The Last Gentleman

though not of respect, which was startling. Making love to his wife, Perlmutter said, was like “being in heaven.” Now he understood. Kitty too, he would have to say, was an armful of heaven. The astounding immediacy of her. She was more present, more here, than he could ever have calculated. She was six times bigger and closer than life. He scarcely knew whether to take alarm or to shout for joy, hurrah!
    â€œNever mind. What about you, you big geezer?”
    Geezer, thought the engineer. “What about me?”
    â€œYou were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?” She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression.
    He was wondering: had the language of women, “love” and “sweeping one off one’s feet,” and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?
    â€œWhat about it, friend?” asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. “Kitty wants to know.”
    â€œKnow what?”
    â€œIs this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?”
    â€œNo, but it’s just as well,” he said dryly.
    â€œTell Kitty why.”
    â€œKitty might be too attractive,” said the chivalrous but wry engineer. “So attractive that it is just as well I don’t feel too well—for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—”
    â€œOh that’s sweet,” said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?
    â€œDo you feel bad,” she asked suddenly and touched his face. “If it is not possible now to—” she broke off.
    He felt just bad enough—his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance—and so it was just possible.
    â€œLover,” said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.
    â€œDarling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed—was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?
    â€œMy sweet,” said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.
    But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.
    Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter’s heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both—well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall—it was too late.
    â€œDear God,” said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly—and fell away from him.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    â€œI’m so sick,” she whispered.
    â€œOh, that’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.
    She went to the farthest corner of the sniper’s den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. “What happened?”
    â€œI think it was that tea you were drinking.”
    â€œYou are so smart,” she said faintly.
    What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.
    â€œDo you feel better?” he asked her.
    â€œYes,” she said, hardly audible. “But talk to me.”
    â€œWhat about?”
    â€œAnything. Anything that comes into your head.”
    â€œAll right.” After all, this was one thing he was good at. “I was thinking about the summer of 1864,” said the engineer, who always told the truth. “My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats’ war, as bad as Stalingrad.