whiteness broken only here and there, by the russet yellow ribbons of dog markings. Ice encased trees. When glittering limbs clattered in the wind, the air echoed with a sound like tackle tinkling against the aluminum masts of harbored yachts. He was on an errand and tried to hustle. But the sidewalks and streets were treacherously slick, so slick it seemed that if you fell you might slide clear off the face of the earth. These conditions forced him into a halting, uneven gait, with his arms spasming out for balance each time he slipped. Which he did frequently. Still, he was not self-conscious until he was six or seven blocks from his home and saw her stepping onto the front stoop of a brick bungalow.
She wore woolen pants and a white, waist-length down coat. Her brunette hair flowed luxuriously out from under a red and yellow striped stocking cap. It was the hair he noticed first. Then he took in her long legs. Suddenly he caught himself trying to walk normally, at a casual gait with his hands relaxed at his hips. You idiot, he thought. You’re twenty-five years old, not a middle schooler who’s just realizing it might be more rewarding to impress girls than pester them. They nearly intersected as she attained the sidewalk. Then she surged ahead of him at a quick pace that would have been natural and sustainable on dry ground. He knew how slippery the surface was, and that she operated unawares. He stretched strides to close the distance between them, trying to imagine how he might tactfully suggest that she slow down and take care. He was nearly even with her elbow when one leg jackknifed out from under her. She tipped backward and righted herself, barely, with a jerking forward over-correction. Now her feet scooted backward and she began to fall facedown. He got a grip on her churning elbow and pulled her up straight. In the instant that she recovered her footing, he lost his. Levering her upright rocked him off balance. His feet flung forward as if they were taking flight from the rest of his body. Instantaneously, without time even to flail, he was on his back.
She looked down at him with wide-open green eyes, gasping alluringly feminine sounds of concern and alarm. At impact his cap had shot off his head like cannon-fire. He lay below her bareheaded, his feet still held off the ground. His body was unhurt; his pride, decimated. Ridiculous figure that he was, what had he to lose now? His spirit felt buoyant, unbound from the merciless gravity that had thrown him on his back. A smile rose to his lips. He looked her in the eyes and heard himself say, “Such is the state of chivalry in the Age of the Descent.”
And they laughed, together.
≤
Next their paths crossed at the train station. She sat on the bench with a beaten up paperback copy of East of Eden on her lap. They remembered each other’s names, and smiled about the Chaplinesque aspect of their first meeting. He told her how much he liked Steinbeck and she went through her personal ratings of the author’s canon: East of Eden in the lead, with The Grapes of Wrath second, then the others following in a blanket-finish. Except for Tortilla Flat, which left her cold; it seemed that Steinbeck wanted to make the paisanos sympathetic, but had managed only to show them comic at best and pathetic at worst. Directly he and she agreed to sit together on the train ride to Old Chicago. They both loved books, and with that mutual love a bridge sprung up between them. This, their first real conversation, was effortlessly rich and resonant. He reveled not only in her words but in her lilting soprano voice and her brilliant smile, which burst into view repeatedly. She liked his ready sense of humor, his unusual but not grating laugh. For emphasis of a point, she at one moment lightly poked and tapped his upper arm. To him it was as if she were gingerly testing a stovetop pan or pot, making sure it was not too hot to touch. The small gesture captivated him. Before they left the train, they had planned a date.
Over subsequent months they went downtown and walked the shores of Lake Michigan. They watched neighborhood softball games and flew kites and met at each other’s home to eat together and play board games. They taught each other favorite songs. They took turns reading aloud all manner of books—Augustine’s Confessions and Kierkegaard and Michel Serres and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Every occasion, whatever else it involved, was an opportunity to talk and to listen, to learn more about the other, sometimes in sips and sometimes in gulps, but never with the thirst for their company slaked. For each of them the other was a new world to be explored, brimming with wonders and some dangers (those helped keep you alert). After a few months it seemed that there was nothing either would hide from the other. They related not only triumphs and amusing foibles, but what they considered the darkest, most shameful parts of themselves. They learned to be confident in their them-ness as a single planet securely encompassing both their worlds, both their lives past and to come. The only passion neither could evoke in the other was humiliation or embarrassment.
Naturally their spiritual and emotional intimacy was accompanied by physical intimacy. At first they simply learned how to fit each other’s lips together, keeping noses out of the way. But since they found each other’s outer selves as endlessly fascinating as their inner selves, their bodily explorations advanced quickly. One summer night she arrived at his place in cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt. A lean woman in cutoffs was irresistible to him. They were on the couch, necking, before she had time to ask for the glass of water she needed after her walk from across the neighborhood. He caressed her rump and thighs as his tongue slid into her ear. Wait a minute—he felt goosebumps, but only on one leg. A probing tongue in her right ear raised bumps on her right leg, though not the left. He kissed across her face, grazing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her lips, the other cheek, then slyly flicked his tongue in her left ear. Now there were goosebumps on her left leg, though not the right. For the next five minutes he delectably repeated the experiment. The hypothesis was validated, and with amused pleasure he informed her of his discovery.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re teaching me things about myself that I never knew.”
“A sweet victory of the scientific method,” he humbly demurred.
This was a woman and a man in their mid-twenties, playing as grownups do. Yet though they were not ashamed or feeling guilty, a shadow hung over their sexual activities. That shadow was the National Anti-Natal Law. If she were to become pregnant, the baby would be removed from them and they both would suffer penalties. Certainly they would be separated, which itself would be an unbearable punishment. So they took precautions.
Their parents, at first encouraging of their relationship, had grown cooler on it as it became apparent how serious the two were about one another. They took occasion to remind their adult children, not always subtly, about the NAN laws and the fact that subordinates—unlike constituents—always suffered their consequences. Eventually, his father became especially insistent that the two should, as he put it, “slow down.” Then one night they dropped by her parents’ house and found his father there. What was he doing? The parents were briefly sheepish, blushing and clearly caught in the act of something. They quickly picked up the bobbled ball of their conversation and put it back into play. But he had taken note, and at the end of the evening he followed his father out the door. As they walked together, he queried about what his father and her parents had discussed before their children arrived. He learned that his father was pressing with her parents the case that the two of them should “take a break,” and maybe resume their friendship in few years, when both were at least twenty-eight years old.
He was outraged at his father’s meddling. He wanted a promise that his father would drop the suit against their relationship, and never again present it to her parents. His father stalled and attempted to divert the discussion from any such vow. The heights of the son’s sense of injustice then rose, and it was from atop a wall of righteous anger that he threw down an ultimatum. He demanded that his father immediately promise to desist, or else the son would quit not his relationship with his lover, but his relationship with his father. In quiet but unrepentant sorrow, the elder responded that the younger couple’s love was a fine thing in itself and at the same time too hazardous to continue. “Then that’s it. It’s decided,” the son said. And he stalked away from his father into the night, until darkness obscured each from the other’s sight.
The following day he and Val were alone, in his apartment. They
