What's Become of Your Creature?

A Girl, a Gay, Pretty and Sullen Girl with full marks for both sweetness and cruelty. When he looked in her desk for cigarettes, there was a silken pile of panties folded like flowers in the drawer, perfumed like flowers, dizzying him with the joy of springtime. When she put on a pair of them, suddenly filling out the tiny petals of cloth in two paired buds, it was as if the sun had forced a flower into delicate Easter bloom. Oh he needed her, loved her, and so for honor to them both, let us tell the truth, as straight as the truth comes.

He taught one class at Western Reserve University just at the geological beginnings of the Allegheny Mountains in the city of Cleveland, Ohio – an abrupt slope after industrial plains. He told poetry students where Keats got his ideas (out of his head) and where Hart Crane got his (straight from his noodle). And why. And what therefore happened in the abstract line, "That is all we know on earth, and all we need to know." He, Frank Curtiss, about 30, making a living one way and another, was very inspiring on the subject of eternal beauty and truth, urns, Popocatepetl, Sunday Morning Apples, etcetera; also very unhappily married.

Until Lenka, having registered late, entered both his class and his life with all those aforementioned desperately particular flowertime devotions. She seemed to have been bleached by centuries of the fierce cold Finnish sun – transparent skin showing blue veins on her forehead and pink capillaries on her cheeks, thick wisps of hair so blonde it was almost white, the bluest eyes with a brush of darkened lash above them and a savant use of crayon at the outer corners. She had a pouting mouth, she lazily and insolently strolled to her seat putting on black shell glasses to examine him, she opened a frayed, thickly used spiral notebook. She turned out to be 22 years old and addicted to occasional efforts at gathering a bachelor's degree by evening classes.

During the first few meetings of the class, nothing much happened to Frank besides an exaggerated exaltation of commentary on:

But with the inundation of the eyes What rocky heart to water will not wear?

Shakespeare was right: his heart dashed like water under her eyes. But he still had rocks in his head. Lenka stared at him, at a transparent, fidgety, too brilliantly nervous Mr. Curtiss, looked right through him with those enormous pale eyes, with that lipsticked mouth doing a lot of thinking about Frank Curtiss as he dissolved into foam and spray, with her vaguely pedantic heavy horn glasses being put on three or four times an hour. She bent her head to touch pencil to notebook, and smiled.

This did Frank Curtiss both harm and good at home. Good because it quickened his pulse, challenged his habitual faith that spring really must follow the dismal Cleveland winter under smoky, purple-gray, fouled industrial skies (at last the salted slush rustles into sewers, March scours the blue of heaven, sun tempts the folded leaves and forces open the bulbs in the gardens of the monkey house near University Circle); giving strength, it did him good in his private winter at home; and harm because it diminished his ability for loyal compromise in the hopeless bickerings, failures, discontents, silent starings over breakfast with his wife. Perhaps that was really harm and perhaps not.

Once Lenka smiled at him, for him, it seemed, for the first time. He had hurried through a late March snowfall and, swinging brief case, wearing his old paratroop boots, dressed for the weather, there was a crust of white like a monk's cowl on his head. He brushed it off; light crash of snow to floor; meltings on his neck; wet hair flung back with impatient hand; Lenka smiled. He saw small white front teeth, very close, one of them just slightly wedged forward. "What's become of your creature," Frank asked, "in the transparent swirls/Where her heart plunged her?"

"I left the book at home," complained a serious lady getting extra credit for her teaching certificate.

"Look on with Miss Kuwaila, please. Jostled by the hurrying current ... This is about a trout. Now why does the trout, a mere fish – –?" But he was confused, inspired, dizzied by the beauty of Lenka's wedged-forward tooth, and so said, "Let me give you the sound of the original. Que devient votre creature dans les orages transparents on son coeur la precipita?"

The schoolteacher who had forgotten her book raised her hand as if she knew the answer. Turned out that she only wanted to declare that the lines lost a great deal in translation, so why bother? Jostled by the hurrying current, gravier ou balbutie la barque, her heart had plunged her to a compelling chauvinism about English language stuff, Americanotype sublimities.

Again Miss Kuwaila smiled! Lenka could be delighted!

By regulation, of course, such a class included conference time. Lenka wrote poetry and also what she called – until he taught her better – "poetic prose." He forgave her:

Love's wild beast, truth in the sword, Self-stabbing couple whom we isolate . . .

And so on; ouch. Enough of that much-tamed beast, the stainless steel sword which needs frequent sharpening, that repetitious, myopic couple. Better she should dance, and in fact, she danced. She made her living by teaching modern dance to the children of Shaker Heights; training accounted partly for the angle of her chin which meant pride to Frank Curtiss (his wife was abysmally discouraged, querulous); dancing and endowment accounted for the fine curve of calf into knee, then tuck and dip, then high and healthy sweep of behind. Don't forget ankle – slim it was. Don't forget high-arched foot. Now take mind off leg. She wore honest blouses, top button undone, second about to be, but she was really reluctant at this moment to show him her poetry, though Frank asked most sincerely (secretly relieved: he was spoiled by much art and even Lascivia, the midnight angel of sweet lust herself, would have suffered if she wrote verse-to-comb-the-libido-by or breathless doggerel or random-focused Eliotic pretension). Lenka liked dancing, however, she liked jazz, she liked jazz people in Cleveland and hung around. "When I was 16 I had long hair, I pulled it back and they thought I was older. I sat in on my first afterhours session when I was – no, 15. I think – hair in a bun, dimestore earrings, very cool."

In music she liked Lennie Tristano, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and of course The Bird. Since Frank was ignorant in the matter, he only blinked to indicate piety. She went as far out toward the commercial as admitting that she could listen to Kai Winding, pass the time anyway, also Bartók, Dessau, Carl Orff. No, she would never be caught writing Eliot's last-gasp-of-Western-culture harangue or boyish Auden's plaint for Demo-Christian politics. Dylan Thomas was the great menace to a postwar adolescent who had gone to after-hours sessions with her copy of James Truslow Adams under her arm, revised 1948, new Questions for Study.

After the class, about 10 o'clock in the evening, Frank hurried straight home in the hope that some miracle had been worked in his absence, his wife had come to love him. Not this time. Another time? Hope had been his habit (flute music, dawn-rising, confidence that orange juice would always taste good); now duplicity also became his habit – he took coffee with Lenka before class in the early evening. They parted; they came to class separately and he called her Miss Kuwaila, though it was Lenka as they huddled warming over their coffee. She did not use his name.

After the first accidental meeting and invitation, they avoided meeting by design. They just went to the same little shop up the hill in Little Italy by accident at the same time, muttered greetings, sat down – soon stopped muttering. Slightly past the university zone, the privacy of this place cost them a brisk walk. Frank began gradually to feel that he was not a stick, a pruned twig, a failed romantic adolescent: he could be a successful romantic adolescent, meaning something to someone besides himself. He bounced on the balls of his feet as he swung back down the hill. Once an oddly exciting, disturbing event took place: she met him for coffee, they separated as usual, but she did not come to class. That was on a Tuesday. On Thursday he demanded, "What happened?"

"Oh, you know ... something came up."

She cocked her head, quizzical. Say more, claim rights, she seemed to be challenging him.

Jealousy meant private, most secret reasurrance: he felt a quick and unhabitual liveliness despite his wife. A roller-coaster thrill of dread and rising release; prickly sweat breaking out along his newly shaved jaw. Felt! He was jealous of the something which came up. but first she had met him anyway in Little Italy – invaded he was by rapid hurt and stubborn hope, by these things yearning toward a prideful chin, an awkward-graceful dancer's walk, her small, fresh-lipped mouth. He asked her to meet him for lunch the next day.

"Why not?" she asked. She opened her eyes very wide, started briefly at the hat on the rack at the next booth, saw no reason why not. "Yes," she said.

Since they had always met at night, her daytime fragrance and colors astonished him, delighted – the rich blue within her pale skin, the lemon shadings of her hair, she smelled different – cologne rather than the lightly astringent perfume to which she had accustomed him. Lord knows he did not need novelty: it merely pitched him higher. With an effort he stopped fiddling, put his pen back in his pocket.

She told him first about her friends, local musicians, dancers, oddball types, and then cautiously, without the habit of confiding – subtle tribute to him – about her own life. She had made her way from a farm near Elyria, leaving her parents firmly behind; she had made her own life, her own living, since she (continued on page 32) Your Creature (continued from page 22) was 17; she was, she supposed, "a permanent student – very treacherous – interested in too many things."

He smiled tolerantly. The jitters let up. "You're rather young to worry about it. Why should you feel out of place in school? You're just at the age when the mob graduates."

"I feel older, Frank," she said.

It was the first time she had used his name. Like a spill of warm honey on his tongue – Lenka, he wanted to say. It was the first certainty that her little stirrings under the table as they drank coffee, her brusque, bumping, bumping motions against him when they walked, were absolutely not accident. Gravity brought them colliding together, brushing, touching away. After class he told her he was keeping that book for her — please come along. He had an office and a key to the building, which was dark, almost empty at this hour. They entered, they went down the hall without lighting, he shut the door to his office, he still did not need light. April. Night birds sleepily twittering in the tree at the window. He turned, she turned, they kissed.

His heart thumped like a fish on a drum. Even through the coats they both were wearing she could feel his heart. She laughed, low and thrilled; she was perfectly at ease, his teacher now; she put her hand over his heart on the coat as if to catch the fish and squeeze it in her fingers. "You're frightened!" she said, and more gently, "don't be."

"I never kissed," he said, "anyone else ... I mean since I was married."

She put her face up to his, pressing her hand against his heart through the coat. Again her mouth asked his to search it while she held up his heart, calmed it.

"But you know," she said.

It is not as if they let their clothes fall and made love then and there, with muffled cries, on the dusty floor of an overheated college office at night, hastily plucking at each other, anguished, grappling, tender, thrusting, greedy. No. She was not that sort of girl. She insisted that first they go for a walk outside in the spring evening. The thumping fish of his heart was eased.

From fresh air, from deep breathing of budded April trees and crisp thickly tended grass, out of silent strolling by Lenka's side at night, he felt eased and content. Now they did not need to speak. They returned to his office. She was that kind of girl, intelligent and purposeful. The building was deserted, and anyway, the watchman, who liked to sit on his stool and contemplate his arthritis, never bothered faculty members working late. But after locking the door, Lenka also leaned a chair against the knob in case some joker came along with a pass key. She wanted no interfering fantasies for that first time. Playful, delighted, breathless, but thinking hard.

• • •

Frank Curtiss found his late return home that night surprisingly uncomplicated. His wife assumed that he had merely taken a couple of drinks. No marks showed, no teeth, bruise, or joy interrupted his wife's dulled recognition of him. In fact, his controlled elation, his satisfaction and triumph, brought the unpredicted bonus of an immediate easing of his trouble at home. Thanks to Lenka, his wife did not grate his own edginess; she too climbed off the razor blade on which they had been sitting in slashed togetherness. His own rebirth seemed to provide a fresh resource for both of them. Since he was able to put up with her, his wife let up on him for a time. Success to the successful, he thought, ease to the easeful! How beautiful to the mind is the Christian ethic, and how helpless before the fact of a struggling soul! Far from inheriting the earth, the meek get only muck. Stunned by time, the lamb trots where it's pushed, sheepishly.

Inconsistent as the mind of a lover, however, it turned out that unsheepish Lenka, that creature of brave yielding beauty, also had her troubles. Frank was not accustomed to the calm and cool varieties of wildness. At 20 she had been sent to Europe to have her baby – "a public man" was all she would say about the father; Frank found the remark cryptic, unyielding. She had refused an abortion, but in Europe she had sickened, the baby had been taken from her dead – "I saw it, he looked alive, I didn't believe the doctor, I screamed and screamed and they put me to sleep again"; and now she could never have a child. This, she understood herself, had something to do with the intensity of dance study, poetry study, art chasing of several sorts.

Cunning and pity filled Frank's heart. Once more he suffered that wild thumping, as if the heart might crunch his ribs. This time Lenka did not notice; she was telling the truth about how it was before she knew him, and so his heart's labor could not now concern her. "I'll miss it more later," she remarked. "I always wanted a child. I try not to think about it. At least I won't let myself take dogs, cats, parakeets, you know. I'll make it work for me. I do dance calisthenics when I feel bad." Then she folded her hands, fell silent, fluttered her thick pale lashes, was a girl again.

In Frank's heart cunning and pity. Pity for this troubled lovely creature who looked so pure and innocent, who surely was. Cunning because he need never worry about pregnancy. (This had bothered him. He suffered the usual fears of retribution.) "Lenka dearest," he said.

"That's all right. No need to feel anything. Want to see how I can stand with my foot higher than my head?"

They were in her room. Confused by confession he too had talked about trouble in love. He got up to cross the lamplit space for a cigarette; then it was that he opened her drawer as she watched, in unconscious confirmation of intimacy, and saw the sheaves of tiny folded panties; no cigarettes in that drawer; naked, he started across the room again, and caught her eyes on him, and the pity and the cunning and the pride at his ease and at her watching his recently slimmed middle (surprise! he was just strolling naked here) and her own curled loving body part under the sheets, all these matters were brought together; her eyes shut, her teeth showed as he rapidly returned to her; perhaps she smiled because she remembered his timid and boyish heart's pounding of a few weeks before; now he brazenly strolled, sprang flopping, laughing across the bed. They cleaved together.

• • •

Their meetings became more purposeful, deeper in pleasure and trouble. Once he waited 15 minutes in the corner of the park which, by May, was their property forever. He was worried; time problems of married men. Then he heard her sandals slapping the pavement, she was running, he saw her, running; she stopped abashed before him, blushing, murmuring, "I was afraid you wouldn't wait." He took her in his arms in the fading afternoon light, he kissed away the little beads of perspiration on her upper lip. They stood kissing, leaning, making passionate walking steps against each other, that vain effort to disappear into each other's bodies. He smelled her sweetness and heat and wanted to sink his arm into her back, stroking the curve, the yearning and folding into him.

But he saw his watch as he kissed her. "Later," he said. "Stay home. I'll come by your place."

"Oh promise, Frank."

"Of course. Don't worry. I'll manage."

It was not so easy. When he got home he found his wife worn and jittery, their child had an upset stomach: "Four times this afternoon," his wife said. But it was the heat, four wasn't too terribly many, she had given him paregoric and Kaopectate already. No, what was on her mind was a telephone call, an anonymous warning: "Do you want to know where to find your husband at this (continued on page 40)

Your Creature (continued from page 32)minute?" Nothing more; just that and click.

"Students," Frank said, his heart sinking. "You deal with crackpots at a city institution, especially evening classes. Happens to everybody. Remember when Mel Bargin had that siege of letters?"

She was convinced, or worn out, or didn't care. Anyway, he was home in time for supper. They ate the silent meal of too many quarrels and the albandonment of hope. Frank knew that he would have to wait until she fell asleep before he took his habitual long walk.

She slept; he walked. Lenka lived on the bottom floor of a converted mansion. He peeked through the window. She had set up an easel and had been working in charcoal, a lamp was on, but she lay breathing gently across the bed, fully dressed, even shoes, the garter belt showed under the sprawled, slipped skirt. He tapped at the window. It was after midnight and the street deserted. She got up blinking, pouting, peered out to him: and oh then her beautiful smile on her beautiful pout and she opened the window.

Later he warned her of spies, his enemies or hers, most likely hers. She frowned, turned tense and worried – that was why he had waited to tell her. She admitted that she was the sort of girl who might have vengeful suitors lurking about. Covertly thrilled, forbidding this excitement, Frank rolled over and faced the window: Could someone have peeked at them under the drawn shade? She sighed. "Maybe it's my fault," she suggested, "breaking all the rules."

"Oh no!" And he thought: it's I who break the rules, crawling through a window for love like a burglar, and I hold on to my son and hope for my wife when it's hopeless.

"I guess both of us," she admitted softly, fairly.

But now they would have to be very careful. Frank could not be seen with her; they met in the park, in far corners of the city, or, most of the time, simply in her room. They sketched each other; they smoked, read, told each other stories; they made love. Frank found himself wanting to talk about his son, but bit his tongue. Self-conscious, self-judging. "Don't be frightened," she said more than once. Although almost 10 years older than Lenka, he came to think of her as wise and anciently mysterious within the desperate yearning gift of herself, the will to be his of her open and lovely body. She had the patience of confident love.

Despite the secret isolation of their life together, the close confinement to odd places, then to her room, then, toward the end of the spring, in a rising pitch of indulgence and claim, to her bed, he had never considered his rivals. She had no right to be jealous of his wife; he had no right to think of Lenka away from him with others. The telephone call to his wife brought the others to mind. He asked questions; she was reticent, unspecific. A few words about her mother and father, the farm, a brother who worked it; vagueness about her friends – he knew none of them – though sometimes a knock would come at the door and they would lie still, listening to the repeated knock, the slow steps away, the outer door slamming. He was marvelously flattered by her refusal to answer the telephone. Their time together was simply theirs. Though girlishly hurt that he would go no place with her, she understood. She proposed a backroom jazz session on the West Side where he could not possibly meet anyone who knew him. He was too cautious. He tried to complete his knowledge of her by looking up her records under camouflage of his faculty credentials. Greedily he studied her previous addresses, the maiden name of her mother, full of Ks, the solemn statement she had made on her first application. Her I.Q. score was extraordinarily high; this reassured him because he wondered if she had simply cast a spell over him – to some questions she merely answered with a stare. No, she was a human girl creature, not a witch. She had lazy grades, brilliant sometimes, sometimes mediocre. She was careful about picking up graduation credits. He felt silly when he handed her folder back to the secretary. "Hm, hm, yes indeed. Very interesting. Thank you."

There is a time in every man's life when he can do anything. It was this time in the life of Frank Curtiss. Despair with his wife had given up to deep gratification with a beautiful girl; he even did better at home; matters cooled and calmed; his work went well; he hardly needed sleep and did not suffer his usual rose fever during the spring he knew Lenka. No sniffles, no pink eyes. Expanded breathing, sharp sight. Of the occasional headache of fatigue and excess he was cured by the touch of her hand, her welcome when he came smiling, showing teeth, through her window. Slipping through, welcomed, he made love to her with the heavily settled industrial window grit still on his hands until it mingled with the secretions of love and summer – paste, caresses, perfume. Later he wrung his hands in soap, hot water, soap again, then cold water, in a gesture like expiation, rinsing away her smells, but soon came aware that this was not guilt – he found the scrubbing and splashing very fine to his summery blood. He did not think of the future; he merely lived and believed himself in love, in a kind of love, surprised by love's surprises, acquiescing.

Since he adored his son, whom we leave absent from this history, he could not imagine dissolving his home; but he thought: I'll wait, I'll see. In the mean-time, I'll ride. Things were going too well to be interrupted by dreams of perfection. There is no perfection, anyway, in an imperfect world (philosophy of adultery); the unhappy husband has the right to save himself (more philosophy for adulteres); life on earth means a quest for the absolute, compromise, violation, tribute, delight in apples, worms, indigestion, purest love, gossip, peeking apes, donkeys, creeps, squares (still more philosophy, poetry, grand hysteria); enough! thought Frank Curtiss. He had a son, Lenka could give him no child, and anyway he had a son. One last time, curled against him, Lenka murmured their password, "Don't be frightened, darling."

He began to laugh in the easy sprawl of his body, remembering the foolish creature he had recently been. "Frightened?" he asked, remembering mightily. Once weak and strict, now he floated down the river, agile, hale and strong. Or so Frank Curtiss seemed to Frank Curtiss. And he laughed, prospering, holding her away and cupping her gratified breasts which had changed, just as his body had, during the past months. "But I'm not frightened any more," he said.

He stopped laughing and very seriously, solemnly, thanked her for saving his life.

"I make you happy, don't I?" she asked. She had the sort of pale and delicate skin which flames at the first touch of a man's beard. With her downcast eyes, it gave her a perpetually astonished blush as they said goodbye. "Don't I make you happy, Frank? Oh I do!"

She did; the god of judgment had become an angel of mercy – had sent unmerited joy. No, he decided, everyone deserves to be able to carry a tune, find that wanton flush on a girl's cheeks, recall sweet love for a moment in the morning before going about the work of the day. "Oh I do love making you happy," – she couldn't say it enough. He promised that it was the final truth and she should know it. Flowers, rebirth, ripening gourds, purity of delight.

It was therefore a considerable surprise to go home later and find a new lock on the door, a note from his wife warning him not to try to enter, and his clothes thrown into hampers on the porch. It shocked him that she had not even bothered to put out a suitcase for his use. In this numbed state he telephoned her from the gas station at the corner. It turned out that she had prepared (continued on page 58) Your Creature (continued from page 40) rather carefully. She had both keys to their car in her possession and advised him to take a taxi someplace, away. She suggested that he use the opportunity to spend a whole night with Lenka Kuwaila and see how he liked it. She remarked that she did not care to speak with him at all and that further discussions could be held through the intermediary of her lawyer. She gave him the lawyer's name and told him to look up the number himself. She paused before saying goodbye and added, "I waited until you finished final exams and you won't have to face so many people over the summer. I thought that was pretty considerate of me." She had also left about five dollars in their joint checking account.

He spent the night in confusion at a friend's house. For the first time he felt exhausted by his secret lovemaking with Lenka: he had left her with her smell still on his hands and come back to this news; there was an ache in his loins and a triangle of lead in his belly. It turned out that his wife had exact information about his connection with Lenka, dates and times and other, terribly intimate details. When her lawyer confronted him, he dully submitted, denied nothing, agreed to everything. Greater than the shock of his wife's action was his shock about the letters she had received. Lenka had simply recounted everything in tormenting detail, with obscene precision. He felt a lingering tenderness for his wife because of the jealously she must have suffered, but whatever this secret suffering, it had now congealed to a buzzing, busy hatred and cold vengefulnes which deprived him even of his sympathy for her. He was stripped bare.

Lenka left for New York without seeing him after his anguished telephone call to her: "Why? Why? Why did you have to do it that way, Lenka? Can't you see how it destroys everything between us, even the past?"

"I don't care about memories. What's over means nothing. Over. You didn't want to do more than crawl through my window a couple times a week ––"

"But to write to her like that – what meant – how – –"

"You cared more about a cold bitch than you cared for me. Just because you had a child."

"Why, why?"

She hung up on him.

He stood shrugging at the telephone. Women were hanging up on him all over the world. He was disconnected. Maybe it was really he, Frank Curtiss, they were hanging up on. He went on shrugging; it was a nervous twitch, a shaking-off-the-burdens tic.

Here we need not detail the prolonged anguish of a divorce when there is a child, when there has been a habit of suffering and also some distant memory of joy (this only increases bitterness and determination to hurt). He survived in a repture of numbness, like a mouse in a paw. His wife tried to set rules about visiting their child; he raged and cursed her. But finally he saw her coolly from a distance, he saw her as impossible, for years she had been a step-wife to him. He was grateful to Lenka for the brutal surgery she had performed; the operation was bloody, but the patient survived. Things were arranged about his boy; he found a new job; he went to New York; a year passed. Where it went, he did not know, but now he considered himself a brilliantly wise 22 years old. He had been 21 when he married; the next years were poisoned by enough misery so that he wanted to leave them out; his year of liberation made him now 22. This was mainly a joke, and he had a fresh sprout of gray hair in his thick cropped black thatch, but the world seemed to be on his side once more.

He was hungry, he ate, he had enough money to invite girls for dinner, he ate voraciously, explaining everything, enticing them on long walks through New York, exciting them with his tourist's freshness of joy in the great city. He found a girl to join him in biting into an apple, sucking the sweet juice of it at dawn, finally kissing in good friendship and turning on their sides to sleep. Life went on with the freshness of the busy mornings and the hesitating nightfalls of Manhattan. He found a good job writing coy letters for a chain of magazines, the sort that are printed to look as if they are typed: "You may have neglected to open our first bill. We know that you are a busy and successful man, but remember! The workman is worthy of his hire! And we here at Daytime Magazine consider our publication..." He had no automobile because of the responsibilities of parking, but could afford taxis (the workman was worthy of his hire). He felt free. He didn't even have a cold for two years after he seperated from his wife: every change seemed to cure him of something. He threw away his bottle of aspirins. His married vision of himself as a heavy, shaggy, weary buffalo, head low and muzzle hurt, gave way to another image – he was lean, his posture was good, he was an agile bucko. When his former wife remarried, his last vestige of guilt disappeared. Free, free. He played badminton twice a week with a French girl who pronounced it "baddming-tonn." Free and agile. "I'd never have matured otherwise," he solemnly told his friend.

"You theenk too motch," she answered.

So finally he decided to telephone Lenka, though his little French friend advised him that this was as bad as thinking. Just curiosity about how she was making out, he promised himself. ("Don't be frightened, darling..." And how she had buttered toast for him, making coffee on a hotplate. And the smell of her perfume when she had run toward him in the park, breathless at being late. "I make you happy, don't I?")

But after he told her how long he had been in New York, she said that she was not interested in seeing him.

"I held a grudge, you can understand that," he said. "I still think you were very wrong, but I'm grateful anyway. It worked out for the best."

"And it's over," she said. She told him that she had an official friend, a drummer with a well-known advanced jazz combo. She named him with pride. Frank asked later and discovered that her friend was known as "the Unholy Wazuli" – a gifted wildman with two breakdowns and a convication for possession of heroin in his curriculum vitae. He claimed to blow finer drum under the hooves of horse, but others disputed the argument.

Disturbed by her refusal to see him, faintly jealous of the Unholy Wazuli, Frank bothered the friend who knew her. "Why do you want to mess with her more? She must be crazy."

"Yes, but I just want to talk with her – –"

"To do what she did to you is plain nutty, pal."

"Yes, nutty, sure. But she cared for me." This is very important to all men, that a lovely girl cares, and especially an unhappily married man will forgive anything for love, even a good dose of nuttines. The man unhappy in marriage may seem merely somber, but he is also crazy. Frank had believed that Lenka cared for him.

Now, however, Frank was enjoying non-conjugal bliss in New York, and although a certain sideways questioning look while buttering toast meant girl to him, and a certain springtime slap of sandals on the pavement made his breath catch hard, his life went on without much thought of Lenka. One spring day, now two years after he had first met her, he was strolling through Washington Square when he saw a girl walking ahead and he thought first of toast, and then, recognizing the tilt of her walk, yes, this time it really was Lenka. He had an hour before dinner. Without considering it further, he ran up to her, first closely studying her because he did not trust himself to see anything but her (continued on page 84) Your Creature (continued from page 58) eyes when her eyes met his. She was still very pretty, but she showed early aging, a new fleshiness at her upper arms and a slight thickening of the legs, and when he said, "Hello, Lenka," and she turned, he saw the fine lines about her pale eyes.

"Well hello, Frank".

She waited coolly to see if he were merely greeting her. Before he lost himself in her, the thought came that she was paying the price for her ancient fragility, which had given her an almost adolescent grace: now she bore some unhealthy weight; she looked 10 years older already. "You want to have some coffee?"

"Well, you know. No man, no."

"What then?"

She smiled, showing her fine teeth, and consciously imitated someone else: "If I could have my druthers, I'd druther have a drink."

"Sure, let's go." And he hurried her by the arm. He was shocked because one of her front teeth was missing, and it gave the smile a wild blackness, again breaking the seamless dancer's grace which he remembered.

They talked; she recited as if he were an elocution teacher and she were doing her lesson. She was still with her Unholy Wazuli. He had cut a great record, more than one, but you know, people put him down. Hard to get the gig when people put you down. The nut on his habit was 15 dollars a day now. He couldn't make it by himself no way. It's no ball, a habit – people on the outside don't dig one bit – it's something to do – you know.

He did not know. Very squarely he asked: "Tell me what's bothering you, Lenka."

"A nut of 15 a day."

"Explain."

"Well, you know . . ." Her man wanted her to work to support his habit.

"What kind of work?"

She shrugged. "Well, you know, man."

He was deeply shocked. "Don't! Please don't!" he gasped, shouted. He drew back from his own excitement, ashamed at how it might look, and tried to be smart, a man of the world, her way, and at the same time trying to make her feel his way about it. He said, "Lenka, promise. You probably think I'm still mad at you – –"

"You want to put me down, man."

"I don't any more, Lenka. It's over now, past."

She smiled, showing the black place in her teeth. It was what she had said. What's over is over. What happens last night is dead.

"OK. But I still care about you, Lenka. Promise you won't do that? God! To buy heroin!"

"It's usually why girls do it," she said. "I know lots of girls, that's how they join up – –"

"Promise!"

"That's how they get in The Life."

"Promise you won't!"

She only shrugged and thanked him for the drink. He asked if she would like to meet him again soon. She smiled thinly and said, well, her friend was jealous. He remarked that this jealousy did not seem to go with the work he had in mind for her. "Well," she said, "you know."

Manhattan is very large, but sometimes far galaxies engage, interlock. Frank was not certain how it happened: he found himself with friends in the jazz world. The hipster bit, as they said, was very big that year. He knew his way around. The Wazuli was a famous character, "a crazy big talent, impossible," Larry Arnold, an editor of Down Beat, told him. They also knew about Lenka, though all they said was, "Cute. Unholy's chick." Was she with him, Frank wondered, confiding, under his conditions? Larry explained, "It ain't the old days, mon. America has really changed in this here regard – you dig like Riesman, Kinsey, Fromm, those cats? A girl can't just patrol, just sell the basic product. Sex and air are but I mean free, mon. It's the specialties pays off now. When you're tired of air, you want to be gassed."

Frank was thinking: she called it The Life.

"She's just an unusually stacked chick is all I meant," Larry said out of pity for his friend's troubled frown. He took the black line between the eyes for jealousy, when everyone but a hipster knows that jealousy is a butt in the stomach and bile in the cheeks. "Besides, I got no news of her – just the Wazuli's chick is all I hear, and he's banned from Manhattan clubs. Tried to play the Embers stoned out of his head. Park Department, Hon. Robert Mosessan, Commissioner-san, picked him up for stepping on the grass. Joke. Yok yok. Whyncha laugh with me, Mister Shelley?"

Frank fought down his imagination of her cool pale dancer's beauty being used in that way, the Finnish farm girl from Ohio with the I.Q. of 155 ... He wondered if she had taken to horse herself. Someone who seemed to notice better than most said that there was no space in her teeth. She must have had money to get it fixed. She had seemed to lack vanity about it (and he recalled the confident disorder of her closet in Cleveland, the smell of her perfume and the bending body, dressing with her back to the mirror on the door).

Another year passed. Frank rarely thought of Lenka, though she was a part of his blood, his suspicions, and his tenderness with girls, and when he found himself liking a girl, he found himself reminded of Lenka's ways – tilted chin, curve of back, lazy easy dancer's walk. He now found one whom he liked very much and he was about to try marriage again, with hope. Settled in New York, his telephone number was in the book. And Lenka looked it up and called.

She asked if he would meet her. It was important. He agreed and named places, but to each she said, "No, not there. I don't make that scene." Finally she said, "Home all afternoon."

He was embarrassed. "Look, I'd rather meet you someplace else. How about under the Washington Square arch?"

"Well Christ Almighty," she said. Paused. "Well, all right."

They met. She gave him a wan smile. She was not wearing lipstick: he had forgotten how her paleness needed the blatant red of lipstick, except when she tanned in June. But the tooth had been expertly replaced, and apart from a peculiar stiffness of her face, the cautiousness of fatigue, she was a girl to make men turn around, shake their heads, and ask themselves if maybe. They strolled; she talked vaguely of having broken with the Wazuli – "and all that scene, you know, man" – and trying to write.

"How are you making a living?"

"I said I write, man."

"You're publishing things? What?"

"I wrote that article on hypnotism, you know." (He did not know – how could he?) "You know I left it there at that magazine. I never read the magazine so how should I know what they did with it?"

At last, more and more uneasy, wanting to call his girl, thinking they should set the date for soon, he demanded bluntly, "I didn't think you really wanted to see me. What's on your mind?"

"I got these letters from your wife," she said.

"What? My wife? You mean my former. You mean she wrote to you? Lately?"

"Yes, sure, didn't she tell you?"

This exasperated Frank. Since he went frequently to Cleveland to see his boy, he had frequently to see his former wife and he hoped for level dealings with her after all this time. He didn't like the idea of pen-pal exchanges between Lenka and her, those two distant chums.

"I'm worried about her," Lenka was saying. "That's why I thought you should pick up on these letters, see. You should fall up and look them over, you think?"

Yes, he thought. They walked across to her apartment on Christopher Street, a hall smelling of cat and a lazy custodian, mailboxes unmarked and flapping open, the locks broken. Lenka lived on the top floor. "I like air," she said vaguely, "I don't mind the walkup." She liked air, but the windows were shut and there was a choke of attic heat, close, hot, unclean. She called the place her pad and she actually had one – a thin mattress on the floor, with a cotton spread covering it, fresh from the laundromat but unironed, and orangish foam-rubber fat peeking at one corner. He remembered once making love to her and the sudden shock of four paws, a jealous cat leaping onto his back. She still had cats, but different ones, a pair of kittens. He wondered if the Unholy Wazuli and the temporary visitors had minded the cats. Lenka was moving against him, putting her head against his chest, arms limp, not moving now.

Frank stepped away. "Those letters."

Pouting, she went to a cardtable and looked through a pile of papers, old copies of the Times, Down Beat, Variety, a row of paperback books leaning against the wall. A split-spined copy of Zen Archery had a letter marking her place, but Frank would have recognized the handwriting. This was Lenka's hand – an unmailed letter.

She shrugged. "I guess I threw them away. I kept them around, but I was cleaning up . . ."

He wanted to laugh at the trivial, stupid, insane lie. Of course there were no letters: his former wife was as done with him as he was done with her. What possible advantage could Lenka gain in making a fool of him like this?

She may have invented a foolish lie, but she recognized the glare of contempt on his face, and in her life of now a quarter of a century, she had learned only one way to answer the judgment of men. She slid against him, on her face a mixture of coyness and dread, a flirtatious halfsmile, a slinking catlike practiced leaning against him, and her eyes filled with tears as she shut them, tears balancing on the wetted lashes, slipping down her cheeks. "Frank," she said haltingly. "I stopped remembering for a long time, I don't know, things were difficult, I thought you were too angry . . . But I've been remembering . . . That's why . . . Forgive . . ."

He put his arms around her, held her to him, but with confusion more than either amorousness or tenderness. He stretched, feeling her light hair against his chin, looking out over the small hot gray-and-brown room. There was a pile of 45-speed records: jazz. Probably the Wazuli's legacy. She lay her head against his chest and waited, but waited cunningly, her body rising and falling with exaggerated breath, fitting itself against his. He felt desire for her. Then he thought of the letters she had written to his wife, and the letters she had just now lied about, and suddenly, as he held her, she had turned her head up and wanted to be kissed, and his most vivid fantasy was this one: She was unclean. His uncurbed dread ran toward a muddle – deceit, illness, secret pity, slime, retribution. Not knowing what he feared, he thought only: filth, cunning, running filth, blotches, sores. Because he could not bear her sorrows, he thought: Deceit and cunning and disease! Her lips came open, slightly wetted, and her breathing stirred imperatively on his face. She was rubbing up against him, trying to make him kiss her, because it was another trick, like writing to his wife, like telling him so many lies; yet as before in Cleveland, she really wanted someone, wanted him, wanted the good comfort of love; and she also wanted to be kissed because she had a disease to give him.

He pulled away before their mouths touched; her nails clawed along his arm, shredding skin; he fled, hearing her sobs at the open door as he careened down the infected stairs and onto the free air of the street.

This was already long past the end, of course. But logic does not apply when a needful man has received love – even false comfort, false love. One more time, with the permission of his new wife, Frank telephoned to find out – what? How she was. He received the crisp mechanical answer: "The number you have called is not a working number. This is a recorded announcement. The number you have called is not a working number. This is a recorded . . ."

It would be useless to go to her apartment, but he went anyway, and then to the post office: but no place, no way, was he able to find a forwarding address. She was gone. Finally she had disappeared from his earth.

His wife, who was now pregnant, shrugged with a certain amount of satisfaction and relief. He kissed her, grateful because she had been easy on him about Lenka. "But she did me a favor, Frank!" – the sweet logic of the practical wife. "Otherwise you might still be in Cleveland. Rub my back, will you? No, just hold me."

On the side of life, he was stroking and comforting this dear person who carried his child; she lay her head against his shoulder with a worn, anxious smile; there were only a few more weeks to wait. But as he touched his lips to her hair, lightly moved his lips on her forehead, he could hear the angel on the other side of oblivion questioning that other girl, who bore no mark or sign of him: "Lenka Kuwaila, what about Frank Curtiss?"

And she rendered her verdict: "Well, you know . . ."