Oracles

New York, 1958

He will ask her tonight. She knows this. Not only because the sky is full of auguries - a full-blown blossom on the spindly magnolia at the corner of Grove and Bleeker, a shooting star last night over Washington Square - but because she knows him, his rhythms, his way of ordering and bunching things. He will disguise it with an ironic look and a negative construction: Not that this is particularly sudden, or I don't suppose you'd have any interest in ... and then it will be there, and done, and the future laid out before them.

Everything is happening as she planned - no, as she willed. (I want it all!) Even the date, May 8, 1958, is an elegant symmetry, and in the European form would be a palindrome: 8-5-58. Also the anniversary of V-E day, as he has pointed out. (The thirteenth anniversary, true; you can carry these games too far. On the other hand, thirteen is the sum of five and eight). He will meet her in front of Zabar's and they'll have supper with Mrs. Puig, even though that will rush them (why should they go to his mother's before a show if it's not a statement of intent?). The show is called "Nickels in May," which must be a musical, though she hasn't heard of it. She can see the stage, bare boards full of young people in primary colors and bobby socks, a full-blooded, full-throated American belting out. Yes, and a counter-chorus of young Negroes with great bubbles of black hair, like Kuli Moyala from his lab at Columbia, who wears bangles above the elbow and batik robes of sass reds and blood browns. All the Negroes Simone has met till now have their hair ironed into waves or pageboys, but Kuli wears a narrow band of beaded stuff around a sprouting of charred oak, so defiantly beautiful that Simone feels like a Miss Milquetoast in her presence.

She has actually eaten milk toast. She didn't believe it existed, but Mrs. Puig- she must learn to call her Hester now, or even Mom? - served it on a Sunday night, a bowl of warm milk with a slice of buttered white toast drowning in it. An amazing thing. Simone had thought a dozen years in England showed her all there was for mush and bland.

That she hasn't heard of the show is not surprising. Marvin knows about off-Broadway things, quirky Village things, loft-shoestring productions. He knows the starving avant-garde. She nips back through the Square, sweating a little because she needs all six of these books this weekend, and they're heavy. The Kitto alone - Form and Meaning in Drama - weighs two pounds in its library binding. Her brain, too, is a little top-heavy with Aeschylus, all those bird-portents and the ravings of Cassandra. She turns into Eighth Street, past Julia's Gems, not pausing and not turning her head because if the ring is still there (the slender circle with the single bend, like a golden scribble; the single black pearl at its zenith) she doesn't want to know. And if it isn't there, what, all the same, would it prove for certain?

She hurries down the half-flight to the Grove Street basement and lets herself in. She kicks off her loafers and peddle pushers and stands in her panties pouring a handful of seed in the cage - shaped like a wicker wedding cake - where a Javanese Temple bird called Ginsberg scolds from side to side. The advantage of this one room, a half-story underground, is that if you adjust the blinds at an upward angle nobody can see in. The disadvantage, apart from ninety dollars a month, is that car exhaust and passing feet and the slightest breeze sift in the airborne detritus of New York. The guy she sublet from said, "It's a fact you get more air below street...