"To the end."
She lowered her arms. "I wasn't so pretty at the end."
Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true.
"Could you?"
She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion
man played the familiar notes. She hummed in his ear and they began to
move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares
only with his wife.
You made me love you
I didn 't want to do it
I didn't want to do it....
You made me love you
and all the time you knew it
and all the time you knew it....When he moved his head back, she was 47 again, the web of lines
beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She
smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he
closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from
the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay
here." When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she
was gone, and so was everything else.
Friday, 3:15 P.M.Dominguez pressed the elevator button and the door rumbled closed.
An inner porthole lined up with an exterior porthole. The car jerked
upward, and through the meshed glass he watched the lobby disappear.
"I can't believe this elevator still works," Dominguez said. "It must be,
like, from the last century."