"I mean she offered more than anyone I"d ever known."

"What did she offer?"

That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.

We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. "Time to chat," she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two gla.s.ses of vodka.

"Time to chat?" I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she"d drawn away from me.

"I don"t have all night," she said as she offered me the gla.s.s.

I took the drink from her hand. "So we"re not going to toast the dawn together?"

She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. "You"re glib," she said as she clinked her gla.s.s to mine. "So am I." She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. "Here is the deal," she added. "If you"re glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That"s when you know you"ve gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk."

"That"s rather harsh, don"t you think?" I took a sip of vodka. "And besides, what"s the alternative to talking?"

"Silence," Veronica answered.

I laughed. "Veronica, you are hardly silent."

"Most of the time, I am," she said.

"And what does this silence conceal?"

"Anger," she answered without the slightest hesitation, "Fury."

Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.

"Of course you can get to silence in other ways," she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her gla.s.s. "Douglas got there, but not by being glib."

"How then?"

"By suffering."

I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn"t. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.

"By being terrified," she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. "The last week he didn"t say a word," she said. "That"s when I knew it was time."

"Time for what?"

"Time for Douglas to get a new job."

I felt my heart stop dead. "In ... software?" I asked.

She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.

"I"d planned to give him these," she said, "but there wasn"t time."

"What do you mean, there wasn"t time?"

"I saw it in his face," she answered. "He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long."

She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. "It was all I had left to offer him," she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. "We have so little to offer."

And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her darkness is real; mine is just a pose.

"What did you do?" my friend asked.

"I touched her face."

"And what did she do?"

She pulled my hand away almost violently. "This isn"t about me," she said.

"Right now, everything is about you," I told her.

She grimaced. "Bulls.h.i.t."

"I mean it."

"Which only makes it worse," she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. "This is about you," she said crisply. "And I won"t be cheated of it."

I shrugged. "All life is a cheat, Veronica."

Her eyes tensed. "That isn"t true and you know it," she said, her voice almost a hiss. "And because of that you are a liar, and all your books are lies." Her voice was so firm, so hard and unrelenting, I felt it like a wind. "Here"s the deal," she said. "If you really felt the way you write, you"d kill yourself. If all that feeling was really in you, down deep in you, you wouldn"t be able to live a single day." She dared me to contradict her, and when I didn"t, she said, "You see everything but yourself. And here"s what you don"t see about yourself, Jack. You don"t see that you"re happy."

"Happy?" I asked.

"You are happy," Veronica insisted. "You won"t admit it, but you are. And you should be."

Then she offered the elements of my happiness, the sheer good fortune I had enjoyed, health, adequate money, work I loved, little dollops of achievement.

"Compared to you, Douglas had nothing," she said.

"He had you," I said cautiously.

Her face soured again. "If you make it about me," she warned, "you"ll have to leave."

She was serious, and I knew it. So I said, "What do you want from me, Veronica?"

Without hesitation she said, "I want you to stay."

"Stay?"

"While I take the pills."

I remembered the line she"d said just outside the bar only a few hours before, I could do it with you, you know.

I had taken this to mean that we would do it together, but now I knew that she had never included me. There was no pact. There was only Veronica.

"Will you do it?" she asked somberly.

"When?" I asked quietly.

She took the pills and poured them into her hand. "Now," she said.

"No," I blurted, and started to rise.

She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly determined, so that I knew that she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.

"I want out of this noise," she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. "Everything is so loud."

In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repet.i.tions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.

"Will you stay?" she asked quietly.

I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add to the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.

And so I said, "All right."

With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.

"I don"t know what to say to you, Veronica," I told her when she took the last of them and put down the gla.s.s.

She curled under my arm. "Say what I said to Douglas," she told me. "In the end it"s all anyone can offer."

"What did you say to him?" I asked softly.

"I"m here."

I drew my arm tightly around her. "I"m here," I said.

She snuggled in more closely. "Yes."

"And so you stayed?" my friend asked.

I nodded.

"And she ..."

"In about an hour," I told him. "Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here."

"So right now she"s ..."

"Gone," I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.

"You couldn"t stop her?"

"With what?" I asked. "I had nothing to offer." I glanced out the front window of the bar. "And besides," I added, "for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That"s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us."

My friend looked at me oddly. "So what are you going to do now?" he asked.

At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman"s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.

"I"m going to keep quiet," I answered. "For a very long time."

Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.

It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.

From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.

I know.

end.