Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Kiss Away

THE HOUSE had an upstairs sleeping porch, and she first saw the young man from up there, limping through the alley and carrying a torn orange-and-yellow Chinese kite. He had a dog with him, and both the dog and the man had an air of scruffy unseriousness. From the look of it, no project these two got involved with could last longer than ten minutes. That was the first thing she liked about them.

Midmorning, midweek, midsummer: even teenagers were working, and in this flat July heat no one with any sense was trying to fly kites. No one but a fool would fly a kite in this weather.

The young man threw the ball of string and the ripped cloth into the alley’s trash bin while the dog watched him. Then the dog sat down and with an expression of pained concentration scratched violently behind its ear. It looked around for something else to be interested in, barked at a cat on a window ledge, then gave up the effort and scratched its ear again.

From the upstairs sleeping porch, the young man looked exactly like the fool in the tarot pack — shaggy and loose-limbed, a songster at the edge of cliffs — and the dog was the image of the fool’s dog, a frisky yellow mutt. Dogs tended to like fools. They had an affinity. Fools always gave dogs plenty to do. Considering this, the woman near the window felt her heart pound twice. Her heart was precise. It was like a doorbell.

She was unemployed. She had been out of college for a year, hadn’t been able to find a job she could tolerate for more than a few days, and with the last of her savings had rented the second floor of this house in Minneapolis, which included an old-fashioned sleeping porch facing east. She slept out here, and then in the mornings she sat in a hard-backed chair reading books from the library, drinking coffee, and listening to classical music on the public radio station. Right now they were playing the Goyescas of Enrique Granados. She was running out of money and trying to stay calm about it, and the music helped her. The music seemed to say that she could sit like this all morning, and no one would punish her. It was very Spanish.

She put on her shoes and threw her keys into the pocket of her jeans. She raised the slatted blinds. “Hey!” she yelled down into the alley.

“Hey, yourself,” the young man yelled back. He smiled at her and squinted. Apparently he couldn’t see her clearly. That was the second thing she liked about him.

“You can’t throw that kite in there,” she said. “That Dumpster’s only for people who live in this building.” She shaded her eyes against the sun to see him better. The guy’s dog was now standing and wagging its tail.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it out,” and when she told him not to and that she’d be down in a second and he should just wait there, she knew he would do what she asked. What she hadn’t expected was that he would smile enormously at her and, when she appeared, give her a hug — they were strangers after all — right out of the blue. She pushed him away but could not manage to get angry at him. Then she felt the dog’s tongue slurping on her fingers, as if she’d spilled sauce on them and they needed some cleaning.

He offered to buy her coffee, and he explained himself as they walked. He had once had good prospects, he said, and a future about which he could boast. He had been accepted into medical school eighteen months ago but had come down with a combination of mononucleosis and bacterial pneumonia, and after recuperating, he had lost all his interest in great plans. The two illnesses — one virus and one bacteria — had taken the starch out of him, he said. He actually used expressions like that. He had a handsome face when you saw him up close, but as soon as you walked a few feet away something went wrong with his appearance; it degenerated somehow.

His name was Walton Tyner Ross, but he liked to be called Glaze because of his taste for doughnuts and his habitual faraway expression. She didn’t think someone whose nickname was Glaze was ever going to become a successful practitioner of medicine, but in a certain light in the morning he was the finest thing she had seen in some time, especially when viewed from a few inches away, as they walked down Hennepin Avenue for breakfast.

Stopping under a tree that gave them both a moment of shade, he told her that if she wanted him to, he would show up regularly in the morning from now on. He needed motivation. Maybe she did, too. They would project themselves into the world, he said. She agreed, and on the next few mornings he appeared in the alley with his dog, Einstein, a few feet behind him. He called up to her, and the dog barked in chorus. She didn’t think it was very gallant, his yelling up at her like that, but she had had her phone disconnected, and his passion for her company pleased and moved her.

They would walk down Hennepin Avenue past what he called the Church of the Holy Oil Can — because of its unbecoming disproportionate spire — to one of several greasy smoky restaurants with plate-glass front windows and red-and-white-checkered café curtains and front counters with stools. They always sat at the stools because Walton liked to watch the grill. The first time he bought Jodie a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a biscuit and orange juice. As the breakfast went on, he became more assertive. Outside, Einstein sat near a lamppost and watched the passing pedestrians.

Walton Tyner Ross — looking very much like a fool as he spilled his breakfast on his shirt — was a Roman candle of theories and ideas. Jodie admired his idea that unemployment was like a virus. This virus was spreading and was contagious. The middle class was developing a positive taste for sloth. One person’s unemployment could infect anyone else. “Take you,” he said. “Take us.” He wolfed down his toast slathered with jam. “We shouldn’t feel guilty over not working. It’s like a flu we’ve both got. We’re infected with indifference. We didn’t ask to get it. We inhaled it, or someone sneezed it on us.”

“I don’t know,” she said. In front of her, the fry cook, a skinny African-American kid with half-steamed glasses, was sweating and wiping his brow on his shirtsleeve. The restaurant had the smell of morning ambition and resolution: coffee and cigarette smoke and maple syrup and cheap aftershave and hair spray. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But maybe we’re both just kind of lazy. My sister says I’m lazy. I think it’s more complicated than that. I once had plans, too,” Jodie said, indicating with a flick of her wrist the small importance of these plans.

“Like what? What sort of plans?”

She was watching the fry cook and could hardly remember. “Oh,” she said. “What I wanted was an office job. Keeping accounts and books. Something modest, a job that would leave the rest of my life alone and not eat up my resources.” She waited a moment and touched her cheek with her finger. “In those days — I mean, a few months ago — my big project was love. I always wanted big love. Like that game, Careers, where you decide what you want out of life? I wanted a small job and huge love, like a big event. An event so big you couldn’t say when it would ever stop.”

He nodded. “But so far all the love you’ve gotten has been small.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “Maybe it’s the times. Maybe I’m not pretty enough.”

He leaned back and grinned at her to dispute this.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “I can say all this to you because we don’t know each other. Anyway, I was once almost engaged. The guy was nice, and I guess he meant well, and my parents liked him. They didn’t mind that he was kind of ragged, but almost as soon as he became serious about me, he was taking everything for granted. It’s hard to explain,” she said, pushing her scrambled eggs around on the plate and eyeing the ketchup bottle. “It wasn’t his fault, exactly. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t play me.” She gave up and poured some ketchup on her eggs. “You don’t have to play me all the time, but if you’re going to get married, you should be played sometimes. You should play him, he should play you. With him, there was no tune coming out of me. Just prose. You know, Walton,” she said suddenly, “you sometimes look like the fool illustration on the tarot pack. No offense. You just do.”

“Sure, I do,” he said, and when he turned, she could see that his ears were pierced, two crease incisions on each lobe. “Okay, look. Here’s what’s going to happen. You and me, we’re going to go out together in the morning and look for work. Then in the afternoon we’ll drive around, I don’t know, a treasure hunt, something that doesn’t cost anything. Then I don’t know what we’re going to do in the evening. You can decide that.” He explained that good fortune had put them together but that maybe they should at least try to fight the virus of sloth.

She noticed a fat balding man on Walton’s other side, with hideous yellow-green eyes, staring at her. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

The next day, he was there in the hot dusty alley with his morning paper and his dog and his limp, and she came down to him without his having to call up to her. She wasn’t totally presentable — she was wearing the same jeans as the day before, and a hand-me-down shirt from her sister — but she had put on a silver bracelet for him. As they walked to the restaurant he complimented her on her pleasant sexiness. He told her that in the moments when she had descended the back steps, his heart had been stirred. “Your heart. Yeah, right,” she said.

Walking with her toward the café, Einstein trotting behind them and snapping at flies, he said that today they would scan the want ads and would calculate their prospects. In the late morning they would go to his apartment — he had a phone — and make a few calls. They would be active and brisk and aggressive. They would pretend that adulthood — getting a job — made sense. Matching his stride, enjoying his optimism, Jodie felt a passing impulse to take Walton’s arm. He was gazing straight ahead, not glazed at all, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and she briefly admired his arms and the light on his skin.

In the restaurant, at the counter spotted with dried jam and brown gravy, where the waitress said, “Hiya, Glaze,” and poured him his coffee without being asked, Jodie felt a pleasant shiver of jealousy. So many people seemed to know and to like this unremarkable but handsome guy; he, or something about him, was infectious. The thought occurred to her that he might change her life. By the time her Belgian waffle arrived, Jodie had circled six want ads for temp secretaries with extensive computer experience. She knew and understood computers backward and forward and hated them all, but they were like family members and she could work with them if she had to. She didn’t really want the jobs — she wanted to sit on the sleeping porch with her feet up on the windowsill and listen to the piano music of Granados and watch things go by in the alley — but the atmosphere of early-morning ambition in the café was beginning to move her to action. She had even brought along a pen.

She felt a nudge in her ribs.

She turned to her left and saw sitting next to her the same fat balding man with horrible yellow-green eyes whom she had seen the day before. His breath smelled of gin and graham crackers. He was smiling at her unpleasantly. He was quite a package. “ ’Scuse me, miss,” he said. “Hate to bother you. I’m short bus fare. You got seventy-five cents?” His speech wore the clothes of an obscure untraceable Eastern European accent.

“Sure,” she said without thinking. She fished out three quarters from her pocket and gave the money to him. “Here.” She turned back to the want ads.

“Oboy,” he said, scooping it up. “Are you lucky.”

“Am I?” she asked.

“You got that right,” he said. He rose unsteadily and his yellow-green eyes leered at her, and for a moment Jodie thought that he might topple over, like a collapsed circus tent, covering her underneath his untucked shirt and soiled beltless trousers. “I,” he announced to the restaurant, although no one was paying any attention to him, “am the Genie of the Magic Lamp.”

No one even looked up.

The fat man bent down toward her. “Come back tomorrow,” he said in a ghoulish whisper. Now he smelled of fireplace ash. “You get your prize.” After a moment, he staggered out of the restaurant in a series of forward and sideways lurching motions, almost knocking over on the way a stainless-steel coatrack. The waitress behind the counter watched him leave with an expression on her face of irritated indifference made more explicit by her hand on her hip and a pink bubble almost the color of blood expanding from her lips. Bubble gum was shockingly effective at expressing contempt, Jodie thought. All the great waitresses chewed gum.

“Who was that?” she asked Walton.

He shook his head like a spring-loaded toy on the back shelf of a car. As usual, he smiled before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some guy. Tad or Tadeusz or like that. He always asks people for money. Usually people ignore him. Nobody’s given him any money in a long time. Come on. We’re going to my place to make some phone calls. Then we’ll go on a treasure hunt.”

When they came out to the sidewalk, Einstein cried and shivered with happiness to see them, barking twice as a greeting. Walton loosened her from a bicycle stand to which she had been tethered, while Jodie breathed in the hot summer air and said, “By the way, Walton, where did you get that thing in your walk? Is it, like, arthritis?”

He turned and smiled at her. Her heart started thumping again. She couldn’t imagine why men didn’t smile more often than they did. It was the most effective action they knew how to take, but they were always amateurs at it. Jodie thought that maybe she hadn’t been smiled upon that much in her life. Perhaps that was it.

“Fascists,” Walton said, getting up. “My dog and I fought the fascists.”

Walton’s apartment was upstairs from an ice-cream parlor, and it smelled of fudge and heavy cream. Although the apartment had a small study area with bookshelves and a desk, and a bedroom where the bed was neatly made and where even the dog’s rubber squeak toys were kept in the corner, the effect of neatness was offset by a quality of gloom characteristic of places where sunlight had never penetrated. It was like Bluebeard’s castle. The only unobstructed windows faced north. All the other windows faced brick or stone walls so that no matter what time of day it was, the lamps had to be kept on.

They went through the circled want ads, made some telephone calls, and arranged for two interviews, one for Jodie as a receptionist at a discount brokerage house and one for Walton as a shipping clerk.

Having finished that task, Jodie dropped herself onto one of the floor pillows and examined a photograph on the wall over the desk showing a young couple, both smiling. Wearing a flowery summer dress, the woman sat on a swing, and the man stood behind her, about to give her a push.

“That’s my father,” Walton said, standing behind Jodie.

“It’s your mother, too.”

“I know it. I know it’s my mother, too. But it’s mostly my father. He always liked to meet my girlfriends.”

“I’m not your girlfriend, Walton,” she said. “I hardly know you.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Want a beer?” he asked. “For lunch?”

He said unemployed people should always seek out castoffs and that was what they would do during the afternoon, but just as they were about to go out to his car, he fell asleep in his chair, his dog at his feet, her front paws crossed.

Jodie sat where she was for a moment, painfully resisting the impulse to go rummaging through Walton’s medicine cabinet and desk and dresser drawers. Instead, she brought a chair over next to him, sat down in it, and studied his face. Although it wasn’t an unusual face, at this distance certain features about it were certainly noteworthy. The line where the beard began on his cheek — he was cleanshaven — was so straight that it seemed to have been implanted there with a ruler. He had two tiny, almost microscopic pieces of dandruff in his eyebrows. His lashes were rather long, for a man. His lower lip was also rather full, but his upper lip was so small and flat at the bottom that you might not notice it unless you looked carefully. When he exhaled, his breath came in two puffs: It sounded like hurr hurr. He had a thin nose, and his left cheek appeared to have the remnant of an acne scar, a little blossom of reddening just beneath the skin like a truffle. With his head leaning forward, his hair in back fell halfway to his shoulders; these shoulders seemed to her to be about average width for a man of his height and weight. Even in sleep, his forehead was creased as if in thought. His hair had a wavy back-and-forth directionality, and it reminded Jodie of corrugated tin roofing. She found wavy hair mysterious; her own was quite straight. She reached up to touch his hair, being careful not to touch his scalp. That would wake him. She liked the feeling of his hair in her fingers. It was like managing a small profit after two quarters of losses.

She was sitting again on the floor pillow when he woke up five minutes later. He shook his head and rubbed his face with his hands. He looked over to where Jodie was sitting. “Hi,” he said.

“Here’s ‘hi’ comin’ back at you,” she said. She waved all the fingers of her right hand at him.

That evening she went to a pay telephone and called her older sister, the married and employed success story. Her older sister told Jodie to take her time, to buy some nice clothes, to be careful not to lend him her credit card, and to watch and wait to see what would happen. Be careful; he might be a psychopath. Sit tight, she said. Jodie thought the advice was ironic because that kind of sitting was the only sort her sister knew how to do. She told Jodie to have her phone reconnected; it wouldn’t cost that much, and after all, telephones were a necessity for a working girl in whom a man was taking an interest. She asked if Jodie needed a loan, and Jodie said no.

Her best friend gave Jodie the same advice, except with more happy laughter and enthusiasm. Wait and see, go for it, she said. What’s the difference? It’ll be fun either way. Come over. Let’s talk.

Soon, Jodie said. We’ll see each other soon.

Her dreams that night were packs of lies, lies piled on lies, an exhibit of lies. Mayhem, penises on parade, angels in seersucker suits, that sort of thing. She woke up on the sleeping porch ashamed of her unconscious life. She hated the vulgarity and silliness of her own dreams, their subtle unstated untruths.

Her job interview was scheduled for eleven o’clock the following morning, and after Walton had called up to her and taken her to the café, she stared down into her third cup of coffee and considered how she might make the best impression on her potential employers. She had worn a rather formal white ruffled blouse with the palm tree pin and a dark blue skirt, and she had a semi-matching blue purse, at the sight of which Walton had announced that Jodie had “starchy ideas of elegance,” a phrase he didn’t care to explain. He told her that at the interview she should be eager and honest and self-possessed. “It’s a brokerage house,” he said. “They like possession in places like that, especially self-possession. Be polite. Don’t call them motherfuckers. They don’t like that. But be honest. If you’re straightforward, they’ll notice and take to you right away. Just be yourself, you know, whatever that is.”

But she wasn’t convinced. At the moment, the idea of drifting like a broken twig on the surface of a muddy river was much more appealing. All through college she had worked at a clothing store as a checkout clerk, and the experience had filled her with bitter wisdom about the compromises of tedium and the hard bloody edge of necessity. She had had a gun pointed at her during a holdup her fourth day on the job. On two other occasions, the assistant manager had propositioned her in the stockroom. When she turned him down, she expected to be fired, but for some reason she had been kept on.

“There you are.” A voice: her left ear: a phlegm rumble.

Jodie turned on her stool and saw the fat man with yellow-green eyes staring at her. “Yes,” she said.

“I hadda get things in order,” he said, grinning and snorting. He pulled out a handkerchief speckled with excretions and blew his nose into it. “I hadda get my ducks in a row. So. Here we are again. What’s your three wishes?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just ignore the guy,” Walton said, pouring some cream into his coffee. “Just ignore the guy.”

“If I was you,” the fat man said, “I’d ignore him. They don’t call him Glaze for nothing. So what’s your three wishes? I am the Genie of the Magic Lamp, like I said. You did me a favor, I do you a favor.” Jodie noticed that the fat man’s voice was hollow, as if it had emerged out of an echo chamber. Also, she had the momentary perception that the fat man’s limbs were attached to the rest of his body with safety pins.

“I don’t have three wishes,” Jodie said, studying her coffee cup.

“Everybody’s got three wishes,” the fat man said. “Don’t bullshit the Genie. There’s nobody on Earth that doesn’t have three wishes. The three wishes,” he proclaimed, “are universal.”

“Listen, Tad,” Walton said, turning himself toward the fat man and spreading himself a bit wider at the shoulders. He was beginning, Jodie noticed, a slow, threatening, male dancelike sway back and forth, the formal prelude to a fight. “Leave the lady alone.”

“All I’m asking her for is three wishes,” the fat man said. “That’s not much.” He ran his dirty fingers through his thinning hair. “You can whisper them if you want,” he said. “There’s some people that prefer that.”

“All right, all right,” Jodie said. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice toward the Genie of the Magic Lamp so that only he could hear. She just wanted to be left alone with Walton. She wanted to finish her coffee. Her needs were small. “I want a job,” she said softly, “and I’d like that guy sitting next to me to love me, and I’d like a better radio when I listen to music in the morning.”

“That’s it?” The fat man stood up, a look of storybook outrage on his face. “I give you three wishes and you kiss them away like that? What’s the matter with you? Give an American three wishes, and what do they do? Kiss them away! That’s the trouble with this country. No imagination when it comes to wishes! All right, my pretty, you got it.” And he dropped his dirty handkerchief in her lap. When she picked it up to remove it, she felt something travel up her arm — the electricity of disgust. The fat man rose and waddled out of the restaurant. She let go of the handkerchief and it drifted toward the floor.

“What was that?” Jodie asked. “What just happened?” She was shaking.

“That,” Walton told her, “was a typical incident at Clara’s Country Kitchen Café. The last time Tad gave someone three wishes, it was because the guy’d bought him a cup of coffee, and a tornado hit the guy’s garage a couple of weeks later. Fat guys have really funny delusions, have you noticed that?” He waited. “You’re shaking,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “What’d you ask for, Jodie?”

She turned to look out the front window and saw Walton’s dog gazing straight back at her in an eerie manner.

“I asked for a job, and a better radio, and a million dollars.”

“Then what was all that stuff about ‘kiss away’?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Walton, can we go, please? Can we pay our bill and leave?”

“I just remembered,” Walton said. “It’s that Rolling Stones tune. It’s on one of those antique albums, I think.” He raised his head to sing.

Love, sister, is just a kiss away,

Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Jodie said.

Walton leaned forward and gave her a little harmless peck on the cheek. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it was. Anyhow, just think of him as an overweight placebo-person. He doesn’t grant you the wish because, after all, he’s just a fat psycho, but he could put you in the right frame of mind. We’ve got to think positively here.”

“I like how you defended me,” Jodie said. “Getting all male and everything.”

“No problem,” Walton said, holding up his fist for inspection. “I like fights.”

She thought that she had interviewed well, but she wasn’t offered the job she had applied for that day. They called her a week later — she had finally had a phone installed — and told her that they had given the position to someone else but that they had been impressed by her qualities and might call her again soon if another position opened up.

She and Walton continued their job-and-castoffs hunt, and it was Walton who found a job first, at the loading dock of a retailer in the suburbs, a twenty-four-hour discount store known internationally for shoddy merchandise. The job went from midnight to eight a.m.

She thought he wasn’t quite physically robust enough for such work, but he claimed that he was stronger than he appeared. “It’s all down here,” he said, pointing to his lower back. “This is where you need it.”

She didn’t ask him what he was referring to — the muscles or the vertebrae or the cartilage. She had never seen his lower back. However, she was beginning to want to. On the passenger side of his car, she considered the swinging fuzzy dice and the intricately woven twigs of a bird’s nest tossed on the top of the dashboard as he drove her to her various job interviews. His conversation was sprinkled with references to local geology and puzzles in medicine and biology. He was interested in most observable phenomena, and the pileup of souvenirs in the car reflected him. She liked this car. She had become accustomed to its ratty disarray and to the happy panting of Einstein, who always sat in the backseat, monitoring other dogs in other cars at intersections.

At one job interview, in a glass building so sterile she thought she should wear surgery-room snoods over her shoes, she was asked about her computer skills; at another, about what hobbies she liked to fill her spare time. She didn’t think that the personnel director had any business asking her such questions. These days she filled her spare time daydreaming about sex with Walton. She didn’t say so and didn’t get the job. But at a wholesale supplier of office furniture and stationery, she was offered a position on the spot by a man whose suit was so wrinkled that it was prideful and emblematic. He was a gaudy slob. He owned the business. She was being asked to help them work on a program for inventory control. She would have other tasks. She sighed — those fucking computers were in her future again, they were unavoidable — but she took what they offered her. If she hadn’t met Walton, if Walton and Einstein hadn’t escorted her to the interview, she wouldn’t have.

To celebrate, she and Walton decided to escape the August heat by hiking down Minnehaha Creek to its mouth at the Mississippi River across from Saint Paul. He didn’t have to be at work for another four hours. He had brought his fishing pole and tackle box, and while he cast his line into the water, his dog sat behind him in the shade of a gnarled cottonwood and Jodie walked downriver, looking, but not looking for anything, exactly, just looking without a goal, for which she felt she had a talent. She found a bowling ball in usable condition and one bruised and broken point-and-shoot camera that she left under a bush.

She walked back along the river to Walton, carrying the bowling ball. On her face she had constructed an expression of delight. She was feeling hot and extremely beautiful.

“See what I’ve found?” She hoisted the ball.

“Hey, great,” he said, casting her a smile. “See what I’ve caught?” He held up an imaginary line of invisible fish.

“Good for you,” she said. His eyes were steady on her. He had been gazing at her for the last few days in a prolonged way; she’d been watching him do it. She could feel his presence now in her stomach and her knees. She heard the double blast of a boat horn. Another boat passed, pulling a water-skier with a strangely unhappy look on her face. The clock stopped; the moment paused: when he said he wanted to make love to her, that he almost couldn’t wait, that he had lost his appetite lately just thinking about her and couldn’t sleep, she didn’t quite hear him saying it, she was so happy. She threw the bowling ball out as far as she could into the river. She didn’t notice whether it splashed. She took her time getting into his arms, and when he kissed her, first at the base of her neck and then, lifting her up, all over her exposed skin, she put her hands in his hair. Suddenly she liked kissing in public. She wanted people to see them together. “Walton,” she said, “make love to me. Right here.”

“Let’s go to your place,” he said. “Let’s go there, okay?”

“Happy days,” she said in agreement, putting her fingers down inside his loose beltless jeans.

He was a slow-motion lover. She had made him some iced tea, but instead of drinking from it, he raised the cold glass to her forehead. Einstein had found a corner where she was panting with her eyes closed.

Jodie had taken him by the hand and had led him out to the sleeping porch. You couldn’t have known it from the way he looked in his street clothes, but his body was lean and muscular, and he made love shyly at first and didn’t really become easy and wild over her until he saw how she was responding to him. She was embarrassed by how quickly and how effortlessly he made her come. She put her arms up above her head and just gave in.

Maybe fools made the best lovers. They were devotees of passing pleasures, connoisseurs of them, and this, being the best of the passing pleasures, was the one at which they were most adept. His fire didn’t burn away. He wasn’t ashamed of any impulse he had, so he kept having them. He couldn’t stop bringing himself into her. “Look at me,” she said, as she was about to come again, and he looked at her with a slow grin on his face, pleased with himself and pleased with her. When she looked back at him, she let him see into her soul, all the way down, where she’d never allowed anyone to own her nakedness before.

“So. Happy ever after?”

Walton was asleep after a night’s work, and Jodie had gone down to Clara’s Country Kitchen Café by herself. This morning the fat man with yellow-green eyes was full of mirthless merriment, and he seemed to be spilling over the counter stool on all sides. If anything, he was twice as big as before. He was like a balloon filled with gravy. Jodie had been in the middle of her second cup of coffee and her scrambled eggs with ketchup when he sat down next to her. It was hard to imagine someone who could be more deliberately disgusting than this gentleman. He had a rare talent, Jodie thought, for inspiring revulsion. The possible images of the Family of Humankind did not somehow include him. He sat there shoveling an omelet and sausages into his mouth. Only occasionally did he chew.

“Happy enough,” she said.

He nodded and snorted. “ ‘Happy enough,’ ” he quoted back to her. Sounds of swallowing and digestion erupted from him. “I give you a wish and you ask for a radio. There you have it.” His accent was even more obscure and curious this morning.

“Where are you from?” Jodie asked. She had to angle her left leg away from his because his took up so much space under the counter. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not really from anywhere. I was imported from Venice. A beautiful city, Venice. You ever been there?”

“Yes,” she said, although she had not been. But she did love to read histories. “Lagoons, the Bridge of Sighs, and typhoid. Yeah, I’ve been there.” She put her money down on the counter, and when she stood up, she felt a faint throbbing, almost a soreness but not quite that, Walton’s desire, its trace, still inside her. “I have to go.”

He resumed eating. “You didn’t even thank me,” the fat man said. “You smell of love and you didn’t even thank me.”

“All right. Thank you.” She was hurrying out.

When she saw him in the mirror behind the cash register, he tipped an imaginary hat. She had seen something in his eyes: malice, she thought. As soon as she was out on the sidewalk, under the café’s faded orange awning, her thoughts returned to Walton. She wanted to see him immediately and touch him. She headed for the crosswalk, all thoughts of the fat man dispersing and vanishing like smoke.

On the way back, she saw a thimble in the gutter. She deposited it in her purse. A fountain pen on the brick ledge of a storefront income-tax service gleamed at her in the cottony hazy heat, and she took that, too. Walton had given her the habit of appreciating foundlings. When she walked onto the sleeping porch, she took off her shoes. She still felt ceremonial with him. She showed him the thimble and the fountain pen. Then they were making love, their bodies slippery with sweat, and this time she stopped him for a moment and said, “I saw that fat man again,” but he covered her mouth, and she sucked on his fingers. Afterward, she showered and dressed and caught the bus to work. Einstein groaned in her sleep as Jodie passed her in the hallway. The dog, Jodie thought, was probably jealous.

On the bus, Jodie hummed and smiled privately. She hadn’t known about all these resources of pleasure in the world. It was a great secret. She looked at the other passengers with politeness but no special interest. Her love was a power that could attract and charm. She was radiantly burning with it. Everyone could see it.

Through the window she spotted a flock of geese in a V pattern flying east and then veering south.

From time to time, at work — where she was bringing people rapidly into her orbit thanks to her aura of good fortune — she would think of her happiness and try to hide it. She remembered not to speak of it, good luck having a tendency to turn to its opposite when mentioned.

She called her sister and her mother, both of whom wanted to meet Walton as soon as possible. Jodie tried to be dryly objective about him, but she couldn’t keep it up for long; with her sister, she began giggling and weeping with happiness. Her best friend, Marge, came over one stormy afternoon in a visit of planned spontaneity and was so impressed by Walton that she took off her glasses and sang for him, thunder and lightning crashing outside and the electric lights flickering. She’d once been the vocalist in a band called Leaping Salmon, which had failed because of the insipid legato prettiness of their songs; when they changed their name to Toxic Waste and went for a grunge sound, the other band members had ousted her. Singing in Leaping Salmon had been her only life adventure, and she always mentioned it in conversations to people she had just met and wanted to impress, but while she was singing in her high, honeyed soprano, Walton walked over to Jodie, sat down next to her, and put his hand on the inside of her thigh. So that was that.

I have a lover, Jodie thought. Most people have lovers without paying any attention to what they have. They think pleasure is a birthright. They don’t even know what luck they have when they have it.

At the end of the day she couldn’t wait to see him. Every time she came into the room, his face seemed alert, relaxed, and sensual. Sometimes, thinking about him, she could feel a tightening, a prickling, all over her body. She was so in love and her skin so sensitive that she had to wear soft fabrics, cottons repeatedly washed. Her bras began to feel confining and priggish; on some days, she wouldn’t wear them. The whole enterprise of love was old-fashioned and retrograde, she knew, but so what? Sometimes she thought, What’s happening to me? She felt a certain evangelical enthusiasm and piety about sex, and pity for those who were unlucky in love.

Her soul became absentminded.

On some nights when Walton didn’t have to go to the loading dock, she lay awake, with him draped around her. After lovemaking, his breath smelled of almonds. She would detach herself from him limb by limb and tiptoe into the kitchen. There, naked under the overhead light, she would remove her tarot pack from the coupon drawer and lay out the cards on the table.

Using the Celtic method of divination in the book of instructions, she would set down the cards.

This covers me.

This crosses me.

This crowns me, this is beneath me, this is behind me, this is before me, this is myself.

These are my hopes and fears.

The cards kept turning up in a peculiar manner. Instead of the cards promising blessings and fruitfulness, she found herself staring at the autumn and winter cards, the coins and the swords. This is before me: the nine of swords, whose illustration is that of a woman waking at night with her face in her hands.

She had also been unnerved by the repeated appearance of the Chariot in reverse, a sign described in the guidebooks as “failure in carrying out a project, riot, litigation.”

Propped up in her living-room chair, she had been dozing after dinner when the phone rang. She answered it in a stupor. She barely managed a whispered “hello.”

She could make out the voice, but it seemed to come from the tomb, it was so faint. It belonged to a woman and it had some business to transact, but Jodie couldn’t make out what the business was. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”

“I said we should talk,” the woman told her in a voice barely above a whisper, but still rich in wounded private authority. “We could meet. I know I shouldn’t intrude like this, but I feel that I could tell you things. About Glaze. I know that you know him.”

“Who are you? Are you seeing him?”

“Oh no no no,” the woman said. “It isn’t that.” Then she said her name was Glynnis or Glenna — something odd and possibly resistant to spelling. “You don’t know anything about him, do you?” The woman waited a moment. “His past, I mean.”

“I guess I don’t know that much,” Jodie admitted. “Who are you?”

“I can fill you in. Look,” she said, “I hate to do this, I hate sounding like this and I hate being like this, but I just think there are some facts you should know. These are facts I have. I’m just … I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just trying to help.”

“All right,” Jodie said. She uncrossed her legs and put her feet on the floor and tried to clear her mind. “I get off work at five. The office is near downtown.” She named a bar where her friends sometimes went in the late afternoons.

“Oh, there?” the woman asked, her voice rising with disappointment. “Do you really like that place?” When Jodie didn’t respond, the woman said, “The smoke in there makes me cough. I have allergies. Quite a few allergies.” She suggested another restaurant, an expensive Italian place with lazily stylish wrought-iron furniture on the terrace and its name above the door in leaded glass. Jodie remembered the decor — she hadn’t liked it. However, she didn’t want to prolong these negotiations for another minute. “And don’t tell Glaze I called,” the woman said. Her speech was full of italics.

When Jodie hung up, she began to chew her thumbnail. She glanced up and saw her reflection in a window. She pulled her thumb away quickly; then she tried to smile at herself.

She was seated in what she considered a good spot near a window in the nonsmoking section when the woman entered the restaurant and was directed by the headwaiter to Jodie’s table. The woman was twelve minutes late. Jodie leaned back and arranged her face into a temporary pleasantness. The stranger was pregnant and was walking with a slightly prideful sway, as if she herself were the china shop. Although she was sporting an attractive watercolor-hued peacock-blue maternity blouse, she was also wearing shorts and sandals, apparently to show off her legs, which were deeply tanned. The ensemble didn’t quite fit together, but it compelled attention. Her hair was carefully messed up, as if she had just come from an assignation, and she wore two opal earrings that went with the blouse. She was pretty enough, but it was the sort of prettiness that Jodie distrusted because there was nothing friendly about it, nothing settled or calm. She was the sort of woman whom other women instinctively didn’t like. She looked like an aging groupie, a veteran of many beds, and she had the deadest eyes Jodie had ever seen, pale gray and icy.

“You must be Jodie,” the woman said, putting one hand over her stomach and thrusting the other hand out. “I’m Gleinya Roberts.” She laughed twice, as if her name itself was witty. When she stopped laughing, her mouth stayed open and her face froze momentarily, as more soundless laughter continued to emerge from her. Jodie found everything about her disconcerting, though she couldn’t say why. “May I sit down?” the woman asked.

Feeling that she had been indeliberately rude, Jodie nodded and waved her hand toward the chair with the good view. The question had struck her as either preposterous or injured, and because she felt off balance, she didn’t remember to introduce herself until the right moment had passed. “I’m Jodie Sklar,” she said.

“Well, I know that,” Gleinya Roberts said, settling herself delicately into her chair. “You must be wondering if this baby is Glaze’s. Don’t worry. I can assure you that it’s not,” she said with a frozen half grin, a grin that seemed preserved in ice. The thought of the baby’s father hadn’t occurred to Jodie until that moment. “I’m in my fifth month,” the woman continued, “and the Little Furnace is certainly heating me up these days. Bad timing! It’s much better to be pregnant in Minnesota in the winter. You can keep yourself warm that way. You don’t have any children yourself, Jodie, do you?”

Jodie was so taken aback by the woman’s prying and familiarity that she just smiled and shook her head. All the same, she felt it was time to establish some boundaries. “No, not yet,” she said, after a moment. “Maybe someday.” She paused for a second to take a breath and then said, “You know, I’m pleased to meet you and everything, but you must know that I’m … well, I’m really curious about why you’re here. Why’d you call me?”

“Oh, don’t let’s rush it. In a minute, in a minute,” Gleinya Roberts said, tipping her head and staring with her dead eyes at Jodie’s hair. “I just want to establish a friendly basis.” She opened her mouth, and her face froze again as soundless laughter rattled its way in Jodie’s direction. “Jodie, I just can’t take my eyes off your hair. You have such beautiful black hair. Men must love it. Where do you get it from?”

“From? Where do I get it from? Well, my father had dark hair. It was quite glossy. It shone sometimes.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “I don’t think women get their hair from their fathers. I don’t think that’s where that gene comes from. It’s the mother, I believe. I’m a zoologist, an ornithologist, actually, so I’m not up on hair. But I do know you don’t get much from your father except trouble. Sklar. What kind of name is that? Do Sklars have beautiful black hair?”

Before Jodie could answer, the waitress appeared and asked for their order. Gleinya Roberts reached for the menu, and while Jodie ordered a beer, the woman — Jodie was having trouble thinking of her as “Gleinya”—scanned the bill of fare with eyes slitted with skepticism and one eyebrow partially raised. “I’d like wine,” Gleinya Roberts said, and just as the waitress was about to ask what kind, she continued, “but I can’t have any because of the baby. What I would like is sparkling water but with no flavoring, no ice, and no sliced lemon or lime, please.” The waitress wrote this down. “Are you ordering anything to eat?” Gleinya Roberts asked Jodie. “I am. Perhaps a salad. Do your salads have croutons?” The waitress said that they did. “Well, please take them out for me. I can’t eat them. They’re treated.” She asked for the Caesar salad, explaining that she positively lived on Caesar salad these days. “But no additives of any kind, please,” she said, after the waitress had already turned to leave. Apparently the waitress hadn’t heard, because she didn’t stop or turn around. If Jodie had been that waitress, she believed that she wouldn’t have turned around, either. “I’m afraid I’m terribly picky,” Gleinya Roberts announced. “You have to be, these days. It’s the Age of Additives.”

“I eat anything,” Jodie said, rather aggressively. “I’ve always eaten anything.” Gleinya Roberts patted her stomach and smiled sadly at Jodie but said nothing. “Now, Gleinya,” she pressed on, “perhaps you can tell me why we’re here.”

Gleinya held her left hand out with the fingers straight and examined her wedding ring. It was a quick mean-spirited gesture, but it was not lost on Jodie. “It’s about Glaze, of course,” she said. “Maybe you can guess that I used to be with him. It ended two years ago, but we still talk from time to time.” She took a long sip of her water, and while she did, Jodie allowed herself to wonder who called whom. And when: probably late at night. “Anyway,” she went on, “that’s how I know about you.” She put down her water glass and smiled unpleasantly. “That’s how I know about your sleeping porch. He’s been spending some nights there. He’s terribly in love with you,” she said. “You’re just all he talks about.”

Jodie moved back in her chair, sat up straight, and said, “He’s a wonderful guy.”

“Yes,” the other woman said, rather slowly, to affirm that Jodie had said what she had in fact said but not to agree to it. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Gleinya Roberts half stood up, then sat down again and settled herself, flinging her elbows out, and before Jodie could ask why she had done so, though at this point the inquiry did seem rather pointless, Gleinya Roberts said, “It’s so hard to get comfortable in your second term. All those little infant kicks.” She patted her stomach again.

“They don’t seem to have hurt you, exactly,” Jodie said.

“No, but you have to be careful.” She touched the base of her neck with the third finger of her right hand, tapping the skin thoughtfully. “You have to try to keep your looks up. You have to try to keep yourself up. Men get fickle. Of course, my husband, Jerry, says I’m still pretty, ‘prettier than ever,’ he says, a sweet lie, though I don’t mind hearing it. He only says that to please me. It’s just a love-lie. Still, I try to believe him when he says those things.”

I bet you do, Jodie thought. I bet it’s no effort at all. “You were going to tell me about Walton.”

“Yes, I was,” she said. The waitress reappeared, placed Jodie’s glass of beer, gowned in frost, in front of her, and Jodie took a long, comforting gulp. All at once Gleinya Roberts’s voice changed, going up half an octave. She had leaned forward, and her face was infected with old grudges and hatreds. “Jodie,” she said, “I have to warn you. I have to do this, woman to woman. I want you to protect yourself. I know how suspicious this seems, coming from an old girlfriend, and I know that it must sound like sour grapes, but I have to tell you that what I’m saying is true, and I wouldn’t say it unless I was worried for your safety. He likes fights. He likes fighting. You’ve seen how he favors his right foot, haven’t you? That old injury?”

Jodie swallowed but could not bring herself to nod.

“He got it in a bar fight. Somebody kicked him in the ankle and shattered the bone. I mean, that’s all right, men get into fights, but what you have to know is that he used to beat me up — and the girl before me, he beat her up, too. He’d get drunk and coked up and start in on me. Sometimes he did it carefully so it wouldn’t show—”

“He doesn’t drink,” Jodie said, her mouth instantly dry. “He doesn’t do drugs.”

“Maybe not now, he doesn’t,” Gleinya Roberts said, smiling for a microsecond and patting the tablecloth with little grace-note gestures. “But he has and probably will again. His sweet side is so sweet that it’s hard to figure out the other side. He just explodes. He’s such a good lover that you don’t want to notice it. He’s quite the dick artist. But then he just turns, and it’s like a nightmare. He waits until you’re really, really happy, and then he blows up. Once, months and months and months ago, I told him that someday I wanted to go out to the West Coast and sit on the banks of the Pacific Ocean and go whale watching. You know, see the whales go spouting by, on their migrations. We both had a vacation around the same time—”

“I don’t think it’s the ‘banks’ of the Pacific Ocean. That’s for rivers. I think you mean ‘shore,’ ” Jodie said.

Gleinya Roberts shrugged. “All right. ‘Shore.’ Anyway, we both had a vacation around the same time, and we drove out there … no, we flew … and then we rented a car …”

She put her hand over her mouth, appearing to remember, but instead her eyes began to fill with dramatic, restaurant-scene tears; and at that moment Jodie felt a conviction that this woman was lying and was still probably in love with Walton.

“We rented a car,” she was saying, “and we drove up from San Francisco toward Arcata, along there, along that coast. There are redwood forests a few miles back from the coastline, those big old trees. We’d stay in motels, and I’d make a picnic in the morning, and we’d go out, and Glaze would start drinking after breakfast, and by midafternoon he’d be silent and surly — he’d stop speaking to me — and by the time we got back to our motel, he’d be muttering, and I’d try to talk about what we had seen that day. I mean, usually when you go whale watching there aren’t any whales. But there are always seals. You can hear the seals barking, down there on those rocks. I’d ask him if he didn’t think the cliffs were beautiful or the wildflowers or the birds or whatever I had pointed out to him. But I always said something wrong. Something that was like a lighted match, and he’d blow up. And he’d start in on me. You ever been hit in the face?”

Jodie had turned so that she could see the sidewalk through the window. She was getting herself ready. It wasn’t going to take much more.

“I didn’t think so. It comes out of nowhere,” Gleinya Roberts was saying, “and you’re not ready for it, and then, boom, he lands the second one on you. The first time he beats you up, it’s an initiation, and then he makes love to you to make up for it, but it makes the second one easier to do, because he’s already done it. You don’t expect it. Why should you? Why do you think he got thrown out of medical school? He hurt somebody there. He broke two of my ribs. I had a shoulder separation from him. He got very practiced in the ways of apology and remorse. He has a genius for remorse. And then of course he’s a demon under the sheets. The man can fuck, I’ll give him that, but, I don’t know, after a while great sex is sort of a gimmick. It’s like a 3-D movie, and you get tired of it. Well, maybe you’re not tired of it yet.”

Jodie said nothing.

“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t say anything, either. I thought he was Prince Charming, too. I’ve been there. And believe me, I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found the right guy. I had to kiss them in every damn place they had. But he won’t tell you. He won’t tell you about himself,” she repeated. “Ask his father, though. His father will tell you. Well, maybe he’ll tell you. You haven’t met his father yet, have you?”

She speared a piece of her Caesar salad, chewed thoughtfully, then put down her fork.

“A woman has to tell another woman,” she said, “in the case of a man like this. I wanted to help you. I wouldn’t want you to be on daytime TV, one of those afternoon talk shows, in a body cast onstage, warning other women about men like this. Jodie, you can look in my eyes and see that what I’m telling you is true.”

Jodie looked. The eyes she saw were gray and blank, and for a moment they reminded her of the blankness of the surface of the ocean, and then the waters parted, and she saw a seemingly endless landscape of rancor, a desert of gray rocks and black ashy flowers. Demons lived there. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the desert was covered over again, and Jodie knew that she had been right not to believe her.

“You’re lying to me,” Jodie said. She hadn’t meant to say it, only to think it, but it had come out, and there it was.

Gleinya Roberts nodded, acknowledging her own implausibility. “You’re just denying. You’re gaga over him. Just as I was. Taking a cruise on his pleasure ship. But, Jodie, trust me, that cruise is going to end. Don’t play the fool.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Don’t play the fool.’ ”

“I thought that was what you said.”

Jodie, her head buzzing, and most of her cells on fire, found herself standing up. “You come in here,” she said, “with your trophy wedding ring, and your trophy pregnancy, and your husband who says you’re still pretty, and you tell me this, about Walton, spoiling the first happiness I’ve had in I don’t know how long? Who the hell are you? What are you? You don’t even look especially human.” Gleinya Roberts tilted her head, considering this statement. Her face was unaccountably radiant. “I don’t have to listen to you,” Jodie said. “I don’t have to listen to this nonsensical bullshit.”

Her hands shaking, she reached into her purse for some money for the beer, and she heard Gleinya Roberts say, “Oh, I’ll pay for it,” while Jodie found a ten-dollar bill and flung it on the table. She saw that Gleinya Roberts’s face was paralyzed in that attitude of soundless laughter — maybe it was just strain — and Jodie was stricken to see that the woman’s teeth were perfect and white and symmetrical, and her tongue — her tongue! — was dark red and sensual as it licked her upper lip. Jodie leaned forward to tip over her beer in Gleinya Roberts’s direction, careful to give the action the clear appearance of accident.

What was left of the beer made its dull way over to the other side of the table and dribbled halfheartedly downward.

“He’s beautiful,” Jodie said quietly, as the other woman gathered up the cloth napkins to sop up the beer, “and he makes sense to me, and I don’t have to listen to you now.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “You go live with Glaze. You do that. But just remember: That man is like the kea. Ever heard of it? I didn’t think so. It’s a beautiful bright green New Zealand bird. It’s known for its playfulness. But it’s a sheep killer. It picks out their eyes. Just remember the kea. And take this.” From somewhere underneath the table she grasped for and then handed Jodie an audiocassette. “It’s a predator tape. Used for attracting hawks and coyotes. It used to be his favorite listening. Just fascinated the hell out of him. It’ll surprise you. Women don’t know about men. Men don’t let them.”

Jodie had taken the tape, but she was now halfway out of the restaurant. Still, she heard behind her that voice coming after her. “Men don’t want us to know. Jodie, they don’t!”

In a purely distanced and distracted state, she took a bus over to Minnehaha Creek and walked down the path alongside the flowing waters to the bank of the Mississippi River. The air smelled rotten and dreary. Underneath a bush she found two bottle caps and a tuna fish can. She left them there.

Sitting on the bus toward home, she tried to lean into the love she felt for Walton, and the love he said he felt for her, but instead of solid ground and rock just underneath the soil, and rock cliffs that composed a wall where a human being could prop herself and stand, there was nothing: stone gave way to sand, and sand gave way to water, and the water drained away into darkness and emptiness. Into this emptiness, violence, like an ever-flowing stream, was poured — the violence of the kea, Walton’s violence, Gleinya Roberts’s violence, and finally her own. She traced every inch of her consciousness for a place on which she might set her foot against doubt, and she could not find it. Inside her was the impulse, as clear as blue sky on a fine summer morning, to acquire a pistol and shoot Gleinya Roberts through the heart. Her mind raced through the maze, back and forth, trying to find an exit.

Gleinya Roberts had lied to her. She was sure of that.

But it didn’t matter. She was in fear of being struck. Although she had never been beaten by anyone, ever, in her life, the prospect frightened her so deeply that she felt parts of her psyche and her soul turning to stone. Other women might not be frightened. Other women would fight back, or were beaten and survived. But she was not them. She was herself, a woman mortally afraid of being violated.

Three blocks away from her apartment, she bought, in a drugstore, a radio with a cassette player in it, and she took it with her upstairs; and in the living room she placed it on the coffee table, next to Walton’s latest found treasures: a pleasantly shaped rock with streaks of red, probably jasper; a squirt gun; and a little ring through which was placed a ballpoint pen.

She dropped the predator tape Gleinya Roberts had given her into the machine, and she pushed the PLAY button.

From the speaker came the scream of a rabbit. Whoever had made this tape had probably snapped the serrated metal jaws of a trap on the rabbit’s leg and then turned on the recorder. It wasn’t a tape loop: the rabbit’s screams were varied, no two alike. Although the screams had a certain sameness, the clarifying monotony of terror, there existed, as in a row of corn, a range of distinctive external variety. Terror gave way to pain, pain made room for terror. The soul of the animal was audibly ripped apart, and out of its mouth came this shrieking. Jodie felt herself getting sick and dizzy. The screams continued. They went on and on. In the forests of the night these screams rose with predictable regularity once darkness fell. Though wordless, they had supreme eloquence and a huge claim upon truth. Jodie was weeping now, the heels of her hands dug into her cheekbones. The screams did not cease. They rose in frequency and intensity. The tape almost academically laid out at disarming length the necessity of terror. All things innocent and forsaken had their moment of expression, as the strong, following their nature, crushed themselves into their prey. Still it went on, this bloody fluting. Apparently it was not to be stopped.

Jodie reached out and pressed the PAUSE button. She was shaking now, shivering. She felt herself falling into shock, and when she looked up, she saw Walton standing near the door — he had a key by now — with Einstein wagging her tail next to him, and he was carrying his daily gift, this time a birdhouse, and he said, “She found you, didn’t she? That miserable, crazy woman.”

He puts down the birdhouse and squats near her. From this position, he drops to his knees. Kneeling thus before her, he tries to smile, and his eyes have that pleasant fool quality they have always had. This man may never make a fortune. He may never amount to much. That would be fine. His dog pants behind him, like a backup singer emphasizing the vocal line and giving it a harmony. Walton’s hands start at her hair and then slowly descend to her shoulders and arms. Before she can stop him, he has taken her into his embrace.

He is murmuring. Yes, he knew Gleinya Roberts, and, yes, they did own a predator tape she had found somewhere, but, no, he did not listen to it more than once. Yes, he had lived with her for a while, but she was insane (his father had been dead for a year; she had lied about that, too), and she was insanely jealous, hysterical, actually, and given to lies and lying, habitual lies, crazy bedeviling lies, and casual lies: lies about whether the milk was spoiled, lies about how many stamps were still in the drawer, lies about trivial matters and large ones, a cornucopia of lies, a feast of untruth. Gleinya Roberts was not married, for starters. He could prove that.

I’m just what I seem, he says. A modest man who loves you, who will love you forever. Did Gleinya tell you that I beat her up? Do you really think I am what that woman says I am? I used to get into barroom fights, but that’s different. I never denied that. She’s deluded. If what she said was true, would this dog be here with me?

Jodie looks at Walton and at his dog. Then she says, Raise your hand, fast, above Einstein’s head. Look at her and raise your hand.

When he does what he is asked to do, Einstein neither cringes nor cowers. She watches Walton with her usual impassive interest, her tail still wagging. She has what seems to be a dog smile on her face. She approaches him, panting. She wants to play. She sits down next to where he kneels. She is the fool’s dog. She looks at Walton — there is no mistaking this look — with straightforward dog love.

Jodie believes this dog. She believes this dog more than the woman.

Let me explain something, Walton is saying. You’re beautiful. I started with that the first time I saw you. He does a little inventory: you lick your fingers after opening tin cans, you wear hats at a jaunty angle, you have a quick laugh like a bark, you move like a dancer, you’re funny, you’re great in bed, you love my dog, you’re thoughtful, you have opinions. It’s the whole package. How can I not love you?

And if I ever do to you what that woman says I did, you can just walk.

One day he will present her with an engagement ring, pretending that he found it in an ashtray at Clara’s Country Kitchen Café. The ring will fit her finger, and it will be a seemingly perfect ring, with two tiny sapphires and one tiny diamond, probably all flawed, but flawless to the naked eye. They will be walking under a bridge on the south end of Lake of the Isles, and when they are halfway under the bridge, he will show her the ring and ask her to marry him.

Then she will sit for a few more days on the sleeping porch, considering this man. She won’t be able to help it that when he moves suddenly, she will flinch. She will be distracted, but with the new radio on, she will from time to time do her best to read some of the books she never got around to reading before. Literature, however, will not help her in this instance. She will take out her tarot cards and place them in their proper order on the table.

This covers him.

This crosses him.

This crowns him.

This is beneath him.

This is behind him.

But the future will not unveil itself. The newspapers of the future are all blank. She will in exasperation throw all the tarot cards into the Dumpster. She will buy a copy of the Rolling Stones’ album Let It Bleed. She will listen to “Gimme Shelter,” the song Walton had quoted, but now she hears two lines slurred hysterically and almost inaudibly in the background — lines she had never heard before.

Rape, murder, are just a kiss away,

Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.

She will throw away the album, also, into the Dumpster.

Once upon a time, happily ever after. She will look occasionally for the hideous fat man at the breakfast counter on Hennepin Avenue, but of course he will have vanished. When you are awarded a wish, you must specify the conditions under which it is granted. Everyone knows that. The fat man could have told her this simple truth, but he did not. Women are supposed to know such things. They are supposed to arm themselves against the infidelities of the future.

She will feel herself getting ready to leap, to say yes.

And just before she does, just before she agrees to marry him, she will buy a recording of Granados’s piano suite Goyescas. Again and again she will listen to the fourth of the pieces, “Quejas ó la Maja y el ruiseñor,” the story in music of a maiden singing to her nightingale. Every question the maiden sings, the bird sings back.

One Sunday night around one o’clock she will hear the distant sound of gunshots, or perhaps a car backfiring. She will then hear voices raised in anger and agitation. Sirens, glass breaking, the clatter of a garbage can rolled on pavement: city sounds. But she will fall back to sleep easily, her hands tucked under her pillow, drowsy and calm.