She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me by Herbert Gold

again, and then turned away, meaning that I could talk freely. He knew I would be talking about him. His own companion was a young woman wearing a black-and-white cowl and nun’s habit although Halloween was still a few weeks away.
    Priscilla smiled at him across the crowded lunchtime terrace, raised her glass and held it there. The nun told him to look and he looked. He raised his glass and both Priscilla and Karim drank, and the nun also drank. I didn’t.
    I held Priscilla’s wrist while I explained that we were getting to know each other these days, she and I, and now she knew there was some work I didn’t do, some folks I didn’t want to know, and Karim fitted the category. In fact, he just about filled it for me.
    â€œBut he wants to know you.”
    â€œIt’s nice to be loved, isn’t it?”
    â€œI kind of like him. He seems confident.”
    â€œWants professional services,” I said. “Collections, or traveling with cash, or maybe better or worse. There seems to be a fair amount of money circulating around him.”
    She liked the sound of this. “Is it illegal? Am I so innocent you can’t explain it in detail?”
    I didn’t know in detail. In North Beach and the Tenderloin it wasn’t always helpful to know in detail. That was Alfonso’s business, not mine. I didn’t have to build a case to know as much as I needed. I explained about how a lack of knowledge can be a helpful thing in my trade. She wanted to learn. Also at times she didn’t mind teaching as it came to her. “He’ll be back,” she said.
    â€œYou don’t get prophecy points for that.”
    â€œHe really wants to persuade you.”
    I didn’t enjoy this. She was longing for adventures and I was longing for limits on them. “Not persuadable,” I said.
    â€œHe’ll be back, lover.”
    *   *   *
    People can join a parade and dance along with the band, giddy with the joy of sunlight on their bodies—a class action of merriment and mystic oneness in community—while the band, which is the source of all this terrific rhythm, is paying strict attention to its own music.
    Sometimes Priscilla and Dan stayed joined, kept their bodies locked into folds and membranes, not moving, breathing, hardly moving at all—a mutuality of decision, both of us deciding, nobody’s idea—lying there and desperately still at first, then calmly still, whispering, telling all the things we loved, admitting freely that the first among these things was each other (I think it was more Dan, my tongue set free by the blessedness of bodies breaking the boundaries of bodies, who spoke these things) until the light started to seep under the shade, in the edges around the shade, and there were morning noises outside. The paperboy’s footsteps. A whistler.
    â€œIs it okay if I come now?”
    â€œWhatever. Yes. Yes.”
    I could feel a bone at her middle rising and falling with her breath as she said yes.
    â€œNow?”
    â€œYes!”
    That cry we all make, smart or dumb, sex-drunk or just human, agreeing, assenting, convening, calling up the spirits of past and future and now, just the two of us here on earth together. Sometimes adding, as a kind of afterthought, “God, God, God,” though God isn’t really what we are believing in. The prayer just pours from some history of love and belief in the joining of souls, the prayer cannot be shut out, as the dawn light and the day cannot be shut out. Priscilla and Dan Kasdan.
    *   *   *
    Like many who marry, we married to learn who and what else we could be. “Let’s,” I said.
    She asked: “I was wondering. Do we need to see the other side of the mountain?” That was what she called transforming this courtship into marriage and permanence.
    â€œHow do you feel about it?”
    â€œI’m curious. We could drive to Big Sur and