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One night while he is letting his purged body drift in listening Jill comes and bends over and caresses him. He turns his head to kiss her thigh and she is gone. But she has wakened him; it was her presence, and through this rip in her death a thousand details are loosed; tendrils of hair, twists of expression, her frail voice quavering into pitch as she strummed. The minor details of her person that slightly repelled him, the hairlines between her teeth, her doughy legs, the apple smoothness of her valentine bottom, the something prim and above-it-all about her flaky-dry mouth, the unwashed white dress she kept wearing, now return and become the body of his memory. Times return when she merged on the bed with moonlight, her young body just begi
"That bitch," Janice said. "How many times did you screw her?"
"Three times," Charlie said. "That ended it. It's one of her rules."
This ghost of conversation haunts Janice this night she ca
She asked, "How could you do that to me?"
He shrugged. "I didn't do it to you. I did it to her. I screwed her."
"Why? Why?"
"Why not? Relax. It wasn't that great. She was cute as hell at lunch, but as soon as we got into bed her thermostat switched off. Like handling white rubber."
"Oh, Charlie. Talk to me, Charlie. Tell me why."
"Don't lean on me, tiger."
She had made him make love to her. She had done everything for him. She had worshipped him, she had wanted to cry out her sorrow that there wasn't more she could do, that bodies were so limited. Though she had extracted her lover's semen from him, she failed to extract testimony that his sense of their love was as absolute as her own. Terribly – complainingly, preeningly – she had said, "You know I've given up the world for you."
He had sighed, "You can get it back."
"I've destroyed my husband. He's in all the newspapers."
"He can take it. He's a showboat."
"I've dishonored my parents."
He had turned his back. With Harry it had been usually she who turned her back. Charlie is hard to snuggle against, too broad; it is like clinging to a rock slippery with hair. He had, for him, apologized: "Tiger, I'm bushed. I've felt rotten all day."
"Rotten how?"
"Deep down rotten. Shaky rotten."
And feeling him slip away from her into sleep had so enraged her she had hurled herself naked from bed, shrieked at him the words he had taught her in love, knocked a dead great-aunt from a bureau top, a
She awakes. The curtains at the window are silver. The moon is a cold stone above Mt. Judge. The bed is not her bed, then she remembers it has been her bed since, when? July it was. For some reason she sleeps with Charlie on her left; Harry was always on her right. The luminous hands of the electric clock by Charlie's bedside put the time at after two. Charlie is lying face up in the moonlight. She touches his cheek and it is cold. She puts her ear to his mouth and hears no breathing. He is dead. She decides this must be a dream.