All alone out there in that big awful cruiser right at the moment when darkness fell.Who the hell else would have been there? Who the hell else could have gotten him out of the water? Why, he could easily believe what she said about determination, about her powers. But she was part and parcel of what had happened, her strangeness and her strength were part of it. If only that awful accident hadn't happened, and he had found her in some simple ordinary place, and they had begun to talk. He wished it wasn't.Īll these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. But he'd put back on the gloves, because he was getting all those random stupid images off everything - Graham, Ellie, and men, lots of different men, handsome men, and all Rowan's men, that was abundantly clear. She had just refilled the coffee for him, and it tasted good. And he rather liked the feeling of thinking clearly. He had not been this long without a drink all summer. 'Well, it was luck for me, all right,' he'd responded, and he had felt an extraordinary sense of well-being when he said it, and he wasn't so sure why. Why do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?' 'It's when you've got one of those dead bodies lying on the deck of your boat, and you're slapping it around and talking to it, and suddenly the eyes do open, and the guy's alive.' 'Well, let me tell you about one other supernatural event,' she'd said, smiling. He had entirely lost sight of the fact that she was the woman who'd rescued him that is, a strong sense of her character had obliterated that vague impersonal excitement he'd felt on first meeting her, and now he was making mad fantasies about her in his head. It was like what was supposed to happen with sex, but seldom if ever did. He realized that he had never had his knowledge of a human being commence at such a pitch, and plunge so deep so fast. Maybe one step from the madhouse, but he wondered if some of the people in the madhouse were there because they took the patterns they perceived too literally? What did she think? And death, well, he had a lot of thoughts about death, but first and foremost, this thought had recently struck him, even before the accident, that the death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience. He had even gone into his crazy talk about the movies, and the recurrent images of vengeful babies and children, and the way he felt when he perceived such themes - as though everything around him was talking to him. She had said only, 'I don't know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don't.' Yet she had been pitched right into it, and she hadn't lost consciousness. She had said that a person loses consciousness almost immediately in very cold water. When she'd been describing the rescue to him in more detail, she had said a strange thing. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she'd said, but she'd been pretty convincing on the subject: 'I like to cook, it's like surgery. He could hear her working in the kitchen.
#Money stack windows#
The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. In fact, when he considered it with this new clarity, he realized he'd been able to concentrate well since he'd been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration - his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film - had left him continuously agitated. And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself. And it made him sad suddenly, sad and almost desperate, as if they were somehow doomed, he and she. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul.īut the point was, he had to leave, and he didn't want to. He told about houses and how he loved them about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. Talking about his life here had been a little easier - explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was.
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