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Hotel bill. Suppose I spent a month in England buying antiques to show and sell at Belle Isle (I did that in the bad years). A clear deductible: Pan Am or Amex card. But where was I in the summer of 1968?
    I found out. Not where I was but where Margot was. Was that the significance of the tingling of the worm of interest? that actually I already knew but did not know that I knew or would not admit it, had even suppressed the knowledge so thai it might then be properly discovered, just as the astronomer already knows in his heart of hearts that that dot will have moved but won’t even think about it until the photographic plate is in his hand and he can see the dot in the right-wrong place—all this in order to do what? In his case savor the superiority of the real over the imaginary? In my case to do what? postpone the interesting horror the way a person will turn an unopened telegram over and over in his hand?
    Here it was. Amex stub and customer’s copy and receipted bill from the Arlington. Texas. Roundtower Motor Lodge for $1,325.27. A clear deductible. Not for me but for Margot, who at the time was still technically an actress, never a very good one but an Equity-card-carrying one and clearly engaged in the practice of her profession, that was why we deducted it, not acting but attending Robert Merlin’s workshop at the famous Dallas-Arlington Playhouse. The entire month of July. Eastern Airlines tickets for June 30 and return August 1. She had not come home and I had not visited her. I knew because all at once I remembered the summer of ’68. The courts had just caught up with Feliciana Parish and a few of us moderate and peace-loving persons of good will of both races had our own workshops, with the schoolboard and teachers and PTA’s, so people wouldn’t get killed when school opened. We succeeded. Nobody got killed. On the contrary. New life was conceived.
    Siobhan then was conceived on or about July 15, 1968, give or take a few days. How many days? a week? ten days? two weeks? As Royal said, biology is not an exact science but a matter of averages and probabilities. So put July 15 at the summit of a probability curve and add or subtract two weeks in either direction along the x axis and, as I discovered later, the curve is so flat and close to the axis that breathing under it is difficult and conception damn near impossible.
    A fact then: Siobhan was fathered in Texas in July 1968 and not by me.
    The thunder machine started and stopped again. Someone was tinkering with it. A door slammed, the heavy front door of Belle Isle. I looked down through a pigeonhole. Margot and Jacoby and Merlin got in the station wagon and drove away. I’d have known it was Margot by the way she drove. Her hand made an arc through the green windshield. She turned the car like a man, or a Texas girl, not push-pulling with two hands but palming the wheel around with one hand. Looking down into the car from the pigeon roost, I could see her bare knees. When she got into a car she hiked up her dress like a man does his pants. They were headed, I knew, for the Holiday Inn on I-10 where the film company stayed and the manager let them have a conference room so Merlin could view the rushes.
    The three of them sat on the front seat. Merlin in the middle next to Margot. Merlin was one of the few men I ever knew who couldn’t drive. There used to be more such people when I was a child, often quite gifted, intelligent men. Especially creative people. Picasso and Einstein never learned to drive, did they?
    The girl in the next room and I communicated yesterday! She has not said a word for months, not since her terrible experience, but we communicated!
    At six o’clock, when they brought us coffee, I knocked once as usual: good morning! To my astonishment, after a minute or two there came a timid little knock back: good morning.
    I could not believe my ears. Perhaps it was not a reply at all. Perhaps she had