"I'm glad you're here. You're safe. What can I get you?"

And then, realizing that what she needed most was a freedom from all choice, he led her into the bedroom and made a space for her.

"Is there anything you'd like?"

"A new father." Her voice was still strange, as over the telephone. "I think I need to sleep."

"Sleep; I'll be here beside you."

He sat beside her as she lay and saw her fall into another space. It had been a long time since he'd seen her in this position, smelled her face cream, watched the calm that stole over her face when she was resting. She stirred once, a few minutes after she'd nodded off, and he put a hand out to assure her he was there. Awake, it had seemed as if some aspirant Camilla was in his room, the amateur actress come once more; asleep, it was her again in his bed.

When she awoke, she pushed herself deeper into him, as if to shut out the light.

"Can I get you anything?"

"Nothing's going to bring him back."

He smoothed her hair, sang a soft song he remembered she liked. When she awoke more fully, she was a little more herself. "Here we go again. I come to you and leave all this garbage on your doorstep."

"I'm just happy to see you. I'd been thinking of how I'd get to see you."

"Like you get to see a sleepless night." The bitterness was the only part the actress had got right.

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"No. I don't."

She slept most of the day, and when it was dark, the small new candle burning as before (he'd gone and bought a new one after she'd taken the old one away), she said, from where she lay, "There was this call in the middle of the night. I went over, and there was an ambulance parked outside. The Browns, the Gottliebs were there. My mother was in her bed crying. I didn't think I could ever feel sorry for her before."

"She must be devastated."

"She's got his will, his safety box. That's all she cares about."

"But she was crying."

"She was crying. She misses him. Now she doesn't have anyone to use."

"What do you feel like doing?"

"Running away, hiding. The same things I always do." The anger came out in every direction, and it didn't matter whom it stung; the world had done what it always did, which was to let her down.

"She wore at him and wore at him. Day after day for thirty years. Rubbing at him till there was no him left."

"But he stayed."

"Of course he stayed. He was too weak. She made him think she'd die if he left her on her own."

He went into the kitchen and brought her juice. Then, settling down beside her again, "There isn't anything you want?"

"Just take me away. Anywhere."

They got into his car, he wrapping her up in his coat and bringing along blankets, and they drove to the ledge just beneath the once-abandoned house. Planes hovered over the town below, red lights winking on their tails, and the grids of yellow lights shivered and blurred as if ready to be snuffed out. Occasionally a car would come around the bend, and crazed shouts would pass into the mountain silence, Californian revelers off to practice whatever forms of private worship they observe outside the city walls.

"Thank you," she said, taking long breaths and looking out the side window. "I needed this."

"L.A. is very far away."

"It never happened," she said. "It doesn't exist."

The next day, again, she spent all the daylight hours in bed, not coming to the phone when Kristina called, not stirring in response to anything he said. She woke towards nightfall, and he asked her the same question he always asked, so she would know she was at home.

"What would feel nice?"

"Do you have some juice?"

"Juice we can do."

She was coming back to shore at last; a little color had returned to her cheeks, and her voice had come up a few notches from the deep. But they were still walking over splintered ground; he was ready to see her wince and recoil at any moment.

"Is that all?"

"Do you have anything to read to me? I think that would feel nice."

"What kind of thing?"

"Something from your poems. Like a year ago."

She'd given him an opening to ask about the manuscript, and, as a kind of reassurance, he asked her nothing. Instead, he went over to the desk, where he kept the photocopies he'd made, and came back with the pieces of paper, as if they were just sheaves from the usual papers on his desk. He didn't know yet how much she even knew of the content of the poems. When she moved up to squeeze his hand, he noticed the ring he'd given her on the wedding finger.

"Here goes. These have never been heard by human ear before. Hot off the press."

She pressed herself into him and closed her eyes.

All night aflame,

I turn and turn.

The wind shakes my trees.

I shiver in my bed.

The world spins all around me.

Heavens fall, angels scramble at my feet.

I turn and turn,

The ground is rich with stars.

"They don't sound like the usual ones," she said, and he, looking down at her, couldn't tell if it was canniness speaking, or innocence. "They don't even sound like they're from the same culture."

"I can read you P. G. Wodehouse instead," he said, not taking the bait. "S. J. Perelman or something, to make you relax."

"No. This is nice. Go on."

These words, my wounds, a homesickness.

A bird calls above the sea.

A light on the shore, a light.

He was trying to read her poems whose provenance he didn't know-not the ones that were from the best-selling Rumi anthology- but whatever her response to them, he couldn't tell: her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular.

When you left, I did, too.

No I at home any more.

Only this candle, this quiet burning.

Her body was so still, he thought she might be sleeping.

"Are you there?"

"I'm here. I'm listening." He looked at her, and thought how the poems would have sounded even to him, two or three years ago: mystification, perhaps, empty portent.

We never move, the earth spins round.

The heavens come down, and the ground rises up.

Why talk, then, of your whirling?