JOHNSHEA
203
suffer. "How can I tell him how I feel, how I want to be with him?
Now. Always."
He stood up and paced back and forth between the table and
the refrigerator. "I could never write it for you." He shook his head.
"Dictation? It's not that it would be like French class, but ... there
you'd be, spilling out your feelings, with
me
like an eavesdropper, a
sneak, writing it all down." Bending to her, his hands trembling
slightly on the tabletop, he looked into her eyes. "Look. I
know
you. I
don't know him. There's a difference."
"I know, I know. You're right. It was a crazy idea. Crazy." She
took a few moments to let a long sigh escape. "It's just that I feel so
cut off, so helpless to do anything real. I sat there earlier, holding his
letter-and it meant nothing to me. And I looked at what I had just
written and knew it would mean nothing to him." Abruptly, she
covered her face with her hands.
"It
does
mean something. Both of them do," he said quietly. He
sat down again and waited for her to speak, or for something more
momentous or apt to strike him. She looked so distraught.
"Terry, I'm so ashamed ... so ashamed." She did not look up at
him. Her voice was a whisper. "I can't believe I asked you to do it. It
was selfish and . . . ."
"No, don't say that," he said, touching her shoulder. He wanted
to give her a "big smile" when she pulled her hands away and looked
dolefully at him, but he felt it would have been false. He would not
pretend
to
have a solution. Instead, he tried to appear as steady and
strong as a sympathetic friend, whatever
that
entailed. He sensed
some confusion of his own. "He knows what you mean, even if he
doesn't always know what you're saying."
He escorted her to the door.
It
was getting late, and the dishes
from his hasty, unexciting meal were waiting unforgivingly in the
sink. When she had gone, he told himself, he would turn back to his
own minor headaches and minor joys. But without a word, as they
stood for a moment at the door, she took his hand in both of
hers - soft and cool- and pressed it. Then he was alone. But for the
rest of the night his thoughts were of her.
v
He found himself being drawn more and more deeply into the
affair. His own mundane existence of libraries and notes and pain-
