ARIANE WAS IN THE KITCHEN when I arrived for my next afternoon of television with her.
“Butter that toast!” she said as soon as I came through the door.
It had just popped up. The butter was cold, straight from the refrigerator, and I had a tough time getting it to spread on the toast. I tried to cut the thinnest slices of butter I could, but the knife kept slipping and clanking against the butter dish. Ariane was at the stove, frying some slices of baloney for sandwiches. A glorious inner warmth spread through me when I realized that she had been expecting me: there were four slices of toast; there were two plates; one of the sandwiches was going to be mine.
“Fry! Fry!” she implored the baloney. To me she said, “We’ve got about a minute and a half before the movie starts. Think we can call these done?”
The slices had curled so that they looked like halves of a pink Spalding rubber ball. I considered this quite an early stage in the process of frying baloney. I liked my fried baloney dark. In fact, I liked to turn the hemispheres over at the end and let their rims turn black and crunchy, but I could see that Ariane was in a hurry. “Done,” I said.
With a spatula, she lifted the baloney from the pan and started throwing the sandwiches together.
We heard the theme of the afternoon movie. “Oooo,” she said. “Get in there, Peter, so you can tell me what happens.”
I went to the television room to wait for her. “They just put a commercial on,” I called out to reassure her.
The ironing board was up again, but there was nothing on it. Ariane came dashing into the room. She handed me a plate with one of the fried baloney sandwiches on it. Then, as an afterthought, she handed me the other one, too.
“Hold this a minute, will you?” she asked.
I took it and sat there with my hands full while she reached around behind her, unhooked and unzipped her dress, let it drop to the floor, stepped out of it, and draped it over the ironing board. There she was, just as I’d hoped, in her slip.
“I don’t want to make a mess of that,” she said, “now that I have to wear my own clothes to work.” She took her plate, curled up at her end of the sofa, and took a bite of her sandwich.
“No more Babbington Clam across the back?” I asked, amazed that my mouth worked, that my voice sounded quite normal.
“Nope. I got promoted. I’m the receptionist now. I have to look gorgeous.”
I wanted to say, “And you do,” but I didn’t have the nerve. At her end of the sofa, she had contrived to curl herself up in the space of a single cushion. She rested her left arm on the arm of the sofa, and she balanced her sandwich plate there, too. She had her legs curled under her, her knees away from me, so that she presented to me a landscape round and soft that suggested comfort as much as sex: the shimmering nylon bulges of her buttocks, the line of her thigh, curving away like a country road, the lenticular pink undersides of her toes.
“Wonderful,” I said. “Great, just great.” I was congratulating her—and myself. I understood the kind of thrill Heisenberg must have felt when he discovered uncertainty. I’d made a discovery of my own: apparently, wishing could make things so.
“Thanks,” said Ariane.
“It’s terrific,” I said. “Terrific.” The thought had come to me that if she now had to be so careful about her clothes, I was facing the delightful prospect of finding her in her slip every afternoon when I arrived to watch the movie with her.
“Shhh,” she said.
My future seemed seamlessly delightful, every day an afternoon, every afternoon a movie, with every movie Ariane. Amazing. I shifted slightly, ever so slightly, not enough, I hoped, to betray my true interests in the little room, but enough so that I could see Ariane much better, enjoy her, study her. She seemed to glow with lunar beauty—thanks to the silver light of the television set. I took a long, deep breath and was delighted to find in it, along with the rich odor of the Bolotomy flats beneath us, the mildewed sofa cushions, the hot iron, the toast and butter, the baloney, something sweeter, the scent of perfume, Ariane’s perfume. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “It’s great. It’s—”
“Peter,” she said. “Shut up. Watch the movie.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
I rested my arm along the back of the sofa, and I passed the rest of the afternoon, while something or other happened on the screen, blissfully watching each tiny movement she made, inhaling her perfume, and slowly, slowly, slowly advancing my fingers closer to her.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 624, Mark Dorset considers Language: Transformations Attendant to the Assimilation of Non-English “Loan Words” in American English, e.g., From Bologna to Baloney from this episode.
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🎧 624: Ariane was . . .