The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn Page A

university. We would cease to be a place where ordinary people can view firsthand the beauty of the ages. We would cease to be what someone has called “the ultimate interpretive center of the human condition.”
    Speaking of which, we had something of a cursory visit by young Winslow Lowe. He came in on Saturday and left on Sunday. He’s remarkably like his late father, as Diantha is like her mother. Strange, the way genes for looks and character get handed around in a family. But then, his attendance, however brief, did cheer up Elsbeth.
    On a lighter note, Korky Kummerbund came over yesterday, and I must say we had what very nearly amounted to a celebration.A celebration of what, I keep wondering. But not to cavil. Elsbeth was up and around and, at times, positively jolly as Korky described “a divine new little bistro on Upper Market Street called the Airliner Galley.” Korky went on about how the owner, his friend Jeremy, had taken the bottom floor of the old Tweed Building, a narrow leftover at the corner of Morton, and redesigned it in the shape of a jumbo jet interior. “But all first-class.”
    “I want to go,” Elsbeth exclaimed. When I began to frown at the idea, “Oh, God, Norman, I just want to take a break from dying.” She took some of the miracle medicine Dr. Berns had prescribed and a handful of vitamins. Korky called ahead, and we set off, Diantha as well.
    We were not disappointed. The seats, apparently from a real airliner, were arranged into two rows of snug booths. Each has a porthole through which you look down at a continuous video of landscapes or clouds that you select on a console just beneath the window. Elsbeth pushed the button for clouds. There was a film playing on an overhead screen that you can listen to with earplugs.
    A waiter with a drinks trolley took our order. Jeremy came on over the loudspeaker, welcoming us aboard as special guests. He said the seat-belt sign would remain off for the rest of the flight, the weather was clear and calm at our destination, and we were lost, but it didn’t make any difference. He then asked one of the cabin staff to please bring him a dry martini, up with a twist.
    The food, a parody of airline fare only as far as the plastic accoutrements, proved delicious in an old-fashioned kind of way.
    At one point I escorted Elsbeth up to the ladies’ room in the back. It had one of those push folding doors, which opened into a roomy vestibule and another door leading to the ladies’room directly. She had to control the laughter of her delight, as it weakens her.
    There was one note of … well, not exactly discord, but of surprise, at least for me. Diantha, sitting next to me in one of the four-seater booths, in the course of the meal entwined the calf of her leg under and around mine. I would be less than honest if I did not admit to being shocked and aroused. Not to pull away, I knew, was to make myself complicit in the gesture, and yet to draw back struck me as a kind of ungallant rudeness. For once, though, I did something quite natural: I leaned toward her, put my arm around her shoulder, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Diantha, who had been subdued through the whole course of the meal, broke down and started to cry. Her mother reached over and took her hand, as did Korky. Diantha dried her tears, smiled, and kissed me back on the cheek.
    Indeed, with Diantha now living with us, it is as though, through some strange alchemy of being and becoming, she and Elsbeth are merging into one. There are times when, in my heart, I cannot separate them.
    Perhaps Diantha is sad not only because of her mother’s decline, but also because Sixy left a message, which I could barely decipher, dude this and cool that, telling her he would be a few days late. In solving her problem, I’m hoping it will solve mine, which persists like some alluring danger to us all.
    Well, I must get back to work on the uncorrected proofs of my magnum opus. Why does it all seem so