Before, During, After

Ms. Barrett and Father Faulk1

Not to be lonely, not to look back with regret, not to miss anything, always to be awake and aware. And to paint. Beautifully.

Natasha Barrett had written this in her journal when she was seventeen.

Favorite watercolorists: Sargent and Gramatky. Favorite sculptors: Bernini, Donatello. Favorite book: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Favorite music: rock, particularly Men at Work, the Police, Dylan; and also for music: jazz, especially Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. Biggest fear: rejection. Biggest ambition: to travel and to know the world by heart.

Seventeen. And she had come upon it this past winter, years away. You could be a little proud, looking back. You could even find some comfort in the recollection.

In early April of the year she was to turn thirty-two, what she thought of as the chastened later version of that young woman attended a fund-raising dinner hosted by her employer, Senator Tom Norland of Mississippi, at his mansion in Arlington. The mansion was on a high bluff overlooking the Potomac River, and from the road it was just visible at its roofline after you crossed into Virginia — an immense redbrick Colonial. She had visited several times before, and there was always something warm and welcoming about it in spite of its imposing size. Behind the house was a flagstone patio, and walking paths wound through the tall oaks that stood at the edge of the bluff above the river. Along the paths, iron benches were placed decorously amid flower beds and statuary. People would gather in this wide shady space when the senator was entertaining guests.

This evening she arrived late and was greeted by Norland’s tall pretty wife, Greta. “Come right in, darling.” Greta smiled her white smile and then frowned. “Are you all right? You look a bit downhearted.”

“Oh, no, I’m fine,” Natasha said. “Just tired.”

“Well, good to see you, honey. Go right through.”

The younger woman reflected that there were people for whom cheerfulness was a trait, something they were blessed with like good bone structure and silky blond hair. She went along the polished hardwood floor of the hall and stepped out onto the patio. Cocktails and wine were being served to the left of the entrance, a young dark man standing behind a table there. Natasha asked for red wine, and his gaze went over her. She could have imagined this.

Moving away from the crowd and out onto the lawn, she walked among the statues — small, delicate-looking angelic figures in supplicating poses. Please, they all seemed to be saying.

The winter had been long, colored by the aftermath of the end of an affair. She was in no mood for a party and had wanted very badly to find an excuse not to come. But it was Friday, still part of the workweek, and her presence was required: the gathering was for the benefit of the Human Relations Conference, one of the senator’s pet projects. She was his chief organizer.

Wandering back to the patio, she stood sipping her glass of wine, surrounded by people whose evident curiosity about the senator’s “assistant”—two people actually referred to her that way — made her irritable and cross. She wasn’t there five minutes before she found herself desiring with adolescent fervor to disappear into the rooms of the house. She kept forcing a smile, listening politely to what was said to her. The guests, many of them local celebrities, were talking about the upcoming conference and about politics — the new president’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. It was a signal, someone said, about where things were headed with the Republicans back in power. Others speculated about all that. Someone else remarked on the perfect weather, trying to change the subject. To Natasha it all began to seem depressingly automatic, like the chatter of birds on a shoreline. Species noise.

The weather was indeed fine: clear and cool, breezes stirring like whispered secrets in the leaves of the oaks bordering the property, the new leaves gold daubed with sun, nearly translucent. The gravel and flagstone walks skirting the edge of the bluff afforded a lovely view of the dark green river far below, with its ranks of sculling boats from Georgetown. The air was flower scented.

Norland approached through the confusion of others, grasping the upper arm of a man who seemed reluctant to be handled in that way. She saw that the man wore a clerical collar. “Natasha,” Norland said. “You grew up in Memphis.”

The senator had a gift for tautology.

She nodded and smiled at him.

“I’d like you to meet Father Michael Faulk, pastor of Grace Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee.”

Father Faulk was tall, solid looking, bulky through the shoulders. She saw his dark brown eyes and, when they shook hands, felt the roughness of his palm.

“Actually, I grew up in Collierville,” she said to him.

“Collierville. I don’t get out that way much.”

“In Memphis people decide not to go somewhere if it’s more than five minutes away. I had Memphis friends who would talk about Collierville as if it was Knoxville, four hundred miles down the road instead of fifteen.”

“You say you had Memphis friends.” His black hair was receding. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties.

She said, “Former friends, yes.”

“I won’t ask.”

“They all moved to other cities?” she said in the tone of someone speculating.

“I’m still not asking.”

They talked a little about Graceland and other attractions. It was the usual informal kindness of social occasions. She did not feel up to it.

“I’ve never really thought about the distance to Collierville,” he went on. “Is it fifteen miles?”

“Fifteen miles from Beale Street to where I lived growing up.” She turned to acknowledge the greeting of a coworker, Janice Layne, who was the senator’s press secretary. Father Faulk moved off, having been pulled in another direction by one of the donors to the event — and perhaps having sensed her reluctance to chat. Janice frowned slightly. “Mmm. Who’s the one in the pretty collar?” That was Janice, boy crazy by her own account, and probably, secretly, nothing of the kind. Natasha had an indulgent sense of knowing affection for her.

“I’ve just been introduced. You don’t know him?”

“He does look a little familiar. And he’s hot. And Episcopal. I already got that much. And so if he’s single, he’s fair game. I’ll find out for us.”

“Go, girl,” Natasha said automatically. She was already beginning to forget him.

But they got seated next to each other at the dinner, and he turned a charmingly sidelong smile her way, talking about how he could never get used to the grandeur of places such as this — with its atrium and its wide entrances and the original Rembrandt on the wall in the next room. He had been raised in Biloxi, in a decidedly middle-class environment, though his mother, just after he turned seventeen, was the recipient of a large inheritance from a great-uncle who had made a lot of money building houses. “Most of my boyhood,” he said, “was spent so far from this. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

The humor in his face and the rich timbre of his voice brought her out of herself. He asked, through the smile, if she liked Washington. “I do,” she told him. “Mostly.”

“Exactly how I feel about Memphis.”

“How long have you been there?”

“A long time, now. I went north out of high school. College in Boston — not Harvard.” The smile widened. “Went to seminary in Saint Louis, and then down to Memphis.”

“Your family still in Biloxi?”

“My mother died three years ago,” he said. “My father lives in Little Rock. I have an aunt here in Washington.”

She leaned toward him and murmured, “The, um, senator’s press secretary wants to know if you’re married.”

He looked down the table toward Senator Norland and Janice Layne. “You mean Ms. Layne.”

“The very lady.”

He grinned. “Divorced.”

“I’m sorry. But she’ll be glad to hear it.”

“Not interested.”

This occasioned a pause, and they watched the others talking and sipping their wine. She thought she might have stepped over some line. He was gazing at the room, evidently far away now, hands folded at his chin.

She said, “Did you like Biloxi?”

And he seemed to come to himself. “I did. Very much. Yes.”

Another pause.

“How about you?” he asked. “Does the senator’s press secretary want to know if you’re married?”

“Janice was just curious,” Natasha told him.

“I was joking.”

“She was, too — a little.”

He grinned. “Actually, my former wife is getting remarried. It’s happening in the next couple of days.”

“How’s that make you feel?”

“It’s — as we say — in everyone’s best interest.”

Natasha nodded, unexpectedly on edge now. She thought of excusing herself. But there wasn’t anywhere to go in this place without being seen leaving. She watched the senator talking to a big florid man about Virginia horse country and drank down her wine. It left an almost-syrupy aftertaste.

“I never feel comfortable at this kind of gathering.” Father Faulk spoke softly, only to her.

“I can’t help seeing it all as a series of gestures,” she said. “Makes me feel judgmental.”

“Not us. We’re too cool.”

It was pleasurable to be included in that way, even jokingly.

“Want to talk about Collierville?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He waited.

“Do you like bluegrass?”

“Don’t know much about it, but I like it.”

She described summer evenings when people would gather in the charming old town center to play music.

“I have seen that,” he said. “Wonderful. I like the antiques shops, too, and the old train station museum. I should go out there more often.”

“I guess it’s different if a person lives there.”

“You couldn’t wait to get away.”

“No,” she said. “Not really. It was just — you know — it was home.”

He had an appealing weathered look. Realizing her own growing interest in him, she experienced a surprising stir of anticipation. It had been months since she had felt much of anything but weariness. She sipped the ice water before her, and her hand shook a little when she set the glass down. She wanted more wine. He was talking across the table about the Rembrandt to a narrow-faced middle-aged woman who had spectacles hanging from a little chain around her neck. “I joked about all the cracks in the original painting,” he told her, “you know, going on about them to this fellow who — doesn’t seem to be here now. Hope I didn’t frighten him away. I told him that I have one just like it that has no cracks at all in it and that I bought it at Walgreens for less than five dollars. He was not amused. I’m pretty sure he thought I was serious.”

The woman across the table was not amused, either.

“Forgive me,” Natasha said to her. “I didn’t get your name.”

“I’m Mrs. Grozier. My husband is on the board.”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Grozier. I’ve worked with your husband.”

Mrs. Grozier nodded civilly and then turned her attention to the other end of the table.

Father Faulk turned to Natasha and said, low, “I keep thinking it was funny about the Rembrandt.”

She smiled. It was as though the two of them were in cahoots, looking at all the others. She felt herself calming down. She saw warmth in his eyes, a sort of reassurance radiating from them.

“What about you,” he said. “You still have family in Memphis?”

“My grandmother. She’s responsible for my having this job. She worked in the mayor’s office in Memphis for years, and she knew a lady who came here to work for the senator.”

“Is the lady still working for him?”

“Retired a couple of years ago and moved to California. Somewhere near L.A. I didn’t know her very well.”

“And your grandmother? Do you still go to Collierville to visit her?”

“We moved into the city the year before I left home. A little house in the High Point district. I visit her there, of course.”

“I know a woman in High Point who used to work in the mayor’s office. Iris Mara.”

This gave her a pleasing little jolt. “That’s my grandmother.”

“I worked with her on a project to make books available to schoolkids in some of the poorer neighborhoods. Iris Mara from the mayor’s office. Retired. Right?”

“Yes. All that — but she never mentioned a project.”

“She comes to my church now,” the priest said.

“Church?” Natasha said. “Iris?”

Grinning, he said, “Hmm.” Then: “Yes. The very lady.”

“We talked on the phone two days ago. We talk a couple of times a week. She’s never said anything about going to church.”

He was silent.

“Well. I’ve been away so much since I left for college.”

At the head of the table, the senator stood and clinked the end of a fork against his wineglass until the room grew silent. He thanked everyone for attending and introduced some of the principal organizers of the event. He congratulated Natasha for her work on the project. Then he sat down, acknowledging the polite round of applause.

Faulk turned to her and said, “I didn’t know you were so important.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Sarcasm in a priest.”

His face betrayed no sign of amusement. “I wasn’t being sarcastic. Honestly.”

After a pause, he said, “So Iris didn’t mention going to church.” And they both laughed. There was something so incongruously familiar about the remark. His soft baritone voice when he laughed rose wonderfully to another register.

He held up his water glass and offered it, as for a toast. She lifted hers, and they touched them and drank.

“I’m probably slandering her by my reaction,” Natasha said. “But she’s always been so secular.”

“She’s been coming for several months now.”

“You notice when someone starts coming to your church?”

He gave forth another little laugh. “In her case, yes. She came to see me first.”

“It’s so strange — Iris going to church. She never went to any church. We never went to any church. As far as I know, my parents never did either.”

“You say as far as you know.”

“They died when I was three. I never knew them.”

“Oh, Lord — forgive me,” he said. “Of course. I should’ve remembered — I knew that Iris lost her daughter and son-in-law.”

“And Iris just goes on through the days being Iris.”

“She’s a brave lady.”

“I can’t wait to talk to her about you,” Natasha said. “And church. I’ll spring it on her. Be fun to hear her reaction.”

“Please don’t tell her I’m as stupid as I must have seemed just now.”

“Don’t be silly.”

The man on his left began talking to him loudly about the unseasonably hot weather in the south. And then the waiters were circling the table, pouring wine in everyone’s glass. Each held a bottle of white and a bottle of red.

Father Faulk asked for water. Natasha held her glass out and indicated that she wanted the red.

“When do you go back to Memphis?” she asked him.

“Probably tomorrow. I’ve been visiting my aunt Clara. She’s the senator’s mother-in-law.”

“Then maybe you’ll see Iris before I do,” Natasha said.

“Oh, well, in that case, I’ll remember you to her.”

The food was arriving. She felt a pull of nausea at the pit of her stomach. For months she had been miserable; and here, completely unforeseen, was something like light pouring in. And he would be gone tomorrow, and she would never see him again. She drank half her glass of wine, nearly gulping it. He was listening to the man go on about humidity. The man owned a bookshop in Leesburg, and business was slow. Finally he grew quiet; Faulk turned to her and asked how she liked the wine.

She held up the nearly empty glass. “Evidently too much.”

She was not thinking of him in a boy-girl way but simply as a possible friend. And she did not want him to go back to Tennessee. “You should have a glass,” she said.

“I think I will at that.” He signaled one of the servers.

“Is your aunt Clara here?”

“She was supposed to be — she knows this crowd pretty well, of course. But she developed a migraine this afternoon. She doesn’t get them often, but when she does they’re fairly incapacitating.”

The waiters were bringing the food. Two choices: a vegetable medley, with butternut squash and kale, or medallions of beef, with arugula salad, red potatoes soaked in olive oil and sprinkled with candied garlic. She asked for the beef, and he followed suit. Her glass had been refilled. He had a little wine, too, now.

“This is very jammy,” he said, with a slight smile.

She said, “Maybe too much so.”

2

Her parents were lost in the Meteor cruise ship fire near Vancouver in 1971, their remains sepulchered somewhere in the waters off that coast. The recitation of this history never failed to make her wish herself far away, and her grandmother still occasionally mentioned it as a reason that Natasha possessed such an old soul.

Natasha, in her early twenties, took to thinking of her own beginnings ironically. After all, it was just who she was. There seemed something faintly snobbish or even smug reporting the calamity to people like some sort of pedigree. But the accident was the dividing line of Iris’s life, so the fact of it would be mentioned in talk with new acquaintances, and often enough this would lead to Iris using the phrase “old soul,” meaning it in the best way, about her granddaughter. At times she would elaborate a little more, pointing to the watercolors Natasha did — depictions of faces from piles of photographs found in bins at antiques stores, families long gone, staring out in the light of those rainy-looking scenes.

Natasha felt like an old soul, all right, but not in the way Iris meant it. Through the past winter all the shifts of her mind and heart seemed frail and elderly to her, and she endured the purgatorial hours of each day, walking around in a haze of penitential worry about minutia, experiencing an immense lethargy and a recurring fearfulness. Fear of others, the sounds outside her apartment at night, the shadows in the cold streets when she walked home, all the possible harms of the world, and, most terrible, the fear that this darkness might last all her life. Night panics, dread wakefulness, fierce dreams when she could manage any sleep. During the days, nothing had any taste. Everything seemed dismally the same, the same. Her own thoughts oppressed her. The voices of others were demoralizing and dull. Friendships lapsed. The young women she had studied with in France and the group of friends and acquaintances she had made in Washington drifted to their own concerns, stopped calling or writing, acceding one by one to the silence. All but two: Marsha Trunan, a Paris friend with whom she had traveled in Italy and who was also from Memphis, and Constance Waverly, who lived in Maine now and was twenty years older than Natasha and sometimes treated her like a daughter. Marsha continued to call and leave messages, apparently having decided to ignore the difference between Natasha before and Natasha now. Marsha wanted to know what was wrong. Natasha kept insisting that nothing was wrong. She was overwhelmed with work. Just awfully busy. And this was partly true when you added to the daily responsibilities in the senator’s office the necessity of keeping up appearances.

Perhaps the thing that tormented her most was the banality of it all: a squalid little cliché of betrayal and being the other woman. Surely regret was supposed to be reserved for mistakes on some grander scale than this — yet regret was what she felt, so deep that it sat under her heart, a physical ache.

She had thought he was the love of her life.

His name was Larry Mackenzie, a photographer she met through her job arranging appointments with journalists and news services for the senator.

She had spent almost a year sneaking in and out of hotels with him, and taking trips to other cities for false reasons, lying to everyone, including herself, holding on to the hope that he would leave his wife for her, end an unhappy marriage, a loveless disaster. He had described the misery in his house: a wife sinking into fanatical pursuit of the supernatural, believing in her ability to read minds and predict the future. Natasha had felt sorrow for his pain, mingled with desire that he stop talking about it and do what he kept saying he would do: find a way to make the civil arrangements. No one had to remain in a marriage he no longer wanted.

The day after Thanksgiving, she got a phone call from the wife.

Mrs. Mackenzie was confident and strong and spoke from a great height of scorn and moral superiority. She had confronted her delinquent husband with what she had known “for some time,” and he’d told her the whole story, had answered all her questions, being courageously forthright, explaining everything to her satisfaction. “I’ve already forgiven him,” she said. “As my faith dictates I should.”

What Mackenzie had done, it turned out, was convince the poor woman that Natasha was the instigator of the affair and was now stalking him.

Ugliness all around.

Natasha confided this to Constance Waverly, and Constance responded in a tone that expressed how sordid she thought it was.

Well, Constance was right — no use denying the fact.

There had followed a series of blurry evenings, of being out by herself in Adams Morgan and Georgetown — boozy hours and instances of dalliance with unknown men. She had stopped painting altogether, and she began to drink alone, in the predawn, in her apartment, often going to sleep drunk, half clothed, on top of the blankets of her bed. This desperation had slowly turned into the interior gloom and ache that had brought her to a doctor and a prescription for bupropion.

She confided in no one else. When she spoke to Iris on the telephone, it was their usual pleasant back and forth. When Iris asked about her plan of saving money to go back to France and spend a year putting together enough work for a show, she pretended that things were still on track. Senator Norland, who kept a proprietary interest in her and saw her nearly every day, was nevertheless too absorbed to notice that anything was wrong, and somehow she continued to keep up with her work. She had in fact gotten better at it, had buried herself in it.

But the days were long, and filled with dejection.

Now, in the soft evening in the senator’s house in Virginia, she was surprised by her own lifted spirits. She finished the medallions of beef, sipped the last of the wine in her glass, and went with Father Faulk to look at the new flowers clinging to the trestle bordering the patio. Blessedly, she felt no pressure to speak. The two of them were quiet. They strolled contentedly together along the gravel path above the river.

3

Father Faulk had seen an intimation of gloom in the young woman’s eyes — not quite definable, yet there, like a shadow on water. Well, she was lovely, bracing up against something, and evidently not particularly eager to be introduced. Senator Norland, with characteristic, ham-handed, well-intentioned gregariousness, had barged through the moment like someone hoping to get them together as a couple. It was nothing of the kind, of course: Norland had merely realized the Memphis connection and, as was his nature, acted upon it, wanting everybody to be comfortable. Anyway, Faulk was grateful for having been pulled away in the middle of small talk. It was clear that this young, darkly beautiful woman had scarcely noticed him.

He was struggling with his own shadows.

The fact that his former wife, Joan, was getting remarried and was also expecting hurt him in a surprising, steady, aching way. He could not plumb the reason for it. The marriage ended three years ago. Joan had wanted a child and they had not conceived, but this was secondary: what bothered her most was what she called his moodiness; she believed that he had no sense of joy. Whereas she saw joy as an emotional goal and resting place, he had always looked upon it as something lovely that nevertheless contained awareness of the possible darkness all around — the rush of delight gazing at a sleeping baby, for instance, while also noting the little blue veins in the cheek, those minute tokens of mortality.

Moreover, the progress of her leaving had to do with her admission to herself that she found little rest in the daily rounds of work, of supporting the life, his ministry. Eleven years of the troubles of others, including his own peculiar form of darkness. She said everything drained her, his needs, his inability or refusal to see her, her, as someone separate from him. “First thing in the morning the calls and the needs and your needs and the work and more calls and I just can’t breathe. It’s driving me crazy.” The accusation surprised and weakened him. He did not know how to change things. It was like trying to change one’s skin and bones. And so she went to visit her mother, who lived in an old house in Portland. It was supposed to be a break, time and space to gather herself. But then the stay lengthened, and when she finally came home, it was to pack and leave for good.

In the end it wasn’t quite clear how much of her discontent came from his work and how much of it came from himself. She wanted to leave. She claimed she felt no anger. And since, now, he was indeed considering leaving the priesthood, he had come to imagine that her restlessness and her wish to depart were early reflections of his own trajectory.

In his vocation, he had lost something unnameable but necessary.

This came to him one afternoon not long after she left. He was visiting a man in the hospital who had fallen in his own kitchen and hit his head. Sitting at the foot of the man’s bed watching him go in and out of sleep, he had the unpleasant thought that this visit was his job. Across from where he sat with his half-conscious parishioner was a woman with a man whose demeanor showed that he hadn’t gone mentally past the age of three. Father Faulk saw the shape of her face in shadow, the devotion in her light blue eyes, her loveliness as a woman. He looked back to the sleeping patient, but the image of this woman played across the surface of his thoughts. He would speak to her, get to know her, offering solace, at which of course he was practiced enough. She turned into the light from the window, and the light showed the lines of her face. For some reason he hadn’t seen those lines before. She held the man’s hand — this man, her son, with some injury to his leg, and all the cost of her reality was in her features. Suddenly Father Faulk knew he had nothing to tell her that she would want to hear, and he experienced the strongest sense of having awakened from some dream of life.

For a time he resisted negative considerations like these. He put them away like temptations — that was what he thought they were — and went on. And on. There wasn’t anything else for it. You did your job and you accepted the bouts of despair as part of the normal run of experience in the life of a priest. Since the divorce he had settled into a zone of gray calm, performing the tasks of his calling — an efficient, uninspired servant of his vocation. Now and then he saw one woman or another and felt lonely even when he was with them. He was no longer fit for the work. Or so he expressed it recently to a friend, Father Andrew Clenon, the warden of the vestry for his parish. Father Clenon wasn’t yet aware that Faulk wanted to leave. The talk had been confined to the dissatisfactions of the life. Clenon thought the trouble was spiritual dryness and told him to pray about it and went on to speak about the perils to the spirit when one was suffering through some change, as Father Faulk was with the news of Joan’s pregnancy.

“It’s been three years, Andrew.”

“You’re going to sit there and tell me that her getting remarried — the baby — none of that’s bothering you at all?”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with Joan. Except that I think maybe she knew I wasn’t up to it before I admitted it to myself.”

“You’ve dealt with it, though. Haven’t you. You’re a fine priest.”

“I’m telling you it has nothing to do with Joan.”

But of course it did have to do with Joan. And it had also to do with that life he once thought he was building, the changed life he was leading now, a chain of barren habit and avoidance and all the complications of being only marginally present in situations that deserved more from him. Through the winter, he had been carrying around the conviction that he must leave, must break free. The journey to Washington and a visit with what was left of his family, the senator’s mother-in-law, had been something Father Clenon suggested.

It hadn’t helped, hadn’t changed anything. In fact it had strengthened the feeling that his priesthood was a failure.

But strolling along the gravel path above the river on that spring evening with Iris Mara’s granddaughter, Natasha, he saw the unselfconscious pleasure she took in the new flowers, tulips and daffodils and wisteria, and he sought to break out of his own self-absorption. The flowers were indeed lovely and sweet scented, and when she looked at him, her dark sad eyes took him in, and for the first time he thought of leaving the clergy not as a capitulation but as a chance at some kind of happiness.

He did not return to Tennessee the next morning. He got his aunt Clara to ask for Natasha’s number from the senator and called her to ask if she would accompany him for a stroll along the Tidal Basin, to the Jefferson Memorial.

4

She was curious, exhilarated, and even so she declined.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s just coffee and a stroll on a fine Saturday morning. What’s preventing you from that? I’m just going to call you tomorrow and ask you the same thing.”

“I thought you were going home.”

“I’m staying on for another week. Come on. A little walk.”

They met at a coffee bar on Wisconsin Avenue. He wore a white shirt rolled above the elbows and tan slacks, and she thought the civilian clothes made him look younger. She wondered if you called them civilian clothes and almost asked him, holding herself in check and smiling under her hands as they walked into the little café. They each had an Americano and pastry. His talk was gratifyingly fanciful. He wondered where she would live if she had unlimited funds, and what climate would be best for her, what countries — advantages and shortcomings of the several candidates for home, as he called it.

“France,” she said. “I’ve been trying to save money to go there for a year and live.”

They talked about Iris a little. He paid for the coffee, and they took their walk. An image came to her mind of clouds lifting. She paused to appreciate the quality of light through the cherry trees. He bent down to pick up a blossom and then tossed it.

“You didn’t name any of the states as a possible place to live,” she said.

His smile was slightly sardonic. “Somewhere far away. California? Alaska? Hawaii?”

“Not Alaska.”

“Too cold,” he said. “Right? I wasn’t serious.”

“My mother was a bit, well, crazy. I mean that’s the only way to describe it. She had an idea that my father and she should find some way for us to live in Alaska. Anchorage. Think of it.”

“A lot of nice happy people live there,” he said.

“I wonder if she would’ve been happy. I don’t know that I would’ve.”

They went on a little.

“So she got my father to get a job on this Norwegian cruise ship to Alaska. My father was a trained chef. They were going to make the money to move. But there was an explosion, and the ship caught fire, and they jumped into the ocean. Several people did that to get away from the flames.”

“Iris didn’t tell me any of this, of course.”

“She didn’t tell me the real specifics of it until I was out of her house a couple of years. All I knew was that they were gone, lost at sea off Vancouver. I never knew them. Iris is — well. I used to wonder sometimes what she was thinking. And she never complains. It could be pretty quiet in the house, and anybody might think we were angry, or sad, but it was both of us sitting within four feet of each other reading. Perfectly glad of the quiet. I used to imagine her raising my mother alone. What that was like. And I guess it must’ve been like it was with me.”

“And your mother wanted to live in Alaska.”

“She actually wanted the cold. Loved snow, Iris says. I don’t think much of her survives in me.”

“Do you think Iris would say that?”

“Probably not.”

Presently, she said, “But really, I’d like to go back to France. The southern coast. I went to school there. Let’s say I like to imagine living in France and — painting.”

“Making enough money to live on it?”

“Sure, why not?” She smiled.

“You paint every day?”

“I don’t paint at all just now. But I have done some watercolors. But this was about fantasy, right?”

“Did you study painting?”

“Studied art.”

“What would you say is your best trait?”

She had the feeling that he was talking now just to talk. “Doing the watercolors.”

“That’s your best trait?”

She decided to change the subject. “Is Clara your mother’s sister or your father’s?”

“My mother’s half sister.”

They were quiet for a few paces. The Tidal Basin was awash in blue shade with patches of sun, and on the fresh-cut grass shirtless young men threw a Frisbee back and forth. Only yesterday she would have seen them as cruelly separate from her, spending a carefree morning.

The day was growing lovelier by the minute. The white linen slacks she wore were comfortable and cool. She had tied her hair back in a chignon, and the breezes pleasantly brushed her neck. Butterflies flew around her.

“I think they’re drawn to your pink top,” he said.

At the water’s edge they stood, watching the ducks glide by and several geese that kept honking. He reached over and, in a way that seemed natural and uninvasive — like the gesture of an older sibling — undid her hair. “I didn’t know I was going to do that,” he said. “I was appreciating the shine of it in this light, and I wanted to see more of it. Sorry. I don’t usually do that kind of thing.”

“It’s fine.” She was a little surprised at how much his worry about it pleased her.

They walked along the bank of the river. Sailboats glided past out in the brightness, and one motorboat sped by heading the opposite way, creating a white wake that churned at the banks. He placed his hand gently at the small of her back as they moved to the lane, into the cooler shade. A woman came by, pulled along by two large black dogs whose panting and striving — long nails clicking on the pavement — were the only sounds in the stillness. At a stone bench near the memorial, with its classic circle of columns and the tall shadow of the statue inside, they sat together and talked idly about the dinner party the evening before and about Senator Norland.

“Ten years dry now,” he said about the senator’s famous alcohol troubles. “But when they handed the presidency to Bush, that was tough for him.”

“We’re not allowed to mention that.”

“I remember John Mitchell saying the country was going to go so far right it would hardly be recognizable. And here we are, not even three months out of the Clinton administration, and Mitchell, that crusty old bastard, looks like a prophet. It’s so strange that the very people who are hurt most by them are their most vociferous supporters. An unforeseen flaw. The Founding Fathers couldn’t have imagined television. What to do about a duped population.”

“Do you talk about any of this from the pulpit?”

“Actually, I’m leaving the, um, pulpit.”

She turned and waited for him to explain. But he sat back and sighed.

“You can’t just say that and leave it there.”

“Well, I’m not a very good priest. I feel like I’m lying.”

“You no longer believe in God.”

“No, I do. Very much. You don’t have to leave the religion, you know, if you renounce your vocation.”

They walked over to the memorial. Staring at the sculpted face, he murmured, as if out of respect for it, “This is one of my favorite places in the city. He’s actually an ancestor on my mother’s side, I’m told.”

“Tell me about your aunt Clara.”

Thinking about the woman gave him obvious pleasure. “She’s lived here all her life. My mother’s younger sister by twelve years. Got a big old pretty house in Cleveland Park, and it’s constantly filled with people. She’s not slightly involved in politics, either.”

“And you?”

“I’m fairly insulated in Memphis. My coming into town to see her and her husband is usually as close as I get.”

“I’ve lived here for years,” said Natasha, “and I’ve never come to this memorial. A lot of this town I’ve never seen. And these are places people travel thousands of miles to see.”

“What did you paint when you did the watercolors?”

“Not this.”

He was still gazing at Jefferson. “There’s a lot of places here I’ve never been in, too.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I won’t make you guess. I’ll be forty-eight in June. And you?”

“Thirty-two in July.”

They went back toward the Ellipse and on to the Lincoln Memorial. School buses were lined up, emptying out, children gathering to go in. The air was full of diesel exhaust.

“Tell me the happiest you’ve been,” he said.

She didn’t have to think. “When I was in France. Aix-en-Provence. One day I was standing in a little café waiting to order a baguette. I’d come on my bicycle down a long mountain road overlooking the Mediterranean, and it was cool and sunny and I realized I’d never felt so much at home, and I was happy. Really happy. And I’d been happy for weeks.”

“Ever been back?”

“Not to live. Had a few days there a couple of times, taking pictures.”

“Not painting them.”

“Working for a travel magazine. And now how about you? What’s the happiest you’ve been?”

“Actually, I’m pretty happy right now.”

“Not fair. Come on.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ve never been really happy. Maybe that’s why I asked the question. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s possible.”

“You’re a little old for that kind of questioning, don’t you think?”

“I know.” He laughed. “Even at my age, I’m incomplete.”

5

They spent the rest of the day together, looking at the famous sights of the city that neither of them had ever gotten around to — the Washington Monument, the National Archives, and some of the Smithsonian. It was a lark, a sweet game. For her it seemed a charm against having to part ways. In the evening they had dinner at a small French place she knew in Georgetown. The day’s experience had made clear to her — it was a disconcerting little revelation — how rarely she had been herself with any of the men she had known. It was as if she’d always had to labor through some unspoken contest of wit. The insight made her hesitate. Perhaps it was the age difference. She got quiet while they ate and thought about finding an excuse to go on her way. Suddenly the whole gloomy history of the past two years blew through her. She sat straighter, attempting to fight it off. She had taken to calling this feeling the white sustenance, except that now she felt anxiety, too. She took a long sip of her wine and finished it, keeping her eyes on him.

He ordered two more glasses, then said, “Be right back.” He rose and went toward the restrooms. The server, a long-faced, grouchy-seeming old man, set the glasses of wine down, and she took a small drink from hers and breathed deeply, wanting to calm down. It had been such a good day. She possessed the necessary detachment to admit that her emotions about it might be sentimental, that she could be producing them in some way, a self-deception born out of where she had been and what she had been through. She looked across the room at the bar, where a man and woman sat close, murmuring.

People got along in the world. People provided comfort for one another.

She took the rest of the wine and signaled the server for another. He brought the bottle over and poured more for her, without saying a word. She saw the wrinkles across the back of his neck as he moved away. Faulk came back to the table and sat down. He was an interesting man, and she could just enjoy him. He was not that much older: sixteen years. But they could simply be friends. She could leave it there.

He sipped his wine and looked at her, and she looked away.

“Something hurt you a minute ago. Did I say something wrong?”

She touched the back of his hand. “No.”

“This is fun,” he said.

She found herself talking more about Iris, how it had been growing up orphaned in that old house. “Of course I never thought about it then, but I was being raised by a woman who had lost everything except me. Her husband had gone off, and she never heard another thing from him or about him until news came from a cousin that he’d passed away on a street in San Antonio. I still don’t know what made him leave, except that she was pregnant with my mother. But, you know, I don’t feel deprived. Life was — well, itself. And then I went off to France. And of course we don’t — she doesn’t live in Collierville anymore. Not since my last year of high school. But I always had a sense of this — this sad past I couldn’t know about, and Iris has a thing about time. There’s a pillow she embroidered that she keeps on the piano bench. It says, The dark backward and abysm of time. I don’t have any idea where it comes from.”

“ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”

“I was fourteen when she did it.”

“Strange thing to embroider on a pillow.”

“So tell me about you,” Natasha said. “Your parents.”

“My father’s Leander. Lee. From Gulfport, Mississippi. He used to practice what he calls small-town law. His joke is that all he’s ever missed in life is the n-e-r at the end of his name. Then we’d be Faulkners. We have what you might call a complex relationship, since he thinks the religion, um, makes me a fool. He and my mother argued about it and about me all the time, and finally they broke apart when I was in divinity school. Basically she believed and he didn’t. And in his mind she coddled me. And I guess she did. In his mind, anyway, that explains my being a priest. Her obsessive piety.”

Natasha took a little more of the wine. “Still?”

“I guess. He’s retired and he has a new wife I haven’t seen.”

“He doesn’t visit you in Memphis.”

Faulk shrugged. “Something about his peripheral vision makes it so he can’t drive anymore, but he talks of getting the new wife to drive him over one day. They were married this past fall, and of course he was glad to have me know it was a civil ceremony. Her name’s Trixie. I’ve talked to her on the phone. Soft, sweet voice. And I’ve seen her picture with him on the Christmas card.” Sitting back, folding his arms across his chest, he sighed. “I’d like one more glass of wine, I think.”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

As he signaled the server, he said, “By the terms of my mother’s last will and testament, I have a trust fund, really enough to live on if I don’t go crazy with it. So if I leave the priesthood I won’t—”

The server came and poured, still without saying anything, and they sipped the wine.

A little while later she said, “I think I’m getting blotto.”

So they ordered coffee and stayed until all the other patrons were gone from the place — the old grouchy server and the bartender talking quietly at the bar.

She was telling him about being eighteen years old and arriving in France with only the vaguest ideas of what she might do with her life. The world was wide and welcoming. As she talked she was suddenly aware of the coarseness of her hands, the bitten fingernails. She folded them under her chin and looked out at the street. Then, slowly, with a small soundless breath, set them down on the table between them, fingers spread, in plain sight. “Anyway, it was a good time. I felt like I’d found the place on earth where I belonged. I took a job as an au pair for a Dutch liquor wholesaler and his wife and two children after I graduated, because I didn’t want to come back to the States. I met my friend Constance Waverly working for them. My rich lady friend. She’s older. So you see, I have experience, I guess because of Iris, really, being friends with—” She stopped.

“You were going to say ‘with people who are so much older’?”

“With people who are a good deal older, sure.”

“That’s — reassuring.”

She sipped her coffee and sought something else to talk about.

“And how old is Constance?”

“Fifties. I’m supposed to spend some time with her in Jamaica in September. A little vacation she’s offered me. All I have to do is pay my way down.”

“Ever been there?”

“No.”

“Nice place.” He stared. “I hear.”

“I’m sorry if I said something wrong,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“It’s all right, really.”

Deciding to pretend that she’d already forgotten about it, she said, “What’re people saying about you leaving the priesthood?”

“Well, you’re the first person I’ve told other than the warden of the vestry about my — difficulty. And he doesn’t really know I want to leave.”

She said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But you’re the first one to know all of it.”

“Not Aunt Clara?”

“No — not yet. But I don’t think it’ll matter much to her.”

“Why me?”

Something changed in his eyes, a very slight narrowing; it could’ve been the light. “I don’t know,” he said.

He walked her to her car, and they exchanged a hug before she got in behind the wheel.

“Good night,” he said. Then: “Let’s go somewhere else tomorrow.”

“Call me,” she said.

He stood under the streetlamp and watched her go, and she saw him in the side-view mirror.

In her apartment she had a whiskey, trying to offset the coffee and the nervousness she felt. Marsha Trunan had called twice and left two messages. Natasha reflected that her last remaining friend in the city might soon go the way of the others. She made herself return the call.

“What,” Marsha said, her voice thick with sleep.

“I woke you. I’m sorry.”

“I knew it would be you. I wasn’t asleep.”

“You called me today?”

“Where are you?” Marsha wanted to know.

“Home.”

“Want a visitor?”

“Marsha, I’m really fried. It’s so late.”

“Busy, busy.”

Natasha said nothing.

“I’ve got tickets to something called Hamlet at the National Theatre way in June. Way, way off in June. And I hear it’s a pretty good play by this English dude named Shakespeare.”

Natasha sighed. “Sounds interesting.”

“But you can’t say that far ahead.”

“I’m sorry, Marsha. I’m just so—”

The other interrupted her. “Busy, right. I get it. I’ll stop calling.”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Well, anyway, I’ve got news,” Marsha went on. “Guess who’s divorcing his insane wife and marrying some Ph.D. sociology student at GW.”

Natasha waited. She could not remember when the other would have learned about it all, and then she felt she knew: Constance.

“You remember your photographer friend. Mackenzie.”

She expected to feel a sting, but it didn’t come. “Why would that mean anything to me?”

“Oh, come on. I know all about it. And I haven’t divulged it, either, like someone else we know. But a lot of people saw that you were pretty thick with him.”

“Well, anyway. Good for him. I’m sure it was love at first sighting.”

Marsha laughed, and coughed, and said through her sputtering that she was going to steal the line.

“You can have it,” Natasha told her.

“God! I miss you. You are amazing. If it was me, I’d be a hopeless mess. But you—”

“Marsha, he’s so gone from me.”

“You’re strong. I wish I was strong.”

“Tell me.”

“Oh, things’re cool with me, really. I wish I had your troubles sometimes.”

“I’m supposed to go to Jamaica with Constance in early September. Why don’t you come with us? We could split the cost of a room ourselves.”

“Constance wouldn’t speak to us for decades.”

Natasha heard her light a cigarette. “Listen, Marsha, I really should get to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise.”

“Bye,” Marsha said, and hung up. Something like a song note sounded in her voice: two syllables. “Bye-eye.”

Natasha listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, feeling the separation. She would call her back, say she loved her. She punched the number, then felt too tired for the talk that would follow. She pressed the disconnect and put the handset down.

Sitting at her small night table, she opened a book. Nearly midnight. She heard sirens out in the night, someone shouted in the street a block or two over. It was the sound of a Saturday night in this part of the city. Without even quite attending to it, she put the book down, undressed and got into bed, and lay there in the light from her reading lamp, gazing at the ceiling and going over the day, afraid to think forward.

So the photographer was breaking up his marriage after all.

Willing herself away from any thoughts of him, she conjured the picture of Michael Faulk as he appeared in her side-view mirror, standing under the streetlight. She went to sleep with this image in her mind like a ghost outline after looking into bright light.

Love Life

1

The weather had been breezy and a bit cooler than usual, and then it warmed up, and you knew real spring had arrived. She took the week off and saw him every day, making sure they went to places where it was unlikely they would encounter anyone from her office. He showed that he had divined this when they were on their way to dinner at his aunt Clara’s, explaining that long ago he’d extracted a promise from her not to talk about his comings and goings.

Her tall old house in Cleveland Park was reminiscent of the house in Collierville where Natasha had grown up, with its wide front porch and its Italianate windows. Going up the sidewalk in front felt like coming home. Here were the same worn steps, the same spindle-shaped wooden supports for the railing. Aunt Clara stood in the doorway with arms extended in greeting as they came up the walk. She was thin, sharp featured, with dark auburn hair and brilliant light blue eyes. Natasha thought briefly of the daughter, the senator’s wife, Greta. The eye color was the same, and you saw something very similar in the jawline.

“Can I call you Tasha?” Clara asked. “When I was a girl I had a friend Natasha and we all called her that. Do any of your friends call you Tasha?”

“Well, no — but I don’t mind at all. If you want to.”

“Sorry I’m so forward.”

“No,” Natasha hurried to say. “Really.”

Aunt Clara’s husband, Jack, was Italian, and he kept a wine cellar and was proud of it, happy to show it off. At dinner, he told about being a young man ignorant of anything but the taste of beer and pouring down the sink a gift bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1956 because it wasn’t sweet. “Well, I was only twenty-four. Grand cru, worth about two hundred seventy-five dollars back then. I lied to the nice guy who gave it to me in gratitude for helping him get his car out of a ditch. Said it was excellent, and of course he was stunned that I’d opened it.”

Aunt Clara said, “The deepest regret of the man’s life.”

“That makes him very lucky,” said Natasha.

After dinner, they all sat out on the porch, and Jack smoked a pipe. They remarked about the hot weather that would arrive soon, the town’s unbearable humidity. Clara said her daughter had recently decided to take up yoga in order to help her relax.

“She always seems so relaxed,” Natasha said.

Clara smiled. “She’s as nervous as the very idea of nervousness. And I think I did it to her, too. I was such an anxious mom. Saw threats everywhere. The poor thing was bearing up under a catastrophic imagination way before she became the senator’s wife, no kidding.”

“I think a person’s character is probably there at birth,” said Jack, blowing smoke.

Clara turned to Faulk and said, “Have you spoken with your father lately?”

“Not too long ago. Couple weeks.”

“I wonder how he’s doing.”

“He said something about stopping to see me on their way to visiting Trixie’s family in Tuscaloosa next month. I’m pretty sure it’s Trixie’s idea.”

“Don’t be so hard on him.”

“Well.”

They sat breathing the spring air, the fragrance of Jack’s tobacco. A bird sang in the nearest tree, and Clara whistled at it, making almost the same sound.

“That’s good,” Jack said, smiling without removing the pipe stem.

It was a pleasant, calm evening, and Natasha watched them, wondering at their ease together. Faulk had said nothing of his plan about the clergy.

As they were taking their leave, Clara said to Natasha, “I hope I’ll be seeing you,” and embraced her. Then she kissed Faulk on the cheek. “We’ll keep the light on, as usual. But you know we always do that anyway.”

“Thanks, darling,” Faulk said. “Thank you very much.” He put his arm around Natasha, and they walked down the sidewalk toward Thirty-Sixth Street, where he’d parked the car. The streetlights made shadows of the laden tree branches across the sidewalk. She felt pleasantly sleepy. “That was such fun,” she said. “What cool people.”

“I stay with them every time I come to Washington. Since my divorce, Aunt Clara’s been worried about my well-being. I think she’s convinced you’ll be good for me.”

Natasha hooked her arm in his. “She’s wonderful. I want to be like her when I grow up.”

“I know that feeling.”

“It’s funny. Politics didn’t come up at all.”

“Cousin Greta came up. That’s politics in a way. Her nervousness. It’s all about what she has to do with her days.”

“But you know Greta always does seem so comfortable and at ease. Like she was born to it. She was glowing at that Human Relations dinner.”

“Yeah, well, she claims Clara’s house is the only place in the city where she doesn’t have to be the senator’s wife. You should see her and Clara together. Clara talks to her so tenderly, like she’s eleven years old and still living under her roof. And of course no mention is ever made of the, um, business. It’s like furniture: always there, but you never talk about it.”

“I thought you might say something about your plans.”

It took a moment for him to respond. “I’m not sure why I didn’t. I’ll tell her sometime before I go back to Memphis.”

They went along the walk to the corner. The concrete was uneven, a tree root having forced it to buckle. He tightened his grip on her arm as they negotiated this and then let go when they crossed the street. Opening the car door, he said, “So where’ll we go tomorrow? It’s your call, I believe.”

“I want to make love,” she said. “Tonight. Now.”

He stood shuffling with the car keys.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“I’m thinking where we can go.”

“My apartment,” she said.

So their first time was in her bed in the small room with one window overlooking East Capitol Street. Before they went in there, though, they sat for an hour on the sofa in her combination living room and kitchen, sharing a snifter of brandy. She liked that he was not in a hurry. At one point she lay her head against his shoulder. She told him about wanting to grow up to be an artist.

He looked at the little square frames with the watercolor faces in them on the wall. “Are those yours?”

“Yes.”

He got up and went to them and stood gazing. He took his time in front of each one. Finally he said, “They’re amazing. Truly. You must know how good they are. Who’re the models?”

“I don’t know. Except, you know, I do feel like I know all of them. I buy old photographs from antiques stores and try to paint the faces, and you do get a feeling for a person, painting a face. I haven’t done it for a while.”

He came back and sat down. “You have to start again. These really are quite amazingly good.”

She felt the need to change the subject. “What will you do when you leave the priesthood?”

“Haven’t thought about it much,” he said. “Some kind of social work? I’ve had to write a homily every week, and not having to do that is going to be good. I can get to some of the reading I’ve been too busy to do. I’ve been rereading Thomas Aquinas. And I’m not trying to impress you with my erudition. Really, it’s calming.”

“It’s Catholic.”

“Well, we’re English Catholics, right?”

“I went to that church down in Charlottesville. A big metal statue of him out in front of the place. A very podgy, disgruntled-looking aluminum monk. And a building that looks like a spaceship.”

“I spent some time reading in his big book when I was a kid. Something reassuring about having everything laid out in that orderly way. I liked that. Still do. It might’ve been what led me to life in the church. Not his, of course.”

“Let’s not talk about church,” she said. Then: “Will you wait until I can put things away?”

“Of course.”

He sat on the sofa in the light of the one lamp, legs crossed, a magazine open in his lap, looking like someone in a dentist’s office. It was endearing, and sweet. She went into the other room and worked behind the closed door, putting dirty clothes into the bottom of the closet, stacking books neatly on the nightstand, and changing the bed. She worked hurriedly, and when she came back out to the living room she found him standing at the bookcase, hands clasped behind his back, gazing at the titles.

“We’ve got some of the same books,” he said.

She took him by the hand and led him into the little room. He moved as if worried about waking someone, padding to the window and pulling the curtain aside to look out. “Nice view of the Capitol.”

“Yes.”

He came back and put his arms around her, kissing her neck, the side of her face. His mouth tasted of the brandy. They were standing beside the bed. They sat down and looked at each other.

“I’m nervous,” he told her.

“Me, too.”

They made love, saying little, and she came very quickly, holding tightly to him. He kept going, and she spread her legs wider to take him deeper, murmuring his name.

“I’m going to come in you,” he said suddenly, loud.

“Do. Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes.”

Afterward, they lay in the tangle of sheets, saying nothing for a time. Finally he leaned up on one elbow and gazed at her. “That was glorious.”

“Can you stay?” she asked.

His expression was faintly bemused. “I’m not going anywhere, if it’s all right.”

This gave her a distressing sense that he might suppose she had done this often enough to wonder. She said, “I don’t know what the protocol is. I’ve never done this.”

“Here?” he said.

She answered simply. “Here, yes.”

“I’m glad I’m the first. Here.” He smiled.

She reached up and brought him to her, then rolled over on top of him and began softly to move down. When she took him, still a little flaccid, into her mouth, he moaned, “Oh, lover.” She felt him harden, and she tightened her lips and pulled, and then ran her tongue slow along the shaft, and then straightened and straddled him, guiding him into her, sinking and rising on him, head back, hands gripping his shoulders. It went on. It was very good. She paused, bending to his face, kissing him, tightening the muscles of herself around him, then straightened, moving her hips back and forth, rising and sinking. “I’m going to come,” she said, and did, and held him tight inside her, hands still gripping his shoulders, her head drooping so that her hair was in his face.

Later, they went into her small bathroom and took a shower together, moving gingerly in concert because of the small space and the clutter of the bottles of shampoo and conditioner. He held her in the rush of warm water while she let it cascade over her hair. They stayed until it began to get cold. Then they toweled off — he dried her and she him — and returned to the bed. She lay back and opened her legs, and he kneeled before her, paused, moaned, lowering his head. He began kissing her inner thighs until, with tantalizing slowness, he licked her. And when she was about to come, raising himself, he pushed deliciously inside. She felt the easing, the falling through, without quite going over, and he went on, apologizing for taking so long, until at last he, too, was finished.

“So lovely,” she murmured.

“It’s been a long time,” he breathed. “Too long.” He was still out of breath.

“Let’s sleep now. Or do you want something else to drink? I have some wine in the refrigerator.”

“I don’t want to move.”

“Can I get it for you?”

“I don’t want you to move.”

She snuggled closer, put one leg over his middle, and felt him running warm out of her — how good to have this sensation without the attendant stab of guilt or aversion; how wonderful to feel so clean and clear.

“Where do we go tomorrow?” he said.

2

She chose the Corcoran Gallery. Though he had driven or walked by the building many times during visits to the city, he had never been in. They spent a pleasant couple of hours looking at an exhibit of Impressionist paintings on loan from the Louvre — and then they went across the river to Mount Vernon and Arlington Cemetery, those somber, gentle slopes, row upon row of white crosses and six-sided stars. At the Kennedy grave site, they stood quietly among other visitors and read the words of the speeches.

She said, “Doesn’t seem fair.”

“What.”

“Lincoln wrote the words on his memorial.”

He stared for a moment, unable to decide how serious she was. “You’ve been working in politics too long, I think.”

“It’s the truth. Right?”

“I think JFK wrote his inaugural himself.”

She shrugged. “He had help.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t remember him,” she said.

“Well, I was ten when he died. I remember him. And I remember that. Everybody remembers where they were that day.”

She said, “For me it’s the Challenger disaster.”

They made their way down to the parking lot and drove back across the river, to Georgetown. He noted that she appeared almost passive about the evening, but then he realized that this came from a form of relaxation: her smile was both playful and compliant, the expression on her face giving forth a lovely intimation of gratitude, perhaps not for him, particularly, but for the fineness of the day. He kept the talk light, and the way her dark eyes seemed to narrow very slightly when she concentrated on something delighted him.

The next morning, they drove out to Middleburg for a long leisurely afternoon of thrift shopping. They stayed there that night. And the following morning they traveled down to the Old Town section of Fredericksburg to look at antiques. He watched her negotiate with a dealer about a set of old pewter cups for Iris, and together they rummaged through old postcards and photographs in a bin. She bought thirty of them in a packet. One family’s photos going back to 1913.

It was gratifying to discover that they had the same fascination with the individual details and concerns of past lives.

He wanted to look at Civil War battlefields in the area, and she agreed to this with an enthusiasm that warmed him; it was an interest of hers as well. They went to Marye’s Heights, and over to Chancellorsville, then on to Manassas and even out to little Ball’s Bluff, in Leesburg. This necessitated intervals of travel on the highways and the country roads, too, and they were quiet for long periods. When they spoke, it was mostly about the battles that had thundered back and forth in these peaceful hills and fields. He was impressed with her knowledge of all that, her comprehension of the politics of the time, and when they were standing at the little monument to the action at Ball’s Bluff, he told her so.

She bowed her head. “Thank you, Mr. Professor, sir.”

“Well, I am impressed.”

“You just can’t believe someone my age could be at all knowledgeable.”

“That’s not how I meant it.”

“Just teasing you,” she told him. “I did a lot of reading growing up because I was alone so much. I even knew about Thomas Aquinas.”

“Hey, I don’t feel there’s anything about you I have to compensate for.”

“I was being silly. Okay?”

“Okay.” He put his arm around her. “Let’s forget it.”

But that night, in her bed, lying awake in the dark with the sound of traffic out the window, he couldn’t sleep, and while she moved and murmured, dreaming, he kept thinking about the numbers: when she was five years old, he was already old enough to vote; when she was ten, he had been married for two years. He quietly got out of the bed and went into her little living room. It was chilly, and he pulled the afghan that covered the sofa around himself. Looking through more of the books, he found a volume of Shakespeare. He took it to the kitchenette and had a glass of water, then poured himself some of the sauvignon blanc that was in the refrigerator. Most of the flavor was gone from it, but he thought it might help him sleep. Finally he sat on the sofa with the afghan over his shoulders, looking through the Shakespeare. The line she had told him that Iris embroidered on a pillow rose to his mind. The phrase was vaguely familiar. He had seen two Shakespeare plays in the last three or four years. He looked through Hamlet, and then The Tempest.

And there it was, in the second scene. He closed the big book, satisfied, as if he had won some kind of contest, and abruptly felt foolish for it.

He crawled back into her bed and was very still when she turned and put her arm over his chest. The feeling of intimacy, the slight sourness of her breath in sleep, the warmth of her body, so close, caused something to collapse in his heart. He told himself that he’d had the wine, and therefore could sleep. But sleep did not come, and he lay there doing the math, worrying all the more about it because he knew now that he was in love.

3

Friday morning at Harpers Ferry they hiked up beyond the old ruin of Saint John’s Church and the grass-overgrown, tumbledown two-hundred-year-old graves adjacent to it, to the big flat boulder where Thomas Jefferson reportedly stood and declared that this view of the conjoining rivers and opposing bluffs was worth the grueling journey across the Atlantic. They stood together on that rock, a light breeze moving over them, and held hands, watching the waters course and mingle in currents and eddies far beneath them.

“I’m beginning to feel like this touring is a pretext,” he said.

“Explain.”

“I don’t really care so much about it now. I just — I want to be around you. We could’ve stayed in bed today, at your apartment.”

“The air-conditioning doesn’t work that well. We’d be miserable there in the heat all day.”

They watched the white folds of the water below and saw two people — a man and a woman — high on the cliff across the way. The two people were wearing backpacks, and it looked like they had dry-tooling axes and ropes. Apparently they were serious. There seemed something ostentatious about all that equipment. Except that now the man dropped something shiny, and it bounced terribly off an outcropping of rock far below. Natasha gave a little cry of alarm.

“A long fall,” her companion said.

She covered her eyes. “I can’t watch them.” A second later, she peeked through her fingers.

“I did a little climbing in Colorado when I was in my twenties,” he told her. “Well — once. I didn’t mean to make it sound like more. It was just once. Very supervised.”

They watched the couple move across the face of the cliff.

Suddenly he said, “It’s from Shakespeare. The line embroidered on the pillow.”

She looked at him.

He shrugged. “It sounded familiar when you told me about it. I was up last night, looking through your books. It’s from The Tempest. I saw it done last year in the park.”

“ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”

“It’s part of something Prospero asks Miranda. ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’ He’s asking her what she remembers.”

“I should know the play, but I don’t.”

“I’m in love with you,” he said evenly, straightly, as if answering a question.

She pressed herself against him, looked up, touched his cheek, and kissed him. It was a long, exquisite kiss. Then she gazed into his eyes and murmured, “ ‘What seest thou …?’ ”

“I want to marry you and have a family and raise a bunch of kids,” he said.

“Yes. The answer’s yes.”

“But I’m a little worried.”

“People will find things to say anyway.”

“Then it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “Sixteen years.”

She kissed him. “Does that answer your question?”

“It answers everything in my life. When do you want to?”

“In Memphis — in September. After I get back from Jamaica. Something small. Very few people. I don’t want a big deal.”

“Can I say the words?”

She smiled.

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

They stood close, gazing at the country below and around them, and then others came rushing up the hill out of the cut path, children with older boys and girls, teenagers showing off for one another. Natasha looked at them with that sense of pity a lover feels for the less fortunate of her kind.

4

In mid-August, she gave notice that she would leave her job with Senator Norland and return to Memphis. Iris had suffered a fall and hurt her knee and had required surgery. She was healing slowly. Natasha was needed at home. This was the truth but, of course, not the whole truth.

She and Faulk had not announced their plans to marry yet; she was keeping to her determination not to divulge anything at work about her personal life. Since the first days of the affair with Mackenzie, she had maintained a strict rule about it.

She had kept the present news even from Iris until the second week of May.

Faulk came to Washington every other weekend through the summer months, and they traveled to the Maryland and Virginia beaches or visited with Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack and sometimes Marsha Trunan, too. It was a splendid summer, full of laughter and wide-ranging talk and long walks on the shady streets of the city. They went sailing off Annapolis and picnicking at Great Falls, and they visited the galleries and saw concerts and went to restaurants, and it was as though she were recovering something lost, that adventurous young someone she remembered.

On the muggy, oven-hot afternoon of her last day at work, Senator Norland tried to talk her into remaining in Washington. She could consider this a long vacation. She listened politely to him, sure now that Faulk had done as she asked and kept it to himself: the senator would not be talking to her about staying if he knew why she had resigned. She was going home and taking her private life with her.

Anyhow, that was how it felt.

The air conditioner whirred in one window, and the other was foggy with inside moisture. She experienced a moment of disorientation, pretending to consider his words. He emphasized that she could come back anytime. He stood over her with arms folded. On his desk were photographs of him with Greta, and Clara and Jack, too, and his own parents — two very jolly-looking people standing on a porch. The wall was festooned with framed photographs of him with presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton, and there was a letter wishing him well on his reelection signed by the current president. But no picture of the senator with him. Tom Norland had fought hard to keep George W. from being given the office by the Supreme Court, and he had been outspoken in his criticism of the whole affair. Natasha had typed some of the letters and had contributed wording for them, too.

But she had never wanted to be the person people saw her as being, in that office. The work interested her, but she had no enthusiasm for wearing the smart little business outfits and the jewelry; never wanted to be the type — with no strand of hair out of place, the senator’s administrative person, the one everyone depended on for practical matters, and about whom they all made easy assumptions, without any inkling of the nights she had spent in other parts of the city. Even before the affair, their picture of her was far from who she really was, sitting in that fluorescent light behind the desk while her thoughts turned on places she had wandered before she was twenty-five years old: Paris and the Loire Valley; Nice and Florence and Rome; Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and Africa. From her earliest conscious life she had experienced the sense of being held back by her own skin and bones, confined in space. This feeling had carried her across the world.

Now, with Michael Faulk, she was full of the old thrilling sense of freshness, on the verge of a new life, and in this last week of work the days crawled, reminding her of the tremendous unhappiness she had endured here. She and her new husband would spend next spring in the south of France. It would indeed be like getting her twenties back.

When she lived in Provence, she went on day trips, biking the roads lined with plane trees and walking the paths above the sea at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Her thoughts about it were delectable. She could be in those places again, and with the time to take it all in, and to paint. She was beginning to believe she might manage to do something consequential, something people might remember. The idea delighted her, though she recognized that just now, since she had not painted anything in many months, it was a form of daydreaming. But she would work to realize it. She felt the resolve like a rush of adrenaline. Life was gorgeous; she would make it so.

Working for the senator, with the daily requirements and the little satisfactions of being on the inside, all that was over now, and she felt detached from it and from the thin, stooped, gaunt man who stood before her, talking. His face was blue veined from the years of alcoholism. He wore a lapel pin with the word HOPE on it. He was a humorous, decent, quiet man whose voice, when he was serious, had a way of making her feel drowsy. “None of this is getting through to you, is it.” He grinned. It was not a question.

“I’m flattered that you’ve taken the time,” she said. “I really am — and I’m grateful. It’s been a wonderful adventure, Washington.” Though in some important ways this was true, she still felt as if she had said something deceitful.

“Well, I couldn’t let you go without at least expressing what I hope you’ll take as my friendly concern.”

“I do. I have.”

“And you’re sure I can’t give you some money to tide you over until you find something out there.”

“No, really. I’m fine. I’ve actually saved some. You’ve already done more than you should.”

“Ah. It doesn’t amount to much.” He had made the arrangements with the storage company and the movers, thinking they were for Natasha alone. All her belongings, which as of that morning were in a storage bin on Georgia Avenue, would, the week of September 10, be headed by truck back to Tennessee.

She rose from her chair and offered a handshake. “Thank you so much for everything. And thank Greta for always being so kind.” They embraced, and that was that.

She would spend the time with Constance Waverly in Jamaica, then join Faulk in Memphis on the twelfth (they had joked about how it would be their own Twelfth Night).

Jamaica was the vacation Constance had offered her in the unhappiness of last winter. People were so kind. She walked along Pennsylvania Avenue in the bright sun and looked at the faces, everyone showing consideration, negotiating the traffic without stopping to realize what a fine thing it was, this organized hurry and bustle of a summer afternoon.

Back at her empty apartment, the phone had not been cut off yet, and she called Faulk to tell him about her conversation with Norland.

“Did you tell him the news?”

“Yes. I just said.”

“About us, sweetheart.”

“Oh, well, he was so kind about storage and the movers, I–I just couldn’t do it. I mean, he wanted me to know I could consider this a long break.”

“Well, of course marriage is such a deeply embarrassing thing to have to go through.”

“Stop it, Michael. I can’t help how I feel about it. I didn’t want my private life bandied about in the halls of that place. You knew that. Aunt Clara will say something to him anyway.”

“No, she won’t. It’s our business.”

“Well, exactly,” Natasha said.

He sighed, and she sighed back at him.

“Are we having a fight?” she said.

“I hope you have fun in Jamaica,” he told her.

“Do you want me not to go? Because I’m going.”

“Go.”

“Bye,” she said, and hung up.

Out the window, sun blazed on the façades across the street and the people strolling by, the cars gliding past. She turned and looked at the empty rooms and then walked through them one more time, pausing in the bedroom, that small space where they had first made love. It looked barren now with its faded places on the walls where the pictures had hung.

5

She had met Constance in Nice while working as an au pair for the liquor wholesaler and his wife and their two overindulged children, a girl and boy only eighteen months apart. The six-year-old, the girl, was verbally quite advanced and already showing signs of a fundamental dishonesty, and she had been giving Natasha a hard time. Her name was Elga. The couple was from Utrecht, but they spoke perfect French and English, and Constance, back when she lived in England, had purchased art from the wife, who was a ceramist. Natasha was introduced — the lady of the house took some pleasure speaking of her young American servant, or so it seemed to Natasha — and in the polite talk that followed, Constance said she had spent time in Tennessee and still had a small house in East Memphis, which she was trying to sell. Memphis remained the subject of their conversation, in English, while Natasha tried to keep Elga from taunting the boy. A moment later, when the Dutch couple had gone to prepare snacks, Constance murmured that the pretty children were decidedly not pretty when considered from the inside. “Selfish, spoiled little buggers, if you ask me,” she said, and the mild obscenity made Natasha laugh. It became a jag. Constance got lost in it, too, both of them unable to speak to the Dutch couple, who waited impatiently for them to subside.

The increasing awkwardness fed the laughter, of course, and it also made them friends.

They saw each other several times that week and kept the connection, though Constance was perpetually moving back and forth from one city to another. Through the six years Natasha was living in D.C., the older woman spent periods of a week or two at a time in the city, really only to see Natasha.

The bond was complex. At times Constance exhibited a form of intolerance for Natasha’s other friends, little asides in conversations, a certain tone when speaking about them, often preceding the name with the word that.

She would say “That George” or “That Marsha” or “That Kelly,” like a schoolteacher discussing unmanageable students, and she could be critical regarding Natasha’s history — seeing herself as a kind of arbiter, especially concerning the younger woman’s relations with men. Her disapproval about the affair with the photographer had been both unsurprising and at the same time intensely dispiriting.

Indeed, they didn’t speak for several weeks after Natasha told her about it. Constance sent vaguely petulant notes wondering who was in Natasha’s life now. It was almost as if she wanted Natasha only for herself. She had a grown daughter with whom she didn’t get along very well, and on occasion Natasha wondered if the other saw her as a kind of surrogate.

So she worried some about the Jamaica trip.

Constance’s money was from her father’s side of the family. The old man had bought a four-mile strip of shoreline that nobody wanted near Pensacola, and in his last years he often talked about this one lucky chance of his: buying a piece of swampy lowland property that he ended up selling, acre by acre, to the hotel chains. Constance herself was in possession of a large house in Malibu, where her daughter lived alone, and a condominium in Manhattan overlooking Central Park. She was renting that to a city official. She now lived temporarily in an apartment near Old Orchard Beach, on Maine’s southern coast, where she was having a house custom-built for herself. Jamaica was a yearly trip for her.

That afternoon on the last day of August, Natasha left her apartment for good and headed for National Airport. While waiting for her flight, she called Faulk to apologize for her sharpness earlier.

“I’m happy about us,” he said. “And I want people to know it.”

“But it really wouldn’t have been the right time to say anything, Michael. I think it would’ve made the poor man feel silly after all his talk about my career in politics.”

“He’s going to feel silly anyway, when he knows.”

“Well, just tell him I didn’t have the courage or something like that. In a way I didn’t have the courage.”

Faulk’s sigh this time was not pronounced, nor intended to be anything but itself. “You have fun, darling,” he said. There was so much he did not know about her, and just now it made her anxious.

“I’ll call you each day,” she said.

“You don’t have to do that. Just be careful.”

“I will. You, too.” He would fly to Washington at the end of next week and then take a train to New York on Monday for the wedding of a family friend. How strange, he had said, to know that he would not be the one conducting the ceremony.

“I’ll only be in town the one night,” he said. “But the wedding’s in the afternoon, and since it’s down where the World Trade Center is, I just might go in the morning and have a look at the city from one of the towers. Be fun to get breakfast a hundred floors up.”

“I have to call Iris now.”

“I’ll look in on her before I go. And I guess I’ll have to try like hell not to see Tom Norland when I get to D.C.”

“Michael.”

“I’m taking an Amtrak express up to New York Monday, to make the rehearsal dinner. Dad and Trixie will arrive around two in the afternoon. The wedding’s midday Tuesday, so I’ll be back in Washington late that night.”

“I’ll call you from paradise,” Natasha said.

“Be careful in those waves. Promise?”

She promised. Then: “And you don’t go dancing in the clubs down in the Village.”

“Not much of that on Monday night, with two elderly people in tow. Anyway, there’s no riptides down there. I’m going to be with Dad, Trixie, and the wonderful Ruhms of Brooklyn, New York, very generous but devoutly conservative Christians. We’ll be downtown. Rehearsal dinner Monday evening, wedding and reception the following noon, with the real possibility that all of it will have to be endured in the absence of anything but fruit punch to drink because the groom’s elderly old aunt Linda gets upset at the sight of anything stronger. Probably won’t be any dancing, either. Maybe just a couple pictures of the city from high up.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said. “Even being in paradise.”

After they hung up, she sat in a small airport café, drinking coffee, feeling strangely bereft. It would be good to see Constance, in spite of the older woman’s occasional tendency to be magisterial.

Poor Constance was like that with her grown child as well, and it was the reason the daughter wasn’t coming to Jamaica and Natasha was. The daughter, against her mother’s wishes, had purchased an antiques store in Malibu, using money given her upon graduation, last June, from law school at Yale.

The two were scarcely speaking.

Natasha thought about being with Constance in the middle of this complication.

Out the window to her left, beyond the line of planes at their gates, she saw the Washington Monument, small in the distance, with two stripes of shadow on it, the shadows moving up and dissolving in sunlight. She reflected that she would not miss this city as much as she had thought she might when she first started thinking of leaving it. Well, she was about to enter a whole new life, a different way of being in the world. The wife of an ex-priest. She sighed, thinking of it. “Help,” she said, low, under her breath. It was as close as she ever got to prayer. She started to order another coffee but then thought better of it and asked for hot water instead. She sipped that, warming herself from the inside. And she called Marsha Trunan. There was only Marsha’s voice: “You know what to do after the beep.”

“I’m at the airport. Getting ready to fly down and see Constance. Be back in Memphis in a couple of weeks. I’ll call you from there. I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid about spending time. I’ll do better.” She broke the connection and felt suddenly so sad that she had to fight back tears. She went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and tossed it back, standing there.

The bartender was a tall round-faced man with arching bushy eyebrows and dark red lips. He stared.

“Flight nerves,” she told him, picking up her bag.

The plane was boarding.

In Jamaica — happily absorbed by the fresh charms of the place, the lovely aqua-colored waters of the Caribbean out her window, and the soft tropical evenings spent in surprisingly relaxed chatter, drinking cool rum cocktails and eating wonderful spicy meals of jerk chicken and ackee with salt fish — she realized again how pervasive her unhappiness had been, and she remembered reading somewhere that the most terrifying thing about despair was that it was unaware of itself as being despair.

The resort was near Kingston, a complex of bungalows ranged around a single hotel-sized building that stood like a sandy-colored fortress above the beach. It was all owned by an elderly German woman named Maria Ratzibungen and her two sons, each from a different father — the older from an industrialist named Dieter Ratzibungen, and the younger from a lover of Maria’s as her marriage was ending. This man had tried suicide when he couldn’t have her and had ended by deranging himself with years of drinking, living on the island within sight of her and his growing son. He was still a figure in their lives, surfacing now and then, looking like someone who had come to the island from a shipwreck. His name was Lawton. Constance had pressed Mrs. Ratzibungen to tell the story on the night she and Natasha arrived. Mrs. Ratzibungen and Constance were friends from Constance’s earlier visits. Neither of the German woman’s sons seemed to have any other family. They were both in their forties and looked like twins, though they were separated by four years. Their mother’s speech was pleasantly accented, but they spoke impeccable English, having been raised among relatives of their grandparents in London — German Jews on their mother’s side who’d had cousins in Manchester and had fled to England in 1934. The older one was forty-eight and went by the nickname Ratzi. Neither Constance nor Natasha saw Ratzi’s brother after their first day on the island.

All Mrs. Ratzibungen’s employees — cooks, waitstaff, those who kept the rooms — were Jamaican, and they dressed according to the traditions of life in the tropics: colorful skirts, blouses, and headscarves made from calico for the women; light shirts full of designs with flowers, loud colors in patterns, or depictions of sailboats, rising fish in the surf, or palm trees in the sun for the men. The men all wore shorts, even in the evenings. Mrs. Ratzibungen’s sons had taken to the island way of dressing.

Natasha got a tan and spent hours swimming. She called Faulk on the third day, and he told her that his father had decided not to attend the Ruhm wedding after all, because a mild case of gout had made it painful to walk. “So it’s only going to be me there, and it’s just as well, I guess. But, you know, I’m actually going to miss the old apostate.”

“We’ll go see him. As soon as we’re settled. Let’s.”

“You sound very happy.”

“It’s beautiful here. I wish you could see it.”

“Maybe I’ll take you back there one birthday.”

“I mean it, you really will love it.”

“And we will go visit the old man in Little Rock. Though he’ll be insufferable about my leaving the clergy, you can bet on that. Vindication. He’ll use the word.”

“I’ll listen for it.”

He laughed. “Think of it. We’ll go visit people, a married couple going around and shining for everybody.”

“And we’ll spend weekends in Jamaica,” she said.

“We’ll be island people half the year.”

“We’ll smell like coconut oil all the time.”

“You’re wonderful,” he said.

They began a pattern where they talked every other morning. He would call her, and the sound of his voice on the other end of the line was a warm reminder of the new life.

Her twelfth day there, she arose and looked out her window at the sea. The morning was gorgeous, white sand and emerald ocean stretching on into dark blue distance, the wide sky without a cloud, showing all the shades of the one color.

Fire

1

Faulk woke before light on that morning with a headache from too much wine. The airlessness of the room wasn’t helping. With a familiar sense of taking his punishment, he got up and swallowed some aspirin and a lot of water, then took a cool shower, and, without feeling any relief, lay back down to try reading for a spell. The wedding wouldn’t take place until noon, more than seven hours away, at Trinity Church, but he would not go down to the towers for breakfast. In the first place, he lacked the appetite, and finally he was too hungover to do much of anything but lie there and suffer it. The Marriott Downtown, three blocks from the church, was where the rehearsal dinner had been and where the groom’s whole family was staying. Faulk had booked himself a room uptown, and before the rehearsal evening was over, he was glad of this.

He had been unready for the well-meaning but essentially prying talk arising from the fact that he was not conducting the wedding ceremony. It placed him at a slight remove from everyone, as if they were all wondering about him.

Theo Ruhm and Faulk’s father had gone to college together; they had been friends for fifty years. Theo considered Faulk another son, and, when they were all boys, his four sons were like brothers. The groom, Charlie, was the youngest and the last to be married. Faulk had performed the ceremony for the three older ones, each in turn.

Everybody was solicitous of him — a couple of people called him Father Faulk and then blanched from embarrassment — and they all wanted to know how he was doing. He could not help hearing a note of concern in their voices, doubtless stemming from the belief that leaving the clergy involved something more complicated for him than the wish for a change. In any case, it seemed unpleasantly clear to him that to these kindly people the very idea was in need of some kind of explication: a man in his late forties leaving a twenty-year vocation for any reason, even if it was only to “seek happiness elsewhere.”

Theo Ruhm was particularly interested and wanted details and wasn’t shy about asking. He cornered Faulk at the entrance to the large ballroom where the rehearsal dinner was to be held, handed him a glass of wine, and said, “So tell me.”

“There’s really not much to tell.”

“Hey — this is me you’re talking to.”

“Well, but there really isn’t much to tell.”

Ruhm merely gazed at him, smiling.

“It stopped meaning anything to me, you know, Theo? I can’t explain it beyond that.”

“You turning into an atheist, like your old man?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“He’s the most religious atheist I ever saw. Been arguing with God his whole life. I still get pissed at him when he starts in about it. And I still love him like a brother.”

“He’ll think he’s won something with my leaving the priesthood.”

“So,” Theo Ruhm said. “How do you—quit, exactly, in your line of work.”

“I went to see my superior. The — the senior warden of the vestry. Who’s a friend.”

“And what did he say?”

Faulk looked at him. “You don’t really want to hear all this do you? Today?”

“You don’t think I’d be interested about what you go through?”

“You’re a good man, Mr. Ruhm.”

“Well,” Theo went on, raising his drink, “the prohibitionist aunt didn’t come, so we can have as much as we want of this. And it’s a happy time. I’m sorry Leander’s missing it. I was looking forward to meeting Trixie and having her meet my lady.”

“I was looking forward to seeing them, too,” Faulk said. “I’ve only spoken to Trixie on the phone a couple times myself.”

“I hope you’re happy, Michael,” said Ruhm, patting his upper arm.

“I am. And I’m happy for you, too, Theo.”

The Ruhms had been together only a couple of years, the boys’ mother having left Theo a decade ago to pursue happiness elsewhere. The phrase went through Faulk’s mind, an evil little turn, and he grasped the other’s hand and congratulated him on the marriage of his youngest son. The boys’ mother, Cheryl, was on the other side of the room celebrating with her side of the family and her new husband, who was a football coach. The new husband’s capacity for this kind of cheerfulness was a cause for worry, and even now he lifted a cocktail and drained it. Faulk saw this, wondering at the failure of kindness in everything he felt, standing there with his glass of wine in his hand and his changed life showing in his face. He wished Natasha could be with him, and the thought of her soothed him.

“You’ll like Natasha,” he said to Ruhm, but the older man was already distracted, greeting a business associate whose bushy red mustache looked as though it had been glued on, completely covering his mouth.

Faulk moved to another part of the room. A band was setting up, five young men with the apathetic look of being hired for the purpose of background music.

Faulk watched them, wishing he was in Tennessee. Or Jamaica. He had a glass of bourbon at the cash bar, then switched back to wine.

And he faltered through the afternoon, repressing the bad temper that troubled him when his new circumstance surfaced in the talk, striving for patience with his own wearisome explanations, the same anemic phrases others used over and over, phrases he hated—self-fulfillment, new challenges, time to move on—phrases that, discouragingly enough, contained an element of truth. He drank several more glasses of Burgundy before the sit-down for the rehearsal dinner. It was not noticed, particularly, because there was plenty to drink and no one was holding back. But when, at dinner, he realized that the alcohol was having an effect on him, he removed himself quietly and took a cab back to the hotel, where he had another whiskey and went to bed with the room spinning.

There, sleepless, he thought of his last meeting with Father Clenon, where he actually said the words “I want to renounce my vows.” He had come back from Washington, and Natasha. He went over the failures of his priesthood, and talking about it was like getting out of jail. Father Clenon stared at him for a long time. Finally he said, “Take a month? For me?”

“Let me do it now,” said Faulk. “For me.”

The other continued to stare, and there was something bitterly forbearing in his gaze. “Write the letter when you’re sure,” he said. “Let’s just put it that way.”

And so Faulk had waited through that following week.

Now, in the dark of predawn, he tried to read and couldn’t. His mind kept wandering to the strangeness of being outside the fold — someone had used the term — and to random images from the evening before. He had seen so many wedding gatherings. The blur of them made his mind ache.

How tired he was of being the one to whom others felt free to unpack their sorrows. Recognizing the self-centeredness of the feeling, he tried to think of something else. But it was true that while his own marriage was deteriorating he had listened to the marriage troubles of countless others, had endured his own suffering all alone, going through each day with the weight of it on his heart. And Joan was discreet. No one had the slightest inkling. Life went on that way for the more than two years it took her to decide.

He turned the television on and flicked through the channels. Old shows, news, commercial broadcasts, movies. Everything in progress, nothing beginning. He felt locked away from the world where all this was happening. It was unnerving, and yet vaguely agreeable, like being proved right about something.

Ten minutes after 5:00 a.m.

He turned the television off, took a Xanax, and lay down to try going back to sleep. And sleep came, with stealth. He saw Natasha standing by the window, going on about the pretty water of the river. She said “river” and he corrected her. It’s not a river, darling.

Yes, it is, she said with unfamiliar insistence.

No, it’s the Mediterranean Sea, he told her, aware now that this was a dream, and yet feeling quite certain that what he had said made perfect sense. In the next instant, he experienced the suspicion that he was wrong and felt an unreasonable terror of the possibility. It was the Life or Death of dreams, and he was casting about in his mind for the answer, which kept eluding him. Finally he could only repeat helplessly “The Mediterranean Sea,” like a prayer, the one explicable thing in the dream, and then that was obliterated, too, and he was not even dreaming anymore. Mysteriously, he was also aware of the blankness.

He woke shortly after nine with a sense of having worked his way up from an awful depth to consciousness. But the headache was gone. Rising, a bit groggy from the drug, he stumbled to the window and looked out. It was a perfect day for a wedding. “There it is,” he said aloud, smiling at the infinite rinsed sky stretching away over the tall roofs of the city with the small cylindrical water tanks and thickets of antennas and wires. “The Mediterranean Sea.”

It came to him that he did not feel like attending a wedding, even this one, with its happy couple and proud father. Just now, the thought oppressed him.

He made his way to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, then moved to the closet and started to dress, thinking of calling Natasha, though it was well past the time. She would already have left for the beach. He decided to try anyway, wanting to tell her about the dream. A recorded voice said that the volume of calls was too much and to try the number later. He pushed the button for the front desk and waited. No answer. Finally he lay back down, hands behind his head, and drifted a little, intending to sit up and try again in a moment. He looked at his watch and remembered that she was an hour behind him.

2

Because it was the day of the wedding in New York, Natasha did not expect to hear from him. This was her last day in Jamaica. She and Constance went out to the beach and had an hour sunning themselves and reading. Natasha stepped into the clear shallows and looked down at her feet in the sand. The water was cold, clean, and lucid, with its lime green color as you looked across it, and you could almost see the place in the distance where it began turning to the deepest blue. The sand was smooth and perfectly consistent, as though it had been designed and produced for human feet to track in it. She turned and looked back at Constance, who lay on her multicolored blanket, one arm across her face, one leg bent at the knee. The picture of relaxation. Natasha wondered why people weren’t strolling down to the beach, as on all the other mornings. “You suppose this is some kind of holy day?” she called to her friend. Constance raised her head and looked at her, then held both hands up, a shrugging motion, and went back to her sunbathing.

Natasha turned to look out at the waves coming toward her, and thought of Faulk. There was so much happiness to come, and now she made an effort not to allow it into her thoughts — as if to anticipate the fond future might render it precarious: her new life in Tennessee and her journey back to Europe in the spring. She saw herself painting in a sunlit room with the lovely countryside of Provence out the window and Michael Faulk somewhere close by, writing perhaps. Imagining this scene, she experienced suddenly a dark shift inside. She dipped her hands in the water and moved them back and forth, watching the swirls, concentrating on the traces running from the ends of her fingers. She saw the gulls gliding low across the iridescent surface and inwardly searched for the contentment she had just been feeling so strongly. Of course this propensity for the flow of her thoughts to shade into darkness was not new, and she had learned to accept it. But with Faulk she had come to believe she could grow out of it at last — that it would fade, becoming only an aspect of past life.

She had never known anything like this passion, and today’s crossing shadow was only that he was so far away. With the thousands of miles between them, it was natural to fear that the world might take him from her.

Though the unease she felt, missing him, brought on other worries.

His experience of the world was indeed unlike her own, and occasionally his seriousness about religion concerned her. The way his eyes glittered as he uttered the phrases of his faith. His fervor sometimes produced in her an irksome displeasure, which she had labored to stifle. Occasionally, she had made light of it, teasing him with the intent of bringing him back to earth about sounding too priestly.

At times her teasing was received in a less-than-lighthearted manner. “There’s stuff I’d rather not ponder,” he said. “Or be too conscious of. Thoughts that lead nowhere and only end in pain.”

“So you don’t question?” she asked him.

“I don’t expect an answer to the questions. So I try not to ask them.”

“And you’ve succeeded in that?”

“Failure,” he said with that sidelong smile, “is rampant where I live.”

How he fascinated her! She was sure now that she had never been in love before, had never even gotten near it. And there was something else, too: in the last few days, watching Constance conduct business over the phone with contractors about the design of the Maine house, she had begun to receive intimations about how much she, Natasha, had let the job in Washington take over her life. She had accepted the position merely to make enough money to spend a year in France painting, and the very effort to make possible the hoped-for journey had somehow diluted the hope itself. Constance’s focus was that house. She was continually rethinking everything about it, wanting the design to be in keeping with new ideas she had about the efficient use of energy and the least possible impact on the wildlife in the vicinity. It was her passion; it gave her definition and purpose.

Natasha stood in the cold water of the beach and thought about her own lack of some central resolve. She had dreamed of putting together a real body of work, a portfolio of paintings and drawings, too, and when actually painting she had always felt so fresh and glad. Yet she had let anything and everything, including her own wandering in the world, take precedence. And perhaps this had to do with her particular beginnings. After all, her earliest memories were of crisis, near and loving presences inexplicably taken away, first into distance and then into the limitless far quiet of the sky — something gravely wrong and her grandmother crying in the nights. Teachers had told her she was talented. Friends had marveled at what she could bring about with the stroke of a brush, and she had wasted so much time, so much of her young life chasing after some nameless inkling of happiness, as if she might come to a place, a physical somewhere else, where she would find whatever it was she had always missed, the right combination of nourishment for her soul, a sense of completion, and, at long last — she could admit it to herself now — relief. Solace.

Here, on this beach in Jamaica, remembering her plans with Faulk, she felt that very thing, that sighing release of the long pressure, and she murmured “My darling,” as though he were standing at her side. She looked at the shimmering horizon with its small white triangle of a single sailboat crossing.

Constance called to her from the beach. “Let’s go eat.”

Walking up to the resort, they saw Ratzi standing in the entrance. Natasha greeted him with a little wave and then, seeing the strange look on his face, paused and waited for him to speak.

He walked up to her and took her by the arms. She thought something had happened to Iris. But then he turned to Constance, and now she thought of Constance’s daughter. Ratzi stood back, almost bowing, wringing his small white hands. “Awful.” His voice was shaky. “I’m so sorry. It’s terrible. Terrible. You must come.” He went along the walk, and they followed, hurrying. Now Natasha thought that something must have happened to Maria Ratzibungen.

They entered the lobby, with its slowly turning ceiling fan and its plush chairs and benches and all the shapes of civilized enjoyment and recreation, the paintings and the statuary and the lush green plants, leaves the size of capes, several of which now screened some of the people — an alarming number of people — gathered there. The television was on. Natasha heard the voice of a newswoman say the phrase “minutes past the hour.” On the screen was a wide panorama of New York with smoke rising from it, a video taken from a distance, probably from a traffic helicopter. It did not quite register in her consciousness. It was something bad in the city. News. In the twelve days she had been here, she had not seen anyone watching this TV, which was hung from black wires on the side wall; only a few of the rooms had TVs in them. Now everyone crowded nearer the screen, and through the gathered others, Natasha saw the Twin Towers capped by the churning clouds of smoke. A little frame inside the larger picture showed the second plane cruising into its own shocking ball of flame.

“My God,” Constance said.

“What happened?” said Natasha, feeling the helpless absurdity of the question. Then, under her breath: “Michael’s there.” No one spoke. They were all staring at the screen. The images were like elements of an awful dream, one that played out impersonally, “witness dreams,” Natasha had always called them, where she saw things in the distance, as if she had just happened upon them in some series of events unwinding in general unconsciousness, a property of night, set to prey on anyone sleeping at that hour. On the television with its pixels and little strands of failed light, doubtless from a cameraman in a helicopter, she saw what she came to realize was a man and a woman standing in the open side of one of the buildings. They were holding hands; you could see that they were holding hands, flames licking up the widely spaced vertical steel ribs on either side of them. They seemed to falter, and then they leaped, and let go of each other, separating and disappearing into the smoke.

Everyone in the lobby of the hotel in far-off Jamaica screamed.

The newswoman went on talking, speaking carefully, slowly, in clipped phrases, inflectionless, concentrating on the smallest details, as a person might think of measurements and minutiae in order to preserve some hold on sanity. And now the camera caught another body hurtling down, that of a man, his suit jacket open to a white shirt and tie. The female newscaster tried to report it. “My God, are you seeing this,” she got out in a tearful voice. A video cameraman from a helicopter hovering near one of the openings made by the planes focused on a woman in light orange slacks and a dark blue blouse standing in the ruin and smoke. She actually appeared calm, so small there in the wide gash with all the destruction behind and around her. She lifted her hand and waved. That simple, forlorn, graceful motion looked almost like a greeting. The mind wouldn’t accept what it really was. She clung to the shattered place at the edge of the opening, leaning out slightly, and then turning, facing into the rubble edge of the wall. When smoke or steam began to come from her whole body, the image abruptly shifted, the cameraman evidently having turned the camera away from what was coming.

As the first tower began to collapse, another cry went up among the people in the lobby, and the young newscaster’s voice carried above it. “I believe there’s been some kind of further explosion. Are you seeing this?”

No one spoke. The crowd gathered in a tighter circle around the screen, another news voice talking about the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and still the cameras in New York showed the churning ash and smoke, the street-level cameras capturing the panic, people running, the yellowish-brown dust covering everything.

“The whole of southern Manhattan’s coated with this dust now,” said a male voice on the TV.

And Natasha turned to Constance. “Michael’s there. He was talking about going to the top of — he said he was — he was going up to the top of — he was—”

The other woman stared, beginning to comprehend.

Natasha, gasping for breath, felt all the strength go out of her legs. Constance gripped her by the arms. “We don’t know anything definite,” she said. “We don’t know anything. He’s probably not anywhere near it. Natasha, listen to me.”

Crying, Natasha said, “I think he — I can’t — no. No.”

“He’s probably still asleep in the hotel. There’s always a long line down there. And — and listen. I was there a couple of years ago, and I don’t think you can get up to the observation deck until something like ten o’clock. Now, really, honey. I remember that.”

They were both quiet a moment, and they saw the second tower collapse.

“Oh my God,” Constance said. “Those poor people. Those poor, poor people.”

“I have to get home,” Natasha told her, beginning to cry. “Oh, I have to go home. I want to go home.”

3

Faulk rose from the bed and finished dressing, and as he was tying his shoes the phone rang. He thought it might be the hotel desk.

It was Aunt Clara. “You all right?”

“Hey,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“My hotel room.”

“Look out the window.”

“I was just doing that.”

“And you’re all right.”

“Clara?”

“Turn the TV on.”

He reached behind him on the bed to get the remote. “What is it?”

“They’ve hit the World Trade Center.”

The television came to light, and there were the towers, burning. He looked back out the window and saw the spotless sky. “Who hit them.”

“Planes. Extremists. Airliners. Somebody.”

“Airliners?” he said. Then: “Airliners.”

“Where are you?” Clara said.

“Fifty-Fourth Street.”

“You tried calling Natasha?”

“They’ll be out at the beach.”

“Gotta try leaving a message for her.”

“My God,” Faulk said, watching the clip of the second plane hitting.

“They’re saying another one hit the Pentagon.”

He stared at the bloom of fire in the side of tower one being played over and over — the second plane. For a few moments, Aunt Clara just breathed into the phone, and he listened. “Are you okay?” he said.

“I’m all right. But oh, God, how many people—”

“These were passenger planes?”

“Are you looking at it? Planes. Yes.”

As the first tower went down, the newswoman began breathlessly repeating the word incredulous. Faulk, watching it happen, said to Clara, “The building’s collapsing.”

Silence.

“Clara?”

When he understood that the line was dead, he tried once more. Nothing. And no answer at the front desk, either. Hurriedly, he packed his bag and then realized there was nowhere to go. He made another attempt to call Clara, with no success. He tried long distance to Jamaica, got the ring, but the phone simply went on ringing. Sitting at the end of the bed, he waited. No answer. He put the receiver back in its place and then picked it up and punched the number again. Nothing.

There wasn’t anything else to do but watch. He saw the second tower collapse. He tried to pray. At last he made still another attempt to phone Jamaica. Now there was no signal at all. He hung up, and almost immediately it rang. It was his father. “You’re okay,” the old man said almost as though trying to reassure him. “I just talked to Clara.”

“I’m way up on Fifty-Fourth Street. I lost her. The line went dead.”

“That’s what she said. You believe this shit?”

“No.”

“I’d better call her back. She thinks the building you’re in might’ve collapsed because the connection got broken and you were talking about the building collapsing. She was pretty upset. And I told her there wasn’t anything about buildings collapsing uptown. But she couldn’t get through.”

“Tell her I’m okay.”

“When’re you getting out of there?”

“I don’t know yet. Today for sure now if I can. I want to see if I can get hold of Theo.”

“Get on out of there, Son. You don’t know what else they might be planning.”

“I’ll let you know,” Faulk told him.

“I’m gonna tell Clara you’ll be in later today.”

“Yes, do.”

After he hung up, he tried to open the line, but it was dead again. He pushed the buttons down, and there was a dial tone. But nothing happened — nothing interrupted the dial tone.

Downstairs, the lobby was crowded and quiet. People were checking out and checking in as usual. He waited in line with his bag. No one appeared willing to look at anyone else. It was very quiet. He went out to Fifty-Fourth Street. There was a subdued something even in the normal traffic sounds. The sunny sky was unchanged. When he got over to Fifth Avenue, he heard the sirens, and looking south he saw the massive ash-colored cloud. The cloud was bizarrely contained, one spiral-shaped strand extending out from it to great height. He saw clear pale sky above it all.

He started down the avenue. Trinity Church, the planned site of the wedding ceremony, was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. Yesterday, he had seen the towers from the window as the train neared the city, and seeing the two structures looming above everything, gleaming with reflected sunlight, he thought of being inside, high up, looking out.

Remembering this made him momentarily short of breath. He went to the curb, intending to flag down a cab. But none of the cabs were stopping. Most of them were coming from the opposite direction.

It occurred to him then that he was in fact headed to where the calamity was taking place. There would be no wedding today. He stopped. The entire morning remained. He had been wandering south. His headache had returned; his mouth was dry. The street now seemed nearly deserted. He saw some people sitting in a sandwich shop with a phone booth at the back. No one seemed to notice him. They were all talking quietly, huddled together, or simply staring with dread out at the sunlight and the buildings opposite. A woman sat crying while two others attempted to calm her.

In the phone booth he was absurdly elated to find that there was a dial tone and that the phone was working when he touched the numbers. He called the downtown Marriott, and to his surprise someone picked up, a woman, who sounded hurried but nothing like someone in the grip of panic. He asked for Theo Ruhm, and she immediately clicked off. He heard a buzzing, and Ruhm answered. “Hello.” It was nearly a shout.

Faulk said, “This is Michael.”

“It’s awful,” Theo Ruhm moaned. “Total confusion. Nobody can get ahold of anybody. But the wedding’s off. They’re setting up to do triage at the church. Triage, for Christ’s sake. Oh, God — I saw it. I went over there and saw everything. It’s awful. We’re headed out. Back to the house. Can you get here?”

“I’m almost to Penn Station,” Faulk said. “I’m going down to D.C.”

“They hit D.C., too.” Theo began to cry. “The sons of bitches.”

“Is everybody all right?”

“We’re all going home. If you can get to Brooklyn, you know you’re welcome.”

“I’m gonna try for D.C.,” Faulk said. The other had hung up. He put another quarter in and tried to call Iris, Aunt Clara, and then Jamaica. Nothing was going through.

He went out and walked down the blocks, hearing the sirens, his head throbbing, the gritty air smelling of exhaust and drywall and plastic and, scarily, of jet fuel. All his training and all the years of practicing his vocation rose in him, and he looked for some way to help those he encountered on the street — but no one looked at him; they were all moving as if in a kind of severe blundering trance, northward.

4

It was impossible for Natasha to absorb what she saw as something really happening. She couldn’t think past the images on the television.

In the crowded lobby, people were lined up at the row of public phones, waiting to try calling relatives in the States. She saw several people with cell phones, but no one was having any success. There were six wall phones. The sixth was broken, the wire hanging from the silver cabinet without a receiver.

The phone lines to the United States were overloaded. But people kept trying. They kept redialing and putting money into the phones while the crowd waited behind them.

There was a movement to drive the twenty miles to Kingston, to try calling from there. Several people stepped forward, Natasha and Constance among them. They climbed into a van with three older women in shorts and blouses who wore big straw hats and sunglasses, a very heavy middle-aged man in a flowered Jamaican shirt, and a thin, ascetic-looking man in his thirties, whom none of them had seen before. The three women were together. They muttered back and forth about where they would sit, getting settled, and then they were still. Natasha saw the strands of red hair coming down over the ears of the nearest one. No one spoke. Ratzi drove. Constance was in the passenger seat in front; Natasha was in the middle seat, next to the window, the two other men on her right. The three ladies had jammed together in the far back. They were sniffling and murmuring to one another, and it sounded like a kind of whisper argument. Constance kept chewing her cuticles and sighing, staring out at the narrow road. She looked back at Natasha and repeated, “It doesn’t open until something like ten o’clock. I’m certain of it. He couldn’t have been in either building yet unless he worked there.”

One of the women in back, the one with the red hair, said, “I lived in New York for thirty-three years. Those buildings don’t open to the public until nine-thirty.”

“There,” Constance said. “See?”

“You have someone in New York?” the woman said to Natasha.

“Yes.”

“My whole family’s there. In Queens.” She sniffled. “My whole family. I’m so afraid for them. What else is going to happen?”

Ratzi turned the radio on, but it was all static. He kept turning the dial. It had been mostly static before, Natasha remembered, though it was difficult not to think of it as part of the catastrophe. Palm trees shaded the road thinly on both sides. There were mountains to the left. Through the palms to the right was the sea with its repeating foamy waves tumbling across the green surface and crashing ashore. The sight seemed unreal, pitilessly immaculate in the clarity of the sun. She felt sick to her stomach, looking at it, so beautiful, and it occurred to her that there was something ruthlessly insensible, blank, heartless, about the exquisite beach and every natural wonder out the window of the Jeep she and Constance rode in with the six silent others. Absurdly, she thought of the senator’s expansive back lawn and the little pleading statues.

Now the young man spoke. “It must have been the pilots. They must’ve infiltrated the pilot force.”

“Force?” Constance said.

“The roster of pilots,” said the heavy man in the flower-print shirt. He had his big hands folded across his belly. His eyes were red and shadowed, and the sclera were faintly yellow. The odor of alcohol came from him through strong cologne. He had a bulbous nose, with little red lines forking across the tip of it.

“Surely no one could force a pilot to do that to his own plane?” Ratzi said.

No one answered. The young man turned to Natasha. “My name is Nicholas Duego.”

Constance glared back at him from the front seat.

He shrugged and then muttered low, dispiritedly, as if it weren’t even worth saying, “We might as well know who we are.”

“You an American?” Constance asked.

“Cuban American.” His demeanor changed slightly. He was plainly buoyed by the question and felt the need to talk. “On my father’s side. I lived in Cuba. We went to Canada for a vacation when I was nine years old, and my father got us to Detroit. We moved to Orlando, Florida, when I was twelve. My father was a horse trainer. I did not speak English until I was ten.” Constance stared. There was a curious formality in his speech. No one else said anything, and after going on a little more he seemed to wind down, with a sort of sullen embarrassment. “We might as well know,” he muttered into the silence of the others.

On the outskirts of Kingston, houses and huts and shacks lined the road, teeming with Jamaicans, all going about the business of life in their native city. Children ran and played under the spray of water hoses, and there were many roadside stands selling goods — coffee, exotic fruits, vegetables, barrel-cooked meat and fish. The proprietors stared after the crowded car as it moved by into the busy stream of traffic, but people on the streets scarcely glanced at them. On the side of one building was a big painting of an imperial-looking black face superimposed on the form of a lion, with the phrase JAH RASTAFARI below it.

“What’s that?” said the heavy man.

“It’s a religion,” Ratzi said.

When they reached Kingston city center, they saw more roadside stands, including one built out of bamboo and containing bins of melting ice in which stood dozens of different kinds of bottled beer. They drove past a big crowded marketplace under a long bamboo roof. There were a lot of taxis — more than usual, it seemed. The Hilton was too crowded. Every American was trying to contact home. When Natasha finally got to a phone, the voice on the other end said all lines were busy. She tried her contact numbers for Faulk. His cell phone, the hotel. And she tried Iris, Aunt Clara. Nothing was getting through. Every circuit into the United States was over capacity. She went to one of the four televisions in the big orange-carpeted, palm-shaded lounge and watched with the others. She had missed the news about the fourth plane — the one in Pennsylvania — and she saw the reporting about that, and when the TV showed the flames and smoke still erupting out of the side of the Pentagon, she thought of all her friends on Capitol Hill. Constance had gone into the English-style pub and was watching the television there. She had ordered a drink. Natasha sat across from her and buried her face in her hands. “I’m numb. I can’t think.”

“You have to know I’m right,” Constance said. “He couldn’t have been there.”

“If I could just get through to him.”

“You heard the lady in the car.”

“I just want to talk to him and know he wasn’t anywhere near it.”

“I’ll get you a drink,” Constance said. “This is Campari and soda. You want one?”

“How can you drink?”

“Are you kidding? Look at this place.”

It was true. Everyone was drinking. The room was crowded, and everyone had something in hand.

“It’s sort of what we have instead of Valium,” Constance said with a soft bitter laugh.

They watched the people out on the sidewalk. Many of them — doubtless Americans — hurrying aimlessly one way and then another, some clearly panic-stricken, unable to decide where to turn. An elderly couple in ridiculously unfitted clothes — bright white long-sleeve shirts and silly-looking bell-bottom red slacks, stopped on one corner, crossed the street, then turned and waited and crossed back, and went on. Natasha felt suddenly so tremendously sorry for them that she found herself weeping again. It was as if she had just awakened from a dream of crying to discover that she was indeed crying.

“Here, baby,” Constance said, reaching to touch her cheek with a handkerchief. “It’s gonna be fine. You’ll see.”

Many people dressed for holidays in the sun were gathering in front of the hotels and restaurants on that side. They all appeared confused and harried.

“The airlines are grounded,” Constance said. “No flights. We’re stuck here. Stuck here. You know that? Jesus Christ. We’re stuck.”

The news on the hotel televisions kept replaying the pictures: the planes slamming in, smoke towering skyward, clear sky beyond the city, devastation, the immense squat black toadstool of a cloud over its southern end — and the buildings collapsing in that terrifying straight-downward, floor-upon-floor, pancaking way, like thick gray powder.

The ride back from Kingston was completely silent. The three ladies had disappeared into the streets, so it was just Natasha and Constance and the three men. They filed out of the van and back into the lobby of the resort’s central building, where others still watched the television with its inexhaustible voices and images, the pundits all weighing in, the discussions of the short presidential speech, and the fact that the president at first seemed to be running — or flying — away, Air Force One heading west for a thousand miles before turning around.

Natasha went up to her room and lay down. A fit of low, breathless crying came over her. The window was bright with sun, and the wind blew through. She turned, pulled the blanket over her shoulder, and lay there trembling. The chill persisted, and though she might have allowed herself to fall asleep, nothing like drowsiness came to her — she was as wide awake as she had ever been in her life. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and finally pulled the blanket high over the side of her face and breathed into her palms.

A while later Constance came and knocked on the door and called to her. She got up and opened it and then walked back to the bed. Constance followed her into the room. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably trying to call you.”

The younger woman sat up and put her feet on the floor. “I can’t stay here.”

“Well, there’s nowhere to go.”

“I mean this room.” She stood and looked at the open French doors leading to the balcony, showing the sea and the sunny sky and the broad pure beach, where, now, there was no one.

“Imagine,” Constance said. “We’ll always feel a kind of hatred for this place now. This is where it happened to us.”

“I can’t stand it here.” Natasha moved toward the other window that looked out on the mountains to the east.

“You want to go down to the water? It’s almost lunchtime.”

“I can’t eat.”

“Then let’s have more to drink. I’d like to get drunk if it’s all right with you.”

Natasha saw something broken and frightened in the other woman’s round, double-chinned face, and she put her arms around her. They stood there embracing, hearing the sounds of others moving down the hallway and still others on the patio below. Someone laughed, a young boy — you could hear the edge of adolescence in the scratchy notes, that lean, pointless exuberance. It seemed excruciatingly out of place, incongruous, even ill spirited, an assault. In the next instant, a voice spoke harshly in Spanish, and the laughing stopped.

Downstairs, the lobby was still crowded, the television blaring. They went past it to the outside patio, where meals were served, a wide veranda in sunlight overlooking the beach. Several other people were already seated at the tables near the stone balustrade. At the farthest table sat the two men who had been with them in the van. They were not talking or looking at each other, but they were together, with the air of strangers clinging to the familiar, or near familiar. The younger one, Nicholas Duego, stood and waved at them.

“Well?” Constance said.

Natasha went with her to the table. It was better to be in company. They sat down, and the waitress came over. The waitress was a beautiful island woman named Grace, and they knew her. “What will it be for you?” Grace said to them with a note of solicitousness. There had existed a sardonic, teasing banter between her and her customers until this day. She had played a version of herself, a performance — an island character with no need of these tourists and interlopers — and now all her normal rosy, affectionate disrespect was gone, replaced by gentle concern. The difference was disheartening.

“Piña colada, Grace,” Constance said. Her voice carried, and Natasha realized how unnaturally quiet it was, turning to look at the other tables, where people were alone or with others, not saying much, staring, some of them, or concentrating on their meals. At one table the three elderly ladies sat, with untouched glasses of beer before them.

“How did they get back?” Constance said, then turned to Grace. “Make it a double, will you?”

“Yes, mum. And the young miss?” Grace was not more than five years older than Natasha. Her eyes were midnight dark and full of mournful kindliness. She wore a floor-length wraparound skirt, and her wild brown hair was tied in an impossibly big tangle atop her head, dark tan dreadlocks trailing out of the knot of it. “Well?” she said.

Natasha pondered a moment. She had been drinking rum punch or white wine all week. “Whiskey,” she said. “I’ll have a whiskey.”

“Bourbon?”

“Yes. Neat.”

Grace nodded and walked off.

The heavy man held up his glass as if to offer a toast. “Whiskey sour,” he said. “I haven’t had one in ten years. This is the first one. Ten years. I’m an alcoholic.”

Natasha remembered smelling alcohol through his heavy cologne in the morning. She almost said something; it seemed pointless now to keep any kind of pretense about things. But she saw the shadows under his eyes and the way his hands shook. He was just someone suffering this, like everyone else.

Duego was drinking water. He took a long swallow of it, set the glass down shakily, then rubbed his eyes. The muscles of his jaw tightened.

Natasha took the rolled napkin from its place on the table, removed the heavy silverware from it, and put it to her eyes, trying to gain control of herself. Duego offered her some of his water.

“Where is Grace?” Constance said.

As if summoned by the question, the tall woman appeared in the doorway and started toward them. Constance reached up and took her drink off the tray and gulped it down. “Bring me another one, please,” she said. “Make it two more. Doubles both. Please.”

Grace nodded, setting Natasha’s glass down, and turning to move off.

Natasha lifted her glass and sipped from it, but caught Grace’s eye as Grace started away and nodded at her questioning look. “Yes. Me, too.”

The heavy man also ordered more, and Duego, as if wanting merely to keep up with the others — there was something grudgingly acceding in the gesture — touched Grace’s elbow and ordered a screwdriver. She moved off, seeming to glide away in the yellow wraparound skirt.

“I haven’t had a drink in ten years,” the heavy man said. “My name’s Walt Skinner. I’m an alcoholic.” This time, the meaning of the words seemed to arrive in his mind as he spoke. His eyes welled up, and he took the last of his drink. “My wife’s here somewhere.”

“I do not usually drink,” Duego said. “I do not like the taste of it.”

“I do,” said Constance, “and I do. I do drink and I do like the taste. And I want to get very drunk today.”

“Jesus,” said Skinner, wiping his eyes with his fat fingers. “I can’t find my wife. She’s here somewhere. I can’t feel a thing. This isn’t touching a thing.” He put the glass to his mouth and took what was left in the melting ice. His hands shook. He kept moving one leg, a nervous up-and-down motion, toe to the ground, heel raised, the movement of someone normally much thinner, so that the ticlike nature of it glared forth, the frenetic shaking of panic. “We’re from New Orleans. You think they’ll keep us from flying there?”

“Everything’s grounded,” Constance said.

“I guess I ought to go looking for her. This feels so helpless. All those people and there’s nothing we can do. My wife went off with some lady friends this morning. She might not even know.” His face seemed to register this possibility. The mouth dropped slightly, the eyes widening, all the color leaving his round face.

Duego said, “I am from Orlando. I have no relatives in New York.”

Both men seemed now to be waiting for Constance and Natasha to speak, to say where they were from. It was a peculiar moment: social expectation spun over appalling actuality. Natasha nearly laughed, and an odd braying sob rose from the bottom of her throat. “She’s moving back to Tennessee,” Constance said. And in the next moment Natasha did laugh, turning away from them. The laughter turned to tears.

Constance patted her shoulder. “It’s all right, honey. I know it is. It’s all right.”

Natasha feared allowing herself to think so. Thinking so could bring on the thing through some terrible convergence of fate: Faulk deciding to go down there and stand on the street, looking up. And perhaps he was looking up when the plane hit. It was as if she could cause this to be true by accepting the probability that it was not true. And then something like premonition came to her that things were only beginning. There were other horrors to come.

Tall, stately Grace came back with another tray of drinks.

“That was fast,” Constance said. “Just the way I like it.”

Grace set the drinks down. For a few moments, they all drank and were silent. Natasha began to feel as though she were violating some kind of morality, greedily taking this form of analgesic help in the face of the unbearable visions of the morning. She finished her drink and excused herself, wanting solitude now, moving away from Constance’s questioning expression across the wide lawn leading down to the beach.

She walked there through the hot sand. And when she reached the edge she felt a deep pang, centered in her chest, just below her neckline. For a moment she thought her heart might be stopping. She put her hands there and looked for a place to sit down. It came to her that she might never get up if she let herself sink to the ground in this moment. Unsteadily, slowly, she walked into the water, feeling the cold pull of it and then the slap of it as it came back, wetting her to the knees. The pain in her chest wall lessened. She waited, crying soundlessly, while the water sucked back, pulling sand along the sides of her feet, foaming there, and then rushing at her. Iris would be worried and trying to call. Iris would know where Michael was. Michael would call her. And why hadn’t he called? The circuits, the overloaded circuits. She looked out at the horizon, that straight dark border under the moving sky, and it terrified her. The waves came in.

Finally she turned, and here was Constance, being helped along by Walt Skinner. They both had their drinks.

“I’ve switched to vodka,” Constance said, holding up her glass. “For my fourth double.” Then she stopped and seemed to consider. “Sounds like something from a tennis match. Fourth double.”

Skinner held his drink up. “My second.”

“That’s your fourth,” said Constance.

“Okay. I stand corrected. I must’ve miscounted.”

“How many did you have this morning?”

“Nothing this morning. I’m goddamned certain of that.”

“You’re lying through your teeth.”

“Madam, I have no teeth. I wear dentures.” He laughed with a low snorting sound, enjoying his own humor, staggering, and she helped him stay on his feet. Together they splashed unsteadily into the water, holding on to each other. They were in almost to their knees when Skinner fell back into a sitting position, holding his drink up, spilling none of it. “Looka that,” he said. “Didn’t lose a drop.” He seemed to be grasping at the fact. There was something hysterical about it: a moment of mastery over the physical world. “We’re stuck in paradise. We’re the lucky ones.” He held the glass higher.

“Shut up,” Constance said. “Don’t talk like that. Jesus.”

“You gonna stand there?”

“Cold.” She sat down carefully. “I am never ready for it to feel so cold.”

“It’s warm as toast,” Skinner said. Then he seemed to recall himself. “Goddamn. What’re we doing, anyway? I don’t know where my wife is.” The water rushed away from them and then came back in foam.

“I’m beginning to believe you made her up,” Constance said.

“I hope we bomb the living shit out of them all. Nuke the fuckers. Pardon my language.”

Natasha started back up the beach.

“Don’t leave,” Constance called to her. “We came to get you.”

“I can’t find my wife,” said Skinner, coughing. “I’m scared. I need another drink.”

“Natasha,” Constance yelled. “I can’t get up.”

Natasha went on, hearing their commotion. They were no longer aware of her, the two of them helping each other get up and laughing crazily. Before she reached the central building, she encountered a man and woman, roughly Constance’s age, headed down to the water. The woman was distraught, and he was supporting her by the elbow. They were talking about how they had visited the World Trade Center only last week.

“You’ve been there?” Natasha said to them.

“Yes,” said the man after the slight hesitation of his surprise at being spoken to. “We were just there, visiting with our son. And he took us to the top.”

“He’s safe?” Natasha said.

“He lives in Brooklyn.”

“Can people get in to go to the top at nine o’clock?”

They looked at her.

“When is it open to tourists?”

“Oh, I don’t remember,” said the woman. She had a big brown mole on the side of her neck.

“It’s nine-thirty,” the man said. “I’m certain of it. I looked at the sign.”

People could be so perfectly kind. Natasha thanked them and wished them a fast return to their home.

She went on into the lobby with its television still transmitting the foment of voices, repeating the images that now suddenly, somewhere beyond language — despite everything you knew and feared — were weirdly, distressingly thrilling, too. It was the awful majesty of the terrible. In the bar, she sat at one end and watched the crowd of people trying to find a way to occupy themselves. Duego walked over from somewhere beyond the patio and stood looking at her. He was holding a glass of what looked like orange juice.

“I cannot concentrate on anything,” he said. He had been crying. She felt an urge to touch his wrist but held it back.

The bartender walked over and stood staring. He was a small man with a gray ponytail. When he smiled, a gold tooth showed.

“A whiskey,” she told him. “Bourbon.”

He looked at Duego.

“Another, yes,” Duego said. “Screwdriver.”

“I thought you didn’t drink,” Natasha said.

“I do not know what is in this. I knew the name of it as a drink. I do other things. But I have heard the name of this drink, and I know that it is made with orange juice. Orange juice is healthy.”

“Yes. Orange juice is healthy.”

“I drink orange juice every day.”

“So do I.”

“I do not usually like alcohol. But this tastes very amazingly good.”

“Vodka is tasteless. So it’s the orange juice. And we’ll drink to orange juice.” Looking past him into the lobby, she saw a group of people on their knees. A square-shouldered, balding man with angry red splotches from sunburn on his muscle-bound arms was leading them in prayer, thick hands folded under his chin, eyes closed.

Natasha went and stood in the entrance, watching for a few moments. The man was saying the Lord’s Prayer. She could not see Faulk doing this if he were here. It seemed vaguely showy. She saw two of the women who had taken the journey to Kingston. In the flow of her thoughts, running through the bands of terror, was the fact that Michael Faulk was thousands of miles away.

“Your whiskey,” Duego said. He had brought it over, with the little napkin at its base. “To orange juice.”

She thanked him and repeated the phrase, and he clicked his glass against hers. They drank. She walked back to the bar and sat on the stool at the end. He followed and took the first stool, right angled from her. He put both elbows on the shiny surface, setting his drink down. “I have never liked orange juice. But this.”

She didn’t respond, looking around the room for Constance or Skinner.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Forgive me. I am unable to be alone just now.”

She gazed at him. “You said you do other things. What other things?”

“I can say nothing about that.” He grinned.

There was that strange stiffness and overformality in the way he talked. “Did you come here alone?”

He nodded, his chin quivered, and she looked away.

“My wife left me,” he said. “A dancer. And she — she fell in love with another dancer. Another woman dancer. Another woman. I came here to get away from all that. My wife the lesbian. I hope you are not a lesbian.”

“I’m not a lesbian.”

“I have nothing against it in principle. I am no rightist.”

“To progress.” She drank.

“My wife is a lesbian, and she did not tell me of this until one month ago and we were married five years.”

“Maybe she didn’t know it until one month ago.”

“There are stories from her brother. It is painfully probable that she always knew. From when she was a girl in school. The brother did not tell me until it was too late.”

The thought occurred to Natasha like a small autonomic impulse running along her nerves that in a crisis of this magnitude, people felt the need to confide.

“I’m sorry,” she said to him. “You know, it’s nobody’s business.”

“I wish I could put it into perspective.” His voice broke. He took a long drink, then set his glass down. “I do not want to go home.”

“Where’s home?” she heard herself ask.

“I have lived a long time in Florida.”

“That’s right. You said that.”

“Orlando.”

“Never been there.” She felt careless, reckless, the sensation stirring like a tic in the nerves of her face. It couldn’t matter what she said.

Perhaps a minute went by.

“Yes,” he said, with an air of acknowledging something, though she had said nothing.

She went shakily out to the bank of elevators and stood in a small group of people waiting to get on. Two young girls murmured and laughed, and the sound filled her with a powerful urge to tell them to shut their mouths. She saw one of the girls make an effort at another joke, some element of what they had been laughing at, but then she sobbed, suddenly, convulsively. Natasha touched her shoulder.

The girl said, “My dad’s best friend — he’s like an uncle to me — works in the Pentagon. I wish I knew he was all right. I wish I knew everyone was all right.”

The doors of one elevator opened, and a lot of people, all older men and women, filed out, muttering low or being silent, with the dazed look that seemed to have settled into so many of the faces. Natasha waited until the elevator was empty, then stepped in, and the others who had been waiting followed. No one spoke. At her floor, two people exited with her, a man and a woman. They did not seem to be together, though they both went the opposite way from Natasha, nearly touching, the woman a step in front of the man. They were in their sixties or seventies, and she heard the man mutter something in Spanish. The woman laughed. Natasha made her way down the hall to her room. Inside, she went to the window and looked out at the beach. People down there stood at the water’s edge, and some had gone into the water and were floundering in the wake of the slow waves. Nobody seemed to be swimming. She could not see Constance. The sun was sinking toward the mountains, behind towering dark-edged clouds. The wind had picked up, moving the palm fronds and riffling the cloth of the big umbrellas jutting from the picnic tables. She stepped to the bed and lay down, trying not to cry anymore and feeling what she’d had to drink. The gray light was warm. She heard the sea, voices rising, and wondered if she was imagining the distress embedded in each utterance, a panicky note in the cries, even those of apparent pleasure in the chill of the water, and the few bursts of laughter. She closed her eyes, intending, if she could, to sleep through until morning. But sleep wouldn’t come.

She rose finally, steadied herself, then moved back to the window. Time wouldn’t budge. There was the whole dreadful night to go through. Picking up the room phone, she called the front desk and asked for an outside line. The line was busy. “Will you ring my room when there’s a line open?” Nothing. The desk clerk had simply punched the numbers for the outside line and gone on to something else or someone else. She waited a moment, still shivering, and when she repunched the number, this time she got the line. All cell-phone signals were still busy out of Jamaica or into New York; there was no telling which. She tried Iris at home.

And got her.

“Oh, I’m so relieved to talk to you, you poor thing,” Iris said. “How will you get home? Are you all right?”

“Have you heard from Michael?”

“No.”

“He’s there, Iris, in the financial district — where the towers were. He’s — I don’t know if he’s—”

“He’s probably all right,” Iris said in a shaking voice. “A lot of people were there. You saw it. He wasn’t in one of the buildings, was he?”

“He talked about looking at the city from the top. Oh, God. I’m scared. Constance said they don’t open that early, but I can’t stop worrying and I know it’s selfish.”

“Honey,” Iris said. “There’s nothing selfish about worrying over someone you love.”

“Will you call Aunt Clara for me? Can you do that?”

“Of course. And I’m sure he’s fine.”

As Natasha started to say the number, Iris interrupted her. “I already have the number, honey.”

“Ask if she’s heard from Michael.”

“I’m sure he’s all right. We’d have heard by now—”

“No, that’s the thing,” Natasha told her. “We don’t know that. All the cell phones are down or too clogged to handle the calls. I can’t get through to him.” She sobbed. “Nobody can find out anything here. I feel so trapped.”

“I’ll call Aunt Clara. Honey, please, now. You have to stop letting your mind run away with you. I’ll call Clara, and then I’ll call you right back. Please try to calm down.”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha said. “I will.” She pushed the button to end the call, then tried Faulk’s cell number. Nothing but a jangle of electronic noise.

Lying back down on the bed, she stared at the ceiling and at the angles of wall and door and the entrance to the balcony. She looked out at the shining water. In an odd optical illusion it appeared to be a faintly shimmering black wall, until she raised her head and saw it clearly, stretching on to the horizon. The phone rang.

“Honey,” Iris said. “I can’t seem to get through. A voice keeps saying that all circuits are busy. The volume of calls. I’ll keep trying. I just got through to you right away.”

“That’s because these are landlines.”

“Yes, but Clara’s phone is a landline.”

“Will you keep trying for me? And if you don’t get me when you call back, will you leave a message at the desk?”

“I will. And you come home as soon as you can, darling.”

She got up and went out on the balcony and looked at the scene before her, a vacation beach, people moving through the fading shadows of the palms or playing in the shallows. She looked at the darkening sky and thought, for the first time in her life, of her country as a separate thing, a nation, harmed, at some kind of war, and unreachable.

5

Faulk reached Penn Station, limping from a catch in his knee, and stood in the center of the big space, holding his suitcase. People wandered aimlessly, many of them without luggage. A great roar of voices reverberated in the high vault of the ceiling, and yet no one appeared to be speaking to anyone. Everyone looked isolated and bewildered. In the waiting area, others were already lying down — preparing for a long wait. The board with the scheduled departures showed a list of cancellations. Faulk moved to a small space near the wall and set down his suitcase. His hand was stiff; his arm and shoulder ached from carrying the thing. His knee hurt. He sat on the suitcase for a while, feeling the fatigue of the long walk and waiting for some sign about what the trains were doing — he heard someone say that the authorities were calling for people to leave the city. But nothing changed. Absurdly, the sight of a small dark bird gliding and dipping in the upper reaches of the high ceiling saddened him beyond measure. Tears ran down his face. He attempted to lie down, but the floor hurt his hips, and then he thought of getting as close to the gates as he could. He had an intimation that something was coming, an announcement. The numbers and town names inside the slat-sized windows of the schedule board suddenly began revolving with a wild clicking sound, as though a whole new schedule were about to be revealed. But the clicking stopped, and the board was blank. He got to his feet, lifted his bag, and started to the nearest ticket counter, in the close, low-ceilinged far end of the station. Surprisingly, he did not have to wait long — the woman there was being very brief with each person. She looked bone weary, her round, dark face glossy with sweat. He stepped up to the window and asked when the next train to Washington would leave.

“Nothing from here right now, and not for several hours,” she said. “One coming in soon, going to Newark. You can get on that one. There’s one from Boston that stops in Newark. It’s not an express. It’ll end up in Washington.”

“I have an express ticket to Washington from here.”

“No tickets, sir. First come, first served. They just want everyone to get out. I don’t know what it’ll be like in Newark. The one from Boston’s not an express.”

A woman standing behind her, holding a stack of what looked like tickets of some kind, said, “The mayor just said everybody should stay. Guess to show ’em we ain’t beat.”

“Tell that to all these people here.”

“Do you think there’ll be seats on that train?” Faulk asked. “The one to Newark?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

He heard the announcement for track 9 as he started toward the stairwell down to the gates. In the crush, he got to track level and walked along the length of the just-arrived train, a long line of tall cars that were packed to the windows, though people were hurrying to board and being helped by the conductors. He took the entrance to one car and stepped up into the mass of others in the aisle, the thick odor of those tight quarters mingling with the smell of the tracks, the diesel- and ozone- and creosote-heavy air. He was carried on the tide of these others almost to the far end, where more people were entering or seeking to gain entrance. Seated next to one window was a woman holding a little boy. She was making an effort to entertain him by talking in an excited voice about all the people out there.

“Is everyone going home?” the boy said.

“Yes, they are,” his mother answered with the brave fake cheer of a parent lying to a child.

Finally, the train jolted into motion. Holding on was difficult without touching someone else. Faulk, reaching to brace himself on one side of the two seat backs where he stood, felt the wrist bone of a gray-eyed old woman, who glanced at him and then looked away. There wasn’t anything for it.

“How would they get pilots to fly their own planes into buildings?” a man said.

“Maybe the pilots were in on it,” said someone else.

“I don’t believe that. My brother’s a pilot. This was some kind of hijacking, I guarantee it. Some suicide fucks. Excuse me for the language.”

There was just the rocking motion of the car for a time, and the difficulty everyone was having staying in place with nothing really to hold on to. Faulk saw an elderly black man rise in the little space he had and offer his seat to a woman with an infant. She took it, and the infant began to whimper, and the man, whose dark face looked too slack to be healthy, had to use her shoulder to keep standing. He had large ears and thick gray hair, and he smiled at the baby.

The windows slowly gave way at last to brightness, the train leaving the confines of the station. Faulk saw other tracks, buildings and billboards, the tall blue shadows of the city, and, visible out the windows to the left, the smoke where the towers had been. The train picked up speed. The ash-and-smoke cloud was appallingly defined, a gigantic, ragged-edged, domelike shape, too strange a sight for belief. Bright, unblemished blue sky still shone far above its dissipating outline.

No one spoke to anyone.

Faulk watched until the cloud was no longer visible, and the many others watched, too, the harmed city behind them in the too-bright sun, and the silence felt almost supernatural, as if everyone here were already dead, spirits being carried away. Even the infant was completely quiet, staring at the faces. The ground on either side of the tracks gave way to tenements, yards with laundry on lines, and a view of the East River beyond, the factory silos and fortresslike walls of coal and metal, the auto junkyards, the cranes of the harbor lifting into the sun. It was all a confusion of commerce and waste, and the people in the packed car gazed at it out the windows, quietly taking in the vast industrial insignia of the country where they lived.

In Newark, there was more confusion and crowding, people hurrying to the escalators that would take them to the ticketing area. Faulk made his way up there and out of the building. The air was heavy and smelled strongly of gasoline and burning. He thought of the fires in New York. He saw a big barrel-shaped metal trash can with flames licking out of it. Someone had evidently thrown a lit cigarette into it. A man stood pouring a can of cola onto the fire. Faulk went on across the street, to the Hilton. In the lobby he saw men, women, and even some children lying on the furniture and on the floor along the walls. At the reception desk, which was surprisingly empty, he got the attention of a young man whose black string tie was hanging loose around his neck. The young man was bleary eyed, his reddish hair disarranged. He looked like someone recovering from a long night of overindulgence. He removed his coat, and Faulk understood that he was at the end of his shift. There was effectively no one behind the reception desk. The young man shook his head and gave him a commiserating look. “We don’t have any more rooms, man. Absolutely nothing. We’re letting people stay in the lobby.” He indicated the others, one or two already sleeping on their bags.

“I guess there’s nothing at any of the other hotels near here?”

“Everything’s booked.”

Faulk went to a side wall and set down his bag but a second later thought better of it and walked back to the station and to the ticketing area to wait along with the others. Hours went by, people moving incrementally closer, bending and picking up bags and setting them down, or simply standing with arms folded. The murmurous racket of the hall went on, and there was something nearly solemn about it. He thought of his training, the things he knew to say to shock and grief, but there was nothing to say, here, with everyone seeking only to go home. A priest came by him, hurrying somewhere, and Faulk saw his not-quite-looking-at-anyone face — he was just a man in a rush to get wherever he had to go, a little frightened and sick at heart.

Trains were leaving for Boston and points north. When he got to his window, he handed over his ticket for Washington and asked when the next train was. The clerk was a leathery-faced ruddy man with large green eyes and sandy hair. “There’s one coming into the station in about fifteen minutes from Boston. But it’s not an express.”

“I don’t care about that,” Faulk said.

“This ticket’ll work, then. Go right up those steps.”

Faulk thanked him and started for the stairs, feeling the need to hurry and expecting many people to be rushing behind him. But no one followed. He went up the stairs and out on a platform, thinking that he must not have understood the directions properly. He believed the train he’d arrived on was below this floor, and he almost started back down. But here on the platform was another man, Asian, a boy, really, no more than twenty-five years old, sitting on the bench, leaning forward with his hands folded, his elbows resting on his knees. “The train from Boston,” he said, simply. Faulk sat down next to him and adjusted his bag at his feet. The young man wore a business suit without the tie. His shirt was unbuttoned. It was very hot here. He turned and looked at Faulk and then looked away. He folded and unfolded his hands. Finally he looked over and said, “Were you there?”

Faulk nodded. “Up on Fifty-Fourth Street.”

“I was in the second one, the south tower,” the boy said, and took in a deep breath. It was as if something had struck him in the chest. He straightened, attempting to collect himself. “They — they told us — we were all going down the stairs — and they told us it was all right, we could go back up. But I didn’t like it, and I kept going down.” He gasped, trying to master himself. “They — all my friends — they — they went back.” And with that he let go, crying quietly, hands over his mouth. Then he reached in the pocket of his coat for a handkerchief, opened it, and put it over his face. “I’m going home, to Baltimore. My parents live in Baltimore.”

“Washington,” Faulk said. He felt the uselessness of it. “I’m a priest. If there’s anything I can do …” The words seemed false, and in the next moment he realized that they were false. “I was a priest,” he said, low, wanting to be exact. It was ridiculous.

The boy’s demeanor seemed to underscore the thought. He sat and stared off and waited for the train, and around them the noise of the station increased, a wave of distraught voices and sounds coming from the very walls. The train was coming in. The sound filled the hot little space where they sat, and it seemed strangely out of place, not something sensibly connected to this narrow room with its bench and its posters on the opposite wall advertising Broadway plays. They moved to the doorway leading out to the track. When the train stopped before them and the conductor jumped down and set the stool for them to step up, the boy hesitated. Faulk saw him wait to see which way he, Faulk, would go — into which car, the left or the right. He went left, took the first seat — the car was nearly empty — and glanced over his shoulder. The young man had gone the other way. The train pitched forward, rocking, and Faulk looked out the soiled window at the yellow lights, the empty platform, the vague shapes in the dimness beyond the wide expanse of other tracks, the cement abutments, switches, painted signs and symbols. The train was gathering speed, and once more, out of the tunnel, the light changed to daylight. But daylight was fading. Gazing at the burnished glow along the marshy fields south of Newark, he thought of how he had failed to be of help to anyone — how, until the minutes with the young man on the station platform, his one concern had been getting away from the city. He had spent most of his adult life performing the very tasks that were called for in this situation, yet he had only reacted, a numb, fearful refugee, like all the others, trying to get out.

6

It seemed to Natasha, looking out from her balcony, that the beach was less crowded. The part of the sky not barricaded by clouds had turned darker. It was almost black at its height.

Down in the lobby, she paused in front of the row of phones. People were still struggling to get through; others still waited to try. “Is anyone getting anyone in New York?” she said to a man who was holding a glass of something bright red with a little paper umbrella in it.

“Are you kidding?” the man said, drinking.

She felt the nausea returning and hurried into the ladies’ room, which was crowded and deathly quiet. There was something about a room this small that made for silence. Everyone had a protective shell of self-concern. She couldn’t breathe.

Back in the bar, Nicholas Duego was still there, with a fresh drink, leaning on the shiny surface with both elbows, head down, one hand making a swirling motion to move the ice and dregs of orange juice and vodka in his glass. The bar smelled of fear and the sweat of exertion, alcohol and tobacco — mixed with several kinds of fried food. She ordered a bourbon on ice from the small man with the gold tooth, and when he brought it she swallowed most of it, feeling it as a cold and then searing place at her middle. She grasped the glass with both hands, eyes fixed on the glossy water-spotted expanse of the bar.

“Are you all right?” Duego asked. “You have been gone a long time.” His eyes were not quite focusing. He drank and then put his head back down.

She signaled the bartender, indicating her empty glass. He nodded at her but went on with what he was doing.

The bar was growing more crowded, the noise level increasing. Alcohol and crisis had loosened some tongues. She couldn’t see clearly through the gathered faces, the crush of people pressing to the bar. She thought of Constance out by the beach somewhere, with Skinner, and the night coming on.

She kept replaying Constance saying Faulk could not have been in either building when the planes struck, and the old couple on the path, and the woman who knew exactly when the towers opened for tourists. Nine-thirty. Nine-thirty.

She went out onto the veranda, aware of herself now as being drunk, feeling nothing good in it, no release of tension or anxiety, but only the amplification of her fear, the need to hold on to it — as if to let it go would be to tempt God: it would be when she relaxed into the belief that Faulk was safe that she would discover something awful had happened.

But in fact something awful had already happened, and the images of it were still being broadcast, in little windows above the talking heads on the TV. She saw the irregular light at the entrance of the lobby, where an elderly man stood with a stricken expression on his face, staring in at the screen. She felt selfish, looking at this. She thought she might speak to him, but when she got to where he had been, he was gone.

It was like moving through a patchy, shifting dream.

She wanted another drink and remembered signaling the bartender. Looking into the bar, she saw the disorder there and decided not to go back in.

On the veranda, seated in one of the wicker chairs looking out toward the lowering red-daubed horizon, another woman sat quite still, with a handkerchief held tight in her fist. The backs of her hands looked bruised. There was nowhere to go — nowhere to escape these others and herself. She wanted sleep but feared being alone. The only empty chair was to this woman’s right. The woman sniffled and opened the hand holding the handkerchief and commenced folding and unfolding the cloth. On the other side of her was Ratzi. He glanced over at Natasha, held up one hand, and moved the fingers in an almost-sheepish little halfhearted wave. Beyond Ratzi, a young man was kneeling in front of a young woman, arms around her middle, making soothing sounds. But the young woman seemed to be laughing.

Mrs. Ratzibungen walked out and stood speaking to Ratzi in German, not quite whispering, casting quick looks at the woman folding and unfolding the handkerchief. Then she stepped over to Natasha.

“You vent to Kingston,” she said. “Ja? Mit Ratzi.”

Natasha nodded, though the other didn’t quite wait for a response, tilting her head slightly in the direction of the woman with the handkerchief. “This is Mr. Skinner’s vife.”

“Oh.” Natasha started to offer her hand but then decided against it. Nothing in Mrs. Skinner’s manner revealed any kind of tolerance for gestures.

She only glanced Natasha’s way, sniffled, and then said, “Do you know where my husband is?”

“He was looking for you,” Natasha told her. “Earlier. I mean this morning. He was with my friend Constance. You haven’t seen him since this morning?”

The woman’s expression was incredulous. “He has a drinking problem.”

Natasha kept still. Mrs. Ratzibungen shook her head and looked out toward the beach.

“And a heart problem,” Mrs. Skinner continued. “And liver trouble.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And psoriasis.”

Natasha was silent.

“And asthma.”

“Oh.”

“And kidney and prostate trouble.”

“Really.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Ratzibungen moved off, saying something about having other guests who were scheduled to arrive and who were either stranded somewhere on the way or, worse, had canceled their plans altogether.

“He had a stroke last year,” Mrs. Skinner continued, sniffling. “He’s in terrible shape. Well, you saw him. The doctors have told him over and over.”

“I don’t know where anyone is,” Natasha said. “My fiancé—”

The other cut her off. “What kind of person is your friend.”

“Excuse me?”

“Is your friend a moral person.” Mrs. Skinner’s tone was devoid of the slightest hint of a question. “I’m asking you. Is your friend a moral person.”

“Well — she’s my friend. And of course — of course, a nice person.”

Mrs. Skinner clutched the handkerchief tight in her fist again and, looking at Natasha with an expression very close to rage, said “What?” as if the younger woman had said something so preposterous that it caused offense.

Natasha gathered herself. “I said she’s a nice person. A good person.”

“Where are they, then? Where are they? Where is my husband. And where is your friend.”

Natasha said, “They came down to the beach.” She heard the grief in her own voice. “I was down there and they came down, they said, to get me. But that was earlier. And that’s the last time I saw them. I’m sorry. They came down and got in the water. My friend and — and Mr. — and your husband. She’s not that sort of person, really. Not at all. And he was looking for you. He said — he kept saying he couldn’t find you.”

“I was right here. Right here in this — in our room. I told him he was definitely and certainly on his way to hell. He had four — four, mind you — four of those little airline bottles of whiskey in the room. This morning — right after it happened. Eight o’clock in the morning. Right after the planes hit. And I told him. And he got sad like he does. Do you believe in God?”

Natasha was thinking now only of finding a way to extricate herself.

“Well, do you?”

“Perhaps it’s just a misunderstanding,” Ratzi said from his chair on the other side, leaning forward, glancing at Natasha and nodding as if to show his good intentions. “No one knows where anyone is at a time like this. I haven’t seen my brother all day. I think he’s in Kingston. We haven’t seen him.”

“Do you believe in God?” Now it seemed crucial for Mrs. Skinner to know whether or not they were believers.

“I do believe in God, yes,” Ratzi said, taking one of her hands into both of his.

She pulled away as if he had scalded her. “Don’t touch me.”

“I’m so very sorry, madam.”

“I’m looking for my husband.”

“We’re sure he’ll turn up.”

“He’s a cheater. Walter is. He cheats.”

“Misunderstanding,” Ratzi said hopelessly.

“Cheats at everything — everything. Cards, games — Parcheesi. He cheats at Parcheesi. A game like Parcheesi. Can you imagine. The man cheats at Parcheesi. And in an argument — you know what he does in an argument? He makes up statistics. Makes them up. He cheats. There’s no honesty in him at all. And physically he’s at death’s door and where is he?”

“Could he have gone into the city?” Natasha asked her.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes — you’ve already asked us that.”

“But what. What do you believe? Do you believe in a God who forgives everything the man does no matter what? No matter who he hurts?”

They were both looking at her.

“Well?” Mrs. Skinner said, turning her gaze from one to the other.

“Yes,” Ratzi said, a little too loudly. “I believe in a merciful God.”

“You?” she demanded of Natasha.

“I believe in God,” Natasha said.

“Well, I believe that if you’re not good — if you cheat—then God will get you. I believe there’s a price to pay. And good people pay it along with the bad people. It’s in the Bible. You can find it in the Bible in plain English straight from God. And look at those people in New York and Washington, and the other place, too. They were all paying the price. And you can bet that a lot of them went straight to hell. You know it’s very probable that most of them were in a state of sin. And where are they now?”

“What are you saying?” Natasha asked her. “Are you—” She couldn’t speak.

“I’m saying I never did a thing in my life that was intentionally a sin. I have practiced my faith to the letter. And I don’t know where my husband went with that woman.”

“They were both in the water,” said Natasha. She came very close to saying she hoped with all her heart that at this very moment on God’s earth they were fucking their eyes out. It occurred to her to say this as she rose, shivering with quiet fury, starting off in the direction of the beach, having to stop to gain her balance. She heard Skinner’s appalling wife say something about talking to drunks.

“I’m very sober,” Ratzi said.

Mrs. Skinner put the handkerchief to her mouth, but got out, “I’ll kill the little son of a—”

He held his hands up, a shrugging motion. “Horrible time,” he said, though he now had a silly smile on his face. And then he was laughing. The woman had not meant to be funny, and she stood to walk away from him but ended up collapsing in Natasha’s vacated chair.

“I’m very frightened,” she said. “Aren’t you very frightened?”

Natasha walked on toward the beach. People were sitting on blankets in the sand, some with coolers and wine, as though nothing at all had happened and this was just the fine weather of cloudy twilight by the sea. One small circle had lit a hibachi. They were speaking Spanish and what sounded like German. It could not matter as much to those for whom America was not home. That was just life on earth. Two girls tossed a beach ball back and forth, and another was trying to make a figure in the sand. Still another walked among the patrons with a little tray of beer. Natasha stood at the water’s edge and looked toward the hills, then toward the open sea. People splashed and moved with the water a few hundred paces up that way. They were all shadows in the failing light.

Someone was playing a guitar back toward the entrance of the resort. Someone else was hitting bongos. She heard the sound of a metal drum, too. It was almost full dark.

She made her way back to the wide veranda, and standing there, staring out, was Constance.

“Where have you been?” Constance wanted to know.

“I was just looking for you.”

“Is this your friend?” Mrs. Skinner asked from her chair. Ratzi was still sitting in his own chair, hands on his knees, his gaze darting from one to the other of them.

Natasha addressed Constance under her breath. “Where’s Skinner?” To her surprise, she had to resist a manic urge to laugh.

“Who?”

“Mr. Skinner. Mr. Skinner — the one you walked down to the beach with.”

“Why, hon-eh love,” Constance said, running the syllables together. “I been down th’ beach with two ’r three types this terrible day. Getting in the water and trying to get sober.”

Mr. Skinner’s wife got out of the chair and moved to face her. “You listen. His name is Skinner. He’s an alcoholic, he cheats, and he can’t have anything to drink.”

“Don’t you know what’s happ’nin’, hon-eh?” Constance said. “Ev’body’s drinkin’ t’day, sweetie. Ev’body. Whole world came down on us like a ton today. We don’ even know how many’s lost their lives today.”

“His name happens to be Walter B. Skinner. He’s in need of help.”

“Walt. Oh, yeah — okay. Him. Skinner. Walt. How could I not remember Walt.” She laughed into her fist. “You know — seriously, if yer innerested I–I ran into him jus’ now. Jus’ left’m in the bar. I swear he’s in there. Good man, ol’ Walt. He got a lil’ sunburned. And, hon-eh, I gotta tell ya, he’s been drinking.”

Mrs. Skinner turned and hurried into the building, through the crowd that was still in the lobby.

“Guy’s three sheets,” Constance said. “Very in-ee-briated man. She’s gonna be mad as hell when she gets to him.”

Natasha said nothing, trying to keep from collapsing with laughter or crying — it felt like a form of psychosis — and she leaned into Constance, bracing herself against the pressure of the whole day.

“Hey,” Constance said. “You look like you’re about to fall down.”

“No,” Natasha told her. “I want another whiskey.”

“I do believe in God,” Ratzi said. “But not like that.”

“I don’ think God cares about us at all,” Constance muttered, mostly to herself. “All we do ev’ry goddamned day is kill ’n’ maim ’n’ starve ’n’ butcher ’n’ fillet ’n’ cook each other.”

“Where were you all day?” Natasha asked.

Constance seemed not to have heard. But then she said, tearfully, “Been tryin’ t’contact my daughter.” She rubbed her eyes vigorously and seemed to let down with a sigh, her hands dropping to her sides. “Well — ev’body’s unhappy. I’m gon’ go t’bed. You go too.”

“Do you need help?” Natasha asked.

But the other didn’t answer, pausing long enough to stare at Ratzi, half wave at him, and then move toward the entrance. Natasha saw sand on her back.

“Nice lady,” Ratzi said. “It’s so sad for everyone today.”

She nodded, then turned and followed her friend into the lobby. Constance had paused. There was commotion in the bar, several people standing around someone on the floor near the waiters’ station. Skinner. A group of men had crouched side by side around him. They lifted him — it took four of them — and moved falteringly to the long couch against the wall. Mrs. Skinner stood by with her hands clasped over her middle, muttering to herself. And here was Ratzi hurrying in, with two members of the waitstaff. Skinner’s head moved, but his eyes were nearly shut, and you could see he was only half conscious. Someone said an ambulance was on the way, and in a little while they all heard the siren. People were coming in from the veranda and the beach, and the paramedics moved through without looking to the left or right. They got to Skinner and started working over him while his wife stood closer, sniffling and saying to anyone who would listen that she had warned him, she had told him what was going to happen if he kept on. Now God had given his sign.

“Hope he’ll be all right,” Constance said. She fixed Natasha with a stony look. “I’m not as drunk as you think.”

“Oh, what can it matter?” Natasha said to her.

“Well, I’m quite drunk enough, though. But look at ’m. He’s just passed out. Pissed, as they say.”

The medics got Skinner onto a stretcher and took him out of the place. He was more alert now, eyes open, taking people in as he was carried past them. Natasha looked around for Mrs. Skinner but could no longer see her. “Where did the wife go?” she asked Constance, who was moving unsteadily toward the elevators.

“Got on her broom and rode away, I guess.”

They stood by the elevators, Constance leaning on the wall there, head down, pale and clearly tired. The elevator door opened, and she got on, put her hands on the small faux-wooden railing inside, then turned and looked bleakly out. There was no recognition in her face, no sense that she saw anything or anyone.

“Remember,” she said gravely. “They don’t allow tourists in th’ place b’fore nine-thirty.” The doors closed on her.

7

Natasha returned to the beach. The moon shining through a hole in the clouds made shadows of the palms. There were no planes in the sky, and though the palm fronds clicked when the breezes moved them, the quiet seemed deeper. The sea shimmered under the silver light, and she saw the silhouette of a passing ship out on the horizon, making its way east, probably with cargo. There was a faintly glimmering flash of movement in the water. Something jumped, and jumped again. A school of porpoises was swimming by, phosphorescence flickering in their wake. She had a moment of knowing that Faulk was safe wherever he was. Near the water she sat down on the damp, packed sand, supporting herself with both hands. So many people were suffering across the miles of darkness. The thought of her dead parents came to her, gone before she could have any memory of them, two young people in love, planning to have several children — according to Iris, they had wanted a large family — and the world had taken them. And now she could not unthink the possibility that this feeling of relief about Faulk was a great irony, and that the world had already taken him as well. She began to entreat the sea and sky, murmuring the words, “Please let it be all right.” And the loss of her parents seemed mingled with this badness, all part of the same pitiless chance. Everything was exaggerated by the fact that she could not find out, could not know for certain. And even as she recognized the morbid indulgence of the fear, it raked through her. She could not change it or make it stop. Because what if he really was gone? All that fire and falling debris, and why could she not get through to him?

In her peripheral sight she saw a stirring nearby, a startling sudden movement that turned out to be a shape stumbling in the uneven pockets of sand toward the water.

Nicholas Duego.

And he had just seen her, veering in her direction. He stopped and fumbled with something in his shirt pocket. A cigarette. She watched him light it and then come on. “Hello,” he said. “I wondered where you went.”

“If you don’t mind I’d rather be alone.”

He seemed not to have heard. He sat down about three feet from her, elbows resting on knees, saying nothing, and not looking at her but at the moonlight on the water. After drawing on the cigarette, he offered it.

“I don’t smoke.”

“It is not tobacco.”

She stared at him a moment, then took it, drew deeply on it, and handed it back.

“It is the only thing that relaxes me,” he said. “When I want to relax. Sometimes I would rather not relax. For that I have other things.”

She blew the smoke out and briefly had to fight the need to cough. Sitting back and looking at him, she said, “Really.”

He smiled. “You are not used to the smoke.”

She had the feeling that he was trying to impress her. She almost laughed. “I guess you’re a bad character.”

He offered the joint.

“Right,” she said.

“I am not bad, no. I am a good man.”

“That’s nice to know.”

They smoked for a few minutes in silence, passing the roach back and forth. She wasn’t thinking about anything but relief from the whiskey-dimmed funk she was in, and it came to her that in its way this was similar to those passes in the bars and clubs of Washington when there was just the blankness of herself in the instant, just the time and place, no history or thought of a future, either, but only the counterfeit brightness of the exact present. The sky shifted before them, the clouds moving, and she could not think of the clouds as anything but emptily pretty things that did not apply to her. There was only this very minute itself: a squall out at sea, water lifting and settling, night with its terrors beyond the line of the horizon, far away.

“I have more,” Duego said, holding out a little plastic bag. “Should I roll us another one?”

She watched him do it, saying nothing, and kept the one he’d given her, taking another hit from it, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, the coal burning very close to her flesh now. It was almost gone.