Chapter13In his extreme youth, Smith had viewed love as an absolute state of being that, if lucky, could be accessed; in his maturity he had decided that this was the heaven of false religion, to be looked upon with amused disbelief, gently familiar contempt, and embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he was beginning to know that it was neither a condition of Doris nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a state invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
The hours he'd once spent in his office, gazing out the window at a landscape that shimmered and emptied before his blank stare, he now spent with Charlotte. Every morning he would go to his office early and sit restless for ten or fifteen minutes; then, una
