They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we’d slaved, smeared by that old man’s stupid carping.
“He’s just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. “And he’s sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”
“How do you know?”
“The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”
“Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.
“Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”
I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.
The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a lustrous fan.
Which brings me to the end of the month.
* * *
The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we’d bring a plate of cat’s meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it’s had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment. But that night the cat didn’t come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, “This is the happiest time of my whole life.”
He turned and kissed me, and he said, “Thank you.”
I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.
“I don’t even mind that you don’t love me,” I said. “I’m so happy.”
“But I do, of course, love you.”
“Because you can make me happy.”
“Yes.”
“Which means I’m no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it’s not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn’t hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.
I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.
“I love you,” I said. “Let’s go. out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”
“If you’re sure you want to spend money on it.”
“Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I’m back to a thousand.”
“I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food.”
“You do?”
“Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Most reprehensible.”
Our positions were reversed for an instant, our dialogue, our speech mannerisms. He was playing, but I had still learned.
“You’ve changed me,” I said. “Oh thank God you have.”
We went in, and I washed my hair. I’d hardly seen it since we’d started work. It had been bound up in scarves as I painted and glued things, and it was thick with dry shampoos because it takes so long to dry without a dryer when I wash it. But tonight I was lavish with the wall heater. As my hair began to dry before the painted mirror, I saw emerge among those blue hills and that tigerish foliage, a mane of light, the color of blond ash.
My mother had got something wrong. Or had she? Or the machines, perhaps, the coloressence charting. Or had my natural hair color simply altered as I grew older? Yes, that must be it, because— “Oh,” I said, touching my hair, “it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in a way it never was.”
“And that,” he said, “is your own.”
I put on one of my oldest dresses, which Egyptia once gave me, and which had been hers. Demeta hadn’t thought it suited me, and neither had I, but I’d kept it for the material, which was strange, changing from white to blue to turquoise, depending on how light struck. And tonight it did suit me, and I dared to put on the peacock jacket and buttoned it, and it fit. I was slim. I was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I wept.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”
“Yes you do,” he said. He held me until I began to laugh instead. “Poor Demeta,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“If I told you,” he said, “I was hungry, you wouldn’t believe me?”
“No. Tell me why my mother is supposed to be ‘Poor Demeta.’”
“I think you know. Look at your hair, and ask yourself if you do.”
But I was feverish and elated. I thrust thought aside and hurried us out of the building, through the streets which now I knew quite well, up onto the only partly moving escalator on South Arbor, to the flyer platform.
We sailed into the center of the city. I wasn’t afraid of meeting anyone. Part of me, perhaps, almost wanted to.
Who, after all, would know me? (And I forgot what he had said.) As we sat in Hunger And Answer, eating charcoaled steak and tiny little roast potatoes shaped like stars, I thought: Now I can phone them, all of them. Egyptia, Clovis. My mother. The wine was red. It matched his hair. And like his own glamour, the wine didn’t interest him very much.
We walked home all across the city.