John's Wife

~ ~ ~

Once, there was a man named John. John had money, family, power, good health, high regard, many friends. Though he worked hard for these things, he actually found it difficult not to succeed; though not easily satisfied, he was often satisfied, a man whose considerable resources matched his considerable desires. A fortunate man, John. He was a builder by trade: where he walked, the earth changed, because he wished it so, and, like as not, his wishes all came true. Closed doors opened to him and obstacles fell. His enthusiasms were legendary. He ate and drank heartily but not to excess, played a tough but jocular game of golf, roamed the world on extended business trips, collected guns and cars and exotic fishing tackle, had the pleasure of many women, flew airplanes, contemplated running for Congress just for the sport of it. In spite of all that happened to his wife and friends, John lived happily ever after, as though this were somehow his destiny and his due.

Floyd, less favored, worked for John. He managed John’s Main Street hardware business, envied John’s power, having none of his own, and coveted John’s wife. “Covet” was Floyd’s word, out of his respect for the Bible, and because he knew what an evil man he was. It embarrassed Floyd to speak of religion outside of Sunday school and at the bowling alley he swore his soul away to the dark powers with every split or spare he blew, but Floyd had come to this quiet prairie town on the run from a thieving and hell-raising past and had got the church between him and the forces — both vindictive and tempting — that pursued him, and so far it had served him well. He was thankful and taught the Bible to John’s children at Sunday school, his voice trembling as he ticked off the Ten Commandments, potent with consequence. Floyd bowled in the winter leagues, toured distant national parks with his wife Edna in the summers, and ran the best hardware store for miles around. Their nearest friend in town was old Stu the car dealer, the only person here they felt at home with, though they saw less of him after his first wife died. They never had a falling out, though, as Otis later claimed.

Now, Gordon was also attracted to John’s wife, though not quite in the same way as Floyd. “Covet” was not his word, nor exactly his inclination. What engaged Gordon’s attention were her fleeting glances and her subtle movements, somehow never quite complete. She seemed always to be at rest and not at rest at the same time. There was a stillness, a stateliness about her that gave her a kind of monumental grace — yet his photos of her, whether in the studio or out on the streets, never seemed quite able to capture this, no two alike, their infinite variety suggesting an elusive mystery that tested him and drew him on. Gordon sold film, albums, frames, and cameras in his photo shop, developed the snaps of others, took passport and wedding and news photos, and was locally famous for his studio portraits, but before all else, he was an artist. And John’s wife, whom he associated with the intrinsic indwelling truth of the town, its very suchness, so to speak, was — though she was not entirely aware of this — his principal subject. He longed to do a complete study of her, in all her public and private aspects. John’s wife stepping out of her car (he had this one). John’s wife trying on a hat. John’s wife dreaming. John’s wife teeing off, walking her dog (this, too), combing her daughter’s hair, combing her own hair, scratching an itch. He’d called her in the titles of his collection by many names but never her own—“Andromeda,” “Eunomia,” “Muse,” “Princess,” “Echo” (suggested to him by a story his friend Ellsworth had once told), “Beauty,” “Woman,” “Model,” “Desire,” “She”—but all of these names provoked private stirrings in him that he felt to be in conflict with his higher artistic aspirations, so in the end he chose the more professional and impersonal practice of considering his photos of her as subsets of his traditional studio family portraits and thence referred to her simply as “John’s Wife.” As in “John’s Wife Taking Communion” (now in his collection). “John’s Wife Pregnant” (missed it). “John’s Wife Emerging from the Morning Mist” (not yet). He wished to tour her as Floyd might a national park, to explore her intimately, exhaustively, hour by hour, inch by inch — John’s wife on the telephone, John’s wife at a PTA meeting, on a swing, at the movies, John’s wife writing a letter, John’s wife examining her underwear, John’s wife in the supermarket, at the doctor’s office, at a dance, in the rain, in ecstasy, in doubt — until there was nothing left to see. It might be said that Gordon — whose passion was to capture the private gesture, the hidden surface, the vanishing secrets of the race, freeing them from time’s ceaseless violence — coveted stasis.

Something like this could be said of Otis as well, though Otis was no photographer. He had bought a camera once, but had felt clumsy with the thing in his hand, cheated by the little paper pictures: his wife had fattened, his children grown to brats, these lost shapes meant nothing to him. Otis was a man of the present, it was the community, here and now, that held his interest. This community Otis saw as a closed system, no less fixed by custom and routine than by its boundaries on the map, a clocklike mechanism if not perfect in its parts and movements, then at least perfectly adequate. Nothing upset him more than disruptions to the pattern of the daily round. He thought people should go out of town to get drunk, and stay out until they were sober. Parties were for Saturday nights; noise on other nights made Otis nervous. He distrusted all intrusions, all changes, strangers, big ideas: why mess with a good thing? Even unseasonable weather disconcerted him. John’s grand projects did, admire him though he might. Newsman Ellsworth’s wacky getup, kids dragracing over the humpback bridge out by Settler’s Woods or out at the malls, that spooky photographer with his secret albums, loitering strangers and cars with out-of-state plates. Otis thought of himself as a kind of guardian warrior, one eye on the periphery, one eye on the center. At the center lived John’s wife, whom he loved.

Floyd, Gordon, Otis, then: all with this in common. And others, too: Kevin, for example, later known as Patch, his eye on her shifting hips and stiffened elbow, or the embittered Nerd with the hallowed garter in his pocket, dreamy Ellsworth and scheming Rex, her pastor Reverend (“Let it happen”) Lenny, wistful old Alf with his finger up her, Fish and Turtle (“Got the hots,” said Fish, and Turtle blushed and grinned and got them, too) — what male in town was not, one way or another, fascinated by John’s wife? John was not. An irony. Or perhaps this is often the case. John was a busy man who liked to make money, see the world, have a good time while it lasted, and as for women, he used them as freely and unreflectively as he did men. And with much less hope of making money off them, though he often did. He supposed they had their problems, who did not? But he had a big construction firm to run, lands to master, malls and suburbs to build, as well as Barnaby’s old lumberyard, a chain of stores, an airport and a budding cargo line, money in several national and local businesses and industries, everything from computer games and action toys to alarm systems and armaments, he had properties and ambitions (on his shortlist: a racetrack and a baseball team) and an appetite big as the prairie, and when he thought of his wife and children, he thought of them mainly as political and social assets, which he estimated once a year by means of Trevor’s tax returns and Gordon’s family portraits. Anyway, he disbelieved in love, at least between people. What John loved, as he told Nevada while doing a loop and roll at a thousand feet that made her wet her pants with excitement and terror, were the days of his life.

Gordon, gesture’s hunter, would have understood John’s view of love, though he didn’t know of it. As John loved life, Gordon loved form. People, intrinsically grotesque, were beautiful only (as he had put it many years ago, shocking his friend Ellsworth, who could not understand the photos he was taking of his mother) as shapes frozen in space. Beyond his photographs, life was disintegration and madness, a meaningless frenzied blur. Birth, death, labor, love: he looked, blinked, and out of his acid baths came a piece of time. Chosen by him, held by him. Forever his, while the world outside dissolved into obscene confusion, vaguely remembered, if at all. Some subjects — a child with its finger in its nose, a dead body, an empty swimming pool, crumpled metal, an intimate scar, reflections in a window — drew him toward a kind of interpretive engagement, in which the photographic forms seemed to hold on to something not visible on the surface of his print. Others (which he thought of as somehow nobler) — John’s wife, for example, uninhabited vistas, slanted light on bared flesh — released him from these worldly illusions into the freedom of pure but sensuous abstraction. Such moments, such photos, he could contemplate forever.

One day, Waldo and Lorraine walked into Gordon’s studio to order portraits of their two boys, and lying flat on the glass counter was a blowup of John’s wife, taken from a group shot at a country club dance. Lorraine, who distrusted John’s wife in the same way that she distrusted the heroines of all the novels she’d read, cast a suspicious glance at Gordon: who was this picture for? Couldn’t be for John, what did he care for photographs, much less of his wife? Lorraine’s husband Waldo said: “Hey! What a swell picture of John’s wife!” She could have strangled him. Fat Gordon flushed and pushed the photo aside: Lorraine saw this and wondered if there was some kind of hanky-panky going on. She had heard about some of this clown’s other photos. Lorraine had had a dream about him once in which he seemed to exist in or as a dirty puddle on the floor, and she’d awakened with the realization that there was something sinister about the photographer that generally went unrecognized. Waldo continued to beam happily, noticing nothing. Lorraine had married the most popular guy in college, but he was a complete corkhead, an imbecilic party boy — what she and the other girls used to call a windup talking dildo. John had brought her husband here as his Assistant VP, but, with his brain, he was more like an Assistant BB. Empty Wallets, they called him. When John asked her why she gave Waldo such a hard time, she’d replied: “Marry a prick with ears and soon all you’ve got left are the ears.” John had grinned his grin and she’d felt her spine lock up. “Haw,” said Waldo now as Gordon’s wife Pauline came in with her blouse half-buttoned and her hair uncombed, and while Waldo ogled the little frump, Gordon said: “Where the heck’s my schedule-book, Pauline?” She didn’t know.

Why would Lorraine suspect hanky-panky where John’s wife was concerned? Probably, her best friend Marge would say, because Lorraine was a constitutionally suspicious woman, made all the more so by her vulgar, butt-slapping, two-timing husband, and because, being a relative newcomer in town, Lorraine didn’t know John’s wife all that well. Marge could have told her: suspect John if you like, hanky-panky was that man’s middle name (she would have been telling Lorraine nothing new), but not his wife. It would be like suspecting that the cornflowers in John’s wife’s garden got up at night and went out chasing bees. Marge had grown up here, a year behind John in school, a year ahead of his wife, and in an isolated little prairie town like this one they were all like siblings. They’d gone to birthday parties together, church picnics, field trips, high school and country club dances. They were in National Honor Society together, they’d exchanged valentines and May baskets, played hide-and-seek, colored Easter eggs in each other’s kitchens, raced bicycles and had fights, popped one another’s blackheads. The world had changed over the years since then and everything in it, but not John’s wife, poor thing. Everybody’s favorite Homecoming Queen. Period. Marge felt pity for her, but at the same time hated her for being pitiable, just as she despised John but admired him for having the power to be despicable. Marge and John had fought since grade school, were still fighting, most recently over the brutal razing of the city park to build another of John’s tasteless eyesores, this time a concrete civic center and swimming pool, and most of the time John, more ruthless than she, and richer, too, had beat her, beat her badly. She’d never let that stop her, she had gone on standing up to him all her life, fighting back through defeat after defeat. Just as she was about to do again, so he’d better get ready. It was the only thing a man like that could respect, and truth to tell, Marge wanted that, John’s respect, and knew that she deserved it.

The trouble was, she went about it backassward, and with an ass as ugly as hers, this was a big mistake, or anyway that was Lorraine’s husband Waldo’s opinion. Marge was a tedious busybody (“pissy-potty” was how Waldo pronounced it, never softly), a piece of cold “pushy” with an old axe to battle, a butt like a stop sign, and for tits nothing but knuckled nipples, hard as brass. It was her husband Trevor (Triv was Waldo’s name for him, short for Trivial Trev) who wore the panties in that family, Waldo always said. He called Marge Herr Marge, sometimes Hairy Marge or Butch, Mad Marge when she had her dander up, which was most of the time when Waldo was around, he gave her little peace. Nor she him, it was disgust at first sight. When he and Lollie first came to town some years ago, thanks to his good old college pal and true-blue fraternity brother, Long John, Waldo had got paired up with Marge in a mixed-twosomes tourney at the club, and not only had she outscored him, he’d been too crocked on the back nine to do anything but slash wildly at his approach shots, or even, what the hell, to see the goddamn greens he was supposedly aiming at, and so had blown their chances for the trophy, which she was apparently used to winning. Most of the time, she’d had to help him find his ball, which seemed always to be miles away from where he’d last seen it, and in ever worsening circumstances, which for some reason tickled his funnybone. “Hoo-boy! Gone again! Go fetch, Marge!” The one time when he found it before she did, he stood on it, drinking from his pocket flask, and let her keep looking until she was frothing at the mouth, his stifled laughter pumping out an obstreperous rat-a-tat, itself not unlike stifled laughter, from the other end of his wind machine. Herr Marge didn’t think it was at all funny when he finally “discovered” the ball underneath his alligator golf shoe (“So that’s what it was! Sumbitch! Thought my corns was acting up!”), but Waldo was having a terrific time. On the last hole, he just couldn’t sink his putt, the goddamned green kept tipping and yawing on him, so after six or seven goofy tries, one from between his legs with the handle of the putter, the business end hooked in the fly of his checkered lavender golf pants, he just laid back and swatted the little booger out of sight, maxing out on that hole as a kind of fitting climax to a wonderful day. His partner, determinedly lining up her own putt, was muttering bitterly about his obnoxious drunken behavior, his boring vulgarity, and his basic inability to play this game, so he tossed down another ball, turned sober long enough to keep the green steady under his feet, and with a clean crisp stroke caromed his ball into hers, croquet-style, while she was still bent over it, sending it off into a sand trap, a brilliant shot that was widely admired at the nineteenth hole afterwards by just about everyone except Mad Marge and his own unloving wife Lorraine, who dragged him away, the mean old grouch, before he’d reaped his full rewards.

Well, they were new in town that summer and wholly dependent on the beneficence of good brother John, whose wife was close to that woman, or said to be, so Waldo’s wife had her reasons for jerking the reins, but as to love, it was true, there was none of it in her heart, for — even though she had once guided her life by it, due, she now believed, to bad reading habits — Lorraine, like Gordon and John, disbelieved in love. A sales hook for the entertainment racket, meaningful as “lite” on diet foods, that was her opinion. Waldo, who had had few reading habits, good or bad, still did believe in love, even if he couldn’t say what it was. He knew, though, it could get you in trouble, and if it could, would. This view of love as an irresistible but chastising force would have been shared by many in town — by Veronica, for example, another schoolchum of John’s wife and much chastised by that emotion to which she nevertheless wistfully clung — or by Otis, upholder of order, for whom love was more or less the same thing as grace, though one could sometimes make you hot and foolish, while the other usually did not — or by Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, who believed that all love came from the Creator, like her husband Lennox said on Sunday mornings, but that the Lord sometimes moved in mysteriously distressing ways. As now, for example: how was it possible, dear God, her present plight? Kate the town librarian, referring to this sweet-joy/wild-woe power of love to overwhelm, delight, and then undo, liked to say that humankind’s apprehensions of the divine and of the diabolical were equally love’s delusions, while goodness, truth, and beauty, without love, were fantasies, idle fictions of a mind turned in on itself and meaningful as chicken scratchings. That is to say, Kate, assenting but without illusions, also believed, much loved herself so long as she lived, in love. As did Dutch the motelkeeper, who nightly watched what he called meat fever erupt and die beyond his magic mirrors but scrupulously kept his distance from a force he thought of as anything but benign. And likewise Alf, he of the inquiring finger, for whom love was, unreasonably, reason’s sedative, else best understood as a chemical reaction to certain neural stimuli, sometimes locally pleasurable, generally overrated. His nurse Columbia sympathized with this latter opinion, though more or less, with but one exception, in the abstract, but did not trust her widowered colleague’s pose of bemused detachment, especially with John’s wife in the stirrups. For Clarissa, it was just great, love was. “Intense” was her word for it. Like, wow. But for her granddad, Barnaby the builder, it only led to despair, pinning you to the earth and gnawing your heart out, without letting you die. If one could stop loving, there would be peace and death. Barnaby being yet another who, inconsolably, loved John’s wife.

Ah well, love: a profound subject. Back in his mayoral days, giving the traditional bandstand speech at the climax of the annual Pioneers Day parade one hot summer, John’s wife still just a schoolkid then, Barnaby’s old lawyer friend Maynard, thumbs hooked in the sleeveholes of his vest, speculated that it was love that had made and mapped the town: the original pioneers’ love of adventure that brought them out here, the settlers’ love of the land that caused them to stay and put down roots, the love of the early town planners for order and progress and the entrepreneurial spirit, those qualities that caused this great town center to rise so gloriously where nothing larger than teepees had ever been seen before, and the love of all those present for justice and prosperity and the good life and for one another. And also for God, he was quick to add. He evoked the time when the only sounds you would hear in these streets would be the clip-clop of horses in the dirt and mud, the lazy drone of bees and locusts, the clink of chopped ice in the lemonade pitchers and the creaking of porch swings, and he said that these were the sounds of love. He spoke of the town as their common mother, the town limits as her loving embrace, and he compared the crisscross grid of the streets to the quilting of a mattress on which, he said, we were all one big loving family, causing his sister Opal, John’s mother, to pick up her paper fan and wave it in front of her face, perhaps finding this one metaphor too many and wishing to remind her brother it was time to have the preacher bless them all and sit down. This Maynard was the father of John’s garter-clutching cousin Maynard Junior, sometimes known as the Mange or the Nerd, for whom love was a singular obsession, otherwise a kind of dirty joke, and he in turn in time became the father of Maynard III, also called Turtle, who thought love was for wimps until his buddy Fish gave him a couple of new ideas a few weeks ago, which were exciting but not very clear.

Old silver-tongued Grandpa Maynard might still be around, but the city park and its quaint gazebo-like bandstand where he flaunted his rhetoric were forever gone, just a dimming memory now like the now-dimming ex-mayor’s fondly remembered clinks, creaks, and clip-clops, public speaking of the all-community sort being performed in more recent times inside the new civic center or else, until John created Peapatch Park, on temporary staging erected in the asphalt parking lot outside, depending on the weather and the occasion. This starkly modern new edifice, named in honor of old Barnaby the builder and built by his son-in-law, was generally held to be, though controversial, the town’s major new construction of the decade, perhaps (some said) of the century, its most popular architectural innovation being its Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof, famous throughout the state and written up in all the metropolitan Sunday papers. You could always count on John to make things happen. His old football, wrestling, and track coach Snuffy, one of the city councilmen most responsible for pushing the project through all its legal and political obstacles (always some soreheads opposed to progress), became, with John’s blessing, the unopposed candidate for the mayoralty and was himself a public speaker of some renown, plain-talking but inspirational in his gruff straight-from-the-shoulder cut-the-crap way. Old Snuffy, as the townsfolk liked to put it, knew how to kick butt. Starting with his own teams. More than one young wiseass in this town had got used in practice as a live tackling dummy until the message got through that when Snuffy talked about giving your all for the team, son, he meant all. Ever do two hundred push-ups with a foot in your back? In the mud? In full uniform? After a game? About love, though, this inveterate bachelor had little to say. He was better on grit and hustle and hanging tough. Had Snuffy known women in his time? Sure, plenty. And all kinds, too, from two-bit to fancy. But love, which he believed in like everybody else, was never a head-to-head body slam with some woman, or man or boy either, it was more abstract than that, more like an ideal form, to speak in the philosophizing manner, as in “I love this game!” or “Body contact! I love it!” To love was to play hard, and to be loved was to win.

God-fearing Floyd, who managed John’s downtown hardware store and was a lifelong expert on butt kicking, mostly from the receiving end, had a more down-to-earth, one-on-one notion of what love was, having once loved his own wife Edna, and that was how he knew that what he now felt for John’s wife was covetousness. He did not want to give himself to her, did not want to embrace her, care for her, adore her, live with her. He did not even want to make love to her. He wanted to throw her down on her fantastic ass and fuck the bejesus out of her. Praise the Lord, this had not yet happened. “Thou shalt not!” he roared at the giggling brats in Sunday school, his voice quaking with the conflict in his heart. He often imagined taking her right there, among the choir robes, something about the glossy feel of them, the range of murky body odors, the cheap lockerroom challenge of the church’s damp back chambers with their un-painted cement walls, cold tile floors. Or else over a counter of carpet tacks, flare nuts, and auger bits down at the store on Main Street. On top of the lead float in the Pioneers Day parade. On the fancy lime green toilet in John’s house between bridge hands (the toilet in Floyd’s house was white with a pink terrycloth seat cover and a loose handle). Or, shoot, why not trump her right on the cardtable itself, frigging grand slam! Maybe his feelings toward John were mixed up in these stormy desires. Whenever the four of them played bridge or had dinner together, which was about once every three or four months, depending on John’s sullen sense of duty (Floyd sensed this and it embittered him), Floyd contrived to sit so as to have his knee pressed against John’s wife’s knee. This recklessness: was it just another effort to emulate John?

John was a man often emulated, Floyd was not alone in this. Some men emulated his style, others his vocabulary, some his aggressiveness or his laugh. Alf emulated his golf swing, not that it did him any good, old Stu the car dealer his jokes and Hard Yard his derring-do, Lennox his cool acceptance of the way things were. When Lennox told his wife Beatrice, his children, his students, his congregation, and most of all himself, “Let it happen,” he was emulating John. For John’s old high school coach Snuffy, entering politics, it was not so much the boy’s fierce team loyalties that he emulated (these Snuffy shared and who knows but engendered) as his strategic use of them in others. In short, it was John’s smarts he sought to emulate, just as for Dutch it was his friend’s killer instincts, and for Marge’s husband Trevor, aka Trivial Trev, his employer’s respect for numbers, for statistics. “There’s no such thing as money, Trev,” John used to tell him, his reading spectacles halfway down his broken nose making him look mockingly professorial, “only the counting of it.” Trevor also emulated John’s attention to detail, his caution with money, his staying power, but he may have been misreading John, seeing what he wanted to see. As all do. Lorraine’s cork-head husband Waldo emulated everything about John, some even thought he was making fun of John, but in actuality Waldo thought John was emulating him. Perhaps Waldo was right, partly right anyway, they had been buddies since college, it was a question of which came first, as Waldo liked to say: the chigger or the leg. Though they had often shared women in the past, Waldo even emulated John’s attitude toward John’s wife: utter disinterest. Anything else would have seemed like incest to him.

Otis, who emulated John’s quiet force, something he had picked up from John back when they had played football here together, had been in love with John’s wife since high school, though she was surely unaware of it. He had never gone out with her, hardly dreamed of it (in this respect, there was no emulating John, not for Otis), had rarely even spoken to her, but they had met a couple of times at high school parties, and one night at one of them she had taught him how to dance. He could still see, as though in a dream, their four feet shuffling about below them, crisscrossing on the shiny hardwood floor of the school gym, their toes bumping, could still feel her soft hand on the back of his neck as she led him about. Though he was now married with four children and never danced, the warm proximity and generosity of her young body that night in the high school gym was still his best and most magical knowledge of womanhood. Whenever Otis, self-styled guardian warrior, thought of the Virgin Mary, he thought of John’s wife.

Whenever Pauline the photographer’s wife thought of Otis, she thought of the way he cried the first time she sucked him off. She thought he should play James Cagney in the movies. Whenever she thought of Otis’s cleft-chinned high school football coach Snuffy, she thought of a cartoon character in a dirty comicbook who wore his impotence on his face. Not surprising that her husband Gordon’s campaign poster headshot of the squinty old geezer with the sausage nose had attracted so much graffiti. Whenever she thought of her husband, she thought of some kind of fat robot with a big glass eye and an exploding forehead. Once he had got the floodlamps so close to her thighs, he had burned them. This shot (what did he think he’d see?) had not turned out. Whenever Pauline thought of the three brothers from the drugstore, Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, she thought of a story about eating and bedding down she’d been told in the first grade. Would her life have been different had she been born with golden locks? It was not a question Pauline would ever have asked. Here’s another: What is love? If pressed, she’d probably have said that it was something that ran over you like a devil train or a wild mule, knocking down all the walls, for that was pretty much what she thought of whenever she thought of love. Whenever Pauline thought of John’s friend Waldo, she thought of a guy in a carnival who invited people in to see the loving couple two feet tall. His wife punched the tickets. With her teeth. Whenever she thought of John, she thought of a young magician (though he was no longer young) with his shadowed face ablaze at the edges with unnatural fire and his pants stuffed full of writhing copperheads. What a night that was. Or must have been: it was like a dream or an old movie. Whenever she thought of John’s wife, she thought of her dead sister coming to her in a nightmare: she was taller than the doorframe, ten years old, wore a ragged white nightdress, and her breasts were dripping blood.

Why did Otis cry when Pauline sucked him off that first time? Otis was a hard man, one of the hardest around. And Pauline was in her day the sweetest cock-sucker in high school, maybe the best the town had ever had. A cynic might suppose it was because John had married the girl that hard man loved. A romantic might say there was something wrong with him. Otis knew better than either: he cried, he knew, for the loss of his freedom. He had taken this experience into his life, and now it would never let him go. He knew, even before he came, lying there in the back of the old panel truck in the Country Tavern parking lot, his knotted-up ass beginning to slap the cold metal floor, that there would be many nights in the years to come when he would need Pauline’s mouth again, when he would roam the streets in a fever, unable to work, unable to go home to his wife and children, unable even to think clearly. As for John marrying the girl he loved, well, she was from a good family in town, Otis from a poor one, if you could even call it a family, and he was younger than she was, he couldn’t blame her for failing to notice him, for marrying a guy who had everything like John, which anyway happened when he was far away at war, and in fact he wished them both well. He became, though at some distance, their friend and protector. John could leave home at any time and know that his wife would be safe. Yet, often, more often even than for Pauline’s warm wet mouth around his cock, Otis the lawman longed for the touch of John’s wife’s hand on the back of his neck again.

Thus, the men of the town revealed themselves through their longings, Otis, Maynard, Floyd, and all the others. Women, too, Lorraine, Marge, Veronica, Beatrice, but in a different way: they were holding something together out here in this vast emptiness, themselves perhaps. The men were more audacious, risked more in their fantasies, as though they perceived this as a birthright. Death was the province of the women, and wisdom, and paradox — garbage left them by the men perhaps, but useful to them as they plotted out the terms of their survival after the cataclysm. Men ventured, but women prepared the field, spreading their skirts out over what ground they could hold (Lollie’s image; her friend Marge, whom Waldo called Mad Marge, rarely wore skirts, saw it differently). The attention of John’s wife, however momentary and enigmatic, was one of the laurels the town’s men competed for, while the women, contrarily, often felt threatened by John’s wife, yet protected by her at the same time. Lorraine, having lost much, sometimes felt she hated her, yet had to admit she needed her as she needed Waldo’s idiocy: one had to live with these strange forces. John’s wife often called forth these ambivalent responses from the women around her. Trevor’s wife Marge envied John’s wife, pitied her. Little Clarissa felt a kind of sentimental rage toward her, Opal a jealous affection, Lumby an erotic disgust. Old Stu’s wife Daphne loved her, more than anyone in the world really, but she could have expressed this better if John’s wife were dead. Floyd’s wife Edna watched her as one watched a cloud: perhaps it would rain; it didn’t matter.

Daphne watched everything these days as one watched a cloud. Seeing and not seeing. John’s wife was her best friend, had been, maybe still was, who could say? Things were pretty vague. Her memories, too, about as cloudy as the rest of it, thanks to Amazing Grace, but she could still recall sitting in the cold concrete stands of a university football game with John, drinking whiskey from a pocket flask. He had invited her up for a Thanksgiving weekend and she had brought her best friend from high school along, John fixing her up with one of his fraternity brothers. Daphne and John were under a blanket and he had his free hand in her pants and she felt very good. As she felt now, with her own hand in her pants, lacking any available other: funny how entangled the present was with the past, hard to tell them apart sometimes. Daphne’s friend was there at the game that day with a comedian named Val or Vern, whatever happened to that guy, he had a missing molar he could whistle through and he sang like a tinny prewar radio crooner, you could even hear the static. How vivid it all was! She should write this up for Elsie’s newspaper: “I Remember.” The guy’s favorite number was “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and while he warbled away, John thrummed her clitoris like a tuning fork. Magic. Like another dimension. It was cold. The sky was blue. The team they were cheering won. Later, in some other memory, might have been the same weekend, more likely not (Christmas? Easter? some time that stank of festering happiness), her best friend had her head on John’s shoulder in the front seat of John’s new silver Mustang, while Daphne was getting mauled on the cramped bucket seats on the floor in the back by a guy with a flat-top haircut and a boil on his nose, feeling not so good. Sort of like, she thought then, thought now, sniffing her fingers, a runner in a relay race, passing on the baton, not because she was ready to let go of it — not Daphne, hell’s bells, are you kidding? give me that sucker! — but because she was supposed to. No wonder she’d been maid of honor at their wedding.

A remarkable event, that wedding, the best the town had seen in years and nothing like it in the nearly two decades since. As one might expect, of course, when Mitch’s son married the builder’s daughter, so dazzlingly beautiful on the day, people said the sight of her made their eyes smart. Her mother, too, was a looker in her day, as many present were reminded when the bride glided into view, though there was a mischievous fiery-eyed edge to Audrey’s darker beauty that her gentle and radiant daughter, beloved by all who knew her as Audrey was not, did not possess. The church was wall-to-wall that memorable day with political bigwigs from the state capital and visiting business cronies of the two family patriarchs, together with all the schoolfriends of the bride, including a penpal all the way from Paris, France, a complementary pack of John’s fraternity brothers down from the university, whooping it up like puppies, Waldo among them, still unmarried then, a multitude of family, friends, and employees, and a great congregation of ordinary townsfolk, young and old, enthralled witnesses to this grand and extravagant event, so full, it seemed, of meaning for them all. Kate the librarian, a thoughtful soul, remarked to her friend Harriet on the occasion (Harriet had just expressed her disappointment that Oxford’s and Kate’s son Yale was not after all the groom, adding with a regretful sigh that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and this wedding just proved it) that, yes, great ingatherings of this kind did indeed confirm the community’s traditional view of itself, but confirmation was also a kind of transformation: this town, unchanging, would never be the same again. On the day, few would have read any but auspicious omens in such an oracle. Daphne, as the maid of honor, was paired with John’s handsome fraternity brother Bruce, his best man: lucky sidekicks, everyone thought, headed for a Hollywood ending. Daphne thought so, too, and it might have happened, were it not, she supposed, for the penpal, and had Daphne behaved herself, too much perhaps to ask. Instead, it was John’s cousin Maynard Junior who, aching rather for the leg that wore it, caught the bridal garter and paid the piper, a day he remembered as the morning after the last day of his life. Full of regret, Maynard. But years, wives, lives later: he still had the garter.

Daphne’s fourth and most recent husband, old Stu, golfing buddy of the groom’s father, supplier of Ford trucks to the bride’s, and so an honored guest at the wedding, remembered it as a day of destiny, helped along in this remembering, never good at it by himself, by one of Gordon’s strangely prophetic photographs, the yellowed eighteen-year-old clipping of which from The Town Crier he kept as long as he lived, framed, on his office desk down at the car lot: “LET HIM EAT CAKE!” it said. “MAID OF HONOR NOURISHES WEDDING GUEST.” That was at the reception, whiskey by then having eased his allergic reaction to the airless church, or anyhow made his suffering seem more remote. It was a real cattleyard in that church, to put a plain word on it, a perfumed crowd so thick you couldn’t breathe, and where there weren’t people there were flowers, heaps of them everywhere, so piled up the brick walls seemed to fall away behind them, a delight to the eye maybe but not to Stu’s tender passages: he had to load up on the antihistamines to keep from wrecking the service with his explosive country-boy sneezing, and even so spent half the ceremony with his head ducked, his wife Winnie, his wife back then, tut-tutting scornfully at his side while down in his lap he quaked and wheezed like an old hounddog with a bone in his throat. There were more flowers at the reception, too, bombing him afresh with their fragrant rot, Audrey must have bought out the whole damned county, but ice-cold whiskey now as well to wash down the antihistamines and scour out the rust — a dangerous chemistry maybe, but by then Stu badly needed both and cared not a goose’s fart for the consequences nor for tedious Winnie’s whiny scolding, ever the backseat driver. Crowds like these were typically just so many potential car buyers for Stu, and he had imagined, as he always did, moving at least half his inventory in such a happy free-spending pack-up — mostly upmarket Lincoln-and-Merc trade at that, a real high-class sale barn — but he couldn’t even see their goddamn faces. When he did finally make a pitch he found himself pushing a four-wheel-drive farm truck on the little girl from France who seemed to think he was telling her a naughty joke. She was peering up at him, all smiles, waiting for the punchline, so he shifted gears, leaned close, and rumbled melodically in her frail papery ear: “Hinky-dinky, par-lee-ffoo!” He winked, roared his big laugh, punched her softly in the shoulder, and thinking, well, the French they are a funny race, drifted off into the noisy blur, looking for the self-service pump: and the next thing he knew, Daphne’s hand was on the throttle and her tongue was in his ear.

Gordon had taken the photo now sitting on the old car dealer’s desk, but Ellsworth had cropped and capped it for his weekly newspaper, Stu and Daph in, their partners out. This was not the tongue-in-the-ear teaser, but her cake-in-the-kisser boffo, though Ellsworth had caught both acts. Who hadn’t? Daphne was pretty manic in those days, hard not to notice, and old Stu, sitting beside her, so drunk his weepy red eyes were crossed, had been an easy target. Earlier that day, or maybe it was later, as she stretched for the bridal bouquet, her strapless bodice had pulled away and, instead of covering herself, Daphne had, whooping like a raffle-winner, grabbed the bouquet and held it to her face, her bare breasts bugging out over the fallen cups on either side of the clutched stems like startled cartoon eyes — another of Gordon’s photos, one that failed to make The Town Crier’s historic spread of course, though it remained to this day a backshop favorite, even though the model herself had, as one might say, outgrown it. The wedding had excited Ellsworth as had little else in his four years back here, and he had front-paged it two weeks running, both before and after, with two inside photo pages in the second week’s issue, he being yet another in this town with a special affection for John’s wife, more than that really if truth be known, but motivated as well by his newsman’s nose: this joining of the local fortunes made for a terrific story, he felt, just when the town most needed one. The entire area at the time was in something of a recession, lying dormant, waiting for something to come along and wake it up, and the wedding was like a fresh breath of life, a real pickup for everyone. Literally, as it turned out: for it was announced at the reception, like a gift from the good fairies, that the state highway commission had decided to route its four-lane north-south link to the new cross-country interstate highway — a sympathetic mating, as it were (Ellsworth’s thought) — past the edge of town, ensuring its continued prosperity. They all drank to the wedding couple’s health and to their own, Ellsworth climaxing the occasion with the recital, by way of a toast to the bride, of his newest poem, later to be published in The Town Crier:

It may have been the Knave of Hearts

Who stole the tarts away,

But after all had played their parts

‘Twas Beauty stole the day!

Though this poem was a great success, both in performance and in print, Gordon disdained it. Indeed, it saddened him. Ellsworth was full of himself, proud of his worldly travels and his quirky bohemian ways, but it was Gordon who had kept alive, though he no longer painted, their youthful artistic principles. They had been pals since the days of toy soldiers and model airplanes, Ellsworth great with the stories that dramatized their play, creating trajectory, Gordon a stickler for the detail that gave it its intensity, its body, as it were. Gordon could not remember when they “grew up,” if ever they did, it was more like their playing simply ripened into something more profound somehow, all by itself, as though what was serious about it was there all along, down inside, just waiting to be revealed, but however it happened, they found themselves suddenly so much older than anyone around them, even the grown-ups, and certainly light-years beyond their classmates, fashion freaks and sexual athletes maybe, but mentally still in diapers, penned up like driveling toddlers in the world’s frivolous illusions. What Ellsworth liked to call “the show,” a coining from their feverish years. Ellsworth was careful with his words then, respecting their shape and gravity. “The show I know,” he wrote in one of his rhyming aphorisms, they were just high school sophomores at the time, reading passionately, painting and writing, showing each other their best and worst efforts, laying plans deep into the night for their escape together, “the real I feel.” The poet and the artist: they were inseparable. Until Ellsworth went off into the world to become famous and live the wandering minstrel’s life, leaving Gordon behind to care for his invalid mother. Couldn’t do that with a paintbrush, not in this town. He took up photography.

They were a pair, all right, Gordo and Elsie, as some folks called them, flamboyant but shy at the same time, always out in the middle of things but never part of them — they hardly seemed like real people at times — but one accepted them as one accepted a nervous tic or a sixth toe, as much part of the body politic in their loony way as John and his wife, and here as sure as warts, as Officer Otis liked to say, to stay. Okay, a bit off the wall maybe — Ellsworth in his cape and beret and long black hair hanging threadily from his bald patch, Gordon bobbing and waddling like a sweaty circus animal in his mute goggle-eyed search for the right angle — but harmless: they never gave Otis any trouble, except for the way they poked their noses into everything, and they had always treated him with respect even though he was a lot younger than they were. Otis had barely begun high school when he first started turning up in the pages of The Town Crier as a freshman lineman on probably the best football team the school had ever had, the one that John captained, and for the Thanksgiving game he even got interviewed and Coach Snuffy introduced him as “a battling bulwark” and old fat Gordon took his photograph. Even Otis’s old man was impressed and came to a game after that. Looking back, he now knew that that was the first year of that newspaper’s existence, Ellsworth having just come back to town, but at the time Otis had had the feeling it was history itself and had been there forever, even before God, and that he was stepping out of nowhere into its pages, into its light, like one chosen, one touched by a sudden grace. There were more photographs and more interviews in the years that followed, but the coverage became more ordinary, or felt that way — of course the team without John and the rest of that great class of seniors was more ordinary, too: the light had dimmed. But had not gone out: the reporter and his photographer recorded his team captaincy, his graduation, his Purple Heart and then his marriage when he got out, his appointment to the force, his children, his investigations and arrests, his promotions, his attendance at civic functions, his league bowling scores. They missed a few things — like his fucking of the photographer’s wife, for example — but Otis understood as well as did Ellsworth that some things were properly historical and some were not. Not all the photographer’s photos, for example, had made the pages of The Town Crier, nor should they, and some perhaps, including those Pauline had been telling Otis about, squirreled away at the back of the studio, should never have been taken.

These photographs that lay concealed from public view in over two hundred carefully maintained and catalogued albums shelved in the back room were, Gordon knew, his greatest achievements, but in the way that all artists are misunderstood (the ironies neither escaped him nor embittered him), what he was best known for in town were his commercial studio portraits. In the spring there were school class, club, and team photos, then graduation, first communions, and weddings in June, the Pioneers Day costumes, birthdays and anniversaries and new babies all year round, Christmas card family portraits in the autumn, club and company year-end galas to follow. There was hardly a household in town without at least one of his photographs, the only thing on most of their walls, buffets, or pianos resembling original art, and all the record most had of family history. Of course, Gordon was good at them as at everything else in what others called his job: they were sharply focused, majestically lit, elegantly composed, ultimately flattering. They were even, for occasions so inherently formal, unusually expressive, something one might not have expected, knowing Gordon, a notoriously timid and solitary man, severe even and cold. Weird, some said. No “Hey there sourpuss watch the little say cheese birdie” from Gordon. But no matter how banal the occasion, he was determined to get each composition just right and his broad pantomimic gestures as he tacked and bobbed behind his lights and camera, demonstrating the attitudes he wished his subjects to assume as they posed there on his little curtained stage, always brought a kind of theatrical gaiety to the otherwise awkward occasion. They loved him suddenly, not knowing why, nor did he understand this either, but it was the love one felt (Pauline understood this) for a clown, and it showed in their faces.

The photographer’s circussy style was not lost on John’s young son Mikey, who used it for one of his famous wordless monodramas at his parents’ annual Pioneers Day barbecue the summer of the civic center controversy, an awkward occasion for Trevor whose wife Marge was leading the opposition to the building of the annoying thing, having even managed that very week to get a temporary restraining order (soon to be overturned, of course, no stopping John) to prevent the plowing up of the city park, and who, even at the barbecue, had trouble keeping her mouth shut. Well, nothing new there. Trevor was John’s personal accountant and a corporation officer, Marge the town’s most intransigent gadfly, there’d been embarrassing parties like this before. Fortunately John was a tolerant man with a good sense of humor, maybe he even got a kick out of Marge’s quixotic activism, they’d been at it since grade school after all, and — until now anyway — she’d not put Trevor’s business relationship with John at any serious risk. Trevor sipped his spring water and knocked on what he hoped was wood: John was about ninety percent of all the business relationships he had. Little Mikey had roped a pillow around his tummy, buttoned on one of his father’s trenchcoats, its tails dragging the ground, and rigged a fanciful camera out of a video cassette, toilet paper tubes, plastic dishware from a child’s tea set, and a penlight which his sister Clarissa complained he’d stolen from her bedroom. Now he bobbed and waddled through the lawn party, taking everyone’s photo by switching the penlight on and off, organizing “family portraits” with broad ludicrous gestures, and, whenever she hove into sight, chasing his mother about with his peculiar apparatus, click-click-clicking away as though demonically possessed. Not everyone got the point of Mikey’s act, especially this last part, even if they knew who was being mocked, but Trevor knew, he’d seen the photographer up to his tricks before. The first time, he’d been sitting in the Sixth Street Cafe on a crisp autumn day with a client, a farmer for whom he was setting up an improved health insurance policy with term life attached, when the photographer had come galumphing past the plateglass window, apparently on his way into the cafe. Suddenly, he’d pulled up short, his lashless eyes bulging, and then had hurried in his walrussy way across the street to the newspaper office and printshop and had ducked inside, reappearing behind the window over there a few seconds later, now hidden behind a camera with a long gleaming lens. He’d seemed to be aiming straight at Trevor, which had made him pull back a bit into the shadows, mildly alarmed. But then the true target of Gordon’s photographic attentions had come by, walking her dog. The dog had caught the food odors from the cafe and brought her to an abrupt stop, blocking Trevor’s view of the window across the street. When she had passed, the window was empty. Since then, more than once, he’d seen the fat photographer in timid clandestine pursuit, and in turn, inexplicably amused, had begun quietly to pursue the pursuer.

Here is one of Gordon’s photos on the same theme, though not the one John’s personal accountant saw being taken: A slender woman in a white tennis costume, having emerged from the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Town Car, is leaning back in to retrieve something from the front seat, her purse perhaps. The car is parked among many others in a vast blacktop lot in the middle of a modern shopping mall, and indeed the photo seems to have been taken from inside another car parked not far away. Has she surprised two young vandals? Dressed in studded leather jackets, printed tee shirts, and torn jeans, they seem to be fleeing from the far side of the Town Car as though to escape capture. Or, more likely, confinement: one of the two girls has her arm extended behind her as though she might have just pushed the backseat door shut, even as she rushes away. In the background, near the mock-arcade entrance to the mall with its automatic glass doors and rows of nested wire shopping carts, young out-of-focus dressalikes can be seen in studied poses — slouching, smoking, waving — vaguely reminiscent of smalltown photographs from generations past. Slanted sunlight falls on the driver’s white tennis shorts, creating a kind of blurry nimbus or halo around her hips (the impression is that of having been stared at too hard and long), a seeming photographic flaw that was perhaps, through darkroom manipulation, intentional.

Clarissa, one of the secondary subjects in Gordon’s parking lot photo of the radiant tennis shorts (part of a continuing series), was not at all happy with her stupid little brother’s impersonation of the town photographer that afternoon at her daddy’s annual summer barbecue, refusing to take part with the other kids in his pseudo family portraits and determined to find some way of sabotaging the little showboat. It was especially disgusting the way Mikey went scuttling after their mom with that dumb thingamajig every time she came outside — why did everyone think it was so funny? When Clarissa complained that he was going to use up her penlight batteries, they all just laughed. Even Uncle Bruce, who had flown in just for the day and on whom both she and Jennifer had a tremendous crush that summer, seemed amused by the little sicko, it was unbelievable. Uncle Bruce was not really her uncle, as she had to keep reminding Jennifer all the time, Jennifer wanting Bruce all for herself and accusing Clarissa of what she called incestual madness. He and her father had both been in the same fraternity at college, and her father had told Clarissa years and years ago that since he called him “brother Bruce,” she could call him uncle. Of course, Jen’s father had also been in their fraternity, but that was different. Clarissa had dibs. Uncle Bruce was very sexy for an older man and tons of fun and Clarissa had made him promise a long time ago that when she grew up he would marry her, and she still meant it whether he did or not: she’d had it engraved in secret code on her love-slave ankle bracelet just to prove it. So, when Uncle Bruce not only let Mikey drag him into one of his ridiculous imitation studio photos, and one making fun maybe of her own family at that, but even with a big laugh and a hug pulled Jennifer along with him to be his pretend wife (Jen was really eating it up: come on! this was her best friend?), it was too much. She went looking for Jennifer’s nerdy brother Fish, found him hiding in the garage, sucking on a snitched can of beer. “Hey, Creep, where are those firecrackers you told me you brought?”

These annual Pioneers Day barbecues were part of a year-round parade of social affairs lavishly hosted by John and his wife, including everything from bridge foursomes, cocktail parties, and stag poker nights to bowl game gatherings, formal dinners, and kids’ birthday parties, a festal sequence that gave incident and body to the evanescent flow, configuring the town’s present as Ellsworth’s weekly paper and Gordon’s family portraits recomposed and fixed the past. The Christmas season did not really begin until their annual open house, the presidents’ midwinter birthdays gave way to John’s between, and their backyard barbecues were famous throughout the state, such wealth and power gathering there on those long summer days as to tickle all the senses: one could smell it suddenly in the rich sweet smoke, see it in the rugged smile of the handsome host, striding through the fresh-mown grass in his tooled boots and brushed denims, taste it on the quickened palate, hear it in the squat tumblers of golden whiskey wherein ice tinkled like pockets full of fairy coins. Brother Bruce, rare guest and ever rarer, called them milestones to oblivion, but was always cheerful when he said so, often donning the chef’s apron and pitching in, entertaining Clarissa with elephant jokes and funny riddles, showing Mikey magic tricks. Out-of-towners like Bruce were frequent guests, business cronies and college friends, clients, investors, politicians, all those who peopled John’s wider world beyond, dropping into town to join the local cast of characters as though from out the clouds, sometimes literally so by way of John’s airport, manifestations incarnate of the community’s global connections and beaming witnesses to its calendric revels, as celebrated at the home of John and his wife, that consummate hostess. As Waldo, another of John’s fraternity brothers and at the time his Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales, put it that afternoon while John’s funny kid was into his fat photogoofer number, clinking glasses in a toast to the pioneer spirit of exploration and new discoveries with a beautiful young woman whose name he couldn’t remember (didn’t matter, at this point in a party all young women were beautiful and had the same name): “Only thing wrong with John’s parties, baby, is that, like life itself, they’re fucking beautiful but they’re too fucking short.” He threw his arm around the woman and raised his glass to Mikey and hollered “Haw!” as the kid passed by, pointing his crazy gizmo at them, and the way her head bounced off his shoulder he definitely had the impression that she was at least as drunk as he was or else stoned, which meant she was quite possibly as much in love with him at that moment as he was with her, whoever the hell she was. “You gotta move fast, know what I mean? or before you can even get your ass into the swing of things, shit, baby, the show’s over.”

As it was, alas, for Kate the librarian, who, had she still been alive at the time of little Mikey’s miming of the town photographer at John’s Pioneers Day barbecue that summer, might have remarked on the way that parody and performance focus the attention in a way that the everyday realities of existence cannot. “One drifts through daily life as in a dream,” she once remarked to her friend Harriet, also, sad to say, deceased, “waking up only when things turn nightmarish, otherwise being carried along on a free association of images, faintly erotic maybe, faintly fearful, all of it blurring into a half-remembered past that’s more like an imaginary space than some aspect of time.” She had made this remark while sitting with Harriet and John’s mother Opal on a bench in the old city park, not yet razed back then, and Opal remembered it to this day for precisely the reason that it did seem to parody the very moment in which they sat, dappled by the sunlight filtering through the leafy branches above as though sprinkled by that gold dust they sometimes used in the movies to indicate a magical moment isolated from the implacable flow of time. Since Opal was not one much given to such flights of fancy, she supposed the image had popped into her head because of Harriet’s earlier remark that “Sometimes I feel more alive at the movies or in the middle of a good novel than I do on the streets of this damned town.” Harriet had had a romantic past, she was probably just feeling restless as she often did, her restlessness making her the insatiable moviegoer and devourer of popular novels that she was. Kate now went on to say that while all novels lied about the past, simply by being things whose pages turned in sequence, life, as kept more loosely in the memory, was not a random shuffle either, but more like a subtle interweaving of mysteriously linked moments whose buried significance in effect defined the rememberer. Poor dear Kate, ever the one for the mind-boggling aphorism. She once, while at one of John’s parties, described them as “cyclic rituals whose purpose was to deny the incorruptible innocence of time,” though what Kate meant by that Opal could not even guess. Opal thought of her son’s parties as themselves altogether innocent, not to say generous and spontaneous and celebrative, and she always looked forward to them, but she did understand how much more went on at them than any one person could know, each person’s experience of such tangly gatherings being so different from all the others, until someone like little Mikey came along to give them all something at the center to share, even if that something was so frivolous as the playacting of a child.

For Reverend Lenny, another witness of Mikey’s masque that afternoon in John’s backyard, nothing in the world was frivolous, least of all a child’s enactment of the adult world, or else it all was, which he also accepted of course as a strong possibility. Lenny, yet another member of John’s old college fraternity present that day and better known to his brothers up at State as Knucksie, sometimes Ob-knucks or Noxious to the pledges he mastered in those long-gone days, mostly happy, give or take a toga party and beer bust or two he’d rather not think about, and rarely did, had come here with his family — his wife Beatrice and their children Philip, Jennifer, and Zoe — nearly a decade ago, thanks to brother John’s timely intervention, and, though not without some adjustment difficulties and unremitting ambivalence and self-doubt, Lennox had over the years come to accept his new vocation as a moral and spiritual leader of the community, and indeed to embrace it. When he first arrived and took up his new mission among, except for John, these total strangers, nothing was easy, but what was hardest were the Sunday sermons. It was like writing term papers all over again, something Lennox had always hated and rarely managed to accomplish without a little help from his friends. Now, suddenly, he had to do one every week, no friends at hand, and for a while he fell back pretty heavily on stuff he stole out of books. Eventually, though, once he discovered that no one was grading him, or even for the most part listening, it became his favorite task. His own special thing, as his wife Beatrice (who strode past now in her fringed leather jacket, pleated skirt, and bright red boots, bearing a large plastic bowl of potato salad like the Holy Grail: she blinked at him as though in wonderment and smiled) liked to say. What amazed him was how everything worked; God — or the gods, any would do, Reverend Lenny was not a fundamentalist — was wonderful. Lennox found he could take any experience, news item, anecdote, whatever, abstract its essence (the fun part), link it metaphorically to some general aspect of the human condition (always plenty of opportunity for pathos, humor, compassion, rue), weave in any images that freely came to mind, toss in a Biblical passage or two (Second John, for example: “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another … for he who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son”: that one was so brilliant it had caused John’s lawyer cousin’s wife to faint dead away), speak with conviction, gravity, and intensity, and shazam! another brilliant spellbinding supersermon. So much fun was it, he soon found himself testing God’s limits, as it were, by attempting to convert the most unlikely material — a golf game, rock lyrics, a visit to the barbershop or a bellyflop at the country club pool, Saturday morning TV cartoons, dirty jokes, shopping at the malls, even the holes in doughnuts or the repairing of a clogged stool in the church basement — into Sunday morning classics of spiritual uplift and moral wisdom. Certainly he was uplifted if no one else was. It was nearly as good as turning on (and he had used that, too, only lightly veiled: John had winked at him from the front of the congregation). So, while John’s son was aping the town photographer at his parents’ Pioneers Day garden party, Lennox was doing what he always did at such events: gathering images. He had decided it was time to take advantage of the hot topic of the day and preach on the doctrinal meaning of a “civic center”: What was it and why was it (in theory) so significant to us all? What did it mean that the beloved park with all its natural Edenic beauty had to be sacrificed so that that center of our civility could be, not found, but fashioned? He envisioned a link to the great themes of the settling of this nation, the New Jerusalem dream and all that, and thus (his wife’s costume suddenly delighted him) to this weekend’s celebrations: hey, genius, right on! He watched John’s little boy with his taped-junk “camera,” bobbing about frenetically with a kind of despairing enthusiasm, a hopeful anguish, and thought: a paradigm for our piteous effort to focus upon the real, to find that center. What was the real, and why was it so elusive? As though in reply, John’s wife passed in her knee-length shorts and crisp cotton shirt, all eyes in the backyard upon her, and Lennox thought: whatever it is, it has substance. Form. Body. And bodily parts. For God so loved the world that he eschewed mere abstractions. But to accept the fleshly real (he was watching his old fraternity brother, once known as Loose Bruce, put his arms around his little pubescent daughter, Jennifer’s face flushed with puppy love) was to accept pain and (his son Philip — or his wife’s, anyway — and John’s daughter Clarissa came out of the garage together, looking guilty) paradox. Irony. Was that not, in point of fact, the very message of the Cross? Yes, it was taking shape, the main themes were all there. All it lacked was a little spark and pop, a final kicker, a quote from the Good Book maybe, something with which to say: “This, my friends, this, this is real!”

When the firecrackers went off behind John’s screwy kid, Maynard II, he, whose wife had swooned during the preacher’s sermon, was just thinking about his cousin’s power and how, maybe, with old Barnaby’s help, he was about to trounce that contemptible cocksucker at last, so he was both startled (dropped his goddamned paper plate of barbecue right down the front of his pants) and at the same time felt somehow confirmed in his hopes, as though that sudden explosive racket was in celebration (a sympathetic glance at his pants from John’s wife, looking down upon him from the back deck, added to his feeling of triumph; although, ever the languishing fool for love, he wished for more, she did send one of the kitchen help out with a wet towel) of his ineluctable and unprecedented win. Yet another fucking illusion, as he was to find out soon enough, but at the time that summer it looked like a sure thing, so when wild applause followed the fireworks, Maynard embraced it as though it were for him, gave a whoop himself and winked across the lawn at his wife Veronica, who dropped her jaw and returned him a sneering hawk-nosed what-the-hell’s-the-matter-with-you-scumbag? look. A joy to be around, that girl. Should have sobered Maynard up, but it didn’t. He was feeling too damned cocky. Old Barnaby, pissed at the way his son-in-law had fucked him over and in a fit over the civic center outrage (and it was an outrage), had come to Maynard’s law firm with a sweet plan, well-funded, and Maynard had put the final touches to it, it was beautiful. John’s ass was grass, he was sure of it. Not that that would be the end of it. His cuz was tough in the clinches and could play mean and dirty. You could sometimes take a point off him, but it was hard to win the game, Maynard knew that. When they were kids, their families used to do Thanksgivings together, and in and around the ritual gut-stuffing they’d get up all-day Monopoly games, which John always won, even if in the end he had to use strong-arm tactics. Everyone cheated of course, but it was Maynard who always got caught. One day John spied him palming an extra house onto Marvin Gardens and decided to call a kangaroo court. It was one of Maynard’s earliest and most enduring lessons in the way the law worked. He was introduced into the dock as “greasy Mayo Nerd” and his defense was met with wet Bronx cheers, especially from the younger shits, getting back at him with John’s protection. He was found guilty of course and his fine was that he had to wear his clothes backward and make a loud vomiting noise every time someone mentioned mincemeat pie. Aunt Opal, John’s mother, had brought the mincemeat pie that year so he took a terrific cuffing from his old man the first time he made that noise, John always getting someone else to do the dirty work for him. Maynard’s dad was the mayor back then and quick with his law-and-order swats across the side of his head, Maynard was always scared of him. Now the rheumy-eyed old fart was his law partner and pretty much did as he was told.

The real reason that day for the burst of enthusiastic lawn-wide applause, which whooping Maynard in his willing self-delusion accepted as celebration of his own imminent victory, was the spectacular conclusion to little Mikey’s mimed performance, a bit of improvisational showmanship that even Lorraine, once a serious student of such matters and no fan of John’s youngest brat (the little weirdo clearly had a serious oedipal problem, for one thing), had to admire. Lorraine, whose dopey husband Waldo, he of the corked head and wayward prick, was one of those who did John’s dirty work nowadays in his grown-up Monopoly games, had, like the lawyer Maynard, been thinking other thoughts when the firecrackers went off: to wit, where have all the flowers gone? How had Sweet Lorraine, the fraternity world’s favorite party girl and teacher’s petted pet of the English department, got transformed into this shapeless old bag drinking beer from a can in the backyard of a hick town bullyboy, standing in crushed buns and dogshit and wondering what griefs the dolts she was living with had in store for her next? Her helpmeet Waldo was drunkenly hustling one of the local housewives while the bimbo’s husband snarled nearby, Lollie’s halfwit sons were getting dragged around by John’s boy like trained bears, and she herself, watching John’s wife temporarily distract attention from her own son’s popular dumb show (the kid’s act was easy, that crazy photographer was a clown, and like all clowns, no joke) simply by passing by, felt near to tears. Damn it, it wasn’t fair! They’d promised her a happy ending! Whereupon, Mikey’s bitchy big sister Clarissa snuck up behind him while he was concentrating on trying to balance his goofy apparatus on a tripod made of three golfclubs and lit a tin bucket full of firecrackers at his feet. Everyone jumped when they went off, even Lorraine who had seen it coming, everyone except Mikey, who merely pointed his “camera” in different directions and pushed the penlight button as though each pop were the taking of a shot. He dropped the contraption to his side when the explosions stopped, then slowly lifted it again as though guessing there must be more to come, or maybe he peeked. He pivoted, pointed the toilet-roll tube lens at his shocked sister, and—POP! POP! — snapped her turning on her heel in frustration and rage and stomping away. It was a sensation. Lorraine felt, just for a moment (much worse was to happen, she knew that), reconciled to the goddamned world once more, and even laughed and applauded with the others as the little photographer-clown took his waddling exit by chasing his mother up onto the deck and into the house again.

Beatrice’s perspective on this Pioneers Day barbecue in John’s backyard, not sharing Lorraine’s chronic vexation, was that smalltown life out here on the prairie was pretty crazy (a couple of years later it would be her turn back here, no hosts but the children — what curious times lay ahead! — to be, popping her own cracker, the star attraction), but what the heck, God was good and a generous know-it-all who cared for the little sparrow even, so, as her husband would say, chirp chirp, Trix, let it all happen. After the fireworks (where did John get those things? it was fun but was it legal? or did it, John being who he was, even matter? not to Trixie did it), Lenny was looking positively beatific, and that made Beatrice, who was cheerful by nature, even more cheerful, for in truth she worshiped her goofy husband, only wishing that he, like she, might have some notion of what worship might be. She would watch him in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, delivering his famous sermons, everybody talked about them, and she would know, even if no one else did, that he was just pretending, like with everything else. He pretended to be a preacher, a father, a friend, a lover, the cosmos as unreal to him as a B movie, but he was a good pretender, so what difference did it make? Well, one. Beatrice felt certain that Lenny’d never had, though he’d pretended to, a really great orgasm, and this made her feel somehow inadequate and caused her to wonder sometimes what it was they really shared. Beatrice believed, with all her heart, in the mystical power of the orgasm, it was what linked you to everything else in the whole universe, and she surrendered to it wherever and whenever it came upon her just as a saint would do when God called, for that was exactly how she saw it, and no matter what it might cost her, sometimes quite a lot. But saints suffered, too, didn’t they? Just look at Jesus: he had it about as rough as it could get, but in the end he ascended, an experience Beatrice herself had enjoyed, it was great. As a little girl, she got off all the time on Jesus, just thinking about him and his spacey life, so weird and beautiful, and she still could and did, though she no longer needed him or anybody else, she was directly wired now, she could turn ecstasy on like flipping a light switch, and maybe it was just as well that cool Lenny was there to switch it off when she’d been gone too long and lovingly bring her home again.

Her mother’s freaky ways embarrassed Jennifer, but intrigued her, too: grownup life might not be as boring as it mostly seemed in this nowhere place. Everything was so desperately flat and common here, you knew just what was going to happen every minute — even out at the malls and the pool, the only halfway exciting places around, you could guess what people were going to say as soon as they opened their mouths, it was like they were all in a play or something, just reading their lines, it was very depressing — but it didn’t need to be that way, and her unpredictable mother was at least, spooky as she was, a case in point. Bruce was another and a more reassuring one than her mixed-up mom. He flew in and out at will, this town having no claim on him, nor any other either, he was as free as the wind like everyone should be, like Jennifer would be when she got out of here, she could hardly wait. Bruce seemed to know and do or have done everything, he was very wild and very wise at the same time, and yet somehow tragic, too, like those beautiful guys in the movies who always died young, though Bruce would not die young, he was already too old for that, and a good thing, too, because Jennifer loved him madly and wanted him around when she was ready to escape this dump, before or after she finished high school, she really didn’t care, what was all that junk good for anyway? Bruce had lots of lovers, Jennifer knew that, but unlike her best friend Clarissa who, when she wanted something, wanted all or nothing, Jennifer did not mind sharing. Clarissa was a real problem. Bruce was a college friend of both their fathers, Clarissa having always called him Uncle Bruce, though they weren’t related, which Jennifer thought was childish, especially now after she’d got her period, but for Clarissa it was a way of trying to own him somehow, and teasing her about it only tended to make it worse. She and Clarissa were the closest of friends, they went everywhere together, planned to leave here together, too — bosom pals, they once joked when they went to buy their first bras together, and in truth, no joke, they were — but because of Clarissa’s possessive attitude, Bruce stood between them. That afternoon at the barbecue, for example, when she and Bruce posed for Clarissa’s little brother’s make-believe camera and Bruce was hugging her in a way that sent a tingling all the way to her toes, she knew it was making Clarissa mad as all get-out and Jennifer was sorry about that, but she just couldn’t help it. She could only hope he wouldn’t let go, it was magic.

John’s friend Bruce, who so willingly joined in little Mikey’s play that day, was perhaps the only person out there who did not know who was being caricatured, and so missed half the point, or more, but then no one got it all, not even Trevor who knew what no others present knew but who had never, it being against his wife Marge’s principles, posed for a family portrait, much nuance thus lost on him as well, this being, as Gordon himself would say, the fate of all art, even of the amateur backyard variety: to become, stripped of nuance, a caricature of itself. Gordon’s wife Pauline, who knew what Trevor knew but was not so curious about it (that lady was the main attraction around here, why shouldn’t Gordon take her picture?), but who was not present in John’s backyard on that day, or on any other day for that matter, would not have known what nuance was, though she would have enjoyed the little boy’s portrait of her portraitist husband as clown and taken it in whole, feeling flattered that something of her private world had been so publicly noticed. But then: had Pauline fallen in love with a clown? No, nor, whatever others might think, married one either, though that was another story. Love was for heroes, giants, and wizards, of whom she’d had some in her mouth maybe, between her breasts even, and up her Sodom-and-Gomorrah, as Daddy Duwayne called it, but none in her life, that strange thing that went on outside the holes in her body. When it came to romance, that old true-love lottery, Pauline had drawn the short straw: suck that, kid! as her fairy godfather was wont to put it in his pedagogical sessions on the floor of their filthy trailer. Where, many years ago, in the scattered iconography ripped from stolen magazines that aroused her crazy tutor’s red-eyed zeal, she had glimpsed a way out. She was nineteen when she finally approached old Gordon and asked him to help her. She knew him only by his shop window with all the glitzy photographs of make-believe families and fairytale weddings, his moony face in the dim shadows behind it, but she assumed he had a swollen spunk-sack that needed relief like any other man and they could strike a deal. Her best years were over, had been since her sixteenth birthday, she knew that — reality-training was one deprivation Pauline had not suffered — but she felt she had one last chance to make her fortune, or the nearest thing to it she could ever hope for, before she turned twenty and it was all over. Her body was ripe enough if a bit beat up (you could brush that out) and she had no pride, but she needed a photographer and Gordon was the only one in town. So she put her best summery dress on over nothing, hid behind the sunglasses a boy had bought her the year before at the Pioneers Day fair, all the wages she had got on that occasion, and screwing up her courage, pushed in, jangling bells, and announced she wanted her picture taken. “Hey, Pauline! Whatcha doin?!” someone yelped as though goosed. It was that little high school boy Corny. She hadn’t noticed there were other people in there. Her sunglasses maybe. Or just too nervous. Corny was with his dad, who was wearing his crisp white jacket from the drugstore, shiny black pens periscoping out of the breast pocket like secret cameras. And there was a girl there, too, thin and pale, dressed mostly in black, with her hair in tight dark ringlets around her parchmenty ears and funny little teeth in her smiling mouth like rows of tiny white corn kernels. She didn’t look all that well. “This is Pauline, Dad! From school! We’re getting passport photos, Pauline — Dad’s sending me to Paris! For graduation!” Big surprise. Corny’s heart-shaped face under its wispy blond cap was pink as a valentine, poor boy. His father stared at her through his thick lenses as though examining her through a microscope, gripping the lapels of his white jacket in a pose she recognized from the family photo in the window out front. Pauline stared back, but wished now she had her underwear on. The bells over the door still seemed to be ringing, but they probably weren’t. “So, uh, how’s it goin’, Pauline, for gosh sake? Where ya been?”

Where Cornell had been the night before, made manifest by his tin-whistle squeak and telltale flush — and, had anyone noticed, the little hickey on her neck — was with Pauline. Tears of farewell before being sent off to Paris, declarations of love, and all that. He supposed his father did not know, a supposition only partly correct: prophylactics had gone missing at the drugstore over the past year, a pattern made familiar in their own time by Oxford’s other two sons. Discovering this had brought tears to his eyes: Ah, little Corny … He was the baby of the family and had seemed till now as though spellbound by childhood: finishing high school and still reading comicbooks, playing with games and toys. Oxford, worried about him, had thought this graduation trip to Europe might somehow work a sea change — might disenchant the boy, so to speak — and he’d trusted the strange frail woman beside him as his dear departed Yale once did, yet feared for poor Cornell and for himself: he had lost so much and this was his last son, Paris was so far away, he could not bear more sadness. He had peered searchingly at the bold girl standing there before them in that gloomy photo shop with her sunglasses on and her toes pointed in — what had Corny called her? Pauline? — but though ready to grasp at any straw, he’d found nothing that might give him hope. A certain wide-browed full-lipped generosity maybe, nothing more. She was probably just using Corny, as so many others did. Of course the light was bad, his eyesight weak, his concentration undermined by grief, he might have missed something. No rash prejudgments. He’d keep the drawer of condom packets replenished and see what happened.

What happened, or seemed to happen — all this was a decade and a half ago — was that Corny, mortified by his public denial of Pauline, went to Paris that summer without seeing her again, and when, after chastening adventures quite different from those his father had envisioned for him, he returned, Pauline was no longer available. He entered university, though not the one that he’d been named for, as a pharmacy student, and some four years later fulfilled at last his father’s lifelong dream, though yet again not in the way he had imagined. Oxford, a staunch rationalist in a town where such a faith was held by few, was such a devotee of the great institutions of higher learning that he had named his children after four of them — Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell — hoping each might go then where appointed. None did. Only Yale came close, attending Princeton, and then to study French, not pharmacy. It was Cornell finally who, if only up at State, pursued at least (a promise to his mother Kate, the town librarian, then gravely ill) his father’s trade, renewing Oxford’s faded hopes that a son might yet return, solace and companion to his autumn years, to carry on what he had here established. These hopes were dashed a few months later when his mother killed herself and Corny suddenly took on Harvie’s errant ways, let the scraggly hairs on his face grow down, burned his library card, dropped out, and in that paradoxical idiom of the times, “turned on,” but then were unexpectedly revived once more when, without advertisement, the boy shaved all but his upper lip and wed a sober northern girl named Gretchen, a pharmacy major more industrious than brilliant maybe, but fully aware of her limitations, which included a withered leg and myopia as severe as Oxford’s. Though Corny dreamed perhaps of grander things, Gretchen brought him home.

Gretchen in innocence once had dreamed her leg was whole, or could be made so, but came to accept instead, finding a father-in-law she’d never dreamed to have, an orthopedic correction and partial interest in a pharmacy one day to be made a whole one in a way her leg could never be. She was a satisfied woman who never showed this with a smile, except sometimes alone with her sister-in-law Lumby, her public face one of pained intensity like that of a long-distance runner about to hit the wall: the goal in sight but dreadful hazards on the route. When, a few years later, John built his newest mall out by the highway, he offered them bright spacious quarters there, which excited Cornell, restless in the dull downtown, duller by the day, but which Oxford feared as a threat to his own dreams of continuity and meaning. As the expense of such a move and broad expansion would have required a partnership with John, Gretchen unhesitatingly sided with her father-in-law and against her whining husband, putting her lame foot down resolutely like the banging of a wooden gavel, and thus began, shaped by frustrated dreams, that family’s slow decline.

In such manner the entire town might be said to have been shaped, its streets laid out by what, though against all probability, might yet be, its daily dialogue sustained by what had not, as though it might have done, come true — though John, again, was an exception. He got always, as if a rule unto himself, more or less what he dreamt of. Perhaps John dreamt wiser dreams, asking from others only what he knew they could give, or taking from them only what he knew they could not refuse him: a kind of magic formula by which John prospered and took his considerable pleasure. Buildings, parks, whole neighborhoods disappeared, and in their place rose banks and malls and housing clusters with lawns where grass had never grown, and simply because John willed it so and other wills were weaker. He endured trials, true, the intrafamilial battle over his new downtown civic center and swimming pool being but the latest, but he relished these trials, as he once had relished the goalline plunge and the raised bar, contests that quickened him, full of risk and body contact, bruising sometimes, exhausting, but never fatal, or almost never, and concluded always, win or lose, with celebrations — celebrations often at John’s expense, for John was also, as all were witness, a generous man, free of rancor and loyal to a fault. Friends from boyhood, school, teams, companies or clubs were friends for life — ask Dutch, a pal since Little League, Loose Bruce or Lennox from fraternity, his old coach Snuffy, Waldo, Otis, Kevin, Trev, they owed him much — and women, too, enjoying John’s beneficence and care long after having given so little, unless they erred and thought it much. Women loved John, most of them did, though he never asked for this, not even from his wife, demanding only a fair exchange, love poor coin, he believed, in such transactions.

Not all women understood this well, and so suffered injured hearts and bouts of self-abasement when their own love declarations were not matched by John or seemingly even heard. Thus, Lollie, as she was known in those days: self-styled sorority archetype, fun-loving, smart, and virgin, parting her thighs at last with elegant simplicity one night down in the games and chapter room of John’s fraternity while a party raged above, her heart racing, her mind a new erogenous zone stroked with prospects and announcements, love bubbling up on her lips like water pumped from a well, from which John appreciatively drank his fill, groaning, “Yes, yes!” suddenly configuring thereby her shapeless life with narrative thrust and plot and conversion to the future perfect — or so she thought until the heartless knave turned up at the sorority house a few evenings later to pick up one of the younger girls for an all-night pool party and, bumping into a startled Lollie, laughingly gave her a hug that iced her spine. Never thawed. Still couldn’t touch her goddamn toes.

Well, the first time, it had its pleasures, it had its bite, not easily forgotten, nor easily retold. Ellsworth’s “I Remember” column had been running in the town newspaper for years, yet no such tale had surfaced there, though Harriet’s frank account of her wartime experiences as an army nurse in Britain did not exclude her bombshelter snuggle with a handsome surgeon whose name she never knew until they met and married eight months later. The meeting took place over an amputation, the wedding in a vicar’s cottage beside a bombed-out church. Legendary times, those romantic war years, envied by most, their own rites celebrated in less glamorous circumstances, even when in marriage beds, more often in car seats and cheap motels, school toilets and darkened rec rooms, listening not for the buzzing hum of approaching aircraft or the whistle of the fateful bomb, but for a creak on the stairs, approaching bushwhackers, authority’s freezing knock or opened door. The sound in Daphne’s ears when it happened was the whine of a mosquito, that and the rusty squeak of cot springs beneath the bare mattress whereon she struggled. There were smells of leaf rot and sawdust and stale beer and old tennis shoes. The guy with her had her arms pinned behind her with one hand and was ripping her panties off with the other while she pitched and kicked, and what she was thinking while she tried to fight him off (she still remembered this) was that, if he got her panties down, that damned mosquito was going to bite her on her bare butt. And it did, too. Edna heard water dripping that first time, trucks grinding by, Opal her brother’s whisper not to tell, Harvard a prostitute’s wry complaints, the sniggering of his pals outside the door. What teenaged Lenny heard was the congregation on the floor above singing “O Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” as his geography teacher and friend of his mother took him inside her on top of the stainless steel worktable down in the church kitchen, whimpering, “Oh, yes, sweet Jesus! sweet Jesus!” while for Pauline it was her Daddy Duwayne in his cidery jacket, unbuckling his old jeans and rumbling, “C’mere now, you little harlot, let’s see what we can do about knockin’ down that wicked ole wall of Jericho!” She was seven years old and thought that Cherry-Go might be an icecream flavor.

Ronnie, like old Alf and Harriet, actually heard humming aircraft and exploding bombs, Cherry-Going, as it were, to the sounds of war, but this happened, long after the real war, out at the old drive-in movie theater where later the interstate link cut through, erasing, so to speak, the scene of the crime. It was following a high school football game and she still had her cheerleading clothes on, which made it both easier and harder. Easier because there were almost no preliminaries to be got through, harder because the underpants were tight and made of heavy lined material like a swimming suit, so there was no going in past the legband, like some guys had tried to do before with flimsier stuff there. Veronica had made up her mind to go all the way some time before, but most of the boys she was going out with seemed to know even less about it than she did, though they’d never admit it, and she just couldn’t trust them. Then, suddenly, the perfect opportunity arose, so quickly it almost took her breath away, when John, home from college, turned up unexpectedly at a weekend football game and, after coming over to josh around with Coach Snuffy and the boys at halftime, turned and asked her what she was doing later on. Ronnie had gone out with him once before, long ago, but he was too fast for her then. Now she was ready, or thought she was, and she said, “I don’t know, you got any good ideas?” It should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. She bled and bled, she just couldn’t stop. She always was unlucky. Up on the screen, they were cursing and yelling and stabbing each other with bayonets, but at the time she didn’t see the humor in this. Neither did John, who was really mad about what she had done and was still doing to the backseat of his father’s car. He jammed his underpants and hers between her legs and drove her home, dropped her off, she sobbing her apologies, at the curb. As she waddled up the walk, she heard the car door slam and, glancing back, saw him coming up the walk behind her. He was smiling: was he laughing at her? Maybe he wanted his underpants back. Confused and frightened and sick with shame, she threw them at him and ran away, as best she could run, hands between her legs, and left him standing back there like that guy in the movies, alone on a battlefield of corpses. She cried for three days after. Bled more, too, had to see the doctor. She hated sex then, though later she got used to it. Whereupon worse things happened.

Others might have had similar tales to tell — Trixie, for example, now known as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, or poor ill-fated Marie-Claire, the Paris penpal, even perhaps (who knows?) John’s wife — but Nevada, a generation younger, was not one of these. Nevada was a career woman, skillful, charming, industrious, worldly wise, discreet. She had met John a year or so ago while working in a private plane and boat show in Denver, a gig she’d picked up for a mouthful of cum in Houston. John was there with an associate from Chicago, shopping for a little hedgehopper of his own, as he called it, but he was scouting companies, too, a man, she judged, of vision and expanding fortunes, well worth a deeper acquaintance. His wife? An abstraction, absent, not yet a nuisance. Like all the women at the show, Nevada had a prepared resume with her, which she showed to John in bed that night over a restorative whiskey, while a pornographic film played silently on the hotel TV, solemn and unheeded as a church service. The resume indicated that she was unmarried, could type and had some familiarity with word processors, enjoyed travel, and was accustomed to flexible work-hours. When John asked her about her ambitions, she smiled, pressed the sweating whiskey glass against a perky young breast, just under the erecting nipple at the lip as though to milk it, or to let it dip its beak to drink, and said she hoped to get into personnel management. He was impressed (his generous laughter told her so) and took her on, remarking that her first assignment was a bit of stiff committee work: to wit, taking the starch out of an incorrigibly hard-headed standing member.

John bought a plane in Denver that week, not his first, and a company, too, together with Bruce, a joint venture — again, not their first. It was Bruce perhaps to whom John felt the closest ties. From the time they met up at State, pledge brothers at the fraternity their freshman year, they held most things in common, including money, clothes, textbooks, and women. They even sat exams for one another, laughing their way through business management, education’s biggest joke, partnered each other for bridge, cross-country drives, and tennis, cocaptained the golf team their senior year, drinking together from the trophies they won. Bruce best man at his postgraduation wedding, John best-manned Bruces then in turn, at least the first of them, this one with a woman John had shared with Bruce for a time, filling in when Bruce had other thighs or hands to spread. If Bruce had had John’s wife, John would not have begrudged him this, though if he’d had her he would in any case not have remembered it, for though, like John, he had a head for names, figures, products, profit margins, even radio frequencies and phone numbers, when it came to glory ‘oles, as he reverentially called them, they were all the same to Bruce, love them as he did. No, to wallow in the memory of a great fuck was for Bruce little better than self-abuse, a kind of impotence really. Every day was a great fuck, potentially anyhow, or you shot yourself, and John, though less radically, shared Bruce’s views in this. In business, too, views and money often shared, Bruce again the long-shot gambler, plunging into entertainment and oil futures, heavy arms and high-risk third world ventures, steady John amassing his portfolio around transport, banking, and property development, partnering each other when their interests or holdings crossed, as they often did. Bruce had taught John how to fly and they had bought a rustic fishing cabin up at the lakes together, laid down a landing strip, went there over the years to fish, shoot ducks and geese in season, take women not their wives, Bruce frequently the provider, though John, too, had gifts to bring from time to time, Nevada but a recent example, joint venture of another kidney. Their cabin became what Bruce, through all his schemes, adventures, wives, and sprees, thought of as home, quite unlike John in this, the basic difference between them being that John was a builder, Loose Bruce was not.

John the builder had added a simple but elegant A-frame lounge of cedar and glass to the fishing cabin, with a big fireplace at one end and views through the trees out over the lake, had improved the septic system, installed an oil-fueled generator, and put in showers and sauna and extra bedrooms, but the furnishings were plain and functional, the decorations few, the general aroma of the place that of pine, mud, and men. Once the airstrip was down, John had blocked off the main entry road with trees and boulders, though he’d left a lesser-known back route open for the man with snowplow and mower he’d hired to keep the airstrip cleared. The first time Dutch saw the place, flown up there by John in a late-summer fishing party (no women on these hometown group occasions, often as not no Bruce either), he was reminded immediately of the clubhouse they’d built as high school seniors on his old man’s property at the edge of Settler’s Woods. He divined at once therefore the full range of activities the cabin had been designed — or redesigned — for, and was not surprised to find a bidet in one of the bathrooms, which John shrugged off as a fancy of the previous owner. Even the cabin’s lone piece of art, a splotched and ripped-up canvas, hanging in shreds like something spilling from an open fly (people were crazy, what they paid money for these days), was not unlike their clubhouse’s tattered pinups clipped or torn from old magazines. For most of the men in the fishing party, if not for Dutch, it was a time up here for escaping their women and the prescripted town-bound lives those women had made for them, a time for virile reflection in the wild to which they all felt they’d been born, but from which somehow mysteriously expelled, a time to shoot and hook and kill and to eat the killed and, unnagged, drink their fill, a time to tell stories not elsewhere tellable and to test one another in all the half-forgotten ways of old. Thus, pissing, shooting, angling, and drinking contests, all-night high-stakes poker, manhood-challenging wisecracks and shower baiting. Again, Dutch thought, so like the days of the “getaway,” as they’d called their old clubhouse (and as Dutch now called his motel bar, located on the clubhouse site), except that women, still a novelty, were more important to them then, a female body, most often human, frequently the arena for their manly competitions. John, unrivaled cherry-picker with his own vast resources, was a rare participant in those gangshags of old — or “club sandwiches,” as they were called back then — though when caught up in one, as at the climax of his own stag party, an event arranged by Dutch as a wedding gift to his former Little League battery mate, he never shied from joining in, firm and upright clubman that he always was.

Bruce, best man when John, constructing story, married the builder’s daughter, was also at the stag party the night before, a reassuring event for Bruce, faced with the disturbing prospect of John’s seemingly straight-faced plunge into the wedded condition and the consequent loss of his one true companion in this ludicrous shithole of a world. Bruce, a city boy, albeit less of urb than sub, approached this remote hog wallow that day with trepidation, a stranger to its hobnail country ways, except so far as John had acridly portrayed them on their college drinking bouts, visions dancing in his booze-bruised head of desensitized TV zombies dangerously adrift on potholed junker-lined streets, of blue laws, Bible Belters, and bottle flies, and of ersatz icecream parlors crawling with pimply beauty queens and noisome brats. When asked what was the principal activity of his hometown, John had once replied: “Ass scratching. Two-handed.” John had given the real world up for this? Well, John had added: “Like every other place I know,” it’s true. It was Bruce’s world still strewn with antique values. A “diseased romantic,” John had called him once, or someone had and John had laughed, Bruce, too, admitting it was so, and adding that it was a glory ‘ole that had corrupted him — cuntamination, he called it — the first he ever knew: “Birth robbed me, buddy, of my fetal hopes and innocence, it’s been downhill ever since I slid that fucking tube.” Arrival was by rented car, John’s airport not yet built back then of course, a numbing passage through vast treeless fields and desolate commercial strips as alien to human life as anything Bruce’s grim misgivings might have led him to imagine. Yes, the worst he’d feared was true. But then, a small creek once crossed over, the humpback bridge nearly pitching him through the roof when he hit it, a little wooded patch rose up on the far shore as if conjured from the weedy soil, and on the other side of that the town appeared and showed a bit of grace: smooth tree-shaded streets with wide-porched houses sitting landscaped lawns, brightly bordered with the seasonal flower show, this followed by a cool green park leading to the town center where young women smiled at him as he passed by, the streets here lined with Lincolns, Caddies, and a Mercedes-Benz or two that put his scrap of rented tin to happy shame. The Pioneer Hotel was a musty relic with frayed linens and prewar plumbing, but all the gang were there, the antediluvian bar and lobby dust astir with their sudden booming talk and laughter. A few bolts of aged sour-mash poured by brother Waldo and an afternoon round of golf on what turned out to be inventive sunswept fairways and well-kept greens revived Bruce wholly, and after the obligatory rehearsal dinner, enlivened by brother Beans rising to toast the bride’s family with his fly vividly agape, the stag party that followed restored his faith in the human comedy and in his old boonfellow John, wired though he may have been.

That park Bruce passed, no longer there, once hosted Sunday Sousa bands, political campaigners, homemade carnivals, and horseshoes tournaments, as well as the famous Pioneers Day pageants, at one of which, a child still, princesslike in white organdy and lace, John’s wife had starred as The Spirit of Enterprise. This pageant, third and last to be penned by school bard Ellsworth, graduating senior about to flee these rustic precincts for what he called the center stage, was a centennial paean to creation, prairie-style, and so eulogized the century’s builders, not least old Barnaby, wee Enterprise’s very father, whose beloved city park now served as his encomium’s mise-en-scène and shaded him where he proudly sat. In time, his son-in-law’s civic center, newest proof of initiative’s power to transform, would concretely rise in Barnaby’s name where John’s wife once performed, its all-weather Olympic pool become her bikini’d daughter’s rock-scripted stage for performances of a more speculative sort, but on that long-ago day the old park seemed ageless, eternal, some sort of sacred site, mother to them all, even the oldtimers forgetting for the moment that it had not always been there, but Barnaby had built it. How sweet his daughter was that day as she recited, in Ellsworth’s accents, Ellsworth’s lines about the builder’s Olympian power to sow his seed upon e’en the thornéd and rocky waysides of the world and see whole cities rise defiantly like living parables of imagination’s potency, untrammeled reason’s finest crops!

Here in Reason’s beauteous grove we stand,

Its glory being: ‘Twas made by human hand!

Though most that leafy sunswept day applauded, enchanted by the pretty child, angelically aglow in the dappled light, and moved by the tears in her father’s eyes (a rich man, yes, a pillar and a patron, but old-shoe common, one of us), some grumbled that that oddball boy who wrote the thing had courted blasphemy with his foolishness, messing with the Good Book like that, then had compounded his sin by the use of an innocent child for his impieties’ transmission. They were not far from wrong, though only Gordon, privy to the throes of composition, knew to what extent his irreverent friend had with his Olympish wordplays mocked the town: the seed of the city fathers, whom Ellsworth slyly, in a rhyme with “creators,” compared to “master painters,” not so much sown as spilled, this town, he said to Gordon, a hand-job made by, of all trades, the jack-ofs. Not for me, twiddle-dee! Kiss my bum, twiddle-dum! This grinningly declaimed while sprawled in the nude, wearing a top hat and smoking a long cigar, Gordon at the easel, frustrated with the impossible translation of light on flesh into oily smears on canvas-board, saddened by his boyhood friend’s announced departure, and musing the while on the aesthetic ugliness of the dark lumpy dangle between men’s legs, as though something that should be inside had grotesquely fallen out, Gordon’s an abstract ideal of pure unblemished form, wartless, headless, hairless, truth expressed best when least expressed (the poet’s line, though it was Gordon who, in other words, first said it). Because he was leaving town forever, Ellsworth allowed his friend to photograph his poses that the paintings might someday (they both believed in art) get done, these taken with a borrowed camera, Gordon’s first essays on film, including one of a laughing Ellsworth dressed only in his high school drum major’s hat, looking back over his bony white shoulder, baton raised on high, other hand hidden, but somewhere between his hairy legs: See ya later, master painter!

Of course, he returned, the silly man, though not with tail between his legs, where it belonged, as most had hoped, but cocky still and weird as ever, only a monkish bald spot on his crown marking his seven years away, no other signs of the misfortunes which all felt must befall so unrepentant a wiseass in the world. Well, concealed perhaps, the bruises, for return at least he did, and after nose-thumbing farewells that had seemed irrevocable, all ties severed, bridges burnt. So what brought him back? Filial duty, Ellsworth would explain with a flick of a wrist as though brushing away a fly, that and the need, he would add with a weary condescending smile from beneath his jaunty black beret, for a quiet out-of-the-way place to finish his novel-in-progress. As for the alleged novel, who could say, but it was true that his enfeebled father, though he’d bitterly disowned his eccentric son, could no longer run the old family printshop alone, it was Ellsworth saved it, perhaps not beyond redemption after all. This certainly was Barnaby’s view, had been all along. Barnaby was close to that family, Ellsworth’s parents his parents’ friends and his in turn, he’d known the strange boy since his awkward birth twenty years too late and had half-adopted him when the gawky child’s aged mother died, and so it was Barnaby who, remembering the little hand-drawn and — lettered newspapers the boy would entertain his infant daughter with, had located him and, with offers to back a weekly newspaper if Ellsworth would print and edit it, brought him home again. And thus began The Town Crier, successor to The Daily Patriot, which had died in Ellsworth’s absence, nothing but an oral record left of all the time between, the which and more Ellsworth now collected — grist, it was suspected, for his novel-if-a-novel’s mill — in his guest column “I Remember.”

“Quiet! This place? Is old Elsie kidding?” Daphne had hooted when her best friend told her what that longhaired geek, a relative of sorts and once upon a time her friend’s babysitter, had said that summer he first came back. She’d blown a bubble with her gum, sucked it in, and snapped it with her bright white teeth: Oh, what a smile she had back then! Everybody said so! “Honey, this town is jumping!” This was out at the country club pool, it was the summer before their sophomore year in high school, and Daphne was ready for anything and everything, though she had only the dimmest notion, got mostly from the movies and the hit parade, what everything might be. That is to say, as she put it years later on the telephone to her best friend (still wed to John, though Daphne by then was, as she liked to put it, under her fourth), she knew everything in those days about sexual intercourse, but nothing at all about fucking. She had a crush that summer on the lifeguard at the pool, an older guy named Dean, Lean Dean, already in college, a boy with beautiful bronzed muscles and a blonde crewcut and cute blue shorts that showed his bulge, which moved, she knew, when she walked by, she’d seen this and he’d winked at her. In those days swimsuits showed less skin, at least in this town, but midriffs were anyway never Daphne’s strong suit, what she had most abundantly looked good in what she wore, good enough that the guys all stopped to stare or joke, the simps, as she climbed up wet out of the pool, popping her knockers in place, or strode out on the diving board, tugging at the leg-seams where they’d crept up her bouncing cheeks, feeling their eyes pasted on her behind like little sequins with electric charges, her nipples so hard with the rub of their gaze sometimes they felt like rayguns about to fire and blow them all away. Oh boy. She hung around the pool whenever her folks would let her, and one evening near the end of the season Dean drove her home in his pickup truck, stopping off near the humpback bridge at the edge of Settler’s Woods to feel her up, and then apologize, and that was that. “I don’t care,” she’d whispered, but probably not loud enough. She came to care but that was a few months later, Settler’s Woods by then in autumn colors and creepy with musty shadows and the smell of rot, the guy she was with a senior footballer they all called Colt, a guy she was going steady with, so to speak, who’d kissed her uncupped tits and had had his hand between her legs, excitements she was still getting used to and not too sure about. Now he said he had something to show her and he took her out to a one-room tarpaper house at the back of Settler’s Woods she’d never seen before, some kind of clubhouse, she learned later, that the senior boys had built. She hung back, but Colt grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her in. “C’mon, Daph, don’t be a party pooper,” he laughed. “What party?” she asked, but too late, they were already inside and the bolt was thrown. A mosquito whined. I Remember.

That clubhouse, built by John and his friends, all seniors that year, on a stubbly piece of land owned by Dutch’s old man at the back edge of the woods outside of town, was the first thing John put up that stayed a while. It was still there five years later at the time of his wedding and did not come down, though by then abandoned and the floor rotted out, until Dutch’s new motel got built out there some five or six years further on. As with all John’s constructions, function, not craft or style or beauty, determined its design: one comfortably sized room with bare wooden floors and walls, low pitched roof, a door made from a tabletop and three framed windows, unpaned but screened and wooden-shuttered (chair seats did the job) to let the breezes through, no plumbing or electrics but a junkyard coal stove for the winter, and furnished with a kitchen table under a hanging Coleman lantern for playing cards, half a dozen folding chairs, an old leatherette sofa with the springs poking out, a single bed and cotton mattress, car blankets and ashtrays tossed around to make it feel like home, a flyswatter, a spike with toilet paper beside the door, and saucy calendar pinups, baseball pennants, girls’ panties, an American flag, and photos clipped from sun-worshiper magazines tacked up on the walls. Though John, having more options, used it less than most, its principle appealed to him: people were multifaceted creatures needing a variety of discrete spaces to fulfill themselves. In short, one house was not enough. Not for the living. Or, as he put it to Waldo and Bruce and the others out at the Country Tavern the night before his marriage, accepting Harvie’s newest round of iced gin, Dutch’s of cold beer, and describing the place they were headed next: “We just wanted a getaway somewhere, a place we could be ourselves. Of course, we were ourselves wherever we went, but this was different, the getaway was a kind of sanctuary, you know, like a chapel or a basketball court or a whorehouse, a place where—” “Where anything can happen,” proposed Harvie, clinking gin jiggers with him, while around him his friends slowly bobbed and rotated, as though on a carousel. “No, not… not anything.” He felt utterly lucid and totally bombed out of his mind at the same time, not used to gin clearly, if gin was clearly what it was. “It’s more like a kind of theater set where the script is different, but what you do there is fucking scripted, just the same. Like a, you know, a church service.” What was he saying? Where was he? “All right then, Father Dutch,” grinned his best man Bruce, tossing back his gin and rising unsteadily, “goddamn it, let us pray!”

Prayer for Pauline had always been associated with a zealous assault on all her orifices, that being Daddy Duwayne’s zinger-wielding mode of sermonizing, and so what transpired that night before John was wived was not without for Pauline its spiritual overtones, its aura of a sacred service, or else a diabolical one, made more so by the strange magical things happening to her mind or in it, the vivid things she saw, not seen since, and almost, her grown-up imagination failing her, beyond recall. Even the funky old-mattress smell of that shape-shifting cabin (she went looking after, could never find it, came to believe it never was) brought back to her her mad daddy’s religious exercises on the trailer floor, though thankfully free on this occasion of the whippings her daddy always laid on, even as he mounted her, to, as he put it, beat the devil out. No beatings, nothing worse than the ritual baptism (though this was much later, another age really, after the magic had faded, and it happened in a ditch), just a surrender so total she seemed not to have a self any longer, all that she was, absorbed into a transcendent otherness that penetrated her utterly and lifted her out of herself into something as vast as the night sky and as intimate as pain and sweat. She was fourteen years old then and her breasts were full and firm and, though she could be sure of little else after, she knew that her yearning heart, which lay nestled between them like a baby bird, was passionately stroked that night by that cosmic otherness and that, as its personification reared majestically above her, his hair was on fire with eerie curling flames, strange-colored, like luminous serpents from another world.

Dutch, from beneath this six-ring circus, had a similar view, through the girl’s unwashed hair, of his tit-fucking buddy’s flaming head, but though stoned, he knew it merely to be the haloing effect of the gas lantern overhead. Dutch harbored no illusions. Things were what they were. There was no magic. Not even in Harvie’s hallucinogens. Life and the mechanics of life were the same thing. He liked to keep his distance, keep his eye on it. At that moment he was lying on his back on the mattressed kitchen table with his dick up the ass of a young girl, ceremonial proxy (he knew, they all knew) for the bride-to-be, but he would just as soon have had someone else where he was and be watching it all from an easy chair. Wouldn’t have all this fucking weight pressing down on him, for one thing, or be rubbing testimonials with a freaking Hard Yard between the girl’s quivering thighs and thus between his own as well, risking a multi directional scattershot shower of cum from all the others. Well, anything for old John. This stag night’s entertainment, just climaxing, was Dutch’s personal wedding gift to his old battery mate, that and the special wedding party rate at the downtown Pioneer Hotel, owned by Dutch’s old man. Dutch and John went back to childhood when Dutch caught John in Little League. They’d been through school together and a lot more besides. The hotel went back much further of course, but not, as some thought, to pioneer days, though some kind of hostelry may have been appended to the livery stable that once occupied the spot, according to an archive photo. The Railway Saloon stood there during the days when a spur was laid to town, but both were gone now, and some time after the Great War the Pioneer Hotel was built in anticipation of a boom that never happened, not in these parts. Dutch’s granddad picked it up at a bankruptcy auction, ran it as a bar and roominghouse until a new war gave it life again, the linens dating from that brief revival. John’s wedding party was its last hurrah. A few years later when the old man died, the two pals struck a deal and John tore it down and built a bank and office block there, Dutch moving out to catch the highway trade with his new motel.

Floyd stayed out there when he first hit town. The motel had just been built, you could smell the fresh-laid cinderblocks and the carpet glue. Booked in for a night, stayed for three weeks, then moved into town, hitting a bit of luck rare in his life, so rare he was never able to say for sure after whether it had been good or bad. Floyd, on the mend from mean times, had in desperation grabbed up several sales jobs, peddling a versatile cheapjack line that ranged from coolers and cosmetics to brushes, Bibles, and magical potions for men afflicted with baldness and loss of vigor. He stopped in at the local hardware store to push his range of screwdriver sets and do-it-yourself rockingchair kits, which he’d had a bit of luck with in these independent backwater operations, often starved for a gimmick to beat the chains, but now all too few and far between. There was a tall broad-shouldered guy in there with his sleeves rolled up who looked skeptically down his slightly broken nose at Floyd, picked up one of the screwdrivers, and bent it double with his bare hands. “This stuff’s junk,” he said. “Hell, I know it,” Floyd acknowledged with a shrug, glancing around. “I do believe in the do-it-yourself line, though, and I don’t see enough of that in here. You should ought to have an auto parts section, too. You’re away behind the times.” The guy studied him a moment. He looked like he might be about to take a swing, so Floyd turned to go, figuring on maybe a bowl of chili and a piece of pie at the cheap cafe next door, but the guy stopped him. “Wait a minute. You want regular work? My manager just quit. I’m looking for somebody to run this store.” Floyd paused, loath to get pushed around, especially by a young shit, still wet behind the ears, but startled by the offer and the amazing timing and needing the job. He didn’t even know how he was going to pay his overnight motel bill. “I got a job. But I’ll think on it.” “I haven’t got time to fuck around, friend. I mean right now. On with the overalls or out the goddamn door.” Floyd sighed, gazed round the dusty old store, peeled off his checkered jacket. “Let me see if they’re my size.” John covered his motel bill for three weeks while he looked for a house. He called his wife Edna who didn’t believe him until he sent her a bus ticket to help him join in the house search. She was so happy once she got to town, she asked for it for the first time in a decade. It made Floyd’s heart swell and fill his chest to see her all flushed and eager like that, she almost looked a girl again.

Dutch saw her, too. Not much to see, but he was testing out his two-way mirrors still, and the salesman gave her quite a ride, enough to get off on anyway while waiting for a better show. Of which plenty to come, to spend a phrase. He’d seen it all, Dutch had, over the dozen years since then, a seamless flow: Marriage nights, adulteries, group gropes. Old guys taking virgin blood. Young kids fumbling. Child sex, dog sex, toilet sex, you name it. Rapes and whippings, faggots and dykes. Gangbangs. Incest. But mostly forlorn meat-beaters, all alone. Melancholy places, highway motels. A lot of fucking solitary sadness, as Dutch knew well. Some used fancy gadgetry, especially the women, others anything at hand. Dutch liked the improvisors best, left stuff around for them like bait to use, but learned more from the others. Sometimes he wanted to reach out and pat a quivering unknuckling ass, say well done, knowing then how God must feel, having to keep his distance, else spoil the show. Couldn’t even use the spectacle as a turn-on for a fuck or bring a buddy in for laughs, as in the old days at the Palace Theater, that’d be the end of it. He used to think that what God went for, if there was a God, was all the stories, why else would He keep watching, but now he thought there were no stories, only one: this ceaseless show and he/He who watched it. Or maybe Dutch had the wrong seat in the house. For stories, he eventually came to believe, somehow always had to do with numbers, numbers and sequence, and maybe this was God’s game, too, having started maybe with one and two and set them humping, but having long since gone on from there, Dutch in his innocence sitting still in the kiddie rows with his useless dick in his hands like a fishing pole, the real stories having all moved elsewhere. The only other who knew about the Back Room mirrors was John, having installed them for Dutch when he built the place, compensation for his lost Palace. Saved a couple of seats from the old moviehouse, too, and the banner that hung in the lobby: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies.” John got no delight in ogling what he couldn’t get his organ into, but sometimes used the room when opening and closing deals, lodging clients and adversaries there, his interest not in bottoms but in bottom lines, and so closer to the notion Dutch had of story, or maybe the notion’s inspiration. John rarely dropped by himself, just let Dutch tape the conferences and calls.

Which was how John found out about his father-in-law’s attempt a year or so ago at the time of their civic center squabble to wrest his construction firm away, the thankless old fossil. Could have wiped John out. It would never have happened if Audrey were still alive, she the smart one in that pair, and loyal to John who’d helped her double their retirement fortune with his genius for investment, a fortune funding now Barnaby’s callous raid. Behind the wedding vows all those years before lay other contracts, silent shifts of wealth and property, unseen by most but sending ripples of rumor and anticipation through the town as in election years or before state championships or raffle draws. John’s ancestors had come to town as harness makers and blacksmiths, his great-great-grandfather a manufacturer of horse troughs and owner of the town’s first hardware store, or at least that was the legend. Paint and wallpaper had soon been added, a real estate agency and a sheet metal company, and his father Mitch had got into heating, refrigeration, and air-conditioning, landing lucrative wartime contracts through his political connections, even though almost everything had to be subcontracted out. Mitch had plowed his profits back into minerals, banks, and land, cheap farmland mostly, bought at mortgagors’ auctions and become prime sites when they put the highway through. Mitch had kept the land and investments but given John the family businesses to use as tokens in his nuptial dealings with the builder, a simple exchange that gave the boy a quarter of the new amalgamated construction firm and related enterprises, his wife’s power-of-attorney forms effectively making it a half. When Audrey died, they each, thanks to a will John had helped her to draft, had thirds, and John, then in his thirties and chafing at the bit, set about easing his grieving father-in-law into an early and hopefully distant retirement. Old Barnaby was a builder famous for his solid constructions, most of the best houses in town had been built by him, but he was slow and too expensive, such craftsmanship was for the rich, a limited market in such a town as this, and out of step with the throw-away times. John understood the common need, wanted to build not houses but whole developments, his own an art of most for least, quick, cheap, and functional, disdaining the vain illusions of perpetuity, a view which Barnaby understood but poorly, so causing them endless friction. And then, just when John had overreached himself in his civic center and newest mall constructions and faced a cash-flow crunch, there came an irresistible offer from an unexpected source: an upstate client of his sorehead cousin Maynard, an industrial and commercial paving company, looking for a merger. Their other chips included an insulation and roofing company, a small tile manufacturer, and a line in septic tanks and cesspools, as well as real estate; they wanted only thirty percent of the final package and were offering a three hundred grand cash investment to close the deal. It seemed too good to be true. “They think you’re hot,” said Maynard with a sour shrug, which John found he could only half believe. As they approached the signing stage and the negotiators came to town, John offered them free lodging at Dutch’s motel, joined Dutch in the old movie seats in the Back Room for once to watch the show, see who turned up and what got said. He figured there had to be a card they hadn’t shown yet. He hadn’t expected it, though, to be his father-in-law.

Maynard II, who had helped old Barnaby cook up the deal to get his company back, stolen from him by John, was not, it’s true, a happy man. It was he who’d caught the garter at the famous wedding when John’s fraternity brother shied from it, mindful not of its alleged foretellings but of the sweet warm leg from which it came; he who, having finally two years later, third time lucky, passed the bar, had then, feeling magnaminous, wed the gatherer of the bride’s bouquet, public boobs, bad rep, and all, a marriage that had lasted less than a year, though it had seemed a century or two longer than that; and he who, with one exception, loathed all women only slightly less than he loathed all men, that exception not being the thriftless screamer who was his present legal mate and mother of his only son. It might be said that Maynard had courted John’s wife all the six years before her marriage, her four in high school and two beyond, though as Maynard had no gift at courting, only he could have known that was what he was doing. Certainly she could have had no inkling, though she must have noticed he was always there, humble and serviceable as a pencil sharpener or a cafeteria tray. One day, the happiest of his life perhaps, she turned to him suddenly, the great distance between them dissolving for a moment as her gaze uncharacteristically penetrated his, and said (he’d just rethreaded and tightened the chain on her bicycle): “Maynard”—she always called him Maynard, even in casual haste, never “Nerd” or “Junior” as the others did—“Maynard, you’re really very sweet.” Or at least that was what she seemed to say, he could not be sure, his ears were ringing so. He thought for a moment then she was going to kiss him, a thought that nearly made him let go in his corduroys, but she only squeezed his hand (a hand that for some time after went unwashed) and then, as though without transition, she was gone again, their torrid romance ended when not yet begun. She married in due time his cross-cousin John, a ruthless cocksman who’d systematically cracked half the hymens in high school, as though he’d bought or won the rights to them, what did he need another for? The heartless egotistical hardballing sonuvabitch, how could he help but hate him?

Thus, though most men admired John, a model for all men, there were many among them who also feared him some, and even those who, resenting him for his usurpations, mistrustful of his success and power, would have been glad to see him fall, feeling the relief of a balance struck, as when gangsters or presidents die, or wars disturb the dull interminable peace.

But not Waldo. No, Jesus, he’d be dead without that beautiful bastard, John was all that stood between Waldo and the awful abyss, a mighty rock in a weary land, may he live and prosper to the end of time. Waldo was not from this town. He and John had been drinking buddies at college. Waldo had brought John into the fraternity, had protected him from most of the pledge horseshit, seen to it that John succeeded him in the chapter presidency. Those were the days, oh man, playing ball, boozing, screwing sorority girls, then all-night bridge and poker till the break of dawn, he and Long John and Knucks and Beans and Brains and old Loose Bruce, a fuck-off’s golden age. Waldo, in love with those times, couldn’t leave them, was still raising hell and drifting drunkenly through a series of worsening sales jobs, dragging Lollie and the kids about, when he ran into John at a home builders show in Chicago and overnight became an Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales for a number of John’s enterprises. Now about all he did was preside over John’s local paint and wallpaper business and run an errand now and then, like the one that helped to nail wicked old Barn, but he knew, whatever happened, shit, old John, good brother, would take care of him.

John’s fraternal succor both rankled Waldo’s wife Lorraine and reconciled her in some small part to her wretched fate: how had a class act like herself — once voted “Most Likely to Marry a Millionaire,” a B-plus lit major, and a hotshot on the tennis courts — ended up a desexed overweight smalltown hausfrau chained to a shopping basket, three of the world’s most unabashed underachievers, and a prehistoric Ford stationwagon off Stu’s used-car lot, suffering from crankcase drip and a fatal skin disease? She should have left the sodden deadbeat she’d wed — madly, after a wild party — years ago, before she met him in fact, but not only were there the two kids to think about, tedious little louts though they were, the truth was, her lot once cast, her options were few. Alimony would have been zip in those shiftless years adrift, jobs she could have tolerated or even applied for were few, and the mirror on the wall told her plain she’d been condemned to a brief bloom: one pollination and the “Here’s Lollie!” show was over, nothing but bracken and stinkweeds after, only a drunk in a dark room could ever again get up a semi-tumescent interest. Which was how she got knocked up the second time, not even sure Waldo knew who he was with when, like a bushel of old winter apples, he fell on her, scattering himself mushily in all directions. So she was relieved to have someone come to their rescue, even if, as rescues went, it was a pretty half-assed affair, regretting only that that someone had to be the callous sonuvabitch who took the only maidenhead she ever had. Not that she missed it — what the hell, let it go, good riddance, it was just getting in her way anyhow — but she really didn’t want ever to see the capricious bastard again, much less live in the same goddamned town with him. Made her feel vulnerable and exposed, as though she’d stepped out naked from behind the doctor’s screen and found herself and her sagging ass on Main Street. She still didn’t know where to look when they were in the same room together, and in mixed-doubles foursomes on the golf course, it cost her a stroke each time John glanced her way or handed her a tee for one she’d splintered. Did he get a charge out of that? Probably, who knows. She sometimes had the weird feeling that John had brought to this town, not Waldo, but her, and no doubt others like her as well, not out of any sense of caring for an old flame (that was flattering herself), and not just to make her eat shit and feel the fool either, though she wouldn’t put it past him, but just because, a smalltowner to the bone, he’d started up these stories and wanted to keep them all around him, see how they all came out.

Beatrice would have been startled by Lorraine’s insight, had she known of it, so similar was it to one of her own. For her husband Lennox, too, whom Waldo called Knucks and the townsfolk Reverend Lenny, had by John been raised from the dead, brought here, and restored to a station of eminence and dignity not his since his days as fraternity chaplain and pledge master, and she, too, thought she might have been the secret beneficiary of John’s unexpected brotherly love — his midlife atonement, as it were, for the dissolute excesses of his youth. For which, at least as they affected her, traumatic as it had all been at the time, she forgave him. Lennox’s feelings, she knew, were more ambivalent, as they always were, part of his character really, a trait that sometimes approximated moral weakness, though now in his new pastoral career, he had learned to dissemble a certain steadfastness in his convictions, an appearance — most of the time — of equanimity and resolve, and so was held by his congregation in general good repute. They saw him, she believed, as a good man, honest and forthright, gentle in his chastisements, understanding at hospital bedsides and burials, artistic in his church services, if perhaps a bit vague and overly intellectual, and they saw her as the good man’s wife and helpmeet, his organist and choir director and mother of his three children. Most of which was nearly true.

Floyd, who taught Sunday school in Reverend Lenny’s church, thought of him as a candy-ass and a prevaricator, a pulpit flimflammer not to be trusted, sinful in not hating sin enough. The silly prat probably didn’t even know what it was. Did Floyd know? Too well. Still had nightmares, blood on his hands. This town, the church, the hardware store: a wall Floyd was throwing up between himself and his past. He was still tough as the nails he sold, old Floyd was, but now he was tough for the Lord. He and Edna had been in town a couple of years already and felt like locals when the new preacher turned up, some old college bud of John’s, people said, just like that seedy bozo Waldo, who came wallowing in the year after, tongue out and wagging his broad behind, and whose only serious job, as far as Floyd could tell, was to sub for John from time to time on the compulsory bridge nights, the female knee then under the table as alluring as a bend in a rusty drainpipe. These people all made Floyd feel old. And vulnerable. John was taking over the family construction company in those years, encouraged by his mother-in-law, not yet dead then but soon to be, and Floyd saw less and less of him, cut from the party invite lists, ignored at the old family hardware store while bigger things got done. Even Stu and they had drifted apart what with poor old Winnie dead and gone, these were lonely times for him and Edna, potluck suppers at the church, the bowling league, and TV quiz shows mostly what they had here of social life. Sometimes Floyd felt like taking a big hammer and smashing every cussed thing in sight. Even that wall he was so painstakingly building. He wanted to shove his fingers deep into the bloodred-rimmed fingerholes of his personalized bowling ball and roll a strike of such terrific force that nothing, nothing, was left standing after.

Intimations of covetous Floyd’s hidden yearnings reached young Clarissa and her friends through his Sunday school lessons, in which he seemed to take special delight — his thin wide lips twitching then in a scary kind of grin that the other kids, who called him Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler, often made fun of — in describing the tortures of hell and the terrific ways God smote his enemies and the day Jesus suddenly blew his cool and almost wackily set about “cleansing the temple,” as the Bible said, or supposedly said, a story which Clarissa tended to take personally, since she associated her dad with the temple, and probably rightly so, too. That man managed one of her father’s stores, and it was like he was working for her dad and against him at the same time. Still, you couldn’t take him seriously. Clarissa and her friends mostly regarded Old Hoot’s ravings as just so much overexcited horsedookie frankly, even her best friend Jennifer, whose own dad was the preacher and had told her it ain’t necessarily so, and the older boys at the church called him a dumb cracker who ought to go join the holy rollers, what was he doing in a serious church like this one anyway? There were exceptions, her something-cousin Little Maynard, for example, or Turtle, as he was now called: he was all eyes and ears, a disciple born and bred, so turned on by all the blood and gore he seemed almost to look forward to God wasting the earth and sending them all screaming into the pits of hell. He was always trying to scare her little brother Mikey and the younger kids with his weirdo ideas, and once when they were smaller Clarissa had even caught him tying Mikey and Jennifer’s baby sister Zoe down and pinching them with barbecue tongs, which he said were the devil’s pincers. They had a fight then, and she called him the name all the other kids were calling him, even though back then she didn’t like to use bad language, and because she was bigger than he was, she was able to give him a good slapping and take the tongs away from him and untie the two little ones, who then surprised her in a way she was never able to understand by siding with him against her. They didn’t really do anything, they just pushed at her and yelled at her to stop hitting him, all of them bawling like babies now and calling her names, so she left them in disgust, wondering why she had ever bothered to try to help in the first place. A lesson learned.

Little Maynard was the firstborn of twice-wed Maynard II and Veronica, proudly named Maynard III, proudly but thoughtlessly, for it is a bad enough thing to be called the Nerd, much worse to be Nerd the Turd. It had started already in the second grade. Little, as his folks called him, didn’t even get the joke at first, and he certainly couldn’t figure out where it all came from, it being the sort of thing his dad never wanted to talk about, blowing his stack whenever he was asked, even swatting Little once across the back of the head. Hard. Finally it was his mom who let it all out one day when she was fed up with his dad, one of the many days, she was fed up with him most of the time, and she always let the whole world know about it. So, that was when he found out that back when his own mom and dad were still in junior high, and Grandpa Maynard had just got elected mayor of the town, everyone at school had started calling his dad Mayor Nerd. Okay, ha ha, very funny, but come on, that was centuries ago, how did the guys in his class know that? Little figured it must have something to do with Clarissa and Mikey, who were Uncle John’s kids, Uncle John being one of his dad’s worst enemies and so probably the person who had started it all in the first place. Clarissa was mean and sneaky enough to do something like that to Little, she was always bullying him, he hated her and had often found himself wishing that Jesus or somebody would order him to take her pants down and spank the daylights out of her, and although Mikey was a spooky little twit who kept to himself pretty much and hardly ever said anything at all, Little didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust much of anybody actually, it was more like a general principle, something his dad had taught him early on, about the only exception being his friend Fish, one of the preacher’s kids, Zoe’s and Jennifer’s big brother. Fish was older than he was, already in high school, and knew just about everything, at least the things Little wanted to know. The first thing he taught him was his weekly paper route when Little took it over, but even that first day they soon got to talking about lots of other things, starting with baseball and God, but pretty soon moving on to more interesting stuff. Things that happened on the paper route, for example. Fish was a good explainer. Then one day Fish heard one of the other kids calling him Turd while they were playing video games out at the mall (“Quit hogging the fricking machine, Turd!” is what the dumb jerk said), and Fish just grabbed him by the back of the neck and said: “What did I hear you say? I think I heard you say, ah, ‘Turtle,’ is that right?” “Yeah, yeah! Ow! Turtle!” the kid squeaked and they all laughed nervously, and after that they mostly called him Turtle, though some of them still said it with a d. It was like some kind of joke they were all in on, but that was okay, he was in on it, too. So everything was cool. It was Fish and Turtle from then on. And it was Fish who told him about collecting for the Crier at the big house of Turtle’s Uncle John one Saturday morning and finding his aunt there all alone. Just out of the bath. Fish said. Naked. Stark naked. You should have seen.

Naked flesh: ever a sight to see, with all its glowing surfaces, its creases and dimples and hairy bits, and especially when generally withheld from view. As was the case with most in town past the crawling age, at least in public between the sexes, John’s wife no exception. Many had imagined her au naturel, as Ellsworth, showing off, once put it in The Town Crier when describing the orthodontist’s scandalous daughter at a famous Pioneers Day parade (“how natural,” is how most folks thought that naughty phrase got spoken, the naughty girl herself long gone from here), but though few would miss the chance, few had actually seen John’s wife starkly so. Young Fish’s brag, if overheard, would have aroused doubt in most, envy in many, rage in a few perhaps and/or anxiety or mad desire, but certainly in all quarters a great curiosity. For Gordon, who longed to photograph John’s wife exhaustively, it would have added another shot for his projected study: “John’s Wife (Wet) Draped in Falling Towel.” He had not thought of this one, not yet, though he had envisioned her, before his lens, on a barren hilltop, dressed in a gauzy stuff like mist, gently pivoting on one foot, glancing around, her hair caught by a breeze, her far hip lifting slightly, her trailing hand waist-high, a mysterious shadow between her thighs: “John’s Wife Turning Through Diaphanous Wisps.” And also, more akin to the paperboy’s uncorroborated report, standing naked (“John’s Wife …”) in the rain, face uplifted, arms outstretched, feet together, her body streaming and glistening in the downpour, diamonds of light in her pubic hair. This one he had practiced with his wife Pauline, and the results, free as he was to play with angles, lenses, filters, and exposures, were professional enough, quite admirable in some respects, but there was no magic in them. No radiance. Not even in his blowups of the diamonds of light.

“Radiance” was a word often used when speaking of John’s wife, though what was meant by it, few could say. “Radiant” was how her parents Barnaby and Audrey described her as a baby when astark, delighting in the little creature, excessively so perhaps, she being the only one they ever had, though others, too, privileged back then to behold her entire, John’s folks Mitch and Opal among them, often remarked that the precious child truly “glowed with health.” She was still “dazzling” (see the testimonials in her high school yearbooks) as she blossomed into the well-dressed woman whom John undressed, starkly, to his great delight, but whom others glimpsed in similar state along the way, or thought they did, Gordon’s friend Ellsworth, for example, who babysat her and dressed her up (and down) for the make-believe games they played. “Babes in the Woods.” “Sleeping Beauty.” “Narcissus and Echo.” “Alice Through the Looking-Glass.” And games that Ellsworth made up from scratch, like “Dreaming Awake” and “The Artist and His Model.” “Narcissus and Echo” was a particular favorite of both of them, copycat play that was lots of fun, followed by a kind of hide-and-seek. Ellsworth would hunch over his own reflection — in a rain puddle, a paddling pool, a hubcap, kettle bottom, or snow shovel, most often just a handmirror at his feet — while she “vanished,” leaving her clothes behind, the playacting ones she wore on top. While she was looking for a hiding place, Ellsworth, his gaze fixed upon the pale acne’d image of himself (sometimes, cheating, he’d tip the mirror to see, between his legs, the dress-up clothes come off), would call out to her in phrases stolen from Ancient Mythologies and she would shout back at him the last words that he said—“Won’t anyone come play with me?” “Play with me!” “Why can’t I see you?” “See you!” “Don’t be such a nincompoop!” “Poop!” “Where have you gone?” “Gone!”—until she had finally hidden, and then she would be silent and he would go looking for her, tickling her when he found her. But not too hard. Just a little. The tickling was not her favorite part. Nor, though he liked it, his. After that, they’d get dressed up and do it again, though sometimes, just to be fair, he’d be Echo. Of course, this was a long time ago, when Ellsworth was even younger than Fish was now.

Fish, whose proper name was Philip, Fish being the name his baby sister Jennifer gave him when they were both just toddlers, was the oldest of three children and the only son of Beatrice and Reverend Lenny, though when he was born his parents were still known mostly as Trixie and Knucks. That is to say, he was certainly Beatrice’s oldest, she never able to say for sure, after what happened that night at the fraternity house toga party, that Lennox was the father, in fact probably he wasn’t, though of course she told him he was, and he seemed to accept that and married her willingly when she asked him to, being a good man at heart, whatever he believed. “Why not?” he said. “Let it happen.” A good man, but also, truth to tell, a weak man, with a talent for trouble, trouble she had had to share over the years, and as for what he believed, that was always pretty vague, whatever the subject, rather too vague for a man of the cloth, as she often remarked, though always with understanding and forbearance. Needful virtues in their trying years adrift. When Philip was born and Lenny had graduated, thanks to a fraternity brother named Brains who wrote three of his final papers for him, she and Lenny had left the baby with her mother and taken a little honeymoon, a spiritual holiday, as Lenny called it, irony being one of his redeeming qualities. He had signed up for a dozen or more credit cards and they had gone on an international spree, living like royalty all over the world until the credit limits were all used up and the collection agencies came after them. Not much those blue-suited bullies could do. All she and Lenny had left when they got back was an old car hidden in her mother’s garage and the baby. The bullies found and took the car. Carted it off on a truck bed, Lenny having sold the wheels. Well, she and Lenny had had a wonderful time, quite literally the time of their lives, and they felt no guilt about the credit card companies, it was their fault for giving them all that credit in the first place, right? But now what? In college, Lenny had majored in philosophy and religious studies, and jobs in these fields were scarce, especially now that he had more or less lost his credibility as a moral exemplar, at least in the eyes of the establishment. About the best they could find were part-time jobs in charity organizations, working with the underprivileged and the handicapped, Beatrice sometimes able to give music and dancing lessons or, until she got pregnant with Jennifer — who was more likely Lenny’s, most likely of the three — to play the piano in bars and restaurants. Finally, like a miracle, Lennox landed a job teaching religious studies at a small liberal arts college, hard up for cheap staff and willing to overlook his minor misdemeanors. In fact, the times were such, his credit card-burning had a certain heroic luster: down with the system, yay. The teaching went well, the students seemed to love him, and he even managed, at Beatrice’s insistence, to get ordained in his spare time. Beatrice helped the students put on an underground satirical revue, they experimented with the drugs that were popular at that time, little Zoe was born. If it had not been for that unfortunate incident with one of Lenny’s hysterical freshman students they might be there still. When he got fired, Lennox seemed to lose all his self-esteem and stayed stoned almost all the time. Luckily, Beatrice had been a zealous sender of Christmas cards, so over the years, throughout their travels and travails, they had stayed in touch with John. It was not exactly Christmastime, but she got in touch again. It was good timing. For all his faults, she thought, God bless John.

Reverend Lenny, ever more ambivalent than his wife, would have to agree and, of course, disagree. Even about the timing, for as it happened, when they first came to town a decade ago, their arrival coincided with the violent death of Stu’s first wife Winnie, Lenny’s first service here — or anywhere — therefore a funeral, a discouraging omen, and besides, Lenny knew nothing at all about funerals, having always, on principle, avoided them. Even his own father’s he had skipped out on. So, to gear up for this newest trial and because he feared it was expected of him, he decided to pay a pastoral visit, hat in hand, to the bereaved, hoping that if they had to pray, they could pray in silence. He had found the old boy on his knees, all right, but only because he couldn’t stand up. He was pie-eyed, nose bandaged, tongue loose in his mouth as a bell-clapper, and his pants looked like they’d been used for a floor-mop in a men’s room. He offered Lenny a drink on condition that he’d pour two, having lost his bottle grip, and Lenny decided it was probably the Christian thing to do, his own throat parched moreover with all his day’s — week’s, month’s — hypocritical posturings, he badly needed one. Time passed, during which old Stu tried to sell him a car (credit no problem), sang a song about honkytonk women, confessed to murder, and told him what he said was a true story about a nun, eventually canonized, who had a second rectum where her other business ought to be. The worst thing was that Lenny found himself laughing like a heathen, another bottle, at least one, having been opened in the meantime. Actually that was probably the second worst thing. The worst thing was that he realized he couldn’t walk, he was alone in a darkening kitchen with a confessed murderer, and there was a committee of ladies from the church at the front door, bearing gifts of food, John’s wife among them. There was the honorable and manly way to behave on such occasions, and there was the despicable tail-between-the-legs sneak-thief way. He chose as always the latter, snatching up his hat and Bible and clattering on his hands and knees into the bedroom and under the bed, where he awoke four hours later, his nose full of dust balls and his erstwhile host snoring overhead like a pneumatic drill. He crept out, thinking about his wife and the terrific story he would have to make up, and found himself face-to-face with a woman, stretched out on the bed beside the brain-dead widower, fully dressed, even to a hat and black veil, and resting a bottle on her belly. “Hey, Preacher, good to see you back among the living,” she slurred throatily this side of the raucous snores, the bottle doing a little dance as she spoke. She wore the veil tossed back like a ballplayer with his cap on backwards. “Whaddaya say we take a little communion, hunh?” She winked broadly, raising her knees and spreading them, her green eyes crossing, then refocusing. “If you do, honey, I’ll tell you where your shoes are.”

Serving on church committees, consoling those who had lost loved ones, and providing sustenance to those in need were but a few of John’s wife’s volunteer civic and religious activities in town. She was also a member of the BPW, Ladies’ Aid, the Parent-Teacher Association, and the Literary Society, which met each month in the town library, except in the summer, less often since the longtime town librarian had died. She rarely missed a school play, attending even those in which friends’ children performed. When old Snuffy retired after nearly thirty years of high school teaching and coaching to take up a managerial post out at John’s airport, it was she who presented him at halftime of the homecoming game with the honorary “Coach of the Century” trophy from his players and ex-players, which read simply: DIG IN, SON. Many in town might pass unnoticed for weeks on end, old Snuffy himself, for example, or others like the drugstore simpleton, tethered to his pinball machines and video games, or his sister Columbia, sullenly overweight and whited out by her nursing uniform, or timid Trevor, housebound Edna, and most old folks much of the time, sad to say, but not John’s wife. She was at the inaugural meeting of the town cleanup campaign, and when they stenciled KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL on all the trash-cans in town, she helped cut the stencils, and people said hers were the neatest. She collected door-to-door each year for the Community Chest and the March of Dimes, sang in the church choir, and though she rarely sought or held office, was treasurer for two years of the Pioneers Day parade committee. She was always in the parade itself, on one float or another or perched on the backseat of one of the lead convertibles, usually dressed in a beautiful pioneer costume, her presence as indispensable as a definiendum’s to a definition (something Kate the librarian once said, though not even Ellsworth could repeat it after). When the decorating of the city fire hydrants was in fashion, she painted one a vivid emerald green, trimmed in metallic gold, which many said was an expression of her true personality, hidden beneath her modest, somewhat dry and formal surface, and others said showed a lack of a sense of humor. Ellsworth recalled that these were the colors of the dress a princess wore in a story he had read to her as a child and Maynard that this was how her high school bicycle was painted, each deriving his own private meaning from his recollection, which may or may not have been accurate. Gordon’s photos of the hydrant and its painter added nothing to his knowledge, though a swatch of glitter on her bluejeaned thigh did haunt for a time his darkroom nights. Waldo’s wife Lorraine, who interpreted all the painted fireplugs as condom fantasies (hers she’d painted like a one-eyed toothless Martian in a tux, though lame Gretchen won first prize with a winsome portrait of her white-jacketed father-in-law), felt a twinge of jealousy when she saw John’s wife’s hydrant, but Barnaby felt only sorrow, perceiving his daughter’s deep malaise.

By the time Gretchen won the hydrant-painting competition, her husband Cornell, though the father of her six children, including triplets born just three months before the contest, much to Grandpa’s great delight (thus the beaming smile on the fireplug’s cartoon face), was little more than a peripheral nuisance to the family, which centered now around the thickly bespectacled lady from the north with the anguished grimace and the withered leg. Lumby loved her, Oxford did, as did all her babies of course (and there were more to come), and so did even, from a distance, her brother-in-law Harvie, grateful that his lonely sister had found true companionship at last, and so, with brotherly gratitude, loving the beloved. And Corny, who spent his mind-bombed days behind pin-ball machines and pornographic magazines, loved her, too, as best he could in his woeful way, having less than all his marbles, as was often said — a strange boy stranger yet as man: his thinning hair uncombed, his eyes unfocused, the hairs of his blond moustache hanging down over his pink mouth like a kind of wispy curtain, nothing but nonsense heard from behind it. With cause, of course, were his marbles lost and scattered, as all who knew his Paris story knew, but that boy was born to strangeness, not all there from the get-go, and in more marbly ways than one, as his sister Lumby would say, speaking euphemistically, she unable to figure out, given his little problem, just how the little sperm machine got the job done, so to speak. Though get it done he clearly did, his bride’s fecundity, even at this early stage in her parturient career, already notorious in the town and soon to become a local legend.

One who was not surprised by the frequent ripening of the crippled drugstore lady’s womb was Pauline, who had seen Corny’s little problem, as his sister called it, from a different perspective. Though she and Corny had been in high school at the same time, just a class or two apart, Pauline had always thought of him as light-years younger, not only because she felt so much older than almost all the boys she knew, but because Corny was such a backward little shrimp, hanging out mostly with gradeschool children right up into her senior year in high school, which was when she began noticing him staring at her from across the room with that confused wall-eyed look of puppydog desire she had seen drift across the faces of successive generations of boys like the special effects in werewolf movies. She had known by all her five senses his two brothers before him, Harvie, the one they called Hard Yard, being off only by an inch or two, and Yale, who was so sweet, and she supposed, by the looks he was giving her, she would eventually know their little brother in like manner as well. This came to pass, though not without a great deal of hesitation on Corny’s part, a lot of time-wasting teasing and pretended hostility and disinterest and silly snickering in the corridors, before he finally turned up at the trailer park on his bicycle one twilit summer evening with two of his little friends, asking if she would like to go riding with them. Luckily, her Daddy Duwayne was not around, he would have eaten them alive. She asked them how much money they had and what they wanted. The idea of needing money had apparently not occurred to them: nothing but small change among the three of them. But what they wanted was small change, too: they merely wanted (after a long list of false wants was got through, starting with the supposed fun of a bike ride) to see. So she took them around behind the trailer and dropped her jeans and underpants, raised her tee shirt. Their frozen, pop-eyed, red-faced, grimacing expressions were so comicbook-like they made her laugh. “You can touch if you want,” she said, feeling generous. Corny held back but the others poked about gingerly like little kids trying to guess the contents of wrapped Christmas presents, and eventually Corny, timidly, joined in. Even body hair seemed strange to them, though one said squeakily he had seen his mother’s and it was just like that, as though this were some kind of brag. She chased them off finally with threats of her violent daddy’s imminent return, but they were back almost every week after that, with more money now and with more boldness in their explorations. They made her bend over and touch her toes, squat, lie down and spread her legs, roll over, get up on her knees and elbows, lie on her side with one knee in the air, press up on her shoulders with her knees by her ears, as they squeezed and patted and palpated and dipped their fingers in wherever they could. Then one evening, just for fun, she told them it was their turn, they had to take their clothes off now and show her. They went rigid with fear, and when she reached for one of their belt buckles, they ran off, leaving her giggling in her own puddle of cast-off clothes and feeling about a hundred years old. But then, later, Corny came back alone and, though he had seemingly lost his power to speak, he indicated by his undone belt buckle that she was to undress him and so she did, remarking to herself, as she took what she found down there into that cavity which had made her locally famous and by which she logged what simple memory she kept of that half of the town’s population, how much more interesting it was, even for an incurious person such as herself, to know mankind in all its variety than to surrender, like John’s wife, say, to the experience of one alone, no matter how beautiful.

Pauline’s loving embrace of the world’s variety was not unlike that, if not of his wife, of John himself, though whereas Pauline was fundamentally interested in men’s zingers, as she often called them — a childish corruption of Daddy Duwayne’s “old sinner,” which, because it perversely pleased him, stuck — John was fundamentally uninterested in any zinger but his own, and in that only with respect to where, variously, he might safely and pleasurably put it. To be fair, it could be said that John did therefore share Pauline’s fundamental preference for a variety of sexual partners, but John’s love of the world’s novelty did not end there, nor was it even fundamentally sexual unless all human activities might be reduced to displacements for sexual ones, as some believed — Alf, for example, or Dutch, or Lorraine in her more bookish highbrow moments, more and more infrequent as the years rolled on. Moreover, even in the matter of sexual partners, there was a catholicity in Pauline’s taste which John, obeying some unstated aesthetic, did not espouse, to his discredit perhaps from a democratic point of view; but then, the democratic point of view was never one that appealed to John very much, though he paid lip service to it and found it profitable. John felt at one with the universe and the universe was not democratic, it was an uninhibited exhibition of colliding forces, of which a bruising game of football was only the barest echo, but an echo at least, which was why he loved it, and the less refereeing the better, a good fuck likewise. Democracy was a sad little human defense mechanism for the inherently powerless against the powerful, a pipe dream and a failure for the most part, instigated by fear and perpetuated by pissants like his cousin Maynard. Or that butch buttinski Marge. It sought to diffuse, curb, and redistribute power, but it did not, as John knew full well and to his daily increase, succeed. It was a joke. Like that variation on the old “put out or get out” line about the guy (old Stu always liked to hear John tell this one) in the beat-up Ford pickup who stops for a girl walking down a lonely country road crying, she explaining through her tears how she’d been taken out into the woods by a guy in a Lincoln Continental (it was a Cadillac when John had first heard it) who had presented her with that cruel and infamous choice, which of course to her was no choice at all. The guy in the truck tells her to hop in, he’ll take her to town, and they go bouncing and jolting and rattling down the road until finally the girl asks to be let out. “Right now, mister, I mean it!” she yells above the clatter. “I’d rather be raped any day in a Lincoln, than get jerked off in a goddamn Ford!”

Stu himself liked to tell this joke when John was not around, occasionally substituting a Chevy or a Toyota for the Ford, though for some reason the joke had a way of stalling out on him when he did that. Another joke he liked to tell, one of his favorites, was the one about the oldtimer who, hollering out, “Mind if I play through, boys?” goes skipping past the young fellows on the golf course, whacking out his long straight drives, then drinks them all under the table back at the clubhouse after, prompting one of them to ask: “Whoo! You still in such fine whack in everything you do, old man?” “Aw, hell no,” he confesses, lighting up a nine-inch stogie. “Old age is a bitch, son. Take last night, for example. Woke my little darlin’ up about midnight and asked her how about it, and she says: ‘How about what? You just had it at ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, you old goat!’ That’s the trouble, see — goddamn memory’s goin’!” Stu’s little darlin’ was Daphne, and although she was a newer model, she was already, like her loving hubby and the principal heroes of his jokes, a pretty heavy guzzler, had been since their cheatin’ days, as Stu liked to call them, it was partly what brought them together, that and her ability to rouse back then his anesthetized pecker. Until recently, Stu was about the only one who ever saw the dear girl sober, and then he was usually soused to the eyeballs himself, which was just as well, since it could be a pretty demoralizing experience, being around Daphne when she didn’t have a healthy toot on, something more common of late, sad to say, have to remember to fire that young mechanic. Stu and Daphne laced their breakfast juice with gin every morning (Daphne called the drink “Amazing Grace,” Stu his day’s choke start) and sometimes never got around to supper at all. During weekdays Stu had his Ford-Mercury car lot to keep him busy, Daphne her phonecalls, but there was always a bottle reassuringly to hand for each of them, a comfortable old habit that helped to make their evenings mellow if not altogether coherent or easy to recollect after. Goddamn memory, as Stu would rumble with a grin, elbow sliding on the bar, trying to remember what it was he had to remember to do.

Daphne, once briefly John’s little darlin’, had also been, more or less at the same time, John’s wife’s best friend and so maid of honor at her wedding, the day that her present ginwinner reckoned as Day One of the romance that brought him back from the living dead, though years were to transpire before she could get around to that little bit of prestidigitation, having to get fucked over first by a passing parade of other nameless pricks, so she was nearly thirty when she started solacing old Stu, he not yet a widower but soon to be. The first thing she ever did for him was to help him back up when he fell off his barstool, a favor he returned more than once, they were made for each other. Not, however, that she supposed so at John’s wedding ten years earlier, when, sick of the old redneck’s drooling half-witticisms at her side while she was trying, with an infuriating lack of success, to get the best man’s fickle attention, she whopped old Stu in the chops with a piece of cake, an event now part of the family legend. That still didn’t shut the relentless sonuvabitch up, and when, as a mimed punchline to some slurred dumb-ass hillbilly joke, he poked his long florid nose in her cleavage, yuk-yukking in his plate after, she coolly dipped her hand in the soupy bowl of strawberries and cream, turned, and licking his weedy ear to distract him, grabbed him in the crotch, leaving a vivid handprint that he apparently, falling in love (so he told her years later), never noticed, though everyone else did, not least that old warhorse he was married to: his colorful forced exit was admired by all, Daphne’s lone triumph of the day. Centuries later, she still thought of John’s wife as her best friend, and though what with her daily excursions into oblivion it could hardly be said that, besides old Stu, Daphne had any real friends anymore, in a way it remained true, because when Daphne went into orbit she often got into long gossipy telephone chats with John’s wife, just like in the old days, the only difference being that now John’s wife was not always on the other end of the line.

Though most of the townsfolk who knew her would have agreed that Stu’s first wife, whom Daphne called a warhorse when not worse, must have been pretty hard to live with, not everyone would have blamed Winnie, that blowhard crapulous car dealer of hers being no bargain either (Stu would cheerfully admit this with a crooked grin, blinking his pale reddish lashes as though amazed at the wisdom of it, then tell the one about the old fleabag who swallowed a razor blade), and few, even among those who loved her least and laughed most at the jokes about her, would have painted her so blackly as did Stu and Daphne, who seemed sometimes almost to be trying to ward off her lingering presence by ridicule and invective even a decade after she was dead. Trevor’s wife Marge in particular was quick to leap to Winnie’s defense, both before and after the deplorable accident out at the old humpback bridge (an accident that changed Otis’s life, at least for a time), speaking of her as an essentially noble and principled woman, driven to a kind of impotent rage by the town’s antiquated and oppressive mores, of which her husband Stu was the perfect bonehead sexist exemplar. A woman of culture who had married a hick and a boor. Of course, Marge was said to be something of a dragon herself, and Winnie was her aunt. Ellsworth’s account of Winnie’s “tragic untimely death” in The Town Crier spoke of “her many cultural, civic, and religious activities” and of “this great inestimable loss to the community,” but in truth he hardly knew the woman, or her husband either for that matter, being a nondriver, nor a golfer either, it was a jaded cliché-ridden obituary, could have been about anybody. More than announcing a woman’s accidental death, it announced that something had died in him. Obits of course were a newsman’s ceaseless charge. Sooner or later, all, all pass away and, passing, exact their column inches no less than their graveyard footage. Ellsworth kept a file cabinet stuffed with bios ready to be plucked for print when a citizen fell, but truth to tell he was never ready when it actually happened, as surprised by others’ deaths as he would one day be by his own. That file cabinet, once his refuge, now made his heart sink when his eye fell on it and caused him to doubt the folly of his having cast himself as the town historian, he who could gather all the stuff of stories but could no longer find any story in the stuff, an apostle of the word fallen from grace, a deserter trapped in the trenches. More than anything it was the mind-numbing volume of mazy detail, the surfeit of story, life’s disorderly overabundance not death’s neat closure, that defeated him. That filing cabinet had no rear panel: it opened out upon infinity. When he reached into one of its crammed drawers he was reaching toward the abyss, and so toward madness. At the time of Winnie’s death, he had been back in this town for a dozen years and his fortieth birthday, no matter which way he turned, was staring him baldly in the face. Probably his best line in the obit in fact was when he compared her death to that of an infant: “Her life, at forty, barely begun, was, like innocence abused, abruptly and cruelly ended when …” Ellsworth decided to dig out his old novel-in-progress, which he was now calling The Artist and His Model, and start working on it again.

Few in town had the dimmest notion as to what Ellsworth was talking about in that obituary, though most thought it grand. That at least was the opinion of Floyd’s wife Edna, she being another who got on passably with the deceased when she was still alive. When Edna and Floyd first moved to town, Winnie and Stu were their nearest friends, the only ones they had that first year really, most folks polite and kind to them in a Christian sort of way, but more like how people treated coloreds nowadays than truly come-on-over, kick-your-shoes-off friendly; Floyd felt it too, saying sometimes it made him almost homesick for truck stops and motels. They had just moved into their first rented house, everything still a sorry sight, no curtains on the windows yet and mice in the stove, when Winnie drove by to invite them over for supper that first time. Except for a cocktail party at John’s house which was more like an arrest than an invitation and where even the hired help made them feel unwashed, it was their first invitation out in donkey ears, since back when Floyd first hit the road really and started up all his troubles — Edna in her excitement found herself all dressed up about two hours before and having to use the clattery old toilet with its stained bowl and chipped wooden seat every ten minutes or so, leaving the door open because there was no light in there, Floyd teasing her and saying: “Hell, he’s seen my old heap, he just wants to sell us a car, that’s all.” But he was pleased and excited, too. Because true or not, it didn’t matter. It meant that for the first time since they could hardly remember they were part of something more than just each other, which sometimes honestly wasn’t all that much, it was almost like getting born again. And Floyd was right, that man did try to sell him a car, didn’t just try, he succeeded, but not without some fun about it, and in friendly accents that took Edna down-home again and almost made her cry for feeling so lost and uprooted. Stu poured some whiskey for him and Floyd after supper, put on some Cajun fiddle music, told some jokes, including one about a rich Texan he said he once knew who was so big he wouldn’t fit in his coffin until they gave the corpse an enema, and then they were able to bury him in a shoebox and had room for his boots as well, which made Edna, who had been constipated ever since she got here (she was bothered somehow by all those motel mirrors), giggle so hard she nearly fell off her chair, Floyd remarking as he sucked a cube that it sounded like the damn guy he was working for, setting her off all the more, God help, even Winnie joining the silly laughter now, and then Stu said he ought to give a Ford product a try. Floyd, winking at Edna, just excusing herself to go use the bathroom for a while, said he only drove General Motors cars on the road, having an old soldier’s respect for rank, but all right, he’d try a used car from him, about five years old, say, and if the results were satisfying, he’d be back later for a trade-in. Which was how they got their deep purple Mercury. Truth to tell, it wasn’t all that grand a car, they hardly drove it away but it needed a new clutch and the brakes relined, but they went on after that, buying all their cars from Stu, even after poor Winnie got killed in a wreck a couple of years later, it seemed like they owed old Stu that much, no matter that his young new wife never had them over anymore.

Edna’s husband Floyd had managed John’s downtown hardware store ever since then, and though he was good at it and made John a pile of money — money John spent on cars and guns and airplanes, and on pussy too no doubt, his wife on clothes, jewelry, and fancy fittings for their big ranch-style house, the one John built — Floyd always had the notion that John was only tolerating him. He should have got promoted out of this junkshop years ago, but he seemed stuck for good and all, like a rusty peg, right where he was at. It was Floyd whose introduction of the do-it-yourself line had completely turned the old museum around, but when John had set up a big new warehouse-style DIY store out at the new mall he had hired another guy to manage it, telling Floyd, after having effectively just pulled the plug on him, that he couldn’t afford to let the Main Street store go down the tubes and needed him there to keep the doors open. Since then, with hard work, smart buying, and a new Hobby Corner line, he had somehow managed to break even, probably mostly on account of his salary was so all-fired low, but in spite of that John had been on his back most of the time. He’d pop in unannounced, complain about the bookshelf kits that weren’t moving or kick at some of the crud littering the aisles or run a grim-faced check on the cash register, snapping at him that he wasn’t doing enough to stop petty theft and why wasn’t the goddamn garden stuff out, it was already the end of February. There was a time, back before the Bible, when Floyd would have stuck a man for talking to him like that. Still could, of course. Eye for an eye, self-defense, and all that, he had his rights, but he was more a New Testament man these days than Old. Or maybe it wasn’t just the Bible, maybe it was something about John himself that held him back. There was the day, for example, when, without any explanation, John had walked into the store, grabbed up an ax, and swung it flat-side against a pillar. Nothing had happened, so he had swung it again and again, ferociously, as like to bring the store down, until finally the handle had cracked. Then he had wanted to know why the hell Floyd was buying such cheap goods for the store. Floyd had been pretty amazed by this act, not to say a little terrified, and he’d felt like a sap for weeks, until finally one day he’d overheard John’s old college bud Waldo at the cafe next door telling a story about John trying to pry open a can with one of those axes on a hunting trip and having to take a lot of razzing from the boys he was with when the handle snapped. Floyd was so anxious to please John, so fearful of a rebuke, that sometimes it made him feel like a damned fairy. Which was partly why he coveted John’s wife, why he wanted to cuckold him, and not just cuckold him, but split his flicking old lady wide open, so the next time John visited that place, if ever he still did, the peckerhead would know a real man had been there before him. Whenever he imagined himself doing this, however, she was not really there. It was more like punching a hole in the universe.

This was a strange thing about John’s wife: a thereness that was not there. She always seemed to be at the very heart of things in town, an endearing and ubiquitous presence, yet few of the town’s citizens, if asked, could have described her, even as she passed before their eyes, or said what made her tick, or if they could or thought they could, would have found few or none who would agree. Coveted object, elusive mystery, beloved ideal, hated rival, princess, saint, or social asset, John’s wife elicited opinions and emotions as varied and numerous as the townsfolk themselves, her unknowability being finally all they could agree upon, and even then with reservations, for some said she was so much herself that she was simply unapproachable (“unreadable,” as Lorraine liked to put it), others that the trouble was that she had no personality at all, so there was nothing to be known. Even fundamental matters were in dispute, her age, the tenor of her voice, the sizes that she wore. Take her eyes, for example. When a woman in New Orleans asked John one night their color, John didn’t know. Nor could Alf, who knew her inside out, have said, though he probably had it written down somewhere. They weren’t alone. Otis, who tended to look away when he talked to her, would have said her eyes were blue, the color of the Virgin’s, though Marge thought them brown, like mud, and Daphne green, the color of her own. Barnaby knew their color, but knew them as the eyes of an innocent child, peering up at him from his knee, and Ellsworth, too, recalling with such clarity the little girl he’d once big-brothered, sometimes found it difficult to see the married woman before his eyes. Indeed, most supposed her younger than she really was, and of those who knew her then some claimed she hadn’t changed since high school, even though she no longer seriously resembled her senior yearbook photo (nor did she at the time, they pointed out, one of the town photographer’s rare failures, as he himself would have, somewhat nonplused, acknowledged). Contrarily, Clarissa thought her ancient and completely out of touch.

Of course, anyone over eighteen was ancient in Clarissa’s eyes. She had her favorites among those beyond the pale — her new high school biology teacher, Granny Opal, the lead guitar of Blue Metal Studs, her daddy (by whom, for Clarissa, the sun rose and set), and especially Uncle Bruce — but her mother these days was not among them. She didn’t exactly do anything, but she just kept getting in the way, even when she was nowhere in sight. Oh, she loved her, you couldn’t help but love your mother, she supposed, but life was both incredibly exciting and incredibly boring, and her mother was part of the boring bit. Even just the idea of her mother was. Destined, she felt certain, like the beautiful faraway lady she had been named after, for a tragic fate, Clarissa wanted to taste it all before it was too late, the world for her was like an awesome carnival full of dynamite surprises with bright lights and screams and laughs and wild killer rides, like in one of her favorite videos, and she had an appetite for it that wouldn’t quit, but when her mother came around, or just came to mind, it all went away, like someone shut the music off, making her feel edgy and restless and completely exhausted at the same time. Her mother didn’t seem to affect Mikey that way, but Mikey was different and still a baby — he had only just stopped wetting the bed and he still liked to dress up and put on his silly wordless plays.

Clarissa’s parents’ second honeymoon in beautiful faraway Paris had been full of dynamite surprises, too, not least, though not then known, the conception, after nearly three years of trying, of their first child, and thus their daughter’s name, a tribute to their wonder-working hostess and to her gaiety and bravery and charm, and not, as Clarissa might have fancied — the events a part of her prehistory and their chronology confused — to Marie-Claire’s seeming propensity for romantic disaster. The invitation, proffered at the wedding three years before, had been to her parents’ palatial home in La Muette at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and the first surprise, upon arrival, was that Marie-Claire had become an artist and had had what she called a “blow-off” with her parents, whom she described, flinging her thin hands about, then choking herself and bugging her eyes, as tyrannical and stiflingly bourgeois, and she had left home, moving into a kind of artist’s garret in an unspoiled corner of the Latin Quarter above an Algerian cafe, a cellar cabaret, and the site of an open-air market. This rooftop space — all higgledy-piggledy with a hundred stacked and leaning canvases in its one large many-angled room, sketches and clippings taped to the water-stained walls under its coven ceilings, the toilet on the far side of the refrigerator and the claw-footed bathtub under the front window next to the sofa bed — she lent to them, moving out to stay with friends, but turning up each day to be their guide and companion. Thus, for ten days, the very center of the city was theirs, the towers of Notre Dame visible over the tiled roofs of the ancient district from their bathtub, the boats and bookstalls on the Seine a few steps from their street door. And the nights, too, were theirs, after their festive brasserie suppers with Marie-Claire, and perhaps it was the wine or the feeling of recklessness and danger and improvisation or the spicy air of couscous on the street below, the harsh music, or the delicious dislocation, the oddity of living in a kind of unwalled efficiency bathroom high above a medieval congestion all but unimaginable to them just a week before, back home in their neat brick house that Barnaby had built, that brought on such arousal, or more likely it was all of these things, together with, John had to admit it, the erotic presence of Marie-Claire, dressed mostly in wispy bits of widowy black (though the dreadful news did not come until the next-to-last day), but whatever the cause or causes, he seemed to be hot as a firecracker all the time, a veritable walking hard-on, in and out of the soft sweet saddle at every opportunity, and with an energy and urgency that took him back to his days as a high school athlete. And Clarissa — whose eyes, like John’s, were gray, and so no clue to the disputed color of her mother’s — was the consequence of this gloriously bohemian adventure. One of them anyway.

Eye color he seemed not to have noted down, but as to Clarissa’s mother’s disputed age, Trevor the accountant could tell it to the day, knew too her social and medical history, as well as that of most of the people related to her. Yet, as though knowing these things so well made the rest more unknowable, when he tried to think of her, all he could see was an abstract point on the abstract graph of his insurance actuarial tables. Of course, most people in town occupied similar featureless points in Trevor’s imagination, but none so exclusively, nor were their points so, well, so restless, so inclined to go adrift. Aware that his tendency to reduce all life stories to statistical data was a flaw of sorts, and one moreover that might cause offense, Trevor would set off to, say, a gathering at the country club, determined to greet her as a fellow human creature, to comment perhaps, with his customary tact and caution, upon her dress or her good health, and to concentrate upon some particular of her person which he might later recall as peculiarly hers. Shyness limited his close attention to her upper reaches, her nose perhaps, her ear and ring, her throat at his most daring, but stare as he might her image would not stick. At home he would draw out his charts and, after careful computations, locate her point, all he had left for all his effort, and — inevitably — would find it moved. As though his stare had altered her life expectancy, or his, at least, of hers. This indeterminacy made no sense. John’s wife was unknowable perhaps, but she was also unchanging, the very image of constancy, at least in this town. She was, abidingly, what she was. So what did it mean that he could not fix the fixed? Trevor felt he had been given a privileged glimpse of something, but he did not know of what. Only that, whatever it was, it was, well, disconcerting. He had tried, obliquely, to speak of this to his wife Marge, who had known John’s wife since childhood, and had found himself clumsily rambling on about her mother Audrey’s premature death and what that might signify, the relative statistical risks of attractive and unattractive women, the wealth factor in the prolonging or shortening of life, and the hazards of being anywhere near the center of a community’s focus, little of which was to the point, Marge cutting him off finally with: “Oh, she’s all right. But what do you think about John?” “John?”

What Trevor thought about John he could not, on that occasion, say, but what John thought about his schoolchum Marge was that she was a horsey, aggressive meddler, a knee-jerk belligerent, cold and flaky as canned tuna. He admired her competitiveness, especially out on the course, she was the perennial women’s club champion, but she was too impatient to be fun to play with, striding leggily down the fairway ahead of everyone, head bulled forward, furious with frivolous delay, which, for most people out there, was the whole point of the game. She set a lot of people’s teeth on edge, had done since a kid. Waldo, who ran John’s paint and wallpaper business and was frivolity personified, despised the woman, calling her, though rarely to her face, Butch and Sarge and Herr Marge, and referring to her prissy linen-suited husband Trevor (whom he called Triv) as “that little Dutchman with his finger in the dyke.” One night at the club, in front of everybody, Waldo told Kevin the bartender not to put any of those boxy pieces of ice with holes in their bottoms in his drink, because he’d had enough of those for one day. Marge had outplayed him once again that afternoon in a mixed-doubles foursome, snorting scornfully whenever he misjudged an approach shot or blew a putt, and asking him on the sixteenth, after he’d failed to get out of a sandtrap in spite of three mighty but impotent swings, if he’d like her to bring him a little bucket and shovel. His icy wisecrack later back at the clubhouse got him half a laugh, but cost him his night out, his wife Lollie doing her usual drag-bigmouth-Waldo-home act after that. John appreciated Waldo’s feelings, but, except when Marge interfered with his construction projects, was himself more discreet. She was his wife’s friend, for one thing, but more than that: Marge was a mobilizer, presiding over just about every club and charity in town, always collecting for one damned thing or another, a woman for whom no task was too daunting, no neighborhood too strange, no door exempt from the good cause’s knock; she would be useful to him if he ever ran for Congress.

Though such an alliance might indeed have been negotiable, in spite of all the wars they had waged from the playground on, John’s forced politeness in truth wounded Marge more than any dumb salesman’s nasty cuts. She felt ill understood by John, though not surprised by this, John’s grasp of character being purely pragmatic and about as subtle as his taste in women, which ran, as far as she could tell, to busty party girls and ambitious little roundheeled gum-snappers. She felt sorry for his wife, her friend since grade school, but was angered by her, too, for letting herself be used so, and for letting John live a life so little challenged, exaggerating his power when she should have been testing it, honing it, making it count for something, instead of letting him wreck the town with it. Marge felt her own womanly powers wasted by such waste, but what could she do? His wife was the closest she could get to him except in a fight. Though she’d towered over most of the high school boys in town, runts still at that age, Marge in her college days had been merely tall, a lean handsome blonde, as she thought of herself, a little long in the legs maybe, a bit flat and broad in the hips and bony in the chest, but trim and fit, bright, engaged, a political force on a campus where women typically weren’t, a terrific conversationalist, more guys should have been interested. But somehow she always turned them off. She knew why. They felt threatened. It was her power, but she couldn’t switch it off, so it was also her weakness. Only Trev was not turned off, though turned on was not exactly what he was either.

Waldo’s wife Lorraine had a theory about Marge. Marge was maybe her best friend in town, in spite of Waldo’s constant sabotage and Marge’s bossy ways. They played golf and tennis together, Lorraine served on Marge’s many committees and espoused her causes, showed up at her club meetings, cut the weed habit with her help, listened sympathetically to her harsh views on men, they had a lot in common and Lorraine felt she knew her well. Knew what made her melt a bit, what bored her, what drove her up the wall. She could tell almost to the hour, for example, when Marge’s period came on, though for that matter so could just about anyone else, Marge suffering periods powerful and sudden as a maddened mare’s. Her appetites were like that, too, hunger hitting her like a blow to the midriff, thirst suddenly taking her voice away, making her hands shake as she grabbed up the iced tea. The two had met while up at State together, though were not real friends there. Lollie, over the protests of many of her sorority sisters, had tried to pledge the ungainly girl after getting beat out by her for president of the Pep Club, but Marge had turned her down flat, letting her know at the time what she thought of the Geek Societies, as she called them, they’d had a pretty nasty scrap over it. Lollie, snubbed and sore, had not returned Marge’s waves and halloos thereafter, until Marge, running for student council president against a fraternity man, came by to seek the sorority’s support. And against all odds, got it, too, and Lollie’s renewed admiration as well, having mixed feelings by that time about fraternity men herself. But their real friendship had begun, a partial consolation for Lorraine, when fate unkindly brought her to this godforsaken town. Without Marge, she would have gone crazy here, and maybe vice versa, too. So Lorraine knew her well. And her theory about her was that, although inside her crusty shell a sensuous woman lay dormant, in spite of her long marriage to Trevor and all her tough brave talk, Marge was still a virgin.

The night Lorraine dragged Waldo home from the club for insulting Mad Marge with his half-iced ass-cube crack was neither the first nor the last time she’d taken him by the scruff and made him look a pussywhipped fool, but though it burned his butt and made him want to hit the road, never to see the ugly uptight bitch again, he knew he couldn’t get by without her. She managed the finances, fed them all, kept the house in order and the cars repaired, shepherded the kids about, covered for all his fuckups and weathered his suicidal binges, she was a goddamn saint in her way. But like most saints she tended to take the fun out of everything. And what the hell else was there? Good thing she wasn’t with him the first time he came to this town to usher at Long John’s wedding. He and Lollie were more or less engaged already, screwing implying that in those ancient purblind times, but he came alone, knowing all the brothers would be here, wanting the freedom of that. Anyway, Lollie never cared much for John. It was only for a weekend, but shit, man, it was one helluva great party. What he could remember of it. A kind of grand faretheewool to college daze. They’d all met up the day before the wedding at the old Pioneer Hotel. Majestic old place, full of polished wood and etched glass and crystal chandeliers, gone now, a piece of history. The long bar in the Old Wagon Wheel Cocktail Lounge was made of ancient weathered railway ties, most beautiful goddamn piece of furniture he ever saw. Dutch now had it out in his motel bar, the Getaway, but it didn’t look the same there, cut down and crowded in. Waldo had arrived and propped himself at it like the castle warden and called for a bottle of the best fucking sour-mash in the house and the party had begun. By noon the place was packed. Political and business pals of the fathers of the bride and groom were also there, an older generation, but they could hold their own, and they seemed to love being around the college boys and did a lot of the setting up. Food was ordered up, but he couldn’t remember if he ate any of it or not, didn’t matter, he was feeling great, young and powerful and ready for anything that happened. Lots did. First, though, they hit the course for a round of golf, bottles in the bags and ice and mix in the carts, and though he seemed to recall slashing around in the rough quite a bit, he ended up with a decent score and they took some coins off the old boys, maybe somebody fudged. After that there was the wedding rehearsal, good for plenty of laughs, then a big feast back at the hotel, jester Beans doing his famous open-fly gag during the toasts, and finally the real party began. Old Dutch had rigged it all. Maybe the best goddamn blowout he was ever at. Or maybe not, but he sure as hell hadn’t seen its equal since. It was like a piece of theater, each new act better than the last. Ended at dawn with him and Hard Yard and Loose Bruce, what was left of the Dirty Six, serenading the bride on old Barnaby’s lawn like battle-weary but triumphant cocks crowing the fucking sun up. Beautiful! Oh my Christ, where did it all go?

Daphne, the maid of honor at that historic wedding, was available after the rehearsal dinner and ready for anything that happened, too, open flies not excluded, but she had less luck that night than Waldo. The boys, it seemed, had other things to do. She had been paired — by wedding protocol, but also, she’d felt, as a kind of so-long-kid gift from John — with the best man, a handsome smoothie from John’s fraternity named Bruce, obviously loaded, an altogether consoling consolation prize, had the prize been hers. But juicy Brucie, polite and attentive though he was, had his eye on another. Daphne was the bride’s best and oldest friend, she knew absolutely everything about her, or supposed she did, but she never was able to figure out where the hell that French penpal came from. Probably the two of them had met on one of those trips Audrey, always full of fancypants improvement schemes for her daughter, had taken her on. Whatever, from wherever, Marie-Claire was a veritable apparition, she had all the guys gaga, Breast Man Brucie-boy among them, it was like they’d never seen a girl before. Ringlets and baby teeth and big dark eyes — hey, she was cute, but not that cute. Maybe it was her goddamned accent. Or maybe she knew some French tricks American girls were not privy to. Later that night, abandoned by the guys and bored with each other, Daphne and Ronnie and some of the girls decided to crash the stag party out at the Country Tavern, or at least to go have a peek and see what lurid depravity the unsociable assholes were up to. It was a pretty depressing scene: a porno flick running on all by itself in a darkened corner, a dozen or so fagged-out yo-yos playing cards or pool or throwing it down sullenly at the bar, one of her ex-steadies out cold, wearing nothing but an ashtray for a codpiece, sad songs on the antique jukebox. Some party. Daphne would have gone in there and livened it up for them, but neither Bruce nor John was there, this lot was dead and gone, beyond reprieve. She figured the rest of the guys were with, damn her eyes, the penpal.

The groomsman officially paired with the French bridesmaid at John’s wedding (though he was not in the Country Tavern that night Daphne and her friends peeked in either, nor was he with Marie-Claire) was Harvard, oldest son of Oxford the druggist and his librarian wife Kate, brother to Yale, Columbia, and Cornell, and known as Harvie in the family, Hard Yard to intimates, of whom John, with whom he’d cocaptained the high school track team their senior year, was one. Harvard, a shy, gentle, and dutiful fellow, a good athlete in spite of what Coach Snuffy called his “handicap” (“Tie a knot in that nasty thing, son, before you catch it on the bar going over and damage the equipment!”) and pride of the showerroom but not quite the scholar his father had hoped for, was a chemistry major at a West Coast surfers’ college at the time of the wedding, showing few signs of graduating soon, if ever, but demonstrating a talent, widely esteemed among scientists, for experimentation, a talent that contributed spectacularly to the revels of the final night of his friend John’s bachelorhood, revels that in turn, maturing into revelation as yard, mind, and soul all came and came together, changed Harvie’s life forever, John’s ass theatrically marked by this sudden transformation. Thus, it might be said that Harvie, unlike most people in this town, created, as though in obedience to the slogan on an old calendar down at his father’s drugstore, “A Better Life Through Chemistry,” his own destiny. Years later, returning here for his mother’s funeral, for whose sake he wore a suit instead of a dress, he told his baby brother Cornell that “out there” it doesn’t matter what you’ve got but how you use it. In a small town like this everybody is always measuring. Out there, there are too many, measuring makes no sense. This generous message was meant to console and uplift little Corny, though it probably missed its mark.

Harvie’s baby brother was at that time a biology student up at State, not a very good one, but by then the only member of the family still in school, their sister Columbia having dropped out to be near her cancer-stricken mother in her final months and seemingly destined, now a doctor’s practical nurse, never to return. Cornell would not last long either. In fact, though he would return to college after his mother’s funeral, he would never, no matter how his father pleaded, scolded, reasoned, wept, attend another class. He became a haggard, unkempt quadrangle hangabout, notorious only for his monosyllabic mewlings, his runny nose and spotted pants, the latter something of a campus legend, likened unto an aerial map of a free-fire zone, a mess of curdled gravy, the abode of the damned, a laminated spunk husks exhibit, the rag used to clean out the cafeteria food trays (itself known as “Grandma’s diaper”), Flocculus Rex, a poison puffball bed, the chitinous scutum of something unspeakably inhuman (an alien resident perhaps of that ghastly fork if not the freaked-out host himself), trampled cowflop, the Milky Way, a spermatazoic Field of Armageddon, and, simply, a zippered scumbag. Poor unwashed unlaundered Corny, who went to Paris to become a man and saw such a thing as to make manhood no place to go and boyhood no place he could return to. “Ondress me,” she said, and then, when, in a magical trance (he was thinking of a certain set of four strange comicbooks, thereafter discontinued, that he owned), he did, she said: “Merci, mon petit! Now ronn down to ze delicatesse be-low and breeng for us a bott-ell of Beaujolais nouveau, and we weell make l’amour nouveau, ze new true love of ze heart and blood!” Oh boy. Sounded great. He left her standing there, eyes wide open, looking startled with wanting, thin legs apart and both hands between them, kneading and wringing what was there as though trying to tear it out and give it to him, and ran down the four dark flights of stairs and out into the spicy street, his heart fluttering in his chest like a trapped moth in a glass jar, explosions already erupting stickily between his own skinny thighs. With his clumsy high school French, it took Corny too long a while, racing from shop to shop and bar to bar, to come to understand that, on Midsummer’s Eve, Beaujolais nouveau was not something he was likely to find. Well. He paused, staring bleakly at a swarthy rat-faced shopkeeper, as the truth sank in. Such cruel teasing was nothing new in Corny’s life. Usually he merely turned away from it. But in this nightmarish place, so far from home, where could he go? The smirking shopkeeper seemed to be recommending, in his threatening foreign tongue, another wine with the word “Love” in its name. This confused Corny and made his face hot, but, hastily, he bought it and, homesick now for his friend Pauline, and for his faithful games and toys which never deceived him, turned his steps back toward Marie-Claire’s studio, fearing further humiliations, but keeping faint hopes alive — why not? as his father would say, it’s perfectly reasonable — for a pleasant surprise.

Pauline had been with Corny not long before he left for Paris, though she had known Marie-Claire’s fiancé Yale as well, and Harvie, too, each in their own time. All the girls loved Yale’s zinger, it was just right, but his brothers’ were more like things you might see in a circus sideshow, and for opposite reasons. Harvard’s was the one best known around town, a giant thing, ghostly white, almost scary, with all its veins showing like Invisible Man. Because of it, all the kids called him Hard Yard, which was ironic, not because of its length, but because it was almost always limply adangle, half stiff at best until that stag party the night before John’s wedding, which Pauline also attended. Corny’s, contrarily, was like a tiny twig with only one testicle beneath it no bigger than a schoolyard aggie, but though it didn’t look like a real zinger, more like a plastic toy one, it was rigid as a fork tine all the time and popped and popped off all the time, as his trousers, even back then in high school and his mother Kate still alive to wash them, attested. After nine or ten quick ones one night, Pauline begged him to stop or he might hurt himself, and Corny only looked puzzled and, guiding her hand to the tip of it, spurted again. And then — thup! — again, each time firing well past her hip. Cornell liked most to have her reach under her thigh and squeeze his testicle, if she could find it, as, sometimes three or four times in quick succession, almost like hiccups, he spilled his seed in her, or more precisely into his rubber, stolen from his dad’s drugstore. These rubbers, of course, did not stay on, Pauline had to wear them like a kind of inner lining. Pushing them in there made her feel pretty silly, but fecund Gretchen later proved the wisdom of it, and feeling silly in boy-girl stuff was one thing that never bothered Pauline much. Everything changed that summer for both of them and many years would pass before they would become good friends again, though when it happened it would seem quite natural, even if by then nothing else did, but Pauline would never forget the last time she and Corny were together that summer. It was the night before Pauline went to Gordon’s studio to ask him to take her photograph for the men’s magazines. Cornell had come to the trailer with tears running down his smooth pink cheeks to tell her he was going to Paris and would not be seeing her again soon. “I love you,” he stammered, coming all over her bluejeans. No one had ever said that to Pauline before, nor would she soon hear it said again, and it left her feeling bewildered and, oddly, a bit sad. It made her think of her sister, the one Daddy Duwayne, looking down at his shoes, said ran away to find her mother.

“I love you”: so simple for some to say (for Daphne, it was as common as an expletive), so awkward for many, such as Otis, Snuffy, Marge, and Mitch, while for others — John, for example — so irrelevant, an artifice serving as a kind of functional code in songs and movies, sometimes useful in his lover-as-fool jokes though rarely as a punchline. When his fraternity brother Waldo, lover-as-fool personified, said “I love you,” it was no joke, he truly meant it, no matter who was with him, even if he’d won her in a raffle in the dark, because that was what love was, blind and brief and all that. Lorraine had heard him say it many times, sometimes even to her, and she knew that he meant it and that his meaning it meant nothing, the phrase having passed her own lips but once, then never more. It was often like that: if left unsaid too long the tongue felt clumsied by it. When, that same summer that Corny went to Paris, Harriet was dying, her husband Alf, grieving at her bedside, realized he hadn’t said it since the war years. It seemed to make sense back then, less now, though he found a way of saying it again before she died, pleasing her, he felt, by enclosing it, like John, in story: “Hey, do you remember when …?” John’s mother Opal, having like Alf lost the words somewhere, found them again when her grandchildren came along, but discovered within the phrase a heart-wrenching sorrow she’d not noticed before. When she told her friend Kate about this at Harriet’s funeral, which was shortly after Clarissa was born, what Kate said was: “Grief for ourselves is what makes love for others possible. And grievous. Wise love loves only the unchanging. But to love only the changeless and the eternal, Opal, is to love with a cold heart.” It was not exactly to a thing eternal that warmhearted Veronica avowed her love, though Second John could not be said to have changed much since first she said it, and grief, she’d be quick to agree, was part of it. Clarissa, now grown but untaught as yet in grief, had practiced the line over and over, but had yet to find its right moment, though she had in mind a target for it. She and her friend Jennifer often argued about the right time to say it, before or after, Clarissa usually insisting upon it as a statement of intent, otherwise it was just a corny way to say thank you, Jen wanting to know how you could really be sure until afterwards, wasn’t it more like a question before, and so a kind of tease? It was something that the Model said in Ellsworth’s novel-in-progress (if you’d have asked her the question Jennifer asked, she’d have replied: before or after what?), but not the Artist, who felt the integrity and purity of his art threatened by such irrational declarations: her saying so made his vision blur and his hands shake, such that weeks passed (in fictional time) before he felt he could attempt another drawing of her, and then only from behind her shoulder.

For Jennifer’s father, “I love you” was a call from earth to his tripping Trixie, guiding her home again. Though drugs were off the menu since their move into the manse, Beatrice still sometimes, involuntarily, revisited trips from the past, and though these episodes were never (so she said) an unpleasant experience, and could even be, as best she could remember, spiritually enlightening, they were not held by this community of skeptical prairie folk to be in any serious sense visionary, and so complicated at times Reverend Lenny’s ministerial career, even while enlivening his sermons. He would find her, for example, sprawled out in her socks and underpants on the cold linoleum floor of the church basement, her head pillowed perhaps (thanks to some good Christian) by her own cast-off clothing or the cushion from the piano stool, her eyes focused on some distant unnamed galaxy beyond the perforated plasterboard ceiling. He would kneel down beside her, put his mouth by her ear, and whisper to her his incantation of love as though sending a radio signal out into the cosmos, meanwhile thinking: How can I use this on Sunday morning? Thus, his famous “Sleeping Beauty” sermon: God awakening us with his love from life’s deep sleep. And his sermon on the efficacy of prayer: learning to whisper “I love you” into God’s cosmic ear. Sometimes it helped to reach inside her panties and stroke her there, pulling her back to this world by activitating her own magnetic field, as it were, and when she awoke, not knowing how she had got where she was, she would often say that his voice was like a call beyond a distant door, which his fingers were slowly opening. Lenny hadn’t figured out yet how to get finger-fucking into one of his sermons, but he knew it could be done. God was great.

Maynard Junior had said “I love you” in his head over and over, but like Lorraine, out loud only once in his life, and that time to a urinal. This was back at the time of his cousin John’s wedding. His dad was the mayor in those days, and he was then known to the locals as Mayo or Mayor Nerd, and more commonly, as simply the Nerd. Three years away in prelaw at Duke had not changed this. The Nerd was a man, in this town, iconocized and so condemned. As one of John’s groomsmen, Maynard felt obliged to paste a smile on his face that weekend and go along with everything like a good sport, even though he felt wrenched apart inside with fury, bitterness, and grief. During dessert at the rehearsal dinner down at the old Pioneer Hotel, someone made a lighthearted remark about the marriage bed, and the horrific image of his loathsome hairy-assed cousin assaulting the angelic thighs of his beloved, which he had managed to keep repressed all evening, rose suddenly and brought the night’s banquet up with it — he barely had time to lurch away from the table and hurl himself into the men’s room before it all roared out of him like a last violent goodbye. “I love you!” he bellowed as he geysered forth, though it was doubtful that the others heard anything but “woof” or “barf.” “The Nerd has very tender sensibilities,” someone was explaining to a roomful of laughter as he returned (even the bride had a smile on her precious face), and his weak damp-eyed rejoinder was, “That’s right, happens to me every time some damn fool gets married.” The party moved from the banquet room into the hotel bar where the drinks were on Uncle Mitch and the bawdy songs and stupid jokes courtesy of John’s drunken frat-rat brothers, the older men and even some of their wives joining in for a while, though most of the ladies understood they were no longer all that welcome. Though Maynard felt, not for the first or last time in his life, like the last frail bastion of sanity in a sickeningly mad world, he joined in as best he could and even contributed a verse to “Roll Your Leg Over” that won him a round of applause, redemption of sorts, though she who mattered was no longer there to witness it:

Here’s to my cousin John, the man getting hitched!

One helluva goddamn son-of-a-Mitch!

Oh, roll your leg over, roll your leg over …!

As the evening wore on, most of the old folks dropped off and, on a signal from Dutch, the men remaining grabbed up all the unemptied bottles and moved on out to a tavern and pool hall at the edge of town, where Dutch had set up poker tables, a bandstand with instruments for those who wanted to jam, and a screen and projector, for which he had rented a dozen old blue movies, or maybe he owned them. The jokes gradually got coarser, the noise louder, the stakes higher, the air thicker, the singing more like shouting. Two guys stripped down and got into a wrestling match, another started playing the drums and cymbals with his penis, the piano with his ass. All Maynard wanted was to go home, and when Dutch and John and a couple of the others tried to sneak away, just as some of the rest were proposing a farting contest, he tried to join them. They obviously didn’t want him along, the clubby bastards, but he insisted, his voice rising to an urgent squawk — he wasn’t going to get fucking left behind! He was nearly crying, and others out there were getting curious about what was going on, so finally, pissed off, they shushed him and gave in. He wished afterwards they hadn’t.

About the same time that helluva goddamn son-of-a-Mitch was slipping out of the Country Tavern with five of his pals for what they were calling “a prayer meeting,” his helluva goddamn father, fresh black stogie in his jowls, was drifting smugly, if somewhat boozily, out of the old Pioneer Hotel, having conducted a little communion service of his own, closing down the bar in there while closing a deal with some of his capitol pals, in town for tomorrow’s wedding, a deal that would route the new proposed highway across some twenty miles of his own land holdings, opening up hundreds of acres out there for development — this area was growing by leaps and bounds, and God bless the bounder who leapt first, amen. Mitch foresaw that the rest of his life would be spent in this enterprise and those that would follow naturally thereupon, and he was proud of it. What were the fucking pioneers themselves, after all, but early land developers? He was taking his place in the great national epic, and he felt like a goddamned hero, a saint, a giant among pygmies. He was feeling “high,” as the young folks liked to say nowadays (and he wasn’t so old himself, goddamn it), high and dry, too much so certainly to turn in just yet. His wife Opal was home already, driven there earlier by the bride’s parents, as were most of the locals past the age of twenty-five or so, and the younger ones were all out at the Country Tavern or else at parties of their own, so the prospect facing this giant among pygmies, standing legs apart out there on the sidewalk in front of the darkening Pioneer Hotel and weaving just a bit, was one of solitude and impenetrable shadows and deep tranquillity. In short, no fun at all. It was at moments like this that Mitch missed the big city. Always somewhere to go, something to do, someone to get to know, in a Biblical manner of speaking. Nothing doing here even if something was doing: to wit, his old maxims about taking your trade out of town, sowing wild oats in distant fields, keeping hair pie off the local menu, and so on, all of which Mitch equated with family values, which he vigorously championed and rigorously (more or less rigorously) adhered to, as he planned to now, unsteady though he was. He considered taking a quiet midnight stroll in the park, still lit up across the way with its old-fashioned postlamps, get his feet back under him, as it were, but he remembered he was carrying a lot of weekend cash in his pocket. This was the sort of town where you could park your car (it was John’s little souped-up silver Mustang awaiting him, he saw, John had taken the Continental for the night) with the motor running, leave your house wide open when you left town for a week, drop your wallet in the street and get it back intact, always had been since it first got settled over a hundred years ago, but times were changing, and there were a lot of strangers in town now. Besides, he might interrupt something over there, a kiddy orgy under the bandstand or crazed drug addicts in the bushes, he’d heard rumors. That was why they were beefing up the police force. Ever since they had found what they said was an illegal substance in the car of those kids who got killed playing chicken on the highway out by the trailer park. It was a fucking shame the way families were falling apart these days, failing their responsibilities, Mitch thought, unlocking the Mustang and stumbling a bit as he struggled with the door. Couldn’t remember walking over to the car, but here he was. He took a deep pull on his cigar, blew smoke up at the flickering streetlamp overhead, getting his bearings, then lowered himself inside. Fucking bucket seats. Got one leg in all right, had problems with the second one. Whoo, felt like he was grappling with some kind of prehistoric beast (“Bucking fuck-it seats!” he said out loud to the night crowding around him, hoping to make it back away a bit), or else he’d grown the leg of an elephant, and he suffered a sudden pang of longing for his beautiful old prewar Packard, the one with the running board. He could crawl in and out of that fantastic machine when he was so drunk he couldn’t walk, and whether or not the goddamned thing was standing still. The trouble today, he thought, as he dragged the rest of him in out of the menacing night at last, hauled the door shut with an echoey whump (that reassuring running board on his old Packard had somehow reminded him once more of family values), and then fumbled, grunting, for the keys which he’d dropped on the floor, was that there was too much self-centeredness, not enough thought for the other guy, and especially the young. What the hell was happening to this country? If Mitch had his way, every time a kid got in trouble, he’d clap his old man’s ass in jail until it was sorted out. Teach the egocentric sonuvabitch a little goddamned civic virtue. Something Mitch (there they were — but where was the cigar? Jesus) would never have to face: his boy was a fucking prince. Had a wild hair or two, of course, wouldn’t be Mitch’s son if he didn’t, but John was a great kid, straight as they come. And now, hell (he found the cigar, scuffed at the sparks on the floor with the clutched keys, planted the dead stub back in his jowls, straightened up confusedly: felt like he’d fallen down a well somewhere), the boy was getting married, hard to believe. It was like things were speeding up somehow, how did we get here so fucking fast? Next thing you knew, he’d be a grandfather, and then … shit… But not yet. Not yet, goddamn it. Mitch turned the ignition, revved up from a gentle purr to a low growl, and pulled out into the lonely night, jaws clamped defiantly around the cigar. Not yet! He was glad to see John marry, of course (that’s right, dumbo, turn on the damned lights), and a good choice, lovely girl, Audrey’s kid, Homecoming Queen and all that, and he believed marriage would help John understand him better, help him appreciate his old dad’s steadfast whaddayacallit, forgive him his trespasses. So, yes, he was in a celebrative mood all round, Mitch was, and he realized that, in this mood (he was thinking about Audrey, the old prewar Packard-vintage model, so wild and beautiful — and now they were to be in-laws, who could have foreseen such a thing?), he was headed out toward the stag party at the Country Tavern. Now, he knew the last thing those young studs wanted was some old fucker hanging around, looking over their shoulders, he’d been the first to point that out to his peers when the lads took off from the hotel hours earlier, he had no intention of going out there, hell no, won’t go, and yet, here he was, the nose of the silvery beast (he tapped the accelerator and felt it spring forward with a throaty snarl) pointed unerringly toward that place like a well-trained birddog with a bone-on and getting up speed. Well, what the heck, wouldn’t hurt to drop in for a beer, unload a joke or two, let them know he was one of the boys at heart, a good guy they could count on in the clutches, then buy them a final round and, duty beckoning the lonely hero, roar off, chin up, into the melancholic night.

Ellsworth had not, except for a general mention of the “weekend festivities,” reported on that stag party in his newspaper, The Town Crier, though he knew about it, or some of it anyway. It was not for reasons of taste that he omitted it from his coverage of the wedding, otherwise extensive if not in fact exhaustive — no, what did he care about such matters, he who had snubbed his nose at propriety all his life? Nor was it a factor that the father of the bride was his patron; the record must be kept, as Barnaby himself would say, no fudging, my boy, on that. The point was, Ellsworth was interested only in recording significant history, and a-historicity was the very raison d’être, he knew, of stag parties, and indeed of all such carnivalesque activities. It was his duty as the town chronicler to bear witness, not to mere surface excitements, but to history’s deeper design. Or so he told himself back in those early days, his file cabinets still as orderly then as a genre plot, more folders in them than documents and reassuringly comprehensive, like a local map of time. So, though Gordon for reasons of his own was rather keen on following through on the night’s more irregular activities, Ellsworth was satisfied (comedians excluded) with the formal wide-angle lens photographs of the rehearsal dinner, paid and posed for by the parents of the betrothed, and after these had been taken he led a reluctant Gordon back to his studio to discuss the photo coverage of the wedding itself on the morrow and to carry on with the conversation they had begun as boys some twenty years before. Gordon’s growing fascination with the irrational, the erotic, the sensational, the morbid bordered, Ellsworth felt, on pornography, and caused him to doubt his friend’s continued commitment to those higher artistic principles they had once so passionately held in common, and which Gordon still claimed, all evidence to the contrary, allegiance to. There was, for example, the bizarre series of pictures Gordon was taking at this time of his dying mother, no longer compos mentis or even continent, confined now to her old iron bed in one of the dismal little back rooms above the shop. Perhaps, like all men, Gordon was blind to his own transformations. Ellsworth suspected that photography itself, not in his judgment an art form at all, might be the efficient cause of this relapse, the effortless voyeuristic eye replacing the critical eye of the creative artist, who must construct, out of the void of a blank canvas, over and over again, ever afresh, his own space, forms, patterns of light and color, unaided by the easy accident of an opened lens.

Pauline, who knew everything there was to know about ahistoricity, being a longtime native of those unlighted regions, also had cause to wonder about her husband’s artistic principles, not to mention the soundness of his mind, though this was sometime later, his mother whom she never knew passed on by then, her daddy jailed, John’s wedding ancient history, her own more recent but even more forgotten. Pauline, it should be said, was not a curious person. Teachers had often noted this with some dismay on her report cards. It was something Daddy Duwayne, ever her most influential mentor, had broken her of early on. Narcissistic men sometimes found this characteristic lessened their erotic enjoyment when with her, but most found it comforting. Being incurious, Pauline supposed all others, except maybe teachers, were as well, and it was not until little Corny and his friends started using her like an animated pop-up picture book that it occurred to her she might have something to offer to those wanting to see but not use, and willing to pay for it besides, and if she could not thereby wholly escape her ahistorical condition, she might, if fortune smiled, escape at least the trailer park. Had she not been by nature or by education so incurious, that first photo session, after Gordon had shooed Corny and his father and that poor little French girl out of the studio and locked the door, might right then have made her think twice about returning for another, but Pauline had long since grown accustomed to the eccentricities of the aroused male, and so not only came back for further sittings, so-called (sitting being what he rarely let her do), but in time moved in above the studio and, after the ruckus with Daddy Duwayne, married the photographer. By then, of course, she had given up on the glittering kingdom of the centerfold, just a childish fantasy anyway, she supposed, and had come to accept as her lot in life these safe dusty rooms overlooking Main Street, wherein she was, if not transported, at least more or less content. Gordon’s photos of her were much too unusual for the men’s magazines, needless to say — he kept trying to turn her into something other than what she was — nor would he have sent them there even had they been suitable. His photos of her, as with many others, were not for general viewing, but were kept in large thick albums in locked cabinets at the back of the shop. Others might have been curious about these albums, but Pauline of course was not. Though, like all artists, he was a bit peculiar, her husband, though he sometimes hurt her, rarely had much to say, and had a crazy way of staring, he had nevertheless taken good care of her and was, she believed, essentially a good man or anyway benign — at least that was how she felt up to the time that poor lady was killed at the humpback bridge and Gordon, obsessed with the accident and exhausted from overwork, uncharacteristically left some of his secret albums out and open where she could not help but see. One lot in particular gave her goosebumps. She decided to tell Otis about them the next time she saw him.

This was not to be for some time, as it turned out, due to a religious experience suffered by the town’s police chief. After Duwayne’s arrest some four years before, Otis, not yet the chief, had picked Pauline up at the photo studio in his squad car and driven her out to the trailer park to ask her some questions about what he had found there in the course of his investigations. Though Pauline told it without emotion, it was a pretty sordid story of rape, child-battering, incest, torture, and all manner of filthy and unnatural sexual acts, all mixed up with her father’s mad evangelical harangues — sordid but also quite exciting: the next thing Otis knew he was getting sucked off again, and this time he didn’t cry. After that, he and Pauline visited the trailer more or less regularly. He picked up more of the story, ashamed that it was such a turn-on, and over time a kind of friendship grew up between them. Otis would ask her to show him exactly what it was her father did to her, she would get him to play the part of the father, though of course he would never really hurt her, and they would end up on the floor a little later in a sweaty cuddle, he telling her by then about his own boyhood, his troubles at home after his old lady walked out on them, the black moods his old man went through until finally he blew his stupid brains out, and then about his own marriage, too early probably, right out of the army, didn’t even know what it was all about before the kids started coming, but mostly about his job and about life down at the station, where he hoped to be promoted soon. She was a good listener, never asked questions, but remembered all the things he told her, making them seem important. She got married, he gave her and the photographer a nice present, his wife had more children that her husband photographed, the promotion came through, they went on meeting out at the trailer. It was like a second life they could visit from time to time, and so the months and years went by. But then one day he stepped out of the trailer, still buttoning up, and there was John’s wife. He was momentarily blinded as though suffering some kind of holy vision, his ears started to pop and ring, and he found himself, crazily, reaching for his revolver. Somehow, instinctively, he managed to slam the door shut behind him, hoping Pauline took the hint, and as his vision cleared he saw that John’s wife was not alone, but with some sort of committee of housewives. He still couldn’t hear what they were saying, but enough leaked through to suggest it had something to do with the town beautification program. The trailer park was an eyesore and they wanted to do something about it. He stood there with his circuits blown, nodding stupidly, a speechless imbecile trying to look serious, hoping only that his fly was done up but afraid to look. One of the women, squinting suspiciously, took a sharp look for him, then cast her skeptical gaze up at his face, seeming to peer straight through him and on into the trailer behind. This was the wife of the Ford-Mercury dealer. One night later she was dead. Grotesquely. Upside-down, blood leaking from her ears. But still staring. And the day after that, Otis arranged for a long weekend and went on religious retreat, promising the Virgin never to see Pauline again.

Here is one of Gordon’s photographs of what Otis saw that night out at the bridge: Viewed in silhouetted profile through a shattered side door window against bright spotlights beamed down from the road above and bouncing off the trickling creek in which the crushed automobile lies, a head, partly submerged, dangles upside down from a broken neck, wearing the shallow creek water across its forehead like a flatcap or a mortar board. Headlamps pierce the night like a blind stare and, in the center of the photo, one high wheel provides a visual echo of the rainbow-arched bridge rising bleakly, upper right, into the dense dark sky above. On the left, a squat figure, also in silhouette and featureless except for thick spectacles ablaze with reflected light, descends the slope from the road above like some sort of otherworldly beast of prey, hunched over and knees bent as if about to pounce, while higher up in the center of the picture, near the foot of the concrete bridge, a scarecrowlike personage, well-lit and seen from the rear, slumps contortively, legs bandied and long arms draped over the shoulders of two white-jacketed helpers, his head fallen forward and out of view, so giving the impression of a headless man with loose airy limbs fluttering in the night breeze. This photograph, now in one of Gordon’s shelved backshop albums, is labeled simply “W-37,” suggesting that what is important is not the identity of the persons in the photograph or their stories or any conceivable meaning that might be attached to the events displayed, but rather simply the composition itself: Time, a fraction of it, frozen into an aesthetically compelling pattern, and all there is to know. This austere view, however, is undermined by the photograph itself, for in it there is another figure, uniformed and proxy for the absent viewer, gazing out upon the scene from a position just below the foot of the bridge with a look of profound perplexity, his billed cap tipped back, seeming almost to turn his head from character to character in his effort to interpret what he sees before him. To locate, or to confirm, its meaning. Even the photographer seems part of the policeman’s intense study, which engages us as it engages him. Something is being revealed. What is it?

“Honey, you can be the first to congratulate me,” Daphne was telling her best friend on the telephone the next morning, that day that Otis made his sacred vow. “I’m engaged again.” Her friend did not seem terribly impressed by this news. Of course, Daphne had been engaged half a dozen times at least over the last ten years, married thrice, it was not the sort of news that made the world shake. Still, Daphne had more to tell, just wait until she heard it all. Her last husband was Nikko, the pro out at the country club. That one didn’t last a year, but it wasn’t her fault, Nikko had vamoosed with that little fifteen-year-old exhibitionist, daughter of the town’s orthodontist, after the little fanny twitcher, already notorious for swimming topless at the country club pool, had scandalized the entire community by turning up at the Pioneers Day parade as an Indian princess dressed in nothing but beads and psychedelic body paint. When Nikko blew town, John brought in young Kevin, the present club pro and barkeep, prodigal son of a business crony, with whom Daphne enjoyed a brief consolatory if hazy fling. Probably John’s wife thought that’s who she was going to marry now. “No, not Kevin, sweetie, that’s been over for ages. Listen, Kevin’s approach shots are clever and he’s fun in the rough, so to speak, but the boy’s drives are short and choppy and he can never keep his eye on the ball, if you follow me. Pulls the flag too soon, too. No, I’ve been seeing — well, now don’t tell anyone, sugar, it wouldn’t look right, not yet, but let me put it this way, your old chum is going to be driving nothing but T-birds and Lincolns from now on. That’s right. Well, he’s old, I know, but that only makes him all the more appreciative, and believe me, appreciation is something I could use more of just now. I’ll be honest, when that shithead Nikko left me for that little high school kid, I realized suddenly that my ass was at least ten years out of date — I mean, god-damn it, honey, I’m not cute anymore. You’ve been lucky, it’s been harder for me. And besides — this is just between us girls, but as someone who’s got pretty high standards you’ll appreciate this — Old Stu’s hung like a horse. I kid you not. It’s a real old country-boy dong, the kind they tell jokes about. Admittedly it doesn’t have a lot of starch in it — mostly it just lies there, curled up like an old hounddog in front of the fire, as Stu says — but I’ve made it get up on its hind legs and do a few tricks, and old Stu’s so grateful he cries, and then I cry, too, and I realize if it’s not love as I’d always imagined it, what the hell, it’s love just the same. So you’re going to have to stand up there with me and the preacher one more time, can you bear it? Honest to God, sugar, I don’t know what we’d do without you around here. And at least that cute fraternity-boy preacher’s new, so we’ll be able to tell this batch of wedding photos from the last ones, right? I think I’ll wear burgundy red this time, it’s the color of the Thunderbird Stu’s giving me. We have to wait for the funeral of course, but — what? Winnie? Winnie got killed last night, hadn’t you heard? Out at the humpback bridge. Sorry, I thought you knew …”

Alf had happened to be on call that night that Winnie died, and the ambulance swung round to pick him up on the way to the wreck. He was not as sober as he should have been, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. Old Stu had, anyone could see at a glance, joined him in widowerhood, and, unscathed except for a scratch across his nose, was himself able to walk away. Or would have been if he had been sober enough to walk at all. Winnie had probably been killed on impact, though the anger and alarm on her face suggested she had seen it coming. The police officer, examining the road, could find no skid marks: “Must have rammed that fucker at full throttle,” he muttered, looking a bit rattled, seeming not to want to get near the wreck itself. They had hit the side of the bridge on Winnie’s side, but may have already been rolling, ending up wheels high in the creek below, so it wasn’t easy getting them out. There were a few drunks from the tavern down the road, come to lend a hand, but they all seemed a bit disoriented by it all, staggering around bleakly in muddy circles, in and out of the beams of the headlights piercing the damp night eerily, and the photographer, something of a nutcase anyway, was preoccupied with getting it all on record just as it had happened, so it was pretty much left up to Alf and his drivers to pull Stu and Winnie out of there. While they were struggling, knee-deep in weedy water, with the Mercury’s crushed doors, a strange-looking bespectacled woman with an exaggerated limp came down into the ditch and gave them a hand. She had apparently just been driving by. She was strong and efficient and especially useful in helping them work the dead body out through the smashed window so she could be stretchered off, though the man she was with, evidently having no stomach for such labors, remained in their car up at the side of the road, staring straight ahead and clutching the steering wheel with both hands. When Alf accompanied the young woman back to the car, thanking her for helping out, he saw that the man was his nurse’s brother Cornell, Oxford’s youngest boy, and he knew then that this woman was his new bride. Her first night in town probably. One she would no doubt long remember.

Alf’s nurse Columbia would not have been surprised at this display, that Gretchen was a real take-charge girl, that was definitely the impression she had brought back from the wedding, though it was not her immediate one. Her first impression had been that Gretchen was ill-tempered and pushy, stomping around aggressively in her orthopedic boot as if she were hammering nails, a haughty and sharp-tongued shrew who was abusive to Corny and quarrelsome with strangers and, on top of it, blind as a mole, which in some ways she unfortunately resembled. Not a good start. But her bad humor, Lumby soon learned, was mostly her brother’s fault as usual. Gretchen had arranged a whole series of appointments with doctors and labs and county clerks and photographers and justices of the peace and what all, and Corny had wandered off to play a pinball machine somewhere and had missed them all, meaning everything had got thrown off by a day, the lesser things just abandoned. Luckily it was only a civil marriage and they had no big honeymoon plans (though those reservations had to be changed, too), but still, Columbia could understand how her baby brother, who had also somehow managed to misplace the rings (they found them finally in the lining of his tatty jacket, bought for a quarter off the Salvation Army racks — the rings, of course, Gretchen herself had purchased), could exasperate a person. Certainly he had tested his own family’s patience over the past few years with his indolent numskull ways, ever since that awful high school graduation trip to Paris. When Corny had announced the wedding to them in a phonecall a few days before, startling everyone, her father assumed the stupid boy must have got some damned hippie pregnant. Lumby didn’t think so. She had played doctors with Corny once upon a time, and so had some idea what his problems were. On the other hand, she could not imagine who would marry the little dummy, and so drove up to the ceremony feeling nearly as skeptical as her father did. She was the only member of the family to attend, acting as one of the witnesses, Harvie being totally out of touch, her father too depressed to go. Her father was depressed all the time back then, it was a kind of endless soapbox routine and frankly getting a bit much to take. It was like he thought he was the only one who missed Yale and Mom. Lumby was mad that he wouldn’t go up there with her, and she let him know how she felt about it — what kind of father was he, for pete’s sake? — but given the sort of wedding that it was, it was probably just as well. He and Corny would have just got into another whining match, and her father, half blind himself, would not have noticed what a real find Gretchen was, and so, like the man who wasted the only wishes he ever got, might have turned her off before she could ever come here and work her magic on them all.

Oxford’s failing in truth was not in wasting wishes, but in having no clear second wish when the only wish he ever wished did not come true. Oxford was a reasonable man, and his sole desire was simply that the world be at least as reasonable as he was, a certain recipe for despair as just about anyone in town could have told him, and as often did close friends like Alf, closer when they both were suddenly left alone and then more often, too: “Human reason is an evolutionary deformity, my friend, an aberrant mutation, a miserable freak. Don’t trust it. The life force itself is savage and mindless. Ruthless. Like a trapped beast. Believe me, I witness its stupid cruelty every day. And in its ruthlessness, it engenders monsters, human reason just one of its grotesque miscreations. Just thinking about it, Oxford, is enough to make you shit your britches. The brain thinking about itself: better than a damned enema.” This said by the old gynecologist, emergency room surgeon, and general practitioner over hot bitter coffee in the Sixth Street Cafe, peering out the window at a dirty rain splashing the cracked blacktop in the empty center of a decentered town. A pause. A rueful sigh. “The only consolation is that monsters, cast off by the force that made them, usually self-destruct. Sooner or later.” Oxford had no reply. He could only gaze out through his tears upon the horror, somewhat fuzzy because of his myopia. Alf’s and Oxford’s wives, Harriet and Kate, friends in life, had paired themselves in untimely death as well, perishing of lingering diseases of the inner organs two years apart (though Oxford’s Kate had cut her suffering short with an overdose of sleeping pills, taken from the store), a double loss to the community and a reminder to all of the brevity of life’s fitful fever, as Ellsworth put it, in a rhyme with “forever grieve her,” in his special Town Crier eulogy to Kate as the longtime city librarian. Perhaps it was this morbid reminder that had caused Alf that particular day, two years of grieving fever welling up behind his own eyes, to leave his finger inside John’s wife a contemplative moment longer than he needed to, or that made Marge cry when she saw the wrecking ball bring down the old Pioneer Hotel which she had never even entered except when obliged, as at John’s wedding, for example, or that inspired Nikko the golf pro to abandon his wife Daphne a few weeks later and run off with the orthodontist’s uninhibited teenage daughter, or that prompted young Cornell to drop completely out of sight for a year and more, further sorrowing his heartbroken father, left now with so little. Poor Oxford. His wife was dead, two of his sons had turned into wildly irresponsible crackbrains, utterly unrecognizable even to those who loved them, the third, the one with the most promise, had been senselessly killed in a distant war, and he himself was reduced to living alone with his churlish daughter, a fat and rather stupid girl who had tried but failed both pre-med and pharmacy, and had ended up working now as a practical nurse for Alf, largely thanks to her father having asked this of his old colleague as a personal favor, so the downtown pharmacist had reason, his noble and rational dreams of a noble and rational world come to such ruin, to feel a bit crushed in the spirit. Cornell had been his last fond hope, his most bitter disappointment, and so he saw nothing to cheer about when his mad son surfaced suddenly a year or two after his mother’s burial to announce his impending marriage to the staggering half-blind creature described shortly thereafter by his daughter on the telephone. The woman sounded like the very emblem of that deformity Oxford’s dream of reason had become. She will be the death of me, or anyway of my sanity, he thought, weeping as he often did in those dark days, when he hung up. He was wrong about this, however. As he admitted to his friend Alf over a sunny midmorning feast of blueberry pancakes and vanilla icecream many years later, his tears long dried and two of his eight grandchildren in the double stroller at his side, Gretchen was in truth the real son he no longer had.

Gretchen’s fecundity amazed the town. A patriarchal future was not the vision most had had, lacking Pauline’s privy knowledge, when autographing little Corny’s high school yearbook. Maybe Gretchen’s myopia helped, some said, to find what others could not see or even say for sure was there. Or was it, others asked, that trip to Paris with Yale’s old flame that made the child child-maker? Drew him out, in a manner of speaking? They say the toilet was in the living room of that strange bohemian garret, and the bathtub was the artist’s sofa, naughtily aimed mirrors everywhere, where could innocence hide in a place like that? Maybe Corny learned a little French after all, in other words, before the lights went out. It was possible, but if so, there was little sign of it on his return, his heart-shaped face with its gaping stare and unwiped mucus streaks reminding some of crackled porcelain, others of a dead child, too long unburied. An odd boy, made odder still, that was the judgment, so when the babies started to drop by twos and threes, it caught the whole town by surprise (old Stu, elbow sliding on the country club bar, said he’d asked the lady druggist if she got three every time, and what she’d said, he said, was, “Oh no, sometimes we don’t get none at all!”), not least his family, though they soon got used to it. For all her minute playroom examinations and later health ed and anatomy courses and her career in a doctor’s office, after all, Columbia never had figured out exactly how males worked (Gretchen promised to show her), and as for Oxford, that reasonable man, he had been wrong about so many things it did not surprise him to be wrong about another. Columbia, being a nurse, or nearly, to a sometimes gynecologist, was a great help through all the pregnancies, giving Gretchen her shots and sometimes a back massage, even once an enema, and accompanying her, since she worked there, through all her visits to the doctor and often to the lab for her scans and blood tests. During the backrubs, Gretchen would tell her about all the problems she was having with her wacky husband, how sometimes he was all over her like a rabbit and other times she couldn’t get near him, he’d hide under the bed or in the closet, or else out in the alley behind the drugstore, prowling around like he was looking for his lost wits. Corny seemed to get it in his head from time to time that he wasn’t really married to Gretchen, that it was all a trick of some kind, or else he’d fallen asleep and couldn’t wake up, he was a real lunatic. Columbia of course was always very sympathetic, having had to put up with her demented little brother all her life, and she said she thought it all had something to do with that crazy trip to Paris, and Gretchen agreed. Gretchen said sometimes it was like there were two Cornys. And neither of them worth a bent penny, Lumby would add, and they’d both giggle, and sometimes hold hands.

Cornell’s hostess in Paris, on a high school graduation trip arranged by his father, was his big brother Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire, penpal of John’s wife and bridesmaid at her wedding, the one Daphne thought seducing Bruce. Had the horny maid of honor had her eyes on anyone all that day but the best man, however, she would have seen the gazes Yale and Marie-Claire were exchanging during rehearsal and at the dinner after, would have noticed that they’d stayed behind while the others drifted toward the bar, Yale there more as the bride’s pal than the groom’s and so easily forgotten when it came time to play stags and hens. Yale was the serious one in that family, both parents’ admitted favorite — but no hard feelings, he was also Harvie’s favorite and the younger kids’, too, a boy born to love and be loved as well. Greatest thing, as is often said, Yale had it. Daphne’s classmates had voted him both Most Popular Boy and Most Likely to Succeed, two accolades rarely paired, not even John in his day had been so honored. By the time he met Marie-Claire — and forget the bridal bouquet and the garter next day, this was that wedding’s one true (to quote one of their love letters later on) full-blown romance — Yale was halfway through Princeton, majoring then in chemistry and what was coming to be known as computer science, but soon to switch to French, foreseeing a life that would take him far from these parts forever, correct in this, as it turned out, though not in the way he had imagined. The plan, elaborated in their long weekly, sometimes daily, love letters, which each wrote in the other’s tongue, delightfully cross-pollinating and scrambling their endearments, double entendres’ meanings doubly doubled, was for Yale to finish his degree and then find a teaching or translating job in Paris where they could live together, which folks back home, lovingly envious, thought of as the French way of doing things. With the diploma in his hands, he already had the airline ticket in his pocket, a graduation gift from his family, sent him in a packet from the drugstore Oxford labeled a “prescription for peace and joy,” to which his mother Kate appended one of her succinct aphorisms: “Love is the source code!”—but before he could join Marie-Claire he got drafted, was made an officer, went off to a war that was not a war, and loved by those he led with love, got shot on patrol in that part of him that had once memorized the conjugations of être and foutre and devised on the computer a pioneer on-line concordance for the collected works of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, who, the shocked and grieving community learned from The Town Crier, were French literary personages, known best as poets, contemporaries of this town’s early settlers, few of whom by contrast could even write.

It was during a routine business call home while on his second honeymoon in Paris that John learned of Yale’s fall on the field of battle, so it fell to him to break the tragic news to their hostess Marie-Claire, an awkward situation, made worse by hainqui-dainqui’s recent mischief, but John handled it with his usual panache, as the natives there would say, and proved that he was a man, as his mother Opal often asserted, not without compassion. Although, true, few who knew him would have described John so, in this matter John himself would have agreed with his mother: he was, he had no doubt of it, a compassionate man. Except when he was in a tough ballgame. Which of course was just about all the time, since that was mainly how he defined life. Compassion was the most natural thing in the world but you could rarely get down to it, that’s how he felt. Too much of life’s rough-and-tumble in the way most of the time, and a good thing, too, else he’d be bored silly. Compassion, in effect, was what was left over when the game was easy: a generous party, a timely job or a business tip, a tax-deductible gift. It was a bonus at Christmastime for his employees, even if he planned to fire them. A visit to the bedside of a guy you’d hit, flowers for the wedding of a rejected lover. Sometimes just a thoughtful phonecall, or a slap on the butt. Three rooms and bath in a retirement community was what stricken Barnaby got, Oxford an offer to save his pharmacy which he foolishly rejected, Lenny a piano for the church basement that Beatrice had asked for, Snuffy new team uniforms, then an airport job, and later, in politics, John’s endorsement. Waldo got business trips when Lollie was too hard on him, Lollie the chance to partner John sometimes in mixed-doubles foursomes. He suffered nights of bridge with his hardware man and his simple wife, even to Mad Marge threw a cookie now and then, though usually by way of her husband’s insurance business, and to Harvie he once sent a marabou stole to show he cared and understood, compassionate man that he was.

“Compassion? He calls that shit compassion?” his cousin Maynard would have snorted bitterly had he known John’s thoughts, though of course he didn’t. Couldn’t. He had trouble enough reading his own dark mind, forget the minds of others. And the Nerd, or Backdoor Mange, as his ex-wife Daphne sometimes called him, was not the sort of person John or anyone else would ever confide in, except for Veronica of course, who did, and wed him, then suffered ever after having her past flung back at her like those custard pies they throw in the movies. Sympathy was not in Maynard’s vocabulary, compassion wasn’t, nor in his heart either. Love was, but narrowly so, so narrowly only he knew it was lodged there. Like a rock, a deeply imbedded stone that his thoughts tripped over, losing coherence, and that sometimes turned red-hot and caused his senses to fail him and his body to shake as though with a fever and his organs to expel their contents. It was strange, he did not understand it, never could, thought of it as something completely crazy, but he could not shift it out of there, it was as much a part of him as his stubby dong, his hairy flat feet, his five o’clock shadow. So instead of kicking at it, he tried to polish it, but everything he did, always for her or for his love for her and his need to be near her, went wrong somehow, whether it was marrying her best friends to be closer to her or producing a kid to companion hers or trying to protect her and her father from John’s cruel depredations or just keeping up the pretense of a social life (he hated the social life) so as to see her from time to time (only she could polish what he could not): all failed. His love was dumb and blind and taught him nothing: he was, classically, its hapless fool. And now, since her father’s foiled raid, though he’d only done it for her: anathema. The great deceiver, cast as, he was, and so cast out wholly. He could not even speak to her anymore nor look her way when she passed by. If ever she still did, it was as though they existed in different worlds. Compassion? Hey, save it for the Nerd, whose pain was deep and, save for a frayed garter in his pocket, utterly without balm.

Certainly no solace from his same-named son, a rival of sorts who also had his eye on John’s wife, or hoped to soon; according to his best pal Fish, it went with the paper route. Love was not in Little’s vocabulary either, not yet anyway, though it was growing — his vocabulary, that is (other things, too, as he excitedly showed to Fish) — growing by lips and buns, as you might say, laps and bums, mostly filling up as it was at this time with words for bodily parts and what you did with them. Fish, as always, was his master in this, and not just in the naming but also in more practical instruction, the preacher’s son being a talented artist in his own right and also having access to certain books and magazines in his father’s collection that he said were attempts to depict what really got God mad at Sodom and Gomorrah. Nowadays, according to his dad, God was more understanding, humans were only humans, after all, so what the heck, let it happen. Fish often had interesting things to say, not just about girls and what made them tick (“—and tuck,” Fish would always add and pump his fist), but also about God and cars and drugs and computer games and what happened to you when you died, lots of things. He taught Little how to skateboard, how to roll a joint and smoke it, how to tell real rock from pop music (which he called “poop music”), how to play poker and chess and do tricks with matches, how to sneak into the swimming pool without paying, and how to tell if a girl was a virgin or not. He promised to show him how to drive when he got his own license and gave Turtle to understand that all his worldly wisdom was at his young friend’s beck and call. A born teacher, he was. The only thing Turtle couldn’t understand about Fish was that he had his eye on Turtle’s bitchy cousin Clarissa, a total pain in the neck if ever there was one, though it was true, she was more Fish’s age, and she did seem, in her tight jeans and torn shirt or in her string bikini at the new pool, as Fish put it, “hot to twot.” Or something like that. He’d seen her naked, or almost naked, Fish said, and when Turtle asked him if she was a virgin, he said he hadn’t been able to test her out yet, but he thought she was. Fish’s sister Jen was her best friend and so she hung out at the manse a lot, sleeping over sometimes, the two of them listening to music, girl-talking, drinking diet pop or sometimes beers, smoking dope when Fish’s folks weren’t around, and often on hot days when they were high, or even sometimes when they weren’t, they liked to goof around in their underwear. The reason Fish thought Clarissa was still a virgin was because he heard her complaining about it to Jen in her bedroom one night while he was watching them through the keyhole. He said she said she couldn’t wait to do it. It? Fish told him. Turtle also had to admit he didn’t know exactly what a keyhole was, not if you could see through it, but when Fish showed him one (their manse was much older than Turtle’s house, and more interesting in lots of ways) he could see how it might be useful.

Clarissa knew that Jennifer’s creepy goggle-eyed big brother was lurking outside the door that night, as he did most nights she stayed over. She didn’t know how a girl as cool as Jennifer could even have a jerky brother like that, but then who was she to talk, what with the retard she was stuck with? At least Philip wasn’t still wetting the bed. “Oh yes, he is,” Jennifer giggled. “Every night! Only with different stuff!” Clarissa thought Philip, better known at school as Fish, had got his nickname from his stupid bug-eyed buck-toothed look, but when Jennifer told her that she’d given him that nickname when she was a baby, he’d had it forever, Clarissa was not surprised. People grow into their names, she believed that, just as she was growing into hers. “Marie-Claire once had a lover she walked like a dog,” she told Jennifer, always a good listener. They were lying around in their underwear, listening to some new CDs. “With a leash and a chain and everything. She took him to the park and made him do tricks for her and spanked him in public with a rolled-up newspaper.” She had to fill in some of the details, but the main points of the story were all true, she’d overheard her daddy tell it. Up in an airplane with Uncle Bruce. “Well, one night he went wild and started frothing at the mouth and he attacked her and tried to bite her in her, you know, between the legs. Hard!” “Boy! Talk about getting eaten out!” “It wasn’t funny, Jen! He was trying to kill her, but Marie-Claire strangled him with her legs until he quit. After that, she wouldn’t let him be her dog anymore, but he never got over it. All the rest of his life he walked around on all fours, until one day a car hit him.” Jennifer thought it was a great story and said she’d turn all her lovers into aardvarks because of how long their tongues were, a fact she’d picked up from a silly poem in a children’s book. Jennifer seemed obsessed about tongues lately. “Or else Bambi’s father,” she sighed dreamily, running her fingers inside her briefs. Philip wandered in then, trying to look bored. “Mom’s coming home soon with Zoe,” he said. Clarissa didn’t mind other people’s moms, just her own. Whom she seemed to see less and less of these days, so it wasn’t too bad. Her mother was useful, but deep down Clarissa wished she’d go away and leave her alone. And take dumb Mikey with her. She pulled down her bra cup to poke at her nipple as though she might have a mosquito bite there, then peered up at Philip to watch him redden. She tried to think of what Marie-Claire might say, and then she thought of it: “You look like a fish out of water,” she said. “Why don’t you flop on out of here, Popeye, and go suck air someplace else?” And as Jennifer spluttered with laughter and hugged her thighs, he ducked out. This was the woman Clarissa was growing up to be. Because of her name. It was — she had just recently learned the word for it — her destiny. Knowing what was coming, what was really coming, was pretty scary, but it gave her an edge. She liked it. Whatever she did, it would come out the same, so there was nothing she couldn’t do. No one could intimidate her, not even teachers or her parents’ friends or the parents of her own. Certainly not the local police goons: during the bust at the mall, she’d collected everybody’s stash, walked it coolly right through the assault lines. She owned the school corridors and lunchroom, was queen-elect of the mall rats and pool punks, would meet any dare. At the new downtown civic center pool that her daddy built, she hung around all day in a string bikini that drove the guys bananas. But if they tried to touch her, she’d scratch their eyes out. Not too close, Creep. Danger, High Voltage. This is what love was. It was great. Totally intense.

Gordon had photos of the new pool, the old one as well and the one at the country club, but no bikini shots. Not even of Pauline. He did have a black-and-white picture of Clarissa’s mother, taken years ago at the country club pool, but in a modest one-piece swimsuit, tied at the neck and open at the back, not a bikini. Cheesecake, as it was called when he was a boy, was not Gordon’s fancy, not his artistic métier. Intimacy was. Sensuous intensity. Intimations of timelessness. And purity of line. In the photo of John’s wife, one of his favorites in an ongoing sequence begun nearly a quarter of a century ago, she is pulling herself up out of the pool near the low diving board, her bare back to the camera, one foot up on the concrete ledge, the other still in the water. Her hair is hidden inside a rubber bathing cap. Perhaps only Gordon would know who the swimmer was, but this very anonymity of his subject gratified him: an intricate arrangement of soft rounded glistening shapes, pure and clean and ultimately non-objective, unnameable, set against a severe geometry. Blowups of isolated fragments of this photo shared these qualities and recalled for him his earliest painterly pursuits, his speculative juxtapositions of hard and soft, line and texture, edge and surface. The pale dimpled membrane of the bathing cap, backgrounded by dark hedges and the chainlink fence at the pool’s outer border, provided impressions, when enlarged, of erotic moonscapes, set against an ominous cosmic grid, just as the potentially prurient and distracting crotch region, barely visible above the waterline and here at full stretch, lent itself with ease to tastefully harmonious studies in textural contrast, of which he had successfully attempted several. Gordon’s favorite area of the photo, however, was the bare back, and especially the glowing expanse of tensed wet flesh from braced right shoulder to lower left rib. He had explored this section inch by inch through long, infinitely pleasurable darkroom nights, emerging with a series of finished prints as near to his artistic ideals as any he had been able to achieve with a camera. In most of his pool photos, however, old and new, at least those mounted in his “Uninhabited Vistas” albums with their panoramic views of abandoned fields, empty parking lots, derelict drive-in movie theaters, windowed reflections of blank skies, and desolate dawn streets dampened with rain, there are no swimmers, and often as not there is no water either.

In another country club photograph, taken more recently, John’s wife, wearing a pale silk blouse later that evening to be dampened with gin, is receiving a lesson from the young golf pro on the proper way to grip a seven-iron. Her instructor is standing behind her, reaching around with both hands on hers and peering over her shoulder at the golf club she is holding, or at least down in that general direction. To get this shot, roughly three-quarters frontal, the photographer placed himself inside the caddy shack, just down the hill a hundred yards or so, and used a telephoto lens while focusing through an open window. Well, “placed himself” was perhaps misleading. He hid himself there. It was a surprisingly swift and covert maneuver. Trevor, watching discreetly from within the clubhouse lounge, almost missed it, remarking to himself, and not for the first time, that for a big man, outwardly clumsy, the photographer could move nimbly enough when he wanted to. Gordon, not a member, was a rare visitor to the club, here on this occasion ostensibly to photograph the new fleet of electric carts for the weekly newspaper, the old caddy shack now serving primarily as a garage for these vehicles, and his presence was odd enough that it caught Trevor’s attention, especially with John’s wife in the vicinity. So, with his own wife still out on the course somewhere, Trevor amused himself by keeping his eye on (“tailing” was the word, was it not?) the furtive cameraman. What possessed him to do this? Was it the same compulsion that gripped the photographer? Trevor didn’t think so, though they did hold in common the desire to see without being seen, and he thought Gordon might be struggling with something like his own wandering actuarial graph point. The difference between their quests was that between object and subject, outer and inner, visible behavior and hidden motive. There was something baldly suggestive about the way muscular young Kevin in his burgundy red golf shirt and yellow pants was embracing John’s wife from the rear, but Trevor doubted that Gordon saw in Kevin anything more than a visual irritant, an obstruction to an unimpeded view of the main target of his camera lens. Or anyway, this would be in accord with the general artistic principles expressed by Gordon in a Town Crier interview with his friend Ellsworth some years ago, principles and ideals that appealed to Trevor, for whom beauty and number were essentially synonymous, even as he doubted those ideals’ validity. Or even their possibility. It was that doubt now, he believed, that compelled him to shadow the photographer, as though the photographer were offering himself up as an arena for the display of the paradoxical inner drama of a necessarily conflicted soul in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Surface eruptions were inevitable, and Trevor, his own inner drama developing apace, would be their witness.