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Show 15 touched, except professionally, in years, the uncanny mystery of finding response in the remains of a breast. I feel Luel swallow, moving closer. I cannot help myself now, in spite of the danger, and I am explaining to Luel the way in which I unwrap their clothes from their bodies, slowly, as if an ancient body were an inestimably precious gift, dressed in cheap wrappings unworthy of it. "How can you do it?" she says, but she is moving still closer now, and she leans toward me in the low-cut black dress, "How can you do it, when they are so old?" „ I can see into the dark space between her breasts. I am telling her everything now, what it is like to run your fingers along an arthritic spine, between legs that are too weak to spread of their own accord, to find the secret places, so old and unresilient that the imprint of your finger stays behind in the soft flaccid flesh. "How can you?" Luel asks, one more time. * * * Within a week, Luel brings her father, the immense man Tate. He is a man of natural arrogance, but for this occasion he has put on a manner of ingratiating politeness: Luel has told him everything, that I was his mother's, uh, friend. "The word is lover," I say. Tate shakes my hand in a carefully controlled way; without the control, I think he would destroy me. But he cannot destroy what is still a threat: |