Blenville. Marietta wore a gray suit with a white thread on the lapel. (Where did all those threads come from? Later, when we traveled in Europe, she would sometimes appear with a white thread on her shoulder.) After the wedding we flew to Curacao and spent two weeks at St. Martha's Bay. It was lovely and when we returned to Blenville I seemed to possess everything in the world that I wanted. When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn't disappoint me. It seemed then that nothing could. I don't know when the honeymoon ended… I'll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o'clock. Groping, I found Marietta 's side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: 'Can't you see that I'm eating.' The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: 'Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can't a person get something to eat without being molested?' After that night-if that was the night-I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta 's distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs-any sort of clemency-seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand-hurricanes, thunderstorms and buzzards-sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls' names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin's knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.
A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia-a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love-I thought-we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory-a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.
Sleeping alone then, as I often did, I found myself forced into the reveries of an adolescent, a soldier, or a prisoner. To sublimate my physical needs and cure my insomnia I fell into the habit of inventing dream girls. I know the vastness that separates revery from the realities of a robust and a sweaty fuck on a thundery Sunday afternoon, but like some prisoner in solitary confinement I had nothing to go on but my memories and my imagination. I began with my memory and pretended to be sleeping with a girl I had known in Ashburnham. I remembered her dark blondness in detail and seemed to feel her pubic hair against my naked hip. Night after night I summoned up all the girls I had ever romanced. Night after night they came singly and sometimes in pairs so that I lay happily on my stomach with a naked woman on either side. I began by summoning them but after a while they seemed to come of their own volition. Like all lonely men, I fell in love-hopelessly-with the girls on magazine covers and the models who advertise girdles. I did not go so far as to carry their photographs around in my wallet, but I was tempted to, and having fallen in love with these strangers I found that they willingly joined me in bed. Surrounded then by the women I remembered and the women I had seen photographed I was joined by a third group of comforters produced, I suppose, by some chamber in my nature. These were women I had never seen. I woke one midnight to find myself lying beside an imaginary Chinese who had very small breasts and a voluptuous backside. She was followed by a vivacious Negress and she by an amiable but very fat woman with red hair. I had never romanced a fat woman that I could recall. But they came, they solaced me, they let me sleep, and when I woke in the morning I was moderately hopeful.
I envied men like Nailles who might, I suppose, looking at Nellie, recall the number and variety of places where he had covered her. On the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean, in catboats, in motorboats, in outboards, cabin cruisers and ocean liners; in hotels, motels, in castles, in tentsj on beds, on sofas, on floors, on grassy hummocks, on pine needles, on stony mountain ledges warm from the sun; at every hour of the day and night; in England, in France, in Germany, Italy and Spain; while I, looking at Marietta, would remember the number of places where I had been rebuffed. In the motel in Stockbridge she had locked herself in the bathroom until I fell asleep. When I took her for a two-week cruise she forgot to pack her contraceptives and the ship's doctor had none for sale. In Chicago she kicked me in the groin. In Easthampton she defended herself with a carving knife. Her menstrual periods seemed frequent and prolonged and on most nights
