How the Dead Dream

2

He killed her driving to Las Vegas, after a truck stop and a few bites of a turkey club served by a waitress with lurid curling fingernails; after a dingy restroom whose yellow urinal mints made him turn away in disgust. He was still in a state of repulsion when he emerged from the diner into twilight. Then the feeling fled: there was a dusky earthshadow in the east, a dim violet light that made even the asphalt look soft.

Driving up the freeway on-ramp he turned the radio on and knew the smoothness of his buttery seat leather against the backs of his thighs. He was satisfied; he was easing in. Then a shape, blurred and fast from the right, and he hit it. The car bumped over it and veered off the road onto the shoulder. He jammed the brake pedal to the floor and sat shaking.

Dust rose behind and beside him, and his two right wheels were off the shoulder pavement. He looked out the window behind him to see if there were other cars coming. What was that on the road? What was hit?

He could see a mound on its side, legs outstretched. His own legs shook with delayed fear but there was already a stream of headlights behind the animal. No time. He pushed his door open and ran back toward it, stomach weak and face hot. He tasted dust and iron on his tongue.

A coyote. People said they were pests. They took pets out of yards in the suburbs, ran off with children's kittens.

He was briefly relieved: no one to be angry at him, no owner. But everything was too fast. The cars were closer, the headlights brighter, and the whine of a horn made him lurch sideways in alarm. A truck swerved around him. He closed his eyes and slowed his breath. Its back legs were pulp. Jesus! He winced looking at them. But he had to move it. It could not stay in the road. It could cause another accident.

He leaned down and put his arms around the front, picked up the body with its head lolling against his chest, the rear half sagging. It was curiously light for its size and left a sweep of blood on the blacktop when he dragged it.

He let it go as quickly as he could, safely out of traffic. He stood there gazing down, his chest clutching. But then he saw its flank moving. It breathed. It was still alive. It could have bitten him. Did coyotes bite people? They were always shrinking away; they slunk along the roadside and veered off into brush as the headlights swept over them. He looked into its face, the muzzle sharp at the nose like a fox but somehow humble-mouthed like a dog; the light eyes, which were open and seemed to see him.

"Oh," he said, and knelt down. It would not bite. It was dying. And if it did, he thought, that meant it was planning to live.

It made a sound from its throat-a growl, maybe. If he had a gun he could shoot it. Because Jesus: the legs! Nothing should have to bear that.

"Good boy. Quiet there, boy," he said uncertainly. It probably did not want him near; he should back off. Better to die alone if you were an animal like this one, a loner that avoided any contact with humans. He looked past the flank to the underbelly; nothing there. The poor thing was a bitch. "Steady, girl," he said. "It's OK."

He stood creakily and stepped back, but somehow he could not leave. He went to sit in his car. He waited, listening to a country music station.

But he was restless and anxious and soon he got out again to see if she was dead yet. He had an idea he should move her, once she was gone; he should carry her into the brush, where she could go to ground.

He willed himself not to look at her legs, to by to ignore what was back there bleeding, the cracked bone tapering into nothing. He looked only at her face and her side to see if she was still breathing. But despite the fact that he was not looking, as he sat beside her, he imagined the shock from the mined legs coursing though her body, what must be the blind surge of the pain as the end closed in. A loud end-the lush of cars still distant punctuated by the searing noise and glare of those approaching, bearing down viciously and then fading again. She was dying in the smells of asphalt, exhaust, and gasoline, no doubt also the smell of her own blood, and him, and other smells he could not know himself.

The fullness, the terrible sympathy!

Had he felt this before, he wondered? Maybe when he was a boy? Animals died by the road and you saw that all the time, everyone did. You saw them lying there, so obvious in their deadness, sad lumps of dirty meat; you saw their limp furry masses thrown up like flowers along the yellow stripes, the tumbly asphalt edges. You saw the red insides all exposed. You thought: that is the difference between them and me. My insides are firmly contained.

And were Ito lie on the side of the road dying, it would be nothing like that. No one would drive around me: the cars would stop, tens upon hundreds of them; there would be lines of stopped traffic for miles as they removed my body, flashing their red and blue lights of crisis and competence.

Presently he realized her flank had ceased to rise and fall. He was relieved but oddly disoriented. Where was the ambulance? No: he was all that she had. All her lights, all her rescue workers.

It was just a coyote. No one would fault him for leaving.

And yet he felt confused.

"Good girl," he whispered.

Back in Los Angeles he traded in the S-Class, chose a modest 190 to replace it and drove off the lot quickly. Irrational, but he had to get rid of it.

We all kill sooner or later, he said to himself, fine. Was she maybe half-blind? Maybe when they got old they went blind and could not hunt anymore, as birds died by starving. Maybe she had been feeble and exhausted and thought, trotting onto the blacktop for the last time: welcome, friend. All the times she must have seen the cars fly by, in their hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

But no. A coyote might want relief from suffering, but to plan for her own end seemed human.

Still a particular moment recurred within him, the sense of a rising pity he could not repress, in which he sank like a stone and could not get to the surface again. He saw the coyote's face as she lay in the dirt of the road, eyes half-closed, the long humble line of her mouth. He thought of the crushed legs. He asked the pain if it was sharp or dull and throbbing; he asked pain, he asked the coyote, he was left in silence.

Any animal could be gentle while it was busy dying, he told himself. That was hardly a mark of distinction. But the sorrow persisted, as though he was worrying an open cut.

In his house growing up there had never been pets. He had wanted one, of course. But his mother said dogs and cats left their hair on the furniture and smelled, so he tried asking for gerbils, guinea pigs, and then hamsters; his mother said rodents in cages reproduced and smelled, birds squawked and smelled, reptiles had scales and smelled, and even butterflies-which he had once been given in the form of a caterpillar kit in a colorful jar his mother would not let him open-seemed pretty at first but would soon die and smell too. The only pets that were smell-proof were fish, due to their immersion in water.

These, however, she also rejected, on the grounds that they defecated. He recalled the conversation well even now. He had asked for goldfish, his last resort; he figured he could breed and sell them, be they ever so boring. His mother had shuddered and said, "They go right in their bowls with them, and then they breathe it in. They poop in the water!" To which T. replied-quite wittily, he thought-"Well, you do too." Then she had called him disgusting and sent him to his room. Lingering around the corner on the way upstairs he heard his father say, "Kid's got a point, Angie."

And while his mother was tolerant of animals, even curious about them as long as they stayed firmly where they belonged-that is, in paintings, stories, even stained-glass windows, but far from her living room-his father was simply indifferent. His father had little interest in anything that moved, beyond athletes on the small screen or the college friends that called occasionally asking for contributions to the alumni fund. Pets seemed at best an unnecessary burden, at worst a lingering nuisance.

Yet a few weeks after the accident he found himself walking past the kennels at the Humane Society, thinking this was how caution got thrown to the winds. He chose a thin, middle-aged dog, white with tan markings, a homely but intelligent face and a tendency to back away, frightened, whenever he made a sudden movement. At first he was not sure what to do, glancing at her speculatively from his armchair as she lay on the floor beside him. An animal was with him, an animal companion. Arbitrary, he thought, arbitrary. The dog seemed superfluous, a being without purpose. He gazed at her muzzle resting on her front paws and wondered if she suspected his coldness.

But as the days passed he found himself growing fonder, almost as though their positions reversed: he was faithful now and she was ambivalent. Still she learned to trust him and he began to feel, as he watched her eat and grow stronger, various anxieties allayed.

And finally he looked forward, at the end of the workday, to going home. If he had business engagements in the evening he drove to the apartment first, snapped the leash to her collar and walked her along the path on the beach, listening to the waves and watching her tail wag as she trotted ahead of him. Outside she was far less fearful than indoors, as though a weight lifted when the ceiling above her disappeared. This puzzled him till he realized that whoever had beaten her had not done so in public.

He was on the telephone discussing the details of a condominium conversion in Laguna Beach when Susan knocked on his office door and pushed it open, flustered. Behind her stood his mother, who sat down heavily in the chair on the other side of his desk.

As he hastily cradled the receiver he saw his mother's makeup was smeared; around her eyes the mascara had streaked and the eyeliner run. She was bedraggled and for the first time in his life he could see gray at the roots of her blond hair.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. She had never visited him in Los Angeles.

"Your father's gone," she said, and began to cry noisily, pulling a clump of wrinkled pink tissues from her purse.

He felt a wave of shock. He forced himself to get up.

"Gone? What do you mean, gone?" he asked, and came from behind the desk to kneel beside her with an awkward palm on her shoulder. He wondered if he should embrace her, but she did not turn to face him.

"I don't know. Gone!" she wailed, and hunched over sobbing.

I don't know, he thought. So not dead.

He stood and rubbed her back lightly with the heel of his hand, in circles, waiting with what he hoped seem like patience; he shook his head at Susan when she opened the door and mouthed Can I do anything?

Finally his mother finished crying and blew her nose.

"Here," he said, and guided her to the sofa against the wall. "It's more comfortable here."

She sat down and instantly looked wretched and pathetic, so he sat down beside her. Wiping at her eyes with one of the balledup tissues she only succeeded in spreading the black smears.

"Now take a deep breath and tell me what happened," he said. "OK?"

"I just woke up and he was gone," she said. "And he didn't leave a note and he never called me."

"And when was this?" asked T.

"Three weeks ago," she said quietly.

"Three weeks? It's been three weeks and you haven't told me before this?"

"I went to the police but they just looked at me like.. this one policeman looked at me meanly. It was very mean the way he looked at me."

"No doubt he failed sensitivity training."

"Your father took exactly half the money from our joint accounts. I think he's, you know. Left me."

"I can't believe it," said T., shaking his head dully. "Did you-I mean-"

"We weren't fighting," she said. "We never fought."

"So everything was-"

"It was fine," said his mother. "It was the same as it's always been."

"So you were-he was-happy?"

"Apparently not," she snapped.

"I meant-"

"We weren't having relations, if that's what you mean."

T. turned away from her and examined a potted plant, one Susan and Julie had given him called an asparagus fern. He closed his eyes for a second and opened them again on the fern. It had not moved, of course.

Meanwhile his mother was rummaging around in her purse, pulling out a purple rosary, a wallet with a checkbook, a pair of tweezers, a lipstick, a comb, keys, mints, and spreading them on the sofa on her other side.

"That's none of my business," he said softly.

"Not for years," she went on, "many, many years," shaking her head, and T. got up abruptly, experiencing minor palpitations. He wanted to block his ears.

"He hasn't been in touch with you?"

"Nothing. He did use the credit card a few times. Once he got gas in Michigan. It was a Texaco. Or no, it was Exxon. No, Texaco."

There was silence in the office for a few long seconds, broken only by the faint blare of a horn out the window. His mother found a compact in the spillings from her purse and snapped it open.

"Oh! Lord!" she said, and rubbed vigorously at the mascara. "Why didn't you say something, T.? This is a time in her life when a woman has to look decent. Where's my cold cream?"

"Here," he said, and lifted a small blue pot from between the sofa cushions. "Is this it?"

She grabbed the pot and opened it, and while she spread the white cream around her eyes kept up a rapid patter.

"Mary Louise called from the K of C office and asked if we were going to come for the meningitis evening. I was so humiliated. You can't go to those things by yourself. They have kids up on the stage that have bravely survived. But then they go deaf or retarded. Water on the brain. It's always this overcooked salmon. Two hundred a plate. I don't know where he is! He could be anywhere! What should I say? What if I tell everyone and then he decides to come back and it turns out I never had to tell them at all?"

"Is that what you're worried about? Is that your main worry?"

"It's time for my car's thirty-thousand-mile service, I got a notice from the dealership. He always takes it in. The lights give me migraines. The fluorescents. What if it just breaks down on me and I have to walk miles in the dark to a payphone to call triple-A and I get raped on the way? That would be his fault then!"

"No one's being ravished, OK? Here. Do me a favor. Can you just slow down a minute? Sit back and relax. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Would you do that?"

"Don't talk to me like I'm crazy! I am your mother, T.!"

"Of course you are. And I'm your son and I'm worried about you."

She looked at him blinking, and he thought she was considering his words until he noticed she was not looking at him but over his shoulder.

"And what is that?"

He turned and followed her gaze. It was a pencil sketch by a famous expressionist. He had bought it at a Sotheby's auction.

"It's art, Mother."

"Don't be ridiculous."

But she seemed mollified, and began to pack her personal items back into her purse.

"Let me take you to my place, OK? I'll make you dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"Then maybe just a cup of tea."

"I'm not an invalid, you know. I'm just a woman whose husband walked out the door. For all I know he's doing it with his secretary."

"He took early retirement. He doesn't have a secretary."

"You know what I mean. Some random floozy."

"Let's just go, OK? Let's talk about this when you're rested."

"And I don't need to stay with you. I made my own arrangements. I have a room in a four-star hotel."

"Well, I need you to stay. Come on. Come home with me.

Weeks later she was still in his guest bedroom. He did not always mind and was even glad, at times, that she was there, but in terms of progress her presence threatened to reduce him. She was a liability.

He liked to present himself as solitary and free, an argument for potential; he moved and spoke with the official neutrality of a man sprung fully formed from the background of commerce. But now suddenly he carried personal freight, which threatened to hold him back. He cringed at the thought of business associates encountering his mother, whether by design or accident. He did not want his investors, for instance, to think of him beholden to a mother, childlike. And she was bad for his image, far too frail and specific to reflect the broadness of his interests and his command of prospects.

The most austere among his investors, in fact, the ones who had wide ocean views out their office windows, gave the impression of never having been born at all. They would die, admittedly, that much was tacitly conceded; but this was understood to be almost a polite gesture on their part, part of a genteel tradition whereby the old bowed out into the wings to make room for the young.

So they would die, when their race was run, but they had never been born: they had not been children. They had not ever been anything but what they were now. And he would not make the concession either.

Still his mother was pathetic, hurt and lonely. He could not bring himself to hurt her further.

When he was at the office she walked the dog three times a day; arriving home he found his laundry washed and folded, shirts hung in the closet by color, mail carefully sorted. She busied herself with the housework usually done by the cleaning woman, and when for the first time since his mother's arrival the cleaning woman arrived and let herself in she found a screaming middle-aged blonde in a kaftan and every surface spotless.

His mother rearranged dry goods and crockery and occupied herself changing drawer liners and purchasing items for which he had no use, such as fondue forks and silver napkin rings. In corners of his apartment things sprang tip that bore no relation to him. On the toilet tank, a china shepherdess with rouged cheeks and a crook and a curly-haired lamb at her feet; on a wall in the foyer, a framed picture of angels accompanied by a homily; on the arms of a leather sofa, elaborate lace sleeves.

"I don't remember," he mused over dinner on the day the shepherdess appeared, "you decorating our house this way when I was growing tip."

"What way?" asked his mother.

She insisted on cooking for him every night; the meals were low-fat and almost completely devoid of flavor. He had taken to eating a fast-food hamburger on his way home from the office.

"You know — the thing you put in the bathroom, the Little Bo Peep thing."

"You don't like it?" asked his mother, her spoon suspended halfway to her lips, trembling.

He heard something in her tone and noticed her eyes were brimming.

"It's not that," he said hastily. "I wouldn't have picked it out myself, per se, is all I meant."

"You needed somewhere to put the guest soaps," she said, and resumed eating. "You can't expect guests to use the same soap you use. It's not hygienic."

"What the hell good is soap if it's not hygienic?"

"You get your germs on it. Or from shaving. A hair could stick to it."

"I appreciate all your efforts," he said. "I love having you here, and I know the dog does too. But maybe you should focus on yourself, for once. You know? There are good day spas in walking distance. Susan made tip a list for you. Or you could take one of those weekend cruises to the Catalinas."

"When will you stop treating me like the walking wounded, T.? I'm fine. I like to keep busy."

"I realize. But I think you've been looking after someone, two people, right? — for the last twenty years of your life…"

"Twenty-three. Thirty-three if you count from when we got married, which you probably should. That man hasn't ironed his own shirts since 1963."

". . and maybe you need to stop looking after other people and look after yourself. Concentrate on what you want, what you need. Because my guest soap is, let's face it, not yet at the level of a national emergency."

"You don't like it, do you? It's an antique. It is Dresden china, T. From Dresden, Germany."

"Mother? I'm not entirely sure you're listening to me."

"They're famous for their china. Wonderful workmanship. Little blue marks… I may be alone, my husband may have left me, but I know how lucky I am, T. At least I know that."

"I'm sure-"

"You know what we did to Dresden in 1945? Your father had friends who were pilots in the air war. And some of them-we're talking about boys who were eighteen years old here, T., barely out of puberty who still had facial acne-they talked about trying them as war criminals. Their superiors told them they had to bomb Dresden, so they did. Some of them were shot down. They still had facial acne."

She gazed at him balefully.

"You know what happened with the carpet bombing? There were fires that burned at fifteen hundred degrees. The cold air rushed in from outside and all the people got sucked into the flames and burned to death in terrible agony. Those were someone's friends, T. Their friends and their families. They had friends and someone was friends with them. Someone lost their friends then."

"Uh…"

"Hundreds of thousands of someone's friends burned to death then, screaming."

He tried to catch her eye but she picked up a salt shaker.

"They were someone's friends and they saw right out of their eyes, like you do. They watched things pass, there was nothing they could do about the world. Nothing they could ever do."

"Are you — "

"And what did they get for wanting? They wanted the world to be different, T. You can be sure of that. They wanted the world to be a good place, fall of holiness and wonder. We all do."

" It»

"But what did they get? They got burning to death."

"Lis-"

"They got watching their children burn. Their children and their babies. Babies, T. Little children, toddlers holding their toys, babies with those wide eyes… mothers had to watch their children die right in front of them, trapped in the burning buildings. Children die faster than adults. And their mothers had to watch it. Choking from smoke inhalation while they burned to death. Hundreds and thousands of babies. Watching them cry that sweet baby cry as their little faces burned away to a crisp."

She spooned up her soup, shaking her head. His own utensils lay untouched on the placemat.

"And you don't like that poor china girl holding the cute baby sheep? Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth."

There was a tinge of hysteria, certainly.

She paused to reach for the salad tongs and he leaned forward and laid a hand on her arm.

"Mother. Listen," he said gently. "Isn't it sort of a stretch? The firebombing of Dresden and my opinion of a toilet ornament?"

She shook her head, frustrated.

"Your generation thinks that wanting means getting. But most of the people in the whole world… for them what they want has nothing to do with their life, with what their life actually is."

"I realize that"

"Here people want something, they get it, and they say that's, you know, happiness. Or success. And those other people, those poor people everywhere.. I mean there's nothing to envy, they live in terrible privation and I pray for them every day, but one thing they have you and your friends will never have."

"What's that?"

"Longing, dear. Longing makes the soul. Without it… "

She gazed at him sadly.

". . the soul has nothing. It just gets forgotten."

What rose in him was tenderness-he was sorry. He wanted to comfort her.

His father called him one day at work. He stepped out of a meeting in his conference room to take the call at his desk.

"Hey, kid."

A forced tone of good cheer.

"Where the hell are you?"

"I'm just driving. Stopped for a cup of coffee. Wanted to let you know I'm doing A-OK."

"You need to call my mother. You've been together thirty years, you can't tell her you're taking off?"

There was a dull buzz on the other end of the line.

"Dad? You hang up?"

"You know, there comes a time…"

His father's voice trailed off.

"She's staying at my house. Call her on the phone there. She's the one you need to talk to."

"Easier said than done, my boy."

"I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's your duty."

There was silence on the line again.

"It's not a mid-life crisis, you know."

"You already had one of those. When you got the hair plugs."

"This is not a mid-life crisis."

"I need for you to call her now. This is between the two of you. Seriously, you don't think you owe it to her? A few words?"

"Did you ever have a dream so real it felt like you were awake?"

"Uh, yeah. I guess."

"What if one day you woke up and you realized your whole life had been a dream like that? Your whole life, from some point where you fell asleep, was only a dream. The kind that tricks you into thinking you're wide awake."

T. was quiet, waiting. He looked around his office, the receiver pressed against his ear, and thought he saw a shade descend on it, roll dimness down the walls. A cloud had moved in front of the sun: his office had a weather all its own, and here he was, suddenly old. With the night coming on.

"My whole life was like that," went on his father, over the static. "From when I left college, from something I did then. I mean I never chose a single thing, when I look back on it. When I married your mother I wasn't really awake. I wasn't awake when she had you. I never woke up once for all these years. It was just not real to me. You know who you were looking at, the whole time you grew up? I was a ghost. I wasn't really there. It was all, I don't know, some other guy's life I stepped into by mistake."

T. felt drunken, his legs heavy beneath the desk. He swiveled in his chair and sadness closed his throat. There they were in his bedroom, when he was a little boy. His father sat on the side of his bed; it was bedtime, and here was his father to read him a story. Usually his mother read the stories, but this time his father had left the television and come upstairs. He almost smelled the new fresh paper of the picture book; he saw his father's large hands turning the pages with deftness, with authority. In the book there was a family of beavers, and they lived in a dam. Inside the dam it was warm and golden, and the beavers ate their dinner at a round wooden table. He remembered the softness of his father's voice.

Not real to his father; a life lived by a stranger. Sitting there on the side of his bed, reading the book about the beavers who were warm in their dam, had been no one.

"Until a month ago. That's when I woke up. It was sudden, like an alarm clock or something. Now I'm awake. It's too bad, but your mother is an innocent bystander. She's a casualty."

T. found he could not speak.

"I'll drop her a line, on down the road."

He barely heard the rest.

As soon as he got home his mother asked, as was her daily custom, whether his father had contacted him. He had fully intended to keep it from her-his father's callousness could hardly fail to do her an injury-but as he crossed the threshold into his apartment he saw, first, all the contents of his kitchen cabinets and drawers spread over the counters around her as she organized them, listening to golden oldies on a tinny clock-radio; and, second, the lettering on her apron, which pictured a slice of bright-red tomato and the words RIPE AND READY.

Exhaustion settled over him. He could not answer swiftly when she asked, and she was onto him.

"What? When? What did he say? Where is he?"

"I don't know," he said wearily.

"Did he say anything? What did he say?"

He moved past her to the refrigerator, whence he removed a bottle of water. Uncapping it, tipping it tip and drinking thirstily, he closed his eyes: this moment by itself must restore him. He opened the back of his throat into a wide hollow and felt the water in it, cool and flowing.

When he lowered the bottle again she was staring at him, fever spots on her cheekbones. Her hands shook, clutching a baking sheet.

"He didn't tell me much. I told him he could call you here," he said, and instantly regretted it. He had asked, but his father had not called. And now he made it worse by telling.

"Is there another woman?"

"I don't think so."

"He didn't mention anyone? He's claiming that he's all alone? He didn't say where he was going?"

"No. He only said he was traveling," said T. faintly, and reluctantly pulled a stool up to the kitchen island. The dog rose from the floor and licked his hand.

"Traveling where?"

"He didn't say."

"So why did he call you, if he didn't want to tell you anything?"

"He wanted to tell me he was on a journey of self-discovery. He wanted to let me know he was alive."

His mother turned away, put down the baking sheet and picked tip a shining triangular implement he did not recognize. No doubt she had purchased it for him. A cake knife, possibly.

"How nice for him," she said softly, and tipped the cake knife from one side to the next, watching the glint shifting.

While he was showering she went out without leaving a note; he waited for a while and then got into bed. At two in the morning a bartender called him. She had polished off a bottle of champagne, passed out in a bougainvillea, and was waiting to be picked up near Venice Beach.

"I must be allergic," she said to him, as he drove her home. She was still slurring her words.

He patted her knee.

"Drunk, we call it."

She gazed out the window until they pulled into the parking lot beneath his building. Then she stayed sitting, her eyes glassy. He walked around the car and opened her door for her.

"You're a good boy," she said fondly, and stumbled over the door lip. He caught her before she fell.

Finally he persuaded her to take a vacation. He loaded her suitcases into his car; he bought her a yellow rose, which she pinned to her lapel. Then he drove her to a cruise ship docked in San Diego, bound for Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a white dress as she walked up the gangplank; she waved at him from the rails smiling madly, as though there were streamers descending around her and theme music playing.

That night he took his dog onto the bed with him, a gesture his mother roundly condemned as unsanitary. In the deepest part of the night he woke up and listened to the dog breathe, the regular pace of the breathing. There was no moon, and through the thick drapes his mother had hung on his windows even the light of the city did not penetrate. He lay with his arms and legs frozen, imagining paralysis: he tried to feel the gradual freezing, the numbness that crept up into him. As a child he had done this.

Back then he had liked to play for a short time that he was something else. In the water he was a dead man, in the grass of the yard he was a fallen log. Then he forgot childish things.

The silence of the apartment was unaccustomed now, since his mother had often paced at night, washing and ironing, watching cable television and drinking instant decaffeinated coffee. Always if he woke there was the faint hum of activity beneath him. Before her, what? Now he barely remembered how his nights had been. Before his mother, the dog; before the dog, nothing. But now he was used to company.

He pushed back the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where he lay next to the dog, along her warm back. His arms were pulled in close to his body and the dog's head was a few inches from his face. Could he sleep here, or would he be distracted?

For a while he was: he smelled the skin of the dog, the hair of the dog: he felt the dog's warmth. But patiently he waited for all this to pass, and tried to match their breathing.

And near morning, waking with goose blimps raised along his arms, he pulled the covers down around both of them.

Then his first golden egg, a swath of empty desert would be converted to subdivisions for retirees, with golf courses and Olympic-size swimming pools and luxury spas and a phalanx of nurses to monitor cardiac rhythms and tend to recovering hip and knee surgeries. Down the road, thanks to economies of scale and various state and federal subsidies, it might become a great citadel-light rail systems, a solar-powered mall. But in California nothing ambitious came without an array of planning difficulties and lawsuits from the liberal fringe, and soon enough there were cases in district court; he excused himself from conference calls with his publicrelations consultants, which droned on and ate into his time on other undertakings.

The project stalled.

Meanwhile he got regular postcards from his mother, who claimed to have met "wonderful people" on the cruise and decided to fly from Yucatan to Guaymas with a claims adjuster from Toledo.

Dear T., read a postcard featuring a sombrero, The weather is beautiful hear. You would not recognize me with my brown sun tan I look just like a native!! My espanol is muy better too.

The court's opinion could easily go against his enterprisehe did not watch the details but this much was quite clearso it was imperative to develop fall-back strategies. He must multiply his options, not wait for the court to decide his future-for when had he ever made of institutions his own enemy? They were his bulwarks, his cathedrals. It was for him only to move on steadily on the assumption that the case and the development were already lost. Plainly nothing could be forfeited through such anticipation, everything gained. He instigated an aggressive search for high-margin properties and stocks and while immersed in the search let other matters gratefully fall away: his mother weeping on the toilet seat abjectly as she stroked the porcelain tresses of the shepherdess, his father who took no pains to hide his lack of conscience.

Setting himself to research he also ignored small matters at the office, failing to notice when Julie the paralegal, absent several days, returned from her sick leave with red-rimmed eyes and a white mark where her engagement ring had been; failing to return a call on his answering machine until the caller called again-his mother's next-door neighbor at the house she had vacated in Darien. A squirrel had become trapped inside and gnawed on the wooden window grilles until it died of starvation.

When his father left a stiff message on the machine, stating that he had completed a mandatory period of residency in Reno, Nevada, and subsequently secured a divorce, he erased the message impatiently.

Some mornings he woke with a nervous premonition of imminence: an event lay in wait. On the day his case was finally decided he had been up half the night researching a stock and even considered cocaine, increasingly popular with the upwardly mobile and visible everywhere. But he was not fully tempted. And then he heard. He had won. The project could move ahead.

That night, exhausted but jubilant after drinks at a bar, he lay back and watched a news segment featuring politicians. The faces on the small screen were interchangeable, not only with each other but with his own: quite possibly they were not only his representatives but his representations. What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these electronic faces but the realignment of line and color to shift among symbols? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he would course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. That near! He moved in impulse and in fret; shot through with glowing nerves he willed himself on to the rest of what was. The tides shifted beneath him but he was holding fast.

That was what they didn't have, those men of state and industry, he thought before he fell asleep in the flickering blue light. They were hard vectors of self, undisturbed by the vestigial presence of others who were less powerful and therefore eternally unlike them. They did not have what those others had, the softness and the whimsy, the coastingthe others far outside their sphere who imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be.

Fortunately he was not one of them.

She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday and in minutes he was converted. Like all conversions his own was sudden. The lights of the restaurant bar bathed them in browns and reds and he watched her laugh. Where there should have been the awkwardness of strangers there was fluency. The investor went home to his wife after a short while, leaving the two of them at the counter, where they stayed and stayed on.

Beth, she had said. She was the investor's assistant. She did not give him her last name. She had erect posture, an effortless dignity and perfect light-brown skin. It was her self-possession that got him, though her features were also lovely. They drank too much as the evening wore on, became lightheaded and carefree: life was an arc in the air, ascending. Everything smaller was treated with a deft and glancing humor, and from the tops of the stools the skin of their knees touched briefly.

In the privacy of the bathroom, where he removed himself for a pause, he felt giddy, liberated and captive both. The bathroom was a confined space but he was hardly confined; nothing was tawdry around him, nothing filthy despite its superficial patina of dirt-or rather he forgave it for its tawdriness. The peeling stickers on the wall, graffiti, wet floors with patches of wet toilet paper adhering-surprising for an upscale establishment but then bathrooms were the main tell when it came to restaurant management, not what came out of the kitchen. All these elements were part of the story, the grounded earth before the flight. This was the instant of exulting, and even the grimy walls could not dull his exhilaration.

The room was a holding pen, a split moment. Outside the room was the rest of his existence. For years he had been detached and now in a stroke of time he was not. He would move, he would touch-no one would think to impede him, they would see him go and be glad-he could be anything. Do not embarrass yourself, he told himself strictly, but could not help smiling. There she was at the bar: their faces met before he got there.

This was how he lost his autonomy-he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung.

Around midnight she agreed to let him drive her home in her car. She had a low tolerance for alcohol and was slurring her words despite the fact that all she had drunk was watery Mexican beer with slices of lime. But his building was nearer than hers, and once in her car they decided to go there instead. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other along the back of her seat; she curled in her seat to watch him as he drove. Music coursed through the car and both of them, he was sure, felt the uplift of the new. A bright panic filled him.

But when they pulled into the parking garage there was his mother-sitting, her suitcases around her, at the base of the stairs that led up to the lobby. She was darkly tanned and smoking a thin cigarette. A few feet away stood a man in a white suit, also tanned and smoking.

"I can't believe this," said T., and turned to Beth, who dipped her head to look past him out his window. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm back!" sang out his mother gaily, and stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete step. She stood up and spread her arms. She had lightened her hair. "And this is?"

"Beth. Our first date," said T. "So don't say anything I'm going to regret. Beth? My mother. She's been on a cruise.

His mother was down the steps and flinging her arms around him in a wild embrace.

"Not just a cruise. I took buses. I stayed in these fleabag hotels. Chichen Itza! Where they sacrificed the virgins? Hello, dear. Pleased to meet you. And T.! Do you even recognize your old mother?"

"You look great," he said dutifully.

"This is Terry," she said. "A friend. Terry is Lebanese!"

"Pleased to meet you," said T., and they shook.

"I tell you what," said his mother, "why don't you just let its in and you kids can retire, or do whatever. We just flew in. We need to crash."

He did not recall the word crash in her vocabulary, nor had she called him a "kid" in recent memory.

"I can't believe you're smoking," he said, as they lugged her cases into the elevators and through his front door.

"I picked up the habit," she said. "Filthy, I know. So, have you heard from your father?"

Less than a minute.

"I haven't talked to him," he answered, evasive.

"A letter? Anything?"

"He hasn't written to me. Let's wait another day to discuss him."

He drove Beth to her apartment, since the mood was shot. He walked her in and called a cab and kissed her until it came.

Waiting to fall asleep afterward, his mother and Terry installed awkwardly in the next room, his thoughts of her attained a certain plateau. He thought of how she might walk down a future of clean avenues beside him, how she would confer her elegance on any landscape. He saw that this was selfish, or worse was self-aggrandizing, as though she was an accessory, but he felt more than that selfish impulse, felt something more exalted, frankly, and the thought of her beauty extended throughout his life was nothing short of captivating. It was not only that he would benefit from having her at his side, it was the shock of how the world glowed with it-how she lent her surroundings the style of her presence, its effortless assertion of grace.

In the desert subdivisions would spread, life radiate outward from the sand as the tone of her flesh shone on the planes of her face, through buildings and cables and gas mains and roads. He thought of the cool of night descending over the settlement-were those coyotes howling out there in the dark, beyond the warm lights from thousands of standardized windows? Coyotes. He thought of them rarely but when he did he felt a pulse of identification and regret, curious and painful… In the distance homeowners in the settlement would be able to make out in the night sky the hulking shape of the Panamint mountains, the lights of the naval base winking beneath.

And in the morning, as the sun rose to the east over the national monument, automated sprinklers would come on and begin their twitching rotations, misting the putting greens and the fairways and the sculpted oases of red-and-yellow birds of paradise and palm, bringing songbirds out of nowhere to perch in the mesquite and palo verde trees lining the courses.

Hundreds of units were already presold.

The place would not disappoint; it would be almost heaven for the buyers, whose profiles were already known to him. Aging golfers whose children lived far away and avoided contact, whose fixed pensions were supplemented by a moderate annual influx of dividend and interest income from conservatively managed accounts, whose idea of leisure involved little more than a sunny clime, eighteen holes minimum and a view of pastel-colored fake adobe; these golfers and their wives, most of whom would outlive them, watching the sunset as they sat in the dry air, gentle, quiet, sipping their gin-and-tonics, smelling the barbeque from a few doors down and watching the colors in the western sky deepen. Was it not a decent way for life to end, in the peace of all that slowness? That he would not wish for an end like that himself was irrelevant. The buyers were not him.

Never pretend to know better, had been the first lesson of real estate. His own preferences were only a private luxury.

He would drive down the softly curving streets when they were built, he would survey the burg in all its idle readiness before the people moved in, when it was waiting, an infant of a city, clean and unmarked. She would be with him then, with her consent. The shining hair that hung down her back, the quick smile, the set of her shoulders and deep curve at the small of her back. He found it satisfying to imagine the completion of this, the village in the middle of nowhere and the contours of her person.

He knew it was her-was not surprised he had held himself aloof from others till now, knowing the perfection of this new sentiment.

In the morning his mother called down from the landing. "Have you been keeping my mail for me?"

She held a toothbrush and wore a black lace robe. In the past she had favored white cotton nightgowns that buttoned to the neck and were patterned with sprigs of flowers.

"In the desk," he said, inclining his head in the right direction.

But he had noticed, among her letters, one with a Reno postmark. Fear took hold of him. He had to go.

He glanced outside and saw that the taxi that would take him to his car was already waiting at the curb. Hastily he left the buttered toast waiting for him on the counter, the poured juice; hastily he left his dog for the day with a last pat on the head; hastily he grabbed his keys from a bowl on a side table. He left.

All day he worked hard and took very few calls, and it was past seven when he finally finished. He was the last to leave the office, something he liked because he could survey it at his leisure, walking around, shuffling his nearly noiseless feet across the carpet. He stood and stared out various windows that offered views past other buildings and onto pieces of the ocean. He saw the blurs of ships like cities in the distance, unmoving on the gray surface. They were large ships, dark ships, solid and far across the waves. Often he saw them through these office windows and the next day they were gone.

When he got home his mother sat red-eyed in a lawn chair on the balcony, Terry in another chair beside her, an ashtray balanced on his mother's chair arm. He felt a pang of needBeth should be here, she would be better at this than he was.

Of course after one evening they were not at that point. It would be far from appropriate.

He knelt in front of his mother and took her hand.

"Are you OK?"

She nodded slowly, vaguely. Her face was clean of makeup.

"Do you need to talk about it?"

She shook her head.

"I'll get us something to eat."

"She broke things," said Terry, catching tip to him in the kitchen.

"She broke things?"

"She threw the dishes down on the floor. See? No plates," and he opened the cabinet door above his head to display its emptiness. "She threw out all her shoes. And the-whatvacuum cleaner."

"She was just, what was she? Angry? Crying?"

"I gave her a tranquilizer. I have them for the airplanes? And so she is better."

When they brought the food out his mother decided she wanted to be inside, but she also wanted to smoke. T. opened the windows and the three of them sat at the table. His mother stared down at her soup with a lit cigarette in her hand; Teny slathered butter onto a piece of bread.

"You shouldn't be able to do that," said his mother finally, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Get a divorce without telling the other person."

He watched her long ash fall onto the table.

"I was thinking," he said softly. "When you were staying here before you went traveling, you were going to Mass at St. Anne's, right?"

His mother nodded.

"Maybe we should go in together tomorrow. You can talk to the priest"

"I hardly know him."

"Then let's call home. Let's call Father Stevens. OK? He'll be able to help with this."

"I didn't tell him I was leaving," mused his mother. "But I did send a postcard. From Cabo."

"Let's call him."

He left his hand on her shoulder. In the morning, he was telling himself, she would talk to her old parish priest, kindly and soft-spoken. She trusted him implicitly.

He would marvel later at how a mind could slip into otherness without you even noticing it. Slip away right beside you, motionless.

After dinner Terry turned on the television in the living room, where he settled down with a beer to watch a game, pretending intense concentration. Angela said weakly that she was going to wash her hair, which T. seized upon as evidence of a restored normalcy. He said his own goodnights to both of them and retired to his room with the portable telephone, relieved.

While she ran her bath in the room next to his he called Beth and spoke to her, told her in low tones about the crisis. She was sympathetic and sounded sincerely worried; she offered to help but he did not want to give an impression of neediness. After he hung up he lay in bed letting his mind roam to business, legs splayed on the bed, one hand idly scratching the hair on his groin; while his mother picked up and inspected Terry's orange vial of tranquilizers he patted the bed and watched his dog jump up to curl at his feet. He closed his eyes and considered the wind farms of Palm Springs, the cost of the turbines, the megawattage that powered Coachella Valley. His own development would be powered thus one day, if he could swing it; and he was considering a contract with the wind-farm company when his mother removed her woven sandals and dark blue skirt.

As she stepped into the bath and opened a bottle of baby shampoo, he was already falling asleep. For a while they floated side by side like that, only a thin wall between them-she with her hair lathered, a towel rolled beneath her neck to soften the bathtub edge, he in an undershirt and boxer shorts on the bare sheets, the blankets pushed down hastily to the foot of the bed. As he fell asleep he was seeing the turbines that stretched along the San Gorgonio Pass, rows and rows of long, white windmill blades that whirred against the sky.

He had once spotted dinosaurs off the freeway there, a brontosatirtis and a tyrannosatirtis rex, their massive heads held high.

Stumbling out his bedroom door to the bathroom in the middle of the night he peed staring at the china shepherdess: and as he turned from the toilet to the sink to wash up he saw his mother.

He dropped to his knees and despite the shock of her nudity grabbed her out of the water and tried to breathe into her mouth and pump on her chest. He called out in panic between breaths, called out to Terry downstairs; and Terry was behind him fast. They kneeled over her together and did what they thought they were supposed to do, did what they could again and again until the ambulance pulled tip wailing outside and the attendants were rushing up the stairs and bending down around him. He welcomed them as he had welcomed no one before; with gratitude he relinquished her to them, a towel thrown across her stomach.

The paramedics took her over and made him stand up, urged him back from her a few steps so that they could work. He stood useless and spare in the corner, breathing hard, his T-shirt soaked in soap-smelling water, his underwear dripping down his bare legs.

When one of them said she had a pulse the strength went out of him and he sat down hard on the toilet seat.

Later he learned it had been a stroke caused by an overdose of Terry's tranquilizers. Later, sitting beside her bed and barely seeing her face for the tubes and the paleness of the skin, he would recall that-after all this panic, all this dread and this commotion-she had never seemed to notice his father much at all, around the house, back in the olden days. His father's absence, he realized, meant more to her than his presence ever had.

Even furniture could be an object of nostalgia. . in recalling her life with his father, as she lay there in the soft bathwater, he imagined her dulled by the weight but then, as if recalling an old armchair with fraying arms, stricken by homesickness. He imagined the life she had led, her weekly route to the grocery store where she had shopped throughout his childhood. He saw her holding the steering wheel and turning right and then left and then right again, watching the wipers shunt back and forth in the rain. She had grown up, as he had, and found the same thing: the warmth of other bodies dissipated as you pulled further and further away, and in the space between people the air became cool.

On the small television in her hospital room, which was on all the time, families sat in a row of chairs and argued. Women hurled recriminations at their stolid husbands and sons and then, meeting with indifference, broke down in a torrent of weeping. A Kleenex box on her nightstand was printed with brown flowers.

He had requested a private room but there was a waiting list, so she shared with another prone woman who was always snoring. During the first week of the coma he took Beth once to visit her, which should have been too intimate for an early date but felt natural. In fact Beth reminded him, standing over his mother's bed with a compassionate expression, of a nurse-not the nurses who actually worked in the hospital but an ideal nurse, capable, courteous, modest. He wondered how she came to have this capacity for appropriateness wherever she went.

But mostly he went alone, not wishing to overwhelm her.

They sent in orderlies to bathe the patients, and on the day his mother came out of her coma the orderly had secured her hair to the sides of her head with a pair of pink barrettes. He went to the bathroom in her room, wondering idly why there were plastic butterflies affixed to his mother's temples, and when he came out her eyes were open. She blinked several times.

"Mother?" he asked, and fumbled to press the call button. "Can you hear me?"

Her face still did not move and he picked up one of her hands, pressed it gently.

"It's me," he said, "T. You're in the hospital."

Finally her mouth worked dryly and he put down her hand. He ran to the bathroom and filled a paper cup with water.

"Here," he said. "Here, drink this."

He spilled the water over her chin and down the sides of her face, trying to tip it into her mouth.

"Can you talk? Do you know me?"

"Tell me your name," said a nurse, cutting in beside him.

"Angela," said his mother.

"And can you tell me what year it is?"

"1990," said his mother.

"OK," said the nurse. "Just lay back there, honey."

"I died," rasped his mother, after a long pause. "I died."

He leaned in and clasped her wrist.

"You almost died," he said. "You had a stroke. But here you are.

"Thirsty," she whispered, and he poured more water into her mouth. He could hear her gulping, and the nurse raised the head of the bed so that his mother sat up.

"You don't need to talk," said the nurse. "Just relax. You're doing great"

"I died and went to another place," whispered his mother, straining to lift her head off the pillow. "But it was nothing like what I expected, T. It was nothing like it."

"You can tell us all about that later," said the nurse. "OK? Right now we need you to just lay back and relax."

"You believe me, don't you," whispered his mother, reaching for his face. "You believe me."

"Of course I do," he whispered back.

"I was surprised. I thought it would be heaven, T. But it was bad, very bad," said his mother, and moved her feet suddenly beneath the sheet. "It was the International House of Pancakes."

"I'm surprised too," said T.

"I thought it would be more expensive than that."

He studied her face to see if he could detect humor but there was nothing, only a vague and yet urgent concern.

"We're just glad to have you here with us," he said, and leaned down to kiss her cheek.

"I don't want to go back there again," she said, and closed her eyes. "I must have done something wrong, T. Something very wrong to go there."

"I'm going to get the doctor now," said the nurse. "And you best be letting her get some rest. Visiting hour's almost done anyways."

"Sure," he said.

Before he left he reached over and removed the barrettes.

He found her a small apartment, on the first floor of a yellowbrick building a block away from him. She would convalesce there and T. could check in on her easily. It was pleasant and any, modest and clean; the windows of the large living room gave onto a common garden whose grass was a deep green, with white plastic lawn chairs and a kidney-shaped pool. The doors were wide enough for a wheelchair and the inside smelled of lemon.

He and Beth furnished the apartment on the day his mother was to be released, drinking coffee and watching as men from a furniture rental company rolled in the chairs and sofas on dollies. They brought over her few belongings from T.'s apartment and Beth put daisies in the window.

"Oh T.? I think we forgot something," she called from his bathroom when they were getting ready to leave for the hospital. She came out holding the Bo Peep figurine.

He was struck by the sight of this-how the statuette, which he had previously viewed as ridiculous, did not appear so the way she held it, how the fluidity of her gestures seemed to steady and ground its frivolity. In her hand it was almost acceptable.

"No," he said softly. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure? It doesn't remind me of you," she said, and put it down on a shelf as they walked together through his front hall, keeping pace, both their key chains jangling.

"She bought it for me," he said, and pulled the door closed behind them. "She believed in guest soap."

He never found out whether the overdose had been an accident. Angela was changed, shifted sideways from her previous self; it was not quite that she was absent, merely that she seemed dislocated. The patterns of her speech had altered and frequently her sentences wasted into nothing; but then some days she seemed to rise from the fog, sharptongued and beady-eyed, and would lecture her son on his selfishness or his lack of religion.

Her time in the coma had persuaded her into an angle of devotion more stringent and bizarre than her old way of worship. She had always assumed that when she died the Blessed Mother would shelter her; instead she had been relegated to a dingy House of Pancakes, and the shock was considerable. Whether her banishment had been to hell, purgatory, or as she first implied a disappointing version of heaven remained unclear to him. But she seemed to be certain of what the experience signified; she had found herself in a place of disillusionment where fluorescents had threatened to bring on a migraine and the other patrons, fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints, had studied her resentfully. None of them were Catholics.

It had been a stern warning, and one she would heedfor the House of Pancakes outcome could be averted, she told T., by renewed attention to matters of the spirit. She had fallen away from attention to faith in recent months, she said, with her self-absorption and her self-pity. Of course the divorce itself, being a violation of doctrine, might also have brought on her punishment despite the fact that she had not had a hand in it personally: it was no coincidence that she ended up in the Pancake House the very day she was notified of the legal severing of her conjugal bond. Starting now she would devote more of her time to charity, attend church daily and curb her language.

But her concern that he might end up in an IHOP was greater than her worry for herself. Her admonitions to him were constant, and on her sharper days he sometimes caught himself wishing she would return to dimness. If an elderly lady with a walker was preparing to cross the road a half a block away, she would wave wildly with both arms to stun her into halting her progress; then grab T. firmly, pinching, to hustle him over to the woman's side so he could support her for the brief traverse. And as he and his current ward made their way through the crosswalk she would often leap around wildly beside them, fending off cars with a fierce and mobile series of facial expressions despite the fact that all of them were already at a standstill. Recipients of her largesse were not always grateful for the interruption but she ignored this; and several times, hands flapping on T.'s back to hurry him along, she pressed him into the service of perfectly hale and hearty men in their early forties.

She also urged him toward charitable contributionshere five thousand dollars for a local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there five hundred for the Roman Catholic Anti-Defamation League of Newfoundland. When T. resisted her tithing demands she would finger-wag and remind him of the flicker of long tubes over his head, the blue-white light, and the laminated menus with close-up pictures of heavy foods.

Behind the wheel of her car she carefully avoided not only the various Los Angeles locations of the International House of Pancakes but all breakfast-oriented restaurants that were national chains. And if she was struck as she drove with the sight of a Denny's or Waffle House, unexpected, she closed her eyes tightly until it was past.

He rarely saw the men he knew from college days. But early that spring there was a call from a fraternity brother reporting that Ian Van Heysen, Jr. had relocated to the Hollywood Hills and was hosting a housewarming gala. The new home had a pool with a view of the city, a whirlpool and sauna and steam room; it had previously been owned by a B-list actress with famously beestung lips. This, and not the independent features of the property, was what had attracted Van Heysen and inspired him to cajole from his father a purchase price in the mid-seven figures.

"You gotta come, man," said the fraternity brother, now a pharmaceutical rep. "You being right there in the city and shit. I mean guys are flying in from Singapore for this thing. And you'd give it that real old-time flavor, you know? I mean shit, we haven't seen you since eighty-fucking-six. It's gonna be a hell of a shindig."

"I'll do my best," said T.

He took Beth with him and they headed up the front path through the garden, which was crowded with exotic plants. Near the front porch they found two men holding beer cans, ties loosened.

"Ron, how are you," said T., and they clapped each other on the back. "This is Beth."

"Pleased to meetcha," said Ron. "Wow. You got a keeper there, T. She a model or something? Whoo-hoo!"

"See you later," said T., and they left him standing with the other man, who leaned over a birdbath and retched.

"My," said Beth.

"Ron was never one of our very brightest stars."

"Reassuring."

Inside the house was palatial, with a spiral staircase and a massive window giving a view out over the light dotted hills in the dark. Caterers moved among the crowds, and in the corner of the main room a tubby man in late-model Elvis sang karaoke.

"T. holy fucking shit! My man!"

Down the stairs came Van Heysen, red hair mussed, his round and florid face shining.

"Ian," said T.

"My man! I can't believe it!"

He found himself clasped to Ian's chest, and when he was released a blast of whiskey breath almost floored him.

"What the hell you been doing? I hear something like real estate?"

"Something like. This is Beth," said T., and Ian looked her tip and down.

"Hot," he said, and stuck out his hand.

"Nice to meet you too."

"So are you like Asian or black or something?"

"You grill everyone about their ethnic background, Ian?"

"Hey. If she wasn't so foxy I wouldn't give a shit. So step on up to my garden of earthly delights. We got coke, we got weed, we got speed, we got X."

"No, thanks," said T. "You remember who you're talking to, right, Ian? Straight as a pin."

"Does a Pope shit in the woods? Is a bear Catholic?"

"What can I say."

"Thought you might have eased up, is all. Mellowed out. But hey! No harm no foul."

"I'd like a vodka tonic, if you have one," said T.

"Sure thing. You?"

"White wine, please," said Beth.

"Stay right there."

"Triple T.!" said a man with a beard, stepping back from the table. White dusted his mustache.

"Stewart," said T. "How are you."

"Great, great, great," said Stewart, and clapped him in a bear hug.

"So I see."

"Hey? You know what? Coincidence for ya. I was at this old-boy thing in Atlanta, right? A month ago or something. Mostly fossils. We're talking Class of 1940 and shit."

"Uh huh."

"It was all ear hair and prosthetic legs and boring Okinawa stories. I went there for business, looking for investors for my new record label."

"Record label. Huh."

"It's completely fucking brilliant, T.T.T. Talk about niches no one's thought of grabbing. Get this: Aryan rap. More on that one later. But so guess who the fuck I fucking ran into there?"

"I have no idea," said T., and held out his hand to accept a drink from Ian.

"Your old man! Your fucking dear old dad. I mean fuck me!"

T. stared wordlessly. Finally he lifted his tumbler and sipped.

"He was looking good," said Stewart earnestly. "Real deep tan and shit. I didn't remember him being so buff. Has he had any work done?"

"Work?" asked T., still stunned.

"Stew! Come here!" someone yelled from outside.

"Hold your fucking horses!" called Stew, and turned back to T. "And he had this kid with him, your brother I guess?"

"I was an only child," said T.

"Oh. Some young guy, then," said Stewart. "I don't know why I thought he was family. Maybe the age difference."

"Did my father happen to mention where he was living?" asked T.

Stewart stared at him until the French doors banged open.

"Stew! I'm serious!" said a woman in pigtails. "Laney's having a bad trip or something! She's like saying she's gonna slide down the cliff on a wine crate! Like, now!"

"My stupid wife," said Stewart, "she always does this stupid shit," and followed the pigtails out the door, shaking his head.

Later, before they left, he went looking for Stewart but could not find him.

Presently his father sent a postcard from Key West. Several days later he had a lunch meeting with Brad, a native of the Keys, whose mother's building he had sold four years before and who now had a large stake in the Mojave project.

"You run into my father around town?" he asked Brad casually, when business was winding down.

"I guess he works in this one bar these days," said Brad, signing the air for the check.

"A bar?" said T.

"This one is, you know… you know."

"I know what?"

"You know. For queers."

T. found his mouth working without producing words. He saw his father putting an umbrella in a margarita glass, wearing a bright pink shirt festooned with sunsets and palm trees.

"T.? You with me there, man?"

"Sure. Yes. I'm just surprised. I always thought he was narrow-minded."

"Yeah. Hey! I'll get this one." And Brad slapped down his card.

T. flew into the Keys on a propeller plane, the thin seat beneath him vibrating. Beneath him the blue was vast, and then he saw the gray precise line of a highway cutting its way across the ocean, between the thin islands. A man sitting next to him told him the road over the sea had been built on a bedrock of dead corals for a railway itself long since destroyed by a storm. One bridge alone was seven miles long, the man said.

From the small airport he took a taxi to a condo Brad owned on the beach, which was pink and had tiers like a wedding cake. He hung his spare shirt in the closet, showered and lay naked on his back on the bed with the sliding door open to the terrace, waves crashing outside and the sea blowing salt wind across his body. The smell of crisp sheets was tinged with the smell of coconut and a breeze came in off the ocean and lifted the white drapes; it grazed the light hairs on his stomach, raising goose bumps and giving him an erection. He thought of Beth, cotton and skin. He should have asked her to come with him. But even with her this would not have passed for a pleasure trip. This was a gesture, but it rankled, it was awkward, even confining. She would not have thanked him.

And it was still not too late to avoid a meeting. He did not have to go any further than this; he could stay where he was, lie low. The prospect was beckoning.

But glancing through the open door to the bathroom he saw white tiles and was briefly touched by the body of his mother, naked and slack-there she was, and there the towel he had tossed across the darkness of her lap for the benefit of the paramedics, because he was ashamed.

By night the bar was crowded and hot. A muscular black man in a net T-shirt handed beers over the counter and there behind him, though it took a few seconds to be sure, was his father.

Newly blond, darkly tanned, his father wore a polo shirt and smiled whitely to a patron waving money at him as he shot soda into a highball glass with the bar gun. Both his father and mother, it struck him, had made themselves blonder: both of them had lightened their hair and darkened their skin-possibly, he thought, to attract attention through contrast, birds with bright plumage. They had turned themselves into summer people, as though they could stave off the winter ahead.

Maybe, he thought hopefully, he had imagined his father's coldness. Maybe his father was only reluctant to face him. He stepped toward the counter, waiting for a hole to clear between other patrons; he stood facing the bartender in the mesh, who nodded at him impatiently.

"Actually, if I could talk to him," he said, and pointed to the other end of the bar, where his father stood, back turned, punching buttons on a cash register.

"Davy!" called the bartender.

As his father turned he felt his stomach flip-carnival rides from way back, the roller coaster that went upside down or the fixed platform that seemed to drop in free fall and then swooped up again. His father's face remained blank for some time. Then he came around the end of the bar, unsmiling, and the first thing that T. noticed, looking for him as he pressed toward him through the close crowd, was his feet. At the bottom of his cream-colored slacks his father, who had always worn plain black leather lace-ups, battered sneakers or a pair of Redwing work boots, wore a snow-white pair of espadrilles.

When they met the next morning for breakfast his father was late-five minutes, ten, then twenty. As he came in he offered a brief, reflexive smile, quickly dropped, and barely glanced at how T. waited for him: ramrod straight in his chair, holding his Wall Street Journal rolled tip in his hand as though he might have to deploy it in the swatting of flies.

As he approached T. understood in a rush that he was not the same man. His bearing was different, his movement, everything: a dog, for example, would not recognize him. Strange as this altered man was to T., the new self suited him, that was clear. At the same time this new parent was closed to T. Not even the awkward intimacy of confession lay between them anymore; his face was shut like a door. He had simply moved on.

He waved at someone behind T.'s shoulder. Then he sat down and adjusted the chair several times, back and forth, tucking himself beneath the table edge.

"You order yet?" he asked, and opened up a menu, signaling to a waiter. "Could I get a cappuccino here?"

"Of course not. I was waiting for you," said T.

"Oh, you didn't need to do that," said his father distractedly. He did not look at him, tracing a finger down the list of menu items. "I'll have the eggs Florentine."

"Huevos rancheros," said T. "So. I ran into Stewart Albin a couple of months ago and he said he saw you in Atlanta."

"I always go to the reunions," said his father, nodding. He seemed bored.

"I know that. He said you were with some kid. He thought it was my brother."

"Stewart, Stewart. Oh yes. He was the one hitting its up for investments in a record or something."

"Aryan rap."

"No one had any idea what he was talking about. I think he's insane."

"So then I got your postcard and then I was talking to Brad Deering and here I am. First off I want to tell you. My mother had a stroke."

"Oh dear," said his father faintly, and clucked his tongue. He reached out and adjusted a daffodil.

"We thought she was dead at first. It was an overdose and the stroke happened while she was unconscious. It happened in my bathtub."

"Oh dear," repeated his father, still not meeting his eyes. "But she's doing fine now?"

"It depends what you mean. She's all right physically," said T. "As far as the tests go. But she's not what she used to be.

"We're not so young anymore, are we?" said his father comfortably. "I've had these tension headaches lately."

"Headaches," repeated T.

"Aspirin does nothing for me. Ibuprofen either. The only thing that does anything is Tylenol with codeine. That stuff is sheer magic."

T. stared at him, but he played with his fork and smiled vaguely.

"I'm sorry about the headaches," said T. slowly, "but I'd really like to think you felt some concern about my mother. That when I tell you she almost died, that you-you knowactually care."

"Sure, sure I do," said his father lightly, but was looking past him again, smiling and waving.

A woman in a straw hat descended on them.

"Davy! Darling!" she said.

She was nut-brown, like his father, and wore shimmering peach-colored lipstick. She was draped in scarves.

"I haven't seen you for weeks it seems like," she said, and kissed his father on the top of his head. "I'm over there with Boolie. He can barely keep down his coffee. He overdid it last night."

"This is Carol," said his father. "A friend. Carol, my son T."

"Well hi!" squealed Carol, as though she'd won the lottery.

T. nodded curtly. Clearly his father wanted her there.

"When did you start going by Davy?" he asked. "It was always Dave or David, my whole life."

"That was the old me," said his father.

"The new you is more jaunty," said Carol.

"Well, Carol," said T., "it's been nice meeting you."

"Join us!" said his father, and put his hand out to grab the back of a chair.

"Are you kidding?" asked T., incredulous.

"Not at all. Here, take a load off," said his father, and patted the chair.

"Just for a minute, while Boolie's in the little boys' room."

"I was telling my father how my mother had a stroke recently," said T. resolutely. He would not be diverted. "But he doesn't seem to be interested."

"Florentine?" inquired the waiter, plate-lifting.

"That was so speedy!" enthused his father. "Right here."

The waiter tried to put the other plate down in front of Carol.

"No, I'm the huevos," said T.

"I'll say," said Carol.

"What?"

"It's important, when you're starting fresh, to let go," said Carol with a therapeutic lilt. She reached out and patted the back of T.'s hand.

"I don't know what you're talking about," said T.

"Your father is like a beautiful butterfly," said Carol. "For him to spread his wings he had to leave the dusty old cocoon behind."

T. stared at her and she stared back, smiling and blinking. Her two front teeth were different shades of white.

His mother had no knowledge of any of this, yet he felt hurt for her.

"You've got to be kidding," he repeated finally, and turned back to his father. Who seemed not to be listening; he was carving into his mound of spinach and egg with a fork as though he had been starving for days. "Are you there? This was a person who spent thirty years with you. This is your wife. My mother."

Carol played with her rhinestone-studded watchband and his father continued to eat, patting neatly at his mouth with his still-folded napkin.

"Your son is an angry person," she whispered finally, and his father shook his head ambiguously as she turned back to T. "You know, honey, that resentment is just like a poison. It will just eat away at you. You should work on it."

"Carol? This is a family conversation. Give us a minute, if you would," said T. "Please."

She looked at his father and got up reluctantly. T. watched as she flowed over to a table in the corner, where a fat man in a baseball cap sat sticking a bright red drink from a straw.

"That was very rude," said his father.

His father waved at the waiter and made a check-signing gesture in the air.

"I have to admit, I really feel like hitting you," said T.

"I'm used to homophobia," said his father, and patted his mouth with his napkin again. "I've been exposed to it all my 1 ife."

"Jesus Christ," said T. wearily.

He gazed down at his refried beans congealing beneath a dollop of sour cream. He felt disinclined to touch them.

"I have to protect myself from people who are full of hate," said his father.

"Dad, listen to me," said T. "So you're gay? Great. Whatever feels right. You look good, you look healthy. But do you have to be cruel to her?"

"I don't have to listen to this, Thomas."

He felt a buzz in his ears, a wall of deafness rising within him. He was hot; he had to get out of the restaurant. He took a card out of his wallet and laid it down. "Her new telephone number. Please at least call her. Please at least tell her why you left. That you're not coming back. Do her that small favor."

He rose, his father half-swiveled away from him in his chair, and tossed down a twenty; passed Carol and the morbidly obese man named Boolie, who glared at him with bulging eyes. He felt tamped down into fury, the tension of his rage making him want to burst into a run. As soon as he was away from the restaurant, enough distance behind him, he turned off the road down to the beach again and took off his shoes.

He did run then, along the cool tidal sand: he pounded the wet grit with the tender soles of his feet, a shoe clutched in each hand, until the bottoms of his feet were raw and he was winded and gasping. Then he slowed to a stop.

By nightfall he was on the West Coast again, curled warmly around Beth's smooth back and listening to the whir of his own ceiling fan. There he drifted back to the sand, the beach beside the pink stucco building.

The sand was fall of fathers in bathing suits, sleeping; he was the only one awake, with fathers all around him. He did not wear a bathing suit but a body cast, and none of the sun or the sand reached his skin. In the cast he was cool. He felt no need for movement.

The tide was so far out that the low white line of the waves breaking was barely visible on the horizon. Between him and the sea the sand was hilly with dunes, and yet past it he could still see the wide flat ocean. Everywhere fathers were dreaming in the warm sun, the fathers who had once been little boys, running; the sun that made them gleam. Crabs sidled up to them and wasps landed on their lax bodies.

No, wait. Were the fathers asleep?

Their eyes were wide open. They were there, gold and massive, but they saw nothing.

The fathers lay still, their faces toward the sky: until the wind passed a hand over all of their eyes, closing them.