The Wild Read Free Page B

Fifth Avenue, not at all. He would not fall back into the world but out of it. He would fall past the moon, past Neptune, past Arcturus and the Milky Way, fall past stars and galaxies with names like NC-2376, and past those without names, past them all, until he thudded softly against the purple velvet side of the universe.
    Then what would he do? Dig through? Maybe that was not such a good idea. Perhaps there was another universe on the other side, maybe worse than this one, a universe where no truth is real, where the child's ball on the grass is a killing boulder, or all of fate is concealed in the toe of a shoe.
    Maybe that's what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about—they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings.
    Sometimes Bob agreed with the quantum theorists, that the world was a knack of chosen possibilities, nothing more substantial than that. Man's true model was not Macbeth, not Othello, not even Gregor Samsa, but rather Puck the fairy, magical and insubstantial and so dangerous.
    "Bob—watch out! Honest to God, I never saw anybody so willing to walk in front of buses. What do you think the bus drivers are—gods? One of these days one of them'll be blinking and he won't see you in time to put on his brakes."
    "Let's not go to a coffee shop. Let's go to the Palm Court."
    "I'm wearing sandals, Bob."
    "Champagne cocktails. Dancing to the music of Vivaldi."
    "We can't afford it. The American Express bill remains unpaid."
    "Let's have some fun for once."
    She never let him down about things like this, The Palm Court it was, and Kevin got a Roy Rogers, she got white wine, and Bob finally settled on a Vodka Sunrise. He assembled a banquet for himself, managing to find goose with fresh snow peas, but no broiled wolf, frog legs, though, but no dog.
    The music was gentle, persistently civilized, and Bob managed to sustain the illusions you need to enjoy food. You cannot think of the way hogs knock against the walls of the slaughterhouses, or of the chickens scrabbling down chutes lined with knives. As he ate he thought he could feel the world turning, exposing each part of itself to the sun, so that the light could sustain it. The engine of life labors so hard, but why? Nothing survives, yet everything tries. Worms on the end of fishing lines struggle through hells beyond imagination, slowly drowning, impaled, while monsters loom at them. Fish in creels take hours and hours to die, and you make them live a little longer so that they'll be good and fresh at the end of the day, a cheerful sight frying in the skillet.
    What eats us? We can't understand it any more than the chicken can understand Frank Perdue. There is something out there.
    "Coffee, sir?"
    "I'd like to see the dessert cart."
    Cindy luxuriated. Kevin's eyes lit up when the glorious tray was brought over, its perfections of sugar and flour and cream enough to make any boy feel suddenly quite cheerful.
    When they came out of the Palm Court, it was nearly three o'clock. The sky had changed. Long, dark clouds rushed down from the north.
    Cindy called Celeste. They would not go home, they would go to a movie and take Kevin with them.
    The Ambassadors, a Merchant-Ivory picture based on the James novel, was playing at the Plaza Theater. In the dark of that theater, Bob felt delicious, immense relief. He closed his eyes and listened to the music, and made the words part of the music, and imagined that he was Henry James, and had succeeded in his creative life.
    That night Cindy asked him to come to bed naked, and she caressed him expertly, her fingers very slow. Even after all these years, the intimacy of her touch still made him shudder with embarrassed delight. He had not had many lovers before her, just one, as a matter of fact, with whom he had slept four times when he lived in London. There was another who had shared a single bed with