chapter 9
A quarter past nine, the clock on the mantel read. Too early for bed, if Charlotte didn't want to wake in the dead of night. She took a seat by the open window in the living room, where warm evening air floated across the sill onto her lap and onto the heads of the dogs lying at her feet. She'd run on too long this afternoon with young Nate, carried away on the Works Progress Administration, but she hadn't been able to help herself.
He had caught her unawares that first day he'd appeared and it had been all she could do to muster an hour's lesson. As he'd scribbled the occasional note, a familiar pall of uncomprehending boredom had settled over his face like custard. How many times had she seen the like while pacing her classroom, Lincoln's doleful eyes gazing over the fruit of his more perfect union? Over the years, most students had been baffled by her importuning, her insistence that they see the conditions of their own lives in historical terms. Amidst the general, bovine indifference there had always been a few willing to entertain the notion that the world might consist of more than their uses for it. She hadn't pegged Nate as one at first.
But now she saw things differently. He attended to her words as if it weren't only the content that mattered. Toward the end of her years at the school, even her better students had become mere harvesters of fact, unwilling to be transformed by what they might learn. They were closed to that higher ambiguity that came only from observing at close range a person compelled by knowledge, someone who might show by example how one's first self, illiberally imposed, could be given up in favor of the chosen course. But not this young man. It wasn't that his few questions had been all that penetrating, and indeed his being impressed by the intruder's mansion had struck her nearly dumb. But he considered her arguments; he followed the rhythm of her words.
A generosity of attention. That was the heart of it.
You expect us to believe that? Wilkie said, rising to press his nose to the screen, ears perked up like the wings of a bat. Come on now, be honest with yourself.
The boy's skin, pale like butter; his large brown eyes; the way his hair fell in a wave over his forehead. She'd seen the resemblance early on, but pushed the thought aside. But sitting across from him at the Chinese the other week it made no sense to deny how like a younger Eric he looked.
Oh, here we go, Sam said.
How could she ever think, ever get things clear in her head with the two of them nattering like this?
That afternoon, tutoring Nate, just as an idea was about to take form and escape the eddies of modification and caveat, some tiny fact - ash on the carpet, a strand of ticking loose on the sofa's arm - had pulsed up bright in front of her, arresting all her forward motion, and she'd floated there, lost, catching the dark sparkle of Sam's or Wilkie's eyes, who called out to her, There is no place other than this: welcome, leaving her terrified but determined to resist, to find the current again before it ceased, and so haul from her stalled mind a coherent thought.
But even now as she tried to concentrate, to keep her mind here in the present, memory, like a troubled friend whispering through the screen, brought the image of her old apartment on West Eleventh Street, those two little ground-floor rooms with the paved square of garden at the back, and the two of them bringing in the firewood Eric had found somewhere the day he moved in with her, his father's old car parked in the rain, the two of them running logs down the steps and into the house, piling them on a blue tarpaulin spread on the living-room floor, the wood dust and strands of bark matted to their coats.
Most of Charlotte's college friends had met their husbands before graduation or secured them soon after. Boys from Amherst and Williams arriving four or five to a car for the dances at Smith, long evenings of the smallest talk imaginable, the young gentlemen speaking like bad pantomimes of their fathers, all summer holidays and the names of banks, little lords of the financial manor. She'd watched women she'd heard speak eloquently in class of Shakespeare or Rome nod their heads and smile, listening patiently to one blandishment after the next, while the boys glanced about to see what else was available, and it made her feel ashamed for her classmates and for herself. It may have been that the boys didn't approach her because she didn't catch their eye, being a bit too tall, neither blond nor pretty in a conventional way, but the defiant expression she wore couldn't have encouraged them either. If one did strike up conversation, she thought it best to compensate for her classmates' hiding of their education; she usually started in on an analysis of whatever she was reading that week. A battlement her pride had been, high and safe.
As a single woman out in the world, it had only seemed the more necessary. At her seat at work behind the reference desk of the New York Public Library, middle-aged men would wink at her. On the subway they'd try worse.
"A bit lonesome, isn't it?" she remembered her mother asking at the table at Thanksgiving the fall she started graduate school at Columbia. "All those hours cooped up studying?"
"As opposed to the ones you spend cooped up in this house?" she replied, which brought silence and a withering stare.
Her father understood; he'd encouraged her from the beginning.
"I'm just being practical," her mother suggested, defending her worries for Charlotte's future. Henry, five years younger, had already graduated from law school, started with a firm, and, to perfect the narrative, married Betsy, whom he'd met one summer on a trip to the Cape. The wedding had been given by Betsy's parents in Hyannis, all white tents and high Episcopal good form, from the Bloody Marys to the starched collars to the understated, almost humble self-satisfaction of the father's toast and the look in Charlotte's mother's eye as Henry took his bride by the arm and led her onto the parquet for the first dance. Or the last dance, as Charlotte thought of it. After all the cotillions and proms and coming-out balls, the dance that fixed you in place. For Henry, it was a dress-up lark dreamed by women into existence for which he was happy to play his role for the day, because what would it ever cost him, and it made his mother so happy (decades later, imitations of the clothes they'd worn on weekends like that would show up in all those catalogues, Ralph Lauren and the others, the smugness of that faded time resurrected as commercial fantasy). At the reception, Charlotte had been seated next to the bride's brother, a Cadillac dealer who'd clearly never read Appointment in Samarra. Henry, to his credit, didn't join in the cloying asides about her being next.
She'd spent three years studying: taking seminars, attending extra lectures, working in the library, and reading in the evenings. Her friends were other people in the history department along with the two or three women from college who hadn't moved out of the city. In school, being single didn't register the way it did at home with her parents. Time had purpose without a companion. Still, the solitude got to her now and again. Despite her best effort, she couldn't rid herself of the tug of "Saturday Night" and the need to have something to do. On the weeks she failed to plan ahead and found herself alone, the doubt which concentration otherwise kept at bay entered her, and she heard her mother's voice. The words in the books and journals spread on her kitchen table seemed lifeless then, dead as the time they described. But the feeling always passed; a paper would demand more reading, more research; the vistas would open up again inside her, lending the world that sense of integration, as she discerned more and more of the structure of the present in the society and politics of Europe three centuries before, as though she were glimpsing the hidden order of things. Try explaining that over gin and tonics at the beach club to one of the sons of her mother's friends. Why no, Chuck, I don't get to play much squash. You see, I'm a secular mystic, transported in private hours by the grandeur of human knowledge. You don't say? Well, actually, I do.
Of the men she met in the city, most were married or seemed put off by her lack of deference.
It was at a winter party, given by one of her professors at Columbia, that she met Eric. She knew most of the people there, other graduate students, junior professors she'd taken classes with or heard speak. She noticed him first with his back to the room, examining the bookshelf, his head craned to read the spines. When he turned, he accidentally met Charlotte's gaze and smiled, shyly, before looking into his drink. Something about the curly brown hair that hung over his brow and the creamy skin and the wide, slightly unshaven jaw had caused her to stare. That afternoon, sitting at her desk at the back of her apartment as the light faded in the courtyard, she'd finished writing what she considered her best work yet, a paper on Milton's tenure in Cromwell's government, the result of a year's research. She remained full of the satisfaction of being done, a pleasure so long and scrupulously deferred. Eric looked a bit younger than she was, in his mid-twenties perhaps. Keeping an eye out, she spotted him a few minutes later on the far side of the room and went over to introduce herself. It was the kind of egalitarian gesture she believed in and for once she'd drunk enough to bring it off.
They spoke for two hours that evening, sitting on the bench in the bay window, the Hudson visible through the bare trees. After an awkward few moments, he had started in, dispensing with the pleasantries of asking who she was or where she fit in the party, right away wanting to know what she'd read recently, "the best things," he said, "the stuff that could change you," and he didn't want to hear only about history but about novels, journalism, poetry. And then through and past that, to her thoughts, assuming without question that her ideas possessed the same integrity and significance of any of the books that helped shape them. His need to hear all this seemed almost animal-like, as though by elaborating her thoughts she were feeding him. At first, she spoke haltingly. She was used to the prescribed discussions of seminars; she'd never been asked to offer such comprehensive views. Answering his questions, she felt ideas, long inchoate, come into focus. The plainness of early Protestant worship explained something about why she'd been transfixed in Amsterdam the summer before by Vermeer's painting of an everyday exterior - the brick fronts of the merchant's house, the gray cloud, the women doing their daily work. And this connected in ways she could only guess at to idealism in politics, the insistence on equality, the plainness of it, and thus too, somehow, to the power of the spectacle of troops in Little Rock escorting a black girl to the ordinary activity of school. She understood then, and even more later, that others, the beautiful perhaps, would laugh if she were to confess it, but sitting fully clothed on that window seat, never having touched a hair on Eric's body, she felt more sexually alive than ever in her life. She would have walked into a bedroom of that apartment, closed the door on the party, and made love to him at once if he'd asked.
As it happened, they made love on her couch the next night after dinner, the heat of his chest on hers and the smell of his flesh a blessing she'd thought she might never receive. Before they even climbed in the bath together, before he even raised himself from her and stood, naked and wet, looking down at her in surprise, she already feared the power of her wanting. She was twenty-nine and a fierce social independent, a position that had cost her a sense of future safety. They'd said nothing about anything between them, how could they? And yet even that first night, every time he touched her, there in the soapy water, lathering her hair, cupping her breast in his hand, it felt to her like a promise.
Had God foreseen the subtlety of your modern devils, Sam began, raising his blunt face from the carpet, he might have added a Commandment: Thou Shalt not Pity thy Self. In the case of Sorrow for a Dead Friend: Suppose, I were Dead; would I have my Friend mourn for me, with an Excessive, Oppressive, Destructive Sorrow? No, sure. Why then let my Sorrow for my Friend be moderated. You dwell in Memory like some Perversity of the Flesh. A sin against the gift of Creation it is to harp so on the dead while the living still suffer.
She wouldn't be chastised like this. Not in her own house. Not by Sam. Lying there with his fine pale coat and superior manner. It was no great mystery who he had come to fancy himself as. All that pure breeding and King James diction. As though each day she walked Cotton Mather over the golf course on a leash. Did he really expect her to believe that was the case?
Across the room, the television stood mute, its glass a dull, greeny gray. The reception had grown steadily worse over the years, though she'd changed nothing, until finally the static had grown so thick it was hardly worth it, Jim Lehrer's voice muffled beneath the hiss. She'd preferred MacNeil, in any case.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator shuddered off and the quiet of the house was once again absolute.
Eric's place had been much like hers, a studio apartment over by the water on Bethune Street. A mess of books and papers, barely any shelves to put them on, a small wooden table, one chair. The previous fall, he'd enrolled to study philosophy at the New School and had been overwhelmed by the amount of work. He was late wherever they went, unkempt, often tired-looking. Charlotte loved him for it and even more for their hours of conversation and for his letting her kiss him whenever she felt the urge, Eric being happy to let her lead the way, telling him when they would study and when they would stop, when they would sleep and eat. Those first few months he'd get up early and go to his apartment a few hours each morning to get ready for his seminars, he said, and she'd usually find him back at her place napping when she returned in the late afternoon. She'd sometimes sit watching him as he slept, his legs curled up toward his chest, his mouth slightly open against the pillow. Her first guess at his age had been right. He was only twenty-four. The youngest of seven. His mother's choice for the priesthood. Yet the only one of his siblings who hadn't ended up living within a quick drive of the house back in the working-class section of Philadelphia where he'd grown up. Charlotte had been surrounded most of her life by people who'd sauntered to their place in the world, coming to it as if by right. This hadn't been the case for her because she hadn't chosen the course offered. Watching Eric sleep like that, an entire evening in the apartment together still ahead of them, she felt delivered not just from the usual loneliness - so well hidden by the manner she kept up with family and colleagues - but from the years of it she'd already been through, the tiring work of living on one's own, of being such an odd bird, a single woman of her age back then, 1962, getting a PhD, no marriage in the offing. An awkward fit in the world. It was as if Eric gave her those years back by accompanying her now.
He made her young. He let her be silly. She'd never been able to afford silliness. Like fooling around in Henry's apartment, where she'd taken Eric for dinner, fooling around in the bathroom after dessert, their drinks perched on the sink. Stuffy Henry and stuffy Betsy in their appropriate little apartment on the Upper East Side, the settee from the back hall in Rye primped up in the living room, carpets their mother had unearthed from the attic covering the floor, the wedding silver polished to the nines, and the two of them already on the lookout for a house, the closer to Mommy and Daddy the better. Charlotte could barely keep herself from laughing when they sat down again, so punch-drunk and pleased she was.
When Eric's stipend ran down he asked if he could move in. She'd been taken aback at first, that it should happen so quickly, so informally, but then it seemed of a piece with how it had all begun. He'd practically been living with her in any case. They slept together most nights and his clothing had started to accumulate in her drawers. It might have bothered other women, women like Betsy who would have wanted to clarify the issue of his intentions. But Charlotte had given up so much of that racket - the hunt for the possession of the man - and instead marveled at how effortlessly Eric had slipped into her heart, as if he hadn't even noticed the rigidity she feared had been the cost of exempting herself from all that.
She'd never been able to explain that to anyone afterward. How thankful she'd been to him for loving her just as he found her. There were too many steps to it, too much to account for. And by then they'd assembled their views, Henry and her mother: that she'd been taken in by a bad character. If there had been feeling there, well my goodness it had been misplaced. For heaven's sake. Would you have us think otherwise? That you could still love and admire such a person? None of which, of course, ever had to be stated aloud, their taut lips and averted eyes all too eloquent.
"But I lived with him," she wanted to say. "Shouldn't you ask first what it was like? He loved me. I felt that to be so. He hated having to put me through it."
In these basic facts, she had never lost her faith. Because while it was true, looking back, that he may have been under the influence around the time they met - those first few months when he'd go back to his apartment during the day - and so perhaps true also that his lack of money stemmed from that, once he moved in, he stopped. He had to have stopped, because it was summer, neither of them were in classes and they spent all their waking hours together. She would have known. And those were the best months they had together. The happiest of her life. Waking midmorning, the drowsy, shut-eyed kissing and fondling, his head in her hands between her legs. Morning after wonderful morning like that. Caught up in him. And then wandering out to a coffee shop where they'd eat and read and talk. And then films, what seemed like every night, though it couldn't have been, and cooking soup or scrambled eggs and bacon on the electric stove and eating wherever they could clear a seat amidst the cram of his papers and hers.
He'd taken a seminar in the spring with a student of Karl Jaspers and that summer was working his way through Heidegger. "How's your serious young man?" Henry would ask when they spoke, and of course there was some of that to Eric, the long discussions about authenticity and being, a cascade of words propelled by the need to believe there existed some world, however abstruse, other than mere things and our accommodation to them. But was that so laughable? Not to Charlotte. She and Henry had grown up in the most unexacting faith imaginable, a drawling, self-satisfied Episcopalianism marked by the minister's wife in her mink coat and pleasant enough hymns at Christmas. They would no more have discussed their religion at the dinner table than fry filet mignon. Eric had been raised strict Catholic. When he left the Church, his mother called him apostate and refused to speak to him for a year. There may have been a pose now and again as he tried on the philosophy he was studying, a slight callowness to the high-handed way he dismissed books or people who hadn't grasped the urgency of existential thought, but at the base of it lay an honest hunger. And a sadness.
Oh, come on sister, Wilkie said. Paint your picture if you want to, but a dope fiend is a dope fiend, and I should know. Your white boy might have been able to keep it under wraps longer than your uptown Negro because he didn't have to score on the street. But the disease is the disease. There comes a day you're going to get desperate, and it's going to get ugly. A woman, if you've still got one by then, she's just another route to a score.
It had taken awhile, but recently Charlotte had come to recognize Wilkie's pretension as well. That oracular tone of his, the voice of Malcolm X streaming from his black head.
It hadn't been as Henry and her mother imagined. Eric never stole anything. He never put her in harm's way. They didn't stop loving each other. The whole thing was so far outside her experience, at first she didn't know what to do. She asked him if he would please stop, and he said that he'd try. Which he did for a time, though it might have only been weeks. She remembered coming back from the library one late afternoon and finding him asleep on the couch, his sleeve rolled up, a dot of red where he'd punctured the skin. With a cotton ball dipped in rubbing alcohol she daubed at the pinprick and covered it with a Band-Aid, then tidied the house and sat at her desk to type up her reading notes, because what else was she supposed to do, still wanting him as she did? When he woke, he rolled down his sleeve without saying anything, walked around behind her as she worked, and hugged her back to his chest. She heated up fish cakes and a can of baked beans, just as her mother used to on Fridays when the cook was off, and they sat at the little table by the back window and she cried a bit, but he told her it was only to help him get through the next while, the pressure of the work.
"You're the only one I don't feel lonely around," he said, holding her hand.
"Can't that be enough?"
"It will be."
She knew nothing about the course of such things. Why should she? When he asked for money, she gave him what she could. He's got the flu, she said to her mother in the kitchen at Christmas back in Rye, where at the dining-room table beside Henry and Betsy and her cousins it was suddenly obvious how sickly he appeared - her mother, who ever since Charlotte had met Eric had been torn between her desire for a wedding and her wish that Eric had come from a slightly better family, or at least a Protestant one. And of course the age difference ran in the wrong direction. She had married Charlotte's father at twenty-one in the church on Copley Square and following her own mother's example treated her husband as a kind of necessary appendage to the larger body of her household, the grand purpose of which was the flawless production of her children. A purpose Charlotte had years ago begun to thwart, failing to hide her disdain for that whole rigid, sequestered, matriarchal prerogative. If there were anyone in the family she could have confided in about Eric, it would have been her father, who'd admired the way she'd gone off on her own, but still it would have meant the end of things, his comforting her but still intervening to protect his daughter.
In January, Eric stopped going to his classes, stopped reading much at all, and only left the house toward dusk, coming back an hour or so later to spend a little while in the bathroom before napping. In bed, she'd hold him close, her hands reaching up to pat his damp hair. Usually by then, at midnight or one, he returned to a kind of equilibrium, and with the lights out and the building quiet, they talked as they had at the beginning, Charlotte recounting a novel she'd read or thinking aloud about the line of argument in whatever paper she was writing at the time, Eric asking her questions and listening, assuring her that, yes, he wanted to know. She remembered now the night she got up her courage to ask him what it was like to have that liquid in his veins. He said it felt like being able to live inside a memory of a childhood he was certain he'd never had, as if all the world around you had become the setting of a rich, nostalgic dream, some invincible summer. She could tell he was partly in love with the romance of it, the affective correlative it gave to the intellectual conviction about our lost experience of being, as if he were the living experiment for the things he studied and would one day turn it off and write it all down. Naive, no doubt. But being with him made Charlotte realize how on her own she'd grown grimly practical, a student of what was required for praise and advancement. The pleasure he gave made her forget all that. Yes, he was deluding himself, mistaking a simple thing like taking drugs for the complexity of figuring out how to live, but the very youthfulness of the error opened something in her, a nostalgia of her own for romances she'd never had.
"He didn't use me, Wilkie," she said. "You're wrong about that. I did what I thought was best."
At the beginning of spring, Eric told her he'd been to a doctor and was tapering off. This was why he felt so sick, he said. Some days he barely left the bed. She ran baths and washed him just as he had washed her those first weeks after they made love. It was on a Friday afternoon that whatever supply he'd managed to build up ran out. To go off too quickly was dangerous, he said.
She hesitated at first. They could stay together there in the apartment and see it through, call the doctor if necessary. But he looked awful, his skin green, his eyes sunken. It was just a short walk through Washington Square Park to a building down on MacDougal Street. Four flights up past the old Italian ladies chatting on the landings. Seven or eight kids, in their twenties most of them, crowded into a little apartment, the shades pulled over open windows, everyone smoking, shouts from the street and the sound of motor engines bouncing off the building opposite into the dank, carpetless living room. The boys wore wing tips like her father's. Wing tips and turtlenecks, the girls in corduroy pants and oversize sweaters. They stared at her as she imagined they would at their mothers. Someone was writing up a flyer. There were meetings she should attend. "In the kitchen," someone told her, guessing her purpose for being there. A man with a lazy eye, who spoke with a slight Canadian accent, was the one she gave the money to and received in return a small envelope. Walking back up lower Fifth Avenue, Charlotte noticed the couples hand in hand, emerging from the brightly lit lobbies of the fancy buildings, headed out to dinner, the Henrys and Betsys, who when they glanced at her saw one of their own, her anxious mind calculating the efficacy of her disguise, wondering if they could ever guess her errand.
To her surprise, Eric had made the bed while she was gone, and tidied the kitchen as well. He'd cleared his books off the table and stacked them by the door.
"You'll take less?" she asked, and he nodded.
Despite the sickness, he looked younger than when she'd met him, his features somehow more open, no longer organized by inquisitive zeal. Again, she offered to phone the doctor. He had never been to one, of course, so there wouldn't have been a number to call. Instead, she put the envelope down on the counter and went into the front room. One thing she couldn't do was watch him at it. Still in her coat, she sat by the window, looking through the bars of the windows at the passersby.
Once the summer came, she thought, they would go up to Massachusetts and use the Finden house for a few weeks when her parents weren't there. They'd take the Jeep to the lake and on the way back buy corn and fruit at the farm stand. Come fall, Eric would get back to his classes, she would finish her thesis. They might get married in a year. She would meet his brothers and sisters. His parents would come around, eventually.
The Day was a public Thanksgiving for the Mercies of Heaven in the Year that is past, Sam intoned. I laid aside the subject I intended and in the Morning I composed a sermon on the line in 1 Samuel. She wept, and she did not eat. A sermon on the Thanks offering, prosecuting that Observation, that a sense of Affliction was oftentimes a Hindrance to the work of Thanksgiving, but that it ought not to be so. My son died about Noon. My sermon in the Afternoon proved very acceptable, and reasonable, and serviceable.
Why you? Charlotte thought. Of all I've read and forgotten, why a pompous old preacher? Why not Whitman's singing or blind Milton to keep an aging isolate company?
He rubbed his ear to her foot to relieve an itch. Sensing something was being given out that he was not a part of, Wilkie's head came down off the sill and he pressed his snout into Charlotte's lap.
They followed her into the front bedroom, settling on their blankets as she took off her cardigan and began to undress. It had been so much harder living here, all those years ago, at the beginning. Such tense awareness of being alone in the house, the day's routines acts that she observed herself completing: her dress returned to its hanger, her shoes put back in their sleeve pockets hanging inside the closet door, the watch on the bedside table, cold cream on her face, the bedroom door shut. To forget a bit, the past and herself, that's all she'd wanted then. To move unsurveilled through time's ceaseless unfolding. The critical eye closed, the narrative intelligence laid to rest. Repetition's welcome victory over event. Up at the sound of the bedside alarm, the school day a prevention of other thoughts, along with the work she carried home. And when, inevitably, retrospect intervened nonetheless, she knew, then as now, that others would consider her precious or sad or both, prey to a romanticism gone morbid. So her mother had thought until she died. So Henry still imagined. And who was she to catalogue the varieties in which love and comfort came in order to tell them they were wrong? She could only know what she had felt, say, on the afternoon during that long summer of theirs when they'd stood together in the Metropolitan Museum looking at a small picture by Daubigny, a painting of a village along a river's edge at dusk seen from across the water, light and peacefulness so miraculously captured it produced in her elation. Before she uttered a word of praise, Eric took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all he wanted was the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy. Those were his words. As if he'd reached into her, discerned an emotional thought still unformed, and allowed it definite shape. Difficult not to think you could live a lifetime with another person and never be as richly acknowledged. To then lie with this man in the grass of the park, make love to him before dinner, to keep discussing painting after the food was cold and the time to catch a film had passed. What did they know of that?
Best she move on after that sort of thing. That's what the landlord had told Henry when Charlotte asked him to phone and find out why the man hadn't sent her a renewal on her lease or returned her calls. There had been the ambulance, after all, and the neighbors standing in the hall watching.
Half an hour, it had been, that she'd remained sitting there by the front window. She heard the bathroom door close and after a few minutes open once more, then Eric's steps to the couch. Such a small apartment it was, just the two rooms. There couldn't have been more than fifteen or twenty feet between them. At first glance, he just looked paler than usual, his body in an odd position, back arched, one arm reaching out to the side, his chin turned down to his chest. At the feel of his hand, she shook him, lightly at first, insisting he open his eyes. Annihilating minutes spent waiting for the medics to arrive, clutching his head in her lap. She had never spoken to his parents. They had been living in sin, after all. His father sounded as if he were choking and had to suck hard for breath. From upstairs, Mrs. Ruskemeyer brought a plate of cucumber sandwiches, white bread with the crusts removed, in perfect English style. Charlotte offered one to the policeman, who smelled it before returning it to the plate.
"You the wife?" he asked.
"No."
At the sink in her nightgown, Charlotte stood before her mirror now and applied the thick Nivea cream to the tissue-soft wrinkles beneath her eyes, struck with familiar wonder at how deeply grooved in a mind one cut of time could become. No school tomorrow to fill the day, as it had filled her life. And so the window opened, the bars came off, the passersby began to drift into the room where she still sat with Eric as he died, some of them quiet like generations past, others hot with the temper of dogs' eyes. The membrane porous, the order shuffled. How arrogant, how wrong, for man to believe his animal senses caught the spectrum whole. An adventure time was, if you calmed yourself to its receipt.