So I got mad and Jean left without finishing her coffee. My brother is still in pain. He walks and works and sits hunched over his plate in pain. There is no guarantee that it would have worked, or that he would be capable of believing. Yet I am ashamed. And my temper frightens me. I look back on all those years of equanimity. I could count the times that I have been really angry on one hand. Many times, of course, what might have been anger in someone stronger-willed was translated in me into hurt, pain, or humiliation by my subsidiary character, by my dependent spirit. But still, I might have been angry more often if I’d cared. Perhaps my indifference has fostered my sanguinity.

Even now, ashamed, I am still angry. I hate being made to look a fool. This is odd, I suppose, but actually being a fool doesn’t bother me nearly so much as having someone, anyone, think I’m a fool when I’m not.

The possible consequences of Jean’s walking out after my anti-spiritualist tantrum: (1) she’ll never speak to me again; (2) after months or years, we’ll reach a stiff reconciliation; (3) I’ll apologize and gradually work back into her good graces; (4) a crisis will throw us together uninhibitedly; (5) she’ll murder me in the night following my brother’s agonizing death from deterioration of the duodenum.

Of course, there always seem to be more possibilities than there actually are. But the habit that has cost me companions, lovers, and sleep is the one that makes me fixate on and fetishize the most lurid alternative. I tell people it’s so I won’t be surprised if the worst happens. I’ll have prepared for that by contemplating its ramifications beforehand. But secretly I believe that, if I dwell on the worst, it can’t happen. It would be too absurdly coincidental for me to be studying the possibility of a safe falling on my head at the same moment that a safe actually falls on my head. So I spend a lot of time conjuring evil. It keeps my tail bushy. It keeps the tide flowing. It keeps me from feeling a fool if not seeming like one.

“I have to tell you something.”

Sam hurried through my door. The room was too small to hurry in. His face was pale, and there were red smears across his cheeks. He sat down in a kitchen chair, hooked his feet behind the legs. I could see him curling his toes inside his shoes.

“Carlotta’s going to have a baby!” He wanted my reaction.

“Well, that’s nice.”

“Do you think so?”

“Don’t you?”