“I was away for a month, yes. You know why.” He’d gone four weeks before her recital. Had convinced them both it made sense—the time was too huge for her, it meant too much. She was playing eight hours a day; he wanted to let her focus. He flew to Calgary with Kev and drove his brother’s car through the Rockies and then south down the California coast. Had phoned her twice a week.
“You know why,” he heard himself say again. It had begun.
“Well, I did some thinking.”
“One should always do some thinking.”
“Paul, don’t be like—”
“What do you want from me?” he snapped. “What is this, Rach?”
So, so, so. “Mark asked me to marry him.”
Mark? Mark Rogers was her accompanist. Last-year piano student, good-looking, mild, a little effeminate. It didn’t fit. He couldn’t make it fit.
“All right,” he said. “That happens. It happens when you’ve got a common goal for a while. Theatre romance. He fell in love. Rachel, you’re easy to fall in love with. But why are you telling me this way?”
“Because I’m going to say yes.”
No warning at all. Point-blank. Nothing had ever prepared him for this kick. Summer night, but God, he was so cold. So cold, suddenly.
“Just like that?” Reflex.
“No! Not just like that. Don’t be so cold, Paul.”
He heard himself make a sound. A gasp, a laugh: halfway. He was actually shivering. Don’t be so cold, Paul.
“That’s just the sort of thing,” she said, twisting her hands together. “You’re always so controlled, thinking, figuring out. Like figuring out I needed to be alone a month, or why Mark fell in love with me. So much logic: Mark’s not so strong. He needs me. I can see the ways he needs me. He cries, Paul.”
Cries? Nothing held together anymore. What did crying have to do with it?
“I didn’t know you liked a Niobe number.” It was important to stop shivering.
“I don’t. Please don’t be nasty, I can’t handle it… Paul, it’s that you never truly let go, you never made me feel I was indispensable. I guess I’m not. But Mark… puts his head on my chest sometimes, after.”
“Oh, Jesus, Rachel, don’t!”
“It’s true!” It was raining harder. Trouble breathing now.
“So he plays harp, too? Versatile, I must say.” God, such a kick; he was so cold.
She was crying. “I didn’t want it to be…”
She didn’t want it to be like this. How had she wanted it to be? Oh, lady, lady, lady.
“It’s okay,” he found himself saying, incredibly.
Where had that come from? Trouble breathing still. Rain on the roof, on the windshield. “It’ll be all right.”
“No,” Rachel said, weeping still, rain drumming. “Sometimes it can’t be all right.”
Smart, smart girl. Once he would have reached to touch her. Once? Ten minutes ago. Only that, before the cold.
Love, love, the deepest discontinuity.
Or not quite the deepest.
Because this, precisely, was when the Mazda in front blew a tire. The road was wet. It skidded sideways and hit the Ford in the next lane, then rebounded and three-sixtied as the Ford caromed off the guard rail.
There was no room to brake. He was going to plough them both. Except there was a foot, twelve inches’ clearance if he went by on the left. He knew there’d been a foot, had seen the movie in slow motion in his head so many times. Twelve inches. Not impossible; very bad in rain, but.
He went for it, sliced the whirling Mazda, banged the rail, spun, and rolled across the road and into the sliding Ford.
He was belted; she wasn’t.
That was all there was to it, except for the truth.
The truth was that there had indeed been twelve inches, perhaps ten, as likely, fourteen. Enough. Enough if he had gone for it as soon as he saw the hole. But he hadn’t, had he? By the time he’d moved, there were three inches clear, four, not enough at night, in rain, at forty miles an hour. Not nearly.
Question: how did one measure time there, at the end? Answer: by how much room there was. Over and over he’d watched the film in his mind; over and over he’d seen them roll. Off the rail, into the Ford. Over.
Because he hadn’t moved fast enough.
And why—Do pay attention, Mr. Schafer—why hadn’t he moved fast enough?
Well, class, modern techniques now allow us to examine the thought patterns of that driver in the scintilla—lovely word, that—of time between the seeing and the