Limitations by Scott Turow Page B

in all of this?” she asks.
    “Not with Koll. Not exactly.”
    “So, where?”
    “I don’t really know. But I’m bothered. And somehow. Well-that’s why I asked. About whether I told you. Because I suddenly realized that my experience was not unlike-” Now he struggles.
    “Like what?” There is an undertone of alarm.
    “This case. Warnovits. ”
    “Please, George. I’m sure it was nothing like it at all.” She tries to sound soothing, but anger curls her voice at the edges. As she said: It means something that she never asked. She is not merely a spectator, that’s what she’s telling him. Sex, after all, matters. The culture screams it. Not to mention our preoccupations. Like death, it remains one of life’s predetermined destinations, and thus is a land of heavy portent whenever one arrives.
    In the interval, her fine features have darkened, and her gaze on him is more alert.
    “Georgie, you don’t seem yourself.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Don’t play dumb, George. It’s not you to stew about cases. You’re distracted. Have you found your cell phone yet?”
    He’s messing up. He can see that. Her needs deserve to predominate, and her clear need right now is for George to be what he always is. Poised. Stable. Loyal as a hound. It would be preposterous, after all, to ask her to feel sorry for him because of her brush with mortality. Worse, Patrice would take it as a breach of faith. When she leaves the hospital tomorrow, or the day after, she intends to use the term cured. The evil invading cells are certain to have been annihilated and thus exert no claim on their future. She wants George to lock arms with her and march forward with no looking back.
    “I’m fine, mate,” he answers.
    A knock. His hour is up. From the door, he waves brightly.
    “Home tomorrow,” he says. “No more hospital.”
    “No more hospital,” she repeats.
    In the air lock between the room and the hospital corridor, George removes the paper layers that covered him and pushes them into a special bag he was given when he entered. A technician sweeps him with a bright orange hand-held Geiger counter, a device the same size as a walkie-talkie. He may go. Striding down the garishly lit hospital corridor, he passes the doorways that often frame briefly glimpsed portraits of anguish. Yet his mind remains on his wife.
    When George met Patrice, he was in his third year in law school and she was a sophomore at Easton College. At a traffic light near the Easton campus, he had gazed over into an MG Roadster in the next lane, its top down in the sun, and found himself stunned by the sight of the driver. The young woman had the kind of tidy, perfect beauty that would last forever; she would still be called gorgeous at ninety. When she caught George ogling, he pretended he’d been staring at the parafoam dice that hung from the rearview mirror rather than at her.
    ‘I’ve never understood what those are for,’ he said through his open window. ‘The dice? Is it luck?’ His impression was that the toys would make it harder to see out the window.
    In response, he had gotten her cool smile.
    ‘I’ll have to ask my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘It’s his car.’
    The light changed and she was gone, but the next time he saw her, at a party, she recognized him.
    ‘I never found out about the dice,’ she said. ‘Somehow when you asked me, I realized that the best thing about that guy was the convertible.’
    He had thought then that he was getting in on the ground floor-before hordes of fellows his age were pursuing her, perhaps even before Patrice realized how much better she could do. There is never an ounce of false modesty when George declares that he married up, took a wife who is more capable than he. But Patrice was far ahead of him-as always. She knew what he was and had plans of her own. She wanted someone solid, faithful, supportive-and impressed. She had gone to architecture school, been the standout he expected, and