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By Root 15409 0

my face afloat in a puddle of sunlight, and I reached with an instinctive twitch for Sophie’s arm, hair, breast, something. The Reverend Entwistle was, to put it with exactitude, ready for another fuck. This matutinal grope, the somnolent reaching out, was a Pavlovian reflex which I would experience often in later years. But Sophie was gone. Gone! Her absence, after the most complete (or perhaps I should say only) propinquity of flesh in my life, was spooky, almost palpable, and I drowsily realized it had partly to do with the smell of her, which remained like a vapor in the air: a musky genital odor, still provocative, still lascivious. In my waking daze I glanced down amid the landscape of tangled bedclothes, unable to believe that after all of its happy, exhausting toil my member still stood valiantly upright, serving as a tentpost to the worn and tacky sheet. Then I was washed by an awful panic, aware from the slant of the mirror that Sophie was not in the bathroom and therefore not in the room at all. Just as I leaped from the bed the headache of a hangover smote my skull like a mallet, and during my struggle with my trousers I was seized by further panic, or I should say, dread: the bell tolled outside and I counted the strokes—it was noon! My yells over the decrepit telephone brought no response. Half clothed, murmuring to myself curses, recriminations, filled with auguries of foul tidings, I burst out of the room and galloped down the fire stairs to the lobby with its single Negro bellboy pushing a mop, its potted rubber plants and rump-sprung armchairs and overflowing spittoons. There the old codger who had first greeted me drowsed behind the desk, mooning over the waiting room’s midday desuetude. At the sight of me he came alert, and proceeded to unfold what was simply the worst news I had ever heard.

“She came down real early, Reverend,” he said, “so early she had to wake me up.” He looked at the bellboy. “What time you reckon it was, Jackson?"

“Hit must have been aroun’ six.”

“Yes, it was about six o’clock. Just dawn. She looked like she was in a real state, Reverend.” His pause seemed a little apologetic. “I mean, well, I think she’d had several beers. Her hair was every whichaway. Anyway, she got on the phone here, long-distance to Brooklyn, New York. I couldn’t help overhearing. She was talkin’ to someone—a man, I guess. She began to cry a lot and told him she was leavin’ here right away. Kept callin’ to him—she was real upset, Reverend. Mason. Jason. Something like that.”

“Nathan,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice. “Nathan! Oh, Jesus Christ...”

Sympathy and concern—an emotional amalgam which suddenly appeared to me rather Southern and old-fashioned—welled up in the old clerk’s eyes. “Yes—Nathan. I didn’t know what to do, Reverend,” he explained. “She went on upstairs and then she came down with her bag and Jackson here took her over to Union Station. She looked awfully upset and I thought of you, and wondered... I thought of calling you on the phone but it was so early. And anyway, I didn’t want to butt in. I mean, it wasn’t my business.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” I kept hearing myself mutter, half aware of the questioning look on the face of the old man, who as a member of the Second Baptist Church of Washington was doubtless unprepared for such impiety from a preacher.

Jackson took me back upstairs in the aged elevator, against whose curlicued cast-iron, unfriendly wall I leaned with my eyes closed in a state of stupefaction, unable to believe any of this or, even more intransigently, to accept it. Surely, I thought, Sophie would be lying in bed when I returned, the golden hair shining in a rectangle of sunshine, the nimble loving hands outstretched, beckoning me to renewed delight...

Instead, tucked against the mirror above the lavatory in the bathroom, there was a note. Scrawled in pencil, it was testimony indeed to the imperfect command of written English of which Sophie had so recently lamented to me, but also to the influence of German, which she had learned from her father so