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It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that is degeneration by definition.
Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them every day...
The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?
Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has secrets.
Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked. She put down the match cover she had been crushing in her hand. “How can I hate you, Carol?”
Carol’s phrase “come out” had made her think of being born, and it embarrassed her. Yes, she had been born since she left Carol. She had been born the instant she saw the picture in the library, and her stifled cry then was like the first yell of an infant, being dragged into the world against its will.
To live with Carol? Once that had been impossible, and had been what she wanted most in the world. To live with her and share everything with her, summer and winter, to walk and read together, to travel together. And she remembered the days of resenting Carol, when she had imagined Carol asking her this, and herself answering no.
“The flowers you gave me—they died.” Carol’s eyes met hers for a second, and Therese looked away.
It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.
