DRIVER
"Just for five minutes. I want to talk to you."
"All right, talk to me."
"Not in the car.
Please.
I can't think in the car."
"You said you wanted to talk. Make up your mind."
Muriel started to weep.
501
With my feet on earth, my head emptied automatically. The
night stung and shone. Something of that cold clarity may have
prompted her words; of those distances, too, without a sense of which
the starry sky would be just another town on a hillside, soon to be
entered and left behind. I tried to take her hand. These were things
she did not need to tell me. At one point a silence fell, long enough
for a small oblivious animal to amble past us on the icy road. I
looked wistfully after
it.
At last we were heading home. "You can keep the house,"
I said.
"You haven't understood, Walker," said Muriel in a higher,
sadder voice than usual. "I don't want you to
go.
I don't love him–
yet. But you're driving me to it."
"Driving you?" I stepped on the accelerator, wanting to tum
it into a joke. "You mean like this?"
The car jolted forward.
"Yes!" Muriel screamed. "Exactly like this!"
Then, in our lights, two amber-green eyes were glowing. I
pulled out of the creature's way. We turned over.
Muriel was not killed-I have never killed a living thing. But
there was no further question of staying together. And early the
following summer she and her new husband were drowned in a
storm on Lake Tahoe.
Towards my next car, as towards the next and the next and the
next, I felt a kind of disabused tolerance. Each could have been my
heavy, middle-aged person-not yet a source of suffering, no longer
a source of delight.
In fact I have nothing more to relate except the incident which
decided me, some weeks ago, to write these pages. Today I wonder
if
what I have set down leads anywhere, let alone to that warm,
bright morning.
I had bought a convertible-not that it promised to change
