They were sending him to Norfolk, he said; but he thought it best if he went alone. Pearl felt she was sinking in at the center, like someone given a stomach punch. Yet part of her experienced an alert form of interest, as if this were happening in a story. “Why?” she asked him, calmly enough. He didn’t answer. “Beck? Why?” All he did was study his fists. He looked like a young and belligerent schoolboy waiting out a scolding. She made her voice even quieter. It was important to learn the reason. Wouldn’t he just tell her what it was? He’d told her, he said. She lowered herself, shaking, into the chair across from him. She looked at his left temple, in which a pulse ticked. He was just passing through some mood, was all. He would change his mind in the morning. “We’ll sleep on it,” she told him.

But he said, “It’s tonight I’m going.”

He went to the bedroom for his suitcase, and he took his other suit from the wardrobe. Meanwhile Pearl, desperate for time, asked couldn’t they talk this over? Think it through? No need to be hasty, was there? He crossed from bureau to bed, from wardrobe to bed, packing his belongings. There weren’t that many. He was done in twenty minutes. He drew in his breath and she thought, Now he’ll tell me. But all he said was, “I’m not an irresponsible person. I do plan to send you money.”

“And the children,” she said, clutching new hope. “You’ll want to visit the children.”

(He would come with presents for them and she’d be the one to open the door — perfumed, in her Sunday dress, maybe wearing a bit of rouge. She’d always thought false color looked cheap, but she could have been wrong.)

Beck said, “No.”

“What?”

“I won’t be visiting the children.”

She sat down on the bed.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

There ought to be a whole separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words — for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.