Gone by Martin Roper Page B

stillness of the moment. I felt her presence grow, then, and I felt happiness emanate from her and dumb fear gripped me in my gut and she was gone. I sat there, sweating and feeling as if there was a shard of ice stuck in my stomach. Sins became harder to live with.
    I became intensely infatuated with the women I slept with while I was with Ursula, but I knew it was not love. I thought it was passionate lovemaking but it was nothing as calculated as that. I was getting over the problem I had had for years with her. I was trying to satisfy that pent-up sexual hunger that could not be satisfied. The heat of the sex was the one area of life where I was not acting. It was a desire to live, as if my own life was running out quickly, the way Ruth’s had. I heard a psychologist on the radio talk about near-death experiences and how these makes people change, how they reassess their lives, improve them. She was talking theory. That’s the problem with psychologists and priests. It’s always theory. Some evenings on the way home from work, or from the hospital, I would slip my seat belt off and drive faster and faster, imagining that it would be all over shortly. There was no fear in me of death, only a fear of the endless pain. But I would think of Ruth hearing of the news of my death and I would slow down and go and visit one of the women who I knew would have me. I poured all of myself into these women, all the longing and ache of life. As I lay in bed, I could tell they knew they were soothing what was locked inside me and I was embarrassed. I would never fall asleep until I was certain the woman was as drained as I was, sure she had come no matter how much sleep pulled me. I needed the mutual exhaustion. I had no expectations of these women, and, more importantly, they had none of me. There were no expectations at all except the pleasure of the moment. Until Holfy.

Holfy
    She can only be described through her city. Even more specifically: Gansevoort Street. Melville walked this street here in the far West Village in New York City. The author of Moby Dick found it hard to get work on a street named after his relatives. Holfy took on Gansevoort Street in the early sixties. Stonewall was years away from her, and I was not yet born.
    She gets bored easily. In 1974 she started a restaurant with her then lover in the heart of Greenwich Village. The Black Man’s Table still does well almost a quarter of a century later in a city that devours restaurants before the paint has dried on their freshly finished fronts. But the restaurant bored her, she had a disagreement with her lover, and she left. Success in itself seems as uninteresting to her as the same meal two nights in a row. Then she got herself into photography in a city lit by photographers.
    Holfy started buying her own train tickets from upstate New York to Manhattan as soon as she was old enough. At eighteen she flew to Denmark and took painting classes. She would become a painter. She sat on both sides of the canvas. Life opened. A year later, when she returned to New York, she and Robert rented a dump on Gansevoort Street in the guts of New York’s meat district. They knocked down the wall between them and the adjoining vacant apartment. When the landlord found out, there was nothing he could do because the lease stated Apartment, second floor. There was nothing describing another apartment on that floor in the plans. It was fun in those days to fool the landlord. Like his tenants, Charlie Gottleib was young and vigorous.
    At night, on Little West Twelfth Street, a sliver of a block from her doorway, prostitutes prance on the cobblestone roads that have been battered by Mack trucks delivering skirts of beef to New York’s finest restaurants. In the filthy night, these prostitutes glisten, looking more outrageously beautiful than supermodels and with smoother legs. On a summer’s evening, even before darkness gives the hookers mystery, cars stalk