Independence Day

9

The Deerslayer is as perfect as I’d hoped — a wide, rambling, spavined late Victorian with yellow scalloped mansards, spindle-lathed porch railings, creaky stairs leading to long, shadowy, disinfectant-smelling hallways, little twin pig-iron bedsteads, a table fan, and a bath at the end of the hall.

Downstairs there’s a long, slumberous living room with ancient-smelling slipcovered couches, a scabbed-up old Kimball spinet, a “take one, leave one” library, with dinner served in the shadowy dining room between 5:30 and 7:00 (“No late diners please!”). There is, however and unfortunately, no bar, no complimentary cocktails, no canapés, no TV. (I have embellished it some, but who could blame me?) And yet it still seems to me a perfect place where a man can sleep with a teenage boy in his room and arouse no suspicions.

Drinkless, then, I stretch out on the too-soft mattress while Paul goes “exploring.” I relax my jaw sinews, twist my back a little, unlimber my toes in the table-fan breeze and wait to let sleep steal upon me like a bushman out of the twilight. To this end I again braid together new nonsense components, which seep into my mind like anesthesia. We better dust off our Sally Caldwell … I’m sorry I drove your erection you putz … Phogg Allen, the long face … eat your face … You musta been a beautiful Doctor Zhivago, you stranger in the Susquehanna … And I’m gone off into tunneling darkness before I can even welcome it.

And then, sooner than I wanted, I’m emerged — lushly, my head spinning in darkness, alone, my son nowhere near me.

For a time I lie still, as a cool lake breeze circulates thickly around the spruce and elms and into the room through the soft fan whir. Somewhere nearby a bug zapper toasts one after another of the big north-woods Sabre-jet mosquitoes, and above me on the ceiling a smoke detector beams its little red-eye signal out of the dark.

Floors below I hear fork and plate noises, chairs scraping, muffled laughter followed by footfalls trudging up the stairs past my door, the sound of a door closing and soon a toilet-flush — water skittering, splashing through pipes. Then the door reopens and more heavy footfalls fade into night.

Through a wall I hear someone sawin’ ’em off just the way I must’ve been — stertorous, diligent, thorough-sounding breaths. Someone’s playing “Inchworm” on the spinet. I hear a car door open in the gravel lot below my window — the muffled ping, ping, ping of the interior “door open” bell — then a man and a woman talking in low voices, affectionately. “It’s dirt cheap here, really,” the male says in a whisper, as if others needed to be kept in the dark.

“Yeah, but then what?” the female says, and giggles. “What would we do?”

“What d’ya do anywhere?” he says. “Go fishing, play golf, eat dinner, fuck your wife. Just like home.”

“I choose window number four,” she says. “There’s not enough of that back home.” She giggles again. Then thump, the trunk is slammed; chirp, a car alarm activated; crunch, their feet cross the gravel headed toward the lake. They are talking houses. I know. Tomorrow they’ll do some window-browsing, check with an agent, look through some listing books, see one house, maybe two, to get a feel, discuss a feasible “down,” then wander dreamily off down Main Street and never think one thought of it again. Not that it’s always that way. Some guys write out whopper checks, ship their furnishings, establish whole new lives in two weeks — and then think better of it all, after which they list the house again with the same realtor, take a beating on the carrying charges, shell out a penalty for early pay-off, and in this way, in the process of mistake and correction, the economy remains vibrant. In that sense real estate is not about finding your dream house but getting rid of it.

I give a wistful thought to Paul and wonder where he could be in a strange but peril-free town after dark. Possibly he and the Hacky Sack gang from Main and Chestnut have forged lifelong bonds and removed to a dingy diner for cottage fries, waffles and burgers at his expense. He may, after all, lack precise peer grouping in Deep River — where everyone’s at least old enough to be an adult. In Haddam he’ll do better.

“Jeepers,” I hear someone — a woman’s nasally voice say, mounting the creaky stairs to floor three. “I told Mark”—Merk—“why can’t she just move to the Cities, where we can keep an eye on her, then Dad won’t have to drive so far for his dialysis? He’s completely helpless without her.”

“So then what’d Mark say to that?” another woman’s equally nasally voice says without true interest — heavy treading down the hall away from my door.

“Oh, you know Mark. He’s such a clod.” A key in a lock, a door opening back. “He didn’t say too much.” Slam.

Since I have napped in my clothes (an irresistible luxury), I change only my shirt, slip on shoes, stretch my spine backward and forward, tramp woozily down to the communal bathroom for a visit and a face washing, then amble downstairs to have a look at things, locate Paul and get a tip on dinner; I’ve by now missed the inn’s: spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, tapioca, all highly praised on the “Weekly Score Card” left on my dressertop (“Mmmmmm,” one penciled-in comment by a previous guest).

In the long, brown-carpeted parlor all the old parchment lamps are burning cheerily and several guests are engrossed in gin games or Clue or reading newspapers or books out of the library, but saying little. A too-strong cinnamon candle is somewhere smoldering, and above the cold fireplace hangs a shadowy six-foot-tall portrait of a man in full leather gear with a silly, compromised expression on his U-shaped face. This is the Deerslayer himself. A big, elderly, long-eared, ham-handed Swede-looking guy is yakking away to a Japanese man in confidential tones about “invasive surgeries” and the extremes he’d be willing to suffer to avoid them. And across the room a horsey, middle-aged southern-sounding woman in a red-and-white polka-dot dress is seated at the piano, talking too loudly to another woman, in a foam neck brace. The polka-dot woman’s eyes roam the long room, wanting to know who might be listening and being wildly entertained by what she’s yammering about, which is whether you can ever trust a handsome man married to a not-so-pretty woman. “Clampin’ a big padlock on my china cabinet’d be my first official move,” she says in a loud voice. She spies me in the doorway contentedly watching the tableau of easygoing inn life (exactly how any prospective proprietor would fantasize it: every room filled, everybody’s credit card slip salted away in the safe, no refunds offered, everybody in bed by ten). Her eyes snap at me. She offers me a long-toothed, savage stare and waves my way as if she knew me from Bogalusa or Minter City — maybe she simply recognizes a fellow southerner (something in the submissive, shruggy set of my shoulders). “Hey, you! All right! Come on down here, I see you,” she shouts toward the door, rings flashing, bracelets banging, dentures a-twinkle. I wave good-naturedly, but fearing I’ll end up piano-side having my brains turned to suet, I step discreetly back and out of the doorway, then hustle down the front under-the-stairs hallway to make some calls.

I would certainly like to call Sally and should call for messages. The Markhams could’ve come back from around the bend, and there might be an all-clear from Karl. These subjects have blessedly slipped my mind for several hours, but I haven’t noticed much relief in the bargain.

Someone (no doubt the old southern number) has begun playing “Lullaby of Birdland” at a slow, lugubrious pace, so that the whole atmosphere on floor one suddenly feels calculated to drive everyone to bed.

I wait for messages, staring at a diagram illustrating the five steps that will save someone from choking, and fingering a stack of pink tickets from a dinner theater in Susquehanna, PA. Annie Get Your Gun is playing this very night, and the stack of playbills on the telephone table rings with the critics’ kudos: “Everybody’s first rate”—Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin; “Move over ‘Cats’ “—Scranton Times; “This baby’s got legs under her”—Cooperstown Republican. I can’t help conjuring up Sally’s review: “My team of death’s-door opening-nighters simply couldn’t get enough of it. We laughed, we cried, we damn near died”— Curtain Call Newsletter.

Beeeeep. “Hello, Mr. Bascombe, this is Fred Koeppel calling again from Griggstown. I know it’s a holiday weekend, but I’d like to get a little action going on my house right away. Maybe show it on Monday if we can get the commission worked out….” Click. Ditto.

Beeeeep. “Hello, Frank, it’s Phyllis.” Pause while she clears her throat, as though she’s been asleep. “East Brunswick was a total nightmare. Total. Why’n’t you tell us, for God’s sake? Joe got depressed after one house. I think he may be headed for a big cavein. So anyway, we’ve reconsidered about the Hanrahan place, which I’m ready to change my mind about it, I guess. Nothing’s forever. If we don’t like it we can just sell it. Joe liked it anyway. I’ll get over worrying about the prison. I’m at a phone booth here.” A deepening change comes into her voice (signifying what?). “Joe’s asleep. Actually I’m having a drink at the bar at the Raritan Ramada. Quite a day. Quite a day.” Another long pause, representing possible stocktaking within the Markham ménage. “I wish I could talk to you. But. I hope you get this message tonight and call us up in the morning so we can get our offer over to old man Hanrahan. I’m sorry about Joe being such a butt. He’s not easy, I realize that.” A third pause, during which I hear her say, “Yeah, sure,” to someone. Then: “Call us at the Ramada. 201-452-6022. I’m probably going to be up late. We couldn’t stand that other place anymore. I hope you and your son are getting to share a lot.” Click.

Except for the boozy longing (which I ignore), there’s no shocker here. East Brunswick’s well known for dreary, down-market, cookie-cutter uniformity. It is not a viable alternative even to Penns Neck, though I’m surprised the Markhams came around so soon. It’s too bad they couldn’t have taken the evening, shot up to Susquehanna for Annie and chicken piccante. They’d have laughed, they’d have cried, and Phyllis could’ve found ways to start getting over worrying about the prison in her back yard. Of course, it won’t surprise me if “old man Hanrahan’s” house is realty history by now. Good things don’t hang around while half-wits split hair follicles, even in this economy.

I instantly put in a call to Penns Neck, to get Ted on the alert for an early-morning offer. (I’ll get Julie Loukinen to deliver it.) But the phone rings and rings and rings and rings. I repunch it, taking care to mentally picture each digit, then let it ring possibly thirty times while I stare down the front hall past the old grandfather clock and the portrait of General Doubleday and through the open screen door into the night and farther through trees to the diamond-twinkle lights of another, grander inn across on the lakeshore, a place I didn’t see this afternoon. All the ranked windows there are warmly lit, car headlights coming and going like some swank casino in a far-off seaside country. Out on the Deerslayer’s porch the high backs of the big Adirondack rockers are swaying as my fellow guests snooze away their spaghetti dinners, murmur and chuckle about the day — something bust-a-gut hilarious somebody’s son has piped up with in front of the Heinie Manusch bust, something else about the pros and cons of opening a copy shop in a town this size, something further about Governor Dukakis, whom someone, probably a fellow Democrat, laughingly refers to as “that Beantown Jerkimo.”

But nothing in Penns Neck. Ted may have slipped off to an Independence Day open house across the fence.

I try Sally’s number, since she said to call and since I intend to renew our amorous connections the instant I let Paul off in Gotham, a time that now feels many miles and hours from now but isn’t. (With one’s children everything happens in a flash; there’s never a now, only a then, after which you’re left wondering what took place and trying to imagine if it can take place again so’s you’ll notice.)

“Hello-o,” Sally says in a happy, airy voice, as if she’d just been in the yard, pinning up clothes on a sunny line.

“Hi,” I say, relieved and cheered for an answer somewhere. “It’s me again.”

“Me again? Well. Good. How are you, Me? Still pretty distracted? It’s a wonderful night at the beach. I wish you could distract yourself down to here. I’m on the porch, I can hear music, I ate radicchio and mushrooms tonight, and I’ve had some nice Duck’s Wing fumé blanc. I hope you two’re having as splendid a time wherever you are. Where are you?”

“In Cooperstown. And we are. It’s great. You should be here.” I picture one long, shiny leg, a shoe (gold, in my mind) dangling out over her porch banister into darkness, a big sparkling glass in her lounging hand (a banner night for women tipplers). “Have you got any company?” Apprehension’s knife enters my voice; even I hear it.

“Nope. No company. No suitors scaling the walls tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess,” she says, clearing her throat just the way Phyllis did. “You’re extremely sweet to call me. I’m sorry I asked you about your old wife today. That was indiscreet and insensitive of me. I’ll never do it again.”

“I still want you to come up here.” This is not literally true, though it’s not far from true. (I’m certain she won’t come anyway.)

“Well,” Sally says, as though she were smiling into the dark, her voice going briefly weak, then coming back strong. “I’m thinking very seriously about you, Frank. Even though you were very rude or at least odd on the phone today. Maybe you couldn’t help it.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But that’s great. I’ve been thinking seriously about you.”

“Have you?”

“You bet. I thought last night you and I came to a crossroads, and we went in the wrong direction.” Something in the South Mantoloking background makes me think I hear surf sighing and piling onto the beach, a blissful, longed-for sound here in the steamy Deerslayer hallway — though conceivably it’s only weak batteries in Sally’s cordless phone. “I think we need to do some things a lot differently,” I say.

Sally has a sip of her fumé blanc right by the receiver. “I thought over what you said about loving someone. And I thought you were very honest. But it seemed very cold too. You don’t think you’re cold, do you?”

“No one ever told me I was. I’ve been told about plenty of other faults.” (Some quite recently.) Whoever’s playing “Lullaby of Birdland” in the living room stops and switches straight into “The Happy Wanderer” at an allegretto clip, the heavy bass notes flat and metallic. Someone claps along for two bars, then quits. A man out on the porch laughs and says, “I think I’m a happy wanderer myself.”

“So I’ve just had this odd feeling all afternoon,” Sally says. “About what you said and what I said to you, about being noncommittal and smooth. That is how you are. But then if I have strong feelings about you, shouldn’t I just follow them? If I have a chance? I believe I could figure things out better when I was younger. I certainly always thought I could alter the course of things if I wanted to. Didn’t you say you had a tidal something or other about me? Tides were in it.”

“I said I had a tidal attraction to you. And I do.” Possibly we can move beyond smooth and noncommittal here. Someone — a woman — starts loudly singing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah” in a quavery voice and laughing. Possibly it’s the loudmouth in polka dots who gave me the barbarous eyeball.

“What does that mean, tidal attraction?” Sally says.

“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just strong and persistent, though. I’m sure of that. I think it’s harder to say what you like than what you don’t.”

“Well,” Sally says almost sadly. “Last night I thought I was in a tide pulling me toward you. Only that isn’t what happened. So I’m not very sure. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

“It’s not bad if it’s pulling you toward me, is it?”

“I don’t think so. But I got nervous about it, and I’m not used to being nervous. It’s not my nature. I got in the car and drove all the way to Lakewood and saw The Dead. Then I had my radicchio and mushrooms by myself at Johnny Matassa’s, where you and I had our first encounter.”

“Did you feel better?” I say, fingering up two Annie ducats, wondering if a character in The Dead reminded her of me.

“Not completely. No. I still couldn’t understand if the unchangeable course was toward you or away from you. It’s a dilemma.”

“I love you,” I say, totally startling myself. A tide of another nature has just swirled me into very deep, possibly dark water. These words are not untrue, or don’t feel untrue, but I didn’t need to say them at this very moment (though only an asshole would take them back).

“I’m sorry,” Sally says, reasonably enough. “What is it? What?”

“You heard me.” The living room pianist is playing “The Happy Wanderer” much louder now — just banging away. The Japanese man who’s been hearing all about invasive surgeries walks out of the living room smiling, but immediately stops smiling when he hits the hall. He sees me and shakes his head as if he were responsible for the music but now it won’t stop. He heads up the front stairs. Paul and I will be happy to be on floor 3.

“What’s that mean, Frank?”

“I just realized I wanted to say it to you. And so I said it. I don’t know everything it means”—to put it mildly—“but I know it doesn’t mean nothing.”

“But didn’t you tell me you’d have to make somebody up to love them? And didn’t you say this was a time in your life you probably wouldn’t even remember later?”

“Maybe that time’s over, or it’s changing.” I feel jittery and squeamish saying so. “But I wouldn’t make you up anyway. It isn’t even possible. I told you that this afternoon.” I’m wondering, though, what if I’d said “don’t” in front of the verb? Then what? Could that be the way life progresses at my age? A-stumble into darkness and out of the light? You discover you love someone by trying it without “don’t” in front of the verb? Nothing vectored by your self or by what is? If so, it’s not good.

There’s a pause on the line, during which Sally is, understandably, thinking. I’m mightily interested in asking if she might love me, since she’d mean something different by it, which would be good. We could sort out the differences. But I don’t ask.

“The Happy Wanderer” comes to a crashing end, followed by complete, relieved silence in the living room. I hear the Japanese man’s feet treading the squeaky hall above me, then a door click closed. I hear pots being banged and scrubbed beyond the wall in the kitchen. Out on the dark porch the big rockers are rocking still, their occupants no doubt staring moodily across at the nicer inn that’s too ritzy for them and probably not worth the money.

“It’s very odd,” Sally says, clearing her throat again as though changing the subject away from love, which is okay with me. “After I talked to you today from wherever you were, and before I went to see The Dead, I walked up the beach a while — you’d asked me about Wally’s cuff links, and I just got this idea in my head. And when I came home I called his mother out in Lake Forest, and I demanded to know where he is. It just occurred to me for some reason that she’d always known and wouldn’t tell me. That was the big secret, in spite of everything. And I’ve never even been a person who thought there was a big secret.” (Unlike, say, Ann.)

“What did she tell you?” This would be an interesting new wrinkle in the tapestry. Wally: The Sequel.

“She didn’t know where he was. She actually started crying on the phone, the poor old thing. It was terrible. I was terrible. I said I was sorry, but I’m sure she doesn’t forgive me. I certainly wouldn’t forgive me. I told you I can be ruthless sometimes.”

“Did you feel better?”

“No. I just have to forget it, that’s all. You can still see your ex-wife even if you don’t want to. I don’t know which is better.”

“That’s why people carve hearts on trees, I guess,” I say, and feel idiotic for saying it, but for a moment also desolate, as if some chance has been once again missed by me. Ann seems all the more insubstantial and distant for being substantial and not even very distant.

“I sound very un-smart to myself,” Sally says, ignoring my remark about trees. She takes a drink of wine, bumping the phone with the glass rim. “Maybe I’m undergoing the early signs of something. Self-pitying failure to make a significant contribution in the world.”

“That’s not true a bit,” I say. “You help dying people and make them happier. You make a hell of a contribution. A lot more than I make.”

“Women don’t usually have midlife crises, do they?” she says. “Though maybe women who’re alone do.”

“Do you love me?” I say rashly.

“Would you even like that?”

“Sure. I’d think it was great.”

“Don’t you think I’m too mild? I think I’m very mild.”

“No! I don’t think you’re mild. I think you’re wonderful.” The receiver for some reason is tightly pinned to my ear.

“I think I’m mild.”

“Maybe you feel mild about me.” I hope not, and my eyes fall again upon the little stack of pink dinner-theater tickets. They are, I see, for July 2, 1987—exactly a year ago. “If it’s free, how good could it be?”—F. Bascombe.

“I would like to know something.” She could very well want to know plenty.

“I’ll tell you anything. No holding back. The whole truth.”

“Tell me why you’re attracted to women your own age?” This harks back to a conversation we had on our gloom-infested fall excursion to Vermont to peep at leaves, eat overcooked crown roasts and wait in stationary lines of bus traffic, later to retreat homeward in a debrided, funky silence. On the way up and in soaring early spirits, I explained, off the cuff and unsolicited, that younger women (who I’d had in mind I can’t remember, but somebody in her middle twenties and not very smart) always wanted to cheer me up and sympathize with me, except that finally bored the socks off me, since I didn’t want to be sympathized with and was cheerful enough on my own. We were whizzing up the Taconic, and I went on to say it seemed like a textbook definition of adulthood that you gave up trying to be a cheerleader for the person you loved and just took him or her on as he or she was — assuming you liked him (or her). Sally made no reply at the time, as though she thought I was just making something up for her benefit and wasn’t interested. (In fact, I might already have been coaching myself against making people up for the purpose of loving them.)

“Well,” I say, aware I could blow the whole deal with an inept turn of phrase, “younger women always want everything to be a success and have love depend on it. But some things can’t be a success and you love somebody anyway.”

Silence again intervenes. Again I think I hear surf languidly sudsing against the sandy shingle.

Sally says, “I don’t think that’s exactly what you said last fall.”

“But it’s pretty close,” I say, “and it’s what I meant and what I mean now. And what do you care? You’re my age, or almost. And I don’t love anybody else.” (Except my ex-wife, which is a non-issue.)

“I guess I’m concerned that you’re making me up different from how I am. Maybe you think there’s only one person in the world for anybody, and so you keep making her up. Not that I mind being improved on, but you have to stick to my particular facts.”

“I have to forget about making people up,” I say guiltily, sorry I ever gave utterance to the idea. “And I don’t think there’s just one person for anybody. At least I hope to hell not, since I haven’t done so well yet.”

“We have some more fireworks out on the water here,” Sally says dreamily. “That’s very nice. Maybe I’m just feeling susceptible tonight. I felt good when you called.”

“I still feel good,” I say, and suddenly the bony, horseface woman who’s been banging the piano to death strides out into the foyer and looks down the hall straight at me, where I’m leaning on the wall above the phone table. She’s in step with the plump woman in the neck brace, whom she’s no doubt been making sing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah.” She issues me another savage-eyebrowed look, as if I was where she knew I’d be and up to my pants pockets in the deceit of some angelic and unsuspecting wifey. “Look. I’m in a public phone here. But I feel a lot better. I just want to see you tomorrow if I can’t see you in ten minutes.”

“Where?” Sally says smally, still susceptible.

“Anywhere. Name it. I’ll come down there in a Cessna.” The two women stay standing in the lighted foyer, unabashedly ogling me and listening in.

“Are you still taking Paul to the train in New York?”

“By six o’clock,” I say, wondering where Paul could be at this minute.

“Well, I could take a train up there and meet you. I’d like that. I’d like to spend the Fourth of July with you.”

“You know, it’s my favorite holiday of a non-religious nature.” I am enthused to hear her even warily agreeable, though she can seem more agreeable than she is. (I have to tabulate all the declarations and forswearings I’ve committed to in the last ten minutes.) “You didn’t answer my question, though.”

“Oh.” She sniffs once. “You’re not really very easy to fix on. And I don’t think I’d be a good long-term lover or a wife for somebody like that. I had a husband who was hard to fix on.”

“That’s all right,” I say. Though surely I’m not as elusive as Wally! The Wally who’s been gone for damn near twenty years!

“Is that all right? For me to be a not very good lover or wife?” She pauses to think about this novel idea. “Don’t you care, or are you just not putting any pressure on me to do anything?”

“I care,” I say. “But I’d actually just be happy to hear any good words.”

“Everything isn’t just about how you say it,” Sally says, very formally. “And I wouldn’t know what to say anyway. I don’t think we mean the same things when we say the same things.” (As predicted.)

“That’s fine too. As long as you’re not sure you don’t love me. I read a poem someplace that said perfect love was not knowing you weren’t in love. Maybe that’s what this is.”

“Oh my,” she says, and sounds sorrowful. “That’s too complicated, Frank, and it’s not very different from how it was last night. It’s not very encouraging to me.”

“It’s different because I get to see you tomorrow. Meet me at seven at Rocky and Carlo’s on Thirty-third and Seventh. We’ll start new from there.”

“Well,” she says. “Are we making a business deal to be in love? Is that what’s happening?”

“No, it’s not. But it’s a good deal, though. Everything’s up front for a change.” She laughs. And then I try to laugh but can’t and have to fake laughing.

“Okay, okay,” she says, in a not very hopeful voice. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You better believe it,” I say in a better one. And we hang up. Though the instant she’s off I depress the plunger and shout into the empty line, “And so you’re nothing but a fucking asshole, are you? Well, I’ll have you killed before Labor Day, and that’s God’s promise.” I snap a vicious look around at the two women, framed by the screen door, peering at me. “I’ll see you in hell,” I say into the dead line, and slam the phone down as the women turn and head hastily upstairs to their beds.

I take a quick peek out onto the porch to see if Paul’s there. He’s not — only one of the gin players is left, asleep but managing to rock his rocker anyway. I make an investigative turn through the smelly dining room, where the light’s still on and the big boarding-house lazy Susan table is cleared and shining dully from being wiped with a greasy rag. Through the two-way kitchen door open at the back I see the young woman who was clanging the dinner bell, wearing a chef’s hat and waving when Paul and I arrived. She’s seated at a long metal table in the brackish light, smoking a cigarette and flipping through a magazine, her hand around a can of Genny, her chef’s hat in front of her. Clearly she’s immersed in her own well-earned and private quality time. But nothing would make me happier than a warmed-up plate of dinner spaghetti with a couple of cold-as-they-may-be slabs of garlic bread and maybe a brew of my own. I’d eat right here, standing up, or sneak a plate to my room by the back stairs so no other guests would have to know about it. (“The next thing, everybody’ll want to eat late, and we’ll be serving dinner from now to Christmas. It’s hard to know where to draw the line in these things”—which of course is true.)

“Hi,” I say in through the kitchen door, one room into the next, sounding meeker than I want to sound.

The young woman — who’s still wearing a chef’s boxy-looking white tunic, institutional baggy pants and a red neckerchief — turns and gives me a skeptical, unwelcoming look. A round tin ashtray sits on the table in front of her, beside a package of Winstons. She looks back and flicks her smoke on the ashtray’s rim.

“What can I do you for?” she says without looking up at me. I take a couple of minuscule steps nearer the doorframe. In fact, I hate to be the one asking for special treatment, who wants his dinner late, his laundry returned without his ticket, who can’t find his stub for his prints, has to have his tires rotated this afternoon because he needs to drive to Buffalo in the morning and the left front seems to be wearing a little unevenly. I prefer my regular place in line. Only tonight, after 10 p.m., worn uneven myself from a long, befuddling day with my son, I’m willing to bend the rules like anyone else.

“I thought I might get a good tip on dinner somewhere,” I say, with a you-know-what-I-really-mean look. My tired eyes dart around to what I can see of the kitchen: a giant cold box, a black eight-burner Vulcan, a bulky silver pot-washer, its door open, four big tub-sinks, dry as a desert, all utensils — pots, pans, skillets, whisks, spatulas — dangling like weaponry from a rack on the rear wall. Nowhere do I see a still-warm pot of spaghetti with a metal spoon handle poked up over the top. Nothing’s doing here food-wise.

“I guess the Tunnicliff’s kitchen shuts off at nine.” The lady chef glances at her wristwatch and shakes her head without looking up. “You just missed that by an hour. I’m sorry to break the news.”

She is a harder-boiled piece of business than I guessed. Frizzy blond hair, pallid indoor skin, blotchy where I can’t now see, thick little wrists and neck, and wandering breasts not well captained inside her chef’s getup. She is twenty-nine, no doubt, with a kid at home she’s slow getting back to, and in all likelihood rides a big Harley to work. (Almost certainly she’s the innkeeper’s squeeze.) Though whatever her arrangements, they haven’t left her easy to win over.

“Got any better ideas?” My stomach produces an audible querking noise as if on cue.

She takes a drag on her Winston and turns her head slightly to the side and blows smoke the other way. I can see the magazine she’s reading is Achieve Super Marital Sex (something you might get mail order). I can also see she’s not wearing a wedding ring, though that’s not my business. “If you want to drive down to Oneonta, there’s a Chinese stays open till midnight. Their egg drop’s almost edible.” She yawns and stifles it halfway.

“That’s a pretty fur piece,” I say, grinning witlessly. I sniff a gamy pilot light/old stale food smell reminiscent of Ted Houlihan’s house. I of course hate egg drop soup, know no one who actually likes it, and hold my ground.

“Twenty-five air miles.” She flips the pages of her magazine to one that has pictures I’m not close enough to see.

“Nothing else open in town, then, huh?” I am less convincing, I can tell.

“Bars. This is just a little hick burg. It pretends different. But what else is new.” She flips another page nonchalantly, then leans forward to get a better look at something — possibly a defter “mounting strategy” or some fancy new penetration protocol, a tricky Swedish “apparatus” for manipulating previously undiscovered parts and zones, ingenuity for making life better than ever. (My own parts, I realize dimly, have not been manipulated in a coon’s age, except in the age-old way; I wonder bleakly if Paul might not be somewhere in the menaceless warp of Cooperstown, having his own parts ardently worked over while I’m here begging a little supper.)

“Look,” I say, “you think there’s any chance I could get a little leftover spaghetti? I’m as hungry as a bear, and I’d be glad to eat it cold. Or I’d eat something else that was handy. Maybe some tapioca or a sandwich.” I edge in the door to make my presence more a feature in the room.

She shakes her frizzy head and thumps her Genny, still intent on her sex magazine. “Jeremy hangs a big lock on the fridge so nobody can come down for Dagwoods, which used to happen, especially with the Japanese. They’re apparently always starving. But I’m not trusted with the combination, ’cause I’d just stand back and let you have it all.”

I look to the dimly shining Traulsen cold box, and indeed there’s a hasp and bail soldered right onto it, and a big impregnable-looking lock — something it’d be a lot of trouble to jimmy off.

I’m close enough, though, to see the diagram that’s captured the chef’s special attention: a full page of four-panel drawings showing a man and woman, both naked, and painted using translucent, unprurient pastels, in front of a completely nonsexual pea-green background of hazy bedroom details (all emblematic of marriage). Fido-style is the theme here. In panel #1 they’re both on their knees; in #2 “he’s” standing and “she’s” half draped off a bed, fully “offered;” in #3 they’re both standing, and I can’t see #4, though I’d like to.

“You finding some new recipes in there?” I leer down at her.

Her head twists around and up, and she gives me a brazen, pouty-mouth look that says: Mind your own business or I’ll mind it for you. It makes me immediately like her, even if she won’t unlock the fridge and build me up a Dagwood. This, I think, is the end of dinner, though my bet is she’s got the combination committed to memory.

“I thought you wanted a sandwich,” she says, looking back, amused at the canine escapades of two idealized pastel versions of married people who look like us. “Whatta you think she’s saying?” She points her short finger, which has some flour dried on its fingernail, at #1, in which the female is looking back around at the already hooked-up male, as if she’s just had a good new idea. “‘Knock, knock, Who’s there?’” the chef says. “‘Did you hear the garage door?’ or ‘Do you mind if I balance my checkbook?’” She tours her tongue roguishly around in her cheek and looks mock-disgusted, as if this were all just shameless.

“Maybe they’re talking about a sandwich,” I say, experiencing a gradual resituating of my own little-thought-of below-decks apparatus.

“Maybe they are,” she says, leaning back again while she smokes. “Maybe she’s sayin’, ‘Now, did you remember to buy Bibb lettuce, or did you get that old iceberg again?’”

“What’s your name?” I say. (My talk with Sally has been more serious and relieving than actual fun.)

“C-h-a-r, Char,” she says. She has a pop of her Genny and swallows it down. “Which is short for Charlane, not Charlotte and not Charmayne. My older sisters are blessed with those.”

“Your pop must’ve been named Charles.”

“You know him?” she says. “Great big loud guy with a tiny little brain?”

“I don’t think so.” I’m waiting for her to flip another page, interested to see what else our panelists come up with.

“Funny,” she says, putting her Winston between her teeth so the smoke makes her squint, and pushing the bulky chef’s sleeves above her fragile elbows. She is more delicate on second notice. Her outfit is what makes her look chunky and tough. The “chef look” is not a good look for her.

“How’d you get to be a chef?” I say, happier, even just for a moment, to be here in the lighted kitchen with a woman rather than scrounging a burger in the dark or struggling to make contact with my son.

“Oh, well, first I attended Harvard and got a Ph.D. — let’s see — in, ah, can opening. Then I did my postdoctoral work in eggs and toast buttering. That must’ve been at MIT.”

“I bet it’s harder than English.”

“You would think so.” She lays the page over to reveal more pastel panels, this time spotlighting fellatio, with some vivid but tasteful close-ups showing everything you’d ever want to know from a picture. The female panelist, I notice, now has her hair tied back in an accommodating ponytail. “My, my,” Char says.

“You a subscriber?” I say archly. My stomach makes another deep, organic-sounding grumble-gurgle.

“I just read what the guests leave after meals. That’s all.” Char pauses longer at the fellatio panels. “This was left under one of the chairs. I’ll be interested by who asks about it tomorrow. My guess I’ll get to keep it.”

I picture ole horseface stealing down after lights-out to give the room a tumble.

“Listen,” I say, with the sudden realization (again) that I can do anything I want (except get a plate of spaghetti). “Would you like to strike out to one of those bars and let me buy you another beer while I have a gin and maybe a sandwich? My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” I give her a smile, wondering if we should shake hands.

“And by the way?” Char says, mocking me. She snaps the magazine shut back-to-front, and on the back is a full-page color ad for a thick, pink, anatomically audacious but rather fuzzily photographed dildo that some comical prior reader has drawn a red Happy Face on the business end of. “Well, hel-lo,” Char says, peering down at the pink appendage grinning back off the tabletop. “Aren’t we happy?” The dildo is referred to in the ad as “Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit,” though I’m dubious about what it has to do with the standard marriage realities. Under standard circumstances, “Mr. Pleasure” would be a hard act to follow. “He” in fact doesn’t have a particularly good effect on my own enthusiasm and leaves me oddly glum.

“Maybe I’ll let you walk me over to the Tunnicliff,” Char says, sliding the magazine out across the slick tabletop, rejecting Mr. Pleasure Unit as pie in the sky. She pushes back in her metal chair and turns her attention finally to me. “That’s halfway home. And we’ll say good night at that point.”

“Great. That’s great,” I say. “That’ll be a good end to the night for me.”

She stays seated, however, squeezes her eyes shut, then pops them open as if she’s just emerged from a trance, then woggles her head around to loosen everything up at the end of a long day’s hard chefing. “What line of work you in, Frank?” She’s not quite ready to get up, possibly deciding she needs more background on me.

“Residential realty.”

“Where at?” She fingers her Winston hard pack as though she’s thinking about something else.

“Down in Haddam, in New Jersey. About four hours from here.”

“Never hoid of it,” she says.

“It’s a pretty well-kept secret.”

“You in the Millionth Dollar Club? I’d be impressed if you were.” She raises her eyebrows.

“Me too,” I say. (In Haddam, of course, the Millionth Dollar Club had better be joined by Valentine’s Day, or you’re out of business by Easter.)

“I prefer to rent,” Char says, staring inertly at the distant Achieve Super Marital Sex where she’s shoved it away, with Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit’s happy face turned up. “Actually I want to get into a condo, but a car costs what a house used to cost. And I’m still paying off my car.” (Not a Harley.)

“You can rent these days,” I say cheerfully, “for about half the cost of buying and save money to boot.” (There’s in fact no use telling her that at her age — twenty-eight or thirty-three — she’s looking at a life of more of the same unless she robs a bank or marries a banker.)

“Well,” Char says, suddenly motivated by something — an idea, a memory, a determination not to bellyache to a stranger. “I guess I just need to find a rich husband.” She raps both sets of knuckles hard on the tabletop, grasps her pack of smokes and stands up (she is not very tall). “Let me get out of my Pillsbury doughgirl outfit.” She’s walking slowly away toward a little door off the kitchen, which when she opens it and snaps on the light within reveals a tiny, fluorescentlit bathroom. “I’ll meet you out on the piazza later,” she says.

“I’ll be there,” I say at the door as it closes and goes locked.

I wander back out into the foyer to wait in the cool breeze through the screen. The old bucket-eared Swede is now hunched over the tiny phone where I’d been, his big, rough finger jammed in his other cavernous ear for better hearing. “Well, what makes you a saint, ya satchel-ass sonofabitch?” I hear him say. “For starters, tell me that. I’d like to get that straight tonight.”

I look out through the screen, where all the chairs are now empty — everyone safe in bed, plans in motion for an all-out Sunday morning assault on the Hall of Fame.

From the darkness of new-mown grass I hear the distant yet close harmonies of a barbershop quartet, singing what sounds very much like “Michelle, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble.” And back among the spruces and elm trunks I see a couple materializing in light-colored summery clothes, arms around, walking in step, returning (I’m certain) from a wonderful five-course dinner in some oak-paneled lakeside auberge now closed and locked up tight as Dick’s hatband. They’re laughing, which makes me realize that it is a good time of night to feel good, to be where you’ve been headed all day, blissful hours with a significant other still in front of you, half surprised that the day’s gone this well, inasmuch as the 4th is the summer’s pivotal day, when thoughts turn easily to fall and rapid change and shorter days and feelings of impendment that won’t give way till spring. These two are ahead of the game.

They come into view now, in the inn’s reflected window glow: he wearing white bucks, seersucker pants, a yellow jacket slung over his shoulder foreign-correspondent style; she in a flimsy pastel-green skirt and a pink Peter Pan blouse. By their flat Ohio vowels I recognize them as the couple from the parking lot back when I lay dozing and their interests lay in property values. Now they have other interests to pursue above floors.

“I ate way too much,” he says. “I shouldn’t have ordered that Cajun linguine. I’ll never get to sleep.”

“That’s no excuse,” she says. “You can sleep when you get home. I’ve got plans for you.”

“You’re the expert,” he says, not at all eager enough by my standards.

“You’re damn right I am,” she says, then laughs. “Hah.”

I want to be well out of their way when they come through — the lacquer of sex being suddenly too thick around me in the night air — want not to be standing behind the screen with a knowing, Now-you-two-have-a-real-good-sleep smirk on my mug. So, as their shoes hit the steps, I slip back into the living room to wait for my “date.”

Two red-shaded lamps have been left on in the long, warm, overfurnished, cinnamon-scented parlor. The Ohioans troop by without seeing me, their voices falling, becoming more intimate as they reach the first landing and then the hallway above. They are full silent as their key enters the lock.

I cruise around the old wainscoted parlor lined with oak bookshelves, a full complement of cast-off butler and drumhead tables, slipcovered couches, wobbly hassocks, nautical-looking brass lamps — all scavenged at antique fairs and roadside flea markets in the Cortland-Binghamton-Oneonta triangle. The scented candle has been extinguished, and bulky shadows encompass the wall art, which includes, in addition to Natty Bumppo himself, a framed, yellowed topo from the Twenties, showing “Lake Otsego and Environs,” several portraits of bewhiskered “founders”—doubtless all shopkeepers dressed up to look like presidential candidates — and a sampler hung over the main door, with good advice for the spiritual wanderer: “Confidences are easy to give, but hard to get back.”

I mouse over the various tabletops, fingering the reading matter — stacks of old MLS booklets for guests whose vacation idea is to consider putting down roots in an alien locale (the Ohioans, for example). The price of the fancy Federalist pile Paul and I passed this afternoon is eye-poppingly low by Haddam standards at 530K (something has to be wrong with it). Plenty of old Peoples and American Heritages and National Geographics are stacked up on the long library table by the back window. I browse down the shelf containing stiff bound editions of New York History, the Otsego Times, The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, American Cage Bird magazine, Mechanix Illustrated, Hersey’s Hiroshima in three different editions, two whole yards of matched Fenimore Coopers, a Golden Treasure of Quotable Poetry, two volumes of Rails of the World, surprisingly enough another Classic Holes of Golf, a stack of recent Hartford Courants—as if somebody had moved here from Hartford and wanted to stay in touch. And to my wonderment and out of all account, among the loose and uncategorized books, here is a single copy of my own now-old book of short stories, Blue Autumn, in its original dust jacket, on the front of which is a faded artist’s depiction of a 1968-version sensitive-young-man, with a brush cut, an open-collared white shirt, jeans, and an uncertain half smile, standing emblematically alone in the dirt parking lot of a country gas station with an anonymous green pickup (possibly his) visible over his shoulder. Much is implied.

I flinch as always when I see it, since in a panicky time-crunch the artist elected to paint my face from my author’s photo right onto the cover of my book, so that I see my young self now, made to look perplexed, forever staring out alone from the front of my very first (and only) literary effort.

And yet I cart the book over to one of the red-shaded lamps, full of unexpected thrill. The boxful that I own, shipped to Haddam when the book was remaindered, was left in the attic on Hoving Road, untouched since its arrival and of no more interest to me than a box of clothes that no longer fit.

But this book, this specimen, sparks interest — since it is after all still “out there,” in circulation, still official if somewhat compromised, still striving to the purposes I meant it to: staging raids on the inarticulate, being an ax for the frozen sea within us, providing the satisfactions of belief in the general mess of imprecision. (Nothing’s wrong with high-flown purposes, then or now.)

A cake of fine house dust covers the top, so it’s clear none of tonight’s Clue players has had it down for pre-bedtime sampling. The old binding makes a dry-leaves crackle as I open it back. Pages at the front, I see, are yellow and water-stained, whereas those in the middle are milky, smooth and untouched. I take a look at the aforementioned author photo, a black-and-white taken by my then-girlfriend, Dale McIver: again a young man, though this time with a completely unwarranted confidence etched in his skinny mouth, ludicrously holding a beer and smoking a cigarette (!), an empty sun-lit (possibly Mexican) barroom and tables behind, staring fixedly at the camera as though he meant to say: “Yep, you just about have to live out here on the wild margins to get this puppy done the way God intended. And you probably couldn’t hack it, if you want to know the gospel.” And I, of course, couldn’t hack it; chose, in fact, a much easier puppy on a much less wild margin.

Though I’m not displeased to view myself thus — fore and aft, as it were, on my own book, two sides of the issue; not queasy in the hollow of my empty stomach where most of life-that-might’ve-been finally comes to rest. I carried that sandpaper regret around in me for a time back in 1970, then simply omitted it the way I’d have Paul omit the nightmares and dreads of his child’s life stolen away by bad luck and unconscionable adults. Forget, forget, forget.

Nor is this the first time I’ve happened onto my book blind: church book sales, sidewalk tables in Gotham, yard sales in unlikely midwestern cities, one rain-soaked night on top of a trash can behind the Haddam Public Library, where I was groping around in the dark to find the after-hours drop-off. And once, to my dismay, in a friend’s house shortly after he’d blown his brains out, though I never thought my book played a part. Once published, a book never strays so far from its author.

But without thinking a thought about its absolute worth, I intend to put my book in Char’s hands the moment she arrives and to speak the words I can’t now wait to speak: “Who do you think wrote this, that I found right here on the shelf below Natty Bumppo’s portrait and hard by the J. F. Coopers?” (My two likenesses will be my proof.) And not that it’ll have any important favorable effect on her. But for me, finding it still in “use” is high on the manifest of writerly thrills longed for — along with seeing someone you don’t know hungrily reading your book on an overland bus in Turkey; or noticing your book on the shelf behind the moderator on Meet the Press next to The Wealth of Nations and Giants in the Earth; or seeing your book on a list of overlooked American masterpieces compiled by former insiders in the Kennedy administration. (None of these has been my good luck yet.)

I blow the dust off and run my finger over the page ends to uncover the original red stain, then flip to the front and survey the contents page, twelve little titles, each as serious as a eulogy: “Words to Die By,” “The Camel’s Nose,” “Epitaph,” “Night Wing,” “Waiting Offshore,” all the way down to the title story — considered my “chance” at something to expand into a novel and thereby break me into the big time.

The book doesn’t in fact seem ever to have been opened (only rained on). I turn past the dedication—“To My Parents” (who else?) — back to the title page, ready to greet crisp “Frank Bascombe,” “Blue Autumn” and “1969,” set out in sturdy, easy-on-the-eyeball Ehrhardt, and to feel the old synchronicity extend to me in the here and now. Except what my eye finds, scrawled over the title page in blue, and in a hand I don’t know, is: “For Esther, remembering that really bleu autumn with you. Love ya, Dwayne. Spring, 1970,” every bit of which has been x-ed through with a smeary lipstick and below it written: “Dwayne. Rhymes with pain. Rhymes with fuck. Rhymes with the biggest mistake of my life. With contempt for you and your cheap tricks. Esther. Winter, 1972.” A big red smooch has been plastered on the page below Esther’s signature, and this connected by an arrow to the words “My Ass,” also in lipstick. This is a good deal different — by virtue of being a great deal less — than what I’d expected.

But what I feel, dizzily, is not wry, bittersweet, ain’t-life-strange amusement at poor Dwayne and Esther’s hot flame gone smoking under the waves, but a totally unexpected, sickening void opening right in my stomach — right where I said it wouldn’t two minutes ago.

Ann, and the end of Ann and me and everything associated with us, comes fuming up in my nostrils suddenly like a thick poison and in a way it never has even in my darkest seven-year despairings, or in the grim aftermath of my periodic revivals of hope. And instead of bellowing like a gored Cyclops, what I instinctively do is whap my book shut and sling it side-arm whirligig across the room, where it smacks the brown wall, knocks loose a crust of Florida-shaped plaster and hits the floor in the crumbles and dust. (Many fates befall books other than being read and treasured.)

The chasm (and what else is it?) between our long-ago time and this very moment suddenly makes yawningly clear that all is now done and done for; as though she was never that she, me never that me, as though the two of us had never embarked on a life that would lead to this queer librarial moment (though we did). And rather than being against all odds, it’s in precise accordance with the odds: that life would lead to here or someplace just as lonely and spiritless, no less likely than for Dwayne and fiery, heartbroke Esther, our doubles in love. Gone in a hiss and fizzle. (Though if it weren’t that tears had just sprung stinging to my eyes, I’d accept my loss with dignity. Since after all I’m the man who counsels abandonment of those precious things you remember but can no longer make hopeful use of.)

I drag my wrist across my cheeks and dab my eyes with my shirtfront. Someone, I sense, is coming from somewhere in the house, and I hustle over, snake up my book, refit its cover, flatten the pages I’ve busted and carry it back to its coffin slot, where it can sleep for twenty more years — this just as Char appears at the front door, looks out, then sees me standing here like a teary immigrant and saunters in smelling of cigarettes and appley sweetness applied just on the off chance I might be the guy to buy her that condo.

And Char is not the Char of ten minutes ago. She’s dressed now in some shrunk-tight jeans with red cowboy boots, a concha belt, a sleeveless black tank top that reveals strong, round, bare athletic shoulders and the breasts I’ve already envisioned (now in much plainer view). She has done “something” to her eyes, and also to her hair, which has made it frizzier. There’s rose color in her cheeks, and what seems like glistening lubricant on her lips, so that she’s recognizable from when she was a chef, but only just. Though to me she’s not nearly as comely as in her boxy whites, when less of her was in view.

But neither am I in the same “place” emotion-wise as ten minutes ago, nor am I exactly used to women with their tits on such nautical display. And I’m now no longer looking forward to being hauled through the door of the Tunnicliff — a place I can all too perfectly picture — and filling the slot as one of “Char’s guys from the inn” while the locals grab off their nightly geeze at those hogans, while writing me off as the doofus I am.

“All right, Mr. Pleasure Unit, you ready to roll? Or are you still reading the instructions?” Char’s new eyelashes bat closed and open, her small hazel eyes roguishly fixing me. “What’s wrong with your eyes? You been in here crying? Is that what I’m getting into?”

“I looked at a book and got dust in my eyes,” I say ludicrously.

“I didn’t know anybody ever read those books. I thought they were just to make the room look cozy.” She surveys the shelves, unimpressed. “Jeremy buys ’em by the metric ton from some recycler up in Albany.” She sniffs, detecting some of the cinnamon redolence. “Pew. P-U,” she says. “Smells like an old folks’ home at Christmas in here. I’m in need of a Black Velvet.” She fires me off a challenging smile. A smile with a future.

“Great!” I say, thinking I’d feel better if I could just take a walk by myself down to the soggy lakeshore and hear the tinkly, liquid sounds of faceless, nameless others enjoying themselves gaily in long, red-walled rooms lit by crystal chandeliers. Not much to ask.

But I can’t back out on something as unfreighted as a simple walk and a drink, especially since it’s me did the asking. Canceling will make me out to be a weepy, cringing nutcase who can’t go a step without scuttling back three for fear and shame.

“Maybe I’ll just have to break down and cook you a fried-egg sandwich à la Charlane. Since you’re so starved.” She’s moving toward the front screen, her hard butt encased in denim like a rodeo wrangler’s, her thighs chunky and taut.

“I should try to find my son eventually, I guess,” I mutter not quite loud enough to be heard, following onto the porch, where little town lights twinkle in through the trees.

“Say what?” Char gives me a head-cocked look. We’re in the solid porch darkness here now.

“My son Paul’s here with me,” I say. “We’re going to the Hall of Fame in the morning.”

“Did you leave Mom at home this time?” She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek again. She has heard a warning signal.

“In a sense I did. I’m not married to her anymore.”

“So who are you married to?”

“Nobody.”

“And where’s your son gone?” She glances out around at the dark lawn, as if he’s there. She runs a finger under her tank top strap, attempting to seem noncommittal. I sniff apple perfume again. That would have to go.

“I don’t know where he is,” I say, trying to sound both at ease and concerned. “He sort of took off when we got here. I had a nap.”

“When was this?”

“I guess five-thirty or a quarter to six. I’m sure he’ll be coming back pretty soon.” I’ve lost all heart for everything now — a walk, the Tunnicliff, a drink, oeufs à la Charlane. Though my failure is a part of human mystery I understand, even have sympathy for. “I should maybe stick around here. So he can find me.” I smile cravenly at her in the darkness.

Out on the highway a dark car rumbles past, its windows open or its top down, loud rock music blaring and thumping through the silent trees. I can make out one scalding phrase only: “Get wet, go deep, take it all.” Paul could be there, in the act of disappearing forever, to be seen by me only on milk cartons or grocery store bulletin boards: “Paul Bascombe, 2–8-73, last seen near Baseball Hall of Fame, 7–2-88.” It is not a relaxing thought.

“Well, whatever stokes your flame the hottest, I guess,” Charlane says, already I hope thinking of something else. “I gotta take off, though.” She’s leaving down the steps right away, concluding I’m more trouble than I’m worth, though also probably embarrassed for me.

“Do you have any children?” I say just to say something.

“Oh yeah,” she says, and half turns back.

“Where’s he right now?” I say. “Or she. Or they?”

“He’s at wilderness survival.”

I hear a faint cry then, a woman’s high-pitched voice, brief and ululating, from somewhere above. Char looks up and around, a little smile crossing her lips. “Somebody’s enjoying her fireworks early.”

“What’s your son learning to survive?” I say, trying not to think about the Ohioans right above us. Char and I are descending back through the stages of familiarity and in a minute will once again be unknown to each other.

She sighs. “He’s with his dad, who lives out in Montana in a tent or a cave someplace. I don’t know. I guess they’re surviving each other.”

“I’m sure you’re a great mom,” I say, apropos of nothing.

“Eastern religion,” she says in a wise-cracky voice. “Motherhood’s as close as I come to it.” She raises her small nose toward the warm, spruce-scented air and sniffs. “I smelled a lilac just then, but it’s too late for lilacs. Musta been somebody’s perfume.” She squints down hard at me as though I’ve suddenly moved far, far away and am moving farther (which I am). It’s a friendly squint, full of sympathy, and makes me want to come down off the porch and give her a bustly hug, but which would only confuse matters. “I assume you’ll find your son,” she says. “Or he’ll find you. Whatever.”

“We will,” I say, holding my ground. “Thanks.”

“Yep,” Char says, and then, as though she’s embarrassed by something else, adds, “They don’t usually stay gone long. Not long enough, really.” Then she hikes off into the trees alone, gone out of sight well before I can manage an audible good-bye.

Très amusant,” a voice familiar to me speaks out of the summer’s wicking darkness. “Très, très amusant. Your most important sexual organ is between your ears. Eeeck, eeeck, eeeck. So use it.”

Down the porch, in the last rocking chair in line, Paul is slouched barely visible behind his drawn-up knees, his The Rock shirt giving out the only light hereabouts. He’s been overhearing my cumbersome parting, no doubt wondering if I’ll get around to finding our dinner.

“Howz ur health?” I say, walking down the line of rockers, laying a palm on the smooth spindled back of his and giving it a small, fatherly push.

“Fine ‘n’ yours?”

“Is that Dr. Rection’s anatomy advice?” I am, God knows, full of airy relief he’s not departed for Chicago or the Bay Area in the blaring-music car, or not off getting his ashes perilously hauled, or, worse, stretched out in the Cooperstown ER with a wound drip-drip-dripping on the tiles, waiting for some old turkey-neck GP, woozy from the Tunnicliff, to shake his head clear. (If I intend to have him home with me, I’ll need to be more vigilant.)

“Was that my new mom?”

“Almost. Did you eat anything?”

“I got a mocktail, some mock turtle soup and a piece of mock apple pie. Don’t mock me, please.” These are all holdovers from childhood. If I could see his face, it would be worked into a look of secret satisfaction. He seems, however, completely calm. I might be making progress with him and not realizing it (every parent’s dearest hope).

“Do you want to call your mother and say you got here safely?”

“Ix-nay.” He’s tossing a little Hacky Sack up and down in the dark, barely making movement but suggesting he’s less calm than seems. I have an aversion to Hacky Sacks. My view is that its skills are perfect only for the sort of brain-dead delinquents who whonked me in the head on my way home from work this spring and sent me sprawling. I understand from it, though, that Paul may have made a connection with the towny kids on the corner.

“Where’d you get that thing?”

“I purchased it.” He still hasn’t looked around. “At the local Finast.” I would still like to ask him if he killed the helpless, driveway grackle, only it now seems too unwieldy a subject. It also seems preposterous to think he could be guilty. “I’ve got a new question to ask you.” He says this in a more assertive voice. Conceivably he’s spent the last four hours in a badly lit diner studying Emerson, fingering his Hacky Sack and mulling issues such as whether nature really suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom that can’t help itself; or whether every true man is a cause, a country and an age. Good issues for anyone to mull.

“Okay,” I say just as assertively, not wanting to seem as eager and encouraged as I am. From across the lawn the tart odor not of lilac but of a car’s exhaust reaches my nostrils. I hear an owl, invisible on a nearby spruce bough. Who-who, who-who, who-who.

“Okay, do you remember when I was pretty little,” Paul says very seriously, “and I used to invent friends? I had some talks with them, and they said things to me, and I’d get pretty involved doing it?” He stares fiercely forward.

“I remember it. Are you doing it again?” This is not about Emerson.

He looks around at me now, as if he wants to see my face. “No. But did it make you feel weird when I did that? Like make you mad or sick and want to puke?”

“I don’t think so. Why?” I’m able to make out his eyes. I’m certain he thinks I’m lying.

“You’re lying, but it’s okay.”

“I felt odd about it,” I say. “Not any of those other things, though.” I am not willing to be called a liar and have no defense in the truth.

“Why were you?” He doesn’t seem angry.

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Then think. I need to know. It’s like one of my rings.” He shifts back around and trains his gaze across toward the windows of the fancier inn across the road, where fewer warm and yellow room lights are on now. He wants my voice in his ears perfectly distilled. The waning moon has laid a silken, sparkling path dead across the lake, and above its luminance is arrayed a feast of summer stars. He makes, and I vaguely hear it, another tiny eeeck, a self-assuring sound, a little rallying eeeck.

“It made me feel a little weird,” I say uncomfortably. “I thought you were getting preoccupied with something that maybe was hurtful in the long run.” (Innocence, what else? Though that word seems not exactly right either.) “I wanted you not to get tricked. I guess maybe it wasn’t very generous of me. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m wrong too. I could’ve just been jealous. I am sorry.”

I hear him breathe, air hitting his bare knees where he has them hugged up to his chest. I feel a small loosening of relief, mixed of course with shame for ever making him feel his preoccupations mattered less than mine. Who’d have thought we’d talk about this?

“It’s all right,” he says, as if he knew a great, great deal about me.

“Why’d this come to mind?” I say, a warm hand still on his rocking chair, his back still turned to me.

“I just remember it. I liked doing it, and I thought you thought it was bad. Don’t you really think something’s wrong with me?” he says — unbeknownst to him, fully within his own command now, an adult for just this moment.

“I don’t think so. Not especially.”

“On a scale of one to five, with five being hopeless?”

“Oh,” I say. “One, probably. Or one and a half. It’s better than me. Not as good as your sister.”

“Do you think I’m shallow?”

“What do you do that’s shallow?” I wonder where he’s been to come back with these questions.

“Make noises sometimes. Other things.”

“They aren’t very important.”

“Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be now? I’m sorry to ask that.”

“Thirteen,” I say bravely. “You did ask me about that today already.”

“He could still be alive, though.” He rocks forward, then back, then forward. Maybe life will seem better when Mr. Toby reaches the end of his optimum life span. I hold his chair steady. “I’m thinking I’m thinking again,” he says as if to himself. “Things don’t fit down together right for very long.”

“Are you worried about your court hearing?” I pinch his chair-back hard between my fingers and hold it nearly still.

“Not especially,” he says, copying me. “Were you supposed to give me some big advice about it?”

“Just don’t try to be the critic of your age, that’s all. Don’t be a wise-ankle. Let your best qualities come through naturally. You’ll be fine.” I touch his clean cotton shoulder, ashamed again, this time for waiting till now to touch him lovingly.

“Are you coming up with me?”

“No. Your mother’s going.”

“I think Mom’s got a boyfriend.”

“That’s not interesting to me.”

“Well, it should be.” He says this completely without commitment.

“You don’t know. Why do you think you remember everything and think you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know.” He stares out at headlights that are curving along the road in front of our inn. “That stuff just comes back around all the time.”

“Do the things seem important to you?”

“Importanter than what?”

“I don’t really know. Importanter than something else you might do.” The debating club, getting your Junior Life Saver’s certificate, anything in the here and now.

“I don’t want to have it forever. That’d be completely fucked up.” His teeth click down once and grind together hard. “Like today for a while, back at the basketball thing, it went away for a while. Then I got it back.”

We pause in silence again. The first adult conversation a man can have with his son is one in which he acknowledges he doesn’t know what’s good for his own child and has only an out-of-date idea of what’s bad. I don’t know what to say.

Through the trees now there comes into view a medium-size brown-and-white dog, a springer, loping toward us, a yellow Frisbee in his mouth, his collar jingling, his breath exaggerated and audible. Somewhere out behind him, a man’s hearty voice, someone out for a walk in the parky darkness. “Keester! Here, Keester,” the voice says. “Come on now, Keester. Fetch it! Keester — here, Keester.” Keester, on a mission of his own, stops, looks at us in the porch shadows, sniffs us, his Frisbee clenched tight, while his master strolls on, calling.

“Come on now, Keester,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

“It’s Keester, the wonder dog,” I say. Keester seems happy to be just that.

“I was bewildered when I saw I’d turned into a dog—“

“Named Keester,” I say. Keester stares up at us now, uncertain why we strangers would know his name. “I guess my thinking is,” I say, “you’re trying to keep too much under control, son, and it’s holding you back. Maybe you’re trying to stay in touch with something you liked, but you have to keep going. Even if it’s scary and you screw up.”

“Uh-huh.” He leans his head back toward me and looks up. “How can I not be a critic of my age? Is that something you think’s pretty great?”

“It doesn’t have to be great,” I say. “But for instance, if you go in a restaurant and the floor’s marble and the walls are oak, you wouldn’t wonder if it’s all fake. You’d sit down and order tournedos and be happy. And if you don’t like it, or you think it’s a mistake to eat there, you just don’t come back. Does that make any sense?”

“No.” He shakes his head confidently. “I probably wouldn’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes it’s not that bad to think about it. Keester,” he says in a sharp command voice to poor old baffled Keester. “Think! Think, boy! Remember your name.”

“It will make sense,” I say. “You don’t have to fight to get everything right, that’s all. Sometimes you can relax.” I notice two more yellow window squares go dark in the big inn across the way. Who-who, goes the owl. Who-who. Who-who. He’s got Keester in his sights, standing stupidly with his yellow Frisbee, waiting for us to get interested in throwing it, as we always do.

“If you’re a tightrope walker in the circus, what’s your best trick?” Paul looks up at me, smiling cruelly.

“I don’t know. Doing it blindfolded. Doing it naked.”

“Falling,” Paul says authoritatively.

“That’s not a trick,” I say. “It’s a fuck-up.”

“Yeah, but he can’t stand the straight and narrow another minute, because it’s so boring. And nobody ever knows if he falls or jumps. It’s great.”

“Who told you about that?” Keester, finally disappointed by us, turns and trots off through the trees, becoming a paler and paler hole in the dark, then is gone.

“Clarissa. She’s worse than I am. She just doesn’t show it. She doesn’t act out anything, because she’s sneaky.”

“Who says?” I am absolutely certain this isn’t true, certain she’s just as she seems, flipping the bird behind her parents’ backs like any normal girl.

“Dr. Lew D. Zyres sez,” Paul says, and suddenly bounds up, with me still clinging to his chairback. “My session’s over tonight, Doctah.” He starts off toward the front screen, his big shoes noisily clunkety-clunking on the porch boards. He is again trailing a sour smell. Possibly it is the smell of stress-related problems. “We need some fireworks,” he says.

“I’ve got bottle rockets and sparklers in the car. And this wasn’t a session. We don’t have sessions. This was you and your father having a serious talk.”

“People are always shocked at me when I say”—the screen swings open and Paul tromps in out of sight—“ciao.”

“I love you,” I say to my son, slipping away, but who should hear these words again if only to be able to recall much later on: “Somebody said that to me, and nothing since then has really seemed quite as bad as it might have.”