World Made by Hand

Fifty-two

I was reading in bed by candlelight later that night when I heard a light rapping on the door.

“Yes…”

Britney came in. She was barefoot and wearing an old green chenille bathrobe that had belonged to Sandy. She sat in a chair to my left that was the place I customarily tossed my clothes if they weren’t too dirty to put on again the next day.

“What are you reading?”

“Albert Speer’s memoirs.”

“Who was he?”

“Hitler’s pet architect.”

“Hitler had an architect as a pet?”

I explained the Hitler-Speer thing to her as concisely as possible. The truth was my pulse had quickened just having her in my room, and though it was another warm evening, I began to shiver slightly.

“You’re good at history,” she said.

“I’m fascinated by it.”

“How so?”

“Where we are now in relation to where we once were. It’s quite

a strange story.”

“Oh. I don’t miss the old days so much anymore.”

“In the old days I used to fly across the country three, four times a month. Imagine that. Clear across North America and back. Boston to San Francisco, Boston to Las Vegas. Over and over.”

“What was it like, being in an airplane?”

“Didn’t you ever fly?”

“No.”

“Really? Well, I was a nervous flyer at first. Being packed into an aluminum tube with a hundred other people. And the climb was so steep. It took ten minutes or so to get up to cruising altitude where the air is thinner and there was less drag on the body of the aircraft. Finally, they’d level off around forty thousand feet, about eight miles high.”

“It makes me queasy just to hear you say that.”

“I got to enjoy it. My company paid for business class seats. They gave you free drinks and nice things to eat and they played movies that were still showing in the cinemas. You forgot you were sitting in a metal tube eight miles up in the sky.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever fly in an airplane.”

“I think you’re probably right about that.”

“When I was a little girl, I rode the train a couple of times from Albany to New York City,” she said. “You’d think they could get trains running again, at least. You don’t need oil to run a train. Even I know that.”

“Yeah, you’d think,” I said. “Except I’m not sure there’s any `they’ left out there to get them running. And I wonder where you’d go if `they’ did.”

I told Britney about my side trip to the state capitol when we were in Albany, the lieutenant governor pretending to be still part of something that had obviously dissolved all around him.

“I wonder what New York City’s like now,” she said.

“I’m beginning to think we’re lucky to be where we are.”

“It’s not wrong, me being here with you, is it?”

“I wouldn’t want you to think so.”

“I won’t then,” she said. “I’ll think something else. I’ll think its fortunate.”

“That may be a good way to think about it. For both of us.”

Britney sat quietly for a while, gazing into the braided rug between the chair and the bed. I could see a pulse beating in the pale skin at her right temple, next to where little wisps of lightcolored hair curled above her ear.

“Oh, there’s something else we were wondering about,” she said eventually.

“What?”

“Sarah wonders if you can teach her how to play the fiddle.”

“I can try.”

“I would be very grateful if you would.”

She continued to sit there in the chair. I didn’t know what to say. I felt increasingly paralyzed by her presence. A little breeze blew through the open window and made the candle flame shudder. It also carried traces of her scent my way. Then Britney stood up, letting the bathrobe fall off her shoulders onto the floor as she did. Her nakedness was shocking. Though small, she was a perfectly formed woman.

“Can I lie beside you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, surrendering consciously.

She came around the bed and slipped in under the top sheet, which was all I used during the hot nights of the summer. She pressed against my side. I put Albert Speer down on the night table and extended an arm so she could nestle more closely under it. Her fragrance and the silkiness of her skin next to mine shredded what remained of my thoughts. What followed seemed driven by mindless instinct. Soon she was on top of me, all wetness, and youth, her breasts swaying in the candle light. She assisted me inside her, and I felt as though I was crossing a frontier into a dangerous wilderness where the animals would never learn to speak and might not be so friendly. When we finally subsided, she came back under my arm, and we lay there silently with the flickering candlelight playing on the ceiling. At some point, I blew it out. We fell asleepat least I did-and woke up some time later-I have no idea how much later-and repeated our exertions slowly and deliberately the second time.

Before I fell back asleep, I thought I heard her say, “You have a family now. What do you think of that?”

“It could be I’m extremely fortunate.”