"The same," I said. "The same now as then. The same for my mother and the same for me."

He said with a revival of interest, "Your mother mistook an episode for a principle. Then yelled fraud. D'you know I've been doing Mrs. Valiant a favor all these years? Been giving her an opportunity to express her strong feelings of principle." And now at last his intricate gargoyle-filled laugh-a laugh a cathedral might produce. But he suddenly cut it off and recovered. "That's why she's against me. n.o.body likes to be kept to a principle."

"You do. You keep yourself to a principle."

"I don't."

"You do."

For a moment we seemed to echo the flirting lovers in the wood.

"I don't," he said again. "What fraud would?"

"A fraudulent fraud."

Loud was his groan; it buried the screams from the tents.

"A fraud cares," I said.

"What about?"

"Consequences."

"Go to the devil. Trash. That's only a word."

"You don't care what happens to anybody. You won't make anything happen. You don't care if anybody believes you or not. A liar likes to get people to believe him. But you don't mind if they do or they don't. You don't mind anything. You wouldn't even have minded if I never showed up. If you never saw me. It wouldn't have changed anything. A fraud tries to get things changed-"

"Listen to her, out-and-out homage to fraud. The Woman of Principle should hear you."

"It's not that you're a fraud," I said, "it's that you like everyone to think you are, and that's a fraud. And all the time they're afraid you're going to do what you say you will, they rely on you to do it and they're afraid, and all the time it's only an impersonation-"

"Ah. That's the principle, hah?"

"If they hadn't paid you you would have stopped asking. If I hadn't come you would never have gone to those newspapers about Enoch. You never would," I said.

Footsteps overhead. The lovers were tramping down. In the dark I heard him spit.

He said: "What bothers you is you can't understand anybody who doesn't give a d.a.m.n. For power I mean. That's what bothers you, girlie. The lilies of the field bother you. They toil not, neither do they spin, they get it just like that."

I took the smallest breath. "Enoch says having no power corrupts."

"I remember that," but his look went toward the stairs. "Hasn't he said anything new in twenty years?"

"Haven't you felt anything new in twenty years?"

To my surprise this pleased him. "You want me to improve? Look, you ask Mrs. Viscera if she thinks Nick needs improving. Because if I'm the same now as then at least I haven't deteriorated, see? Only if I'm the same for you as for her it's only by reputation. She didn't have dermaphobia, not Mrs. Vaccination."

I stared.

"Fear of membranous contact, call it. Well here's the little looker. Right off the amphora."

"Right off the what?" cried Stefanie in pique.

I said jealously, "He thinks you're a warrior's girl on a Greek jar. He collects Greek jars."

"Good G.o.d, you talk just like him."

"I am just like him."

"Well bully for you. You go in for ghosts in trees too?"

"You're wrong," my father said solemnly, "it's the G.o.ds I collect."

William's son said, "It's too wet to walk down there. Mud knee-deep. Forget it, we'll use the sofa."

"She's got the sofa. And anyhow it's full. Asleep at the switch and meanwhile those kids are playing Chicago slaughterhouse. We saw 'em from the window up there. What a racket. p.u.s.s.yhead, if you didn't leave those d.a.m.n bags in the ship where'd you leave them?"

"I don't know. Out near the table I think."

"You think. That big lawyer's brain and all. I bet they're soaked. I'm not going to sleep in a soaked bag, you can bet your life I'm not. The zipper could rust and we'd be like the Man in the Iron Mask. Look, you didn't have to go and forget to bring up the d.a.m.n sleeping bags for goodness' sake. I'm not supposed to spend the night in a Greek olive jar, am I? Don't get the idea I'm going to sleep on the floor either," but she did. That night she did sleep on the floor.

"Well you want me to go down to the beach and look?"

"I don't know." She s.n.a.t.c.hed her fiance's flashlight and shone it all around. It washed shockingly into my eyes and then slid off, and in a half-blindness I saw that William's son had remembered to take away his plunder. The Law of the Sea was lodged in his armpit The coin of light wavered, then found the Purses. "Your house is on fire and your children will burn. They don't budge, look at that."

She stood fixedly over them, marveling. Tilbeck came beside her. The two of them looked at the Purses. The tips of their elbows grazed. Purse shuddered. Mrs. Purse snapped one eye and yawned. Somnolently they rose. Yawning and shuddering, light as sacks, emptied, they were borne up, they levitated, they floated slowly out of sight It was as though someone had rubbed them out.

"You'd think they'd say something," Stefanie complained.

Beyond the house, among the tents, nothing was heard.

"They're all dead. Everybody's killed everybody."

"Why not?" William's son said glumly.

The lovers had touched. The lovers had touched at last Their skins had touched; the friction had begun; the Purses were expunged: something had happened. Love. The private worm; the same. What my mother knew I knew.

-I loved my father.

And the union of the lovers was about to be.

16.

The union of the lovers takes place on the floor, between the piano and the sofa, on the brown blanket Mrs. Purse has thrown down. There is the night sound of wind. The wool is the color of earth. Into the cavern of the dining room a weak moving light swims. It swims in like a fish, with short unsure darts, nudging an eye into life, a cruel honed nostril, gouging a murderous chin: the kings' heads are swarming in conclave on those walls. What is it, what stirs the mouths of monarchs?-a tremulous candle beating all the while, and now and again a stick of brightness cutting' through from a flashlight. Someone is reading in the kitchen-I hear a page turning, I hear the fleshy creak of the reader turning his body into the night. The turning of a body is what has wakened me. I huddle on my sofa, hiding myself. The wind breathes as a sleeper might. I feel stiff with life, and lean my face between my knees-I can see my ankles, bad straight ankles with no indentation toward the heel. Above the heel a stubble snags my rub. The arms of the sofa shrug upward into shoulders, the shoulders into back. On the back the dancers dance. Behind it the lovers couple. I crouch on the ledge of the world and am their witness.

And I see her moulting, she crawls from the white tunnel of that skirt, her knees flash calisthenic. pockets, in her neck two ropes pull and fall, the plane of her face grows negligible, her head feels out the floor slowly, like the tenderly lowered head of a patient Then hands rise-her own-and through cleavages in the cloth the b.u.t.ting noses of b.u.t.tons force themselves, her jacket springs open like mechanical wings and her shoulders lift grinning their strengths, her fingers acquiring eyes maneuver valorously against the ditch of vertebrae and the white sails over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s fail and sink to her belly. Then in a kind of loneliness, with the subtlety of feeling watched, she shows sportsman's skill, bets on herself, begins to slide, as with an itch in the upper back, and with a quick comic football dig has freed herself into whole nakedness, never once raising her body from its surgical la.s.situde. Arrogant on her dimensionless platform she lies stretched to his view and dares his daring. In her right thigh a dent like a scar but not a scar, a sulfurous soap-colored birth bruise, mocks the long strong highway of her haunch. With the vengefulness of the knowledgeably imperfect she throws her elbows crisscross over her head, displays the tangle in the armpit, and in a gesture almost scholarly closes one deft leg over another, obscuring the lower tangle. Then with b.u.t.tocks nailed to the floor she rolls from the waist, twists out a balloon of flesh at the bending-point, presses to the wool two brown valves like weights dragging her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to their taperings, and reaches to shove away her clothes. He sees his chance, takes hold of her hipfat like a lever, and pushes her over-the solemn seal of her legs breaks, her chinbone grinds into the floor and her b.u.t.tocks, pulled separate, crash into air like a pair of helmets. At the nape of each, on either side of her spine, there is a depressed pan; into the left one he fits his palm and sucks out the noise of vacuum tugging at vacuum. The hollow of his hand flees this place and seeks something round. "Roach," she says, "you nearly cracked my jaw." He gives no answer, travels with a forcing finger down into her bellyb.u.t.ton, he can tell how her muscles are carrying her accommodatingly higher for him, he blimps upward over the rhythm of ribs and is about to collect the candle-end of her nipple when she smashes herself suddenly down on his hand underneath her, so that her skeleton toils into his knuckles. "That hurt, you b.i.t.c.h, let go." "You roach. You c.o.c.kroach," she says calmly, and heaves down to hold him. But somehow under her heaviness he has regained action-I can see from the minute but regular twitchings in his shoulder that he is in control of his wrist again, he has converted the soft hand of cautious searching into a fist with one uncompromising finger pointing straight out, a hand on a signpost, and bow he abandons the upward direction, switches it round like an insect antenna, and probes down hard, punching with the ball of his finger as he listens to her anger, wiggling it down down among her whiskers, and slowly slowly of her own will she ripples her weight away from him, he is untrapped and free to wander, a bridge of strength grows from the root of her neck to her calves, her b.u.t.tocks strain into squares, she seems to hang upward from the cord of her side, her bones gather themselves into a hinge and for a moment the leafy hillock that caches her cleft swings up, rears, dominates like a fortification, an acropolis, then from that second's ascendancy dives-her high place is razed, the Y of her slaps into an I, she closes like a compa.s.s, the hairy mound of love is re-claimed and reduced by the primary mound of the belly, vanishing almost, she is on her back, shut, but his touch which has risen with her, turned and fallen with her, clings for its life to the cliff, grabs at brush to keep itself from slipping to that belly-plain and its deep abandoned s.e.xless pock, recovers, arches its hard knuckles, protrudes the resuming finger of excitation, and thrusts it laboring into the secret wood. "Quit that," she says bitterly, "I don't need any help from the likes of you, never mind those Chinaman gimmicks, believe me I can just cross my legs and break your arm off," but her voice runs with a moist sluggishness, die surfaces of her eyes are leathery as calluses, he has tripped some strand linked to other strands, some voluptuary wire in her brain tightens, he has caught the drawstring of her frame, her thighs knot and shift, the wicks of her nipples stiffen-"If you're waiting for tomorrow skip it," she mutters-her upper lip is hoisted, her nostrils knead themselves. But his body is away. "How d'you like that, bus without a driver," he says, "you going to get off before I get on?" "You'll never get on," she rasps. Again he does not answer, his feet curve under him like communing antlers, the absurd knots of his b.u.t.tocks pile up on his heels, he angles forward a little and from his cluttered fork just then lowers a lopsided basket like bunches of grapes in a wineskin, the round weights dragging heavily and unequally in their loose pulled bag. Hairs spring from his shoulders and he shows himself to her, leaning his tongue on his lip, then quick and crafty plunges it into the furrow of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. His tongue scribbles figure 8s in a wobbling track-"I ride my own way, n.o.body tells me how to ride," and I see what he rides, I see the neck of the animal he rides kneeling, it stretches to escape him but is docile, its. long straight neck yearns from its ruff and collar, it is a thick-flanked headless beast and new to me.-I think of Enoch and the door always open to insult my mother's delicacy, and I coming by one day and seeing how his stream falls from a tender fat creature with a short neck scalloped out of the head, and in the head a pouring cyclops-eye-the Jews are different. Stefanie laughs, mutedly they laugh together in fear of being heard, exposed-"the Leaning Tower of Pisa," she calls up to him, "whyn't you try Perma-Starch?" and I see how under the whip of her dispraise his steed hardens its headless neck, all sinew and maneless muscle, all sudden brutishness and power, its will surges out of his thighs, it bears him up on the crest of its canter, he climbs sideways to her side and still that stallion stays high in an arrested leap between his thighs, it strains outward as though it would shoot free, a slow wax tear glistens in its blind cup-"are you dressed for this?"-he turns his mouth and spits into the dark. "What d'you think, I came with," she answers him, "I'm stuffed to the gills, I'm not stupid," down now to a whisper, and he falls on his flattened hands on either side of her, and enc.u.mbered by the life that prances out of his fork he falls to his knees astride her haunch and suspends himself above her like the tent-skin that goes from bone to bone of the wing of a bat. His wrists and shins are the bones, and his ropy body hangs like a hammock between them; meanwhile his steed paws her belly. Then strangely-her face is very still-a fulcrum moves in her spine, her hams revolve and lift, her legs climb for their embrace like arms, she takes him like a caliper around the waist of an ant, her ankles are locked into his armpits, she divides herself to bag him, she cleaves herself wide for him, his stud charges and misses, retreats, a.s.sesses, charges, misses, their sighs sing together, he grabs for her b.u.t.tocks and shoves them higher, she teeters on the base of her neck and props herself for him, he dangles her now from his neck like a wishbone, his sides within the crook of her urge her wider, she tears thigh from thigh, she opens herself, she is split beyond belief, his blind beast's thick muzzle lumbers down, vanishes. Ah. Reappears. She cries out at her loss of it, but now he has caught the sense of her track and goes to her straight, keen, with a cleanliness of skill and s.p.a.ce, I hear a small brief grateful sucking, now he is like some woodcutter with a great bole before him and he must cut it down before night, and he begins, little by little, with his tempered saw, afraid of time and of magnitude, but snaring courage from the courage of the stroke, and driving in, in, toward the tree's deepest inner thong, each thrust to the center exacting an equal retreat to the farthest margin, the retreat feeding on the thrust and the thrust each time seizing more and more elasticity from the release that follows, so that the tree seems to labor in its own cutting, the tree devours the saw, together the tree and the cutter strive for its felling, the sunball leaps down and still the tree offers its opened side to the saw and the saw dives crucially into the wound, and they hurry, they hurry, if they do not meet in the crisis of the stroke they will forfeit the victory of time, if they do not match will for will they are lost to time and crisis. Time and crisis sweat in them, crisis claws time, time waits: now something huge; huge, taut, distended; some enormous dome of absence swelled by the squeeze of hope looms, intrudes, shoulders itself between the fitted halves of woman and man, untender, cunning yet blunt, now her mouth strains to stretch flat, the muscles of her cheeks squeeze now not hope but demand-now it is demand and demand, she demands the hugeness, she sweats for it, the huge freight of toil, she toils and demands, she demands what sharp birth she will bear, she toils and demands-"You lousy little independent," he tells her, "you've got plenty to learn," and she, bleak with fear of early triumph, bleats, "It's you not me, just try and catch up, grandpa," and suddenly both are motionless: motionless: a photograph of the tide: then the reel begins to run again, but too quick, berserk, backward, he flashes backward to his knees, I see his wet breast rise like a column rebuilding, he undoes gesture and posture, the trail of sweat shining downward climbs from the inner elbow to return itself to the armpit, he retrieves himself for himself: then reaches a single vast hand curved and spread to contain her and takes the swell of her crotch and fast and brutally, before she can sprawl, he flips her over. And penetrates, A noise of pain creaks from her-her arms are pressed crooked and tangled under her ribs, her palms show helplessly the wrong way up, like the pale backs of leaves, she is captive, twisted, his teeth pull on the skin of her nape and the heel of the hand that threw her over leans deep into her iron resisting belly, she no longer has her will, she is heaped below him and cannot turn, he keeps her stiff and still, his bottommost leg pries apart her calves and angry knees, she will not widen herself for him but inch by inch he pries with his invading knee and shin, now he has her wide for him but stiff, his fingers creep to cup themselves and push flat her nipple and breast, she is stiff but wonderfully wide for him, she sinks for the blow of his sinking, she burrows her hams in his grizzly triangle, she claims nothing, she is curiously manageable and quickly soft, he rides with her and rocks, as on a sea-toy, he rocks and rides, he slices the top off each smooth wave as it shrugs into being, the waves shrug themselves tall, the sea-toy swells to scale them, the waves are walls, his rocking slams the sea like a door, the tall water has walls and doors like a room, he rocks in the room, the small room shrinks, the walls tighten, he cannot rock so he beats, he beats, he does not rock or slide but he beats, beats, and slow-motion through the density of her spine the tender doors fall away of themselves, and behind one is another and beyond that another, door after door after door, and all the doors fade away into openings past openings, and he rolls from her, annulled, and she rolls slowly round, taking the curve of her flank prudently and slowly until she is on her back, her hand on the hand that dents her high nipple, and I have the sense that a mirror has peered into a mirror and viewed infinity, and I the witness of it.

From the beginning they never kissed.

17.

They lay whispering.

Then I understood that they were making their plans, so I hung back to hear-a witness has no resources and no stratagems. But it was uninteresting. They were only wrangling over something nautical. Where they would go and what they would do seemed too well agreed for argument. And anyhow it was a very short quarrel, full of this boat and that boat; immediately they slept, so I started after the light. The light led from them. On the way to it I felt I had witnessed the very style of my own creation.

18.

In the kitchen a gaggle of candles lit The Law of the Sea.

I said, "What are you reading in that?"

The flashlight drew a bead on me. "Piracy. What're you doing creeping around?"

"I thought that book was rare."

"Well?"

"Piracy isn't."

"I know that I know what there is to know," William's son said, and vengefully blew at the flames: they all went out, but one unexpectedly revived.

"Long John Silver," I said. "The black flag."

"Oh shut up. Don't be a d.a.m.n fool."

The flashlight circuited s.p.a.ce and caught a mouse running into a cavern-we heard its feet slip in panic on the refrigerator floor.

"What do you expect me to do?" he said finally, and I was startled-William had asked the same, though retroactively. Certain questions, like fortunes and misfortunes, pa.s.s from father to son. "Apply the Unwritten Law? Go in and kill them?"

"You could start with local precedent," I said, and sat down next to him on the green silk sofa, my father's bed, where green girls danced. Our heads were nearly in the fireplace. "What this place demands of all its lovelorn. -Head for the woods like a red-blooded Armenian. You could always do that."

And I made the gesture of the knife.

"Very funny."

"She isn't worth it?"

"He isn't."

I asked, "Do you make a habit of insulting fathers?"

"What?"

"First yours. Now mine."

"What did I say? I said he'd be a shoo-in-"

"Not stepfather. Father."

"I haven't said a word about my father. -All right, so I said I'm getting like him. Every day little by little, more and more-it's something you can feel. If I keep it up I may yet qualify for a trustee. Unless I decide to stop short of murder and stick to robbing banks."

"You could call it off."

"Call what off? My probably inherited criminal pattern? The grapes that the fathers have eaten shall set the teeth of the sons-"

"Getting married."

"-on edge. You don't turn back from the edge." He said fiercely, "I can't call it off."

"Why not? You think she'll quit? She's practically just got started."

"You don't just call a thing like that off. Not a wedding. You don't know the machinery. It would kill the families, they'd die."

"Of satisfaction. I mean William. I bet he'd do a jig. He doesn't like her."

"He hates her. Look," he said, "I told you once, you don't know a thing about families, not one d.a.m.n thing."

"I remember-family unity. Its a sort of rule, like parliamentary procedure-has to do with giving people the floor." I took the flashlight from him and meditatively switched it off and on; then off. "Your fiancee's on the floor right now."

"Go to h.e.l.l."

"You'll marry her anyway?"

"You bet I will."