Cassandra's feelings about her were not confined to admiration and a desire to please. The two of them walked in silence for a while. The branches threw pale indistinct shadows on the walk.
“I'd like you to spend more time with him,” Cassandra said at length, and Mary could not read the tone in her voice. It was not angry, nor was it kind. It was, if anything, strong but blank, as if she were reciting a set of important, indisputable facts.
“I should,” Mary said. “I will.”
How could someone like this presume to lecture her? Still, she listened.
“I mean it,” Cassandra said. “He should know you better, he may need you someday.”
“Mm-hm.”
“This child leads a less than orthodox life, and believe me, I don't have any illusions about the orthodox. Still. There are limits. I don't want to think of him just bouncing around if anything happens. I don't want him to have to go and live with anyone who seems like a stranger to him.”
Mary felt something. She couldn't name it but it was there, an inner tug, like the lost memory of a dreadful sorrow. There was a chill, an insistent inner tug. Two black women sped past on roller skates, laughing, their wheels setting the pavement abuzz. Cassandra was pale and thin and full of obscure purpose, and Mary touched her arm with her fingertips.
“What is it?” she asked.
Cassandra put her own hand over Mary's. “Nothing. It's exactly what I've just said.”
“Well,” Mary said, and she could think of nothing else to offer. A flock of pigeons flew by, so close Mary believed one of their wings would brush her face, though she didn't flinch. She thought she would welcome the flick of the bird's wing. That wild gentleness, that effortlessly beating life. She almost felt the feathers graze her. Up ahead Jamal bent over to pick up something, a coin or a glittering stone, which he held in his hand and came running to show to Cassandra.
1988/ The most terrible beauty came out at night. In daylight the world was full of facts; you could live in a swarm of errands. At night, late, there was only desire or its absence, after the other stories had been pulled in off the streets. It was Boston—most citizens were dreaming by midnight. During the deeper hours men owned the streets, at least in certain neighborhoods, and for those hours, on streets usually devoted to the most ordinary transactions—a pound of coffee, a haircut, fire and theft insurance—a defiant, muscular beauty was the only virtue.
Will filled his clothes now, he moved without apology. On a cold night in April he kissed his friends good night outside a movie theater and walked toward home. A winter smell, rainwater on bare branches, still hung over Boston, though Easter had come and gone.
On the sidewalk ahead of him, two boys whispered and laughed, shoved one another with the easy familiarity of brothers. They were big and young, underdressed in cheap leather jackets and bright scarves, painfully handsome in their size and their broad, unexceptional faces. By their heedless presence they told the street that sex was not a torment, not a doomed striving of the spirit. Sex was ordinary as grass—what's the big deal? Will tried to be unobtrusive, to watch them without appearing to. He wanted . . . Not them, though he'd gladly have slept with either. It wasn't anything quite so simple as a yearning of the body. He wanted their certainty, the easy motion of them. He wanted whatever they were creating with their jokes and loud laughter, and he wanted what they made for themselves when they ran up the stairs of a brick apartment building, clattering in their boots, going home to bed together or to a party Will wouldn't know about because it was the province of young men like these, confident and affable, brand-new. Will fidgeted with his jacket, adjusted the cuffs. He'd be thirty-five in a little more than a month. He liked his life well enough—he couldn't think of another he'd prefer—but still he felt haunted by absence. Still the years felt featureless, for all their event, and still he waited to inhabit himself. He had no complaints about the details, the hard but satisfying work and the band of good-hearted, interesting friends and the series of affairs that lasted anywhere from three weeks to a year but always turned out to have contained the specifics of their endings right at the start,