Independence Day

7

Eight a.m. Things speed up.

On my way out of the Sea Breeze I remember to hike across, scale the green side of Mr. Tanks’s Peterbilt and squeeze a business card under his king-size windshield wiper, with a personal note on the back saying: “Mr. T. Good meeting you. Call up any time. FB.” I include my home phone. (The art of the sale first demands imagining the sale.) Strangely enough, when I take a quick curious peek inside the driver’s capsule, on the passenger’s seat I see a clutter of Reader’s Digest condenseds and on top of it an enormous yellow cat wearing a gold collar and staring up at me as if I were an illusion. (Pets are not welcome in the Sea Breeze, and Mr. Tanks is no doubt a consummate player-by-the-rules.) I notice also, as I climb down the cab’s outer shell, and just in front of the door, a name, painted in ornate red script and set in quotes: “Cyril.“ Mr. Tanks is a man deserving of study.

Back in the lot to leave my key (forgoing my deposit), I see that the Suburban with its Boston Whaler rig is gone now, and yellow “crime scene” tape is stretched across the closed door to #15. And I realize then that I’ve dreamed about it all: of a sealed room, of a car being towed off in the dark by small, muscular, sweaty white men in sleeveless shirts, shouting, “Come on back, come on back,” followed by the sound of scary chains and winches and big motors revving, then someone shouting, “Okay, okay, okay.”

At 8:45 I stop bleary-eyed for coffee at the Friendly’s in Hawleyville. After consulting my atlas, I decide on the Yankee Expressway to Waterbury and over to Meriden, a jog across and down to Middletown — where adjunct Charley “teaches” Wesleyan coeds to distinguish which column is Ionic and which Doric — then CT 9 straight into Deep River; this instead of drag-assing all the way down to Norwalk and 95 as I meant to do last night, driving east along the Sound with, I’m certain, four trillion other Americans craving a safe and sane holiday, yet doing everything they can to prevent me from having one.

In Friendly’s I browse through the Norwalk Hour for any mention of last night’s tragedy, although I’m sure it happened too late. I learn here, however, that Axis Sally has died in Ohio, aged eighty-seven and an honors graduate of Ohio Wesleyan; Martina has out-dueled Chris in three sets; hydrologists in Illinois have decided to draw down Lake Michigan to channel water into the more important and drought-starved Mississippi; and Vice President Bush has declared prosperity to be at “a record high” (though as if to call him a liar there are sidebar reports of declines in prices, mutual funds and CDs, declines in factory orders and aircraft demands — all “pocketbook” issues Dullard Dukakis needs to shanghai or lose his ass in a bucket).

After paying, I make my strategic calls squeezed between the double doors of Friendly’s “lobby”: one to my answering machine, disclosing nothing — a relief; another to Sally, intending to offer a private charter to anyplace I can meet her — no answer, not even a recording, causing my gut to wrench like someone had tightened a rope around it and jerked downward.

Apprehensively then I call Karl Bemish, first at the root beer palace, where there’s no reason for him to be yet, then at his bachelor digs in Lambertville, where he answers on the second ring.

“Everything’s jake here, Frank,” he shouts, to my inquiry about the felonious Mexicans. “Aw yeah, I should’ve called you back last night. I called the sheriff instead. I expected some action, really. But. False alarm. They never showed up again, the little fucks.”

“I don’t want you being in danger down there, Karl.” Customers stream in and out beside me, opening the door, jostling me, letting in hot air.

“I’ve got my alley sweeper, you know,” Karl says.

“You’ve got your what? What’s that?”

“A sawed-off twelve-gauge pump,” Karl says supremely, and grunts an evil laugh. “A serious piece of machinery.”

This is the first I’ve heard of an alley sweeper, and I don’t like it. In fact, it scares me silly. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have an alley sweeper at the root beer stand, Karl.” Karl doesn’t like me to call it root beer, or a “stand,” but that’s how I think of it. What else is it? An office?

“Well, it beats lying facedown behind the birch beer cooler drinking your brains out of your paper hat. Or maybe I’m wrong about that,” Karl says coolly.

“Jesus Christ, Karl.”

“Just don’t worry. I don’t even bring it out till after ten.”

“Do the police know about it?”

“Hell, they told me where to buy it. Up in Scotch Plains.” Karl shouts this too. “I shouldn’t have blabbed it to you. You’re such a goddamn nervous nelly.”

“It makes me goddamn nervous,” I say, and it does. “I can’t use you dead. I’d have to serve the root beer myself, plus our insurance won’t pay off if you’re killed with an unlicensed gun in there. I’d probably get sued.”

“You just go on and have a holiday with your kid. I’ll hold down Fort Apache. I’ve got some other things to do this morning. I’m not alone here.”

There’s no more getting through to Karl now. My window’s just been shut. “Leave me a message if anything’s strange, would you do that?” I say this in an unlikely-to-be-acknowledged voice.

“I plan to be out of touch all morning,” Karl says, and makes a dumb hardee-har-har laugh, then hangs up.

I immediately dial Sally again, in case she’s been out picking up croissants and the Daily Argonaut. But nothing.

My last call is to Ted Houlihan — for an update, but also to grill him on the status of our office “exclusive.” Making client calls is actually one of the most satisfying parts of my work. Roily Mounger was right on the money when he said real estate has almost nothing to do with the state of one’s soul; consequently a necessary business call is tantamount to an enjoyable game of Ping-Pong. “It’s Frank Bascombe, Ted. How’s everything going down there?”

“Everything’s just fine, Frank.” Ted sounds frailer than yesterday, but as happy as he claims. A slow gas leak may create an unbeatable euphoria.

“Just wanted to tell you my clients are taking a day to think about it, Ted. They were impressed with the house. But they’ve looked at a lot of houses, and they need to push themselves beyond a threshold now. I do think the last house I showed them, though, is the one they ought to buy, and that was yours.”

“Super,” Ted says. “Just super.”

“Anybody else been through to look?” The crucial question.

“Oh, a few yesterday. Some people right after your folks.” Followed by not unexpected but still aggravating bad news.

“Ted, I have to remind you that we’ve got an office exclusive on your house. That’s what the Markhams are acting in reliance of. They’re under the impression they’ve got a little time to think without any outside pressure. We got all that stapled down ahead of time.”

“Well, I don’t know, Frank,” Ted says dimly. Conceivably, of course, Julie Loukinen has played down the exclusivity clause for fear Ted would balk, and just put it on the sign anyway. It’s also likely Ted’s known far and wide as a perpetual “potential,” and Buy and Large or whoever else is involved is simply horning in on the chance of splitting a commission; this versus our suing the shit out of them and queering the whole deal — a strategy tantamount to walking in the winning run, something you never want to do. A third possibility is that Ted’s as crooked as a corkscrew and wouldn’t tell the truth to God in his heaven. The supposedly bum testicle story could be part of the act. (Nothing should surprise anybody anymore.)

“Look, Ted,” I say. “Just step out and take a look at that green-and-gray sign and see if it doesn’t say ‘exclusive.’ I’m not going to make a big deal out of it right now, because I’m up in Connecticut. But I’m going to get it straight on Tuesday.”

“How is it up there?” Ted says, daffy as a duck.

“It’s hot.”

“Are you up at Mount Tom?”

“No. I’m in Hawleyville. But if you’d just be considerate enough, Ted, not to show the house to anyone else, maybe we can avoid a big lawsuit. My clients deserve a chance to make an offer.” Not that they haven’t had ample chance, or that they aren’t right now cruising the deserted, lusterless streets of East Brunswick, hoping to find something much better.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Ted says, energetic now.

“Great, then,” I say. “I’ll get back to you in a hurry.”

“The people after you yesterday said they’d be coming in with an offer this morning.”

“If they do, Ted,” and I say this threateningly, “remember my clients have first refusal. It’s in writing.” Or it should be. Of course this is standard realty baloney, routinely purveyed by both sides: the “bright ‘n’ early in the morning” offer. In general, people (buyers, usually) who trot out this “promise” are either making themselves feel substantial and will have forgotten it entirely by five o’clock, or else they’re deluding themselves by supposing the mere prospect of a fat offer makes everybody feel better. Naturally, only generous offers you can pinch between your thumb and index, finger make everybody actually feel better. And until one of those comes into view, there’s nothing to get excited about (though a rising tide of seller’s angst never hurt anybody).

“Frank, do you know what’s a very strange thing I’ve learned,” Ted says in a seeming state of goofy wonderment.

“What’s that?” Through the window I’m watching a van full of retarded kids off-load in the Friendly’s lot — teenage tongue-thrusters, frail cross-eyed girls, chubby Down’s survivors of unspecified gender — eight or so, bumbling out onto the hot tarmac in elastic-band shorts of various hues, sneakers and dark blue tee-shirts that have YALE printed on the front. Their counselors, two strapping college girls in matching brown shorts and white pullovers, who look like they go to Oberlin and play water polo, get the van locked up while the kids stand staring in all different directions.

“I’ve learned that I really enjoy showing people my house,” Ted rambles on. “Everyone who’s seen it seemed to like it a lot and they all think Susan and I did all right here. That’s a good feeling to have. I expected to hate it and feel a lot of grief at having my life invaded. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I say. My interest in Ted is dwindling fast since I realize there’s a decent chance he’s a real estate scammer. “It just means you’re ready to move on, Ted. You’re ready for Albuquerque and all that sunshine.” (And to have your nuts preserved in amber.)

“My son’s a surgeon in Tucson, Frank. I’m going out for surgery in September.”

“I remember.” (I got the city wrong.) The gaggle of afflicted teens and their two big, tan-legged, water-polo-type minders are making for the door now, some of the kids in full charge, and all but a couple wearing plastic crash helmets strapped under their chins like linebackers. “Ted, I just wanted to touch base here, see how your day went yesterday. And I needed to remind you about the ‘exclusive.’ That’s a serious agreement, Ted.”

“Okay then,” Ted says buoyantly. “Thanks for telling me.” I imagine him, white-haired, soft hands, diminutively handsome in his dimpled Fred Waring way, framed in his back window, marveling out at the bamboo wall that has long shielded him from his peaceable prison. It leaves me with a dull feeling that I’ve gone about this wrong. I should’ve stayed close to the Markhams, but my instincts said otherwise. “Frank, I’m thinking that if I get this cancer thing behind me I might just give realty a try. I think I might have a gift for it. What do you think?”

“Sure. But it doesn’t take a gift, Ted. It’s like being a writer. A man with nothing to do finds something to do. I’ve got to hit the road now. I’ve got to pick up my son.”

“Good for you,” Ted says. “Go right on. We’ll talk another time.”

“You bet,” I say darkly, and then that’s over.

The kids are clustered at the glass doors now, their counselors wading through them, laughing. One Down’s boy is giving the door handle a vicious jerking and making a fierce face at the pane, in which he can no doubt see his reflection. The rest of them are still looking around and up and down and back.

When the first counselor drags the door open with the Down’s kid still attached to it, he glares at her and makes a loud, fully uninhibited roar as the door lets hot air right into my face. Then the whole bunch comes scuttling in and past, heading for the second door.

“Oops,” the first tall girl says to me with a wondrously bountiful grin. “We’re sorry, we’re a little clumsy.” She moves on by in the current of little feebs in their Eli shirts. Her own shirt has a bright-red shield on its breast that says Challenges, Inc. and below that, Wendy. I give her a smile of encouragement as she gets shoved past.

Suddenly the little Down’s kid whirls left, still attached to the door, and roars again, conceivably at me, his dark teeth clenched and worn to nubs, one little doughboy arm raised, fist balled. I am poised by the phone, smiling down at him, my hopes for the day attempting to scale the ladder of possibility.

“That means he likes you,” says the second counselor—Megan—inching past at the back of the pack. She’s putting me on, of course. What the roar means is: “Stay away from these two honeys or I’ll eat your face.” (People in many ways are the same.)

“He seems to know me,” I say to golden-armed Megan.

“Oh, he knows you.” Her face is freckled with sunshine, her eyes as plain brown as Cathy Flaherty’s were dazzling. “They look alike to us, but they can pick you and me out a mile away. They have a sixth sense.” She smiles without a whit of self-consciousness, a smile to inspire minutes but possibly not hours of longing. The inner door to Friendly’s hisses open, then slowly shuts behind her. I head at that moment out into the sunny morning to begin my last leg to Deep River.

By 9:50, feeling late, late, late, I’m larruping down-hill-and-up toward Middletown, Waterbury and Meriden, being already lost in the morning’s silvery haze. CT 147 is as verdant, curvy and pleasant as a hedgerow lane in Ireland minus the hedgerows. Tiny pocket reservoirs, cozy roadside state parks, pint-size ski “mountains” perfect for high-school teams, and sturdy frame homes edging the road with satellite dishes out back, show up around every curve. Many houses, I notice, are for sale, and quite a few display yellow plastic ribbons on their tree trunks. I can’t now remember what Americans are being held prisoner or where and by whom, though it’s easy to conceive somewhere, somebody must be. Otherwise the ribbons are wishful thinking, a yearning for another Grenada-type tidy-little-war which worked out so happily for all concerned. Patriotic feelings are much more warming when focused on something finite, and there’s nothing like focusing on kicking somebody’s ass or depriving them of their freedom to make you feel free as a bird yourself.

My thoughts, though, unwillingly run again to the pathetic Markhams, no doubt at this very minute touring some grisly cul-de-sac, accompanied by a nasal-voiced, thick-thighed residential specialist demoralizing the shit out of them with chatter. An indecent, unprofessional part of me hopes that by day’s end, faced with calling me and crawling back to 212 Charity with a full-price offer, they jump for the last house of the day, some standing-empty, dormered Cape whose prior owners gave it to the bank when they transferred-out to Moose Jaw back in ’84, some dire shell on a slab, with negative R factors, potential for radon, a seeping septic, in need of emergency gutter work before the leaves fly.

Why, in an otherwise pleasant and profitable summer season, the Markhams would so shadow my mind isn’t clear, unless it’s that after much finagling, obstruction and idiot discouragement at every level, I have now fashioned the Easter egg, filled it with the right sweet stuff, made the hole and put their eye right to it; and yet I’m afraid they’ll never see inside, after which their lives will be worse — my belief being that once you’re offered something good, you ought to be smart enough to take it.

Years back, I remember, in the month before Ann and I moved to Haddam, new, happy suburban ethers full in our noses, we got it in mind to buy a practical-sturdy Volvo. We drove out in my mother’s old Chrysler Newport to the dealership in Hastings-on-Hudson, kibitzed around the showroom for a hour and a half — chin-rubbing, ear-scratching potential young buyers — fingering the mirror surfaces of some olive-drab five-door job, slipping into and out of its sensible seats, sniffing its chilly perfume, checking out the glove box capacity, the unusual spare tire mounts and jack assembly, finally pretending even to drive it — Ann side by side with me in the driver’s seat, both of us staring ahead through the dealership window at a make-believe road to the future as new Volvo owners.

Until, at the end, we simply decided we wouldn’t. Who knows why? We were young, spiritedly inventing life by the minute, rejecting this, saying yea to that, completely by whim. And a Volvo, a machine I might even still own and use to transport potting soil or groceries or firewood or keep as a fish car to haul myself to the Red Man Club — a Volvo just didn’t suit us. Afterward we drove back into the city toward whatever did suit us, our real future: marriage, parenthood, sportswriting, golf, glee, gloom, death, gyrating unhappiness unable to find a center point, and later, divorce, separation and the long middle passage to now.

Though when I’m in just the right deprived-feeling, past-entangled mood and happen to see one, some brawny-sleek, murmuring black or silver up-to-date-version Volvo, with its enviable safety record, its engine primed to drop out on impact, its boastable storage spaces and one-piece construction, I’m often struck with a heart’s pang of What if? What if our life had gone in that direction … some direction a car could’ve led us and now be emblem for? Different house, different town, different sum total of kids, on and on. Would it all be better? Such things happen, and for as little cause. And it can be paralyzing to think an insignificant decision, a switch thrown this way, not that, could make many things turn out better, even be saved. (My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything — a marriage, a conversation, a government — as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)

It’s best at this moment not to think much along these lines. Though this I’m sure is another reason why the Markhams come to mind on a weekend when my own life seems at a turning or at least a curving point. Likely as not, Joe and Phyllis know how these things work as well as I do and are scared shitless. Yet, while it’s bad to make a wrong move, as maybe I did with the Volvo, it’s worse to regret in advance and call it prudence, which I sense is what they’re doing roving around East Brunswick. Disaster is no less likely. Better — much, much better — to follow ole Davy Crockett’s motto, amended for use by adults: Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.

By ten-thirty I’m past bland, collegiate Middletown and up onto Route 9, taking in the semi-panoramic view of the Connecticut (vacationers assiduously canoeing, jet skiing, windsurfing, sailing, paraskiing or skydiving right into the drink), and then straight downstream the short distance to Deep River.

My chief hope of a secondary nature here is not to lay eyes on Charley, for reasons I perhaps have brought to light already. With luck he’ll be nursing his lumpy jaw out of sight, or else waxing his dinghy or sighting a plumb line or doodling in his sketchbook — whatever rich dilettante architects do when they’re not competing in marathon gin rummy matches or tying their bow ties blindfolded.

Ann understands I don’t precisely loathe Charley, only that I believe that whenever she tells him she loves him there’s an asterisk after “love” (like Roger Maris’s home run title), referencing prior, superior attainment in that area, as though I’m certain she’ll one day pitch it all and begin life’s last long pavane with me and me alone (though neither of us seems to want that).

In nearly all my preceding visits, I’ve ended up feeling I’d snuck onto the property by way of a scaled fence and left (for wherever I’m taking my children — the mollusk exhibit at Woods Hole, a Mets game, a blustery ferry ride to Block Island for a little stolen quality time) as though I was one step ahead of the law. Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.

Charley, unlike me, who thinks everything’s mutable, is the sort of man who puts his trust in “character,” who muses when alone about “standards” and bona fides, “parsing” and “winnowing out men from boys,” but who (it’s my private bet) stands at the foggy mirror in the locker room at the Old Lyme CC thinking about his dick, wishing he had a bigger one, considering if a rectangular glass doesn’t distort proportions, deciding eventually that everybody’s looks smaller when viewed by its hypercritical owner and that, in absolute terms, his is bigger than it looks because he’s tall. Which he is.

One evening, standing together out below the knoll where his house sits, our shoes nuzzling the pea-gravel path that leads down to his boathouse, beyond which is a dense, pinkly-rose-infested estuarial pond protected from the Connecticut by a boundary of tupelo gums, Charley said to me, “Now, you know, Frank, Shakespeare must’ve been a pretty damn smart cookie.” In his big bony hand he was cradling one of his drop-dead vodka gimlets in a thick, hand-blown Mexican tumbler. (He hadn’t offered me one, since I wasn’t staying.) “I took a look at everything he wrote this year, okay? And I think history’s writers just haven’t moved the bar up much since six-teen-whatever. He saw human weakness better than anybody ever did, and sympathetically at that.” He blinked at me and rolled his tongue around behind his lips. “Isn’t that what makes a writer great? Sympathy for human weakness?”

“I don’t know. I never thought a thing about it,” I said bleakly but churlishly. I already knew Charley thought it was “odd” that a man who once wrote respectable short stories would “end up” selling real estate. He also had views about my living in Ann’s old house, though I never asked what they were (I’m sure they’re prejudicial).

“All right, but how do you see it?” Charley sniffed through his big Episcopalian nose, furrowing his silver eyebrows as if he were smelling a complex bouquet in the evening’s mist that was available only to him (and possibly his friends). He was clad in his usual sockless deck shoes, khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, but with a thick blue zippered sweater I’d seen thirty years ago in a J. Press catalogue and wondered who in the hell would buy. He is of course as fit as a greyhound and maintains some past master’s squash ranking for oldsters.

“I don’t really think literature has anything to do with moving the bar up,” I said distastefully (I was right). “It has to do with being good in an absolute sense, not better.” I now wish I could’ve punctuated this with a shout of hysterical laughter.

“Okay. That’s hopeful.” Charley pulled on his long earlobe and looked down, nodding as though he were visualizing the words I’d said. His thick white hair glowed with whatever light was left in the twilight. “That’s really a pretty hopeful view,” he said solemnly.

“I’m a hopeful man,” I said, and promptly felt as hopeless as an exile.

“Fair enough then,” he said. “Do you suppose in a hopeful way you and I are ever going to be friends?” He half raised his head and looked at me through his metal-rim glasses. “Friend” I knew to be, in Charley’s view, the loftiest of lofty human conditions men of character could aspire to, like Nirvana for Hindus. I never wanted to have friends less in my life.

“No,” I said bluntly.

“Why’s that, do you think?”

“Because all we have in common is my ex-wife. And eventually you’ll feel it’s okay to discuss her with me, and that would piss me off.”

Charley held onto his earlobe, his gimlet in his other hand. “Might be.” He nodded speculatively. “You’re always coming across something in someone you love that you can’t fathom, aren’t you? So then you have to ask somebody. I guess you’d be an obvious choice. Ann’s not that simple, as I’m sure you know.”

He was doing it already. “I don’t know,” I said. “No.”

“You maybe oughta have another go at it, like I did. Maybe you’d get it right this time.” Charley rounded his eyes at me and nodded again.

“Why don’t you have a go at a flying fuck at whatever’s in range,” I said moronically, and glared at him, feeling fairly willing to throw a punch irrespective of his age and excellent physical condition (hoping my children wouldn’t see it). I felt a chill rise then like a column of refrigerated air right off the pond, making my arm hairs prickle. It was late May. Little house lights had printed up across the silver plane of the Connecticut. I could hear a boat’s bell clanging. At that moment I felt not truly angry enough to cold-cock Charley, but sad, lonesome, lost, unhappy and useless alongside a man I wasn’t even interested in enough to hate the way a man with character would.

“You know,” Charley said, zipping his sweater up to his glunky Adam’s apple and tugging his sleeves as if he’d felt the chill himself. “There’s something about you I don’t trust, Frank. Maybe architects and realtors don’t have that much in common, though you’d think we would.” He eyed me just in case I might be about to produce guttural sounds and spring at his throat.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I wouldn’t trust me either if I were you.”

Charley gently tossed his glass, ice and all, off onto the lawn. He said, “Frank, you can play sharp and play flat but still be in tune, you know.” He seemed disappointed, almost perplexed. Then he just strolled off down the gravel path toward his boathouse. “You won’t win ’em all,” I heard him say to himself, theatrically from out of the dark. I let him walk all the way down, pull aside the sliding door, enter and close it behind him (I’m sure he had nothing to do there). After that I walked back around his house, got in my car and waited for my children, who were soon to be there with me and be happy.

Deep River, as I drive hurriedly through, is the epitome of dozing, summery, southern New England ambivalence. A little green-shuttered, swept-sidewalk burg where just-us-regular-folks live in stolid acceptance of watered-down Congregationalist and Roman Catholic moderation; whereas down by the river there’s the usual enclave of self-contented, pseudo-reclusive richies who’ve erected humongous houses on bracken and basswood chases bordering the water, their backs resolutely turned to how the other half lives. Endowed law profs from New Haven, moneyed shysters from Hartford and Springfield, moneyed pensioners from Gotham, all cruise sunnily in to shop at Greta’s Green Grocer, The Flower Basket, Edible Kingdom Meats and Liquid Time Liquors (less often to visit Body Artistry Tattoo, Adult Newz-and-Video or the Friendly Loaner pawn), then cruise sunnily back out, their Rovers heaped with good dog food, pancetta, mesquite, chard, fresh tulips and gin — all primed for evening cocktails, lamb shanks on the grill, an hour of happy schmoozing, then off to bed in the cool, fog-enticed river breeze. It is not such a great place to think of your children living (or your ex-wife).

Nothing extravagant seems planned here for Monday. Droopy bunting decorates a few lampposts. A high-school “Freedom Car Wash” is in semi-full swing out on the fire station driveway, a rake-and-hoe promotion in front of the True Value. Several businesses, in fact, have put up red-and-white maple-leaf flags beside Old Glory, signaling some ancient Canuck connection — a group of hapless white settlers no doubt mercifully if unaccountably spared by a company of Montcalm’s regulars back in ’57, leaving a residuum of “Canadian Currency OK” sentiment in all hearts. Even Donna’s Kut’n Kurl boasts a window sign reading “Time for a trim, eh?” But that’s it — as if Deep River were simply saying, “Given our long establishment (1635), the spirit of true and complex independence is observed and breathed here every day. Silently. So don’t expect much.”

I turn toward the river and head down woodsy Selden Neck Lane, which T’s into even woodsier, laurel-choked Brainard Settlement House Way, which curves, narrows and switches back onto American holly and hickory-thick Swallow Lane, the road where Ann’s, Charley’s and my two children’s mailbox resides unnoticeably on a thin cedar post, its dark-green letters indicating THE KNOLL. Beside it a rough gravel car path disappears into anonymous trees, so that an atmosphere of exclusive, possibly less than welcoming habitation greets whoever wanders past: people live here, but you don’t know them.

My brain, in the time it’s taken me to clear town and wind down into these sylvan purlieus of the rich, has begun to exhibit an unpleasant tightness behind my temples. My neck’s stiff, and there’s a feeling of tissue expansion in my upper thorax, as if I ought to burp, gag or possibly just split open for reliefs sake. I have, of course, slept little and badly. I drank too much at Sally’s last night; I’ve driven too far, devoted too much precious worry time to the Markhams, the McLeods, Ted Houlihan and Karl Bemish, and too little to thinking about my son.

Though of course the most sharp-stick truth is that I’m about to pay my former wife a visit in her subsequent and better life; am about to see my orphaned kids gamboling on the wide lawns of their tonier existence; I may even, in spite of all, have to make humiliating, grinding conversation with Charley O’Dell, whom I’d just as soon tie up on a beach and leave for the crabs. Who wouldn’t have a “swelling” in his brain and generalized thoracic edema? I’m surprised it isn’t a helluva lot worse.

A small plastic sign I haven’t noticed before has been attached to the bottom edge of the mailbox, a little burgundy-colored plaque with green lettering like the box itself, which says: HERE IS A BIRD SANCTUARY. RESPECT IT. PROTECT OUR FUTURE. Karl would be pleased to know vireos are still safe here in Connecticut.

Only directly below the box, on the duffy, weedy ground, lies a bird — a grackle or a big cowbird, its eyes glued shut with death, its stiff feathers swarmed by ants. I peer down on it from behind my window and puzzle: Birds die, we all know that. Birds have coronaries, brain tumors, anemia, suffer bad luck and life’s battering, then croak like the rest of us — even in a sanctuary, where nobody has it in for them and everybody dotes on everything they do.

But here? Under their very own sign? Here is odd. And I am, in my brain-tightened unease, suddenly, instantly certain my son’s to blame (call it a father’s instinct). Plus, animal torture is one of the bad childhood warning signs: meaning he’s begun the guerrilla war of spirit-attrition against his foster home, against Charley, against cool lawns, morning mists, matched goldens, sabots, clay courts and solar panels, against all that’s happened outside his control. (I don’t completely blame him.)

Not that I approve of dispatching blameless tweeties and leaving them by the mailbox as portents of bad things on the wing. I don’t approve. It scares me silly. But as little as I hope to be involved in domestic life here, I also believe an ounce of intervention might deter a pound of cure. So, putting my car in park, I shove open my door and climb out into the heat, my brain still expanding, stoop stiffly down, lift the little dull-feathered, ant-swarmed carcass by its wingtip, take a quick look behind me at Swallow Lane curving out of sight, then quick-flip it like a cow chip off into the bushes, where it falls soundlessly, saving my son (I hope) one peck of trouble in a life that may already stretch out long and full of troubles.

Out of ancient habit I quickly raise my fingers for a sniff-check in case I need to go someplace — back up to the Chevron on Route 9—to wash the death smell off. But just as I do, a small dark-blue car (I believe it is a Yugo) with silver lettering and a silver police-shield door decal inscribed with AGAZZIZ SECURITY pulls in to block me where I’m standing beside my car. (Where has this come from?)

A slender, blond man in a blue uniform gets quickly out, as though I might just take off running into the trees, but then remains behind his door looking at me with an odd, unhumorous smile — a smile any American would recognize as signifying wariness, arrogance, authority and a conviction that outsiders cause trouble. Possibly he thinks I’m filching mail — ten reggae CD offers, or some prime steaks from Idaho, special for high rollers only.

I lower my fingers — unhappily they do smell of feral death — my skull tightened back down into my neck sinews. “Hi,” I say, extra cheerful.

“Hi!” the young man says and nods in some unclear sort of agreement. “Whatcha up to?”

I beam probity at him. “I was just going into the O’Dells’ here. I’ve been driving a ways, so I decided to stretch my legs.”

“Great,” he says, beaming cold indifference back. He is razorish-looking and, although thin, undoubtedly schooled in lethal martial-arts wherewithal. I can’t see a firearm, but he’s wearing a miniature microphone that allows him to talk to someone in another location by speaking straight into his own shoulder. “You friends of the O’Dells, are ya?” he says cheerfully.

“Yep. Sure am.”

“I’m sorry, but what was it you threw over in the trees?”

“A bird. That was a bird. A dead one.”

“Okay,” the officer says, peering over in that direction as if he could see a dead bird, which he can’t. “Where’d it come from?”

“It got caught behind the outside mirror of my car. I didn’t notice it till I opened the door. It was a grackle.”

“I see. What was it?” (Perhaps he thinks my story will change under interrogation.)

“Grackle,” I say, as if the word itself might induce a humorous response, but I’m wrong.

“You know, this is a wildlife sanctuary back here. There isn’t any hunting.”

“I didn’t hunt for it. I was just disposing of it before I drove in with it on my car mirror. I thought that’d be better. It’ll be okay over there.” I look where I’m referring.

“Where you driving from?” His young weak eyes twitch toward my blue-and-cream Jersey plates, then quickly back up at me so that if I claim I’ve just driven in from Oracle, Arizona, or International Falls, he’ll know to call for backup.

“I’m from down in Haddam, New Jersey.” I adopt a voice that says I’d be glad to help you in any way I can and would write a letter of commendation to your superiors complimenting you on your demeanor the moment I’m back at my desk.

“And what’s your name, sir?”

“Bascombe.” And I haven’t done a goddamn thing, I say silently, but toss one dead bird in the bushes to save everybody trouble (though of course I’ve lied about it). “Frank Bascombe.” Cool air surrounds me from my open car door.

“Okay, Mr. Bascombe. If I could just look at your driver’s license, I’ll get out of your way here.” The young rent-a-cop seems pleased, as if these words are the standard words and he positively loves saying them.

“Sure thing,” I say, and in a flash have my wallet out and license forked from its little slot below my realtor certification, my Red Man Club membership, my Maize and Blue Club alumni card.

“If you’d bring it over here and put it on the hood of my car,” he says, giving his shoulder mike an adjustment, “I’ll have a look at it while you stand back, then I’ll put it back and you can pick it up. Is that all right?”

“It’s just great. It seems a little elaborate. I could just hand it to you.”

I start in the direction of his Yugo, which has a springy little two-way antenna stuck onto its dumpy top. But he nervously says, “Don’t approach me, Mr. Bascombe. If you don’t want to show your license”—he’s eyeing his shoulder mike again—“I can get a Connecticut state trooper out here, and you can explain your case to him.” The blond boy’s amiable veneer has, in a heartbeat, disappeared to reveal sinister, police-protocol hardass, bent on construing obvious innocence as obvious guilt. I’m sure his real self is right now trying to figure out how Bascombe is spelled, since it’s obviously a Jewish name, remembering that New Jersey’s chock-full of Jews and spicks and darkies and towelheads and commies, all needing to be rounded up and reminded of a few things. I see his hands drifting somewhere below window level and around toward his backside, where he probably has his heat. (I have not provoked this. I merely am handing over my license.)

“I don’t really have a case,” I say, renewing my smile and stepping over to his Yugo and laying my license above the headlight. “I’m happy just to play by the rules.” I take a few steps back.

The young man waits till I’m ten steps away, then comes round his door and snakes up my license. I can see his idiotic gold name-plate above his blue shirt pocket. Erik. Besides his shirt and blue trousers, he’s wearing thick crepe-soled auxiliary-police footwear and a dopey little red ascot. I can also see that he’s older than he looks, which is twenty-two. Probably he’s thirty-five, has multiple applications in with all the local PDs and been turned down due to “irregularities” in his Rorschachs, even though from a distance he looks like the boy any parent would love and spare no expense in sending off to Dartmouth.

Erik steps around behind his open car door and gives my license thorough study, which includes looking up at me for a mug-shot match. I see now he has an almost colorless Hitler Youth mustache on his pale lip, and something tattooed on the back of his hand — a skull, maybe, or a snake coiled around a skull (no doubt a Body Artistry creation). He is also, I can just make out, wearing a tiny gold earring bead in his right lobe. An amusing little combo for Deep River.

He turns my license over, apparently to see if I’m an organ donor (I’m not), then he walks it back around, lays it on the Yugo’s hood and returns to his protective door. I still can’t tell if he’s packin’.

“There you go,” he says, with a remnant of his former warmth. I don’t know what he’s learned, since it wouldn’t say on my license if I was a serial killer. “We just have a lot of strangers drive in here, Mr. Bascombe. People who live in here really don’t like being harassed. Which is why we have a job, I guess.” He grins amiably. We’re friends now.

“I hate it myself,” I say, coming over and snugging my license back in my billfold. I wonder if Erik got a whiff of the dead-bird stink.

“You’d probably be surprised the number of wackos come off that I-Ninety-five and end up back in here, roaming around.”

“I believe it,” I say. “A hundred percent.” And then for some reason I am enervated, as if I’d been to jail for days and had just this very moment stepped out into harsh daylight.

“Particularly on your holidays,” says Erik the sociologist. “And especially this holiday. This one brings out the psychos from all over. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.” He shakes his head. Those are the states where most lunatics live if you’re him. “You old friends with Mr. O’Dell?” He smiles, protected by his door. “I like him a lot.”

“No,” I say, stepping back to my car, which has cold air still pouring out, making me feel even more enervated.

“You’re just business acquaintances, I guess,” he says. “You an architect?”

“No,” I say. “My ex-wife’s married to Mr. O’Dell, and I’m picking up my son to take him on a trip. Does that seem like a good idea?” I can easily imagine wanting to harm Erik.

“Wow, that sounds pretty serious.” He leers from behind his open blue door. He’s, of course, got me figured now: I’m a defeated, pathetic figure engaged in a demeaning and hopeless mission — not nearly as interesting as a wacko. Though even my kind can cause trouble, can have a trunkful of phosphorous grenades and plastique and be bent on neighborhood mayhem.

“It’s not that serious,” I say, pausing, looking at him. “It’s something I enjoy.”

“Is Paul your son?” Erik says. He brings his forefinger up to his earring, a small gesture of dominion.

“Yep. You know Paul?”

“Oh yeah,” Erik says, smirking. “We’re all acquainted with Paul.”

“All who? What does that mean?” I feel my brows thicken.

“We’ve all had contact with Paul.” Erik starts lowering himself back into his stupid Yugo.

“I’m sure he hasn’t caused you any trouble,” I say, thinking that he probably has, and will again. Erik is the kind of monkey Paul would consider a barrel of laughs.

Erik is speaking from the driver’s seat now; I can’t make his words out. No doubt he’s saying something smart-assed he doesn’t intend me to hear. Or else he’s radioing messages via his shoulder. He drops the Yugo in reverse, scoots back out the drive and wheels around.

I consider saying something vicious, running over and screaming in his window. But I can’t afford to get arrested in my ex-wife’s driveway. So I only wave, and he waves back. I think he says, “Have a good day,” in his policey, insincere way, before heading slowly up Swallow Lane out of my sight.

My daughter, Clarissa, is the first living soul I spy as I drive tired-eyed into compound O’Dell. She is far below the big house, on the ample lawn slope above the pond, committedly whacking a yellow tetherball all by her lonesome, oblivious as a sparrow to me here in my car, surveilling her from afar.

I pull up to the back of the house (the front faces the lawn, the air, the water, the sunrise and, for what I know, the path to all knowledge) and climb wearily out into the hot, chirpy morning, reconciled to finding Paul by myself.

Charley’s house is, of course, a glorious erection, chalky-blue-shingled and white-trimmed, with a complex gabled roof, tall paneless windows and a big sashaying porch around three sides that gives onto the lawn down some white steps to the very spot where Charley and I discussed Shakespeare and came to the conclusion we neither one trusted the other.

I wedge in sideways through the row of purple-blooming hydrangeas (contrast my poor dried-up remnants on Clio Street), stagger only slightly, but walk on out onto the hot shadowless grass, feeling light-legged and dazed, my eyelids flickering, my eyes darting side to side to see who might see me first (such entrances are never dignified). I have, to my eternal infamy, forgotten to buy a gift this morning, a love and peace offering to appease Clarissa for not taking her along with her brother. What I’d give for a colorful Vince Lombardi sweatband or a Four Blocks of Granite book of inspirational halftime quotes. It would be our joke. I am lost here.

Clarissa ceases larking with the tetherball when she sees me and stands eyes-shaded, averting her face and waving, though she can’t tell it’s me she sees — possibly hopes it is and not a plainclothes policeman come to ask questions about her brother.

I wave back, realizing for some reason known only to God that I have begun to limp, as though a war had intervened since I last saw my loved ones and I had returned a changed and beaten veteran. Though Clarissa will not notice. Even as rarely as she sees me — once a month nowadays — I am a timeless fixture, and nothing would seem unusual; an eye patch, a prosthetic arm, all-new teeth: none would rate a mention.

“Hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee,” she sings out when it’s clearly me she’s waving welcome to. She wears strong contacts and can’t see distances well, but doesn’t care. She darts and springs barefoot toward me across the dry grass, ready to deliver a big power hug around my aching neck — which every time hurts like a hammerlock and makes me groan.

“I came as soon as I heard the news,” I say. (In our makeshift, make-believe life I always arrive just in time to face some dire emergency — Clarissa and I being the responsible adults, Paul and their mother the temperamental kids in need of rescue.) I am still limping, though my heart’s going strong with simple pleasure, all tightness in my brain miraculously dispatched.

“Paul’s in the house with Mom, getting ready and probably having an argument.”

Clarissa, in brilliant red shorts over her blue Speedo suit, jumps up and gives me her hammer hug, and I swing her like a tetherball before letting her sink weak-kneed into the grass. She has a wonderful smell — dampness and girlish perfume applied hours before, now faded. Beyond us is the boathouse crime scene, the pond again dense with pink fleabane and wild callas and, farther on, the row of dense motionless tupelos and the invisible river, above which a squad of pelicans executes a slow and graceful upward soar.

“Where’s the man of the house?” I let myself down heavily beside her, my back against the tetherball pole. Clarissa’s legs are thin and tanned and golden-sheeny-haired, her bare feet milky and without a blemish. She arranges herself belly-down, chin-propped, her eyes clear behind her contacts and fastened on me, her face a prettier version of my own: small nose, blue eyes, cheekbones more obvious than her mother’s, whose broad, Dutch forehead and coarse hair match Paul’s looks almost completely.

“He’s work-ing now in his studi-o-o.” She looks at me knowingly and without much irony. It’s life to her, all of this — few tragedies, few great singing victories, everything pretty much good or okay. We are well paired in our family unit.

Charley’s studio is half visible beyond a row of deep-green hardwoods that boundaries the lawn and stops at the pond’s edge. I see a glint off its tin roof, its row of cypress stilts holding up a catwalk (a project Charley and his roommate doped out as a joke freshman year, back in ’44, but that Charley “always wanted to build”).

“So how’s the weather?” I say, relieved to know where he is.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Clarissa says noncommittally. A skim of sweat is on her temples from belting the tetherball. My back’s already sweaty through my shirt.

“And how’s your brother?”

“Weird. But okay.” Maintaining her belly-down, she rotates her head around on its slender stem, some routine from dance class or gymnastics, though an unmistakable signal: she is Paul’s buen amiga; the two of them are closer than the two of us; this all could’ve been different with better parents, but isn’t; do not fail to notice it.

“Is your mom okay too?”

Clarissa stops rotating her head and wrinkles her nose as though I’d announced an unsavory subject, then rolls over on her back and stares skyward. “She’s much worse,” she says, and looks unconvincingly worried.

“Worse than what?”

“Than you!” She rounds her eyes upward in mock surprise. “She and Charley had a howler this week. And they had one last week too. And one the week before.” “Howlers” mean big disputes, not embarrassing verbal miscues. “Hmmmm, hmm, hmm,” she says, meaning most of what she knows is being retained silently. I of course can’t quiz her on this subject — a cardinal rule once divorce has become the governing institution — though I wish I knew more.

I pluck up a blade of grass, press it between my two thumbs like a woodwind reed and blow, making a sputtery, squawky but still fairly successful soprano sax note, a skill from eons back.

“Can you play ‘Gypsy Road’ or ‘Born in the U.S.A.’?” She sits up.

“That’s my whole repertoire on grass,” I say, putting my two hands down on both her kneecaps, which are cold and bony and soft all at once. Conceivably she can smell dead grackle. “Your ole Dad loves you,” I say. “I’m sorry I have to kidnap Paul and not all two of you. I’d rather travel as a trio.”

“He’s much needier now,” Clarissa says, and drags a blade of grass all her own across the backs of both my hands where they rest on her perfect kneecaps. “I’m way ahead of him emotionally. I’ll have my period pretty soon.” She looks up at me profoundly, fattens the corners of her mouth and slowly lets her eyes cross and keeps them that way.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I say, my heart going ker-whonk, my eyes suddenly hot and unhappily moist — not with unhappy tears, but with unhappy sweat that has busted out on my forehead. “And how old are you?” I say, ker-whonk. “Thirty-seven or thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-twelve,” she says, and lightly pokes my knuckles with the grass blade.

“Okay, that’s old enough. You don’t need to be any older. You’re perfect.”

“Charley knows Bush,” she says with a sour face. “Did you hear that?” Her blue eyes elevate gravely to mine. This is bottom-line business to her. All that Charley might conceivably have been forgiven is reassigned to him with this choice bit of news. My daughter, like her old man, is a Democrat of the New Deal bent and considers most Republicans and particularly V.P. Bush barely mentionable dickheads.

“I guess I knew that without knowing it.” I scour my two fingers on the turf to clean off the death smell.

“He’s for the party of money, tradition and influence,” she says, way too big for her britches, since Charley’s tradition and influence are paying her bills, keeping her in tetherballs, tutus and violin lessons. She is for the party of no tradition, no influence, no nothing, also like her father.

“He has his rights,” I say, and add a lackluster “I mean that.” I can’t help conjuring what Charley’s cheek looks like where Paul has whopped him.

Clarissa stares at her blade of grass, wondering, I’m sure, why she has to accord Charley any rights. “Sweetheart,” I say solemnly, “is there anything you can tell me about ole Paul? I don’t want you to tell me a deep dark secret, just maybe a shallow light one. It would be as-you-know-held-in-strictest-confidence.” I say this last to make it halfway a joke and let her feel comradely about providing me some lowdown.

She stares at the thick grass carpet in silence, then angles her head over and squints up at the house with the flowering bushes and the white porch and stairs. Atop the highmost roof pinnacle, in the midst of all the springing angles and gable ends, is an American flag (a small one) on a staff, rustling in an unfelt breeze.

“Are you sad?” she says. In her sun-blond hair I see a tiny red ribbon tied in a bow, something I hadn’t noticed but instantly revere her for, since along with her question it makes her seem a person of complex privacies.

“No, I’m not sad, except that you can’t go with Paul and me to Cooperstown. And I forgot to bring you anything. That’s pretty sad.”

“Do you have a car phone?” She raises her eyes accusingly.

“No.”

“Do you have a beeper?”

“No, afraid not.” I smile at her knowingly.

“How do you keep up with your calls then?” She squints again, making her look a hundred.

“I guess I don’t get that many calls. Sometimes there’s a message from you on my answering box, though not that often.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t answer me about Paul, sweetheart. All I really want to do is be a good pappy if I can.”

“His problems are all stress-related,” she says officially. She plucks up another blade of quite green and dry grass and slips it into the cuff of my chinos where I’m cross-legged beside her.

“What stress is he suffering from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that your best diagnosis?”

“Yes.”

“How ’bout you? Do you have any stress-related problems?”

“No.” She shakes her head, makes a pruny pucker with her lips. “Mine’ll come out later, if I have any.”

“Who told you so?”

“TV.” She looks at me earnestly as though to say that TV has its good points too.

Somewhere high in the firmament I hear a hawk cry out, or possibly an osprey, though when I look up I can’t see it.

“What can I do about Paul’s stress-related problems?” I say, and, God be gracious, I wish she’d pipe up with a nice answer. I’d put it in place before the sun sets. Somewhere, then, another noise — not a hawk but a thumping, a door slamming or a window being shut, a drawer being closed. When I look up, Ann is standing at the porch rail, watching down on us across the lawn. I sense she’s just arrived but would like my chat with Clarissa to come to a close and for me to get on with my business. I make a friendly ex-husband-who-wishes-no-trouble wave, a gesture that makes me feel not so good. “I believe that’s your mom,” I say.

Clarissa looks up at the porch. “Yeah hi,” she says.

“We better dust off our britches here.” She will, I see, out of ancient, honorable loyalty, offer no help with her brother. She fears, I suppose, divulging compromising secrets while claiming only to love him. Children are wise to adult ways now, thanks to us.

“Paul might be happier if you could maybe live in Deep River. Or maybe Old Saybrook,” she says as if these words require immense discipline, nodding her head slightly with each one. (Parents can break up, fall out of love, get searingly divorced, marry others, move miles away; but as far as kids are concerned, most of it’s tolerable if one parent will just tag along behind the other like a slave.)

There was, of course, in the savage period after Ann moved away in ’84, a dolorous time when I haunted these very hills and stream-sides like a shamus; cruised its middle-school parking lots, its street corners and back alleys, cased its arcades and skating rinks, its Finasts and Burger Kings, merely to be in visual contact with where my children might spend the days and afternoons they could’ve been spending with me. I even went so far as to price a condo in Essex, a sterile little listening post from which I could keep “in touch,” keep love alive.

Only it would’ve made me even more morose, as morose as a hundred lost hounds, to wake up alone in a condo! In Essex! Awaiting my appointed pickup hour with the kids, expecting to take them back where? To my condo? And afterward, glowering back down 95 for a befuddled workweek till Friday, when the lunacy commenced again? There are parents who don’t blink an eye at that kind of bashing around, who’d ruin their own lives and everybody’s within ten miles if they can prove — long after all the horses are out of the barn — that they’ve always been good and faithful providers.

But I simply am not one of these; and I have been willing to see my kids less often, for the three of us to shuttlecock up and back, so that I can keep alive in Haddam a life they can fit into, even if pre-cariously, when they will, and meanwhile maintain my sanity, instead of forcing myself into places where I don’t belong and making everybody hate me. It’s not the best solution, since I miss them achingly. But it’s better to be a less than perfect dad than a perfect goofball.

And in any case, with the condo option, they would still grow up and leave in a heartbeat; Ann and Charley would get divorced. And I’d be stuck (worst case) with a devalued condo I couldn’t give away. Eventually, I’d sell Cleveland Street as a downsizing measure, perhaps move up here to keep my mortgage company, and grimly pass my last years alone in Essex watching TV in a pair of old corduroys, a cardigan and Hush Puppies, while helping out evenings in some small bookshop, where I’d occasionally see Charley dodder in, place an order and never recognize me.

Such things happen! We realtors are often the very ones called in for damage control. Though thankfully my frenzy subsided and I stayed put where I was and more or less knew my place. Haddam, New Jersey.

“Sweetheart,” I say tenderly to my daughter, “if I lived up here, your mother wouldn’t like it at all, and you and Paul wouldn’t come stay in your own rooms and see your old friends-in-need. Sometimes you can change things and just make them worse.”

“I know,” she says bluntly. I’m sure Ann hasn’t discussed with her Paul’s coming to live with me, and I have no idea what her opinion will be. Perhaps she’ll welcome it, loyalty aside. I might, if I were her.

She reaches fingers into her yellow hair, her mouth going into a scowl of application. She pulls the little red bow out along the fine blond strands until she frees it still tied, and hands it to me rather matter-of-factly. “Here’s my latest present,” she says. “You can be my bow.”

“That’s another kind of bow,” I say, taking the little frill in my hand and squeezing it. “They’re spelled different.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s okay, though, this time.”

“Thanks.” Once again, sadly, I have nothing to trade as an act of devotion.

And then she is up and on her bare feet, spanking the seat of her red shorts and shaking out her hair, looking down like a small lioness with a tangled mane. I am less quick but am up too, using the tetherball pole. I look toward the house, where no one’s standing on the porch now. A smile is for some reason on my lips, my hand on my daughter’s bony bare shoulder, her red bow, my badge of courage, clutched in my other hand, as we start — the two of us — together up the wide hill.

Did you ever take trips in Mississippi with your father?” Ann asks without genuine interest. We are seated opposite each other on the big porch. The Connecticut River, visible now above the serrated treetops, is a-glitter with dainty sailboats sporting rust-colored sails, their masts steadfast as the wind transports them up the current toward Hartford. All boats of a certain class rising on a rising tide.

“Sure, you bet. Sometimes we went over to Florida. Once we went to Norfolk and visited the Great Dismal Swamp on the way back.” She used to know this but has now forgotten.

“Was it dismal?”

“Absolutely.” I smile at her in a collegial way, since that is what we are.

“And so did you two always get along great?” She looks away across the lawn below us.

“We got along pretty great. My mother wasn’t around to complicate things, so we were on our best behavior. Three was more complicated.”

“Women just enjoy disrupting men’s lives,” she says.

We are fixed firmly in two oversize green wicker chairs furnished with oversize flowery cushions of some lush and complex lily-pad pattern. Ann has brought out an ole-timey amber-glass pitcher of iced tea, which Clarissa has fixed and drawn a fat happy face on. The tea and glasses and little pewter ice bucket are situated on a low table at knee level, as we, the two of us, wait for Paul, who was up late and slow now to rustle his bones. (I notice no warm-hearted carryover from our sentimental sign-off at the Vince last night.)

Ann runs a comb-of-fingers back through her thick, athletically shortened hair, which she’s highlighted so sudden blond strands shine from within and look pretty. She’s wearing white golfing shorts and an expensive-looking sleeveless top of some earthy taupe color that fits loose and shows her breasts off semi-mysteriously, and tan, sockless tassel shoes that cause her tanned legs to look even longer and stauncher, stirring in me a low-boil sexual whir that makes me gladder to be alive than I ever expected to feel today. I’ve noticed in the last year a subtle widening of Ann’s wonderful derriere and a faint thickening and loosening of the flesh above her knees and upper arms. To my view, a certain tense girlishness, always present (and which I never really liked), has begun subsiding and been replaced by a softer, womanly but in every way more substantial and appealing adultness I admire immensely. (I might mention this if I had time to make clear I liked it; though I see she is wearing Charley’s pretentiously plain gold band today, and the whole idea seems ridiculous.)

She has not asked me to come inside to wait, though I’d already decided to stay clear of the glassed-in, malaise-filled “family room,” which I can just see into through the long mirror-tinted windows beside me. Charley has of course installed a big antique telescope there, complete with all the necessary brass knobs and fittings, engraved logarithmic calibrations and moon phases, and with which I’m sure he can bring in the Tower of London if he takes a notion. I can also make out the ghostly-white beast of a grand piano and beside it a beaux arts music stand, where Ann and Clarissa almost certainly play Mendelssohn duets for Charley’s delectation on many a cold winter’s eve. It is a tiresome recognition.

Truth is, the one time I ever waited inside (picking up the kids for a day trip to the fish elevator at South Hadley), I ended up waiting alone for nearly an hour, leafing through the coffee-table library (Classic Holes of Golf, Erotic Cemetery Art, Sailing), eventually working my way down to a hot-pink flyer from a women’s clinic in New London, offering an enhance-your-sexual-performance workshop, which made me instantly panicky. Prudenter now just to stay on the porch and risk feeling like a grinning high-school kid forced to make deadpan parental chitchat while I await my date.

Ann has already explained to me how yesterday was much worse than I knew, worse than she explained last night when she said I thought “be” and “seem” were the same concept (which may have been true once but isn’t now). Not only, it seems, did Paul wound poor Charley with an oarlock from his own damned dinghy, but he also informed his mother in the very living room I won’t enter and in front of damaged-goods Charley himself that she “needed” to get rid of “asshole Chuck.” After that, he marched out, got in his mother’s Mercedes wagon and hit off on a brief tear, barrel-assing unlicensed out the driveway at a high speed, missing the very first curve on Swallow Lane and sideswiping a two-hundred-year-old mountain ash on the neighbor’s property (a lawyer, of course). In the process he banged his head into the steering wheel, popped the air bag and cut his ear, so that he had to take a stitch at the Old Saybrook walk-in clinic. Erik, the man from Agazziz, arrived moments after the crash — similar to how he apprehended me — and escorted him home. No police were called. Later he disappeared again, on foot, and came home long past dark (Ann heard him bark once in his room).

She of course called Dr. Stopler, who calmly informed her that medical science knew mighty damn little about how the old mind works in relation to the old brain — whether they’re one and the same pancake, two parts of one pancake, or just altogether different pancakes that somehow work in unison (like an automobile clutch). However, distressed family relations were pretty clear bugaboo factors leading to childhood mental illness, and from what he already knew, Paul did have some qualifying preconditions: dead brother, divorced parents, absent father, two major household moves before puberty (plus Charley O’Dell for a stepdad).

He did allow, though, that when he’d conducted his evaluative “chat” with Paul back in May, prior to his Camp Wanapi visit, Paul had failed entirely to exhibit low self-esteem, suicide ideation, neurological dysfunction; he was not particularly “oppositional” (then), hadn’t suffered an IQ nosedive and didn’t display any conduct disorders — which meant he didn’t set a fire or murder any birds. In fact, the doctor said, he’d demonstrated a “real capacity for compassion and a canny ability to put himself in another’s shoes.” Though circumstances could always change overnight; and Paul could easily be suffering any and every one of the aforementioned maladies at this very minute, and might’ve abandoned all compassion.

“I’m really just pissed off at him now,” Ann says. She is standing, looking out over the porch rail where I first saw her today, staring across the apron of shining river toward the few small white house façades catching the sun from deep in the encroachment of solid greens. Once again I steal an approving look at her new substantial-without-sacrificing-sexual-specificity womanliness. Her lips, I notice, seem fuller now, as if she might’ve had them “enhanced.” (Such surgeries can sweep through the more well-to-do communities like new kitchen appliances.) She rubs the back of one muscular calf with the top of her other shoe and sighs. “You may not know how exactly lucky you’ve had it,” she says, after a period of silent staring.

I mean to say nothing. A careful review of how lucky I am could too easily involve more airing of my “be/seem” misdeeds and tie into the possibility that I’m a coward or a liar or worse. I scratch my nose and can still smell grackle on my fingers.

She looks around at where I sit still not very comfortably silent on my lily pad.

“Would you agree to seeing Dr. Stopler?”

“As a patient?” I blink.

“As a co-parent,” she says. “And as a patient.”

“I’m really not based in New Haven,” I say. “And I never much liked shrinks. They just try to make you act like everybody else.”

“You don’t have that to worry about.” She regards me in an impatient older-sister way. “I just thought if you and I, or maybe you and I and Paul, went down, we might iron some things out. That’s all.”

“We can invite Charley, if you want to. He’s probably got some ironing out that needs doing. He’s a co-parent too, right?”

“He’ll go. If I ask him.”

I look around at the mirror window behind which sits the spectral white piano and a lot of ultra-modern, rectilinear blond-wood furniture arranged meticulously between long, sherbet-colored walls so as to maximize the experience of an interesting inner space while remaining unimaginably comfy. Reflected, I see the azure sky, part of the lawn, an inch of the boathouse roof and a line of far treetops. It is a vacant vista, the acme of opulent American dreariness Ann has for some reason married into. I feel like getting up and walking out onto the lawn — waiting for my son in the grass. I don’t care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.

Behind the glass, though, and unexpectedly, the insubstantial figure of my daughter becomes visible crossing left to right, intending where, I don’t know. As she passes she gazes out at us — her parents, bickering — and, blithely assuming I can’t see her, flips one or both of us the bird in a spiraling, heightening, conjuring motion like an ornate salaam, then disappears through a door to another segment of the house.

“I’ll think about Dr. Stopler,” I say. “I’m still not sure what a milieu therapist is, though.”

The corners of Ann’s mouth thicken with disapproval — of me. “Maybe you could think of your children as a form of self-discovery. Maybe you’d see your interest in it then and do something a little more wholeheartedly yourself.” Ann’s view is that I’m a half-hearted parent; my view is that I do the best I know how.

“Maybe,” I say, though the thought of dread-filled weekly drives to dread-filled New Haven for expensive fifty-five dread-filled minutes of mea culpa! mea culpa! gushered into the weary, dread-resistant map of some Austrian headshrinker is enough to set anybody’s escape mechanisms working overtime.

The fact is, of course, Ann maintains a very unclear picture of me and my current life’s outlines. She has never appreciated the realty business or why I enjoy it — doesn’t think it actually involves doing anything. She knows nothing of my private life beyond what the kids snitch about in offhand ways, doesn’t know what trips I take, what books I read. I’ve over time become fuzzier and fuzzier, which given her old Michigan factualism makes her inclined to disapprove of almost anything I might do except possibly joining the Red Cross and dedicating my life to feeding starving people on faraway shores (not a bad second choice, but even that might not save me from pathos). In all important ways I’m no better in her mind than I was when our divorce was made final — whereas, of course, she has made great strides.

Only I don’t actually mind it, since not having a clear picture makes her long for one and in so doing indirectly long for me (or that’s my position). Absence, in this scheme, both creates and fills a much-needed void.

But it’s not all positive: when you’re divorced you’re always wondering (I am anyway, sometimes to the point of granite preoccupation) what your ex-spouse is thinking about you, how she’s viewing your decisions (assuming she thinks you make any), whether she’s envious or approving or condescending or sneeringly reproachful, or just indifferent. Your life, because of this, can become goddamned awful and decline into being a “function” of your view of her view — like watching the salesman in the clothing store mirror to see if he’s admiring you in the loud plaid suit you haven’t quite decided to buy, but will if he seems to approve. Therefore, what I’d prefer Ann’s view to be is: of a man who’s made a spirited recovery from a lost and unhappy union, and gone on to discover wholesome choices and pretty solutions to life’s thorny dilemmas. Failing that, I’d be happy to keep her in the dark.

Though in the end the real trick to divorce remains, given this refractory increase in perspectives, not viewing yourself ironically and losing heart. You have, on the one hand, such an obsessively detailed and minute view of yourself from your prior existence, and on the other hand, an equally specific view of yourself later on, that it becomes almost impossible not to see yourself as a puny human oxymoron, and damn near impossible sometimes to recognize who your self is at all. Only you must. Writers in fact survive this condition better than almost anyone, since they understand that almost everything — e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g — is not really made up of “views” but words, which, should you not like them, you can change. (This actually isn’t very different from what Ann told me last night on the phone in the Vince Lombardi.)

Ann has assumed a seat on the porch railing, one strong, winsome brown knee up, the other swinging. She is half facing me and half observing the red-sailed regatta, most of whose hulls have moved behind the treeline. “I’m sorry,” she says moodily. “Tell me where you two’re going, again? You told me last night. I forgot.”

“We’re heading up to Springfield this morning.” I say this cheerfully, happy to change the subject away from me. “We’re having a ‘sports lunch’ at the Basketball Hall of Fame. Then we’re driving over to Cooperstown by tonight.” No use mentioning a possible late crew addition of Sally Caldwell. “We’re touring the Baseball Hall of Fame tomorrow morning, and I’ll have him in the city at the stroke of six.” I smile a reliable, You’re in good hands with Allstate smile.

“He’s not really a big baseball fan, is he?” She says this almost plaintively.

“He knows more than you think he knows. Plus, going’s the ur-father-son experience.” I erase my smile to let her know I’m only half bluffing.

“So have you thought up some important fatherly things to say to solve his problems?” She squints at me and tugs at her earlobe exactly the way Charley does.

I, however, intend not to give away what I’ll say to Paul on our trip, since it’s too easy to break one’s fragile skein of worthwhile purpose by jousting with casual third-party skepticism. Ann is not in a good frame of mind to validate fragile worthwhile purposes, especially mine.

“My view is sort of a facilitator’s view,” I say, hopefully. “I just think he’s got some problems figuring out a good conception of himself”—to put it mildly—“and I want to offer a better one so he doesn’t get too attached to the one he’s hanging onto now, which doesn’t seem too successful. A defective attitude can get to be your friend if you don’t look out. It’s sort of a problem in risk management. He has to risk trying to improve by giving up what’s maybe comfortable but not working. It’s not easy.” I would smile again, but my mouth has gone dry as cardboard saying this much and trying to seem what I am — sincere. I drink down a gulp of ice tea, which is sweet the way a child would like it and has lemon and mint and cinnamon and God knows what else in it, and tastes terrible. Clarissa’s finger-drawn happy face has droozled down and become a scowling jack-o’-lantern in the heat.

“Do you think you’re a good person to instruct him about risk management?” Ann suddenly looks toward the river as if she’d heard an unfamiliar sound out in the summer atmosphere. A fishy breeze has in fact risen offshore and moved upriver, carrying all manner of sounds and smells she might not expect.

“I’m not that bad at it,” I say.

“No.” She is still looking off. “Not at risk management. I guess not.”

I hear a noise myself, unfamiliar and nearby, and stand up to the porch rail and peer over the lawn, hoping I’ll see Paul coming up the hill. But to the left, at the edge of the hardwoods, I can see, instead, all of Charley’s studio. As advertised, it is a proper old New England seaman’s chapel raised ten cockamamie feet above the pond surface on cypress pilings and connected to land by a catwalk. The church paint has been blasted off, leaving the lapped boards exposed. Windows are big, tall, clear lancets. The tin roof simmers in the sun of nearly noon.

And then Charley himself makes an appearance on the little back deck (happily in miniature), fresh from this morning’s sore-jawed brainstorms, cooking up super plans for some rich neurosurgeon’s ski palace in Big Sky, or a snorkeling hideaway in Cabo Cartouche — Berlioz still booming in his oversized ears. Bare-chested, tanned and silver-topped, in his usual khaki shorts, he is transporting from inside what looks like a plate of something, which he places on a low table beside a single wooden chair. I wish I could crank his big telescope down and survey the oarlock damage. That would interest me. (It’s never easy to see why your ex-wife marries the man she marries if it isn’t you again.)

I would like, however, to talk about Paul now: about the possibility of his coming down to Haddam to live, so as to stop limiting my fathering to weekends and holidays. I haven’t entirely thought through all the changes to my own private dockets that his arrival will necessitate, the new noises and new smells in my air, new concerns for time, privacy, modesty; possibly a new appreciation for my own moment and freedoms; my role: a man retuned to the traditional, riding herd on a son full time, duties dads are made for and that I have missed but crave. (I could also bear to hear about the howlers Ann and Charley have been conducting, though that isn’t my business and could easily turn out to be nothing: mischief Clarissa and Paul dreamed up to confuse everyone’s agenda.)

But I’m thwarted by what to say, and frankly inhibited by Ann. (Perhaps this is another goal of divorce — to reinstitute the inhibitions you dispensed with when things were peachy.) It’s tempting just to push off toward less controversial topics, like I did last night: my headaches with the Markhams and McLeods, rising interest rates, the election, Mr. Tanks — my most unforgettable character — with his truck, his gold-collared kitty and his Reader’s Digest condenseds, a personal docket that makes my own Existence Period look like ten years of sunshine.

But Ann suddenly says, apropos of nothing but also, of course, of everything, “It’s not really easy being an ex-spouse, is it? There isn’t much use for us in the grand plan. We don’t help anything go forward. We just float around unattached, even if we’re not unattached.” She rubs her nose with the back of her hand and snuffs. It’s as if she’s seen us outside our real bodies, like ghosts above the river, and is wishing we’d go away.

“There’s always one thing we can do.” She makes a point of rarely using my name unless she’s angry, so that most of the time I just seem to overhear her and offer a surprise reply.

“And what’s that?” She looks at me disapprovingly, her dark brows clouded, her leg twitching in a barely detectable, spasmic way.

“Get married to each other again,” I say, “just to state the obvious.” (Though not necessarily the inevitable.) “Last year I sold houses to three couples”—two, actually—“each of whom was at one time married, and who got divorced and married, then divorced, then married their original true love again. If you can say it you can do it, I guess.”

“We can put that on your tombstone,” Ann says with patent distaste. “It’s the story of your life. You don’t know what you’re going to say next, so you don’t know what’s a good idea. But if it wasn’t a good idea to be married to you seven years ago, why would it be a better idea now? You’re not any better.” (This is unproved.) “It’s conceivable you’re worse.”

“You’re happily married anyway,” I say, pleased with myself, though wondering who the “special someone” will be who’ll make decisions about my tombstone. Best if it could be me.

Ann scrutinizes Charley treading long-strided, barefooted, bare-chested back inside his studio, no doubt to see if his miso is ready and to dig the soy sauce and shallots out of the Swedish mini-fridge. Charley, I notice, walks in a decidedly head-forward, hump-shouldered, craning way that makes him look surprisingly old — he’s only sixty-one — but which makes me experience a sudden, unexpected and absolutely unwanted and impolitic sympathy for him. A good head shot with an oarlock is more telling on a man his age.

“You like thinking I ought to be sorry I married Charley. But I’m not sorry. Not at all,” Ann says, her tan shoe giving another nervous little twitch. “He’s a much better person than you are”—grossly unproved—“not that you have any reason to believe that, since you don’t know him. He even has a good opinion of you. He tries to be a pal to these children. He thinks we’ve done a better than average job with them.” (No mention of his daughter the novelist.) “He’s nice to me. He tells the truth. He’s faithful.” My ass as a bet on that, though I could be wrong. Some men are. Plus, I’d like to hear an example of some sovereign truth Charley professes — no doubt some self-congratulating GOP Euclideanism: A penny saved is a penny earned; buy low, sell high; old Shakespeare sure knew his potatoes. My unmerited sympathy for him goes flapping away.

“I guess I didn’t realize he held me in high esteem,” I say (and I’m sure he doesn’t). “Maybe we should be best friends. He asked me about that once. I was forced to decline.”

Ann just shakes her head, rejecting me the way a great actor rejects a heckler in the audience — utterly and without really noticing.

“Frank, you know when we were all living down in Haddam five years ago, in that sick little arrangement you thrived on, and you were fucking that little Texas bimbo and having the time of your life, I actually put an ad in the Pennysaver, advertising myself as a woman who seeks male companionship. I actually risked boredom and rape just to keep things the way you liked them.”

This is not the first time I’ve heard about the Pennysaver etc. And Vicki Arcenault was far from a bimbo. “We could’ve gotten remarried again anytime,” I say. “And I wasn’t having the time of my life. You divorced me, if you can remember precisely. We could’ve moved back in together. All kinds of things could’ve happened instead of what did.” Possibly I’m about to hear that the most difficult milieu adjustment of my adult life didn’t really have to be made (if only I’d been clairvoyant). It’s the worst news anyone could hear, and for a nickel I’d pop Ann right in the chops.

“I didn’t want to marry you.” She keeps shaking her head, though less forcefully. “I just should’ve left, that’s all. Do you even think you know why you and I got unmarried?” She takes a brief, angling look at me — uncomfortably like Sally’s look. I’d rather not be delving into the past now, but into the future or at least the present, where I’m most at home. It’s all my fault, though, for rashly bringing up the queasy matter of — or at least the word — marriage.

“I’m on record,” I say, to answer her fair and square, “as believing our son died and you and I tried to cope with it but couldn’t. Then I left home for a time and had some girlfriends, and you filed for divorce because you wanted me gone.” I look at her haltingly, as if in describing that time in our life I’d as much as stated a Goya could’ve easily been painted by a grandmother in Des Moines. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

Ann is nodding as if she’s trying to get my view straight in her head. “I divorced you,” she says slowly and meticulously, “because I didn’t like you. And I didn’t like you because I didn’t trust you. Do you think you ever told me the truth once, the whole truth?” She taps her fingers on her bare thigh, not looking my way. (This is the perpetual theme of her life: the search for truth, and truth’s defeat by the forces of contingency, most frequently represented by yours truly.)

“Tell the truth about what?” I say.

“Anything,” she says, gone rigid.

“I told you I loved you. That was true. I told you I didn’t want to get divorced. That was true too. What else was there?”

“There were important things that weren’t being admitted by you. There’s no use going into it now.” She nods some more as if to ratify this. Though there is in her voice unexpected sadness and even a tremor of remorse, which makes my heart swell and my air passage stiffen, so that for one long festering moment I’m unable to speak. (I’ve been badly slipped up on here: she is distraught and dejected, and I cannot answer.)

“For a time,” she continues, very, very softly and carefully, having slightly recovered herself, “for a long time, really, I knew we weren’t all the way to the truth with each other. But that was okay, because we were trying to get there together. But suddenly I just felt hopeless, and I saw that truth didn’t really exist to you. Though you got it from me the whole time.”

Ann was forever suspecting other people were happier than she was, that other husbands loved their wives more, achieved greater intimacy, on and on. It is probably not unusual in modern life, though untrue of ours. But this is the final, belated, judgment on our ancient history: why love failed, why life broke into this many pieces and made this pattern, who at long last is to blame. Me. (Why now, I don’t know. I still, in fact, don’t know with any clarity what she’s talking about.) And yet I so suddenly want to put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her that I do — I put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her. God knows how I can.

“Can’t you tell me something specific?” I say gently. “Women? Or something I thought? Or something you thought I thought? Just some way you felt about me?”

“It wasn’t something specific,” she says painstakingly. Then stops. “Let’s just talk about buying and selling houses now. Okay? You’re very good at that.” She turns an unpleasant and estimating eye on me. She doesn’t bother to remove my warm and clammy hand from her smooth knee. “I wanted somebody with a true heart, that’s all. That wasn’t you.”

“Goddamn it, I have a true heart,” I say. Shocked. “And I am better. You can get better. You wouldn’t know anyway.”

“I came to realize,” she says, uninterested in me, “that you were never entirely there. And this was long before Ralph died, but also after.”

“But I loved you,” I say, suddenly just angry as hell. “I wanted to go on being your husband. What else from the land of truth did you want? I didn’t have anything else to tell you. That was the truth. There’s plenty about anybody you can’t know and are better off not to, for Christ sake. Not that I even know what they are. There’s plenty about you, stuff that doesn’t even matter. Plus, where the hell was I if I wasn’t there?”

“I don’t know. Where you still are. Down in Haddam. I just wanted things to be clear and certain.”

“I do have a true heart,” I shout, and I’m tempted again to give her a whack, though only on the knee. “You’re one of those people who think God’s only in the details, but then if they aren’t the precise right details, life’s all fucked up. You invent things that don’t exist, then you worry about being denied whatever they are. And then you miss the things that do exist. Maybe it’s you, you know? Maybe some truths don’t even have words, or maybe the truth was what you wanted least, or maybe you’re a woman of damn little faith. Or low self-esteem, or something.”

I take my hand off her knee, unwilling now to be her consoler.

“We don’t really need to go into this.”

“You started it! You started it last night, about being and seeming, as if you were the world’s expert on being. You just wanted something else, that’s all. Something beyond what there is.” She’s right, of course, that we shouldn’t go on with this, since this is an argument any two humans can have, could have, have had, no doubt are having at this moment all over the country to properly inaugurate the holiday. It really has nothing to do with the two of us. In a sense, we don’t even exist, taken together.

I look around at the long porch, the great blue house on its big lawn, the shimmering windows behind which my two children are imprisoned, possibly lost to me. Charley has not come out onto his little porch again. What I’d thought he was doing — eating his ethical lunch in the ethical sunshine while we two battered at each other far above and out of earshot — is probably all wrong. I know nothing about him and should be kinder.

Ann just shakes her head again, without words accompanying. She eases herself down off the porch rail, lifts her chin, runs one finger from her temple back through her hair, and takes a quick look at the mirror window as if she saw someone coming — which she does: our son, Paul. Finally.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I drove you crazy when we were married. If I’d known I was going to, I wouldn’t ever have married you. You’re probably right, I rely on how I make things seem. It’s my problem.”

“I thought you thought how I thought,” she says softly. “Maybe that’s mine.”

“I tried. I should’ve. I loved you very much all the time.”

“Some things just can’t be fixed later, can they?” she says.

“No, not later,” I say. “Not later they can’t.”

And that is essentially and finally that.

Why the long face?” Paul says to his mother and also to me. He has arrived, smirking, onto the porch looking far too much like the murder boy from Ridgefield last midnight, as committed to bad luck as a death row convict. And to my surprise he’s even pudgier and somehow taller, with thick, adult eyebrows even more like his mom’s, but with a bad, pasty complexion — nothing like he looked as recently as a month ago, and not enough anymore (or ever) like the small, gullible boy who kept pigeons at his home in Haddam. (How do these things change so fast?) His hair has been cut in some new, dopey, skint-sided, buzzed-up way, so that his busted ear is evident in its bloody little bandage. Plus, his gait is a new big-shoe, pigeon-toed, heel-scrape, shoulder-slump sidle by which he seems to give human shape to the abstract concept of condescending disapproval for everything in sight (the effects of stress, no doubt). He simply stands before us now — his parents — doing nothing. “I thought of a good homonym while I was getting dressed,” he says slyly to either or both of us. “‘Meatier’ and ‘meteor.’ Only they mean the same thing.” He smirks, wishing to do nothing out here more than present himself in a way we won’t like, someone who’s lost IQ points or might be considering it.

“We were just discussing you,” I say. I’d meant to mention something about Dr. Rection, to speak to him via private code, but I don’t. I am in fact sorry to see him.

His mother, however, steps right up to him — essentially ignoring him and me — grips his chin with her strong golfer’s thumb and index finger, and turns his head to examine his split ear. (He is nearly her height.) Paul is carrying a black gym bag with Paramount Pictures — Reach Your Peak stenciled on its side in white (Stephanie’s stepfather is a studio exec, so I’m told) and is wearing big black-and-red clunker Reeboks with silver lightning bolts on the sides, long and baggy black shorts, and a long midnight-blue tee-shirt that has Happiness Is Being Single printed on the front below a painting of a bright-red Corvette. He is a boy you can read, though he also is someone you’d be sorry to encounter on a city street. Or in your home.

Ann asks him in a private voice if he has what he needs (he has), if he has money (he does), if he knows where to meet in Penn Station (yes), if he feels all right (no answer). He cuts his knifey eyes at me and screws up one side of his mouth as if we’re somehow in league against her. (We aren’t.)

Then Ann abruptly says, “So okay, you don’t look great, but go wait in the car, please. I want to have a word with your father.”

Paul wrinkles his mouth into a mirthless little all-knowing look of scorn having to do with the very notion of his mother talking to his father. He has become a smirker by nature. But how? When?

“What happened to your ear, by the way?” I say, knowing what happened.

“I punished it,” he says. “It heard a bunch of things I didn’t like.” He says this in a mechanistic monotone. I give him a little push in the direction he’s come from, back through the house and out toward the car. And so he goes.

I’d appreciate it if you’d try to be careful with him,” Ann says. “I want him back in good shape for his court appearance Tuesday.” She has sought to lead me the way Paul has gone, “back through,” but I’m having no part of her sinister house beautiful, with its poisonous élan, spiffy lines and bloodless color scheme. I lead us (I’m still inexplicably limping) down the steps to the lawn and around via the safer grass and through the shrubberies to the pea-gravel driveway, just the way a yardman would. “I think he’s injury prone,” she says quietly, following me. “I had a dream about him having an accident.”

I step through the green-leafed, thick-smelling hydrangeas, blooming a vivid purple. “My dreams are always like the six o’clock news,” I say. “Everything happening to other people.” The sexual whir I experienced on seeing Ann is now long gone.

“That’s fine about your dreams,” she says, hands in pockets. “This one happened to be mine.”

I don’t wish to think about terrible injury. “He’s gotten fat,” I say. “Is he on mood stabilizers or neuroblockers or something?”

Paul and Clarissa are already conferring by my car. She is smaller and holding his left wrist in both her hands and trying to raise it to the top of her head in some kind of sisterly trick he’s not cooperating with. “Come on!” I hear her say. “You putz.”

Ann says, “He’s not on anything. He’s just growing up.” Across the gravel lot is a robust five-bay garage that matches the house in every loving detail, including the miniature copper weather vane milled into the shape of a squash racket. Two bay doors are open, and two Mercedeses with Constitution State plates are nosed into the shadows. I wonder where Paul’s station wagon is. “Dr. Stopler said he displays qualities of an only child, which is too bad in a way.”

“I was an only child. I liked it.”

“He’s just not one. Dr. Stopler also said”—she’s ignoring me, and why shouldn’t she? — “not to talk to him too much about current events. They cause anxiety.”

“I guess they do,” I say. I am ready to say something caustic about childhood to seal my proprietorship of this day — revive Wittgenstein about living in the present meaning to live forever, blah, blah, blah. But I simply call a halt. No good’s to come. All boats fall on a bitter tide — children know it better than anyone. “Do you think you know what’s making him worse, just all of a sudden?”

She shakes her head, grips her right wrist with her left hand, and twists the two together, then gives me a small bleak smile. “You and me, I guess. What else?”

“I guess I was wanting a more complicated answer.”

“Well, good for you.” She rubs her other wrist the same way. “I’m sure you’ll think of one.”

“Maybe I’ll have put on my tombstone ‘He expected a more complicated answer.’”

“Let’s quit talking about this, okay? We’ll be at the Yale Club just for tonight if you need to call.” She looks at me in a nose-wrinkled way and slouches a shoulder. She has not meant to be so harsh.

Ann, in amongst the hydrangeas, and for the first time today looks purely beautiful — pretty enough for me to exhale, my mind to open outward, and for me to gaze at her in a way I once gazed at her all the time, every single day of our old life together in Haddam. Now would be the perfect moment for a future-refashioning kiss, or for her to tell me she’s dying of leukemia, or me to tell her I am. But that doesn’t happen. She is smiling her stalwart’s smile now, one that’s long since disappointed and can face most anything if need be — lies, lies and more lies.

“You two have a good time,” she says. “And please be careful with him.”

“He’s my son,” I say idiotically.

“Oh, I know that. He’s just like you.” And then she turns and walks back toward the yard, continuing on, I suspect, out of sight and down to the water to have her lunch with her husband.