The Second Coming

having you around at four o’clock in the afternoon.”
    He laughed. “What’s wrong with night? What’s wrong with now?”
    â€œNothing. But—”
    She was moving against him, enclosing him, wrapping her arms and legs around him, as if her body had at last found the center of itself outside itself. But he stopped her or rather took her face in his hands and looked she thought at her, the firelight making his eye sockets deeper and darker than they were.
    â€œThere is something I must tell you.”
    â€œYes, but—” she said.
    â€œYes, but what?”
    Yes, but not now. Yes, but why did you stop? Keep on.
    â€œWhat?” he asked her.
    â€œI said why did you stop. I mean I meant to say ‘it.’ Why did you stop? I think this is ‘it.’”
    â€œI have to leave,” he said.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œNow.”
    â€œIs the leaving—”
    â€œI’ll be back.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œSoon. There are some things I must do.”
    â€œWhat about this? It? That is, us.”
    â€œWhat about us?”
    â€œIs there anything entailed?”
    â€œIs anything entailed between us?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat is the entailment?”
    He lay back, his hand behind his head. The wind shifted to the south. The sleet turned to rain. Some of the drops on the glass beyond his head didn’t run. In the big drops the open firebox was reflected in a bright curved stripe like a cat’s eye. With his hand behind his head, his shoulders and chest bare, the firelight showing the line of his cheek and the notch of his eye, with my hair falling across my arm and touching his arm, we are like lovers in the movies. Men never wear pajamas in the movies. So Sarge didn’t wear pajamas. My father always wore pajamas.
    â€œThere is something you need to know,” he said.
    Yeah, she thought, there is something I needed to know and I think I know. What I need to know and think I know is, is loving you the secret, the be-all not end-all but starting point of my very life, or is it just one of the things creatures do like eating and drinking and therefore nothing special and therefore nothing to dream about? Is loving a filling of the four o’clock gap or is it more? Either way would be okay but I need to know and think I know. It might be the secret because a minute ago when you held me and I came against you, there were signs of coming close, to it, for the first time, like the signs you recognize when you are getting near the ocean for the first time. Even though you’ve never seen the ocean before, you recognize it, the sense of an opening out ahead and a putting behind of the old rickrack bird-chirp town and countryside, something tasting new in the air, the dirt getting sandier, even the shacks and weeds looking different, and something else, a quality of sound, a penultimate hush marking the beginning of the end of land and the beginning of the old uproar and the going away of the endless sea.
    Then why had he stopped and would she ever know the secret or if there was a secret?
    â€œThis is like running around at the Dunes Exxon a mile from the beach and going back to town,” she said.
    â€œWhat’s that?” he asked quickly. He looked at her. “You mean the ocean, getting near the ocean.”
    â€œHow did you know that?”
    â€œPerhaps that is what I want,” he said absently.
    â€œThe ocean?”
    â€œSomething like that. Now may I tell you something?”
    â€œOkay.”
    He turned to face her. Her cheek was on his arm.
    â€œHow are you?” he asked her.
    â€œI’m all right now.”
    â€œBut not before?”
    â€œI’m all right because you are doing the instigating and you seem to know what you are doing. I was a good dancer.”
    â€œSo if I do the instigating you’ll do the cooperating?” he asked.
    â€œHa ha. Very funny.”
    â€œVery well. I am going to tell you what has happened concerning you because you are entitled to know. I’m also going to tell you what I have learned because, for one reason, you may be the only person who would understand it.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œFirst, your mother and I are old friends. That is, I used to know her a long time ago.”
    â€œYou and my mother?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow about that?” she said in her mother’s voice, using an expression her mother liked to