«Oh …? And where's that?»

«In my unbelieving head! Nothing this good has happened to me in three years …!»

He hadn't lied to her, Mark thought later, as he moved knowingly around his own small, seedy apartment, making himself a pitcher of martinis, some crackers with cheese, then settling down in his easy chair. He heard Queenie's level breathing beside him and felt the reassuring closeness of her strong body against his bare foot. He flicked on the small radio and found his favorite FM station, while his mind raced. If only he could have gotten one look at her, for Christ's sake! He turned up the radio to drown out the clattering worthlessness of the air- conditioner.

She had to be beautiful with a voice like that … and she was certainly no hooker. Single, evidently, or maybe divorced like him. He took off his eye-shades and rubbed at his sightless eyes. Opening them again, he wondered how dead or vacant they looked. Were they still the same bluish tint? … the color Nancy had told him she loved so much … the bitch.

He sipped at his martini, then popped a whole small cracker with cheese into his mouth. They'd told him the acid had never noticeably damaged the actual eyeball, only destroyed the thin lids, which plastic surgery had restored … plus his sight, but he had no way of knowing that was true.

Shit, that was hardly important anymore! In three years, a man learns to live with a horror, just as he accustoms himself to the loss of his wife after seven years, the girl he comes to believe is a part of him, for richer or poorer, through sickness and in health, till death …! Malarky! Goddamn, what had gotten him off onto this tangent? He didn't want to think of that shallow bitch ever again! She was gone, on the other side of the continent, back in her Boston environment where she belonged, and he was well rid of her. More important things had suddenly, and so unexpectedly, happened to him!

The sound of Carol Dorsett's almost sensual voice and the delicate scent of her perfume shouldn't play any part in the picture, Mark knew, but he couldn't exactly get them out of him mind.