No. 12 was across in the opposite wing. It was in the corner, and there were three doors between it and the end; fifteen rooms altogether. As I put down the cases and fished in my pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the bleak area baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it: flagstones, deck-chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass—It screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.

The room was nicely furnished with a green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a chest of drawers with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest-green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and curtained window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were worn and threadbare, the type of thing you’d expect in a cheap hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured out a whisky. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.

It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get hold of with my hands. Building something. That was it. You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn’t throw away six years’ work in five crazy minutes.

I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn’t any particular feeling about it any more, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness. We’d been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone—the job she’d blamed our failure on.

I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she’d read about it when it finally happened. She’d married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There’d been no word from her, but there was no reason why she should write. She wasn’t the kind for that ‘I told you so’ routine, and there wasn’t much else to say.