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LEONARD KRIEGEL
389
all, blesses their shrivelled meanness, blesses the two old men he is
leaving, now staring into the space he has left empty between them,
symbiosis of death and desire on the way to the top floor.
"If
it wasn't
them," he tells his father in a moment of confessional weakness, "it
would be some fat Buddha in Oregon."
Haunted by their past, he spies his own as he steps out of the
elevator. He has not seen her since his return from Paris two and a
half years earlier. In fact, he has not seen her since she went off to
Texas to do graduate work in something or other. He forgets what.
Probably he never knew. But now she is leaning against the door of
his apartment, waiting expectantly, her face framed by the harsh
neon of the hallway. A thin shiver of excitement-the kind of
prelude he recalls from nights in Paris when he would roam the
small clubs and student cafes, betting himselffor or against his abil–
ity to persuade some unknown woman- spins through his body. No
odds necessary with Miriam, just the remembered taste of those
weekend nights when he was still thirteen and she would put his
sisters to bed and then he would lie next to her, eyes fastened on the
garish axe murders and thick streams of blood on the television
screen. He lies as still as he can, knowing that, oversized thirteen–
year-old or not, the night will bring visions following her departure
which will end only when the voice within cries out, "It's not real! It's
the other that's real!" A decade turned over. Initiations re-lived.
Memory demanding that he acknowledge what she had done for
him.
And he remembers the afternoons following the nights, when
he would roam the neighborhood searching for her, rehearsing in his
mind what he would say if he chanced upon her on his way to fill a
prescription for a mother long since beyond the comfort or illusion
prescriptions might bring. Miriam just seventeen then. And already
he towers above her, four years her junior and light-years removed
from all that she seems to know and he doesn't. And it is that oval
face, smiling against the clear August afternoon, that he calls up.
Not beautiful but striking in its open embrace of the world, like a
portrait of a woman sheltered by nothing but the deep blue of the
necessary sky. She used to tell him that she should be clothed in
peacock feathers, at seventeen already impatient with aging parents
still tied down to the simple pieties of the garment center and equally
impatient with the education she was finishing at whatever one of
the high schools for "gifted" children the city fathers had allowed her
to attend.
