Beautiful Companion (cont)

She drops the facts down on the table like bombs. The others grin as she laughs, and Michael especially finds her story just as hilarious as she does, and says so: he says the portrait is nearly ridiculous; the young operator, the good student, the one who sees through her educators, who despises them because they have disappointed her; who moves beyond them, as she thinks, at twenty-two years old, and he giggles as he says it, which of course sets Caitlin off again, and back and forth it goes. It takes the two of them almost five minutes to properly get a handle on themselves. This laughter is appropriate to Caitlin’s character, appropriate to her secrecy and to the horror that she moves among as a native. She sometimes looks like a steam engine, or a complex motor-apparatus, sucking in fuel and venting steam and smoke, chained in some lightless pit, laughing and laughing at her own aggressiveness, at her presumption. She was so young then. The laughter is appropriated by Michael,…

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