^* As we go to press, we learn that Mr. Sacks is no longer claiming pseudonymity and that, indeed, he vigorously promotes his oeuvre at petersacks.com. Macte virtute!

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Kelly Hampton has long served as Praesidium’s youngest (and probably most youthful) advisor on the Board of Directors. She has done extensive graduate work in English but (like so many of us in that troubled discipline) has not found a comfortable niche in the post-literate, anti-literary world. She is currently working on a novel.

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Mary Grabar is a frequent contributor to Praesidium. She recently received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia (Athens), where she is a postdoctoral teaching fellow for the current academic year, specializing in American literature since 1865.

More and more, I find the labor of writing to be oppressive. I don’t mean putting one word behind another: that’s no labor at all. I do it daily, do it abundantly, and do it in complete confidence that nine out of every ten words will never be read. Reports and reviews, recommendations and evaluations, budget proposals and defenses of said proposals… these I grind out by the dozen, or perhaps the hundred. The very rare scholarly paper I have attempted on certain case studies is another matter, but it presents difficulties of a welcome sort: questions of accuracy, of correct deduction, of alertness to other research. I’m not really the clinical type, but I find that the remove of such discipline appeals to me. I should like very much to be able to observe life from within the armor of a white lab coat and the comfort of last-names-only.

But writing, real writing, is almost beyond me now. Thirty years ago, when I was a freshman in college, I would never have dreamed that I could regard my first love with such dread. Though my dad eventually "talked sense" into me, I never surrendered my passion for scribbling even as a science major. The student literary magazine seemed especially pleased to have something from someone down the icy corridors of dissection and autopsy, so I never wanted for laurels in those early years. The literary influence, besides, must have had a role in drawing (or "warping", as Dad would probably have said) my scientific interests toward social science, and eventually toward counseling. In fact, I find (for it is a discovery: writing continues to inform me about myself, even now) that I have passed most of my life believing in its coherence. My creative and my analytical halves harmoniously joined in a career, my career sufficiently profitable while also serving the betterment of mankind… I have come, in middle age, to view myself not just as a successful man, nor just as a man who didn’t have to sacrifice one talent to another—though that would already make me a wonder of the world—but as a good man. I not only like what I do for a living (or thought I liked it until now): I like myself for doing it.

So why am I no longer able to write? Why have even personal letters become impossible for me? The advent of e-mail supplied me with a generously floppy carpet under which to sweep all kinds of ugly confrontations. My correspondence became quick and shallow because it could be so, because it had to be so—"no time… just a note… fyi… syl." I kept palming off electronic rain-checks on my conscience, nipping my confessions in the bud with technological shorthand. And I had absolutely no idea that I was doing so. The miracle is that I know now.

So this is a confession, maybe. Agony—alack-a-day! If there’s one thing upon which I have grown surfeited over the past thirty years, it’s narcissism. People talking endlessly about themselves, perhaps in the illusion that they are confessing—or often beginning in sincere confession, but quickly snapping the thin thread connected to duty in the labyrinth of self-preoccupation. As I look back over what I’ve written so far, I count an "I" in almost every sentence. If I were a reader, I would be on the very edge of bailing out right now. Not another confession—not another indictment of society, of everyone else, disguised as a confession! Everyone accusing everyone else of ruining his life, her life… I stopped reading fiction a long time ago (just before I gave up serious writing) exactly because I got so sick of it all, all the baying at the moon. So why am I of all people now talking about myself so much?

The oddest thing of it is that I wanted to talk about her, she whom I have not yet managed to name. That isn’t a discovery whose gate my writing has just crashed: I knew all along that this was about Celine. The discovery is that I cannot simply begin writing about her as though I were composing a report—that I can only reach her by talking about myself. I should have expected that, no doubt, since Celine is laced into the very core of my being. Maybe Celine is the reason I gave up writing—because the core of my being has become divided against itself.

But no, people with divided hearts are precisely those who write the most, and the best. Celine isn’t my writer’s block. It’s you, my readership—or, I should say, those of you who are not reading this and who, like me, have given up reading anything. You won’t understand. What’s the point of setting this down for you? You might understand… but you won’t try, because you’ve slid too far down the slope. So have I. You don’t have the wits or the patience to listen, and I don’t have the wits or the patience to tell the story. Good God, how we’ve fallen! If we weren’t already so begrimed with an infernal mud of hell’s lower circles, I could throw my arms about you and have a good cry (at which point you would sock me in the eye, and then we would have an uproarious brawl straight out of Dante).

So I will keep my hands to myself, rest assured. Only allow me to prepare you for some of the quaint trappings which you will not understand, or will not have the patience to understand. People used to fall in love. They were falling in love even as late as thirty years ago, though by then they were already getting the hang of falling around or through or just shy of love. They were already starting to speak of attachments as "relationships", using that clinical dispassion which I personally admire for its objectivity only in circumstances where one is an observer. I have never suffered from any desire to be a distant observer of my own emotional involvement, and I certainly have never been able to keep such distance at the very climax of my longing. But all around me, thirty years ago, the people who attended high school and then college with me were beginning to make a great deal of noise about their "wants" and "needs" without registering any interest in commitment. In my view, it was my generation’s least attractive characteristic: we lived, breathed, sang, and sighed love, but we were always very clear about not being tied down. Our children now deplore our fickle hearts, we are told—the children of our divorces, rebellions, and experiments; but they are our children, and I frankly see much of our worst side in them. They have a right, maybe, to know nothing of love and to have no patience with love. If there is bitterness in the evolution of our "relationship" into their "hook-up", they have a right, I’m sure, to that bitterness—to the quick, the coarse, the childish, and the cynical. I just want to warn them away from my story. They won’t understand it, because they won’t understand love. Their parents are just beginning to understand it in many cases, and some of those parents I would like to slap in the face. And yet, those same parents, maybe, will sit still for my story. My classmates, my brothers and sisters—my hypocrites lecteurs—you destroyed Celine, some of you, and Celine’s destruction has destroyed the best part of me. For that I hate you, I hate us all; but I expect, at least, that you can understand my feelings and will not be apt to "click" me off for being "boring".

Another thing. People still paid attention to detail thirty years ago. They were beginning to ignore it, and they would make rapid progress in that direction until, today, their children are wholly incapable of perceiving anything outside the paradigm of movie formulas, TV clichés, rock-star poses under the strobes, and a menu of computer icons. My classmates were already starting to dress the same, wear their hair the same, listen to the same music, and always—always—mouth the same lines about being independent. But for a little while in my youth, it still mattered how you said "hello" and "goodnight" on a date. I suppose it matters now, too. What I mean is that, back then, your degree of deviation from the mass-produced paradigm was rich in nuance and was read minutely for important hints. A stammer, a smile, a hanging head… none of that matters with our children today, it seems to me, except as an indication of failure to enact the paradigm. I have witnessed young people of the present eructate a "Hey, dude!" at peers of either sex in an oily, gravelly tone which sullies every notion I have of childhood or innocence or decency, and receive for these Uriah Heap-like contortions immediate entry into the clique. Willing members of such cliques, if they could possibly have worked this far into my story, should exit now. My images are "tainted" by unwrinkled blushes and candid glints of the eye whose mere memory weighs upon my heart and has probably—I wouldn’t be surprised—cheated its lifetime of a few thousand beats. People to whom that sort of thing ranks no higher than "boring" should not waste their time on these pages.

Finally, there’s the matter of sex—the sex act itself. Today, nobody can even define such a thing. Little girls with crosses around their necks are convinced of their virginity because they only bestow fellatious intercourse on their pimply beaux. More conservative types who insist on having their pleasure the old-fashioned way come armed with condoms, which are now a household word (and, in some households, as available to passing teenaged fingers as salt and pepper shakers). Those who have grown crazed after pleasure, on the other hand, as an alcoholic is crazed for moonshine, court death and release from their mania in the same motion, copulating in all postures with both sexes—perhaps with several species. Somewhere amid this chaos, maybe among the last group but sociopathically bereft of the skills necessary to capture prey alive, sit millions and millions of frustrated men before "live performances" of entrepreneurial females on the Internet. Disease, lunacy, and murder raft through the whole brew, competing for castaways to haul away to hell.

Words begin to fail me again. How could any young survivor of this Lepanto ever imagine a world (and yet it existed only a few decades ago!) where a single act of consummation was a major stake in the great game? The risk which loomed over everyone’s head was also the prize: an emotional attachment more forceful than anything else on earth. Of course, there was the risk of pregnancy, as well—the risk of social ostracism for young females, the risk of premature adult commitments for young males. The fear of sex was really a fear of society, or of society’s begrudging of necessary supports. The two people involved knew (or thought they knew) how they felt, and lying together in rapturous embrace was the climax of that feeling which kept intruding its images upon every touch. But how would they live after, she rejected by her family and he unemployed? All the artificial pressure and poignancy of melodrama imbued these situations as they repeated themselves dozens of times in every graduating high school class. There were no death’s heads dancing in the frolic around the Maypole, or not until Roe v. Wade let in the first band of those uninvited revelers. How insipid it all seems now—now that the polarities are life and death, aversion and perversion, the girl’s constant risk of rape and the boy’s of criminal prosecution, the two faces of Jekyll and Hyde versus the castrated half-body of a Heaven’s Gate convert. But does this mean that our children have proceeded farther into something "real"? Doesn’t it mean, rather, that they have lost touch with reality? Professionally speaking, I have often been moved throughout my career to make the observation that, from a certain point of view, freedom leads to insanity.

Celine. Earlier generations of men (and of women, even more) would have described—rather crudely and quite heartlessly—someone who had been through what she had as "damaged goods". Today’s generation would find her anguish entirely ridiculous. Our children find nothing hard to comprehend about a person eating spiders or feces on television for money: they call the subject’s aversion "fear", having no concept of disgust or disdain within their moral ken. The idea that a woman in her mid-twenties might actually "crack up" because one man has enjoyed her body and then disposed of it in one brief "relationship", her first and only "relationship", would never pass review for a television script. Far too improbable. Just doesn’t happen. There, you see? There’s the source of my writer’s block. Here I sit, trying to write about the most important encounter of my life—about the great love of my life (a flattering cliché I flippantly bestowed above upon writing, but it belongs to Celine)—and the whole thing can never have happened. Too improbable. No movies or TV shows or lives of the rich and famous to confirm the precedent. It is not retrieving stardust from the past’s ruin, but trying to admire the past in the present’s sulfurous stench, which blunts my efforts.

I was home from graduate school for the Christmas holidays. I have to convey that part of the setting, because, for all I know, it had a major impact on the most extraordinary day I have ever lived. The best way I can portray my state of mind is to say that I was nervous but confident. A year of teaching high school after my first degree had fully convinced me that I was on the wrong track: now I was enrolled in a program which would allow me, I thought, to fulfill my destiny. That’s not too strong a word, for I was twenty-three, and I believed in destiny. I imagined that I had discovered a special mission to bridge past and present. In a combination of arrogance and devotion such as only young people can generate, I fancied that the problems of contemporary life lay in the too hasty rejection of ancient wisdom. I wanted to revive the classic stories of the world now that the world seemed to have forgotten them (an enthusiasm which hadn’t gotten me very far with ninth-graders). I was going to revolutionize clinical therapy, specifically, by using great literature as its basis; and I was going to dedicate my Master’s thesis, instrumentally, to the neo-Jungian idea that recurrent literary sequences and myths flesh out the essential neuroses to which the human spirit is most prone. I expected, grandly and obtusely, to make a big splash. I was enamored of structuralism at a time when it was passing quickly out of style, I mistook the academy’s accelerating surrender of all standards for tolerance of new approaches, and I misread the demoralization going on around me as a post-Vietnam daze which was bound to wear off as cooler heads prevailed. I was twenty-three, and I had my whole life ahead of me. How could I help but be optimistic?

The Vietnam fiasco itself had completely ended a few years earlier. I remember that my birthday had come up Number One in the lottery the year before I was eligible for the draft. The following year, I was given a Selective Service number in the low three-hundreds. That, too, probably fueled my tendency to confidence: I had dodged the bullet which had claimed a few of my friends, and also my older brother. (I speak figuratively: Damon spent most of his stint shuffling papers, and only one of my acquaintances ended up dead in a rice paddy—apparently from friendly fire.) Though Dad was gung-ho on supporting our country and had himself brought back a Bronze Star from the South Pacific, there was undiscussed agreement among our clan that this action was a big mess. Random sniping, hikes through mine fields, tracking the enemy into sectors where only women and children were visible, living with leeches and fever, surrounded by drugs and illicit diversions in a stationary wait for the next round of pandemonium… no, I won’t deny that I was happy to have been spared all that. I will say, even, that my having avoided the war’s slippery vortex made me believe more in destiny than ever. And now my brother was back safe and newly married, and everyone around me was still spinning in a childish intoxication, listening to childish music and wearing childish clothes—all a vast cultural reaction, I theorized smugly, to years of fatally misplaced gravity. Any day now, a small élite of intelligently and correctly grave men was going to step forth from the bell-bottomed fiesta and lead civilization into the twenty-first century. In some very vague way, I felt in my bones that I was going to be among those men, if only as a lieutenant. For I was twenty-three.

Damon’s marriage had also bequeathed to me, for the first time in family history, the Number One Son spot around the holiday hearth. I had not really been old enough to enjoy that position the one Christmas when he had been away in the service; and Christmas a year ago, he and his new bride had hogged the spotlight at our home. Now Patty was pregnant, and the two had agreed to lavish their holiday presence upon her parents. That left me king of our domestic mountain, and this time I was prepared to relish my office. With a bachelor’s degree and a year of "real life" employment under my belt (or wearing me under its treads, more exactly—but they didn’t know the difference), I wielded an august authority over my college-freshman brother and high school-junior sister. I felt old, in that delightfully self-satisfied (and rather inane) way that only the young can feel old. Even Dad, I sensed, was somewhat out of the "real world" loop into which I had been admitted. For I had already begun to realize (how could I have failed to realize instantly?) that grad school was no open exchange of brilliant ideas, but a kind of intellectual shake-down from which only the fully cooperative—the spiritually subservient, the creatively null—would be allowed to emerge unmolested. I brought home invisible wounds from a battlefield which people like Dad could not begin to conceive of. He thought I was doing science, after all, and he also had a general respect for higher education (part of his military background, perhaps—he always believed that hierarchical systems worked). I don’t know what it would have done to him to learn how squalid were the games played in such respected places, or if he could have learned by any means at my disposal. After a couple of lackluster attempts at serious conversation on the subject, I gave up. It made my wounds hurt a little more, for I had never before been so completely cut off from Dad’s advice, from the calm sanity of his mind; but in compensation, as I have said, it made me feel more mature. In a way, Damon had probably brought home less from Vietnam that Dad could not assess at its proper value than what I brought home from my graduate program. That put me in a pretty special place, for no one in our household had ever explored terrain unknown to Dad.

When he died a couple of years later, claimed in his sleep by a heart attack whose discomforts he must have decided to tough out rather than complain about, I understood what a pompous young ass I had been that Christmas. How could I ever have imagined that I was the ascending head of the household, the resident Master of the Real World! Our family members flew apart like the cars of some overheated carousel whose center has finally snapped. My mother lived in a mild sort of stupor for the rest of her life, and we four children settled into unconnected cracks and fissures separated by hundreds of miles. It was Dad who had always held us together, even though he was the last to know when anyone arrived for a visit, the last to give you a grudging pat on the shoulder out in his workshop after everyone else had hugged and laughed and flailed about in removed coats and transported baggage. He was always at the control center. None of us has proved remotely his equal, even in our own growing families. How could I have worn such a big head on my shoulders that Christmas? Put it down to twenty-three.

One more thing. I don’t know how to write this in a few words, but probably no young man could ever be more ready to fall under Celine’s spell than I was then. My experience of women was not exactly wide and varied. A couple of my little sister’s friends had fawned on me constantly as I loafed about the house during my high school years—which kept me, I suppose, from ever being unduly afflicted with low self-esteem in that area. On the other hand, the girls I actually went out with were few. On most of the many festive occasions of those years, I appeared publicly in the company of Beverly Brady, largely because my mother was convinced that she was a thoroughly "nice" girl. The Homeric phrase "cow-eyed Hera" has always evoked memories of Beverly in me—and not, I am afraid, just because of her dark, limpid eyes. What I originally took for shyness in Beverly was more likely a deep temperamental passivity. There were times in my senior year when I desperately longed to ask out someone else, but by then Beverly and I were taken so much for granted that I hadn’t the heart to destroy her idyll. I waited patiently, instead, for college, which brought new opportunity with a vengeance. There I set my sights so high that I encountered nothing but rejection—or perhaps Beverly had so swollen me with false confidence that I had never developed the necessary seductive powers for big-game hunting. I was so humbled by these experiences that I actually sought Beverly out over a summer break. One of her close friends would only tell me (with an invincibly stupid laugh) that she had become "really wild" at college. Another was more explicit, if hardly what I could call helpful. Beverly, it seemed, had wandered so far "out of her shell" at college that she passed for promiscuous even in a dormitory of coeds eager to earn their stripes of feminist liberation. She was currently enrolled in a drug rehab program (and, I later figured out, bringing an unwanted pregnancy to fruition). I never did manage to see her face to face. The odd thing is that the compassion I felt for her then was by far the strongest draw she had ever exerted upon my emotions. I literally wept for her.

The news of Beverly’s running amuck festered deeply and, in some way which I can’t entirely explain, left me ice-cold at the center—stunned numb, perhaps scared stiff. Coupled with my own failures at wooing the most splendid figures on campus, it turned my nose back into my studies for the rest of my undergraduate years. Afterward, during my ill-conceived venture into teaching, I had neither the time nor the energy to devote to girls and dating. Not that I had any intention of remaining a bachelor for the rest of my life: that, indeed, was one of my concerns about teaching. I didn’t see how I could keep at it and also ever have a life of my own. Then came grad school. For the first time in my mortal existence, I was both far away from anyone who might have tattled on me for misbehaving and also surrounded by young women who wanted very much to misbehave. (This was less true of my undergraduate years, not only because I just didn’t crave to see "the far side" with the hunger characteristic of my peers, but also because I boarded with my grandmother and attended several classes with a first cousin.)

Here I arrive at the very heart of my… oddity. My susceptibility to Celine, perhaps. I am no plaster saint, and though we were all raised in the Church, I heard plenty of criticism of the clergy at home for its involvement in political issues (more accurately, for its choosing what seemed to my dad the wrong political side). So I had not abstained from sex throughout my young life in devotion to holy principles. I wish I could say that I had—but it was really more of an accident. However I happened to reach the ripe old age of twenty-three intact in this peculiar manner, I was made aware in grad school as never before that "adventures" were constantly sitting in the chair beside mine, just waiting for a nod or a smile. Maybe if these girls with an axe to grind had been prettier, or had allowed themselves to look pretty… but no, besides being "sexist" (I plead guilty, if it is sexist to be repelled by a belligerent mug), that explanation only gets at minor causes. The main reason was power. Power: a noun which these harridans used in every other sentence. And they were right about power—that was the point. If they had harvested me—if I had allowed myself to be harvested by their club-and-cave technique—I would have been just one more male scalp on their belt, while they, in turn, would have deprived me of something very precious, a kind of integrity upon which I had blundered by the grace of God and the luck of the Irish. If I had not held out this long, I would not have held out now; but having held out this long, I could not see the need to grope after such puny, temporary favors. And yes, the un-prettiness of these young women was part of the puniness of their favors—not because I was such a young sexist pig, but because they were offering their favors on that level. Just sex: just a night of wine, weed, and rumpling the mattress. I would sooner have sought out a dazzling professional than I would have given away first bragging rights to such as these. But I figured that I could do better than both, with a little endurance. I’m sure some of them sensed the specific nature of this reserve about me (there were many student-lounge conversations about bourgeois hang-ups which got quite personal—these were some of the deepest secret wounds I was carrying about that Christmas). The general resentment of my moral reserve, of my "mystification" before sex—of my power to hold out, to hold on—among our tight clique of graduate students made me more determined than ever to hold aloof. I occupied the position of greater strength, and I enjoyed the feel of that strength. I possessed the power to forge an ultimate union with a woman stronger than any that my rude critics could ever forge with a man, and they knew it, and they hated me for it. And they knew that my choice would not be one of them. Hippolytus and Phaedra, with the number of Phaedras multiplied by ten.

But whom, then, would I choose? Beverly was out of the question now… and would there ever be another Beverly at this late date? After all, I was getting old: I was twenty-three.

The first words Celine ever said to me are burned into my brain—or, rather, they forever float about behind every thought I have had since, the echo of a waterfall or the sigh of a breeze which has grown inaudible through familiarity. I was at the mall looking for last-minute Christmas gifts. I was alone, my windbreaker zipped about my neck, an important man with bills in his wallet and a bank account. I can see myself as I was, because I literally saw my own figure just before Celine appeared. Much of the old mall (which was all new back then) opened upon a pleasant network of outdoor colonnades and landscaped promenades especially popular in the summer, but also traveled on mild winter days like this one; so my pause before a jeweler’s display window had brought me up before my mirror image, dark but clear against the parking lot’s shimmering backdrop. In that instant, my eyes had strayed from a bracelet I was considering for my sister to the silent face that considered. It was reserved but not intimidating, I thought, intelligent but good-humored, full enough to smile expressively but muscled enough to set its jaw firmly. Was it handsome—was I handsome? In two seconds, I must have grazed many of the thoughts which I have lavished the last several pages on. A jeweler’s store… why wasn’t I standing before this window in search of something special for my girl friend? Why didn’t I have a girl friend? A man with my promise, with my command of life… it wasn’t fair that I should be alone like this.

"How long are you going to pretend that you don’t recognize me?"

The sidewalk was not crowded in that quarter, and the voice was so soft, so near, that it could only have been addressing me. I looked up in a combination of startled embarrassment (for we are not supposed to study our faces publicly, are we?) and absolute certainty that a mere pivot of the neck would produce an apology—for nobody with a voice like that knew me well enough to speak with such intimacy.

This is where the formula calls for me to write that I was thunderstruck by the most beautiful woman I had ever… etc., etc. In the first place, Celine was not what I would call beautiful. She was a sprite, a nymph: she could easily have played one of those Shakespearean girls who masquerades as a young page (and who were played in Shakespeare’s time, of course, by boys). She was cute beyond cute, but she was too energetic—too boyishly agile and restless—for the stateliness of a classic beauty. Yet I have to confess, at the risk of cliché, that I was thunderstruck. The fair blond races cannot imagine what such eyes as hers, pale green and brilliant, do to gloomy tribesmen like me. Everyone in my immediate family is brown-eyed. To look into such eyes for me, then, has something of an encounter with a photographic negative or with anti-matter. For a moment, it is completely arresting, completely disorienting. After that, for me, it partakes of a religious vision. Two broad pupils staring at me through the crystalline empyrean, pure light descending upon my soiled clay… it was irrelevant that these particular pupils stood the better part of a foot beneath mine. The transparent splendor in which they swam marked them as heavenly bodies, while in my mind lingered the dusky afterglow of my own image in the window.

Over the years, I have tried to measure how long in real time we must have stared at each other—tried until my calculations were hopelessly garbled by previous attempts at calculation. One thing’s for sure: that gilded green gaze never betrayed a hint of having mistaken its object. My best guess is that I awaited the inevitable apology—and then remained stupified that no such apology came—for the better part of a real-life minute. We use the word "minute" very carelessly. Sit before an old-fashioned clock and watch the minute hand sweep out thirty seconds… well, it was close to that much, anyway. Many people who’ve been married for forty years have never looked into their partner’s eyes silently for so long. Even before the conversation that followed, I had absolutely no doubt that this lovely elf of Winter Wonderland believed we knew each other very well. A sight like that freezes all the clichés and formal platitudes which spring to the tongue. (Besides, I am morbidly sensitive to clichés, as I may already have indicated: unlike today’s kids, I would have run the other way if I saw one coming, even at twenty-three.) How many responses must have died on my parted lips in those thirty seconds? "I’m sorry, you’ve made a mistake," would have expired at once. "I assure you, madame, I would have remembered"… anything in that form, you know, I would never have dared whatever my degree of confidence. But these eyes were so certain that they shook me to the core. I am positive that at least a physical shiver must have passed down my spine. And since an integral part of the "showdown" (as I must have sensed, despite my youth) was for her not to help me out by uttering another syllable—was for me to be kept on the "spot" where she imagined she had me—I could expect no way out of this terrifying rapture which didn’t arise from my own throat.

"You know," I finally laughed (though I doubt that the smile carried any sound), "my cousin did that to me in my last year of college. I mean, she mistook me for someone else. My own first cousin! She was absolutely positive that she’d seen me the night before at some wild party where her date took her—and she kept insisting on it in front of my grandmother, to make matters worse. It’s the eyes, I think. I mean, I’ve got unusually dark eyes—"

"Yes, you do."

"—and I… what was I saying?"

"That you have dark eyes."

"You have very… very green eyes. I’ve never seen… well, anyway. Yes. People with unusually dark eyes are typed in our culture. They all look the same—we all look the same. To people with… to fairer people, you know. I mean, more Nordic people. The people of the midnight sun. My cousin comes from the side of the family that has blue eyes occasionally. Through intermarriage."

"With people of the sun."

"Yes."

"Who visited your island on a dragon?"

"Something like that. I remember… you know, there’s this photo of me in the high school yearbook. I’m sitting behind this girl who’s reading, and I’m leaning forward in my desk for some reason. The caption reads, ‘Anthony Toole contemplates violence.’ That bothered me for years. And what made it worse was that I really did look like a heavy about to strangle the girl. All because of my eyes—because the angle of the camera threw their shadow over my face. Anyway… I guess that’s why I get mistaken."

My mysterious sprite bit her lower lip. Perhaps it was then that I consciously perceived, for the first time, how the hair-fine lines radiating outward from the exact center of her lips had reinforced the sense of beams humidly rising, not just from her gaze, but from her whole face. The disruption of that perfect center, especially where it creased the bottom lip more heavily in two, was sure to capture attention. (At least, it always captured mine.)

"So you don’t go by Richard any more…."

These words were said with such a fading tone of sadness—and they so clearly implied that the celestial stranger didn’t buy a word I’d said—that I must have gaped for another several seconds. Of course, her stubbornness took me completely by surprise. How could it not have? We were now crossing the border into something very unorthodox, she and I. Something not yet unhealthy, not quite unhealthy—but far, far beyond the bounds of any polite script. I had not yet recovered from meeting this vision on a sunbeam, and I was supposed to confess some degree of intimacy with her which, perhaps, was more than I had known with Beverly Brady in high school. I certainly sensed that it was more. I felt like one of those fabulous travelers, maybe an Arthurian knight out of Mallory, who enters a strange castle and finds a beautiful queen welcoming him home. What man living would have had the strength not to sit in the prepared chair before the prepared feast?

"My middle name is Richard," I volunteered at last.

"Your middle name." She brightened a little—just enough to make her seem even sadder. Surely she must have blinked before then—but that was the first time I noticed her blinking; and the smile which wryly upset her perfectly centered lips was as painfully picturesque as a cloud draped over the setting sun. "I suppose I’ll have to make do with that." And she looked back up at me keenly. "As a concession."

For the first of several dozen times that afternoon, I reflected that I had to choose between convincing this Ariel of unknown name that I was not her estranged beau—thereby losing her forever, quite possibly—and allowing her to believe that I was someone precious to her who had proved disappointing, and must still prove so in acting out a cruel forgetfulness (how could I play it otherwise?). I very nearly drew out my wallet then and there with the intent of showing her my driver’s license… but I was frightened at the thought of chasing her off. Later. Maybe an hour or two later, maybe a day or two. I would know when… but not now.

We had started to drift down the sidewalk together, she apparently thinking that we had picked up where we left off some weeks or months or years ago, I without a thought in my soul’s coolest recesses of prying myself away from her. The great luxury of being admitted to instant intimacy in this way was that I didn’t have to strain for small talk. We seemed to have reached the point (or she and "Richard", whose existence I already blessed and cursed) where complete silence was acceptable. In fact, the more steps we took without a word, the more genuine our intimacy became. I could feel it growing in dense, warm folds about us. Her shoulder and mine were virtually rubbing when she happened to turn up her impish nose (I counted three freckles) and delicate chin at my lapel.

‘What were you doing back there, pricing a ring for your latest conquest?"

I stopped on the spot. That bracelet had been ideal for Meg, and Christmas was just four days away. At twenty-three, neglecting to buy your little sister a suitably gaudy present is a direct blow against reality’s foundations, especially if you have just anointed yourself the clan’s high priest of reality.

"I… will you come back with me?" I babbled.

I could tell that she was again utterly nonplussed. For all my resolution to walk on eggshells, I was turning over carts left and right. The tiny cleft bisecting her lower lip was already beginning to fascinate me as much as her green eyes: now it seemed to grow rounder, as if she were going to whistle.

"It’s for my sister," I continued, miring myself still more deeply in un-Richard-like detail, no doubt, before I could rein in my tongue. It was too late now. She would either have to think me the most inept liar in the world (which wouldn’t be all bad) or an outright lunatic (which might even be better).

That was probably the very matter she was trying to settle in her mind. Her pupils widened in their Venusian orbs, the cleavage in her lips spread outward to became a fissure, and her thin golden brows twisted acutely. All I can say is that the fear of what might be bubbling up behind these features I already wanted to see every day of my life must have made a lion of a mouse. I grabbed her slender wrist with as much playfulness as I could inject into the act (keeping my touch carefully to the cuff of her shirt) and sped her back toward the shop. Later I credited myself with having felt instinctively that she didn’t really want to be deprived of her recovered Richard—that a decisive gesture of tenderness was sure to trump material fact and logic. Though I felt her fingertips tremble and recoil the one time they grazed the back of my knuckles, I also noticed that she quickly fell into step, her heels tapping smartly over the concrete beside my silent sneakers.

We passed a nice little quarter-hour in the shop. I latched onto the bracelet without any show or discussion, then floated along beside her as she examined the merchandise no less eagerly than a child would have a candy store’s. I was beginning to notice, having now memorized every curve and color of Celine’s face and every scent in her hair, the fine points of her general appearance. She plainly had an artist’s eye for details in her dress, and willingly occupied herself with them. Her shirt was a kind of dull golden, her slacks dark green, and the sweater-vest bridging the two a gentle beige with Indian designs running across it in brick-red and forest green. The weather, though mild for the season, was perhaps too brisk for mere shirt sleeves. No doubt, she wore the sleeveless sweater at some small sacrifice because it snugged so faithfully about her trim midriff and flowed out along her compact but angular bust. She was a perfection of balance. The flared cuffs so popular back then (except with me alone, apparently, among the twenty-somethings) seemed to emphasize that she could cut a cartwheel with ease at any moment. Of course, she must have known well that shades of red and orange—and green, naturally—were her colors, though she had the taste never to choose loud ones. Her short yet richly bodied hair (which obediently lifted its touch from her temples but converged and amassed thickly around the neck) was a deep blonde color, almost russet. Women always tell me that tint is called a strawberry blonde; and when they tell me so, I can usually surprise a note of envy in their voices.

Somehow—one more thunderclap, I suppose, in this afternoon when miracle rained upon miracle—the return to the jeweler’s had been just the thing to cure our sudden intimacy of its sadness. Surely, I reflected, this sublimely mistaken girl couldn’t believe that I was buying trinkets for other conquests when I had dragged her back to observe my purchase. However jocular her remark may have been, I felt that she was relieved to be here beside me. She nudged me more than once to look at a piece, more than once held something to her neck or finger in an earnest "What do you think?" pose. The earnestness impressed me. There was coquetry, all right, in her doings; but I am convinced that it was mostly unconscious, because there was far more of the studious artist mixing designs and matching effects. I can vouch that she had no inkling of my asking the saleslady to slip a gold Celtic cross with a tiny emerald at its center out of the casement. At the time, she was kneeling down before an array of wristwatches, her back completely turned.

Meg’s bracelet was already a bit steep for my budget. I had rather finely calculated how much I needed to register next semester, buy books, and pay January’s rent. Buying the gold cross with the emerald, besides being an act of gross presumption and even sheer folly, was the sort of fiscal irresponsibility I have never committed before or since. It didn’t clean out my account, but it assumed, at the very least, that the King of the Real World would be larded with a rich haul of Christmas leftovers to cart back to grad school, or that he could otherwise make do on bread and water. How could I have done it, I of all people—the rationalist, the reserved skeptic? I did it because gold and emerald were her colors. I did it because, at the time, I could not not have done it. I did it, if you want a specific motivation, because the saleslady seemed so utterly convinced that we were a pair, Celine and I. As she removed things for us and followed us about the shop with her eyes, I surprised her a couple of times in a smile—not a suspicious scowl, but a smile. Imagine! That smile was no sales tactic, for I had surprised it. Rather, it was objective verification of everything I felt in my heart: that this was my girl, this girl whose name I did not yet know and who knew me by another’s name.

At least I had the sense not to present the necklace to her in the shop and risk public humiliation. But no, what I really did was to preserve my salesclerk-witness’s false "objectivity" by stealing the moment of truth away from her. The man that I am now cringes to remember that moment. I have counseled professionally many a stalker who regaled his idol with expensive gifts as innocently, and as clumsily, as I did then. No doubt, it worked in my favor that the necklace wasn’t quite as extravagant as I boyishly thought it to be, meant it to be: it seemed so to my budget, but Celine, who lived and breathed such things, must have known that this was no mink coat. Still, the look she gave me when I detained her before a gurgling fountain, drew the small case from my sack, and opened it against her collar was even more perplexed than that which had preceded our visit to the shop. In it were mingled fear and—most mortifying of all—anger. The fountain’s purling chatter helped me to conceal the nullity of my stammers, but she must have discovered in my eyes that I had no very good explanation. Only the obvious one… but that, you see, was the problem. You boy of twenty-three, couldn’t you have foreseen that that would be the problem? An ex-lover doesn’t suddenly fall head-over-heels in love. I had betrayed the part which I had half-agreed to play. My love wasn’t simply too much too soon by any normal standard, it was too much too late by the standard of this farce which I had consented to. I had placed her in the position of having to admit either that I was another, completely different Richard or that the old Richard was up to some kind of incredibly, indecipherably subtle mockery.

I would write out some of our verbal exchange here as I have elsewhere, for I recall almost every word which passed between us that day—but there was scarcely any exchange at all. "This is too much," or, "How could you?" or, "It’s lovely"… none of that conveys what nervous looks fluttered back and forth, avoiding each other yet constantly crossing each other. I was never closer to losing Celine that first day, before I even knew her name, than when I presented her with that beautiful, baleful necklace. She slipped it back into the case, which she kept tightly clasped in her right hand, a thing both precious and dangerous.

But she could not leave me then, after all—not without flinging the necklace in my face; and she could not fling the necklace in my face without being sure that I knew why she was doing so. By accepting it, she accepted the possibility that I might really be enthralled to her; and by accepting that possibility, she was accepting a new admirer, and hence accepting more time and more intimacy. Yet the reason she would most have wanted to run away, even more than if I were the old Richard playing a cruel prank, would be if I were a complete stranger. It was an impossible predicament for her. I realized it at the time, belatedly. My clumsiness had brought the thumbscrews to their tightest twist. The least I could do now was just to keep quiet: to climb back up on the eggshells and stay there.

Gradually, the activity around us restored a certain equilibrium between us. We walked among the shops and stores and displays, diverted almost as much by other shoppers (many of whom were about our age, but none of whom seemed as sensible as we) as by the wreathes and strings of lights and store-front Santas. Whether we slipped indoors to follow a corridor among a cluster of shops or escaped those overheated spaces to enjoy the brisk afternoon again, Christmas carols were piped steadily about us. The highly staged scenes before which we lingered—a toy train running through cotton snow, a mannequin in ermine poised like Miss Eskimo after her Jell-O diet, an armada of color televisions running the same sharp picture without antennas—always supplied matter for a few words (mercifully, for our silences had grown hazardous since the necklace). As I recall, our comments were often salted with a mild irony (the Miss Eskimo crack was my original) or barbed with genuine astuteness (she volunteered how much worse the TV shows were getting as the pictures improved). By tacit consent, neither of us wandered into family matters, jobs, friends, or anything remotely personal, let alone our own troubled history which—I knew, and she must have suspected now—had never existed.

Things loosened up over lunch. As we sauntered past a restaurant, I was assailed by the scent of grilled hamburgers and suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten since early that morning. It was now after two-thirty! My visionary companion did not decline to break bread with me, though she ended up doing little more than foraging among the contents of a rather large salad. Upon being given the option by the waiter, I had requested that we be seated on the "patio". Here we were suffused in sunlight yet happily concealed from any breeze. Celine’s shirt sleeves were no longer a worry to me (yes, I had worried about her taking a chill before: I had twice offered her my jacket). Thanks to the odd hour, we had only a handful of diners to guard our comments from, if the inspiration and courage should overtake either of us to be forthright. But for the opening minutes, at least, we drank hot tea and admired each other a little groggily. I complimented her sweater, and she said I looked dashing in my Navy blue turtleneck—"like James Bond," she cajoled with her wry smile. "Or better yet, Sean Connery."

If I should die and go to heaven, I have no fonder hope than that God will let me resume that off-hour lunch with my young Celine in my own young pelt between performances of high praise. If I should die and go to hell, I can think of no more exquisite torture than being forced to view that scene forever from some gutter-level grate as the real Richard plays my role. For I was happier in those moments than I had ever been before, or have been since or shall ever be; yet the lazy sunlight was not so purgative that it entirely managed to dissolve the shade of the other man. How could it have done? He flitted between us like a gossamer thread every time one of us spoke to the other, warping all our words in their invisible passage through him. As I listened to Celine chat more and more freely about her work, about her intimate likes and hopes, I understood (since her little revelations were tailored to his level of knowledge) that this captivating young woman had given her heart away to a man who had learned very little, after all, about that heart—who had exploited its generosity without pausing over its secrets. And I both rejoiced and feared. I was exhilarated that I had already come to know her soul so much more privately than he had; yet I grasped that, by default, the nature of her profound involvement with him could only have been of one kind, of the remaining kind. Of my ability to compete with such memories, I was agonizingly uncertain.

I have lived half a century without knowing a man who desired to strangle another with his bare hands when he could neither give this person’s full name nor describe the first detail of his appearance. Only I have been that man, and I began to be him on that day.

Someone named Mona kept coming up in Celine’s remarks. (Was she now talking about herself so much to avoid discovering more contradictions in her false Richard?) At first I took Mona for a sister, then a best friend: of course, I didn’t ask for clarification, but just followed it all knowingly over my hamburger. Finally I decided that Mona was a kind of employer-cum-mentor. Mona had brought new commissions for her to work on when she was recuperating, and Mona had granted her an extended leave of absence while she resumed her interrupted bachelor’s degree work. I was struck by two things along this conversational corridor: that she wanted to lay before my eyes a series of solid accomplishments, and that she wanted to hint at some grave indisposition’s having overtaken her while she accomplished them. Being a student myself, I didn’t have to feign an interest in her career, especially since it seemed artistic. I gathered (again, I avoided asking questions too directly) that she designed background matter and illustrations for a magazine, or maybe an advertising agency. The sinister gap in her young life left me far more timid; yet it was here, I suddenly reflected, that the other Richard would have forced some query. Had she fallen desperately ill and he failed to come see her, to track down the causes of a disappearance? Alarmed that I might already have allowed my cue to pass me by, I clumsily intruded, gulping spectacularly and coughing as if to indicate that a mouthful had stifled me for several seconds.

"You said… excuse me… you mentioned something about recuperating. Were you… what was that about?"

Had I misread the cues? For a moment, I thought I had ruined everything. She abandoned her fork, rolled her green eyes as if checking for signs of the sky’s splitting open, and hugged her elbows to contain a shudder. A cynic would probably say that I had been taken in by theatrics for several hours now, but no gesture of hers had seemed remotely theatrical to me before this one. It seemed altogether too much for the provocation… yet its artifice ended up relieving me in a very temporary way, since the little show clearly declared the subject to be off limits.

"Thanks for asking," she finally murmured over an empty swallow. "It happened right after you… after the last time I saw you. I don’t really want to talk about it right now."

Maybe she didn’t, and maybe she did… but just as her manner relieved me of pursuing the issue, her "right after you left" warned me not to do so. I would inevitably have tipped my hand if I went further. Then again, I had been tipping my hand all along. Perhaps I was a little vexed that she insisted on continuing the charade: perhaps stepping around a secret that she probably wanted to reveal was my way of exacting revenge. Perhaps that’s why I even dared to add, "Well, I hope you’re all right now. Are you sure you don’t need my jacket?"

She waved me off, resuming her fork and her pleasant ramble. She could easily have asked to see the contents of my wallet, I mused now for the umpteenth time—and mused again in a moment, when I paid off the waiter so that he would leave us in peace. But then I mused further that nothing was keeping me from shoving my identification under her nose.

"It’s funny how few women go into designing women’s fashions. Mona thinks I should go in that direction. She says our business is slowly going to dry up… that bigger companies with more hi-tech stuff are going to take it over. But I don’t know… I don’t know if I have the pushiness to be a fashion designer. That’s probably why women don’t do it. I’ve been working on being more assertive, but… I guess you think it was a little pushy to come up to you the way I did."

I dealt my empty plate my best Sean Connery smile. "Pushy has negative connotations. It’s entirely the wrong word to describe our meeting."

She hadn’t really laughed before then—maybe just a bar or two: but at that moment she played me the whole tune. The sunlight caught her teeth, the coffee cups on the surrounding tables seemed to peal in harmony, and I noticed the patio’s remaining couple turn our direction from thirty feet away (the woman with a glance, the man in lingering admiration).

"You’ve really changed, Richard! You’ve really, really changed. I’ve been noticing it all afternoon. Here I’ve been talking about myself all this time, but what I’m really thinking is, ‘What’s he been up to? What’s made him so different?’"

"Is the change for the better?"

"Oh, I should say so."

My deep satisfaction with the compliment was clouded by my realizing that I had just—quite accidentally—implied a confession that I was him. I squirmed vigorously. For a penny, I would have asked, "Was I so bad before, then?" But I was not going to let my curiosity about the other man block me off from establishing my own version of Richard—of Anthony Richard. With just a little more priming, then, I hazarded a few vague sentences about my entry into graduate school. I skipped over the bit about teaching for a year: I said only that my earlier employment didn’t challenge me, and that I needed something which would put my mind through its paces regularly. I described my meager graduate fellowship (they were being doled out left and right to keep the psychology department afloat) as if I had received some prestigious grant; and I’m sure I made my projected thesis sound less like an ingenu’s literary effusions than a government scientist’s formula for truth serum. It wasn’t that I was trying to seem brilliant or important. On the contrary, I wanted to stay obscure, like a real secret agent… but I’m afraid my obfuscations had the effect of puffing me up.

Was it that cloak of importance in which I wrapped myself (with maddening credibility), or was it the mere notion of Richard going to grad school? She grew more and more still before me as I spoke. Her bright eyes widened, her brows lifted toward a red-gilt shock of hair which beckoned them, and her cheeks flattened until that mysterious, microscopic "o" in the heart of her lips opened again. While I spun my yarn, I fought off a million questions swirling in the back of my mind. Does she like this new Richard better—is now the time to press home the point about his being a different Richard? Or is it, rather, the prospect of a new depth grafted onto the old lady’s man (for so I pictured him), full of fine phrases but empty of insight, which fascinates her? Would not amputating the latter from the former be a disastrous mistake? Couldn’t she have cut the incision herself a hundred times already if she wanted a clean separation? Indeed, if I distanced myself too much from the old bounder—the young bounder of earlier days who must, after all, have looked a little like me—wouldn’t I chase her away forever? More than once, girls had left me smarting under the charge that I was too intellectual, too cool. (I remembered those painful undergraduate rejections.) For once in my life, I had a chance—but maybe it all depended on this borrowed skin.

"You’re just so different," she almost whispered. "I can’t believe it." I would have cut my life’s years in two and thrown away the part without her if only she had smiled, just a little, in saying that.

When we left the restaurant, shortly thereafter, we had to exit either into the mall’s inner labyrinth again or engage the wide walkway which divided it from the parking lot. We did the latter without saying a word or even exchanging a look. Yet we proceeded slowly. Though we knew that the road back to those scenes of our incredibly unsteady first hour—the jewelry shop, the fountain, the storefront Santas—was sealed behind us now, we were in no hurry to be parted. We ambled and basked in the sun. I honestly don’t know which of us made some prosaic comment about the gentle weather—probably both at about the same time.

"Indian summer," she daydreamed. "That’s what my grandmother would have called it. It doesn’t seem right for Christmas… but it seems right that everything should be all golden, just now. Like Easter, maybe. I like the sound of that better. Indian summer makes me think that it’s bound to end in a day or two. Do you think it will end soon?"

"Christmas and Easter are really the same thing, you know," I said in what must have struck me as a straight answer at that instant, craning my neck at the parking lot so that I could feel her hair graze my chin. "The rebirth of longer days… the rebirth of green plants… the triumph over cold and death. It’s never too late to begin again…."

My voice fell flat, leaving a wide gap where her name should have been. Her name. This had gone on long enough—I had to know.

But the mischievous god who had presided over this midwinter day’s dream (in fact, that very day was the winter solstice: no wonder the sun was so low and liquid at our backs) sprang into action before I could rend his delicate, maddening web.

"Mona is always saying that," she had already picked up. "That I should begin again—look at today as the first day of my new life. ‘Celine,’ she says, ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life, not the last day of all you’ve done before.’ I really like the sound of that… I really want to make a clean start, Richard."

She stopped and stared straight into my eyes. Those large pupils in their pale brilliance again reversed gravity and turned me upside-down. My spirit flailed about. Yes, tell her we’ll start again—but I was not him, there was no again with me, and to play this part much longer would be to annihilate myself utterly in the role of someone I detested. All I found to hold onto in my somersaults was her name.

"Celine," I said. "Celine."

Perhaps she thought that was an answer in itself. Her lids fell deliberately, and her head bowed toward my shoulder.

In my struggle to find just the right words now while also sneaking a touch of her hair across my lips, I believe I almost grew a little dizzy. Who had time to think about breathing? "Your name… I’ve always wanted to ask you…" Always? Careful! "Celine… it’s such a beautiful name. It sounds French. There was a French impressionist painter by that name, wasn’t there?"

I just wanted her to keep talking, for I still had next to nothing. (I missed both the medium and the period of my French artist, by the way: I’m not trying to dress up my pompous blunders, for I was young and erudite enough to leave them strewn behind me at every step.)

"I had an aunt named Celina," she said as we resumed walking. Dare I reach for her hand? Dare I not? "Mom thought that Celine sounded more French, actually, though I never heard about a painter."

"Maybe ‘Selena’ was with an ‘s’," I strayed off in my damned pedantry—or was I chasing a metaphor? "The Greek goddess of the moon."

"This was with a ‘c’. Maybe they changed it from some earlier great-grandmother, or something."

I wanted to say, "My land of dreams, at any rate, starts with a ‘c’"—but that kind of courtly frivolity has always been beyond me. I hope my stuffiness occasionally gets reckoned in my favor as honesty, or at least modesty. What would he have said, I wondered? Maybe, "Let’s head back to my place, babe"? Was that what she wanted to hear, just maybe?

I never did find the courage to take her hand on the way to her car. By way of covering my awkwardness, I thought to fish out a pen and blurt, "Why don’t you give me your number?" I bit my tongue just before I said, "It’s probably changed." Instead, I added, "I’m staying at… staying with friends. For the holidays. I can give you the number there, if you like. No telling who’ll answer—it’s a big family."

"Sure. Give me the number." We had rounded a group of cars to a small two-door sedan: hers, I supposed. This was it—these were our last precious moments, my last chance to garner information. I recall trying—ridiculously—to memorize her license plate in one nervous glance.

"Just let me see if I have a piece of paper in my purse."

"No. I… here, here’s an old sales receipt from the university bookstore. Thought I might sell back a couple of textbooks if I dropped a course."

I had not planned the effect—in fact, I would probably have caught myself if I’d thought in time—but the validation of my story about graduate school sent a visible shudder through her trimly angled shoulders. (The sweater-vest emphasized their perfect T, as she must have known.) Her right side actually twitched with such suddenness that its tendons tugged her chin in a flinch. With my wallet poised in my left hand like a writing pad, I briefly paused and calculated how I might turn my "gaff" into a chance to press my case—to press home the truth. "Somebody will answer here at any time of the day or night," I continued very slowly as I scrawled. "I’ll tell them that someone might be calling for Richard."

When I gave her the scrap, I pretended to dig around in my wallet for more paper. I managed to eavesdrop on her flipping the receipt over and cradling it in her palms.

"Ah… I’ll use this for your number," I said airily in mock triumph. "My Selective Service card. They’re obviously not going to draft me now. I could have gotten a deferment, anyway, since my brother went."

As she distantly droned her number for me, I feared that I had pressed too hard. Only a few minutes earlier, the fragrance of her hair had filled my nostrils. Now she was looking absently around the parking lot as if to flag down a passing car.

"I’ll call you tomorrow," I broke out cheerfully, sliding the wallet back out of her sight. "I’ll… I’ll call you tonight, about tomorrow. About when we can meet. Unless… maybe it’s too much, for right now." Too much, too soon—or too little, too late. How apparent was the panic within my forcibly vaulting tones?

Celine had been in the process of slipping my receipt-with-scrawl into her purse (a woolen design matching her vest so well that I’d scarcely noticed it until now) when she must have seen the jewelry case. She lifted it out and held it tightly to her ribs in both hands.

"Why did you give me this? You never gave me anything before. Not like this."

My panic mounted. Do not say, "I’ve changed," I told myself. Her eyes seemed almost blue now with intensity. I had to focus on her clutching fingertips before I found enough breath to answer.

"It’s just as we said, Celine, we’re starting ov—" Do not use over with starting, either. "We’re starting, just starting. For the first time, everything is new. Nothing has ever happened before now. Today is the day that Celine meets Richard and Richard meets Celine."

But now, for some reason, she wasn’t buying it. The receipt, the wallet, the draft card, my brother… yes, I had gone too far. Broken eggshells lay all about me. All I could do was try to restrain my gesturing hands as they reached in her direction, searched to soothe her quavering figure. Whatever phantom car she was going to flag down must have sprouted wings, for she intensely directed her gaze to the sky, her elbows twitching as if she would suddenly hail a late sunbeam. Her freckles grew browner as her cheeks flushed, and her lips swelled until they would no longer seal. I was witnessing a kind of breakdown.

"At first I thought that maybe you were confused—that you’d had some trouble. Like my trouble. But I never really believed that. You of all people could never have that kind of trouble—no one would ever be allowed to get that far inside you. You’d never let them in. But then, why?" Here she looked down at the jewelry case and squeezed it ferociously in one hand while the other caressed it. "You didn’t owe me anything. That’s what you told me, anyway, two years ago. And you believed it. Why would you think otherwise now? Besides, what you did owe me—what I thought you owed me… you could never pay it off this way. Or get out of paying. Not even you could have believed that."

"It belongs to you," I babbled stupidly, as afraid of being evaded by her eyes now as of meeting with them. I tried to soothe both of us by letting my worship utter a kind of prayer. "It’s gold and emerald. Like you. It’s rare and precious and beautiful, and perfect and delicate and sparkling. Like you. A few dollars made it change hands, but it was always yours, and it will always be yours—"

"Don’t, Richard. Don’t. You need to take it back." Still she wouldn’t look at me, only at her intricately agile hands, her wonderfully limber wrists, as they extended their charge to me.

"Then I’ll take it and wear it under my shirt, where no one will ever see it. Next to my heart. It will still be yours to me—it will be you. It’ll be waiting for the day when I can put it around your neck. It’s your colors, Celine." And I laughed and repeated, as if this argument clinched my victory, "Gold and green are your colors!"

"I know… but you couldn’t have!" Finally she stared straight into my eyes, her upper body swaying toward me over the fondled necklace so that I could count her lashes. "You were color-blind!"

I made no movement to take the box: I was suddenly incapable of any movement at all. In the same instant, she spun away, the necklace still clasped tight in her right hand, and leaned with her left heavily on the car’s roof. Despite the sweater’s burly concealment, the space between her shoulder blades began observably to quake. I saw the left hand make a fist over the car, and could not help but admire, even in my daze, the perfect little squares which its knuckles formed beyond the broad cuff. And then, as a slight breeze blew or as her head twitched convulsively, I saw the impishly upturned nose, the chin which God’s thumb brought from a heavenly lathe, a glint of her front teeth… and I heard a sigh captured by a sob.

"I’m so frightened! I’m so frightened! I’m so frightened! I couldn’t believe it was you, after two years and an eternity—after nearly losing my mind over you. Now I can’t believe it’s not you. Your face, your voice, your manner… did I imagine them all today, or did I forget them all two years ago? It has to be you! Oh, you’ve changed, yes. I… I said that to you, didn’t I? I kept telling myself that people change. Who doesn’t change in two years? And it was okay while it was just… just books and ideas. People can grow up. Maybe you grew up. Or maybe I never knew you very well to start with. You never let me know you—you always kept so much from me. So maybe I just never saw that part of you before. Or maybe you’ve been faking it this afternoon. How do I know? Maybe you’ve been stringing me along today. It wouldn’t be the first time! Myths and Greek words and French painters… how do I know if any of it is true, or just made up? You know I don’t know! Maybe you’re just refining your act, practicing for some heiress."

I couldn’t take any more of this. I knew the man she meant, all right—the kind of man—and I hated him as much as she seemed once to have loved him. I was indignant, frankly, that she had squandered herself on him. I grabbed her shoulders gently but firmly. The feel of the soft flesh beneath her thin shirt evaporated any last trace of timidity in me.

"Do you really think this has been an act? Look into my eyes and tell me I’m acting."

She looked over her shoulder, instead, at my hand. The lowered lid showed no fear—it held a full tear for seconds on its lashes—but it also signaled a strange distance, almost a state of trance.

"I know you’re not acting. Because of your eyes—your eyesight. Because of the necklace, and what you said earlier about my sweater and that TV that needed tuning. You can see colors, Richard!" She bent very close to my fingers, which rose on her contracted shoulder, and whispered into them, "My middle-name Richard!" That was the first moment when I confided to my conscious mind, in so many words, that I loved Celine.

"And you see things with taste," she went on. "You have an eye for beauty now. You, of all people—you who used to make fun of my designs. But it’s not you. That’s just it. All of this, it’s not the kind of thing anyone could fake. So then you’re not Richard, after all, are you? And me taking you for him all afternoon, talking to you as if you were him… I’m not cured at all, am I? Mona told me I’d be fine, but my mother was right. I’m not there yet—I’m not even close. Maybe I’m farther away now than I’ve ever been—maybe I can’t even remember what he looks like. Now I’ll have to go back… back there. I don’t won’t to go back there!"

I was losing her to the convulsions again. What I did next was all wrong, from a professional standpoint. But I had no profession then. I was a lost young man who had found his way, or so he thought, in this lost child. And so I folded her trembling shoulders from behind in the blanket of my arms. My jacket was unzipped, and I held her slender, shivering spine against my broad, warm chest. I had no doubt that I could smother the tremors just as my gaze could at once have purified all her doubts about my sincerity. And, indeed, I felt her calming in my embrace. Maybe a boy knows some things better than a man. With my lips, I sought her ear through a sweet, smooth curtain of hair, and I spoke the spell which love and whimsy suggested to me.

"Listen to me, Celine! Who I am and who you are... it all started today, when we first met. There’s you, there’s me, there’s right now, and there’s all our lives from now on. Call me Richard—Richard’s fine. I like Richard. I’m the Richard who’s not blind—who knows gold when he sees it. We can go anywhere we want, do anything we please. Who’s to stop us? We’ll join the circus. You’ll tell fortunes, and I’ll tame lions. We can live in a little shack—I’ll unload boxcars by day, and you can make spaghetti for my dinner. What’s it matter—what’s any of it matter? All I know is that my life began today, the minute I saw you. You can’t leave me now. Half a day isn’t long enough to live, not with our whole lives ahead of us. I can make it all okay for you. That’s all I want to do with my life from now on… to pay you back for that time you lost, to make you forget the pain. This is the day when the nights stop getting shorter. This is the day when the sun starts to come back."

Then I pressed my cheek down into her hair, and I held her that way until my shoulders told me that our lungs were going up and down in unison. At last the thick wave of thin locks shifted slightly under me, and I felt a moist whisper upon my neck.

"All right," she said. "All right.

My life immediately grew very complicated. In a way, it grew very simple, too: its sole focus was Celine, and the sole purpose of getting up in the morning was to see Celine. But accomplishing that purpose required a subterfuge which rendered all of my comings and goings very intricate. My mother was at once alert to the strange distance which she saw in my gaze and heard in my vague answers. I’m sure my younger brother and sister were also impressed by it, though they must have ascribed it to the kingly aura of the "independent adult" rather than to any more specific cause. In fact, I could have squeezed as much savor from the role of Worldly Graduate Student as I’d wanted if I had had any time for such trivial pursuits. That’s the irony of the whole game, of course. Only a juvenile heart longs to bask in the admiration of those who admire its maturity: a truly mature heart doesn’t even notice that it is being admired, or perhaps smiles at the admiration’s childishness. I don’t think I paid enough attention to my family, however, to entertain these uplifting thoughts. All of them—Mom, Roger, Meg—were just so much clutter on my radar which I had to steer around or navigate through. I guess I was being immature in a different way rather than showing any growth spurt. I was exchanging an eagerness to impress my family for an eagerness to fling myself at Celine’s feet, the latter actually being a far more fanatical eagerness than the former had been. If I had truly possessed some kind of manly poise during those holidays long ago, I would have paused to reflect that my family had a claim upon my affections, too, and hadn’t seen me for several months. But I can’t be too hard on myself as I was then. A young man is constantly trying to put his boyish past behind him and hurl himself into the future. This is probably nowhere more true than when he first meets the woman who represents that future for him as does no other single person on earth.

Dad was a different story. In an odd sort of way, I think the situation brought me closer to him than I would have been if I were strutting about the house dispensing superior smiles over all the gift-wrapping, tree-trimming, and candy-making. I can’t imagine a man so little afflicted by the need to show off finding my ostentation at all interesting; and the one serious topic that I had already tried to tackle with him—the politically poisonous atmosphere of grad school—was probably one of the few grave issues under the sun which he couldn’t handle knowledgeably, as I wrote earlier. But now he was almost like a co-conspirator with me. Over supper during those four days before Christmas, I was always in the hot seat. I would invariably have done some skulking around in the day or be planning some for the evening which I wasn’t inclined to explain. (Of course, I couldn’t very well skip out on our family suppers to court Celine: the barbarity of it wouldn’t have stopped me, but the indiscretion of it warned me off.) My attitude was absolutely beyond my mother’s comprehension. Hadn’t I gone out last night? Why was I going out again tonight? To see Jimmy Warwick again? Since when had we become such good friends? If I went to his house, could I deliver a box of cookies to his mother? We weren’t going to be drinking, were we? The probes did not come all at once, but between seams of the conversation and under the cover of comments they trailed with the loosest of logic. If I had been faced merely with the chore of fighting off one stiff onslaught, I might have toughed it out without much trouble. But the effect of this constant sharp-shooting was very wearisome, and I must have sighed pretty heavily between mouthfuls sometimes. Without Dad’s help, I might very well have lost my temper. His ability to deflect Mom’s questions was flawlessly good-natured. "Cookies! Since when have you become such good friends with Mrs. Warwick?" he smirked once, and later, "A twenty-three-year-old man who’s never been drunk a day in his life isn’t going to start because he’s seeing a few high school friends at Christmas."

It was actually Mom who ended up getting angry. I could hear them later on through the vent of the upstairs bathroom, which sometimes brought me reconnaissance from the most unlikely places. This conversation was probably being waged just below me in the laundry room. "I can tell when something’s not right," my mother kept repeating. "You should be helping me rather than interrupting me." My father might have indignantly clamored for a more responsible use of the word "interrupt", as I would have done… and then push would have come to shove. Instead, he picked up on another word. "I am helping you. I’m helping you not to ruin Christmas for yourself and everyone else."

The only problem that really occupied me at the time, however, was how to arrange meetings with Celine without smothering her in my attentions. I had virtually no idea of what family commitments she had for the holidays, but she was apparently going into her job right up until Christmas Eve. That was just as well for me. Otherwise, half of me would have been wanting to spend the whole day with her, every day. But the other half was restrained by something like decency, if not sanity—or even more probably, by something like self-consciousness. I dare not seem overly pushy and scare this rare bird back into the forest forever, just as I dare not play it too cool and let her follow her inclination to run away from the "wrong Richard". I settled for meeting her at lunch time the day after our encounter at the mall—we had a very low-key half-hour at a sandwich shop which, she said, was within walking distance of her job. From then on, we scheduled our rendezvous in the evening (including one that same evening, at the park). The hour had to be fairly late in the evening, since we only finished supper at home around seven o’clock (more like seven-thirty: I’m afraid I rather rudely gulped it all down and took French leave, to use my mother’s terminology). As I look back now, I’m surprised that the obvious explanation didn’t occur to Mom: I had met a girl, and I had a date each evening. But then, what young man returned from grad school for Christmas suddenly "meets a girl" in his hometown and starts chasing after her like a teenager? No, I’m not surprised at all. I’m only surprised that I behaved like a teenager. I was probably surprised in that respect at the time—I certainly wasn’t unaware of my situation’s silliness. But I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t so much as summon the will to wish that I could fight it. On the contrary, nothing like this had ever happened to me.

Celine never breathed a word about having to spend this or that evening with this or that parent or relative, so my discomfort about pressing her too hard wore off quickly. At the same time, I wondered how she could be so alone. I have written that we met in the evenings after one attempt to squeeze our time together into the narrow window allotted everywhere for lunch. Those evenings are blurred together for me now, after all these years. In a way, they seem many in retrospect, twice as many as their true number could have been; and in a way, they seem a single long, intimate exchange between two people, one of them increasingly in love with the other, that other always a little frightened and confused. After more effort than I would like to admit or would ever have believed necessary, I can separate our encounters into distinct occasions. None of this is to say that my memory is going, or that what I’m about to write is a story-teller’s invention. I’m sure I’ve already used artistic license here and there in trying to resurrect a conversation that happened decades ago, and I’m sure I’ll do so again. We embellish even what we recall from yesterday or this morning. But I’m also sure that I am being very faithful to the substance of each exchange. There are certain visual images, and even certain sensations of the ear and nose, which I shall remember until my heart lies still and the blood ebbs from my brain—whereupon, if I go to heaven, I shall recover all those images intact and multiplied. What I’m saying is that everything else around them—the circulation of the day which made them possible, the composition of the day which almost made them impossible—is now a great gray swirl. It is the sallow, crinkled edge, that vital background detail, around some ancient photograph in whose middle a beloved face is forever young.

The walk through the park on the evening of our rendezvous for lunch proved a bad idea. Although the weather continued clear and the days had an amber, wine-like quality which left you slightly tipsy, they nevertheless ended early. Once night descended, the temperature quickly dropped. I recall that we had to walk fast just to stay warm, and our swollen lips almost missed the "r’s" on the few words they exhaled from upturned collars. Yet I recall, too, the joy of bending to catch Celine’s eroded words in my ear, and to capture her frosty breath in my nostrils. I recall saying at the end of the jaunt, "You’re shivering. It was wrong of me to drag you out here at this hour," and then holding her tight—so tight—against my jacket on the pretext of warming her up. I’m sure that neither of us was very much deceived by the pretext, especially when I closed my eyes and rocked her back and forth.

The next night began in the grocery store, of all places. Celine had remarked over the phone (when I called her: she never presumed to call me) that she was about out of food and had to make a trip to the supermarket. I was the one who had the bright idea of meeting her there. The arrangement reassured me: obviously, she could not have been concealing very much if she would allow our trysts to be diverted into something as prosaic as getting groceries. Yet this glimpse into her intimate routine also renewed my wonder at the desolation of her personal life. Why was she getting groceries the night before Christmas Eve? Why wasn’t she being feasted by a doting family, like me? If she got along so well with this Mona, who appeared to be her best friend as well as her boss, then why hadn’t Mona given her a few days off for the holidays? Especially if her family lived out of town, what was she still doing here—why wouldn’t she have left to be with them? It certainly wasn’t for me… was it? If it was for me, then was it for the Richard whom I was supposed to be—or not supposed to be, I should say? How could it possibly be for a stranger she met a few dozen hours earlier at the mall? Was she, then, planning to spend Christmas Day alone in her apartment? If so, I had to know about it—because I wasn’t going to let that happen. Even if I had to leave my own family—even if I had to have some definitive falling out with my mother—I had already decided that I wasn’t going to let Celine be alone on Christmas.

I actually enjoyed shopping with her. The word "charming" has been so overused, and used so artificially, that I can’t quite bring myself to write it now. But I did indeed feel as if someone had struck me with a magic wand as I wandered up and down aisles with her, standing with my hands in my pockets while she examined apples or compared the price of cheeses. The other men who passed me in the company of women were most certainly husbands. What I wouldn’t have given, then and there, to be able to go home with this fair-haired child of the Aurora Borealis, help her store away cans and boxes, sit with my arm around her before the evening news, and then find a dark retreat with her under three winter blankets! When we finally reached the checkout counter, I was pierced with an unexpected twinge of humiliation and regret upon realizing that my checkbook had no part to play here.

We hadn’t discussed doing anything afterward. When she had mentioned the grocery store over the phone, I had just dived in and said, "Well, then, let’s go grocery shopping!" I think we had both been somewhat intoxicated by the idea’s… its what? Not its absurdity, for it seemed anything but that to us. By its very sensibleness, in a way: by the fact that we could do something so sensible, so ordinary together. What could be more intimate than that? Only the rites of a couple puttering around their little domestic nest… and maybe that’s why Celine resisted my offer to drive her home, help her unpack the groceries, and then trek back to my car. She said that it was too cold for me to go rambling in the dark, that the distance was too far; but when she added that her apartment was a mess with last-minute gift-wrapping, I knew that, at the bottom, she wasn’t quite ready to have that space invaded by me. I backed off.

I also knew that she wasn’t entirely alone. I don’t mean that I suspected her of harboring another person in her apartment, but only that I registered the plain fact of her having some friends and family around, since she had been wrapping presents. And in the oddest sort of way, I felt my relief on that score grow overshadowed by a disappointment. I suppose something in me had wanted the two of us to be alone against the world: Christmas Eve transformed into The Eve of Saint Agnes!

So instead of going back to her place, we stood talking after the last brown bag was stored in her trunk. Once a few minutes had passed, I suggested that we sit in my car, parked next to hers. I said that her frozen things wouldn’t thaw very quickly at this temperature, and that we might as well keep ourselves warm if we were going to talk for a little while.

"What a nice car!" she shivered after I’d shut her door and run around to let myself in behind the wheel. "It still smells new." Our hermetic enclosure made her voice seem suddenly right on my shoulder: in her s’s I could hear all the crispness of a tongue against moist teeth.

I turned to her, the vinyl seat moaning drowsily under my coat. "It’s my dad’s."

Her pale, brilliant eyes darted away from me to the ceiling, and kept darting behind her nervous lashes. With my first sentence, I had already blundered. How badly… how hard would it be to get back from this ledge? But no, I wasn’t going back. I leapt forward with all the confidence of a man plunging to his death.

"I’m staying with my family, Celine. I… I live here. I grew up here."

"Me, too."

"Really? I’ve been meaning to ask. I mean… yeah, that’s what I mean. I’ve been meaning to ask. Because I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about you but what you tell me."

Now her eyes were fixed upon the darkness straight out the front window, like a driver’s who is unable to see the road through a thick fog. I watched her pupils grow larger, watched her chest rise and fall beneath her woolen pullover (where, at the height of inhalation, her breasts defined their roundness from the folds).

At some point I shook off a spell concocted of fear, doubt, and something like sensual longing. "Anyway… yeah, I was going to speak to you about my family. About my staying with them. I was going to say that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea if you called and asked for Richard. Because they don’t use that name for me at home, and my Mom’s already suspicious about why I keep leaving the house at strange hours."

I could have fallen on my knees and said a long prayer of thanks to the God of Graces when she queried, with the flicker of a smile, "And what do you tell her?"

"Certainly not the truth!" I laughed—and then realized that my hearty chuckle would sound serpentine if she hadn’t guessed that it sprang from her recognizing me as not Richard. "I mean… the truth would be something like, ‘Mom, I’ll die if I can’t see this girl that I met at the mall over the weekend. I know this is Christmas, and that I’ve been away for months, but… I can’t… I’ve got to go!"

Her smile kindled from my laughter a bit, though she remained gazing out the front window. "I don’t like the sound of that! I don’t want to be destroying your family’s Christmas!"

"It’s nothing that can’t be fixed. It’s just a little chipped here and there… and that’s my mom, it’s not you. But if you call and someone else answers, and you ask for me—"

"You mean, if I ask for Richard," she said glumly. Her gaze ahead was all at once no longer searching, but riveted. A furrow appeared between her slender brows, and her jaw rose in a way which made her minutely fluted, precisely modeled lower lip protrude during her brief pause. A strip of radiance from the parking lot’s floodlights ran smoothly over that lip just before the deep line where it merged with the upper one. "I ask for Richard, and she says I have the wrong number, and you snatch the phone from her hand, and then you have to explain to her why I call you Richard. You have to tell her that you’re seeing a girl who’s a little off her…"

"Celine, don’t!" I insisted.

"I’m to call you… Anthony, is that right? You only told me once. When we first met. Your very first words, almost. If I phone you, I’m to call you Anthony."

I followed this incredible concession (incredible to me… why? because I had actually thought her mentally unstable?) without taking a breath. When it was over, my voice, almost too faint to hear, sounded sad to me. I should have expected it to sound happier. "Yes. Yes, that would be better. But she’ll be suspicious no matter what you call me. That was my main point. And… as far as we go, you can call me Richard all the time. If you want to. It’s my middle name—I don’t know if you remember my telling you that, too. Nobody’s ever called me by it before, and I kind of like the idea of your doing it. I mean, because… because I’ve never known anyone like you before." When I saw her face begin to soften, I added, "In a way, I became a new person when I met you. I feel like I became alive for the first time. So I’m really not the same person, you see."

Her eyes had sunk from the window to the dashboard to her lap, and I thought she was going to speak once when, instead, she closed her lips again and puffed out her cheeks. I watched her left hand, just a few inches from where my fingers dangled over the arm rest, flex and relax over and over in a geometrician’s dream of perfect circles and perfect squares.

"My mother is funny about things, too," she finally said, still studying her lap. This was the only time I would hear her speak openly of her family in those early days. "Before I left home, when I was still in high school, she always had to know who I was going out with. If it was a boy, she had to know all about him—how I’d met him, how he’d spoken to me, how he dressed and cut his hair, what I knew about his family. If I didn’t make the right answers, I couldn’t go out. And I usually didn’t go out, because all the answers were never right. Sometimes I cheated a little, just to get out of the house. But then I’d find out later that mother had been right, after all. That was the worst of it. She was always right. I didn’t mind her being right, but… I minded her being right about everyone else being wrong. About all the boys being… being what they were. It got to where I got really scared of boys, because I was scared that I would be alone all my life, but scared that there was nothing else but this, no other choice but this—that this was the only way out. Boys, I mean. One time, in my junior year, one of them threw me out of his car because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. It was right about here. He’d parked in this parking lot. I ended up… there’s the phone booth I used over there. I expected mother to give me an ear-full, but she never said a word. Not one single word. That night, before I went off to bed, she ran her hand through my hair. It was like her telling me, ‘You poor kid, you’re doomed, and there’s nothing I can do for you.’ Or like her telling herself—like her thinking, ‘The evil prophecy is beginning to happen. I’ve done all I can. My girl will be destroyed.’"

I must have been almost gaping by the last few sentences of this soliloquy. The thought of a girlish Celine being almost raped in the very spot where we sat, then trembling and sobbing in the very phone booth that I saw fifty feet away, held me bound and gagged before the outrageous prophecy of doom which, in some vague manner, Celine continued to reveal.

"It’s not that you don’t appreciate it when your mother gives you advice… or it wasn’t that I didn’t, anyway. But there should be some hopeful advice, too. Or if the advice is all about all the wicked people in the world, why does it have to be such good advice? Why does it always have to be true? If that’s all there is, wouldn’t the best thing be to let your child find out for herself? Wouldn’t that be better than knowing… knowing that every man was hopeless the instant you met him?"

Thank God, I did not launch the protest that was on my tongue: something like, "And me? You think I would do something like that to you?" There was no reason to force myself into these bitter recollections. The more proper thing was to let them keep rolling along, as recollections. I’m sure that my sense of timidity kept me silent far more than whatever sensitivity to others I had… but silence was the right response. Finally, in what may actually have been a true flash of emotional insight, I remarked, "It doesn’t sound as though your mother has had a very happy life."

Celine gave a voiceless laugh—an outrush of breath through her nostrils, since her lips shut tight in a smile. I found it a rather warm smile, under the circumstances: her large eyes warmed it, looming over it with the streetlights caught in their glaze. "Poor Mom! No, she’s not what you’d call a happy person."

"Did you… did you live nearby here, back then? I mean, if this pig decided to choose this particular parking lot…."

"Not too far from here. Over in Westbrook Hills."

"That’s a very nice part of town."

"Yeah. That neighborhood and the ‘boy’ thing were enough to ruin my reputation at school. They all decided that I thought I was better than they were. The funny thing is, we couldn’t afford that house. We had a piano when I was younger, but that got sold pretty soon. Most of the rooms upstairs were almost empty." Then she noticed the look on my face: it was good to realize that I was receiving a glance ever so often. "What are you thinking? You look like you’re trying to remember something."

"I was just thinking… with us living down the street a few blocks from here… and back then I was probably just sitting up in my room, as I did on a lot of weekend nights. If only I’d known that you were here, that that was happening! I would have put on my cape, jumped out the window, and been here in a flash! That guy would have ended up between the apples and the bananas!"

I couldn’t have put in the plug for myself at a better time. Since she had offered me a penny for my thoughts, I was not gate-crashing upon her sad reminiscences to assert my ego—and my protest against the young gorilla’s behavior, as I see now, may well have been something that she wanted to hear from me. I can look back now and marvel at how I made just the right moves at just the right time; but the truth, of course, is that these were not "moves" at all. Nothing could have been less calculated. Age forgets that youth, quite without wisdom’s help, can do right things from love. My weathered mind and withered heart have to struggle sometimes to appreciate the kind of energy which inspired me then.

Since we’d reached a pleasant note, and since we knew that we needed to part company about now, we both began to talk about tomorrow night as if on cue.

"It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow," I said. "I guess you’ll probably want to go be with your mother… or someone else in the family. Maybe if I could just see you… I don’t know. We could always try lunch again. It was kind of a madhouse yesterday, but at least I’d get to see you."

"I won’t be going to my mother’s until Christmas day. Her new husband has two children, so they have their own sort of…."

"Chestnut-roasting ’round an open fire," I joked, and won that sad wry smile from her, the broad high point of her right upper lip climbing, her lashes falling like a curtain. I held back from observing that the same mother who had warned her against all men clearly hadn’t refused herself a little indulgence—that was way too far out of bounds; but the thought certainly crossed my mind. "So you’ll be over there on Christmas day?" I pried instead, anxious for one more glance in the family closet.

"Christmas morning. I’ll go over so they can open their presents. I’m skipping Christmas dinner since I’m going over to Mona’s for supper. She has no one—her only son is in… Allentown, I think. Pennsylvania… right? The steel town? Too far for her to travel."

"It’s not very comfortable for you, though, is it? I mean… at your mother’s. It seems like you don’t really want to go there, very much."

The fingertips of her raised hands interlaced in a gesture whose purpose escaped me. All I could think of was the miraculous elegance of the two thin wrists looping from the pullover at right angles.

"He’s all right… her husband. And the little girl, she’s about ten. I get along well with her. Stacey. I got her a sewing kit. I think she’s really going to be surprised. But the older boy—well, he’s no boy. He’s about our age." With a big sigh, she concluded, "I just don’t like being around him."

Again with the wisdom of age, I have decided that the inclusion of "he’s about our age" leaves no room for doubt that this stepbrother, too, had been brushing up against Celine and pressing her into tight corners. And with the genius of young intuition, I’m again sure I recognized the same thing then. I was a little bewildered that, no matter which direction this girl of my dreams and I walked, some avenue or corridor always opened up with a bone pile or a burned house at its end. To fight the sense of impending doom which Celine exuded at such moments drew upon every ounce of optimistic energy I possessed.

Perhaps that very metaphor of wandering through some populated labyrinth entered my mind at the time: perhaps it caused me to turn my eyes out upon the suburban street corners surrounding our island of concrete and parked cars. At any rate, I was privy to one more inspiration that evening.

"Christmas lights! I’ll pick you up at your place tomorrow, and we’ll cruise around and look at Christmas lights!"

What an idea! A slow tour of the neighborhood’s decorated house fronts would be blandly holiday-cheerful, it would save us expenses which neither of us could well afford now, it would be one of those things of homely intimacy like grocery shopping (which obviously attracted her as much as me), and it would keep us moving—would save us from more anguishing confessions. Yes, love had served me well in my want of wisdom. As she suddenly let herself out of the car, surprising me a little with the abruptness of the resolution, Celine caught my wrist and squeezed it, allowing her chilly fingers to run the length of mine and return for a split second upon their tips.

The next evening was indeed an idyllic Christmas Eve for us—perhaps the best of my entire life—but I paid dearly for it back home. I had rushed through supper, as usual, and was in the process of mumbling the curt excuses which had become typical of me. I don’t blame my mother a bit for losing her composure. Now that I’m a father myself, I can imagine how several evenings of being sloughed off in this manner must have wounded her. If only everyone had known about Celine, if only she had been my high school sweetheart… a parent can accept neglect at such a level, and even feel sadly happy about it. But how on earth could I explain Celine? I was aware that I had been utterly, definitively "swept away" by her, and a young man is ashamed of no emotion before his parents more than a purely irrational one. He does not want to give them good cause to mistrust his reason just when he’s trying to establish his competence for handling life. I couldn’t have told Mom alone, either. Dad would have been brought into it: Mom would have run to him instantly. But that actually states my problem inside-out. If only I could have explained it to Dad, I think he would have understood. He was a man, and a gentleman, as they used to say. The honor of devotion would not strike him as something irrational, but rather as something necessary for survival. And he would have kept my secret. But I didn’t need a father-confessor or an advisor: I needed Mom off my tail.

When I got up from the table to leave, her face grew as slack as if I’d slapped her, and she said (in a voice more accusatory than plaintive), "I thought we would all go look at Christmas lights after supper."

It was then that I very nearly spilled the story about Celine, in two or three sentences and in front of all four of them. Something like, "I’m going to see a girl, okay? I’ve been seeing her every night. I have to see her. If you want to kick me out of the house, I’ll go stay in a motel." Of course, that would not have been the story about Celine at all, and I couldn’t possibly have devised a worse way to introduce her to the family. Fortunately, my own stars are lucky ones, not the ominous group which tormented Celine. I have always been endowed with the happy quality of chewing on my words before I spit them out. My younger brother Roger would, in my shoes at that moment, have let something fly which nobody present would ever forget. The tense silence which preceded my own ruthless announcement, however, was broken by my father, so that announcement was never made.

"You didn’t tell me you wanted to see the lights," said Dad with mock simplicity.

"Do I have to make an appointment?" fired back Mom, still aghast—now more than ever—at the churlishness which had invaded her household. "Are we not a family any more? Do I just assume that you’re all going to be gone on Christmas Eve unless I check your schedules? I certainly know better than to expect anyone to go to midnight Mass any more… but I thought some of you might at least stay on the premises."

The unwise appeal to the whole table sealed the defeat of her proposal. My sister Meg would never have opened her mouth until someone else had taken the brunt of the attack: now she thought it safe to speak up. "As a matter of fact, Mom… I told Melanie that I’d stop by tonight. I did mention to you that they were having a little party." Probably a complete fabrication, off the cuff. "And anyway, I’ll only be gone about an hour. We can do something when I get back." Also completely disingenuous. Three hours minimum, and she knew Mom would never take her up on her generous compromise.

Mom looked at us all as though we had betrayed her to the Sanhedrin: it felt more like the Eve of the Crucifixion. "What about you, Roger? Would you like to drive me around town to see the lights?"

"Hey, I never said I wasn’t coming," said Dad. "The only way you can keep me out is to let Roger do the driving."

"Why don’t you two go?" shrugged my younger brother with that aplomb he displayed only in matters requiring verve. "I was going to watch Mannix."

Everybody probably knew all along that the whole scene revolved around my strange behavior over the past few days. Nevertheless, Dad insisted that Mom leave the kitchen alone and get her coat. There was another flare-up when he asked if I needed his car again, and I remarked stupidly, "No, mine’s fine in the cold as long as I don’t let it stop running." Mom overheard, and unleashed a howl whose split-second insight frightened me: "So you’re not even going to turn the car off? You’re just cruising the town?" But I knew by the way that Dad shushed her up that the real purpose of their jaunt was to have Round Three or Four or Five about me where they could not be observed. He passed his keys to me and waved me out the door. Over my shoulder, I heard arrangements being made to take Meg’s car (which had been bequeathed to her by Dad, of course), drop her off at Melanie’s, and pick her up two hours later. Give her an hour more than she’d said she needed but an hour less than she would have taken: generosity and discipline in one and the same stroke! That was my father. God bless his soul, and God forgive me for harrowing one of his last Christmases.

Honesty compels me to confess that all the anguish I was putting my mother through, as well as all the noble sacrifices my father was making on my behalf, passed from my mind as I sped off through the suburbs, intent upon finding the street which led to Celine’s apartment complex. I had never appeared on her doorstep before, but the venue was nothing very revealing. Neither posh nor the worst that money could buy. I could probably have left my little Chevy coughing at the curbside while I ran up a flight of stairs if I had been reduced to traveling third-class—our city certainly wasn’t crime-free, but the riskier spots were still on the other side of town. (What idiot thief would have stolen that car, anyway?) Having Dad’s Buick at my disposal, however, was unquestionably an ego-booster. I played the grand host that night precisely as I had intended to do, never getting very personal, always whisking my lovely but brooding charge away to some new curiosity. I had taken care to feed our acquaintance with such moments from the start, a feat of sensitivity which, again, I can only put down to the genius of love. That evening was pure neutrality, rich in emotional sugar and carbohydrate, void of protein. We didn’t settle anything or even broach anything. We just logged time together. I had intuited that the more our bodies simply occupied the same proximate space, the better I would be able to wrestle with Celine’s demons when they could no longer be avoided.

My good luck also spared me the thought that I might cross paths with Mom and Dad while cruising the town. That particular horror only occurred to me in retrospect, as I lay in bed sleepless and without any ear for reindeer and sleigh bells. In the very deep retrospect of the present, I rather doubt that my parents actually went a-gawking as Celine and I had. More likely, Dad had forced Mom to sit with him through some movie—the sillier the better—or to calm herself in some overheated ice cream parlor. It was probably a Christmas Eve that she would never forget, either.

Celine and I parted very good friends, wishing each other a merry Christmas. I left her at her door, and she didn’t offer me any fruitcake or cookies. I think we both understood that the evening’s "therapy" called for us to stop well short of whatever intensity was just beneath the surface (and in me, of course, was the makings of a volcano). I didn’t even kiss her: I had not yet kissed her once in the four-day eternity that I had known her, and I wasn’t going to chance the first one now. I just held her hand until I couldn’t tell if its heat were more mine or hers.

A major reason that I have difficulty separating the various settings of our trysts, I think, is Christmas Day. There it stands in my memory, impossible, incredible, unique. It shouldn’t even have been in the file. By rights, Celine should have spent the whole day with her family, I with mine. We were just a couple of mainstream bourgeois naïfs: what a daring rupture of convention! One of the oddest things about the occasion, in fact, is that it so clearly turns oddity right back around in my face. I was odd! I had created the occasion, I had willed it against all propriety and common sense. Celine had an excuse to be eccentric—had several excuses: her split family, her recent health problems, her sentimental topsy-turviness over the hateful Richard. What was my excuse? How long had I been floating far adrift from the Standard Deviation Curve?

In fact, Celine had tried to dissuade me from meeting on Christmas Day as I had nosed the Buick back before her apartment the previous evening. The only time she could slip away, she had said, would be mid-afternoon: she had her mother in the morning and Mona in the evening. Maybe, she had said, I shouldn’t chance an exit at such an awkward, observable hour if I was trying to keep our secret. I hadn’t thought of this myself. It made good sense—but I remember being more disturbed that I had so successfully enlisted Celine into keeping our love a secret (her paranoia was contagious: was she, perhaps, ashamed of me?) than that I would have to extract myself from a household swelled in number by two grandparents and probably an aunt’s family. Aunt Martha’s family… well, the conundrum carried the seeds of its resolution. Aunt Martha’s family was enough to give anyone cabin fever, and very plausibly. I would simply arise at three o’clock and announce that I needed some fresh air (or I would sneak away behind the bodies, more likely, and whisper a word to Dad). Then I could walk the six or seven blocks down to a local oasis containing a drug store, a bakery, and a laundromat. I’d meet her in front of the drug store, I had exclaimed triumphantly to Celine—and not without a laugh. On Christmas afternoon, there would be no cars parked before these businesses, nor any snooping eyes of strolling adults and biking kids. (But why did I care about the snoopers? I recall being pinched by that thought, as well.)

Celine’s only objection had then been the weather, which was predicted to turn very cold. Possible snow flurries. She had been sincerely, visibly worried about my getting chilled during my seven-block hike. I had been so delighted by her concern that I don’t think I ever registered its logical content. I had said something like, "You really care, then, don’t you?" and she had answered, with a wounded pout that melted me—whose mere memory could have warmed me through a blizzard, or so I must have thought—"Of course I care!"

If I had nevertheless been the least bit bothered by her protest’s possible lameness ("Is she just afraid to tell me straight out that she doesn’t want to see me?" I kept thinking on Christmas Eve between visions of sugar plums), the next day justified her worries completely. Christmas morning was colder in broad daylight than the previous evenings had been, and with the vengeance of a strong north wind. It was a dry cold: a few flakes of snow milled before our timidly opened drapes, but we saw no accumulation of white upon the tawny dead lawns about us. Traffic moved freely, if rarely. Nothing prevented my grandparents from arriving at their appointed time (and I should say that I genuinely enjoyed talking with them that morning: my love hadn’t reduced me to utter boorishness or indifference where third parties were involved). We opened presents on cue, we had Christmas dinner on cue, Aunt Martha’s mob arrived on cue just when my family felt like dozing off (Grandad actually retreated to my room for a nap: he braved the stairs lest his rest be negated by little feet pitter-pattering to and from the downstairs bathroom)… everything went according to plan. Their plan… and mine, too. At the specified hour minus thirty minutes, I stretched luxuriously—but not ostentatiously—and sidestepped my way around kids playing with missile-launchers, comatose adult males, and women of a certain age murmuring on and on about… well, about subjects like my romance with Celine, probably, if only they had known. That was why I had to keep the lid on. I would decide my own fate and live my own life, thank you very much.

The only snag in my slick escape was Meg. Decorum absolutely demanded that I tell someone where I was going, and I chose her as least likely to impede my progress… whereupon she insisted that she wanted to come, too. She made just enough noise that Mom, who must have been keeping an eagle-eye out from the kitchen on my movements, noticed us at the front door. Her hands folded in her apron, she came staggering toward us across the marbled foyer floor (doing kitchen work in those dress shoes must have been comfortable!) without ever a word, glancing over her shoulder, obviously eager to keep intruders out of whatever family crisis she thought she was immersed in. Her look was more imploring than severe. It made me feel guilty as nothing she could say would have done. I uncorked my well-prepared and ridiculous excuse for plunging into twenty-degree weather, knowing that my not taking a car absolved me of all the most desperate sins, knowing also that it magnified the mystery of my behavior tenfold.

Of course, I instantly forgot about all of these anxieties after pulling the door behind me. I had anticipated delivering myself to my most delicious memories of Celine: holding her tightly to me at the mall, embracing her shivering shoulders in the park, feeling her fingers on mine as she slid out of Dad’s car, hearing her object, "Of course I care!" last night… but the wind, alas, was simply brutal. It knocked everything out of me, all thoughts guilty and giddy, repentant and ecstatic. It reduced me to a walking machine, and a very inadequate one. My toes felt frozen after one block. I was wearing a kind of parka, and the hood provided a little cover for my ears but also chuted gusts down behind my neck. I struggled to arrange the forward collar so that it would cover my mouth and nose. When that effort met with little success, I pulled on my elastic shirt collar and snuggled my chin and face down in it as far as I could. All things considered, I would probably have been all right—seven blocks, after all, is no trek across the Yukon—if I had just not left so early. It was the one point in which I had not adhered to my plan. I couldn’t help myself. At a certain moment, I just had to be off to see Celine.

Add to that the misfortune that Celine was fifteen minutes late (how I reproached her infidelity as I stomped along the concrete walkways before the closed stores: was she, then, not even a little impatient to see me?), and you have the picture of a thoroughly miserable young man. Did I write "miserable", and "misfortune"? What blessed folly, to be twenty-three! Five minutes later, I was the most transported, passionately raptured human being on the face of the planet. Her yellow hatchback came wheeling through the empty lot at a speed which would certainly have drawn attention if any living soul had stood by to watch. She flung open the door before my gloved but frozen fingers could reach the handle. I was instantly beside her—close beside her. Maybe my haste to get in out of the cold had carried me into the passenger seat before she could vacate it, or maybe she was reaching to shut the door behind me. Maybe, too, she was trying to warm me back to life: certainly that, because she babbled some horrified remark about my face being blue and some abject apology about not being able to get her car started over at her mother’s. "They made me park in the street, of course," she whimpered in my ear as she reached inside my parka with both hands and pressed my body to hers. Between my coat’s unwieldy vastness and the gear box’s irritating presence just at her back, we had both sunk into an impossible position. As I gathered her around the waist and dug my heels in to right us, my half-frozen lips slid right across hers. Through the coldness of the Arctic, I felt the coolness of heaven. I kissed her, and then kissed her more times than I can count. Between rounds of measuring the perfection in her lips, her chin, her cheeks, I drew deep, cold breaths through her frosty hair, and I told the mind contained therein, "I love you," enough to match the number of our kisses. I said, "I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you"—not I want to, but I’m going to. I said, "The day I don’t have you any more is the day I stop living." I said, "Nothing that could ever happen to me could ever matter as long as I have you."

After a while—as her face lay half-buried under my parka and the winter stung my right shoulder through the window—I told her that I was going to start putting things in order. I said that, once I’d finished the spring semester’s course work, I could begin writing my thesis in earnest, which would not require me to be on campus regularly. I could even move back here, I said, and just make the trip to the university when I had to see my advisor. I could stay there a night or two in a motel, and I could get books through library loan. Over the summer, as I wrote my thesis, I could look for counseling jobs. I could get it all set up: in just a few months, maybe by Christmas next year, we would be all set up.

I said these things rather than repeating, "I love you," another hundred times because, first of all, they were what sprang to my tongue, and they sprang there from my heart. They were what I really felt. There was no maneuvering involved. To me, describing for Celine my vision of the two of us permanently, stably together—not my vision, but my very realizable design—was a way of repeating, "I love you," with force. Call it bourgeois or crude, if you like. It was at least not naïve: these were things I could do, even though they all demanded great energy. She would have seen that, too: she did see that. Proclaiming that I would have slain a dragon for her would have been empty bombast, a stain of dishonest excess: revealing to her how I would muscle a space for us in the adult world was an actual step into the line of fire. And as for bourgeois, and crude, is it less of these to want a woman’s body and tell her lies leading to its capture, or more? If it is bourgeois to lie for money, is it less so to lie for carnal relief? The joy I felt in kissing Celine and holding her that day was as much spirit as body. It was one part now, and one part forever: one part exploring the crease that bisected her lower lip, and one part caressing a sunbeam. I could easily cover my tail now before the cynics by reiterating—yet again—that I was twenty-three. Frankly, though, I was far older than the cynics then, and I hope I have not regressed.

The leaden lining of this silver cloud was that I took sick that night. The two women who most ruled my life, and whom I was terrified of bringing together, had both advised me against my trek through the cold air, and they were both proved right. I probably trapped too much moisture in my lungs when I covered my mouth with my shirt again for the trip back home (for I would not let Celine drop me off even within a couple of blocks: I think this foolish stunt was improvised for her eyes as some kind of medieval sacrifice, like wearing a hair shirt or walking barefoot up a mountain). Or maybe my body had finally just been taxed too far by missed sleep, curtailed meals, and hyperventilating anticipation. I wanted to fight against the despicable weakness of the flesh, of course, but my rattling cough soon convinced me that I would have to yield in this particular struggle. My mother seemed strangely pacified in her grim concern. Her silent frown was a combination of, "I told you so," and, "Now you’ll have to stay home."

As severe as was my own disappointment, I discovered that it, too, was tinged with peace. The last few days had been like a race, me against my shadow—my love of Celine, my invincible need to have her, against that other Richard who soiled and caricatured all our touches and kind words. (Or was it, perhaps, myself that I was running against—that other Anthony whom two princesses had cruelly snubbed in college and whom the girls at grad school regarded as fit fun for a dull weekend?) I had never been a moment without the fear of failure in the back of my mind, the fear of having pressed too hard always equaled by that of not pressing hard enough. Now I was off the hook, for a day or two. I was sick. There was nothing I could do but loll around in bed. For the next several dozen hours, I was allowed the luxury of reveling in a great race finally won.

My one poisonous anxiety upon waking up with a chill and a cough was that I might not be able to get word to Celine before evening. I now knew where she worked and could look up the number… but what if she had taken the day off, or were unavailable? And when would I be able to get at a phone unnoticed? (There were two in our house, but neither occupied what you would call a private position: on the contrary, the jacks seemed to have been strategically positioned to permit eavesdropping from four or five directions at once.) The latter problem quickly solved itself. My mother, satisfied that I was hors de combat, took off with Dad early in the morning to return several gifts of clothing that didn’t fit (probably at that same mall where I had met Celine). Roger was sleeping till noon these days after his grueling nights of watching whatever movies The Late Show found to throw at him. With similar predictability, Meg would burst from her room at about nine-thirty, make a fifteen-second pass through the kitchen (I have no idea what she imbibed in transit: I could never turn my head fast enough), and vanish through the garage door in a jingle of keys. The field was mine, then, by ten o’clock. I could stump miserably, robed and slippered, to the upstairs phone in full confidence that my privacy would not be invaded.

It was Celine, in fact, who answered the number I dialed. "Images Unlimited," her voice chirped through the receiver, "how may I help you?" My own voice was so convincing in its raspy morbidity that merely identifying myself was a greater challenge than explaining my business. "Richard!" she finally exclaimed in hushed excitement. "I told you you shouldn’t have come out yesterday!… I’m glad you did, too, but… no. Yes. Positively, you need to stay in today. And tomorrow. As long as it takes…. Me, too."

Those were the highlights. I ascribed the terseness to her being in a room full of other employees, or perhaps clients whose names she didn’t even know. Certainly the concern in her whispers sounded genuine. The "me, too" was in response to my parting, "I love you"—and it was delivered with feeling, even though it was not verbally embellished. What could you expect in those circumstances? I would have been far more uncomfortable if she had advertised effusions in front of strangers. Celine wasn’t like that: whatever expression of emotion you got from her was the real thing, and couldn’t be appraised on the basis of how much noise it made. At that moment, I had absolutely no doubt that she loved me… nor do I now. Maybe what I should write is that I hung up without any inkling that another big bump lay just around the corner. I saw only smooth coasting through infinite fields in full blossom.

It actually did take me two days in bed—two evenings without Celine—to recuperate tolerably from my hacking cough. I’m seeking a seam somewhere in my story now to break off the chapter, for what was about to happen definitely began a new chapter in my life, even if it was temporally still attached to the Christmas holidays. I prefer to leave those first days bundled in bright foil and bound with a golden ribbon, just as I shall set them apart in these pages. For there were moments when being with Celine was pure heaven. The other moments cast a cold, dark shadow over these, but did not stain them: they always remained the happiest days of my life—the most blessed, holy days—despite their being stockaded in depression and paranoia. Even when I realized that, in some grotesque fashion, they caused the other days—that extreme happiness somehow threw Celine into a panic, so that she would crush her head on the pavement rather than wait for the sky to fall on her—I will never be able to view the good days as anything other than my making true contact with the true Celine. She loved me as much as she possibly could. If she perhaps would not have managed much more than that "me, too" even in complete privacy, the "me, too" was still a triumphant assertion above the terrifying voices of her demons.

There were two interesting encounters in my bedroom over the next two days (they may have come in the same afternoon: I honestly don’t remember). My mother had removed the tray of soup and crackers which she’d served me and had come back to see if I needed anything else. Of course, I’d felt a lot worse than this at college on occasions and had no one to wait on me hand and foot, so I was sensitive to her attentions. I never wanted to hurt her at any stage of this affair—far from it. But there wasn’t much I could do to keep her from hurting herself. As she retreated from my room the second time, she hung back and dealt me a long look which electrified me. I had seen that face, just days ago—but not on her. The haunting, dark-eyed stare, searching and searching for a lighter corridor among thick clouds… at last it came to me. The mall, out in front of the jeweler’s shop—just before I met Celine. My own reflection in the display window. I remembered how, as a child, I had often heard it said that I looked more like her than any of the other children. It was a compliment, for she was a handsome woman.

"You do know," she finally said at an impressive crawl, "that Beverly Brady isn’t the same girl she once was…."

I was astonished. I think my lips started to frame a gigantic Who? when the name suddenly conjured up certain very sad associations in me—certain feelings which had once made me weep. I regrouped, and came back with a question like, "Did something happen to Beverly?"

"Yes, she… but I thought you knew this, Anthony! You were the one that first told me, about three summers ago."

"Oh, that. I thought you meant she’d been in a car wreck, or something. A drunken car wreck," I couldn’t help adding in cruel jest.

I had now astonished her, in turn. I think it was the jest that dumbfounded her, for she had imagined herself to be charting a course through very delicate waters. She began to work her wedding ring around and around with the fingers of her right hand, as she always did when she was extremely perplexed. "But even though she’s back home now," she said still more slowly—almost in a drone, "and even though she may appear to have all the pieces back together again… you should know that appearances can be deceiving. To protect yourself, you should know. I was talking to Mrs. Lambert…."

At this point, her voice trailed into nothing. She must have been waiting for some sign of agitation on my face, or perhaps of irritation. Instead, I think I must have looked faintly bored. I pitied Beverly Brady as I pity Dido of Carthage, but the one was no more real to me then than the other.

"So you haven’t seen Beverly?" she very nearly whispered.

I sighed and leaned meditatively back on my pillow. "About a week after senior prom was the last time I was alone with Beverly, and the last time I saw her at all must have been the day I graduated from high school."

Obviously, Mom had imagined that she had put all the pieces together. I should have shown some mercy on her, no doubt; but instead, I could only keep picturing what mincemeat she would make of Celine if she had now decided that I needed protecting from Beverly—Beverly, the good girl whom she herself had pushed me toward all those years ago. I was probably also slightly alarmed that, ludicrous though her error was, she had found her way into the right ballpark. In fact, her intuition about such things could be unnerving. That I had scored a small victory over it, therefore, gave rise to a wicked little smirk on my face as the door closed. I’m not proud of that smirk… but as a middle-aged adult now, I can say that she had left me no exits where I wouldn’t soil my knees or elbows. Parents who want their children to keep clean consciences should not paint them into moral corners.

Either later that afternoon or some time during the following day’s, my sister Meg also blessed me with a visit. She came right to the point (as she always did when she intended the point to be reached at all). Cynthia Cooley (or some such initiate of her set) insisted that I was in Danforth’s Deli a few days before Christmas with "this beautiful, beautiful girl". And then Meg gazed upon me as if I were Mick Jagger. If she had held a piece of paper in her clasped hands, I would have offered my autograph.

Immediately I recalled the college incident when my cousin had sworn up and down before my grandmother that I had been sighted in some swinging dive a few nights earlier. This confrontation was part of our family mythology now, thanks largely to me: I had been deeply offended at the time, and I made sure all on my side of the family knew it. I could easily have played that card heavily upon Meg’s eye-witness. I could have lifted my brows and said, "Hmm, here we go again with these sensational sightings of your brother being hip in public places." Frankly, though, I felt far too proud to be vexed, or even alarmed. The praise which Meg lavished upon my mysterious companion’s unearthly aura was manna to me. I simply smiled and waited for her to dish out more.

"Is she really beautiful? Cynthia thinks everyone’s beautiful who’s not overweight… but she said really, really beautiful. That’s why you’ve been going out every night, isn’t it? Are you going to marry her?"

And then she got to the point of her point. "What will you give me if I don’t tell Mom? Can I have another charm to go on my bracelet?"

A thought seized me, and I started to laugh. I laughed some more—I laughed so hard that I careered headlong into a violent fit of coughing. And then I laughed some more. What if Meg told Mom? What if she told her that I was courting the most exquisite girl on earth? It wouldn’t have come from me, so Mom would harbor no illusions about my soliciting her advice or approval. (My reluctance to invite her judgment of Celine was surely at the heart of my not breathing a word to her: I knew that both discovery and judgment would be bound to happen eventually.) Maybe this hot scoop from the deli would set some of Mom’s worries to rest, at any rate. But it would also torment her with new ones. She would be eaten up by the desire to know more. All in all, it would be a zero-sum gambit: the losses would match the gains. And since it wasn’t worth encouraging, the best answer was no answer. Say nothing. I well knew, having served years of apprenticeship as a big brother, that teenaged girls observe some unwritten law against divulging anything to a parent unless they can extract hard cash or clear profit from it.

"Close the door on your way out," I croaked weakly as I nestled back under my blankets. "I feel a swoon coming on."

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