below Atlantic Avenue. It wasn’t personal, I realized. Grace’s little outburst hadn’t been against me so much as a reaction to what I’d said – a spark produced by an accidental collision between my comments and her own train of thought. Good people do bad things . Had Grace done something wrong? Had someone close to her done something wrong? It was impossible to know, but someone felt guilty about something, I decided, and even though my words had triggered Grace’s defensive remarks, I was fairly certain they had nothing to do with me. As if to prove that point, a moment after we crossed Atlantic Avenue and headed into the final leg of the journey, Grace reached out her hand and took hold of the back of my neck, then pulled me toward her and pressed her mouth against mine, slowly pushing in her tongue for a long, provocative kiss – a full-bore osculation , as Trause had put it. ‘Make love to me tonight,’ she whispered. ‘The second we walk through the door, tear off my clothes and make love to me. Break me in two, Sid.’
*
We slept late the next morning, not climbing out of bed until eleven-thirty or twelve. One of Grace’s cousins was in town for the day, and they were planning to meet at the Guggenheim at two, then work their way down to the Met for a few hours in the permanent collection. Looking at paintings was Grace’s preferred weekend activity, and she scrambled out of the house at one in reasonably tranquil spirits. 6 I offered to walk her to the subway, but she was already running late by then, and since the station was a good distance from the house (all the way up on Montague Street), she didn’t want me to overexert myself by having to walk so many blocks at too fast a pace. I accompanied her down the stairs and out onto the street, but at the first corner we said good-bye and walked off in opposite directions. Grace sped up Court Street toward the Heights, and I ambled down a few blocks to Landolfi’s Candy Store and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the extent of my constitutional for the day. I was eager to return to the blue notebook, and so rather than take my usual walk around the neighborhood, I immediately turned around and went home. Ten minutes later, I was in the apartment, sitting at my desk in the room at the end of the hall. I opened the notebook, turned to the page where I had left off on Saturday, and settled down to work. I didn’t bother to read over what I had written so far. I just picked up the pen and started to write.
Bowen is on the plane, flying through the dark toward Kansas City. After the whirlwind of falling gargoyles and reckless dashes to the airport, a sense of growing calm, a serene blankness within. Bowen doesn’t question what he is doing. He has no regrets, doesn’t rethink his decision to leave town and abandon his job, feels not the slightest pang of remorse about walking out on Eva. He knows how hard it will be on her, but he manages to persuade himself that she’ll be better off without him in the end, that once she recovers from the shock of his disappearance, it will be possible for her to begin a new, more satisfying life. Hardly an admirable or sympathetic position, but Bowen is in the grip of an idea, and that idea is so large, so much bigger than his own paltry wants and obligations, that he feels he has no choice but to obey it – even at the cost of acting irresponsibly, of doing things that would have been morally repugnant to him just one day before. ‘Men died at haphazard,’ is how Hammett expressed the idea, ‘and lived only while blind chance spared them…. In sensibly ordering his affairs [Flitcraft] had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a
*
We slept late the next morning, not climbing out of bed until eleven-thirty or twelve. One of Grace’s cousins was in town for the day, and they were planning to meet at the Guggenheim at two, then work their way down to the Met for a few hours in the permanent collection. Looking at paintings was Grace’s preferred weekend activity, and she scrambled out of the house at one in reasonably tranquil spirits. 6 I offered to walk her to the subway, but she was already running late by then, and since the station was a good distance from the house (all the way up on Montague Street), she didn’t want me to overexert myself by having to walk so many blocks at too fast a pace. I accompanied her down the stairs and out onto the street, but at the first corner we said good-bye and walked off in opposite directions. Grace sped up Court Street toward the Heights, and I ambled down a few blocks to Landolfi’s Candy Store and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the extent of my constitutional for the day. I was eager to return to the blue notebook, and so rather than take my usual walk around the neighborhood, I immediately turned around and went home. Ten minutes later, I was in the apartment, sitting at my desk in the room at the end of the hall. I opened the notebook, turned to the page where I had left off on Saturday, and settled down to work. I didn’t bother to read over what I had written so far. I just picked up the pen and started to write.
Bowen is on the plane, flying through the dark toward Kansas City. After the whirlwind of falling gargoyles and reckless dashes to the airport, a sense of growing calm, a serene blankness within. Bowen doesn’t question what he is doing. He has no regrets, doesn’t rethink his decision to leave town and abandon his job, feels not the slightest pang of remorse about walking out on Eva. He knows how hard it will be on her, but he manages to persuade himself that she’ll be better off without him in the end, that once she recovers from the shock of his disappearance, it will be possible for her to begin a new, more satisfying life. Hardly an admirable or sympathetic position, but Bowen is in the grip of an idea, and that idea is so large, so much bigger than his own paltry wants and obligations, that he feels he has no choice but to obey it – even at the cost of acting irresponsibly, of doing things that would have been morally repugnant to him just one day before. ‘Men died at haphazard,’ is how Hammett expressed the idea, ‘and lived only while blind chance spared them…. In sensibly ordering his affairs [Flitcraft] had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a
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