unmistakably the one. There was a quality discernible in her repose, a lightness of bearing, and then he saw who she was. She was Elise Shifrin, his wife, reading a book of poems.
He said, 'Recite to me.'
She looked up and smiled. He knelt on the step beneath her and put his hands on her ankles, admiring her milky eyes above the headband of the book.
'Where is your necktie?' she said.
'Had my checkup. Saw my heart on a screen.'
He ran his hands up her calves to the rills behind the knees.
'I don't like saying this.'
'But.'
'You smell of sex.'
'That's my doctor's appointment you smell.'
'I smell sex all over you.'
'It's what. It's hunger you smell,' he said. 'I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk.'
He held her hand and they moved single file through groggy traffic to the luncheonette across the street. A man sold watches from a bath towel spread across the pavement. The long room was thick with bodies and noise and he pushed past the take-out crowd and found seats at the counter.
'I'm not sure how hungry I am.'
'Eat. You'll find out,' he said. 'Speaking of sex.'
'We've been married only weeks. Barely weeks.'
'Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.'
'We don't want to start counting the times, do we? Or having solemn discussions on the subject.'
'No. We want to do it.'
'And we will. We shall.'
'We want to have it,' he said.
'Sex.'
'Yes. Because there isn't time not to have it. Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day. What. You don't know this?'
She looked at the menu that extended across the upper wall and seemed discouraged by its scope and mood. He cited aloud certain items he thought she might like to eat. Not that he knew what she ate.
There was a cross-roar of accents and languages and a counterman announcing food orders on a loudspeaker. Horns were blowing in the street.
'I like that bookshop. Do you know why?' she said. 'Because it's semi-underground.'
'You feel hidden. You like to hide. From what?'
Men talked business in tattoo raps, in formally metered chant accompanied by the clang of flatware.
'Sometimes only noise,' she said, leaning into him, whispering the words cheerfully.
'You were one of those silent wistful children. Glued to the shadows.'
'And you?'
'I don't know. I don't think about it.'
'Think about one thing and tell me what it was.'
'All right. One thing. When I was four,' he said, 'I figured out how much I'd weigh on each of the planets in the solar system.'
'That's nice. Oh I like that,' she said and kissed the side of his head, a bit maternally. 'Such science and ego combined.' And she laughed now, lingeringly, as he gave the counterman their orders.
An amplified voice leaked from a tour bus stuck in traffic.
'When are we going to the lake?'
'Fuck the lake.'
'I thought we liked it there. After all the planning, all the construction. To get away, be alone together. It's quiet at the lake.'
'It's quiet in town.'
'Where we live, yes, I suppose. High enough, far enough. What about your car? Not so quiet surely. You spend a lot of time there.'
'I had the car prousted.'
'Yes?'
'The way they build a stretch is this. They take a vehicle's base unit and cut it in half with a huge throbbing buzz-saw device. Then they add a segment to lengthen the chassis by ten, eleven, twelve feet. Whatever desired dimension. Twenty-two feet if you like. While they were doing this to my car, I sent word that they had to proust it, cork-line it against street noise.'
'That's lovely actually. I love that.'
They were talking, they were pressed together nestling. He told himself this was his wife.
'The vehicle is armored of course. This complicated the cork-lining. But they managed in the end. It's a gesture. It's a thing a man does.'
'Did it work?'
'How could it work? No. The city eats and sleeps noise. It makes noise out of every century It makes the same noises it made in the seventeenth century along with all the noises that have evolved since then. No. But I don't mind the noise. The noise energizes me. The important thing is that it's there.'
'The cork.'
'That's right. The cork. This is what finally matters.'
Torval was not in sight. He spotted the male bodyguard standing near the cash register, appearing to study a menu. He wanted to understand why cash registers were not confined to display cases in a museum of cash registers in Philadelphia or Zurich.
Elise looked into her bowl of soup, bobbing with life forms.
'Is this what I wanted?'
'Tell me what you wanted.'
'Duck consomme with an herb twist.'
She said this self-mockingly, affecting an accent that was extraterritorial and only slightly more elevated than her normal system of inflection. He looked at her closely, expecting to admire the arched nostrils and the fine slight veer along the ridge of the nose. But he found himself thinking that maybe she wasn't beautiful after all. Maybe she missed. It was a stab of awareness. Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. They needed the final term in the series. She was rich, he was rich; she was heir-apparent, he was self-made; she was cultured, he was ruthless; she was brittle, he was strong; she was gifted, he was brilliant; she was beautiful. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple.
She held the soup spoon above the bowl, motionless, while she formulated a thought.
'It's true, you know. You do actually reek of sexual discharge,' she said, making a point of looking into the soup.
'It's not the sex you think I've had. It's the sex I want. That's what you smell on me. Because the more I look at you, the more I know about us both.'
'Tell me what that means. Or don't. No, don't.'
'And the more I want to have sex with you. Because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. It's the antidote to disillusion. The counterpoison.'
'You need to be inflamed, don't you? This is your element.'
He wanted to bite her lower lip, seize it between his teeth and bite down just hard enough to draw an erotic drop of blood.
'Where were you going,' he said, 'after the bookstore? Because there's a hotel.'
'I was going to the bookstore. Period. I was in the bookstore. I was happy there. Where were you going?'
