There was nothing like ugly rumors spread about her because people were really sophisticated on this little court and could care less whether she walked up and down the sidewalk at midnight or whether she always seemed alone or whether she was living in probably the worst house in the neighborhood. They really didn't give it any notice since there were so many other more spectacular attractions and diversions in life then looking for oddities in the neighborhood; just as long as she kept eccentricities to herself and by displaying them didn't interfere with anyone's pursuit of happiness or anyone's particular desire.

Only once had anything resembling friction occurred and that's when several of the neighbors organized a street fair. They printed flyers and stuffed them in mailboxes and tacked them on every telephone pole on the court and asked anyone with any particular talent to be brave enough to show it. There would be games and food and music and stories and a chance for everyone in the neighborhood to get to know one another. So the day finally arrived and as it approached noon more and more of the neighbors had collected together to share food and dance a bit on the court. It was in full swing an hour later. Children yelling and clapping their hands over simple games and men standing around trying to find something important to talk about and all the women talking and moving about clusters of people, taking one conversation and mixing it with the next one and relaying certain contents of the next conversation to be taken up in another one.

She had forgotten all about the fair. That morning she had gotten out of bed with one thought in her mind and that was to hurry downtown and see the new movie that had come out by the German film maker, Herzog, who had become a kind of guiding saint for her. His films always seemed to be expressly for her and though she knew otherwise she still believed it was so. His films were about the frenzy of loneliness which she knew very well.

She was waiting in the window, face turned toward the street below, watching two dogs leaping in the middle of a group of children.

She sat for a long while half-fiddling with her black hair and thinking about the children down on the little court which ended at the large two storied, rather run-down house she had rented now for two years.

The white dress she was to wear that afternoon lay across a cushion on her bed. The house was really a wreck of a place but she didn't mind as long as the owner promised, as he did every six months, that he'd paint it, seal the cracks, install new appliances, repair the broken fence in the backyard, cut the weeds that grew out of a once flourishing lawn and anything else that was necessary to prevent accidents or otherwise make the place worthy of living in as it once had been.

It was not so easy since her husband had left and with her brother now moving in, it made it twice as difficult. The brother was a wandering fool who had no respect for anything much less the rather delicate situation she had made for herself. But it was none of her business to keep her brother away if he really needed a place to stay. And he had promised to move along in a few weeks when the business he had in the city came to a close. She wasn't sure what the business was; he'd been vague on the telephone, even distant, as if really he was embarrassed about the whole thing.

So much beauty in the little children, she thought. They were really half- naked creatures who were teasing the two dogs into a kind of playful frenzy. They're such beautiful little things, she thought again. They belonged to neighbor's several houses down the little court who really thought her to be an odd one, the way she would walk up and down at night, up and down the little court as if she were going someplace but always stopping and retracing her steps as if really she had no place to go and it went on for an hour or more, pacing up and down the sidewalk apparently for no reason and dressed all in tight fitting black pants and a leather fringed jacket and when someone passed her she'd become startled and say in a rather halting kind of voice, "Oh, not you" and go her way.

Now, as she dressed, she could hear the laughter of children and the sound of music from the street and in her curiosity she went to her window and was startled to see the neighborhood collected almost directly below her. Then she remembered the fair and remembered that she had forgotten it thinking that it would never come off; that people living in cities never did such things and, at any rate, it was very sentimental and look, she thought to herself, the way the dogs are eating off the tables and all those foolish woman gaggling over nothing. But it startled her nonetheless to see so many people she had seen individually from time to time together in one place, in a kind of assent she never thought possible.

For a moment her mind was taken by a desire to find another way out of her house so she wouldn't have to walk in the middle of her neighbors. There were steps leading to the back and a field and a fence and what was over the fence was anyone's guess; another yard perhaps with a big guard dog and when she put her dress on and listened, the desire for escape became simply another ache.

He could not understand the group. He listened for awhile and then began to dance. Yes, the story he was writing. What was it about? A young man riding in a car listening to hypocrisy. But the boy was not himself. The boy was someplace else, on a hilltop in a large city where everything was happening and there was a kind of ease to the way the hypocrisy occurred like images across a television screen. He felt embarrassed and turned back to the group.

"And the woman are happy!" Laughter scattered over his head. Women. There were no women in his story. The group was talking about a clique of girls from the city who ran together with a friend's cousin. He felt his story evaporate in the sound of laughter and a part of him shriveled, with the story, into a barbaric silence over which laid the impunity of the group.

Later that day as he took the pages he'd been working on from the brown Manila folder and began to write he stopped and listened to the laughter earlier that afternoon and looked at the curious words he'd written. What means all this? he thought. He looked out the window to the old, desiccated tree in the back that for years had been brown and on the verge but never going completely over to decay. For years it had stood upright, scaly and brown; never once had he seen a green leaf from its limbs.

When he looked back to his story the whole thing seemed absurd. Again the laughter; but not from the group... someplace else he couldn't identify and he placed the Manila folder back into his desk and went outside.

"She was the guiding one. She was the perfect embodiment of dream without the slightest embarrassment."

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