Picturing Will

ONE

At night, when Jody had trouble sleeping, Wayne seemed, in his sneaky way, always to be there in the shadows, his smooth voice still a whispered undertone of the breeze. They had divorced years ago, and except for talking to him on the phone periodically to arrange for Will’s visits to Florida, she had no contact with him at all. His image had become blurry. She was confused about whether his gaze seemed more intense when he wore his glasses or contact lenses. She could remember that he was tall, but not what it felt like to stand beside him, let alone to be held in his arms. She could remember the pattern of the plaid shirts he wore in the winter, but not if he had tucked them in or left the shirttails hanging out. The only absolutely distinct memory she had — whether she was awake or during the many times she dreamed it — was of the day they married. They had gone to a justice of the peace. His brother, and a girlfriend with whom she had since lost touch, had been the only witnesses. After the ceremony, she and Wayne had walked out the door with an arm around each other’s waist and made a happy race for the car (his brother had overtaken them and managed to throw open the car door, bowing as if opening the door of a gilded carriage). There had been a split second when she looked down to where Wayne’s fingers curved around her waist and suddenly saw their future as clearly as anyone looking into a crystal ball. His fingers were perfectly placed, but you could see how lightly their touch registered. Either the thing he touched was ephemeral, or his touch made it so; this many years later, she still wondered which. But in that instant, she had realized that she would slip through Wayne’s fingers.

She had known him for only a few months before they married — months during which there was such frantic activity that by the time he proposed, Jody had begun to think that marriage must have been what they were headed for from the start. Their eyes had met when they passed each other, walking down a crowded street. Only a few steps beyond him, her heel had snapped. He had been looking over his shoulder — giving her the evil eye, she now believed — and when she stopped to take off her shoe, she was stopping for years. Years in which she’d move to the country, marry, and have Wayne’s child. The thin little leather heel she held was the shed tail of a captured lizard.

She should have seen through it — the bullying and bravado — but the bullying was always accompanied by charming coercions (so many flowers he couldn’t afford), and the bravado seemed at the time like real intensity. Wayne had always been about to create a life for himself, and for her. He borrowed money from his brother to go to school, then quit. He railed against city life — everything from the cracks in the sidewalk that caught the tip of your heel to the political wheelingc and dealing that determined the city’s character. For Wayne, the plaster gargoyles on the buildings were always blowing an ill wind, but the night sounds of the country were the music of the spheres. They lived in a tiny house on a farm, where she looked after the horses, and Wayne read books — not to expand his horizons, as he said, but to reinforce the limits of what he believed. His brilliance, he claimed, would someday light up the world, but in the meantime he rewired lamps for a living and worked as the odd-jobs man on the property. And for quite a while she had been entranced with him, and with that life. Without knowing much about him — without even knowing, until they applied for a marriage license, that he had been married before, without ever pausing to consider how strange it was that he had no friends and that his own brother was mystified that he had been asked to attend the wedding, without any knowledge beyond what she saw in his eyes and what she felt when she touched his body — she was willing to leave behind worried friends, argue with and finally stop speaking to her parents, and view her own ambition with skepticism. Though it now seemed impossible that she had ever been under his spell, she continued to feel chastened by the experience. Still disturbed enough to roam the house at night, checking like some crazy worried lady to make sure torn-up love letters hadn’t reappeared as untouched sheets of stationery, that the roses hadn’t taken root to bloom again at the bottom of the trash.

Wayne left without leaving a note, when roses he had given her were only slightly wilted in the vase. She had awakened to Will’s cries one morning in a house that felt intensely empty. She couldn’t convince herself that he had gone out to fork hay for the horses. Or that he had decided to call it quits with his attempts to repair the car and had taken it to Smoky’s garage. The horses were quiet, and the car was gone, and on the table by the door was his house key. Outside, dawn was breaking And she had Will in her arms — Will, who smelled of the night’s sleep: that mixture of damp diaper and Johnson’s baby shampoo and sweat and powder that for years she thought she would never get out of her lungs. She had stood there by the closed door as if it were transparent and she could look out and see Wayne’s car in the distance. Because even before she saw the key on the table, she knew that he was gone. He was gone and at the end of the month she and Will would be gone too, with the money she had borrowed from her father, whose note was so kind that she had crumpled it and thrown it away before finishing it. The gardener’s wife had put a picnic basket — as if they were going for a day’s pleasant outing! — in the backseat of the old Buick she had bought with her father’s money. She drove an hour farther south and spent the next two weeks at a girlfriend’s house in Charlottesville — a house that was miraculously empty, because the girlfriend had put it on the market and was on her way to join her boyfriend in New Orleans. It was a lie to think that photography and good luck had saved her, but it was still too painful to think that her father’s small savings account had been the factor — or even that her girlfriend’s generosity in leaving her not only the house but a series of friends she asked to call Jody (one of whom had invited her to the party where she met Mel) had foiled Wayne’s plans to ruin her life.

Now she lived with her son — their son — in the same small Southern town she had driven to almost randomly, and she had gone from being a clerk in a camera store to working as a much-in-demand wedding photographer. Prowling through the house at night, a drink in hand for consolation, walking quietly in her stocking feet so as not to awaken Will, she was often mesmerized by what she had created. Not that it was particularly lovely or even expressive of who she was, just that it existed at all: the tripods and strobes and drop cloths, the entire dining room transformed into a photographer’s studio.

She would feel her way around that room in the darkness: the pegs next to the fireplace, from which she had hung antique wedding dresses and straw hats; the mantel, where her lenses were lined up like soldiers; the built-in corner cabinet with her cameras inside and her light meter dangling from the front latch; the window seat Duncan had extended so she could lower the ivory-colored velvet curtain and photograph brides-to-be sitting prettily in the little niche; the chair bought at the Salvation Army and reupholstered (no modern chairs had such wide seat cushions) so the bride and groom could be shot sitting together without looking like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Was it possible that at the end of the day doctors turned out the fluorescent lights in their offices and ran their hands over their stethoscopes and tongue depressors and syringes and felt perplexed at the unfamiliarity of those cold items and plastic packages? Did bakers take a secret finger-swipe at perfectly scalloped icing, taste it, and then repair the damage with their pastry tubes? Didn’t people sometimes hover a bit above their lives, see that they were stranger than they seemed, and then — with their hearts fluttering — answer the ringing phone, say the perfunctory good night, continue on the same path?

Rhetorical questions were some help, but when Jody was awake — when it seemed that she was totally alone in the house, in spite of her child sleeping upstairs and her lover sleeping in New York City and dreaming dreams of her — only the slight absurdity, and the awkwardness of having created this life, seemed pertinent. She could have turned on the lights, but then everything would have looked too stark — the room would be obliterated by such brightness. She could have stayed in bed and thought about all this, but one of the advantages of being an adult was that she could rise and claim her territory without being challenged.

She sat alone in the big chair and listened to the sound of the trees blowing in the night wind. An irregular patch of light from the street lamp jutted across the wood floor. She studied it as if it were a slip of test paper: What would be the proper exposure to register every gradation of white to black? It was a luxury, she knew, to be able to speculate, to seriously put observation before action. To be neither the harried mother nor the beleaguered artist.

She put her empty glass on the kitchen counter and looked through a pile of papers ready to slip into chaos. She got a large manila envelope and put into it the bag from the pharmacy, with the receipt stapled to the outside, that had held a bottle of eardrops for Will, and a crumpled receipt for the Chinese takeout they had eaten the night before. Will loved wonton soup. He loved the special spoon that came with it and had as much interest in the wontons sunk to the bottom as a fisherman looking at trout in clear water. Jody also dropped in a note she had no intention of responding to, from a woman whose wedding she had photographed, which asked for a written reminiscence of the day. There was also Will’s printed request for another G.I. Joe, the letters enlarging and sloping as the pencil came near the edge of the paper; a computer letter offering Jody two free days in a Key West condo if she agreed to consider buying; the cartoon that came with a cube of bubble gum; a grocery receipt with a smudge of strawberry juice that looked like blood; another postcard from the Electrolux dealer, urging her to reserve a date for a demonstration; Hershey’s Kisses wrappers; a Polaroid of Will holding one pajama leg high, trying to look elegant in a pair of pink satin high heels; a note from Will’s teacher expressing her concern that Will’s attention drifted too often; a place mat imprinted with a picture of a cardinal, the state bird, crayoned on by Will, who drew a stick figure pointing a gun at the bird’s beak; the label from a jar of black currant jelly that Will had asked her to soak off and then had lost interest in. In the morning she would stop at the post office and mail the envelope to Wayne. She took some pride in her audacity, even though there would be no acknowledgment, even though she might as well be sending it to Mars. She just wanted him to know things: the price of a quart of soup, the fact that medicine had been prescribed. She thought of some of the things she enclosed as wide-angle views of their lives and other things as close-ups. Nothing much could be made of a parking ticket — a common enough occurrence — but there was something almost intimate about sending the pharmacy bag.

She ran her finger along the flap of the manila envelope. The first time she mailed one to Wayne, she had realized what a devilish thing it was to do. But after the second and third, when he never responded, she realized she had found a way to confound and intimidate him.

She sealed the envelope tightly, licking until the glue of the top flap became wet enough to adhere perfectly to the dry strip of glue underneath. At the same time, she took care not to cut her lip on the paper. This was what the careful kisses of years ago — the lightly placed night kisses, meant to register without awakening Wayne — had become: a lick along a line of glue, and a flap folded and pressed in place with the strength of one person strangling another.

When she finished putting things in the envelope she began to straighten up a bit, even though she knew Mel would say that of course she couldn’t be expected to be the perfect housekeeper when she was raising a child and supporting herself. Mel understood final notices and took fines for not paying on time in stride. He urged her to be even-tempered when cops stopped her for speeding, and he didn’t hesitate to run out into the rain to tip the paperboy at Christmas. Mel was nobody’s fool and came close to being ideal. He was a more patient lover than Wayne and found Will’s laughter contagious. He loved her and had let it be known that he was very sad that she had not yet chosen to marry him and move to New York.

That was a good part of the reason why she stayed awake at night, pacing like a lost person. Because she suspected that she would have to relocate, be lost, capitulate, in order to keep what she had. She was feeling another version of the anxiety that had made her pace through the house years ago, mesmerized by late-night fears about what would become of her and Will. Though she had found a way to make a stable life for them, she still felt everything could become precarious. That once again she would walk out her door and be a night traveler, but that this time she would have to go it alone because she wouldn’t dare awaken Will. When Will was a baby she had held him in her arms and taken him for walks. If he couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t sleep. It always surprised her that there were not other mothers who were nightwalkers. At three or four in the morning she and Will would start down the hill, and along the way she’d ask, “What’s this?” and really the question would be as much for herself as for him. The Indian cigar tree did look surreal at night: something of a mix between an upside-down birthday cake whose candles improbably stayed stuck in the icing and the mobile that had once dangled over Will’s crib. “What’s this?” she’d say, pointing at the sky, and they’d both say, in unison, “The moon.” Even on the coldest winter nights they’d wander through a strange dream that distorted the daytime world, noticing what was highlighted by streetlight or by starlight. There was hardly ever a noise. Sounds, certainly — the cat darting out of the bushes, leaves rustling in the breeze — but the overall impression was of quiet. The neighbor’s old blue car glowed lavender when the moon was full. Falling snow looked as solid as pearls. Tar could look like satin. Sometimes her own voice would imitate the breeze; lips on top of Will’s ear, she’d whisper, “What’s that?” drawing out the last word so that the a’s, exhaled, caused their own air current. “Whose baby are you?” she’d say, and Will would say, “Yours.” She’d point: “Whose house is that?” and he’d say, “Mine.” A kingdom to be claimed. Who could have blamed him for feeling powerful? Moving through the night, she became for him a galloping horse with an unerring sense of direction. Smell the air: danger there. Feel the breeze, coming from the north.

Without him, she would have perished. Only a baby — someone who truly needed her care — could have made her rise to the occasion. Held tightly against her chest, Will became her buffer against the world. When he had bad dreams and she consoled him, the warmth of his body had made her relaxed enough to sleep. Now there was enough money to get by, enough time to work and to play, and there was Mel — even the person closest to her had no idea that she and Will had ever been night travelers. If she did not confide in him about that time, she would forget it sooner, she was convinced. Why remember your vulnerabilities? It was a great advantage that her accomplice in those days had been a baby, who would forget the wind blowing through his hair and the rush of hot and cold as she put her lips to the brim of his stocking cap and tried to breathe evenly, getting over her anxiety about how they would live and what would become of them. That would all be as lost to him as the moment of birth. It would matter no more than a lost marble mattered a month after its disappearance. Your secrets were always safe with babies. With adults — and sometimes even with yourself — they were not at all safe.

TWO

The day after Jody photographed a wedding on an estate east of town she called the housekeeper to see if she could return to rephotograph the grounds. Something about the house — nothing architectural; some nebulous something that seemed to be in the air — had gotten her attention. She was not sure herself what she wanted. She only knew she wanted another opportunity to poke around.

Though she photographed weddings for a living, her real interest was in the photographs she took for herself. She had gotten good enough, she knew, to start thinking seriously about showing her secret work. Photography had been a fascination at first — nothing she thought she would ever be involved in. Will had been an infant then, and her marriage had just about collapsed. She would buckle Will into a car seat and drive into Washington every week to see photography shows, or to browse through museum bookstores and look at books she couldn’t afford. How vulnerable she must have seemed to anyone who noticed her: a pretty young woman with an infant in a Snugli slumbering on her chest, attention riveted to the book she was examining, as if it could provide her with clues about the rest of her life. Where had the photographers positioned themselves, and why? The photographers’ preoccupations became clear, their level of aggression measurable. In the best photographs, the photographer’s presence was palpable. Though she had revised her thoughts now and was inclined to think just the opposite, she was interested, then, in trying to understand what the photographers revealed about themselves. The risks they took were the ultimate fascination. She had tried to figure out when the photographers thought they were hiding, and to what extent this was true. Sometimes the photographer disappeared as unconvincingly as a child playing hide-and-seek who couldn’t help peeking around the corner to see how the game was going. Other times you couldn’t help thinking that the photographer had orchestrated the moment in order to make a personal statement, which did not express the subject’s feeling at all. Looking at photographs was a little like sleuthing, but in so many cases the mystery transcended anything that could be explained.

She bought photographs from the Library of Congress.

Wayne asked her why she wanted pictures on the walls of people she didn’t know.

She cashed the Christmas check she got from her father and bought a Canon TX.

Wayne reacted like someone whose cat has proudly brought home a dead mouse.

She bought a developing tank and practiced prying open a roll of film with her eyes closed, trying to wind it on the reel by her sense of touch.

As she tipped the tank back and forth, Wayne looked at her as if she were a deaf person shaking maracas that had no seeds inside.

Memories of those years could overwhelm her when she least expected it. Perhaps the road she was driving on reminded her of the road she and Wayne had lived on. Certainly it was not the sight of the wedding house itself, one of many big houses that had been kept up but not extensively renovated, painted over too many times without having been scraped, the shutters hanging a bit awkwardly. Still, there were nice things about the big white house: leaded-glass windows that ivy would have to be pulled away from when spring came; huge maple trees with gnarled roots that twisted along the ground, and ash trees, recently planted, with slender trunks no thicker than a broom handle.

Getting out of the car, she stepped on shards of gold crushed in the gravel: the plastic champagne glasses from the day before. Her friend Duncan, who often catered such events, said that pilfering had become such a problem that many of the rich people now relied on plastic for large gatherings.

Because she thought someone might be watching her approach, she did not stop to photograph the crushed plastic. It was also too obvious a thing to photograph, though she often allowed herself to work her way into feeling something about a place by photographing in a perfunctory way: documenting what was there, then moving on. Seeing the obvious through the viewfinder always sharpened her eye for odd, telling details. Photographing a tree, she would see ants swarm a bit of food on the ground; shooting the side of the house, she would catch the reflection in the window of two trees whose overlapping branches seemed to form the shape of a cross.

“Do you believe this is the same place where we had all that excitement one day ago?” the housekeeper said, throwing open the door. Jody could tell from her tone of voice that she was truly welcome. Except for the housekeeper’s wiry hair, it might not have been obvious that the woman was black. She wore a black uniform — or an unstylish dress — with a tan down vest. Blue plastic earrings dangled from her ears.

“You didn’t go on their honeymoon?” Jody said, smiling.

The woman shook her head. Clearly, she was more than a housekeeper. The day before, she had been sipping champagne and teasing the bride, threatening to slip into the steamer trunk so she could pop out when their ship arrived in Europe.

Jody walked in, and the housekeeper turned to pour coffee without asking if she wanted any. “He was my second choice,” the housekeeper said, “but I think she did wonderful well for herself.” She handed Jody a mug of coffee. The aroma filled the room. “I want to tell you,” the housekeeper said, “he has got to be some nice boy for me to like him without him having no religious beliefs of any shape or kind. He told me his own parents, out in California, raised him to be an atheist.”

“Who was your favorite?” Jody said.

“An Episcopal boy who’s in training to be a doctor. And that has nothing to do with my personal religion, either, which happens to be Baptist. The boy she married just doesn’t have the charm Taylor Tazewell has, but the both of them are kind boys, and I guess that’s what’s important.” The housekeeper smiled. “It’s not one bit of my business,” she said, “but I can’t tell if that ring on your finger is a wedding ring or not.”

It wasn’t. It was a blue enamel ring with a little strand of gold spiraling delicately through the enamel. Mel had bought it for Will to give her last Mother’s Day. “I’m divorced,” Jody said. “I have a son. Will.” She reached into her bag and brought out her wallet.

The picture she carried of Will was several years old, a black-and-white Polaroid that had faded, so that now Will’s face was indistinct; it was not obvious that he was smiling. Like all photographers, she cared most about pictures of people she loved that were in no way exceptional as photographs. Maybe there was something special about the day a picture was taken (the first time Mel got Will to climb to the top of the slide and come down without his having to stand next to it, ready to reach for Will if he toppled), or even the day it went into the wallet (Will had cut it small, with Mel’s help, for the card-case of an old wallet she no longer had). The housekeeper’s face lit up, though, as if she had seen an angel.

“I have two boys and would of had three, but one was taken from me in infancy with pneumonia,” the housekeeper said.

“I’m very sorry,” Jody said. She looked at the picture of Will. Impossible that he would be taken from her. As impossible as having aborted him to please Wayne. She looked at the ring — her hand, holding the picture. The enamel ring had cost more, she was sure, than the thin silver wedding band Wayne had given her. With the tip of her thumb, she pushed the ring closer to her palm.

“It’s always easy to think there’s a reason for everything, unless something bad happens to you,” the housekeeper sighed. She offered Jody milk for her coffee. Jody poured some in before she realized what she was doing; she drank her coffee black. She would let the mug warm her hands a few seconds longer, then go outside and pour the coffee on the ground.

Wayne had done that, years ago: poured all the coffee out of his cup over her tomato seedlings. He had also thrown things: bed pillows, dishes, unlit cigarettes.

“I’m taking up too much of your time,” Jody said. “I’ll go outside for a few minutes and take a few quick pictures, if that’s all right.”

The housekeeper shrugged. “The outdoors sure don’t belong to me,” she said, smiling as Jody walked out the door.

There were times when the smell of the breeze let you know you were going to get a good photograph. A tingle in your fingertips preceded whatever was about to intervene: a breeze, a stream of migrating birds. The best of them were synergistic, or they didn’t work at all except as well-composed arty photographs.

Earlier that day she had been looking through a book of Atget’s photographs of Paris — in particular, the photographs he took in the 1920s of hotel interiors. The picture of the Hotel de Roquelaure would have seemed a vision of heaven to any parent with a young child whose home was a battlefield of fallen animals, marching monsters, and discarded clothes. Only the black chair sitting to the side of the tall doors reminded you there was life in the hotel. You knew instantly that the chair was covered in velvet. It was not a leather chair, or a chair covered with any other material, but a chair with a fringed velvet seat. That hint of softness humanized the entire picture. The viewer believed there was a possibility of entering that room through the open door, of sitting in a magical chair.

She set up the tripod and screwed on the camera. Why was she about to take a photograph of the side of a house? Because — unless you were Atget — you had to wait for a mystery if you did not discover one. It was all intuition and patience: A rabbit might appear from under the bush; a meteor might fall.

She moved the tripod to another location so that when she photographed the house the little ash trees would be in the picture. She leaned over to look through the lens. Until you looked through the lens, you could never be sure. That was when things took on a prominence they didn’t have in life, or when details disappeared. You could find that the picture you thought to take with a wide-angle lens was really better seen in close-up. You could know the routine, use the right exposure, compose perfectly, but still — the photographs that really worked transcended what you expected, however certain the results may have seemed at the time.

It was a nice shot, but Jody didn’t trust the dimming light, so she bracketed when she took the shot again. Then she let the tripod stand where it was and loaded the Leica. Its lightness was reassuring. With the little Leica in the palm of your hand you suddenly felt more delicate, but at the same time more connected to things, the way you felt when you slipped a ballet slipper on your foot.

Through the lens of the Leica, the scene was nondescript. Turning a bit to examine the world, though, she found that it was just right for photographing the remains of a bird’s nest wedged between limbs above her head. No broken eggs lay below it. The ground was almost winter-hard. There would be no photograph of eggshells, and there would be no photograph of the crushed plastic in the driveway. At that moment, though, the photograph that would be taken began to exist. A rusty blue pickup started to bump its way into the driveway. She photographed the approach, as documentation. She photographed the man opening the door on the driver’s side and his companion, hopping out the other side. If they saw her, they gave no sign. They walked toward the house, one tall man and one small man with a funny way of walking, never turning to look over their shoulders.

She waited until they got to the door, then began photographing in earnest. And luck was with her: the wind got in the photograph. A wind blew up, and in an almost palpable way it reinforced the empty space that surrounded the men. Then she moved quickly to stand behind the tripod and photograph the men as the door opened, the lens compressing distance until their truck was no longer a respectable distance from the house but a huge presence, large and threatening. It existed in stark contrast to the branches blowing in the breeze, overwhelming the three small people who stood in the doorway. The housekeeper was squinting against the rush of air. Jody clicked and knew she had the right picture. The photo caption would read: After the Wedding. It would be one of twenty or so pictures she took in the county that winter that, to her surprise, would make people stop dead in their tracks to stare — photographs that revealed what she knew about the world in 1989.

THREE

In the late afternoon, the sun moving toward the west struck the globe of the ceiling light, sending prisms of color against the walls, mottling the furniture, and electrifying the edges of the big silver mirror. Jody’s camera equipment was pushed against the back wall. A tangle of cords was piled up in the corner, making her think of blacksnakes stunned in their crawl. Will liked to put his rubber snakes in among the cords. Sometimes he would wind them more neatly and place his collection of windup toys in the corral. Often, when Jody began to pull out the cords, she would topple Godzilla, or a family of apes in graduated sizes. Ah, she thought, staring at her improvised home studio, what a noble profession. She had put on hip-waders to walk into the lake amid lily pads in order to photograph one wedding couple setting sail in a canoe. She had loaned her size-eight shoes to a bride whose heel began to wobble just as she was about to walk down the aisle and had photographed the ceremony in her stocking feet. In the beginning, when she had almost no money and hadn’t believed in her heart of hearts that she could support herself and Will by taking photographs, she had bargained with one groom’s father for a weekly supply of baked goods in lieu of a fee. At least half a dozen times before she met Mel she had wished that she was marrying the man the bride was marrying. She routinely lied in admiring wedding rings that were no more attractive than pebbles. Camera raised, she would close her eyes for a few seconds and pray that the marriage taking place would last, however unlikely it might seem at the moment — that it wouldn’t become some dreary statistic of failure down the road. She often went home with blossoms stuck in her hair and rice in her shoes. She had also gone home and wept, unaccountably.

Right now, Will was at his Friday-afternoon hobby class. So far, he had made fourteen ashtrays (she did not smoke) as well as a dozen tiny human forms with arms outstretched so that they resembled Mel’s favorite corkscrew. Mel thought that whatever Will produced was a work of genius. Mel had also been presented with several ashtrays and had been told at great length about the ones that broke during firing. The ashtrays were lined up on Mel’s desk at work (when they were in New York last, he had taken Will to see them), and he assured Will that everyone at the gallery admired them greatly. It made Jody feel a little bad that she stored so many things Will gave her in the corner cabinet, but really, what was she supposed to do with so many presents?

Duncan knocked on the door. He had come to borrow her vacuum. Duncan was twenty-eight and young for his years. Mel was sure that he had a crush on her. He asked her opinion of cameras he would never buy, stood very tall when she complimented his cooking, and was always available to baby-sit if a sitter canceled at the last minute. Will assumed that Mel could follow up in teaching him ballet steps that Duncan had been showing him. He was entranced when Duncan snipped flowers from their stems and tucked the blossoms on trays of food he prepared, and he didn’t see why his mother wouldn’t adorn their dinner with sprigs of lilac. Duncan was always cheerful — and so hopeful — that even Mel occasionally made fun of him behind his back, rolling his eyes and posturing the way Duncan did when he was being praised.

“Are you sure?” Duncan said, standing in the hallway. “If you need it to clean up—”

“It gives me the perfect excuse not to vacuum,” Jody said. “Take it. Keep it as long as you want.”

“Well,” Duncan said, reaching into the deep pocket of his sheepskin coat and bringing out a little rectangle wrapped in foil. He thrust it toward her, the same way Will gave her something he was shy about handing over.

“Brandy walnut cake,” Duncan said. “It’s an improvement on the cake I made with hazelnut flour that you liked so much.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said. “It isn’t necessary to give me something just because you’re borrowing the vacuum, though.”

“Not because it’s necessary. Because you’re one of my best testers.”

“Thank you,” she said again. She opened the door of the hall closet. He rushed forward and took out the vacuum. Previously, he had borrowed books, blankets, vases, and her slide projector. Since he was a caterer, he could hardly borrow a cup of sugar. When he returned the things, he always brought her something in return for the favor: beeswax candles, tulip bulbs, a brass stirring spoon.

“Babette’s Feast is playing at the movies this week,” he said. “Have you seen it? I was wondering if—”

“Thanks,” she said. “Actually, I have seen it.”

“Who’s baby-sitting on Halloween?” he said.

“Will’s going to a party.”

He nodded. “I was supposed to cater that Halloween party you’re photographing, but the guy canceled.”

“He canceled the party?”

“No. The food. He must be using somebody cheaper. I got the feeling he didn’t like my prices.”

She shrugged. “Then he’s a creep,” she said. “Your prices are fair. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m catering quite a few things on Halloween,” he said. “He invited me to come to the party anyway, but I don’t think I’m going to go.” He looked at the vacuum. “Well,” he said, “I ought to be going.”

“Thanks for the cake,” she said. Didn’t he realize that she was anxious for him to leave? “Maybe I’ll see you if you decide to go to the party.”

He nodded. “You might want to put the cake in the refrigerator if you’re not going to eat it right away,” he said.

“I will,” she said. “Thanks again.”

“Let me know if it’s not sweet enough. I like to get by with as little sugar as possible.”

“I’m sure it’s perfect.”

“But let me know if it isn’t,” he said.

She looked at him. He looked at the vacuum. “Find out who’s catering it if you can,” he said.

“I could call the next day and ask if anybody else got sick,” she said.

“No, don’t do that,” he said, alarmed.

“Kidding,” she said, smiling.

He clicked his fingers. “I forgot to bring Mel’s book back.”

“I’m sure he’s in no hurry for it,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “maybe I’ll see you at the party.”

She opened the door and smiled. Duncan lifted the vacuum and waved goodbye as he went down the walk. Like a child, he looked over his shoulder at the end of the walkway to see if she was still standing there. She was, but not because she was seeing him safely on his way. Mary Vickers’s car had just pulled up to the curb. They were going to the playground to sit and talk while Will and Wagoner played, as they did two or three times a week.

Will was involved in G.I. Joe’s taking over a new kingdom (a cordoned-off area of the bedroom rug, laid out by Mel during his visit the week before: a swarm of plastic cowboys and Indians, with the addition of free-standing castles that Mel had laboriously cut out of a book and glued together), but when the old Ford coasted to the curb, he began to run down the stairs. He and Wag were still too young to have inhibitions about throwing themselves in each other’s arms and instantly resuming their important talk that had been heartlessly interrupted by Mary or Jody when they last insisted upon parting them. They did make a slight parody of their quick embraces, though perhaps it only seemed that way to Jody and they were not even aware of it. The slightly bumped foreheads and the fingers that tickled as they grabbed each other’s waist might have been true awkwardness, the quickly locked eyes a conditioned response from infancy. In any case, they formed a unit of their own that always made Mary and Jody instant outsiders, so that they moved awkwardly toward each other, conscious of the lack of passion they themselves displayed.

Mary Vickers was Jody’s best friend, but when intimacies were exchanged, they tended to be said with dropped eyes, and certain topics, such as Mary’s marriage to Wagoner (her son was — and Jody never stopped marveling at this — Wagoner Fisk Vickers III), were never alluded to unless Mary initiated the conversation. Jody was better at not asking Mary why she didn’t divorce her husband than Mary was about not prying into the reasons why Jody didn’t marry Mel and move to New York. Then again, although she would hesitate to say it aloud, Jody considered herself more in control than Mary Vickers. More of a survivor, if truth be told.

Duncan had been caught in the maelstrom of the arrival. Holding the vacuum aloft, waving to Jody, and exchanging a quick greeting with Mary Vickers, he bowed out, heading toward his car. Of course Mary Vickers and Jody agreed that Duncan was a sweet, harmless soul — someone whose positive attitude they could only be in awe of.

“Don’t go upstairs,” Jody called, seeing the boys’ feet disappear up the stairs. “If we’re going to the playground, we’re going to the playground. G.I. Joe can win the war when you come home.”

Will looked over the banister. “I just wanted to show him,” he said.

Will had a way of always seeming moderate. He also had a way of making her remarks seem too cute. Of appearing adult, while she called out shrilly like a child.

“Show him for two minutes. Then we’re leaving,” she said.

Will hesitated. “We can look later,” he said.

Clever. This meant that after the playground they would return to the house. Jody looked at Mary Vickers.

“Let’s go,” Mary Vickers said. “We want to get there while it’s still light.”

Will began to walk down the stairs.

“Wag!” Mary Vickers called.

He stomped down, overtaking Will.

“So is Duncan coming to the park with us?” Will said.

Wagoner stood at his mother’s side, sulking.

“Duncan just came to borrow the vacuum. You didn’t express any interest in Duncan when he was here.”

“I didn’t know he was leaving,” Will said.

Was Will really hurt that Duncan wasn’t going to the play-ground with them? Will’s acting the part of the perfect host, a little late, was making her feel less than the perfect hostess. She searched his child’s face: guileless. He thought whatever he thought.

“Duncan’s gone,” she said. “And we’re gone, too, the minute you put on your coat.”

The bench Mary Vickers and Jody sat on was across from the Episcopal church, whose bells rang early every Sunday morning and on numerous other occasions — so often, in fact, that the bells might have heralded the first fallen leaf of autumn and the first star of twilight. The bells were one of the things Jody always listened for, along with the daily screech of sirens, which began early in the morning, reached a hiatus around four o’clock, then sounded sporadically throughout the night. There was nothing in the newspaper to explain why the rescue squad, fire department, and ambulance constantly raced through the streets. It was Mel’s belief that the sirens were turned on every time the men went to grab a burger at McDonald’s. When you were driving, ambulances and rescue-squad wagons inevitably shot past, barely braking to go through the lights, weaving into oncoming traffic, stabilizing just as they seemed about to turn over in their wild trajectory toward one of the hospitals.

Will liked the sirens; for him, the potential for disaster was exciting. In his experience toppled soldiers shed no blood, and he had not been present when G.I. Joe got his cheek wound.

His own experience of pain had been the result of falling on the blacktop in back of the school, or being stricken with a sore throat or an earache, and without Jody’s telling him to be brave, he had learned that he should not cry unnecessarily. The other boys had taught him that, the way they had taught him to use a slingshot and to call breasts hooters. Recently, Mel had been trying to teach him to whistle through a piece of grass held between his thumbs. Will’s progress so far was what it would have been if he had been instructed to whistle through pudding. The nicely shaped little-boy hands, when the grass blade was clamped between the sides of the thumbs, suddenly looked boneless, molded from clay, and as he frowned at the blades of grass Jody had an inkling of what it would be like if she lived to see Will an old man, myopically staring at objects held close to his eyes. Mel felt that if Will could master whistling through grass, that would be a good preface to his calling “Hooters!” That was what he had said lying in bed the week before, trying to get a rise out of her. It amused Mel to pretend that he intended to corrupt Will — that he was her enemy, as was the passage of time, which would change her baby soon enough anyway.

Will and Wagoner were climbing the ladder to go down the slide, “the up-down” in Will’s baby parlance, shooting to the bottom, racing around the side to climb the ladder again. Mary Vickers pretended to be an announcer telling the audience, sotto voce, about an upcoming show, in which Will ’n’ Wag, as she called the performers, would be seen doing various amusing stunts sure to strike fear into their mothers’ hearts. Sounding like an excited sports announcer narrating a batter’s triumphant trot around the bases, she crossed her arms and whispered to Jody: “Now Wag’s in the lead, coming down the slide, and we can see on the sidelines that the squirrel who’s been watching is scared. Not so his sidekick, Will, who’s four for four in successful rides to the bottom. Wag’s dusting the slide — time out — and we can expect that the next ride down is going to be a particularly fast one. You know, our audience out there might be interested to know that part of the success of sliding depends on a slick slide that does not have a residue of sand. But back to the main action, and then at our station break, folks, an ad for Valium.”

The summer before, Mary Vickers had had her first affair, with a playwright who had moved to town to team-teach a drama course at the university. Mary did not meet him there but ran into him by chance, at the all-night drugstore, where he was buying 3-D postcards of hawks floating over Skyline Drive at sunset. She had stopped at the bulletin board by the Kong game inside the sliding glass doors to see if anyone was advertising to do lawn work. The playwright came out then, slightly high on a few shots of Cuervo Gold, holding one of the postcards and snorting with appreciation. He showed her the card, as if she had been there waiting for him to exit. “Is this really out there?” he had asked. He had come to Virginia from New York for the summer. Walking to the parking lot, she suggested he take 29 south to North Garden, then cut through to route 250, as a good way to get to the mountains. Jody supposed, when Mary first told her these things, that it must have been obvious to Mary that she and the man would become lovers. It had happened between one visit Mary and Jody made to the playground and the next visit, so that when Mary sat on the bench and toed the dust like a sad horse, Jody had not been surprised — only perplexed that neither Mary nor the man thought it would last. It didn’t last past the end of the semester, but during the period when they were meeting for clandestine pepper vodkas and holding hands early in the morning at Spudnuts, eating doughnuts and licking the sugar from each other’s lips in the parking lot before going their separate ways, Jody had taken a photograph of Mary Vickers, naked to the waist, with a feather boa wrapped around her neck. Mary later mailed it to New York so it would be waiting for him when he went home. It was a soft-focus glamour-girl shot that Jody had sepia-toned, in which Mary — except for her sad, expressive eyes — looked like a little girl masquerading in her mother’s clothes.

Not long after she photographed Mary Vickers, she had taken the boa from the shelf and shot a roll of color to explore its other possibilities. In a decorative way, it could make anything it was draped over look humorous, so she had let herself take a few of those shots, trying to work her way toward something more interesting. She coiled it so that it made a fuzzy turban on top of a melon. She photographed it weaving through her fingers. She photographed it stretched out, bouncing light off a reflector. Then she tried a twenty-second exposure, using only candles for illumination. When she studied the contact sheets later, she saw her inclination had been right. With a starburst filter, the tips of fur narrowed into threads that flashed to the top of the photograph like a spiderweb gleaming in sunlight.

On the bench near the fence, two mothers were ignoring their children and talking animatedly. The subject was former surgeon general C. Everett Koop, who, one of the women said, had apparently crept around his neighborhood with his mother when he was a child, carrying a garbage can that contained an ether-soaked rag; they would capture a cat, and the surgeon general would take it home to operate on. Whether Mary Vickers was paying any attention to the conversation was unclear, but the woman hearing it looked frightened to death. Mary Vickers was looking at the spot where Will and Wagoner crouched, studying something in the grass. Then she looked at her watch. She shrugged, because she knew Jody had seen her checking the time, and wound the scarf around her throat and pulled the end, pretending to hang herself. Jody knew that Mary Vickers envied her because she didn’t have to go home and cook a meal. Will was always happy to eat cereal with fruit, or the two of them would have what Jody called a many-colored meal: She would arrange side by side on a plate a hot dog, a narrow squirt of mustard, a slice of avocado, a wedge of tomato, a carrot, a piece of green pepper. She and Will said nothing about their secret meals when Mel was there. Either they ate proper dinners she or Mel cooked, or they went out.

“It’s time to go,” Jody said as Wagoner ran by, arms stretched out like airplane wings. Will ran behind him, tilting his own arms and humming. Jody and Mary Vickers might as well have been monsters who had risen from the ground to claw in the boys’ direction. Please. Go back to the underworld. Don’t be our mothers. No surrender to hooter monsters with grabby hands and obsessive ideas about the necessity of sleep. Just die! Begone! Let us live free!

Across the playground the pilots were giggling, ready for lift-off, eager to leave the grassy runway behind.

“Maybe I should get on a plane and go to New York to visit him,” Mary Vickers said, shrugging again and getting up to stare at the two boys in the distance. She plunged her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I have to admit that I envy you,” she said. “Being able to plan your life so you can be gone when you want to. Being in love with somebody you can actually go and stay with.”

“Mel’s just a romantic,” Jody said. “He’s romanticized me so that he thinks I’m a great artist, and that I’d make a great wife.” Her words surprised her. She was not used to expressing her doubts, even by making questions into statements.

“Aren’t you thankful that somebody believes in you?” Mary Vickers said.

The pilots had expected artillery fire, but Jody was speaking softly as she came up behind them. They veered off course and were allowed to try for greater altitude one last time.

“Did Mel ever tell you he ran out of gas when he was driving Wag and Will to the lake?” Mary Vickers said. “He wanted me to keep it a secret. He thought you’d think he was irresponsible. Another time he called from New York and wanted to know what your favorite color was. He didn’t know your favorite color.”

Jody smiled. “You think everything he does is endearing.”

“I told you,” Mary Vickers said. “I think you’re lucky. I envy you.”

“You could leave Wagoner and do something else,” Jody said. If Mary was going to keep after her, she thought it only fair that she be allowed to mention the unmentionable.

“You go first,” Mary Vickers said. “Without you I’d go crazy. That would make it a lot easier to leave him.”

FOUR

Jody sat next to Mel in the porch swing, pushing them gently back and forth with the tips of her toes. Mel was a tall man with disproportionately large hands and feet he was used to being kidded about. The dark brown eyes he had inherited from his Greek father were his best feature; from his English mother he had gotten his narrow lips, slight chin, and wavy hair. She had met his parents once, years before, when they visited Mel in Virginia. He had dropped out of business school and stayed around trying to figure out what to do, meanwhile writing a novel he never finished. He was rescued — if that was what it was — by his former roommate from Exeter, who opened a gallery in New York City. Mel was in charge of the bookkeeping and administration of the gallery, but more and more often he dropped the names of the celebrities who’d come in to browse, mentioned the parties he tagged along to, discussions held below Sandro Chia’s mural at Palio. Jody listened to his accounts of city life with the same mixture of affection and skepticism she reserved for Will’s theory that G.I. Joes had proliferated all over the planet, so that everyone in the world but him had dozens. Will would come right out and say I want; Mel implied it, and could contain his breathless excitement better than Will.

Mel’s plane from New York had been late, as usual. The long-promised airport improvements had nothing to do with flights; instead, bulldozers plowed up fields to expand the parking lots. It was no longer possible to abandon your car some distance from the airport to escape paying for parking. As Mel liked to point out, many of the so-called improvements in town were detractions. The city council couldn’t decide whether to build a bypass or widen the highway again to accommodate the traffic. Signs saying Security Watch were posted on downtown streets as often as houses were broken into. Mel had been using these things as leverage, trying to convince her to move to New York.

When she called the airport and heard that his plane would be delayed an hour, she had rounded up Will and Wag, dumped Captain Magic Rainbow Beads into the tub, and helped the boys undress as the big bubbles rose. Blown from the palm of the hand, they stayed airborne as long as Pustefix bubbles sent sailing from the bubble wand. She launched Will’s rubber turtle, which could float with a bar of soap in its back but now held a devotional candle, which she lit when she turned off the water. The two boys climbed into the tub with their Night-Viper G.I. Joes. After a few seconds, Will blew out the candle so Jody could remove the little glass cup and Joe could have a ride in the turtle’s belly. It occurred to Jody that an idyll such as that might have been what some real soldier envisioned, dying in combat: to be set afloat, if not among the bulrushes, then amid the Captain Magic bubbles, safe in the hollow belly of a grinning turtle. She got wet helping them soap up and rinse off. Out of the tub, Wag exaggerated his shivering and suffering, allowing her to fold him in a big bath towel and hold him against her legs. Will took hold of his towel and shimmied, like a person about to lose a Hula-Hoop that had already slipped to his knees. Neither boy would let her come near him with a brush. Wag had pleaded to bring the big damp bath towel to play with in the backseat as she drove to the airport to get Mel. All the way there they held it high, a sail that wouldn’t fill with wind but that they made to flap erratically, giggling behind it as she took the winding curves. Later Mel had gotten them to bed with almost no trouble, though he was probably wondering, as was she, whether the house didn’t seem almost too quiet.

“No wonder kids have nightmares,” Mel said. “Everything in those books has to be made literal. It says, ‘The wind that night had a bite to it,’ and there’s a drawing of a gaping mouth with shark’s teeth.” He bared his teeth and gently sank them into Jody’s shoulder. Then he leaned back, sighing dramatically. “It’ll be his lucky day when he can read pornography under the sheets with a flashlight,” he said.

Wag was spending the night because Mary Vickers’s husband had come home drunk. Mel had used this information, too, as leverage, saying that people were no different wherever you went. He implied that he was a saint, compared to men like Wagoner Vickers.

“How can you compare yourself to a fifty-year-old insurance agent?” Jody said.

“How can you pretend to be excited by taking pictures of glassy-eyed girls holding nosegays when you should be taking serious photographs?”

“Don’t put me down for supporting myself,” she said. “I spend a lot of time photographing for myself.”

He had her, though. He was only repeating what she had said to him on the phone earlier in the week, when she had been feeling blue. Mel had made the mistake of trying to bolster her with praise, which only resulted in her becoming reflexively cynical. It was easy to be admired in a small town, she had said. Reassuring to know that you could make a life for yourself. But it was also a dead end. Even the wedding photographs themselves had started to make her sad: documents that would allow people to look back and wonder about their naïveté or their self-righteousness that would one day turn to skepticism. That had been Jody’s reaction when she looked back at photographs of herself and Wayne. She could see that she had romanticized their little house into something it had never been. That she had remembered the landscapes as more inspirational than they were, filled with scrub and pines and mountains too far in the distance. Even the photographs she had been so proud of in those days now seemed terribly forced: an obvious detail seen with a too-practiced eye; the beginner’s conventionally unconventional cropping; filters that artificially changed what would have radiated as intrinsically complicated if photographed correctly. These days she was transfixed by one of Man Ray’s rayographs of what looked like a white ship in a bottle, fuzzy enough to be a dream ship, the bottle floating against a cloudy sky, and by Coplans’s incisive examination of his own aging body. She wanted to be capable of working with such exactitude. And only privacy would make that possible: no more polite comments about the weather as she worked; no bottles of champagne unless she was so proud of what she turned out that she went out and bought the champagne.

“Are we ever going to take that walk, or are we going to sit here with horns locked all night?” Mel said.

She went into the house without comment to get a warmer sweater. A cold wind had begun to blow. Rummaging through the hall closet, she thought of the illustration in Will’s book and smiled at Mel’s comment about everything in storybooks having to be personified. Sometimes Mel doctored Will’s books for her amusement. In one that gave samples of things mentioned, such as a scratch-and-sniff patch that smelled of roses, he had crossed out the word “Straw” on one of the pages and written “Kiefer” above it. At the end of another book he had taped an index card with an alternate ending, in which all the characters flushed each other down the toilet and went to Happy Sewer Land. Will knew Mel’s changes were jokes and would never let her pass them off without explaining them in detail. She blamed Will’s crayoning in the stairwell on Mel’s scribbling in his books. Mel maintained that Will was a budding artist. “Would you rather have him take it out on the stairwell now or grow up and waste his time being Cy Twombly?” he had said. Still, she had made the two of them repaint the stairwell. They had come upstairs with white paint on the tips of their noses and brushes held behind them like horses’ tails and pranced around the kitchen. She worried that they thought of her as uptight every time she tried to preserve order. She had a sense, too, of how ridiculous she sounded every time she tried to cajole Will. For some reason Mel never sounded ridiculous, but she did, saying, “Oh, don’t you want to hear a bedtime story? I’ll turn all the adults into funny animals and pretend that one of your favorite TV characters is there with them. It’s a party that you can go to without having a bath! Just close your eyes. I’ll get you a puppy and double your allowance and never again cut your fingernails if only you’ll listen to this very, very important bedtime story.”

Bedtime was always a difficult time. Sometimes she was convinced that Will did not love her at all and that if he were reincarnated as a cowboy he would drop a lasso around her neck. If he became a doctor, his bedside manner would consist of walking away from her bed. As a dragon, he would breathe fire into her face. His desire to escape was transparent, yet she was also sure that he would marry her if she were not his mother. As it was, he pushed her away when he could stand to, hurt her when he couldn’t stop himself, and nestled against her at night when he was too tired to be anything but her baby. Sometimes he crept into the bedroom early in the morning, on the run from having been imprisoned in some dream. Other times he put his toy stethoscope around his neck and listened to the heartbeat of the table leg, the porcelain vase, the amaryllis stalk — those mysterious, silent rumblings that went on in the adult world all the time. He watched TV and imitated the stance of cowboys about to rope a steer, although what Jody noticed were the scars on his knees. He had fallen on the blacktop at school so many times. You would think that a gathering tornado drove him to race for the distance, at a speed no one could sustain.

She felt a strong bond with Will, but it was Mel who adored him sensibly, Mel who was flexible enough to use common sense instead of preconceived ideas, Mel who could silence Will by looking pained by what he was doing quicker than she could stop him by grabbing his hand and pulling him. Mel was gracious — it was one of his best qualities; he was genuinely gracious. He said that because Will was not his child, he found it easier to go to the heart of the issue.

“I’m going to check on them,” Mel said as he passed by Jody, who was rearranging jackets in the hall closet. A mummylike stillness in the room upstairs had made him suspicious. (He had come in to see if Jody had been swallowed by the silence; he should have known that she was brooding — brooding and preparing herself for an argument if he didn’t back down and stop pressuring her to move.)

Mel walked close to Will’s perfectly straight body, put his nose lightly on the tip of Will’s nose and Will rose up, squealing. Wag also gave up his pretense of being asleep.

“We were playing mole,” Will said. One of their favorite games was mole. They burrowed deep into the covers Jody piled on the bed — she had a horror of awakening cold with not enough blankets — and twitched their noses, following the scent of buried treasure, or quickly flapping back a corner of the covers and letting the wind tell them the best route to escape from their enemies.

“Finish playing mole and go to sleep before we get back, or we’ll both be in trouble,” Mel whispered.

Coming downstairs, he took his scarf off the banister, where he had draped it when he arrived. It was going to be too cold for late-night walks soon. The rustling of leaves would end. The mountains would be easier to see, fading from gold to bluish gray.

Jody got off the porch swing when he came out of the house. She had been worrying that if they married she would take him for granted. Not that he would take her for granted, but that she would take him for granted. He wanted to have a child with her, and she did not want more children. This meant that she would let him down and be disappointed in herself, while he would no doubt survive with his feelings intact. He always encouraged her. If she succeeded as a photographer, she feared, she might not need his encouragement in the same way. She needed to need him. Need enforced manners on people. It was only children, who made no distinction between what they needed and what they wanted, who were confused enough, or honest enough, to give in to thrashing in the presence of whoever foiled them.

He put his arm around Jody’s shoulder. She had a sudden thought, turned, and locked the door. He saw her questioning look and folded his hands as if in prayer. She hadn’t been in the house when Will spoke, so she didn’t know the boys were awake. He put his cheek on his hands and closed his eyes, letting her assume, from the gesture, that Will and Wag were sleeping the sleep of angels. He felt a twinge about deliberately misleading her, but finally it seemed a minor matter: sniffing moles or slumbering angels. They were safe in bed.

He thought about telling her that he had made inquiries about the possibility of Will’s attending Collegiate. That he thought they should move to a larger apartment in New York — farther downtown, where you could see the sky. That she could have a darkroom in the same building where he worked, in SoHo.

Her head was resting on his shoulder. They had taken this walk so many times. He had resolved, so many times, that he would succeed in persuading her to marry him. Silently, he began to rehearse his opening line, so that he was surprised himself when only a tired “I love you” came out, and then nothing more.

FIVE

King Kong was a mystery, but Jody suspected the frog was Bob Walsh, because it was quite tall and had Walsh’s way of walking. Many people had taken off their masks or headpieces, but King Kong had revealed nothing of himself. She had taken a photograph of him holding his hairy costume away from his chest and shaking it to allow some air to circulate inside.

Jody was photographing a Halloween party at an abandoned church twenty miles outside of town. She had been hired by one of the men who owned the hundred acres and planned on tearing down the old clapboard church. Earlier in the year she had photographed the same man’s daughter’s wedding, which took place in an orchard adjacent to his Earlysville property. He had made it clear that if she hadn’t been involved with someone, he would have liked to have an affair. Will had been along that day, dressed in a gray suit that resembled Mel’s favorite suit, because at the last minute the baby-sitter had canceled, and she couldn’t get Duncan or Mary Vickers on the phone. She had promised Will a Lego train if his behavior was impeccable, and as the father of the bride tried to ingratiate himself with Jody, Will kept coming to her side — and her rescue — with visions of train tracks and imaginary puffs of smoke rising in his eyes. Lowering his voice, as if his whispered tones would escape Will’s notice, the father of the bride suggested having a drink, in order to offer her some advice about real estate investments in the county. She was curt with him because she wasn’t interested, but also amazed that he thought she had that kind of money. The following day, three dozen irises had arrived, and that afternoon Will’s new train whizzed through Iris-land: water glasses filled with flowers meant to approximate trees the train would pass by.

At the wedding, she had moved away quickly once the man’s intentions were clear, walking across the grass, holding Will’s hand. She wondered how many times women tempted Mel in New York. Mary Vickers’s expression about Jody’s refusal to make a permanent commitment to Mel was that she was “playing with fire.” Hardly a unique way to express the idea of danger, but over time Jody had come to interpret what Mary Vickers meant by “fire” as having to do with all the matches carefully cupped in waiters’ hands as they ignited the white candles on your dinner table; all the flame-haired beauties who had back-combed and sprayed their hair to make it wild and electric; all the hot tips you got every day, about as-yet-unannounced corporate mergers, about which doorman would tell you honestly how many tenants might be about to die. Mary insisted upon seeing New York as either burning or smoldering, whether it involved physical passion, or the burnt-rubber smell that rose off the streets from so many slammed brakes, or lunatics who wired themselves and blew apart on the subway. Of course Mary Vickers feared and hated New York so much because she had convinced herself that it was the city — anthropomorphized as a burning witch — that had taken her lover away from her. She was sure that if Jody didn’t watch out, time and the city could well do the same with Mel.

Jody looked at Mel across the room. He was dressed as a stalk of celery. He had borrowed the costume from a ballerina whose husband was one of the new artists represented by his gallery. BAM popped into Jody’s mind, and she smiled. She didn’t think Mel would turn to ashes. She still was not sure that marrying him and moving to New York was the right thing. Though she would never say it to Mary Vickers, her hesitancy had less to do with the vague feeling that the moment wasn’t right than with the belief that the more she withheld, the more Mel would desire her. She did not think it was necessary to be withholding in a physical way, but she hesitated to talk too much, to have too many discussions. She and Wayne had talked their relationship to death, but when he left, he had taught her an important lesson by leaving unexpectedly and silently. It had been a rude awakening, but later a relief, to find that saying nothing could be the strongest way of communicating — and also the strongest way to flirt: A hesitant shrug or narrowing of your eyes in concentration as you listened could make a man’s heart beat harder. You could honestly say “I don’t know” and have any number of men assume that you only wanted to keep your sphinxlike secrets. From the moment she started studying photographs she had given herself permission to move farther and farther away from Wayne. It had driven him crazy when she taped on the walls photographs of people she did not know. He hated it that she began to submerge herself in a world of nameless faces. He saw himself losing her to a drug called silver halide.

But they stayed lovers. That was the other part of the trick: to get as close physically as the other person wanted. To jump into the tub when they were showering, pull cold champagne from under the bed, announce on the way to dinner with another couple that you were not wearing underwear. If you came through physically, men would give you a lot of time to decide whether you would marry them, because some part of them would foolishly think that you had already chosen.

She stood by one of the narrow, drafty church windows and realized that it would probably be easy to reenter the church some other day, even if it was locked. There might be enough Halloween souvenirs and enough character to the rundown church itself to make photographing the empty interior worthwhile. The church faced west; late afternoon would be the time to come. She unscrewed her camera from the tripod and began to take a few last pictures with the lens wide open, holding the camera above her head, aiming down and guessing about what would make it into the frame.

Mel came up beside her, the leafy celery top hanging down his chest like a pale green jabot.

“I just called the Careys’,” he said. “Will’s on his second pair of fangs. Nothing seems to be winding down over there.”

“Where did you find a phone?” she said, surprised.

“I struck up a conversation with a guy who had a phone in his car.” He nodded toward the door.

“You found somebody with a cellular phone in Charlottesville?”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who’s always telling me it’s not Siberia. If I had my way, we’d be in New York right this minute.” He put his arm around her shoulder. Jody was dressed in 1950s regalia: a crinoline, over which she wore a skirt embossed with a poodle that flashed blue rhinestone eyes; a pink blouse with a silver circle pin; white bobby sox; loafers with bright copper pennies. She had pulled her hair back in a pony tail.

“You know,” Mel said, “you look like the type who wants to party all night but won’t put out.”

“Not true,” she said. “As silly as this seems, it’s work. And if you remember—”

He put his fingers over her lips as Bozo strutted by, honking his bulbous nose. Bozo had acquired a fur cape and a wife who had pushed her eye mask to the top of her head. She was trying to steer Bozo toward the front door, but he was drunk and got away from her, swirling his fur like a bullfighter’s cape as she went toward him.

“I remember,” Mel said.

Before leaving the house, they had had sex in the shower while Will marched his new G.I. Joe (his fourth) around the living-room floor, making it do maneuvers over such obstacles as Mel’s running shoes and his own plastic-wrapped bubble-gum Dracula fangs, which he was to put in his mouth later that night. Will loved Halloween. The costumes and shrill cries at the door for candy that had frightened her as a child had never intimidated him. It was interesting to see what a child feared on his own, what fears were communicated to him, and what he was absolutely fearless about. The first time he tasted a soda he had been as shocked as if he’d drunk acid. He shrank from cats but would pat any dog. Halloween was a breeze, but as a small child he had not wanted the overhead light to be put off when the Christmas tree lights were turned on. Vampires were shocking but fascinating. Joan Rivers would make him run from the room. He loved cap pistols but was afraid of the vacuum. The flamingo night-light was scarier than being left in darkness. Will was afraid to put his face in water but fearless in the seat of a bumper car. He once cried because he looked into a man’s mouth and saw gold fillings and thought he could catch them, like a cold.

The band had switched from rock and roll to the big band sound, and Richard Nixon led King Kong onto the dance floor, both stepping aside to avoid colliding with Bozo the matador, still swishing the fur cape. Here was a roomful of people, Jody thought, most of them parents, behaving as if they were children so out of control they had to be threatened. Monsters that all parents swore existed only in their children’s nightmares cavorted with one another, plotting mischief, entering the den of smoke, uncorking bottles with no regret, even if genies were trapped inside.

Mel smiled at Jody. “Too caught up in this craziness to take pictures?”

“No,” she said. “I was just wondering who’d have a cellular phone in this town.”

“Would you like me to get you one?” he said. “Maybe in lieu of an engagement ring? Keep up with the times?”

She shook her head no.

“A cop,” he said.

“A cop?”

“A private investigator.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“That’s who had the phone. A guy who’s a private investigator. He’s doing what you’re doing: taking pictures. But he’s got a tiny hand-held job. Some woman who’s off in Aruba hired him to get a picture of her husband with his lover. At first he thought it was going to be impossible, because everybody was in costume, but he came anyway and got the big payoff because the guy’s in regular shoes. They’re the only shoes the guy ever wears. He said he already had a dozen pictures of the guy and the secretary, and that the guy was always wearing those same black wing-tips.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Why would I be putting you on? It’s not to my advantage to make this place sound exciting.”

“But how did he happen to tell you that?”

“I went outside on the off chance there was a phone any-where in sight. He was talking on the phone in his car. I hung around, and he let me use the phone. He was happy that he had what he needed and could split.”

“You just walked up and asked if you could use his phone?”

Mel nodded. “What’s so strange about that? I said I wanted to make sure my kid was okay.”

She felt a pang when he said “my kid.” Will really did seem to be as much Mel’s child as her own. He had Mel’s way of sitting with his legs uncrossed, both feet dangling because he could not yet plant them on the floor. He bit his bottom lip when he was concentrating, like Mel. He had Mel’s way of saying no without shaking his head as an accompanying gesture. Both of them often threw their pillows on the floor when they slept. And of course they never drank the right beverage from the right glass. For a drink of water Will would take a tiny glass; for an inch of apple juice he’d reach for a beer glass. It was just the cast of his eyes that sometimes reminded her of Wayne — that way of looking slightly down and to the side, even when nothing important seemed to be happening there.

“Guess who!” a flamingo said, stepping in front of her. She could smell alcohol on the flamingo’s breath. Like the private detective, she looked down and saw Duncan’s worn Adidas, though she could have told from the voice alone.

“Duncan,” she said, and he nodded without taking off his headpiece. A palm tree stood next to him: someone in a badly made outfit fashioned out of a sheet painted to look like wood. Big green-painted cardboard palm fronds protruded from the shoulders. The person wore a black eye mask, with a small painted moon curving over one of the eyes.

“Take our picture,” Duncan said, stepping in front of the camera. He put a pink wing around the palm tree. “Mel,” Duncan said, “I really enjoyed that Harry Mulisch book you let me borrow. I keep forgetting to bring it back.”

Jody inclined her head and looked into the camera. There they were: two happy, silly people who had no doubt given great thought as to how they would appear. They didn’t seem that different from the engaged couples who put on their best clothes and sat side by side to smile for posterity.

As Duncan and the palm tree walked away, a dog came up and sniffed Jody’s leg. A fireman tugged at the dog’s leash, smiling at Jody and Mel and saying that the dog was really a rabbit in disguise, but that he was a real fireman.

“I’m the woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec painting,” a blue-faced woman announced, butting her way in front of the camera.

Jody looked through the lens. The woman stood very still, chin resting on her shoulder.

“Got it,” Jody said, looking up. But she had not taken the picture. There was something about the woman she didn’t like — something deeper than the paint and the rakish hat. As the woman moved away Jody moved the tripod a little to the side, centering Mel in the picture. She did not take that picture either, because when she cared about someone, she didn’t like to waste time taking pictures that didn’t reveal him. Mel was sure that he was being photographed, though. He put the celery top back over his head and stood very formally, hands at his sides. Was it mock seriousness, or was he really so used to being accommodating? For a moment she felt vulnerable and sentimental, as if she wanted to rush into Mel’s arms.

That was the good thing about having a camera between you and the rest of the world: It afforded some protection, a way to stall for time. She walked forward and gave him only a quick hug. She could almost hear Mary Vickers’s voice: Playing with fire. She kissed Mel quickly on the lips. His lips were cool, as was his hand, which he put briefly on the back of her neck as they kissed.

She looked around for Mary Vickers, who had come as Cinderella, to say goodbye, but the room was very crowded.

It was possible that Mary Vickers had left early with Wagoner, who, as usual, had gotten drunk. Those thoughts flashed through her mind in the few seconds it took Mel to bend and zip her camera bag. Camera bag over his shoulder and tripod in her hand, the celery stalk and the American Bandstand cutie started out into the night.

As they left the church, Mary Vickers was about a mile ahead of them down the road. She had quarreled with Wagoner (if you could call it that — she insisted he turn over the car keys; he tossed them at her and walked off). She had sat in the cold car for a few minutes, expecting that he would come to his senses and reappear, but as she waited she got angrier and thought that he could find his own way home. One of his drinking buddies could escort him. One of those men whose faces got mottled by drink until they turned as rosy as the madras pants they wore.

Mary passed over a small bridge and looked at the moon glowing over a field. She drove by a trickle of a brook that passed under some willow trees. The spring before, during Will ’n’ Wag’s short-lived fascination with butterfly hunting, she and Jody and the boys had picnicked under those trees. Jody had described to her a photograph of Nabokov, running forward with a butterfly net — Jody could make other people’s photographs seem more real than what was actually in front of her as she spoke — and they had agreed that, at the boys’ early age, it was impossible to say what interests would keep up, what hobbies were worth investing money in. Mel had fashioned the butterfly nets from netting that held the padding around busts that had been shipped to the gallery in New York, and sturdy sticks he had collected on a walk. In spite of everyone’s complaints that there were no available men in New York, when you did find a New York man, he seemed too good to be true. It was her ex-lover she was thinking of.

Licking her chapped lips, she remembered his taste for alcohol that burned going down — drinks meant to get you wired, none of those diluted bourbon-and-waters that Wagoner sipped until bedtime. She tried to think that she had been attracted, yet again, to another alcoholic, but that was an oversimplification. She had been attracted to someone who was energetic and a little crazy, and who had ventured to involve her in his flirtation with danger.

A sepia shadow spread in front of the car. She found it difficult to believe that what she saw was real, that it wasn’t just some externalization of what had been going through her mind. It was as if Impossibility had materialized — taken real form — so that she could hit up against it. What had been going through her mind? The willow trees sprang up. She had bit her lip as the car slammed to a stop. There was the cold taste of blood in her mouth.

She had hit a deer. All in a second, her thoughts and her car collided with a deer that ran in front of the headlights. She touched her seat belt to make sure it was fastened. She looked out the front window. For a vertiginous second, the shadow rose and twisted before it crumpled, like something in a horror movie. She fiddled with the shoulder strap of the seat belt like a lady lightly fingering her corsage. Below her fingers, her heart was racing. She said — probably out loud—“My God. I hit a deer.”

There were no other cars. She kept searching the rearview mirror. She looked out the window on the passenger’s side and saw the moon again, but no cars coming in either direction. In a few seconds headlights flashed into the rearview, but by then it seemed she had been sitting there for an hour. She was too shaken to get out of the seat. Rather than having an urge to bolt, she felt glued in place: a heavy person, a ludicrous statue, a woman in a formal dress sitting behind the wheel of a car, a deer crumpled in front of her headlights.

Lights began to blink behind her. A man in a tuxedo who had been at the party was tapping on the window, asking if she was all right. His round-faced wife, who had dressed as Mao, was standing behind her husband, her hands clasped over her mouth. Eventually she lowered one hand and made a circular motion.

The window rolled down, but Mary Vickers didn’t remember having done it. New York, she thought suddenly, but what she was saying was “No. I’m fine.” She was fine, but she had hit a deer. Mao’s hand was now clasping her hand, which gripped the seat belt.

As more cars stopped, Mao helped her out of the car. A real estate agent dressed as Peter Pan ran past everyone and bent over the deer. “Stay back,” he shouted. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said that he had a rifle. That he had a rifle, but he didn’t think he was going to have to use it. Suddenly Wagoner had come from nowhere and was looking at Mary, perplexed. Or maybe he was worried. Or angry, because people in front of the car were assessing the damage. One headlight shot off to the side, cockeyed. There was the moon, over to the right, and the beam of light to the left from the headlight.

The deer was dead. Wagoner, as if he had been just a moment’s apparition, had suddenly disappeared (later, he would tell her that once he saw she was all right he ran down the hillside to take a piss before his bladder exploded). “Let’s move the cars,” Batman was saying. “We’ll have a real pileup if we don’t.”

The wind blew a swirl of leaves against Mary Vickers’s leg as she stood shakily outside the car, and she jumped, thinking that something had stabbed her. She could smell the dead deer’s blood, and taste blood inside her mouth. Mel stood beside her, frowning and examining her cut lip. If Mel was there, then Jody must be there. She looked down and saw that the side mirror had broken. Glass beads spread out in the road as though fish had spawned there. Was this the same world in which little boys chased butterflies? She turned and looked at Jody.

Jody had been moving fast. She had a roll of 1000 ASA in her camera and was in the process of taking photographs of Casper the Ghost as he crouched with Peter Pan by the car headlights. As she moved the camera and Mary Vickers’s startled look suddenly became the central image of the frame, she clicked quickly. Thank you, God, she was thinking, for the invention of the auto winder. The next shot she took was the photograph that would later be blown up and hung on the large wall to the right-hand side of Haveabud’s gallery in New York — the primary display wall, the place people always looked as they began to find their way into the depths of the gallery: Mary Vickers’s eyes, bright enough to bore a hole through the camera lens, full moon shining to one side, people clotted together on the road, and in the background the large form of a ghost, white body billowing in the wind, looking down at who knew what.

Of course you do not want the child to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, but if there could be a bit more sitting on the knee, a little less of the back of the head and more of the profile as you spoke, that might be all the better. The child that reminds you of your own mortality needs so much tending to — so many wisps of hair brushed off the forehead, so many dollar bills handed out, so many anklet cuffs turned down, so much humming to accompany the soprano-sung solo — that it is almost impossible to decide whether to be as quick-talking as an escaped convict, or as patient as a penitent.

It is understandable that parents play a little game of self-deception and think they know everything about their child — that with their peripheral vision and with their ear inched backward an extra bit to listen they need not turn to see the child’s predictable expression: the gleeful smile, the lowered eyes. In this way, they miss the unexpected. They make the mistake of thinking children are simpler than they, and that therefore they have children figured out. (The children know better. They know that at least some of the time they can rush toward danger faster than their parents can stop them. That the parent who confiscates the water gun has failed to notice the slingshot in the back pocket. That tying shoelaces is a reassuring activity for parents. That off-key bedtime singing should be tolerated because it helps parents unwind.)

You have created the child, but you could not have anticipated the child’s power. Because the child’s presence and desires are so constant, it becomes the course of least possible pain to persuade yourself that being subsumed is synonymous with parenthood. You can only pray that by early evening the child’s eyelids will grow heavy with sleep. Then you hope that the sleeping child will not loom large in your own dreams, that once the night-light has been switched on, that beam of light alone may guide the child to dreamland.

In the silence of the house, you can sort out the day’s failures and successes. You can admit that you have approached the child with a mixture of awe, regret, and envy. Wouldn’t it be nice to scream louder than the child? To plead for peace as diligently as the child pleads for adventure? Couldn’t the tables be turned, and couldn’t you be found hiding underneath?

Parents can endure only so many tears before they become impervious, can listen to only so much pleading before whatever is being requested — the smooth peanut butter, the puppy in the pound — begins, cosmically, not to matter. It is predictable that the child denied a mongrel will contort its face into a version of the thing it most desires.

Fact: The child is your child whether or not the crib seems some days like a sinking ship. In order to proceed, focus your attention even though the haunting lullaby you sing distracts you. Grab on to the diaper as if you were clinging to the mast of a ship. Ignore the Sirens’ song tinkling on the child’s music box that would lure you into drowning in memories of your own childhood. Consult the experts and let them steer the way; call a sympathetic friend whose child is six months older.

There are so many books published to advise you about the child’s upbringing, so many predictions about patterns you will notice and pleas to which you will be subjected. Psychologists will speak to you on early-morning television shows, mothers in the park will disagree, relatives will try to pull the rug out from under whatever you believe, the pediatrician’s calm may turn to poorly disguised mystification, and the comic on late-night TV will effectively satirize the creature whose existence you care so much about.

The message is always to change doubt to certainty and proceed. Sit by the sandbox with newfound strength. Embrace the squirming child and urge him to behave differently. Insist on eye contact when you speak. Do not let others turn the child upside down. Check the baby-sitter’s references. Lock the cabinet that contains the cleaning products below the sink. Regular visits to the doctor. Two security blankets, so one can be washed. Check toe room in shoes regularly, by depressing the leather underneath your thumb. Comb tangled hair from the ends up. Speak out against environmental hazards. Look out for danger, but do not communicate your fear to the child. Buckle your seat belt. Cut down on consumption of red meat. Learn a jingle called “The Toothbrush Is Your Friend.” Advise him not to bother kitty when she’s eating. Try to make a game of gathering up toys with the child. Don’t overdramatize the scary parts of books. Do everything right, all the time, and the child will prosper. It’s as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign under which the child was born, his order of birth, his first encounter with evil, the girl who jilts him in spite of his excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs he may try once or too many times, the friends he makes, how he scores on tests, how well he endures kidding about his shortcomings, how ambitious he becomes, how far he falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstance, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies. With these things in mind, you will watch the child hopscotch from certainty to uncertainty, throwing the stone of trust before him, going all the way to the end by hopping one-footed, then turning and hopping back, full grown, much taller, with a puzzled expression that may not leave his face whether he is succeeding or failing.

Does it seem impossible that the child will grow up? That the bashful smile will become a bold expression? The sparkling eyes in need of corrective lenses? That fevers will subside, that there will be no more bloody knees, that a briefcase will replace the blue security blanket? You must resist the tendency to think ahead; wishing for peace is not the same as wanting things to change forever, and when all is said and done (a state only songwriters believe in), the child will never really be gone, even though he grows up. You will find that although the child may be remembered in association with one or two prized toys, more likely the child will be remembered alone, standing with his legs parted, his arms dangling at his sides, pants fallen down a bit so that only the toes of the sneakers are visible. He will be standing the way he stood in the snapshot, with an expanse of field — or maybe the beach — around him. A little thing, but you will remember that distinctly without having a photograph in front of you. That will be the way, in fact, the child will stay: a visual image — one that, even at the time, you squinted to look harder at, whether or not a camera was raised to your eye.

When you are thirty, the child is two. At forty, you realize that the child in the house, the child you live with, is still, when you close your eyes, or the moment he has walked from the room, two years old. When you are sixty, and the child is gone, the child will also be two, but then you will be more certain. Seeing pictures of your child at different ages, you will not hesitate for a moment. You will point to the two-year-old, not the ten-year-old or the twenty-year-old. He will always be that high. With a nick above the eyebrow. Those eyes, at that point a bit too large for his face, so that, in remembering the eyes, you are sure that your child possessed startling intensity. He might be wearing some article of clothing purchased for a special occasion, but unless the picture of the shirt with the anchor and the sheepshank knot is right in front of you, you will not think much about that. He will be in typical little-boy clothes, smiling or looking straight at the camera with a tolerant expression that may show a hint of fatigue: Another picture? Why do you want it? What can it mean to you? He will be there with you without special costumes or toys as the years go by: the child alone, more and more a fact. Your life before the child seems too long ago to think of. What happened with the child, something of a blur. There were late-night walks in the summer heat, weren’t there? Didn’t the child once assume that you could give him pointers about how to fly? Didn’t he think he was recreating the rumbling of Vesuvius with the plastic straw in the glass of chocolate milk? You go on — and the child goes on — but you change, as the child sees you. You do, but he does not. He stays the same, no matter how many marriages, mortgages, dogs, and children he may surround himself with — he does not change, so he is not vulnerable. It becomes difficult to remember that he ever was. That the dog snapped at him, and he was afraid. That the cut got infected. That night after night, the same blue-bodied demon flicked its tail in his dreams. Sticky fingers. Wet sheets. Wet kisses. A flood of tears. As you remember him, the child is always two.

SIX

In New York, every crack in the sidewalk seemed to Mel to portend disaster. Wouldn’t panes of glass be blown out of skyscrapers? That had happened so often with the John Hancock building in Boston that for a long time people were not allowed to walk beneath it. The situation with the homeless was already so grim you didn’t want to have to think about buildings tipping over, construction accidents, small things gathering speed and force as they dropped to earth. If you thought of New York as precarious, it would do you in; the way to keep going was to take big strides even if you felt like shuffling, to come on stage like the MC even if you were only the warm-up act.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, Mel kept thinking. His mother had been dead for years. Then maybe bad luck would befall his father? Nothing had befallen his father so far but a woman twenty years his junior, who lived with him in his Scottsdale, Arizona, condominium. His father had stopped smoking, joined a country club, and was taking flying lessons. Step on a crack or not, the world was an unpredictable place. He was back in the awful pattern of finding fear in a handful of dust, when he should have been savoring life in every egg of caviar he spooned onto his tongue.

Mel was on his way to the second meeting with D. B. Haverford, who had bought him lunch at Petrossian the week before. Haverford was moving his gallery uptown and wanted Mel to work for him. He must never know that childish rhymes went through Mel’s mind, that over the weekend, after a cold walk during which Mel had again not gotten up the courage to ask Jody to marry him, he had cried. That Mel had seriously been thinking about going to a psychic at the Ansonia Hotel. That because the woman Mel loved wouldn’t marry him, he was even thinking about leaving the city and going to her, to see if that would impress her. For D. B. Haverford, Mel had put on his Charivari suit, with a moss-green shirt and no tie. The more audacious he was in his dress, the more compliments he got. Being a graduate of Dartmouth was a great embarrassment to him, but he covered for it by being the first to bring it up, shaking his head and saying that he had turned down Yale (not the truth; he hadn’t even applied) because in his youth he had only wanted to ski. When Mel shrugged, he looked as helpless as someone forced to stand and recite something he hadn’t memorized. At Dartmouth he had been the lead in two plays and the applause had made him seriously consider becoming an actor, though he had eventually capitulated to his father’s demands that he go to business school at his alma mater, U. Va. His father had also been an excellent skier, and Mel had never learned how to outski him, though for years he had dreams in which he did, leaving his father behind, buried in avalanches. Years before, he had tried to write about the competitiveness that existed between them, but probably he had tried to write for the wrong reason: to exorcise demons instead of trying to court them and see if, in a fair fight, they won out or the writer did. The analyst he saw during those years pointed out to him that he was very goal-oriented. In the novel, the analyst became a humorous figure who listened to his patient’s stories about skiing and replied with anecdotes about tennis. As he was writing the book, and during the time he saw the doctor, he found the courage to quit school and to try to envision something to do with his life other than what his father would have liked. Mel’s grandfather left him a house in Williamstown and some money when he died. He sold the house the same spring he met Jody. She had just moved south and was figuring out how to make a living. Jody had seemed to him genuinely sad — so much so that he was surprised she didn’t turn out to be a transient, that she stayed in town, placed ads in the paper and started a business, functioned like a person who was not oppressed. All the particulars of her sadness intrigued him, so that he would have fantasies about Wayne and the bad way he had treated her, imagine her other suitors who fell short of the mark as keener competition than they were. He had thought she was younger than she was, so he had lied about his age by a couple of years — an entirely pointless thing to do, because women never minded that men were older. He had no reason to trust her, so he told her about the sale of the house but not about the money he had also been left after his grandfather’s death — also pointless, but he didn’t know then that she had very little interest in other people’s money. He pretended that his novel did not mean much to him, though she probably would not have asked to read it anyway, being hesitant to ask anything that might seem to be a favor. He never mentioned his analyst, but since Freud and Jung were among her books, it was doubtful that she would have thought less of him for seeing a psychiatrist. She had always turned out to be other than he expected.

A few weeks after Mel first met Jody, he loaned her money. To get the roof repaired, to buy the new camera lenses she needed, whatever was necessary to make her house habitable and to get her career started. He slept with her the second time he saw her — the first time he saw her alone, really, because he had first met her at a party. He had dismissed his life story by saying that his father was overbearing and that he had too often given in, so that it was only recently that he was getting his life together. She whispered when she talked about her life. There was something very seductive about that, and at the same time consoling, as if he were being told a fairy tale. The next night, when she was also whispering to him in bed, he teased her about it, and she said that she was whispering because she didn’t want to wake Will. He pointed out that the thunderstorm earlier that evening hadn’t awakened Will. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I’m whispering about things Will and I have lived through because I like to think he doesn’t know about them.”

She still whispered at night, but now she whispered because of shared intimacies, or because the two of them were planning strategies or conferring about Will’s upbringing. Upbringing — what an antiquated way to think about someone’s childhood: as if the two of them were slowly and competently stretching Will like taffy, when in reality it was all either of them could do to keep up with his energy, his questions, and his desires.

He was thinking about Will in Will’s calmer moments — usually when he was tired, at bedtime. He gave his mother a hard time about going to sleep, but when Mel was there he never minded going to bed. Halloween night, Will had wanted both of them to tell him stories, though. He had wanted to cling, even though they had said nothing about the accident, made no mention of danger. Like all smart children, he had sensed their disquiet. He had let it be known that he thought Where the Wild Things Are was a story for babies. Mel sat at the foot of the bed, chin resting in his cupped hand, while Jody read Will a poem by Auden.

Who was Icarus? Will had wanted to know.

A mythological creature (her soft voice). A boy who tried to fly, but his wings came too close to the sun (matter-of-fact; no preaching to the child), so the wax that had been used to attach the wings to his body melted, and he fell to earth (Mel, hoping to make this less ominous, had whistled on the intake and made a little downward spiral with his index finger).

When they left his bedroom that night, Jody had whispered to him, “It’s so easy to answer questions when all you have to do is recite information.”

Will had looked at his mother so calmly. If the explanation of Icarus’s plight and Mel’s finger whirling through the air hadn’t pleased him, her voice certainly had. Mel knew what it was like to have that voice settle calmly in his own heart: It was the antidote to the sharp sounds of the city, the smooth assurance that she had infiltrated his body to echo even when she was not present.

What he wished, walking along the street in New York, was that it would become clear to her that she should marry him. But since that did not seem likely, he had decided on a strategy — something that would be done at his expense, but perhaps not at so great an expense. Something that might even be like a game that could be well played. As he watched the sidewalk to make sure he did not step on any cracks, he continued to consider carefully Haverford’s offer. It was well known in the business that the mercurial Haverford usually got his way. He had already offered Mel a significantly larger amount of money than he was making at his friend’s gallery, but Mel thought that money alone should not be the deciding factor. Haverford also knew Mel was thinking that. If another price could be struck, however — if, to be specific, Haverford might take an interest in giving Jody a show — that might be the incentive Mel needed to join up with him.

In addition to the enlargements Jody asked Mel to get from the photo lab, he had had four shots blown up to sixteen by twenty and had paid for a rush job. He now carried those photographs in a portfolio he had bought earlier that day at Charrette. People passing him would have thought him an artist, if they paused to look. A thought suddenly went through his head: that the Queen of England always carried a change purse, even though there was nothing in it.

If he could get Jody a show, her self-confidence would soar. And if the Halloween photographs wouldn’t do it, nothing would.

Stepping carefully, he turned the portfolio vertically to hold it like a shield against his chest as he went through the revolving door.

Haverford was there, on a barstool. Tiny bubbles floated up in Haverford’s champagne flute. Haverford smiled, and Mel smiled back. That was it: two people who believed they knew each other so perfectly — who thought they could predict things about the other so well — that they didn’t even need to shake hands.

SEVEN

On an unusually warm April day, Jody took the bus from the airport to Grand Central, got on the subway, exited at Twenty-third Street, walked crosstown to Ninth Avenue, and continued to Mel’s street. Will was spending the weekend with the Vickerses. Jody was supposed to meet the man Mel was considering going to work for — a man whose last name made him sound like a character in a Henry Fielding novel, a name she could not remember, no matter how hard she tried. One of those men named Lord So-and-So, who would wear what they called drawers, and whose days would always be characterized by high propriety.

She smiled to herself. Whenever she imagined people in excessive detail it made Mel nervous, as if she were really hallucinating and bound to bring trouble on herself. But the joking protected her; otherwise, a gallery owner whose name, she’d been told, was often mentioned in the society pages might be a formidable and intimidating figure.

Mel lived across the street from General Theological Seminary, behind which stretched a long courtyard with grass so green it shocked you into remembering the country. Mel had befriended one of the seminarians and had in his possession a key that would open the big iron gate if you reached through the bars, inserted the key into the lock on the other side, and turned it counterclockwise. Some dexterity was needed for this, and some nerve — though the few times someone had spotted her and Mel sneaking in, the person had not batted an eye. Perhaps the seminarians thought there was nothing wrong with finding a way into the courtyard, which might be analogous, to them, to finding a way into heaven. The key could not be duplicated, though, and Mel had the key, so she would have to wait for Mel in his apartment. Also, SoHo Wine was delivering a case of chardonnay for dinner that night, and a woman named Angela, who had run away from Oklahoma to become a Rolfer and had a catering business on the side, was coming over around five to drop off the dinner Mel would serve that night. Jody had met Angela before, at a party she and Mel attended, when she went to get a drink of water in the kitchen. Angela had told her that she had lost her mother when she was a child and had grown up on a ranch in a family of four brothers who treated her like one of the horses. Jody did not ask exactly what this meant. By the time she left the kitchen, she had Angela’s card, and Angela’s boyfriend’s card. Jody could either get Rolfed or get legal advice. Angela had her own staff, which included the dishwasher, who was a teacher of the Alexander Technique and with whom she was two-timing her lawyer boyfriend, and a fleet of people who served the food, among them a dwarf who worked nights when he was between movie-stuntman jobs. He went around tapping people’s knees to see if they needed their wineglasses filled. Jody had wished that Will was with her. Why read fairy tales to your child when you can take him to a party in New York? If he understood that Rolfing and the Alexander Technique were similar to spanking in slow motion and to being made to stand in the corner, he might not have liked that, but he would have liked the dwarf in his blue cap, carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white in the other. The dwarf was doing just what Will was not supposed to do: carry two drinks at once.

What did Mel think about Jody’s being in his apartment while he was at work? Apparently, it was fine with him. She’d already seen the secrets (such as they were) in the medicine cabinet. Everything else had been put on display to show her how tempting life in New York could be, so she would move in with him. Did she like his crystal champagne flutes, hung upside down under the kitchen cabinet as if they were ordinary wineglasses, which could be hers if she married him? What about the stereo (they could compromise on the volume), the mattress (they could get one larger), the bath towels (if she didn’t like brown, they could buy them in every color of the rainbow).

As she came to the end of the row of brownstones, she saw the man who lived in the garden apartment sitting on the front steps, watching his dog play with a bone on the little patch of cement inside the front gate. Daryl was a good-looking man in his late fifties who had retired from NBC, where he had worked as a cameraman, to devote his time to his great love: the acquisition and repair of jukeboxes. The garden behind the brownstone prospered because it was cared for by his sister, who came from her apartment in Hoboken two or three times a week to plant and prune. His sister was responsible for ending — or almost ending — the springtime ant problem in Mel’s apartment. The ants had climbed the twisting wisteria boughs and come through the screens until Estelle ingeniously designed an upside-down funnel that fit around the base of the vine and sprayed it with chemicals to repel ants. “All he has to do is remember to douse it every couple of days, but I know he slips up,” Estelle had said to Jody when she last visited. “All his life he’s put his cereal bowl in the sink ‘to soak,’ which means that he was too lazy to wash it. All men are the same about their cereal bowls — as if they’d be washing a part of themselves down the drain if they cleaned them. Cereal bowls are sitting in sinks all over America, filled to the brim with water.” Naturally, Jody was crazy about Estelle. She loved to be invited to walk in the garden behind the apartment to see the little plants and flowers. From the fourth floor, most of the flowers were only a pastel haze.

“She’s not here today,” Daryl said. “I thought I’d take the opportunity to sit out front. She gets insulted if I want to see some city life instead of flowers.” He picked up the blue leash the dog trailed behind it. She smiled down at the little dog, whining happily to see her at the front gate. Will had been asking for a dog. She suspected that Will and Mel were in collusion.

“The tulips are up,” Daryl said. “The ones with the green centers.”

“Parrot tulips,” she said.

Daryl gave her the look a parent gives a child who has said a dirty word the parent would like to disappear from the child’s vocabulary: a glazed-over look, with the trace of a prim smile.

The dog ran up the steps behind her and stood panting at the front door. Daryl got up and brought the dog down the stairs again. She put her key in the door and pushed it open — it always stuck on the ugly carpeting — then closed it behind her. The half-table in the hallway had a vase of dried flowers on it, and the gray rug had been recently vacuumed. This was because the second-floor apartment was empty. The landlord always put out flowers and hung a painting in the stairwell when an apartment was empty. When it was filled again, the painting would disappear and the flowers would be left to crumble into confetti on the tabletop.

Climbing the stairs, Jody thought about the peculiarity of walking into someone else’s life. Now the dog downstairs knew her. Just like that, she was greeted by the small things that surrounded Mel’s life. You never merely took on another person, you drew all the things surrounding that person to you like a magnet — the postman’s nod, the gas station attendant smiling through the windshield at both of you, the waiter who asks, “How are you?” and looks to both faces, the colleague’s wife who asks you to lunch. Before you knew it, there would be a drinking glass that was your favorite; the lipstick you left behind would be put in a dish on the back of the toilet. He’d hide your toothbrush so you’d go home and have to buy another, and then there the toothbrush would be, in the holder, the next time you went back. You’d know that you were in deep when your things began to proliferate in the apartment: things he bought for you, to be yours, if you did not leave enough behind. When he stopped taking his blue shirt to the dry cleaner and started tossing it in the wash because it had become your favorite nightgown. When he bought you a plant instead of cut flowers so you would call to make sure it had been watered. When cotton pullovers became unisex and got jumbled together. When pictures of the two of you were put on the refrigerator. When other women called and he didn’t close the door or lower his voice and, when he hung up, acted as if your conversation hadn’t been interrupted.

That was the thing about taking photographs. About taking wedding photographs, at least: that the people you were seeing wanted so sincerely to belong. It was desperation rather than vanity that made them look soulfully into the camera, because the camera had the power to stop time and to verify that they were part of a tradition. That was why brides wore their grandmothers’ wedding dress (a little too tight in the waist, and the shoes were always too small; few brides could walk down the aisle in their grandmother’s size-five shoes). It was a celebration that all generations were invited to witness, and sometimes the dog as well. The bride was always asking an implicit question: Don’t you remember this? Even if you don’t understand my life now or know me very well, doesn’t this ceremony constitute a link between us? Isn’t this your engagement ring I’m wearing? Haven’t I styled my hair with the waves that swept my mother’s cheeks at her wedding? Isn’t this the wedding cake we’ve always eaten, even though we’ve never had dessert together? The figurines at the top are generic. The bubbles in expensive champagne don’t vary in size. I’m in love. Don’t you remember being in love?

At a wedding she photographed recently, some relative of the groom had said to her, “Love is like a feather in the breeze.” People often said startling things at weddings, so perhaps it was just the dreamy — no, deranged — look on the woman’s face that had made Jody force a smile. As the old lady walked away from her, Jody had thought several things in quick succession: Love, that exhilarating and exhausting state, is whatever anybody says it is, so stop the poetry and end the song; love is, indeed, like a feather; love is nothing like a feather; the word “breeze” might have been indicative of the lady’s attitude, because a feather in the wind would be another matter entirely.

Jody put her key into the lock and opened the door. A flight of steep black-painted steps rose into Mel’s apartment. Except for two rooms in the front, under the steep pitch of the roof, the area was open space, with an off-center stairwell surrounded by a high railing. It was like being in a treehouse; tall windows at the back overlooked the tops of ailanthus trees growing below. In the kitchen there was a skylight through which wisteria had pushed its way. When it rained, the top of the stove would be moist, and occasionally tiny flowers would be scattered over the stovetop. When Mel turned on the stove he ignored them, but she always brushed them away, as if they were alive. She sat for a minute, a little out of breath, on the sofa that curved around the room. No sofa in New York rose higher than midback.

Mel had left a note for her on one of the sofa cushions. Apparently Duncan had called to say that his former roommate, who lived on Christopher Street, had just gotten very bad news from a blood test. What was she supposed to do? Call some man she’d never met? She pushed the note aside and wandered away. Tucked in the bathroom mirror was a picture of Will, straddling Mel’s neck, proud of his new red sneakers and looking as secure, perched there, as the driver of an armored car. Recently, Mel had instigated the silliness of nicknames. Some days Will wanted to be Ace, some Butch. She thought that on the day the picture had been taken he was Ace. Ace in need of a haircut. Ace, who swung as hard as he could and still didn’t raise a bruise on Mel’s bicep. (“Of course you can’t hit me in the stomach,” Mel had said to him. “You’d hurt me.”) She looked at the lipstick on the saucer on top of the toilet tank. Mel would like it — he liked any profession of affection, however corny — if she scrawled I LOVE YOU on the bathroom mirror. The lipstick had cost ten dollars. Ten dollars for lipstick! She took off the cap and put lipstick on her lips but didn’t write on the mirror. She filled a glass with water and rose on tiptoes to water the spider plant. Putting the glass back in the holder, she remembered one of Mel’s peculiarities: wiping the glass, after use, with his bath towel. How could men be so neat about some things and so haphazard about others?

She tried to remember the name of the man she would meet that night. Could it really be Haveabud? His first name was probably Steve or Ed. No, there were no more Steves or Eds in New York. They were now Steven or Edward, whether they were gay or straight. If they had money, they didn’t have a nickname. Everybody was into high seriousness, so that now even dogs were named Humphrey and Raphael.

When Angela buzzed and Jody let her in, she was dressed in stone-washed jeans, probably about a size three, and an enormous sweatshirt with a green-faced, red-lipped Oriental on it and raised red letters spelling SUMO. Her hair was yellow — not any shade of blond but yellow, Crayola-crayon yellow. Pink ballet slippers. No socks. On her wrist a coiled bracelet that ended in the triangular head of a spitting snake. An earcuff and a diamond stud in one ear, a replica of the Empire State Building dangling from the other.

“I’ve left my old man, but it’s a good thing. I just don’t want him inquired about ever again. But wait, you weren’t here when he came to help out last time, were you? Tell Mel that it’s over, and to please not ask how he is, because that’s as boring as somebody calling you to tell you how their day went. The thing I’m handing you now”—Jody had stopped on the second-floor landing as Angela rushed up the stairs two at a time, heading for the top—“is a date-and-prune tart. The prunes cut the sweetness of the dates, but don’t tell anybody about the prunes because they won’t eat it. They think prunes are those things they bring you in wet bowls in Miami Beach, and prunes actually don’t cause you as much trouble as corn, but try telling that to anybody. So. I’m double-parked, and if you can help me carry stuff upstairs I can leave the car at the curb. It’s salmon mousse for the main course. And I love that lipstick. That’s going to look fantastic by candlelight.” Angela smiled a beatific smile. The waves that surrounded her face looked more like a corona than overdyed yellow hair. “Room temperature,” Angela said, handing the platter to Jody. She put her hand over her heart. “As if we know no seasons in New York. As if each moment is purely invented.”

—

After the party that night, Mel listened to the message tape. Duncan was flying to New York in the morning. Jody shrugged. “Why does Duncan think I’m going to get involved in the problems of a man I’ve never met?” she said to Mel. Then they fell into bed and drunkenly made love.

In his dream Mel sank to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine. At first it was one of those submarines the tourists get into to see the coral reef and the fish swimming around, but a few seconds into the dream everything changed, and suddenly there was a commanding officer who was quite annoyed with him for thinking of the submarine’s downward path as “sinking.” “We are descending!” the man shrieked shrilly at Mel, who suddenly had to endure the stares of the other Navy men. One woman from the first part of the dream was still there: a tourist in a pink pants suit, taking a picture of a flat yellow-and-blue fish that floated by. Then there was the carnage: the deer on the road, again; the Halloween revelers squatting and standing in the glow of the headlights. The bright eye of the deer. A body too large to have been supported by such delicate legs.

He kicked his feet backwards, out of the covers.

In the next part of Mel’s dream the small dog who lived downstairs was sniffing the corpse in the road.

Mel opened his lips, exhaling to blow the scene away, but the deer stayed still. The October cold made him shiver. His lips closed.

The small dog sniffed and sniffed, and then it became apparent that there was a second dog, identical with the first, and that they were not partygoers on Halloween night but damned souls in Hell.

He had some consciousness of his mouth. Was he drooling on the pillow? But then there was confusion: It was the dog who was drooling — the dog in the dream — and that dog was Cerberus, who was guarding the gates to Hell.

The small dog had an owner, but Mel could not imagine who among the costumed partygoers that could be. It was not Richard Nixon, because Richard Nixon’s dog was named Checkers. It must be Will’s dog, then. He and Will must have persuaded Jody to get a dog.

Mel turned onto his side.

Just before the dream ended, dogs were floating past the window of the submarine. In the little corner of his mind that fought to become conscious, Mel knew that if there were a cartoon caption — if Gary Larson were in charge — everything that was dreadful could be amusing. But the unconscious mind won out, so he knew that if he laughed it could be a death sentence: It would attract the rabid dog, and once bitten — once his leg had sprung a leak — it would be impossible for the submarine to rise again. Even the woman in the pants suit was alarmed. She had been photographing fish, and then drowned dogs began to drift by. Then Will was in the dream, looking at him as if he had known all along how grotesque this would become.

Mel drew his feet inside the covers and moved his knees up, toward his chest. His eyes darted left and right, behind closed eyelids. Like little fish, Jody thought. She was propped up on one elbow, looking at Mel. The aspirin she had taken was slowly dulling the thud in her head that was the result of too many drinks too late at night. Now Mel’s REMs had subsided, though she still looked sleepily at him in the gradually brightening bedroom. A line from “The Waste Land” came to her: Those are pearls that were his eyes. She had read Keats and Auden to Will, but did not think “The Waste Land” would hold his attention, even though a few of the lines had end rhyme. What was the line before that line? The world could indeed be a perilous place, she thought as she was falling asleep, if you could not remember those things that came first. She remembered that someone had drowned but not the line itself.

EIGHT

Lord Haveabud raised his glass — topheavy, so that it was easier to curve his fingers under the bowl and forget about the stem — and swooshed the blue margarita through the air like a courtesan about to make an elaborate curtsy. The toast was all eye contact and no words. The deal had been decided on (though Jody, who kept forgetting his last name, didn’t know it was a deal), the deed as good as done (though Haveabud wanted to see the entire shoot, not just the enlargements Mel had shown him at Palio), and now all that remained was for Haveabud to buy a tie — lately, he didn’t like what Alexander Julian was up to — to wear to the opening. Photographic galleries, like Witkin, were showing paintings, so why shouldn’t he show photographs? Haveabud believed that new ties brought him luck. Also, whenever he flew, he carried with him in some pocket a small geode he had bought in a previous life, when he and his second wife visited a gift shop near the Grand Canyon. Being an agnostic, he recited silently to himself, in times of stress, a litany of introductory adverbs, in alphabetical order: after, again, also, as, before, besides … He fancied himself something of a character, wearing a Swatch instead of a Rolex, but spending more on Missoni socks than most people spent on an entire outfit. Haveabud bought his ties well in advance of openings and put them, still in their boxes, in his filing cabinet under the artists’ names.

When he first came to New York he had been married to his high school sweetheart and had worked as a clerk in a store specializing in art books. He became so trusted that he was left behind in the store to take inventory and to create his impressive displays after the others had left. When he was done, he threw two switches to activate the alarm, then got out the front door and locked it, all within fifteen seconds. Those few seconds were never a problem until he started drinking champagne after hours. The champagne came to him as gifts from women — daytime browsers who were searching for more than oversized books on Monet’s water lilies. It was classier to meet someone in a store such as the one Haveabud worked in than to go to a high-class bar. And if the women didn’t meet anyone else, or if they just took a fancy to the earnest young man with a body he imagined to be better than it was (now he worked out four days a week, swam on Thursdays, and jogged on weekend evenings around the reservoir in Central Park), they were likely to ask him over for a drink after work — the husbands were always away on business — or to try to please him with enough gifts of bubbly so that he’d ask them out for a drink. Much to Haveabud’s surprise, you could often have a beautiful woman lusting after you just because you had special-ordered a book on Christ’s sexuality or a biography of Courbet. In fact, Courbet was Haveabud’s favorite painter, but he would not reveal this to anyone. He had his secrets: his geode, his visions of Courbet’s landscapes, his package of French ticklers in the file under S. He might never have been in the position he was in today if he hadn’t been fired from the bookstore. In the good old days, he and a few of the other employees (now they hired clerks who looked like people in a Grant Wood painting. Where did they find them?) had opened bottles of champagne and played baseball in the buff on the second floor of the store, using the handle from the toilet plunger to bat rolled-up wads of duplicate inventory slips. This had never been discovered, but a jealous husband had had a tête-à-tête with the owner, and Haveabud was fired. “You don’t want to hear whether I deny having an affair with her?” he had asked the owner. “No,” the owner said. “I knew that anybody as knowledgeable and personable as you was too good to be true.”

There had been months of anguish after he was fired, but finally he had gotten a part-time job proofreading, and the excellent job he did with one manuscript resulted in an admiring call from an editor at the publishing house who, when she heard Haveabud’s plight, called a friend who owed her a favor, and zip, Haveabud began working part-time in a gallery on then-still-unfashionable West Broadway. The rest was history. History was personified in the form of Luther, a.k.a. Jake Markson from Brooklyn, an overweight overachiever from the Queens College art program whose talent Haveabud knew he could market. He put Luther on a protein diet and called twice a day to make sure he was drinking the daily gallon of Poland Spring. By the time showtime rolled around Jake Markson didn’t exist anymore and Luther, twenty pounds lighter, pores cleansed at Dr. Mario Badescu’s for extra radiance, stood in the gallery in his jeans and white shirt — a shirt that had cost Haveabud two hundred dollars — to start a new tremor in the downtown art scene. Around him were hung photorealistic paintings of enlarged cash-register receipts, including the smudged thumbprint of the clerk who ripped one out of the register, or the spot where it had been slightly torn, the numbers in black ink or purple, some so pale they could hardly be read. The Tx./Tl. show was the rage of the moment, pronounced upon even by Andy Warhol, who said, “Money is very important, but usually artists don’t keep good receipts.” After the opening the two-hundred-dollar shirt was handed from Luther to Haveabud the way a bullfighter folds his cape and gives it to a worthy lady. Haveabud’s cut of the sold-out show was fifty percent, and he and Luther did a pas de deux to Dean Witter Reynolds to find out about shelters. As anyone might imagine, fame went to Luther’s head. In trendy restaurants he offered to autograph the bill for the dinner he and his hangers-on had eaten, in lieu of payment. Though many places would not go for this, Luther found that star-crazed waitresses themselves would often foot the bill for the dinner in exchange for a fuck. One of those waitresses nabbed him, of course: a nobody from Lyme, Connecticut, who had come to New York to study acting — a young woman who dyed a green streak in her hair long before it was fashionable and went by the name Thalo. She became Luther’s Yoko, and eventually he was lured from Haveabud into instant obscurity, after doing a recording with Thalo that consisted of the sound of whips cracking, punctuating a two-way whispered argument, as a boys’ choir soared to high soprano in the background. The bitch got pregnant instantly and had twins. When she and Luther divorced, Luther attempted to work his way back into Haveabud’s affections, and when he could not — Haveabud believing that those who turned their back on people who had helped them did not deserve a second chance — ended up working in his brother’s restaurant, though later Haveabud heard that he had gone to Paris, to the Left Bank, where he made take-out ceviche that was praised in Le Figaro and French Vogue. Quel dommage, Haveabud said, with malice instead of sincerity.

But life is strange, and years later he became reacquainted with one of Luther’s sons. The bitch remarried — step, step, stepping up the rungs of the social ladder in her Manolo Blahniks — so that when Haveabud saw her again she was the young wife of a sixty-year-old multi, standing outside Collegiate, waiting for her son (the other twin being, for some reason Haveabud never got clear, with her parents in upstate New York), with a Cuban au pair who stood at her side, looking into the swarm of children leaving school with the wide eyes of one of her relatives fleeing Castro’s Cuba. The bitch looked Haveabud up and down and then spread an inappropriately radiant smile on her face. What was he doing there? He was about to attend a meeting, with his third wife, about her nephew’s progress in overcoming dyslexia. (His third wife’s sister was at the Betty Ford Clinic, and Haveabud had been persuaded that he should attend the meeting as a show of support to the boy.) Luther’s son turned out to be his third wife’s nephew’s classmate. His third wife emerged from a cab then and was introduced. The bitch said that she and Haveabud were old friends and invited them to dinner that Saturday, and his wife accepted. On a run, the seven-year-old boy rushed not into the bitch’s arms but into the arms of the au pair, and a most extraordinary thing happened to Haveabud: He felt a surge of tender affection for the boy. The boy was a dead ringer for his father, so much so that Haveabud had the eerie feeling that Luther in miniature stood near him on the sidewalk. It brought back memories of the good times he and Luther had had — the shopping expeditions for clothes sure to impress, when the two of them laughed so merrily that one clerk had said, as she wrote up the sale, “You know, evening wear is not returnable.” The two of them used to toke up and go for tango lessons. They had owned, together, a ski chalet in Stowe and a house on the beach in Barbados, half a mile from the Sandy Lane. They had had drunken sing-alongs with Dolly Parton records, late at night, savoring the quality of Luther’s Blaupunkt, even learning an a cappella version of “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” that would have friends rolling on the floor. When Haveabud had to explain to his third wife who Luther was, Luther became an eccentric artist who had encountered fleeting fortune. He did not fill her in on their personal relationship. He did warn her that the bitch was poison, but she discounted his words because she thought he was always too harsh. The bitch’s lawyer and her hairstylist had been at the dinner that night, her multi out of town on business (it gave Haveabud pause: The bitch was one of those women he would have encountered years before in the bookstore, who would have given him a bottle of champagne), and she and Haveabud’s third wife chatted merrily about house renovation, agreeing that exposed beams were as necessary for aesthetic reasons as a frame on a painting. His wife was astonished to learn, during the warmed-goat-cheese-and-grapes course, that Luther and Haveabud had enrolled in an Arthur Murray dance class. The hairdresser wanted to have a dance with Haveabud, but he declined, saying that he’d forgotten everything he’d learned. (Later that night, alone in his living room after his wife had gone to bed, he went through the dance movements.) Roederer Cristal was poured throughout the evening, and at party’s end the two women kissed the air, his third wife inhaling the bitch’s Graffiti, the bitch sniffing his wife’s lavishly applied Joy. The two would meet again, to discuss ceilings.

Haveabud disdained the lawyer’s Republican politics, but since the hairdresser — whom Haveabud had rather come to like — had given him such a rough time, Haveabud had not had to expend any energy in that direction. But the child, Spencer, he was quite fascinated by. In the boy’s bedroom were hundreds of dinosaur models, some cast in bronze and arranged on a long shelf, others standing among the palm and ficus trees. An inflated Rhamphorhynchus dangled from the ceiling fixture. (“It means ‘prow beak,’ ” Spencer said.) That one Haveabud had to be informed about, but he was able to recognize the large green Stegosaurus, and he nodded with faint recognition when Spencer told him that that particular dinosaur usually weighed almost two tons. “How long have you been collecting them?” Haveabud had asked, and the boy’s answer made it clear that he would have preferred teething on dinosaurs if they had been offered in place of teething rings. Here was a child who would not plead for a pet, unlike his third wife’s nephew, who would agitate himself into weeping fits, chanting corgi, corgi, corgi. In a frame was a drawing of a Brachiosaurus, which Spencer proudly pointed out, saying it was probably the largest animal that ever lived. “It was strictly herbivorous, too,” the boy said. “Do you know what that means?” Assuming that the boy was asking if he knew, in point of fact, what “herbivorous” meant, Haveabud nodded yes. The implications, on the other hand … But the boy had rushed to pull a massive book from the shelf. “This one is about carnosaurs,” the boy said, raising his lip and exposing his little top teeth. “They were really wicked.” Haveabud was startled that the word “wicked” was in a seven-year-old’s vocabulary. He wondered if at night the dinosaurs came alive for him, ranging around the room or wading into the river of his dreams.

But the au pair had come to the door for the second time, accompanied by his impatient wife, and because he had felt protective of Spencer and his reassembled prehistoric world, he quickly said goodbye and left the room to rejoin the party. He also had the distinct thought that the au pair knew he did not love his wife, an impression she later confirmed over cappuccino at The Cupping Room in SoHo. But that night he had really not planned to meet Gloria again. It was only later, thinking it over, that he realized the obvious: The au pair was his way to Spencer, and Spencer was a person he wanted to know better. How much of Luther, besides his looks, had gotten planted in the child? To his complete surprise, he began to swell with emotion, like the buddy of a soldier killed in action who must go to that person’s hometown and kiss the wife’s cheek, lift the child into his arms. It was surprising because, while Luther was indeed M.I.A., his disappearance was only into le monde chi-chi of Paris. But really, why bother to understand your reasons when you are so strongly drawn to something or someone? Sipping through the foamy milk, Haveabud knew there was something that he wanted, but he did not know exactly what that something was. Only that it involved Spencer, and staying on good enough terms with the bitch to have access to Spencer.

But that was the past, and right now Haveabud was sipping not cappuccino but a sour-sweet, fashionably silly blue margarita with Mel Anthis, from whom he also wanted something, and Mel Anthis’s ladyfriend, who turned out to be a more impressive photographer than he could have imagined. To get Mel, he might have mounted a show of thumbtacks and string, but this woman, whose name he had forgotten in the haze of remembering that night, several years ago, with the lawyer, and the hairdresser, and Gloria, and the person who had served the dinner, and Stegosaurus, and …

The waitress asked if he would like his salt rim freshened.

“What?” he said. The Rolling Stones were singing “Wild Horses” and a group of hyperactive partygoers had just come in and were playing musical chairs around a table too small for them.

“If you would like your salt rim freshened,” the waitress said, raising her voice slightly.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Haveabud said.

She took this for a no and went away. Mel Anthis and Jody — that was her name — were frowning at him, as if he had anything to do with the waitress coming to the table.

He shrugged, indicating his own puzzlement and surprise. He was also surprised to have heard, just as the waitress interrupted, that Jody was the mother of a small child: a boy, Will, going on six. He was entering her life when she had a son just a little younger than Spencer had been when he had reentered the bitch’s life. How would Will deal with his mother’s becoming a star? She was a very smart, very attractive woman, and her work was stunning; this one was going to be almost too easy. He would call in a favor and get some notice on Page Six. He would ask his former assistant, to whom he had advanced money so that two thugs would not break his legs for nonpayment of a gambling debt, to find some way to borrow a gold evening dress he had just seen in the window of Charivari.

He tried to get the waitress’s eye, to take her up on her offer. A little salt to cut the sweetness. Another night on the town, during which possibilities arose when you least expected them.

NINE

Sitting under an umbrella at a table outside the Empire Diner, Haveabud took in the passing parade as he waited for Jody. A limousine driver in Ray Bans sat doing a Jack Nicholson imitation, trying hard to look oblivious of passing people and traffic. He could have been shot, stuffed, and put back in the front seat, for all the life his expression betrayed. He was not going to leer at anything, à la Jack. He had joined the ranks of what Haveabud thought of as New York statues. Yes, they moved, but for all intents and purposes they were statues: guards at Bendel’s, doormen, hatcheck girls, out-of-towners waiting fearfully on the curb to cross the street when the lights changed. They were the startled fawns and self-contained spiritual masters, the repositories of peace in our time. Haveabud’s mother, who visited once a year just before or after his birthday, searched for these buoys the way a drowning insect rides the current until it encounters a solid object to fasten its grip upon. His second wife had had quite a talent for both amusing his mother and keeping her calm, but his present wife had no regard for a woman who chose to live without being smothered by fur or anesthetized by French aromatics, and so it had fallen to Haveabud to squire his mother around, carefully leading her on a zigzag through collapsed women with ulcerated legs and Senegalese hawking imitation Rolexes. Still, she would say to him, “Whoever would have imagined that you would want to live this way?” Amid the chaos of Jackson Pollock at the Modern she would find the simple shape of the treehouse he had once climbed into. Lifting her head to see the blinking warnings to planes on the tops of buildings she would remember carrying him outside to see the stars. His mother had an unerring ability, with her sincere questions and her well-intended assertions about the value of a peaceful life, to make him question every aspect of his existence, and remember to say his prayers at night, too. What was Pollock up to? Might it not have been the externalization of the body’s death wish, bleeding out, so that all the world could see, onto the canvas? How did Diane Arbus have the nerve to poke her camera into the face of a mental patient? If Albers’s colors vibrated, was there really so much value to that? It was all he could do to refrain from mentioning that he had considered suicide himself, that he had been emotionally, and sometimes physically, involved with other men. It made him nearly wild to see his mother, though he thought that perhaps he would have been driven to distraction no matter whom he had to tour around the city unwillingly. You simply had to march forward like the conqueror or you would be done for. The mere presence of a doubter could undercut your own confidence.

In his breast pocket was a letter from his mother, who would be coming to town in about a week. It was a half-formed thought that perhaps Gloria could be useful in entertaining her — that is, if he could think of a way to make Gloria seem just a casual acquaintance while at the same time communicating to his mother that she must not mention her name to his wife. Or even Jody — surely she would be beholden to him, but the problem was that she might be back in Charleston, or … shit, the name of the town, the name of the town, he simply could not remember. Charlotte. That was it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Charlotte was in North Carolina, and he remembered her saying that she lived near the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Charlottesville, he was thinking triumphantly when she turned the corner, leading a little dog on a blue leash. Mel’s dog? Most dog owners mentioned their pets, and Mel never had. Well, no matter, he would have been happy to see her if she had been leading Quasimodo by the hand. A pigeon flapped a few feet away, clearing the path for her black Indian moccasins (oh, how he admired the outré trendy) and the little dog’s clicking paws. She had style — there was no problem there. Anyone who had melded into Chelsea well enough to wear her lover’s shirt over white painter’s pants with neon-green socks and moccasins would need no coaching on how to make an appearance. Then, in a sudden jumble of thoughts as she saw him and smiled, he imagined fucking her, or, alternatively, asking her to take his mother for tea at the Palm Court. As a groundswell of desperation rose in his brain, he wondered if she was drawn to Mel for the same reasons he was: a steadfastness and dedication that had a loony spin to it, a faint suggestion that a masquerade was going on the more one revealed oneself. He was not, Haveabud firmly believed, either a drug user or — other side of the coin, and harder yet to deal with — a person who had religious beliefs. He did not seem to be reformed anything, but neither did he seem weighed down with the cynicism so chic in his profession as advisor to artistes. Or rather, those concerned with the fates of artistes. Or, to be honest, those concerned with their own fates, who trucked with artistes. The little dog was all bright eyes and tongue and looked as if it had lived all the sexual moments Haveabud imagined. Haveabud raised his hand to gallantly kiss hers, but she surprised him by taking his hand and leaning forward to plant a little kiss on his knuckle. Women were never what you expected, even when you thought you had no expectations. When she sat down her chair scraped the concrete. She stood again, after drawing it in toward the table, to drop the top of the leash under the chair leg.

“What is it like?” Haveabud said, searching her face. He waited for confusion to register. When it did, he moved an inch closer to her. “Being an artist but … taking photographs of weddings. We all have to keep ourselves amused, don’t we?”

Amused? she thought. Ah, he must mean the amusement of eating. The amusement of buying your child’s corduroys. The amusement of paying the electric bill.

“Because Mel has explained to me,” he said, moving his hands as if cutting a deck of cards, “that the intensity of what you do is something no one would want to sustain. I myself go and scream my head off when the Mets play. I certainly do not merely immerse myself in the world of art. The intensity — I keep coming back to that word — the intensity would be too much to cope with.”

Intensity? Did he know what it was like to be home with a child who had a fever and who would not keep the blanket over him and whose only happy moments came when people were crashing their cars into walls on television at ear-splitting volume, because his ears were blocked up and he could hardly hear? Could this man have any idea what her previous week had been like in terms of intensity?

But she did not answer him. She shrugged, considering a minute. She could have said that photographing weddings was not the easy diversionary activity that he supposed. You were part shrink, part philosopher, part stand-up comic. At weddings you moved snooty great-aunts shoulder to shoulder with skeptical children from the first marriage and linked them for all time in one shot. You tried to subtly communicate in any way you could that there was a sure future, that this was the beginning of a trip that would be sunny, a send-off for people who for one day, at least, had the countenance of angels. You assured the mother of the bride that her daughter’s beauty was due to her; you pulled the tick off the top of the dog’s head without comment; you piled napkins in puddles of champagne on the furniture. You tossed rice if you had a free hand and a free minute, danced one dance if asked, and won their hearts by taking picture after picture and by being the last to leave. Then you went away with memories of the day that would be larger than life because you had a machine that could do the enlarging, smiling with the assurance that you had zoomed in on details people were too preoccupied, or too nervous, to notice.

Would he understand if she made an analogy?

She told him that after the pictures were taken they were pieces of a puzzle. That in the darkroom they would float for a while, like a rose petal that had fallen into a glass of champagne.

She looked at a spot on the table where no glass was placed. He looked at the same spot.

They were images ruffled by currents, she said. Those slips of paper in the developing fluid.

“Images ruffled by currents,” he said slowly.

Whatever mood he had meant to establish, she had broken it. She looked at the tabletop, secretly proud of herself. Then she looked up and gave him a smile as lovely as she could manage, being sure that it was still tinged with regret.

Haveabud knew that his momentum had been interfered with, but he was really quite captivated with what she was saying. If she could say that when she was at his side — when there were people there who mattered — he felt sure that they would be on Easy Street.

Though any day without his mother, and before he went home to his third wife, was relatively easy.

Such a pretty girl, he thought.

She thought: This man is going to be no problem. I am not ever going to have to seriously discuss photography with him.

A waitress in a black fright wig walked out and gave them the menus Haveabud had declined until his companion arrived. He reflected on the fact that he had called her “my companion,” as opposed to many other things he might have called her. He could have lied and said she was his wife. He could have called her, archly, “the lady” or even, pedantically, “the woman who will be meeting me.” He could have said “my daughter” for laughs, since she was about his age.

As he smiled to himself, he was suddenly struck by the realization that he would not have to worry about his mother’s coming into town for another week. The euphoria of that — the 168 hours contained in a week — lifted his spirits.

Jody ordered chili. He ordered another Heineken, and scrambled eggs, loose, with sausage, a dismissive motion through the air with fingers splayed accompanying his order. (Though Haveabud did not, and would not ever, know the waitress, this particular motion would be recreated for the waitress’s best buddy in acting class later that night, and reported to her psychoanalyst. His fingers would continue to rise in her dreams, and she would confide to her girlfriends that she hoped against hope that he would stop by again and this time take notice of her. He was uptown, upscale, uptight in a way she found irresistible. But none of those thoughts and desires had anything to do with the way she pivoted and affected lack of interest, walking back inside the diner. To Haveabud, she was just a girl whose thin lips led him to suspect that she would give cold kisses.)

“You said last night that you wanted to show my work,” Jody said. She touched the top of the saltshaker, letting her fingers linger.

He nodded, as if this were a foregone conclusion and not their only agreement.

Haveabud said that she must move to New York so he could launch her career. He would put in a call to Scavullo that afternoon. She could attend an important opening with him the next night. But she must be in New York. This went without saying, he said, then said it again, even more emphatically.

She looked a little startled, as if she had been strolling along and a stick on the ground had suddenly begun to sing to her.

Haveabud stared as if transfixed. Hypnotize with your insistence. And then — when the person was captured — throw a curve, express a little doubt. What about showing a little wit in her work? Things not quite so … dark.

The feather boa unfurled in her imagination. The early shots of the boa were so much what he wanted, so witty, that it might as well have been there, tickling his chin and provoking a smile. She described the series of photographs: the boa coiled; the tip of the boa dangling from the light table; the boa laid out on the dining-room table so that, against the mahogany, it seemed delicate and lost on so large a surface. The boa wrapped around Mary Vickers’s neck (“a model,” she called her), like a sensual noose.

Haveabud was looking at the multicolored beads on Jody’s shoes, which reminded him of sprinkles on an ice-cream cone: absolutely mesmerizing, when you stopped to examine them. If you stopped to examine them. That was the artist’s imperative, of course. Haveabud closed his thumb and first finger tightly against the bridge of his nose, squinting. The French word for beads … what was that word? Ou sont les beads d’hier? Fallen, every one, like plates from a Schnabel canvas. The waitress asked if they wanted anything else. Haveabud played rogue, raising his eyebrows and turning to look at Jody as if the question were intentionally loaded with sexual innuendo.

Jody was thinking of the flash storm that had hit the week before, soaking a wedding tent as it was being erected. Early in the morning, she had walked east to the photo district to drop off the negatives at the lab, so she could pick up contact sheets at the end of her meeting with Haveabud. She suspected that if she presented the contact sheets to him as amusing, he would see them as amusing; if she said they were sad photographs, he would see them as that.

Haveabud asked the waitress for the bill. As Jody looked away, Haveabud suddenly wondered whether his wife might be having an affair. She rarely cooked anymore — more interesting things to do in the afternoon? Instead, they ate roasted chickens she had delivered to the apartment, along with asparagus-tip salad that cost the same per pound as gold.

Two men pulled out chairs at the adjacent table and sat down. One carried a beat-up violin case with a peeling peace sign stuck to it. The other had eyeglass frames with a false nose and bushy eyebrows pushed to the top of his head. Bushy Brows swatted at his companion and told him to lighten up. “Telling me to lighten up when you’re in one of your manic periods is like telling me to raise my hands above my head as the roller coaster dips down,” the man with the violin case said.

“Do you think they have Bosco?” Bushy Brows said.

“What in the name of God would make you think they might have Bosco?”

“So,” Haveabud said. “Scavullo. Any time better for you than another?”

“I have to go home tomorrow,” Jody said. “A friend is taking care of my son.”

“Aaaaaaah, the son,” Haveabud said, letting her know by his use of the article that the child was interchangeable with an object: the chair, the phone, the stove.

She shrugged, palms up.

What a pretty woman, Haveabud thought. Nice hands. Pretty shoes. Someone’s mother. Why couldn’t he have been dealt such a mother?

The waitress gave him his change. He said, “That’s a private detective double-parked over there. My companion is Sherry Lansing, wearing a wig.”

In his daybook, Haveabud wrote: “Lunch re Scav shot $28.40,” adding twenty cents for good luck. Particularities — that is, lies that were very particular — were in Haveabud’s experience quite likely to convince people.

Haveabud decided he would take Jody up on her offer to accompany her to the photo lab, where contact sheets of the rained-out wedding awaited them. Even Jody could not have imagined the perfect effect of the rain-splashed filter, like a glossy membrane over everything: women clustered under an overhang, hands lifted to their faces in dismay; the chaos made by men first erecting, then abandoning, the tent. It was unclear whether rain or tears glistened on some faces, but the surprise — the shock of the sudden downpour — was there. Ultimately, one rained-out wedding hardly mattered, and because she was so sure of that, Jody decided she would play devil’s advocate and pitch the photographs to Haveabud as serious business.

As his mother and Haveabud sat on the front step of a brownstone, looking at small rectangular images, Will was in Virginia, staring at a peanut butter sandwich Mary Vickers had served him. He had peeled the top piece off, to compare with Wag the number of banana slices each had been allocated.

Haveabud’s lips, smacking with pleasure as he surveyed the photographs, were echoed across the miles by the sticky lips of two small boys who had been told to place the bread back on the sandwich instantly and to begin eating before Mary Vickers went stark raving mad.

Before the child can tell time, the wristwatch with painted hands is not a joke but quite acceptable. Later, he may wish to have a real watch so he can turn back the hands and make the hour earlier and not have to go to bed, or turn the hands ahead so the visit to the circus will come sooner. At first, there is no hostility to clocks. Like a puppy soothed by the regularity of a sound, the child may be consoled or oblivious — but in any case, the sound of seconds ticking away will not correspond to anything real. He may see it as something that fascinates adults: that disc on the wall that is watched so closely when a visitor hasn’t arrived, when the bread has taken too long to rise, when many other people are ahead of you in the pediatrician’s waiting room.

What is time? As the child experiences it, it makes no sense at all. Children have little or no sense of what goes on behind the scenes, so when things happen, they seem to just happen suddenly. Imagine how strange the world would seem if you were too young to know gray clouds meant rain, too inexperienced to realize that the dog coming toward you could run faster than you could get away. Adults become angry when they have to slam on the brakes, unhappy even if the weather report has been unreliable.

Considered from the child’s perspective, life is always speeding up or going too slowly. The best ideas come at bedtime. The circus ends too soon. String beans take forever to eat. Cartoons aren’t satirical exaggerations but normative presentations of everyday situations. The child also will suddenly crash into a wall, unable to correctly judge speed versus distance.

In cartoons, people drop off cliffs.

The child wakes up on the floor, tangled in covers, having toppled — who knows how? — from the bed.

In cartoons, beasts roar and devour people.

Turn a corner in a city, and a gang of pink-haired punks hurtles in front of the child.

In cartoons, buildings suddenly explode.

Remember that the child also sees TV news.

What if your world was a comedy routine gone out of control? What if you experienced the world as a dwarf? What if people saw in you a potential troublemaker simply because you were present? What if half the questions you were asked were rhetorical and the other half inordinately complicated? What if you lacked the ability to judge whether people were drunk or sober, and if your plans for the following day were changed when another person announced a change of plans? What if you lived in one house and suddenly moved to another? What if you had mysterious fevers?

Consider a typical day in the life of a child:

A Day Visit to Mrs. X

Getting up early, on an overcast day. Raincoats put in the car trunk. Finding Ozzie, the rubber turtle, when the trunk lid pops up. Ozzie, saved from oblivion! (Though the child has never been informed of it, Ozzie has been named by the parent after Ozzie Nelson, whose short neck made him look like a turtle.) Then the road: pine trees, with all the green growth high up, which must mean they’re dying. An unfamiliar smell blowing through the windows. The ride is much too long — how can adults just look straight ahead and drive? The parent’s jack-o’-lantern eyes shine brightly in the rearview mirror. The child counts all the cars that are red. Probably the color of the car Santa would drive, if he drove a car instead of a sled. Checking the sky, just to see … but it’s the wrong month. Santa never makes mistakes. He only comes out one night a year.

Arrival at Our Destination

The child is suddenly shy when he meets X, a tall, matronly woman in a gauzy dress. When it blows in the wind, it looks like the ruffling feathers of the lavender-blue bird he saw at the zoo. They let you walk right into the cage with the birds. There are strips of plastic instead of doors. Does X know about the birdcage at the zoo?

The child tells X about the zoo.

X sits on her heels to make eye contact. She says she knew him when he was a little baby.

People say this all the time.

X says she has spent all day cleaning her house; it won’t be much like a zoo. (She says this to the child, but is actually speaking to the parent.)

X rises. The parent and X embrace.

Time stretches endlessly. X brings out cookies. Raisin, not chocolate chip. The child has been told that raisins are monsters’ nose goop.

Slightly embarrassed, the parent says that children are unpredictable. Who knows why they sometimes refuse to eat?

Returning Home from X’s

It might not be a road but the sea. They might be in a boat, not a car. That might not be the setting sun but the North Star by which the parent navigates. Soon all the other cars will have to give sea room. Sea room means that other boats are supposed to come only so close. What if there was sidewalk room, and people were supposed to stay a certain distance away? Or bedroom room, and your stuffed animals needed to be one foot away from you? The child decides that before he goes to bed, he will see that Dobbin, Chubby, and Sheila Skunk are all one foot from his side, instead of nestled close. That is, if the hill they are about to ascend doesn’t turn into a wave that crashes, sending their car far off its path. With relief, he sees that they have caught the wave perfectly. Then there is more black sea in front of them. Distances across water are farther than they seem.

Think about the odd situations and difficulties the child faces every day. With not enough information, he has to go on intuition; because of an as-yet-uninhibited imagination, the ordinary devolves into the extraordinary with phantasmagoric swiftness. And, as if the world weren’t mysterious enough with its cacophony of voices and unanticipated interruptions, at day’s end the child is read a fanciful tale.

There can hardly be a more serious test of a person’s sanity than surviving childhood. Romanticized by adults as a time of freedom, childhood is actually the time when the child is increasingly told to repress his desires. Singled out by poets as persons who possess great wisdom, children are in actuality often silenced.

Adults keep their sanity by ruling out excessive speculation. They strive to see continuity when little is discernible. But these things do not come naturally to a child. The child is either totally involved or looking ahead to the next thing. The child always wonders, What if? The child can see continuity in a doll, a train, and a yo-yo. Though the child’s room can seem a chaotic battlefield, it may have a very distinct order. How distressing that at the parent’s whim villages are torn down, and all the animals in the zoo are piled in the toy box, with no regard to natural enemies.

While children spontaneously imagine, parents compulsively seek order. The lines are drawn, though fatigue can erode the strongest parent’s resolve. Down on all fours, the parent may agree to help reconstruct the village. To stop the child’s tears, the parent will willingly take the yellow hatbox down from the top shelf of the closet, in spite of previous explicit instructions to the child to stay away from it, and place the box at the far end of the rug, so it can shine again as a three-dimensional sun, illuminating a happy kingdom.