Now he did feel something. With all his soul he wanted to say to the girl who no longer existed that it was all right. (Outside the train window rushed the gunmetal dapplings of dark ponds. He saw a squirrel's raised tail in the leaves.) He wouldn't embrace her because she wouldn't like it. He wouldn't demonstrate through any gesture of puerile romanticism how she who once had been the center not only of his selfish desires but also of much of the goodness and generosity which slept within him now remained and would always be his — no matter that he'd long ago lost of her all but the memory; as someone in his past she'd yearly become (in a secret all too well kept from himself) more and more a part of him, her trace so permeating him that he was hardly conscious of it. The proof was the physical weight of the grief he felt (as if he were carrying a backpack of leaden sadness) once he understood that she might die within months. You see, he loved her so much. — He'd confine himself to stating that nothing was or had been her fault, and even that communication could be reburied under his breastbone if its presentation would interrupt her (on the rare occasions when he did telephone her and got beyond the nurse, she'd say: Who's this?); he'd explain that he had no desire to ask anything of her because he had other wives now and would never be lonely. He only wanted her to be happy if she could. If she had any notion of how he could help her, he would do whatever she asked. He'd lay everything out for her with the utmost service and ceremony, just like the waiter at the Hotel Thanada in Rangoon who put on his glasses whenever you ordered, then carefully polished each utensil that he brought you, making one trip for the fork, one for the knife, one for the spoon, cleaning each of these in a once-white rag before setting it noiselessly in front of you on the greasy tablecloth. That was service from the heart. If she didn't want that, he would think kindly of her and return to his various rushing trains. But that scared girl was not there anymore. He could not find her, no matter where in the world he went. She was gone. She was not dead yet, only gone. She did not need his love and care anymore. She never had, because what he'd possessed she never wanted. Now she needed chemotherapy, and then pills to stop vomiting, and a wig to hide her baldness, and more pills for weeping and for pain.
