Another You

16

“ ’S WONNERFUL, ’s mah-vel-lous, that you should care fooooooor meeeeeee,” McCallum sang.

McCallum was in charge of the tape selection. So far, they had been through both sides of Bobby Short, one side of Maria Muldaur, and ten or fifteen minutes of a Jean-Michel Jarre tape Marshall had ejected, because it was impossible to listen without speeding. They were on day two of their journey, instigated and largely bankrolled by McCallum, who sat in the passenger’s seat padded with down-filled pillows: one behind him, one wedged between seat belt and door, another under his knees. In anticipation of their ultimate destination, McCallum was wearing black kneesocks, khaki Bermuda shorts, running shoes, a baseball cap he’d turned backward, and thermal underwear under a denim workshirt. “Wonnerful,” McCallum sang, though that verse had ended several minutes before.

“You’re grouchy because you’re doing all the driving,” McCallum said. “How is the doctor going to know I’m taking a turn at the wheel? You’re also supposed to not cross the street on a red light. How much advice can anybody afford to pay attention to? Who’s going to see me doing a little driving? It’ll make me feel less like an invalid.”

“I’d see you,” Marshall said.

“Well, I wish you’d been my guardian angel when you-know-who was trying to kill me.”

“I wish I had, too.” He was thinking not only of the possibility of McCallum’s having escaped physical harm, but how much better he would feel if his house had remained the pleasant, undisturbed environment it once had been. Sonja was there now, as he and McCallum drove south during Benson College’s spring break. He had wanted her to come, and initially he had taken it as a bad sign that she hadn’t wanted to. Though she’d assured him it was over, he’d begun to feel that her affair with Tony was the new subtext for everything — every new recipe she prepared, every silly, old romantic movie she wanted to watch on TV. If McCallum hadn’t gotten so excited by the idea of getting some sun, he probably would not have left Sonja’s side he was so worried she would pick up again with Tony. He felt ambivalent about seeing Gordon and Beth, and he was worried that McCallum might be — because suddenly this was getting to be the story of McCallum’s life — an unwanted guest. None of which he had said to McCallum, because the last time Marshall had visited him in the hospital he had become as excited as a child at the prospect of getting out of town.

Already, he missed Sonja. He wanted to be angry at her, but he couldn’t sustain his anger. She had at least acted on her desires — and, much to his relief, she had selected a slightly ludicrous lover. Still, how boring the house must seem, after her antics with Tony. She had considered going somewhere warm herself to “think things over,” but then she had decided to stay where she was.

Between McCallum’s ejecting one tape and plugging in another, the radio cut in with the theme from Midnight Cowboy, a movie that had greatly impressed Marshall when he’d first seen it. The song also immediately caught McCallum’s attention, though it was frizzed with static, as well as fading in and out as if they were driving through a series of invisible tunnels. Marshall could have done without hearing it; the song conjured up the movie’s ending — Ratso wearing his palm tree shirt, dead on the bus bound for Florida.

Florida was where the two of them were headed, after the stopover they would make first in the small town of Buena Vista, where McCallum, for reasons Marshall still could not comprehend, felt that he must, for once and for all, explain himself to Cheryl Lanier so that his soul might begin to heal along with his bodily wounds. McCallum had also tried to find out where Livan herself was, to no avail; if McCallum had been intent on contacting her, the best he could probably do would be to send a letter to Livan Baker, Planet Earth. To the extent he’d been involved with Cheryl himself, Marshall could hardly refuse to stop on their way to visit Gordon in the Keys. Though she hadn’t responded to the note he sent her along with the clipping about Livan Baker — vanished, it seemed; or at least, in a follow-up article in the paper, the U.S. government claimed to be interested in finding out her whereabouts — Cheryl had phoned McCallum in response to whatever letter he’d sent her.

The tape deck swallowed the next tape McCallum pushed in: Eddie Fisher, singing “I’m Yours.” It was quite possibly the worst song Marshall had ever heard. Eddie Fisher’s soaring tenor was vehement; it would have paralyzed the intended recipient of his affections as certainly as Kryptonite would bring Superman to a screeching halt. He had read that during Eddie Fisher’s brief marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, she had had him picked up from the piano bench aboard her yacht and thrown overboard. Marshall looked imploringly at McCallum, but his eyes were shut, his head dropped back on the headrest, a shit-eating grin on his tipped-up face. All he could hope was that it was a homemade tape and that next they might be treated to something less ridiculous. It turned out to be Kate Smith. Rolling along on the Beltway, as a pallid half-moon beamed through drifting clouds, surrounded by vanity license plates and cars that were either expensive and new or limping-along junkers, Marshall practiced patience by listening silently to McCallum’s hit parade.

“I love it,” McCallum said, keeping his eyes closed so that there was no indication he was talking to Marshall, rather than himself. “Here we are doing our update on the buddy film: would-be murder victim and concerned friend making a big circle around Slick Willy’s Washington, on their way to making amends and soaking up some Florida sunshine. ‘Greetings from sunny Florida,’ ” McCallum said. “Remember those postcards where you check one box in each category? ‘I am: Fine; Sunburned; Fatter; Lonely; Horny.’ ”

“ ‘Wish you were: Here with me; Farther away; Kissing me now; Back on Mars,’ ” Marshall said.

The events of the winter had been so extraordinary he might as well have been living on another planet, Marshall thought. He flipped down the visor to block the sun, a bright orange orb low in the sky, shining in his face. To keep pace with the traffic, he was going fifteen miles over the speed limit, checking signs for Route 29 South, not sure how soon the turn would come after taking the exit for Front Royal. McCallum, now apparently asleep, was sitting on the map, leaving only a small corner protruding. The man was a wonder: to be able to tune out Kate Smith’s heartfelt, booming voice; to not even squint in the blaze of sunlight. Then again, considering what he’d been through, such things were probably rather delightful. The night before, McCallum had slept with one of the bedside lamps on, lowered to the floor so it wouldn’t disturb Marshall. Wearing earphones, he had fallen asleep almost immediately, and in the barely darkened room, Marshall, unable to fall asleep quickly, had turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow to look at the odd spectacle that was McCallum: he slept wearing his socks and running shoes, though he’d stripped down to his Jockey shorts and thermal shirt before getting into bed. He could tell by the bright yellow butterfly on the cover of the cassette case on the floor that McCallum had fallen asleep listening to Brahms. Brahms’s “Lullabye” seeping smoothly into his unconscious, where the listener also retained images of a knife rising and falling, the memory of sudden pain. McCallum had not so much been shifting in sleep as trying to avoid the knifepoint, Marshall decided. Looking at him sleeping so fitfully, he had remembered his own fatigue the night he returned home and saw him there, slouched in the chair like the comfortable old friend he was not, fingers raised in that odd, nonverbal greeting he’d watched McCallum poke into the air as they’d walked away from the motel registration desk the night before, or as he had signalled his appreciation to the convenience store clerk who’d come out and opened the newspaper vending machine after he’d inserted twenty-five cents and nothing happened. McCallum was following “Shoe,” which he snorted over appreciatively, along with his daily horoscope (any publication’s report equally credible). He’d had trouble following stories of any length; he still couldn’t concentrate on a book, but his new strategy was to try to work up to serious reading by finishing newspaper articles. The New York Times had proved too much for him, so he’d backtracked to USA Today. He was also interested in the weather maps, happy that he’d persuaded Marshall to make the trip, glad to get out of the cold.

McCallum didn’t wake up until Marshall had turned onto the Warrenton bypass. After Washington, the Volvos and BMWs had tapered off, and pickups began to speed alongside, with quite a few Jeeps mixed in, and some old Fords and Chevys whose chassis almost dragged the road. The radio was mostly country, shot through with static. McCallum settled for “I Told You So,” which he sang along with in a satirical Southern accent, not quite in sync with Randy Travis because he didn’t know anything but the chorus. The dimming sun highlighted the grime on the windshield, but through the flecks of dead bugs and the haze of highway dust he could see the trees, redbuds budding and dogwoods almost in full flower. They reminded him of Evie, and her love of all flowers. Of Sonja, to whom he’d often given roses on Valentine’s Day, though she always told him in advance of the day not to buy them because the prices were marked up. Had she secretly been flattered, or had she meant what she said? The past February, he hadn’t been sure. He hadn’t bought them, but he hadn’t bought anything else either. Had he intuited something was wrong? Not wanted to appear a chump?

No. He hadn’t had a clue.

So, what had Tony given her?

No doubt roses, which she kept on her desk at work.

It occurred to him that there was probably no middle ground: you either wanted to hear every painful detail, or you didn’t want any specifics at all. He seemed incapable of selecting either attitude, though; even if he’d felt masochistic, Sonja’s words had a way of jumbling in his head like Ping-Pong balls turned in a drum until, at unexpected intervals, the drum stopped and they bounced to stillness and he reached in and took one out, turned it over, and then dully repeated what was written there: empty houses; programmatic; sorry. There were quite a few sorry Ping-Pong balls. Smooth and cold, he could feel the shiny surfaces of the many sorrys. He had sat with her the night before he left, watching some TV show in which balls were churned in a transparent drum, had tried to focus his attention on the numbers the woman called out as she picked out ball after ball. The numbers corresponded to prizes: a cruise; a sheepskin coat. What Sonja had been saying corresponded to an indeterminate future, married people skeptical of one another. They never watched game shows, but that night they’d sat there riveted, neither of them really watching. During the show Gordon had called, wanting to double-check their “ETA.” Though he’d already told Gordon Sonja wouldn’t be coming, Gordon had either forgotten or else suspected something was wrong, though Marshall had decided that he would not tell Gordon about it. Gordon had a way of letting you know he didn’t like to hear bad news. His usual response was to listen silently, then shrug and say something like “Life — can you beat it?” or “Hell — what can you do?” He knew Sonja thought Gordon was, as she’d once put it, “impossibly defended.” In her opinion, Gordon was filled with a sense of futility about the smallest, as well as the largest, things, a man full of anger and resentment, a person imploding while speaking banalities. It was difficult to argue with her, but of course Gordon was his brother; he registered the contradictions in his eyes, interpreted the dismissive, rhetorical questions as answerable — it was only that he hesitated to cast a pall on Gordon’s efforts to remain upbeat by getting serious. In a way, he respected the distance Gordon tried to keep between himself and problems. Sonja had told him, in bed the night before he left, that Evie had told her to leave her lover; Evie had advised her to say nothing to Marshall, to try, privately, to make herself happier in her marriage. At first, Sonja had been sure Evie had been speaking out of her own sense of guilt, from having slept with Marshall’s father before she married him. But then, it turned out, Evie had worried that Marshall’s reaction might insult her. “She says you’ve kept your reactions to yourself ever since childhood,” Sonja had said to him. So there it was: Sonja had had an affair, and instead of his criticizing her, she — and Evie — had implicitly criticized him. Had Evie been right, though? An impossible question for him to answer: yes, she was right, because, as Sonja had seen from the expression on his face, which indicated he was about to cry, he was unable to handle it; no, she was wrong, because, as she could see from his ear-to-ear smile, he must be thrilled she confided in him, he obviously felt closer to her than ever, wished she had more of such interesting news.

“Fuck Tony,” he said, pounding the heel of his hand into the steering wheel.

“Fuck what?” McCallum said, opening his eyes and shifting in the seat. “Oh,” he said, answering his own question, “Tony the phony. Forget him. If she hadn’t already forgotten him, you wouldn’t have heard about it.”

“You think so?” He could hear the tenuous acceptance of the idea in his voice. Not exactly Gordon, saying, “Life — can you beat it?” but still, he was surprised to realize that he had sounded slightly hopeful.

“Absolutely,” McCallum said.

“You’re humoring me.”

“It’s what I believe. You’ve got to understand, I don’t exactly idealize the union of marriage right now, with these sutures still dissolving and pinpricks of pain burning my gut like bees stinging me.”

“How are you doing?” he asked McCallum — as if he hadn’t just heard.

“Used to be a husband,” McCallum said. “Used to like my color TV. Even had a pet. A turtle. Did I tell you some neighbor came in and found the turtle under the bed and donated His Highness to the third-grade class? Used to have la vie normale. Used to be a devoted daddy.”

He waited for McCallum to continue talking about his son. He did not. He rose slightly, wincing in pain, then held the seat belt that crossed over his chest near his breastbone with his left hand as he sat upright, trying to ease some sudden pain, while looking through the windshield, taking in the budding trees, a tractor bumping along, plowing a field, the sinking sun. If it had been his right hand touching his upper chest on the left side, McCallum might have been pledging allegiance to those things. Pledging allegiance to daily life in Virginia, where the landscape, once they passed Warrenton, had begun to remind Marshall of New Hampshire. New Hampshire seemed far behind, farther than it was in actual miles, and he had to squint to bring back details of the roads he drove most days, narrowing his eyes to focus sharply on the remembered image of the ghostly dead elms crowding the road at the bend by Rimmer’s Stream, to envision the swaying light blinking yellow at the crossroads. The season hadn’t changed to almost-spring there; it was still winter, the light fading fast as evening came on, black ice a sheen that could surprise you on the roads.

To his right he saw a gun shop and shooting range that advertised discounts on fireworks. So many cars and trucks began to signal their turn into the parking lot that Marshall pulled into the left lane and slowed slightly to look, the way someone would decelerate to look at an accident: trucks were clustered in the lot, appearing as small as toys below the huge brown bear that loomed outside the store, its mouth opened in a red-tongued roar, its teeth the size of Roman candles. Beside the bear, he saw briefly as he glanced past McCallum, was a ride of some sort: a twirling disk with handles gripped by children, further dwarfed in the adult world by a thirty-foot bear. He thought again of McCallum’s son — whether seeing children brought him to McCallum’s mind, or whether, as it seemed, he’d written the boy off. Unless he asked, there would be no answer to that question, he could tell. He rolled up his window against the evening coolness, continued surveying the land. He thought that what he and Sonja might need was a change of scene, that they might explore the possibility of living elsewhere, someplace less harsh than New Hampshire, a place where spring came earlier. Though the problem didn’t have to do with long winters, but with her infatuation with Tony. Which she said had ended.

“If you pass another one of those places, we should get some fireworks, set them off in a field. Celebrate my being alive,” McCallum said.

“Do you think about your son?” he blurted out.

A moment’s delay before McCallum spoke. “Probably as much as you think about your wife.”

“I can’t stop thinking about her. The situation, really. Not her in particular.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” McCallum said. “Maybe you’ve seen her as part of a situation, but you haven’t seen her in her own right. Good armchair-shrink speculation, don’t you think?”

“It might be true,” Marshall said.

“Might be, but what do I know?” He looked at Marshall. “How come you used to get so mad when I said you were my friend, now all of a sudden it’s just an accepted fact?”

“You persuaded me,” Marshall said. “With your many virtues.”

“Being?” McCallum said. “That the suggestion we hit the road came along at just the right time? Think things over yourself; see your brother; check out your sweetie.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You told me how guilty you feel about her dropping out of school. Come on — all I said was that you were sweet on her.”

“Only in your mind.”

“Not true, but I won’t argue because backing down is another one of my many virtues.”

“Your wife thought you were pretty domineering,” Marshall said.

McCallum shrugged. “What’s this?” he said. “You playing nyaa-nyaa-nyaa all of a sudden? For a while, she liked the way I was,” he said. “Only thing I went too far with was keeping after her about getting the kid on some medicine, which she construed as my wanting to shoot tranquillizer darts in him like he was a charging rhino — and of course I hoped she’d abort the next one.”

“I can’t believe my bad timing, to call just when …”

“Bad timing, good timing, I don’t know,” McCallum said. “I sort of like the idea of her in jail. Excuse me: in the prison psychiatric ward.”

“I still don’t see how a person would do something like that as a response to another person’s sarcasm.”

“She didn’t like criticism. All you can do with people like that is back off from them or keep your self-respect by saying whatever you want to say, whether you cross them or not.”

“But you didn’t suspect? Nothing made you suspect she might be violent?”

“What are you asking? Did I see her eating Twinkies?”

“What?”

“Twinkies. The Twinkies defense. Some lawyer went into court and—”

“Oh yeah,” Marshall said.

Stores began to string together into larger rows to become shopping areas, the farmland disappearing, new roads poked into recently graded land. They were the warm-up act for the inevitable Wal-Mart that was sure to appear momentarily, the blunt-topped Taj Mahal rising out of the suburban blight, the long reflecting pool in front sensibly paved to provide convenient parking for thousands of cars. A palace that was not a monument to love, but to discounts. Sonja snuck off to Wal-Mart once or twice a year, he knew: not so much to save money as to take in the spectacle, bring back some souvenirs, though she stuffed the bags deep in the garbage so he wouldn’t find them. All the problematic things we do that we don’t care to discuss: where we shop; with whom we have an affair. Insult to injury: it had been Tony, an uninteresting control freak who could drop his pants and play tag with someone’s wife, but heaven help the person who was improper enough to stay too long at his house, his precious, private house. He’d invited them, then flipped out. Sonja had told him about it: that childish proprietariness not acceptable to her … though hell: she hadn’t objected to joining in to help enact his childish fantasies. And wait a minute: if everyone else was expected to be so proper, what about showing up at Evie’s funeral, making Sonja uncomfortable, returning to the house, sipping coffee and making small talk, being nice to old ladies who would have fainted if they’d known what he spent his days doing with Sonja, suggesting all along he was Marshall’s friend as much as hers. How long would it take for him to be in Sonja’s presence and not think of Tony? When Tony picked out their house — he had, really, and Sonja had either loved it or pretended to love it — that early on, he now thought, Tony must have been conspiring to have an affair with Sonja.

Traffic was heavier, and he looked for an excuse to pull off the road. He turned into a gas station just as “Yellow Submarine” started to play on the radio, a song dedicated to Ms. Blair (much giggling, as the dj asked the caller to announce the dedication herself) from the M.F.A. students.

“Submarine surfaces, you get gunned down at the Dakota,” McCallum said, loosening his seat belt and slowly, wincing, swinging one leg, then the other, onto the asphalt. He stood with more effort than Marshall expected, even given that people got stiff sitting for long periods in cars. Just when Marshall was about to help him, McCallum wavered to almost full height, leaning forward slightly, his hand on his side. He straightened his body as he walked toward the bathroom, suddenly swinging his arms and high-stepping as if he were doing a military drill, aware that Marshall was staring after him. A teenage boy in black leather, coming out of the bathroom, slowed down to take in the spectacle. McCallum marched on.

Paying for gas and a Diet Sprite, he saw McCallum exit the bathroom and walk to the car, neither marching nor walking normally, his legs rubbery. They were within sixty miles of Charlottesville, then it would be another seventy or so to Buena Vista. What was McCallum’s scenario? Were they going to check into a motel and call Cheryl, get together with her that night? It seemed particularly pointless to be seeing Cheryl, who meant so little to him, when everything with Sonja was up in the air. He had not mentioned the planned stop in Buena Vista to Sonja.

“Want me to get you something to drink?” he called to McCallum as he approached the car.

“Yeah, thanks,” McCallum said. “Ginger ale. Something to settle my stomach.”

He turned, sipping from the can of Sprite. Though you could see nothing but shadowy shapes inside the store from outside, from inside the view out was clear. As he waited in line, he thought about using the pay phone he’d seen near the ice machine, calling Sonja and telling her he loved her, he knew everything was going to be all right. He wasn’t sure everything was going to be all right, though, and the risk of having his voice ring hollow as he spoke made him decide against it. He paid with a dollar bill, got thirty cents change. Exiting, he looked through the glass and saw McCallum, head resting on his arm, which protruded from the open window, and was struck again by how strange it was to be travelling in this part of the country not with Sonja, but with McCallum. For a split second, he had wondered: What is that man doing in my car? What was he doing in the car himself? Had it been a good idea to leave, even though Sonja told him the trip would do him good, even though she’d insisted she wanted time alone? There wasn’t even the slightest possibility she’d get back together with Tony, was there?

He handed McCallum the Schweppes, wiping his fingertips on his jeans before turning on the ignition.

“Hey, man, I can take a turn driving,” McCallum said.

Marshall didn’t answer him. He pulled around a Jeep, coasted to a stop, then accelerated to get onto the highway. This was fine, he’d decided: all of it fine except perhaps the Cheryl Lanier part. What few words of consolation he could redundantly offer her could be said quickly; he intended to claim fatigue, leave the two of them together, wherever they might be, and tell McCallum to call the motel so he could pick him up when they’d finished talking. It irritated him more the farther south they got: Why was McCallum so intent on being granted forgiveness by a girl who had never even been his student? How guilty could he feel when, along with many other students who for one reason or another couldn’t hack it, she had decided to drop out of school for a while? McCallum hadn’t made it impossible for her to continue. Neither had he; the silly flirtation, the imagined romantic connection, the overreaction to the situation, however unpleasant it had been for everyone involved, were all partly the result of Cheryl’s own youthful inability to deal with problems. What was her motivation in agreeing to see them? Why had she responded to McCallum’s call, but not to his letter? It was going to be an effort to be kind, to pretend that how she was doing mattered.

A hawk flew over the highway, its large wings slanting a ragged shadow over the car. It took both of them so much by surprise, they ducked. McCallum snorted, an acknowledgment they’d been fooled, thinking a plane was about to crash into them — a snort to the Fates to indicate they knew that anything still might happen.

17

THE DECOR OF DOLLY’s was country eclectic: birds’ nests hanging on fishline dropped from the rafters, taxidermy treasures (a deer head with tinsel dripping from its antlers; a fox striding forward on a shelf that also held a fishbowl with two goldfish too large for the small container); license plates hung next to chintz curtains. There was an old jukebox with a cardboard sign: OUT OF ORDER SINCE ELVIS DIED. At eight o’clock it was an hour until closing.

Marshall had ordered a bowl of beef stew and a side order of cornbread. McCallum ordered next: pork chops, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. When the waitress asked if he wanted gravy on the pork chops, McCallum said, “Absolutely.”

“And on the potatoes?”

“You bet.”

“What would you like to drink with that?” the waitress said.

“Iced tea. But don’t forget a dollop of gravy on my collards.”

“You serious on that?” she asked, tilting her head skeptically.

“I’m a man who loves his gravy,” McCallum said.

“That so?” she asked Marshall, who was less than amused by McCallum’s high spirits. McCallum had also bought a Texaco cap, which he wore with the brim pulled low, so the waitress trusted the look in Marshall’s eyes more than McCallum’s.

“I’m betting you don’t want none of it in your tea, even if you do want everything on the plate to float.”

“That’s right,” McCallum called after her. “Let me have the gravy on the side with my tea.”

She turned, smiling as she hurried away.

“Lemon wedge can be right in it, but the gravy’s got to be on the side,” he said.

As he walked to the table, a spasm of pain had passed through McCallum, who’d reached out to steady himself on the coatrack. He’d washed down a pill the second the waitress brought the water. He kept them in his pants pocket. Marshall thought about it and decided that along with hating Band-Aids, men almost never carried medicine with them. When McCallum had emptied his pocket in the motel the night before, the pocket of treasures had contained the loose aspirin with codeine that Marshall was almost sure he was taking too often, a small compass, a wristwatch with half the band missing.

“What’s left to say to Cheryl Lanier?” Marshall said — the second time that day he’d asked, though he’d tried to fight the urge and not keep after McCallum. It was irrational; McCallum had never come up with a satisfactory answer, and Marshall was sure he wouldn’t. He thought, in the second after he spoke, that perhaps McCallum was still in some sort of shock; if he, himself, had been so physically wounded, maybe he’d have some unexplainable feelings too. “Never mind,” he said instantly, though McCallum had not rushed to answer.

Music started playing, not from the broken jukebox but from a cassette player on top of an old sewing machine: Jerry Lee Lewis, doing “Great Balls of Fire.” A man whose stomach had forced the waistband of his pants to his groin rose from a stool at the counter, held his hands above his head, and shimmied his hips, breaking into a wide grin as his friend walked back from the cassette player. He ducked when his friend lifted a hand to swat him, and their waitress, from behind the counter, pretended to be about to douse them with a pitcher of water. It was that way, with everybody at the back counter smiling and one taciturn family eating fried chicken at a table in the middle of the restaurant, when Cheryl Lanier leaned hard against the door and rushed into the restaurant. She was wearing the white ski parka. To Marshall’s surprise, she was also wearing the scarf he’d given her the night he picked her up hitchhiking. It was coiled around her throat, one end dangling in front, the other tossed over her shoulder. She loosened the scarf as she approached their booth, looking more puzzled than pleased — though why should she be surprised to see them?

Because McCallum had lied; he’d never told her Marshall was going to be there. That was why. Marshall knew it instantly. And too late.

“Like nuns,” McCallum said. “We travel in twos.”

“Wrong sex,” she said, after a long pause.

She took off the parka and hung it on the tall pole with coat hooks two booths away. On the other hooks hung the pink jacket of the little girl who was tapping a chicken wing on the edge of her plate and the parents’ denim jackets, lined in black-and-white-checked wool. “How are you?” the man said to Cheryl.

She knew them. She knew the waitress, too, who raised a serving spoon in greeting from behind the counter. It was Cheryl who had suggested this restaurant.

“I’m fine. How are you?” Cheryl said, stopping at the table, her hand on top of the little girl’s chair.

“We’re about to sit here all night if she doesn’t eat her chicken. She’s had nothing but cornflakes for three days. Tell Cheryl Jean why you won’t eat nothing but cornflakes,” the man said.

The little girl squirmed in her seat. Marshall saw that her plate was almost untouched. The man’s plate was empty, except for bones, and his wife had almost finished her dinner. She reached across to her daughter’s plate and picked up a chicken breast, saying nothing to Cheryl in greeting, avoiding her husband’s eyes, saying to no one in particular, “All she eats is cornflakes. You might as well get used to it.”

“So how have things been back at the cloister?” Cheryl said, sliding in beside McCallum. As he slid sideways in the booth, he winced.

“Cheryl Jean, you tell Bobby to call me in the morning whether that part comes in or not,” the man called.

Cheryl nodded. The waitress came to the table and put a cup of coffee down in front of Cheryl. “Eating, hon?” she said.

“No thanks,” Cheryl said.

“You be in this Saturday?”

“One to nine,” Cheryl said.

If the waitress had any interest in who anyone was, she wasn’t letting on. Marshall had eaten only half his stew, but McCallum had finished. She cleared McCallum’s plate, asking if he wanted “gravy coffee.”

“One sugar cube, no milk, gravy on the side,” he said, smiling.

“We charge extra for gravy with coffee,” the waitress said. “Tell him,” she said to Cheryl.

“So,” Cheryl said. “What a surprise to get a call from you. I take it you’re headed down to Florida too, Marshall? Doesn’t sound bad.”

“Spring vacation. Ten glorious days on the road leading to the southernmost point of the U.S. of A. Going to stand at land’s end and have our pictures taken. Buy a coconut,” McCallum said.

“I’ve never been that far,” Cheryl said. “I went to Marathon to go fishing with one of my brothers a few years ago.”

Though the waitress paid no attention, the man at the table never took his eyes off their booth.

“I wait tables here on weekends,” Cheryl said. “During the week I’ve got a job in Lexington, working at a gift shop one of my cousins opened.” She looked at Marshall. “I haven’t thought about poetry in a while,” she said.

Marshall shrugged. “I can’t say I’ve thought about it lately myself. Cheryl — I thought McCallum told you I was going to be here.”

“She’s happy to see you. I knew she would be,” McCallum said.

“I’m not exactly happy to see either of you. I hope you don’t take that wrong.”

“We don’t understand why you left,” McCallum said. “It doesn’t seem right that because”—he lowered his voice to a near whisper—“because of what happened, you should be here, and Livan should have blown town, leaving whatever mess she left behind.”

“You came to Buena Vista to sympathize with me,” Cheryl said. It was the first time Marshall had heard the name of the town pronounced. It was “Buena” to rhyme with “tuna.”

“We’re stopping on our way to Key West,” Marshall said.

“No, we came because we wanted to see you,” McCallum said.

“Well, here I am,” Cheryl said.

“Though I didn’t know when I wrote I’d have the added benefit of meeting with your mother,” McCallum said.

What was this? Marshall thought. Her mother was suspicious about why two college professors would stop to see her daughter who’d dropped out? It did sound strange. He could well imagine that Cheryl’s mother would want to check them out.

“Why?” Cheryl said, ignoring the remark about her mother. “Why do you care how I’m doing?” It was loud enough that the man eating with his family heard the question. Marshall saw him kick his wife’s leg under the table.

“I want to tell you the truth about the things Livan accused me of,” McCallum said. “At the very least, you deserve to have an idea of what was true and what wasn’t, and what was an exaggeration.”

“Forgive me,” Cheryl said, “but I’ve stopped thinking about the truth. She thinks what she thinks, and you say what you say. It’s all over, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Then what’s this about, that you drop out of college—”

“You worried about falling enrollments or something?”

“Worried about you,” McCallum said.

Cheryl sighed. She looked around the restaurant, taking it in as the odd place it was the same way they had when they’d first come in. Marshall could almost feel her sudden estrangement from the place. A woman came from the back and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED on the front door. She ruffled Cheryl’s hair but didn’t say anything. She looked through McCallum and Marshall as if they weren’t there.

“Listen, this isn’t about me. It isn’t even about me,” Cheryl said suddenly. “But since I’ve heard enough about you, and even from you, for a lifetime, let me tell you a couple of things myself. My mother has gray hair now, she had a baby last year, and she had to go half-time at the food plant. Daddy’s doing long-distance hauling on runs between here and Michigan. He’s got a girlfriend in Michigan my mother found out about, and she thinks it’s just a matter of time until he’ll find work out there and not come back. Since I’ve been home she’s had two operations to tie off veins in her legs, but she’s going back to work full-time next month. She needs the money. I’ve been taking the baby to my cousin’s shop in Lexington, because the lady who was coming in while my mother worked ran away with the Amway salesman. It’s not The Bridges of Madison County down here; everybody runs away all the time. It’s nothing special.”

“Makes it stranger you came back,” McCallum said.

“McCallum,” Marshall said, with exaggerated patience, “she wanted to help her mother out.”

“Which I very much approve of — the idea of her getting some help — because the woman was once the love of my life. When I was sixteen years old. Seventeen. Not that much younger than you are now, Cheryl.”

“I’m aware of that,” Cheryl said.

“What?” Marshall said.

“Your mother tell you we almost got married?” McCallum said.

“She’s got a picture of you two hidden in her dresser drawer. You probably know the one: the two of you in a canoe,” Cheryl said, evading the question.

“She got a scholarship to a camp in Virginia. It was my last year there,” McCallum said to Marshall. “I was a camp counsellor.”

“She told me when I was in high school,” Cheryl said. She looked at Marshall. “My mother and the guidance counsellor thought I should apply to Benson. That Professor McCallum here would be my ticket to getting financial aid.”

“What in the hell!” Marshall said, shaking his head. What was he doing here, as if he had any part in this? He hardly knew McCallum, and had no desire to know about the intricacies of his life.

“I’m still ashamed,” McCallum said to Cheryl. “I dumped your mother for no good reason and broke her heart. It’s still painful to think about.”

“Unbelievable,” Marshall said. “Why couldn’t you have given me a little background before we showed up here? What is this about that I’m constantly dragged into your life and your problems like my feelings don’t matter? You think I love your revelations, or do you have trouble levelling with anybody?”

“Cowardice,” McCallum said. “You continue to misunderstand me.”

“We’re both cowards,” Cheryl said. “I didn’t tell her you were coming.”

“You didn’t?” McCallum said. “You said you would.”

“I changed my mind. I thought I’d leave it up to you — have you call her yourself if you were so sure it was the right thing.” She looked at her untouched coffee as if she were considering something small and sad. “She has ten children, you know. She’s at the free clinic with one of my brothers tonight, waiting to get his arm x-rayed. She’s got enough troubles. I don’t know how to say this except to say it: I don’t know what happened in Boston, in spite of the fact that Livan turned out to be a real nut case. On the chance that you did that, though, I could hardly want you back in my mother’s life. Your track record is that you proposed to her, asked her to wait for you, then took off with somebody else.” She looked around the restaurant. The dancing man and his friend were sitting slumped forward with their arms around each other’s shoulders. No sign of any waitresses, as they waited for everyone to clear out. “What do you think can happen?” Cheryl said. “You think you two are going to fall into each other’s arms like all these years never happened? If she’d wanted to do that, why didn’t she make an attempt to get in touch with you when she drove me to Benson?” She didn’t wait for McCallum to answer. “I told her about Livan Baker — what she accused you of. She wanted to know why I’d felt under so much pressure; I told her exactly what I’d been through. Courtesy of her white knight.” Cheryl shook her head. “She was so horrified. I guess—” She pushed the coffee aside. “She clearly didn’t think you would have done such a thing,” Cheryl said, in a very matter-of-fact tone. “You say you didn’t. Let’s say you didn’t.”

“Let’s take her home and give her a bowl of cornflakes,” the woman said to the man. “Tomorrow’s a workday.”

“Don’t need to remind me of that,” the man said.

“They’re closing,” Marshall said, stating the obvious, looking around at the too-bright, sparsely populated restaurant.

“I want to say one more thing,” Cheryl said. “Two things, actually. Up until a few years ago she was still very pretty. Her hair’s gray now. She hasn’t lost the weight she gained with the last baby. She’s had one medical problem after another since Sara was born. I don’t want you to be unprepared. The other thing I want to say is something I’ve already told Marshall. If you don’t talk to him about what’s so meaningful in your life, maybe he doesn’t keep you posted. It’s not such a big thing, but I think you need to hear it. The things Livan said you did to her. Does he know where she got a lot of those things from?” Cheryl said.

“No,” Marshall said.

“Does he know you kissed me that night in the car?”

McCallum smirked, raising an eyebrow in Marshall’s direction.

“He didn’t until now,” Marshall said.

“Well, the thing is, I’m pretty sure my mother had a lover. Either that or she and this man had a crush on each other. My mother got religion a while back, and she had me baptized. She would have baptized the older ones, but two brothers are gone and the other one put his foot down, and Daddy backed them up. I wrote Marshall that this boyfriend, or whatever he was — he was somebody she’d met at church. She got all excited about the idea that he become my godfather. When I was going to look at colleges, he drove me to a couple of places not too far away — we’d go there and come back the same day. I didn’t like him. On one of the rides, before we got there, he said he felt sick; he pulled off the highway and said he needed to take a walk. I went with him. He raped me in the woods.”

“They don’t talk to you in school about being a vegetarian, do they?” the man at the table said to his daughter.

The answer was inaudible. The two men from the counter picked up their jackets and started out, slapping each other on the shoulder, trading insults about how ugly the other one was. One waved to the man at the table, the other picked up a free real estate guide from a stack inside the door. “Put that back, you ain’t buying nothing,” the man at the table hollered. “You expect some tree to have got chopped so you can wipe the ice off your window?” Behind them, the waitress sponged the counter.

“The reason I’m telling you is because considering that man, and considering my father, it makes me think she doesn’t have great taste in men. I’m not saying you’re that man. Livan apparently thought you were, or decided to make you into him. But she didn’t even know him, and I did. He was singing in the choir the next Sunday, and afterwards when we were filing out, he looked right at me when she stopped to talk to him, swung one of my little brothers up on his shoulders and looked at me like nothing had happened. A whole year went by before he tried it again. That time I told him I’d tell my brother in the marines, and my brother would kill him. He would have, too. He was betting on me being too ashamed to tell anybody, but when he found out I would, that was the end of it. I’m over it now. He comes in here and I let somebody else wait on his table. I mention all this because I still have that brother in the marines, and if you do anything that upsets her, you’re going to wish you’d died when your wife meant you to.”

“Think about it,” McCallum said. “She’s still got my picture, she’s having a rough time — how could I come all the way here and not call her? What’s that look for? She got in touch with me when she needed a favor, didn’t she?”

“You know, Marshall,” Cheryl said, touching her scarf, “it would be bizarre if I hadn’t stopped kissing you. If I’d gone to bed with you”—she looked at Marshall, whose attention had been drifting, but whose eyes immediately shot open—“and then, after that, if my mother got together with your best friend. Everybody willing to fuck everybody else. It could have been the way it probably was for you guys in the sixties.”

“It was such an awful night,” Marshall said. “It was one quick kiss. You only imagine we might have slept together.”

“Describe it to your wife,” she said. “See if she’d draw the same conclusion.”

“Temper, temper,” McCallum said.

“It really is unbelievable that you’d think about coming back into her life,” Cheryl said to McCallum. “She’s married. She has—” she faltered. “She has a life, and everything about it is difficult enough without you.”

“Think about it: you want to maintain the status quo. You’re also pretending I have power I don’t have. Do you really think that against her inclinations I could take her away?”

“You’d have to take her away, because you could never hack it in Buena Vista,” Cheryl spat out, gesturing around her as if the restaurant represented the entire town. Which it might, Marshall thought. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine his house in New Hampshire. Instead, what came back to him was the green bedspread in the motel room, the bed sagging under him like a badly inflated float.

“Cheryl,” McCallum teased. “Have I made you feel insecure? Are you afraid you won’t be my Dulcinea?”

They’d snapped at each other so fast Marshall hadn’t been able to interject a word; he hadn’t been able to object to McCallum’s pushing this frightened girl too hard — couldn’t he see this was her notion of protecting her mother? All she must feel she had at this moment was her mother, her life with her mother — the same person who had compromised her without realizing it.

“Cheryl,” Marshall said, “I’m going to do my best to see we leave without any call being made to your mother. I want you to know I agree with you.”

“Can you imagine it?” Cheryl burst out. “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at Dolly’s restaurant in Buena Vista, Virginia? I mean, poverty like this would bring down even Don Quixote. How would anybody”—she looked at McCallum—“nobody,” she said, “could believe in resuming a great romance in Buena Vista. I’m here while she recovers from her leg surgery, and that’s the end. In another few months, I am out of here.”

It was the first time Marshall had the sinking feeling that she was trapped.

McCallum paid the bill, smoothing wadded-up bills on the table-top. “You might both dislike me right now, but at least it should prove to you that I can be transparent,” he said, putting a saltshaker on top of the money. “See? Willing to let my friends know my failures, see my flaws. Willing to admit my shortcomings, to try to make amends.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Cheryl said. “I don’t believe what you say. You’re a barnacle. You attach yourself. You stick on, like a parasite. That’s what’s most important to you.”

“I had no idea in hell about any of this,” Marshall said to Cheryl.

“You seem not to have an idea in hell about a lot of things,” she said.

“You’re mad at him. Don’t be mad at me,” he said.

But her comment had been on target: he had no idea what Sonja was doing tonight; he’d never had a clear idea about what to do in the face of Livan Baker’s problems. He remembered the night he’d talked to McCallum about their talking to someone in an official position, when McCallum had derided the entire concept, saying, “What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?” All his life, he’d stayed the younger brother, looking to someone else for cues. Two days into the trip, he didn’t know whether he’d done the correct thing in leaving New Hampshire, or if Gordon was really looking forward to seeing him. There seemed every chance Gordon had called the other night half hoping Marshall’s plans had fallen through. He was also unsure whether, the more he knew him, McCallum receded farther or began to seem more comprehensible.

“I want things to turn out well for all of us,” McCallum said, pushing open the restaurant door. Over his shoulder, Marshall saw that the family still sat around the table, the man stubbornly remaining until he was asked to leave, the little girl powerless, the mother fatigued, resigned. My God, Marshall thought: Were those people so different from their own trio? McCallum bullish; Cheryl trying to resist intimidation; himself, sitting silently for most of the time they were there at the table, under the weight of a situation — a constantly unfolding situation — that seemed never to stretch to full length, so it could be examined and understood.

The cold air might as well have literally smacked them, the impact was so powerful. It took Marshall’s breath away. In the parking lot was an old pickup, a Toyota, and a black Ford station wagon. A sheet of newspaper blew across the lot, followed by a can of Coke that rolled from underneath the pickup. Back in the restaurant, one light was turned off, then another.

“If you didn’t know me, if you didn’t know anything about me,” McCallum said, “would it bother you as much that she had a place in her heart for me, and that I still cared for her?”

“You don’t care for her,” Cheryl said, hunched in the wind. “This isn’t some cosmic coincidence either. Your marriage is over and you’re doing what’s expedient. You were driving through on your way to Florida anyway.” She gestured toward Marshall. “Wasn’t that what you pointed out earlier?” she said.

“Don’t confuse me with him. Please,” Marshall said.

“I don’t,” Cheryl said, arms crossed over her chest. “I remember you, too.”

That night, as McCallum slept curled against the pillow he clung to like a life raft pushed against his stomach to ride out another stormy night, the flashlight from the road emergency kit sending an oblong beam along the dirty gray shag carpeting because there was no bedside lamp, Marshall played back in his mind the night he’d left his house intending to go to Livan Baker’s rescue. Had he really been going to the apartment because of her, or because of Cheryl? Cheryl more than Livan, to tell the truth. In the moment, though, that trip had seemed to be about something else; it had been convenient not to think it through. Now he thought Sonja might have been with Tony. Was that why she wasn’t home, though it was late? Was that why she’d said, “Happens” with such resignation, sitting tiredly on the bed, still in her clothes, after McCallum’s long night of revelations? “Happens.” Well, that was indisputable. Things happened, situations materialized and transmuted, changed of their own accord, it seemed, as if they were not within people’s control. Maybe, he thought sleepily, everybody in the face of life’s power, its tragedy and its absurdity, its changeability, became the little brother, looking to someone else for explanations, confirmation, guidance. That would be one of the reasons people procreated: so they’d have someone impressionable to tell their stories to, someone who would believe them, at least for a long time, an audience to whom they could recite their stories instead of introspecting. All those little dramas, made huge because they were personal: How Dad Met Mom; Your First Brilliant Statement; Why Our Family Has Special Reason to Fear Thunderstorms; Gentlemen Open Doors for Ladies. Family myths, passed on from generation to generation, along with a tendency toward tooth decay, or genes determining baldness.

He could remember distinctly lying in bed, a twin bed far more comfortable than the bed he was lying in now, taxing Gordon’s patience by wanting everything the adults had said that day verified or refuted by the one person he trusted absolutely. What a reluctant interpreter Gordon had been: caught in the middle, Marshall now understood, having to decide whether it was better that Marshall believed what they said, because that would make things easier on everyone, or whether he should respect his little brother’s intelligence and give him more information, allowing him to see through the adults’ rhetoric, their shaky scenarios passed off as absolutes, their parents no more convinced what direction to take than their mapless children. For years, Gordon had pointed out the fallacies in their parents’ logic, kept from sleep by the necessity of setting Marshall straight: the parents needed to believe in Santa Claus, so it was best to pretend; their father had sent them from the table not because they’d had inappropriate fits of giggling, but because he wanted time alone with his wife. In retrospect, he had been a burden — more than he’d suspected, thinking over their nighttime debriefings this many years later. He could remember Gordon saying, She’s really dying, and He doesn’t think you’re a sissy for playing with paper dolls, he wants someone to blame for her getting sick, because he can’t blame her and he can’t blame himself. You just happened to have your stupid paperdolls out. He could also remember climbing into Gordon’s bed, when no amount of reasoning would work to make him feel better, and Gordon’s deep sighs, as if Marshall’s presence were a boulder rolled onto his tiny island of mattress to displace him, though another part of him knew that Gordon was flattered to have him there. Yes, she’s sick; she’s dying, he remembered Gordon saying, whispering it with real urgency, but there’s something else, he had said. I can’t figure it out, but there’s something I don’t know.

It was Marshall’s last conscious thought, sliding lower in the bed, fastidiously turning back the green bedspread he automatically assumed was soiled, settling himself in the bed’s deep crease as well as he could, the hum of a headache boring into him. The idea of being on his way to see Gordon was at once comforting and discomforting; he had asked so much of Gordon — probably too much. And then when they became adults they had drifted apart. He had drifted away from the person who had been his life raft, yet he had the idea now that he needed, at least temporarily, to return; that even if McCallum hadn’t seized on the idea of a trip, he would have made the trip alone. It was a time in his life when Gordon shouldn’t have any power over him; everyone knew that at some point the complexity, the sheer accumulation of experiences, evened out age differences between people. He supposed it was not so much his insights that he wanted as his guaranteed sympathy: his burdensome friend; his disenfranchised wife. Though he wasn’t talkative on the phone, face-to-face he would become again the Gordon Marshall had always known, the brother he could still turn to.

He looked across the room, as he had when he was a child, though instead of seeing the reassuring sight of his brother asleep — the explanations all registered, Gordon leading the way even into sleep — he saw the lumpish mass of McCallum.

18

MARSHALL—the note from McCallum began. I wouldn’t do this if I thought I’d really be leaving you stranded, but I’m afraid I’ve been getting you down. I do have to see Janet Lanier, but am not going to end her marriage (I guess that’s been done already) or force myself on her sexually, and if I do, I won’t tie her up (joke). Got up a little after five, found diner across the highway just opening. Looked at my horoscope. Scorpio must “trust those from the past to provide knowledge about your present.” I don’t suppose I have to justify this to you, but it’s pretty hard to see myself as Prince Charming — Cheryl’s wrong about my power — but what I’m hoping for from Janet is some acknowledgment I’m not a monster, either. I got some money out of the cash machine (behind 7-Eleven, if you’re interested; it’s one of those new ones. Screen says HELLO, MR. MCCALLUM when you slide in card) that I’m going to press on her. Not my cock, my money. As if I could get it up feeling this bad. One more addendum, slightly embarrassing: the same way you were telling me you still look up to your older brother, I look up to you. I know there are problems in your marriage right now, but I also know they’re going to blow over. Hey — at least you didn’t marry Susan. If she loved the kid as much as she said, she wouldn’t have gone after me, landing herself in jail, leaving him stranded. Can still hear the old lady’s gasp when I called her from the hospital and told her what her daughter had done.

Marshall turned to the other side. He looked at McCallum’s little arrow, surprised that McCallum might think he wouldn’t have the sense to turn the bag over. On the flip side, McCallum’s writing became smaller, sloppier.

About Boston: felt guilty cheating on Susan, though as you might suppose, our sex life wasn’t great. That trip wasn’t the first time Livan and I had sex. Afterwards, I had a nightmare in which Susan’s greatest fear (along with doing anything positive to help the kid, that is) materialized. I was Prince Charming, or at least somebody richer than I am, and Susan was a bag lady, which is always what she feared she’d end up. She wanted me to join the Masons, so she’d have a decent old age home to go to if I died. Not in the dream, in real life. We had fights because I wouldn’t join the Masons. A guy who writes in “Gore Vidal” on every Presidential election ballot, a hippie who spent his college years in SDS, and she wanted me to join the Masons. In the dream, I was kissing Livan, walking pretty much where we actually walked, area around Boston Common, and the b. lady threatened us with a gun. I talked the b. lady into dropping it. Then I kissed her, and suddenly it was Susan standing there. I grabbed her hands. Then she was handcuffed by the police for causing a public disturbance. Livan woke me up because I was grabbing her wrist. Bits and pieces of what Livan later accused me of are true, but they weren’t done to her the way she said, they were things I’d described to her from nightmares.

You’ve been more of a friend to me than anybody since I lost Livan. No kidding: I once thought that despite her age, despite the fact she was a girl, she was my best friend. Trust you know me well enough to know that I know what I’m doing. This afternoon will get ticket back north from Roanoke, try to pick up pieces. I appreciate everything you’ve done.

What do you sign a note written on two sides of a takeout bag? Best Wishes? Best wishes, Happy New Year next year, Hang loose, God bless. — McCallum

It was an incredible document. The obvious thing to do would be call the Laniers’ house. McCallum would be glad to hear from him, reassured to know Marshall worried about him after receiving the note; he’d also no doubt want him to go there and sit around the kitchen table, listen along with him to the woman’s story, or even — God forbid — he’d want him to listen to more of his own. He sat in the car, where he’d been sitting since he looked through the window and saw the note on the driver’s seat. The first thing he noticed was that without a passenger the car was quiet and seemed infinitely spacious. He tossed the bag in the backseat, rubbed his hands over his face. McCallum had mentioned Roanoke. Where was Roanoke, and how had McCallum known there was an airport there?

He went back into the dingy motel room. A maid’s cart sat on the blacktop outside, and a fat black maid was cleaning in the room next door. He wanted to be gone from the room as much as the maid wanted him gone. He decided to forget about shaving and tossed the few things he’d brought in with him into his duffel bag. As he picked up his shaver, he saw that one of McCallum’s dirty shirts hung on the back of the bathroom door, and when he saw it a feeling went through him almost as if he’d seen the ghost of McCallum. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Neither was he proud of himself for leaving the shirt hanging there until he felt ashamed — of course he would have to turn around and get the shirt. He zipped the duffel bag and picked up the shirt, exiting the room just as the maid came to the open door. He said good-morning to her; she returned his greeting. He tossed the duffel bag on the backseat — no more McCallum, who’d stretched out there for naps periodically — and got halfway to the office, on foot, before he realized McCallum had taken his denim shirt. It had been in a plastic bag on the floor of the backseat, a last-minute grab on his way out of the house in New Hampshire, Sonja thoughtfully having decided to go to the cleaner’s the day before he left. His next-to-favorite blue shirt, and McCallum had just helped himself.

Behind the desk was a thin woman with a missing front tooth. She stood behind dish gardens and potted plants that had a lavender Gro-Lite aimed at them from a bulb clipped near the top of a coat-rack. He saw that a philodendron had been trained to grow coiled around a toilet plunger, which had been painted white. At the top, with nowhere else to climb, the plant looped down and was headed for a pink ceramic elephant with a begonia planted in its back. Small pots of African violets were dotted amid the larger plants, rounds of cotton underneath the bottom leaves, padding the rims. Stuck in some of the pots were drink swizzle sticks topped with pink plastic mermaids, or bright green sailboats.

“Your brother paid the bill,” the woman said.

Was it the woman’s supposition they were brothers, or had McCallum told her that? If he had, he’d probably guessed there was a good chance the woman would repeat the information.

“Just need the key. I already given him the receipt,” she said.

“My brother,” Marshall said. “Was he able to find out from you where the nearest airport was?”

“Would have been, but didn’t ask,” the woman said. He saw that there was also a tooth missing on the bottom.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

He went back to the car and drove to the diner across from the motel. Climbing the steps, he saw at the top a plaster rabbit and three small plaster bunnies clustered around an empty terra-cotta planter into which someone had thrown a beer can and a used rubber. Inside, on a metal stand, the local paper was piled up, with a canister attached to the side of the rack marked 25 CENT HONNOR SYSTEM. A child’s doll lay on the bottom shelf, its blue dress folded under its head. He passed through the fog of cigar smoke rising into the air from the man paying his bill at the register and walked to the back counter. A short man in a denim jumpsuit was crumbling saltines into a bowl of tomato soup. Two seats away, a woman looked straight ahead and puffed a cigarette, a full cup of coffee in front of her.

“I’d like one of those bran muffins,” he said to the waitress, pointing into a hazy plastic container on the counter, “and a coffee to go. Light.”

“Tuesday,” the woman said. “Second muffin, Danish, or cream horn half price. Only one cream horn left.”

“Oh,” he said. “Then I guess I’ll have a Danish too.”

“Apple raisin strawberry.”

“Apple, please.”

She poured coffee, put the top on the container. With plastic tongs, she lifted an apple Danish from a tray, centered it delicately on a precut piece of foil she pulled from a box, and wrapped it. Then she opened the container that held the bran muffin, lifted it with the tongs, and dropped it, unwrapped, into a white bag. She carefully placed the pastry in the bag, closed the top, and handed him the coffee separately. “Cream’s at the register,” she said.

“I think my brother came in earlier,” he said. “Walked a little funny? Nice looking, about my height. I wondered how he was feeling this morning.”

“Feeling like he meant to leave town!” the waitress said. “I gave him our biggest takeout bag to write on, and I thought: I never seen a man write for so long about how to get to the airport. Either that is the most forgetful man in the world, or I gave such detailed directions I scared him to death.”

“Let me have a beef barley soup and more of these crackers,” the short man down the counter said.

“Let me once in my life live someplace where people eat breakfast at breakfast and lunch at lunch and dinner at dinner,” the woman two seats away said to the waitress.

“I heard that at Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casino, if you’re winning big you can call for poached eggs on toast at two in the morning and have them carried right up to you on a silver platter as long as you don’t push back your chair and walk away with your winnings,” the waitress said.

“You thinking about rejoining the fire department?” the woman said. It was the first indication she knew the man.

“Might,” he said.

“Silly snit, if you ask me. This isn’t a community where one person taking exception to another person can ruin things to the point where we don’t have enough firemen.”

“Beef barley,” the waitress said, lifting the pan off the burner and pouring it into a bowl. She put the bowl on a plate and carried it to him, doing a deep knee bend to pick up one package of crackers on the way.

“I order more crackers, tell me no,” the man said.

“That’s what I like,” the waitress said. “A man who tells me what to tell him. You want to put the words right in my mouth, Randall?”

“ ‘Oh, Randall, you look so handsome today,’ ” Randall said in falsetto.

The woman on the stool laughed.

“Hear me repeating them?” the waitress said. “Then everybody’d really have something to laugh about, because Betty would have finally lost her mind.”

Marshall smiled, taking the bag and coffee container to the cash register.

“What do you think it is about banana nut?” the woman said, peering into the bag, then punching cash register keys. A dollar and fifty-one cents came up, and the woman automatically reached into a dish for a penny as she gave Marshall two quarters. He pocketed them, thanking her, then took two small, wet half-and-half containers from an ice bucket. “Used to be everybody preferred banana nut.”

In the car, he broke off a piece of muffin and ate it while looking at the map. He wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t call McCallum and wish him well, just for the sake of closure. There was a phone booth in the gas station, beyond the diner, but someone was inside. Marshall moved his finger along Route 84 toward this day’s destination: somewhere in South Carolina. It couldn’t start to get warm fast enough. Just walking from the diner to the car, his feet felt frozen. He scuffed them back and forth on the floor, trying to warm them a little with the friction. He turned on the radio and searched for a station, stopped when he heard music he thought was Beethoven. The person was still in the phone booth. He took another bite of muffin, dropped the remaining lump in the bag. He peeled back a little rectangle of plastic from the top of the coffee container and sucked up mostly air, deliberately, testing to see how hot the coffee was. Hot enough to make him shiver, because his body was so cold. No McCallum up front, so he could leave the map unfolded on the seat. On the floor, he saw one of McCallum’s pens. Thinking about that, and about the shirt, he had the sudden image of a snowman that had melted and could be conjured up only by the carrot on the ground, the black coal eyes. That brought to mind the snowman and snow woman on campus he had seen when he went back after Evie’s funeral. He thought briefly about the snow woman’s breasts with their spoutlike nipples, then remembered Sophia Androcelli’s irate letter to the newspaper, preceded by her equally irate comment to him that he shouldn’t dismantle the snowpeople when he went outside. The person was off the phone, so he started his ignition and drove onto the road, then immediately turned off, coasting to a stop in front of the phone booth. When he got there, he was sure he didn’t want to call McCallum. Instead, suddenly and surprisingly on the verge of tears, he dialled his own number, to talk to Sonja. His hand was shaking. An automated voice asked him to reenter his card number. Then the call went through, and he heard the familiar double ring of his home phone, over and over, ringing in the empty house. She wasn’t there. It seemed more than possible she wouldn’t be, but it made him suspicious that she might be with Tony. It seemed completely far-fetched she would be buying groceries. Ludicrous to assume she would have returned to the dry cleaner’s so quickly. Then, taking a deep breath, he hung up and began rationalizing another way. What if he had reached her? What was there to tell her? More about McCallum’s odd behavior; chitchat in a diner. He drove away, but was only on the road a few minutes when he decided he’d made the wrong decision; it was the sound of her voice he needed to hear, not Beethoven, not his own roiling thoughts, the silent conversations he’d begun having with himself. He dialled the area code, but couldn’t remember the number of Hembley and Hembley. The thought of Tony made his fingers tingle, so he took another deep breath and reminded himself that except for calling, he wouldn’t need to have anything to do with Tony ever again. Even Sonja was fed up with Tony. Hadn’t she said that? Forcing calmness into his voice, he reached New Hampshire information and asked for the number, tracing the numbers on the dusty metal shelf under the phone. His fingers were so sweaty, the numbers were perfectly legible. He called the number, hoping Tony wouldn’t answer the phone. Gwen, the other agent who worked there, answered, but he didn’t want to talk to her either; he disguised his voice, finding it very little trouble to sound tremulous and slightly high-pitched. And she was there. Sonja had gone back to work. Sonja was there!

“I’m so glad I got you,” he said. “I miss you. I’m standing beside the highway sweating, and it’s not that hot here. I’m—”

“I know you hate it when I do this, but I’ve really got to put you on hold,” she said.

Her voice sounded official. She did not sound delighted to hear from him. Probably Tony was standing right in front of her. Probably she and Tony were having a discussion. Even Gwen might be in on it.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I don’t know how things went so out of focus”—he saw the white line painted up the center of the highway running along, as if it were a conveyor belt—“I’m here without you. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I thought you had to see your brother, and McCallum had to have a vacation,” she said.

“You’re furious at me,” he said. “Why? Why are you?”

“I’m not,” she said. “I thought a trip would do you good.”

“Why?” he said.

“Have you called to start a fight about a trip you told me you wanted to take?”

“Is he standing right there?” he said.

“ ‘He’ Tony? No, he’s not in the office. He does own the place, though.”

“I don’t care what he fucking owns, he doesn’t own you.”

“I realize that,” she said.

“You just don’t realize that I love you,” he said. “And maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe I’ve really blown it. McCallum — McCallum went off to apologize to some woman he knew from years ago when they were kids in summer camp. After all this time, he needed to apologize to her. I understand that. It’s not easy, sometimes. Too much time passes. You don’t know what to say. I don’t exactly know what to say now.”

“Write me a love poem,” she said. Her voice softened slightly.

“I’ll build you that tree house and climb up into it with you and read it to you there. How’s that?”

“It’s funny you teach poetry and you never write poems,” she said. “Do you write them and keep them hidden from me?”

“No,” he said. He shuddered as he remembered the grotesquely inept poem written by Mrs. Adam Barrows. “What are you doing?” he said quickly.

“Sitting here, waiting for an electrician to stop by and explain something to me about an exploding stove,” she said.

“You could fly to Key West,” he said. “Meet me.”

“Maybe we should take another vacation. Another time.” A pause. “McCallum is setting right some wrong? New lease on life and all that?”

“He jumped ship. He’s flying back.”

“And you wouldn’t be calling just to get me to pinch-hit for McCallum, would you?”

“I love you. Don’t you know that I love you?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

He looked again at the highway. The line was no longer moving, but cars were. The sun had begun to shine on his back. He turned away from it, facing into the phone booth. “The reason I called was to say I loved you. I’m afraid you’re going to leave. Have you been thinking about leaving?”

“I’ve given some thought to a brief vacation in Santa Fe, floating over the desert and eating blue corn tortillas.”

“That would be great,” he said. It sounded terrible. Far away, and pointless.

“I think I’m going with Jenny. Maybe after you write me your poem, you and I can go to, oh, Niagara Falls.”

“Anywhere,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I love you. Can you say you love me even if you’re at work?”

“I love you,” she said.

“You’d say it if Tony was there, right?”

“I’m not in love with Tony,” she said.

“Does Gwen know about this? Did everybody besides me know?”

“You mean, did I confide in McCallum that night we had our little chat?”

“You did?”

“In fact, I didn’t. Listen: here’s the electrician. Once this stove situation gets fixed, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll be fine. Write the poem. Buy the lumber.”

“Niagara Falls. Hell, I really will take you, if you want to go.”

“I was kidding,” she said.

“But not about the other?” he said.

“No,” she said, lowering her voice. “I do love you. You’re always so distracted. I mean, you didn’t even pay attention to Evie. I don’t know if it was your class you were thinking about, or—”

“Don’t say any more,” he said. “This isn’t sounding as good as when you just said, ‘I love you.’ ”

She laughed. “You do make me laugh,” she said.

“I didn’t do well enough by Evie. I haven’t done well enough with you.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” she said.

“I will,” he said. “I’ll get back.”

He looked around him, smacking his lips dryly to send her a small kiss as he hung up, his hand still shaking as he replaced the phone in its cradle.

It would be good to get to Gordon and Beth’s. That would be his own version of McCallum’s sitting by the hearth, nestled in a chair, himself the center of attention, a drink on the table, forget the coffee and tea, a drink. It would be interesting to start from the beginning, with two people who knew nothing about the situation except its outcome — its ostensible outcome, since who knew what McCallum would do, and who knew what would happen to Susan, when and if she was released from the prison psychiatric ward to stand trial? — to discuss how McCallum had for reasons of his own decided he was entitled to be a part of Marshall’s life, which was in counterpoint to Marshall’s having decided he would distance himself from Gordon. Absenting yourself was a decision made by default, wasn’t it? What had happened that he and Gordon had for years kept a distance from one another? Wives? Geography? Their jobs? All those things, though Sonja had encouraged him to see more of his brother (more time for Tony?), and he’d always had the same amount of vacation time he had now, he could have gotten on a plane. It was too far to drive. He’d just driven because McCallum had stars in his eyes about being out on the road, though now he saw that McCallum had an ulterior motive. That left the category “jobs.” Okay: his had allowed him to turn inward, to spend his time passively, reading and thinking. Things that had once seemed a great luxury had become habit. Following the complexities of books had ultimately made him naïve about what was happening around him: everyone’s complicated lives; their difficult-to-articulate desires. Perhaps, having no ability to compete with his brother, he’d taken the opposite path, learned vocabulary while Gordon was learning skills, surrounded himself with other thoughtful people, while Gordon had concluded the optimal life was about more action and less thought.

He was worried that he’d dropped out of Gordon’s life too long, that it was going to be difficult to reconnect. There was every possibility Gordon thought that too; that Gordon was signalling he’d left not only Marshall, but the whole family behind when he didn’t come to Evie’s funeral. Gordon had said that exact day was when a Japanese businessman would be meeting with him to discuss buying the dive shop. But who knew? And what should his brother have done? Put everything on hold, since no doctor would say whether she was getting better or worse? Truth was, Gordon had never been as attached to Evie as Marshall. He had liked her, but not loved her. As a child, Marshall had thought that admirable: that Gordon was still loyal in his thoughts to their mother, while Evie’s kindness eroded more and more of their mother’s memory. It had been easier, probably, for Evie to embrace the younger child — physically embrace him — because Gordon was standoffish; Gordon saw his mother’s death as a way to increase his independence, because the adults were so preoccupied. And Gordon didn’t want his father to have any excuse to think him the sissy he thought his younger son. They had both known that was the way he had thought of Marshall. His father had asked Gordon to repair things, while he’d asked Marshall to help Evie wash dishes. It was to Gordon’s credit that he deemphasized his own achievements, that he had so convincingly made their father seem silly in his reactions toward Marshall. Well, Marshall thought, what if the payoff for having been such a good person was that one day Mr. Watanabe from Tokyo, Japan, made Gordon a rich man. What if Mr. Watanabe was an original thinker — no taking over Hollywood, no buyouts of companies in Silicon Valley: acquiring a diving-supply and boat-chartering business in Key West, Florida, the end of the line, Cuba floating ninety miles away, across all the gleaming water filled with million-dollar fish that were loaded onto airplanes still flopping, flown to Japan to be filigreed into sashimi. According to Sonja, who had talked to Beth, Mr. Watanabe’s other businesses included a drugstore chain in Kansas, and a meatpacking factory in Omaha. That sounded so dreary that the guy was probably looking for a business that would provide a little excitement.

The music had gotten lugubrious, so he pushed the “seek” button, thinking wryly, Yes indeed; yes indeed — that’s what I’m out here on the road doing, all right. It was the McCallum mentality, communicable, like a cold. He pushed his thumb against the tiny button above which a green light quivered, locking in Bette Midler singing “Skylark.” Another song that should make him watch his foot on the accelerator. A cop car sat in a gulley where the road sloped, but he’d seen it in time. He looked at his watch, saw that it wasn’t time yet for lunch, and reached into the bag and broke off another piece of muffin. The muffin disintegrated, which made him think again of McCallum, who, the night before, reaching for Marshall’s leftover cornbread, had found himself holding bright yellow crumbs.

The prospect of days without McCallum, the idea of sun, palm trees, ocean breezes, lifted his spirits. He flipped down the visor as the car moved in line with the sun.

19

IN CHARLESTON, South Carolina, he decided to call it a day. For the past three or four hours driving rain had pelted the car, the jagged patches of light between clouds narrowing until early darkness erased what Sonja would have called “the fill-in parts of the puzzle”—the maddening, uniformly toned blue pieces of the one puzzle they owned, which depicted a small, colorful desert below an enormous, even-blue sky. The puzzle had been a gift from Gordon and Beth several Christmases before. Usually they sent a carton of grapefruit and oranges, but that year they had sent the desert, the orderly little desert with its one prairie dog peeking from its hole and its red-flowered cactus blooming. More than he wanted to, he had thought for much of the ride about McCallum, imagining scenarios in which Cheryl’s mother raced into McCallum’s arms, or, alternatively, the woman’s husband taking exception to his presence, going after him the way McCallum’s wife had. He thought that maybe he had gotten addicted to McCallum’s life the way other people got addicted to soap operas, though instead of being allowed to tune in to watch, he had been given constant synopses of what had happened, as if McCallum were reading from outdated issues of TV Guide. It was nothing he and Sonja would have watched on TV, he was sure of that. The jigsaw puzzle had been such a novelty, and they’d been snowed in just after getting it. But other people’s despair and ongoing confusion? It didn’t seem titillating, didn’t figure in their lives.

He stopped outside a small building with a canopy above the entranceway, using McCallum’s shirt to cover his head as he made a mad dash for the front door.

Inside, a man in a three-piece suit was talking to a young woman behind the counter. The counter was flanked by potted palms aglow with tiny coral lights. A woman in a long black raincoat stood peering out the window. It was as different from the motel in Buena Vista as anyone could imagine, which meant that it was exactly where he wanted to stay. When he heard a room was available he didn’t ask the price. He said, “Good,” and waited while the man went behind the counter and got a registration form and put Xs in the two places where Marshall was to sign. The man wore a silver signet ring on his third finger and, on the other wrist, a Rolex. He feigned interest in the young woman’s paperwork as Marshall filled out the form. “We have complimentary continental breakfast in the lobby or in your room between the hours of seven and nine,” the man said. “There is a hot tub in the courtyard I don’t think you’ll be using tonight, and there should be a duvet in your armoire, which also contains the television. I’ll be happy to provide you with a list of complimentary movies you might view on the VCR. Alicia will show you to your room.” He placed an index card of movie titles on the registration desk. “I believe there should be a duplicate list in your room, but you might want to glance at this now so you could take one with you.”

He selected Betrayal, which he’d never heard of, because it starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.

“May I help with any luggage?” Alicia said.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a duffel bag in the car I can bring in. I can take the key and find the room myself.”

“I’ll be happy to accompany you. House rules,” Alicia said.

“We don’t want anything not up to standard when you enter the room,” the man said.

“Of course,” Marshall said. “I’m parked right outside. I’ll get my bag.”

“You’re checking in after turndown, so let me give you a Godiva mint also,” the man said.

“Thank you,” Marshall said. He felt as if he were doing a kind of charade: a reenactment of Halloween, from an old-fashioned gentleman’s perspective. There he had been, knocking at the door, and here were these civilized people, offering him mints and movies.

“Please place this inside your windshield in order to avoid parking penalties,” the man said, handing him a laminated card with the hotel’s name on it.

“Certainly,” Marshall said. “Thank you.”

He turned and went outside, reluctantly. It was raining harder, and McCallum’s already damp shirt was almost no protection. He quickly got the bag and locked the car, slightly embarrassed to be reentering the lobby looking like a drowned person.

“There will be chamber music tomorrow at twelve-fifteen,” the man said. “Checkout time is one p.m., which we would be happy to extend.”

Marshall felt the foil-wrapped mint in his pocket, jiggled it like a good-luck charm. Maybe I could live here the rest of my life, Marshall thought. To the man he said, “I’ll have a better idea in the morning.”

“Please,” Alicia said, holding out her hand for his bag. She wore a thick silver cuff bracelet between two narrower gold bracelets. Though he was reluctant to hand a woman his bag, he extended his arm.

“Sir,” the man said, “it would be possible to have your shirt laundered and returned by checkout time.”

He looked at McCallum’s shirt, feeling as if he’d carried in a grease rag. “No, no,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“Please follow me,” Alicia said, opening a side door. The building, two tiered, stretched behind them. Just outside the overhang, two redwood tubs held palm trees with something flowering at their bases. Pansies? Purple pansies in April? The elevator was about twenty feet away; the doors opened immediately when Alicia hit the “up” button. They rode in silence to the second floor. When the doors opened, she said, “Please turn left,” then came up beside him and overtook him just outside room 44. Before the key turned in the door, he felt sure that room 44 would be as close to heaven as he could imagine. He saw it in advance, felt the carpeting beneath his feet, almost drank in the pale light from the table lamp Alicia switched on. It sat on a lacquered chest just inside the door. As she switched on two more lights, he looked at the cherry armoire, saw the large bed with its enormous bedposts and scalloped back. On a brass tray were a digital clock, a flashlight, a thick black pen, and the request form for the morning’s breakfast. He reminded himself that he was not an unsophisticated person: he had stayed in other good hotels, seen these things before. But tonight it was as if velvet were replacing sandpaper. He realized the extent of his exhaustion. It was the strain of being with McCallum, not only the days of driving, and in that large bed he could lie spread-eagled, dreaming it all away. Maybe he really would stay for the chamber music. Maybe he would extend his stay, recuperate, use this extremely nice place as the springboard for reentering the world.

“Thank you,” Alicia said, as he slipped his billfold from his back pocket and tipped her.

She left, telling him to call the desk if they could provide anything further. She had already lifted the duvet from the armoire and placed it at the bottom of the bed. As she closed the door, he poked it with the heel of his hand, watched the down cover sink and slowly rise. McCallum’s shirt was draped over an arm of the chair. His bag sat on a luggage rack. Over the bed, flanked by sconces, was a framed Audubon print of a flamingo. For the first time, he felt he had truly left New Hampshire behind. Something indescribable about the room, which was at once comforting and impersonal, relaxed him. He decided to take a hot shower and stretch out on the bed, to decide then whether it seemed the right moment to call Sonja, or whether he felt more inclined to watch Betrayal. He ate the mint, rolling the foil between thumb and finger, dropping the little ball into the trash basket in the marble bathroom. On a tray he saw cotton swabs, small bottles of lotion and shampoo, a Bic shaver, a small sewing kit, a shoeshine cloth. Above those things, in the long rectangular mirror, he saw his face: haggard; showing the signs of the skipped morning shave; a small red pimple or bug bite on his temple; his sideburns, now almost completely white. It had been a while since he’d scrutinized himself in a mirror. He’d developed a way of more or less looking through mirrors, so he didn’t consciously register what he was seeing. Who would love a person who looked so ordinary? he wondered, smoothing his rain-matted hair. Not that Tony Hembley was any movie star. Not that he looked this bad every day. Not as though you have to keep looking if you’ve seen enough, he told himself.

A thick white terrycloth robe hung from a hanger suspended from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. He removed the robe and draped it over the top of the shower door, spent a few seconds figuring out how the faucet worked while admiring the heaviness of the brass. The bath mat was rolled and placed in a deep, chrome-plated basket attached to the tile at the back wall of the shower, along with a back scrubber enclosed in plastic. Standing under the strong force of the shower, he unwrapped the soap, tossing the wrapper sideways, over his head. The soap smelled of roses and cloves, he decided after some thought; it smelled like something that might be ingested. Tempted to put the tip of his tongue to the heavy oval bar, he touched it instead with the tip of his nose, then smeared it over his cheeks and forehead before placing it in the soap dish and spreading the soap with his hands. If he had brought the razor into the shower he could have shaved, though he was glad he’d left it on the counter because he was enjoying the sybaritic shower. He washed his hair with the soap — something Sonja deeply disapproved of, saying it made his hair look like it had been struck by lightning — then massaged each shoulder as he dialled the showerhead clockwise, increasing the force of the water. What if he looked for another job? What if he went into business with Gordon, assuming Gordon wasn’t retired himself? What if he and Sonja had an adventure? What if this time they bought a more expensive house, one with a marble bathroom, the floor matte-black tile, a brass hook on the back of the door strong enough to haul Moby Dick out of the water? What if he got out of the shower transformed, combed his hair straight back in the fashionable European style, put on fresh clothes and went down to the lobby and charmed Alicia, lured her back to the room to spread herself on the bed beneath the impossibly long, swooped neck of the pink flamingo. Maybe instead of being an artistic exaggeration, the flamingo’s neck had grown like Pinocchio’s nose, responding to all the lies told beneath it, all the breathless I love yous. Cynical, cynical, he thought. McCallumesque.

He stepped carefully from the shower, turning off the water after he got out. He reached for a towel, ran it over himself lightly before pulling on the robe and tying the sash. With a serious expression he faced the mirror again, considered shaving lightly while his skin was still wet, decided to grow a beard. He opened one of the small bottles and squeezed, discharging a tiny slug of bright yellow lotion into the palm of his hand, swiping it over his cheeks and down his neck. It felt strange, as if it were about to sting, though it did not. He massaged it in with awkward delicacy, went to his duffel bag, and rummaged for his comb, taking it into the bathroom and combing his hair back, stepping back from the mirror to look at himself a second time. He turned up the robe’s thick collar, then became suddenly self-conscious, as if this middle-aged man might presume to be Humphrey Bogart in his trench coat. Instead of telling Ingrid Bergman she should leave him, though, he would be urging Sonja to stay. He thought: We’ll always have New Hampshire.

Sitting in one of the two overstuffed, flame-stitched armchairs, he tucked the robe between his legs and flipped through a magazine that described tourist highlights of South Carolina. He looked at a close-up of a peach, flipped to another page that showed a close-up of a wrinkled black hand holding a puff of cotton. On another page, Marla Maples, Donald Trump, and Marla Maples’s mother stood in a line, Marla smiling, Donald either trying to look enigmatic or else dragged down by the weight of his extra-long tie, Marla’s mother in profile, no doubt telling the photographer to hurry up before Donald jumped out of the frame. Another page gave recipes for étouffée.

He stretched out on the bed and looked at the ceiling. White, unmarred, a round, unilluminated lightbulb hanging from the center of the ceiling fan. He thought again of Casablanca. A couple, arguing, walked down the corridor past his room, their Southern drawls mitigating the seriousness of what they were saying. He seemed to be objecting to her only liking expensive restaurants; she seemed to be objecting to his objecting. They were thin shadows cast ceilingward, the white enamel fan paddles briefly beheading them.

Dorothy Burwell, he thought. She had been the first girl he had ever argued with. She had said she’d go to a school music concert with him, and then she’d cancelled. Evie had gone with him instead, and there Dorothy Burwell had been, on stage with the sopranos, dressed in a pink dress with pinker flowers, right up there on stage as part of the performance she’d said she’d attend with him. He had said afterward, driving home with Evie, “How could it ever have been possible that she’d be my date when she was part of the choir?” and Evie had tried to make light of it, saying that probably Dorothy had wanted to be with him so she’d practiced a bit of self-deception, pretending until the last minute that it was a real possibility. It hadn’t seemed very likely to him at the time, but now he thought perhaps Evie had been right. He had not had any experience with conflicted people at that point, or run into many people who responded to things in terms of the way they wanted them to be instead of the way they were. Though there was still the chance Dorothy Burwell had said yes because she didn’t know how to say no. Dorothy had spent the first ten years of her life in Savannah, Georgia; she had a Southern accent some of the other kids made fun of, but he had loved it, the way she’d drawn out words as if sentences were a taffy pull.

He looked in the phone book, but Savannah wasn’t listed. He rolled over, picked up the phone and called Savannah information. Dorothy’s mother had left Dorothy’s father when she moved north, but he remembered how proud Dorothy had been of her father and how much she’d missed him. Her father had run the Ford dealership there. Maybe he still did, if he hadn’t retired. Or the Ford dealership would be closed; he would think better of calling Dorothy the next morning; the idea could be dispensed with in one quick call. Information gave him the number, the recorded voice telling him to “Please hold for your num-burrr.” He wrote it on the pad by the phone, then looked at the phone, wondering if he really wanted to do this. He dialled. He reached a recording, giving the hours when the shop was open. When the beep came to leave a message, he said, “Mr. Burwell, this is a friend of Dorothy’s from high school. I remembered that you ran the—”

“Hello?” a man’s voice said.

He hadn’t expected that. “Hello,” he said. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Burwell.”

“Speaking,” the voice said.

“Hello, sir,” he said, becoming again an adolescent. “We’ve never met, but I went to high school with your daughter Dorothy—”

“Graduated with honors. Very proud of her. Seems like yesterday,” the man said.

“Yes,” Marshall said. “I was wondering if you knew how I might get in touch with her. To discuss old times,” he added lamely.

“Got a few dollars, I hope.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ll have to call Frankfurt, Germany. She’s married to a German fellow and has two German children, one sixteen years old this month, the other one adopted. Just born.”

“Oh, I see,” he said.

“About the way I look at it. What can you say? She fell in love with a German at the University of Santa Barbara.”

“Oh,” Marshall said.

“She’d love to hear from you,” the man said. “I don’t have the number at the shop. I’ll give you my home phone number and you can call me. I’ll be bowling until ten p.m.”

“Thank you,” Marshall said. He would never call the man. He would hang up and forget all about it.

“Speaks perfect German,” the man said. “Talk fast. Don’t let them hang up on you.”

“No, sir,” Marshall said.

“Here’s my number,” the man said.

Marshall wrote it down and drew cross-hatches beneath the number.

“Reminds me of the time I looked up an old army buddy. Took about twenty phone calls and when I got him, you know what he said? He said, ‘I thought you’d call.’ Thirty years later, that was his reaction.”

“Did you get together?” Marshall said.

“Meant to, but didn’t.”

“Uh-huh,” Marshall said.

“Not impossible. Don’t have but one toe in the grave so far, and I’m not wiggling that one, as they say.”

“I’ll call you later,” Marshall said. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” the man said. He hung up.

Marshall replaced the phone and rolled over on his back. It had only been a strategy not to call Sonja, he decided. He had no real feeling for Dorothy Burwell. He had not felt disappointment when he heard she was married; he had felt relieved she was out of the country.

He got up and opened the armoire, studied the VCR, opened the box, and slid in Betrayal.

By the time it was over, he had decided he could not possibly speak to Sonja. The movie was gripping, a love story that went backward in time, Ben Kingsley the mischievous but calculating husband, wiser than he seemed, revelling in the pain he inflicted. Jeremy Irons was Ben Kingsley’s friend as well as his wife’s lover, outdone in his game of pretense by Kingsley, the master gamesman. A spectacular scene in a restaurant in which Kingsley, coming apart in Irons’s company, speaks about another issue, his voice careening out of control like a runaway car. Marshall was transfixed, admiring such acting talent, in awe of Pinter’s script, but also personally rebuked. The woman had fallen in love with Jeremy Irons, at least. But what would he prefer — that his wife have an affair with someone interesting and handsome: Jeremy Irons? Still, it was annoying and slightly puzzling that she had selected Tony Hembley. Even Sonja felt dismissive of him now. She really did; he had seen it in her eyes. He was grateful that she had had the affair with someone who wasn’t a personal friend of his. Though, to be honest, he had no personal friends. He thought about McCallum writing on the white bag that Livan Baker had been his friend. He doubted it, though maybe McCallum had felt that, in which case McCallum must have been willing to settle for very little. Even he did not say Livan Baker had depths that were not apparent.

He stood on the bed and pulled the fan’s chain, which set it gently spinning. More people passed by, murmuring. He got up and closed the shutters, went back to the bed and thought again of Alicia, not really desiring her, but desiring to desire her. Sort of like Eliot’s “distracted from distraction by distraction.” What he really desired was something to eat. He closed his eyes, imagining himself dressing, walking out the door, asking at the desk for a recommendation of a good restaurant. He awoke an hour later, the ceiling fan stirring warm air that came through the ceiling vent, the duvet he must have pulled over himself unconsciously shed, the thermostat apparently set for heat without his knowledge. The previous occupant, or Alicia’s idea of the perfect temperature?

He decided to forget about dinner, because the rain was still pounding. The problem was, he would probably never fall asleep again, and all he had in the room was the guide to South Carolina. He got up, turned off both the fan and the heat, pulled the duvet back up on the bed, rechecked the drawer in the bedside table: the magazine and the Bible. He picked up the Bible, read randomly for a minute, then found the 121st Psalm and read it. It was inseparable from the context in which he’d heard it years ago, his mother quietly reading, the long time he and Gordon had sat in the room, and then the rainfall that had finally driven their father in from his pacing, Evie holding out a closed umbrella to him, he now remembered — Evie’s assumption he would be going back out into the rain, his mother’s struggle to take the umbrella away from him, though that wasn’t it, she had been trying to take away the bottle in the deep pocket of his coat, saying to him that he was more like her than he admitted, he accusing her of being drunk, Gordon’s sliding closer as if the two of them might meld to intensify their strength for the battle that was about to break out. He and Gordon as still as stones, Evie snatching the bottle away from their father, opening it, and pouring the contents out, the stench of alcohol as strong as the smell of vomit as it slushed into the sink. So many things passed from hand to hand, as if a mad version of hot potato were being played; the umbrella first in their mother’s hands, then grabbed by Evie; their father reaching for it and stumbling over the table; more paperdolls and coloring books spilled; the ripping off of the paperdolls’ arms, and their mother staring, suddenly still and staring, saying, “Is that what you’d really like to do? Don’t you think you’ve done enough to destroy us all already?” He had destroyed them, their mother had said, and Evie had tried to quiet her. The umbrella had flown open, and then their father was gone, the wind blowing in the front door as Gordon sat with his leg pressed against Marshall’s. Marshall had stopped watching. In the darkness he heard the rain, heard their father cursing, and then the sound of his car, motor racing, then tires skidding on wet pavement, followed by Evie’s deep sigh that seemed to have absorbed much of the outside wind, her exhaled breath a barely registering whistle as she collapsed on the sofa and turned to them, looking through them instead of meeting their eyes, saying to their mother, who had rushed to the window to watch the car disappear, “My God, they’re terrified.” He remembered their mother turning toward them then, coming back toward the center of the room but then stopping to carefully pick up the paperdolls and put them back in the box, the mother and father, son and daughter, dog and cat paperdolls she had helped him carefully cut from the pages, tucking the torn pieces in the side pocket of her white nightgown, leaving to Evie the job of comforting them and getting them to bed. The umbrella lay on the carpet, and Evie had muttered something about how absurd it had been to care if he got wet, why should either of them care that he had rushed off in a senseless fit of anger, what did it matter if a person got wet? In bed, they had heard their mother quietly crying, Evie whispering, their mother’s crying abating. Gordon had whispered, “I don’t think they want him to come back,” and Marshall had nodded silently in the dark, thinking: if someone had to go, best that he was the one. He had been sure he would never see his father again. His presence would be extraneous to their family, like the little girl paperdoll, the dog and cat paperdolls. “He was drunk,” Gordon had whispered. “Maybe she was, too,” Gordon had said. “I’m not sure she’s going to die.” But that turned out to be wishful thinking. Like a shred of paper disappearing into a pocket, she had died the following year.

All his life, Marshall had connected rain with death.

20

JANET LANIER’S VOICE, when she answered the phone, was weary. “Jack McCallum’s friend. My daughter’s teacher. Right,” she said. In the background, children’s voices shouted responses to something on TV. “Do you have children yourself?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t suppose you need to be a parent to be a teacher,” she said. “Teaching at Benson College — is that like teaching children or teaching adults? I understand you do have a wife,” she added. When she slurred the word “understand,” what he understood was that Janet Lanier was drinking. Then he heard her sip from her glass. One of her children raising his voice to her, or to someone else. A door banging. “Jack isn’t here,” she said. “As to how you can get in touch with him, I’d say to call Lexington information and ask for Lenore Brighton’s number on Pine Street. That will get you my cousin. I don’t think they’d have a phone. Maybe you can persuade Lenore to go across the street and knock on the door.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t know?” Genuine surprise was mixed with her weariness.

“He left the motel before I woke up. He left a note saying he was going to your house to talk to you.”

“Ah,” she said. On the TV, someone got off a round of gunfire. Then: “So he did.”

He listened to the confusion of her house, as if, by focussing, he could sort through that and determine whether she might have said what he thought she’d said. He could almost see it: the children, excited, taking the opportunity of Mom’s being on the phone to act up, quarrel, change channels, slam doors.

“I would never have recognized him,” she said. “Handsome Jack McCallum. Now he’s underfed and has such a haunted look. I think he’s haunted himself, if you know what I mean.” She put her hand over the phone, spoke inaudibly to whoever was speaking to her. “His injuries are quite serious, though I could have done without seeing the gash in his side.” She cleared her throat. “Would you like to come over?” she said. “Might as well talk about this face-to-face.”

He looked at the highway. Across the street was a discount boot store. A large pink neon boot repeatedly kicked a falling star. Next to that was a liquor store with an unlit neon sign of a huge martini glass tipped almost on its side. At the base of the sign was a tangle of pink and orange bougainvillea. “I’m in Islamorada,” he said.

“Then I guess you wouldn’t like to come over,” she said. “I don’t find that many people do come over, including my husband.”

Marshall decided to ignore that remark. It was as if flames leaped from it. “He said he’d known you years ago at camp,” Marshall said hollowly.

She laughed. A small dry laugh, or a cough — he couldn’t be sure.

Why was it, he wondered, that involving himself in any aspect of McCallum’s life always made him perplexed and vulnerable? “Perplexed” was too mild a word. He was so shocked by McCallum, so often, that now he was trying to quell his reactions by downplaying what his emotions really were. Yet again, McCallum had omitted significant information. He and Cheryl were together, in Lexington, Virginia. This was what Cheryl’s mother had just said, surely it was what she had just said. He looked at the ground, at the asphalt strewn with dropped blossoms and crushed cigarettes. Across the highway, the star descended toward the boot’s pointed toe. He was standing at a phone outside a seafood restaurant in Islamorada.

“I won’t keep you,” he said. “If you see him, tell him I called to see how he was doing,” he added lamely.

“Did you think I might be having them to Sunday dinner?”

“Excuse me?”

“Jack and Cheryl. Did you think I might roast a chicken and have them for Sunday dinner?” She covered the receiver again, but this time her words were audible: everyone in the room was going to go straight to bed if there was any more fighting over Nintendo. He imagined her there, stuck in the chaos of her life, a woman who had just gotten the information that her ex-boyfriend from about thirty years ago was now her daughter’s lover. “Hang on. I have to switch to the extension,” she said.

As he waited, he thought of hanging up. He was embarrassed that he was both too shocked and too curious to do it. What a story he would have to tell Sonja when he next spoke to her. He could imagine no way to tell her this on the phone.

“Hang it up, Richard,” Janet Lanier hollered.

The phone was hung up. When she spoke to him, the absence of background noise was stunning, almost surreal, like trees becoming still in the wake of a storm.

“I assumed you knew. Cheryl said you knew she’d been raped — how would she not have told you about her great savior Jack? Did you know Cheryl had been raped?”

“She told me,” he said.

“By one of the nicest people, I thought, I’d ever known. I have to believe her. I wish she’d said something at the time. But now I find that I was the last to know.” She cleared her throat. “Of course, I have to believe her,” she said again.

It was incredibly perplexing. So Cheryl had known McCallum all along? Known him when Livan Baker made her accusation? Known that he had come to be with her the night she came into Dolly’s restaurant, and that was why she was so troubled when she discovered both that Marshall was present and also that he meant to contact her mother? McCallum had instigated this trip knowing he’d jump ship in Virginia. Why hadn’t he just flown there? Why had it been necessary to involve him, to mislead him by saying the rendezvous with Cheryl was for his sake, too?

“You knew that he arranged financial aid for Cheryl, didn’t you?” Janet Lanier said. “All those years we kept in touch, and he was so helpful. So ‘supportive,’ I believe the current term is. He sent me so many letters years ago. Do you know, I began to fantasize we’d get together when he finished college. We’d get married, we’d have nice lust instead of backseat lust. All these years later, suddenly there’s Jack, standing in my kitchen. The two of them, come to set me straight about what I didn’t know. And the worst thing is, I forgive her. She’s foolish, but I’m stupid. Do you know what I thought as they stood there, my Cheryl so brazen, trying to change the conversation by blaming me for having her baptized and naming her a godfather, as if those things were the same as arranging to have her raped? I thought: He’ll stop at nothing. A boy from summer camp, who once taught me to swim. He used to stand out there in the water, hollering instructions, blowing his whistle, and then before we got out of the water he’d always do the same thing: the dead man’s float. He could hold his breath so long, we’d all race for him in a panic. I can still see him in the pond, not moving a muscle. Then he comes to Buena Vista and takes my daughter’s hand, claiming to be in love with her. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, I know he’s still doing the dead man’s float. What does he think he’s going to do to support her? He’ll have to take her back to New Hampshire. Is that what’s going to happen? Is she going to live with him down the street from you?”

“I don’t live anywhere near him,” he said. He was grateful that there was finally something he could say.

“A thought like this doesn’t even cross your mind. It reminds me that most murder victims know their murderer. Or is that an old wives’ tale? I think they know them, that they’re lovers or aunts or uncles or whatever they are. The same way so many people get broken bones from accidents right in their own house. People walk fine when they’re outside, then they slip in the tub. Have you heard this, or am I imagining it?”

He said, “I have heard that.” He wanted to get off the phone. He had called someone who was drunk, whose life was a mess, who had been deceived all her life and then slapped in the face.

“And to think: I used to write her letters asking if she had dates. I thought she might be at dances, or going to parties and building snowmen — the pictures I’d seen in the Benson College catalog. Are you sure you don’t want to come by so we can cry on each other’s shoulders? You don’t exactly seem to be holding up your end of the conversation.”

“I’m eleven hundred miles away,” he said.

“You are? Where are you?”

“Islamorada,” he told her again. He wouldn’t blame her for not believing him; it sounded like an invented name for an invented place. Islamorada. How about Uranus? Just some strange point on the planet where he was standing in a parking lot, talking on the phone. Why? Why had he not learned that McCallum and everything associated with McCallum did nothing but cause him pain. He was a compulsive liar. Dangerous, probably. Set on a trajectory he sucked people into, tossing them aside at his convenience. He felt humiliated for both of them — for himself, and for Janet Lanier. To know McCallum was to be humiliated by your own vulnerabilities.

In the parking lot, a windblown couple got out of an old Olds-mobile convertible, the woman taking off her visor and running her fingers through her hair, the man in a tank top and white Bermuda shorts bending forward and backward to stretch himself. Though the lot was mostly empty, it held quite an assortment of cars: a blue Miata with New Mexico plates that read GOERNER; a Jeep; Toyotas; BMWs. There were window boxes filled with bright pink flowers and drips of dark green ivy. Over one of the window boxes a monarch butterfly hovered. Two monarch butterflies. He thought of a photograph he had once seen of Vladimir Nabokov running with his butterfly net. He thought of Lolita. What a second-rate Lolita Cheryl Lanier had been — not particularly pretty, but most of all, distinct from Lolita in that she had not been genuinely needy; she was just another person who wanted things.

“Do you believe me when I tell you I didn’t have the slightest idea that McCallum and your daughter—”

“That makes two of us,” she said. “I’m glad to know it doesn’t have something to do with my lack of sophistication.”

“Sophistication,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a lack of sophistication. It’s just not possible to keep up with him.”

“You get thrown off by people who go to great lengths to explain themselves,” she said. “What I mean is, you take what they say to be explanations. I kept his letters explaining himself from the end of that summer until about 1975. I got rid of most of them when we moved. While I was packing boxes I reread them, and you know what? I was a grown woman by then, and I didn’t believe any longer I’d been the great love of his life, but I believed he still missed me. That I was special.”

“I’m sorry,” Marshall said. It sounded lame, inconclusive. It was probably the last time he would speak to Janet Lanier.

The man in white Bermudas came out carrying a bag of takeout food. The woman in the visor held his hand. An ordinary couple, he thought. Then he immediately wondered if there was such a thing as an ordinary couple.

“Your husband,” he said to Janet Lanier. “Is it true he’s got a girlfriend in Michigan?”

“True,” she said.

Why had he asked? He stared after the couple, the woman giving a little skip as she leaned into him and appeared to be saying something joking. He could not remember the last time he and Sonja had seemed close — close and casual about the closeness. They had let too many things from outside influence their moods: the routine of their jobs; Evie’s illness. Then he had an image of Cheryl Lanier, appearing like an apparition in the snowstorm, his pulling over to give her a ride, the moment when he involved himself in something from which he felt he was still trying to retreat.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Because I can’t believe anything either of them has ever told me. I wondered — generally, I sort of wondered whether you’re going to be all right,” he said.

Were those awkward words really the ones that came out of his mouth: “generally, I sort of wondered”?

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m sorry I’m so far from Buena Vista,” he said. “Right now, I think I’m probably the only person who could understand exactly what you’re saying, and you’re the only person who could understand—”

“That’ll change,” she said, a little abruptly. “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”

“We’ve had some trouble lately,” he said. “But you’re right, of course. She won’t believe the continuation of this story. Which I don’t think we’ve probably heard the end of, have we?”

“No. I can’t imagine we have.”

“Your husband,” he said. “You aren’t worried about being physically harmed, are you?”

“What would make you ask that?”

“Well, clearly not intuition,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any of that.”

“Men don’t have it the way women do,” she said. “That’s true. But don’t blame yourself for not understanding Jack. Jack has to have an audience. He always did. He always finds it, too. Even if it takes doing the dead man’s float.”

“You were kids,” he said.

He and Janet Lanier had so clearly been an audience for McCallum’s madness. But he had been the audience for other things, too: if he stood behind a lectern and lectured on literature, he was still only speaking publicly about works for which he had been a passive, willing audience. As a child, he had followed instead of leading. It was always someone else — his mother, that night in the living room; Sonja, in a discussion he thought had been only that, an exchange of ideas, dropping the bomb about Tony; all the way back to Gordon, who had explained things, like Sherlock Holmes to the young Dr. Watson. He would have believed anything his older brother said. It was as if things were not real until Gordon discussed them. He could remember, with slight humiliation now, asking Gordon whether it was true it was going to rain the next day.

He said goodbye to Janet Lanier, vaguely aware that she had not answered his earlier question, but taking her evasion as a dismissal of his concerns. Cheryl had seemed so protective of her mother, but in thinking it over, maybe what she said, even about her mother’s physical appearance, had been untrue. Maybe she knew her mother was still pretty, but she wanted to pretend otherwise because she feared McCallum’s affections might waver. Maybe her hair was attractively gray, but Cheryl had needed to emphasize her mother’s age, as opposed to her own youthfulness. She was a seductive girl. He remembered sitting with her in the restaurant, her drinking his drink while he was on the phone. There he had been, telling a white lie to Sonja about whom he was with, while she had probably spent the day fucking Tony Hembley.

Everywhere he looked, there were couples in the restaurant. Couples in booths, everyone with someone else, only a few tables filled with people clustered together who seemed to be friends: the odd man out, the unaccompanied woman. The customers seemed happy, smiling, and tan, vacationers taking time out, intent on having a good time.

The waitress handed him the menu and a list of specials. He ordered a scotch and water, changed it to a gin and tonic before the waitress walked away. It seemed more tropical. He was somewhere called Islamorada. Out the window he saw the window boxes, the pink pansies, the monarchs, he saw now, plastic butterflies on springs, bobbing in the breeze.

21

DRIVING INTO KEY WEST he passed what seemed like endless shopping malls, filled with building-supply stores, open-air nurseries, discount liquor stores, stores selling aloe products. In spite of the state of the economy, the building boom was still on in Key West. Its advantage to Gordon was that it had allowed him to move off a distant key onto Key West itself, which Beth had been lobbying for since she’d married Gordon on a sailboat at sunset five years before.

The previous night, after talking to Janet Lanier, Marshall had called from the seafood restaurant. Beth had answered the phone after so many rings he’d been about to give up. A party roared in the background: the Byrds, he had decided, as the music overwhelmed Beth’s voice. The best he could make out was that Gordon and some friends had gone on a late-night sail. She urged him to come immediately, while there was still seafood pizza. He heard people yelling, splashing in the pool. “What will you give me.…” he heard. It was the Byrds.

He told a white lie. Told her he’d run out of steam, was stopping to spend the night at a motel he’d just checked into; he’d be in Key West before noon the next day. It sounded as if a tractor had toppled into the pool. “Oh God!” Beth said, the rest of her sentence drowned out by women shrieking and music overlaying the Byrds — live music, he guessed. He wondered who the neighbors were.

Gordon’s first wife, Caroline, had left him after five years, taking their daughter with her, moving to Mexico. Gordon had heard, from Caroline’s cousin Rawlins, who passed through Key West and went into the shop Gordon worked in, that Caroline had remarried another American while she was in medical school in Mexico, and that they’d gone to Rome to join a group of American and French doctors. When Caroline left the United States, Gordon decided to, as he put it, “cut my losses” and not have further contact with Caroline or with Julia. Caroline had been bitterly opposed to his having a relationship with his daughter. She had done everything she could to thwart him, but leaving the country had finally been successful.

Gordon’s second wife stayed married to him for about two years. She had a teenage son when they married, but the boy was in military school and visited infrequently, usually for a week or so during summer vacation. They’d lived in Fort Lauderdale then, and Gordon had been a late-night weekend disc jockey for the local radio station, as well as assistant manager of the bar Lissa worked in. Sonja had asked Lissa, when she married Gordon, what the boy’s interests were. She wanted to send him birthday presents. She was very thoughtful about that sort of thing. The answer, as best Marshall remembered, had been pornographic magazines and fencing, which had pretty much stymied Sonja in her pursuit of appropriate gifts. That marriage had also ended badly, with Lissa getting a quickie divorce and marrying a much older man. About that time, Gordon had started to work for the dive shop he’d stayed at until he started living with Beth. Then he’d gone into partnership with another person, borrowing money from Evie, which had slightly shocked Sonja, along with five thousand dollars from Marshall and Sonja after a desperate late-night phone call, which he’d paid back after a year, with interest. Sonja had returned the interest part of the check, and Gordon — whether he’d been sincere or meant to be funny — had sent a “thank-you” gift of a pitcher shaped like a parrot, a set of glass swizzle sticks topped with pineapples, cherries, and bananas, and a box of instant margarita mix. As far as Marshall knew, Gordon had lived alone in between Lissa and Beth. He’d married Lissa in a large wedding in her hometown of Memphis, wearing a rented tuxedo to accompany his bride, in an ornate white bridal dress she’d told Sonja her mother had kept on a dress form in her sewing room from the day Lissa turned sixteen. For her first marriage, Lissa had eloped, but her mother had never gotten rid of the dress. Once a week — this was true years after the second marriage and was probably still the routine — Lissa’s mother set her hairdryer on “cool” and blew air on the dress to remove any dust. The curtains were kept pulled in the room so the dress wouldn’t yellow. Sonja had related this to him with amazement, late one night in bed. He and Sonja and Evie had gone to the wedding, flying out of Boston and staying at the Peabody Hotel, which was famous for having a flock of ducks that got off the elevator and marched into the lobby to swim in the fountain twice a day. The day before the wedding, Sonja and Evie had gone to Graceland and bought plastic place mats depicting Elvis in his various jumpsuits, smiling. He could remember the place mats propped up on the window ledge, Sonja shaking her head at them as she sprawled on the big bed: all those views of dead Elvis in his sparkle suits.

He had only met Beth twice: soon after her wedding, and a year later, when she flew to New Hampshire with Gordon to attend Evie’s birthday party. She was now in her early forties, a short, slim woman with streaked blond hair and inch-long red fingernails who seemed to him a mixture of simultaneous shyness and extroversion. She had blushed and mumbled when anything resembling a personal question was asked of her, but she’d also brought a big suitcase filled with Mary Kay cosmetics, which she sold, and had insisted the women who had come for coffee and birthday cake stand under falling mists of various fragrances to see which most suited them. Evie’s birthday present had been a bottle of perfumed lotion and a small pink kit containing blush, eyeshadow, and lipstick. Evie wore no makeup. She gave it to Sonja after Beth left.

He passed the dive shop on Route 1 where Gordon used to work, recognizing it from the time he’d been in Key West years before, with Sonja. The dive shop was his landmark; Marshall set his odometer and began to look for the other markers Gordon had given him. In five minutes, he’d pulled onto Simonton and found the house: a white frame house with a new roof and rotten boards and broken shutters piled in the front lawn next to a banyan tree whose trunk took up half the front yard. Two long, splintered window boxes sat at curb-side, along with a recycling container loaded with beer cans and upside-down liquor bottles. One window box was empty, an end broken off. The other held one yellowish hemp plant. The brackets were on the back, rust bleeding through white paint. One high-heeled shoe lay on its side in a puddle. The front door was ajar. A rooster, bobbing out from behind water-soaked cardboard boxes thrown under a dead palm, crowed piercingly as Marshall approached the gate, surprising him so he jumped back, grabbed the sunglasses he’d just removed so hard he feared he’d broken the arm. He hadn’t. He blew on his glasses, cleaned them on his shirttail. Back on his nose, they were only slightly less smeared.

People on mopeds sped by. A truck carrying lumber, with a white handkerchief dangling from an end of a board, crept along behind the mopeds. Behind that came an elderly man pedalling a bicycle. He wore blowsy swim trunks, a white Isadora Duncan scarf dangling down his bare chest, and green clogs. A small brown dog hung its head out of the bike basket fastened to the front; behind him, he pulled a slightly larger dog in a basket on wheels. That dog also wore a scarf. A bandanna. What difference did it make? He moved backward to lean against the hood of his car and look at the house. A new window had just been set in beside the front door; plywood covered a hole to the left of the door. A wicker chair and a chair with several broken brown and beige plastic straps sat on the front porch, where a work table was also set up. A palm grew out of a plastic garbage can, pushed up against the plywood window. Above the door was a curved window of etched cranberry glass. From inside, music that sounded like the vocal equivalent of a whirling dervish floated out, though it was nowhere near as loud as the music from the night before. The neighbors, he saw, were a small bodega and, on the other side, a boarded-up house with a rotting boat in the front yard. Several cats watched him from the bow of the boat. A hula hoop was draped over one arm of a lamppost twined with faded red tinsel. A stocky man wearing a leather cap, leather jeans, and leather vest walked by, his chains jingling. Marshall looked back at the house. Three roosters followed their mother out Beth and Gordon’s gate, heading for the next yard. This was the neighborhood Beth preferred to the cluster of contemporary houses on the channel on Duck Key? The singer’s voice soared, repeating the same phrase over and over as he went up the walkway, trying to avoid tripping on scattered bricks and heaved-up cement. The first step was two thicknesses of board; the other steps were cinder block.

“Oh, great!” Beth yelled, as he rang the doorbell and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. “Great, great, great,” she yelled, rushing to greet him.

As he remembered, she was short and thin, but her hair was now very pale blond, streaked with pink. She was wearing enormous gold earrings and a silver choker. She had on a tightly knotted white halter top that revealed half her rib cage, and striped sultan pants. Her toenails were painted bright pink. She leaped into his arms.

“Don’t say you didn’t get a warm welcome,” she said. The earrings swayed, making a cacophonous noise inside his head.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, returning her hug with slightly less strength.

“What is this, are you having some crisis like Gordon says? He’s gone to get briquettes to cook your dinner. You missed the clam pizza with white sauce last night. Best you’ll ever eat, brought all the way from Miami. Come in. I’m a little wired because I just got out of my step class. Come in, Gordon would hate me for holding you in the doorway.”

His first thought was that it was good Sonja wasn’t with him. His second thought was that he was surprised — inside, the house was in very good shape. He followed her through a long pine-panelled hallway with a central ceiling fan. He glanced into several small rooms on the right side of the hallway as he walked past. In the first, where the door was propped open with an iron Scottie dog, he saw a dressing table and mirror on a white shag carpet and several white folding chairs. That was the Mary Kay room, he thought. Next was a dark room with the door almost closed. After that, the bathroom, the track lights glowing, steam on the mirror, a pleasant, fresh, wet smell. The largest area of the house was the main room, a room about twenty by thirty, at the end of which were sliding screen doors, through which he could see a raised hot tub and black iron benches with flowered cushions. She pushed open the screen and motioned for him to follow. In several large terra-cotta pots on wheeled platforms, variously colored bougainvillea bloomed. A seven-foot-high wall surrounded the back deck, hung at intervals with mirrors, in ornate picture frames, that needed to be resilvered. Several orchids hung in pots suspended from a tree limb that stretched from the bodega’s backyard to overhang the deck. Standing beside him, she smiled brightly as he looked around. Beside the steps leading up to the hot tub he saw the mate to the high heel in the puddle outside the house. An aluminum garbage can held discarded liquor bottles and beer cans. On the redwood table, a pitcher held birds-of-paradise.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “A real surprise.”

“We’re going to eat out here tonight,” she said, ducking back into the house and turning down the volume of the boom box that sat on the kitchen counter. “He wants it so picture perfect, he even keeps the grill behind that fence, there.” She pointed to a bamboo screen.

“This is amazing,” he said. “How long did it take you to do this?”

“Helped along by my winning at blackjack,” she said. “No kidding. They might get me later, but that time I had the sense to take the money and run.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s really wonderful. You’d never think this was back here.”

“He wants to keep the front looking like shit so people won’t break in. I’ve got to get you to persuade him that stuff has got to go. There was a bathtub there until the day before yesterday. If people are going to break in, they break in. You can’t spend your life trying to protect yourself.” A little lizard darted from the hot tub to the bamboo screen and disappeared. Above them, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. “I don’t see any point in fighting obstacles,” she said. “The climate here is perfect, as far as I’m concerned. And in the summer you just go from air-conditioning to air-conditioning. The bedroom’s air-conditioned,” she said. “So are we going to convert you to Key West? If everything goes right, your brother could be retired and a rich man and you could sit around on the back deck with him, shoot the breeze. I’m going to get you a drink. What kind of drink would you like?”

He began to think the parrot pitcher hadn’t been a joke.

“Corona,” she said, before he could answer. She walked to the long narrow kitchen bordering the living room. The floor was tiled a deep green-blue; a counter divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. A big ceiling fan stirred the air.

“Are you upset about Evie’s death?” she said, coming toward him, holding two opened beers. “Is that a subject I should avoid?” she said, before he had time to answer.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t a subject you should avoid. We both — I’m glad we found a nursing home that seemed like a good place. Sonja visited her often. I’m afraid I didn’t go as often as I should have.”

“I’m always making mistakes in what I’m not supposed to say,” Beth said. “Remember when I gave her a makeup kit? I knew when she wasn’t wearing makeup on her birthday, when we first walked in, that I’d made a mistake.” She relinquished one of the beer bottles to him. “I hope she used the lotion,” she said.

“I don’t really know if she used it,” he said.

“I like you,” Beth said. “That’s a good answer.” She fingered the silver choker. “She was very kind to remember me,” she said. “Is this something that has a history in the family? I asked Gordon, but according to him, he doesn’t remember anything.”

“The necklace?” he said, following her back outside.

She nodded.

“You mean it’s Evie’s?”

“Yes,” she said, a little put out. “You don’t remember it either?”

“I’m not the right person to ask. I don’t notice things like jewelry, usually.”

“Well, that makes two of you. You and your brother.”

She sat on the black iron bench. He sat in a chair. In the distance, he heard a dog yapping. A plane passing overhead.

“When did Evie give you the necklace?” he said.

She fingered it. “When she died. There was a nurse friend of hers who packaged some things from her room and sent them to us. I hope I haven’t said something I shouldn’t have said. This nurse said she was supposed to pass on things to both you and Gordon. She said Evie reminded her all the time, and they had a joke: the nurse would pretend to scold her, saying, ‘Is that the only thing you keep forgetting? You mean that’s the one and only thing you’re senile about?’ She’d promised her a hundred times she’d do it, she said.” She sipped her beer. “She seemed quite nice on the phone,” she said.

“Yes. I know who you mean. She was very nice. She did bring us things, come to think of it, on the day of the funeral.”

“I feel bad we didn’t come to Evie’s funeral,” Beth said.

He shrugged. “To come all that way for someone you didn’t really know,” he said.

“I know, but I was surprised Gordon didn’t go. He went and sat on the floor of the ocean. That’s what he spent the day doing.”

“Well,” he said, “that would have been a long way to come just for the funeral.”

“He doesn’t like to face some things,” she said.

“No, I suppose none of us do,” he said.

“But he just doesn’t do it. I had a lump in my breast biopsied last year. Everything was fine, but the day he was supposed to go to the doctor’s office — we weren’t even going to hear right then, it was just a biopsy — he had somebody call from work to say he’d gotten tied up. He didn’t even call me himself!”

“That’s unfortunate,” Marshall said.

“It is unfortunate. He has more capabilities than he calls on.”

Marshall nodded. He would just as soon not hear these things about Gordon.

“Maybe a lot was expected of him when he was young,” Beth said. “It was that way with my older brother. I have an older brother, too. He works for a conservation group in Africa. He’d do anything for an animal, but he doesn’t even send my mother a birthday card. Sometimes a postcard, but there’s never much information on it. She was going to visit him once, and he told her there were too many diseases, not to come.”

“He was probably telling her for her own sake,” Marshall said.

“Men stick together, they really do.” She sighed. “I don’t even believe that you believe that.”

“I don’t,” Marshall said.

“I like you,” she said again. She looked around. “I was thinking about getting a few ficus, or something like that. Do you think there’s enough greenery, or would more look nice?”

“It looks perfect to me, but I’m not very good at envisioning things when they aren’t in place.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Gordon’s very good at that, usually. You know what he does? He gets a piece of paper and he draws polka dots on it. He says doing that allows him to envision what things will look like before he breaks his back moving everything.”

He nodded.

“Did he tell you about the letters?”

“Letters?” He had been thinking about ficus trees. Were ficus the ones with small, wrinkly leaves? The ones they sold sometimes in the supermarket in New Hampshire?

“He didn’t tell you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t suppose I thought he really had.” She slid forward, placing her feet together, the beer bottle half-empty. “Don’t tell him I told you,” she said.

“What about letters?” he said.

“The nurse. That woman, who was so nice. She called to say they’d be coming. I really shouldn’t tell you this, because you almost got the letters. Evie was going to give them to Sonja and you until just before she died. She changed her mind, the nurse said, and wanted them to be sent to me and Gordon. I hardly knew her, so she was sending them to Gordon, not to me.”

He frowned.

“Don’t tell him,” she said again.

“Okay,” he said.

“Well, she called to say how sorry she was, but to say she’d heard from the nurses at the hospital that she didn’t die a painful death, and all of that. Gordon told her we’d see her at the funeral. I was going to go. If he went, I was going to go with him. Anyway, the nurse was calling to say she was sending the things by Federal Express, because she didn’t feel right about putting jewelry in the mail and just mailing it. I told Gordon he should send some money to reimburse her, that that was probably what she was hinting about. Well, she did send it. This necklace was in its original box, from a jewelry store in Boston. I kept the box, because it’s beautiful too. I started to read the letters, but I didn’t understand anything in them. Sort of business letters, about somebody’s delayed arrival. They were boring, to tell you the truth. I put them aside and thought maybe I’d look at them again some other time, and then Gordon got home from work and started reading them. They were in three packages, tied with ribbon. He read about half of one pack and then he said, ‘You know, the truth of the matter is, I don’t much like surprises.’ He doesn’t, either. He likes to know in advance what I’m getting him for his birthday. He told me right out, when I hardly knew him, that if I ever gave him a surprise party, he’d never speak to me again. I wish you’d gotten the letters, because then I could find out if that stuff meant anything. I saw them and they didn’t look like love letters. I think he was just teasing. But he didn’t like having them, so do you know what he did? He took them with him when he made a night dive. He and his buddy went out together, and when he went down he tucked the whole pile of them under a rock on the bottom of the ocean. Littering the Atlantic! At first I thought he was kidding me, but then it turns out to be true. He took a bunch of her old letters and drowned them.”

“Jesus,” Marshall said. He remembered, now, the box the nurse had brought with her to the house the day of the funeral. With the exception of the necklace, Evie had given Sonja the entire contents of her jewel box. His father’s pocket watch had been in there. Sonja had given that to him. It seemed almost obscene that Tony Hembley had looked at it admiringly — that he had stood in the living room, joining the little cluster of Sonja and Marshall and the nurse, and peered into the pink satin jewel box and looked appreciatively at the watch Sonja drew out, his father’s octagonal watch dangling from its platinum watch fob. The nurse had done just what Evie had asked. Her timing might have been better, but he supposed that if someone other than Tony had gazed in, he wouldn’t feel so cantankerous. It was hardly a private matter, really: a box filled with an old lady’s brooches and rings, bracelets and necklaces, costume jewelry with only a few precious stones dropped in among the tangle, Sonja had told him later. It wasn’t as if the Hope diamond were hiding in there.

“I think maybe it made him sentimental,” Beth said. “Letters from so long ago.”

A bird began to shriek, its piercing cries making Beth spring up, grabbing the top of the fence and hissing at a cat that had begun to prowl the bird’s cage in the neighbors’ yard. “They hooked up some electronic thing that was supposed to keep that cat ten feet from the birdcage,” Beth said. “It works all day until late afternoon, and then I just don’t know. The cat’s right in there like there was nothing set up at all.” Next came a recorded voice, as he watched her, white-knuckled, clinging to the fence. “You have entered a secured area,” the voice said. “Oh, fuck you,” Beth said to the recording. “If I didn’t grab the fence and hiss, that three-hundred-dollar bird would be dead, and that would be a very happy alley cat.”

“Where are the people?” he said.

“Oh, they don’t ever do anything about their hair-trigger alarm. They’re probably inside smoking dope.”

“Really?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. The owners keep going back and forth between here and Boca Raton, and they’ve got some Rastas staying in there who don’t care about anything but dope and sunshine. Why they’d leave the bird that way, I don’t know. The guy really likes the bird. He’s out there every evening he’s home, trying to get it to say things.”

“What does it say?” Marshall said.

“It says ‘Margaritaville’ and ‘tropical breeze’ and things like that. Now it says ‘good weed.’ His girlfriend’s the one who rented to the Rastas. Now he’s gonna be furious at her.”

“Hey, beauty!” the bird hollered. “Helloooooooo.”

“I save your life every day. Can you say, ‘Save my life?’ ” Beth hollered.

Silence from the bird.

“I do,” she said.

Marshall sloshed the last inch of beer around in the bottle. He could see living this way: blue skies; warm winters; flowers.

“Hey, Marsh!” Gordon hollered, appearing at the end of the long hallway. He was backlit, just a shape, his features indistinguishable as Marshall went toward him. Gordon embraced him one-armed; the other held a bag of charcoal and a string bag dangling from his thumb, filled with things from the store.

“Hey, I hope the party didn’t keep you away last night. You didn’t check into a motel just because those idiots hadn’t cleared out, did you?”

“No, no,” Marshall said. Gordon smelled of alcohol. Beth stood smiling at him, having picked up both empty beer bottles.

“Corona, babe?” she said.

“Yeah, sweetie. Thanks,” he said. He put his arm around Marshall’s shoulder. “Very good to see you here, man,” he said. This time he sounded more enthusiastic. “Hey, quite the transformation, don’t you think?” he said.

“He never saw it before,” Beth said.

“Oh, right. Right. We were out on Duck Key when you and Sonja came down a few years back. Right,” Gordon said. “Well, nothing would do for Beth but to be a townie, hey, hon?”

“I didn’t want to live my life driving in from Duck Key,” she said.

“She doesn’t appreciate the fact I have to work for a living,” Gordon said. “She wants us to live like it’s our twilight years right now, today. Maybe I can hunch myself over and limp over there near the kitchen and get me a beer for my twilight years. Toast them the way we bring New Year’s in.”

“People retire in the United States before they’re old,” Beth said. “What’s so wrong with having money and deciding how you want to spend your days? Some of us, rich or not, prefer to spend them kicking along parallel to the ocean floor. I guess I understand that by now.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You see me plenty. Plenty more than you want to sometimes. He’d shown up last night, I could get more of a report on what a party girl you are than you might provide me with yourself.”

“I have never flirted with a human being since the day we tied the knot,” Beth said. She had opened three beers and put the bottles on the kitchen counter. She opened a jar of peanuts.

“Vacuum-packed,” Gordon said, taking the jar from her. “Close as she gets to a vacuum.” Gordon laughed.

“This place is fantastic,” Marshall said.

“You got yourself a new house, didn’t you?” Gordon said.

“No. We’ve been in the same place since we moved to New Hampshire.”

“Is that right? I thought you’d gotten yourself another place.”

“No,” Marshall said.

“I guess you’d know,” Gordon said.

“Honey, did you get any food?” she said, unloading the string bag.

“All the way down,” he said.

She pulled out a package wrapped in white wax paper. “Oh, snapper,” she said. “Good. Do you like snapper, Marshall?”

“Very much,” he said.

“You look just great. Come on outside and we’ll drink these beers,” Gordon said. “Outside, by Mount Vesuvius.”

“He calls the hot tub Mount Vesuvius,” Beth said, rolling her eyes. She pushed two of the beer bottles toward them. Gordon, like Beth, was thin — thinner than Marshall had last seen him, and slightly wobbly on his feet. His hair was combed strangely, a crooked part dumping long bangs over half his face. His nose was red: drink, or sunburn? His brother was in constant motion: wiping his hands on each side of his jeans, passing the bottle of Corona from one hand to the other as he dried his hands; tucking the long flap of hair behind his ears, freeing it; scratching his chest, adjusting his shirt.

“She tell you how she got that hot tub?” Gordon said.

“He loves this story,” Beth said.

“She had it delivered, never mentioned the first thing about it,” Gordon said. “Her girlfriend came down with meningitis. What happens but Beth starts waitressing for her. Don’t outguess me here: she does not make the money in tips. She makes the money — this is gonna kill you — a guy comes into the Hyatt, sitting at the bar, he’s got a cold. Miss Health-Conscious gives the guy her jar of vitamin C out of her bag, tells him when he gets back to his room to take the vitamins, then put a hot washcloth on top of his head, and sit in a chair for ten minutes, thinking positive thoughts about the disappearance of the cold. You know what happens? This’ll make you laugh, but the first time Beth tells you this, I swear by it: it works. She presses the vitamin C on him—”

“One thousand milligrams a pop,” Beth said. “You have to have a high concentration to make it work.”

“Yeah, babe, but you say that’s also not good for your kidneys,” Gordon said, pushing the screen door farther back, walking out on the deck. Marshall followed.

“Here’s what happened,” Gordon said. “She goes into work the next day and the guy has left an envelope for her, doesn’t even know her name, just writes on the outside it’s for the blond-haired waitress with the flower earrings who was on the previous night at ten p.m. The bartender takes it, writes ‘Beth’ on it. She gets there and opens it: four thousand dollars — a buck for every milligram of vitamin C. The guy thinks he’s found a miracle worker, someone who’s got the cure for the common cold. Says so, in his note. It used to be hung on the refrigerator with one of those refrigerator magnets: a pink cow holding a nice, handwritten note that accompanied four thousand dollars cash. You know what Beth did? Went to Tropical Tubs right after her shift ended, picked out what she wanted looking through the gate, next morning in she walks with her money, and here it is.”

Beth shrugged. “It works more times than not,” she said.

“Hey, listen,” Gordon said, turning his attention to Marshall as if he’d just walked through the door. “How the hell are you? How’ve you been?”

“How have I been?” Marshall echoed. “This has been a very confusing year. I haven’t been all that well.”

“You haven’t?” Gordon said. Marshall could hear the trepidation in his voice. He drained his beer, his eyes darting to a lizard heading for one of the bougainvillea pots.

“I’m fine,” Marshall said halfheartedly. “I had a friend along on part of the ride. He was having health problems.”

“He try the Corona cure?” Beth said.

“No,” Marshall said. “As far as I know, he didn’t try that.”

“Hey, babe, how far ahead should I light those coals?” Gordon said.

“Better dump them in the barbecue first,” she said.

“Notice that I married a wise ass?” Gordon said. “I love her, though. Babe, tell him how we got the ceiling fans in the house.”

“No,” she said. “It’ll sound like bragging.”

Gordon shrugged. The bird shrieked again.

“Get away, you fucking asshole!” Beth yelled at the cat, racing toward the fence. She bypassed the beer bottles, stepped over Gordon’s discarded T-shirt, Marshall’s kicked-off shoes. “And stay away!” she hollered.

“Pretty boy!” the bird shrieked. “Pretty boy. Pretty boy.”

“Oh, my long-suffering ass you’re pretty,” Gordon said, picking up his empty bottle and throwing it into the yard.

“Gordon!” Beth said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Is it my fault if our friends the Rastafarians have a problem with picking up after themselves when they’ve been drinking beer?”

“Don’t do that again,” she said.

“Pretty boy, pretty boy,” Gordon said, puffing out his chest. He smiled at Beth. “How is it you think that bird lives through every night? You’re not awake all night long to protect it, unless that book you were reading on astral projection finally took.”

“All I know is I’ve stopped that cat from getting it approximately one million times.”

“She sends protective thoughts to it during the night,” Gordon said.

“I say a prayer for it. That’s all I do,” she said, handing Marshall a dish filled with nuts. The dish was in the shape of a flamingo’s head, nuts filling the shallow pocket of its beak. A bright blue eye stared up at Marshall as he reached for the dish. Gordon’s fingers dipped in. Some of the nuts scattered to the deck; others made it into his mouth.

“Here comes the part where he objects that I’m mystical, as he calls it,” Beth said. “I meditate before dinner. Watch him make fun of me once I turn my back.”

A new tape was clicked into the boom box: the sounds of the sea, Marshall guessed. The sea, with chimes intermittently ringing. Marshall watched her disappear into the house, heard a door close behind her.

“She meditates in the Mary Kay room,” Gordon said. “You know what I tell her? That she’s in there meditating for money.”

“Pretty necklace she got from Evie,” Marshall said.

“Say what?”

“Her necklace,” Marshall said. “She said it was Evie’s.”

“That what she was wearing?” Gordon said. “Yes, very nice of Evie.”

Marshall waited, hoping he’d say something else. Finally, Gordon said, “Hey. How about some colder-than-cold beers? Friend of mine is tending bar tonight down at the Green Parrot. What do you say I light these coals and we duck out while she’s meditating?”

“Sure,” Marshall said.

“That all right with you?”

“Sure,” Marshall said again. He was slightly drunk and didn’t intend to drink more once he got to the bar, but he decided he’d go along for the ride.

“Hey, I can tell you all about the buyout,” Gordon said. “I got my hopes up.”

“This might really happen, huh?”

“Might happen. Yeah, might happen. If so, I’m going to think something from living with Beth rubbed off. She’s got the most amazing good luck of anybody I ever met, let alone a pretty woman. Women don’t have much luck at all, in my personal experience. Listen to them long enough, you’ll think no one woman ever had a moment’s luck, ever.”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he wondered exactly what he was agreeing with.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Gordon said. As he passed the boom box, he turned up the volume slightly. “I know just how she likes it,” he said. “Music, at least. The rest, you go figure.”

This seemed not to require a reply.

“You mind hanging on to the back of a motorcycle?” Gordon said. “It’s not mine, it’s borrowed. I’m giving it back to the bartender. We can walk back.”

“How far is this place?”

“Across town, but town’s about as wide as the Queen Mary sideways. You know about the fish that saw the shadow of the Queen Mary’s bottom, right?”

Searching for his keys in a fishbowl of change on the floor near the front door, Gordon forgot to expect a reply. If that’s the Queen Mary’s bottom, then God save the King, Marshall thought. If someone had asked him for the punchline of the joke — that joke, or any joke — he wouldn’t have thought of it. Amazing, the irrelevant things stored away that could be tapped into, spontaneously.

The motorcycle was a big black Harley. When Gordon turned the key in the ignition, it sounded like something large exploding; then the engine settled into a burbling, growling monotony. Instead of a helmet, Gordon pulled on a baseball cap that had been stretched over the fake leopard-skin seat. Marshall jumped on and the motorcycle took off at a forty-five-degree angle, Gordon hollering something into the wind he didn’t understand. “When I lean, don’t lean with me,” Gordon said a second time. “Sit back there like you’re Queen Elizabeth on the throne. Sure ain’t gonna be Prince Charlie, all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. Whoo-ee!”

Gordon zigzagged between two cars, turned right on a red light after a second’s hesitation. “This is Truman,” Gordon shouted. It was the same road Marshall had taken into town, but he was experiencing it differently now. He decided to let out a big breath and trust Gordon’s driving skills.

“You see that Saturday Night Live skit about Prince Charles wanting to be his lover’s Tampax?” Gordon shouted. Every third word was lost in the wind. Gordon seemed to realize this. “Prince Charles. Camilla Parker-Bowles: Tampax!” he shouted. “Saturday Night Live.”

“I did, actually,” Marshall said. He was slightly surprised that his brother remembered Prince Charles’s lover’s name. He hadn’t remembered that himself, though he did know what he was talking about: the woman gets a gift from the Prince and it turns out to be a Tampax with Charles’s head talking at the tip. Maybe everything and everybody was just fucking crazy. Maybe riding on a motorcycle with Gordon made as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t that exactly what the recondite McCallum would do, hooting with pleasure? Sonja, herself — apparently she liked a wilder time than she let on.

The motorcycle veered right onto Whitehead, steeply banked as it cornered, a few blacks on bicycles looking up as the two men roared past on the big black Harley, one clinging to the other’s shirt as if it provided a secure grip, the driver hunched over, barrelling forward in yellow aviator glasses and a backward Mets cap, shirt billowing. He slowed for a red light, then coasted through, accelerating when he passed the intersection. “Oo-ee!” Gordon hollered. “Hate to return this baby.”

The Green Parrot was on a corner several blocks up: a big bar with open shutters and a deeply overhanging roof, specks of light inside from pinball machines and the lights dangling over pool tables. The wall art, Marshall saw as he climbed off and walked limp-legged into the bar, consisted of hand-painted beer bottles and framed pictures of parrots. The rectangular bar took up almost the entire room and was worked by one bartender, who did things faster than the eye could register them. “Hey, man,” he called, in greeting to Gordon. “You got my machine fixed, I see.” He raced to their end of the bar, setting down two open bottles of Rolling Rock and pouring two shots of vodka that slowly settled after he left like water calming in the wake of a boat. Gordon nodded, tossing down the vodka. Marshall did the same, tears springing to his eyes.

“So you tell me, man,” Gordon said. “Have we got the right life down here, or do we not?”

“Seems great,” Marshall said.

“Beth upsets herself about the place, though. Says the reef is a cesspool. Everglades almost gone. Hell, she won’t go into the Audubon House because it turns out he killed birds. She’s got quite a rant against Audubon. But luck? Does that woman have luck? She got four ceiling fans off the back of a truck in trade for her spare tire. No fuckin’ way you can figure out what that’s about, right? Guy driving a Ford pickup is getting gas the same time Beth is, tells her he’ll give her four ceiling fans in exchange for her spare. She didn’t even question him, man. She is some cool customer. You know her philosophy? It’s better not to ask. Which is a hard philosophy to argue with. Jackson!” he hollered to the bartender.

Jackson raced to their end of the bar. “I had a customer you missed by ten, fifteen minutes. He was going to Paris to jam with Jim Morrison. Hope he likes playing music leaning up against tombstones — that’s what I didn’t tell him.”

“He doesn’t contradict a lot of ideas,” Gordon said to Marshall.

“Heard that, Gordo,” Jackson said, opening a cluster of beer bottles and racing with them in two different directions.

“He hears real good. But he doesn’t hear. You know?” Gordon said.

Jackson raced back. “What about the machine, man?” he said, pouring two more shots.

“It was nothing. Got it fixed in half an hour. My guy admitted it couldn’t count as repayment for his debt. Have it break down a couple more times, he might be even with me.”

“Gordon built this guy a brick courtyard,” Jackson said.

Marshall nodded appreciatively.

“Hey, this is my brother,” Gordon said.

“No shit. He’s your brother? Where you here from, bro?”

“New Hampshire,” Marshall said. The words stuck in his throat.

“Isn’t that where Jean Louise went the time she ran away?” Gordon said.

“Nah. Seattle.”

“She get that tattoo lasered off okay?”

“Nah, now she’s decided she likes it.”

“We going diving or what?” Gordon said.

“My ear’s still no good,” Jackson said. He pivoted to take a drink order, dunking glasses in soapy water, then clear water, putting them upside down on a towel to drain, reaching for drier glasses to squirt drink mix into, while scooping in ice cubes left-handed. “Gin tonic, vodka tonic, liiiiime for everyone,” Jackson said, opening two bottles of beer, grabbing them by their necks, palming slices of lime onto the rims, setting all four drinks in front of two people standing and two sitting.

“Is Beth going to mind if we’re not there when she’s through meditating?” Marshall said.

“Beth? No way. Beth’ll start ’em all over again, let the burned-out coals be dust to dust. She knows I’ll be home eventually.”

“So you really like it here?” Marshall said. “You think you’d retire here even if you sold the business?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gordon said. “Is that gonna happen? Am I gonna sell that man the business? Hank’s not even sure he wants to be bought out. I expect if he saw it in writing, he’d change his tune. But retire here? I don’t know. I’ve heard Maui is pretty nice. For all that, I’ve heard Costa Rica can be beautiful.”

“Really?” Marshall said. “You’d think about those places?”

“Yeah, why not?” Gordon drummed his thumb on the counter-top.

“Guy down there’s a friend of the boss,” Jackson said, picking up their empty shot glasses, indicating with a roll of his eyes he couldn’t refill them again.

“His wife is gonna leave him,” Gordon said as they left. “Came to the wife or the motorcycle, I think I know which he’d miss most, though.”

“His wife, who went to Seattle?”

“That was the girlfriend,” Gordon said. “She got a viper tattooed on her butt. So I hear, anyway.” Gordon coughed a long, dry cough. His face was red, and there was a scar above his left eyebrow, pink and puckered. Off the motorcycle, Gordon looked suddenly smaller. He had gotten quite thin. Marshall felt protective; he was glad Beth would be feeding Gordon dinner.

“You remember that night Mom told us she was dying?” Marshall said.

“Shit, man, I knew you were going to mention that. Sitting in the bar, it came to me that that is exactly what you were going to ask about. I’ve gotten psychic since I’ve been with Beth.” He kicked a stone, stepping far to the left to do it. “What about it?” he said.

“Did you know that was what she was going to talk about that night? It just occurred to me that you might have known what was coming.”

“Well, Evie had told me she was sick, but it was the first time I’d gotten it from the horse’s mouth.” Gordon turned slightly to look at two girls passing by, both in short shorts and tropical shirts tied at the waist. “Jail bait,” he said. As they got to the corner of a more crowded street, Gordon said, “This is Duval. The main drag. We take you sightseeing when you were here before?”

“Yeah,” Marshall said. “We ate on Duval one night. At an outdoor place.”

“Claire,” Gordon said. “Closed. Became something else.”

“Good jukebox,” Marshall said. He looked at Gordon. “How did you do that to your eye?” Marshall said.

“Hit the fucking reef,” Gordon said. “She’s putting vitamin E on it. Healing it pretty damn fast.” Gordon pointed to something ahead of them. “This street we’re walking up. Faustos is on it. I’m always trying to get her to go out on the highway to shop, but now she’s a townie, she feels she’s got to be loyal to local establishments. Watch: she’ll say whatever vegetable she’s cooked came from Faustos.”

“I swear I won’t keep talking about this, but lately I’ve been thinking about that night, and some things are very distinct, but other things are blurry.”

Gordon looked at him with mild interest. Not because of the night, Marshall guessed, but because he was so intent on discussing it.

“Our father — he was outside? In a storm?”

“Overcome with grief,” Gordon said. “Didn’t you ever see Wuthering Heights on the tube? One of those old movies like Rebecca or whatever, trees blowing, clouds streaming over the moon. Cliffs. Stuff like that. The big house lit by lightning.”

“What was going on?” Marshall said.

“You think I know?” Gordon said. “He didn’t want her to tell us. He thought we shouldn’t have to hear it, or something. She had cancer. People didn’t use the word in those days. Look, she was crazier instead of better after what they did to her in the hospital. My opinion is that he’d rather she’d faded away, but she decided to pull out all the stops. Those two were going to have their show, and so they did. She’d started drinking again, you know. She did not stop drinking the day she got home from the hospital. Quite the opposite.”

“What do you think was wrong?” Marshall said.

“Oh, Marshall, forgive me, but why would you look for some one thing to be wrong? The two of them could blink in unison, and suddenly they were actors in a soap opera, and to tell you the truth, I think they got off on it. They understood each other. They got off on the pain. Forget the fact that real things might happen to other people that might be painful; all they could think about was themselves. There was a summer night on the back porch that I remember.…”

“You understood so much more than I ever did,” Marshall said. “Just those few extra years you had on me — they gave you a perspective I never could have had.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Gordon said. “I might have been around to observe some unfortunate stuff. I might have known some things they would just as soon I didn’t know anything about. But don’t assume that gave me any advantage. Whatever I saw, whatever I knew, the only way to keep the peace was to shut up about it. So what good did it do that I had their number? They closed down, and I was expected to do the same.”

“Because the marriage was bad, you mean?”

“Because the marriage was bad,” Gordon echoed. “Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. When I think about them, that certainly comes to mind: that their marriage was bad.”

“But what are you remembering?” Marshall said. “You saw them fighting, but you weren’t supposed to let on? They were fighting on the back porch?”

Gordon looked at Marshall. “What do you want, Marsh? You want me to fill in details? Tell you about every tragedy, major or minor? Look: he married somebody who was nothing like him, didn’t he? Not that Evie was much more like him, but he wasn’t afraid of her. All I remember about that particular night when he went out into the storm was that Evie thought she was having a heart attack and Mom was drunk, going into one of her religious fits, and the two of us were sitting there as their captive audience. I mean, give me a fucking break. You were so scared I thought you were gonna have the fucking heart attack. That place was a fucking zoo sometimes.”

“Do you think he married Evie so we’d have a mother?” Marshall said.

“I think that sounded as good as anything else he could come up with. Do I think that? No, not really. I never knew him to do anything except for himself. I think he was boffing her long before Mom died. I mean, think about it. All that running around at night. It used to wake you up. You were the lightest sleeper in the world. You’d wake up and get afraid and wake me up. I still never sleep through a night, man. Beth was feeding me pills with a name I can’t pronounce — Tryp-something — that worked pretty well, and then they got yanked off the market. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you: I do not sleep through a fucking night, no matter how tired I am.” Gordon looked at Marshall. “So now you know everything I know.”

Marshall was walking fast to keep up with him. Past Faustos, Gordon had turned right, onto Simonton. The conch train passed by, filled with tourists. Alongside it, a one-armed boy on Rollerblades kept pace. They caught up with him at the next red light, wheeling in backward circles.

“Do you wish you knew more?” Marshall said.

“More?” Gordon said. “Do I wish I knew more? No, I don’t wish I knew more.”

“Don’t think it would help you sleep?” Marshall said.

“Maybe it would. Never thought about it.”

“But you don’t wish—”

“There was more to know. I realize that,” Gordon said. “You know what I think? If I knew that stuff, there’d still be more to know. I talk to Beth more than I’ve ever talked to every other woman combined, and you know what? I will never know it all. I’ll know what she says that day. I’m not saying she’s a liar, or that she doesn’t want to talk to me. She’ll talk till she’s blue in the face most of the time. But every time she surprises me, I realize that I am simply never, ever going to have enough information to predict what she’ll do. Here in the Conch Republic, there’s a tradition I’ve come to depend on. Stand down at Mallory Square, or anywhere the tourists are, and when the sun sinks below the horizon line, everybody claps. I take it as a sign that people like a grand finale, but when they’ve had one, they’ve had one. Something like the sun gradually sinking is very distinct. You figure things out about people when they rush off or you see them stick around to see the sky get more colorful, because that’s what happens. The colors deepen. It gets orange and bright blue and battleship gray. It gets real pink, and sometimes the pink’s shot through with lavender. A pink and purple sky. If you applauded all the while that spread out above you, you’d never get to drink your drink.”

A cat tried to rub against Gordon’s leg. He raised a foot in its direction, and it darted away.

“Fuck, man, you just got here, and look what I did. We missed sunset,” Gordon said, pushing open the front gate. “Can’t have you missing dinner, too. Hey, babe! How are those coals coming?” Gordon hollered.

They had burned to ash, they saw, but Beth, still meditating, had not restarted the fire.

22

HE SAT IN A canvas butterfly chair behind the dive shop, waiting for Gordon to get off the phone. The phone was a cordless, and Gordon kept wandering in and out of the store, so there wasn’t any way to tell from his end of the conversation whether Gordon was pleased or displeased by what Mr. Watanabe was saying. Marshall picked up Gordon’s sunglasses from the seat of another butterfly chair, put them on, and looked at the water, and the boats docked nearby, through the yellow lenses. The dive shop was closed for the day while Gordon’s partner, Hank, took inventory. Altiss, the Trinidadian roofer, was installing a skylight in the loft above the store. Mr. Watanabe had called from Fort Lauderdale and would not be coming to have dinner with Gordon that night — that much Marshall had understood.

“This is the good life,” Altiss said to Marshall, climbing down to get a cold drink from his Styrofoam cooler that sat near the cluster of butterfly chairs. “I recommend to you the profession of roofing. Very good money, and not as dirty as plumbing. I go once a month to Orlando to Walt Disney World, where there is always work to do on the roofs in the Magic Kingdom.” Altiss wore khaki shorts, a red T-shirt, and a many-pocketed vest. He also wore argyle socks and purple basketball sneakers. He grabbed his boom box and took it with him when he climbed the ladder to the roof.

Four days spent driving to Key West; three in Key West, four days until he would be home again in New Hampshire. Today, day three, when he had just begun to unwind, was his last day in what was alternatively referred to as Paradise or the Conch Republic. There had been a sunset sail planned with Mr. Watanabe, but when that plan fell through Gordon had rented the boat to a Texan and his girlfriend. Though the store was officially shut, Gordon hadn’t been able to resist answering the door when the man knocked, grinning from ear to ear and holding up his wallet, pointing his thumb in the direction of the boats moored off the dock. His wife or girlfriend had flirted with Gordon as Gordon pointed out the reef on the navigational map. “Check his bank balance before you turn your attentions, sugar,” the man had said, cupping his hand over her ass. It was all good-natured: the flirting was as obvious as her sparkling gold jewelry. The woman had been surprised when she couldn’t draw Marshall in. He had never liked being the object of someone’s flirtation. It usually had an edge he distrusted. He remembered Cheryl Lanier, drinking his Jack Daniel’s as he talked to Sonja on the telephone. If it was McCallum she’d been interested in, why had she bothered to flirt with him? Maybe he had been a backup flirtation. Or a flirtation within a flirtation, like a play within a play. A sailboat with PUCK written in fancy calligraphy had caught his eye, making him think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As he watched the boats bob, he realized he’d been wrong: it was a too fancily drawn L, not a P. What did that mean, he wondered — that the person who owned the boat had good luck, or that the person hoped to invoke it?

“He’s going to buy this place. I really think he is,” Gordon said, sprawling in the chair beside Marshall. “Apparently his secretary wants him to buy a Thai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale instead, but I said to him, ‘Why would you listen to your secretary?’ He’s Americanized enough to be pussy whipped. Thinks her opinions are as interesting as her snatch.”

“What’s the first thing you’re going to buy when you get rich?” Marshall asked.

“Ticket to Hawaii,” Gordon said.

“Two tickets, I presume.”

“You hinting?” Gordon smiled.

“No, not for myself. For Beth,” Marshall said.

“You think I got it right this time?” Gordon said. “I don’t know. I sure am fond of her, but I don’t know if she’s the lady I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

“You’re kidding,” Marshall said.

“I’m serious.”

“Does she know it?”

Gordon shrugged. “She likes more action than she gets with me. I’m fourteen years older than Beth, you know. I shouldn’t be so cocksure she’ll always be around, even if I want her to be.”

“I thought you two were really in love,” Marshall said.

“Who’s really in love past the age of twenty? You and Sonja really in love?”

“We haven’t had a very good year,” Marshall said.

“I haven’t noticed you burning up the phone lines,” Gordon said.

“I’ve spoken to her,” Marshall said. “I called her before I got here.”

“Yeah? What did she say? Missing her hub and sorry she wasn’t in the Florida sunshine? Sonja doesn’t like me,” Gordon said. “She thinks I’m a lowlife.”

“She does not,” Marshall said.

Gordon lowered the yellow aviator glasses dangling from a red cord around his neck, raising one eyebrow. “I hereby indicate skepticism about what you just said,” Gordon said. “I also ask you to look at me impartially. I am a lowlife. I drink too much, I take a shower once a week, maybe twice, I skip out on work whenever I can, sit around topless bars out on the highway, and if I sell this damn business I’m out of here. I’m going to be draping orchids around my neck and dunking my butt in picturesque swimming holes below cascading waterfalls, attended by dark-haired Hawaiian beauties who live to give head. It’s the American Dream, bro: going to the westernmost point in America. Fuck this southernmost point in the United States bullshit. I want what’s across the water, and I am not talking Fidel Castro.”

Marshall did look at him impartially. He saw Gordon, drunker than he’d realized, so that now he understood Gordon had been drinking as he’d talked to Mr. Watanabe. The years of sunlight and drinking had permanently reddened his brother’s face. He was losing his hair, and he’d aged — it seemed as if he’d aged ten years in the time since Marshall had last seen him. When Beth first met Gordon, Gordon had probably looked worse than Marshall realized. Yet he did not think he was the only impartial observer who would understand that Gordon was acting a part. He was playing a role, using language that did not come naturally, but doing a credible imitation of a lowlife, all right. He had the right clothes, the macho bravado, the beer bottle prop, even the right wife. Beneath the facade, Marshall saw the watchfulness, the steadiness, of his older brother. It was interesting that as they became adults, both of them had chosen a slightly mocking attitude: Marshall mocked himself, he supposed, in the way he addressed his young students by putting their names in implied quotes, communicating that they all — himself included — had become marginal people, attempting to better understand the human condition through the careful reading of literature, which for all intents and purposes was no longer a currency in which the real world traded. “The real world,” of course, was also something deserving of mockery: the masses — idiotic tourists who could not understand what they were looking at, let alone what it signified, as they regarded the big fish at the end of The Old Man and the Sea. Literature was the study of Them by Us. It was undertaken by people smart enough to make a microscope of the page — or, more fashionably, to assert that things could shake out any number of ways because the page was a kaleidoscope. That was what they were taught by McCallum. He, too, tried to instill a sense of self-doubt in his students, though his approach wasn’t as fashionable as McCallum’s. It was his strategy to point out to them that they were America’s elite, to stress that the future was in their hands. The students smart enough to understand his tone would get the real message almost immediately — that he actually meant to instill doubt about one’s importance by pretending to insist on the supremacy of the self. So amusing, to send them out of the classroom having proved to them they were the elite, while having twisted that term into a dirty word; graduate, and they become the entirely dismissable elite — those who have seen the world in its variety and its complexity, but once their little group disperses, no one in that now opened-up, fascinating, complex world would care any longer what questions they raised, what conclusions they reached. The world would continue to operate in terms of dirty politics, opposing religions, wars, insider trading, freakish accidents, and the sale of lottery tickets. His benediction to them, last class: Goodbye, and good luck. Watch out for Answered Prayers. And if you must pray, don’t eat lunch with the next Truman Capote.

Well, all right: interesting that once Gordon was seen clearly, he could see himself more clearly, also. Two mocking people: he used a vehicle, language, to mock; his brother lived his life by invoking a stereotype he knew was absurd. Gordon had done Marshall one better; he had lived his entire life in apologetic quotes to call attention to the absurdity of his position. This much was entirely clear. The only problem was that he couldn’t announce this revelation to Gordon, because Gordon had invested everything in keeping people at a distance through the pretense of being crude.

Their father had excelled at keeping others at arm’s length, also, but his method had been to intimidate by imperiousness, while Gordon had decided to be a beer-swigging good ole boy. Their parents — their father, their mother, Evie — would not recognize Gordon now. It was only an act, though, meant to be repellent. Underneath, Gordon was still observant and insightful. He looked at his brother and thought about what Gordon had said the first night he arrived in Key West. It was true: their father had married someone not at all like him. Though Evie had not been much like him either, the friction between them had still never been as obvious as the contention between his father and mother. If his father had put his hopes in either of them, it had been Gordon, but he sensed his mother cared more what became of him. Or should he see it differently now? Was it just a case of a mother’s favoring her baby? That had been what his father said to his mother, that night. He had heard them arguing — had run upstairs because they were arguing. He had been in the kitchen with Gordon, and then he had pushed his chair back from the table and run upstairs — how embarrassing, to remember his endless cowardice — and Evie had risen to leave as well, only to be called back into the kitchen by their father. It became a three-way argument, Evie calling his father a bully, his father complaining about their mother’s love for him, Marshall — all her love reserved for the person he humiliatingly called “the baby.” All she cared about was the baby, he remembered his father saying. She was obsessed with the baby, ruining their lives with her preoccupation with the baby — though it was an unfair criticism; she had not been as focussed on him as his father insisted. It might have been true that Evie fussed over him slightly more, but his father had not been objecting to that — it was quite specifically his mother’s attentions toward Marshall “the baby” that had infuriated their father that night.

A plane coming toward the airport descended quickly, motors roaring, and Marshall looked at it, there below the clouds. What a sky, blue with white clouds, the ideal sky, the sort of sky that was supposed to make people feel life was miraculous. Instead, the vastness of the mesmerically blue sky made him think that his birth had been an accident. Of course it had been: the perfect son already existed, and his mother’s attentions toward him — her attentions toward Marshall-the-Baby — clearly incensed his father. There was every probability his father had not wanted a second child; especially not one who was emotional, cowardly, his nose always in a book, welded to his brother’s side — not even clinging to their father, but dependent on Gordon, which must have offended their father. He had blocked out that night for so long for the obvious reason that he found it all so painful — his role in disturbing the family, his being the center of attention even when he absented himself, the thorn in his father’s side. That was why their father had insisted on talking about his wife’s having favorites when she was terminally ill — that was why he insisted on telling her her deficiencies as she was preparing to tell her sons she was going to die.

“Gordon,” Marshall said, “do you think he loved her?”

“The Texan?” Gordon said.

He looked at his brother. Gordon had pulled the brim of his cap low over his eyes and was resting, one knee crossed over another, hands clasped on his stomach. Amazing but not surprising: Gordon’s thoughts really did not return to their parents — to that time or that place. Certainly not to that night.

“Yeah, the Texan,” Marshall said, for the hell of it.

“Mm,” Gordon said. “He probably loves her. Yeah.”

“Do you think our father loved our mother?”

He could hear the slight annoyance, mixed with resignation, as Gordon sighed, “No. I doubt it.”

“Evie?” Marshall said.

“What’s this? Cupid’s love survey?”

“What do you think?” Marshall persisted.

“What does it matter?”

“I’m curious.”

“I realize that. How about going into the store and getting us a couple of beers? I want to take a ten-minute catnap, then maybe we can wander over to Mallory Dock, give you the required touristic experience of watching the performers and the tourists strutting their stuff as the sun goes down. Beth’s selling air plants for a friend who’s out of town. You know what? I think Beth is a good person. I’m fond of her. I admire her. But I don’t think I love her, if I ever did.”

“You’ve read all those things,” Marshall said. “About your early life and how you form relationships later on, I mean.”

“I form relationships to get laid and to have one woman who doesn’t hate me, who isn’t after me night and day to marry her because I already have,” Gordon said. “How’s that for the confessional mode?”

“I’m not saying that anything that happened to us makes us unique,” Marshall said.

“I fucking think you are unique,” Gordon said. “How about two Coronas?”

Marshall got up, limping slightly on the first few steps because his left leg had gone dead sitting in the chair. Gordon probably did have the right approach to life: stretch out beneath the sky, don’t cause yourself any unnecessary problems in Paradise, have a cold beer and a brief nap. He and Hank nodded silently as Marshall passed him, heading into the office to get beers out of the refrigerator. He stepped carefully through the clutter, looking briefly at a calendar that had not yet been changed from January. A bare-chested woman holding a pink heart-shaped lollipop between her enormous breasts smiled down at him from the wall to the left of the refrigerator. On a bulletin board to the other side hung a photograph of Mr. Watanabe, Gordon, Hank, and six women in sparkling evening gowns with plunging necklines. They were in a nightclub somewhere, clustered around a small round table. Mr. Watanabe’s eyes, on closer inspection, looked like pinwheels. Gordon’s eyes … it frightened him to look at Gordon’s eyes. With a hand curled halfway around one of the blond women’s jewel-studded breasts, the other arm dangled at his side as if it were a useless appendage. Looking at the arm, you would be certain the limb had no feeling — that you were looking at a handicapped person’s flaccidly dangling arm. The more he looked, the more he realized Gordon was just very drunk; he seemed to be propped up in the chair, more like a mannequin than a real person, except that his eyes told you he was human. They weren’t just empty, they were dead. They were eyes that had died.

He shuddered as he pulled open the refrigerator door. A blast of cold air hit him, causing him to double up as he reached quickly in, taking two beers from several dozen bottles crowded onto the top shelf. He shut the door quickly and looked around for an opener. He saw one on the wall, under the calendar, and opened both bottles, letting the bottle caps fall to the floor amid ant traps, crumpled paper, and many other bottle caps. He carried them out, looking down so as not to meet Hank’s eyes again. It was as if he’d seen something shameful in the room, or as if he’d partaken in something shameful — a thought he didn’t want to come any closer to articulating.

A breeze had blown up outside, disturbing the surface of the water. From the roof, the sound of a staple gun punctured the silence. Gordon reached up for the beer without changing his position in the chair, and Marshall’s heart missed a beat, he was so delighted to see Gordon’s right arm move. My God, he thought: I must have convinced myself something was really wrong with Gordon’s arm. He stood there as if he’d awakened from a bad dream, grateful to be back in the world, silently embarrassed he’d been elsewhere. He handed down the beer, fascinated at Gordon’s hand as it gripped the long neck of the Corona. Elbow bent, he moved his hand to his mouth and swigged from the bottle. It was ordinary — the most quintessentially ordinary thing Marshall could imagine — but the motion seemed beautiful, inherently fascinating, and beyond that a relief. It was a huge relief. Gordon was not the Gordon of the photograph; that had been a sudden flash that produced a deceptive photograph.

The rooftop reggae devolved eerily into Jim Morrison, singing “Wishful Sinful.” For a minute, amid hammering, he listened. A stronger station had overtaken Bob Marley. It was Morrison in the lead, Marley second, darting in for a fuzzy word, a sung phrase, Altiss loudly rooting for Marley until a Skil saw overwhelmed both words and music When it resumed, Marley had triumphed, though Marshall’s thoughts were no longer on the music. Hearing Jim Morrison had reminded him of Gordon’s friend the bartender. He was replaying going into the Green Parrot, watching the ambidextrous bartender perform, frantically keeping up with drink orders while washing glasses and holding simultaneous conversations. It seemed that in Key West everyone was either completely wired or very laid back. How amusing, then, that high-energy Gordon was pretending to sleepwalk, turning over the possibility of leaving his wife, travelling in his mind to places like Hawaii while he sat sprawled in a butterfly chair near the water’s edge, picking under a fingernail with one of the toothpicks he always carried in his shirt pocket. What a shirt, Marshall thought, appreciating the bizarre colors — a shirt that reminded him of a tequila sunrise, pinks settling into orange, a watery concoction of electric color that blurred more the harder you tried to focus.

“Man, with my eyes closed, I can tell you’re lost in thought,” Gordon said. He hunched his shoulders and sat up, raising the yellow aviator glasses, rubbing his arm over his eyes, pushing the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “You understand I don’t have any special knowledge about what never got said when we were kids, right? But you want my opinion anyway. Okay: my opinion is that if he ever loved our mother, he stopped loving her pretty fast. He felt bad when he knew she was going to die, but that’s something else. And Evie — as I’ve said, looking back, I think Evie was always his squeeze on the side. Guy needed to get laid, is my guess. Our mother seemed like a ghost long before she got sick and died. I don’t remember her in any season but winter. That Bible she carried around. Always so unhappy. I know what he felt like: if something doesn’t work out, next time you go to the opposite extreme.” Gordon rolled his head to the side, looked up at Marshall, standing with his back to the water, holding a bottle of beer from which he had not yet sipped. “Are all these questions because your marriage to Sonja is breaking up? I mean this quite sincerely: I’ve been through this stuff before. At the moment it seems like the end of the world, but it won’t be. Whatever happens, I don’t think you’re going to get any answers about the present by raking through the past. By thinking about the previous woman, yes — but you’ve only been married one time.”

“I don’t care about what I’m doing for a living. I don’t — with the exception of a madman who’s no longer my friend, I don’t have any friends except you. Sonja and I had a bad year, but I should have seen it was going badly. I should have cared, and I didn’t. I’m shutting down.”

Gordon shook his head. “You make it sound like you’re a dangerous nuclear reactor, man. Who do you know who loves what he does, loves his wife, loves every fucking thing in the world? Things will work out. You’ve got to think forward, not back.”

Marshall nodded.

“I should also mention that you find yourself in a slightly strange place, bro. Boats bobbing out there on the water, people on their rented pink motor scooters. It seems easy. People talk like it’s easy. There’s flowers and sunshine. It’s like an illustration in a fucking children’s book. The Conch Republic’s not necessarily the best place to find yourself when you’re undergoing self-doubt. You pick up that conch shell and hold it to your ear, you know what you hear? A roar. A hollow roar. If you’re already down, you’ll take it as the absolute truth.”

At Mallory Dock, the air was suffused with the odor of meat and onions frying on a grill, the roar of fruit and juice liquefying in a blender, the triple blast of a cruise ship calling for the last passengers so it could sail away before dark. Smaller boats crisscrossed the water, sailboats and motorboats, people clustered on deck as the boats blew back and forth, turning to keep the sun in sight, bands playing at the open-air bars on shore, recorded music or an amplified guitar drifting off the water toward land, people drinking swampy margaritas and cheap wine included in the price of the sail that would give them instant headaches. Near where they stood, a bagpipe player puffed his cheeks and began to finger his next song, drowning out the Bob Dylan imitation undertaken beside him by a barefooted man who stopped singing every half minute to berate people in the crowd for walking on the cord that attached his guitar to the amplifier. People grabbed each other’s hands, snaking through the dense crowd, yelling over their shoulders for others to follow, evading jugglers, backing off to provide a small circle of space to a man who raised a shopping cart containing four bowling balls, with a bicycle tied to the cart, from his shoulders to his forehead, then moved it from his forehead to his mouth, taking small, bent-kneed steps while finally tipping it enough to balance the entire shopping cart by its handle on his teeth. Children were lifted to parents’ shoulders, teenagers tumbled against each other’s bodies, using shoulders and legs as springboards, their T-shirts rolled to reveal tattoos of the setting sun inked into their biceps, along with skulls and crossbones, Merlins with crystal balls, long-haired, big-breasted women galloping on unicorns. Dirty, shoeless men with caved-in chests stood squinting in the background, looking for abandoned hot dogs or half-full cans of Pepsi left on the ground. Dogs nosed through the crowd while others of their kind performed: a white dog in a bandanna who jumped over three Vietnamese pigs in graduated sizes, their tails braided, who in turn jumped over the expressionless dog, landing in a perfect line, one-two-three; a cat in red booties who jumped, at the crack of a whip, through a flaming hoop. He thought, suddenly, of Janet Lanier, telling him, “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”

As the sun inched down in its descent below the horizon line, music reached a fever pitch, soprano sax scuttling the bagpipes as stoned teenagers released Mylar balloons to drift over the Gulf and mingle with swooping seagulls and flapping sails. Piercing whistles and applause continued for a full half minute after the disappearance of the last sliver of orange sun, caps thrown up and clambered after as they landed in the infinitesimal spaces between bodies, or perched rakishly on other people’s heads. One man danced in place, shaking his tambourine, as the pigs once again flew forward to make their perfect nose-to-tail line. Quite possibly, this would be the most ludicrous place on earth to come if you were hoping for an epiphany. Though it made Marshall uncomfortable to think in those terms, he was looking for something, and furthermore, Gordon realized that he was. It was not an accident that Gordon had suggested this gaudy party at land’s end. If Mr. Watanabe had come, the plan had been to sail past Mallory Dock as the sun was setting, to be out there with the other boats, looking toward shore through binoculars, but when Watanabe cancelled, Gordon had still been intent upon showing his brother a sight he couldn’t miss.

He and Gordon had parked several blocks away, walked down Duval Street, then fought their way through the crowd streaming onto the dock, heading toward the table where Beth was selling her friend’s air plants. Marshall recognized her from behind, the tie-dyed tank dress she had put on that morning with its interlocking cobwebs of maroon and deep purple suddenly sedate in comparison with the extravaganza in the sky. Beth was barefoot, a gold clip in her hair, still damp from a shower. The air plants grew out of conch shells, to which her friend had glued button eyes and red felt lips: the green-gray plants looked like odd, miniature toupees. Playing grab-ass with her, Gordon had caused her to lose one sale, so she tried to send them off to watch the performers, telling Marshall to be sure to see the cat who jumped through a burning hoop. “Just like Morris the cat,” she said. “It was saved from a shelter.”

He trailed after Gordon, trying to stay calm. Moving deeper into the crowd, he had begun to feel claustrophobic. Faces began to take on a sameness: a fixedness of gaze; sweaty skin; people snaking forward without looking at one another. He was suddenly reminded of the travelling carnivals they’d been taken to as boys, the ones they begged to be able to attend, where they’d watched Punch-and-Judy shows and been given rides on straw-hatted donkeys. This spectacle was as unrelated to those summertime travelling road shows as crawling was to space travel. As he walked, passing dusty traveller’s palms and thorny sprays of bougainvillea growing weedlike in narrow patches of dirt near the buildings, he saw the brightening sky, lavender streaks dissipating like smoke, dark gray clouds like so many submarines rising to the surface. From where he stood he could not see the water at all, but the sky seemed a kind of sea, the clouds devolving into sea creature shapes, tentacles spiralling out and then retracting, nets of white flung toward the sinking sun.

Below a tree Beth had told him the second day he was there was named a flamboyant tree, a drunk lay on his side, a broken pint bottle still clasped in his hand, blood speckling the ground where he had cut himself as he passed out. Marshall took a deep breath, needing air to avert a swarming dizziness. The place had sent him into a near panic. He was looking for reference points, landmarks, familiar things that would provide a buoy on which he could affix his attention. In another flamboyant tree he saw two balloons. In a store window, a gargoyle draped with shiny necklaces. Trash in the gutter. People still rushing toward the dock grabbed for flyers flicked in their direction — flyers advertising discount videos, massages, two-for-one drinks, trips to the same reef Beth had told him the first day he arrived was all but dead. His life had been sharply proscribed, he realized, and he was the one who had done it; he had been the one who’d chosen to circle on the slow donkey, going round and round but going nowhere, and then what had happened but someone had galloped into his life on a high-spirited horse, and he had found himself on the road, a most unwitting and highly unlikely Sancho Panza. Okay: Cheryl had been right about that — following after … what? Whatever unarticulated quest McCallum had decided must be enacted.

Suddenly, a man, in a parody of an effete conductor, raised his hand and poked a burning stick of incense toward his nose, which he tried to ward off. Still, the musky smell seemed to clash unpleasantly with the sunset, the near-fetid smell making him squint at the sky’s harsh brilliance. Behind them, people continued to crowd toward Mallory Dock: excited tourists; indifferent day-trippers who’d been told this was the place to go; the homeless, who might as well drift in that direction as another. The dock was by now punctuated with fire: jugglers tossing torches, animal trainers raising burning hoops, people holding sparklers that fizzed with silver fire, the cacophonous music as loud as sirens in the night. Whistles and shrieks continued, along with balloons released to float upward and intermingle with the coming stars, until that time when they would inevitably explode or deflate, to become a deadly food for fish. If McCallum had made it this far, Marshall thought, he would have loved this lurid spectacle. With an increasing feeling of claustrophobia and an adrenaline rush that made his heartbeat echo in his ears, the noise of the after-sunset revellers became white noise, just as — in a place that seemed across the universe — drifted snow disguised the landscape of New Hampshire in his absence. He thought of New Hampshire. The snowy woods. The icy hoarfrost on his own front lawn. Every man’s house his castle. New Hampshire, blanketed in white. Returning, he would have to drive carefully. Gingerly, back to the gingerbread house, real icicles its white frosting.