Be then of good cheer on this Our Lord’s day, beloved, and spin no snares in which to catch yourselves, nor allow yourselves the self-indulgent sin of misery, and make no false distinctions between ends and beginnings, but go onward, ever searching, to new ecstasies, to new communions, to new worlds, and give no space in your soul to fear, but yield yourself up to the Peace of Christ and await that which must come. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Now comes a dark equinox out of its proper moment. The bleached moon glimmers like a wretched old skull. The leaves shrivel and fall. The fires die down. The dove, wearying, flutters to earth. Darkness spreads. Everything blows away. The purple blood falters in the narrowing veins; the chill impinges on the straining heart; the soul dwindles; even the feet become untrustworthy. Words fail. Our guides admit they are lost. That which has been solid grows transparent. Things pass away. Colors fade. This is a gray time, and I fear it will be grayer still, one of these days. Tenants of the house, thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

When Toni moved out of my place on 114th Street I waited two days before I did anything. I assumed she would come back when she calmed down; I figured she’d call, contrite, from some friend’s house and say she was sorry she panicked and would I come get her in a cab. Also, in those two days I was in no shape to take any sort of action, because I was still suffering the aftereffects of my vicarious trip; I felt as though someone had seized my head and pulled on it, stretching my neck like a rubber band, letting it finally snap back into place with a sharp thwock! that addled my brains. I spent those two days in bed, dozing mostly, occasionally reading, and rushing madly out into the hall every time the telephone rang.

But she didn’t come back and she didn’t call, and on the Tuesday after the acid trip I started searching for her. I phoned her office first. Teddy, her boss, a bland sweet scholarly man, very gentle, very gay. No, she hadn’t been to work this week. No, she hadn’t been in touch at all. Was it urgent? Would I like to have her home number? “I’m calling from her home number,” I said. “She isn’t here and I don’t know where she’s gone. This is David Selig, Teddy.” “Oh,” he said. Very faintly, with great compassion. “Oh.” And I said, “If she happens to call in, will you tell her to get in touch with me?” Next I started to phone her friends, those whose numbers I could find: Alice, Doris, Helen, Pam, Grace. Most of them, I knew, didn’t like me. I didn’t have to be telepathic to realize that. They thought she was throwing herself away on me, wasting her life with a man without career, prospects, money, ambition, talent, or looks. All five of them told me they hadn’t heard from her. Doris, Helen, and Pam sounded sincere. The other two, it seemed to me, were lying. I took a taxi over to Alice’s place in the Village and shot a probe upward, zam! nine stories into her head, and I learned a lot of things about Alice that I hadn’t really wanted to know, but I didn’t find out where Toni was. I felt dirty about spying and didn’t probe Grace. Instead I called my employer, the writer, whose book Toni was editing, and asked if he’d seen her. Not in weeks, he told me, all ice. Dead end. The trail had run out.

I dithered on Wednesday, wondering what to do, and finally, melodramatically, called the police. Gave a bored desk sergeant her description: tall, thin, long dark hair, brown eyes. No bodies found in Central Park lately? In subway trash cans? The basements of Amsterdam Avenue tenements? No. No. No. Look, buddy, if we hear anything we’ll let you know, but it don’t sound serious to me. So much for the police. Restless, hopelessly strung out, I walked down to the Great Shanghai for a miserable half-eaten dinner, good food gone to waste. (Children are starving in Europe, Duv. Eat. Eat.) Afterwards, sitting around over the sad scattered remnants of my shrimp with sizzling rice and feeling myself drop deep into bereavement, I scored a cheap pickup in a manner I’ve always despised: I scanned the various single girls in the big restaurant, of whom there were numerous, looking for one who was lonely, thwarted, vulnerable, sexually permissive, and in generally urgent need of ego reinforcement. It’s no trick getting laid if you have a sure way of knowing who’s available, but there’s not much sport in the chase. She was, this fish in the barrel, a passably attractive married lady in her mid-20’s, childless, whose husband, a Columbia instructor, evidently had more interest in his doctoral thesis than in her. He spent every night immured in the stacks of Butler Library doing research, creeping home late, exhausted, irritable, and generally impotent. I took her to my room, couldn’t get it up either — that bothered her; she assumed it was a sign of rejection — and spent two tense hours listening to her life story. Ultimately I managed to screw her, and I came almost instantly. Not my finest hour. When I returned from walking her home — 110th and Riverside Drive — the phone was ringing. Pam. “I’ve heard from Toni,” she said, and suddenly I was slimy with guilt over my sleazy consolatory infidelity. “She’s staying with Bob Larkin at his place over on East 83rd Street.”

Jealousy, despair, humiliation, agony.

“Bob who?”

“Larkin. He’s that high-bracket interior decorator she always talks about.”

“Not to me.”

“One of Toni’s oldest friends. They’re very close. I think he used to date her when she was in high school.” A long pause. Then Pam chuckled warmly into my numb silence. “Oh, relax, relax, David! He’s gay! He’s just a kind of father-confessor for her. She goes to him when there’s trouble.”

“I see.”

“You two have broken up, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure. I suppose we have. I don’t know.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” This from Pam, who I had always thought regarded me as a destructive influence of whom Toni was well advised to be quit.

“Just give me his phone number,” I said.

I phoned. It rang and rang and rang. At last Bob Larkin picked up. Gay, all right, a sweet tenor voice complete with lisp, not very different from the voice of Teddy-at-work. Who teaches them to speak with the homo accent? I asked, “Is Toni there?” A guarded response: “Who’s calling, please?” I told him. He asked me to wait, and a minute or so passed while he conferred with her, hand over the mouthpiece. At last he came back and said Toni was there, yes, but she was very tired and resting and didn’t want to talk to me right now. ‘It’s urgent,” I said. “Please tell her it’s urgent. Another muffled conference. Same reply. He suggested vaguely that I call back in two or three days. I started to wheedle, to whine, to beg. In the middle of that unheroic performance the phone abruptly changed hands and Toni said to me, “Why did you call?”

“That ought to be obvious. I want you to come back.”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t say I won’t. She said I can’t.

I said, “Would you like to tell me why?”

“Not really.”

“You didn’t even leave a note. Not a word of explanation. You ran out so fast.”

“I’m sorry, David.”

“It was something you saw in me while you were tripping, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “It’s over.”

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“I do.”

I do. That was like the sound of a great gate clanging shut in my face. But I wasn’t going to let her throw home the bolts just yet. I told her she had left some of her things in my room, some books, some clothing. A lie: she had made a clean sweep. But I can be persuasive when I’m cornered, and she began to think it might be true. I offered to bring the stuff over right now. She didn’t want me to come. She preferred never to see me again, she told me. Less painful all around, that way. But her voice lacked conviction; it was higher in pitch and much more nasal than it was when she spoke with sincerity. I knew she still loved me, more or less; even after a forest fire, some of the burned snags live on, and green new shoots spring from them. So I told myself. Fool that I was. In any case she couldn’t entirely turn me away. Just as she had been unable to refrain from picking up the telephone, now she found it impossible to refuse me access to her. Talking very fast, I bludgeoned her into yielding. All right, she said. Come over. Come over. But you’re wasting your time.