And the enormous pillows were stuffed with goose feathers, expensive and luxuriant. And the bedroom, the "master" bedroom as real estate agents call such rooms, was beautifully furnished in Revolutionary-era things; and the walls papered in a net of silken dove-gray fleur-de-lis and ser-pentine tendrils, an exact reproduction of the wallpaper in the bedroom of General Cleveland Wade and his wife. In such surroundings the

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Hoffmanns slept. In their burrow of thirty years the Hoffmanns slept. In the aftermath of grief the Hoffmanns slept. On opposite sides of the double bed they slept. They were spent, exhausted; like swimmers who have only barely made it back to shore, through a treacherous surf; swimmers who've survived a common wreck, and dread the knowledge of what happened, and what almost happened, in the other's eyes. No! I can't look.

Don't make me look. I don't know you.

In the history of the Colonial house on Old Mill Way, how many wives and husbands had slept beneath the high ceiling of the master bedroom, such spent, exhausted sleep.

Camille, who lived now, understood that Lionel, her husband, was deeply disappointed in her. Her weakness, her tears. Her public breakdown. In the car returning from Nyack, he'd said virtually nothing to her except "Blow your nose, Camille. Please." And in fear of him, his severe eyes, Camille had crept upstairs to bed while Lionel was in his downstairs study with the door shut against her; as years before he'd shut the door against the children whispering and giggling outside it. Their daring soft pummelings against it with the palms of their hands. Daddy? Dad-dy?

Why are you hiding? Camille had sometimes pressed the palms of her hands against that door and listened intently, and hearing nothing inside had not dared to speak; tonight, she hadn't dared to approach the door.

The house was so large, you could be lost to another person for days. But Lionel was required to come upstairs to bed, in the "master" bedroom as Custom dictated. He was faithful to Custom, Camille knew. In gratitude she knew. She'd bathed luxuriantly, and put on a floral-checked flannel nightgown (though the night was hot, Lionel kept the house air-conditioned and their sleeping quarters were wintry), and lay on her side of the four-poster bed to wait for him; she'd left a dim light burning on the table by Lionel's side of the bed. Her lips moved in a silent prayer for Adam Berendt, and for herself and her husband. O God let us endure. Let us be happy again! She had not committed adultery except in her heart. She was not guiltless, neither was she guilty. Should she confess? That she'd loved another man? While continuing to love her husband, she'd been desperate with love for another man? Lionel in his remoteness could not know; he'd have had no idea. What an insult to his manhood! Must Lionel know the full truth, in order to forgive her, if he would forgive her?

O God, instruct me. Adam? Camille had always been a religious person but her relations with God were formal and not very comforting. There were Middle Age: A Romance

long periods when she no more thought of Him than she thought of the elderly white-bearded man who'd been her Grand-da-daddy, her mother's own grandfather, who'd given her so many nice presents including a Shetland pony, who'd disappeared from her life forever before she was ten. (When she'd asked where Grand-da-daddy was, her mother always said, with a quirky little smile, "Grand-da-daddy's gone back to the Highlands, where he came from.") Camille squinted into the darkness.

She was in a wild place, approaching the mouth of a cave. She was alone, and in her nightgown, and frightened; but someone, perhaps Adam, was close by, protecting her. She couldn't see him but knew he was there. As in life, he'd protected her. She was drifting downward to sleep, which was inside the cave. Yet at the same time she was fully awake, conscious of that sequence of creaks on the stairs. In fact, her mind was racing, like a rabbit chased by hounds! She was exhausted from these racing thoughts! Since that terrible telephone call of the other evening. Camille, I have such sad news for you. For us. It's Adam. Adam has-in an accident, Adam has-died.

(The caller hadn't been Marina Troy but Abigail Des Pres, who'd been one of the women in Adam's art class at the high school.) The caller broke down into sobs, and Camille, stricken to the heart, sobbed with her. Not that she'd been able to quite believe that Adam was dead, so quickly. Since that hour, Camille's mind had had no peace. Her thoughts were sharp as razors. They spun, they glittered. In the midst of the glittering a door opened stealthily, and it was her husband coming finally to bed. The house was deathly quiet, it was the middle of the night. Lionel Hoffmann barefoot, carrying his shoes; out of gallantry, not wanting to wake his exhausted wife. (Not wanting, Camille knew, to have to speak to her, touch her.) A rapist he was, creeping into her shadowy room. Camille smiled at the thought, for Lionel was not a man with rape on his mind. "Lionel, darling?" Camille whispered, and Lionel, startled, had no choice but to reply, "Yes? What?" Camille stirred, sitting up, the enormous goose-feather pillow sighing behind her. "What-what time is it?" and Lionel said quickly, "What difference does it make? It's late. I'm sorry I woke you." "I haven't been asleep." "I think you were, Camille, and I woke you. I'm sorry." "But I wasn't asleep, Lionel. I was waiting for you." "You were asleep, I think. I could hear you breathing. I'm sorry I woke you." Camille smiled into the darkness at the elusive man hovering just beyond the arc of light. She wanted to scream, Stop being sorry! I hate you but instead she said plaintively, "Lionel, do you l-love me?" But Lionel had already slipped

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away into his bathroom, which opened off the far side of the spacious bedroom; already the fan inside was clicking and whirring. "What will I do if you don't love me? And Adam gone."

It was Lionel's strategy to take a very long time in his bathroom before coming to bed. Camille understood that he was waiting for her to drift back to sleep. Since the news of Adam's death he hadn't wished to comfort her, nor even to touch her. Nor even to look at her. "Adam was my friend, too"-so strange a remark to make, as he'd turned away from her in a kind of reproach. Yet Lionel's remoteness was hardly new. How many months, years. Since about the time the children departed? Now she wasn't Mother, but again Wife. She'd served him and the children well, as Mother. As Wife, possibly she was deficient? Often she overheard Lionel complaining of his office staff, the "girls" he was forced to hire, none of them capable, and she understood that, if Lionel were to interview her for Wife, he wouldn't hire her. Somehow, her personality had begun to fade in her early forties. As her fair, wavy brown hair had faded. When they'd first met, Camille had been a vivacious eighteen-year-old college freshman; very pretty, and very popular with boys; at Ithaca College, she'd been fre-netically busy with activities like Glowworms, HiSky, PIPS, Slipper & Pen, Lancettes, Icicles, and the women's intramural volleyball team; she'd nearly been elected class public relations officer, a position of responsibility. She'd met Lionel Hoffmann at a Deke party at Colgate one evening when Lionel's date had gotten shamelessly drunk, and was dancing with a succession of Dekes, and Lionel had stalked out of the fraternity house, furious; and Camille's date who was a friend of Lionel's had asked Lionel to join him and Camille for the remainder of the weekend; and somehow it happened that Lionel, in his fury and heartbreak, had focused on her.

And so he'd loved Camille for several years before finally Camille agreed to marry him, giving up her hope of a career in education, and a stint in the Peace Corps. (Camille had begged Lionel to join the Peace Corps with her, they might have spent their honeymoon in exotic Africa, but of course, Lionel vetoed the idea.) Almost immediately after the marriage their relationship altered. By degrees, Camille lost her "sparkle"-her "dancing" eyes-as her Grand-da-daddy had called them. But she'd been very capable as Mother, with nannies, housemaids, and cooks to assist her, and this had pleased not only her demanding husband but her husband's yet more demanding parents; and in the pleasure of such knowledge, Camille had basked innocently for years. Then the children were grown Middle Age: A Romance *

and gone, overnight it seemed. And Camille began to lose her looks. In mirrors, often she saw an unrecognizable face. It was known by Camille to be hers, as in dreams we "know" people who don't at all resemble their real selves; yet parts might be missing-an eye, a nostril, the right side of the jaw melted away. In family snapshots, Camille was a blur. Her figure was ectoplasmic, shapeless. Her hair lost its color, its lustre, its texture; what beauticians call "body." Her eyes faded: where once they'd been a deep blue, now they were a pale gray, like wetted newsprint. A number of times Camille answered the phone only to hear the caller say, "Hello? Hel lo? "

though Camille had distinctly said hello; when Camille protested she was there, she was Camille Hoffmann, the caller seemed not to hear, and hung up. It was so frustrating! It was heartbreaking. To be a wraith while still alive, and still relatively young. Only Adam Berendt in his kindness had seen her.

Time had passed, the bathroom fan still whirred. Camille was determined to remain awake though it was :6 .. by her bedside clock.

Thinking how their lovemaking, hers and Lionel's, had become so rare in recent years as to have acquired, for each, a new and alarming awkwardness; as if they were inexperienced newlyweds, or strangers by some mysterious chance (a lottery?) forced to sleep in a single bed. This bed!

Camille stifled a sob. She adjusted the enormous pillow beneath her head.

Oh, why had Adam Berendt never climbed the stairs to this room, to this bed? Why didn't you love me as I loved you, if you'd made love to me in this bed the bed would be sanctified now and I could sleep. She'd bathed, and powdered her soft slipping-down body with talcum that smelled of lilac, to erase the gritty-acrid odor of the crematorium, but it was difficult to find a comfortable position in this bed. If Camille lay on her back, her right breast sagged to the right, and her left breast sagged to the left, to a degree that disconcerted; if she lay on her side, her heart seemed to beat faster, and her left breast was mashed against the mattress while her right breast was mashed against her upper arm. (For she could only face the left side of the bed, since Lionel lay to her right; that was his territory.) And her breasts had become fearful to her. Even as their maternal function rapidly retreated in time, they seemed to be growing larger. (In fact, Camille hadn't nursed either of her babies. Her obstetrician, male, hadn't recommended it. And Lionel had wondered aloud in his remote, whimsical way if nursing wasn't a bit aboriginal for their time and place.) How unnatural it had seemed that day in the crematorium "chapel," that Camille felt

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herself both a ghost and a mammalian physical being, burdened with the impediments of female flesh. And there is no one to whom I can speak of such things, now that Adam is gone. If she dared to bring up such a topic to Lionel, he would have been dismayed and embarrassed; he disliked what he called Camille's "metaphysical" tendencies, fearing his emotional wife might come to believe in spiritualism, seances, New Age notions like rein-carnation and "channeling" and communing with animals. Because I am not my body. I am so much more! Not long ago at a fund-raising luncheon for Planned Parenthood, the unpredictable Augusta Cutler shocked women friends by declaring she was God damned bored with her female body; she'd outgrown the thing, even as, ripening and spreading, it seemed to be outgrowing her. Lifting her breasts in both beringed hands, and they were sizable breasts in taupe jersey decorated with myriad tiny pearls, Gussie said in her husky growl, "Sometimes I feel like a rubber sex doll some guy blew up, and discarded." Abigail Des Pres, the only divorcee in their circle, who'd lost so much weight since her divorce that she'd become ethereal, like a fading watercolor, glanced down at her narrow torso saying, "Me!

I'm a rubber sex doll that's been deflated, and discarded." Camille snorted with sudden laughter.

Oh, but was it funny, any of it? Camille knew that Lionel was furious with her, and that his fury had something to do with the size of her breasts, and her hips and thighs, and their ectoplasmic nature; he was furious with her femaleness; even as he honored her as his wife, and would never dream (Camille knew!) of being unfaithful to her, still less leaving her. But he was upset with her grieving for Adam before witnesses, their Salthill friends. Camille lay listening to faucets being turned on, and off.

The toilet flushing. Reproach vibrated in these sounds. A medicine cabinet door being opened, and shut. And opened again? It's a test of wills. If he can outwait me. If I fall asleep before he comes to bed. Camille smiled, thinking this might be a TV show. Marriage at Bedtime: The Test of Wills. How popular it would be!

At last, the fan ceased. A door opened quietly. A man's shadowy figure, barefoot, in pajama bottoms and white T-shirt top, came stealthily to the bed. Switched off the bedside lamp. Slipped beneath the covers, stiff and on his back and breathing as inconspicuously as possible. Camille was awake (wasn't Camille awake?) yet she seemed incapable of moving her head, or speaking in even a murmur Lionel? I'm so afraid. Her sprawling soft body felt as if it had been shot with novocaine. No, it was the coarse Middle Age: A Romance

white pill she'd taken before coming to bed. Lethesse was the brand name.

She'd had three, possibly four of these today? The powdery, slightly bitter taste of the pills was confused with the powdery, gritty, acrid-bitter taste of the air in the chapel, and in the parking lot outside Nyack Burial-Cremation Services, Inc. Oh, the shock of it: looking up to the tall stained chimney where big puffs of smoke drifted skyward with balloon-like ease.

My card, ma'am. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have, ma'am. At any time. The gravely smiling Shad had pressed his card into Camille's hand, murmuring in her ear as if making an assignation. (And Lionel only a few yards away, oblivious.) Camille shuddered, remembering. She'd torn the card into tiny pieces. She was a Christian woman.

Lionel would never permit her to be otherwise. He, too, was thinking rapidly; Camille could feel his brain, a finer mechanism than her own, working; his thoughts humming and vibrating, like the bathroom fan.

Lionel still lay on his back, though facing the outside of the bed, having shoved his pillow aside (for Lionel had a decades-old, irrational fear of being "smothered" in the goose-feather pillows) and of course, he would begin to snore as soon as he drifted into sleep; and Camille wouldn't dare nudge him awake. When she did, he responded with irritation and hurt pride. ("Camille, I wasn't asleep. How could I be snoring? I'm as wide awake as you.") Lionel's snoring was surprisingly loud for a man with a lean, lanky frame and fastidious manners. It had the power to penetrate her sleep as a bore penetrates a plasterboard wall. For thirty years Camille's dreams had reshaped themselves into narratives to absorb the man's snoring. Often Camille found herself in airports, or on airplanes roaring through the sky. She was on a train, rocked by rhythmic deafening wheels. She was involved with sewing machines, lawn mowers, lathes.

Sometimes there was a wet, gurgling sound to Lionel's snores and Camille found herself in her nightclothes, barefoot in a turbulent surf. How eternal is a single night, and of what eternities are our long marriages composed!

Yet the most upsetting of sounds was silence; the abrupt absence of sound.

If Lionel ceased snoring, Camille would wake in alarm. "Lionel? Is something wrong? Darling?" She would shake him gently, not into wakefulness but into the comforting rhythm of his snoring. Only then could Camille resume her own sleep. As now she was making her way through an unfamiliar yet teasingly familiar landscape: Battle Park? She was stumbling in rocky soil, snagged by a snoring-thorn bush. Lionel's deep resonant snores were mixed with wild rose brambles. Sharp little thorns catching at

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Camille's clothing, and her bare, exposed skin. In a cave in the hillside Adam Berendt was awaiting her. She was desperate to get to him. She understood that something terrible had happened to him, yet if neither of them acknowledged it, this terrible thing had not yet happened. It was no longer summer but the wintry afternoon years ago when, boldly, she'd come to Adam's stone house on the river. Adam's studio was somehow in the cave, yet simultaneously in the stone house. And the cave wasn't dark but warmly lit; it was the outdoors, the winter sky, that was shadowy, the color of heartbreak. Camille, entering, kicking snow off her boots, stepped into an illuminated space like no other she'd seen. An artist dwells in light, Adam had told his students. And there was Adam Berendt in stained work clothes, jaws glinting with stubble, square-built, startled to see her.

She'd interrupted him in the midst of deliberating on an unwieldy collage-sculpture. "Don't send me away, Adam! I need to speak with you." Camille was wearing a raffish fox fur jacket from the twenties, inherited from a grandmother, and hounds-tooth woolen slacks and knee-high boots; her cheeks blazed; her honey brown hair, just beginning to be streaked with silver, was windblown. She was in her mid-forties, still in the unconscious prime of her Renoir-female beauty. But she had no vision of herself, for her vision had been taken from her, and she had no confidence. In the quizzical stare of Adam Berendt's single sighted eye she began to tremble.

If he sent her away! "I'm so deeply unhappy, Adam," she whispered. Gently Adam took her hands in his. Smiled at her, but in silence. Nudging against Camille's legs were two dogs, the older a yellow Labrador called Butterscotch, the younger a mongrel husky-shepherd called Apollo who quivered and barked excitedly, forbidden by his master to leap up and lick Camille's face. This dog, new to Adam's life, was less than a year old yet nearly full grown; his fur sleek and healthy, a mixture of black, dark brown, and silver, with black ears and muzzle. Adam had found Apollo abandoned as a puppy on a state highway, and brought him home. Camille stared at the handsome dog so quickened with life he seemed about to spring at her, not viciously, not with bared teeth, but with an unnamable animal affection. Adam dragged him away, laughing in apology. "The power of Eros," he said. "No matter your 'species' isn't his."

"Oh, Adam. What a beautiful dog. 'Apollo'?"

"His full name is Apollodoros. You remember-Socrates' youthful loyal friend."

Camille, who had no idea what Adam was talking about, nodded in smiling agreement. Oh, yes!

Middle Age: A Romance

There followed then this haphazard scene, which Camille would recall in flashes and fragments for the remainder of her life. In this lighted space, waiting for me like a stage.

Adam banished the dogs to another part of the studio, and returned to Camille, whose eyes gleamed with tears of yearning, and of love. How many months, in secret she'd adored this man! Now she seized Adam's hands, and would have lifted them to her lips to kiss except Adam, surprised and embarrassed, drew away. "Adam, I l-love you," Camille said pleadingly. "You must know it." "Camille, my hands are dirty. They smell of mortality." Camille said, "I don't expect you to reciprocate my feeling, Adam. I know this is terribly intrusive. It's in terrible taste. I can't believe that I'm here-like this. But please accept my love, Adam. Will you?"

Across the room, the husky-shepherd Apollo whined as if in a parody of sexual yearning, shimmying his lean rear quarters and lowering his muzzle to the floor, barely restraining himself from leaping forward. Adam, rarely at a loss for words, seemed confused now, and chagrined; a deep mottled flush rose into his face. "Camille, dear! You know you love your husband.

You love your family, not me." Camille protested, "Yes, I love them, but- not as I love you." "But what is it you 'love' in me, Camille? Seeing that you hardly know me." "I-love everything about you, Adam. I think I did from the first-when we first met. Your face-" "My face?" Adam smiled incredulously. "Yes. I do love your face." "Not my blind eye, surely?"

Adam's right eye did make Camille uneasy, as it made others, even Lionel, uneasy; for it seemed neither a truly blind eye, nor was it a normal eye.

The eyeball appeared larger than the other, protruding beneath a grizzled, scarred eyebrow; it had the resiliency of glass, the iris unmoving. Sometimes there was a tawny-golden light reflected in it, uncanny. Adam's other eye, the left, was alert, alive, human; often bloodshot as if with strain. This eye winked, this eye communicated. It was gazing at Camille now with a look of bemused patience. "I don't think about your eye, Adam!" Camille said. "I love you." It was a time when, in this compulsively rehearsed romantic scene, Adam would have come to Camille, to touch her; to hold her, perhaps to kiss her, to comfort her at least. To make her feel less ridiculous, exposed. Instead, he crossed his burly arms and said, in the manner of a stonemason, or a carpenter, hired to work for the Hoffmanns, and wanting to be certain he knew what their expectations were, if only to respectfully challenge them, "But what exactly do you think you love? In me? A man you scarcely know? That's what we're trying to determine." Camille drew breath to speak, but stood confused, blushing. Adam

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had slipped into his Socratic mode of speech; almost, there was a sexual swagger in his manner at such times. "My face you 'love'-? But not its components, surely? My psoriatic skin? My bumpy forehead, my Cro-Magnon skull? My crooked teeth?" Camille said, hurt, "Adam, when I say I love you I mean I love you. Why are you being so cruel?" "I'm not being cruel, Camille. I'm only just trying to understand you." "When a woman loves a man, she loves-all that a man is. The physical part is-just a part."

"But a part of-what?" "All that you are." " 'All that I am'-how is that possible?" Adam's forehead was creased with genuine perplexity. "You hardly know me, Camille. You don't know my background, my history, my private self; you've seen me with others, as you might see a performer on a lighted stage. That isn't knowing me." Camille said stubbornly, "I know- someone. Who tells the truth. As so few people seem to." "But Camille, how would you know? You'd have to know the full truth about me, and about yourself, which surely you don't?" Camille said, "But I-I know you're the person you are. Your presence in the world, Adam, makes me feel less-" she paused, searching for the word, "-futile."

Futile! Yes, that was it. Adam Berendt's presence in the world made others feel less futile.

Camille's uncharacteristic eloquence seemed to take her by surprise.

But square-built Adam stood his ground, shaking his head, frowning. If only the man would let her touch him! wrap him in her arms! hide her heated face against his neck. "Camille, you're a lovely woman, and I feel very tenderly toward you. But I don't think you understand what the consequences could be, of your coming to me like this; coming to any man, like this. Your marriage which has been your life might be destroyed, and your life devastated. It isn't worth it, dear. Not with me, not with anyone."

Camille said, her voice rising, "I don't want 'anyone,' Adam, for God's sake! I want you. I love you."

"But what exactly does this 'love' attach to, Camille? What do you love? "

Camille stared incredulously as Adam began tugging at his clothing, baring parts of his anatomy as both dogs barked in excitement, leaping about. "My chest?"-Adam opened his shirt to reveal a broad, muscular torso, fatty at the waist; beneath an untidy pelt of graying hair, his skin was mottled, flaking and peeling, and looked scarred as if with burn tissue; his breast-nipples were tough little pink-rubbery knobs. "My belly?"-it was a flaccid, sagging belly, both unnaturally pale and red-mottled, blemished like his chest, and scarred with old burn tissue. "My cock?"-a thick, Middle Age: A Romance

stubby growth, like a thalidomide arm, purplish-red, moist at the tip, partly erect. Adam's pubic hair was copious, bristling, sprouting even on the insides of his thighs. Camille, blushing fiercely, turned away, hiding her eyes. Adam laughed. "I don't blame you, dear, it is ugly, isn't it? I've never been one of those men who imagines his cock is impressive."

Both dogs were nuzzling at Camille's ankles with their damp inquisitive noses. Camille didn't know whether to cry, or to laugh; didn't know whether she'd been deeply insulted, or treated with an original sort of consideration. The intense romantic scene she'd been fantasizing for many months had swerved out of her control like a careening car, and had become comedy. Adam was matter-of-factly shoving his penis back into his pants, zipping himself back up, adjusting his clothing as if nothing extraordinary had occurred, even as Camille retreated stiff-backed, with what dignity she yet retained. Adam called after her, "Camille? You aren't offended, I hope? But possibly enlightened?" He sounded like a mildly repentant, mostly amused host. Both Adam's dogs, the aging yellow Labrador Butterscotch and the lean young husky-shepherd Apollo, trotted protectively beside Camille as if charged by their master with escorting her through the drafty, cluttered house, and back to her car in the driveway.

Had she left the keys in the ignition? And the headlights on, in a thickening wintry dusk.

The river's surface was opaque, the hue of stainless steel.

Still, I love him.

Camille drove home, cautiously, like an impaired person. She was deeply mortified, stricken to the heart, and yet: the absurdity of the scene swept over her, and she began unexpectedly to laugh. She was still laughing, tears streaking her face, when she returned to the house on Old Mill Way, and entered the warmly lit country kitchen where the Jamaican woman who came twice a week to clean house was sitting in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. When she saw Camille, she said with a gap-toothed grin, "Mrs. Hoffmann! That sure must be some joke you been told, the way you laughin." Camille agreed, wiping at her eyes. "Felicia, it is."

Immediately she was elsewhere. The kitchen vanished, Camille was staggering into a monstrous vibrating machine like an upright lawn mower. Or was it a helicopter. Near to waking-to be rudely awakened, by Lionel's snoring-but clutching at the protection of the dream. Where was Adam? She knew now that something terrible and irrevocable had

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happened to him; but that he would not leave her, he was with her still. I must tell Lionel! I must confess. Bare my soul. My love for you, Adam. It isn't too late.

Camille. Of course it's too late.

No. I love you!

But now I'm gone. Even my ugly battered body, gone.

My love isn't gone.

You can't love a dead man, Camille. Love the living.

But, Adam- Love the living.

With a shudder Camille awoke. The green luminous numerals of her bedside clock read : .. Beside her, turned from her, Lionel was not only snoring fitfully but grinding his back teeth as if arguing. Heat lifted from his long lanky back and his mussed hair. Camille, shaken from her dreams, slipped from bed and into her bathroom, to wash her feverish face and to drink a glass of water. (She deliberated, but decided against, taking another of her coarse white pills.) Oh, what had she been dreaming?

What visions had Adam brought her, from the Land of the Dead? She contemplated in a mirror above her sink a puffy girl's face, and dilated eyes. She was thrilled, trembling. A decision had been made for her in her sleep: she would not tell Lionel of her love for Adam, as she'd intended.

Her hopeless (yet somehow still radiant) love for Adam Berendt.

Love the living, Camille, he'd instructed her. And so she would.

A L * his own secret agitated sleep. Tangled in sleep as in the bedclothes of the handsome four-poster bed, and in the enormous goose-feather pillows which (no matter how he shoved the damned things aside) were always pressing against his face, tickling his nose. Before coming to bed he'd had a small glass, or two, of bourbon.

Rinsed his mouth, gargled. Hadn't kissed Camille good night. (By the time he came to bed, Camille was peacefully sleeping.) In bed, in his usual posture, he turned from her, gazing out into the dark. What a nightmare of a day! What sorrow. My best friend. Dead of a heart attack. Cremated.

And how perverse it was that, drifting into sleep, Lionel was becoming sexually aroused: moaning softly to himself, grinding his back teeth. He seemed to be crouched at the mouth of a cave. Or maybe it was a cellar: one of those old, earthen cellars built into a hillside he'd seen on farms in Middle Age: A Romance

upstate New York, in the Adirondacks when he'd been a boy. He was crouched awkwardly on his haunches, his groin throbbing with blood. Inside the mysterious hole in the earth, which was approximately the width of an ordinary doorway, but not so high, what appeared to be a naked female figure lay curled. Her hair was long, matted, and greasy. Her body was naked, and smeared with dirt. Lionel squinted, seeing that the soles of her feet were filthy. She repelled him yet was sexually arousing, inviting. A sexual creature, purely female, still in the womb. He must give birth to her, if he dared. The earth is the womb. Daylight is birth. Adam Berendt was explaining. Lionel inched squatting closer to the mouth of the hole. God, how his penis bobbed taut with blood, painfully erect as a fist! He dared to lean inside the hole inhaling in a swoon the rich, rank smell of the female.

Her flesh-smell, the smell of her hair, the smell between her legs, the musky blood-smell that so powerfully repelled, and invited. The girl was awake, pretending to sleep? Moving her body provocatively in the dirt.

Her belly and thighs were a lurid milky-white, but smeared with dirt.

Girl's breasts, tight and hard, with eye-like nipples; tufts of armpit hair (what a shock to a man of Lionel's sensitivity, when first he'd glimpsed such tufts of wiry hair in female armpits, for Camille, of course, fastidiously shaved all unsightly hairs from her body, Camille would have been ashamed to acknowledge that such hairs grew on her body); toes that curled lasciviously in the dirt, like a monkey's. Bring her into the light, you must bring her into the light. You must give birth to her. Lionel understood that the purpose of the dream was to instruct him. He was a hypocrite, he'd been a hypocrite for a long time. Adam Berendt, who was his true brother, had brought him to the mouth of the cave, now it was Lionel's task alone to fulfill the command. He must crawl inside the cave, into that place of fetid darkness, and he must rouse the sleeping female, and bring her into the light. No shame. Never again. The broken halves of your life.

Lionel woke with a shudder, on the precarious brink of orgasm. For a long time, his heart pounding, skin oozing sweat, he dared not move.

By slow degrees the blood drained out of his groin.

He felt his brain quicken, his thoughts rushing clear. Beside him in blissful ignorance, turned on her side, breathing wetly and sleeping that sleep that seemed to Lionel placid, bovine, dreamless, Camille lay inert as one of the goose-feather pillows. Now and then she sighed. Poor Camille!

Lionel did love her. Always he would love her. Though knowing she'd been in love with their friend Adam, and Adam hadn't loved her in return.