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By Root 12333 0

seriously to wonder if I had not made a grave mistake in coming to Brooklyn. It really was not my element, after all. There was something subtly and inexplicably wrong, and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said that Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations. I was still shaken by that unmerciful, lascivious dream. By their very nature dreams are, of course, difficult of access through memory, but a few are forever imprinted on the brain. With me the most memorable of dreams, the ones that have achieved that haunting reality so intense as to be seemingly bound up in the metaphysical, have dealt with either sex or death. Thus Maria Hunt. No dream had produced in me that lasting reverberation since the morning nearly eight years before, soon after my mother’s burial, when, struggling up from the seaweed-depths of a nightmare, I dreamed I peered out the window of the room at home in which I was still sleeping and caught sight of the open coffin down in the windswept, drenched garden, then saw my mother’s shrunken, cancer-ravaged face twist toward me in the satin vault and gaze at me beseechingly through eyes filmed over with indescribable torture.

I turned back toward the house. I thought I would go and sit down and reply to my father’s letter. I wanted to ask him to tell me in greater detail the circumstances of Maria’s death—probably not knowing at the time, however, that my subconscious was already beginning to grapple with that death as the germinal idea for the novel so lamentably hanging fire on my writing table. But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence. But I must confess that at first, certainly one of them was her distant but real resemblance to Maria Hunt. And what is still ineffaceable about my first glimpse of her is not simply the lovely simulacrum she seemed to me of the dead girl but the despair on her face worn as Maria surely must have worn it, along with the premonitory, grieving shadows of someone hurtling headlong toward death.

At the house Sophie and Nathan were embroiled in combat just outside the door of my room. I heard their voices clear on the summer night, and saw them battling in the hallway as I walked up the front steps.

“Don’t give me any of that, you hear,” I heard him yell.

“You’re a liar! You’re a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!”

“You’re a cunt too,” I heard her throw back at him. “Yes, you’re a cunt, I think.” Her tone lacked aggressiveness.

“I am not a cunt,” he roared. “I can’t be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don’t you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you’ll ever get a chance.”

“You called me that!”

“But that’s what you are, you moron—a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!” he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. “Let me out of here before I murder you—you whore! You were born a whore and you’ll die a whore!”

“Nathan, listen...” I heard her plead. And now as I approached closer to the front door I saw the two of them pressed together, defined in obscure relief against the pink hallway where a dangling forty-watt lightbulb, nearly engulfed by a cloud of fluttering moths, cast its palsied chiaroscuro. Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence.