Purity

[le1°9n8a0rd]

My affair with Anabel had begun as soon as our divorce decree came through. In exchange for stipulating that I’d abandoned her—“abandonment” being one of the few grounds for divorce that New York state law recognized, and the one that Anabel felt best captured the wrong she’d suffered — I’d been permitted to reclaim our valuable rent-controlled tenement in East Harlem while Anabel went off to live by herself in the woods of New Jersey. Since there could be no talk of inflicting Manhattan on her, I had to take the bus across 125th Street and the subway up to 168th, followed by a much longer and invariably nauseating bus ride over the Hudson and out through increasingly raw developments to the hills northwest of Netcong.

I’d made this trip twice in February, twice in March, and once in April. On the last Saturday in May, my phone rang around seven in the morning, not long after I’d gone to bed drunk. I answered it only to stop the ringing.

“Oh,” Anabel said. “I thought I was going to get your machine.”

“I’ll hang up and you can leave a message,” I said.

“No, this is only going to be thirty seconds. I swear I will not get drawn in again.”

“Anabel.”

“I just wanted to say that I reject your version of us. I utterly reject it. That’s my message.”

“Couldn’t you have rejected my version by just never calling me again?”

“I’m not getting drawn in,” she said, “but I know the way you operate. You interpret silence as capitulation.”

“You don’t remember me promising I’d never interpret your silence that way. The very last time we spoke.”

“I’m hanging up now,” she said, “but at least be honest, Tom, and admit that your promise was a low trick. A way of having the last word.”

I laid the phone on my mattress, next to my ear and mouth. “Are we at the point yet where I get blamed for this conversation lasting more than thirty seconds? Or do I still have that to look forward to?”

“No, I’m hanging up,” she said. “I wanted to say for the record that you’re completely wrong about us. But that’s all. So. I’m going to hang up.”

“OK, then. Good-bye.”

But she could never hang up, and I could never bear to do it for her.

“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “You did consume my youth and then abandon me, but I know you’re not responsible for my happiness out here, although in fact I’m having a good time and things are going pretty well, unbelievable as it may sound to a person who considers me, quote, ‘unequipped’ to deal with the, quote, ‘real world.’”

“‘Consumed my youth and then abandoned me,’” I quoted back. “But this is not a provocation. You just wanted to leave a thirty-second message.”

“Which I would have done! But you reacted—”

“I reacted, Anabel — do I need to point this out? I reacted to your picking up a telephone and dialing my number.”

“Right, I know, because I’m so needy. Right? I’m so pathetically needy.”

I couldn’t have named one instant of happiness or ease from our previous togetherness binge, four weeks earlier. I emerged from these binges feeling bruised and harrowed, with worrisome bomb craters in my memory but also a vague, sick craving for a do-over.

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to get together? Do you want me to come out? Is that why you called?”

“No! I do not want to get together! I want to hang up the phone if you would please just let me!”

“Usually, in the past, though, when you’ve called,” I said, “you’ve started out saying you didn’t want to get together, and then, after a couple of hours on the phone, it’s come out that you did actually, all along, underneath, want to get together.”

“If you want to come out and see me,” she said, “you should have the decency to say so in so many words—”

“And by then, of course—”

“Like any polite man who wants to spend time with a woman he respects, instead of making your invitation some sort of icky accusation—”

“By then, of course,” I said, “it’s gotten to be pretty late in the day, which means that by the time we actually do get together, which is what you’ve secretly wanted all along, it’s very late, and when we then, inevitably, go ahead and sleep together—”

“Instead of insidiously twisting things around,” she said. “So that it looks like my neediness rather than yours, my lousy life rather than your own lousy life—”

“Inevitably go ahead and sleep together—”

“I don’t want to sleep with you! I don’t want to see you! That’s not why I called! I called to say a simple thing which—”

“It’s three or four in the morning before we actually get around to the sleeping part of sleeping together, which, with three hours of travel and a workday ahead of me, has tended, in the past, to become kind of a bad scene. Is all I’m trying to remind you.”

“If you want to come out and go for a hike with me,” she said, “that would be very nice. I would like that. But you have to say it’s what you want.”

“But I didn’t call you,” I said.

“But you were the one who brought up getting together. So just be honest with me now.”

“Is this something you want?”

“Not unless you want it and you say so like a human being.”

“But that perfectly mirrors my own sentiments. So.”

“Look, I called,” she said. “You could at least—”

“What could I do?”

“Do you think I’m going to harm you if you let your defenses down for one tiny half second? I mean, what do you think I’m going to do? Make you my slave? Force you to be married to me again? It’s a hike, for God’s sake, it’s just a hike!”

Simply to avoid the two-hour version of this conversation — wherein Party A tried to prove that Party B had made the fatal statement that prolonged the conversation in the first place, and Party B challenged Party A’s version of events, and this, in turn, there being no actual transcript, compelled Party A to reconstruct from memory the conversation’s overture and Party B to offer a reconstruction that differed from Party A’s in certain crucial respects, which then necessitated a time-devouring joint effort to collate and reconcile the two reconstructions — I agreed to go out to New Jersey and take a hike.

Anabel was cleansing her spirit on land that belonged to the parents of her younger friend and only fan, Suzanne. One of my first actions after requesting a divorce was to sleep with Suzanne. She’d asked me out to dinner as a kind of ambassador for Anabel, intending to talk me into reconsidering the divorce, but she was so worn out from listening to Anabel’s complaints about me and about the New York art world, in nightly two-hour phone calls, that I ended up talking her into betraying Anabel. I must have been trying to make Anabel want a divorce as much as I did, but things hadn’t worked out that way. She’d terminated her friendship with Suzanne and accused me of refusing to rest until I’d stolen or polluted every last thing she had. But the upshot, according to her curious moral calculus, was that both Suzanne and I owed her. I continued to take Anabel’s calls and get together with her, and Suzanne allowed her to keep living on the New Jersey property, which Suzanne’s parents, who’d relocated to New Mexico, were trying to sell at an unrealistic price.

The frosty bus ejected me at a nowhere little intersection in the woods. For a split second my eyeballs fogged up in the humidity. A kind of atmospheric curfew had been imposed by the heat — everything felt close and lush. Greenhouse. I saw Anabel step out of some trees where she’d been hiding. She was smiling broadly and, all things considered, inappropriately. My face did something grotesque and inappropriate in reply.

“‘Hello, Tom.’”

“‘Hello, Anabel.’”

Her extraordinary mane of dark hair, whose intricate care and increasingly frequent colorings probably occupied her more than any activity except sleeping and meditating, was all the thicker and more splendid in the steam of summer. Between the top of her beltless corduroys and the bottom of a tight plaid short-sleeved shirt was a strip of naked belly that could have been a thirteen-year-old’s. She was thirty-six. I was two months short of thirty-four.

“You’re allowed to come closer to me,” she said at the moment I was about to come closer.

“Or not,” she added, at the moment I was deciding not to.

Bus fumes lingered in the buggy road cut.

“We’re sort of perfectly out of sync here,” I said.

“Are we?” she said. “Or is it just you? I don’t feel out of sync.”

I wanted to point out that, by definition, a person couldn’t be in sync with a person who was out of sync with her; but there was a logic tree to consider. Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point, since the job of retracing the steps would itself result in utterances to which I would inevitably produce a certain percentage of complicating responses; and so I’d learned to be exceedingly careful about what I said in our first moments together.

“I should tell you right now,” I said, “that I absolutely have to catch the last bus back into the city tonight. It’s a really early bus, like eight o’clock.”

Anabel’s face became sad. “I won’t stop you.”

In the minute I’d been off the bus, the sky had steadily grown less gray. Sweat was popping out all over me, as if somebody had turned on a broiler.

“You always think I’m trying to detain you,” Anabel said. “First I bring you out here when you don’t want to come here. Then I make you stay here when you want to be gone. You’re the one who’s always coming and going, but somehow you have the idea that I’m the one pulling the strings. Which, if you feel powerless, just imagine how I feel.”

“I wanted to get it said,” I said carefully. “I had to say it sometime, and if I’d said it later, it might have seemed like I’d been trying to hide it from you.”

She tossed her mane with displeasure. “Because of course it would disappoint me. Of course it would break my heart if you had to catch the eight eleven bus. You’re standing there wondering: What is the best moment to convey this heartbreaking news to your clinging, suffocating, former whatever-I-am?”

“Well, as you’re kind of demonstrating right now,” I pointed out, “both approaches carry their own risk.”

“I don’t know why you think I’m your enemy.”

Cars were approaching on the main road. I moved up the smaller road toward Anabel, and she asked me if I’d thought she would be disappointed that I wasn’t spending the night.

“Possibly, a little bit,” I said. “But only because you’d mentioned that you didn’t have anything planned all day tomorrow.”

“When do I ever have anything planned?”

“Well, exactly. And that’s why the fact that you went so far as to mention it—”

“Instantly became translated in your mind into the threat of recrimination if you decided not to spend tomorrow with me, too.”

I inhaled. “There’s an element of truth to that.”

“Well, good,” she said. “And I’m suddenly not sure I want to see you at all, so.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “although I wish you’d told me that before you’d invited me out here and I’d spent half a day on buses.”

“I didn’t invite you. I accepted your offer to come out. There’s a big difference there. Especially when you show up so full of animosity, and the first thing out of your mouth is how soon you have to leave. The first thing out of your mouth.”

“Anabel.”

“You rode the bus all day. I sat here waiting for you. Who has it worse? Who’s more pathetic?”

It was humiliating to do the logic tree with her. Humiliating how ready I was to contest the pettiest point, humiliating to still be doing it after having done it so infernally much in the previous twelve years. It was like beholding my addiction to a substance that had long since ceased to give me the slightest kick of pleasure. Which was why our meetings now had to take place in the strictest secrecy. Anywhere else but deep in the woods, we would have been too ashamed of ourselves.

“Can we just hike?” I said, shouldering my knapsack.

“Yes! Do you think I want to stand here talking like this?”

The little road ran near the boundary of Stokes State Forest. We’d had a wet spring, and the plant kingdom of the ditches and the successional meadows and the stonier-sloped woods was fantastically green. Obscene amounts of pollen were in the air, the trees burdened with the bright dust of their own fertility, the swollenness of their leaves. We squeezed through the jaws of a rusty gate and went down an old dirt road so badly washed out that it was more like a creek bed. Weeds liable to repent of their exuberance very soon — weeds already bigger than they ever ought to have been, weeds on steroids, weeds about to lean and buckle and be ugly — shouldered in so high on both sides that we had to walk single file.

“I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask you why you ‘have to’ go back tonight,” Anabel said.

“Not really, no.”

“It would be just too painful for me to hear you have a brunch date with Winona Ryder.”

My presumptive interest in dating much younger pretty girls, now that I was divorced, had become a leitmotif of Anabel’s. But my actual date the next day was for dinner, not brunch, and was not with a girl but with Anabel’s father, whom she loathed and hadn’t seen in more than a decade. Despite our well-demonstrated pattern of recidivism, I’d allowed myself to believe that I really wouldn’t ever hear from her again, and that I could see her father without fear of being castigated for it.

“Isn’t that what the girlies like to do now?” Anabel said. “Meet for ‘brunch’? I do believe there’s no more sickening word in the English language. The mingled smells of quiche lorraine and sausage grease.”

“I have to go back because I need to get some sleep, not having had any last night.”

“Oh, right. I woke you up. I still need to be punished for that.”

I managed not to respond. I was starting to remember chunks of binge that I’d blacked out from my previous visit, but it felt less like remembering than reliving. Past and future mingled in the land of Tom and Anabel. The New Jersey sky was a low-hanging steambath of churning flocculence, darkening and then yellowly brightening in random places that gave no clue about the sun’s actual location or, thus, about what time it was or where east and west might be. My disorientation deepened when Anabel led me up into woods once haunted by the Lenape tribe. It was simultaneously five and one and seven and last month and tomorrow afternoon.

Anabel stayed ahead of me, her corduroy butt directly in my line of sight. She led me along deer trails, long-legged like a deer herself, skirting anything that looked like poison ivy. She was no longer life-threateningly malnourished the way she’d been in the years leading up to our separation, but she was still thin. Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

We were coming down a spongy rust-brown hillside of pine needle when I saw that she’d unbuttoned her shirt. Its little tails fluttered at her sides. She didn’t turn back but started running down the hill. How oppressively hot the woods were, compared to the road! I followed my ex-wife into a small clearing by a lake that appeared to have dried up, though not before drowning all the trees that had once stood in the basin. It was a forest of big gray sticks, the same metallic color as the sky. A silvery heron lifted itself into the air.

“Here,” Anabel said. There was moss and rock and bare dirt underfoot. She shrugged off her shirt and turned around and showed herself to me. Her areolae were too big and outrageously red-red to bear looking at. It was as if her skin were a cream-colored silk into which the blood from matching punctures had seeped extensively. I averted my eyes.

“I’m trying to become less shy with you,” she said.

“Seems to be going pretty well today.”

“So look at me.”

“All right.”

Her blush was highlighting the long, thin line of scar tissue on her forehead — a vestige of the same childhood horse-riding accident that had cost her most of her two front teeth, which had been capped expensively, if not altogether imperceptibly. Between these two teeth was a gap that to me had always been a sexy thing. Her little come-hither gap. The continual suggestion of a tongue.

She shook her breasts at me and shuddered with shyness and turned away, embracing the trunk of a beech tree. “Look, I’m a tree hugger,” she said.

This was the point at which we were supposed to reverse course and scamper back down to the unitary trunk of the logic tree, all the yes-no branchings converging in assent: yes yes yes. I took off my clothes and discovered that although we were divorced I’d packed six condoms in my little knapsack.

Anabel, lying prone on moss and dirt, offering herself like an original Lenape woman, told me these weren’t necessary.

“How so not necessary?”

“Just not,” she said.

“To be discussed later,” I said, tearing open a package.

I was still so thin in 1991 that I didn’t really have a body at all. What I had was more like an armature of coat-hanger wire with a few key sensory parts attached to it — a lot of head, a fair amount of hands, an erection either tyrannical or absent, and nothing else. I was like a thing drawn by Joan Miró. I was all idea. Six times now, this weird contraption had hauled itself out to the scenic Delaware Water Gap region to be part of some bad idea that Anabel and I now jointly had about ourselves. It wasn’t snuggly, it wasn’t nice. It was her lying down on something hard or squalid and the coat-hanger-wire contraption jumping on furiously.

I asked if I was hurting her.

“Not … damaging me.… … as far as I can tell…”

She said this with an ironic twinkle. There was a football-size rock near her head. I wondered if she’d deliberately lain down by this rock to suggest a thing that she was still too shy with me to ask for. I wondered if the idea was for me to pick up the rock and smash her skull with it.

“How about now?” I said, thrusting hard.

“Now damage possible.”

All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we’d had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and compulsive sex we’d had to get divorced. It was a way of raging against the giant nothing that arguing had ever done to save us. It was the one argument that each of us could lose with honor. But then it was over and there was nothing again.

Anabel was lying facedown on the rocks and dirt, quietly sobbing, while I sorted out the topology of pants legs and underwear. I knew better than to ask why she was crying. We’d be here until nightfall if I did that. Much better to start hiking again and actually cover some ground while we had the conversation about why I hadn’t asked her why she was crying.

She stood up to put her shirt on. “So,” she said. “Now you’ve had your treat, and you can go back to the city.”

“Please don’t try to tell me you didn’t want that yourself.”

“But it was the only thing you wanted,” she said. “And so now you can go back. Unless you want to do it again right now and then go back.”

Slapping a mosquito on my forearm, I looked at my watch and couldn’t read what it plainly said.

“Tell me why we never had children,” Anabel said. “I don’t remember what your explanation was.”

I felt suddenly light-headed. Even by Anabel standards, her broaching of the subject of children seemed an exorbitantly high price for me to pay for a few minutes of sex. She was also presenting the bill brutally soon.

“Do you remember?” she said. “Because I don’t remember any real discussion.”

“So let’s have a five-hour discussion about it right now,” I said. “This would be a great time and a great place.”

“You said, ‘To be discussed later.’ And now it’s later.”

I killed another mosquito. “I’m suddenly getting bit.”

“I’ve been getting bitten the whole time.”

“I didn’t realize you meant that kind of discussion.”

“What did you think I meant?”

I touched the plump knotted rubber in my pants pocket. “I don’t know. Some possible-other-partners, epidemiological type of thing.”

“Safe to say I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Lot of mosquitoes here,” I said. “We should move.”

“Do you even know where we are? Can you find your way back?”

“No.”

“So I guess you need me after all. If you want to catch your bus.”

Strict vigilance was needed to avoid getting lost in the logic tree, but Anabel’s heat, the heat of her back and of our liquid interfacing, and the scent of the Mane ‘n Tail shampoo in her hair, which was always faint but never entirely absent, had dulled my thinking. I’d eaten the opium of Anabel, with predictable consequences. I said, somewhat desperately, “Look, I already know there’s no way you’re letting me catch that bus.”

“Letting you. Ha.”

“Not you,” I said, “I meant us. There’s no way we’re letting me catch the bus.”

But the mistake had been made. She kicked her feet into her sneakers. “We’ll go right back and wait,” she said. “Just to spare me a tiny bit of your hatred for once in my life. So for once I don’t have to be blamed for making you miss your bus.”

Anabel refused to see that there was simply something broken about us, broken beyond repair and beyond assignment of blame. During our previous binge, we’d talked for nine hours nonstop, pausing only for bathroom breaks. I’d thought I’d finally succeeded in showing her that the only way out of our misery was to renounce each other and never communicate again; that nine-hour conversations were themselves the sickness that they were purportedly trying to cure. This was the version of us that she’d called me this morning to reject. But what was her version? Impossible to say. She was so morally sure of herself, moment by moment, that I perpetually had the feeling that we were getting somewhere; only afterward could I see that we’d been moving in a large, empty circle. For all her intelligence and sensitivity, she not only wasn’t making sense but was unable to recognize that she wasn’t, and it was terrible to see this in a person to whom I’d been so profoundly devoted and had made a vow of lifelong care. And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn’t keep working with her.

“Here’s what’s fucked up,” I said as we climbed out of the ruined basin and up to a less buggy height. “Just speaking for myself. A month goes by, and I’m feeling so freakish and depressed and ashamed, because of the last time we got together, that I can barely show my face to another human being. And so I have to come out here, and once I’m here it’s practically biological that I’m going to end up staying thirty-six hours, and raising all sort of false hopes and expectations—”

Anabel spun around. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Do you want me to kill you?”

She shook her head emphatically, no, no, she didn’t want to be killed.

“Then don’t call me.”

“I wasn’t strong enough.”

“Don’t get me out here again. Don’t do this to me.”

“I wasn’t strong enough! For God’s sake! Do you have to rub my face in how weak I am?” And she walked in a small circle with her hands bent into claws near her face, which looked as if a swarm of hornets had somehow got inside her head and were stinging her brain.

“Have pity on me,” she said.

I seized her and kissed her, my Anabel. She was snotty and teary and hot-breathed and dear. Also quite seriously disturbed and all but unemployable. I kissed her to try to make the pain stop, but in no time I also had my hands down the back of her corduroys. Her hips were so narrow that I could take her pants down without unbuttoning them. We’d been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took out my Swiss Army knife, I thought she might be thinking of it, too. But instead she was stabbing the five remaining condoms dead.

* * *

The apartment on Adalbertstraße was hostage to a stomach. When Clelia closed her eyes at night, she could picture it hovering in the darkness above her cot. Outwardly taut and glossy, a pale pink digestive aubergine with darkish veins stemming off it, the stomach was red and shredded on the inside, awash in caustic liquids and liable to convulse like a raging baby at any hour, especially a wee one. This unhappy organ had its residence in the body of Clelia’s mother, Annelie. Clelia slept in the corner of the living room nearest to her mother’s bedroom, so that when Annelie called out for milk and zwieback in the night she wouldn’t wake the younger children or her brother, Rudi, in their bedrooms, only Clelia.

The stomach was keenly attuned to Clelia’s self-pity. It could hear her when she cried herself to sleep, it didn’t like her doing this, it threw up blood and bile onto her mother’s bedsheets, which Clelia then had to strip and soak. There was no arguing with blood. No matter how cruel her mother was to her, she held the bloody trump card of actually being ill.

Nor was there any arguing that Clelia needed to have a job. Even if she hadn’t been denied entry to the university — the university that her father had attended, the four-hundred-year-old university that she passed every morning on her way to the bakery — the family couldn’t have afforded to let her go full-time. Uncle Rudi worked for the city in a street-paving capacity, proud in his bright blue coveralls, the German worker’s uniform, the true uniform of tyranny in the socialist workers’ state, and he took care of his ailing sister to the extent of paying the rent. But he drank and had girlfriends, and so it fell to Clelia to put food on the table. Her brother was fifteen and her sister was still a little girl.

By day Clelia waited on customers at the bakery, by night she waited on the stomach. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays did she have a few hours to herself. She liked to walk along the river and, if the day was sunny, find a patch of clean grass to lie down on and close her eyes. She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger. Most of Clelia’s Oberschule friends were now at the university and strangers to her, the rest kept their distance because her father’s family was bourgeois, and she preferred to be by herself anyway, so she could dream of the man who would take her away from Adalbertstraße to Berlin, to France, to England, to America. A man like her father, whom she could still remember following up their building’s stairs and hearing gently say, through the grudging one centimeter that their upstairs neighbor had opened his door, “My wife is very sick tonight. Her stomach. If you could not be quite so loud?” A man like that.

On a very warm June Saturday, not long after Clelia had turned twenty, she took off her apron at the bakery and told the manager she was leaving early. Already, in 1954, workers in Jena were learning that no harm would come of leaving early; all it meant was that customers had to wait in longer lines, at worst at the cost of work time at their own jobs, where it likewise didn’t matter if they were absent. Clelia hurried home and changed into her favorite old faded lavender summer dress. Her uncle had taken her brother and sister fishing and left her mother, whom the stomach had kept awake all night, asleep in bed. Clelia made a pot of the blackberry tea that her mother claimed was calming to the stomach, although it contained tannic acid and caffeine, and took it to her bedroom with a plate of dry biscuits. She sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and stroked her hair the way she remembered her father doing. Her mother awoke and pushed her hand away.

“I brought you some tea before I go out,” Clelia said, standing up.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Her mother’s face was still pretty when the stomach was off duty. She’d suffered for enough years to be ancient now, but she was only forty-three. For a moment, it seemed that she might be about to smile at Clelia, but then her eyes fell to Clelia’s body, and her face immediately assumed its customary contours. “Not in that dress you’re not.”

“What’s wrong with this dress? It’s a hot day.”

“If you had any sense, the last thing you’d do is call attention to your body.”

“What’s wrong with my body?”

“Its chief defect is that there’s rather a lot of it. A girl with any intelligence would seek to minimize its effect.”

“I’m very intelligent!”

“No, in fact,” her mother said, “you’re a stupid goose. And I predict with some confidence that you’ll make a present of yourself to the first stranger who says two kind words to you.”

Clelia blushed and, blushing, felt herself to be unquestionably a stupid goose: breasty and tall and absurd, with long feet and too much mouth. Goose that she was, she persisted in honking: “Two kind words is more than I ever heard in my whole life with you!”

“That’s unjust, but never mind.”

“I wish some stranger would say kind words to me. I would love to hear kind words.”

“Oh, yes, it’s very nice,” her mother said. “Every once in a long while, the stranger might even be sincere.”

“I don’t care if he’s sincere! I just want to hear kind words!”

“Listen to yourself.” Her mother felt the pot of tea and filled her cup. “You haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet. Your uncle makes a mess of the toilet. I can smell it from in here.”

“I’ll do it when I get back.”

“You’ll do it now. I don’t understand this ‘pleasure first and duty second.’ You’ll clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor, and then, if there’s time, you can change your clothes and go out. I don’t see how you can enjoy a pleasure when you know there’s work to do.”

“I won’t be gone long,” Clelia said.

“Why the hurry?”

“It’s such a beautiful warm day.”

“Are you going to buy something? Are you worried that the store will close?”

Annelie was good at intuiting the one question Clelia didn’t want to answer truthfully, and asking it.

“No,” Clelia said.

“Bring me your pocketbook.”

Clelia went to the parlor and came back with the pocketbook, which contained some small bills and change. She watched while her mother counted pfennigs. Although her mother hadn’t hit her since she became the family’s breadwinner, Clelia’s expression was all animal edginess, the distraction of cornered prey.

“Where is the rest of it?” her mother said.

“This is all there is. I gave you the rest of it.”

“You’re lying.”

All of a sudden, in the left cup of Clelia’s bra, six twenties and eight tens began to stir like crisp-winged insects preparing for flight. She could hear the rustle of their paper wings, which meant that her sharp-eared mother could hear them too. Their scratchy legs and hard heads dug into Clelia’s skin. She willed herself not to look down.

“It’s the dress,” her mother said. “You want to buy the dress.”

“You know I can’t afford that dress.”

“They’ll take twenty marks and let you pay installments.”

“Not for this, they won’t.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I went and asked! Because I want a nice dress!” Clelia looked down in dismay as her right hand, entirely of its own volition, rose from her side and came to rest on the guilty bra cup. She was such an open book, such a guileless and everywhere-spilling mess, that her mother simply said:

“Show me what you have there.”

Clelia took the bills from her bra and gave them to her mother. In the rear of the clothing shop on their street was a particular sundress cut Western or what passed for Western in godforsaken Jena, certainly too Western to be placed on display. Clelia brought the shop lady fresh pastries that she said were old and had to be disposed of, and the shop lady was kind to her. But Clelia was such a stupid goose that she’d described the sundress to her little sister, as an example of what could be found in the rear of stores in the socialist republic, and her mother, though no fan of the socialist republic, had taken note. She was better at surveillance than the socialist republic was. Calm in victory, she put the money in the pocket of her robe, took a sip of tea, and said, “Did you want the dress for some particular assignation? Or just for walking the streets?”

The money didn’t rightfully belong to Clelia and was, to this extent, unreal to her, and she felt that she deserved the punishment of having it taken away from her — indeed, she’d reached into her bra with a sense of penitent relief. But seeing the money disappear into her mother’s pocket made it real to her again. Six months it had taken her to save it up without being caught. Her eyes filled.

“You’re the streetwalker,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Horrified with herself, she tried to take it back. “I meant, you like to walk in the street. I like to walk in the park.”

“But the word you just used. It was?”

“Streetwalker!”

Warm dark tea slapped Clelia full across the bodice of her lavender dress. She looked down, wide-eyed, at the destruction.

“I should have let you starve,” her mother said. “But you ate and ate and ate, and now look at how much there is of you. Was I supposed to let my children starve? I couldn’t work, and so I did the only thing I could. Because you ate and ate and ate. You have no one but yourself to blame for what I did. It was your appetite, not mine.”

It was true enough that her mother had no appetite. But she spoke with such fairy-tale cruelty, in a voice so exacting and controlled, that it was as if there were no mother there at all: as if the person in bed were merely a flesh-and-blood dummy through which the vengeful stomach spoke. Clelia waited to see if some human remnant of her mother might reconsider what she’d said and apologize for it, or at least mitigate it; but her mother’s face distorted with a sudden writhing of the stomach. She gestured feebly toward the teapot. “I need hot tea,” she said. “This isn’t hot enough.”

Clelia fled the bedroom and hurled herself onto her cot.

“You’re a dirty—whore!” she whispered. “A dirty whore!”

Hearing herself, she immediately sat up and clamped her mouth shut with her fingers. Tears in her eyes gave trembling, diaphanous wings to the bars of sunlight leaking in around the heavy curtains that the stomach insisted be kept closed. My God, she thought. How can I say that? I’m a terrible person! And then, throwing herself back down on the narrow mattress, she expelled more words into her pillow: “A whore! A whore! A filthy whore!” At the same time, she beat on her head with her knuckles. She felt herself to be the world’s most terrible person, also one of the most unlucky and ridiculous. Her legs were so long that to sleep on the cot she had to bend them or leave her feet hanging off the end. She was more than one and three-quarters meters tall, a ridiculous goose in the too-small cage of her cot, with the ugliest name any girl was ever given. People at the bakery had the impression that she was stupid because she giggled for no reason and tended to blurt out whatever came into her head.

She wasn’t stupid. She got excellent marks in school and could have been taking classes at the university if the committee had let her. The official word was that her father was bourgeois, but her father was dead and her mother and uncle came from the correct social class. The real stigma was that her mother had granted favors to one and then another black-uniformed officer in the worst years. Clelia’s little sister was the daughter of the second one. And, yes, Clelia had eaten the meat and butter and candy, but she’d been a child, unversed in evil. It was to the evil stomach that one of the officers had brought an entire case of authentic Pepto-Bismol. Annelie had sold herself for the stomach, not for her children.

In my mother’s many tellings of this story to me, she always stressed that when she’d changed out of her ruined dress and dropped one hard roll and two books into her purse, she hadn’t been intending to abandon her siblings, hadn’t been acting on any long-contemplated plan. She just wanted an evening away from the stomach, at most a night and day of relief from an apartment that made her both wholly conscious of the misery of being German and wholly unable to imagine not being German. Until that Saturday in June, the worst thing she’d ever plotted was to buy a Western sundress. Now she’d never have the dress, but she could still go walking in the West, the American sector was only a train ride away.

With thirty marks in her shoulder bag, she hurried downhill to the center of town, which was still being rebuilt, with socialist unhurry, from the pummeling it had received for harboring the manufacturer of bomb sights and rifle scopes for the war. The round-trip ticket to Berlin cost her nearly all her money. With the little that remained she bought a small bag of candy that left her all the hungrier by the time the train reached Leipzig. So little had she planned to run away, one dry roll was the only other food she had. But what she mainly yearned for now was fresh air. The air in her train compartment stank of socialist underarm, the air from the open window was hot and rank with heavy industry, the air at the Friedrichstraße station was befouled with cheap tobacco smoke and bureaucratic ink. She had no sense of being one drop in the bucket of brains and talent that was draining out of the republic in those years. She was just a blindly running goose.

The West was even more ruined than the East, but the air really was a little fresher, if only because night had fallen. The impression Clelia had on Kurfürstendamm was of a place that had experienced a hard winter, not permanent socialist ruination. Already, like the first green shoots of spring, like snowdrops and crocuses, the vital signs of commerce were emerging on the Ku’damm. She walked up the length of it and back down again, never stopping, because to stop would mean to think about how hungry she was. She walked and walked, through darker streets and neighborhoods more demolished. Eventually she became aware that, in some unthinking animal way, she was looking for a bakery, because bakeries dumped their stale Schrippen after closing hour on Saturdays. But why, when a person was desperately seeking one particular kind of store in an unfamiliar city, did she invariably choose the best route to not find it? Every intersection was another opportunity for error.

Error by error, Clelia blundered into the extremely dark and deserted neighborhood of Moabit. A light rain had started falling, and when she finally stopped walking, under a mutilated linden tree, she had no idea where she was. But the city seemed to know — seemed only to have been waiting for her to stop walking. A black sedan, windows open, roof poxed with raindrops, pulled up alongside her, and a man leaned out from the passenger side.

“Hey there, Legsy!”

Clelia looked around to see if the man might be addressing someone else.

“Yes — you!” the man said. “How much?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much for the two of us?”

Smiling politely, because the two men were smiling in such a friendly way themselves, Clelia glanced over her shoulder and started walking again in that direction. She stumbled and began to hurry.

“Oh, hey, wait, you’re fantastic—”

“Come back—”

“Legsy — Legsy — Legsy—”

She felt she was being impolite, even though the two men appeared to have mistaken her for a prostitute. It was an honest mistake and understandable given the circumstances. I should go back, she thought. I should go back and make sure it really was a mistake, and try to think of the right thing to say, because otherwise they’re going to feel embarrassed and ashamed, even though it’s my own stupid fault for walking on this street … But her legs kept carrying her forward. She could hear the sedan turning around and coming after her.

“Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the driver said, slowing the car to match her pace. “You’re a decent girl, aren’t you?”

“Pretty girl,” the other man averred.

“This is no kind of neighborhood for a decent girl to walk in. We’ll give you a ride.”

“It’s raining, sweetheart. Don’t you want to get out of the rain?”

She kept moving, too embarrassed to look in their direction, but also unsure of herself, because it really was raining and she was very hungry; and maybe this was how it had started for her mother, too, maybe her mother had once been a girl like she was now, lost in the world and needing something from a man …

On the dark sidewalk in front of her another man loomed up. She stopped and the car stopped. “You see what I mean?” the driver said to her. “It isn’t safe to walk alone here.”

“Come, come,” the other one urged. “Come with us.”

The man on the sidewalk wasn’t physically imposing, but he had a broad, honest face. And this would have been my father: even on a dark and rainy night in sinister Moabit, he was unmistakably trustworthy. I’m helpless to picture him on that street in anything but cheerfully terrible clothes, his L.L.Bean walking shoes, his khaki high-water pants, and one of those fifties sport shirts whose collar tabs opened wide and flat. After sizing up the situation with a frown, he spoke to Clelia in self-taught German: Entshooldig, fraulein. Con ick dick helfen? Ist allus okay here? Spreckinzee english?

“A little,” she said in English.

“D’you know these guys? D’you want ’em here?”

After a hesitation, she shook her head. Whereupon my father, who was in any case physically fearless, and who believed, moreover, that if you treated people in a rational and friendly manner they would treat you the same way, and that the world would be a better place if everyone would do this, went over to the sedan and shook the men’s hands, introduced himself in German as Chuck Aberant of Denver, Colorado, and asked them if they lived in Berlin or were just visiting like he was, listened with genuine interest to their answers, and then told them not to worry about the girl; he would personally vouch for her safety. It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.

My mother, who at twenty had already witnessed the bombing of Jena, the Red Army’s arrival, her mother being doused with the contents of a neighbor’s chamber pot, a dog eating a child’s corpse, pianos hacked apart for firewood, and the rise of the socialist workers’ state, liked to say to me that she had never in her life seen anything more amazing than the American man’s warmth toward the two creeps in their sedan. His kind of trust and openness was, for a Prussian, inconceivable.

“What’s your name?” my father asked her when they had the street to themselves.

“Clelia.”

“Oh my, what a beautiful name,” my father said. “That’s a great name.”

My mother happily smiled and then, certain that she looked like a mouthsome Tyrannosaur, tried to stretch her lips down over her hundred teeth; but concealment was a lost cause. “Do you really think?” she said, smiling all the more widely.

My father hadn’t said two kind words, it was more like ten. It still wasn’t very many. In the back pocket of his khakis was a map of Berlin, the kind with the patented folding system (my father loved innovations, loved to see inventors rewarded for improving the human condition), and he was able to lead my mother to Zoo Station and buy her some wurst at the all-night food kiosk there. In a mix of English and German, followable only spottily by my mother, he explained that this was his first day in Berlin and he was so excited to be here that he could have walked all night. He was a delegate to the Fourth World Congress of the Association for International Understanding (which wouldn’t survive to hold a fifth congress, owing to its exposure, the following autumn, as basically a Communist front). He’d left his two little girls, from his first marriage, in the care of his sister, and had flown to Berlin on his own nickel. He’d had some disappointments in life, he’d hoped to contribute more to the world than teaching high-school biology, but the wonderful thing about teaching was that it gave him whole summers to get out, out into the world, out into nature. He delighted in meeting foreigners and uncovering common ground; at one point, he’d studied Esperanto. His girls, only four and six, were already great little campers, and when they were older he intended to take them to Thailand, to Zambia, to Peru. Life was too short for sleeping. He didn’t want to waste one minute of his week in Berlin.

When my mother told him she’d run away from Jena, my father’s first impulse was to think of his own daughters and insist that she go home again in the morning. But when he learned that her mother had beaten her and that she’d never go to college, he reconsidered. “Golly, that’s rough,” he said. “Something wrong with a system that makes a bright, vital girl like you work behind the counter in a bakery. I’m an old-fashioned camper — a blanket and a piece of level ground’s enough for me. My hotel’s not much, but it does have beds. Why don’t you sleep in mine, and we’ll see how things look to you tomorrow. I can get a little shut-eye on the floor.”

His motives were almost certainly benign. My father was a good man: a tireless teacher and loyal husband, a seeder of independence in my sisters, a sucker for stories of injustice, a reflexive giver of the benefit of the doubt, a vigorous raiser of his hand when there was unpleasant work to be volunteered for. And yet I’m haunted by the fact that, all his life, he did exactly what he pleased. If he wanted to take his students to Honduras to dig sewage lines, or to a Navajo reservation to paint houses and brand cattle, even if it meant leaving my mother alone for weeks with the kids, he did it. If he wanted to stop the family car and chase a butterfly, he did it. And if he felt like marrying a pretty woman young enough to be his daughter, he did it — twice.

He was originally from Indiana. Hoping to make a contribution to agriculture, he’d pursued entomology, but the road to a PhD in entomology is long. Certain stages in the life cycle of the caddis flies he was studying could be collected only for a week or two each year, and to support himself while the years went by he took a job with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. He was living in Denver when he finished his dissertation and sent his collection to his committee in Indiana, which couldn’t grant a degree without seeing specimens. The package, which represented eight years of work, disappeared in the U.S. mail without a trace. His dream had been to teach at a university and do pure research, but instead he ended up as an ABD in the Denver public school district.

Sometime in the late thirties, he took under his protection a bright but vulnerable girl whose stepfather was an alcoholic brute. He had conferences with her mother, he arranged for the girl to live with a different family, and he encouraged her to apply for college. But the girl turned out to be amenable to rescue only temporarily, because her boyfriend was in prison. As soon as he got out, they ran away to California. My father served four years in the Army Signal Corps, the last of them in Bavaria, and when he returned to his job in Denver he learned that the young woman was living at home again; her boyfriend was now in military prison for nearly killing someone in a bar fight. My father, who I suspect had been in love with her from the beginning, invited her on long hikes in the mountains and by and by proposed to her. Trying to turn her life around, and under pressure from her mother, the young woman may have felt that she had no choice but to accept. (She looked like an angel in the one picture I ever saw of her, but there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be.) The daughters she’d had with my father were one and three when her boyfriend finished his sentence and resurfaced in Denver. My father never told even my mother, let alone me, what happened then. All I know is that he ended up with sole custody of my half sisters.

He was more than twice my mother’s age, but she was a couple of inches taller, and maybe this helped equalize and normalize things. In Berlin, he blew off the plenary sessions of the Fourth Congress, which even by the standards of international do-goodery must have set new records for tediousness and pointlessness, and together he and my mother walked the city. They took the boat rides that must be taken in Berlin, they ate at restaurants that seemed first-class to her. On their fifth evening, he sat her down and made a little speech.

“Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “I want to marry you, and, no, don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull anything dishonorable. I just have a feeling that if you stay here you’re going to get in trouble and find yourself back in Jena in no time, and there goes your whole life. So, and then we’ll see about getting you a passport and so forth. I’ll fly back here next week with my little girls, and you can see if you want to come back to the States with me. If you don’t want to, no hard feelings, we’ll annul the marriage. I just think you’re a swell girl, with a good head on your shoulders, and I have a feeling I’d be happy to stay married to you. I think you’re pretty darned wonderful, Clelia.”

“My mother was right,” my mother said to me much later, when my father was long dead. “I was a stupid-innocent goose. I was so thirsty for kindness, but I’d still never imagined a man could be as kind as your father. I thought I’d run into the kindest man in the world. On a dark street in Moabit! Some kind of miracle! And you know how thick his wallet always was — all those things he never took out of it, business cards from important people, clippings from important publications, all those tips for self-improvement, all those recipes for a better world. And money. Well, it was more than I’d ever seen — more than we had at the bakery at the end of the day. A price-subsidized Communist bakery with one cash register: that was my idea of a lot of money! I didn’t even know the hotel we were in was terrible, he had to tell me it was terrible, and even then I blamed it on the congress, not him. What did I know about strong dollars, weak currencies? And I couldn’t follow everything he said, so I thought the entire city of Denver had elected him to be its representative at an important world congress. I thought he was rich! I’d never seen a thicker wallet. I didn’t know the Association for International Understanding had exactly four dues-paying members in the state of Colorado. I didn’t know anything. He had my heart in his hand in five minutes. I would have crawled on my knees to America to be with him.”

It took some years for my mother’s passion to wane and the marriage to fully polarize. In the early years, she was engulfed by child care and by night school, where she eventually earned a degree in pharmacology. But by the time of the first presidential election I remember, she was voting for Barry Goldwater. She’d seen enough of socialism to foresee its ultimate failure, she knew the Soviets to be thieves, rapists, and murderers, and she never got over the shock of discovering that my father was rich only in comparison to Jena, only the way most Americans were rich. In her disappointment with him, she idealized the truly wealthy, attributing improbable virtues to them. She’d cashed in her youth and her looks for life in a cramped three-bedroom house with a tin-pot progressive too good and kind to be divorced, and in her rage against her stupid-innocence she found better men to admire: Goldwater, Senator Charles Percy, later Ronald Reagan. Their conservatism appealed to her German belief that nature was perfect and that all the troubles in the world were caused by man. During my school hours, she worked at the Atkinson’s Drugs on Federal Boulevard, and what she saw there was diseased human beings parading to the counter where she took their scripts and gave them drugs. Human beings busily poisoning themselves with cigarettes and alcohol and junk food. They weren’t to be trusted, the Soviets weren’t to be trusted, and she arranged her politics accordingly.

My father knew that nature wasn’t perfect. During his years with the Ag Department, he’d stood in parched fields amid plants that were dying of thirst because they lost too much water through their stomata, because their use of carbon dioxide was grossly inefficient, because the chlorophyll molecule’s left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing — its left hand took in oxygen and emitted CO2 while its right hand did the opposite. He foresaw the day when deserts would bloom because of smarter plants, plants perfected by human beings, plants implanted with better, more modern chlorophyll. And he knew that Clelia knew her chemistry, he defied her to refute his proof of nature’s imperfection, and so they would argue about chemistry, with rising voices, at the dinner table.

Sadly, she wasn’t a very good stepmom to my sisters. She herself was like a plant in a parched field, craving the rain of my father’s attention, which my sisters soaked up so much of. But it was worse than that: she criticized my sisters the way her own mother had criticized her; she found particular fault with their clothes. This had to do partly with the rebellious sixties, hard years for a conservative, and partly with the rebellion of one of her own organs, her colon. I’m told I was a colicky baby, and no sooner was she past the stress of this than she suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Physical stress, life disappointment, money worries, genetic predisposition, bad luck: her bowel became inflamed and gave her trouble for the rest of her life. It pulled the strings in her face that her mother’s stomach had pulled in hers, and she became, with everyone but me, the voice of its unhappiness.

When I think about Anabel and the warning signs I ignored on the road to marrying her, I keep coming back to my polarized family: my sisters out doing world-bettering things with my dad, me at home with my mom. She spared me the shameful details of her suffering (she would have preferred, I’m sure, to have had her mother’s stomach, which ejected nothing worse than blood, not foul-smelling filth, not the very foundation of German expletive, humor, and taboo), but of course I could sense that she wasn’t happy, and my father always seemed to be out at some meeting or away on an adventure. I spent a thousand evenings alone with her. She was mostly very strict with me, but we had a strange little game that we played with the tony magazines she subscribed to. After we’d paged through an entire Town & Country or Harper’s Bazaar, she had me pick out the one house and one woman I most wanted. I soon learned to choose the most expensive house, the greatest beauty, and I grew up feeling as if I could redeem her unhappiness by getting them. What was striking about our game, though, was what a gushing, hopeful, big-sisterly girl she seemed like, leafing through the pages. When I was older and she told and retold me the story of her flight from Jena, the person I imagined was that girl.

* * *

I betrayed Anabel before I even met her. At the end of my third year at Penn, I’d run for the top job at The Daily Pennsylvanian on a platform of paying more attention to the “real” world, and once I was installed as executive editor, after a summer in Denver with my mother (my father had died two years earlier), I created the position of city editor and assigned articles about ticket scalping at the Spectrum, mercury and cadmium in the Delaware, a triple murder in West Philly. I thought my reporters were breaking the hermetic campus bubble of seventies self-indulgence, but I suspect that, to the people they pestered for interviews, they seemed more like kids whose overpriced candy bars you had to buy so they could go to summer camp.

In October, my friend Lucy Hill alerted me to an interesting story. Across the river, in Elkins Park, the dean of the Tyler School of Art had come to his office one morning and found a body wrapped in brown butcher paper. Scrawled on the paper in red crayon were the words YOUR MEAT. The body was warm and breathing but nonresponsive. The dean summoned security, which tore away enough paper to reveal the face of a second-year grad student, Anabel Laird. Her eyes were open, her mouth taped shut. Laird was already known to the dean for a series of letters denouncing the underrepresentation of women on the faculty and the disproportionate number of fellowships awarded to male MFA students. Further judicious tearing seemed to indicate that Laird was wearing nothing but the butcher paper. After some collective hand-wringing, security carried away the package and put it in a room with a female secretary who unwrapped the student, untaped her mouth, and covered her with a blanket. Laird refused to speak or move until late afternoon, when a second female student arrived with some clothes in a plastic bag.

Since Laird was an old friend of Lucy’s, I should have edited the story myself, but I’d fallen behind with my class work and left the DP in the hands of the managing editor, Oswald Hackett, who was also my roommate and best friend. The Laird story, written by a notably amoral sophomore, was by turns salacious and snarky, with an assortment of tasty blind quotes from Laird’s fellow students (“nobody likes her,” “poor little trust-fund girl,” “a sad cry for the attention she’s not getting with her films”), but the reporter had checked the requisite boxes, getting lengthy quotes from Laird and a bland statement from the dean, and Oswald ran it in full on our front page. When I read it the following afternoon, I had only a fleeting sense of guilt. Not until I stopped by at the DP and found phone messages from both Laird and Lucy did I realize — all at once, with a lurch in my heart — that the piece had been really cruel.

A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women. Somehow I persuaded myself that I could get away with not returning either of the women’s messages. Nor did I bring the matter up with Oswald; being so afraid of reproach myself, I hated to inflict it on a friend. It seemed possible that Lucy, who lived off campus, might have cooled down by the next time I saw her, and it didn’t occur to me that a woman militant enough to wrap herself in butcher paper might show up at the DP in person.

As the executive editor, I had an actual office I could use as a study room. If Anabel had come to it in bib overalls, the Penn uniform of feminist militancy, I might have guessed who she was, but the woman who knocked on my door, late on a Friday afternoon, was dressed expensively, in a white silk blouse and a snug below-the-knee skirt that struck me as Parisian. Her mouth was a slash of crimson lipstick, her hair a dark cascade.

“I’m looking for Tom Aberrant.”

“Aberant,” I corrected.

The woman registered her surprise with the bulging eyes of a hanged person. “Are you a freshman?”

“Senior, actually.”

“Good Lord. Did you come here when you were thirteen? I’d pictured somebody bearded.”

My baby face was a sore subject. My freshman roommate had suggested that I age myself by manufacturing a dueling scar in the nineteenth-century manner, by cutting myself with a saber and laying a hair in the cut to keep it from healing cleanly. I believed my face to be the main reason why, although I was good at befriending women, I wasn’t having sex with any of them. I got physical attention exclusively from very short girls and queer guys. One of the latter had walked up to me at a party and, without a word, put his tongue in my ear.

“I’m Anabel,” the woman said. “The person whose message you didn’t return.”

My chest constricted. Anabel shut the door behind her with a chicly booted foot and sat down with her arms crossed tightly, as if to conceal what her blouse wanted to reveal. Her eyes were large and brown, like a deer’s, and her face rather long and narrow, also like a deer’s; she shouldn’t have quite been pretty but somehow was. She was at least two years older than me.

“I’m sorry,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your message.”

“Lucy told me that you were a good person. She said I could trust you.”

“I’m sorry about the article, too. The fact is, I didn’t even read it until after it was out.”

“Are you not the editor?”

“Authority is delegated in various ways.”

I was avoiding her eyes, but I could feel them blazing at me. “Was it necessary for your reporter to mention that my father is the president and chairman of McCaskill? And that I’m not a well-liked person?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “As soon as I saw the story, I realized it was cruel. Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of putting a story together, you forget that someone’s going to read it.”

She tossed her dark mane. “So, if I hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t be sorry? What does that mean? You’re sorry you were caught? That’s not sorry. That’s cowardly.”

“We shouldn’t have used those quotes if we couldn’t attribute them.”

“Oh, well, it makes for a fun guessing game,” she said. “Which person thinks I’m a spoiled rich girl, which person thinks I’m a nut job, which person is so sure my art is bad. Of course, it’s maybe not so fun to sit in the same room with the people who said those things, and know they’re still thinking them, and feel them looking at me. To have to sit there with those eyes on me. To be visible like that.”

She still hadn’t lowered her arms from the front of her blouse.

“You’re the one who showed up naked in the dean’s office,” I couldn’t help pointing out.

“Only after they ripped the paper off me.”

“I’m saying you wanted publicity and you got it.”

“Oh, it’s not like I’m surprised. What’s more interesting than a nude female body? What better to sell papers? You proved my point better than I could have proved it myself.”

This was the first of the ten thousand times I had the experience of not quite following Anabel’s logic. Because it was the first time and not the ten thousandth, and because she seemed so ferociously sure of herself — it hurts me to remember the ferocity and assurance she still had then — I assumed the fault was mine.

“We’re a free paper,” I said lamely. “We don’t worry about selling.”

“Actions have consequences,” she said. “There’s a high road and a low road, and you took the low road. You’re the editor, you put those things in print, and I read them. You hurt me and you’re going to have to live with it. I want you never to forget it, the same way I’m never going to forget what you printed. You didn’t even have the decency to return my phone call! You think because you’re male and I’m female, you can get away with it.” She paused, and I saw a pair of tiny tears dissolving her mascara. “You may not think so,” she said more softly, “but I’m here to tell you you’re a jerk.”

Her looks and her superior age gave the accusation a particular sting. In truth, though, I was already primed to doubt my goodness. One Easter, when I was in seventh grade, the younger of my older sisters, Cynthia, had come home from college transformed into a hippie, with octagonal wireframes and a biblically bearded boyfriend. The two of them took a friendly clinical interest in me as one of the first new men of tomorrow. Cynthia asked me about my air rifle: Did I like to shoot and kill my enemies with it? Did I like to blow their heads off? How did I think it felt to have your head blown off? Like a game?

The boyfriend asked me about the butterfly collection I halfheartedly kept in an attempt to please my father: Did I like butterflies? Really? Then why did I murder them?

Cynthia asked me what my ambitions for life were: I wanted to be a reporter or a photojournalist? That was cool. But what about being a nurse? What about being a first-grade teacher? Those jobs were for girls? Why only for girls?

The boyfriend asked me if I ever thought about trying out to be a cheerleader: It wasn’t allowed? Why not? Why couldn’t a boy be a cheerleader? Couldn’t boys jump, too? Couldn’t boys cheer?

Together, the two of them made me feel like a stodgy old man. This seemed mean of them, but I also had the guilty sense that there was something wrong with me. One afternoon, a few years later, I came home late from school to a rodent emergency in the attic, my belongings spread across the floor of my bedroom, my closet door open, my father’s legs visible on a stepladder. I allowed myself to hope that he’d somehow overlooked the worn copy of Oui magazine that I’d shoplifted from the back of a used-book store and hidden in the closet, but after dinner he came to my room and asked me what I thought it was like to be the women in a pornographic magazine.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully.

“Well, you’re at the age where you’d better start thinking about it.”

Everything about my dad was repelling and embarrassing me that year. His Mission Control eyewear, his petrochemically slicked hair, his wide gunslinger’s stance. He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry. Building another dam why? Gnawing tree trunks why? Paddling around with a big grin why, exactly?

“Sex is a great blessing,” he said in his teaching voice. “But what you see in a porno magazine is human misery and degradation. I don’t know where you got the magazine, but simply by owning it you’ve materially participated in the degradation of a fellow human being. Imagine how you’d feel if this were Cynthia, or Ellen—”

“OK, I get it.”

“Do you really? Do you understand that these women are somebody’s sisters? Somebody’s daughters?”

I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone’s degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I’d financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.

A few days later, I stole more magazines. I liked Oui because the girls in it seemed realer — also more European, hence more cultured, intelligent, and soulful — than the ones in Playboy. I imagined deep conversations with them, I imagined them attracted to how compassionately I listened to them, but there was no denying that my interest in them died at the instant of orgasm. I felt as if I was up against a structural unfairness; as if simply being male, excitable by pictures through no choice of my own, placed me ineluctably in the wrong. I meant no harm and yet I harmed.

It got worse. With college looming, I made a bloodless but nonetheless exciting pact to exchange virginities with my senior-prom date, Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, whose romantic sights were set on someone unattainable, and so it happened that, on the last possible weekend of the summer, in an Estes Park cabin belonging to the parents of a mutual friend, at the crucial moment of entry, I accidentally delivered a sharp masculine poke to the very most sensitive and off-limits part of Mary Ellen. She gave a full-throated shriek, recoiling and kicking me away. My attempts to comfort her and apologize only fed her hysteria. She wailed, she thrashed, she hyperventilated, she kept babbling a phrase that I finally deciphered, to my immense relief, as a wish to be taken home to Denver right away.

Mary Ellen’s anally violated shriek was ringing in my ears when I matriculated at Penn. My father had suggested that I choose a smaller college, but Penn had offered me a scholarship and my mother had seduced me with talk of the wealthy, powerful people I would meet at an Ivy League school. In my first three years at Penn, I made not one wealthy friend, but my intimations of male guilt were given a firm theoretical foundation. From lectures both in and out of classrooms, beginning with an orientation-week sex talk delivered by a female senior in bib overalls, I learned that I was even more inescapably implicated in the patriarchy than I’d realized. The upshot was that, in any intimate relationship with a woman, my motives were a priori suspect.

Not that intimate relationships turned out to be a problem. Apparently, only to girls less than five feet tall did I not look heinously young. One of them, a fellow staffer on the DP during my second year, started giving me significant looks, tilting her head to one side, and finally passed me a note in which she alluded to the “danger” of getting “badly hurt” by me. I obliged her by making out with her in the middle of the Green one night, partly out of guilt for not being more interested in having sex with her — for being such an objectifying male that I couldn’t see past her shortness — and partly with the vile male motive of finally having sex with someone, but I was unable to oblige her with the avowals that she then, with tilted head, solicited, and so I ended up guiltily hurting her with nothing to show for it. She went so far as to quit the paper.

I took refuge in beer, the pool tables in Houston Hall, and the DP. As working journalists in a student body doing frivolous student things, my friends and I achieved levels of self-importance that I wouldn’t encounter again until I met people from the New York Times. We had nougat cores of innocence, of course, but we’d all bragged about our high-school sexual exploits and it never occurred to me that, since I had lied, my friends might also have lied. The one person who saw through me was Lucy Hill. She’d been a scholarship student at Choate Rosemary Hall and had waitressed for two years before starting at Penn. She had a boyfriend who was nearly thirty, a self-taught hippie carpenter who looked a lot like D. H. Lawrence, her favorite writer. Lucy’s friendly clinical interest in me was more explicit and forgiving than my sister Cynthia’s. When I confessed to her what I’d done to Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, she laughed and said that Mary Ellen had shrieked because I was giving her the kind of intercourse she couldn’t admit she wanted. Lucy was now intent on finding me somebody with whom to fuck like bunnies. I didn’t love the sound of fuck like bunnies, and I vaguely resented the condescension implicit in Lucy’s project, but I had no one else to talk to about sex, and so I kept going to her off-campus house for weak coffee and mushy Moosewood Cookbook desserts.

Neither Anabel nor I knew it when she left my office, after pronouncing her judgment on my character, but I was exactly the guy she wanted. Outside my window, the sun had gone down in its sudden October way, and I sat in the twilight and suffered shame. I was prepared to believe I was a jerk, and yet it rankled to have been called one by an older and very attractive (and rich, can’t forget rich, it was there from the beginning) woman who’d made a special trip across the Schuylkill to denounce me. I didn’t know what to do. Calling Lucy would simply invite further reproach. I couldn’t get you’re a jerk out of my head. The mental picture of Anabel’s nude body in butcher paper also gave me no rest.

Stopping only briefly at the dining hall to eat two chicken cutlets and a slice of cake, I returned to my dorm room and dialed Anabel’s number, which I’d copied onto the palm of my hand. I counted ten rings on her phone before I hung up. When Oswald came back after dinner, he found me sitting in the dark.

“Mr. Tom, he brooding,” he said. “Something has ‘got his goat.’ Something is ‘stuck in his craw.’” He referenced, not for the first time, a Get Smart episode about an East Asian evildoer named the Claw: “Not ‘the Craw’! The CRAW!”

I wanted to tell Oswald that he’d fucked up and exposed me to humiliation, but he was in such high spirits, so completely unaware of having fucked up, that I couldn’t bring myself to ruin his evening. Instead, I vented my hatred of the author of the article.

“He’s very like a little sharp-toothed mink,” Oswald concurred. “If there were any justice in the universe, he wouldn’t write such clean copy.”

“The blind quotes about Laird were really mean. I’m wondering if we should print some sort of apology.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Oswald said. “You’ve got to stand by your reporter, even if he is a little beady-eyed mink.”

Oswald and I had come up together on the DP, tearing apart each other’s prose. Neither of us ever fell into a mood so bleak that the other couldn’t talk him out of it, and Oswald soon had me laughing with his impression of the Broncos’ backup quarterback Norris Weese (Oswald was a Nebraskan and a fellow Broncos fan) and his savage quotation of classmates dumber and more popular than us. Oswald’s gift for ressentiment was redeemed by his Eeyore-like self-esteem levels. His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet. Out of respect for my own drought, still ongoing, he rarely mentioned her to me, but when he left me alone again I knew that he was going to her, and I fell back into a pit of remorse.

Around ten o’clock I managed to reach Anabel on the phone.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m feeling really bad about not protecting you better. I want to try to make it up to you.”

“The damage is done, Tom. You already made your choice.”

“But I’m not the person you think I am.”

“Who do you think I think you are?”

“A bad person.”

“I’m only going by the evidence,” she said with a hint of playfulness, a possible softening of her judgment.

“Do you want me to resign? Would you believe me then?”

“You don’t have to do that for me. You can just try to be a better editor in the future.”

“I will. I will.”

“All right, then,” she said. “I don’t forgive you, but I do appreciate your returning my call.”

This was where the conversation ought to have ended, but Anabel, even back then, had a specific lack of resolve when it came to hanging up a telephone, and I didn’t want to hang up without having been forgiven. For some seconds, neither of us spoke. As the silence lengthened it began, for me at least, to pulse with possibility. I strained to hear the sound of Anabel’s breath.

“Do you ever show your art?” I said when the silence had become unbearable. “I’d be interested in seeing your films.”

“‘Come up to my room and see my etchings.’ Is that why you called me back?” Again the playful lilt. “Maybe you want to come over and see my art right now.”

“Seriously?”

“Give it some thought and decide if you think I’m serious.”

“Right.”

“My art doesn’t hang on a wall.”

“Right.”

“And no one goes in my bedroom but me.”

She said this as if it were a prohibition, not a circumstance.

“You seem like an interesting person,” I said. “I’m sorry we hurt you.”

“I should be used to it by now,” she said. “It seems to be what people do.”

Again the conversation might have ended. But there was a factor in play which never would have occurred to me: Anabel was lonely. She still had one friend at Tyler, a lesbian named Nola who’d been her confederate in the butcher-paper incident, but the pressure of Nola’s prospectless crush on her made her difficult to take in high doses. All the other students, according to Anabel, had turned against her. They had reason to resent the special status she’d wangled as a filmmaker at a school that didn’t have a film program, but the real problem was her personality. People were attracted to her looks and wicked tongue and to the real-seeming possibility that she was an artistic genius; she had a way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness. The instructor who’d encouraged her to make films had also later propositioned her, which (a) was piggish, (b) was apparently not unusual, and (c) destroyed her faith in his assessment of her talent. She’d been on the institutional warpath ever since. This had clinched her pariah status, since, according to her, the other students cared only about professorial validation, the professorial nod, the professorial referral to a gallery.

I learned some of this and many other things in the thrilling two hours we spoke that night. Though I didn’t feel myself to be an interesting person, I did have listening skills. The more I listened, the more her voice softened toward me. And then we uncovered an odd coincidence.

She’d grown up in Wichita, in a stately house on College Hill. She belonged to the fourth generation of one of the two families that wholly owned the agribusiness conglomerate McCaskill, the country’s second-largest privately held corporation. Her father had inherited a five percent share of it, married a fourth-generation McCaskill, and gone to work for the company. As a girl, Anabel said, she’d been very close to her father. When the time came to send her away to Rosemary Hall, which her mother had attended before its merger with Choate, she said she didn’t want to go. But her mother was insistent, her father uncharacteristically unwilling to indulge her, and so she arrived in Connecticut at the age of thirteen.

“For the longest time, I had everything turned around exactly wrong in my mind,” she told me. “I thought my mother was terrible and my father was wonderful. He’s extremely smart and seductive. He knows how to have his way with people. And when he started betraying my mother, after I went away to school, and when my mother started drinking after breakfast, I realized that she’d been trying to protect me by sending me away. She never admitted it to me, but I know that’s what it was. He was killing her, and she didn’t want him to kill me, too. I was so unjust to her. And then he killed her. My poor mother.”

“Your father killed your mother?”

“You have to understand the way McCaskill works. They’re obsessed with keeping the business in the family, so nobody on the outside can know what they’re doing. It’s all about secrets and family control. When a Laird marries a McCaskill, it has to be forever, because they’re obsessed with family solidarity. So after I went away to school and my father started cheating on my mother, there really wasn’t anything for her to do but drink. That’s the McCaskill way. That and drugs and dangerous hobbies like piloting helicopters. You’d be surprised how much of my extended family is strung out on something. At least one of my brothers is strung out as we speak. You either go to work for the company and increase the family riches — which is what they call the McCaskill way — or else you kill yourself with hedonism, because there’s no reality principle to hold you back. It’s not like anybody in the family needs to make a living.”

I asked what had happened to her mother.

“She drowned,” Anabel said. “In our pool. My father was out of town — no fingerprints.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A little over two years ago. In June. It was a nice warm night. Her blood alcohol would have knocked a horse down. She passed out in the shallow end.”

I said I was very sorry, and then I told her that my dad had died in the same month as her mother. He’d retired only two weeks earlier, after counting the years to his sixty-fifth birthday, never speaking of “retirement,” only of “retirement from teaching,” because he still had so much energy. He was looking forward to reconstructing his caddis-fly collection and finally getting his PhD, to learning Russian and Chinese, to hosting foreign-exchange students, to buying an RV that met my mother’s requirements for outdoor comfort. But the first thing he did was volunteer for a two-month zoological mission to the Philippines. He wanted to scratch his old itch for exotic travel while I was still young enough to be spending summers at home, so that my mother wouldn’t be alone. When I drove him to the Denver airport, he told me that he knew my mother could be difficult but, if I ever felt impatient with her, I had to remember that she’d had a rough childhood and wasn’t in the best of health. His speech was loving and the last I ever heard from him. A day later, he was in a small plane that hit the side of a mountain. A four-paragraph story in the Times.

“What day did this happen?”

“It was June nineteenth in the Philippines. June eighteenth in Denver.”

Anabel’s voice became hushed. “This is extremely weird,” she said. “My mother died on the same day. We were both half orphaned on the exact same day.”

It now seems to me somehow crucial that the day was arguably not the same — her mother had died on the nineteenth. And until that Friday night I’d never been a superstitious person. My father had waged a personal war against the overvaluation of coincidence; he had a classroom riff, sometimes repeated at home, in which he “proved” that chewing Juicy Fruit gum causes hair to be blond, by way of illustrating proper scientific inference. But when Anabel spoke those words, after an hour and a half in which my world had been shrinking to the size of her voice in my ear — and here again it seems crucial that we had our first real conversation on the phone, which distills a person into words passing directly into the brain — I shivered as if my fate were overtaking me. How could the coincidence not be significant? The interesting person who’d pronounced me a jerk not six hours earlier had now been confiding in me, in her lovely voice, for an hour and a half. It felt incredible, magical. After the shiver had passed, I had an erection.

“What do you think it means?” Anabel said.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. That’s what my dad would say. Although—”

“It’s very weird,” she said. “I wasn’t even planning on going to your office today. I was coming back from the Barnes Collection, which is a different story, why anybody still thinks Renoir père needs to be looked at, but there is such a person at Tyler and I have the misfortune of being in his lecture class, not having taken it last year when everyone else did. I’d imagined that an exception might be made, but, safe to say, nobody’s in a mood to make exceptions for me now. But I was on the platform at Thirtieth Street, and I got so upset thinking about what you’d done to me that I let my train go by. And that seemed like a sign that I should go and find you. Because I missed the train. I’ve never gotten so involved in a thought I’ve missed a train.”

“That does seem like a sign,” I said, at the urging of my erection.

“Who are you?” she said. “Why did this happen?”

In the state her voice had put me in, I didn’t consider these questions nutty, but I was spooked by their seriousness. “I am an American, Denver-born,” I said. And added, pompously, “Saul Bellow.”

“Saul Bellow is from Denver?”

“No, Chicago. You asked me who I am.”

“I didn’t ask who Saul Bellow is.”

“He won the Pulitzer Prize,” I said, “and that’s what I want to do.” I was trying to seem a tiny bit interesting to her, but instead I sounded idiotic to myself.

“You want to be a novelist?” Anabel said.

“Journalist.”

“So I don’t have to worry about you taking my story and putting it in a novel.”

“Not going to happen.”

“It’s my story. My material. It’s what my art comes out of.”

“Of course it is.”

“But journalists betray people for a living. Your little reporter betrayed me. I thought he was interested in what I was trying to express.”

“That’s not the only kind of journalist.”

“I’m trying to figure out whether I should be hanging up now. Whether these are bad signs. Betrayal and death, those are bad signs, aren’t they? I think I should be hanging up on you. I’m remembering that you hurt me.”

But of course she couldn’t hang up.

“Anabel, please,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken her name. “I want to see you again.”

I saw her again, but not before going to Lucy’s house for weak coffee and some sort of brown Betty with oatmeal in it. Lucy’s house was overwarm and reeked, to me, of fucking like bunnies. “You shouldn’t feel bad about the article,” she told me. “I only called you to warn you a righteous tornado was heading your way. Anabel needs to read Nietzsche and get over her thing about good and evil. The only philosopher she ever talks about is Kierkegaard. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this OK?’”

“I still feel bad,” I said.

“She called me yesterday to talk about you. Apparently you had some sort of marathon conversation?” Lucy helped herself to more brown Betty. She wasn’t fat, but she was getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs. “She asked me if you’re Good, capital G, which I took to mean she might want you in her pants. You certainly need to be in someone’s pants, but I’m not sure that hers are the right ones. I know what I’m talking about. I was head over heels for her myself, our senior year at Choate. All the teachers were in awe of her, and she always had funds and got these crazy-strong buds they’ve started growing hydroponically. She had trouble relating to people, but not when she was stoned. She’d get massively stoned at parties, sort of dangerously stoned, and then have sex with somebody, and then get up at six in the morning and write college-level papers. I wanted to sleep with her myself, but she’d sworn off sex by the time we roomed together. Now she’s given up pot, too. She’s become Saint Anabel. I still love her, and I felt bad about the article, but it was really her fault for talking to your reporter. She sets herself up for these things.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Not for the longest time,” Lucy said. “I asked her how often she masturbates, and she acted all appalled with me for asking. As if she hadn’t been one of the wildest girls in the history of Choate. But I think she’s sort of messed up sexually from that. She was too young and she also got VD. It’s unfortunate, but the upshot is I don’t think she’s a great candidate for you.”

I was still processing this information when Lucy took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, away from its towers of crusty cookware, and up to the room she shared with her boyfriend, Bob. The bed was unmade, the floor strewn with clothes. “I have a new plan,” she said. She pressed her forehead into mine and propelled me backward onto the bed. “We can start slowly and see how this goes. What do you think?”

“What about Bob?”

“That’s my problem, not yours.”

Just a week earlier, I might have been down with the plan. But now that Anabel was in the picture, I felt disappointed by the idea that sex, which had assumed such fearsome proportions in my mind, was supposed to be as natural and homey as eating brown Betty. There was also no escaping the conclusion that Lucy was trying to keep me away from Anabel. She was all but saying so. We necked on her paisley sheets for no more than ten minutes before I excused myself.

“This is fun, though, don’t you think?” Lucy said. “We should have thought of this months ago.”

“Definitely fun,” I said. To be polite, I added that I looked forward to the next time.

How different my Sunday afternoon with Anabel was. We met at the art museum under a cold gray sky. Anabel came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions. I’d asked for instruction in art, and she swept through the galleries impatiently, issuing blanket dismissals—“snore,” “wrong idea,” “religion blah blah blah,” “meat and more meat”—until we came to Thomas Eakins. Here she stopped and visibly relaxed.

“This is the guy,” she said. “This is the only male painter I trust. I guess I also don’t mind Corot and his cows. He gets the sadness of being a cow. And Modigliani, too, but that’s only because I used to have a crush on his work and wished he could have painted me. All the rest of them, I swear to you, are telling lies about women. Even when they’re not painting women, even when they’re painting a landscape: it’s lies about women. Even Modigliani, I don’t know why I forgive him, I shouldn’t. I guess because he’s Modigliani. It’s probably good I never met him. Later on, I can show you all the women painters in this collection — oh, wait.” She snorted. “There are no women painters. This entire collection is an illustration of what happens without women on the scene to keep men honest. Except for this guy here. God, he’s honest.”

I took it as a heartening sign that she liked at least one male painter; that she could make an exception. She was a terrible art-history instructor, but if you were going to look at only one artist in that museum, Eakins wasn’t a bad choice. She pointed out the geometry of rower and oar and scull and wake, and how honest Eakins was about the atmospherics of the lower Delaware valley. But the main thing for her was Eakins’s bodies. “People have been depicting the human body for thousands of years,” she said. “You’d think we would have gotten really good at it by now. But it turns out to be the hardest thing in the world to do right. To see it the way it really is. This guy not only saw it, he got it down in paint. Somehow, with everybody else, even photographers, or actually especially with photographers, some idea gets in the way. But not with Eakins.” She turned to me. “You’re a Thomas also, or just plain Tom?”

“Thomas.”

“Am I allowed to say I’m glad I don’t have your last name?”

“Anabel Aberant.”

She thought about this. “Actually, Anabel Aberrant might not be so bad. Kind of my entire story in two words.”

“You’re allowed to pronounce it any way you want.”

As if to dispel any coded allusion to future marriage, she said, “You really are bizarrely young-looking. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“I think it was a character thing with Eakins. I think to paint this honestly, you have to have a good character. He may have had sexual issues, but his heart was pure. People are always saying Vincent had a pure heart, but I don’t believe it. His brain was full of spiders.”

I was beginning to feel like the flavorless kid brother of someone Anabel was doing a favor by seeing me. That she’d called Lucy to ask about me, or that she might be trying to impress me, was hard to credit. As we made our way back outside, I remarked that she and Lucy were very different.

“She has a really fine mind,” Anabel said. “She was the only person at Choate whose ambition I could recognize. She was going to make documentaries and change the face of American cinema. And now her ambition is to make babies with Handyman Bob. I’d be surprised if he has a single good chromosome left after all the psychedelics he’s done.”

“I think she and Bob may be having trouble.”

“Well, I hope they hurry up with that.”

Snowflakes, the first of the season, were slanting across the museum steps. In Denver a day like this would have delivered six to twelve inches, but in Philadelphia I’d learned to expect a turn to rain. As we proceeded down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the most desolate of Philly’s many soul-oppressing avenues, I asked Anabel why she didn’t have a car.

“You mean, where’s my Porsche?” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it. Nobody ever taught me how to drive. And I might as well tell you, in case you have the wrong idea about me, that I’m in the process of weaning myself from the family teat. My father’s paying for my last semester, but that’ll be the end of it.”

“Daughters don’t inherit?”

She ignored this small temerity. “The money is already ruining my brothers. I’m not going to let it ruin me. But that’s not even the reason. The reason is the money has blood on it. I can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. That’s what McCaskill is, a river of meat. They trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river. You probably had McCaskill meat for breakfast today.”

“They have a thing called scrapple here. It’s said to be made out of organs and eyeballs.”

“That’s the McCaskill way, use everything.”

“I think scrapple is more Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“Have you ever been to a pig factory? Chicken farm? Stockyard? Slaughterhouse?”

“I’ve smelled them from afar.”

“It’s a river of meat. I’m making my thesis film about it.”

“I’d like to see this film.”

“It’s unwatchable. Everybody hates it, except Nola, who’s vegan. Nola thinks I’m a genius.”

“Remind me what vegan is?”

“No animal products of any kind. I know I need to go that way myself, but I basically live on toast and butter, so it’s not easy.”

Everything she said fascinated me. We seemed to be heading toward the train station, and I was afraid that we’d part ways without my having fascinated her at all.

“I can assign a story on scrapple,” I said. “Investigate where it comes from, what it’s made of, how the animals are treated. I could write it myself. Everybody complains about scrapple, nobody knows what it is. That’s the definition of a good story.”

Anabel frowned. “It’s sort of my idea, though. Not yours.”

“I’m trying to make amends here.”

“First I’d need to find out whether McCaskill makes scrapple.”

“I’m telling you, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch. I was the one who brought it up, anyway.”

She stopped on the sidewalk and faced me full-on. “Is this what we’re going to do? Are we going to compete? Because I’m not sure I need that.”

I was happy that she spoke of us as something potentially ongoing; distressed that we might be something she didn’t need. Somehow, already, the decision was hers to make. My interest in her had quietly been assumed.

“You’re the artist,” I said. “I’m just the journalist.”

Her eyes searched my face. “You’re very pretty,” she said, not kindly. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

“Fine,” I said, smarting. “Thank you for showing me Thomas Eakins.”

“I’m sorry.” She pressed a gloved hand to her eyes. “Don’t be hurt. I just suddenly have a bad headache and need to go home.”

When I got back to campus, I thought of calling her to see how she was feeling, but the word pretty was still rankling, and our date had been so unlike what I’d hoped for, so much not the dreamlike continuation of our phone call, that the needle of my sexual compass was swinging back toward Lucy and her plan. My mother had lately taken to warning me not to make the mistake she’d made and fall too hard for a person at too tender an age — to think of my career first, by which she meant that I should first make money and then choose the most expensive house, etc. — and I certainly felt safe from falling too hard for Lucy.

In my Sunday-night call to Denver, I mentioned that I’d been to the art museum with one of the heirs of the McCaskill fortune. This was weak of me, but I felt I’d disappointed my mother by failing to make the right sort of Ivy League friends. I seldom had news that cheered her.

“Did you like her?” my mother asked.

“I did, actually.”

“Your father’s friend Jerry Knox spent his entire career with McCaskill. They’re well known for having the highest ethical principles. Only in America can you find a company like that…”

I settled in for another lecture. Since my father died, my mother had become a droner, as if to fill the hole in her life with verbiage. She’d also frosted her hair a yellowish gray to make herself look older, more like a widow, but she was still only forty-four and I hoped she would remarry, this time choosing somebody rich and politically right of center, after the expiration of whatever she deemed a proper interval of bereavement. Not that she’d done much actual grieving. She’d used the interval instead to be angry at my father and the pointless way he’d died. It had fallen to me and my sisters to be devastated by the plane crash. I’d already begun to take a kinder view of my father when it happened, and when I arrived at the high-school auditorium for his memorial service and saw the overflow crowd of colleagues and former students, I felt proud to be the son of a man who never met a person he didn’t want to like. My sisters both gave eulogies whose effusion seemed pointed at his widow, who sat next to me and chewed her lip and stared straight ahead. She was still dry-eyed when the service ended. “He was a very good man,” she said.

I’d since spent three increasingly unbearable summers with her. The highest-paying job I could find was at the Atkinson’s Drugs branch where she herself worked. I stayed out late every evening with my friends and returned home after midnight to foul smells in our bathroom. My mother’s colon was unhappy not only with me but with my sisters. Cynthia had dropped out of grad school to become a labor organizer in California’s Central Valley; Ellen was living in Kentucky with a gray-bearded banjo player and teaching remedial English. Both of them seemed happy, but all my mother could see, and drone about, was the waste of their abilities.

I owed my drugstore job to Dick Atkinson, the owner of the chain. During my second summer with my mother, her bowel’s irritation was aggravated by Dick’s courtship of her. Dick was a nice guy and a staunch Republican, and I felt that my mother, who’d always admired his entrepreneurship, could do a lot worse. But Dick was twice divorced, and she, who had stuck it out with my father, disapproved of discarding spouses and wanted no part in it. Dick considered this ridiculous and believed that he could wear her down. By the end of the summer, she’d worked herself into such a state that her gastroenterologist had to put her on prednisone. A few months later, she’d quit her job at the pharmacy. She was now working, at what I suspected were slave wages, for the congressional campaign of Arne Holcombe, a developer of downtown Denver office space. When I’d gone home for a third summer with her, I’d found her health improved but her idealization of Arne Holcombe so over the top, so incessantly and droningly expressed, that I worried for her sanity.

“What are the polls showing?” I asked her when she’d exhausted the subject of McCaskill’s contributions to the moral fiber of the nation. “Does Arne have a chance?”

“Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen,” she said. “We’re still suffering from the aftereffects of a lowlife president who put his lowlife cronies’ interests before the public good. What a gift that was to the special-interest-pandering Democrats and their sickening, grinning peanut farmer. Why any rational person would think that Arne has anything to do with Watergate, it mystifies me, Tom, it really does. But the other side slanders and slanders and panders and panders. Arne refuses to pander. Why would he pander? Is it really so hard to understand that a person with twenty million dollars and a thriving business only descends into the gutter of Colorado politics if he’s animated by civic responsibility?”

“So, that’s a no?” I said. “The polls aren’t looking good?”

I could never get a straight answer from her anymore. She droned on about Arne’s honesty and integrity, Arne’s fiercely independent mind, Arne’s sensible business-based solution to the problem of stagflation, and I hung up the phone still not knowing what the polls showed.

The following Saturday night, Lucy and Bob threw a Halloween party at their house. Oswald and I put on suits and dark glasses and earphones and went as Secret Service agents. Bob’s many friends, people who’d been living within a mile of their alma mater for nearly a decade, people for whom it was a political statement to invest their energies in absurdities and trivialities, had come in ungainly conceptual costumes (“I am the Excluded Middle,” a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door) and were filling the place with reefer smoke. Bob himself was wearing moose antlers, signifying Bullwinkle, with Lucy as his sidekick, Rocky. She’d blackened her nose, covered the rest of her face with brown greasepaint, and dressed in brown stretch pajamas with a tail of real animal fur attached above her butt. She scampered over to Oswald and me and offered to let us touch her tail.

“Must we?” Oswald said.

“I’m Rocky the Flying Squirrel!”

She seemed possibly stoned. I was already embarrassed to be there with Oswald, who had no patience with counterculture zaniness. I scanned the living room for younger, edgier faces and was surprised to see Anabel, standing alone in a corner, her arms crossed firmly. Her costume was no costume — jeans and a jean jacket.

Lucy could see where I was looking. “You know what her costume is? ‘Ordinary person.’ Get it? She can only pretend to be ordinary.”

“That’s Anabel Laird,” I explained to Oswald.

“Hard to recognize without the butcher paper.”

Anabel caught sight of me and widened her eyes in her hanged-person way. It was interesting to see her in denim — it really did look like a costume on her.

“I should go talk to her,” I said.

“No, she needs to try to mingle,” Lucy said. “This happened at our Bastille Day party, too. People can tell she’s worth talking to, they’re coming up to me and asking who she is, but they’re afraid to go near her. I don’t know why she bothers coming to parties where she doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her.”

“She’s shy,” I said.

“That’s one word for it.”

Anabel, seeing that we were talking about her, turned her back on us.

“Take us to your beer,” Oswald said.

I was following him to the kitchen when Lucy grabbed my hand and said she had something to show me. We went upstairs to her bedroom. In the harsh light of its ceiling fixture, she looked like Lucy but also like a small animal. I asked what she wanted me to see.

“My tail.” She turned around and wagged the fur at me. “Don’t you want to touch my tail?”

Who doesn’t enjoy touching fur? I stroked her tail, and she backed into me, grinding her butt against my thighs, dislodging the tail. This was sort of hot and sort of not. She brought my hands up to her breasts, which were lolling free under the pajamas, and declared, “I’m the little squirrel that loves to fuck!”

“Wow, OK,” I said. “But aren’t you also, like, hosting a party?”

She turned herself around in my arms, took off my shades, and pressed her face to mine. Her greasepaint had a strong crayon smell. “Has anybody ever lost their virginity to a squirrel?”

“Hard to know,” I said.

“Would it even count?”

She put her tongue in my mouth and then led me to the bed. Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal, and I was feeling strangely unconcerned about Anabel; I intuited that being pounced on by someone else might even advance my cause with her. But when Lucy got around to drawing my hand under the waistband of her pajamas, saying, “Feel what a furry little animal I am,” I couldn’t help seeing her silliness through the appalled eyes of Oswald, whose personality made me think of Anabel’s, her judgments, her hanged-person eyes, which made me pull my hand away. I stood up and put my shades back on. “I’m sorry,” I said.

Lucy was too programmatic about sex to betray, or possibly even to feel, any hurt. “That’s OK,” she said. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”

I could smell the greasepaint on my face; I must have looked like I’d been eating shit. When I went to the bathroom to clean myself up, I discovered a large brown smudge on the collar of my dress shirt, the only good one I owned.

Downstairs the music was King Crimson, a favorite of Bob’s. Anabel was nowhere to be seen. Oswald was near the front door with the Excluded Middle, who was holding a rubber-banded bundle of pamphlets.

“Our friend here has published a chapbook of poetry,” Oswald explained to me.

“Poetry should be free,” the Excluded Middle said, handing me a chapbook. “This is my gift to you.”

“Read the first one for Tom,” Oswald urged him. “I love the joie de vivre.”

“My bare soles squoosh the black spring muck,” the Excluded Middle recited. “The earth is my WHOOPEE CUSHION!”

“There you have it,” Oswald said. “A miracle of poetic compression.”

“Did you see Anabel?” I said. “Anabel Laird?”

“She just walked out.”

“Wearing a jean jacket?”

“The very one.”

I hurried out to the street. When I got to the corner of Market Street, I saw Anabel at the next corner, waiting for the light. I could feel that she’d become, in the space of half an hour, the person in the world it mattered most to me to catch sight of. She must have heard my running footsteps, but she didn’t look at me, even when I reached her side.

“How could you leave?” I said, breathing hard. “We hadn’t talked yet.”

She angled her face away from mine. “What makes you so sure I wanted to talk to you?”

“I was attacked by a rabid squirrel. I’m sorry.”

“You can still go back,” Anabel said. “She seems very determined to take you. I’m guessing you’re the problem she and the Handyman are having? I saw him in those ridiculous antlers and I thought: that is more perfect than he even knows.”

“Can we go somewhere?” I said.

“I’m going home.”

“Right. OK.”

“I can’t stop you from taking the same train, though. If you follow me to my door and ask politely, I might let you sit in my kitchen.”

“Why did you come to the party?” I said. “You knew you’d hate it.”

“Do you want me to say it was because I thought you’d be there?”

“Was that the reason?”

She smiled, still not looking at me. “I’m not going to draw your conclusions for you.”

Her apartment was on the top floor of a well-maintained old house, not a student place, and her kitchen was a vision of cleanliness. She took her shoes off at the door and asked me to do the same. In a rustic white pottery bowl on the table were three perfect apples, on the windowsill two volumes of The Vegetarian Epicure, on the stove a gleaming copper-clad skillet. There was also, on the largest wall, a poster from a butcher shop, a diagram of a cow segmented and labeled as cuts of beef. I studied it, learning where the brisket and the chuck were, while Anabel left the kitchen and came back with an expensive-looking bottle.

“Here we have Château Montrose,” she said. “The same vintage as my birth year. My father sent me a whole case for my birthday, which I’d be doing him a favor if I said was no worse than insensitive and symbolically grotesque, given how my mother died. I suspect his actual motives were more sinister. But I won’t drink alone, for obvious reasons, and Nola is the only person who ever comes here, and she can’t drink red wine with the medication she’s on, so I still have ten bottles. It’s your lucky night.”

“What happened to the other two?”

“I took them to Lucy on Bastille Day. She’s one of my oldest friends, I wanted to bring her something nice. But she was too grateful, if you know what I mean. One or two references to my amazing generosity would have been enough. After that it became a hostile comment on my privilege. Not just my privilege — me personally. I have to say, I know you’re still friends with her, but I’m at the point where she’s literally turning my stomach.”

“Me too, a little bit,” I said.

“Are you aware that you have squirrel on your collar?”

“She took some fending off.”

“You’ll notice I didn’t ask why you were at the party.”

“Look where I am now,” I said. “I’m here, not there.”

“Undeniably.”

We clinked glasses, and I wished her a belated happy birthday. This led to our comparing birth dates. Hers turned out to be April eighth. Mine is August fourth.

The symmetry of 4/8 and 8/4 had a powerful effect on Anabel. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at me as if I were an apparition. “Did you just make that up? Is your birthday really August fourth?”

The signs meant more to her than they did to me. For her they were a way for us to be about more than just chemistry, to be something in the stars, while for me they served mainly to confirm the chemistry of my feelings for her. When the wine had warmed her up and she took off her jean jacket, I saw my fate not in calendrical coincidence but in the thinness of her upper arms, in what they did to my heart.

Under the influence of wine and mystical sign, she set about improving me that night. To be with her, I’d need better ambitions. When she learned that I was applying to journalism school, she said, “And then what? You go to city council meetings in Topeka for five years?”

“It’s an honorable tradition.”

“But is that what you want? What do you want?”

“I want to be famous and powerful. But you have to pay your dues first.”

“What if you could start your own magazine? What would you do with it?”

I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I’d grown up in, my father’s blind progressivism, my mother’s faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other’s politics.

“I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations,” Anabel said darkly.

“But the alternative doesn’t work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It’s like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house.”

“I know what you mean. I had to be an artist for the same reason. But that’s why I can’t see you wasting five years in Topeka or wherever. If you already know you want to serve the truth, you should serve it. Start a magazine like nobody else’s. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time.”

“The Complicater.”

“That’s good! You should remember that. I’m serious.”

In the glow of her approval, it seemed almost possible that I could start a magazine called The Complicater. And would she be talking about my future if she didn’t think she might be a part of it? The thought of this future, the love it would imply, led me to the thought of reaching across the table and touching her hand. I was just about to do it when she stood up.

“I have a project, too.” She went over to the diagram of the beef cuts. “This is my project.”

“I was wondering why a vegetarian had a cow poster in her kitchen.”

“I don’t have it all figured out yet. And it’s going to take me fifteen years to complete. But if I can do it, it’s going to be like your magazine: like nothing the world has ever known.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Let’s see if I ever see you again first.”

I stood up and joined her by the diagram. “Do I have to stop eating beef?”

She turned to me in surprise. “Yes, now that you mention it. That would be a requirement.”

“And what sort of thing would you give up?”

“A lot,” she said, retreating to the table. “I’ve gotten good at being alone. This kitchen smells the way I want it to smell. I have a problem with smells, I smell things that nobody else can. I’m smelling greasepaint on you right now. It’s nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it’s quiet. It wasn’t easy to become a person who’s OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there, and now some part of me is wishing I hadn’t gone out tonight. Some part of me wants you not to be here. But it’s like you were fated to be here.” She took a breath and looked me directly in the eye. “I waited at that corner for you, Tom. I looked at my watch, and I said I’m waiting five minutes. And you came in four. Four eight, eight four.”

My heart began to pound. I was becoming a sign, I was losing my self, and although I was obviously excited to learn that Anabel had waited for me, the surge of blood in my groin might have been the erection they say men get at the moment of being executed. That was how it felt.

I went to her and dropped to my knees. No less powerful than my desire for her was my wish, now on the verge of being granted, to be the person she allowed into her private world — to mean something in the story she was telling herself. When she put her hands on my shoulders and knelt down in front of me I experienced the gravity of what it meant to her to do this, and was excited even more for her sake than for mine. I looked into her eyes.

She said, “This is our fourth encounter, you know.”

“If you count the phone call.”

“Are you going to kiss me?”

“I’m afraid to,” I said.

“I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of us.”

I brought my face closer to hers.

“You break it, you pay for it,” she whispered.

I could have kissed her all night. I did kiss her all night. How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth. And there were pauses, certainly. There was gazing into each other’s eyes, there was pleasurable discussion of when exactly we’d become inevitable. There was the bounty of her hair, the pure Anabel smell of her skin, the little gap in her front teeth, the physical outskirts with which I needed to acquaint myself before proceeding deeper. There were new apologies and small confessions. There was her sudden, mad, amusing licking of the linoleum to prove to me how clean Anabel Laird kept a kitchen floor. Later there was a move to the sofa in her living room. There was the closed door of the bedroom that nobody but Anabel entered. But mostly we just kissed until dawn exposed us to our raw-eyed selves.

Anabel sat up and reassembled her composure like a cat after an awkward leap. “You need to go now,” she said.

“Of course.”

“I can’t let you in all at once. You can apparently go straight from Lucy to me without skipping a beat, but I’m out of practice.”

“I wouldn’t call myself practiced.”

She nodded seriously.

“I have something to confess and something to ask you,” she said. “I need you to know that Lucy told me things about you. I wanted to scream at her, Shut up! shut up! But she told me you’re a virgin.”

How I hated that word. It sounded outmoded and obscene and accurate.

“Well, so here’s my confession: it matters to me. It’s why I waited for you at the corner. I mean, I waited because I wanted to see you. But also because I thought you might be a person I could start over with. Do you even understand how clean you are?”

My underpants were sticky from hours of steady seepage, but Anabel was right: my dick and I were barely on speaking terms. The stickiness, like the dick itself, was a male embarrassment and seemed to have little to do with the tenderness I felt toward her.

“But that’s not my question,” she said. “My question is what did Lucy tell you about me.”

“She told me”—I chose my words carefully—“that you’d had some bad experiences in high school and hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time.”

Anabel gave a little shriek. “God I hate her! Why did I stay friends with this person?”

“I don’t care what you did at Choate. I won’t talk about you again with her.”

“I hate her! She’s a gutter with no grate. She has to drag everything down to her level. I know her. I know exactly what she told you.” Anabel squeezed her eyes shut, pushing out mascara tears. “You have to go now, OK? I need to be in my room.”

“I’ll go, but I don’t understand.”

“I want us to be different. I want us to be like nothing else.” She opened her eyes and smiled at me timidly. “It’s really OK if you don’t want to. You’re just a very nice person, Denver-born. I’d understand if you didn’t want any of this.”

My communication lines with my dick were maybe not so very bad, because my response was to pull her face into mine, force her swollen lips into my sore ones. I can’t help thinking that if we’d done the sensible thing and gone ahead and fucked there, on the floor, we might have had a happy life together. But everything in the moment argued against it — my inexperience, my suspicion of my motives, Anabel’s strange notions of purity, her wish to be left alone, my wish not to harm her. We separated, breathing hard, and glared at each other.

“I want it,” I said.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said.

“I won’t hurt you.”

Back on campus, I slept away the morning and went to the dining hall just in time to get food. I found Oswald at the table we preferred, and he greeted me with headlines.

“Aberant to Friend: Enjoy the Party.”

“Really sorry about that.”

“Apologetic Aberant Cites Secret Laird Summit.”

I laughed and said, “Hackett Found Guilty in Laird Hatchet Job.”

“You’re blaming me for that?” Oswald batted his eyelashes.

“Not anymore.”

“Please tell me some butcher paper came into play.”

The Monday issue of the DP was light work, because we had all weekend for it. By late afternoon we’d put it to bed and I was able to call Anabel. She’d slept until three and should have had nothing to report, but lovesickness makes the most minor thoughts and doings worthy of narration. We talked for an hour and then discussed whether to get together that night, since I wouldn’t have another free night until Friday.

“So it begins,” she said.

“What does?”

“Your important responsibilities, my waiting. I don’t want to be the person who waits.”

“I’m the one who’ll be waiting until Friday night.”

“You’ll be busy, I’ll be waiting.”

“You don’t have work to do?”

“Yes, but tonight is my one chance to make you wait. I want you to have one little taste of what it’s going to be like for me.”

If the logic had been anyone else’s, I might have become impatient, but I, too, wanted us to be like nothing else. To prolong an essentially semantic disagreement for half an hour, as we proceeded to do, didn’t frustrate me. It led me deeper into her singularity, our soon-to-be joint singularity. It meant keeping her voice in my ear.

When we’d finally compromised by agreeing to meet for drinks in Center City — whence I imagined myself following her home again and this time gaining entry to her bedroom, gaining permission to put my hands on more highly charged parts of her body, maybe even gaining everything I wanted, provided she wanted it as much as I did — I ate a quick dinner and went to my room to read Hegel for an hour. I’d barely sat down when the call came from my sister Cynthia.

“Clelia’s in the hospital,” she said. “They admitted her last night around midnight.”

I was in such an Anabel state that my thought was: we had our first kiss around midnight. It was as if my mother had somehow known. Cynthia explained that my mother had been in the bathroom for four hours with a rising fever, unable to get away from the toilet. She’d finally managed to phone her gastroenterologist, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout, who was old-school enough to make house calls and fond enough of my mother to do it at eleven on a Saturday night. His diagnosis was not just an acute bowel inflammation but a complete nervous breakdown — my mother couldn’t stop deliriously defending Arne Holcombe from some unnamed accusation.

“So I just got off the phone with the campaign manager,” Cynthia said. “Apparently Arne exposed himself to a female staffer.”

“My God,” I said.

“They tried to keep it from Clelia, but somebody told her. She kind of went out of her mind. Twenty-four hours later, she can’t leave the toilet long enough to call for help.”

Cynthia was hoping I could fly to Denver. She had a big vote on unionization coming up on Friday, and Ellen was still furious with my mother for some remark she’d made about banjo players. (Ellen’s position then and ever after was: She’s a bitch to me, and she’s not actually my mother.) Cynthia had never entirely stopped being dubious of me morally, albeit in a friendly way, and she probably already feared (with good reason) that she’d end up stuck with the primary emotional care of her stepmother. I agreed to call the hospital.

First, though, I called Anabel and luckily caught her before she’d left to meet me. I explained the situation and asked if she might come and see me in my dorm instead. Her response was dead silence.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Now you see what I mean about it beginning,” Anabel said.

“But this is an actual emergency.”

“Try to imagine me in your dorm. The eyes on me. The smell of those showers. This is something you can imagine me doing?”

“My mom is in the hospital!”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said more kindly. “I’m just sick about the timing. It’s like everything is some sort of sign with us. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m disappointed.”

I consoled her for nearly an hour. I believe this was the first time I ever really spoke ill of my mother; she’d previously been nothing worse than an embarrassment I’d kept to myself. I must have wanted to show Anabel that my loyalties were hers for the taking. And Anabel, though she identified with her own suffering mother, not only said nothing in defense of mine but helped me to sharpen my complaints with her. She groaned when I told her that my mother subscribed to Town & Country, and that she considered paper napkins déclassé and put out cloth ones, with napkin rings, at every meal, and that her idea of a chic department store was Neiman Marcus. “You need to tell her,” Anabel said, “that the people she admires all fly to New York and shop at Bendel’s.” Anabel may have renounced her privilege, but she was still defending it from parvenus. When I recall her snobbery, the innocent cruelty of it, she seems very young to me, and I even younger for feeling intoxicated by it and using it against my mother.

The voice in Denver was hoarse and slurred with sedatives. “Your dumb old mother is in the hospital,” it said. “Doctor Schan … Vyllingerhout took one look at me … ‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’ He’s the most wo’r’ful man, Tom. Lef’ his bridge game for me, plays bridge on Saturday night … They don’t make physissans like that anymore. He doesn’t have to work — sisty-sis years old. A real arissocrat, I think I told you his family … very old family, Belgium. He comes on Saturday night straigh’ from his bridge game to dumb old me. Saturday night he makes a house call. Says I’m going to get better, not giving up until I’m better. Honestly, I’m so discouraged with this dumb old thing … He really is my savior.”

I was encouraged that she seemed already to be moving on from Arne Holcombe to Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. I asked if she wanted me to come and see her.

“No, sweetie. You’re sweet to offer but you have your magazine. To edit … your newspaper I mean. I’m so proud you’re editor in chief. It will really impress … the law schools.”

“Journalism schools all the more.”

“I’m just happy to think of you with your fine, interesting, ambitious friends … all your bright prospects. You don’t have to come and see dumb old me. Rather you not see me this way. Not my best … you can come when I’m better.”

I’m not proud to have seized on permission granted under sedation not to go and see her. I think she did genuinely want me to have my own life, but this doesn’t lessen the offense of my fear of being around her, my fear of implication in her sickness and recovery, and I ought to have known — did know, but pretended I didn’t — that Cynthia, who was a very good person like our dad, would take up my slack and drive to Denver in her VW minibus after her union vote.

Not that I gave it much thought. My head was a radio playing Anabel on every station. There was no magazine in the world in whose pages I wouldn’t have pointed to her picture and said: That one. No words in the language that stopped my heart like ANABEL CALLED on my office message board. (Never ANNABELLE. She was vain about her name and spelled it for whoever took the message.) We spoke every night and I began to resent the DP for interfering. I stopped eating beef and much of anything else; I was constantly half nauseated. Oswald clucked over me, but I was half nauseated with everything, including my best friend. I only wanted Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel. She was beautiful and smart and serious and funny and stylish and creative and unpredictable and liked me. Oswald delicately called my attention to signs that she might be somewhat crazy, but he also showed me an article in the business section of the Times: McCaskill, still swimming in profits from Soviet grain sales, had an estimated value of $24 billion, and its dynamic president, David M. Laird, was aggressively expanding its operations overseas. I did the math on David — five percent, four heirs — and arrived at a figure of three hundred million dollars for Anabel, and felt even sicker.

I had to see her three more times before she let me in her bedroom. She was no doubt mindful of the number four, but there was also a peculiar circumstance that I learned of some hours into our third meeting as a couple, after I’d emerged victorious from protracted struggle with fear and feminist self-scrutiny and dared to ease my hand up under the maroon velvet dress she was wearing. When my fingers finally reached her underpants and touched the source of the heat between her legs, she drew breath sharply and said, “Don’t start.”

My hand retreated immediately. I didn’t want to harm her.

“No, it’s OK,” she said, kissing me. “I want you to feel me. But only for you, not for me. You don’t want to start with me.”

I took my hand out of her dress altogether and stroked her hair, to impress on her that I wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t selfish. “Why not?” I said.

“Because it won’t work. Not tonight.”

She sat up on her sofa and pressed her knees together with her hands flat between them. She made me promise that, no matter what happened, I would never tell anyone what she had to tell me. Ever since she was thirteen, she said, her periods had been in perfect sync with the phases of the moon. It was a very weird thing: her bleeding invariably began nine days after the moon was full. She said she could be trapped in a cave for years and still know what day of the lunar month it was. But there was something even weirder: ever since she’d had her unhappy disease in high school (this was her phrase, “my unhappy disease”), she could only achieve satisfaction in the three days when the moon was fullest, no matter how hard she tried on other days of the month. “And believe me, I’ve tried,” she said. “There’s nothing but frustration at the end of what you were starting.”

“It’s a half-moon tonight.”

She nodded and turned to me with worry in her eyes, what I took to be the endearing worry that she was strange or damaged, or the even more endearing worry that I might be repulsed by her. But I wasn’t repulsed. I was thrilled that she’d confided in me and wanted me enough to worry about repulsing me. I thought I’d never heard of anything more amazing and singular: in perfect sync with the moon!

She must have felt relieved by how ardently I kissed her and reassured her, because her actual worry had to do with the rather obvious corollary to her confession: if I was committed to complete mutuality, to doing nothing with her that she couldn’t equally join in, I was going to be getting laid three days a month at best. She assumed that I could see this corollary. I didn’t see it. But even if I had, three days a month would have looked pretty great from where I was sitting that night. (Later, indeed, when we were married, it did come to look pretty great, in the rearview mirror.)

A week later, arriving early at Thirtieth Street for the SEPTA train, I had an impulse to buy something for Anabel in honor of our fourth date. I wandered down to the book-and-magazine store, hoping it might have a copy of Augie March, which Oswald had taught me to consider the finest novel by a living American, but it didn’t. My eye was caught instead by a stuffed animal, a miniature black plush-toy bull with stubby felt horns and sleepy eyes. I bought it and put it in my knapsack. On the train, crossing the Schuylkill, I saw the full moon gilding fair-weather clouds over Germantown. I was already so far gone that the moon seemed to me the personal property of Anabel. Like something I could touch and was about to.

Anabel, in her kitchen, wearing a stunning black dress, opened another bottle of Château Montrose. “This is the last bottle,” she said. “I gave the other eight to the winos behind the liquor store.”

Eights and fours, everywhere eights and fours.

“They must have thought you were their angel,” I said.

“No, in fact, they hassled me because I didn’t have a corkscrew.”

I’d expected the night to be magical through and through, but instead we had our first fight. I made a joking offhand allusion to her father’s wealth, and she became upset, because everywhere she went she was hated as the rich girl, and I was not to joke about it, she couldn’t be with me if that was how I thought of her, she hated the money enough without my reminding her of it, she was already knee-deep in the blood of it. After my tenth unavailing apology, I found some backbone and got angry. If she didn’t want to be the rich girl, maybe she should stop wearing a different dress from Bendel’s every time I saw her! She was shocked by my anger. Her deer’s eyes bulged at me. She poured her wine into the sink and then upended the bottle over it. For my information, she hadn’t bought a new dress since her senior year at Brown, but this clearly didn’t matter to me, I clearly had my own idea about her, and I’d dragged my wrong idea into what was supposed to have been a perfect night. Everything was ruined. Everything. And so on. She finally stormed out of the kitchen and locked herself in the bathroom.

Sitting by myself, listening to the sound of her showering, I had the opportunity to replay our fight in my head, and it seemed to me that everything out of my mouth had been the words of a jerk. I was gripped by my old sense of ineluctable male wrongness. My only hope of cleansing was to dissolve my self in Anabel’s. It seemed that black and white to me. Only she could save me from male error. By the time she came out of the bathroom, wearing lovely white flannel pajamas with pale-blue piping, I was shivering and crying.

“Oh dear,” she said, kneeling at my feet.

“I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I just love you.”

I was in wretched earnest, but my dick was eavesdropping in my corduroys and sprang to life. She rested her cheek and damp hair on my knee. “Did I hurt you?”

“It was my fault.”

“No, you were right,” she said. “I’m weak. I love my clothes. I’m going to give up everything, but I can’t give up my clothes yet. Please don’t think badly of me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. We just needed to have a fight tonight, that’s all. It was a test we had to go through.”

“I love your clothes,” I said. “I love how you look in them. I’m so in love with you I’m sick to my stomach.”

“I can stop wearing them in public,” she said. “I’ll only wear them when I’m with you, and it won’t have to mean anything, because you’ll know it’s only me not being strong enough yet.”

“I don’t want to be the person who tells you what you can’t do.”

She kissed my knee gratefully. Then she saw the lump in my pants.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. Boys can’t help it. I only wish I could unlearn everything I know about it for you.”

She then suggested I take a shower, which seemed perfectly reasonable, since she’d taken one herself. After I’d dried myself with one of her luxurious towels, I put all my clothes back on, not wanting to appear presumptuous. When I stepped out of the bathroom, I found the apartment lit only by the moon. Her bedroom door, which had always been shut, was now open the width of one finger.

I went to it and stopped at the threshold, my ears full of the sound of my heart, which seemed to be pounding with the impossibility of what had happened to me. Nobody went in Anabel’s bedroom, but she’d left the door open for me. For me. My head was so full of significance I thought it might explode, the way the world would have to when it encountered an impossibility. It was as if no one existed, had ever existed, except Anabel and me. I pushed open the door.

The bedroom was a dream of purity in strong monochrome moonlight. The bed was a high four-poster with a calico quilt under which Anabel was lying on her side. There were sheer curtains on the dormer windows, one Amish rug on the floor, a spindly chair and desk (the latter bare except for the watch and earrings she’d been wearing), and a high antique dresser topped with a lace cloth. Sitting on the dresser were a threadbare teddy bear and an eyeless and equally threadbare toy donkey. On the wall were a pair of unframed paintings, one of a horse from an unsettling close-up perspective, the other of a cow from a similar perspective, both of them unfinished-looking, with bare patches of canvas, which was Anabel’s way as an artist. The spareness of the room felt rural-Kansan, nineteenth-century, especially in the moonlight. The animals reminded me that I hadn’t given Anabel her present.

“Where are you going?” she called out plaintively when I went to retrieve my knapsack.

I came back with the little plush bull and sat on the edge of the bed like a father with his girl. “Forgot I had a present for you.”

She sat up in her pajamas and took the bull. For a moment I thought she was going to hate it; was going to be scary Anabel. But she wasn’t that Anabel in her bedroom. She smiled at the bull and said, “Hello, little one.”

“It’s OK?”

“He’s perfect. I haven’t had a new animal since I was ten.” She glanced at her dresser. “The others are too worn out to talk to me anymore.” She stroked the bull. “What’s his name?”

“Not Ferdinand.”

“No, not Ferdinand. Only Ferdinand is Ferdinand.”

I don’t know why the name Leonard popped into my head, but I said it.

“Leonard?” She peered into the bull’s sleepy eyes. “Are you Leonard?” She turned its plushy face toward mine. “Is he Leonard?”

“Yes, I am Leonard,” I said in the Belgian accent of my mother’s gastroenterologist.

“You’re not an American bull,” Anabel said coyly.

Leonard explained, through me, that he came from a very old aristocratic cow family in Belgium, and that a series of misfortunes had brought him to Thirtieth Street Station in severely straitened circumstances. Leonard turned out to be a terrible snob, appalled by the ugliness of Philadelphia and the tackiness of America, and he was delighted with the prospect of entering Anabel’s employ — he could tell she was a kindred spirit.

Anabel was entranced, and I was entranced to be entrancing her. I was also afraid to set Leonard aside, afraid of what came next, and I now see that I couldn’t have found a better way to make Anabel feel safe than to play with a stuffed animal in her little girl’s room. I’d blundered into being perfect for her. When we finally dismissed Leonard and she pulled me down on top of her, there was a new look in her eyes, the unconcealable and unfakable look of a woman seriously in love. It’s not something a man sees every day.

I wish I could remember the sensation of being taken by her, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I wish I could go back to that moment as the person I am now, could be in that state of trembling wonder but also have enough experience to appreciate how it felt to be inside a woman for the first time; to enjoy it, basically. But it wasn’t as if I’d enjoyed my first beer or my first cigar, either. The beauty of Anabel naked literally made my eyes hurt, and I was nothing but a thousand worries. If I remember anything from the moment at all, it’s the dreamlike sensation of walking into a room where two figures had been for my entire life, two figures who knew each other well and were talking about realistic adult things I knew nothing about, two figures indifferent to my very late arrival. These figures were the things so graphically down there, my dick and Anabel’s cunt. I was the young and excluded third party, Anabel a distant fourth. But this may have been some actual dream from some other time.

What I do remember clearly is what a full moon did for Anabel, how she came and came. I was too clumsy to manage it in the purely thrusting way I would have liked to, but she showed me different ways. It seemed inconceivable that such a total pleasure machine couldn’t come at other times of the month, but later experience seemed to bear this out. She was a nearly silent comer, not a screamer. In the warmer light of dawn, she confessed to me that during her now-ended years of celibacy she’d sometimes waited for her best day and spent the entirety of it in her bedroom, masturbating. The vision of her beautiful, endless, solitary self-pleasuring made me wish I could be her. Since I couldn’t, I fucked her for a fourth and last sore time. Then we slept until the afternoon, and I stayed in her apartment for another two days, sustaining myself with buttered toast, not wanting to waste the moon’s fullness. When I finally got back to campus, I resigned from the DP and let Oswald take over.

* * *

My mother had warned me that her face had swollen up from the high doses of prednisone that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had her on, but I was still shocked when I met her at the airport. Her face was a ghastly fat cartoon of itself, a miserable moon of flesh, her cheeks so bloated they pushed her eyes half shut. Her apologies to me were piteous. She said she was sick about the state she was in for an Ivy League graduation she’d so looked forward to.

I told her not to worry, but I was sick about it, too. No matter how often you remind yourself that a face is just a face, that it has nothing to do with the character of the person within, you’re so used to reading people through their faces that it’s difficult to be fair to a deformed one. My mother’s new face repelled the very sympathy it ought to have elicited from me. She was like a shameful secret of mine, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow in a checkered pants suit, when I walked her across the Green to my Phi Beta Kappa induction. I avoided meeting anyone’s eyes, and when I’d deposited her in a seat in College Hall, I had to force myself to walk, not run, away from her.

After the ceremony, in what felt like a straightforward purchase of my freedom from her, I gave her my Phi Beta Kappa key. (She wore it on a fine gold chain for the rest of her life.) I left her in her assigned room in the Superblock to freshen up — the weather was bludgeoningly hot and humid — while Oswald and I set up our dorm rooms for a wine-and-cheese party. I’d conceived of the party as a way to introduce my mother and Anabel in a casual setting. Anabel was dreading it, but my mother had no reason to. She disapproved of Anabel without even having met her, and I’d been too cowardly to tell her that Anabel was coming to the party.

Back in November, I’d imagined that my mother would be pleased that I was officially dating a McCaskill heir. But she’d heard from my sister how Anabel and I had met. Cynthia had been amused by the butcher-paper story, but all my mother could see in it was kookiness, radical feminism, and public nudity. In her weekly dronings to me, she promulgated a new, invidious distinction between entrepreneurial wealth and inherited wealth. She also rightly suspected that I’d quit the job of executive editor because of Anabel. I explained that I wanted to focus on my reportorial skills — I was writing, with Anabel’s blessing, a major piece on scrapple — but my mother could smell our sex acts all the way from Denver. When I went home for Christmas and informed her that I’d not only become a vegetarian but was returning to Philly after only a week, her colon flared up badly again.

Let it not be thought that I didn’t know what I was getting into with Anabel, or that I made no effort to escape it. Three days a lunar month we were a pair of junkies who’d scored the cleanest shit ever, but on the other twenty-five I had to contend with her moods, her scenes, her sensitivities, her judgments, her so easily hurt feelings. We seldom actually fought or argued; it was more often a matter of processing, endlessly, what I or someone else had done to make her feel bad. My entire personality reorganized itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach. It’s possible to describe this as an emasculation of me, but it was really more like a dissolution of the boundaries of our selves. I learned to feel what she was feeling, she learned to anticipate what I was thinking, and what could be more intense than a love with no secrets?

“A word about the toilet,” she’d said one day, early on.

“I always raise the seat,” I said.

“That’s the problem.”

“I thought the problem was guys who think they can aim through the seat.”

“I appreciate that you’re not one of them. But there’s a spatter.”

“I wipe the rim, too.”

“Not always.”

“OK, room for improvement.”

“But it’s not just on the rim. It’s on the underside of the rim and on the tile. Little drops.”

“I’ll wipe there, too.”

“You can’t wipe the whole bathroom every time. And I don’t like the smell of old urine.”

“I’m a guy! What am I supposed to do?”

“Sit down?” she suggested shyly.

I knew this wasn’t right, couldn’t be right. But she was hurt by my silence and became silent herself, in a more grievous way, with a stony look in her eyes, and her hurt mattered more to me than my rightness. I told her I would either be more careful or start sitting down, but she could sense that I was resentful, that my submission was grudging, and there could be no peace in our union unless we truly agreed about everything. She began to weep, and I began the long search for the deeper cause of her distress.

“I have to sit down,” she said finally. “Why shouldn’t you sit down? I can’t not see where you spatter, and every time I see it I think how unfair it is to be a woman. You can’t even see how unfair it is, you have no idea, no idea.”

She proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get her to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up. I made this adjustment to my personality — and a hundred others like it in our early months together — and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn’t, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)

She was more lenient of difference in the bedroom. It was certainly an unhappy day when she connected the dots for me and explained that we couldn’t have intercourse when only one of us could take satisfaction in it. At my suggestion, after hours of pained discussion and silences, we tried it anyway, and I had to suffer the guilt of her sobbing when I came inside her. I asked if she’d had no pleasure, to which she sobbed that the frustration outweighed the pleasure. We had the whole unfairness conversation again, but this time I was able to point out that, by her own admission, she wasn’t normal, i.e., that we weren’t dealing with a structural gender imbalance. In the end, since she loved me, and was probably afraid of losing me to someone more normal, she agreed to make other arrangements for me. These were a little strange but very creative and, for a while, satisfactory. First I had to take a shower, then we had to converse with Leonard and get his amusing Belgian bull’s-eye take on the news of the day, then we undressed, and then she — there’s no other way to put it — played with the dick. Sometimes it was a camera slowly panning over her body and then shooting its favorite parts. Sometimes she wrapped it in her cool, silky hair and milked it. Sometimes she nuzzled it until it wet her face, as if it were a shower head. Sometimes she took it in her mouth, her gaze not moving from it to my eyes until the moment she swallowed. She was affectionate to the dick in much the same way she was affectionate to Leonard. She told me it was pretty like I was pretty. She claimed that my semen smelled cleaner than other semen she’d had the misfortune of smelling. But the strangest thing, in hindsight, was that she always made the dick not part of me. She didn’t like me to kiss her while she was touching it; she preferred that I not even touch her with my hands until she was finished with it. And always, as I discovered, she was counting. When a full moon came around again, restoring normalcy, she informed me when an orgasm of hers had equalized our tallies for the month. And then everything was OK with us. Then we were one again.

Two other crises bear noting. The first was my acceptance by the journalism school at the University of Missouri, an excellent school that my mother had encouraged me to apply to because it was affordable and not so far from Denver. I may have been besotted with Anabel, and I may have turned against my maleness as an impediment to our union of souls, but the male part of me was still there and well aware that she was strange, that I was young, and that a vegetarian diet wasn’t agreeing with my stomach. I imagined regrouping in Missouri, becoming a lean and mean reporter, sampling some other girls before deciding whether to commit to a life with Anabel. I made the mistake of breaking the Missouri news to her on the night before a full moon. I tried to jolly her into her bedroom, but she went silent. Only after hours of sulking and prodding, hours we could have spent in bed, did she lay out my thinking for me in its full male vileness. She didn’t miss a thing. “You’ll be there having your excellent journalist’s life, you’ll be happy not to be with me, and I’ll be here waiting,” she said.

“You could come with me.”

“You can see me living in Columbia, Missouri? As your tagalong girl?”

“You could stay here and work on your project. It’s only two years.”

“And your magazine?”

“How am I going to start a magazine with no money and no experience?”

She opened a drawer and took out a checkbook.

“This is what I have,” she said, pointing to a figure of some $46,000 in the savings ledger. I watched her write me a check for $23,000 in her elegant artist’s hand. “Do you want to be with me and be ambitious?” She tore out the check and handed it to me. “Or do you want to go to Missouri with all the other hacks?”

I didn’t point out that checkbook gestures aren’t so meaningful coming from a billionaire’s daughter. Doubting her vow not to accept more money from her father was as grievous a wrong as doubting her seriousness as an artist. She’d already trained me never to do it. She was rabid on the subject.

“I can’t take your money,” I said.

“It’s our money,” she said, “and this is the last of it. Everything I have is yours. Use it well, Tom. You can go to school with it if you want to. If you’re going to break my heart, this is the time to do it. Not from Missouri a year from now. Take the money, go home, go to journalism school. Just don’t pretend you’re in this with me.”

She went and locked herself in her bedroom. I don’t know how many times I had to promise I wasn’t leaving her before she let me in. When she finally did, I tore up the check—“Don’t be a fool, that’s good money!” Leonard cried from the headboard — and seized her body with a new sense of possession, as if becoming more hers had made her more mine.

My mother was furious about my decision. She saw me starting down the path of indigence my sisters were treading, the path of my father’s stupid idealism, and it did me no good to cite the many famous journalists who hadn’t gone to grad school. She was even more upset, a month later, when I told her I was coming to Denver only for a week that summer. I’d spent all of eight days with her since her hospitalization, and I felt I owed her (and Cynthia) a month at home, but Anabel had been counting on our starting a life together the minute I graduated. She took my proposal of a month apart as a catastrophic betrayal of everything we’d planned together. When I suggested that she join me in Denver, she stared at me as if I, not she, were the insane one. Why I didn’t resolve the crisis by breaking up with her is hard to fathom. My brain was apparently already so wired into hers that even though I knew she was being unreasonable and heartless, I didn’t care. All drugs are an escape from the self, and throwing myself away for Anabel, doing something obviously wrong to make her feel better, and then reaping the ecstasy of her renewed enthusiasm for me, was my drug. My mother cried when I told her my travel plans, but only Anabel’s tears could change my mind.

Anger with the two of us was broadcast in my mother’s swollen face at the graduation party. There was no safe way to explain to my friends and their normal-looking parents that she didn’t always look like this. Everyone was sweating mightily by the time Anabel arrived, wearing a drop-dead sky-blue cocktail dress and accompanied by Nola. They went straight to the wine, and it was a while before I could pry my mother away from Oswald’s parents and lead her to the corner where Anabel was sitting in Nola’s little cloud of disaffection. I made the introduction, and Anabel, stiff with shyness, rose and took my mother’s hand.

“Mrs. Aberant,” she bravely said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

My poor disfigured pants-suited mother, confronting the vision of that sky-blue cocktail dress: Anabel could never forgive her for what she did, but eventually I could. Something resembling a condescending smile appeared on her bloated face. She released Anabel’s hand and looked down at Nola, who was dressed in punky black. “And you are…?”

“The depressive friend,” Nola said. “Pay me no mind.”

Anabel had wanted to make a good impression on my mother; she just needed a modicum of coaxing out of her shyness. None was forthcoming. My mother turned away and told me she wanted to change her clothes before dinner.

“You need to talk to Anabel,” I said.

“Maybe another time.”

“Mom. Please.”

Anabel had sat down again, her eyes wide with injured disbelief.

“I’m sorry I’m not at my best,” my mother said.

“She came all the way over here to meet you. You can’t just walk away.”

I was appealing to her sense of propriety, but she was too sweaty and miserable to heed it. I gestured to Anabel to join us, but she ignored me. I followed my mother out into the hallway.

“Just tell me how to get back to my room,” she said. “You stay at your nice party. I’m so happy to have met Mr. and Mrs. Hackett. They’re fine, interesting, responsible people.”

“Anabel is extremely important to me,” I said, trembling.

“Yes, I can see she’s quite pretty. But so much older than you.”

“She’s two years older.”

“She looks so much older, sweetie.”

Half blind with hatred and shame, I led my mother outside and over to her room. By the time I got back to the party, Anabel and Nola were gone — a relief, since I was hardly in a mood to defend my mother. At dinner with the Hacketts, my mother’s face was an unreferred-to elephantine presence, and I refused to say a word to her directly. Afterward, in the humid shade of the Locust Walk, I informed her that I couldn’t spend the evening with her, because Anabel’s thesis project was being screened at Tyler at nine thirty. I’d dreaded telling her this, but now I was glad to.

“I’m sorry your mother is such an embarrassment,” she said. “This dumb condition of mine is ruining everything.”

“Mom, you’re not embarrassing me. I just wish you could have talked to Anabel.”

“I can’t stand having you angry at me. It’s the worst thing in the world for me. Do you want me to come and see her movie with you?”

“No.”

“If she means so much to you that you won’t even speak to me at dinner, maybe I should go.”

“No.”

“Why not? Is her movie immoral? You know I can’t stand nudity or gutter language.”

“No,” I said, “it’s just not going to make sense to you. It’s about the visual properties of film as a purely expressive medium.”

“I love a good movie.”

Both of us must have known she’d loathe Anabel’s work, but I managed to persuade myself to give her a second chance. “Just promise you’ll be nice to her,” I said. “She’s worked all year on this, and artists are sensitive. You have to be really, really nice.”

Anabel’s project was titled, at my suggestion, “A River of Meat.” She’d wanted to call it “Unfinished #8,” because in her view the film wasn’t quite finished, because she never quite finished anything, because she got bored and moved on to the next artistic challenge. I told her that only she would know that her film wasn’t finished. She’d obtained two short 16 mm film clips, one of a cow being bolt-gunned in the head in a slaughterhouse, the other of Miss Kansas being crowned Miss America 1966, and she’d labored for the better part of a year to reprint and hand-doctor and intercut the two clips. Her favorite filmmakers were Agnès Varda and Robert Bresson, but her project owed more to the hypnotic musical tapestries of Steve Reich. She alternated a single frame with its negative one to one, one to two, two to one, two to two, and so on, and she introduced other rhythmic variations by reversing the frames, rotating them by ninety degrees, running them backward, and hand-coloring the frames with red ink. The resulting twenty-four-minute film was radically repellent, a full-scale assault on the visual cortex, but you could also see genius in it if you looked at it right.

My mother’s all-time favorite movie was Doctor Zhivago. During the last minutes of the screening, I could hear her muttering angrily. When the lights came up, she hurried to the door.

“I’ll just wait outside,” she said when I caught up with her.

“You need to say something nice to Anabel first.”

“What can I say? That is the most horrible, disgusting thing I’ve seen in my entire life.”

“A little nicer than that would be good.”

“If that’s art, then there is something wrong with art.”

A wave of anger came over me.

“You know what?” I said. “Just tell her that. Tell her you hated it.”

“I’m not the only person who would hate it.”

“Mom, it’s fine. She’s not going to be surprised.”

“Do you think it’s art?”

“Definitely. I think it’s amazing.”

Down at the front of the screening room, Anabel was standing with Nola, not looking at us, some terrible scene with me no doubt brewing inside her. The few students and professors in the audience had fled for their lives. My mother spoke to me in a low voice.

“I don’t even recognize you, Tom, you’ve changed so much in the last six months. I’m very disturbed by what’s happened to you. I’m disturbed by a person who would make a movie like that. I’m disturbed that she’s the reason you suddenly quit the fine job you worked so hard to get, and you’re not pursuing your graduate studies.”

I, for my part, was disturbed by my mother’s steroidal ugliness. My life was lovely Anabel, and I could only hate the bloat-faced, slit-eyed person who questioned it. My love and my hatred felt indistinguishable; each seemed to follow logically from the other. But I was still a dutiful son, and I would have taken my mother back to Penn if Anabel hadn’t come stalking up the aisle.

“That was great,” I said to her. “It’s amazing to see it on the big screen.”

She was glaring at my mother. “What did you think?”

“I don’t know what to say,” my mother said, frightened.

Anabel, her shyness now dispelled by moral outrage, laughed at her and turned to me. “Are you coming with us?”

“I should probably take my mom home.”

Anabel flared her long nostrils.

“I can meet you later,” I said. “I don’t want her taking the train by herself.”

“And she couldn’t possibly take a cab.”

“I’ve got like eight dollars on me.”

“She has no money?”

“She didn’t bring her purse. She has this idea about Philly.”

“Right. All those scary black people.”

It was wrong to be talking about my mother as if she weren’t there, but she’d wronged Anabel first. Anabel stalked back down the aisle, opened her knapsack, and returned with a pair of twenty-dollar bills. What do they say at NA meetings? The thing you promise yourself you’ll never go so low as to do for drugs is the very thing you end up doing? I would have said that it was bad in eight different ways to take money from Anabel and hand it to my mother, but that’s what I did. Then I called a cab and waited with her in silence in front of President’s Hall.

“I’ve had some rough days,” she said after a while. “But I think this has been the worst day of my life.”

The moon above us, in the Philly haze, was a dissolving beige lozenge. My response to its fullness was Pavlovian, a quickening of the pulse that was hard to distinguish, in the moment, from my fear of my mother’s pain and from the thrilling cruelty of what I was doing to her. My chest felt too tight for me to say anything, even that I was sorry.

* * *

I met Anabel’s father later that summer. For two months, she and I had played house with some of her remaining forty thousand dollars, sleeping until noon, breakfasting on toast, trolling thrift stores to improve my wardrobe, escaping the heat at double features at the Ritz, and perfecting our wok skills. On my birthday, we made a plan to become more serious about our work. I began to write a manifesto for The Complicater while she embarked on the year of reading she needed to do for her grand film project. She went to the Free Library every weekday afternoon, because we’d decided it was healthy to be apart for some hours and she didn’t want to wait for me at home like a housewife.

David Laird called on one of those afternoons. I had to explain to him that Anabel had a boyfriend and that I was that person.

“Interesting,” David said. “I’m going to tell you a little secret: I’m glad to hear a male voice. I was afraid the wind was blowing in the direction of that mentally-ill dyke friend of hers, just to spite me.”

“I don’t think that was ever in the cards,” I said.

“Are you black?” he said. “Handicapped? Criminal? Drug addict?”

“Ah, no.”

“Interesting. I’ll tell you another secret: I like you already. I take it you’re in love with my daughter?”

I hesitated.

“Of course you are. She’s quite something, isn’t she? To call her a handful is the understatement of a lifetime. They really broke the mold with that one.”

I could already hear why Anabel hated him.

“But listen,” he went on, “if she likes you, I like you. Hell, I was even prepared to like the mentally-ill girl, although, praise the Lord, it didn’t come to that. Anabel’d do almost anything to spite me, but she won’t go so far as to cut off her nose, if you know what I mean. I know her, I know that pretty nose of hers. And I want to know the guy she’s living with. What do you say to dinner at Le Bec-Fin next Thursday? The three of us. The reason I called is I’ve got some business over in Wilmington.”

I said I’d have to ask Anabel.

“Aw, hell, Tom — it’s Tom, right? You’re going to need to grow some serious gonads if you’re going to live with my girl. She’ll eat you alive if you’re not careful. You just tell her you said you’d have dinner with me. Can you say those words to me? ‘Yes, David, I will have dinner with you’?”

“I mean, yeah, sure,” I said. “If it’s OK with her.”

“No, no, no. Those aren’t the words. You and I are having dinner, period, and she can come along if she wants to. Believe me, there’s no way in hell she’s letting the two of us go out alone. That’s why it’s important that you say the words to me. If you’re this afraid of her now, it’ll only get worse later.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” I said. “But if she doesn’t want to see you…”

“OK. All right. Here’s a different argument. Here’s another secret for you: she does want to see me. It’s been more than a year since she got to spray me in the face with cat piss. That’s what she does. And she doesn’t like to admit it, but she enjoys it. She’s got a lot of cat piss, and there’s only one face she wants to spray. So when she says she doesn’t want to see me, you tell her you’re going to see me anyway. It’ll be our little secret that we’re really doing it for her.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s a good argument.”

David laughed loudly. “Oh, come on, I’m just fooling around. Let’s go and have a great meal at the best place in Philadelphia. I miss my Anabel.”

Of course she threw a scene when she learned I’d spoken to him. He was a seducer, she said, and when he couldn’t seduce he bullied, and when he couldn’t bully he bought, and although she was on to him and had built up her defenses, she didn’t trust me not to be seduced or bullied or bought. And so on. I’d been offended by much of what he’d said, but I also couldn’t get it out of my head; who else, after all, could I talk to about Anabel? I experimentally grew some gonads and said it was hurtful and insulting not to trust that I loved her, not him. I experimented further and told her I’d given my word to have dinner with him. And, exactly as he’d predicted, she agreed to come along.

I tasted my first $3,000 wine at Le Bec-Fin. David had handed Anabel the wine list, and she was reading it when the sommelier came by. “Give her a minute while she finds your cheapest bottle,” David said to the sommelier. “In the meantime, Tom and I will have the ’45 Margaux.”

When I sought Anabel’s approval for this, she widened her eyes at me unpleasantly. “Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“It’s a little game she and I play,” David explained. He was a tall, trim, vigorous man with nearly white hair, a distinguished male version of his daughter, much better-looking than your average billionaire. “But here’s an interesting fact for your future reference. At a place like this, the very cheapest bottle on the list is often sensational. Not sure why that is. It’s the mark of a great restaurant, though.”

“I’m not looking for something sensational,” Anabel said. “I’m looking for something I won’t gag on the price of.”

“Nice for you that you’ll probably get both,” David said. He turned to me. “Ordinarily, I’d order that bottle myself. But then she and I couldn’t play our little game. You see what she makes me do?”

“Funny how women are always to blame for what men do to them,” Anabel remarked.

“Has she told you how she broke her teeth?”

“She has.”

“But did she tell you the best part? She got back on the horse. Blood all over her face, her mouth full of broken tooth, and she gets right back on the horse. And she gives that bridle a yank like she’s going to rip its head off. She almost broke its neck. That’s my Anabel.”

“Dad, shut up, please.”

“Honey, I’m speaking well of you to your boyfriend.”

“Then don’t omit the part about my never getting on a horse again. I still feel bad about what I did to that poor beast.”

Given Anabel’s hatred of David, I was surprised by their intimate way together. It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other — you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh. When David mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d remarried, Anabel’s response was “To one person, or several?”

David laughed. “One is all I can afford.”

“You’ll need at least three in case you have to kill a couple more.”

“I married a dipsomaniac,” David explained to me.

“You created an alcoholic,” Anabel said.

“Somehow men are always to blame for what women do to them.”

“Somehow it’s always true. Who’s the lucky lady?”

“Her name’s Fiona. You’ll want to meet her.”

“I won’t want to meet her. I’ll just want to sign over my birthright to her. Just show me the dotted line.”

“Not going to happen,” David said. “Fiona signed what they call a prenuptial agreement. You’re not going to be rid of your birthright that easily.”

“Watch me,” Anabel said.

“You must talk her out of this madness, Tom.”

I was having trouble fitting into their banter. I didn’t want David to think I was too earnest or subservient to Anabel, but I couldn’t be too at ease with him without appearing disloyal to her. “That’s not in my job description,” I said carefully.

“But you do agree it’s madness?”

My eyes met Anabel’s. “No, I don’t,” I said.

“Give it time. You will.”

“No, he won’t,” Anabel said, looking into my eyes. “Tom’s not you. Tom is clean.”

“Ah, yes, the blood on my hands.” David held his hands up for inspection. “Funny, I’m not seeing it tonight.”

“Look more closely,” Anabel said. “I can smell it.”

David seemed disappointed in me when he learned that I didn’t eat meat, and outright annoyed when Anabel ordered nothing but a plate of vegetables, but his foie gras and his veal chop restored his spirits. It may only have been a form of billionaire narcissism, but he demonstrated cover-to-cover familiarity with The New Yorker, spoke knowledgeably of Altman and Truffaut, offered to get us tickets to The Elephant Man in New York, and seemed genuinely interested in my opinions about Bellow. It occurred to me that something tragic had happened in the Laird family — that Anabel and her father ought to have been the best of friends. Was she his bitter enemy, and her brothers three disasters, not because he was a monster but because he was too fabulous? Anabel had never claimed that he wasn’t likable, only that he seduced people with his likability. He told me stories of bad business moves he’d made — the selling of a Brazilian sugar mill a year before it became wildly profitable, his torpedoing of a partnership with Monsanto because he thought he knew more about plant genetics than Monsanto’s head of R&D did — and made fun of his own arrogance. When the conversation turned to my career plans and he offered, first, to get me a job at the Washington Post (“Ben Bradlee’s an old friend of mine”) and then, after I’d declined that offer, to fund the start-up of my contrarian magazine, I had the feeling that he was daring me to be fabulous like him.

Anabel thought otherwise. “He just wants to buy you,” she said on our train ride home. “It’s always the same. I let my guard down a tiny bit, and I loathe myself afterward. He wants to get his fingers into everything I have, the same way McCaskill’s got its fingers into everything the world eats. He won’t rest till he has everything. It’s not enough to be the world’s leading supplier of turkey meat, he has to have Truffaut and Bellow. You flatter his intellectual vanity. He thinks if he can have you, he’ll get me, and then he’ll have everything.”

“Did you hear me saying yes to him?”

“No, but you liked him. If you think he’s going to leave you alone now, think again.”

She was right. Not long after our dinner, I received, by express mail, a package containing four hardcover first editions (Augie March, H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Joseph Mitchell), two tickets to The Elephant Man, and a letter from David in which he’d recorded his thoughts on rereading Augie March. He also mentioned that he’d spoken on the phone to Ben Bradlee about me, and he invited me and Anabel to New York for a weekend of theater the following month. When Anabel had finished tearing up the tickets, she pointed out the initials in the lower corner of the letter’s second page. “Don’t flatter yourself too much,” she said. “He dictated it.”

“So what? I can’t believe he went and reread Augie March for me.”

“Oh I can.”

“You’re not tearing up the books, though.”

“No, those you can keep if you can get the blood off them. But if you ever take anything more than token gifts from him, you will destroy me. And I mean destroy me.”

He continued to call me now and then, and I considered not telling Anabel about it, but I was already peeing in the sink and didn’t want to keep more secrets from her. Instead, I reported on his fabulous doings and then concurred in her condemnation of them. But I secretly liked him, secretly loved the loving way he spoke of Anabel, and she — he’d been right about this — secretly enjoyed having fresh doings to condemn.

My manifesto for The Complicater wasn’t going well. It was long on contrarian rhetoric and short on facts. If I really intended to found a new magazine, I ought to have been maintaining my friendships from the DP and cultivating relationships with local freelancers. The Complicater was an obvious nonstarter unless Anabel relented and let David fund it, and so I passed my days in the vague hope that she would relent. Oswald, who’d gone home to Lincoln to pay down his college debt, sent me droll letters to which I couldn’t summon the energy to respond. I would make it my one task for the afternoon to write him a letter, and I wouldn’t manage to write one sentence until five minutes before Anabel came home from the library. I didn’t have anything to report to anybody except that I was besotted with her.

Having spent the previous ten months shaping my personality to fit with hers, sanding away the most prominent points of friction, I was mostly blissful in her presence that fall. We were developing our routines, our shared opinions, our private vocabulary, our store of phrases that had been funny on first utterance and seemed scarcely less funny on the hundredth, and every word and every belonging of hers was colored by the sex I’d had with her and no one else. When I was alone in the apartment, though, I felt depressed. Anabel had limitless money but intended never to take any of it, I was mad for her body but could have it only three days a month, I liked her dad but had to pretend I didn’t, her dad had fabulous connections but I wasn’t allowed to use them, I had a supposedly ambitious project but no chance of making it happen, and whenever my mother dared to question what I was doing — I continued to call her every Sunday night — I took it as a criticism of Anabel and angrily changed the subject.

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date. Anabel was so convincing that I believed in our plan. My only fear was that she’d realize I wasn’t as interesting as she was and leave me. She was the amazing thing that had happened to me, and I intended to support her and defend her from a world that didn’t understand her, and so, on the anniversary of Lucy’s Halloween party, I withdrew the last $350 from my old savings account and bought a ring with a pitiful little phonograph-stylus diamond. By the time Anabel came home from the library, I’d tied the ring to Leonard’s neck with a white ribbon and left him standing in the center of our bed.

“Leonard and I have something for you,” I said.

“Aha, you’ve been out,” she said. “I thought I smelled city on you.”

I led her into the bedroom.

“Leonard, what do you have for me?” She picked him up and saw the ring. “Oh, Tom.”

“I am not, of course, a beast of burden,” Leonard said. “I am an ornament of society, not a common toiler. But when he requested that I be your ring bearer, I could hardly refuse.”

“Oh, Tom.” She set Leonard on the nightstand and put her arms around my neck and looked into my eyes. Her own were lustrous with tears and ardor.

“It’s our first anniversary,” I said.

“Oh, my darling. I knew you’d remember, but I also wasn’t sure you would.”

“Will you marry me?”

“A thousand times!”

We tumbled onto the bed. It wasn’t the right time of month, but she said it didn’t matter. I thought that maybe now that we were going to be married she might get past her problem, and I think she thought so too, but it wasn’t to be. She said she was happy anyway. She lay on her back with our little bull between her breasts and untied the ribbon.

“I’m sorry the diamond is so small,” I said.

“It’s perfect,” she said, putting the ring on. “You picked it out for me, and so it’s perfect.”

“I can’t believe I get to be married to you.”

“No, I’m the lucky one. I know I’m not an easy person.”

“I love your difficulty.”

“Oh, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect!” She kissed me all over my face, and we made love again. The ring on her finger had magical powers. I was fucking my betrothed, there was a new dimension to the joy of it, an immeasurably deeper chasm into which to throw my self, and no end to the falling. Even when I finished, I kept falling. Anabel cried softly — with pure happiness, she said. What I now see is a pair of kids who’d been snorting the powder for a year, losing their connections to reality one by one and becoming (at least in my case) depressed about it. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein? But in the moment all I was aware of was the rush the ring brought. While it lasted, I gathered my courage and asked Anabel to come with me to Denver for Christmas, announce our engagement, and give my mother another chance. To my delight, Anabel not only didn’t resist but smothered me with kisses, saying she’d do anything for me now, anything, anything.

In her own way, she tried. She was prepared to like my mother if my mother would appreciate her. She even bought her own separate Christmas presents for her — a volume of Simone de Beauvoir, some fruit-scented soaps, a lovely old brass pepper mill — and when we got to Denver she was good about offering to help my mother in the kitchen. But my mother, still traumatized by “A River of Meat,” declined the offers. She seemed determined to play the role of martyred working mom — she’d gone back to her job at the pharmacy, Dick Atkinson having married someone else — to Anabel’s indolent rich girl. She also, though I’d been explaining it to her for months, refused to grasp that Anabel had become a vegan and I a vegetarian. For our first dinner, I caught her making baked whitefish for me and macaroni and cheese for Anabel.

“No flesh for me, no animal products for Anabel,” I reminded her.

She was still somewhat moonfaced, but we were getting used to it. “It’s nice fish,” she said, “not meat.”

“It’s dead animal. And cheese is an animal product.”

“Then what is ‘vegan’? Does she eat bread?”

“The macaroni is fine, the problem is the cheese part.”

“So, she can just eat the macaroni. I’ll cut away the crust.”

Fortunately my sister Cynthia was there, too. After I’d introduced her to Anabel, she’d pulled me aside and whispered, “Tom, she’s beautiful, she’s wonderful.” Cynthia took up the defense of our dietary restrictions, and when I announced our engagement, at the dinner table, she ran to the kitchen for a bottle of pink champagne that my mother had bought in expectation of an Arne Holcombe victory. My mother herself simply stared at her plate and said, “You’re very young to be doing this.”

Anabel evenly asked her how old she’d been when she got married.

“I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.”

“We’re not you,” Anabel said.

“That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.”

“Mom, be happy,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Anabel’s fantastic, this is great news.”

“You don’t need my blessing,” my mother said. “All I can give you is my opinion.”

“Noted,” Anabel said.

Somehow we got through the holiday on civil terms. I slept in the basement so that Anabel could have her own bedroom. We assented to this maintenance of propriety to keep the peace, but every night, in the basement, as if to show my mother who was boss, Anabel gave me a blow job. This was probably the all-time peak of her carnality with me, the only time I remember her getting down on her knees. My mother was less than fifteen feet away from us, as the gamma ray flies; we could hear her footsteps, the toilet flushing, even the sounds of her bowel. After Cynthia left, Oswald came over from Nebraska for two nights, and my mother was so pointedly affectionate to him that Anabel remarked to me, “She’d rather you were marrying Oswald.”

On our last day, alone with my mother, we made our favorite stir-fry for dinner, and she began to drone on about money. She could understand our living on Anabel’s assets and doing something socially beneficial, she said, and she could understand our finding responsible jobs and supporting ourselves, but she could not understand our living in voluntary poverty and pursuing unrealistic dreams.

“We still have some savings,” I said. “If we run out, we’ll get jobs.”

“Have you ever had a job?” my mother asked Anabel.

“No, I grew up obscenely rich,” Anabel said. “It would have been a joke to have a job.”

“Honest work is never a joke.”

“She works incredibly hard on her art,” I said.

“Art isn’t work,” my mother said. “Art is something you do for yourself. I’m not saying you have to work, if you’re lucky enough not to have to. But if there’s money coming to you, you should accept the responsibilities that come with it. You need to do something.”

“Art is something,” I said.

“Part of my artistic performance,” Anabel said, “is not to touch money that has blood on it. To be the person who rejects it.”

“I don’t understand that,” my mother said.

“There’s such a thing as collective guilt,” Anabel said. “I didn’t personally keep farm animals in hellish conditions, but as soon as I found out about the conditions I accepted my guilt and decided to have nothing to do with it.”

“I can’t believe McCaskill is any worse than other companies,” my mother said. “It’s helping feed a hungry world. And what about wheat? And soybeans. Even if you don’t like the meat business, your money isn’t all bad. You could take some of it for yourself and do something charitable with the rest. I don’t see what you gain by rejecting it.”

“The Nazis improved the German economy and built a great highway system,” Anabel said. “Maybe they were only half bad, too?”

My mother bristled. “The Nazis were a terrible evil. You don’t have to tell me about the Nazis. I lost my father in Hitler’s war.”

“But you don’t have any guilt yourself.”

“I was a child.”

“Oh, I see. So there isn’t such a thing as collective guilt.”

“Don’t talk to me about guilt,” my mother said angrily. “I left behind a sister and a brother and a sick mother who needed me. I don’t know how many letters I wrote to apologize, and they never wrote back.”

“Neither did six million Jews, I guess.”

“I was a child.”

“So was I. And now I’m doing something about it.”

My own brand of collective guilt had to do with being male, but I could see that my mother had a point about work. When Anabel and I returned to Philadelphia and I again faced the impossibility of The Complicater, I was seized with a new plan: write a novella. Begin it in secret and surprise Anabel with it on our wedding day. It would give me new work to do, solve the problem of a wedding present for Anabel, prove to her that I was interesting and ambitious enough for her to marry, and maybe even reconcile her with my mother — because the novella I envisioned was a Bellovian treatment of the only good story I knew: my mother’s guilty flight from Germany. I already had the first sentence of it: “The fate of the family on Adalbertstraße was in the hands of a raging stomach.”

We’d chosen the Washington’s Birthday weekend for our wedding party, so that our friends from out of town could comfortably attend. Besides Nola, Anabel still had three reasonably good friends, one from Wichita, two from Brown. (She would terminate two of these friendships within months of our marrying; the third would remain on probation until a baby put an end to it.) Since she was inviting no one from her family to the party, and since my mother didn’t even like her, Anabel thought it was unfair to invite my own family, but I made the case that Cynthia did like her and that I was my mother’s only child.

Then one evening Anabel brought me a letter from our mailbox.

“It’s interesting,” she said, “that your mother still writes just to you, not to both of us.”

I opened the letter and scanned it: Dearest Tom … house seems so empty with you gone from it … Dr. Van Schyllingerhout … higher dose of … I tried to say nothing but every nerve in my body … to compare her childhood of inherited privilege and luxury to my childhood in Jena … unspeakable carnage of the War with modern farming methods … deeply offended … no choice but to speak my heart freely to you … You are making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE … quite attractive and very alluring to an inexperienced young man … you ARE very inexperienced … see nothing but unhappiness in your future with a pampered, demanding, EXTREME person raised in extreme wealth and privilege … already so skinny and pale from the kooky diet she has you … when a person is not experienced sometimes the sex instinct clouds their judgment … I beg you to think hard and realistically about your future … want nothing more than for you to find a loving, sensible, mature, REALISTIC person to make a happy life with …

With suddenly cold hands, I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope.

“What does she say?” Anabel asked.

“Nothing. Her colon’s flared up again, it’s really bad.”

“Can I read the letter?”

“It’s just her being her.”

“So we’re getting married in six weeks, and I can’t read a letter from your mother.”

“I think the steroids make her a little crazy. You don’t want to read it.”

Anabel gave me one of her frightening looks. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “We’re either full partners or we’re nothing. There is no letter that anyone could send me that I wouldn’t want you to read. None. Ever.”

She was preparing to rage or to cry, and I couldn’t stand either, and so I handed her the letter and retreated to the bedroom. My life had become a nightmare of exactly the female reproach I’d dedicated it to avoiding. To avoid it from my mother was to invite it from Anabel, and vice versa; there was no way out. I was sitting on the bed, kneading my hands, when Anabel appeared in the doorway. She didn’t look hurt, just coldly angry.

“I’m going to use this word once in my life,” she said. “Exactly once.”

“What word?”

“Cunt.” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “No, that’s a terrible word, even for her. I’m sorry I said it.”

“I’m so sorry about the letter,” I said. “She’s really not well.”

“But you understand I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to buy her little Christmas presents. She’s not coming to our wedding party. If we ever have a family, she’s not going to see my children. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” I said eagerly, in my relief that Anabel hadn’t turned against me.

She knelt at my feet and took my hands. “People have strong reactions to me,” she said, more gently. “It hurts me, but I’m used to it. What I can’t stand is what her letter says about you. She has no respect for your taste or your judgment or your feelings. She thinks she still owns you and can tell you what to do. And that makes me very angry. She refuses to see who you are.”

“I really do think she’s miserable because she’s sick.”

“Her feelings make her sick. You’ve said it yourself.”

“She was polite to you in Denver. This has to be the steroids talking…”

“I’m not saying you can never see her again. You’re a loving person. But I can’t see her anymore. Ever. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“We were both half orphaned on the same day,” she said. “And now we’ll be full orphans together. Will you do that with me?”

The next day, I wrote a very formal letter to my mother, retracting her invitation to the wedding party.

We were married on Valentine’s Day, with two ladies from the clerk’s office as witnesses. We had dinner at home, spaghetti with spinach and garlic and olive oil, to symbolize the thrift that we intended to embrace, but Anabel had once mentioned that she liked Mumm champagne, and I’d bought her a bottle to mark the occasion with some small luxury. After dinner, she gave me my present, a new Olivetti portable typewriter. I was immediately aware of a more troubling symbolism: both of our gifts had to do with my work, not hers. But my novella had taken an unexpected turn — the young woman in Jena came from the town’s richest family, and her father was a brute — and I believed that Anabel would be able to recognize it as a loving tribute to her. So I bravely handed over a manila envelope to which I’d glued a white bow.

She opened it with a puzzled frown. “What is this?”

“The first half of a novella. I wanted to surprise you.”

She took out the manuscript, read some of the first page, and then simply stared at it without reading; and I saw that I’d made a terrible mistake.

“You’re writing fiction,” she said dully.

“I want to be with you in everything,” I said. “I don’t want to be a journalist, I want to be with you. Partners—”

I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.

“I think I need to be alone now,” she said.

“The novella is a tribute to you. To the two of us.”

She stood up and headed toward the bedroom. “I really just need to be alone right now.”

I heard her close the bedroom door behind her. Our marriage, four hours old, couldn’t have been going worse, and I felt entirely to blame. I hated my novella for having done this to her. And yet I’d been happy working on it, had been markedly less depressed in the six weeks since I’d abandoned her plan for me, The Complicater. I sat for an hour at the kitchen table, in a deepening cold fog of depression, and waited to see if Anabel might come out of the bedroom. She didn’t. Instead I began to hear the sharp gasps of her unsuccessfully resisting tears. Full of pity for her, I went into the bedroom and found it dark. She was crumpled up on the bare floor by the windows.

“What have I done?” I cried.

Her answer came out slowly, in fragments punctuated by my apologies and her tears: I’d lied to her. I’d kept secrets from her. Both of our wedding presents were about me. I’d broken my promises to her. I’d promised that she was the artist and I was the critic. I’d promised that I wouldn’t steal her story, but she could tell from one paragraph that I’d stolen it. I’d promised that we wouldn’t compete, and I was competing with her. I’d deceived her and ruined our wedding day …

Each reproach landed like acid on my brain. I’d heard it said that there is no pain worse than mental torture, and now I believed it. Even the worst of our premarital scenes had been nothing like this; it had always been fundamentally OK me dealing with temperamental Anabel. Now I was experiencing her psychic pain directly as my own. The heaven of soul-merging was a hell. Clutching my head, I ran away from her and threw myself on the living-room sofa and lay there for some hours, experiencing mental torture, while Anabel did the same in the bedroom. I kept thinking, this is our wedding night, this is our wedding night.

It must have been two in the morning before I worked up enough hatred of my novella to stand up and start burning it, page by page, on the kitchen stove. Anabel eventually smelled the smoke and came staggering in, very pale, and watched me in silence until the last page was burned and I burst into tears.

She was immediately all over me, full of comfort, desperate with love. How I craved that love! How we both craved it! Better than the best drug after the agony of withdrawal from it: the smell of her teary face, the soft avidity of her mouth, the warm solidity of her body, the naked fact of her. It was almost as if we’d deliberately manufactured unspeakable pain to achieve this level of wedding-night bliss.

Without being aware of it, however, I’d made a second terrible mistake, which came to light at our party, two nights later. The party was already uncomfortably weighted against the distaff, because Nola had failed to show up (she’d moved to New York, in part to get over her feelings for Anabel) and one of Anabel’s Brown friends had bailed at the last minute, while Cynthia and five of my Penn friends and three of my Denver friends had come from near and far. But Oswald had brought good mix tapes and seemed to be developing a brother’s-best-friend thing for Cynthia, which was fun to watch happening, and Anabel had drunk enough to be enjoying my other friends’ stories about me, rather than feeling threatened by them, and I was proud of how beautiful she looked in her strapless party dress.

I was clearing the floor for dancing when our buzzer rang. Anabel, hoping it was Nola, ran to the intercom in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear her over the party noise, but she came back pale with fury. She beckoned me into the bedroom with a jerk of her head and shut the door behind us.

“How could you?” she said.

“What?”

“It’s my father.”

“Oh no.”

“The only way he could have known is if you told him. You!” Her face twisted up. “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”

It was true: David, in a recent phone call, had coaxed out of me the date of our party, so that he could send us, he said, a very small wedding present. I’d emphasized that the party was for friends, not family.

“I specifically told him he wasn’t invited,” I said.

“My God, Tom, how could you be so stupid? Haven’t you learned anything about him?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But can we just try to make the best of it?”

“No! The party is over. I’m pulling the plug. This is my worst nightmare.”

“Did you let him in?”

“I had to! But I’m not leaving this room until he’s gone.”

“Let me deal with it.”

“Oh right, good luck with that.”

Out in the living room, David had set down a load of small presents and a jeroboam of Mumm and was jovially introducing himself to our guests. His face lit up further at the sight of me. “There he is! The groom! Congratulations! You’re looking very dashing, Tom, as well you should.” He gave me a crushing handshake. “I meant to be here two hours ago, we had a problem with the plane. Where’s my little girl?”

I tried to answer coldly, but my tone was simply factual. “She doesn’t want you here.”

“Doesn’t want her only parent at her wedding party?” David looked around the room, appealing to our silent guests. The stereo was playing “Remote Control.” “She’s my favorite person in the world. How could I miss her wedding party?”

“I really think it’s better if you go.”

David stepped around me and rapped on the bedroom door. “Anabel, honey? Come out and join us before the wine gets warm.”

To my surprise, the door opened immediately. Anabel drew her head back and spat in David’s face. The door slammed shut again.

Everybody saw it, nobody said a word. “Remote Control” continued to play while David wiped spit from his eyes. When he lowered his hand, he looked a decade older. He smiled at me weakly. “Enjoy the years,” he said, “until she does the same to you.”

* * *

Her long months of preliminary reading done, Anabel went to work on her ambitious project. It was a film about the body. She couldn’t get over how strange it is that a person can live for fifty or seventy or ninety years and die without having made the most basic acquaintance with the body that is the sum of her existence: that there are so many places on the body — certainly places on the head and back that she can’t directly see, but even places on her arms and legs and torso — to which, in all those years, she won’t have paid as much attention as a butcher pays to cuts of beef.

The surface area of her own body was about sixteen thousand square centimeters, and her plan was to inscribe a grid of 32-square-centimeter “cuts” on it with a fine-tipped black marker. Except on her feet and face and fingers, these “cuts” would be simple 57 × 57 millimeter squares. All five hundred of them would appear in her film. She intended to take a full week to acquaint herself with each one — to neither slight nor privilege any one 32-cm2 part of her body; to be able to say, when she died, that she’d truly known all that could be seen of it — and she’d assigned herself the daunting task of doing something fresh and compelling with every cut. The differences might be purely filmic, but more often they’d involve images relating to the thoughts and memories that a particular cut inspired. In this respect, the project was closer to performance art than to film. If she could stick to her schedule, the performance would last ten years, the creative challenge steadily increasing. She didn’t know how long the final film would be, but she was aiming for twenty-nine and a half hours, an hour for each day of the lunar month. Her larger ambition was to reclaim possession of her body, cut by cut, from the world of men and meat. After ten years, she’d own herself entirely.

I loved the idea, and she loved me for loving it. One hot July afternoon, she let me be the one to make the first black mark on her body, a grid encompassing two of her left toes, whose surface area it had taken her half a day to determine accurately; she’d left ink dots that I connected. “Now you have to leave me alone with it,” she said.

“I want to know every inch of you myself.”

“I’ll always come back to you,” she said gravely. “In ten years I’ll be all yours.”

I kissed the toes and left her alone with them. What was ten years?

If she could have worked faster, and if artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin hadn’t risen to prominence, and if video art hadn’t suddenly all but extirpated experimental film, and if she hadn’t been paralyzed by jealousy of my smaller but completable journalism projects, it’s conceivable that her film would have come to something. But a year went by and she was still on her left ankle. I now see that she must have quickly become bored with the surface of her body — there’s a reason we go through life without paying much attention to it — but to her it felt as if the world were out to thwart her.

Naturally, I bore the brunt of this. A wrong word at the breakfast table or a distracting smell from something I was cooking (“Smell is hell,” she liked to say) could ruin a workday. Even a capsule newspaper review of a “competitor” could shut her down for a week. With her tacit permission, I took to vetting The New Yorker and the arts section of the Times and tearing out potentially upsetting items before she could read them. I also answered our phone, paid our bills, and did our taxes. When we moved into a larger space, I soundproofed the windows of her project room, and when, six months later, she decided that Philadelphia was depressing her and retarding my career, I went to New York and found us our apartment in East Harlem. There, too, I soundproofed her room. And none of this resentfully, all of it true-believingly, because she was the hedgehog and I was the fox. But it was more than that: as with the toilet seat, I was making amends for a structural unfairness. It hurt her that I had practical skills, and because it hurt her it hurt me, too.

My greatest capacity was for earning money. I was so hungry for advancement and had so much time on my hands (seven days a week, Anabel closeted herself with her 16 mm Beaulieu) that I broke in rather easily at Philadelphia magazine. I could have become a news editor there, or later at the Voice, but I didn’t want an office job, because some mornings, before closeting herself, Anabel needed to spend several hours discussing an incorrect look I’d given her or a disturbing news item that had slipped past my censoring, and I had to be available for that. So I worked from home and became a skilled reporter. Since I wasn’t competing with Anabel creatively, she encouraged me to be ambitious and gave me good notes on everything I wrote. In return, I covered our rent and utilities and food. For film stock and processing, she burned through her remaining savings and then started selling off the jewelry she’d been given by her father and inherited from her mother. I was shocked to learn how much the jewelry was worth, and a tiny bit resentful, but it wasn’t as if I’d entered our marriage with any jewelry of my own.

Need I mention that our sex life went straight downhill? Our problem wasn’t typical marital boredom. It was partly that she spent all day deeply contemplating her body and just wanted to read a book or watch TV in her free time, but mostly that our souls were merged. It’s hard to feel as if you are someone and at the same time want her. By the mid-eighties, our only halfway decent sex was of the homecoming variety, after one of my reporting trips or my annual summer visit to Denver; for a few hours, we were unlike enough to reconnect. In the years after that, when she was starving herself and exercising three hours a day, she simply stopped having her periods. Then there was never a good time of month for her, then we put Leonard in a shoe box and didn’t take him out again, then all we did was talk and talk, like a two-person emotional bureaucracy. The smallest of questions (“Why did you wait ten minutes to tell me your good news instead of telling me immediately?”) triggered a full formal investigation, with every response filed in triplicate and the review period extended and re-extended while the archives were searched.

And we were isolated. To get dressed up and mingle with other sexual beings might have helpfully separated us. But Anabel became ever shyer and less sure of herself, ever more ashamed to speak of a project that she and I believed was genius but no one else could see; and inevitably, since our only friends were my friends, she felt slighted by their greater interest in me. I started meeting them alone for lunch or early drinks. I told absolutely no one about my home life. It would have been a betrayal of Anabel, and I was ashamed of the strangeness of my marriage and, worse, of how I sounded when I answered a friend’s polite question about her and her work. I sounded like a person making excuses for her, a person who couldn’t see that his spouse wasn’t actually the genius he was convinced she was. I was still convinced, but, oddly, I didn’t sound convincing.

Even David, who hadn’t stopped calling me, seemed to have lost interest in Anabel. His three sons were continuing to enact every known cliché of rich-kid misbehavior, and his daughter had spat in his face. I was his most plausible remaining object of paternal pride. He never failed to offer me funding, connections, a good job at McCaskill, sometimes all three. Under his leadership, McCaskill was expanding its Asian operations, trading in Peruvian fish meal and German flaxseed oil, diversifying into financial services and fertilizer, widening the river of meat, pouring beef and eggs into the gullet of McDonald’s and turkey into the maw of Denny’s. By my calculation, David’s stake in the company was approaching three billion dollars.

And then suddenly I was in my thirties. I had dozens of professional friends but nobody to talk to about Anabel except our building’s super, Ruben, who doubled as the manager of an underground lottery that was operated by our building’s owner and pegged to the Dominican Lotería Nacional. The building was kept safe by the constant presence of Ruben and his runners — a toothless alcoholic nicknamed Low Boy, a couple of retired hookers. Ruben was courtly with Anabel and respectful of the man who’d married her; he called me Lucky. Anabel’s other fan was her new friend, Suzanne, whom she’d met at an improv class that I’d implored her to take after she’d been stymied with her project for an entire fall. She’d finally filmed her way to the top of her left leg and couldn’t bring herself to inscribe a “cut” near her genitals. Her food intake had dwindled to coffee with soy milk in the morning and a small dinner in the evening. During the day she was often disabled by “bloatation” and stomach cramps, but she became frantic if anything (i.e., too many hours of discussion with me) impeded her 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. exercise regime, which involved workout tapes by Jane Fonda, runs in Central Park, and a secondhand rowing machine that now dominated her work space.

She had as much body fat as a Shaker chair, her periods were a thing of the past, and whole seasons came and went in which the closest I came to fucking her was Ruben’s imagination, but this didn’t stop us from discussing a potential baby. She wanted to have a family with me, but first she had to finish her project, reclaim her body, and achieve a success to match or exceed my own; otherwise she’d be stuck at home with diapers while I had my splendid male career. I didn’t see how we could wait for her to finish — she hadn’t even looked at much of her hundred hours of raw footage, let alone begun to edit it, and at the rate she was proceeding she’d still be filming at seventy — but I couldn’t point this out without stoking her panic. All I could do was try to calm her, so that she could get on with the contemplation and filming of her genitals.

For our eighth anniversary, after my first sale of an article to Esquire, I prevailed on Anabel to come to Italy with me. We’d never had a honeymoon, and I thought that Europe might revive us. The trip was touristically successful — we had the Gothic sculpture of Tuscany and the ancient ruins of Sicily to ourselves — but Anabel got hunger headaches every afternoon, and every evening I had to accompany her on three-hour power walks in the dark, our abdomens cramping while we scouted for a restaurant filled with locals, because this was our honeymoon and she needed her one meal of the day to be a great one.

We returned to New York determined to make our own Sicilian-style spaghetti with fried eggplant and tomatoes, a dish so delicious that we wanted to eat it twice a week. Which we did, for several months. And here was the thing: I didn’t get sick of it slowly. I got sick of it suddenly, radically, and permanently while eating a plateful whose first bites I’d enjoyed as much as ever. I set down my fork and said we needed a break from fried eggplant and tomatoes. The dish was perfect and delicious and not to blame. I’d made it poison to me by eating too much of it. And so we took a monthlong break from it, but Anabel still loved it, and one very warm evening in June I came home and smelled her cooking it.

My stomach heaved.

“We overdid it,” I said from the kitchen doorway. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

Symbolism was never lost on Anabel. “I’m not spaghetti with eggplant, Tom.”

“I’m literally going to throw up if I stay here.”

She looked frightened. “All right,” she said. “But will you come back later?”

“I will, but something has to change.”

“I agree. I’ve been having thoughts.”

“Good, I’ll come back later.”

I ran down five flights of stairs and over to the 125th Street station with no plan, no friend good enough to go and confide in, just a need to get away. There was, in those years, a ragged band of funk musicians who busked irregularly on the station’s downtown platform. Always a bass player and guitarist, often a drummer with a trap set that looked rescued from a dumpster, sometimes a singer with gold teeth and a soiled sequined dress. Only the singer ever interacted with their audience, the others seemed wrapped up in painful private histories from which the music was a momentary respite. The guitarist knew how to pitch a groove above the rumble of the trains and not let up on it, no matter how he sweated.

That evening they were a trio. Dollar bills had collected in an open guitar case, and I threw in a bill and retreated up the platform with the respect incumbent on the white in Harlem. I’ve since searched, to no avail, for the song they were playing. Maybe it was their own song, never recorded. It had a simple minor-seventh riff that spoke of beauty amid incurable sadness, and in my recollection they played it for twenty minutes, half an hour, long enough for many local and express trains to come and go. Finally there came a perfect storm of drafts from uptown and downtown, a big humid uric wind that swept the platform and then reversed itself, and reversed itself again, so that the dollar bills came levitating out of the guitar case and drifted up and down the platform like leaves in autumn, tumbling and skidding, while the band played on. It was perfectly beautiful and perfectly sad, and everybody on the platform knew it, nobody bent down to touch the money.

I thought of my suffering Anabel, alone in the apartment. I saw my life and walked back up the stairs.

She was standing right inside our front door as if she’d been expecting me. “Will you help me?” she said immediately. “I know that something has to change, and I can’t do it without you. Will you look at what I’m doing and tell me what I’m not seeing?”

“Just don’t make me eat any more fried eggplant,” I said.

“I’m serious, Tom. I need your help.”

I agreed to help her. We went into her workroom, which had long been off limits to me, and she shyly showed me some impressive film clips. An underexposed black-and-white close-up of a “cut” on her left thigh which she’d hand-doctored to create the impression of dark ocean swells. An imperfectly synched but very funny monologue on kneecaps. A disturbing montage of subway-platform footage intercut with her corpse-white big toe tagged with her name, as if to suggest that she’d thought about jumping in front of a train. I was so warmly encouraging that she opened her notebooks for me.

These had always been strictly private, and it was a measure of her desperation that she let me see them, because they weren’t the elegantly lettered and story-boarded pages I’d imagined. They were a diary of torment. Entry after entry began with a daily to-do list and devolved into increasingly illegible self-diagnoses. Then she’d start a fresh page with a neat chart of film cuts, fill in only the first few squares, and then scribble revisions to them, and then cross out the revisions and scribble new ones in the margins, with lines connecting various thoughts and key points triple-underlined; and then she’d draw a big angry X through the entire thing.

“I know it doesn’t look like it,” she said, “but there are good ideas in here. This looks like it’s crossed out, but it’s not really crossed out, I’m still thinking about it. I have to leave it crossed out because otherwise it puts too much pressure on me. What I really need to do is go through all the notebooks”—there were at least forty of them—“and then try to keep everything in my head and make a clear plan. It’s just that there’s so much. I’m not crazy. I just need some way to organize it that doesn’t put too much pressure on me.”

I believed her. She was smart and had good ideas. But, leafing through those notebooks, I could see that she had no chance of finishing her project. She, who for so long had seemed all-powerful to me, wasn’t strong enough. I felt responsible for having failed to intervene sooner, and now, even though I was sick of the marriage to the point of heaving, I couldn’t leave until I’d helped her out of the stuck place I’d allowed her to fall into. The marriage I’d hoped would lead me out of guilt had led me only deeper in.

And yet: guilt must be the most monstrous of human quantities, because what I did to relieve my guilt then — stay in the marriage — was precisely the thing I felt guiltiest about later, when the marriage was over. After the night of spaghetti and eggplant, as if she’d seen for the first time that I might leave her, she began to speak of a date, eighteen months in the future, when she and I could set about having a little baby girl (she never imagined a boy). The idea was partly to give herself a goal and deadline for advancing her project above her abdomen, but she was also trying, for my sake, to be more realistic; we couldn’t wait forever to get pregnant. I could see that a baby might be just what we needed, a baby might save us, but I could also see that I was likely to be doing the bulk of the child care as long as her project was unfinished. And so, whenever she brought up the baby question, I changed the subject to her project. Whether I wanted her to hurry up and finish it so that we could share the care of a baby, or whether I just wanted her to be OK enough that I could safely divorce her, I honestly can’t remember. But I do know that I could summon up the sickening smell of fried eggplant simply by thinking of it. If I’d heeded my stomach and cut her loose, she might have had time to find someone else to have her baby with.

“Bold proposal,” I’d said in her workroom, the morning after the spaghetti night. “You increase the size of your ‘cuts’ by a factor of ten. I can help you plan the whole thing, I can draw it out for you so it’s not all in your head. And then you do it in two years and you’re done.”

She shook her head dismissively. “I can’t change the size of the cuts halfway in.”

“But if you make them ten times bigger, you can redo the whole leg in two months. You can cherry-pick the best nonbody shots you already have.”

“I’m not throwing away eight years of work!”

“But it’s not even finished work.” I gestured toward her towers of processed but unopened film boxes. “You need to do whatever it takes to be finished.”

“You know I’ve never finished anything in my life.”

“Good time to start, don’t you think?”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said. “What I need your help with isn’t throwing away eight years of work. It’s helping me organize the ideas I already have. And it was obviously a mistake to ask you. Oh! Oh! I’m so stupid.”

She beat her fists on her offending head. It took me two hours to talk her down and then a further hour to emerge from the sulk she’d put me in by suggesting that my aesthetic was vulgar. Then, for three hours, I helped her block out a rough schedule for completing her project, and then, for another hour, I began the transfer of important thoughts from the first of her forty-odd notebooks into a new notebook, written by me. Then it was time for her three hours of exercise.

We had many days like this in the year that followed. For ten hours I worked out sequences for her, sequences that seemed to me totally doable, only to hear her say, when it was time for her to exercise, that we seemed to be making my journalistically organized film, not her film, which led to another day of discussion in which she tried to describe the sequences she wanted, and I couldn’t follow her overall logic, and she explained it all again, and I still couldn’t follow it, and it was time for her to exercise. I cut back on my own work, passing up an opportunity to follow the Dukakis campaign for Rolling Stone, and I was losing friends the way addicts do, by canceling dates at the last minute. We’d entered the squalid maintenance phase of our addiction, not a particle of pleasure in the morning, just a sick sense of unresolved issues from the day before. It went on and on and on and would have gone on even longer if my mother hadn’t gotten a death sentence.

She called, unusually, on a weekday afternoon. “Oh, this terrible body of mine,” she said. “It’s given me nothing but trouble, and now it’s going to kill me. Tom, I’m so sorry. I’m letting you down, I’m letting Cynthia down, I’m letting everyone down. Dr. Van Schyllingerhout has been so patient with me, he’s tried so hard, he says I’m one of the reasons he won’t retire. He’s almost eighty, Tom, and still seeing patients. I’m such a disappointment to you all. But your dumb old mother has cancer.”

More pitiable even than her cancer was her impulse to apologize for it. I probed her news for a silver lining, but apparently there wasn’t one. She’d simply had rotten luck. Because the steroids had put her at high risk for cancer, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had been giving her biennial colonoscopies, but the cancer must have appeared immediately after her previous one. In two years it had spread beyond her colon and was likely inoperable. They were going to open her up to relieve her blockage, blast her with radiation, and then do further surgery to see what could be salvaged, but the prognosis was poor.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.

“Tom, I’m so sorry. I hate to burden you with this. I want to live to see you happy and successful. But this dumb old body of mine, always the same dumb thing…”

I walked into Anabel’s workroom and sat down and cried. Anabel later told me that my tears had terrified her — she was afraid I’d come in to say I couldn’t live with her anymore — but once I gave her the news she put her arms around me and cried with me. She even offered to come to Denver.

“No,” I said, drying my face. “You stay here. This will be good for both of us.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “That I’m going to work better without you, and you’re going to be happier without me. And that’ll be the end of us. You’ll think, Why am I with this crazy woman who can’t do her work? And I’ll remember how much better I worked when I got to be alone all the time.” She began to cry again. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me,” I said. “It’s just some time apart.”

The argument I made to her, and to myself, was that we needed to reconstruct our separate identities in order to go on together. I genuinely believed this, but my reasons for believing it were bad. I was postponing for as long as possible the guilt of abandoning her. I was also hoping, unrealistically, that she might spare me from this guilt by being the one to leave.

In a hospital corridor in Denver, while my mother was in post-op, I conferred with Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. He was a compassionate-eyed bald man with an aquiline nose. He’d been good to my mother, but he was unmistakably pissed off about her cancer. “The surgeon is unhappy,” he said in an accent less like Leonard’s than I’d remembered. “He wanted to take more, but your mother is adamant about not wanting a stoma. It’s a quality-of-life choice we have to respect. She doesn’t want the bag. But you hate to tie a surgeon’s hands. Her chances are worse now.”

“How bad?”

He shook his head, pissed off. “Bad.”

“I appreciate your respecting her wishes.”

“Your mother is a fighter. I’ve had many patients not as sick as her give up and take the colostomy. And of course you know the story of her leaving Germany. She was in a situation of indignity that she refused to accept. With the will she has, she should have lived another thirty years.”

So began my admiration of my mother. It’s odd to say this, given how sick she was, but she gave me hope about my own life. My situation with Anabel was surely no more of a torment to me than her bowel was to her, and abandoning her mother and siblings couldn’t have been easier than what I had to do to Anabel. If my mother could fight through it, so might I.

Her surgery seemed to have excised the phrase dumb old mother from her vocabulary, along with others like it. She came home from the hospital without her self-deprecation. Under the influence of Cynthia, who was now a single mom and living in Denver with her daughter, her political views had also softened. “I’m starting to think that money really is the root of all evil,” she said to me one night. “As soon as you have money, you have envy. That’s the problem with the Communists, they envy the rich, they’re obsessed with redistributing money. And, I’m sorry, but I look at Anabel’s family and all I see is the harm the money did to it.”

“That’s why she rejected it,” I said.

“But rejecting money is just another way to be obsessed with it. It’s just like the Communists. The productive workers get exploited by the lazy ones. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s not right that Anabel doesn’t work — that you’re the one who has to make up for her obsession. She would have been better off not having money in the first place.”

“Her family is messed up, for sure. But she’s not lazy.”

“When I’m gone, you’re going to have a little money from this house. And I do not want that money going to support Anabel. That money is for you. It’s not much, but your father worked hard, I worked hard. Please promise me you won’t give it to the daughter of a billionaire.”

I considered my hardworking parents. “All right,” I said.

“Do you promise?”

I made the promise, but I wasn’t sure I would keep it.

That summer, I started eating meat again. I went to Nevada and wrote a story for Esquire about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. I also nursed my mother through her radiation sickness and saw a lot of Cynthia and her little girl. Now it was Anabel to whom I made Sunday-night phone calls. She claimed to be having productive thoughts, and only when she said things like “Don’t forget me, Tom” was it less than nice to hear her voice. She wouldn’t have guessed that I was eating meat again, and I didn’t mention it.

My mother continued to surprise me. After she’d recovered from her second, conclusively discouraging surgery, in October, she asked me to take her to Germany before she died. She’d been following the political developments there, the swelling exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in many years she’d tried sending another letter to her family at its old address. Three weeks later, she got a long letter back from her brother. He and his wife were still living in the old place, his mother had died in 1961, his little sister was twice divorced, his older son had been admitted to the university. At least as my mother translated it to me, his letter was devoid of resentment, as if her disappearance were just another fact from a difficult childhood he’d long since put behind him. There was no mention of the many earlier letters he hadn’t answered. I wondered if he might never have been resentful, only fearful that the Stasi would frown on his corresponding with an escapee. And now people had stopped being afraid of the Stasi.

On the strength of my three semesters of college German and my mother’s story, I contracted with Harper’s to write a firsthand account of communism’s collapse. My mother had lost a lot of weight and was looking truly scarecrowish, but her bowel was still functioning somehow, and she didn’t have a stoma. One evening, when I was helping her put her simple affairs in order, she set down her pen and said to me, “I think I’m going to die in Germany.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I’m done here,” she said. “Cynthia is a good mother, a fine person, and you’re on your way to a fine career. I think Denver and I have had enough of each other. A life is a funny thing, Tom. People talk about putting down roots, but people aren’t trees. If I have any roots, they aren’t here.”

She worried that she’d forgotten her German, but she was so good at language, had learned English so well, that I considered this unlikely. On our last night in Denver, Cynthia came over to our house without her daughter. When it was time for her to say good-bye, forever, I tried to leave her alone with my mother.

“No, stay with us,” my mother said. “I want you to hear what I have to say.” She turned to Cynthia. “I want to apologize for not being a better mother to you when you were young. I made excuses for it, but that’s all they were, excuses, and I don’t deserve any of what you’ve done for me since then. You’ve been the best daughter a mother could ever ask for. You were the great gift your father gave me. If I’ve been lucky in nothing else, I’ve been lucky in you and Tom. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate everything you’ve done, and how sorry I am that I was ever unkind to you. You’re a wonderful person, more wonderful than I deserve.”

Cynthia’s face had crumpled, but my mother remained dry-eyed, dignified. German. In the shadow of death, she was no longer the person I’d known. She’d become the person I hadn’t known, the German person. The decades of her unhappiness, the years of her dronings, now seemed like a long failure to find a good way to be American.

By the time we left for Berlin, the Wall had been breached. (I mentally rearranged my unwritten story, as journalists do, to make it more about young Clelia.) After resting for a day in Berlin, we proceeded by train to Jena. Looking out the window at a town shrouded in coal smoke, my mother commented, “Thirty-five years they’ve had to make it even uglier. Thirty-five years, my God, of manufacturing ugliness. People will forget, but I don’t want you to forget: this part of Germany paid for its guilt.”

I wrote this down in a notebook. East Germany may have been a giant penitentiary administered by the Russians, the Stasi may have embodied the worst excesses of German authority and bureaucratic thoroughness, and anyone with brains or spirit may have fled the country before the Wall went up, but the inmates who’d remained behind to expiate the country’s collective guilt had paradoxically been liberated from their Germanness. The ones I met in Jena were humble, unpunctual, spontaneous, and generous with what little they had. The country’s economy had been a sham from the start, and although the inmates had played along with the rules, attending the political-education meetings, licking their attendance stamps and pasting them into little books that reminded me of the Green Stamps of my youth, their real loyalties were to one another, not to the state. My uncle Klaus and his wife cleared out of the bedroom that had once been Annelie’s and gave it to my mother. They had a telephone but rarely used it. Friends simply appeared at the door and were ushered in to the weeklong house party with which my mother’s return was celebrated. There was endless beer and bad white wine and cream cakes. My presence was awkward, since I couldn’t understand much of the conversation, and I was relieved when, at the end of the week, my mother proposed that I leave her alone with her brother and come back to visit only on Saturday nights and Sundays. “You need to write your article,” she said. “They’ve offered to take care of me, but I want them to have a break every week.”

“You’re sure this is what you want to do.”

“That’s how they do things here,” she said. “They take care of each other.”

“You’re sounding like an old Communist.”

“It’s been forty years of terrible waste,” she said, “a whole country of wasted lives. It’s a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher’s back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good little socialists. People submitting to the system because they’re German and because it’s a system. The whole thing was stupid and a lie. But they’re not arrogant, not know-it-alls. They give what they have and they take me the way I am.”

The closer she came to dying, the more sure of herself she became. She’d concluded that the meaning of a life was in the form of it. There was no answering the question of why she’d been born, she could only take what she’d been given and try to make it end well. She intended to die in her mother’s bedroom, in the company of her brother and her only offspring, without the indignity of a colostomy bag.

I went back to Berlin, teamed up with a couple of young French journalists I’d met, and ended up squatting with them in a Friedrichshain apartment whose tenants had simply walked away from it and showed no sign of returning. For a month I made the weekly trip down to Jena, with an extra trip at Christmas, while my mother grew ever thinner and grayer. Thankfully, her pain was mostly tolerable. When she had a sharper attack of it, she rubbed her gums with the morphine that Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had given her to smuggle along with us.

My last meal with her was breakfast on the second Sunday of January. She’d been up a few times in the night, doing things that her dignity precluded my witnessing, and her eyes were hollow, the contours of her skull crisply visible beneath her thin skin, but she was still bright Clelia, her heart still beating, her brain still oxygenated and filled with her life. I was happy to see her eat an entire hard roll with butter.

“I need to know what you and Anabel are going to do,” she said.

“I’m not thinking about that now.”

“Yes, but you’ll have to think about it soon.”

“She needs to finish her project, and then we’re still hoping to have a family.”

“Is that what you want?”

I thought about this and said, “I want to see her happy again. She used to be amazing, and now she’s all beaten down. I think if she were happy and successful I’d be happy with her.”

“Your happiness shouldn’t depend on hers,” my mother said. “You were a happy little boy, and I know your father and I weren’t the easiest parents, but I don’t think you were harmed. You have a right to be happy for yourself. If you’re with someone who can’t be happy, you need to think about what you’re going to do.”

I promised to think about it, and my mother went to lie down in her mother’s bedroom while I struggled to read a German newspaper. Half an hour later, I heard her go into the bathroom. A while after that, I heard her scream. The scream has stayed with me, I can still play it in my head exactly as I heard it.

She was on the toilet, doubled over and rocking with agony. She’d been on a toilet in distress countless times in her life, but this was, remarkably, the first time I’d ever seen her on one. She would have wished that I hadn’t, and I was and remain sorry, for her sake, that I did. She looked up at me, wild-eyed, and said, with a gasp, “Tom, my God, I’m dying.”

I helped her up by the armpits and half carried her into the bedroom, leaving behind a bowl of blood and worse. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Some part of her jerry-rigged colon had ruptured, and she was dying of sepsis. I rubbed morphine into her gums and stroked her fragile head. Her head was still so warm, I wondered what was happening inside it, but she didn’t speak to me again. I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then, just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother. Then I got up and called the number my uncle had given me to get a message to him at his little weekend cottage.

Klaus and I thought it was better to have no funeral than a tiny funeral. After the cremation, he and I walked along the river, among the lawns where my mother had sunned herself as a girl, and scattered half of the ashes along the riverbank. The other half I put aside for scattering in Denver with Cynthia. On the morning I left Jena, I thanked Klaus, in halting German, for everything he’d done. He shrugged and said my mother would have done the same for him. It occurred to me to ask what she’d been like as a girl.

“Herrisch!” He laughed. “Now you see why I had to help her.”

I looked up the unfamiliar word later. Bossy.

On the train back to Berlin I stood at the rear of the last car the whole way, watching the receding track signals change from red to green. It didn’t feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny. The only cloud, Anabel, was in a different hemisphere. My sense of liberation was partly financial — Cynthia and Ellen and I would divide an estate worth more than $400,000—but it was larger than that. My parents had both bowed out now, leaving the entire field to me, and I could see that I’d been hobbling myself for Anabel’s sake, for fear of getting too far ahead of her.

I’d promised to call her that afternoon, but scattering my mother’s ashes had made me aware of something childish and fundamentally irrelevant in the body-filming project, and I was afraid of betraying this if we spoke. My own body felt so vital, so far from its own death, that I went out walking instead, retracing my mother’s long-ago steps, mingling with foreign gawkers along the Wall in Moabit and then finding my way to the Kurfürstendamm.

Near the western end of it, I stopped in a pub to eat a sausage and record my journalistic impressions in a notebook. At some point I noticed a man alone at the next table, a young German with a high forehead and loosely curly hair. He was watching the pub’s television with his arms draped across the chairs on either side of him. The wide-openness of his posture, the sense of ownership it broadcast, kept drawing my eyes to him. Finally he saw me looking and gave me a smile. As if letting me in on a joke, he pointed up at the TV screen.

His face was on the screen as well. He was being interviewed on a city street, above a tag of ANDREAS WOLF, DDR SYSTEMKRITIKER. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, but I caught the word sunlight. When the news program cut away to a wide shot of what I recognized as the national headquarters of the Stasi, I looked over and saw that he’d spread his arms even wider. I stood up with my notebook and went over to his table. “Darf ich?”

“Certainly,” he said in English. “You’re an American.”

“That’s right.”

“Americans are entitled to sit wherever they want.”

“I don’t know about that. But I’m curious what you were saying there. My German isn’t great.”

“Your notebook,” he said. “Are you a journalist?”

“I am.”

“Excellent.” He extended a hand. “Andreas Wolf.”

I shook his hand and sat down across from him. “Tom Aberant.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“Let me buy you one.”

“I’m the person celebrating. Never been on television, never been in the West, never spoken to an American. It’s my lucky night.”

I bought us some beers and got him talking. He told me he’d been part of the storming of Stasi headquarters, where he’d found himself the de facto spokesman of the Citizens’ Committee demanding oversight of the archives, and had rewarded himself by making his first trip out of the East. He’d barely slept in sixty hours, but he didn’t seem tired. I was feeling similarly buoyant. The luck of meeting an East German dissident in his first hours in the West, before any other Western journalist had had a crack at him, was making my mood on the train from Jena seem prophetic.

We finished the beers and went out to the street. Andreas didn’t walk so much as strut, in his tight jeans and army jacket, with his shoulders thrown back. The city’s atmosphere was still lingeringly festive, and he kept tossing his head at the foreigners and East Berliners on the Ku’damm, as if daring them not to recognize him. When we passed good-looking women, he pivoted sharply to stare after them. I had a feeling that Anabel wouldn’t like him, not one bit, and that I was furthering my liberation simply by walking with him.

On a quieter block, he stopped in front of a BMW showroom. “What do you think, Tom? Should I try to want one of these cars? Now that there’s no East, only West?”

“It’s your duty as a consumer to want them.”

He gazed at the ultimate driving machines. “I’ve never seen anything more terrifying in my life. Everyone else couldn’t wait to come here. Everyone else was too stupid to be terrified.”

“How would you feel about my writing down what you’re saying?”

“That’s what you want?”

“You seem like a person with stories to tell.”

He laughed. “And let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts … Who am I quoting?”

“I believe that is Horatio’s final speech.”

“Very good!” He hit me, flat-handed, on the shoulder. “Is it just you, or am I going to like every American?”

“Probably somewhere in between.”

“You’d laugh if you could see my image of America. Skyscrapers and a wretched underclass. Brechtian exploitation. Gorkian lower depths, Mick Jagger as the devil. Puerto Rican girls just dyin’ to meetchoo.”

“I recommend lowering your expectations.”

“Should I go there?”

“To New York? Definitely. I can show you all around.”

I was aware of benefiting, in his estimation, from being an American; aware also of the shame I would feel if he came to New York and witnessed the kind of life I had with Anabel. He gave the finger to the shiny BMWs and kept the finger raised above his shoulder as we proceeded down the sidewalk.

What he’d told me already — that he’d spent his twenties as a designated antisocial citizen, living outside the socialist grid, in the basement of a church — was going straight into my Harper’s piece. And yet journalism was the least of the reasons why, when we parted ways at Friedrichstraße, I asked him to meet me there again the following afternoon. Andreas looked nothing like Anabel, except that he was skinny, but his self-assurance was so reckless that it gave the impression of something damaged or anguished underneath, something that reminded me of the charismatic damaged girl I’d fallen for. Or maybe he just reminded me of what a crush felt like.

Like it or not, I absolutely had to call Anabel the next day. This could only be done from a booth at a post office, and while Andreas showed me around the center of East Berlin, pointing out the church where he’d counseled at-risk teens, the privileged Oberschule he’d attended, the youth club where frowned-upon bands had played, the bars where the Asoziale had congregated, I became nervous about finding a post office before closing time. Finally I said as much to him.

“What will happen if you don’t call her?”

“More trouble than not calling her is worth.”

“OK, serious question: is this what being married is like?”

“Why? Are you considering it yourself?”

His expression became earnest. We were on a street in Prenzlauer Berg littered with the crap furniture that people had been throwing out their windows since the Wall came down. “Not marriage,” he said. “But there is a girl. She’s very young, I hope you’ll get to meet her. If you meet her, you’ll see why I’m asking.”

It was a measure of how much I was liking him that his mention of a girl made me jealous. I had no doubt that she was unbelievably beautiful and as keen for sex as Anabel wasn’t. I envied him for that. Weirder, and indicative of the raw place where losing my mother had landed me, was that I also envied the girl for the entrée that being female gave her to his private life.

“Call your wife,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”

“No, fuck it,” I said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

I did, in my wallet, a snapshot from Italy, a flattering picture. Andreas studied it and nodded with approval, but I saw or imagined that I saw something relax in him, as if he now knew for sure he had the better woman; had won that particular competition. I felt sorry for Anabel but sorry for myself as well, for having to be her defender.

He handed back the snapshot. “You’re loyal to her.”

“So far.”

“Eleven years — fantastic.”

“A vow is a vow.”

“It won’t be easy for me to live up to your standard.”

Already he, too, seemed to be thinking we might be friends. As we continued to walk, in the underlit streets, he alluded to his country’s pollution, its literal and spiritual pollution, and to his own personal pollution. “You don’t even know how clean you are.”

“I haven’t had a bath in three days.”

“You worry about calling your wife. You nurse your mother when she’s dying. These things seem obvious to you, but they’re not obvious to everyone.”

“It’s more like a morbidly overdeveloped sense of duty.”

“Your mother — how old was she?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Shit luck. Good mother?”

“I don’t know. I always thought she was a problem, and now I can’t think of one bad thing she ever did to me.”

“How was she a problem?”

“She didn’t like my wife.”

“And you were loyal to your wife.”

“You’ve got me wrong,” I said. “I’m sick of clean. I’m sick of my marriage. I’ve been wasting my life.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I’m so fucking sick of who I am.”

“I know that feeling, too.”

“Do you want to get a beer?”

He stopped walking and looked at his watch. It hurt my pride to be so much the asker, but I was determined to be his friend. He had an irresistible magnetism and an air of secret sorrow, secret knowledge. Years later, when he became internationally famous, I wasn’t surprised. The whole world seemed to feel what I’d felt for him, and I was never able to begrudge him his success, because I knew that underneath, inside him, something was broken.

“Yeah, OK, a beer,” he said.

We went into a bar, aptly named the Hole, and there I proceeded to lacerate myself. I told Andreas how I’d ignored my mother’s warnings about Anabel and then all but abandoned her for eleven years. How I’d ignored Anabel’s father’s warnings, ignored my own instinctual liking for him, and pledged my allegiance to a nutty woman. I was betraying Anabel with every word I said, and the terrible thing was how good betrayal felt. It was as if all I’d needed was some plausible alternative to her, some potential male friend for whom I had a crushlike feeling, to admit to myself how angry I was at her; how angry I perhaps had always been.

My confession was no less sincere for having a tactical dimension. I’d never spoken to a source about my marriage, but openness was my modus, my way of encouraging sources to open up in turn. It didn’t mean I was manipulative; it meant I had a personality made for journalism. And I could tell, from the raptness of Andreas’s attention, that my American style was effective with a German. It had been my father’s style, too, and my mother, at twenty, had been defenseless against it.

“So what are you going to do?” Andreas said when I was finished.

“Anything that’s not going back to Harlem sounds good to me.”

“You should call her tomorrow. If you’re really not going back.”

“Yeah, all right. Maybe.”

He was looking at me intensely. “I like you,” he said. “I’d like to help you write the truth about my country. But I’m afraid that if you knew my own story, you wouldn’t like me.”

“Why don’t you tell it and let me be the judge.”

“If you could meet Annagret, you might understand. But I’m not allowed to see her yet.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really.”

The bar had filled up with cigarette smoke, cancerous-looking men, and girls with haircuts that only a day ago I would have considered ghastly. Now, when I permitted myself to imagine sleeping with one of those haircuts, it seemed like something I would soon be doing, if I didn’t leave Berlin.

“It’s good to talk about things,” I said.

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

We were in territory familiar to a journalist. Sources who bothered to allude to stories they couldn’t tell me almost always ended up telling them. The important thing was to talk about anything that wasn’t the untold story. I bought us another round of beers and got him laughing with an attack on twentieth-century British literature, which he seemed to know inside out and was shocked by my dismissal of. Then I defended the Beatles while he extolled the Stones, and we found common ground in ridiculing the Dylan worshippers, both American and German. We talked for three hours, while the Hole emptied out and the untold story hovered in the vicinity. Finally Andreas covered his face and pressed hard on his closed eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

It was curious, in retrospect, how little I’d identified with my father; how wholly I’d sided with my mother. But now she was dead, and as I walked into the dark Tiergarten with Andreas I could have been my dad on the night he’d met her. A chance meeting, a tall young woman from the East, a city alive with possibility. He must have been amazed to have her at his side.

We sat down on a bench.

“This is not for publication,” Andreas said. “This is simply to help you understand.”

“I’m here as a friend.”

“A friend. Interesting. I’ve never had a friend.”

“Never?”

“When I was in school, people liked me. But I found them contemptible. Cowardly, boring. And then I became an outcast, a dissident. No one trusted me, and I trusted them even less. They were cowardly and boring, too. A person like you couldn’t have existed in that country.”

“But now the dissidents have won.”

“Can I trust you?”

“You have no way of knowing it, but, yes, you absolutely can.”

“See if you still want to be my friend when you hear what I have to tell you.”

In the darkness, in the center of a city too diffuse and underpopulated to fill the sky with its noise, he told me how well connected his parents had been. How privileged he himself had been until he’d thrown away his life with an act of political defiance. And how, after his expulsion from the university, he’d drifted into a Milan Kundera world of pussy; how he’d then met a girl who’d changed his life, a girl whose soul he loved, and how he’d tried to save her from the stepfather who’d abused her. How the stepfather had pursued them to his parents’ dacha. How he’d killed the stepfather in self-defense, with a shovel that happened to be at hand, and buried the body behind the dacha. He told me about his subsequent paranoia and his good fortune in retrieving his police and surveillance files from the Stasi archives.

“I did it to protect her,” he said. “My life is not worth protecting, but hers is.”

“But it was self-defense. Why didn’t you just report it?”

“For the same reason she hadn’t gone to the authorities. The Stasi protect their own. The truth is whatever they want it to be. We both would have gone to prison.”

I’d interviewed convicted murderers in the past. I’d been a little scared of each of them, in an purely instinctive way, as if their history might repeat itself on me. But in the state I was in, after so much beer and conversation, I found myself strangely envious of Andreas, for the largeness and extremity of the life he’d led.

He’d begun to cry, voicelessly.

“It was bad, Tom,” he said. “It never goes away. I didn’t mean to kill him. But I did it. I did it…”

I put my arm around his shoulders, and he turned to me and clung to me.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Not all right. Not all right.”

“No, no. It’s all right.”

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man’s burden. He pulled away and composed himself.

“So that’s my story,” he said.

“You got away with it.”

“Not quite. She won’t see me until I know we’re safe. We’re almost safe, but there’s still a body in my parents’ yard.”

“Jesus.”

“Worse than that. They may be selling the house to speculators. There’s talk of digging up the ground. If I want to see her again, I have to move the body.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with that.”

“No, you’re clean. I would never involve you.”

There was a note of tenderness in his voice. I asked what he planned to do about the body.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I could learn to drive a car, but that would take time. I’m worried that I’m going to lose her. I guess I could do it with two suitcases, a trip on a train.”

“That would be some high-stress train trip.”

“I have to see her again. Whatever is needed, I’ll do it. That’s my only plan — to see her again.”

I felt another twinge of jealousy. Of exclusion; of competition with the girl. How else to explain what I said then?

“I can help you.”

“No.”

“I just cremated my mother. I’m up for it.”

“No.”

“I’m an American. I have a driver’s license.”

“No. It’s a dirty business.”

“If you’ve been telling me the truth, it’s a thing worth doing.”

“I have to do it alone. I have no way to repay you.”

“No repayment necessary. I’m offering as a friend.”

Somewhere in the distance, in the dark trees and bushes behind us, a cat cried out faintly. Then there came a second cry, somewhat louder, not a cat. It was a woman receiving pleasure.

“What about the archives,” Andreas said.

“What about them?”

“The committee is going to Normannenstraße again on Friday. I could get you in.”

“I don’t see them letting an American do that.”

“Your mother was German. You represent the people who escaped. They have files, too.”

“This doesn’t have to be a quid pro quo.”

“Not quid pro quo. Friendship.”

“It would certainly be a journalistic coup.”

Andreas jumped up from the bench. “Let’s do it! Both things.” He leaned over me and clapped me on the arms. “Shall we do it?”

The woman in the distance was crying out again. I had the thought that I could have this very woman, or one just like her, if I stayed with Andreas in Berlin.

“Yes,” I said.

Early the next morning, in Friedrichshain, I woke up in a state of remorse. The linens on my bed hadn’t been clean to begin with, and I’d never washed them; had simply accustomed myself to squalor. If the person I’d fallen for had been female, and had been lying next to me in bed, naked, I might have been able to block out thoughts of Anabel. As it was, the only way I could get back to sleep was to resolve to call Anabel later in the day and try to make amends for what I’d said to Andreas about her.

But when I did get up, around noon, the prospect of hearing her voice, its tremolo of injury, was repellent to me. The voice I wanted to hear and the face I wanted to see were Andreas’s. I went over to West Berlin and rented a car, making sure I was permitted to take it outside the city limits. Returning home, I found a telegram addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule.

CALL ME.

I lay down in my unclean bed, the telegram beside me, to wait for the city’s coal smoke to thicken into darkness and the post offices to drop their shutters.

Driving out to the suburbs, under the cover of night, I swerved around a stopped streetcar and nearly mowed down the riders who came bursting out of its doors. They shouted angrily, and I waved my hands in American apology. With the help of my father’s old patented-fold Berlin map, I navigated through endless neighborhoods of German penitence. The streets near the Müggelsee were more built up and heavily trafficked than I’d imagined; I was relieved to find the Wolfs’ summer house secluded by overgrown conifers.

I cut the lights and drove the car onto the frozen lawn and around behind the house, as Andreas had instructed me. From there I could see the iced-over lake, mottled white beneath a dome of urban cloud, and a toolshed in the rear corner of the lot. Andreas was standing by the shed with a shovel and a tarp.

“Any trouble?” he said cheerfully.

“A near-fatal accident, but no.”

“You’re good to do this for me.”

“Thank me later.”

He led me into the woods behind the shed. There was a pile of dirt and a corresponding hole. “My hands are terrible,” he said. “The dirt on top was frozen hard. But now I think we can just lift the thing out by the clothes. I already lifted up both ends.”

I looked down into the hole. There was enough ambient light to see that the body’s coveralls, now impregnated with sandy mud, had once been blue. They gave the bones the shape and some of the bulk of a body. There looked to be some shreds of skin still on the hand bones. The smell wasn’t bad, a faint rot on rot, like moldy cheese. Only one thing was missing.

“Where’s the head?”

Andreas nodded over his shoulder. “In a plastic bag. No need for you to see that.”

I appreciated his consideration. Having sat so recently with my mother’s body, I was still in a penumbra of inurement to death. But a skull, perhaps with bits of hair on it, would have been a bad sight. The bones were more safely abstract without it. I felt that in making myself look at them, I was ensuring that I could never go back to Anabel.

Nevertheless, my jaw was shuddering, and not simply from the cold. Andreas spread the tarp, and we straddled the hole and tugged on the coveralls. They must have been rotten underneath. They came apart in the middle, dumping bones and various lumps of unidentifiable substance.

“Fuck this,” I said.

“Yeah, OK. Leave it to me.”

I stood at the edge of the lake while Andreas heaved and shoveled things out of the hole. I didn’t go back until he’d rolled up the tarp and was filling the hole with dirt again. I helped him with that, to speed things along.

“I got us some sandwiches,” he said when we’d stowed the tarp and its contents in the trunk of the car.

“I can’t say I have much appetite.”

“Force yourself. We have a long drive.”

We washed our hands with a bottle of mineral water and ate the sandwiches. I was cold again, and in the cold it occurred to me, as it somehow hadn’t before, that I was about to commit a serious crime. I felt a pang, not a large one, but a definite pang of homesickness for Anabel. Bad as our life had become, it was domestic, predictable, monogamous, uncriminal. In a corner of my mind, a rat of a thought scurried: that I’d met Andreas forty-eight hours ago, that I didn’t really know him, and that he might have not told me the whole truth; that, indeed, he might have been working me all along, as his ticket back to Annagret.

“Reassure me about the police,” I said. “I’m picturing a routine traffic stop. Please open the trunk.”

“The police have bigger things to worry about these days.”

“I did almost kill about six people on the way over here.”

“Would you be happier if I said I’m scared out of my mind?”

“Are you?”

“A little bit, yeah.” He punched me in the arm. “You?”

“I’ve had funner evenings.”

“I won’t forget what you’re doing for me, Tom. Never.”

In the car, with the heat blasting, I felt better. Andreas told me more about his life, the bizarrely literary terms in which he understood it, and his yearning for a better, cleaner life with Annagret. “We’re going to find a place to live,” he said. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. It’s the least we can do for you.”

“And you’ll do what for a living?”

“I haven’t thought so far ahead.”

“Journalism?”

“Maybe. What’s it like?”

I told him what it was like, and he seemed interested, but I sensed a faint, unspoken distaste, as if he had grander ambitions that he was tactfully refraining from mentioning. It was the same sense I’d had when he looked at Anabel’s picture: he was happy to admire what I had as long as what he had was even better. This might not have boded well for a future friendship of equals, but there at the beginning, in the very warm car, it was consonant with my experience of crushes — the feeling of inferiority, the hope of being found worthy nonetheless.

“The Citizens’ Committee is meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “You should come along with me, so they know who you are on Friday. How’s your German?”

“Eh.”

“Sprich. Sprich.”

“Ich bin Amerikaner. Ich bin in Denver geboren—”

“The r is wrong. Say it more in the throat. Amerikaner. Geboren.”

“My r’s are the least of my problems.”

“Noch mal, bitte: Amerikaner.”

“Amerikaner.”

“Geboren.”

“Geboren.”

For a good hour, we worked on my pronunciation. It makes me sad to think of that hour. Judging from his arrogant street presentation, I would never have guessed what a patient teacher he was. We were already assuming that I would stay on in Berlin, but I could also feel that he liked both me and his language and wanted us to get along.

“Let’s work on your English accent,” I said.

“My accent is flawless! I’m the son of an English professor.”

“You sound like the BBC. You’ve got to flatten your a’s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve said a like an American. They’re one of the glories of our nation. Say can’t for me.”

“Can’t.”

“Aaaaa. Caaaan’t. Like a bleating goat.”

“Caaaaan’t.”

“There you go. The British have no concept of what they’re missing.”

On the outskirts of a no-account town, we stopped at a shuttered gas station so that Andreas could dig into a trash bin and bury the skull in it. Waiting in the car, I felt convinced that I was performing a good deed. If my mother hadn’t emigrated, if I’d been born in a Stasi-shadowed country, I might have killed a Stasi rat in self-defense myself. Helping Andreas seemed to me a way of atoning for my American advantages.

“You didn’t leave the engine running,” he remarked when he was back in the car.

“Didn’t want to be conspicuous.”

“It’s a question of efficiency. Now you have to warm it up again.”

I put the car in gear and smiled at knowing better. “In the first place,” I said, “what heats a car is excess engine heat. The added fuel use is zero. You might know this if you’d ever driven one. More to the point, it’s never efficient to maintain heat in a cold environment.”

“That’s completely false.”

“No, in fact it’s true.”

“Completely false.” He seemed eager to spar. “If you’re heating a house, it’s much more efficient to maintain a temperature of sixteen degrees overnight than to raise the temperature from five degrees in the morning. My father always did it at the dacha.”

“Your father was wrong.”

“He was the chief economist of a major industrialized nation!”

“I’m understanding better why the nation failed.”

“Trust me, Tom. You’re wrong about this.”

It happened that my own father had explained to me the thermodynamics of home heating. Without mentioning him, I pointed out to Andreas that the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential — the warmer the house, the more profusely it bleeds calories on a cold night. Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of that, too. We tussled while I drove. He advanced ever-more esoteric arguments, refusing to accept that his father had been wrong. When I finally defeated him, I could feel that something had changed between us, some hook of friendship set. He seemed both confounded and admiring. Until then, I don’t think he’d believed I was a worthy intellectual adversary.

It was after midnight when we reached the Oder valley. We crossed a decrepit wooden bridge to an island used only in the summer, by farmers growing hay. The crusted snow on the dikes between frozen marshes was virgin. I didn’t like the tracks we were leaving, but Andreas said that the forecast was for rain and warmer weather. On the far side of the island was a tangle of woods that he remembered from a nature walk he’d taken while attending an elite summer camp. “It was the height of privilege,” he said. “We had border guards with us.”

Whatever the East German army was doing now, it was doing it somewhere else. We hustled the rolled-up tarp and two shovels up into a ravine where our footprints wouldn’t be visible. From there, we struggled through leafless brambles and into the woods.

“Here,” he said.

The digging was hard but also warming. I was ready to stop when we were one foot down, but Andreas insisted on digging deeper. An owl was calling from somewhere near, but the only other sound was the crunch of our shovels and the crack of the tree roots we encountered.

“Now leave me alone,” he said.

“I don’t mind helping. It’s not like not helping will lessen my criminal offense.”

“I’m burying what I was before I knew Annagret. This is personal.”

I walked away from the grave and stayed away until he was throwing dirt on the remains. Then I helped him finish the burial and cover the spot with leaves and dirty snow. By the time we returned to the road, a fog had gathered, brighter in the east where the night was ending. We stowed the shovels in the trunk. After Andreas had slammed down the lid, he let out a falsetto whoop. He jumped up and down and whooped again.

“Jesus, shut up,” I said.

He grasped me by the arms and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Tom. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“You need to understand what this means to me. To have a friend I can trust.”

“If I tell you I understand, can we hit the road?”

His eyes were shining strangely. He leaned into me, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. But it was merely a hug. I returned it, and we stood for a while in awkward embrace. I could feel him breathing, feel the humidity of his sweat escaping from beneath his army jacket. He put a hand on the back of my head, his fingers closing around my hair the way Anabel’s might have. Then, abruptly, he broke away from me. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?”

“One minute,” he said.

I watched him run back up the ravine and kick through the brambles. I hadn’t liked his whooping, and I liked this additional delay even less. I lost sight of him in the trees, but I could hear sticks snapping, the rustle of his jacket on branches. Then a deep rural silence. And then, faintly but distinctly, the clink of a belt buckle. The sound of a zipper.

To avoid hearing more, I walked up the road in the direction of our tire tracks. I tried to put myself in Andreas’s position, tried to imagine the relief and exhilaration he was feeling, but there was simply no squaring his avowed remorse with defiling his victim’s final grave.

His business was done in a few minutes. He came running up the road, running and jumping. When he reached my side, he turned in a complete circle with his arms in the air and the middle finger of each hand extended. He whooped again.

“Can we leave?” I said coolly.

“Absolutely! You can drive twice as fast now.”

He seemed not to notice that my mood had changed. In the car, he was manically voluble, bouncing from subject to subject — how it could work for me to live with him and Annagret, how exactly he was going to get me into the archives, and how the two of us could collaborate, him unlocking the forbidden doors, me writing the stories. He urged me to drive faster, to pass trucks on blind curves. He recited old poems of his and explicated them. He recited long passages of Shakespeare in English, banging out the blank-verse rhythm on the dashboard. Every now and then, he paused to whoop again, or to pummel me in the arm with two fists.

When we finally reached his church in Berlin, on Siegfeldstraße, my mouth tasted metallic with exhaustion. He wanted to grab a quick breakfast and go straight to the Citizens’ Committee meeting, but I said, truthfully, that I had to lie down.

“Leave it to me, then,” he said.

“OK.”

“I’m never forgetting this, Tom. Never, never, never.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I popped the trunk lid and got out of the car. Seeing Andreas take out the shovels in full daylight, I wondered, belatedly, which one of them had been the murder weapon. In my sleep-deprived state, it seemed very bad that I might have used that particular shovel.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Get some sleep. Meet me here at seven. We’ll have dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

I never saw him again. When I awoke, in my filthy sheets, it was an hour before the rental-car office closed. I returned the car and walked back to my squat in the dark. I still had a hankering to see Andreas’s face and hear his voice — I have it even as I write this — but the sadness from which I’d been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright. I lay down on the bed and wept for myself, and for Anabel, and for Andreas, but above all for my mother.

* * *

The approach of thunderstorms was making the New Jersey sky three-dimensional, a many-tiered vault of variously shaded cloud, gray and white and hepatic green, when Anabel led me out of the woods and up through a pasture to Suzanne’s parents’ house. She claimed that she wanted to show me something quickly before taking me back to catch my bus, but I knew that my actually catching the 8:11 bus was as arrant a fantasy as our ever finding a way to live together again, if only because the business of escaping from her, of enforcing my right to leave, was so painful that I shied from it like a brutalized animal. Anything at all was preferable, and there was also the prospect of further sex, which promised minutes of relief from consciousness.

And still I balked at the door of the house. It was a sixties-modern summer place with a mountain view and some apple trees behind it. Anabel went right in, but I hung in the doorway, my stomach suddenly upset like the sky, my heart racing with what I now think was straightforward PTSD.

“Won’t you come inside with me?” she said in a tone whose very sweetness was insane.

“I think after all maybe not.”

“Do you realize you left your toothbrush here last time?”

“My dentist keeps me well supplied.”

“The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.”

My panic intensified. I looked over my shoulder and saw a fractal of lightning on the next ridge over; I waited for the thunder. When I looked into the house again, Anabel was not in sight. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver’s feelings to consider …

I stepped into the house and closed the screen door behind me. With my help, she’d cleared the furniture from the living room, leaving only a mat for her yoga and meditation. She hadn’t officially abandoned her film project, it was merely on hold while she sought to regain her calm and centeredness. She was living on the half of my inheritance I’d given her as part of our divorce settlement. After returning from Berlin, I’d needed no more than a day with her to recognize that my homesickness had been grounded in a fantasy. She’d said she wasn’t spaghetti with eggplant, but to me she really was. And so I’d built us a new fantasy of divorce as our only hope of reuniting.

Anabel was convinced that I’d been unfaithful to her in Berlin — that this was why I hadn’t called her. To defend myself against this baseless charge, I’d told her more about Andreas than I should have. Not about the murder, not about my having been an accessory after the fact, but enough about his personality and history to explain both why I’d been attracted to him and why I’d run away from him. She’d concluded that he was a jerk who’d brought out the jerk in me, the jerk who’d returned from Berlin and asked for a divorce. But the person I’d actually been a jerk to was Andreas. I’d stood him up for our dinner date, and then I’d waited two months before sending him a stilted letter of apology, reassurance, and “warm wishes.”

I could hear Anabel showering in the bathroom. There being nowhere to sit in the living room, I went and sat down on her bed. Outside, the sky seemed to have taken on the black solidity of a hillside you could walk right up. All the books on the nightstand were self-help and spirituality, titles Anabel would have sneered at just a few years earlier. I felt very sorry for her.

She came out of the bathroom naked, her hair in a towel. “The shower’s nice,” she said. “You should take one, too.”

“I’ll wait until I get back tonight.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to lock you in the bathroom.” She moved close to me, her pubic hair commanding my field of vision. “If you like me,” she said, “you’ll take a shower.”

I didn’t like her, not anymore, but I still hadn’t found a way to say so. “Do you have any form of contraception that you haven’t destroyed with a pocket knife?”

“First take a shower, and then I’ll tell you if I do.”

There was a blast of thunder directly over the house.

“You said you had something to show me,” I said. “That’s the only reason I came inside.”

“But now it’s raining and there’s lightning.”

“Being struck by lightning doesn’t sound too bad to me right now.”

“It’s your choice,” she said. “Take a shower or be struck by lightning.”

A middle was being excluded, and the middle was reality. I took a shower, listening to the thunder, and put my clothes back on. When I returned to the bedroom, Anabel was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her old Japanese silk robe, which she’d disarranged with poignantly transparent seductive intent, a breast hanging halfway out. Beside her was a shoe box.

“Look who I found,” she said.

She opened the box and took out Leonard. It was five or six years since I’d last seen him. Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.

“Come say hi to him,” Anabel said, smiling at me with love.

“Hello.”

She picked up the bull and looked into his face. “Do you want to say hello to Tom?”

I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.

Anabel frowned at Leonard with coy reproach. “Why aren’t you saying hello?” She looked up at me. “Why isn’t he talking?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leonard, say something.”

“He doesn’t talk anymore.”

“He must be angry that you’re not with us anymore. I think he wants you to come home.” She cuddled the bull. “I wish you’d say something to me.”

Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it. Even hating your own heart is no relief. I don’t think I’d ever hated her more than I did for exposing herself to the shame of my refusing to speak in Leonard’s voice.

“I’m seeing your father tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s not Leonard’s voice,” she said, frightened.

“No. It’s my voice. Put that thing away.”

She set the toy aside. Then she picked it up again. Then she set it down again. Her fear and indecision were terrible to see. Or maybe it was my own power that was terrible.

“I don’t want to know about it,” she said. “Can you please just spare me?”

I’d intended to spare her, but I hated her too much now. “He’s bringing me a check,” I said.

She moaned and fell over as if I’d hit her. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“A large check,” I said.

“Shut up! For God’s sake! I try to be nice to you and you spit in my face!”

“He’s giving me money to start a magazine.”

She sat up again, her eyes blazing now. “You’re a jerk,” she said. “That’s what you are. A jerk! You always were and you always will be!”

I’d thought that nothing could be worse than the sight of her being hurt and shamed by me. But in fact I hated her even more for hating me.

“Maybe twelve years is enough years of being made to feel that way,” I said.

“It’s not what you feel, it’s what you are. You’re a jerk, Tom. You’re a fucking asshole journalistic jerk. You ruined my life and now you’re spitting on me, you’re spitting on me.”

“You’re the one who did the spitting, as you may recall.”

To her credit, her honesty and morality were still functioning. She said, more quietly, “You’re right. I was young and he ruined our wedding party, but you’re right, I did literally spit on someone.” She shook her head. “And now you’re making me pay for it. Both of you. Now the men are doing the spitting, because I was weak. I was always weak. I’m weak now. I failed. But the person I spat on had everything, while you’re spitting on somebody when she’s down. There’s a difference there.”

“One obvious difference being that I’m not actually spitting,” I said coldly.

“I’m so far down, Tom. How can you do this to me?”

“I keep looking for a way to make you never call me again. I keep thinking I’ve found it, but then, no, the fucking phone rings.”

“Well, you finally may have found it. Taking his money may do it for you. I’m thinking you’ll never hear from me again. There was still one thing in my life that you hadn’t perverted or stolen or destroyed. Now there’s nothing. I’m totally alone with nothing. Job well done.”

“I hate you,” I said. “I hate you even more than I love you. And that’s saying something.”

After a moment, her face turned red and she began to cry piteously, like a little girl, and it didn’t matter that I hated her, I couldn’t stand to see her in such pain. I sat down on the bed and held her. The rain had gone away, leaving behind a blue-gray curtain of cloud that looked almost wintry. I thought of winter as I held her, grew bored with holding her. The winter of no Anabel in my life.

As if sensing it, she began to kiss me. We’d always relied on pain to heighten the pleasure that followed it, and it seemed to me we’d reached the limit of the psychic pain we could inflict. When she lay back and opened her robe, I looked at her breasts and hated their beauty so intensely that I squeezed a nipple and twisted it hard.

She screamed and hit me in the face. I was murderously aroused and hardly felt it. She hit me again, on the ear, and glared at me. “Are you going to hit me back?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.”

“No, I don’t want that.”

I’d never spoken so violently to her. We’d reached the end of the road of our feminist marriage. “You wrecked the condoms,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Give me a baby. Leave me with something.”

“No way.”

“I think it could happen tonight. I have a sense about these things.”

“I think I’d sooner kill myself than sign on for that.”

“You hate me.”

“I hate you.”

She was still in love with me. I could see it in her eyes, the love and the pure inconsolable disappointment of a child. I had all the power, and so she did the only thing still available to her to stab me in the heart, which was to roll over submissively and raise the skirt of her robe and say, “All right, then. Do it.”

I did it, and not once but three times before I escaped from the house the next morning. After each assault, she went straight to the bathroom. My state of mind was that of the crack addict crawling on the floor, looking for crumbs. I wasn’t raping Anabel, but I might as well have been. Pleasure was low on the list of what either of us was after. I was after what she’d been after with her film, a final and complete exhaustion of the subject of the body. What she was after, it seemed to me, was the sealing of her moral victimhood.

At dawn, to a chorus of birds, I got up and dressed without washing. Anabel was facedown on the sweaty bed, corpse-still, but I knew she wasn’t sleeping. I loved her terribly, loved her all the more for what I’d done to her. My love was like the engine of a hundred-dollar car that had no business starting up and yet kept starting up. The murder and suicide I imagined weren’t figurative. I would keep going back, and it would be worse each time, until finally we were driven to the violence that released our love to the eternity it belonged to. Standing by the bed, looking down at my ex-wife’s body, I thought it might happen as soon as the next time I saw her. I thought it might even happen now if I said anything to her. So I picked up my knapsack and left the house.

The full moon was setting in the west, a mere white disk, its light-casting power defeated by the morning. Halfway down the driveway, I entered golden sunlight and saw a bright red bird mating with a yellow female on a dead tree branch. The birds were too busy to mind my approach. The head feathers of the male, sticking straight out, a scarlet Mohawk, seemed to be sweating pure testosterone. Finished with the female, he flew straight at me, kamikaze style, barely missing my head. He landed on a different branch and glared in a blaze of aggression.

The day was even hotter than the day before, and the air-conditioning on the bus was broken. When I finally got back to 125th Street, the sidewalk was crowded with sweat-gleaming women and children emerging from storefront churches. A stench of rotten cantaloupe was in the air, gastric and cloying, cut with exhaust from a Kennedy Fried Chicken. The pavement was shiny with a blackish vulcanized glaze of chicken grease, sputum, spilled Coke, and trashbag leakage.

“My man Lucky,” Ruben said to me in my building’s lobby, which was littered with Sunday-morning betting slips. “You look like shit warmed over.”

My answering machine was showing one new message. I was afraid it was from Anabel, but it was from a woman who sounded Jamaican, asking me to tell Anthony that her husband had died last night and that the funeral would be on Tuesday afternoon at such-and-such church in West Harlem. She repeated that I should tell Anthony that her husband had died. This was it, the only message, a Jamaican woman informing me, in a calm and very tired voice, that her spouse had died.

I turned on the AC and left a message at the Carlyle for David Laird. Then I fell asleep and dreamed that I was in a many-roomed house where a party was happening. I’d fallen into a deep flirtatious conversation with a young dark-haired woman who seemed to like me, seemed ready to leave the party with me. The only impediment to effortless happiness with her was something I may or may not have said, something that made her think I might be a jerk. To my joy, I was able to tell her that a different man had said it. Andreas Wolf had said it. I knew this for a fact, and she believed me. She was falling in love with me. And just as I was beginning to understand that she must be Annagret, Andreas’s young girl, I realized instead that she was Anabel — a younger, softer Anabel, at once pliant and sportive, instilled with the best kind of knowledge about me, knowledge that felt loving and forgiving — except that she couldn’t possibly be Anabel, because the real Anabel was standing in a doorway, witnessing my flirtation. The dread I felt of her judgment, and of the punishment of interacting with her nuttiness, came directly from life. She looked stricken with betrayal and hurt. Worse yet, the girl had seen her and vanished.

David returned my call late in the afternoon.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“An eight o’clock table at Gotham? Are you kidding me? Of course you can do it.”

“I can’t take the money.”

“What? That is beyond ridiculous. It’s criminally foolish. You can dedicate every one of your issues to sullying the good name of McCaskill, I still want you to have the money. If you’re worried about Anabel, just don’t tell her.”

“I already told her.”

“Tom, Tom. You can’t listen to what she says.”

“I’m not. She’s going to think I took the money, and I’m OK with that. I just don’t want to take it.”

“Stupidest thing I ever heard. You need to come to the Gotham and be plied with martinis. The check’s burning a hole in my briefcase.”

“Not gonna do it.”

“And this change of heart?”

“I can’t have anything to do with her,” I said. “I appreciate how good you’ve been to—”

“I’ll be frank with you,” David said. “I’m more than a little disappointed in you. I thought you’d finally quit trying to out-Anabel Anabel, now that you’re divorced. But everything you’re saying to me is bullshit.”

“Look, I—”

“Bullshit,” he repeated, and hung up on me.

The next time I heard from David, four months later, it was through an intermediary, a retired New York City cop who worked as a private detective. His name was DeMars and he showed up at my door one afternoon without warning, having bullied his way past Ruben. He was walrus-mustached and intimidating. He said the simplest thing would be for me to show him my datebook and receipts for the previous four months. “It’s entirely routine,” he said.

“I don’t see anything routine about it,” I said.

“You been in Texas recently?”

“I’m sorry — who are you?”

“I work for David Laird. I’m especially interested in the last two weeks of August. Best thing for you is if you can show me you weren’t in Texas at any point then.”

“I’m going to call David right now, if you don’t mind.”

“Your ex disappeared,” DeMars said. “She sent her dad a letter that appears to be authentic. But we don’t know the circumstances of the letter, and, nothing personal, but you’re the ex. You’re the man we go to.”

“I haven’t seen her since the end of May.”

“Easiest for both of us if you can document that.”

“It’s hard to prove a negative.”

“Do your best.”

Having nothing to hide, I handed over my receipts and credit-card statements. When DeMars saw that my August was richly documented — I’d been in Milwaukee with half the journalists in America, reporting on Jeffrey Dahmer for Esquire—he became less obnoxious and showed me copies of a postmarked envelope and the handwritten note it contained.

To David Laird: I’m not your daughter. You won’t hear from me again. I’m dead to you. Don’t look for me. I won’t be found. Anabel.

“Postmark is Houston,” DeMars said. “I need you to tell me who she knows in Houston.”

“No one.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, see, here’s why I’m involved. David says he hasn’t seen her in more than a decade. He’s dead to her anyway, so why the letter? Why now? And why is she in Houston? I thought maybe you could shed some light.”

“We just went through a bad divorce.”

“Violent bad? Restraining-order bad?”

“No, no. Just emotionally painful.”

DeMars nodded. “OK, so an ordinary divorce. She wants to make a clean break, start a new life, and so on. But the way I read this letter is she’s afraid people are gonna think that someone did away with her. That’s the only reason to write it: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not actually dead.’ But why would anyone think that in the first place? You see what I mean?”

Anabel was so impractical and such a recluse that it was hard to imagine her in Houston. But something had clearly changed in her, because she hadn’t called me in four months.

“We have her in New York on July 22,” DeMars continued, “taking five thousand in cash out of her bank. Same day, she leaves keys, no note, just the keys, at the building of her friend Suzanne. You didn’t see her in New York that day, did you?”

“We’ve had no contact of any kind since May.”

“But, see, if she doesn’t send that letter, nobody looks for her. My impression is she’s not exactly Miss Congeniality. It could have been years before anybody noticed she was missing.”

“At the risk of sounding self-important, I think she wrote the letter as a message to me.”

“How’s that work? Why not just write you a letter? Did she write you a letter?”

“No. She’s trying to prove that she’s capable of not having any contact with me.”

“Kind of an extreme way of going about that.”

“Well, she’s extreme. It’s also possible she was trying to protect me, in case someone like you came looking for her.”

“Bingo.” DeMars snapped his fingers. “I was hoping you’d be the one to say that. Because that’s my problem with the letter. Painful divorce, irreconcilable differences, and yet here she is, going out of her way to protect you? I don’t see it. Your typical angry ex, she’d like nothing better than to have people wondering if you’d offed her.”

“That’s not Anabel. Her whole thing is being morally irreproachable.”

“What about you? Any friends in Texas?”

“Not to speak of.”

“You’ll show me your address book and phone bills.”

“I will. But you’d do her a kindness if you stopped looking for her.”

“She’s not the person paying me.”

DeMars wanted more from me — wanted contact information for every person Anabel had ever known — and I worried that I made myself suspicious by refusing to provide it. But there was an air of due diligence, of nose-holding, in his questioning of me. He seemed already to have concluded that Anabel was nutty and a pain in the ass, and that the entire case was nothing more than family nonsense. He called me a couple of times to follow up, and then I never heard from him again; never learned if he’d succeeded in locating her. I hoped for her sake that he hadn’t, because I really did think that her letter to David was a message to me. I may have left the marriage before she did, but she was determined to one-up me and be the really radical leaver. I hated her for the hatred implicit in this, but I still felt guilty about leaving her, and it eased my guilt, a tiny bit, to imagine her succeeding in something, if only in disappearing. I’d escaped the marriage but the moral victory was hers.

I didn’t hear from David again until 2002, a year before he died. This time the intermediary was a lawyer, writing to inform me that I’d been named the sole trustee of an inter vivos trust that David had created in Anabel’s name. I dialed the number on the letter and learned that she was still missing, eleven years after her disappearance, and that David intended her to have one-quarter of his estate anyway, in the hope that she’d eventually show up and claim it.

“I don’t want to be the trustee,” I said.

“Well, now,” the lawyer said with a lovely Kansan twang. “You might want to hear the terms first.”

“Nope.”

“You’re gonna make my life harder if you don’t, so please just hear me out. The trust consists entirely of McCaskill stock. Seventy percent of that is illiquid, the other thirty percent can be offered by way of the company’s ESOP program but doesn’t have to be. Just going by book value, you’re looking at nearly a billion dollars. Five-year average dividend comes in at four point two percent, which the company is nominally committed to increasing. Based on that simple average alone, you’ve got about forty-two million annually in cash dividends. Trustee’s fee shall be one point five percent of that. So we’re talking, what, three-quarters of a million a year for the trustee, probably a million soon enough. Since the stock either can’t be sold or doesn’t have to be, the trustee’s responsibilities are nugatory. Nothing more than ordinary shareholder responsibilities. To put it plainly, Mr. Aberant, you get a million a year for doing nothing.”

My salary then, as the managing editor at Newsday, was less than a quarter of that. I was still making mortgage payments on the Gramercy Park one-bedroom that I’d bought after landing my first editing job at Esquire and had held on to through my years at the Times magazine and at the Times. If I’d still believed that a journal of opinion called The Complicater could change the world — if I hadn’t instead come to feel that covering daily news responsibly was a worthier and more embattled cause — I could have funded a fine quarterly with a million a year. But David had been right: I was trying to out-Anabel Anabel. Trying to stay clean in case she ever happened to find out what I’d been doing since I left her. Trying to prove her wrong about me. I repeated to the lawyer in Wichita that I wanted nothing to do with the trust.

I never quite figured David out. He was fabulously good at making money, and he really did love Anabel, for many of the same reasons I did, but the cruelty and the vengeance in giving her a billion unwanted dollars, and in naming the person she most hated as trustee, were unmistakable. I couldn’t decide whether he intended to keep punishing her from beyond the grave, or whether he nurtured the sentimental hope that she might one day return and claim her birthright. Maybe it was both. I do know that money was the language he spoke and thought in. A year after I’d heard from his lawyer, he died and left me twenty million dollars, free and clear, “for the establishment of a quality national newsmagazine.” The bequest seemed to have more to do with rewarding me than with punishing Anabel — so, at least, I chose to construe it — and this time I didn’t say no.

About Anabel the obituaries of David reported only that her address and occupation were unknown, but press coverage of the Laird family continued to be findable if you were curious and did a little looking. Anabel’s three brothers had blossomed into larger-scale failures. The oldest, Bucky, was briefly in the news for trying and failing to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves and move them to Wichita. The middle one, Dennis, dropped $15 million on a Republican primary Senate campaign that he still managed to lose by double digits. The youngest, Danny, the former drug addict, had gone to work on Wall Street and shown a knack for joining firms on the brink of going down in flames. Three years after David’s death, presumably using the money he’d inherited, he partnered into a hedge fund that soon went down in flames. Around the same time, I happened to meet Bucky Laird at a leadership-conference boondoggle in California. We chatted a little, and he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that he and his brothers had always assumed I’d murdered Anabel and got away with it. When I denied it, he seemed neither to believe me nor particularly to care.

I’ve never stopped wondering where Anabel is and whether she’s alive. I know that if she is alive she takes satisfaction in my being unaware of it — a satisfaction great enough, I suspect, to keep her living even if she has no other reason to. I remain convinced that I’ll see her again someday, even if I never see her again. She’s eternal in me. Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity. I couldn’t go on and have children with anyone else, because I’d prevented her from having them. I couldn’t settle down with anyone significantly younger than me without proving that my wish to do this was the reason that I’d dumped her. She’d also left me with a lifelong allergy to unrealistic women, an allergy that tended to compound itself, since the minute I detected a hint of fantasy in a woman and had my reaction to it, I rendered any hopes she had for me unrealistic. I wanted nothing to do with anyone like Anabel, and even when I found someone truly unlike her, a woman with whom it’s an inexpressible blessing to share a life, Anabel’s sadness and her moral absolutism continued to color my nighttime dreams. Her act of disappearance and negation becomes more significant and wounding, not less, with every year that passes without a sign of her existence. She may have been weaker than me, but she managed to outplay me. She moved on while I stayed stuck. I have to hand it to her: I feel checkmated.