“My wife has a secretarial job and the neighbor will tell her I’ll be late.”

“How old is he?”

“Not quite three.”

“Is he alone a lot?”

“No, no. I’m home a good deal. It’s Eva who goes off in the morning. He loves the neighbor.” Then he added for no reason, “She’s a big dumb woman, easy on a child.”

She laughed a little; the laugh broke off as she lowered herself carefully to the bed. “It’s moving,” she gasped.

She had turned to lie on her stomach; her face was hidden by a pillow. His skin prickled as he gripped one hand with the other. There was nothing he could say to her. The worm was dying. It was as if she were dying.

She was very good to talk the way she did, losing herself in her stories, not clinging to the ghastly process taking place inside her. But he could not really think about what she was telling him. He was listening for that other thing—as though it would have a voice, a subterranean mouthless moan.

He had been with her for hours now, and his memory of her had faded, replaced by a living presence.

That quality he had attributed to her when she’d walked away from Fern’s car in San Diego, of stubbornness, of will, was here confirmed. What at first had been so easy for him to grasp, the forlorn facts of her life, the room, the damp, the dripping tap, her poverty, her jobs, the marriage that seemed so negligible, had gone feeble, tenuous, as he had begun to feel the force and mystery of her nature.

He reminded himself sharply that everyone was made of class and fortune and circumstance, of food and work, given or withheld. But in the rawness of his openness to her, he kicked all such categories out of his mind like bums, knowing at the same time that he could not utterly abandon the beliefs he had acquired over nearly a decade. Ordinary life had its ordinary powerful truths. God damn all! She needed work, care, knowledge of the world! How long could that will of hers lead her like a Seeing Eye dog through idiot events? Helpless now to help her, afraid of his own thoughts, he was, on this painful occasion, suddenly happy.

An hour later, he left to phone. She had begged him to go and when he hesitated, she had said, “I’ve got to collect what comes out for the laboratory. The doctor said the head of it must be there, otherwise it will grow again. And—please go now!” She had turned then and stumbled toward a small door near the couch. His bowels trembled as he went down the street. What she must be going through in the bathroom he visualized at once, obliged to attend every second of her travail as much as he was able.