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By Root 12271 0

Hunt, with whom I lay tangled on a sandy beach of the Chesapeake Bay at high noon in summertime; in my fancy her frantic eyes rolled up beneath the lids and she chewed through the lobe of my ear. Imagine, I thought, imagine—I was possessing the heroine of my own novel! I was able to extend the ecstasy a long time with Maria; we were still going at it like minks when my father with a primitive strangled sound aborted a snore, sprang up in his bed, then padded off to the bathroom. I waited with a blank brain until finally he returned to bed and began to snore again. And then with desire that was hopeless and tumultuous like ocean breakers of grief I found myself making ravenous love to Sophie. And of course it was she I had wanted all along. It was astounding. For so boyishly idealized and ruinously romantic had been my longing for Sophie all summer that, in truth, I had never really allowed a fully contoured, many-dimensioned, vividly tinted fantasy of sex with her invade or bother, much less take command of, my mind. Now while despair over her loss encircled my throat like hands, I understood for the first time how hopeless was my love for her, and also how immeasurably huge was my lust. With a groan that was loud enough to jar my father from his tormented sleep—a groan that I’m sure sounded inconsolable—I embraced my phantom Sophie, came in an unstoppered deluge, and while coming called out her beloved name. In the shadows, then, my father stirred. I felt his hand reach out to touch me. “You all right, son?” he said in a troubled voice.

Feigning drowsiness, I murmured something intentionally unintelligible. But both of us were awake.

The concern in his voice turned to amusement. “You hollered ‘soapy,’ ” he said. “Crazy nightmare. You must have been caught in a bath.”

“I don’t know what I was doing,” I lied.

He was silent for a while. The electric fan droned on, penetrated intermittently by the city’s restless night sounds. Finally he said, “Something’s bothering you. I can tell that. Do you want to let me know what it is? Maybe I can help some. Is it a girl—a woman, that is?”

“Yes,” I said after a bit, “a woman.”

“Do you want to tell me about it? I’ve had my troubles in that sphere.”

It helped some to tell him, even though my account was vague and sketchy: a nameless Polish refugee, a few years older, beautiful in a way I could not express, a victim of the war. I alluded dimly to Auschwitz but said nothing about Nathan. I had loved her briefly, I went on, but for various reasons the situation had been impossible. I skimmed over the details: her Polish childhood, her coming to Brooklyn, her job, her lingering disability. She had simply disappeared one day, I told him, and I had no expectation of her returning. I said nothing for a moment, then added in a stoical voice, “I guess I’ll manage to get over it after a while.” I made it clear that I wanted to change the subject. Talking of Sophie had begun to twist my gut into spasms of pain again, waves of fearful cramps.

My father muttered a few conventionally sympathetic words, then fell silent. “How’s your work coming along?” he said at last. I had side-stepped the subject before. “How’s that book doing?”

I felt my stomach begin to relax. “It’s been going really well,” I said, “I’ve been able to work well out there in Brooklyn. At least until this business with this woman came up, I mean this breakup. It’s brought everything pretty much to a dead stop, pretty much to a standstill.” This, of course, was an understatement. It was with sickening dread that I faced the possibility of returning to Yetta Zimmerman’s, there to try to resume work in a suffocating vacuum without Sophie or Nathan, scribbling away in a place that was a grim echo chamber of memories of shared good times, all vanished now. “I guess I’ll get started again pretty soon,” I added halfheartedly. I felt our conversation beginning to wind down.

My father yawned. “Well, if you really want to get started,” he murmured in a sleep-thick voice, “that old farm down in Southampton is waiting for you. I know