Michael Malone - Weebly

aimless path of last night's rain, what he felt, at first,
was not so much a sense of loss as a sense of wonder
at Beanie's revealed intensity. What must so precipitous
an emotion be like to blot out domestic and social
habits, to cut through the easeful inertia of that many
years? It must be frightening to be caught in such a
passion. Beanie must be frightened. No, that wasn't
true. Physical things had never scared her. Letters and
numbers scared her, in their (to her) arbitrary
manifestations—like cocktail party invitations or bank
figures. He and she were quite opposite in that, in most
ways. Abernathy had no fear of anything that could be
written down. He was, on the other hand, made queasy
by the darting approach of a cat, or Big Mutt, the dog
Beanie had so named because he was simply that, a
large mongrel. She was not given to metaphor.
The lawyer worried about how his wife must feel
about how he must feel. How must he feel? Betrayed?
He could not visualize this absurdly named man (this
poet?) with regard to whom his wife had written that
she had never felt this way before. He could not feel
betrayed, because he could not believe it. Arthur was