Rebecca got in the habit of walking around those pieces of paper, on the days that followed, designing routes that took her from one to another, as if she were seeking the outline of some figure. She never stopped to read them, she just walked around them. Slowly Jasper Gwyn saw her change, become different in her ways of revealing herself, more unexpected in her movements. Perhaps it was the seventh day, or the eighth, when he saw her suddenly composed into a surprising beauty, without flaw. It lasted a moment, as if she knew very well how far she had ventured, and had no intention of staying there. So she shifted her weight onto the other side, raising a hand to smooth her hair, and becoming imperfect again.
That same day, she began to murmur, in a low voice, as she lay on the bed. Jasper Gwyn couldn’t hear the words, and didn’t want to. But she went on for many minutes, every so often smiling, or pausing in silence, and then starting up again. She seemed to be telling someone something. As she spoke she slid the palms of her hands back and forth along her extended legs. She stopped when she was silent. Without even realizing it, Jasper Gwyn approached the bed, like someone who is pursuing a small animal and ends up a few steps from its den. She didn’t react, she only lowered the tone of her voice, and continued to speak, but barely moving her lips, in a whisper that sometimes ceased, and then began again.
The next day, while Jasper Gwyn was looking at her, her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment of transient thoughts or of memories in flight.
If Jasper Gwyn had had to say when he began to think that there was a solution, probably he would have cited a day when, at a certain point, she put on her shirt, and it wasn’t a way of going back on some decision but of going forward beyond what she had decided. She kept it on but unbuttoned in the front—she played with the cuffs. Then something in her shifted, in a way that one might have defined as lateral, and Jasper Gwyn felt, for the first time, that Rebecca was letting him glimpse her true portrait.
That night he went out and walked the streets, and he walked for hours, without feeling fatigue. He observed that there were Laundromats that never closed, and he registered the fact with a particular satisfaction.