He is that romantic. Sometimes I wonder if loving me in this homey life in middle age with two sets of bedroom slippers, one a skin of sandal for summer and the other pair lined with cozy sheepskin—it must be a disappointing experience for him.

No, no, my friend, no politics. Money. Greed. Of course, I’m sure the kidnappers thought: The money will come. What is $100,000 to that person. The children blindfolded a day or so will be returned. No one the wiser. No problem. No one the wiser. They dreamed. A new car—two new cars. An expensive woman in the city. Restaurants. High life. But aha! something went wrong. I’m not afraid to tell you this. Everyone knows it. Clearly. The money did not go out quickly enough. Why? Let me tell you why. Because our friend is vain and foolish and believed himself too powerful and lucky to suffer tragic loss. Too quickly (because he is an important man), the police, all, the locals, the federals, moved in. Fear struck the kidnappers, you can see that. You may ask, Where are the children? Perhaps in another country, perhaps kindly treated by a frightened wife. Perhaps they will forget, go to school, they will think—oh, that childhood was a dream. Perhaps they are thrown into the sea. Garbage. Not good, not good.

Mr. Wong, the political guidance counselor in the Travel Service, said it was because of Antonioni’s film on China and his denigrating attraction to archaic charm. His middle-power chauvinism looked on China as the soufflé of Europe, to rise and fall according to the nourishment beaten into it by American capital investment and avant-garde art.

He said the high vigilance of the people would not allow us to imitate this filmmaker’s disdain for technologies that visibly assert themselves in urban steel and all along the terraces of rice and soy and wheat.

But Susan’s seven or eight years younger than Selena. What did she know? Because: People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they’re getting older they look at each other’s face a little ashamed. It’s clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn’t mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn’t want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend’s eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it’s nothing at all. I hardly noticed.

Susan, I asked, you still seeing Ed Flores?

Went back to his wife.

Lucky she didn’t kill you, said Ann. I’d never fool around with a Spanish guy. They all have tough ladies back in the barrio.

No, said Susan, she’s unusual. I met her at a meeting. We had an amazing talk. Luisa is a very fine woman. She’s one of the office-worker organizers I told you about. She only needs him two more years, she says. Because the kids—they’re girls—need to be watched a little in their neighborhood. The neighborhood is definitely not good. He’s a good father but not such a great husband.

I’d call that a word to the wise.

Well, you know me—I don’t want a husband. I like a male person around. I hate to do without. Anyway, listen to this. She, Luisa, whispers in my ear the other day, she whispers, Suzie, in two years you still want him, I promise you, you got him. Really, I may still want him then. He’s only about forty-five now. Still got a lot of spunk. I’ll have my degree in two years. Chrissy will be out of the house.

Letty began to squirm out of Ruth’s arms. Mommy, she called, Gramma is squeezing. But it seemed to Ruth that she’d better hold her even closer, because, though no one else seemed to notice—Letty, rosy and soft-cheeked as ever, was falling, already falling, falling out of her brand-new hammock of world-inventing words onto the hard floor of man-made time.

At the grocer’s I met an old friend who had continued his life as it had begun—in the avant-garde, but not selfishly. He had also organized guerrilla theater demonstrations and had never spoken ill of the people. Most artists do because they have very small audiences and are angry at those audiences for not enlarging themselves.

How can they do that? I’ve often asked. They have word of mouth, don’t they? most artists peevishly will reply.

Many of these Chinese artists (mostly men and some women) flew back and forth from American coast to coast so often (sometimes stopping in Iowa City) that they were no longer interested in window seats but slept on the aisle or across the fat center where the armrests can be adjusted … while the great deep dipping Rockies, the Indian Black Hills, the Badlands, the good and endless plains moved slowly west under the gently trembling jet. They never bother anymore to dash to the windows at the circling of New York as the pattern holds and the lights of our city engage and eliminate the sky.

But they’re right, I said in my turn. Yes, and this is in order to encourage the young whom we have, after all, brought into the world—they must not be abandoned. We must, I said, continue pointing out simple and worthwhile sights such as—in the countryside—hills folding into one another in light-green spring or white winter, the sky which is always astonishing either in its customary blueness or in the configuration of clouds—the way they’re pushed in their softest parts by the air’s breath and change shape and direction and density. Not to mention our own beloved city crowded with day and night workers, shoppers, walkers, the subway trains which many people fear but they’re so handsomely lined with pink to dark dark brown faces, golden tans and yellows scattered amongst them. It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has begun to guess.

Think think, talk talk, that’s you, stop it! Come on, kid, he said, touching my knee, my thigh, breast, all the outsides of love. So we lay down beside one another to make a child, with the modesty of later-in-life, which has so much history and erotic knowledge but doesn’t always use it.