And she talked so much -- almost ceaselessly, while Macon
was the kind of man to whom silence was better than music.
("Listen! They're playing my song," he used to say when Sarah
switched the radio off.) She talked about blushers,
straighteners, cellulite, hemlines, winter skin. She was
interested in the appearance of things, only the appearance:
in lipstick shades and nail wrapping and facial masques and
split ends. Once, on one of her more attractive days, he told
her she was looking very nice and she grew so flustered that
she stumbled over a curb. She asked if it was because she had
tied her hair back; and was it the hair itself or the ribbon
or rather the color of the ribbon, which she'd feared might be
a little too bright and set off the tone of her complexion
wrong. And didn't he think her hair was hopeless, kerblamming
up the way it did in the slightest bit of humidity? Till he
was sorry he had ever brought it up. Well not sorry, exactly,
but tired. Exhausted.

	Yet she could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind
like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random,
insignificant moments would flash before him: Muriel at her
kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling
out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood.
Muriel telling her mirror, "I look like the wrath of God" -- a
kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her
big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a
soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water and
belting out one of her favorite songs -- "War as Hell on the
home front Too" or "I wonder if God Likes Country Music."
(Certainly, she liked country music -- long complaining
ballads about the rocky road of life, the cold gray walls of
prison, the sleazy, greasy heart of a two-faced man.) And
Muriel at the hospital window, as he'd never actually seen
her, holding a mop and gazing down at the injured coming in.

	Then he knew that what mattered was the pattern of her
life; that although he did not love her he loved the surprise
of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her.
In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an
entirely different person. This person had never been
suspected of narrowness, never been accused of chilliness; in
fact, was mocked for his soft heart. And was anything but
orderly.