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floating. I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. To my closed eyes Deborah’s face seemed to float off from her body and stare at me in darkness. She gave one malevolent look which said: “There are dimensions to evil which reach beyond the light,” and then she smiled like a milkmaid andfloated away and was gone. And in the midst of that Oriental splendor of landscape, I felt the lost touch of her finger on my shoulder, radiating some faint but ineradicable pulse of detestation into the new grace. I opened my eyes. I was weary with a most honorable fatigue, and my flesh seemed new. I had not felt so nice since I was twelve. It seemed inconceivable at this instant that anything in life could fail to please. But there was Deborah, dead beside me on the flowered carpet of the floor, and there was no question of that. She was dead, indeed she was dead.

2 / A Runner from the Gaming Room
    O N THAT NIGHT sixteen years ago when I made love to Deborah in the back seat of my car, she looked up when we were done, smiling with a misty somewhat bewildered look, and said, “You’re not Catholic, are you?”
    “No.”
    “I was hoping perhaps you were Polish Catholic. Rojack, you know.”
    “I’m half Jewish.”
    “What is the other half?”
    “Protestant. Nothing really.”
    “Nothing really,” she said. “Come, take me home.” And she was depressed.
    It took eight years for me to find out why, seven years of living my own life and a first year of being married to her. It took all ofthat first year for me to understand that Deborah had prejudices which were as complex and attractive as passions. Her detestation of Jewish Protestants and Gentile Jews was complete. “They know nothing about grace,” she finally explained to me.
    Like any other exceptional Catholic, Deborah was steeped in her idea of grace. Grace was a robber bridegroom, grace was the specter in our marriage bed. When things went badly, she would say sorrowfully, even remotely, “I used to be filled with grace, and now I’m not.” When she had been pregnant, grace had come to her again. “I don’t think God is so annoyed at me any more,” she said. And indeed a tenderness rose from her at moments like that, a warm full-bodied balm to my nerves but for the purity of it: Deborah’s grace always offered its intimation of the grave. I would be content she loved me, and yet at such moments my mind drifted out to the empty peak of a mountaintop or prepared to drop down the sheer gray face of a ten-foot wave in a storm at sea. That was love with Deborah and it was separate from making love to Deborah; no doubt she classified the two as Grace and Lust. When she felt love, she was formidable; making love she left you with no uncertain memory of having passed through a carnal transaction with a caged animal. It was not just her odor, that smell (with the white gloves off) of the wild boar full of rut, that hot odor from a gallery of the zoo, no, there was something other, her perfume perhaps, a hint of sanctity, something as calculating and full of guile as high finance, that was it—she smelled like a bank, Christ she would have been too much for any man, there was something so sly at the center of her, some snake, I used literally to conceive of a snake guarding the cave which opened to the treasure, the riches, the filthy-lucred wealth of all the world, and rare was the instant I could pay my dues without feeling a high pinch of pain as if fangs had sunk into me. The afterbreath, lying on her body, floated on a current of low heavy fire, a sullen poisonous fire, an oil on flame which went out of her and took me in. Invariably agroan came out of me like the clanking of chains, my mouth on hers, not sobbing but groping for air. I always felt as if I had torn free some promise of my soul and paid it over in ransom.
    “You’re wonderful,” she would say then.
    Yes, I had come to believe in grace and the lack of it, in