"Yes?"
"Can I come in and play?"
"You need to ask?" she said, turning in his arms so that she faced him. "Of course you can play."
"Even in your delicate condition?"
"I'm not delicate," she said, pressing against him. "I'm feeling fine. Better than fine." She kissed him. "This is an amazing place."
"You're amazing," he said, returning her kiss. "The more I know you, the more I fall in love with you. I'm not very good at telling you that. You throw me off my stride. I'm supposed to be Mr. Cool, but when I'm with you, I get stupid, like a kid." He put his mouth against her face. "A very, very, very horny kid."
She didn't need to be told; he was so hard against her. And his pale face was flushed, and his neck blotchy. "Can I put it in you?" he said.
That was always his overture; can I put it in you? When she'd been angry with him, and thought of this phrase, it had struck her as perfectly ridiculous. But right now she was persuaded by its idiot simplicity. She wanted it inside her; that it which he couldn't bear to name.
"Which bedroom?" she said.
They made love without fully undressing, on a bed so big she could have thrown an orgy amid its countless pillows. He was more passionate than she could ever remember his being, his hands and mouth returning over and over to her silky belly. It was as if he was aroused by the evidence of his own fecundity; muttering words of adoration against her body. The session didn't last more than fifteen minutes; he couldn't hold back. And when he had finished, he was up and showering, and then away downstairs to make some calls. He was late for his meetings, he said; Garrison would be cursing him.
"I'll catch a cab and leave the limo downstairs for you," he told her, leaning over to kiss her forehead. His hair was still wet from the shower.
"Don't get a chill. There's a blizzard out there."
He glanced out. The snow was coming down so heavily it had almost obscured the park.
"I'll stay warm," he said softly. "I'll think of you two lying here, and I'll be toasty."
When he was gone her body remembere'd the motion of his erection inside her, as though there were a phantom phallus still sliding in and out of her. And she remembered too the way he spoke when he was aroused. Often, in the heat of the moment, he'd called her baby, and this afternoon had been no different. Baby o baby o baby, he'd said as he put it in. But now, when she conjured his voice, it was as if he were speaking to the child in her; calling to it in her womb. Baby o baby o baby.
She didn't know whether to be moved or disturbed, so she told herself to be neither. She pulled the sheets and quilt up around her, and slept, while the snow lay its own fat white quilt on the park below.
Since I wrote the foregoing passage-which was yesterday afternoon-I've had no less than three visits from Luman, which have so distracted me that I haven't been able to get back into the mood for continuing my story. So I've decided to tell you the matter of my distractions, and maybe that will put them out of my mind.
The more time I spend with Luman, the more troubling he seems to be. He'd decided from our last conversation-after all these years of estrangement-that I was now his best buddy: a smoking companion (he's been through half a dozen of my havanas), a confidante, and of course a fellow writer. As I told Zabrina, he's got the notion lodged in his head that I'm going to collaborate with him on the definitive tome about madhouses. I've agreed to no such thing, but I haven't got the heart to spoil his dream; it's plainly very important to him. He comes to my room with odd little scribblings he's made (actually, he doesn't barge in the way Marietta would; he waits on the veranda until I chance to look up, see him there, and invite him in) and gives me what he's written, telling me where he thinks it's going to fit in the grand scheme of his book. He's obviously thought the whole project through in great detail, because he'll say: this belongs in Chapter Seven; or: this goes with the stories about Bedlam, as though I shared his vision. I don't. I can't. For one thing, he hasn't communicated what this book of his is going to be (though he clearly assumes he has) and for another I've got a book of my own to think about. There isn't room in my head for two. In fact there's barely room for this.
I suppose it would have been better for all concerned if I'd just told him that I had no intention of collaborating with him. Then he'd have gone away and left me to get on with telling you what happened to Rachel. But he was so impassioned about it, I was afraid he'd be a wreck if I did that.
That's not the only reason that I didn't tell him the truth, I'll admit. Though it's a disruption having him come in and pick my brains the way he's been doing, he's also been strangely stimulating company. The more comfortable he becomes in my presence, the less effort he makes to keep his conversation on any coherent track. In the midst of telling me some lunatic detail of his book he'll veer off onto a completely different subject, then veer again, and again, almost as though there was more than one Luman in his head, and they were all vying for the use of his tongue. There's Luman the gossip, who has a chatty, faintly effeminate manner. There's Luman the metaphysician, who gazes at the ceiling while he pontificates. There's Luman the encyclopedia, who'll out of the blue talk about Roman law, or the finer points of topiary. (Some of the information he's provided in this latter mode has been fascinating. I didn't realize until he told me that in some species of hyena the female is indistinguishable from the male, her clitoris the size of a penis, her labia swollen and drooping like a scrotum. No wonder Marietta took to them. Nor did I know that the temples where Cesaria was worshipped were often also tombs; and that sacred marriages, the heiros games, were celebrated there, among the dead.) And then there's Luman the impersonator, who can suddenly speak in a voice that is so unlike his own it's as though he were possessed. Last night, for instance, he impersonated Dwight so well if I'd dosed my eyes I wouldn't have been able to tell it from the real thing. And then later, just as he was leaving, he spoke in Chiyojo's voice, quoting a piece of a poem my mother wrote:
"My Savior is most diligent;
He has me in his book
With all my faults enumerated,
And I am certain there.
It's only the Fallen One
Who wants us perfect;
For then we will not need an angel's care."
You can imagine how strange that was to hear: my wife's voice, still distinctly Japanese, speaking a thought that came from my mother's heart. The two great women in my life, emerging from the throat of this raddled, wild-eyed man. Is it any wonder I've been distracted from the flow of my story?
But the strangest portions of these exchanges are those with a metaphysical cast; no question. He's evidently thought long and hard about the paradoxes of our state: a family of divinities (or in my case a semidivinity) hiding away from a world which no longer wants us or needs us.
"Godhood doesn't mean a damn thing," he said to me. "All it does is make us crazy."