“Very well.” He sighed. “It was in your room. You remember that room?”

“I do.”

“I had been drinking. I couldn’t make myself drunk, although I tried very hard. I walked. Round and round the city. It was night by then. I came back to the old quarter. I walked around and around the graveyard—you remember that graveyard, with those great monuments like houses? Where you used to play as a child?”

“I remember. I think I remember.”

“I went there, to think of you. There was jazz playing in the distance. A blues number, with saxophones. The rhythms nearly drove me insane. I was very desperate.”

“You needn’t have been desperate. It was simple. I told you all along.”

“I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t dare. So—that night—I felt powerful, and I felt damned. I was at the crossroads of my life. I felt I could live forever, or kill myself then and there. I felt I had to speak to you. I was so afraid of you. One word from you and I’d have done anything, everything.”

“I gave you the word.”

She opened her eyes and turned her gaze upon his face. She had begun to tremble again, and her eyes were unfocused, a little glazed.

“You do remember?” She caught at his arm. “Tell me you remember. What was the word?”

“Maintenant.”

He said it quietly, using the old accent they had both once shared. He turned his face away as he said it, because of the pain that word now recalled. He could see the room where she said the word, which was shadowy, and he could hear the sounds from outside, the distant and mournful drift of the blues. He could hear the shriek of the freight-train whistle, and the rush and rattle of its wheels.

Sound carried in the still of the night, and those freight trains were long: thirty boxcars, forty sometimes. He had heard that sound go past, and watched her face, so pale and so small, looking up at him from the shadows. Now, she had said, almost angrily, in a fierce and peremptory tone, as if she could stand these evasions no longer and was determined to cut through all the pretenses and defenses he had erected before.

Now, she had said, and he had listened to the freight cars, looked at the crucifix that hung on the wall, and understood that he could fight no longer: all his resistance had gone.

He had gathered her up into his arms then, with a deep sigh, and kissed her for the first time in the new way, like a lover as well as a protector and a friend.

“And that was how it began,” he said now in the quiet of the blue room. “I knew then what the consequence would be. We both knew. We began something that couldn’t end.”

She had begun to move beside him as he spoke, he realized, although the movements were slight, and it was a while before he became aware of them, he was so tightly locked in the past. She stirred, moved onto her side, plucked again at his sleeve.