He wakes up, isn’t holding her, pats around the bed; she isn’t there. “Sally?” he whispers. He feels over the side of the bed, since she once rolled off it and continued to sleep on the floor. Maybe she went to sleep in another room because he was keeping her awake with his noises. Or she suddenly couldn’t see herself with him for even a few days this summer and didn’t know how to tell him or didn’t want to wake him to tell him or wait for him to wake up, so got in the car and quietly drove off, or drove off normally but he was sleeping so hard he didn’t hear. She could be driving around aimlessly now, thinking of what to do about him — not say anything or ask him to leave? — or drove back to New York or to a friend’s place around here. She knows how hurt and disappointed he’ll be. What it also means is their relationship’s finished and with it all his plans of marrying her and having kids and coming here every summer with her and them for years. But she didn’t know how to tell him in any other way but leaving while he was asleep and hoping he’ll understand what’s happened when he awakes and doesn’t see her. (He knows he’s repeating himself and could tighten this a lot but don’t stop.) She probably left a note. It probably says — it could say this, in other words, though it could also say Please be out of here tomorrow or even by late today — Feel free to stay here for a week. That’d only be fair after what I’ve done and all the trouble you went through in getting here. You can rent a car if you want. The rental companies — you’ll find several of them listed in the local directory by the kitchen phone — will drive the car to the cottage and do all the paperwork here. But you don’t have a credit card, so renting a car’s out of the question even if you have the cash. Whatever you do, please be out of here by Thursday at the latest, six days from today, so I can come back. Don’t worry about the various house and car expenses I incurred, since it’ll cost you plenty to return to New York unless you get a ride. I’m so sorry. What I’ve done is wrong and contemptible and (find the word later, but something to do with pusillanimousness, so maybe the adjective for that) as anything I’ve done to anyone in my life. He wakes up, has been dreaming she left him alone here. When he’s fully awake he realizes he’s not holding her anymore and he can’t feel her near him in the dark. He pats her side of the bed just as he did in the dream, looks over that side to the floor, though she’s never fallen off a bed that he knows, and says—
He’s dozing off again when he hears a buzzing by his ear. He slaps at it and hits his ear, which starts ringing. Oh, Jesus, he thinks, cupping his ear and rubbing it, the city fool in the country. Suppose he goes deaf in that ear because of the slap, how’ll he explain it? “I didn’t think.” Listens for the mosquito, doesn’t hear anything, so maybe he got it, and shuts his eyes. Minute later the buzzing’s by the other ear, almost as if in it. Same mosquito — different? — they zooming in to torment him one at a time? Turns on the ceiling and bed lights, waits a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to them, can’t see or hear the mosquito, stands on the bed naked and will just stay there, giving the mosquito as big a target as he can so he’ll have more of a chance of slapping it and also be in a better position to, or at least till Sally starts back upstairs. Doesn’t want to look the fool, standing on a bed with his penis flopping. Then he hears one. (Is he going on too long about this? Just finish it.) Turns around and sees it coming toward him, holds his hands out, aims and slaps them together, and thinks he got it. He did, and rubs it off onto his thigh and then flicks it off with his finger. In the light, he thinks, I’m one for one, batting a thousand, though the ear still hurts. The mosquito lands on the bed instead of the floor. Tries flicking it off the bottom sheet and leaves a bloodstain there an inch long. She’s coming up. He’ll have to say something about the stain. Is there some protocol for this? No slapping mosquitoes on rented sheets or someone else’s walls because of the possible bloodstains? He could say — well, lots of things. That’s what he does, makes things up or fools around with the truth. “The first mosquito I faced in years, so lost my head when it bit me — that’s my blood there,” and so on, “and I think it also got me inside the ear, or one of its sisters did, for something in there itches and hurts.” He says to her, the moment her head gets above floor level—
Back in bed, lights out, he’s holding her from behind, his left arm under his pillow. She’s clutching his right hand, kisses it several times, each time a little lighter, then lets go. Maybe that means she’s falling asleep. He should have started rubbing her buttocks and back soon after she turned over on her side — something she likes done because it relaxes her and it’s one of his signs he wants sex — but too late. If he did that now — well, like he said before (well, he said it, just as he’s done this routine before, so no more). Okay, there’ll be many nights and days for it, and it’s not as if this one’s an absolute must, so now just go to sleep. Closes his eyes. (“Shuts”? Prefers “closes” but “shuts” has only one syllable in its favor. Either, then; does it matter? Does. In this case, “closes” sounds better in relation to the sentences that preceded it. “Preceding sentences”?) After a minute, things — presleep things; he recognizes them, though they usually come when he hasn’t had anything or has had only a little to drink — flit through his head. The road, major highway, other cars alongside, some zipping by, cutting in front, tailing too close, kid in the passenger seat of a car next to his giving him the finger and saying something derisive. In this presleep it’s an exciting ride. Rest stop, like the one they were at a few miles into Maine, pulsing cups of coffee, counterman who got Sally her extra-crisp french fries. The road again, but as if the car’s stationary and the trees on both sides are flying past. Then some unfamiliar people on a conga line, a couple of cartoon characters from his youth on it and everyone laughing, and at the end of it the woman who a month ago invited him to the Magical Kingdom or whatever it’s called — he’d never heard of it before — in northernmost Vermont. On the phone — this isn’t in his head but actually what happened — knows people always say this in these circumstances but she’s been thinking of him … it’s been almost ten years. True, they didn’t part amicably, but she still has good memories of them and if anything he was always good for a laugh and intellectually energizing, and she bets things like that don’t change. Got his phone number from Information — lucky he’s the only Gould Bookbinder in New York, maybe the whole world. “Think of it,” she said. “If the world had its own Four-One-One, and you had to give the country, state, city or village, and street, and so on, I could just say ‘Gould Bookbinder, Earth,’ and get hold of you if you were listed.” “There’s got to be a few others somewhere out of four or five bil, and maybe even one with my middle initial.” Suddenly so bored in this kingdom, she said, but she’s made it her home and art studio and will never again set foot in loony-bin New York, and thinks he’d love it here for a week and pep her up and again be a good figure model, no matter how his physique and scalp’s probably changed, that is — and his only expense would be the bus fare; she grows all her own food and chops her heat — if professional and personal commitments permit it. He said his job’s not crucial — he’s a lowly teacher in poorly paid continuing ed — but he is seeing someone seriously and thinks it might lead to marriage and kids, and she said, “So, screw you, Gould; who needed to hear that?” and hung up. She hung up last time they spoke also after saying, “Who needs a cock to only crow after midnight?” Image of her fades, tries to bring her back nude because he remembers she had a big beautiful body, can’t, and in his head says goodbye. Another woman, this one much younger, dark-skinned from sun, which he liked then — and the white marks — but would now find unhealthy, hasn’t thought of her in maybe twenty years. Artie, her name was, on the first student ship he took to Europe. Slept with her the second and third nights of the trip and then started up with another girl, after they’d planned to youth-hostel and Eurorail around together for a month, and dropped this one for her. (Not quite clear and tough line, he sees, to make right, but it’ll come if he works on it; so far he thinks all of them have.) She sulked and looked away whenever she saw him after that, wrote him love notes and poems and had her friends or the cabin steward pass them on to him or leave them on his bunk bed.
Penned in tears, one note or poem said at the end of it. So what did he think then? Probably very little or wished she wouldn’t be on the same deck as him so much or that her dining room sitting wasn’t the same as his and her table so close. Did she intend a double meaning with that “penned” which he wasn’t able to see at the time? Doubts it, but wouldn’t have made much of a difference to him. Wishes he could make it up to her in some way. If only to say it was nothing she did or could have prevented; that he was a two-faced bastard then, fickle as hell and out for what he could get. And if he couldn’t think of anything better to say — he can’t now, but he’s not giving himself the time — then something about his not deserving her one bit and adding that he’s being thoroughly sincere about it. He hopes when she thought of him after the voyage that she nailed him as a bastard too, not worth a minute of her sadness and regret…. His father, mouthing “Sing ‘God Bleth America, ‘ Juney Boy. You know yours is my favorite rendition of one of my all-time great tunes, and I’ll pay you a dime this time,” and picks up a boy who doesn’t resemble Gould and stands him on a kitchen counter as he used to do, usually when he had a few of his cronies over. Mimicking Gould’s speech impediment then, and the nickname he gave him when he was around five and teased him with another twenty years and was always evasive as to where it came from. “Not out of my inside coat pocket” was one of the things he said. In bathing trunks, no shirt on, brown chest and head hair instead of white and gray, since his face is old and has the same near-death look it had just before he sunk into his last coma. Then he stands back to listen, folds his arms, big biceps appear, and is gone…. His brother, sitting on the floor playing with Gould’s blocks. Gould in his head saying something to him, he can’t make out what, and his brother looks up and holds out a block with the letter T and mouths “Say it: ‘today,’” and crumbles the block in his hand and disappears…. Mr. Rich, his eighth-grade homeroom and music teacher, wanted him to take voice lessons and become a lieder and opera singer, sitting at the piano in class and about to crash down on the keys … but jump tr his mother: rocking in a regular chair, then sitting on a swing in his dream at what looks like the Central Park playground at West 77th Street she took him to a lot when he was a kid. (Did he make that shift to the dream okay? Maybe too wordy.) Saying, “She’s a genuine doll and a knockout, Sally, and I wholly approve of your sleeping together before you marry. Your dad and I didn’t and look what it got us: two boys who became one and all four hands unhappy. You don’t want to mismanage things; she could have her pick of the cream. I want to dance at your wedding before my knees dry up, and have grandchildren: two girls; boys will kill you. Even where I am they’d be mine by name and I’d watch over them as I still do you, though you didn’t know that till now.” “You’re not dead, if that’s what you’re saying. You’re in relatively good health and have plenty of reasonable years left,” and starts pushing her from behind. “Pump, pump; use your legs if you want to fly higher. You could even remarry, you’re still a very handsome woman. Though do what you want — you will anyway — but don’t make me even think you can die.” “Oh,” she says, rising more than six feet into the air, “I haven’t felt so giddy and free since you took me for a walk in the blizzard at night in this park. Higher, higher,” and he pushes her harder. “That’s more like it, Mom. And you like her, right? So I’ll do my best not to botch it.” “The others were so-so to very nice, but her I adore like my own daughter. Some unasked-for advice? Be smart, carry a stopwatch, think before you walk, keep your ears clean and fingernails spotless, and don’t talk tough or snipe, and then enhance your chances even more by not being a doormat for anyone to wipe his hands on.” “I don’t know what you mean, for when have I done that? Explete to me, Mom; I know it’s for my own good and you don’t want me to lose her,” and brings the swing to a stop and twists the chains around till she’s facing him. Wakes up, is still holding Sally. She’s blubbering in her sleep, then says, “Nustling and muscling”—or “musseling”—“Can’t fed up and gotta quid go. Help ham.” Maybe this is a good time to speak to her. If she says why’d he wake her, he’ll say she seemed to be having a troubling if not a scary dream and he thought he’d be helping her — she even said the word “help” in her sleep — by getting her out of it, and now that she’s awake he wants to tell her something. Shakes her shoulder a little. She’s not talking or blubbering anymore. Shakes it harder. Leans over, and her right eye seems to be open and she says, “What, a storm?” and he says—