But though he had fallen in love with Pascale because of her words, it was only now, in her writhing wordlessness, that he knew how entwined their two souls were. They inhabited this silence with an intimacy so complete it all but matched a person’s own intimacy with himself. The two of them were alone together inside this silence, with all the world outside. Her brilliant words, counter, original, spare, and strange, had entranced him, but also distracted him, distanced him even as they pulled him in. Perhaps words always do. We depend on them to read each other’s souls-what else do we normally have?-but it’s only in cases like this, when the other is simply given to one, soul to soul laid out before one like a scene before the eyes, that one really knows who the other is.
He had spoken of all this and more to his stricken wife, sometimes in words, but more often in the soundless communion to which they had been both reduced and elevated.
And then, one evening, after the supper tray-loaded with the home-cooked food he brought her-had been removed, she had spoken, vindicating McSweeney, who alone had known what Pascale’s own passionate desire was in regard to the question of whether to operate or not, while Cass had wandered lost in the matrix of risks.
“I must of necessity break your heart.”
Meaning: I have lain here in my silence and I have fallen in love, as you, too, have fallen in love in my silence. It is symmetrical, absolument, in the abstract.
Meaning: Therefore, it is necessary to love Micah McSweeney.
Meaning: Therefore, it is impossible to love you. A tout à l’heure, devoted Cass. You have served the muses well, in your time.
For all these years, it had been impossible for Cass to think of Pascale, her starved-wolf eyes and the long coarse black hair that always held an intoxicating fragrance that he had thought of as the scent of ethereality itself, without a gasping contraction round the ventricles of his heart.
Lipkin must have miscalculated the length of his talk. It was nearing the end of the hour, and he obviously still had a lot more material to get through. He was powering through his PowerPoint at a maniacal clip.
“Oh dear, don’t tell me he’s going to throw in the Milgram experiment now, too? Lipkin, Lipkin, where will this end?” Lucinda was laughing deliciously in Cass’s ear.
Lipkin had clicked up onto the screen the famous picture of Adolf Eichmann in his bulletproof glass booth, the three Israeli judges, in their heavy black robes, sitting above him like buzzards. The top of the screen was labeled “Only following orders.”
