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  “You’re a thousand miles away,” she said over the Sunday salad. “What is it?”

  “I’m preoccupied.” His tone made it clear that her plaintiveness was futile, and she became frightened and angry. She didn’t say anything, which was what he wanted.

  He did not lie down with her that evening, although he was exhausted. He walked around the loft, striking the furniture with Diane’s riding crop, annoying the cats, making them skitter across the floor, their eyes unnerved, their tails ruffled. His eyes dried in their sockets. His back was sore and balled into knots from staying up for three days.

  He began doing things to attract Daisy’s attention. He told jokes. He slapped his face with eau de toilette. He wore red pants and a sheathed knife in his belt. He did full splits and handstands. He talked about his active role in the theater department at Bennington and his classes with André Gregory. He mentioned the karate class he’d taken once, and punched a hole in a box of books. She said, “Joey has done everything!” There was a thrilling note of triumph in her voice.

  For a long time he just looked at her. That alone made him so happy, he was afraid to try anything else. Maybe it would be better to hold her winglike shadow safe in the lock of his memory than to touch the breathing girl and lose her.

  He decided to give her a card on Valentine’s Day.

  He spent days searching for the valentine material. He found what he wanted in an old illustrated children’s book. It was a faded watercolor drawing of three red poppies sharing a field with pink clover and some blameless little weeds. A honey-colored bee with dreamily closed eyes was climbing a stalk. An aqua-green grasshopper was flying through a fuzzy, failing blue sky, its eyes blissfully shut, its hairy front legs dangling foolishly, its hind legs kicking, exultant, through the air. It was a distorted, feverish little drawing. The colors were all wrong. It made him think of paradise.

  He tore it from the book and covered it with a piece of fragile paper so that the scene, veiled by the yellowing tissue haze, became remote and mysterious. He drew five hearts in misshapen lines and senselessly alternating sizes on the bottom of it. He colored them red. He wrote “Voici le temps des assassins” under them.

  He carried it to work with him for several days before and after Valentine’s Day. He decided dozens of times to give it to her, and changed his mind every time. He examined it daily, wondering if it was good enough. When he decided it was perfect, he thought perhaps it would be better to keep it in his drawer, where he alone knew it existed for her.

  Finally, he said, “I have a valentine for you.”

  She pattered around his desk, smiling greedily. “Where is it?”

  “In my drawer. I don’t want to give it to you yet.”

  “Why not? Valentine’s Day was a week ago. Can’t I have it now?” She put her fingers on his shoulders like soft claws. “Give it to me now.”

  When he handed it to her, she hugged him and pressed against him. He giggled and put his arm around her. He sadly let go of his shadow captive.

  That night he couldn’t eat his spinach salad. The radish, gaily flowering red and white, was futile enticement. Diane sat across from him, stonily working her jaws. She sat rigidly straight-backed, her throat drawn so taut it looked as if it would be hard for her to swallow. He picked at the salad, turning the clean leaves this way and that. He stared past her, sighing, his dry eyes hot in their sockets.

  “You look like an idiot,” she said.

  “I am.”

  The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time.

  “You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.”

  She smiled, he thought, uncertainly.

  “You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “What about Diane?”

  “I’ll leave Diane.”

  She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her.

  She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said.

  “Why not? I love you.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?”

  “I can’t. I’m medicated.”

  “You’re what?”

  He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot.

  They left the restaurant and walked around the block. Daisy butted her head against the harsh wind; her short gray coat floated in back of her like a sail. He held her mittened hand. “I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I want to cast my mantle of protection over you.”

  “Let’s sit here,” she said. She sat down on an even rise of yellow brick in front of an apartment building that was an impression of yellow brick and shadowy gray glass shielding the sad blur of a doorman. He sat very near her and held her hand.

  “I have to tell you some things about myself,” she said. “I don’t take admiration very well.”

  “I don’t care if you take it well or not. It’s there.”

  “But won’t it make you unhappy if I don’t return it?”

  “I’d be disappointed, I guess. But I’d still have the pleasure of feeling it for you. It doesn’t have to be returned.” He wanted to put his hands on either side of her head and squeeze.

  She looked at him intently. “I said that to someone recently,” she said. “Do you suppose it’s a trend of some kind?”

  The wind blew away her bangs, baring her white forehead. He kissed the sudden openness. She dropped her head against his shoulder.

  An old woman in a pink coating bearing a sequined flower with a disturbing burst of petals on her lapel looked at them and smiled. Her white face was heavy with wrinkles and pink makeup, and her smile seemed difficult under the weight. She sat on the short brick wall about two feet away from them.

  “I’m not making myself clear,” said Daisy. She lifted her head and looked at him with wide, troubled eyes. “If you’re nice to me, I’ll probably make you unhappy. I’ve done that to people.”

  “You couldn’t make me unhappy.”

  “I’m only nice to people who are mostly mean to me. Once somebody told me to stay away from so-and-so because he beat up girls. They said he broke his girlfriend’s jaw.”

  She paused, for emphasis, he supposed. The old lady was beginning to look depressed.

  “So I began flirting with him like wild. Isn’t that sick?”

  “What happened?” asked Joey with interest.

  “Nothing. He went to Bellevue before anything could. But isn’t it awful? I actually wanted this nut to hit me.” She paused again. “Aren’t you disgusted?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  The old lady rose slowly, head down, and walked away with stiff, painful steps. Her coat blew open; her blue-veined legs were oddly pretty.

  Daisy turned to watch her. “See,” she said. “She’s disgusted even if you aren’t. We’ve ruined her day.”

  Every day after work, he walked Daisy to a corner two blocks away from her apartment so he wouldn’t meet her boyfriend, David. There was a drugstore on the corner with colored perfume bottles nesting in fistfuls of crepe paper in the window. The druggist, a middle-aged man with a big stomach and a disappointed face, stood at the door and watched them say good-bye. It was a busy corner; traffic ran savagely in the street, and people stamped by, staring in different directions, clutching their packages, briefcases and huge, screaming radios, t
heir faces concentrated but empty. Daisy was silent and frail as a cattail, her fuzzy black mitten in Joey’s hand, her eyes anxiously scanning the street for David. She would say goodbye to him several times, but he would pull her back by her lapel as she turned to cross the street. After the second time he stopped her, she would sigh and look down, then begin to go through her pockets for scraps of unwanted paper, which she tore into snowflake pieces and scattered like useless messages in the garbage-jammed metal wastebasket under the street lamp, as if, trapped on the corner, she might as well do something useful, like clean her pockets.

  That day, when he finally let her go, he stood for a moment and watched her pat across the street, through the awful march of people. He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans.

  He thought of rescuing Daisy. She would be walking across the street, with that airy, unaware look on her face. A car would roar around a garbage-choked corner, she would freeze in its path, her pale face helpless as a crouching rabbit. From out of nowhere he would leap, sweeping her aside with one arm, knocking them both to the sidewalk, to safety, her head cushioned on his arm. Or she would be accosted by a hostile teenager who would grab her coat and push her against a wall. Suddenly he would attack. The punk’s legs would fly crazily as Joey slammed him against a crumbling brick wall. “If you hurt her, I’ll …”

  He sighed happily and got another pill and a handful of jelly beans.

  “My mother couldn’t understand me or do anything for me,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.”

  “She sounds like a bitch,” said Daisy.

  “Oh, no. She did what she could, given the circumstances. She at least recognized that I far surpassed her in intelligence.”

  “Then why did she let her boyfriend beat you up?”

  “He didn’t beat me up. He was just a fat slob who got a thrill out of putting a twelve-year-old in a half nelson and then asking how it felt.”

  “He beat you up.”

  They were in a small, dark bar. It had floors and tables made of old creaking wood, and a half-moon window of heavy stained glass in one wall. The tables were clawed with knifemarks, the french fries were large and damp. The waitresses carried themselves like dinosaurs with ungainly little hands and had purple veins on their legs, even though they were young. They were friendly though, and they looked right at you.

  Daisy and Joey came here for lunch and sat in the deep, high-backed booths. Joey didn’t eat, and by now Daisy knew why. He drank and watched her eat her hamburger with measured bites.

  “I still can’t understand why she married that repulsive pig. I ask her and she says ‘because he makes me feel stable and secure.’”

  “He doesn’t sound stable to me.”

  “I guess he was, compared to my father. But then Dad was usually too drunk to make it down the stairs without falling, let alone hold a job. I mean, you’re talking about a guy who died in the nut ward singing ‘Joey, Foey, Bo-Poey, Bananarama Oh-Boey.’ Any asshole is stable compared to that. But Tom? At least my father had style. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in those ugly Dacron things Tom wears.”

  Daisy leaned into the corner of the booth and looked at him solemnly.

  “When she first told me over the phone that she was getting married to Uncle Tom, I was happy. At least I’d get to come home instead of staying with my Christian Scientist relatives who made me wear those retarded plaid pants to school.”

  “She never should have sent you away like that,” said Daisy. She sat up and pulled her drink closer, latching on to the straw with a jerking motion of her lip.

  “She thought it was the right thing to do after my father died. Only she never knew how much my relatives hated me.”

  “I don’t know how she could’ve thought it was the right thing to let him throw you out of the house when you were sixteen.”

  “He didn’t throw me out. I just knew the constant fighting over whether or not I was a faggot was hurting my mother. I realized that I was more of an adult than they were and that it was up to me to change the situation.”

  Daisy leaned back with both hands on her glass as she sucked the straw, her cheeks palpitating gently. There were dainty gurgle noises coming from the bottom of her glass as she slurped the last of her drink. He smiled and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers. He gulped his alcohol, his pulse beating wildly to and fro. He hadn’t really been thrown out of the house when he was sixteen. He had been eighteen when Tom went berserk at the sight of his anti-Vietnam poster and broke his nose.

  Daisy put her glass on the table with a slurred movement. She leaned against him. He cradled her head and ordered more drinks.

  “They couldn’t believe it when I got that scholarship to Bennington. I didn’t even tell them I applied. They already felt inferior to me.”

  “Did you drop out of college to get back at your mother?” Her voice was blurry from his shoulder.

  “I dropped out because I couldn’t stand the people. I couldn’t stand the idea of art. Art is only good at the moment it’s done. After that it’s dead. It’s just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.”

  She sat away from him, reaching for her new glass. “I’m an artist. Diane is an artist. Why do you like us?”

  He kissed the blue vein on her neck and enjoyed the silly beat of his heart. “You’re like a pretty shadow.”

  Her eyes darted with worry. “You like me because I’m like you.”

  He smiled tolerantly and stroked her neck. “You’re not like me. No one is like me. I’m a phenomenon.”

  She looked tired and turned away from him to her drink. “You’re a misfit. So am I. We don’t belong anywhere.”

  “Aww.” He reached under her shirt and touched her small breast. She put her forehead against his neck, she put her hand between his legs. Her voice fluttered against his skin. “David has a gig out of town next week. Will you come stay with me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Sometimes, though, he thought Daisy was sort of a stupid little thing. He thought it when he looked at Diane and noticed the stern, distinct line of her mouth, her strong nose, the muscles of her bared arms flexing as she furiously picked her nails. She didn’t ask annoying questions about drugs. She never thought about being a misfit, or having a place in society. She loathed society. She sat still as a stone, her heavy-lidded eyes impassively half-closed, the inclination of her head in beautiful agreement with her lean, severe arm and the cigarette resting in her intelligent fingers.

  But it was too late. Diane wouldn’t talk to him anymore, except to insult him. She changed her medication days so she wouldn’t be on schedule with him. Sometimes she didn’t medicate at all. She said it made her cry.

  He found her crying one day when he came home from work. It was so rare to see Diane cry that it was several minutes before he realized there were tears on her face. She was sitting in the aging purple armchair by the window, one leg drawn up and bent so that her knee shielded her face. Her shoulders were in a tight curl, she held her long bare foot tightly in her hand. She watched him walk past her. She let him reach the doorknob before she said, “You’re seeing someone.”

  He stopped and faced her, thankful and relieved that she had said it first. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t know how.”

  “You cowardly piece of shit.”

  “It’s nothing serious,” he said. “It’s just an obsession.”

  “It’s Daisy, isn’t it?” She said the name like it was a disease.

  “How did you know?”

  “The way you mentioned her name. It was sickening.”

  “I didn’t intend for it to happen.”

  “What a slime-bag you are.”

  It was then that he identifie
d the glistening on her cheeks and chin. The tears were wrenching and poignant on her still face. He dropped his bag of jelly beans and moved toward her. He sat on the fat arm of the chair and put his arms around her rigid, shivering body. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s like before,” she said. “With Rita. It’s so repulsive.”

  “If you can stay with me through this, just wait it out …”

  “I want you out of here by the end of the month.” The tears shimmered through her voice, which quivered like sunlight in a puddle. He wanted to make love to her.

  “You’re the cruelest person I’ve ever known.” Her voice almost broke into panting. She yanked herself out of the chair and walked away, kicking the bag of jelly beans as she passed, spraying them across the floor. He waited until she was out of the room and then went to scoop up a handful of the red, orange and green ones. He ate them as he looked out the picture window and down into the street. There were two junkies in ugly jackets hunched beside the jagged hole in a wire fence. I am a slime-bag, he thought.

  He went to his room to think about Daisy.

  The next morning he went to Daisy’s desk and sat near her on a box of books bearing an unflattering chalk drawing of the shipping department supervisor. She held her Styrofoam cup of tea with both hands and drank from it, looking over its rim with dark-shadowed eyes.

  “She said I was the cruelest person she’d ever known.”

  “Oh, you’re not so bad. She just doesn’t get out of the house much. She doesn’t know what’s out there.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  She put down her cup. “I talked to David last night. He cried too. He just lay there and stared at me with those big eyes. It was awful.”

  She picked up a piece of cardboard and began sweeping the mouse droppings on her desk into a neat pile. “So now they both know.”

  “And we can go to the opera tonight. I have tickets to Die Walküre. You can medicate and we can stay out all night.”

  “I don’t want to medicate.” She pulled the sticky, coffee-stained wastebasket out from under her desk and showered the mouse turds into it with a deft swish of cardboard.