I WORKED HARD that night and all the following weekend. I drew diagrams, changed them, redrew them, made more changes, and redrew them again. I wrote, changed what I wrote, rewrote, made more changes, and wrote again. I didn’t seem to get anywhere. ...

     “Hey, Peter. Peter.”     “Hm?” She was shaking me, and with each shake I was pressed for an instant closer to her, the skimpy pillow compressed between my head and her hip.     “It’s the commercial,” she said. “What were you going to tell me?”     

30 “ISN’T IT INTERESTING the way all knowledge is interrelated?” I said. “Not now, Peter,” said Ariane. “Wait for the commercial.” I knew I was breaking Ariane’s rule by speaking to her during a movie, but I was out to impress her, and I was impatient. I had brought a volume of my encyclopedia with me that afternoon, Volume C (Cat paradox; Causality; Cavendish laboratory; Combination lock; Como conference; Complementarity; Compound nucleus, theory of; Copenhagen school of physics; Correspondence principle), hoping that she would appreciate the intellectual patina I was acquiring, but I’d arrived a little late, the movie had already begun, and she didn’t want to be diverted. ...

     I was annoyed by articles without cross-references. I doubted that one little article could be all there was to say on a subject. Could this really be the last word? Was there nothing else related to this topic? At first, I tried getting out of these dead ends by backing up. ...

     Opening the packages turned out to be a pleasure all its own, one I’ve never forgotten. Every package I’ve opened since has had a sweet association with the packages that held those books. ...

ONE AFTERNOON, when I got home from school, I found a stack of cartons just inside the front door. Each of them was addressed to me. I rarely got mail of any kind—I was still a child, after all—and packages were rarer still, so the arrival of these packages would have been an unexpected treat if I hadn’t been expecting it, which I had been ever since the night when, sitting at the top of the stairs out of my parents’ sight, listening to the television show they were watching, I had heard them discussing the idea of buying me the encyclopedia I’d been lobbying for and, to my astonishment, deciding in favor of it. ...

ARIANE WAS IN THE KITCHEN when I arrived for my next afternoon of television with her. “Butter that toast!” she said as soon as I came through the door. ...

MISS RHEINGOLD SAT on the edge of her desk, holding the general science book open in front of her. Her habit of sitting on her desk and crossing and recrossing her legs had led most of the boys in the class—including me—to sit throughout general science in a rubbery slump with our eyes at the level of Miss Rheingold’s desk top so that if she recrossed her legs carelessly we wouldn’t miss the opportunity for some important extracurricular education. ...

THE FIRST OF MY AFTERNOONS in that dark little room with Ariane came about by accident—or luck. ...

25

EVERY AFTERNOON, as soon as she got home from work, Ariane began watching television. Nearly every afternoon I watched with her. For hours and hours I watched movies and commercials on the Lodkochnikovs’ television sets, but I can’t recall one of them, even though I have a good memory for such things and can remember quite vividly certain movies and some favorite shows, personalities, actors, and actresses that I saw on television at home. The reason for this blind spot is that the cinematic memories that must be there are entirely obscured by another memory, one so bright that it obliterates all the others as the light of the sun obliterates the feeble light of distant stars. I can’t recall the television programs because I’m blinded by the memory of Ariane.