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By Root 12334 0

’s condition had dampened the cruder urgencies of the desire I had continually felt for her, but the fragrance and slope of the bed—seminal, erotic, sagging with ten thousand fornications—and her simple touch and proximity made me stir, squirm, fidget, unable to sleep. I heard a distant bell chime the noon hour. Sophie slept against me with lips apart, her breath faintly odorous of whiskey. The low-cut silk dress she wore had allowed most of one breast to become exposed, causing me such an irresistible hunger to touch it that I did just that, stroking the blue-veined skin at first lightly with my fingertips, then beginning to press and fondle the creamy fullness more elaborately with palm and thumb. The seizure of pure lust which accompanied this tender manipulation was accompanied in turn by a twinge of shame; there was something sneaky, almost necrophiliac in the act; molesting even the epidermal surface of Sophie in the privacy of her drugged slumber—and so I stopped, withdrew my hand.

Still I could not sleep. My brain swam with images, sounds, voices, the past and the future trading places, sometimes commingled: Nathan’s howl of rage, so cruel and mad that I had to thrust it from my thoughts; recently written scenes from my novel, the characters babbling their dialogue in my ear like actors on a stage; my father’s voice on the telephone, generous, welcoming (was the old man not right? shouldn’t I now make the South forever my home?); Sophie on the mossy shore of some imaginary pond or pool deep within the woods beyond “Five Elms’ ” spring fields, her lithe restored body glorious and long-legged in a Lastex bathing suit, our grinning elf of a first-born perched on her knee; that hideous gunshot swarming in my ear; sunsets, abandoned love-crazed midnights, magnanimous dawns, vanished children, triumph, grief, Mozart, rain, September green, repose, death. Love. The distant band, fading away on the “Colonel Bogey March,” made me ache with a hungry nostalgia and I recalled the war years not so long before, when on leave from some camp in Carolina or Virginia, I would lie awake (womanless) in a hotel in this same city—one of the few American cities stalked by the revenants of history—and think of the streets below and how they must have looked only three-quarters of a century ago, in the midst of the most grief-blasted war that ever set brother to murdering brother, when the sidewalks teemed with soldiers in blue and with gamblers and whores, sharp swindlers in stovepipe hats, splashy Zouaves, hustling journalists, businessmen on the make, pretty flirts in flowered hats, shadowy Confederate spies, pickpockets and coffin-makers—these last ever-hurrying to their ceaseless labor, awaiting those tens of thousands of martyrs, mostly boys, who were being slaughtered on the desperate earth south of the Potomac and who lay piled up like cordwood thick in the bloody fields and woods just beyond that sleeping river. It was always strange to me—awesome even—that the cleanly modern capital of Washington, so impersonal and official in its expansive beauty, should be one of the few cities in the nation disturbed by authentic ghosts. The band vanished into the far distance, its brazen diminishing harmony soft, heartbreaking on my hearing like a lullaby. I slept.

When I awoke, Sophie was sitting crouched on the bed on her knees, looking down at me. I had slept like one in a coma, and I could tell from the alteration of light in the room—it had been like twilight even at noon but was now nearly dark—that several hours had passed. How long Sophie had been gazing down I could not tell, of course, but I had the uneasy feeling that it had been for quite a spell; the expression she wore was sweet, speculative, not without humor. There was the same wan haggardness in her face, and beneath her eyes there were dark patches, but she seemed revived and reasonably sober. She appeared to have recovered, at least for the moment, from that awful fit on the train. When I blinked up at her she said, in the exaggerated accent she sometimes affected in fun,