My Mistress

My wife is precise, elegant and well dressed, but the sloppiness of my mistress knows few bounds. Apparently, I am not the sort of man who acquires a stylish mistress like the mistresses in French movies. Those women rendezvous at the café of an expensive hotel and take their cigarette cases out of alligator handbags, or they meet their lovers on bridges in the late afternoon, wearing dashing capes. My mistress greets me in a pair of worn corduroy trousers, once green and now no color at all, a gray sweater and an old shirt of her younger brother's that has a frayed collar and a pair of very old, broken shoes with tassels, the backs of which are held together with electrical tape. The first time I saw those shoes, I found them remarkable.

"What are those?" I said. "And why do you wear them?"

My mistress is a serious person, often glum, who likes to put as little inflection into a sentence as she can. She always answers a question.

"They used to be quite nice," she said. "I wore them out. Now I use them for slippers. These are my house shoes."

This person's name is Josephine Delielle, nicknamed Billy, called Josephine by her husband. I am Francis Clemens and no one but my mistress calls me Frank. The first time we went to bed, after months of longing and abstinence, my mistress turned to me, fixed me with an indifferent stare and said, "Well, well. In bed with Frank and Billy."

•

My constant image of Billy is of her pushing her hair off her forehead with an expression of exasperation. She frowns easily, often looks puzzled and is frequently irritated. In movies, men have mistresses who soothe and pet them, who are consoling, passionate and ornamental. But I have a mistress who, while she is passionate, is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole or wear fancy underwear. She has taken to referring to me as her "little bit of fluff" and she refers to me as her mistress, as in the sentence "Before you became my mistress, I led a blameless life."

But in spite of this, I am secure in her affections. I know she loves me--not that she would ever come right out and tell me. She prefers the oblique line of approach. She may say something like, "Being in love with you is making me a nervous wreck." Or, "Falling in love with you is the hobby I took up instead of knitting or wood engraving."

Here is a typical encounter. It is between two and three o'clock in the afternoon. I arrive and ring the doorbell. The Delielles, who have a lot of money, live in the duplex apartment of an old town house. Billy opens the door. There I am, an older man in my tweed coat. My hands are cold. I'd like to get them underneath her ratty sweater. She looks me up and down. "Gosh, you look sweet," she might say, or, "My, what an adorable pair of trousers."

Sometimes she gets her coat and we go for a bracing walk. Sometimes we go upstairs to her study. Billy is an economist and teaches two classes at the business school. She writes for a couple of highbrow journals. Her husband, Grey, whom she met when she worked as a securities analyst, is a Wall Street wonder boy. They are one of those dashing couples, or at least they sound like one. I am no slouch, either. For years, I was an investment banker, and now I consult from my own home. I own a rarebook store--modern English and American first editions--which is excellently run for me so that I can visit and oversee it. I, too, write for a couple of highbrow journals. We have much in common, my mistress and I, or so it looks.

Billy's study is untidy. She likes to spread her papers out. Since her surroundings mean nothing to her, her study is bare of ornament and actually cheerless.

"What have you been doing all day?" she says.

I tell her. Breakfast with my wife, Vera; newspaper reading after Vera has gone to work; an hour or so on the telephone with clients; a walk over to my shop; more telephoning; a quick sandwich; her.

"You and I ought to go out for lunch someday," she says. "One should always take one's mistress out for lunch. We could go Dutch, thereby taking both mistresses at once."

"I try to take you for lunch," I say, "but you don't like to be taken out for lunch."

"Huh," utters Billy. She stares at her bookcase as if looking for a misplaced volume, and then she may say something like, "If I gave you a couple of dollars, would you take your clothes off?"

Instead, I take her into my arms. Her words are my signal that Grey is out of town. Often he is not, and then I merely get to kiss my mistress, which makes us both dizzy. To kiss her and know that we can go forward to what Billy tonelessly refers to as "the rapturous consummation" reminds me that in relief is joy.

After kissing for a few minutes, Billy closes the study door and we practically throw ourselves at each other. After the rapturous consummation has been achieved, during which I can look upon a mistress recognizable as such to me, my mistress will turn to me and, in a voice full of the attempt to stifle emotion, say something like, "Sometimes I don't understand how I got so fond of a beat-up old person such as you."

These are the joys adulterous love brings to me.

•

Billy is indifferent to a great many things: clothes, food, home decor. She wears neither perfume nor cologne. She uses what is used on infants: talcum powder and Ivory soap. She hates to cook and will never present me with an interesting postcoital snack. Her snacking habits are those, I have often remarked, of a late--19th Century English clubman. Billy will get up all naked and disarrayed and present me with a mug of cold tea, a plate of hard wheat biscuits or a squirt of tepid soda from the siphon on her desk. As she sits under her quilt nibbling those resistant biscuits, she reminds me of a creature from another universe--the solar system that contains the alien features of her real life: her past, her marriage, why I am in her life and what she thinks of me.

I drink my soda, put on my clothes and, unless Vera is out of town, I go home to dinner. If Vera and Grey are out of town at the same time, Billy and I go out to dinner, during the course of which she either falls asleep or looks as if she is about to. Then I take her home, go home and have a large, steadying drink.

I was not entirely a stranger to adulterous love when I met Billy. I have explained this to her. In all long marriages, I expound, there are certain lapses. The look on Billy's face as I lecture is one of either amusement or contempt or both. The dinner party your are invited to as an extra man when your wife is away, I tell her. You are asked to take the extra woman, whose husband is away, home in a taxi. The divorced friend of yours and your wife's who invites you for a drink one night, and so on. These fallings into bed are the friendliest things in the world, I add. I look at my mistress.

"I see," she says. "Just like patting a dog."

My affair with Billy, as she well knows, is nothing of the sort. I call her every morning. I see her almost every afternoon. On the days she teaches, she calls me. We are as faithful as the Canada goose, more or less. She is an absolute fact of my life. When not at work, and when not with her, my thoughts rest upon the subject of her as easily as you might lay a hand on a child's head. I conduct a mental life with her when we are apart. Thinking about her is like entering a study or office, a room to which only I have access.

I, too, am part of a dashing couple. My wife is an industrial designer who has dozens of commissions and consults to everyone. Our two sons are grown up. One is a lawyer and one is a journalist. The lawyer is married to a lawyer and the journalist keeps company with a dancer. Our social life is a mixture of our friends, our children and their friends. What a lively table we must be, all of us together. So I tell my mistress. She gives me a baleful look.

"We get plenty of swell types in for meals," she says. I know this is true and I know that Billy, unlike my gregarious and party-giving wife, thinks that there is no hell more hellish than the hell of social life. She has made up a tuneless little chant, like a football cheer, to describe it. It goes:

They invited us

We invited them

They invited us

We invited them

They invited us

We invited them.

Billy and I met at a reception to celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of the journals to which we are both occasional contributors. We fell into a spirited conversation during which Billy asked me if that reception weren't the most boring thing I had ever been to. I said it wasn't, by a long shot. Billy said, "I can't stand these things where you have to stand up and be civilized. They make me itch. People either yawn, itch or drool when they get bored. Which do you do?"

I said I yawned.

"Huh," said Billy. "You don't look much like a drooler. Let's get out of here."

This particular interchange is always brought up when intentionality is discussed. Did she mean to pick me up? Did I look available? And so on. Out on the street, we revealed that while we were both married, both of our spouses were out of town on business. Having made that clear, we went out to dinner and talked shop.

After dinner, Billy said why didn't I come have a drink or a cup of tea? I did not know what to make of this invitation. I remembered that young people are more casual about these things and that a cup of tea probably meant a cup of tea. My reactions to this offer are also discussed when cause is under discussion. (continued on page 142)My Mistress(continued from page 136) Did I want her to seduce me? Did I mean to seduce her? Did this mean that I, having just met her, lusted for her?

Of her house, Billy said, "We don't have good taste or bad taste. We have no taste." Her living room had no style whatsoever, but it was comfortable enough. There was a portrait of what looked like an ancestor over the fireplace. It was not a room that revealed a thing about its occupants except solidity and a lack of decorative inspiration. Billy made herself a cup of tea and gave me a drink. We continued our conversation, and when Billy began to look sleepy, I left.

After that, we made a pass at social life. We invited them for dinner, along with some financial types, a painter and our lawyer son. At this gathering, Billy was mute, and Grey, a very clever fellow, chatted interestingly. Billy did not seem at all comfortable, but the rest of us had a fairly good time. Then they invited us, along with some financial types they knew and a music critic and his bookdesigner wife. At this dinner, Billy looked tired. It was clear that cooking was a strain on her. She told me later that she was the type who, when forced to cook, did every little thing, like making and straining the veal stock. From the moment she entered the kitchen, she looked longingly forward to the time when all the dishes would be clean and put away and the guests would all have gone home.

Then we invited them, but Grey had a bad cold and they had to cancel. After that, Billy and I ran into each other one day when we were both dropping off articles at the same journal and we had lunch. She said she was looking for an article of mine and two days later, after rummaging in my files, I found it. Since I was going to be in her neighborhood, I dropped it off. She worte me a note about this article, and then I called her to discuss it further. This necessitated a lunch meeting. Then she said she was sending me a book I had said I wanted to read, and then I sent her a book, and so it went.

One evening, I stopped by to have a chat with Billy and Grey. Vera was in California and I had been out to dinner in Billy's part of town. I called her from a pay phone, and when I got there, it turned out that Grey was out of town, too. Had I been secretly hoping that this would be the case? Billy had been working in her study and without thinking about it, she led me up the stairs. I followed her, and at the door of her study, I kissed her. She kissed me right back and looked awful about it, too.

"Nothing but a kiss!" I said, rather frantically. My mistress was silent.

"A friendly kiss," I said.

My mistress gave me the sort of look that is supposed to make your blood freeze, and said, "Your friends must be very advanced. Do you kiss them all this way?"

"It won't happen again," I said. "It was all a mistake."

Billy gave me a stare so bleak and hard that I had no choice but to kiss her, and that, except for the fact that it took us a couple of months to get into bed, was the beginning of that.

That was a year ago, and it is impossible for me to figure out what is going on in Billy's life that has me into it. She once remarked that in her opinion, there is frequently too little kissing in marriage, through which frail pinprick was a microscopic dot of light thrown on the subject of her marriage, or was it? She is like a red Indian and says nothing at all, nor does she ever slip.

I, however, do slip, and I am made aware of this by the grim, sidelong glance I am given. I once told Billy that until I met her, I had never given kissing much thought--she is an insatiable kisser for an unsentimental person--and I was rewarded for this utterance by a wellraised eyebrow and a rather frightening look of registration.

From time to time, I feel it is wise to tell Billy how well Vera and I get along.

"Swell," says Billy. "I'm thrilled for you."

"Well, it's true," I say.

"I'm sure it's true," says Billy. "I'm sure there's no reason in the world why you come and see me almost every day. It's probably just an involuntary action, like sneezing."

"But you don't understand," I say. "Vera has men friends. I have women friends. The first principle of a good marriage is freedom."

"Oh, I see," says Billy. "You sleep with your other women friends in the morning and come over here in the afternoon. What a lot of stamina you have for an older person."

One day this conversation had unexpected results. I said how well Vera and I got along, and Billy looked unadornedly hurt.

"God hates a mingy lover," she said. "Why don't you just say that you're in love with me and that it frightens you and have done with it?"

An unexpected lump rose in my throat.

"Maybe you're not in love with me," said Billy in her flattest voice. "It's nothing to me."

I said, "I am in love with you."

"Well, there you are," said Billy.

•

My curiosity about Grey is a huge, violent dog on a very tight leash. He is four years older than Billy, a somewhat sweet-looking boy with rumpled hair who looks as if he is working out problems in higher math as you talk to him. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and his shirttail hangs out. He has the body of a young boy and the air of a genius or someone constantly preoccupied by the intense pressure of a rarefied mental life. Together he and Billy look not so much like husband and wife as like coconspirators. How often does she sleep with him? What are her feelings about him?

I begin preliminary queries by hemming and hawing. "Umm," I say, "it's, umm, it's a little hard for me to picture your life with Grey. I mean, it's hard to picture your everyday life."

"What you want to know is how often we sleep together and how much I like it," says Billy.

Well, she has me there, because that is exactly what I want to know.

"Tell you what," says my mistress. "Since you're so forthcoming about your life. We'll write down all about our home fronts on little slips of paper and then we'll exchange them. How's that?"

Well, she has me there, too. What we are doing in each other's lives is an unopened book.

I know how she contrasts to my wife: My wife is affable, full of conversation, loves a dinner party and is interested in clothes, food, home decor and the issues of the day. She loves to entertain, is sought out in times of crisis by her numerous friends and has a kind or original word for everyone. She is methodical, hard-working and does not fall asleep in restaurants. How I contrast to Grey is another matter, a matter about which I know nothing. I am considerably older and perhaps I appeal to some father longing in my mistress. Billy says Grey is a genius--a thrilling quality but not one that has any real relevance to life with another person. He wishes, according to his wife, that he were the conductor of a symphony orchestra, and for this reason, he is given scores, tickets and batons for his birthday. He has studied Russian and can sing Russian songs..

"He sounds so charming." I say, "that I can't imagine why you would want to (continued on page 174)My Mistress(continued from page 142) know someone like me." Billy's response to this is pure silence.

Once in a while, she quotes him on the subject of the stock market. If life were not so complicated, I might very well be calling him up for tips. I hunt for signs of him on Billy--jewelry, marks, phrases. I know that he reads astronomy books for pleasure, enjoys cross-country skiing and likes to travel. Billy says she loves him, but she also says she loves several paintings in the Museum of Modern Art.

"It you love him so much," I say, taking a page from her book, "why are you hanging around with me?"

"'Hanging around,'" Billy says in a bored monotone.

"Well?"

"'I am large and contain multitudes,'" she says, misquoting a line from Walt Whitman.

This particular conversation took place en route to a cottage in Vermont that I had rented for a week when both Grey and Vera were going to be away for ten days.

I remember clearly with what happy anticipation I presented the idea of this cottage to her.

"Guess what," I said.

"You're pregnant," said Billy.

"I have rented a little cottage for us, in Vermont. For a week, when Grey and Vera are away on their long trips. We can go there and watch the leaves turn."

"Great," said Billy faintly. She looked away and didn't speak for some time.

"We don't have to go, Billy," I said. "I only sent the check yesterday. I can cancel it."

There appeared to be tears in my mistress' eyes.

"No," she said. "Don't do that. I'll split it with you."

"You don't seem pleased," I said.

"Pleased," said Billy. "Being pleased doesn't strike me as the appropriate response to the idea of going off to a love nest with your lover."

"What is the appropriate response?" I said.

"Oh," said Billy, her voice now blithe, "sorrow, guilt, craving, glee, horror, anticipation."

Well, she can run, but she can't hide. My mistress is given away from time to time by her own expressions. No matter how hard she tries to suppress the visible evidence of what she feels, she is not always successful. Her eyes turn color, becoming dark and rather smoky. This is as good as a plain declaration of love. Billy's mental life, her grumpiness, her irritability, her crotchets are like static that from time to time give way to a clear signal, just as you often hit a pure band of music on a car radio after turning the dial through a lot of chaotic squawk.

In French movies of a certain period, the lovers are seen leaving the woman's apartment or house. His car is parked on an attractive side street. She is carrying a leather valise and is wearing a silk scarf around her neck. He is carrying the wicker basket she has packed with their picnic lunch. They will have the sort of food lovers have for lunch in these movies: a roast chicken, a bottle of champagne and a cheese wrapped up in leaves. Needless to say, when Billy and I finally left to go to our love nest, no such sight presented itself to me. First of all, she met me around the corner from my garage after a number of squabbles about whose car to take. My car is bigger, so I won. I found her on an unattractive side street, which featured a rent-a-car place and an animal hospital. Second of all, she was wearing an old skirt, her old jacket and was carrying a canvas overnight bag. No lacy underwear would be withdrawn from it, I knew. My mistress buys her white-cotton undergarments at the five-and-ten-cent store. She wears an old T-shirt of Grey's to sleep in, she tells me.

For lunch we had hamburgers--no romantic rural inn or picnic spot for us--at Hud's Burger Hut on Route 22.

"We go to some swell places," Billy said.

As we drew closer to our destination, Billy began to fidget, reminding me that having her along was sometimes not unlike traveling with a small child.

In the nearest town to our love nest, we stopped and bought coffee, milk, sugar and corn flakes. Because I am a domestic animal and not a mere savage, I remembered to buy bread, butter, cheese, salami, eggs and a number of cans of tomato soup.

Billy surveyed these items with a raised eyebrow.

"This is the sort of stuff you buy when you intend to stay indoors and kick up a storm of passion," she said.

It was an off-year Election Day--Congressional and Senate races were being run. We had both voted, in fact, before taking off. Our love nest had a radio I instantly switched on to hear if there were any early returns while we gave the place a cursory glance and put the groceries away. Then we flung ourselves onto the unmade bed for which I had thoughtfully remembered to pack sheets.

When our storm of passion had subsided, my mistress stared impassively at the ceiling.

"In bed with Frank and Billy," she intoned. "It was Election Day, and Frank and Billy were once again in bed. Election returns meant nothing to them. The future of their great nation was inconsequential; so busy were they flinging themselves at each other, they could barely be expected to think for one second of any larger issue. The subjects to which these trained economists could have spoken, such as inflationary spirals or deficit budgeting, were as mere dust."

"Shut up, Billy," I said.

She did shut up. She put on my shirt and went off to the kitchen. When she returned, she had two cups of coffee and a plate of toasted-cheese sandwiches on a tray. With the exception of her dinner party, this was the first meal I had ever had at her hands.

"I'm starving," she said, getting under the covers. We polished off our snack, propped up with pillows. I asked Billy if she might like a second cup of coffee and she gave me a look of remorse and desire that made my head spin.

"Maybe you wanted to go out for dinner," she said. "You like a proper dinner." Then she burst into tears. "I'm sorry," she said. These were words I had never heard her speak before.

"Sorry?" I said. "Sorry for what?"

"I didn't ask you what you wanted to do," my mistress said. "You might have wanted to take a walk, or go for a drive, or look around the house, or make the bed."

I stared at her.

"I don't want a second cup of coffee," Billy said. "Do you?"

I got her drift and did not get out of bed. I tried to do an imitation of a man giving in to a woman, because, in fact, my thirst for her embarrassed me and I did not mind imagining that it was her thirst I was being kind enough to quench, but the forthrightness of her desire for me melted my heart.

During that week, none of my expectations came to pass. We did not, for example, have long talks about our respective marriages or our future together or apart. We did not discover what our domestic life might be like. We lived like graduate students, or mice, and not like normal people at all, but like lovers. We kept odd hours and lived off sandwiches. We stayed in bed and both were glad that it rained four days out of five. When the sun came out, we went for a walk and watched the leaves turn. From time to time, I would switch on the radio to find out what the news commentators were saying about the election results.

"Because of this historic time," Billy said, "you will never be able to forget me. It is a rule of life that care must be taken in choosing whom one will be in bed with during Great Moments in History. You are now stuck with me and this week of important Congressional elections twined in your mind forever."

•

It was in the car on the way home that the subject of what we were doing together came up. It was twilight and we had both been rather silent.

"This is the end of the line," said Billy.

"What do you mean?" I said. "Do you mean you want to break this up?"

"No," said Billy. "It would be nice, though, wouldn't it?"

"No, it would not be nice," I said.

"I think it would," said Billy. "Then I wouldn't spend all my time wondering what we are doing together when I could be thinking about other things, like the future of the dollar."

"What do you think we are doing together?" I said.

"It's simple," said Billy. "Some people have dogs or kitty cats. You're my pet."

"Come on."

"OK, you're right. Those are only child substitutes. You're my child substitute until I can make up my mind about having a child."

At this, my blood does freeze. Whose child does she want to have?

•

Every now and then, when overcome with tenderness--on these occasions naked, carried away and looking at each other with sweetness in our eyes--my mistress and I smile dreamily and realize that if we dwelled together for more than a week, in the real world and not in some love nest, we would soon learn to hate each other. It would never work. We both know it. She is too relentlessly dour and too fond of silence. I prefer false cheer to no cheer and I like conversation over dinner no matter what. Furthermore, we would never have proper meals, and although I cannot cook, I like to dine. I would soon resent her lack of interest in domestic arrangements and she would resent me for resenting her. Furthermore, Billy is a slob. She does not leave the towels lying on the bathroom floor. but she throws them over the shower curtain any old way, instead of folding them or hanging them properly so they can dry. It is things like this--it is actually the symbolic content of things like this--that squash out romance over a period of time.

As for Billy, she often sneers at me. She finds many of my opinions quaint. She laughs up her sleeve at me, often actually unbuttoning her cuff button (when the button is actually on the cuff) to demonstrate laughing up her sleeve. She thinks I am an old-time domestic fascist. She refers to me as "an old-style heterosexual throwback" or "old hetero" because I like to pay for dinner, open car doors and often call her at night when Grey is out of town to make sure she is safe. The day the plumber came to fix a leak in the sink, I called several times.

"He's gone," Billy said, "and he left big, greasy paw prints all over me." She found this funny, but I did not.

After a while. I believe I would be driven nuts and she would come to loathe me. My household is well run and well regulated. I like routine and I like things to go along smoothly. We employ a flawless person by the name of Mrs. Ivy Castle, who has been flawlessly running our house for some time. She is an excellent housekeeper and a marvelous cook. Our relations with her are formal.

The Delielles employ a feckless person called Mimi-Ann Browning, who comes in once a week to push the dust around. Mimi-Ann hates routine and schedules and is constantly changing the days of the people she works for. It is quite something to hear Billy on the telephone with her.

"Oh, Mimi-Ann," she will say, "please don't switch me, I beg you. I have to feed some friends of Grey's and the house is really disgusting. Please, Mimi. I'll do anything. I'll do your mother-in-law's tax return. I'll be your eternal slave. Please. Oh, thank you, Mimi. Thank you a million times."

Now, why, I ask myself, does my mistress never speak to me like that?

In that sad twilight on the way home from our week together, I asked myself, as I am always asking myself: Could I exist in some ugly flat with my cheerless mistress? I could not, as my mistress was the first to point out.

She said that the expression on my face at the sight of the towels thrown over the shower-curtain rod was similar to what you might find on the face of a vegetarian walking through an abattoir. She said that the small doses we got of each other made it possible for us to have a love affair but that a taste of ordinary life would do us both in. She correctly pointed out that our only real common interest was each other, since we had such vast differences of opinion on the subject of economic theory. Furthermore, we were not simply lovers, nor were we mere friends, and since we were not going to end up together, there was nothing for it.

I was silent.

"Face it," said my tireless mistress, "we have no raison d'etre."

There was no disputing this.

I said, "If we have no raison d'etre, Billy, then what are we to do?"

These conversations flare up like tropical storms. The climate is always right for them. It is simply a question of when they will occur.

"Well?" I said.

"I don't know," said my mistress, who generally has a snappy answer for everything.

A wave of fatherly affection and worry came over me. I said, in a voice so drenched with concern it caused my mistress to scowl like a child about to receive an injection. "Perhaps you should think about this more seriously, Billy. You and Grey are really just starting out. Vera and I have been married a long, long time. I think I am more a disruption in your life than you are in mine."

"Wanna bet?" said Billy.

"Perhaps we should see each other less," I said. "Perhaps we should part."

"OK, let's part," said Billy. "You go first." Her face was set and I entertained myself with the notion that she was trying not to burst into tears. Then she said, "What are you going to do all day after we part?"

This is not a subject to which I wanted to give much thought.

"Isn't our raison d'etre that we're fond of each other?" I said. "I'm awfully fond of you."

"Gee, that's interesting," Billy said. "You're fond of me. I love you." Of course, she would not look me in the eye and say it.

"Well, I love you," I said. "I just don't quite know what to do about it."

"Whatever our status quos are," Billy said. "they are being maintained like mad."

This silenced me. Billy and I have the world right in place. Nothing flutters, changes or moves. Whatever is being preserved in our lives is safely preserved. It is quite true, as Billy, who believes in function, points out, that we are in each other's life for a reason, but neither of us will state the reason. Nevertheless, although there are some cases in which love is not a good or sufficient excuse for anything, the fact is, love is undeniable.

Yes, love is undeniable and that is the tricky point. It is one of the sobering realizations of adult life that love is often not a propellent. Thus, in those romantic movies, the tender mistress stays married to her stuffy husband--the one with the mustache and the stiff tweeds--while the lover is seen walking through the countryside with his long-suffering wife and faithful dog. It often seems that the function of romance is to give people something romantic to think about.

The question is: If it is true, as my mistress says, that she is going to stay with Grey and I am going to stay with Vera, why is it that we are together every chance we get?

There was, of course, an explanation for this and my indefatigable mistress came up with it, God bless her.

"It's an artistic impulse," she said. "It takes us out of reality and gives us a secret context all our own."

"Oh, I see," I said. "It's only art."

"Don't get in a huff," Billy said. "We're in a very unusual situation. It has to do with limited doting, restricted thrall and situational adoration."

"Oh, how interesting," I said. "Are doting, thrall and adoration things you actually feel for me?"

"Could be," said Billy. "But, actually, I was speaking for you."

•

Every adult knows that facts must be faced. In adult life, it often seems that's all there is. Prior to our week together, the unguarded moments between us had been kept to a minimum. Now they came rather more frequently. That week together haunted us. It dogged our heels. It made us long for and dread--what an unfortunate combination!--each other.

One evening, I revealed to her how I sometimes feel as I watch her walk up the stairs to the door of her house. I feel she is walking into her real and still fairly young life. She will leave me in the dust, I think. I think of all the things that have not yet happened to her, that have not yet gone wrong, and I think of her life with Grey, which is still mostly unlived.

One afternoon, she told me how it makes her feel when she thinks of my family table--with Vera and our sons and our daughter-in-law and our daughter-in-law-to-be, of our years of shared meals, of all that lived life. Billy described this feeling as a band around her head and a hot pressure in the area of her heart. I, of course, merely get a lump in my throat. Why do these admittings take place at twilight or at dusk, in the gloomiest light, when everything looks dirty, eerie, faded or inevitable?

Our conversation comes to a dead halt, like a horse balking before a hurdle, on the issue of what we want. I have tried my best to formulate what it is I want from Billy, but I have not gotten very far. Painful consideration has brought forth this revelation: I want her not ever to stop being. This is as close as grammar or reflection will allow.

One day, the horse will jump over the hurdle and the end will come. The door will close. Perhaps Billy will do the closing. She will decide she wants a baby, or Grey will be offered a job in London, or Billy will get a job in Boston and the Delielles will move. Or perhaps Vera will come home one evening and say that she longs to live in Paris or San Francisco and the Clemenses will move. What will happen then?

Perhaps my mistress is right. A love affair is like a work of art. The large store of references, and jokes, the history of our friendship, our week together in Vermont, our numberless telephone calls, this edifice, this monument, this civilization known only to and constructed by us will be--what will it be? Billy once read to me an article in an anthropological journal about the last Coast Salish Indian to speak Wintun. All the others of his tribe were dead. That is how I would feel, deprived of Billy.

The awful day will doubtless come. It is like thinking about the inevitability of nuclear war. But as for now, I continue to ring her doorbell. Her greeting is delivered in her bored monotone. "Oh, it's you," she will say. "How sweet you look."

I will follow her up the stairs to her study and there we will hurl ourselves at each other. I will reflect, as I always do, how very bare the setting for these encounters is. Not a picture on the wall, not an ornament. Even the quilt that keeps the chill off us on the couch is faded.

In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me, "My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about."

As I gather her into my arms. I cannot help imagining all that interior furniture, those hard-edged things she thinks about, whatever is behind her silence, whatever, in fact, her real story is.

She may turn to me and in a moment of tenderness say, "What a cute boy." This remark always sounds exotic to me--no one has ever addressed me this way, especially not at my age and station.

I imagine that someday she will turn to me and, with some tone in her voice I have never heard before, say, "We can't see each other anymore." We will both know the end has come. But, meanwhile, she is right close by. After a fashion, she is mine. I watch her closely to catch the look of true love that every once in a while overtakes her. She knows I am watching, and she knows the effect her look has. "A baby could take candy from you." she says.

Our feelings have edges and spines and prickles like cactus, or a porcupine. Our parting when it comes will not be simple, either. Depicted, it would look like one of those medieval beasts that has fins, fur, scales, feathers, claws, wings and horns. In a world apart from anyone else, we are Frank and Billy, with no significance to anyone but the other. Oh, the terrible privacy and loneliness of love affairs.

Under the quilt with our arms interlocked, I look into my mistress' eyes. They are dark and full of concealed feeling. If we hold each other close enough, that darkness is held at bay. The mission of the lover is, after all, to love. I can look at Billy and see clear back to the first time we met, to our hundreds of days together, to her throwing the towels over the shower-curtain rod, to each of her gestures and intonations. She is the road I have traveled to her, and I am hers.

Oh, Billy! Oh, art! Oh, memory!

"'Vera has men friends. I have women friends. The first principle of a good marriage is freedom.'"

"I tried to do an imitation of a man giving in to a woman, because my thirst for her embarrassed me."