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He hadn’t noticed the magazine before because the paint cans had blocked it from view. On the cover was the photograph of a woman. She was tall, passably beautiful, leaning over a rock, a look of pleasure on her young face. She was wearing a tight red long-sleeved sweater and a pair of clinging black shorts cut just below the hips.
    He stared at the enormous figure of the woman. She was looking at him, smiling.
    It was strange, he thought as he sat there, bare feet dangling in space. He hadn’t been conscious of sex for a long time. His body had been something to keep alive, no more—something to feed and clothe and keep warm. His existence in the cellar, since that winter day, had been devoted to one thing—survival. All subtler gradations of desire had been lost to him. Now he had found the fragment of Louise’s slip and seen the huge photograph of the woman.
    His eyes ran lingeringly over the giant contours of her body—the high, swelling arches of her breasts, the gentle hill of her stomach, the long, curving taper of her legs.
    He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. The sunlight was glintingon her dark auburn hair. He could almost sense the feeling of it, soft and silklike. He could almost feel the perfumed warmth of her flesh, almost feel the curved smoothness of her legs as mentally he ran his hands along them. He could almost feel the gelatinous give of her breasts, the sweet taste of her lips, her breath like warm wine trickling in his throat.
    He shuddered helplessly, swaying on his loop of rope.
    “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, God, God, God.”
    There were so many hungers.
    49″
    When he came out of the bathroom, damply warm from a shower and shave, he found Lou sitting on the livingroom couch, knitting. She’d turned off the television set and there was no sound but the infrequent swish of cars passing in the street below.
    He stood in the doorway a moment, looking at her.
    She was wearing a yellow robe over her nightgown. Both garments were made of silk, clinging to the jut of her rounded breasts, the broadness of her hips, the smooth length of her legs. Electric pricklings coursed the lower muscles of his stomach. It had been so long, canceled endlessly by medical tests and work and the weight of constant dread.
    Lou looked up, smiling. “You look so nice and clean,” she said.
    It was not the words or the look on her face; but suddenly he was terribly conscious of his size. Lips twitching into the semblance of a smile, he walked over to the couch and sat down beside her, instantly sorry that he had.
    She sniffed. “Mmm, you smell nice,” she said. She was referring to his shaving lotion.
    He grunted quietly, glancing at her clean-featured face, her wheat-colored hair drawn back into a ribbon-tied horse’s tail.
    “You
look
nice,” he said. “Beautiful.”
    “Beautiful!” she scoffed. “Not me.”
    He leaned over abruptly and kissed her warm throat. She raised her left hand and stroked his cheek slowly.
    “So nice and smooth,” she murmured.
    He swallowed. Was it just ego-flattened imagination, or was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy? His left hand, which hadbeen lying across the heat of her leg, drew back slowly, and he looked at the white, glaze-skinned band across the bottom of its third finger. He’d been forced to take the ring off almost two weeks before because the finger had become too thin.
    He cleared his throat. “What are you making?” he asked disinterestedly.
    “Sweater for Beth,” she answered. “Oh.”
    He sat there in silence while he watched her skillful manipulation of the long knitting needles. Then, impulsively, he laid his cheek against her shoulder. Wrong move, his mind said instantly. It made him feel even smaller, like a young boy leaning on his mother. He stayed there, though, thinking it would be too obviously awkward if he straightened up immediately. He felt that even rise and fall of her breathing as he rested there, a tense,