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“Yes.”

“You’ve never told me about him.”

She was silent long enough for him to think she wasn’t going to answer. She sat opposite him, drawing her legs up under her. Finally she said, “I suppose he wasn’t exceptional. I mean, you wouldn’t have singled him out in a crowd. But we loved each other and when he died …”

When she trailed off he reached for her wrist. “What is it?”

“I really don’t like to talk about it.”

“Maybe it needs talking about.”

“Now you’re trying to get revenge for the way I pinned you to the wall at dinner tonight.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “What was he like?”

She brooded toward the photograph. “He was alive. Vital—enthusiastic. He came from Topeka—his father worked for the railroad. Phil was an engineer and his whole face would light up when he thought about building things. He was really a very straightforward guy—no hidden corners. He was working on his Ph.D. at the university here when he died. I had a secretarial job with a phone-company executive and Phil had a fellowship, and we were living in a horrible little house trailer in one of those miserable camps on Miracle Mile. Sometimes Phil used to go across the street to bowl a few lines on afternoons when he didn’t have classes. One day he didn’t come home and we went to tell him it was dinnertime—a girl friend and I—and we found …”

After a while Forrester said, “You may as well finish it, Ronnie.”

Her eyes were barely open. “In the weeds behind the bowling alley. He’d been clubbed and his wallet and class ring were gone. The police never found the muggers who’d done it”

“Was he dead when you found him?”

She gave a start. “I—I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She withdrew her hand and twisted her face away from him. “I don’t remember it very well.”

“That’s natural. Sometimes—”

“No. It wasn’t just a minor thing. I feel ashamed of it—you see the truth is I had a pretty severe blackout and it lasted quite a while. I spent several months in a sanatorium, Alan. I came out of it, of course. All kinds of therapy. Insulin, hypnosis—the doctors put the pieces back together, more or less, but there are things that still haven’t come back to me. I’m sure it’s just as well. I don’t know, I’ve never been able to work it out in words. It seemed to burn something out of me and I’ve never wanted to work up the strength … Perhaps there just isn’t enough of me left over to offer anyone again. Phil and I gave each other everything we had.”

She seemed willing to let the conversation die but Forrester revived it deliberately: “That was eleven years ago.”

“I know what you’re trying to make me admit. It’s true enough but it’s not as easy as it seems. Maybe there’s something wrong with me—a wire down, inside.”

“That’s ridiculous. Possibly you let yourself brood your way into an obsession but it’s time you came out of it.”

“Now who’s being tough?”

“An eye for an eye,” he said in a mausoleum tone, and it made her laugh and suddenly she was on her feet moving gaily toward the easel. She lifted the covering cloth and threw it back and stood aside proudly. “Do you like it, Alan? Please like it.”

The painting was incomplete around the edges but the subject was unmistakable—the great pink mesa that towered at the corner of the ranch. She had caught it in late-afternoon sunlight, all magenta shadows and cruel incisions. Her bold brushstrokes had dispensed with trivial distractions and left only the great looming rock against a cobalt sky and he heard her say with an embarrassed little laugh, “That’s how I really see you, you know. But don’t take that in a trite Freudian way. I want to finish it by the weekend.”

“Why?”

She moved around the room, suddenly shy. “Because you’re probably going back to Washington soon and I want you to take it with you.”

She was trying very hard to keep it casual but the strain in her face proved the deceit of it. He turned his back to her, ostensibly to look at the painting again but actually to hide his face from her because his throat was thickening and his eyes felt tight and he didn’t want her to watch him do combat with the sudden confusions inside himself. This was what he had not only wanted but subconsciously planned, but now he felt a sense of panic because he wasn’t ready for it just yet. His inner defenses were up; his mind, with stubborn refusal, simply didn’t want to face it and he found himself thinking wildly about everything except the question at hand.

He had meant to break down Ronnie’s hostile barriers and he had succeeded but suddenly he was afraid and wanted to withdraw: did that mean the same thing might happen if after a carefully plotted campaign he won the White House? Would he discover he really didn’t want it and was terrified by it? Was there something inside him that made him fear success, like an athlete who suddenly and inexplicably ran out of steam when victory was in sight? He remembered Les Suffield railing at him just before the end of the last campaign when during a television speech he’d blurted something ad lib that had shocked the audience—For Christ’s sake are you trying deliberately to blow it, Alan? You had them in the palm of your hand but now … And in the end the election had been much too close; he had barely squeaked through with a five-thousand-vote plurality. He couldn’t even remember what it was that he had said. But there had been other times: in high school he had fudged his senior exams and blown the valedictorian’s chair; in the summer of his twenty-third year he had all but failed the bar exam; in court prosecuting a murder case he had forgotten to ask a key witness a key question and had watched the defendant walk out of court free; in Congress he had steered the writers’ tax bill all the way to the floor but neglected to sew up three votes that would have made the difference between passage and failure.…

The sudden insight stunned him and he stood filled with frightened wonder, face and hands stilled, hearing Ronnie move forward behind him—the whisper of nylon thighs, the catch in her breath when she spoke: “Alan? What’s wrong? What is it?”

He felt her weight behind him and he turned quickly and drew her close to him so that she wouldn’t see his face; he tipped his head to get the noses out of the way and kissed her with crushing violence but she kept her lips tightly compressed and hard.

She pulled herself away from him and touched her mouth. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Ronnie.”

She stared. “What are we getting ourselves into?”

“Are you frightened?”

“I feel rocked—and I don’t want to.”

“Ronnie, I—”

“I’ve never been any good at the casual oh-hell-after-all-we’re-both-adults game, Alan.”

“Neither have I. It’s nothing to do with that.”

“Then what is it?” She was pleading to know.

He was shaking his head as if to clear it and her face came into sharp focus before him. Suddenly he realized what had been wrong before: he had been looking at her only in relation to himself, seeing her only as a part of his own difficulties and the possible instrument of a cure for them, but not as herself, a complete and separate being with difficulties and a unique identity of her own. In his mind she had been an antidote to the memory of Angie: he had kept thinking of her as a means of deliverance—a departure rather than an arrival.

“It isn’t like that now,” he said.

It startled her. “It isn’t like what?”

He smiled. “I’m not making sense, am I? I’ve been standing here making discoveries. It’s hard to explain.”

He stood quite still and put his hands on her arms; after a while her mouth lost its nervous smile and began to soften and when she lifted her glance to his face her whole body suddenly was in her eyes. She brought her hands up under his elbows and slipped her arms around him as if they had been designed to fit exactly there and she said, “I think I’m falling in love with you. You were right, I am frightened.”