How tall she was! The knife was in her right hand, with her left she pushed back the hair from her cheek where the perspiration from her exertions at the oven had glued it. She was wearing a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse. Myron, as he often did, gazed at her flat belly where, beneath the flannel of the skirt and the cotton of her slip, she wore his scar. It moved him oddly to think of that arrow-shaped indentation she would bear all her life, which, three years ago, he had sewn up himself. Now and then, peering at it as they lay in bed together, he would see a shadow of a stitch working its way through the flesh. There were new techniques now, learned from the war, and scars could be made no more than hairlines. The thickness of hers satisfied him though, gave him the kind of medical pleasure that he referred to as his little touch of sadism.

He attributed to himself a small “touch” of any sort of psychological quirk—and proud of it, Annie thought, telling him once that he had a large touch of belief in the supernatural.

“You don’t want to be surprised by yourself, do you?” she’d observed dryly.

“We’re all potentially aberrant,” he’d replied. “My patients trust me because I don’t put distance between myself and them. I can be as sick in body as they are, and as sick in mind.”

She held back an ironic retort. She didn’t believe that Myron believed he was a peer among his peers as he did his rounds in the hospital wards. Anyone could be sick; anyone could go mad. “Truths” like that weren’t about anything. As far as Annie was concerned, the mere avowal of such commonplaces was boasting, an effort to raise oneself above the common lot by dint of superior comprehension. Myron irritated her faintly, mildly, always. Their arguments were low-keyed. He always had the answers, yet she knew she disconcerted him, and although he laughed at her assertions, he couldn’t dismiss them. They’d spent the afternoon wrangling about cause and effect. There was nothing without an original cause, he’d said. “But some things spring into being out of nothing!” she’d said.

“That’s irrational.”

“Myron, you’re trying to chain water!”

“I can!” he said triumphantly. “Look at the TVA! Now, give me an example of something springing out of nothing.”

“A poem.”

“Oh, Jesus!” he cried.

She watched him walk over to her bureau and lift the cover of the leather cosmetic case that always rested on the bureau top.