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looked at her as if she had dropped from another planet to invade their private world. Neither of them spoke.
    â€œI didn’t mean to interrupt,” Hazel said, addressing Elaine. “I just came back to help Dr. Foster pour up an inlay . . . My, it’s certainly hot, isn’t it?”
    Elaine blinked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
    â€œA perfect day for the beach.”
    â€œYes, I thought so too. Apparently I was wrong.” She buttoned the little bolero she wore over her yellow linen sundress, and slung the rope straps of her beach purse over her left shoulder. “Well, I’ll be going now, Gordon. I don’t want to interfere with anything you and Hazel had planned.”
    â€œI’ll take you out to the car.”
    â€œDon’t bother. I’m quite accustomed to finding my way around alone.” She walked down the hall to the back door, passing Hazel without a glance. “When you’re ready to come home, Gordon, give me a call.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œUnless you’d prefer a nice long walk.”
    Gordon colored. “I’ll walk.”
    â€œGood. And I’ll have a pot of coffee waiting for you. You like coffee so much.”
    She closed the door behind her very softly to indicate to Gordon that she was not in the least angry.
    She went out into the court, past the goldfish pond and the lantana hedges, holding her head high, looking like a real doctor’s wife. But when she reached the sidewalk she began to tremble so violently that she could hardly walk. She stood for a moment and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. Behind her closed lids there were no pictures, only a moving mass of colors, the reds of rage, the grays of terror.
    Gordon turned to Hazel. “Don’t say anything.”
    â€œI had no inten—”
    â€œIn fact, it might be a good idea if you went home.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNow.”
    â€œAll right.”
    When both the women were gone, he began to whistle again.

4
    From a distance Hazel’s house looked like a small white box set right against the foot of the mountains in a grove of live-oak trees. But as Hazel drove up Castillo Street the box enlarged into a house, the live-oak trees stepped back a hundred yards into their proper place, and the mountains were six or seven miles away, the color of violets seen through frosted glass.
    Hazel had lived in the town all her life. When she was a child she liked to believe that these mountains were the highest in the world, roadless, inaccessible, to be climbed only by daring men with ropes and pickaxes and spiked boots. It was quite a disappointment to her when her brother Harold, at the age of ten, accompanied his Boy Scout troop on a weekend trip to the Lookout Tower and returned unharmed. Harold reported great dangers, some real, like poison oak and rattlesnakes, some imagined, like tigers and man-eating plants; but he had worn ordinary gym shoes and no one in the party had carried a pickaxe.
    Hazel stepped out of the car and the roadless, inaccessible mountains were blue dwarfs of hills. She opened the gate of the picket fence and crossed the back yard, stepping carefully around the gopher holes and the clusters of nettles that stung like wasps, ducking to avoid the spider webs spun from the tangle of geraniums to the clothesline, and waiting while a lizard shimmied across her path into the safety of the anise weeds which had grown large as shrubs beside the wall of the garage. Cross­ing the back yard was as hazardous as Harold’s trip up the mountain. When Hazel was feeling a little depressed, and consequently vulnerable to superstition and guilt, she believed that her back yard, with all its sprawling re­production and confusion of nature, was getting back at her for certain lapses in her own life.
    She had tried once to explain it to George: “It’s like the minute my back is turned, things happen —you