"Mau Mau," I said, when she came back from the toilet. The forbidden name spilled out, although I'd forgotten it completely until this moment.
"Oh, Art, it's been so long."
I said yes, it had, but we were talking, I think, about two different things.
"What's happening?" I said. "What is this?"
"Lust," she said. "I believe it's frenzied lust." She giggled.
"Did you arrange that phone call this morning?"
"What phone call was that?" she said, meeting my eyes but turning a bit red.
"Mau Mau. It was never like this before, Mau Mau."
"We have to take each other back."
"I'm back," I said. And lying beside her on the floor of her living room, with my arm beneath her head, her breath against my shoulder, the orange plaid of last light falling on the carpet, I felt, for a little minute, that I really had returned. I felt weak, languid, as though I'd been for a swim. Phlox spoke into my ear, apologizing, scolding sweetly, and as she spoke, a breeze stirred the damp hairs of my groin, so that it was as though her words raised the goose flesh along my arms and legs, gently chilled me, and I curled myself around her and said, "I'm back." Yet as the aftereffects of the drug of sex began to wear off, as my worldly strength returned, as the circulation in my pinned arm was cut off and my hand fell asleep, I began to doubt, to worry, to search my heart. I did not know if I was truly still in love with Phlox or simply blowing off some final heterosexual steam. I thought, with a guilty pang, of Arthur, and remembered his having said once that there was no such thing as bisexuality, that you were either one thing or the other. I guess I still believed in absolutes. I didn't know what I would tell him now when I saw him again, or if indeed there was something I should be telling Phlox, right this minute, before things went any further. I grew more and more uncomfortable, bound up in Phlox's arms on the rough carpet. I wanted a cigarette, wanted to unstick my prickling skin from hers. When she began to talk about the letter she'd left on my doorstep, laughing as though it had been twenty years since then, I sat bolt upright.
"The letter!" I said.
"I know, and I'm so sorry, Artichoke. Come back here," she said, pulling at my shoulders. "I can't even remember what I wrote. I know it must've been pretty silly."
"No!"
"You didn't think so?"
"No, I-well." I stood, ashamed, looking around and around for the shirt that I'd thrown off. I took a deep breath. "I lost it."
"Art!"
"No, I mean, Cleveland has it." The shirt was halfway across the room, my cigarettes in its pocket, and I tore for a while at the almost empty pack. Anything but meet her gaze.
" Cleveland! Why does he have my letter?"
"I'll get it back, don't worry. He picked it up by mistake. " The match flowered. "And lately I haven't seen him; he's been, ah, busy."
"I saw him the other day," she said, slowly. "He didn't say anything about it."
Now I turned to face her. "You did? Where?"
"But he was very strange. Art. He didn't read my letter?"
"Strange? What did he do?"
"Art, did Cleveland read my extremely private and personal letter?" She stood up now, hands on her naked hips, tossed her flyaway hair. Nearly all the light had drained from the room.
"No," I said. "Of course not."
"Well." She came over, took me in her arms, kissed me; I'd just inhaled a lungful of smoke; we parted and I exhaled gratefully, hating myself for having lied, and for having waited impatiently for the kiss to end. "I don't suppose it would really have mattered if he did, " she said.
"And he might have, you know, by now," I said lamely. "Knowing Cleveland."
"It doesn't matter." She kissed me again, a happy, dismissive peck. "I'm starved. Let's get a pizza delivered, how about?"
We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the win-dowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.
"I've been walking a lot, Art," she said, running a finger down my shin. "Very long walks, since-since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head."
"Alone?" I said. It was difficult to imagine Phlox setting out for a long excursion, or for anything at all, all by herself.
"Yes, alone. I've gotten much better at being alone lately."
"It's only been ten days, Phlox. You keep making it sound like I've been off sailing around the Horn."
"Well, I'm not good at being alone. It was a long ten days."
She looked away, pretending to watch two hopping robins down on the little lawn, though at first I didn't see that she was just pretending. At first I saw only her profile, that outline I knew so well, and the dim light falling past it to her ear, the mass of familiar shadows and glints, the darkness along the side of her straight nose, the tiny lights in the hairs of her upper lip, and it pleased me, as it always did, her profile, so that I was impelled now to look more closely, to toss my gaze quickly across it as across a painting reproduced in an artbook, to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time, to bear in mind the regular profile but remark the Egyptian effect of her slightly pointed chin, the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile, for profiles, really, don't exist; it was Phlox's face; and I had loved it. And then, suddenly, I saw motion, the tightening of her lower lip, the flaring of her nostril, the tears that dwindled down her cheek, and I saw that she pretended to look down at the birds in the grass.
When we went to bed that night it was loud and fast again, again she took control, and I found myself, inevitably perhaps, crouching on my elbows and knees-that way; I twisted and buried my face. She said, then, in an odd, clear voice which cut through everything, that she wished she could fuck me, that there must be a way, and something very primitive deep inside me awoke with a start. I rolled over, panting, but came to a definite halt. Phlox began to sob, and I wondered, unclenching my fists, if she was crying because the thing she'd wished for had frightened her, or because she could not have it, or if it was because she knew, now, that she could have it, because somehow I had been changed.
"I didn't mean it," she said, tumbling over onto the bed.
"All right," I said. I knelt beside her, ran my fingers through her faded hair. I said things that I forgot as soon as I said them. In ten minutes we were going at it again, and although I'd wanted it to be more gentle this time, had wanted to embrace, to linger, in no time at all it was exactly like wrestling; we bit and exclaimed, and I found myself twisting her into the pose I'd held just a little while before. I stared all the way down her glistening back to the tangle of her distant head.
"Can I?" I said.
"Do you want to?"
"Can I?"
"Yes," she said. "You'd better. Now."
I went to her cluttered vanity and scooped out a dollop of cold petroleum jelly, prepared everything Arthur had trained me so well to prepare, but immediately on entering that pinched, plain orifice of so little character, I lost heart, because I simply could not understand what I was about to do; it was neither backward nor forward, or else it was both at the same time, but it was too confusing for me to desire it anymore, and I said, "It's all a mistake."