her mouth and kissed her through it, an exciting, sexy kiss that at once relinquished and asserted.
“Soon!”
“Ah, you!” she said again. “I can’t seem to get enough of you tonight.” Then she removed herself from him, without moving at all. “How are you going to get past him?”
“That’s my problem. When are you going to move out of this old ladies’ home?”
“I’ve paid a week in advance.”
“Don’t stay any longer. Let’s start looking for some other place tomorrow.”
“All right. But you’ve got to go now. You’ve got to go
go
GO! My name will be mud if they catch you here.”
“What can they do?”
“I don’t want to find out. Write my father, maybe.” She took him by the ears and wagged his head back and forth, pecking him with kisses that hit and missed. “You!” she said a third time. “Get out of here! You’re driving me wild.”
He yielded. He had always been going to yield. He knew the rules. But as they went through five more minutes of panting good-nights, as he finally broke away and sneaked down the stairs and with ridiculous ease caught the elevator man dozing on his stool, and slipped out the side entrance unseen, he was full of the awed realization that the rules were about to change. One of these days, the next time the opportunity presented itself, he would press her again, and the answer would be yes. It was yes tonight. There was no way to think around a fact like that. All he could do, driving home, was visualize that coming event in a dozen ways, each softer and more secret than the last.
So there she was, retrieved by his computer along with all the rest of it. The old way of thinking of the memory as an attic wasabsurd. In attics things gathered dust. There was no dust on any of this. It was as fresh as if he had reached back only an hour. He could feel the humorous violence with which she took hold of him, he could smell pine soap.
Without ever crossing the street to look into the hotel, he turned back along the wall of the temple block to where Brigham Young stood at the bright beginning of Main Street. The night was mild, with a steady flow of air from the mountains. The street reaching southward was Anystreet, Anywhere, and yet he knew it in its special and local identity. Simply by the way it lay on the earth he knew it. It lay on his mind that same way.
He turned down it among the thin evening crowds.
7
As he walked, scraps of a poem were bothering the back of his mind. Something about being sick for home for the red roofs and the olives, something about It is a strange thing to be an American. McLeish? Whoever it was, Mason agreed. He had felt it all during his years abroad, when he represented in foreign countries a country to which he himself belonged only tentatively and temporarily and partially, but by which he had been shaped, evoked, limited, given opportunity, perhaps warped or damaged. Many a time he, too, had been sick for home, not for red roofs and olives, but for this city planted between the desert and the mountains. Yet as he walked in the shirt-sleeve night among the paragranite urns, planters, fountains, and stelae that crowded the tiled sidewalks of transformed Main Street, there was little that evoked memory or nostalgia. Home was another word for strange.
His initial inclination to think well of it, to accept Progress, withered as he walked. Urban slick. He might have thought it attractive in Montreal or San Francisco, cities about which he held no illusions. But it wasn’t Salt Lake. A flock of bronze sea gulls rising from a sunken garden in front of the Prudential Building, new to him, revived his approval briefly. Then more paragranite,and fountains whose jets wagged like sheeps’ tails. What he remembered was shabbier, homelier, friendlier than this. A salmon turning inland after years in salt water should taste with certainty and gladness the waters of its birth.
Something was missing, and it took him nearly a block
“Soon!”
“Ah, you!” she said again. “I can’t seem to get enough of you tonight.” Then she removed herself from him, without moving at all. “How are you going to get past him?”
“That’s my problem. When are you going to move out of this old ladies’ home?”
“I’ve paid a week in advance.”
“Don’t stay any longer. Let’s start looking for some other place tomorrow.”
“All right. But you’ve got to go now. You’ve got to go
go
GO! My name will be mud if they catch you here.”
“What can they do?”
“I don’t want to find out. Write my father, maybe.” She took him by the ears and wagged his head back and forth, pecking him with kisses that hit and missed. “You!” she said a third time. “Get out of here! You’re driving me wild.”
He yielded. He had always been going to yield. He knew the rules. But as they went through five more minutes of panting good-nights, as he finally broke away and sneaked down the stairs and with ridiculous ease caught the elevator man dozing on his stool, and slipped out the side entrance unseen, he was full of the awed realization that the rules were about to change. One of these days, the next time the opportunity presented itself, he would press her again, and the answer would be yes. It was yes tonight. There was no way to think around a fact like that. All he could do, driving home, was visualize that coming event in a dozen ways, each softer and more secret than the last.
So there she was, retrieved by his computer along with all the rest of it. The old way of thinking of the memory as an attic wasabsurd. In attics things gathered dust. There was no dust on any of this. It was as fresh as if he had reached back only an hour. He could feel the humorous violence with which she took hold of him, he could smell pine soap.
Without ever crossing the street to look into the hotel, he turned back along the wall of the temple block to where Brigham Young stood at the bright beginning of Main Street. The night was mild, with a steady flow of air from the mountains. The street reaching southward was Anystreet, Anywhere, and yet he knew it in its special and local identity. Simply by the way it lay on the earth he knew it. It lay on his mind that same way.
He turned down it among the thin evening crowds.
7
As he walked, scraps of a poem were bothering the back of his mind. Something about being sick for home for the red roofs and the olives, something about It is a strange thing to be an American. McLeish? Whoever it was, Mason agreed. He had felt it all during his years abroad, when he represented in foreign countries a country to which he himself belonged only tentatively and temporarily and partially, but by which he had been shaped, evoked, limited, given opportunity, perhaps warped or damaged. Many a time he, too, had been sick for home, not for red roofs and olives, but for this city planted between the desert and the mountains. Yet as he walked in the shirt-sleeve night among the paragranite urns, planters, fountains, and stelae that crowded the tiled sidewalks of transformed Main Street, there was little that evoked memory or nostalgia. Home was another word for strange.
His initial inclination to think well of it, to accept Progress, withered as he walked. Urban slick. He might have thought it attractive in Montreal or San Francisco, cities about which he held no illusions. But it wasn’t Salt Lake. A flock of bronze sea gulls rising from a sunken garden in front of the Prudential Building, new to him, revived his approval briefly. Then more paragranite,and fountains whose jets wagged like sheeps’ tails. What he remembered was shabbier, homelier, friendlier than this. A salmon turning inland after years in salt water should taste with certainty and gladness the waters of its birth.
Something was missing, and it took him nearly a block
Similar Books
