JACQUELINE 4

I am convinced for a moment that all this puts my life on track. I present the good news about the new girlfriend to this young therapist David Yammer, but he does not share the enthusiasm I am trying to project. Still, I do not feel foolish.

She connects me with her friends, a cinematically good looking French couple who mysteriously are in an apartment, a very ordinary looking apartment, in an office building adjoining Rockefeller Center. She invites over one night Wayne Sorce, a intense, friendly photographer she represents who like me had been with the opposition in the Philippines. And now that things were worse than ever there she thinks maybe Wayne and I can work together and go back. Also, she seems to be ready to read anything I write.

She shows me an old American cookbook that has the most disgusting things in it from the19th century. Bloody ways of killing animals, the steaming of the flesh of those just killed, gooey things made from their bleeding inner organs. She asks if these things ring a bell with me since this is apparently what prominent Americans used to have done in their kitchens, and I am apparently from an old line, non-ethnic American family.

She tells me everything she tells her therapist, who she says is a delightful man. She says she has her sessions with him not in his office but while on the move around various parts of New York.

She says she will help in every way she can my plan to quit using sleeping pills.

She backs me up when one day I bring out a tie to wear to a funeral of someone who has died of something he should not have died of but everyone knew he would – my first experience with what AIDs was doing.

She goes to the Carlyle for power breakfasts while I stay in bed in the big room where we spend our time – these high curtains that are always rustling, the teletype and telex machines always clicking away, the phone ringing, never answered right away but the volume of the answering machines always turned up. How life has changed since you and I met, she keeps saying.

One night before we get to bed she says she wants to read to me from Lao-tzu, who she says is her favorite. Once again I can make no sense of what is going on around me and so cannot think of anything to say. She reads about how the fool is always talking, the wise man stays silent. "When I read this I know it is about you," she says.

We decide to stay in on New Year’s eve. We are in her bed again and still. The sex really justifies all this, I think. And then both of us stay there still naked if not quite ready for the next round, I am lying on my back, and she is sitting up on a pillow, her upper thigh and rump against my ear. New Years Eve. A milestone time in our lives. Or so I think it seems to her. I wish I could rise to it. I am speechless again.