"Look, was it necessary?" says one of the J's, addressing to me the serious urgency of womankind's eternal quest for love, the ages-long effort to heal the wounds of the sick soul, the infinite, caring compassion of the female saint.
An over-familiar mode! Dawn comes up over the waste land, bringing into existence the boulders and pebbles battered long ago by bombs, dawn gilding with its pale possibilities even the Crazy Womb, the Ball-breaking Bitch, the Fanged Killer Lady.
"I don't give a damn whether it was necessary or not," I said.
"I liked it."
It takes four hours to cross the Atlantic, three to shuttle to a different latitude. Waking up in a Vermont autumn morning, inside the glass cab, while all around us the maples and sugar maples wheel slowly out of the fog. Only this part of the world can produce such color. We whispered at a walking pace through wet fires. Electric vehicles are quiet, too; we heard the drip of water from the leaves. When the house saw us, my old round lollipop-on-a-stick, it lit up from floor to top, and as we came nearer broadcast the Second Brandenburg through the black, wet tree-trunks and the fiery leaves, a delicate attention I allow myself and my guests from time to time. Shouting brilliantly through the wet woods-I prefer the unearthy purity of the electronic scoring. One approaches the house from the side, where it looks almost flat on its central column-only a little convex, really-it doesn't squat down for you on chicken legs like Baba Yaga's hut, but lets down from above a great, coiling, metal-mesh road like a tongue (or so it seems; in reality it's only a winding staircase). Inside you find yourself a corridor away from the main room; no use wasting heat.
Davy was there. The most beautiful man in the world. Our approach had given him time to make drinks for us-which the J's took from his tray, staring at him but he wasn't embarrassed-curled up most unwaiterlike at my feet with his hands around his knees and proceeded to laugh at the right places in the conversation (he takes his cues from my face).
The main room is panelled in yellow wood with a carpet you can sleep on (brown) and a long, glassed-in porch from which we watch the blizzards sweep by five months out of the year. I like purely visual weather. It's warm enough for Davy to go around naked most of the time, my ice lad in a cloud of gold hair and nudity, never so much a part of my home as when he sits on the rug with his back against a russet or vermilion chair (we mimic autumn here), his drowned blue eyes fixed on the winter sunset outside, his hair" turned to ash, the muscles of his back and thighs stirring a little. The house hangs oddments from the ceiling; found objects, mobiles, can openers, red balls, bunches of wild grass, and Davy plays with them.
I showed the Js around: the books, the microfilm viewer in the library in touch with our regional library miles away, the storage spaces in the walls, the various staircases, the bathrooms molded of glass fiber and put together from two pieces, the mattresses stored in the walls of the guest rooms, and the conservatory (near the central core, to make use of the heat) where Davy comes and mimics wonder, watching the lights shine on my orchids, my palmettos, my bougainvillea, my whole little mess of tropical plants. I even have a glassed-in space for cacti. There are outside plantings where in season you can find mountain laurel, a tangled maze of rhododendron, scattered irises that look like an expensive and antique cross between insects and lingerie-but these are under snow now. I even have an electrified fence, inherited from my predecessor, that encloses the whole estate to keep out the deer and occasionally kills trees which take the mild climate around the house a little too much for granted.
I let the J's peep into the kitchen, which is an armchair with controls like a 707's, but not the place where I store my tools and from which I have access to the central core when House has indigestion. That's dirty and you need to know what you're doing. I showed them Screen, which keeps me in touch with my neighbors, the nearest of whom is ten miles away, Telephone, who is my long-distance backup line, and Phonograph, where I store my music.
Jeannine said she didn't like her drink; it wasn't sweet enough. So I had Davy dial her another.
Do you want dinner? (She blushed.)
