or two. The case was settled out of court and she had won a very large settlement, and now she seemed to battle everything in the same way.
He realized he wished she were dead.
He turned away from her and faced the wall. After a moment he heard and felt his wife shift in the bed and turn toward him. And then he felt her hand on his shoulder, pressing against it as if she were supporting herself.
I’m sorry, she said. I know I’m making things impossible for you. I would stop myself if I could. But I can’t. Something—some kind of self-control—has left me. Of course everything is leaving me, but that has gone first. She turned away from him and began to weep.
His meanness stopped him from turning toward her, holding her. And every second he did not do it made it more difficult to do. And then, suddenly overcome with tenderness and shame, he turned and reached out and pulled her back against his body and held her tightly. After a while she stopped crying and pushed herself back against him. Her body had lost all of its voluptuousness and weight, and so it felt almost like nothing. To make it more real he slid his hand inside her silk underwear and cupped it gently between her legs, feeling the soft warmth there. They both felt him growing hard.
She reached down and moved his hand away.
Sorry, he said.
No, she said. I meant . . . She reached behind her and held his penis in her hand and felt it swelling, like an animal that was alive, and shifted herself closer to him, and fitted herself onto him. She heard him gasp, or sigh, and he held her tighter and fucked in the gentlest way, rocking against her, and moved both his hands onto her breasts, and she felt the somewhat rough skin of his palms encasing them, and he turned his head sideways and laid it against the back of her head so that his mouth was near her ear, and she heard him say, I love you, I love you, I love you, in time to his timid thrusts, and she reached behind and grasped his buttock and pulled him more tightly into her, and rocked back against him, thinking of the golden eggs, the beautiful golden eggs he was planting inside her.
FOUR
The woman left immediately after breakfast to see Brother Emmanuel.
The taxi driver, a woman, wore a man’s fur-collared overcoat atop a flannel nightgown. Her head was studded with metal curlers over which she wore a net beaded with bejeweled butterflies.
Could we make two stops? the woman asked. Could you take me two different places?
Not at once, the driver said.
No! Of course not. I meant take me one place and then wait and then take me to another. I’ll pay you for the time I wait.
The time I wait! All life is waiting.
I want to go to the orphanage. And then to Brother Emmanuel’s. Do you know these places?
Of course, said the driver. I know all places.
Good, said the woman. Then please take me. The orphanage first.
The driver put the car into gear and slowly accelerated. She gripped the steering wheel tightly with both of her hands and leaned her whole body forward, so that her bosom pressed itself against the wheel, and peered intently out at the snow-covered road that tunneled before them. She maintained the same exact slow speed, as if there were a bomb in the car and any acceleration or deceleration would cause it to detonate.
The woman remembered driving with her parents as a child and passing a long line of cars moving very slowly, with their headlights on. She asked why they were driving like that and her father told her it was a funeral cortege and that all the cars were driving to a cemetery to bury a dead body. Wait, he said, and in front of all the cars, the first car in the line will be big and black and look different from any car you’ve ever seen. And he had been right, and for the longest time after that the woman thought her father had called the procession of cars a corsage, and she always thought it was odd that a word could mean two very different things. But she knew that flowers figured in both death and burial and in dances and galas so perhaps there was a link after all.