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67 Socks She thinks she’s silly, making love in them. “Sorry,“ she says. “My feet get cold.“ She can’t believe he loves the contrast—public parts clothed, private not—the unsettling quality, like clouds lolling on the ground as rain falls up. Socks make her human— no Maja in majesty, or Bunny with an airbrushed muff. Socks show her frail and suffering, a wounded thing, like Plato’s people when the gods cut male and female apart. As a boy, he loved to give girls jewelry, then pose them wearing just the silver necklace, topaz earrings, turquoise brooch. Now age has taught him all about cold feet. He knows how small the range of temperature that lets people live, how exacting their demands of atmosphere. He knows how fragile is that flesh people protect with cloth and leather: tenderness on which they walk or run or vault or hobble painfully around the globe, forlorn as single socks until they make a pair. ...

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