“Will you do it?” she asked somberly.
“When?” I asked quietly.
She took the pills and poured them into her hand. “Now,” she said.
“No,” I blurted, and started to rise.
She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly determined, so that I knew she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.
“I want out of this noise,” she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. “Everything is so loud.”
In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repetitions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.
“Will you stay?” she asked quietly.
I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add lo the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.
And so I said, “All right.”
With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Veronica,” I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.
She curled under my arm. “Say what I said to Douglas,” she told me. “In the end it’s all anyone can offer.”
“What did you say to him?” I asked softly.
“I’m here.”
I drew my arm tightly around her. “I’m here,” I said.
She snuggled in more closely. “Yes.”
* * * *
“And so you stayed?” my friend asked.
I nodded.
“And she…?”
“In about an hour,” I told him. “Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here.”
“So right now she’s…”
“Gone,” I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.
“You couldn’t stop her?”
“With what?” I asked. “I had nothing to offer.” I glanced out the front window of the bar. “And besides,” I added, “for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That’s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us.”
My friend looked at me oddly. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.
At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman’s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.
“I’m going to keep quiet,” I answered. “For a very long time.”
Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.
It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.
From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.
I know.