I

HE FOUND, QUITE SUDDENLY and just as he took a stool midway down the bar, that he had been vouchsafed a theme. A notion about the nature of things that he had been turning over in his mind for some time had become, without his ever choosing it, the theme of a book. It had “fallen into place,” as it’s put, like the tumblers of a lock that a safecracker listens to, and—so he experienced it—with the same small, smooth sound.

The theme was the contrary pull men feel between Novelty and Security. Between boredom and adventure, between safety and dislocation, between the snug and the wild. Yes! Not only a grand human theme, but a truly mammalian theme, perhaps the only one. Curiosity killed the cat, we are warned, and warned with good reason, and yet we are curious. Cats could be a motif: cats asleep, taking their ease in that superlatively comfortable way they have—you feel drowsy and snug just watching them. Cats on the prowl, endlessly prying. Cats tiptoe-walking away from fearsome novelty, hair on fire and faces shocked. He chuckled, pleased with this, and lifted the glass that had been set before him. From the great window south light poured through the golden liquor, refracted delicately by ice.

The whole high front of the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill where he sat is of glass, floor to ceiling, a glass divided by vertical beams into a triptych and deeply tinted brown. During the day nothing of the dimly lit interior of the bar can be seen from the outside; walkers-by see only themselves, darkly; often they stop to adjust their clothing or their hair in what seems to them to be a mirror, or simply gaze at themselves in passing, momentarily but utterly absorbed, unaware that they are caught at it by watchers inside. (Or watcher, today, he being so far the bar’s sole customer.) Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness.

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn’t be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking.

The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldn’t see her face as she crossed to the bar in front of the window, but he could see, drawn with exactitude by the light behind her, her legs within a summery white dress. When young he had supposed, without giving it much thought, that women didn’t realize that sun behind them revealed them in this way; now he supposes that of course they must, and thinks about it.

“Well, look who’s here,” said the bartender. “You off today?”

“I took off,” she said, and as she took a seat between him and the window, he saw that she was known to him, that is, they had sat here in this relation before. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. What’s tall and cool and not too alcoholic?”

“How about a spritzer?”

“Okay.”

He caught himself staring fixedly at her, trying to remember if they had spoken before, and she caught him, too, raising her eyes to him as she lifted the pale drink to her lips, large dark eyes with startling whites; and looked away again quickly.

Where was he again? Novelty, security. He felt the feet of his attention skate out from under him in opposite directions. Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. “Theme for a novel: The contrary pull…” No. If this notion were real, he needn’t make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can.

But had he spoken to her before? What had he said?

II

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet’s company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student’s concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it’s fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn’t talent—not especially—but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn’t rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.

Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, and transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, silent pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer’s failure (which perhaps the producer didn’t feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

His editor now and then took him to an encouraging lunch, and talked about royalties, advances, and upcoming titles, letting him know that whatever doubts he had she considered him a member of the profession, and deserving of a share in its largesse and its gossip; at their last one, some months before, she had pressed him for a new book, something more easily graspable than his others. “A couple of chapters, and an outline,” she said. “I could tell from that.”

Well, he was sort of thinking of something, but it wasn’t really shaping up, or rather it was shaping up rather like the others, into something indescribable at bottom…. “What it would be,” he said timidly, “would be sort of a Catholic novel, about growing up Catholic,” and she looked warily up at him over her Campari.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter’s place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.

He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn’t what she had in mind at all. But he couldn’t do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn’t important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was coming to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn’t say) that he wasn’t a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn’t have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar.

III

“Boring, boring, boring,” said the woman down the bar from him. “I feel like taking off for good.” Victor, the bartender, chin in his hand and elbow on the bar, looked at her with the remote sympathy of confessors and bartenders.

“Just take off,” she said.

“So take off,” Victor said. “Jeez, there’s a whole world out there.”

She made a small noise to indicate she doubted there was. Her brilliant eyes, roving over her prospects, fell on his where they were reflected in the bar mirror. She gazed at him but (he knew) didn’t see him, for she was looking within. When she did shift focus and understand she was being regarded, she smiled briefly and glanced at his real person, then bent to her drink again. He summoned the bartender.

“Another, please, Victor.”

“How’s the writing coming?”

“Slowly. Very slowly. I just now thought of a new one, though.”

“Izzat so.”

It was so; but even as he said it, as the stirring stick he had just raised out of his glass dripped whiskey drop by drop back into it, the older notion, the notion he had been unable to describe at all adequately to his editor, which he had long since dropped or thought he had dropped, stirred within him. Stirred mightily, though he tried to shut doors on it; stirred, rising, and came forth suddenly in all the panoply with which he had forgotten it had come to be dressed, its facets glittering, windows opening on vistas, great draperies billowing. It seemed to have grown old in its seclusion but more potent, and fiercely reproachful of his neglect. Alarmed, he tried to shelter his tender new notion of Novelty and Security from its onrush, but even as he attempted this, the old notion seized upon the new, and as he watched helplessly, the two coupled in an utter ravishment and interlacement, made for each other, one thing now and more than twice as compelling as each had been before. “Jesus,” he said aloud; and then looked up, wondering if he had been heard. Victor and the woman were tête-àtête, talking urgently in undertones.

IV

“I know, I know,” he’d said, raising a hand to forestall his editor’s objection. “The Catholic Church is a joke. Especially the Catholic Church I grew up in…”

“Sometimes a grim joke.”

“And it’s been told a lot. The nuns, the weird rules, all that decayed scholastic guff. The prescriptions, and the proscriptions—especially the proscriptions, all so trivial when they weren’t hurtful or just ludicrous. But that’s not the way it’s perceived. For a kid, for me, the church organized the whole world—not morally, either, or not especially, but in its whole nature. Even if the kid isn’t particularly moved by thoughts of God and sin—I wasn’t—there’s still a lot of church left over, do you see? Because all the important things about the church were real things: objects, places, words, sights, smells, days. The liturgical calendar. The Eastern church must be even more so. For me, the church was mostly about the seasons: it kept them in order. The church was coextensive with the world.”

“So the kid’s point of view against—”

“No, no. What I would do, see, to get around this contradiction between the real church and this other church I seemed to experience physically and emotionally, is to reimagine the Catholic Church as another kind of church altogether, a very subtle and wise church, that understood all these feelings; a church that was really—secretly—about these things in fact, and not what it seemed to be about; and then pretend, in the book, that the church I grew up in was that church.”

“You’re going to invent a whole new religion?”

“Well, not exactly. It would just be a matter of shifting emphasis, somehow, turning a thing a hundred and eighty degrees…”

“Well, how? Do you mean ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,’ that kind of thing? Pantheism?”

“No. No. The opposite. In that kind of religion the trees and the sky and the weather stand for God or some kind of supernatural unity. In my religion, God and all the rituals and sacraments would stand for the real world. The religion would be a means of perceiving the real world in a sacramental way. A Gnostic ascension. A secret at the heart of it. And the secret is—everything. Common reality. The day outside the church window.”

“Hm.”

“That’s what it would really have been about from the beginning. And only seemed to be about these divine personages, and stuff, and these rules.”

She nodded slowly in a way that showed she followed him but frankly saw no novel. He went on, wanting at least to say it all before he no longer saw it with this clarity. “The priests and nuns would know this was the case, the wisest of them, and would guide the worshipers—the ones they thought could grasp it—to see through the paradox, to see that it is a paradox: that only by believing, wholly and deeply, in all of it could you see through it one day to what is real—see through Christmas to the snow; see through the fasting, and the saints’ lives, and the sins, and Baby Jesus walking through the snow every Christmas night ringing a little bell—”

“What?”

“That was a story one nun told. That was a thing she said was the case.”

“Good heavens. Did she believe it?”

“Who knows? That’s what I’m getting at.”

She broke into her eggs Florentine with a delicate fork. The two chapters, full of meat; the spinach of an outline. She was very attractive in a coltish, aristocratic way, with a rosy flush on her tanned cheeks that was just the flush his wife’s cheeks had had. No doubt still had; no doubt.

“Like Zen,” he said desperately. “As though it were a kind of Zen.”

V

Well, he had known as well as she that it was no novel, no matter that it importuned him, reminding him often of its deep truth to his experience, and suggesting shyly how much fun it might be to manipulate, what false histories he could invent that would account for the church he imagined. But he had it now; now the world began to turn beneath him firmly, both rotating and revolving; it was quite clear now.

The theme would not be religion at all, but this ancient conflict between novelty and security. This theme would be embodied in the contrasted adventures of a set of characters, a family of Catholic believers modeled on his own. The motion of the book would be the sense of a holy thing ripening in the stream of time, that is, the seasons; and the form would be a false history or mirror-reversal of the world he had known and the church he had believed in.

Absurdly, his heart had begun to beat fast. Not years from now, not months, very soon, imaginably soon, he could begin. That there was still nothing concrete in what he envisioned didn’t bother him, for he was sure this scheme was one that would generate concreteness spontaneously and easily. He had planted a banner amid his memories and imaginings, a banner to which they could all repair, to which they were repairing even now, primitive clans vivified by these colors, clamoring to be marshaled into troops by the captains of his art.

It would take a paragraph, a page, to eliminate, say, the Reformation, and thus make his church infinitely more aged, bloated, old in power, forgetful of dogmas long grown universal and ignorable, dogmas altered by subtle subversives into their opposites, by a brotherhood within the enormous bureaucracy of faith, a brotherhood animated by a holy irony and secret as the Rosicrucians. Or contrariwise: he could pretend that the Reformation had been more nearly a complete success than it was, leaving his Roman faith a small, inward-turning, Gnostic sect, poor and not grand, guiltless of the Inquisition; its pope itinerant or in shabby exile somewhere (Douai, or Alexandria, or Albany); through Appalachia a poor priest travels from church to church, riding the circuit in an old Studebaker as rusty black as his cassock, putting up at a plain frame house on the outskirts of town, a convent. The wainscoted parlor is the nuns’ chapel, and the pantry is full of their canning; in autumn the broken stalks of corn wither in their kitchen garden. “Use it up, wear it out,” says the proverb of their creed (and not that of splendid and orgulous Protestants), “make it do, do without”: and they possess themselves in edge-worn and threadbare truth.

Yes! The little clapboard church in Kentucky where his family had worshiped, in the Depression, amid the bumptious Baptists. In the hastening dawn he had walked a mile to serve six o’clock mass there. In winter the stove’s smell was incense; in summer it was the damp odor of morning coming through the lancet windows, opened a crack to reveal a band of blue-green day beneath the feet of the saints fragilely pictured there in imitation stained glass. The three or four old Polish women always present always took Communion, their extended tongues trembling and their veined closed eyelids trembling, too; and though when they rose crossing themselves they became only unsanctified old women again, he had for a moment glimpsed their clean pink souls. There were aged and untended rosebushes on the sloping lawn of the big gray house he had grown up in—his was by far the best off of any family in that little parish—and when the roses bloomed in May the priest came and the familiar few they saw in church each week gathered, and the Virgin was crowned there, a Virgin pink and blue and white as the rose-burdened day, the best lace tablecloth beneath her, strange to see that domestic lace outdoors edge-curled by odorous breezes and walked on by bugs. He caught himself singing:

Of course he would lose by this scheme a thousand other sorts of memories just as dear, would lose the grand and the fatuous baroque, mitered bishops in jewel-encrusted copes and steel-rimmed eyeglasses; but the point was not nostalgia and self-indulgence after all, no, the opposite; in fact there ought to be some way of tearing the heart completely out of the old religion, or to conceive on it something so odd that no reader would ever confuse it with the original, except that it would be as concrete, its concreteness the same concreteness (which was the point…) And what then had been that religion’s heart?

What if his Jesus hadn’t saved mankind?

What if the Renaissance, besides uncovering the classical past, had discovered evidence—manuscripts, documentary proofs (incontrovertible, though only after terrible struggles)—that Jesus had in the end refused to die on the cross? Had run away; had abjured his Messiah-hood; and left his followers then to puzzle that out. It would not have been out of cowardice, exactly, though the new New Testaments would seem to say so, but (so the apologetic would come to run) out of a desire to share our human life completely, even our common unheroic fate. Because the true novelty, for God, would lie not in the redemption of men—an act he could perform with a millionth part of the creative effort he had expended in creating the world—but in being a human being entire, growing old and impotent to redeem anybody, including himself. Something like that had happened with the false messiah Sevi in the seventeenth century: his Messiah-hood spread quickly and widely through the whole Jewish world; then, at the last minute, threatened with death, he’d converted to Islam. His followers mostly fell away, but a few still believed, and their attempts to figure out how the Messiah could act in that strange way, redeem us by not redeeming us, yielded up the Hassidic sect, with its Kabbalah and its paradoxical parables, almost Zenlike; very much what he had in mind for his church.

“A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”—the greatest grief, far greater than a few moments’ glorious pain on that Tree. Mary’s idea of it was that in the end the Father was unable to permit the death of his only begotten son; the prophecy is Abraham and Isaac; she interceded for him, of course, her son, too, as she still intercedes for each of us. Perhaps he resented it. In any case he outlived her, and his own wife and son, too; lived on, a retired carpenter, in his daughter’s house; and the rabble came before his door, and they mocked him, saying: If thou art the Christ, take up thy cross.

Weird! But, but—what made him chuckle and nearly smack his lips (in full boil now)—the thing would be, that his characters would pursue their different destinies completely oblivious of all this oddity, oblivious, that is, that it is odd; the narrative voice wouldn’t notice it either; their Resurrection has always been this ambiguous one, this Refusal; their holy-card of Jesus in despised old age (after Murillo) has always marked the Sundays in their missals; their church is just the old, the homely, the stodgy great Security, Peter’s rock, which his was. His priest would venture out (bored, restless) from that security into the strange and the dangerous, at first only wishing to be a true priest, then for their own sakes, for the adventure of understanding. A nun: starting from a wild embracing of all experience, anything goes, she passes later into quietness and, well, into habit. His wife would have to sit for that portrait, of course, of course; though she wouldn’t sit still. The two meet after long separation, only to pass each other at the X-point, coming from different directions, headed for different heavens—a big scene there. A saint: but which one? He or she? Well, that had always been the question; neither, or both, or one seeing at last after the other’s death his sainthood, and advocating it (in the glum Vatican, a Victorian pile in Albany, the distracted pope), a miracle awaited and given at last, unexpectedly, or not given, withheld—oh, hold on, he asked, stop a minute, slow down. He plucked out and lit a cigarette with care. He placed his glass more exactly in the center of its cardboard coaster and arranged his change in orbits around it.

Flight over. Cats, though. He would appropriate for his Jesus that story about Muhammad called from his couch, tearing off his sleeve rather than disturbing the cat that had fallen asleep on it. A parable. Did Jews keep cats then? Who knows.

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning…. Noparagraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel’s worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn’t work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn’t that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. He drank, and gazed out into the false golden day, where a passage of girl students in plaid uniforms was just then occurring, passing secret glances through the trick mirror of the window.

VI

“I’m such a chicken,” the woman said to Victor. “The other day they were going around at work signing people up for the softball team. I really wanted to play. They said come on, come on, it’s no big deal, it’s not professional or anything…”

“Sure, just fun.”

“I didn’t dare.”

“What’s to dare? Just good exercise. Fresh air.”

“Sure, you can say that. You’ve probably been playing all your life.” She stabbed at the last of her ice with a stirring-stick. “I really wanted to, too. I’m such a chicken.”

Play right field, he wanted to advise her. That had always been his retreat, nothing much ever happens in right field, you’re safe there mostly unless a left-handed batter gets up, and then if you blow one, the shame is quickly forgotten. He told himself to say to her: You should have volunteered for right field. But his throat said it might refuse to do this, and his pleasantry could come out a muffled croak, watch out. She had finished her drink; how much time did he have to think of a thing to say to her? Buy her a drink: the sudden offer always made him feel like a masher, a cad, something antique and repellent.

“You should have volunteered for right field,” he said.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “How’s the writing coming?”

“What?”

“The last time we talked you were writing a novel.”

“Oh. Well, I sort of go in spurts.” He couldn’t remember still that he had ever talked with her, much less what imaginary novel he had claimed to be writing.

“It’s like coming into a cave here,” she said, raising her glass, empty now except for the rounded remains of ice. “You can’t see anything for a while. Because of the sun in your eyes. I didn’t recognize you at first.” The ice she wanted couldn’t escape from the bottom of the glass till she shook the glass briskly to free it; she slid a piece into her mouth then and crunched it heedlessly (a long time since he’d been able to do that) and drew her skirt away from the stool beside her, which he had come to occupy.

“Will you have another?”

“No, nope.” They smiled at each other, each ready to go on with this if the other could think of something to go on with.

“So,” he said.

“Taking a break?” she said. “Do you write every day?”

“Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.” He’d said all this before, to others; he wondered if he’d said it to her. “It’s like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn’t ever a time you absolutely had to do it—there was always Saturday, then Sunday—but then there wasn’t ever a time when it wasn’t there to do, too.”

“How awful.”

Sunday dinner’s rich odor declining into stale leftoverhood: was it that incense that made Sunday Sunday, or what? For there was no part of Sunday that was not Sunday; even if, rebelling, you changed from Sunday suit to Saturday jeans when dinner was over, they felt not like a second skin, like a bold animal’s useful hide, as they had the day before, but strange, all right but wrong to flesh chafed by wool, the flannel shirt too smooth, too indulgent after the starched white. And upstairs—though you kept as far from them as possible, that is, facedown and full-length on the parlor carpet, head inches from the funnies—the books and blue-lined paper waited.

“It must take a lot of self-discipline,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.” He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that “Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter—if you write one page a day, you’ll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.”

“I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “I can’t even bring myself to write a letter.”

“Oh, now that’s hard.” Easiest to leave it all just as it had been, and only inveigle into it a small sect of his own making…easiest of all just to leave it. It was draining from him, like the suits of the bathing beauties pictured on trick tumblers, to opposite effect. Self-indulgence only, nostalgia, pain of loss for what had not ever been worth saving: the self-indulgence of a man come to that time when the poignance of memory is his sharpest sensation, grown sharp as the others have grown blunt. The journey now quite obviously more than half over, it had begun to lose interest; only the road already traveled still seemed full of promise. Promise! Odd word. But there it was. He blinked, and having fallen rudely silent, said. “Well, well, well.”

“Well,” she said. She had begun to gather up the small habitation she had made before her on the bar, purse and open wallet, folded newspaper, a single unblown rose he hadn’t noticed her bring in. “I’d like to read your book sometime.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s not very good. I mean, it has some nice things in it, it’s a good little story. But it’s nothing really.”

“I’m sure it’s terrific.” She spun the rose beneath her nose and alighted from her stool.

“I happen to have a lot of copies. I’ll give you one.”

“Good. Got to go.”

On her way past him she gave the rose to Victor without any other farewell. Once again sun described her long legs as she crossed the floor (sun lay on its boards like gilding, sun was impartial), and for a moment she paused, sun-blinded maybe, in the garish lozenge of real daylight made when she opened the door. Then she reappeared in the other afternoon of the window. She raised her hand in a command, and a cab the color of marigolds appeared before her as though conjured. A flight of pigeons filled up the window all in an instant, seeming stationary there like a sculpted frieze, and then just as instantly didn’t fill it up anymore.

“Crazy,” Victor said.

“Hm?”

“Crazy broad.” He gestured with the rose toward the vacant window. “My wife. You married?”

“I was. Like the pumpkin eater.” Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse?

“Divorced?”

“Separated.”

He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. “Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don’t want it.”

He nodded, though it wasn’t wisdom that his own case would have yielded up. He was only glad now not to miss her any longer; and now and then, sad that he was glad. The last precipitate was that occasionally when a woman he’d been looking at, on a bus, in a bar, got up to leave, passing away from him for good, he felt a shooting pang of loss absurd on the face of it.

Volunteer, he thought, but for right field. And if standing there you fall into a reverie, and the game in effect goes on without you, well, you knew it would when you volunteered for the position. Only once every few innings the lost—the not-even-noticed-till-too-late—fly ball makes you sorry that things are as they are and not different, and you wonder if people think you might be bored and indifferent out there, contemptuous even, which isn’t the case at all….

“On the house,” Victor said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar.

“Oh, hey, thanks.” Kind Victor, though the glass put before him contained a powerful solvent, he knew that even as he raised the glass to his lips. He could still fly, oh yes, always, though the cost would be terrible. But what was it he fled from? Self-indulgence, memory dearer to him than any adventure, solitude, lapidary work in his very own mines…what could be less novel, more secure? And yet it seemed dangerous; it seemed he hadn’t the nerve to face it; he felt unarmed against it.

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.

And he would reckon with it: on that last Sunday in Advent, when his story was all told, the miracle granted or refused, the boy would lift his head from the books and blue-lined paper, the questions that had been set for him answered, and see that it had begun to snow.

Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for. (The blizzard of ’36 had looked like that.) And filling up the world’s concavities, pillowing up in the gloaming, making night light with its whiteness, and then falling still in everyone’s dreams, falling for pages and pages; steepling (so an old man would dream in his daughter’s house) the plain frame convent on the edge of town, and drifting up even to the eyes of the martyrs pictured on the sash windows of the little clapboard church, Our Lady of the Valley; the wind full of howling white riders tearing the shingles from the roof, piling the snow still higher, blizzarding the church away entirely and the convent too and all the rest of it, so that by next day oblivion whiter than the hair of God would have returned the world to normality, covering his false history and all its works in the deep ordinariness of two feet of snow; and at evening the old man in his daughter’s house would sit looking out over the silent calm alone at the kitchen table, a congruence of star, cradle, season, sacrament, etc., end of chapter thirty-five, the next page a flyleaf blank as snow.

The whole thing, the full thing, the step taken backward that frames the incomprehensible as in a window. Novelty: there was, he just then saw, a pun in the title.

He rose. Victor, lost in thought, watched the hurrying crowds that had suddenly filled the streets, afternoon gone, none with time to glance at themselves; hurrying home. One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb.