Carol Mundt lay on the desk, propped up on her elbows, reading a cooking article in You. She was six feet tall and a hundred and sixty pounds of muscle, bone and sinew, with only a slightly bulging belly. In Saskatchewan she had not stood out for her size, but here in New York it was a different story. She shifted to take the pressure off her pelvis. Clement said, "Please", and she went still again. She could hear his speeded-up breathing over the back of her head and now and then a soft little sniffing.
"You can sit up now if you like," Clement said. She rolled on to her side and swivelled up to a sitting position, her legs dangling. "I need a few minutes," he said, and added jokingly, "I have to digest this," and laughed sweetly. Then he went over to his red leather armchair, which faced the dormer window that looked uptown as far as Twenty-third Street.
Sighing, getting comfortable in his chair, he stared over the sunny rooftops. The house was the last remaining brownstone on a block of old converted warehouses and newish apartment houses. Carol let her head hang forward to relax, sensing that she was not to speak at such moments, then slid off the desk, her buttocks making a zipping sound as they came unstuck from the wood, and crossed the large study to the tiny bathroom, where she sat studying a recipe in the Times for meatloaf.
Three or four minutes later, she heard "OK!" through the thin bathroom door, and hurried back to the desk where she stretched out prone, this time resting her cheek on the back of one hand, and closed her eyes. In a moment, she felt the gentle movement of the marker on the back of her thigh and tried to imagine the words it was making. He started on her left buttock, making short grunts that conveyed his rising excitement, and she kept herself perfectly still to avoid distracting him, as if he were operating on her. He began writing faster and faster, and the periods and the dots over the "i"s pushed deep into her flesh. His breathing was louder, reminding her again what a privilege it was to serve genius in this way, to help a writer who, according to his book jacket, had won so many prizes before he was even thirty and was possibly rich, although the furniture didn't match and had a worn look. She felt the power of his mind like the big hand pressing down on her back, like a real object with weight and size, and she felt honoured and successful, and congratulated herself for having dared answer his ad.
Clement was now writing on the back of her calf. "You can read, if you like," he whispered.
"I'm just resting. Is everything OK?"
"Yes, great. Don't move."
He was down around her ankle when the marker came to a halt. "Please turn over," he said.
She rolled on to her back and lay looking up at him.
He stared down at her body, noting the little smile of embarrassment on her face. "You feeling all right about this?"
"Oh, yes," she said, in this position nearly choking on her high automatic laugh.
"Good. You're helping me a lot. I'll start here, OK?" He touched just below her solid round breasts.
"Wherever," she said.
Clement pushed up his wire-rimmed glasses. He was half a head shorter than this giantess, whose affectionate guffaws, he supposed, were her way of hiding her shyness. But her empty optimism and that damned midwestern affliction of regular-fella goodwill annoyed him, especially in a woman - it masculinised her. He respected decisive women, but from a distance, much preferring the inexplicit kind, like his wife, Lena. Or, rather, like Lena as she once was. He would love to be able to tell this one on his desk to relax and let her bewildered side show, for he had grasped her basic tomboy story and her dating dilemmas the moment she'd mentioned how she'd had her own rifle up home and adored hunting deer with her brothers Wally and George. And now, he surmised, with her thirties racing toward her, the joke was over but the camouflaging guffaws remained, like a shell abandoned by some animal.
With his left hand, he slightly stretched the skin under her breast so that the marker could glide over it, and his touch raised her eyebrows and produced a slightly surprised smile. Humanity was a pitiful thing. An inchoate, uncertain joy was creeping into him now; he had not felt this kind of effortless shaping in his sentences since his first novel, his best, which had absolutely written itself and made his name. Something was happening in him that had not happened in years: he was writing from the groin.
Self-awareness had gnawed away at his early lyricism. His reigning suspicion was simply that his vanishing youth had taken his talent with it. He had been young a very long time. Even now his being young was practically his profession, so that youthfulness had become something he despised and could not live without. Maybe he could no longer find a style of his own because he was afraid of his fear, and so instead of brave sentences that were genuinely his own, he was helplessly writing hollow imitation sentences that could have belonged to anybody.
Long ago he had been able almost to touch the characters his imagining had provided, but slowly these had been replaced by a kind of empty white surface like cold, glowing granite or a gessoed canvas. He often thought of himself as having lost a gift, almost a holiness. At twenty-two, winner of the Neiman-Felker Award and, soon after, the Boston Prize, he had quietly enjoyed an anointment that, among other blessings, would prevent him, in effect, from ever growing old.
After some ten years of marriage, he began groping around for that blessing in women's company, sometimes in their bodies. His boyish manner and full head of hair and compact build and ready laughter, but mainly his unthreatening vagueness, moved some women to adopt him for a night, for a week, sometimes for months, until he or they wandered off, distracted. Sex revived him, but only until he was staring down at a blank sheet of paper, when once again he knew death's silence.
To save the marriage, Lena had pointed him toward psychoanalysis, but his artist's aversion to prying into his own mind and risking the replacement of his magic blindness with everyday common sense kept him off the couch. Nevertheless, he had gradually given way to Lena's insistence - her degree had been in social psychology - that his father might have injured him far more profoundly than he had ever dared admit.
A chicken farmer in a depressed area near Peekskill, on the Hudson, Max Zorn had a fanatical need to discipline his son and four daughters. Clement at nine, having accidentally beheaded a chicken by shutting a door on its neck, was locked in a windowless potato cellar for a whole night, and for the rest of his life had been unable to sleep without a light on. He had also had to get up to pee two or three times a night, no doubt as a consequence of his terror of peeing on potatoes in the dark.
Emerging into the morning light with the open blue sky over his head, he asked his father's pardon. A smile grew on his father's stubbled face, and he burst out laughing as he saw that Clement was pissing in his pants. Clement ran into the woods, his body shaking with chills, his teeth chattering despite the warm spring morning. He lay down on a broken hay bale that was being warmed by the sun and covered himself with the stalks. The experience was in principle more or less parallel to that of his youngest sister, Margie, who in her teens took to staying out past midnight, defying her father. Returning from a date one night, she reached up to the cord hanging from the overhead light fixture in the entrance hall and grasped a still warm dead rat that her father had hung there to teach her a lesson.
But none of this entered Clement's first story, which he expanded into his signature novel. Instead, the book described his faintly disguised mother's adoration of him, and pictured his father as a basically well-meaning, if sad, man who had some difficulty with expressing affection, nothing more. Clement, in general, would always find it hard to condemn; Lena thought that for him the levelling of judgment in itself was a challenge to confront his father and symbolically invited a second entombment.
And so his writing was romantically leftwing, a note of wistful protest always trembling in it somewhere, and if this quality of innocence was attractive in his first book it seemed predictably formulaic thereafter. In fact, he would join the sixties' anarchic revolt against forms with enormous relief, having come to despair of structure itself as the enemy of the poetic; but structure in art - so Lena told him - implied inevitability, which threatened to turn him toward murder, the logical response to his father's terrifying crimes. This news was too unpleasant to take seriously, and so in the end he remained a rather lyrical and winningly cheerful fellow, if privately unhappy with his unbudging harmlessness.
Lena understood him; it was easy, since she shared his traits. "We are charter members of the broken-wing society," she said late one night while cleaning up after one of their parties. For a while in their late twenties and thirties, a party seemed to coagulate every weekend in their Brooklyn Heights living room.
People simply showed up and were gladly welcomed to smoke their cigarettes, from which Lena snipped off the filters, to flop on the carpet and sprawl on the worn furniture, to drink the wine they'd brought and talk about the new play or movie or novel or poem; also, to lament Eisenhower's collapsed syntax, the blacklisting of writers in radio and Hollywood, the mystifying new hostility of blacks toward Jews, their traditional allies, the state department's lifting of suspect radicals' passports, the perplexing irrational silence that they felt closing in on the country as its new conservatism went about scooping out and flipping away its very memory of the previous thirty years, of the Depression and the New Deal, even changing the war's Nazi enemy into a kind of defender against the formerly allied Russians.
Some were refreshed by the Zorns' hospitality and went into the night either newly joined or alone but, either way, under the influence of a forlorn time of lost valour: they saw themselves as a lucid minority in a country where ignorance of the world's revolution was bliss, money was getting easier to make, the psychoanalyst the ultimate authority, and an uncommitted personal detachment the prime virtue.
In due time, Lena, uncertain about everything except that she was lost, analysed matters and saw that she, like his sentences, was no longer his, and that their life had become what he took to saying his writing had become: an imitation. They went on living together, now in a lower-Manhattan brownstone on permanent loan by the homosexual heir of a steel fortune, who believed Clement was another Keats.
But Clement often slept on the third floor these days and Lena on the first. The gift of the house was only the largest of many gifts that people dropped on them: a camel's-hair coat came from a doctor friend who found that he needed a larger size; the use of a cottage on Cape Cod year after year from a couple who went off to Europe every summer, and with it an old but well-maintained Buick. Fate also provided. Walking along a dark street one night, Clement kicked something metallic, which turned out to be a can of anchovies. Bringing it home, he found that it needed a special key and put it in a cupboard. More than a month later, on a different street, he once again kicked metal - the key to the can. He and Lena, both anchovy lovers, instantly broke out some crackers and sat down and ate the whole thing.
They still had some laughs together, but mostly they shared a low-level pain that neither of them had the strength to bring to a head, both feeling they had let the other down. "We even have an imitation divorce," she said, and he laughed and agreed, and they went on anyway with nothing changed except that she cut her long wavy blond hair and took a job as a child counsellor.
Despite their never having been able to decide to have a child, she understood children instinctively, and he saw with some dismay that her work was making her happy. At least for a while, she seemed to perk up with some sort of self-discovery, and this threatened to leave him behind. But in less than a year she quit, announcing, "I simply cannot go to the same place every day." This was the return of the old crazy lyrical Lena, and it pleased him despite his alarm at the loss of her salary.
They were beginning to need more money than he could make, with the sales of his books falling to near nothing. As for sex, it was hard for her to recall when it had meant very much to her. Gradually, it was a four- or five-times-a-year indulgence, if that. His affairs, which she suspected but refused to confirm, relieved her of a burden even as they gnawed at what was left of her self-regard. His view was that a man had to go somewhere with his erection, while a woman felt she was somewhere. A big difference. But in a cruel moment he admitted to himself that she was too unhappy to be happily screwed, a condition he blamed on her background.
Then one summer afternoon, while smoking his pipe on the rickety step of their donated beach cottage, he saw a girl walking all alone by the lip of the sea, looking totally immersed in her thoughts, with the sun flashing across her hips, and he imagined how it would be if he could get her naked and write on her. His soul quickened. It had been a long, long time since he had had any vision of himself that brought such a lift of joy. This picture of himself writing on a woman's body was somehow wholesome and healthful, like holding a loaf of fresh bread.
He might never have placed the ad at all had Lena not finally erupted. He was up in his third-floor workroom, reading Melville, trying to cleanse his mind, when he heard screaming from downstairs. Lena, when he rushed into the living room, was sitting on the couch pouring herself into the air. He held her in his arms until she was exhausted. There was no need to talk; she was simply dying of inchoate outrage at her life, the relentless lack of money and his failure to provide some kind of lead. He held her hand, and could hardly bear to look at her ravaged face.
She grew quiet. He brought her a glass of water. They sat together on the couch, waiting for nothing. She took a Chesterfield from a pack on the coffee table, snipped off its filter with her fingernail, and lay back inhaling defiantly, Dr Saltz having seriously warned her twice now. She was having an affair with Chesterfields, Clement thought.
"I'm thinking of writing something autobiographical," he said, somehow implying that this would bring in money.
"My mother..." she said, and went silent, staring.
"Yes?"
This obscure mention of her mother reminded him of the first time she had openly revealed the guilt she felt. They were sitting at Lena's rooming house window overlooking a splendid street lined with trees in full leaf, with students idling past and the placid quiet of a midwestern campus sequestering them from the real world, while back in Connecticut, she said, her mother was rising before five every morning to board the first streetcar for her eight-hour day in the Peerless Steam Laundry.
Imagine! Noble Christa Vanetzki ironing strangers' shirts so she could send her daughter the twenty dollars a month for room and board, meanwhile refusing to let her daughter work, as most students did. Lena had to shut her eyes and squeeze her unworthiness out of her mind. To make her mother happy, she had to succeed, success would cure everything - maybe a job in social psychology with a city agency.
She was wearing her white angora sweater. "That sweater makes you glow like a spirit in this crazy light," Clement said. They went out for a walk, holding hands along the winding paths through shadows so black they seemed solid. The clarity of the moon that windless night brought it unnervingly near. "It's got to be closer than usual, or something," he said, squinting up at its light. He loved the poetry of science, but the details were too mathematical. In this amazing glare his cheekbones were more prominent and his manly jaw sculpted. They were exactly the same height. She had always known he adored her, but alone with him she could sense his body's demand. Suddenly he drew her into a clearing beneath some bushes and gently pulled her to the ground. They kissed, he fondled her breasts, and then stretched out and pressed against her to spread her legs. She felt his hardness and tensed with the fear of embarrassment. "I can't, Clement," she said, and kissed him apologetically. She had never given even this much of herself to anyone before, and she wanted her gift forgotten.
"One of these days we have to." He rolled off her.
"Why!" She laughed nervously.
"Because! Look what I bought."
He held up a condom for her to see. She took it from him and felt the smooth rubber with her thumb. She tried not to think that all his verses about her - the sonnets, the villanelles, the haiku - were merely ploys to prepare her for this ridiculous rubber balloon. She raised it to her eye like a monocle and looked up at the sky. "I can almost see the moon through it."
"What the hell are you doing!" He laughed and sat up. "The mad Vanetzkis." She sat up giggling and returned the condom to him. "What is it, your mother?" he asked.
She was dead serious. "Maybe you ought to find somebody else. We could still be friends." And then she added, "I really don't understand why I'm alive." Clement had always been moved by these quick mood changes - "the Polish depths", he called them. She had a baffling connection with some mystery across the Atlantic in the dark Polish middle of Europe, a place neither he nor she had ever been.
"Is there a poem about anything like this?"
"Like what?"
"A girl who can't find out what she thinks."
"Probably Emily Dickinson, but I can't think of a particular one. Every love poem I know ends with glory or death."
He wrapped his arms around his raised knees and stared up at the moon. "I've never seen it like this before. This must be how it makes wolves howl."
"And women go mad," she added.
"Why is it always women the moon makes mad?"
"Well, they've got such a head start."
She bent forward to clear a branch from her line of sight, narrowing her gaze against the glare. "I really think it could make me crazy." In a distant way, she actually was afraid of insanity. Her father's mad death had never left her. "How close it seems. Like an eye in Heaven. I can see it frightening people. You'd think it would be warm with this brightness, but it's cold light, isn't it? Like the light of death."
Her dear, childlike curiosity chilled him with anticipation of her body, which he still hoped to have someday. Was she blond down there? At the same time, she was holy and rare. Her only defect was her cheekbones, slightly too prominent but not fatally so, and the too broad Polish nose. But he was past comparing her to perfection. He opened her hand and pressed her palm to his lips. "Cathleen ni Houlihan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Queen Mab" - now he had her giggling pityingly - "Betty Grable... Who else?"
"The Karamazov woman?"
"Ah, yes, Grushenka. And who else? Peter Paul Mounds, Baby Ruth, Cleopatra... " She grasped him by the head and crushed her mouth on his. She hated disappointing him like this, but the more physical she tried to become, the less she felt.
Maybe if they did do it, some spring would uncoil inside her. He was certainly gentle and lovable, and if anyone was to enter her before she found a husband, it might as well be Clement. Or maybe not. She was certain of nothing. She let his tongue slide over hers. Her welcoming mouth surprised him, and he rolled her back and lay on her and began pumping, but she slid out from under him, got up, and walked out on to the path, and he caught up with her and had started to apologise when he saw her intense concentration. Her frustrating mood changes dangled above him like a bright-coloured toy over a baby's crib. They walked in a nearly mournful silence to the road and then to her rooming house, where they stood below the deep Victorian porch, the brightness of the moon stretching their giant inky silhouettes across the grass.
"I wouldn't know how to do it."
"I could teach you."
"I'll be embarrassed."
"Only for a minute or two. It's easy."
They both burst out laughing. He loved to kiss her laughing mouth. She touched his lips with her fingertips.
He stood on the sidewalk watching her incredible form going up the path to the house - her round ass, the full thighs. She turned in the doorway and waved and vanished.
He had to marry her, crazy as that sounded. But how? He had nothing, not even prospects, unless he could win another prize or be taken on as a faculty assistant. But there were hundreds with degrees higher than his looking for jobs. He was most likely going to lose her. An erection was stirring as he stood there on the moon-flooded sidewalk, a hundred feet from where she was undressing.
"Why do you bother with her?" Mrs Vanetzki asked Clement. Carl, the white-and-black mutt, lay stretched out in the shade, dozing at her feet. It was a hot mill-town Sunday afternoon, the last day of spring break. Even the rushing Winship River looked oily and warm below the house, and in the still air shreds of the smoke of a long-departed train hung over the railroad tracks along the riverbank.
"I don't know," Clement said. "I figure she might get rich someday."
"Her? Ha!" For Clement's visit, Mrs Vanetzki wore a carefully ironed blue cotton dress with lace trim around the collar, and white oxfords. Her reddish hair was swept up to a white comb at the top of her head, emphasising both her height - she was half a head taller than her daughter - and, somehow, the breadth of her cheekbones and forehead. Beneath her defiant banter, Clement felt the scary force of the majestically defeated, something he could not reconcile with his hopes.
A framed tinted photo in the living room showed her only ten years earlier, standing proud beside her husband, with his Byronic foulard and flowing hair, a fedora hanging from his hand. His misunderstanding of America's sometimes lethal contempt for foreignness had not yet strapped him to the stretcher and made him into a paranoid, raving in Polish to the walls of an ambulance, cursing his wife as a whore and the human race as murderers.
Only Lena was left her now. The responsible one, "the only one who got herself a brain in her head". Lena's sister Patsy, the middle child, had had two abortions with different men, one of whose surnames she admitted she didn't know. She had a wild loud whine of a voice and helter-skelter in her eyes. A sweet girl, really, with a big heart, but simply barren in the head. Patsy had once heavily intimated to Clement that she knew Lena was not letting him in and that she would not mind substituting herself "a couple of times". There had been no envy or spite in this offer, simply the fact of it and no hard feelings whichever way he decided. "Hey, Clement, how about me if she won't?" Kidding, of course, except for the undeniable light in her eye.
There was also Steve, the last-born, but for her he somehow hardly counted. He was dull and sweet and heavy-footed, the peasant side of the family. Steve was like Patsy, swimming around like a carp at the bottom of the pond, but at least he wasn't sex-mad. Hamilton Propeller liked him, amazingly enough. They knew they had a serious worker, and had advanced him into calibration technology after his first six months - Steve, who was only nineteen, with but two years of high school. He would be all right, although his recent shenanigans troubled her.
"Steve does a lot of walking in his sleep, you know. Lately." Mrs Vanetski addressed this to Lena with an implicit request for her college-educated interpretation.
"Maybe he needs a girl," Lena ventured. Clement was astonished and amused at the irony of her speaking so easily about sex.
"Trouble is there are no whores in this town," Mrs Vanetzki said, scratching her belly. "Patsy keeps telling him to go to Hartford for a weekend, but he doesn't understand what she's talking about. How about you, Clement?"
"Me?" Clement flushed, imagining she would be asking next if he'd slept with Lena.
"Maybe you could tell him about the birds and bees. I don't think he knows it." Lena and Clement laughed, and Mrs Vanetzki allowed herself a suppressed grin. "I really don't think he's even heard of it, but what can be done?"
"Well, somebody has to teach him!" Lena exclaimed, worried by her brother's persisting childishness. Clement was baffled that she could apply this level of energy to making her family face their dilemmas when she was fleeing her own.
"He seems to have bent Patsy's old bicycle," Mrs Vanetzki said, mystified.
"Bent her bicycle!"
"When we were all asleep. He seems to have been sleepwalking in the night and gone outside and bent the front fork in his two hands. It's some kind of force in him." She turned to Clement. "Maybe you could talk to him about going to Hartford some weekend."
But before Clement could reply, Mrs Vanetzki waved him down. "Ah, you men, you never know what to do when it comes to practical."
Lena quickly defended him. "He'd be glad to talk to Steve. Wouldn't you, Clement?"
"Sure, I'd be glad to talk to him."
"But do you know anything about sex?"
"Mama!" Lena went red and screamed with laughter, but her mother barely smiled.
"Oh, I know a thing or two." Clement tried to brush off the woman's bewildering near-contempt for him.
"Now, you be nice to Clement, Mama," Lena said, and went and sat on the glider beside her mother.
"Oh, he knows not to be upset. I just say things." But she had pinned inadequacy to his nature. She pushed her heel against the floor and made the glider swing.
Nobody spoke. The glider squeaked intimately. Beyond the porch the street was silent. Mrs Vanetzki finally turned to Clement. "The main thing that puts people's lives to ruin is sex."
"Oh, come on - even if you love somebody? I love this crazy girl," Clement said.
"Ah, love."
Lena nervously giggled through her cigarette smoke.
"Isn't there such a thing?" Clement asked.
"Whoever is not realistic, America kills," Mrs Vanetzki said. "You are an educated young man. You are handsome. My daughter is a mixed-up person. She will never change. Nobody changes. Only more and more is let out, that's all, the way a ball of string unwinds. Do yourself a favour - forget about her, or be friends, but don't marry. You should find a smart woman with a practical mind and clear thoughts. Marriage is a thing for ever, but a wife is only good if she is practical. This girl has no idea of practical. She is a dreamer, like her poor father. The man comes to this country expecting some respect, at least for his name. Nobody respects a Polack. What did they know of Vanetzkis, who go back to the Lithuanian dukes? He went crazy for a little respect, a man with engineer training. They kept wanting to make friends with him, the kind of people he wouldn't have spoken to in the old country, except maybe to get his shoes shined. So he comes to Akron and Detroit and then here, looking for a cultured circle. This is the nature of Lena's father. He didn't know that here you are either a failure or a success, not a human being with a name. So he went raving to his grave. Don't talk about marriage. Please, for both your sakes, leave her to herself. Our Patsy, yes - she should be married. Only marriage can save her, and even that I doubt. But not this one." She turned now to look at her elder daughter, who had giggled in loving embarrassment through all her remarks. "Have you told him how lost you are?"
"Yes," Lena said, uncomfortably. "He knows."
Mrs Vanetzki sighed, pressed a hand against her own perspiring cheek, and rocked slightly from side to side. She was in touch with what time was to bring to her, Clement thought, and he was moved by this transcendency in her nature, even if it was excessively tragic for his taste.
"What are you going to do for a living? Because I can tell you now she will never amount to anything financially."
"Mama!" Lena protested, delighted by the implied female revolt in her mother's candour. "Oh Mama, I'm not that bad!"
"Oh, you're getting there," Mrs Vanetzki said. She repeated her question to Clement. "What are you going to live on?"
"Well, I don't know yet."
"Yet? Don't you know that every day costs money? 'Yet'? Economics does not wait for 'yet'. You have to know what you are going to live on. But I see you are like her - the world is not real to you, either. Isn't there something in Shakespeare about this?"
"Shakespeare?" Clement asked.
"You tell me everything is in Shakespeare. Tell me how a hopeless beautiful girl's supposed to marry a poet who hasn't got a job. My God, you are regular children!" And she laughed, shaking her head helplessly. Clement and Lena, relieved that she was no longer judging them, joined her, delighted that she was sharing their dilemma in this crazy life.
"But it's not going to happen right away, Mother. I've got to graduate first, and then if I can get a job..."
"She'll get a job - she's got perfect grades," Clement said, with complete confidence.
"What about you? Is there a job for poets? Why don't you try to be famous? Is there a famous poet in America?"
"Sure, there are famous American poets, but you probably wouldn't have heard of them."
"That's what you call famous, people that nobody's ever heard of?"
"They're famous among other poets and people interested in poetry."
"Write some kind of story - then you'll be famous. Not this poetry. Then maybe they'd make a moving picture out of your story."
"That's not the kind of writing he does, Mama."
"I know, you don't have to tell me that."
Patsy appeared behind the screen door in her bra and panties. "Ma, you seen my other bra?" She sounded persecuted.
"Hangin' up in the bathroom. Why don't you look sometime instead of 'Ma, Ma, Ma'?"
"I did look."
"Well, look again with your eyes open. And when you goin' to wash your own stuff?"
Patsy opened the screen door and came out barefoot on the porch, her arms crossed over her big breasts in deference to Clement. A towel was wrapped like a turban over her wet hair. In the fading daylight, he saw grandeur in her powerful thighs and her broad back and deep chest. On an impulse Patsy grasped her mother's face between her hands and kissed her. "I love you, Mama!"
"There's a man here and you walking around naked like that? Go inside, you crazy thing!"
"It's only Clement. Clement don't mind!" She turned her back on her mother and sister and faced Clement, whose heart swelled at the sight of her out-thrust breasts, barely cupped by the undersized bra. With her taunting whine of a laugh, she asked, "You mind me, Clement?"
"No, I don't mind."
Mrs Vanetzki leaned forward and smacked her daughter's ass hard with the flat of her hand and then laughed.
"Ow! You hurt me!" Patsy ran into the house, gripping her buttock.
It was almost dark now. A freight train clanked along in the near distance. Lena lit a cigarette and leaned back into the glider cushion.
"He's going to write a play for the stage, Ma."
"Him?"
"He can do it."
"That's good," Mrs Vanetzki said, as if it were a joke. Before her black mood of disbelief, everyone fell silent.
Later, they went for a walk. It was a neighbourhood of bungalows and four-storey wooden apartment houses, workers' homes.
"She's right, I guess," Clement said, hoping Lena would contradict him.
"About getting married?"
"It'd be silly for us."
"Probably," she agreed, relieved. A decision decisively put off was as comforting as one that had been made, and she grasped his hand, lifted by this concretising of the indefinite.
He could not get up the courage to place the ad. He was beginning to wonder if it might be thought perverse. But it gradually loomed like a duty to himself. One day, he picked up a copy of the Village Voice and stood on the corner of Prince and Broadway perusing the personal columns: page after page of randy invitations, pleas for a companion, offers of psychic discovery and physical improvement - like an ice field, he thought, with human voices calling for rescue from deep crevasses. Dante. He took the paper home to his barren desk, trying to think of some strategy, and finally decided on a direct approach: "Large woman wanted for harmless experiment, age immaterial but skin must be firm. Photos."
After five false starts - immensely blubbery nude women photographed from either end - he knew the moment he saw the photo that Carol Mundt was perfect: head thrown back as if in a laughing fit. When she appeared at his door - in her yellow miniskirt and white beret and black blouse, six inches taller than he, and touching in a corny way with that shy, brave grin - he wanted to throw his arms around her, instantly certain that she was going to validate his concept. At last he had done something about his emptiness.
Snuggling into his armchair, she made a desultory attempt to draw down her skirt while trying to look sceptically game, as if they were strangers at a bar. She jingled the heavy bracelets and chains around her neck, and neighed - horse laughter, irritating his sensitive hearing. In fact, there was something virginal about her that she might be working to cover up, maybe extra virginal, like the best olive oil, a line he resolved to remember to use sometime. "So what's this about? Or am I wide enough?" she asked.
"It's very simple. I'm a novelist."
"Ah-huh." She nodded doubtfully.
He took down one of his books from the shelf and handed it to her. She glanced at his photo on the dust jacket and her suspicions collapsed. "Well, now, say..."
"You will have to be naked, of course."
"Ah-huh." She seemed excited, as if steeling herself for the challenge. He pressed on. "And I want to be able to write anywhere on you, because, you see, the story I have in mind will need all your space. Although I could be overestimating. I'm not sure yet, but it might be the first chapter of a novel." Then he explained about his block and his hope that writing on her skin would deliver him from its grip. Her eyes widened with fascination and sympathy, and he saw that she was proud to be his confidante. "It may not work - I don't know..."
"Well, it's worth a try, right? I mean, if you don't try, you don't fly."
Vamping for time, he moved a small box of paperclips off his desk and a leather-bordered blotter, a long-ago Christmas present from Lena. How to tell her to undress? The madness of the scheme came roaring at him like a wave, threatening to fling him back into his impotence. Scrambling, he said,
"Undress, please?" - something he had never actually dared say to a woman, at least not standing up. With what seemed a mere shrug and a wriggle, she was standing before him naked but for her white panties. His eye went down to them and she asked, "Panties?"
"Well, if you don't mind, could you? It's kind of less - I don't know -stimulating with them off, you know? And I want to use that area."
She slid out of her panties and sat on the desk. "Which way?" she asked. Clearly, she had been having compunctions and now in overcoming them had been left in uncertainty, a mental state he practically owned. And so their familiarity deepened.
"On your stomach first. Would you like a sheet?"
"This is all right," she said, and lowered herself on to the desktop. The broad expanse of her tanned back and global white buttocks was in violent contrast, it seemed now, to his desk's former devastated dryness. An engraved silver urn, one of his old prizes, held a dozen felt-tipped pens, one of which he now took in hand. Something in him was quivering with fear. What was he doing? Had he finally lost his mind?
"You OK?" she asked.
"Yes! I'm just thinking."
There had been a story - it was months ago now, maybe a year - which he had begun several times. Then, suddenly and simply, it occurred to him that he had outlived his gift and he had no belief in himself any more. And now, with this waiting flesh under his hand, he had committed himself to believe again.
"You sure you're OK?" she repeated.
It hadn't been a great story, or even a very good one, but it held the image of how he had first met his wife, under a wave that had knocked them both down and sent them tumbling together toward the beach. As he got to his feet, yanking up his nearly stripped-away trunks while she staggered up as well, pulling her tank suit up over a breast that had popped out in the churning water, he saw them as fated, like Greeks rising from the ocean in some myth of drowning and being reborn.
He was a naive poet then, and she worshipped Emily Dickinson and burning the candle at both ends. "The sea tried to strip you," he said. "The Minotaur." Her eyes, he saw, were glazed, which pleased him, for he was reassured by vague people, as it soon turned out that she was. Disgorged by the sea - as he saw the scene for years afterward - they instinctively glimpsed in each other the same anguish, the same desire to escape the definite. "Death by the Definite," he would write, a paean to the fog as creative force.
Now, holding the black felt-tipped pen in his right hand, he lowered his left on to Carol's shoulder. The warmth of her firm skin was a shock. Not often had his fantasy turned real, and that she was willing to do this for him, a stranger, threatened tears. The goodness of humanity. He had sensed that she had needed all her courage to respond to his ad, but something kept him from inquiring too deeply about her life. As long as she wasn't crazy. A little weird, maybe, but who wasn't? "Thank you, Carol."
"It's OK. Take your time."
He felt himself beginning to swell. The way it used to happen long, long ago when he wrote. A man wrote with it, his aptly named organ, and a gallon of extra blood seemed to expand his veins. He leaned over Carol's back, his left hand pressing down more confidently on her shoulder now, and slowly wrote: "The wave gathered itself higher and higher far out where the sand shelf dropped down into the depths as the man and the woman tried to swim against the undertow that was sweeping them, strangers to each other, out toward their fate."
Astonished, he saw with clarity fragments of days of his youth and young manhood, and, arcing over them like a rainbow, his unquestioning faith in life and its all but forgotten promise. He could smell Carol's flesh as she responded to the pressure of his hand, a green-tinted fecund sea scent that somehow taunted him with his desiccated strength. How to describe the sheer aching he felt in his heart?
And Lena's face rose before him as she had looked more than twenty years before, her eyes slightly bloodshot from the salt water, her swirling blond hair plastered across her laughing face, the fullness of her young body as she stepped upward across the sand and collapsed breathlessly laughing, and himself already in love with her form and both of them somehow familiar and unwary after their shared battering. It seemed that these were the first images he'd experienced in many years, and his pen moved down Carol's back to her buttocks and then down her left thigh and then the right, and, turning her over, it continued on to her chest and belly and then back down her thighs and on to her ankle, where, miraculously, the story, barely disguised, of his first betrayal of his wife came to its graceful end. He felt he had miraculously committed truth to this woman's flesh. But was it a story or the beginning of a novel? Oddly, it didn't matter, but he must show it to his editor right away.
"I finished on your ankle!" he called, surprised by a boyishness in the tone of his voice.
"Isn't that great! Now what?" She sat up, hands childishly spread out in the air so as not to smudge herself.
It struck him how strange it was that she was as ignorant of what had been written on her as a sheet of paper. "I could get you scanned, but I don't have a scanner. Otherwise, I could copy it on my laptop, but it'll take a while. I'm not a fast typist. I just hadn't thought of this... Unless I put you in a cab to my publisher," he joked. "But I'm only kidding. He might want some cuts."
They solved the problem by him standing behind her reading her back aloud while she sat typing on his laptop. They burst into laughter at the procedure from time to time. For the text on her front, she thought of having a full-length mirror to read from, but it would all be reversed. So he sat down in front of her and typed while she held the machine on her lap. When he had read down to her thighs, she had to stand so he could continue - until he was on the floor reading her calves and ankles.
Then he stood up and they looked deeply into each other's eyes for the first time. Then, possibly because they had done something so intimate, and so unthought of, they had no idea what to do next, and started to giggle and then collapsed from laughing, an infectious hysteria heaving their diaphragms until they had to lean their foreheads on the edge of the desk and not look at one another. Finally, he was able to say, "You're welcome to shower, if you like." And this for some reason rendered them screeching again, falling around with delicious helplessness.
Gasping, they slid to the floor and their laughter subsided. They lay side by side, filled with some unexpected childish knowledge of one another. Now they were quiet, still panting, lying face to face on his Oriental carpet.
"I guess I'll go, right?" she asked.
"How will you wash it off?" he asked, feeling an incomprehensible anxiety.
"Take a bath, I guess."
"But your back... "
"I know somebody who'll wash it."
"Who, a man?"
"No, a girl down the hall."
"But I'd rather nobody read it yet. I'm not really sure it's ready to publish, you know? Or for somebody to read it. I mean..." He was lurching about, looking for some reason to fend off the curiosity of this unknown back-washing girlfriend; or perhaps it was to preserve the privacy of his creation - God knew why, but he felt her body was still too personal for any stranger to look at. He raised himself up on one elbow. Her hair had spread out over the carpet. It was almost as if they had made love. "I can't let you out this way," he said.
"What do you mean?" There was a hopeful note in her voice.
"People who know us will recognise things about my wife in it. I'm not ready for that."
"Why'd you write it, then?"
"I just put it down raw and then I'd change some of it later. You can't go this way. I'll take a shower with you and scrub your back, OK?"
"OK, sure. But I didn't intend for anybody to read it," she said.
"I know, but I'll feel better if it's gone."
In the small metal shower stall, she seemed so immense that he started to tire after scrubbing her for a few minutes with his back brush. Carol washed her front, but he did the backs of her thighs, calves and ankles. And when she was clean, the water coursing down over her shoulders, he drew her to him. There was solid power in her body.
"Feeling better now?" she asked. He went abstract before this woman, the last vestiges of his brain slipping out of his skull and down into his groin.
Later, he wondered why making love to her under the stream of water was so easy and straightforward, while earlier, covered as she was with his words, the very thought of it was like penetrating thick brush and thorns. He wished he could have discussed this riddle with Lena. But of course that was out of the question, although he was not convinced it should be.
After he had helped dry Carol off, she slipped into her panties, bra and blouse and yanked up her skirt while he sat at the desk and opened a drawer and took out a chequebook. But she immediately touched his wrist.
"It's all right," she said. Her damp hair bespoke their intimacy, the fact that he had changed her.
"But I want to pay you."
"Not this time." An open shyness passed over her face at this perhaps unintended suggestion of her wish to return. "Maybe next time, if you want me again." And then she seemed alarmed by a new thought. "Or will you? I mean, you've done it, right?" Her earlier brashness was returning. "I guess you can't have a first time twice, right?" She laughed softly, but her eyes were imploring.
He stood up and moved in to kiss her goodbye, but she turned away slightly and he landed on her cheek. "I guess you're right," he said.
A certain hardness surfaced in her face now. "Then, look, maybe I'd better take the money."
"Right," he said. Reality is always such a relief, he thought, but why must it come with anger? He sat down and wrote a cheque and, with a twinge of shame, handed it to her.
She folded the cheque and stuck it in her purse. "This has been quite a day, hasn't it!" she yelled, and let out one of her horse laughs, startling him, for she had left off laughing like that since their initial moments as strangers. She's gone back to hunting deer now, he thought, and slogging through the tundra. After peeking out of concealment for a self-confident moment, she had scurried back in.
With Carol gone, he sat at his desk with his manuscript before him. Eighteen pages. His unfocused stare, his freshly washed body and spent force seemed to clarify and elevate him. He laid his palm on the pile of paper, thinking, I have dipped my toe over sanity's edge, so this had better be good. He rubbed his eyes and began to read his story when from far down below he heard the front door slam shut. Lena was home. Home with her face deeply wrinkled like a desiccated over-ripe pepper, her mouth drawn down, her breasts flat, the hateful brown nicotine smell on her breath. He was getting angry again, filling up with hate for her stubborn self-destruction.
Turning to his story, reading and re-reading it, he felt a terrible amazement that its sweet flood of sympathy and love for her was thriving in him even now, almost as though a very young and unmarked man had written it, a man imprisoned inside him, a free-singing poet whose spirit was as real and convincing as the waves of the sea. What if he tried to turn the story into a kind of paean to her as she once had been - would she recognise herself and be reconciled?
As he read, he saw how perfectly beautiful and poetic she still was in some buried centre of his mind, and remembered how merely waking with her in the mornings had once filled him with happiness and purpose. Looking up from the manuscript to stare out across the barren rooftops, he felt a pang for Carol, whose brutally young presence was still vibrating in the room, and he wanted her to return maybe one more time so that he could write on her tight skin again and perhaps dredge up some other innocent thing that might be shivering in the darkness inside him, some remnant of love so terrified of coming out that it seemed to have disappeared - taking with it his art.
· Arthur Miller was born in New York in 1915, and began writing as a student at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons, Death Of A Salesman (for which he won a Pulitzer) and The Crucible; he has also written two novels, Focus and The Misfits, and a short story collection, Homely Girl, A Life. walk. It was a neighbourhood of bungalows and four-storey wooden apartment houses, workers' homes.
"She's right, I guess," Clement said, hoping Lena would contradict him.
"About getting married?"
"It'd be silly for us."
"Probably," she agreed, relieved. A decision decisively put off was as comforting as one that had been made, and she grasped his hand, lifted by this concretising of the indefinite.
He could not get up the courage to place the ad. He was beginning to wonder if it might be thought perverse. But it gradually loomed like a duty to himself. One day, he picked up a copy of the Village Voice and stood on the corner of Prince and Broadway perusing the personal columns: page after page of randy invitations, pleas for a companion, offers of psychic discovery and physical improvement - like an ice field, he thought, with human voices calling for rescue from deep crevasses. Dante. He took the paper home to his barren desk, trying to think of some strategy, and finally decided on a direct approach: "Large woman wanted for harmless experiment, age immaterial but skin must be firm. Photos."
After five false starts - immensely blubbery nude women photographed from either end - he knew the moment he saw the photo that Carol Mundt was perfect: head thrown back as if in a laughing fit. When she appeared at his door - in her yellow miniskirt and white beret and black blouse, six inches taller than he, and touching in a corny way with that shy, brave grin - he wanted to throw his arms around her, instantly certain that she was going to validate his concept. At last he had done something about his emptiness.
Snuggling into his armchair, she made a desultory attempt to draw down her skirt while trying to look sceptically game, as if they were strangers at a bar. She jingled the heavy bracelets and chains around her neck, and neighed - horse laughter, irritating his sensitive hearing. In fact, there was something virginal about her that she might be working to cover up, maybe extra virginal, like the best olive oil, a line he resolved to remember to use sometime. "So what's this about? Or am I wide enough?" she asked.
"It's very simple. I'm a novelist."
"Ah-huh." She nodded doubtfully.
He took down one of his books from the shelf and handed it to her. She glanced at his photo on the dust jacket and her suspicions collapsed. "Well, now, say..."
"You will have to be naked, of course."
"Ah-huh." She seemed excited, as if steeling herself for the challenge. He pressed on. "And I want to be able to write anywhere on you, because, you see, the story I have in mind will need all your space. Although I could be overestimating. I'm not sure yet, but it might be the first chapter of a novel." Then he explained about his block and his hope that writing on her skin would deliver him from its grip. Her eyes widened with fascination and sympathy, and he saw that she was proud to be his confidante. "It may not work - I don't know..."
"Well, it's worth a try, right? I mean, if you don't try, you don't fly."
Vamping for time, he moved a small box of paperclips off his desk and a leather-bordered blotter, a long-ago Christmas present from Lena. How to tell her to undress? The madness of the scheme came roaring at him like a wave, threatening to fling him back into his impotence. Scrambling, he said,
"Undress, please?" - something he had never actually dared say to a woman, at least not standing up. With what seemed a mere shrug and a wriggle, she was standing before him naked but for her white panties. His eye went down to them and she asked, "Panties?"
"Well, if you don't mind, could you? It's kind of less - I don't know -stimulating with them off, you know? And I want to use that area."
She slid out of her panties and sat on the desk. "Which way?" she asked. Clearly, she had been having compunctions and now in overcoming them had been left in uncertainty, a mental state he practically owned. And so their familiarity deepened.
"On your stomach first. Would you like a sheet?"
"This is all right," she said, and lowered herself on to the desktop. The broad expanse of her tanned back and global white buttocks was in violent contrast, it seemed now, to his desk's former devastated dryness. An engraved silver urn, one of his old prizes, held a dozen felt-tipped pens, one of which he now took in hand. Something in him was quivering with fear. What was he doing? Had he finally lost his mind?
"You OK?" she asked.
"Yes! I'm just thinking."
There had been a story - it was months ago now, maybe a year - which he had begun several times. Then, suddenly and simply, it occurred to him that he had outlived his gift and he had no belief in himself any more. And now, with this waiting flesh under his hand, he had committed himself to believe again.
"You sure you're OK?" she repeated.
It hadn't been a great story, or even a very good one, but it held the image of how he had first met his wife, under a wave that had knocked them both down and sent them tumbling together toward the beach. As he got to his feet, yanking up his nearly stripped-away trunks while she staggered up as well, pulling her tank suit up over a breast that had popped out in the churning water, he saw them as fated, like Greeks rising from the ocean in some myth of drowning and being reborn.
He was a naive poet then, and she worshipped Emily Dickinson and burning the candle at both ends. "The sea tried to strip you," he said. "The Minotaur." Her eyes, he saw, were glazed, which pleased him, for he was reassured by vague people, as it soon turned out that she was. Disgorged by the sea - as he saw the scene for years afterward - they instinctively glimpsed in each other the same anguish, the same desire to escape the definite. "Death by the Definite," he would write, a paean to the fog as creative force.
Now, holding the black felt-tipped pen in his right hand, he lowered his left on to Carol's shoulder. The warmth of her firm skin was a shock. Not often had his fantasy turned real, and that she was willing to do this for him, a stranger, threatened tears. The goodness of humanity. He had sensed that she had needed all her courage to respond to his ad, but something kept him from inquiring too deeply about her life. As long as she wasn't crazy. A little weird, maybe, but who wasn't? "Thank you, Carol."
"It's OK. Take your time."
He felt himself beginning to swell. The way it used to happen long, long ago when he wrote. A man wrote with it, his aptly named organ, and a gallon of extra blood seemed to expand his veins. He leaned over Carol's back, his left hand pressing down more confidently on her shoulder now, and slowly wrote: "The wave gathered itself higher and higher far out where the sand shelf dropped down into the depths as the man and the woman tried to swim against the undertow that was sweeping them, strangers to each other, out toward their fate."
Astonished, he saw with clarity fragments of days of his youth and young manhood, and, arcing over them like a rainbow, his unquestioning faith in life and its all but forgotten promise. He could smell Carol's flesh as she responded to the pressure of his hand, a green-tinted fecund sea scent that somehow taunted him with his desiccated strength. How to describe the sheer aching he felt in his heart?
And Lena's face rose before him as she had looked more than twenty years before, her eyes slightly bloodshot from the salt water, her swirling blond hair plastered across her laughing face, the fullness of her young body as she stepped upward across the sand and collapsed breathlessly laughing, and himself already in love with her form and both of them somehow familiar and unwary after their shared battering. It seemed that these were the first images he'd experienced in many years, and his pen moved down Carol's back to her buttocks and then down her left thigh and then the right, and, turning her over, it continued on to her chest and belly and then back down her thighs and on to her ankle, where, miraculously, the story, barely disguised, of his first betrayal of his wife came to its graceful end. He felt he had miraculously committed truth to this woman's flesh. But was it a story or the beginning of a novel? Oddly, it didn't matter, but he must show it to his editor right away.
"I finished on your ankle!" he called, surprised by a boyishness in the tone of his voice.
"Isn't that great! Now what?" She sat up, hands childishly spread out in the air so as not to smudge herself.
It struck him how strange it was that she was as ignorant of what had been written on her as a sheet of paper. "I could get you scanned, but I don't have a scanner. Otherwise, I could copy it on my laptop, but it'll take a while. I'm not a fast typist. I just hadn't thought of this... Unless I put you in a cab to my publisher," he joked. "But I'm only kidding. He might want some cuts."
They solved the problem by him standing behind her reading her back aloud while she sat typing on his laptop. They burst into laughter at the procedure from time to time. For the text on her front, she thought of having a full-length mirror to read from, but it would all be reversed. So he sat down in front of her and typed while she held the machine on her lap. When he had read down to her thighs, she had to stand so he could continue - until he was on the floor reading her calves and ankles.
Then he stood up and they looked deeply into each other's eyes for the first time. Then, possibly because they had done something so intimate, and so unthought of, they had no idea what to do next, and started to giggle and then collapsed from laughing, an infectious hysteria heaving their diaphragms until they had to lean their foreheads on the edge of the desk and not look at one another. Finally, he was able to say, "You're welcome to shower, if you like." And this for some reason rendered them screeching again, falling around with delicious helplessness.
Gasping, they slid to the floor and their laughter subsided. They lay side by side, filled with some unexpected childish knowledge of one another. Now they were quiet, still panting, lying face to face on his Oriental carpet.
"I guess I'll go, right?" she asked.
"How will you wash it off?" he asked, feeling an incomprehensible anxiety.
"Take a bath, I guess."
"But your back... "
"I know somebody who'll wash it."
"Who, a man?"
"No, a girl down the hall."
"But I'd rather nobody read it yet. I'm not really sure it's ready to publish, you know? Or for somebody to read it. I mean..." He was lurching about, looking for some reason to fend off the curiosity of this unknown back-washing girlfriend; or perhaps it was to preserve the privacy of his creation - God knew why, but he felt her body was still too personal for any stranger to look at. He raised himself up on one elbow. Her hair had spread out over the carpet. It was almost as if they had made love. "I can't let you out this way," he said.
"What do you mean?" There was a hopeful note in her voice.
"People who know us will recognise things about my wife in it. I'm not ready for that."
"Why'd you write it, then?"
"I just put it down raw and then I'd change some of it later. You can't go this way. I'll take a shower with you and scrub your back, OK?"
"OK, sure. But I didn't intend for anybody to read it," she said.
"I know, but I'll feel better if it's gone."
In the small metal shower stall, she seemed so immense that he started to tire after scrubbing her for a few minutes with his back brush. Carol washed her front, but he did the backs of her thighs, calves and ankles. And when she was clean, the water coursing down over her shoulders, he drew her to him. There was solid power in her body.
"Feeling better now?" she asked. He went abstract before this woman, the last vestiges of his brain slipping out of his skull and down into his groin.
Later, he wondered why making love to her under the stream of water was so easy and straightforward, while earlier, covered as she was with his words, the very thought of it was like penetrating thick brush and thorns. He wished he could have discussed this riddle with Lena. But of course that was out of the question, although he was not convinced it should be.
After he had helped dry Carol off, she slipped into her panties, bra and blouse and yanked up her skirt while he sat at the desk and opened a drawer and took out a chequebook. But she immediately touched his wrist.
"It's all right," she said. Her damp hair bespoke their intimacy, the fact that he had changed her.
"But I want to pay you."
"Not this time." An open shyness passed over her face at this perhaps unintended suggestion of her wish to return. "Maybe next time, if you want me again." And then she seemed alarmed by a new thought. "Or will you? I mean, you've done it, right?" Her earlier brashness was returning. "I guess you can't have a first time twice, right?" She laughed softly, but her eyes were imploring.
He stood up and moved in to kiss her goodbye, but she turned away slightly and he landed on her cheek. "I guess you're right," he said.
A certain hardness surfaced in her face now. "Then, look, maybe I'd better take the money."
"Right," he said. Reality is always such a relief, he thought, but why must it come with anger? He sat down and wrote a cheque and, with a twinge of shame, handed it to her.
She folded the cheque and stuck it in her purse. "This has been quite a day, hasn't it!" she yelled, and let out one of her horse laughs, startling him, for she had left off laughing like that since their initial moments as strangers. She's gone back to hunting deer now, he thought, and slogging through the tundra. After peeking out of concealment for a self-confident moment, she had scurried back in.
With Carol gone, he sat at his desk with his manuscript before him. Eighteen pages. His unfocused stare, his freshly washed body and spent force seemed to clarify and elevate him. He laid his palm on the pile of paper, thinking, I have dipped my toe over sanity's edge, so this had better be good. He rubbed his eyes and began to read his story when from far down below he heard the front door slam shut. Lena was home. Home with her face deeply wrinkled like a desiccated over-ripe pepper, her mouth drawn down, her breasts flat, the hateful brown nicotine smell on her breath. He was getting angry again, filling up with hate for her stubborn self-destruction.
Turning to his story, reading and re-reading it, he felt a terrible amazement that its sweet flood of sympathy and love for her was thriving in him even now, almost as though a very young and unmarked man had written it, a man imprisoned inside him, a free-singing poet whose spirit was as real and convincing as the waves of the sea. What if he tried to turn the story into a kind of paean to her as she once had been - would she recognise herself and be reconciled?
As he read, he saw how perfectly beautiful and poetic she still was in some buried centre of his mind, and remembered how merely waking with her in the mornings had once filled him with happiness and purpose. Looking up from the manuscript to stare out across the barren rooftops, he felt a pang for Carol, whose brutally young presence was still vibrating in the room, and he wanted her to return maybe one more time so that he could write on her tight skin again and perhaps dredge up some other innocent thing that might be shivering in the darkness inside him, some remnant of love so terrified of coming out that it seemed to have disappeared - taking with it his art.
· Arthur Miller was born in New York in 1915, and began writing as a student at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons, Death Of A Salesman (for which he won a Pulitzer) and The Crucible; he has also written two novels, Focus and The Misfits, and a short story collection, Homely Girl, A Life.
