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"How lovely to think that," Thelma says. "It makes you" – the word is hard for her to find – "radiant. And sad." She gives him advice on some points. She thinks he should seek out Ruth and ask her point-blank if that is his daughter, and if so is there anything he can do to help? On the subject of Nelson, she thinks the child's problem may be an extension of Harry's; if he himself did not feel guilty about Jill's death and before that Rebecca's, he would feel less threatened by Nelson and more comfortable and kindly with him. "Remember," she says, "he's just a young man like you once were, looking for his path."
"But he's not like me!" Harry protests, having come at last into a presence where the full horror of this truth, the great falling-off, will be understood. "He's a goddam little Springer, through and through."
Thelma thinks he's more like Harry than he knows. Wanting to learn to hang glide – didn't he recognize himself in that? And the thing with two girls at once. Wasn't he, possibly, a bit jealous of Nelson?
"But I never had the impulse to screw Melanie," he confesses. "Or Pru either, much. They're both out of this world, somehow."
Of course, Thelma says. "You shouldn't want to fuck them. They're your daughters. Or Cindy either. You should want to fuck me. I'm your generation, Harry. I can see you. To those girls you're just an empty heap of years and money."
And, as they drift in talk away from the constellations of his life, she describes her marriage with Ro
A savage rattling at the door. "Thelma. Harry. It's us." Thelma puts on a robe to answer the knocking while Rabbit hides beneath the sheet and peeks. Webb and Ro
He shouts out, "You O.K.?"
She shouts back, "As O.K. as you are," and doesn't emerge.
On the way out, Harry stuffs an unbuttered croissant and some scalding sips of coffee into his mouth. The papery orange and magenta flowers beside the door hurt his head. Webb and Ro
"You're kidding. Why?" He is groggy, and had pictured a long afternoon nap, to be in shape for tonight. Also his foreskin was tender after last night's workout and slightly chafed every time he swung, thinking of Cindy, hoping her vagina would be nonfrictional. His golf, threaded through vivid after-images of Thelma's underside and a ticklish awareness of his two businesslike partners as silently freighted with mental pictures of their own, was mysteriously good, his swing as it were emptied of impurities, until fatigue caught him on the fifteenth hole with three balls sliced along the identical skyey groove into the lost-ball terrain of cactus and coral and scrub growth. "What's happened? The baby?"