Last Night Read Free

desires.
    Outside, the sky, the topmost dome of it, was brushed with clouds and the stars were dim. Adele finally made him out, standing far off in the darkness. She walked unsteadily toward him. His head, she saw, was raised. She stopped a few yards away and raised her head, too. The sky began to whirl. She took an unexpected step or two to steady herself.
    — What are you looking at? she finally said.
    He did not answer. He had no intention of answering. Then,
    — The comet, he said. It’s been in the papers. This is the night it’s supposed to be most visible.
    There was silence.
    — I don’t see any comet, she said.
    — You don’t?
    — Where is it?
    — It’s right up there, he gestured. It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
    — Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.
    — It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.
    — How do you know where it’ll be? she said. Come on, it’s late, let’s get out of here.
    He did not move. After a bit she walked toward the house where, extravagantly, every window upstairs and down was lit. He stood where he was, looking up at the sky and then at her as she became smaller and smaller going across the lawn, reaching first the aura, then the brightness, then tripping on the kitchen steps.

Eyes of the Stars
     
    SHE WAS SHORT with short legs and her body had lost its shape. It began at her neck and continued down, and her arms were like a cook’s. In her sixties Teddy had looked the same for a decade and would probably go on looking the same, there was not that much to change. She had pouches under her eyes and a chin, slightly receding when she was a girl, that was lost now in several others, but she dressed neatly and people liked her.
    Myron, her late husband, had been an ophthalmologist and proud of the fact that he treated the eyes of many stars, although frequently it was a relative of a star, a nephew or mother-in-law, almost the same thing. He could recite the exact condition of all these eyes, retinitis, mild amblyopia . . .
    — So, what is that?
    Silvery-haired, he would confide,
    —Lazy-eyed.
    But Myron was gone. He hadn’t really been a very interesting man, Teddy would sometimes admit, apart from knowing exactly what was wrong with famous patients’ eyes. They had married when she was past forty and resigned to the idea of being single, not that she wouldn’t have made a good wife in every way, but she had only her personality and good nature by that time, the rest, as she herself would say, had turned into a size fourteen.
    It had not always been that way. Though she did not state, like London’s notorious Mrs. Wilson two hundred years earlier, that she would not reveal the circumstances that had made her the mistress of an older man at the age of fifteen, Teddy had had something of the same experience. The first great episode of her life had been with a writer, a detoured novelist more than twenty years older than she was. He had first seen her at a bus stop. She was not, even in those days, exactly beautiful, but there was a body that spoke, at the time, of much that youth could offer. He took her to get her first diaphragm and she was his mistress for three years until he left town and returned to literature and in the end a large house in New Jersey.
    She had stayed in touch with him for a time, her real link to the grown-up world, and read his books, of course, but slowly his letters became less frequent until they simply stopped and along with them the foolish hope that he would come back someday.
    Through the years she began to remember him less and less as he had been and more as one lone image: driving. The boulevards in those days were wide and very white and the car was weaving a little while he, half-drunk, was telling her