Lately, given the publicity, those admirers first meeting her called her only “Alabama.” She hid her real first name now, or rather it hung back, in natural eclipse. I myself had always held off changing it; or else I alternated between “Angie” and that entire state for which she’d titled herself.

Henceforth I vowed I would only call her that third-person geographic name, invented. Never again “Angie.” I couldn’t be that personal, not after It.

A few months later Gideon took me aside and asked, in his divine accent the following phrase chic then, “Why get your bowels in any of ze uproar?” He sweetly tried to explain that I mustn’t blame them, that, champagne, cocaine, good fortune was a flammable mix and I was a prig to mind, though walking in on them like that could not have been so pleasant. Was it true I’d dented Robert’s precious boat? Hadn’t its luck been bad enough pre-me?

How could I explain the extra sadness? About the spot. Everybody betrayed feels killed. You feel that the turncoat loved ones are now dead to you. But, loving them as I still did, how could I tell our friend here how literal all that Love-Death duet stuff might really be? So I shrugged, acting as “adult” as our pal the philosophical French-Egyptian. How could I tell him when I myself was still unable to say aloud how wronged and small and sad and underrated and left-behind it made me feel—their doing it or anything without me? Even dying, if that was ever required. And since we were mortals, certainly probably, it would be.

At least, they could have called me in to watch.

All I’d ever really tried was seeing them both.

So, after It, to me, her name was only “Alabama.”

Nothing more than what everybody else called her. Nothing older than the brand name.

Strange, that helped. She heard and knew and sensed the difference, and uneasily accepted. It kept Angie, my old love, back safe, and for myself. It saved that time when we both sat groaning, joking, wondering about him. But Alabama would never again get to be, for me, plain Angelina Renata Byrnes, co-hick, another troublemaking player, my fellow beginner.

And at the same second I vowed this, I learned something. I learned that, all along, my real passion had not been Robert. (That’d all been cupid arrow ricochet.) It had not ever been Miss Alabama Famous. No, I most yearned for that freckled missing person.

It was li’l Angie that I’d really loved.

But we stayed together; we had too many years on record not to. I had never before understood my parents’ marriage, how—having got this far in—they could neither of them just admit a mistake and bail the hell out. Happiness might demand it, but Mythology—the myth of their being a handsome couple made-for-each-other—would simply not permit that. Myth outranks any single person’s little Joy. We’re all continually upstaged by the scale of our own times and tragedies. In the end, the name of the ship that took you down is better known than your name ever will be.