Secrets & Surprises

Friends

Perry had just walked into Francie’s living room, headed toward the table for the bowl of anchovy-stuffed olives. Dickie, who had called earlier to say he was too stoned to come, looked up and raised two fingers to his sweaty forehead in salute. Before Perry could say anything but hello, the phone rang, and he answered. The woman Perry used to live with, Beth Ann, used to complain that Perry should have been a robot — he was programmed to answer the phone and would talk politely to whatever wasted friend it might be, at whatever ridiculous hour.

“Delores?” he said.

“I’m in Miami,” she said over the static in the line, “but I’m coming your way. I came to round up Meagan from my parents’ place.” Static cut off her next sentence. “I haven’t talked to you for so long. How are you, Perry? I heard you were winterizing your place in Vermont.”

“Yeah, I am. I can live in half the house now. I came down to Francie’s this weekend for a party. It gets lonesome up there. I broke my goddamn foot. I had on sneaks, and I turned my ankle jumping off a wall.”

“Your hand was broken the last time I saw you.”

“Only two broken bones I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.

Dickie had picked up the bowl of olives and was having one. He held the bowl out to Perry. Perry took two, and with his tongue rolled one to either side of his mouth.

“I’d love to come up there.”

“There’s plenty now that’s livable. Come on up. Bring Meagan.”

“Thanks, Perry. I think I really might. Is Francie there?”

“This may sound crazy, but Francie is passed out with her head under the bed.”

“Everybody’s drunk?”

“I’m not drunk, Delores. Is there anything I can tell Francie tomorrow?”

“Maybe you’d know.” (He waves away the olives.) “I wanted to know if my oak table is still there. The one with the wide-board top.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Would you look in the kitchen for me? I think she piles cookbooks on it.”

“Sure.”

He walked down the hallway to the kitchen. T.W. and Katie were putting the make on each other in a corner of the kitchen. The Scandinavian rock-’n’-roll record Daryl Freed had brought to the party was playing for the fifth or sixth time. He looked for the table and it wasn’t there. He remembered the table now. He was sure it wasn’t in the house.

“Hey, Delores? It’s not there.”

“No?” she said. “Thanks for looking.”

In the other room the needle scratched across the record, somebody cursed loudly, and Chuck Berry started singing.

“Jump a wave for me,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Stick your finger in some maple syrup.”

He put the phone down in time to face his fate: Dickie coming at him, ski mask pulled over his head, fireplace poker extended. He laughed a little more than he felt like laughing and stepped aside so that when Dickie stumbled and tripped, the poker jabbed the wall.

“It’s all sexual,” Dickie said. He pulled off the ski mask and smiled widely. “I put a hole in her wall,” he said. “Hey, I saw you had two poems published. Congratulations.”

Perry tilted his head like an obsequious maître d’.

“They were good, too,” Dickie said. “I read them in one of those free magazines on the airplane.”

Perry frowned, confused.

“No I didn’t. I read them in the magazine. Francie gave it to me. Where is our hostess, anyway? Did I hear you say she was about, but indisposed?”

“Why don’t you go check on her?” Perry said.

This time Dickie did the courtly bow. He turned with a military pivot — long ago he and Dickie had gone to the same boys’ school — and headed out the door just as the needle was scratched across another record and Daryl Freed cursed. After a long silence the London Bach Choir began to sing. “Cut that shit!” somebody hollered. “I mean it — cut the shit.” The London Bach Choir was silent. T.W. and Katie, arms around each other’s waists, walked down the hallway, past the door. He knew they were going to bed. He looked down at his foot. The cast looked larger than he remembered. He had not put on his sock, and his toes were lavender from the cold. Francie never heated the house well enough in the winter. When he was partying he didn’t notice it, but when he stood still, he noticed both the cold and the slight pain across his instep. He looked at the glass of Scotch he had left on the table and decided to leave it there. He took an olive, picked up the Scotch only for a second, to wash away the salty taste, and left-right-left-right, without his crutch went into the living room. Nick and Anita were dancing. Roger Dewey and Daryl Freed were sitting on the floor in earnest conversation, bobbing heads at each other like plastic birds dipping for water. Somebody Perry had never met before — a man (a teen-ager?) with white streaks fanning out from his temples whom Freed had brought to the party — sat next to Roger Dewey. It looked as if he was mocking Roger’s gestures.

“Hi,” Anita said.

“Hi,” he said. He hobbled out of the room. He went down the hall to Francie’s room and found her conscious, flat on her back, Dickie seated behind her, brushing her hair.

“Good night,” he said to both of them. “I’m going up to the attic to go to sleep.”

Dickie raised the brush to his forehead in salute. Perry took the afghan draped over Francie’s mattress and headed for the attic stairs.

“He drilled a hole in your wall, Francie,” Dickie said, making his words come slowly, in time with the brush strokes. “In the other room, he crouched down and concentrated all his energy, and his right eye bored a hole about half an inch deep in the wall.”

He climbed the stairs to the attic slowly and carefully, wishing there were a handrail. The afghan was draped around his neck like a towel.

Francie painted, and the attic was where she usually went to do it, although it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He groped for the light bulb at the top of the stairs and fumbled for the switch on the side of it. The attic lit up. To his left was the mattress, under the window, flecked with oil paint. It was the mattress the cat had had a litter on when he and Beth Ann and Francie, Dickie and Gus lived together in Connecticut. He sat down awkwardly because of the cast, sighing as he sank down because he would just have to get up in another minute to turn off the light. In front of him was a stool with a piece of material draped over it. On top of the fabric was a conch shell. Little tubes of paint were scattered on the floor like cigarette butts. He always liked to sleep in Francie’s attic, and went there by choice instead of to the spare bedroom. In the morning the light came through the four-over-four windows and made a Crosshatch pattern on the floor.

He lay back on the mattress, pulling the afghan over him, and tried to block out the noise from the party. He heard rock-’n’-roll, pretty clearly. Then he opened his eyes and concentrated on the music; it was rock-’n’-roll, and he could hear it clearly.

He took off his belt and watch and unbuttoned his jeans. There was a slight odor of cat about the mattress. He got up and put off the light and went back to bed. The bass downstairs was turned up so high that he could feel the reverberation through the mattress, and it made him think of one of those motel beds that vibrate when you deposit a quarter. The last time he had been in one of those beds it was in a room he shared with Francie, after he drove to Francie’s sister’s house to pick her up and bring her back to this house. Francie had been married to a lawyer for a year, and when the marriage broke up, she flew to her sister’s. She missed the house and wanted to come back to it, but she was afraid that she might cry in public. She called him because she said that she did not want to cry on an airplane or train. They could have made the ride from her sister’s to Francie’s house in New Hampshire without spending the night in a motel. Stopping had been Francie’s idea. She wanted to spend the night in a motel and go back in the morning, when the house wouldn’t look as nice, when the sunlight would make all the dust visible, when she wouldn’t be sentimental for the good times she and her husband had had in the house. They sat in the motel on their twin beds and each drank a Coke from the machine outside their door. Francie had been going to pay for the motel with her American Express Card, but then she realized that the bill would go to her husband. She didn’t have any money, so he paid for the room. They had each put quarters in the boxes attached to the headboards and been shaken off to sleep. At least they had pretended that, because it wasn’t the right night to sleep together. The next morning when they woke up it was raining, and when they got to her house it looked even more depressing than she had hoped it would. He was never clear on why Francie and her husband divorced, except that Francie did not want children and wanted to be a painter.

Before he fell asleep he heard the silence. He was conscious of it not because he heard the music die out or voices get quiet, but because he heard a car starting outside. It sounded as if everybody downstairs had gone home. Waiting to fall asleep, he thought about what Francie had told him recently: that he was her best friend. “A woman should have another woman for her best friend,” Francie said and shrugged, “but you’re it.” “Why would you have to have a woman for a best friend?” he said. She shrugged again. “It’s hard for men and women to be best friends,” she said. He nodded and she thought he understood, but all he meant to acknowledge was that they were close, but there was also something hard about that. What it was, was that it had never been the right time to go to bed with her, and if he did it after all this time, he would have been self-conscious.

Beth Ann was in Albuquerque.

Delores — spacy Delores — had traveled from Palo Alto to Miami and was headed north.

Drifting off to sleep, he thought about being on the subway in Boston, where he had stopped on the way to Francie’s earlier in the day to pick up some things for her at Charrette. An old lady had struck up a conversation with him, saying that she was a rarity, a native Bostonian. She asked him where he was from. “Michigan,” he said, although he was not from there. He hated talking to strangers, and he felt that there must be something wrong with him because so many old ladies thought he was a nice young man; they talked to him in spite of his long hair and leather jacket, with the leather so old it was flaking off like scabs. But she had a friend in Michigan, so she went on and on about it. “Then I moved with my family to Fort Worth,” he said, “and then we lived in Germany until I was a teen-ager, and then we moved to New Jersey, and Iowa, and Los Angeles.” She nodded, greatly interested. “How long have you been in Boston?” she asked. “Six days,” he told her. Then she caught on — something told her he was putting her on, or crazy. He could see her narrowing her focus on the rotting leather, raise her head a bit to look at where his hair edged over the shoulder of the jacket. “Tomorrow I’m going to Mexico,” he said. She didn’t speak the rest of the ride, from Charles Street to Harvard Square.

In the morning he went downstairs, looking for coffee. The door to Francie’s room was closed. In place of a DO NOT DISTURB sign was a sign that Delores had taken from the pool at the condominium where her parents lived: POR FAVOR PONGA LES TOALLAS EN EL CESTO. He thought that he could use a shower, and wondered if there would be towels. His friends’ bathrooms never had towels, and he could not imagine how they dried off. He got distracted by the odor of bacon, walked into the kitchen to find a plate of half-eaten eggs and bacon, and Daryl Freed slumped over it.

“Fucking creep stole my car,” Freed said.

“What are you talking about?”

Freed had pulled his cardigan sweater over the top of his head. He looked like a mad nun. He looked as if he had been awake all night.

“What are you talking about, Freed? Who stole your car?”

“He fucking ate breakfast, and then he stole my car.”

“Who did?”

“The kid I brought to the party. Didn’t you see that kid with the skunk streaks down both sides of his hair?” Freed pulled the cardigan back to his shoulders and gestured toward his temples. His hair was full of electricity.

“Yeah. I think I saw him talking with you. Who was he? How do you know he stole your car?”

“He was a hitchhiker. He was going to your home state of Vermont. Put on a big push to come to the party with me when I told him what I was doing. I brought him over here with me, and he tried to put the make on T.W. You missed T.W. taking a swing at him, too. Kid woke me up this morning when I was sleeping in there on the rug and said he wanted cigs, where were my car keys? I didn’t even know what time it was, but I thought it was morning. Pulled my keys out of my pocket and handed them up to him. Must have been about four in the morning because when I got up I realized it was still dark. So I came in here and waited for him and he never showed.”

“What time is it now?”

Freed pointed to the clock in the stove. It was grease-covered, so he got up to peer into it. It was close to eleven o’clock.

“You tell me how it takes seven hours to go to the corner store for digs.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“I don’t like the cops.”

“I’ll ride you down to the store. We can find out if he went there.”

“He didn’t go there. He stole my car.”

“You’ll get your car back, Freed. Come on — let’s go to the store.”

“Wait’ll I explain to the cops why I have a Virginia driver’s license and New Hampshire plates and live in Maine.”

“Come on, Freed.”

“I don’t know where my jacket is. He stole my jacket.”

Perry pointed to something behind Freed. Freed turned and stared down at the thick red nylon jacket hanging from the chair.

“Yeah. That’s my jacket. Now where’s my car? He fucking stole my car. I handed him the keys like I knew him, and he got my car.”

“Come on, Freed. Let’s go down to the store.”

Freed stood and pulled on the jacket. It was an exceptionally thick ski jacket, and Freed looked as if he should have a hose trailing out of it and be walking on the moon.

“I hate it when somebody makes a fool of me,” Freed said. “It makes me want to kill. I don’t mean that as a generalization — I mean it really makes me insanely angry and I want to kill the person.”

“Come on, Freed. The door’s this way.”

“I know where the door is. Don’t tell me anything. Just take me to the store so I can make a fool of myself asking if some faggot stopped there for cigs and drove off in a black Pontiac. Watch how friendly that guy at the store’s going to be.”

He left the front door open a crack, since he didn’t have a key to get back in. Freed walked beside him, his huge red-jacketed arms folded over his chest.

“How are things in Maine?” he asked. Freed taught English, French and German at a private school there.

“Cold. And the little ladies in my class look at me while I’m talking with that same vacant look chickens have when they lay eggs.”

“So are you going to stay there?”

Freed shrugged. “I’m looking around.” Freed picked up a cassette from the floor and studied the label and pushed it into the machine. It was a live recording of Gatemouth Brown playing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

The store was coming up at the bottom of the hill. He pulled in beside a Ford truck. Freed looked at the store with incomprehension. During the summer, when he first bought the house in Vermont, Freed and several of the others had come up and they had played hide-and-seek. When it came Freed’s turn to count, he counted out loud very slowly and then never went looking for anyone. Eventually Francie’s laugh boomed through the woods, and all of them peered out from behind trees or bushes or wherever they were hiding, and there stood Freed, stark naked, waiting to be discovered himself.

“You ask,” Freed said.

“It’s your car.”

“I’m a Jew. The guy who runs the store doesn’t like Jews.”

“Are you putting me on? What has he ever said?”

“I know he doesn’t,” Freed said.

“Get in there, Freed. Go on.”

Freed got out of the car and slammed the door behind him and walked into the store. He was out almost as fast as he went in.

“He doesn’t know who bought cigarettes there this morning. He was sick and his mother was at the register, and his mother is eighty-eight and he won’t call her at home to ask because she went home to go to sleep. It’s stolen,” Freed said, looking around. “It’s obvious that it’s stolen. How am I going to get back to Maine?”

“Maybe back at the house you ought to get some sleep and then call the cops.”

“I told you, I don’t want to call the cops.”

“What do you intend to do — just forget about the car?”

“I need cigarettes myself,” Freed said, “and I forgot to buy them.”

Perry made a U-turn and went back to the store. Freed didn’t thank him for doing it. He got out and slammed the door again. He came back with a newspaper and a pack of Trues. Perry backed out and headed for Francie’s house, suddenly remembering clearly the large canvases Francie had painted recently, in greens and grays, of herself, naked. He had come down the weekend she showed them to him determined to sleep with her, but as usual something happened — the showing of the paintings happened — and he thought that it would be crass if he asked her after she showed him her work.

“What do you hear from Beth Ann?”

“I don’t hear anything. Her sister sent me part of a letter Beth Ann sent her, about how she and Zack had managed to borrow the money for a restaurant and how they’d just found a building. It was about a quarter of a piece of paper that her sister cut off for me with pinking shears. On the back was some drivel about the Grand Canyon.”

“That was a surprise to you she left,” Freed said.

“I thought she was going to New York. I didn’t know she was going to Albuquerque, and I had no idea she had any interest in Zack.”

Freed shrugged. “None of my business to have brought it up.”

“It’s okay. I’m not that touchy.”

“Yes you are. You’ve always been touchy. You were pissed off at me for months after we went to the baseball game and I rooted for the Red Sox.”

“I was just kidding.”

“No you weren’t. You care a lot about sports and you don’t approve of my taste.”

He turned onto the unpaved road that went to Francie’s house and parked his car beside three bushes that were trimmed in the shape of triangles. Francie had had them shaped a few summers before because she thought it was funny. Nothing else on the property was pruned. “They’re pyramids,” she said, making her eyes look crazy. “You can walk up to the bushes and derive power from them.”

Going into the house, he noticed that T.W.’s car was in the driveway.

The front door was closed, but when he rapped quietly on it, Francie answered. She was wearing her blue nightgown, and somebody’s plaid shirt in place of a robe.

“My car was stolen,” Freed said.

“What do you mean? Somebody took your car from here?”

“The kid I brought to the party stole it. I’ve got to call the cops.”

“Oh hell,” Francie said. “Do they have to come here? Have I got to have cops in the house?”

“No. I’ll call them from the store and sit there and have a cup of coffee with them while I tell the story.”

“Oh Christ,” Francie said. “Who was that guy, anyway?”

“Somebody who was hitching. I don’t know who he was.”

“What did you pick him up for?” Francie said. When Francie first woke up she was always argumentative.

“Because I’m stupid,” Freed said. “Did you know that T.W. was here in the bedroom?”

“Yeah. He said he was going to come back after he took Katie home.”

“Maybe we ought to wake him up. It’s noon, isn’t it?”

“Go ahead and call the cops,” Perry said. “They’re going to wonder why it took you so long to report it.”

“Good morning,” Francie said to Perry.

“Hi,” he said.

Freed sighed and unzipped his jacket and went to the kitchen phone.

“Maybe you should wait,” Francie called. “Maybe he’ll come back with it.”

Freed came into the living room and sighed and sat down. He and Francie both saw the puddle of red wine that had seeped into the rug at the same time.

“I don’t know why I have parties,” Francie said.

Perry remembered Delores’ phone call, and wondered if there was any point in mentioning it to Francie. Francie went over to the wine stain and looked down at it. “How do you get wine out of a rug?” she said.

“Don’t you transform the wine into blood and the rug into a turnip?” Freed said. “Francie, if you didn’t have such drunken parties, my car never would have been stolen.”

“I guess you should call them,” Francie said. “If he really stole it, he’s not going to bring it back.”

“Delores called last night from Miami,” Perry said. “She was looking for her oak table.”

“What oak table?”

“That one with the wide-board top. You used to have it, didn’t you?”

“I never had it here. I think it was in my room in the house we rented.”

“I think T.W. has that table,” Freed said.

Francie took one of Freed’s Trues and sat down by the stain. She had on black knee socks that were covered in lint, and she sat so that he could almost see between her legs.

“Or maybe I did have it here. Maybe it’s the table I used to stack things on in the kitchen, that Delores took out of here and traded Beth Ann for a chair she wanted. Yeah, that’s what happened to it: Beth Ann has it.”

“Oh goddamn it,” Freed said. “Goddamn it to hell. It’s freezing out and I’ve got to start discussing how my fucking car was stolen with a bunch of New Hampshire cops.”

“Let’s have some music,” Francie said. “Does anybody have a headache, or can we have music?”

The music got T.W. out of bed. He came looking for his shirt, and when Francie had to hand it over, she decided to get dressed herself. Before long they were all dressed, and Freed was down at the store, and Francie and T.W. and Perry were eating eggs Benedict that T.W. fixed and drinking leftover champagne mixed with ginger ale.

“I’ve got to drive all the way to a job in Stowe,” T.W. sighed. “But that’s not until tomorrow.”

Perry looked out the window and saw his own car gone from the drive. Freed had taken it to go to the store after he called the cops. It had started to snow.

“Why don’t we have another party tonight and invite your other set of friends, Francie? There’s food left over.”

“What other set of friends?”

“Just kidding,” T.W. said.

Perry and T.W. went out to the shed and loaded in kindling and wood for the fire.

Nick and Anita came back that night, bringing with them a huge pan of Anita’s fried chicken. Francie got out the last gallon of Chablis and they sat by the fire talking about the snow storm and eating and drinking. T.W. and Freed were talking about architecture. They both knew more than Perry, and he kept entering into their conversation, hoping they could tell him some things he needed to know about fixing his house. He had hired people to fix the heating system, but he was doing the carpentry work himself. It was a large house, oddly shaped because it had been added onto without much thought for aesthetics at least twice, and probably three times. T.W. and his band had been up a lot on the weekends, and T.W. had been a lot of help.

“You lonesome up there in the woods?” Anita asked Perry.

“Sometimes.”

“Ought to come back to the city,” Nick said. (He was kidding; he and Anita lived in a town with a population of three hundred.)

“Bring your dirty pictures out,” Anita said to Francie.

Francie laughed, embarrassed, knowing that Anita meant the canvases.

“Don’t you freeze your butt standing in here naked?” Freed said.

“Maybe I should have asked my other friends,” Francie said to Perry. He smiled at her, no longer interested in T.W. and Freed’s talk about architecture. He was thinking about Francie, in the big house, painting herself.

“Aren’t we an artsy bunch?” T.W. said. “Perry a poet and Anita a photographer and Perry a poet — or did I say that? — Francie a painter …”

Freed moved the jug of wine away from T.W.

“To say nothing of our music maker,” T.W. said, touching his chest. He reached for the jug of wine, but Freed was pouring the last of it in his glass.

“I need it more than you do,” Freed said. “My car was stolen.”

The phone rang and Francie got up to answer it. Perry saw her turn on the kitchen light. Things looked better in the living room, where it was dark except for the fire. The clutter from the party the night before was still all over the room, but sitting and looking into the fire, he could forget about it. He intended to help her pick it up on Sunday, before he left to give Freed a ride to his house in Maine. He looked back to the kitchen, where Francie stood with her back to him, talking on the phone. Sometimes it bothered him that he was just one of the people she liked to have around all the time, although it meant a lot to him that they had all been friends for so long.

As they sat silently they could hear Francie talking on the phone. Perry heard the name Beth Ann twice and concentrated on the log crackling in the fire. He had gotten so he didn’t think about her much, and that day he had had to listen to her spoken about too much.

“That was odd,” Francie said, coming back and sitting next to Perry. “That was Delores’ mother, and she said she wanted me to know that Delores and Meagan were coming to my house — that they had left yesterday in a hurry and had asked her to call. Did Delores say that to you?”

“I think she said she was coming this way, but she didn’t say she was about to leave.”

“And her mother said that Delores is going to live with Carl in New Hampshire. Do you know anything about that?”

“No,” he said.

“We ought to get going,” Nick said. “We’ve got to go to Anita’s mother’s tomorrow.”

Anita groped behind her for her cowboy boots. They were fine boots, her Christmas present, with red roses painted on the sides and pointy toes and high heels.

“You ever want to borrow these, you could add a little kink to your dirty pictures,” Anita said, and Francie smiled in embarrassment. Anita rolled her white wool slacks down over the boots and pushed herself up with a groan. Nick stood with her, holding the pan that had once held chicken but now held bones.

“Thanks for the good dinner,” Perry said. “Thanks for cooking it, Anita.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” Anita said, fanning out her fingers and pushing her fingertips into her chest. She had on a cashmere sweater that looked electrified in the firelight. Her belly protruded because she was four months pregnant.

“Good night,” Nick said, kissing Francie on the forehead. Freed reached up and silently shook hands with both of them. T.W. got up and walked them to the door. When he had waved them off, the door closed and the draft stopped. T.W.’s hair was dusted with snow when he came back to the fire.

“I’m going to bed down in your spare room, Francie. You’re welcome to share the bed, Freed,” he said.

“I think I’ll sleep in the attic,” Freed said.

“I’m sleeping there,” Perry said.

“I know it, asshole. I was just kidding.”

Freed and T.W. walked out of the living room, clowning, with arms around each other’s waists, swaying their hips with all the grace of cows walking on ice. Francie looked after them without saying good night.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I’m annoyed is what’s the matter.”

“Why?”

“First of all, that phone call. People’s mothers calling me and informing me of what’s going to happen to me — some woman I’ve never met calling to tell me that her crazy daughter and grandchild are headed for my house to stay with me.”

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve always felt sorry for Delores.”

“And all that talk about her oak table. I never asked for the damn table to begin with — she put it in my house and then she took it out, and now she wants me to track it down.”

“It’s sad,” he said. “It’s sad if she’s so crazy that she’s trying to track down a table nobody has seen for years.”

“And I’m touchy about Anita, and her talking about my dirty pictures. She’s trying to embarrass me because she resents it that I have a career, when she’s pregnant.”

He remembered going to Francie’s house once when Francie was still married, and he and Francie’s husband had sat on the mattress playing checkers while she painted. The radio was playing. People and noise didn’t distract her, usually. He liked it that when she painted, she acted like a painter: she backed up from the canvas, tilted her head from side to side, moved forward to put a small blot of paint on the canvas, stood back, smiled. He lost the game of checkers. Winning had never been very important to him, but it would have pleased him if Francie had known that he had won — if the “Aha!” had come from him instead of from Francie’s husband. Francie herself was both casual about her art and competitive. She would paint quietly, showing nothing, for many months. But if she entered a show and didn’t win first prize, she would be furious, drag out all her canvases to show her friends, pointing out how good they were. Sometimes there was some doubt in her mind — you could tell by the way her enthusiasm came out with a questioning tone — but most of the time failure made her angry, and she resisted the idea of it by talking about all the things that were done right, with originality, in her work. The first time she did that it had taken him aback — all his friends were humble, if not self-deprecating, and he had thought at first that Francie was putting him on. He probably listened to her talk about her work for half an hour with a silly smile on his face before he realized that his expression was inappropriate. Though when other people said, occasionally, that she was an egomaniac, he defended her, saying that it was mature to believe in yourself. Sometimes even Francie knew that she went on about the importance of what she was doing too much; she had a sense of humor about it, and would mock herself: she had a long gray apron she painted in, with GREAT ARTIST stenciled across the back.

He looked at Francie, slumped by the fire.

“You’re in a bad mood,” he said.

“You don’t think Anita said that to embarrass me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He threw a chip of wood into the fire.

“Anita and her hundred-dollar boots she walks around in the snow in.”

“Go to bed,” he said. “You’ve tolerated all of us for long enough today.”

“Everybody has to be so teasing. Nobody can talk straight. Freed has to pretend he’s taking the attic. T.W. and Freed have to pretend they’re gay because they’re sleeping in the same double bed. Everybody’s got their act down.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said again.

“What’s the matter is that it will be six months before I have a show, and nothing happens. I sit around here all day alone and I paint. When people come they want to make jokes about my being my own model, as though I’m narcissistic.”

“Your paintings are good,” he said. “You know they are. Nobody else paints the way you do.”

“You like them?”

“I admire them. They’re very good. I think you should hang them on the walls.”

In the living room there was one picture — a photograph taken by Anita of oil drums in the snow in New Jersey the winter before. It was a large 11” × 14” photograph hanging on the longest wall of the room. When Francie’s husband left, she took down the drapes and gave him the pictures from the walls. Perry didn’t ask about it because he thought he understood.

“Put some up,” he said. “You shouldn’t just lean them against your bedroom wall.”

She bent her knee and put her forehead to it. “I guess I am in a bad mood,” she mumbled. “I guess I might hang some of them up. But the earlier ones — not the ones of me.”

“Loan me one,” he said. “I’d like to hang one in my house.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Then I’ll give you one. Which one do you want?”

She got up and went toward her bedroom. He walked behind her and noticed, as they passed the kitchen, that she had left the phone off the hook.

There was a mattress on the floor of Francie’s room. There were hooks shaped like eagles on the wall in front of the bed, on which she hung clothes. There were bamboo curtains, and in the corner there was a tall plant with four leaves at the top. He thought the room was even more depressing than the one she had lived in, in the house they had shared. Her husband had taken the furniture when he went, and although she had gone to auctions and replaced some of the furniture in some of the rooms, she had put only a mattress back in the bedroom. Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young. In place of the line of yellow boots beneath them were Francie’s self-portraits.

“This one?” she said. The painting she propped against her side was one of her best; she had painted it in front of the fire, and the pink glow of the firelight on her bare legs was just right. He looked from the picture to Francie, wanting to say that what he would like was the person propping up the painting, but the expression on her face (shy but earnest; it was easy to see that she took her painting seriously) kept him from saying anything except that it was one of her best, she should keep that one and give him another.

She shook her head. “I’ll leave it in front, and you can take it when you go.”

He touched his lips to the top of her head with a small kiss and gave her a hug and went out of the room for a drink of water, then climbed the stairs to bed. His foot felt sore, and too large for the cast. He put the light on in the attic and went over to the stool with the piece of fabric and the shell on it. He stroked the fabric and held the shell to his ear to listen to the roar, carefully holding his free hand on the material so he wouldn’t disturb her still-life arrangement. The sound inside the shell was very loud in the attic. He put it back and turned off the light bulb and lay on the bed. Like a child, he scrawled “Francie” on the fogged windowpane above the mattress, then, before falling asleep, erased it with the side of his hand.

Nobody could understand how Delores and Carl had made such good time driving, but they said they were speeding the whole way, and that one slept while the other drove. They came to Francie’s door late Sunday night — early Monday morning, actually — with Meagan thrown like a sack over Carl’s shoulder. “She had hiccups half the way here,” Carl sighed, sinking down in the nearest chair with Meagan still sprawled up against him.

“But what are you doing with your coats on?” Delores asked. “What’s going on?”

“We were on our way out. Freed has got to teach school tomorrow.”

“Freed!” Delores said, running over to him and throwing her arms around his neck.

“Do I know this woman?” Freed said, rubbing the palm of his hand down her spine after he hugged her. Freed and Delores had been lovers ten years before.

“My Pontiac was stolen,” Freed said. “Ask anybody.”

“What?” Delores said, looking around. “What’s the joke?”

“His car was stolen,” Perry shrugged.

“Do you want some coffee, Delores? Do you, Carl?” Francie said.

“I don’t care,” Carl said. “I’ll do anything.”

“I can’t let you two take off when I just got here,” Delores said.

“I’ll write out directions to my house,” Perry said. “The three of you can come up and stay with me.”

“That’s right,” Delores said. “You have that big house now.”

“Francie,” Carl said, “you look freakishly beautiful. You’ve kinked up your hair and your butt is unnaturally shapely.”

“T.W. was here,” Francie said to Carl, ignoring what he had just said. “He would have stayed around if he had known you would be here so soon, I know.”

“How’s your ex-husband, Francie? It looks like you decided to go on living after he pulled out. Last time I was here there wasn’t a chair to sit in. How’s Beth Ann, Perry? Might as well state all the shit that’s in my mind and calm myself down.”

Delores broke in, saying, “She has nightmares,” to Francie and pointing to Meagan. “They took her to Disney World and she screams in the night.”

Carl picked up a small bottle from the table and shook it back and forth absently. Meagan shifted on him and was still again. The bottle was Hard As Nails, which T.W. coated the middle fingernail of his right hand with, to keep the nail in good shape; to relax, when he was not playing electric music with the band, T.W. played the banjo.

“Did Anita have her kid yet?” Delores asked.

“No — she’s just four months pregnant,” Freed said. “How did you know about that?”

“She wrote me.”

“What did you do to your foot, Perry?” Carl said, standing.

“I broke it.”

“I can see that your foot is broken. Forgive me for speaking imprecisely: how did you break your foot, Perry?”

“I fell down. I was stepping off of a stone wall in the woods and my foot went out from under me in wet leaves beneath the wall.”

“Oh Christ, I’ve got to teach in the morning,” Freed said. “I hate to bust things up, but are we about to move?”

“I’ll spread out the sleeping bag for Meagan,” Perry said. He went down the hall and turned the radiator all the way on in the bedroom, unrolled the sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. He went back to the living room and got Meagan, who flopped into his arms without waking up. He carried her to the sleeping bag and put her inside and closed the top over her without zipping it. If she had nightmares, it wouldn’t do to zip her in. There were little flecks of dried skin on her eyelids, and beneath her eyes were bluish circles. Her face was a little sunburned from Florida. “Do you remember me, Meagan?” he whispered. He smiled at her and turned off the light. Meagan never moved.

“How’s T.W.’s band?” Carl asked when he came back into the room.

“Are you giving me a ride home or not?” Freed said.

“What are you going to do without a car?” Delores asked.

“I can borrow my neighbor’s truck. I don’t know,” Freed said. “Hopefully they’ll find it and it won’t be wrecked.”

“T.W. says they’re making money. He had a new demo tape down here that was very good.”

“Come on,” Freed said, pulling at the sleeve of his leather jacket.

“One minute,” Perry said. He went into Francie’s bedroom and got the painting and hobbled out to the car with it. Freed came out the door behind him, and then Francie, carrying his crutches, saying, “Aren’t you even going to say goodbye?”

“I’m just carrying this out to the car.”

“I’m sitting in the car,” Freed said. “I’m sitting in the car until you decide to start driving it.”

“I hope they find your car, Freed,” Francie said.

“Del looks great,” Freed sighed, and pushed around the snow with the toe of his boot. “That’s all I need to see.”

“Oh — are you giving them directions to your house?” Francie asked Perry.

He closed the trunk and wiped the snow off his hands on his jeans.

“Just one second,” he said to Freed.

“Thank you for the weekend, Francie,” Freed said. “I’m going to sit here and freeze until he decides to get going.”

“He has to give directions—”

“I understand what’s being said, Francie.” He closed the car door, opened the window a crack to let the smoke from his cigarette leave the car. Freed was talking to himself in the car about how he was going to sit there until they got going.

Perry went into the house and found a piece of paper and wrote directions and a map. He gave it to Carl, who pocketed it and said, “Thanks. When are we welcome?”

“Any time,” he said. “Come up as soon as you can.”

“Thank you,” Delores said. “We can help you work on the house.”

He nodded. He could not remember ever seeing Delores do anything with her hands.

“Goodbye, Francie,” he said, giving her a hug. “Stop entertaining people and do your painting.”

“I can’t see,” Carl said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Go ahead,” Francie said. “Goodbye, Perry. Let me know where you hang the picture.”

He hugged her again and stepped to the side, still holding her. He was clowning, clumping in his cast to do the box step. The walkway was covered with snow. The flagstones underneath the snow were slick with ice, so he hopped down the grass, feeling the snow edging over the top of his low boots.

“It’s an odd match,” Freed said, shivering in the car. “Delores and Carl. I don’t get it.”

“Come on, close that window,” Perry said, starting the car.

“I’m smoking.”

“Wait’ll I get the heat on.”

Freed pitched the cigarette into the snow. “You think he’s still on reds?” Freed said. Before Perry could answer, Freed changed his voice. “You have to feel sorry for the little children,” he said, wobbling his head at Perry. “What will become of the little ones?” With the hood of his parka covering his head, he looked enough like a little old lady to make Perry laugh. “What the fuck did I do to deserve having my car stolen?”

Freed lit another cigarette. “Tonight when I saw Del I wished I had her back,” he said. “It makes me sad that I still don’t have any sense.”

“Delores is okay now.”

“She might look it, but she’ll never be okay. You think Carl is still swallowing pills?”

“If he is, they aren’t keeping him too alert.”

“They looked good. Tired, but okay. Del looked good.” Freed sighed. He pushed the tape into the tape deck, listened a second, then rewound to Gatemouth Brown doing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

“You forgive me for cheering for the Red Sox?” Freed said. He opened the window a crack. “Where’s my car?” he said. “It could be anywhere.”

(They finally went to Alexandria, Virginia, to get Freed’s car. The police found it after four days. At the start of the ride Freed had said, “Thank you very much for doing this,” but Freed had let him pay for his own coffee in the machines along the highway, and Freed had not thanked him again. It was true that when Freed saw the car parked on the lot behind the police station he reached out and grabbed the crook of Perry’s arm, but that was almost certainly happiness at seeing the car rather than silent thanks to Perry. Yet on the ride back to Vermont without Freed, he had been lonesome. He and Freed had shared a motel room the night they got the car. They had eaten soggy fried shrimp in the motel dining room, and wandered around Alexandria. Freed, who always had a lot of energy, had tried to talk him into going across the bridge into Georgetown, but he wouldn’t do it, and Freed had had the nerve to sulk. He had told Freed that he didn’t feel like dragging his broken foot around that night — actually, it didn’t bother him very much, and by that time he was hardly able to remember what it had felt like not to have a broken foot. Reading a letter he had written Francie at that time but forgot to mail — a letter he found in a book — he could read between the lines of his petulance that he was already becoming antisocial.)

In June, Beth Ann came back from Albuquerque. She found out from Francie where Perry was living and wrote down his phone number, and took a bus to the town nearest him in Vermont. He picked up his phone one night when the band was practicing — everyone’s instrument was instantly silent — and he stood there wishing they would make noise again when he realized who was on the phone. “Whether you want me or not, I’m almost to your house,” Beth Ann said. “Will you come get me?”

He went to the drugstore where the bus had left her off, and got her. She had on a black cap and a trench coat. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her skin was filmed with sweat, as if she had walked to Vermont instead of taking the bus. They walked back to his car without touching. “I actually knew your number,” she said. “The reason I called Francie first was to see if she was still living in New Hampshire, or if she had moved here with you.”

“She’s still in New Hampshire,” he said. “What made you think she’d be with me?”

“Everybody knows how you feel about Francie except Francie. Or maybe she pretends not to know. I don’t know.”

“Francie’s having a show in New York next month,” he said.

“I don’t want to be filled in on the news.”

“Should I talk about politics?”

“Do you read the newspaper?” she said. “What’s the point of being so isolated if you pick up the paper?”

“What are you doing here?” he said.

They drove without speaking all the way back to the house. He was glad that T.W.’s band was there because that would give him something to do other than listen to whatever she had to say. They would be eating dinner by the time they got back — he could sit down and eat, and not talk much.

“T.W.’s band is at my place,” he said.

When they got inside, T.W. was on the phone. “Here he is, wait a minute,” T.W. said, holding the phone out to Perry. “There’s Beth Ann!” T.W. said, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Good to see you.”

Perry was talking to Nick, who had just become a father — a long, blurted story about how Anita was all right and how they had an enormous baby that Anita and the midwife hadn’t been able to deliver at home. “They took her out in the ambulance bent like a boomerang,” Nick said. It sounded as if he was crying. “This kid is eleven pounds and some ounces, I can’t remember how many. One, I think. The kid looks like he’s ready to take off crawling.”

“Well, congratulations, Nick. What are you naming him?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t written down anything yet. Call me back if you think of a good name.”

He hung up. “Nick and Anita had a baby,” he said to Beth Ann.

“Hey,” said T.W., “you ought to see Delores’ kid now, Beth Ann. She’s the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen. Delores is living in New Hampshire with Carl Fellows, on a farm his grandfather used to run. I think they’re getting married. Is that right, Perry?”

Perry shrugged.

“Hey, what happened to Zack?” T.W. asked.

Perry rolled his eyes, and not wanting to hear, he started for the kitchen, where two people from the band were cooking spaghetti sauce. He heard her say, “Zack is dead.”

“What are you talking about?” T.W. said.

“He fell off a rock in the Sandia Range. I’m not kidding you.”

“What did you say?” Dickie said, coming out of the kitchen, dripping tomato sauce from a spoon.

“He really is,” Beth Ann said. “He’s dead.”

“Is he buried?” T.W. said. Perry looked at T.W., wondering why he asked such a thing.

“Of course,” Beth Ann said.

“Where?” T.W. said.

“In Albuquerque.”

“He is not dead,” Dickie said. “Look at her: she’s smiling.”

“I’m smiling because it’s so horrible, and because I told you in such an awful way.” She was no longer smiling. She went over to the sofa where Perry had just sat down and slumped beside him. “He’s been dead for four months,” she said.

“Fuck it!” Dickie said. “Fuck it — he didn’t fall off a mountain.”

“I don’t know,” Roger said. Roger had just come out of the kitchen. He had joined the band a little while before and hadn’t known Zack.

“Oh fuck it!” Dickie said, and walked to the front door and went outside. Roger went after him and looked out the door for a minute, then quietly closed it.

“Why didn’t you call us?” Perry said.

“I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t even hit me that I had no reason to be in Albuquerque until a few days ago. I sat around a rented room for four months. I called his parents, and they came out and put on a funeral. It was horrible. His mother was taking sedatives, and we all had to hold her up for three days so she wouldn’t fall over. When she left she said to me, ‘I’m not even going to see you again, ever in my life,’ as though I was her kid.”

The phone rang. Perry picked it up. “We’re naming her Belinda,” Nick said. “This is really embarrassing, but the baby’s a girl. I don’t know what I was talking about. I haven’t had any sleep for almost two days.”

“Tell Anita we’re happy,” Perry said. “T.W. and the band are here. We’ll come around soon and inspect the kid and see for ourselves if it has a penis.”

“What’s he talking about?” T.W. said to Beth Ann.

Perry hung up. He sat on the floor by the phone, thinking of all the times he’d cursed Zack. He hoped that he had never said that he wished he would fall off a mountain.

“I’m going to eat dinner,” Roger said. “If anybody else can eat, they’re welcome.”

They sat in the living room, smelling the sauce. T.W. pulled a guitar slide out of his case. Joints were tightly packed inside it. He looked at it and said, “I guess that’s not the thing to do,” put it in his pocket, and got up and went into the kitchen. Perry and Beth Ann could hear Roger, feigning cheerfulness, saying, “Would you like me to get you some spaghetti?”

“Maybe I ought to go after Dickie,” Beth Ann said.

Dickie came back, with leaves and mud and bark sticking to him, as they were finishing dinner. He bit into a piece of cold garlic bread. He tore a square of paper towel from the roll that was in the center of the table and rubbed it over his face. “What was that spastic asshole doing climbing mountains?” he said.

The phone rang, and no one got up to answer it.

Roger went to the door the next evening, when Delores and Carl showed up. The others had organized a softball game on a neighbor’s field, but Roger had been feeling sick to his stomach, and he had stayed around for Borka’s arrival. Borka played electric bass with the band, and he was thinking about moving in on her. He loved her wavy gold hair and the little pierced earrings she wore, a moon in one ear and a star in the other. She had won his heart when she did an imitation of Viva in Bike Boy for an audience in a bar between sets, calling Bike Boy an “old movie.” When he went to answer the door, he thought it was her. It was Delores and Carl, and he didn’t know who they were. They introduced themselves and came in and sprawled on the sofa, and alternately commented on how nice the house was and argued about whether it was wrong to have left Meagan with Francie. Carl said it was, and Delores said that Meagan knew very well who Francie was, and was just bluffing when they left. Roger told them that he would have to excuse himself (he had been lying on the couch before they took it over) to go stretch out because his stomach felt funny. “Papaya leaf tea,” Delores said and instantly pulled a box from her canvas bag. She went into the kitchen and brewed it for him. Roger began to formulate questions to find out who they were.

“Who are you?” Carl finally said to him.

“I’m Roger. I play trumpet with the band.”

“You look familiar,” Carl said. “Did I see you some other time with another band?”

“I doubt it,” Roger said. “I haven’t played with a group for a long time.” What he didn’t tell Carl was that he had been in the seminary. He realized that that always stopped conversation, and he had been trying hard not to say it to people.

“Who are you?” Roger said to Carl.

“Hello, look at this,” Perry said, coming into the house. There was a grass stain down the side of his khakis and he had torn the knee of his pants.

“Is there room for us?” Delores called from the kitchen. “We tried to call you twice this morning, but everybody must have been out.”

“Sure,” Perry said.

He looked around. “Where’s Meagan?” he said.

“We were visiting Francie and we left her there. Carl thinks I’m a bad mother.”

Carl looked away and said nothing.

“She’s with Francie?” Perry echoed. “Well, have you two eaten? We were going to drive into town and get a pizza.”

“Perry, this house is as big as a barn. Doesn’t it get depressing here in the winter?” Delores said, coming into the living room.

“Did you go to Bard?” Carl asked Roger.

“Yeah,” Roger said. “I was there for a couple of years.”

“In ’sixty-five or ’sixty-six?”

“ ’Sixty-six, sure,” Roger said, his face lighting up. He and Carl shook hands and laughed.

“Gordon Liddy was the fucking Assistant D.A. of Duchess County,” Carl said to everybody. “Did you know Inez?” Carl asked Roger.

“Was she the tall girl who hung out with Little Ruthie?”

“No — she was a musician.”

“Right, right.”

Delores sighed. She had not gone to college, and Carl was always running into people from Bard, which bored her. She asked Perry if she could use the phone and went into the kitchen. Suddenly Carl stopped reminiscing. He hollered, “Who are you calling?”

“I’m calling Freed. I thought we’d stay here a couple of days and look around and then go see him in Maine.”

“I’m not going to Maine to see Freed,” Carl said.

“Why not?”

“Why don’t you call and see if your kid stopped sulking?” Carl said. “That’s what I think you ought to do.” They could hear her dialing.

“Delores,” Carl said. “If you’re calling Freed, don’t tell him I’m going there, because I’m not.”

“Inez used to go to Adolph’s and drive everybody crazy playing “Heat Wave” on the jukebox over and over,” Roger said.

“Don’t be that way,” Delores said, coming out of the kitchen. “He wrote us that nice letter.”

“I don’t give a shit what he writes us. If you want to go visit Freed, I’m not stopping you.”

“I suppose you’re going to give me your car too.”

“If it really means that much to you to visit him, Delores, you can take the car.”

“I’m going to stretch out,” Roger said. “Excuse me.”

Delores watched Roger walk out of the room and go up the stairs. “You seriously won’t go to Maine?” she said.

“That’s right.”

She went back into the kitchen. Perry sat in a chair and waited for the fight. As he waited, Beth Ann and T.W. came back to the house. “Carl!” Beth Ann said. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey!” Carl said and stood to hug her. “How are you, T. W.?” he said.

“Hey, Carl,” T.W. said. “Are you going to fill in on bass if our bass player doesn’t show?”

“I’d throw you off — I’m not good enough,” Carl said. He looked toward the kitchen. “In every respect,” he said.

“Is Roger still sick?” T.W. said, looking around the room. He saw his slide on the floor and took out a joint and offered it around. Only Beth Ann would have any of it.

“Is that Delores in there?” Beth Ann said.

“Yeah,” Perry said.

Beth Ann went to the door and waved to Delores and stood by the door, waiting for her to finish. When Delores kept whispering on the phone, she walked away and sat by T.W. and asked where the band was playing. He started naming names of bars.

Carl took a hit off of T.W.’s joint and walked into the kitchen. He came out with a beer.

T.W. offered the joint again and Carl had another hit. “I’m very tempted to go get in my car and drive off,” he said.

“Sit down, Carl,” Perry said. “We’re all going to go get pizza in a minute.”

“This is humiliating,” Carl said. “Why did she have me bring her to your place if what she wanted was to be in Maine with Freed?”

“I don’t know,” Perry said. “Sit down.”

“I’m going,” Carl said. “This is ridiculous.”

“Where are you going?” Beth Ann said.

“I’m just going. I apologize for making a scene. I’m just going.”

He stood in the middle of the room for a minute, then pulled his wallet and sunglasses out of Delores’ bag and went outside. He sat in the car for quite a while. Then they heard the car start.

“Who is she talking to?” Beth Ann said. “She’s talking to Freed?”

“Let’s get Dickie and go eat,” T.W. said.

“Maybe there’s something here to eat,” Beth Ann said.

“There isn’t,” Perry said.

“I’m willing to spring for pizza,” T.W. said. “I want to eat so we can start practicing. We’ve got to get up early to drive to the job.”

Delores came out of the kitchen, seeming oblivious to Carl’s departure. She went over to Beth Ann and rumpled her hair. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Don’t tell her,” T.W. said. “We’re going for pizza. Want to come?”

“Sure,” Delores said. “Did Carl stalk out?”

“He drove off. In the car.”

“Did you ever see anybody have a temper tantrum like that?” Delores said. “Don’t you think that was irrational?”

“I want pizza with mushrooms and onions,” T.W. said. “Will you split that kind of a pizza with me, Beth Ann?”

All of them got up and followed him out of the house.

“We can take my bus,” T.W. said. “Come on — pile in the back.”

“How far do we have to go?” Beth Ann said.

“Come on, get in. Should we ask Roger if he’s feeling better?”

“He’s sick,” Perry said. “Let’s just go.”

“Tell me about Meagan,” Beth Ann said to Delores. “Does she still have skin like porcelain?”

“You can see the veins in it,” Delores said. “It scares me sometimes. It looks like silk instead of human skin.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s with Francie. Francie’s taking her to a dog show.”

“Bring her to see us,” Beth Ann said.

Perry wondered if the “us” was inadvertent. He wondered how long she intended to stay, and what Delores intended to do about getting out of the house with Carl gone.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Beth Ann sighed as they rolled down the driveway.

They were sitting on wood seats on opposite sides of the van, facing one another. The floor of the van had been painted with a picture of the sun coming up over the mountains. T.W. drove with the dome light on, and the painting was positioned right under it; that made it seem as if the sun was actually glowing.

“Where’s Borka?” Perry called to T.W.

“I don’t know. If she doesn’t show this time, I’m firing her.”

“It’ll break Roger’s heart,” Perry said.

“Roger doesn’t have a heart. Roger’s got religion.”

T.W. put on the brakes. Dickie was standing up to his knees in the stream, clearing rocks out of it.

“There’s Dickie,” T.W. said. “Hey, Dickie! You going to eat with us?”

“I can eat mud,” Dickie said, stumbling around in the stream and making a wild face and holding a cupped hand of mud in front of his face.

“You want us to bring you a pizza?” T.W. called.

“I eat mud!” Dickie screamed.

“What’s that all about?” Perry said.

T.W. shrugged. They pulled out of the driveway and T.W. headed toward town.

“Somebody remind me to call my mother,” T.W. said.

T.W., as usual, set two alarms, and at nine in the morning they left in the van, taking Delores with them and dropping her at the bus stop so she could get the bus to Maine. Perry didn’t know she was going until she tiptoed into his room to say that she was going to Freed’s and that if Carl came back, he could tell him whatever he wanted. Perry sat up in bed and smiled at her and said, “It was good to see you.” When she tiptoed out, he couldn’t sleep because that had been such a lame thing to say. Beth Ann had left late the night before, with Roger, who was going to drop her at the train station so she could go to her parents’ house in Westport. It crossed his mind that she and Roger would get something going. He could remember his anger and outrage when she pulled out for Albuquerque, and was surprised when she came to him again that he felt very little hostility. That was because, as Freed had been telling him for a long time, the person he was interested in was Francie. He thought that he should call her because she might not know where Delores had gone. Her line was busy when he called, though, so he forgot about that for a while and went outside and looked at the new paint on his house. He walked down to the brook and inspected and approved of the work Dickie had done clearing it. In spite of smoking dope too much, Dickie got a lot of work done. He sat on a mossy rock and thought about Zack’s death and wondered if there might not have been one split second during the fall that was pleasurable, when perhaps his body was weightless and his mind clear. He tossed a pebble into the stream below him and it hit the water unremarkably — it just fell and went plop. He smiled at himself in dismay: he would have to do better than that if he was going to be a poet. Writing poetry was still an embarrassing idea to him, and Francie was the only one he thought really approved of it and urged him on. He thought that the more practical thing to aim for would be to repair houses. It seemed that this might be a part of the world where he could establish himself as a carpenter, now that he had some experience. He and T.W. had even tossed around the idea of a partnership, with T.W. working when it was more profitable to do that than play music.

He thought again of what Dickie had said; Dickie had been right to wonder what gawky Zack had been doing scaling mountains. The truth was that there was something very debilitating about being with Beth Ann — Zack had said that to him, which was why he assumed Zack didn’t like her — and probably Zack had felt the urge to break out to do something physical and in that way escape her. The last time he saw Zack, before Zack picked up Beth Ann, they had played a quiet game of poker. He could not remember at whose house they had played, but he remembered that Zack had won the game. Later, in his journal, he noted that as a nice irony and as a neat little foreshadowing of what was to come. Zack had always been quiet and clumsy, and while a lot of people came around to liking him, he didn’t have one close friend in the group. It occurred to him that Beth Ann might have picked Zack the way she had picked out the runt of the litter when they went their separate ways when the lease was up on the house they all rented, and she had to take a kitten from the litter. He could remember Zack’s ornate denim jacket, with a mandala embroidered on the back. Since his parents had arranged the funeral, it was certain that he wasn’t buried in that. Zack claimed that he got the jacket by trading a Porky Pig bank to a friend named Famous Malcolm he had since lost track of.

He walked back to the house and took off all his clothes but his underwear and stretched out on the chaise longue. It was missing several strips, so his body sank low to the ground and he could feel the cool of the earth on his buttocks. He sat there enjoying the quiet, listening to the birds. Then after a while he got up to call Francie and stopped on the way in to study an ant war in the grass by the front door. That was when he heard the unfamiliar car in the driveway and looked up to see Borka in a beat-up Chevrolet.

“They’re all gone,” he said.

“They can’t be. We have to practice.”

“The job is today. The practice was yesterday.”

“You’re putting me on,” she said. “Are they inside?”

“I’m not putting you on. They’re gone.” He was pulling his jeans on.

She put her hand to her face and was about to sink down in the grass, but he took her by the arm and steered her away; she had been about to sit where the ants were having their war.

“T.W. is never going to believe this wasn’t on purpose,” she said.

Borka had on a scarf tied around her breasts and several necklaces: one that looked like a little magnifying glass, a necklace of tiny silver birds, and a necklace with a large moon dangling from it that seemed to be made out of pottery. She had on cut-off lavender jeans and black spike-heeled shoes. She was eighteen. It was T.W.’s opinion, Perry knew, that she dressed that way because she was a virgin.

“What am I going to do?” she said. “You can even look at the book I wrote the date down in — it says today, not yesterday. Maybe he told me the wrong day.”

She was upset, and it was unlike her; he was used to her silence, or her mockery.

“I know the name of the bar they’re playing at. Why don’t you call the bar — or you could even make it there in about three hours.”

“He’d kill me. I don’t have the nerve to call him.” Borka went over to her car and sat on the hood and stared into the woods. “I blew it,” she said.

He went inside to call Francie. If Borka was going to cry, he didn’t want to have to watch. Before he got to the phone, it started ringing. He answered the phone, and it was Freed.

“Let me talk to Del,” Freed said.

“She left hours ago. She was on her way to Maine.”

“Yeah, well, Carl called and told me he was going to slit my throat, and I really don’t want that to happen, and I’m very willing not to have that woman here if Carl is going to kill me over the issue.”

“Freed. What have I got to do with it?”

“Do you think I should call the cops? Does he know where I live? What have I suddenly got to be involved with the cops all the time for? I’m growing grass in my garden this summer, and the cops are going to take a liking to me and stop around for fucking coffee.”

Borka came into the house and got a Coke from the refrigerator. She had been crying.

“Leave your house,” Perry said.

“Leave. That’s fine, except that he specifically said that he was coming to the school to slit my throat in front of my class so that I would be embarrassed before I died. I mean, I know Carl isn’t going to kill me, but I really don’t want to deal with Carl.” Freed coughed. “Carl is jealous because I have a job and he doesn’t.”

“I don’t think Carl will even show up, Freed.”

“I’ve got to hang up,” Freed said. “My phone bill was a hundred and forty dollars last month.”

He said goodbye to Freed and sat down opposite Borka. “T.W.’s temper always cools off,” he said to her.

“No, I think he really dislikes me. And I keep making mistakes like this, and that makes him dislike me more.”

“You like him?”

She nodded.

“I don’t think he knows that,” he said.

“He isn’t interested in knowing it. All he cares about is music. Anyway — he told me if I fucked up again, he was throwing me out of the band.”

“I think what you ought to do is drive to the place in New York State and go on stage with them. You’ll do okay without practicing, and they’ll be relieved to see you, even if they’re pissed off.”

She hung her head. Perry could see the dark hair down her center part; it became golden again about an inch from the scalp.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For the Coke,” she said and hit the edge of the empty can on the table.

When she left he picked up the things the band had thrown around, and emptied the ashtrays and sat at the kitchen table again, listening to the birds and to the sound of a dog barking far away. It was too much for him when the house was full of people, but when everybody was gone he felt a little depressed. He was grating cheese and sprinkling it over a can of pinto beans for an early supper when the phone rang.

“You wouldn’t know where Delores is, would you?” Francie said.

“Yeah. Carl left and Delores went to Freed’s.”

“Freed’s?”

“Freed’s. What the hell.”

“Where’s Carl?”

“He was supposed to go there too. I heard from Freed that Carl called and threatened to kill him.”

“This is wearing me down. I’m going to call Maine. Meagan is coming down with a cold and she wants her mother.”

“Did you get your paintings crated?” he asked.

“Some of them. I’m going to fix Meagan and me some supper and go back to it.”

“I put your painting—” He cut himself off from what he was going to say: that the painting was hanging in his bedroom. “I put it up, and it looks wonderful, Francie.”

“Thanks,” she said. “When I become famous, don’t sell it.”

He wandered around the house. He wondered if this was what someone who was going crazy would be like. Then he berated himself for thinking about that again, and for still believing in the back of his mind that the most honorable activity was working from nine to five. He put on a John Coltrane record and sat in his favorite Morris chair to calm down. After he had sat there quietly for a while, he started to get his perspective back: the house was a wreck, after all, not because he didn’t care enough to live decently, but because his friends had taken it over and wrecked it. When Dickie sat in a chair, it seemed to come unglued. Pieces of paper on which T.W. had scrawled words and chord symbols were scattered everywhere, amid tangles of broken strings. Cigarette butts were floating in half-empty glasses of bourbon. He knew that it was Francie again when the phone rang.

“I can’t reach Delores,” she said. “If you hear from her, tell her to call me.” Francie hesitated. “Is it because I’m a Capricorn? What is it about me that makes people drop their kids with me and come stay with me, and why is everything always so confused?”

“People take advantage of you.”

“It’s such a nice night out,” Francie sighed. “Meagan has a cold and I’m going to get it. I don’t think that’s fair. I was going to go for a walk, but I can’t drag her along when she’s so droopy, and I don’t feel right about leaving her.” Francie lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think much of Delores walking out on Meagan to take a vacation. I only took Meagan because I felt sorry for her.”

“Call her at Freed’s and tell her to come back.”

“I have to cut aspirin in half and give her a half aspirin,” Francie whispered. “I called my doctor.”

“Would you like me to come there to be with you?”

Francie waited a minute before answering. “I’d like it, but that would be silly.”

“I’m coming. It’s only an hour’s drive.”

Another hesitation. “Are you sure you want to?”

“I want to. I don’t have anything I have to do here.”

Going down the driveway, Perry felt elated. It was the right time, and he knew what he was going to say to Francie. The realization of it, the weight of it, came as inevitably as pressure builds around a diver.

Francie was talking on the phone to Delores’ mother. She was assuring her that Meagan’s voice was odd only because she was coming down with a cold, and lied that Delores was out but would be back soon.

Francie hung up and greeted him with “Wait’ll you hear this: Freed and Delores have decided to go away and live together. Carl went to the house and threw firecrackers at the windows, apparently, and scared them to death. Then Carl drove off and they got some things into suitcases. He’s just left his job a week before the term ends and he’s going south, he says, to live with Delores. I hinted that I didn’t want them to come here just now, but they’re coming anyway. I think Delores is cracking up. She was crying and laughing on the phone.”

“Let’s lock the door and turn out all the lights,” he said.

“No, I’m just going to tell them that they can spend the night, but that I’m not going to put up with any shit. And if Carl follows them down here and makes a scene, I’m going to call the police.”

She was too preoccupied for him to ask her to go to bed. He looked at her and looked away. There was a smudge of yellow paint on her cheek she did not know was there.

“Why don’t we take Meagan and get out of here?” he said.

“Delores would arrest us for kidnapping.”

“If she could remember where she left her,” he said.

She followed him to the living room. It was June, and too warm for a fire, but Francie loved the wood burning, and when the evenings were a little cold, she lit a fire. The fire was dying in the fireplace. He sat on the sofa and patted the cushion for her to sit beside him. There was a big box on the sofa, addressed to T.W. c/o Francie.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Worms. Honest to God. He’s going to start raising worms for profit.”

“What are you doing with the worms?”

“He had them delivered here because I’m usually home in the day and he’s out of town so often.”

He put the box of worms on the floor. In this context, how could he talk about going to bed with her?

“You shouldn’t put up with it,” he said.

“You know what T.W. said that time about my other set of friends? It was just a joking remark, but he was right: I don’t have any other friends. I know a few other people, but I don’t care anything about them. Sometimes when all of us are together we have good times. I don’t want to make them all go away.”

“What if you were just with me? What if we did what Freed and Delores are doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if we went away?”

“Where would we go?”

He had not thought about where they would go. “You could come live in my house in Vermont.”

“What would I do with my house?” she said.

He sat by the fire, staring into the peaks of flames, and looked at her. He saw that she did not want to live with him. She shifted on the sofa and looked somewhere else, embarrassed.

“You told me before that I was your best friend,” he said.

“You are. We don’t have to live together because of that, do we?”

“You don’t even have to speak to me. You can entertain yourself with T.W. and his worms, or you can hold down the fortress while Carl rockets firecrackers at your windows, or you can have a big party and study the Rorschach blots of wine on your rug. You could do most any of those things.”

“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” she said.

“I’m your best friend, Francie. Say something kinder to me.”

“I don’t know how to talk,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’m either alone and it’s silent here all day, or my friends are around, and I don’t really talk to them.”

“You can talk to me.”

“I’ve already hurt your feelings. I don’t want to do anything worse.”

“Well, what are you holding out that might really do me in? How little do you think of me?”

Francie drew up her knees and clasped her hands around them. “I want to be a painter,” she said.

“You are a painter.”

“I want to be an important painter.”

He stared at her, waiting for more.

“I don’t know what I want,” Francie said. “When Anita had her baby I wanted to be a mother. I want to be left alone, but I need to have people around.”

“When I was a kid my parents made me take dancing lessons, and the boys had to go up to the girls and ask them to dance. I asked, and the girl stomped my foot.”

“That didn’t really happen.”

“If I wanted to make you feel sorry for me, I could have thought of something more dramatic.”

“You mean just live with you in the house?” Francie said.

“No,” he said.

Francie heaved out a sigh. “Was that horrible to ask?”

“No. It’s okay that you asked.”

“But I mean — do you understand?” Her voice was softer than the crackling fire.

“No,” he said.

She let her legs hang down and stroked the top of the box with one foot, looking away from him.

“I just don’t think of us that way,” she said.

“Would you think about it for a while?” he said.

Francie got off the sofa and went to sit by him. “Have I not understood all along?” she said.

“I love mattresses thrown in attics, Francie.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry I said anything. I can’t keep sitting here being embarrassed.”

Perry got up. He was tired and hungry, and he knew that he had made a mistake. He went into the kitchen and headed for the refrigerator to see if there was a beer. One of her canvases of herself was propped up in the kitchen, and he looked away from it and went back to the living room with nothing to drink.

“Forget I said it,” he said. “Are you willing to forget it?”

She smiled at him. “Sure,” she said.

“It’s none of my business,” he said, “but who do you sleep with?”

“Nobody,” she said.

That came as a harder blow than the little-girl’s shoe on the top of his foot.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Don’t embarrass me.”

She looked terrible, as if she was about to cry.

“Get rid of the worms,” he said. “Let’s get rid of the worms.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Yes. Come on. I’m dumping them.”

He took the box and went outside. It was just starting to get dark. The sky was deep-purple at the horizon. He pried open the box while Francie watched. The worms were packed in something that looked like straw, but darker brown. When he lifted that out of the big box, Francie stepped back, wincing. You could see the worms squirming in the packing. He pulled it apart into about five gobs and threw them into the bushes. Then he went inside and ripped up the box and threw it into the fire.

They sat in front of the fire for a long time, neither of them saying anything, until the car came into the drive. They both got up and went to the window and looked out. Delores got out of the car first and came weaving toward the house without waiting for Freed. Perry almost grabbed Francie and stopped her from going to the door.

“How’s my baby?” he heard Delores say. There was something wrong with her voice. He heard Freed’s voice. The three of them came into the living room. Freed shook his head. “I thought you were in Vermont,” he said. He came over to where Perry stood by the window. Freed was sweating.

“What do you think I found?” Delores said. Perry looked at her, forcing a smile. Delores was stoned; her eyes were red, and she wasn’t focusing.

“I found my table,” Delores said. “I thought it was lost, and Freed had it all the time. It was there in his living room.”

“I thought all this time that I’d gotten the table from Anita,” Freed said. Then he looked self-conscious because obviously nobody cared how he got the table.

“Meagan’s sleeping,” Francie said. “She has a cold.”

“Does she have the hiccups again?”

“What?” Francie said. “I said she has a cold.”

“Where’s my poor baby?” Delores said and walked out of the living room toward the bedroom.

“What the hell are you doing?” Perry said to Freed.

“I don’t know,” Freed said and hung his head. “Either I’ve always loved Del or I never have.”

Francie looked disgusted when he said that and walked out of the room to find Delores.

“What’s the matter?” Freed said. “Why does everybody look so funny?”

“Freed, you can’t take them out of here like this. Delores is stoned and probably has no idea of what’s going on.”

“I’m not stoned,” Freed said. “I can’t help it if she got herself smashed.” His clothes smelled of grass, and he kept tugging at his shirt hanging out of his pants but not tucking it in. “Listen,” he said. “This is the end.”

“The end of what?”

“It’s just the end! We’re taking Meagan to her grandparents and we’re going to try to have a life. She knows what she’s doing. Don’t insult me by saying she’s just going with me because she’s not in her right mind.”

“Okay,” Perry said. “You do what you want.”

“Well, I want to be friends,” Freed said, dipping his hand toward Perry’s. “Aren’t you going to be my friend?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t your friend, Freed. You do what you want.”

“Then shake my hand,” Freed said. “You shake it.”

He shook Freed’s hand firmly.

“Jesus Christ!” Freed said. “What happens when a handshake doesn’t mean anything?”

“I shook your fucking hand, Freed.”

“You like me! Cut it out, Perry. You drove me to fucking Alexandria to get my Pontiac.”

“It’s okay, Freed. Calm down.”

“You don’t think she knows what’s going on, do you?”

“What about Meagan? Are you going to take her when she’s sick?”

“We’ve got my two pillows in the back seat. She can lie back there. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it.”

“Then what’s happening?” Freed said. “You’re acting this way and Carl flipped out and tried to bomb my house. Is it because you’re jealous that I’ve got Delores?”

“No,” he said. “I just think you’re both upset and you oughtn’t to do this.”

Delores was standing in the doorway holding Meagan, with Meagan’s head fallen off of her shoulder, and Francie beside her. Freed stood with his back to the fire, tilting the clock on the mantel back and forth absent-mindedly. He tilted it too far and had to turn around and set it back in place.

“We don’t want to have a fight,” Francie said. “Let’s talk about this some other time.”

“He doesn’t think we can get to Florida!” Freed said. “What’s he talking about?”

Nobody sat down. They stood awkwardly until Meagan began to squirm, and then Delores whispered to Francie and the two of them walked out to the car. Freed looked at Perry and didn’t say anything more. He put out his hand, and Perry shook it again, this time taking care not to shake it firmly. Freed mumbled something that Perry couldn’t catch; it sounded as though he was saying “How do you know?”

Perry sat on the sofa and waited for the inevitable starting of the motor and the car driving away. Francie came in, shaking her head. “I forgot to tell her that her mother called,” she said.

Perry remembered, suddenly, what T.W. had asked to be reminded of in the car.

“I feel like a criminal letting them go,” she said.

“What could you do? They’ll probably wake up in the morning and forget the plan. You can expect one or both of them by tomorrow night.”

“I don’t want them. I’ve really had it.”

He felt sorry for her, and sorry for himself that he wasn’t what she wanted. He thought about what she had told him a long time ago about how she had been a fat kid, and the last one picked to be on teams. Of course it would be important to her to be the center of things. She was slender now, and pretty in spite of her frizzed hairdo. He had thought all the time he was repairing his house that eventually he would have the nerve to ask Francie to live there. He had not thought beyond that — that Francie would say no.

“Some days I think I’m going to be famous,” Francie was saying.

He got up and looked out the window. There was a three-quarter moon shining on the pyramid bushes, and he sighed because he suddenly felt that he couldn’t derive power from them or anything else.

“I’m sure you will,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Francie.”

At the top of the stairs he stepped on a little twisted tube of paint, and orange oozed out on the floorboards. He sat on the mattress and listened to her walking downstairs. He heard her put on the tape of T.W.’s band. He got up and took off his belt and his watch and put them beside the mattress. In a little while he heard her walking again.

“Listen,” Francie called up the stairs. “I’d like to come live in Vermont.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I know it. I want to.”

He waited to hear her foot on the stairs.

“Is that all right?” she said. “I can live in Vermont and be a painter.”

He thought that she sounded like Meagan, who liked to tell stories back to people as well as have them read to her.

“Okay?” she said. She was climbing the stairs as she spoke.

“It’s morning,” she said.

He opened and closed his eyes several times; the crosshatching on the floor drew his attention. He looked at Francie and saw that she was already awake.

“I think I have bad news for you. I think Carl’s poking around here.”

“Carl?” he said.

“I’m not going to answer the door,” she whispered.

His arm had gone dead stretched under her neck during the night. He withdrew it and put it outside the covers. Lying together, they drifted off to sleep again. They slept for about an hour, until the crosshatching began to slant and grow pale. He heard a noise and woke up.

“What’s that?” she said.

“I don’t know. Is Carl hanging around because he thinks Delores is here?”

She pushed herself up and looked out the window. She didn’t see Carl’s car, or any car but hers and Perry’s.

“Be quiet,” he said. “Listen.”

But there was no more noise downstairs. He lay back, waiting for another sound. It came, eventually, in the form of faint radio music.

“Who’s down there?” Francie whispered to him. She curled into him and didn’t move.

He was curious now, so he got up and pulled on his jeans. “Hey — who’s downstairs?” he called.

The radio continued to play.

Francie got up after him and put on her jeans. She picked up his sweater from the floor and pulled it over her head. Barefoot, they went down the stairs.

“Carl?” Francie called. It was the first time that Perry was frightened; her voice echoed in the house, and there was no answer, just the radio music. They saw him at the same time, and both drew back a little.

It was the boy from the party — the boy who had stolen Freed’s car. He had on a stocking cap, but his face, which had seemed unremarkable before, seemed unforgettable now. There was what looked like a large mole on his temple. Perry took one step forward and saw that it was a fly, but not a real fly — a little black plastic fly, with glue smeared underneath it.

“How did you get in here?” Perry asked. Francie took one step forward to stand beside him.

“I’m not here. You just think I’m here. You’re sleepwalking.” When he said that last thing, his voice changed from mocking to serious. “This is a very nice house, but I’m not interested in comfortable furniture or nice oil paintings. What I’m interested in is money, and that’s what I haven’t found. Where’s your money, Francie?”

They were both shocked that the boy knew Francie’s name.

The boy said, “I have a hunting knife with a fat straight blade, and I have a Swiss army knife with little corkscrews and curved blades. What I don’t have is money, and I know that there has to be money, Francie, because this is a very fancy house you have here.”

Perry reached in his back pocket and took out his billfold and tossed it at the boy. He did it because he was afraid to walk up to him, and he hoped that money was all he wanted.

The boy looked inside and saw the money: about forty dollars, although he didn’t count it. He threw the wallet back.

“Let’s play ‘Mother May I,’ ” the boy said.

Perry turned to walk for the phone, but stopped. The gleam he saw out of the corner of his eye was the knife: not the Swiss army knife, but the other one — a knife you would use for skinning animals.

“I know your brother,” the boy said to Francie.

Perry heard her voice as if it were filtering through something. “You do?” Francie said.

“And I know your friend Freed better than he told you. I slept with your friend Freed. That’s why I can’t understand his pretending I was just some hitchhiker at your party. He was going to give me the car. The plan was, he was going to buy a car from your brother, and he was going to sell me his car.” The boy’s voice changed. “His car wasn’t worth anything,” he said.

Francie looked at Perry. He was too frightened to do what he wanted to do and look back at her reassuringly.

“I don’t understand,” Francie said.

Perry held out the wallet again but didn’t throw it.

“Do you think I’m lying?” the boy said. “You didn’t know that he picked me up hitching two days before he brought me here? I was on my way somewhere else, but he took me home with him and then he brought me to your party.”

“We don’t know anything about it,” Perry said. “You can have any money we have if you’ll get out.”

“Where’s your brother’s car?” the boy said to Francie.

“I don’t—” Francie broke off, not wanting to say that she had no brother. “I don’t know anything about what Freed told you.”

Francie saw that Perry was staring at something and followed his line of vision. She saw the sofa cushion, sliced down the middle.

“I wanted to come here and be friendly, but you know, I didn’t think you’d feel friendly toward me. I thought maybe you’d act like you were, and that you might be liberal-minded about the mistake with your friend Freed’s car — particularly if I showed you this — but I thought, you understand — that I wanted your money more than I wanted your friendship. But then I thought I’d serenade you and you’d come downstairs and we might be friendly too. I thought I could explain to you about Freed.”

Francie looked at Perry, her hands clenched in front of her; the ladylike gesture seemed grotesque in context.

“I see what you’re saying about Freed,” Perry said.

The boy smiled what looked like a genuine smile. “Then you understand about the car.”

“Sure,” Perry said.

“Do you know that game, ‘Mother May I?’ ” the boy said to Francie.

She looked again to Perry. He stood there with his arms at his side, his billfold in one hand, the other hand making a fist and releasing it.

“Does she know the game?” he said to Perry.

“No,” Perry said. He was wondering why some of their friends who were always around didn’t show up.

“It’s such an easy game!” the boy said. “I tell you to do something, Francie, and you have to ask, ‘Mother may I?’ before doing it. You lose if you do something without asking permission. You see? It’s a fucked-up game.”

The boy was the only one who smiled at this.

“If you want our money, you can have it,” Perry said again.

“I’m not talking about money now,” the boy said. “I’m talking about a game. If, for instance, you wish to ask, ‘Mother may I give you my money?’ and then wait for me to give an answer, I might say yes.”

“Mother may I give you our money?” Perry said quickly. He held out his billfold.

“I’m not your mother, you blind son of a bitch,” the boy said, and turned his smile into a laugh. “I used to work in a restaurant and carve centerpieces out of ice.”

“Please,” Perry said. “Take our money and whatever else you want from the house and go.”

“Why aren’t we playing the game?” the boy said. He seemed to be genuinely puzzled. “Are you too fucked-up to play this game?”

They stood there silently.

“I was Freed’s friend, but I’m not good enough to be your friend, am I? Do you think your brother doesn’t like me, Francie, and that’s why the car deal fell through?”

Perry held out his billfold again.

“You’re a fucking coward,” the boy said. “I don’t want to see that again.”

Perry put it in his pocket.

“Take out the money,” the boy said then.

Perry removed his billfold and took the money out of it. He couldn’t throw the bills at the boy because they wouldn’t reach him, and he didn’t want to go closer.

“Say, ‘Mother may I give you the money?’ ”

Perry didn’t say it. He took a few steps closer and held out his hand. When the boy made no move, Perry said what the boy wanted.

“No!” the boy said and laughed.

“Make him get out,” Francie said to Perry.

“And then you’d be so happy!” the boy said suddenly. “You’d have no money, and one of you would have lost a car, but they’d find the car for you, and I might not even have wrecked it, and you could get more money and you could buy a deadbolt lock for your door — that’s what you’re supposed to have, Francie, not leave your door swinging open.”

“I didn’t,” Francie said to Perry. She stared at him, wanting him to agree with her.

“You want to lock your doors,” the boy said. “There are so many crazy people. Your friend, for instance — Freed. I could tell from the way he was acting toward me that you didn’t understand what was going on. I came back to set you straight. I know you probably think I came back to kill you, but the truth is, I decided I needed a car and some money for gas, and I thought I’d turn on the radio while I waited. If you wanted to give me your car keys, Francie, and if you wanted to get your money, I’d be grateful.”

Francie turned toward the backpack that hung from one strap on the doorknob, and the knife whizzed past her shoulder and stuck in the door. Perry was going to dive for it, but the knife was in too deeply; he would never get it out in time.

“Mother may I?” the boy said.

Francie sucked in her breath. It was a long time before she spoke, and said, “Mother may I get my money?”

“I’ll get it,” the boy said. He got up and Francie jumped back, next to Perry. The boy looked at the two of them and nodded politely. He had the Swiss army knife drawn, and as he spoke he began clicking out the parts; Perry looked at the corkscrew snap out. With his free hand the boy groped through her backpack for her wallet, found it and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Just like that,” the boy said, “I got everything I wanted, and now I can be going. Only I want your assurance that you won’t call the police.”

“No,” Francie said. “We won’t.”

“We won’t call,” Perry said, his voice overlaying hers.

“Do you think you’ll get a bolt for your door, Francie?” the boy said.

Francie was looking at the sofa cushion.

“She learns fast,” the boy said to Perry. “She learned the game and she knows what to do now. I’ve actually performed quite a service for you, Francie.”

The boy’s T-shirt said NATIONAL HOTEL, BLOCK ISLAND, R.I. When he got up to cross the room, the fly fell off his temple. Under the smeared glue Perry could see blood — the fly had been glued there to cover a sore.

“Of course, I could stay much longer,” the boy said. He paused dramatically. “But I hate to drive in rush hour,” he said.

Then he was gone. Neither of them moved toward the door. All the time he had been pulling knives out of his pocket, Perry had seen the butt of a gun sticking out of his pants pocket. Except for coming together, neither of them moved again until they heard the car screeching out of the driveway. Then Francie exhaled and he put his arm around her. He noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling. When he locked his fingers together, he could feel the joints vibrating against each other.

“It’s the first time I ever wanted to be old,” Francie said. “I thought I was going to die.”

They went to the kitchen to call the police, but the boy had cut the phone cord. The receiver, with a stub of cord, was placed on the top of the refrigerator, in a basket of apples. He had also slashed through one of Francie’s self-portraits, the one that had been propped in the kitchen for months. He had slashed her head until it was unrecognizable, but the body was untouched. Francie put her hand over her mouth when she saw that. And since there was no way to call the police, Perry went back to her.

“What if Meagan had been there?” she whispered. “And what was he saying about Freed — was there any sense to that?”

Perry snapped off the radio. For the first time since coming down the stairs and seeing the boy, Francie was crying. She was crying as hard as she had been the night before, when she got to the top of the stairs.

“All right, let’s take it from the top,” T.W. said, banging a Bic pen instead of a baton on Perry’s table instead of on a conductor’s podium.

The band started up, perfectly together, until suddenly Roger, swaying back and forth, wearing his Harvard letter sweater and a pair of cut-offs, lifted his trumpet and blared out the first bars of “Young At Heart.”

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Borka said. She cupped her hand and pretended to be speaking into a microphone. “And now I’d like to do an old favorite of mine: ‘As Time Goes By.’ ” Borka leaned into her hand again.

Everybody in the band was convulsed except T.W., who said, “All right, you piss-holes, we get the song down right or we practice all night.”

Borka stepped back behind the bass. Roger put down his trumpet.

“Here we go,” T.W. said, tapping the pen.

The band started playing, perfectly together. Less than ten seconds into the song, Roger picked up his trumpet and loudly blew the beginning of “Young At Heart” again.

“Oh fuck,” T.W. said, shouting above everyone’s laughter. “Somebody take his pipe away from him.”

Borka leaned her bass against the wall and lifted the ashtray with the pipe of grass burning in it from the floor and put it on the table by T.W. Roger glared at her.

“If you screw us up again, I’m going to stab your eyes out,” T.W. said, holding out the Bic pen to Roger. Roger looked humble. T.W. was in a bad mood because he had agreed to play for a bar mitzvah, on Long Island, and he hated things like that. Nobody in the band wanted to do it either, except that they all needed the money. Halfway through the next song, there was more activity. Dickie was wrestling with Roger. They all turned and saw Roger’s horn lifted in the air. Dickie had gotten it away from him and was handing it to Borka.

“You’re all a bunch of fucking imbeciles,” T.W. said and threw the pen into the center of the group and slammed out of the house.

“I got his horn! He’s going to sit this song out!” Dickie called after T.W., but it was no use. The door slammed before Dickie had finished speaking. Dickie sighed and handed Roger his horn back.

“What’s going on?” Perry said, coming downstairs. Everybody looked at him gloomily, and no one answered. “What?” Perry said.

“Roger made T.W. mad,” Borka said.

“ ‘You must remember this,’ ” Roger boomed, a capella.

“ ‘A kiss is just a kiss,’ ” Borka sang, in an unnaturally high voice.

Roger picked up his trumpet. He thrust out his hips and raised his horn high, over his head, playing “As Time Goes By.”

“I think he’s getting not very funny,” Dickie said, brushing past Perry to get a beer in the kitchen. “I think Roger’s acting like a moron.”

The rest of the band sat slumped on the floor, enduring Roger’s song.

“All right!” T.W. screamed, rushing back into the house. “On your feet. Roger, you put your horn away and go sit across the room. We’re going to do this practice so we can do the job and get it over with.”

“Why do we have to play at a circumcision?” Roger said.

“Shut up, Roger,” T.W. said.

“I’m going to play ‘As Time Goes By’ at the circumcision.”

“Go sit in that chair, Roger,” T.W. said, pointing to Perry’s Morris chair. “If we have to tie you into it and stuff your sweater into your mouth, we’re going to do that.”

Roger skulked off to the chair. Everybody stared at him, and nobody smiled.

“Now let’s play this fucking song,” T.W. said.

Perry sighed and wandered into the kitchen to see if there was any meatloaf left over from dinner the night before. There was a small end slice, and he picked it up in his fingers and ate it. He thought about taking part of it to Francie but ate it all himself. For the past several days, not at all distracted by the band, she had been making a sketch for a huge painting she wanted to do of all her friends. They were going to be standing on the canvas holding hands, like paper dolls. It was a realistic painting except that Francie had sketched a horn in place of Roger’s arm, and she had put a fox’s head on T.W.’s body and a chicken head on Borka’s body. T.W. and Borka were sleeping together.

It was August, and hot in the house. Several of the screens were ripped, and there were a lot of flies buzzing around. At dawn the flies would dive-bomb everybody. The last several nights, Perry had bought the newspaper so he could roll it up and hunt flies.

Francie had put her house up for sale. Nobody had made a good offer yet, and she was getting anxious for it to be sold: she didn’t feel right about taking Perry’s money, and all the money she had now was what she had made from the sales at the gallery in New York where her show had opened. The show had been a success, and Francie was getting what she wanted — she was going to be famous, all of them were sure. That afternoon a man who was writing about contemporary women artists was coming to Vermont to interview her. She had gone upstairs to sketch because all of them had been teasing her. Roger had said that when the man came, he was going to open the door naked. Perry worried that Roger might really do it now that he was so stoned, but he didn’t say that to Francie. He just listened carefully for the car so he could be the one who opened the door. He figured that if Roger started to throw off his clothes, the band would tackle him.

On the calendar in the kitchen was penciled: “Miner—Village Voice.” It was hard to believe that someone was coming to interview Francie — that Francie was living in his house, in the first place, and that someone was coming here to interview her. He wanted to stay with her when the interview took place, but she had already told him that she didn’t want him there; she didn’t want any protection and, it was true, she didn’t need any.

He was very proud of her. Some days he thought that his importance in life was to take care of other people — that he would be remembered as the person who housed them and looked after them: T.W.’s band was going to be famous, he was sure, and when Miner’s piece came out in the Voice, Francie was going to be interviewed much more, and have more shows. It made him slightly sorry for himself that there was nothing he excelled at. He had done a good job finishing the inside of his house, but there were a lot of people who did good carpentry work.

He wanted to ask her to marry him now, before she was famous, but he didn’t dare. She had had nothing but withering things to say about marriage since her own marriage had gone bad, and although she liked Nick and Anita, she also thought their togetherness was a little ridiculous. He was embarrassed at what he wanted lately: to have T.W. and the band go away, to have the house to him and Francie, to marry her.

He went upstairs. She was where he had left her, painting.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She laughed at him; they both knew he was being petulant, that he was more nervous about the interview than she was. He was standing and admiring the work she had done that day when they heard the car in the driveway. Francie pretended indifference and went on painting. He looked out the window and saw the old Saab pull into the drive, and the man, the interviewer, get out of the car. He had a backpack that he put on, nudging away Perry’s neighbor’s puppy with his foot. The puppy kept yapping, so finally the man bent and patted it. He stood outside his car a minute, stroking the puppy’s ear, not realizing that anyone was watching. He stood there, sizing everything up: the rainbow Borka had painted on the front door, the cars in the drive, the puppy running in circles, the loud music from T.W.’s band. Then he came toward the house, one hand smoothing down his hair in the back, amused — Perry was suddenly sure, from the slight smile on his that he was about to interview someone in a commune.

Perry turned away from the window to answer the door; the phone rang.