"I'm beginning to draw again. I believe I'm painting some works that will outdo anything I've accomplished before. I feel so creative now like I'm about ready to produce something that could be my magnum opus. Before, I was just going through a phase where I couldn't draw and didn't know what I was all about. It wasn't you. It was me."
"I don't know that we are a good match, to tell you the truth."
"Why do people have to match? Why can't they just love each other and appreciate their differences?" She said this while knowing that finding a perfect match for herself might be impossible and that in her present mood any man was better than none. Now with her youth waning she knew that sexual liaisons with beautiful forms would become more and more like hunting for mushrooms in an area with a worsening annual rainfall. "I don't know if you have a new girlfriend now but — "
"I don't have one."
He blew more smoke into her face. "So what are you wanting?"
"Let's do it now, Sweetheart. Let's just get married — no fancy, pretentious stuff, just a quick run to the justice of the peace …maybe today or tomorrow…the sooner the better."
They were married in the early afternoon and a day later he moved many of his things back into her home. Since the wedding had been as bland as she had requested it (a justice of the peace and a couple of Michael's employees who acted the part of witnesses), she told herself that a permanently delayed honeymoon would be a matchingly dull complement. To her this honey and moon composed a word that was no misnomer: it implied a bee addicted to a nectar-induced high and she knew that even a minute of that unreality would have cloyed her sanity. Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women reached for sanitary napkins. Still the human goddess who once dressed Barbie dolls for imaginary weddings couldn't help but yearn for a honeymoon all the same. She was mystified why Michael did not move Rick's belongings with his own; and yet partly assuming that this would happen after the honeymoon and partly from a desire to not know, she did not ask. Then the saturnine groom took her to the airport to watch the airplanes come and go. They looked through the glass cages at these volant pterosaurs with American Airlines branded on their skins. At first she thought that he who was so parsimonious about the amount of water that could flow from a tap had decided upon this watching of the airplanes as the honeymoon but then he left and came back with something worse than nothing: tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had no luggage but he told her that they would pick up some clothes in the capital city and she smiled. She told him that it had been a long time since she had flown in a plane as if Jakarta had been nothing but a dream.
The first day after their arrival they took a small plane to Bentonville, Arkansas and then walked through the Wal-Mart museum witnessing different possessions of Sam Walton's humble beginnings and listening to the story of his ambition to become a multimillionaire. She disparaged her disparaging thoughts. She blocked the formulation of negative ideas and smiled at each new exhibit.
"To think that he addressed the first consumer inquiries on a manual typewriter like this," she said at the typewriter exhibit.
"Isn't that the truth," he told her. "A man who in later life could have bought a factory to manufacture the most sophisticated supercomputers used by the government and here he was in younger days pecking on that old thing."