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Show 20 After a long time I raise my head; I see first the ceiling, then the posts of the bed, and finally I focus on the naked shoulder of Luel. She is raised up on one arm, studying the contours of her fingernails, and across her lips sits a cleverly satisfied smile. She looks at me, mocking. "You're pretty damn good," she says, "you don't want to waste it on them." Them. I sink back on the bed, and across my consciousness winds a long line of wraiths, their thin arms bent against an invisible wind, their hollow mouths unspeaking, their sparse hair disheveled in the wind. Sentimental, I think. But then an image comes more clearly; it is Sadie, smiling her smile in the bed, before she died. There is nothing clever or smug about Sadie's smile, it is a smile that envelops her whole feminine face, that softens the corners, gives her substance and form. "I love you," she had said, but without jealousy, or expectation, or any demand for the future. "I even know that you love me." With that, she had taken the ring from her finger and slipped it into the bowl. It is in those smiles that I have come to discover the astonishing possibilities of love. But I am seeing the smile on her granddaughter now, corrupted through two generations: I stare at Luel, not at her naked body, but at her smile. It is a smug, satisfied, commercial smile, the product of conquest: she is the cleverer one. "Call me tomorrow," Luel is saying, pulling on the skintight pants. She is fastening the shirt across her breasts. |