Bay of Souls

2

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT during the Christmas season, Michael burned until dawn. Neither he nor Kristin could quite regain equilibrium. He tried repeatedly through words and small gestures to provide some setting where the two of them might rest, take comfort and exchange the burden of their hearts. The sweet meeting he longed for, the mutual summoning of assurances and insights, somehow never took place. Lengthening her long jaw like a sword swallower, pursing her thin lips, Kristin absorbed her son's return from the dead as though it were her medicine. Pale and shivering, dull-eyed as a snake digesting a rat, she contained the whole awful business. It glowed through her, stretching her translucent skin like a frame.

During Christmas midnight Mass at St. Emmerich's, Michael sat numb and grieving, appalled at his son's intense, clear-eyed devotion. At the Kyrie he accidentally met Kristin's gaze. There were no questions for him there, no promises or confidences or happy conspiracies. Her look was as blank as the face of things themselves. It filled him with the terror of impending loss. He was the only child of a widow; his father had died in Michael's infancy. His mother had been erratic, demanding, flirtatious, constantly threatening him with the abridgment of love.

Kristin's mother had come for Christmas, on furlough from the nursing home to which she had retired after her husband's death. The farm, the fifty ragged acres left of it, had been sold off. Kristin and her mother spent the December afternoons examining old photo albums, doting over the pictures of Pop. Pop and a caught walleye. Pop on a horse. Pop in a canoe or behind the wheel of a new 1955 Buick. Pop with baby Paul. On the drive back to the nursing home, the old girl was vague but lucid. From time to time, Michael looked from the road to find himself fixed in her blue-eyed silent inquiry.

The trip home from his mother-in-law's required an overnight stop. Michael spent it in a cheerless river town that housed the state penitentiary. The prison's original building was a hundred-year-old fortress with crenelated towers and razor-topped walls, shrouded that night in river fog. At one guard tower someone had put up a lighted Christmas tree. Michael stood in the darkness outside his second-story room in the brick and cement motel — a structure itself like a cellblock — and smoked his first cigarette in ten years. But that was the last. He threw the pack away in the morning. There was Paul.

Nights were bad. He came to know the geography of night so well that he could tell the hour without looking at his watch. The stretch he knew best was between one and dawn. Light burned behind his eyes, resinous fires over which sparks whirled. In their glare his rage and dread brought forth bitter, unspeakable thoughts to be shaded, refined, reordered endlessly. Over and over the black insights appeared, one played on the last like tarot cards, spelling out the diminishing possibilities of life for him. Evenings he drank. And though he might sometimes pick up an early hour or two of sleep that way, the alcohol mainly served to keep him awake. He was aware of Kristin beside him and he knew that she was often sleepless too, often with pain, though her leg healed quickly. The bone had not separated and the cast was off by Christmas.

Still, he felt that some terrible misreading of the signs, some great incomprehensibility, was hardening between them. Every morning he got out of bed whipped.

A week after the winter term had opened, he went to his carrel in the university library to read. The campus was under deep snow, ice-crusted by weeks of boreal cold. Trudging up College Hill on a sunny January afternoon, he was blinded by the wind and the glare. The quiet world inside the double glass doors of Bride Library was warm and welcoming.

His small study was on the lower level, its thick-paned narrow window half submerged beneath the snow line outside. Only a pale winter light came, filtered through the needles of an adjoining pine grove. The fluorescent lamp in his cubicle was heartening and businesslike. Waves of heat shimmered against the lower windowpane.

The course he had designed for the spring semester consisted of works from early-twentieth-century vitalism — Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell. A hundred years late, his students were not entirely immune to its appeal. In the sterile ease of his afternoon's refuge, laboring under the same sadness he woke to each morning, he settled down with Cabell's Jurgen. It was a book he had liked very much as a youth, although recently he had seemed to run out of new things to say about it. After a weary page or two he went to sleep.

The exterior light was fading altogether when he heard a gentle rap at the door. It was Phyllis Strom.

"I'm really sorry to bother you here," Phyllis said. Her regrets were genuine because he had ordered her not to disturb him at the library. He stood blinking, running a hand through his hair.

"I couldn't get you on the telephone," Phyllis said. "But Mrs. Ahearn said you were probably here."

"She was correct." He directed Phyllis to the nearest library table, where there were two vacant chairs.

"I really am sorry," Phyllis said anxiously. "I know how you like to come here."

Michael laughed in spite of himself.

"Just goofing off, Phyllis. What's up?"

"Well, you know, I waited until the last minute to line up a thesis committee."

"Right," Michael said. It had been his fault. He had kept her busy through the break, shamelessly overworked her. She had never so much as breathed an impatient sigh. The rumor about beautiful Phyllis Strom, untrue so far as Michael could determine, was that as an undergraduate she had posed for a Playboy spread, "The Girls of the Big Ten." In any case, as a graduate student she had become a model of industry, modesty, sobriety and decorum.

"Well, you know I asked Professor Fischer when I asked you?"

Michael nodded.

"Well, I have a third person lined up." When Phyllis told him the name he could not quite make it out. He had heard it around.

"Professor Purcell." She repeated it for him. "Marie-Claire Purcell. Everyone calls her Lara."

"She's a political scientist, and her specialty is the Third World," Phyllis explained. "She's real hard to get hold of on campus. Like she doesn't have e-mail and her phone's unlisted."

"Should I write to her?"

Phyllis blushed fetchingly.

"Your wife said you didn't have time to write until after term. So I wondered if you could catch her on campus today. I told her you might stop in."

Michael watched her for a moment.

"I guess I owe you, Phyllis. You were a lot of help to me this term."

"I feel so badly about pushing it," said the contrite but determined Phyllis Strom. "But it's so important to me."

"Is it? Is she so terrific?"

"Yes," Phyllis said simply, "she's great. She studied at the Sorbonne. She has a couple of books and she's been a television journalist."

"Wonderful." He had a vague sense of Mme. Purcell. One of the overpaid Eurotrash faculty who frequented each other's houses for edible food and adult conversation and liked to photograph roadside diners and picturesque gas stations. "Lucky us. Sure," he told Phyllis. "I'll call her. Is she in her office this afternoon?"

"Until four-thirty," Phyllis said with a guilty smile. "Please?"

And who could refuse Phyllis, wintry nymph with her tasseled elfin cap, frost-nipped little nose and principled ambition. So, in violation of the library rules, he dialed the college directory on his cell phone and eventually found himself in conversation with Dr. Lara Purcell.

"We probably met at the dean's drinks party," Dr. Purcell said. She had a pleasant voice, with an accent that continually surprised, with Britishisms and French words pronounced in English. It was not disagreeable. She was said to have grown up in the Windward Islands.

"Yes, probably," Michael said. They agreed to meet at her office in half an hour.

All over the campus, college groundsmen were salting walkways to keep traction underfoot for pedestrians, fighting a losing battle with the oncoming cold of night. The offices in the political science building were lighted as Ahearn jogged up the ornate steps, past the allegorical statues attending them.

The secretary had gone home but the department's door was open. He wandered in and found Professor Purcell at her desk. He knocked twice on her office door.

"Are you Michael Ahearn?" the woman asked him. She got to her feet and came out from behind her desk.

"Professor Purcell?"

She was only slightly shorter than Michael, who stood six feet. She was wearing an elegant purple turtleneck jersey with a small horn-shaped ornament on a gold chain around her neck. A short leather skirt, dark tights and boots.

"I've heard so much about you from Phyllis," Professor Purcell said. "You're her mentor and ideal."

"Well, bless her. She's a terrific kid."

"Is she?" asked Professor Purcell.

The wall behind the desk was decorated with paintings in bright tropical colors. There were photographs too, taken in palm-lined gardens with ornamental fountains and wrought-iron balconies. In the photographs Lara Purcell appeared with people of different racial types, all of whom shared a cool, confident air of sophistication. Almost everyone portrayed seemed attractive. The exception was a pink, overweight and unwholesome-looking man standing next to Professor Purcell herself. His features were distantly familiar to Michael — a politician, unsympathetic, one from the wrong side. But Michael had no time to study the office appointments closely. "Well, I think so," Michael said.

"Call me Lara," Professor Purcell told him. She wore her dark hair shoulder length, streaked from the forehead with a shock of white. Her skin was very pale, her eyes nearly green, large, round and unsurprised. Beneath them were slightly swelling moons of unlined flesh, a certain puffiness that was inexplicably alluring. It somehow extended and sensualized the humor and intelligence of her look. Her mouth was provocative, her lips long and full.

Lara offered him a chair. "She's so serious, is Phyllis. And she thinks you make serious things seem funny."

"Who, me?"

The professor laughed agreeably. "Yes."

"Does she think that's good?" Michael inquired.

"I think she had her doubts. She didn't think it could be done. But now she sees the point of you."

The lady's cool impudence made him blink. It was not how people spoke to each other in Fort Salines.

"I'm glad to hear it. I'm very possessive about Phyllis."

"Rest assured you possess her, Mr. Ahearn."

"Please call me Michael. Phyllis," he said, "is very big on you too."

Lara only smiled. She looked at her watch. "I usually stop for coffee at Beans about now. Like to join me?"

Michael's usual refreshment at the same hour was a glass of the whiskey he kept in his carrel. He decided the drink could wait.

It was tough going downhill on the icy pathway. From time to time one of them began to slide and had to be rescued with a hand from the other. Beans, the coffee shop that served the campus, was at the college end of Division Street, four blocks of thriving retail stores and service establishments that ended in the courthouse square. It was bright, its windows cheerfully frosted. The place was full of kids. At a table beside the door, some of the foreign graduate students and junior faculty were gathered at a long table speaking French. Entering with Michael, Lara stopped to chat. She did not introduce him.

They stood in line for their paper cups of cappuccino and carried them to a table at the back.

"I gather," Michael said, "you haven't agreed yet to serve on Phyllis's committee. And that I'm supposed to persuade you."

"She's sweet," said Lara. "She seems to have done her work. But I don't want any tears. I don't rubber-stamp the language requirement. And I expect a capable defense conducted in standard English."

"Phyllis is quite articulate. I can't speak for her fluency in French. She's intellectually curious. And of course she has a social conscience."

The professor looked over Michael's shoulder to throw a backhanded farewell to one of their colleagues.

"Her social conscience worries me," she said to Michael. "Please assure me. Will I hear pious prattle in American kiddie-speak? If I do, you see, she'll be out on her little bum."

Michael made a note to warn poor Phyllis of what awaited her.

"I'll vouch for her. I think we'll survive your scrutiny."

"On your head be it," Lara told him.

They looked at each other for a moment.

"You do hear a lot of silly uplift," he said. "Phyllis isn't that way."

"It's contemptible," she said with a fine sneer. "Life is a fairy tale and they're the good little fairies. The gallant little social egalitarian feminist fairies. It's our responsibility to keep them from getting loose in the world."

"Keep them down on the farm," Michael said, "before they've seen Paree."

"Right. Stifle them aborning. Because, you know, one sees them overseas," she said, "and one's ashamed to be an American."

"They can get nasty too," Michael said. He had somehow not thought of Lara as an American.

"But of course they're nasty. On their own ground, in absurd provincial backwaters of the academy — places like this — they run our lives."

They both laughed.

"You're blushing. I haven't offended you? Oh, but I suppose I have."

"No, you're absolutely right," he said. "Jargon and goodie-speak prevail here. Actually, I'm not sure it's better at… more prominent institutions."

"There are nuances," she said. "Places like Berkeley are exhausted by politics. They're in deep reaction, which is fine with me. At other places — Yale, for example — the powers that be are merely cynical."

"Tell me this," Michael said. "What's someone like you doing in an absurd provincial backwater?"

"It's what I deserve," she said. "And you?"

"I'm a genuine provincial. People like me provide authenticity."

"In fact," she said, "I planned to settle here with my ex-husband. The job was a great convenience."

"It's a nice town for kids."

She shook her head. "No kids." Then she said, "You'll want to be going. Your dinner will be waiting."

"Norman Rockwell," he said, "is stopping by tonight to sketch us."

A little flaring of the fine nostrils. "An artist, isn't he? A sentimental artist? So you think I picture your home life as a sentimental ideal?"

"Happy families are all alike," Michael said.

"What will you have for dinner?"

"We call it supper," Michael said. "We'll have pot roast."

"I mustn't keep you from it," Lara said. "You can tell your protégée Phyllis I'll serve on her committee. I hope she won't regret it."

"I'm confident she won't."

She offered him her hand. "And," she said, "we can get to know one another."

"Yes. Yes, I hope so."

Just before he turned away, she cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. As if to say it was fated. As if to say, inevitable now. When he hit the cold street, his heart soared.

It was a three-quarter-mile walk from the coffee shop to his house. The cold, the walk and the scintillations of his encounter with Marie-Claire Purcell had sharpened his desire for a drink. Kristin, in gym clothes, was in the kitchen preparing one of her quickie Viking specials, warm smoked salmon with dill and mustard sauce. She had taught two classes and spent the rest of the day at the pool. He went by her and took the Scotch bottle out of a cupboard.

"You're late," she said.

"I was detained."

"Really?"

He poured out half a water glass of whiskey and added water from the tap.

"By Phyllis?" Kristin asked.

"Sort of. You want a beer out of the fridge?"

"Sure," she said. "What did little Phyllis want?"

Michael got his wife the beer.

"Just wanted me to line up her thesis committee. So I did."

"Sometimes I wonder who's assisting who."

"Assisting whom."

She turned to him, put her beer down beside the smoked salmon and gave him the finger. Then she walked out of the room.

Michael quietly addressed the silence she had left behind her.

"Is there some rule," he asked, "by which every time I feel halfway human you get to throw a shit fit?"

He could feel himself coming down hard. It was downright physiological, he thought, the collapse of elan, the sensation of your chin hitting the floor. He kept the image of her retreating figure in his mind's eye, her upright posture, her waggling braid, her small perfect ass in the light gray flannel tights. Though he dreaded it, something about her anger aroused him.

He swallowed his drink. He was bored with pondering the etiology of his own hard-ons, his own insights, literary and otherwise. Bored with introspection. A man without a meaning was a paltry thing, and increasingly, since the day of the deer hunt, he had seen himself revealed as one.

Perhaps, he thought, it was not boredom but fear. They were closely related. Behind the bland irritation, the true horrors. His son came in, pulling off a hockey shirt and tossing it in the laundry pile.

"Mom's in a snit," the boy said.

"Have some respect," Michael said, pouring another drink, "for your mother's feelings."

"Huh?"

"How can we call the rage of Iphigenia a snit?" he asked. And while the poor kid was dutifully trying to remember who Iphigenia was, Michael commanded him to do the laundry. "Don't just toss that dirty shirt in there. Stick it all in the machine. I'll get dinner."

While Paul hauled the basket into the laundry room, Michael took his drink up to the master bedroom. His wife was not to be found.

"Kris?"

The door to the attic was slightly ajar but there was no light on in the stair that led up to it. He opened the door a little more, on darkness.

"Kris?" he called up.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm sorry."

He found the light switch and snapped it but the bulb must have been broken; the stairway and the attic stayed dark. He climbed the first two steps.

"You know," he said, "you must know there's nothing between me and Phyllis. I mean nothing."

"I believe you," she said. "I'll come down. I'll come down in a minute."

"I'm going to put your lovely salmon out."

"Yes," she said. "Yes, go ahead."

He stood in her darkness, wondering whether to put another foot on a higher stair.

"Go ahead," she said. "I'll be down."

Paul put the laundry through its wash cycles and Michael warmed the fish and finished making the tart sauce but there was no sign of Kristin. He put two plates on the kitchen table. By then he was well down the bottle of Scotch.

Paul, hungry from hockey practice, finished his first serving quickly and helped himself to another from the stove.

"Leave some for your mother."

"Of course, Dad."

Michael opened a beer to have with the smoked salmon. "You know what I think," he said to his son. "I think there's a vestigial reason why we like this kind of tart, rich stuff. Savory stuff."

"Like a prehistoric impulse or something?"

"That's right." He looked at the salmon in its yellow mustard sauce. "I think we used to like rotten meat. We must have cached it like bears. We're trying to get the taste back."

Michael paused and put his fork down.

"That's like so disgusting. Yarg. Cripes."

"You dismiss my thesis?"

Paul, who had enjoyed their banter since learning to talk, was discovering the difference between his father sober and his father drunk. He did not much care for the drunk game. He quietly cleared his place at table, emptied the rest of his second helping in the sink and prepared to do the dishes.

Michael spent another hour at the table, tapering off the drink, brooding haphazardly, recalling his meeting with Lara. Then he remembered Kristin in the darkness upstairs. When he went up, Paul was at his computer. The door to the attic was firmly closed. Then he saw that Kristin had gone to bed. Her braid undone, she lay facing the wall. He went in and lay down beside her.

"I swear this to you," he said. "I swear it. There is no woman in my life but you. No one. And if that is the trouble between us… then there is none."

She turned over to face him. "You wouldn't lie to me, Michael?"

He put an arm around her.

"How can you think I would risk what we have for a little kid like Phyllis? She's a baby. I mean really, Kris."

Touching her cheek, he saw some question in the look she fixed on him. It made him understand what it suddenly seemed should have been obvious, that perhaps the trouble was not pretty Phyllis but something else, something Kristin herself might not understand. The thought frightened him.

He got up and went to check on Paul, who had shut his computer off and propped his Tolkien by the table lamp and was saying his prayers. He quietly told the boy good night.

"Night, Dad."

Careful of her wounded leg, he and Kristin gently made love. It was great pleasure to have her long-boned, long-legged body under his hands. A strong body, possessed of surprising softnesses. She could be most avid, with a style of alternate yielding and resistance. There was a kind of physical pride to her; it was necessary to win her each time, convince her. Sometimes it made him think of logic, little syllogisms, discoveries, recognitions. But that night things did not go very well. He kept imagining Lara; Kristin held back as though she knew his mind.

A few days later he had lunch at a burger joint in town with Norman Cevic.

"Miz Purcell," said Norman, "oh my!"

"So what's her story?"

"She had a husband originally. They were hired together. They'd been living in France. Teaching there."

"Her husband was French?"

"Her old man was French and he was considered quite a catch for the poly sci department. He was Ridenhour's kind of guy. But somehow she lost him along the way."

The late Dr. Nicholas Ridenhour had been a minor cold warrior of intensely right-wing views who maintained the university's political science department as a kind of woodsy clerico-fascist grand-dukedom. A wag had once declared that its members printed their own gold-based currency with Dr. Nick's picture on it.

"Lost him?"

"He got a better job back east. Solo."

"A practical man," Michael observed.

"Practical folks," said Cevic.

"So her views are like her husband's."

"Listen, man," Cevic said. "This is a dangerous woman. Really!"

"Dangerous?"

"Very smart girl this is. She has a following — a cultlike following — among some of the kids."

"She's attractive," Michael said.

"She's not attractive. She's about the hottest babe in the history of the state."

"She looks crazy," Michael said. It had not occurred to him before.

"She is. And she makes other people crazy."

"Phyllis Strom wants her on her thesis committee."

"Well, man," Norman said, "this is a struggle for a young mind. See if you can keep her from biting Phyllis on the throat."

That afternoon he suffered a breakdown in communication with his second class, an expository writing workshop. Led by an extroverted young woman athlete, the group undertook to address the personal problems of the characters in one four-page fictional narrative. The personal needs and available life choices of these thin conceits were examined as though they were guests on the kind of television talk show whose participants murdered each other.

"For Christ's sake," Michael told them. "You're supposed to be replicating life here. This is like a drawing class — the characters aren't real until you make them real. It's not group therapy or social work or an uplift pep rally! How about a little more literary criticism and a little less mutual support?"

The class sullenly dispersed ahead of schedule. He had failed to make himself clear. They had understood only that their youthful goodwill was being insulted. He had used abusive language. He had employed sarcasm. He had better watch it.

Rattled, he went over to the pool for a swim. The steamy showers and liquefactious echoes were comforting on that raw winter day. He had the luxury of a lane to himself. He swam hard, trying to outrun the shadow inside him. Some kind of bill had come up for payment.

He had, it seemed to him, done quite well by randomness. By the day at least, unless one insisted on pondering it all, randomness was no less cruel than some unlikely mysterious providence. He had always considered himself a lucky man.

Buying himself a cold can of grapefruit juice from a machine in the lobby, he came upon Lara Purcell sipping bottled water beside it. She was wearing a black sleeveless leotard and there was a damp towel around her neck.

"Doing your aerobics?" Michael asked.

"Squash."

"Where do you find opponents?"

"Oh, there are some formidable women around. I play men too." She drained her plastic bottle and tossed it in the receptacle against the near wall, a rimless shot. "Do you play?"

"What I play is racquetball."

"Oh," Lara said. "I can play that."

"Want to play tomorrow?"

"What time?"

"Three?"

But three might bring him home suspiciously late, if they stopped for coffee. It would be dark by four. They agreed to play at two.

"If you're good enough," Dr. Purcell said, "I'll teach you squash."

Back at his office he called Norman Cevic.

"So Lara Purcell," he told Norman, "invited me to play squash."

There was a brief silence on the line. "So what can I tell you, Michael?"

"Is that a pass?"

"Gamboling half clothed in a sealed chamber? What do you think?"

"I should say no way," Michael said. "I should decline."

"Did you?"

"I accepted. Racquetball, actually."

"You know," Norman said, "some of our colleagues — I won't mention names — are real screwballs. Disasters in search of a victim. Who knows what games are being played out? I'm not talking about squash."

"I'll call her," Michael said. "I'll make an excuse."

"Well," Norman said, "you're a man of the world."

Very funny, Michael thought. But it was not so. He was a tank-town schoolmarm's son, the grandson of farmhands on four quarterings, married out of high school. An overeducated hick.

That night the PBS station presented a particularly absorbing documentary about convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. It left the Ahearns in mild shock. What terror to fall into the hands of a system so cruel and arbitrary as the law, so surreal in its unconcern for any kind of responsibility. It was the kind of thing that made you want to pray.

Kristin had not allowed Paul to watch because of the warning about graphic depictions. Michael, who would have preferred his son to see it, did not argue. Later he regretted it.

In the morning, he read the class papers on Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Many students had not troubled to finish the reading. Several of these compared it to Madame Bovary, which was presumably the posted line on it in Cliffs Notes or somewhere. A few apologized for their inability to sympathize with the heroine, vaguely aware that sympathy was the attitude expected. The class feminists abandoned Edna as a flibbertigibbet. Eros and Thanatos were too quaint and reactionary, even embraced in a solitary act of personal liberation.

It was hardly a surprising response. Solitary acts of personal liberation were what everyone must be spared or forbidden. They represented the failure of everything progressive. The courage to be yourself, a virtue much celebrated on campuses like theirs, lost its luster if you were selfish and boy-crazy and a bad mother, the way Edna was.

It occurred to him that he had been preaching against literary vitalism all his career, mocking the pretensions of the antinomians, the self-conscious libertines. If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to reexamine everything now. By midmorning he was beginning to associate the insidiousness of literary vitalism with his afternoon game of racquetball. He skipped lunch and went over to the gym in plenty of time. Lara had reserved the court.

They played for an hour. Professor Purcell wore latex shorts and a red club vest, her dark hair bound in a ponytail with black and yellow ribbon. She played facing the front wall, utterly focused, it seemed, on the game. She was fast and strong, not afraid of getting hit, not afraid of the ball. In two of their fifteen-point matches she beat him, and her game seemed to improve as they played. Their last game was the hardest for him; they exchanged advantage nearly a dozen times before he won it. It seemed to him he had never played a better woman athlete. When they finished the last game he had a quick vision of summer, of tennis and lemonade, a strange, happy anticipation of the sort he had not experienced for weeks.

Surrendering to his final victory, she took her protective glasses off and wiped the sweat from her forehead and rested her right hand on his shoulder. He was intensely aware of her touch.

"Oh," she said, "you're good."

Michael had barely the breath to answer her.

"Will you teach me squash?"

She laughed and shook her head.

They met, dressed, in the lobby, lined with its trophy cases and framed photographs of teams going back to the twenties.

"Coffee?" Michael asked.

She hesitated. "Honestly," she said, "I'm well and truly beat. You don't do massage, do you?"

There was no way in which this could be other than a joke.

"I'm afraid not."

"Well, there's a Latvian lady I go to. I think I feel the need of her."

"Good idea," Michael said. "If I had a Latvian lady I'd go too."

"Oh," Lara said, "no, I feel selfish. Let's do something we can both do. What you like best."

"I think my favorite thing would be to drink a beer."

"Decadent, eh?"

"Not at all," Michael said. "Wholesome. Agreeably provincial."

They drove her Saab to a sports bar in a mall surrounded by dairy farms, whose silos and storage tanks loomed over the fake tiles and tin towers of the mall. A few students from campus and a tableful of off-duty FedEx drivers were half watching a British soccer game on the bar's giant screen. Sunderland against Manchester United. The screen commentary competed with Billy Joel.

Lara was wearing an ankle-length fox coat. Hanging it for her, he could feel the warmth of her body against the coat's silk lining. He ran his fingers over the fur. The bar sold draft Harp lager by the pint.

"I'll sleep tonight," Lara said with feline satisfaction. "I'm sure of that."

"I hope I do."

"Have trouble sleeping?"

He nodded and shrugged.

"Get the health service to give you something."

"Not my guy."

"Nonsense. Insist."

"Come on, you know how they are. He believes in valerian root. He believes fatigue makes the best pillow. He thinks people don't need sleep. He likes saying no."

"You should sleep," she said. "I'll give you something."

Her lips were inches away, and when he kissed her he thought he heard a little yahoo chorus rise from the bar. They sank back against the banquette. Michael was weak-kneed and dizzy.

"Want to play tomorrow?" she asked. "I'll teach you squash."

"I don't like all this losing-to-a-girl stuff," Michael said. "It's against religion."

"I'm a good teacher. I'll have you beating me. We'll turn it into an opera."

"Squash?" Michael asked.

"Squash is fate's game. The ball game. You have to be ready to die. You have to know how to sing."

"Maybe I can beat you," Michael said. "I get your clothes if I do. Isn't that right? I'll settle for that."

"Nicey, nicey," she said. "I'll have you singing in chains. I'll have your soft heart on a dish."

He kissed her again.

That night when Paul had gone to bed, Kristin asked him, "Did you ever think of joining AA?"

"Not for the merest instant," Michael said. "I think I might join Al-Anon."

"Really? Getting bored nights? It's supposed to be a hot pickup spot."

As usual, she left the sarcasm lying where it fell, immune. "I've been thinking about how out of contact you are sometimes. As though you're not there."

They were on the second floor, tidying a spare room full of shelves they'd placed to accommodate an overflow of books.

"But I am there, Kris." Dumb denial was the best he could do.

She picked up an unjacketed book and looked at the spine. "I may be a dumb squarehead, fella, but I know when you're with me and when you're not."

They went to bed. Michael turned out his bedside lamp and turned over, facing away from Kristin. She lay beside him stiff as starched laundry, reading or pretending to read. He fell asleep before she did.