Trust: A Novel Part 60

"Worse than Stefanie?"-I thought he would wince.

"Worse than my father." But he was bold merely. He said, "My father killed a boy to please her. But he went to the burial. She won't even bury a man."

"She won't bury a Muse. n.o.body does that."

He said disgustedly, "The Muse is a woman."

"A male Muse he was. Nick."

"That beats it. Cant What it comes down to is she wont bury the man."

"Then she's not worse than Stefanie," I said.

"You go to h.e.l.l. That poor kid cries and cries. She's cried five hours straight without letting up. She nearly drowned herself trying to keep him up and out of it. And all that muck. I say she's a heroine. How about this quiz they're putting her through? You ought to get down on your knees to her-it's your father. I don't give a d.a.m.n whose Muse, but he's your muck, and she nearly saved him-practically saved him, so don't go around saying she buried him."

"Not him. Somebody else. You."

Now he did wince. I saw it-a current of shock in the nostrils. "That poor kid's a victim," he defended himself. And hesitated. Then: "What she's been through today. A martyrdom. Use your eyes. A martyr to muck she is. She's been through h.e.l.l today."

"St. Stefanie," I reminded him. "Patroness of housecats, floruit circa 1957 A.D. p.u.s.s.yhead, you make William look like a lion."

"A man died."

"And you were the one who was going to make it h.e.l.l for her!"

"She's had her h.e.l.l," he said, subdued.

"The water-power of a tear exceeds the sea. My stepfather says that. What will you do?" I asked him. "All, her lovers won't die," and watched him return to her side. My envy had nothing to take then but the back of his neck. She would have other lovers. None of them would die. None of them would live. It is no light thing to have intercourse with the Muse. Afterward there is not taste for this or that. The planet's sweetmeats fail after a nibble at vatic bread. The grove without its genius is bleak and chill. The spirit of a happening, like the spirit of a place, has no wants. It is we who want it. Think of the man who slept with a mermaid and learned her unearthly singing: when she at last, no longer amused by hot human love, and suffocated by hot human flesh, flopped from the beach where they had lain to the cold base-depths where he could not swim or follow, he was smitten not with grief of her abandonment but with unexpungeable longing for that singular absent music: he goes home, pursues composition, labors all the rest of his life to duplicate her clef and scale and system, never so much as catches the spoor of any of these, and is acclaimed a master of the newly weird, of art, of beauty, of the illimitable into which few can penetrate; but he breathes failure, loss stuns him. How changed he is from his days of gold!- then he wore a gold beard, and saw its image in the mirror of her burnished scales at that s.h.i.+ning delta place where the human female's in-between would be, then he listened to the inhuman scales of her song, neither archaic nor Oriental nor twelve-tone nor diatonic nor chromatic nor like the lightly grave hendecachord of Ion of Chios, but unlike all, cold, multisegmented, isolate, phantasmal, neither color nor graph nor emotion, yet ghastly, ghostly, more lovely and less bearable than that hendecachord of Ion of Chios (which no living ear has ever heard), and the beat of it h.o.m.ologously suggestive of the rational wash of one's own blood in the arteries, when the ears are stopped by the sea in the instant before drowning-phylogeny connects that music and this, as it connects gill and ear.

So now Stefanie. She would change. I listened to the tissue of her weeping: she spun it out and spun it out. It made a grey net over her voice. The florets ceased to fall in her voice. She went on weeping and weeping as though joy were done forever. The county politicians sighed with boredom. All who have not had intercourse with the Muse, female, or male, sigh with boredom. The Coast Guard officer sighed with boredom. Ditto the doctor. Ditto the man holding the wire. Ditto the men with the notebooks-still they dutifully wrote. (The motors did not sigh.) Her flowerless voice told the future-how she would go from place to place, looking for Duneacres, as my mother had flown from place to place, looking for the bird of the world and secretly thinking it Brighton: and now thought Brighton might somehow lodge itself in an Emba.s.sy. William's son sighed with boredom. He had achieved his father in blunted tooth and shaven claw, and it could not be said it was against his will. All who had not had intercourse with the Muse, female or male, achieve no more than their begetters. The begetter of William's son acquiesced in the law of prey. So at last did William's son. They acquiesced in themselves as prey. But the Muse does not prey: no Muse commits the act of love upon a domestic animal, and she will never touch William or his son. Not that the Muse is extraordinary-extraordinariness in pa.s.sion is a modern fallacy. Besides, the Muse is in charge of artifice (as no nature-acquiescing creature of prey can be), and artifice is never extraordinary. Our phrase for the marvelous is natural wonder. The sun is extraordinary, but the white blaze of my father's head was not. A dye. Ah, tawdry, tawdry, yet why not a tawdry Muse? (It must be a tawdry Muse to call forth Allegra's Marianna or Stefanie's tale of death and puking.) Tawdry, to hope to bring to life one of those boys on an amphora, bright-haired, goat-legged, with a little tibia-pipe poised and halted for laughter, among those love-exalted girls? A dye! Aha, my mother's fantastic lover, potter, Muse, charlatan, insincere blackmailer-somewhere and sometime he had to bend, grimace, crouch (crouched on the beach: mechanized faun, neck curved), dip his whole head into a vat of fake youth-there is no other way to get a good result.

The thing was visible. Impossible, after all, not to have seen it-sea-change at the scalp. The man who drew the crosses had noticed it at once. From my father's body, green with a moss of dried vomit (or green as one of those antique bronze statues divers now and then pull out of the sea), nothing shone.

(I interrupt for Enoch, though his turn is not yet. Reading Anna Karenina aloud to my mother, he one day began to talk of characters in life and literature. In literature, he said, a character is interesting because he changes. Fiction, despite its professions, cares only for stabilized types, and fiction amazes when it produces a person who plausibly reverses his nature. Not so life. In life, where not plausible but shocking reversals are commonplace-if only we are clever enough to witness them-it is just the opposite: in fickle life nothing amazes more than unchangingness. That is why, he said, we are so infrequently surprised by the people we know.) The skipper of the parenthesis will have missed Enoch's cool half-paradoxes. Never mind. I thought my father more splendid than any other being, and not because he amazed by never changing. He never changed; he did not amaze. I had been amazed to come on a boy knocking at a ball in a ruined field, but what would I have felt to find a man like William or a man like Enoch?-it would have contradicted and corrupted all that I imagined of my mother's early time. My father devised and invented himself, and chose to stay at the crest: the same for my mother, the same for me. And the splendor of this was its perfect naturalness and logicality: what else shall Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck be if not a boy? I forgave him his devices; I would have had him yield more. Let them discover that his heels are split, or that he carries in his pocket a half-eaten mushroom (the fly amanite, with its visionary properties), or anything else incredible and magical-that his eyes are agate, his nostrils wrens, his teeth the horns of pygmy deer; that his nose hangs on a pivot; that he wears rings; that limb by limb he can be pried apart and kept in a jewelled box; that his death too is sham and he meanwhile merely hides grinning behind a tree, commanding that company of investigators to feast on his torso. Anything: I would believe it, and envied Stefanie who still steadily and liturgically wailed, talking now of suicide: "I could kill myself, really I mean it, I could die this minute"; but plainly she would live to be old, thin, resentful, duped, sly. Suddenly no one was bored-not the doctor, not the Coast Guard officer, not the audio man, not the men with the notebooks, not her fiance. Just then she gave out a sense of raw presence; of totality: she had had her life, now it was over, she needed no more, the rest was commentary. All at once everyone acceded to her cry. No one denied it, no one told her it was nonsense. Envy had them in thrall-the girl had had her moment. She had it and it was gone. Faith in her claim showed in their faces. They looked religious. They were believers: her moment had pa.s.sed, it would never come again. William's son knew it; it subdued him; they all knew it. Some careless secret, already lost, already half-forgotten, nothing extraordinary, marked her mouth: perhaps it was joy, perhaps it was an adventure, perhaps it was neither. She scarcely remembered. What has happened and will not come again is easily recognized by everyone, but the moment of recognition itself is unique and terrible, like birth and disclosure, and like these cannot be re-experienced. Once is all. Over that cl.u.s.ter of men and motors the irretrievable pa.s.sed its stale wing.

She spoke again of the two boats. They had taken the little boat for the quiet. The quiet was the thing-so as not to wake the Purses. At dawn there was one star left over. The rest was clouds, long and spread out. Then came the sun, not gradually, but all at once, plink! He never wanted the little boat, it was her fault. She was afraid of the Purses. The big boat might churn them out of the tents and down the hill, it had a burr like death. She imagined them all lined up on the sand, the whole mob yowling and ogling. She wanted to row away, quiet and private in the new air. The moon was gone. With the oars rolling out it was like beating on cotton. No one heard. No one woke. There was a little hard wind that smelled of morning and of autumn. She slipped down into the hull to escape the spray and the cold wind. They were going for the middle of the bay. The idea was to get far out and then switch to Mrs. Purse's motor. She wanted cake for breakfast. They were going to tie up for breakfast at a fancy place in Rye, half dock half restaurant. He said again they should have taken the launch and had their comfort, no one ever tied up there in a shabby little tub, not even tub, bowl. He asked did she want to row awhile. No, no, it was cold, cold. He spat over the side and went on rowing. His arms hoisted like wheels. The sun drifted nearer and nearer, splattering in the water. He spat. She looked over and saw the foam of his spit fall into the hole in the water. The oar made a dark deep hole. Then the water whorled up and filled it from below, and the sun ran in. The motor now, he said. No, no, too soon. Everybody could hear, even p.u.s.s.yhead. Poor p.u.s.s.yhead, to see them fly away, at least he would be having the launch for himself, still he'd be mad all the same. We should've taken the launch, Nick said. No, no, stupid noisy s.h.i.+p it was, all those kids would hear and then the whole world would know where they were at. He spat again: the motor now. She held the oars for him while he turned to pull on the string. Why d'you spit like that? To catch fish with, nothing draws them like human spittle, they come down from Alaska and up from Peru, the flounder and the salmon, for a whiff of human wetness. I want cake for breakfast not fish. The motor did not catch. He pulled on the string again. The motor did not catch. I think it's too soon, we're not out far enough, they'll hear us, you better wait before starting it up. No, he said. And spat. He looked angry. Why d'you spit like that? Nothing, don't talk. Are you mad at me about the other boat? Nothing, don't talk. He pulled on the string and the motor brayed. There. She came out of the hull and watched the fork of their wake. It was seeded with gold. That's better, he said, talk if you need to I was afraid the d.a.m.n thing wouldn't get started. The blades drilled the water and now they began to take on speed. She laid the oars like a pair of crutches down at the bottom under their feet. He was holding the steering handle and she saw his teeth biting at the wind. He shouted, but the noise of the motor was too loud and she did not hear. She crawled back to him and yelled into his ear, See, I told you, we could wake the dead with this thing and the other one's even worse, I told you, but the wind almost plucked her tongue out, and she felt her words leap away as though they were energies of their own. They sat close in the stern, and if they looked straight forward to the prow they could not see the water, the boat's point rode so high. They made their own waves behind them and slicked head after head off the waves that kept getting in their way in front. She decided to try screaming at him again, and let out as few words as possible, very near his face: You're not mad about not taking the big boat any more are you? He shook his head, but now she did not know whether this meant No or merely that he could not hear. She saw his teeth again, and realized from his funny unfurling mouth that he was not answering her, it was singing coming out. The water's like a nylon stocking, we're making a big long run in it, but she knew he could hear her as little as she could hear him. She wondered what he was singing. This is much better, I hate that s.h.i.+p, it doesn't feel like this, I'm so hungry, I feel so happy, I wish I had that Hershey Bar we left in the other boat, I want chocolate cake. She leaned against him and could tell in his chest the vibration of his singing. It was like a buzzer in an electric alarm clock, it was as if she could turn it off if she wanted to but she was too happy to stir. Across the water there was a fringe of green and brownish-yellow. It was autumn turning. She reflected that autumn always came after summer, it was never any different, why was that, why did it always happen in the same order like that? Other things didn't always come off in exactly the same order every time, though some things did, for instance first you were engaged and then married, never the other way, first you were young and then old, even though it didn't have to be that way, for instance a baby didn't have to be a baby, it could look like ninety years old when it was born and then get better-looking and stronger and all, and then when it was really ninety years old it would be ready for s.e.x and everything, and then it could die when it began to look like a little baby, that would be interesting, that would mean only little tiny coffins and it would even save a lot of room in graveyards so they could use some of the graveyard s.p.a.ce for more tennis courts and things. Swimming pools and even stadiums.

She was hearing her thoughts very clearly, why was that? The sun was flat and clear on the water. Everything was still and clear, and when she looked over again at the brownish-yellow trees on the sh.o.r.e, they kept very still and never even fluttered. Why was that? d.a.m.n d.a.m.n d.a.m.n, Nick said, and she heard him because there was no motor.

William's son had resumed his cigar. The men on the beach were listening silently. The doctor slapped at an insect on his neck. "Motor failed," the Coast Guard officer said, and the men with the notebooks took it down.

It isn't the fuel, we had plenty of fuel, d.a.m.n that woman, it's gone foul again. Who, Mrs. Purse? It's no good. He pulled on the string. The motor had no lung. It's dead, he said, not a spark, nothing. He pulled on the string. Nothing. d.a.m.n her, she fixed it with a shoelace, nothing. That's all right, we can row up, I like rowboats, I don't mind. We're going back, he said. Back where? Where we came from, it's the shortest, I'm not going to get stuck in the middle of the Sound with nothing but a pair of posts, get down, will you?

As he rowed he spat. His arms went up and shuddered downward. He seemed to be making a frame for the tall sun. He rolled around the sun and contained it, then it rolled off, then he contained it again.

She did not know what was the matter. His face was perfectly closed. His forehead was smooth. She was afraid to speak. He rowed as though the water was an altar. The oars spooned up bubbles. He continued to spit. Foam flew down into foam. The oars came up like terrifying candlesticks.

He went on spitting. She did not know what was the matter.

Something s.h.i.+mmered past. At the side of the boat a stick slipped into the water. It ran off toward the sun. He had lost one of the oars. The other was pulled tight against him like a chinning bar. He was exercising against it in midair; his head was stiff over it; his eyelids were stiff. His squeezed eyes shot a dozen scallops of skin across his face. Webs were emitted from his nose. The bridge of his nose contorted vertically. It was very strange. She did not like to see him pinch his eyes, it made his chin unpleasant, the jowl of a toad. It ruined him, he was ruined. He exercised against the oar. She was certain he would drop it, they were in the near middle of the bay, she bawled at him not to drop the oar. He did not drop it, but it was suddenly as flexible as a finger, it turned alive, it insinuated itself under his chin and then stretched off like an impudent wrist, it seized itself from him and dived in at the paddle-end, fiat on the water, so that the splash washed them both. Then he began to retch. Matter fell from him.

The Coast Guard officer said, "Loss of sculls due to illness," and the men with the notebooks took it down.

A brilliant skein flowed over the top of the water. He leaned after it. He braced a leg on the rim of the hull. He accommodated the hinge of his back to the flux. He hung howling. His issue escaped him, and unwillingly he followed it over.

Like any of Miss Jewett's girls, she had no physical fear and went after him at once, and for a long time they danced together in the sour water, but in the end he took a turn she did not know and he lost her. The skein had clotted into islands of tender putrid greenish flowers, and his falsely bright head was covered.

21.

When I came home my mother was deep in grief which had no signs. She seemed just the same-she ranted, rambled, bellowed that my hem hung wrong, criticized the cut of the collar of my blouse (though it was her own choice and gift), doc.u.mented by a line at my nose how I was sure to age early, and showed me that my quick return was in every way an offense to her: she was objective.

But all the same I saw, in certain absences, vacancies, distractions, omissions, in all that she had formerly professed and now failed to perform (for example, her eyes were perfectly tearless), the truth of her grief. She was stricken. Her grief was dark and genuine and contained a quietness. Behind the plain misery of our confrontation her little quiet lurked. She had already had the neWS for some hours. She told me it had come out of the radio-Nanette's radio. "She locks herself up in her room to follow all the stage tunes, they don't allow it, and well, to make a long story short, Mrs. William pa.s.sed by and heard the name. The name of shame. The name of blame. She hasn't been that excited since she got herself jilted. Well, about that, she asked for it absolutely-piety begets jilting. So behold, she permitted the name of shame and blame to leap from the purity of her lips, never mind excited, call it exalted, I've always thought she'd make a good priestess or vestal virgin. I don't suppose they were really virgins you know. More likely a convention, a way of speaking. -And reports."

"To you?" I said.

"To me. Direct address. Telephonic communication."

"Sarah Jean?" I said. "She called you up?"

"Talked to me. I'm trying to tell you. She hasn't talked to me since the day I married Enoch, nineteen years almost. But gave way for the sake of the name of shame and blame. She recognized it, imagine that. 'Allegra, is that you?' 'No,' says Janet. 'Allegra,' she says finally, 'I've been trying to get William, but all the lines are busy, Connelly's line too. It's something your lawyer should break to you after all. It's a thing really a minister should tell you, but you don't have a minister. Bread cast on the waters, when you need one you don't have one.' And then she p.r.o.nounces the name of blame and shame that came out of Nanette's loudspeaker. Contraband. They think they'll keep that girl off the stage but they won't, you know, it won't work. How did you get back, in the police launch?"

"No. They took Stefanie in it."

"Aha. They'll want to question her at headquarters. That's how they like to do it."

"No," I said again, "they finished all that, it's just that she was upset, she wouldn't come with us. They might put her in a hospital for a while. The doctor said that."

"Us? Who's us?"

"William's son and me. I came back with him. In that boat they have."

"Not a thing on the radio about that boy. The papers may or may not go into that kind of detail, why should they? Local news, a nonent.i.ty gets drowned. Typical summertime reporting, it's not what you'd call a story with a name in it. 'Allegra,' she says, 'a shocking thing. The name came out at me.' She wouldn't've opened up after nineteen years if that boy's name came out. Poor William. Mrs. William can take it, but William! Maybe they'll leave out the boy and concentrate on the heroine angle. 'Debutante Ducked in Derelict Drowning,' I know the style they use. My G.o.d. A crowd on that place, it sounded like."

"There was a family."

"You'd think William would do something about the squatters. He treats that place exactly as though it wasn't there. A family! What was he doing with a family? Never mind. Milking and bilking I suppose. I always" knew he'd drown. It was a fantasy I had about him. Full fathom five. Listen to me in life everything comes out exactly the way you always thought it would, that's the first rule of being. What did you talk about?"

In a fit of fatigue I threw myself on the carpet. It was after midnight. The boat's lights on the water had printed black points on my vision. I said resentfully, "You. We talked about you from morning to night. All he ever talked about was you."

"William's boy?" she marveled; she had not even thought of Nick. "In the boat? Coming back I mean. The two of you alone. He wasn't embarra.s.sed?"

I turned over on my belly and moaned. "Why should he be embarra.s.sed?"

"Well they didn't go up there to picnic, did they? Did he ask you not to tell William?"

I was startled; she had come near to the truth. "Tell William what?"

"What went on up there."

"He asked me not to tell you. On the principle that telling you would be the same as telling William." But I did not say what it was I must not tell. A commonplace. First crack at the bride's crack would never any more belong to William's son.

"Birds of a feather, that's William all over. Indirect, everything through Connelly. I think it's sound. Premarital trial run. If I'd done it with William we wouldn't have gotten married in the first place."

I said, "You don't just call off a wedding-"

"Oh don't you?" she sneered. "Where'd you get that?"

"William's son wouldn't."

"You mean it wasn't satisfactory? A failure? It didn't work out? He didn't"-she seized it-"tell you the details?"

"No," I said.

My mother was thoughtful but avid. "Of course he's younger, not that that's an obstacle-"

"He's not younger, he's lots older than she is."

"Who's talking about that Pettigrew girl? You I mean. I had you before Sarah Jean ever came into the picture, well didn't I? I used to think it would be such a funny ironic thing if he fell in love with you. William's boy. It would make everything respectable again, not that I gave a d.a.m.n about that sort of thing. But he never did."

"He never did," I agreed.

"And you, you never fall in love with anybody," she accused. "Well go to bed if you're that tired, you look like an old maid dumped there. I'm staying up, Enoch's flying in. I wish you could wear clothes. You can't wear clothes, that's only part of the trouble. What about that family?"

"They're gone."

"Thank G.o.d for small favors. It's a nice empty island again, maybe I'll go and live there." The little quiet lay under her face. "The house?" she asked. "How did it look?"

"Big."

"Big, that's right. Big as an Emba.s.sy. I really ought to go and live there. That'll be a solution. Oh, sit up, sit on a chair like a person."

"He burned all the chairs," I said.

"Who?"

"Except the ones with the kings' heads. Nick. And the piano stool."

"Don't talk to me about Nick will you? I have to figure out my whole life. I have to re-figure it out. What do I care about kings' heads? They go rolling in the end, that's, exactly the point. That's where you just don't seem to follow. You don't know a thing, not one thing. You think just because we're rid of a threat there's nothing more in the world to worry about, all the rest comes easy."

I said, "He wasn't really a threat."

"Look, are you going to go on and on about Nick? Is that what you're here for? To go on and on? He wasn't really a threat, oh that's very nice, I expected that. You've always been on his side. I realize that. The reason you were born was for him to have somebody on his side. Celestial design. Look, he's dead, what's the use of going on and on about a dead blackmailer? He sweettalked you, I realize that. That's his way. You can't see that. He convinced you, right? Well he was out to convince you. That's why he wanted you over there."

"He didn't want me."

"That's right, he's got you now. You swallowed it and he's got you. The Man of No Desires. I know the whole thing, I've got it all by heart, please don't bother me with it. There's not a thing he wants, he doesn't want a thing. Just like the Buddha after nirvana. A holy man. What I want to know is how come these holy men always want to sit in a temple full of virgins? He told you he wasn't a blackmailer? 'Me? I'm no blackmailer, right? Is that what he told you?"

"No."

"No. So?"

"I could see it. He wasn't that way."

"He wasn't that way! She could see it! He sweettalked you and you believed every d.a.m.n stale word. Don't tell me how he looked while he was doing it, I don't want to know, I'm not interested. Eyes like blueberries, nose like on a statue et cetera et cetera. Don't start on me with that. Then you'll say it wasn't just his looks, it was his soul. Well there is no immortal soul. Some people don't know a horsethief when they're in the middle of smelling the manure." Her look was maimed by anger. She was insulted. Then it came to me that her tone was formal, traditional, a fiction: she spoke not of a man but of a legend, a theory, an ancient familiar crotchet. "I don't say it isn't pitiful. I mean even if it was a complete stranger and I read the report in tiny type somewhere that a complete stranger got drowned somewhere I would think it was pitiful just the same. Even for a crook to die. I'm against capital punishment, you know that. I think all death is pitiful. I'm against Death."

With this proclamation she told her grievance. She still believed in her own duration, her ascendancy, even her perpetuity; she still meant to s.n.a.t.c.h a coruscating feather from the breast of the world. She was against Death; her grievance was against Nick; but her grief skirted both. Her grief was not for Nick. Nick was as little to her as Death. Nick and Death were the same. To my stepfather she had whimpered the very truth: she felt nothing. It was not grief then when she had mourned my impossibilities and what I was issue of and how I would not be freed: not grief but fabrication, grievance, pique. Fake, fake, every tear a fake, a theatricality, a fraud, hoax, and profane replica of loss. Her hysteria was only an expert indifference: she had never cared whether I was free or how I was made or where I must go. What she cared for was the Emba.s.sy. She was not in pursuit of my freedom but of a palace. I knew this, and from the beginning; therefore wondered why now behind the clamor of her grievance she hoisted the terrible small silence of disaster.

She said: "The Senate has confirmed."

Her voice had a certain lapidary uncompromisingness, like an epitaph.

"When did it happen?"

"The minute Enoch got there. Before he got there. They called him up and told him to fly out right away, and when the plane came down it was practically all over Was.h.i.+ngton. They met him and they told him."

"Fast," I said.

"Oh, fast, you bet. They rushed it through. The fastest confirmation in Senate history. It's made him a laughingstock. A figure of fun, it took no time at all. They didn't ask him a single question. He did all that reading up on rainfall and cows and all their juntas"-she said the j of jugular for this word-"and it all went for nothing. A clown, a Punch-and-Judy show, they practically banged him on the nose with it-"

"It means they like him, doesn't it, if it went like that?"

"It means they were in a hurry. It's made him a fool."

"What's the difference what it's made him if it's made him Amba.s.sador? That's the main thing, isn't it?" I watched the cautious point of her tongue. I said: "Now you have it."

"No I don't have it."

"All right"-I thought her pedantic-"Enoch has it."

"I'm in the middle of re-figuring out my whole life, I told you, can't you follow that? My life is changed. The whole basis of my life from now on, can't you follow?"

"You'll have to do something about your geography," I agreed. "And go to Berlitz for irregular verbs."

"Is that what you think's involved in changing a life? Is that what you think a turning-point is? Look, I'm at a turning-point, can't you understand that?"

"So am I," I said.

"You?" She was blank.

"Someone died."