"And comment. I remember. Then I think the worst time in my life up until then was when I knew she was alone in the empty Pacific with a monstrous... nonperson with no motivation except boredom and impulse. I never ached so badly. I knew he was going to kill her, and I felt as if that was exactly what I deserved."

"Can I say something?"

"Why ask?"

"Because you have a very low boiling point lately and I don't want you to hit me in the head first and apologize second. Try this for size. You have this Calvinist concept the fates should kill her to punish you for all the rotten things you have done in your life. Of course you are not exceptionally rotten. Just average rotten, like everybody. Okay, so maybe the fates decided that killing her was clumsy and simplistic. Maybe the fates have a sense of... irony."

He was right. My first impulse was to strike out. Even at Meyer.

One tries it for size; hoping it won't fit. Together, aboard the Flush, it had been so absolutely perfect we had a superst.i.tious awe toward it. We made bad jokes about the horrid adjustment problems of having a wife too young and too rich. We made bad jokes about her adjustment problems-about the three afternoon hours a week she had to spend in group therapy, trying to get down to the places Howie had broken and attempting to mend them.

Two people, totally, blissfully, blindly in love. And gradually it became apparent that there was only one person in love, and the other one was merely repeating lines which had once been spontaneous, going through the motions which used to be bliss. Excuses have a hollow sound. Lies have an earnest tacky melody.

Because of my size and visibility, I have had to become adept at following people. It was all too easy to follow Pidge, and be acidly amused at her amateur precautions. It took four of those therapeutic afternoons to track her to the grubby little singles lounge, to the booth where he waited for her. My first impulse was to say to myself that it could not be true. Only in television, in the worst of daytime television, does the handsome young psychiatrist fall in love with the lovely young patient. Never in real life. Please make it never. Don't let her fall in love with him. By a simple device I tuned in on that fateful line, that timeworn line as she said, "But I can't ever leave him, darling. I owe him my life."

Okay, the fates are ironic. The biter bit. If it fits, wear it. If you wear it, you have to laugh. Maybe it will go away if you laugh.

So I tried to laugh. For Meyer. For myself. For all young psychiatrists in love. G.o.d only knows how ghastly that sound of laughter could have become had not Meyer raised his hand and hissed at me. "Shhhh!"

Then I heard it too. That great rush of fish escaping a predator in the moonlight. With the stealth of burglars, we got the rigged rods and went over the side and waded into the moon pattern. I could still taste the laughter in my throat, exactly like vomit. On the third cast, something hit like a cupboard full of dishes and went arrowing off across the flats making the reel yell in an unaccustomed agony.

It was a long long time before I thought about Pidge again. Very long, for me. Almost a half hour, I think.