LEONARD KRIEGEL
387
finall y hlotted out even metaphors . As much fact as Miriam lying
beside him , half-eaten apple browning now and still in hand. An–
nouncing she was bisexual with the same sense of surety she once
used to let the twins know it was time for milk and cookies and bed .
As if she knows what he is thinking, Michael feels the small of
her back shift lightly beneath his hand . "Bisexual," she purrs . He
looks down at her. Shreds of green apple skin on her parted lips , she
laughs that irritatingly narrow metallic laugh once again . "How does
it make you feel, Michael?"
"Nothing surprises me, Miriam ." Suddenly , he finds himself
joining in her laughter. "I'm a child of New York ."
"Nothing?"
"Absolutely nothing," Michael says , flipping her onto her
stomach and sliding up against her . "Not even the real estate
market."
Dead days in winter. His father and his father's new bride still
in Bedford then. How long ago? Eleven months. Eleven years.
However long, it feels more distant. He himself driven out of Paris
exactly one year earlier by the boredom of the prospect of staying.
The city of light in drab shadows, day by day graying of the sky
threatening deluge but invariably satisfied with a damp mist sprayed
against tourist and Parisian alike by the hard slashing wind. A city
with five weeks of summer-not enough for a Columbia-educated
New Yorker who may know nothing else but who knows that sum–
mer should not begin on the twenty-first of August and end with the
twist of September into October. Before Thanksgiving, he is back in
New York, a refugee from that long monotonous darkness that
descends on Paris each afternoon, embracing the city in some deep
pointillist fog. Home with his mother's portable typewriter and a
thick pile of pages he has managed to write.
Home to the old people who, even as winter approaches, sit
bundled like aging mannequins on the green benches which line the
walks . Fifteen years earlier, they would curse at him and his friends
for playing on the grass , that green scar of socialist longing for the
riches they had been promised. There are few children in the co-op
now. Those that he sees are careful not to walk on the grass . He
studies them again, the same faces, only older, some toothless,
others seemingly collapsed into gumlessness , eyes sunken not into
protest but into the remembered habit of protest. False bluster.
