[...] I ask Nicole where she is from. She says Chicago, with what is so clearly a German o that I’m taken aback. I just say, Really. She says, Before that Minneapolis. I have now firmly decided that by tomorrow I shall be gone from Ireland. [...]
“I’ll get over it.”
“Will you?”
“Yes. And you’ll find somebody else.” Your face froze. You said, “I won’t.” I said, “You will. The thing is, I won’t mind so much. Because I won’t know.”
Look here, you know. I loved you.
Well, the question occurs, so many times, clearing desks, doing inc…
And then one night, when you were about to leave for the island where you spend your weeks at Christmas, and your wife was already there but your children, the last of whom has now grown up, were not this year going with you, I said, I’m afraid I said, You know, we wouldn’t have to make love as muc…
You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.
Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.
Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. And in the second place because is how the Nabokov story starts, and I hate the artifice, but it is a star turn. I mean, what a star turn, what a triple coup to begin a story thus, with “And,” when nothing at all has gone be…
