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Her eyes were like her ears. She would inflict well-meaning barbarities of jewelry and clothes on Shrimp, who wore them as tokens of her bondage and abasement. The walls of her room were one great mural of unspeakable, sickly-cute junk and sententious propaganda posters, like this jewel from the lips of a black Spartacus: “A Nation of Slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their Master, who, in the abuse of Absolute Power, does not proceed to the last extremes of Injustice and Oppression.” Bow-wow-wow. But what could Shrimp do? Walk in and rip them from the walls? January
valued
her crap.

What do you do when you love a slob? What she did—try and become a slob herself. Shrimp wallowed diligently, losing most of her old friends in the process. She more than made up for her losses by the friendships January brought with her as a dowry. Not that she ever came to like any of them, but gradually through their eyes she learned that her lover had virtues as well as charms, problems as well as virtues, a mind with its own thoughts, memories, projects, and a personal history as poignant as anything by Chopin or Liszt. In fact, she was a human being, and though it took a day of the very clearest air and brightest sunshine for this feature of January’s landscape to be visible, it was such a fine and heartening sight that when it came it was worth every other inconvenience of being, and remaining, in love.

After the sweeping license fell through, Lottie had one of her bad spells, sleeping up to fifteen hours a day, bullying Amparo, making fun of Mickey, living for days on pills and then demolishing the ice-box on a binge. In general she fell apart. This time it was her sister who pulled her out. Living with January seemed to have made Shrimp one hundred per cent more human. Lottie even told her so. “Suffering,” Shrimp said, “that’s what does it—I suffer a lot.” They talked, they played games, they went to whatever events Shrimp could get freebies for. Mostly, they talked; in Stuyvesant Square, on the roof, in Tompkins Square Park. They talked about growing old, about being in love, about not being in love, about life, about death. They agreed that it was terrible to grow old, though Shrimp thought they both had a long way to go before it got really terrible. They agreed that it was terrible to be in love but that it was more terrible not to be. They agreed that life was rotten.

They didn’t agree about death. Shrimp believed, though not always literally, in reincarnation and psychic phenomena. To Lottie death made no sense. It wasn’t death she dreaded so much as the pain of dying.

“It helps to talk, doesn’t it?” Shrimp said during one magnificent sunset up on the roof with rose-colored clouds zooming by.

“No,” said Lottie, with a sour. here-I-am-again type smile to say to Shrimp that she was on her feet and not to worry, “it doesn’t.”

It was that evening that Shrimp mentioned the possibility of prostitution.

“Me? Don’t be silly!”

“Why not You used to.”

“Ten years ago. More! And even
then
I never earned enough to make it worthwhile.”

“You weren’t trying.”

“Shrimp, for God’s sake, just look at me!”

“Many men are attracted to large. Rubens-type women. Anyhow I only mentioned it. And I was going to say that
if
—”

“If!” Lottie giggled.

“If
you change your mind. January knows a couple who handle that son of thing. It’s safer than doing it as a free lance, so I’m told and more businesslike too.”

The couple that January knew were the Lighthalls, Jerry and Lee. Lee was fat and black and something of an Uncle Tom. Jerry was wraithlike and given to sudden meaningful silences. Lottie was never able to decide which of them was actually in charge. They worked from what Lottie believed for months was a bogus law office, until she found out that Jerry actually belonged to the New York State Bar. The clients arriving at the office behaved in a solemn deliberate way, as though they were after all here for a legal consultation rather than a good time. For the most pan they were a son of person Lottie had had no personal experience with—engineers, programmers, what Lee called “our technologically
ee
-leete clientele.”

The Lighthalls specialized in golden showers, but by the time Lottie found this out, she had made up her mind to go through with it, come what may. The first time was awful. The man insisted that she watch his face the whole while he kept saying, “I’m pissing on you, Lottie. I’m pissing on you.” As though otherwise she might not have known.

Jerry suggested that if she took a pink pill a couple hours beforehand and then sank back on a green at the start of a session it was possible to keep the experience at an impersonal level, as though it were taking place on teevee. Lome tried it and the result for her was not so much to make it impersonal as to make it unreal. Instead of the scene becoming a teevee screen, she was pissed on
by
one.

The single largest advantage of the job was that her wages weren’t official. The Lighthalls didn’t believe in paying taxes and so they operated illegally, even though that meant charging much less than the licensed brothels. Lottie didn’t lose any of her regular MODICUM benefits, and the necessity of spending what she made on the black market meant that she bought the fun things she wanted instead of the dull things she ought to have. Her wardrobe trebled. She ate at restaurants. Her room filled with knickknacks and toys and the fruity reek of Fabergé’s Molly Bloom.

As the Lighthalls got to know and trust her, she began to be sent out to people’s homes, often staying the night. Invariably this would mean something beyond golden showers. She could see that it was a job that she could grow to like. Not for the sex, the sex was nothing, but sometimes afterwards, especially on assignments away from Washington Street, the clients would warm up and talk about something besides their own unvarying predilections. This was the aspect of the job that appealed to Lottie—the human contact.

“Heaven. I’m
in
heaven.

“What I mean is, anyone if he just looked around and really understood what he saw … But that’s not what I’m supposed to say, is it? The object’s to be able to say what you
want.
Instead, I guess what
I
was saying was that I’d better be happy with what I’ve got, cause I won’t get any more. But then if I don’t
ask
for more … It’s a vicious circle.

“Heaven. What is heaven? Heaven is a supermarket. Like that one they built outside the museum. Full of everything you could ever ask for. Full of fresh meat—I wouldn’t live in any vegetarian heaven—full of cake mixes and cartons of cold milk and fizzies in cans. Oh, the works. And
lots
of disposable containers. And I would just go down the aisles with my big cart in a kind of trance, the way they say the housewives did then, without thinking what any of it was going to cost. Without thinking. Nineteen-fifty-three a.d.—you’re right, that’s heaven.

“No. No, I guess not. That’s the trouble with heaven. You say something that sounds nice but then you think, would you really want it a second time? A third time? Like your highway, it would be great once. And then? What then?

“You see, it has to come from inside.

“So what I want, what I really do want… I don’t know how to say it. What I really want is to really want something. The way, you know, when a baby wants something? The way he reaches for it. I’d like to see something and reach for it like that. Not to be aware that I couldn’t have it or that it wasn’t my turn. Juan is that way sometimes with sex, once he lets loose. But of course heaven would have to be larger than that.

“I know! The movie we saw on teevee the other night when Mom wouldn’t shut up, the Japanese movie, remember? Do you remember the fire festival, the song they sang? I forget the exact words, but the idea was that you should let life burn you up. That’s what I want. I want life to burn me up.

“So that’s what heaven is then. Heaven is the fire that does that, a huge roaring bonfire with lots of little Japanese women dancing around it and every so often they let out a great shout and one of them rushes into it. Whoof!”

“One of the rules in the magazine was that you can’t mention other people by name. Otherwise I could just say, ‘Heaven would be if I were living with January’ and then describe that. But if you’re describing a relationship, you don’t let yourself imagine all you could and so you learn nothing.

“So where does that leave me?

“Visualize, it said.

“Okay. Well, there’s grass in heaven, because I can see myself standing in grass. But it isn’t the country, not with cows and such. And it can’t be a park, because the grass in parks is either sickly or you can’t walk on it. It’s beside a highway. A highway in Texas! Let’s say in nineteen-fifty-three. It’s a clear, clear day in nineteen-fifty-three, and I can see the highway stretching on and on past the horizon.

“Endlessly.

“Then what? Then I’ll want to drive on the highway, I suppose. But notby myself, that would be anxiety-making. So I’ll break the rule and let January drive. If we’re on a motorcycle, it’s scarcely a relationship, is it?

“Well, our motorcycle is going fast, it’s going terribly fast, and there are cars and gigantic trucks going almost as fast as we are. Toward that horizon. We weave in and out, in and out. Faster we go, and faster and faster.

“Then what? I don’t know. That’s as far as I see.

“Now it’s your turn.”

“What do I feel? Angry. Afraid. Sorry for myself. I don’t know. I feel a bit of everything, but not— Oh, this is silly. I don’t want to be wasting everyone’s time with—

“Well, I’ll try it. Just say the one thing over and over until— What happens?

“I love you. There, that wasn’t so bad. I love you. I love you, January. I love you, January. January, I love you. January, I
love
you. If she were here it would be a lot easier, you know. Okay, okay. I love you. I love
you.
I love your big warm boobs. I’d like to squeeze them. And I love your … I love your juicy black cunt. How about that? I do. I love
all
of you. I wish we were together again. I wish I knew where you were so you’d know that. I don’t want the baby, any babies, I want
you.
I want to be married. To you. For all time. I love you.

“Keep going?

“I love you. I love you. I love you very much. And that’s a lie. I
hate
you. I can’t stand you. You appall me, with your stupidity, with your vulgarity, with your third-hand ideas that you take off the party line like— You
bore
me. You bore me to tears. You’re dumb nigger
scum!
Nigger bitch. Stupid! And I don’t care if—

“No, I can’t. It’s not there. I’m just saying the words because I know you want to hear them. Love, hate, love, hate—words.

“It isn’t that I’m resisting. But I don’t feel what I’m saying, and that’s the truth. Either way. The only thing I feel is tired. I wish I were home watching teevee instead of wasting everyone’s time. For which I apologize.

“Somebody else say something and I’ll shut up.”

“Your problem,” he told her, as they were rocking home in the RR after the big nonbreakthrough, “is that you’re not willing to accept your own mediocrity.”

“Oh shut up,” she said. “I mean that sincerely.”

“It’s my own problem, just as much. Even more so, perhaps. Why do you think I’ve gone so long now without doing any work? It isn’t that if I started in nothing would happen. But when I’m all done I look at what I’m left with and I say to myself, ‘No, not enough.’ In effect that’s what you were saying tonight.”

“I know you’re trying to be nice, Willy, but it doesn’t help. There’s no comparison between your situation and mine.”

“Sure there is. I can’t believe in my pictures. You can’t believe in your love affairs.”

“A love affair isn’t some goddamn work of art.” The spirit of argument had caught hold of Shrimp. Williken could see her struggling out of her glooms as though they were no more than a wet swimsuit. Good old Shrimp!

“Isn’t it?” he prompted.

She plunged after the bait without a thought. “You at least try to do something. There’s an attempt. I’ve never gone that far. I suppose if I did I would be what you say—mediocre.”

“You attempt too—ever so visibly.”

“What?” she asked.

She wanted to be torn to pieces (no one at the Asylum had bothered even to scream at her), but Williken didn’t rise above irony. “I try to do something; you try to feel something. You want an inner life, a spiritual life if you prefer. And you’ve got it. Only no matter what you do, no matter how you squirm to get away from the fact, it’s mediocre. Not bad. Not poor.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit. Eh?”

“Exactly. But you don’t believe that and neither do I. You know who we are? We’re the scribes and Pharisees.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“You’re a bit more cheerful now.”

Shrimp pulled a long face. “I’m laughing on the outside.”

“Things could be a lot worse.”

“How?”

“You might be a loser. Like me.”

“And I’m a winner instead? You can say that! After you saw me there tonight?”

“Wait,” he promised her. “Just wait.”

“Bulgaria!” Milly exclaimed, and it took no special equipment to know that her next words were going to be: “I’ve been to Bulgaria.”

“Why don’t you get out your slides and show us,” Boz said, clamping the lid gently on her ego. Then, though he knew, he asked, “Whose turn is it?”

January snapped to attention and shook the dice. “Seven!” She counted out seven spaces aloud, ending up on Go to Jail. “I hope I stay there,” she said cheerfully. “If I land on Boardwalk again that’s the end of the game for me.” She said it so hopefully.

“I’m trying to remember,” Milly said, elbow propped on the table, the dice held aloft, time and the game in suspense, “what it was like. All that comes back is that people told jokes there. You had to sit and listen for hours to jokes. About breasts.” A look passed between them and another look passed between January and Shrimp.