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  Frances had an excellent view of her luncheon companion. The restaurant was lit for seeing, like a public library. Allan Schieffman did not look at Frances. He darted glances. He met her gaze, then lowered his eyes before she did. He tilted his head. He stroked the stem of his wineglass. His gestures, in any female, would be called coquettish.

  “I can’t leave my wife,” said Allan, setting down his menu. Frances was so startled that she turned to look around her, in case he had addressed a woman at a nearby table. Allan ducked his chin and spoke to a basket of breadsticks. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You have funny looks. On your bad days you’re plain, but your good days are very good.” He smiled at the breadsticks, a shy, self-mocking smile, as if it were too soon to pay them such a lavish compliment.

  Frances froze like a rabbit in the headlights of a speeding car. Her mind went blank, although she noticed Allan Schieffman’s teeth. He was thirty-six, but his teeth were in their middle fifties. One canine was chipped and the lower incisors were dark, as if they had fur caps. His mouth was moving, which implied he must be talking. All she could hear was a rushing sound in her ears. Frances was not trained in the art of swift reprisals. She sat there with her teeth in her mouth, and they were sharp, white teeth.

  When her hearing came back, Allan Schieffman was telling a story, or the end of a story, in which Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute to his washboard midriff. Allan Schieffman treated Frances to a picture of literary life. Allan’s place was in the inner circle, not on the fringes. Saul Bellow had bipped him on the arm to test his biceps. William Styron, who was balding, had tugged at Allan’s thick brown hair. No wonder Allan Schieffman practiced chin-ups in her office doorway; he needed to be fit to endure the brutal world of letters.

  Allan Schieffman took Frances’s arm walking back to Harwood. He cupped her elbow crossing streets when the light turned green. When they reached the building, Allan paused. He was holding keys, a bunch of many keys on a ring with a round brass tag. He weighed the keys on his palm. He tossed them up and caught them. He weighed them, tossed them, and caught them several times in turn.

  “They belong to a friend,” he said. “He’s out of town.” He twirled the keys by the tag. They jingled loudly. “We can go there any time,” said Allan. “He lives alone.”

  Up went the keys. Frances grabbed them in midair and caught them. She held them overhead and dropped them from that height onto the sidewalk. They hit Allan’s foot, which was shod in a canvas sneaker. Frances turned without a word and pushed through the revolving doors.

  Frances Girard had followed Paul Treat’s instructions. She had “seen other people,” and found them distinctly wanting. She wondered if Paul had issued his instruction in the first place to increase her awareness of his rare and curious nature. Other people were not like Paul. They were vain and random. They lacked Paul’s sense of mission and powers of concentration. Frances had never been privileged to know an artist. She had known many writers, but they saw all sides of a question. Paul was never enthralled by doubts or opposing viewpoints. He ran a straight course, keeping close to the inside rail. Now that Frances knew Paul, her own inner discipline had sharpened. In less than a year, she had learned to account for her time. Before Paul, there were hours she had put to no use or purpose. She had had lunch with friends, walked the long way instead of the short way, watched the life of the streets or the patterns of clouds from her window. When she turned out the lights and reviewed the events of the day, she often found there were holes in her memory, gaps of time she had wasted. With Paul in Kansas City, she had backslid on several occasions. Only last Sunday she had eaten her breakfast on a bed tray. She had sat in the park feeding sparrows and sunning her face. Frances burned and peeled in short order. She would have new freckles when Paul got back late Friday night. He would notice her freckles and be sure she had never acquired them in his service or her role as a worker for the Harwood Press.

  Several months after Frances met Paul, she began to lose weight. She started losing red blood cells, too, and took doses of iron. She saw Paul every night when she should have been editing or reading. Then she got the idea of mixing romance with homework. One night she appeared at Paul’s loft in the brass-fittings building with an armload of manuscripts from Harwood, now long overdue. Paul was writing a play, Variations on a Primal Scene, not a play as we know one, but outlines for improvisations. Paul believed that the playwright was passé (except for Shakespeare), and that theatre was a collaboration of director and actors. Paul was seated at his desk ruling lines on a sheet of blank paper. Frances curled up nearby and opened a large box of typescript. After reading several pages, relating to women in communes, she noticed that Paul kept frowning and sending her glances. He was tapping his pencil, too loudly for concentration. When he had broken two pencils, she put her assignment away. Paul looked at Frances, more in sorrow than in anger, and announced that the program for the evening had been disrupted. If she had not preferred to engage in parallel play, they might have advanced the cause of Paul’s new project by reading aloud some sections from Oedipus Rex, that mother lode of all conjecture on primal scenes. Frances hung her head and listened while Paul explained that lovers must work together or drift apart. Love was a partnership, based on shared aims and values. Separate interests were as harmful to love as infidelity. Paul had never used the word “love” in her connection, which went a long way toward easing her niggling doubts, such as whether her job at Harwood was a “separate interest,” along with chores like paying her bills or worming her cat. Would she get time off? Did Paul ever take a break? Even tourists on package tours had free days scheduled.

  Paul ran a tight courtship, but his standards for himself were as stringent. When Frances’s motor began to cough or idle, she had his example to shame her back in line. No one had ever called her a lazy person, though she sometimes took naps after work for half an hour. She had once gone to sleep at Paul’s loft between work and supper. She awoke in the dark to an uproar in the kitchen, drawers wrenched open and cutlery rattling, pots or skillets banged down on the stove, dishes stacked, or un-stacked, in a way that portended breakage. Over this din she had heard an evil grumbling, and made out the words “escape” and “motivation.”

  In spite of his devotion to work, Paul believed he was lazy—if not lazy, perhaps hypothyroid, or possibly dead. Since death might set in by inches, undetected, he had formed the habit of checking his pulse throughout the day. She had seen him holding his wrist in the soundest sleep, though his chest was rising and falling at a steady rate. Frances was never sure Paul really slept, or that his brain, that wakeful giant, became unconscious. Paul had pointed eyebrows to match his reddish beard. From the peak of each brow curled a hair, like an antenna, which twitched during sleep, sending signals to the giant, who decoded them for Paul into dreams as clear as memos. Asleep or awake, Paul never seemed dead to Frances, who wished he would take his lazy tendency to his bosom, embrace it with a fervent heart, and make it his friend. Then she and Paul could go for walks without a camera, taking pictures of odd or demented passersby, whose gestures and grimaces might prove helpful in coaching actors. She and Paul could make conversation in public places, instead of copying overheard gems into spiral notebooks (although Paul had lately lost interest in flavorsome quips and dialect, and had started recording the monotonous quality of functional speech). They could visit museums and galleries for pleasure, stopping to gaze at what was beautiful or new, instead of discussing the composition of every painting, and drawing diagrams that Paul could use for blocking scenes. They could go to a party without a fixed agenda, enjoy meeting new people and exchanging useless small talk, instead of casing the guests according to rank and income, and whether they qualified as backers of modern theatre.

  There is one place where lovers are allowed to rest from toil, or so Frances thought until she was undeceived. The bedroom—or, in a loft like Paul’s, the bed—should
be a refuge, a holiday, and a hiding place. When Frances and Paul first met, they had once spent a day in bed, a whole day of play, athletic and meditative, a white day, the French would say, since sleep was not its object. There had been some white mornings since, and white afternoons, but most of their life in bed was more like work. No matter how warm their embraces at the outset, each session was soon corrupted by goals and tests. One night they were lying in bed, Paul covering Frances. Paul was heavy and tall and Frances was short and thin. He was large enough to crush her, if he had a mind to, but he seemed content to kiss her and stroke her haunches. Frances had begun to stir and press him closer. All at once, Paul rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed. Frances wondered if she had been clumsy—or, worse, unsavory. Perhaps there were patches of chicken skin on her rump.

  “I think we should practice cunnilectus,” said Paul severely.

  Frances started to laugh. She thought Paul must be teasing. “Cunnilectus” (the word) was a recent private joke. Frances had heard it pronounced by a young gynecologist, who felt bound by his oath to give patients some sex-instruction. The same doctor put a u in “spontaneity,” where the e ought to be, and told couples they could choose from a “plathora” of sexual positions.

  “We did, once,” said Frances, “for your play on the incest taboo.”

  “Wrong for incest,” said Paul.

  “Is it better for primal scenes?”

  “It’s for me, not the play. I ought to learn how. They like it.”

  “If ‘they’ includes me, you did a good job,” said Frances.

  “If I practice enough, I might get to like it,” said Paul.

  “Do you think I’m a sewer? Is that why you hate it?” asked Frances.

  “You have to go wash. Perhaps we should shave you,” said Paul.

  This idea was so striking that Frances forgot her hurt feelings. “In the shape of a heart? In the shape of a bowler hat?”

  Cunnilectus (the act) was proving too challenging to Paul. He sought reassurance. He grabbed Frances’s wrist and took her pulse as well as his own.

  “We could bleach you,” said Paul.

  “It would sting.”

  “We could settle for a trim.”

  This bargaining might have continued until early morning if Paul had not glanced at his copy of Oedipus Rex. For the rest of the night, they played Oedipus and Jocasta, stopping short of the blinding of Oedipus and the suicide of the Queen.

  Friday, the day of Paul’s homecoming, came too soon. Too soon because Frances had a very long manuscript to edit. The author was a woman doctor with a pitted complexion who thought women had given up control of their menstrual cycles. Dr. Marr disliked Frances, whose skin was unblemished and fair, and argued each point until Frances conceded from weariness. Her arguments were logical, but Frances found their premise wrongheaded. The menses were a natural phenomenon, like the weather, or Paul Treat. She had no more control of her cycles than she did of her weekends. Before Paul, she had met Monday deadlines by working straight through. How would she juggle Paul’s claims and her half-finished manuscript? Could she feed him a sedative and work while he slept off its influence? Could she gain a few hours if she invented a visit from Aunt Ada, in town for the day from her house in the Hudson Valley? She remembered, however, that Paul felt, with Jesus Christ, that service to him involved severing family ties. Perhaps she could slip away to the corner grocery, pretending to restock Paul’s icebox and his kitchen shelves. She could button a sheaf of manuscript inside her shirt and edit the pages in the dark back booth of a coffee shop. Would Paul rather be betrayed for a manuscript or a man? On the whole, Frances thought he would not admit the difference.

  Late Friday night, Frances climbed the five flights to Paul’s loft. Carrying a suitcase and a bottle of wine, she scratched at his door; it was made of solid steel, with no bell or knocker. If Paul did not answer in a minute, she would kick or pound. The door flew open. A tall figure loomed in the half-light.

  “Brutal beast!” cried Paul, and wrapped her in his mighty arms.

  “Large and fair,” said Frances, hugging him with wine and suitcase. She rubbed her face against his coat until her left cheek burned. Paul gnawed the top of her head and chafed her ears.

  “I forget how blonde,” he said as he patted her hair.

  For an hour they kissed and grappled on Paul’s sofa. They drank the wine. Paul read her his reviews. Paul’s Winter’s Tale had frightened Kansas City—not the bear (trained and live), but the shepherds’ groins, which were bearded. Paul had pasted false hair on their legs and lower torsos, and studded the tufts with berries, weeds, and field flowers. Frances beamed with pride. She butted her head against his shoulder. Here they were, conversing, even chatting, like a normal couple, bending Time to their will, taking flagrant liberties with Time. After only an hour of friendly ease and leisure, she began to imagine a day, a week, a month. Her vision was interrupted by a steady creaking. Paul was jiggling his foot and making the couch springs vibrate. He slapped his palms on his knees and prepared to rise.

  “Well,” said Paul. “Are you ready to do the arson?”

  “Right now?” asked Frances.

  “While it’s fresh in my mind,” said Paul. He dug in his pockets and fished out bits of paper, halves of envelopes, backs of matchbooks, and shredded napkins. He sorted through them and laid some on the table, arranging the scraps like the pieces of a picture puzzle. While directing a play, Paul always worked on the next one, scrawling new ideas on any handy surface. While The Winter’s Tale was being rehearsed and mounted, Variations on a Primal Scene was taking form.

  Frances had no experience of primal scenes, though Paul insisted that she was blocking out the memory. Her parents had slept in single beds with monogrammed spreads, and opened their door at night for ventilation. Paul’s mother and father shared a double bed, the covers of which were always mussed or pushed aside (“enseamèd bed,” said Paul, reciting Hamlet). At night their door was closed, and little Paul, who should have been tucked in and dreaming sweetly, was drawn from his own warm bed toward the taboo portal, rooted at the threshold by the sounds of lewdness, quick gasps, sharp sighs, grunts, moans, and bouncing bedsprings. With both small fists he tried to turn the doorknob, and found the door was bolted from inside. His eyes were almost level with the keyhole, but the room was dark, or the hole had been plugged up. One night, after many vigils, Paul boiled over. He took what he called the “only-child’s revenge.” (It was his theory that children with siblings had other outlets, and were far less likely to witness primal scenes.) Little Paul set a box of matches on the doorsill. He opened the box and struck a match. He dropped it in. He watched the matches hissing into flame; then he ran on his tiptoes back to his nursery room. The house had not burned, and Paul was alive to tell the tale. After that night, Paul often slept in his parents’ bed, a state of affairs that made him a director, since directors were all voyeurs, according to textbooks.

  From the fragments contained in the pockets of his jacket, Paul had outlined the core event of his primal play. In order to explore this psychic raw material, he set the stage with Frances as his stagehand. The couch was the marriage bed; a chair Paul’s cot. A bookcase would represent the Door of Doors. Paul acted out the spying and the arson, and Frances took notes because he might remember something new, such as jabbing his finger into the darkling keyhole, and kneeling to peer through the space between doorsill and door. At one point Paul introduced an innovation. He pretended to pee on the matches to put them out. He declared himself pleased with this tricky piece of business, which would play if the actor in question was turned upstage. Many boxes of matches were consumed during these experiments. They left a blackened area on the floor. Later on, Paul asked Frances to do the bedroom noises. At first, she did them so lamely that Paul started yelling, like the skipper of a sailboat who is stuck with a novice crew. Little by little, she produced better sexual music. She could gasp staccato and grunt up and down the scale. Pa
ul applauded when she made an especially low-pitched moan, and made her repeat it until she lost her voice.

  On Monday, Frances was hoarse but Dr. Marr was finished, except for its index and its twelve-page list of women’s clinics. Paul had granted Frances a reprieve on Sunday afternoon, and left the loft to haggle with a theatre-owner. At the office, Frances noticed that all the desks were empty, as if the secretaries had gone out on strike. She put her purse and Dr. Marr on Ruthanne’s chair, and set off down the hall to get a cup of coffee. She passed by Mr. Harwood’s office. He was pacing, which meant that he was hating authors or their agents. Hammy Griner was eating doughnuts. Allan Schieffman’s office door was closed, but he was out of town. When she had passed his door, she heard a hiss. She turned. The door had opened several inches. A skinny arm reached out and crooked a skinny finger. Frances followed where it led and slithered through the opening.

  The arm belonged to Mary Land, who worked for Hammy Griner. Mr. Harwood’s secretary, Delma Dunbar, was rummaging in the center drawer of Allan’s desk. She found an envelope, or airmail letter, and gave it to Ruthanne, who held three others. Mary Land, who had forgotten her reading glasses, was bending over a sheet of stationery, colored pink. Delma brought out two picture postcards and waved them high. Ruthanne snatched one and went to the window to read it better. Frances cleared her throat to capture their attention.