Free Old Acquaintance by David Stacton

but it was too late to do so now. Now she only sang the faster numbers.

XVII
    “ HAS it occurred to you,” said Charlie, “that we have more time to ourselves than we had in the dark backward and Abysm of, say, three days ago?”
    Yes, it had. She was lonely. She would have felt fed up to the gills, if she hadn’t enjoyed the role she had to play in this world so much.
    “It’s rather convenient, it gets us off the hook,” said Charlie. “Not only does it solve an always awkward social problem, but it leaves us with some time to ourselves. In fact, come to think of it, too much time. I’m even beginning to catch up with my reading again.”
    It was Charlie’s habit to read in bed before going to sleep. It was also his habit to drink coffee in bed, alone, in the morning, until he could move. After two weeks with anyone he began to get restless, until he could reestablish both. This had ruined his sex life, as he often said, but it had kept him sane. He always returned to his routine, like a traveler who, no matter what he has seen along the way, is relieved to get home to a place where he knows where everything is.
    He couldn’t help it. The allurements of the flesh are all that count in life. Everybody says so. He said so himself. He even believed it. But he preferred reading.
    It was his misfortune to be attracted to young men whose literacy was limited. Otherwise he might have settled down with one of them and never remarried again at all.
    The real time for playing around is the afternoon, but since he usually worked all morning, by afternoon Charliewas too tired. What he wanted to do then was relax. So there simply wasn’t any time for these people he spent so much of his time tracking down.
    It was an anomaly. But whatever would we do without reading? Without reading we would go mad.
    Lottie, who did most of her reading in the afternoon, was beginning to get restless. She was beginning to count the days until the arrival of Miss Campendonck and the rest of the clowns. Still, she had to admit that Charlie was taking it well. She was relieved. Not, however, as relieved as all that. What, if anything, was going on?
    Together they went down the stairs to the lobby. That film had bothered her. It brought things back. And the lobby here had the same movements left and right, the same entrances, as the lobby of the old Adlon in Berlin, where she had first met those American producers, thirty years ago, who like all flesh-peddlers had been explicit about which part of her they had wanted, not to buy, but sell.
    She would always be grateful to her first director for having told those gentlemen not only what she had to sell, but for having the decency to consult her in the matter. He had been homosexual, of course. In that business, if they treat you with any respect they always are. But such people have a lesson to teach: they alone know the commercial value not of what we are, but of what we aren’t. Her first popularity she owed to those lessons in the androgyne, for though men liked her, it was women who went to her pictures, and American women long to be a father to their sons. She had taught them how.
    To that ambiguous image she owed everything. But ever since the Adlon, hotel lobbies had made her nervous. She didn’t know why.

XVIII
    CHARLIE was puzzled. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. So, as usual when he was perplexed, he played dead.
    As far as he knew, nobody had ever seen this game but his sister, and his sister was dead now herself. There was nothing even remotely sinister about the game. On the contrary, it was one of his favorite ways of being privately happy. But to an outsider it would have looked odd, therefore he was careful that no outsider should know about it.
    When he was about six, and his sister eight, they had both been impressed by the lying-in-state of their Uncle Felix. Not only was Uncle Felix the only rich member of the family (he had been a city councilor), but