Desire Provoked

Part Three

THE pleasure he took in naming his children is the same pleasure he feels in finishing a map. State names, county names, city names. The names of rivers, marshes, fjords. What the seas are called, the continents, the winds hushed deep in coves. The first name of a forest. The original word for a ridge. Irish, Icelandic, Nordic. Indian similes, Eskimo symbology, the nomenclature of the Vikings. Script (so ferociously ornate it reveals the cloistered monk’s distrust of words), bold strokes (the explorer’s hand), primitive type. German, Russian, French.

The world map of John Speede, 1626, revealing in the Southern Unknowne Land the County of Parrots, so named because of the “extraordinary and almost incredible bigness of those birds there.”

Ptolemy, the father of design, advising, “We shall do well to keep the straight line.”

Columbus wrote that the world resembles a woman’s breast, terrestrial paradise flourishing at the spot that corresponds to the nipple.

Adams has mapped amazing ground. Six years ago, on a summer field trip to Mexico, he and his party lodged at a ranch thirty miles south of Mount Ciénega, an active volcano. Lava had altered the face of the landscape, diverting rivers, forcing villages to relocate, contaminating Sonora’s water supply. Adams had been asked to make preliminary sketches for revised maps of the region.

A nearby university used the ranch for agricultural research, but graciously allowed the American party to stay in the main house. Adams’ room overlooked the barn and the smell of rye grass and the chuffing of horses in their stalls reminded him of Red Cloud.

One night, unable to sleep, Mount Ciénega rumbling in the distance, he dressed and walked outside. The mosquitoes were thick; fallen berries snapped beneath his feet. Slapping the back of his neck he entered the barn. It was still. The animals were tense. He waded through the hay and was startled to see, in the corner, a thick white snake wrapped around a cow’s hind legs, its mouth firmly attached to the udder. The terrified cow stared at the slats in the side of the barn.

Pamela has prepared cold zucchini and buttermilk soup. “I’m on a vegetarian diet,” she says. “Did you know that for every sixteen pounds of soy and grain fed to cows, we only get one pound of beef? The Institute for Food and Development says eating meat is like driving a Cadillac.”

Toby won’t touch the food. Neither will Adams. Deidre is eating with a friend.

“I understand you’ve been saying some nasty things to your mother,” Adams says.

“He called me an uncool bitch just before you got here.”

“Is that why you came over?” Toby says. “To yell at me?”

“No. But I don’t want you calling your mother names. Not to her face, and not behind her back.” “Bitch.”

“Do you hear me?”

Toby mutters something else.

“I mean it, son.”

Toby stands. “Bitch!” he shouts.

“If you call her that one more time — ”

“How do you know I’m talking to her?”

“All right, is it me you’re upset with?”

Toby sits.

“Is that it?”

He props his elbows on the table. “I’m not upset,” he says. “And I’ll do whatever I want.”

“You’ll do your homework.”

“If I feel like it.”

“You’ll feel like it,” Adams warns him, “after dinner.”

“We’re doing geography,” Toby says. “It sucks. All those stupid maps.”

“Your feelings toward me have been noted. But you’re still going to have to do your homework.”

Toby pushes himself away from the table. “I’ll do whatever I want.”

“Go to your room,” Pamela tells him. “And stay there.”

Toby leaves the kitchen.

Pamela smooths the tablecloth in front of her. “I don’t know what to do with him. I’ve talked to a couple of doctors.”

“He doesn’t need to see a doctor. For God’s sake, Pam, we just split up. It’s bound to be confusing — ”

“Poor man, he’s become so boring boring boring.”

“It needs to be discussed. You’re like Fort Knox these days. I never see you, never hear from you.”

“If it’s the money — ”

“To hell with the money.”

“I can’t deal with him, Sam. Last week he sat here throwing lighted matches at me.”

“Lighted matches?”

“Let me try a doctor.”

“All right,” Adams concedes. “But on a trial basis. I want to know how he’s coming, and if there are no good signs within a month, we do something else.”

“Okay.”

“Your family’s always been quick to push the panic button.”

“If you mean my father — ”

“That’s right. He’d have Toby in juvenile court. It’s a wonder he hasn’t locked Otto up.”

“He should be. He’s a drunk.”

“He’s not as bad as Jurgen thinks.”

Pamela folds her arms. “He has too good a time.”

Adams knocks on Toby’s door. “Come in.”

Toby jounces on the side of the bed. Once. Twice. His shoulders drop, he slumps and places his elbows on his knees.

“What is it,” Adams asks. He sits on Toby’s American Bicentennial desk with the bald eagle decoupaged on top. The desk was a gift from Otto one Christmas — he had taken a sudden shine to the children.

Above the desk, a poster of a woman in a leopard-skin bikini, gazing provocatively from the crotch of a tree. She is famous, though Adams can’t recall her name, acts in a television series and does commercials for a popular soft drink.

Toby’s room is clean, almost empty.

“What’s bothering you, Toby?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

Toby jounces on the bed.

“Things have been pretty rough.”

“I’ll say.”

“Let’s talk about it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Would you rather talk to your mother?”

“No.”

“Why are you giving her such a hard time?”

“I’m not.”

“She said you threw matches at her.”

Toby doesn’t answer.

“It hasn’t been easy on her, either, you know.”

“I know.”

“Well then, why don’t you give her a break?”

“She’s always busy.”

“She’s very talented.”

“Does she hate you?”

Adams stands, smooths his pants. “No.”

Toby jounces higher. “When you’re married and you like each other, you fuck a lot, right?”

“Are you trying to shock me with your language, is that what you’re trying to do?” He feels the leopard woman’s eyes on him as he moves around the room. “Because if that’s what you’re trying to do, it won’t work.”

“Don’t be an igno, Dad.” Toby stops jouncing. “Everybody says it. But Mrs. Sorge, the principal, heard me and now I’ve got detention for a week.”

“For saying — ”

“Fuck.”

“That’s all?”

“No.”

“What else?”

“We were on the playground.”

“And?”

“I peed on a girl’s shoes.”

Adams resists an impulse to laugh. “You must like her a lot.”

“Yeah.” For a second Toby smiles, then his face hardens. “Mom wants to ground me.”

“I think you deserve it, Toby.”

“She can’t stop me from doing what I want.”

“She can take your money away from you and make you sit in your room.”

“No she can’t.”

Adams believes him.

“She doesn’t care what happens to me.”

“You know that’s not true, Toby.”

“And she hates you. I can tell.”

Maybe I should wrap a steel tube around his neck, pin him to a tree with wooden pegs.

When Toby was six he joined the Indian Y-Guides, a father-son organization sponsored by the YMCA. Adams went to meetings, wore a silly headband and feather, helped Toby make bulletin boards, letter holders, hot pads. (The leader of the “tribe,” a retired fireman, nixed Adams’ suggestion that they all make tom-toms — “too damn noisy.”) In early Decern-ber the Y-Guides took a bus to an abandoned state park, now overrun with weeds. The nights were cold, Toby cried, peed in his sleeping bag, lost both his shoes. He was never, after that weekend on the plains, a “joiner.” Refused the Cub Scouts, church groups (shook Jurgen mightily), Little League. They would never explore together, father and son.

He mixes a Scotch, presses the suit he will wear tomorrow morning, removes the Ixodes from his pocket and places it on the nightstand next to his wallet. He sits in the dark, eating the ice, recalling happier days.

Alaska. He had joined a geological survey, exploring uninhabited regions in northern Birkin County. They had flown in by Piper Cub and landed, late at night, on a dirt road between water and ice. On the plane a graduate student from the University of Oklahoma, who’d done fieldwork the previous summer, suggested that each member of the survey take sulfur pills. “If you sweat sulfur, the insects’ll leave you alone,” he said, and passed around a Dopp Kit full of tablets. In the mountains the mosquitoes were big as birds, and more colorful.

Grizzly bears also posed a problem, especially in wooded areas where the snow was beginning to melt. To warn the bears of their approach the geologists draped cowbells around their equipment. One young man played Bob Dylan (badly) on the harmonica.

Hunters from Seattle and San Francisco shot caribou from helicopters at night. Adams couldn’t see the sport in this but tried it one night, unsuccessfully, to see what it was like.

He was young. Just married. Endless vistas.

In 1978, when the focus had narrowed for him and he was very much a married man, seismologists began to question existing plans of the Izu Trench and the Okhotsk Abyssal Plain. The Plain, they felt, was perhaps twice as deep as previous calculations had indicated. In Tokyo, on his last assignment abroad, Adams met the Japanese cartographers who would accompany him to the coast. At a sushi dinner the day before they left, a man named Onu spoke of a recent survey he’d done at the foot of Mount Fuji. The survey had been interrupted by a manhunt in the foothills. A twenty-one-year-old Tokyo woman, who had recently broken her engagement to a young banker, was missing. A week later, police turned up not only her body but the badly decomposed bodies of six others, four male, two female. “Fuji has come to be known as Suicide Mountain,” Onu said. The 6,250-acre Aokigahara woodland at Fuji was, Adams learned, the most popular spot for self-destruction in all of Japan. Annually, thirty to sixty people — businessmen, usually, or pregnant women disowned by their families — made a suicide pilgrimage to Fuji. “The forest is one of the most picturesque in Asia,” Onu continued. “It has a sacred, gloomy aspect, and most of these people simply wander into the woods, lose themselves in the foliage, and starve. Their skeletons are often found under leaves.” As he spoke he fingered prawns and gracefully scooped slivers of tuna into his mouth.

The following day Adams and his crew flew to the coast. From there they chartered the Glomar Challenger and sounded depth charges along the northern edge of the trench. Shrimp boats hovered near them all afternoon, waving their nets in the sun. The ship’s captain, an American who’d spent the last eight years on the Sea of Japan, explained to Adams that American shipping was dying. “Can’t compete with foreign prices,” he said. He was returning to the United States next month to guide a ferry. “I can make more as a ferry pilot than I can as the captain of a ship.” He showed Adams the radar system — a constantly changing, transparent map — and provided cheerful explanations of the ship’s workings.

The crew drank beer, watched a school of sharks in the warmer waters of the continental slope, and compiled their charts. On the way in, early evening, they toasted the coastal lights and listened to a Japanese broadcast of the World Series.

Disappointed with the initial results of the mission, Adams remained in Japan for another four months, taking time off to visit other parts of the country. At Aokigahara, his access to the forest was limited by yet another manhunt: a party of schoolchildren had wandered away from their class picnic and had not been seen in two days. The police had reason to suspect that the children had lost themselves intentionally, to fulfill a suicide pact. When Adams expressed astonishment, a Japanese tourist assured him, “Japan, unfortunately, has one of the highest child suicide rates in the world. Our school system is very rigorous and many children succumb to the pressure.”

In the forest Adams paused to rest in a small clearing. The wood’s magnetic rocks confounded compass readings but he had kept his eye on a line of trees. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, relaced his shoes, and started to move on when he heard a rustling in the leaves. He paused. Again. Adams turned and crept toward the shade. There, kneeling in the dirt, were two little girls wearing checkered dresses. Their bangs were long. Adams crouched. One of the girls began to giggle. Her friend, startled at first, joined her. Adams sat back on his heels and watched the laughing little girls.

Deidre crying. “Toby hit me.”

“Apologize to your sister.”

“No,” Toby says.

Adams sends them to bed.

All night, sniffles from their rooms. Adams gets up, feels his way along the wall. He winds up in the kitchen, annoyed that he cannot find his way around the house in the dark. In the field behind his yard two boys, bundled against the cold, light a Roman candle. The cardboard tube explodes, knocking the boys face down into the weeds. Before Adams can reach the back door, the boys leap up, apparently unharmed, and slice a path through the stickers. Adams calls his kids, feeds them ice cream and cakes. “What’s wrong, Dad? What’s the matter,” Deidre asks, holding out her cone. “Can I have some more?”

When Pamela was pregnant with Toby, she craved foods that didn’t exist. “Is there something that tastes the way furniture polish smells?” Adams made a meatloaf that nearly fit the bill, but nothing quite satisfied her and she moped around the house, miserable. To cheer her up, Adams bought an ottoman on which she could recline, and several cans of Lemon Pledge to polish it.

Yesterday Pamela arrived with a U-Haul for the ottoman and the oak wardrobe she had left behind. Adams is glad to have the furniture out, but the change is unsettling. He goes to Morty’s early, orders a couple of beers. Bob arrives at eight-thirty and tunes his bass guitar. Before the first set begins, Bob addresses the band. “We were shit last week. Sam dragged on nearly every tune.”

Pete and Denny turn to look at Adams.

“‘Dock of the Bay’ saved us but let’s tighten up, all right?”

There is something about guitars and cords and amps that changes a man. During the week Bob and Denny are polite businessmen, Pete a smooth announcer, but let them strap on a Fender or pick up a Gibson and they develop a slouch, mumble “Hey,” and squint whether the room is smoky or not.

Tonight the combo will alternate sets with a punk band Morty has hired to appeal to the teenagers. Orphaned by Bullets, they’re called. The drummer has blue hair.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he tells Adams. Adams is rubbing his cymbals with Brasso and a rag.

“It changes the molecular structure. Your cymbals turn into wax paper.”

He’s nineteen, pimpled, answers to Zig. His drums are plastic, transparent, flat as tables. A long extension cord connects his toms to an outlet behind the bar. The drums ping when hit, and reverberate for several seconds.

Adams’ set looks clumsy next to the modern equipment. Zig gapes at Adams’ snare. “Where’s it plug in?” he says.

Pete is sitting at a table next to a short young girl. “Sam, this is Mary.”

“Hi. I’m Sam.”

“You’re good. I heard you last week.” “Thanks.”

“Mary goes to high school,” Pete says, grinning. He offers her a cigarette. She says something about living on her own. It’s not clear to Adams how she can rent an apartment or stay out late without her parents’ consent.

“So, what do you do when you’re not playing the drums?”

“I draw maps.”

“Neat.” Her T-shirt says RELAX. “YOU know what, I think we should have an adventure when you guys get off,” she says. Her toes are painted red. “Buy some shit and go sleep on the moon.”

“Time to swing,” Pete says, tapping Adams’ arm.

Adams follows him, takes his place behind the drums, and counts them into the first set. After ten minutes the band’s in gear, they’re relaxing, but the air remains charged, keeping the songs tight. The set moves nicely, and when they kick into “Dock of the Bay” they’ve never been better. Melody and rhythm work together like two bodies long accustomed to the steady timing of affection.

Orphaned by Bullets sounds a little like hash brown potatoes being shaken in a jar. Pete and Denny fall on each other with laughter, order extra Scotch-and-waters. Adams and Bob, gauging the crowd reaction, listen intently to the tunes. In the eighties, punk is the come-together shout, but Orphaned by Bullets’ sound is unlike any variation of rock and roll Adams has ever heard. Each member of the band, dressed in gray plastic overalls with dabs of wild paint in his hair, seems to be playing a mathematical progression on his instrument unlike the progressions performed by his cohorts. They are hardly a band at all in the traditional sense of the word, but the young crowd, which had been perfunctorily polite during the combo’s set, is eating it up.

“We can’t compete for this audience,” Adams tells Bob.

“You’re right. I figure jazz — straight jazz. They’ll think it’s something new. Next set, we open with ‘Take Five.’”

“These cats are great!” Pete shouts across the table.

“Shut up, Pete,” says Bob.

Adams calls Jill from a pay phone near the kitchen. She had wanted to come tonight to hear him play, but Carter dumped a box of paperwork on her at quitting time.

“How’s it going?” Adams asks.

“Slowly. Carter’s up to something.”

“Like what?”

“Can’t tell. What he gave me is incomplete, but it’s complicated, that much I can see.”

“Does it involve more real estate?”

“Somehow. I got a feeling things’ll be hopping in another month or two.”

“Listen, I get off around two-thirty.”

“Come by. I’ll be up.”

Jill’s est terminology annoys him — she knows this and teases him with it — yet sometimes it’s strangely accurate. The word “impact,” for example, with its soft plosive p, reminding him of sitting on a plane, without peanuts or gum, a popping in his ears, a sudden descent.

“How did your wife’s leaving impact you?” she asked one night. He fell and fell.

“Are you ever uneasy, doing stuff for Carter?”

“No,” she answers. “It’s my job.”

“Right. Balzac said ‘The individual is not expected to be more scrupulous than the nation.’”

“I don’t know about that. I just figure he’s building his own karma. In the next life he’ll come back as an old chamois in a car wash. I’ll wipe my dipstick with him.”

Adams enjoys hearing her talk late at night after playing at the club, delights in the gentle pressure of her head on his arm.

The second marriage, they say, is the one for love.

He strokes her hair.

The first, too.

The phone wakes him from a dream: perfume, silken clothes.

Jill hands him the receiver. “Hello?” he says.

“Parum-pum.”

“Kenny?”

“What’s up?”

“It’s late. What’s happened?”

“Nothing, man, just checking to see if you’re still kicking.”

“What time is it?”

“One.”

“Three here.” He should never have given Kenny Jill’s number.

“Good news. I’m fixed.”

“You are?”

“No more going broke. I’m fixed with a band now.”

“Great.” Jill turns over, asks him who it is. “My brother.”

“What?”

“Nothing, Kenny. That’s great.”

“We’re doing a shoot for MTV next week. Song called ‘Thoughts You Never Had.’ Rock’s tribute to Nancy Reagan.”

“Gonna get rich.”

“Damn straight.”

“We’re splitting the bill with a punk band now. They’ve got synthesized drums and a Linn drum machine.”

“I hate that fuckin’ Linn,” Kenny says. “Glorified metronome.”

“Goddamn tin can.” Adams enjoys his brother.

As Kenny talks, Adams’ dream comes back to him: he was swimming in a sea of women’s clothes, with an erection like a wooden mast. Perfume sprayed his face. His body was heavy, sopping with the scent. He touches Jill’s bare shoulder, leans back on the blue-striped pillow, and drifts away again, Kenny’s voice a distant warning from shore.

No one, he thinks, properly appreciates the difficulty of beginning. He is entering coordinates into the computer. Latitude, longitude, the Tome Pepsi sign hanging by a nail on the wall, facing north, of that brown adobe bar in Ciudad Acuña, the river in south Texas where he lost his high school ring, all reduced to a set of binary numbers, neat, concise.

Caprice, he thinks, occupies much of the world’s space.

A sign on the wall says, PROPER NAMES/DANGEROUS WORDS. The gallery is nearly empty. A series of pedestals in the center of the room support copper cylindrical tubes — he recognizes these as more sophisticated models of the equipment Pamela used to tinker with in the garage. Atop the copper tubes, attached with wires, striated plastic cylinders rotate slowly. Images appear inside the cylinders. In one, an image of Pamela, strands of her dark hair blowing violently across her forehead. As the cylinder turns she raises her arms. She is holding a camera. With a sardonic smile she snaps the viewer’s picture. Then she lowers her arms and closes her eyes. Another cylinder reveals, bit by bit, a house frame, crossbeams and posts. As the cylinder turns the frame crumbles in a funnel of dust.

Most of the cylinders contain words. Wirklichkeit is here. So is Marriage, a vague, faded pink, floating as if underwater.

Pamela’s other words:

On the gallery walls, framed holographic images illuminated by black light: spectra of various lengths and intensities, silver, gold, and blue. Names of actors and politicians (Strom Thurmond, Veronica Lake), a more traditional collage reminiscent of Picasso.

The catalog says, “Saussure writes, ‘In language there are only differences,’ emphasizing the centrality of choice. A term’s meaning is determined by a host of other terms not chosen. Ms. Adams’ work renders dramatically this structuralist principle. Her words, free of referents as they are free of frames and museum walls, are tangible negations resisting interpretation. In representing only themselves, their meanings attached to words that the artist did not choose, they fill the gallery space, almost invisibly, with absence.”

In the fall the valley turns green. Scholars and mystics have joined hands in attempts to explain why our seasons misbehave. Weathermen pepper our skies with balloons, diviners scratch the earth with sticks. Legends, and curious accounts in leather pouches found in the hollow of a tree, suggest that the valley was once a lake. Dogwood bloomed on its banks, peacocks danced in the hills.

Fishermen reported seeing water sprites, twinkling, no fatter than fingers, change into bulbous squashlike creatures in the middle of the night. What appeared to be falling leaves drifted slowly out over the lake, then turned into metal filings, which rained down hard upon the men. Nothing was safe. The shape-shifters smashed turtles, birds, trawlers, anything that settled on the lake.

On shore a chubby boy, an orphan, lived on the pumpkins of the fields. He longed to swim. As he had no family, the villagers assumed responsibility for him. They warned him of the danger in the water, but he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the lake. He spoke of the colors at the bottom as though he’d been diving. Some people suggested that he came from the lake; after all, he had no family. Where did he come from?

One night, having informed the fishermen that he was tired of treading the earth, he jumped into the shallows and swam. From time to time the townsfolk saw him in the middle of the lake, riding a shaggy white buffalo. Eventually the boy wrenched a horn from the animal’s head and tossed it ashore. A tree laden with heavy fruit sprang up where it landed. Next the boy surfaced gripping a black obelisk. The obelisk was slippery; often the boy lost his grip, but finally managed to fling it ashore. An artesian well burst forth, spraying water high into the air. The villagers danced beneath the spring, feasting on heavy fruit as the boy battled tumbleweeds, crates, panes of glass. Each time he hurled an opponent ashore it became, instantly, a source of beauty and health. The people were delighted.

Finally one creature remained — the mother squash, the biggest in the lake. The boy caught his breath, ate a chunk of pumpkin, submerged. He was underwater for hours. The lake boiled. Orange steam rose in patches off the water. The water began to blaze. Women from the village tossed ice into the deepest part. A mixture of blood — male and female, mother and son — hardened on the surface, burst into flames. It burned until the lake dried up. Afterwards there was no sign of the boy or the squash — just a salt deposit, as if from giant tears. For years boiling rain seared the dogwoods in the valley. The grass dried up in summer.

He turns out the light. “Good night,” he says.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“That was neat. Will you tell us another story tomorrow night?”

“Sure. Go to sleep now.”

He sits up with a drink, then falls asleep in his chair and dreams about the valley he had mentioned in the children’s story. When he wakes up he goes to his drafting table and on a thin sheet of paper tries to recall the dream: “Each morning before the valley is awake the little girls escape. Their curtains blow through windows, like blouses opening. They’re out to catch the fathers.

“The fathers have not been home all night. Their coats are creased, faces rough with stubble. Before the sky is light they’ve ordered bacon, eggs, toast and jelly, waffles, bagels with cream cheese. In the alley, doors X-ed with boards echo the children’s hisses, shadows dart across the bricks. When the fathers leave the diner, they discover that their cars have been pushed down the street and rest, engines smoking, in a pile.

“It matters, our life with women, how we hurt them if we see them, but the little girls have clearly had enough.”

A picnic with the kids in the car beneath an overpass.

“This is great,” Deidre says, pulling thick waxed paper away from a fat pimiento sandwich.

He had simply pulled off the road because he knew it would surprise them, and they are pleased whenever you surprise them.

“Put the Coke on the dash,” he says. “You’ll spill it.”

Deidre spills it trying to put it on the dash. Apologies. Kleenex. Toby turns the radio on as high as it will go. Elvis Costello singing “Watching the Detectives.”

“We can do without that,” Adams says, turning the radio down. “I wanted to ask you — Toby, be careful.” Pulling over was not a good idea. “Okay, leave it, I’ll get it later. I wanted to ask you how you’re getting along now. It’s been a while since you moved into the new house. Do you like it all right? Is everything okay?”

A Jeno’s Pizza truck roars by, shaking the car. The kids eat in silence. They’ve learned the game. Keep quiet. Don’t rat on Mom. When the adults are acting funny, stay out of their way.

“I just want to know if you’re happy,” Adams says, brushing crumbs from the seat. He misses being able to surprise them. When they were very young, a stray cat came into the backyard. Pamela fed it every evening and they loved to watch it. Deidre was wild with new expressions — a dozen every day, it seemed — and “cat” was one of her favorite discoveries. Just for fun Adams started referring to the stray as a “catezoidal object.” The kids laughed uproariously, impressed that you could call a thing more than one name, or twist words around to make them sound funny. Now that he sees Toby and Deidre only on weekends he has to schedule their time wisely. Surprise has gone out of their Saturdays. “Things haven’t been the same, I know,” Adams says.

Toby replies, “You can say that again.”

“Well, tell me about it. How does it make you feel? What can I do for you?”

“Buy me a sheep,” Deidre says.

“Shut up,” Toby says.

“You shut up.”

“Would you like to stay with me more? Not just on weekends, but maybe during the week sometimes?”

“I don’t know,” Toby says. He’s been seeing a psychologist once a week. The man, he says, “sucks.”

“Could we stay up late and watch TV?”

“Not on school nights.”

“Please, Dad.”

“No. Not on school nights. You know better than that.”

“It’s no fun,” Toby says, “when you have to plan things.”

“I know. Do you have fun with Mom? Does she spend enough time with you?”

Silence. Well, it was a loaded question. “I know she’s busy a lot.” “She’s all right,” Toby says.

Adams thinks she’s frightening. Lately, to give her “Dangerous Words” more depth, she’s been reading Wittgenstein. When he picked up the children, she read him the opening paragraph of The Brown Book: “Augustine, in describing his learning of language, says that he was taught to speak by learning the names of things. It is clear that whoever says this has in mind the way a child learns such words as ‘man,’ ‘sugar,’ ‘table,’ etc. He does not primarily think of such words as ‘today,’ ‘not,’ ‘perhaps.’”

She also showed him a David Hockney photograph, a woman in a thin lace blouse, tousled hair, one arm thrown languorously over her head, hand brushing her cheek. The photograph was pieced together from several Polaroids so that the woman had two noses, three eyes, two mouths. A hand in four parts. The overall effect was of movement, of seeing a two-dimensional image from several angles at once. “Cubist photography,” Pamela said. “That one,” pointing to the woman, “resembles Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse series. The Red Armchair. Remember, I showed you?”

Adams does not remember.

Her house must be full of surprises: face parts, altered bodies, words hung like wet towels from the shower rod, drying in the sink, smuggled under pillows. Adams fears boring his children.

“I know what,” he says. “Would you like to come to the club some night and hear me play the drums?”

“Yeah!” Deidre says. Toby shrugs.

“You haven’t heard me play in a long time.”

A Ryder rental truck swooshes by on the highway.

“Didn’t you have fun,” Adams asks.

“Yes,” they answer at once, the practiced response.

“I don’t think Toby likes me,” says Jill, delightfully naked, closing the bedroom door. The furniture seems to change temperature whenever she spends the night.

“He doesn’t like anybody,” Adams answers. “I’m hoping he’ll outgrow it.”

He is on his back on top of the sheet. She leans over him, touches the top of his ear with her lips. “You’re a good man,” she says.

“I don’t want to be a good man.”

“Show me.”

He catches the small of her back with his arm and rolls her over on top of him so that she is facing the ceiling, her shoulders resting against his chest. With his hands he warms her stomach. She bends her knees, locks her legs on either side of his hips, and lifting her arms over her head, sends her fingers through his hair.

Pamela phones. “I hear you have a new friend.” “Yes.”

“Listen, Toby took the ledgers and financial records from your closet. I found them in his room yesterday. He had your canceled checks spread out on the bed. He said he’s auditing you for a political science project. Claims you owe five hundred dollars in back taxes.”

The figure’s a little high, Adams thinks. “I’ll come by tomorrow,” he says.

“All right. One more thing, Sam. I’ve hired a divorce lawyer.”

“Oh?”

“Can we not be messy about this?”

“No problem,” Adams says.

City code (written): One parking space/four theater seats. Theaters best located in suburbs. Commuters generally do not return to the downtown area at night for pleasure after leaving the downtown area after work. Four- to six-screen theater complexes, cor-porately managed (AMC, Loews, etc.) to be encouraged for zoning purposes (i.e., limit entertainment space as much as possible).

Adams recalls the wide, balconied theaters of his youth, stone pillars on either side of the screen.

City code (unwritten): Fast-food franchises generally discouraged for the present. Reasons cited: (1) glut (2) cash flow out of the community. Records indicate that seventy-four percent of expenditures at a single McDonald’s restaurant flow out of the community (food and paper from the corporation, rent paid to the corporation, advertising, accountants, lawyers).

City code (revised, S. Adams): Freeway overpasses with more than forty percent curvature to be dislodged by giant cranes and placed, unanchored, on the ground in reversed position, to serve as bases for rocking horses roughly the size of three-story buildings. Ancient cannon (howitzers, etc.) to be removed from military museums and welded together as superstructure for legs, tails, heavily maned necks. Clouds snagged by oversized cloth nets stretched between helicopters to be used for padding in Astroturf-and-leather saddles. Redbud trees bundled together and tied are to be placed on the horses’ noses: blazing nostrils. In addition, cypress trees to be imported from states with large rivers, sculpted to resemble butterflies, birds, painted white, gold, blue, and suspended mobile-like from cranes around the horses.

Deidre dressed for dance rehearsal. In her grass skirt and cap she looks like a little hut. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Adams says.

“Well, we were in David’s yard — ”

“David is the little boy…?”

“Next door. His daddy took down his swing set.” She stops, as though she’s made her point.

“And?”

“He’s really mean. He doesn’t want David to have any fun.”

“Okay, so then what happened?”

“So then … we were in David’s yard, okay? And his daddy took down his swing set. And there was this metal bar, you know, that used to be part of the swing set, and I picked it up and started throwing it in the air like a baton, okay? And I wasn’t throwing it high, like he said I did, and it came down on David’s head.”

“How badly was he cut?”

“I didn’t see him bleeding or anything, but five minutes later David’s dad comes over here yelling at me like I’m some kind of wookie or something.”

“They had to take him to the emergency room,” Pamela says.

“Has this sort of thing happened before, Deidre?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“Well, apparently David’s father says the other kids are afraid of you.”

“That’s ‘cause they’re really really dumb. I liked it better where we lived before.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell your father about the Crisco,” Pamela says.

“Oh, that’s stupid.”

Adams says, “What about the Crisco?”

“I was with Stephanie in her kitchen — ” “Stephanie is eighteen months old,” Pamela adds.

“And I thought it would be funny to put Crisco on her face to make her look like a clown.”

“Stephanie was covered with Crisco head to toe,” Pamela says.

Adams laughs.

“It’s not funny, Sam.”

“You had me thinking she was terrorizing everybody.”

“I never said that. That was Mr. Doyle, David’s father.”

“He’s really mean,” Deidre says.

“He had no right to yell at her. I’ll punish my own kids the way I see fit,” Pamela says.

“Ma-ma.”

“All right,” Adams says. “I’ll take you to dance class. And tomorrow I want you to apologize to David and his father.”

“It was an accident!”

“You’re sorry it happened, aren’t you? And if you haven’t apologized to Stephanie’s mother, I think you should do that too.”

“And to Stephanie?”

“Yes, and to Stephanie.”

“She won’t understand, Dad.”

“Well, you’ll teach her. Now get your stuff.” He slaps her bottom.

Pamela offers him a drink. “I’m not home enough, Sam. I know that’s part of the problem.” In addition to her work, she’s now involved on a volunteer basis with a social group called Women Against Poverty. On Tuesday nights she counsels battered wives, distributes food to women whose food stamps have been rescinded by federal cuts, and helps uneducated single mothers put together résumés and fill out job applications.

“You should see these women when they realize how easy it is to fill out a job application. They think their problems are over. Of course they’re just beginning. I don’t know how much good we do. Sometimes I think we’re getting their hopes up for nothing. But I’m teaching them art. I’ve put these cutouts on the wall, like Matisse dancers, and we talk about color and proportion. Most of them don’t care, but it takes their minds off their children and their boyfriends and their bad checks.”

“Don’t worry about the kids. We’ll work things out.”

Deidre is ready to go. Adams drops her off at class, circles back, and has a talk with Mr. Doyle, a nervous man who turns out to be friendly and reasonable.

“I’m sorry if I upset your wife,” he says.

“Understandable. And you probably did Deidre some good. David’s all right?”

“He’s going to be fine.”

Fathers being fatherly.

Adams offers to pay David’s medical costs; Mr. Doyle politely declines.

Adams drives to the women’s shelter with a bottle of champagne. “To celebrate your work. And the end of the hostilities with Mr. Doyle,” he says.

The shelter is temporarily located in a vast ware house, no private alcoves, and he feels embarrassed standing nicely dressed among crying women and children, holding a chilled bottle of Moët et Chandon.

“That’s really sweet of you, Sam. Can you leave it in my car?” She hands him her keys and leads a mixed group of children — black, Chicano, Asian — toward a corner of the room. One of the boys repeats to himself in a deep, affected voice, “I worked late last night, worked late tonight, and I’m fed up, do you hear me, I’ve had it up to here.” Loudly buzzing yellow lights glare from the rafters of the building, the gray metal walls are covered with cardboard figures holding hands and dancing in circles. Folding chairs and cots fill the space in the center of the room; on the sides, seven or eight portable freezers.

Adams follows Pamela, jangling her car keys. “Why don’t you just come over when you get through tonight?” For some reason — perhaps because Mr. Doyle was so nice — he feels gracious and forgiving this evening.

“I’m going to be here awhile.”

“How long?” He bumps into a pregnant woman with very thin legs and arms.

“I don’t know, Sam. I’m just not up for it, okay? It was very sweet of you, but …”

“Okay, okay.” He is jealous of the crowded shelter, of her purpose here.

She squats beside a woman with long curly hair. The woman is seated on the concrete floor.

“How you doing, Angela,” Pamela asks.

Angela’s left wrist is in a cast. “I haven’t changed my mind,” she says. Her tongue is cut.

“Please, Angela.”

“Where did they park my car?”

“Stay with us, at least for tonight.”

“I’ve got to see him again!” Angela starts to cry.

Pamela looks up at Adams: condemnation, fear, affection? He’d like to squeeze her shoulder reassuringly but knows she might consider it, at this moment, a hostile gesture.

City of Women Alone, Street of the Listener, Avenue of Lost Children. Come back. Return. So this is where we are.