He slapped me on the shoulder with his gloved right hand, then walked through the shower-room, trailing his black air-hose, and dropped down the manhole into the formaldehyde sump on his way back out into the world.
I sat on my bench in my artificial garden in the middle of the great steel womb I'd been delivered into, and I thought about my Anne.
"If I had a chisel and about four tons of Carrara marble," the girl standing behind me said, "I'd hack me out a statue on your model, and call it The Thinker." Dorothy—the Firebird—Damien plumped her little backside onto the bench beside me and scintillated eagerness to converse.
I didn't want to talk to anyone at the moment, certainly not to the Firebird. To employ a metaphor from an appetite less exalted than love, seeing the Firebird after losing Anne was too much like being offered hamburger after having had a filet mignon snatched from under nose.
Still, as my peripheral vision took in the Firebird's brilliantly distributed five-foot-three, I realized that my metaphor was false. That flame-colored hair and impish, freckled face; that halter taut as a double-barreled ballista cocked to fire twin rounds; I turned my attention to the girlscape beside me, quite innocent of covetousness, my interest purely aesthetic. No hamburger, this. Firebird Damien was filet mignon.
But she wasn't Anne.
Suddenly I was contrite toward my fellow captive. "You're looking splendid, Miss Damien," I said.
"And you got a face peeled off the iodine bottle. Tell mamma where it hurts."
"Don't delve, doll."