Sourland

Pumpkin-Head

In late March there’d been a sleet storm through north central New Jersey. Her husband had died several days before. There was no connection, she knew. Except since that time she’d begun to notice at twilight a curious glisten to the air. Often she found herself in the doorway of her house, or outside — not remembering how she’d gotten there. For long minutes she stared seeing how, as colors faded, the glassy light emerged from both the sky and from the Scotch pines surrounding the house. It did not seem to her a natural light and in weak moments she thought This is the crossing-over time. She stared not certain what she might be seeing. She felt aroused, vigilant. She felt apprehension. She wondered if the strange glisten to the air had always been there but in her previous, protected life she hadn’t noticed it.

This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, headlights turned into the driveway, some distance away at the road. She was startled into wakefulness — at first not sure where she was. Then she realized, Anton Kruppe was dropping by to see her at about this time.

Dropping by he’d said. Or maybe she’d said Why don’t you drop by.

She couldn’t see his face distinctly. He did appear to be driving a pickup truck with indistinct white letters on its side. Out of the driver’s seat in the high cab of the truck he climbed down and lurched toward her on the shadowy path — a tall male scarecrow figure with a misshapen Halloween pumpkin for a head.

What a shock! Hadley backed away, not knowing what she was seeing.

The grinning pumpkin-head on a man’s shoulders, its leering cutout eyes not lighted from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, but dark, glassy. And the voice issuing through the grinning slash-mouth in heavily accented English:

“Ma’am? Is correct address? You are — lady of the house?”

She laughed, nervously. She supposed she was meant to laugh.

With grating mock-gravity the voice persevered: “You are — resident here, ma’am? I am — welcome here? Yes?”

It was a joke. One of Anton Kruppe’s awkward jokes. He’d succeeded in frightening Hadley though probably that hadn’t been his intention, probably he’d just meant to make her laugh. It was embarrassing that she’d been genuinely frightened for she had known perfectly well that Anton was coming of course. And who else but Anton Kruppe would show up like this, with a Halloween pumpkin for a head?

Hadley scarcely knew the man. She felt a stab of dismay, that she’d invited him to drop by. Impulsively she’d invited him and of course he’d said yes.

At the co-op, Anton was the most eager and courteous of workers. He was the one to joke with customers, and to laugh at his own jokes; he was boyish, vulnerable and touching; his awkward speech was itself a kind of laughter, not fully intelligible yet contagious. For all his clumsiness you could tell that he was an exceptionally intelligent man. Hadley could see that he’d gone to painstaking trouble carving the Halloween pumpkin-head: it was large, bulbous, weirdly veined and striated, twice the size of a normal man’s head, with triangular eyes, triangular nose, grinning mouth studded with fang-teeth. Somehow, he’d managed to force the thing over his head — Hadley couldn’t quite see how.

“How ingenious, Anton! Did you — carve it yourself?”

This was the sort of inane question you asked Anton Kruppe. For you had to say something, to alleviate the strain of the man’s aggressive-doggy eagerness to please, to impress, to make you laugh. Hadley recalled the previous time Anton had dropped by the house to see her, which had been the first time, the previous week; the forced and protracted conversation between them when Anton hadn’t seemed to know how to depart, after Hadley had served him coffee and little sandwiches made of multigrain bread; his lurching over her, his spasm of a handshake and his clumsy wet kiss on her cheek that had seemed to sting her, and to thrill her, like the brush of a bat’s wings.

“Yes ma’am. You think — you will buy?”

“That depends, Anton. How much…”

“For you, ma’am — ‘no charge’!”

This forced joke, how long would it be kept up, Hadley wondered in exasperation. In middle school, boys like Anton Kruppe were snubbed by their classmates — Ha ha very funny! — but once you were an adult, how could you discourage such humor without being rude? Anton was considerably younger than Hadley, as much as ten or twelve years, though looking older than his age, as Hadley looked younger than her age; he’d been born in what was now called Bosnia, brought to the United States by a surviving grandparent, he’d gone to American schools including MIT yet had not become convincingly American in all those years.

Trying too hard, Hadley thought. The sign of the foreign-born.

In a kind of anxious triumph, sensing his hostess’s exasperation yet determined not to acknowledge it, Anton swung the lurid pumpkin-head down from his shoulders, in his chafed-looking big-knuckled hands. Now Hadley could see that the pumpkin wasn’t whole but only two-thirds of a shell — it had been gutted and carved and its back part cut away — the back of what would be, in a human skull, the cranium. So the uncanny pumpkin-head was only a kind of pumpkin-mask set on Anton’s shoulders and held in place by hand. Yet so lifelike — as the scarecrow-figure lurched up the walk in her direction the face had appeared alive.

Could have sworn, the eye-sockets had glared merrily at her.

“Is good? Is — surprise? ‘Happy Halloween’ — is right?”

Was it Halloween? Hadley was sure it was not. October thirty-first wasn’t for another several days.

“Is for you — Hedley. To set here.”

Flush-faced now and smiling in his shyly aggressive manner that was a plea for her, the rich American woman, to laugh at him, and with him; to laugh in the spontaneous way in which Americans laughed together, mysteriously bonded in their crude American humor. On his angular face and in his stiff-wiry hair that receded sharply from his forehead were bits of pumpkin-flesh and seeds at which Anton wiped, surreptitiously, like a boy whose nose is running, wiping at his nose. Hadley thought If he kisses me he will smell of pumpkin.

Her husband had died and abandoned her. Now, other men would drop by the house.

Anton presented Hadley with the misshapen pumpkin. The damned thing must have weighed fifteen pounds. Almost, it slipped from her hands. Hadley thought it would have served Anton Kruppe right if she’d dropped the pumpkin and it smashed on the brick. No doubt, he’d have offered to clean it up, then.

“Anton, thank you! This is very…”

Their hands brushed together. Anton was standing close beside her. He was several inches taller than Hadley though his posture was slouched, his back prematurely rounded. Perhaps there was something wrong with his spine. And he breathed quickly, audibly — as if he’d been running. As if he were about to declare something — then thought better of it.

At the organic food and gardening co-op where Hadley had once shopped frequently, when she’d prepared elaborate meals for herself and her husband, and now only shopped from time to time, tall lanky Anton Kruppe had appeared perhaps a year ago. He’d always been alert and attentive to her — the co-op manager addressed her as Mrs. Schelle. Since late March in her trance of self-absorption that was like a narcotic to her — in fact, to get through the worst of her insomniac nights Hadley had to take sleeping pills which left her dazed and groggy through much of the day — she’d scarcely been aware of Anton Kruppe except as a helpful and persistent presence, a worker who seemed always to be waiting on her. It was just recently that he’d dared to be more direct: asking if he might see her. Asking if he might drop by her house after the co-op closed one evening, to bring her several bags of peat moss that were too heavy and cumbersome for Hadley to remove from the trunk of her car by herself. He’d offered to spread the peat moss wherever she wanted it spread.

Hadley had hesitated before saying yes. It was true, she was attracted to Anton Kruppe, to a degree. He reminded her of foreign-born classmates in her school, in north Philadelphia; pasty-faced skinny boys with round eyeglasses, tortured ways of speaking as if their tongues were malformed. Hadley had been attracted to them, but she’d never befriended them. Not even the lonely girls had she befriended. And now in weak moments she was grateful for anyone who was kind to her; since her husband’s premature death she’d felt eviscerated, worthless. There is not one person to whom you matter, now. This is the crossing-over. For long entranced minutes like one in a hypnotic state she found herself listening to a voice not her own yet couched in the cadences of her own most intimate speech. This voice did not accuse her nor did the voice pass judgment on her yet she knew herself judged, contemptible. Not one person. This is the crossing-over.

She had signed the paper for her husband’s cremation. In her memory distorted and blurred by tears as if undersea her own name had been printed on the contract, beside her husband’s name. Signing for him, she’d signed for herself as well. It was finished for her, all that was over — the life of the emotions, the ability to feel.

Yet with another part of her mind Hadley remained alert, prudent. She was not an adventurous woman, still less was she reckless. She had been married to one man for nearly twenty years, she was childless and had virtually no family. She had a circle of friends in whom she confided sparingly — often, it was her closest friends whom she avoided, since March. Never would she have consented to a stranger dropping by her house except she’d learned that Anton Kruppe was a post-doc fellow in the prestigious Molecular Biology Institute; he had a Ph.D. from MIT and he’d taught at Cal Tech; his area of specialization was microbial genetics. She’d seen him at a string quartet recital on campus, once. Another time, walking along the canal towpath, alone. Wearing earphones, head sharply bowed, his mouth working as if he were arguing with someone and so lost in concentration his gaze drifted over Hadley unseeing — his favored co-op customer in cable-knit sweater, wool slacks and boots, a cap pulled low over her head, invisible to him.

She’d liked it that Anton Kruppe hadn’t noticed her, at that moment. That she could observe the young man without his observing her. Thinking He’s a scientist. He won’t see anything that isn’t crucial for him to see.

Now, in her house, Hadley felt a frisson of power over her awkward visitor. He could not have been more than twenty-nine — Hadley was thirty-nine. She was certain that Anton hadn’t known her husband or even that she’d had a husband, who had died. (Hadley still wore her engagement and wedding ring of course.) Her power, she thought, lay in her essential indifference to the man, to his very maleness: his sexuality clumsy as an odd-sized package he was obliged to carry, to proffer to strangers like herself. He had the malnourished look of one who has been rebuffed many times yet remains determined. There are men of surpassing ugliness with whom women fall in love in the mysterious way of women but Anton Kruppe didn’t possess anything like a charismatic ugliness; his maleness was of another species altogether. Thinking of this, Hadley felt a swell of elation. If he kisses me tonight he will smell of — garbage.

Hadley was smiling. She saw how Anton stared at her, as if her smile was for him.

She thanked him for the pumpkin another time. Her voice was warm, welcoming. What an “original” gift it was, and so “cleverly” carved.

Anton’s face glowed with pleasure. “W-Wait, Hedley! — there is more.”

Hedley he called her. At the co-op, Mrs. Schelle with an emphasis on the final e. Hadley felt no impulse to correct him.

With boyish enthusiasm Anton seized Hadley’s hand — her fingers must have been icy, unresponsive — and pulled her with him out to the driveway. In the rear of the pickup was a large pot of what appeared to be cream-colored chrysanthemums, past their prime, and a long narrow cardboard box of produce — gnarly carrots with foot-long untrimmed greens, misshapen peppers and pears, bruised MacIntosh apples the co-op couldn’t sell even at reduced prices. And a loaf of multigrain bread that, Anton insisted, had been baked only that morning but hadn’t sold and so would be labeled “day-old” the next morning. “In this country there is much ignorant prejudice of ‘day-old’ — everything has to be ‘new’ — ‘perfect shape’ — it is a mystery to me why if to 6 P.M. when the co-op closes this bread is good to sell but tomorrow by 8:30 A.M. when the co-op opens — it is ‘old.’ In the place where we come from, my family and neighbors…” Moral vehemence thickened Anton’s accent, his breath came ever more audibly.

Hadley would have liked to ask Anton more about his background.

He’d lived through a nightmare, she knew. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Yet, she felt uneasy in his presence. Very likely, it had been a mistake to have invited the eccentric young molecular biologist to drop by her house a second time; she didn’t want to mislead him. She was a widow who had caused her husband to be burnt to ashes and was unrepentant, unpunished. Since March declining invitations from friends who had known her and her husband for years. Impatient with their solicitude, their concern for her who did not deserve such concern. I’m sorry! I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to leave the house. I’m very tired. I don’t sleep any longer. I go to bed and can’t sleep and at 1 A.M. I will take a sleeping pill. At 4 A.M. I will take another. Forget me! I am something that is finished.

Thinking now that possibly she didn’t have to invite her awkward visitor into the house, a second time; maybe Anton wouldn’t notice her rudeness — wouldn’t know enough to interpret it as rudeness. He’d set the mums and the box with the produce onto a white wrought-iron bench near Hadley’s front walk and was now leading Hardley around the side of the large sprawling stone-and-timber house as he’d done previously, as if he’d been summoned for this purpose. He’d boasted to Hadley of being “Mister Fix-It” — he was the “Mister Fix-It” of his lab at the Institute — his quick, critical eye took in the broken flagstones in the terrace behind Hadley’s house which he’d “repair” — “replace” — for her, on another visit; with the scrutiny of a professional mason he stooped to examine corroding mortar at the base of the back wall of the house; he examined the warped and lopsided garden gate which he managed to fix with a deft motion of his hands — “Now! It is good as ‘new’ — eh?” — laughing as if he’d said something unexpectedly witty. Hadley was grateful that Anton had made no mention of the alarming profusion of weeds amid a lush tangle of black-eyed Susans, Russian sage and morning glory vines in her husband’s garden that had not been cultivated this year but allowed to grow wild.

“Thank you, Anton! Truly you are — ‘Mister Fix-It.’”

Hadley spoke with more warmth than she’d intended. It was her social manner — bright, a little blurred, insincere and animated.

There was something admirable — unless there was something daunting, aggressive — about her visitor’s energy — that brimmed and thrummed like rising yeast. Hadley would have supposed that after a day presumably spent at the molecular biology lab — work-weeks in such labs could run beyond one hundred hours during crucial experiments — and several hours at the co-op Anton would have been dazed with exhaustion; yet there he was, tireless in his inspection of the exterior of Hadley’s house — inspecting windows, locks, dragging aside broken limbs and storm debris. You’d think that Anton Kruppe was an old friend of the family for whom the discovery that one of the floodlights on Hadley’s garage had burnt out was something of a coup, arousing him to immediate action — “You have a bulb to replace — yes? And a ladder with ‘steps’ — ‘step-ladder’ —? I will put in — now — before it is too dark.”

So adamant, Hadley had no choice but to give in.

And no choice except to invite Anton Kruppe inside, for just a while.

Politely and with regret explaining that she had a dinner engagement, later that evening. But would he come inside, for a drink?

“Hedley yes thank you! I would like — yes so much.”

Stammering with gratitude Anton scraped his hiking boots against the welcome mat. The soles were muddy and stuck with leaves. Though Hadley insisted it wasn’t necessary Anton removed the boots with a grunt and left them on the front step carefully placed side by side. What large boots they were, like a horse’s hooves! The sodden shoelaces trailed out — left, right — in perfect symmetry.

Inside, most of the downstairs rooms were dark. Now it was late October night came quickly. Pleasantly excited, a little nervous, Hadley went about switching on lights. There was a curious intimacy between her and Anton Kruppe, in this matter of switching on lights. Hadley heard her voice warmly uplifted — no idea what she was saying — as her tall lanky guest in his stocking feet — soiled-looking gray wool socks — came to stand at the threshold of the living room — stared into the interior of the long beautifully furnished living room with a shoulder-high stone fireplace at its farther end, book-filled shelves, Chinese carpets on a gleaming hardwood floor. Above the fireplace was a six-by-eight impressionist New England landscape of gorgeous pastel colors that drew the eye to it, as in a vortex.

Excitedly Anton Kruppe asked — was the painting by Cezanne?

“‘Cezanne’! Hardly.”

Hadley laughed, the question was so naïve. Except for surreal pastel colors and a high degree of abstraction in the rendering of massed tree trunks and foliage, there was little in the Wolf Kahn canvas to suggest the earlier, great artist.

Outside, while Anton changed the floodlight, Hadley had been thinking I will offer him coffee. That’s enough for tonight. But now that they were out of the October chill and inside the warm house it was a drink — wine — she offered him: a glass of dark red Catena wine, from a bottle originally purchased by her husband. Anton thanked her profusely calling her “Hedley” — a flush of pleasure rose into his odd, angular face. In his wiry hair that was the color of ditch water a small pumpkin seed shone.

Hadley poured herself a half-glass of wine. Her hand shook just slightly. She thought If I don’t offer him a second glass. If I don’t ask him to stay.

Since there was an opened jar of Brazilian nuts on the sideboard, Hadley offered these to Anton, too. A cascade of nuts into a blue-ceramic bowl.

Gratefully Anton drank, and Anton ate. Thirstily, hungrily. Drifting about Hadley’s living room peering at her bookshelves, in his gray wool socks. Excitedly he talked — he had so much to say! — reminding Hadley of a chattering bird — a large endearingly gawky bird like an ostrich — long-legged, long-necked, with a beaky face, quick-darting inquisitive eyes. So sharply his hair receded from his forehead, it resembled some sort of garden implement — a hand trowel? — and his upper body, now he’d removed his nylon parka, was bony, concave. Hadley thought He would be waxy-pale, beneath. A hairless chest. A little potbelly, and spindly legs.

Hadley laughed. Already she’d drunk half her glass of wine. A warm sensation suffused her throat and in the region of her heart.

Politely Hadley tried to listen — to concentrate — as her eccentric guest chattered rapidly and nervously and with an air of schoolboy enthusiasm. How annoying Anton was! Like many shy people once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand of changing the subject; he had no idea how to engage another in conversation. Like a runaway vehicle down a hill he plunged on, head-on, heedless. And yet, there was undeniably something attractive about him.

More incensed now, impassioned — though he seemed to be joking, too — speaking of American politics, American pop culture, “American fundamentist ignorance” about stem-cell research. And how ignorant, more than ninety percent of Americans believed in God — and in the devil.

Hadley frowned at this. Ninety percent? Was this so? It didn’t seem plausible that as many people would believe in the devil, as believed in God.

“Yes, yes! To believe in the Christian God is to believe in His enemy — the devil. That is known.”

With his newfound vehemence Anton drained his glass of the dark red Catena wine and bluntly asked of his hostess if he might have more? — helping himself at the sideboard to a second, full glass and scooping up another handful of the Brazilian nuts. Hadley wondered if he meant to be rude — or simply didn’t know better. “I can’t really think,” she persisted, “that as many Americans believe in the devil, as believe in God. I’m sure that isn’t so. Americans are — we are — a tolerant nation…”

How smug this sounded. Hadley paused not knowing what she meant to say. The feral-dark wine had gone quickly to her head.

With a snort of derision Anton said, “‘A tolerant nation’ — is it? Such ‘tolerance’ as swallows up and what it cannot, it makes of an enemy.”

“‘Enemy’? What do you mean?”

“It makes of war. First is declared the enemy, then the war.”

Anton laughed harshly, baring his teeth. Chunky yellow teeth they were, and the gums pale-pink. Seeing how Hadley stared at him he said, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “First there is the ‘tolerance’ — then, the ‘pre-empt strike.’”

Hadley’s face flushed with the heat of indignation. This was insulting — it had to be deliberate — Anton Kruppe who’d lived in the United States for much of his life knew very well the history of the Iraq War, how Americans were misled, deceived by the Republican leadership. Of course he knew. She opened her mouth to protest bitterly then thought better of it.

Surreptitiously she glanced at her wristwatch. Only 6:48 P.M.! Her guest had been inside the house less than a half hour but the strain of his visit was such, it seemed much longer.

Still Anton was prowling about, staring. Artifacts from trips Hadley and her husband had taken, over the years — Indonesian pottery, African masks, urns, wall hangings, Chinese wall scrolls and watercolors, beautifully carved wooden figures from Bali. A wall of brightly colored “primitive” paintings from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala. Yet more, the books on Hadley’s shelves seemed to intrigue Anton, as if these hundreds of titles acquired years ago, if not decades ago, mostly by Hadley’s husband who’d earned both a Ph.D. in European history and a law degree from Columbia University, possessed an immediate, singular significance and were not rather relics of a lost and irretrievable private past.

“You have read all these, Hedley — yes?”

Hadley laughed, embarrassed. No, she had not.

“Then — someone else? All these?”

Hadley laughed again, uncertain. Was Anton Kruppe mocking her? She felt a slight repugnance for the man, who peered at her, as at her art-objects and bookshelves, with an almost hostile intensity; yet she could not help it, so American was her nature, so female, she was anxious that he should like her, and admire her — if that could be settled, she would send him away, in triumph.

Remembering the foreign-born children at her schools. In middle school they had seemed pitiful, objects of sympathy, charity, and condescension, if not derision; in high school, overnight it seemed they’d become A-students, star athletes. A drivenness to them, the complacent Americans had mistaken initially as weakness.

In soiled wool socks Anton continued to prowl about. Hadley had not invited him to explore her house — had she? His manner was more childlike than aggressive. Hadley supposed that Anton’s own living quarters in university-owned housing were minimal, cramped. A row of subsidized faculty housing along the river…“Ah! This is — ‘solar-room’?” They were in a glass-walled room at the rear of the stone house, that had been added to the house by Hadley and her husband; the “solarium,” intended to be sun-warmed, was furnished with white wicker furniture, chintz pillows and a white wrought-iron table and chairs as in an outdoor setting. But now the room was darkened and shadowed and the bright festive chintz colors were undistinguishable. Only through the vertical glass panels shone a faint crescent moon, entangled in the tops of tall pines. Anton was admiring yet faintly sneering, taunting:

“Such a beautiful house — it is old, is it? — so big, for one person. You are so very lucky, Hedley. You know this, yes?”

Lucky! Hadley smiled, confused. She tried to see this.

“Yes, I think so. I mean — yes.”

“So many houses in this ‘village’ as it is called — they are so big. For so few people. On each acre of land, it may be one person — the demographics would show. Yes?”

Hadley wasn’t sure what Anton Kruppe was saying. A brash sort of merriment shone in his eyes, widened behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed schoolboy glasses.

He asked Hadley how long she’d lived in the house and when she told him since 1988, when she and her husband had moved here, he’d continued smiling, a pained fixed smile, but did not ask about her husband. He must know, then. Someone at the co-op has told him.

Bluntly Anton said, “Yes, it is ‘luck’ — America is the land of ‘opportunity’ — all that is deserved, is not always granted.”

“But it wasn’t ‘luck’ — my husband worked. What we have, he’d earned.”

“And you, Hedley? You have ‘earned’ — also?”

“I–I — I don’t take anything for granted. Not any longer.”

What sort of reply this was, a stammered resentful rush of words, Hadley had no clear idea. She was uneasy, Anton peered at her closely. It was as if the molecular biologist was trying to determine the meaning of her words by staring at her. A kind of perverse echolocation — was that the word? — the radar-way of bats tossing high-pitched beeps of sound at one another. Except Anton was staring, his desire for the rich American woman came to him through the eyes…Hadley saw that the pumpkin seed — unless it was a second seed, or a bit of pumpkin-gristle — glistened in his wiry hair, that looked as if it needed shampooing and would be coarse to the touch. Except she could not risk the intimacy, she felt a reckless impulse to pluck it out.

He would misunderstand. He is such a fool, he would misinterpret.

But if I wanted a lover. A lover for whom I felt no love.

As if Anton had heard these words, his mood changed suddenly. His smile became startled, pained — he was a man for whom pained smiles would have to do. Asking Hadley if there were more repairs for “Mister Fix-It” in her house and Hadley said quickly, “No. No more.”

“Your basement — furnace — that, I could check. I am trained — you smile, Hedley, but it is so. To support myself in school — ”

Hadley was sure she wasn’t smiling. More firmly she thanked Anton and told him she had to leave soon — “I’m meeting friends for dinner in town.”

Clearly this was a lie. Hadley could lie only flatly, brazenly. Her voice quavered, she felt his eyes fixed upon her.

Anton took a step closer. “I would come back another day, if needed. I would be happy to do this, Hedley. You know this — I am your friend Anton — yes?”

“No. I mean — yes. Some other time, maybe.”

Hadley meant to lead her awkward guest back out into the living room, into the lighted gallery and foyer near the front door. He followed in her wake muttering to himself — unless he was talking to Hadley, and meant her to hear — to laugh — for it seemed that Anton was laughing, under his breath. His mood was mercurial — as if he’d been hurt, in the midst of having been roused to indignation. He’d drained his second glass of wine and his movements had become jerky, uncoordinated like those of a partially come-to-life scarecrow.

It was then that Anton began to confide in Hadley, in a lowered and agitated voice: the head of his laboratory at the Institute had cheated him — he’d taken discoveries of Anton Kruppe to claim for his own — he’d published a paper in which Anton was cited merely in a list of graduate assistants — and now, when Anton protested, he was exiling Anton from the lab — he refused to speak to Anton at the Institute and had banished him and so Anton had gone to the university president — demanding to be allowed to speak to the president but of course he’d been turned away — came back next morning hoping to speak with the president and when he was told no, demanding then to speak with the provost — and the university attorney — their offices were near-together in the administration building — all of them were in conspiracy together, with the head of the Institute and the head of Anton’s laboratory — he knew this! — of course, he was not such a fool, to not know this — he’d become excited and someone called security — campus police arrived and led Anton away protesting — they had threatened to turn him over to township police — to be arrested for “trespassing” — “threatening bodily harm” — Anton had been terrified he’d be deported by Homeland Security — he had not yet an American citizenship —

“You are smiling, Hedley? What is the joke?”

Smiling? During this long breathless disjointed speech Hadley had been staring at Anton Kruppe in astonishment.

“It is amusing to you — yes? That all my work, my effort — I am most hardworking in the lab, our supervisor exploits my good nature — he was always saying ‘Anton is the stoic among us’ — what this means, this flattery of Americans, is how you can be used. To be used — that is our purpose, to the Institute. But you must not indicate, that you are in the know.” Anton spoke like one whose grievances are so much in excess of his ability to express them, he might have been the bearer of an ancient, racial burden. “And now — after three years — when my findings are cheated from me and I am of no more use — it is time to toss away into the ‘Dumpster’ — that is good word, good joke, eh? — ‘Dumpster’ — very good American joke — the Institute is saying my contract will not be renewed, for the federal grant is ended. And my supervisor had not ever gotten around to aiding me with my citizenship application, years it has been, of course I have been dialtory myself — I have been working so hard in the lab — yesterday morning it was, the decision came to me by e-mail…You — you must not smile, Hedley! That is very — selfish. That is very selfish and very cruel.”

The indignant man loomed over Hadley. His angular face wasn’t so soft now but hardened with strain. His jaws were clenched like muscles. The trowel-shaped triangle of hair at his hairline was more pronounced and a sweaty-garbagey smell wafted from his heated body. Behind the smudged schoolboy lenses his eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Hadley said nervously, “Maybe you should leave, Anton. I’m expecting friends. I mean…they’re stopping by, to take me with them. To dinner in town…”

Hadley didn’t want her agitated visitor to sense how frightened she was of him. Her mistake was in turning away to lead him to the door. Insulting him. His arm looped around her neck, in an instant they were struggling off balance, he caught at her, and kissed her — kissed and bit at her lips, like a suddenly ravenous rodent — both their wineglasses went flying, clattering to the floor — “You like this, Hedley! This, you want. For this, you asked me.”

He overcame her. She was fighting him, whimpering and trying to scream, trying to draw breath to scream but he’d pushed her down, horribly she was on the floor, pushed down helpless and panicked on the floor of her own house, in terror thinking that Anton was trying to strangle her, then it seemed that he was kissing her, or trying to — in panic she jammed her elbows into his chest, his ribs — his mouth came over hers again — his mouth was wet and ravenous and his teeth closed over her lip, in terror she thought that he would bite off her lip, in a kind of manic elation he was murmuring what sounded like You like me! You want this! Grunting with effort he straddled her, his face was flushed with emotion, fury; he brought his knee up between her legs, roughly; their struggle had become purely physical, and desperate, enacted now in near-silence except for their panting breaths. Hadley had no idea what she was doing moving her head from side to side trying to avoid the man’s mouth, his sharp yellow teeth, the smell of his agitated breath, the mouth was like that of a great sea leech sucking at her, sucking at her tongue, the back of her head was being struck against the hardwood floor Oh! — oh — oh as if he wanted to crack her skull, his fingers were poking and jabbing at her between her legs, in a paroxysm of desperation Hadley managed to squirm out from beneath him, like a panicked animal crawling on hands and knees and almost in that instant she believed that she might escape Anton Kruppe except he had only to lunge after her, seize her ankle in his strong fingers, laughing and climbing over her straddling her again more forcibly this time closing his fingers around her neck so now she knew she could not escape, she knew it was certain, she would die. In a choked voice Anton was saying, “You — want me here! You asked for this. You have no right to laugh at me. You and your ‘trustee’ husband…” In the confusion of the moment Hadley had no idea what Anton was saying. Trustee? Her husband had served on an advisory board for the history department at the university, he’d had no association with the molecular biology institute. She could not have explained this, she had not the strength, or the breath; she felt her assailant’s fingers now poking inside her, she cried out in pain and kicked at him squirming beneath him like a creature desperate to escape a predator yet she had time to think almost calmly This can’t be happening. This is wrong. She seemed to see herself in that instant with a strange stillness and detachment as frequently through her marriage when she’d lain with her husband and made love with her husband and her mind had slipped free and all that was physical, visceral, immediate and not-to-be-halted happening to her was at a little distance, though now tasting the wine on Anton’s tongue, the dark-sour-feral wine taste of a man’s mouth like her own, he’d lost patience now and was jamming at her with two fingers, three fingers forced up inside the soft flesh between her legs which Hadley knew was loathed by the man, he was furious with her there, disgusted with her there, his hatred was pure and fiery for her there as she begged him Please don’t hurt me Anton, I want to be your friend Anton I will help you. It wasn’t wine she was tasting but blood — he’d bitten her upper lip — on his feet now looming over her — his work-trousers unzipped, disheveled — his shirt loose, blood-splattered — he’d managed to get to his feet disengaging himself from her — their tangle of limbs, torn clothing, tears, saliva — he staggered away to the front door — stiff-legged as a scarecrow come partway to life — and was gone.

She lay very still. Where he’d left her, she lay with a pounding heart, bathed in sweat and the smell of him, her brain stuck blank, oblivious of her surroundings until after several minutes — it may have been as many as ten or fifteen minutes — she realized that she was alone. It had not quite happened to her as she’d believed it would happen, the crossing-over.

She managed to get to her feet. She was dazed, sobbing. Some time was required, that she could stand without swaying. Leaning against a chair in the hall, touching the walls. In the opened doorway she stood, staring outside. The front walk was dimly illuminated by a crescent moon overhead. Here was a meager light, a near-to-fading light. She saw that the pumpkin-head had fallen from the step, or had been kicked. On its side it was revealed to be part-shattered, you could see that the back of the cranium was missing. Brains had been scooped out but negligently so that seeds remained, bits of pumpkin-gristle. She stepped outside. Her clothing was torn. Her clothing that was both expensive and tasteful had been torn and was splattered with blood. She wiped at her mouth, that was bleeding. She would run back into the house, she would dial 911. She would report an assault. She would summon help. For badly she required help, she knew that Anton Kruppe would return. Certainly he would return. On the front walk she stood staring toward the road. What she could see of the road in the darkness. On the roadway there were headlights. An unmoving vehicle. It was very dark, a winter-dark had come upon them. She called out, “Hello? Hello? Who is it?” Headlights on the roadway, where his vehicle was parked.

The Story Of The Stabbing

Four years old she’d begun to hear in fragments and patches like handfuls of torn clouds the story of the stabbing in Manhattan that was initially her mother’s story.

That morning in March 1980 when Mrs. Karr drove to New York City alone. Took the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel exit, entered lower Manhattan and crossed Hudson and Greenwich Streets and at West Street turned north, her usual route when she visited an aunt who lived in a fortress-like building resembling a granite pueblo dwelling on West Twenty-seventh Street — but just below Fourteenth Street traffic began abruptly to slow — the right lane was blocked by construction — a din of air hammers assailed her ears — vehicles were moving in spasmodic jerks — Madeleine braked her 1974 Volvo narrowly avoiding rear-ending a van braking to a stop directly in front of her — a tin-colored vehicle with a corroded rear bumper and a New York license plate whose raised numerals and letters were just barely discernible through layers of dried mud like a palimpsest. Overhead were clouds like wadded tissues, a sepia glaze to the late-winter urban air and a stink of diesel exhaust and Madeleine Karr whose claim it was that she loved Manhattan felt now a distinct unease in stalled traffic amid a cacophony of horns, the masculine aggressiveness of horns, for several blocks she’d been aware of the tin-colored van jolting ahead of her on West Street, passing on the right, switching lanes, braking at the construction blockade but at once lurching forward as if the driver had carelessly — or deliberately — lifted his foot from the brake pedal and in so doing caused his right front fender to brush against a pedestrian in a windbreaker crossing West Street — crossing at the intersection though at a red light, since traffic was stalled — unwisely then in a fit of temper the pedestrian in the windbreaker struck the fender with the flat of his hand — he was a burly man of above average height — Madeleine heard him shouting but not the words, distinctly — might’ve been Fuck you! or even Fuck you asshole! — immediately then the van driver leapt out of the van and rushed at the pedestrian — Madeleine blinked in astonishment at this display of masculine contention — Madeleine was expecting to see the men fight together clumsily — aghast then to see the van driver wielding what appeared to be a knife with a considerable blade, maybe six — eight — inches long — so quickly this was happening, Madeleine’s brain could not have identified Knife! — trapped behind the steering wheel of the Volvo like a child trapped in a nightmare Madeleine witnessed an event, an action, to which her dazzled brain could not readily have identified as Stabbing! Murder! — in a rage the man with the knife lashed at the now stunned pedestrian in the windbreaker, who hadn’t time to turn away — striking the man on his uplifted arms, striking and tearing the sleeves of the windbreaker, swiping against the man’s face, then in a wicked and seemingly practiced pendulum motion slashing the man’s throat just below his jaw, right to left, left to right causing blood to spring instantaneously into the air — A six-foot arc of blood at least as Madeleine would describe it afterward, horrified — even as the bleeding man kept walking, staggering forward. Never had Madeleine Karr witnessed anything so horrible — never would Madeleine Karr forget this savage attack in the unsparing clarity of a morning in late March — the spectacle of a living man attacked, stabbed, throat slashed before her eyes and what was most astonishing He kept walking — trying to walk — until he fell. The victim wore what appeared to be work clothes — work-boots — he was at least a decade older than his assailant — late thirties, early forties — bare-headed, with steely-gray hair in a crew cut — only seconds before the attack Madeleine had seen the victim visibly seething with indignation — empowered by rage — the sort of rough-hewn man with whom, alone in the city in such circumstances on West Street just below Fourteenth Street, Madeleine Karr would never have dared to lock eyes. Yet now the burly man in the windbreaker was rendered harmless — stricken — sinking to his knees as his assailant leapt back from him — dancer-like, very quick on his feet — though not quick enough (Madeleine had to suppose) to avoid being splattered by his victim’s blood. Fucker! Moth’fukr! — the van driver mouthed words Madeleine couldn’t hear but comprehended. In the righteousness of his fury the driver made no attempt to hide the bloody knife in his hand — in fact he appeared to be brandishing the knife — ran back to his vehicle, climbed inside and slammed shut the door and in virtually the same instant propelled the van forward head-on and lurching — Madeleine heard the protesting shriek of rubber tires against pavement — reckless now the fleeing man aimed the van into a narrow space between another vehicle and the torn-up roadway where construction workers in safety helmets had ceased work to stare — knocking aside a sawhorse, a series of orange traffic cones scattering in the street and bouncing off other vehicles as in a luridly colorful and comic simulation of bowling pins scattered by an immense bowling ball; by this time the stricken man was kneeling on the pavement desperately pressing both hands — these were bare hands, Madeleine could see from a distance of no more than twelve feet — against his ravaged throat in a gesture of childlike poignancy and futility as blood continued to spurt from him Like water from a hose — horrible!

In a paralysis of horror Madeleine observed the stricken man now fallen — writhing on the pavement in a bright neon-red pool — still clutching desperately at his throat, as if the pressure of his hands could staunch that powerful jet-stream — vaguely Madeleine was becoming aware of a frantic din of horns — traffic was backed up for blocks on northbound West Street as in a nightmare of mangled and thwarted movement like snarled film. Help me! help me out of here! — nothing so mattered to Madeleine Karr as escaping from this nightmare — she was thinking not of the stricken man a short distance from the front bumper of the Volvo — not of his suffering, his terror, his imminent death — she was thinking solely of herself — in raw animal panic yearning only to turn her car around — turn her damned car around, somehow — reverse her course on accursed West Street back to the Holland Tunnel and out of New York City — to the Jersey Turnpike — and so to Princeton from which scarcely ninety minutes before she’d left with such exhilaration, childlike anticipation and defiance Manhattan is so alive! — Princeton is so embalmed. Nothing ever feels real to me here, this life in disguise as a wife and a mother of no more durability than a figure in papier-mâché. I don’t need any of you!

But that was ninety minutes before. Driving along leafy Harrison Street over the picture-book canal to Route 1 north in blustery skidding patches of winter sunshine.

Through a constricting tunnel — as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope — Madeleine became aware of other people — other pedestrians cautiously approaching the dying man — workmen from the construction site — a young patrolman on the run — a second patrolman — there came then a deafening siren — sirens — emergency vehicles approached on a side-street peripheral to Madeleine’s vision — now there were figures bent over the fallen man — the fallen man was lifted onto a stretcher, carried away — until at last there was nothing to see but a pool of something brightly red like old-fashioned Technicolor glistening on the pavement in cold March sunshine. And the nightmare didn’t end. The police questioned all the witnesses they could find. They came for me, they took me to the police precinct. For forty minutes they kept me. I had to beg them, to let me use the women’s room — I couldn’t stop crying — I am not a hysterical person but I couldn’t stop crying — of course I wanted to help the police but I couldn’t seem to remember what anything had looked like — what the men had looked like — even the “skin color” of the man with the knife — even of the man who’d been stabbed. I told them that I thought the van driver had been dark-skinned — maybe — he was “young” — in his twenties possibly — or maybe older — but not much older — he was wearing a satin kind of jacket like a sports jacket like high school boys wear — I think that’s what I saw — I couldn’t remember the color of the jacket — maybe it was dark — dark purple? — a kind of shiny material — a cheap shiny material — maybe there was some sort of design on the back of the jacket — Oh I couldn’t even remember the color of the van — it was as if my eyes had gone blind — the colors of things had drained from them — I’d seen everything through a tunnel — I thought that the van driver with the knife was dark-skinned but not “black” exactly — but not white — I mean not “Caucasian” — because his hair was — wasn’t — his hair didn’t seem to be — “Negroid hair” — if that is a way of describing it. And how tall he was, how heavy, the police were asking, I had no idea, I wasn’t myself, I was very upset, trying to speak calmly and not hysterically, I have never been hysterical in my life. Because I wanted to help the police find the man with the knife. But I could not describe the van, either. I could not identify the van by its make, or by the year. Of course I could not remember anything of the license plate — I wasn’t sure that I’d even seen a license plate — or if I did, it was covered with dirt. The police kept asking me what the men had said to each other, what the pedestrian had said, they kept asking me to describe how he’d hit the fender of the van, and the van driver — the man with the knife — what had he said? — but I couldn’t hear — my car windows were up, tight — I couldn’t hear. They asked me how long the “altercation” had lasted before the pedestrian was stabbed and I said that the stabbing began right away — then I said maybe it had begun right away — I couldn’t be sure — I couldn’t be sure of anything — I was hesitant to give a statement — sign my name to a statement — it was as if part of my brain had been extinguished — trying to think of it now, I can’t — not clearly — I was trying to explain — apologize — I told them that I was sorry I couldn’t help them better, I hoped that other witnesses could help them better and finally they released me — they were disgusted with me, I think — I didn’t blame them — I was feeling weak and sick but all I wanted to do was get back to Princeton, didn’t even telephone anyone just returned to the Holland Tunnel thinking I would never use that tunnel again, never drive on West Street not ever again.

In that late winter of 1980 when Rhonda was four years old the story of the stabbing began to be told in the Karr household on Broadmead Road, Princeton, New Jersey. Many times the story was told and retold but never in the presence of the Karrs’ daughter who was too young and too sensitive for such a terrifying and ugly story and what was worse, a story that seemed to be missing an ending. Did the stabbed man die? — he must have died. Was the killer caught? — he must have been caught. Rhonda could not ask because Rhonda was supposed not to know what had happened, or almost happened, to Mommy on that day in Manhattan when she’d driven in alone as Daddy did not like Mommy to do. Nothing is more evident to a child of even ordinary curiosity and canniness than a family secret, a “taboo” subject — and Rhonda was not an ordinary child. There she stood barefoot in her nightie in the hall outside her parents’ bedroom where the door was shut against her daring to listen to her parents’ lowered, urgent voices inside; silently she came up behind her distraught-sounding mother as Madeleine sat on the edge of a chair in the kitchen speaking on the phone as so frequently Madeleine spoke on the phone with her wide circle of friends. The most horrible thing! A nightmare! It happened so quickly and there was nothing anyone could do and afterward… Glancing around to see Rhonda in the doorway, startled and murmuring Sorry! No more right now, my daughter is listening.

Futile to inquire what Mommy was talking about, Rhonda knew. What had happened that was so upsetting and so ugly that when Rhonda pouted wanting to know she was told Mommy wasn’t hurt, Mommy is all right — that’s all that matters.

And Not fit for the ears of a sweet little girl like you. No no!

Very soon after Mrs. Karr began to tell the story of the stabbing on a Manhattan street, Mr. Karr began to tell the story too. Except in Mr. Karr’s excitable voice the story of the stabbing was considerably altered for Rhonda’s father was not faltering or hesitant like Rhonda’s mother but a professor of American studies at the University, a man for whom speech was a sort of instrument, or weapon, to be boldly and not meekly brandished; and so when Mr. Karr appropriated his wife’s story it was in a zestful storytelling voice like a TV voice — in fact, Professor Gerald Karr was frequently seen on TV — PBS, Channel 13 in New York City — discussing political issues — bewhiskered, with glinting wire-rimmed glasses and a ruddy flushed face. Crude racial justice! Counter-lynching!

Not the horror of the incident was emphasized, in Mr. Karr’s telling, but the irony. For the victim, in Mr. Karr’s version of the stabbing, was a Caucasian male and the delivery-van assailant was a black male — or, variously, a person of color. Rhonda seemed to know that Caucasian meant white, though she had no idea why; she had not heard her mother identify Caucasian, person of color in her accounts of the stabbing for Mrs. Karr dwelt almost exclusively on her own feelings — her fear, her shock, her dismay and disgust — how eager she’d been to return home to Princeton — she’d said very little about either of the men as if she hadn’t seen them really but only just the stabbing It happened so fast — it was just so awful — that poor man bleeding like that! — and no one could help him. And the man with the knife just — drove away… But Mr. Karr who was Rhonda’s Daddy and an important professor at the University knew exactly what the story meant for the young black man with the knife — the young person of color — was clearly one of an exploited and disenfranchised class of urban ghetto dwellers rising up against his oppressors crudely striking as he could, class-vengeance, an instinctive “lynching,” the white victim is collateral damage in the undeclared and unacknowledged but ongoing class war. The fact that the delivery-van driver had stabbed — killed? — a pedestrian was unfortunate of course, Mr. Karr conceded — a tragedy of course — but who could blame the assailant who’d been provoked, challenged — hadn’t the pedestrian struck his vehicle and threatened him — shouted obscenities at him — a good defense attorney could argue a case for self-defense — the van driver was protecting himself from imminent harm, as anyone in his situation might do. For there is such a phenomenon as racial instinct, self-protectiveness. Kill that you will not be killed.

As Mr. Karr was not nearly so hesitant as Mrs. Karr about interpreting the story of the stabbing, in ever more elaborate and persuasive theoretical variants with the passing of time, so Mr. Karr was not nearly so careful as Mrs. Karr about shielding their daughter from the story itself. Of course — Mr. Karr never told Rhonda the story of the stabbing, directly. Rhonda’s Daddy would not have done such a thing for though Gerald Karr was what he called ultra-liberal he did not truly believe — all the evidence of his intimate personal experience suggested otherwise! — that girls and women should not be protected from as much of life’s ugliness as possible, and who was there to protect them but men? — fathers, husbands. Against his conviction that marriage is a bourgeois convention, ludicrous, unenforceable, yet Gerald Karr had entered into such a (legal, moral) relationship with a woman, and he meant to honor that vow. And he would honor that vow, in all the ways he could. So it was, Rhonda’s father would not have told her the story of the stabbing and yet by degrees Rhonda came to absorb it for the story of the stabbing was told and retold by Mr. Karr at varying lengths depending upon Mr. Karr’s mood and/or the mood of his listeners, who were likely to be university colleagues, or visiting colleagues from other universities. Let me tell you — this incident that happened to Madeleine — like a fable out of Aesop. Rhonda was sometimes a bit confused — her father’s story of the stabbing shifted in minor ways — West Street became West Broadway, or West Houston — West Twelfth Street at Seventh Avenue — the late-winter season became midsummer — in Mr. Karr’s descriptive words the fetid heat of Manhattan in August. In a later variant of the story which began to be told sometime after Rhonda’s seventh birthday when her father seemed to be no longer living in the large stucco-and-timber house on Broadmead with Rhonda and her mother but elsewhere — for a while in a minimally furnished university-owned faculty residence overlooking Lake Carnegie, later a condominium on Canal Pointe Road, Princeton, still later a stone-and-timber Tudor house on a tree-lined street in Cambridge, Massachusetts — it happened that the story of the stabbing became totally appropriated by Mr. Karr as an experience he’d had himself and had witnessed with his own eyes from his vehicle — not the Volvo but the Toyota station wagon — stalled in traffic less than ten feet from the incident: the delivery van braking to a halt, the pedestrian who’d been crossing against the light — Caucasian, male, arrogant, in a Burberry trench coat, carrying a briefcase — doomed — had dared to strike a fender of the van, shout threats and obscenities at the driver and so out of the van the driver had leapt, as Mr. Karr observed with the eyes of a front-line war correspondent — Dark-skinned young guy with dreadlocks like Medusa, must’ve been Rastafarian — swift and deadly as a panther — the knife, the slashing of the pedestrian’s throat — a ritual, a ritual killing — sacrifice — in Mr. Karr’s version just a single powerful swipe of the knife and again as in a nightmare cinematic replay which Rhonda had seen countless times and had dreamt yet more times there erupted the incredible six-foot jet of blood even as the stricken man kept walking, trying to walk — to escape which was the very heart of the story — the revelation toward which all else led.

What other meaning was there? What other meaning was possible?

Rhonda’s father shaking his head marveling Like nothing you could imagine, nothing you’d ever forget, the way the poor bastard kept walking — Jesus!

That fetid-hot day in Manhattan. Rhonda had been with Daddy in the station wagon. He’d buckled her into the seat beside him for she was a big enough girl now to sit in the front seat and not in the silly baby-seat in the back. And Daddy had braked the station wagon, and Daddy’s arm had shot out to protect Rhonda from being thrown forward, and Daddy had protected Rhonda from what was out there on the street, beyond the windshield. Daddy had said Shut your eyes, Rhonda! Crouch down and hide your face darling and so Rhonda had.

By the time Rhonda was ten years old and in fifth grade at Princeton Day School Madeleine Karr wasn’t any longer quite so cautious about telling the story of the stabbing — or, more frequently, merely alluding to it, since the story of the stabbing had been told numerous times, and most acquaintances of the Karrs knew it, to a degree — within her daughter’s presence. Nor did Madeleine recount it in her earlier breathless appalled voice but now more calmly, sadly This awful thing that happened, that I witnessed, you know — the stabbing? In New York? The other day on the news there was something just like it, or almost… Or I still dream about it sometimes. My God! At least Rhonda wasn’t with me.

It seemed now that Madeleine’s new friend Drexel Hay — “Drex” — was frequently in their house, and in their lives; soon then, when they were living with Drex in a new house on Winant Drive, on the other side of town, it began to seem to Rhonda that Drex who adored Madeleine had come to believe — almost — that he’d been in the car with her on that March morning; daring to interrupt Madeleine in a pleading voice But wait, darling! — you’ve left out the part about… or Tell them how he looked at you through your windshield, the man with the knife — or Now tell them how you’ve never gone back — never drive into the city except with me. And I drive.

Sometime around Christmas 1984 Rhonda’s mother was at last divorced from Rhonda’s father — it was said to be an amicable parting though Rhonda was not so sure of that — and then in May 1985 Rhonda’s mother became Mrs. Hay — which made Rhonda giggle for Mrs. Hay was a comical name somehow. Strange to her, startling and disconcerting, how Drex himself began to tell the story of the stabbing to aghast listeners This terrible thing happened to my wife a few years ago — before we’d met —

In Drex’s excited narration Madeleine had witnessed a street mugging — a savage senseless murder — a white male pedestrian attacked by a gang of black boys with switchblades — his throat so deeply slashed he’d nearly been decapitated. (In subsequent accounts of the stabbing, gradually it happened that the victim had in fact been decapitated — even as, horribly, he’d tried to run away, staggering forward until he fell.) (But was decapitation so easy to accomplish, cutting through the spinal cord? — Rhonda couldn’t think so.) The attack had taken place in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses and no one intervened — somewhere downtown, below Houston — unless over by the river, in the meat-packing district — or by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel — or (maybe) by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, one of those wide ugly avenues like Eleventh? Twelfth? — not late but after dark. The victim had tried to fight off his assailants — valiantly, foolishly — as Drex said The kind of crazy thing I might do myself, if muggers tried to take my wallet from me — but of course he hadn’t a chance — he’d been outnumbered by his punk-assailants — before Madeleine’s horrified eyes he’d bled out on the street. Dozens of witnesses and no one wanted to get involved — not even a license plate number or a description of the killers — just they were “black” — “carried knives” — Poor Madeleine was in such shock, these savages had gotten a good look at her through her windshield — she thought they were “high on drugs” — only a few yards from Madeleine my God if they hadn’t been in a rush to escape they’d have killed her for sure — so she couldn’t identify them — who the hell would’ve stopped them? Not the New York cops — they took their good time arriving.

Drex spoke with assurance and authority and yet — Rhonda didn’t think that the stabbing had happened quite like this. So confusing! — for it was so very hard to retain the facts of the story — if they were “facts” — from one time to the next. Each adult was so persuasive — hearing adults speak you couldn’t resist nodding your head in agreement or in a wish to agree or to be liked or loved, for agreeing — and so — how was it possible to know what was real? Of all the stories of the stabbing Rhonda had heard it was Drex’s account that was scariest — Rhonda shivered thinking of her mother being killed — trapped in her car and angry black boys smashing her car windows, dragging her out onto the street stab-stab-stabbing…Rhonda felt dazed and dizzy to think that if Mommy had been killed then Rhonda would never have a mother again.

And so Rhonda would not be Drex Hay’s sweet little stepdaughter he had to speak sharply to, at times; Rhonda would not be living in the brick Colonial on Winant Drive but somewhere else — she didn’t want to think where.

Never would Rhonda have met elderly Mrs. Hay with the soft-wrinkled face and eager eyes who was Drex’s mother and who came often to the house on Winant Drive with presents for Rhonda — crocheted sweater sets, hand-knit caps with tassels, fluffy-rabbit bedroom slippers which quickly became too small for Rhonda’s growing feet. Rhonda was uneasy visiting Grandma Hay in her big old granite house on Hodge Road with its medicinal odors and sharp-barking little black pug Samson; especially Rhonda was uneasy if the elderly woman became excitable and disapproving as often she did when (for instance) the subject of the stabbing in Manhattan came up, as occasionally it did in conversation about other, related matters — urban life, the rising crime rate, deteriorating morals in the last decades of the twentieth century. By this time in all their lives of course everyone had heard the story of the stabbing many times in its many forms, the words had grown smooth like stones fondled by many hands. Rhonda’s stepfather Drex had only to run his hands through his thinning rust-colored hair and sigh loudly to signal a shift in the conversation Remember that time Madeleine was almost murdered in New York City… and Grandma Hay would shiver thrilled and appalled New York is a cesspool, don’t tell me it’s been “cleaned up” — you can’t clean up filth — those people are animals — you know who I mean — they are all on welfare — they are “crack babies” — society has no idea what to do with them and you dare not talk about it, some fool will call you “racist” — Oh you’d never catch me driving into the city in just a car by myself — even when I was younger — what it needs is for a strong mayor — to crack down on these animals — you would wish for God to swipe such animals away with His thumb — would that be a mercy!

When Grandma Hay hugged her Rhonda tried not to shudder crinkling her nose against the elderly woman’s special odor. For Rhonda’s mother warned Don’t offend your new “grandma” — just be a good, sweet girl.

Mr. Karr was living now in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Mr. Karr was now a professor at Harvard. Rhonda didn’t like her father’s new house or her father’s new young wife nor did Rhonda like Cambridge, Massachusetts, anywhere near as much as Rhonda liked Princeton where she had friends at Princeton Day School and so she sulked and cried when she had to visit with Daddy though she loved Daddy and she liked — tried to like — Daddy’s new young wife Brooke who squinted and smiled at Rhonda so hard it looked as if Brooke’s face must hurt. Once, it could not have been more than the second or third time she’d met Brooke, Rhonda happened to overhear her father’s new young wife telling friends who’d dropped by their house for drinks This terrible thing that happened to my husband before we were married — on the street in New York City in broad daylight he witnessed a man stabbed to death — the man’s throat was slashed, blood sprayed out like for six feet Gerald says it was the most amazing — horrible — thing he’d ever seen — the poor man just kept walking — trying to walk — with both his hands he tried to stop the bleeding — Gerald shouted out his car window — there was more than one of them — the attackers — Gerald never likes to identify them as black — persons of color — and the victim was a white man — I don’t think the attackers were ever caught — Gerald opened his car door, and shouted at them — he was risking his life interfering — he’s utterly reckless, he has the most amazing courage — the way Gerald describes it, it’s like I was there with him — I was in middle school at Katonah Day at the time — just totally unknowing, oblivious — I dream of it sometimes — the stabbing — how close Gerald and I came to never meeting, never falling in love and our entire lives changed like a tragic miracle…

You’d have thought that Mr. Karr would try to stop his silly young wife saying such things that weren’t wrong entirely — but certainly weren’t right — and Rhonda knew they weren’t right — and Rhonda was a witness staring coldly at the chattering woman who was technically speaking her stepmother but Mr. Karr seemed scarcely to be listening in another part of the room pouring wine into long-stemmed crystal glasses for his guests and drinking with them savoring the precious red burgundy which appeared to be the center of interest on this occasion for Mr. Karr had been showing his guests the label on the wine bottle which must have been an impressive label judging from their reactions as the wine itself must have been exquisite for all marveled at it. Rhonda saw that her father’s whiskers were bristly gray like metal filings, his face was ruddy and puffy about the eyes as if he’d just wakened from a nap — when “entertaining” in his home often Mr. Karr removed his glasses, as he had now — his stone-colored eyes looked strangely naked and lashless — still he exuded an air of well-being, a yeasty heat of satisfaction lifted from his skin. There on a nearby table was Gerald Karr’s new book Democracy in America Imperiled and beside the book as if it had been casually tossed down was a copy of The New York Review of Books in which there was said to be — Rhonda had not seen it — a “highly positive” review of the book. And there, in another corner of the room, the beautiful blond silly young wife exclaiming with widened eyes to a circle of rapt listeners Ohhh when I think of it my blood runs cold, how foolishly brave Gerald was — how close it was, the two of us would never meet and where would I be right now? This very moment, in all of the universe?

Rhonda laughed. Rhonda’s mouth was a sneer. Rhonda knew better than to draw attention to herself, however — though Daddy loved his sweet little pretty girl Daddy could be harsh and hurtful if Daddy was displeased with his sweet little pretty girl so Rhonda fixed for herself a very thick sandwich of Swedish rye crisp crackers and French goat cheese to devour in the corner of the room looking out onto a bleak rain-streaked street not wanting to think how Daddy knew, yes Daddy knew but did not care. That was the terrible fact about Daddy — he knew, and did not care. A nasty fat worm had burrowed up inside Daddy making him proud of silly Brooke speaking of him in such a tender voice, and so falsely; the stepmother who was so much younger and more beautiful than Rhonda’s mother.

Here was the strangest thing: when Rhonda was living away from them all, and vastly relieved to be away, but homesick too especially for the drafty old house on Broadmead Road where she’d been a little girl and Mommy and Daddy had loved her so. When Rhonda was a freshman at Stanford hoping to major in molecular biology and she’d returned home for the first time since leaving home — for Thanksgiving — to the house on Winant Drive. And there was a family Thanksgiving a mile away at the Hodge Road house of elderly Mrs. Hay to which numerous people came of whom Rhonda knew only a few — and cared to know only a few — mainly Madeleine and Drex of course — there was the disconcerting appearance of Drex’s brother Edgar from Chevy Chase, Maryland — identified as an identical twin though the men more resembled just brothers than twins. Edgar Hay was said to be a much wealthier man than Drex — his business was pharmaceuticals, in the D.C. area; Drex’s business was something in investments, his office was on Route One, West Windsor. The Hay twin-brothers were in their late sixties with similar chalky scalps visible through quills of wetted hair and bulbous noses tinged with red like perpetual embarrassment but Edgar was heavier than Drex by ten or fifteen pounds, Edgar’s eyebrows were white-tufted like a satyr’s in an old silly painting and maddeningly he laughed approaching Rhonda with extended arms — Hel-lo! My sweet li’l step-niece happy Turkey-Day! — brushing his lips dangerously close to Rhonda’s startled mouth, a rubbery-damp sensation Rhonda thought like being kissed by a large squirmy worm. (Call me Ed-gie he whispered wetly in Rhonda’s ear That’s what the pretty girls call me.) And Madeleine who might have observed this chose to ignore it for Madeleine was already mildly drunk — long before dinner — and poor Drex — sunken-chested, sickly pale and thinner since his heart attack in August in high-altitude Aspen, Colorado, clearly in some way resentful of his “twin” brother — reduced to lame jokes and stammered asides in Edgar’s presence. And there was Rhonda restless and miserable wishing she hadn’t come back home for Thanksgiving — for she’d have to return again within just a few weeks, for Christmas — yet more dreading the long holiday break — wishing she had something useful to do in this house — she’d volunteered to help in the kitchen but Mrs. Hay’s cook and servers clearly did not want her — she’d have liked to hide away somewhere and call her roommate Jessica in Portland, Oregon, but was fearful she might break down on the phone and give away more of her feelings for Jessica than Jessica had seemed to wish to receive from Rhonda just yet…And there was Rhonda avoiding the living room where Hay relatives were crowded together jovial and overloud — laughing, drinking and devouring appetizers — as bratty young children related to Rhonda purely through the accident of a marital connection whose names she made no attempt to recall ran giggling through a forest of adult legs. Quickly Rhonda shrank back before her mother sighted her, or the elderly white-haired woman who insisted that Rhonda call her “Grandma” — sulkily making her way along a hall, into the glassed-in room at the rear of the house where Mrs. Hay kept potted plants — orchids, African violets, ferns. Outside, the November air was suffused with moisture. The overcast sky looked like a tin ceiling. A few leaves remained on deciduous trees, scarlet-bright, golden-yellow, riffled by wind and falling and sucked away even as you stared. To Rhonda’s dismay there was her stepfather’s brother — Drex’s twin — wormy-lipped Edgar — engaged in telling a story to a Hay relative, a middle-aged woman with a plump cat-face to whom Drex had introduced Rhonda more than once but whose name Rhonda couldn’t recall. Edgar was sprawled on a white wicker sofa with his stocky legs outspread, the woman in a lavender silk pants suit was seated in a matching chair — both were drinking — to her disgust and dismay Rhonda couldn’t help but overhear what was unmistakably some crude variant of the story of the stabbing of long ago — narrated in Edgar’s voice that managed to suggest a lewd repugnance laced with bemusement, as the cat-faced woman blinked and stared open-mouthed as in a mimicry of exaggerated feminine concern My brother’s crazy wife she’d driven into Manhattan Christ knows why Maddie’d been some kind of hippie fem-ist my brother says those days she’d been married to one of the Commie profs at the University here and so, sure enough Maddie runs into trouble, this was before Giuliani cleaned up the city, just what you’d predict the stupid woman runs into something dangerous a gang of Nigra kids jumping a white man right out on the street — in fact it was Fifth Avenue down below the garment district — it was actual Fifth Avenue and it was daylight crazy “Madeline” she calls herself like some snooty dame in a movie came close to getting her throat cut — which was what happened to the poor bastard out on the street — in the paper it said he’d been decapitated, too — and the Nigra kids see our Madeline gawking at them through the windshield of her car you’d think the dumb-ass would’ve known to get the hell out or crouch down and hide at least — as Rhonda drew nearer her young heart beating in indignation waiting for her stepfather’s brother to take notice of her. It was like a clumsy TV scene! It was a scene improbable and distasteful yet a scene from which Rhonda did not mean to flee, just yet. For she’d come here, to Princeton. For she could have gone to her father’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts — of course she’d been invited, Brooke herself had called to invite her, with such forced enthusiasm, such cheery family-feeling, Rhonda had felt a stab of pure loneliness, dread. There is no one who loves me or wants me. If I cut my throat on the street who would care. Or bleed out in a bathtub or in the shower with the hot water running…

So she’d had a vision of her life, Rhonda thought. Or maybe it was a vision of life itself.

Not that Rhonda would ever cut her throat — of course! Never. That was a vow.

Not trying to disguise her disgust, for what she’d heard in the doorway and for Edgar Hay sprawling fatuous-drunk. The ridiculous multi-course Thanksgiving dinner hadn’t yet been brought to the dining room table, scarcely 5:30 P.M. and already Edgar Hay was drunk. Rhonda stood just inside the doorway waiting for Edgar’s stabbing-story to come to an end. For maybe this would be the end? — maybe the story of the stabbing would never again be told, in Rhonda’s hearing? Rhonda would confront Edgar Hay who’d then gleefully report back to Drex and Madeleine how rude their daughter was — how unattractive, how ungracious — for Rhonda was staring, unsmiling — bravely she approached the old man keeping her voice cool, calm, disdainful O.K then — what happened to the stabbed man? Did he die? Do you know for a fact he died? And what happened to the killer — the killers — the killer with the knife — was anyone ever caught? Was anyone ever punished, is anyone in prison right now? And Edgar Hay — “Ed-gie” — looked at Rhonda crinkling his pink-flushed face in a lewd wink How the hell would I know, sweetheart? I wasn’t there.

Babysitter

Midday, early spring, sunshine in steel bars flashing on the river, she drove to meet him where he’d summoned her. Wind swept in roiling gusts from the Canadian shore.

Suburban life: appointments! Mornings, afternoons. And then the children’s appointments. Dentist, orthodontist. Gynecologist, hair salon, yoga. Architect, community relations forum, library fund-raiser for which she’s a committee co-chair, flattered to be invited, yet uneasy. Suburban life: each calendar day is a securely barred window, you shove up the window and grasp the bars, grip the bars tight, these are bars that confine but also protect, what pleasure in shaking them!

My appointments this afternoon, she’d told them. Two o’clock, then three, after the library I must drive downtown.

It was a journey: downtown. Twelve miles south and east on the thunderous expressway.

She drove without haste. She drove like a woman already fatally stricken, resigned. She drove at a wavering speed, in the right lane. Calm as a woman in a dream the outcome of which she already knows though in fact she did not know What will happen? I will never go through with this — will I?

She didn’t think so. It would be her first time, she hadn’t such courage.

Out of the leafy suburbs north of the Midwestern city she drove. Massive vehicles passed on the left, her station wagon shuddered in their wake. The nape of her neck was bare, her pale hair swung in scissor-cut wings about her face. Suburban villages were passing beyond the six-foot chain-link fence above the expressway, barely visible from the highway that seemed to be sucking her into it, by degrees downhill in the direction of the river, what was called, as if it were a self-contained place, City Center.

The air was clamorous, like an argument among strangers you can’t quite hear. It was a gusty April, not yet Easter. There was something she meant to remember: Easter. Something about the children. Her skin burned in anticipation of him.

He was her friend, she wished to think. He’d touched her only once. The imprint of his fingers on her forearm was still visible to her, in secret.

The station wagon was a new model, handsome and gleaming and paneled in wood. A sturdy vehicle, in the rear strewn with children’s things. Still, gusts of wind rocked it, she gripped the steering wheel tight. Such wind! In their hillside house in Bloomfield Heights that was an old fieldstone Colonial wind whistled in the chimneys, rattled the windows with a furtive sound like something trying to get in. Doors were blown open by the wind, or blown shut with a crash. Oh Mommy! their five-year-old daughter cried. The ghost!

My appointment downtown, she’d told Ismelda who had her cell phone number in any case. Should anything happen. Should you need me. You can pick up the children at the usual door, at their school. I will be back by five-thirty, I’m sure.

Five-thirty! This was a statement, a pledge. She wondered should she tell him, as soon as she stepped inside the door.

I can’t stay long. I will have to leave by.

It was astonishing to her, how the city began to emerge out of a muddle of wood-frame houses, aged tenements, flat-topped roofs and debris-strewn pavement. Suddenly in the distance, two or three miles ahead, were a number of high-rise buildings, some of them quite impressive. City Center was ahead, a narrow peninsula at the tip of downtown, on the restored riverfront: Renaissance Plaza. She would exit there.

The city had once been a great Midwestern city, before a catastrophic “race riot” in 1967. Since then, the white population had gradually declined, like air escaping from a balloon.

I won’t have the courage, I’m not a reckless woman. I will only just talk to him. I will tell him…

The next exit was City Center. Last Exit Before Tunnel to Canada. Her heart quickened like the heart of a creature sensing danger though not knowing from which direction danger will spring.

…I want you as a friend. Someone in whom I can…

She’d driven the children to school that morning, as she did most mornings. Mommy in a bulky car coat. She had been married for nine years. That morning the children had been unusually fretful, tugging at her. Mommy! Mom-my! That sound of reproach in a child’s voice, your heart is lacerated. It was a summons to her blood, she could not resist. The children adored her, they were insatiable. Perhaps they sensed something. The little girl was in kindergarten, the little boy in second grade. Mommy kiss-kiss! She laughed, she was wounded by their beauty that seemed to her fragile like something tiny that has fallen from its nest, or something that has been expelled from its shell, its protective armor.

She shuddered with the knowledge, Mommy was their protective armor. She was not wearing the bulky car coat now but a coat of soft black cashmere with a blank mink collar, that fell in loose folds about her slender legs.

In the rearview mirror above the windshield her face gleamed pale as a moon. Fine lines at the corners of her eyes not visible in the glass. She smiled, uneasy. For a long time she’d been one of the young wives, one of the younger mothers, now no longer. She thought I am a beautiful woman, I have a right to be loved.

Lying beside her heavily sleeping husband, nights in succession for nine years. She could not remember their first time together, it seemed as if they had always known each other, as children perhaps. Her husband was a man who shook hands forcefully, looked you in the eye. A man you could trust. A man you wanted to know. She had seen him look appraisingly at women, she’d seen the way women looked at him. He was careless, there was something imperial about him, he was a six-foot boy, confident of being admired. He was a man who could not love her quite so much as she loved him, he’d admitted this. Even in wounding her, saying such a thing, he seemed to be granting a blessing, tossing gold coins at her.

In all marriages there is the imbalance: one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.

Now she was no longer on the expressway, she was uncertain where to turn. The streets of the City Center were narrow, one-way, congested with delivery trucks. A dying city, why was there so much traffic? She could see the gleaming tower of the hotel that was her destination. She could not possibly get lost in a maze of streets, so close to the hotel! She regretted she hadn’t left home earlier. Her pride in not having left home earlier. She had stared at the clock mesmerized, she had held herself back. Then calmly telling Ismelda: I have an appointment, downtown. I will be back by. Her eyes shone like the eyes of one unaccustomed to emotion, taking care not to stammer.

In this season of their marriage, her husband often returned home late. He was an enormously busy man, he had both an assistant and a secretary. He had business luncheons, dinners. He was in New York City, in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles. Yet he was one of the younger men in his firm, his elders looked upon him with admiration and approval. The children loved Daddy emptying his pockets for them, pennies and nickels, dimes. She was fearful of lying to this man, he might hear the quaver in her voice with indifference.

She had turned the station wagon in to a parking garage. She was beginning to be anxious. She would be late meeting him, she had no idea if he would wait for her. He was not a man accustomed to waiting for women, she supposed. He was not a resident of this city, he came here on business. Though perhaps it wasn’t business as her husband might identify it. He appeared to have money, he appeared to be unmarried, not a father. She tried to recall his eyes, if they were brown, if they were dark, she could recall only the impact of his eyes, the heavy lids, the carved-looking face, a singular face, one she’d felt she had recognized, that left her weak to contemplate. She could not have said his middle name: did not know exactly how to spell his surname. (Perhaps — she had to concede this! — she didn’t know his actual name.) What he’d said to her, she could not recall except it had made her laugh initially, with a kind of visceral shock, and then it had made her weak. He’d told her he stayed at the new hotel by the river, where there was a heliport. The governor of the state was flown to the city, often. They’d been cadets together out in Colorado.

It was a torment to her, in her agitated state: navigating the damned station wagon, looking for a parking space, turning the clumsy vehicle around tight turns, ascending to the next parking level, and to the next. Was this a joke, a comedy! Was her life a farce, others might observe with scorn! Yet she managed to find a place to park, always you manage somehow. She locked the station wagon, a chill wind blowing at her face, her legs. Tugging at her black cashmere coat, like teasing fingers. Then in the slow clanking elevator descending to street level, ugly graffiti at which she could not look. She was thinking This is a mistake of course. In the hilly suburban village in which she lived there was no graffiti.

If you don’t mind a married woman, she’d joked with him. Her voice had been bold, wistful. He’d only laughed.

It was a windy walk to the Renaissance Plaza by the river. A fierce white sun, though half the sky was massed storm clouds. So close to the great Midwestern lake north of the city, the sky was likely to be unpredictable, one hour to the next. There was sun, later there might be sleet, then a warm rain. The Plaza was elevated above the street, there were numerous steps, revolving doors. There was a symphony hall, there were restaurants, high-rise apartment buildings, a luxury hotel. Limousines, airport shuttle buses moving slowly forward. At once she began to feel more at home, doormen recognized women like her, bellboys, security guards. If she was not a guest at the hotel, she resembled its guests. Good day, ma’am! the uniformed men called to her. They were dusky-skinned like Ismelda, their smiles flashed white. She was a beautiful woman, at a distance you saw this. A beautifully sculpted black coat, black fur collar. Her shoes were expensive, her leather gloves. She wore dark glasses she’d fumbled to slip onto her face. She carried a leather handbag, finely stitched. The uniformed doorman smiled at her as she passed into the revolving door, in the corner of her eye she saw his smile begin to fade immediately, she felt his scorn for her, she had to be mistaken.

She could be a guest here certainly! More likely, she was meeting friends for a late lunch. A business lunch, she was a woman who belonged to numerous committees. Her father served on corporate boards, he was a trustee of his former university, both her parents were civic-minded, responsible. Only this once she would be unfaithful to her husband, and to her children, it would never happen again.

He, the man, was to be in room 2133. She did not think of him as an individual with a name, she did not think his name to herself, only just he, him. Without apparent haste or agitation she crossed to the bank of elevators, sleek glass cubicles that lifted and fell soundlessly through the immense open space of the hotel’s atrium. At midday the hotel lobby was crowded, festive. There was a convention of hairstylists, another of radiologists. There was recorded harp music. There were terraces of Easter lilies, tulips. Potted ferns the size of small trees. A noisily trickling fountain. Like a woman in a spell she stepped into the glass elevator, she was sucked up into the interior of the hotel as if into a vacuum. Still she was thinking I can turn back at any time.

How distant her other life seemed to her, where she was Mommy.

That morning the children had behaved strangely, as if sensing her mood. She’d laid her hand against their foreheads that seemed slightly overwarm, damp. The little girl had been fretful, uncooperative while being dressed. The little boy had complained of bad dreams. She would keep them home, she thought. For April, it was such a raw wet windy day. She and Ismelda and the children would make Easter eggs as they’d done the year before. Yet somehow she’d hurried them through breakfast, she’d driven them to school as usual. If they came down with colds, if they had fevers that evening, it would be her fault.

Ismelda had been born in Manila, she belonged to an evangelical sect called the Church of the Risen Christ. In her small room on the third floor of the stone house Ismelda played Christian rock music.

He was to be in room 2133. He’d left a message for her just that morning. Breathless she hurried along the corridor. Underfoot was a thick carpet, rosy as the interior of a lung. The far end of the corridor seemed to dissolve in haze. Closed doors, no movement or sound. On the doorknob of room 2133 was DO NOT DISTURB. Hesitantly she knocked on the door. He would not open it, there was no one inside. She was faint with yearning, dread.

The door opened inward, he was there.

He laughed at her, the expression in her face. He spoke words she couldn’t hear. His arms pulled her inside, the door was shut behind her. He wore trousers, a white undershirt. Hair lay in damp dark tendrils on his forehead, like seaweed. The ridge of bone above his eyes was prominent. He was heavier than she recalled, she was trying to speak his name.

…my happiness is my children, my husband. My marriage. My family. My happiness is not myself but…

It was mid-afternoon, the tall windows were open to the sky. A spangle of sunshine like gold coins against the ceiling. He returned from the bathroom, his face was shadowed. He knelt above her. He straddled her. Their skins slapped wetly together. He laughed into her face, his teeth were bared. She began to plead no, I don’t think…He was gripping her throat that was so beautiful. His thumbs caressed the arteries beneath her jaw. Beneath her makeup, her skin was wearing through. She began to move in protest, she was a beautiful scaly snake. She was firm-fleshed as a snake, lithe and pained. She was having difficulty breathing. Her eyes were open and stark showing a rim of white above the iris. Her wristwatch and rings had been removed, as before surgery. Her bracelet. On the table beside the bed. She was lost, she had no idea where she was. Her cries were torn from her, like blows. He was not squeezing her throat, only just caressing, forcibly, rhythmically. He was deep inside her, even as his large hands held her throat, he moved deeper, her body had no defense against him. He was unhurried, methodical. He had been a fighter pilot in an earlier lifetime. As a young man he had dropped bombs onto the earth, onto cities. At a distance he had killed. He had not told her this exactly but she knew. He had not done these things by himself, others had performed with him, he was one of many though he’d been alone in the cockpit of his plane as he was alone now inside his skin. His thumbs released their pressure on her arteries, the relief was immediate and enormous. Breath rushed into her lungs, she could have wept with gratitude. The wish to live flooded into her, she adored this man who gave her back her life. In a flat bemused voice he was saying, You like this. You like this. You like this.

Far above her he regarded her. Her hands tried to reach him but could not. Her fingers were weak, her wrists broken. Still he was inside her, she was impaled upon him as upon a hook that pierced her lower body. Now his hands moved onto her torso, her breasts, as if he were a blind man, curious to see her in this way, in the way of touching, sculpting with his fingers. He ran his hands over her, he gripped her breasts as if to test the resiliency of her flesh. Her breasts ached with sensation, the nipples felt raw, as if she’d been nursing, hungry mouths had been feeding from her, tearing at her. She was writhing, darkness opening at the back of her skull. She understood then why she had no name for him, why he had not once spoken her name. When she’d begun to speak his name, at the start of their lovemaking, he’d covered her mouth with the heel of his hand, lightly yet in warning: No.

Beyond the tall windows whose drapes had been pulled back the sky was shot with a vivid chemical light. Below was the river, invisible from where they lay, so chopped by wind you could not have said in which direction it flowed. Her eyeballs shifted upward, a death had come over her brain. She saw only a portion of her lover’s face, the glisten of oily sweat on his forehead. Only a portion of the ceiling where shimmering water reflected, live-seeming as microorganisms. How ragged her breath was, short and frayed like cloth that has been ripped! As if she’d been drowning, the man had saved her. No one had brought her to such a place before. He had brought her there as if by chance, negligently. The knowledge was crushing to her.

She heard moans, whimpers. She heard a woman’s choked sobs. He laughed at her, there was little tenderness in him.

Still he observed her, curiously. As a pilot might observe the ground far below, at a distance at which everything is in miniature, inconsequential. At such a distance there are no individuals. No cries can be heard. She could not bear it, this distance. She reached for him, he gripped her wrists and brought her arms down, spread outright beside her head, so she was helpless. He moved into her, she began to shout, guttural cries that scraped like gravel against her throat. She was a sinewy snake, every inch of her flesh quivering, her skin a damp scaly glisten. He’d pulled a pillow free of the tangle of bedclothes, it must have been caprice, he must have miscalculated, he lowered the pillow over her sweaty face, her anguished eyes and opened mouth, he was pumping hard between her spread thighs as if there was a fascination in him, what he might do to her, the woman, what was emerging between them in this place. Desperately she pulled at his hands, his wrists that were too thick for her fingers to close about, there were hairs on the backs of his hands, wiry hairs on his wrists, she was blinded by the pillow, she was frantic to breathe. Now her body, in which her soul was mute, dazed, swollen tight against her skin like a balloon blown nearly to bursting, began to struggle for its life. The man held her fixed, she was impaled upon him, a great sinewy snake helpless beneath him, the heavy pillow seemed to enclose her head, she was being suffocated. Tendons stood out in her neck, her arteries swelled. She lost consciousness, in a moment she was gone.

Like companions they lay side by side. Like companions who are strangers, thrown together in the same wreck. For a long time she could not move. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, she could not see. Sensation had obliterated her, in the aftermath of sensation there was nothing. Her heartbeat, that had madly accelerated, was slowed now, almost imperceptible. A match had flared into flame, the flame had touched her, exploded inside her, now the flame was extinguished, her body was numbed, she could barely lift her head. The soles of her bare feet seemed to burn as if she’d been walking on hot sand. She spoke to the man, she was helpless not to speak, hearing with a kind of pitying astonishment the hopeless words in a voice barely audible I love you. It was something of a plea, an argument, yet there was no one with whom to argue, the man seemed not to hear as if sparing her.

She lay as if beneath the surface of shallow water. Sun played upon the water, that was warm, unthreatening. She could not drown in this water, it would protect her. She was drifting into a stuporous sleep. Mommy? Mom-my? the little girl was looking for her, though Mommy stood before her, squatted before her, the little girl stared through her, the little boy, the boy whose name she’d forgotten for the moment, he was looking for her, anxious Mommy where are you? — she’d become a wraith, they could not see her. Someone touched her as if accidentally, in his abrupt way the man was rising from the bed, walking away. He was barefoot, he moved with a negligent ease, no more self-conscious than if he were alone in the hotel room. Weakly she spoke to him, he did not seem to hear. She heard faucets, a toilet flushing. At least she forced herself to move. Her limbs that were paralyzed, broken. Something warmly sticky as blood between her thighs, on her belly.

He went away from her, he wanted her gone. While she was in the bathroom running water, the hottest water she could bear staring at her dilated eyes in the steamy mirror, she heard him on a telephone. His easy laugh, the murmur of his voice. A man among men he seemed to her, unknowable.

She left him. He wanted her gone, she understood and so she left him. Hey: he gripped her chin, kissed her mouth as you might kiss the forehead of a plain child. At the elevator she turned back, the door to 2133 had shut. In the rapidly descending glass cubicle she wiped at her eyes, angry fists in her eyes. She had restored the damage to her mascara, her eye makeup, now it was damaged again, a teary ruin. Her body wept for him, a seepage between her legs. She thought I am soiled, fouled. I am a woman who deserves harm.

She left the hotel quickly, the revolving door seemed to sweep her out. She imagined faint muffled laughter in her wake but heard only a doorman invisible to her calling after her in a voice of scornful familiarity Good evening, ma’am!

Evening! She wouldn’t be home until nearly seven o’clock.

On the expressway, wind buffeted the station wagon. Other vehicles veered in their lanes. She was too distracted to be frightened. Fumbling to call Ismelda on her cell phone but the battery had run low. She was thinking, If the children have been hurt! It was not a rational thought yet she was thinking if The Babysitter had taken them, this was punishment she deserved.

The Babysitter was an abductor and killer of children in the suburbs north of the city, he’d never been identified, arrested. He had taken nine children in all but he had not taken a child in several years, it was believed that he’d moved away, or was in prison, or had died. He was called The Babysitter for his methodical way of bathing the bodies of his small victims after raping and strangling them, positioning them in secluded places like parks, a golf course, a churchyard, he’d taken time to launder and even iron their clothing which he folded neatly and left beside them. Always their arms were crossed over their narrow pale chests, their eyes were shut, in such peaceful positions they resembled mannequins and not children who had died terrible deaths, it was said you could not see the ligature marks on their throats until you knelt beside them. The Babysitter had not abducted a child from the suburb in which she lived for at least a decade and yet she was thinking almost calmly If he has taken them, I will have to accept it.

The house was made of fieldstone, mortar, brick that had been painted a thin weathered white. Most of the house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, on a large tract of land which was now reduced to three acres, the minimum for property owners in the township. She was relieved to see the warmly lit windows through the trees, of course nothing had happened, they were waiting for her to return and that was all. Her husband had a dinner engagement, he wouldn’t be back until the children were in bed. Yet relief flooded her, seeing her husband’s car wasn’t in the garage. She’d had her revenge, then! She would love her husband less desperately now, she knew herself equal to him.

Rich cooking aromas in the kitchen, the sound of a TV, children’s uplifted voices and Ismelda calling: Ma’am? — but quickly she slipped away upstairs, before the children could rush at her. She showered as she hadn’t in the hotel. She soaped every part of her body, she was giddy with relief. She had a lover! He hadn’t given her his number, vaguely he’d promised to call her the following week. No one knew, no one had come to harm, the family was safe. Bruises and red welts had already begun to show on her body as if a coarser skin were pushing through, her husband would never notice.

She hurried downstairs, she was kneeling with the children. Hugging the little girl, the little boy. Mommy? Mom-my? In two arms she hugged them, what did they have to show her? Easter eggs? So many? Yes they were beautiful but hadn’t Ismelda understood that Mommy wanted her to wait, they would make the eggs together? She spoke sharply to Ismelda at the stove, Ismelda didn’t seem to hear, it was a maddening trait of hers, seeming not to hear so her employers had to raise their voices, invariably you sounded like a bully, a fool, raising your voice to a Filipina woman scarcely five feet tall, staring at you with hurt eyes. And the children were clamoring at her, suddenly she wished them gone, all of them gone, banished from her so that she could think of her lover. I am a murderer she thought. I am the one. Her children crowded her, adoring.

Bonobo Momma

That day, I met my “estranged” mother in the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, New York City. It was a few weeks following the last in a series of surgeries to correct a congenital malformation in my spine, and one of the first days when I could walk unassisted for any distance and didn’t tire too quickly. This would be the first time I’d seen my mother since Fall Fashion Week nearly two years ago. Since she’d divorced my father when I was eight years old my mother — whose professional name was Adelina — spent most of her time in Paris. At thirty she’d retired from modeling and was now a consultant for one of the couture houses — a much more civilized and rewarding occupation than modeling, she said. For the world is “pitiless” to aging women, even former Vogue models.

As soon as I entered the Carlyle Hotel lobby, I recognized Adelina waiting for me on a velvet settee. Quickly she rose to greet me and I was struck another time by the fact that my mother was so tall. To say that Adelina was a striking woman is an understatement. The curvature of my spine had stunted my growth and even now, after my last surgery, I more resembled a girl of eleven than thirteen. On the way to the hotel I’d become anxious that my beautiful mother might wince at the sight of me, as sometimes she’d done in the past, but she was smiling happily at me — joyously — her arms opened for an embrace. I felt a jolt of love for her like a kick in the belly that took my breath away and left me faint-headed. Is that my mother? My — mother?

Typical of Adelina, for this casual luncheon engagement with her thirteen-year-old daughter she was dressed in such a way — cream-colored coarse-knit coat, very short very tight sheath in a material like silver vinyl, on her long sword-like legs patterned stockings, and on her feet elegantly impractical high-heeled shoes — to cause strangers to glance at her, if not to stare. Her ash-blond hair fell in sculpted layers about her angular face. Hiding her eyes were stylish dark glasses in oversized frames. Bracelets clattered on both her wrists and her long thin fingers glittered with rings. In a hotel like the Carlyle it was not unreasonable for patrons to assume that this glamorous woman was someone, though no one outside the fashion world would have recalled her name.

My father too was “famous” in a similar way — he was a painter/sculptor whose work sold in the “high six figures” — famous in contemporary Manhattan art circles but little-known elsewhere.

“Darling! Look at you — such a tall girl — ”

My mother’s arms were thin but unexpectedly strong. This I recalled from previous embraces, when Adelina’s strength caught me by surprise. Surprising too was the flatness of Adelina’s chest, her breasts small and resilient as knobs of hard rubber. I loved her special fragrance — a mixture of flowery perfume, luxury soap, something drier and more acrid like hair bleach and cigarette smoke. When she leaned back to look at me her mouth worked as if she were trying not to cry. Adelina had not been able to visit me in the hospital at the time of my most recent operation though she’d sent cards and gifts to my room at the Hospital for Special Surgery overlooking the East River: flowers, candies, luxurious stuffed animals and books more appropriate for a younger girl. It had been her plan to fly to New York to see me except an unexpected project had sent her to Milan instead.

“Your back, darling! — you are all mended, are you? — yet so thin.”

Before I could draw away Adelina unzipped my jacket, slipped her hands inside and ran her fingers down my spine in a way that made me giggle for it was ticklish, and I was embarrassed, and people were watching us. Over the rims of her designer sunglasses she peered at me with pearl-colored eyes that seemed dilated, the lashes sticky-black with mascara. “But — you are very pretty. Or would be if — ”

Playfully seizing my lank limp no-color brown hair in both her beringed hands, pulling my hair out beside my face and releasing it. Her fleshy lips pouted in a way I knew to be distinctly French.

“A haircut, cherie! This very day.”

Later I would remember that a man had moved away from Adelina when I’d first entered the lobby. As I’d pushed through the revolving door and stepped inside I’d had a vague impression of a man in a dark suit seated beside the striking blond woman on the settee and as this woman quickly rose to greet me he’d eased away, and was gone.

Afterward I would think There might be no connection. Much is accident.

“You’re hungry for lunch, I hope? I am famished — très petit dejeuner this morning — ‘jet lag’ — come!”

We were going to eat in the sumptuous hotel restaurant. Adelina had made a “special reservation.”

So many rings on Adelina’s fingers, including a large glittery emerald on the third finger of her left hand, there was no room for a wedding band and so there was no clear sign if Adelina had remarried. My father did not speak of my “estranged” mother, and I would not have risked upsetting him with childish inquiries. On the phone with me, in her infrequent calls, my mother was exclamatory and vague about her personal life and lapsed into breathless French phrases if I dared to ask prying questions.

Not that I was an aggressive child. Even in my desperation I was wary, hesitant. With my Sshaped spine that had caused me to walk oddly, and to hold my head at an awkward angle, and would have coiled back upon itself in ever-tighter contortions except for the corrective surgery, I had always been shy and uncertain. Other girls my age hoped to be perceived as beautiful, sexy, “hot” — I was grateful not to be stared at.

As the maître d’ was seating us in the restaurant, it appeared that something was amiss. In a sharp voice Adelina said, “No. I don’t like this table. This is not a good table.”

It was one of the small tables, for two, a banquette seat against a mirrored wall, close by other diners; one of us would be seated on the banquette seat and the other on the outside, facing in. Adelina didn’t want to sit with her back to the room nor did Adelina want to sit facing the room. Nor did Adelina like a table so close to other tables.

The maître d’ showed us to another table, also small, but set a little apart from the main dining room; now Adelina objected that the table was too close to the restrooms: “I hate this table!”

By this time other diners were observing us. Embarrassed and unhappy, I stood a few feet away. In her throaty aggrieved voice Adelina was telling the maître d’ that she’d made a reservation for a “quiet” table — her daughter had had “major surgery” just recently — what was required was a table for four, that we would not be “cramped.” With an expression of strained courtesy the maître d’ showed my mother to a table for four, also at the rear of the restaurant, but this table too had something fatally wrong with it, or by now the attention of the other diners had become offensive to Adelina, who seized my hand and huffily pulled me away. In a voice heavy with sarcasm she said, “We will go elsewhere, monsieur! Merci beaucoup!”

Outside on Fifth Avenue, traffic was thunderous. My indignant mother pulled me to the curb, to wait for a break in the stream of vehicles before crossing over into the park. She was too impatient to walk to the intersection, to cross at the light. When a taxi passed too slowly, blocking our way, Adelina struck its yellow hood with her fist. “Go on! Allez!”

In the park, Adelina lit a cigarette and exhaled bluish smoke in luxurious sighs as if only now could she breathe deeply. Her mood was incensed, invigorated. Her wide dark nostrils widened further, with feeling. Snugly she linked her arm through mine. I was having trouble keeping pace with her but I managed not to wince in pain for I knew how it would annoy her. On the catwalk — catwalk had been a word in my vocabulary for as long as I could remember — Adelina had learned to walk in a brisk assured stride no matter how exquisitely impractical her shoes.

“Lift your head, cherie. Your chin. You are a pretty girl. Ignore if they stare. Who are they!”

With singular contempt Adelina murmured they. I had no idea what she was talking about but was eager to agree.

It was a sunny April day. We were headed for the Boathouse Restaurant to which Adelina had taken me in the past. On the paved walk beside a lagoon excited geese and mallards rushed to peck at pieces of bread tossed in their direction, squawking at one another and flapping their wings with murderous intent. Adelina crinkled her nose. “Such a clatter! I hate noisy birds.”

It was upsetting to Adelina, too, that the waterfowl droppings were everywhere underfoot. How careful one had to be, walking beside the lagoon in such beautiful shoes.

“Not good to feed wild creatures! And not good for the environment. You would think, any idiot would know.”

Adelina spoke loudly, to be overheard by individuals tossing bread at the waterfowl.

I was hoping that she wouldn’t confront anyone. There was a fiery sort of anger in my mother, that was fearful to me, yet fascinating.

“Excuse me, cherie: turn here.”

With no warning Adelina gripped my arm tighter, pivoting me to ascend a hilly incline. When I asked Adelina what was wrong she hissed in my ear, “Eyes straight ahead. Ignore if they stare.”

I dared not glance back over my shoulder to see who or what was there.

Because of her enormously busy professional life that involved frequent travel to Europe, Adelina had relinquished custody of me to my father at the time of their divorce. It had been a “tortured” decision, she’d said. But “for the best, for all.” She had never heard of the private girl’s school in Manhattan to which my father was sending me and alluded to it with an air of reproach and suspicion for everyone knew, as Adelina said, that my father was “stingy — perfide.” Now when she questioned me about the school — teachers, courses, classmates — I sensed that she wasn’t really listening as she responded with murmurs of Eh? Yes? Go on! Several times she turned to glare at someone who’d passed us saying sharply, “Yes? Is there some problem? Do I know you?”

To me she said, frowning, “Just look straight ahead, darling! Ignore them.”

Truly I did not know if people were watching us — either my mother or me — but it would not have surprised me. Adelina dressed like one who expects attention, yet seemed sincere in rebuffing it. Especially repugnant to her were the openly aggressive, sexual stares of men, who made a show of stopping dead on the path to watch Adelina walk by. As a child with a body that had been deformed until recently, I’d become accustomed to people glancing at me in pity, or children staring at me in curiosity, or revulsion; but now with my repaired spine that allowed me to walk more or less normally, I did not see that I merited much attention. Yet on the pathway to the Boathouse my mother paused to confront an older woman who was walking a miniature schnauzer, and who had in fact been staring at both Adelina and me, saying in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “Excuse me, madame? My daughter would appreciate not to be stared at. Merci!”

Inside the Boathouse, on this sunny April day, many diners were awaiting tables. The restaurant took no phone reservations. There was a crowd, spilling over from the bar. Adelina raised her voice to give her name to the hostess and was told that we would have a forty-minute wait for a table overlooking the lagoon. Other tables were more readily available but Adelina wanted a table on the water: “This is a special occasion. My daughter’s first day out, after major surgery.”

The hostess cast me a glance of sympathy. But a table on the lagoon was still a forty-minute wait.

My disappointed mother was provided with a plastic device like a remote control that was promised to light up and “vibrate” when our table was ready. Adelina pushed her way to the bar and ordered a drink — “Bloody Mary for me, Virgin Mary for my daughter.”

The word virgin was embarrassing to me. I had never heard it in association with a drink and had to wonder if my capricious mother had invented it on the spot.

In the crowded Boathouse, we waited. Adelina managed to capture a stool at the bar, and pulled me close beside her as in a windstorm. We were jostled by strangers in a continuous stream into and out of the dining area. Sipping her bloodred drink, so similar in appearance to mine which turned out to be mere tomato juice, my mother inquired about my surgery, and about the surgeon; she seemed genuinely interested in my physical therapy sessions, which involved strenuous swimming; another time she explained why she hadn’t been able to fly to New York to visit me in the hospital, and hoped that I understood. (I did! Of course.) “My life is not so fixed, cherie. Not like your father so settled out there on the island.”

My father owned two residences: a brownstone on West Eighty-ninth Street and, at Montauk Point at the easternmost end of Long Island, a rambling old shingleboard house. It was at Montauk Point that my father had his studio, overlooking the ocean. The brownstone, which was where I lived most of the time, was maintained by a housekeeper. My father preferred Montauk Point though he tried to get into the city at least once a week. Frequently on weekends I was brought out to Montauk Point — by hired car — but it was a long, exhausting journey that left me writhing with back pain, and when I was there, my father spent most of the time in his studio or visiting with artist friends. It was not true, as Adelina implied, that my father neglected me, but it was true that we didn’t see much of each other during the school year. As an artist/bachelor of some fame my father was eagerly sought as a dinner guest and many of his evenings both at Montauk Point and in the city were spent with dealers and collectors. Yet he’d visited me each day while I’d been in the hospital. We’d had serious talks about subjects that faded from my memory afterward — art, religion? — whether God “existed” or was a “universal symbol” — whether there was “death” from the perspective of “the infinite universe.” In my hospital bed when I’d been dazed and delirious from painkillers it was wonderful how my father’s figure melted and eased into my dreams with me, so that I was never lonely. Afterward my father revealed that when I’d been sleeping he had sketched me — in charcoal — in the mode of Edvard Munch’s “The Sick Child” — but the drawings were disappointing, he’d destroyed them.

My father was much older than my mother. One day I would learn that my father was eighteen years older than my mother, which seemed to me such a vast span of time, there was something obscene about it. My father loved me very much, he said. Still, I saw that he’d begun to lose interest in me once my corkscrew spine had been repaired, and I was released from the hospital: my medical condition had been a problem to be solved, like one of my father’s enormous canvases or sculptures, and once such a problem was solved, his imagination detached from it.

I could understand this, of course. I understood that, apart from my physical ailments, I could not be a very interesting subject to any adult. It was a secret plan of mine to capture the attention of both my father and my mother in my life to come. I would be something unexpected, and I would excel: as an archaeologist, an Olympic swimmer, a poet. A neurosurgeon…

At the Boathouse bar, my mother fell into conversation with a man with sleek oiled hair and a handsome fox face; this man ignored me, as if I did not exist. When I returned from using the restroom, I saw the fox-faced man was leaving, and my mother was slipping a folded piece of paper into her oversized handbag. The color was up in Adelina’s cheeks. She had a way of brushing her ash-blond hair from her face that reminded me of the most popular girls at my school who exuded at all times an air of urgency, expectation. “Cherie, you are all right? You are looking pale, I think.” This was a gentle admonition. Quickly I told Adelina that I was fine. For some minutes a middle-aged couple a few feet away had been watching my mother, and whispering together, and when the woman at last approached my mother to ask if she was an actress — “Someone on TV, your face is so familiar” — I steeled myself for Adelina’s rage, but unexpectedly she laughed and said no, she’d never been an actress, but she had been a model and maybe that was where they’d seen her face, on a Vogue cover. “Not for a while, though! I’m afraid.” Nonetheless the woman was impressed and asked Adelina to sign a paper napkin for her, which Adelina did, with a gracious flourish.

More than a half hour had passed, and we were still waiting to be seated for lunch. Adelina went to speak with the harried young hostess who told her there might be a table opening in another ten-fifteen minutes. “The wand will light up, ma’am, when your table is ready. You don’t have to check with me.” Adelina said, “No? When I see other people being seated, who came after us?” The hostess denied that this was so. Adelina indignantly returned to the bar. She ordered a second Bloody Mary and drank it thirstily. “She thinks that I’m not aware of what she’s doing,” my mother said. “But I’m very aware. I’m expected to slip her a twenty, I suppose. I hate that!” Abruptly then my mother decided that we were leaving. She paid the bar bill and pulled me outside with her; in a trash can she disposed of the plastic wand. Again she snugly linked her arm through mine. The Bloody Marys had warmed her, a pleasant yeasty-perfumy odor lifted from her body. The silver-vinyl sheath, which was a kind of tunic covering her legs to her mid-thighs, made a shivery sound as she moved. “Never let anyone insult you, darling. Verbal abuse is as vicious as physical abuse.” She paused, her mouth working as if she had more to say but dared not. In the Boathouse she’d removed her dark glasses and shoved them into her handbag and now her pearly-gray eyes were exposed to daylight, beautiful glistening eyes just faintly bloodshot, tinged with yellow like old ivory.

“Cherie, your shoulder! Your left, you carry it lower than the other. Are you aware?”

Quickly I shook my head no.

“You don’t want to appear hunchbacked. What was he — Quasimodo — A terrible thing for a girl. Here — ”

Briskly like a physical therapist Adelina gripped my wrists and pulled them over my head, to stretch me. I was made to stand on my toes, like a ballerina.

Adelina scolded: “I don’t like how people look at you. With pity, that is a kind of scorn. I hate that!”

Her mouth was wide, fleshy. Her forehead was low. Her features seemed somehow in the wrong proportions and yet the effect of my mother was a singular kind of beauty, it was not possible to look away from her. At about the time of their divorce my father had painted a sequence of portraits titled Bonobo Momma which was his best-known work as it was his most controversial: enormous unfinished canvases with raw, primitive figures of monkey-like humanoid females. It was possible to see my beautiful mother in these simian figures with their wide fleshy mouths, low brows, breasts like dugs, swollen and flushed female genitalia. When I was older I would stare at the notorious Bonobo Momma in the Museum of Modern Art and I would realize that the female figure most closely resembling Adelina was unnervingly sexual, with large hands, feet, genitalia. This was a rapacious creature to inspire awe in the merely human viewer.

I would see that there was erotic power greater than beauty. My father had paid homage to that, in my mother. Perhaps it was his loathing of her, that had allowed him to see her clearly.

Approaching us on the path was a striking young woman — walking with two elegant borzoi dogs — dark glasses masking half her face — in tight designer jeans crisscrossed with zippers like stitches — a tight sweater of some bright material like crinkled plastic. The girl’s hair was a shimmering chestnut-red ponytail that fell to her hips. Adelina stared with grudging admiration as the girl passed us without a glance.

“That’s a distinctive look.”

We walked on. I was becoming dazed, light-headed. Adelina mused: “On the catwalk, it isn’t beauty that matters. Anyone can be beautiful. Mere beauty is boring, an emptiness. Your father knew that, at least. With so much else he did not know, at least he knew that. It’s the walk — the authority. A great model announces ‘Here I am — there is only me.’”

Shyly I said, “‘There is only I.’”

“What?”

“‘There is only I.’ You said ‘me.’”

“What on earth are you talking about? Am I supposed to know?”

My mother laughed, perplexed. She seemed to be having difficulty keeping me in focus.

I’d meant to speak in a playful manner with Adelina, as I often did with adults who intimidated me and towered over me. It was a way of seeming younger than I was. But Adelina interpreted most remarks literally. Jokes fell flat with her, unless she made them herself, punctuated with her sharp barking laughter.

Adelina hailed a taxi, to take us to Tavern on the Green.

The driver, swarthy-skinned, with a short-trimmed goatee, was speaking on a cell phone in a lowered voice, in a language unknown to us. At the same time, the taxi’s radio was on, a barrage of noisy advertising. Adelina said, “Driver? Please turn off that deafening radio, will you?”

With measured slowness as if he hadn’t quite heard her, the driver turned off his radio. Into the cell phone he muttered an expletive in an indecipherable language.

Sharply Adelina said, “Driver? I’d prefer that you didn’t speak on the phone while you’re driving. If you don’t mind.”

In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes fixed us with scarcely concealed contempt.

“Your cell phone, please. Will you turn it off. There’s a law against taxi drivers using their cell phones while they have fares, you must know that. It’s dangerous. I hate it. I wouldn’t want to report you to the taxi authority.”

The driver mumbled something indistinct. Adelina said, “It’s rude to mumble, monsieur. You can let us off here.”

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are, monsieur! You understand English perfectly well. I see your name here, and I’m taking down your license number. Open this damned door. Immediately.”

The taxi braked to a stop. I was thrown forward against the scummy plastic partition that separated us from the furious driver. Pain like an electric shock, fleeting and bright, throbbed in my spine. Adelina and the swarthy-skinned driver exchanged curses as Adelina yanked me out of the taxi and slammed the door, and the taxi sped away.

“Yes, I will report him! Illegal immigrant — I wouldn’t be surprised.”

We were stranded inside the park, on one of the drives traversing the park from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. We had some distance to walk to Tavern on the Green and I was feeling light-headed, concerned that I wasn’t going to make it. But when Adelina asked me if I was all right, quickly I told her that I was fine.

“Frankly, darling, you don’t look ‘fine.’ You look sick. What on earth is your father thinking, entrusting you with a housekeeper?”

I wanted to protest, I loved Serena. A sudden panic came over me that Adelina might have the authority to fire her, and I would have no one.

“Darling, if you could walk straighter. This shoulder! — try. I hate to see people looking at my daughter in pity.”

Adelina shook her head in disgust. Her ash-blond hair stirred in the wind, stiffly. At the base of her throat was a delicate hollow I had not seen before. The bizarre thought came to me, I could insert my fingers into this hollow. I could push down, using all of my weight. My mother’s brittle skeleton would shatter.

“ — what? What are you saying, darling?”

I was trying to protest something. Trying to explain. As in a dream in which the right words won’t come. Not ten feet from us stood a disheveled man with a livid boiled-beet face. He too was muttering to himself — or maybe to us — grinning and showing an expanse of obscenely pink gum. Adelina was oblivious of him. He’d begun to follow us, lurching and flapping his arms as if in mockery of my gorgeous mother.

Adelina chided: “You shouldn’t have come out today, darling. If you’re not really mended. I could have come to see you, we could have planned that. We could have met at a restaurant on the West Side.”

Briskly Adelina was signaling for another taxi, standing in the street. She was wearing her dark-tinted glasses now. Her manner was urgent, dramatic. A taxi braked to a stop, the driver was an older man, darker-skinned than the other driver, more deferential. Adelina opened the rear door, pushed me inside, leaned into the window to instruct the driver: “Please take my daughter home. She’ll tell you the address. She’s just thirteen, she has had major surgery and needs to get home, right away. Make sure she gets to the actual door, will you? You can wait in the street and watch her. Here” — thrusting a bill at the driver, which must have been a large bill for the man took it from Adelina’s fingers with a terse smile of thanks.

Awkwardly Adelina stooped to kiss my cheek. She was juggling her designer handbag and a freshly lit cigarette, breathing her flamy-sweet breath into my face. “Darling, goodbye! Take a nap when you get home. You look ghastly. I’ll call you. I’m here until Thursday. Au-voir!”

The taxi sprang forward. On the curb my mother stood blowing kisses after us. In the rearview mirror the driver’s narrowed eyes shifted to my face.

A jarring ride through the park! Now I was alone, unobserved. I wiped at my eyes. Through the smudged window beside me flowed a stream of strangers on the sidewalk — all that I knew in my life that would be permanent, and my own.

Bitch

It was a bitch. The summer was jinxed. Her father died on her birthday which was July 1. Then, things got worse. Though before that, things had not been exactly good. There were clouded memories. There had been a fear of entering the hospital. Her father had joked that hospitals are dangerous places, people die in hospitals. Her father had believed that hospitals are to be avoided at all costs. The air of hospitals is a petri dish of teeming microorganisms. Her father had rarely stepped into hospitals in his former life. Her father had had to be taken by ambulance to this hospital. Her father had not returned from the hospital. Her father had seemed to know he would not return from the hospital. Her father began to call her Poppy in the hospital. Each time she entered the hospital with dread. Each time she entered his room shivering with dread. Why are hospitals refrigerated? You don’t want to ask this question. Each time she entered his room, if he was awake, if he was awake and in his bed and able to see her, he would say Is that you, Poppy? He would squint and smile eagerly and say Is that you, Poppy? Her name was not Poppy. Poppy was not a name much like her actual name though it was rare, it had become rare, for anyone to call her by that name, either. She wondered if Poppy had been her baby name, and she’d forgotten. This thought frightened her so she tried not to think it. Nor could she ask her father Who is Poppy? Before the ambulance and the hospital and the elevator to the eighth floor which had become her life things had not been exactly good and yet not-good in a way of meaning not-bad, considering. You might have said not-good in the way of meaning pretty-good, considering. She wished now that that simple happy time would return but it wasn’t likely. She was visiting her father in the hospital because she was the daughter. The two of them were marooned alone together as in a lifeboat. Somehow, suddenly this had happened. There had been a family at one time, there were other relatives living now but the father did not wish to see anyone else. The father could not bear complications in his life. He had been an aggressive man in his former life but he had had to surrender his life as a man, now he would endure the life of the body. And so they were a father and a daughter alone together as in a lifeboat in the midst of the ocean. They had to shout at each other to be heard over the rushing winds and the slosh of six-foot waves. The hospital air was teeming with microorganisms poised to devour them. These were sharks too small to be detected by the human eye but obviously they were there. Disinfectant could keep them at bay but not for very long. The smell of disinfectant had seeped into her hair and could not be washed out. The smell of disinfectant had seeped into her clothing, her skin, even her fingernails. Beneath her fingernails, a sharp smell of disinfectant as if she’d been scratching her own skin, or scalp. No one would ever kiss her mouth again. No one would ever draw close to her again. What a joke! The summer was jinxed. The entire year would be jinxed. The preceding year, seen in retrospect, must have been jinxed. Though she had not known then, for she had believed that the not-so-good present was a “phase,” a “stage,” some sort of “transition.” Until the hospital, much can be interpreted as “transition.” She hadn’t known that her father had loved her. That was a surprise! She hadn’t known that her father had taken much notice of her. As a girl she had loved her father but eventually she’d given up, as we do when our love is not returned. Though possibly she’d been mistaken. Oh, it was a bitch! It was a bad joke. She was a bitch to think such thoughts at such a time. Though it was a comfort in this, that she was a bitch who deserved bad luck and not a nice person who deserved better. There had been a previous life involving her but in the hospital at her father’s bedside she could not recall this life very clearly. Perhaps it had involved someone else, in fact. Perhaps her family had been other people. Through a glass darkly came to her. She was envious of those other people she had not known. The nurses on the eighth floor knew her. Some of them, the nice ones, smiled encouragingly. Some of them smiled in pity. Some of them did not smile but glanced quickly away. Some of them ducked into supply closets. The attendants who spoke little English knew her. Everywhere were hospital workers who had no idea who she was yet knew her. Each time she entered the hospital with an eager dread. She shivered with an eager dread. The hospital was refrigerated in summer. You had to wear heavy clothing. You had to wear warm stockings. You had to clench your hands into fists and squeeze them beneath your armpits for warmth. She stepped out of the elevator on the eighth floor with her eager dread. She pushed through the doors of the cardiac unit with her eager dread. She was bringing flowers, or a basket of fruit. She was bringing the local newspaper which she would read to her father. Yet, she entered his room with her eager dread never knowing what she would encounter. For each time, her father was a smaller man in the ever-larger bed. Each time, her father’s eyes were sunk more deeply in their ever-larger sockets. Each time, something was missing from the room. Her father’s wristwatch that had been on the bedside table. Her father’s fuzzy bedroom slippers that had been neatly positioned on the floor beside the bed. Her father’s reading glasses were taken from him, who would want a dying old man’s reading glasses! Her father’s dentures were taken from him, who would want a dying old man’s dentures! Tears glistened on her father’s sunken cheeks. His collapsed mouth was frantic. She was his only hope. Her voice became excited. A nurse warned of calling security. You can’t accuse theft. You had better not accuse theft. You had better have evidence for theft. He was saying, You are my only hope. You will live on. I will live in you, my only hope. My beautiful daughter. Only you. She was terrified by such words. She began to tremble, such words. There was a roaring of wind, a terrible sloshing of waves. She wanted to scream at him, I’m not the one! Don’t count on me. No one had said she was beautiful in a long time. No one had kissed her mouth in a long time. Her father looked at her with love — but what is love, in a dying old man! What is love, in a deranged old man! On the eve of her father’s death, the missing dentures turned up. “Turned up” was the explanation. Yet her father died with a collapsed mouth, for it was too late for dentures. She was wakened from a stuporous sleep by a ringing phone. She who was his daughter who’d been claiming to be insomniac and sleep deprived yet she’d been wakened from a stuporous sleep to be informed by a woman’s voice that her father had passed away and she must come to the hospital as quickly as possible to make arrangements for the disposal of the body and to clear out the room. Now the summer stretched ahead like an asphalt parking lot to the horizon. Through a glass darkly rang in her head. She had no idea why. Though she’d been warned, there was the shock of entering an empty room. There was the shock of the stripped bed, the bare mattress. There was the shock of an overpowering smell of disinfectant. It was her task to clear this room of her father’s things. She was capable of this task, she thought. Her father’s dentures were given to her. Her father’s dentures had “turned up.” Later she might wonder if these dentures were in fact her father’s dentures but at the time she had not doubted that this was a happy ending. Later she would doubt for there was no way of knowing, really. She took care to wrap the dentures in tissue paper, though her hands were trembling. She was terrified of dropping the dentures onto the floor and breaking them. She was her father’s only hope. She believed that she was equal to the task except she was distracted by something murmurous. It sounded like an anxious Is that you, Poppy? But she couldn’t be sure.

Amputee

You’re wondering how we meet. People like us.

“Excuse me?” — near closing time at the library & suddenly he’s looming over me. His manner is friendly-anxious & his eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses are dark & shining like globules of oil. He smells of wettish wool, something chalky & acrid. He’s a neatly dressed man in his late thirties whom I have seen previously in the library, at a little distance. Or maybe I have seen him elsewhere in Barnegat. His breathing is oddly quickened & shallow as if he’s just run up a steep flight of stairs with a question only Jane Erdley Circulation can answer.

In fact Jane Erdley has been observing this person for the past hour — he’s tall, lanky-limbed & self-conscious — as if he’s ill at ease in his body — there’s a glare in his clean-shaven face, a look of intense excitement, yet dread — for the past hour, or more, he’s been sitting at the long polished-pine table in the periodicals & reference room across the foyer, covertly glancing over at me while reading, or pretending to read, a copy of Scientific American.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“I have a, a question — ”

“Yes?”

Vaguely I remember — in the way a near-forgotten dream is recalled not by an act of will but unwittingly — that I’d first glimpsed this man shortly after the New Year. He’d worn a dark woolen overcoat — another time, a hooded windbreaker — now it’s late winter he’s wearing a tweed herringbone sport coat frayed at the elbows, black corduroy trousers & white dress shirt open at the throat. He might be as old as fifty, or as young as thirty-five — his thick dark hair is threaded with filaments of gray & receding unevenly from his forehead.

On the previous occasions I’d sighted him in the library, he’d been watching me, too. But not so fixedly that I took note of him.

For others stare at me, often. Mostly men, though not exclusively men. Rarely do I take note, any longer.

When I was younger, yes. When I was a girl. But no longer.

Today has been an odd, ominous day. Icy pelting rain & few people came to the library & abruptly then by late afternoon the sky above the Atlantic Ocean cleared & now at dusk there is an eerily beautiful blue-violet tinge to the eastern sky outside the Barnegat library’s big bay window a quarter-mile from the shore & somehow it has happened, who knows why at this moment, the man in the herringbone coat has decided to break the silence between us.

“There is a writer — ‘Triptree’ — ”

“‘Tiptree.’”

“‘Tiptree.’ That’s the name?”

“‘James Tiptree, Jr.’ — in fact, Tiptree was a woman.”

“A woman! I guess I’d heard that — yes.”

How eager, his eyes! Behind the steel-rimmed glasses a terrible hunger in those eyes.

In this way we meet. In this way we talk. There’s both excitement between us & a strange sort of ease — a sense that we know each other already, & are re-meeting — reviving our feeling for each other. Later I will learn that Tyrell premeditated this exchange for some time. Tiptree is just a pretext for our meeting — of course. Any reader interested in Tiptree would know that “James Tiptree, Jr.” is the pseudonym of a female science-fiction writer of the 1950s, of considerable distinction — but Tyrell’s question is a shrewd one since as it happens I am the only librarian in the small Barnegat library who has actually read the few Tiptree books on our shelves & can discuss Tiptree’s stories with him as I check out other patrons at the circulation desk.

In the Barnegat Public Library where I’ve worked — in Circulation, in Reference, in Children & Young Adults — for the past two years, since graduating from library school, it’s common that visitors pause to speak with me like this; it’s common that they hope to establish some sort of bond with me, which I find repellent. With what absurd sobriety do people regard Jane Erdley — with what respect they speak to her — as if the youngest librarian on the Barnegat staff were composed of the most delicate crystal & not flesh, blood & bones, or afflicted by some hideous disease which causes the victim to waste away before your eyes & wasn’t a reasonably attractive & healthy young woman of twenty-six with long curly rust-colored hair, hazel-green eyes and skin flawed only by tiny tear-sized scars at my hairline — ninety-seven pounds, five-foot-three — small hard biceps & sculpted shoulder muscles just visible through my muslin blouses, silk shirts open at the throat & loose-crocheted tops. You might expect me to wear trousers like the other female librarians but I prefer skirts; from vintage clothing stores I’ve assembled a small but striking wardrobe of velvet, satin, lace dresses & shawls & in winter I am sure to wear stylish leather shoe-boots. In warm weather, quite short skirts: & why not?

Deliberately I’m not looking at the man in the frayed herringbone coat leaning his elbows on the counter as we speak together of the mysterious & entertaining fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. I’ve become so accustomed to checking out books — a mindless task like most of my librarian duties & therefore pleasant & soothing — that I can manage a conversation with one library patron while serving another — though sensing how this man is staring at me, turning a small object in his fingers — car keys? — compulsively, like dice; I can sense his unease, that my attention is divided — I’m withholding from him my fullest attention — when he has surprised himself with his boldness in speaking to me, at last. Clearly this is a reserved man — not shy perhaps but secretive, wary — the kind of person of whom it’s said he is a very private person — & now he’s feeling both reckless & helpless — resentful of the other library patrons who are taking up my time.

That sick-drowning look in the man’s eyes — it would be embarrassing of me to acknowledge.

This is one who wants me. Badly.

When he walks away I don’t glance after him — I am very busy checking out books. I assume that he has exited the library but no — there he is in the front lobby a few minutes later, peering into glass display cases at papier-mâché dinosaurs made by grade school children, bestselling gardening books & romance novels.

How strange! Or maybe not so strange.

He isn’t looking back at me. He’s determined not to look. But finally he weakens, he can’t resist, a sidelong glance which I give no indication of having seen.

Don’t look at me. Try not to look at me.

Go away. Go home. You disgust me!

Much disgusts me. For a long time I was encouraged to count myself blessed, for of course it could have been much worse, but in recent years, no.

Since graduating from library school at Rutgers. Since having to surrender my life as a student, a privileged sort of person in a university setting in which, though never numerous, others like myself were not uncommon; that large & varied subspecies of the disabled of which I am but a single specimen & by no means the most extreme.

Wanting to say to the somber faces & staring eyes Save your God damned pity for the truly piteous. Not me.

This I resent: though I could be trained to drive a motor vehicle — with mechanical adjustments for my disability, of course — I’m forbidden by the Motor Vehicle Department of the State of New Jersey which will not grant me a driver’s license. How ridiculous this is, & unjust! — when any idiot with two legs & half a brain can get a license in New Jersey. And so I’m dependent upon accepting rides with co-workers or taking the shore bus.

For the first several months of my employment at Barnegat I rode with one of the other librarians, who also lives on Shore Island, three miles to the north. Until one day it became abundantly clear that this woman was too curious about me. Too interested in me. So now I take the shore bus. Now I ride with predominately dark-skinned commuters — African-American, Hispanic — most of them nannies, cleaning women & day-laborers of various kinds. This is something of a scandal at the library — something of which my co-workers speak ruefully behind my back — Why won’t Jane let us help her? If only Jane would let us help her! To their faces I am not at all unfriendly; in fact I’m very friendly, when I wish. But the bus stop is less than a block from the library. The trip itself is less than three miles, from my (rented) apartment (duplex, ground-floor) on Shore Island to Barnegat; if you continue south from Barnegat it’s another three miles to Lake View, & so along the Jersey shore — densely populated in the summer, sparsely populated in the winter — forty-three miles to Atlantic City.

Yes I’ve taken the bus to Atlantic City since moving to the Jersey shore.

Yes I’ve gone alone.

My family disapproves of course. My mother in particular who is anxious & angry about her cripple-daughter of course.

Why on earth would you take public transportation when you could ride with a friend, she asks.

Not a friend, I tell her. A co-worker.

A co-worker, then! But why live alone on the Jersey shore when you could live in Highland Park, with us.

(Highland Park is a very nice middle-class suburb of New Brunswick not far from the sprawling campus of Rutgers University where my father teaches engineering.)

Because I do what I want to do. And not what you want me to do.

My mother & I are not close. And so I would not tell her how fascinated I am by others’ fascination with me. How I love the eyes of strangers moving onto me startled, shocked — by chance, at first — then with deliberation — making of me an object of sympathy, or pity; an object of revulsion. Love making you feel guilty for having two normal legs, feet. For being abled, not disabled. Staring at my face fixing your eyes on my eyes to indicate how pointedly you are not looking away nor are you glancing down at my lower body to see what is missing in me that makes me irremediably different from you who are whole & blessed of God.

Now at the rear of the darkened library he’s waiting.

In the parking lot, near Library Staff Parking Only — he’s waiting.

Later he will say I tried to go away. But I couldn’t.

He will say Do you know why, Jane? Why I couldn’t go away?

By 6:20 P.M. the parking lot behind the library is empty except for a single vehicle, a station wagon, which must be his. In no hurry I have prepared to leave. For I know he’ll be there: already between us the bond is established, should I wish to acknowledge it.

Like an actress preparing to step out onto a stage & uncertain of the script — uncertain what will be said to her. By this time the sky has darkened. The clouds are thickening. There is a wan melancholy beauty remaining in the sky in the heavy massed clouds like a watercolor wash of Winslow Homer, shading into night & oblivion. On the pavement are swaths of snow pockmarked with the grime of the long Jersey winter but at this hour, imperfections are scarcely visible. I am wearing a long military-looking dark wool coat swinging loose & unbuttoned — a chic, expensive designer coat purchased at an after-Christmas sale at the East Shore Mall — my face is stony & composed & in fact I am very uneasy — I am very excited — pushing open the rear door that bears on the outside the admonition No Admittance — Library Staff Only — & at once the man in the herringbone coat steps forward to take hold of the door & pull it farther open, as if I required assistance. In a thrilled voice saying, “May I help you, Ms. Erdley? Let me get this door.”

“Thank you — but no. I can manage the door myself.”

“Then — let me carry this bag for you.”

“No. I can carry this bag myself.”

On my crutches I’m strong, capable — swinging my Step Up! legs like a girl-athlete in a gym. On my crutches I exude an air of such headlong & relentless competence, your instinct would be to jump out of my way.

No I tell him. And again No. Almost I’m laughing — the sound of my laughter is startling, high-pitched — a laughter like breaking glass — it’s astonishing to me, this sudden sexual boldness in the man in the tweed coat & white shirt who’d been so polite, earnest & proper, inside the library. No one is close by — no one is a witness — he can loom over me, taller than I am by several inches — he can coerce me with his height & the authority of his maleness. Very deliberately & tenderly he appropriates my leather bag — slips the strap from my shoulder and onto his own.

“Yes. This is very heavy. I can carry this.”

I can’t tug at the shoulder bag — I don’t want to get into a struggle with the man. We’re walking together awkwardly — as if neither of us has a sure footing — the sidewalk is wet, icy — my crutches are impediments, obstacles — my crutches are weapons, of a kind, & make me laugh, so ugly & clumsy & this man isn’t sure how to appropriate me, armed as I am with both crutches & prosthetic lower limbs that clearly fascinate him even as they frighten him — I can’t help but laugh at the situation, & at him — he’s trying to laugh, too — but agitated, embarrassed — daring to grip my arm at the elbow as if to steady me.

“Ms. Erdley — maybe I should carry you? This pavement is all ice…”

“No. You can’t carry me.”

“Yes. I think I should.”

“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Where is your car?”

“I don’t have a car.”

“You don’t have a car?”

“I said no. Now leave me alone, please.”

“But — how are you getting home?”

“How do you know I’m going home?”

“Wherever you’re going, then — how will you get there?”

“The way I got here.”

“Ms. Erdley — how is that?”

“I think that’s my business.”

“Just tell me — how? You’re not walking home, are you?”

“And what if I am?”

“Well — are you?”

“No. I am not walking home.”

“Then — where are you going?”

“I’m taking the bus.”

“The bus! No — I’ll drive you.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“I’ll drive you.”

How we meet, people like us.

He tells me his name: Tyrell Beckmann.

He knows my name: Jane Erdley.

He was born in Barnegat Sound, thirty-seven years ago this month. Moved away for all of his adult life & just recently moved back for “family & business reasons.”

He has a wife, two young daughters.

Matter-of-factly enunciating Wife, two young daughters in the stoic way of one acknowledging an act of God.

A miracle. Or a natural disaster.

Solemnly he confides in me: “After my father died last fall the family put pressure on me to return to Barnegat — to work with my brothers in the family business — ‘Beckmann & Sons’ — I’d rather not discuss it, Jane! In February I enrolled in a computer course at the community college — anything that’s unknown to me, I’m drawn to like a magnet. Also it’s a good excuse for getting out of the house in the evening. Until I came into the library. Until I saw you.”

His breath is steaming in the cold air. Shrewdly he has shifted the heavy shoulder bag to his right side so that I can’t tug it away from him, & he can walk close beside me unimpeded.

Here is a surprise: the man’s long-legged stride is a match for me on my crutches. Despite my so-called disability I normally walk a little too fast for other people especially women in impractical footwear — it makes me smile to hear them plead laughingly Jane! For heaven’s sake wait — but Tyrell Beckmann keeps pace with me, easily. Though he doesn’t seem very coordinated — as if one of his legs were shorter than the other, or one of his knees pained him. His head bobs as he walks, like the head of a large predator bird. His forehead is creased with the intensity of his thoughts & the corners of his mouth have a downward turn except when something surprises him & he smiles a quick startled boyish smile.

Already I take pride in thinking I will make this man smile! I have the power.

As we walk, Tyrell does most of the talking. Like a man long deprived of speech he tells me how as a boy he took out books from the Barnegat library — how he loved the children’s room, & read virtually every book on the shelves. He tells me about the writers he’d read since boyhood & most admired — Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London (The Call of the Wild), Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick — then in high school Henry David Thoreau, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Dostoyevsky — the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground & not the massive sprawling novels. As a “mystic-minded” adolescent he fell under the spell of the Upanishads & the Vedantists — the belief that the individual is one with the universe. As a young man in his twenties he read Søren Kierkegaard & Edmund Husserl & at Union Theological Seminary — where he’d enrolled with the vague intention of becoming some sort of Protestant-existentialist minister — he fell under the spell of the theologian Paul Tillich who’d once been on the faculty there & whose influence prevailed decades later.

Tillich was a Christian, he says, for whom Christianity wasn’t an encoded religion but living, vital. So too Tyrell is a Christian in principle though he finds it difficult to believe in either Jesus Christ or in God.

“‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.’”

These beautiful words! I wonder if they are from the Bible — the Old Testament, or the New.

I ask Tyrell do these words mean it’s what people do that matters, & not what people are, or in what state they are born; & Tyrell squeezes my hand, awkwardly & eagerly as my fingers grip the crutch — “Yes, Jane. That is exactly what that means.”

He has called me Jane. His hand lingers on mine, as if to steady me, or himself.

By this time it’s beyond dusk — nearly nighttime. We didn’t walk to the bus stop but as if by mutual consent we made our way behind the library parking lot along a path through tall rushes & dune grass & spindly wild rose & descended to the wide hard-crusted beach where a harsh wet wind whips at our faces & clothing. Here is the Atlantic Ocean — moving walls of jagged slate-colored waves — exactly the waves painted by Winslow Homer so precisely & obsessively, farther north along the Maine shore — in these waves a ferocious wish to sweep over us, to devour us.

Tyrell sees that I am shivering. Tyrell leans close to me, his arm around my shoulders. How clumsy we are, walking together! A man, a girl, a pair of crutches.

I ask him why he’d dropped out of the seminary & he says he was in despair, badly he’d wanted to be a “man of God” — to help others — while believing neither in God nor in others — & at last he realized that his desperation was to help himself — & so he quit. Living alone then in a single room on 113th Street, New York City — he’d broken off with his family in Barnegat Sound — went for days sometimes without speaking to anyone — took night courses at Columbia — found solace in his secular courses, psychology & linguistics — did research into the “secret language of twins” — the “social construction of twinness” & the “psychic ontology of twins” — its reception in the world.

“In some primitive cultures, twins are sacred. In others, twins are demonic and must be destroyed.”

“Why is that?”

“Why? No one knows why.”

From the subject of twins Tyrell shifts to the subject of the Hebrew Bible he’d studied — “deconstructed” — in the seminary; the compendium of writings — crude, inspired, primitive, surpassingly beautiful & terrifying — of an ancient people possessed by the idea that they are the chosen of God & hence their fate is God’s fate for them & never mere accident lacking in meaning.

“Essentially there are two ontologies: the accidental & the necessary. In the one, we are free. In the other, we are fated.”

“Are we! You sound very sure of yourself.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Jane! Please.”

“But why are you telling me these things? I don’t even know you.”

“Of course you know me, Jane.”

“No!”

“And you know why I’m telling you these things, Jane.”

“Why?”

“Because we are twins, Jane.”

“Twins! Don’t be ridiculous.”

The man’s calmness frightens me. His matter-of-fact speech. Though the wind is whipping at our faces, making our eyes tear. I want to think He’s mad. This is madness.

“Twins: in our souls. You know that.”

“I don’t know any such thing.”

“Yes. You know that, Jane. It’s clearer to me than any mystic identity of oneness in the universe. Just — us. We are oneness.”

“Oneness! That’s so — ”

I want to say ridiculous, mad. Instead, my voice trails off. I’m overcome by a fit of shivering & Tyrell grips my arm at the elbow, his fingers strong through the fabric of my coat.

Oblivious of our surroundings we’ve been hiking on the winter beach — a mile? Two miles? We turn back & retrace our steps in the hard-crusted sand.

The man’s heavy footprints, my smaller footprints & the slash-like prints made by my crutches.

No one could identify us, studying these prints. No one could guess at us.

The winter beach is littered with storm debris. Python-sized strips of brine, swaths of frozen & crusted ocean froth resembling spittle, or semen. Through a tear in the cloud-mass is a pale glaring moon like a mad eye winking.

The next time he asks, I will say Yes. You may carry me.

No one can understand how we are perfect together.

My stumps, fitted into the shallows at the base of his thighs.

My pale-pink skin, the most secret skin of my stumps, so soft, a man touching this skin exclaims as if he has been scalded. Oh! My God.

How do such things happen you ask & the answer is Quickly!

Those weeks of late-winter, early spring at the Jersey shore at Barnegat. Those weeks when Tyrell Beckmann entered my life. For there was no way to prevent him.

Saying Jane you are perfect. I adore you.

Saying I was born imperfect — “damaged.” There is something wrong with my body, no one can see except me.

It was so: Tyrell inhabited his body as if at an awkward distance from it. As if he had difficulty coordinating the motions of his legs as he walked & his arms that hung stiffly at his sides. Almost you might think Here is a man in the wrong body.

Confiding in me as I lay in his arms fitted into his body like a key in a lock.

So often in those weeks Tyrell came to me at the library, once I asked him where was his wife? & he said his wife was at home & in the mildest way of taunting I asked didn’t she wonder where he was on those evenings he was with me & he said she would suppose he was at the community college & I said oh but not every night! — & not so late on those nights — & it was then he said in a voice of male smugness: “She doesn’t want to know.”

Hearing this I felt a small stab of pleasure. Resenting as always the very syllable wife & certainly any thought of Tyrell’s wife until seeing now that this man was the prince of his household, very likely — the marriage, the family life, was centered upon him.

In any love-relationship there is the stronger person, & there is the weaker. There is the one who loves, & the one who is loved.

Loved, & therefore feared.

As often as he could come to me, he came. Arriving a half hour before the library closed. Or breathless & flush-faced arriving a scant five minutes before closing time. Sometimes Tyrell came directly from work — as he called it, without wishing to elaborate — as if the subject of his work in a family-owned local business was painful to him — & wore a sport coat or a suit, white shirt & necktie & black dress shoes like any professional man; at other times he wore corduroy trousers, the herringbone-tweed coat with leather elbow-patches, salt-stained running shoes.

Never did I look for the man. Never did I betray surprise or even (evident) pleasure glancing up & seeing the man looming over me with his tense tight smile, at the circulation desk.

There is the hunter, and there is the hunted.

Power resides not in the hunter — as you might think — but in the hunted.

In his hand a book as a prop. A book as a pretext. A book to be checked out of the Barnegat Public Library by the librarian at the circulation desk.

“Jane! Hello.”

It was not forbidden that Tyrell call me Jane. Many of the library patrons knew me & called me Jane.

It was not forbidden that Tyrell smile at me. Every patron known to me at the library was likely to smile at me.

It was forbidden that Tyrell touch me in public. Not even a handshake. Not even a brushing of his fingers against mine when I handed him back his plastic library card. Nor did I allow Tyrell to stare at me, in that way of his that was raw, ravenous. I had a horror of others knowing of us, or guessing. I had a horror of being talked-of, whispered-about.

Though it gave me a childish pleasure to lie in my bed in the early morning — amid my bedclothes tousled & rumpled from the man’s perspiring body of the previous night — & languidly to think yes probably others had noticed Tyrell lingering in my vicinity, or waiting for me when the library closed; very likely, some had seen us walking together on the deserted winter beach. Jane Erdley & that man — that tall man who comes into the library so much & is always hovering over her. The other librarians on the staff who are so sharp-eyed & our supervisor Mr. McCarren whose particular project Jane Erdley has been.

We are committed to hiring the disabled here, Ms. Erdley. This was the Barnegat mandate long before it was a directive of the State of New Jersey.

Oh thank you! Mr. McCarren that is so — kind.

I did not like it that others might wonder of us & gossip but I did like it that Tyrell revealed so plainly in his face the desire he felt for me. I liked it that the older, married man should be so reckless, desperate.

It pleased me perversely to think that he was the prince of his household. He was a man of thirty-seven who retained the youth & cruel naivete of a man a decade younger, or more — & so his maleness, his sexuality, withheld from the woman who was his wife, would aggrieve her. Not a syllable of reproach would pass the wife’s lips — so I imagined! — yet her hurt, her woundedness, her anxiety would be considerable. It is natural that a husband hold his wife in disdain, for she is his possession, available to him & known to him utterly as Jane Erdley would never be fully known.

Oh God! So beautiful.

Beneath the red plaid flannel skirt flared & short as a schoolgirl’s — beneath the schoolgirl white-woolen stockings worn with shiny red ankle-high boots — the (expensive, clumsy) prosthetic limbs: pink-plastic, with aluminum trim, lewd & ludicrous & to remove these, to unbuckle these, the man’s fingers trembling & the man’s face heated with desire, or dread — the first stage of the act of love — the act of sex-love — that will bind us, close as twins.

“Has there been any other —? Any other who — like this?”

“No. No one.”

“Am I the first?”

“Yes. The first.”

Seeing the look in the man’s face, the adoration in the man’s eyes I burst into laughter, it was not a malicious laughter but a child’s laughter of delight & playfulness & tears spilled from my eyes — a rarity for Jane Erdley does not cry even stricken with phantom-pain in her lower limbs — & I kissed the man hard on the lips as I had never kissed anyone in my life & I said, “Yes you are the first & you will always be the first.”

Throbbing veins & nerve-endings in the stumps. The stumps of what had once been my legs, my thighs — years ago in my old, lost life. Spidery red veins, thicker blue arteries deep inside the flesh. Where the stumps break off — where the amputation occurred — about six inches below the fine-curly-red-haired = of my groin — there is a delicious shiny near-transparent skin, an utterly poreless skin, onion-skin-thin, an infant’s skin; in wonderment you would want to stroke this skin, & lick it with your tongue yet in fact this skin isn’t only just soft but strangely sturdy, resilient — a kind of cuticle, a protective outer layer as of something shimmering & unspeakable.

“And you, Jane — you will always be my first.”

On Shore Island in his station wagon he kissed me. That first night shyly asking permission & several nights in succession I told him No — that isn’t a good idea & at last as he persisted I said Well — all right. But just once for the man knew that I would say Yes finally, from the first he’d known.

On Shore Island in my (small, sparely furnished) apartment he first kissed me there. Undressed me & unbuckled the plastic legs & kissed me many times there.

On Shore Island overlooking marshland: six-foot rushes that swayed & thrashed in the wind, a brackish odor of rotting things & at dawn a crazed choir of gulls, crows, marsh birds shrieking in derision, or in warning.

Kissing & sucking. For long delirious minutes that became half hours, & hours. Shivering & moaning & kissing/sucking the stumps, the soft infant-skin at the end of the stumps, so excited I could feel the blood rush into his penis, in my hand his penis was a kind of stump, immediately erect & smallish then filling out with blood leech-like filling with blood & hardening with blood & at last a hard yearning stump with a blunt blind soft head that seemed wondrous to me, so vulnerable & beautiful — a ludicrous thing, yet beautiful — as the stumps that are all that remain of my girl-legs are ludicrous, ugly & yet to this man’s eyes beautiful, as I am beautiful — the female torso, the upper limbs, the spread-open thighs, stump-thighs, & the openness between the thighs, moist & slash-like in the flesh, thrumming with heat & life & yearning — I will love you forever, there is no one like you my darling Jane you are so beautiful, my darling! Love love love love you — & in his delirium he seemed not to comprehend how I did not claim to love him.

For to be loved is to bask in your power, like a coiled snake sunning itself on a rock.

To love is weakness. This weakness must be overcome.

“I first saw you with some other women. I think they were your colleagues. The other librarians. You were walking into town” — this would be a distance of only a few blocks, on Holland Street leading into Barnegat Avenue where there is a very good inexpensive restaurant named Wheatsheaf — “you were laughing, & so beautiful — the braces just visible beneath your skirt shining, your crutches — the other women were just — so — ordinary — plain & heavy-footed — they were just walking. All the light was on you, & you were flying. Your beautiful shimmering-red hair, your beautiful face, all the light was on you & you seemed almost to be seeing me — taking note of me, & smiling — at me! — you passed by so close on the sidewalk, I could have reached out & touched you…I felt faint, I stared after you, I had never seen anyone like you — beside you all other women are maimed, their legs are clumsy, their feet are ugly. I could have reached out & touched you…”

“Why didn’t you touch me?”

I laugh in his arms. I am very happy. In the man’s arms, my thigh-stumps lifted to fit in that special place. He is caressing, kissing, the pit of my belly. My tiny slant-eye belly button. With his tongue. & my shoulder tucked into the crook of his arm. So snugly we fit together, like tree-roots that have grown together. & this not over a period of years but at once, all but overnight as by a miracle.

“Because one touch would not have been enough for me. That’s why.”

At the Jersey shore spring is slow to arrive. Still in early April there are dark-glowering days spitting icy rain. Fierce swirling snowflakes & ice-pellets — flotillas of snow-clouds like gigantic clipper ships blown overhead — yet by degrees with the passing of days even the storm-sky begins to remain light later & later — until at last at 6 P.M. — the library’s closing time, weekdays — the sky above the ocean, visible through the broad bay window at the front of the library, was no longer dark. “Jane! Your friend is waiting at the front desk.”

“My friend? My friend — who?”

My face flushed hot with blood. My eyes welled with tears of distress. So it must have been known to them, casually known to the other librarians, that crippled Jane Erdley had a friend; that the tall, taciturn slightly older man who came frequently to the library was Jane Erdley’s special friend.

This was a day I was working at the rear of the library doing book orders on a computer. Another librarian had taken over the circulation desk.

“He — isn’t my friend. He’s a relative — a cousin — a distant cousin — he lives over in Barnegat Sound.”

I did not meet the woman’s eye. My voice was husky, wavering.

Though I was smiling, or trying to smile. A flash of a smile lighting up my face, in defiance of pity, sympathy. Whatever you are offering me, I am not in need of.

On this windy April day I was wearing a pleated skirt made of cream-colored wool flannel, that resembled a high school cheerleader’s skirt, & I was wearing a crimson satin blouse with a V-neckline glittering with thin gold chains & small crystal beads, & if you dared to lean over, to peer at my legs, or what was meant to represent my “legs,” you would see the twin prostheses, shiny plastic artificial legs & steel pins & on my (small) feet eyelet stockings & black patent leather “ballerina slippers.”

My crutches were nearby. My crutches have a look of having been flung gaily aside, as of little consequence.

“Well. He seems very nice — gentlemanly. He’s obviously very fond of you.”

The woman spoke in a voice of mild reproach. A chill passed over me. She knows! They all know, & are disgusted.

This was clear to me, suddenly. & there was no pleasure in it, only a shared disgust, dismay.

& so that evening I told Tyrell I did not want to see him anymore, I thought it was best for us not to see each other after this night. In his station wagon he was driving us along the ocean highway to Shore Island & gripping the steering wheel tight in his left hand so the knuckles glared white & with his other hand he held my left hand & spread his fingers wide grasping my upper thigh, that was my “stump” — the living flesh that abutted the plastic prostheses, so strangely — compulsively he was squeezing the pleats of my skirt & the tip of his middle finger pressed against the pit of my belly; it was past 6:30 P.M. but not yet dusk, the eastern sky above the ocean was streaked with horizontal strips of clouds of the color of bruised rotted fruit & quietly I told him I did not think that this was a good idea — “seeing each other the way we do” — I told him that people were beginning to talk of us in Barnegat — & eventually, his family would find out — his wife…

My voice trailed off. I knew that I had upset him & knew that he could not turn to face me while he was driving, to protest.

Yet: without speaking Tyrell pulled the station wagon off the highway & turned onto a gravel service road — the abruptness of his behavior was exciting to me, & unnerving — behind us traffic streamed on the highway but this was a desolate place amid stunted trees & sand dunes & scattered trash & out of sight of the highway Tyrell braked the station wagon & turned to me & his shadowed face was anguish & his hands were on me roughly & in desperation — his mouth on mine, his tongue in my mouth hungry & strangely cool & I held him in my arms in triumph feeling the strength of my biceps & my shoulders flow into the man, though I could not match the man in physical strength yet he would have to acknowledge the strength & the suppleness of my body & he said, “Don’t say such things, Jane — I love you so much, Jane, there is no one but you. There is no one” — pulling at my clothing, at the pleated skirt & now his hands were on the prosthetic limbs fumbling to detach them from my thigh-stumps & he was moaning — trembling — he was desperate with love for me & behind the rain-splotched windshield of the vehicle that same waxy-pale moon now a diminished quarter-moon, winking.

No one Jane but you.

Nothing but this.

In the night he cries out in his sleep. He thrashes, he shivers, he shudders & I am frightened of his sudden strength, if he tries to defend himself against a dream-assailant. From his throat issue loud crude animal cries, like nothing I have heard from him before. With some difficulty I manage to wake him & he’s uncertain of where he is & agitated & by degrees becomes calmer & finally laughs — he has turned on the bedside lamp, he has fumbled to find a cigarette in a trouser pocket — saying he’d had a nightmare. Some “ridiculous” creature with sharp teeth & a stunted head like a crocodile was trying to eat him — devour him.

I ask him if he often has nightmares & he laughs irritably saying who knows or gives a damn — “Dreams are debris to be forgotten.”

Later: “I dreamt that we were both dead. But very happy. You said Maybe we will never be born.”

Then in early April, I saw him.

In the East Shore Mall, I saw him.

Suddenly then & with no preparation, Tyrell Beckmann & his family.

On their strong, whole legs. As in the central open atrium of the Mall I approached these strangers & saw how one of them, the male, the husband & father, materialized into Tyrell who was my lover — this was a shock! — this was an ugly surprise — yet I did not falter unless for a half-second, a heartbeat & immediately then I had recovered & on my crutches gripped beneath my arms like paddles or wings & my useless but showy plastic legs swinging I flew past them — swift as an arrow Jane Erdley can move, at such times propelled by adrenaline like a wounded creature.

His face. A startled blur as I flew past on my crutches staring straight ahead & ignoring him. Tyrell, the wife, the two daughters — within seconds I was past them. The younger of the two girls sucked at her fingers murmuring to her mother Ohhh what happened to that lady — oh did it hurt!

Beside her an older sister, ten or eleven, fleshier & resembling the mother crinkled up her face & rudely stared after me.

Ohhh is she crippled? Is she missing her legs? Ohhh that’s ugly.

But already I was past, unseeing. And not a backward glance.

Immediately I left the Mall. Immediately retreating to lick my wounds & to prevent further humiliation & on the bus back to Shore Island my brain in a frenzy replayed the scene. Helpless & furious replaying the scene like one digging at a raw wound with a fingernail.

I did not choose to linger on my guilty lover’s face. For in that moment it was clear that Tyrell Beckmann was not my lover. The man’s allegiance was to his family — the wife, the daughters. In his shocked face & alarmed eyes there was no discernible love for Jane Erdley only just startled recognition & a cowardly terror of being found out, exposed. Instead, I concentrated on the wife — I did not know the wife’s name, Tyrell had not told me — a woman in her late thirties or perhaps older — solid-bodied, husky — brown hair of no discernible style brushed back from her face round as a moon — fleshy cheeks, flushed with color — staring eyes though veiled, unlike her rude daughter — not a striking woman but you could see she’d been attractive when younger, with slackening jowls, a fatty chin — a look of competence, capability about her & yet some slight worry, anxiety — a tiredness in the fleshy-female body — a no-longer-young mother harried by two children of whom the younger was fretting & dragging at her arm & her husband — her prince of a husband — walking a few feet ahead of his family in corduroy slacks, pullover sweater, running shoes frowning as he leafed through a glossy brochure advertising some sort of expensive electrical appliance. In the positioning of wife/mother — husband/father — you could see the dynamics of their family & the thought came to me, as consolation She is wary of losing him. Of course she is anxious, & she is resentful. As she ages, her prince of a husband will remain young.

What I saw was: the woman’s eyes glancing onto me, dropping to my lower body & to the artificial limbs — taking in my crutches, & the dexterity with which I manipulated the crutches — you could see that I’d been doing this a long time & had learned to propel myself forward with a kind of defiant ease — & the woman’s eyes that were smallish, piggish, with scanty brown lashes — narrowed in disdain or revulsion just perceptibly & in those eyes not a glimmer of sympathy for me as for one like herself who has been afflicted with grievous bodily harm, this woman who was Mrs. Tyrell Beckmann did not wish to acknowledge There but for the grace of God am I.

That arrow, shot into my heart.

And what would you like for Christmas, little girl? Tell Santa!

Very little of this I remember. I never dream of it since I don’t remember.

How at the age of eleven my legs above the knees were amputated & taken from me & I would not run again nor even walk except with crutches flailing & falling & both missing legs alive with pain like invisible flame. How it was Daddy’s fault for Daddy had been drinking at the Fourth of July picnic & afterward driving to the traffic circle for a bag of ice & six-packs of cold beer & his favorite child Jane-Jane in the passenger’s seat beside him & in the confusing dimness of dusk & headlights on the highway there was a head-on collision with a truck whose headlights were blinding or maybe it was just that Daddy fell asleep at the wheel, drunk-Daddy’s eyelids were drooping & drunk-Daddy’s mouth drooping & in an instant the vehicles careened together & the front of Daddy’s car was smashed flat like a snub nose.

I was pried from the wreckage. So it was said. I have no memory of this.

Mostly my face was spared. Except for glass-cuts, bruises & welts but the skin itself was not torn off nor the face-bones smashed. As if God meant to mock: a pretty-girl face on a broken body.

Many of the bones of my body were broken, fractured or sprained but the spinal column was spared, & the skull. All of the parts of my body were great lurid bruises orange & purple like rotted fruit. Both my legs, both my feet & my knees were smashed. There were few bones remaining intact. The calf of my right leg was sheared off. Much of my blood was lost. Transfusions kept me alive. Yet, I had died. It was said that my heart ceased beating more than once. In surgery for six hours & the heart will cease beating after such trauma. Six hours surgery but this made little difference. The leg-bones were lost. The muscle-flesh had been torn away. The surgeon would operate above the knees. The stumps were made to be the same size. The nerve-endings were cauterized. By the age of twelve I’d been fitted with prostheses — prosthetic legs — but these were clumsy & hateful & I could not manage them at first — it would require many weeks & months — it would require years — before I would acquire the skill to use these plastic legs in the way that I do now provoking relatives & friends of our family to say within my hearing as if such words were a gift to the tragic cripple-girl Isn’t Jane wonderful! Isn’t Jane brave! Isn’t Jane a miracle.

My father was very shamed. My father too was injured but he did not lose his legs nor any of his limbs though he would never walk fully upright again & without pain. His ribs were broken & chest muscles lacerated & he could not lie in bed but required a special chair of soft leather with moveable parts that could be lowered & raised & yet often he would scream in pain like a stricken animal. He took painkillers & he continued to drink. He could not look upon me. His shame was so great he could not look upon the prosthetic legs with the perky name Step Up! & he could not bear to hear my crutches against the hardwood floor. It was my mother & my aunt who drove me to the rehab clinic at Robert Wood Johnson so many months. After my father was gone from us at Christmastime we drove to the Fair Hills Mall which is the largest shopping mall in all of New Jersey & there we shopped for presents & when I was tired we stopped to rest & looked at the Christmas tree lights & animated figures & there was Santa Claus on his throne, I was too old & my eyes ringed with the fatigue of an old child but in my Step Up! artificial legs, braces, & crutches, I was small for my age, never would I catch up with other children my age as I would not return to school with my class but would remain a year behind forever. At this time I was almost thirteen but so small I might have been eleven, or ten. Inside his fluffy fake-beard Santa smiled at me as my mother urged me forward. “My little girl is a brave little girl Santa isn’t she! Her name is Jane.”

“Well — Jane! Hel-lo little girl how are you!”

“Jane is very well, Santa. Jane is doing very well.”

Santa’s eyes narrowed in concern. Santa’s cheeks blushed beneath the silly white whiskers, you could see. Santa was compelled to ask, “And what would you like for Christmas this year, Jane?” as Santa asked all the children who came to sit on his knee. I felt the man stiffen, I felt the man steel himself, what words little cripple-Jane might utter. & my mother gripping me, my arm, as if I were a doll who might topple over without Mommy holding tight & smiling as if nothing was more natural than to bring a twelve-year-old legless dispirited child to Santa Claus at the Fair Hills Mall & await her answer to Santa’s question.

I was not a young child even then. I felt sorry for Santa. In a scratchy broken little doll-voice saying, “For Christmas I would like Cowgirl Barbie.”

Whether my father was made to go away or whether my father went away of his own volition was not clear. He would move to another state, Minnesota. Some time later he would move to Wyoming. He would drink himself to death as it was said by my mother & my mother’s family grim with satisfaction.

My mother said it was a blessing he had gone, & I was blessed of God & one day I would understand.

“Why should I believe that?” I asked her.

I was an angry-mouthed girl. I have learned to hide this.

“Because” — my mother chose her words with care, fixing her eyes on my face as if there was no other part of me that could be looked-at, without revulsion — “if God didn’t love Jane very much, He would have smote her down when he took her poor legs. He had that opportunity, & He let it pass.”

The man who is Mr. Erdley who has been my father for many years, who is a professor of engineering at Rutgers New Brunswick, is my stepfather. It is expected of me to say that I love my stepfather as I had loved Daddy long ago but this is not true & I do not say it.

At the library at the circulation desk was another librarian & through that long day I remained in the rear at a computer typing in book orders & I did not think of him — of Tyrell — I would not think of him — & when he came into the library rushed & breathless in the late afternoon, as I had expected he would come, I did not see him nor was Jane Erdley anywhere in his sight. That weekend he had called me — he had left phone messages which I had not answered. He’d sent emails which I deleted without reading. He has betrayed me. There is no love between us. There is nothing — these words chill & hard & resolute as polished stones were a consolation to me. & then through a doorway I saw him, abruptly there was Tyrell, leaning on my crutches I stood very still & calm & observed him — the man who was my lover & who so claimed to love me, yet had been appalled by the sight of me in the Mall; my lover who had been terrified of me, that I would expose him to his wife & rude staring daughters.

At last, he saw me. In his face a look of anguish — I felt the force of his love, & his regret — quickly I drew back, & hid from him.

Thinking Maybe it isn’t over yet. Not yet.

When I left the library that evening — not with the others but at 6:25 P.M. there was Tyrell waiting at the rear & seeing me approach the door quickly he came forward & pulled the door open as I pushed it & in a lowered voice though there was no one within earshot he said, “Jane, may I carry you? — just to my station wagon let me carry you,” & this time I did not say No.

In his arms I feel airy, guiltless. My arm around his neck, my stump-thighs borne aloft in his embrace. The crutches he leaves behind, leaning against the rear wall of the library. In the car he settles me, buckles me into the seat belt & returns to the crutches & positions them beneath his arms — Tyrell is several inches taller than I am, & so the crutches are short for him — he is clumsy & funny using them — “walking” — he has not the knack of swinging his body, his legs as if they were useless, lifeless. But he is very funny — we are both laughing — breathless & giddy like drunken lovers.

At the station wagon Tyrell shoves the crutches into the backseat with a clatter — he seizes my shoulders, seizes my head, my face framed in his hands & he kisses me — his kisses are hungry, predatory — he begs me to forgive him & exulting in my power which is the most exquisite sexual power I tell the man Yes maybe. This time.

Our naked bodies. The man’s body is heavier & thicker than you would think. His chest is nearly hairless, & the hairs a very pale brown, almost invisible. His man-breasts are flat but the nipples are small & hard as pits. On his back, like an outline of wings, are whorls of hair. At his waist, a ring of excess flesh. With what passion the man licks, kisses, sucks at my thigh-stumps, that end above my knees; very excited, aroused, the man lifts my stumps onto his shoulders & presses his hot hungry face between them. What he does to me with his lips, teeth & tongue is near-unbearable to me, in a delirium I murmur his name, I cry out his name, I am utterly helpless, lost. In orgasm the man is rocked as by a sudden powerful wave yet within minutes he has begun again licking, kissing, sucking at the thigh-stumps Love love love you there is no one like you & there is nothing like this.

It is not true as Tyrell believes, that no man ever carried me in his arms as Tyrell has.

In Atlantic City, this occurred. But only once, when I was new to Barnegat & lonely & reckless one weekend.

The man was a stranger — of course — & the name I gave him was not my true name nor did he know where I lived or how I was employed though I saw in his watering eyes that unmistakable look of sick-helpless love. For without my Step Up! legs I am petite as a child, I weigh so little a man of below average height & strength can lift me & carry me in his arms. & nothing further came of this. So little do I recall, I could not tell you the name of the glittering casino & hotel where we met, in a lounge near the blackjack tables. It was a meeting I entered into of my own volition but with much doubt & distaste & abruptly then I ended it without telling the man, fled from a women’s restroom & back to Barnegat, on the bus.

As I said, he did not know my name. Had he wished to find me, he could not.

He will leave her, he says. His wife.

He speaks bravely, recklessly. You would believe that he speaks sincerely.

He wants to live with me, he says. He loves me, he thinks that we should live together…

His words are stunning to me, unreal. My heart begins to beat quick, hard & erratically. Calmly I say to him — my voice is light, lightly teasing — “You loved her when you married her — you can’t deny that” — & Tyrell protests, “No. I don’t think so” & I say, cruelly, “What do you mean — you ‘don’t think so’ — not only did you marry your wife, you had two children with her. You must love her,” & he says, speaking slowly, grimly, “I was lonely when we met — I was desperate to be ‘normal’ — Courtney was somehow there — she wanted a more permanent relationship & I didn’t want to hurt her — There is so little between us now, only the children, household matters, problems — the minutiae of life. Nothing like what I feel for you. Nothing like what binds us together. Courtney is a good decent woman & of so little interest to me, I have difficulty listening to her — her flat whining hurt voice — even when we were newly married we didn’t ‘have sex’ often — & never, now — we’ve become old people — prematurely old — only the children & the household keep us together — a kind of adhesive — adhesive tape, soiled & frayed — we’re like people of the 1950s — that feels like us, when you see a movie of that era, or photographs — the men wearing hats, fedoras — the men so determined to be mature — the women wearing hats, gloves — stockings — ‘girdles’ — the photography in black & white, not color. What infuriates me is how Courtney complains of me, to the children — she speaks of me in the third person to them, so that I can overhear — she says, ‘Does Daddy love us? Daddy never tells us that he loves us’ — ” his voice going shrill, mocking; a voice of such masculine derision, for a moment I am silenced; for a moment pricked with guilt, sympathy for the contemptible unloved female.

Then recovering I say, in my lightly teasing voice, “So — what do you tell this poor woman?” & Tyrell says, “I tell her — ‘Courtney, why should that matter? Why the hell should that matter so much?’”

He pauses, breathing quickly. In his eyes a look of utter exasperation, righteousness.

“It only proves that I was living a mistake, Jane. It proves that I don’t know why I did anything before I met you.”

Courtney! The name makes me smile, in scorn. A pretentious name, for a plain dull unloved woman.

After lovemaking that exhausts us, strains our hearts & chafes our skin — my most sensitive skin, the insides of my stump-thighs, & the soft pale cottony flesh of my breasts — sinking then into sleep, open-mouthed, quivering. The man breathes heavily, deeply — his face close up appears contorted — his forehead creased & lines in his cheeks like erosion in earth — his skin is a rough hot parchment-like skin — clammy with sweat, exuding a sharp pungent smell — by degrees I feel myself weakening I don’t want to love this man, I am not able to love any man. Still awkwardly my thigh-stumps are spread & fitted to the man’s thighs, & his arms around me are still tight, uncomfortably tight, as he sinks into a jagged twitchy sleep where I can’t follow except the love that passes between us — I think it is love — as in a single thrumming artery — whose thought is We are twins. In our souls. We are joined together at the heart.

In the morning, he was gone.

Very early in the morning, before dawn. While I lay dazed & groggy in sleep & he lowered his weight onto the bed beside me, stroking my hair, my naked shoulders & back saying he has to leave & he will call me — he will see me that evening — he will try to see me — there is so much happening in his life, a series of crises — “You are the central crisis of my life, Jane! — but you are not the only crisis” — & on his strong legs he goes away & for an hour or more I lie unmoving like a child trapped in a wreck — waiting to determine Am I alive? Or — am I dead? Rousing myself then & reaching for my Step Up! legs & my crutches & maneuvering myself into the day & at Barnegat library there is Jane Erdley reliable & professional as usual — in a lime-green velvet vintage dress, with a tinkling glass-bead necklace — her Step Up! legs stylishly encased in ivory eyelet stockings & her demure plastic feet in black patent leather Mary Janes. Yet sternly instructing myself through this long day — as for much of my life following the accident when drunk-Daddy fell asleep at the wheel — Look, Jane: you are alone. You will always be alone. No one will love you, & no one will desire you. And if there is love, & desire, it will be a sickness in the other, that will revolt you.

Monday night following Easter Sunday when he had to be with his family — a large family gathering at his parents’ house on the Sound — & there seems to have been some stress at this gathering — he doesn’t speak of it, & I will not ask — he is morose, brooding — by the smell of his breath I understand that he has been drinking before he came to the library for me — complaining how his body hadn’t ever “fitted” him right — his left leg especially is “wrong-angled” — only with me, his darling Jane, does his body fit right; suddenly he confides in me, there was a girl in his grammar school, in fact in kindergarten he’d first seen her, she’d had to use crutches — children’s crutches — & when she was older, a wheelchair — bright steel braces on her legs which were her legs but withered, wasted-away — yet she’d been so pretty — & smart — her name was Wendy — Wendy Hauserman — he’d been fascinated by this girl whose family moved away from Barnegat when they were in sixth grade & later when he was thirteen at summer camp in the Poconos there was the wife of the camp director — a tall blond beautiful woman with a sullen face, wide mouth & gray eyes & rarely smiled — said to be “Swedish” — her hair long & straight & so pale it looked white in certain lights — at dusk, & by firelight — her name was Brigit & she was missing a leg — her left leg, below the knee — half her leg had been amputated after a skiing accident — yet she lay in the sunshine in a bikini on an outcropping of shale, her pale skin oiled & her eyes hidden behind dark glasses & sometimes Brigit wore her prosthetic limb, & sometimes not; sometimes Brigit smiled at the boy-campers, & sometimes not.

“Then — when I first met you…I mean, when I first saw you — on the sidewalk, with your colleagues — I thought…”

Holding my breath & trying not to stiffen in the man’s embrace. He has been stroking my breasts, my stomach, my thighs idly, as if not aware of what he’s doing; since Easter dinner at his family’s house, he has been in a strange unsettled mood; he has smoked several cigarettes, he has not asked if he can smoke in my apartment & I have not told him Please no! The smell of smoke makes me nauseated & numbly I listen to him revert to the familiar account of how he’d first seen me, he has told me this several times in virtually the same words, I am listening in dismay, in disgust & impatience & when he prepares to leave my apartment at midnight I tell him:

“Maybe — please — you should not come back.”

He goes away, he is gone.

He doesn’t call me. He calls.

He sends me a letter, Federal Express. A plain white envelope, a folded sheet of plain white paper.

Dear Jane I love you!!! Only you.I will make you know this. I believe you know this.

He returns to my apartment. He knocks at the door. His is a special knock, a kind of code. I have not answered his phone messages or his frantic emails & so he has driven to Shore Island & stands at my door & I have no choice but to admit him. On my crutches — I open the door. He is unshaven, his white shirt is rumpled & his eyes behind the (crooked) steel-rimmed glasses are ringed in fatigue. In triumph he says, “I left her. It’s over. I told her, I couldn’t continue to live with her, I’m in love with another woman.”

The room is darkened, we grope for each other like blind persons.

“I can change my life, Jane. The externals of my life. If I can be here with you.”

In bed he fits my stumps to his shoulders. He is hot-skinned, trembling. He is rough, agitated — he hurts me, without knowing. His cries are like his nightmare-cries, he’d dismissed so lightly. I feel the jump of his seed inside me, the juice of the man, his most secret life. He is not a young man & yet every cell in his body yearns to impregnate me, the female; what remains of me, the stump-torso, legless & open to the male, vulnerable as a wound. “We could die together. I want to die with you. The two of us together, as in the womb. As if we haven’t been born yet.”

Tangled in the bedclothes we fall asleep. In the night I’m wakened by his breathing, his harsh breathing & the mutterings of his sleep. I kiss his mouth, his breath is heated, moist & sour-smelling. I suck at his breath like a giant cat. His jaws are covered in silvery stubble. Beneath my groping fingers, his penis stirs. The stump-penis, soft & limp as a slug. I rub one of my stumps against it, the sensation is electric — the nerve-endings are not dead, or cauterized, only dormant, awaiting this touch.

We could die together. I want to die with you. It would have been better — the two of us not yet born.

That weekend in Atlantic City at the Trump Casino — where I’ve come alone, by bus. Friday night entering the vast glittering-humming casino & feeling eyes move upon me idly at first, & then — some of them — snagging. In a pool of fish I am a curious-shaped fish — I am a “wounded” specimen. Yet making my way swiftly through the Friday evening crowds — to the blackjack tables — here, my senses are alert — here, I feel a tug of hope — for the occasion I am wearing one of my velvet dresses — luscious dark crimson with a sharp V-neck & a scalloped hemline, lifted at the front to expose the knee — the knees — the steel-gleaming Step Up! knees — & my shoulder-length hair brushed & glossy & pinned back with tortoiseshell combs like a schoolgirl of another era long-ago & romantic & as a novelty — to set me apart from Jane Erdley Circulation — my skin is powdered geisha-white — my mouth is a damp crimson rose, or wound — in mirrors on the casino floor I’ve glimpsed my reflection, I am repelled by my reflection & fascinated thinking Oh is that me? Would Daddy recognize his Jane-Jane, now? I love the way strangers stare at me — the way they step aside, clear a path for me as I fly by them — there is respect for me, a young woman alone, on a Friday night, in Atlantic City, decked out in sleek white arm-support plastic crutches & prosthetic legs — respect & repugnance in about equal measure but at the blackjack table I am a serious gambler — I am totally absorbed in the action — the blackjack dealer (male, mid-thirties, sharp-eyed) is stiff with me, stiff-smiling & avoiding my eye — as if warning me off but I am oblivious — I am not drunk, but I am oblivious — I pay no heed to others observing me — I have just two chips remaining, of five — each chip is worth fifty dollars — in less than an hour I have lost three hundred fifty dollars. At a nearby table a man has been watching me intently — his face is a blur — their faces are always blurs — his hair is a blur of sandy-white — though my impression is, his face is not old — I love the sensation of eyes crawling onto me like ants — unlike ants, these eyes can be shaken off — I can make my way past them defiant & graceful on my crutches — if I am patient at the blackjack table there will be one who will approach me carrying his drink in his hand, his chips in his other hand loose & jangling like coins & he will wait for the opportunity to slip in beside me at the blackjack table guessing it might be time for this rueful cripple-girl-gambler — who appears to be alone in the Trump Casino, 10 P.M. Friday night — to ask to borrow a chip — a chip, or two — to regain my losses — smiling to think how losses sounds like kisses — & bring a cheery smile to my face — such smiles flare up like a sudden struck match here in the glittery gaudy casino — the blurred-faced man is drawing closer, he is an older man yet not an old man & he is somber & sympathetic beside me now observing the blackjack cards from my perspective, observing my set-aside crutches, my lifeless but showy Step Up! legs in black patterned stockings all but hidden by the table & seeing the uplifted card & the flash of its numerals & if it’s a loss, very likely it is a loss, the girl-gambler will wince, suck at her crimson lips & wipe at her eyes & this is the strategic moment for the gentleman to lean a little closer & to say, just audibly above the hum & buzz of the casino — “Excuse me?”