Jeannette welcomed the solitude of her small room and the tangled, dying vines over the lace-curtained windows: curtains, a single chair, a night table, and her bed. She gave way to tears, bewildered by Orville, saddened by the funeral, resenting the hospital and its wounded, resenting Dr. Mercier, Dr. Marcuse, Louis ... what a lackluster lot of minor medics: they would never mean anything to her: each day was impersonal: I must get to a movie in Senlis, perhaps a luncheon date: the men craved sex (she did not blame them, so often wanting it herself). She was able to concentrate on duty and remain faithful to Orville and sexual fantasies. On Ermenonville’s main street, war had slung together a shabby eating place, between a candy shop and a milliner’s. Walking through the village, Orville opened the door onto charcoal smoke and a row of empty tables spread with checkered cloths. A fellow, wearing an apron, appeared from behind an unpainted wooden screen and asked Orville what he wanted, speaking rudely, obviously ill, his voice strained, the face fat, both obese and pocked: something was hurting his lungs: such coughing! Orville ordered wine and asked for a pack of cigarettes and sat down--arms elbowed on the red and white squares. As he sipped wine he tried to evolve a tomorrow: Yeah, Germany was on fire. He was due back. He wanted none of it. He wanted time, time to be himself, for a week or a month, doing something useful: it would be exciting to plan a house, and he scrawled the outlines of a residence on the table cover with the handle of a spoon: a plan: when can I have a chance to plan? For now, he had had enough of Jeannette: what help was she? Nobody was gifted at helping: the world was not geared to helping: sleep might help: it was possible to drown in sleep, under illusion and disillusion, head pillowed on hate, saying to hell with khaki, away with GI slop, the stink of another man’s piss. When the waiter tried to talk, Orville shook him off. "Sorry," he said, and gulped his wine and stalked out. Over there is where I attended school, that one-story building where famed New York architect learned about King Francis, Napoleon, read Victor Hugo and Villon, hated classes: see bronze tablet above the entry: what numbing sensations in that box-shaped building topped by four chimney pots. Across the street, by those poplar trees, is her hospital: notice the calloused grey paint: some of the doors have scaled: some of the windows are blacked out. Nurses are huddled on the front porch, wrapped in coats, jackets, sweaters, scarves, relating the latest. Out in the country I could walk for years, bumping myself against the cage of introversion. Trees are bare. Not a person is working in the fields ... maybe the fields have been deserted for years. The walls of a bygone abbey were waiting for someone or something, a scream, a leaf. Across hedgeless fields, willows were also waiting. No machine guns.