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an abundance of entertaining childhood symbols: a doll’s arm was twisted, a teddy bear smashed against the headboard in a love scene. Her publisher was a good publicist, making sure the book was noticed by the newspapers and by today’s literary stars. They lined up on the book jacket like the principals in a shotgun wedding.
    I was glad Lane didn’t have to get a job. I’m forever aiming at that goal, but I’m not unhappy to do some manual labor out under the sun. I took my shirt off delivering the propane tanks and in a few weeks my skin deepened in correspondence to a color chart of wood stain preservatives that was left behind at my cottage. That was fine, because I have a severe widow’s peak which suggests a vampire’s if I get too sallow. Women have said it’s the hairline of a tango artist, of a marquis, of a Casanova. A girl once told me, in her love talk, that I had the chiseled profile of tragic figuresin history book block-print illustrations. I said, in reply, that the similarity resided in the fact that all romantic heroes died young, before they started to lose their hair. In fact, I know that women are intrigued by a rather dramatic scar that runs down one side of my face. It’s a perfect line, carved like a seam of grout. In our idle games, once I even let a girl roll a tiny BB or ball bearing down its track.
    I was able to get the Friday off and I was glad to be driving north, into the city to see her. It was good to breathe the impurities and diesel fumes of the Southeast Expressway and to inch along with the back-up on Storrow Drive. That carbonized perfume and oily aftertaste was fine with me after too much salt air and the overwhelming scent of hot scrub pines that had intoxicated me all summer.
    That evening we were going to a book-signing party. After the party I would take her to some bars where we would get drunk. Lane was an easy drunk, as some men say about innocents, and I liked to think of her that way too. With a few rounds in her, I could have a little height over her, I could graduate to the head of the class. In daylight hours she was often too bossy with me. She confined me to a mild-mannered, superficial behavior which irritated me the way wool slacks can chafe the inner thigh when you’re walking in a direction you don’t want to be going.
    She sometimes made me feel like a boy climbing the narrow stairs of a choir loft.
    I looked forward to the dark of the coming night. I thought of it this way—I wanted an asphalt-and-glass situationafter the white light of the seaside, I wanted to get her immersed in darkness and in the loud music of the times.
    When I arrived at her door, she was dressed in a flowery kimono. The robe was torn and unraveling at the shoulder. This, I can tell you, was completely calculated. She said she was getting into the bath or out of it, so I turned around and went down the street to a Store 24 for a carton of cigarettes, which I knew I’d be ripping through in two days. She already had me biting the nail off my little finger and flicking it into the gutter as I walked back to her place. The sun was heavy and dripping through the leaves like a form of coy lava—I knew it was going to be hard for me to keep calm, the façade was rippling, yet not falling away. I kept saying to myself, this might be the time I get my way. I might be rewarded for my utter patience, but not unless I was able to contain myself. I must continue to relate to the world as mouse to lion, as flea to dog. I had to go on that way just a bit more. I took a deep abdominal breath, like a pearl diver or someone standing below a window starting his serenade. Even breathing had become a secret chore. With Lane, I practiced the nonchalant sigh, the easygoing exhalations of someone trying to go with the flow. In truth, I was fighting against an internal current, a carnal river rising. I could no longer outsmart it with intellectual patter between drags from my Winston Kings. Being with