A Multitude of Sins

Abyss

Two weeks before the Phoenix sales conference, Frances Bilandic and Howard Cameron drove from home — in Willamantic and Pawcatuck — met at the Olive Garden in Mystic and talked things over one more time, touching fingertips nervously across the Formica tabletop. Then each went to the rest room and made a private, lying cell phone call to account for their whereabouts during the next few hours. Then they drove across the access road to the Howard Johnson’s under the Interstate, registered in as a Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, and in five minutes had chained the door, turned up the air conditioning, pulled the curtains across the sunny window and abandoned themselves to the furious passions they’d been suppressing for the month since meeting at the awards banquet, where they were named Connecticut Residential Agents of the Year.

What had occurred between them at the awards banquet was something of a mystery to them both. Seated beside each other at the head table, they’d barely spoken before being presented with their agent-of-the-year citations. But after the first course, Howard had told a funny joke about Alzheimer’s disease to the person seated on his other side, and Frances had laughed. When Howard realized she thought he was funny, their eyes had met in a way Frances felt was shocking, but also undeniable, since, in her view, they’d each experienced (and fully acknowledged) a large, instinctual carnal attraction — the kind, she thought, animals probably felt all the time, and that made their lives much more bearable.

Within fifteen minutes, she and Howard Cameron had begun exchanging snickering asides about the other winners’ table manners, their indecipherable wardrobe choices and probable sales etiquette, and all the while avoiding the dull, realtor shop-talk about house closings, disastrous building inspection reports, and unbelievable arguments customers routinely waged inside their cars.

By dessert, they were venturing into more sensitive areas — Frances’s junior college roommate Meredith, who’d died of brain cancer in June at thirty-four (Frances’s age); Howard’s father’s tachycardia and his unfulfilled wish to play Turnberry before he died. Napkins across their empty plates, they moved on to life’s brevity and the need to squeeze every second for all its worth. And by the time decaf arrived, they’d eased over onto the subject of sex, and how misunderstood a subject it was in the culture, and how it was all the Puritans’ fault that it even was a subject, since it should be completely natural and unstigmatized. They each spoke lovingly about their spouses, but not that much.

Seated at the long head table full of fellow award-winners and bosses, and directly in front of a Ramada Inn banquet room full of noisy, laughing people they didn’t know but who were occasionally casting narrow-eyed, flaming arrows of spite through the two of them, sex infiltrated their soft-spoken conversation like a dense, rich but explosive secret they, but only they, had decided to share. And once that happened, everything, everyone in the room, everything Frances and Howard planned to do later in the evening— drive home to their spouses, Ed in Willamantic, Mary in Pawcatuck, down dark and narrow, late-night Connecticut highways; the chance visits they might have with zany colleagues at the bar; voice mail they might check for after-hours client calls — any and all thoughts about this night being normal ended.

Most Americans don’t even begin to reach their sexual maturity until they’re not interested in it anymore, Frances observed. The Scandinavians, indeed, had the best attitude, with sex being no big deal — just a normal human response (like sleeping) that should be respected, not obsessed over.

Americans were too hung up on false conceptions of beauty and youth, Howard agreed, sagely folding his long arms. He was six-foot five, with big pie-plate hands and had played basketball at Western Connecticut. His father had been his high-school coach. Howard had dull gray, closely spaced eyes and still wore his hair in an old-fashioned buzzed-off crew cut that made him look older than twenty-nine. Orgasm was way overrated, he suggested, in contrast to true intimacy, which was way underrated.

Nothing in a marriage could ever be absolutely perfect, they agreed. Marriage shouldn’t be a prison cell. The best marriages were always the ones where both partners felt free to pursue their personal needs, though neither of them advocated the open marriage concept.

The word marriage, Frances said, actually derived from an Old Norse word, meaning the time after the onset of a fatal illness when the disease has you in its grip but you can still walk around pretty well. This was her father’s joke, though she didn’t mean it to sound like a sourpuss complaint. Just a yuck, like Howard’s Alzheimer’s story. She found she could joke with Howard Cameron, who was witty in the blunt-to-gross way nerdy ex-jocks who weren’t complete idiots could be funny. She was impressed she knew him well enough to relax, after only two hours. With Ed she hadn’t gotten that far in six years.

“I’m the fifth of five. All boys,” Howard said, watching the Mexican waiters collecting banquet dishes off the tables. Their own table had emptied, and the crowd was filing out through the back doors, leaving the two of them conspicuously alone behind the white-skirted dais table. People were saying goodbyes and telling lame jokes about spending the night in the car on the Interstate. The lights were turned up bright to move people out, and the room smelled of sour food. He was aware they were obviously lingering. Yet he felt intimacy with Frances Bilandic. “I’m sure my parents had a solid sex life until my dad had to go on the blood thinners,” Howard went on solemnly. “But then, well, I guess things changed.”

“Technology took over, right?” Frances said and smirked. She was spunky and had snapping blue eyes, an attractively mannish little blond haircut and a barely noticeable overbite that displayed the bottoms of her incisors. She was the only daughter of a Polish widower from Bridgeport, had performed the balance beam in high school, and was as hard as a little brickbat. She’d probably seen plenty. Though he knew he was getting serious too fast, and that could spook her. Only she had to know what was what. It was a game. “He went on the pill? Or the pump, right?” Frances made a little up-down pumping motion with her thumb, up-down, up-down, and a little “eee-eee-eee-eee” squeaky sound. “That works out better for older people, I guess.”

“He’s not the type,” Howard said. He thought then about his father standing sadly out in their broad, freshly mown back yard that sloped all the way to the shining Quinebaug River, in Pomfret. It was the late-spring day his father had come back from the hospital after having his veins surgically ballooned. Geese were flying over in a V. His father had been wearing faded madras shorts and stood barefoot in the cool grass, staring off. His legs were thin and pale. It was heartbreaking.

But heartbreaking or not, Howard thought, it just showed that life had to be seized and squeezed before somebody came after you with a vein balloon. Marriage, kids — these were certainly ways you could squeeze it. His parents’ way. (Though maybe they weren’t so happy about that now.) But there were also alternatives, avenues that society or their employer the Weiboldt Company — red-and-white FOR SALE and SORRY YOU MISSED IT signs littering the seaboard from Cape May to Cape Ann — wouldn’t necessarily condone; and avenues you definitely wouldn’t start down every day of your life. Except of course those very avenues got chosen every day. Every second probably somebody somewhere was squeezing life on that alternative avenue. Probably in this very Ramada, while their banquet was ending, somebody was squeezing it. Why fight it?

“I hope I haven’t made light of a serious subject,” Frances said somberly referring to his parents. She was wearing a white pants suit with a green polka-dot blouse that did nothing, she knew, to show off her curves. But what she had wanted tonight, her special night of recognition, was to look drop-dead gorgeous, yet also to look like business. She, after all, had sold more real estate than anybody in her part of western Connecticut, and done it by working her tail off. And not by listing water-view contemporaries and Federalist mansions in Watch Hill, but by flogging attached row-houses in Guatemalan neighborhoods, four-room Capes, and buck-and-a-half condos downwind of the Willamantic landfill — units they buried you with in anybody else’s market. And she knew business didn’t take nights off, so you had to look the part. She thought of herself as a smart, tough cookie, a Polack go-getter, an early riser, a quick study who didn’t blink.

But that didn’t mean you couldn’t wander into some fun with a guy like this big Howard. A long, tall, galunky-jocky guy with some mischief in his eye, who could use some release from his own pressure cooker. Having an intense, private conversation with Howard Cameron was the reward for doing her job so fucking well.

“I’ll bet if we adjourned to a bar where there aren’t so many familiar faces, we wouldn’t have to be so solemn,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corners of her mouth. She liked the sound of her voice saying this.

Howard was already nodding. “Right. I’m sure you’re right.” He picked up the cheap fake-wood-framed certificate he’d gotten for selling huge amounts of real estate and making everybody but himself rich. “I intend to hang this over the can at home,” he said. The certificate had a stick-on gold seal below his name, and the words In Hoc Signo Vinces embossed around the rim in Gothic-looking letters. He had no idea what this meant.

“I intend to lose mine someplace,” Frances said. He felt her hard-as-a-board little gymnast’s thigh (conceivably innocently) brush by his knee as she slid away from the long head table. “You find us a bar, okay? I’ll find you.” She placed her small hand onto his large one and squeezed. “I’m off to the whatever.” She started for the rear doors, leaving him alone at the table.

A Negro woman’s big round face had for a while been staring at them through the round porthole window in the kitchen door. The crew in there were wanting to go home. But when Howard caught the woman’s eye, she winked a big lewd wink which he didn’t appreciate.

This was how these things happened, he understood, fingering his chintzy agent-of-the-year plaque. He would see Frances Bilandic after tonight. No way it wouldn’t happen. He had no pre-vision about the circumstances or what the degree of risk would be — if they’d go straight to bed or just have lunch. But in the fervid yet strangely familiar way he knew sex could make a point-of-no-return out of the most unsuspecting and innocent human interaction, nothing now seemed to make any difference but the two of them having a drink and almost certainly giving serious thought to fucking each other senseless in the not too distant future. And she knew it. She was definitely up for whatever this would lead to — the little brush against his leg was no mistake. Women were all different now, he thought, working women especially. A blow job meant what a handshake used to. When he’d driven down the teeming, vacationer-swarmed corridor of I-95 tonight, he’d had no idea there was even a Frances Bilandic on the planet, or that she’d be waiting for him, and that in the time it took to get designated agent of the year, they’d be wandering off in search of a dark little bar for some dirty work. The world was full of wondrous surprises. And he was absolutely ready for this one, ready to find out all the mysteries and wonders it was ready to bring.

He looked back at the porthole window where the black woman’s face had appeared and winked at him. He wanted to give her some kind of answering look, a look that meant he knew what she knew. But the window was empty. The light behind it had been turned off.

In Phoenix, the Weiboldt “Sales Festival” had taken over a towering chrome-and-glass Radisson in a crowded western foothill suburb that presented big views back toward the oppressive, boundariless city. There were two golf courses, forty-five tennis courts, a water-fun center for kids, an aquarium, a casino, an IMAX, a multiplex with eighteen screens, a hospital, a library, a crisis counseling center and an elevated monorail that sped away someplace into the desert. All this seemed to guarantee silent and empty hallways where no one would encounter the two of them together, empty back stairways, and elevators opening onto faces neither of them would ever see again. Plus sealed, air-conditioned rooms with heavy light-proof curtains, enormous beds with scratchy sheets, giant TVs, full minibars, jacuzzis and twenty-four-hour anonymous room service.

Yet they knew they could be detected by any hint that something was funny. Following which they would immediately lose their jobs. Real estate wasn’t like it used to be, when an office romance flamed up and everybody thought it was sweet and looked the other way (to gossip). Office romances, even romances that took place between offices miles apart, now landed you in federal court for polluting the workplace with messy personal matters that interfered with the lives of loser colleagues obsessed with getting rich in a boom market and looking for an excuse for why they’d crapped out. Personal was now a term that meant something like criminal. Everyone was terrified.

Consequently, Howard and Frances had flown out from separate airports — Providence and Hartford — and requested rooms in different “towers.” Howard had requested a smoking room, though he didn’t smoke, then asked that no calls be put through. The first night, at the Platinum Club ice-breaker, they’d mingled with completely separate crowds — Frances with some high-spirited lesbian agents from New Jersey; Howard with some dreary, churchy Mainers. Afterward, they’d gone off to different daiquiri bars, then to separate Mexican restaurants, where they made certain not to drink too much and to talk about their spouses non-stop, without once mentioning each other’s name or even Connecticut.

As a result, by the end of night one, when Frances tapped lightly on Howard’s door at eleven-thirty ready for fun, they each found it not immediately easy to set aside their blameless public disguises, and so had sat for an hour across a little wooden card table in uncomfortable hotel chairs, doing nothing but discussing what had happened that day, even though their days had been 100 percent the same.

Frances liked talking about real estate. To her surprise, she’d enjoyed her night out with the “Garden State lesbos,” had picked up on some new thinking about cold-call strategies in low-income, ethnic concentrations, and had discovered she had useful intelligence of her own to put into play about structuring earnest-money proffers so that the buyer offered full price up-front, but was protected right to closing, and could get out without a scratch in case of buyer’s remorse. She said that because her husband, Ed, had suffered an industrial accident in the indistinct past, an unspecified injury that left him not fit to work anymore (he was “older”), she’d been forced to jump into real estate as her full-time career, whereas she’d hoped to be a physiotherapist, and maybe work in France. It was a stroke of luck, she felt, that she’d turned out to be so “goddamned good at selling.”

Howard, on the other hand (he’d already explained this in the dark and cozy boss-and-secretary bar they’d found after the awards banquet in August) thought of selling real estate as just a “bridging strategy” between his first job out of college (playground supervisor) and something more entrepreneurial, with travel, an incentive bonus and a company car built into the equation. His entire family were lifelong Republicans, and two of his brothers were engineers in the road-paving business down in New London, and they were thinking of bringing him in. The only problem was that he didn’t get along with those brothers that well, and his wife, Mary, didn’t like them at all. Which was why he was still selling houses.

Frances had brought a bottle of not very cold, not very good Pinot Grigio, and it sat sweating on the hotel table attended by two clear-plastic bathroom cups they were drinking out of. The vast and darkened desert colossus of Phoenix lay to the east beyond the window glass — cars moving, planes descending to outlined runways, blue police flashers flashing, wide, walled neighborhoods tainting patches of the night pumpkin orange with their crime lights. It was exotic. It was the west. Neither of them had ever been here, though Howard said he’d read that Phoenix was the American city where you were most likely to get your car stolen.

Frances liked Howard Cameron. Feeling drunk, jetlagged and talked out, she appreciated that he could come up with this good humor, yet could also exhibit caring sensitivity — in this case, not to presume upon her for showing up in his room, though they’d been in bed together four different afternoons in four different seaside motels since the awards banquet. He understood consideration (even though she assumed he was ready to pop with desire just like she was). He also recognized the precarious situation they were in and how she might feel stressed. True, he was ready to cheat on his wife back in Pawcatuck; but he also seemed like a decent family man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and no real wish to do anybody harm. She felt the same. It was tricky. There was probably a category in some textbook for what the two of them were doing, slipping around this way, but she wasn’t ready to say what it was.

She let her gaze rise woozily above the sparkling rhomboids of gaudy Phoenix and into the moonless dark, to where the face of Howard’s wife, Mary, a woman she’d never seen even in a snapshot, materialized out of the dark clouds like a picture in a developer’s tray. The image was of a young, sweet-faced blonde like herself, whose oval face and small heart-shaped mouth bore a look of disappointment, her eyes large and doleful and unmistakably expressive of hurt.

“That’s true,” Frances Bilandic said. “I understand that.”

“Hm?” Howard said. He looked around at the door as if someone had entered and Frances had begun talking to whoever it was. The red message bulb on the phone was blinking as it had been since he came back from dinner. Too late to call home now, he’d decided, with the time difference.

No one, however, had come into the room. It was chain latched. “Were you talking to me?”

“I guess I’m pretty whacked,” she said. “I must’ve gone to sleep sitting up.” She smiled a smile she knew was a sweet, probably pathetic smile. It was her surrender look, and she was ready for him to give up being so reserved. It hadn’t been at all pleasant to see Howard’s wife’s face frowning out in the sky. It hadn’t been the end of the world, but it had left her feeling a little dazed. But that would go away if she could get Howard to take her to bed and fuck her in the damn near frightening way they’d gone at it back home.

“I feel so free now,” he said suddenly, incomprehensibly. His great, smooth, ball player’s hands encircled his tiny plastic cup of cheap wine. He was looking straight at Frances, his elongated, not particularly handsome face full of wonder, his sensuous lips parted in a dopey smile. “Really. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.”

“That’s good,” she said. She hoped he wouldn’t give a speech now.

Howard shook his head in small amazement. “Not that I’d ever really thought different. But this is no sidetrack we’re on here. This is my real life, you know? This is as free and as good as things ever get. I mean like — this is it.” He nodded instead of shaking his buzzed head. “This is as real as marriage, for sure.”

“Lots of things are that real.”

“Okay,” Howard said. “But I’m not sure I ever knew that.”

“Read the fine print,” Frances said. It was another of her dad’s Polack maxims. Everything you either didn’t like or were surprised by meant you hadn’t read the fine print. Marriage, children, work, getting old. The fine print was where the truth was about things and it was never what you expected.

“I really like you,” Howard said. “I’m not sure I exactly said that.”

“I like you, too,” she said. “I wouldn’t fuck you if I didn’t like you.”

“No. Of course not.” His grin showed his large teeth behind his almost feminine lips. “Probably me, too.”

“Then why don’t you just fuck me now.” She intentionally widened her pretty blue eyes to indicate that was real, too.

“Okay, I will.” Howard Cameron said, moving toward her, touching her knee, her breast, her soft cheeks, her lips in quick, breathless assault. “I want to,” he said. “I’ve wanted to all day. I don’t know why we waited ’til now.”

“Now’s okay,” Frances said. “Now’s perfect.” Which, she felt, was only true.

One thing he liked about Frances Bilandic was the direct, guiltless, almost stern yet still passionate way she involved herself with screwing the daylights out of him. His sexual preference had always been for a lot of vociferous bouncing and spiritedly noisy plunging; Mary referred to their early lovemaking as the side show, which embarrassed him. But Frances gave fucking a new meaning. Her eyes fixed on him with an intensity that was frequently intimidating, she entered a different sexual dimension, with assertive declarations about exactly how she expected to take hold of him, and him of her, raucous tauntings in the form of instructions as to how vigorously he was expected to bring her to fulfillment; plus limitless physical stamina and perplexing orgasmic variety and originality. “That’s not it, that’s not it, no, no, no. Jesus, Jesus,” she’d shout in his ear just when he thought he had her on the cusp. This insistent, uncompromising voice alone could blow the top off of him. “Don’t you dare lose me, don’t you lose me, god damn it,” she’d command. “That’s right. You’re right. There it is. I see you now. There you are. There’s no one like you, Howard. Nobody. Howard. Nobody!”

She made him think that in fact it was true. That by some amazing luck, among all men there was no one like Howard Cameron. He was as sexually insatiable as she was; he did possess the need, the vigor, the ingenuity — plus the equipment to do things properly. He’d never thought much about his equipment, which just seemed normal, given his height. And yet, why other men couldn’t cut the mustard wasn’t really a mystery. Life wasn’t fair. Nobody ever said it would or should be.

Frances, however, was unqualifiedly his sexual ideal. That was irrefutable. He’d never known there was an ideal, or that this version was what he’d always really wanted (his sexual experience wasn’t that extensive). Only here was a flat-out, full-bore sexual appetite, and with an arrogance that said that if all this wasn’t absolutely fantastic she wouldn’t even bother with it. Except it was fantastic. And he was moved by Frances, and by sex with Frances in ways he’d never in his whole life thought he’d be lucky enough to experience.

Of course, it wasn’t the kind of experience that ever led to marriage, or to any lasting importance. He remembered what she’d said about the Old Norse word. She understood plenty. She and poor lame Ed probably had polite, infrequent sex, just like his parents, so that her own ravenous appetites were permanently back-burnered out of respect for whatever pitiful use he was. His own luck, Howard understood, was to play a bit part in their life’s little humdrum. Though it was way too good to miss, no matter where it led to or from.

One thing had surprised him. After their first epic session at Howard Johnson’s in September — this after three weeks of steamy meetings in shadowy bars and roadside cafes in little nowhere Connecticut towns between Willamantic and Pawcatuck — they had stepped out of the room into the laser sunlight of the HoJo’s parking lot, with Interstate 95 pounding by almost on top of them. He’d looked up into the pale, oxidized sky, rubbed his eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness of the room and, without much thought, said, “Boy, that was really something.” He’d meant it as a compliment.

“What do you mean, something?” Frances said in her husky blondie voice — a voice that electrified him in bed, a voice made for sex, but that suddenly seemed different out on the harsh, baking asphalt. She was wearing red-framed sunglasses, a short blue leather skirt that emphasized her thighs, and what was by then an extremely wrinkled white pinafore blouse. Her hair was pressed flat on the sides and she was sweating. She looked roughed up and dazed, which was how he felt. Fucked to death would’ve been a way to say it.

He smiled uncomfortably. “I just mean, well … you’re really good at this. You know?”

“I’m not good at this,” Frances snapped, “I’m good with you. Not that I’m in love with you. I’m not.”

“Sure. I mean, no. That’s right,” he said, not happy being scolded. “We don’t do these things alone, do we?” He smiled, but Frances didn’t.

“Some people might.” She frowned from behind her shades, seeming to reassess him all in one moment’s time. It was as if there was one kind of person whom you met and maybe liked and thought was okay-looking and funny and whom you fucked — one kind of Howard; but then there was another Howard, one you never liked and who immediately started comparing you to other women the moment you fucked him, and who pissed you off. She’d just met that Howard. It was her “tough cookie” side, and she was dead serious about it.

Although maybe, he thought, Frances just wanted it clear that if somebody was going to be the “tough cookie” it had to be her. Which was fine with him. If you had only one situation in your life with no unhappy surprises and that one worked out just halfway well — the one his parents had had for thirty years, for instance — then you were a lucky duck. His own marriage, all things taken into consideration, might be one of those rarities. He wasn’t hoping to make Frances Bilandic number two. He just wished she wouldn’t be so serious. They both knew what they were doing.

Frances had tiny, child’s hands, but strong, with deep creases in their palms like an old person’s hands. And when he’d held them, in bed in the HoJo’s, they’d made him feel tender toward her, as if her hands rendered her powerless to someone of his unusual size. He reached and took both her little hands in both of his big ones, as semis pounded the girders on I-95. She was so small — a tough, sexy little package, but also a little package of trouble if you didn’t exert strong force on her.

“I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me,” he said, bringing her in close to him. Her strong little bullet breasts greeted his maroon Pawcatuck Parks and Recreation Department T-shirt.

“I’ve never done this before, okay?” she said almost inaudibly, though she let herself be brought in. They didn’t have to be in love, he thought, but they could be tender to each other. Why bother otherwise? (He absolutely didn’t believe she’d never done this before. He, on the other hand, hadn’t.)

“Same here,” he said. Though that didn’t matter. He just wanted a chance to do it again sometime soon.

One of the tractor trailers honked from up above. They were standing out in the hot parking lot at two p.m. on a Tuesday in early September. It was sweet and touching but also completely stupid, since the Weiboldt Mystic office was only five blocks away. An agent could be picking up clients at the HoJo’s. If someone blabbed, it could be over in a flash. Boom … no job. Their colleagues would love nothing more than for two new agents of the year to be fired and to take over their listings. And for what? For a minor misunderstanding about Frances being good in bed — which she definitely was. It made him suddenly anxious to be touching her out in the open, so that he stopped and looked around the lot. Nothing. “Maybe we ought to go back inside,” he said, “we’ve got the room the rest of the night.” He didn’t really want to — he wanted to get to an appointment in White Rock. But he would go back if fate required it. In fact, a part of him — a small part — would’ve liked to have gotten in his car, piled Frances Bilandic in beside him, and headed up onto the Interstate, turning south and never coming back. Leave the whole sorry shitaree in the dust. He could do that. Worry about details later. People who did that were people he admired, though you never really heard what their lives were like later.

“I’m afraid if I went back in that room I might not come out for a week,” Frances said, looking around at the green door of the motel room. She put her rough little hand flagrantly against his still-stiff cock and gave it a good squeeze. “You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess there’s your evidence,” Howard said solemnly.

“Just checkin’ in on Garfield,” Frances said behind her shades. “I’ll save him for Phoenix. How’s that?”

“I can’t wait.” Howard realized he was grinning idiotically.

“You better,” Frances said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

And that’s how they left it.

The sales conference, following the first day’s jet-lagged festivities and spiritless camaraderie, developed into a slog almost immediately. Frances kept running into the loud-mouth lesbians from Jersey, who kept repeating the punch line of the joke they’d told twenty times the first night. “Suck-off’s just a Russian general to me, soldier.” They’d bray that line in the elevator or in the ladies’ room or waiting for a panel to begin, then break into squalls of laughter. She couldn’t remember how the joke began, so she couldn’t tell it to Ed on the phone.

All the seminars, chalk-talk panels, motivational speeches and mano a mano sessions with the Weiboldt top management team were tedious and repetitive and usually insulting. They were aimed, she felt, at people who’d never sold a piece of real estate, instead of Platinum agents who’d spurted past 4 million and would’ve been better off at home, fielding stragglers at the end of the summer selling season.

Howard skipped most of the sessions and found some new guys from western Mass. he could talk sports with — a bald Latvian he’d once played against in a state tournament in the eighties. “It comes from being one of five,” he said to Frances on day three, when they’d broken their rule and allowed themselves lunch together in the hotel’s food court, which had an OK Corral theme, and the servers were dressed like desperadoes with guns and fake moustaches. “I spent my youth listening to my parents telling me for the thirteenth time something I already knew.” He seemed pleased, grazing at his taco salad. “I mean, I don’t really mind somebody telling me how to sell a house when I’ve already sold five hundred of them. But I don’t need to seek it out, you know?”

There were certain qualities about Howard Cameron that would never grow on you, Frances thought. He was always happy for somebody to tell him something, instead of generating important data himself. It was a passive aspect, and made him seem sensitive at first. Except it wasn’t really passive; it was actually aggressive: a willingness to let somebody else say something wrong after which he could sit in judgment on the sidelines. You learned that attitude in sports: the other guy fucks up, and when he does — because he always will — then you’re right there to reap the benefits. It was a privileged, suburban, cynical way of operating and passed for easy-going. And he made it work for him. Whereas someone like her had to scrap and hustle and do things in a straight-ahead manner just to get them done at all.

Of course you’d never convince him his way was wrong. He was genetically hard-wired to like things how they were. “That’ll work” was his favorite expression for deciding most issues — issues such as whether to solicit a higher bid on a property after a lower one had already been accepted, or quoting a client an interest rate lower than the bank’s in order to string them along. Things she would never do. Howard, however — long-armed, solemn, goony-faced, harddick Howard Cameron—would do them; had done them countless times, but liked to make you think that he wouldn’t. It was a surprise — something learned from being alone with him two nights running — but she’d already decided that if she saw him again once they were back home, she’d be shocked. He wasn’t a con man, but he wasn’t much better.

Across the noisy food court she saw two of the New Jersey women waiting beside the big chrome sculpture in the middle of the room, scanning around for someone to eat lunch with, and yakking it up as usual. The food court occupied a wide, light-shot, glass-roofed atrium, architecturally grafted onto the Radisson and rising twenty stories, with real sparrows nesting in the walls. Protruding upward fifteen stories from a central reflection pool was a huge, rectangular chrome slab that had water somehow drizzling down it. People had naturally thrown hundreds of pennies in the pool. The New Jersey realtors were looking up at it and laughing. They thought everything had a sexual significance that proved men were stupid. Frances hoped they wouldn’t spot her, didn’t want the Howard Cameron issue to get them going. They should never have come here together.

She had a good idea, though, that she thought she’d enlist Howard in if the two of them were still hot and heavy by midweek. It was more fun to do things with somebody, and she still liked Howard okay, even if he had personal qualities she was starting to be sick of. “Do you know what I think we should do?” She wanted to seem spontaneous, even if the idea wasn’t really original. She smiled, trying to penetrate whatever he was thinking — sports, sex, his parents, his wife — whatever.

“Let’s go up to my room,” Howard said. “Is that your idea?”

“No, I mean do in a real sense.” She tapped the back of his hand with one middle finger to seize more of his attention. “I want to see the Grand Canyon,” she said. “I brought a book about it. I’ve always wanted to. Do you want to come with me?” She tried to beam at him.

“Is it in Phoenix?” Howard looked puzzled, which was how he registered surprise.

“Not that far,” Frances said. “We can get a car. Tomorrow’s our free day. We can leave in an hour and be back tomorrow afternoon.”

Howard shoved away the remains of his taco salad. “How long do we have to drive?”

“Four hours. Two hundred miles. I don’t know. I looked at the map in the welcome kit. It’s straight north. We’d have a good time. You always wanted to see it, I know you did. Take the plunge.”

“I guess,” Howard said, pushing out his livery lips in a skeptical way. He probably looked like his father when he did his lips that way, she thought, and he probably liked it.

“I’ll drive,” Frances said. “I’ll rent the car. All you have to do is sit there.”

“Mmmm.” Howard attempted a smile, but didn’t seem to share the enthusiasm. Which was, of course, his self-serving way: let the other people — his poor, innocent wife, for instance — present him with a good idea, then cast pissy doubt on it until he could let himself get talked into it, then never really seem appreciative until it turns out good, after which he takes all the credit. She could just go alone, except she didn’t want to. If Ed was here, he definitely wouldn’t go.

“Well look,” she said, “if you’re going, I vote we go right after the amortization panel, so we can see the desert in twilight. We can spend the night on the road, see the Grand Canyon as the sun’s coming up, and be back for dinner.”

“You got it all figured out,” Howard said, smirking. He was beginning to go for it. In his mind, agreeing to go made it his idea.

“I’m a good planner,” Frances said.

His smirk became a proprietary grin. “I never plan anything. Things just work out, whatever.”

“We wouldn’t make a good team, would we?” She was already standing beside the table, primed to head for the Avis desk in the lobby. She was thinking about a big red Lincoln or a Cadillac. The car could be the kick — not the company.

“I guess we might as well enjoy it,” Howard said and suddenly seemed amiable. “We’re out where they blew up the atom bomb, right?” He gazed at her with dumb pleasure, as if he’d forgotten he liked her, but had just suddenly remembered. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe she was confusing him with Ed — lumping men in the same heap and missing their finer distinctions. Exactly like the lesbians did.

“It’s New Mexico,” she said, waving at the New Jersey gals, who were making gestures with their hands to indicate they thought something was up between her and whoever it was she was having lunch with. “Where they blew up the A-bomb was New Mexico.”

“Well, whatever. Same desert, right? Bottom line?” He looked pleased.

“Bottom line. I guess so,” Frances said. “You get to the heart of things. You probably already know that.”

“I’ve heard it before,” Howard said, and rose to head for his room.

In the car he wasn’t on the proper side to see the sunset. Interstate 15 to Flagstaff was nothing but arid scrub, with forbidding treeless mountains on the other side of the car, where the sun was setting. Mostly all you saw was new development — big gas stations, shopping malls, half-finished cinema plazas, new franchise restaurant pads, housing sprawled along empty streambeds that had been walled up beside giant golf courses with hundreds of sprinklers turning the dry air to mist. There was nothing interesting or original or wild to see, just more people filling up space where formerly nobody had wanted to be. The reason to live out here, he thought, was that you had lived someplace worse. These were the modern-day equivalent of the lost tribes. The most curious feature of the drive were the big jack-rabbits that’d gotten smacked and were littering the highway by the dozens. He quit counting at sixty. Mary believed atmospheric conditions humans weren’t sensitive to made animals throw themselves in front of cars. In Connecticut it was deer, raccoons and possums. Someday it would start happening to people — maybe these people out here. Maybe they were members of a cult that was planning that.

Frances had rented a new red Town Car — the ultimate Jew canoe, she called it — a big fire chief’s sedan with untouched white-leather seats, red floor mats, unspoiled ashtrays and a heavy new-car smell. He wasn’t allowed to drive because he wasn’t Frances’s husband, which was perfect. To get comfortable, he’d ditched his conventioneer clothes for his green terry shorts, a white T-shirt and an old pair of basketball sneaks. With the seat pushed back, he could stretch his legs and doze on the headrest. The whole thing was set up right.

Frances was in high spirits behind the white-leather steering wheel. She’d brought her Grand Canyon book, her cell phone and some noisy Tito Puente CDs that featured a lot of loud bongo music. She’d changed into tight white Bermudas, a blue sailcloth blouse with a white anchor painted on the front, some tiny sapphire earrings and a pair of pink Keds with little tasseled half-socks. She’d also bought a quart of cheap gin, which they both started drinking, minus ice, out of white Styrofoam cups.

The plan was to eat dinner in Flagstaff, drive ’til after dark, then stop at whatever motel was near the canyon entrance, and be up early to see the great empty hole at daybreak, when Frances believed it would be its most spiritually potent. “I never knew I wanted to see it. You know?” She was driving with a cup in one hand. “But then I read about it, and knew I had to. The Indians thought it was the gateway to the underworld. And Teddy Roosevelt killed mountain lions in it.” She’d already poleaxed one of the big jackrabbits. “Oooops, sorry. Shit,” she said, then forgot about it. “Conquistadors came there in fifteen-ninety-something,” she went on, casting a mischievous eye at Howard, who was thinking about the run-over rabbit and staring moodily out at a big cinema complex built to look like an Egyptian jukebox. A vast, unlined, untenanted expanse of black asphalt lay between the theater and the highway. Soon enough, he thought, it would be stuffed with new cars and people. And then in ten years it would be gone.

“I never thought about it,” he said to whatever she’d said, considering what movies the cinema would specialize in. Westerns. Space movies. Idiot comedies about golf. It was California all over again out here, just worse. “Californicate” was the word that went around realtor circles two years ago. The gin might be affecting him, he thought.

“As big as the Grand Canyon, isn’t that what people say?” Frances had gone on dreamily. “My father used to say that. He was an immigrant. He thought the Grand Canyon meant something absolute. It meant everything important about America. I guess that’s what it means to me.”

“‘In one sense it’s a big hole in the ground formed by erosion.’” He was reading aloud now off the back of her Grand Canyon guidebook. Up ahead, another big gray-and-white jackrabbit sat poised on the shoulder as cars whipped past. He stared at it. The rabbit seemed on the verge of venturing forward, but was waiting for what it must’ve felt in its busy rabbit’s brain to be the perfect moment. In the opposite lane, semis were hurtling south toward Phoenix in the twilight. This rabbit’s got problems, Howard thought. Overcoming man-made barriers. Circumventing unnatural hazards. Avoiding toxic waste on the roadside. “Watch out for the rabbit,” he said, not wanting to seem alarmed, taking another sip of his warm gin.

“Roger. That’s a copy, Houston,” Frances said. She had the lip of her white Styrofoam cup pinched between her fingers, letting the cup dangle under the top arm of the steering wheel. She made no effort whatsoever to steer clear of the bunny, poised on the berm. She was drunk.

And just as the Town Car came almost abreast of the big rabbit, a critical split second after which it would’ve been spared and perhaps made it across all four lanes to sleep easily one more night in the median strip — in that split second — the rabbit bounded forward straight into the car’s headlights, never looking right or better yet left. And whump! The Lincoln sped over it, bopping whatever part of the rabbit was highest and tumbling it senselessly across the highway.

“Ouch! Damn! Oh shit. That’s two. Sor-ree little Thumper,” Frances said. “Bummer, bummer, bummer.”

“Why didn’t you change fuckin’ lanes?” Howard said.

“I know.” Frances had not even looked in the rearview. “It’s on my karma now. I’ll be paying for it.”

“It’s really ridiculous.” He glared at her, then back out into the darkening scrub. It’s fucking idiotic, he thought.

“I’ll get shaped up here,” she said.

“Not for that rabbit you won’t.”

“Nope. Not for that Mr. Bunny Rabbit,” Frances said. “He’s part of history now.”

He wished he was back at the Radisson having a glass of Pinot Grigio, not cheap warm gin he didn’t even like. He could be enjoying the glowing amber grid of nighttime Phoenix, and getting ready to call Mary.

“Do you think you can find something to be jovial about?” She looked at him and smiled a smile that exaggerated her face’s angles. “Try to think of one thing.”

She was hateful, he thought. Flattening a rabbit wouldn’t be the half of it. It was probably how she sold houses: a steamroller; never relenting, never seeing anything but the sale; driving buyers crazy with cell phone calls from her car; working every weekend.

“Put on some new music, why don’t you, Mr. Moody?” Frances said. The insane bongo drumming had stopped miles back, rendering the car peaceful. “Put on the Rolling Stones,” she said. “Do you like them? I do.”

“Whatever,” he said, fingering through the stack of cassettes she’d lodged on the leather seat between them. He tried to think of one Rolling Stones song but couldn’t. He’d drunk too much for sure.

“Put on Let It Bleed, in honor of the brave rabbit who gave his life so we could see the Grand Canyon and commit adultery.” She didn’t even look at him.

This was fucked up, he thought. Just all of a sudden, she was a different person. The best thing would be to find the bus station in Flagstaff and let her drive off drunk into the night and never see her again. A smart man would do that.

“I was kidding about Let It Bleed.” She sniffed. “It’s not there. Put on some more Chiquita banana music and give us some gin. We’ll be seeing the bright lights of Flagstaff pretty soon now. Surely something there’ll make you happy. Isn’t it a famous place?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Howard said, then under his breath added, “I hope so.”

“So do I, sweetheart,” Frances said, handing over her empty cup so he could fill it. “Or else, we’ll just have to make it famous.”

In Flagstaff, they found a dim little strip-mall sushi place, facing a wide avenue clogged with evening traffic. He was tired of Mexican and spaghetti, and wanted fish even if he had to eat it raw. He would never make a westerner, he realized; he needed to see the ocean once a week and seafood was healthier. Though he also realized, as they were searching for a restaurant, traffic lights blooming into a blue-lit distance, that he’d actually been to Flagstaff — in the eighties, on a ten-day overland vacation the whole Cameron family had made to Disneyland. He’d somehow forgotten it. Though naturally, nothing looked the same. The streets were all widened twice as big and there were now a thousand motels and burger franchises and car washes. It was weird to have been in a place, and then to have blotted it out completely. It was possible, of course — and he was already beginning to forget the memory again — that he’d only dreamed about Flagstaff, or possibly seen it on TV.

From the fake teak table by the window, Frances had begun eyeing the phone booth outside in the parking lot. She wanted to call Ed. He’d be in bed soon, though the sky was still lighted over the mountaintops here. She couldn’t remember when she’d called him last. And she was sorry to have gotten smashed, sorry she’d run over a rabbit, sorry to have forgotten all about her husband. It was so unusual being this free, and fucking somebody she absolutely didn’t care about, or for that matter fucking anybody at all. It was disorienting and actually embarrassing.

Howard was eating sea-bass tempura and was happy for her to go make a call. She walked outside into the warm evening and stood beside the Lincoln to make the call on her cell phone. A police substation was set up in one of the empty mall store spaces. Through the windows you could see police inside sitting at desks, talking on phones and writing under fluorescent light. A young black man was also standing inside and appeared to be wearing handcuffs, his hands behind his back. Two police officers standing with him were laughing as if he’d said something funny.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said brightly to Ed across the vast distance. She wanted to be upbeat. “Guess where I am? In Flagstaff.”

“Yeah. So?” Ed said. “Where’s that, Texas?” Ed suffered from an unusual blood disease that made his bones disintegrate from the toes up, and he was in pain a lot. He took steroids and maintained dietary restrictions that made him either hungry all the time, or else nauseated, and he was almost always in a bad mood. When she’d met Ed, who was fifteen years older, he’d been strong as a racehorse and had run his own jet-ski business. Now he couldn’t work, and just watched TV and took his meds.

“No silly, it’s in Arizona,” Frances said. “But guess where I’m going. You won’t believe it.” She wondered if she’d said, “Guess where we’re going.”

“Bulgaria,” Ed said. “Iran. I don’t know. Who cares? I won’t be there.”

“The Grand Canyon,” she said, manufacturing enthusiasm. She felt her mouth break into an involuntary smile. She was smiling for Ed, standing alongside a big red Lincoln.

Silence opened on Ed’s end.

“The Grand Canyon,” she said again. “Isn’t that great? I’m going to see it tomorrow.” She needed to be careful about particulars. She could say she was with one of the lesbians. Ed would think that was a riot.

“And what?” Ed said irritably. “You see it and then what?”

“I don’t really know.”

Silence again. Ed had become distracted by something in his room, possibly the Red Sox game. The thought flitted through her mind to say, “I’m going to the Grand Canyon with a man I’m fucking every night and who’s got a cock as hard as a hoe handle.” Though it didn’t make Howard any more interesting for that to be true. He might as well have not had it.

She stared at the brightly lit police substation. The uniformed police were steering the young, handcuffed black man into a wire cage in the back of the room. It was like an animal’s cage. She felt suddenly dispirited and in fear of starting to cry right on the phone. Gin made women fuck, then cry, then fight, her father always said. She needed to stay away from gin. Ed, of course, was still handsome — a big, gruff, blue-eyed Boston-Irish whose life, unfortunately, hadn’t made him happy. Though he loved her. That she knew. It was a shame. Lately he’d begun growing hydrangeas in the back yard, which seemed nice. “I wish you could see the Grand Canyon with me, honey.”

“Maybe I’ll fly out there tonight,” Ed said sarcastically, and expelled a dry little cough-laugh.

“That’d be great. I’d come pick you up.”

“Maybe I could just jump in,” Ed said bitterly. “That’d be great, too, wouldn’t it?”

“No, sweetie. That wouldn’t.”

Unexpectedly from across the parking lot she saw Howard emerge from the restaurant, a toothpick in his mouth. He glanced at the crowded street, then started off down the strip-mall sidewalk. He passed right in front of the police station. Two of the desk officers inside stopped what they were doing and looked out the window at him. Howard was odd looking — tall and gawky, like somebody out of the fifties.

But where was he going! She felt her heart beat three then two sudden beats. Was he taking off? Heading across to the Arco station to hitch a ride back? Her heart bumped three more percussive bumps as she watched Howard stride along in his almost-graceful gait and geek haircut (he looked ridiculous in his terry-cloth shorts, big T-shirt and sockless sneakers). But she felt panicky — as if a disaster was unfolding right in front of her, and she couldn’t stop it. Like running over the rabbit. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, her heart pounded. She realized she didn’t really care if he left, but the sight of his leaving made her almost paralyzed.

“Oh Jesus, don’t leave,” she said.

“My feet are disintegrating. I probably won’t be alive in a year. That’s where I’m going,” Ed said.

“What’s that?”

“What did I say?” Ed said. “I said …”

When Howard reached the asphalt apron of the Arco station, he turned left directly into the empty phone booth and began punching in numbers, though as he did it he craned his neck around in her direction, grinning at her, phone to phone — each calling his or her spouse to report where each of them was, leaving out the crucial part of the story. That absolutely wasn’t how life should be, she thought. Life should be all on the up-and-up. She wished she was here alone and there weren’t any lies. How good that would feel. To be all alone in Flagstaff.

“Maybe you just don’t know what fuckin’ fed up is,” Ed was saying angrily.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, what is it? You’re breaking up. It’s way out in the prairie out here.”

“Prairie schmarry,” Ed snarled. Something had set Ed off. “We were already breaking up.”

“You don’t need to say that,” Frances said. She was trying to push Howard out of her thinking, trying to concentrate on Ed, her husband, furious at her for going to the Grand Canyon, furious at her for enjoying herself, or trying to, furious at her for being herself and not being him. Maybe she didn’t know what fed up meant. “Why don’t you take a pill and let me call you later, hon, okay?” She stared at Howard, his back turned, his head bobbing back and forth. He was talking animatedly to his wife in Connecticut. Happily lying.

“You take a pill,” Ed said. “And then disappear.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“That’s what I was just thinking,” Ed said.

“I’ll call you later, sweetheart,” she said softly.

“I’ll be asleep later.”

“Sleep tight, then,” she said, and folded her phone away.

Out again in the darkened desert, Howard ran his window down to let in the rich cooling breezes. Frances had put on some watery new-age electronic music that was making him woozy. He took his shoes off, tilted back and faced the landscape behind the barrier of the night.

A little band of nastiness which he definitely didn’t appreciate had begun widening between them all the way up to Flagstaff. It was the sort of thing you suffered in the workplace. Except, precisely because it was the workplace and not your real life, you weren’t stuck with whoever it was the way he was stuck now with nutty Frances. Which explained why being married was so good — at least the way he understood it: if you married the right person (and he had), you didn’t experience unwelcome surprises and upsets. The more you got to know that right person, the better it got — not the worse and more discouraging. You liked them and you liked life. The institution took you to deeper depths, and you felt serious things you wouldn’t otherwise feel. Idiotic and unnecessary escapades like this trip just didn’t come up. He hadn’t been married long enough to fully appreciate all this — a year, only — but he was beginning to. Of course, it was also nice to be spinning along in a big expensive car, headed for some unknown exotic place, where the night would be spent screwing an attractive woman you didn’t have to take care of the rest of your life. Still, though, he was sorry not to have just gotten on a bus in Flagstaff. Frances would probably have welcomed it. He’d just forgotten.

Occasionally a dimly lit settlement rocketed past. A scattering of lights, some shadowy men standing outside a bar or a crummy store or beside a row of pickups, seemingly unaware of the highway.

“Indians,” Frances said authoritatively. She’d elevated her seat and resituated closer to the steering wheel, so she appeared to be a tiny pilot in a green-lit cockpit. “We’re on the Hopi reservation here.”

“We don’t want to break down, then,” Howard said.

“I’m sure they’d take good care of us.”

“As soon as they finished stripping the car and killing us. That’s probably true. They’d give us a decent burial up on some platform.” He stared into the night, where a single socketed light glowed like a boat on the ocean. “I have Indian blood in me,” he said for no particular reason. “My father was a Paiute, and my mother’s named Sue.” It was a joke he’d never thought was funny before but seemed amusing now. “My mother is named Sue. Sue Crosby,” he added, feeling better about things, including Frances. The nastiness seemed to have drifted away suddenly. Though he wasn’t crazy about how she came off in her white shorts (too tight) and her blue blouse with the dopey, hand-painted anchor. She looked like a little Polack — somebody who sold cheap houses to other Polacks and bought her clothes at Target. She was too muscular, too — like somebody on the Polish gymnastics team. Somebody named Magda. Her body wasn’t that great to touch. He preferred softer, less toned-up women like his wife. Though Frances was older and, he assumed, had to take better care of herself.

On an impulse, he reached across the seat, unfastened her small right hand from the steering wheel and grasped it in his own hand. “I’ve been wanting to do that,” he said, though it wasn’t true.

“Okay,” she said, not looking at him, just peering ahead into the tunnel of light.

“I was thinking about those Japanese in the restaurant,” he said. “How weird is that? In fucking Flagstaff. Indians. Desert. Snakes. You wonder how they got there.” He squeezed her hand for emphasis. He hated electronic music and switched it off before it made him carsick.

“They’re everywhere now, I guess,” Frances said in the new silence. “I’ve sold houses to them. They’re nice. They take care of their stuff.”

“Like lesbians,” he said. “Lesbians are good home owners.”

Frances sucked in her lower lip, squinted, scrunched her face up, then looked over at Howard. It was her Japanese imitation. “Condlo-min-lium,” she said through her teeth.

“We want buy condlo-min-lium long time,” Howard said, then they both laughed. She was funny — a side of her he hadn’t seen. “You’re great,” he said. Then he said, “You’re terrific.”

“Men sometimes velly hard please,” she said, still in the Japanese voice. “Too hard.”

“Yeah, but it’s worth it. Isn’t it? Innnit?” This was his only imitation — the harelip. People always cracked up.

“Not know,” Frances said. “Still early. Know better later.”

He moved his hand up to her firm small pointed breast, then wasn’t sure what to do next since she was driving and gave no sign she might want to stop the car and get something going. “If you pull this car over I’d fuck you right now in the front seat.” He pushed the button to un-recline his seat, as if to make good on his word.

“Not good plan now,” Frances said, still in Japanese. “Hold raging dragon. Good come to mans who wait long time. Make big promise.”

He caressed her breast, leaned closer, smelled the perfume she’d put on in Flagstaff. “Big promise, yeah, you bet,” he said, but again wasn’t sure what to do. He held her breast a few moments longer, until he began to feel self-conscious, then he re-reclined his seat and went back to staring out.

For a time afterward, maybe an hour, they were encased in silence — Frances staring ahead at the illuminated highway, Howard gazing at the border of desert, beyond which in the scrubby recesses of darkness who knew what acted out an existence? He mused for a while about what sort of house Frances might live in. He’d never seen it, of course, but assumed it was a minuscule, white-shingled, green-roof Cape with fake dormers and no garage, a place she paid the note on herself. Then he thought darkly about Ed, whom he hadn’t thought about all day, until he’d seen her phoning him. Frances was basically a solid, family-oriented person, no matter what she was doing with him on this escapade. She was a capable do-er, who took care of things, and made a good living. She just couldn’t make every thing fit exactly for Ed’s particular benefit. Fucking him, for example — that didn’t fit. Though you needed to be able to do the unusual — be married and still have it be all right. Even if you had to lie about it. There was no sense hurting people for reasons they couldn’t control, or that you couldn’t either. Just because everything didn’t always fit in the tent, you didn’t throw the tent away.

He kept a pretty clear mental picture of Ed, despite having never seen him. To him Ed was a big, shambling, unshaven man in gray clothing and unlaced shoes, who’d once been physically powerful, even intimidating, but was no longer the man he once was, and so had become sulky and capable of saying cruel and unfair things to innocent people, all because life hadn’t been perfect. As it wasn’t, of course, for anybody. The expression “block of wood” and the wounded, weathered face of the old movie actor Lon Chaney, Jr., had become linked to Ed and with the nonexistent sex Frances intimated he provided.

Whenever Howard thought about Ed, it eventually involved some imagined confrontation in which he— Howard — would be cool and collected while Ed would be seething and confused. Howard would try to be generous and friendly, but Ed inevitably would begin being cutting and sarcastic. He’d try to make Ed realize that Frances really loved him, but that sometimes other tents had to be brought in and pitched. And then it always became necessary to kick Ed’s ass, though not enough to do any real damage. Later, when both their marriages had been repaired and time had elapsed, he and Ed could become grudging friends based on a shared understanding about reality and the fact that they both cared deeply for the same woman. He imagined going to Ed’s funeral and standing solemnly at the back of a Catholic church.

Ahead in the pale headlights, the figures of a man and a woman appeared on the opposite shoulder — at first small and indistinct and then hyper-real as they came up out of the dark, walking side by side. Two Indians — dressed shabbily, heading the other direction. Both the man and the woman looked at the big red Town Car as it shot past. The man was wearing a bright turquoise shirt and a reddish headband, the woman a flimsy gray dress. In an instant they were gone.

“Those were our ancient spirits,” Frances said. She’d been silent, and her words carried unexpected gravity. “It’s a sign. But I don’t know what of. Something not good, I’d say.”

He quit thinking about Ed.

“I guess if they were going in the other direction, we could’ve given our ancient spirits a ride. Drop them off at a convenience store.”

“They were coming back from where we’re going,” Frances pronounced in a grave voice.

“The Grand Canyon?”

“It’s a completely spiritual place. I already told you the Indians thought it was the door to the underworld.”

“Maybe we’ll see Teddy Roosevelt, too.” He felt pleased with himself. “We oughta turn around and go back and ask them what else we need to see.”

“We wouldn’t find them,” Frances said. “They’d be gone.”

“Gone where?” he said. “Just disappeared into thin air?”

“Maybe.” Frances looked at him gravely now. He knew she disapproved of him. “I want to tell you something, okay?” She looked back at the streaming white center line.

Up ahead was a string of white lights — a motel, he hoped. It was long after eleven, and he was suddenly flattened. Those two Indians might’ve been phantoms of fatigue, though it was strange they’d both see them.

“If anything happens to me, you know?” Frances said, without waiting for his answer. “I mean, if I have a heart attack in the motel, or in the car, or if I just keel over dead, do you know what I expect you to do?”

“Call Ed,” Howard said. “Confess everything.”

“That’s what I don’t want,” she said, her voice edgy with certainty. Her eyes found him again in the green-lit interior. “You understand this. You just walk away. Leave it. It’d require too much explanation. Just fade away like those Indians. I mean it. I’ll be dead anyway, right?”

“What the shit,” Howard said. He could see the magic letters M-O-T-E-L. “Don’t get fucking weird on me. I don’t know what happened when you talked to Ed, but you don’t need to start planning your funeral. Jesus.” He didn’t want to talk about anything more serious than sex now. It was too late in the day. He was sorry all over again to be here.

“Promise me,” Frances said, driving, but flicking her eyes back to him.

“I won’t promise anything,” he said. “Except I’ll promise you a good time if we can get out of this hearse and find a bed.”

Obviously she was stone serious. Except he wasn’t the kind of person who walked away, and there was no use promising. His family had raised him better than that.

“You know what I’d do if you got hit by a car or struck by lightning?” Frances said.

“Let me guess.”

“You don’t need to. Some complications aren’t worth getting into. You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

The motel sign was off to the right. On the left — like a little oasis — was a bright red neon casino sign with rotating blue police lights on top, and a big red neon rattlesnake, underneath, coiled and ready to strike. Beside the snake the neon lettering said strike it rich. The casino itself was only a low, windowless cube with a single, middle door and a lot of beater cars and pickups and a couple of sheriff’s vehicles nosed into the front. “Womans some-time velly hard to prease,” Howard said in Japanese, just to break up the gloom.

“I wish you’d do what I ask you to,” Frances said disappointedly, steering them into the motel’s gravel lot. A lighted office building inside of which a man was visible behind a counter, talking on the phone, sat beside the highway. The units, in a row behind it, were white stucco teepees with phony lodge poles showing through phony smoke holes. There were ten teepees, each with a small round window on either side of its front door. Two other cars were parked outside individual units. Lights shone from their windows.

“If you have a heart attack,” he said, “I promise I’ll ride with your body back to Willamantic. Just like whoever that was. President Kennedy.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Frances said, stopping in front of the office, and staring ahead disgustedly.

“I’m your idiot, though. At least tonight,” Howard said.

He was out the car door fast, his sneakers in the gravel, the sky all around suddenly dazzlingly full of pale stars, though a strong disinfectant odor was floating all through the little parking lot, and there was country music coming from the casino. Frances continued talking inside the car— more about leaving her behind — but he didn’t hear. He looked up and breathed the stinging disinfectant smell all the way deep down in his lungs. This was a relief. They’d driven way too far. The whole idea sucked to begin with. But he just wanted to get her off her stupid subject — heart attacks and deaths, etc. — and back to why they’d come. People talked and talked and none of it mattered to the big picture. It was like buyer’s remorse — but tomorrow would be different, no matter what you worried about today. You rode it out. He thought quite briefly about having been named agent of the year. It made him, for a moment, happy.

. .

From the driver’s seat Frances watched a large, long-tailed rat as it pestered and deviled a snake while the snake tried to make its way across the gravel from the line of teepees to the scrub ground where the desert began. The motel sign hummed and made the floodlit lot feel electrified, and kept the entire little skirmish visible. She wasn’t aware things like this even occurred. The snake, she thought, was the natural enemy and physical superior to the rat. The rat had things to fear. But here was the surprising truth. As she watched out the window, several times the snake stopped, coiled and struck at the rat, who reared up on its little hind legs like a tiny stallion and danced around. Then the snake, having missed, would start to slither off again toward the vegetation and shadows. The rat pursued almost idly, nipping then hopping back, then nipping again, as if it knew the snake personally. Eventually she let the window down to hear if they were making noise — if rattles were rattling or anyone hissed or growled. But the country music from the casino was too loud. Eventually the snake found the edge of the gravel and slid away, and the rat, its work complete, scurried back across the lot and disappeared under one of the dark teepees — not, she hoped, the one they’d be staying in.

She felt strange waiting here. Not really like who she was, the little agent from Nowhereburg, Connecticut—specialist in starter homes and rehabbed condos. Daughter. Wife. Holder of an associate’s degree in retail from an accredited community college. In a way, though, this guy was exactly right for her, as wrong as he was. Aren’t you always yourself? Is anybody you want ever wrong for you? She did desire him, especially after all the drinking. It was like her father had said. And anyway, why not want him? Life was sometimes a matter of ridding yourself of this or that urge, after which the rest got easier.

And adultery — she liked it when her thoughts connected up well — adultery was the act that rid, erased, even erased itself once the performance was over. Sometimes, she imagined, it must erase more than itself. And sometimes, surely, it erased everything around it. It was a remedy for ills you couldn’t get cured any other way, but it was a danger you needed to be cautious with. In any case, she felt grateful for it tonight. And because she thought all of this, she knew she had to be right.

Howard strolled out of the motel office flipping a room key back and forth, and smirking. She wondered how often he’d done this. It seemed so natural to him, not that she gave a shit. She never had, and yet it felt perfectly familiar to do it, as if she’d been doing it forever.

“Drive down to the last teepee,” Howard said, leaning in, hands on his bare knees. “And if you want to hit the casino, Big Chief Poker Face in there gave me two drinks coupons.”

“I just want to get fucked, is all.” She looked out the other window. “I don’t like to play slot machines.”

His eyes narrowed, the corners of his large unintelligent mouth turned almost imperceptibly upward. He wasn’t handsome, his hair buzzed and his ears and mouth way too big. He was clownish. Though that probably made his little wife ecstatic: a husband no one else much wanted, but who could work wonders.

Howard again put his big hand, adopting a cupping motion, in through the window, and up under one of her breasts. He didn’t seem to have a purpose. Just a pointless act of uncaring familiarity. “Back this baby over across the lot and we’ll do it in the car,” he said in a husky, theatrical voice. His small eyes twitched to the far edge of the gravel. “Nobody’ll see.” He sniffed a little humorless laugh.

“I’ll wait.”

“That’ll work, then,” he said, standing up, sniffing again.

“Good,” she said. “I’m ready for something to.” She turned the key in the ignition and began backing up.

She knew exactly what he liked. He liked her eyes to be on him. He liked for her to slip his cock into her mouth and, just as she did it, to raise her eyes to his. “I’ll do this to you now,” was what that meant. Like a cheap betrothal. Otherwise he liked her voice. With her voice, with whatever she chose to say when she was whispering to him, she could make him ejaculate. Just like that. Even her breathing could do it. So she had to be careful. Though coming wasn’t what he wanted. He was smart. He wanted to stay in it with her, move her where she needed to be moved around the bed, have it go and go and go until coming was just a way to end it, when they weren’t interested anymore. Strange, to be so intelligent in bed, and other times not at all. It was her doing, she thought; she’d invented him, turned him into someone she had a use for. His real intelligence was not to resist.

Only, in the cramped airless teepee, with the rayon portiere across the doorway and beetles crawling on the floor and the air heavy with bug dope, he wanted to take her too fast too violently — suddenly, vociferously — as if he meant to rid her of whatever had its grips into her, all by himself. As if it was his duty. Pounding, pounding. Like that. No time to work him with her voice, or bring him along and ease him in and out of it. Just the hard way, until it was over. And again — so odd that this man should be aware of her; knowing that something was wrong and setting out to fix it the way he knew how. That was intimacy. Of a certain kind. Yes.

Though possibly, of course — as she lay in the grainy darkness with Howard instantly, infinitely asleep beside her — possibly, she’d expressed herself perfectly in the car, and he’d just done what she’d told him. “I just want to get fucked.” That’s what she’d said. Anyone could understand what that meant. She had orchestrated things then, not him. She just hadn’t been aware of it. He’d simply let her employ him — that was the word — become the implement for what she wanted fixed, emptied, ended, ridded — whatever. Really, they didn’t know each other so well. She’d been mistaken about intimacy.

In the parking lot she heard men’s voices, talking and laughing, followed by car doors closing and engines starting and tires rolling over gravel. Farther away there was a sudden blare of country music, as if a door had been thrown open. Then the music was muffled, so that she realized she’d been hearing it for a while without knowing it. Someone shouted, “Oooo-weee,” and a car roared away. She’d brought in the bottle of gin from the car, and she reached it off the bedside table, unscrewed the cap and took a tiny sip — just to kill the stale-paper-bug-dope taste. And then she couldn’t help wondering, idly, she knew: does this really come to an end now? Couldn’t this go on a little longer after tonight, without the need of a fixed destination? There was a small good side to it. They both understood something. People ended things too soon, lacked patience when they could go on. If they truly erased themselves with each other, they could go on indefinitely. She could, anyway. And Howard wouldn’t resist, she assumed. This was a view she was glad to have, something more than she’d expected from this night. A surprise found in the dark.

On the concrete stoop of their teepee lay the littered brown husks of two hundred beetles killed by the bug dope somebody’d squirted around the door after they were asleep. Unpleasant to step on them. An Indian woman was sweeping them off the other teepee steps, using a broom and a plastic dustpan. A young Indian man with a ponytail was standing beside her watching and talking softly. The only other car in the lot was a dented black Camaro with yellow flames painted on its side and a spare-tire doughnut on the back.

The morning sun was warm, though a cool autumn breeze shifted the dust across the hardtop toward the casino, where there were still some cars and trucks in front. It was eight. A small neon rectangle, previously invisible on the STRIKE IT RICH sign was illuminated to say BREAKFAST NOW BEING SERVED. The blue police lights were turned off.

Breakfast was an idea, Howard thought, shirtless in the teepee doorway, his eyes aching. He couldn’t find his shirt on the floor in the dark room. But it would be a relief — even without his shirt — to eat breakfast in the empty casino while Frances slept on. They’d seen it all in a casino. He could bring coffee back, pay for it with the drinks coupons.

Up behind the STRIKE IT RICH, treeless brown mountains stood stark against the cool sky. These weren’t available when they’d arrived last night. You definitely never got a view like this in the east — just trees there and clouds and a smaller hazy sky, even by the ocean. So this was good — the drive had brought them up to where the air was cleaner, thinner; to a beautiful wasteland no one but Indians could stand to live in. And somewhere beyond this was the Grand Canyon — the big erosion hole Frances was now sleeping through. Maybe she’d forget about it and want to drive back to the convention.

He stepped out into the lot, shirtless, in his terry-cloth shorts and sneakers. Across the highway, beside the casino, was a small, new-looking, white clapboard chapel with a steeple and some plastic-looking stained-glass windows, surrounded by a white picket fence that also looked plastic. For quickie marriages, Howard thought, a wife you ended up with when you got lucky in the casino. Like in Atlantic City. Indians owned it, too, he was certain. A wooden sign in the grass-less fenced yard read, CHRIS DIED FOR YOUR SINS, which put him in mind that his family had been Christians. The Camerons — Presbyterians, somewhere back in Scotland. Not Christians, per se, anymore. Sunday was everybody’s personal day. But perfectly good people. His father was always pleased to see a church.

Except, what this crummy little chapel made him consider was that life, at best, implied a small, barely noticeable entity; and yet it was also a goddamned important entity. And you could ruin your entity before you even realized it. And further, it occurred to him, that no doubt just as you were in the process of ruining yours, how you felt at the exact moment of ruining it was probably precisely how this fucked-up landscape looked! Dry, empty, bright, chilly, alien, and difficult to breathe in. So that all around here was actually hell, he thought, instead of hell being the old version his father had told him about under the ground. The breeze moved just then across his bare chest, giving him a stiffening chill. A Greyhound rumbled past on the highway, stirring up dust and bringing a lone man out of the casino door to stare. Just being out here, Howard thought, was enough to spook you, and make you ready to have Chris go to bat for you, before you fell victim to something awful — despair you wouldn’t escape from because you were so small and insignificant. Or worse. He felt completely justified to hate it here. He was glad his father wasn’t along. The Greyhound was becoming a speck on the highway heading south. He needed to get Frances to forget the Grand Canyon and get in behind that bus back to Phoenix. He’d really just come along for the ride — to keep her company. None of this was anything he’d caused.

When Frances stepped out of the teepee into the sharp light and cool breeze, she looked tired — her blue, anchor blouse rumpled, and her sapphire earrings missing, leaving just the little holes showing. Though she looked happy. She’d showered and slicked back her short blond hair, and had her purse and the gin bottle in hand. She looked younger and like she wasn’t sure where she was, but wasn’t displeased about it. Whatever last night had been hadn’t left her dissatisfied, though he couldn’t remember much except that it hadn’t lasted very long and he’d passed out.

He’d bought Styrofoam cups of coffee in the casino and was sitting on the fender of the Lincoln, looking through her Grand Canyon book. He’d found his shirt and felt better, though he was ready to leave.

“You rarin’ to go?” Frances was looking around the empty lot and up at the mountains. She smiled at the pure blue sky as she sipped her coffee. Her throat was congested and she kept clearing it. She wasn’t really steady, her eyes were slits, her face puffy.

“Ready to go somewhere,” he said, hoping for Phoenix, but not wanting to press it.

“Isn’t it beautiful here.” She blinked, her cup to her lips. “Are you happy?”

“I’m great.”

“Last night?” she said. She looked confused. “You know? After you were asleep? I woke up, and I had no idea where I was. I really didn’t even know who you were. It was weird. I guess it was the gin. But I got on my hands and knees and I stared right down into your face. I could feel your breath on my eyeballs. I just stared at you and stared at you. I’m glad you didn’t wake up. You’d have thought you were in the middle of an operation.”

“Or that I was dead.”

“Right. Or that.” She noticed all the beetle husks that had yet to be swept off the teepee steps. “Oh dear,” she said. “Look-it here.”

“Who’d you think I was,” he said, slipping off the fender.

“I didn’t know,” she said looking at the beetles all around her feet. “I didn’t think you were anybody. You could’ve been an animal. You could’ve changed shape.”

“Did you think I was Ed?”

“No.” She reached into her purse for her car keys and nudged a few husks with the toe of her pink shoe. “No resemblance there.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No. You wouldn’t,” she said and seemed annoyed, and began walking toward the car. “Come on,” she said. “We’re late.”

A mile beyond the motel, a green highway sign said SOUTH RIM—85 MILES. They turned that way, and Howard put on the Tito Puente music, then remembered what it was and turned it off as the road immediately began climbing and they began encountering campers and more tour buses creeping up and coming down. The landscape that was beginning to be below them looked flatter and smooth, pinkish like a sand sculpture, and, Howard felt, totally different from when he was on the ground in it, when it seemed spooky and uninviting. When he’d thought it was hell.

Frances produced a camera, one of the new sleek, molded operations designed by Japanese to look serious and professional, though it was actually cheap. Three times on the steep road up, she stopped the car and made them get out so she could take a picture of the desert. Twice she got him to take her picture, posing short-necked, stiff and squinting in front of a flagstone retaining wall. Once she took him, and once she got a man from Michigan to take them together with the empty sky behind. “These can be used in divorce court,” Frances said when the Michigan man could still hear them. “I’ll give you the negatives and you can destroy them. I just want a print.”

Howard was remembering how little he liked tourist venues, how you could never see anything 10 million yokels hadn’t already seen and shit on and written graffiti all over before you could get there. What they were doing now really had no purpose. Purpose ended last night. They were just doing this.

Frances stood beside the car, studying her camera, which she’d tried to make operate automatically but couldn’t. The camera made its soft, confident whirring, clicking, sighing noise. “There’s another one of my hand,” she said.

“I don’t think I’m going to get the Grand Canyon,” Howard said. She’d gotten different again now, become businesslike. She was different every hour. You needed a program.

“You haven’t experienced it yet,” she said, holding her camera up, pointing back at the retaining wall and the perfect blue matte of empty space. Again it whirred, clicked and sighed. “It has to be believed to be seen. Of course, I haven’t seen it either. Just pictures.”

“Me not know,” he said, but didn’t sound Japanese. It was more like Indian, and sounded stupid.

She smiled painfully as she turned the camera upside down and read something on the bottom. “Well, you will.” She shook her head and stuck the camera in her purse and started around the car to go. “Then you’ll want these pictures. You’ll pay me for them. You’ll have been exposed to something the likes of which you’ll never have seen or expected. And you’ll thank me all the way back to Phoenix.”

She loved it that the air grew cooler, and that the plant life changed, that there were little pine trees growing right out of the dry, rocky mountain turf. She loved it that the scrub desert floor looked, from high above, like a sand painting an Indian might do — reds and pinks and blues and blacks in layers you’d never see when you were in the middle of it. This was the lesson of the outdoors, she thought: how much that actually existed was hidden in the things you saw; and, that all the things you felt so sure about, you shouldn’t. It was hopeful. She would have to go outdoors more. Selling real estate wasn’t really being outdoors.

She still hated it, and couldn’t quit thinking about it, nearly three weeks later, that he’d said she was good in bed — like she was some carnival act he could give a score to and maybe clap for. Howard was her mistake, no matter that she’d tried to see it different, tried to make him happy. It was one thing, she thought, and maybe okay, to fuck Howard in a HoJo’s by the Interstate. But it was quite another thing — much less good — to move it all out to Phoenix, get to know him a lot better, risk being caught and fired, and still think it could turn out good. And it was stupid, stupid to take him to the Grand Canyon, given his little withholding, stand-on-the-sidelines, complaining self. Ed would’ve been better. Ed would be better because even though sex was out, Ed at least had once been a good sport. As a human being, Howard Cameron had been subpar from the beginning. She hadn’t read the fine print.

She glanced at him, musing away on his side about absolutely nothing, his long hairless white legs planked out in front of him like stilts, his pale knees too far below his shorts, his enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten, and his soft, characterless face, and his bushy unkempt eyebrows. And his basketball haircut. What had been wrong with her? He wasn’t interesting or witty or nice or deep or pretty. He was a pogo stick. And up here, where everything was natural and clean and pristine, you saw it. And that it was wrong. True nature revealed true nature.

But steering the big fire chief’s car up the winding, steepening road with the sheer drop to the desert twenty feet away, she understood she wasn’t going to let him ruin another day with his poor-mouth, sad-sack, nothing’s-perfect, pissy bad attitude. Today she felt exhilarated — it was dizzying. The feeling went right down into her middle, and set loose something else, a spirit she’d never realized was there, much less locked up and trapped. And, they were still on the road, not even to the canyon yet! How would it feel when she could get out, walk ten paces and there would be the great space stretching miles and miles and miles? She couldn’t imagine it. The profound opening of the earth. Great wonders all had powers to set free in you what wasn’t free. Poets wrote about it. Only the dragging, grinding minutiae of every day — cooking, driving, talking on the phone, explaining yourself to strangers and loved ones, selling houses, balancing checkbooks, stopping at the video store — all that made you forget what was possible in life.

Probably she’d faint. Certainly she would be speechless, then cry. Conceivably she’d want to move out here right away, realize she’d been living her life wrong, and begin to fix it. That’s why the people she sold houses to moved — to go where they could live better. They made up their minds — at least the ones who weren’t forced into it by horrible luck— that they and not somebody else ran their lives.

“Those were Navajos,” Howard said, staring out at the drop-off beyond the right road shoulder. He’d been nursing his thoughts. “Not Hopis, okay? I read it in your Grand Canyon book while you were asleep this morning.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Do I scare you?” Howard said.

Frances braked as traffic on the two-lane road slowed ahead of them. “Do you scare me?” she said. “Are you supposedly threatening or something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I really can’t think of a way right at this moment that you scare me.” They were already entering the village of South Rim, Arizona, which seemed to be an entirely separate town. A thousand citizens living on the edge of the Grand Canyon — going to the grocery, the dentist, watching TV, car-pooling … all here! Maybe it would seem like Connecticut after a month, but she couldn’t see how.

“Do you think you could ever be married to me?” Howard glanced at her strangely.

“I don’t think so.” She was inching forward, watching traffic. “It’s about the fact that I’m already married. And you’re already married. And we’re married to other people.”

“So it’s just barb-less fucking. Fuck-and-release.” He wasn’t paying attention, just blabbing. Bored.

“Like Etch-a-Sketch. You know?” She stared at the license plate of the Explorer ahead of them. Maine. A Natural Treasure. What was there?

“And so, do you feel guilty about it?”

“I feel …” She stopped. Whatever she was about to say could definitely jeopardize her first look at the Grand Canyon, simply because of whatever brainless thing he would then say back. And precious little happened for the first time anymore, so she didn’t intend to fuck this one up with a lot of idiot blabbing. Why wasn’t Meredith, her roommate who’d died of brain cancer, here now, instead of this guy? Meredith would’ve enjoyed this. “Communications are suspended for a period, okay?” She smiled over at him inhospitably. “I want to, you know, look at the Grand Canyon. No mas preguntas este mañana.”

“That’ll work. Whatever,” Howard said, reaching down where he’d removed his shoe to pick at his raised, big toenail as if he was thinking of pulling it off.

She might even be harming herself by associating with this man. Possibly he posed a threat, staring at his huge toenail. What could he be thinking? Something sinister. She’d excuse herself to use the rest room the minute they were out of the car, then get away from him. Call the police and say he was stalking her. Let him find his pitiful way back to Phoenix alone. She thought of his wife’s pained expression, seen like a wraith out in the night sky of Phoenix two nights ago. She could have him back.

“Do you like things complicated or simple?” Howard said, still worrying his toenail.

“Simple,” she said.

“Hm. I guessed so,” he said idly. “Me, too.”

“I’ve realized that.”

“Yeah,” he said, straightening up to stare at the traffic. “Right.”

Entering South Rim Village was also entering the National Park. Cars were required to follow designated paved roads you couldn’t deviate from and that wound one-way-only through pretty pine groves where traffic quickly piled up. All the drivers were patient, though, and didn’t honk or try to turn around. This was the only answer to the numbers problem: orderly flow, ingress/egress, organized parking, stay in your vehicle. Otherwise people would drive straight to the rim, get out and leave their vehicles for hours, just like at the mall. When she’d imagined it, there’d been no traffic, and she’d ridden up on a palomino, stopped at the rim and stared for hours, alone with her thoughts.

“Everything’s just about moving people through,” Howard said. He’d run his seat forward, pushed his knees up and was watching the traffic, engrossed. “What you or I see or do is beside the point. People have to be moved or the system breaks down.” He scratched his hand over the top of his bristly hair, then pulled at his ear. “Real estate’s exactly the same thing. People move somewhere, and we find ’em a place. Then they move someplace else, and we find them another place. It doesn’t matter where they finally are— which is not what we were taught to understand in school, of course. We’re supposed to think where we are does matter. But it’s like a shark’s life. Dedicated to constant moving.” He nodded at this conception.

“I think they come here for very good reasons,” Frances said. The campers and land yachts took up too much space was what she was thinking. The problem was cramped space, not movement. The Grand Canyon was open space. “People don’t just move to be moving. I wasn’t dying to drive and somebody dreamed up a Grand Canyon for me. That’s stupid.”

“Civilization,” Howard said dully, paying no attention, “coming up here, working up here, living up here — all these thousands of people. It’s like an airport, not a real place. If we ever get to see the fucking Grand Canyon, if it’s not just a myth, it’ll be like being in an airport. Looking at it will be like looking at a runway where the planes are all lined up. That’s why I’d rather stay home instead of getting herded here and herded there.” He sniffed through his wide nostrils.

And now he was beginning to ruin things, just the way she’d feared but had promised herself not to let him. She looked at him and felt herself actually grimace. She needed to get away from this man. She felt willing to push him right out the door onto the road, using her foot. Though that would be hysterical, and scare him to death. She would have to try to ignore him a little longer, until they were out of the car. She produced a displeasing mental picture of Howard whamming away on her in the grubby, awful little teepee with beetles all over the floor and no TV. What had that been about? All those thoughts she’d thought. What was her brain doing? How desperate was she?

“There’s that Indian from the motel.” Howard pointed at a young man with a long black ponytail, wearing jeans and a green T-shirt. He was walking across the sunny parking lot into which a park ranger in a pointed hat, and standing beside a little hut, was flagging traffic. The Indian was in with the tourists hiking out of the lot up a paved path Frances knew had to lead to the canyon rim. This would be fine, she thought. It was too late to ruin it now. “Maybe he’s one of the ancient spirit people.” Howard smirked. “Maybe he’s our spiritual guide to the Grand Canyon.”

“Shut up,” Frances said, swerving into a slot among other parked cars and campers. Families were leaving vehicles and legging it in the direction the Indian had gone. Some were hurrying as if they couldn’t wait another minute. She felt that way. “Maybe you can go buy us a sandwich. I’ll come find you in a while.” She was looping her camera around her neck, eager to get out.

“I guess not.” Howard pushed open his door with his sneaker and began unfolding his long legs. “I couldn’t miss this. Haven’t you ever stood beside a construction site and looked in the hole. That’s what this’ll be. It’ll be a blast.”

She looked at him coldly. A chill, pine-freshened breeze passed softly through the opened car doors. There were plenty of other people come to admire the great vista, the spiritual grandeur and the natural splendor. It was with them that she would experience the canyon. Not this loser. When it was all over, he could decide it was his idea. But in an hour he’d be history, and she could enjoy the ride back to Phoenix alone. None of this would take long.

Down the hill from the parking lot and through the pine trees, set away from where the tourists went, Howard could see what looked like barracks buildings with long screened windows, painted beige to blend with the landscape. These were dormitories. Like going to basketball camp in the Catskills. A boy and a girl — teenagers — were toting a mattress from one barracks building to another, and giggling. You got used to it, he imagined. Days went by probably, and you never even saw the Grand Canyon or thought a thing about it. It was exactly like working in an airport.

Frances was hurrying up the path, paying no attention to him. There had to be Weiboldt people up here, he thought, folks who’d recognize them and get the whole picture in a heartbeat. They stood out like Mutt and Jeff. No way to get away with anything. His father always said it didn’t matter who knew what you did, only what you did. And what they’d been doing was fucking and riding around in a rental car on company time — which was probably a federal crime anymore. Plus, Frances seemed not to like him much now, though he didn’t see how he’d done anything particularly wrong, except go to sleep too fast in the motel. He was perfectly happy to be up here with her, happy to take part if they didn’t stay all day. He realized he was hungry.

Coming up the path, you couldn’t actually tell that there was something to see up ahead, just a low rock wall where people had stopped, and a lot of blue sky behind it. An airplane, a little single-engine, puttered along through that sky.

And then, all at once, just very suddenly, he was there; at the Grand Canyon, beside Frances who had her camera up to her face. And there was no way really not to be surprised by it — the whole Grand Canyon just all right there at once, opened out and down and wide in front of you, enormous and bottomless, with a great invisible silence inhabiting it and a column of cool air pushing up out of it like a giant well. It was a shock.

“I don’t want you to say one single thing,” Frances said. She wasn’t looking through her camera now, but had begun to stare right into the canyon itself, like she was inhaling it. Sunlight was on her face. She seemed blissed.

He did, however, expect to say something. It was just natural to want to put some words of your own to the whole thing. Except he instantly had the feeling, standing beside Frances, that he was already doing something wrong, had somehow approached this wrong, or was standing wrong, even looking at the goddamned canyon wrong. And there was something about how you couldn’t see it at all, and then you completely did see it, something that seemed to suggest you could actually miss it. Miss the whole Grand Canyon!

Of course, the right way would be to look at it all at once, taking in the full effect, just the way Frances seemed to be doing. Except it was much too big to get everything into focus. Too big and too complicated. He felt like he wanted to turn around, go back to the car and come up again. Get re-prepared.

Though it was exactly, he thought, staring mutely out at the flat brown plateau and the sheer drop straight off the other side — how far away, you couldn’t tell, since perspective was screwed up — it was exactly what he’d expected from the pictures in high school. It was a tourist attraction. A thing to see. It was plenty big. But twenty jillion people had already seen it, so that it felt sort of useless. A negative. Nothing like the ocean, which had a use. Nobody needed the Grand Canyon for anything. At its most important, he guessed, it would be a terrific impediment to somebody wanting to get to the other side. Which would not be a good comment to make to Frances, who was probably having a religious experience. She’d blow her top on that. The best comment, he thought, should be that it was really quiet. He’d never experienced anything this quiet. And it was nothing like an airport. Though flying in that little plane was probably the best way to see it.

The people they’d followed up the paved path were now moving on in the direction of telescopes situated in some little rocky outcrops built into the wall. They were all ooo-ing and ahh-ing, and most everybody had video equipment for taping the empty space. Farther along, he assumed, there would be a big rustic hotel and some gift shops, an art gallery and an IMAX that showed you what you could see for yourself just by standing here.

He hadn’t spoken yet, but he wanted to say something, so Frances would know he thought this was worthwhile. He just didn’t want to make her mad again. It was a big deal for her. They’d gone to all this trouble and time. She should be able to enjoy it, even if he didn’t particularly care. There was probably no way to get her interest in him back now; though he’d thought, while they were driving up, that they ought to at least try to keep this going back home, turn it into something more permanent, get the logistics smoothed out. That would be good. Only now it seemed like they might not even be talking on the ride back. So why bother?

Down the scenic walkway, where the other tourists were wandering toward the telescopes and restaurants, he saw the Indian boy from the motel again. He was talking into a cell phone and nodding as he walked along with the others. He was a paid guide, Howard decided, not a spiritual guide. Somebody hawking beads or trinkets to corn pones.

“What do you think about it now?” Frances finally said in a husky, reverent voice, as though she was in the grip of a religious experience. Her back was to him. She was still just staring out into the great silent space of the canyon. They were alone. The last three tourists were drifting away, chatting. “I thought I’d cry, but I can’t cry.”

“It’s sort of the opposite of real estate, isn’t it?” Howard said, which seemed an interesting observation. “It’s big, but it’s empty.”

Frances turned toward him, frowning, her eyes narrowed and annoyed. “Is that what you think? Big but empty? You think it’s empty? You look at the Grand Canyon and you think empty?” She looked back at the open canyon, as if it could understand her. “You’d be disappointed in heaven, too, I guess.”

This was clearly not an interesting observation, he realized. He stepped up to the stone wall, so his bare knees touched the stones and he was doing what he guessed she wanted. He could now see a little fuzz of white river far, far below, at the bottom of the canyon. And then he could see tiny people walking down the canyon’s sides on trails. Quite a few of them, once you made out one — small light-colored shirts, moving like insects. Which was for the birds. You wouldn’t see anything down there you couldn’t better see from up here. There would be nothing down there but poisonous snakes and a killer walk back, unless somebody sent a helicopter for you. “What river is that?” he said.

“Who cares what goddamn river it is,” Frances snapped. “It’s the Ganges. It’s not about the river. But okay, I understand. You think it’s empty. To me it’s full. You and I are just different.”

“What’s it full of?” Howard said. The small buzzing plane appeared again, inching out over the canyon. It was probably the police patrol, he thought. Though what could you do wrong out here?

“It’s full of healing energy,” Frances said. “It extinguishes all bad thoughts. It makes me not feel fed up.” She was staring straight out into the cool empty air, speaking as if she was speaking to the canyon, not to him. “It makes me feel like I felt when I was a little girl,” she said softly. “I can’t say it right. It has its own language.”

“Great,” Howard said, and for some reason, he thought of the two of them together in bed last night, and how she’d fixed her eyes on his face when she took him in. He wondered if she was looking at the canyon the same way now. He hoped so.

“I’ve just got to do what you’re not allowed to,” Frances said, and took a quick, reconnoitering look to where the other visitors were occupied with their video cameras and with crowding around the brass telescopes far down the walk. “I need to get you to take my picture with just the canyon behind me. I don’t want this wall in it. I want just me and the canyon. Will you do that?” She was handing him her camera and already crawling up onto the flat-topped stone retaining wall and looking around behind at the wide ledge of rubbly, rocky ground just below. “You probably can’t even see the canyon from where you are, can you? You’re tall but you’re still too low.”

He stood holding the camera, watching up at her, waiting for her to find the right place to pose.

There were plenty of hand-carved wooden signs with crisp white lettering that said, PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB ON OR GO BEYOND THE WALL. IT’s DANGEROUS. ACCIDENTS OCCUR FREQUENTLY. She could see these signs. She could read, he thought. He didn’t want to start another argument.

“I’ll have to break some more rules,” Frances said from up on the wall, and she began to scoot down on the outside of the wall until her pink shoes touched the dirt. He looked over at her. Little pine shrubs were growing out of the arid ground, their roots broken through the dirt. Other footprints were visible. Plenty of people had walked around where she was. A small yellow film box lay half-buried in the dirt. A red-and-white cigarette package was wadded up and tossed. “I just want to go a step or two farther out here,” Frances said, looking up at him, widening her eyes and smiling. She was happy, though she’d gotten her white shorts dirty and her pink shoes, too.

He looped the camera cord around his neck so he wouldn’t drop it.

“I want just me and the canyon in the picture. Nothing else. Look through it now. See what you see when you see me.” She was beaming, backing up through the little scrub pines, squinting into the morning sun. “Is it okay?”

“Be careful,” Howard said, fitting the little rubber eye-cushion to his face, the camera warm against his nose.

“Okay?” she said. He hadn’t found her yet. “This’ll be great. This canyon’s really young, it just looks old. Oh my.”

He put the little black lens brackets on her, or at least on the place he thought she would be just below him — where she’d been. But where she wasn’t now. Through the lens he looked left and then right, then up, then down. He lowered the camera to find where she’d moved to. “Where’d you go?” he said. He was smiling. But she was gone. The space he’d had fixed with the viewfinder was there, recognizable by a taller, jutting piece of piney scrub—piñons, he remembered that name from somewhere. But Frances was not occupying the space. He saw only sunny open air and, far away, the sheer brown and red and purple face of the canyon’s opposite wall and the flat earth’s surface atop it. A great distance. An impossible distance.

“Frances?” he said and then waited, the camera weightless in his hands. He’d hardly ever said her name, in all the times, all the hours. What had he called her? He couldn’t remember. Maybe they’d never used names. “Oh my.” He’d heard those words. They were in memory. He wasn’t certain, though, if he hadn’t said them himself. What had they meant?

He stood still and peered straight down into the space Frances Bilandic had occupied, behind which was much more vacant space. She would appear. She would spring up. “Frances?” he said again, without completely expecting to speak, but expecting to hear her voice. He heard the far-off buzzing of the patrol plane. He looked up but couldn’t see it. His knees and thighs were pressed against the rock wall. All seemed perfectly pleasant. He looked to the left and down to where he’d seen the small white-shirted humans inching along the canyon walls. One or some of them, he thought, should be looking up here. For an instant, he expected to see Frances down where they were. But she wasn’t, and no one was looking up. No one there had any idea of anyone here.

And no one down the path was now walking back in his direction. He was alone here, unobserved. He put the camera on the sunny top of the wall and started crawling over, one bare knee then the other, scraping his shin but getting himself down onto the dusty ground where Frances was supposed to be, beyond where the film package and the cigarette box were. He took a step through the loose rocks — it smelled warm and familiarly like urine. But after only four cautious steps (a snake seemed possible here) he found himself at a sudden rough edge and a straight drop down.

And it was at this instant that his head began to pound and his heart jerk, and his breathing became shallow and difficult and oddly hoarse, and a roar commenced in his ears, as if he’d been running and shouting to get to here. And it was now that he got down on his knees and his fists like an animal, as though he could breathe better that way, and peered over the jagged edge and down, far down, far, far down — certainly not to where the river was shining whitely. But far. Two hundred feet, at least, to where the dirt and rock sidewall of the canyon discontinued its straight drop and angled out a few feet before breaking off again for the long, long drop to the bottom. There were rocks and more piney bushes there, and a tree — a ragged, Asiatic-looking cedar growing into the dirt and stone at an angle that would eventually cause it to fall away. And it was just there, at the up-slope base of this ancient cedar, that Frances was, two hundred feet below him.

It was her face he saw first, appearing round and shiny in the sunlight. She was staring up at him, her eyes seemingly open, though the rest of her — her white shorts and blue sail-cloth top with the anchor, her bare legs and arms — these were all jumbled about her in a crazy way, as if her face had been dropped first, and then the rest of her. It actually seemed, from here, that one arm was intact but separated from her body.

And she didn’t move. For a moment he thought the expression on her face changed the instant he saw her. But that wasn’t likely, because it didn’t change again. As poorly as he could make her out, her expression never changed.

How long did he kneel in the pine scrub and rubble and bits of paper trash and urine scent beyond the wall? He couldn’t be sure. Though not long. The roar in his ears stopped first. His heart beat furiously for a time, and then seemed almost to stop beating, after which a cool perspiration rose on his neck and in his hair and stained through his T-shirt. He looked down at Frances again and, keeping a careful eye on her very white upward-turned face, he tried to think what he might do: help her, save her, comfort her, bring her back to here, give her what she needed, given where she was. Anything. All of these. What? Time did not pass slowly or quickly. Yet he seemed to have all the time he needed, alone there in the brush, to decide something.

Only, he knew that this time wouldn’t last. Howard gazed up toward the telescopes, where the other visitors had wandered. Frances would not be seen at first — she was too near to the canyon wall, too hidden among the cedar branches. Too surprising. For a time she’d be mistaken for something she wasn’t. An article of her own clothing. No one would want to see what had happened. They wanted to look at something else entirely.

Though if anyone had seen, they would already be coming — shouting, arms waving — the way he’d felt a moment or ten minutes ago. Other people would already be at the wall looking down. He would be seen, too, hunkering like an animal, his T-shirt a white flag in the underbrush. Soon enough this would happen. Her camera was on the wall. He needed to move, now.

On his hands and knees he backed away from the edge, got turned around and crawled up through the pine roots and human debris to the piss-scented base of the wall. And as he was so tall, he simply stood and peered over, able to see all the way back down the asphalt path to the parking lot where he and Frances had followed the crowd. No one was walking up, nor was anyone coming back from the telescopes. And in that moment’s recognition he leaped-hoisted himself up onto and over the wall, and in doing so kicked Frances’s cheap Pentax down onto the pavement.

He stood up again quickly, on the right side of the wall, the correct side, where the rest of the world was supposed to stay. And it was not, he felt, the cool breeze lifting out of the open expanse of canyon — not at all a bad feeling to be here. Whatever was bad had occurred on the other side. Now he was here. Safe.

Though all the other many phrases were about to begin now. Their exact meanings would very soon be present in his thinking. Authorities notified. Help summoned. Frances rescued (though of course she was dead). The forces responsible for terrible events had to be mobilized and mobilized now.

He stared at the Pentax lying on the black sequined asphalt, ruined. He tried to remember if she’d taken his picture in the car this morning, his picture in the motel last night, his picture in Phoenix, his picture at the scenic turn-out even one hour ago. But he simply couldn’t remember. His mind wasn’t so still that he could bring back that kind of thing, although he knew he very much wanted for the answer to be no, that she had not taken his picture, and for the camera to stay where it had come to rest. (Though hadn’t he touched it?)

And of course yes, the answer was that his face was in the camera. More than once. That recognition did come back now. And of course he had touched it. And despite the fact that in two minutes or less he would walk quickly to the tourist center or the ranger station or to whatever there was, and make a call for emergency assistance, the camera needed to be removed. Since everything that would happen — happen to Frances, happen to him, happen to Mary, to Ed — could depend on what happened to this one camera and what it contained. Now being the significant time — he knew this from TV — with Frances suspended face-up to the empty sky and himself unscathed; now was the “critical period” that, in a thorough police investigation, had to be accounted for, challenged, scrutinized, gone over again and again and again. The time up to, during, and immediately after, would be considered and reconsidered to determine if he had killed Frances Bilandic and why that had suddenly become necessary. (Love gone sour? A sudden breakfast quarrel? Resentment repaid. An inexplicable act of passion or fury. A simple mistake. You could almost think you did do it, there were so many allowable reasons that you might’ve.)

Too bad, he thought, standing above the black camera, on its side on the black asphalt, too bad he hadn’t snapped Frances just at the moment she’d gone over. So many thousands of words would be saved by that luck. “Oh my.” Those were her last words to the world, apparently. He was the one who’d heard them. No one else knew that. He was very involved in this.

He grabbed the camera up then and, for a reason he wasn’t at all clear about, started back from the canyon rim toward the parking lot, not toward the tourist village where help was. Newly arrived Grand Canyon tourists-enthusiasts were strolling out of the lot in shorts and bright sweaters, carrying cameras, lugging backpacks, laughing about seeing “a big hole in the ground.” They would see him holding Frances’s camera. But there was nothing truly suspicious about him except that he was very tall and alone. Did his face look strange? Distressed?

A pay phone sat just at the border of the prettily landscaped parking lot, at the edge of some pinewoods. Pink wildflowers still grew here. Of course he should make the call. Do that much. Call in the emergency. Though there was no such thing as an anonymous call now. Everything flashed up on a screen someplace: “Howard Cameron is calling in a death.” Response would be instantaneous. And then what? He needed to think, as more visitors drifted past him chatting, chuckling. Call and say what? Explain what? Own up to what? (Since he hadn’t done anything but not take a picture.) Possibilities fluttered hotly in his face like cinders above a fire — none of them distinct or graspable, but all real, full of danger. And it was so so odd, he kept thinking: they had just arrived, and then she’d fallen in. He had wanted not to come.

He looked out across the sunny parking lot. The ranger in his campaign hat was waving vehicles past his little house, leaning in the car windows, smiling and joking with passengers. The sight of the ranger made him lonely, made him long to be miles and miles and miles from where he was — at home, or waking up, lying in bed, thinking about the day when he would sell a house, eat lunch with a friend, call his mother, drive to the playground, shoot baskets, then return at dusk to someone who loved and understood him. All that was real. All of that was possible if he didn’t call.

Though all of that would soon become a dream-life he’d never live again, since eventually, somehow he’d be trapped. Reeled in. You didn’t really get away with things. And he had come up here with Frances — if only just to fuck her; he had made crazy mistakes of judgment, mistakes of excess, of intemperance, of passion, of nearsightedness, of stupidity. Of course, they’d all seemed natural when he was doing them. But no one would see them that way. No one would take his part, even if it became clear and beyond any argument that he hadn’t pushed Frances Bilandic off the cliff (he was in the camera, his hands and feet, even his toenails had left traces in the car’s carpet, he had been seen with her often at the convention). Even if he was finally acquitted in court, he was still guilty of so much that he might as well have done it. Who actually did do it — Frances had done it to herself — was just a matter of splitting hairs. He did it. “A fuck-up, oh what a fuck-up.” He said these words out loud as strangers walked past him. A young woman carrying a baby papoose-style glanced at him and smiled sympathetically. “I just should plan things. I can’t understand,” he said in agony, because of course there was no way out of this now.

So that he simply walked to the pay phone, shining there in the morning’s sun, looped the camera strap around his wrist and began to set the whole complicated machinery of responsibility into motion.

Later in the day, when he went to find the rental car to show the park police how they’d arrived at the Grand Canyon, it was gone. Howard stood, in his shorts and T-shirt, again in the warm parking lot, gazing at the taillights of cars and campers and vans and SUVs. He walked across into the next yellow-lined row — the one he knew was the wrong one — and looked there. Nothing he saw he recognized. The big fire chief’s car was gone. It seemed unimaginable. In the sunshine, with two officers watching him, it was as though he’d invented a car. Too bad, he thought, he hadn’t.

“I just don’t know,” he said, feeling tired, confused, but inexplicably smiling, as if he was lying. “We left it right here.” He pointed to a place where someone had parked a huge white Dodge Ram Charger and emptied the contents of an ashtray on the pavement. He thought oddly about the Tito Puente CD and the bottle of gin and Frances’s purse and her cell phone and her guidebook. All gone with the car.

One of the officers was a young, stiff, short-necked blonde not so different in her appearance from Frances Bilandic, but dressed in a tight, high-waisted beige uniform with a clean white T-shirt under her tunic. She was carrying an absurdly large black-gripped automatic pistol high on her plump little hip. Jorgensen was the name on her brass name-plate. “And you are sure you drove up here in a rental car?” she said, looking up at Howard, her tiny periwinkle eyes blinking as though to penetrate him, see his soul, locate the wellspring cause of the profound dislike she’d begun to experience. His height, he thought, made him dislikable. Though who wouldn’t doubt his story? He doubted it. Nothing seemed very true.

“Yes,” he said, distracted. “I’m sure.” He watched a crow fly across the blue pane of sky above the lot. “You can call the rental-car company. She rented it. Not me.”

“And which rental-car company was that?” Officer Jorgensen said, continuing to ponder him, squinting.

“I don’t know,” he said and smiled. “I don’t know very much.”

“Did you notice anyone suspicious following you?” Suddenly she sounded almost sympathetic — as if no one should’ve followed him. He felt willing, since she was willing to be sympathetic, to think back through the day. Such a long day, so complicated with complex, terrible things. And now the stupid car. He could barely believe such a day had begun where it had, in the cool sunny breeze outside a teepee, watching an Indian woman sweep beetles off the stoop, while Frances slept. He remembered the Camaro with the flames on the side and the doughnut tire. And the little chapel where Chris died for everyone’s sins. He thought a moment about Frances saying, “Those were our ancient spirits,” last night, but couldn’t remember what had made her say that.

“No, I don’t think anyone followed us,” he said and shook his head. He looked back down the row of taillights. He felt he’d have to see the red Lincoln now. It would be there, like your wallet on the hall table — present, only for a time invisible. But no. It was far away. Something else hard to imagine.

He hadn’t done what Frances told him to do, of course, as if she’d been foreseeing everything. He remembered her advice at intervals through the day, when for a time suspicion fell upon him; when he’d been informed by a rescue crew member in a plaid shirt — while he was eating a sandwich— that Frances’s body had been recovered by use of a wire basket and cables, not a helicopter, and that her left arm had indeed become separated; when he’d heard her next-of-kin had been informed, using cards from a small beaded wallet she’d carried — something he didn’t even know about; and when he had heard Ed’s name (surprisingly, Ed’s last name was Murphy); and when the name Weiboldt Company was spoken, and then the name of his wife and the town he lived in all sounding quite peculiar in the voices of strangers; on and on and on through the details of lives that now were affected, possibly spoiled, unquestionably made less good, even made impossible because of a few misguided occurrences, and by his questionable decision to stand up for them. At several intervals — sitting in a metal folding chair in a wood-paneled office with a window that looked out into the new-but-rustic visitors’ center — he thought again that he’d compounded a mistake with a worse mistake, and that he should’ve walked away, just as Frances had said; let all he was enduring now come out not in just one day, or maybe never come out. Every single thing he’d done for two days could’ve gone unnoticed. And instead of these lengthy, wrenching moments, he could’ve been in Phoenix considering how best to put the day’s events behind him and greet the evening. Though, of course, that might have turned out to be harder. Whereas what he had done — stayed, told, accepted — might actually be easier.

In the end, even before the afternoon was concluded, suspicion gradually lifted and settled on the concept of an accident. He had told it all, handed over the camera almost gratefully, endured the police officers’ disapproval, until something about him, he thought, something actually honest in his height, something in the patient way he sat in the folding chair, elbows on his bare knees, eyes on his large soft empty hands, and explained not without emotion, what had happened — all of that just began to seem true and almost, for a fleeting instant, to seem interesting. So that finally, without even declaring so precisely, the police accepted his story. And once another hour had passed, and three documents were filled out and signed, and his address noted, and his driver’s license returned, and the names of officers and telephone numbers given, he was informed he was free to go. He noticed that it was three o’clock in the afternoon.

Though not before he had spoken briefly to Ed. The police woman had asked him if he wished to when she called, and he’d felt she wanted him to, that it was his duty, after all, given his position.

“I don’t really get all this,” Ed had said, his voice slow and gruff with emotion. He imagined Ed sitting in a dark room, a bitter, disheveled man (more or less the man he’d imagined having a fistfight with — Lon Chaney, Jr.). “What were you doing there?”

“I’m a friend,” Howard said, solemnly. “We drove up together.”

“Is that it?” Ed said. “A friend?”

“Yes,” Howard said, and paused. “That’s it. Basically.”

Ed laughed a dry mirthless laugh, and then possibly — Howard wasn’t sure, but possibly — he sobbed.

He wanted to say more to Ed, but neither one seemed to have any more to say, not even “I’m sorry.” And then Ed simply hung up.

For reasons he didn’t understand, a corporal from the Arizona Highway Patrol suggested they drive back down to where Howard could catch a bus back to Phoenix. The STRIKE IT RICH was where the bus stopped. One would be arriving late. He had the drinks coupons if there was a wait.

On the drive down, the officer wanted to talk about everything under the sun but seemed not to want to talk about what had transpired that day. He was a large, thick-shouldered, dark-haired man in his fifties, with a lined, square, attractively tanned face, whose beige uniform and pointed trooper’s hat seemed to fill up the driver’s seat. His name was Fitzgerald, and he was interested that Howard sold real estate, and that his deceased “friend” had, too. Trooper Fitzgerald said he’d moved to Arizona from Pittsburgh many years before, because it was getting too crowded back east. Real estate, he believed, was the measure and key to everything. Everyone’s quality of life was measured out in real estate values, only it was in reverse: the higher the price, the worse the life. Though the sad truth, he believed, was that in not much time all you’d see (Officer Fitzgerald pointed straight out the windshield, down to where Howard had seen the multi-colored, multi-layered beautiful desert open up that morning, but where it now seemed purplish, smoggy gray), all that would be houses and parking lots and malls and offices and the whole array of the world’s ills that come of living too near to your neighbor: crime, poverty, hostility, deceit and insufficient air to breathe. These would presently descend like a plague, and it wouldn’t be long after that until the apocalypse. All the police in the world couldn’t stop that onslaught, he said. He nodded his head in deep agreement with himself.

“Are you pretty religious, then, I guess?” Howard asked.

Officer Fitzgerald wore his trooper’s hat set low on his big square head, almost touching his sunglasses rims. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, exposing his big straight, white teeth gripping his lower lip. “You don’t need a book to know what’s coming. You just need to be able to count the bodies.”

“I guess that’s right,” Howard said, and suddenly felt uncomfortable wearing shorts in this man’s solemn presence. He looked at his bare knees and noticed again how he’d scraped them getting back over the wall after Frances died. Trying to escape. It was embarrassing. He thought of Frances saying he’d thank her all the way back to Phoenix. He couldn’t remember why she’d said that or even when. Then he thought of the night before, when he’d waked to find her on her hands and knees, staring down into his face in the dark. He’d smelled her sour breath, sensed her chest heaving like an animal’s. He’d believed she intended to speak to him, feared she would say terrible things — about him — things he’d never forget. But she’d said nothing, just stared as if her open eyes no longer possessed sight. After several moments she’d lain back down on her side and said, “I don’t know you, do I? I don’t remember you.” And he’d said, “No, you don’t. We’ve never been introduced. But it’s all right.” She’d turned away from him then, faced the wall and slept. In the morning she’d remembered almost none of it. He hadn’t wanted to remind her. He’d thought of it as a kindness.

What you did definitely changed things, he thought, as the powerful cruiser sped along. Even this view down the mountain was changed because of what had happened; it seemed less beautiful now. He thought about his job — that he would lose it. He’d be given the option of resigning, but there’d be no mistaking: sex with a fellow employee, a violent death, a clandestine trip on company time when other priorities were paramount — without a doubt, that didn’t work. He thought about Mary — that he would tell her about none of his true emotions, would omit most of the details and the history, would try to let the subject subside and hope that would be enough. He would try to put better things in their place. His parents, too — they would all have to grow up some.

He hadn’t seen Frances again after he’d seen her hung there in the little cedar tree, gazing up at him. It shocked him — that memory, and then not seeing her. It all made him feel peculiarly wronged and alone, as if he resented her absence more than he felt sorry about it. You could be happy, of course, that she’d seen the Grand Canyon before it got spoiled by houses and malls and freeways and glass office buildings. Though she’d tried to make him feel inadequate, that the things he cared about didn’t matter when they were put alongside the spiritual things she was so enthused about, but had now unfortunately given her life for — the healing energy.

But those things didn’t matter. Peering out the windshield at the flat, gray desert at evening, he understood that in fact very little of what he knew mattered; and that however he might’ve felt today — if circumstances could just have been better — he would now not be allowed to feel. Perhaps he never would again. And whatever he might even have liked, bringing his full and best self to the experience, had now been taken away. So that life, as fast as this car hurtling down the side of a mountain toward the dark, seemed to be disappearing from around him. Being erased. And he was so sorry. And he felt afraid, very afraid, even though that sensation did not come to him in the precise and unexpected way he’d always assumed it would.