He has a craning look when he drives, immensely responsible. And a way of signaling when he passes, letting his thumb wing out sideways on the lever, a deft and lovely motion. She is struck by the beauty of it, also its absurdity, a little dwarfish, unconscious salute, and silent.

There is too much sorrowful sharing in marriage, Barbara thinks. When added up, it kills words. Games have to be invented; theater. Out loud she says, like an imitation of a gawking person, “I wonder what those little red flowers are.” (Turning, reaching for her wildlife book.) “We don’t have those in Ontario. Or do we?”

The mention of the red flowers comes after an other long silence.

Then Peter says, not unkindly, not even impatiently, “A gully’s deeper, I think.”

“Deeper?” says Barbara in her dream voice. She is straining her eyes to read a billboard poised high on a yellow bluff. IF YOU SMOKE PLEASE TRY CARLETONS. The word please, it’s shocking. So!—the tobacco industry has decided to get polite. Backed into a corner, attacked on all sides, they’re hitting hard with wheedling courtesies, please. Last week Barbara watched a TV documentary on lung cancer and saw a set of succulent pink lungs turning into what looked like slices of burnt toast.

“Deeper than a gulch.”

“Oh,” says Barbara.

“Unless I’ve got it the wrong way round.”

“It’s slang anyway, I think.”

“What?”

“Gully. Gulch. They’re not real words, are they? They sound, you know, regional. Cowboy lingo.”

Peter takes a long banked curve. On and on it goes, ninety degrees or more, but finely graded. His hands on the wheel are scarcely required to move. Clean, thick hands, they might be carved out of twin bars of soap. Ivory soap, carbolic. He smiles faintly, but in a way that shuts Barbara out. On and on. Rain falls all around them—il pleut—on the windshield and on the twisted landforms and collecting along the roadway in ditches. “Could be,” Peter says.

“Does that look brighter up ahead to you?” Barbara says wildly, anxious now to keep the conversation going. She puts away the tape, sits up straight, pats her hair, and readies herself for the little fates and accidents a conversation can provide.

Conversation?

Inside her head a quizzing eyebrow shoots up. These idle questions and observations? This dilatory response? This disobliging exchange between herself and her husband of thirty-three years, which is as random and broken as the geological rubble she dully observes from the car window, and about which Peter can scarcely trouble himself to comment? This sludge of gummed phrases? Conversation?