The Circle by Elaine Feinstein

people asleep in their homes and Eli asleep at her side as she drove through the curving down darkness. Until the lights of the sea town came into view and he awoke; like a cat without blur; to catch the sight of it.
    *
    When she and Eli met at Old Street: they had gone to hear a Russian poet give readings from Mayakovsky and a friend of Eli’s read some translations of his own. She knew she couldn’t take in the Russian through her ears alone; she hoped the translations would work. But mostly she wasn’t certain what she hoped. Sitting nervously drinking with them all in the sleazy pub over the road, the dirty red plush and tassels and the brass-handled pumps all part of the same drunken strangeness ; and among these people her own sense of oddness disappeared; she could not have put an age to the garrulous black-bearded poet from South America, or the white-faced woman in the big red hat. She liked them. She liked London. She was: happy.
    Afterwards: walking round the dirty city streets together. Into the tube in a sort of daze, not talking much; taking coffee at last somewhere off the Charing Cross road. Too late now for trains back home. Sheknew then the conjecture that was set up between them. Ferociously, miserably, she thought of Ben; his phlegmatic face observing her departure saying (of her new white top) did she think it was sexy? And her own evasion: it was a bad purchase for that.
    They phoned Danny from the station explaining. And his voice, blank and non-committal said: of course no problem. And from Danny’s she phoned Ben; had a long cheerful call to him. Not mentioning Eli. Mainly because he was there, listening.
    Danny and his wife were sleepy but hospitable; they set about finding two sets of bedclothes without comment , arranged two rooms for them two floors up. Next door to one another and out of hearing (she thought). Said goodnight. It was past two.
    And now they mounted the stairs together and she could imagine clearly enough what might come next, the curling out of his young body towards her. Her own receiving of it. But she wasn’t sure. How she felt and what she intended. Until two landings up it was suddenly clear as a knife in her brain that she didn’t want anything precise to happen; and her feelings settled into anxiety. That perhaps it was already too late to prevent.
    She went to the lavatory to think about it. Was she then indulging a sort of diseased and disgusting fantasy? That the possibility of making real what she had so often thought filled her with such apprehension? Was it in any case, she wondered hopefully, an entirely private piece of imagining?
    It was lovely in the bathroom. Cool and clear and green, and she undressed slowly and looked at herself in the long mirror; and said you silly bitch, it’s vanity. It’s vanity will keep you chaste. Or fear. She was washed clean, scented. No cap ,anyway she reasoned.
    Eli was sitting on her bed.    Reading.    And now ithad to be admitted that what she felt was alarm. Had she, then, given some earlier signal? Would he look up and hold out a hand, and if so what? Else could she do?
    He looked so young. And she remembered suddenly the only sexual experience of her own youth that filled her with shame.
    *
    It was a young teacher, and she was his first girl. They’d started to make love many times, teased and frustrated, in public doorways, late at night, always somewhow in the open air. And the first occasion they had to go further was in his sister’s flat, a squalid early evening opportunity, with baby-sitting the lame excuse. With the telly blaring, he lay on top of her. Inexpert, fiddling with zips and buttons, and at last she had to help him get his trousers off, and then she saw. How small he was. The slightness of the hips like a bird or a chicken, and the penis that lay limply between his legs.
    –It’ll be all right. In a minute, he said, and wanted to lie on her again, but she knew now. How all that sighing of