“Why do you always have to do this to me? You make me feel so lonely.”

“That comes from you.”

“What do you mean it comes from me? Tonight I wanted to be happy. It’s Christmas Eve. Why do you turn on me? What did I do?”

Silence.

“What did I do?”

He looks at her as if her not knowing were another injury. “Look, let’s just go to sleep now. Let’s just forget it.”

“Forget what?” He says nothing.

“Forget the fact that you turned on me? Forget the fact that you’re punishing me for nothing? Forget the fact that I’m lonely and cold, that it’s Christmas Eve and again you’ve ruined it for me? Is that what you want me to forget?”

“I won’t discuss it.”

“Discuss what? What won’t you discuss?”

“Shut up! I won’t have you screaming in the hotel.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you won’t have me do. I’d like to be treated civilly. I’d like you to at least do me the courtesy of telling me why you’re in such a funk. And don’t look at me that way…”

“What way?”

“As if my not being able to read your mind were my greatest sin. I can’t read your mind. I don’t know why you’re so mad. I can’t intuit your every wish. If that’s what you want in a wife you don’t have it in me.”

“I certainly don’t.”

“Then what is it? Please tell me.”

“I shouldn’t have to.”

“Good God! Do you mean to tell me I’m expected to be a mind reader? Is that the kind of mothering you want?”

“If you had any empathy for me…”

“But I do. My God. you just don’t give me a chance.”

“You tune out. You don’t listen.”

“It was something in the movie, wasn’t it?”

“What, in the movie?”

“The quiz again. Do you have to quiz me like some kind of criminal. Do you have to cross-examine me?… It was the funeral scene… The little boy looking at his dead mother. Something got you there. That was when you got depressed.”

Silence.

“Well, wasn’t it?”

Silence.

“Oh come on, Bennett, you re making me furious. Please tell me. Please.”

(He gives the words singly like little gifts. Like hard little turds.) “What was it about that scene that got me?”

“Don’t quiz me. Tell me!” (She puts her arms around him. He pulls away. She falls to the floor holding onto his pajama leg. It looks less like an embrace than like a rescue scene, she sinking, he reluctantly allowing her to cling to his leg for support.)

“Get up!”

(Crying) “Only if you tell me.”

(He jerks his leg away.) “I’m going to bed.”

(She puts her face to the cold floor.) “Bennett, please don’t do this, please talk to me.”

“I’m too mad.”

“Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

“The more you plead, the colder I feel.”

“Please.”

They are lying in bed thinking. The bolster on her side is wet. She is shivering and sobbing. He seems not to hear. Whenever they roll toward the depression in the center of the bed, he is the first to draw back. This happens repeatedly. The bed is hollowed out like a log canoe.

She likes the warmth and hardness of his back. She would like to put her arms around him. She would like to forget the whole scene, pretend it never happened. When they make love, they’re together for a while. But he won’t. He snatches her hand from his pajama fly. He pushes her away. She rolls back. He moves to his outer edge.

“That’s no solution,” he says.

Listen to the rain falling. Out in the street there are occasional shouts from students coming home drunk. Wet cobblestones. Paris can be so wet. After the movie tonight, they went to Notre Dame. They were packed in between wet wool coats and wet fur coats. Midnight Mass. Umbrella points dripping into their shoes. They couldn’t move backward or forward. A mob of people stuck there, clogging the aisles. Paix dans le monde, said a high, electronically amplified voice. There is nothing worse than the smell of wet fur.

He’s home in Washington Heights. His father has died. He feels nothing. It’s funny that he feels nothing. When people die you are not supposed to feel nothing.

I told you I felt nothing, why do you keep asking? Because I have to know you. You never lost anyone. You never had anyone die. Is that why you hate me? We were on relief. You were on Central Park West when we were on relief. Is that my fault? Do you know that Chinese funeral home on Pell Street? When people die they go back to their own. Racists in death. He never believed in God. He never went to church. They said the prayers in Chinese. And I thought: my God, I don’t understand a word. The coffin was open. That’s important. Otherwise you don’t want to believe in death. Psychologically sound. Seems gruesome, though. Then the relatives came and took the last of our money. The business will provide, they said, but the business folded. I was a junior in high school. I could go to work when I graduated, the welfare lady said. But I thought: then I’ll wind up a waiter. And I can’t even be a waiter in a Chinese restaurant because I don’t know Chinese. I’ll be a tool, I thought, a poor slob. I have to go to college. Meanwhile you were on Central Park West. And you were in Cambridge for weekends. In medical school I was feeding laboratory animals. Christmas night Everyone went out. I was in the lab feeding the goddamn rats.

She is lying beside him very still. She touches herself to prove she’s not dead. She thinks of the first two weeks of her broken leg. She used to masturbate constantly then to convince herself that she could feel something besides pain. Pain was a religion then. A total commitment.

She runs her hands down her belly. Her right forefinger touches the clitoris while the left forefinger goes deep inside her, pretending to be a penis. What does a penis feel, surrounded by those soft, collapsing caves of flesh? Her finger is too small. She puts in two and spreads them. But her nails are too long. They scratch.

What if he wakes up?

Maybe she wants him to wake up and see how lonely she is.

Lonely, lonely, lonely. She moves her fingers to that rhythm, feeling the two inside get creamy and the clitoris get hard and red. Can you feel colors in your finger tips? This is what red feels like. The inner cave feels purple. Royal purple. As if the blood down there were blue.

“Who do you think of when you masturbate?” her German analyst asked. “Who do you sink of?” I sink therefore I am. She thinks of no one really, and of everyone. Of her analyst and of her father. No, not her father. She cannot think of her father. Of a man on a train. A man under the bed. A man with no face. His face is blank. His penis has one eye. It weeps.

She feels the convulsions of the orgasm suck violently around her fingers. Her hand falls to her side and then she sinks into a dead sleep.

She dreams she is back in the apartment where she grew up, but this time it was planned by a dream architect.

The halls leading to three-walled bedrooms meander like ancient river beds and the kitchen pantry is a wind tunnel hung with cabinets too high to reach. The pipes fret like old men gargling; the floorboards breathe. In her bedroom, the frosted doorway glass is full of faces crying their anguish to the moon with O-shaped mouths. A long syllable of moonlight slides forward silvering the floor, then shatters with the sound of breaking glass. The faces in the door are wolfish. Blood stiffens in the corners of their mouths.

The maid’s bathroom has a claw-footed tub where a child can imagine herself drowning. Four brass lanterns hang from the living-room ceiling. It is fathoms high and covered with tarnished gold leaf. Above the living room is a balcony with turned railing posts just wide enough apart for a child to ease through and begin floating through the air. One flight farther up and she is in the studio which smells of turpentine. The ceiling points up like a witch’s hat. A spiked iron chandelier hangs dead center from a black chain. It swings slightly in the wind which hisses between the trapezoidal northern window and the trapezoidal southern window.