The King in the Tree

FRONT HALL

This is the hall. It isn’t much of a one, but it does the job. Boots here, umbrellas there. I hate those awful houses, don’t you, where the door opens right into the living room. Don’t you? It’s like being introduced to some man at a party who right away throws his arm around your shoulders. No, give me a little distance, thank you, a little formality. I’m all for the slow buildup, the gradual introduction. Of course you have to imagine it without the bookcase. There isn’t a room in the house without a bookcase.

May I take your coat? Oh, I like it. It’s perfect. And light as a feather. Wherever did you find it? It’s so hard to know what to wear this time of year, warm one day cold the next. I worry about my jonquils. They came out last week and then wouldn’t you know it: snow. Luckily it didn’t stick. It’s a miracle they didn’t die. I’ll just hang it right here, next to mine. It must look very empty to you, all those hangers side by side. Those are my late husband’s hats. Funny. One day I cleared out all the coats, all the shoes and galoshes — it just seemed pointless. But I left the hats. I couldn’t touch the hats.

LIVING ROOM

This used to be my favorite room. Listen to me! Used to be. But that’s the way it is, you know. I don’t have a favorite room anymore. Still, I spend most of my time here. Where else would I go? I’m so glad you like it. One thing we always agreed on, my husband and I, was furniture: it had to be comfortable. As Robert put it, no matter how new it was, it had to look sat in. And of course the piano — what’s a living room without a piano, I’d like to know. Not that I ever touched it. No, I gave up piano at twelve. Don’t know why, really. It’s the sort of thing you later think you regret, without really regretting it. But Robert, now. He quit lessons at fifteen but kept on practicing. He never did like to give anything up.

It’s a warm room too. When we bought the place it was a little drafty in winter, but first we insulated and then we replaced those drafty old windows that Robert had to put up every fall. Triple-track: it made a difference, let me tell you. When you close the curtains, in cold weather, it’s just as if you’re sealing yourself in. I’d sit on the couch with my feet tucked under, reading, while Robert sat in the chair there, by the bookcase, reading and marking passages. Or we’d talk— you know, thoughts drifting up, turning into words, like, I don’t know, like a way of breathing. Sometimes he made a fire in the fireplace — excellent draft. I meant to tell you I had the chimney cleaned only last month. Was that ever a job. You wouldn’t believe what was in there. I almost fell over when I saw the bill. But hey, can you blame the poor guy? Anyway. When the fire was going, I’d move to that end of the couch, to be near it. I could feel the heat all along my right side. Sometimes Robert would go over to the piano, if the mood struck him. He never played for anyone except me. This wasn’t exactly as romantic as it sounds. He called himself an amateur—harsh word for Robert — said he refused to destroy beautiful things in public. Robert never liked to make mistakes. It upset him. He played for me because he knew I wouldn’t mind an occasional wrong note. Or you could say he played for himself and allowed me to overhear him. But I loved to hear him play, especially his Chopin nocturnes. He was crazy about Chopin, said he was the greatest composer — not ever, but of piano music. Second was Mozart. He’d play those Mozart sonatas over and over — every single one of them. Do you know what he’d do? He’d begin with any sonata and play right through the book, in order, till all of a sudden — right in the middle of a movement — the middle of a phrase — he stopped. “That’s enough of that!” he’d say, as though he were angry at himself, or. . or disappointed. Robert was hard on himself. You had to know when to soothe him and when to leave him alone. Men are harder on themselves that way than women, don’t you think? Or am I wrong? But when he played, he was able to lose himself for a while, in the music. So imagine a fire going— wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains — and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys — and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.

I hope you don’t mind these little. . anecdotes of mine. We can just breeze on through the house if you’d rather. Then it’s all right to continue?

Well. I don’t want you to think of me sitting on that couch for twenty-two years with a look of blissful idiocy on my face. You know, the adoring wife and the happy hubby. Twenty-two years! That was how long Robert and I were married: twenty-two years. Things are bound to be a little imperfect, in twenty-two years. I met him when I was twenty-four, working in a bookstore in Vermont. Robert was thirty. Even back then he had that gloomy kind of handsomeness that just. . slayed me. A handsome moody man. Doomed, as he was fond of saying. Difficult, was what it boiled down to. Robert was difficult. But you work your way through. Besides, I was a handful myself, back then. Demanding. Temperamental. Robert was very patient. Impatient with himself and others, patient with me. We. . fell in love, as they say. And stayed there. That was the thing. And I knew him: God, did I know him. I was a student of his expressions, a scholar of his moods. I don’t know when it was, exactly, that I felt something was wrong. It was last year — spring was further along, half my forsythias dead. You remember that late frost. I was sitting on the couch with a book, after dinner, and Robert was sitting in his chair, with a book facedown on his leg, thinking. Brooding, you could say. For no particular reason I asked myself: Am I happy? And I felt a little pause, a little — oh, breath of hesitation, before I answered: Well, yes, of course I’m happy. Of course I am. Happy.

What stayed with me was that blink of hesitation. Robert had been acting a little strange lately. I’d noticed it without noticing it, the way you do. His work wasn’t going well again, he was — I mean, all this was nothing new. But there was a new element, something I was suddenly aware of. Robert was very good at giving you his full attention. I’ve never known anyone who was so good at giving you their full attention that way. He would listen with a kind of. . a kind of alertness, and whatever he said would be at the center of what you were talking about. I realized that I’d missed this for a while — that his deepest attention was elsewhere. Now, listen. There was no question of unfaithfulness between Robert and me. I knew Robert. It wasn’t the sort of thing he did. Not that he didn’t notice a pretty woman. He liked pretty women. He liked me, didn’t he? Was always talking about how pretty I was and all that; I didn’t deny it. And of course women were always noticing him. But noticing’s one thing, and Robert. . it wasn’t his way. It just wasn’t in the bounds of possibility. Besides, we were happy. Weren’t we? But I found myself thinking, on the couch — or not really thinking, it was more like the shadow of a thought: could it be that Robert. .? I immediately felt embarrassed, almost. . ashamed, as if I’d been caught in some unpleasant act. But there it was. The little thought-shadow.

This mantelpiece came with the house. I can show it to you in the original plan. Solid marble. Nice, if you like that sort of thing.

Listen. I’ll tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a woman — just like me. She grew up in a small New England town, just like me. She was well loved and cheerful and fond of reading, just like me. She was good at school but not brilliant and went to a small college in Vermont, and at the age of twenty-four she fell in love — just like me. She married the next year, and she and her husband moved into a comfortable old house. The years passed. She was happy. Then one day, do you know what happened? Listen: I’ll tell you what happened. Nothing happened. She was happy, life was worth living, she liked the summer, and the fall, and the winter, and the spring, and she liked all the days of the week. And this woman was not like me, not like me at all.

That’s my story. Did you like it?

But — good lord — can you believe it? All along I’ve been holding this envelope. You must have been wondering. Why didn’t you say something? It’s the appraisal. As I said on the phone, I’m selling the house myself. I have no use for realtors— or reelators, as everybody says these days. God, how Robert hated that. Put some water in the perculator for the reelator. Then we can discuss nucular war. Anyway, I had the place appraised, and here’s the report. I won’t ask a penny more, but I also won’t take a penny less. That keeps it nice and simple.

Now if we step around this way. . Door to the cellar. Back porch. I want to show you the back porch. But first the kitchen. That door?

DOWNSTAIRS BATH

The downstairs bath. Half bath — tub and no shower — newish WC — everything in fine working order. Please note the bookcase. I promised you a bookcase in every room and, by God, girl — as my grandpa used to say to my grandma — you’ll get a bookcase in every room! I mean, what with Robert’s books and mine. Will you just look at these things. A real mishmash. Wealth of Nations. Jane Eyre. Wizard of Oz. We knew where everything was, it just wasn’t in any particular order, except of course in Robert’s study. The Guermantes Way. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Now there’s a title I’ve always liked. Screw’s coming out of that towel rack. The paint’s cracking over there; you’d want it redone. When I ordered the new toilet — I was the one who took care of things like that — the man said they came in two sizes: a short one, and a longer one. So I ask him what the difference is. He looks embarrassed, lowers his eyes. “Well, ma’am,” he says, “the longer one is. . sometimes it’s more comfortable for. . the gentleman.” Can you believe it? I practically bit my tongue off, not to laugh. “More comfortable for. . the gentleman.” Robert and I howled over it. Of course I ordered the larger one. We called it The Gentleman. Permit me to introduce you. Lady: Gentleman. Ahm right proud to make your acquaintance, ma’am. To the Lighthouse. Tristes Tropiques. Good God. I spent one night lying on the floor of this room, right here on this old linoleum. Can you imagine? It’s hard to see how anyone could fit.

KITCHEN

Lots of sun through those windows. Kitchens should be bright, don’t you think? You ought to see the light coming through the window onto the table, on a good summer morning. Of course it’s terribly old-fashioned. Not nearly enough cabinet space. I know, I know. And I’m the only woman in America without a dishwasher. But really, where would you put it? I refuse to give up my sunny table. I could put one there — and cramp up the whole room. No, let it go. Besides, what would my friends do if they couldn’t say: Oh, you poor thing! You’ve just got to redecorate. Of course I understand a new kitchen’s a selling point. But I’ve told you about that. I’m sticking to the appraisal, no matter what.

You see up there? On top of the cabinets? Complete works of James Fenimore Cooper. Library sale. They were practically giving it away.

I could use a cup of tea. Would you care to join me? Oh, good. Good. I’ve been talking a blue streak, haven’t I? And that’s strange, because I’m known as a more or less quiet person. I calmed down after a few years of marriage. As I say, I was happy. It quiets you down. So: Robert’s quiet wife. And now, isn’t it odd, I have a desire to talk. Of course I don’t talk to just anyone. But there’s something about you. . a sympathy, I think. I could sense it when you first entered the house.

Milk? Sugar? I’m afraid I’ve only got whole. I can’t stand that two-percent stuff. Tastes like bad water, if you ask me. They say it isn’t much different from whole anyway, you have to have one percent to accomplish anything. Accomplish what, I’d like to know. Of course someone with your figure doesn’t have to worry. But I suppose it’s always the ones who don’t have to worry who do. No milk? I hadn’t thought of that. Solves the problem nicely, doesn’t it?

Mmm, that’s good. That’s very good. Tea calms me. Selling this house rattles me — it’s like stirring a pile of leaves with a stick — you never know what’s going to come slithering out— but tea, now. Tea calms me. Especially on an afternoon like this, the sun in and out — a little on the cool side. I do worry about my jonquils. Last year I lost half my forsythias. Just look at those clouds. Well. After that evening I told you about — the evening when a doubt crossed my mind — things continued as usual — except that they weren’t as usual. I knew something was wrong. Believe me, I knew. Robert was withholding something from me. You have to understand that Robert was a secretive man. I mean, he was a combination of secretiveness and. . openness. It’s one of the things you get to know about a man. But this withholding, this, this awkwardness — well. It was new. Something had changed. It upset me. He knew it did. I still thought it was the book that was harming him. He’d taken a semester off, he was putting tremendous pressure on himself, and it wasn’t going well. He told me very little about it. Typical Robert: bottle it up, fight it alone. Be a man! I knew it had to do with things, American things — I think he was even planning to call it American Things—familiar household objects that were supposed to reveal something about American life in the late nineteenth century. Robert taught history and American studies at the community college. Have I mentioned it? They paid him nothing. It was a crime. Anyway: things. Fountain pens, tin cans, bottle caps — he kept reading about these things, searching for something deep. He wanted everything to mean something. So of course I thought it was that. I wanted it to be that. I could hear him scraping back the chair in the study, pacing around. Sometimes he left the house on long walks, or rode to the supermarket late at night, where he’d spend hours studying boxes, cans — or so he said. I felt estranged from him. And, funny as it sounds, I began drinking a lot of tea. I liked the ritual, I suppose. One evening last summer I was sitting right here at this table, alone, drinking tea. Iced tea, it was, with a slice of lemon. I heard Robert’s footsteps coming down the stairs. He came through the dining room into the kitchen and sat down, right where you’re sitting now. He had his sad, doomed look but also something else, a tension, an energy. I had the impression of a dangerous electrical wire — touch it and you’re dead. In a clipped, haughty way, angry and cold but weary, broken — oh, who knew what it was — he told me. He confessed. It was a withheld kind of out-pouring, a strangled eruption. But he confessed. He’d been seeing someone. You won’t believe this, but I thought he meant a therapist. A shrink. Robert? But of course he meant a woman.

More tea?

Now this, too, may surprise you. My first thought was: Oh, no! Poor Robert! Not him! I mean, Robert, whose harshest word after amateur was banal—accent on the last syllable, to give it the true French stink. I could hear him mocking it all, in that way of his. Adultery, for Chrissake, in suburbia, for Chrissake. Doesn’t the poor sap have a sense of style? Pure kitsch, kiddo. Right up there with busts of Beethoven and bookmarks with Emily Dickinson poems printed on them. And so forth. Poor Robert! What a sad falling off. And so, creature of habit that I was, I wanted to comfort him, the poor man. I mean there he was, sitting all doomed and sort of crumpled and. . and banal, so of course the only thing you want to do is reassure your husband, while at the same time it’s dawning on you what he’s actually said, and there’s a panic starting somewhere because this handsome man with his doomed look has gone and done something bad to you, if only you could stop comforting him and start concentrating long enough to figure out just what it unbearably is.

I suppose I should have told you the house is haunted. Well, of course. All houses are haunted. It’s just that some are more haunted than others. Robert’s ghost is sitting right there, where you’re sitting now, and my ghost is sitting here, listening to his strangled confession. The air is full of ghosts. At night you can hear them: sifting through the house, like sand.

I said nothing. I think he wanted me to say something — to scream at him, to burst into tears. I felt he wanted drama. I lowered my eyes. I could tell I was disappointing him. At the same time I felt threads of fire shooting through me, a wondrous fiery piercing, a kind of. . a kind of exhilaration of misery. I thought I might die, and that dying might be a strange, exciting thing to do. And you know, I felt almost soothed, almost comforted in my private fire, because it protected me from him, from the words he had spoken.

I think I exasperated him. The poor man needed something from me, blame or forgiveness or. . drama, and there I sat, exalted in misery, a saint of suffering. Who knows? When the living have become the dead, who shall speak? There was too much silence in the room. The kitchen was no longer large enough to contain all that silence. It was pushing against the walls, cracking the plaster. I don’t think he intended to say more, but the silence was choking him. He spat out some words, the way you do when someone’s hands are around your neck. He told me things. I said nothing. He told me her name. That’s when I learned it was you.

You seem upset. Of course you ought to be. Of course Robert would have sworn eternal secrecy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made you prick your finger with a needle and sign a document in blood. Secret love! What could be better? What you failed to understand was Robert’s loyalty. It’s true that by taking you as his — do you mind the word mistress? — he had been disloyal to me. That’s what confused you. Your mistake was to assume that there were two separate facts: a disloyalty, to me, and a new loyalty, to you. No, whatever his feelings might have been for you, his disloyalty to me simply stirred up and even strengthened the old loyalty. He confessed to me because he was loyal and couldn’t do anything about it. He was stuck with it. Robert betrayed you. I want you to know that. It’s something we have in common.

Do you know what else he told me? He told me you were nothing to him. Don’t you say anything. He told me you were a body, just a body. If he was trying to soothe me, he was failing brilliantly. But I want you to know what he said, sitting right there. Just a body. Men can be a little thoughtless sometimes, don’t you think? Of course you can choose not to believe me, if it makes you feel better. Or you can believe that Robert was lying. A good man, lying to spare the feelings of his wife.

But let’s adjourn to the porch, shall we? There’s so much more to tell.

BACK PORCH

This was all open, when we bought the place. I used to hang a line between these two posts: I remember Robert’s socks dripping onto the handrail. On Robert’s salary and the little I picked up part-time at the library, we had to be careful — a dryer was the last thing we considered necessary. It was the mosquitoes that finally drove us to screen it in. I don’t think it’s too chilly out here, do you? We can sit a little. Sit, why don’t you. I just loved it out here, summer evenings. I’d come out with a book and sit with it facedown in my lap. You can hear a lot of sounds in the summer, and I liked all of them: children’s voices all woven together, a car radio suddenly loud and then fading away, a basketball hitting a driveway with that smacking sound, grackles in the trees — and the crickets, always the crickets, and always the lawn mowers. I used to think of the evening lawn mowers as big summer insects — a sort of bee. Robert never lasted long out here. I think it made him restless. But he always sat for a while, in the summer, to keep me company. Sometimes we’d talk about converting it to a full-time room — windows, heat, I imagined myself sitting out here feeling warm in winter — but my heart wasn’t in it. A porch needs to be open. You need to feel the air and hear the sounds. Don’t you think? The whole idea is to be outside and inside at the same time. That’s what a porch is.

After Robert’s confession, I came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting now. Who knows what I was thinking? It’s hard to remember things, even the most important things in your life. All you know is that they happened. I sat down. I felt dead. At the same time my mind was very sharp and alert. And this might strike you as odd, but I was in a state of — of surprise. Robert had killed me, a quick stab to the heart, and I’d come out on the porch to watch myself die. Why wasn’t I dead? It did surprise me. Or maybe the dead have their thoughts, as well as the living. Do you think so? My mind, as I said, was very alert. I heard Robert’s words, the words that I knew were going to change my life, and already I was judging them. You see, I heard in his confession a certain — well, a certain pride. He had said his piece — had come to terms with his conscience — he’d acted like a good man. He had performed well. I almost felt like standing up and applauding. Bravo, Robert! Now it was my turn — to act like a good woman. All I had to do was forgive him.

I don’t know how long I sat out here. I remember noticing it had grown dark: a peaceful summer night. At one point I heard Robert’s footsteps in the kitchen. They stopped at the door of the porch, and I knew he was standing there in the dark kitchen, looking at me through that window. Then he went away.

When I first met Robert, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, he used to come into the bookstore where I was working. He wore jeans and work boots and flannel shirts. He looked like a skinny lumberjack. I thought he was my age — a student, maybe. Even then he was an interesting man. A teacher who hated teachers, an intellectual who made fun of intellectuals, a Jew with no ties to Judaism — unless you count the piano. Robert liked to say that all pianos are Jews. He didn’t sit comfortably in his skin. It’s one of the things that most attracted me to him.

I thought about that time in a dim, puzzled way, as if I’d read about it in some book I could no longer remember.

Then I recalled something that happened once at a party. A loud man was talking to Robert, a little way off. “Good old Robert,” I heard him say, with a friendly laugh. I saw Robert’s face tighten behind his little smile. Later I asked what that was all about. “Oh, he’s a fool,” Robert said. “But even so, he has no right to call me good.” At the time I thought he was just being — you know, being Robert. But now I wondered about it. Was it possible he wasn’t a good man? Of course I never thought he was a saint. I couldn’t have stood that. Robert was difficult. But I knew him — I knew him. Didn’t I?

That’s what I asked myself, sitting right there where you are.

What do you do when you’re dead-alive and your husband is a ghost? What do you do? You go up to bed. I went up to bed. I felt sluggish with weariness, but at the same time feverishly tense, as though I might explode. There was no question of sleeping in the same bed as Robert. But when I looked into the dark room and saw the bed empty, I felt. . I wanted to. . I mean, Jesus, to think that he’d gone to her — to that body—to you—well, it was too much. Then it all came rushing into me, a black wind. Do you know it, the black wind? It’s the wind after the first wind. It’s the wind that comes rushing in when you think the worst is over, sweeping you clean, till you feel like a room without furniture. I realized then that I wasn’t going to be spared. Not even a little. At that moment I heard a creak and realized that Robert had gone to sleep on the couch in his study. I felt grateful to him for removing himself from our bed — Robert was always sensitive, a very sensitive man— and fell with relief into a sort of half sleep.

That was how it was for the next few weeks. I slept without sleeping, woke without waking. I ran a low fever. I felt. . bruised all over, as if I’d been beaten up. Robert worried over me, without coming too close. He tried to show me that he wanted to take care of me but that he understood my desire to be left alone. A sensitive man, as I said. And you too — a sensitive woman. I can see that. I can feel that. Two sensitive people, giving off flames of hell. As for Robert and me, we barely spoke, though I didn’t shut him out. I think he thought I was punishing him. But I wasn’t doing something to Robert. I just — it was like — listen. Robert had gone away. Do you understand that? In his place was this — this man, a polite stranger, who hung around the house, making sure I didn’t. . die, I guess. Or hurt myself. You can hurt yourself, in a house. I was very weak. Once I even fell down the stairs. Can you imagine? Falling down the stairs out of sheer unhappiness? Nothing got broken, but I think it alarmed him, this man who was always in the house, imitating my dead husband.

Where was I? Sleep. Of course I didn’t only sleep. I moved about. I felt heavy, draggy — and light, very light, as if at any second I’d float right up to the ceiling. I lost my color; my skin was sickly white, like one of those old dinner plates you see glimmering out at you in a dark corner of an antique shop. I felt feverish and dead. Robert was — as I said, he was very good to me. I mean, what else could he be? He wanted me to see a doctor. Can you imagine that? Doctor, Doctor, my husband is seeing another woman. Do you have a pill for that, Doc? Maybe a shot in the behind? No, I’d never be able to keep a straight face. Besides, wasn’t Robert thinking of himself, as well as of his poor zombified wreck of a wife? Much better for him if she’s a happy, perky little wifey-wife. Thaaat’s all right, dear. Boys will be boys. A little fun never hurt anybody, for gosh sakes. All’s forgiven! Really! Not only that, you can bring her over here! Sure, why not? We have a big bed — there’s room for one more. I’ll make punch and sandwiches. Bring my binoculars. Well. Don’t get me going on that. If I was sick, if I was depressed, at least my sickness was mine. I wasn’t going to let him take that away too.

But, as I said, I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about Robert, at that time. I was actually thinking about. . you. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. It’s a natural thing. Up to that point, there had really been only the two of us — Robert and me. Now there were three. People say that about having a baby, you know: go in two, come out three. Well, we had you. There was Mommy, and Daddy, and cute li’l cuddly-wuddly you. So of course I thought about you. God, did I think about you. I thought about you all day long. I even thought about you that night I spent lying on the floor of the bathroom. Dizzy spell— lay there all night long, after coming downstairs at two in the morning. Do you know what it feels like, lying on the linoleum in the bathroom thinking about your husband’s cutie pie? Sometimes I imagined you as a big blond slut in a tight red dress. Other times you were a slim business-type in a snazzy skirt suit — you know, one of those jackets with a notched lapel and a trim skirt that zips up the side. Zip zip. Oh, darn, my zipper’s stuck. Would you mind giving me a hand, Robert? Of course it wasn’t you I thought about, exactly. Just: that woman. And so I thought about her. I became obsessed by her: by you. I tried to imagine you as Robert would: a desirable body. I. . undressed you, in my mind. I looked at you. I. . did things to you. Or rather, I did things to her, to them, to all women — no one was safe from me, in my mind. I’ve always thought of myself as a — a modest woman, but I wasn’t modest as I tried to find my way to the heart of Robert’s need. I imagined the friends of friends, women I didn’t know by name, wondering if she was the one. I unhooked their bras, I pulled down their underpants — the way I imagined Robert would. Just a body. What was a body? I had one, but it wasn’t the right one. Which one was that? Maybe a young one? — sophomore? — a no-bra, T-shirt kind of a girl — one of those hipless wonders, legs like a nutcracker. Could be. Who knew? Not me. There was one woman — a colleague of his. Someone without a name. Miss Colleague. I’d met her a few times, one of those touchy-feely types, always putting her fingers on everybody’s arm, as if she were afraid she wouldn’t be noticed unless she stabbed you to death with her nails. You know the type. Eyes too bright, chin too sharp, bra too pointy. Was she the one? Why not? What did they have, these phantom-women, that I didn’t have? I tried to picture things I’d never. . well, I won’t say never. But they never concerned me, especially, the things other women did in bed. Why should they? Things were fine between us, in that department. I mean, weren’t they? Of course things weren’t exactly the way they used to be — not after twenty-two years. You get used to each other. You don’t feel crazy anymore. It’s actually a good feeling. But I mean. . but I’m losing the thread. And so I made women naked in my mind. I tore off their clothes. I looked at their bodies. I turned myself into a man. My hips shrank. My arms grew hard. I was a lovely man; tense, dangerous. I was a lean teenager, mean and cool, prowling the suburban streets till dawn.

Women’s bodies! They were out there, millions of them, and men wanted them. It was just that I had the wrong body. A shame, really. I’d always figured I had the right body, but it turned out I’d gotten the wrong one by mistake. A shipping error. Sorry, lady, no refunds. Earlier, we’d been friends, my body and me — at worst I’d treated it with a kind of skeptical affection. Now I became ruthless. I judged it mercilessly. Upstairs in the hall there’s an old mirror — framed in mahogany — shaped like a shield. It’s one of the pieces of furniture we inherited from Robert’s grandmother. One day I took the hand mirror from my dresser and stood in front of the hall mirror, in my underpants. I turned around and studied my figure in the hand mirror. I put my weight first on one leg, then the other. I tried to desire myself, I tried to imagine myself an object of desire. And as I stood there, studying myself coldly but feverishly too, it came over me that what was upsetting wasn’t so much the harsh judgment I passed on my body as the knowledge that I was entering willingly into a world of humiliation.

Finally I couldn’t bear it any longer — I mean, not knowing what you looked like. And so one night I paid you a little visit. Oh, Robert neglected to mention that? How careless of him.

It must have been toward the end of July, the second or third week after Robert’s famous little confession. I was still in a strange state, drifting through the house, never really sleeping, never really awake. Ghosts are like that, I imagine. Do you think ghosts are like that? I remember it was a hot night: a hot summer night, the kind I had always liked, back in the days when I was among the living. Robert was asleep in the study; I came down and sat here, on the porch. I was still running a low fever. I was dressed, I remember that, jeans I think and a blouse, and I tried to listen to the sounds of the night, but I was too restless for that. It was impossible to breathe, and I thought I’d go out and take a little walk.

I was struck by the peacefulness of the night, and I thought maybe — just maybe the peace would enter me and calm me a little. And I was struck, you know, by how much it looked like a summer night. I could feel myself smiling, the way you do when something is so much itself that it seems a little. . contrived. Somebody’d put a big white moon up there in the sky, and for some reason it reminded me of the round white top of a Dixie cup, the underside — the way the ice cream sticks to it and makes little patterns like mountain ranges — and you could see the shadows of chimneys slanting along roofs and the shadows of trees thrown up against the fronts of houses. I could smell things very sharply: the leaves of a big Norway maple, fresh tar from a driveway, wet grass and gravel under a sprinkler. Of course I knew where I was going. Robert had told me your name, and one night I’d looked it up in the phone book. Right here in town! How fortunate for both of you.

I knew it was on the other side of town, out past the cemetery. I wasn’t exactly sure where. It seemed to me that I’d been walking for hours; it may be that I lost my way. But when you have a fever, when you’re walking in a waking dream, through a summer night made up of nifty stage props — streetlight, moon, tree — then what does it matter whether you get there sooner or later or never or always, your husband asleep in the study, your front door open, your mind disordered, your heart opening and closing like a fist, the hair of a dead woman streaming from a tree — or was it a kite string, a ball of unraveling twine, rope of a hanged man; not for me to say. Then I was there, in front of her house — your house — the house of the wicked witch. Go awaaay, my voices sang in me. Oh staaay, my voices echoed. I took in the front porch — wicker sofa, the two plants hanging like. . oh, like anchors. . and shutters. . with those little grooves in them. I went around the side toward the back. Two garbage pails with little wheels, tomato sticks with nothing growing, one of those grills that look like a diving bell. Magnolia in back yard. Round glass table, metal chairs. Two doors! The back door at the top of the steps: locked. But the cellar door — really, people ought to be more careful, why only the other day. . It opened so easily, as if you’d been expecting me. Were you? Up the little stairs. Moonlight in the kitchen. So tired! I was, you know: tired, I mean. Everything was strange. The edges of the plates in the dish rack caught the moonlight. I realized that I was in an enchanted cave. Clock ticking like a stick knocking. Bick bock. Bick bock. Knife handles sticking out of a block of wood, as though the knives had been thrown at a target. But where was the knife thrower, where was the woman on the turning wheel? I took one out — the sort of thing you do, in a fever-dream. The hall led to three doors, all open. Three: just like a fairy tale. I looked in the first. Empty! Looked in the second. Empty! Of course! I wanted to shout: Oh, I know where you’re hiding! Can’t fool me! Through the third door I could see you lying in your bed. I went in — just like that — and stood over the bed, looking at you. I was surprised to see a knife in my hand. Where had it come from? I felt that I was on a stage, and people were watching: the crazy lady with the knife, bent over the sleeping witch. You had stolen my husband. Broken my heart. Ruined my life. Why shouldn’t you die? I felt the moon turn suddenly red, bleeding great red drops into the sky. I was exalted. I was an angel: wrathful. I looked at you. Robert didn’t tell you this? Your face was on the pillow, turned a little to one side, your hair loose, flowing. You were younger than I was, but not young, not the way I had imagined. Light hair, straw not blond. The covers were partway down, sheet turned over the spread to form a border. Your hand on the edge of the sheet, as though you were stroking it. Your bare throat, your nightgown. Not the silky clingy thing I’d expected, but a cottony smocky sort of thing. I could see you were an attractive woman, handsome not beautiful, not drop-dead gorgeous, nothing little-girly about you — character in the mouth. I stood there. I stood there. What came over me then. . it was. . I had a sense that all this. . the moonlight in the room, the stillness, the hair on the pillow. . it was as if I’d crept into the room of a sleeping child, or. . something along those lines. Call me a sucker for cheap effects. But suddenly I was the wicked witch and you were. . only you. A woman sleeping. I looked at you. I tried to make you dream me. I saw something in my hand. I left the room and never looked back.

That was our first meeting.

And when I got home, it was the strangest thing. Robert was there in the doorway, waiting for me. Isn’t that just too much? He looked worried to death, poor man. So I told him— where I’d been, I mean. I left out the part about the knife. Then I went up to bed.

But, good lord, listen to me! — nattering on and on. You’d think a person had nothing better to do all day than sit and listen to stories. You can stay a bit longer, can’t you? I’m so glad. I haven’t even shown you the upstairs. But first the dining room. This way, this way.

DINING ROOM

I promised you bookcases. Well, take a look. Uno. Due. And please observe the top shelf of the hutch. Book junkies, both of us. I started reading at five and forgot to give it up the way I gave up everything else — my tutu, my ballet slippers — so long, piano music, goodbye, ice skates, Ginnie doll, tennis racket. . I can remember in sixth grade sitting holding Anne of Avonlea open on my lap, pretending to memorize the products of Central America. Chicle. Or was that South America? I had bangs back then — down to my eyebrows, like a helmet. I kept reading in high school, and college — where I majored in guess what — and then came the bookstore, and Robert, and good old marriage — still turning those pages. Do you think people can read too much? I’m grateful for it, myself, but you know what? I haven’t opened a book for nearly a year. One day I simply stopped. That’s right. Just when you’d think I needed it most, reading deserted me. Books just didn’t like me anymore. Betrayed by literature! But really, among so many betrayals, what’s one more?

This table is also from Robert’s grandmother. Solid mahogany — and will you look at the carving on those legs. Still, there’s a heaviness, don’t you think? We ate breakfast and lunch in the kitchen, dinner always here. Robert complained about the table at first — said it made him think he was eating roast pig with Queen Victoria — though really there’s nothing actually Victorian about the thing. But it was too fine a piece just to let go. It always got on his nerves a little. I kept it covered with a cheerful tablecloth, which helped.

There’s a secret about this table — two secrets. But first I have to tell you about tough girls and golden girls.

Just sit. Pull out a chair.

In high school I was never aware of any special unhappiness. You look surprised. But no, really. Oh, I had my bad days, my rotten days, but they were basically exceptions. The truth is, adolescent angst bored the hell out of me. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I was never a morbid type, never broody or gloomy or crazy-restless. All that was like some dumb style of hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in. There were girls in my school — I could tell you stories. Girls who wore long black dresses with lots of rattly beads, stared at you with big sorrowful eyes, and looked like they started each day bright and early by slitting their wrists in the bathtub. Who needed it? Really, who needed it? I had a few good friends, I got on all right with my classmates. I fit in well enough, without fitting in completely — which was fine with me. But right from the start I was aware of two kinds of girls whose very existence made me uneasy. I would see girls walking down the halls in pairs, wearing tight skirts and sweaters, swinging their hips — girls who laughed loud, brassy laughs, wore too much lipstick, talked dirty at the lockers, and had sudden fits of anger. These were the tough girls, who’d give you a hard look if you met their eyes. What was it about them that seemed to make me doubt myself? And then there were the golden girls. . Ah, those golden high-school girls! Beautiful — really gifted with beauty — slightly languorous, clean-smelling, friendly but somehow untouchable. There they were, the golden girls, sashaying down the halls with their long hair swaying, giving off a kind of light, as if whenever you saw them they’d just spent the entire day at the beach. . oh, they were as far as possible from the tough girls with their black leather jackets and cheap pocketbooks. But I saw that they shared a secret, the tough girls and the golden girls, a secret I wasn’t allowed to know. It was the way they walked. Yes, they were at ease in their bodies, they inhabited their bodies — while I, don’t you see, I stood a little outside my own body, I didn’t fit myself. I was like one of those color comics where the color doesn’t fit the outlines but leaves a space on one side and spills out the other. Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t ashamed of my body. It was a pretty good body, as bodies went. No, I wasn’t morbidly self-conscious— that came much later. That was your gift. But I was estranged from my body — in a not unpleasant way.

The grand thing about Robert is that he made the color fit the outline. In college I’d had two lovers — to call them that— strange name for the loveless — who taught me something about pleasure — and anger. But it was as if my body had its own life, and I myself another. But with Robert — well, he liked to tell me I was good in the sack, and all that jazz, but what thrilled me was how I no longer. . I mean. . it’s difficult to say. But the color fit the outline. I somehow got into my own skin. Do you see what I mean?

But I was telling you about the table. Here was this heavy, serious, deeply solemn piece of furniture, sitting right there where we had to eat our dinner. Robert said we ought to paint it yellow, or maybe put up a Ping-Pong net. Or else we ought to eat on the floor, he said, underneath the table. One night after dinner we both stood looking at it, the grandmother table — gleaming, solid, unmovable — all too depressingly there. We looked at each other. And we knew; we knew how to break the spell. And so we made love on the table. After clearing away the dishes, of course. Right over there, near that end. “That’ll give her something to think about,” Robert said later. I never knew whether he meant the table, or his grandmother, or Queen Victoria.

It was our little joke — our secret — our little protest against gravity. We ate in the dining room without trouble, after that.

We were lighthearted, Robert and I. Can you understand that?

I don’t know exactly what I hoped for, after the night of my visit to you. If it was peace I was looking for, an end to night madness, I found none of it. Instead of imagining all women, I confined myself to just you — but you grew to be a giantess, you were all women, you were more than all women. You were my obsession, my. . demon. I imagined Robert making love to you, over and over again, until my head felt battered. I wondered what you did in bed exactly, what you did to draw him to you. I’d seen your plain nightgown, but I imagined you had fancy things, just for him: black lace underpants, for example. Robert had once pointed to a pair of black lace underpants on a mannequin and said, “Do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” And speaking of a colleague’s wife he said, “She’s a white cotton underwear sort of woman”—curled lip, little dismissive wave of the fingers. “Like me,” I said. “Oh, you’re different,” Robert said with a laugh. And it’s true that I like yellow, and blue, as well as white. But I thought of that mannequin, when I imagined Robert in your room. Black lace underpants. Was that your secret? I imagined him tearing them off with his teeth. It wasn’t — you realize — simply a matter of black lace underwear. It was that I thought I might have misunderstood something about Robert, that my whole life might have been wrong.

So: black lace underpants. But that was only the beginning. I imagined you owned more specialized things, things you ordered from expensive catalogs — maybe a sheer pink bra embroidered with flowers, or one of those male-fantasy things that hook up the back and come with garters to go with your lace-top thigh-highs and your spike heels. Or say a nice black nylon spandex slip with lace hem over your pale-peach bikini panties. Oh, I imagined you could teach Victoria a secret or two! Unless the trick was simpler than that. Under a tight skirt that showed off your legs — look, Robert! — no underpants.

There was no stopping you now. You’d do anything— anything. I saw you in a little-girl Sunday frock — ironed and pink — sitting with your knees pressed together — your long-lashed eyes blinking innocently — a nice pink bow in your hair — your legs in black fishnet stockings. And of course there was your classic chambermaid routine: short black dress, white apron, little white cap, lowered eyes — oh yes, sir, oh no, sir, very well, sir — reaching higher, higher, higher with that cute feather duster as your skirt hiked up.

I imagined Robert standing behind you, burying his teeth in your shoulder.

Or you as calendar pinup in six-inch heels and black top hat — your back to Robert and me — black-gloved hand on hip — white dress shirt not quite covering your perfect behind— as you glance over your shoulder at us — well, hello there — with bee-stung lips — in a darling little sulky pout.

But maybe that wasn’t it at all, maybe there was some other trick you used, to get him into that room of yours. One summer Robert and I traveled to Paris. Our hotel room was small, but we faced a courtyard, which seemed to me exotic. On the first night I was startled by a loud cry, a terrible anguished groan that made me think someone was being murdered. I ran to the window, but Robert pulled me away, laughing. I realized that what I was hearing was the sound of a woman screaming in orgasm. I was uneasy, thinking of my own much quieter sounds. “I imagine he’s completely deaf by now,” Robert said, in that way of his. But now I wondered: Is that what men liked? Were you a screamer? I imagined you letting everything go, filling the room with murderous cries, with shouts of ecstasy bordering on pain.

I watched the two of you making love—is that what you called it? — in your moonlit love nest on the other side of town — while I lay alone in my big big bed and Robert creaked in his study. Sometimes I felt myself turning into you, a high-class whore in fancy lingerie, seducing my husband away from his boring wife. And he would make love to us fanatically— insanely — in the cheap motel room of my mind — till we hurt between the legs.

Is this what’s called jealousy? I guess. Who knows? For me it was also a kind of — I don’t know, a kind of exploration. As though I wanted to push past whatever I thought I was, into regions of unknown pain, frontiers of humiliation. Look at me! — the cowgirl of sorrow.

Sometimes I thought of beaches: Robert and me at the beach, sun shining on sandbars — another life. Robert leaning back on his elbows, his skinny-muscly legs crossed at the ankles, images of sky and water in his dark glasses. Dream-women walking in the sand, walking right there in his sunglasses — he always did like a pair of long legs on a woman. Like yours. At the beach he would look at them admiringly. I never minded — well, maybe a little. More than a little. And both of us liked to look people over, it was a thing we did well together. “Your type,” I’d say, nodding toward some leggy bimbo in a string bikini. Robert would laugh. Sometimes I worried about my legs, that they weren’t long enough. “Long enough for what?” he said once. Typical Robert.

Was it your legs? Was it that simple? Two inches taller and a girl gets it all? Maybe there was something you did with your legs, some special way of walking across a room, or. . or something. A technique you practiced: a secret craft. That was it. Or maybe it was your body itself that had a secret — some special feature — some unusual development — that no man could resist. I liked the idea of a secret — something hidden— because then you were lifted into the realm of magic, where you defeated me unfairly — where nothing was my fault.

Or maybe your nasty little secret was that you talked a different way in bed — talked dirty, as they say. Is that what golden girls do? I imagined the words coming from your mouth, words I never used because to me they were sharp stones flung at bodies. And Robert would never. . In the night I whispered them aloud: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I was oddly soothed by them, as I said them over and over again: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. Fuck me, Robert, I imagined you saying. Come on, Robert. Fuck me. That’s what it comes down to, I said. Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I spoke them louder and louder. They thrilled me and hurt me. I had the confused sense that I was saying goodbye to something. My childhood? But I was a forty-seven-year-old woman! I felt tears on my face.

Late that same night I put on my robe and prowled around downstairs, exhausted and awake. I sat on the porch, but the sound of crickets was like a burn on my skin. In the kitchen I filled a glass with ice cubes and pressed it to my forehead. I walked into the dining room. That afternoon Robert had tightened a screw in a drawer pull. The screwdriver was lying on the hutch. I picked it up and went over to the table.

Here it is, under the cloth. An ugly mark, don’t you think? Like a scar. As I gouged the mahogany with that screwdriver, I thought of many things — the time, long ago, when Robert and I made love on the table, the time when we were happy and lighthearted — but most of all I thought of you. I imagined the table was your face.

You look shocked. You shouldn’t be. It’s only a table, after all. Besides, these little expressions of yours — shock, dismay — I’m sure they’re very appealing to men—who like to be shocking— but when you’re talking to me, you really ought to drop it. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good.

Robert was terribly upset, the first time he saw the mark. He wanted to know why.

Why, Robert? Why? He might as well have asked me to walk down the street with him holding hands.

Now I eat my meals in the kitchen. I don’t like this room anymore. Oh, let’s get on with it, shall we? I haven’t even shown you the upstairs.

STAIRS

I like this old stairpost, don’t you, with this whatchamajigger on top: a bowling ball, it looks like to me, though Robert said it reminded him of the top of a barber pole — or a bald old professor. Just follow me. The handrail’s a little nicked; nothing a bit of furniture polish won’t fix. Those three photographs were taken by my father — Mexico — photography was his passion, though he sold insurance. Here’s the step where I stumbled. Second from the landing. This one right here. Fell right down all those steps and landed on the floor at the foot of the stairs, down there by the hall closet. I could’ve broken my neck; Robert was impressed. Have you ever fallen down a flight of stairs, out of sheer — I suppose it was sorrow. A sorrowful fall. I remember everything: a feeling of just letting everything go, that sense of release, it was almost exhilarating, like floating up in the air, except that my head was banging against the banister and my body was a big awkward lump with arms and legs sticking out all over the place. At the bottom I lay there thinking: so that’s what it’s like, falling down stairs. One leg was bent in a funny way and my skirt was partway up. I wondered if anyone could see my underpants. Vanity! — take it from me, even half dead we’re stuck with it. So there I was, lying with my skirt up, aware of looking like some woman trying to seduce some man. Then I tried to remember the last time I’d made love to Robert. It seemed a long time ago. But was it really that long? And then out of nowhere I thought of Tom Conway. It’s astonishing what a person will think of, lying at the bottom of a stairway. Tom Conway. I’ll tell you about Tom Conway. But not now. Just three more steps after the landing. Robert said we ought to buy a statue and put it right there in the corner. A statue in magnificently bad taste — you know, white marble nymph emerging from bath, one hand modestly covering her pudendum. Instead: tah-dah! Emerson’s Essays. Murder on the Orient Express. Animal Architecture. Can you believe it?

UPSTAIRS BATH

This is the shower. We had a new head installed five — six years ago, walls and ceiling painted. I ought to spray the damn walls to stop that speckling, but I never do. Those tiles are original with the house; a little grout wouldn’t hurt over there.

At some point after Robert’s confession — it must have been late summer? early fall? — I began to take lots of showers. I’d stay under till the hot water ran out, sometimes three times a day. If I wasn’t going to die — and I realized, with astonishment— and disappointment — and a kind of outrage — that I was not going to die — then at least I was determined to be clean. It was as if by seeing you — as Robert so charmingly put it — he had made me dirty. Explain it any way you like: I needed to be clean, shining; a temple virgin; a little girl. Sometimes I took a long bath, and showered right after.

That medicine cabinet came with the house — one of the many home improvements we never made. You see the filigree work on the mirror. And here’s something funny: funny peculiar, as a particularly obnoxious colleague of Robert’s used to say, not funny ha ha. Every time I stepped out of the tub, I would see myself in that mirror. Of course I’d always seen myself in that mirror, but it struck me for the first time how I saw only my top half. It was a mermaid mirror. Yes, I was a mermaid — nothing below my waist. Of course by this time Robert and I were no longer making love, as the saying goes. So it made a weird kind of sense that when I looked at myself naked in the mirror, after stepping out of the tub, I had no lower half. That was one of your cruelest thefts: stealing my bottom half. I suppose it was just as well, since nothing any longer pleased me about my body. And this was strange, because — but haven’t we spoken of this already? You’ve really got to excuse me if I repeat myself. So many things in my head, going round and round! But you see, I’d always been easy enough, in my mind, about my body. I mean, I always did fill out a sweater pretty well — that kind of thing. Of course my legs—but that’s another story. Still, all in all. Not that I ever loved my body, for God sakes — or sake, as Robert would say. God’s. Pause. Sake. It was just that I accepted it, the way I accepted my — oh, I don’t know, my nose. There it is: a nose. Look at it as long as you like, it’s still just a nose. Hey there, nose! You know, there are people who spend their entire lives doing nothing, I mean nothing, but worrying about their noses. Then they die, and go to a heaven full of angels with perfect angel-noses, and for all eternity they do nothing but worry about their noses. That was never my way. But now, thanks to you, I found myself worrying about my body. It was wrong in every way, an immense. . wrongness. Too this. Too that. Too — oh, everything. I hated it all. For the first time in my life, at the tender age of forty-seven, I became an adolescent.

Do you know what I wanted? What I really wanted? What I wanted, the thing I wanted — it was to become a little girl again, in saddle shoes, with a dab of Mercurochrome on my knee.

Yup, you got it, sister. To start over. .

Oh and by the way. I was wrong. No bookcase here. But the ghosts of books — from Robert’s time. See? One on the radiator — one on the floor — and there, on the edge of the tub.

You know, when you hate your body, then you think continually about your body, and when you think continually about your body, then you become nothing but a body. You become a disgusting little materialist. You become a secret sensualist, a sort of — a sort of hangdog sensualist. Oh, I like that. Hangdog sensualist. I do have a way with words sometimes, you will grant me that. “You have a way with words,” Robert once said, and then he paused, thinking it over, and then he said: “Sometimes. I grant you that.” So. Let us grant me that. But here’s the thing: I hated my body. I hated my body because it wasn’t your body. You look as if you’re about to maul me with a compliment. Please refrain. Besides, I didn’t hate only my body. I also hated your body. Why don’t we change the subject?

STUDY

Robert’s study. Wall-to-wall books, arranged by historical period. And listen to this. Within each period? — alphabetical by author. Is that order, or what? All summer long I seemed to hear him pacing. Scrape the chair back, pace, scrape the chair forward. Scrape it back. Pace, scrape, pace, scrape. God. Why no rug? Sometimes I blame his book for everything. Of course that’s too easy, it lets everyone off the hook: you, Robert, and li’l ol’ me. Besides, a man set on betraying his wife is bound to find an excuse. Bound to. Still! That awful book. Robert was too self-critical ever to write a book. A book for him was pure torture. He should never have taken that leave. Poor Robert. And there you were, waiting for him in that little house, with your long legs practically sticking out the window. You must have seemed — the solution. Of course he needed consoling. Those long walks he used to take that spring! That was the time, you know, when I felt something was a little wrong between us, a little. . off. Later I realized he must have met you on one of those walks — unless he’d met you before, and was simply walking straight to your bedroom. What drove him crazy wasn’t the knowledge that he wasn’t going to finish his book. It was the knowledge that he wasn’t going to begin it. He took notes, billions of notes, typed up parts of a chapter, fragments — never good enough. Scrape, pace, scrape, pace. A body in a bed was something he could count on. Makes a man feel young again, m’boy. Nothing like greasing the old engine. Of course you got something out of it, too. A needy man. A man wanting to be rescued. What could be better than that?

Did I fail Robert? Was there something I didn’t understand? Of course I brooded over that too. Because if your heart is broken, if I may use that dear old expression, famous in song and legend, then the time comes, sooner or later, when you begin to wonder. . at first only for a second or two, then for longer periods of time. . whether you deserved to have it broken. . if I may continue to make use of these time-honored phrases. Because surely it wouldn’t just happen to you, something like that, for no reason.

So maybe Robert’s little infidelity was the very sign that was supposed to alert me to my own lack of something. It was supposed to show me the way. And I misread the sign. Imagine! A bad reader, after all.

Oh my. I do hope I’m not sounding histrionic. That’s what he called me once: histrionic. It was a way of showing he disapproved of my sadness. Robert’s histrionic wife. I just love the theater, darlin’—don’t you? All those histrionic people.

I don’t know when I began to suspect he hadn’t stopped seeing you. After my. . breakdown, I somehow imagined. . But you see how naive I was! I thought a sense of decency — a sense of respect. . Even you, I thought. . But no. He must really’ve liked those black lace undies. And you must have enjoyed showing them to him. That fall he began teaching again, three days a week, but he’d always rush right home. Make sure nothing had happened to the crazy wife. A girl can fall down the stairs, you know. She can get dizzy in the bathroom. She can fall out a window and break her pretty neck. Razor blades have been known to cause trouble in the most well-regulated families. A house is a dangerous place: kitchen knives, deadly hammers, sleeping pills, gas stoves. . Ours is electric, but I’ve always preferred gas, at least for disposing of unwanted wives. Rope. Gasoline. Matches. No wonder he hurried home, the poor man. He’d find me lying in bed, in my nightie, or else in the shower. But I was already getting better! I was eating a little. I felt like a house that had burned down, leaving the charred foundation and half a chimney. Of course, I was still a burned-down house. It’s just that I wasn’t burning down anymore.

Besides, what was all the fuss about? Men have affairs every day. It’s chic — it’s cool — and good for you too. Keeps down that bad cholesterol. And great for your lower back. The numbers say it all. According to the most recent survey, ninety-nine point eight percent of all American husbands have been unfaithful to their wives at least twice in the last year. Did you know that? Also, and this may surprise you, ninety-two point four percent of all American men have slept with their own mothers. Sad but true. But here’s the good news. Ninety-four point six percent of men with erectile dysfunction say that it doesn’t really matter — they never enjoyed it anyway. I found these facts in women’s magazines. I was beginning to eat, as I mentioned, and I was starting to go out a little in the car: CVS, Grand Union, you name it. Wherever I went, women’s magazines sprang out at me. Sleek, insolent panther-women looking at me with jungle eyes. Cheekbones like ski slopes. Thumbs hooked in bikini underpants, like a guy wearing jeans. Forty-three Ways to Snag Your Man. One Hundred Sixty-three Ways to Drive Him Insane with Lust. All over America, housewives were reading this stuff. Was I the only one who wasn’t in on the secret? I bought a few and read them sitting in the car. Eat All You Want and Get Thin. Twelve Sizzling New Positions. Apparently the thing to do was find his E spot. When you found it, you pressed it. Then he raped you. Your marriage was saved. The trouble with the E spot was that it was very hard to locate; it was somewhere near the abdomen, or the pancreas. You could waste a lot of time looking for it, and meanwhile your man might fall insanely in love with someone else— someone thinner than you. I think I’m talking too fast. Am I talking too fast? I feel that I’m talking a little rapidly and I am going to make a conscious effort to control myself.

There.

One evening after returning from the Grand Union — I liked to walk up and down the long aisles pushing my basket, how it soothed me — I took a drive to your house. I parked almost across the street and watched the front windows. In the living room the blinds were down but the lights were on. Your bedroom was dark. After a while I saw the light go on in your bedroom. The blinds were closed and lowered halfway. I saw you move toward the window and lower the blinds some more, as if to keep me from spying. I could see only part of you, from a little above the waist to about mid-thigh. You were wearing an Indian-print skirt with a wide red belt. I thought of my bathroom mirror: I was the woman without a bottom half, and you — you were nothing but a bottom half. Then I imagined you were a mermaid in reverse, legs below and fish scales above, and the idea struck me as so absolutely incredibly hysterical that really I nearly died laughing.

GUEST ROOM

Bed. Bookcase. No one’s stayed here in nearly a year. And yet, at one time, practically everyone stayed here: my mother, my father, Robert’s mother, Robert’s grandmother, for God sakes, his unmarried sister — let us please not forget Robert’s unmarried sister — the sort of woman who does you a little favor, like picking you up a quart of milk at the corner store, and says with a bright little laugh, “You owe me one,” meant to show her brave girlish humor in the face of life’s burdens — and Robert’s old roommate the failed painter, who backed me up against the refrigerator and instead of kissing me asked me the recipe for my ratatouille, and Robert’s old friend Lydia, who is so relieved to get away from Manhattan and so happy to be up here where you can actually see the stars at night. . and many more. . scads of colorful folks. . all of them right here, in this room. And sometimes I think of it as your room, if you know what I — in the sense that that would have been one solution. To the problem, I mean. Because you really were a problem, you know, a great big problem that didn’t seem to have a solution, or had only difficult solutions that themselves were problems without solutions. You could have died of cancer, for example — but you were too healthy for that — or I could have killed you that night — or Robert could have given you up. The poor man was suffering so. We talked a little, now and then. I would come down for my late breakfast, and Robert would materialize from somewhere or other and stand by the table, looking proud and sad and doomed.

“I need to know what you’re going to do.”

“Going to do?”

“About us.”

“Us, Robert?”

“Stop echoing me, will you? Just stop echoing me.”

And then he would disappear; it was very strange. Poof! Gone. A sad, angry ghost. And so in certain moods I would think: Oh, for heaven sakes. Come on, girl. Grow up. There’s no reason to be so childish about this. Why am I being so selfish? It’s all me me me. Why don’t I ever think of his needs? Then of course I would think that you might as well move into the house — into the guest room. If I loved Robert, then I wanted him to be happy, didn’t I? I saw myself tucking the two of you in at night, sitting on the side of the bed — oh, the adorable little rascals! — telling a bedtime story. And they allll lived hap pilyeverafter. Nighty-night! Don’t let the bedbugs bite! I would be a sister, a saint. And if any little problem came up between you two, why, I’d be right there, in the house. I could serve you meals. I could bathe you. Gosh, I could do your nails: red hot, or a nice minty green, or black as witches. I could even dress you in the mornings, after your strenuous nights. As I say, it was one solution. . to the problem. Look, the sun’s gone in. Or is it getting dark? I’m feeling a little tired. I’ll just sit for a minute on the side of the bed. If you don’t mind. You sit on that side. No, go right ahead. There was something I wanted to tell you. . You know: when I was lying at the foot of the stairs? Oh, now I remember.

In high school, senior year, I had a crush on a boy called Tom Conway. He was a good-looking, clean-cut sort of boy, not my type really, very shy, a little awkward, as if he’d grown into a body he didn’t know what to do with — all those arms and shoulders and elbows and things. I don’t know when I realized I had a crush on him. I liked being around him; it was like turning a corner and finding yourself on a street with shady maples and front porches. This wasn’t crazy teenage love, with wildfire burning in your stomach, but something else, something. . restful. Somehow we began taking walks together, that spring. We held hands. And that was it: no kissing, no hugging, no touching except for hands. We walked all over town, along tree-lined streets, with sun flickering on us through the leaves, up into the wooded section where the roads were curvy and there were no sidewalks and the big houses were set far back from the road. One day he took me to his house to meet his mother. She was a friendly woman, standing in the kitchen wearing an apron embroidered with apple branches. Right off the kitchen was a small room, with white curtains— a guest room, where his grandmother used to stay. Somehow we ended up lying on the bed in that room. We lay on our backs, on the green spread, holding hands. I remember it was late afternoon, and the sun coming through the windows had a very orange cast to it. Everything in the room was glowing in the orange light. I lay there entirely peaceful, entirely happy— I was without desire. Or let’s say the kind of desire I had for Tom Conway was completely satisfied by lying there on his grandmother’s bed, in the orange light, holding hands, while his mother moved around in the kitchen. That summer his family moved to Arizona. I never saw him again. I don’t know that I had time to miss him much, what with college starting and all the rest. But every once in a while, for no reason, when I’m walking along a familiar street, or coming up the back steps with a bag of groceries, or lying there at the foot of the stairs, I think of that room, with the white curtains, and the orange sunlight coming in.

You look tired. We’re almost done.

BEDROOM

Our room. No, come in. I want you to come in. I said: Come in. You know, I admire that hesitation. It shows you have a certain. . decency. Or are you afraid of something? Good heavens! Nothing to be afraid of in here. Look: another bookcase. And permit me to introduce you to the, um, conjugal bed. Or have you two already met? Ha ha: my little joke. We used to read ourselves to sleep. . in the old days. We made love every night, just about. Maybe not every night, but a lot — we didn’t have to count. People count, you know. Twice a week. Once a decade. Then they look it up and compare themselves to the national average. That’s what I find so. . I mean, if we had grown distant or. . Of course sometimes we were tired, or not exactly in the mood. But then the next night. . or the night after. . And sometimes there were longer gaps, when we both, for no reason. . I mean, twenty-two years. It’s a long time. I’m going to lie down here, I’m feeling a little. . You lie down, too. I want you to. No, please: lie down. You’re tired, I can tell. We can have a nice pillow talk, like girlfriends in junior high. Of course I never had them, those nice pillow talks in junior high, but still. Oh, don’t you just adore that dreamy new math teacher? And Todd Andrews. He’s soooo cute. That’s how girlfriends talk, you know. At least I think they do. I used to imagine having talks like this with a girlfriend, but they weren’t about boys, those talks, they were about. . oh, books, and. . and things. Take my hand. All right, then I’ll take yours. Sisters! We’ve been through a lot together, we two. Listen. This is where I was lying when the call came about Robert’s accident. That was in January. He’d been very upset, you know. We’d had an argument, a week earlier. Oh, a bad one. Do you know what we were arguing about? We were arguing about making the bed. Isn’t that the strangest thing? The man on the phone kept saying something about black ice. The words seemed weird and scary, as if he were talking about some disease. The Black Ice Plague. Black ice in your carotid artery. Sharp splinters of black ice piercing the left ventricle. Robert was what? Was dead? He was angry, for God sakes, how can you die when you’re. .? Killed by black ice. The black ice of his black-hearted icy wife.

Isn’t it fun talking like this, just the two of us? Here’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody. When Robert and I fell in love, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, it was all very passionate and so forth, but for a while there. . he couldn’t make love to me. It drove him wild. He swore that never, never before. . He was ready to kill himself. But you know something? I didn’t care. I was so in love with him that even if. . It came right, soon enough. He was so grateful to me, as if I’d endured the impossible — fought some heroic battle. He swore I was an angel, a goddess. How I hated that. What he couldn’t understand is that I was so happy that I didn’t care about. . about anything on earth. I was demented with happiness. They should’ve carted me off to the loony bin. And then, when we started making love, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but it became absorbed into the happiness I was already feeling.

I asked him about you once. Only once. I asked him if you were married. I don’t know why, but it seemed the one thing I had to know. He was shocked. His “No!” was almost violent. He looked at me — a sad, raging man. A man misunderstood. “I’d never break up a marriage.” That’s what he said to me. Proud pose: shoulders back, defiant look.

But what about my marriage, Robert?

Here’s another secret. You won’t tell, will you? Come closer: I have to lower my voice so no one will hear. I know that you’ve slept in this bed. With my husband, of course. Don’t you pull away from me. We’re having a nice little pillow talk — just the two of us. Of course it must be unpleasant for you to know that I know. I understand that. I mean, that I’ve known all along. It must be upsetting. Even embarrassing, for some people. But once you start sharing secrets. . I admit it changed my idea of you. I hadn’t thought you would be so. . what is the word I want? Bold? Cruel? I’ll even tell you how I found out. Robert told me! Wasn’t that sweet of him? Of course he had no choice. He knew I was on to something. That was in December, just after Christmas, when I went to visit my mother for a few days. At the time I’d begun to think that maybe we could somehow survive, Robert and I, the way a ruin survives. You can preserve a ruin, you know. It’s artful, expensive work. And I thought: I’ll stay in the house, and he’ll stay in the house, and together we’ll be a ruined monument, with ivy on the walls. People can come and admire us. We can charge admission. Of course you were still at the other end of town, pulling down shades, crossing and uncrossing those legs of yours. When I came home from my mother’s I went up to my room to lie down. Robert had never moved back from the study. I saw right away that the bed had been made up wrong. Robert has absolutely no sense of such things. He was a domestic idiot, in some ways. I screamed; we had it out. He confessed. How many times can you confess to someone before you start wanting them dead? Or before you start wanting to be dead yourself? I remember one thing he said. He said he didn’t think I loved him anymore. I believe he meant it, poor man, but it was also very clever. Because I broke your heart, dear, and because you’re a cold-hearted bitch who won’t forgive me one little bit for breaking your heart, I have the God-given right to screw somebody else in our bed. Like it or lump it, baby.

They say murderers always return to the scene of the crime. And look: here you are! Now all we need is a judge — and an executioner. Come on, sister! I’m almost done showing the house.

ATTIC

Look: my old cradle.

Sometimes I think everything in my life is up here. If I could just find it, if I could just put it in order, then I could reconstruct my entire life, day by day, minute by minute. . Bookcases. Over there too. One of them used to be in the living room. . years ago. People talk about finishing their attics, but how can you finish an attic? Things keep accumulating. That’s the whole point of attics. They’re never finished. That’s why houses are different from ancient civilizations — the oldest layer is always on top. We did have it insulated, about five years ago. It was supposed to save on heating bills, but I don’t think it saved all that much. I don’t remember. That’s what you get for trying to be practical. You would never call us worldly people, Robert and me. It was one of the good things about us. Intermittently worldly, at best. Half in, half out. Of the world, I mean. Every summer I mount an exhaust fan in that window. It gets blazing up here in the summer. You wouldn’t believe how hot it gets. My old dollhouse. My red parasol. I used to stand by a window with the sun coming in and watch my forearm turn brilliant red under my parasol. Robert’s eighth-grade science project: optical illusions. You know: is that a vase, or is it two profiles? Hoarders, both of us. You see that beam? Scene of my suicide. Did I mention that I committed suicide up here? Well. I came up here with a rope. It was after Robert’s accident — a few days after the phone call. I kept trying to talk to him. That’s one thing about the dead: they don’t talk to you. They listen, but they don’t talk back. It can make you angry. I found the rope in the cellar and brought it up here. I had some confused idea, from the movies. . I didn’t even know how to make a slipknot. So you might say I didn’t kill myself, after all. Still, when you come up to your attic carrying a rope, when you try to swing it over a beam, when you have every intention, then can’t it be said that actually. . in a real sense. . despite appearances. . And here I stand before you, a living dead woman, come back to tell the tale. A creepy place, really. You can hear things moving around in the dark. Wings. Weensy little feet. Children are right. Stay out of the attic. It’s like walking around in the head of a madwoman.

CELLAR

Personally I’ve always preferred cellars. Careful, this rail’s a little wobbly. There’s something about going down to a place, don’t you think? Watch your head. Robert used to clonk himself all the time. It’s a lot like falling, really — you can feel a sort of tug, and you hang on just to keep from tumbling head over heels. And another thing is knowing you’re headed under the ground, like a. . like a rodent. Of course, cellars can be creepy too. In my parents’ house there were these big barrels under the stairs, full of who knew what. Rats. Bats. Dead men’s bones. That’s what I used to say, on the way down. Rats, bats, dead men’s bones. Rats, bats, dead men’s bones. Even here, things can surprise you. Once I reached into that pile of wood over there and a mouse ran over my hand. Do you know what it feels like, having a mouse run over your hand? It feels like you’re being nibbled by lots of tiny mouths. That would be a good punishment, don’t you think? Tie a person up and let mice run over them. Look: bookcases. Five, no less. Robert would sometimes talk about building a room down here to hold all the books in the house — a cellar library. He might as well have talked about building a subway station in the back yard. That’s practically a new furnace. The old one broke down two years ago. It’s got one of those automatic whatsits— you know, to regulate the water level. Copper water pipes. Washer/dryer hookup. Heck, we’ve got it all. Sink. Old bicycle. Dead refrigerator. Look at this clothesline, will you? It must be forty years old. Over here’s where I murdered you. Oh yes: many times. Attics for suicide, cellars for murder. It makes sense. A quick blow to the head with a shovel or hammer. Cellars are full of hiding places, you know. Your head’s in that trunk, eyes wide open. Your legs are in that metal cabinet, leaning up like oars. You stay right here. I’m not done with you. Don’t play Little Miss Innocent with me. Haven’t you ever murdered anyone? We all do it, you know. Lure them into cellars, hack off their limbs, stab those evil people until tears of joy pour down my face. See that cabinet? Your head again, hanging on a hook. Lovely she was, even in death. I buried you here, under the floor. Under that ratty rug. And don’t look in the woodpile. This place is nothing but a graveyard, and all the corpses are you. Look! Over there. Over there. And there. But you know, a time comes when it doesn’t really work anymore. . the shovel too heavy. . the ax handle broken. . the voices quiet. . the cellar empty. Do you know what I think? I think you lack imagination. I’ve always thought that about you. You don’t murder people, you don’t think about things. Did you ever imagine me? Did you? The irritating little wife left at home? Of course it was all a secret. You didn’t want to hurt anyone. Above all, Robert, I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s why Robert never told you he told me. He knew that at the first sign of trouble you’d head for the hills. The arrangement must have struck you as perfect. A perfect adultery: no pain. Safe for everyone. The golden-girl special.

That’s the old Ping-Pong table. We used to play quite a lot, in the old days. Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong. A ridiculous game, really. My only sport. Robert took it very seriously, the way he took most things. His backhand was so-so, but he had a very good forehand smash. Did you know that about Robert? A very good forehand smash.

Oh and another thing about you. Another thing. You don’t like it when I use coarse words — I can see it in your face — your mouth — but you also don’t like it when I go the other way— use words that are way up there, like — oh, like ecstasy. It bothers you. I can see it does. Do you want to know something? You live in the flatlands of language. No dizzy mountain views, no hellish undergrounds — just: flat. The Kansas of things. No attic or cellar in your house of words.

How often I lured you down here and accused you of your crimes! Because you broke my heart, you must surely die. Because you turned my husband into a ghost, you must surely die. Because you stole my body from me, you must surely die. Because you lack imagination, you must surely die. Heart-wrecker! Wifekiller! Manslayer! Then I cracked open your head with that shovel, stabbed you with those gardening shears, strangled you with my own hands. . the sweet feel of your neck crushed under my thumbs. You have to hate very hard to do that. Have you ever hated anyone hard enough to want to kill them? I thought about it a lot, my hatred. Love, for me, turned out to have a limit: Robert’s faithfulness. But my hatred for you breathed the pure air of infinity.

The trouble with hatred is that it doesn’t really take you very far. It takes you quickly to a certain point, and then you can’t get beyond it. Do you know why that is? I can tell you. It’s because when you hate someone, when you really hate someone, you always turn them into a caricature. The Lady in Black Lace Underpants. The Girl with the Golden. . but you fill in the missing blank. Even as I hated you I knew — I knew — that I wasn’t really seeing you — at all. I was guilty of your crime: lack of imagination. I knew I had to be calm — calmer. I had to get at you a different way. And so, little by little, I began to make an effort, a painful effort. I began to imagine you.

Don’t misunderstand me. It was never a matter of being fair to you — of being nice. It was simply a question of getting a more accurate picture. So that I would know what to do.

My insight — my stroke of genius — because I’d become brilliant through hatred, brilliant — was this: to imagine that you weren’t so different from me, after all. Not different from me! You! Of course I struggled violently against it. It wasn’t bearable. You! And there were dangers — serious dangers. If you weren’t all that different from me, if you weren’t just a body, then I might be threatened from a new direction, one that I— but it was a risk worth taking. Slowly I gave way to it — I welcomed it — I abandoned myself to it completely. Imagining you! Yes, that was the stroke, the liberating blow! That was my deepest revenge! Because once you were like me, once you were more or less human, then you were capable of — well, of whatever I was capable of. Suffering, for example. Suffering! Unhappiness like fire! Maybe you weren’t a witch. Maybe you were — oh, who knew, lonely, bereft, at the end of your rope. An unhappy woman. Sure, why not? In love: that, too. Fine! Wonderful! A woman in love. A woman in love would be capable of. . feelings. Sympathies. She might even be capable of imagining me.

That’s when I decided to put my house up for sale. There was a chance you would come. . You had to come. Because really, how could you resist? A guided tour — and what a guide! — of those unreal rooms. . in the haunted mansion. . Of course you’d already invaded the house and rolled around in my sheets. Did you like it? Was it thrilling? I cut up the sheets the next day, tore them to shreds. The appalling brash-ness of that visit — whatever else it said about you — suggested a taste for. . shall we call it adventure? It told me you might jump at a chance to break in again. And maybe you hadn’t had time to look around, on that occasion. I imagined Robert leading you through the dark to keep you from attracting attention, as you held his hand and moved through dream landscapes of foglike furniture flashing out at you here and there in the light of a streetlamp. You were returning my visit, though you didn’t know it at the time. And of course you never did get to see her—the famous wife — me. So there was that. To attract you. It must be — oh, it must be an almost irresistible pleasure, I imagined, to see the wife of your lover: to sympathize with the poor woman, as I felt you beautifully would, while secretly triumphing over her. To say nothing of comparing your body to hers, as you’d surely want to do. Robert’s wife. That’s his wife. Why didn’t he just kill her? But maybe you were searching for higher pleasures — the pleasure of guilt. . the thrill of remorse. . and other sophisticated pleasures of that kind. Because I think we can agree, you and I, that you are a woman who likes her little pleasures. Of course there was a pleasure in it for me too. Your visit would tell me something I desperately had to know: whether or not Robert had told you about his confession to me. Because if he had told you, then you would never come. But I knew you would come. I wanted you to come. I was banking on it. I would advertise — like a spider — and you would come — like a fly. And I would show you my house. I would tell you my story. Then, when you’d seen everything, when you’d understood what you’d done— you, a woman of feeling, a woman like me—then you would know what to do. You would do the right thing.

Oh, you wouldn’t do it at once, that very day. But one day, or say one night, at three in the morning, when you wake up for no reason and can’t fall back to sleep, when every little thing in your life feels wrong, when you look into your heart and see rats, bats, and dead men’s bones, when your soul is nothing but a lump of black ice, then, if you listen closely, you will hear my voice whispering in your ear. Then you’ll get up your courage. It isn’t difficult, you know. So many ways! In every room a sharp instrument, a blunt object, dangerous devices of all kinds. Pills in the cabinet, poison in the basement, knives in the kitchen drawer. A rope. A high window. Simple as ABC. Easy as pie. Did you know there’s a gun shop in town? A woman like you would have no trouble. The temple. The mouth. The heart. The smooth place between the eyes. Think of it! Your arm outstretched on the bed, your head flung back, your hair strewn across the pillow. Very becoming, very. . romantic. You do like to think of yourself that way, don’t you? I mean, a romantic woman. A woman in a movie — windswept hair, dress blown against your legs. But no — no — now that I think of it, maybe other endings are more your style. Here’s one. The ice on the road, the sudden curve, the wildly turning wheel. Is that a good one? Do you like it? That was no accident, you know. Did you really think it was an accident? An accident? Come on. You know what it was? It was Robert’s way of solving the problem. Yes! If it hadn’t been for you. . Yes! You! Murderer! You! Coming to my house! And that awful telephone. Robert’s what? He’s what? Black ice? I hate telephones. . voices without faces. . ghosts in dead houses. . talking to you in the dark. Whispering. Shhh. I knew you’d come back. I knew you would. Did you know I knew? About you and Robert? Deep down did you know? I think you knew. I think you did. Or peaceful scenes. . on the rug beside the fire, the small brown bottle beside you. . or slumped in a favorite chair. Peace, at long last. Because you’ll never have it any other way, you know. I’ll never have it any other way. You did wrong, my dear. I’m afraid so. Of course you never meant to hurt anyone. Of course not. You were very, very considerate. But there you have it: Robert dead, and me. . as you find me. I’m afraid you made a real mess of it. There’s no escaping it. So you might as well get it over with. I think so. Do it. Do it. Do it. Why don’t you? Of course you can probably get by, for a while. There are crossword puzzles, and mystery novels with nice big blood drops on the cover, and men with. . oh, what’s that word. . it’s on the tip of my. . oh, I have it. Desire. But sooner or later. One day or another. Somewhere down the line. That sudden uneasiness as you look out a window. That moment of panic as you climb the stairs. What will you do? How can you live? Where will you go? There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing to do. No one to see. Don’t you know? Why go on? And always the little voice whispering in my ear, always the sad ghost rustling in the dark. That is why I wanted to show you my house. To tell you who we are. So that we would know. What to do.

And now my story’s done. I never dreamed I’d be so tired! But I wanted us to hear it. People don’t get to hear stories much anymore, and that’s a shame. Mine even has a moral, just the way a story should.

Tired. . I really am, you know. It takes it out of you, showing a house to strangers. And planning to go. . to some far-away place. A journey. . out of here. That would be nice. Peaceful, and. . nice. Don’t you think? I feel as if I haven’t slept for a long time. I haven’t, you know. I haven’t slept for nearly a year.

Remind me to show you the heating bills. I’ve got them all in some folder somewhere, going back ten years.

Here’s a question for you. If you were a ghost, if you were a ghost in this house, if you were dead and came to live in this house, where would you hide? In the attic? Or in the cellar?

Watch it. Watch your head.

TOP OF THE STAIRS

Back from the dead. Oh, look: it’s dark out. Imagine.

FRONT HALL

Your coat. Have I said how much I admire it? I need a new spring coat myself, mine’s practically a rag. I’ll just put the porch light on for you. They say the weather’s going to be a little warmer tomorrow: sun mixed with clouds. Last time they said that, it rained for two days. I’m hoping my jonquils will pull through. I ought to tell you that someone’s coming to see the house tomorrow at four, or is it four-thirty: just for you to know. You think it over. Think over what we talked about, down there. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. And I meant what I said about the appraisal: I won’t budge. Not a penny less, not a penny more. You let me know. I’ve lived here a long time, and now I don’t want to live here anymore. You let me know. You just let me know.