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By Root 6785 0

one hour earlier, heading to the airport. There was only the present moment with Connie, and whereas, before, when they’d fallen through a cosmic fissure into their two-person world, it had happened only at night, in a bedroom or some other contained space, it was now happening in broad daylight, under a citywide haze. He held her in his arms, the cashier’s check resting on her sweaty breastbone, between the damp straps of her top. One of her hands was pressed flat against one of his breasts as if it might give milk. The grown-woman smell of her underarms intoxicated him, he wished it were much stronger, he felt there was no limit to how strongly he wanted her underarms to stink.

“Thank you for fucking somebody else,” he murmured.

“It wasn’t easy for me.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it was very easy in one way. But almost impossible in another. You know that, right?”

“I totally know it.”

“Was it hard for you, too? Whatever you did last year?”

“Actually, no.”

“That’s because you’re a guy. I know what it’s like to be you, Joey. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then everything’s going to be all right.”

And, for the next ten days, everything was. Later, of course, Joey could see that the first, hormone-soaked days after a period of long abstinence were a less than ideal time to be making huge decisions about his future. He could see that, instead of trying to offset the unbearable weight of Connie’s $50,000 gift with something as heavy as a marriage proposal, he should have written out a promissory note with a schedule for payment of interest and principal. He could see that if he’d separated himself from her for even an hour, to take a walk by himself or to talk to Jonathan, he might have achieved some useful clarity and distance. He could see that postcoital decisions were a lot more realistic than precoital ones. In the moment, though, there had been no post-, it had all been pre- upon pre- upon pre-. Their craving for each other cycled on and on through the days and nights like the compressor of Abigail’s hardworking bedroom-window air conditioner. The new dimensions of their pleasure, the sense of adult gravity conferred by their joint business venture and by Connie’s sickness and infidelity, made all their prior pleasures forgettable and childish in comparison. Their pleasure was so great, and their need for it so bottomless, that when it waned even for an hour, on their third morning in the city, Joey reached out to press the nearest button to get more of it. He said, “We should get married.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Connie said. “Do you want to do it now?”

“You mean like today?”

“Yes.”

“I think there’s a waiting period. Some kind of blood test?”

“Well, let’s go do that, then. Do you want to?”

His heart was pounding blood into his loins. “Yes!”

But first they had to have the fuck about the excitement of going to have the blood tests. Then they had to have the fuck about the excitement of finding out they didn’t need to have them. Then they wandered up Sixth Avenue like a couple drunk beyond caring what anybody thought of them, like red-handed murderers, Connie braless and wanton and attracting male stares, Joey in a state of testosterone heedlessness in which, if anybody had challenged him, he would have thrown a punch for the sheer joy of it. He was taking the step that needed to be taken, the step he’d been wanting to take since the first time his parents had said no to him. The fifty-block walk uptown with Connie, in a baking welter of honking cabs and filthy sidewalks, felt as long as his entire life before it.

They went into the first deserted-looking jewelry store they came to on 47th Street and asked for two gold rings that they could take away right now. The jeweler was in full Hasidic regalia—yarmulke, forelocks, phylacteries, black vest, the works. He looked first at Joey, whose white T-shirt was spattered with mustard from a hot dog he’d bolted along the way, and then at Connie, whose face was flaming with heat and with abrasion by Joey’s face. “The two of you are getting married?”

Both