The Second Coming

gorge. The tree was vanishing for good into the cloud.
    For at least a hundred times in past years he had lined up ripple of glass with rim of gorge. A novel thought occurred to him. Sooner or later there comes along a lining up which is the last—number 101 or 102. Ordinarily one does not keep track and does not imagine that there will be a last lining up. But why not decide which lining up will be the last? Very well. This one. He lined up ripple with the beginning of the gorge rim like the two points of a gunsight and moved his eye. The ripple ran along the rim until it came to the scarlet oak which hid the target like the tree in front of the Texas Book Depository. Anyhow, the tree had almost vanished in the fog.
    Suddenly he knew why he remembered the triangular patch of woods near the railroad tracks where he wanted to make love to Ethel Rosenblum. It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.
    The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.
    Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?
    Silence.
    Very well, old mole, you win.
    6
    Kitty touched him, jostled him with her hip, shoulder, elbow. She looked at him. “You look as though you just made up your mind to do something, decided what you wanted, and know just how to get it.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œWhat is it, Will?” She moved closer.
    â€œAh.”
    Her eyes widened. “Is it me?”
    â€œAh—”
    Kitty laughed, put her arm around his waist, and said she had a favor to ask of him. He smiled and nodded, noting with curiosity that everywhere she touched him a welt rose to meet her.
    His body swelled. It occurred to him that it would be pleasant to take her hand and hold it against him. He turned his back on the others. But before he could take her hand, she laid both hands on him and tugged him playfully roughly into the corner beyond Marion’s Louis XV secretary. As they went past, Kitty’s hand went out to touch one of the brilliant enamel-like decoupage panels. Hand and eye made one swift appraisal. “My God, would you look at that,” she said absently to no one and in a different voice.
    â€œNow, old dear friend Will, my first and only love. Oh, it’s so good to see you. Do you remember Central Park?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat a dummy I was. I should have taken you up. But you were always so vague. I never knew when you were going to wander off in one of your funks.”
    â€œTaken me up on what?” he said absently, watching the tree. The room was closed up in a cloud, a white room whited out by a white cloud, but no one seemed to notice.
    â€œHa ha, haa haa. Don’t give me that, son,” said Kitty, coming even closer.
    â€œAll right.”
    Maybe he had “proposed” to her. In any case, he saw that Kitty had made over her past life in her head so that it became as clear and simple as a movie. He had proposed to her and she had turned him down. If she had taken him up, it was possible for her to think she would have been happy. But she hadn’t and so her life had been screwed up. If only—But even an “if only” is not so bad if it is simple. Regret can be enjoyed if it makes sense. The difference between them was that the older she got the more sense her life made. Yet she was not altogether serious in her swaying and swooping against him and her “if onlys.” The seriousness showed in her quick sure appraisal of the Louis XV secretary, the split-second touch-and-look. She knew what she wanted. What did she want from him?
    The tree grew dimmer. Some of the leaves came off and blew straight up. There must be an updraft from the gorge.
    â€œWhat a good-looking couple we made, Will!”
    â€œWe did?”
    â€œDo you remember what my housemother told me at school?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThat you and I were not only the best-looking couple she had ever seen but the most distinguished.”
    Distinguished. What could Kitty mean? Undoubtedly Kitty was making up her own bad but clear fiction and the always unclear tact. What could the housemother have meant? What was distinguished about a coed cheerleader and an addled ATO who didn’t know whether he