If You Could See Me Now Read Free Page A

spread thickly through his mind, canceling all else. He glided up beside her, bruising all that foreign heartland and wilderness of skin.
    For a second he was unable to see, and Alison’s arm clamped about his neck: when his eyes cleared, he was looking into a sleek wet fall of hair. Her hard cheekbones pressed his jaw. Using all his strength, he broke the hold of her arms and turned her into him. His head went under water, forced to the hollow of her neck, and he heard her yell of laughter. His legs kicked around hers. They were back under, thrashing, and the trouble in his mind forced them to roll deeper into the cold water. His ears boomed as she struck them.
    Booming was everywhere. The water blanketed him, herslippery perfection fought him. They reached the surface again and gulped air a second before the water exploded with trouble. Her laughter ceased and she gripped his head, crushing his ears forward painfully and then there seemed to be more than two of them, fighting the trouble, fighting the water and fighting for air and fighting
for
trouble. The water boomed and whenever all their bodies, their one body, broke the surface, geysers of spray were booming too.



ONE
    N o story exists without its past, and the past of a story is what enables us to understand it (perhaps that I believe this is the reason I teach novels and not poems, where the internal history may be only a half dozen slewfoot lines), but because—precisely because—I am so aware of the past pressing in on my story, I wish to allow it to leak in when it must, and not butter it over the beginning. I know, and here speaks the lecturer in literature, the sort-of professor of contemporary fiction, that each story, however freighted with history, is a speaking present unit, a speaking knot, a gem. We may appreciate a diamond more if we know its history of association with bloody feuds and failed dynastic marriages, but we do not understand it better. The same point could be made of love, or of lovers—the history of indifferent wives or loafing husbands, even the paraphernalia of personality, is strewn about there on the floor, waiting to be put on with their clothing. So I begin this story, so far along in this maladroit paragraph, with myself driving my car, a decade-old Volkswagen, from New York to Wisconsin in the last breathless weeks of June. I was in that limbo between youth and middle age when change is most necessary, when new possibilities must replace the old dying visions, and I had been divorced a year. Divorced spiritually, not legally: because my wife had died six months after she had left me, I would never need the formal decree. (Impossible to conceal the bitterness, even after Joan’s death.)
    I had been driving for a day and a half, going as fast as my Volkswagen and the highway patrol would permit, and I had spent the intervening night in an Ohio motel of shabby aspect—a motel so characterless that I forgot its name and the town on the heel of which it squatted the moment I rejoined the freeway. Having had a particularly disturbing nightmare, I was gasping for freedom, for new air. Every cell and nerve of my body was choked with malignancy, the residue of gasoline fumes and repressed outrage; I needed dull green peace, fresh days in which to finish (actually, to write most of) the dissertation which would enable me to keep my job.
    For as I have said, I am not a professor: not even, to be truthful, a “sort-of” professor. I am an instructor. An instructor of the last gasp.
    Automobiles, especially my own, make me irritable and prone to accidents of temperament. Each man sits alone in his six-foot metal coffin, and traffic jams are like noisy graveyards. (I may be mechanically incompetent, but I can reduce death to a metaphor—the day after dreaming of it!) I am likely to “see” things, whereas normally all my hallucinations enter through another organ—I mean my nose. (Some people see things, I smell ’em.) In