Nude Men

money on a real trip.”
    “I don’t care at all. I can’t think. Your mother went to Disney World with Sara. I would like to meet her. I want to be with people who have been with Sara when I was not there.”
    “How long do you want to stay?”
    “Don’t ask me petty questions at a time like this. I couldn’t care less. I have no idea. Maybe one hour, maybe one month, maybe forever, okay? You decide.”
     
    L aura understands perfectly and approves of my going to the country with Lady Henrietta to comfort her.
     
    H enrietta and I go to my mother’s house. We both sleep in my old room, which has twin beds. The only other bedroom in the house, my mother’s, has one big bed, so we have no choice. Henrietta stays in our room most of the time, on her bed, her legs under the blanket, like someone sick. In darkness. She cries incessantly. She gets cold sores under her nose and on her upper lip, from blowing her nose all the time. She lies under a mountain of Kleenex. She vomits once, from crying so much. Her hair is stuck to her face, so I brush it for her and tie it in a ponytail. I wipe her face with cold water. I feed her. She eats absent-mindedly. After crying a lot, she gets very cold, and I find her sitting in bed, wearing her winter coat.
    Henrietta keeps Sara’s braids on her night table, in the long box. Even the little note is still there, on which Sara wrote to me: “Here is a lock, a token of my affection.” Henrietta often pets the braids.
    My mother is angelic, as I suspected she’d be. She is discreet, sensitive, always there behind the door if she is needed. She wears black. She always whispers. Her face gets bloated, like Henrietta’s, maybe out of sympathy. Perhaps she cries secretly in her room. When she’s not behind the door, she sits on the couch in the living room and does nothing. Sometimes she walks around and looks out the window.
    It’s summer outside. The weather is gorgeous. Not too hot. Very sunny and bright and colorful. The birds chirp. So do the insects. It feels very inappropriate,- this chirping. Henrietta keeps the blinds down, but there’s a high window in our room, which has no blind. Through it she can see the sky, blue like someone’s eyes, and the trees rustling in the breeze.
    Henrietta’s mourning is a normal mourning. It’s very intense, probably as intense as mourning gets, short of suicide, but it is normal—for Henrietta, that is, which means there are still a few pitiful eccentricities here and there, but nothing I couldn’t have thought of myself. Actually, that’s wrong. I could not have predicted that she would take a liking to spilling water around the house and that she would feel the need to unplug the electrical appliances in whatever room she’s in. I cannot figure out the secret meaning of those things.
    I take a walk in the woods, the parrot on my shoulder. I give in to some fantasy of life after death. I will utter Sara’s name aloud to see if I’ll get some sort of response from her. No one is listening, so why not try. It can’t hurt.
    “Sara,” I say, in a normal voice.
    The parrot cocks his head and looks me in the eyes. “Sara?” he says.
    I walk some more in silence, and then I say again, “Sara.”
    I get no response from Sara, unless she is communicating to me through the parrot, who repeats, “Sara?”
    “Sara,” I say.
    “Sara,” he repeats, not looking at me anymore but staring ahead in a melancholic way, like a little person. He understands that we’re looking for her.
    “Sara,” I say.
    “Sara,” he says, his voice becoming deep and mournful.
    I look at the trees. I wait for the slightest response to our calling, but there is no variation in the activities of nature. The breeze does not become stronger after we utter Sara’s name, not a single branch cracks, no squirrel darts by at that moment, the sky does not become overcast, nor does the sun get brighter.
    I start thinking about the afternoon of Sara’s death, its bizarre sequence of events. Destiny. I have always craved to control destiny, either through down-to-earth effort or through supernatural means. But she is frighteningly whimsical, Destiny, inexorably so. She will not be controlled by little white elephants. She’ll fight them to the death. She does not like to feel pressured, does not like commitment. Only accepts freedom. She’s impatient, bored, restless, fidgety, like a little kid who can’t sit still at table, with one cheek of her