Journey to a woman

She lay in the dark and cried. She lay close and warm in her husband’s arms while their breath slowed to normal and their hearts quieted together and she wept silently at his si...

Beth loved her kids the way she loved Charlie: at a distance. It was a real love but it couldn’t be crowded. She had no patience with intimacy. The hardest years of her life had...

They fell into the routine then which became so dull and empty to Beth over the next few years. At first she was too busy getting settled in her new home to be bored. She inspec...

_She wouldn’t tell me to save her own skin_, he thought resentfully, and a wave of hatred for her secretiveness, her airs, came over him. He tried to swallow it down. He didn’t...

Vega’s studio was located on the second floor of a building that housed an exclusive dress shop and a luggage and notions shop. It was an expensive place to rent and Beth was ra...

She drove home like a punch-drunk novice, laughing at the panic she caused and feeling light, giddy, peculiarly happy in a way that almost seemed familiar. She was unable even t...

Beth and Charlie both jumped when the phone rang at one-thirty in the morning. Charlie grumbled, “I’ll get it,” but Beth had a sudden premonition and said, “Oh, never mind. I’ll...

Beth went through a period of nearly two months, as spring edged into summer, of emotional upheaval and torment that were all the harder to bear for being secret. There was no o...

In Pasedena she stopped and called Cleve. It was past eleven o’clock and she hesitated, but she had to talk to somebody about Vega and had to make some arrangements about Charli...

Uncle John, genial and bustling and worried, picked her up in Chicago. He had to be content with the briefest and barest explanation from her. She was utterly exhausted and all...

Beth withdrew her money from the bank. There was nearly four thousand dollars. That was plenty. She felt extravagantly rich with the money her parents had left her lined up neat...

They had lunch the next day, though Beth felt gray with the hangover. And somehow, over the salad and crackers, she found she couldn’t speak of Laura. It was like trying to swal...

When Beth left Nina’s apartment two days later, she found a letter waiting for her in the post office box she had rented. She half expected Nina to ask her to move in before she...

In Nina’s phrase, they did the town that night. Beth drank very little at first, but as the evening wore on the little mounted up and she realized, some time shortly after midni...

Beth stayed with Beebo that night and they sat up and talked through most of it. Beebo told her about the two years she and Laura had lived together, what a paradise it had been...

Beth walked over to Seventh Avenue to get a taxi. She walked with a light, swinging step, feeling a small new joy in her heart that almost amounted to hope for a happy ending to...

It was almost dawn when she heard the front door opened carefully, and shut with a small click. She was lying on her stomach with her face obscured by crumpled bedclothes and th...

She walked. She spent most of the day walking, and when she got tired she went to the library and sat at a table in a corner of the Social Sciences room and stared ahead of her....

They walked over to Sixth Avenue and hailed a taxi, and all the while Beth was looking around her, behind and on all sides for the little man she was so sure was the detective....

In the silence that followed Beth lay where she was, nailed to the bed. She had neither the courage nor the physical strength nor the desire to sit up and look at Vega. What hap...

He closed the door of the room he had taken in the Blackwell and turned to face her. Beth couldn’t look at him. She sat down on the bed—a spacious double bed that unnerved her s...

There was only one thing left that she knew she had to do, and that was see Laura and tell her the truths she had withheld before. She wrote to her aunt and uncle first and expl...

When she came she had coffee with them—they were on their third cups—and she listened quietly while Beth explained what she had been through with Vega—and what Vega had been thr...