LEONARD MICHAELS
315
''I'll call a taxi."
"No . My bicycle is still at the hotel."
The next morning Beard went to a barber shop and then shopped for
a new jacket. So much time remained before he could see Inger. In the
afternoon, he decided to visit the cathedral, a gothic structure of dark
stone. It thrust up suddenly, much taller than the surrounding houses, on
a curved narrow medieval street. Beard walked around the cathedral,
looking at saintly figures carved into the stone. Among them he was sur–
prised by a monkey, the small stone face hideously twisted, shrieking. He
couldn't imagine what it was doing there, but the whole cathedral was
strange, so solemn and alien amid the ordinary houses along the street.
Men in business suits, students in their school uniforms, and house–
wives carrying sacks of groceries walked by without glancing at the
cathedral. None seemed to have any relation to it, but surely they felt
otherwise. They lived in this city. The cathedral was an abiding feature of
their landscape, stark and austere, yet complicated in its carvings. Beard
walked inside. As he entered the nave, he felt reduced, awed by the
space. Most of all, he felt lonely. He felt a good deal, but it struck him
that he could never understand the power and meaning of the Christian
religion. With a jealous and angry God, Jews didn't need such space for
worship. A plain room would do.
It
would even be preferable to a cathe–
dral, more appropriate to their intimate, domestic connection to the
deity, someone they had been known to defY and even to fight until, like
Jonah, they collapsed into personal innerness, in agonies and joys of sa–
cred delirium.
Walking back to the hotel, he remembered that Inger had talked
about her monkey. The memory stirred him, as he had been stirred in the
restaurant, with sexual desire. Nothing could be more plain, more real.
It
thrust against the front of his trousers. He went into a coffee shop to sit
for a while and pretend to read a newspaper.
That evening in the hotel room, with his fresh haircut and new
jacket, he presented himself to the bathroom mirror. He had once been
handsome. Qualities of handsomeness remained in his solid, leonine head,
but there were dark sacks under his eyes that seemed to carry years of
pain and philosophy. They made his expression vaguely lachrymose.
"You are growing the face of a hound," he said to his reflection, but he
was brave and didn't look away, and he decided he must compensate for
his losses. He must buy Inger a present, something new and beautiful, a
manifestation of his heart.
In a jewelry store window in the hotel lobby, he noticed a pair of
gold earrings set with rubies like tiny globules of blood. Obviously ex–
pensive. Much too expensive for his travel budget, but he entered the
