Meanwhile, I keep the company of my characters as though they were dear friends. I have only to dose my eyes, and there they are.

Rachel, for instance? I can see her in my mind's eye right now, sipping her evening's Bloody Mary before she goes to bed; not remotely suspecting that the night of her life lies before her. I can picture Cadmus just as clearly. There he is, sitting in his wheelchair in front of his sixty-inch television, his eyes glazed as he contemplates a scene remote from him in years yet closer than the liver spots on the back of his hand. I can bring Garrison before me-poor, sick Garrison, who has such harm in his heart, and knows it-and Margie, in her cups; and Loretta, plotting successions; and my father's wife, busy with plots of her own; and Luman and Marietta and Galilee.

Oh, my Galilee. I see him more clearly tonight than ever I've seen him in my life, even when he was standing before me in the flesh. Does that sound absurd, that he should appear in my imagination more completely than he ever did before my eyes? However it sounds, it's true. Dreaming of Galilee as I do, conjuring him not as a thing of flesh and personality, but as a creature half gone into myth, I believe I am in the presence of a truer soul than that phantom man whom I lately met.

You may say: what nonsense. We live in flesh and blood, you may say. To which I reply: yes, but we die into spirit. Even divinities like Galilee give up the limitations of the flesh eventually, and unbounded swell into legend. So imagining him in his mythic form-as a wanderer, as a lover, as a brute-am I not closer to the Galilee with whom my soul will spend eternity?

I just made the mistake of proudly reading the preceding paragraphs to Marietta. She snorted at them; called them "pretentious claptrap" (that was the mildest epithet); told me I should strike all such ruminations from my text and get on with doing my job, which is-as far as she's concerned-rsimply to report what I know about the history of the Barbarossas and the Gearys in as clear and concise a fashion as I can.

So I've decided I'm not going to share any more of what I'm writing with Marietta. If she wants a book about the rise and fall of the Geary dynasty, then she can damn well write it herself. I'm making something entirely different. It'll be a ragtag thing, no question, sewn together from mismatched parts, but I find that just as beautiful in its way as a small, nicely formed tale. And, by the way, more like life.

Oh, there were two other things Marietta said that day which bear reporting here, if only because they both contain more than a measure of truth. One, she accused me of liking words because of their music. I pleaded guilty to this, which infuriated her. "You put music before meaning!" she said. (This was just spiteful; I don't. But I think meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later, ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.)

Which brings me to her second remark: something to the effect that I was no better than a village storyteller. I smiled from ear to ear at this, and told her that nothing would give me more pleasure than to have my book by heart, and to tell it aloud. Then she'd see how much pleasure there was to be had from my bag of tales. You don't like what I'm telling you, sir? Don't worry. It'll change in two minutes. You don't like scandal? I'll tell you something about God. You hate God? I'll recite you a love scene. You're a puritan? Have patience; the lovers will suffer. Lovers always suffer.

Marietta's response to all this was inevitably sour.

"You're no better than a crowd-pleaser then, are you?" Marietta replied. "Pandering to whatever people want to hear. Why don't you just slather the thing in sex and have done with it?"

"Have you quite finished?"

"No."

"Well I'd really like you to leave. You just came in here to have an argument, and I've got better things to be doing."

"Ha!" she said, snatching one of the sheets I'd been reading from off my desk. "This is one of your better things? We live in flesh and blood, you may say-" I retrieved the page from her hand before she could go any further. "Just… go away," I said, very firmly. "You're being a philistine."

"Oh so now I'm too stupid to appreciate your artistic ambitions, is that it?"

I contemplated this for a moment. "Well, as you put it that way…" I said. "Yes."

"Fine. Then we both know where we stand don't we? I think this work is wretched crap and you think I'm stupid."

"That seems to be a fair summary."

"No," she said, as though I was about to change my mind (which I wasn't). "You've said it now. And that's the end of it."

"I'm agreeing with you, Marietta."

"I won't be coming back in here," she warned.

"Good," I said.

"You'll get no more support from me."

"I just said: good."

She was red-faced with rage by now. "I mean it, Mad-dox," she said.

"I know you mean it. Marietta," I said, quietly. "And believe me, it's tearing me apart. It may not appear that way, but I am in agonies at the prospect." I pointed to the door. "That's the way out."

"God, Maddox," she said. "Sometimes you can be such a dickhead."

That was, as best I remember it, the entire exchange. I haven't seen her since. Of course, she'll come crawling back sooner or later, probably pretending that the conversation never happened. Meanwhile, I'm undisturbed, which suits me fine. I have to write what may be the most important passages of my story so far. The less distraction I have the better I can focus upon it.

There's only one portion of the conversation that I have returned to muse over: and that's the part about being a village storyteller. I realize she meant it as a form of condemnation, but in truth I can see nothing undesirable about being thus employed. Indeed I have imagined myself many, many times sitting beneath an ancient tree in some dusty square-in Samarkand, perhaps; yes! in Samarkand-telling my epic in pieces, for the price of bread and opium. I would have had a fine time doing that: get myself fat and flying by parceling my tale out, day after day. I would have had my audience wrapped around my little finger; coming back every afternoon to visit me in the blue shadows, and asking me to sell them another piece of the family saga.

My father was a great improviser of stories. In fact, it's one of the few truly fond memories I have of him. My sitting at his feet when I was a child, while he wove wonderful fictions for me. There were often malevolent stories, by the way: violent, blood-thirsty tales about the way the world was in some uncalendared time. When he was young, perhaps; if indeed he ever was.

A lot later, when I was approaching adulthood and about ready to go out looking for female company, he told me that I shouldn't underestimate the potency of stories in the art of seduction. He had not seduced my mother with kisses or compliments, he said (and he certainly hadn't got her drunk and raped her, as Cesaria had told me); he'd brought her to his lap, and thence to his bed, with a story.

Which brings us back (though you do not yet see why, you will) to that night on Kaua'i, and to Rachel.