A short and exceedingly fat woman with a pair of long-legged, unhappy, teenaged sons stood in line as a group behind Egress. She kicked one of her large suitcases along the floor until it crashed into his heel, battering his Achilles tendon with it as she kept on kicking. Her arms, like meat-filled pillows, were folded pugnaciously across her huge breasts, and, while swinging at her suitcase with one stubby foot, she glared intolerantly at Egress and Naomi Ruth.
— Next! the clerk pointedly called out.
— They think they’re in a movie, the fat woman muttered to her sons.
— Okay, okay, I’m next, Egress said, turning for a second to the clerk, saying to him, — One way, please, and when, a second later, he looked back, Naomi Ruth was gone.
— One way … to where, mister? the clerk impatiently asked him.
— Oh. Ah… Nevada. Reno, Nevada.
— First-class or tourist?
— Ah, tourist, tourist. Yes … tourist. He placed his credit card onto the counter in front of him and the clerk ran it through the machine and handed it, with the ticket, back to him.
Egress deftly stepped away and slipped into the crowd as if slipping into a broad, slow river, and let the current carry him. He said to himself, I’ve never felt so tired, so bone-weary. I feel a thousand years old. I wish I’d been born a member of a different race, one with more of a future. I almost wish I’d been born a woman.
Oh, but just the same, thinking that one over, he thought, I’m glad I don’t have to be born again as anything. The risk isn’t worth taking, he observed shrewdly. Maybe everything’s only as decently worked out as possible. It’s hard to run off and turn your back on the fact of your own manhood, when you are a man and have been one all your life. I mean, what the hell, an ego’s an ego, and you sort of have to take it as it comes from where you get it. Right? he humbly asked himself.
Right, he declared with confidence, sliding forthrightly along with the crowd and keeping a sharp lookout for the proper boarding gate and any possibilities of Naomi Ruth.
2.
(ON THE BEACH)
Egress sat atop the smooth, sow-sized boulder, looking out to sea, diddling idly with memories of his childhood. The harsh cry of a gull caused him to look to his right, along the gray beach, and though he could see little more of the figure walking toward him than that it was a woman’s, he knew immediately that it was Naomi Ruth’s. The languorous yet sporty walk, that slow movement of muscles hardened leisurely by tennis, could belong to no other woman, certainly to no other woman in his life, which, at that exact moment, he realized, in terms of the number and kinds of women he had studied closely, had been rather oddly narrow. Was that usual? he wondered. Was he, then, therefore, lonelier than other men of similar means and abilities? Was this, the catastrophe of his middle age, his own fault?
She didn’t give any sign of recognition until she had drawn near enough for her to speak to him, when she said simply, — I never thought of you as a sun-worshipper, Egress. She was wearing a tiny, cerise, two-piece bathing suit. He had on a rust-colored tanksuit made of wet-look nylon. They both had good tans, leathery brown and evenly distributed.
— Having a good time? he asked.
— Yes! And you? She sat down lightly beside him on the rock and looked out to sea.
Egress looked out to sea also. — Yes, I guess one could call it that.
— What?
— A “good” time.
— Oh.
— I mean, I’ve been “good” lately. Travel and most other forms of inactivity, as you know, produce in me a certain … “morality,” he said carefully.
— That’s pretty decadent-sounding, Egress, she said, laughing. — You were many things, but I don’t remember you as particularly decadent.
— I don’t know. No, I don’t think I was, not at all. Nowadays, though, well, maybe I am. After all, life has to go on, n’est-ce pas? “The old biological imperative,” as the Loon used to call it…
— The Loon! she sneered.
— Oh, you can’t blame him, Naomi. Not for this. He was weak, that’s all, and he knew it. For him, everything had to come down to that old biological imperative. His one ethic, his only possible morality, was survival, for god’s sake. We shouldn’t go off projecting our own alternatives onto him, not now. That’s just too easy…
— I know, I know. It’s just the associations. They’re still very strong, you know. And painful.
— Sure, I understand. It’s the same for me — though of course I’m temperamentally slightly more existential than you.
— That makes it easier, probably.
— Aw, please, Naomi, I happen to treasure this moment, so please, don’t indulge in sarcasm. Not now.
— Sorry.
— As a matter of fact, just as you came walking up, I was sitting here wondering whether or not this whole thing was my fault completely. I mean, completely.
— Completely?
— Yeah. Except for a few things, of course. All that destruction at the end, for instance. I mean, Jesus, Naomi, you could have just “left” me, you know. All those innocent people! he exclaimed compassionately.
— Nobody’s “innocent,” she said grimly. — It’s Greek, and that means everything’s interlocked. When the House of Atreus finally collapses, the entire city has to collapse around it. I had nothing to do with all that destruction at the end, not personally, any more than you did. Not as much as you did, if you ask me, from what I heard. What were you doing when you went underground, anyhow? Working as some kind of secret double agent? No, I’m sorry, I don’t mean that. I know you had nothing personally to do with all that violence and destruction of property at the end. It was just coincidence. Fate.
Egress sighed with evident relief. — If that’s true, then maybe the whole thing wasn’t my fault, not entirely. Right?
— Who cares about “right” now? she asked rhetorically, leaving the rock. — Good-bye, Egress. I’m glad you are having a good time, however decadent. I don’t miss you, but I wonder lots of times how you are now.
— Same here, he said. — Are you “lonely”?
— Yes. But as I said, I don’t miss you.
— Right. Same here, he said to her lithe back as she walked athletically away.
3.
(IN THE MUSEUM)
He had stepped into the museum to get out of the rain, a sudden, unexpected shower that probably would not last. I never seem to have an umbrella when I need one, he thought, as he glanced into the adjacent roomful of midnight blue, very abstract paintings. The paintings, recent acquisitions, evidently, were all about six feet square, covered completely with a smooth coat of midnight blue paint. The surface was so smooth that it seemed to have been applied with a large roller or spray gun. There were between twenty-five and thirty of the paintings hanging in the large room, distributed evenly along the walls and hung at exactly the same height. Egress found himself moved invitingly by the sight and went into the room for a closer look at them.
They were by an artist whose name he did not recognize, and they were entitled, “Composition A,” “Composition B,” and so on, in sequence, all the way, he discovered, to “Composition Z,” which brought him back to the door again. The exhibit gave him considerable peace of mind, and it was with pleasure and a kind of relief that he noticed, after having gone through the exhibit a second time to study each individual painting closely, that he was the only person in the room — until the moment when Naomi Ruth, in a lemon yellow dress and carrying a matching yellow umbrella, entered the room.