I closed the books and stacked them up on the table and made my escape through the door. I went out onto the sidewalk, out into the burning hot summer day. The sun beat down on me, a zillion bolts a minute. It poured down upon the cars and sidewalks and trees and camellias and Cape jasmine bushes and crepe myrtle trees. It poured down upon my hands and arms and sandaled feet. The same sun had shone on ancient Greece, on Italy in the time of the Caesars, on me when I was a small child in the Delta, on me when I was twelve and lost a baseball game by striking out. It had shone on Freud when he thought up all that stuff and on the dinosaurs and where I was standing for millions of years. It had shone on Malcolm and me the summer we ran away to get married. It was still shining, that much was sure, but all the rest was lost in myth. I did not know where I was, in any way. I want a drink, I decided. I’ll talk Klane into staying and I’ll go get Hilton and we’ll go out to the country club and order some hot hors d’oeuvres and a gin martini. I have to have some fun. Life is short and then we die. We die and don’t even know what’s up there in our brains. It’s just some stuff like gray toothpaste. We don’t even know how we got here or what will happen to us. I don’t have anyone to love me. I just have Malcolm and he hates me. He thinks my hips are big. He thinks I’m fat.

Chapter

30

“I wish you would go to a psychiatrist, Rhoda.” It was Derry talking to me on the phone a few weeks later. “I gave you the name of that man. Did you lose it?” I could hear her losing interest in the conversation. She had started being short with me when I called her up. She kept telling me things to do and I never did any of them and she was getting tired of having me call her up all the time.

“I definitely am going. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Derry. I know you’re tired of me calling you up.”

“I’m busy this morning, Rhoda. Call the doctor whose name I gave you. You can’t figure it out by reading books. You have to have some help.”

“I’m going to. I really am. I’m going to call him this afternoon.”

“Call him now. Call him when you hang up.”

“Okay. Goodbye. Thanks for taking time to talk to me. Derry?”

“Yes.”

“Have you heard from Jim?”

“I’m going to be seeing him next week. We’re going to a meeting in Washington. He’ll be there.”