She went to the mirror to comb her hair.
"I'm not here because I feel sorry for you.
It's because I feel sorry for me."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It doesn't mean," she shrugged.
"It just is—like a poem.
I wanted to see you."
"What's wrong with the zoo?"
"Oh, come off it, Charlie. Don't fence with me. I waited long enough for you to come and get me. I decided to come to you."
"Why?"
"Because there's still time. And I want to spend it with you."
"Is that a song?"
"Charlie, don't laugh at me."
"I'm not laughing.
But I can't afford to spend my time with anyone—there's only enough left for myself."
"I can't believe you want to be completely alone."
"I do."
"We had a little time together before we got out of touch. We had things to talk about, and things to do together.
It didn't last very long but it was something.
Look, we've known this might happen. It was no secret.
I didn't go away, Charlie, I've just been waiting.
You're about at my level again, aren't you?"
I stormed around the apartment.
"But that's crazy.
There's nothing to look forward to.
I don't dare let myself think ahead—only back.
In a few months, weeks, days— who the hell knows?—I'll go back to Warren.
You can't follow me there."
"No," she admitted, "and I probably won't even visit you there.
Once you're in Warren I'll do my best to forget you. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But until you go, there's no reason for either of us to be alone."
Before I could say anything, she kissed me.
I waited, as she sat beside me on the couch, resting her head against my chest, but the panic didn't come.
Alice was a woman, but perhaps now Charlie would understand that she wasn't his mother or his sister.
With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else.
All the barriers were gone.
I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting.
I loved her with more than my body.
I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body.
It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself.
I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else—just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe—beyond the universe—because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being—of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night—and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision.
The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.
This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day.
And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking.
The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other—child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.
But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding.
As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.
And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled.
No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery.
I leaned over and kissed her eyes.