once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.
"Thank God there's a man in my bed," Lois said sleepily.
"Thank God it's me," Ralph replied, and she laughed.
"Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin"
"Nope. I'm sure they'll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up." The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind-one that had probably been waiting there all along.
"Lois?"
"Mmmmm?"
In his mind's eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world's cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
"Do you think we'll sleep through?" he asked her.
"Yes," she said unhesitatingly. "I think we'll sleep just fine."
A moment later, Lois was doing just that.
Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.
The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again-like the world's biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world's biggest pop-bottle-and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.
Except there was something better-one thing, at least-and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.
Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best, Ralph thought.
The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names-peace, serenity, fulfillment-but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are krown but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.
When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn't hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o'clock in the morning. They slept-sometimes apart but mostly together-until just past seven o'clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.
Lois made them breakfast at sunset-splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind-to create that sensation of blink, He couldn't do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.
"Just as well, she said, bringing their plates to the table.