The Progress of Love

ahead, somehow, to the waiting room in Honolulu. Mary Jo sees herself sitting there in a room with stunted, potted palm trees, on a padded bench. The man and the girl walk past her. The girl is walking ahead, carrying the shopping bags. The man has the travelling bag slung over his shoulder and he is carrying the umbrella. With the end of the furled umbrella, he gives the girl a poke. Nothing to hurt her or even surprise her.A joke. The girl scurries and giggles and looks around her with an expression of endless apology, embarrassment, helplessness, good humor. Then Mary Jo catches her eye, without the man’s noticing. Mary Jo gets up and walks across the waiting room and reaches the bright, tiled refuge of the ladies’ washroom.
    And this time the girl does follow her.
    Mary Jo runs the cold water. She splashes it over her own face, in a gesture of encouragement.
    She urges the girl to do the same.
    She speaks to her calmly and irresistibly.
    “That’s right. Cool your face off. Get your head clear. You have to think clearly. You have to think very clearly. Now. What is it? What is it you want? What are you afraid of? Don’t be afraid. He can’t come in here. We’ve got time. You can tell me what you want and I can help you. I can get in touch with the authorities.”
    But the story halts at this point. Mary Jo has hit a dry spot, and her dream—for she is dreaming by now—translates this in its unsubtle way into an irregular, surprising patch of rust where the enamel has worn away at the bottom of the sink.
    What a badly maintained ladies’ room.
    “Is it always like this in the tropics?” says Mary Jo to the woman standing beside her at the next sink, and this woman covers her sink with her hands as if she doesn’t want Mary Jo to look at or use it. (Not that Mary Jo was intending to.) She is a large, white-haired woman in a red sari, and she seems to have some authority in the ladies’ room. Mary Jo looks around for the Eskimo girl and is bewildered to see her lying on the floor. She has shrunk, and has a rubbery look, a crude face like a doll’s. But the real shock is that her head has come loose from her body, though it is still attached by an internal elastic band.
    “You’ll get a chance to choose your own,” says the white-haired woman, and Mary Jo thinks this means your own punishment. She knows she is in no danger of that—she is not responsible, she didn’t hit the girl or push her to the floor. The woman is crazy.
    “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I have to get back to the plane.”
    But this is later, and they are no longer in the ladies’ room.They are back in Dr. Streeter’s office and Mary Jo has a sense of a dim scramble of events she can’t keep track of, of lapses in time she hasn’t noted. She still thinks about getting back on the plane, but how is she to find the waiting room, let alone get to Honolulu?
    A large figure entirely wrapped up in bandages is carried past, and Mary Jo means to find out who it is, what has happened, why they are bringing a victim of burns in here.
    The woman in the red sari is there, too. She says to Mary Jo, in quite a friendly way, “The court is in the garden?”
    This may mean that Mary Jo is still to be accused of something, and that there is a court being conducted in the garden. On the other hand, the word “court” may refer to Dr. Streeter. The woman may mean “count,” being mixed up in her spelling. If that’s so, she intends to mock him. Calling him the count is a joke, and “in the garden” means something else, too, which Mary Jo will have to concentrate hard on to figure out.
    But the woman opens her hand and shows Mary Jo some small blue flowers—like snowdrops, but blue—and explains that these are “court” and that “court” means flowers.
    A ruse, and Mary Jo knows it, but she can’t concentrate because she’s waking up. In a jumbo jet over the Pacific Ocean, with the movie screen furled and the lights mostly out and even the baby asleep. She can’t get back through the various curtains of the dream to the clear part, in the ladies’ room, when the cold water was streaming down their faces and she—Mary Jo—was telling the girl how she could save herself. She can’t get back there. People all around her are sleeping under blankets, with their heads on small orange pillows. Somehow a pillow and a blanket have been provided for her as well. The man and the girl across the aisle are asleep with their