Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering child. Darling,
this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied
adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be
immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar,
nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part
of an old tree's shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little
beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed
foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into
me and righten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved
in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets
fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I
shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my
chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl
hung over me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet
I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a
great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some
of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance
that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across
the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of
undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus
removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that
made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But
abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored
would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of
a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open
window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.