Michael Chabon
A Model World And Other Stories

To the memory of Ernest Cohen

The author is very grateful to Mr. Daniel Menaker, to Mr. Douglas Stumpf, to Ms. Mary Evans, and to Ms. Lollie Groth.

More delicate than the historians’ are the map makers’ colors.

— ELIZABETH BISHOP

Part I: A Model World

S ANGEL

ON THE MORNING OF his cousin’s wedding Ira performed his toilet, as he always did, with patience, hope, and a ruthless punctilio. He put on his Italian wool trousers, his silk shirt, his pink socks, to which he imputed a certain sexual felicity, and a slightly worn but still serviceable Willi Smith sport jacket. He shaved the delta of skin between his eyebrows and took a few extra minutes to clean out the inside of his car, a battered, faintly malodorous Japanese hatchback of no character whatever. Ira never went anywhere without expecting that when he arrived there he would meet the woman with whom he had been destined to fall in love. He drove across Los Angeles from Palms to Arcadia, where his cousin Sheila was being married in a synagogue Ira got lost trying to find. When he walked in late he disturbed the people sitting at the back of the shul, and his aunt Lillian, when he joined her, pinched his arm quite painfully. The congregation was dour and Conservative, and as the ceremony dragged on Ira found himself awash in a nostalgic tedium, and he fell to wishing for irretrievable things.

At the reception that followed, in the banquet room of the old El Imperio Hotel in Pasadena, he looked in vain for one of his more interesting young female cousins, such as Zipporah from Berkeley, who was six feet tall and on the women’s crew at Cal, or that scary one, Leah Black, who had twice, in their childhoods, allowed Ira to see what he wanted to see. Both Ira and Sheila sprang from a rather disreputable branch of Wisemans, however, and her wedding was poorly attended by the family. All the people at Ira’s table were of the groom’s party, except for Ira’s great’ aunts, Lillian and Sophie, and Sophie’s second husband, Mr. Lapidus.

“You need a new sport jacket,” said Aunt Sophie.

“He needs a new watch,” said Aunt Lillian.

Mr. Lapidus said that what Ira needed was a new barber. A lively discussion arose at table 17, as the older people began to complain about contemporary hairstyles, with Ira’s itself — there was some fancy clipperwork involved — cited frequently as an instance of their inscrutability. Ira zoned out and ate three or four pounds of the salmon carpaccio with lemon cucumber and cilantro that the waiters kept bringing around, and also a substantial number of boletus-mushroom-and-goat-cheese profiteroles. He watched the orchestra members, particularly the suave-looking black tenor saxophonist with dreadlocks, and tried to imagine what they were thinking about as they blew all that corny cha-cha-cha. He watched Sheila and her new husband whispering and box-stepping, and undertook the same experiment. She seemed pleased enough — smiling and flushed and mad to be wearing that dazzling dress — but she didn’t look like she was in love, as he imagined love to look. Her eye was restive, vaguely troubled, as though she were trying to remember exactly who this man was with his arms around her waist, tipping her backward on one leg and planting a kiss on her throat.

It was as he watched Sheila and Barry walk off the dance floor that the woman in the blue dress caught Ira’s eye, then looked away. She was sitting with two other women, at a table under one of the giant palm trees that stood in pots all across the banquet room, which the hotel called the Oasis Room and had been decorated to suit. When Ira returned her gaze he felt a pleasant internal flush, as though he had just knocked back a shot of whiskey. The woman’s expression verged a moment on nearsightedness before collapsing into a vaguely irritable scowl. Her hair was frizzy and tinted blond, her lips were thick and red but grim and disapproving, and her eyes, which might have been gray or brown, were painted to match her electric dress. Subsequent checking revealed that her body had aged better than her fading face, which nonetheless he found beautiful, and in which, in the skin at her throat and around her eyes, he thought he read strife and sad experience and a willingness to try her luck.

Ira stood and approached the woman, on the pretext of going over to the bar, a course which required that he pass her table. As he did so he stole another long look, and eavesdropped on an instant of her conversation. Her voice was soft and just a little woeful as she addressed the women beside her, saying something deprecating, it seemed to Ira, about lawyers’ shoes. The holes in her earlobes were filled with simple gold posts. Ira swung like a comet past the table, trailing, as he supposed, a sparkling wake of lustfulness and Eau Sauvage, but she seemed not to notice him, and when he reached the bar he found, to his surprise, that he genuinely wanted a drink. His body was unpredictable and resourceful in malfunction, and he was not, as a result, much of a drinker; but it was an open bar, after all. He ordered a double shot of Sauza.

There were two men talking behind him, waiting for their drinks, and Ira edged a little closer to them, without turning around, so that he could hear better. He was a fourth-year drama student at UCLA and diligent about such valuable actorly exercises as eavesdropping, spying, and telling complicated lies to fellow passengers on airplanes.

“That Charlotte was a class A, top-of-the-line, capital B-I-T bitch,” said one of the men, in the silky tones of an announcer on a classical music station. “And fucked up from her ass to her eyebrows.” He had a very faint New York accent.

“Exactly, exactly,” said the other, who sounded older, and well-accustomed to handing out obsequious counsel to young men. “No question. You had to fire her.”

“I should have done it the day it happened. Ha ha. Pow, fired in her own bed.”

“Exactly. Ha ha.”

“Ira!” It was his cousin, the bride, bright and still pink from dancing. Sheila had long, kinky black hair, spectacular eyelashes, and a nose that, like Ira’s, flirted dangerously, but on the whole successfully, with immenseness. He thought she looked really terrific, and he congratulated her wistfully. Ira and Sheila had at one time been close. Sheila hung an arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Her breath blew warm in his ear. “What is that you’re drinking?”

“Tequila,” he said. He turned to try to get a glimpse of the men at the bar, but it was too late. They had been replaced by a couple of elderly women with empty highball glasses and giant clip-on earrings.

“Can I try?” She sipped at it and made a face. “I hope it makes you feel better than it tastes.”

“It couldn’t,” Ira said, taking a more appreciative pull of his own.

Sheila studied his face, biting at her lip. They hadn’t seen one another since the evening, over a year before, when she had taken him to see some dull and infuriating Soviet movie—Shadow of Uzbek Love, or something like that — at UCLA. She was looking, it seemed to him, for signs of change.

“So are you dating anyone?” she said, and there was a glint of tension in her casual tone.

“Lots of people.”

“Uh huh. Do you want to meet someone?”

“No thanks.” Things had gotten a little wiggly, Ira now recalled, in the car on the way home from Westwood that night. Sheila drove one of those tiny Italian two-seaters capable of filling very rapidly with sexual tension, in particular at a stop light, with Marvin Gaye coming over the radio and a pretty cousin in the driver’s seat, chewing thoughtfully on a strand of hair. Ira, in a sort of art-house funk, had soon found himself babbling on about Marx and George Orwell and McCarthyism, and praying for green lights; and when they arrived at his place he had dashed up the steps into his apartment and locked the door behind him. He shook his head, wondering at this demureness, and drained the glass of tequila. He said, “Do you want to dance?”

They went out onto the floor and spun around a few times slowly to “I’ll Never Be the Same.” Sheila felt at once soft and starchy in her taffeta dress, gigantic and light as down.

“I really wish you would meet my friend Carmen,” said Sheila. “She needs to meet a nice man. She lives next door to my parents in Altadena. Her husband used to beat her but now they’re divorced. She has the most beautiful gray eyes.”

Át this Ira stiffened, and he blew the count.

“Sitting right over there under the palm tree? In the blue dress?”

“Ouch! That’s my foot.”

“Sorry.”

“So you noticed her! Great. Go on, I., ask her to dance. She’s so lonesome anymore.”

The information that the older woman might actually welcome his overtures put him off, and somehow made him less certain of success. Ira tried to formulate a plausible excuse.

“She looks mean,” he said. “She gave me a nasty look not five minutes ago. Oh, hey. It’s Donna.”

“Donna!”

Donna Furman, in a sharp gray sharkskin suit, approached and kissed the bride, first on the hand with the ring, then once on each cheek, in a gesture that struck Ira as oddly papal and totally Hollywood. Donna started to tell Sheila how beautiful she looked, but then some people with cameras came by and swept Sheila away, so Donna threw out her arms to Ira, and the cousins embraced. She wore her short hair slicked back with something that had an ozone smell and it crackled against Ira’s ear. Donna was a very distant relation, and several years older than Ira, but as the Furmans had lived in Glassell Park, not far from Ira’s family in Mt. Washington, Ira had known Donna all his life, and he was glad to see her.

This feeling of gladness was not entirely justified by recent history, as Donna, a girl with a clever tongue and a scheming imagination, had grown into a charming but unreliable woman, and if Ira had stopped to consider he might, at first, have had a bone or two to pick with his fourth cousin once removed. She was a good-looking, dark-complected lesbian — way out in the open about that — with a big bust and a twelve-thousand-dollar smile. The vein of roguery that had found its purest expression in Sheila’s grandfather, Milton Wiseman, a manufacturer of diet powders and placebo aphrodisiacs, ran thin but rich through Donna’s character. She talked fast and took recondite drugs and told funny stories about famous people whom she claimed to know. Despite the fact that she worked for one of the big talent agencies in Culver City, in their music division, and made ten times what Ira did waiting tables and working summers at a Jewish drama camp up in Idyllwild, Donna nonetheless owed Ira, at the time of this fond embrace, three hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“We ought to go out to Santa Anita tonight,” Donna said, winking one of her moist brown eyes, which she had inherited from her mother, a concentration camp survivor, a Hollywood costume designer, and a very sweet lady who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills when Donna was still a teenager. Donna’s round, sorrowful eyes made it impossible to doubt that somewhere deep within her lay a wise and tormented soul; in her line of work they were her trump card.

“I’d love to,” said Ira. “You can stake me three hundred and twenty-five bucks.”

“Oh, right! I forgot about that!” Donna said, squeezing Ira’s hand. “I have my checkbook in the car.”

“I heard you brought a date, Donna,” Ira went on, not wanting to bring out the squirreliness in his cousin right off the bat. When Donna began to squeeze your hand it was generally a portent of fictions and false rationales. She was big on touching, which was all right with Ira. He liked being touched. “So where is the unfortunate girl?”

“Over there,” Donna said, inclining her head toward Ira as though what she was about to say were inside information capable of toppling a regime or piling up a fortune in a single afternoon. “At that table under the palm tree, there. With those other two women. The tall one in the flowery thing, with the pointy nose. Her name’s Audrey.”

“Does she work with you?” said Ira, happy to have an excuse to stare openly at Carmen, seated to the right of Donna’s date and now looking back at Ira in a way that, he thought, could hardly be mistaken. He wiggled his toes a few times within his lucky pink socks. Donna’s date, Audrey, waved her fingers at them. She was pretty, with an expensive, blunt hairdo and blue eyes, although her nose was as pointed as a marionette’s.

“She lives in my building. Audrey’s at the top, at the very summit, I., of a vast vitamin pyramid. Like, we’re talking, I don’t know, ten thousand people, from Oxnard to Norco. Here, I’ll take you over.” She took hold of the sleeve of Ira’s jacket, then noticed the empty shot glass in his hand. “Hold on, let me buy you a drink.” This was said without a trace of irony. “Drinking shots?”

“Sauza. Two story.”

“A C.C. and water with a twist and a double Sauza,” she said to the bartender. “Tequila makes you unlucky with women.”

“See that blonde Audrey is sitting beside?”

“Yeah? With the nasty mouth?”

“I’d like to be unlucky with her.”

“Drink this,” said Donna, handing Ira a shot glass filled to the brim with liquid the very hue of hangover and remorse. “From what I heard she’s a basket case, I. Bad husband. A big mess. She keeps taking these beta-carotene tablets every time she has a Seven and Seven, like it’s some kind of post-divorce diet or I don’t know.”

“I think she likes me.” They had started toward the table but stopped now to convene a hasty parley on the dance floor, beneath the frond of a squat fan palm. Donna had been giving Ira sexual advice since he was nine.

“How old are you now, twenty-one?”

“Almost.”

“She’s older than I am, Ira!” Donna patted herself on the chest. “You don’t want to get involved with someone so old. You want someone who still has all her delusions intact, or whatever.”

Ira studied Carmen as his cousin spoke, sensing the truth in what she said. He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declarations veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or jonquils, nor haunted a mailbox or a phone booth or a certain café, nor screamed his beloved’s name in the streets at three in the morning, heedless of the neighbors, and it seemed possible that to fall for a woman who had been around the block a few times might be to rob himself of much of the purely ornamental elements, the swags and antimacassars of first love. No doubt Carmen had had enough of such things. And yet it was her look of disillusion, of detachment, those stoical blue eyes in the middle of that lovely, beaten face, that most attracted him. It would be wrong to love her, he could see that; but he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

“Just introduce me to her, Donnie,” he said, “and you don’t have to pay me back.”

“Pay you back what?” said Donna, lighting up her halogen smile.

She was a basket case. The terra cotta ashtray before her on the table, stamped with the words EL IMPERIO, was choked with the slender butts of her cigarettes, and the lit square she held in her long, pretty fingers was trembling noticeably and spewing a huge, nervous chaos of smoke. Her gray eyes were large and moist and pink as though she had been crying not five minutes ago, and when Donna, introducing Ira, laid a hand on her shoulder, it looked as though Carmen might start in again, from the shock and the unexpected softness of this touch. All of these might have escaped Ira’s notice or been otherwise explained, but on the empty seat beside her, where Ira hoped to install himself, sat her handbag, unfastened and gaping, and one glimpse of it was enough to convince Ira that Carmen was a woman out of control. Amid a blizzard of wadded florets of Kleenex, enough to decorate a small parade float, Ira spotted a miniature bottle of airline gin, a plastic bag of jellybeans (all black ones), two unidentifiable vials of prescription medication, a crumpled and torn road map, the wreckage of a Hershey bar, and a key chain, in the shape of a brontosaurus, with one sad key on it. The map was bent and misfolded in such a way that only the fragmentary words S ANGEL, in one corner, were legible.

“Carmen Wallace, this is my adorable little cousin Ira,” Donna said, using the hand that was not resting on Carmen’s bare shoulder to pull at Ira’s cheek. “He asked to meet you.”

“How do you do,” said Ira, blushing badly.

“Hi,” Carmen said, setting her cigarette on the indented lip of the ashtray and extending the tips of her fingers toward Ira, who paused a moment — channeling all of his sexual energy into the center of his right palm — then took them. They were soft and gone in an instant, withdrawn as though he had burned her.

“And this is Audrey—”

“Hi, Audrey.”

“—and Doreen, who’s a — friend? — of the groom’s.”

Ira shook hands with these two and, once Carmen had moved her appalling purse onto the floor beside her to make room for him, soon found himself in the enviable position of being the only man at a table of five. Doreen was wearing a bright yellow dress with an extremely open bodice; she had come to her friend Barry’s wedding exposing such a great deal of her remarkable chest that Ira wondered about her motives. She was otherwise a little on the plain side and she had a sour, horsey laugh, but she was in real estate and Donna and Audrey, who were thinking of buying a house together, seemed to have a lot to say to her. There was nothing for him and Carmen to do but speak to each other.

“Sheila says you live next door to her folks?” Ira said. Carmen nodded, then turned her head to exhale a long jet of smoke. The contact of their eyes was brief but he thought it had something to it. There was about an inch and a half of Sauza left in Ira’s glass and he drained a quarter inch of it, figuring this left him with enough to get through another five questions. He could already tell that talking to Carmen was not going to be easy, but he considered this an excellent omen. Easy flirtation had always struck him as an end in itself and one which did not particularly interest him.

“Is it that big wooden house with the sort of, I don’t know, those things, those rafters or whatever, sticking out from under all the roofs?” He spread the fingers of one hand and slid them under the other until they protruded, making a crude approximation of the overhanging eaves of a California bungalow. There was such a grand old house, to the north of Sheila’s parents, that he’d always admired.

Another nod. She had a habit of opening her eyes very wide, every so often, almost a tic, and Ira wondered if her contact lenses might not be slipping.

“It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” she said bitterly, as though this were the most withering pair of epithets that could be applied to a house. These were the first words she had addressed to him and in them, though he didn’t know what she was talking about, he sensed a story. He took another little sip of tequila and nodded agreeably.

“You live in a Hetrick and Dewitt?” said Doreen, interrupting her conversation with Donna and Audrey to reach across Audrey’s lap and tap Carmen on the arm. She looked amazed. “Which one?”

“It’s the big pretentious one on Orange Blossom, in Altadena,” Carmen said, stubbing out her cigarette. She gave a very caustic sigh and then rose to her feet; she was taller than Ira had thought. Having risen to her feet rather dramatically, she now seemed uncertain of what to do next and stood wavering a little on her blue spike heels, It was clear she felt that she had been wrong to come to Sheila’s wedding, but that was all she seemed able to manage, and after a moment she sank slowly back into her seat. Ira felt very sorry for her and tried to think of something she could do besides sit and look miserable. At that moment the band launched into “Night and Day,” and Ira happened to look toward the table where he had left his aunts. Mr. Lapidus was pulling out his aunt Sophie’s chair and taking her arm. They were going to dance.

“Carmen, would you like to dance?” Ira said, blushing, and wiggling his toes.

Her reply was no more than a whisper, and Ira wasn’t sure if he heard it correctly, but it seemed to him that she said, “Anything.”

They walked, separately, out to the dance floor, and turned to face each other. For an awful moment they just stood, tapping their hesitant feet. But the two old people were describing a slow arc in Ira’s general direction, and finally in order to forestall any embarrassing exhortations from Mr. Lapidus, who was known for such things, Ira reached out and took Carmen by the waist and palm, and twirled her off across the wide parquet floor of the Oasis Room. It was an old-fashioned sort of tune and there was no question of their dancing to it any way but in each other’s arms.

“You’re good at this,” Carmen said, smiling for the first time that he could remember.

“Thanks,” said Ira. He was in fact a competent dancer— his mother, preparing him for a fantastic and outmoded destiny, had taught him a handful of hokey old steps. Carmen danced beautifully, and he saw to his delight that he had somehow hit upon the precise activity to bring her, for the moment anyway, out of her beta-carotene and black jellybean gloom. “So are you.”

“I used to work at the Arthur Murray on La Cienega,” she said, moving one hand a little lower on his back. “That was fifteen years ago.”

This apparently wistful thought seemed to revive her accustomed gloominess a little, and she took on the faraway, hollow expression of a taxi dancer, and grew heavy in his arms. The action of her legs became overly thoughtful and accurate. Ira searched for something to talk about, to distract her with, but all of the questions he came up with had to do, at least in some respect, with her, and he sensed that anything on this subject might plunge her, despite her easy two-step, into an irrevocable sadness. At last the bubble of silence between them grew too great, and Ira pierced it helplessly.

“Where did you grow up?” he said, looking away as he spoke.

“In hotels,” said Carmen, and that was that. “I don’t think Sheila is happy, do you?” She coughed, and then the song came abruptly to an end. The bandleader set down his trumpet, tugged the microphone up to his mouth, and announced that in just a few short moments the cake was going to be cut.

When they returned to the table a tall, handsome man, his black hair thinning but his chin cleft and his eyes pale green, was standing behind Carmen’s empty chair, leaning against it and talking to Donna, Audrey, and Doreen. He wore a fancy, European-cut worsted suit, a purple and sky blue paisley necktie, a blazing white-on-white shirt, and a tiny sparkler in the lobe of his left ear. His nose was large, bigger even than Ira’s, and of a complex shape, like the blade of some highly specialized tool; it dominated his face in a way that made the man himself seem dominating. The shirting fabric of his suit jacket caught and stretched across the muscles of his shoulders. When Carmen approached her place at the table, he drew her chair for her. She thanked him with a happy and astonishingly carnal smile, and as she sat down he peered, with a polished audacity that made Ira wince in envy, into the scooped neck of her dress.

“Carmen, Ira,” said Doreen, “this is Jeff Freebone.” As Doreen introduced the handsome Mr. Freebone, all of the skin that was visible across her body colored a rich blood-orange red. Ira’s hand vanished momentarily into a tanned, forehand-smashing grip. Ira looked at Donna, hoping to see at least some hint of unimpressedness in her lesbian and often cynical gaze, but his cousin had the same shining-eyed sort of Tiger Beat expression on her face as Doreen and Carmen — and Audrey, for that matter — and Ira realized that Jeff Freebone must be very, very rich.

“What’s up, Ira?” he said, in a smooth, flattened-out baritone to which there clung a faint tang of New York City, and Ira recognized him, with a start, as the coarse man at the bar who had fired an unfortunate woman named Charlotte in her own bed.

“Jeff here used to work in the same office as Barry and me,” Doreen told Carmen. “Now he has his own company.”

“Freebone Properties,” Carmen said, looking more animated than she had all afternoon. “I’ve seen the signs on front lawns, right?”

“Billboards,” said Donna. “Ads on TV.”

“How was the wedding?” Jeff wanted to know. He went around Carmen and sat down in the chair beside her, leaving Ira to stand, off to one side, glowering at his cousin Donna, who was clearly going to leave him high and dry in this. “Did they stand under that tent thing and break the mirror or whatever?”

Ira was momentarily surprised, and gratified, by this display of ignorance, since he had taken Jeff for Jewish. Then he remembered that many of Donna’s Hollywood friends spoke with a schmoozing accent whether they were Jewish or not, even ex-cheerleaders from Ames, Iowa, and men named Lars.

“It was weird,” Carmen declared, without elaborating — not even Jeff Freebone, apparently, could draw her out — and the degree of acquiescence this judgment received at the table shocked Ira. He turned to seek out Sheila among the hundreds of faces that filled the Oasis Room, to see if she was all right, but could not find her. There was a small crowd gathered around the cathedral cake at the far end of the room, but the bride did not seem to be among them. Weird — what had been weird about it? Was Sheila not, after all, in love with her two hours’ husband? Ira tapped his foot to the music, self-conscious, and pretended to continue his search for Sheila, although in truth he was not looking at anything anymore. He was mortified by the quickness with which his love affair with the sad and beautiful woman of his dreams had been derailed, and all at once — the tequila he had drunk had begun to betray him — he came face to face with the distinct possibility that not only would he never find the one he was meant to find, but that no else ever did, either. The discussion around the table hurtled off into the imaginary and vertiginous world of real estate. Finally he had to take hold of a nearby chair and sit down.

“I can get you three mil for it, sight unseen,” Jeff Freebone was declaring. He leaned back in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.

“It’s worth way more,” said Donna, giving Carmen a poke in the ribs. “It’s a work of art, Jeff.”

“It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” said everyone at the table, all at once.

“You have to see it,” Doreen said.

“All right then, let’s see it. I drove my Rover, we can all fit. Take me to see it.”

There was moment of hesitation, during which the four women seemed to consider the dictates of decorum and the possible implications of the proposed expedition to see the house that Carmen hated.

“The cake is always like sliced cardboard at these things, anyway,” said Donna.

This seemed to decide them, and there followed a general scraping of chairs and gathering of summer wraps.

“Aren’t you coming?” said Donna, leaning over Ira — who had settled into a miserable, comfortable slouch — and whispering into his ear. The others were already making their way out of the Oasis Room. Ira scowled at her.

“Hey, come on, I. She needs a realtor, not a lover. Besides, she was way too old for you.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his head. “Okay, sulk. I’ll call you.” Then she buttoned her sharkskin jacket and turned on one heel.

After Ira had been sitting alone at the table for several minutes, half hoping his aunt Lillian would notice his distress and bring over a piece of cake or a petit four and a plateful of her comforting platitudes, he noticed that Carmen, not too surprisingly, had left her handbag behind. He got up from his chair and went to pick it up. For a moment he peered into it, aroused, despite himself, by the intimacy of this act, like reading a woman’s diary, or putting one’s hand inside her empty shoe. Then he remembered his disappointment and his anger, and his fist closed around one of the vials of pills, which he quickly slipped into his pocket.

“Ira, have you seen Sheila?”

Ira dropped the purse, and whirled around. It was indeed his aunt Lillian but she looked very distracted and didn’t seem aware of having caught Ira in the act. She kept tugging at the fringes of her wildly patterned scarf.

“Not recently,” said Ira. “Why?”

Aunt Lillian explained that someone, having drunk too much, had fallen onto the train of Sheila’s gown and torn it slightly; this had seemed to upset Sheila a good deal and she had gone off somewhere, no one knew where. The bathrooms and the lobbies of the hotel had all been checked. The cake-cutting was fifteen minutes overdue.

“I’ll find her,” said Ira.

He went out into the high, cool lobby and crossed it several times, his heels clattering across the marble floors and his soles susurrant along the Persian carpets. He climbed a massive oak staircase to the mezzanine, where he passed through a pair of French doors that opened onto a long balcony overlooking the sparkling pool. Here he found her, dropped in one corner of the terrace like a blown flower. She had taken the garland from her brow and was twirling it around and around in front of her face with the mopey fascination of a child. When she felt Ira’s presence she turned, and, seeing him, broke out in a teary-eyed grin that he found very difficult to bear. He walked over to her and sat down beside her on the rough stucco deck of the balcony.

“Hi,” he said.

“Are they all going nuts down there?”

“I guess. I heard about your dress. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all right.” She stared through the posts of the balustrade at the great red sun going down over Santa Monica. There had been a lot of rain the past few days and the air was heartbreakingly clear. “You just feel like such a, I don’t know, a big stupid puppet or something, getting pulled around.”

Ira edged a little closer to his cousin and she laid her head against his shoulder, and sighed. The contact of her body was so welcome and unsurprising that it frightened him, and he began to fidget with the vial in his pocket.

“What’s that?” she said, at the faint rattle.

He withdrew the little bottle and held it up to the dying light. There was no label of any kind on its side.

“I sort of stole them from your friend Carmen.”

Sheila managed an offhand smile.

“Oh — how did that work out? I saw you dancing.”

“She wasn’t for me,” said Ira. He unscrewed the cap and tipped the vial into his hand. There were only two pills left, small, pink, shaped like commas — two little pink teardrops. “Any idea what these are? Could they be beta-carotene?”

Sheila shook her head and extended one hand, palm upward. At first Ira thought she wanted him to place one of the pills upon it, but she shook her head again; when he took her outstretched fingers in his she nodded.

“Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.

“My darling,” he said.

Ocean Avenue

IF YOU CAN STILL see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible. One day not too long ago, in Laguna Beach, California, an architect named Bobby Lazar went downtown to have a cup of coffee at the Café Zinc with his friend Albert Wong and Albert’s new wife, Dawn (who had, very sensibly, retained her maiden name). Albert and Dawn were still in that period of total astonishment that follows a wedding, grinning at each other like two people who have survived an air crash without a scratch, touching one another frequently, lucky to be alive. Lazar was not a cynical man and he wished them well, but he had also been lonely for a long time, and their happiness was making him a little sick. Albert had brought along a copy of Science, in which he had recently published some work on the String Theory, and it was as Lazar looked up from Al’s name and abbreviations in the journal’s table of contents that he saw Suzette, in her exercise clothes, coming toward the cafe from across the street, looking like she weighed about seventy-five pounds.

She was always too thin, though at the time of their closest acquaintance he had thought he liked a woman with bony shoulders. She had a bony back, too, he suddenly remembered, like a marimba, as well as a pointed, bony nose and chin, and she was always — but always—on a diet, even though she had a naturally small appetite and danced aerobically or ran five miles every day. Her face looked hollowed and somehow mutated, as do the faces of most women who get too much exercise, but there was a sheen on her brow and a mad, aerobic glimmer in her eye. She’d permed her hair since he last saw her, and it flew out around her head in two square feet of golden Pre-Raphaelite rotini — the lily maid of Astolat on an endorphin high. A friend had once said she was the kind of woman who causes automobile accidents when she walks down the street, and, as a matter of fact, as she stepped up onto the patio of the café, a man passing on his bicycle made the mistake of following her with his eyes for a moment and nearly rode into the open door of a parked car.

“Isn’t that Suzette?” Al said. Albert was, as it happened, the only one of his friends after the judgment who refused to behave as though Suzette had never existed, and he was always asking after her in his pointed, physicistic manner, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Needless to say, Lazar did not like to be reminded. In the course of their affair, he knew, he had been terribly erratic, by turns tightfisted and profligate, glum and overeager, unsociable and socially aflutter, full of both flattery and glib invective — a shithead, in short — and, to his credit, he was afraid that he had treated Suzette very badly. It may have been this repressed consciousness, more than anything else, that led him to tell himself, when he first saw her again, that he did not love her anymore.

“Uh-oh,” said Dawn, after she remembered who Suzette was.

“I have nothing to be afraid of,” Lazar said. As she passed, he called out, “Suzette?” He felt curiously invulnerable to her still evident charms, and uttered her name with the lightness and faint derision of someone on a crowded airplane signaling to an attractive but slightly elderly stewardess. “Hey, Suze!”

She was wearing a Walkman, however, with the earphones turned up very loud, and she floated past on a swell of Chaka Khan and Rufus.

“Didn’t she hear you?” said Albert, looking surprised.

“No, Dr. Five Useful Non-Implications of the String Theory, she did not,” Lazar said. “She was wearing earphones.”

“I think she was ignoring you.” Albert turned to his bride and duly consulted her. “Didn’t she look like she heard him? Didn’t her face kind of blink?”

“There she is, Bobby,” said Dawn, pointing toward the entrance of the café. As it was a beautiful December morning, they were sitting out on the patio, and Lazar had his back to the Zinc. “Waiting on line.”

He felt that he did not actually desire to speak to her but that Albert and Dawn’s presence forced him into it somehow. A certain tyranny of in-touchness holds sway in that part of the world — a compulsion to behave always as though one is still in therapy but making real progress, and the rules of enlightened behavior seemed to dictate that he not sneak away from the table with his head under a newspaper — as he might have done if alone — and go home to watch the Weather Channel or Home Shopping Network for three hours with a twelve-pack of Mexican beer and the phone off the hook. He turned around in his chair and looked at Suzette more closely. She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite or adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman’s body as seal her off from gamma rays and lethal Stardust. Lazar pronounced her name again, more loudly, calling out across the sunny patio. She looked even thinner from behind.

“Oh, Bobby,” she said, removing the headphones but keeping her place in the coffee line.

“Hello, Suze,” he said. They nodded pleasantly to one another, and that might have been it right there. After a second or two she dipped her head semiapologetically, smiled an irritated smile, and put the earphones—“ear-buds,” he recalled, was the nauseous term — back into her ears.

“She looks great,” Lazar said magnanimously to Albert and Dawn, keeping his eyes on Suzette.

“She looks so thin, so drawn,” said Dawn, who frankly could have stood to drop about fifteen pounds.

“She looks fine to me,” said Al. “I’d say she looks better than ever.”

“I know you would,” Lazar snapped. “You’d say it just to bug me.”

He was a little irritated himself now. The memory of their last few days together had returned to him, despite all his heroic efforts over the past months to repress it utterly. He thought of the weekend following that bad review of their restaurant in the Times (they’d had a Balearic restaurant called Ibiza in San Clemente) — a review in which the critic had singled out his distressed-stucco interior and Suzette’s Majorcan paella, in particular, for censure. Since these were precisely the two points around which, in the course of opening the restaurant, they had constructed their most idiotic and horrible arguments, the unfavorable notice hit their already shaky relationship like a dumdum bullet, and Suzette went a little nuts. She didn’t show up at home or at Ibiza all the next day — so that poor hypersensitive little José had to do all the cooking — but instead disappeared into the haunts of physical culture. She worked out at the gym, went to Zahava’s class, had her body waxed, and then, to top it all off, rode her bicycle all the way to El Toro and back. When she finally came home she was in a mighty hormonal rage and suffered under the delusion that she could lift a thousand pounds and chew her way through vanadium steel. She claimed that Lazar had bankrupted her, among other outrageous and untrue assertions, and he went out for a beer to escape from her. By the time he returned, several hours later, she had moved out, taking with her only his belongings, as though she had come to see some fundamental inequity in their relationship — such as their having been switched at birth — and were attempting in this way to rectify it.

This loss, though painful, he would have been willing to suffer if it hadn’t included his collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in The Kennel Club Murder Case to Powell’s personal copy of the shooting script for Life with Father to a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles, which Lazar had managed to obtain from a Powell grand-nephew only minutes before the epistolary buzzards from the University of Texas tried to snap it up. Suzette sold the entire collection, at far less than its value, to that awful Kelso McNair up in Lawndale, who only annexed it to his vast empire of Myrna Loy memorabilia and locked it away in his vault. In retaliation Lazar went down the next morning to their safe-deposit box at Dana Point, removed all six of Suzette’s 1958 and ’59 Barbie Dolls, and sold them to a collectibles store up in Orange for not quite four thousand dollars, at which point she brought the first suit against him.

“Why is your face turning so red, Bobby?” said Dawn, who must have been all of twenty-two.

Oh!” he said, not bothering even to sound sincere. “I just remembered. I have an appointment.”

“See you, Bobby,” said Al.

“See you,” he said, but he did not stand up.

“You don’t have to keep looking at her, anyway,” Al continued reasonably. “You can just look out at Ocean Avenue here, or at my lovely new wife — hi, sweetie — and act as though Suzette’s not there.”

“I know,” Lazar said, smiling at Dawn, then returning his eyes immediately to Suzette. “But I’d like to talk to her. No, really.”

So saying, he rose from his chair and walked, as nonchalantly as he could, toward her. He had always been awkward about crossing public space, and could not do it without reeling somehow cheesy and hucksterish, as though he were crossing a makeshift dais in a Legion Hall to accept a diploma from a bogus school of real estate; he worried that his pants were too tight across the seat, that his gait was hitched and dorky, that his hands swung chimpishly at his sides. Suzette was next in line now and studying the menu, even though he could have predicted, still, exactly what she would order: a decaf au lait and a wedge of frittata with two little cups of cucumber salsa. He came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder; the taps were intended to be devil-may-care and friendly, but of course he overdid them and they came off as the brusque importunities of a man with a bone to pick. Suzette turned around looking more irritated than ever, and when she saw who it was her dazzling green eyes grew tight little furrows at their corners.

“How are you?” said Lazar, daring to leave his hand on her shoulder, where, as though it were approaching c, very quickly it seemed to acquire a great deal of mass. He was so conscious of his hand on her damp, solid shoulder that he missed her first few words and finally had to withdraw it, blushing.

“… great. Everything’s really swell,” Suzette was saying, looking down at the place on her shoulder where his hand had just been. Had he laid a freshly boned breast of raw chicken there and then taken it away her expression could not have been more bemused. She turned away. “Hi, Norris,” she said to the lesbian woman behind the counter. “Just an espresso.”

“On a diet?” Lazar said, feeling his smile tighten.

“Not hungry,” she said. “You’ve gained a few pounds.”

“You could be right,” he said, and patted his stomach. Since he had thrown Suzette’s Borg bathroom scale onto the scrap heap along with her other belongings (thus leaving the apartment all but empty), he had no idea of how much he weighed, and, frankly, as he put it to himself, smiling all the while at his ex-lover, he did not give a rat’s ass. “I probably did. You look thinner than ever, really, Suze.”

“Here’s your espresso,” said Norris, smiling oddly at Lazar, as though they were old friends, and he was confused until he remembered that right after Suzette left him he’d run into this Norris at a party in Bluebird Canyon, and they had a short, bitter, drunken conversation about what it felt like when a woman left you, and Lazar impressed her by declaring, sagely, that it felt as though you’d arrived home to find that your dearest and most precious belongings in the world had been sold to a man from Lawndale.

“What about that money you owe me?” he said. The question was halfway out of his mouth before he realized it, and although he appended a hasty ha-ha at the finish, his jaw was clenched and he must have looked as if he was about to slug her.

“Whoa!” said Suzette, stepping neatly around him. “I’m getting out of here, Bobby. Good-bye.” She tucked her chin against her chest, dipped her head, and slipped out the door, as though ducking into a rainstorm.

“Wait!” he said. “Suzette!”

She turned toward him as he came out onto the patio, her shoulders squared, and held him at bay with her cup of espresso coffee.

“I don’t have to reckon with you anymore, Bobby Lazar,” she said. “Colleen says I’ve already reckoned with you enough.” Colleen was Suzette’s therapist. They had seen her together for a while, and Lazar was both scornful and afraid of her and her linguistic advice.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be, um, yielding. I’ll yield. I promise. I just — I don’t know. How about let’s sit down?”

He turned to the table where he’d left Albert, Dawn, and his cup of coffee, and discovered that his friends had stood up and were collecting their shopping bags, putting on their sweaters.

“Are you going?” he said.

“If you two are getting back together,” said Albert, “this whole place is going. It’s all over. It’s the Big One.”

“Albert!” said Dawn.

“You’re a sick man, Bob,” said Albert. He shook Lazar’s hand and grinned. “You’re sick, and you like sick women.”

Lazar cursed him, kissed Dawn on both cheeks, and laughed a reckless laugh.

“Is he drunk or something?” he heard Dawn say before they were out of earshot, and, indeed, as he returned to Suzette’s table the world seemed suddenly more stressful and gay, the sky more tinged at its edges with violet.

“Is that Al’s new wife?” said Suzette. She waved to them as they headed down the street. “She’s pretty, but she needs to work on her thighs.”

“I think Al’s been working on them,” he said.

“Shush,” said Suzette.

They sat back and looked at each other warily and with pleasure. The circumstances under which they parted had been so strained and unfriendly and terminal that to find themselves sitting, just like that, at a bright cafe over two cups of black coffee seemed as thrilling as if they were violating some powerful taboo. They had been warned, begged, and even ordered to stay away from each other by everyone, from their shrinks to their parents to the bench of Orange County itself; yet here they were, in plain view, smiling and smiling. A lot of things had been lacking in their relationship, but unfortunately mutual physical attraction was not one of them, and Lazar could feel that hoary old devouring serpent uncoiling deep in its Darwinian cave.

“It’s nice to see you,” said Suzette.

“You look pretty,” he said. “I like what you’ve done with your hair. You look like a Millais.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little tonelessly; she was not quite ready to listen to all his prattle again. She pursed her lips and looked at him in a manner almost surgical, as though about to administer a precise blow with a very small ax. She said, “Song of the Thin Man was on last week.”

“I know,” he said. He was impressed, and oddly touched. “That’s pretty daring of you to mention that. Considering.”

She set down her coffee cup, firmly, and he caught the flicker of her right biceps. “You got more than I got,” she said. “You got six thousand dollars! I got five thousand four hundred and ninety-five. I don’t owe you anything.”

“I only got four thousand, remember?” he said. He felt himself blushing. “That came out, well, in court — don’t you remember? I — well, I lied.”

“That’s right,” she said slowly. She rolled her eyes and bit her lip, remembering. “You lied. Four thousand. They were worth twice that.”

“A lot of them were missing hair or limbs,” he said.

“You pig!” She gave her head a monosyllabic shake, and the golden curls rustled like a dress. Since she had at one time been known to call him a pig with delicacy and tenderness, this did not immediately alarm Lazar. “You sold my dolls,” she said, dreamily, though of course she knew this perfectly well, and had known it for quite some time. Only now, he could see, it was all coming back to her, the memory of the cruel things they had said, of the tired, leering faces of the lawyers, of the acerbic envoi of the county judge dismissing all their suits and countersuits, of the day they had met for the last time in the empty building that had been their restaurant, amid the bare fixtures, the exposed wires, the crumbs of plaster on the floor; of the rancor that from the first had been the constant flower of their love. “You sold their things, too,” she remembered. “All of their gowns and pumps and little swimwear.”

“I was just trying to get back at you.”

“For what? For making sure I at least got something out of all the time I wasted on you?”

“Take it easy, Suze.”

“And then to lie about how much you got for them? Four thousand dollars!”

“At first my lawyers instructed me to lie about it,” he lied.

“Kravitz! Di Martino! Those sleazy, lizardy, shystery old fat guys! Oh, you pigs!”

Now she was on her feet, and everyone out on the patio had turned with great interest to regard them. He realized, or rather remembered, that he had strayed into dangerous territory here, that Suzette had a passion for making scenes in restaurants. This is how it was, said a voice within Lazar — a gloomy, condemnatory voice — this is what you’ve been missing. He saw the odd angle at which she was holding her cup of coffee, and he hoped against hope that she did not intend to splash his face with espresso. She was one of those women who like to hurl beverages.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, despite himself, his voice coated with the most unctuous sarcasm, “you’re reckoning with me again.”

You could see her consulting with herself about trajectories and wind shear and beverage velocity and other such technical considerations — collecting all the necessary data, and courage — and then she let fly. The cup sailed past Lazar’s head, and he just had time to begin a tolerant, superior smile, and to uncurl partially the middle finger of his right hand, before the cup bounced off the low wall beside him and ricocheted into his face.

Suzette looked startled for a moment, registering this as one registers an ace in tennis or golf, and then laughed the happy laugh of a lucky shot. As the unmerciful people on the patio applauded — oh, but that made Lazar angry — Suzette turned on her heel and, wearing a maddening smile, strode balletically off the patio of the café, out into the middle of Ocean Avenue. Lazar scrambled up from his chair and went after her, cold coffee running in thin fingers down his cheeks. Neither of them bothered to look where they were going; they trusted, in those last couple of seconds before he caught her and kissed her hollow cheek, that they would not be met by some hurtling bus or other accident.

A Model World

MY FRIEND LEVINE HAD only a few months to go on his doctoral dissertation, but when, one Sunday afternoon at Acres or Books, he came upon the little black paperback by Dr. Frank J. Kemp, he decided almost immediately to plagiarize it. It was lying at the bottom of a whiskey crate full of old numbers of the Evergreen Review, which he had been examining intently because he was trying to get a woman named Betty, who liked the poetry of Gregory Corso, to fall in love with him; he was overexuberant and unlucky in love and had just resolved — for example — to grow some beatnik facial hair. The little book was marked on the outside neither front nor back; it was a plain, black square. Levine picked it up only because he had been lonely for a long time and he idly hoped, on the basis of its anonymous cover, that it might contain salacious material. When he opened it to its title page, he received an indelible shock. “Antarctic Models of Induced Nephokinesis,” he read. This was the branch of meteorological engineering he was concerned with in his own researches — in fact, it was the very title he had chosen for his dissertation. Beneath this, Dr. Frank J. Kemp’s name was printed, and then the name Satis House — an academic vanity press in Ann Arbor; Levine had seen its discreet advertisement in the back pages of the Journal of Applied Meteorology. The date of publication was given, to his astonishment, as 1970, almost twenty years before Levine had had even the dimmest notion of the potential power of Antarctic models — a notion that, despite all his ascetic labor over the past year and a half, remained only partly elucidated. It was a radical conception of nephokinesis even today, and in 1970 sufficiently heterodox, no doubt, to have prevented Kemp from publishing his theory by any other means than paying for it himself.

Levine turned the page and saw that Dr. Kemp had, with a precision that struck Levine as tragic and fine, dedicated his work to the beloved memory of his wife, Jean, 21 May 1900–21 May 1969. Levine imagined the sorrowing, hairless scientist, slumped in a chair beside his wife’s hospital bed on a spring day in 1969, his head filled with polar wind. Levine was literally horrified — the hairs on the back of his neck stood erect — at the ignoble fate that had befallen the widower’s theory. It was like the horror he had felt, a few weeks earlier, when he had come across the row of bookshelves in the graduate library where the bound dissertations were kept — a thousand white surnames inscribed on a thousand uncracked blue spines, like the grim face of a monument. It was a horror of death, of the doom that awaited all his efforts, and it was this horror, more than anything else — he really was only a few months from finishing — that determined him to commit the mortal sin of Academe.

I had been browsing among the Drama shelves, looking for a copy of anything by Mehmet Monsour, the fashionable Franco-Egyptian theater guru, who was currently serving as guru-in-residence at the university’s School of Drama. I was at the beginning of an affair with a guru-prone would-be actress named Jewel, and I had come with Levine to Long Beach only in the hope of finding something that would please her; Levine had been irritable, paranoiac, and unwashed for the past several months, and in general, I confess, I tried to avoid him. When I found nothing at all Franco-Egyptian in the Drama section I went to find Levine, who had said something about going for lunch to a local taqueria that served goat. It was the sort of thing one did with Levine, and I was halfway looking forward to it.

“Levine,” I said, “let’s go get those tacos.” He was slouching against a fire extinguisher at the back of the store, completely absorbed in his reading, eyeglasses slipped down his nose, his mouth open. He suffered from a deviated septum and was a chronic mouth breather. His lank red hair covered one eye. He seemed unpleasantly surprised by what he was reading, as if it were a friend’s diary.

“What’s that?” I said.

Levine looked up, his face first blank, then irritated; he had forgotten where he was, and with whom, and why.

“That book,” I said, with a nod. “You look fascinated. You look scared.”

With a sigh Levine stared down at the black book, and bit his lip. “It’s going to be my dissertation,” he said. “Once I retype it.”

“You’re going to plagiarize it?”

“I’m going to rescue it,” he said. “It and myself.”

“Is it on the same subject? There are other books on Antarctic models of induced nephokinesis?”

Embarrassed, afraid that I must disapprove of him, he nodded his head. Then, with the childish look of apology he wore when at his most abject — he always looked this way around Betty — he opened the book to its fly and held it out to me.

“It’s only seventy-five cents,” he said.

He also said that he was too excited to eat anything, particularly goat, and so after he had paid his six bits we walked back to his car. As he pulled onto the freeway, Levine, when he saw that I was not going to censure him, began to expound on his dire plan, which was quite simply to retype Kemp’s book on approved thesis paper, in the approved thesis font, within all the prescribed margins; receive his degree; and move to Santa Fe or Taos several months earlier than he had thought possible, where he would set himself up as a maker of ceramic wind chimes. And no one would ever know of his deception, he felt certain of that. He was the only person in the world, besides the author, to have read the book.

“Someone read it,” I said. “Or else how did it end up at Acres of Books?”

“Kemp lived in Long Beach. When he died, someone sold off his things, and this ended up at Acres. And there was only one left to sell off, because he burned the rest. In despair.”

I stared at him. He was driving as cautiously as ever, both hands on the wheel, never exceeding forty-five miles per hour. He always blamed his meticulous driving on his car, a blue Rambler American that had been his grandmother’s, but the truth was that Levine belonged to that large brotherhood of young men, often encountered in Academe, who are obsessively careful about two or three things — the arrangement of socks in their drawers, the alphabetical order of their jazz albums, the proper way to make a Bloody Mary — and slobs in every other regard. In any case he did not look particularly deranged, or desperate, as he wove his fantasies about New Mexico and the scattered estate of Dr. Kemp. He seemed completely certain of everything, in particular of success in his projected crime, and by the time we got back to the graduate-student housing complex, or Gradplex, he even seemed happy. I got him to invite me over to watch the Lakers game on his color television, for the first time in months. He had to retrieve the set from a closet, and, smiling, blow the dust from its screen in a small cloud. I think it was a nice evening for Levine. James Worthy scored thirty-five points, two with a reverse lay-up he sank while on his knees, and at half time Levine went into his bedroom, called Betty, and was successful.

The next morning at eight o’clock, Levine sat down at the kitchen table to begin retyping Kemp’s book onto the sheets of archival bond he had purchased, along with three typewriter ribbons, two bottles of Liquid Paper, and a large bag of yogurt-covered raisins, on his way home from Betty’s. The acid-free paper had a lifeless, creepy feel, like embalmed flesh, and he felt bad about consigning Kemp’s words to it. It was foggy and cool out, and, a rapid typist, he planned to be done by the time the coastal morning burned off and it was glaring, limitless afternoon. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, he had unplugged the telephone, and the package of white raisins sat near at hand. He flexed his fingers, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type.

He soon ran into difficulty, however, when instead of just transmitting Kemp’s words mindlessly to his fingertips he made the mistake of reading them and grappling with the concepts they attempted to frame. This slowed his progress considerably, and by the time the sun emerged, around two o’clock, he was still mired in the second chapter, “Modeling on Cationic Residues Found in Austral Solstitial Winds,” in which the crux of Kemp’s thesis — that the ionized molecules of oxygen frequently found around quickly moving cumulonimbus clouds in the wake of a summer storm on the Ross Ice Shelf presented the likeliest model for nephokinesis — was forcefully argued.

Levine had skimmed through this chapter in the store the day before, paying more attention to the meteorologist’s literary style, to see if it at all resembled his own, than to the burden of the prose, and now he found himself entranced. It was a creative, dogged, well-supported, even ingenious argument, and he felt a surge of custodial pride at the boldness of Dr. Kemp’s mind. Levine had suspected — it had come to him in a dream, in fact — that Antarctic winds held the key to controlling the dreamy movement of clouds, but he had never really gotten beyond this one intuition. And here it all was! Laid down in charts and statistical tables, with almost a dozen sources that were entirely new to Levine. There was a massive Soviet study of cationic Antarctic winds, undertaken during the International Geophysical Year, which Levine had somehow missed, and there were as well the priceless results of three trips that Dr. Kemp had himself made to the Antarctic, aboard the Hodge, in 1963 and 1968. The argument and its advocate were made all the more poignant by the fact that the region in which Kemp had made the crucial measurements was the Bay of Whales, not far from Little America, on the Ross Ice Shelf — a region that had broken off from the continent in 1987 and was now melting. The Bay of Whales was no longer to be found on the map.

(“Isn’t that going to be a problem with your committee?” I asked him that night as we were on our way to dinner at Professor Baldwin’s. “Basing your whole theory on evidence that no longer exists?”

(“That’s all you guys do,” he said — which stung me. I was engaged at that time in the observation of those subatomic particles, such as muons, that lead very short lives. I protested that evanescence itself was in a way the object of my studies — But I’m getting ahead of the story.)

It was nearly sundown when Levine finished his dissertation. His eyes were strained, his back and his neck hurt, but there was a sweet taste in his mouth, for he had regained his faith in the stoic nobility of scientific endeavor, and his regard for the austere beauty of its method. His New Mexican plans, the tinkling of wind chimes in a sonorous breeze, all his months of fruitless research, were forgotten. He had never wanted to be anything but a scientist. He leapt to his feet and dashed out into the gray little Gradplex living room, furnished with only a stereo and a folding aluminum and rubber-lattice lawn chair. His roommate, a graduate student in English, had been expelled from the university earlier in the month, after brawling with a professor over the supposed ties to Benito Mussolini of a female Italian semiotician who was an old girlfriend of the professor’s, and now Levine had the place to himself. He lay down on the hard gray carpet and allowed the knuckles of his spine to crack and relax. A breeze blew in from the patio, through the screen door, and ruffled the hair on his damp forehead. Levine thought, as he had not since high school, about the way the breeze was composed of a trillion trillion agitated molecules that he could not see. He thought, with the wondering pedantry of a sixteen-year old boy, about the way every object around him, including himself, his body, was made of invisible things. He got up, grinning foolishly, and went to the telephone.

Julia Baldwin, the wife of the head of his committee, answered the phone. “What is it?” she said.

“Is Professor Baldwin in?” said Levine, momentarily filled with doubt.

“Just a minute.” There was the sound of the receiver rattling as she let it drop. “It’s another one of your goddamned students,” he heard her say. Professor Baldwin mumbled something apologetic to her and then said hello.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “It’s just — Well, I’ve been looking into solstitial winds at Ross, and I think — I think I may have stumbled onto something really big. And, well, it kind of scares me, sir, it’s so big. I’d kind of like to talk to you about it, if that’s all right.”

“We’re having company, Levine,” said Professor Baldwin. “One of my wife’s instructors is coming to dinner. What is it, this big, scary thing?”

Levine filled him in briefly on the nature of Kemp’s argument for Antarctic models, without of course saying anything about Dr. Kemp. He said that in his opinion a practical method of cloud control was now ten years closer than it had been yesterday. At first Professor Baldwin interjected such comments as “Yes, yes,” and “I see,” but when Levine had finished he was silent for a long time. Levine could hear Mrs. Baldwin, beautiful Julia, shrieking with laughter in the background.

“Perhaps you’d better come over,” said Professor Baldwin. “I’ll have to ask Julia. Hold on.”

Levine jumped up and down while he waited and watched the last red pennant fade from the evening sky. One of the things he loved best about meteorology was that its domain encompassed sunsets.

“Come in an hour,” said Professor Baldwin. “It’s fine. In fact, my wife has suggested that you invite your friend Smith. We have a whole salmon.”

“Thank you,” said Levine. “I’ll call him.”

It was, of course, this same Julia, or Jewel, Baldwin for whom I had hoped to find that volume of Franco-Egyptian dramatic theory, and I told Levine that I would be more than happy to accompany him.

There were coyotes out laughing and looking for pussycat in the foothills above the Facuplex when Levine and I came up the driveway to the Baldwins’ house on Froebel Lane. This entire neighborhood, with its skinny new trees on their crutches, its fresh-rolled lawns, its streets named for famous educators, had not been here six months before, and Levine and I had often walked up, carrying our binoculars and a six-pack of beer, to a couple of flat boulders that had stood not far from the present site of the Baldwins’ Japanese station wagon. Among a few other things, we shared a soft spot for birds and small animals, although he knew far more about them than I, and we had once been enchanted by the sight of two red rattlesnakes, somewhere in the vicinity of the Baldwins’ front door. I reminded Levine of this.

“They were doing it, too,” he remembered. “Making love like a couple of snakes.”

He rang the doorbell and straightened his necktie. I had told him no one else would have one, but he’d insisted on wearing his. The only tie he possessed, it was at least twenty-five years old, brown, with a vaguely birdlike white figure, inside a pattern of concentric circles, against a grid. He called it his Radar Duck tie, and he generally wore it only on first dates and for court appearances. I was just going to tease him about it for the hundredth time when the door was opened by a large, portly man with very dark skin and gray hair, wearing a bathrobe over a pajama top and sweatpants. The bathrobe had a rodeo motif and was printed with leaping cowboys, lariats, and brands. This was Mehmet Monsour.

“They are having a bitter argument,” he said, grinning delightedly and offering us his big brown hand. “Please come in.”

We followed Monsour into the tiled living room, sat down at opposite ends of an elderly Danish modern sofa, and folded our hands in our laps. The Baldwins bawled and pleaded in another room. Monsour went to a battered recliner and eased himself backward, taking up a large can of malt liquor and the remote control for the television. Wearing a look of rapt scrutiny, as for the turns of a Berma or a Norma Desmond, he flipped back and forth from a courtroom-simulation program to a talk show on which three transsexuals were discussing the male lives they had abandoned; we’d evidently interrupted his theatrical studies. Like most acting teachers, he was famous chiefly for the whimsical and slightly cruel discipline he imposed on his pupils, and for the unconventional sources of his difficult productions. (Six months later I read in the Los Angeles Times a respectful review of Monsour’s “harum-scarum” new play, Divorce Court.) I had met him only the week before, when Jewel took me to his messy room at the Kon-Tiki Motor Lodge, but he showed not the faintest recognition now, and in fact ignored both Levine and me completely. After five minutes we looked at each other and rose simultaneously to our feet.

“Just tell Professor Baldwin I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Levine.

“Sure thing,” said Mehmet Monsour, waving us brightly away.

We went to the door and were about to go out when Professor Baldwin came to retrieve us. His hands were in the pockets of his gray cardigan, and he was wearing the cool, bored demeanor someone in a store attempts to adopt when he has just broken an expensive item. He looked as though he were going to whistle a little song.

“Where are you going?” he said mildly.

“Oh,” said Levine. “Nowhere.”

“We just got here,” I said. “Just this minute. How are you, Professor Baldwin?”

“We don’t have to stay for dinner,” said Levine. “We can leave right now.” Faced with the substance and strife-haunted eyes of his chairman, and not just his disembodied voice on the phone, Levine felt his feet begin to grow a little cold.

“Nonsense. Julia’s just getting dressed. Have you met Mehmet? Met Mehmet. I bet you haven’t met Mehmet yet.” He gave a small laugh, and I could see that he mistakenly felt the rift in his marriage to have been opened and occupied by Mehmet Monsour, and that he consequently liked to make fun of his visiting, untenured colleague. I felt sorry for Baldwin all at once and wished that I hadn’t come. He brought us back into the living room, and then we four sat and watched the television, wondering what it might be like to become a woman. No one spoke. I waited for Jewel to emerge, trying to guess which outfit she would wear. She had a pair of old Levi’s I liked, with a rip in the seat which showed bare skin when she bent forward.

“Mr. Smith!” she cried when she appeared at last, in a purple sarong, and took my hand. “Mr. Levine! It’s so good to see you!” She attempted, as had her husband, to seem as though she had never in her life raised her voice, let alone in the past quarter of an hour, but her cordiality was brittle, sarcastic, and even a little frightening, as though she were doing Shaw.

“Now, if you gentlemen will just give me twenty minutes,” she said, going around to Mehmet Monsour’s chair to give his gray head a fond pat. “Everything’s almost done.”

“Let me help you, Mrs. Baldwin,” I said.

“Good,” said Professor Baldwin. “Levine, let’s you and I sit in my office for a few minutes and talk.”

Levine stood instantly, as though summoned to the bench, and followed Professor Baldwin down the hall and into the small room at the back of the house where Baldwin did his revolutionary work on the so-called greenhouse effect. The room looked out over the canyon, toward the mountains, and was furnished with a single cinder-block-and-plank bookcase on which were massed perhaps a hundred books. A much wider plank spanned two sawhorses to make the professor’s desk, at which he sat in a Barcelona chair that had belonged to his father-in-law, an architect. There was only a kitchen step stool in the corner for Levine. Although relatively young for a full professor and a laureate of atmospheric science, Baldwin possessed the hard-won virtues of an older man: caution, resignation, frugality. The few strands of black hair on his prematurely lunar head seemed, like his spare office, like his marriage, to be the conscious result of an effort to get by with as little as possible, as though he were preparing for the imminent decline of the biosphere. His only indulgence, aside from a small framed photograph of his wife in a parka on a Falkland island, was his computer — an expensive machine capable of animating color images in three dimensions, which he had bought with some of the money from his MacArthur Fellowship, and which was now running a long, slow simulation of worldwide ozone accretion.

“That’s the man my wife is having an affair with,” he said, reaching into a cardboard box on the floor beside him. He took out a Baggie filled with marijuana and a small water pipe.

“Smith?” said Levine, and a light went on in his head. I’m afraid I had never told him anything about it.

“Mehmet,” said Baldwin, spitting out the last syllable. “Not Smith. It’s driving me out of my wits.”

Levine didn’t know what to say to this. He and his committee chair were not friends. There were one or two graduate students who spent a lot of time in his office on campus, talking about Robert Heinlein and Buckminster Fuller, but they were not Professor Baldwin’s friends, either, really. Perhaps Professor Baldwin didn’t have any friends.

“Never mind. Forget it.” He gave his head a shake. “Tell me about this Ross thing,” he said, and lit the pipe. As he inhaled, the professor raised his eyebrows, and lowered them as he blew out. He and Levine passed the pipe in near-silence for several minutes. The room filled with miniature cumulonimbus clouds. Levine looked at the titles of the books on the shelves without registering them until his vacant gaze fell upon a slender black spine at the upper left-hand corner of the bookcase, unmarked, exactly the same height and thickness as the spine of Dr. Kemp’s book.

“Oh my,” said Levine, exhaling a thick plume.

“What?” said Professor Baldwin. He looked toward the bookcase as if there might be a large spider or rodent crawling across it.

“Were you a student of Dr. Kemp?” Levine could see Baldwin, a little heavier, with hair, standing beside his brave mentor, frost on their faces, against a background of auks and green icebergs. They had been inseparable.

“Dr. Kemp?” Baldwin frowned. “I never heard of him.”

This did little to reassure Levine. Even if it were not Dr. Kemp’s book on this particular bookshelf, it might as well have been — the book was out there somewhere, waiting; he was going to be found out. He was not in the least surprised, and the sudden renascence in his heart of defeat, of the sense of failure, was almost a relief, as though he had loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his collar. There was no easy way out of the prison of his studies, and he had known this very well until yesterday. His plagiarism had been only an act of self-deception.

“It is Smith,” he said, with a feeling of great detachment from the words he spoke.

Professor Baldwin was staring intently at the face of his wristwatch and seemed not to have heard.

“It isn’t that Monsour guy,” said Levine, abandoning both of us to our fates. “I think it’s Smith, sir.”

Now the professor looked up at Levine and bit his lip. He was going through the evidence in his mind.

“You could be right,” he said. “That sounds feasible.”

He replaced the pipe and the plastic bag, carefully, then stood and steadied himself against his desk. On the screen of his computer a model world of weather slowly overheated and drowned.

“What are you going to do?” said Levine.

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Professor Baldwin. “But something. Him I’m not afraid of.” He strode to the door. “A bad student I know how to handle.”

“A bad student?” said Levine, rising with a wobble to follow Baldwin out of the cloudy room.

As he switched off the light, Baldwin smiled weakly, as though seeing that his phrase had perhaps not been appropriate.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “What if all of my numbers came out of the Bay of Whales? That wouldn’t be good, would it?”

“That wouldn’t make any difference at all.” He stepped aside in the hall to let Levine pass. “After you,” he said.

The party was in its second hour, the bones and oily plates cleared from the table, when Mehmet Monsour was begged to demonstrate one of his famous little games. He and Jewel had done most of the talking during dinner, discussing the theatrical abilities of Bill and Luke and Clothilde and Janet, and particularly of Jewel; malt liquor made Monsour incredibly voluble, it seemed, as with each tall can he came to dominate the conversation more and more, and his stories — how I hate men who tell stories at dinner! — grew increasingly sordid and disturbing. He had been all around the world. Professor Baldwin, Levine, and I were abandoned to our disparate silences. Every time I looked at Baldwin, he was looking at me, beaming at me, really, as though he were in on some happy word of my fortunes, as though I had won some prize. I could hardly eat a thing. Levine nodded his head so intently at the things mentor and pupil were saying that I could see he wasn’t listening to a word.

“And so I simply stole it. It was not mine, and it could be of no real practical use to me — you see that,” Monsour was saying. He had gotten loud and a little gross in the course of the evening — his bathrobe was all untied and some of the crucial buttons of his pajama top had popped open — and I remembered a piece of advice my father had once given me about never drinking anything that had a number in its brand name except for Vat 69. “While on the contrary, as I look back on it, this radio was her only connection, aside from me, to the outer world. It was precious to her. When I left, she would be cut off completely, as you can see.” He shook his head at the memory of this wickedness he had practiced, but with a wistful smile, as though he had long ago forgiven himself.

“I’ve already heard that story,” said Jewel. She had also been drinking malt liquor; the continued adhesion of her sarong was in some doubt. “I told it to you, Baldwin.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember,” Professor Baldwin said, smiling at me now with perfect fondness. He turned to Mehmet Monsour. “Why don’t you tell these two about that game? That sounded like a bear.”

Oh, let’s play it,” said Jewel. She was sitting next to me, and as she said this she nudged me lightly with her left elbow. I was certain now that something unpleasant lay in store for me and certain also, for the first time, that as a person I meant very little to her. I was just another way of irritating her husband.

“It is quite simple,” said Monsour, whirling on Levine and catching him off guard. Levine sat up and folded his hands scholastically in his lap. “In fact, it is hardly a game at all. We turn out all the lamps.” He rose from the table and gathered about him the flaps of his rootin’-tootin’ bathrobe. The candle on the dinner table shed its lone light. “This is all right, Baldwin?”

“Sure it is,” said Baldwin. “Quite all right. I don’t think I’ll play, though. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”

He looked at Jewel and they blushed like a couple of lovers.

“Whatever you like. Fine.” Monsour sat down again and picked up his drink. “And now, boys, I would like you to please tell us.” He touched his hands together at the fingertips and contemplated the resultant structure. “What is the worst thing you have ever done in your whole, entire life?” He had asked this question of a thousand students over the past twenty years, and he paused after the fifth and ninth words in a way he had discovered to be particularly effective in eliciting a juicy response. “You, Mister, er—” He nodded his head at Levine. “Levine, I am sorry. You try first.”

In the candlelight my friend’s face looked warm and flushed, and although I didn’t know the reason, I could see that he was about to unburden himself of success. He uncoiled the tie from around his neck and cast it on the table, then turned to face me, as did Baldwin, Jewel, and Mehmet Monsour.

“After you,” he said.

I suppose cuckoldry, charlatanism, and academic corruption are not the only things that could have produced a feeling of unease like the one that now suffused the dinner party. It was as though we all knew that there had been a mild poison in the food, which was now taking effect, and we knew as well who the poisoner was, and we all knew that we knew. It was that sort of unease; the sort generated by a family on the brink of divorce or a team of researchers at work on a new type of death ray. I felt the frank encouragement of Jewel’s fingertips on my thigh, pressing me to injure a man who was in some measure eagerly anticipating his injury, but her face, like her husband’s and Monsour’s and Levine’s, and, I imagine, like my own, was uncertain and a little pinched.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to tell the truth. I told them that as a child I had had a reputation for honesty and probity of which I felt miserably undeserving. I said, shame already beginning to mount in my belly, that one summer evening I had gone barefoot down the sidewalk in our deserted neighborhood, set free from the dinner table earlier than anyone else. I had heard a distant lawnmower, a sprinkler, TV gunfire. I had passed the garage of a friend named Mike, who just that day, I knew, had been given a new toy car; the garage door was raised and I could see a card table on which stood some jars of model paint, a half-constructed model bomber, and the new red Matchbox. For no particular reason at all I grabbed a brush and a jar of silver paint and blotted out the windshield and rear window of the toy, threw it to the ground, stepped on it, and then ran home. The horrible part had been afterward, when I returned to Mike’s house to find all the neighborhood children standing around denying that they had been vandals. “Smith didn’t do it,” Mike’s older brother had said. “That’s for sure, anyway.” That night as I got ready for bed I had discovered two streaks of glitter on the sole of my foot.

“You’re making it up,” said Mehmet Monsour, with a mysterious, Nilotic laugh. “Well done.”

“I didn’t believe it,” said Jewel. She stood up from the table and began to clear the rest of the dishes.

“Neither did I,” said Baldwin, and I suddenly found myself free of his unbearable look of kindness.

“What about me?” said Levine.

“I’m so bored!” said Monsour in a cheery voice, as though announcing his intention to take a brisk postprandial swim. He rose from the table and went back to the television.

I was surprised, as I took my leave of Monsour that evening, when he asked me to attend his next Grand Seminar, at a local ice rink, later in the month — so surprised that I consented. Monsour’s interest in me may have irked Jewel; she stopped calling. I guess she had no more real use for me, if she’d ever had any. She did not attend the seminar, and I haven’t seen her for a long time. At the ice rink, for forty-eight hours during which we imitated various animals, fasted, shrieked, and held our water, I began to learn something of the aboriginal connection between anguish and entertainment. The whole thing was a grueling and silly but nonetheless eye-opening experience, and I guess I have to credit Monsour with whatever success I have since found on the stage and even, if this deal with Lucifex Pictures goes through, on the silver screen. I’ve written a screenplay, as a vehicle for myself, based on the heroic life of Werner Heisenberg. I haven’t completely abandoned physics, you see. Of course I know what everyone says about Hollywood, and sometimes it is a little disheartening to think of making my way in a pit of savage vipers, but I have no reason not to consider myself equal to the task. As for Levine, his dissertation caused an uproar in the field after its second chapter was published in JAM. He dropped right into the tenure track at Caltech, with access to a huge laboratory and a twelve-million-dollar Cray computer, and when I went up to Pasadena the other day he told me, with a note of awe and delight in his voice, that the human race is now only a few years away, by most reckonings, from total dominion over the clouds.

Blumenthal on the Air

ANGLOPHONES OF PARIS, LADIES and gentlemen, fellow Americans in exile or on vacation or both, I have a wife; and she has her green card. We live beside the most beautiful cemetery in the world. When we walk along the quiet streets of Père-Lachaise, climb all the staircases to its highest tombs, stand before the small stone palace that holds the bones of a Russian princess, sometimes Roksana talks sweetly and kisses me on my ear or fingertip, and for a second we’ll seem married and almost normal. But in any other part of Paris, and in several parts of the United States, I am merely the man who is making her a citizen, and she will hardly look my way. Roksana is Iranian — or Persian, as she prefers to say — big and black-haired; her lips and lashes are thick and dark; she can beat me up. She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but when she’s angry or seized by Persian lust, something enters her face and she gets to looking savage, ancient, one quarter ape. I was playing records in Dallas, working for an FM station far down on the left-hand side of your radio dial, hanging around with the kind of people who have imperiled foreigners as friends, when I heard that an Iranian woman of iron will and countenance was looking for a husband. I met her at a party, watched her drink a whiskey, and, as Roksana spoke unwillingly of her battles, old and new, with secret police and landlords, zealots and bureaucrats, spoke of the loss of her father, of the terrible tedium of homelessness in a tone neither self-pitying nor angry, I admired her. Initially, it was only that — a marriage of admiration and desperation, made for neither money nor love. Under the gaze of the I.N.S., the love police, we planned to live together, intimately perhaps, for the three years it would take her to become a citizen, divorce, and afterward maintain nothing more than a strange, inexplicable friendship. Had I not breached our contract by actually falling in love, we would still be in Texas, counting the days, but here we are, in the capital of France, waiting for her heart, or mine, to undertake a change.

So now, every Saturday from eight to midnight I play records here on La Voix du Brouillard, and talk about Los Angeles in school French, because certain Parisians are crazy for L.A., where my brother, Calvin, is an Artists and Repertoire man for Capitol Records. Once a week he sends me an account of his previous seven days of living on the edge, of parties, of massive car accidents, of billiard-ball trysts with models and waitresses, knocking into them and then spinning off into some other corner of the city. I translate his letters and read them over the air, in a Rod Serling voice (tricky in French). I have fans; girls call me up and, on the air, promise me rendezvous and the round parts of their bodies, and so on. Guys call to request songs, to tell me about their pilgrimages to southern California in 1969 or 1979, the wild blondes they met there, le délire californien, and so on.

Tonight Roksana calls after I play a song for her. She says thank you, very politely, and we don’t chat. I picture her sitting at the table with the radio and the telephone, in her men’s underwear, eating a plate of boiled meat or a five-ton slab of some Iranian dessert, listening to the sound of my voice speaking in a language she doesn’t know. When I picture this, I am filled with love and hopelessness. Paris seemed like a good idea when I was hopeless in New York, the way New York did when I was hopeless in Dallas, but it hasn’t worked even the slightest charm, and Roksana’s tremendous heart slumbers on. I do not even have her thanks. “You should have charged me,” she has said, twice. “I would have paid.”

After she hangs up, I put on “Sister Ray,” because it’s seventeen minutes long, and I go to stand in the street outside the studio and smoke three cigarettes end to end. No one else is in the little studio at this hour, and the thought of the stylus drawing nearer and nearer to the emptiness after the last groove of the song, without me there to make the segue, thrills me and keeps me from thinking about everything else. And then when I am thrilled enough, I drop the third cigarette and rush back into the studio, with the stumbling, happy urgency of someone who has heard the milk on the stove begin to boil over. I play this game pretty often. Sometimes I make it, sometimes there’s a terrible pause.

At midnight I shake hands with Jean-Marc, le Jazz-Maniac, who’s on his way in for his shift. Then I’m out and I echo along the street to the Metro and clatter down onto the empty platform. At the foot of an advertisement for a new American film, someone has scrawled a tangle of Farsi, a long, descending statement followed by three tiny exclamation points, and it looks to me like the notation for a difficult passage of music, a decrescendo. I catch the next-to-last train home and ride alone in the fluorescence the whole slow way. I’ve read all the advertisements, all the safety warnings and every damn word of French between the Europe and the Père-Lachaise stations a hundred times, and now reading them again makes me jumpy, impatient. I’m in a hurry because it’s late and we still have to pack for our trip to Brittany tomorrow. And when I get home, Roksana’s stretched out on the sofa with her eyes wide open and the two suitcases are lying empty on the living-room floor.

“Roksana,” I say, “I saw some Persian graffiti in the Metro again tonight.”

“I didn’t write it,” she says.

“Come on, let’s talk. Tell me some more about Iran.”

We’ve finished packing and we’re on the sofa, and I draw her big head down onto my lap; I hold it there. Her hair is always cool to the touch. The light in the living room, dim and pink through the heavy shade on the only lamp, tends to put us to sleep anyway, and now it’s 3 A.M.; Roksana is going under, eyelids fluttering. Every so often she stirs and struggles to free her hair from my twining fingers. She stiffens her neck, and against my thigh I feel the hardness of the muscles of her back. Now that I’ve mentioned Iran, she springs up and goes to perch on the other end of the sofa, black eyes, no nonsense. My lap feels cold.

“What about Iran?” she says. “Let’s not.”

“No, please.” I don’t really want to talk about Iran, either. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before, but what else is there? About the things someone would write on an advertisement in the Metro. “I don’t know. The shah, the ayatollah.”

“Tell me what you think,” she says, barely, and yawns, and there again are the three gold teeth I bought for her. I had heard that toothache can cause profound, moral sadness.

“As far as I could see, um, the shah was an asshole and they threw him out, but he died anyway. And then the ayatollah came in, and he’s an asshole, too. And a bunch of sweaty guys were running around throwing Coke cans and setting American flags on fire.”

“That’s it,” she says. She stands up, I watch her black knit dress gather around her hips, then fall, one instant of yellow boxers. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

Many things fill the distance between me and Roksana, and one of them is the nation of Iran. If you look at a map, I am the Caspian Sea, and she is the Persian Gulf. Once upon a time, I suppose, the whole place was underwater.

Roksana hoists our suitcases and we follow Hervé Heugel down onto the platform at Le Pouliguen, where we stand waiting for his mother or his father, I’m not sure which, to take us to the Heugel manor, or chateau, as Hervé calls it. I’ve known Hervé for about a month. He lives in our neighborhood in Paris and takes his morning coffee around the corner from our apartment, at the Voltaire, where one day he spotted my accent and my Velvet Underground T-shirt and, after I gave him the money for a croissant, became my friend. Though he looks kind of intellectual and severe — big forehead, pointy chin, rimless glasses, and a crew cut — it turns out that he has no interests other than the usual nonintellectual ones. He loves to laugh and to swear in English — the only English he knows. He and Roksana don’t like each other very much, although neither would ever say so. They can barely speak to each other, anyway. Hervé is arrogant, callous, and I often feel myself getting on his nerves, but he knows his garage bands of the late sixties, and he knows the city, and sometimes he drives me around Paris on the back of his motor scooter, his thin scarf flapping in my face. I think that if I met someone like Hervé in America, I wouldn’t make friends with him, but there are no people like him in America. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn’t have to understand what you feel, and I don’t expect it. It’s enough if he understands what you just said.

We can smell the sea now, and I look around eagerly at the tiny cars, the embracing families, the ancient candy machine rusting next to the men’s room, and at the low brown houses and scrub fields that surround the train station.

“She is there,” says Hervé. He pushes his stern little glasses up his nose, drops his Adidas duffel. When his mother reaches us, he takes her in his arms, gets it on both cheeks, and then presents us. His mother is short, a bit wrinkled but fine-featured, with motionless hair.

“Ah, the little Americans,” she says uncertainly. “Brine.”

“Brian. Brian Blumenthal,” says Hervé, fairly well. “And — Roksana — Khairzada.”

“Brine,” says Madame Heugel, and she takes my hand, a complex expression on her face — a smile-frown, or a polite sneer. Or just a face that is uncomfortable with our names, and with our presence, and with my wife, and with her own son. whom, I know, she considers lazy, sly, and overly fond of Americans, particularly of American girls.

She asks her son if we speak French; I answer for both of us. “I do, my wife regrets that she doesn’t.” Then Hervé takes her arm and off they go, speaking French, and we follow.

“She hates me,” Roksana says quietly.

“No, she doesn’t. Why do you say that?”

“It’s all right, I don’t care. She can hate me.”

I try to pull her to me, and I’m about to say again those three helpless words when she stops short.

“Look,” she says.

Behind the scratched display window of the candy machine is a brand of chocolate bar with an English name: Big Nuts. Roksana laughs. I buy one and put it in my pocket, and when we reach the Heugel Renault, I am still smiling.

“Oh, what beautiful teeth,” says Madame Heugel.

“Yes, they’re like that — American teeth,” says Hervé.

We eat outside, at a long table, and lunch is a mountain of steamed shrimp, a stacked cord of fresh asparagus, cider, and bread. Hervé’s father, who looks like Hervé—thin with a large head and a sharp nose — tells us in French about his trip to New York City in 1968. I am delighted by his account of a misadventure in “les Bronx,” and everything goes well until I notice that my plate is the only one on which mounts a pile of tails, shells, rosy filaments, and shrimp heads; Hervé and his parents are eating the entire shrimp, unpeeled. Roksana will not eat shrimp.

“No one told me what kind of a neighborhood I would have to walk through to get to the Cloisters,” says Monsieur Heugel, struggling with the word. He has shot five small fowl that morning and seems to be in fine spirits; I saw the brown and iridescent-green pile of birds on the kitchen table. “Harlem! Think of that! Full of blacks! Did I care?”

“Yes,” Hervé says.

“No, I did not. I walked right through. On my way home I had an appetite, I stopped at a little coffee shop, I bought a sandwich, I sat right down on the curb, in Harlem, and ate it. No one bothered me.” He smiles at his wife, who probably hears this story every time the Heugels feed an American, and she smiles and reaches to move his sleeve out of the butter dish. “I have nothing against blacks; you see.”

“Since when?” Hervé turns to me. “He’s completely prejudiced against blacks. Blacks and Arabs.”

Right away he puts an embarrassed hand to his mouth, and we all turn to look at Roksana — myself included, which makes me ashamed — who has no idea of what’s been said and continues calmly to eat her asparagus and bread, eyes to her plate. While Monsieur Heugel protests that he has known several Arabs who were very worthwhile fellows and, it must be said, skilled businessmen, and Hervésnorts and puts away fistfuls of shrimp, I push back my chair.

Our table is spread in the grassy clos between two of the estate’s several houses. On my right is an ivy-covered stone building with a turret, five chimneys, and fabulous eaves — the house of Hervé’s family; on my left, across the lawn, is one of the larger outbuildings, a brown barn that has been converted into a guesthouse. All around our table are bees and butterflies and giant oaks, the air smells lightly of manure and salt, and across from me, in the distance behind Monsieur Heugel, is the bay, filled with sails. I watch Roksana chew, closed, dark, mute, immovable, and I think: I am a fool.

“Oh, the little American,” says Madame Heugel, pointing delicately with her fork at my plate. “He will not eat the heads!”

They laugh, and Roksana looks up.

“In America,” I say, “it’s unlucky to eat them.” I fold another buttery stalk of asparagus into my mouth. The Heugels shoot another round of glances at my staring wife.

“Monsieur Heugel,” I say, “how many centuries has this manor been in your family?”

“Hervé’s grandfather purchased the manor in 1948,” says Madame Heugel.

Everyone laughs much louder this time. Roksana looks up again, her face blank, her jaw working, and for one moment, and for the first time, I feel like striking her.

I excuse myself, leaving Roksana to sit at their table, to suck up all their joy and conversation like a black hole. I hate all of them.

Upstairs, I sit in the tub and hold the hand nozzle over my head for a few minutes, showering off the train ride and the strange conversation, which, after all, I may have misunderstood. Then I go back into the bedroom the Heugels have given us, which smells of cedar. With a towel on my head I step over to one of the lozenge-shaped windows and look outside, onto the yard, where the table is still covered with the wreckage of lunch and where Hervé and his father drink Calvados from little glasses. Roksana and Hervé’s mother have disappeared, perhaps into the house, and I have this brief, stupid, happy fantasy of the two of them doing the dishes together, working in smooth and wordless concert.

When I take from my suitcase the new dress shirt, white with coral pinstripes, that I bought specially at an outlet store in the rue du Commerce, because Hervé had promised to take us to a Breton club where the women would go wild over my accent, the shirt is wrinkled and my shaving cream has exploded all across the collar. I sit down on the bed, looking for a long time at the pale blue smear of foam and trying to remember the word for clothes iron.

The stairs creak. Roksana’s face is in the doorway for half a second, and I think she’s coming into the bedroom. I toss aside the spoiled shirt, but she turns and I hear her start to creak back downstairs. I shut my eyes. “Roksana.”

Plates in the kitchen, laughter outside.

“I need to be alone.”

“Please come here.”

When I open my eyes she’s in the doorway again. This time I see the anger on her face, and before the words come out of her mouth I know, with a rush of bent happiness, that we’re going to have a fight, after a year and a half of wedlock as empty and quiet as a dark theater.

“I want to leave,” she says, coming into the room and slamming the door behind her. “I’m not welcome here. You stay. They like you.”

“You’re as welcome as you choose to be.”

“No. Bullshit. They were laughing. They were laughing at me. I could tell. You were laughing at me, you bastard.”

“You bitch.”

I’m still sitting down, and Roksana steps so close to me now that the tips of her pointed black shoes come down, hard, on my toes. She throws a shadow across me.

“Please, don’t,” I say.

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“You’re here because it’s Bastille Day. You’re here to have fun. Ouch! Can’t you ever have fun?”

Roksana looks down upon me, her eyes perfectly dry and black, and says that she hates fun more than anything else in this world, and I see that I misunderstood her when she said she didn’t know why she was here, because I thought that by “here” she just meant in Brittany.

“You sound like Khomeini,” I say, trying to slide my pinched feet out from under her shoes, and reeling somehow offended, as though I were responsible for all of us, and for the fireworks and feast days and surfeits of the entire fun hemisphere. I manage to free my feet, but now she grabs me by the ears and pulls, and it hurts.

“What do you know about Khomeini? What do you know about me? I am not fun. Do you think to run away from Iran was fun? From my mother? From the bodies of my family?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, still angry. “Fine. Go. Go back. All I have to do is say the word to Mr. Immigration and you can go right back to the land of seriousness.”

“You won’t.”

“I might,” I say, and think, well, I could. But I can’t stand the frightened, stubborn way she has narrowed her eyes or the way the room and the air between us seems filled with the cheesy smell of blackmail. I look down and my gaze falls upon the blue on my shirt collar. “You said I should have charged you. I’m charging you now.”

There is no human sound from downstairs, which means, I suppose, that the Heugels have been listening to our raised foreign voices. Roksana sits down beside me, rubbing softly now at the sides of my head. Her shoulders droop, and her little pink earrings swing back and forth like the clappers of two invisible bells.

“What is Bastille Day, anyway?”

“It’s like the Fourth of July.”

“Beer and noise,” says my wife, the ayatollah of love, remembering last year in Texas with an unanswerable frown. This year, for us, there was no Fourth of July. I woke up on the fifth, feeling guilty and strange for having forgotten, and went alone to the Burger King on the Champs-Elysées.

“I’m sorry, Brian Blumenthal,” she says at last. “I can’t do it.”

Dinner, from discussion to drinks to preparation, from further drinks to further discussion to eating, from the time we passed around five kinds of cheese for dessert to the time we wearily threw down our napkins and drank a bit more, took five hours, and now, stunned by food, I’m drifting with Hervé and his family along the heights of the cliff town of Kerguen, where we’ve come to see the fireworks. Roksana has stayed behind. The last orange light of the day flows across the houses and across the faces of the Heugels, and in the coolness, the clouds of gnats and fireflies and the smell of the nearby farms grow denser. I’ve drunk too much brandy, understood too little talk, and, as night falls around us, I feel deaf and blind. Only my nose is alive, with mown fields, livestock, low tide.

The townspeople are all out-of-doors, strolling from the place to the cliff’s edge and back, shaking hands, waiting for the display to begin; and the children and careful fathers fill the wait with match flares, loud firecracker pops and whistles and laughter, just as in the United States. But there’s that difference I always feel in French crowds, a lack of excitement that is not exactly boredom, but like an air of age, of deep habit, even among the children, as though these same five hundred people have been coming to stand and talk together forever and ever. A platform for dancing has been built, and it stands empty and brightly lighted at one end of the place, surrounded by loudspeakers and tricolors.

We hear the first commanding bang from across the inlet and lift our eyes. The fireworks are fireworks; they spray and glitter and lightly move me like every display of fireworks I have seen in every July I remember, and lingering octopi of smoke float over our heads. During the applause and cries after the long last outburst, Hervé takes my arm and pulls me down along the cliffs, where we kick stones out into the water, and he surprises me by asking if there is anything wrong. I try to find the French for it; I tell him about all the useless gold in her downturned mouth.

Hervé says, “Oh la la,” which I didn’t think Frenchmen ever really said; and in a language that is always wistful, it is the most wistful phrase that I have heard, and I start to cry.

And then he says, “Why did you marry her?” although he already knows the practical and bureaucratic answer to this question.

We walk farther and stand high above the water on the last two feet of Kerguen. “She is not pretty. Elle a une drôle de tête. And she is so gloomy, it must be said. No, it’s a good thing you did, perhaps. I see that. But it’s an arrangement. No? And she understands. You are the one who makes the mess.”

There are a few stray firecrackers, then a loud whomp, then laughter.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it irritates me to see you made a fool.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“But then I remember that you’re an American.”

They start the music down in the place, and before I can say anything, Hervé moves slowly back away from the edge, and looks down on the town. I go to stand beside him, and we watch the distant dancing to a French song that sounds like it’s from the fifties, a ballad about a girl named Aline. The kids hold each other and rock, barely, from foot to foot.

Ah, le slow,” says Hervé, tying the sleeves of his sweater more firmly around his neck. “This is an ancient song. It gives me nostalgia, this music.”

“Me, too,” I say.

“Do you dance with your wife?”

“I could never get my arms all the way around her,” I say.

We laugh. I sniffle and wipe my nose, and I’m on the point of asking him for advice, for the cool, sober shrug of French counsel that will brace me for the act of surrendering up my wife, when the wind shifts, and the reckless note of the saxophone is carried off to the east. In the sudden absence of music, it comes to me that Hervé has already told me what to do, and that I must follow, until the finish, the foolish policy of all my hopeless race.

Smoke

IT WAS A FRIGID May morning at the end of a freak cold snap that killed all the daffodils on the lawns of the churches of Pittsburgh. Matt Magee sat in the front seat of his old red Metropolitan, struggling with the French cuffs of his best shirt. This was a deliberate and calm struggle. He did not relish the prospect of Drinkwater’s funeral, and he was in no hurry to go in. He had already sat and fiddled and listened to the radio and rubbed lovingly at his left shoulder for ten minutes in the parking lot of St. Stephen’s, watching the other mourners and the media arrive. Magee was not all that young anymore, and it seemed to him that he had been to a lot of funerals.

On the evening that Eli Drinkwater wrecked his Fleetwood out on Mt. Nebo Road, Magee had been sent down to Buffalo after losing his third consecutive start, in the second inning, when he got a fastball up to a good right-handed hitter with the bases loaded and nobody out. He’d walked two batters and hit a third on the elbow, and then he had thrown the bad pitch after shaking off Drinkwater’s sign for a slider, because he was so nervous about walking in a run.

Eli Drinkwater had been a scholarly catcher, a redoubtable batsman, and a kind, affectionate person, but as Magee lost his stuff their friendship had deteriorated into the occasional beer at the Post Tavern and terse expressions of pity and shame. Little Coleman Drinkwater was Magee’s godson, but he hadn’t seen the boy in nearly four years. It was the necessity of encountering Drinkwater’s widow and son at the funeral, along with his erstwhile teammates, that kept Magee hunched over behind the wheel of his car in an empty corner of the church parking lot, rolling his cuffs and unrolling them, as the car filled with the varied exhalations of his body. For eleven and a half hours now, he’d been working on a quart of Teacher’s. He was not attempting to get roaring drunk, or to assuage his professional disgrace and the sorrow of Drinkwater’s death, but with care and a method to poison himself. It was not only from Drinkwater that he had drifted apart in recent years; he seemed to have simply drifted apart, like a puff of breath. He was five years past his best season, and his light was on the verge of winking out.

At last Magee started to shiver in the cold. He fastened his pink tourmaline cuff links, turned off the radio, and climbed out of the car. He was nearly six feet five, and it always gave other people a good deal of pleasure to watch him unfold himself out of the tiny Metropolitan. According to the settlement of his divorce from his wife, Elaine, he had ended up with it, even though it had been hers before. Elaine had ended up with everything else. Thanks to a bad investment Magee had made in an ill-fated chain of baseball-themed, combination laundromat-and-crabhouses, this consisted of less than seventy-one thousand dollars, a king- size mobile home in Monroeville with a dish and a Jacuzzi bathtub, and a five-year-old Shar-Pei with colitis. Magee retrieved his sober charcoal suit jacket and navy tie from the minute rear bench of the Metropolitan and slowly knotted the necktie. The tie had white clocks on it, and the suit was flecked with a paler gray. He had lost his overcoat — a Hart Schaffner & Marx — on the flight down to Florida that spring, and had hoped he wouldn’t be needing one again. Just before Magee slammed the car door, he paused a moment to study his two small suitcases, side by side on the passenger seat, and allowed himself to imagine carrying them to any one of a thousand destinations other than Buffalo, New York. Then he checked his hair in the window, patted it in two places, and headed across the parking lot toward the handsome stone church.

It was warm inside St. Stephen’s, and there was a wan smell of woolens and paper-whites and old furniture polish. Magee took up a place behind the last row of pews, over by the far wall, among some reporters he knew well enough to hope that they would not be embarrassed to see him. The arrangements for the funeral had been made without fanfare, and although the church was filled from front to back, there were still not as many people as Magee had expected. The minister, a handsome old man in a gilded chasuble, murmured out over the scattered heads of Drinkwater’s family and teammates. There was to be a memorial ceremony later in the week which ought to pack them in. By then the newspaper eulogies would have worked their way past shock and fond anecdote and begun to put the numbers together, and people would see what they had lost. Drinkwater had led the league in home runs the past two years, and his on-base average over that period was.415. He had walked three times as often as he struck out, and had last year broken the season record for bases stolen by a catcher — not that this had been all that difficult. The lifetime won-lost percentage for games he had caught, which to Magee’s mind was the most important statistic of all, was close to.600; had he not been required to catch most of the fifty-odd games Magee had lost during that period, it would have been even better. Drinkwater had been cut down in his prime, all right. And that was what the numbers would show.

“Too bad it couldn’t have been you instead of him,” said a gravelly female voice at his ear. He turned, startled at hearing his own thought echoed aloud. It was Beryl Zmuda, in a fur coat, and she was only kidding, in her gravelly way. Beryl was a sports columnist for the Erie morning paper, and she had known Magee ever since Magee had come up in that city, with the Cardinals organization. A laudatory article by Beryl, written after Magee’s first professional shutout, had gotten things rolling for him eleven years before. In that game Magee had struck out nine batters in a row and made the last out himself by bare-handing a line drive. No one was more disappointed by what had become of Magee’s career than Beryl Zmuda.

“Hey, Ber,” said Magee in a whisper. “When do I get to go to your funeral?”

“It was last year. You missed it.” She did not trouble to whisper. She wore a myrtle-green hat with a heron feather which he had seen many times before. “You look terrible. But as usual that’s a lovely suit.”

“Thanks.”

They shook hands, and then Magee bent down to kiss her. She sniffled and leaned forward to accept his kiss. Her pointed nose was still red from the cold, and he found her cheeks a little wet. The sable coat felt delightful and smelled both of warm fur and of Quelques Fleurs, and he had to force himself to let go of her. They had slept together for two months during the minor-league season of 1979, and Magee still held a fond regard for her. Her uncle had been a wartime pitcher for the St. Louis Browns; she knew baseball, especially pitchers, and she could write a nice line. Because of her name, she favored the color green, and under the coat her funeral suit was a worn gabardine the somber hue of winter seawater.

“What a shame it is,” he said, wiping at his own eyes. Magee was a sucker for weeping women, and lachrymose when he had been drinking.

“He had a great April,” said Beryl. Her Pittsburgh accent was flat and angular. She had fifteen years on Magee, and it was starting to tell. Her hair, blond as an ashwood bat, was entirely the product of technology now, and her face was looking papery and translucent and pinched at the corners. But she still had nice legs, with the pomaceous calves of a Pittsburgh girl. She had been raised on the steep staircases of Mt. Washington.

“He did,” said Magee. “Three-thirty-one with seven home runs and eighteen ribbies.”

“Hey, how about you?” She looked him up and down as though he had just gotten out of the hospital. “How’s the arm?”

He shrugged; the arm was fine. Magee had a problem with his mechanics. He had become balky and as wild as a loose fire hose. Although on the hill he felt the same as he had since the age of fourteen, jangling and irritable and clearheaded, some invisible element of his delivery had changed. The coaches felt that it was the fault of his right foot, which seemed to have grown half a shoe size in recent years. Whatever the cause, he could no longer find what Eli Drinkwater had called the wormhole. Drinkwater had picked up this term from Dr. Carl Sagan’s television program. A pitched ball passing through the wormhole disappeared for an instant and then reappeared somewhere else entirely, at once right on target and nowhere near where it ought to be, halfway across the galaxy, right on the edge of the black. Magee’s repeated, multiseasonal failure to find the wormhole had bred fear, and fear caution; he had undergone some horrendous shellings.

“It’s fine,” said Magee, rubbing at his left shoulder. “I’m going up to Buffalo this afternoon. Right after this.” He nodded in the general direction of the altar, before which sat the closed casket that held the body of Eli Drinkwater. It was a fancy black casket, whose size and finish and trim recalled those of the massive American automobiles its occupant had preferred.

The pastor finished his bit, and Gamble Wicklow, the Pittsburgh manager, rose to his feet and approached the pulpit. He was an eloquent speaker with a degree in law from Fordham — his sending down of Magee had been a masterpiece of regret and paternal solicitude — but he looked tired and elderly today. Magee could not make out what he was saying. Gamble had been sitting beside Roxille Drinkwater, in the foremost pew, and now there was a gap between Roxille and little Coleman. The sight of this gap was poignant, and Magee looked away.

“Will you look at that,” said Beryl. She went up on tiptoe to get a clearer view.

“I can’t,” said Magee.

“Look how Roxille’s looking at that casket.”

The reporters on either side of them, saddened, serious as the occasion required, were still rapacious and insatiable. They turned toward the grieving widow with the simultaneity of starlings taking wing. There was indeed something odd in the face and the posture of Roxille Drinkwater. Roxille was a pretty woman, a little heavy. Her russet hair was pulled tightly against her head and tied at the back. She wore no veil, and the look in her eyes was angry and complicated, but Magee thought he recognized it. Her husband had blown away, out of her life, like an empty wrapper, like a cloud of smoke. She was wondering how she could ever have thought he was real. As Magee watched she began to rock a little in the pew, back and forth. It was hardly noticeable at first, but as Wicklow’s voice rose to praise her dead husband for his constancy and steadiness, and to foretell the endurance of his presence in the game, Roxille’s rocking gathered force, and Magee knew he would have to do something.

Once, on an airplane, Magee had seen Roxille lose it. It had been during a night flight from New York, where Drinkwater had gone to collect an award, to Pittsburgh, aboard a careering, rattling, moaning little two-propeller plane. Roxille had begun by rocking in her seat, rocking and staring into the darkness outside the window of the plane. She had finished by shrieking and praying aloud, and then slapping a stewardess who attempted to calm her down. Now the people sitting in the pews around Roxille exchanged worried looks. Joey Puppo, the G.M., was frowning, and glancing frequently toward the reporters, who had begun to mutter and click their tongues. Magee saw that she intended, whether she knew it or not, to hurl herself across the gleaming black lid of the coffin.

“She won’t do it,” said Beryl, in a voice that just qualified as a whisper. She had little esteem for other women, in particular for baseball wives.

“This is a funeral,” said a television sports reporter, a former outfielder named Leon Lamartine who once at Wrigley had knocked one of Magee’s sliders — a high, hard one that was not quite hard enough — out onto Waveland Avenue, under a rosebush and into pictures that were shown on national TV. His tone seemed to imply not that decorum would prevent Roxille from doing something outrageous but that anything was possible at funerals.

“Hey, c’mon, you guys,” said Magee. “Keep it down.” But he cracked his knuckles and worked his shoulder blades a couple of times, just in case.

Gamble Wicklow was winding down now. His chin had settled into his chest, and he was commending the departed soul of Eli Drinkwater to the Man in charge of putting together the Great Roster in the Sky. Roxille licked her lips. Her eyelids fluttered. She reached out tentatively toward the stylish coffin. Three dozen cameras and recording devices turned upon her. Magee moved.

“Where you going, Matty?” said Beryl, whirling. “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

“… now that Eli Drinkwater has forever become, as I think we may truly say, All-Star,” said Gamble Wicklow, putting a period to his elegy with a sad smile.

“I told you,” Leon Lamartine said, pointing.

Magee had delayed too long — his timing was irrevocably off — and his initial smooth glide down the aisle toward the first pew became a two-way foot race as Gamble stepped down from the pulpit. Magee was forced to run while pretending that he was still walking, all the time trying to keep his head down and remain inconspicuous. The result was an unintentional but skilled approximation of the gait of Groucho Marx. Only the fact that Gamble and the next eulogist collided by the entrance to the chancel allowed Magee to occupy Gamble’s place in the pew. Magee put his left arm around Roxille, as though to comfort her, and wrestled her back into her seat.

“Take it easy,” said Magee in his softest voice.

When Gamble Wicklow saw that Magee had usurped his seat, he frowned, gave an odd little wave, then turned and trudged managerially up the aisle. His suit was of old tweed and fit him ill. The nave of St. Stephen’s filled with rumor and alarm and a faint, funereal laughter.

“Magee. Oh, Magee. What in the hell am I going to do?” Roxille said quietly. Her voice was almost inaudible when she said the word “hell.” Her eyes were bloodshot and lively. She was not really looking at Magee but around him, at her son, who had turned and clambered to his knees in the pew to see what was going on back there among the cameras. Coleman had grown to be a good-looking little boy, long-limbed and as dark as his father. His hair had been cut very short, and, according to the fashion, a design had been carved into the stubble at the side or his head; it looked like a couple of eyeballs.

Magee put his hand on Roxille’s forearm. She had on an expensive-looking black knit dress with a black lace collar and noticeable gores. She smelted of Castile soap.

“I don’t know, Roxie,” he said. He blushed. He felt very out of place, here in the front row, and he was ashamed to have gone so long without visiting or speaking to her, but he was glad that he had kept her off national TV. “You’ll get along.”

Roxille shuddered and took a deep breath. She closed her wild eyes and then opened them carefully. The minister had regained the pulpit and managed, by dint of looking pale and disappointed, to quiet the murmuring. He then introduced the next eulogist, a writer from Sports Illustrated. This man had started out working at the same Erie newspaper as Beryl, and not all that long ago. He was talented and he had done well for himself. Beryl hated him, in a good-humored way, and this led Magee to wonder why he had not hated Eli Drinkwater, whose fortunes had begun to rise so soon after Magee lost sight of the wormhole. He looked at Drinkwater’s coffin, now no more than a few feet away from him. The Teacher’s had worn off, and all at once he felt incurably tired. It occurred to him that you could probably tell a joke whose punch line involved a choice between being dead and being outrighted to Buffalo. It didn’t seem like much of a choice, but he supposed that Buffalo held a slight edge. On the other hand, at least Drinkwater didn’t have to know that he had died.

He had the vague impression that something was disturbing his exhaustion and then realized that it was Coleman Drinkwater, pulling on his sleeve. The little boy pointed at the coffin. He was watching it as though he had been told that it was going to perform a trick.

“Is my daddy in there?” he said, in a clear, thin, terribly normal voice.

Magee and Coleman looked at each other for what became several seconds. Magee, who had no children, searched for the correct way to answer. He wanted to say something that would be fair to Coleman and yet would not make him afraid. He wished that his head were clearer and that he were not so damn tired. He felt as though everyone in the church were waiting on his reply. His forehead grew damp and he opened his mouth, but he said nothing. Finally, helpless, he put an arm around Coleman’s small shoulders, and turned back to the speaker in the pulpit. The little boy suffered his godfather’s arm upon him, and as the funeral dragged on he even rested his head against Magee’s rib cage. Presently he fell asleep.

After a while, Magee himself, who had been awake for some thirty-two hours, drifted into an easy sleep. He dreamed his usual dream, the one in which he had found his stuff again and was on the mound at Three Rivers throwing seven different kinds of smoke. The sunshine was fragrant and the grass brilliant. When he awoke, feeling refreshed, the funeral was over and the coffin had already been wheeled out. Beryl was standing in front of him, her arms folded, looking as she had once looked on bailing him out of the Erie County Prison. Magee smiled, rubbed his eyes, and then realized that Coleman and Roxille had gone. He spun around in time to see the little boy being towed by his mother out the front door of the church. Coleman smiled across the empty pews at Magee, who saw from this distance that the design shaved into the side of the little boy’s head was not two eyeballs. It was Eli Drinkwater’s uniform number, the double zero.

“Poor kid,” said Beryl. “I heard what he asked you. God. I almost lost it.”

“I know,” said Magee, scratching his chin. He could not seem to remember what his reply had been, or if he had said anything at all.

“So,” said Beryl, sitting down beside him and taking hold of his throwing hand. She began, with a firm, nursely touch, to massage it. The backs of her hands hadn’t aged very much at all, and Magee, reeling nostalgic, watched them for a while as they worked him over. A soft lock of her platinum hair brushed against his cheek. “So. What are you going to do? Buffalo? You’re really going to let them do that to you?”

“I want to pitch, Ber. I have to get my mechanics back. I think it’ll be a little easier in Triple A.”

Beryl tightened her grasp on his hand and looked at him. Her face was neither incredulous nor mocking; she only bit her lip and wrinkled the bridge of her nose. Beryl’s nose, though small, could be expressive of great sadness.

“Magee,” she said. “Matty. Maybe I’m wrong to even put this thought in your head. I know how hard you’re trying, Matty, but — what if they’re just gone, baby?” Her voice cracked sweetly as she said this. “Have you ever thought of that?”

Magee withdrew his pitching hand and flexed it a couple of times. He watched it with a puzzled expression, as though it were a new model, of uncertain capacity. Then he looked away from it, up toward the ceiling of the church, and tried, for the last time, to remember if he had answered Coleman Drinkwater, and what he had told him.

“Yes,” he said to the empty choir.

Millionaires

AT ONE TIME HARRY and I shared everything; it is an error common to fast friendship. We idolized the same artists, movies, and ballplayers (particularly Cornell, The Conversation, and Madlock) and liked our food — even our breakfasts — with equally generous garnishes of the Vietnamese hot sauce we purchased at Tran’s on Murray Avenue. We wore each other’s clothes and merged our record collections. The expenses on our apartment and the grocery bills we paid with one another’s money, spending in a rough and free rotation until both of us were broke. The one thing we were unable to share — of course — was female companionship. When Harry began to sleep with Ruthie Louise Dollar or Atalanta Chin, or I with Evelyn Smrek, we did our best to stay above it, and made nervous jokes about the young woman and about the beast with three backs, but a shadow would fall across our friendship for the duration of the affair.

Nevertheless, Harry and I were still living together after the advents and ascensions of a good dozen girlfriends, and there was a special shelf above the radiator in the bathroom on which we displayed a tortoiseshell barrette, a gold Star of David on a chain, and a plaster impression of Ruthie Louise’s snaggled lower teeth, made by her orthodontist when she was in junior high, which had somehow come into Harry’s possession. I regret to say that in conversation we took a good deal of pride in our friendship’s proven invulnerability to women; and I kept to myself the potentially disruptive information that I was in love with his newest girlfriend, Kim Trilby, and that there were many Saturday nights during the winter they were together upon which, as I lay alone and shivering on my futon in the empty house, the thought of Harry and Kim sleeping spoon-wise and naked in Kim’s hot bedroom made me wish that he were dead.

I was working at the time as a disk jockey for a failing A.O.R. station that not long afterward went all-polka and cornered a small but solid share of the market. There was a high-watt, long-established rock-and-roll station two point six notches to the right, and no one listened to WDAN except, I imagined, people in hotel rooms who chose it on their clock radio for their wakeup call on the morning they left Pittsburgh forever. I had a Sunday-to-Friday midnight-to-six slot that wrecked my social life but afforded me the opportunity to talk a lot of outrageous nonsense in a variety of voices and now and then slip in a cut by Blurt or the Virgin Prunes without fear that anyone might hear it and complain. On the air I became once more an only child in his room on a rainy Saturday afternoon with his dolls and his record player, temporarily unaware of the weight of loneliness upon me.

Very early one Tuesday morning in March — I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner — I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim’s, over on Beacon, but I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry’s chronic tightfistedness — we were responsible for half of the heating bill — and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years’ friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry.

“Hey!” I said, walking through the empty living room — we had one chair. I imagined that Harry would be in the kitchen, fixing breakfast, but there was no reply. I let my coat and scarf fall to the floor around me, listening for his footsteps or his voice talking on the telephone. Just as I was about to call his name again, there was the sound of a breaking dish or glass from the basement. We were on the first floor of a two-story house that had been made into a duplex, and the way to the basement was through our apartment. There was another explosion of glass, then another, then several more in rapid succession, as though Harry had set a tow of tumblers along the top of the washing machine and were now blowing them off with an air rifle. He did not own an air rifle, however, and I ran, almost falling, down the steps, knowing that at their base I would find my friend heartbroken and half in the bag.

In fact, I found him in just his boxer shorts and ski cap, holding a half-empty bottle of George Dickel in his right hand and one of my late mother’s Franciscan dinner plates in his left. His left arm was raised and cocked at the elbow, and he held the plate as for a flea-flicker into the end zone. The service for twelve was part of my mother’s legacy to me and she had intended me to present it to whatever unfortunate woman might become my bride. On the concrete floor all about him lay one hundred and twenty-seven shards of consolation. I knew at once that he’d split up with Kim; I had seen him in the mood to shatter things many times before. As usual he wore a smile, peculiar to this mood, that combined the glee of the vandal with the grim, self-loathing amusement of the drunk. The ski cap was pulled down crookedly over one eye, and this, when he whirled toward me and brandished the plate and the bottle of whiskey, gave him a piratical air. He was a big fellow, wore a full black beard, and his left eye, I saw, had been badly blackened.

“Well, she’s all yours, Vince!” he said, in an ugly voice.

“It’s my bedtime,” I said, suddenly very tired. “Why are you doing this now?”

Harry was always considerate of my hours — he suffered from intermittent insomnia, and held sleep in high esteem — and he set the dish down on the floor with a drunken gentleness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess Kim dumped me.”

“You guess?”

“It’s one of those.”

“You mean you might have dumped her.”

“It’s possible.”

“Did she give you that shiner?” Not too long before this, Kim and a baseball bat had broken up a knife fight at the bar where she worked, the Squirrel Cage — maybe you saw that jerk Snake Fleming walking around with his head all bandaged — and she had a reputation, despite her size, for being pretty good with her fists.

“What shiner?” said Harry. He took a long swallow from the bottle of Dickel. It went down a little rough, and this seemed to sober him up for a minute. He looked around him at the wreckage of my mother’s dishes and frowned.

“It was the toys,” he said at last.

Harry was the director of research and development for Other Worlds, Inc., a Pittsburgh firm that manufactured what its advertisements called “playthings for the unusual child,” or, as Harry described them, “toys for kids nobody will like in high school.” It was a small firm, and Harry constituted the entire department. The president and other half of the firm was an elderly Orthodox man named Mr. Levinsky, a thirties socialist and tri-state sales representative for Piatt & Munk, or Funk & Wagnalls — I forget which — who now devoted his days to driving all over the eastern seaboard attending customs auctions and buying up abandoned shipments of whatever looked interesting and cheap. All manner of odd and useless items, in huge lots, are auctioned off every day in the ports of the East: twelve hundred hydraulic fan blades, nine thousand spools of orange thread, fifty-two cases of baby-food jars, a half-mile of plastic forks still on their sprues. Mr. Levinsky and Claude, the company driver, would return with these prizes, in a drug-bust-impounded Mercedes truck that Mr. Levinsky had also bought at auction, to the Other Worlds warehouse, in Monroeville.

It was Harry’s job to attempt to play with each item, to discover if it had any “intrinsic ludic value,” as Mr. Levinsky put it, apart from its intended function. Harry would devise some way of building with it, or decorating his body, or annoying his elders, and then the item would be packed in an attractive box and sold nationally for $24.95 at museum gift shops and at toy stores with track lighting and Scandinavian-sounding names. Harry’s greatest success so far had been Odd Ject. You’ve seen it — an assortment of polystyrene balls, golf tees, and those multicolored cocktail toothpicks that have a lock of curly cellophane hair at one end. This “Self-Generating Deconstruction Kit” had caught on the Christmas before, selling out eighteen thousand units in two and a half weeks, and had earned him a raise and a rare handshake from Mr. Levinsky. The chief drawback of his otherwise enviable line of work was that it led Harry to regard every object around him — his shoes, a box of brads, a woman’s birth-control-pill dispenser — as a potential plaything. In the middle of a serious conversation about the Supreme Court or chlamydia, you would catch him poking straightened paper clips into a sponge, staging a mock naval battle with dry macaroni, or rolling his pocket lint into the shapes of animals and setting them on parade. I mention the pill dispenser because this was the item that had precipitated his break with Kim.

“They make really cool spaceships,” said Harry. He sagged to his knees and began to sweep up the broken dishes with his hands. “When you turn the dial, you can pop the pills out like little, uh, hormone bombs. Pow. Pow. An entire population suddenly unable to conceive.”

“Harry,” I said. “Come on upstairs. I’m going to bed now.”

“There’s this way you can make them shoot really far.”

“Leave the mess. Come on.”

I took him by the arm, guided him to the steps, and gave him a little push. He returned the push, more forcefully, and I fell backward. My head cracked against the floor and I heard within my skull the sound of a rock hitting a sheet of taut aluminum. I smelled blood in my nose and I imagined, for a half second, that I was about to pass away. I lived.

“Stay away from her,” he said. “I know what you have in mind.”

It was a while before I was able to speak. “You asshole,” I said. “I don’t have anything in mind.”

This was not, I realized as I said it, entirely true. I had already begun to form vague plans to unbutton Kim’s blouse, remove her cowboy boots, peel off her blue jeans, and lick her body from sole to crown. The pain in my head was all at once as nothing.

“Oh, my God, you’re bleeding, Vince,” said Harry. He extended a hand and then pulled me to my feet. I touched a finger to my nose and smiled at him.

“You just made a big mistake,” I said.

I awoke early that afternoon, showered, and performed my toilet with the care of a man intent on seduction. Kim worked as a waitress at the Squirrel Cage and did not go on until evening, and I expected to find her at home. I had come to believe in my interchangeability with Harry so completely that it did not occur to me that Kim would have any qualms about going to bed with a new partner while still in the midst of a painful breakup; I simply assumed that she would have me, as she would have had Harry, as though he’d called in sick and I were the equally qualified temporary sent by some Kelly Services of love. I had known her as long as he had, and we got along well. She was a thin, raspy-voiced woman with a sarcastic manner, expressive hands, and a respectable knowledge of what is sometimes known as industrial rock — a particular favorite of mine. I had taken her once to see my friend Lee Skirboll perform in a band called Hex Wrench, for which Lee beat on a steel filing cabinet with an assortment of golf clubs and spatulas while his partner sat in on tape deck, amplified shortwave radio, and a bank of old-fashioned Philco sine-wave generators supplied, without his knowing it, by Mr. Levinsky. Kim had enjoyed it, and, I now reminded myself, lathering my chin with increasing zeal, there had been a furtive kiss and hand squeeze in the instant before we’d gone into the bar, where we were rendezvousing with Harry, who liked only Debussy, DeFalla, and Erik Satie.

When I came out to the dining table — the heat was turned off again, and I wore my gloves and a hat — there was a note from Harry propped against the sugar bowl. “SORRY,” it read, “JESUS, WHAT A HEADACHE I HAVE, YOU MUST TOO. SORRY SORRY SORRY. H” As a matter of fact, I had a rather large lump on the back of my head, and a faint sensation of pain if I turned too quickly; otherwise I was all right. Beside the note were looped five dozen yards of very thin telephone wire, in seven colors with contrasting stripes, that Harry had been experimenting with recently for his long-planned masterpiece, Aporia — ran “inverted board game” whose rules changed unpredictably with each roll of the dice but whose outcome was always the same. I sat down with a cup of coffee and idly picked up a length of yellow-and-blue wire. I had grown up in a young community in which there was a continual construction of houses all through my youth, and I remembered finding this kind of wire at the building sites and twisting it into finger rings, single loops of wire — about that wide for Kim’s finger, I guessed — along which you wrapped little coils, like this, pressed together so that in the end each coil made a bead, yellow or blue. After ten minutes’ work I had a handsome piece, the sight of which recalled to me a hopeful love offering of my boyhood that had not been rejected. I slipped it into my pocket and went, almost skipping, out the front door.

It was much warmer outside than inside, and I soon shed my hat and gloves and stuffed them into the pocket of my coat. The sun shone most promisingly, there was a slight gasoline hint of summer traffic in the air, and on the lawn of the Methodist church on the corner I saw blades of early daffodils where a few days before there had been a crust of old snow. A warm breeze blew up along the sidewalk, and it seemed to me I had only to kick twice and thrust upward my chin in order to lift off the pavement and glide, touching down every twenty feet or so, toward the house of my slender love. People in cars had their windows rolled down, and I could hear the airy music from their radios as they passed. Now I unzipped my coat and rocked my head from side to side. The resultant ache was poignant and appropriate. Two elderly men emerged from Isaly’s, both of them biting into the first Klondikes of the season, and I sailed after them along Murray Avenue, listening as they argued about the potential of a good-hitting shortstop the Pirates had decided to promote from the minors. Oh, I thought, it is almost Opening Day!

When I arrived at Kim’s door I found to my surprise that I had lost the better part of my desire to sleep with her. It would be nice to see her, to sit down in her sunny kitchen and look at some absurd daytime program on the television — we had done that many times before — but I was so happy just then, slapping up the concrete steps with my coat flapping behind me and the warmth of my body rising up through my open collar in a fragrant column of air, that I didn’t think anything, not even taking her into my arms, could improve my mood. The sexual act, in prospect, seemed to offer only danger and regret.

I proceeded more cautiously up the three steps of her front porch and across to her front door, and as soon as I rang her doorbell I wished that I had not. I wavered a moment on the welcome mat, then fled back down the steps; but there was no time to get away without being seen. I looked this way, then that, turned back toward the door, turned away. I heard her tread in the hallway, her hand on the knob, and at the last possible moment I ducked between the concrete skirt of the porch and the low hedge of holly that concealed it, crouching in the dirt, in the narrow space between the prickling holly and the house. A thorn scratched my cheek as she opened the door, and it was all I could do to keep from cursing.

There was a long pause during which I had time to realize that I was crouching in a hard pile of snow and my butt was getting very wet. I heard Kim sniffle a few times, as though she were smelling me out, and then a beleaguered sigh.

“You have hat-head, Vince,” she said. “As usual.”

I rose, pulled the hat from my pocket, and put it back on my head. It might have been the hat — perhaps it was enchanted — or simply the sight of Kim in a long cable sweater that sagged at the neck and reached down to the tops of her knees; in any case, as soon as I saw her I wanted her again. Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.

“I slept in my hat,” I said. “As usual. Don’t ever let your life get to the point where you have to sleep with your hat on.”

“Come on in. It’s nice and warm.”

“I know it is.”

I followed her into the house and down her long front hallway to the kitchen, where the radio played and there was a smell of bay leaf, onion, and fresh dirt.

“I’m making lentil soup,” she said, turning to the stove and peering into a cast-iron pot. In the bulky sweater Kim looked plump and wifely; she who was so thin that Harry would sometimes clean and jerk her over his head and spin around calling, “Choppers! Incoming wounded!” At the time she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds. “This’ll be the last lentil soup of the winter, I guess.”

“Looks like it.”

“You can have some when it’s ready.”

“Thanks.”

“If you promise not to mention Harry.”

“I can promise that,” I said.

The old pink radio on the kitchen table emitted a familiar promo. Two bars of the psycho-kazoo opening to “Crosstown Traffic,” followed by the synthesized effect of a starship’s landing, and then my own voice, filtered and phased, sounding as though I were a twenty-seven-foot black man about to get very angry. “WDAN!” said my disturbing voice. “Huge Music!”

You’re the one who listens,” I said. In general I pretended that it did not trouble me to labor in the ratings cellar, but at the discovery that Kim tuned in to that doomed little station, I was moved and took it as incontestable proof of her rightness for me.

“Harry makes me,” she said.

She carefully straddled a kitchen chair and motioned for me to do the same. I sat. I looked at the ashtray between us, in which there were fifteen or sixteen bent butts. Kim smoked far too much, even for a waitress. Now she lit another.

“I’m going to have to stop,” she said, in a sad little voice, as though it had never occurred to her before.

“Sure you are.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Was he trashed when you got home?”

“Oh, no, not really,” I said.

“Don’t lie.”

“He was breaking my mother’s dishes in the basement.”

“Oh, boy.”

“And he had the heat on.”

She put down her cigarette, and her brown eyes got very wide and surprised.

Then she laughed, without sarcasm, with a happiness so genuine that I was taken aback. It was deep and caroling laughter, and it seemed to invite me to turn Harry, the idea of Harry, into a risible fool, to flatten him into a cartoon character and laugh him right out of her affections. This was the simple task before me.

“What’s so funny?” I said; the question sounded more harsh than I had intended.

“Nothing,” said Kim. She looked down at the coal of her cigarette and bit her lip.

“Kimberly Ellen Donna Marie Trilby,” I said. I went over to her chair and knelt on the floor beside her. She sat, looking at her cigarette and calmly crying. I didn’t know why she was crying, whether because Harry was gone or because I was still there, but I felt very sorry for her. Once in a while you will see a waitress like that, crying at the back of a restaurant or in the hallway by the phone, staring down at a monogrammed matchbook in her fingers, and consider for a second or two the untold hardness of a waitress’s life. I reached around and pulled her to me. There followed the briefest of struggles before she fell sprawling into my arms.

“Come with me,” she said, after a minute or two. She stood and led me down the hallway and into her bedroom. Her gait was too brisk to be seductive; she had some business to attend to. I had been in her bedroom many times before, had felt the thrill of seeing her white bedclothes and rows of empty shoes, but never with this acute a sense of being suffered, like a smelly old dog on a miserable night, just this once allowed to sleep indoors, on the still warm hearth — of being such a lucky dog.

On her bed there stood a large cardboard Seagram’s box, taped shut, and bearing, in Harry’s antic handwriting, the Magic Marketed label TREASURE.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

“I have no idea.” She looked at it as though it might go off any second. “He brought it over yesterday after work. Will you give it back to him for me?”

“He didn’t say what was in it?”

“I didn’t ask. I stopped asking questions about his junk a long time ago.”

“Because you didn’t love him anymore,” I said, taking hold of her chin and drawing her to my lips. At this mild demonstration of amorous force — an effect I have never been adept at pulling off — she put her knee into my stomach, firmly, and I fell gasping to the floor.

“I will always love Harry,” said Kim. “I will always, always love Harry.”

“I understand that,” I said.

“I’m sorry I kicked you.”

“Thanks,” I said, getting up. “I’m sorry, too. It was just all that kissing we did back there in the kitchen.”

“Sure it was.”

“Wait here,” I said. I sighed, as much to catch my breath as to register my impatience with her and with Harry’s goddam toys, then picked up the cardboard box and carried it out of the room.

“I know what to do with it,” I called over my shoulder.

“What?” she said, with a strange furrow in her voice. She followed me out of the door and laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. “What are you going to do with it? Vince?”

“You’ll see.”

The box was a good deal heavier than it looked, and I wondered, as I bore it out of the kitchen door and down the back steps, what might be in it, and why Harry had packed it all up in this way and left it sitting on Kim Trilby’s bed. The sun was still shining, there in the backyard amid the skinny poplars and the rusted-out Kelvinator with its door chained shut, and it was going to be a beautiful afternoon. I set the treasure down on the brittle grass and went into the cellar, where I had left the battered old spade I’d used to shovel the walk all that winter, ostensibly for the benefit of Kim’s upstairs landlady, Mrs. Colodny, who afterward would always feed me frozen kishkes from the KosherMart. The spade in question had got hidden, I saw, behind a stack of Harry’s boxes marked BEEHIVE PANELS and G.I. JOE HEADS in the far corner, but I got it out and went straight to work.

“Come on, Vince,” said Kim, calling to me from the back steps of her apartment. “That’s Mrs. Colodny’s dirt you’re messing up. Hey, Vince, come on. I get it, O.K.?”

I grinned at her and kept on. Digging is one of the most difficult of boring chores, if I have not transposed the adjectives, and it took me a good fifteen minutes of sweating and cursing, but when I finished I was wet and hot and exhilarated and the thing was three feet under the ground. Kim stayed where she was, hugging herself in that loose sweater and lighting a third cigarette with her second. I leaned on the spade, and for a moment we regarded one another across the lawn. I didn’t know what I had proved, exactly, and she probably didn’t know what had impressed her, but I had proved something, and she looked impressed. I let the spade fall, went to her, and rested my head against the doorjamb, breathing hard, and waited for Kim to throw herself, without regret, without apprehension, into my faithless embrace.

“What happens to it now?” she said, staring bitterly out into the sunny backyard at the black patch of earth I had uncovered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that would depend on what it is.” Perhaps, I speculated guiltily, Harry had packed up every note I’d ever left him, and all of the baseball cards and Playboys I had bought him when his asthma got bad, and the cigar box of ancient Inuit teeth from my trip to Alaska that he’d said he needed, and the French edition of Tropic of Cancer labeled, thrillingly, “Not to be taken into the U.S.A.,” which I’d picked up for him at the Bryn Mawr-Vassar bookstore on Winthrop Street one day. There might have been some pretty swell stuff in that box; I realized that.

“You don’t know,” she said. “I like that.” She grinned, as though she could be satisfied with this response, at least for an hour or two.

Early that evening, in her bedroom, she awoke with a start. She was trembling, and she felt so frail that I was afraid I had harmed her somehow in our thrashings and busculation, and when she lit a cigarette it frightened me to hear the rattle in her breast as she exhaled — a terrible sound like the shivering of withered leaves on a branch.

“Put out that cigarette and come on back to bed,” I cried.

“All right,” she said, with an odd tenderness. As she slid down under the covers again, I leaned over, found my trousers in the heap of clothes on the floor, and reached into the left pocket. My fingers closed around the wire ring and held it fast. I was afraid that we had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds. We made a tent of the bedclothes with our knees, and sat within this intimate yurt, breathing one another’s exhalations and listening to everything around us. After a moment, as the air grew thick and sweet, I found her left hand, counted off the fingers, and then slipped on the ring. (It was a little too big, but it would come, eventually, to fit her.) I lifted it, with her fingers, to my mouth, and printed a kiss upon them. Our tent collapsed and the cold March evening, with its last gray skies, flooded in. I was panting with relief. I would figure out something to tell Harry, both about Kim and about the thing I had buried, and we would all just have to adjust.

“I have to get to work,” said Kim, twisting the ring around on her finger as though it chafed her, or as though to invoke whatever doubtful protection its loops of wire might provide. Then she turned to me, smiling, and said something hopeful about the baby she was going to bear, and I smiled back at her in the dimness, as though I had known about it all along. I did not admit — as I ought to have, God knows — that the bauble I had given her was really only a toy.

I dropped in on Harry not too long ago. These days he shares a four-room flat in East Liberty with two Japanese girls named Tomoko. We’re still friends, I guess — to the extent that we can make each other laugh — but it’s rare that we get together for longer than a few hours, and our relations have passed into that stage at which they draw their greatest animation from beer and reminiscence. Usually when I see him, at Chief’s or at the Electric Banana, there is a third person present — some friend of his whom I don’t get along with, or a woman I work with whom Harry dislikes — and our conversation is ungainly, unfamiliar, and touches not upon important matters.

Since the day Kim left us, we have never truly talked about her — I doubt if we will ever be able to talk seriously about Kim again — nor have we succeeded in forgetting her and putting all that behind us. For one thing, there are the pictures of little Raymond James Trilby that Kim sends both Harry and me from time to time. Then there is the odd evening when Harry and I run into each other at the Squirrel Cage, where, in a frame over the bar, right next to the Sign that reads IT’S NICE TO BE IMPORTANT BUT IT’S MORE IMPORTANT TO BE NICE, you will still find a carnival-midway caricature of Kim brandishing a Louisville Slugger. And another constant reminder, I guess you could say, is the large, whistling hole that was torn in the fabric of our lives by my marriage to and then divorce from Kim — a hole that opens onto frigid emptiness and the brilliant debris of stars. We were married for seven months in all, and toward the end Kim was — almost despite herself — eating her dinner more often with Harry than with me, and calling him constantly to bitch and commiserate. And then one day, a family of purple lint polar bears appeared on top of the clothes dryer, amid the flakes of Ivory Snow, and in the kitchen wastebasket we found a crumpled squadron of cigarette-foil fighter jets; and Kim, who had already made one or two mistakes, got out of Pittsburgh as quickly as she could.

When I stopped by Harry’s the other night, the two Tomokos were out for the evening with a visitor from Nagoya, and after Harry had shown me their neat beds, their pastel closets, the photos on their walls, and samples of their handwriting, and had generally filled me in on them and on his own xenophilia, we sat down in the living room, on opposite sides of a six-pack of Rolling Rock, and looked at each other. I am not seeing anyone at present and had few accounts to amuse him with in this regard.

“So it sounds like you’ve been very busy,” I said.

“Really busy,” he said. “How about you?”

“Busy.”

There ensued an awkward pause, during which I might easily have drained my beer, slapped my knee, and slipped off into the October evening — the sun had gone down distressingly early. I could not think of anything to say, not a single thing, and I saw how much I had come to depend on the presence of a third person at our meetings — on having someone there to fill up the awful gap in our facetious conversation. I looked again at Harry’s beard, which had of late grown to mermanish proportions, floating out from his face. Then I looked all around me. “It’s nice and warm in here,” I said at last.

Oh, my God,” he said, shivering in recollection. “I can’t believe we lived that way. Do you remember that one morning there was a, like, a skin of ice on the water in the toilet?”

“Oh, God, I remember,” I said.

“Ha.”

“Hmm.”

“Have you heard anything from Kim?” he said, standing, making for the refrigerator to cover the question. I said that I had not, nor had I any news of little Raymond James. I understood from Kim’s mother, whom I’d met in the Giant Eagle a couple of months before, that Kim was working out of Honolulu as a personal secretary on board a rich woman’s yacht, but someone else had told me she was working as a paralegal in Philadelphia. Harry said he had heard these reports already and disbelieved them both. He handed me another can of beer.

“Funny how that all ended up, huh?” he said.

“Funny.”

“I pretty much bailed on her, I guess. On the baby, too.”

We sipped our beers and wondered at one another, at what was left of all that and of those prodigal days.

“Not too funny, really,” Harry said.

“Kind of not too funny at all,” I said.

The telephone rang, and Harry went into the kitchen to answer it. He spoke in curt and secretive tones to some friend I would never meet, promising — ah, but this came as a blow to me — that he would be free to call him or her back in a little while. He returned with a mostly empty bottle of George Dickel and a long face.

“Maybe I’d better go, Harry,” I said.

Oh, no!” he said, looking so earnest that my doubts were almost erased. “I have things to show you.”

He took me down into the basement of the house, where there were a washer and dryer, three bicycles, a stranded toilet lying on its side, some camping gear — including two voided backpacks bearing Rising Suns and some of those horrific Hello Kitty patches — and a vast assortment of cardboard cartons, perhaps sixty or seventy in all, stacked in ragged stacks and labeled in Harry’s familiar, Mayan-looking handwriting: PIPE TAMPERS, VELVETEEN, HEMP, SQUARE BUTTONS, GUM ARABIC, MR. POTATO HEAD HATS, ATOMIZER BULBS, PLASTIC SUSHI REPLICAS, FAN BELTS, LITTLE RED MONKEYS. He showed me the plans for a new game called Car Crash, involving bottle caps, miniature Christmas light bulbs, tin-whistle sirens, and cans of some knockoff red Play-Doh from Malaysia, and then, crouching down on the floor and reaching in behind the carton of gum arabic, drew out a large square box.

“This is going to be my next toy,” he said. “I’m calling it Treasure.”

This time the word TREASURE was machine-stenciled on the box’s sides, in large letters, along with the name of a leading British toy manufacturer and the two words “Spanish Main,” in Old English type.

“They tried to market it over here, but it stiffed early,” he explained, opening the seal on the box with his thumbnail. “Levinsky made a killing in Baltimore on a misdelivered shipment of game pieces.”

I watched his face for any sign that he was toying with me, but there was none; he seemed to want only to show me, with a hint of desperation, what was inside the crate, as though the hardest part of it for him had been having no one in whom to confide the secrets of his fabulous vault. He lifted the flaps to reveal a king’s ransom, a cool million, in cardboard doubloons, painted gold and dimly glittering in the basement light, and I wondered if this was what had been in the box I’d buried in Mrs. Colodny’s yard, or if it had been some other treasure entirely. I knew little about the subject, but I hoped that once you had buried a treasure you did not have to keep reburying it again and again.

“It’s supposedly real gold dust in the paint,” Harry said. “That was the gimmick, I guess.”

He handed me a thick coin, and I examined it. It bore an illegible mock inscription and a crude cartoon of an emperor’s head, and as I fingered it some of its luster came away on my hands. Harry was looking right at me now with a fevered smile, and once more I didn’t know what to say, but there was no one else there, and I had to say something.

“We’re rich,” I said.

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