Stein on Writing Part 8

Each point of view has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of first-person POV (writers usually refer to point of view as POV, so let's call it that) is that it establishes the greatest immediate intimacy with the reader. It is an eyewitness account, highly subjective, and highly credible. When a character speaks directly to us, it's easier to believe what the character is saying. If you are good at impersonating your characters, you will be comfortable with the first-person POV. Better still, once you know the character, you will become expert in talking with that character's voice.

For each plus there is, alas, a minus. The author of a first-person story must constantly be on guard against telling the reader something that will sound like the author rather than the character. Furthermore, many writers see a severe limitation in that the first-person POV can convey to the reader only what that character sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes, and thinks. You can't have scenes your first-person character isn't a witness to. He doesn't know what's going on beyond his ken, although there are ways of circ.u.mventing that liability, which I'll demonstrate in a moment.

Another liability of first person is that it's difficult for a character to describe himself without seeming foolishly egotistical. Hundreds of writers, including me, have used a mirror to get around that. Forget it. A character seeing himself in a mirror is a cliche. However, a first-person character can think about his looks, or changes in his looks. Or another character can say something like: "Are you dyeing your hair?"

This could lead to an exchange about the character's hair. Or: "Are you getting taller?"

"I'm just stooping less these days."

Dealing with the "I" character's ego is more difficult. If he sees himself as weak, the reader won't have much interest in him as a protagonist. If he sees himself as strong, the reader will think him a braggart. Therefore, in the first-person POV the author relies on action and the speech of other characters to reveal things-particularly good things- about the "I" character. An unreliable or villainous first-person narrator can lend credibility. A first-person commentary by a not terribly intelligent character can provide an experienced writer with opportunities. In any event, first-person POV can be exceptionally rich.

There's something you'll want to watch out for using the first person. If the character takes the reader into his confidence, the character can't "forget" to provide the reader with an essential secret or other important piece of information. When the reader learns that something was withheld, he will feel cheated. The most dramatic way of handling information that the character is reluctant to convey is for another character to strip the secret from him in heated conversation: I have been wedded to the truth my entire life. What would I be doing at a young person's bachelor party? I told Jonathan flat out, "I didn't go."

"Bulls.h.i.+t, Maurice, you were there."

"On my conscience, I swear I didn't go."

"You don't have a twin brother, do you?"

I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. Jonathan pursued me across the room.

"Was it your twin brother who came out of the John in his suspenders? Maurice, you left your jacket hanging in the stall you were so drunk. You're lucky somebody didn't rifle your pockets before Adam steered you back in for it."

I was barely able to speak. "You were there?"

Jonathan nodded. "I was there."

A point sometimes overlooked by beginners is that if a story centers on the narrator's ability to survive life-threatening dangers, some suspense will be lost in the first person because the character will have to survive to finish the story!

If you examine an anthology of short stories that have been selected for their excellence, you may be surprised by the number that are written from the first-person point of view. Despite the seeming limitations of a single character's perspective, first person well done is immensely rewarding to both experienced writers and experienced readers. The first-person point of view is valuable, for instance, if you've drawn a character who is highly intelligent or perceptive. His or her complex thoughts can be conveyed much more directly and intimately to the reader.

Another advantage of first person is that it can involve the reader's emotions-even empathy-with a protagonist who does horrible things. The New York Times Book Review carried an interesting interview with Scott Smith, a first novelist, that accompanied a review of his novel A Simple Plan: Scott Smith's protagonist Hank commits b.l.o.o.d.y acts. The reader would find it hard to empathize with Hank if the story were told in the third person. In fact, Smith's choice of first person was "vital to overcoming the reader's natural distaste for Hank's b.l.o.o.d.y acts." Said Smith, "I think there's something very seductive about a first-person voice, you sort of fall into it, no matter what horrible things the character does, and I wanted to keep that up until the very end, at which point the reader would have to sort of pull back. But no matter what he did, I was sympathetic to him. What's seductive to the reader is even more so to the writer."

Sometimes using the first-person point of view is a necessity. Jerzy Kosinski's first and best novel, The Painted Bird, is a story of tremendous power. I once loaned a copy to a man I'll call Michael, a hugely successful businessman who was expert in cla.s.sical music, a collector of first-rate art, and an avid reader who "never reads fiction." We were vacationing in adjacent cottages and after he'd read only a few pages, Michael rushed over to ask, "Is this true?" I strung him along with "Do you think it's true?" and he kept coming back after several chapters, asking again, "Is this true?" That book converted Michael to reading fiction from that time on.

The amazing fact about The Painted Bird is that its language is full of imaginative images and some of the events depicted are bizarre or aberrant, yet because the use of first person is handled so skillfully the emotional experience for the reader is "This is true."

The Painted Bird begins with a preface in third person of less than two pages that sets the period and the locale. (In general I advise against the use of prefaces in fiction. Some readers skip them, and in doing so, miss essential information. I have found that the essential material of prefaces can almost always be skillfully developed in the story itself.) Kosinski's novel, unlike the third-person preface, is in the first person. The narrator is presumably a ten-year-old boy: I lived in Marta's hut, expecting my parents to come for me any day, any hour. Crying did not help, and Marta paid no attention to my sniveling.

She was old and always bent over, as though she wanted to break herself in half but could not. Her long hair, never combed, had knotted itself into innumerable thick braids impossible to unravel. These she calls elflocks. Evil forces nested in the elflocks, twisting them and slowly inducing senility.

She hobbled around, leaning on a gnarled stick, muttering to herself in a language I could not quite understand. Her small withered face was covered with a net of wrinkles, and her skin was reddish like that of an overbaked apple. Her withered body constantly trembled as though shaken by some inner wind, and the fingers of her bony hands with joints twisted by disease never stopped quivering as her head on its long scraggy neck nodded in every direction.

Her sight was poor. She peered at the light through tiny slits embedded under thick eyebrows. Her lids were like furrows in deeply plowed soil. Tears were always spilling from the corners of her eyes, coursing down her face in well-worn channels to join glutinous threads hanging from her nose and the bubbly saliva dripping from her lips. She sometimes looked like an old green-gray puff-ball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to blow out the black dry dust from inside.

At first I was afraid of her and closed my eyes whenever she approached me. ...

This story is seen through the eyes of the narrator. If it were told in the third person, it wouldn't be credible. The fantastic old lady would have seemed "made up." In my judgment, the author didn't have a choice. First person was inevitable. Kosinski chose it and wrote a novel that is now an established twentieth-century cla.s.sic.

Third person is the most frequent choice of so-called commercial novelists. A majority of the books on the fiction bestseller list at any given time are likely to be written in the third person. It is a popular form for action/adventure and mainstream stories. There is strong precedent for today's third-person stories. Before stories were written, the man who told stories around a fire undoubtedly spoke of the adventures or experiences of others. When man invents myths, he is using the third person. Third person works best when the story is seen consistently from the point of view of one character at a time, though the author is free to report what any of the characters hear, smell, touch, and taste. Bottom-line editors and publishers favor third person. Here's an example: Peter Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and surveyed his domain. The two children were lying a.s.s-up on the carpet, watching television, and didn't turn to greet him.

Were they ignoring him, or had they simply not heard him come in?

He opened the door again and this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she hadn't heard me the first time.

Jonathan, a blase thirteen, turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over her father, taking his hat, holding on to his arm as it were the limb of a backyard tree.

There are many variations within the third-person mode, which is often confusing to less experienced writers. Third person can be close to first person, telling only the experiences of a single character as that character would know those experiences, but always referring to him as "he." As the author takes advantage of the third-person form, he can move into a scene from which the protagonist is absent, and show that scene from a different character's POV. But be warned: POV has to be consistent within a scene, otherwise you'll be crossing the line into the omniscient point of view, which gives you license to go into any character's head at will but involves the danger of confusing the reader or losing him along the way.

Plausibility is a major concern of third person. In the first person, a character can say, "I ate six bananas" and perhaps we believe him. In the third person, when a character says "Mary ate six bananas," we are inclined to think, "Oh yeah?" We accept things from a first-person speaker that we would question in a third-person speaker, who has the same distance from the reader as a stranger does in life. The first-person speaker becomes an intimate. We are inclined to accept his word.

Once the author establishes the limitation of the third-person point of view, he must stick to it and the limitation becomes an advantage, a restraint, a discipline. If you adopt a loose form of third person in which, say, each chapter is seen from a different character's POV, be sure to choose for each scene the character who is most affected by the events of that scene.

Though I have written in third person (The Magician, Living Room, The Childkeeper, The Resort), I love writing in the first person and am partial to it (Other People, The Touch of Treason, A Deniable Man, The Best Revenge).

In the "know-it-all" omniscient POV, the writer can go anywhere, especially into the heads of more than one character even within a scene. Hemingway in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" skillfully gets into the mind of a wounded lion. Look it up.

The omniscient POV allows the author to speak in his own voice, to say things that would be inappropriate for any of his characters to say. The author's voice, however, should have personality, authority, some wisdom, and ideally a fresh sense of humor. The author, in other words, needs to be quite a character to manage the omniscient point of view interestingly. One of my most talented students, Anne James Valadez, whose work sparkles with originality, prefers the omniscient point of view; her voice is unusually distinctive and exudes the authority of myth.

The danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking instead of experiencing the story. The omniscient POV lacks discipline. Because the author can stray into anybody's head, it is hard to maintain credibility and even harder to gain a close emotional rapport with the reader. Total freedom can be as upsetting to the writer as to the reader.

Even authors with several published novels to their credit can make errors in point of view. In a novel called Talent, the looseness of an uncontrolled omniscient point of view results in pa.s.sages like this: "Driving up here always makes me feel like Paul Newman at the wheel," joked Allison.

She and Diana climbed quickly to Mulholland, which twisted for miles along the spine of the ridge like a carelessly abandoned garden hose.

The point of view at that moment is presumably Allison's. From the driver's point of view, would a twisting road ever look "like a carelessly abandoned garden hose"? The image is forced. But more important is the fact that it mixes point of view within the same paragraph. A twisting road might look like a garden hose from a helicopter or a low-flying airplane, but from a car?

Readers don't notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.

Clifford Irving handles the omniscient point of view skillfully. His novel Trial begins with an objective view: In Houston, Texas, in the early winter of 1985, a petty thief named Virgil Freer devised a scheme to bilk the chain of Kmart stores.

Virgil's scheme is outlined, but by the end of the first paragraph he was arrested and in jail. Virgil hires a young criminal defense attorney named Warren Blackburn. We get glimpses of what Virgil is thinking. He says to Blackburn, "You got to help me."

And immediately we are inside Blackburn's head.

I've met a lot worse than Virgil, Warren decided.

In the first few pages, we've heard the author, and we've been inside the head of Virgil and the lawyer he picks. Clifford Irving is using a controlled omniscient point of view- with good results.

Let's take a moment to examine the comparative subjectivity of each point of view. In first person, the POV is entirely subjective. Think of it this way: the character talking to the reader is not only conveying everything the reader gets to know, the character is making a case for himself. It's his view of himself, the others, the world.

In third person, the choice is greater. If the story can be told as if from a single character's POV, the reader will have some sense of subjectivity. The writer can even choose to s.h.i.+ft the subjectivity to another character, but has to be careful not to s.h.i.+ft about carelessly. Back in 1973, John G.o.dey, a thriller writer, published a book called The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about the hijacking of a New York City subway train. G.o.dey wrote in the third person, s.h.i.+fting from character to character every few pages. Every short section was headed with the name of the person from whose point of view he was writing. The problem was that in the first twenty-eight pages, I counted seven characters into whose point of view the reader was admitted for a short period. It was a dizzying experience.

If you use the third-person point of view, you can be a partisan of all the characters or some. You can be entirely neutral or objective, conveying nothing of the characters' thoughts or aims. Complete objectivity tends to be sterile of emotion, particularly the kind of intimacy that readers enjoy in literary novels, but it is useful in stories that are mainly action. Whatever genre you write in, my recommendation is that you focus on the POV of one character at a time, and sustain it, or you're likely to get into trouble. If you've got to let your readers know what everybody thinks, you'd probably be better off using the omniscient point of view, the loosest of forms. You can more readily let the reader know what each character thinks than you can in the third person, as Norman Mailer did in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The novel starts with: n.o.body could sleep. When morning came, a.s.sault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ash.o.r.e on the beach at Anopopei. All over the s.h.i.+p, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours, some of them were going to be dead.

That is clearly an omniscient point of view. The next long paragraph begins with: A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully.

The reader experiences everything in that paragraph and the next long paragraph from the point of view of an anonymous soldier. That paragraph ends with the soldier coming back from the latrine: And as he returns, he is thinking of an early morning in his childhood when he had lain awake because it was to be his birthday and his mother had promised him a party.

The reader might expect to be taken back to the anonymous soldier's childhood party. Instead, the next paragraph introduces us to new characters: Early that evening Wilson and Gallagher and Staff Sergeant Croft had started a game of seven card stud with a couple of orderlies from headquarters platoon.

Then we get a scene of a card game with Wilson, Gallagher, and Croft. We get inside Wilson's head: He was feeling very good. In the next paragraph, we enter Croft's head for a second to find out he is annoyed by the hands he's been getting. Soon Wilson reflected for a moment, holding an undealt card in his hand. Then we are told Wilson is dejected. We get into Gallagher's head-his conscience is bothering him, he is thinking of his seven-month-pregnant wife back home. And so it goes. We are told things by the omniscient author, and we go in and out of the minds of the three card players. Young as he was when he wrote The Naked and the Dead, Mailer's natural talent overcame his lack of experience. His use of the omniscient point of view seems instinctive, but he made it work well because the reader feels the author is in control. The great danger in using the omniscient point of view is the loss of control that is attributable to the lack of discipline.

While an author can write about characters more sophisticated than himself, it is difficult to fas.h.i.+on a character who is more knowledgeable and intelligent than the author, particularly if the author is going into the character's most profound thoughts. That's why characters like scientists, public figures, and intellectuals in some popular novels come across as stilted or fake. Similarly, if the author is writing about people less intelligent than himself, he must be careful not to put thoughts into a character's head that are beyond that character's capabilities.

The major decision, of course, is which point of view to use. Some of the authors I've worked with have an instinct for one or another point of view based in some measure on their experience as readers. Those who write thrillers usually write in the third person. Those whose reading has been mainly literary are more often tempted by the first person. But that still leaves a large terrain in the middle. Mainstream fiction is written in both first and third person. My advice is to try the form that feels comfortable to you. One advantage of understanding point of view is that if your work isn't satisfying you, you can always put the draft aside and rewrite it from another point of view. If you've used third person, try first. If you've used omniscient, try third or first. Or both. Switching points of view has saved novels that were going nowhere.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that there are ways to get around some of the limitations of first-person point of view. The most important, of course, is to get beyond the character's horizon and let the reader experience an event where the first person narrator was not present. In the following example, a character named Florence is speaking: "The old b.i.t.c.h threatened to blow the party if I was invited, though the occasion was as much mine as Rose's. Helen told me she put her punch gla.s.s down in the first minute because the punch tasted as if it were made with grape juice and gasoline. Debbie, would you believe it, phoned me from her car to say the background music was so loud you couldn't hear what anybody said if you didn't know how to lip read. I could hardly hear her because of the traffic noise. Thank heaven Maryanne came zipping straight over from the party to tell me Sally's husband looked like he wouldn't last another day. And Rose, she said Rose's breath kept everyone standing at least three feet away from her, looking for an excuse to escape. I wasn't invited, but I might as well have been. I probably know more about what happened than anybody."

Note that to help credibility, there is a sense of cattiness and conflict in Florence's att.i.tude toward the people at the party. A simpler but perhaps less credible way would be to give the first-person character a legitimate reason to ask about what is for her an offstage event. Or the first-person character addressing the reader can guess what might be happening at that moment elsewhere. The point to remember is that you have to motivate the reporting of offstage scenes. And whenever possible keep the report visual. We see Helen putting the awful punch down. We hear Debbie with difficulty as well as see her use her car phone. We smell Rose's breath.

Finally, here's a POV checklist to use in examining your own work: * Is your point of view consistent? If it slips anywhere, correct it. If it isn't working, try another point of view.

* Is your point of view sufficiently subjective to involve the reader's emotions? Have you been too objective?

* Have you avoided telling us how a character feels? Have you relied on actions to help the reader experience emotion?

* If you're using the first person, have you used another character to convey in conversation what your first person character looks like?

* Is the "I" character sufficiently different from you?

* Have you told the reader anything that the "I" character couldn't know or wouldn't say? Is the author's voice showing?

* Is there anything in your material that is not likely to be known to someone with your character's background or intelligence?

* If you're using third person or the omniscient point of view, have you used particularity in describing that person?

* Would it pay to narrow your focus so that the reader can identify more readily with one of the characters?

* Have you established limitations or guidelines for your third-person point of view? Have you then adhered to those limitations?

Subjects taught in colleges and universities are called disciplines. Writing is a discipline. And one of its most disciplined techniques is that of point of view. The choice of point of view is yours, but once you've decided, be sure that you stick to it as if your reader's experience of the story depended on it. Because it does.

When he was young, Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, worked for Sinclair Lewis. Once he asked the master how best to handle flashbacks. Lewis's reply was succinct. He said, "Don't."

It is true that even experienced writers sometimes handle flashbacks awkwardly. It is also true that flashbacks are used too often, and frequently remove the reader from the experience he is having. Nevertheless, you sometimes need to use flashbacks, and therefore you should learn how to employ them properly.

Ideally, all fiction should seem to be happening now. That sentence is worth pasting on your makeup or shaving mirror or on your computer where you will see it every day.

We don't read in real time. A writer can brush hours aside by one word: "Later ..." Some stories seem to read fast, some seem to drag. Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, dwells for dozens of pages on thoughts inspired by a cookie. Zola, in his cla.s.sic L'a.s.sommoir, has a sumptuous meal that, as I recall, lasts for fifty pages. If we don't read in real time, why not go back to some previous matter in a flashback? Why are editors so inhospitable to flashbacks?

The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience. The reader is intent on what happens next. Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier. If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information. If we are enthralled, we don't want to be interrupted. Therefore, the art of writing flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader's experience. I'll show you how that's done.

Let's be sure we understand each other. A flashback is any scene that happened before the present story began.

Note that I said any scene. A true flashback, however short, is a scene, preferably with characters in conflict.

If you find that you absolutely must use a flashback, there are a number of points to engrave on your mind: * A flashback must illuminate the present story in an important way. Otherwise, why bother? If it doesn't enhance the present story markedly, you may not really need it.

* Whenever possible, the flashback should be an immediate scene rather than an offstage narrative summary. The reader needs to witness the flashback rather than be told about what happened.

* You can go into a flashback directly or segue into it. The object is to make the transition to the flashback as un.o.btrusive as possible. Slipping into the flashback quickly avoids the risk of the impatient reader skipping pages because he sees the flashback coming before it grips him.

* The first sentence of a flashback needs to be arresting.

A flashback is presumably there because it provides information. To the reader that information should not come across as information about the past; it should be as immediate and gripping as a scene in the present. If you're riding in an elevator, you don't want to see the chains and pulleys of the mechanism. The reader doesn't want to see your chains and pulleys, he just wants the ride. Ask yourself: If the flashback is necessary, can the reader see the action in it as an immediate scene? Is the opening of the flashback as interesting or compelling as the beginning of a novel or story?

Does the flashback enhance the reader's experience of the story as a whole? A good flashback is a scene that is depicted exactly as it would be in the present story except for how it is introduced and how the present story is rejoined.

Certain words should carry warning labels for the writer. "Had" is the number-one villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use the same tense you're using for the present scenes. That means in almost all cases the straight past tense, not the variants. Instead of saying, "I had been remembering ...", say "I remembered ..."

Here's an example of an author who gets tangled up in "hads" that are totally unnecessary: I remember when my boss had called me into his office and had said, "Sit down." He had remained standing. In those days I was like a new army recruit, I had taken everything said to me as an order. I hadn't wanted to sit down with him looming over me.

When that author's editor finished, this is the way the text read: I remember the time my boss called me into his office and said, "Sit down." He remained standing. In those days I was like a new army recruit, I took everything as an order, but d.a.m.n if I wanted to sit with him looming over me.

The first example has five "hads." The second example has none.

Sometimes authors double up on a fault with "had had," or use the contraction for "had," and compound the problem with another word to avoid in flashbacks, "then": Ellie had had a mother who wanted a boy and who'd made Ellie wear boys' clothes and cut her hair like a boy for years. Then one day...

The author should have written: Ellie's mother wanted a boy. She made Ellie wear boys' clothes and cut her hair like a boy's for years. One day ...

In starting a flashback, your aim is to get into an immediate scene as soon as possible. Since dialogue is always in immediate scene, one way of handling flashbacks is to use dialogue early. What most writers don't realize is that you can use dialogue even if the flashback is short. Here's an example from the second page of The Resort. Margaret Brown, a physician, is reminiscing about her education in medical school. Watch how the thought of a certain instructor almost instantly becomes dialogue: Margaret realized much too soon that the ultimate organ, the brain that harbored the mind, was terra incognita for most of her fellow students. Her wisest instructor, Dr. Teal, once asked her if brain surgery attracted her as a specialty. "No," she said much too quickly. "May I ask why?" "I find surgeons boring."

Dr. Teal, a surgeon, blushed. Margaret quickly apologized, explaining she meant those of her fellow students who ...

Inserting those three lines of dialogue helps the rest of the reminiscence become visible to the reader.

There are two ways of introducing a flashback. First is the direct method. An example I point to often is from Brian Glanville's novel The Comic. The protagonist is a comedian who is thought to be crazy. On the sixth page, he tells his therapist: "I've always told jokes, Doc." The next paragraph begins a flashback in a direct manner: Which is true. Go back as far as I can remember, and I'm telling jokes. In fact I think he's right, it was a defense; or it began as a defense. At home, at school. My father, big b.a.s.t.a.r.d, keeping that pub in the Mile End road, always handy with his belt.

And so on, into the comic's childhood. Brian Glanville hooks us with an intriguing character. We want to know more about this "mad" comic who is speaking to us over the head of his doctor, as it were. We're glad to have his background brought to us by the flashback.

There are equally simple ways of concluding a flashback.

You can use a line s.p.a.ce (four blank lines) to mark the pa.s.sage of time and restart the present scene after the line s.p.a.ce. Or you can begin a new paragraph with "One week later ..."

Or you can restart the present scene with dialogue: "Last week you didn't talk this way."

You can come out of the flashback by a direct statement. John, in bed with Anna, has been remembering (in a flashback) a scene in the past: The next day John got out of bed as if he had his whole life to live all over again. It needn't be that direct: Without taking his eyes off Anna's sleeping face, John slipped into his undershorts, b.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt, put one leg and then the other into his pants, but when he sat on the bed to put on his socks and shoes, Anna opened her eyes.

While flashbacks are to be avoided whenever possible, the flashback thought can be immensely useful in enriching both a character and a scene. In life our thoughts interrupt us all the time. Frequently the thoughts are relevant to where we are, what we're doing, what people are saying to us. Thoughts give texture to life and also to novels.

The first three pages of my novel Living Room show the heroine, s.h.i.+rley Hartman, locking the door of her apartment in a Manhattan high-rise, taking the elevator to the top floor, and climbing the stairs to the roof. Then we get her thoughts, which are interspersed with thoughts of the past. Without those thoughts, of the past as well as the present, the scene would lose impact.

Let's join s.h.i.+rley Hartman one page into the scene, listen to her thoughts, and then examine them closely to see how the effect is achieved: Through gaps in the clouds drifting across the charcoal sky, she made out the moon. As a child, she could always decipher its face; now it seemed to have only a scarred surface, crags and mottled ground where instruments had been implanted, sending messages, even now.

A few rectangles of light in the higher building across the street betrayed their occupants' sleeplessness. s.h.i.+rley leaned over the waist-high parapet, her feet on tiptoe, and dizzyingly saw in the street below a taxi disgorging its pa.s.sengers. Suddenly she thought of the unwashed dish with the remains of the cottage cheese and fruit. She should have rinsed it off, stuck it in the dishwasher, left things neat. And the diary she kept in her desk drawer, the leather flaking with age, the broken lock, the coded recordings of long ago, the first time she had taken pleasure with herself, the crazy evening with Harry, she should have dropped it into the incinerator! And Al's one letter, she should have flushed it away. Al, that intolerably independent man who could live without anyone, who she thought loved her but didn't need her, how would he react when he heard, would it surprise him, the stoic who pretended never to be surprised by anything?