Dying Inside

Can I reconstruct Toni? Let’s try it in a few swift strokes. She was 24 that year. A tall coltish girl, five feet six, five feet seven. Slender. Agile and awkward, both at once. Long legs, long arms, thin wrists, thin ankles. Glossy black hair, very straight, cascading to her shoulders. Warm, quick brown eyes, alert and quizzical. A witty, shrewd girl, not really well educated but extraordinarily wise. The face by no means conventionally pretty — too much mouth, too much nose, the cheekbones too high — but yet producing a sexy and highly attractive effect, sufficient to make a lot of heads turn when she enters a room. Full, heavy breasts. I dig busty women: I often need a soft place to rest my tired head. So often so tired. My mother was built 32-A, no cozy pillows there. She couldn’t have nursed me if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. (Will I ever forgive her for letting me escape from the womb? Ah, now, Selig, show some filial piety, for God’s sake!)

I never looked into Toni’s mind except twice, once on the day I met her and once a couple of weeks after that, plus a third time on the day we broke up. The third time was a sheer disastrous accident. The second was more or less an accident too, not quite. Only the first was a deliberate probe. After I realized I loved her I took care never to spy on her head. He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. A lesson I learned very young. Besides, I didn’t want Toni to suspect anything about my power. My curse. I was afraid it might frighten her away.

That summer I was working as an $85-a-week researcher, latest in my infinite series of odd jobs, for a well-known professional writer who was doing an immense book on the political machinations involved in the founding of the State of Israel. Eight hours a day I went through old newspaper files for him in the bowels of the Columbia library. Toni was a junior editor for the publishing house that was bringing out his book. I met her one afternoon in late spring at his posh apartment on East End Avenue. I went over there to deliver a bundle of notes on Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign speeches and she happened to be there, discussing some cuts to be made in the early chapters. Her beauty stung me. I hadn’t been with a woman in months. I automatically assumed she was the writer’s mistress — screwing editors, I’m told, is standard practice on certain high levels of the literary profession — but my old peeping-tom instincts quickly gave me the true scoop. I tossed a fast probe at him and found that his mind was a cesspool of frustrated longings for her. He ached for her and she had no yen for him at all, evidently. Next I poked into her mind. I sank in, deep, finding myself in warm, rich loam. Quickly got oriented. Stray fragments of autobiography bombarded me, incoherent, non-linear: a divorce, some good sex and some bad sex, college days, a trip to the Caribbean, all swimming around in the usual chaotic way. I got past that fast and checked out what I was after. No, she wasn’t sleeping with the writer. Physically he registered absolute zero for her. (Odd. To me he seemed attractive, a romantic and appealing figure, so far as a drearily heterosexual soul like me is able to judge such things.) She didn’t even like his writing, I learned. Then, still rummaging around, I learned something else, much more surprising: I seemed to be turning her on. Forth from her came the explicit line: I wonder if he’s free tonight. She looked upon the aging researcher, a venerable 33 and already going thin on top, and did not find him repellent. I was so shaken by that — her dark-eyed glamour, her leggy sexiness, aimed at me — that I got the hell out of her head, fast. “Here’s the Truman stuff,” I said to my employer. “There’s more coming in from the Truman Library in Missouri.” We talked a few minutes about the next assignment he had for me, and then I made as though to leave. A quick guarded look at her.

“Wait,” she said. “We can ride down together. I’m just about done here.”