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A Boeing buzzing from the west brings the boy that I love best. But a Boeing from the east…

Just nonsense, but it taught directions, like north and south. Boz, who had no patience with Science, always confused north and south. One was uptown, one was downtown—why not just call them that? Of the two, uptown was preferable. Who wants to be MOD, after all? Though it was no disgrace: his own mother, for instance. Human dignity is more than a zipcode number, or so they say.

Tabbycat, who was just as fond of sunshine and out-of-doors as Boz, would stalk along the prestressed ledge as far as the rubber plant and then back to the geraniums, very sinister, just back and forth all morning long, and every so often Boz would reach up to stroke the soft sexy down of her throat and sometimes when he did that he would think of Milly. Boz liked the mornings best of all.

But in the afternoons the balcony fell into the shadow of the next building and though it remained almost as warm it didn’t do anything for his tan, so in the afternoon Boz had to find something else to do.

Once he had studied cooking on television but it had nearly doubled the grocery bills, and Milly didn’t seem to care whether Boz or Betty Crocker made her omelette fine herbes, and he had to admit himself that really there wasn’t that much difference. Still, the spice shelf and the two copper-bottom pans he had given himself for Christmas made an unusual decorator contribution. The nice names spices have—rosemary, thyme, ginger, cinnamon—like fairies in a ballet, all gauze wings and toeshoes. He could see her now, his own little niecelette Amparo Martinez as Oregano Queen of the Willies. And he’d be Basil, a doomed lover. So much for the spice shelf.

Of course he could always read a book, he liked books. His favorite author was Norman Mailer and then Gene Stratton Porter. He’d read everything they’d ever written. But lately when he’d read for more than a few minutes he would develop really epic headaches and then be a complete tyrant to Milly when she came home from work. What she called work.

At four o’clock art movies on Channel 5. Sometimes he used the electromassage and sometimes just his hands to jerk off with. He’d read in the Sunday facs that if all the semen from the Metropolitan Area viewers of Channel 5 were put all together in one single place it would fill a medium-sized swimming pool. Fantastic? Then imagine swimming in it!

Afterwards he would lie spread out on the sofa that looked like a giant Baggie, his own little contribution to the municipal swimming pool drooling down the clear plastic and he would think glumly: There’s something wrong. Something is missing.

There was no romance in their marriage anymore, that’s what was wrong. It had been leaking out slowly, like air from a punctured Baggie chair, and one of these days she would mean it when she started talking about a divorce, or he would kill her with his own bare hands or with the electromassage, when she was ribbing him in bed, or something dreadful would happen, he knew it.

Something really dreadful.

At dusk, in bed, her breasts hung above him, swaying. Just the smell of her is enough, sometimes, to drive him up the walls. He brought his thighs up against the sweaty backside of her legs. Knees pressed against buttocks. One breast, then the other, brushed his forehead; he arched his neck to kiss one breast, then the other.

“Mm,” she said. “Continue.”

Obediently Boz slid his arms between her legs and pulled her forward. As he wriggled down on the damp sheets his own legs went over the edge of the mattress, and his toes touched her Antron slip, a puddle of coolness on the desert-beige rug.

The smell of her, the rotting sweetness, like a suet pudding gone bad in a warm refrigerator, the warm jungle of it turned him on more than anything else, and way down there at the edge of the bed, a continent away from these events, his prick swelled and arched. Just wait your turn, he told it, and rubbed his stubbly cheek against her thigh while she mumbled and cooed. If only pricks were noses. Or if noses …

The smell of her now with the damp furze of her veldt pressed into his nostrils, grazing his lips, and then the first taste of her, and then the second. But most of all the smell—he floated on it into her ripest darknesses, the soft and endless corridor of pure pollened cunt, Milly, or Africa, or Tristan and Isolde on the tape recorder, rolling in rose-bushes.

His teeth scraped against hair, snagged, his tongue pressed farther in and Milly tried to pull away just from the pleasure of it, and she said, “Oh, Birdie! Don’t!”

And he said, “Oh shit.”

The erection receded quickly as the image sinks back into the screen when the set is switched off. He slid out from under her and stood in the puddle, looking at her uplifted sweating ass.

She turned over and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, Birdie, I didn’t mean to … ”

“Like hell you didn’t. Jack.”

She sniffed amusement. “Well, now you’re one up.”

He flipped the limp organ at her self-deprecatingly. “Am I?”

“Honestly, Boz, the first time I really didn’t mean it. It just slipped out.”

“Indeed it did. But is that supposed to make me feel better?” He began dressing. His shoes were inside out.

“For heaven’s sake, I haven’t thought of Birdie Ludd for years. Literally. He’s dead now, for all I know.”

“Is that the new kick at your tutorials?”

“You’re just being bitter.”

“I’m just being bitter, yes.”

“Well, fuck you! I’m going out.” She began feeling around on the rug for her slip.

“Maybe you can get your father to warm up some of his stiffs for you. Maybe he’s got Birdie there on ice.”

“You can be so sarcastic sometimes. And you’re standing on my slip. Thank you. Where are you going now?”

“I am going around the room divider to the other side of the room.” Boz went around the room divider to the other side of the room. He sat down beside the dining ledge.

“What are you writing?” she asked, pulling the slip on.

“A poem. That’s what I was thinking about at the time.”

“Shit.” She had started her blouse on the wrong buttonhole.

“What?” He laid the pen down.

“Nothing. My buttons. Let me see your poem.”

“Why are you so damn hung up on buttons? They’re unfunctional.” He handed her the poem!

Pricks are noses.
Cunts are roses.
Watch the pretty petals fall.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “You should send it to Time”

“Time doesn’t print poetry.”

“Some place that does, then. It’s pretty.” Milly had three basic superlatives: funny, pretty, and nice. Was she relenting? Or laying a trap?

“Pretty things are a dime a dozen. Twelve for one dime.”

“I’m only trying to be nice, shithead.”

“Then learn how. Where are you going?”

“Out.” She stopped at the door, frowning. “I do love you, you know.”

“Sure. And I love you.”

“Do you want to come along?”

“I’m tired. Give them my love.”

She shrugged. She left. He went out on the veranda and watched her as she walked over the bridge across the electric moat and down 48th Street to the corner of 9th. She never looked up once.

And the hell of it was she did love him. And he loved her. So why did they always end up like this, with spitting and kicking and gnashing of teeth and the going of their own ways?

Questions, he hated questions. He went into the toilet and swallowed three Oralines, one just nicely too many, and then he sat back and watched the round things with colored edges slide along an endless neon corridor, zippety zippety zippety, spaceships and satellites. The corridor smelled half like a hospital and half like heaven, and Boz began to cry.

The Hansons, Boz and Milly, had been happily unhappily married for a year and a half. Boz was twenty-one and Milly was twenty-six. They had grown up in the same MODICUM building at opposite ends of a long, glazed, green-tile corridor, but because of the age difference they never really noticed each other until just three years ago. Once they did notice each other though, it was love at first sight, for they were, Boz as much as Milly, of the type that can be, even at a glance, ravishing: flesh molded with that ideal classic plumpness and tinged with those porcelain pink pastels we can admire in the divine Guido, which, at least, they admired; eyes hazel, flecked with gold; auburn hair that falls with a slight curl to the round shoulders; and the habit, acquired by each of them so young that it could almost be called natural, of striking poses eloquently superfluous, as when, sitting down to dinner, Boz would throw his head back suddenly, flip flop of auburn, his ripe lips slightly parted, like a saint (Guido again) in ecstasy—Theresa, Francis, Ganymede—or like, which was almost the same thing, a singer, singing

I am you
and you are me
and we are just two
sides
of the same coin.

Three years and Boz was still as hung up on Milly as he had been on the first morning (it was March but it had seemed more like April or May) they’d had sex, and if that wasn’t love then Boz didn’t know what love meant.

Of course it wasn’t just sex, because sex didn’t mean that much to Milly, as it was part of her regular work. They also had a very intense spiritual relationship. Boz was basically a spiritual type person. On the Skinner-Waxman C-P profile he had scored way at the top of the scale by thinking of one hundred and thirty-one different ways to use a brick in ten minutes. Milly, though not as creative as Boz according to the Skinner-Waxman, was every bit as smart in terms of IQ (Milly, 136; Boz, 134), and she also had leadership potential, while Boz was content to be a follower as long as things went more or less his own way. Brain surgery aside, they could not have been more compatible, and all of their friends agreed (or they had until very recently ) that Boz and Milly, Milly and Boz, made a perfect couple.

So what was it then? Was it jealousy? Boz didn’t think it was jealousy but you can never be sure. He might be jealous unconsciously. But you can’t be jealous just because someone was having sex, if that was only a mechanical act and there was no love involved. That would be about as reasonable as getting uptight because Milly talked to someone else. Anyhow he had had sex with other people and it never bothered Milly. No, it wasn’t sex, it was something psychological, which meant it could be almost anything at all. Every day Boz got more and more depressed trying to analyze it all out. Sometimes he thought of suicide. He bought a razor blade and hid it in The Naked and the Dead. He grew a moustache. He shaved off the moustache and had his hair cut short. He let his hair grow long again. It was September and then it was March. Milly said she really did want a divorce, it wasn’t working out and she could not stand him nagging at her any more.

Him nagging at her?

“Yes, morning and night, nag, nag, nag.”

“But you’re never even home in the morning, and you’re usually not home at night.”

“There, you’re doing it again! You’re nagging now. And when you don’t come right out and nag openly, you do it silently. You’ve been nagging me ever since dinner without saying a word.”

“I’ve been reading a book.” He wagged the book at her accusingly. “I wasn’t even thinking about you. Unless I nag you just by existing.” He had meant this to sound pathetic.

“You can, you do.”

They were both too pooped and tired to make it a really fun argument, and so just to keep it interesting they had to keep raising the stakes. It ended with Milly screaming and Boz in tears and Boz packing his things into a cupboard which he took in a taxi to East 11th Street. His mother was delighted to see him. She had been fighting with Lottie and expected Boz to take her side. Boz was given his old bed in the living room and Amparo had to sleep with her mother. The air was full of smoke from Mrs. Hanson’s cigarettes and Boz felt more and more sick. It was all he could do to keep from phoning Milly. Shrimp didn’t come home and Lottie was zonked out as usual on Oraline. It was not a life for human beings .

The Sacred Heart, gold beard, pink cheeks, blue blue eyes, gazed intently across twelve feet of living space and out the window unit at long recessions of yellow brick. Beside him a Conservation Corporation calendar blinked now BEFORE and then AFTER views of the Grand Canyon. Boz turned over so as not to have to look at Jesus, the Grand Canyon, Jesus. The tuckaway lurched to port side. Mrs. Hanson had been thinking of having someone in to fix the sofa (the missing leg led an independent existence in the cabinet below the sink) ever since the Welfare people had busted it on the day how many years ago that the Hansons had moved in to 334. She would discuss with her family, or with the nice Mrs. Miller from the MOD office, the obstacles in the way of this undertaking, which proved upon examination so ramiform and finally so formidable as very nearly to defeat her most energetic hopes. Nevertheless, some day.

Her nephew, Lottie’s youngest, was watching the war on the teevee. It was unusual for Boz to sleep so late. U.S. guerillas were burning down a fishing village somewhere. The camera followed the path of the flames along the string of fishing boats, then held for a long time on the empty blue of the water.

Then a slow zoom back that took in all the boats together. The horizon warped and flickered through a haze of flame. Gorgeous. Was it a rerun? Boz seemed to think he’d seen that last shot before.

“Hi there, Mickey.”

“Hi, Uncle Boz. Grandma says you’re getting divorced. Are you going to live with us again?”

“Your grandma needs a decongestant. I’m only here for a few days. On a visit.”

The apple pie colophon, signaling the end of the war for that Wednesday morning, splattered and the decibels were boosted for the April Ford commercial, “Come and Get Me, Cop.”

Come and get me, Cop,
Cause I’m not gonna stop
At your red light.

It was a happy little song, but how could he feel happy when he knew that Milly was probably watching it too and enjoying it in a faculty lounge somewhere, never even giving a thought for Boz, or where he was, or how he felt. Milly studied all the commercials and could play them back to you verbatim, every tremor and inflection just so. And not a milligram of her own punch. Creative? As a parrot.