Panama

3

AT TRUMAN AND FRANCIS there is a florist’s shop in a building made of the kind of cinderblock that is bulged to look like rocks. The window is always fogged from the cool interior and it is run like a dry cleaner’s, with a counter and cash register jutting into its greenery like a dock in the Everglades.

“I want something nice,” I said, watching across the street as a pallid rock-and-roll band loaded equipment behind a franchised fun bin called Big Daddy’s Lounge. “For a friend. A whole plant.” I could smell cold flowers.

“Is this a special occasion, I mean something for which we might have a price arrangement or any of them good things?” An eighty-year-old woman ought not to talk that way.

“A friend,” I said, “who’s had an accident.”

“Oh dear, what?”

“Peed on.”

“What?”

“She got peed on.”

I settled for a plant with blue flowers in a terracotta turtle; not settled, really. I liked the plant and felt good marching through the cemetery toward Elizabeth Street toward Marcelline’s, a Christian soldier. I spotted Peavey ward-heeling in front of the library and waved without eliciting one in return. I felt uplifted in some way, taking a little something to a friend who had gotten it as we all have, though seldom so directly. Then I remembered Marcelline wasn’t precisely a friend; and in fact, I didn’t know her very well. Maybe I don’t know why I felt good, beyond that the obligation of being a screaming misfit was gone, the onus of dirty money was about to lift off, and the simple motifs of poverty and Christian vengeance were starting to back-fill their absence.

Vengeance? It’s so intricate, maybe no one else would call it that. I don’t question it any more; anyone’s sources are as mysterious as spring water.

Marcelline’s house is on the dead end of William Street, what was the dead end until the fire department opened it on through for access to the wooden tinderbox houses of this old quarter, on through past the empty stables in the overgrown palm-shrouded field; so that what was once still as countryside now carried the tin murmur of Truman Avenue.

Marcelline came to the door just as my finger touched it. She had painted bright red circles on her face and was wearing fifteen or twenty rings. I could hear the radio and a teakettle at once. She said, “Hi you!”

I told her, “Fine,” then I said, “Marcelline, you look just, just—”

She said, “Go ahead.”

I said, “It’s not that, it’s—”

And she said, “I know. I’m indescribable.”

I can’t quite recall; I believe, though, she told me to come in. I did go. We bumped in the woody smell of the hallway, her bright circled cheeks in that light and the teakettle screaming now over a Spanish-language broadcast out of Miami, Havana, I don’t know. Machine-gun music.

She cried, “Is that for me!” And ran the plant into the little sitting room. She had a coffee can with a soldered spigot and babied the vegetable while I tried to figure out what I was doing there. I believed that it had to do with Catherine. The room was dim and the windows drained everything; the lines in the wooden floor ran off into the glare and you could hardly decide what was what.

“We had a plant with blue flowers in Oklahoma once. My mother took it into the cellar with us during a tornado. I had a Peter and the Wolf record and my mother had a handbag. There was this big groan and the house was gone. The plant was okay but I forgot the record when we moved to Tampa. This was on a Wednesday.”

“What was?”

“When we moved to Tampa. My mother worked for a pirate-type-atmosphere restaurant. Then she was a target for a knife thrower, and ran an addressograph. Jack-of-all-trades kind of deal I guess.”

When she sat down finally, she said, “What brought this on?”

“Thought I’d you know come on over see how things were.”

“Well, they’re not too neat.”

“I heard about your accident.”

“That’s just the end of it. The trip to New Orleans was also ratshit. I stayed out at the Cornstalks and it was full of musicians. So, I spent the whole time taking cabs into the Quarter, where you can’t get nothin any more, not even a beignet you’d want to eat. You’re better off down on Canal watching traffic. I tell you, bad luck and trouble is getting to be my middle name.”

“Well, that and a dime will get you a cup of coffee in any town in America.”

“I just want to fix up my place and kick back for about a year. I want them to be able to put the story of my life on a Wheaties box. I’m sick of junkies and dancers and triggermen.”

“They’re not going to put your unnatural conduct with Catherine on Wheaties.”

“It’s not unnatural. You ever read this Sappho?”

“Not Sappho again. You get the right Greek and you can really cover the waterfront.”

“I go straight and you see what happens. All over everything. I nail the guy where it does the most good and he starts to whine. Save it for the john, I told him. I don’t like it. So, then he tore up my place and split. I’d like to find out whose agent he is and tell his clients.”

“You know what happens when agents die? They go to ten percent heaven.”

“That helps.”

“Can I do anything?” I asked, very much in earnest.

“You’re not any more together than I am, as I hear it.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’ve made a start. Just ask me and I’ll help you out.”

“I don’t need anything. It’d be nice if you could get that agent off the key. He’s drinking at the Full Moon Saloon and that is my bar.”

“Consider it done.”

Marcelline stopped fidgeting around and rearranging and stared at me a moment, absolutely otherworldly in her red cheeks. You’d want her on your arm at some kind of fiendish ball. I resolved to take her to my seaside gala, given that I could succeed in organizing it; that is, if Catherine predictably refused me. Marcelline was a vivid primitive and that was okay with me.

“Catherine is sure that she’s a survivor. I’m just a flashy cunt. But I know a thing or two. I know what’s what.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, the street. How to stay up all night by yourself, fry okra without it getting slimy, tell when plantains are ripe. I can test coke more accurate than a lab even if it’s ether or acetone base and repair furniture without glue. But I’m not absolutely sure I’m a survivor. I might be gone in the next reel.”

“Well, I’ll get the slicker off the key and you’ll have the Full Moon back. That’ll be a step in the right direction.”

There are people anyone knows who are at times stranger to them than Hottentots. Peter and the Wolf in the storm cellar. And for me, these strangers are dangerously simple obsessions, not durable necessarily, but certainly it can get smokey. A topless dancer tells you about her paper route in Indiana. A shrimper shows you his collection of Fred Waring records. But without that, maybe you’re all by yourself. I saw an old drunk fall in front of the laundromat at Elizabeth and Fleming. He cracked his head open and made a terrible pool of blood. Someone seemed to know he wouldn’t die of it. But I looked down through spinning air filled with frangipani and rock and roll and saw how quickly you are alone, how that can be shown to you in an instant. I think for a long time that it was my business to drive this into relief, that this was what I did for my time, poured blood from my head so that strangers could form a circle. The immaculate dream of touching and holding was shed and I stood, an integer, not touched; for nothing but power. I couldn’t even name my dog. But there was something I wanted besides that; something as simple as to ache in the literal heart and chest for all of us who had lost ourselves as parents lose children, to the horizon which is finally only overtaken in remorse and in death.

I talked to a woman who told me nothing larger than the house going off in the wind and the move to Tampa and thought, Let us not try to see beyond these walls where we are taken up into the terrible stream. And then my heart could swoon from the smell of a cold-cream jar left open, a calendar with two pages needing to be turned, a handsome lady looking to get by but holding some hard secrets beautifully lacking in universality.

I thought, I can handicap the track on this whole shit-heel civilization and truck paychecks till doomsday. It’s like taking candy from a baby. But I want that cracked thumbnail, the graze of wildly disingenuous eyes upon my own, breasts suspended in the frame of arms, and level thighs drifting toward each other into the dark.

Because then I’m happy. I wanted Marcelline as absolutely as I knew I would do nothing about it. It starts with a gesture you remember from somewhere else: a girl chipping the map of Czechoslovakia into the polish of her fingernail. And in my hope of immaculacy, my Catholic childhood enshrouded within, I brained myself with the thought of her pulling the T-shirt over her head, the skirt unwound, each leg over an arm of the chair. And yes, me, at the business end of where it counted.

* * *

I last saw my brother Jim at a mental hospital where he had a small, decent room with a poster of me on the wall and which, don’t ask me why, I couldn’t bear to see there. It was the famous one of me climbing out of the elephant to sword-fight the pitching machine. He had hospital corners on his neatly made bed, a toothbrush in a glass, paperbacks, and a spiral notebook.

We walked around the grounds and he gazed with happy awe at me and told his ineffable, funny stories about the other patients, stories told with the sense of humor that is the mirror of pain, the perfect mirror, not the trick mirror of satirists. We had a long talk about our mother and father, about Roxy and our uncles. Then I flew to Stockholm to do a show. Jim was due out of the bin in three days. A week later, full of morphine, he smothered to death on a plastic-covered mattress. I came home and the last I saw of him he was lying next to a Lithuanian, who, after eating cat food for three years in a Miami hotel, jumped out of its window. I said Jim was Jim and they filled out his tag.

I thought, they’ll fill out mine and Marcelline’s and Catherine’s too; which thought makes you tolerate every creep on earth. And I considered how Catherine had had enough. Well, hadn’t we all. You are always up against those who ask, Why go into it? and the smart set who tell you, musically, That’s how it is.

Wondering what I am doing here makes me behave as I have, which is a matter of record. Like Ulysses S. Grant, it was an instance of a village crank being called by his Republic; I found myself in the consciousness traffic, hawking a certain ugliness on a cash-and-carry basis. It took me a little while to get the bugs out; and after that, I was lethal.

See, in Key West, we were an old family that had lost its money … Marcelline was at the window. I want her to open herself for me without this fashionably veterinary innocence. This stuff is wicked and sinful and everyone knows it.

Marcelline, please.

* * *

I buried Jim. The rest of the family did needlepoint of ineffectuality to show how we’d gone broke. Jim was in an open casket, deferring to barbarism that mattered to his friends and our family. There were beaucoup whores and sorry-looking junkies, past masters at turning blue, who marched to the casket and then didn’t know what to do with themselves, chins abashedly on chests, and fingers laced over their lower abdomens. As always, I positioned myself among the mourners, third from the left. I saw the body for days without so much as being reminded of Jim, a real effigy. Then when Catherine was with me and the funeral parlor was empty, I saw behind the cosmetics and cold smell of the flowers, the same smell when I’d bought the flowers for Marcelline; well, I saw. I felt something physical rack through and Catherine took hold of me. And I had this thought which was, I guess, a watershed: That’s him all right and he’s dead.

But once you get the idea finally that what dead means is the end and no one is coming back, once you know that as opposed to having heard about it and having coppered your bet with a few well-chosen coins of stupidity, then you don’t care so much about your own any more. I don’t anyway.

* * *

“I can’t see why you brought me flowers.”

“It was an impulse. I think I’m trying to get close to Catherine again. And she cares about you and for example worries about the wrigglers in your cistern as well as her own. But the flowers are just for you too.”

“Are you jealous of us?”

“No.”

“Because it’s just this little thing, you know.”

“Okay.”

“I gather that at the end there you just went slap impossible on her.”

“I did that. I believed myself though. I thought if I turned myself into enough of a goblin, everybody would come out and say what they had on their minds. Ha ha ha. What did I know.”

“And gettin paid a lot with all kind of trash goin after you. Which you loved.”

“I didn’t hide that.”

“And bringin it back to Catherine until there wasn’t any pride left. New York chippies high-siding her.”

“Yes, it was very bad. Is she gay now?”

“We’re all just sick of you.”

“You didn’t know though how grand it was to go home to somebody who knew you for the asshole you were, that relief.”

“Well,” said Marcelline, “it got old.”

“Sure.”

“For instance you coming in with these flowers to do me up.”

“That isn’t true. I came because I felt badly about what that clown did and because I felt guilty that I thought it was funny. And I wanted to surround Catherine.”

“She still loves you but I don’t foresee her having a single thing to do with you. She put up with you right up to where you had become a real animal and a national disgrace.”

“That was the height of my career.”

“It was sick. You were a depraved pervert.”

“Everybody calls me that.”

“I wasn’t going for originality.”

“Did you ever turn tricks?” I asked her.

“For a little while.”

I said, “How’d you like it? Turning tricks is how I saw my job.”

“I dunno. This was out of a steak-and-brew joint in St. Augustine. It was real different, I guess.”

“Strung out?”

“Yup, and sixteen. I was geezing speed. Later, crossroads and quackers. Up and down.”

“Ever happy?”

“Quite often.”

“Ever ask yourself what you are doing here?” I was waiting.

“All the time.”

“How far do you get with the question?”

“Nowhere.”

I started wandering around the place, halfheartedly looking for a spot to take a leak. I was off on a tangent. Marcelline held electrical fingernails to the light and I thought, Jim knew what ailed me but died and never said. And what ailed him? The horizon.

“The thing of it is,” said Marcelline, “is that we want to talk and we want to fuck one another and if we fucked one another we’d talk better but we’re not gonna fuck and I wonder how come.”

I replied brilliantly, “We’re being faithful to Catherine!” She smiled and then laughed like a valkyrie.

“Now and again,” she said, “I see you looking at me and I can make out what you want and I feel bad about that.”

“I’m not neglected.”

“I mean, I’d do it.”

“I would too,” I said, “only we won’t.”

“I’m not even that sore from my trip, but I’m just not going to.”

“It gets curiouser and curiouser.”

“Did Catherine stay on the other day after I left?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it was kind of nothing, kind of flippant, kind of see-you-next-time.”

“Everybody was confused after you nailed yourself up. I wasn’t impressed with that particular lulu by the way.”

I don’t know what I cared to do at that moment. I really hadn’t come for any but the described reasons. Which was not to say that Marcelline wasn’t a leggy, otherworldly beauty, trailing her dubious dreams and pastel whoredom like a pretty kite.

When she picked up the phone, it seemed it could have been for anything. But she called Catherine. I felt immediately embarrassed, as though I had stressed the acquaintanceship with Marcelline into something I hadn’t any right to. She told Catherine that I’d come over and been most, even more than, distinctly, a gentleman; but how would it be, now be honest, if she and I did get it on. It was perfectly all right with Catherine and I cannot pretend that that didn’t hurt my feelings. I was worrying over things I hadn’t cared about in years.

“Having it happen like this,” I said, still staring at the now inert and cradled black phone, “is flat strange.”

“I’ve got a nice little cunt you’re gonna be just crazy about.”

“Fine, if I can. For years, I have to tell you, the only thing that excited me was to have someone fake an orgasm.”

“Do you have a problem?”

“Just with suddenness.”

“How about with guys?”

“I don’t with guys.”

“Scares you?”

“It’s not there. Or I’d act it out. But I’m glad somebody likes it, so a possibility doesn’t go to waste.”

She was sitting in front of me, and put her hand up inside herself thoughtless as she talked. I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chain saw.

Marcelline tugged her top off and really started fooling with my mind. She loved herself and that just does it to me, pride of that kind.

She put some music on—Tejas by Z Z Top, I think, something hard — stood up, and slid out of the rest of her duds. I was transfixed, all my general views gone, everything withering to make room for the present, the furious rifle vision which riddles everything, that madhouse of what seems like a good idea at the time.

I had come with the flowers in addition to my usual maladies, been touched, and now found myself just as addled as thrilled. My mental focus left like water for her to swim in; and suddenly we were on the floor and she was slipping away and I’m thinking, I can settle this. And then I thought about Catherine and how it could be when it was with someone you loved. This was the girl from the storm cellar.

She said, “You’ve got premature ejaculator written all over you.” I glanced into mid-air.

I felt completely there for it; but the feeling of the inside of her ran up spreading through me like swallowing hot soup upside down. I looked down, as I do, and thought, as I am afraid I do, that she couldn’t get away. But she had some little movement that ought to be against the law. And I was grateful, wondering where my old vanity had gone, when it was always my benificence that I thought was on the line, not these glorious collisions. The earlier theater between Marcelline and me evaporated and it all grew dead serious; and probably, objectively, maybe even a trifle grotesque, as in knotty and wet and uncoordinated.

About then Catherine walked in.

She said, “I’m just so sorry but I can’t help it and I don’t know but I’m hurt.” And began to cry. I rolled back. Marcelline stood up, that preening quality gone so that she looked a little gawky with defeated breasts and foolishly decorated cheeks. As for me, I felt elegant. I hadn’t forced or even thought about the possibility of this disclosure except when hurt at her handing out permission. Now I was flattered and happy and wanted to take these lovely women to dinner and use my genius, which I have, to make them happy.

“Do you feel betrayed?” Marcelline asked Catherine.

“It’s just that this spastic cocksucker was once my old man and I’ve got some reactions left.”

I said, “I love you.”

“Well, I can’t begin to process that.”

Marcelline said, “He’s all right to fuck.”

“Yeah,” said Catherine, “I tried it and you shut up about it. There’s something inside of him nobody can face.” I wanted to know what that was, though I suspected that my enormous evasions had culminated in some ghastly suck hole. Still, I had faced a lot. The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.

Marcelline looked distressed. She said, “I feel like sewing it shut.”

“I just had to go and spoil it,” said Catherine.

“He’s been real wholesome. You could take him anywhere.”

“Ever see him with his teeth out?” Catherine asked.

“Huh-uh.”

“Take your teeth out, champ.”

I did.

Marcelline said, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

Catherine shouldn’t have asked me to do that. I was tempted to get creepy. I feel not the same with my teeth out and I look frightful and as if I had nothing to lose.

Catherine headed for the john and Marcelline sat in front of me and touched my legs. Catherine shouted, “Get your hands off him. If necessary, I’ll ball him.”

“Don’t say ‘ball’!” said Marcelline.

“Please be friends,” I said.

“We are, in spite of you.”

“I didn’t try to make trouble.”

“Cath, we had your blessing,” said Marcelline.

“I know, sweetie, but I wasn’t here and my mind was acting up and now the animal knows I’m still carrying this torch.”

“Why shouldn’t I know?”

“Because depraved perverts misuse personal information.”

“Would it help if I put my clothes on?” I asked.

“No, think of yourself as an Arab tent boy. Oh, you are a lovely man.”

“He is.”

“But finally you’re not good. You don’t like people, you like mobs. You’re a lovely mob-loving rotter.”

I ruefully watched Marcelline dress. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ve lost interest. Why don’t you all let me be for now. The both of you, ándale! Call me from El Paso.”

So then, Catherine and I were walking down the street again like old times and I was happy. Even the bus fumes smelled good. A filling station had become a Cuban sandwich shop overnight and I was vastly charmed by that. And it seemed bracing that Marcelline had thrown us both out, the little whore.

“Well, how did you like it?”

“Whussat?” I asked absently.

“The nooky.”

“Oh, good, great, very nice indeed.” I was running this on savoir faire. Catherine was irate and I was completely happy over it. “You seem displeased. It’s a trifle.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Every Thursday this marine biologist and I meet and fuck around the clock. Are you happy for me?”

“I’ve been murdered.”

Here was one of my vices, but I’m bored without them.

Catherine was strong and smart. I loved her and she was the only thing I couldn’t have. I knew that what she claimed to see inside me was actually there. She is not a liar. I am both a liar and a forgetter. Moreover, I feel it in there, a streak of something that’s never gotten any satisfaction.

I used to believe that if I really blew my gourd with ladies, such things would be worked out in little-theater form. Somebody called it the twitching of three abdominal nerves. Who knows.

I was carrying her down the street in my arms with my tongue in her ear. She made me put her down. I took out my teeth and gaped at pedestrians. It was all like before and I had a girlfriend.

* * *

Question: was Catherine a looker? I think handsome at least. Certainly no traffic stopper. Her upper lip was a little turned back and mildly insolent. But she had silvery eyes, drawn in the corners. She looked self-owned, cheerfully fierce, and ready to rock and roll. In our time together, she was often stern with me. She said I used those old drugs too much. But, given the objective conditions of our lives, how can we avoid taking the drugs? It’s our only defense against information.

When I was down and out and ugly, Catherine could hold me when no one else could, and keep on holding me when there was absolutely no one, including me, prepared to claim it was worth it. She left me when two things came together like an eclipse: I was in good health and had behaved unforgivably. When I thought about her wanting to get out, I can only imagine that the combination must have seemed a long time coming.

As for her penchant for telling the bald truth, I’m not sure that it is a virtue. Cooking did not interest her very much; I loved sleeping with her not only for her fanciful approach but for her fucking back. Sadly, the more legendary I became, the more I neglected this and everything else. We ended quickly in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, down the hall from Francis Ford Coppola’s majestic quarters, quick because of her power. She left and I who had become, among other things, ruthless, and an absolute cretin, thought at first — I who had ignored her—“I will die of this.” I couldn’t have been more of a pig.

Instead, I slobbered, wept, crawled, and from time to time called room service for kiddie plates and gin. I masturbated endlessly and in some instances projected Catherine in humiliating variations on Leda and the Swan in which the featured players were a gruesome wattled turkey, an ostrich; never a swan, just the worst, most terrible birds.

Before she could leave town, I caught her in the Russian Tea Room eating salad behind dark glasses. She was on something and I could tell the waiters had been having a problem. I had never seen her like this. I thought she was ruined and that I had done it.

I took her back to the hotel, walking her through a corner of Central Park where a Puerto Rican folkloric festival was taking place. She kept saying, “Aren’t they damned good?” In the morning, she showered and split, apologizing crisply for the trouble, leaving an afterimage of her burnishing her face with a cloth and cold water, organizing her purse, adjusting her stockings out of my sight, and leaving her smell in three out of four rooms like an avenging angel.

I yelled down the corridor, risking annoyance to the ministers and personnel of Francis Ford Coppola, “Are we finished?”

“You bet your life,” she said and covered her face. Back in the room, I pulled a chair up to the radiator, sat with my knees to the heat, and looked at the asylum city. I began to try to summarize what was happening to me; but I could only think: This time the pus is everywhere.

* * *

We were still walking, taking in the chronicles of street repair from cobble to tar along upper William.

“By letting everything fall apart,” said Catherine, “featuring your career and livelihood, are you attempting to demonstrate that such truck is beneath you?”

“It’s not that, Catherine.”

“They are totally beneath you.”

“I disagree. I quit because I felt unpleasant. Demonstrating awfulness breaks down important organs and valuable coupons.”

“You’re addressing the multitudes again.”

“Yes, could be so. It’s reflexive.”

She smiled, very slightly triumphant, but not unkind.

“You women,” I said.

“Oh, boy.”

“Dragging me down. Pussy, job talk, intrigues. You’re not like the fellows, you cunts.”

“Women the only trouble you had?” she inquired.

“No, slapped up a bit by the po-lice. Threats from Counselor Peavey. Other than that, it’s pretty nice. Plenty of ozone. Catherine?”

“What.”

“Have I become pathetic?”

“A little, I have to say.”

“The other day there, was that a mercy fuck? I want to know.”

“Yeah, a little mercy. A little auld lang syne and just enough bum’s rush to give it an edge.”

This crack got me hot. You watch it, I thought.

“There wasn’t any edge for me,” I said. “It was like fucking a horse collar. Fall through, you’d tangle your ankles.”

I thought I was ready but she brought one up from the floor and moused me good under the eye. She had more slick and wicked sucker punches than Fritzie Zivic. We walked on while my face beat like a tomtom.

“Remember that morning we went to get married?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did we?”

“I don’t think so. I can check through my papers if you’d like. But I don’t think so.”

We had now cut a pointless zigzag to Whitehead and ducked into the Pigeon Patio and got a table facing the Coast Guard station. We ordered a couple of wine coolers.

“You working Marcelline for tips on me?” she asked.

“Nope.” I bit a thick Cuban cracker and it sucked all the saliva out of my mouth. I pegged the rest of it to a bird who carried it to a sewer grate and dropped it through. That one’s going back to Cuba. “But I was on the trail.”

“I can’t have it, and if you knew the state I’ve been in, you wouldn’t press.”

“How’s your love life?” I, a Catholic, asked.

“The last one is living in the Dominican Republic with his wife. She is a jockey. Every horse’s ass should have his own jockey. I was raised to think women did not become jockeys.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

She said, “Can’t buy a thrill. How about you?”

“Will you go for pain?”

“Hell, yes.”

“How about hatred of dead losses and hope of something better.”

“I’ll buy it. Any others?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to point out my inability to stand having nothing that began long ago. Also we have sickness in the head and my failure to name my dog. We have no money, enemies at every turn, nuns haunting my house, evaporating lists of friends, the dark, family dead, and dead this and dead that and killing everything and killing time—”

“Shut up you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I will. I want a doctor.”

“So I don’t want to hear this.”

“If I had the right tubes I could have a baby. Get me a doctor.”

“Oh fuck you.”

“I just want to start somewhere,” I said.

“So do I,” she said and by now tears were pouring down her face. I was, I guess, choking.

“But do it my way. Admit to yourself that you wasted so much of your life that not enough of it can be saved to matter. Then pull into yourself far enough that you can stand it and hang on until it’s over.”

“Oh, shit,” she said from her tormented face, and got up from the table. I didn’t have it to watch her go.