V

She was the strangest woman I had ever seen. She wore a bloody pearl choker. Costume jewelry, or was it real? Heavy mascara around her eyes. She looked like a model. Like a mannequin from a thrift store that got bored and walked out. She was short, petite, with large perceptive eyes that seemed to scan everyone and everything, and absorb anything of interest. She looked wealthy, but I wasn't sure she was. Her clothes were thrift store vogue, and her knee-high socks mismatched under a vintage dress. She was twenty-something, maybe thirty, or three hundred, and she looked like she hadn't slept in three days, yet it didn't make her less attractive. If anything, it made her more engaging to the eye.  She was cat-like. Cathartic to look at. 

This, I wrote down in my notepad as I watched her in the delicatessen. She didn't order anything. She just stood there, looking at the menu board making various facial expressions before picking up a bag from the counter where take-out orders are placed as though it were her own. I knew that it wasn't. She had just stolen someone's lunch and the ensuing hullabaloo that culminated after she left when the dreadful person who ordered it came in, confirmed my suspicions to be true. In the usual boring course of my day, on my lunch hour from the bank, I had witnessed a most pretty theft. 

She grabbed the bag, twirled around, put on a pair of large black sunglasses and a black floppy sunhat, and then disappeared into the roar of traffic outside. The anonymity in the chaos of a sunny New York City street, Tuesday, July 7, 1998.

She was the most attractive person and the most interesting woman I had ever seen. When she left, there was an immediate void, and it felt as though all life was sucked from it so that all that remained were a collection of us dull and empty vessels propped up for decoration doing the same mundane things that we always do. It felt that the room might implode because of the force of her leaving it. I felt a sense of loss when the bell clanged and out she went to that busy street for I was sure that I would never see her again. Such good fortune smiles only so often upon us, after all.

Although I thought to chase her, I sat there and watched the beautiful thief leave like I have done with every beautiful woman who has ever come before her, though how less they were in comparison, and how her beauty compelled me to the point I felt sick to my stomach that I didn't go. How inadequately anyone I had ever seen before, compared to her. 

But what would I have said to her if I followed her out and caught up to her at a crosswalk? I had nothing to offer. Only that I would like to take her to dinner, or some dreadful thing any boring person might say. Things she has heard a million times before. Certainly not that I would like it very much if she sat on my face. Or if we made love in the park under moonlight like hungry wolves. Women appreciate urbanity, not crudeness, I learned reading my mother's Marie Claire's. To be chased like foxes are chased in a fox hunt. Sniffed out by the hounds of persistence and won by bullets of confident flattery. 

I am no good at hunting foxes and I have neither dogs nor bullets at my disposal. And I knew that sort of thing wouldn't impress her as she was not like other women. No. I knew she wasn't. I was sure of it. I wanted to show her my art in my apartment. My paintings, which are extensions of me. It was as though I painted them for her without knowing she existed. I wanted to swallow her like a pill. Eat her like a last meal. Drink her like a glass of wine. 

Perhaps she would pose for me, though I had never done that before and don't know how well I would do with a perfectly beautiful naked woman standing in my studio apartment for a purpose other than to make love. It hadn't gone so well with the prostitutes. I simply paid and fell into them. Plugged in. Vibrated for a little while like some doohickey, then erupted, withdrew, and cleaned myself as I made small talk while they cleaned themselves before they got dressed and left. 

I hadn't ever made love to anyone who wasn't a prostitute, other than myself. I wouldn't even know how to do so without the foreplay of exchanging money. Such was my strange life. 

I am an akward man. Thirty four years-old and akward like a humbolt penquin at the zoo is akward on those fake rocks waiting for a fish to be thrown his way, especially with beautiful women. It is to the point that anytime a beautiful woman comes into the bank where I am a teller, the guard who directs them to the windows will avert them from mine. Even if I have no line. 

When a new guard is trained, that is part of their training. Only when a beautiful customer insists on coming to me do they come to me, and if they do, there I hopelessly fumble their money and the guard sighs, and I sigh, and the customer sighs and even the painting of the bank's founder, Hubert Hughes, sighs — a dreadful blob of gray painting which I didn't paint. His gigantic, drab, omnipotent, gray face stares at me all day long hoping I don't have to assist a beautiful woman. He thinks I should sell hammers at a hardware store as he loathes my existence.

Surely, I'd paint her. I'd paint her from memory and maybe I'd keep her in that way and that would be good enough. Jerk off to her once in a while like I did to that toothpaste girl and have been to the woman from the telephone advertisments. Hang her above my bed, which is the most prominent space in my apartment. She would be my masterpiece. If ever I could capture her as I saw her. 

I sold paintings now and then. Not in galleries, but in street fairs and at flea markets. No one at the bank would guess that I was a painter or an artist of any sort unless they looked at my fingernails. I do not appear creative in the least. I am a person one might assume eats oatmeal daily and reads his Bible and might work in a bank or in insurance if you looked at me long enough to consider such. I was a humble humbolt penguin. 

Then I realized I'd never painted a woman before. Not even a prostitute. Not even from memory. Except for my mother. I did paint my mother. But she wasn't nude. She was wearing a green bathrobe and slippers. Her hair was in curlers. It was for a fourth grade art project. Paint something you love, the teacher said. My God, how I once loved my mother. How scared I was for her to die until she finally went and did it and then I was afraid of her being in Heaven looking down upon me. Watching me fumble with women and lethargically fuck prostitutes and jerk off to the telephone girl. I'm sure she wouldn't agree with my choices in women. 

Oh, Daniel, I could hear her say. For Heaven's sake, choose a girl with a little more meat on her bones. Don't mess with those dirty girls. Find yourself someone who can cook and clean. Someone who doesn't do drugs. Someone who appreciates you. Someone with class.

I don't know how I would paint a beautiful nude woman. Then I thought that I ought to put out an advertisment for a nude model. Of all shapes and sizes. I am very interested in painting an obese woman, probably because I have no love interest in them and I favor the macabre. Besides, I feel there is the opportunity for forgiveness in their corpulence. In all their lumps and protrusions that jutt from their lovely large bodies. You can make mistakes with someone like that and still do well, whereas, with someone skinny, you cannot. They'd look terribly disproportionate. She was skinny, though. The girl from the delicatessen who haunts me weeks after seeing her that fateful Tuesday afternoon. 

Most of my paintings are of horses. I don't paint their genitals. I don't know what their genitals look like, but I've heard they are large. There was a theatre on 7th Avenue that used to play movies of women making love to horses in stables and on prairies. Sometimes the women wore cowboy booots. It was a big draw but got it shut down by the ASPCA or someone. I suppose there is a book at the library about horse gentalia. There are books about everything. But it is all a mystery to me. 

I've never ridden a horse or known one personally, but "Mr. Ed" was my favorite show growing up. I had a crush on Wilbur's wife, Carol. My mother told me every time we watched it that they put peanut butter on his gums to get him to appear to talk. She liked to spoil everything. She was a wet blanket. 

I also sometimes paint New York City as it used to be because it is always many things before it is now. Before it became something else and then something else. I get books on it at the library with old pictures. The dellicatessen was once a haberdashery. Before that it was a drug store. Before that it was an Italian grocery with sausages hanging everywhere on strings. I love studying late 19th century New York City. The Victorian era. East Village, primarily, which is where I live and work and very likely will die. 

I sometimes walk by the hospital where I will probably die and look up to the windows and wonder which room will I die in. If I'll lie there and look out and see something interesting. Whose face will I see before I go as I lie there dying. A pretty nurse? Or will I be doomed to stare up the hairy nose of a middle-aged Indian doctor whose breath smells of black coffee and pepperjack cheese?

She was lost. I'd never see her again. Sitting at the bank I often think of that Tuesday. I wondered why she stole the lunch. The answer was boredom. 

She stood at my window at the bank two weeks later out of the blue and told me. She confessed to me like I was her priest saying that she stole someone's food because she was bored and hungry and didn't feel like taking the time to order anything, and for the fact that she liked surprises. She seldom gets surprised anymore, she pined. She said she sometime's steals people's laundry, too, when they leave it at the laundromat. Serves them right, she says. She will take it back when she gets bored of it, or donate it to charity. But she said she likes to think that she inspires someone to buy a new wardrobe. To dare to be someone different. 

"How did you know I saw you?" I squeaked. The folds of my membranous tissue that project inward from the sides of my larynx to form a slit across the glottis in my throat, and whose edges vibrate in the airstream to produce my voice, tightening in my throat. I felt like Mr. Ed and someone had just put peanut butter on my gums. My mouth was dry and my penis was hard. 

"I saw you, of course. You were sitting in the corner writing in a notepad, pretending not to notice me. But you did notice me. Didn't you, Danny?"

"How did you find me?" I stammered. "And how do you know my name?" I couldn't have imagined how beautiful she would be at close range. So often people up close have flaws that you can't see in the ambiguity of distance. I had already dropped several things in my nervousness. A box of paperclips. An unlucky tape dispenser. A coffee mug. I felt like I was going to fall down, but I was sitting down. I was sitting on a stool that didn't fidget, swivel, or wobble. It was a very sturdy stool for the purpose of keeping me stable if a beautiful woman was to come to my window. The bank manager thought of that. It felt like an earthquake beneath me. Like San Francisco in all the earthquake movies. Like Godzilla was bowling in my bowels. 

"I could smell you," she said. "I followed my nose. Where do you live?"

I stammered and muttered some inaudible and inadequate response. I coughed and cleared my throat. I blinked rapidly as though I was losing my vision. It must have appeared that I was going to pass out. I couldn't look her in the eyes, but I couldn't help not to try. Then she said, look at me, and I did and I couldn't look away and my nerves subsided. Her eyes possessed me. I knew I was lost in them, and I was hopeless. She didn't need anything from the bank. She wasn't there for a withdrawal or a deposit or for any sort of official bank business. She was there to talk to me. Me. A humble humbolt penquin. 

At first, I thought I was hallucinating. These kind of things happen, after all. A man thinks of someone or something for so long he starts seeing that thing in his soup. I've read all about it. I had recently heard of a man who thought he was rooming with Adolf Hitler in the Bronx. Turned out it was a rat and the man was arrested for shooting up a synagogue because the rat told him to do it. He was all over the TV. He was bigger than David Berkowitz and charged with 22 felony hate crimes. It all started in a porno theater, he explained. A horse's penis on the silver screen is the size of a grown man.

But there she stood making conversation. Asking me if I wanted to have sex later. I nearly choked on my tongue that swelled up like a fat seal wallowing on the rocks of my teeth. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I swore I was hallucinating until the guard came along after she left and asked me if I was okay. He was smiling and just wanted to know what she said. When I told him, he didn't believe me. I didn't believe me, either. 

I took a drink of cold coffee. Coffee from 8am. It was 3pm. Seven hours of stagnation and inattention. Of cold bank temperatures and invisible things that float in the air and settle in an unsuspecting coffee cup. Fibers from exchanged money. Tiny hairs from scratched heads. Pet dander from ruffled clothes. Lung droplets from coughs. My coffee didn't believe what had happened, either. It didn't believe it at all. Nor did the picture of my mother on my desk. Daniel, she said, stay away from that devil woman. She will give you a venereal disease. She will break your heart into a million little pieces. 

I didn't expect to see her again, yet again. She didn't state her purpose other than to ask me if I wanted to have sex, which I didn't know was a serious question or not. How could it be a serious question? When I failed to answer because of my nerves, or my nervous disorder, she smiled and reached through the hole in the window to hold my hand. She took a breath, blew out on me, smiled, and then left. 

That was all I ever expected to see of her. A bonus moment because she happened to know where I worked and recognized me. But why me? What was it about me that compelled her to visit. A humble humbolt penguin and a runaway thrift store mannequin — an eccentric beautiful thief in a bloody pearl choker. 

Six days past. Six unadventful, inartful days. Six days, however, that I didn't get flustered around beautiful women. That I wasn't at all nervous. Then there was a knock at my apartment door. No one besides the building super ever knocks at my apartment door, and that in itself is rare. There would have to be a gas leak or something. A dead tenant next door. 

Food delivery people knock at my door sometimes mistakenly because the Chinese kid doesn't know his F from his G. So I answered the door expecting to see the super or some confused kid holding some beef chow mein, and there she was. She darkened the door with all the wanton beauty in the world in a five foot three ninety-nine pound frame.

"Hello, I am V," she said politley. She extended her hand to shake mine, formally. Smiling queerly. I loved her immediatley. Her eyes were watery as though she had been crying, though she denied she was. Even if I had no penis and she, no vagina, I would love her. Like Ken loves Barbie in playboxes everywhere. Even if it could only be consummated in my inagination. Even if she was, in fact, a thrift store mannequin and I, a dickless penguin. 

She possessed me and took possession of my soul and it was as though it had always belonged to her and she just came by to finally claim it. What did I need with a soul, anyway? What did it ever do for me, or I for it? I've carried it around all these years for nothing. It was as useless as a shadow. It made sense suddenly that it was hers to have. She was a lascivious Jehovah's Witness selling no God. No promise of anything. A perfect bone collector. 

"Do you want to have sex," she asked again. There was a more lustful tone to her voice this time.

I couldn't just say yes and that be it. I just stood there and bumbled like bumbles bumble. Like a buffoon. She chiseled away at my good judgement and resistance, if I had either. She worked me over like she was the heavyweight champion and I was a beat-up heavy bag dangling from a rattling chain with no arms to defend myself from the brunt of her coital barrage. 

But despite my bumbling, I wasn't nervous. She had cured me of that six days before with a simple puff of breath. I smiled at her and invited her inside. She had a look around and pretended my place was charming. It wasn't like her place, I was sure. I could only imagine where she lived and how elegant it was. Then she took off the coat she was wearing, casually revealing nothing underneath besides knee-high stockings, panties, that pearl choker, and a pair of boots. Her breasts were perfect. Her ribs visible. 

She made saying no impossible. No, I considered. What a ridiculous sounding word it was all of a sudden to me. How I began to salivate. To drool. To get hard and to turn into some sort of lurid ravenous beast with a fat tongue and no moral fortitude.

She was like an animal in heat. I would imagine this is the way coyotes screw in the woods, or cats in alleys, or horses in stables. She made noises as she took me inside of her hallowed flesh walls, ungodly noises, and her fingernails protruded and dug into my skin. She bit my neck and sucked as she grinded harder and deeper down onto me. I had never felt anything like her in my life, and that soul I bore all these years for her she took in one of those slow and deliberate gyrations as she pressed hard against me.  

It was as though she knew my body better than I knew it myself, for she let up just when we were about to reach coitus, until the urge subsided, then she clamped back onto me and sucked my neck again so that I was sure tomorrow I would have to wear a turtleneck or be a ludicrous leopard spectacle, lampooned like a hapless teenage girl new to love bites. 

She bore no reflection in the mirror. That is how I knew. The oval mirror across the bed that she didn't notice, which I watched as we made love like wild dogs. It is a strange thing to see yourself making love to no one in the mirror but looking at her and feeling her as you do. 

I suppose it should have shocked me. I suppose I felt I was the man who was conned by his own fractured mind to believe that a rat was Adolf Hitler. I suppose this might have been a sophisticated jerk off session in which my mind exploded like a Salvador Dalí painting under the stress of my desire for someone so desirous I saw only twice, so briefly. 

But there she was in my bed after the eruption, my pyroclastic flow oozing from her flooded mewling quim onto the blue ocean of the bedsheets. The lost city of Atlantis found there in the mattress. She moaned deeply and squinted her eyes as she bit her lip, sucked her lip, and then licked her teeth clean. 

She was writhing like a wounded animal, like she had been hit by a car while giving birth, and then suddenly she stopped, inhaled deeply, thanked me, and got up to loot my dresser drawers for something to wear. She found sweatpants and a sweatshirt and got dressed as I lied in bed in a near-comatose state, an arm dangling from the bed as I watched her dress, witnessing yet another pretty theft. 

"Would you like to go out for dinner? It's still early," I asked.

"No. I must go home. My husband will wonder where I have gone."

"Your husband? You didn't say you had a husband." I was shattered. A husband was so incongruous to who she was or seemed to be. 

"Well, I didn't not say I had a husband. He simply didn't come up in conversation. But never mind him. He wouldn't begrudge me of the pleasure of a simple tryst."

"A simple tryst?"

"Oh, dear. Were you expecting more? I haven't more to give, Danny. I am sorry if you were. I suppose I should have had you read the disclaimers at the beginning. The terms and conditions. But how boring. I don't like those who talk too much about sex. It is drivel. It ruins it. Like pornography ruins it. It's a thing to be had not to be discussed or dwelled upon, molested in the mind. That is what our predecessors understood. They were having sex just as often as you or I, they just didn't discuss it as much. It wasn't all over TV and movies. Eluded to, perhaps, but nothing more."

"Is your name really V?"

"It is part of it. The first letter of my name, but it is what I prefer. Madame V, if you'd rather."

"Do you do this often?"

"Often is a subjective term, isn't it? You're suddenly rather inquisitive, aren't you? What is this? 60 Minutes?" 

She came over to look at me. Tilted my chin back and inspected my throat with great concern, then seemingly satisfied of its condition, tilted my chin back down and offered my lips a goodbye kiss. 

"Goodbye for now," she whispered.

I didn't get to say anything else to her. She was gone before I could think of more. I didn't get to ask her about the absence of her reflection in the mirror, but I drew one obvious and absurd conclusion. The V was not for Victoria, or Vera, or Virginia. Rather, the V was for Vampire. And I had just traded blood for sex with a ridiculously beautiful woman. The most beautiful woman, in fact. It seemed like a better deal for me than donating blood to the Red Cross for a cookie and juice. 

Of course, it is logical to ask obvious questions. Why me? Of the eight million people in New York City, why had she chosen me. And would she return? Was it my bloodtype, or the fact that I had no connections, or that I wasn't a threat of any sort. Or that no one would believe me if I told them. If I wrote a story and sent it to the New Yorker or whoever else, they would label it fiction and send me a letter explaining vampire stories are clichéd and no longer of interest.

I went to the bank as usual the next morning and waited on customer after customer. I told them they needn't keep beautiful women from me as I was no longer afflicted by my nervous disorder. If anything, other people bored me. Beautiful woman, in particular, bored me because they were not V. Because they were fake. Their fake eyelashes and make-up bored me. Their fake boobs and botox. Their dyed hair and nose jobs and threaded eyebrows. They are pop-culture, pop-music-loving zombies. Doofs. Democrats. They bore me because they are not impetuous and they don't dare do or say anything intelligent or that could be construed as offensive. Nothing to inspire or to ponder. Not a word worth saying, really. Just plain words, drivel, nonsense. Same as the next one. Each of them dressed like the last. Wishing to be a celebrity. Same trendy hairstyles. Same nails. Same designer handbags and purses. I cashed their checks. Deposited their money. Whatever they needed. That is what I did until mercifully it was time to go home. Go home and wait for V to come. 

You never really notice how similar everyone is until you see someone different. Until you experience them. Then no one and nothing is ever the same again. Or they are all the same. 

Hubert Hughes, the giant gray ominous face on the wall of the bank, was scowling at me. He was my fiercest critic and he looked at me like he knew my secret. He liked uniformity and blandness, even if he didn't particularly like today's style of it. He was suspicious of me. Suspicious I was going to embezzle money and take off to Chile where a beautiful woman waits on me without realizing she is waiting at all. He had seen my type before. His ghost was stirring. 

I waited for days hoping she would return. I had no stomach for prostitutes and no desire to paint. Everything bored me except the thought of her. Eight million people in New York and I was only interested in one. Desperately interested in one. Despite her being married. Despite the imbalance of our attractiveness. I, the humble humbolt penguin, and she the desirous vampire goddess who shamed any actress or model I had ever seen. 

Then on the sixth day, a knock. We made love much the same way we had before. It was apparently more voracious and intense because it compelled Mrs. Ludvitz in the apartment below to shout something while beating the ceiling mercilessly with a broom handle. But we did not stop nor pay her any mind. The bed was hopping across the floor like it was doing the worm. Like it was possessed. I hope my mother wasn't watching. 

I looked again at the mirror and it was as though I was making love to myself. My arms wrapped around nothing but air. My lips kissing nothing. But she was there when I looked at her. She smiled afterwards, out of breath, and caressed me as I lied next to her. Again she looked at my throat and then ran her fingers over where she had sucked blood from my jugular. I was food to her. I was sustenance. It was obvious to me that I was little more than that, nor would I be. 

But I wasn't pure and motiveless as much as I might pretend that I was. While she was sex to me, while she was beauty, she was also inspiration and life itself. Meaning. Purpose. Motovation. She gave me confidence and a belief in something more than the mundane. How boring life was before her. How boring it is in between the days that I see her. Between the hours that are counted on the bank clock second by second like the heartbeats of the old and wretched Hubert Hughes. 

I don't dread when she leaves because I am still intoxicated on her. And it lasts a day or so, then I miss her again and I long for that knock. She is a drug I've not before known and I am hopelessly addicted. Everything was so dull without her. So drab it was almost colorless, pleasureless, tasteless. Or maybe it was the blood loss. The lack of blood to my brain that intensified my sense of pleasure and euphoria. 

She came every six days for three months without fail. At around eight she knocked and she was gone by eleven. I cannot forget the sound of the latch as the door closed behind her. The smell of her vapors in the air as they lingered there. That hollow feeling like an extracted tooth from the mouth of my soul when she was gone. Still I wondered about the mirror, though I knew. Some things need not spoken of, detailed, or explained. I knew she was older than twenty or thirty. Maybe she was older than three hundred and three.   

I never spoke of her husband. I never wanted to remind her like my mother reminded me of the peanut butter on Mr. Ed's gums. I never wanted to give her any sort of moral dilemma. But perhaps I was over-stating the potential of my affect and there was nothing to be concerned of in that respect. What was I to her, I wondered. Was I more than blood?

I began to paint again. I was painting the cemetery at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral Churchyard with mourners present. I was studying an old photograph dated 1888 when I saw her. Dressed in a black dress with a hat looking at the photographer as though she were surprised. Or desolate to the point that she could not look away in her melancholy. Her lips parted full and plump. Her eyes vacant. 

By her position among other mourners, I could discern the deceased was someone of great importance to her and that she was dreadfully anguished. I studied her face under a magnifying glass in that old book until I had not the slightest doubt that she was one in the same for no one else in the world has ever looked like her. 

I did the painting that I called "Mourners at St. Patrick's Churchyard" and hung it in my apartment. I was hoping it would mean something to her and she would tell me who it was she mourned when she came over next. I intended to gift it to her. I stayed up all night for two days to finish it. But on the sixth day, there wasn't a knock. I waited the way a cat waits around a doorstep where he gets milk, but nothing came of it. There was no more milk. 

After several months, she lost interest, it seemed. Perhaps her husband found out. Or a guilty conscious overcame her. Or maybe it was only that I bored her and this is how boring things are parted with. Whatever it was, she was gone. And though, I suppose, I knew she would go away someday, it didn't make it any easier that she did. She was something not to be kept or caged. Not to be settled upon or predictable. 

What a beautiful curse she turned out to be upon me. For how could I find interest in anyone after being with her? In life itself. She ruined me for my tolerance of boredom and my contentment with prostitutes and my job. I held on to the hope that she might return to me for months. I worked at the bank and hoped she would show up sometime, just as she had before, until months turned into a year and I simply couldn't tolerate life anymore as it was. 

I walked the streets hoping to bump into her. Went places I've never gone before. Done things I don't normally do. Rode the subway for several years, aimlessly. Joined an eclectic sex club where they say vampires casually feed. Sat at the delicatessen and hoped she'd return on another Tuesday afternoon to steal someone's lunch until the food became too bland and intolerable for me to stomach. Heartbreak is like swallowing a slow poison. 

I painted painting after painting. Trying to get her face right. Every detail exact as it was. Canvases after canvases trashed. Year after year passed. Years it took me to complete my masterpiece. The greatest painting I've ever painted or would ever paint. 

I told old Hubert Hughes off and quit my job at the bank and became celibate for lack of desire. I dared to live as an artist and sold paintings to make my living. After a while, I became a success, thought it felt hollow without V. The only painting I refused to sell was the one of her in my doorway that first time she came to me. That one I kept for myself. She kept me company, even in her absence. She inspired me to keep painting and to believe in myself as an artist. 

Years later, I had a show at art gallery in Soho and someone paid two million dollars for "Mourners at St Patrick's Churchyard" with the condition that they meet the artist. The artist who met hardly anyone. I was a recluse by reputation. There was a room in the back of the gallery and I followed my agent who left me at the door with a delightful grin. 

When I opened the door, there she was — V — without mascara and that bloody pearl choker. She told me her husband was in the gallery waiting for her to return, but she wanted to commend me on my work and to look into my eyes again because she had missed me. She had tears in her eyes I am not soon to forget. We made love in that room on a velvet sofa. When it was over, I no longer wondered if I'd ever see her again — I simply wondered when.