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He had just enough time to shower before the girl arrived. Half an hour later he gave her fifty dollars, and she left. He called downstairs for a bottle of Grant’s and some ice and soda. He drank and watched television for four hours, then called the same number again with the same request.

The woman on the other end of the line read it back in a finishing school accent, then stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute, was something the matter with Trina?”

“That was hours ago,” he said.

“You just get off a ship?”

“A nuclear submarine. Three years under the ocean.”

“I guess.”

In fifteen minutes a second girl arrived. He thought at first that she looked something like Trina, then realized that he had forgotten what Trina looked like. In any case she was attractive enough to fill his needs, as Trina had been. She was less hurried than Trina, accepted a drink, and made a certain amount of conversation in and out of bed. It was almost an hour after her arrival when she took her fifty dollars and left.

He tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. He was drunk but not drunk enough for sleep and he did not want to drink any more. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at himself in the mirror on the closet door. He wasn’t crazy about what he saw.

He had noticed at lunch that Mary Fradin had gray in her hair. Well, he was getting gray in his beard lately. They were none of them getting younger. His editor talked reverently about One If by Land, whether he had really read it or not. His editor had been born in 1942 and had been three years old when the war ended, the war that One If by Land was about. Worse, his editor gave the impression of knowing nothing about anything that had taken place before his own brief lifetime; as if anything much more ancient than yesterday was unimportant.

He smoked cigarettes and made another drink without wanting it. He had had a number of affairs since the divorce, but only two of them had been of any substance. Twice he had lived with women, once for three months, once for almost a year. Twice they had moved into the old stone house, and each time their entrance and ultimate exit was tactfully unremarked by Mrs. Kleinschmidt. Tongues might wag all they wanted, evidently, just so they did not wag about her.

In each instance he had seen marriage as an eventual outcome, though both times he had wanted to be very sure before letting it go that far. And in each instance the relationship had run its course and then broken down. No hard feelings, no regrets or bitterness on either side. Smiles at parting. Cards at Christmas. He had even slept again with one of the two women a year and a half after they separated. It was nothing important at the time and convinced him it had been nothing important before.

He reached for the phone and found himself starting to dial the same number a third time. The act had been involuntary and scared him. He cradled the phone and forced himself to lie down. He did not want another whore. He had not wanted the first two, much as he had seemed to need them. He wanted a woman.

He wanted Anita. He had always wanted her and always would, and of course he knew it. But that was one of a great many things he tried not to think about.

He woke up in the morning. When he ordered breakfast he also asked them to send up a tin of aspirin and a double Bloody Mary. He went back to Trenton on the Metroliner and his headache was gone by the time he boarded the train.

He spent the next few days as he spent most nonworking days. He drove into New Hope one day and Doylestown another, wandering the streets, looking in store windows, talking to friends and strangers. He drank coffee in his kitchen and half listened to Mrs. Kleinschmidt’s endless stories about various friends and relatives. He could not keep the people straight in her stories and did not try to, as there was no point. Her stories all lacked a time element; she would tell him an anecdote as if it had happened yesterday, and he would later learn it had taken place fifty years ago, and that the daring young people in the story were now sitting on porches while their arteries hardened. Most of her stories concerned people long dead, some of them local characters who had died in her childhood, but her reminiscences all had the flavor of current gossip. Years ago he had learned to let her conversation wash over him, neither listening nor not listening to it. It was astonishing how much of what she said, not consciously noted at the time, would later find its way into one of his books. On more than a few occasions he had realized after the fact that a bit of plot material or a scrap of background he had thought he was inventing had in fact derived from something the old woman had said.

In the morning after breakfast or in the evening when the sky was still bright he would walk over his property. Eighteen years ago his land had been a farm, neglected for a time but still identifiable as such. The back land was clear pasture to within less than a hundred yards of the creek, where the woods began. With surprising speed the woods had moved up toward the garden behind the house. In ten years’ time the whole meadow had become a young forest of red cedar. Now the cedar forest was rapidly evolving into a hardwood forest; oak and maple seedlings shot up above the short-lived cedars, and as they matured and shaded the cedars they would take over completely. There were deer in the woods, and in season there were hunters who would not be deterred by the signs he posted every autumn. There were also foxes and rabbits and pheasants, and muskrats lived in the creek bed. Now the grackles were nesting, and nine out of ten of the cedars had nests in their branches. He walked through his woods and felt the special pleasure he had felt so many times before and knew as he had always known that he could not sell this land.

It did not belong to him nearly so much as he belonged to it. For the first two years he had tried to maintain it himself, mowing and planting and pruning with furious energy. He would put in farmer’s hours at these tasks, but when a book took hold, he could put in no time at all. When he wrote he could think of nothing but the book on which he was working and would go weeks without walking over his land, let alone working on it. A garden could not be thus neglected, and eventually he had hired gardeners. They had been busy this spring, and he walked through the beds of flowers and shrubbery and noted the changes. The towering Kieffer pear was in bloom at the kitchen door. Late daffodils vied with the earliest tulips. Most of those flowers were bulbs he had planted. In eighteen years there had not been an autumn when he had not put at least a few bulbs into the ground.

On one afternoon almost a week after his trip to New York he returned from a walk in the woods just as a car pulled into the driveway. One of the rear doors opened and a girl emerged carrying a suitcase. The driver rounded the circular driveway and headed back toward town and the girl approached the house. She was on the doorstep before he recognized his daughter.

He was at the side of the house as this happened, and he hurried forward and called to her. She turned to him still holding the suitcase, and her face broke out in a smile that made his chest ache. They met in front of the living room window and embraced.

He said, “Did you write? I never got your letter. You should have called.”

“I thought I’d surprise you.”

“I’ve never had a better surprise. You cut your hair.”

“I got tired of it.”

“Let me see. Well, it was lovely long, but I can understand why you got bored with it.”

“I mean, everybody had long hair.”

“I know.” He stepped back and looked at her. “You know, when you got out of the car I didn’t recognize you. I wondered who was the beautiful girl and what she was doing here. You grow more beautiful every time I see you.”