"But they interest you. They are your drugs. I could not give you that. It is I who gave you something plain. I am not a drug."

She looked at the grey blond hair on the nape of his neck, and felt almost capable of staying at his side while he experienced his passion for Sabina. But she was too certain that the body of Sabina would triumph. They were better matched in violence. But what would become of the tender Jay she had known?

So she said: "I must go and see my children. Adele is ill."

"Whatever you do is right. For the first time I see some beauty in it."

The plane was flying into the night now. At times it shivered as from too great an effort to gain altitude.

Jay had been concerned with being the lover of the world, naming all it contained, caressing it with his short and stocky hands, appropriating it, exploring it. And Djuna concerned only with the longitude and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other.

For a while it seemed as if Lillian were flying into a storm. Luminous signs informed her she must strap herself to her chair. Other passengers slept, confident that strapped to their chairs they would safely reach earth again. Lillian slid the curtain open and through the porthole watched the immensity of space in which sorrows seemed to lose their weight. She looked at the moon, as if to communicate with it, as if it would assure her that the storms of earth could not reach her. Looking at the moon intently it seemed to her that the plane flew more steadily.

It was the year when everyone's attention was focused on the moon. "The first terrestrial body to be explored will undoubtedly be the moon." Yet how little we know about human beings, thought Lillian. All the telescopes are focused on the distant. No one is willing to turn his vision inward.

What she had seen of Larry during their marriage was only what he allowed her to see, giant albatross wings, the wings of his goodness. She had been unable to see above or beyond the rim of them. Larry had collaborated in this. He only offered his goodness. He never said: "I want, I like, I take," but "What do you want? What do you like?" He deliberately obscured any vision into his being.

"The moon is the earth's nearest neighbor."

They had slept side by side. In the night, or at dawn, his body had been there. She had felt its radiations. In his voice there were caresses. In his sympathy, a tropical balm. In his goodness, a universe. His attentiveness blinded her. If he had another life, other selves, he turned like a planet, only one face towards Lillian.

"A rocket that would take months to reach one of the planets can travel to the moon in a day or two."