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him.
    But finally my legs began to prickle and go numb, and I turned my face into his neck and said into his ear, a bubble of laughter catching in my throat, “And I was actually going to ask you if you were having an affair.”
    He began to quiver against me, as I have felt him do before a hundred times when he laughs silently after love, and I began to laugh, too. I stretched myself as far as I could, like a cat, laughing against the side of his face, rubbing his shaking shoulders, giddy and nerveless with completion and relief.
    It was not until I felt the wetness on my neck, a small rivulet of it coursing slowly down the slope of my breast, that I realized he was crying.

CHAPTER TWO
    H ER NAME WAS SHERI SCROGGINS. She was an assist-ant attorney in Coca-Cola’s legal department, thirty-two years old, estranged from her viciously Pente-costal family in the Florida Panhandle, divorced seven years from her citizens’ militiaman husband, childless, possessed of a naturally acute legal mind and prodigious ambition, and definitely on Coca-Cola’s inside fast track.
    Tee wanted to marry her.
    At dawn, through a ringing in my ears that sounded as if I’d stood too near a great explosion, I heard myself say in a tinny, puzzled voice, “How on earth can you marry her, Tee?
    Then she’d be Sheri Redwine.”
    Tee turned away from the window, where he’d been watching day break over Ansley Park (But how could dawn come? How could the sun rise on such a morning as this?), and said, “I might have known you’d make a joke of this, Molly.”
    If I could have felt pain through the stupid numbness that enveloped me, I would have flinched at his words. I had not been making a joke. I had meant just what I’d said: It seemed to me in my craziness that Tee simply could not marry a woman whose name ever
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    afterward would be a bibulous joke. I had thought perhaps it had not yet occurred to him.
    We had talked for hours. Or rather, Tee had talked. Talked, wept, talked, wept some more, talked and talked and talked.
    It was as if someone had pulled a stopper out of him. He sat on the side of our bed and babbled words that had, for a long time, no meaning to me, because they were about people I did not know. I said nothing, because nothing occurred to me. I sat half shrouded in crackling plastic wrap, sensing rather than feeling the small frown between my brows, leaning closer to him every now and then so that I could hear him better, so that perhaps some of this tidal wave of urgent, tear-borne words might make some sense. Grandma Bell could not have done it better. Every now and then I could feel my head shake from side to side, no, no, in a small gesture more of incomprehensibility than anguish. Anguish was not a part of that night. Anguish presupposes understanding.
    I did not know this man who wept on the side of my bed, and I did not know what he was saying.
    Teddy had a biology project in his freshman year at Westminster in which he studied the effect of strong emotion on the human body. I remembered that one effect of great shock and fear was the widening of the pupil to admit all possible daylight, so that the ensuing brightness could better illuminate danger. I thought now that it was true. The bedroom where we sat was very bright, even though no daylight had paled the windows on to the garden yet. I seemed smothered, and floated in a buzzing, shifting cloud of radiant mist. Sometimes I could see so clearly through it that the stubble on Tee’s chin stood out like cuttings in a hay field; sometimes he all but disappeared. Occasionally I could UP ISLAND / 39
    hear words and sentences with the clarity of gunshots in a silent forest, but mostly I sat and watched his mouth move and the tears run down his face, and could not hear what he was saying.
    I sat and nodded and nodded, tilting my head to hear, my hands folded in my lap, as the stray words dived out of the mist at me, pecking like scavenger