“Something the matter?” his wife says, and he says “Oh, you know, just that heady all-consuming philosophical thinking pushing in again,” and she says “So tell me, I can stop to listen, seeing how you’ve stopped,” and he says “‘To listen’—that’s right, that’s what it is and why I stopped — no, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and all that baloney before about my having deep and demanding philosophical thoughts and also thoughts of big decisions and worries and remorse over how I’m treating the kids and the growing possibilities of disabling and painful illnesses — my teeth, I remember — well, they were all just that, baloney, is what I’m saying,” and she says “Why? How?” and rests her head on his thigh, and he says “What I mean is, it’s just not like me or in me to think philosophically — I mostly just go on and on and don’t stop to think, so I was evading your questions from not now but before, and of course also now, meaning just before,” and she says “Wait, I’m losing you,” and he says “I’m saying that if I do get a philosophical thought it’s usually by accident — I’m thinking of something practical, let’s say, and the philosophical thought just pops up, but it mostly usually comes from something like, if I get a pain in my stomach that wakes me up two consecutive nights and keeps me up, I think maybe I have pancreatic cancer — the one they can’t detect till it’s in an untreatable stage because it was hidden behind some other organs, and that might make me think of my mortality, of how I’d hate to go so fast and leave you and the kids while they’re so young and also the physical pain I’d have before they doped me up with morphine and the emotional pain it would bring the kids of their daddy dying and probably to you too,” and she says “Of course me, what do you think?” and he says “I know, but you could recover after a while — a year, half a year — and marry again, while with them they’ve lost their father permanently, there’s really no one to replace him if he goes when they’re so young — but what was I saying? And truth is, even that wasn’t a good example of a philosophical thought — it wasn’t even one. So maybe I never get philosophical thoughts, or I get them only rarely but never deep ones. But I was saying or was going to say that I didn’t have any philosophical thoughts before when I was sitting downstairs and told you I did, or thoughts of worry and remorse and so on, but only a rush of thoughts with pictures and scenes and the rest of it of kids I knew when I was between maybe five and fifteen. I don’t even know why the thoughts came, or why those particular kids, some of whom I haven’t thought of in maybe thirty years, though maybe the more erotic scenes — one was of seeing a girl’s vagina for the first time when I was four or five, or first time where I remembered it — came in simply because I was feeling amorous and wanted to make love, even if it took me a while to get up here, and so those excited me to it. Anyway, they won’t stop me anymore — I think enough time’s elapsed where I’m done with them for now — and we better get going again since we don’t have much more time,” and runs his hand over her shoulder and across her mouth, and she moves her face next to his and they resume making love.
He’s behind her, place he likes best, her buttocks up and his hands holding her hips, pretty close to the finish he guesses since it hardly ever takes him long when they’re like this, much as he’d like to keep going for her sake, though she was the one who said “Come behind me”—probably because they were so short of time and she was nowhere near done — something he often hopes she’ll suggest and he rarely initiates since she’s said it’s never the best position for her and she does it mostly because she knows how much he loves it. “Not that I’m saying it’s horrible,” she once said, “it’s just that I can’t see you and it’s rough on my elbows and knees and the pleasure isn’t the greatest so it’s simply not one of my favorites,” when he thinks of Bea Fields. Standing in front of an audience, hands cupped to her chest, eyes closed, face transported, moving her mouth as if singing. He liked to sing also and could tell her voice was beautiful with clean tones and a tremendous range though it seemed for her age a little artificial and too trained. Mr. Sisk, the music teacher, said a few times he’d like them to do a duet in front of the assembly, since they had the best voices in school, and he was glad it never got past an idea. She usually snubbed him, seemed to look down on all the boys, maybe because she knew how they felt about her and also because she thought they had no culture and she didn’t think much of their brains. She was homely, big thick glasses, large nose, piano legs they said, messy frizzy hair, big fat breasts before it seemed any of the other girls started to get theirs or only had buds, waist and hips like those women who wore bustles in old-fashioned westerns though she was only twelve or thirteen, ugly dresses and shoes, big lips, little teeth, whiny speaking voice, it was said she never studied for tests but she always ended up with top marks, he and a few others also tried out for Performing Arts but she was the only one to get in. At their graduation ceremony she sang a Negro spiritual, something from a popular operetta and La Bohème, and then, other than for once or twice in the neighborhood, he never saw her again.
He comes, keeps moving as long as he can, then she lies on her stomach and he collapses on top of her. They stay that way, side of face against side of face, her eye closed, probably the other one too, and she’s murmuring while he thinks of Gwynn. The best athlete for a girl he ever played with, and then she lost a leg below the knee because of some rare bone disease her first year in high school. Then she was in a wheelchair without the other leg and last time he saw her was when he was going to a movie alone, it was his first or second year in college, and she was in her chair in front of her apartment building a block from the theater, she must have been left there since it was a walk-up and she couldn’t have got downstairs herself, and he said “Gwynn?” though he knew it was her, and she said “Gordon Tannenbaum, or Mandelbaum?” and he said “Mandelbaum, though no difference,” and asked how she was and she said fine, doing okay, considering, she finally graduated high school with an equivalency diploma by having a slew of special-education teachers come to her home and that she was even planning to go to college, which she bet he was in now and he said he was, but also working, but that was good, her going to college, getting out and around and really exercising the brain, and he thought maybe she’d like to go to the movie with him, he could handle it, wheeling her there and back or she could do her own wheeling if that was the kind of wheelchair it was and she had the strength for it and preferred doing it, and then he’d just ring up her apartment and someone would come down for her and get her up however they do it and he’d even pay her way, treat her at the candy counter and everything, but said “Well, I’ll see ya,” and she said “It’s been nice talking, stop by again,” and he felt bad after he left, and looked back from the corner and saw her talking with an older woman but looking at him. She waved, he waved, he continued going but told himself he would stop by, maybe even phone for her to meet him downstairs or he’d come upstairs to help her down, and later heard, maybe a year after, she’d been sent to a hospital in the Midwest that specialized in her disease and that was the last he heard anything about her. He wonders if these people, the ones who didn’t die, ever think of him. His wife says from under him “You better fetch the kids,” and he says “Right, I forgot,” looks at the clock, gets up and wipes himself and dresses and quickly leaves.