390
PARTISAN REVIEW
And that is still the Miriam he wants. Poised against the clear
blue summer sky, about to embark for Reed or Bard or Antioch and
long since beyond what they might teach her . Even more vivid than
this woman of close to thirty who leans against the door of his apart–
ment, dressed in a sky-blue skirt and a white peasant blouse, as if
she had stepped out of some recolored print of Dovzhenko's
Earth.
Another illusion for the old people who ride up and down on the
elevator, clawing for a piece of each other's dreams.
But Miriam has dressed for him. "I'm not crazy," she says. "I'm
just home for good. Michael, this is no place for crazies. Too much
competition." And she laughs, the first time he hears the metallic
sound. Then she beckons him on with the curled index finger of her
right hand. "Want to fuck your ex-sitter?"
"You sat for the twins," he answers. "And they're still in Califor–
nia." But he enjoys the thought of it, a raunchy note even for a New
York in which nothing is forbidden. Flushed with excitement, he
feels as if all past affairs had been preparatory exercises meant to do
no more than feed him a sense of time passing, like those grainy
American movies from the forties the French were so fond of. .He
wants her now, even more than he wanted her then. They embrace,
the dark floral smell of the perfume she wears spinning him back in
time to those nights when she would press him to her body so that
the smell of her and the rise of her well-shaped tits would reach past
whatever horror she had selected for them to watch on television. It
was as if she had folded him into the security of her body. He had no
fear that the twins might awake and spy out what they were doing or
that his parents would suddenly appear in the doorway of the room,
having decided to come home early from the play or party or concert
or dinner with friends they pursued so avidly before time played
itself out. Miriam as guardian. Miriam as guarantor. Later, after
she had returned to her own parents' apartment six floors below, he
would lie awake in bed, afraid to sleep and face the inevitable
nightmare. And he would listen to his mother's cancer-ravaged voice
from the bedroom next door, "It's a city that makes dying easier.
That's why. Not for you to question. Not you. Not the children. We
live
here! Here!"
He couldn't understand it then. He couldn't understand how
New York made anything easier. But he understood it now. His
mother holding on to the city so fiercely during those final three
years because she understood that if death was inexorable then New
York was simply a way of commenting on what death was taking.
