She whispered, "Tell me something." He uncrossed his legs and sat with a hand on each knee, a dummy in a red club chair, his head turned toward her. "I know how much." He said, "I know how much this house. Alone by the sea." He looked not pleased exactly but otherwise satisfied, technically satisfied to have managed the last cluster of words. And it was in fact, coming from Mr. Tuttle, a formulation she heard in its echoing depths. Four words only. But he'd placed her in a set of counter-surroundings, of simultaneous insides and outsides. The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self. She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web. It happened this final morning that they were here at the same time, in the kitchen, and they shanbled past each other to get things out of cabinets and drawers and then waited one for the other by the sink or fidge, still a little puddled in dream melt, and she ran tap water over the blueberries bunched in her hand and closed her eyes to breathe the savor rasing. He sat with the newspaper, stirring his coffe. It was his coffe and his cup. They shared the newspaper but it was actually, unspokenly, hers. “I want to say something but what”. She ran water from the tap and seemed to notice. It was the first time she noticed this.
