Displacemen

Displacement

...replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life...

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 377

It was a gray Manhattan morning. Gideon Lewis spent it among the disaffected and the bohemian. He had cut ties with family five years before. Now, he got his community and a sense of his own identity by living in a way that he sensed sabotages the orderly working of the social machinery and that is, consequently, even if un-admittedly, alluring to many people trapped, even if willingly, in that mechanism. Most people lived lives, as far as he could see, that made them dependent upon life-stifling routines, routines they adhered to for the sake of life and livelihood. Most people, he observed, were not as free as he was. They could only dream of being so, now and then. They were holding on to their vitiated lives for dear life.

He sat with a book, but he had trouble focusing his attention on it. A large cup of coffee he was unable to swallow and a croissant he had hardly touched were pushed to the side of the table. He was outside, at a café, under an awning. A light drizzle had begun. The awning outside the Riviera stretched along the sidewalk its whole length, about half the block on Seventh Avenue, across from Sheridan Square Park.

He had slept badly, had dreamed of a girl he thought he no longer desired. In the dream an exquisite intensity of desire, nevertheless, had arisen in him. The edges of fulfillment were pressing against him just as the girl slipped momentarily away leaving a promising smile behind to attest that she would hardly be away for a minute. But immediately he knew that where she had been present so palpably, now was a volume of dreamy air aching with a wish that was losing its form. No one would return. Need would remain. He awoke with a renewed sense of how alone he was.

The lingering effect, once he was awake -- perhaps this is strange -- of this awareness of loneness was not oppressive. It was liberating. Being alone -- loneliness -- took on the lineaments of exile; exile, as Gideon was experiencing it, was an essential, ecstatic, even if achingly painful, condition of liberty. Exile transferred him to a difficult land. There he was free from the demands and the expectations that he had experienced as the means to enforce the imprisonment he had endured for as long as he could remember. Bondage had meant being forbidden the essential freedom of self-definition. It was, by definition, painfully, devitalizingly comfortable. He had managed to get out of it and felt he was an escapee, a refugee. He took refuge inside the world of his own consciousness, of his own longing, of his own anguish.

He looked up from the book he had taken with him and gazed at nothing. He had not been able to read it: undoubtedly, through no fault of its author's, it proved unable to hold his attention. As so often happened: he was reading something; the words lost their power to secure and direct his attention. It felt like he broke into fragments and one part of him blocked another. Words lost their meaning. They became mysterious vehicles carrying hidden suggestions of some incoherent whole. Although words hit the block that his mind had become and fell away, as they struck, they did revive apparently-dormant bends of thought within him, shooting stars, each of which he might, in the drowsiness that reading had induced in him, follow for a few illuminated seconds until they went dark, scattering in charred cinders like the fireworks that crumble after their copper gold bursting, and fall from the sky, decomposing. He remembered a lost, momentary cerebration of some over-illuminated joy that filled temporarily the nighttime globe of his mind the way the full moon filled the night sky. But, when he looked up from his book with the aim of following his own thoughts rather than the author's, blank and void, incoherent, and dry like shifting sand in the desert was his mind. Nothing of the moon's corona remained.

He shook his head and smiled a defeated smile. He was accustomed to the inanition. He was resigned to the infertility that blocked the longing he had to penetrate his consciousness and transpose his longing into art.

Art! What was it that "art" meant to him? A substitute for the actual? The memory or anticipation of lucid flesh? A hallucinatory shadow he could install in the place of substance? A dazzling array of hypnotic decorations conjured to usurp the pain at the center of a sense of emptiness that could never be transformed? A sense that there was nothing to realize? A lingering awareness of something that does not arrive, that cannot linger?

It was noon. Absorbed although he was by the expansive cloudy forms that he sought vainly to realize concretely, the only reality that was concrete was that he had to be at the club in an hour. He signaled the waiter for the check, gathered his things in the small knapsack through which he hooked his arms. He bore it on his back as a camel carries its hump or an old grizzled peddler the pack that weighs upon him as he tramps through the neighborhoods crying, "I cash clothes." He opened his umbrella against the drizzle that was becoming a rain, and caught the bus for the long ride up to Central Park.

He walked through the misty park under a turbulent sky, then, after he reached Fifth Avenue, he continued further east. The destination was a dark and cavernous space. There was a long nickel bar; there were tables; there was a dance floor. It was a palace of noise, of motion and commotion all night. It was quiet now, as if it were still asleep, and he were there as one of the attendants who performed their duties at its levée.

He shouldered through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

"I saw your play last night," Mike said, sneering and wiping beer foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. "I did not get what all the fuss was about."

He was addressing David Gill, an actor. Gill was playing Montano in the Shakespeare Festival production of Othello at The Public Theater. The nights the play was not being performed, he worked as one of the bartenders. Gill, tall, well-built, sandy-haired, self-assuredly handsome, adorned with a redheaded girlfriend who came to the club late every night and gave him a kiss, leaning against the bar, across the bar. Gill hardly looked up from the steak he was cutting and offered no response. Mike continued, unconcerned, more intent on provoking René, the dishwasher, with his critique: "It's what you'd expect from an arriviste nigger." Mike was a drunk and a bastard, but he had an Irishman's love of magniloquent phrases.

René remained impassive, perched on a stool by the empty sink, penciling corrections on a score he was composing.

Gideon sneezed. René looked up, at him.

"Bonjour, Jideon," he said, noticing him now. He pronounced it Jideon with a soft g, a j, with a lilting French Caribbean intonation. He was a musician of subtle proportions composing his Suite for Jazz Orchestra. He washed dishes at night and worked on his score wherever he was, whatever else he was doing.

Mike was not satisfied. His barb had been deflected by Gideon's entrance, which had removed René from the circle of his words. There was no reaction. René returned to his score. Gill, for his part, said nothing and went on eating the steak that Mike had prepared for him.

Gideon pursed his lips and shook his head at Mike and went to the locker where he hung his rain jacket.

After he had sponged his tables, placed the classic bistro red and white cloths on them, and put down napkins, peanuts, olives, and drink menus, he went outside and watched the light of late day dissolve into early evening's darkness, that time of falling day when the combination of dying light and dawning darkness make it particularly hard to see.

Early customers eat, but after ten or so, mostly people who want to drink and dance come in. The music gets very loud and never loses its hammering insistence or its irreducible presence. Colored lights flashing from the ceiling make the pillars and walls jump all over the place.

Gideon was covering three celebrity tables, as well as the regular big-group tables where he usually had to provide half a dozen separate checks. A couple, in their early twenties, good looking, cute together, but unable, it seemed by the young man's discomfort, really to get into each other's rhythm, had ordered hamburgers and vodka sours. She was vertical. He was horizontal. They didn't dance. The guy was shy when he ordered, perhaps embarrassed. When she ordered, he shriveled. He kept his eyes down and avoided exchanging a glance with Gideon.

She, on the other hand, was blooming. She was dazzling. Her eyes spoke. Gideon wondered why she was coming on to him. It was cruel.

"You know what, kid?" Mike said when he asked for two burgers and fries, "it's late for a food order."

"Come on, Mike. What else you got to do?"

"This is the last one."

"Ok," Gideon said.

"You work so hard. You must be tired," the vivacious young woman said when Gideon brought them the food. "Why don't you sit down with us? I'm Olivia. He's Max."

"I can't do that," Gideon said laughing.

"Sure you can. We'll buy you a drink. Right, Max? Can't we buy him a drink?" she said. "Don't they let you drink with the customers?"

"I'm working," Gideon said, as he placed their order on the table.

Max looked up at Gideon and smiled shyly, man to man, hoping for understanding.

"I think I'm being rejected," Olivia said, coyly and with the hint of danger in her voice. "I don't like being rejected."

"If you need anything else," Gideon said, backing away, "let me know. I've got to stay on my feet." He winked and smiled.

She woke him from sleep around eleven in the morning two days later with a telephone call.

"How the hell did you get my number?" he said, when she said who she was.

"The woman from the other night, Olivia," she said explaining.

"Huh," he said.

"At the club, with the very good looking guy, – I hope you won't get jealous because I say that – Max, who couldn't look at you."

He remembered her.

"How the hell did you get my number?"

"It wasn't hard," she said. "When I want something, I usually get it?"

"What do you want?" he said.

"I'd like to get to know you," she said. "Is that so bad?"

"Depends," he said.

"You sound so ferocious."

"Sorry," he said. "But it is unusual."

"For a girl to want to get to know you?" she said giggling.

"Why do you want to get to know me?" he said.

"Maybe because I find you so sexy," she said in a silken voice.

"What about your boyfriend?"

"He finds you sexy, too."

"I didn't mean it that way," he said, annoyed.

"But he does," she said, and we'd really like to get to know you."

"Are you calling for him as well as for yourself?" Gideon said.

"I told you," she said, "it's even hard for him to look at you."

Gideon never worked Thursday nights. Despite reluctance that took the form of superstitious foreboding, the next Thursday after the phone call, he met them. They had not come to the club in the interim. Although reluctance was one of the characteristics that defined his character, it was counterpoised by an absurd faith he cherished that something transformative, a Rilkean entelechy, a hidden soul that gives us the desire to realize a longed-for unknown, is waiting just outside the door of everyday life, waiting to be let in.

When he came to the corner of Seventh and Greenwich Avenues, they were already there, waiting in a café au lait Mini with the top down. They insisted he sit in the front and Olivia ride in the back. He resisted. They insisted. "We are your slaves today," she said. "Please," Max said, "sit in the front." Olivia pushed the front seat down and climbed into the back and pulled the seat up. "Please," Max said. When Gideon was belted in, Max placed his arm around his shoulder and smiled shyly. "I'm glad you're here. We are honored." "Honored?" Gideon said. It all made no sense.

They drove up the west side to The Cloisters. Max drove and played early Miles Davis, from Elevator to the Scaffold. At The Cloisters they sat in a medieval hall on worn stones and listened to period music. Soon, Olivia tilted her head just enough to indicate that she had had enough and wanted to go.

Over the Hudson the sun was setting russet. They rode back to lower Manhattan keen for ravishing pleasure. Old music and nature's art whet their need. They were hungry for each other, but Gideon felt he had to keep up his guard.

As much as they made him the center of their attention, their love play excluded him until, as they nuzzled in each other's embrace in a booth in The Green Lion opposite Gideon, Olivia said, "Don't you think we're being thoughtless?"

"What do you mean?" Max said.

"We're not including Gideon."

"Does he want to be included? Max inquired.

"Do you want to be included? Olivia said, looking at Gideon.

Gideon let out a gasp of air and felt unable to answer. The throbbing pulse of forbidden desire was being crushed by the unyielding stubbornness of disquietude.

"I bet you do," she said.

What is intended to seduce can fail sometimes because it is so perfectly seductive, and just because it is seductive it demands resistance. Gideon's reluctance was reinforced just because it was threatened.

"I don't want to be in this game," he said.

Olivia looked at him with a face full of astonishment and resentment. "What do you mean by game?" she said, and leaning across the table she grabbed him by the neck and drew her to him and kissed him long, violently, and with real desire. He felt it.

"Does this look like a game?" she said.

He was frightened.

"It's getting late," he explained.

"You can sleep late tomorrow. Tonight you belong to us," Max said.

"Our guest or our prisoner. Which is it to be?" Olivia said.

"This is crazy."

"Our guest or our prisoner?" Max repeated.

It was enough, this show of compulsion, to allow Gideon to capitulate without assuming the responsibility for his longing to yield. It allowed him to surrender to the desire to go in the direction he was preventing himself from taking. His body broke open and was flooded with desire. It was what he feared. Desire is the enemy of freedom. It makes one vulnerable. The free are invulnerable and want nothing.

"I was wounded when I was in the army," Max said as Gideon's fingers felt the cicatrix on his otherwise flawless chest. Max had unbuttoned his shirt to show him. "Feel it," he said.

"You were in the army?

"I joined a few months before my eighteenth birthday."

"How were you wounded?"

"It was in a bar fight, not in combat."

"Olivia said you were shy."

"Olivia says a lot of things."

"What do you mean I say a lot of things? You can hardly speak and you blush and get embarrassed at the slightest twinge of desire. Don't frown. It's true. I love it about you. And then, you were drunk."

Max frowned.

"Stop that. It's true. I can bring you to your knees," Olivia said. "You can pretend it's not true when you're not with me, but you know it is the way it really is and that I can see right through you."

Max shrugged and smiled. "The proof of the pudding," he said.

Their unfailing wittiness mitigated the anxiety that their precocious advances caused Gideon to feel. He had undergone a transition from reluctance to eagerness. Outside, the night air was cold. The anticipation of snow was folded into the air and seemed to turn the air inside out.

And then everything stopped. Max's phone rang.

"Yeah," he said buoyantly, still high and eager in anticipation, but without a moment's passing, his expression became serious and he said, "Yes," and snapped the phone shut. He glanced at Olivia and she understood him.

"We better take you home," he said. "Tonight is not a good time."

Gideon was puzzled, of course, taken up and then dropped.

"What's the matter?"

"There's nothing the matter. We all need to get some sleep." They left it at that, refusing to say any more. Silence that Gideon did not have the audacity to break with unwanted prodding smothered their last moments together.

"Sorry about this," Max said, reaching over him and opening the passenger door for him. "Another time."

Gideon nodded. He felt his reluctance had been prescient. He also understood that he was weak enough give in to temptation. But to be seduced and abandoned before anything even happened! One had to take care that that did not happen. It meant having to be suspicious: Gideon was disturbed that he was, just by his nature, suspicious, but he was unable to risk the vulnerability and possible hurt that can come from not being wary of others.

Noon the next day – he had risen from bed not a half hour earlier – Max called him.

"Sorry about last night. It was unavoidable. We really want to see you again."

"You think so?" Gideon said.

"Definitely," Max said. "I think you're very attractive.

"You are starting that again?

"Are you angry...about last night?"

"Let's say I'm confused."

"About what?

"About what!!

"Yeah."

"About how you guys went this way and that."

"We didn't go `this way and that.' Something came up that made it impossible. But we did not change what we want. Maybe you're confused about what you want."

Max sounded sympathetic. He was not scolding, challenging, or shifting blame. Gideon said, "Maybe I am."

"It's not as bad as that," Max said.

"Maybe it is."

"When can we get together?" Max answered, ignoring what Gideon had just said. "How `bout when you get off work tonight?"

Gideon was born in the Bronx, in New York City, in 1943, he told them that night when they took him back to their apartment on Ninth Street. He was sent, at the age of five, to an all-day Jewish parochial school (a yeshiva) a mysterious bus ride away from his home. He went first to a yeshiva in the Bronx and then, until the eighth grade, to a coed one in Queens, when his family moved there to get away from the Bronx. Its effect on him, that early religious education -- quite quickly -- when he was still only five or six, was to make him realize that such religion as it represented, the behavior and rules that it imposed, were not what he was about, not at all. It was a religion of tears, of boredom, of constraint. Nor was any other religion alluring. God was a frightening specter, usurpatious and vague, contingent as something he wanted nothing to do with, something he would rather ignore, something that had, really, despite how it was pressed upon him, nothing to do with him.

He was queer before he consciously knew there was sex or eroticism. He knew eroticism before he knew sexuality. He had felt, he had imagined the desire to surrender, to bend before a superior terror that drew him to it and bent him.

He was a stranger to himself in the world outside himself, the world that encountered him, that impinged upon him, and in the world inside himself, his alone, yet as removed from him as the outer world. It was a place of happiness or of misery, of pain or release, contingent upon influence. In the inner world, pleasures lived that were in hiding when he was awake.

He was queer before being queer had anything to do with object choice. He never experienced desire arising easily, freely, not secretly, not clandestinely, from within him, without fright. He did not meet the world with desire. His own sensations were the objects of his desire. He became the object of his own desire and he was always unattainable. Attraction assaulted him with seductive power that was mysterious; because its power was a mystery, it was absolute. His hidden desires shamed him. They took him over. But he could not surrender to them. He imprisoned them and freed them only when he could. He lived apart from the life he lived and became the slave of wishes he imprisoned. He could not get away from these imprisoned longings. He felt his will as an alien force that had commandeered him. He could not dominate his will; it dominated him. He felt his sinews stretch to high tension. It was a frightening pleasure to be drawn to where he did not want to go. Images took on kinetic power. There were negative images, too. He did not feel like he chose the objects of his fascination; they chose him – they lurked in stories he read or watched at the movies -- and he was often guilty or ashamed that he felt compelled to gaze in their direction, but that did not lessen his desire -- only made it darker, made him try to bury it deeper, made him more inauthentic at the surface.

His teachers were cruel. They encountered his neediness with mockery, and sometimes they were brutal, allowing themselves to become violent, using fists, fingers, yardsticks, and canes, punching, slapping, pinching, and beating. Some of the English teachers, in the early grades, sometimes were momentarily tender -- but not much -- and any generosity was inside their ideological/ethnic universe, from which he excluded himself -- sometimes by deliberate misbehavior, spite, and sabotage. They were kind as long as he let them shape him. The Hebrew teachers, never tender, were refugees from Eastern Europe. He was too young to understand anything about them.

He was defeated in his early, spontaneous acts of active resistance. He held back when the rabbis dragged him to class, screaming, resisting, digging in and using the weight of his five-year-old body against their tough, unrelenting hands and awesomely greater body weight. But, his active resistance was useless and caused him added anguish. That anguish accumulated within him and became his personality. His misery was the way his passive resistance showed itself. But the response his misery provoked in other people usually was rejection and anger. He received the most injury, or it seemed so to him: he was the repository of his own feelings and could not feel other people's feelings except as they impinged upon him and shaped his feelings. He could only feel his own feelings, but to feel them and to express them and to experience them as his own was impossible.

Gideon's mother, Elsa Lewis, demanded that every Friday night he go to the early evening service at the synagogue. Left to himself he would not have gone, would not even have thought of going. Going to the synagogue was one more of the compulsory things that determined his every day, things he had to do, was made to do, and had no desire to. It meant oppression, misery, tedium, and dissociation, being who he was not. Because he knew Hebrew and the inside of the religion, its prayers, obligations, and practices, the rabbi asked him to sit on the platform, an honor that he scorned and sabotaged, becoming his own victim. He sat on the platform at whose center was the Ark of the Covenant, within which were stored the sanctified Torah scrolls. With one leg crossed over his knee, he sat with a hand on his shoe. The disrespect was brazen and impossible not to notice. The rabbi wondered at this act of insolence. He understood it was a deliberate taunt. At the second service, later that evening, he spoke quietly with Gideon's mother about him, mixing tender solicitude for her and concerned reproach for the boy, compassionating her problem and warning of what might be some troubling tendencies in the boy. He explained, half apologetically, half reproachfully, that he was equally concerned that the early service, attended by the old men, should not be disturbed by some distraction from worship.

"When the rabbi reported my behavior to my mother," Gideon said, sipping on the vodka and lime Olivia had mixed for him, "she was embarrassed."

"I'm embarrassed," Gideon said then, "talking like this to you. It can't be what you expected."

"We like you?" Max said.

"I'm confused," Gideon said.

"Why are you so unsure of yourself?" Olivia said.

Gideon did not think that he was unsure of himself and the question stymied him. He was sure that a cautionary attitude to irregular occurrences like the advent of Max and Olivia was judicious and necessary. A looming sense of a hovering, incipient danger informed his action at all times. But it created a nervous need in him to fill any silence.

"My mother was not concerned that my behavior could be signaling some deep agony or that it could be a cry for her to recognize who I really was. She was concerned about the way it made her look. It was a very fucked up and self-defeating form of rebellion I had undertaken. I wanted her to stop trying to make me somebody she wanted me to be but I just was not. But I didn't believe in my right to resist, or, actually, to exist, so I did it in such a way that my act of rebellion sabotaged itself. I became a problem instead of a person. This is so trite as I tell it, but when I lived through it, it was indelible. My mother was embarrassed in front of the rabbi. With me she was angry. She was angry because I had embarrassed her by not behaving as I ought to have behaved, as she wanted me to, for her sake. I accepted that, that I was a fault, that I was not as I ought to have been." Gideon said "I was a fault," not "I was at fault."

By the time Gideon got to be a young man he had constructed his identity out of his defeats, but he did not feel like the architect of that identity; it seemed to him to be the building he was born into. What was his identity? It was a work of alienation: from the religion in which he was raised and from all religious regimentation, from his own family and from those aspects of himself that longed for family warmth, from belief in the sanctity and the correctness of the country that demanded his heartfelt allegiance. The greatest act of alienation he accomplished was alienation from himself. But he was not aware of it. In fact, he always sensed, with confidence that might be tried but never overthrown, that he was adhering to himself with an existential loyalty that was impervious to outside attack. He traded self-knowledge for a self-reflexive persona that was sometimes comic and sometimes desperate.

In the third grade -- inside the classroom against whose windows grey mornings pressed themselves helplessly; he was seven -- they were, one morning, reading a section from genesis, in the original Hebrew. Mrs. Wall called on him to translate. "Mrs. Wall!" Dickens could not have named her better, for she embodied, was an allegorical representation of, the wall against which he banged his head forever after.

He was seven years old. She called on him to translate a section in Genesis, the passage where Jacob cooks porridge and then sells it to his brother Esau, the ravenous hunter returned from the hunt with nothing to exchange with his brother for the food he begged of him but his birthright. She had to help him find the place, and then the Hebrew words huddled before him alien and mysterious.

"You see what happens when you don't pay attention?" Mrs. Wall interrupted his hesitant reading, and scolded him. "You waste your time looking out the window. You are doing nothing here. You have stopped paying attention. You learn nothing and you make yourself stupid. This is what your parents send you here for? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

Her words infuriated him. He felt his breath accumulate in his chest unable to get out, as if it were driven back by a chokehold.

"I hate you," the words exploded as he cried them in blind rage.

She shook her head with an angry pity and an intense awareness that she needed to assert her mastery. "I will speak to you during recess," she said. "Now read the passage and translate it."

He stumbled and even before he was able to straighten up and read the next Hebrew word, she had called on someone else to do the passage and left him collapsed in his seat.

"Why did you say you hate me," she admonished him with the question as he stood beside her desk warding off shame.

"Because I do," he said.

"No," she answered. "You don't hate me. You hate yourself."

"I don't hate myself," he said, striking back at her. "I love myself."

"No you don't," she corrected him. "You hate yourself for being the way you are."

"When I got older, there was no limit to the indignation I felt at her behavior. I detested her – it was no longer a matter of simple animal hatred unmediated by the intellect. The devious gall! To try to infect a child with self-hatred!"

"You have nearly spoken the night away, as they do in old books," Olivia said, dragging on a French cigarette.

"I'm sorry," Gideon said.

"It's good," Max said.

"I feel like we've gotten to know you," Olivia said with a hint of something mischievous in her voice. She dropped more ice into their three glasses and poured each a finger of vodka and poured tonic over that. She raised her glass in a toast and Gideon and Max followed. "Here's hoping your tongue tastes as good as it sounds," she said and kissed him before he knew what was happening.

"I love the taste of lime," she said. "Tell us more."

As Mrs. Wall was reproaching him, Gideon was chewing on the unwrapped end of a "Powerhouse" candy bar. And when she told him he did not hate her but that he hated himself, he cried out in defiance that it was not himself that he hated, that he loved himself and he felt the glow of the sweet and nutty milk chocolate as his surety.

What could he have meant when he said that? What did he mean by "love"? arises as a question, of course. What did "love" mean to him, to a seven year old? But as important, and the two questions cannot be unrelated, is the question, What did he mean when he used the word "myself?" What was, as he felt it, "myself?" The idea of "myself" was manifest in the struggle of "myself" to remain "mine" – his – and not to surrender, to surrender itself and belong to somebody else. Gideon did surrender. He accepted the self, as himself, that did deny the self that had called out the hate he felt, accepting that it was aberrant, and not him. He overcame himself. Its was a betrayal that damned him to a life-long exile and to repeated sabotage, to the incessant rebellions his self waged against him.

As the morning light rose over the city and darkness faded, and the air was fresh as if each morning it were new, newly awakened and cleansed, the three looked out at New York Bay. They had walked through lower Manhattan before the bustle.

"We want you to sleep with us," Olivia said.

Gideon said nothing.

She played her fingers over his chest. "With both of us," she said.

The morning sun gave way to clouds and the chill that covered the city caused what might have been rain to be snow. They were exhausted from their night awake and when they returned to Olivia and Max's place on Barrow Street, Olivia made them an aromatic imported French tea and they snuggled together under a quilt in a bed big enough for all of them and they fell asleep.

When they woke, Max turned on the bedside lamp and the deep blue evening that pressed against the windowpane turned instantly black. They looked at each other and asked, "Did anything happen this morning," and nobody could remember. They laughed at their puzzlement.

"What time is it?" Gideon asked, tilting the clock on the night table beside the bed so that he could see it.

"I'll be late," he said.

"Can't you call in sick?" Olivia said.

"I have to go to work," Gideon said. "I need the money."

"You're no fun," she said. Gideon could not tell if she was teasing and just pretending to be petulant or if she really was.

"I really have to go," he said.

"Who's keeping you?

"Olivia," Max said, trying to moderate her rising anger.

"Don't be so spineless," she said.

"Look, I don't know what's going on," Gideon said.

"Nothing's going on," Olivia said. "I thought you were going."

"I am," Gideon said, buttoning his pea coat, his hand on the doorknob.

"I'm sorry," Max said.

"What are you sorry about?" Olivia said.

"Everything," Max said.

Olivia had soft, full, alluring breasts, skin that glowed, eyes like the sky in springtime, and a fierce temper. She was alluring and forbidding. As he jogged through the falling snow, across Eighth Street to the Astor Place subway station, careful to keep from slipping, Gideon felt a terrible confusion. He was not sure what had happened or if they would get in touch with him again.

When they did, it was only Max.

"Olivia has left me," he said.

"She left you," Gideon repeated.

"She's found a guru in Oregon."

"What happened?" Gideon said.

"I don't want to talk about it, especially not over the phone. I want to see you."

They went to the movies and in the dark Max took hold of Gideon's hand and began to trace his fingers across his palm.

"Do you know what that means?" he whispered as he leaned his lips near Gideon's ear. It excited Gideon and he said, "I do."

"Will you?" Max said.

"Do you want me to?"

"I do," Max said, touching his lips to the convolutions of Gideon's ear.

But when they got outside, Gideon felt bored and listless. His electric connection with his own body had snapped and when Max held him in his arms and pressed his mouth to his, leaning against a stone fence in a deserted and dark side alley, and said, "I want you in me," Gideon endured his advances instead of enjoying them. Max felt it and flared with inner anger but blamed himself for not being able to overwhelm Gideon and make him swell and resonate with need.

"What happened?" Max asked.

"I'm tired," Gideon said. "I need to be home." A great, dark, unfathomable sadness had come upon him.

The sky was black and the stars in streams and swerves and lines and swirls spangled it with their pure blue white combustion.

"I'm so glad you consented to come with me," Max said, putting his arm around Gideon and pulling him to his flank. He kissed him on the neck just below the ear. Gideon smiled.

"I like to touch you," Max said.

"I like to be touched," Gideon said.

"Do you like when I touch you?" Max said, emphasizing the word "I" with a combination of self-assertion and trepidation.

"I do like it, yes," Gideon said, "and I wish I didn't."

"But I want you to. I want you to like it and to need it, to need me more than you can help yourself."

The road was a dirt road bordered by tamed forests on either side. The road sloped up slightly and turned in the distance. Once beyond the turn, they could see the dim lights of their inn.

"Why are you afraid to take me?" Max said, as they lay in bed side by side.

"I'm not afraid," Gideon said.

"You're a liar," Max said.

"That's not a fair thing to say."

"But it's true. You want me and you keep yourself away from me."

"It is true, I do want you."

"And you keep yourself away from me."

"I guess I do."

"You guess?"

"Okay, I do."

"So that doesn't show you're afraid?

"No," Gideon insisted. "It doesn't."

"Kiss me," Max said.

"I have to be in the mood."

Max touched him and saw that Gideon was soft.

"What's the matter, baby?" Max said, coaxing affection.

"I'm sorry," Gideon said. "Maybe I should not have said `yes'."

"I don't understand this," Max said. "Why are you shutting me out?"

"Go to sleep, Max," Gideon said. "It's late, and I want to hike to the lake tomorrow."

Max Davis was born in a wealthy suburb of Austin, Texas, but spent his boyhood roaming the woods that stretched out beyond the gated community where he lived. In the woods, his heart stretched to the sky and he bounded through the woods and stepped from one stone to another across innocent streams.

When he refused to sign the loyalty oath in the senior year of high school, everybody's attitude towards him changed and he was no longer, in everyone's eye, the person he had been for the past three, and, for some, eleven years.

In Boston, where he attended a small college that had propelled itself into a university, he met Olivia when they both auditioned for a production of An Enemy of The People. And they both did not make it, but they became friends and, for each other, they were the embodiment of what ripening genius must be.

Together, they moved to New York City without finishing school. Subsidized by Max's father, they rented an apartment on Hudson Street. And they began to live like artists. Max began painting and Olivia began writing poetry, not as she had before with a schoolgirl's sentimental intelligence, but with an eye on the market. Max's painting looked like cartoon surrealism. He used gray and muted monochrome tones.

But soon, they both felt blank.

"We've gone deep," he said.

"But there's deeper," she said.

"Can't you ever..." he pouted.

"Can't I ever what?" she said.

He looked at her with an intensity of gaze that filled his eyes with cloudy emotion.

"I'd like it to hear you say we've achieved something, that we accomplished real pieces of art, your poems and my paintings."

"Yes," she said.

"What do you mean, `yes'," he said.

"Yes," she said, "I know you would."

"That is so cold," he said. "Where have your feelings gone, the little tendrils you extended so that I knew you are there. We did accomplish something."

"What have you done that's original, that matters?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know exactly what I mean. You jerk yourself off and think that's profound."

Max felt himself blocked at every exit, and everything he did seemed worthless, and nothing would ever lodge within and transform others.

"What are we going to do?" he said.

"Take a vacation," she said. "No work for a month."

It was then that they met Gideon.

I feel like dancing," she said.

But when they stood outside, Max pursed his lips.

"What's the matter, now," Olivia said.

"You don't have to go in if you don't want to, but you are not going to stop me from having a good time."

It was then they sat a Gideon's table and Olivia flirted with him in her peremptory way and Max withdrew.

But when they were alone that night, Olivia said, "I know you like him, and I'll get him for you, but then I will leave you."

"I don't want you to leave me."

"I have no choice."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She looked at him with irritation. She had passed her period of patience. He annoyed her. Having to explain herself annoyed her.

"That's enough now. You'll have what you want. Don't be greedy."

Seebold Davis called himself Tom from the first day of kindergarten, when he corrected Miss Minerty as she was introducing him to the other five-year olds.

"It's Tom," he said.

"But it says Seebold here," she said.

"That's what my parents call me, but I call myself Tom," he said.

"But Seebold is such an interesting name. What kind of name is it?"

"My name is Tom," the boy said with such quiet insistence that Miss Minerty yielded.

"Alright, Tom," Miss Minerty said. "Here we will call you Tom."

He disgraced himself in his father's eyes, seventeen years later, when he married a Jewish girl. Such was his resentment, so hurt was he that his father's loyalties were ideological -- or was it only institutional? -- rather than personal, that he never told him that in the way he and Laura brought Max up and in the general life and customs of the family as it was lived and as they were celebrated, they did not follow any Jewish traditions. Laura subsumed her identity to his. Max was raised as a Protestant, and it was in regard to Protestantism, not, as in Gideon's case, to Judaism, that he became apostate.

Max disappointed his father not by a disapproved marriage but by a passivity of will that was uncannily accompanied by a stubborn inwardness. He capitulated continually, hardly seeming to have any initiative of his own, it seemed, but his father could feel that he never gave in. Max, on the other hand, thought he did nothing but yield.

"My grandfather was a Nazi," Max said to Gideon as they left the exhibit at the Modern. It was the collection that had been labeled Degenerate and been shown in Berlin in the late 1930s until it became too big a draw.

"My father was very upset when he died. He called me all the time. I'd have to go stay with him until he regained some measure of calmness. They were attacks of remorse. You were there one night when he called me and we had to leave you." Max laughed. "You thought we were jerking your chain."

"Ugh," Gideon said.

"What?" Max said.

"I hate that expression," Gideon said making a face again.

"You are a Puritan. Olivia was right."

"Are you in touch with Olivia?"

"No, there would not be any point to it except to keep a painful sense of inadequacy alive in me," Max said.

"What does your grandfather's having been a Nazi have to do with the fact that you are passive?" Gideon asked.

"What?" Max said.

Gideon repeated the question, biting each word as he uttered it.

Max let out a groan-like sigh.

"I have wondered about that," he said. "My father killed himself a year after his father's death. He left a letter. He wrote that he was guilty as a son, and could not reconcile the warring passions of love and hate he had for his father. He wanted to caress him and to assault him, in equal measure. His rage at his father was fierce and impotent and his need for him was unquenchable."

Max recalled one evening, as they rambled down Hudson Street, coming home a little high from Benny's, in the full moon light, he recalled, it flashed through his mind, the after-image that had remained, disembodied from the flesh of its time, grafted onto his inherent being: his father standing in the dark kitchen lighted only by a mercuric November moon and enameled by a blue sky so black it glowed.

"What are you doing here?" he said when he sensed the boy's presence.

"Nothing," Max said, guilty at looking at his father.

"Do nothing somewhere else," his father said. "Git," his father said, throwing at him a crumb of affection with a smile and a wink, as he said it, as if including the boy in a spiritual conspiracy with him from which he actually was excluding him.

"I still long for him" Max said, "but I don't miss him. I ought to, I know. There's something wrong with me because I don't."

"What?" said Gideon somewhat lost.

"It's at the root of my passivity," he said.

"What is?" Gideon said with furrowing brows.

"The disconnection with my father?" Max said.

"It was because he was cruel to you," Gideon said, as if trying to make a child see reason.

"But he went through it himself. It was what he knew, what he was made to be."

Gideon became intrigued and wanted to write Max's history.

"It will be like sitting for me if I were a painter or sculptor."

"You want to capture my likeness," Max laughed.

"I want capture your likeness," Gideon repeated, agreeing, delighted to say it, to assert it as a fact, as a project to be undertaken.

Gideon reached over and kissed him. He felt Max yield to him like an inrush of air.

Olivia rattled the doorknob. The door stayed firmly fastened against her shaking and would not open. She wanted to call, "Let me out. Richard! Open the goddam door." She did not. She feared that if she did, she would not be able to stop and would consume herself in panic.

The wind howled outside and the others who were in the house held her in their minds only to the extent that they were excited that someone was undergoing the cathartic, de-cathexis process. She was probably still passing through the first stages. Those were difficult: your past clung to you demanding your fidelity. It clung until you came to the abyss and understood in your breath that there was no birth without death. They had all gone through it and they had come out of it knowing it was one of the essential things.

Richard was in the kitchen, baking bread, his beautiful fingers turning and kneading the firm and subtle twist of dough that he had twice punched down and was now dividing, and laying out on tins, and shaping into loaves for the weekend.

He frowned when Marc walked in.

"I was mistaken," Marc said

"You want to be the boss," Richard said.

"I'm sorry," Marc said.

"You think of me as the boss, and you're jealous."

"What can I do?"

"Purge yourself of envy."

Olivia stopped rattling the handle when she was convinced the door would not budge and that no one would come save her from this confinement. She had heard of it, but she thought she would evade it. Richard had made her feel special, and she had slept beside him for more than a week until tonight when she was surprised by his command that she should undergo the de-cathexis.

"Don't do that to me, Richard."

"Why not? Do you think you're special because I take you to my bed? I take everyone to my bed."

Olivia lay on the wooden bench inside the locked cell tearing herself apart to see if she felt she felt she was special. But she had trouble understanding what the word meant. She could not focus on where she could search or what she was supposed to look for. She strayed among thoughts of regret and desire; she was savaged by feelings of frustration and rage.

In the morning she had no greater understanding of the world than she had the night before, nor had the pain that had taken her by surprise when she fell from favor become any less now than it was then. But it did not matter. The tempos of her every function had been slowed down. She felt that she had time to breathe; as she followed her breath she lost awareness of her mind; whatever it was she was thinking became a blank. She looked at how she had become, as if from a great distance, and was quietly fascinated. She was a spectator, as removed as a spectator, at her own transformation.

Richard was pleased when he saw her. She knew he was. It irritated her. He smiled, wrinkled his cheeks tilted his head to one side like a bird and spoke through playfully clenched teeth.

"It is morning," he said. "We should have breakfast."

"I'm not hungry."

"Petulant," Richard said.

"Call it what you will," Olivia said. "I thought we were here for enlightenment not abuse."

"How can you tell the difference between the two?"

"Don't head fuck me," Olivia said, and slapped him.

Richard backed away, touching his fingers to his cheek.

"How's that for enlightenment?" Olivia said.

"The baby beats the nurse."

"I want my things."

"The enlightened spirit does not require or desire things."

"But I want mine."

"You pledged them to the group.

"I have changed my mind."

"No, you haven't. It's the same mind you came here with. Your mind is as bound and hobbled as it was when you came here," Richard said, raising his voice. "Your mind is your prison."

"And you know all about prisons," Olivia said, in defiance.

"I see so many people who think they are free are really locked up."

"And you are free?"

Richard smiled cryptically.

Max showed Gideon the beginning of a story he was trying to write. It shocked Gideon when he read it, not because of its contents but because of what it revealed about Max, how unlike what he presented to the world; suggesting what he had kept hidden:

I am not pleased -- Gideon read -- that I long to be subservient and that I get excited by the thought of being entirely dominated and forced to surrender control to a powerful, overpowering man, but every night, as if in a trance I change into a torn and tight slutty uniform and walk the street with my eyes following the pavement as it rolls under me, waiting with needles of expectation for a voice that will hail me and stop me, take me by the arm and let me know that I will be his.

Even if I am tired or would rather stay home and read Proust, even if I know that I do not want another night of being slapped and teased, humiliated and penetrated, I still find myself checking myself out in front of the mirror and then cruising through the streets.

It was on one of those nights when I was dull of desire that Graham saw me and stopped me saying, "You are just what I want tonight."

I recognized his voice, and I nodded to him and kept my head lowered, "It's a nice evening," I said.

"Buy you a drink?" he said with a friendly smile.

"Thank you," I said, meaning the words as a refusal, but he ignored that and took me by the arm, and I let myself be led down the street to Benny's as he steered me by the arm through a crowd of losers who were watching us with envy.

We drank martinis and I felt on edge, stuck where I did not want to be.

"I'm tired tonight," I said. "I know you're not supposed to say a thing like that in a situation like this" I said, apologetically, "but I want to be honest with you. I don't know how obliging I can be tonight. I think I'd rather just go home."

Graham smiled. "You don't have to apologize," he said. "I know how to turn you on, no matter how you think you feel."

I just looked at him with a half sleepy stare.

He lifted his glass and finished his drink, and as he did, so did I.

"I need to go home," I said.

"No, you don't," he said.

We were at his place in a few minutes. He pulled me close to him as we walked there. I was oblivious to everything, as if sleepwalking.

It was warm inside. He unbuttoned my shirt. I breathed deeply as he gently played with my nipples. He continued, increasing the pressure. I felt the beginnings of a headache.

"Please don't," I said. "Not tonight. I don't want to go there.'

"You will."

"Not tonight," I said.

It was as if I had not spoken.

"Are you listening?" he said.

I had not heard what he said.

"What?" I said.

He pinched my nipples harder.

I bowed my head. I was stung by his slap across my cheek.

"None of that abjection shit. I like to see pride in a submissive."

"I don't want to be a submissive."

He pinched my nipples yet harder and brought me with a jerk to my full height.

I was not proud that I was a submissive. It was a curse I could not lift.

Graham teased my lips softly with his index finger, then with that same finger, one digit stronger than my entire force of will, gently parted them and limned the crests of my teeth with the taint of desire, then pressed my jaw down, and down my open mouth drove his finger to the back of my throat, and I gagged.

I could not get rid of the feeling of being enslaved all throughout the next days when I had to have a clear mind and a ready disposition. I needed to be able to be interested in things other than myself and the reverberations of my yearning. It was a familiar feeling, being wary. I could not live in both worlds.

Gideon stopped reading and looked at Max. Max blushed.

"I told you I was taking a risk by showing it to you."

"Is that the whole thing?"

"It's very short."

"But what happens after that?"

"I don't know."

"So it's more like a picture of a psychological condition than a story set in motion by that condition or recounting the adventures of that condition."

"I never thought about it, really."

"That's hard to believe," Gideon said.

"I just try to follow my imagination. An artist makes things out of whole cloth and air."

"You really want me to think so?"

"I could not write if I didn't."

Olivia found a boy in a café in Oregon and hitched with him to northern California. She moved in with him. Brandon was a software engineer. After eight years working for Apple, he had left the company soon after its founder died. A sense of loss weighed heavily upon him. He had stashed away so much during the years there during which he spent most of his life -- waking and some times even sleeping on a couch in his office and having coffee in the morning in the commissariat -- that he had no need to worry about making money. He decided to purge himself of uneasy longing by undertaking a break from everything and spend two weeks in the wilderness, in an Oregon forest, with water, only, nuts, apples, and brown rice cooked over an open fire.

He breathed through his nostrils on the fifteenth day and the oxygen flooded his forehead, his eyes swooned, his spine stretched upward with energy of its own. He stood and looked at the mountains, breathed in the morning air, saw the light crash into the forest through the gate of foliage, and watched the sky from an open grove. He walked through the woods to the highway and along the highway unsuccessfully for several hours until he came to The Lost Road Café. There he saw Olivia and felt that he had been renewed. She looked at him, too, and smiled.

"Where are you headed?" he asked.

She shook her head, raised her shoulders, and smiled.

"Come with me," he said, believing that what was happening was inevitable.

She said "yes" before she asked where.

"Do you mind if I sleep somewhere else tonight?" Olivia asked as they nuzzled together under a tree in the little woods on the land that his house was built on as the declining sun made the landscape golden. She had lived with him nearly three months.

"No," Brandon said. He had been meditating on the condition of non-attachment.

Even though she remained resting in his embrace, she had disappeared. Then she began to feel her restlessness in the heaviness of his body as it pressed against hers, against her. He was asleep. She freed herself from his hold and rose. It woke him.

"Where are you going? he asked.

"To meet someone," she said.

"Now?" he said.

"I'll be away for a few days. I'm not sure how many," she answered and walked to the house.

Brandon sat up and watched her disappear.

Despite Gideon's presence, there was a palpable hollow for Max where Olivia had been. He was haunted by the concrete sensation of absence. It was not even a sensation of her absence anymore. It was just a pang of pure absence. It resided in him the way feelings of joy or sorrow can, and when they do, how strongly they affect the essential disposition that envelopes a person, the disposition that makes the shadow a person casts in the world.

"But she crushed you," Gideon said. "I don't understand."

When Olivia met Max, she believed that he possessed the kind of integrity she could rely on, the kind of solidness she could build on, the kind of imagination that could restore light to a life that had fallen in shadow. She throbbed inside with energy she did not know how to use and kept spilling in misplaced and shaky enterprises.

"I want someone who can go places with me," she said, but/and Max wondered where there was to go. He listened to her, however, and usually kept silent for fear of her wrath but also, for his sense of his own inadequacies. It was not that there was no place to go, no place worth going to. It was that he was removed from the energy of any quest. Curiosity and venturesome energy had been pulled out of him, drained out of him, pressed every day out of him. She represented possibility for him, and all too often she frustrated what she offered. Had he been someone else he would have had the resources to take possession of her. But even if Olivia could not admit it, she sensed in her deepest fibers what was numb and dissatisfied in him and it sent her excitement crawling back upon her. Rather than desire, will -- equally defiant and defeated -- drove them to each other. Sometimes they really met. Often they were searching for each other; sometimes hiding from each other.

"I miss her," Max said.

"That is because you never had her," Gideon said.

When Olivia returned to Brandon after a few days he told her he could not go on that way despite thinking before it happened that he could. When she said she could not be chained, that she needed to move when and how she wanted to and that he would have to accept it and adjust to it, he said he could not, and she left him.

Olivia fell asleep on the train, in her seat, on the way to Connecticut. She dreamed that fields of eggs began to snow. She was shivering as she ran through them barefoot in her shift. "What can this mean?" she asked herself inside the dream. "I must be dreaming; that's it," she dreamed she thought. "In the waking world this is impossible."

She loved Max; she was angry at him. She had left him once it became obvious to her that he had left her first. She made sure always to protect herself: Humiliation always was lurking.

Thinking of him now, all she could feel was his sweetness. It was not his fault that he had fallen in love with Gideon. Gideon was irresistibly needy and adorably blind when it came to himself and to most other things. His greatest wisdom was to have made the shell of a world to contain himself that he had made. But she wanted to crack Gideon's shell and get inside him.

She called him when she arrived in New York. She asked him not tell Max yet that she had returned and she told him she wanted to see him and that he should meet her in front of a certain movie theater in So-Ho, that she wanted to walk to the water with him and maybe they could take the ferry. But they only stood looking out at the water of the bay and then facing each other in a restaurant nearby.

"Why did you leave?"

"Why is that a question for you to ask?"

"Because it injured him."

"Not more than your ability to heal him. Which is what you wanted."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"You won't let yourself. You both need me to have a relationship. I'm at the center of it, there because I'm not there. He pours out his neediness to you and you are melted by the warmth of his unhappiness, and try to make him happy, not because you care about him but because you see yourself in him."

"What do you want?" Gideon said, feeling something unpleasant like the urge to slap her.

"You," she said, "inside me."

Gideon breathed in and widened his eyes. He became dizzy and wanted to flee, but he sat at the table. The replica of New York lampposts of a century ago dimly lighted the place; turned it into an indoor extension of the late autumn early evening outside.

"I don't feel right having this conversation without Max?"

"Did it bother you just as much to talk about me with Max when I wasn't there?"

Gideon said nothing.

"Take me home," she said.

"Where do you live?"

"I'm staying at a friend's place on Perry Street while she's in Paris making a commercial for Christian Dior."

She stashed some cash into his hand as the cab pulled up in front of the place she was staying on Perry Street saying, "Pay the driver."

"I have money," he said.

"My treat," she said, leaving the money in his hand.

Upstairs, she said, "I am not good at not getting what I want. You should know that by now. I said it in our first phone call." She approached him and put her hands flat on his chest. When her lips opened against his, forcing them open, her palm caressing the back of his neck drew him tenderly to her. To him it felt like a long-awaited gift being offered. She drew back and smiled. He moved back to her and drew her to him and now his tongue entered her mouth and she closed her lips upon it.

It was warm in her bed in the morning and he was happy.

Max was in hysterics that afternoon.

"Where were you? I tried calling you I can't tell you how many times. You never answered your phone. And that's not like you."

"Olivia is staying on Perry Street."

"She's back."

"I saw her last night."

"And she didn't let me know."

"She just got back. She intends to get in touch with you."

"But she got in touch with you immediately...You...slept with her."

Gideon nodded. Max expelled a breath, bit his finger, and shook his head.

"Why haven't you called me?"

Max saw her in the lobby and walked over to her.

"Why haven't you called me?"

"Not here. Not now." Olivia said, as if gently reproaching him for bad manners.

"Don't I deserve some kind of explanation?" he nevertheless insisted, gripping at her with his need.

"I don't owe you anything," Olivia said as Miriam – but she did not introduce her to Max -- returned with two plastic champagne flutes and gave one of them to Olivia. They touched glasses and drank. Olivia had turned from him. Max stood dumbfounded and wounded. He could say nothing. Olivia had disappeared even as she stood there, sipping champagne with a woman he did not know.

Max found it impossible to sit through the second half of Traviata and left the opera house in despair.

When Max finally knocked on Gideon's door, he had been wandering through the streets of lower Manhattan for hours, grief-stricken and tormented. When Gideon opened the door he burst into sobs and fell into his arms.

"I can't help it. I need to be with you," he said. "It's crazy. You're the last person I should have to turn to. Why did you betray me?"

Gideon held him but said nothing, feeling his anger and despair.

"Answer me, godamit," Max shouted through his tears.

"I didn't betray you. You know that."

"That's what makes it tough. You weren't even thinking of me. I have no right to want you to think of me."

"You can want what you want," Gideon said.

"A lot of good it does me."

"Do you know what you want?"

"I didn't come here for this."

"What did you come here for?"

"If I've got to say it, you don't know it."

"We're separate people."

"But we don't have to be." He let it hang at that, unable to say out loud: "We wouldn't be...if only...you gave yourself to me."

"You're weaving gossamer ropes and choking yourself with them," Gideon said, happy to be able to put it so exactly. But Max did not know what he was talking about.

"You're bored," Gideon said to Olivia.

It was nothing about Gideon, per se, she said. It was about herself. Anger was frozen at the center of her belly. She said it told her that she had betrayed something essential about herself. She was at a loss, she said, and that made her all the angrier – frustration made her angry.

"What the hell are you so angry about?" Gideon challenged her. Every word she said, every gesture she made was smoldering and charred. Everybody was unreliable, and it offended her, threw her off, isolated her.

"You wouldn't know even if I told you," Olivia said.

Gideon absorbed the offense without saying anything.

She stared at him. He took a step backwards, away from her. He turned and opened the door. There was a smell of coffee and toast in the hallway.

"You got what you wanted," he said. "I'm finished with this. Go back to Max. He's waiting."

[If you write to me, please put the name of the story in the subject slot.]