Raymond Chandler: Poodle Springs

She didn't answer, only looked at me, and her eyes were enormous and simultaneously dark and luminous.

"This is a community property state," I said. "Did you come to carry off half my ammunition?"

"I came to make love with you," she said.

"I thought we were getting divorced," I said.

"Yes," she said, "we are. But it doesn't cover making love."

"You seem awfully sure of yourself," I said. "Overnight case and all. What if I said no?"

Linda smiled and shook her head. I felt as if I might disappear into her eyes if I looked at them too long.

"You're right," I said. "I probably won't say no."

She smiled a little wider, still silent, still with eternity lurking behind her eyes. She reached up and unpinned the silly pink hat and put it on the coffee table.

"I need to know what all this means to us," I said.

She nodded slowly.

"It means," she said, and her voice was almost detached, as if in tune with an orchestra playing out of earshot, "that we love each other too much to give each other up. We can end the marriage, but we cannot end the love. Probably we can't live together. But why must that mean we can't be lovers?"

"Oh," I said, "I see. That's what it means."

"Yes."

"Well, it makes sense to me," I said.

Linda unbuttoned the suit jacket and took it off, and unzipped her skirt and slid out of it. She took off her undergarments and let them drop to the floor and stood up straight and smiled at me some more.

"Do you wish to have me ravage you here on the living room floor or would you prefer to retire to the bedroom?" I said. I seemed disconnected now from my voice, as well, as if reality were off camera and we were enacting a poem that someone else had chanted. Linda didn't answer.

"What's your preference?" I heard myself say.

"I think both," I heard Linda say. And later, much later in the darkness, with the world put far aside, I heard one of us say, "forever?" and the other, I don't know which, our voices had merged by then, answered, "forever."