The man—eminent in his profession—said in a kind way that he did understand, that he already knew this.

His reassurances seemed to come at her from a great distance. She could feel sense fragmenting. She felt that this man was not hearing her, or not fully understanding her, so she brushed aside his remarks about postsurgical therapy, patient cooperation, and a period of healing that would take, at the very least, six months.

She reiterated her fears, and her arguments, until suddenly midsentence, she realized she was not asking this eminent man to cure any injury Star had inflicted; she was asking him to cure all the injuries, especially those she had inflicted herself.

Those words, as such, were not said, but she felt that the doctor sensed something of her meaning; he read, maybe, the pain and the guilt and the distress she felt. He chose—and it was perhaps a wise choice—to ascribe her reaction entirely to shock. Gini, who knew this to be untrue, did not argue. She consented to the prescribed interlude of quiet and rest. She was led to a small room; she lay down on a narrow hospital bed. In order to hasten the departure of the nurse assigned to her, she pretended to sleep, and lay there with closed eyes, watching with mortification and sick despair reenactment after reenactment of her own shame, of her betrayal not just of Pascal, but also of herself.

Fatigue and misery and self-reproach made her grip on these events begin to slacken eventually. For the first half hour, all she could see, fearfully repeated, were her own actions, that night at the St. Vincent. Yes, it was true; she had done these unimaginable things, and said these unimaginable things, but as they danced before her eyes, as she made herself reexamine them, they began to seem not more real, but less. Her tired mind rebelled. She began to feel that it was not she who had acted in this way, but some other Gini, a woman who had sprung up unheralded from nowhere, a succubus, a dream woman, a mirror woman who had stepped out from the glass and for a few hours reversed the rules of life, so north became south, and right, left.

Grasping at this idea, and despising herself for doing so, she fell into a restless, feverish sleep. And in the sleep, up from her unconscious, came a man who might have been Rowland McGuire, who spoke with his accent but did not have his face. This man rearranged all these actions in yet another form; he consoled, and with a promissory air, said no, she was reading the sentences all the wrong way; if she would only let him rearrange the words in a different order, she would understand. With a conjuror’s hands he took the words “shame” and “self-betrayal,” and they spelled out “love” and “hope.” She watched all those bright vowels and consonants sparkle in the air, and just when they were suggesting to her that a right might lie beyond a wrong, she awoke, crying out.