A faint banging of pots and pans drifted up to us from the kitchen.

“What about when you woke up?”

“I wasn’t anymore. You’ve got to understand, there’s something basic about her that repels me.”

“The smell, maybe?”

“About her. It’s not the accent or her neuroses or her ugliness but something that they all add up to, or derive from. That’s why when I realized how close I’d come to wanting that ugliness, I mean, I wanted her. Anyway I thought for a while I’d kill myself. For the first five or ten minutes after I woke up I felt really bad. It struck me as the sort of thing to kill yourself over. But I got out of the house. Got a ride over to the school. I was wandering around leaning against things. Not speaking to anybody. I leaned against the art lecture room. Dr. Duncan was talking. He’s really such a fine old man. He’s always stumping around with his pipe and his white hair. I could hear him talking about Zen Buddhism. He was explaining the still center, kind of the psychic center of gravity. He says most people are eccentric, and off-center, so they wobble crazily and are unhappy. But if you can orient yourself around your true center everything becomes cool. You sit quietly and the world is all comprehensible and slow. Like sitting in the middle of the merry-go-round at the playground. Your world becomes concentric. Mr. Duncan is a very bright man. It just hit me, standing against the window like that, on a misty morning shivering and hating myself. And out of the walls comes this friendly, old, cracked voice—like a sleepy god. He said, ‘The thing about human beings is that they hate things. And if you’re going to make something it might as well be beautiful.’ Have you ever heard him talking?”

“But how did Omar happen?”

“Well, I decided I’d do two things: I have to meditate really seriously and straighten out my life. And I have to make things. I went into town right away and got some books and I enrolled in a Chinese painting class. Next term I’m going to take Duncan’s course in calligraphy.”

He was bustling around in his blanket, then hauled his backpack to the mattress and emptied it. Out came about a dozen paperback books on Oriental art and religion. He ran his hands over them excitedly.

“I came home and threw Clancy out. She was up here messing around. I couldn’t even look at her. I started cleaning up. I’m going to take all this stuff to the laundry.”

“But what about Omar?”