She had said only, 'I don't know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don't.'Īs for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it. 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. Why do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?' 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. The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. What I'm saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it's dead, absolutely unequivocally dead. I'm talking about ordinary people in the modern world. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul. 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. well, it's a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see.' and you're not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker. They don't believe they're going to die Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy But if you really see it. 'Exactly, but it's deeper even than that. 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. ![]() 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. Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn't want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go.Īll these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. '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. ![]() He still had to go home and he had to determine the purpose. How could he continue to know her and maybe even get to love her, and have her, and do this other thing he had to do? And he still had to do this other thing. ![]() 'Do you think it was that power?' he asked. 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.
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