Stephen. I have said he was loving, fair, kind, gentle. I have said that people from his office told me he was efficient, demanding, intolerant of mistakes. Their view of him was different from mine. Still, thinking about him, I feel the tenderness toward him, such a good person. And yet, and yet. I saw what I wanted to see? He wasn’t like that? It was a role? It was a role he played at work? He had depths I did not know about, and surfaces as well? He was a different person from the one I knew? Did I make him up?

Yes, of course I made him up; that is not so difficult to see, or to admit. I deliberately made him into nothing. I made everyone up. No one was what I saw; perhaps they responded to what I saw, but no one really was that. Each of them, Stephen, Katie, Elliott, my mother, the business people at the dinner parties, their wives, each of them was something entirely different. I made them up, gave them characters from within my own tiny view, assessed them, made them into people I knew. I simplified them. And then I reacted to what I had made up, behaved as if what I had invented was real. And of course they did the same to me. Absurd. It must always be like looking into a mirror, seeing what is recognizable through a particular set of eyes, not seeing the rest because it is shapeless without the eye’s ability to form it. Of course. It was very clear. One could accept everything, knowing that. Yes, this is the person before me, this is the person I live with, or who is my friend, or my child, this is the person I see, this is what he’s like, except you have to understand I just made that up, he’s not like that at all, this isn’t what he sees, or how other people see him, this is all just my idea.

And so now I can see Katie and listen to her, understanding or not what she is saying, and say, “This is what she is offering to me, this is the face she is presenting, diluted and changed by my own face, this is what we have. I can accept that as long as I know it.” She looks at me, she sees — God knows what — and she understands that small part and thinks it is the whole, or the essential root at least. Within those limits of misperception, we are together and that is all right.

I am glad Katie came, just so that I could understand that; it makes many things more clear. But, and it is an indication of my present confusion, I see that if Katie hadn’t come, there would have been no need to realize it, and nothing would have been lost.