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Betsy.
    “I got them at a sale at Buy Brite,” said Maria, “but I think they’re all gone. I got a friend in the Oriental Arts business who might be able to get you a set.”
    “Oh, I don’t want any,” Betsy said. “I just wondered if you can hear them as loudly as we can.”
    “Of course I can hear them,” Maria said. “What do you think I bought them for?”
    “Well, the thing is we can hear them too much,” said Betsy. She was struggling. To say that they kept her awake would seem to state that she was an enfeebled sleeper. “I mean I wondered if you couldn’t turn them off at night.”
    “You must be going crazy,” said Maria. “You think I can turn off the wind?”

5
    D URING the weeks that followed Renée refused to take any presents from Sears. She gave him a scarf, gloves and a pair of cuff links but when he gave her a piece of jewelry she made him return it. “You don’t,” she said, kissing him, “understand the first thing about women.” Sears’s sexual demands had given him a great deal of pleasure, some embarrassment and a painful suspicion that the polarities in his constitution were acutely incompatible and that the only myth that suited his disposition was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He’d never read the book but he had seen the movie. Renée’s understanding, her willingness to accommodate him in taxis and hallways was of a beauty that he could not remember ever having experienced before. There was an unspoken understanding between them. She had once said, over her shoulder, that male discharges were, in her experience the most restorative face cream and while he had heard this remark he had swiftly forgotten it since the clinical aspects of carnality were not what he sought. His importunacy and her deep concern with youthfulness were facts but facts that he would dismiss since in constructing a useful paradigm for love there are various organic needs that seem to contribute nothing to the pleasurewe take in one another. They both had something the other wanted.
    She was, in his long experience, the kind of woman whose front hall was always a mess. She was the kind of woman who always forgot to buy oranges and when you woke with her in your arms you would realize that the first thing you had to do was to put on your pants and go out and buy fruit. She was the kind of woman who, as soon as she entered her apartment, turned on first the lights and then the record player. Music had been playing when he first entered her apartment and it would be playing when he was long gone and forgotten. He knew from experience that silence—the absence of music—was for some men and women as suspect as darkness. It seemed a genuine need like protein or sugar but in his case continuous music presented a problem he had never before encountered. One night when they were making love the record player was performing a romantic piano concerto that closed with a long chain of percussive, false and volcanic climaxes. Every time the pianist seemed about to ascend his final peak he would fall away from the summit into a whole spectrum of lower octaves and start his ascent once more, as would Sears. Finally Renée asked, with great tenderness: “Aren’t you ever going to come?” “Not until the pianist does,” said Sears. This was quite true and they concluded their performances simultaneously. He never knew whether or not she had understood him.
    He would have described her as a clever woman although from time to time she surprised and disappointed him. She knew absolutely nothing about radioactivity. When he camein one evening, very tired from a board meeting, and tried to explain what had tired him, she seemed bored and uncomprehending although he thought it simple enough. The conglomerate that owned his firm had, that afternoon, acquired an airline whose sales were three times as large as theirs. No conglomerate, he explained, should be overly committed. As she well knew, specialization of any sort