The only other language she knows is incomprehension, and luckily she’s been taught the apt phrase. “I beg your pardon?” she says to Mr. Manfred. Her face does a courteous twist, enterprising, meek, placatory, and masked with power, allowing Mr. Manfred time to sink back into the lavender twilight of the uncut grass. “I’m afraid I didn’t quite hear.... ”

Later, twenty-three years old, she is on a train, the Super Continental, traveling eastward. She has a window seat, and sunlight gathers around the crown of her hair. She knows how she must look, with her thin clever mouth and F. Scott Fitzgerald eyes.

“I can’t resist introducing myself,” a man says.

“Pardon?” She is clearly flustered. He has a beautiful face, carved cheeks, crisp gray hair curling at the forehead.

“The book,” he points. “The book you’re reading. It looks very interesting.”

“Ah,” she says.

Two days later they are in bed together, a hotel room, and she reflects on the fact that she has not finished the book, that she doesn’t care if she ever does, for how can a book above love compare with what she now knows.

“I’m sorry,” he says then. “I hadn’t realized I was the first.”

“Oh, but you’re not,” she cries.

This curious lie can only be accounted for by a wish to keep his love. But it turns out she has never had it, not for one minute, not love as she imagines it.

“I should have made things clear to you at once,” he says. How was he to know she would mistake a random disruption for lasting attachment? He is decent enough to feel ashamed. He only wanted. He never intended. He has no business. If only she.

She seems to hear cloth ripping behind her eyes. The syntax of culpability-he’s drowning in it, and trying to drown her too. She watches him closely, and the sight of his touching, disloyal mouth restores her composure. Courtesy demands that she rescue him and save herself at the same time. This isn’t shrewdness talking, this is good manners, and there is nothing more economical, she believes, than the language of good manners. It costs nothing, it’s portable, easy to handle, malleable, yet pre-formed. Two words are all that are required, and she pronounces them slippingly, like musical notes. “Forgive me,” she says.

There. It’s said. Was that so hard?

There is a certain thing we must all have, as Georgia Willow has learned in the course of her long life. We may be bankrupt, enfeebled, ill or depraved, but we must have our good stories, our moments of vividness. We keep our door closed, yes, and move among our scratched furniture, old photographs, calendars and keys, ticket stubs, pencil ends and lacquered trays, but in the end we’ll wither away unless we have a little human attention.