The Rags of Time
Page 27
RC
If it can be imagined, RC. She was so far beyond me, that Austrian student stroking the cross buried in the throbbing pit of her neck. Schande, the shame was all mine.
Then RC on an illustration scanned from Willy Pogany’s Parsifal, the young knight having discovered the Grail. Finding the initials again and again, he believes she was back to figuring herself at the starting line in a parochial school with a crucifix over the blackboard, which had always made him uncomfortable. A secular Jew, her wager with the gods was improbable to him. Then RC on a turned-down page in the biography of Oppenheimer who—he is pleased to discover—studied the rock formation in Central Park when he was twelve. The mystery cleared up with the disappointing annual report of The El Dorado Gold Corporation: Reality Check says it’s old news. That was her pet name for him when they were first together. He did not mind it, Reality Check—not then, not now—but minded that he had failed, for a moment, to understand she was only attempting to square the circle, to give heaven its due.