Mentally I tally Charlie’s recent events: unkind Rat Burglar argument; hostile hard-on and smack in the face underscoring death threats against RB; theft of thesis by underhanded academic; unapologetic send-off into the night, braless; father’s accident and loss of digit. All in all, not a propitious set of circumstances under which to propose, but if I don’t do it now I don’t know if I’ll ever have the guts again. Besides, in a way that I hope is not sicko, seeing Charlie all kaleidoscoped with sadness like this makes me love her even more. It makes me want to protect her.

That’s part of the job description of a personal pulse, isn’t it?

With both arms I reach out, lasso Charlie, and pull her to me, her face slicking my neck with saltwater, her hair hot and fragrant as a rain-soaked garden. But it is an unsuccessful embrace. I have been demoted somehow—to some degree my access has been denied—and the embrace is out of proportion with the current level of intimacy. It has the unhappy feeling of door-to-door salesmanship, the uncertain plummet of solicitation, and Charlie shrinks minutely from it as if the victim of an overhug by someone she has just met. Or someone she does not trust.

Still, it does not stop me from saying, probably too brightly, “Hey, I forgot something at the store! Do you want to go for a ride with me?”

In the car I try to cope with Charlie’s sadness with a certain negative capability, and, as far as is possible, I try not to let it poison my excitement.56 It might not be the most opportune moment of all time, but, I tell myself, it still has to be right. Even the radio seems to encourage me; when I fire up the Reliant the radio is playing that annoying Rat Burglar song by the Hard Twenties—“Steal Me”—but when I change the channel the first thing I hear is that ubiquitous commercial for Covet perfume. It’s right at the end of the spot, when the woman from the billboards and TV, the one in the sexy red dress that echoes the contours of the bottle, says in that sultry backroom voice, “You know you want it. What will you do to get it?”57

I think: you’re right, sultry-voiced vixen in the sexy back-less dress.

I do want it. And now I am going to take it. I am going to make Charlie mine.

Originally I had planned on pulling over on a leafy, Frost-like, Connecticutian country lane, but now I can’t help myself. I barely make it down Clinton and right onto Lafayette when I blurt it out.

“You hear that?” I say, my nerves making me emit a noise almost like a giggle.

“Hear what?” Charlie says, studying the ramified cracks of the windshield.

“That noise.”

“What noise?” she says, looking dead ahead.