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Show 97 the cash for all three days out of her pocketbook, and puts it on the desk. "Here," she says, "I'd like to pay it all in advance," It is a small room, somewhat dingy, decorated in floral chintz of a tasteless sort, but it does have rather a large window, and the window does look out onto the ocean. She sits on the bed, surveying the room around her: flat, dull-yellow walls, a single armchair, with a crooked-neck lamp hanging over it. There is a television set staring like one bulging eye into the room; she wheels it into the closet and shuts the door. Mow the central item in the room is the bed, a very large bed, but hollowed a little in the middle, where night after night couples have lain together, young couples, old couples, married and unmarried, but always their legs intertwined and their bodies pressed together, while they breathe almost in unison. "So this is the last room," she says to herself. She takes the items she has brought with her out of the bag: she unfolds the rubber sheet, lifts up the bedcovers and inserts it above the mattress, which though already amply stained, need not be ruined altogether. She puts the aspirin and the sleeping tablets in a nighttable drawer, next to the Bi'ble she finds there. She opens the box of rat poison, and discovers that it comes in granular form. She shudders a little, but she will not allow herself to think of the instantaneous tablets which could have been brought from her husband's lab, or the sweet easy capsules which had filled her purse. She pours the granules into the bottom of one of the plastic drinking glasses that the motel supplies, covers them with sugar, and puts the glass in the drawer too. She fills a second glass with water; then she breaks open the two lemons intended for that distant, farewell dinner, and |