Free The Hours by Michael Cunningham

so.’’
    ‘‘What you need right now is a nap.’’
    ‘‘Do you think so?’’
    ‘‘I do.’’
    ‘‘All right, then.’’
    She says, ‘‘I’ll come to help you get dressed. How’s three-thirty?’’
    ‘‘It’s always wonderful to see you, Mrs. Dalloway.’’
    ‘‘I’m going to go now. I’ve got to get the flowers in water.’’
    ‘‘Yes. My, yes.’’
    She touches his thin shoulder with her fingertips. How is it possible that she feels regret? How can she imagine, even now, that they might have had a life together? They might have been
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    husban d and wife, soul mates, with lovers on the side. There are ways of managing.
    Richard was once avid and tall, sinewy, bright and pale as milk. He once strode through New York in an old military coat, talking excitedly, with the dark tangle of his hair tied impatiently away from his face by a length of blue ribbon he’d found.
    Clarissa says, ‘‘I’ve made the crab thing. Not that I imagine that’s any kind of serious inducement.’’
    ‘‘Oh, you know how I love the crab thing. It does make a difference, of course it does. Clarissa?’’
    ‘‘Yes?’’
    He lifts his massive, ravaged head. Clarissa turns her face sideways, and receives Richard’s kiss on her cheek. It’s not a good idea to kiss him on the lips—a common cold would be a disaster for him. Clarissa receives the kiss on her cheek, squeezes Richard’s thin shoulder with her fingertips.
    ‘‘I’ll see you at three-thirty,’’ she says.
    ‘‘Wonderful,’’ Richard says. ‘‘Wonderful.’’
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    Mr s . Wo olf
    S h e looks at the clock on the table. Almost two hours have passed. She still feels powerful, though she knows that tomorrow she may look back at what she’s written and find it airy, overblown. One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper. She takes a sip of cold coffee, and allows herself to read what she’s written so far.
    It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course—she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations. But can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel? Virginia taps at her lips with her thumb. Clarissa Dalloway will die, of that she feels certain, though this early it’s impossible to say how or even precisely why. She will, Virginia believes, take her own life. Yes, she will do that.
    Virginia lays down her pen. She would like to write all day,
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    t o fill thirty pages instead of three, but after the first hours something within her falters, and she worries that if she pushes beyond her limits she will taint the whole enterprise. She will let it wander into a realm of incoherence from which it might never return. At the same time, she hates spending any of her cogent hours doing anything but writing. She works, always, against the fear of relapse. First come the headaches, which are not in any way ordinary pain (‘‘headache’’ has always seemed an inadequate term for them, but to call them by any other would be too melodramatic). They infiltrate her. They inhabit rather than merely afflict her, the way viruses inhabit their hosts. Strands of pain announce themselves, throw shivers of brightness into her eyes so insistently she must remind herself that others can’t see them. Pain colonizes her, quickly replaces what was Virginia with more and more of itself, and its advance is so forceful, its jagged contours so distinct, that she can’t help imagining it as an entity with a life of its own. She might see it while walking with Leonard in the square, a scintillating silver-white mass floating over the cobblestones, randomly spiked, fluid but whole, like a jellyfish. ‘‘What’s that?’’ Leonard would ask. ‘‘It’s my headache,’’ she’d answer. ‘‘Please ignore it.’’
    The headache is always there, waiting, and her periods of freedom, however long,