At this moment her life was a foolish quandary of being unable to figure out if there was more salience in trying to reestablish family ties or independent strivings at all cost. She filled her cart, took out items, and then replaced them with others of different labels and equivalent prices. She couldn't figure out how many people she should be shopping for even though she had each person's tastes in mind in making selections. The closer she got to the cash register the more exacerbated were her doubts about buying most of her products, so before she purchased anything she abandoned most of it in a vacant cart and shoved it off once into the oblivion. When she got to the trunk of her car she had only one meager bag of groceries. She thrust it into the trunk, slammed down the lid of the trunk in vexation, and then buckled herself into the coolness of the vinyl seat. She passed a bridal boutique many times in the car and then spontaneously parked in front of the building that she had been rotating around. The saleswomen there could not find happiness in dressing the strangely sullen woman with monosyllabic mendacities of date and place for this celebratory solemnization. Under the lattice inside the store, staring at herself in a tripartite mirror, she didn't like the trains of the wedding dresses she was trying on. They were too short, florid to the point of gaudy, or not as ornate as she thought they should be. When she drove down to the end of the drive at the junction of the house she noticed that Nathaniel's dog was the only one that was chained up on the side of the house and that Michael's sailboat and motorcycle were conspicuously missing. She wasn't sure how she felt. In her room she took off some expensive, gaudy earrings and slipped out of her dress. The closet was now hers. His clothes were missing. Only the toes of her myriad shoes were within this capsule confronting her naked feet. Gracefully, with the highest poise, she swaggered from room to room to counter an inclination to stagger. Rick's room was vacuous space making her life unbearably vapid. She mourned the loss of her other son before going to the ball game.
She was spread out on a bleacher resting her eyes into the intricate mosaic of the silhouette of leaves and taking a break from her sketch (myriad tiny nude candymen having sex with various women, the women having candymen babies in their arms, and each copulation and baby scene wrapped in its own circle or monad; these monads making up total planets, and ultimately the planets composing the cellular outline of a long fanged beast that was the lonely universe) when the man with the unmemorable name looked down upon her.
"Hello, Gabriele, do you remember me?"
Startled, she turned to him. "Yes, but I'd never be able to say your name."
He laughed. No one outside of the immediate family would be able to do that.
What an intricate sketch!"
"Do you like art?"
"I love it." He said it so simply with such sincerity that the breath of his idea went up her nostrils titillating her with pleasure. "After you finish your sketch I think you should paint it onto an enormous canvas with a dismal red and black background."
"Yes, I like that idea, even if being so large it is never sold."
"Oh, it would fit over the staircase of a millionaire's old home perfectly.
You'll sell it in time."
"I was sitting here not knowing how to apply this thing really and was becoming annoyed at myself on different levels."