X wouldn’t either, though for other, even better reasons (she expected more). Vicki is hopeful, but not of much, and so is never far from disappointment.

Still, the worst reconciliation with a woman is better than the best one you work out with yourself.

“There’s nothing in this bag worth stealin, or even finding out about,” Vicki says wearily, everting her lips at her weekender as if it were a wreckage that has washed ashore after years of not being missed. “Money,” she says languidly, “I keep hid in a special place. That’s one secret I keep. You won’t get that.”

I want to hug her knees, though this is clearly hands-to-yourself time. The slightest wrong move will see me on the phone locating another room on another floor, possibly in the Sheraton, four cold and lonely blocks away, and no coat to keep out the slick Canadian damp.

Vicki peers over at the glass desktop, at her wallet open alongside her cigarettes. The snapshot of brain-dead Everett leers upwards (it may in fact be hard to tell my somber, earnest face from his).

“I really believe there’s only six people in the world,” she says in a softened voice, staring down at Everett’s mug. “I’d been thinking you might be one. An important one. But I think you had too many girlfriends already. Maybe you’re somebody else’s one.”

“You might be wrong. I could still make the line-up.”

She looks at me distrustfully. “Eyes are important to me, okay? They’re windows to your soul. And your eyes … I used to think I could see your soul back in there. But now….” She shakes her head in doubt.

“What do you see?” I don’t want to hear the answer. It is a question I would never even ask Mrs. Miller, and one she’d never take it upon herself to speculate about. We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

“I don’t know,” Vicki says, in a thin wispy way, which means I had better not pursue it or she’ll decide. “What’re you so interested in my stepbrother for?” She looks at me oddly.

“I don’t know your stepbrother,” I say.

She picks up the wallet and holds the snapshot up so I am looking directly into the swarthy smart-aleck’s face. “Him,” she says. “This poor old thing, here.”

So much of life can’t be foreseen. A hundred private explanations and exculpations come rushing up into my throat, and I have to swallow hard to hold them back. Though, of course, there is nothing to say. Like all needless excuses, the unraveling is not worth the time. However, I feel a swirling dreaminess, an old familiar bemusement, suddenly rise into my appreciation of everything around me. Irony is returned. I have a feeling that if I tried to speak now, my mouth would move, but no sound would occur. And it would scare us both to death.