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There’s a lot of likker in the world, even Scotch, but I took it and gave a pull, feeling too that it was something special.

She sank down on the couch with an easy motion, vaguely suggestive of a flutter and preening as when a bird touches a bough, and took a sip, and lifted her head as if to let the liquor trickle into her throat. She had drawn one leg up beneath her and the other hung over with the sharp tip of the gray suède pump stretched forward to just touch the floor, with the precision of a dancer. She turned cleanly from the erect waist to look straight at me, twisting the gray cloth of the dress. The firelight defined her small, poised features, one side bright, one side in shadow, and emphasized the slight, famished, haunting hollow beneath the cheekbones (I always figured, after I got old enough to do any kind of figuring, that it was that–the hollow beneath the cheekbone–that got them) and the careful swooping lift of her piled-up hair. Her hair was yellowish, like metal, with gray in it now, but the gray was metallic, too, like spun metal woven and coiled into the yellow. It looked as though that was the way it had been intended from the very first to be, and a damned expensive job. Every detail.

I looked at her and thought: Well, she’s pushing fifty-five but I’ll hand it to her. And suddenly seemed to stretch back forever. But I had to hand it to her.

She kept on looking at me, not saying anything, with that look which always said, “You’ve got something I want, something I need, something I’ve got to have,” and said, too, “I’ve got something for you, I won’t tell you what, not yet, but I’ve got something for you, too,” The hollow in the cheeks: the hungry business. The glittering eyes: the promising business. And both at the same time. It was quite a trick.

I took the last of the drink, and held the glass in my hand. She reached out and took it, still watching me, and reached out to set it on the little table. Then she said, “Oh, Son, you look tired.”

“I’m not,” I said, and felt the stubbornness in me.

“You are,” she said, and took me by the sleeve of the forearm and drew me toward her. I didn’t come at first. I just let her pull the arm. She didn’t pull hard, but she kept on looking straight at me.

I let myself go, and keeled over toward her. I lay on my back, with my head on her lap, the way I had known I would do. She let her left hand lie on my chest, the thumb and forefinger holding, and revolving back and forth, a button on y shirt, and her right hand on my forehead. Her hands were always cool. It was one of the first things I remembered ever knowing.

For a long time she didn’t talk any. She just moved the hand over my eyes and forehead. I had known how it would be, and knew how it had been before and how it would be after. But she had the trick of making a little island right in the middle of time, and of you knowing, which is what time does to you.

Then she said, “You’re tired, Son.”

Well, I wasn’t tired, but I wasn’t not tired, either, and tiredness didn’t have anything to do with the way things were.

Then, after a while, “Are you working hard, Son?”

I said, “So-so, I reckon.”

Then, after another while, “Tan–the man you work for–”

“What about it?” I said. The hand stopped on my forehead, and I knew it was my voice that stopped it.

“Nothing,” she said. “Only you don’t have to work for that man. Theodore could get you a–”

“I don’t want any job Theodore would get for me,” I said, and tried to heave myself up, but have you ever tried to heave yourself up when you’re flat on your back on a deep couched and somebody has a hand on your forehead?

She held her hand firm on my forehead and leaned over and said, “Don’t now, don’t. Theodore is my husband, he’s your stepfather, don’t talk that way, he’d like–”

“Look here,” I said, “I told you I–”

But she said, “Hush, Son, hush,” and put her hand over my eyes, and began to move it again upward over my forehead.

She didn’t say anything else. But she had already said what she had said, and she had to start the island trick all over again.