In the moment of waking, on the same bed in Fiddlersburg where, twenty years back, he had lain in the dark by Lettice Poindexter, his wife, Brad Tolliver became aware first of the throbbing head and uneasy stomach which he had predicted from the brandy.  Then, even before memory could sort out the facts of the recent past, he was aware of a sudden swooping descent into despair, like lying in a dory, at sea, eyes closed, and the day sliding side-on, down the trough of a wave.
 
He had, actually, shut his eyes.
 
Now he opened them again, recognizing the ceiling, the gray plaster, the familiar cracks—would that plaster never fall?—and knew that it was late, knew that it was Sunday, knew that he had certain obligations to a guest, to an employer, to Yasha Jones, the Great Director, the Wonder Boy of the Coast, and knew the source of his despair.  Long ago he had written a little book.  Now, because of that book—not because of two Oscars or two awards from the Screen Writers Guild, not because of seventeen credits, not because of any of these things that had filled the years between—he was here and Yasha Jones was here, and they would make a beautiful moving picture.  Had all the years between gone, therefore, for nothing?
 
He shut his eyes and knew that that was the way it had begun last night: with that question.  He had lain on the bed, and moonlight had fallen across it, and he had remembered writing that book.  If he had not written that book, he would not, late one sunny afternoon in June 1937, have been walking in Central Park, along a narrow, winding path bordered by high hedges, chewing a grass stem, while Lettice Poindexter leaned down at him a little (she was in high heels), or, rather, let her head bend a little forward and sidewise so that she could scrutinize his face while, to the accompaniment of small weaving gestures, merely from the wrist, on the left wrist, two heavy gold bracelets, East Indian or something, with barbaric things dangling from them, she explained to him the deeper meaning of his work.
 
He had great talent, she said.  She would hate to see it wasted, she said. Besides, she said, there was only one way, in the modern world, to find happiness.  She had found it.  She was explaining to him how he could find it and, at the same time, bring forth the deeper meaning of his work.
 
If there had been no work there would have been nothing to talk about the deeper meaning of.
 
Work, he thought now, lying there.
 
Deeper meaning of, he thought.
 
 
The editor who was responsible for the collection of stories called I’m Telling You Now was a graduate of Yale, magna cum laude, class of ’15, had taught briefly at that institution, in the department of English, had been rejected for military service in 1917 because of a slight curvature of the spine, and shortly after had gone into publishing because, suddenly, he found the academic environment stultifying.  After being in publishing a few years he himself had written a novel, a thing vaguely resembling the work of Ronald Firbank, and have very competently translated several German classics.  In 1924 he had married a socially appropriate girl of some beauty and no imagination whatsoever, by whom he had one child, a son.  For the first two years of the child’s life, he was a fantastically devoted father, but when he began to live apart from his wife, who would not give him a divorce, he lost all interest in the child.
 
During the late 1920s he took all his vacations in Berlin and wrote political articles accurately predicting the rise of Nazism. On his last vacation in Berlin in 1931, he had, to his profound astonishment, a homosexual adventure, his only one, this with a middle-aged political organizer, a militant who had been maimed by Nazi toughs in Munich and whose courage the young publisher greatly admired; but thereafter he returned to his satisfactions among the young women of the literary and political circles he frequented, including several young women whose work had been published by the house to which he was attached. He now wore a beard, reddish, cut square.
 
Previously, his dress had been rather elegant, in an insouciant combination of British and campus, but now the insouciance deteriorated into a somewhat dramatic unkemptness, though the tweed, even when in need of mending, was always good. His name, in this period, appeared more and more frequently among the signers of manifestos and letters of protest in the magazines.
 
The name of the editor was Telford Lott.  He was a good man, singularly free from ambition and rancor, conscientious in his work, anxious to do something for the betterment of mankind, but worried because his way of life gave such small scope for significant action. His grandfather had been an eminent Unitarian clergyman in Massachusetts, and Telford Lott resembled the grandfather far more than he realized. He was sometimes moved to tears by fiction presenting images of generosity or of human suffering patiently borne. In the spring of 1934 a certain story in a small magazine affected him profoundly, a story about an old Jewish tailor whose natural decency and dignity had touched the life of a woebegone, bigoted little Tennessee town by a muddy river.  Telford Lott wrote the author, and, when he discovered his proximity in the unlikely milieu of Darthurst College, invited him to come to see him at his office. The story became the title piece of the little collection which Telford Lott shortly assembled.
 
The book had a succès d’estime of some proportion.  It was praised in the usual organs of reviewing, but even more highly in the liberal and radical magazines. The author had, it was said, great compassion. He had reported, without flinching, extenuation, or romanticism, the degradation of the life of his native region.  He had an instinctive awareness of social problems, and with maturity and doctrine he might be counted upon to make an important contribution.
 
In those days a peculiar elation suffused the life of Telford Lott.  It did not come from the little gleams of reflected glory which he enjoyed at cocktail parties before the conversation moved on from the discovery of Bradwell Tolliver to politics, adultery, or money.  Telford Lott was happy now because, in the person of Bradwell Tolliver—that heavy-skulled young man, with pale blue eyes, slightly off-set ears, raw frame, big hands, untidy dress, and strange, appealing combination of brashness and timidity—he had found a way, however modest, to touch the future.  He would give Brad—he already called him Brad—the quiet confidence and sense of mission he would need to sustain him, and that doctrine he would need to undergird his compassion.
 
A man could do that much, at least, to touch the reality of his time, Telford Lott decided. He began to think of returning to his wife.  He was, after all, past forty.  He was losing interest in parties. He began to think of his son, how he might train him to bear the burden of the human future. His back, which lately had been causing him pain at night, got much better. He became aware one day that not for a long time had he had the old exasperating fantasy of facing a firing squad to die for some belief which, just at the moment of execution, he could not remember the nature of. He dreamed several times of the death of his mother, and his grief was delicious. He returned to an early passion for the poetry of Wordsworth, and even began an essay on the relation of the social conscience and the love of nature.
 
Telford Lott did return to his wife and resumed his old devotion to his son. The son fulfilled the father’s highest hopes, making a brilliant record in classics at his father’s university, taking a doctorate at Oxford, and then fighting bravely in Korea. But he was captured by the Chinese. A year later the news was published that the son had defected.  Telford Lott shot himself.
 
When Bradwell Tolliver, in Beverly Hills, read the news of the tragic death of the distinguished editor he felt, at first, nothing. For the moment, he did not, in fact, identify the name.  It was familiar, yes—but in that split second he couldn’t quite place it.  Then he saw his own name among the writers who had been discovered by the deceased.
 
What he felt then, looking at the announcement of death, was a secret relief.  Mixed with the relief was a sense of slyness, of adroitness, as though he had executed some coup—just what, he could not say.  That satisfaction in his unspecified cunning sustained him all day.  Little bursts of well-being would just jet up in him.
 
But by night he was in a black mood.  He was so quarrelsome at a party that his host asked him to leave.  His wife—he was married then to Suzie Martine, the famous set designer—refused to sleep in the same room with him and went to a guest room.  That occasion was, indeed, the beginning of the end of the marriage to Suzie Martine, who loved him.
 
For several months Bradwell Tolliver felt compelled to recount how Telford Lott, whose own son defected in Korea, by God, had tried to make a Commie of him, how he had given him Commie books to read, how he had even provided him with Commie tail. Hell, he would say, he was just an innocent boy from the Buttermilk Belt and he got dialectical materialism so mixed up with something else he might have been a Commie himself if he hadn’t escaped back to the healthy degradation of the muskrat-skinners.  He even developed a comic parody of the most anthologized story from I’m Telling You Now—a combination of muskrat-skinner accent and Marxist patois—to illustrate what Telford Lott had really wanted him to do.
 
One night—after the loyalty purge in Hollywood—he had especial success at a party at Malibu. He held seven people completely enraptured in a pantry for forty-five minutes. That night when he got back to his own house, still having a house even though Suzie had gone off for the divorce, he was very drunk.  He could not bear to enter the dark house.  He lay down on the lawn by a Japanese quince and looked up at the beauty of the starlit sky.  When he had finished weeping, he kept on staring up at the sky while his eyelids prickled astringently with the drying tears.  He lay there by the quince, and thought that now, after the tears, he had some notion of the sweetness of being born again in the spirit.  He went to sleep lying there by the shrub.  Just after dawn he woke up, entered the house, and went properly to bed.  He never again mentioned the name of Telford Lott.
 
 
 
Telford Lott had introduced him to Lettice Poindexter, who was, he said, extremely interesting—a painter of promise and a person who had struggled to transcend the limitations of her class and education.
 
Telford Lott not only introduced him to Lettice Poindexter; he presided over the early stages of their acquaintance.  For example, when the girl confessed to him that she found the young man not very attractive (she having, as a matter of fact, an inclination to older men), Telford Lott reminded her of her duty.  Her duty, he said, was to use her influence, which, he said, he knew the boy felt, to canalize his talent in the proper direction and not let it be dispersed in the sands of bourgeois sentimentality.
 
What Bradwell Tolliver felt for her was, at that moment, awe.  To begin with, she was, in her high heels, taller than he, not much, just a shade, but enough to do something strange to him, to make him feel incompetent, gauche, angry.
 
She came from a bracket of society which Telford Lott had not quite accurately described as a world where yachts and polo ponies were as common as Kiddie Kars in the nursery; and though she might often wear old sneakers, a frayed flannel skirt that seemed to be held most precariously in place by a safety pin, and a Normandy fisherman’s jacket, she always wore a sizeable square emerald which, when she let her cheek rest against her hand, brought out stunningly the range of color in her hair, rust to deep auburn, and brought out, too, certain auburn glints in her large dark brown eyes.  At calculated intervals she would lay aside the sneakers and old flannel and appear in clothes which, in their severity or flamboyance, it did not matter which, indicated some deep self-confidence—or at least, and more impressively, some class confidence—in the wearer, and, even to the untutored nose of Bradwell Tolliver, smelled of money, a great deal of money.
 
He had felt rich in Fiddlersburg. He had not felt poor in prep school in Nashville, or even at Darthurst. Now she made him feel poor, and, worse, made him feel ashamed of feeling poor, and then ashamed of being ashamed, for she herself seemed to have no respect for money.  She seemed, even, contemptuous of the rich world of her origin, and seemed proud only that she could now move in a world of people of talent, moral devotion, and distinguished reputation. This fact compounded his awe of her in another way, for as she, with Telford Lott, initiated him into that world, he soon began to feel that if the name of any person was a name he had never heard of, that fact merely emphasized the poverty of his past experience and the hopelessness of his present condition.
 
Significant as were these objective reasons for his awe of her, they were overshadowed by something at all objective:  by a sense of inner freedom that the girl seemed to possess. She was, for instance, the first woman he had ever heard use as an expletive the vulgar word for excrement, and the word came so naturally, so innocently, that his first shock was quickly absorbed into shame for having reacted with shock.  And she referred to her own mother as a bitch—the first person, male or female, he had ever heard who did not bother to make at least some side obeisance, however false and pro forma, to the conventional expectation of reverence toward that quarter.  Her mother was a bitch, she said simply, and added that she would have to take him to have cocktails with the old girl just so he could see what a bitch she was—“a bitch in heat, forty-six years old, and you sit there and hear her pant.  It’s enough to make you want to be a nun.”
 
Then she added wryly, as though in recognition of some secret joke:  “If you’ve got it in you.”
 
The remarks about her mother were made in connection with an easy reference to her own psychoanalysis, a reference which came to Bradwell Tolliver with as much shock as had her use of the vulgar word for excrement. He knew, he thought, what psychoanalysis was, but what he knew was something totally abstract.  It was something that happened to people in Austria or London, usually to Jews.
 
Anyway, if psychoanalysis happened to anybody you knew you wouldn’t know it anyway, for it was too shameful, they would never tell. And here this girl was saying it out loud, in a restaurant where somebody might hear you.  He found himself guiltily stealing a glance over his shoulder to the nearest table.  When he returned his gaze, he found her smiling at him in some amusement.
 
She was, rather, grinning; for at times, usually very unexpected times, that was what she had, a grin.  It was a grin not at all to be expected, too, in a girl of such height and challenge of bearing, mixed with the supple femaleness. It was anachronistic, the grin of the little girl Lettice Poindexter must have once been, long ago, at the stage of one front tooth missing, socks that slid down into grimy saddle shoes that just wouldn’t stay tied, long little shanks that bumped each other, a covey of inordinate freckles on a round nose not too well wiped, and hair that, holding no promise of depth and shimmer, was pure carrot.  That was, for an instant, the kind of grin she offered now, with no malice or condescension in it, the recognition of something pretty funny.
 
But he found himself flushing, feeling guilty and caught out, even before she said, still with amusement and no malice, “Afraid someone will spot you out with a leper, huh?”
 
He mumbled something that, even to him, made no sense.
 
“Oh, Bradwell,” she cried, for during a short period she called him Bradwell, “I swear it wasn’t leprosy!”
 
She laughed, and in the instant of that laughter, when she tossed her head, and he looked at her across the red-check tablecloth of a one-time four-bit basement speak-easy on Perry Street, where the red ink was now legal and imported and inferior to that of the old days, and saw the hair catch a deep shine from the candle stuck there in a straw-covered chianti fiasco, he felt himself flushing again.  He had only the dimmest notions of why anybody might go to a psychoanalyst, but he did see the laugh stop and the brown eyes, with pupils distended a little, as though belladonna had been applied, stare beyond him at what he knew to be exactly nothing; and in that moment he had the shadowy flicker of a vision of her lying on some kind of couch, something white and surgical about the couch it seemed, with her head moving slightly from side to side as though in pain, and the eyes distended, as now in reality, and staring at exactly nothing, as now.
 
That vision was, instantly, gone.  There was only the tall girl sitting there across the red-check tablecloth, staring beyond him, the slight pucker of the V between her eyes, the extraordinary fox-brown glint of her eyes dimmed, the candlelight accentuating the golden-glowing tan of her skin (a glow which, for a redhead, must have required endless care and expensive leisure), and a small scale of lipstick sticking up minutely from the now somewhat lax lower lip, like the beginning of a fever blister, a little to the left side, sharply visible in the candlelight as though under a microscope.  He saw her, still staring beyond him, tighten the lower lip across the teeth.  He saw her lift the upper lip slightly and draw it back; bring the even row of upper teeth out to cover the lower lip, exposing the canines, one of which, he noticed for the first time, was a little discolored, as though from a dead nerve; and draw the lower lip slowly out, against what seemed to be the painful pressure of the upper teeth.
 
When the lower lip was released, he saw that the little flake, or scab, was gone. The lip had been raked smooth by the sharp, even pressure of those upper teeth, and now, in its provocative laxness, gleamed bright with saliva.
 
He looked at her, and felt that, suddenly, he knew her. In a peculiar way it seemed that she was the only person he had ever known. In that nakedness of knowing her, he experienced, as though he were the one caught naked, a shame, an embarrassment, and a somewhat frightening involvement. He felt involved in whatever dark, warm, deep, coiling, shifting, viscous thing was implied by the psychoanalysis which she had avowed. He felt involved by the scale of dried lipstick or bit of scabrous lip-tissue, by the faintly discolored canine. He felt like getting up and getting out of the speak-easy, quick.
 
It had all happened in an instant, the whole thing.
 
Then she was grinning again, she was saying, “Buck up, Bradwell. It was not leprosy.  It was just old-fashioned Q-trouble.”
 
He looked at her, befuddled.
 
"Q for quimm,” she said, still grinning in that innocence.  Then, inspecting his befuddlement, continued:  “It is British,” she said. “It is British for what little girls have and little boys don’t. It is what Lord Rawthorneboop had his hand on,” she said, shifting to a fluting, gulping burlesque of upper-class English speech, “at the banquet at Buckingham Palace when he was sitting beside Lady Fidget and she said, ‘Oh, do take your hand off it and put it on the table,’ and he said, ‘Oh, rahly, my deah, I cawnt think that either decent or prawt-icabble.’” She waited again for an instant, watching him, grinning at him with a more muted amusement. “That,” she said then, “is a British joke.” Then she dropped the grin, looked seriously at him, and said, “I don’t want to talk about that, about my analysis. What I want to talk about is—“
 
She did not want to talk about it then. That was to come later, considerably later, in his grubby basement room on Macdougal Street, when, late a night, she would lie by his side in the dark and, in some kind of belated backwash from the analysis, which had been abandoned several years before, tell him what her life had been.
 
In the dark there, she would offer him her life, all of it, all she knew of it, in a slow, humble way, in a ritual of love and redemption.  It was as though she knew that the slightly over-long body which was Lettice Poindexter had no value beyond the dreary animal warmth and nervous spasm unless it could be put in a perspective of the past events which had brought it here, to Macdougal Street; and that Bradwell Tolliver, whose breath she could hear in the dark and who would soon embrace that body, must, in the same moment, be led to embrace, and redeem, all the past, and in that process create the true, the real Lettice Poindexter.  He had to be led to understand all the confusion and unhappiness of the past as a necessary part of the certitude and happiness which, she told herself, she was about to discover.
 
As for Bradwell Tolliver, this progressive unveiling was an aphrodisiac which, more and more, he came to crave. It was, as it were, perhaps the most subtle of the arts of love in which he recognized, secretly, her skill, a skill that put him, with his limited and blundering experience, in further awe.
 
But there was an awe that compounded this awe. Her ability to speak without shame of her life, to move around in her life as though it were a house she inhabited so familiarly she could find anything in the dark—that was a mark of that inner freedom which, to him, she seemed to possess.  He would lie by her side in the dark, hearing the story unwind, and feel cramped and bound in some dark mystery which was himself, like a box.
 
Or perhaps, he sometimes thought, it was merely that he, himself, had no story worth telling. Perhaps no story at all. He did not surmise that this fear was what had led him to try to recognize the stories of those who seemed to have no story. He did not realize that as soon as he began to try to create, to enact, a story for Bradwell Tolliver, he would lose that gift, the only one he had, of recognizing the story of someone who had no story.
 
When a little later—later, that is, than a certain episode in Central Park, in June 1937—he went to Spain to fight, he did not recognize that his fear of having no story was one of the motives that impelled him. Or rather, mistily recognizing it, he quickly denied the fact, out of shame.
 
He did not know that every man yearns for his story.
 
He did not yet know that the true shame is in yearning for the false, not the true, story.
 
 
 
That afternoon in Central Park came in the rather early stages of Bradwell Tolliver’s acquaintance with Lettice Poindexter, shortly after her remark to Telford Lott that she did not find the boy attractive.  As for him, it was a period when worry about his inability to work was his dominant emotion.  He had been in New York for more than a year, and he had written nothing that he himself liked or that Telford Lott liked.  Telford Lott did not seem disturbed; all the shocks of the present experience and new ideas would be absorbed later, he said. But Bradwell Tolliver felt like a man bleeding to death from an inner wound.
 
All the people around him seemed so confident. Their pronouncements, on the page of a magazine or coming through the cigarette smoke over the half-empty glass, seemed so final.  They all, like Lettice Poindexter, had some inner freedom which he felt could never be his. As she seemed to move around inside herself, inside her own life, with that familiarity that would let her lay hand to any object in the dark, so they all seemed to move through History with the expertness of a blind man in his own house.
 
For him, History was merely what had happened, no matter how blank the happening. In a kind of grim humor he thought of himself as one of those muskrat-skinners of long back, of his great-grandpa’s time, who had peered out of the willows to watch the squat, improbable looking ironclad gunboats of General Grant puffing and clawing their way southward, upriver, out of nowhere, toward nowhere.  Yes, for him—out of nowhere, toward nowhere—that was History. But for the people now around him, History was a train that arrived on time, or only a little late.  He was in awe of them.
 
Christ, he would think, Fiddlersburg.
 
But what, that afternoon, Lettice Poindexter was talking about was not History. It was happiness.  At one time, she had been miserable, she said. She had been leading a life of no meaning. When she had moved out on her mother and gone to the Village and begun to work seriously at her painting, that had done something, she said. But she had still been the way she was inside.  She had still been trapped in the old way.
 
“You know,” she said, inclining her head to inspect him better, letting the glossy swatch of auburn hair fall evenly away from her cheek, in the sunshine, “you can’t be happy if you feel trapped.  Now can you?”
 
Quite soberly, she asked him the question.  She had to make him say, no, you couldn’t. She had to make him understand. He was so ignorant. His ignorance, she suddenly and surprisingly felt, was touching.
 
No, he was saying, he reckoned you couldn’t be happy if you felt trapped.
 
He was, at that moment, feeling trapped. He was thinking of the old Oliver typewriter on the table in his basement room on Macdougal Street, the table that doubled for eating and for work (and for an ironing board, too, on those rare occasions when he pressed his good trousers), with the old cracked plate full of cigarette butts and the glass jug of red wine and Roget’s Thesaurus beside the typewriter, and on the floor the wadded-up discarded sheets of paper. He wanted to be a writer. He wanted it so bad that, at that moment, his head swam in the sunshine. Being a writer, that was the only way he could see how to live.  He would never be one, he thought, in misery.
 
But she was talking of happiness.
 
The painting hadn’t been enough, she said. Then she had gone into analysis. You get so miserable you have to do something. Oh, yes, it had helped, some ways—she got to know why she had been living the way she had. But knowing hadn’t made her happy.  It hadn’t made her act differently, at least not much.
 
“But psychoanalysis,” she said, “is merely a fancy kind of bourgeois self-indulgence.  It is what the bourgeois buys with his money when he discovers there’s nothing else he wants that his money can buy. It is a private pleasure of the liberal individualist intellectual, like masturbation.  It is—"
 
She was repeating, with only the most shadowy awareness of echo, the language Telford Lott had used two years before when, during the course of their affair, he had tried to help her out of her unhappiness by showing her how she could attune herself with the fate of mankind and work for human justice. He had succeeded beyond any expectations.  He had talked her out of analysis and, in fact, out of his bed.
 
He had talked her out of his bed, into happiness.  She found some meaning in her life.  She had found, strangely, that she did not need men as before. She began to feel herself, sometimes, in a stage of tiptoe expectation of something to come. What that might be, she did not try to say to herself, but she felt, somehow, that a man’s hand upon her would defile that thing to come:  that happiness beyond happiness.
 
“It is like a conversion,” she was saying to Bradwell Tolliver, telling him what had happened to her, but with ellipses and deletions that made the whole story teasingly abstract, like the feeling left over from a dream whose details you can’t quite remember.
 
“Yes, exactly like a conversion,” she was saying, as they moved down the narrow, winding path between the high hedges, at the slow pace of her seriousness.
 
The seriousness was, if anything, emphasized by the fact that this was one of the occasions when the sneakers and old flannel skirt were discarded. She was taking him, this very afternoon, to see her mother.  To see the bitch, who lived over there on the east side of the Park, in the upper 60s, and so she was not wearing the old flannel skirt. She was wearing a rust-colored linen dress, with bold skirt and a yellow leather belt drawn so tight it made the bold skirt even bolder. She made her serious, small gestures from the wrists, and the barbaric bangles of the heavy bracelets clinked every so lightly. She inclined her head to regard him, saying, “Yes, exactly like a conversion.  It happens, and then you—"
 
At the turn, the path gave, suddenly, upon a graveled enclosure, some forty feet across, into which, on the far side, a wider track entered. There was a fairly heavy growth around the enclosure. To one side were a couple of benches. Beyond the benches, there was, predictably, the metal trash container with the letters NYC—SD. A pigeon was drearily skirmishing the gravel in front of the benches. The sun was getting fairly low.  Light, falling from the west across the top of the enclosing growth, glinted on the radiator cap of a car over there, all that was visible of a car backed into the bushes, at an angle.
 
In a flash, Bradwell Tolliver became aware of every item.
 
In a flash, too, he became aware that over yonder where the car was backed into the bushes, the bushes were not high, and on each side of that spot the taller growth, rising to the overhanging boughs, made a kind of oval frame in which appeared the head and upper torso of a woman, a woman with dark bobbed hair, wearing some kind of blue dress, with short sleeves. Her face was tense, her eyes were shut, her arms reached out before her as though the unseen hands held reins, and her body rose and fell, in a decorous rhythm, as though posting to an easy trot. The body was leaning forward a little, as at the first instant of approaching a jump. Over there across the gravel, in the oval frame of the greenery, the dark bobbed hair tossed gently with the motion.
 
Bradwell Tolliver stood absolutely motionless.  He heard, suddenly, what he had not been aware of before, the pervasive, insistent undertone of the traffic, and now and then above that pervasive context, muted in distance, the irascible and anguished sound of the horns. He was, suddenly, aware of the light as the light of evening. It fell across the high roofs and towers. The sunlight falling across the graveled area seemed smoky.
 
He was holding his breath.  He did not look at Lettice Poindexter, and he knew that she was not looking at him. He knew that she was holding her breath. He knew it, for he knew that he was holding his own breath so that, if she did breathe, he could hear her breath, and he could not hear it.  He wondered what her face looked like. He thought he would die if he did not see what her face looked like.  But he did not turn his head to see.
 
He heard, then, the slight movement of her foot on the gravel. He knew she had turned, was moving away. He waited an instant, and then turned. What he looked at was the heels of her alligator-skin pumps being set on, and lifted from, the gravel. Then he overtook her.  He walked by her side, but not close, and, as they moved eastward across the Park, did not look at her.
 
He was sure, however, that now he could hear her breathe.
 
 
 
Now, he lay on a bed in Fiddlersburg and thought that it was a long way, and a long time, from Fiddlersburg to Central Park.
 
He thought:  I am in Fiddlersburg.