For all we know, the last great last-minute fling. So the particulars of Faunia Farley's biography form an unlikely contrast to your own. So they don't conform to decency's fantasy blueprint for who should be in bed with a man of your years and your position—if anyone should be. Did what resulted from your speaking the word
'spooks' conform to decency's blueprint? Did Iris's stroke conform to decency's blueprint? Ignore the inanely stupid letter. Why should you let it deter you?"
"Anonymous inanely stupid letter," he said. "Who has ever sent me an anonymous letter? Who capable of rational thought sends anyone an anonymous letter?"
"Maybe it's a French thing," I said. "Isn't there a lot of it in Balzac? In Stendhal? Aren't there anonymous letters in The Red and the Black?"
"I don't remember."
"Look, for some reason everything you do must have ruthlessness as its explanation, and everything Delphine Roux does must have virtue as its explanation. Isn't mythology full of giants and monsters and snakes? By defining you as a monster, she defines herself as a heroine. This is her slaying of the monster. This is her revenge for your preying on the powerless. She's giving the whole thing mythological status."
From the smile indulgently offered me, I saw that I wasn't making much headway by spinning off, even jokingly, a pre-Homeric interpretation of the anonymous indictment. "You can't find in mythmaking," he told me, "an explanation for her mental processes.
She hasn't the imaginative resources for mythmaking. Her métier is the stories that the peasants tell to account for their misery.
The evil eye. The casting of spells. I've cast a spell over Faunia.
Her metier is folktales full of witches and wizards."
We were enjoying ourselves now, and I realized that in my effort to distract him from his rampaging pique by arguing for the primacy of his pleasure, I had given a boost to his feeling for me—and exposed mine for him. I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to. But ever since he had banged on my door the day after Iris's death and proposed that I write Spooks for him, I had, without figuring or planning on it, fallen into a serious friendship with Coleman Silk. I wasn't paying attention to his predicament as merely a mental exercise. His difficulties mattered to me, and this despite my determination to concern myself, in whatever time I have left, with nothing but the daily demands of work, to be engrossed by nothing but solid work, in search of adventure nowhere else—to have not even a life of my own to care about, let alone somebody else's.
And I realized all this with some disappointment. Abnegation of society, abstention from distraction, a self-imposed separation from every last professional yearning and social delusion and cultural poison and alluring intimacy, a rigorous reclusion such as that practiced by religious devouts who immure themselves in caves or cells or isolated forest huts, is maintained on stuff more obdurate than I am made of. I had lasted alone just five years—five years of reading and writing a few miles up Madamaska Mountain in a pleasant two-room cabin situated between a small pond at the back of my place and, through the scrub across the dirt road, a ten-acre marsh where the migrating Canada geese take shelter each evening and a patient blue heron does its solitary angling all summer long.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) "the communications of a solitary mind with itself." The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
It took time to face down the difficulties set by this choice, time and heronlike patience to subdue the longings for everything that had vanished, but after five years I'd become so skillful at surgically carving up my days that there was no longer an hour of the eventless existence I'd embraced that didn't have its importance to me.
Its necessity. Its excitement even. I no longer indulged the pernicious wish for something else, and the last thing I thought I could endure again was the sustained company of someone else. The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn't deprive me of the silence—the music is the silence coming true. I swim for thirty minutes in my pond first thing every summer morning, and, for the rest of the year, after my morning of writing—and so long as the snow doesn't make hiking impossible —I'm out on the mountain trails for a couple of hours nearly every afternoon. There has been no recurrence of the cancer that cost me my prostate. Sixty-five, fit, well, working hard—and I know the score. I have to know it.
So why, then, having turned the experiment of radical seclusion into a rich, full solitary existence—why, with no warning, should I be lonely? Lonely for what? What's gone is gone. There's no relaxing the rigor, no undoing the renunciations. Lonely for precisely what?
Simple: for what I had developed an aversion to. For what I had turned my back on. For life. The entanglement with life.
This was how Coleman became my friend and how I came out from under the stalwartness of living alone in my secluded house and dealing with the cancer blows. Coleman Silk danced me right back into life. First Athena College, then me—here was a man who made things happen. Indeed, the dance that sealed our friendship was also what made his disaster my subject. And made his disguise my subject. And made the proper presentation of his secret my problem to solve. That was how I ceased being able to live apart from the turbulence and intensity that I had fled. I did no more than find a friend, and all the world's malice came rushing in.
Later that afternoon, Coleman took me to meet Faunia at a small dairy farm six miles from his house, where she lived rent-free in exchange for sometimes doing the milking. The dairy operation, a few years old now, had been initiated by two divorced women, college-educated environmentalists, who'd each come from a New England farming family and who had pooled their resources-pooled their young children as well, six children who, as the owners liked to tell their customers, weren't dependent on Sesame Street to learn where milk comes from—to take on the almost impossible task of making a living by selling raw milk. It was a unique operation, nothing like what was going on at the big dairy farms, nothing impersonal or factorylike about it, a place that wouldn't seem like a dairy farm to most people these days. It was called Organic Livestock, and it produced and bottled the raw milk that could be found in local general stores and in some of the region's supermarkets and was available, at the farm, for steady customers who purchased three or more gallons a week.
There were just eleven cows, purebred Jerseys, and each had an old-fashioned cow name rather than a numbered ear tag to identify it. Because their milk was not mixed with the milk of the huge herds that are injected with all sorts of chemicals, and because, uncompromised by pasteurization and unshattered by homogenization, the milk took on the tinge, even faintly the flavor, of whatever they were eating season by season—feed that had been grown without the use of herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers-and because their milk was richer in nutrients than blended milk, it was prized by the people around who tried to keep the family diet to whole rather than processed foods. The farm has a strong following particularly among the numerous people tucked away up here, the retired as well as those raising families, in flight from the pollutants, frustrations, and debasements of a big city. In the local weekly, a letter to the editor will regularly appear from someone who has recently found a better life out along these rural roads, and in reverent tones mention will be made of Organic Livestock milk, not simply as a tasty drink but as the embodiment of a freshening, sweetening country purity that their city-battered idealism requires.
Words like "goodness" and "soul" crop up regularly in these published letters, as if downing a glass of Organic Livestock milk were no less a redemptive religious rite than a nutritional blessing.
"When we drink Organic Livestock milk, our body, soul, and spirit are getting nourished as a whole. Various organs in our body receive this wholeness and appreciate it in a way we may not perceive."
Sentences like that, sentences with which otherwise sensible adults, liberated from whatever vexation had driven them from New York or Hartford or Boston, can spend a pleasant few minutes at the desk pretending that they are seven years old.
Though Coleman probably used, all told, no more than the half cup of milk a day he poured over his morning cereal, he'd signed on with Organic Livestock as a three-gallon-a-week customer. Doing this allowed him to pick up his milk, fresh from the cow, right at the farm—to drive his car in from the road and down the long tractor path to the barn and to walk into the barn and get the milk cold out of the refrigerator. He'd arranged to do this not so as to be able to procure the price break extended to three-gallon customers but because the refrigerator was set just inside the entryway to the barn and only some fifteen feet from the stall where the cows were led in to be milked one at a time, twice a day, and where at 5 P.M. (when he showed up) Faunia, fresh from her duties at the college, would be doing the milking a few times a week.
All he ever did there was watch her work. Even though there was rarely anyone else around at that time, Coleman remained outside the stall looking in and let her get on with the job without having to bother to talk to him. Often they said nothing, because saying nothing intensified their pleasure. She knew he was watching her; knowing she knew, he watched all the harder—and that they weren't able to couple down in the dirt didn't make a scrap of difference.
It was enough that they should be alone together somewhere other than in his bed, it was enough to have to maintain the matter-of-factness of being separated by unsurpassable social obstacles, to play their roles as farm laborer and retired college professor, to perform consummately at her being a strong, lean working woman of thirty-four, a wordless illiterate, an elemental rustic of muscle and bone who'd just been in the yard with the pitchfork cleaning up from the morning milking, and at his being a thoughtful senior citizen of seventy-one, an accomplished classicist, an amplitudinous brain of a man replete with the vocabularies of two ancient tongues. It was enough to be able to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing whatsoever in common, all the while remembering how they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything about them that was irreconcilable, the human discrepancies that produced all the power. It was enough to feel the thrill of leading a double life.
There was, at first glance, little to raise unduly one's carnal expectations about the gaunt, lanky woman spattered with dirt, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and rubber boots, whom I saw in with the herd that afternoon and whom Coleman identified as his Voluptas.
The carnally authoritative-looking creatures were those with the bodies that took up all the space, the creamy-colored cows with the free-swinging, girderlike hips and the barrel-wide paunches and the disproportionately cartoonish milk-swollen udders, the unagitated, slow-moving, strife-free cows, each a fifteen-hundred-pound industry of its own gratification, big-eyed beasts for whom chomping at one extremity from a fodder-filled trough while being sucked dry at the other by not one or two or three but by four pulsating, untiring mechanical mouths—for whom sensual stimulus simultaneously at both ends was their voluptuous due. Each of them deep into a bestial existence blissfully lacking in spiritual depth: to squirt and to chew, to crap and to piss, to graze and to sleep—that was their whole raison d'être. Occasionally (Coleman explained to me) a human arm in a long plastic glove is thrust into the rectum to haul out the manure and then, by feeling with the glove through the rectal wall, guides the other arm in inserting a syringelike breeding gun up the reproductive tract to deposit semen. They propagate, that means, without having to endure the disturbance of the bull, coddled even in breeding and then assisted in delivery-and in what Faunia said could prove to be an emotional process for everyone involved—even on below-zero nights when a blizzard is blowing. The best of carnal everything, including savoring at their leisure mushy, dripping mouthfuls of their own stringy cud. Few courtesans have lived as well, let alone workaday women.
Among those pleasured creatures and the aura they exuded of an opulent, earthy oneness with female abundance, it was Faunia who labored like the beast of burden for all that she seemed, with the cows framing her figure, one of evolution's more pathetic flyweights.
Calling them to come out from the open shed where they were reposefully sprawled in a mix of hay and shit—"Let's go, Daisy, don't give me a hard time. C'mon now, Maggie, that's a good girl. Move your ass, Flossie, you old bitch"—grabbing them by the collar and driving and cajoling them through the sludge of the yard and up one step onto the concrete floor of the milking parlor, shoving these cumbersome Daisys and Maggies in toward the trough until they were secure in the stanchion, measuring out and pouring them each their portion of vitamins and feed, disinfecting the teats and wiping them clean and starting the milk flow with a few jerks of the hand, then attaching to the sterilized teats the suction cups at the end of the milk claw, she was in motion constantly, fixed unwaveringly on each stage of the milking but, in exaggerated contrast to their stubborn docility, moving all the time with a beelike adroitness until the milk was streaming through the clear milk tube into the shining stainless-steel pail, and she at last stood quietly by, watching to make certain that everything was working and that the cow too was standing quietly. Then she was again in motion, massaging the udder to be sure the cow was milked out, removing the teat cups, pouring out the feed portion for the cow she would be milking after undoing the milked cow from the stanchion, getting the grain for the next cow in front of the alternate stanchion, and then, within the confines of that smallish space, grabbing the milked cow by the collar again and maneuvering her great bulk around, backing her up with a push, shoving her with a shoulder, bossily telling her, "Get out, get on out of here, just get—" and leading her back through the mud to the shed.
Faunia Farley: thin-legged, thin-wristed, thin-armed, with clearly discernible ribs and shoulder blades that protruded, and yet when she tensed you saw that her limbs were hard; when she reached or stretched for something you saw that her breasts were surprisingly substantial; and when, because of the flies and the gnats buzzing the herd on this close summer day, she slapped at her neck or her backside, you saw something of how frisky she could be, despite the otherwise straight-up style. You saw that her body was something more than efficiently lean and severe, that she was a firmly made woman precipitously poised at the moment when she is no longer ripening but not yet deteriorating, a woman in the prime of her prime, whose fistful of white hairs is fundamentally beguiling just because the sharp Yankee contour of her cheeks and her jaw and the long unmistakably female neck haven't yet been subject to the transformations of aging.
"This is my neighbor," Coleman said to her when she took a moment to wipe the sweat from her face with the crook of her elbow and to look our way. "This is Nathan."
I hadn't expected composure. I was expecting someone openly angrier. She acknowledged me with no more than a jerk of her chin, but it was a gesture from which she got a lot of mileage. It was a chin from which she got a lot of mileage. Keeping it up as she normally did, it gave her—virility. That was in the response too: some-thing virile and implacable, as well as a little disreputable, in that dead-on look. The look of someone for whom both sex and betrayal are as basic as bread. The look of the runaway and the look that results from the galling monotony of bad luck. Her hair, the golden blond hair in the poignant first stage of its unpreventable permutation, was twisted at the back through an elastic band, but a lock kept falling toward her eyebrow as she worked, and now, while silently looking our way, she pushed it back with her hand, and for the first time I noticed in her face a small feature that, perhaps wrongly, because I was searching for a sign, had the effect of something telling: the convex fullness of the narrow arch of flesh between the ridge of eyebrow and the upper eyelids. She was a thinlipped woman with a straight nose and clear blue eyes and good teeth and a prominent jaw, and that puff of flesh just beneath her eyebrows was her only exotic marking, the only emblem of allure, something swollen with desire. It also accounted for a lot that was unsettlingly obscure about the hard flatness of her gaze.
In all, Faunia was not the enticing siren who takes your breath away but a clean-cut-looking woman about whom one thinks, As a child she must have been very beautiful. Which she was: according to Coleman, a golden, beautiful child with a rich stepfather who wouldn't leave her alone and a spoiled mother who wouldn't protect her.
We stood there watching while she milked each of the eleven cows—Daisy, Maggie, Flossie, Bessy, Dolly, Maiden, Sweetheart, Stupid, Emma, Friendly, and Jill—stood there while she went through the same unvarying routine with every one of them, and when that was finished and she moved into the whitewashed room with the big sinks and the hoses and the sterilizing units adjacent to the milking parlor, we watched her through that doorway mixing up the lye solution and the cleansing agents and, after separating the vacuum line from the pipeline and the teat cups from the claw and the two milker pails from their covers—after disassembling the whole of the milking unit that she'd taken in there with her—setting to work with a variety of brushes and with sinkful after sinkful of clear water to scrub every surface of every tube, valve, gasket, plug, plate, liner, cap, disc, and piston until each was spotlessly clean and sanitized. Before Coleman took his milk and we got back into his car to leave, he and I had stood together by the refrigerator for close to an hour and a half and, aside from the words he uttered to introduce me to her, nobody human said anything more. All you could hear was the whirring and the chirping of the barn swallows who nested there as they whished through the rafters where the barn opened out behind us, and the pellets dropping into the cement trough when she shook out the feed pail, and the shuffling clump of the barely lifted hooves on the milking parlor floor as Faunia, shoving and dragging and steering the cows, positioned them into the stanchion, and then the suction noise, the soft deep breathing of the milk pump.
After they were each buried four months later, I would remember that milking session as though it were a theatrical performance in which I had played the part of a walk-on, an extra, which indeed I now am. Night after night, I could not sleep because I couldn't stop being up there on the stage with the two leading actors and the chorus of cows, observing this scene, flawlessly performed by the entire ensemble, of an enamored old man watching at work the cleaning woman-farmhand who is secretly his paramour: a scene of pathos and hypnosis and sexual subjugation in which everything the woman does with those cows, the way she handles them, touches them, services them, talks to them, his greedy fascination appropriates; a scene in which a man taken over by a force so long suppressed in him that it had all but been extinguished revealed, before my eyes, the resurgence of its stupefying power. It was something, I suppose, like watching Aschenbach feverishly watching Tadzio—his sexual longing brought to a boil by the anguishing fact of mortality—except that we weren't in a luxury hotel on the Venice Lido nor were we characters in a novel written in German or even, back then, in one written in English: it was high summer and we were in a barn in the Northeast of our country, in America in the year of America's presidential impeachment, and, as yet, we were no more novelistic than the animals were mythological or stuffed. The light and heat of the day (that blessing), the unchanging quiet of each cow's life as it paralleled that of all the others, the enamored old man studying the suppleness of the efficient, energetic woman, the adulation rising in him, his looking as though nothing more stirring had ever before happened to him, and, too, my own willing waiting, my own fascination with their extensive disparity as human types, with the nonuniformity, the variability, the teeming irregularity of sexual arrangements—and with the injunction upon us, human and bovine, the highly differentiated and the all but undifferentiated, to live, not merely to endure but to live, to go on taking, giving, feeding, milking, acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—all was recorded as real by tens of thousands of minute impressions.
The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant-superabundant—detail of life, which is the rhapsody. And Coleman and Faunia, who are now dead, deep in the flow of the unexpected, day by day, minute by minute, themselves details in that superabundance.
Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
The trouble with Les Farley began later that night, when Coleman heard something stirring in the bushes outside his house, decided it wasn't a deer or a raccoon, got up from the kitchen table where he and Faunia had just finished their spaghetti dinner, and, from the kitchen door, in the summer evening half-light, caught sight of a man running across the field back of the house and toward the woods. "Hey! You! Stop!" Coleman shouted, but the man neither stopped nor looked back and disappeared quickly into the trees.
This wasn't the first time in recent months that Coleman believed he was being watched by someone hiding within inches of the house, but previously it had been later in the evening and too dark for him to know for sure whether he had been alerted by the movements of a peeping Tom or of an animal. And previously he had al-ways been alone. This was the first time Faunia was there, and it was she who, without having to see the man's silhouette cutting across the field, identified the trespasser as her ex-husband.
After the divorce, she told Coleman, Farley had spied on her all the time, but in the months following the death of the two children, when he was accusing her of having killed them by her negligence, he was frighteningly unrelenting. Twice he popped up out of nowhere —once in the parking lot of a supermarket, once when she was at a gas station—and screamed out of the pickup window, "Murdering whore! Murdering bitch! You murdered my kids, you murdering bitch!" There were many mornings when, on her way to the college, she'd look in the rearview mirror and there would be his pickup truck and, back of the windshield, his face with the lips mouthing, "You murdered my kids." Sometimes he'd be on the road behind her when she was driving home from the college. She was then still living in the unburned half of the bungalow-garage where the children had been asphyxiated in the heater fire, and it was out of fear of him that she'd moved from there to a room in Seeley Falls and then, after a foiled suicide attempt, into the room at the dairy farm, where the two owners and their small children were almost always around and the danger was not so great of her being accosted by him. Farley's pickup appeared in her rearview mirror less frequently after the second move, and then, when there was no sign of him for months, she hoped he might be gone for good. But now, Faunia was sure of it, he'd somehow found out about Coleman and, enraged again with everything that had always enraged him about her, he was back at his crazy spying, hiding outside Coleman's house to see what she was doing there. What they were doing there.
That night, when Faunia got into her car—the old Chevy that Coleman preferred her to park, out of sight, inside his barn-Coleman decided to follow close behind her in his own car for the six miles until she was safely onto the dirt driveway that led past the cow barn to the farmhouse. And then all the way back to his own house he looked to see if anyone was behind him. At home, he walked from the car shed to the house swinging a tire iron in one hand, swinging it in all directions, hoping in that way to keep at bay anyone lurking in the dark.
By the next morning, after eight hours on his bed contending with his worries, Coleman had decided against lodging a complaint with the state police. Because Farley's identity couldn't be positively established, the police would be unable to do anything about him anyway, and should it leak out that Coleman had contacted them, his call would have served only to corroborate the gossip already circulating about the former dean and the Athena janitor. Not that, after his sleepless night, Coleman could resign himself to doing nothing about everything: following breakfast, he phoned his lawyer, Nelson Primus, and that afternoon went down to Athena to consult with him about the anonymous letter and there, overriding Primus's suggestion that he forget about it, prevailed on him to write, as follows, to Delphine Roux at the college: "Dear Ms. Roux: I represent Coleman Silk. Several days ago, you sent an anonymous letter to Mr. Silk that is offensive, harassing, and denigrating to Mr. Silk. The content of your letter reads: 'Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.' You have, unfortunately, interjected yourself and become a participant in something that is not your business. In doing that, you have violated Mr. Silk's legal rights and are subject to suit."
A few days later Primus received three curt sentences back from Delphine Roux's lawyer. The middle sentence, flatly denying the charge that Delphine Roux was the author of the anonymous letter, Coleman underlined in red. "None of the assertions in your letter are correct," her lawyer had written to Primus, "and, indeed, they are defamatory."
Immediately Coleman got from Primus the name of a certified documents examiner in Boston, a handwriting analyst who did forensic work for private corporations, U.S. government agencies, and the state, and the next day, he himself drove the three hours to Boston to deliver into the hands of the documents examiner his samples of Delphine Roux's handwriting along with the anonymous letter and its envelope. He received the findings in the mail the next week. "At your request," read the report, "I examined and compared copies of known handwriting of Delphine Roux with a questioned anonymous note and an envelope addressed to Coleman Silk. You asked for a determination of the authorship of the handwriting on the questioned documents. My examination covers handwriting characteristics such as slant, spacing, letter formation, line quality, pressure pattern, proportion, letter height relationship, connections and initials and terminal stroke formation. Based on the documents submitted, it is my professional opinion that the hand that penned all the known standards as Delphine Roux is one and the same hand that penned the questioned anonymous note and envelope. Sincerely, Douglas Gordon, CDE." When Coleman turned the examiner's report over to Nelson Primus, with instructions to forward a copy to Delphine Roux's lawyer, Primus no longer put up an argument, however distressing it was to him to see Coleman nearly as enraged as he'd been back during the crisis with the college.
In all, eight days had passed since the evening he'd seen Farley fleeing into the woods, eight days during which he had determined it would be best if Faunia stayed away and they communicated by phone. So as not to invite spying on either of them from any quarter, he didn't go out to the farm to fetch his raw milk but stayed at home as much as he could and kept a careful watch there, especially after dark, to determine if anyone was snooping around. Faunia, in turn, was told to keep a lookout of her own at the dairy farm and to check her rearview mirror when she drove anywhere. "It's as though we're a menace to public safety," she told him, laughing her laugh. "No, public health," he replied—"we're in noncompliance with the board of health."
By the end of the eight days, when he had been able at least to confirm Delphine Roux's identification as the letter writer if not yet Farley's as the trespasser, Coleman decided to decide that he'd done everything within his power to defend against all of this disagreeable and provocative meddling. When Faunia phoned him that afternoon during her lunch break and asked, "Is the quarantine over?" he at last felt free of enough of his anxiety—or decided to decide to be—to give the all-clear sign.
As he expected her to show up around seven that evening, he swallowed a Viagra tablet at six and, after pouring himself a glass of wine, walked outside with the phone to settle into a lawn chair and telephone his daughter. He and Iris had reared four children: two sons now into their forties, both college professors of science, married and with children and living on the West Coast, and the twins, Lisa and Mark, unmarried, in their late thirties, and both living in New York. All but one of the Silk offspring tried to get up to the Berkshires to see their father three or four times a year and stayed in touch every month by phone. The exception was Mark, who'd been at odds with Coleman all his life and sporadically cut himself off completely.
Coleman was calling Lisa because he realized that it was more than a month and maybe even two since he'd spoken to her. Perhaps he was merely surrendering to a transient feeling of loneliness that would have passed when Faunia arrived, but whatever his motive, he could have had no inkling, before the phone call, of what was in store. Surely the last thing he was looking for was yet more opposition, least of all from that child whose voice alone—soft, melodic, girlish still, despite twelve difficult years as a teacher on the Lower East Side—he could always depend on to soothe him, to calm him, sometimes to do even more: to infatuate him with this daughter all over again. He was doing probably what most any aging parent will do when, for any of a hundred reasons, he or she looks to a long-distance phone call for a momentary reminder of the old terms of reference. The unbroken, unequivocal history of tenderness between Coleman and Lisa made of her the least af-frontable person still close to him.