Roscoe by William Kennedy Page B

of immense spirit, a man for loss, just as she was a woman for loss. She reached back and took his hand.
    When they were in the main parlor of the house and Gilby had gone upstairs, she took both Roscoe’s hands in hers and, standing in the burnished light of this rare Tivoli afternoon, she
raised her face to his and kissed him on the mouth in a way she had kissed no other man since the Elisha of a sensual yesterday. Roscoe, suddenly transformed into six feet two and a half inches of
tapioca pudding, tried to firm himself; and he grew bold.
    “Will you spend one day alone with me?” he asked.
    “A day alone? Where?”
    “Tristano. I’m asking for a day, not a night.”
    “It takes half a day just to get there.”
    “We can leave early, come home late. A long day. Or we can stay over if you want to, but that’s not what I’m asking.”
    “We wouldn’t be alone. There are caretakers at Tristano.”
    “We’ll blindfold them. Are you creating impediments to avoid an answer?”
    “I have an answer.”
    “What is it?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “You crush me,” Roscoe said, “under the burden of hope. I pray I can survive it.”
    As he walked to his car, Roscoe saw a crow, blacker and larger than crows he had known, and female, which he deduced after she landed on an upper branch of an oak tree and was immediately set
upon by another large, black crow, which mounted her; and they lay sideways on the branch and copulated. Roscoe stopped the car to watch and became convinced the female crow was smiling. Roscoe
might have taken this to be a good omen, but it was too proximate to his kiss, the crows were black as sin, and they were crows enthralled by passion. They were the crows of fornication.
    What did you expect, Roscoe, the bluebirds of happiness?

On the road, Roscoe met the women who died of love, some naked, some garbed as when love took them, a legion stretching to the horizon.
    “Roscoe, Roscoe,” one warned as they passed, “love is a form of war.”
    “I always knew that,” he said.
    “Keep yourself chaste for your beloved,” said a woman dressed as a bride, “and if you want love, avoid lies and avarice.”
    “I have no beloved, lies are my business, and without avarice we’d have chaos in City Hall,” Roscoe told her.
    “Do not lust for every woman,” said a naked siren, still voluptuous in death, “for that turns a man into a shameless dog. Seek love where nubile women are found: the horse
races, the theater, the law courts.”
    “I’ve looked in all those places, but I’ve yet to find one for me. You have a nubile look about you. What are you doing tonight?”
    “Nice try,” said the dead siren. “Just keep remembering that the pursuit of love makes an ugly man handsome, a fat man thin, that love transforms shame into glory, and falsity
into truth. And if you fail with love, your only consolation is food and drink.”
    Then she passed on, and Roscoe was enveloped by hunger, thirst, desire, and gloom.

Picture Roscoe: he is wearing his blue-and-white-vertical-striped pajamas; his stomach pain from the accident seems worse, though he is trying to ignore it, trying to sleep in
the double bed of his suite in the Ten Eyck. He is a hotel-dweller and probably will remain so for the rest of his days. He has no yen to live the landed life of Patsy of the mountain, or Elisha of
the manor, though Veronica could talk him into the manor if she played her cards right. He is by nature a guest, not a host, though he usually picks up the check. He has never craved the permanence
so many others desire, but he does seem permanent here, at least in open-ended continuity; for in these rooms his father lived the last years of his life: in this very same bedroom, bath, and
sitting room, though the rug is new.
    His father’s influence is every where in Roscoe, even in those names of his: Rosky, Ros, Rah-Rah (what Gilby used to call him), diminutives of Roscius, from Quintus Roscius, the Roman
comic