Later, he wants to say how beautiful everything was tonight right to the end, but she seems asleep. She’s on her side, he’s holding her with his arms from behind, and she doesn’t move. He pulls the covers up over her shoulder. She shut off the light soon after they’d made love. He didn’t see her do it. Suddenly the room was black, and then after a few seconds there was a little light from outside. He rubs her nipple, and she doesn’t say anything or stir. Don’t do it again. If she’s asleep she won’t want to be woken up by his doing that. They’d made love, it was long and strong and so on (that should be sufficient as a description of it), and now she’s very tired and wants to sleep. That’s what she’d say, minus the long and strong and commentary on it, if he were rubbing her nipple and woke her up, he’s almost sure. If he persisted after that, which he’s done when they hadn’t already made love and he wanted to, she’d get mad. He wonders if she’s dreaming. If so, of what? If he’s in it: their lovemaking, his hand on her breast now and the rubbing before, and things like that. She drove half the way here and during it complained her eyes hurt and she may need glasses. Would he also, when he takes off her clothes when they start making love, take off her glasses? They got up early to get an early start. (He knows he’s said that but he’s making a point, which is what?) That they’ve been going seventeen-eighteen hours straight. Where does the energy come from for that kind of strenuous love-making after so long and arduous a day? But he’s not tired. That could be for a number of reasons — his excitement at being here with her, the sea air and that it’s a new place, all that coffee on the road — and he thinks lots of activity makes him even more active, till he just drops. That so? Doesn’t know. He’s just saying, which he often does. (He doesn’t see the need for any of that after the dreaming part, and maybe not that either, so out.) He continues to hold her breath and shuts his eyes. Breast. One hand on it; other arm, because it was starting to hurt under her shoulder, pulled out and tucked under his pillow. This is how he likes to sleep. What he returns to several times a night after he turns over and maybe sleeps for a while and then turns back to her: left arm under the pillow under his head, right arm around her and its hand usually on her breast, though sometimes, when he tries and she lets him (maybe one time out of five), on her crotch, and maybe one time out of ten with his finger on her clitoris or inside. But this way — hand here, arm there, which is what he started out to say and which he hopes will be his evening’s final resting place — he can fall asleep faster, and the faster he does, the less chance he’ll annoy her, which he doesn’t want to do because… but he feels himself drifting off, so just go to sleep. He almost always says good night to her when he’s dozing off or she says she is. Sometimes when he’s said it she didn’t answer, because she was already asleep or so close to it that even if she tried to answer, she couldn’t. But before he also gets too drowsy to speak, he says—
He’s dreaming he’s in a forest: thick woods like the ones they drove past once they got off the main highway and headed east on a two-lane road for the ocean about an hour away. He’s sleeping in a tent in a sleeping bag. (He’s sleeping in a sleeping bag in a tent. He’s in a tent, sleeping in a sleeping bag.) Drifting off, really — thinking how nice it’ll be for him and healthy and restful for his mother after he picks her up at the airport tomorrow to camp out with him — when a claw rips through the tent, slitting it cleanly to the floor. A bear’s claw, then a big bear on its hind legs, roaring at him as it walks into the tent. Behind it are two cubs tossing a live fish back and forth. He tries unzipping the bag but it’s locked at the top. He finds the key in his pajama shirt pocket, unlocks and unzips the bag, and jumps out and grabs the tent’s center pole and begins swinging it at the bear, the tent collapsing on the four of them. The bear throws off the tent, grabs the pole and snaps it in two with its teeth and eats part of it, and flings the other to the cubs and makes clicking sounds with its teeth as if they should also eat it, and then comes at him, arms out and claws open as if it intends to strangle him, the cubs now scratching and biting his ankles. “End this dream, end it before I’m mauled!” he screams, and wakes up pressed to her from behind, hand on her breast and other arm still under his pillow, and says—