"Listen, I'm going to go home now and leave you two alone," I said. "But why don't you see if you can get her to talk some more? Without me around, maybe she'll make more sense."
"If she wants to say something, I'll listen." He gave me a strong, absent embrace, his eyes still despondent. "But no way am I gonna start pushing her."
I edged into the bedroom, unsure if I really should, to say good-bye to Sarah and to give her one last hug. Her eyes were open again and she just stared at me for a second, then whispered a word I couldn't quite make out. It might have sounded like "Babylon," but that made no sense at all. Finally she covered her eyes with her hands and turned away, gone from me, leaving me more alone than I'd ever felt.
[ Chapter Eleven]
Heading home, finally, I told myself to try to calm down. I was determined to help Sarah get over her trauma, though truthfully I was too tired to really think straight at that moment. So instead I decided to let everything rest for a few hours and try for some distance. In fact, I began imagining myself in a hot bath, gazing at my now-wilting roses. Home Sweet Home.
Mine was a standard one-bedroom in a building that had been turned into a co-op five years earlier, the owner offering the individual apartments to the tenants. I'd stayed a renter, however, passing up the "low" insider price, $138,000, because I didn't really have the money, and when I did have it someday I would want something bigger. I wished I had more space—a real dining room and a bigger bathroom would do for starters, along with some place for more bookcases. And if a baby should someday miraculously come along . . .
I'd often thought you could tell a lot about somebody from where and how they lived; it's revealing as a Rorschach test. What, I often wondered, did my apartment say about me?
A decorator might conclude I'd done up the place with love, then lazily let it go. They'd decide I cared about nice things, but once those nice things were there, I neglected them. It would be true.
I'd covered the walls of the living room with pale blue cloth, then hung a lot of framed pictures and old movie posters. Okay, I like movies. For me even the posters are art. My couch was an off-white, more like dirt-colored actually, and covered with pillows for the "feminine" touch. I'd hoped you'd have to look twice to realize it was actually a storage cabinet in disguise, with drawers along the bottom of the front. The floor was polished hardwood, rugs from India here and there, in sore need of a vacuuming, and even a couple of deceased insects that'd been there for over a week. That sort of said it, I thought glumly. I'm a workaholic slob.