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shaving soap, Burma Shave.
    Those were the years, in the late 1950s, when serious literature was teaching the few serious readers that communication between any two individuals is impossible, that we are all isolated and that this isolation is no accident but due to the “human condition” itself. And yet I, who had been isolated, now found such perfect communion with Maria that I couldn’t detect a single gap between us, and I exalted in our closeness. Of course, there were many differences and omissions, but now during the hot windless evening they were forgotten.
    We went wandering through the woods, great forests of shabby birches unspooling themselves, until we reached thedunes, climbed them, and looked out at the late afternoon sun reflected by Lake Michigan. We took off our shoes and sat on the beach, digging our feet down into a layer of cold, root-thick marl so much blacker than the hot surface sand. We stared into the sun and talked, our words overlapping, our laughter ringing out across the still, orange water. A loon flew overhead, then dove for a fish. We held hands. I was wearing my suit for the train (for in those days Americans still dressed up for travel), but Maria had on white shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, nothing more, so for once I felt the older, graver one. I was pale from my shopkeeper’s summer, she as tan as she ever became.
    When she talked, she squinted as though sighting an idea in the distance. Her squint would even flutter slightly. A small colorless wen was attached to her lower left eyelid and, like a speck in her eye, this slight deformity added—oh, but it’s hopeless for me to work up an inventory of this woman I’ve known now for three decades and whose looks and way of moving have become the argot of my feelings.
    That night the summer heat did not lift and I lay naked under a wet sheet in a little cabin I’d been assigned on the edge of the woods. I listened to crickets. The sweat poured freely from my body. I was wide awake. The crickets throbbed louder and louder, as though they were rattles on the ankles of approaching dancers. When I closed my eyes, I still could feel the lurching and speeding of the train. The train would delve into a tunnel, then emerge and flirt with a fellow-traveling river that refused to stick to the party line.
    I was so happy. Since the cabin had no closet, my clothes were hung on hangers along the wall or draped from hooks at different heights, and in the moonlight these shirts and jacket and pants looked like a flight ascending the white wall. I pulled on a pair of shorts and walked barefoot through the dew-squeaky grass down to the shack Maria had called thelithography studio. No one anywhere was awake, not a bird or dog or person. The cabins had no electricity, and even their kerosene lamps had been extinguished.
    The moon was nearly full and almost directly overhead, like the hole in the Pantheon. But not an absence, rather a presence I’d call human except that it was nobler, at once tender and aloof—not a speaking presence but an intelligence I could address. Two big wooden lawn chairs, painted green, but looking almost blue-black in this light, conversed with one another sporadically like old people. The water scarcely moved but once in a great while lapped, as a sleeping dog will wake and hugely lick its lips before dozing off again.
    Until now, looking at the night sky had usually made me long to be elsewhere, to escape, and had reminded me that I was alone, but here the night had changed and become friendlier. The moon was not the retreating face of a traveler seen through a veil of smoke but a concentrated attention bearing down on these cabins, these sleeping minds. I could picture the moon’s rays as a protractor slowly turning to encompass us all in a perfect circle.
    The next morning I had breakfast with Maria at the inn. Solitaire was made up of the paying guests, mostly older Sunday painters who came for a week or two and