The Progress of Love

woman tagged by little children in the laundromat. The delicious, old-fashioned word “trollop,” which he uses to describe her, doesn’t apply to her, really—has no more to do with her than “hippie” had to do with Catherine, a person he cannot now bear to think about. He knows that sooner or later, if Dina allows her disguise to crack,as Catherine did, he will have to move on. He will have to do that anyway—move on.
    He knows all this and observes himself, and such knowledge and observation has no effect at all on his quaking gut, zealous sweat glands, fierce prayers.
    “Sir? Do you want to keep on trying?”
    The nursing home that they visited, earlier in the day, is called the Balm of Gilead Home. It is named after the balm-of-Gilead trees, a kind of poplar, that grow plentifully near the lake. A large stone mansion built by a nineteenth-century millionaire, it is now disfigured by ramps and fire escapes.
    Voices summoned Stella, from the clusters of wheelchairs on the front lawn. She called out various names in answer, detoured to press hands and drop kisses. Vibrating here and there like a fat hummingbird.
    She sang when she rejoined David:
“I’m your little sunbeam, short and stout ,
Turn me over, pour me out!”
    Out of breath, she said, “Actually it’s teapot. I don’t think you’ll see much change in Daddy. Except the blindness is total now.”
    She led him through the green painted corridors, with their low false ceilings (cutting the heating costs), their paint-by-number pictures, their disinfectant—and other—smells. Out on a back porch, alone, her father sat wrapped in blankets, strapped into his wheelchair so that he wouldn’t fall out.
    Her father said, “David?”
    The sound seemed to come from a wet cave deep inside him, to be unshaped by lips or jaws or tongue. These could not be seen to move. Nor did he move his head.
    Stella went behind the chair and put her arms around his neck. She touched him very lightly.
    “Yes, it’s David, Daddy,” she said. “You knew his step!”
    Her father didn’t answer. David bent to touch the old man’shands, which were not cold, as he expected, but warm and very dry. He laid the whiskey bottle in them.
    “Careful. He can’t hold it,” said Stella softly. David kept his own hands on the bottle while Stella pushed up a chair, so that he could sit down opposite her father.
    “Same old present,” David said.
    His father-in-law made an acknowledging sound.
    “I’m going to get some glasses,” Stella said. “It’s against the rules to drink outside, but I can generally get them to bend the rules a bit. I’ll tell them it’s a celebration.”
    To get used to looking at his father-in-law, David tried to think of him as a post-human development, something new in the species. Survival hadn’t just preserved, it had transformed him. Bluish-gray skin, with dark-blue spots, whitened eyes, a ribbed neck with delicate deep hollows, like a smoked-glass vase. Up through this neck came further sounds, a conversational offering. It was the core of each syllable that was presented, a damp vowel barely held in shape by surrounding consonants.
    “Traffic—bad?”
    David described conditions on the freeway and on the secondary highways. He told his father-in-law that he had recently bought a car, a Japanese car. He told how he had not, at first, been able to get anything close to the advertised mileage. But he had complained, he had persisted, had taken the car back to the dealer. Various adjustments had been tried, and now the situation had improved and the figure was satisfactory, if not quite what had been promised.
    This conversation seemed welcome. His father-in-law appeared to follow it. He nodded, and on his narrow, elongated, bluish, post-human face there were traces of old expressions. An expression of shrewd and dignified concern, suspicion of advertising and of foreign cars and car dealers. There was even a suggestion of doubt—as in the old days—that David could be trusted to handle such things well. And relief that he had done so. In his father-in-law’s eyes David would always be somebody learning how to be a man, somebody who might never learn, might never achieve the steadfastness and control, the decent narrowness of range. David, who preferredgin to whiskey, read novels, didn’t understand the stock market, talked to women, and had started out as a teacher. David, who had always driven small cars, foreign cars. But that