Legends of the Fall

CHAPTER 1

Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone. He considered his sanity to be unblemished and his nightly dances an alternative to the torpor of calisthenics. He had chided himself of late for so perfectly living out all of his mediocre assumptions about life. The dancing was something new and owned an almost metaphysical edginess to it. At forty-three he was in fine but not spectacular shape, though of late he felt a certain softness, a blurring in the perimeters of his body. After cleaning up the dishes from a late dinner he would dim the lights in the den and put an hour's worth of music on the stereo though recently he often increased it to two hours; the selection was eclectic depending on his mood and might on any evening include music as varied as Merle Haggard, Joplin's Pearl, the Beach Boys, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Otis Redding and The Grateful Dead. The point was to keep moving, to work up a dense sweat and to feel the reluctant body become fluid and graceful.

The fact of the matter is that Nordstrom wasn't a very good dancer but when you're dancing alone, who cares?

Beginning with his childhood in Wisconsin he had been an excellent swimmer, a fair fly-caster and bird hunter, a fair basketball player, a fair linebacker, a fair golfer and a fair tennis player. Only the swimming haunted his dreams, all other sports had been discarded. Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and blue-gills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.

The first indication of dancing in his life had begun quite by accident. As a sophomore scholarship student at the University of Wisconsin he had noted that he couldn't possibly reach the men's gym from a classroom in the allotted ten minutes. Yet in 1956 four semesters of physical education were an absolute requirement. At registration he approached his track coach who remembered Nordstrom from fall term for having won the half mile and the shotput in his section, an oddity that removed Nordstrom if only momentarily from the anonymous pile of sophomores. The track coach suggested he run between classes, a bit unrealistic in view of all the unshoveled snow on the campus sidewalks. A muscular middle-aged woman sitting next to the track coach behind the registration desk recommended that Nordstrom take modern dance, which was held in the women's gym and only a short walk away from the classroom buildings. Nordstrom signed up and walked away with scattered imaginings of competence at the waltz, fox-trot, samba and rumba. As an economics major working thirty hours a week in the statistics library he had no social life and rather thought this enforced dancing would open up some new vista of romance.

The shock that neared paralysis in effect was that the class taught truly modern dance à la Martha Graham. He was the sole man among thirty young women in leotards and his ears rang and his mouth dried in embarrassment. It was the nature of his upbringing to stick things out and this, in addition to not wanting to admit his stupidity, kept him in the class. But the paralysis remained with him and other than the perfunctory warming up exercises he could not move. He feared that the girls who were strikingly midwestern, largely dumpy and ill formed, thought him a "homo," the commonest word in the dorm. After a few weeks he had the minimal wit to change his position in the back row until he was directly behind the loveliest girl in the class. Her name was Laura and Nordstrom often saw her in the library studying with her boyfriend, a gaunt and lanky basketball star. Her grace at the exercises threw Nordstrom into a trance of lust that gave the class a dreamlike atmosphere. He wore an especially tight jockstrap to conceal the results of her postures, the especially taut flex of her high buttocks and how she knelt and stretched like the most beautiful dog on earth with his nose not more than a few feet behind. He only spoke once to her to tell her she shouldn't chew her knuckles one day after class. She simply stared at him as if preoccupied and walked away.

As winter semester slid into spring the class became more painful because the new warmth allowed the girls to wear leotards without leggings. Nordstrom thought Laura's legs far surpassed any he had seen in bathing suit ads in magazines. It enraged him that the basketball player might have gone "all the way" with her as they said at the time. She never turned around to meet the eyes burning into her backside. And Nordstrom was pathetically flunking the class which meant an additional semester of physical education. He was desperate. On the hot late May afternoon in which the final exam was held—a four-to-six-minute solo dance of one's own devising—Nordstrom drank deeply from a pint of schnapps his father had given him at Easter vacation for his nerves. He had been up all night studying for an economics exam with the aid of a green and white time-released Dexedrine spansule. He felt he had done well in the exam and there remained only the dance before he could carry his suitcase to the station and take the bus from Madison to Rhinelander in northern Wisconsin for the summer. By the time he reached the gym he felt like the damp and rotting lilac blooms he had noted along the path beside the river. The blooms reminded him of the odor of the gym and the schnapps tingled in his brain which seemed to be sweating like his body. He wondered why he could dance in his imagination while his body remained stiff, almost frozen in the self-consciousness of its unruly lack of grace.

In the gym there were only four girls left who hadn't completed the solo test. Laura leaned against a window casement in the shadow of a long stream of sunlight waiting her turn. Nordstrom picked the next window and glanced at her somewhat furtively but turned away when he found her staring at him. He watched a plump girl thump and twist around to a Modern Jazz Quartet number and smiled idiotically with tension. The teacher approached him with a smile and said that she wanted him to watch the next performance closely and then merely react to it in his own dance. He swallowed with difficulty and nodded as Laura put on a Debussy record and began to dance with an inconsolable grace. He felt a lump arise beneath his breastbone and swim toward his throat, then the emergence of the inevitable hard-on at which point he put a hand in his pocket and squeezed it painfully to make it go away. By the time she finished he was a moon walker with feet of tingling fluff.

In fact he scarcely noticed when the teacher wrapped a blindfold around his eyes. Laura had gotten up slowly from the floor where she had lain on her stomach limply in imitation of death, with the soft, damp leotard drawn up tightly between her legs dividing the buttocks which owned a sheen of sweat. Then he was blinded and the teacher said that would relax him. He heard Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin above his breathing and went berserk with the berserk music.

Twenty-three years later in a large apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, the event still seemed the most extraordinary of his life. It had taken that long to dance alone again. The teacher had removed the blindfold, laughed and kissed his forehead. He saw Laura standing by the door then abruptly leave. He buried his face in the towel, returning freely to his native embarrassment. He got drunk with some acquaintances in the dorm and missed his bus, barely awakening to make the bus the next day. Throughout the summer he brooded while working for his father's small company that specialized in building cabins for the cottagers that came to northern Wisconsin from the cities each summer. His family were provident Scandinavians and Nordstrom had worked summers since his twelfth year, saving for college he had thought, but really simply "saving" as is the want of the stern, mostly snowbound Lutherans of the north. While others were playing baseball he learned rough carpentry, how to mix mortar, and finally how to lay blocks and bricks. And that particular summer he volunteered for all the roughest jobs: digging well-pits, the foundation work, unloading cement blocks and mortar and carrying the squares of roofing up the ladders. He was trying to exhaust his infatuation with the girl in manual labor but secretly fantasized a run-in where he would thrash her basketball player. He had been embarrassed when his grades had arrived and the "A" in Modern Dance had amused his father into saying, "You must cut a rug."

To abbreviate our tale, Nordstrom spent nearly another year before he made contact with Laura again. Frankly, he lacked imagination. He would stare at her name and number in the student directory, sigh and occasionally go out with a girl from his hometown who had at least a fashionable promiscuity in her favor. But she was a cheerleader type and often when he hovered above her punching away, Nordstrom thought of this act of love as only a tolerable form of masturbation. His mind was elsewhere. Once he saw Laura across the floor at a basketball game and he had to leave, so deep did his heart plummet. Then in mid-May, in a tavern habituated by the sorority and fraternity sorts where he only stepped in one Friday afternoon to get out of the rain he felt, of all things, a wet finger in his ear as he stood at the bar.

"You never called me. I thought you would call me," Laura said.

He was stunned and they drank for a while with two of her "sisters," Nordstrom very quickly to overcome shyness; then even more quickly when a group of athletes joined them. The athletes arm-wrestled to see who would buy pitchers of beer and to their surprise Nordstrom beat them having been raised on the sport and the labor it takes to be good at it. Then the athletes bet on Nordstrom against all comers until he was tied by a Polish football tackle and Laura stood and said she had to go back to the house to get ready for her date. Nordstrom was stunned and followed her to the door. She put an arm around him and said she was tied up for the weekend except perhaps Sunday afternoon and to stop by at three.

Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn't rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half-gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at the marsh hawk. He stared downward at her legs and the skirt slipping upward a bit while she leaned back to gaze at the hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him.

"You're looking up my legs," she said.

"No I wasn't."

"If you're honest you can kiss them."

"I was."

He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.

Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways. He bloomed as much as perhaps he ever would and they were married to the mild disgust of her ambitious parents and the delight of his own the week after graduation. They moved to California where she worked for a small company that made documentary movies for corporations and he worked for a large oil company. They lived in a duplex out in Westwood and after one year Laura gave birth to a daughter, returning to her career a year later. It was the sexual mystery that made their marriage last eighteen years. The word "mystery" is still appropriate despite the implacable vulgarizing of the media, so total in attempt that it must express our desire to smash this last grace note in our lives. (On the way back from California after the summer before their senior year they had made love in the car in the daylight, standing up for novelty in gas station bathrooms, like dogs back in the roadside evergreens with pine needles sticking to knees and palms, on a picnic table in North Dakota, on motel room floors, in a sleeping bag in a cold fog near Brainerd, Minnesota, in a movie theatre (East of Eden) in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

Do you want to screw Julie Harris?

I don't know. Never thought about it. Do you want to screw James Dean?

Of course. Don't be silly. But he just died.

The marriage had been unhappy for years before it ended rather amicably. He suspected that she had a lover and the lover had turned out to be a good friend of the family, Martin Gold. Both Nordstrom and Laura had been successful but never together. She traveled a great deal as a line producer and he made a great deal of money with the oil company. The sole meeting point had been their daughter Sonia, a rather fragile child until the summer of her twelfth year when it seemed she gained health and vitality overnight. But this seemed to remove their only mutual concern and they faded into their careers. Laura became more important to her company which gradually had entered the television market with feature specials and made-for-TV movies, most of them shot on location. Nordstrom owned a nagging jealousy over the glamor of her business compared to the boardroom composure of his own. Businessmen are by and large hapless wretches like anyone else and Nordstrom had that rare particular strength of the well disciplined, intelligent, good-looking man who never shoots off his mouth; terribly solid, never slick with the "sticktoitiveness" that Nordstrom's father-in-law so admired when he saw the fruits of the labor—a fine home in Beverly Glen.

They may have gone on indefinitely in this stasis but one night at dinner their daughter, with the terrifying intensity of a sixteen-year-old, told them they were both cold fish. Laura only laughed but Nordstrom was deeply hurt: to have worked so hard for sixteen years only to be called a cold fish by your own daughter. But then he was bright enough to know he was a bit of a cold fish, what is known in the business world as a hatchet man. Until this particular moment the idea had never bothered him.

That night after the unpleasantness of dinner Nordstrom broke with the rigidity of his drinking habits that confined him to two highballs after work and a little wine with dinner. He drank a lot of brandy and tried to talk on more intimate terms with his daughter. She was receptive though it later occurred to him that she was being kind. He had been so much what is thought of as a "model father" that he didn't really know his daughter and she, like any child, played the same formal though skittish game. After their talk he noted that he had smoked a half-dozen cigarettes in succession and promised his daughter a BMW when she graduated from college if she wouldn't smoke.

Then he talked with Laura about getting a less demanding job, or anyway something different. But she was preoccupied readying herself for the driver. She was taking the "red-eye" to New York for two days on business. They stood in the kitchen talking and he asked if they could quickly make love. She said no it'll mess up clothes, then offered a blow-job. So Nordstrom sat back in the breakfast nook getting what turned out to be half a blow-job because the driver rang the doorbell. Laura kissed him on the forehead and left, the job barely half done as it were, though Nordstrom didn't mind, being a good enough lover to prefer the process to the conclusion. Now he felt totally alone and an edge of panic crept into his soul that would stay with him for years. He thought, "What if what I've been doing all my life has been totally wrong?" He sat in the den the entire night thinking it all over. By dawn he decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees.

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change. Unless he is an essentially sound creature this can drive him frantic, perhaps insane. Nordstrom knew that at base business was a process of buying or manufacturing cheap and selling dear. Long before he took Economics 101 at the University of Wisconsin he had been attracted by the simple grace of capitalism: his father would build three cabins for five thousand and sell them for eight thousand; years later the cabins would be built for fifteen thousand and sold for twenty-two thousand, but despite this variation in price over the years to account for the increase in materials and labor—and inflation—it amounted not oddly to the same amount. His father was without greed and despite the urging of Nordstrom would not expand the business, say to ten cabins a year. In the oil business it was a trifle more complicated in that the big profits came from outsmarting the regulatory and tax structures and swindling the Arabs (he was amused when the situation reversed itself). It was pretty much a gentleman's game within the infrastructure. But it was all ruined during that long night in the den, no matter that the poison, like the changes Nordstrom wished to make in his life, was slow in coming. Between his thirty-seventh and fortieth year he began going to a number of plays and screening parties with his wife and was filled with a curious envy over the easy familiarity show business people had with each other, no matter that the lust for profit was the same as the oil business. There was at least a sense of play involved and Nordstrom had forgotten how to play, in fact had never learned. So he bought a sailboat but it turned out that there wasn't any particular place to go from Newport Beach. He played tennis with his daughter feverishly and built an expensive court behind their home, but she broke her ankle at Sun Valley and they never played tennis again. He tried skiing in Aspen; he went skeet shooting; he quail hunted with oil friends on an island near Corpus Christi and was nearly bitten by a rattlesnake. The rattlesnake incident was so actual that it secretly thrilled him for months; he reached under a mesquite bush to retrieve a dead quail, heard the strange sound but reacted slowly because he had never heard it before, and the snake's open mouth hurtled forward barely grazing his shirt cuff. He changed his hairstyle. He bought himself a silver ring in Cabo San Lucas where he went marlin fishing. He bought a camera. He began reading biographies and a few novels. One silly evening when Laura was away his daughter rolled a joint for him and he laughed until his stomach hurt, then became tight and mildly frightened. He screwed his secretary and felt sad. He bought a sports car which only his daughter and wife drove. He bought an expensive painting of a pretty girl washing her feet. He took up cooking when he resigned his arduous job in the oil business for a simpler one as a vice-president for a large book wholesaler. He learned to cook Chinese, French, Italian and Mexican food. He rented a van and drove north to the wine country around San Francisco, tasted the wines of many vineyards and returned with as much as the van would hold. He had visited, by referral, a high-priced, exotic whorehouse in San Francisco to fulfill a fantasy of being in bed with two women at once. It cost him three hundred dollars not to get a hard-on, his first experience at unsuccessful love. He brooded all the way back to Los Angeles. He brooded about his cock, he brooded about the young filmmaker friend of Laura's whom he had backed on an unsuccessful venture. It wasn't the money so much (the loss would be absorbed in the tax advantage) but the suspicion that Laura might have made love to the young man on an air mattress in the shrubbery near the Jacuzzi in the backyard. He brooded about his boredom with money because everything had been provided for by his own wit and the death of Laura's father. He brooded about his daughter's departure for Sarah Lawrence only three months distant. Suddenly he was terribly lonely for the greenery, the cold lakes, the thunderstorms and snow of his childhood.

He brooded about whether or not his wife had fucked an African when she had visited Kenya for a film the month before. Had she ever been in bed with two men, in an effort similar to his own abortive attempt? Nordstrom was appalled when his member rose up under his belt at the thought. It was time to pull things together.

That evening after a late dinner where they both drank too much wine Laura did a mock dance to the same Debussy song she had danced to in the gym nineteen years before. He watched with his mind frozen in dread because he knew their marriage was over and she knew it and was perhaps unwittingly dancing a swan song. Her body had changed very little but the grace had somehow been tainted with an almost undetectable hint of vulgarity. He went into the bathroom and wept for the first time in twenty-seven years, the last incident being when his beloved dog bit a deputy sheriff ice fishing on the lake in front of their home and was blown into a snowy eternity with six shots from a service .38. He dried his eyes with a towel that smelled of Laura's body, returned to the bedroom where they made love nearly as passionately as they had in the green knee-high winter wheat with the hawk circling above, but it was the terrible energy of permanent loss that wound them together and made them repeat every sexual gesture of their lives together.

That night was the final grace note of the marriage. It was three months before the divorce papers were filed (on the afternoon of the morning their daughter left for college). She had more money than he did, though not all that much more, and as an ardent feminist who took care of herself wonderfully she wanted nothing from him. He insisted for selfish reasons on paying the college bills (a fear of losing contact with his daughter) and they agreed to split the sale of the house down the middle. Certain necessary tortures were performed to insure the permanence of the divorce. Nordstrom was the simpleminded victim of these emotional barrages that accompany separation, the hacking of all the knots and threads that held the lovers together. He was told he was selfish, cold, calculating, intoxicated with his business success, with the toys that later decorated his life. During many wine-soaked summer evenings he heard ruminations about his midwestern infantilism, his self-satisfied ignorance of the real world, his insensitivity to the arts. Sometimes the ardor of the spleen was tempered by laughter or her ready admission that on a comparative basis it hadn't been all that bad a marriage. Unfortunately his potency waned as she drew away from him. He sought out wrongs, even imagined ones that he could present, but came up with nothing of substance. He loved her and had always been utterly uncritical of her often sloppy nature. He only felt anger when she told him about her lovers, and not that he was a bad lover, only that she saw life as too exasperatingly short to know only one man. He felt flashes of the cuckold's rage but his spirit had become too fatigued with sorrow to express himself. He invented a few infidelities but sensed she didn't believe him and was being kind to his inventions. It was their daughter who kept them totally civil: she loved them both for childlike reasons but questioned their sanity when they proposed only a tentative separation. She understood her father's nature, how while he could be lovable, he was also an introverted ignoramus, lacking even a touch of ease and spontaneity. She had known of her mother's lovers since fourteen and was only mildly embarrassed, owning a woman's matter-of-factness in sexual matters.

So a nearly twenty-year period of Nordstrom's life was over. After Christmas that year when he had tied up what he thought of as loose ends he moved to Boston where he had arranged a vice-presidency for another large book wholesaler. He was so dead to himself that the move actually constituted a way to keep at least cautiously near his daughter two hundred miles to the south. She even stayed with him for two months one year when she attended Harvard summer school. And that prolonged visit was what led to Nordstrom dancing alone. She had spent the two previous summers in Europe and now had a boyfriend at Harvard. They shared a mutually intense interest in art history and contemporary music, two subjects that seemed pleasantly impractical to Nordstrom. The young man was Jewish and this distressed him a little too until he spent an evening brooding about it and came up with nothing decisive one way or another. Laura had remarried and to a Jew; she was apparently quite happy, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that her daughter picked a Jew. Brookline was full of Jews and though Nordstrom didn't know any on a personal basis he rather liked them from a distance. He didn't know that he was somewhat an object of comedy in the delicatessen where he took his morning breakfast. He mentioned one morning to the owner that his Formosa oolong tea had said on the packet "this rare brown leaf tea from the island of Formosa has the exquisite odor of ripe peaches" but he hadn't smelled any peaches. This laconic form of midwestern humor escaped the delicatessen owner who sniffed the tea and said "so whadda I'm supposed to do." Then several weeks later the short-order cook didn't show up and Nordstrom called his office telling the secretary he'd be late. He looked a little absurd in the white apron with a J. Press shirt peeking out the top with a silk tie in a Windsor knot tightly in place. He cooked through the two-hour breakfast rush preparing basically simple orders—scrambled eggs with lox and onions, toasted bagels with cream cheese, a variety of omelettes, fried potatoes. When it was over and Nordstrom took off the apron and the owner wondered aloud what Nordstrom might like in return he said jauntily "just put something on a horse for me," having seen the owner study the Racing Form. Later when his daughter had been in the delicatessen with him the owner had complimented him on the "beautiful piece of ass." Nordstrom hadn't had the heart to admit it was his daughter.

Nor would Nordstrom admit that he was lonely. If the idea had arisen, which it didn't, he would have insisted to himself that he was alone most of the time only so he could figure things out. At work he was cold and efficient, only perfunctorily social. In the three years in Boston he had quickly renewed his reputation as a hatchet man by firing ten percent of the firm's two hundred employees and increasing efficiency and volume by more than twenty percent. There was a lot of muttering among the shanty Irish and the lower level Italian workers but never in Nordstrom's presence. The fact of it was that Nordstrom was powerful to no particular purpose. If he were to walk into a bar and say "it's raining" all the drinkers would nod attentively even though they could clearly see the sun shining through the windows. Perhaps, though, his preparations for his daughter's summer arrival painted his solitary life accurately. The gestures weren't at all conscious but more like an animal preparing for spring or winter, not really knowing which. He had the large master bedroom repainted a pale blue, bookshelves installed and filled with art books; he shopped for a stereo set and ended up buying two combination stereos that included tape decks. Her frugality at college had always depressed him, reminding him of his own bleak years. When he first met her young man in New York they were both wearing blue jeans, not even particularly clean ones, so Nordstrom had to cancel reservations at La Caravelle and they had ended up in the Village. He had noted to himself to return there at a future date because a particular waitress had caught his eye.

At the beginning of the summer of 1977 Nordstrom wanted sex to go away. In the three years since the divorce he had proven himself in a few encounters to be utterly without versatility. Desire went away for a long while and he was relieved but recently it had surfaced again at odd moments: a photo in a magazine, the rare movie (the nurse in Cuckoo's Nest, Louise Fletcher, gave him a momentary hard-on), an overweight waitress at the delicatessen, and most reprehensibly in his view, a girl across the courtyard from his apartment. She had just moved in and was in the habit of turning out all the lights and watching TV in the dark presuming herself invisible. But the blue light on her body was startlingly sexual and one evening her hand had moved down as if to massage herself and Nordstrom rushed from the apartment to find a prostitute. There were none to be had in the neighborhood bars and he ended up watching a Red Sox game on television, baseball being an effective nationwide soporific. But he brooded about his sexual failures, the dead feeling in his body as he watched the future disappear in nightly units full of odd dreams; dreams that brought the strange glandular rapacity of his marriage back so strongly that he half-expected Laura to be beside him when he awoke exhausted in the morning. He read widely on the subject but the reading was like trying to translate a foreign language after one year's study: his sexuality had been wonderful for eighteen years and then vanished. The books weren't any good on the vanishing act as if it were an example of antimagic and too subtle to describe. Nordstrom didn't know that he longed to fall in love. In his rage for order he began to keep a diary and the simple act of writing calmed him a great deal.

May 77: Sold some stock today to cover an August rental of a house on the water in Marblehead. It was extravagant but it has occurred to me this will be the last chance I have to spend much time with Sonia. Also noticed that when the decorator and painters finished with the room I had made it look like a huge room we had at the Lotti on the Rue de Castiglione in 1967 when she was eleven. Sid from the deli asked me to go to the Red Sox-Tigers game tonight, then to a stag party for his brother's fiftieth birthday out on Revere Beach. He said there would be plenty of "bimbos, floozies and coochy-coos" in addition to food and movies. When Sid is dressed up he behaves like Kojak on TV right down to the slightly vulgar tailoring. Wondered why I said no? I might have been able to let off some steam though I doubt it. After twenty years of studying them I am no longer able to read newspapers. Why? It's because they no longer reflect the world I perceive. I will have to go along with the way I see it even if wrong. And if they are right, it lacks interest. Broke up a fight between two stockboys in the alley slugging it out over a rather attractive filing girl. Whole shipping department watching and the girl crying rather too dramatically. Good punchers but I got an old-fashioned wristlock on one. Everyone thought they would be fired but I hadn't the heart for it. In high school I thought it grand to fight over a girl and these emotions swept over me. Perhaps I am becoming juvenile. Anyway the workers talked excitedly about the fight all afternoon. One said the boys were "pussy struck" which is an odd term from years ago, a dormitory kind of colloquialism as young men talk all sorts of filth and then when they're with girls they quote snippets of popular songs and become utterly dopey. Girl they were fighting over caught me looking at her, wet her lips and smiled. A stringy tart. Wangled lobster mousse recipe from Locke-Ober's to fix for Sonia on Sunday with asparagus vinaigrette and that Fetzer fumé blanc she likes. Know she's coming Saturday but spending evening with her young man. Must make her understand that it's fine if he stays with her on occasion or I won't see much of her. She's twenty. It's usual to ask where the years went but I know very well where they went and sloppy sentimentality never did anyone any good. Dad wrote to say because of his bad heart and cholesterol he had to give up herring, fried salt pork, cheese, bacon and eggs, fried pork and onion sandwiches—his favorite. This is a sad thing. On Thursday we would go to the basement together and clean the salt herring and pickle them for Saturday night supper. Mother did not like to reach into the barrel. She saw a snake in the root cellar and screamed. He can still eat lukefist. Certain older men at work are always telling moronic jokes which must mean something. Read a Knut Hamsun novel to see what Norwegians could do (not much). The book made me quite unhappy and reminded me of certain dreams of Laura: once when she returned from one of her movie parties that I left early and she was very drugged up on cocaine and wanted me to make love to her which I did for a long time. Once in front of the mirror but in the dream the man in the mirror wasn't me. A bit scatterbrained of late. For instance I looked up earth, fire, water, and air in the Brittanica. Also radio as I had quite forgotten the principles on which they work. Certain other disturbing things are: why am I continuing to work? My wife is gone who ironically never needed what I made and my daughter is going and my parents well cared for. I am no longer torn to pieces by the collapse of my life but I have no idea what should come next. Perhaps nothing. My mother always closed her letters by saying "you are in my prayers" but I've never put much stock in religion, believing that prayer is trying to make a special case for yourself.

CHAPTER 2

Nordstrom's summer with his daughter went splendidly, so happily in a bittersweet sense in fact that he thought that it might mean that he was going to die. He was breathing more deeply and took to laughing at odd times. He thought that one ought to die when things were going particularly well rather than badly, then the deathbed would be without the usual accumulation of terror that Nordstrom thought was anyway fraudulent. He fashioned himself without superstition or imagination, though mostly because people always told him he was without either. Laura was his chief and most convincing accuser. During the lengthy and expensive period when she visited a psychiatrist on a daily basis Nordstrom asked her what on earth did she find to talk about so extensively, adding that she must be making a lot of it up whole cloth. This had caused a great deal of anger wherein Nordstrom had been told that he didn't have enough imagination to have valid mental problems. This hurt a bit so he had been delighted years later when Laura's psychiatrist had been arrested for jacking off in public on Rodeo Drive. But then the psychiatrist had spent a year in Colorado getting his "head straight" and it was business as usual with his old clientele including Laura returning to have their griefs further exhumed.

Actually it was a matter of what is faddishly known as "communication": Nordstrom's nature was deeply private and there never was an occasion to express what he believed on certain matters. For his seventh birthday he had been given the twelve volume Book House, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller, who had assured her young readers that "the world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be happy as kings." Approaching age forty-three, it would still be difficult to convince him that a Norse girl didn't ride a polar bear on a long journey, or that Odin didn't exist on some rainy northern taiga, dressed in reindeer skins and warmed by a huge fire fed on human marrow with the music of the cries of the dying floating across a misty lake. Merlin was real and so was Arthur; in twelfth-century Japan there was a madman who painted pictures of mountains and rivers by dipping his hair in ink and whipping his head over the paper. Sometimes he painted with live chickens. Why wouldn't certain ghosts live at the bottoms of lakes and express themselves through the voice of a loon? In his eleventh year Nordstrom shot a crow and Henry, an Ojibway Indian who worked as a carpenter for Nordstrom's father when he wasn't drunk, wouldn't speak to him for months, after telling Nordstrom that any fool "knows that a crow is not a crow." By fall Henry had become pacified and that early winter for a Christmas present he built Nordstrom a small rowboat out of white pine. Late the next spring Nordstrom found a baby crow in the woods fallen from its nest and nursed it to health with earthworms. The crow learned to fly and he left his bedroom window open so the crow could visit when it wished. He asked his father if it was a boy or girl crow and his father said it didn't matter to the crow, just as it doesn't matter to a dog. Nordstrom pondered this mystery. He surprised and delighted Henry though when he appeared at a building site with a crow perched noisily on his shoulder. The crow would sit on the backseat of the rowboat as Nordstrom rowed on summer mornings, squawking at his curious brethren in the sky who would circle at a distance and sometimes the crow would join them. Typically Nordstrom named his crow "Crow." The bird disappeared late in the fall and returned for three springs in a row. Then he didn't return and Nordstrom dug a small grave, then paused before returning the earth to the empty hole. He always remembered how excited the crow had been when they had watched a watersnake swallow a small frog. For two days he imagined himself turning from solid flesh into liquid in the belly of a snake.

But perhaps it was this largely secret imagination that gave Nordstrom his self-possession, hence his success in business which only recently he had come to consider valueless. Businessmen who are so good at passing off bung-fodder as a necessity can scarcely be thought of as witless, or unimaginative, he thought. Laura had been raised in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago some three hundred miles south of Rhinelander, but really another part of the country as far as humor or imagination. Nordstrom would laugh at the cat sleeping on the diving board above the pool in the backyard. He also thought it extremely funny when show people took to wearing Indian jewelry and French denims; other objects of humor were traffic jams (even when he was trapped in them), homosexuality (something to be given up by fourteen), politics and the evening news, including the fact that a great number of people still didn't believe we had reached the moon. The French were truly funny, except the food was wonderful: Nordstrom's repertory of jokes included only one, and that was about two Frenchmen meeting on the street: First Frenchman: "My mother died this morning at ten o'clock." Second Frenchman: "At ten o'clock?" The general unpopularity of this subtle joke led Nordstrom to reflect on the nontransference of ethnic humor. Duck feet looked funny to some but to the Chinese they were a delicacy. When he and his father fished on summer evenings and were overtaken by a thunderstorm they would continue fishing in the rain because they hadn't wanted it to rain. This made them laugh as did ice fishing on a twenty-below day with a thirty-knot wind, where after interminable hours of cold his father would decide it was a "bit chilly." When he shot his first deer at thirteen, a doe, his father and uncles while cleaning the deer had plastered the bloody cunt to Nordstrom's forehead. It stuck there for a few moments then fell to his lap as he sat there mournfully on a snow-covered stump. They assured him it was a blooding ritual, then laughed for days at his gullibility.

Sonia's boyfriend was a bit too smart for Nordstrom's taste, very glib with a tendency to talk incessantly in paragraphs with subordinate clauses and divagations wandering off waiflike through history and the arts. As a Harvard boy he also owned the aura of fungoid self-congratulation that Nordstrom identified with Ivy League types. Back in Los Angeles he had noted that graduates of Yale and Dartmouth and so on had automatic purchase even though they were swine, fools or plain stupid as was often the case, looking as they did at the rest of the country with careless indulgence as if it were an imposition on their lives. But then the boy was very kind to Sonia, almost feminine with her and it was plain to see that a permanent bond was formed. Nordstrom had wondered about the young man's nervousness and Sonia had said that her lover had found Nordstrom a bit frightening at first. Nordstrom did have the peculiar habit of staring into anyone's eyes for a minute or so before forming a sentence and this was unnerving to employees, lovers, waiters, even acquaintances and superiors.

Despite this mutual anxiousness the summer went very well, especially with the arrival of August and Nordstrom's month of vacation when they moved to the house in Marblehead. The sea took over then and Nordstrom was incredibly pleased that he had had the sense to take this huge stone house on the water with its tangled hedge of sea-rose, the days of warm blustery winds and the harbor dotted with sailboats. There was a modest swimming pool, a tennis court in a state of mild decay. Best of all Nordstrom liked to take his morning coffee on a veranda and stare at the sea, leaving newspapers, magazines and business correspondence unopened in favor of the sea, watching the surface of the sea with the same intensity whether stormy or becalmed. The other truly fine feature was an antique cast-iron grill from an earlier time when people prepared feasts rather than meals. Nordstrom spent all the first morning horsing its bulk from the backyard near the kitchen door around to the front so that he could cook and watch the sea at the same time. Then he puttered across the harbor in an old Chris-Craft runabout to shop for dinner.

It was while cooking dinner that a strange feeling came over him that gradually forced a radical change in his life. It was an ache just above his heart between his breastbone and throat; at first it alarmed him and he placed a hand on his breast and stared out past the sea-rose to where the ocean buried itself in the haze of dusk. The sharpness of low tide mixed with the roasting meat and he looked down at the meat and sighed "Oh, fuck it." He was rather suddenly not much interested in past or future, or even his breaking heart that perhaps now felt the first itch of healing. But he didn't know that and cared less. The sigh seized his backbone, rippling up his vertebrae to his brain which felt delicately peeled, cold and clean. The feeling was so abruptly powerful that he decided not to examine it for fear that it would go away. He checked the temperature on the meat thermometer and went into the house to take the salad out of the refrigerator; he did not approve of cold salads. He put the small red new potatoes in water, ready to turn them on when he heard Sonia's car. He opened a magnum of Burgess zinfandel to check it out, then put his finger in a sauce dish to taste again the marinade he had swathed the leg of lamb in after he had boned it: a mixture of olive oil, rosemary, crushed garlic, Dijon mustard and a little soy. The pungency of the sauce crept up his sinuses and he turned at the scratching of a stray cat at the kitchen door. He prepared a bowl of lamb trimmings and set it out on the back porch for the cat, a frayed old torn with battered ears staring at him from beneath a flowering crab tree whose pink blossoms perfumed the backyard. A sharp gust of sea breeze loosened some petals and they fell on the unblinking cat. The cat approached slowly with three petals stuck to its fur and wolfed the lamb scraps with a low growl, then stretched and lay down thumping its tail and returning Nordstrom's stare. It seemed to him it was the first cat he had ever truly looked at in his life. They gazed at each other unblinking until tears formed to moisten his unblinking eyes. Then Sonia's car pulled into the driveway and the cat became a gray blur and slid through the porch railing, more reptilian than mammal.

The month fueled Nordstrom's departure from what he thought of as normal life. He awoke fairly early, took his coffee, then helped the maid who came with the house to tidy up from the night before. Sometimes the music from the night still drummed in his ears, tingled in his brain until he learned to recapture melodies as he began the day's shopping and cooking. Sonia was fluid enough to sense a change in her father's personality and did not question his behavior. Nordstrom had insisted that she and Phillip bring up all the houseguests they wanted from Cambridge because he felt like celebrating.

"What are we celebrating?" She laughed, then endured his stare, which seemed distant.

Nordstrom was thinking that with her tan Sonia looked more like her mother, that her hazel eyes were captious and a bit giddy. "I have no idea really. Why not? Maybe I know it's unlikely that there'll be another month like this. Also I want the excuse to cook for a lot of people, to be honest."

She walked up and kissed him on the forehead and laughed again. "I wish you wouldn't disappear every evening."

Nordstrom shrugged and watched the bright light in the room waver from a scudding cloud. She was the dearest creature on earth to him and still this didn't make him melancholy as it once did. "I like to sit and watch it get dark. Then when I go to bed I like to listen to the music through the floor."

Sonia looked away in embarrassment. "You ought to get a girl friend. I mean, you'd probably be happier."

"So strange in these modern times to have your daughter tell you that you need to get laid. I'm saving it for marriage."

"I didn't mean to be coarse. I didn't want you to think that Mother was the only woman in the world. You might even find something better, for Christ's sake."

Nordstrom rolled his eyes and Sonia stomped out of the room. There was a kind of half friendly bitchery between Sonia and her mother that he had found incomprehensible, as if they were trying to play a game with razors. He poured a dollop of bourbon and went to the window, abruptly turning away when he saw that two of Sonia's friends from college had taken off the tops of their bikinis. One of them, a rather plain girl all in all, had beautiful pear-shaped breasts that tilted up a bit and glistened with suntan lotion. Nordstrom felt a slight pulling low in his stomach that he was unable to blame on the whiskey. The girl had helped him with the dishes the night before and he had scarcely noticed her. In the past week or so, since the incident while basting the lamb, he had maintained with no particular effort the sensation of having just awakened from a lovely dream, but the difficulty was that certain things had become too utterly poignant to be borne up under. He would sit in the room in the dark listening to the music until it quit, sometimes not until near dawn. In between the records he heard the sea rising and falling against the breakwater. He found himself unable to read and without any interest in thinking. Thoughts, sensations and pictures passed through his mind but he let them float away. He wondered what a person blind from birth saw in his mind. He wondered about that sophomoric notion of what a man is, deprived of the input of the five senses. He wondered who was listening to the music from his bedroom, who was the listener and was startled. In sleeping the dreams of Laura had disappeared and he occasionally dreamt of women that didn't exist. How could that be? He would wonder in the morning. He rigged a setline down on the beach using a doorknob for a sinker and a chicken liver for bait, as he had done as a boy, but at dawn when he pulled in the line there was only a small dead shark tangled in a large clump of seaweed. He mourned his errant curiosity and buried the shark with the same reverence he had buried the soul of the crow thirty years before.

That night as he prepared dinner for a dozen absolutely stoned young people Sonia came into the kitchen and stared at him with her eyes flashing.

"You really pissed me off today. I wasn't trying to interfere in your life. You could at least talk to people. I keep telling them you're my father but they think you're the cook."

"There's nothing wrong with being a cook. But I'm going to take your advice and get a girl friend. A blond one with a huge ass that listens to country music."

Actually two of Phillip's friends had asked for turkey sandwiches one morning thinking Nordstrom was the cook. They had been embarrassed later and one, a short plumpish Sephardic Jew from New York, had helped Nordstrom with dinner. He was an habitue of the same restaurant in the Village where Nordstrom had eaten with Sonia and Phillip. The young man was a fine cook and while they were preparing the food (filet of sole Bercy aux champignons) Nordstrom asked him about the waitress that had caught his eye. It proved to be a fatal question.

"Oh my god just stay away. She's an absolute kike cunt, a dancer with those big dark Monet eyes. She'd put you in the blender. I mean my god every well-heeled fool in town comes around with flowers and she treats them like dog-shit. She was married to this schvartze coke dealer, you know, a spade killer, and she had an affair with this writer who got his teeth beaten loose. But of course I'll introduce you if you love the masochism bit. You don't look like the type." The young man had given off a melancholy laugh. "I like these dipshit English girls myself."

The night of Sonia's anger Nordstrom capitulated and sat at the head of the table. He didn't mind that the people he cooked for smoked marijuana as it seemed to sharpen their appetites. He had roasted some quail he had stuffed with green grapes, halved and soaked overnight in Calvados. They were eaten greedily which pleased Nordstrom and he talked at length with two Harvard MBA's about the energy crisis and the consequences of Middle Eastern politics on oil imports. The two young men were surprised that the cook had been to Jidda, and had helped to negotiate an OPEC deal. They left rather hesitantly for a disco in Rockport with the rest of the crowd. Sonia kissed him and patted his back on the way out of the door.

Nordstrom watched their taillights recede into the warm darkness and then fed the tomcat that had emerged from under the backporch. If no one else were around the cat would now enter the kitchen which tonight was hot and muggy with a rank low tide smell hanging in the air, a seaboard reminder of what a swamp in summer smells like. The cat ate the last single quail that Nordstrom had been thinking about having for breakfast but had decided the cat would enjoy more than he did. The cat ripped at the brown-roasted skin and even crunched down the bones. Nordstrom petted the animal until it went rigid and dashed for the kitchen door. It was the plain girl with pear breasts in a pale-blue caftan. She shrugged at Nordstrom as he let the cat out the screen door. She poured a glass of club soda and drank as if her life depended on it. Nordstrom didn't remember her at dinner.

"I got this perfectly goddamned sunburn today and felt sick as shit." She talked out of the side of her mouth as was the strange habit of her class. Nordstrom could think of nothing to say so he put on his white cook's apron and began the dishes. He had taken off his shirt while the cat ate and felt a bit naked, now that the girl was there.

"Hope you're having a nice time," he said lamely.

"Sure. Faboo, if I hadn't fried the hell out of my skin like a perfect nitwit." She paused and boldly appraised Nordstrom. "You're a perfect dear to do all this cooking. I mean Sonia's so lucky." She sat down at the kitchen table and took a bag of papers from her purse and rolled a large joint, lit it and inhaled deeply. "I'm going to Santa Barbara tomorrow to visit my mother, if anyone gets up early enough to run to Logan." She approached Nordstrom at the sink and put the joint between his lips, ignoring his shaking head. "This is pretty good shit, supposedly Hawaiian."

"I'll take you to the airport," he choked expelling the smoke.

They looked at each other closely for a moment and there was a glimmer of comprehension Nordstrom decided not to admit to himself. He looked down at his hands buried in the soapy water. She left the room and put on a record, then returned and helped him with the dishes. Above the music they could hear a thunderstorm approaching from the west. The air grew even more still and warm. He felt the sweat flatten his hair and trickle down his back as he listened to her chatter about a career in fashion. She absentmindedly traced a finger down the sweat on his arm and he felt an involuntary shudder. Then she drew her caftan over her head and tossed it in the corner.

"I don't know about you but I'm perfectly suffocating and my burn itches."

She wore very slight, pale-beige panties and bra. She was burned, though not too badly, on the top of her breasts and just above and below her panty line. He reached out and touched a nipple beneath the fabric with a wet forefinger. She turned around and raised her arms. "My back isn't as bad." He wiped his hands on the apron and pressed them to the small of her back. Then she backed toward him, stumbling a bit in clogged sandals. He looked down at his hands and her buttocks craning outward. She reached behind her touching his hands, then slipped down her panties to just above her knees. "Go ahead. I've been thinking of this for an hour."

Nordstrom went ahead, as it were. On completion he collapsed backward to the floor with his pants around his ankles and the damp apron forming a small tent around his member. She laughed and he laughed. She lit him a cigarette and he smoked it without getting off the floor. She stepped out of her panties and took off her bra. She took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator and handed it to Nordstrom with a corkscrew. They abandoned the dishes and took a dip in the pool with the lights off, watching the approaching thunderstorm above the lights of Marblehead. They made love again with him sitting beneath her on a wicker lawn chair. The rain drove them indoors and they sat naked on the couch feeling the air cool gradually and watching the lightning and thunder explode above the ocean. They smoked another joint and danced. They fell asleep on the couch and did not hear the laughing voices that turned out the lights and record player.

Another week and the summer was over. Nordstrom made a melancholy bouillabaisse for twenty and the next day everyone disappeared. Another week in Boston and Sonia returned to Sarah Lawrence and Nordstrom returned to work. In the evening he was palpably lonely and began dancing alone to the records left behind and with the same bittersweet ache in his chest. In a little more than another month, in the middle of October, late one night he received a call from his mother that said "your father is dead."

Nordstrom took the first available plane out of Logan for O'Hare at dawn. He smiled remembering a previous dawn when he had taken the girl to the airport and had run into an old business associate from Los Angeles. He had been startled when the man had said "sorry about your divorce" and when Nordstrom had introduced the girl as one of his daughter's school chums it was plain that the man thought otherwise. But the meeting had made him feel buoyant driving against the traffic back to Marblehead; not only had he made love rather wonderfully, the word and idea of divorce no longer knotted his stomach or threw him into a fretful or melancholy state.

There was a five-hour wait at Milwaukee for a North Central for Rhinelander so he chartered an idle Lear Jet, having enjoyed the plane when he was in the oil business as the closest domestic approximation to the thrill of a jet fighter. The fact of his father's death had not penetrated much beyond his intellect and in a difficult, blustery landing he thought he might join him. The copilot had radioed ahead and his mother and a cousin, a sallow barber with a truly dirty mind, were waiting there to meet him. There were tearful embraces, then the barber could not help himself and quipped "it must be nice" as he eyed the Lear. Nordstrom said nothing. In previous visits when he had tried to conceal his success all of his old acquaintances had been terribly disappointed. Those who had stayed home didn't want Nordstrom to be one of them—he was the stuff of their economic fantasies and any gesture to the contrary wasn't appreciated. Walking to the car with his mother in a cold, light rain he remembered when his parents had come to Los Angeles for a visit. They considered Nordstrom's home to be somewhat of a "mansion" as they called it, and on the next to the last day his mother had shyly asked him to see where Cary Grant lived. He drove her over a few blocks and pointed out an imposing home, having no knowledge or interest in the movie colony. He liked movies and novels, but had no curiosity about celebrities, actors, actresses or writers. His father had always wanted him to be a forest ranger and that still seemed to Nordstrom a noble pursuit. When his father was in Los Angeles he fished off the piers or took a headboat out of Santa Monica. Then his father would eat a great quantity of fried sand dabs just short of serious indigestion and talk about his first visit to Los Angeles in 1930. He had come from a poor family of Norwegian immigrants living in Chicago and when the Depression hit he spent four years as a young hobo drifting all over the troubled country. After some brief civilities at the wake at his mother's house, jammed with friends and relatives, Nordstrom went to the funeral home and saw death itself. He stood at the open casket, the other visitors keeping distant to let the only son express his grief. He kissed his father's cool forehead and tears flushed out of him and his body shook. He was convulsed with loss and the unthinkable fact of death. He was a boy again and it was beyond his comprehension and he whispered "Daddy" over and over until there were no more tears left in his body and he walked out of the funeral home and down the street to the edge of town where he walked down past a lake rimmed with cottages to a log road that led into the forest. He walked up this log road for a mile or so until finally the sun came through the disappearing clouds and he took off his trench coat. Now it was suddenly Indian summer in the forest and the hardwoods were a brilliant deep yellow and red, shifting away in the haze to umbrous hills with splotches of white birch and green pine. He walked until his feet became sore and then he spread his trench coat on a stump and sat on it. He thought about his father, even felt envy for those Depression days when he had traversed the country to "look things over." Starting from nothing, everything was fine to his father beyond a subsistence level. He made money because he was competent, had wit and could not help making money. It was simply another world, Nordstrom thought. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day. He seemed to see time shimmering and moving up above him and through the leaves and down around his feet and through his middle. Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else. There was no still point. For an instant he floated above himself and smiled at the immaculately tailored man sitting on the stump and in a sunny glade back in the forest. He got up and pressed against a poplar sapling swinging back and forth to a harmony he didn't understand. He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn't mind because he knew he had never been found.

He walked toward the lowering sun knowing that in October it was toward the southwest. He came to a pond he didn't recognize and flushed a raft of blue-winged teal. He walked around the pond through a blackberry thicket, snagging his suit a number of times. He walked up a small creek muddying himself to his knees in a seep until he reached higher ground where he dropped his trench coat and climbed slowly up a large white pine tree to get a vantage point. His hands were blackened and sticky from the resin that exuded from the tree but he could see for a dozen miles: he could see the white steeple of the Lutheran church where his father's funeral service would be held in two days, he could see a motorboat crossing a lake, a silo without a barn—the barn had burned when he was a senior in high school. He curled his arm around a limb for safety and lit a cigarette, hearing the shotgun blast of a partridge hunter far in the distance. A crow flew by and was startled by his presence, squawking away at a greater speed to warn others. There's a man up in a tree in a blue suit. Nordstrom looked down at his suit and was amused at how he had ruined it. He took out his gold pocket watch and aimed the 9 at the steeple knowing there was a section of road near the 12 if he needed to climb another tree for a sighting. His father liked to climb trees and was always creating deliberately lame excuses for doing so. Up in the tree for the first time in twenty-five years, Nordstrom thought it was part of his father's penchant for "looking things over." When Sonia was a little girl and they came to Wisconsin for a summer vacation she had brought along a diving mask. His father didn't care much for swimming and hadn't noticed diving masks before but he took to puttering around the lake with Sonia and diving overboard in his favorite fishing spots. At dinner he would say he saw a bluegill "as big as a goddamned frying pan" or a pike or largemouth bass "as long as your goddamned arm."

Nordstrom finally emerged from the woods just before dark near a small Indian reservation community outside of town. He walked down a gravel road toward a tavern thinking how his father would be amused at his ruined four-hundred-dollar suit not to speak of his Florsheim shoes now scarred and mud-caked. The last mile or so he had been concentrating on suits and the government and decided he no longer much believed in either. Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits. He stopped in the parking lot of the tavern favored by Indians and regarded the dirty old jalopies and beaten pickups. Perhaps he should quit his job he thought, give all his money to his daughter and some to his mother whose small annuity was probably worthless in light of inflation. Then he cautioned himself for his wild thoughts, thinking that somehow they might be connected to death, to becoming lost and climbing a tree after a tiring flight and not having eaten all day. The bar smelled of piss and sweat and Nordstrom blinked to focus on the drinkers. He heard his name called out. It was Henry who was appreciably into a binge. Nordstrom stood next to him wondering whether he should embrace the old man whose head seemed to nod with the jukebox and booze.

"You better call home. They're all looking for you."

"Henry, I want you to be a pallbearer," Nordstrom said, then ordered a drink for Henry, a bourbon and beer for himself. Henry downed his in a gulp and stared intently at Nordstrom.

"There isn't any fucking way I'm going into that church. I worked all day yesterday with your dad and he didn't look too good. So we had a few drinks. And he says, 'Henry I'm not feeling too good and I think my heart is going.' So I took him home and your mother called the doctor and then we went over to the hospital because he wouldn't ride in an ambulance. So they said it was bad and he could hardly breathe up in the room and they brought oxygen but he said he didn't want to die in an oxygen tent. He just lay there staring straight ahead with me and your mother on each side. Around about midnight the doctor said there is no hope. To call you. We went back in and he held our hands. He made your mother get up in bed beside him to be close as he went. He had ahold of my hand hard, so I stayed. He talked a little about fishing. I told him I would go along with him into death as far as I could but I would have to turn back. He said for me to tell you good luck and to say he loved you and to give you a kiss good-bye."

Henry stood then and gave Nordstrom a hug and kissed him on the cheek because he was short and could not reach Nordstrom's forehead. They had another drink in silence, then Henry led him out the door to his pickup.

A few days later Nordstrom flew back to New York with Sonia, who had come for the funeral, and then took the shuttle up to Boston. Laura had cabled her regrets from Mexico, saying she would have come but word only reached her on the day of the funeral. Nordstrom did not doubt it as Laura had loved his father and there had always been a playfulness and banter in their contacts that Nordstrom never quite comprehended. She had even stopped by for a visit in the past summer on her way through the Midwest. Laura had once said she found his father "sexy," a statement that had horrified him at the time. Laura had had the advantage of knowing that people died whereas even the most ordinary events, and death is the most ordinary of all, took Nordstrom by surprise.

CHAPTER 3

Now we have arrived where we began and are in continuous time, a wonderful illusion for those addicted to notions of yesterday, right now and tomorrow. Every evening after a long walk and light dinner Nordstrom dances alone, surely an absurd picture of a man of forty-three years, a father, formerly a husband, magna cum laude University of Wisconsin 1958, at thirty-five vice-president of finance for Standard Oil of California, and so on, as if such simpleminded clues were effective in tracking our mammal. But they are all discarded habits. Nordstrom means "north-storm" but it's not much more helpful than "crow." One learns little from a telephone book. It's winter in Boston, our St. Petersburg, and the man dances on, a bit clumsily to be sure, and with a witless tenacity. Sometimes he just jumps straight up and down. One night he went with the delicatessen owner to see a Celtics-Denver Nuggets' game to witness the greatest jumper of all, David Thompson. Thompson floated through the air in a three-sixty, and dunked the ball backward over his head and didn't even smile. The crowd rose to its feet, was hushed a moment, then exploded over this act that was not so much a defiance of gravity as a transcendence of what we have experienced of gravity. Sonia came up for the weekend and he took her and Phillip to the ballet to see Baryshnikov. Nordstrom wore a Cardin suit that Laura had selected for him years before but he had never worn out of embarrassment. In the lobby at intermission many lovely and not so lovely women smiled at him thinking Nordstrom must be someone they should know. They had a late celebratory dinner because Phillip had won a fellowship to spend the coming year in Florence studying at the Uffizi. Sonia would leave with him in June after her graduation. Phillip was prattling on about death at dinner. His own father had died when Phillip was fourteen and he had begun staying up very late, smoking cigarettes and wearing sloppy clothes. Lately he had read a certain French writer who talked about the "terrible freedom" that comes when the father dies. There is no one left on earth to judge. Sonia shushed him, thinking the conversation was insensitive to her father. Nordstrom said her concern was nonsense and though he found the whole notion appalling he guessed that it was probably true. He had been lucky with his own father who was all in favor of Nordstrom following his heart's affections, though it seemed odd that only recently had his son an inkling of how to go about it.

Late that night Nordstrom found himself sleepless because he hadn't had his two hours of dancing. He had enjoyed the ballet but he was losing what little of the spectator was left in him: he was becoming an amateur in the true sense—one who loved the doing, and had the beginner's openness about life that had been lost for transparent reasons since his childhood. Now in the middle of energetic insomnia he knew that he couldn't turn on the stereo at three A.M. because Sonia and Phillip were sleeping. He got up and tiptoed into the den in his pajama bottoms and danced an hour without music, hearing only a clock ticking and the shuffle of his bare feet on the carpet.

Feb. 17, 78: Have been planning this long trip for after I resign to include both S. America and Africa. Startling how close Rio is to Dakar. Desk covered with atlases, maps from National Geographic, guidebooks for a month now, but the energy is fast disappearing. Why should I want to know the strange when I am ignorant of the familiar. Really noticed my ankle the other morning for the first time in years. I like the crow on the cover of The Grateful Dead album but it is very difficult music to dance to. I bought a parka and snowmobile boots from a sporting goods store on Boylston and have been walking a great deal after work. The snow is wonderful this year despite the occasional near paralysis of the city. Between five and eight is the best time to walk. First the electric urge for people to get home from work, then the dinner silence and then the people going out for the evening. Have spent a great deal of time helping people get unstuck from their parking places. Wisconsin makes one an expert on snow and getting unstuck. Old man and wife buried in their Chrysler which I shoveled out as he was gasping, then rocked the car until it came free. He gave me a five-dollar bill refusing to take it back. He said it was for "a hot supper and a few drinks." Gave it to a bum a few blocks farther on. Bought a dozen Hawaiian shirts off the rack at Jordan Marsh for the trip I perhaps have lost interest in though I told the travel agent to go ahead. Always thought them in bad taste but now I like the silken feeling, strange colors though I haven't worn one out of the apartment not finding an occasion to do so. Have come to think in my cooking of the new cuisine minceur as narcissistic and partly silly though a few good ideas. People could eat what they chose if they did not ignore pushing their bodies a bit. Since dancing my belt has gone down two notches. Closely studied a flounder I filleted so as to get further sense of what I was eating. Fragile pearl-colored bones, spine in which through a filament of paste, the fish's body receives instruction from its tiny brain. Swim there and there and there. Wonder what he had seen in his watery life. Made a small court bouillon so as not to waste this carcass which had assumed outsize importance by the time I finished studying it. Then I cooked a handful of vermicelli in the stock and had it for a snack after dancing. Had a streak of tripe this week as I bought too much by the butcher's mistake: tripe Milanese, menudo—Mexican tripe stew—then the justly famed tripe à la mode de Caen. Old man in shipping department has cancer of liver so have put through an authorization for a bonus as he wants to die in his birthplace in Galway, Ireland, where his mother still lives. My own mother wrote to say she is getting along fine and her cousin, also widowed, is moving in. She said she had a fine letter from Laura. Got a hard-on in a taxi thinking about Laura's butt, more picturing it than thinking. She had small breasts but was justly vain about her legs and butt. How clearly I remember her Debussy dance so many years ago in the hot gymnasium. It takes my breath away now but there is no bitterness. I have been having some intuitions about sex though ill formed as a whole. For instance I saw the movie Pretty Baby and though the girl is a superb beauty it was her mother that owned sexual appeal. It is the life unlived that makes men want so young a girl. To be twelve and thirteen, be careless and silly, with floppy grace. The world at face is so frightening no wonder. She becomes her mother in a night. I longed so often for that girl at the kitchen sink in Marblehead but it is the nature of such things not to return. For instance Ms. Dietrich as she chooses to be called is married to a city planner, childless, in her mid-thirties and my executive secretary though she could easily run the company. Last Thursday we did a twelve-hour day to prepare for audit, the last three hours at the apartment after I prepared a light dinner. It was hard and tedious work and afterward we drank a bottle of Korbel champagne to ease our sore necks and eyes. I have known this woman closely for three years but was startled by the effect of the wine on her. She wept and said she was crying for me because Jews had taken both my wife and daughter. So shocking it was funny and I said now, now Ms. Dietrich that's utter nonsense. She embraced me and then I knew that she wanted to tumble, and though she is a little chubby to be my type, I thought to myself why not. So we carried on at some length and once when we were up and down on each other I "awoke" with a start when I was looking plainly at her bottom and I said to myself "this is reality." The sensation lasted acutely for several days. And like the feeling when I was roasting the lamb last summer I decided not to doubt it as it seems to me that doubt is often an example of self-pity, a kind of whining about existence. Poor pitiful me, and that rot. Henry did not doubt that he could help my father into death, open the gate for him and shake his hand as he entered nothingness or whatever on earth eternity is. I don't read books on mystical matters as, like Lutherans, special powers are ascribed. My dealings in Tokyo with Orientals do not lead me to think they are any different from us. Henry is one Indian among a hundred sorry ones I have known. He gave me a turtle claw. It was wonderfully funny at the office when Ms. Dietrich pretended nothing had happened, all rather Germanic. Intimacies can be frightening in the light of day. As on the walk after I was lost and then found the gravel road, I'd been thinking solidly of giving up money and power. I would rather make an omelette. When I was young and had to hoe the garden or dig a garbage hole I would resent it and then get lost in doing these things for hours. Ms. Dietrich is so self-conscious because she is trying to be Ms. Dietrich every minute. Like Phillip trying to be unique and doing so by this stream of talk as if he would vanish if he stopped talking. How strange we all are. One minute we're laboring over the accounts and the next moment we're chewing on each other's bodies like dogs. Or bears. Henry and Father once saw two bears make love across a lake in Canada through binoculars. Read the other day that whales commit homosexual acts.

Spring proved to be obnoxiously difficult for Nordstrom. It was incredibly complicated for him to resign his job. The owners of the company were a family of New Hampshire aristocrats, crankish Yankees who plainly didn't want to be abandoned by their managerial wunderkind. They offered everything and when their largess was refused they grew resentful. It was even more difficult and confusing to give away the money. Sonia didn't want it and his mother was hysterical. The E.F. Hutton man insisted he see a psychiatrist and Nordstrom readily agreed out of curiosity and his understanding that, to others, he was committing an outrageous act. His mother's tearful attitude was that he had worked so hard all his life for the money. The broker went to New York to see Sonia, hoping that she could make her father behave sensibly. Sonia came to Boston and they had lunch with the broker whom Nordstrom actually had a great deal of respect for. But Nordstrom was diffident and ended up convincing them later that afternoon by giving twenty-five grand to the National Audubon Society though he had no special fascination for birds. He liked to watch shorebirds by the hour on weekends near Ipswich but wasn't curious about the names given them. When he saw a particular species the second time he would remember the first time he saw it. That saved him from having to carry around a birdbook.

And not that the concern for Nordstrom by others was unfounded. How were they, given their own natures, to know that Nordstrom wasn't another dipshit cracking utterly under all those pressures, known and unrecognized, that make up our lives? Sonia, with the cynicism of youth, thought it was too late for her father to change. Laura, who had been contacted, had refused to interfere, thinking the whole problem to be at the same time silly and charming, believing as did the broker all of the vulgar lingo attached to notions of mid-life change and so on, language as blasphemous to life as the central fact of the government in everyone's existence. His mother simply believed, within the framework of Protestant thrift, that people should hold on to their money for a rainy day. She wrote Nordstrom about how a prominent citizen of Rhinelander had come down with cancer and some seventy thousand dollars had been spent on the medical community in a hopeless effort to save his life. Ms. Dietrich's concerns were a bit more down to earth, centering on her hopes for another love-making session before Nordstrom cleared out. Her own husband was only nominally interested in sex and fell asleep after ejaculation whereas Nordstrom was a princely dallier who had obviously been well trained by his wife.

On the morning of his psychiatric appointment Nordstrom walked from Brookline to Cambridge. The fact of the matter was that in his arduous study of reality he had become a trifle goofy. He understood this and decided to go with it, as they say. It was a fine morning in early May and as he crossed Commonwealth he paused on the traffic island to study a jet liner passing above him on an approach to Logan. The silver plane looked lovely against the deep blue sky. He paused in Allston and ate an Italian sausage sand wich with green peppers and onions for breakfast. It was delicious with a cold beer and he exchanged pidgin Italian with the counterman who was trying to decide what number to pick for a dollar bet. As Nordstrom walked on he decided again that nothing was like anything else. One quantity could never technically equal another. No two apples on earth were alike, neither were the two cars at the stoplight, or any two of the three or so billion people on earth. He laughed aloud at the philosophicalnaiveté of these thoughts but that did not diminish their intensity. Neither were dogs, days, hours and moments ever the same. Finally, he was not the same as yesterday, and was at least infinitesimally different from a moment ago. When he reached the bridge near the business school he paused to stare down at the water dirtied by effluents and a heavy rain the day before. It was the Charles River and Nordstrom had always thought it lacked the charm of the icy clear rivers of northern Wisconsin, though history buffs were quick to assure everyone that the Charles owned a great deal of history. Today Nordstrom had no opinions about the river. He just looked at it for a while. Of late he had become especially tired of pointless opinions and was trying to get rid of them. He would catch himself thinking as everyone does: too hot, too cold, too green, too fat, too spicy, ugly building, old slippers, loud music, homely woman, fat man. Not, he thought, that one couldn't discriminate but it had grown boring to get in a dither over rehearsing opinions about everything. To the degree that he had gotten rid of this propensity he felt a bit lighter and more fluid. The trouble was that life, the world around him, had begun to seem more fragile, almost evanescent. For instance, he looked at the river so long he forgot what it was. An old lady pushing a shopping cart paused next to him and looked over the rail to see what Nordstrom was looking at: he said "river," coming to what we think is our senses, and she continued on, a little alarmed.

Nordstrom walked downstream along the embankment and sat down on the grass on the far side of the Harvard boathouse. There was an old man with a gray beard sitting on a bench with his trousers rolled to his knees, basking his shins in the sun. The old man was staring at a young woman in a sleeveless blouse, sandals and a loose green skirt, who had her back turned to the old man and Nordstrom, and was rolling a softball back and forth with her infant son. When she bent over to pick up the ball the breeze from the west would billow under the skirt and the old man stared at the back of her smooth thighs. The old man did not mind that Nordstrom had caught him at his voyeurism, and Nordstrom himself only felt lucky at this noontime vision. After a little while the woman and her son scampered across Memorial Drive and were gone forever. Nordstrom felt more aroused generally than sexually, though there was that too, but added was the feeling of good food, good wine or another perhaps stranger feeling, that of letting a beautiful trout go after you had caught it. He was amused at the easy sentimentality the woman's thighs had brought over him.

The hour with the psychiatrist went rather easily, with none of the raw moments he expected. The man privately thought of Nordstrom as somewhat of a religious hysteric without a religion who did not seem in the least harmful to himself or others. The psychiatrist was a Jungian and not at all cynical about what he recognized as a pilgrimage away from an unsatisfactory life. He questioned Nordstrom on the possibility that he might be burdening his mother and daughter by giving them the money. Nordstrom wasn't particularly distressed by the question; he tended to be clinical about ironies, not forgetting their comedy and forgiving the often heartless questions they raised. The psychiatrist followed Nordstrom's gaze out the window to a fully leafed maple that was losing the final remnant of early May's pastel green. This hour's patient had a stolidity that reminded him of the commercial fishermen near his summer home up in Maine. He had put no stock in the broker's call—he treated the man's wife and considered him a cruel nitwit behind the patina of Hingham manners. For some unanswerable reason the Boston area seemed the capital of exotic neuroses and Nordstrom's problem had a refreshing tang of the ordinary.

"What are your immediate thoughts?" the doctor asked, taken by the intensity of Nordstrom's gaze out the window.

"Robin Hood. That maple reminded me of Robin Hood. When I was twelve a friend and I built a tree hut in a maple and played Robin Hood. Then my friend quit the game in favor of throwing a baseball against a barn in hopes of becoming Hal Newhouser. I was hurt because we had made cuts in our arms and become blood brothers. So I moved the hut so no one would know where it was but my father caught me hauling lumber and told me to build in a beech, not a maple, because lightning never strikes a beech for some reason. But I said that a beech doesn't have enough foliage to hide anything. My dad said then you'll have to take your chances and that when he was young he always wanted to build a hut at the bottom of a lake so he could look out the window and see fish."

"Do you still enjoy fantasies about being Robin Hood?" Nordstrom had made a long pause and the psychiatrist wanted to continue this interesting train of thought.

"Oh god no. I don't think about being anyone. I don't have that much imagination. Young boys admire outlaws because they don't have to do anything except what they want to. Outlaws pull a job and then just sit around at a hideout cleaning weapons, you know? Every day they simply do what they choose and make a good living at it, at least that's the childhood notion. Outlaws think the law is full of shit which is not an unpopular suspicion. But to be honest I thought today of Robin Hood's girl friend, Marian or Miriam? Up in the hut I had two photos, one of a woman's front and one of her back. That's what we used to call it, front and back. I paid three dollars for these pictures as a nude was hard to find and three dollars was a lot of money. This woman I saw bending over down by the river reminded me of Marian or Miriam because she wore a green skirt. I used to be a little amazed in my hut knowing that Marian or Miriam had a front and back by natural law and very probably Robin Hood had taken advantage of the fact."

"Did you have a fantasy about the woman by the river?"

"No, not really. Again I'm not too imaginative and then I like to avoid fantasies so that it's more of a surprise when it happens. Sometimes it's a little difficult when you see a lady as lovely as today. Maybe it's a simpleminded oddity of mine. I noticed the other day that if I forget to wind my watch I am always interested in the exact time the watch stops. I remember the year when I stopped finding pennies in my pocket that were older than myself. I was thirty-three. I feel a little silly taking up your time, though I'm paying for it. To be frank, I became tired of this money thing when my wife left me. I started to look at it coldly. I loved her terribly and then it all disappeared, especially for her and not so much for me. I thought my ambition ruined us though hers helped in the ruin. It's such an ordinary story. I didn't so much lose faith in it all as I totally lost interest."

"What are you interested in now?" The psychiatrist interrupted another of Nordstrom's long pauses. "Oh Jesus I don't know. My dad who died in October always said he liked to look things over. Maybe that's what I want to do. I might take a long trip. I sort of came to life again last July and it's been pleasant. Most days I'm quite excited about living for no particular reason. I've taken to cooking rather elaborately."

Nordstrom stared at the psychiatrist for a full minute and smiled. "In the evening I dance alone, most often for two hours. Sometimes I just jump around, you know?"

May floated along easily. Nordstrom's replacement arrived from Chicago. There was a modest dinner honoring his departure with many in management finding reasons not to attend. There was a fine set of luggage for Nordstrom. A tearful Ms. Dietrich got drunk and had to be sent home in a cab, her plans for the evening awry and the concealed lingerie bought for nought. Nordstrom ended up in Dorchester after a tour of honky-tonks and played poker until dawn with a group of men from the shipping department. He made the long walk home at daylight, a dim and misty morning with the Atlantic palpable in the air, the breeze causing only the slightest tremor in the leaves. He felt a nagging compassion in quasi-dangerous Roxbury for an old black man lying in a pool of bloody vomit watched by sparrows. A block later it was a diseased tree that upset him, trying to remember in puzzlement why Jesus killed the fig tree. When you got past the surface civilities of even a state religion you weren't far from the tom-toms. The long gray empty street was a different sort of river. He could whistle and make his own music, despite the flavor of gin in his sinuses. An old dog followed him for a block and he paused to allow it to sniff his pant leg.

He reached his apartment in two hours, took a shower and made a cheese omelette which he washed down with a slug of white wine. He went to bed but couldn't sleep. He made a pot of coffee and leafed through his diary with disinterest. "Saw pretty girl at Crane's Neck Beach. She had extraordinarily large feet. She will no doubt spend the summer burying them in sand out of view. The cruelty of genes. That classmate with the huge dick who was the secret envy of all in the locker room after gym class was teased to a shamefaced idiot. Now a bachelor driving county snowplow and gravel truck nicknamed Dork." Nordstrom paced the apartment and saw the girl across the courtyard stretching in her shorty pajamas. He got a hard-on that more closely resembled a toothache than something pleasant. He regretted that he found self-abuse so unsatisfactory. He leaned out the window and breathed deeply, his cock nudging the sill unpleasantly. She smiled and waved. He waved back, his heart thumping. She stretched and retreated into the darkness of her apartment. He sighed and went back to the kitchen and turned on the radio. An unnamed man sang "Don't Say Mariana Unless You Mean It," and Nordstrom longed for the Caribbean though he'd never been there. Joe Carioca or something. He'd rent a small apartment, drink rum and cook seafood. The sun would be hot, the water blue. Despairing of sleep he pulled a bottle of Montgomery Calvados from the cupboard and began to write.

May 78: Holy Christ I can't sleep and it's nine in the morning. Drank more than I usually do in a week or so but not sedated. It's because I'm usually awake now and I don't like these old man's unchangeable habits. I used the same shaving lotion for twenty years. Walked from Dorchester in a trance. Old drunk Negro grieved me, made throat well with tears. Wrote Henry a note asking him to please accept Dad's fishing tackle and deer rifle. Got a picture postcard back that said "thanks Henry" and that was all. Asked Mother to have him looked after if he takes ill. Hard drinkers go fast sometimes. Dad said that once to Henry out on the lake and Henry said nobody is born and nobody ever dies. Dad said, "Henry, you are full of shit to the sideburns," and we all laughed. I have not forgotten the idea that he might have been serious. Read in The New Yorker how this man walked thirty-five days into the Himalayas facing numerous perils to see a snow leopard and never saw one. He saw many tracks and spoor, though. Saw a bobcat once from the tree hut. Also a badger snorting along. The bobcat floated. I made a noise and he did a three-sixty like Thompson and vanished. Bobcats are always ready. Called my summer friend the Sephard to arrange graduation dinner party for Sonia. He suggested the Village restaurant where I saw that girl. But he said she was back to dancing and no longer worked there but should he invite her as a lark to thicken the stew of the evening? I said of course and sent a check leaving the menu to his good taste. Thinking of her now puts heat into my stomach. Felt like I'd levitated when the money was gone but now the feeling is gone and there's no sensation but a slight lightness. Are we truly allowed to start over? We'll see, as Dad used to say. I'm so hopelessly slow to change. All those years with Laura and the gradual deadness and then three years of true deadness. Then the lucky break which I am not interested in comprehending for fear still that it might disappear. I have just lit some dope Sonia left me, like an antique hippie, in hopes it will rest my brain. She thinks it's good for me though I don't do it more than once a month. Can't ever remember wanting a woman so much. Deranged by fatigue. They are the best thing there is for better or worse. My heart aches. It would be good even now to have that older black woman in the Green Bay whorehouse on that obligatory trip in high school. I hugged her and wanted to smooch which she thought was funny. Girl in green dress on river bank was heartless. Now I am what they call stoned. The apartment is almost packed. The storage people are coming. On Tuesday after Decoration Day now called Memorial Day for reasons I forgot. Decorating graves on a warm day. Now an image of Laura again. Almost can smell her. That summer in pine board cabin by a creek in Montana with Sonia playing in the yard. The creek was loud but soothing. She was making coffee, wearing only her underpants. She tied up her hair and washed the sleep away at the sink. She stretched. Sunlight from the window on the back of her legs.

CHAPTER 4

The world does not suffer fools gladly, thought Nordstrom at four in the morning in a corner suite seven stories up in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. He sipped bourbon with not too much relish. He was half waiting for the phone though unwilling to take the initiative himself. There was no getting a jump on reality. He had imagined the day otherwise, which is okay if you're by yourself and in control. You only approach total control in the toilet, Nordstrom thought and laughed. Outside the toilet there were bound to be surprises and not all of them pleasant. Some of them left a vacuum in the stomach as if one were falling off earth backward. Something that will inevitably happen anyway. Now he wanted Laura to call but knew she wouldn't. And he wouldn't call her. Sonia and Phillip and Laura had just dropped him off in a cab. There was an abyss he had almost forgotten between what his heart wished would happen and what would probably occur in the hours that came toward him before sleep.

The first surprise was seeing Laura at all. No one had told him but then he hadn't bothered to inquire. There she was sitting beside him, having flown in from Paris. He hadn't seen her for nearly four years. During the studied banality of the ceremony and the reception afterward, Nordstrom thought that a whole world was occurring behind your back and it was best to be on your toes. She looked very good though he felt it only as a surface impression rather than in his stomach. When graduation was over they took a cab down from Yonkers to the Pierre where Phillip and Sonia were staying with Laura before they would all leave the next day. They talked and then Nordstrom made a bad move caused by his inherent sentimentality. Safely pinned in the pocket of a linen sport coat was fifteen thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. It was for the BMW he had promised Sonia seven years ago in their Los Angeles den. He had made inquiries and it was recommended she fly up from Florence (Phillip already pronounced it Fee-renz-ee) and buy the car in Munich. The gesture brought the room to a halt and he felt very clumsy and old-fashioned, say like Sid, the owner of the delicatessen to whom he had bequeathed his whole wardrobe in a touching moment. He wanted to travel light. They all went at him at once and he felt insufferably gauche: Phillip said an expensive car might provoke violence given the troubled state of Italian politics. Laura said no one cares about cars. Sonia said he had already given everything away and they wouldn't need a car in Florence. Nordstrom retreated to the bathroom and felt no control. He didn't feel as hurt as he felt misplaced with what remained of his sense of family. Sonia and Laura embraced him when he came out of the toilet and there was a sudden shockingly sexual urge toward both of them. They would disappear tomorrow and it was the lust brought on by death. Phillip broke the strange mood by snapping a photo of the "charming" family.

A further surprise came at the restaurant. The waitress-dancer he had so looked forward to meeting had a sort of feral coldness about her when they met, and now, seated at the far end of the table between the Sephard and Laura, she regarded the table with an unmistakable hauteur though she couldn't have been much older than the graduates and their dates. She was plainly a woman of the world with Levantine features tending toward thinness, and whatever warmth she might have was well concealed. Nordstrom was pleased with the meal (a galantine of duck, mussels steamed in white wine, striped bass baked with fennel, leg of lamb that had been boned and butterflied then stuffed) but the crowd was giddy and drinking too much to concentrate on food. They all had plans. They were excited to a degree almost equal to Nordstrom's excitement about having no plans. The raw point of the evening was that everyone, through the graces of Phillip's mouth, knew that Nordstrom had given away all of his money and was going on a long trip. In fact, he thought, they had a certain advantage over his future as he wasn't at all sure about the trip—departure day three days hence —though the sheaf of tickets was back in a leather folder at the hotel. But it was the fact of his giving the money away that made him, in their eyes, a monkish wild man off on a pilgrimage. He was appalled. He knew most of them from last summer in Marblehead but he noted that he had become radically changed in their eyes. The girl next to him assumed he was going to India and expressed disappointment at his itinerary. He had thought of them previously as au courant and rather far to the fashionable Left but now they seemed to stand decidedly more than himself as smack-dab in the middle. He remembered how so few of the sixties' radicals did anything so rash—say not pay their taxes—as to actually end up in jail for their beliefs. It was a hoax in that most of them seemed to own boutiques now. There was something amusing here that couldn't quite be traced. Everyone is just fucking around as usual, he thought. If I were home, which no longer exists, I'd be dancing now. He began to get an inkling that the point was to be dancing in your brain all of the time when his daughter who was seated next to him sensed his bleakness, squeezed his hand and kissed him on the ear, saying please come visit. He felt the intensity of her concern and nodded yes.

The evening wore itself garishly thin. He noted that Laura and the waitress-dancer—Sarah by name—were making frequent trips to the toilet, he guessed for snorting cocaine. A number of couples left for a disco and the party closed in together but still lacked the ease and camaraderie of wine. They were in an anteroom and the Sephard had the waiter close a partition. Phillip lit a joint and passed it. Another couple left and now there was only Laura, Sarah, the Sephard, Phillip, Sonia, the close friend of Sonia who wanted desperately for Nordstrom to go to Katmandu, and Nordstrom. The party warmed as the Sephard told witty stories, so deft that Nordstrom laughed deeply and forgot himself. He saw Laura's eyes motion to him and then over her shoulder to the rest rooms.

Nordstrom made his way to the rest room and stood mugging in the mirror for no reason. There was naturally a toilet in there which meant he was in control again. If one sat on the stool, he thought, that made one the king of a dubious country about six-by-eight feet, but only if you could lock the door and in this case you couldn't. Even the lock on the stall was broken. It might be better to give up the idea of kingship before it went awry. The mirror revealed a man much stronger than the man felt. He knew it didn't matter if the image was himself or not. Jo-Jo the Dogface Boy, Marvin, Farley Cudd—any name would do. The dog was there at suppertime without being called. Anyone knew that when you had to be called it was usually for something unpleasant. Before they cut a tree down the timber cruiser made a mark on the tree for the lackeys with chain saws to follow, and the mark had to be construed as the tree's name. Nordstrom was grinning at the idea of names when Laura and Sarah entered. O these days. Women in men's rooms. What next? he thought. Sarah poured a line of cocaine along her forearm and offered it up to him.

"Frankly, I'd rather fuck."

Sarah widened her eyes mockingly and looked at Laura whose eyes glittered. Then she laughed.

"I heard you've become a lunatic," Sarah said.

"I thought you didn't like rich businessmen."

"They have definite advantages over poor businessmen."

She lifted her arm closer to Nordstrom's nose. He snorted it off as he imagined a crazed pig or dope fiend would. Laura laughed leaning against the urinal.

"Nobody addressed my first suggestion," Nordstrom said.

The two women looked at each other and he was intrigued that they were taking him seriously. He had simply been trying to keep control of his country by mounting an offensive.

"Let's flip." Sarah drew a quarter out of her purse.

"Okay." Laura drew closer and kissed him on the cheek. "Of course it's adultery for me but there are extenuating circumstances. I'll take heads."

Nordstrom slid his hand down Laura's buttocks feeling the cheeks clench a bit as they used to do. When the quarter was in the air Phillip blundered in.

"What's happening in here?" he said with a drunken leer.

The ladies bustled out and Nordstrom wondered what the final penalty might be for strangling his future son-in-law. The quarter jangled against the wall but he did not look down as he walked out. The coke made him feel like he had been locked in some sort of hyperthyroid refrigerator.

Back at the table the ladies looked at him and laughed. He slowly concocted his most murderous stare that had been used to good effect against business opponents in the old days. They became nervously silent but Nordstrom persisted until everyone at the table was alarmed. He had won the round, as paltry as that might be, but it was somehow important. Phillip returned to the table mumbling about having found a quarter. The Sephard's face stiffened as the partition abruptly opened. A tall black man looked in, elegantly dressed in a gray pin-striped suit. Behind him and staring over his shoulder was an Italian, a cutout from the movies of a gangster psychopath. The tall black man eased around the table and grabbed Sarah's wrist squeezing it painfully. Then he walked away dragging her, a half ambulatory doll, the pain of her twisted arm bright in her face.

"See here . . ." Nordstrom said, moving away from his chair.

"Fuck off, dude," the black man said.

Nordstrom hit the man rather too hard, low on the cheek, and the man spun around losing his grip on the girl. Then his knees buckled and he sat down hard before bouncing up still dazed. Laura and Sonia began screaming and Nordstrom turned to see the Italian very close with the muzzle of a pistol aimed at his stomach. The black man rubbed his jaw and stared at Nordstrom.

"You'll die," he said smiling.

Two waiters and the manager rushed in belatedly at the screaming. There was no point in taking a chance.

"It's just a family quarrel," Nordstrom said. The black man accompanied by the girl pushed past the waiters. The Italian followed and the manager shrugged.

Back at the hotel Nordstrom had thought of the event as the last nasty surprise of the day. But then a death threat was rather striking in its own unique way. He would have to deal with it. Things were bound to happen if you lived in the open, if you walked very far off your porch. He jotted down some contingency plans as they used to call it in the oil business. After he had deservedly punched the man it had taken a full hour, a magnum of Dom Ruinart and two of Phillip's joints to calm down what was left of the dinner party. The Sephard had insisted on a frantic consultation in the toilet where he kept insisting, "Oh my god I told you." But Nordstrom's ho-hum self-assurance even calmed the Sephard. He simply resented the intrusion on the evening, very probably his last family gathering.

In the hotel suite there were a number of options though they lost a little of their clarity in the mixture of wine and cocaine, also the feel of Laura's bottom in his left hand as some sort of electrical stigma. Perhaps after more than twenty years the hormonal confusion of love was gone, the lump in the throat and the void beneath the breastbone, but one could hardly negate the happy sexuality that had become hapless but still there for reasons no one understands. The first option was to call the security chief of his former company, at one time an FBI chief in Los Angeles. His advice would be clinically expert and friendly. The two men would be in jail by first light. Nordstrom rejected this because he hadn't really liked the man. There was something unctuous and utterly crooked about him and he didn't want to owe the man a favor. The second choice was a bit more sensible and he might have made a call had not Laura and Sonia been leaving at noon the next day. It was the former bodyguard and factotum of a Texas oilman. He now occasionally exchanged recipes with the man who lived near Corpus Christi and raised quarter horses. They had had a fine time quail hunting and Nordstrom had entertained the man and his wife when they came to Los Angeles. The man was sort of Texas A&M linebacker type from Del Rio. He now maintained his family by what he euphemistically referred to as his "specialties." He was an intelligent character and collected editions of Dickens and Thackeray. Nordstrom had never minded that the man was a major league arbiter of the kind of extortion case that never hits the press and an occasional killer. But then the threat, direct as it was, didn't seem important enough. Then the phone rang.

"Darling, did I wake you?"

"No, I was reading. My nose is still awake."

"Well it's just that I was worried about you. That girl Sarah called. She wanted to warn you to be careful. The man is very dangerous . . ."

"I already had him checked out. He's a nickel ante dope pusher," Nordstrom lied.

"You're so smart, darling. Anyway I told her where to get in touch with you . . ."

"That wasn't smart," he interrupted. "She's married to the man. But it doesn't matter. Get some sleep."

"I'm sorry. Oh my god." There was a longish pause. "Do you want me to come over?"

"Of course I do, but I'd have too much sense to open the door. You looked wonderful today."

"So did you. It was a little crazy but I would have gone ahead with it at the restaurant."

"So would I but we didn't. Good-bye darling."

"Good-bye. Be careful."

Nordstrom felt a little bleak over his strength in not letting Laura come over. His family was disappearing in a jet plane. It suddenly occurred to him that he could get Laura back if he so chose. During dinner Sonia had dropped an obviously planted hint that her mother was unhappy. After they had left the restaurant there were frantic inquiries by Laura over his plans. The cab stopped at one point so Phillip could retch in the gutter. He wasn't a drinker and had gulped far too much wine. Nordstrom had said he'd probably cash in the tickets for his trip and go to a cooking school for a few months. Then he would get a job in a restaurant by the ocean. He got carried away by the wine and the coke and the speeding taxi: he would cook near the ocean, buy a small boat to fish from in the off hours. He hadn't decided whether the Atlantic, Pacific or Caribbean. Probably the Caribbean since he had already bought the shirts. Laura and Sonia had eagerly interrupted, saying since he had given away his money they would buy him a restaurant but he said no, I don't want to own a restaurant, just want to cook in one. They seemed a bit sad after that and he couldn't help them.

Sarah called then and said though it was five A.M. she wanted to come over and explain certain things. He said he'd meet her for lunch at Melon's at one the next day. She seemed startled but agreed. He was reasonably sure they thought they had a turkey and were setting him up. He knew he had a certain advantage contrary to appearances: he lacked the usual misapprehensions about people that are caused by preconceptions. Sarah, her husband and the Italian thug waltzed around New York like violent peacocks. People that tripped most often and fatally did so out of greed, not understanding that it was a limited though convoluted game. Nordstrom had learned this in the oil business if not before. Still sleepless he drank a cold beer and made a few notes in his diary.

June 15, 78: A new and interesting problem. I have been threatened by death. I saw this basically as an insult and will have to deal with it on those terms. Otherwise I would simply go away as there is certainly nothing to hold me here. But that is not the point. People diminish themselves so horribly by letting themselves get pushed around by nitwits, whether by the government or the thousand varieties of criminals. Surprised I refused Laura, the first time ever, but then life is a matter of fine, hard lines. I remember tonight fishing for bluegills and perch with Mother, how I had to bait the hook as she couldn't bear wigglers and earthworms, and also take off the fish. She didn't mind cleaning fish, birds or rabbits. Also when we went blackberry picking and saw that bear she said get behind me and I said Mother I'm sixteen and bigger than you. Must call her tomorrow, maybe go see her, also Henry then go south in the fall. Dear Mother I'm in a pickle. Henry would probably wait until dark and shoot them. None of the young men ever dared tease him even when he was drunk as a hoot owl. Doubt if I really need cooking school though am weak on certain sauces and desserts. This random violence saddens the heart. Here I had arranged a wonderful dinner for my daughter. I could take the plane to Rio the day after tomorrow but the threat would follow me everywhere like a toothache. Of course it's not limited to the City. Heard at Dad's funeral that huge drunken pulp cutter that lived in shack near the sawmill got tired of his neighbor's barking dog so one night tore the dog's head off with his hands and beat the master senseless with the carcass. Served thirty days and moved to Duluth. Laura could be here now talking about random violence. What an astounding lover she was, probably still is. Once we read a modern sex book but found nothing we hadn't already done. Long for my dancing. How biologically flimsy we are. We go along for forty-three years then someone pokes a knife in us or a .38 slug and it's good-night. That deer-hunting accident when I was sixteen. Two Milwaukee factory workers out by Wells Lake. One shot the other thinking it was a deer. I was nearby and carried the doctor's bag for him. I told the ambulance guys they didn't need the oxygen but they carted it into the woods anyway. It was a 30.06 and the bullet entered below his belt, struck the hipbone and deflected upward scrambling along the way and coming out below a shoulder blade in an apple-sized hole. The air was cold, the wound smelled and his eyes were open. I can imagine Sonia strolling around the Uffizi with a notebook, so intense and lovely. What is that river in Florence? Must get some sleep. It's first light and I need to be on my toes.

In the morning Nordstrom shaved with his straight razor, using his soft leather belt as a strop, as his father taught him to do insisting it was the only way to get a good shave. He stuck his head out the window while drinking his three-dollar pot of coffee to taste the late morning warmth. Far below a man in a dirty white apron was smoking a cigarette in an alley. A cook should smoke his cigarettes looking at the ocean he thought. He dressed in a grandiose Hawaiian shirt (surfer against a setting sun) and baggy chinos. Into an ankle-high pair of desert boots he slipped the razor, which would discomfort his walking but might prove handy in a pinch.

He reached the restaurant purposefully a half-hour early. He spotted the Italian down the street in a parked car and paid a waiter ten bucks to take out a note that read "Hi! Be careful." Sarah was beautiful when she entered and many heads turned. They sat near the corner window and he noted the thug was gone. They talked about dancing while Nordstrom ate a double steak tartare for strength and she trifled with a salad. She had begun dancing at ten, studying with Andre Eglevsky who had only recently died. She hoped to go to Jacob's Pillow for July and August. She was the daughter of a New York University law professor. She had been married to Slats for three years. He was an exciting man though a bit volatile. Nordstrom thought that she had given no indication thus far of actually being a human being. There was the quality of a photograph or mirror image about her. She said she needed to talk to him in the strictest privacy and perhaps his hotel room would be better than a restaurant.

They walked the six or seven blocks to the hotel with Nordstrom hobbling a bit from the razor in his shoe. He decided he liked New York very much and if things cooled off a bit and after a visit to Wisconsin, New York would be the place to go to cooking school. Even the nasty air was good, somehow addictive in its mix of ozone and oxygen, the smells coming out of restaurant and subway vents, looking at Rodin's bust of Balzac with the indigestion of a big lunch, and up here on the East Side, the most striking ladies in the world. If you couldn't live in the woods for reasons of unrest this had to be a good place. Suburbs everywhere were murderous with torpor. Nothing vivid and all the trees looked planted. He paused in a shop to buy Normandy goat cheese; wrapped in straw, its odor seeping out of the package. He was amused at her impatience and accurately predicted what would happen: she would seduce him and then afterward in a parody of concern she would make an extortionary offer. She wasn't a very good actress. He was lighthearted and bouncy despite the razor, doubting that anything bad could happen before dark.

And that was how things did happen. In the room she snorted some coke and Nordstrom refused. She was girlish, turned on the radio and demonstrated some dance moves. She shed all but her underthings and pranced around. She talked about how much she liked Laura and Sonia and itwas too bad that terrible thing had happened. They made love and for a half hour or so she broke through her bad acting into simply making love in silence. While she was in the bathroom Nordstrom removed the .32 from her purse with his handkerchief and slid it under the mattress while whistling the old tavern song "Heart of My Heart." When she had done her toilet she came out affecting a troubled mien and had two more lines of cocaine.

"I don't know if I can help you . . ."

"Help me what? I doubt I can get it up again. You are one crazed little windmill. My god." He yawned deeply.

"I mean protect you from Slats. He's really pissed. In fact no one ever hit him and lived."

"Not even his mama? Didn't he ever get spanked? I bet you spanked him before."

"You better get serious. He could have offed you last night but I said, no Slats. He didn't mean it. But I can only do so much." She was getting angry.

"But I did mean it. He fucked up my daughter's graduation dinner. I'd sort of like an apology. Tell him that. He has bad manners . . ."

"That's not the way it works, you hick fuck. If it wasn't for me you'd be dead. I pleaded with him and he finally said this morning he'd accept ten grand not to kill you. That's a final offer. You got until tomorrow at midnight. And don't run. He'll find you. He's got connections everywhere."

"Tell him that's my offer, too."

"What the fuck you talking about?" she spit out.

"I won't kill him by tomorrow night. That makes us even. No one kills anyone. No one has to go to the bank. Everyone saves his money."

She left in a snit after writing out a number and saying she hoped he'd come to his senses. Nordstrom turned off the radio and fixed on the idea of coming to his senses. He had never felt more within his senses, as a matter of fact. He had fixed his point on earth as dead center in New York while at the same time his family diminished high above the Atlantic. His mother and his dad's best friend Henry were in northern Wisconsin. He had already had lunch and made love. Next came a much-needed nap, a long stroll and a late dinner. Perhaps a movie. But there was the slight aftertaste of asking the Sephard about Sarah the summer before, the increased curiosity after the warning. He toyed with the idea of the airport, or simply renting a car. Or calling Corpus Christi, imagining alternatives without interest. Then he made up his mind for good and called the desk to arrange to have the room next to his bedroom added to the suite. Then the Sephard called in a state of concern adding that he had a psychopathic second cousin over in Brooklyn that might be of help. Nordstrom assured him that everything was "lovey-dovey," and that he'd call if there were problems. The bellhop appeared with the new key, and Nordstrom prepared for his nap. He discarded the idea that this whole thing wasn't fair and that the extortion attempt was too clumsy to take very seriously, even with the threat. Later in the evening would be the test; if there was no move to freshen things up he would let it go.

Seven hours later he was sitting in a chair in the new room reading Audubon magazine. He had read hastily through the entirety of E.M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay, a book Phillip had left behind for him. Cioran immediately became Nordstrom's favorite author and he meant to scour the city for additional books. He had spread his weapons around the room; the razor on a windowsill beneath a wide-open window, Sarah's gun still wrapped in a handkerchief—the prints might prove useful—and before him on the desk a bottle of wine wrapped in a wet hand-towel to use as a sap. He was mindful of the total absurdity of what he was doing. It was impossible not to smile despite the apparent danger but then he figured he might own some modest sort of amateur's advantage: his concentration was complete because he had either lost or given up everything on earth. He went through the unlocked double door and made a pass beside the street window and turned off the light. Now if anyone were watching the window they might assume he was going to bed. He had placed a number of empty beer cans around on the floor with spoons stuck in them as a childish early warning system. He picked up his diary, went through the bedroom and into the new room, leaving the inner door ajar. He doubted if any interloper could resist the bait of the new room. He refused the urge to have a drink.

June 18, 78: The girls with Phillip took off for Europe at noon today. I am sitting here waiting for Slats' man, probably the Italian, to show up and threaten me further—probably a mild beating for the insolence of my reply to the extortion. What a surprise he'll have assuming I'm successful. Will check out cooking schools tomorrow, also Cioran books. Like those sections titled "The Arrogance of Prayer," "Crimes of Courage and Fear," "The Mockery of a 'New Life,'" "Non-Resistance to Night" and "Turning a Cold Shoulder to Time." Despite the fact that Phillip is an utter asshole I must send him a thank you note. Wish I had some fried bluegills. A drink. A pretty woman. Wonder what Cioran does everyday writing out of that abysm of despair. Presumptuous to write and ask though I suspect he's reasonably happy having gotten it out of his system as they say. I am not a violent person and I'm not interested in violence. The media romanticizes this nonsense constantly. Never read anything about anyone I knew that was accurate. The world is haphazard. You can see the strain of resisting this principle if you study faces at all. My first warning should be the elevator cable unless he comes up the stairs. But that door is locked on the inside. Locks are useless except against the most slovenly criminals. Wish I had that huge Bouvier that got hit by a car down at the beach. Terrible to keep a dog like that in the city. Sephard talked about a Spanish restaurant that makes first-rate stewed squid. Maybe tomorrow night. Forgot I had all that dough until I paid the bill at Melon's and felt lump. Sarah owns one of those truly beautifully formed pussys. A marvel of wise design amen. Remembered I could call my old friend high up in D.E.A. and have Slats rousted. But I oddly hate to see anyone locked up. And it's best to learn how to do things on your own in this new life I have so studiously chosen. Midnight now.

Nordstrom got up from the desk and stared in a slow half-circle at the locations of his weaponry. Dressed in his pajama bottoms he did a little jig and shuffle in front of the mirror before turning out the light. If things went well he would get a room or a small sublet apartment and a radio so he could begin dancing again. He had prepaid for the suite for a full week: over two hundred dollars a day— thinking he might need to entertain—but now he knew he must economize. He began to force everything from his mind so that sitting there he could dwell entirely within his ears. He had purposefully left his watch in the bedroom —such things moved on a different time and a watch was a pointless distraction.

It was interesting for him to note that in the darkness, barring thought, pictures still floated lazily across his mind. He discovered that if he didn't fix on these mental images, no matter how fascinating they were, they would disappear. They came from left to right: Sonia on the bassinet, thunderstorm on the lake with a crane flying across the metal plate of water, Mother picking wild strawberries, a wreck on the San Diego Freeway, dancing in Brookline, asparagus in Marblehead, a distracting woman he had never seen in life. Now his eyes fixed on a cuticle of light peeping above the next building. It became the moon, nearly full and its flowering nimbus showed him the room and his feet on the floor. A beer can tipped with its spoon. He rose and flattened his bare back next to the doorjamb. The future came at five breaths a minute and his heart seemed too high in his ribs. There was a small itching now inside just below his pajama drawstring. Then the door opened and the man made three slow steps in, paused half turning, and made three more. Using the wall for a fulcrum Nordstrom bolted through the room catching the man low in the back; two long heavy steps and he bore him quickly to and out the window before the man even began to struggle, and catching only the window jamb with an effort to save himself. In the first few stories of his plummet the man was silent, then a scream began that diminished in distance until his body struck the trash cans. Nordstrom had the odd thought that it was like casting out a huge anchor in a very deep place where for some strange reason there was no water. He dropped Sarah's pistol out the window, then wiped his sweating face with the handkerchief. The moon shone clear and sweet on his face and chest. Visitors often forgot the moon shone down on New York City.

In the morning he had just gotten out of the shower and was having his coffee and talking to his mother when the detectives came. He let them in and quickly finished the conversation; she was planning on a trip to Hawaii with her cousin Ida in November. They hoped to see Jack Lord work on Hawaii Five-O One detective accepted a cup of coffee while the other looked out the window. They were both very bored. No, Nordstrom hadn't heard anything. Sound asleep. Too much celebrating. His daughter had graduated eighth in her class at Sarah Lawrence. Why the extra room? He thought his ex-wife and daughter might stay an extra day. He went to the window and looked down with them. O what a shame. Some poor soul. A suicide.

Perhaps but not a hotel guest or model citizen. A thug in fact and they were trying to figure out what he was doing in the neighborhood. It was a hot morning and Nordstrom offered them a beer but they refused politely. They had a lot of floors to cover. Thank you.

The detectives were barely out of the room when Sarah answered the call he had made to Slats before he went to bed the night before. Nordstrom was very grave. The prisoner had made a full confession before, out of grief, he flung himself out the window. Maybe he hadn't counted the floors on the elevator. Who knows. He insisted she and Slats join him for lunch at the Japanese restaurant at the Waldorf. Then they could settle up. Then Nordstrom arranged to have dinner with the Sephard, thinking he might have some good tips on a cooking school.

To tell the truth he had mixed feelings about what he had done but there seemed no alternative. These criminals might have finally threatened his family. And he had been prepared in his soul if the night had gone otherwise. But it was no small thing to hurl another creature into eternity. Only rarely did a man occur on earth bad enough to die. He dressed and combed the bookstores in the area looking with some success for books by E.M. Cioran, finding them finally at the newly opened Books and Company near the Whitney.

When he arrived at the Waldorf Sarah and Slats were already seated, having no doubt arrived early to case the joint. Nordstrom had barely been seated by a brightly painted geisha when an old, florid colleague from the oil industry stopped at the table. Nordstrom introduced his table mates but the conversation faded dismally when he admitted readily that he was doing nothing but thinking about going to cooking school. Slats was elegant in a blue cord Haspel summer suit. The oil man left and drinks arrived.

"Now you're a murderer," Slats tisked knowingly and Sarah nodded in agreement.

"Righto," Nordstrom said with a weird musical lilt. He meant to make them uncomfortable. "Right now under this table cloth I got a .44 aimed at your balls and I'm thinking of blowing your ass off in self-defense." Slats' eyes widened in alarm and disbelief. Nordstrom winked crazily at Sarah and yelled "bang." Heads turned in alarm and Slats tipped over his drink. A geisha rushed over. "I was just telling a joke that ended with 'bang,'" Nordstrom explained to the room at large. "I want three Sashimis and one large squid tempura. And get the man another drink." The geisha bowed.

"You are a fucking lunatic," Slats insisted.

"Righto. I wanted your complete attention."

"Oh, man, you are in real trouble," Slats nodded.

"Yes, you are . . ." Sarah began to chime in but noted Nordstrom's crazed stare and paused. He stared at both of them with his head strangely atilt.

"You both have to cut this jive shit or I'm going to tear out somebody's heart. There's only so much shit I can take, you know? You sent that numb-nuts wop to my room and I proved he couldn't fly, not even a little bit. Now I got this confession . . ."

"This man would never talk," Slats interrupted, for the first time fully getting into what was happening at the table.

"That's how much you know, fuckface." Nordstrom was enjoying the purity of his acting performance, unexampled until now in his life. "I interrogated for Special Forces in Da Nang in sixty-seven. Sometimes we pitched them out of Hueys, and sometimes I strangled them. They had thin necks." Nordstrom made a strangling motion with his hands. "Your friend was a hard case. I sapped him and when he woke he wouldn't be nice so I knotted a wet towel and got it in his mouth so he wouldn't bite. Then I put four fingers in and jerked up and got the front teeth. The confession with a gold tooth is in a safety deposit box at Chase Manhattan." Nordstrom remembered the gold tooth from the restaurant. "Then I pitched the cocksucker out the window. And then I called you and went to bed."

The sashimi arrived and Nordstrom advised that they use the horseradish mustard sparingly. Slats gazed at him feeling a bit trapped. It had been a little stupid all along and the angles were disappearing. "This is raw fish isn't it?" Nordstrom nodded. Slats was tentative, and then, liking the fish, he began to eat quickly.

"Maybe it's a draw. Shit, Berto had a grand of mine on him. Some detective is at the track today with my money. You need any toot?"

Slats signaled to the waitress and pointed at his place. "More," he said.

"No thanks. I don't think so. Or maybe I could buy some for a friend." The tempura arrived and Nordstrom served.

"Here I am gobbling this shit and my dad died on Iwo Jima," Slats laughed. "For you it's five hundred bucks for a quarter. I can see this detective feeding his old lady lobster on my money."

"I'm actually sorry I hit you. I don't usually think that fast but I had some coke in the toilet and I forgot you were married."

Sarah explained it was only a way of making money, a gig, and that they weren't married. Rich men sympathized with her mistreatment and advanced her money to get out of Slats' clutches. With Nordstrom they decided to escalate because they were convinced he was simpleminded. Slats was curious about the itinerary of the trip he had forgotten. The idea of foreign travel suddenly reminded Nordstrom of the pictures of vigorous men shearing sheep in the National Geographic in faraway places. They talked on for another half hour and Sarah suggested a cooking school on Waverly Place for when he returned. Slats insisted on paying for the meal. Nordstrom counted out fifteen hundred bucks from Sonia's BMW money on his lap. Sarah slid him a small sack of coke under the table.

"I added the grand for what you lost on Berto. I wanted us to be even up. Now everyone is even except Berto."

They walked out of the restaurant into a hall off the Waldorf lobby. Slats patted Nordstrom on the shoulder. "Don't sweat it. He was an asshole."

At midnight Nordstrom was sitting in the dark in his hotel bedroom looking at the moon and thinking about lily pads. Sonia had insisted he go to the Museum of Modern Art to see these huge paintings of lily pads by Monet and he had gone after lunch, staring at them utterly blankminded for an hour. Now in the moonlight all of the lily pads on the lakes of northern Wisconsin revolved before him. Sometimes they had small buttery-yellow flowers and sometimes they had large white flowers, strong with an eerie perfume he could smell twenty-five years later in a hotel room. He didn't know if in the morning he would leave on his trip or go to Wisconsin for a few weeks. Bass hid under the lily pads and he used to swim under them and look upward so that the pads looked like small green islands in the air refracting the light. He had given the cocaine to the Sephard over dinner. The Sephard had been relieved but puzzled when Nordstrom insisted that Slats and Sarah were "nice people." There was a neurotic English girl with a perfect fanny with the Sephard. She wanted to call a friend for Nordstrom but he said no. He was really quite tired. Just breathing on the bed in the moonlight seemed quite enough for the moment. First you breathed in, then out, and so on. It was easy if you tried to keep calm.

EPILOGUE

He drove south in late October, one year after his father's death, in a sixty-seven Plymouth he had paid seven hundred dollars for. In no particular hurry and nothing to guide him but a Rand McNally, he stopped in Savannah, bought two new tires, and thought the town rather too pretty for his taste. He wanted to avoid a self-conscious location. In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light; he was neither happy nor unhappy as he rejected one place after another, just looking things over. Finally, in late November, he got a job in a small seafood restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, of good reputation at an abysmal wage. His fingers were soon sore from cleaning shrimp and picking crab. He got nailed rather painfully in the palm by a stone crab and learned to be careful. Within a month he was allowed to cook a daily specialty. His home was a one-room tourist cabin at the end of a lane of crushed shells lined by dank mangroves bordered by an unnavigable lagoon. There was a small gas stove, a double bed, Formica table, linoleum floor, black leopard lamp, rickety air conditioner, three rattan chairs. There were a lot of mosquitoes which he didn't mind, having been trained for them in Wisconsin. He kept his money in an upturned frozen orange juice can in the refrigerator freezer, not wanting to bother with the bank. He didn't kill the palmetto bugs that crawled around, having figured that they didn't eat much or sting. One day he was pleased to see a large rattler back in the bedraggled palm scrub. He bought a rowboat and nearly died when an oarlock broke and he was swept out to sea in a strong tide and a heavy sea and spent an entire day bailing with his hat and paddling with one oar. He was rescued by fishermen and spent two days in a hospital being treated for severe sunburn, feeling like a stupid shit. It paid to keep on your toes, he thought, in this new life where he was utterly unprotected. He unfolded a lot of ice-cold money and bought a Boston Whaler and a sixty-horse Evinrude, after determining it was the most stable boat available. With the help of a push pole he kept strapped to the boat's gunwhale he could skid it across the lagoon in a medium tide and keep it beside the cabin. He bought a spinning rod and some jigs, mask and flippers and a book on marine biology. He waded tidal flats looking at the bottom, fished channels, identified his catch in the book and released it. He worked six days a week but had mornings and Monday off for his explorations. When he felt more comfortable in these strange waters he bought charts and a boat trailer and went off to Big Pine on Mondays, an area richer in mangrove islets and tidal cuts. One warm still day in a deep tidal creek he hooked a tarpon and was shocked as it hurtled out of the water near the boat, twisting its big silver body and its gill plates rattling before it broke off. That day he thought he counted a thousand shades of turquoise in the water. He had become a water, wind and cloud watcher in addition to being a cook. Late at night he danced to a transistor radio. He was the source of respectful local amusement. He had a wonderful affair with a Cuban waitress his own age. She had a small portable stereo and taught him Latin dances. He got more local respect when he threw two burly drunks out of the restaurant one night, punching one senseless, but it reminded him unpleasantly of Berto and he wept a few minutes when he got home. He wrote and received chatty letters from his daughter in Florence, exchanging apercus with Phillip on the great author E.M. Cioran. After the Cuban waitress abandoned Islamorada for Miami he had a brief three-day fling with a college girl who was a bit sullen and really didn't like to fuck. His mother wrote that she had actually seen Jack Lord in Honolulu. She and Henry planned a two-week trip down in April when the tourist season slackened and Nordstrom would have more time. They would have to take the bus as Henry considered planes an insult to his life and the life of the sky. One day while driving Nordstrom saw a moray eel and a black-tipped shark and was thrilled to the core.

One evening while he was taking a cigarette break behind the restaurant, Nordstrom watched two waitresses approach, then pause while they whispered. It was his habit during the evening break to sit on a huge piece of dredged coral, hundreds of pounds of tiny antique, crushed marine invertebrates. He would drink a tall, cold piña colada, smoke a cigarette and watch the ocean. In his position of chef none of the other help usurped his sitting place. Now the waitresses came up to him, both a little plump and giggling but one with fine olive features. They offered a joint and he took a long, noncommittal puff. Their problem was that there was a dance tonight in a bar just down Route 1 and they had no one to go with and they didn't want to walk in the bar alone. Nordstrom was disturbed. He had never danced in public. Oh Jesus why not, he said to himself. At the bar he danced with the two girls and anyone else willing until four in the morning when the band stopped. Then he danced alone to the jukebox until four thirty in the morning when everyone had to leave.