“I began to think that maybe he was trying to sell me drugs. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, and that was pretty much the truth, since I didn’t know what a cynosure was, for one thing, ‘but you can buy me a drink if you want.’ 

     “You know—that’s an age when we want to seem so hip to it all. Already weary of it all. But we’re still sort of kids at heart. We’re quick to hope, eager to find the good news behind the bad, . . .

ARIANE SAT UP. She gave me a peck on the cheek. She moved to the opposite end of the sofa. She crossed her legs at the knee and struck a pose like that of a guest on an interview program. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, winked and smirked.

     At first this tense little exercise seems like nothing more than a twisted kind of homage to the windswept terror of Wuthering Heights and its cinematic offspring, . . .

ARIANE LAY ACROSS MY LAP, with her head on the arm of the sofa. She didn’t bother wiping her tears away.     “I had anticipated that night,” she said. 

“I RAN around to the back door and let myself inside.”

CHAFING UNDER the frustrations and delays, Ariane worried about what her absence might make my grandfather think. She hated the idea of his supposing even for a moment that she would let him down, . . .

42

“SHE WAS FAILING,” said Ariane, “so the point of the deception changed. Now we wanted to get to Rarotonga before she died.”

RAIN PELTED the kitchen windows, and wind shook them in their frames. Ariane was glad to be in the warm kitchen, where she was beginning to feel at home.

ARIANE GOT UP and lit another cigarette. “This is going to sound very strange,” she said. “I began dreaming of the voyage.”     “That doesn’t seem surprising,” I said.     “I don’t mean at night—I mean all the time.”