Gadfly: Chapter 1

1

William Gadfly read the letter and then put it down on the table beside him. He remembered the words as he tried to close his eyes. Something wouldn’t let them shut. “Blatant academic irresponsibility … an inappropriate use of an unpublished classroom exercise … stunning display of selfishness and disrespect for a fellow student.” Gadfly was sure all those words would mean something to him one day. Just not now. Although, to be fair, the whole episode had sent him reeling down a long-untraversed corridor, back to his undergraduate days when a classmate had accused him of not being at all interested in storytelling, but in waxing philosophical. For some reason, one silly word came into his head: “Touché.”

After six weeks as a half-hearted participant in one of New York City’s most prominent graduate writing programs, Gadfly had embarked on a project entirely of his own design. He’d sat down on a Monday evening, the shade on his lamp removed, his telephone turned off, his head wet from another rainy night, and began to write. It was to be his final project. He imagined himself by candlelight, at the drafty window of an English cottage. He lived on the second floor of a brownstone on one of the only quiet streets in Manhattan. He had inherited it from his maternal grandmother, who never liked him. She gave it to him because she liked to be shocking, even in death. The next morning, Gadfly had emerged from his quarters with his manifesto: 26 pages, single-spaced and a smart title: “Frugal Fiction: The Rise of Cheap Literature.”

He began: “Though I have spent only six weeks as a member of Randolph University’s prestigious-in-name-only graduate fiction writing program (schools like Randolph are no longer required to earn their reputations, their statuses having been cemented from years of hearsay and numerous decorative initials following the names of their esteemed-in-their-own-minds-only professors), it is more than enough to ratify the following declaration: fiction is not dead, but if the students at Randolph represent what is to come, somebody ought to murder it.”

Within moments of affixing the final period, Gadfly sent the essay off to The Free Thinking Press, an obscure right-wing literary journal known for publishing writers with unpopular positions. The magazine’s political leanings made it scarce within graduate school environments. Gadfly figured that even if it were published, nobody at Randolph would ever see it or read through to the section toward the end that quoted and discussed classmate Mona Baltimore’s “insipidly existential” short story about modern disillusionment.

“Baltimore (I worry that referring to her by last name only might attach an undue importance to her work), whose story is marred by several bouts of intellectual laziness, never even pretends to utilize her clumsy language and derivative dialogue for the sake of definitive ideas. Early on, the protagonist, a sheepish, 30-year-old office temp (a Bartleby wannabe for the Facebook age) utters what is to become her mantra – ‘I couldn’t possibly. Or perhaps I could?’ – a declaration that makes every possible interpretation available for dissection by our thumb-sucking, psychobabble-inclined profs. Such non-committal drivel is tolerated as long as the ending allows readers to scratch one of several, pre-approved, literary itches – juxtaposition, irony, symbolism, nihilism, ambiguity and historical allusion to name only a few. In Baltimore’s case, the symbolic silence of the opening line (‘I hear nothing when I swallow’) is mirrored by an equally hollow final sentence (‘I turn on the light but, to my chagrin, the electricity doesn’t make noise’). Ipso facto: nothing much changes or means anything in the modern world. Thanks for wasting my fucking time.”

After Mona saw the article, she confronted Gadfly in workshop, and he was silent all the while, never bothering to offer a defense. He nodded and frowned and scribbled a few notes as his classmates lambasted him. He left right before they were to workshop his new story. The letter came a week later. He’d received it in his mail the previous morning and was rereading it as he drank his morning coffee. The whole situation wouldn’t have bothered him all that much, if only he could get his money back. He was done with writing anyway. He’d long ago given up on susceptibility.

He found himself in the old reading chair he’d owned since his first marriage and which had been in his family since well before that. He balanced a bowl of cereal on his lap, and the remote control rested on one of the arms. The chair was blue and bursting with foam. It had been re-upholstered twice during its illustrious history, which extended back to his grandfather’s middle age when it was a mustard color, almost puke-yellow. Its coils were stretched and the headrest was splotched with shadows of grease. The television was not yet on. He was in his pink polka-dot boxer shorts from the night before, a basketball jersey and some brown dress socks pulled up around his meaty calves. His face was mild and gray. He used to drink heavily, not as a greedy addict would, but with nonchalance, in order to stave off boredom. He hadn’t had a drink in more than three years, mostly because he now preferred boredom to whatever else was feasible.

His living space was in a state of disrepair far beyond anything that was reconcilable. A simple cleaning would never do. There was old food crusted to the walls from spasms of unremembered frustration. The carpet was damp and cluttered and a patch of it in the corner beside the couch gave off a vague whiff of urine from time-to-time. His files were mixed-up across the floor, including the folders that contained all of the stories he’d written over the years, all of which had been rejected by nearly every major literary magazine in the country: “Stories Written Before 1995” now mixed in with “Stories Written with Animal Characters” and the even more obscure “Stories Set in an Alternative Galaxy.” In a fit one evening, after being unable to recall the name of an actress from some small film of his youth, he punished himself by purposely confusing the various files that contained every piece of data he had ever been given pertaining to himself: W-2 forms, immunization records, school transcripts, credit reports, job evaluations (originally in separate files for the good and the bad), phone bills, insurance cards, social security cards, tax reports, acceptance letters, rejection letters and electronically-generated relationship compatibility reports.

He was going to see his mother for dinner that evening to let it be known he was moving away – in fact, he’d be leaving right after their meal – and would no longer be in contact with the family. His mother no longer seemed of any importance to him since his father’s heart had given out earlier that year. His father – William Gadfly Sr. – had been the sort of man who made regret fashionable. He carried it with him down the street to the grocer’s to pick up a gallon of milk; wore it like a garish brooch on his well-pressed funeral home suits; hinted bravely at it within each polysyllabic sigh that rose from his chest, even as he mimed his way through an endless array of Saturday night, cocktail hour chit-chats: “Oh, they say Melville’s too inaccessible, but well – hayEWah – I’m just not sure that any old regular Joe ought to have access to the things he’s trying to say, anyway.”

On weekends, before the company would arrive, William Gadfly Sr. would eat enormous amounts of the cheese his wife had laid out on circular snack tables on the back veranda of their ground floor, Upper West Side home. “I hope your plan isn’t to escape our marriage by clogging your arteries with provolone,” his wife would say. And Senior would then put down his cheese in mid-bite and slink to his office to play computer chess until the middle of the afternoon, when social propriety finally got the best of him. In truth, though, the heart attack was more a product of disappointment than cholesterol, a condition he passed on to his son. As a result, Junior now saw the world as a kind of mute-blue idea, where even the most vivid characters were nothing more than airy wisps whose touch was never final, never fatal.

William Gadfly had been enamored of his father. When Senior was not in the company of his wife and her respectable friends, he was bawdy and irreverent. He was known to, after a glass or two (he preferred Grand Marnier but sometimes resorted to cheap wine to quell his sense that he was growing more pretentious with age), refer to his wife as “The Cunt,” a moniker that got back to her on one occasion when father and son were overheard at a lounge near Gramercy Park. Mrs. Gadfly responded by crying for days and refusing to let her husband into the bedroom, where she sobbed brutally and lamented the “grotesque betrayal.”

At 8:15 the telephone rang. It was an old rotary affair and the ring was a metallic shrill that always made Gadfly shudder. After the third ring, he placed the cereal bowl on an oak end table and lifted the receiver.

“William? William, honey, are you OK?”

“Who is this?”

“William, how could you not know? It’s me. Valerie. Your wife. How could you not know me?”

“Oh. Oh. How are you?”

Valerie had a disturbing habit of continuing to refer to herself as his wife, even though they’d been divorced for a decade.

“I haven’t been able to reach you for days. What’s going on? Where have you been? Are you OK? Where is Maria?”

“She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“She’s gone.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I have no idea.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“If she did, I haven’t found it yet. But it’s a little messy in here.”

“Messy? What happened? Have you been shuffling your files again?”

“No.”

“You have, haven’t you? Oh, I wish you wouldn’t do that William. You know how upset that makes you.”

“It doesn’t make me upset. It just makes me confused.”

“William, honey, let me come over and fix things up for you. I know how you get. Let me come over and tidy up the place.”

“You can do anything you want to do. But I won’t be here for much longer. I have a day’s worth of errands to run. And I’m having dinner tonight with my mother.”

“Let me come over now, before you go out. How much longer will you be there?"

“Until about ten o’clock.”

“I’ll throw on some clothes and come over right away. Just stay there, OK? I’ll come over and clean up for you. I know how you get.”

“OK.”

“You’ll be there?”

“Until ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock.”

He hung up the phone, because there was nothing left to say. He picked up his bowl of cereal again. He was almost finished and wanted to slurp the milk. He turned on the television and put on a news show. He turned off the voice. He liked to see people talking, or just to know they were there, though he was not particularly interested in what they had to say. (For sound, he liked music. He didn’t like to mix the two.) He didn’t like people talking to him when he could not respond. Not that he would have, but he resented the very idea of it. Still, he liked to see their faces.

As he finished eating, he stared at the close-up photograph of professional baseball players on top of the television. Gadfly had once been a die-hard fan. Basketball, too. The NBA. No more. The picture was from a game several seasons back. His friend Luke from the newspaper had given it to him after getting excellent tickets and going to a game with his camera and a woman from sales he hardly knew. Luke had claimed he felt guilty for going without Gadfly – especially on the weekend of William’s 36^th birthday – but did it anyway. The picture was supposed to be a balm.

Luke took huge breaths before he spoke in order to get all the words out in one stream. He smoked American Spirits and said everything as if it were a matter-of-fact, as if the logic were obvious to anyone but a philistine. He had been Gadfly’s side-man – in between wives – through their years of adamant bachelorhood. He was divorced twice as well, but ten years older. When Gadfly told his friend of his engagement to a magazine editor named Maria (they were engaged only 6 months after they met), Luke called him a “fool.” Gadfly had said no such thing about the girl from sales.

Gadfly remembered how it was on the night he and Luke dissolved, about four years back. It was a scene at the Russian Tea Room in which Gadfly, Luke and two of their associates from the newspaper had gone out for drinks. Maria, who’d met Luke only a handful of times, stopped by as well. Everybody was having a solid time. It was after work and the room was ornate and gold and beautiful. It was like sitting down in the middle of a bowl of sugar. Gadfly and Maria were to be married in a little more than a month, but Luke had never bothered to formally congratulate the union. Several drinks in, when Gadfly made mention of the upcoming nuptials, Luke took the opportunity to say what he had been thinking.

“So you’re part of the cavalry now, eh, Will?”

“Which cavalry is that?”

“The cavalry of belief. Those that believe – without proof – that love is more than something transitory. That it is an everlasting condition.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ah, of course you do. Of course you do! Congratulations, my friend! We, on the other side, are grateful for your temporary foray into our muck and mire. It is where we reside with only a silly, miniscule hope of rescue. We want to know if love is wild. If it is, in fact, real. Can you tell us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe your lady friend can help us. Maria, is it? Can you tell us if you have found true love with our little Will here? Or is this just another stopgap for both of you, on the way to something better? I certainly hope it’s not that. Don’t go shattering us with disillusionment now, here, on this lovely evening in this lovely restaurant.”

Maria, whose cool beauty was never undone, even by indignation, looked to Gadfly. He had not prepared her for Luke’s jealousy. He had expected Luke to hold his tongue.

“C’mon now. Don’t look to Will for your answer, doll. We all know he’s not the place to find insight of a romantic nature. Just ask his first wife about that.”

Luke and one of the other colleagues had a good chuckle over this line. Gadfly didn’t say anything. Maria did.

“Actually, Will is quite an expert on matters of the heart. And he’s by far the best fuck I’ve ever had.”

Everyone else froze, including William Gadfly. After a long, hard silence, Luke took a swallow of his drink, then regained his tongue.

“Good. Good to know. You’re a lucky lady.”

“I am. I really am. Say, why don’t we have a toast to my husband’s magnificent cock, huh?”

She raised her glass and encouraged everyone to do the same. They followed her lead, albeit tentatively. She then downed her drink and told Gadfly to hurry up with his. He did. She was still smiling. She rose and took him by the hand. She waved to the crowd and led her husband-to-be out of the restaurant.

Outside, she dropped his hand and pointed a finger in his face.

“If you ever leave me hanging out there like that again, at any point, for the rest of our lives, you will never see me again. Do you understand?”

She then turned and walked up the street, far ahead of him and his shame. As he shuffled along behind her, he was even more ashamed that despite her claims about his prowess, he hadn’t actually slept with Maria yet. She hadn’t even seen his penis, much less fucked it. She wanted to wait for their wedding night. She wasn’t a virgin or anything like that, but she thought holding out would add urgency to the honeymoon. She wanted the demarcation. She’d said something along the lines of how sex would coronate her decision to become a wife. It was convoluted logic, to say the least. But Gadfly went along with it rather easily because she was simply too beautiful. And he couldn’t afford to take any chances.

When Luke did not show up at the wedding, Gadfly had not figured on it. He had a drink in memory and kissed his wife. Love is full of casualties, he thought, without feeling that way.

Gadfly watched the television and wondered what the morning newscasters were saying. He was aware of the fact that he had to stand up and knew he could do it whenever he chose. He waited and watched the television screen and waited for words that would not come. It seemed like a very long time. The room was brown and garbled.

Gadfly spoke:

I walk into the kitchen and place the bowl in the sink. There are other dishes there but I don’t yet feel it is appropriate to clean them because Maria’s final bowl is still at the bottom. It’s difficult to understand that someone can eat soup in your home one minute and still at some minute soon afterward decide to never step foot inside it again except to gather some things and say an obligatory goodbye. Eating soup seems such an intimate act. But the break wasn’t nearly so abrupt. She left nearly four months ago and the bowl at the bottom of the sink was her last dish, it was true, but it wasn’t her fault that she was hungry when she came to tell me what was happening, I had in fact offered her the soup which I’d made for her and was still excited to give her even as her motives became apparent. “I’ll try it,” she said when I told her it was vegetable beef, even as she insisted on becoming thick inside the room, and yet she immediately turned strange to me, dissolving into a very small figure, like an action figure, as she spoke words which I refused to hear even as the message seeped into me, snatches of its disease finding its way to places in my neck and nostrils and that place underneath my knees where I’d packed every spoonful of sorrow that had come my way since I was ten years old.

Love love love love love. I’d found it unconscionable in so many others and yet I’d accepted it inside of myself (the impulse at least if not the rocks), but Maria was the kind of girl people are supposed to fall in love with, she was all set up for love and I’d fallen for it like I was supposed to, like they did in movies, because no matter how hard I try I always fall in love like a picture of myself, falling and never like it is actual, actuality isn’t as intense, never gets me going, never betrays me, never slashes me or gets broken inside my blood, which was why Valerie was never a long-term solution, knew that from the first year really, before that even. Maria was a different problem. She crushed me like rain, made me into the last ecstatic sip of beer at the bottom of an all-night glass, urged me to be who I should have been were it not for the problem of breathing; Maria was the clink of a glass, the prowl of a burglar, the gulp of a swallower, the gas of an ancient stove, the highest note in the range of a gospel singer who never goes that high. I loved her like that, as if she were full of dizziness and baseball, which she was, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t, instead she was ready to tell me how I should dress and behave and what I should eat for breakfast and how I should perceive beauty. And still I eat her cereal. There is no way to love someone you adore that much, no way to quiet everything going on when the love is like that, she loved me so much less that it was impossible once I knew that, which I knew right away but tried to pretend like it wasn’t the case, so instead I was always trying to overcome something (my mind was adept at belief but not as much at love), and that’s another reason why it couldn’t be any good despite all my poetry: it was stuck, it was doomed, it was asthma, it was dead because it never was.

Maria’s bowl is still at the bottom and I place my bowl on top of another bowl, newer bowls, newer plates, newer forks, and I undress in the kitchen and let my shirt and my pink polka-dot shorts and brown socks wilt to the floor before walking to the bathroom and getting in the shower, and all I can hear and taste are Maria and England and cereal bowls and soup bowls and embarrassing pleas that don’t embarrass me anymore and urine on the carpet (when did I do that?) and television news with no voice and my mother and I touch myself and get bored of that and stop and wait until I am tired of the water. And then I can tell that the bell has been ringing for quite a while even though I haven’t actually noticed it until right now, but I realize that somewhere in some recess of awareness – as if down a stretched and haunted corridor where a person becomes a speck – I have known the ringing all along, but only now am I capable of understanding what it is, only now am I able to translate the memory into the recognition of its existence. And so I wrap a towel around my waist and get out and press the intercom button and everything is goosebumps and New York City again.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me. What took you so long? Let me up.”

He pressed the button and sat down on the couch in his towel, still dripping. The door was unlocked and she walked into the apartment in a rush. She removed her coat, put it on the rocking chair and sat beside him on the couch without any surprise or recognition, as if she knew he’d be right where she found him.

“Oh, William. I was so sorry to hear.”

She threw her arms around Gadfly and hugged his shoulders. Then she pulled away and looked deeply into him, searching vainly for his wounds.

“How long?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Ask the sink.”

“William!”

“I kicked her out.”

“Why?”

“Because she didn’t want to stay.”

“When?”

“It must be four months now. Four months or four decades. I can’t recall.”

“Four months? My God! How long have you been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like this.”

“Four months. And before that, too.”

“Oh, William.”

She hugged him again, this time pulling him into her and caressing his hair. It was messy and it wasn’t gray yet, but it was thinner than the last time she’d seen him. He thought about that, if she would notice that. Then he closed his eyes and let her caress him. She let go quickly.

“You’re all wet! Were you in the shower?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“Yes. I told you.”

“Oh, yes. Dinner with your mother. Isn’t that later?”

“Yes. But I must run some errands around the city.”

“Errands? Since when do you run errands?”

“I have some things that need order.”

“You should start with this apartment.”

Nothing.

“I’ve never known you to be an errand-runner. You always seemed to accomplish those things by accident.”

“Today is an important day.”

“All the days are important.”

Nothing.

“Would you like me to stay and tidy up for you?”

“If you’d like.”

“Well, it’s not about what I’d like, William. It’s about you. What would you like?”

“I guess I’d like it.”

“There’s a lot to do.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I will do it for you.”

“OK.”

“What do you say?”

“What?”

“I said, what do you say?”

“I don’t understand that question.”

“‘Thank you,’ William. You say, ‘Thank you.’”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh, William. Four months? Why didn’t you call? You could have come with us to Cape Cod. You could’ve stayed with us, taken Patrick to the movies, come out with us and taken your mind away from all of it. I don’t know why you insist on this sort of affectation. You weren’t like this with me.”

“I was much younger then.”

“Younger, yes. But not as smart. Not nearly as smart as you are now. Think of all the wisdom you’ve acquired! Not just information, with someone like you. Wisdom, which is much more important. And now getting a Masters Degree to boot, right? I haven’t spoken to you in a bit. How is school going?”

“It’s going fine.”

“Wonderful. You’re so smart, William. Much smarter than me. I could never be that smart, no matter how many books I read. Oh, sure, I could be educated, I suppose, but that’s a horse of a different color altogether. How can it be that you can’t find somebody to stick by, as smart as you are?”

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with it.”

“I mean, we were young, so you can’t go and lay the blame on me. Blame youth. Blame our twenties. Blame New York City. But don’t blame me.”

Nothing.

“But you’ll meet someone again. I just know it. I can feel it in my bones. Did you ever get a feeling like that? I do. All the time. I can just feel it. Maybe at school. Are there people our age at your school?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s it. I just know it. That’s where you’ll meet someone who can keep up with you and all those ideas you’ve got. You may not be happy now, William, but you’re the type who will make it last once you find it. It will be a deep and gratifying happiness, like I have with Richard. Something that lasts and lasts, maybe not until death, but close enough. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“Probably.”

“Probably. Yes. Nothing is for sure, of course. But probably is a good word.”

She got up and began to busy herself. The television set was still on, still muted. It was framed by the deep windowsill behind it on the far wall of the living room. It was a small window and the only one on the street side of the room so there was never a lot of light. What Gadfly could see above the set was filled in with gray. Gadfly thought that every day had been gray light in the city lately. Sometimes it was so dark during his afternoon walks that he could hardly make out the shape of his hand if he held it out in front of him. It reminded Gadfly of his undergraduate days in New England, the only extended period of his life when he hadn’t lived in New York. In his New England autumns, there had been very little sun, and the rainy days were all hammers and nails; it was like dreaming in aluminum. But on the days of occasional clarity, the sun was always blue-white and brittle and seemed to be farther away than any other sun he had ever seen. It looked ready to be cracked open if only you could ever reach it.

“Ugh, William. This place is even worse than I thought. How could you let it get this bad? This isn’t like you.”

After a quick survey of the living room, she went into the kitchen and began putting away some of the food items that Gadfly had left out. It was quiet in the apartment. He watched her trying to clean up, looking all around her at the mess, throwing up her hands out of helplessness. Gadfly thought about how he wasn’t embarrassed to be in a towel in front of her. His body had gotten a little tired since Maria had left. It wasn’t flab really. It just seemed like everything on him had exhaled. Patches of his skin looked like they had come unbuckled. There were inexplicable crinkles or bulges where before there had been none, but it wasn’t a uniform condition. He felt shapeless. When he looked at himself naked in front of a mirror, he was reminded of an amateur painting, something that hardly even resembled the human form. She hadn’t seen his body in years and hadn’t bothered to comment on it. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. More likely, she had, and was commenting now in her head about how repulsive he’d become. It didn’t matter.

He saw her go over to the sink. She reached into it and pulled out Maria’s bowl from the bottom. There was still soup in it and whole pieces of vegetables. It was a green bowl with a chip on the lip. He’d bought it for Maria during their honeymoon. She was still sleeping in the hotel room and he’d gone out into the streets of London to get a taste of the English morning. In the big cities, there is only an hour or so where one can view the city without prejudice, after the nighttime parties and before the working people begin to twitch. It was not quite 5 a.m. in London. It was their first morning there. He was fresh from making love on the balcony. He was still tingling from her, still remembering that look of terror on her face as he pushed her into the railing and roughly dipped her into the city. There was a mark on her back from it. He wasn’t sure how to release himself into love in any other way. He wanted to show her he could be gentle, too. He found the vendor setting up his inventory on a side street. He was the first vendor out that day. When he got back to the room, he woke her up to give it to her. She was the one who noticed it was chipped.

“This is where the smell is coming from. It’s this bowl of vegetables. They’re all moldy and gross. Yugh!”

It was almost nine o’clock when she dumped the contents of the bowl into the garbage can and ran it under steaming water from the sink. Gadfly watched her. He watched her empty the bowl. He watched her smash the vegetables down into the garbage pail. He watched her scrub the bowl clean with elbow grease and a soapy sponge. He watched her rinse it and wipe it down with a dishtowel. He watched her place the bowl in a cabinet above the sink as the water continued to run. He watched her move on to the next dish.

Gadfly stood up from the couch as she continued, now washing all the other bowls and plates and forks piled in the sink and then drying them. She did not notice him standing, nor did she notice that the towel around his waist had fallen to the ground and that he was standing naked in the middle of the living room. He was hard and pointed toward her. He walked quietly and she did not hear him over the rush of the faucet until he was right behind her. She turned around at hearing his breath and instinctively looked down at his penis. He acted quickly, so she would not misunderstand his intentions. There wasn’t enough time for her to look shocked. With his left hand he covered her mouth and smashed her head against the cabinets. The water was still running. He was breathing better than he had in years. She could hear him breathing and still trusted him enough not to try screaming. By the time she wanted to scream, it was too late. His right thumb pressed into her windpipe and he could feel the straining tendons of her neck as they tensed into coiled rope. He moved his left hand around her neck and squeezed as hard as he could. He lifted her head up for a moment then slammed it again against the kitchen cabinets. The violence of the thrust appeared to invigorate her resistance. He squeezed harder. He shook her. He shook her more. He wondered why it was taking so long. Then, as he watched her eyes close, willfully it seemed, he wondered how it could be so easy. He kept squeezing, well after she’d given up. He did not pull off all at once, but gradually un-tensed his grip. When he was certain she was dead, he took away his hands and felt them pulsing and hungry, ready to reattach if necessary. Her body crumpled beside his shirt and pink polka-dot boxers and brown dress socks. She was dressed in a brown skirt and a silk top that was too loose on her. Her stockings were new. Her shoes were red.

When his hands had calmed and everything had returned to normal, Gadfly knelt down on the floor. He laid Valerie flat on her back and pulled her hair out so that it was neat and flowing on the kitchen linoleum. He felt himself going down as he stroked her hair and leaned his head against her cheek. He was still kneeling and still naked. Then he patted her head six times until his 40-year-old knees creaked and he was forced to stand. He went to the sink and turned off the water just as it threatened to overflow.

It was still not quite nine o’clock.