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and herrings were sold.
    “It’s all right. It’s gone now. Seriously,” I was the more withdrawn now, “what would you do if you did get pregnant?”
    “I don’t know. I suppose I’d go somewhere with my poor baby if the man didn’t marry me. The whole family’d be shocked,” she laughed. “Outraged.”
    “If I got you pregnant I wouldn’t marry you.”
    “Why do this, then?”
    “It’s a need—like food or drink.”
    “You could come to love me.”
    “I don’t think so. I like you. I desire you.…”
    “Even if I didn’t love someone to begin with, and I was doing this, I know I’d come to love after a time. I’d have to,” she said as if willing it.
    “Maybe we’re talking too much,” without even touching I could feel the wetness between her legs.
    “We’re talking far too much love,” she breathed.
    “We don’t have to do it all the way. We can have this deliciousness of skin and.…”
    “Now you are talking too much, love. I want to feel you completely inside me. And don’t worry. I’m as regular as clockwork and it’s only two days off.”
    If it’s raw meat you want, raw meat you’ll get, I thought as she said, “Easy,” and as I went through like any fish feeling the triumph of breasting the hard slimy top of the weir I needed that sense of triumph to dull anxiety. Maybe it could not go easily and proudly through, I tried to lull myself, if it was weighted and made clumsy with the condom.
    The moment is always the same and always new, the instinct so strong it cancels memory. To lie still in the moment, in the very heart of flesh, the place of beginning and end, to snatch it out of time, to move still in all stillness of flesh, to taste that trembling moment again, to hold it, to know it, and to let it go, the small bird that you held, its heart hammering in the cup of the hands, flown into the air.
    “Now. Ο my God,” I heard her call as it flew.
    “You are beautiful,” I said as we lay in sweat, our hearts hammering down.
    “Wait,” she said as I stirred.
    Death must sometimes come the same way, the tension leaving the body, in pain and not in this sweetness and pride, but a last time, the circle completed, never having to come back to catch the flying moment that was always the same, always on the wing.
    “O boy,” she said. “That is what I seem to have been needing for ages without knowing it. I don’t feel any guilt or anything. I feel just wonderful.”
    “How come you sometimes have a touch of an American accent?” I asked tenderly, now that she was stretched out, relaxing above me.
    “There is, of course, the movies. I must have spent half my life at the pictures. My two best friends are Americans, Janeyand Betty. They work at the embassy and they’re at Water ways too. They’re both crazy about Ireland. And they’re the only ones I’ve told about us, about the fairly big differences in our ages.…”
    “What do they think?”
    “They’re all for it. They say no one pays any attention to that kind of difference in the States. In fact, they drove me to the Green Goose this evening. I wanted them to come in for a minute but they said they’d meet you another time.”
    “Would you like a drink?” I asked as the old fear of being enmeshed returned. “You can have almost anything.”
    “I’d love a glass of white wine, if that’s possible.”
    I poured it in the light of the open door of the fridge and got a very large whiskey for myself.
    “What are you drinking?” she asked.
    “Whiskey.”
    “It’s just wonderful to have all this time and ease,” she said.
    “Your good health,” I drank.
    “Do many people live in this house? I didn’t realize it was as big as it is till I came in tonight.”
    “There are ten flats. It’s an old house. It was converted about five years ago.”
    “What kind of people live here?”
    “Much the same as I, mostly single. Once they marry they don’t seem to stay long. Civil servants, school