The Risk Pool

original plan. She was pretty sure I had no legitimate business futzing around with her grandfather’s manuscript. But when I asked her to give me a week she reluctantly agreed, and I went to work in earnest. Each night I carefully reread about ten pages of typescript, then went back and edited five of them on the theory that I’d always be far enough ahead to catch significant repetitions of style and substance and be able to reorganize details where needed. Then I retyped the edited pages and made further cosmetic revisions. I was at best a mediocre typist though, and that slowed my progress, until Tria, who typed like the wind, volunteered to do the edited text while I worked in pencil on the copy of the typescript.
    We were a strange pair. Most evenings she’d join me about forty-five minutes into my labors so I’d have something to give her, and then we’d be together in that small room, so close that I could smell her perfume, neither of us uttering a word. Sometimes, I’d be conscious that she had stopped typing, and when I looked up she’d be studying me with an expression that was more suggestive of perplexity and suspicion than the affection I would have preferred. And she always looked quickly away, before I could smile, as if she were conscious of having betrayed her innermost thoughts.
    Paradoxically, even though I doubted that Tria Ward felt much attraction, I began to be uncharacteristically certain that before long she would extend me the invitation. Such arrogance, I hasten to add, was far from customary. In my relations with other young women to this point in my life, I had always been rather pessimistic about my prospects, a circumstance born of experience. I’d been told that I struck most girls as gloomy, and at the university one honest sorority girl I had badgered about going out said that she had nothing against me personally, except that when she went out with a guy, like, she preferred to have a good time, you know? I knew. Perhaps I was confident about Tria because I was beginning to suspect that she was
not
the sort of girl who preferred to have a good time.
    Once we entered the library, Mrs. Ward left us so thoroughly alone that I began to suspect the older woman’s motives. An early riser, she retired, or claimed to, shortly after nine o’clock, andonce her bedroom door closed softly behind her, it never opened again, almost as if she were observing the conditions of a contract. She even announced her retirement each evening by knocking quietly on the door of the library and advising us not to work too hard or too late. Each night Tria would say, “I love you, Mother,” to which Mrs. Ward would reply, “And I you, Dear,” all of this rendered even more bizarre by the fact that the library door remained closed, their protestations of affection thus required to penetrate wood.
    One late July evening, after we’d been working together for several weeks, I couldn’t get in gear. I’d been struggling with the same passage for over half an hour under flickering lights. A dry electrical storm was approaching and we could hear the wind coming up outside, even though the library was windowless. Mrs. Ward had already retired, and when I handed Tria the still flawed page I’d been working on, I pretended to begin another, but watched her type instead. She carried herself the same way she had when she was fourteen and I’d fallen in love with her, as if she hadn’t revised her opinion of herself significantly in the intervening decade, a notion that I found quite charming, I don’t remember why. She seemed to be keeping something at bay, and the result was beautiful, mildly disconcerting only if one recalled the photographs of her mother, who appeared to have done the same thing. I couldn’t help wondering if, like Mrs. Ward, Tria would be transformed, almost overnight, from a young woman to an old one.
    From where I sat that evening, the question was academic. Much more to the point was the smell of her perfume in the close room, the extraordinarily pale white skin of her throat, the enticing silhouette created by the table lamp which backlit the loose, peasant-style Mexican blouse she was wearing. Then the lights went out entirely, and along with them the hum of the electric typewriter.
    “Great,” I heard her mutter in the dark, then, “where are you?”
    “Right here,” I said, not having moved.
    “I’ve always hated the dark.”
    I found her by smell and took her