236
PAUL NEUBURG
explained for her on the phone and grabbed things quickly in the
shop, and he was getting hot.
"Go to hell," she said. "With your logic." His working self, logic.
Unbreakable. That was all he was.
He made no reply. The refrigerator was the only clean place,
so he put everything in there, the salt and the bread and the tins
too. Then he got on with the room. Soon it was empty and he was
preparing to clean it.
He'd piled the furniture into the other room, surrounding
Nancy. It filled her space, her blue space. The bed and the mattress
against the wall, the rest all around. Shutting her in, hostile and
foreign, not her own. He'd put them there, and she couldn't stop
him. She'd never be able to stop him, working, breaking her blue
space with logic. That was all he was, thinking at work. 0 drop
dead.
He'd found the bucket, and filled it with hot water, and squirt–
ed in some of the topjob thing.
"Leave it," she said.
"Just the floor, lightly, so we can put things back, then I'll be
with you."
"I mean leave it." Her voice sank. "Drop it. Go home. Go eat
with them. Go somewhere, you're going somewhere, that's what
you are."
"What's the matter?"
"I can't stand you. You think too much, all the time. And you're
so sure, you're deadly. And you'll never try anything, because you
know, you just know."
"Stop that, Nancy. You wanted us to sit and talk, not fight.
Just wait a little and I'll be with you."
"With me, you'll never be with me, not my way. You've ruined
the whole thing. That's all you can do. Think and destroy it. I hate
you."
Dave bent down for the bucket. But he couldn't ignore her.
She was running now, running from him, and even before he'd told
her, running from just what he was. Tensed up with her smoke to
hysterics, everything much larger, more sudden. He had to tell her,
and stay firm, or she'd just run, back into herself, the one direction
she knew, and no way to reach her.
"Nancy, you phoned me because you wanted help so we can
