Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men. Her contemporaries seemed to be moving like that loose downward tire of a flipped car and she seemed to only favor the stagnancy of deceased enlightenment. For a moment, she was as much as wishing to die to be raptured into their thoughts, and they into hers, the way a normal person yearned for shared physical and emotional intimacies. Dying young might be preferable to decades of being pinned into a stall hearing the shallow grunting of one of those male members of the porcine herd. Isolation in Antarctica without seals and penguins would be a hundred times better than that indelible connection of producing for him more grunting piglets; however death was not rapture but rupture.
"How is Rick?" she asked after he was seated and she had sipped a bit of the coffee that he had prepared for them.
"The same. Growing."
"And the dog?"
"Growing more quickly. He shits a lot, too. Thanks for asking. What do you want?"
She smiled bashfully as if she were an errant child whose laziness or mischievousness had been exposed. She noted the peculiarity of her erroneous reaction: a fixated response that she had comported in girlhood. Back then it had always preceded an impetus to be diligent so that she might propitiate a teacher's wrath and regain favor with one of those rare individuals whom she admired in her more credulous days. "I hate how this ended," she suddenly confessed in womanly neediness. "I don't know why you just pulled out like that."
"Pulled out like what? I proposed and you said no, so that was it. I decided I needed a wife who would be supportive and that you were right all along: it wasn't you."
"I think I was supportive."
"Why would you think that? You were never interested in any of my plans—at least not in the later stage of things. Maybe you just aren't interested in the business aspects of life, although I at least thought you were about selling those paintings of yours—at least at the beginning of knowing you. Maybe nobody changes. It is just what we know of them at different stages of expressing themselves—that changes. Just ideas of people at different stages…ideas changing."
She now felt that being here had not been such a mistake after all. Even though she repudiated superstition in all of it derivative forms from anthropomorphism to destined fate still she couldn't help but feel that she was meant to be here hearing his profound utterances and perceiving him anew.