undertow, she’s already groaned several times earlier (seeing my indifference and also of course the hopelessness at Cody’s and the hopelessness of her wrecked apartment and wretched life) “Someday I’m going to commit suicide,” I suddenly wonder if she’s going to horrify the heavens and me too with a sudden suicide walk into those awful undertows—I see her sad blonde hair flying, the sad thin figure, alone by the sea, the leaf-hastening sea, she suddenly reminds me of something—I remember her musical sighs of death and I see the words clearly imprinted in my mind over her figure in the sand:—ST. CAROLYN BY THE SEA—“You were my last chance” she’s said but dont all women say that?—But can it be by “last chance” she doesnt mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we’ve shared—Can it be I’m withholding from her something sacred just like she says, or am I just a fool who’ll never learn to have a decent eternally minded deepdown relation with a woman and keep throwing that away for a song at a bottle?—In which case my own life is over anyway and there are the Joycean waves with their blank mouths saying “Yes that’s so,” and there are the leaves hurrying one by one down the sand and dumping in—In fact the creek is freighting hundreds more of them a minute right direct from the back hills—That big wind blasts and roars, it’s all yellow sunny and blue fury everywhere—I see the rocks wobble as it seems God is really getting mad for such a world and’s about to destroy it: big cliffs wobbling in my dumb eyes: God says “It’s gone too far, you’re all destroying everything one way or the other wobble boom the end is NOW.”
“The Second Coming, tick tock,” I think shuddering—St.Carolyn by the Sea is going in further—I could run and go see her but she’s so far away—I realize that if that nut is going to try this I’ll have to make an awful run and swim to get her—I get
