Aloft

two

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I worked in the family business, Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, a masonry company that my grandfather started in the Depression and that my father and uncles gradually turned into a landscaping company that I maintained and that Tack has plans for expanding into a publicly traded specialty home improvement enterprise to be re-named Battle Brothers Excalibur, L.L.C. (OTC ticker symbol: BBXS), replete with a glossy annual report and standby telephone operators and an Internet website.

The family name was originally Battaglia, but my father and uncles decided early on to change their name to Battle for the usual reasons immigrants and others like them will do, for the sake of familiarity and ease of use and to herald a new and optimistic beginning, which is anyone's God-given right, whether warranted or not.

Battle, too, is a nice name for a business, because it's simple and memorable, ethnically indistinct, and then squarely patriotic, though in a subtle sort of way. Customers — Jack says clients — have the sense we're fighters, that we have an inner resolve, that we'll soldier through all obstacles to get the job done, and done right (this last line can actually be found in the latest company brochure). My father insists that the idea for the name originated with him, and for just the connotations I've mentioned, which I don't doubt, as he was always the savviest busi-nessman of his brothers, and talked incessantly through my youth about the awesome power of words, from Shakespeare to Hitler, though these days he mostly just brings up his favorite blabbermouths on the Fox News Channel. But it's not just marketing for the most part the tag has been true, though certainly more so in my father's generation than my own, probably more in mine than in Jack's; but this is world history and I'm not going to rail on about the degradation of standards or the work ethic. My father and uncles did their work in their time, and I did mine, and jack will do his at this post-turn-of-the-millennium moment, and who can say who will have had the hardest go?

Sometimes I think Jack's is a tough slot, given the never-ending onslaught of instant information and the general wisdom these days that if you don't continually "grow" your business at a certain heady rate it will wither and die. Good for him that for the last four years he has seemed to be practically printing money, what with all the trucks out every day and him needing to hire extra help literally off the street each morning in Farm-ingville, where the Hispanic men hang out. Now with the economy in the doldrums he probably wishes he hadn't built his mega-mini-mansion but he doesn't seem concerned. In fact, we're all meeting at his new house this weekend, both to celebrate Theresa's recent engagement to her boyfriend Paul (they're flying in from Oregon), and my father's eighty-fifth birthday, which of course he has forgotten about but will enjoy immensely, as he does whenever he is celebrated, which Jack and Eunice will do in high and grand style.

I do sometimes worry about Jack, and wonder if he's grinding too hard for the dollars. Just sit down with him to lunch sometime and you'll see all the digital hardware come un-clipped from his belt and onto the table, the pager and cell phone and electronic notepad and memo-to-self recorder. At least my father and uncles had the twin angels of innocence and ignorance to guide them and the devil of hard times to keep working against I merely inherited what they had already made fairly prosperous, and did what I could not to ruin anything, though Rita often pointed out that I had the least envi-able position, given that I really had no choice in the matter, expected as I was to sustain something I never had a genuine interest in. This is mostly true. I had no great love for brick and mortar. When I was still young I was sure I wanted to become a fighter pilot; I sent away for information on the Air Force Acad-emy, did focusing exercises to make sure my vision stayed sharp, tried not to sleep too much (you grew in your sleep, and I was afraid of exceeding the height limit). But when the time came I watched the application date come and go, applying only to regular colleges, my inaction not due to lack of interest or fear but what I would say was my disbelief in the real, or more like it, the real as it had to do with me. I suppose therapist types and self-actualizers would say I have difficulty with visualization, how you must see yourself doing and being — say, at the controls in the cockpit, or making love to a beautiful woman, or living in a grand beach house — but even though I can summon the requisite image and can get a little fanciful and dreamy, too, I can't seem to settle on any one picture of myself without feeling a companion negativity whose caption at the bottom reads, Yeah, right.

And if it's no surprise to those out there who are thinking that was probably my father's favorite line I would say it certainly was (and still is), not just to me but to everyone in the family and the business, with the exception of my little brother, Bobby, who surely would have benefited from a healthy dose of skepticism had he ever returned from his first and last tour in Vietnam. In all fairness, however, I'm Hank (The Tank) Battle's son, with the main difference between him and me being that I was never able to summon his first-strike arrogance, nor develop the necessary armature for the inevitable fallout from oneself. And while there will be more on this to follow, I will not complain now, and add that choices are a boon only to those who can make good on them. I made a fine living from Battle Brothers, and was able to raise my children in a safe town of decent families and give them every opportunity for self-betterment, in which I believe I succeeded. I always worked hard, if not passionately. I never took what was given to me for granted, or thought anything or anyone was below me. I was not a quitter.

In these regards, at least, I have no regrets.

And I had more than my fair share of good times. Through all the work, I still took the time to travel the whole world twice over, going pretty much everywhere, including the North and South Pole (well, almost) and even a few "rogue" states in Africa and the Middle East, and slipped into those countries I wasn't easily allowed to enter, like Cuba and North Korea (if you count that conference table in the DMZ). Of course this was after the kids were in college, and most of the time Rita came along with me, though often enough she didn't have the vacation days left and I went alone. The only typical places I haven't been, oddly enough, are Canada and Mexico, not even their side of Niagara, not even Cancun, but these glaring omis-sions never bothered me much, and I doubt ever will. I like to think I make up for any intracontinental bigotry by sending planeloads of tourists to popular spots across both borders, as I've worked for a couple years now as a part-time travel agent at the local branch office of a huge travel conglomerate (which call Parade) that runs full-page ads in the Sunday Times.

When I sold out my shares in Battle Brothers four years ago I hadn't fully realized that there was no place left for me to go, and decided, on the suggestion of Theresa, citing my extensive résumé as a "passenger," that I ought to try my hand at being a travel professional, which, it turns out, despite her snide decon-structive terminology, was just my calling. For long before I donned my red Parade travel agent's blazer I could speak to most every notable sight in every notable town in this shrinking touristical world, I knew the better ranks of inns and hotels and tour and cruise operators, and I knew which all-inclusives and play-and-stay packages offered good value or were just plain sorry and cheap.

Likewise, I'm not the man to call if you are looking for some cloistered, indigenous roost in a cliffside sweat-lodge-cum-spa or a suite in a designer hotel where the bellboys wear gunmetal suits and headsets and the rooms are decorated in eight shades of white. I am suspicious of the special. I have always believed in staying in vacation trappings that are just slightly nicer than what I have at home, and certainly not any worse, where at least breakfast is included (even if it's just coffee and a gelid danish in the lobby), and the cultural tour, whether by coach or by foot, is led by a cheerleading guy or gal with an old-fashioned and gently ironic sense of humor and a thick local accent and a soul-ful character suffused with a grand and romantic self-aspiration. I have always preferred wayfaring with such a group, exchanging our white-man arigatos and auf wiedersehens with jolly inanity while hitting all the trod-over sites and famous vistas, for the allure of traveling for me has never been in searching out the little-known pieve or backroad auberge but standing squint-eyed amidst the sunbaked rubble of some celebrated ruin like Taormina or Machu Picchu in the obliging company of just-minted acquaintances of strictly limited duration and knowing that wherever I go be able to commune with fellow strangers over the glories of this world.

During her undergraduate years when she seemed angry about almost everything I did, and pretty much saw me, she once even said, as "the last living white man," my smart-as-heck daughter often felt compelled to expose my many travels for the rapacious, hegemonic colonialist "projects" that they were. At Thanksgiving or Christmas she'd idly ask where I'd been lately and I'd mention some island in the Caribbean or off the coast of Thailand and she'd start in on how my snorkeling was undoubtedly negatively impacting the coral reefs, and I'd swear I didn't touch anything except maybe an already dead starfish (which I brought home and had framed) and right there would be evidence of my integral part in the collective strip-mining of an indigenous culture and ecosystem. I'd answer that the locals seemed perfectly content to strip it themselves, given the number of shell and sponge and stuffed-bird shops lining the beachside streets, and then we'd get into the usual back-and-forth about the false-bottomed tourist economy (Theresa) and whether tourists should stay home so the natives could still weave their clothes out of coconut threads (J13) and the need for indigenes to control the mechanisms of capital and production (TB) and the question of who really cared as long as everyone was happy with the situation (JB) and the final retort of who could possibly be happy in this unthinking, unjust world (guess who)?

To which, when your once-sugar-sweet daughter, who used to hang on your shoulders and neck like a gibbon monkey, now just home from her impossibly liberal, impossibly expensive New Hampshire college, is glaring at you desperately with bloodshot all-nighter eyes from too much 3 A.M. espresso and clove cigarettes and badly recited Rimbaud (and other activities too gamy to think about), you're tempted to say, "I am," even knowing it would quite possibly put her over the edge. But then you don't, and hope you never do, just requesting instead that someone pass down the boiled brussels sprouts, which are as usual utterly miserable with neglect.

All this, it pleases me to report, has come full circle in our steady march toward maturation, as I'm now sitting at my desk at Parade Travel in Huntington comparing package prices for Theresa and her fiance, the purportedly semi-famous (and only semi-successful) Asian-American writer Paul Pyun. I'm to say

"Asian-American," partly because they always do, and not only because my usage of the old standby of "Oriental" offends them on many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin to reenvision myself as a multicultural being, as my long-deceased wife, Daisy, was Asian herself and my children are of mixed blood, even though I have never thought of them that way. I must admit that I don't quite yet appreciate what all the fuss is about, but I've realized that words matter in ordinately to Theresa and Paul, and far beyond any point I wish to take a stand on.

They're planning to get married sometime this coming fall or winter, right here on Long Island (Paul's parents, both medical doctors, live down the Expressway in Roslyn), and have asked me to look into a moderately priced one-week honeymoon in a tropical location. I assumed they wanted a — que holiday (unique, boutique, exotique), some far-flung stay with plenty of cultural sites and funky local flavor, but in fact Theresa told me herself that they were thinking something "spring breaky,"

maybe even a cruise. Apparently after endless backpacking forays into Third World sections of First World countries, they now desire the fun and the tacky, perhaps on the order of certain beachfront "huts" I can book them in Ixtapa, where they can roll out of bed and lie in the sand all day and get served strong, sweet drinks and only if they wish exert themselves with a paddleboat or parasail ride. No forced eco-hikes here.

Theresa (and Paul, too, for that matter) can get her hair corn-rowed and they'll have dinner at a "sumptuous international buffet" and then dance on a floating discotheque where they'll exchange tequila body shots and maybe even catch a wet T-shirt or naked belly-flop contest.

Here at Parade Travel we gladly enable much of this, as people would be surprised to find that it's not just college kids but young thirty-somethings like Theresa and Paul and then much older folks, too, getting into the act, more and more of our holidays geared to reflect what seems to be the wider cultural sentiment of the moment, which is basically that You and Everybody Else Can Kiss My Ass. No doubt you readily see this in play at your own office and while driving on the roads and almost every moment on sports and music television. I have to suppose this is the natural evolution of the general theme of self-permission featured in recent generations (mine foremost), but it's all become a little too hard and mean for me, which makes me wish to decline.

I wish to decline, even if I can't.

Still, I don't want to send my only daughter on such a trip, even if she thinks she wants to go. This is her honeymoon, for heaven's sake, and I won't let her spoil it with some folly of an ironic notion. For all her learning and smarts she has always had the ability from time to time to make the unfortunate life decision, plus the fact that she has much to learn about romance. Paul I don't know so well, but I suspect he can't be much different, or else totally cowed by her on this one. Luckily I've found them a tony plantation-style hotel in Mustique and have called the manager directly to request that he give them the best room whenever we know the exact dates (#8, according to knowledgeable colleagues). They'll get a champagne-and-tropical-fruit-basket welcome, and a special couples' massage, and though I know the antebellum trappings might initially speak to Theresa and Paul of subjugation and exploitation and death, I'm hoping they'll be spoiled and pampered into an amnesic state of bliss that they can hold on to for years (and if lucky, longer than that). This will be my secret wedding present to them, too, as their arts-and-humanities budget is barely a third of the final cost, even with my travel agent discounts.

Kelly Stearns, my coworker here at Parade, with whom I share a double desk, will tell me that I am a sweet and generous father any girl would be darn lucky to have. Each of us works three and a half days a week, overlapping for an hour on Fridays. Kelly is late again, however, as she has been quite often this summer. I'm worried about her, as it's not like her to take her responsibilities lightly.

Kelly is an attractive, big-boned blonde with a pixie, girlish face that makes her seem much younger than her mid-fortyish years, the only thing really giving away her age being her hands, which are strangely old-looking, the skin waxy and thin like my mother's once was. Kelly comes to us from the South, the Carolinas, which I mention only because it's obvious what an unlikelihood she is around the office, with her dug-deep accent and sprightly way of address and her can-do (and will-do) attitude, all reflected in the fact that her clients know exactly her days and hours. After the clock clicks 3, there's always a surge of call volume for "Miss Stearns," which I field as best as I can, though mostly they insist on working with her, even if it's just a simple matter of changing a flight time or booking a car.

I suppose I come off like everybody else here on the Island, meaning that I'm useful to a point and then probably a waste of time. I completely understand this. Whenever I call a company or business and realize I've been routed to the Minneapolis or Chattanooga office, I feel a glow of assurance, as if I've been transported back to a calmer, simpler clime, and though I know it's surely all hogwash I can't help but fall in love just a little with the woman's voice on the other end, picturing us in an instant picnicking in the village square and holding hands and greeting passersby like any one of them might soon be a friend.

This is partly why I can talk to Kelly about almost everything, including the sticky subject of Rita, as she in fact has the stuff of kindness and generosity bundled right onto her gene strands, along with the other reason — namely, that she can summon the forgiveness of a freshly ordained priest. I should know, for she's forgiven me for certain transgressions, for which almost any other woman could only summon the blackest bile.

You'd think she'd steer clear of me forever. This is not to suggest she's a pushover. I'll just say for now that we were intimate in the period after Rita decided to leave and did but then came back only to leave again, which Kelly always recognized as a difficult time, and she ultimately decided that whatever judg-ments were due me would be presided over not by her but by some more durable power, whose reckoning would be ever-lasting.

Another call comes in for Kelly but it's not a client. It's that tough guy again, the one sounding like Robert Mitchum, though even more diffident than that, and certainly charmless, and to whom I'm pretty much done showing patience. His sole name, as far as I know, is Jimbo (how he self-refers). I've had to field his calls the last few times she's been late, and was pleasant enough at first if only because I had the feeling he was her new boyfriend, which I don't think anymore, nor would I care about it if I did. Kelly introduced us once when he came to pick her up, Jimbo not even bothering to shake my hand, just offering a curt nod from behind his mirrored wraparounds. But the more I do think about it, I don't like the idea that Kelly has anything to do with him. There's a streak of the bully in his voice, a low whine that makes me think he's the sort of man who not so secretly fears and dislikes women.

"It's practically three-thirty," he complains. "She should be there."

"She's not."

"Did she call in?"

"No," I tell him. "Look, don't you have her number by now?"

"Hey, buddy, how about minding your own business, okay?"

"That's what I'm doing."

"Well, do yourself a big favor and shut your sassy mouth."

"Or what?"

"You'll know what," Jimbo says, all malice and mayhem.

"Why don't you come down here and show me, then."

He pauses, and I can almost hear his knuckle hair rising.

"You're a real dumb fuck, you know that?" he says low and hard, and he hangs up.

I hang up, too, banging the handset back into the cradle.

Where this will lead I don't know or care. These days every thick-necked monobrow in the tristate area likes to pretend he's a goodfella, some made guy, but having been in the brick-and-mortar and landscaping business I have plentiful experience with all varieties of blowhard, including the legitimate ones, who for the most part don't even hint at their affiliations.

notice that the other people in the office have hardly looked away from their screens, except for Miles Quintana, our newest and youngest Parade travel professional, who ack-acks me a double machine gun thumbs-up, shouting, "Give 'em hell, Jerome!" He's young (and historically challenged) enough that he thinks I'm a member of the "Greatest Generation." He's seen Saving Private Ryan at least two dozen times and can describe every battle-scene amputation and beheading in digital frame-by-frame glory, and despite the fact that I've told him I was only born during that war he continues to see me as the re-luctant hero, as if every graying American man has a Purple Heart (and Smith & Wesson.45 automatic) stashed away in a cigar box in his closet. Of course I'm sure he's playfully teasing, too, just slinging office shit with the old gringo, and if this is the way that a guy like me and a nineteen-year-old Dominican kid can get along, then it's fine by me.

Miles is the office's designated Spanish speaker (our office manager, Chuck, proudly taped up the Se Habla Espaii ol sign in the front window the day Miles joined up), and part of the company's efforts to attract more business from the large and growing Hispanic community in the immediate area. The interesting thing is that Miles, though a perfectly capable travel agent, is actually not so hot at habla-ing, at least judging by the conversations he has with clients in the office and on the phone, when he uses at least as many English words and phrases as he does Spanish, if not more. In fact I can confidently say that one need not know any Spanish to understand him when he's in his translation mode, which employs gesture and posture more than speech. Still, he continues to get referrals from the Colom-bians and Salvadorans and Peruvians and whoever else they are waiting their turn at his desk, proving that it's not always the linguistical intricacies that people find assuring, but broader, deeper forms of communication. This jibes with my own sharp-ening feeling that I can hardly understand anybody anymore, at least as far as pure language goes, and that among the only real things left to us in this life if we're lucky is a shared condition of bemusement and sorrowful wonder that can maybe turn into something like joy.

My phone rings again and I'm ready to communicate with limbo once more, in whatever manner he'd like to take up. But it's Kelly on the line. She's calling from her little maroon econobox, which I notice double-parked across the street. I wave.

"Please don't do that, Jerry," she says, sniffling miserably. I can see her dabbing at her nose with a peony-sized bloom of tissues. She's wearing big sunglasses and a print scarf over her hair, like it's raining, or 1964. "I don't want anyone there to see me."

"Are you all right? You sound terrible."

"I don't have a cold, if that's what you mean."

"Do you want me to come out there?"

"Definitely not, Jerry. I'm looking pretty much a fright right now."

"I'm worried about you, Kel."

"Are you, Jerry?"

"Of course I am." Her tone is alarmingly knowing, even grim. I press on, not because I want an impromptu lecture (which I'm pretty sure I'll get), but because my friend Kelly Stearns does not talk this way, ever. I say, "I don't want to butt in because it's none of my business. But that guy called for you again, and I don't need to ask what you're doing with him to know that it can't be too happy."

"It's not, Jerry. I've told Jimbo that we won't be seeing each other for a while. He hasn't accepted it yet. But that's not the problem."

"So what's the matter?" I say, being as even as I can, given our very brief if not-so-ancient history. "What's wrong?"

"Everything's plain rotten," Kelly answers, enough Scout Finch still leavening her mature woman's voice to make my insides churn with a crush. Her Old-fashioned idiom strikes me to the core, too, and I realize once again that I am a person who is taken much more by what people say than by what they do. I tend to overrecognize signifiers, to quote my daughter; I'm easily awestruck by symbol and tone. Apparently this is neither good nor bad. And right now it's easy to gather that this isn't our usual belle Kelly.

She says, "I just want to crawl beneath a rock and die."

"Did something happen?"

"Nothing happened," she says. "This is me living my life."

"This is definitely not your life, Kel."

"Oh yes it is," she says. "Of all people, Jerry, I'd hoped you'd not try to give me a line."

"I'm not. You're in a rut, that's all. I've seen you worse, which is still a hundred times better than anyone else on a good day."

"You certainly saw me in one way," she counters, to which I can't really reply. She's double-parked but badly, her back end sticking out too far into the street, right near the yellow line. A minor jam is building in both directions. She says, oblivious to the pepper of horns, "I don't blame you, Jerry. You were gentleman enough. Even though you dumped me no less than three times."

"Not to defend myself, but I'm pretty sure you dumped me the last time."

"You know very well that it was preemptive. My final effort at retaining some dignity. When I still thought I had some."

"You've still got plenty," I tell her, noticing that she's un-screwing the top from an orange prescription bottle. It's a slim, small bottle, definitely not the kind they give you vitamins in.

She shakes out some pills and pops them into her mouth, chasing them with a long straw-sip from a massive Big Gulp, her signature drink. Though it's silly to say, the only thing about Kelly that really bothered me was her use of the 7-Eleven and the like as grocery stores, the result being her drive-thru diet of chili dogs and Hot Pockets and Doritos and aspartame-sweet-ened anything; nothing in the least natural ever entering her body. Really the opposite of Rita, who even made her own corn tortillas. This shouldn't have been the reason Kelly Stearns and I couldn't be together forever, and I never brought it up to her even though I understood so from the beginning, but it was.

"What's that you're taking, Kel?"

"Jimbo gives them to me," she says, shaking the bottle.

"OxyContin. They say they're good for pain."

"I'm sure they are. Listen, why don't I come out there right now and sit with you. I'll tell Chuck you called in sick. It's real slow anyway, and I can take you back to my place and you can talk things out. We'll have an early dinner on the patio."

"I'm at my limit, Jerry. My outer limit. I know you don't feel that way because you've got it all together."

"You know that's not true."

"It is from where I'm sitting. You have your whole life accrued to you, and it's only getting better. You're a good-looking man who's going to be sixty but hardly looks a day over fifty.

You have all your hair. You have your family nearby and enough money and you have Parade to pass the time with and you have your plane to go up in whenever you want to split. You can have all the girlfriends like me that you'd ever want."

"Kel."

"I'm not criticizing. I'm a fairly nice girl but I'm not so special or unique and more times than not I get passed over. It's the truth and you know it. It turns out the only guy who wants to keep me forever is limbo."

"That's a load of bull."

"It's not. He makes love to me. Not very well, but he tries.

He's not superbright or interesting or exceptionally kind. But he wants me. He needs me. It's as simple as that. Did you ever wonder about those women who get hitched to guys in jail?

Why they would ever do that? Now I know. I'm forty-five years old today and…"

"Today?" I checked the desk blotter calendar, but I'd written nothing on it, today or any day.

"Yes, but I'm not giving you shit about that. I'm forty-five years old and never been married and I won't ever have children and I'm the only child of dead parents. I've got no pension fund to speak of. My furniture is rent-to-own. I color my own hair. I haven't done anything really terrible or wrong in my life but look, I've got next to nothing. All you have to worry about is keeping your health and not getting bored. I'm not criticizing.

I'm happy for you. You're missing Rita, is all, but she's going to come back to you sometime, I'm sure of it. I talked to her yesterday. She asked how you were."

I'm not thinking much of anything for a moment, my heart clogging my throat. "You spoke to Rita?"

"I told her you were fine, but lonely, which is definitely the truth."

"How is she?" Kelly would know, as she and Rita have been friendly since the end of Kelly/Jerry II, meeting for Happy Hour at Chi-Chi's once a month or so, apparently jabbering about everything but me. I spied on them once, from the corner of the bar, tipping their waitress $20 to eavesdrop, which was not a good use of money, as the only thing she related was how they were joking about penis sizes.

"Same as you, Jerry, only not so lonely. She's still seeing Richard, on and off."

"Yeah." Richard as in Richie Coniglio, coniglio in Italian being the word for rabbit. Which he is — short, thin guy, kind who lives forever, fluffy in the hair, with prominent teeth, probably false. I've known him since middle school, when he followed me around the halls, as I was one of the few kids who didn't beat up on him daily. He was always smart, and he's become sort of a bigwig around here, with the charities and such. That's how he met Rita, at a hospital gala, where she was a volunteer hostess. He's divorced, exactly my age, though admittedly looks at least five years younger than me, Kelly's previous comment notwithstanding. He's a partner at a white-shoe New York law firm, collects Ferraris, and lives alone in a mansion in Mutton-town. He takes Rita out east on the weekends, to his "cottage"

in Southampton. I've actually spotted him out in public wearing jodhpurs, at the Bagel Bin with the Sunday Times tucked under his arm, his boots stuccoed with horse dung.

"I bet she's happy with him," I say.

"Don't beat yourself up, Romeo. Richard can be a peach but I think we all know where you and Rita are headed. I can hear it in your voices, and all around you. The tarantella has already started up."

"I wish."

"You better not just wish, Jerry Battle. You had better do. But why I'm bothering to tell you this right now astounds me."

"Because you're the sweetheart of Huntington Village," I tell her, already heartened immeasurably, though realizing that this has somehow become all about Me again, our chronic modality. So I say, "You should have told me it was your birthday. I'm going to hang up now and tell Chuck you called in sick and I'm going to take you out tonight. We'll go to the city. I'll get us a table at Smith & Wollensky. We'll get the double porterhouse."

"Don't you dare!" she shouts, the squawk almost hurting my ear. "Don't you even budge. I don't want to go to the city for dinner and I don't want you coming out here. I only stopped by to tell you I'm going away."

"What do you mean? Where?"

"I really don't know yet," she says, sounding high and tight like she's going to cry. "But I wouldn't tell you if I did. I'm not telling anyone. If you hear from me after today, it'll be from someplace far away."

"I don't like this word 'if,' Kel."

"Tough shit, Jerry!" she says, her emphasis more on my name than the expletive. But she gathers herself. "Listen. I don't want to yell at you. Just tell Chuck I'm taking a leave of absence. If he doesn't like it, tell him I quit. And don't you worry about me. I'm going to be fine. I'm going on a trip all by myself. I'm superhappy about it. Don't worry"

But I'm deeply worried, this spiky scare rappelling down my spine, especially with her mentioning how happy she'll be, the image of her splayed out on a motel bed with a hand mirror snowy with crushed pills, a plastic garbage bag, a straight razor.

"I'm coming out now," I tell her firmly, "whether you want me to or not."

But just as I put down the phone and stand up I see Kelly wave, wave, and not really to me, like she's on the top deck of the Queen Mary, embarking on an around-the-world. Her blond hair spilling out of the scarf (Why there is a glamour in all departures, I don't know.) Before I can even get outside she's speeding away, her dusty little car clattering down the main street of the village, being nearly broadsided as she drifts through a red light. There's another clamor of protesting horns, and then, momentarily veiled by a white puff of oil-burning acceleration, she's gone. I try her cell over and over but all I get is her outgoing message, whose molasses lilt always manages to upend me: "Hi y'all, Kelly here. I ain't home right now. But do say something nice."

W H I C H I H A V E tried to do, at the time and then throughout this evening, but all I've been able to muster is to say I am here if she needs me, whatever hour of the night. It's nearing midnight now. All this sounds pretty good, like I'm on call for her, braced by the nightstand, wracked and sleepless. Of course if I were a wholly better person (and not just a former-lover-turned-friend) I'd be out searching the avenues for her, having already called her friends and maybe even Jimbo (number from the office Caller ID), having already gone by her apartment, instead of half dreading the blee-dee-deet of my cordless as I sit here on the patio beneath a starless Long Island sky, steadily drawing down an iced bottle of cut-rate pivot grigio. I'm worried about Kelly, of course, not quite admitting that part of me is scared stiff she might try to hurt herself, but here I am taking up space in my usual way, as if waiting for the news to come on, some defining word filtering down from the heavens to let me know what ought to be done next.

This is what Rita found most chronically difficult about me, and what Theresa has begun openly referring to as my "preternatural lazy-heartedness." Jack has to this point professed no corresponding view, which I suspect is because he's finally realized that in this regard the apple hasn't fallen very far from the tree (or off at all), and is perhaps an even more fully realized version of its predecessor. Kelly Stearns, if I may take the liberty to suppose, would probably identify this quality of mine as how I'm most like "a real jerk," which is what she called me after the last time we slept together, not for anything that happened (or didn't) between the sheets (I've always tried to be at least eager and attentive in love's physical labors, understanding I'm no expert), but for the solidly marvelous days leading up to that last passionate if cramped union, when I took her on a fancy Caribbean cruise despite my unswervable intent of breaking up with her once again, and for all.

In her opinion, I should have dumped her before the trip, which by any standard of decency and decorum makes good sense, though in my behalf I should say that I did want to treat her and spoil her one last time, not as reward or consolation but because I genuinely cared for her and wanted to make her plain happy and frankly saw no other way to accomplish it save for going on a carefree junket heading nowhere in our immediate world. Kelly et al. (the entire office, except for Miles, who surprisingly falls to my side of the ledger in most worldly matters) naturally saw my aims as self-serving and usurious in spirit, a sneaky final lust-grab and cruel deception, made even worse by the fact that Kelly and I had reached that certain juncture in our relationship when a romantic luxury cruise might seem an odds-on prelude to proposing a union unto death. Indeed, in anticipation of something special Kelly had brought along some of her more wicked boudoir getups, including a melt-away fruit-roll teddy burnished in edible gold that the Parade gals had slipped in her carry-on, as well as a distinctly matrimonial gown, complete with lace train, just in case I had arranged for the captain of the ship to perform a surprise wedding-at-sea.

The first hint of trouble was when I unpacked my garment bag and only had a Permapress travel blazer to hang up, the sight of which momentarily arrested all her functions, as if she'd looked up to see a complete solar eclipse. I asked her what was wrong and she tried to ignore me but then broke into a sweet smile and said brightly, "Whatever could be wrong, my ever casual man?"

Kelly, like all the Southern women I've known (three total — the other two being the identical Cohen twins from Decatur, Georgia, Terri and Traci, who were lifeguards at the Catskills camp where I landscaped several summers of my youth), features an inborn lode of a chin-up, good sport reserve that I can tell you positively jazzes a guy like me, though eventually invites some ill use and taking advantage of, too, if unwitting and unintended. The Cohen twins, I remember, besides being splendid swimmers, were deadly rifle shots and archers, their identical carriage buxomly and erectly Aryan, which the young Jewish-American campers beheld with a hushed adoration and trembling. That last summer I dated Terri (I'm pretty sure), my buddy Lorne seeing her sister, and by the middle of the camp session we'd convinced them that losing their virginity with a couple of Gentiles was probably an ideal way to go, there being no strings or expectations. Ever reasonable, they agreed. So one night we paddled our canoes to the little foot-shaped island in the middle of Lake Kennonah, outfitted with sleeping bags and candles and condoms and a fifth of Southern Comfort. The four of us drank together and then Terri and I hiked to the other side of the island and spread our bedding atop a broad flat rock right by the water. We could still hear Traci and Lorne talking and laughing and then getting very quiet, and without even kissing much we took off our clothes and started making love. I say this not because I loved her or am uncomfortable using cruder terms but because I thought then and still do that no matter who it is you're with or whether it's the first and/or last time, there's always at least one verifiable moment when you can believe you're doing exactly that, literally trying to make love, build it up, whether by alchemy or chemistry or force of will. With Terri Cohen it was no difficult task, for she was ardent and mostly unafraid and steadfast beneath me on that absolutely ungiving rock, which made me feel like I was going straight through to the igneous, like we were plunging another axis for the world. (This is but one of many a young man's ego-istic virginal follies — sentimental and ridiculous, I know.) Afterward, not unhappy, and both quite sore from the vigorous but clearly unclimactic-able sex, we hiked back in silence to where we'd put ashore. We weren't thinking about Traci and Lorne, or at least I wasn't, and suddenly we came upon them in the can-dlelight, in mid-engagement, her slender heels tapping out time on his back, and perhaps it was because they were twins that Terri didn't pull us away or try to hide us. We watched as they crescendoed and decrescendoed and crescendoed again, until they finally came (Traci before Lorne, amazingly), when Terri grabbed my hand and hustled us back to our spot on the rock and astraddle of me swiftly finished us both.

Now there's the definition of a good sport.

I'm long accustomed to the umbraged, oversensitive, volcani-cally eruptive type, firstly my good mother, who could shame a false confession out of Saint Francis and who, during her last moments on her deathbed, scolded us arrayed there to go wash our hands before leaning on her Belgian lace bedspread. When I was young she and my father had horrific arguments over his handling of the business and the periodic dalliances he'd have with his young bookkeepers fresh out of night school, the nas-tiest of their fights ending with my mother wielding a rusty fish-filleting knife, swearing that she'd gut them both if she ever caught them, and my father (recklessly quoting Sartre and Camus and Reader's Digest) taunting her with the then recently announced death of God. Hank Battle has always liked a rousing fight, especially with family, whether fair or not, and if I were constituted more like him I'm certain I'd have ended up with a woman who would burn the bed before letting me tread too long over her.

And so it's never been strange to me that I've gravitated toward women like Kelly Stearns, and then my Rita, who hardly said a word until the end and then coolly informed me, sotto voce, as we were driving home from the multiplex after having watched Jurassic Park II, that she had rented back her old studio apartment in Hauppauge and would be gone by the end of the week. I didn't say anything, because it was no great surprise; I didn't protest, because I had no arguments for her, the previous long years providing evidence enough of what we might expect (past performance, in the recent stock-crazed parlance, being in this case a bankable guarantee of future results), and I drove home feeling as if I'd been bitten clean through right at the sternum, my heart pumping fast but pumping nothing, my lower half already marinating in the gullet of a beast named Rue. Rita was by then more sorrowful than angry, though still plenty bitter, as the next morning she gave me back the diamond-and-ruby ring I'd given her to celebrate twenty-one years of living together, but then carefully packed for removal every last one of the expensive stockpots and saute and cake pans I'd bought her over the years (despite the fact that she never cooked for just herself), understanding before I did the full measure of how this would pain me.

As I step inside the kitchen, the wall clock (shaped like the nose of a Sopwith Camel) mumbles "Contact" and fires up, the hands whizzing around until they stop back at the present hour, midnight. Still no word from Kelly, so I call her again, at her apartment and cell phone, but to no avail. My next move, I think now, is to call the police, to check if there has been any accident or report involving her, but then the phone in my hand rings and I know this is she, and something aberrant in me lets it go a few more bleats before I click it on.

I say, "Kelly. ."

"Jerry?"

"Kelly, is that you?"

"No, Jerry. It's me. It's Rita."

I can't say anything, because of course I knew it was Rita, almost before she even spoke, which makes no sense at all. And I have no sense now, the only feeling the clammy empty bottle in my other hand.

"Listen. I'm at work. I just got on shift and I really can't talk.

Kelly is here. She came in about an hour ago. Actually she sort of crashed her car by the emergency entrance."

"Is she hurt?"

"Not from that," Rita says, and not casually. "She must have known she was in trouble and driven here, but couldn't quite make it. She took a lot of pills."

"Oxy-somethings," I say.

"That's right. How did you know?"

"She told me she was taking them," I say, realizing how not good this sounds, vis4-vis me. "She's okay, though, right?"

"She'll be okay," Rita says grimly. "She didn't have enough to kill herself, but she could have really hurt herself. She's in a daze right now She did ask me to call you. That's why I'm calling."

"I know."

"She said you might be looking for her."

"I was. I am."

There's an unsettling, sneaky long pause, the kind we got used to over the years, and then finally became sick of, though now I don't know that I'd refuse a great deal more of it, if this is all I'll ever have.

Rita says, nurselike, "She'll be okay, but she has to rest. She'll have been transferred to the main ward. You should go by there in the late morning."

"I'll come first thing," I say, knowing the night shift ends at 7 A.M., with a thirty-minute changeover, after which Rita will go back to Richie the Rabbit, snug in his baronial bedchamber.

"Let her sleep," Rita says, her tone riding somewhere be-tween command and wish. "Listen, I've gotta go. Be kind to her."

"I'm always kind."

"Okay, Jerry. Okay. I'm hanging up now Bye."

"Rita. "

But before I can say anything else she's clicked off. I punch

*69 but it's the hospital operator, and by the time she connects me to the emergency room nursing station Rita's already un-available, according to another nurse, as the paramedics are wheeling in a minivan's worth of teenagers from a nasty wreck on the Meadowbrook Parkway.

After this surprise brush with Rita, and then settling in with the increasingly sobering notion that Kelly may have really tried to hurt herself, I can't really sleep at all. I get up every other hour to satisfy my quick-trigger bladder and then poke around in the refrigerator and surf the late-night cable for anything remotely engaging (for me it's an infomercial for a rotisserie cooker, the chicken done to a perfect shade of polished cherry wood) and then sit in my old convertible out on the driveway, squinting in the scant moonlight at the just-getting-old guy in the parking mirrors. Not to worry, as this won't be that moment for a midstream self-appraisal heavy on deprecation and knowing charm, or a dark night of the soul's junket through the murk of a checkered, much remorsed-upon past. I won't suffer anyone bizarre fantasies or nightmares, as often happens in movies and books, because I'm not really capable of that sort of thing, being neither so weird nor smart enough. I'll simply relay what I can see, which is a man sitting alone at night in an open-air car, hands restless on the wheel, humming silently to himself, waiting for the sun to rise up so he can just get moving again.

Come morning, I'm already here, in the parking garage of the mid-county hospital. It's amazing how many cars are around at this hour, like it's the long-term lot at La Guardia during Thanksgiving week. You'd think that people (despite what they profess) in fact love hospitals, as they do everything they can (smoking, drug-taking, road-raging) to hurry themselves inside. Sometimes I used to pick Rita up from her shift (then the day shift) and they'd be practically lined up in the emergency waiting room in all manner of wreck and ruin, accidently poisoned, nearly drowned, stabbed and shot and burned, so that it seemed we were living nearer to Beirut than to Baby-lon, Long Island.

It's only just 7 A.M. and I'm determining exactly how I'm going to go about talking to Rita, or more to the point, have her talk to me. I've already visited Kelly Stearns in the adult ward, having told the nurses that I was her half-brother and had driven all night from Roanoke when I heard the news, leaving a couple of carnation-heavy bouquets of supermarket flowers (nothing else was open) and a surprisingly long and wholly loving note on her dresser, generally saying that I was sorry if I let her down and that I would never do so again. I was glad to leave the note, especially as she was asleep, and, strange to see but understandably, strapped down in restraints, and my one alarming thought was that she was going to wake up like that and might very well flip the hell out. So when the nurse left us alone I un-fastened one of Kelly's hands, so that she could move a little bit, at least scratch an itch somewhere, if she needed to.

Concerning Rita, I know she'll exit the hospital from the ER entrance and come this way, past where I'm just idling, as her banana-yellow 1982 Mustang with the black racing stripes and fake chrome wheels is parked behind me, against the far wall.

She bought the car used, already in a dinged-up, rusty condition, and oddly enough it looks no worse than it ever was. She liked to say it was her PR Mobile (as in Puerto Rican), which I'm surprised Richie Coniglio allows her to drive into his estate area in Muttontown. Maybe he likes it, or maybe he has no choice. When she began living at the house with me I offered to buy her a new car, really anything she wanted, my heart breaking open with an uncharacteristic (back then) generosity, with only the smallest cell of me doing it for unsavory reasons. I never gave a damn what the neighbors thought, never really knowing them anyway, but I must admit, during those first few months of domiciling, to a certain twinge in my gut whenever she'd jounce up the driveway. These past six months I have been waiting for Rita to return just like that, with me staring out the kitchen window in the afternoons, waiting for her to step out in her white shoes and pad up the walk. For her to use her key.

I first met Rita almost twenty-five years ago, on a boat. It was one of those Friday sunset booze cruises they used to run out for two-hour sprees in the Sound in the summertime. A few years back (actually, probably more like fifteen or twenty) a Commack woman fell overboard and presumably drowned (the body was never retrieved), and the company promptly got sued and had to close down operations. I went only twice, meeting Rita the second time. They crammed about sixty or so of us single people onto an oversized cabin cruiser, charging $20 a head ($10

for women) for a cash bar, baked brie and crudités, and a DJ

spinning funk and disco and some oldies (this is 1977, when oldies seemed more like oldies than they do today, maybe because they were played on records, and literally sounded old). I was working a lot then, this after Daisy died, with mostly my mother looking after the kids and then some neighborhood women pitching in when they could, and finally a string of nannies who never quite worked out.

One night I ran into an old high school classmate, Rick Steinitz, at the then brand-new cineplex on Route 110, both of us just coming out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind Rick called out my name and somehow I knew who he was and though he was with a date (leggy, pretty brunette) he seemed to want to linger and chat, perhaps more so for it. He was a podia-trist, with an office in Huntington. We hadn't been friends in high school and in fact hardly knew each other. As I recalled we were both shy loners, neither popular nor reviled, though Rick would heartily disagree about my memory of him. The final truth here is unimportant. It's enough to say that ours was one of those midlife friendships between men that happen not because of a shared interest like liquor or golf or even the pleasure of each other's company but from a mutual, pointed need for a fresh association. Rick was just divorcing for the second time, clearly in a rut, and when he heard I'd been widowed for over a year and was still unattached he seemed inspired, as though I'd presented him with a particularly challenging case.

When his date excused herself to go to the ladies' room, he insisted I go with him on this booze cruise that launched out of Northport.

Rick was something of a regular on the boat, part of a core group of guys and gals who hadn't yet found their match and for the most part tried each other out but ultimately weren't interested, which was okay by them. They got bombed in the first half hour and always started the dancing, and the rest of the boat seemed appreciative of their shake and roar, which in another venue would have certainly been boorish, embarrassing behavior but was just about the right speed here. Belowdecks there were a couple of spartan staterooms, which Rick had informed me could be "toured" for a twenty-spot gratuity to the captain's assistant, Rem or Kem, a beanstalky Eurotrash dude with a bleached ponytail who wore mauve silk blazers and snuck peeks at Kerouac paperbacks in the quieter moments of the trip. But I think stateroom visits were pretty rare, as most people preferred public displays that seemed risque and full of possibilities but in fact were fairly chaste and thus ceremonial.

For example, the night I met Rita, Dr. Rick had set up shop on the foredeck and was "reading" the soles of women's feet, offering extra rub therapy to anyone who wanted it, which was nearly all of them.

Rita wasn't one of the women who lined up for a foot consultation, nor was she a reveler or a party girl. To be perfectly honest she initially stood out to me and probably everyone else because she was the only one who wasn't white. It's no big news that in most places people tend to congregate with their own, or at least who they think is their own, and in this middle of the middle part of Long Island we're n o different, nearly all of us on that boat descended from the clamoring waves of Irish and Italians and Poles and whoever else washed ashore a hundred or so years ago, but you're never quite conscious of such until somebody shows up and through no intention of her own throws a filter over the scene, altering the familiar effects.

When she and her girlfriend walked up the gangplank I heard some idiot behind me mutter, "Hey, somebody invited their maid," but no one else minded save one older lady who made a face. He was focused on Rita. Anyone could see she was pretty much a knockout, Puerto Rican or not. She was wearing a crisply tailored cream-colored blazer and matching skirt cut well above the knee, her legs just full and rounded enough that you thought if you were her husband or boyfriend you'd always grip them firmly, with a purposeful appreciation. I was the first person to talk to Rita, not for any honorable reason except that I was standing next to her when the boat cast off, and we bon-voyaged the landlubbers on the dock, as seafaring people will.

Later on, the guy who made the remark was standing right behind me at the bar in his white polyester suit, and when I got the order of strawberry daiquiris for me and Rita and her friend Susie I turned and fell into him, square and true, leaving a wide pinkish Rorschach of what looked just like a woman's mouth, and though I bought his drinks and gave him extra for dry cleaning I have to say the rest of his evening was a certified flop.

When I returned, Rita noticed a couple of drops of red on my shirt collar and thoughtfully blotted them with a wet wipe from her handbag, leaning quite close to me, which I liked immediately and Rick winked at but which I had to step back from—

figuratively, at least. For just as suddenly I was aware of how I myself was viewing us, and especially viewing her, this lovely darker-skinned woman attending to some average white dude she'd just met, which should be, of course, a completely silly, waste-of-time consideration but one that I was spooling about nonetheless, even as I was trying to breathe in every last mole-cule of her perfumed, green appley-smelling hair.

Rick then suggested we dance and the four of us pretty much took over the small square of hardwood they'd laid down on the fat part of the boat, Rick and Susie getting kind of wild with the synchronized pelvic movements, Rita and I more grooving than moving, early '70s style. Rick brought Susie over and started a kick line with us, boy-girl-boy-girl, arms and shoulders linked, something that can be genuinely fun for about ten seconds. But then I felt Rick's hand start to grab at my neck, and then claw, and I looked over at him and his face was the color of concrete. Susie screamed and let go of us. I caught Rick before he collapsed and Rita went right into trauma mode, ordering Susie to tell the captain to turn around for port. He was having a heart attack. Rick's eyes were open but they didn't seem to be focusing on anything. Then they brightened. He said, "I'm okay, I'm okay," as if he truly meant it, and I swear I was sure he would be, because that's what we all wanted. But his eyes went dumb again and he didn't say anything after that.

Rita attempted CPR continuously, though by the time we got back to the dock twenty minutes later he was pretty much gone.

I can say she was downright heroic, and then immeasurably composed throughout the ordeal, and simply held his hand at the end. The EMS crew that was waiting took Rick away, and the three of us followed the ambulance to the hospital. After a short time in the trauma room the ER doctor came out and told us he had died. Susie began crying, mostly because of the trauma of it, for she hadn't met him before. I was the only one who really knew him, but when the nurse asked me whom they could call (his ex-wife or siblings or parents), I had no idea who they were or where they lived. This was the truly sorry part.

They basically had to treat him like any other DOA who was wheeled in alone, needing the police to look up his records and locate next of kin.

Rita's friend Susie was getting more and more upset, and so Rita told her that she should go home, and that she would stay with me until someone from Rick's family showed up. She lived close by and could easily take a taxi. I told her I was fine and that she'd done enough but she insisted, and I agreed only if I could at least give her a lift home. Rick's sister and most recent ex-wife showed up and promptly nose-dived as anyone would, and when they righted themselves a little, Rita and I took our leave as gracefully as we could, hugging the aggrieved and leaving our phone numbers and generally feeling shell-shocked ourselves. I drove her to her apartment and before she got out of the car she must have seen something wrong in my face because she asked if she could make me a cup of coffee.

We went inside her tiny but very tidy apartment and talked for an hour or so. She was just starting as a nurse's aide, going to nursing school at night, and sometimes doing child care for extra money. When I told her I had been having trouble finding the right person to watch my kids after they came home from school, we both sort of lit up and I swear I had no visions of romance when I asked if she might want to give us a try. It was only after a couple of weeks that I began to think about leaving early from work and then get this I-dropped-my- ice-cream feeling when it was time for her to go. Why shouldn't I have? When I'd get home she'd already be feeding the kids some delicious meal and for once since Daisy died they'd be eating all of it, and though it wasn't part of her duties she'd make plenty of extra and then pop open a bottle of beer and I'd take it to the shower with me and when I came back out dig in like Crusoe to the came and dirty rice or whatever else she'd made (the gourmet cuisine she developed later). After she'd clean up the kitchen we'd all sit around and watch a sitcom or two until bedtime for the kids. Those were good times, as good as the few Daisy and I had when she was alive, and maybe even better, full as they were with a quiet pleasure that wouldn't be sullied by sudden implosions of crying or madness.

These days, I'm feeling shorn clean by time and event and circumstance, so much so that I'm not even so hungry anymore.

But now here's Rita, in her white shoes, walking out of the ER doors. Her dark hair is straighter than before, a little shorter, devolumized of its natural kink. I have to believe this must be Counselor Coniglio's high-class influence, which I don't think in the least right, but none of it matters because she's a beautiful woman who's reached an age when her loveliness begins to haunt, in addition to the usual provoke and inspire.

Before I can wave she sees me. Halts for a beat. Finally comes forward, but not too close, staying near the front fender.

"I don't need a ride, you know"

"I know."

"Have you visited Kelly yet?" she says.

"She was asleep. I left her flowers. I'll come back later today."

"And where are you going now?"

"I was hoping to follow you somewhere. Maybe I can take you to breakfast?"

"I'm not eating breakfast anymore. Or lunch."

"What do you mean?"

"Pm on Slim-Fast."

"That shake stuff? You're kidding. You don't need to do that."

"I do. And don't be patronizing. You don't know, Jerry, what happens to a woman. How we age. You take everything for granted."

"You look great to me. Fantastic, even. Honest."

Rita just stares at me, I know rolling about that last word in her head. I am honest, certainly, and always am with her, but it's the doing more than professing that counts for the most, particularly in matters of love, especially when you've been long found out.

"I can sit with you, if you like. Just don't give me crap about my diet."

"I won't. Hop in."

"I'll follow you," she says, jangling her keys at me. "And don't try to take me anywhere near the house."

At a diner on Jericho Turnpike we take a window booth looking out onto the boulevard. It's backed up with the morning rush, as far as we can see, something that neither of us has ever had to deal with much, if at all, the sight of which makes our little square of space seem cozy and calm. Rita, looking better than great to me, her skin a summertime cocoa, orders just ice water and an extra glass. Out of sympathy I get a half grapefruit and toast and coffee, instead of my usual Mexican omelet.

She takes a can of vanilla-flavored diet drink out of her bag and pours it, and it reminds me of those supplement formulas they give my father at the assisted living home, which he rails against but drinks anyway, mostly so he can complain how no one will ever again make the dishes for him that my mother did. Rita, as mentioned, is a gourmet cook, and it actually pleases me to think that she's having a shake for breakfast and for lunch and then a sensible (read boring) dinner with Richie, and not preparing him the scallop terrines and pepper-pork ten-derloins and honey-glazed short ribs that made our years so thoroughly fine.

Or maybe she does, cooking just for him, serving it on fine china, in a sexy petite-sized uniform, nothing on underneath.

"Kelly told me you're still seeing Richie," I say, deciding that I probably don't have a lot of time (given our orders), or future chances. "How's it going?"

"I'm not sure it's any of your business. Especially since you know him."

"Only from a long time ago. Doesn't he ask about you and me? About all our history?"

"Actually he never has."

"Conceited little bastard. Even when he was a loudmouth runt who had nothing to be conceited about. That's why everyone picked on him. I was the only one who was nice to him, you know."

Rita doesn't defend him, or say anything else about it. She says, "How are the kids?"

"They're doing great," I say, for a second entertaining the fantasy that she is talking about ours, once little ones in jumpers with snot on their faces. "Theresa is engaged. To a writer. You never met Paul, did you?"

"Just once, briefly."

"You'll be there for the wedding, whenever it happens."

"I'm not sure yet."

"It would break Theresa's heart if you didn't show. You can bring Richie along, I don't mind. But I think you really can't miss it."

"I wouldn't bring Richie," she says, taking a sip from her drink "What about Jack? How's his new house?"

"They've got space like you can't believe. It's about five times bigger than our place. I mean my place. They have refriger-ated drawers in the kitchen, and a water tap right over the stove, for the pasta water. This is perfect for Eunice. She can only boil macaroni."

"She doesn't have time to cook. She's too busy with her decorating business."

"You mean too busy buying furniture and rugs. They're starting to buy art, and I don't mean poster reproductions. They went into the city last week for an auction at Christie's. I've got a feeling they brought back something grand."

"Sounds like Battle Brothers is doing well."

"Jack's expanding it like crazy. I never knew he could be such a mogul. He was always the shyest kid."

"He's like your father," Rita says. "Secret Mussolini."

"Oh God."

"Jack's not as confident as Hank. But he's a lot sweeter."

I say, "He cares too much what people think."

"Your opinion especially."

This is probably true, though I've never acknowledged it, for fear of making it forever stick. (Theresa has the opposite problem, by the way, which I have never minded, though often enough she can be a pain in the neck.) One thing I've learned as a parent is never to call a spade a spade when it comes to your offsprings' failings and defects, no matter their age. And now I remember, too, how well Rita knows my children, as she shep-herded them through their adolescence when everything fell apart after Daisy died, and I was mostly absent to them and to much all else, save the business of shrubs and mulch.

"They love you, you know," I say, despite how completely low and unfair it is to bring up the kids like this. "They'll love you to death."

Rita of course instantly sees through all my stratagems but what I've said is undeniably true, and she can do little else but avert her gaze down into her foamy parfait glass and try not to relent. If I had the guts I'd follow with the coup de grace of how I feel about her, utter the words, or at least recite a few verses from the poet, to wonder if she might accept "The desire of the moth for the star/Of the night for the morrow, / The devotion to something afar/From the sphere of our sorrow."

But Rita doesn't wait for me, the great never-poet, to even try, and takes one last sip of her breakfast. She wipes her mouth and loops a hand through her bag handles, leaving a dollar for the tip.

"I'm leaving," she says, rising. "Goodbye."

"Wait a second."

"I haven't even finished my breakfast yet."

"You eat fast. You'll be done before I'm in my car."

"Can't you humor me just a little?"

Rita sits back down, eyes afire, and says in a whisper, "You have a lot of fucking nerve."

"I do?"

"Yes, you do," she says, leaning forward. "Because you don't even care how obvious it is, what you're doing. You have no clue what you're saying or what it might mean."

"That Jack and Theresa think the world of you? I don't have to hide what that means. It means you can't just up and leave their lives. You're almost their stepmother."

"Oh please," she says, gathering up her things again. "Do you know how silly that sounds? Almost stepmother? Anyway, they're not concerned. They know they'll see me again plenty.

It's you, Jerry, like always. You're the one never budging from the center of the show. You're forever the star."

"If that's the guy who's got to do all the worrying, then so be it."

"Right," she says, with an unappreciative smirk. "Why don't you just say what you want to say. I know it's not that you're so worried about Kelly."

"Hey, you said yourself she'll be fine. At least she's in good hands," I say, though now I'm regretting how I unpadlocked her. "It's you I'm not so sure about."

"Me? You've got to be kidding."

"How can that guy be right for you? How do you stand him?

He has no idea how ridiculous he looks. Sir Richard of Chukkah. Does he imagine that they'll let his dago ass into Piping Rock or Creek Club?"

Rita says, "He's a member of both, actually. Not that I find that impressive. So what else?"

"Okay, then. What's he do all by himself over there at Tara?

And why did his wife leave him? I bet he screwed around on her, for years. And then worked some legal hoodoo to boot her and the kids out."

"She cheated on him, and ran off and married the guy. She didn't want the place. And his kids and grandkids stay with him for most of the summers. And for what he does around the house, he likes to garden and read. He practices tai chi. He's also a very good Asian cook, Thai and Japanese."

"I always took you to Benihana's."

"Yes, you did."

So I say, full of it, "He sounds like the ideal man."

"He certainly isn't!" Rita says, like she's tired of the idea.

"But at least he's interested in things. He's still curious. He never complains about being bored. He's always searching, but riot in a stupid or desperate way."

"Sounds sort of pathetic to me."

"That's not a surprise."

"So why don't you marry him, then?"

"I'm thinking about it," she answers, with a little oomph.

"He's asked you?"

Rita nods. "The other night."

"Christ. You've barely been seeing him six months."

"We're not young people."

"He give you a ring?"

She pauses, then takes a jewelry box from her bag, cracks it open. Voila. It's huge, a rock and a half, the size of something that you get from a gumball machine tucked inside a plastic bubble. It's frankly amazing, its sheer objecthood, this token-become-totem. Having nothing to counter with, I feel ushered aside already, obsolete, biologically diminished just in the way I'm supposed to be by another man's splendid offering.

"Of course Richard wants me to take my time, really think it through."

What I'm thinking is, Richard is a dope.

I say, "Only fair and right."

Rita says, "But I don't want to linger with this. No way. I'm not going to do that."

"Listen," I tell her, bearing down now "you're not someone who makes quick decisions. It's not in your nature. You shouldn't do so, especially now. It's no good."

"You think I should do what I did for the last twenty-one years? You think that was good for me?"

This is the part where I usually answered that our legal union wouldn't have made things better than they were, and where Rita would say that she'd have something now, after all she put into our relationship and my family, and where I'd point out that it was her unilateral decision to leave, to which she'd respond that of course it wasn't about money or property but respect, meaning my respect for her and for myself. This is the part that is hardest to speak about, because all along I'd thought I was treating her like a queen. Maybe I didn't shop at Tiffany or Harry Winston, but I always bought her very nice jewelry from Fortunoff's, and we took plenty of trips to sexy all-inclusive resorts, and I never expected her to keep working as a nurse, if she wanted instead to just stay home and garden and cook and read (all the things she's clearly doing with Richie). The aforementioned seems, at least from my view, to be as good as it gets with a guy like me, or maybe with anyone who isn't an emotionally available millionaire or professional masseur (the two life profiles of men women desire most, according to a magazine at my doctor's office). But I guess I'm dead wrong again because the sum reality of my efforts is that I'm sitting here trying desperately to say something she'll believe, or that at least will gain me a temporary stay.

"You can't marry Richie" is what I muster. "You just can't.

Can't."

Rita waits for the reason, the angle or argument, though soon enough she realizes there is none coming, just this obtuse plea from her just freshly aging former lover, who is limply waving a serrated grapefruit spoon. Can't. She wants to scold me, throttle me, certainly say hell all and scram, but she doesn't yet move, God bless her, she doesn't bolt.

"You make me so tired," she says, slumping back a little.

"You should leave me alone."

"I was trying."

"You have to try harder. Otherwise, I can't see you. I won't."

Her meaning: Ever.

"Don't marry Richie," I say, though sounding funny to myself, like I'm a lamentable young man in an old summer-love movie, flesh-and-blood wreckage. "Marry me."

Rita giggles, then laughs, out loud, with enough hilarity that the jelly roll gang hunched at the lunch counter turn around half smiling, to see what the joke is all about.

"I'm serious, Rita. Marry me."

Rita stops laughing. She glares, then picks up her handbag A. L o F T

and walks out. I head outside after her, calling her, but she ignores me and quickly gets into her car, which she never locks.

The windows are never rolled up either, and I stand right over her as she tries to get the old motor going, karumph, karumph, and if you didn't know any better you'd think I was a rapist or stalker or three-eyed space lizard, the way she's cranking that thing. I can tell she's flooding the engine, but I say nothing. Our waitress has followed me out, waving the check, but I'm not paying attention because this is a not-yet-depleted moment in what seems to be my increasingly depleted life, and I'm telling Rita to stop trying to leave as the waitress keeps saying, "Hey, buster," and tapping my arm, and finally Rita steps out of the car and whacks me hard on the chest, not quite open-handed.

"She's talking to you, Jerry! Listen!" Rita digs a ten-spot from her bag and gives it to the waitress, who shoots me a kickin-the-shins smirk if there ever was one. Rita shouts, "What's the matter with you?"

"I'm serious," I say, feeling the stamp of her hand bloom hot on my skin. "I really am."

"Doesn't matter," she answers, now getting back in the driver's seat. She tries to roll up the window, but it only goes three-quarters of the way. "You think our not getting married is still the issue, don't you?"

"It's not not, is it?" I say, the idiot in me inappropriately focused on the unexpected palindrome. This is an excellent way to get into trouble. Though I rally "I realize that it's not the whole problem."

"And what, in your mind, is that?"

"C'est moi," I say, though maybe a bit too eagerly. "It's me.

It's all about me."

Of course this is accurate enough, though rather than illuminate or chart a new course, this mostly deflates the moment, which seems to be a growing skill of mine.

Rita says, as if she's been holding her breath forever, "Fine, then."

"Can you come out of there now?"

Rita shakes her head. She looks down into her lap, slips her sunglasses on, and starts turning the engine over again, now going badank ba-dank I'm sure it will soon quit entirely, but then somehow the damn thing rumbles to life, all muscle and smoke, spirit ghost of Dearborn. She clicks the car into reverse and tells me to watch my feet.

"Don't do anything yet," I say, "at least not until after the weekend. Theresa's flying in, and we're having a get-together at Jack's. Why don't you come? Everyone would love to see you."

"Pm sorry, Jerry."

"I'll pick you up on Saturday afternoon."

"Please don't," she says, backing it out.

"I'll call you!"

She mouths a big No and gives a tiny wave, like she's peering out the window from two thousand feet. Then she squeals rubber to accelerate out onto the jet flows of the Jericho Turnpike, and is gone.