"Do you know anything about Zen?" Miss Stickyfoot asked.

"Only that you ask koans which are sort of riddles," he said. "And you give a sort of nonsense answer because the question is really idiotic in the first place, such as Why are we here on earth? and so forth." He hoped he had put it properly and she would think that he really did know something about Zen, as mentioned in her letter. And then he thought of a very good Zen answer to her question. "Zen," he said, "is a complete philosophic system which contains questions for every answer that exists in the universe. For instance, if you have the answer 'Yes,' then Zen is capable of propounding the exact query which is linked to it, such as 'Must we die in order to please the Creator, who likes his creations to perish?' Although actually, now that I think about it more deeply, the question which Zen would say goes with that answer is 'Are we here in this kitchen about to drink instant Yuban coffee?' Would you agree?" When she did not answer immediately, Cadbury said hurriedly, "In fact Zen would say that the answer 'Yes' is the answer to that question: 'Would you agree?' There you have one of the great values of Zen; it can propound a variety of exact questions for almost any given answer."

"You're full of shit," Miss Stickyfoot said disdainfully.

Cadbury said, "That proves I understand Zen. Do you see? Or perhaps the fact is that you don't actually understand Zen yourself." He felt a trifle nettled.

"Maybe you're right," Miss Stickyfoot said. "I mean about my not understanding Zen. The fact is I don't understand it at all."

"That's very Zen," Cadbury pointed out. "And I do. Which is also Zen. Do you see?"

"Here's your coffee," Miss Stickyfoot said; she placed the two full, steaming cups of coffee on the table and seated herself across from him. Then she smiled. It seemed to him a nice smile, full of light and gentleness, a funny little wrinkled shy smile, with a puzzled, questioning glow of wonder and concern in her eyes. They really were beautiful large dark eyes, just about the most beautiful he had ever seen in his entire life, and he in all truthfulness was in love with her; he had not merely been saying that.

"You realize I'm married," he said as he sipped his coffee. "But I'm separated from her. I've been constructing this hovel down along a part of the creek where no one ever goes. I say 'hovel' so as not to give you a false impression that it's a mansion or anything; actually it's very well put-together. I'm an expert artisan in my field. I'm not trying to impress you; this is simply God's truth. I know I can take care of both our needs. Or we can live here." He looked around Miss Stickyfoot's modest apartment. How ascetically and tastefully she had arranged it. He liked it here; he felt peace come to him, a dwindling away of his tensions. For the first time in years.

"You have an odd aura," Miss Stickyfoot said. "Sort of soft and woolly and purple. I approve of it. But I've never seen one like it before. Do you build model trains? It sort of looks like the kind of aura that someone who builds model trains would have."

"I can build almost anything," Cadbury said. "With my teeth, my hands, my words. Listen; this is for you." He then recited his four-line poem. Miss Stickyfoot listened intently.

"That poem," she decided, when he had finished, "has wu. 'Wu' is a Japanese term – or is it Chinese? – meaning you know what." She gestured irritably. "Simplicity. Like some of Paul Klee's drawings." But then she added, "It's not very good, though. Otherwise."

"I composed it," he explained testily, "while paddling down the creek after my tied-together snuff tins. It was strictly spur-of-the-moment stuff; I can do better seated in isolation in my locked study at my Hermes. If Hilda isn't banging at the door. You can discern why I hate her. Because of her sadistic intrusions the only time I have for creative work is while paddling or eating my lunch. That one aspect alone of my marital life explains why I had to break away from it and seek you out. In relationship to a person of your sort I could create on a totally new level entirely. I'd have blue chips coming out my ears. In addition, I wouldn't have to spend myself into oblivion seeing Dr. Drat whom you correctly call a number one fud."

" 'Blue chips,' " Miss Stickyfoot echoed, screwing up her face with distaste. "Is that the level you mean? It seems to me you have the aspirations of a wholesale dried fruit dealer. Forget blue chips; don't leave your wife because of that: you're only carrying your old value-system with you. You've internalized what she's taught you, except that you're carrying it one step farther. Pursue a different course entirely and all will go well with you."

"Like Zen?" he asked.

"You only play with Zen. If you really understood it you never would have answered my note by coming here. There is no perfect person in the world, for you or anybody else. I can't make you feel any better than you do with your wife; you carry your troubles inside you."

"I agree with that up to a point," Cadbury agreed, up to a point. "But my wife makes them worse. Maybe with you they wouldn't entirely go away, but they wouldn't be so bad. Nothing could be so bad as it is now. At least you wouldn't throw my Hermes typewriter out the window whenever you got mad at me, and in addition maybe you wouldn't get mad at me every goddam minute of the day and night, as she does. Had you thought about that? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as the expression goes."

His reasoning did not seem to go unnoticed by Miss Stickyfoot; she nodded in what appeared to be at least partial agreement. "All right," she said after a pause, and her large dark attractive eyes gleamed with sudden light. "Let's make the effort. If you can abandon your obsessive chatter for a moment – for perhaps the first time in your life – I'll do with you and for you, which you could never have done by yourself, what needs to be done. All right? Shall I lay it on you?"

"You have begun to articulate oddly," Cadbury said, with a mixture of alarm, surprise – and a growing awe. Miss Stickyfoot, before his eyes, had begun to change in a palpable fashion. What had, up to now, appeared to him the ultimate in beauty evolved as he gazed fixedly; beauty, as he had known it, anticipated it, imagined it, dissolved and was carried away into the rivers of oblivion, of the past, of the limitations of his own mind: it was replaced, now, by something further, something that surpassed it, which he could never have conjured up from his own imagination. It far exceeded that.

Miss Stickyfoot had become several persons, each of them bound to the nature of reality, pretty but not illusive, attractive but within the confines of actuality. And these people, he saw, meant much more, were much more, because they were not manifestations fulfilling his wishes, products of his own mind. One, a semi-Oriental girl with long, shiny, dark hair, gazed at him with impassive, bright, intelligent eyes that sparkled with calm awareness; the perception of him, within them, lucid and correct, unimpaired by sentiment or even kindness, mercy or compassion – yet her eyes held one kind of love: justice, without aversion or repudiation of him, as conscious as she was of his imperfections. It was a comradely love, a sharing of her cerebral, analytical evaluation of himself and of her own self, and the bonded-togetherness of the two of them by their mutual failings.

The next girl, smiling with forgiveness and tolerance, unaware of him as falling short in any way – nothing he was or was not or could do or fail to do would disappoint her or lower her esteem for him – glowed and smouldered darkly, with a kind of warm, sad, and at the same time eternally cheerful happiness: this, his mother, his eternal, never-disappearing, never going-away or leaving or forgetting mother who would never withdraw her protection of him, her sheltering cloak that concealed him, warmed him, breathed hope and the flicker of new life into him when pain and defeat and loneliness chilled him into near-ashes… the first girl, his equal: his sister, perhaps; this girl his gentle, strong mother who was at the same time frail and afraid but not showing either.