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Show 89 solitude. Often he gets up in the middle of the night and writes equations. From Atlanta, Hall goes to Toledo. He takes a job with Owens-Illinois, at their computer graphics division. He finds Toledo strange, no real downtown - though people say they're building it. In Toledo, Hall meets a woman. Her name is Jewel. Hunt studies Leah. He feels the gravity of her hand on his knee. He kisses her, very lightly, on the top of her head. Jewel is divorced. She has a boy six and a girl five. She is twenty-seven. What she loves is photography. And for a while, Hunt imagines, she made a go of it, accompanying groups of men on hunting trips, shooting their kills. But Jewel tells Hunt, tells Hall . . . that it made a. whore of her or nearly did, so she stopped climbing into Cessnas and Lear Jets with 40- year-olds and took a job in a flower shop - which is where Hall calls her. -Hi. -Hi. What's hot today? --We're pushing blue carnations. They laugh. Hall comes over and takes Jewel to lunch. Hall falls in love. His migrains clear and then get worse. He finds himself walking down the street, then losing balance; it scares him. Jewel scares him. Yet he loves it. She is the only woman he has ever, truly, made love to, and he blanks out at times, like smoke inhalation, though he doesn't tell her. But Hall loves Jewel. He writes in a journal: "With Jewel, there is the most elegant, precarious terror I have ever known." One day, Jewel calls from her flower stand. -Let's make this actual, she says. -Let's make this whole picnic real. |