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antelope? If I could kill her monstrous guile, as in mythology, by pushing a lump of lead down her throat to be melted by her fiery breath, I would. How different their Akeru from our castle high—Talcilla—which Talbot and I created—did Talcilla exist only in my imagination? A ritual, a convention, a method of defense, a means of transmuting instinctive impulses to find expression in more appropriate ways—a standard method of control in which impulses and instinct are, as it were, tamed and allowed symbolicexpression the world respects? Which castle is real? I torment myself—was it because Talbot possessed an unusual combination of qualities, rather than one particular attribute? Was the tension between these opposites and the need to resolve this tension the motivating force that drove him to create The Rules—Akeru—seek a queen for his realm? My beloved, bewitched into a Minotaur with the head of a bull living in the body of a man, devouring any person or thing as he lives in a paradise with this Bee person. It is she who is his Muse, not I, she who possesses his creative spirit, illuminating his body and mind with pleasures; as abandoned in a labyrinth of pain and misery I am torn asunder, the flesh of my heart they feed on. How can I not deny She is true Wife—not I. To her—no Minotaur—but beloved King Jupiter. And Talcilla not the logos—Akeru. Oh the bitterness—the betrayal—with what objects had he surrounded her? Had he insisted on selecting the clothes, the jewels she wore, as he had with me? I must stop or I’ll go mad.
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    P RISCILLA FELL INTO DEEP SLEEP , and when she woke she looked at the cache of pills, dazed to feel something like—hope? curiosity? dream/hallucination? Whatever it was had been awfully good—better than anything.
    The cat jumped onto her lap and sat staring at her. She replaced the cap on the vial of pills. She got up to pour the cat some milk.
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    B Y NEXT MORNING , reading and rereading the letters, I’d worked myself back into hysteria.The letters became the only reality, and reality became dream as I put them in my suitcase and hurriedly left Easton for our house in New York.
    My housekeeper Phoebe, after greeting me, retreated into silence, interested only in doing her job serving me my meals as requested, on a tray in the library in front of the fireplace, and making certain seasonal flowers were replenished in the rooms looking out over the river.
    The bedroom I shared with Talbot had been lacquered and layered to simulate the shades of a seashell we’d found on a beach in Africa. A silvered screen painted with flamingoes he’d placed at an angle so the Balthus painting of a girl hanging over our bed, her legs stretched apart on a divan, acat by her side, would be only partly visible on entering the room. I lay there under it, reliving the last time Talbot and I had been in New York, shortly before his death, to attend a charity function. I’d been on edge, as he’d been in one of his moods—distant, withdrawn on that brief trip, detached, until weeks later, on a business trip to Rio, in sudden desire on our way out the door, late to attend a business meeting, he pulled me back into our room at the hotel, closed the shutters against the blaze of noon and forced entry into me from behind, a form of lovemaking I detested but which I had come to adjust to, as, mercifully, he infrequently required it of me. But distasteful as it was, it once again restored me into an image of myself I could believe in.
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    T HE POISON OF JEALOUSY consumes Priscilla as she acknowledges Bee to be Wife she was incapable of being. She brooded on the energy put into years creating a castle high that never existed. It was Bee who possessed the living, vibrant, passionate sexual side of the Talbot Priscilla had smugly believed belonged only to her. She could not deny it—Bee had won.
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