The blue air compressor did not come until later. It is desperately
important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts.
* * *
He did show her some of his writing. Not the important part, the
story he was writing about her, but fragments of poetry, the spine
of a novel that had ached in his mind for a year like embedded
shrapnel, four essays. She was a perceptive critic, and addicted to
marginal notations with her black felt-tip pen. Because she
sometimes dropped in when lie was gone to the village, he kept the
story hidden in the back shed.
September melted into cool October, and the story was completed,
mailed to a friend, returned with suggestions (bad ones), rewritten.
He felt it was good, but not quite right. Some indefinable was
missing. The focus was a shade fuzzy. He began to toy, with the
idea of giving it to her for Criticism, rejected it, toyed with it again.
After all. the story was her; he never doubted she could supply the
final vector.
His attitude concerning her became increasing])- unhealthy; he was
fascinated by her huge, animalistic bulk, by the slow, tortoise-like
way she trekked across the space between the house and the
cottage.
* * *
image: 'mammoth shadow of decay swaying across the
shadowless sand, cane held in one twisted hand, feet clad in huge
canvas shoes which pump and push at the coarse grains, face like a
serving platter, puffy dough arms, breasts like drumlins, a
geography in herself, a country of tissue'
* * *
by her reedy, vapid voice; but at the same time he loathed her,
could not stand her touch. lie began to feel like the young man in
'The Tell-Tale Heart, ' by Edgar A. Poe. He felt lie could stand at
her bedroom door for endless midnights, shining one Tay of light
on her sleeping eye, ready to pounce and rip the instant it flashed
open.
The urge to show her the story itched at him maddeningly. He had
decided, by the first day of December, that he would do it. The
decision-making did not relieve him, as it is supposed to do in the
novels, but it did leave him with a feeling of antiseptic pleasure. It
was right that it should be so-an omega that quite dovetailed with
he alpha. And it was omega; he was vacating the cottage on he
fifth of December. On this day he had just returned from the Stowe
Travel Agency in Portland, where he had booked passage for the
Far East. He had done this almost on the spur of the moment: the
decision to go and the decision to show his manuscript to Mrs.
Leighton had come together, almost as if he had been guided by an
invoisible hand.
* * *
In truth, he was guide; by an invisible hand-mine.
* * *
