Excerpt:
The Source of Longing

1.
Longing

It occurred to Sloan Fox as he was leaving the house that he was actually in retreat.

Running late – yet there had been no running – he had showered in a hurry and did not take time to wash his hair, which, he knew, was overdue. The only laundered shirt was the blue pinstripe with the too-tight neck. In the bedroom’s half-light he swiped yesterday’s white shirt from the back of his desk chair, looked and didn’t look at its starched creases, smudged patches on the collar band. Hell with it, hell with it, hell with it, he told himself as he clumped downstairs.

In the buttery kitchen light, Jen stood at the counter watching the coffee-maker drip into the clear, calibrated pitcher. Sloan looked into the eyes of his son Bart who was weakly slicing sections of banana into his cereal bowl. The boy seemed, Sloan thought, stupefied with sleepiness, and he almost laughed.

“All set to conquer the world?” Sloan said to his son.

Bart looked up at his disheveled father, water from his shower moistening his shirt-front, beading along his hair-line.

“Yeah right, that’s me.” he said,

“You should really try drying yourself after your shower,” Jen said. “It’s part of the whole experience. You’d be surprised at how nice it feels.”

“Really?” Sloan answered flatly. He felt a reflexive burn of resentment at her sarcasm rising in his gut. “That’s a terrific idea. We should buy some towels.”

Sloan moved to his wife, awkwardly and closer to her than he wanted to be, in order to pour some of the brewing coffee into his mug. When he removed the pitcher, a succession of droplets hissed and spattered onto the heating element, spraying a faint brown mist over the counter top. Jen stared hard at the hissing burner, then up at her husband.

Sloan looked at his watch. Some beads of water, he noticed, had formed under the crystal. The retreat started in fifteen minutes, and it was a twenty-five or thirty minute drive downtown to the Hyatt. He looked sadly into the impossible coffee steaming in his mug.

“I’ve gotta run,” he said, “I’m way late.”

“Since when is eight-fifteen way late?” Jen asked.

Again the mounting burn below his heart.

“It’s an administrative retreat today,” Sloan said, emphasizing “retreat” as if he found the event, or perhaps the word for it, contemptible.

“What are you all retreating from?” Jen was relentless in her disapproval of the Cleveland Sun Messenger, the paper for which Sloan worked. She seemed to take an enjoyment, which he did not entirely understand, in dismissing it. Her question confused him.

“We’re not retreating from. We’re retreating to.” Sloan’s fingers found the glossy flier in his jacket pocket. “We’re retreating to…’The Organization and Its Shadow.’”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Jen said.

“Go figure,” Sloan said and swallowed back what he knew would be his only gulp of coffee.

“Now I’m good and late,” he said. “First day of the rest of your life, big guy,” he said to his son.

“It makes no sense,” Jen repeated as he let himself out the back door. “You retreat from, not to…”

Sloan had scalded his tongue and the roof of his mouth with hot coffee. He knew he would feel it, as a kind of reprimand, all day.

Good, Sloan thought, as he made his way into the Parlor One conference room of the Hyatt. Nothing formal had begun. His colleagues, editors and staff writers mostly, were standing or seated, chatting in little clusters around a horseshoe configuration of linen draped tables. He could see insulated coffee jugs, plastic cups of orange juice. Sloan imagined the bitter tang on his scalded tongue.

He was acknowledged, assumed into the gathering with greetings, jokey and incoherent. Someone said: editorial page heard from. The words gave Sloan pause. Was he? He thought about his new post, new title: Editorial Page Editor. For a moment, although he knew clearly what he must do and with whom as the Sun Messenger editorial page editor, the idea of the job confused him. Editorial editor seemed to him, at least semantically, redundant. Editorials were already “edited” versions of issues and events set forth in the rest of the paper. He was – what? – the editor of the edited. His work was now abstracted from the real and the urgent. He was no longer to deal with news but in creating a mood about the news. Sloan was beginning to feel confined and diminished by this idea when Nora Hick, the book pages editor, said, “Earth to Sloan. Earth to Sloan.”

“What am I being,” Sloan said, “stupid?” He felt stupid saying this.

There was purposeful movement, an abrading of metal chair legs on the tile floor. Steve Kraal, executive editor of the paper, was standing at a lectern at the open end of the horseshoe. Friends…friends…if we could begin…if we could find a seat…”

Sloan was struck by the open, unfinished proposition: if, if we could begin.

At Sloan’s place, at everyone’s place, was a glossy folder, its pockets stuffed with printed material: photocopied articles, some schematic diagrams and charts. Sloan fanned through the enclosures, noting on one of them the heading “Self/World.”

Sloan sat back. He felt heavy, tired, his awareness deep and muffled behind his eyes. At once he realized he had slipped back into his school posture, padding quietly, anonymously to the rearmost seats of the classrooms and lecture halls at Amherst. With luck he would not be engaged, singled out. With luck, his lack of preparedness and, usually, of interest would go unnoticed. With luck, the clenched feeling in his stomach would dissolve, and he would let himself drift into safe reverie.

The fluorescent light on the white linen made reverie difficult, and Sloan’s attention was suddenly drawn to the guest speaker – “facilitator” – seated to Steve Kraal’s right, waiting with an attentiveness bordering on mischief. She was striking.

Now she was at the lectern herself, broadly smiling, taking her time. She had a look Sloan had always liked: slight, angular, nicely formed. Her blond hair was pulled back, imperfectly, in a kind of twist so that wisps strayed appealingly about her ears. Her eyes were dark and shadowed with color, lips vividly reddened. The nose was a little hooked, and her upper lip – she was talking now – drew tightly away from good, slightly protruding teeth. This drawing away of her upper lip was arrestingly interesting to Sloan.

She was Naomi Wise, a psychologist, an authority, a handout said, on “organization dynamics.” Now she was laughing, and because of the irresistible drawing back of the upper lip from her teeth, and the accompanying helpless down-turning of the corners of her eyes, Sloan laughed, as they all laughed, in welcoming response.

Naomi Wise had begun well – no inconsiderable achievement, Sloan felt, given the quirks and cantankerousness of many of his Sun Messenger colleagues. Sloan drew himself a bit more upright to listen. Whatever might be said about organizational dynamics at the Sun Messenger, he was now willing, even eager, to watch her, to hear her talk. He could not have articulated it yet, but this was a presence he was pleased to let into his inner world, and with the rising awareness of his pleasure, she had already entered.

Naomi Wise told the editors and executives of the Sun Messenger that every organization has a shadow. The shadow consists of everything that was true of the organization that its members, especially its leaders, do not consciously acknowledge. The shadow was not an inert bundle of qualities and attributes, but a purposeful being, a kind of force with intent. When the rational, conscious activity of the organization diverges too greatly from the shadow, when the shadow is negated, trouble erupts. The trouble might take the form of unassignable bad morale, irrational lapses in performance and conduct. The shadow is mischievous, inclined to subversion. Shadow play might include sophisticated dissembling, the anonymous disclosure of embarrassing and illicit behavior on the part of the leaders, the implanting of computer viruses. When the shadow is actively at work, Naomi Wise said, mishaps and crises tend to cluster. Everyone tends to feel on edge, confidence and productivity low.

In a way that both energized him and made him uncomfortable, Sloan could feel the condition Naomi Wise described even as she spoke. He recalled, with a startled unease, the still unattributed prank that embarrassed the paper’s editors on Christmas Eve. Over a rather dull editorial in the late edition which mildly approved a court ruling that the Salvation Army could solicit donations inside city hall despite the administration’s objections, a bold headline appeared stating: SANTA KICKS MAYOR’S ASS. The intended headline, which Sloan and others had seen in the final lay-out, had been SALVATION ARMY PREVAILS. The prankster had not been discovered. Technology services were unable to determine the computer terminal from which the headline change was directed. There seemed to be no lapse in supervisory protocols. For a time there was a worrying belief that someone outside the paper’s computer network had cracked the security code, although most of the staff felt only an insider could have managed the substitution. It had fallen to Sloan, on Christmas Day, to compose the correction notice. Only Jen had heard him laugh crazily over his lap-top at the impossibility of making the confession of error anything other than an extension of the prank’s intent.

An editorial headline in the Dec. 24 late edition, SANTA KICKS MAYOR’S ASS, should have read: SALVATION ARMY PREVAILS. The editors regret the vulgarity of the suspected prank and are vigorously investigating the lapse. The Sun Messenger further regrets any embarrassment caused to the mayor, the Salvation Army or to any other party mentioned in the editorial.

Sloan e-mailed the correction to Steve Kraal. He couldn’t resist asking: should we also regret any embarrassment caused to Santa?

Naomi Wise stopped mid-sentence at the lectern and looked out with kind puzzlement at Sloan. He realized with a hot flash of embarrassment at the back of his head that he was inappropriately grinning. There could be no explaining. He willed his face to go blank, bent over his pad as if to make a note. Naomi Wise resumed speaking. Sloan wrote, for some reason in microscopically tiny script: am I the shadow, the shadow, the shadow --

Naomi Wise began answering questions. The shadow, she explained to the Sun Messenger staff, was a finding of the Swiss depth psychologist Carl Jung. Sloan scanned his memory, Amherst again, a seminar: Psychoanalysis and the Twentieth Century Mind. Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Reich. But what exactly was Jung? Sloan had not thought or read deeply at the time. There was an impression of Freud as grimly, powerfully logical; deep, instincts channeled, as if hydraulically, into compromised outwardly acceptable behavior. Unconscious frustration, conscious anxiety. But Jung? The psyche was brighter and livelier; the unconscious more crowded, somehow containing whole mythologies, whole destinies. Sloan didn’t really know.

Naomi Wise said that Jung was mainly concerned with the personal shadow, but that institutions and organizations revealed shadow activity as well; much more needed to be learned. There was a hand-out, on the personal shadow, quite good, she said, included in their folders. And now, perhaps, would be a good time for a break.

Sloan remained in his chair, riffling through the documents in his folder looking for the article praised by Naomi Wise. The piece in question, “Honoring the Shadow: Integration and Individuation in Mid-Life,” was written by Chandru Lott, a Jungian analyst in Santa Monica. Sloan poured some coffee from one of the thermal urns, took a sour sip, then began reading deeply into the essay; the opening section of which was titled, “The shadow in Dreams, Mistakes, Obsessions.” Sloan thought: this is very clear, this is smart – and at the same time had to will himself to continue reading. Something insistent within wanted him to put the article aside, turn physically away from it, get up and leave the table.

Because the shadow presses dark and culturally forbidden content onto conscious awareness, it is easy to think of the shadow as a “dark side,” as dangerous wishes and illicit destructive urges.

While the shadow does indeed contain such material, it also includes the heroic, perfected, “larger-than-life” qualities and aspirations the waking persona is unable to imagine or admit. We worship heroes because we cannot bear, or are repressively afraid, to be heroes.

Naomi Wise had resumed her place at the lectern. Sloan was immediately drawn to her words – but at the same time troubled. He found his response to the agreeable progression of her thoughts exactly like his response to the shadow article. Something accurately and unsettlingly striking an inner target. Then, just for an instant, Sloan saw it. If I am free and clear to think and feel this way, to take in and to be my whole crazy, unsavory self, then where are the boundaries? Where does it stop? And then, even more unsettlingly: how will I know what to do, how to be with anybody? Sloan suddenly felt uncomfortably weak, adrift. Then, just as suddenly, he sat up straight in his chair and told himself that he would no longer drink, or he would drink less, before dinner.

Naomi Wise held her listeners fast. Even while he was reading during the interval, Sloan had heard his colleagues’ approval through the din of chat: “this is deep stuff,” “incredible,” “she’s good.” Naomi Wise was illustrating the shadow at work in the organization.

“Take bigotry,” she said. “Or that we don’t have any bigotry in our lives. That’s right isn’t it? We are all open, good, modern, liberally educated people here. Look, I can see it in your faces. The Civil Rights movement was not lost on you. I read your paper. I know your editorial positions.

“There is still bigotry, but it is out there, in infuriating pockets, brutalizing the police, wrecking the poor city schools. But it’s not to be found, in fact it is vehemently denied, it is outlawed at the Sun Messenger.” Naomi Wise paused, she smiled penetratingly into the eyes of one listener after another.

Again, softly, “Am I right?

“Oh, but what has been happening, what have you been feeling since I brought up the subject, since I said, ‘bigotry’?” She paused again, and Sloan could feel the rising unease. “I am looking out at two black faces and – what? – fifteen or sixteen white ones around these tables. Is it now a little unpleasant, or more than a little, that I have raised the subject of bigotry, of race?” Without turning to look at her, Sloan pictured Rasheel Giddings at her seat, imagined her discomfort.

Sloan considered the phrase ‘is it now a little unpleasant’. There was something, he thought, old-world vaguely, European about Naomi Wise’s manner of address.

“And now maybe,” she continued, “some of you are thinking, ‘I wish she would stop.’ Yes?” Sloan was glad for her laugh, the upper lip so appealingly drawn back from her teeth.

“Let me tell you. Whatever feelings have just surfaced are just the tip, tip, tip of your shadow business about race. Unless you are somehow utterly unlike any other people in the United States, you are unconsciously loaded with racial concerns. There is fear, fear about difference. Fear, and also resentment, about acceptance, or the lack of it. I don’t know how much, if any, racial anger or aggression there is in your offices. But I do know this – and how strange and dangerous to talk about it. There is desire. There is a subterranean current, a pulse of desire across racial lines, at your paper, in the place you all come to work every day.” Sloan sensed the arrival of laughter in her eyes, but it did not come.

“Only the tip, the feathery edge of the shadow. The whole of the shadow includes everything about race that is felt and feared and desired that The Sun Messenger can’t acknowledge or publicly admit.”

“The most important thing to realize is that the danger does not lie in whatever race-related feelings and impulses might be unconsciously at work in your paper. No, the danger comes when the denial of those feelings becomes an institutional posture, an infallible certainly, company policy.

“Because whenever something soulfully alive is denied altogether, that truth goes underground and starts making itself known in the strangest ways. The worst, the most vicious race relations in this country occur not in the pockets and regions of society believed to be to most racist. The worst outrages occur in those places that have declared themselves forever enlightened and thus beyond primitive racial feeling. So it’s not in Mississippi farm towns, but at elite liberal colleges and universities where the racial shadow erupts. That’s where crosses are now burned at night. That’s where the hate mail and hate e-mail are anonymously dispatched. And you know a peculiar thing? It is now likely to be minority students themselves who are secretly provoking the self-righteous and the enlightened.” Naomi Wise paused. “Isn’t that interesting? It’s an amazing thing, the shadow.

“You can count on the shadow being on the prowl whenever something important and true in the organization goes unidentified or is denied. I don’t know the personnel or the personnel issues at The Sun Messenger, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the people in top management weren’t itching to let someone go, maybe even to let a lot of people go. Rarely are such desires, such wishes openly expressed, nor are they always consciously acknowledged by those who hold them. For just as none of us generous souls wants to harbor any racial fears and desires and resentments, no one in this room wishes to be anything other than a good, fair, supportive colleague. Right?

“I hope you all would feel this way about your colleagues. But if you do, and if that is all you allow yourself to feel and to admit, then you may be unleashing a frenzy of doubt and fear about job security. Again, as with racial feelings, stated concerns about poor job performance from overly demanding executives are not the organizational problem. No, the problem is the smiling inability to acknowledge the fact that, yes, there are some terrible contributors among us and everyone would be happier if they would leave or get fired. When the wrong hands are on deck, or in charge, for that matter, the shadow goes into high mischief mode. Before long all authority, even duly constituted authority doing perfectly reasonable tings, is mocked and questioned. A maddening climate is created in which every conceivable ineptness goes unaddressed or is forgiven. In an organization unwilling to acknowledge its critical disapproval and aggression, everybody finds himself and herself walking on egg shells and not quite knowing why.”

Sloan’s thoughts raced confusingly as he summoned up images and circumstances to corroborate Naomi Wise’s propositions. Not because her words were aversive, but because they were now too much for him, he felt an urge to withdraw, to find an excuse to exit the conference room and go home. No – not home. It was not yet noon. He pictured his empty house in the forlorn light of mid-day. There would be breakfast dishes on the counter and in the sink, crumbs on the sticky plastic tablecloth. Sloan felt a wave of deep and unfamiliar sadness, a kind of sadness that made him feel helpless and exposed, like a little boy. He willed his attention back to Naomi Wise.

“This is a lot to think about,” she said with what seemed to Sloan infinite thoughtfulness and concern. “And you know I could add sex to the picture.” She widened her eyes in a way that suggested sorrow. “We carry out, or at least try to carry out, our organizational life as though we had all tacitly consented to be eunuchs until it is time to go home.” There was some laughter. “And of course there is no sex at The Sun Messenger. We don’t even joke about it much anymore, because that might be harassing somebody. No, we don’t flirt, touch, ogle, or consort on company time. We banish such thoughts, or at least keep them to ourselves. Because that’s appropriate, right? It’s only proper. But there’s a problem in organizationally neutering ourselves. I don’t have to say what it is, do I?”

Naomi Wise was looking, Sloan believed, directly at him.

“The problem is that we are not and cannot ever be neutered. Because sex is sex, the shadow finds a way to take charge of our lives. Deny sex and we become helpless, we become fools.

“And on that very peculiar note” – she was already laughing – “ we should have our lunch!

“So how was it,” Jen asked him as he stepped into the bright, cluttered kitchen, “the retreat?” She spoke the word “retreat” as if it could only have been pretentious, silly.

“Actually,” Sloan said, feeling strangely spent, “it was interesting. It was kind of amazing.” Immediately Sloan wished he had not said it. Now he would have to elaborate, and he did not want to, especially at that moment in the kitchen to his wife.

The atmosphere was heavy with the aroma of something insistent and faintly sour. Sloan glanced at the stove and saw broccoli and onions sizzling in the wok. Another stir-fry. Sloan’s stomach clamped tight. He wanted to ascend up and out of the kitchen, to make his way to his chair in the corner of their bedroom, maybe to flop down on the bed, lie still in the darkness until it was time to eat.

“Bart coming home?” Sloan said, he hoped cheerfully.

“Of course he’s coming home. He lives here.” Jen turned away from Sloan. She began paring a slippery white brick of tofu into little cubes. “He’s at practice.”

Go team, go Bart,” Sloan said as he moved past Jen and out to the hall closet. He heard her say, “e-mail from Henry today.”

Henry. Sloan felt a tightening below his heart. He pictured the rangy, slouching figure of his older son, the sharp, appealing bones of his cheeks and chin. He imagined that he was looking directly into Henry’s imploring, apologetic eyes. Sloan knew at once that Jen’s mention of the e-mail was a kind of summons to talk about Henry’s precarious position at Miami University of Ohio where, as a freshman, he seemed to be failing to thrive. For a moment Henry’s head was flooded with images of college, of courses and credit hours, lecture halls and examinations in blue books, waxy dormitory corridors, vast cafeterias, shabby cluttered rooms smelling of stale socks, bunk beds, stalls of steaming showers. In the dark hallway Sloan could not imagine Henry, himself, anybody wanting to be in a college.

“I want to hear about it,” Sloan sang out in a voice loud enough to carry into the kitchen. “But I’m absolutely whipped. I’m going upstairs to crash for a few minutes before dinner.” He said this with an exaggerated cheerfulness he did not feel as he lunged up the stairs. His steps on the carpeted risers were heavy and loud, or perhaps he merely imagined they were, so that he was not able to hear all of Jen’s response, or complaint, from the kitchen: “you go crash…retreat…takes it out if you…your son…drop out…”

Sloan closed the bedroom door and lay down on the bed. Drop out. Was Henry going to quit, was that the e-mail? From the outset, Henry had not seemed to like Miami much. There was little pointed complaint, but there was an ominous absence of enthusiasm in his periodic phone calls and e-mails. He seemed to Sloan less discontented than sad, flat, unaccountably lost. Or, Sloan told himself, that’s just the way I imagine he is. Sloan recalled Naomi Wise talking about the universal tendency to project unacknowledged psychic business onto others. I am – Sloan was aware that he was mouthing the words out loud – I am the lost one.

The sadness seemed to descend from his head down into his throat, heart, belly. Sloan let himself feel the shame of realizing that Miami, because it was a state school, was the only one he could afford. Others, Kenyon College, Bucknell in Pennsylvania, had also accepted Henry. But they were nearly thirty thousand a year, and neither one offered much aid. Miami cost about nine, and Sloan knew they could not really afford even that.

The mess of the family finances swam in his head. Forty-eight thousand a year with his new post as editorial page editor. Another two or three thousand for free lance work. Jen’s tuition for her doctoral program at City College was now a wash, since she taught freshman writing classes as part of her assistantship. A fifty-thousand dollar no-interest loan from his father allowed them, barely, to meet mortgage, insurance, and car payments. Sloan loved the old, eccentric, chronically drafty house they had bought in Cleveland Heights, but he could never seem to keep free of code violations – peeling paint, detached gutters, outdated wiring – much less improve and spruce up the place the way he and Jen had planned when, lightheaded about owning a rather big, lovable house, they had made the purchase. Three thousand bucks a year for heat, Sloan heard himself saying, again, surprisingly, out loud. There was not, Sloan knew, money for Henry’s second term tuition. He would talk to his father, go to the bank. There should be – for Bart, for Jen – a vacation somewhere in the summer. Bart’s friends all went to basketball camp. Jen had finally had to turn off the water in the downstairs powder room to stop the leaks. Other leaks had discolored the ceiling plaster in the dining room and the den. “One day we will be eating,” Jen had said, “entertaining guests and, ka-boom, the ceiling will crash down and kill us.” The boys’ bikes were rusted. Car tires were balding, neither car serviced in months. The night before the drier shorted out an electrical circuit. Sloan had been working at his lap top on the third floor when the room went suddenly, silently dark. It felt like the end of the world.

When Jen yelled up the stairwell, “Supper! Your family would like to eat supper,” Sloan was thinking about talking to his father, asking him for an extension of the loan. He knew his father would say yes, even though the present loan payment was only three hundred dollars a month, and that from any other kind of investment his father would receive well-deserved interest on his savings. His father lived simply, almost austerely, with outwardly less, and certainly in smaller quarters, than his son. His father had been gently humorous and kind when Sloan appealed for Help. For years the head teller at a small branch bank, his father had retired at a salary of $31,000. His father had sent him to Amherst.

“Suit yourself,” Jen called up the stairwell, “We’re eating.”

Later that night Sloan half reclined in his battered large chair in the corner of the bedroom. The clunks and whooshes of the plumbing in Bart’s bathroom had stilled, and Jen lay asleep across the darkened room, her deep regular respiration somehow contributing to the quiet.

The house felt sweetly at rest. A shaft of butterscotch lamplight was just sufficient for Sloan to read the remaining pages of Dr. Chandru Lott’s essay on the shadow in mid-life. Again, as when he first looked at the piece during the morning break, the ideas in the text seem to proceed into the center of his understanding without resistance.

His shadow, Sloan read, was simply the rest of him. It was, in a phrase he reread several times, the source of his longing. Longing. The word seemed to belong to an operatic, inaccessible past. People longed, they yearned in romantic poems, in love songs. But this was not quite right. Sloan paused to consider the presence of his wife, the breathing, indistinct mound of her across the darkened room.

Sloan longed. Sitting in his chair in the lamplight, he realized that he longed, even that “longing” was a good word for it. He longed for the unexpected sparks of communion with his boys when in the course of their odd errands, outings, shooting hoops in the driveway, they would acknowledge the wonder or the humor in something and then, in a somewhat deeper psychic recess, register pleasure that the moment had been shared. Sloan longed for that wonder, for, especially, his boys to know it. He could not bear to think about them being overwhelmed, shamed, afraid – of what? – of their own longing. He did not want them to draw back from the wonder of things, to grow reflexively defensive, to be always on edge, always a little afraid. Sloan thought about projection. He was, he knew, always on edge, always a little afraid – also that this was the last thing anyone was likely to say about him.

Sloan considered Jen and whether he longed, whether he had ever longed, for her. He pictured the surprise of her quick smile when they had met, his fascination with the sharp bones of her cheek and chin – like Henry’s. It was a nervous smile, almost a tic, her eyes narrowing in a way that made her look at once delighted and suspicious. Yes, Sloan had longed for her, had sensed her in rooms, in crowds before she would arrive. There had been the exquisite softness of her skin. What words could describe it? Like silk, like satin – but not really right. Like – like her skin, like skin if skin could be powder or the softest breeze: without blemish, seemingly without pores, creamy, milky white skin which, through the medium of Sloan’s fingertips, had once made him worshipful. Yes, he had longed.

Jen would not hear that she was beautiful or desirable. Slender, small boned, and delicate, she protested, and also felt, that she had been denied the requisite feminine allures of her era. “Don’t tell me I’m thin!” she would shriek. “Look! look at me” -- she was standing naked, just out of the shower, her heels together as if under mock inspection. “I have no definition, no muscles. Look! I just hang there on my bones. I’m all white and horrible. I’m a dough girl.” She was being funny for Sloan, but he sensed a kind of terror in her self-effacement. To Sloan the very qualities about which she complained, the absence of chiseled contours, defined musculature, any kind of athleticism, were themselves wondrous. Dancing, she seemed nearly to disappear against the pressure of his embrace, as insubstantial at his chest as the bird skeleton of her delicate bones. She did not understand that he loved this mystery in her, that her physical being, as when they made love, somehow joined and received his but without any apparent mass or resistance. Sex with Jen felt to Sloan like dissolving ecstatically into softness itself, an exquisite release into white milkiness, feathers opening into feathers.

Sloan lay the shadow article aside and turned off the standing lamp. Deeply sad now and surrendering all resistance to this sadness, he was stirred, awake and vulnerable in a new way. The source of his longing was within, a shadowy but irrepressible part of himself. He wanted it to come out. He wanted it to come true.