Tony didn’t think it was cute. She thought it was Zenia, putting him up to it. Twisting the knife.

It was Roz who suggested Tony should give up the apartment and buy a house. “The prices are great right now! You’ve got the down payment—just cash in some of those bonds. Look—think of it as an investment. Anyway, you should move out of here. Who needs the bad memories, eh?” She got Tony a good real estate agent, drove around with her from house to house, clambered panting up and down the stairs, peering at furnaces and dry rot and wiring. “Now this—this is a deal,” she whis=pered to Tony. “Ask low—see what they say! A few repairs and this could be gorgeous! Your study goes in the tower, just ditch the fake wood panelling, get rid of that linoleum—it’s maple underneath, I looked. It’s buried treasure, trust me! Once you’re out of the old place, things will be tons better.” She got a much bigger charge out of buying the house than Tony did. She found Tony a decent contractor, and dictated the paint colours. Even at the best of times Tony would have been incapable of making such arrangements herself.

After Tony moved in, things were indeed better. She liked the house, though not for any reasons that Roz would have approved. Roz wanted the house to be the centre of the new, outgoing life she envisaged for Tony, but for Tony it was more like a convent. A convent of one. She didn’t belong in the land of the adults, the land of the giants. She shut herself up in her house like a nun, and went out only for supplies.

And for work, of course. Lots of work. She worked at school and also at home; she worked nights and weekends. She got pitying looks from her colleagues, because gossip travels through universities at the speed of influenza and they all knew about West, but she didn’t care. She skipped regular meals and snacked on cheese food and crackers. She booked an answering service so she couldn’t be disturbed while thinking. She did not answer the doorbell. It did not ring.

Tony in her turret room works late into the night. She wants to avoid bed, and sleep, and especially dreaming. She is having a dream, a recurring one; she has the feeling that this dream has been waiting for her a long time, waiting for her to enter it, reenter it; or that it has been waiting to re-enter her.

This dream is underwater. In her waking life, she is no swimmer; she has never liked immersing herself, getting cold and wet. The most she’ll trust herself to is a bathtub, and on the whole she prefers showers. But in the dream she swims effortlessly, in water as green as leaves, with sunlight filtering down through it, dappling the sand. No bubbles come out of her mouth;—she is not conscious of breathing. Beneath her, coloured fish flit away, darting like birds.

Then she comes to an edge, a chasm. Like going down a hill she drops over it, slides diagonally through the increasing darkness. The sand falls away under her like snow. The fish here are larger and more dangerous, brighter—phosphorescent. They light up and dim, flash on and off like neon signs, their eyes and teeth glowing—a gas-flame blue, a sulphur yellow, a red the colour of embers. Suddenly she knows she isn’t in the sea at all but miniaturized, inside her own brain. These are her neurons, the crackle of electricity touching them as she thinks about them. She looks at the incandescent fish with wonder: she is watching the electrochemical process of her own dreaming!

If so, then what is that, on the dim level white sand at the bottom? Not a ganglion. Someone walking away from her.

She swims faster but it’s no use, she’s held in place, an aquarium goldfish bumping its nose against glass. Reverof, she hears. The backwards dream language. She opens her mouth to call, but there is no air to call with and water rushes in. She wakes up gasping and choking, her throat constricted, her face streaming with tears.

Now that she’s started to cry it seems impossible to stop. In the daytime, in the lamplight, when she can work, she can keep this weeping locked away. But sleep is fatal. Fatal and unavoidable.

She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. From the street her room must look like a lighthouse, a beacon. Warm and cheerful and safe. But towers have other uses. She could empty boiling oil out the left-hand window, get a dead hit on anyone standing at the front door.

Such as West or Zenia, Zenia and West. She broods about them too much, them and their entangled bodies. Action would be better. She thinks about going over to their apartment (she knows where they’re living, it wasn’t hard to find out, West is listed in the university directory) and confronting Zenia. But what would she say? Give him back? Zenia would just laugh. “He’s a free agent,” she would say. “He’s a grown-up, he can make his own choices:” Or something like that. And if she were to turn up on Zenia’s doorstep, to whine and beg and plead, wouldn’t that be just what Zenia wanted?

She recalls a conversation she had with Zenia, early on, in the days when they were drinking coffee at Christie’s and Zenia was such a friend.

“Which would you rather have?” said Zenia. “From other people. Love, respect, or fear?”

“Respect,” said Tony. “No. Love.”

“Not me,” said Zenia. “I’d choose fear.”

“Why?” said Tony.

“It works better,” said Zenia. “It’s the only thing that works.”

Tony remembers having been impressed by this answer. But it wasn’t fear through which Zenia had stolen West. Not a show of strength. On the contrary, it was a show of weakness. The ultimate weapon.

She could always take the gun.

For almost a year there was no word from West; no mention—for instance—of lawyers or divorce; not even any petitions about the spinet and the lute, which Tony was holding captive in her new living room. Tony knew why West was so wordless. It was because he felt too awful about what he’d done, or rather what had been done to him. He felt too ashamed.

After a while he began to leave timid messages with Tony’s answering service, suggesting they get together for a beer. Tony did not reply, not because she was angry with him—she wouldn’t have been angry with him if he’d been run over by a truck, and she viewed seduction by Zenia as analogous—but because she couldn’t imagine what form any conversation between the two of them might take. How are you and Fine would about cover it. Thus when he finally turned up at her door, her new house door, the door of her nunnery, she simply stared at him.

“Let me in?” said West. Tony could tell at a glance that’it was all finished between Zenia and West. She could tell from the colour of his skin; which was a light greenish grey, and from his sagging shoulders and dejected mouth. He’d been dismissed, sacked, ejected. He’d been kicked in the nuts.

He looked so pitiful, so pulled apart—as if he’d been on the rack, as if every one of his bones had been disconnected from every other bone, leaving only a kind of anatomical jelly—that of course she let him in. Into her home, into her kitchen, where she made him a hot drink, and ultimately into her bed, where he clutched her, shivering. It was not a sexual clutch, it was the clutch of a man drowning. But Tony was in no danger of being dragged down. She felt, if anything, strangely dry; strangely detached from him. He might be drowning, but this time she was standing on the beach. Worse: with binoculars.

She began again to cook small dinners, to boil breakfast eggs. She remembered how to care for him, how to pat him back into shape, and she did it again; but this time with fewer illusions. She still loved him, but she didn’t believe he would ever love her in return, not to the same extent. How could he, after what he’d been through? Could a man with one leg tapdance?

Nor could she trust him. He might crawl out of his depression, tell her how good she was, bring home treats for supper, go through the routines; but if Zenia were to return, from wherever she had gone—and even West didn’t seem to know—then all of these fond habits would count for nothing. He was only on loan. Zenia was his addiction; one sip of her and he’d be gone. He’d be like a dog summoned by a supersonic whistle, inaudible to human ears. He would run off.