“Have you got to see me, Ben? Are you at a hotel now?”
“Patty, I’ve got to see you. I’m at a hotel in Colorado Springs. The Broadmoor. Get a plane to Denver, then fly down from there.”
“I’ll come out tomorrow,” Patty said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. I knew it would be you. I knew you would need me. That’s why I stayed on.”
“I know.” He did. Patty, who could not hear loud noises, was the one he needed.
She wired her arrival time and he met her plane. “I’m sorry about Estelle. I sent a contribution in Mom’s memory to the Riverdale Temple Sisterhood.” Patty nodded and opened her arms. They kissed. She flicked her tongue around inside his mouth, darting it like a mouse across the vault of his palate. “Woof,” he said, releasing her. “Woof.”
“The Black Studies Programs in the nation’s high schools and universities,” she said, “are racist in intent. They’re designed to induce in young colored people a pride of such fantasy dimensions that an entire generation of blacks will voluntarily return to Africa.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“I’m not the Insight Lady for nothing,” she said.
He had loved all the girl twins, all the girl triplets. From the time he was twenty-four until now they had been his collective type. All that could happen to married men had happened to him. He had courted them, loved them well, had affairs, been unfaithful, kissed, made up, moved in, moved out. He had loved and won, loved and lost, pined, mooned, yearned. He had had understandings, stood up at their weddings, given the brides away, proposed the toasts. He had flown in for their operations, collared the surgeons in the corridor, spitting his tears in their faces, thrown down his distraught warnings, pleading always his passionate sui generis priorities. Over the years his love letters to them would have made thick volumes. And though they were identical physically, he had loved each in her turn — achronologically — and despite the monolith of their triplet and twin characters, for different but not quite definable reasons.
“I don’t know,” Ethel had once said to him when he was falling in love with Mary, “what you see in her.”
“What,” Mary had asked when he was beginning to see Helen, “has she got that I haven’t got?”
And he could not have told her. Could not have told any of them. It was as if love were the most solipsistic of energies, spitting and writhing, convulsing on the ground like a live wire, uncoiling, striking at random.
“It’s — what? — a feeling, an emotion,” he told Kitty when he was starting to itch for balding Maxene, “like anger, something furious in feeling that will not listen to reason.”
“All us cats are gray at night, surely,” Lotte said when she learned he was seeing LaVerne. “Don’t you know that?”
And it was so. If he knew anything it was their replicate bodies, their assembly-line lives, their gynecological heads and hearts, informed about their insides as a mechanic. Which, for one, made him a great lover, the official cartographer of Finsberg feeling, expert as a pro at the free-throw line, precise as a placekicker. And lent something cumulative to love, some strontium ninetiness in his ardor, the deposits compounding, compounding, till the word got round, the sisters deferring after the third or fourth, hoping probably to be last, as heart patients, say, might want their surgeons to have performed an operation a thousand times before it was to be performed on them.
“Oh, God,” Gertrude screamed in orgasm, “the last shall be first!”
And for him cumulative, too. But if the sex was better each time for his practice, that did not mean it had ever been fumbling. No. Never. The kiss he had given Lotte beside the bus all those years before had had in it all the implications of his most recent fuck. And some increment of the social in his relations with the girls, of the historical. Because he had seen them through not only their own puberty but the century’s, had heavy-petted them in the fifties, taken them, stoned on liquor, in lovers’ lanes in the back of immense finned Cadillacs, like screwing in a giant fish, worrying with them through their periods, sometimes using rubbers, sometimes caught without — who knew when one would fall in love? — driving them in the late fifties to gynecologists in different boroughs and waiting for them in the car while they were fitted for diaphragms. And in the sixties going with them to the gynecologists’ offices while their coils were inserted. Discoursing about the naughty liberation of the Pill and, when, in the late sixties, the warnings and scares began to appear, going with them right up to the shelves in pharmacies where they picked out their foams. Something of the mores of the times associated with each act. Could he, then, have fallen in love with history, with modern times, the age’s solutions to its anxieties? Have had with each girl what other men had never had — the possibility of a second chance, a third, of doing it all over again, only differently, only better? Sexually evolving with them during the sexual revolution.
But sentiment, too. That refractive as well as cumulative. Associating with each sister the song, the device, the clothing and underclothing peculiar to her incumbency. A living nostalgia, differentiated as height marks inked on a kitchen wall. An archaeology of sex, love, and memory.
And Patty was the last. (She was not the Insight Lady for nothing.)
They drove up to the Broadmoor, a pink Monaco castle at the foot of the Rockies, and he showed her the hotel in a proprietary way, taking her through the nifty Regency public rooms with their beautiful sofas, the striped, silken upholstery like tasteful flags. He showed her huge tiaras of chandelier, soft plush carpets.
“Yes,” she said, “carpets were our first floors, our first highways.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We call the rug in the hall a ‘runner.’ It’s where the runners or messengers waited in the days of kings and emperors.”
“I never made the connection.”
“It’s an insight. Chandeliers must have come in with the development of lens astronomy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I should think it was an attempt to mimic rather than parody the order of the heavens, to bring the solar system indoors.”
“Really?”
“Well, where, to simple people, would the universe seem to go during the daylight hours, Ben?”
“But chandeliers give light.”
“Not during the daytime. The chandelier is a complex invention — a sculpture of the invisible stars by day, a pragmatic mechanism by night. But a much less daring device finally than carpeting.”
“Why, Patty?”
“Because carpeting — think of Oriental rugs — was always primarily ornamental and decorative. It was a deliberate expression of what ground — our first flooring, remember, and incidentally we have to regard tile, too, as a type of carpeting—ought to be in a perfect world. Order, symmetry, design. And since rugs came in before lens telescopy, how could they know? Oh, carpeting’s much more daring. A leap of will.”
“Of will?”
“Men will the laws of nature.”
“I’m glad you came, Patty.”
“Oh, look,” she said, “just look.” They had stepped through the great French doors onto the broad cement patio behind the hotel where small wrought-iron tables and chairs had been set up. People chatted, sipped drinks, and watched the promenade of guests as they moved across the patio and onto the smooth, flower-bordered paths that circled the man-made lake. Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak rose unobstructed behind the lake.
“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben asked.