. . . The traffic around her loosened as she set out on the wide north road; her car threaded through it like a needle through old cloth, picking up speed. The boy's directions had been eccentric and wandering, but she wouldn't forget them, having impressed each one in place on an old folding Monopoly board she kept in her memory for just such a use.
II.
The Thirst that from the Soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sip
I would not change for thine.
—Ben Jonson
Earth rolled its rotundity around, tilting the little park where Auberon sat one, two, three days more faceupwards to the changeless sun. The warm days were growing more frequent, and though never matching quite the earth's regular progress, the warmth was already more constant, less skittish, soon not ever to be withdrawn. Auberon, hard at work there, hardly noticed; he kept on his overcoat; he had ceased to believe in spring, and a little warmth couldn't convince him.
Press on, press on.
Not Her But This Park
The struggle was, as it had always been, to think rightly about what had happened, to come to conclusions that took in all aspects, that were mature; to be objective. There were multitudes of reasons why she might have left him, he knew that well, his faults were as numerous as the paving-stones of those walks, as rooted and thorny as that blooming hawthorn. There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.
No, her leaving him was sad, and a puzzle; it was her disappearance that was insane and maddening. How could she leave not a wrack behind? He had thought of her abducted, murdered; he had thought of her planning her own vanishing, just to drive him mad with bafflement, but why would she want such a madness? Certainly he had raged, frantic, at George Mouse, unable to bear it, tell me you son of a bitch where she is, what you've done with her, and saw his madness reflected in George Mouse's honest fear as he said "Now now, now now," and groped amid his souvenirs for a baseball bat. No, he had not gone about his searching in the most lucid frame of mind, but what the hell was to be expected?
What the hell was to be expected, when after four gins at the Seventh Saint he would see her passing by in the crowds outside the window, and after five find her sitting on the adjacent stool?
One trip only to Spanish Harlem, where he had seen her replicated on a dozen street corners, in halter tops, with baby carriages, chewing gum on crowded stoops, dusky roses all of them and none of them her, and he had abandoned that search. He had forgotten utterly, if he ever really knew, just which of these buildings on highly individual hut at the same time identical streets had been the ones she had taken him to; she might be in any of those aqua living rooms, watching through the plastic lace of curtains as he passed, any of those rooms lit by aeqeous television and the red points of votive candles. Even worse was the checking of jails, hospitals, madhouses, in all of which the inmates had obviously taken over, his calls were shunted from thug to loony to paralytic and finally cut off, by accident or on purpose, he had not made himself clear. If she had fallen into one of those public oubliettes . . . No. If it was madness to choose to believe she had not, he would rather be mad.
And in the street his name would be called. Softly, shamefacedly; happily, with relief; peremptorily. And he would stand looking up and down the avenue, searching, stock still amid the traffic, unable to see her but unwilling to move lest she lose sight of him. Sometimes it was called again, even more insistently, and still he would see nothing; and after a long time move on, with many halts and backward glances, having at last to say out loud to himself that it wasn't her, wasn't even his name that had been called, just forget it; and curious passersby would covertly watch him reason with himself.
Mad he must have seemed, but whose God damn fault was that? He had only tried to be