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“Have you? That’s good. What with?”

“Painting, mostly,” Calla says, holding out her blunt hands and examining them. “I’ve become a real interior decorator. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve hardly had a moment to spare, all summer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, though, I must say.”

I find such difficulty in focusing on what she is saying, but something of her voice’s belligerence cuts through to me.

“That’s good.” How can I say it convincingly enough? “That’s – I’m awfully glad.”

“Yes. We finished painting the Tabernacle a week ago. It turned out a great success.”

“Oh – fine.”

“Yes. We did the walls in eggshell. Teams of four. Any more don’t get things done, you know, they just gab. Trimming and woodwork in moss-green. It’s a real improvement, I must say. I got so good with a roller that I’ll never use brushes again for walls. Or ceilings. I did most of the ceilings, because I’ve got a head for heights, not that you might think it, to look at me.”

Now there is something so unassuming about her that I wish I could talk to her. But I can’t talk about him to anyone.

I got the curse this week. I was – of course – relieved. Who wouldn’t be? Anyone would naturally be relieved, under the circumstances. It stands to reason. You hear of women waiting for it, and worrying incessantly, and then when it comes, they’re released and everything is all right again and that anxiety is over for the moment and for a while one need not think What would I do? What would become of me? I was terribly relieved. It was a release, a reprieve.

That is a lie, Rachel. That is really a lie, in the deepest way possible for anyone to lie.

No. Yes. Both are true. Does one have to choose between two realities? If you think you love two men, the heart-throb column in the daily paper used to say when I was still consulting it daily, then neither one is for you. If you think you contain two realities, perhaps you contain none.

If I had to choose between feelings, I know which it would be. But that would be a disaster, from every point of view except the most inner one, and if you chose that side, you would really be on your own, now and forever, and that couldn’t, I think, be borne, not by me.

What are we talking about, Calla and I? Where did I leave her? Painting the Tabernacle. It’s all right. Only an instant has elapsed, I guess.

“I’d like to go and see it some time.”

“Would you,” she says, “really?”

“Why, yes. Yes, of course. It sounds very nice.”

Nice. The most useful word in the language, the most evasive. Calla isn’t taken in. She’s brusque, sometimes, and her taste in furnishings seems so horrible to me that it creates a kind of horrible snobbishness in me and I go to the opposite extreme to admire her larkspur walls. But she’s not stupid. She knows.

“You don’t have to,” she is saying, quite kindly.

“No – I’d like to. I mean it.” I have to say this, now, have to go on protesting my sincerity. Yet I can’t think of that place without dread. The abandoned voices, abandoned in both ways – their owners bereft and because of it needing to utter with that looseness. And the one voice which can’t be forgotten. But it was a momentary thing, a lapse, an accident. It couldn’t happen again. I don’t think that sort of thing could ever happen again, could it?

“After it happened – I mean, at the Tabernacle that night when you were there,” Calla says, “I didn’t go again for weeks.”

“Didn’t you? Why not?”

“Because of how you felt. It was contagious. No, don’t say anything. I know you didn’t mean it to be. But I felt the same. As though it must be awful, in some way, the place and everything there. It was then that I re-read St. Paul.”

“Really?” I cannot take her earnestness seriously. What is she talking about?

“Yes. I suppose you knew all along. That was what I kept thinking about. You’d known all along.”

“Known what?”

“Just exactly how much he’d warned against speaking in tongues. I’d only known bits of his sayings, here and there,