She remembers her happy love affair in New York.

His raining tongue laps under her eyelids herds of woolly mammoth, bison, leaping reindeer, a tusked wild boar. Her head fills till it’s so heavy it rolls away by itself.

How would you define our relation? he asks. Technically we are lovers, she says after a while.

And nontechnically? (She cannot think of the term that would cover everything.)

The day hangs suspended—a dull golden weave on which an impressionist master’s brush has sketched, placed at random, the familiar furnishings of a New York City apartment: the whiskey bottle, jar of instant coffee, cans of soup and spices on the shelf, a torn bag of sugar, ashtrays, magazines and a bowl of fruit on the floor. A tropical garden painted on the air. At this moment the mind, which has sunk deep into the trunk, a migrating organ, passing through the clapping valves of the heart and the belly toward the bowels; the mind, especially lucid, observes with surprised amusement an old riddle unfolding into a simple demonstration. Irrespective of will or will-lessness, the arm plunges into space, the hand reaches out to seize a pear and as gratuitously arrested, lies still on the fruit. Movement and rest, irrespective of will or will-lessness. The mind, sunk comfortably in the liver, finds a wonderful significance in this. It would like to make a note of it; but does not, in fact, any more than a fat man submerged in a hot bath will make a note of his revelation. He cannot. The paper would get wet. Besides, to lift his arm out of the water is inconceivable: it would damage his insight.

“But why?” Ezra gasps.

He stands stunned in the hallway, still in his galoshes, coat half unbuttoned, a night’s train journey written on his face.

“I don’t want to be married to you,” she repeats.

“But why, Sophie?”

His look of utter bewilderment belies the least suspicion of a rift between them. Hardening his face, biting on his pipe, he struggles to maintain calm. A shattered man, he has not lost all pride. It is difficult not to be moved. Ezra has his moments of beauty: just now, staring expressionless, an animal dazed by a sudden blow, he seems so solitary and forlorn—a stranger, as if he were already deserted, the person she cast out into the street, cut out of her life. If he were to walk out now without a word, she could not bear it.

...go somewhere else for coffee and dessert? No, she will finish the wine, it’s marvelous. She must remember the name—no, it’s better not. It’s quite wonderful not to be Sophie Blind just now. It’s wonderful enough to be this someone else in the car. He asks why she is smiling. She answers with a new smile which turns into a kiss. She is thinking of what her aunt told her when she was twelve: Always be sure your underwear is clean even if you’re only going across the street; you never know when a car might hit you and people will see your underwear. While they wait at an intersection she hears him tell her about the garage; it’s three blocks from the hotel, does she mind walking? He could ask the doorman, but he doesn’t want n’importe qui to drive his car. She doesn’t mind walking; it’s right, his tenderness for his car, it’s such a delicate, sensitive, powerful beast—she’s in love with it herself. They talk about cars. He finds it unusual, her enthusiasm for machines, women don’t usually—she hasn’t had the opportunity of course. She chatters foolishly about typewriters, phonographs, a motor scooter she owned once. She wonders how long this euphoria will last. Whether it will last her through. In the elevator (perhaps just the stupid situation: sealed in this ascending coffin with him, a separate individual who doesn’t mean anything to her) the reflection that she is a bitch taints her euphoria; doesn’t interrupt her ease, only changes its color, which may be for the best. Undeluded, she walks with the same ease, it doesn’t spoil her pleasure. There is no regret when she awakes to herself, all the wine drained off in the act of pleasure, leaving her utterly lucid, alone, curiously purged; after a while, just empty and becoming restless. She recalls other rooms in other places...the men...It’s really quite nice, this elegant suite at the George V. Faïence knobs high in the wall so you don’t have to bend when you take a shower. Nice, the thin white blankets—Does she really have to go in half an hour? They could have an early supper served in the room. He is explaining about his trip to London: He would invite her to come along except that his brother-in-law will be waiting for him at the airport. But she could join him in a day or two, and they could drive through Scotland or fly off to—

Nice for an afternoon—but too strenuous a business to incarnate some guiding star or even an exotic fish for a floundering millionaire. Has she missed her calling? She recalls backing out of a very attractive offer two years ago: a yacht, villa in Nice, apartment in Paris. Wanted her to fly to San Francisco with him. Took her three days to realize the futility of it. Sorry now? But then other things wouldn’t have happened. As for the tyrannical rich man who was usually on the other side of fifty, that too was impossible in the long run—and anything over a day ran into a long run or just a waste. No, it was just too much trouble to comply with an assured, vain man’s whims, or revolt, or get around him—that was the kind of patience Sophie knew she didn’t have. It naturally occurred to her that she might use a floundering rich man for her ends, indeed this was mostly on her mind. It wasn’t so much a question of the means; it wasn’t at all a moral problem, but simply that if you’ve set your heart on going to Rome, the Shanghai Express won’t get you there. You’re better off walking. The Shanghai Express might be great fun, you might fall in love with a station master, it could make you forget about ever wanting to go to Rome, revolutionize your life or be just an adventure. All this was possible but it wouldn’t get her to Rome.

[...] “Consider it as a business proposition,” he pursues with gentle irony. “I am not pleading with you; I will not use force. We are in the twentieth century; you are a free woman and I want you to make a rational choice. I hope one day you will feel some affection for me. I have a right to hope, after all, but I accept your present feelings of hostility. I want you to look at this as an offer in terms of your interests, professional ambitions, your taste. I know how important it is for you to live in the right setting. We have struggled through such difficult years; now for the first time I can offer you what you always wanted.” A city of culture, he pursues, and reminds her that she always wanted to live in Europe; and she could go to Greece every summer. As for her Paris apartment, he can think of any number of solutions. “Isn’t it reasonable?” he asks. “Be reasonable,” he says.

She can’t be reasonable even if his proposition appears reasonable—reasonable and attractive for someone else. She cannot be that person. Even if her own position is groundless, the fact is she has no position, she has no plans, she is nowhere. She has only her feelings to rely on. And she must say no. Perhaps she is really in another room, a young woman listening to Ezra Blind’s marriage proposal fifteen years ago. Must this time say no.

Weeks before the day when Sophie Blind walked up the ramp into the upholstered belly of a jet prop, weeks before she made her flight reservation, before she wrote her lover what she wanted, back in January when Paris was leafless, a bleak wet wash, and New York as bleakly wind-swept; in January at the unrecorded hour of its birth, her naked desire had started walking toward him.

Getting more Jewish every day. Fooled even Ezra as a freshman in his Hegel seminar. Had a wedding cooked up with a girl from a wealthy Sephardic family. Surprised to discover his star pupil was a pure Polish Catholic (son of a small-town New England pharmacist—corrupted by Marxist piano teacher, Nicholas explained with cynical Semitic shrug). Ezra decided his mistake was not a mistake. Claimed he could smell a Jew, developed trans-racial theory. Nevertheless, the wedding didn’t materialize.

More guests keep arriving. There is excitement at the door. A raspy voice rising above the general hubbub sounds like my father, speaking louder and with a heavier Hungarian accent than normally. He keeps asking how much all this cost—the shipping, the rabbi, the mortician, the total sum; he will write a check—so loudly it’s embarrassing. While Ezra placates him, he mutters on about religious atavism, back to the primal horde. There is Uncle Joske, the soccer player from Budapest. Have they all come? The aunts and cousins from Australia, Canada and Paraguay? I see my mother enter, wrapped in a crystal cocoon. No, it was only a reflection. A little draft lifted the edge of the drape over the mirror. Renata has fixed it already.

“A woman with your potentialities,” he proclaims wide-eyed, his arms outthrown to illustrate her far-flung positions. “You are not one but many women. You’ve got a fantastic problem between Spinoza and being a playgirl in Acapulco,” he exclaims. “How will you resolve this?”

She senses her peril. In a minute he will make the initial move to resolve this conflict for her which she cannot, which no woman alone can resolve for herself.

“It’s no problem. I told you I am writing a novel. The truth of the matter is that I’ve never read Spinoza.”

“Baby, I saw your publications on display in the lobby, but it’s understandable that you should want to deny it; the conflict between your intellectual passion and your femininity, just as I was telling you. It’s obvious you’re worried I’m less attracted to you because you read Spinoza.”

“I swear to God I’ve never read Spinoza. As for my degrees and publications—ancient history. If you must know, my husband made me do it.”

“What about your lovely wife and children?”

“They’re three thousand miles away,” he yawns, “and you’re right here. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. You can laugh. It doesn’t bother me. Go on, laugh like a witch. It arouses me. Can you tell me now you don’t like how I screw around in you?”

“That’s O.K. But why do you have to have such a pot belly? What do you have in there—quintuplets?”

“I’ll tell you why. When God made me a genius he said, ‘Johann Tobler, I have made you a genius and I am giving you a big pot belly so you shouldn’t be vain.’ There you have the answer.”

“How sweet. Is that what you tell every woman?”

“What do you think? You would like me to invent something special for you?”

“We,” he used to say when they first walked together in Garfield. “We are different. We don’t like foolish chatter, frills, extravagance, display of feelings. We are thinkers.” Both he and she were different from her mother in Budapest, who lived on flatteries, who dressed extravagantly, who was always preoccupied with her emotions. They were different from his family, different from anybody he could think of because practically all other people were vain, foolish, hypocritical. “We are different,” he said. His daughter detected a tinge of sadness and irritation—as if he were questioning why this was so, troubled by the fact that they were different—which offended her pride and created a distance between them. She wanted to remain apart, to be left alone. Paternal approval gave her certain liberties: an aloof man, an aloof daughter. But he was also a father: he worried why she didn’t care for her appearance, spent all her time alone, why didn’t she have a boyfriend? Why wasn’t she like other girls?—like the grocer’s red-haired daughter showing off her breasts, she would catch a man for sure before she was seventeen; or like the reform rabbi’s daughter who was high-minded, a brilliant student—but all in the service of femininity. He cited others, sometimes he was joking; he wouldn’t seriously want her to be like the receptionist at the hospital, with her perfect manicure, hair set and doll smile, sitting there just to attract a man. And certainly not like one of his patients he was describing. He didn’t want her to be like his mother and sisters. The world had changed. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know himself what was demanded of a woman in this new and changing world; what a woman should be, and his daughter in particular. It was a question on his mind he was asking himself and his daughter. Perhaps because she took too long to answer, he went on citing cases; or perhaps it was to relieve her, or simply because he was accustomed to her silence and accustomed to answering the questions addressed to her. Occasionally she spoke, and she startled him by her answers; so perhaps to spare himself her answers he went on thinking out loud about what a woman’s life used to be and what it could be under the present circumstances—a question that he could not bring to either theoretical or practical resolution. He always concluded by returning to his daughter approvingly, praising her seriousness, her kind of beauty which was not cheap or worldly. “We are different,” he always concluded, sometimes with a touch of theatricality, fusing pathos and irony in the sweep of a gesture, putting his arm around her shoulder as they walked.

There was the corner drugstore where the big kids hung out and where every lollypop- and ice cream–licking child aspired one day to spoon the sundae or banana split whose giant images were plastered on its windows. There was East Liberty with its three five-and-ten-cent stores, twelve movie houses, its soda fountains and slot machine joints, its stench of exhaust gas mingled with the smell of popcorn and sweet carbonated drinks, where everyone from the surrounding slums flocked evenings and weekends. And towering over the store windows and movie marquees, the giant cereal boxes, tires, tubes of toothpaste and the silly smiling faces of beer-drinking, soup-gobbling, car-satisfied men, women and children, the gods of America.

She wasn’t sure what he meant; she remembered that the little boy Petie was very important to the little girl she was. His face hadn’t changed much; the same skinny boy grown very tall; she is still surprised by the wide shoulders and his big feet; he is another person now and just like any other young man with whom she does not know what she feels or should feel. The same strangeness with Peter as with every other man, waiting for something to happen, to change in her, or change between them; never having known any other feeling; asking herself, “Can I love this man?” waiting for some impossible revelation or simply for a man to take hold of her and make her will-less.

“I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. Naturally I had many affairs. But it was all right, your father wanted it.”

“That’s very strange.”

“I’m serious. He encouraged me. I hope you will forgive me for saying that your father was a little neurotic. The first-generation Freudians, you know, were not properly analyzed. It gave him pleasure that I had affairs. He wanted to be the husband of the woman who had the most admirers.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t help it, my dear,” Kamilla tells her sadly. “I went to the best psychoanalysts in Budapest and they told me that I had to have affairs to prove to my mother that I could have all the men. When I was a child my mother told me that I was so ugly no man would want me; therefore, you see, I had to make every man desire me, even though I had the most wonderful husband. This was the tragedy of my life. You can’t imagine how much I suffered. I was in analysis for fourteen years. We can’t change our nature,” she sighs. [...]

On Sundays he belonged to her; they did wonderful things together. Going on walks was what Sophie enjoyed most, more than going to the theater or the amusement park. She pulled him or stopped him. She marveled at her power over someone so much bigger, a man who earned money, owned a house—was this what the dog felt when she took him on walks?—this mad joy in running, jumping on and off all the ledges? Why couldn’t he run? The dog and she both went after his walking stick. They could ruffle him, they weren’t afraid. Could he make the dog behave at least? He made solemn and threatening faces, trying to get her to listen. He wanted to show her things, explain things. She wanted to play; she didn’t know what explanations did. He wanted to talk. She asked questions, why and what then and so what—made him grind out answers just to exercise power over him. Power and curiosity and wonder that this big man with a walking stick and bushy eyebrows who smoked cigarets could be pushed and pulled and made to talk and buy things for her, and she was happy till he spoiled it for her by putting it in words. “...why do you think I spend the one free afternoon of my week with you and buy you things, and why do you think I love you?” On and on about all that he did for her. And why? Why did he do all this for her? Because he was stupid. He put the words in her mouth. No, she only thought it and he said it. It was all right, he said and spoke about the laws of nature, the selfishness of children; they were all instruments of nature but he was resigned to it, he said, making it sound sad. Then she hopped and skipped and ran till she got rid of her anger.

The silence growing vertiginous, my body’s surface like a black cloth absorbs his angry baffled look.