In fact, when he considered it with this new clarity, he realized he'd been able to concentrate well since he'd been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration - his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film - had left him continuously agitated. And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself. well, it's a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see.' and you're not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker. They don't believe they're going to die Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy But if you really see it. 'Exactly, but it's deeper even than that. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul. He told about houses and how he loved them about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. Talking about his life here had been a little easier - explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was. What I'm saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it's dead, absolutely unequivocally dead. I'm talking about ordinary people in the modern world.
Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn't want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go. He had entirely lost sight of the fact that she was the woman who'd rescued him that is, a strong sense of her character had obliterated that vague impersonal excitement he'd felt on first meeting her, and now he was making mad fantasies about her in his head. It was like what was supposed to happen with sex, but seldom if ever did. He realized that he had never had his knowledge of a human being commence at such a pitch, and plunge so deep so fast.