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plan—was to rip her in two. That’s what her church friend Evangeline, who’d married at seventeen and left school, said it was like. Marion saw her at the Sunday social two weeks after the wedding where Vangy had worn her mother’s heavy dress, weighed five pounds. She and Vangy carried their plates slick with watermelon juice from the tables and snuck down to the Willow Run Creek and Vangy had said, Oh, Marion, wait long as you can. I’m riven in two and I never knew from such pain like a hot poker stuck. Each time like wire sticking in me. Don’t relent till you can’t wait for a baby a moment longer. Once I get two children I’m turning face to the wall in bed each night and just he try and make me lay still for him one more time. Just he try.
     
    M R. L ANIGAN, Gent Joe, took her to lunch twice more that week. They spoke again, and at length, of his poor wife, buffered in cotton balls, glossed with ointments, wrapped tight like a swaddled baby, eyes glazed over with narcotics. And then, as they shook their napkins of crumbs and settled into tea at the end of the third lunch, he looked across the table and said, “And, Mrs. Seeley, how is your Dr. Seeley? How does he come to be so far from your side?”
    Marion had been lifting her teacup and as the words struck her ear, for they did strike and with some force, the handle slid round her finger and slid from the crook her fingers made and cracked in two perfect pieces on the table. A chip flew in Marion’s eye and her lashes rustled against and a spot of blood flecked up and starred her brow.
    It was all so terrible, with the crash and clatter and Joe Lanigan rushing round to assist her and the waitress walking her, more than half blind, to the ladies’ parlor to flood her eye under the sink, head cracking the sink twice, water running everywhere, even down her uniform, sopping her chest and trickling deep between her breasts and rivuleting down to her belly.
    (For hours afterward, with each blink she’d think the porcelain pock was still there, still there and scraping, ridging her eye with each flutter.)
    Riding from the tearoom in his motorcar, her hair slipping from beneath her scarf, she told him she couldn’t, no, couldn’t come to lunch again on Monday. And, far more, she would not be able to take up his recent invitation to attend, as his new friend,the birthday revels of one Ephraim Solway, a fellow Knight, in the banquet room of the El Royale Hotel.
    She could not fathom what had come over her that had let it go and go and go. Sitting in restaurants together, legs sweeping against legs, hand on her back, the center of it, fingertips there, as she seated herself. It was dreadful. It was unforgivable at the core. In her head, she began formulating a letter to Dr. Seeley. (How was it now she could only think of him as “Dr. Seeley”? The longer he was away, the more impossible to name that looming absence “Everett,” much less some coo-cooing term, as she might let slip from her lips in their sweetest times, their private afternoons, he pressing his face gentle into her hair and calling her his darling, his dimple-cheeked dearest. When were those times?)
    Yes, she told herself, she would write Dr. Seeley directly, chronicle the whole series of luncheons, and make him understand she’d stumbled—foolishly, yes, but she was young and all by herself and in a strange place for so long—into something improper and found her way out quickly, before a single observer could disapprove.
    Oh, Dr. Seeley, you alone in fierce surroundings, tending nobly to the ruined lungs of sad-eyed Cornish miners, their own days trapped under bauxite, silver, manganese miles thick, nights spent brining their grief in sugarcane liquor. Oh, Dr. Seeley, your sacrifices so great and your soul beating off the dark furies inside you, that depthless, dooming taste for the needle and its bloom? Your sufferings so immense, and here I sit in comparative comfort and ease,