“Hello down there,” his wife says, “are you coming up or should I forget it?” and he says “No, I’m coming,” and gets out of the chair, something in him says wait, sit, just another minute, for Lillian, thinks, blue hair, black eyes, he means long black hair and very bright blue eyes, sweet face, lanky frame, ears seemed to be pinned back and were pointy, almost no nose, sits, looks at the clock, has time, studying to be a dancer and, with her hair, clothes and walk, already looked like one. When he was around twelve he wrote her a note and slipped it to her in an envelope, which said he wanted to go out with her, maybe to a Saturday or Sunday afternoon movie or something if she didn’t have dance lessons then and she wrote him a note back, a girl friend of hers handed it to him in gym, that said “I’m too young and you are too and I have a lot of school to go to, let’s only be friends like we’ve been, but thank you, kind sir,” when what he really wanted to do was kiss her in the movie house as they’d done once somewhere else, maybe a date or two later hold her hand and, if he was lucky sometime after that, feel her a little bit on top through her blouse, though she only seemed to have started getting breasts, maybe much later get her to touch his dick through his pants and then outside them someplace and maybe where he could get her to hold it and later shake it till it sprayed and where he could also get to feel her bush if she had one and finger her, for that was what boys his age or a little older said they were starting to do with girls or trying to. Some months before at a birthday party, he kissed her. A couple of the other boys did too, and kissed some of the other girls, though he only got to kiss one, but he didn’t know if they’d done it as hard to her and got as hard a kiss back. They were playing a type of musical chairs in which the one running around when the music was going had to sit on the lap of the person he was standing beside the second the music stopped and kiss her on the lips or, if it was a boy whose lap he sat on, shake his hand, and same thing for the girl running around but instead of shaking hands she hugged the other girl. The music stopped when he was a person away from her, but he made believe by sneaking up a few inches past the boy that he’d stopped in front of her, and he sat on her lap and she said “No fair,” and everyone else it seemed said “Go ahead,” and she said “Okay, but it has to be quick,” and they kissed. Her mouth was slightly open when they did, his closed. He’d never kissed an open mouth and started to open his because he thought she wanted him to but she pulled away and said “That’s enough, I’ve done it even if you cheated,” and pushed him off. After that, just about whenever he saw her in school he imagined kissing her with their mouths open and feeling her up and unhooking her bra and shoving his hand down her panties and going to this special spot in Central Park behind some bushes and rocks near the bridle path where he knew some really older boys went with their girls and getting her on her back, it’d have to be warm out and not right after a rain, and sticking his prick in her, maybe with only pushing their clothes up and down but not taking anything off except the shoes, and then burying the scumbag or just tossing it under the bushes, where he and his friends had found a few used ones but mostly just the rings of them. When he came back from camp that summer he learned she’d moved to some other part of the city and wouldn’t be going back to the same school for eighth grade. He wrote her a letter in care of the school, to be forwarded, held on to it for weeks before he dumped it; he just didn’t think she’d be interested and he didn’t want to get a letter back saying she wasn’t or get no letter back and then one day bump into her or that friend of hers in school who he sometimes bumps into and be embarrassed he sent it. In it he said “If you think we’re any older now, I mean from when I asked you this once, and you have some extra free time from your dance lessons and schoolwork, I’d still like going to an afternoon movie or anything you’d like with you. I hope to hear from you soon, and I hope you like your new school and life. Yours sincerely,” and his first name, with his full name printed underneath, and phone number and address.
He goes upstairs. His wife’s typing at her desk and he says “I’m ready but maybe I took too long and you’re no longer interested,” and she says “Why do you say that?” and he says “Oh, nothing; you know me by now; I can never accept good things gracefully,” and she says “That’s better,” and gets up, he takes off his clothes, she leaves on her panties and bra and they sit on the bed. She likes him to undress her, he thinks, at least the last part, even her watch, which he takes off her wrist and then puts his arms around her, kisses her while unhitching her, and she shakes the straps off and lets the bra drop to the floor, he feels her breasts, she makes some sounds, they lie back and he puts his hand down her panties — now it’s “put,” now it’s “slide,” then it was “shove,” which was probably accurate for the way he did it then or rather would have liked to and then started to a couple of years later — pushes her panties off with her help and thinks of Lillian while their eyes are closed and they’re kissing and playing with each other. He didn’t mean for her to come back again, “again” meaning now, and quickly opens and shuts and opens and shuts his eyes, a trick he uses to get rid of images he doesn’t want, but she’s still there, walking away from him down a busy street, turning around to wave at a passing car, hugging a stack of books to her chest as she leaves school, lying back with her clothes on and holding her arms up to him. Let her stay till she goes away, it won’t hurt things and might even help if he can get her clothes off and see what’s underneath. Then she becomes skinny Mark, body and face, in his old woolen clothes and long wavy hair when the rest of them at that age — eleven, twelve, late spring when he first met him — were wearing shorts and had something bordering on the crew cut, and he blinks repeatedly till Mark disappears. He came over from Europe after the war, lived with his sister and aunt in a Columbus Avenue tenement across from their side street; the rest of his family died in the camps. He thinks he remembers him saying he and his sister survived by his nanny passing them off as Poles. He learned English fast, soon got great grades, skipped out of Gordon’s class but they still stayed friends, got into a special academic high school and moved away, but that was later on. Gordon couldn’t teach him baseball or football or anything like that; his game was soccer and he did fantastic tricks with a basketball with his feet, chest, knees, head, back of his neck. He showed up on the block a year after he left, looking for Gordon; they talked, nothing was foreign about him anymore, not even his speech, and that was the last time he saw him. Did he take down Mark’s phone number and address? Doesn’t think so. Did he expect old friends to always contact him? Doesn’t remember if he had that attitude then. Now, since he likes working at home and doesn’t much like going out for very long or having people over, he hardly sees anyone but his children and wife. “Mark my words about Mark,” one of their teachers said several times, “he’ll be a great mathematician or physicist or something like that in the sciences, which might not seem like much to those of you who don’t even know what a physicist is. But mark my words, twenty years from now you’ll see his face and what he’s doing in the newspapers and you’ll recognize his name.” He wonders what Mark became or just what became of him, has stopped kissing and feeling.