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Show •208 "O.K." "Did you love your wife in Arizona?" "Mary-Ellen? No. I thought it was love but in the end it was only a terrific desire to be grown up." "I don't understand." "It was a marriage of errors, and most of them were mine. To tell the truth I don't exactly understand what happened either. Her aunt was a monster but she was only following her own nature, like a shark, so I can't really blame her. No, it was mostly my fault," Fancy's voice, when it came back, was dreamy and lost; her eyes were wide open in wonder at the oddness of the world. I took her hand; she seemed to have fallen into a receptive childlike state. "Wasn't there one girl sometime that you just purely loved, like in the stories?" "Jenny." But there were really two of her: one a slightly homely girl with a largish nose and brown hair that I met riding in J. Cash's red pickup truck, and the other a high-school girl of the same name. They merged into a Jenny of the mind, a prettier girl I'd spent a whole summer hunting for in Los Angeles without luck, and was still longing after the day of my marriage in Maybelle's living-room in Tucson. It occurred to me now that I might have been trying to track down something more mysterious and elusive |