Augusta Played by Kelly Cherry

were closed…heavy, figured drapes that made the room seem timeless—as if the room were airtight, sealed against the world and the corruption of change. A languid gold light, overrich as syrup, lay in thick, inert pools on the deep-pile carpet.
    Gus reached both arms around her back to unzip her dress, and the action twisted her at an angle so exquisite in relation to Norman that she nearly fainted. Norman had to take his hand away to pull the dress over her head, and he brought her underpants down when he did. Then she shut her eyes as he drew the dress over her face and took her into his arms, dispensing with the bra, and when she opened them again, looking over his navy-suited shoulder in the direction of the door, she saw the bellhop.
    She screamed.
    The bellboy jumped. He would have put Nureyev to shame. He jumped so high, kicking his legs to turn around at the same time, that he could almost be said to be dancing. But he wasn’t dancing. He was running, out of an instinct as old as the Lascaux Caves, an instinct for self-preservation that said it was not safe to look on another man’s naked wife. It was evidently an instinct with as much urgency behind it in the twentieth century as in the Pleistocene period, and if Norman was anything to go by, it had retained its validity, because Norman turned around, saw the bellhop, and wanted to kill.
    The bellhop had fled, a single, useless, courteous phrase left lingering behind him in the room, the result of a kind of time-lag as if he were traveling faster than the speed of sound. It was, “Compliments of the management, sir,” and it had been delivered with a magnum of champagne in an ice pail which the boy dropped clattering on the coffee table as he turned tail and ran. Norman took off after him.
    The first leg of the race was a straight stretch of hotel carpeting from the room to the elevator; then there was a hallway-crossing, and the bellhop made a sharp swerve to the left. Norman caught hold of him in front of an open linen closet.
    â€œYou fucking popeyed bastard,” he said (strictly metaphorically, as the boy, unlike Norman, had not even been thinking of fucking, and, unlike Dinky, was not at all exophthalmic, and , as Norman was to learn later, was definitely not illegitimate).
    â€œYou fucking popeyed bastard,” Norman said again, with emphasis, unable to think of anything else—and kayoed him with a left uppercut to the jaw and a right to the stomach (Norman was lefthanded).
    The boy fell backward into the closet, bringing down shelves of sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths, toilet paper, detergent, and a broom. Maids materialized from nowhere, blossoming in the doorways of rooms all along the hall, like primroses springing up after an April shower.
    They were standing there, the primrose maids, dumbstruck, and the bellboy was lying there, among the linen, and Norman slowly began to realize what he had done. Without saying a word to anyone, carefully, like a silent film rewinding, he edged back in the direction he had come. When he was around the corner, he tore back to the room. Gus had locked the door.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Gus,” he shouted in a stage whisper, “let me in!”
    Gus opened the door and he whisked into the room but she latched the door again afterward. She was dressed in jeans and one of his shirts but her face was as white as dough and as ready to crumble as a matzo cracker. “What happened?” she asked.
    â€œI hit him.”
    â€œYou what?”
    â€œWhat do you think I did? Asked him back to play gin rummy?”
    â€œIt’s not funny.”
    â€œI’m not laughing.”
    Gus was. Hysterically. “Oh God,” she said. “I’m sorry, Norman, but you should have seen the look on your face when you turned around and saw him.”
    Norman didn’t at all like being laughed at, and, disgruntled, answered, “I was looking at the look on his face