![]() He could hear her working in the kitchen. The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. He liked the look in her gray eyes he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures. He didn't like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He had liked what she said about going out to sea about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they'd already felt. 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. But the point was, he hadn't lost her with his crazy rambling. He had started kissing her, and that was how that particular segment of the conversation had come to an end. She had smiled so beautifully at him then. 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. 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. ![]() 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.Īll these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. 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. '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.
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