The Golden Madonna

She led him into a room with a high, paneled ceiling, talking all the while, questioning him closely. How long would he be in London? Why was he alone, hadn't he mentioned he would bring a friend? Alexander tried to answer her questions politely but heard his voice go vague and flat. He resented being here, with his aunt. He was 45 minutes late because the streets in this part of the city were so strangely marked, changing names every block; the humiliation of being lost several times was still with him. "Weren't you going to bring a friend with you...?" Eunice asked.

"She decided not to come."

"I'm sorry ...."

Though she looked at him as if hoping for an explanation, he said nothing. He was still nervous and irritable from being lost half a dozen times. And he resented being here, visiting his aunt Eunice, whom he didn't know at all and had not even seen for six or seven years. Frankly, he hardly recognized her. While she chattered and fussed over him he recalled, painfully, his girl back at the hotel, Marian, saying She's your aunt, I don't want to meet her after all, go alone, leave me alone ... lying across the bed with her long slender legs pressed together. He told his aunt about Marian's not feeling well enough at the last minute--they had had lunch in an Indian restaurant on Wardour Street, and Marian's stomach was delicate--and he himself didn't feel well when he traveled----

She interrupted him. "Oh, but you look so healthy, you look so handsome, Alexander! You're thin, but you've always been thin ... and boys your age are all so terribly thin now .... " She squeezed his hands; she leaned close to him as if she were nearsighted. Her perfume was flowery. He wanted to step back, in irritated embarrassment. Except for her eyes, which were dark and slightly protruding, heavily lashed, like his father's eyes but more attractive, he might not have even recognized her.

"How long did you say you were going to be in London?" she asked.

"Only a few more days," Alexander said quickly. In fact, he and Marian had no plans to leave. They would do what they wanted to do. "We're going to rent a car and drive up into the Highlands," he said. "We like ... we like to be on our own. ..."

"I'm sorry I won't get to meet her," Eunice said.

He sat somewhere, still a little confused. Though he had left his hotel near Russell Square nearly an hour earlier, he had gone past his station; he found himself rushing through the underground on his long anxious legs, bumping into people, apologizing, then resigning himself to being late as he rose on escalators behind tightly jammed double lines of tourists. Like himself, they looked around with alert but glazed eyes. Eunice asked him about whether he'd had any trouble finding her flat, and he said no, then he realized how late he was and how out of breath and wild-haired, so he made a joke out of it and described the uniformed man with a broom in the South Kensington station who had given him directions, and though Alexander hadn't been able to understand every word, he kept nodding, nodding ... experiencing from time to time that sensation of rising, incomprehensible panic that he had felt several times since leaving New York. "Then I kept seeing myself in the same advertisement, on the wall," he said, "a kind of curved, concave metallic advertisement for cigarettes ... once at the St. James stop, once at South Kensington, and finally back here at Sloane Square ...." His aunt smiled at this anecdote, as if willing to laugh but not able to see why it was funny. She might have thought that his long, frizzy brown hair and the denim jeans and tightfitting denim jacket he wore were not funny, any more than his parents did. He remembered her from years ago, staring at him and assessing him, strangely, and he fell silent. His face hardened with resentment.

This woman, his father's sister, was 48 or 49 years old. He knew that: His father was 51. But she looked much younger. She wore her frosted-blonde hair in a stiff, complex style, which seemed to spring weightlessly from her forehead, falling nearly to her shoulders; the ends were turned up, bouncing and fluttering as she spoke. She was girlish, animated. Her face was smooth and unlined and her mouth was too perfect, outlined in red, a blatant impossible red. It was difficult for Alexander to take such a face seriously, after the faces of the girls he knew--pale, fierce, naked faces, absolutely honest. He was calculating rapidly how soon he could leave, maybe pleading the excuse of not feeling well--he had already mentioned the Indian restaurant, deliberately, cleverly--and of worrying about Marian back at the hotel.

A porcelain-smooth face, a smiling, charming, too-red mouth and earrings that swung free of her hair occasionally and gleamed in the light, his aunt Eunice Loeper, Eunice Resnick, at one time Eunice From of White Plains ... he forced himself to agree with her, to smile and nod agreeably, but he did resent being here and it was a mystery to him why he had bothered to come over at all. Just to please his mother, whom he didn't usually bother pleasing, and now he had to puzzle through a complicated question-and-answer period with a woman he hardly knew. Eunice had not been back to the United States for a halfdozen years, and before that she'd visited them only a few times; no one had ever met her husbands. Alexander had learned, over the years, without having much interest in the information, that her first husband had been a minor diplomat and her second husband. Loeper, was a novelist; she must have been divorced from him, or separated, because she made no mention of him and Alexander did not ask.

He found himself sitting on a low, awkwardly low sofa, so close to the floor that his knees rose almost to the height of his face. He finally turned his legs sideways, in exasperation. "Aren't you comfortable? You aren't comfortable," Eunice said. He assured her he was fine. She got to her feet, though, and hovered over him, adjusting pillows, murmuring something about how she hoped he wasn't disappointed in the weather, it had been dark and raining for the past week, day after day, and perhaps he had read in the paper of icebergs drifting down from the North Pole and of how June 21 was colder this year than December 21 had been .... "But I don't want to complain," she said. "I like living here very much."

She poured him sherry, which he didn't much want; but he accepted it. There was a bowl of cashews squarely before him, obviously meant for him, and Eunice went to get a small basket of fruit from somewhere--absent-mindedly setting it before him, as if he might want to eat a pear or a greenish-yellow apple or some large purple grapes. She returned to her seat across from him, leaning forward, as if addressing herself to someone else, someone not Alexander at all. He was not accustomed to being treated so well by people his aunt's age. "You don't look comfortable," she said again. "You don't look happy .... Are you worried about the girl?"

"No, no," Alexander said quickly. He blushed. "No. I'm very happy to be here."

"Tell me about your father. Is he hardworking as ever? How is he?"

"The same," Alexander said flatly.

His aunt smiled. He saw there, in that smile, a subtle ironic look. She clasped her ringed fingers together, around her knees, nodding slowly to encourage him. He went on, "Exactly the same. I haven't been out to the house for a while, because he and I don't get along--he thinks I'm hopeless, a failure--and I can't be bothered to defend myself to him. When I quit medical school, he wouldn't speak to me for a month. So. So, he's the same, as far as I know or care."

Eunice watched him, smiling gravely, thoughtfully. He half expected her to say Go on, tell me more. There was something tense between them, she was keyed up, as if the dwarfish furniture they sat on and the bowl of fruit and the warm, sluggish light cast over the room from a single lamp with a carved pedestal were props for a stage, things to be used, touched, to establish some basis of reality they might both believe in. Her dress was long, falling to her ankles; it was made of a coarse, costly looking material, gold and silver and golden-green threads, and Alexander could see small raised figures on it that might have been dragons .... He felt a little sorry, now, that he had deliberately worn this denim outfit; he did have something better back at the hotel. He shifted his legs, embarrassed, and began to tell his aunt about his father's latest hobby: karate. The old man was (continued on page 168)golden madonna(continued from page 120) taking karate lessons. "There's a shopping mall behind our house--do you remember the woods we used to have? All razed, for a damn shopping mall--and there's a karate training center there," he said, smiling sardonically, "for men like my father. Hard-working, fifty pounds overweight, troubled and confused and instructed by their doctors to take up hobbies, stop smoking, discover their bodies.... He used to come home from his karate lessons looking pretty humiliated. I suppose it was good for him--the humiliation."

His aunt laughed. Alexander, warmed by the sherry, was beginning to speak in his usual manner: dry, Witty, ironic, fluent. He went on to tell Eunice an anecdote about the morning his father had discovered--right there on the train, headed into the city--the articles in The Wall Street Journal that announced that one of his 20-year accounts, with some computer corporation out in Minneapolis, had switched to another law firm. "The reason they gave was that my father's generation was out of phase," Alexander laughed.

Eunice shook her head at this, as if pretending to disapprove of him.

"Your father must have been very upset by that," she said. "Especially reading it that way...."

Alexander shrugged.

"Your father does have some feelings," Eunice said slowly. She spoke dubiously, deliberately, starting at Alexander with mock-sympathetic eyes. He noticed that her body was plump, shapely, her bust rounded and almost too large for that sheathlike dress; she wore shoes with thin old-fashioned heels. There was something dramatic, musical, about her and about this setting. It did not seem quite real.

• • •

For some time, his aunt kept questioning him about home, about his mother, especially. But he began to feel relaxed; he didn't mind, really. Then the telephone rang. She answered it, in another room, and he was left alone for quite a while.... He was irritated, a little hurt. When she came back, she apologized breathlessly but did not explain. Then she sat back down again, without mentioning dinner.

After a while he glanced at his wrist watch: He was in amazement that it was already after ten o'clock.

But she was eager to hear about what Alexander referred to as his "trouble with the police," so he launched into an anecdote about that, about a, police raid on a house in Cambridge he had lived in. She kept pouring them both sherry; he knew he was getting drunk. Go on, tell me more, she seemed always to be saying, urging. She was a very attractive woman, with her intense, sympathetic stare, her habit of nodding and smiling at him. She even leaned forward, clasping her hands around her knees. "You've certainly had adventures, for someone your age," she said, amazed. "Things are so different today .... I hate to show my age, Alex, but I had the vague idea you were still in school. High School. Isn't that awful? But even with that mustache, you look so young ...."

Alexander laughed, embarrassed. He finished his glass of sherry.

Then the telephone rang again. Eunice made a movement as if to stand--no, don't answer it--and then sank back, catching his eye. She smiled. Again, she did not explain and only shook her head as if to assure him, no, she was not going to answer it this time. Alexander waited, tensely. The phone rang for some time, then stopped.

They were silent for a while. He wondered what time it was but didn't want to look at his watch. Then it occurred to him, suddenly, that he would ask her a few questions. But it was difficult for him to begin, to find the right words. He cleared his throat. "I noticed that your husband, I mean Mr. Leper, had another novel published last year ...."

Eunice laughed. "That pathetic bastard," she said.

"I didn't read it, myself," Alexander said. He spoke quickly, not wanting to let her sudden reckless, definant mood pass, going on to tell her that his mother had bought the book, as far as he knew his mother had bought all of Loeper's books----

"But you haven't read them, yourself?" she asked.

"No. I never got around to it."

"That's just as well," Eunice said. Her face twisted into a look Alexander could not quite interpret--amusement, disgust, mockery. She was really a very pretty woman, in spite of her exaggerated make-up. "His books are all autobiographical and he hasn't exactly been merciful to anyone, including himself. But I don't intend to talk about him ... I don't even know where he is .... Your mother, of course, would be interested in his books."

"Why?"

Eunice lifted the bottle of sherry and poured them each another drink, though Alexander indicated he didn't want any more. He felt light headed and sickish in a strange, impersonal, superficial way, as if it didn't matter. He heard himself asking again, "Why?" and his voice rose shrilly.

Eunice frowned. "This girl of yours--the one you're traveling with--I suppose she's very independent? I mean, very liberated?"

"I suppose so," Alexander said defensively.

Liberated!

"Things change so rapidly, these days," Eunice said slowly. She sat back and crossed her legs; the stiff material of the dress rustled. Alexander could see that her shoe dangled from one foot, dangling there, swaying .... He blinked and concentrated his attention upon his aunt's face. She looked dreamy and yet formal, not quite meeting his gaze, as if she were saying words she had prepared ahead of time and didn't want him to get ahead of her. "Your mother and I ... our generation ... life was different then, it seemed to move very slowly. For long periods of time it would move slowly, like a glacier, then something would erupt, years would jump by, and then it would return to normal again. Slow. Very slow. Over there, back home, it always seemed to me very slow. Of course, things are different now."

"I suppose so," Alexander said.

They sat for a while, silent. Alexander tried to think of Marian, whom he had known now for nearly six months. When they argued, she would not look at him, would stand turned from him, maddening him, her thin covert little face turned away .... Her short-cropped dark hair looked militant at times, like a cap. But his thoughts touched her and dissolved, fizzed away. He found himself smiling. Eunice asked him why he was smiling and he shook his head, he didn't know. She laughed. "Yes, life is very different now," she said. "What your mother and I had to discover, so painfully ... well .... It's commonplace now. I suppose."

Alexander finished his glass of sherry. He felt suddenly hungry, shaky. He ate a few cashews and picked a grape out, fingering the overlarge grape nervously before he ate it; he had the strange idea it wasn't real, it must have been flown in from some tropical place, bulbous, exaggerated, swollen, a deep gleaming purple ... His aunt sighed and said something about getting dinner for them, she'd better, hadn't she? Or did he still feel the effects of his Soho lunch? At that Greek restaurant?

"Indian restaurant," Alexander said.

"You told me Greek!" she laughed.

"No, Indian. Indian. I told you Indian," Alexander said excitedly.

Then they fell silent again. Alexander didn't know why he had spoken like that; he felt his mouth twisted into a foolish smile, a grain. It was the truth, he hadn't lied. He and the girl had eaten at a cubbyhole of a restaurant, at a small table jammed in a corner; the entire lunch had cost only a pound and 20 pence ... and afterward, when they'd walked away, he had felt his mouth and throat burn angrily from the curry.

"Well, I'd better feed you. It's very late. Come out to the kitchen with me and let's see ... Help me up, will you?" Eunice laughed. Alexander managed to push himself up from the squat sofa, swaying slightly. He pulled his aunt to her feet. Her hand was plump but rather cool, damp. He noticed that one of her rings, was a carved figure, made out of what appeared to be ivory; it looked like a sphinx. "The refrigerator is crammed, I went on a shopping spree just for you," Eunice was saying cheerfully. "I hope you don't mind cold food ...? I went over to Harrods this afternoon, to the food hall, where they have such nice things. I buy most of my food there, actually. I just get in a cab and go there, then get in another cab and come back. It's expensive, but I can't help that ... You don't mind a cold dinner, do you?"

"No, not at all, no, no, I like cold food," Alexander said.

"But your mother--your mother is such a good cook! I should be ashamed of myself, offering a boy your age cold things----"

He tried to assure her it was fine, he wasn't even that hungry anymore, but she kept apologizing. She led him down a corridor and into a kitchen with high, ugly cabinets and a single window overlooking some pavement; out there it was damp and dripping. The kitchen was so cold that Alexander shivered convulsively. It was like a cave in there. Eunice peered into the refrigerator, mumbling to herself: Now, let's see, let's see.... Alexander shivered again. The other room had been so warm. His face was quite warm. There was a cold, damp flow of air coming into the kitchen, the window didn't fit its frame properly.... Eunice was reading off the names of cheeses in a singsong, girlish voice: Cheddar, camembert, port du salut, stilton, brie----

"All of them. Fine. Any of them," Alexander interrupted.

"Some of them are hard as rocks," Eunice said. "Oh, Christ. This brie is withered, it's like a fossil. So expensive, now the damn stuff is withered like a fossil."

"I can eat it," Alexander said. "I can eat anything."

She laughed as if he had said something very clever. "All right, dear, we'll see. Can you reach that cheese board up there? Up on the shelf? It's too high for me to reach." Alexander got it: a heavy, oblong cheese board, which felt weighted, it was so heavy, made of dark ebony wood. It was not very clean; tiny bits of cheese clung to it. Alexander blew them off.

Eunice loaded things onto the cheese board, quite gay now. "I feel so guilty about not preparing you a proper dinner!" she said. "And you'll be comparing me with your mother, you'll go home and tell her what a bad housekeeper I am----"

"I won't tell anyone anything," Alexander said.

"Oh, but you will. You might."

"I don't communicate very freely with them. Either of them."

"Either of them?"

"Either of them."

Alexander carried the board aloft, like a waiter; in the other room, his aunt dragged two chairs over to a drop-leaf table by the window. "Now we're all set. Now. Isn't this delightful? It's like a picnic. I hope you don't mind."

"Is this where you usually eat?"

"Sometimes. When I eat here, at home. But sometimes I eat in the kitchen, and sometimes in the bedroom.... This flat is so awkwardly set up, the bedroom is as big as this room, but the bathroom is just a closet.... I suppose the place you're staying in, the room you're in, is all right for you?"

"It's all right," Alexander said, shrugging his shoulders. "It's cheap."

"Does your girl like it?"

"Watch out," Alexander said. A jar of something nearly fell off the table--he caught it; it was a small jar of Russian caviar. His aunt took it from him. Alexander looked at her, knowing she had asked him a question; but he could not remember it. He said, softly, "Aunt Eunice, you were telling me something about my mother.... About my mother. You were telling me something about her, weren't you?"

"You must be starved!" Eunice exclaimed. "Why, so much time has gone by ... I lost track of time.... You're so tall, you're so thin, you must be starving.... It was the surprise of my life, to see you tonight, the size you are, when I remember you so differently ... just a boy.... What was I saying? About your mother? ... I thought we'd just have a drink or two, but so much time went by. I get a little lightheaded from sherry."

Alexander shook his head, trying to make sense of this. "What about my mother?"

"You probably wish you'd stayed with your little girl and had dinner with her tonight!"

"She isn't little," Alexander said.

"Is she large? Heavy?"

"No."

"Is she as tall as you are?"

"I don't know, no, christ, no, she's just a short girl, she's shorter than you are," Alexander said. He had lost track of the conversation and was staring now at the food: a half loaf of Vienna bread, jars of olives and pickles and pimientos, a tall jar of cocktail shrimps, cheeses in different shapes, a heavy slab of what appeared to be turkey white meat, some processed ham, a long, dark coil of salami.... He smiled at the food. His aunt was trying to slice off pieces of bread, but the loaf wobbled, so he steadied it for her. The bread was rather stale; crumbs flaked off, flew off, tiny bits of crust flew up into Alexander's face and made him laugh. "Did you buy all this today? You didn't buy all this today," he said.

Eunice put the bread knife down. "I knew I was forgetting something," she said. She went to a liquor cabinet nearby. When she bent over, Alexander stared at her--the material of her dress very tight at her hips, straining against her--and he held onto the loaf of bread, still, while she chattered about how disappointing the weather must seem to tourists and how hard it was to get a cab out here, since everyone got cabs when they went by Sloane Square, and she knew he didn't really want to be here, she'd heard the dismay in his voice over the telephone----

"Hey, that isn't true," Alexander said.

But did he want a martini? Or just some Scotch?

"I don't know. I don't drink, usually," Alexander said. "Anything is all right."

"Anything?"

"You want me to help you get that open?"

"No, it's open. It's already open."

She came back to the table. She poured them each a drink. She said, "Well, the strange thing is, I was always closer to your mother than I was to your father.... I mean, after I met your mother... though I'm your father's sister, as you know, and should have been absolutely loyal to him. But your mother and I, we became quite fond of each other. In fact, you owe your existence to me. You really do. You owe your very existence to me."

Alexander laughed. "How is that?"

"Well, she didn't want to marry him; she knew it would be disastrous. She wanted an abortion. But I talked her out of it... because I knew she would never survive, she'd never, never survive ... she was far too gentle, she wasn't independent like me, she was terrified of life ... and an abortion would have----"

Alexander set down his glass. "A what? What? ... What?"

"She confided in me," Eunice said. She looked over the things on the table, squinting. With one long, painted fingernail she poked at the gelatin that edged the ham. "I suppose I betrayed her ... because perhaps I gave her the wrong advice ... I said, Oh, he'll make a good husband, I'm sure he will, why don't you just grit your teeth and go through with it? ... Because, because, things were quite different in those days. We were different."

"Who was different?" Alexander asked, confused.

"It always seemed strange to outsiders, that I was closer to your mother than to your father, though I'm related to him," she said. "Is that pâté? I like pâté very much, but I don't remember buying that. Do you want some? It's liver--I think it's liver--let me spread some on a piece of bread for you, dear. You must be famished."

"My mother wanted an abortion? When was this?"

Eunice sighed. "That's it: It was so long ago. Everyone is so much older now."

"My mother never wanted an abortion," Alexander said evenly.

Eunice did not reply. She spread something on a piece of bread for him, carefully. He took it from her but didn't eat it. He held it for a while, then found a place to set it down, on the window sill, out of the way. He stared at her. "What kind of a dress is that? Is that a Chinese or a Japanese dress? I see lizards or dragons in it."

Eunice laughed. She dropped the cover of the pickle jar and it rolled across the table and onto the floor. "Oh, this bracelet! These things are so heavy, they just get in the way," she murmured. He noticed a large, ornate bracelet, made of gold, hanging from her wrist; it had slid down her forearm and hung heavily against her wrist. He wondered if he should help her with the clasp, it worked hard, but she didn't ask him. She managed to get it off herself. Alexander, watching her, felt that he was close to shouting or laughing. She continued her light, girlish chatter: "Well, no one would know it from the external evidence, she's a sweet, mousy-looking woman, like most of them.... But she's very deep. Very. And tragic."

"Tragic? My mother?"

"Like most of them."

Alexander laughed coarsely. No, this was too much. He knew now that his aunt was lying, she was lying, and wouldn't even look at him now that he had challenged her.... "What do you mean?" he asked.

Eunice was licking pâté off her short, plump fingers. "She was a beautiful girl for a while. You wouldn't know this, of course. My brother wouldn't know it, either. I was very, very close to her and when he showed up, and threatened to have her committed.... I nearly went mad, it was so horrible. You don't know what your father is like."

"My father? What? When did this happen?"

"When she moved out."

Alexander shook his head. For a while, he sat quietly, not eating, watching his aunt as she pretended not to notice him, pretended not to feel the agitation of the heartbeat in his body. Behind her the unfamiliar room seemed to waver. He had a confused impression of something mirrored--the ceiling reflected in the mirror above the mantel--and his aunt's head bobbing snakelike in his vision, the heavy, stiff wings of hair, the part drawn carefully through the middle of her hair, her flushed, luminous, dramatic face, her exaggerated self. He knew she was lying. "She never--!" he shouted.

Eunice looked calmly at him. Calmly, fastidiously, she wiped her mouth with her finger tips; she had forgotten to give them napkins. On that hand she wore two rings. She smiled, in a pretense of sympathy. "The Polish lover in that novel, A Trois, Loeper's second-to-last novel--he's still in London, would you like to meet him? He lives in a pathetic little room in Chelsea, down at the far end near----"

"Who? What? I don't know what you're talking about," Alexander said. "Novel--! I didn't read any novel, I didn't read any of them--"

"Then you could write a postcard to your mother and say you'd gone to visit P-- that your aunt Eunice had accompanied you----"

"I'm not going to visit anyone, I'm not going to write anyone," he said. "I can't even remember her.... No, I can't remember her. I saw her a week ago, but now, now I can't remember her, her face is mixed up with ... with someone else's face.... I don't know if I had a mother," he laughed. He felt his face, like Eunice's, glow dramatically. He wondered if his skin looked like hers, throbbing, shining with perspiration, the warm red-veined flesh beneath the skin swelling outward, pushing outward, so that the surface of his skin was flushed, ripe, golden.

Eunice poured an inch or two of liquor into his glass. He was holding onto that glass. He had been holding onto it, his forearm lying heavily on the edge of the cheese board. He watched her covertly, seeing how she frowned, pouring the Scotch, pretending to frown, seeming to frown, while all along she was lying ... she paused, like an actress, not yet meeting his gaze. Then she met it. Sly, teasing. "You must know that your mother tried to escape? That she came here one winter, oh, maybe ten years ago--she came here--she came to me here, when I lived up in Hampstead, with a friend of mine--and with Loeper, too, of course, at that time--a dear friend of mine, Nicole Bergé; do you know who she is? Was? You must know these things."

Alexander could not speak.

"How old are you now? Twenty?"

"Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four!" Eunice laughed. She reached out to touch him, as if to apologize--as if spontaneously--and he drew his arm away, fearing her, but still she smiled, pretending not to notice this, saying, "But you look so much younger, like a boy! But you must have been fourteen then. About that age. You must remember, you weren't a child. You must remember when she left you, you and him both, and came here. You do remember that."

"I don't remember. I don't remember anything." Alexander said. He wondered why he had jerked his arm away so quickly. He had almost upset something on the table. "I don't want to remember."

"Yes, well. Yes. Of course. You're like my brother, you're like him in many ways. I understand. And it certainly wasn't my intention ... wasn't my intention," she said, with drunken caution, "to upset you."

He was poking with his thumbnail at a piece of cheese: Hard as a rock it was, discolored in places, stale and cracked. After a while, he said softly. "If she wanted an abortion, back then, it wasn't because of me ... she didn't want to kill me. She didn't want ... to do that to me."

"Of course not," Eunice said quickly. "Of course not."

"It wasn't me."

"That's true, very true. That's very true," Eunice said.

Alexander noticed bits of cheese under his fingernails. Suddenly, the pressure of the crumbs disgusted him; he seized a fork and tried to pick them out. His aunt was speaking in a rapid, soothing, unconvincing voice, speaking of a Polish dancer with a troupe here in London, and an ex-ballerina named Nicole, and a big partly restored 18th Century mansion at the edge of Hampstead Heath--and somehow a woman found lying on the kitchen floor, on a rug she'd dragged in, lying there with the gas oven on, the oven door open, too terrified of freedom because of the past.... Alexander paid no attention. He ran the fork prongs beneath his nails, one by one. After a long, embarrassed pause, Eunice began speaking again: this time in a furry drunken murmur, as she patted his arm, petted it, as if to restore him. "But you don't have to believe all this, or even listen to it. It might never have happened, really," she whispered.

Alexander cleared his throat. He let the fork fall onto the table. "He says--he says you're the way you are, you live like this, like this--because you're sterile. You're sterile."

Eunice laughed delightedly. "The way I am--! But does he know how I am?"

"Unhappy--a failure. Because of the marriages." Alexander said. "Once in a while, he gets onto the subject of you. He says you've always been like this--I've heard him talk about you lots of times, to my mother."

"I'm very happy," Eunice said belligerently. "I'm happy, very happy. But it is for the reason he gave--because I'm sterile. He's right about that, but he's got me wrong in every other way.... Because he has no imagination. Like most men.... Most of them are just animals, you know, they have no imagination, they're barely human. Without imagination you sink back into your physical body, you become bestial, stupid, fixed on one idea, like him. You degenerate. You really do, you sink back. You regress. The season for mating takes no imagination, it's all direct, physical, it's impersonal, but after that, life is all imagination, and your father doesn't have that capacity. Most men don't. That's why they are impotent--most men."

Alexander looked up. His arm was oddly heavy. He saw that her hand lay on it, absent-mindedly, a plump beringed hand, his arm, abstractions like the glimmer of the room behind her and around her, all light, gradations of dim, dusky, tawdry-golden light, without strong outlines or divisions between things. "Are they? Most men?" he asked in a whisper.

"Yes. Of course. Didn't you know that?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know if I knew it...."

"But you're so young yourself, you can't know much; you probably don't know anything. Why do you think your father wanted to marry that girl, what was her name?, that girl who modeled at Saks--you must remember her, she's about your age--I even met her the last time I visited White Plains, out at your house at a big cocktail party--your mother didn't know yet about her, oh, her name was Stella, I think--and once in the city, in a midtown restaurant with your father. Why do you think he went crazy over her? He was forty-five years old then and----"

"What? Stella? Stella?"

"Yes, that thin girl, she was very pretty and very intelligent, and tried to back out of it gracefully, after she got enough out of him and saw how--well, how close to a nervous breakdown he was--it was her idea the three of us meet for lunch, almost at the first instant our eyes met I knew--I knew what the situation was, how desperately she needed help--evidently you didn't know about this, Alexander? You didn't know the girl?"

"None of this is true," Alexander said.

"I don't know how we got onto the subject ... it wasn't my intention.... Oh, yes. Yes. I simply wanted you to consider why you thought your father was so devastated, why he was so sick during that period, sick with love for a girl twenty-five years younger than he was, a lovely girl, if you like girls so vacuous and so skeletal, and he confessed to me himself he didn't even know her--but, well," she said, swerving back into her bright, cheerful manner, "why do you think, Alexander? Why?"

"It isn't true. It really isn't," he said, smiling. The corners of his mouth lifted by themselves.

"Because he was impotent everywhere in the universe except with her, and she looked at me with her stricken eyes, just desperate to get out, to get out of that noisy, expensive, fake-French restaurant, just to get out and be free of him. I knew exactly what the situation was. The two of them didn't even talk to each other, he just stared at her, and she talked to me, chattering away about college, she'd dropped out of college, about girlfriends of hers at Bennington, and it was all to make him know how old he was, how free she wanted to be ... she drank too much, she even squeezed my hand too often, her eyes were just terrified...."

"That was in the summer, all that," Alexander said suddenly. "I knew her. Stella. I knew her. Yes," he said, smiling, grinning, thinking of the dark-eyed soiled Stella, whom he had found kissing someone in a cloakroom at the country club once, Alexander a high school boy then, blundering into a strange couple's embrace and gaping in surprise, and for years afterward--yes, now he remembered her--he had run and rerun that vision in his head, trying it on with other girls, feeling it float up, helplessly, into his brain. And his father also--! His father--!

"He lost so much weight. I felt sorry for him ... in spite of everything, in spite of the past," Eunice said.

"Yes, he lost weight. I remember.... But I don't really believe any of this," Alexander laughed.

"You can believe it or not believe it," Eunice said happily.

"I know that. I know that."

"But they are all impotent, in their imaginations," Eunice said. "That's why women like your mother and myself and ... well, other dear friends of mine, whom she came to know ... before she got frightened by life and let him take her back to White Plains ... that's why we laugh at them so much and never take them seriously. Yes," she said, still with that bright, happy voice, "they really are tragic, but they can't be taken seriously. If I took such thing seriously, I wouldn't be as happy as I am."

Alexander was thinking of Stella, Stella Reiner. His head was heavy and vaporous, with a perfumelike vapor; perhaps his aunt's perfume. Then he stopped thinking about Stella. His aunt squeezed his arm, sighing, "Yes, you're all tragic people," and it went through him like electricity, a pang of sexual desire. He felt faint.

"Tragic? Tragic?" he stammered.

He thought of his mother, but her face, too, eluded him: plain, was she, or beautiful? He had never looked. He stared at his aunt's face. "Yes, tragic ... tragic," she whispered. They looked at each other, Alexander breathing hoarsely through his mouth, faces rising and falling in his mind, a girl's face, Stella's or someone else's, a girl, a girl's face and body, no, his mother's face, his mother standing there in her expensive beige coat with the mink collar, hurt, trying to have a conversation with him and Marian while they waited for the plane to load, subtly snubbed by Marian, who was Marian?--and now their faces all blurred and glowed and his aunt was starting at him, smiling gently at him, that gentle throbbing smile.

"Why don't you finish your drink?" she said softly.

Alexander was breathing noisily. He could not believe this, but it was true: She was closing his fingers now, firmly, around his glass. She urged him to raise it to his lips. She helped him. She rose to her feet, she swayed over him. Radiant, damp, warm, very warm.... He wondered at her beauty, he wondered how he had got here to see it. She drew her hand up along his arm, up to his shoulder, to his neck. Every hair on his body stiffened. She said, smiling, "Are you tragic--or? Maybe not, maybe you're different? Are you different? You, are you different? You, Alexander, are you different?"

He got to his feet. He felt the stammer rise in his throat, from his chest. I think--She was so short! He glanced down and saw that she had slipped her shoes off, he could see that she was barefoot, he did not mean to take a step toward her, but he swayed in that direction, helplessly. She was saying something out of a mouth that was curiously red, reddened; though the lipstick was smeared a little, she was saying, "Yes, I think you are different ... yes, I think so...."

No, Alexander thought. Yes.

"Come back here, back along here," she whispered. She led him out of the room; he followed, dazed, very tall; his shoulder brushed against the dangling leaves of a plant hung somewhere, shadowy spidery tendrillike leaves, and she was speaking rapidly, urgently, while he felt his body yearn to crouch over, the throbbing in him was so violent, so helpless. She hurried into a room and he came after her, his hands grasping each other, he was wringing his hands in that strange, drafty, cavelike room--her bedroom? But it was so jumbled, so crowded with furniture, it smelled sour, it smelled of earth, somehow. He saw on the window sill another of those plants, the cheap clay pot overturned and a small halo of dirt spilled out around it. His aunt turned away from him. Two big, ceiling-high windows seemed to move in upon him, out there a street ... a street upon which traffic moved.... No, it was too confusing. He watched her, terrified. He wanted to stop her before it was too late.

"Aunt Eunice? Aunt Eunice?" he whispered.

He stepped toward her, he bumped into something--one of the bedposts--she exclaimed as if she, and not he, had been hurt, but he interrupted her, saying, sobbing, "No, no, no, I don't want to.... No, don't make me, don't make me do it...."

He backed away. He ran out.

"Alexander!"

He looked wildly around. She was behind him, standing there, calling his name--"Alexander, don't be afraid, don't be afraid like everyone else, Alexander----"

"No," he cried, "no," and ran out the door and down the steps to the foyer and out to the sidewalk, out into the fresh surprising air, panting No no no no no, and behind him she was still calling his name. He glanced over his shoulder in real terror and saw her, there, right in the doorway where anyone on the street might see her, calling out to him in that high musical shrill voice, "Alexander! Alexander!" She had snatched off the hairpiece, she was shaking it at him, he heard a catch in her voice, a choked-off laugh--with her close-cropped gunmental-gray hair she looked robust, delighted, crying out, "Oh, Alexander, you, too----"

He ran away, down the street, and halfway down the long windy street he had to catch hold of something, an iron railing, to support himself.... His breath was tearing him in two. Out here it was raining, out here cars and strange double-decked buses were passing, in the rain. He stared, amazed. He was somewhere he didn't recognize. It was strange to him, new to him; evidently he was in a foreign city.