Strong Motion : A Novel

1

Sometimes when people asked Eileen Holland if she had any brothers or sisters, she had to think for a moment.

In grade school she and her friends had played foursquare during recess, and when fights broke out in far corners of the playground, it usually turned out that the person whose face was being smashed into the blacktop was her younger brother, Louis. She and her friends would continue to bounce their ball from square to square. They were skipping rope the day Louis fought a boy on the top tier of the old tetanus-infested jungle gym and damaged a different part of himself on each of the pipes he hit during his fall, breaking off his front teeth on level three, bruising his ribs on level two, getting a concussion by impact and whiplash on level one, and stunning his diaphragm on the asphalt. Eileen’s friends ran to look at the possibly dead boy. She was left holding the jump rope and feeling as if she’d fallen and no one would help her.

Eileen was a faithful and pretty image of her mother, with astonished dark eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows, a high forehead and plump cheeks and straight dark hair. She had the limbs of a willow tree and sometimes she even swayed like one, with her eyes closed, when she was so happy to be among her friends that she forgot they were there.

Louis, like his father, was less ornamental. From the age of ten onward he wore aviator-style glasses whose metal frames vaguely matched his hair, which was curly and the color of old brass screws, and was thinning by the time he finished high school. His father had also donated a barrel chest to his genetics. In junior high and high school new friends of Eileen’s expected to be told, “No, no relation,” when they asked her if Louis Holland was her brother. To Eileen these questions were like vaccination shots. The soothing alcohol swab that followed was her friends’ avowal that her brother was not like her at all.

“Yeah,” she’d agree, “we’re real different.”

The young Hollands grew up in Evanston, Illinois, in the shadow of Northwestern University, which employed their father as a history professor. Once in a while, in the afternoon, Eileen caught sight of Louis in a booth at McDonald’s surrounded by the misfits he hung out with, their snide menu selections, their cigarettes and pasty faces and military clothing. The negativity emanating from his booth made her feel like she couldn’t wedge herself tightly enough between the elbows of her peers. She was, she told herself, very different from Louis. But she was never entirely safe from him. Even in the middle of a jammed and laughing back seat she would glance out a window just in time to see her brother striding along the trashy shoulder of some six-lane suburban thoroughfare, his white shirt gray with sweat, his glasses white with road glare. It always seemed that he was there for her alone to see, an apparition from that parallel private world which she herself had stopped living in when she started having friends but which Louis still obviously inhabited: the world where you were by yourself.

One day in the summer before she started college she suddenly needed to use the family car to see her boyfriend Judd, who lived farther up the Lake Michigan shore in Lake Forest. When Louis pointed out that he’d reserved the car a week earlier, she became furious with him, the way a person gets with an inanimate object that she keeps dropping and mishandling. Finally she made her mother go ask Louis to be selfless, just this once, and let her use the car to visit her boyfriend. When she got to Judd’s house she was still so furious that she left the keys in the ignition. The car was promptly stolen.

The Lake Forest police were not particularly nice to her. Her mother was even less nice, on the telephone. And Louis, when she finally got home, came down the stairs in a diver’s mask.

“Eileen,” her mother said. “Honey. You let the car roll in the lake. Nobody stole the car. I just got a call from Mrs. Wolstetter. You didn’t set the emergency brake and you didn’t put the car in Park. It rolled across the Wolstetters’ lawn into the lake.”

“Park, Eileen?” Louis’s voice was glassed-in and adenoidal. “The little ‘P’ on the far left? N for Neutral? P for Park?”

“Louis,” their mother said.

“Or is it N for No and P for. Proceed? D for Desist?”

After this trauma Eileen could no longer retain information about where Louis was or what he was doing. She knew he went to school in Houston and was majoring in something like electrical engineering, but when her mother alluded to him on the telephone, perhaps to mention that he’d changed his major, the room Eileen was calling from suddenly got noisy. She couldn’t remember what her mother had just said. She had to ask, “So he’s majoring in — what now?” And the room got noisy again! She couldn’t remember what her mother was saying even as she said it! And so she never did figure out what Louis was majoring in. When she saw him during Christmas vacation of her second year of graduate school — she was getting her MBA from Harvard — she had to make a wild guess about what he’d been doing since he graduated from Rice: “Mom tells me you’re, like, designing microchips?”

He stared at her.

She shook her head no no no no, cancel that. “Tell me what you’re doing,” she said humbly.

“I’m staring at you in amazement.”

Later her mother told her he was working for an FM radio station in Houston.

Eileen lived near Central Square in Cambridge. Her apartment was on the eighth floor of a modern high-rise, a tower of concrete that loomed above the ambient brick and clapboard like a thing that had failed to erode, with shops and a fish restaurant in the basement. She was at home making triple-fudge brownies one night at the end of March when Louis, whom she’d last seen reading a crime novel by the Christmas tree in Evanston, called her up and informed her that he’d moved from Houston to the town of Somerville, Cambridge’s budget-class neighbor to the north. She asked what had brought him to Somerville. Microchips, he said.

The person who walked into her apartment a few days later, on a raw late-winter night, was effectively a stranger. At twenty-three, Louis was nearly bald on top, with just enough curls remaining to have captured sleet. His crude black oxfords squeaked on Eileen’s linoleum as he walked around her kitchen in a starshaped path, slowly ricocheting off the counters. His cheeks and nose were red and his glasses were white with fog.

“This is so contemporary,” he said, meaning the apartment.

Eileen pressed her elbows to her sides and crossed her wrists on her chest. She had all four stove burners going full blast and a pot simmering on one of them. “Can’t keep it warm enough,” she said. She was wearing a bulky sweater, fluffy slippers, and a miniskirt. “I think they turn the furnace off on April first.”

Her doorbell rang. She buzzed. “It’s Peter,” she said.

“Peter.”

“My boyfriend.”

Soon there was a knock on the door, and she led the boyfriend, Peter Stoorhuys, into the kitchen. Peter’s lips were blue with cold, and his skin, which was suntanned, was a leaden gray. He hopped up and down, his hands in the pockets of his twills, while Eileen made introductions that he was evidently too frozen to pay attention to. “Shit,” he said, crouching by the stove. “It’s cold out there.”

There was a tiredness to Peter’s face that no suntan could conceal. It was one of those urban faces that had been reconceived so many times that the skin, like a piece of paper smudged and abraded by multiple erasures, had lost its capacity to hold a clear image. Beneath the shadings of his current neo-Angeleno look were visible traces of a yuppie, a punk, a preppie, and a head. Repeated changes of style, like too much combing, had sapped his long blond hair of its resilience. For weather protection he was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a collarless shirt.

“Peter and I were in St. Kitts last month,” Eileen explained to Louis. “We still haven’t readjusted.”

Peter put his white-knuckled hands over two burners on the stove and toasted them, investing this warming process with such importance that there was little Eileen and Louis could do but look at him.

“He looks like a total sillybird in hats,” Eileen said.

“I find coats useful in this regard,” Louis said, dropping his fiberfill jacket in a corner. He was dressed in his uniform of the last eight years, a white shirt and black jeans.

“You see, that’s the thing,” Eileen said. “His favorite coat is at the cleaner’s. Is that a silly place for it to be?”

It was another five minutes before Peter was thawed enough to allow them all to retire to the living room. Eileen curled up on the sofa, pulling the hem of her sweater down over her bare knees and draping one arm over the back of the sofa just in time to receive the glass of whiskey Peter had poured her. Louis paced around the room, stopping to bring his face myopically close to books and other consumer goods. All of the apartment’s furnishings were new and most were combinations of white planes, black cylinders, and cherry-red plastic hardware.

“So, Louis,” Peter said, joining Eileen with a whiskey. “Tell us a little about yourself.”

Louis was examining the VCR’s remote-control box. In the big steamed windows the distant lights of Harvard Square formed halos the color of mother-of-pearl.

“You’re in communications,” Peter prompted.

“I work for a radio station,” Louis said in a very slow and very level voice. “It’s called WSNE.? News with a Twist.?”

“Sure,” Peter said. “I’m familiar with it. Not that I ever listen, but I’ve dealt with them a couple times. In fact I understand they’re in some doo-doo, financially. Not to say that’s not the norm for a thousand-watt station. One thing I’d suggest is try to get paid at the end of every week, and whatever you do don’t let ’em involve you in any kind of ownership scheme—”

“Oh I won’t,” Louis said, so earnestly it would have made an observant person wary.

“I mean, go ahead if you want,” Peter continued. “But, uh — a word to the wise.”

“Peter sells ad space for Boston magazine,” Eileen said. “Among other things,” Peter said.

“He’s thinking of applying to the business school in the fall. Not that he hardly even needs to. He knows so much stuff, Louis. He knows tons more than I do.”

“Do you know how to listen?” Louis said suddenly.

Peter’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know how to listen when you’ve asked somebody a question about themself?”

Peter turned to Eileen to consult about this remark. He seemed to have some doubts concerning its purport. Eileen jumped to her feet. “He was just giving you some advice, Louis. We all have lots of time to listen to each other. We’re all very interested in — each other! I’m going to get some breadsticks.”

As soon as she was out of the room, Louis sat down on the sofa and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, his ruddy face right next to Peter’s ear. “Hey, friend,” he said. “I have some advice for you too.”

Peter stared straight ahead, his eyes widening a little at the pressure of a swallowed smile. Louis leaned even closer. “Don’t you want to hear my advice?”

“You’ve got some problem,” Peter observed.

“Wear coats!”

“Louis?” Eileen called from the kitchen. “Are you being strange to Peter?”

Louis thumped Peter’s knee and went around behind the sofa. On the floor, on a folded-out newspaper, was a cage in which a gerbil was availing itself of an exercise wheel. The gerbil ran haltingly, pausing to stumble with its microscopic toenails on a crossbar, then galloping onward with its head high and its neck turned to one side. It didn’t seem to be enjoying itself.

“You silly bird.” Eileen had returned from the kitchen with a faceted beer mug full of breadsticks. She handed them to Peter. “I keep telling Peter our whole family’s wacko. I’ve been warning him since the day we met not to take it personally.” With breathtaking suddenness and fluidity she dropped to her knees and, unlatching the door of the cage, extracted the gerbil by its tail. She raised it above her head and peered up at its twitching nose. Its front paws clawed the air ineffectually. “Isn’t that right, Milton Friedman?” She opened her mouth like a wolf, as if to bite its head off. Then she lowered it onto her upturned palm and it ran up the sleeve of her sweater to her shoulder, where she recaptured it and boxed it in her hands so that only its whiskered, pointed face stuck out. “Say hi to my brother Louis?” She thrust the gerbil’s face up close to Louis’s. It looked like a furry penis with eyes.

“Hello, rodent,” he said.

“What’s that?” She brought the gerbil to her ear and listened closely. “He says hello, person. Hello to Uncle Louis.” She popped the animal back in the cage and latched the door. Still anthropomorphized but free now, it seemed imbecilic or rude as it ran to the tube of its water bottle and nibbled on a droplet. For a moment longer Eileen remained kneeling, hands pressing on her knees, head tilted to one side as if she had water in her ear. Then with the fluid quickness at which Louis was visibly marveling she went and rejoined Peter on the sofa with a bounce. “Peter and Milton Friedman,” she said. “Are not on the best of terms right now. Milton Friedman did number one on some poplin trousers that Peter was very attached to.”

“How funny,” Louis said. “How terribly, terribly funny.”

“I think I’m going to take off,” Peter said.

“Oh come on, be patient,” Eileen said. “Louis is just protective. You’re my boyfriend but he’s my brother. You guys will just have to get along. Have to put-choo in the same cage together. You can have the wheel to walk on, Louis, and I’ll put some Chivas in the bottle for my little sozzlebird. Ha ha ha.” Eileen laughed. “We’ll get Milton Friedman some poplin trousers!”

Peter drained his glass and rose. “I’m going to get going.”

“OK, I’m being a little hard to take,” Eileen said in a completely different voice. “I’ll stop. Let’s loosen up. Let’s be adults.”

“You be adults,” Peter said. “I’ve got work to do.”

Without looking back, he left the room and the apartment. “Oh great,” Eileen said. “Thanks.” She dropped her head back over the top of the sofa and looked at Louis with upside-down eyes. Her narrow eyebrows were like unbreathing lips, and without brows above them the eyes had an expression foreign to the human vocabulary, an oracular strangeness. “What’d you say to him?”

“I told him he should wear coats.”

“Real cute, Louis.” She stood up and put some boots on. “What’s wrong with you?” She ran down the hall and out the door.

Louis observed her departure with little interest. He wiped a porthole in the condensation on the window and looked down at the taillight-pinkened sleet that was falling on Mass Ave. The telephone rang.

He went to the communications equipment, which sat on its own little table, and ran his eyes over it as if it were a buffet where nothing appealed to him. Finally, after the fifth ring, the machine not coming on, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Peter?” The speaker was an old woman with a tremor in her voice. “Peter, I’ve been trying and trying—”

“This isn’t Peter.”

There was an uneasy rustle. Muttering an apology, the woman asked for Eileen. Louis offered to take a message.

“Who’s this?” the woman asked.

“This is Eileen’s brother. Louis.”

“Louis? Well, for goodness’ sake. This is Grandmother.”

He stared at the window for a long time. “Who?” he said. “Rita Kernaghan. Grandmother.”

“Oh. Hey. Grandmother. Hey.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met but once.”

Belatedly Louis recalled an image, the image of a potbellied woman with a painted kitty-cat face who was already seated at a table at the Berghoff, in Chicago on a snowy evening, when he and his parents and Eileen trooped in. This was some seven years ago — about a year after his mother had flown to Boston for her father’s funeral. Of the Berghoff dinner he remembered nothing but a plate of braised rabbit with potato pancakes. And Rita Kernaghan touching Eileen’s hair and calling her a doll? Or was this some other dinner, some other old woman, or maybe a dream? Not grandmother: step-grandmother.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember. You live around here.”

“Just outside Ipswich, yes. You’re visiting your sister?”

“No, I work here. I work for a radio station.”

This information seemed to interest Rita Kernaghan. She pressed Louis for details. Was he an announcer? Did he know the programming director? She proposed they have a drink together. “You can get to know me a little. Shall we say after work on Friday? I’ll be in the city in the evening.”

“All right,” Louis said.

No sooner had they set a time and place than Rita Kernaghan murmured goodbye and the line went dead. Moments later Eileen returned to the apartment, wet and angry, and disappeared into the kitchen. “No dinner till you apologize to me!” she said.

Louis frowned thoughtfully, consuming breadsticks.

“You were very childish and very bullyish,” Eileen said. “I want you to apologize to me.”

“I will not. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.”

“He was cold!”

Louis rolled his eyes at his sister’s sincerity. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry I messed up your dinner.”

“Well, don’t do it again. I happen to be very fond of Peter.”

“Do you love him?”

The question brought Eileen out of the kitchen with a confounded look on her face. Louis had never asked her anything even remotely so personal. She sat down by him on the sofa and reached for her toes, in a leg-shaving posture, the tip of her nose resting lightly on one knee. “Sometimes I think I do,” she said. “I’m not the real romantic type, though. Milton Friedman’s more my speed. I mean, it’s funny you should ask.”

“Isn’t it the obvious question?”

Still bent over, she closed one eye and studied him. “You seem different,” she said.

“Different from what?”

She shook her head, unwilling to admit it had never occurred to her that her little brother might, at the age of twenty-three, be acquainted with the concept of love. She gave careful attention to her ankles, fingering the round protruding bones, pinching the tendons in back and rocking a little. Her face was already losing prettiness. Time and sun and business school had made her color more shallow, a conceivable middle-aged Eileen suddenly beginning to show through like old wallpaper beneath a coat of new paint. She looked up at Louis shyly. “It’s nice we’re in the same city again.”

“Yeah.”

She became even more tentative. “You like your job?”

“Too early to say.”

“Would you give Peter a chance, Louis? He comes on a little arrogant but he’s very vulnerable underneath.”

“Which reminds me,” Louis said. “He got a phone call while you were out. I was like, Grandmother? Grandmother who?”

“Oh. Rita. She tried to get me to call her Grandmother too.”

“It slipped my mind that she existed.”

“That’s because she and Mom are like — agggggh.” Eileen started strangling herself with both hands. “Do you know anything about this?”

“You know when the last time I had a real conversation with Mom was? Ferguson Jenkins was on the Cubs’ roster.”

“Well, but apparently Grandpa made a whole lot of money at some point, and when he died he didn’t leave anything at all to Mom or Aunt Heidi, because he was married to Rita. Rita got everything.”

“Definitely not the way to Mom’s heart.”

“Except Peter says Rita didn’t really get anything either. It’s all in a trust fund.”

“What’s Peter know about this?”

“He was Rita’s publicist. That’s how I met him.” Eileen hopped up and went to her bookshelf. “Rita turned New Agey after Grandpa died. She’s got a pyramid on the roof of the house. She keeps her wine in the barn because she thinks it won’t mature under the pyramid. This is her new book.” She handed Louis a thin, hot-pink volume. “She has them printed by some pretend publisher in Worcester, and they all come in one shipment, on these huge flats. Last time I was at her house she had them all in the barn, with the wine. Just this massive wall of books. That’s what she needs a publicist for, and for her lectures too. But listen, do you want tortellini with red sauce or linguine with white clam sauce?”

“Whichever’s easier.”

“Well, they’re both in bags.”

“Tortellini,” Louis said. The title of the hot-pink book was Princess Itaray: An Atlantean Case History. On the title page the author had written: To Eileen, my little doll, with love from Grandmother. Louis paged through the book, which was divided into chapters and subchapters and sub-subchapters with boldface numbered headings:

4.1.8 Implications of the Disappearance of the Dimesian Appendage: A Reversible Fall from Eden?

He looked at the flap copy. In this fanciful yet erudite work, Dr. Kernaghan advances the hypothesis that the cornerstone of Atlantean society was the universal gratification of sexual desire, and proposes that the human appendix, now a vestigial organ, was, among the Atlanteans, both external and highly functional. With the hypnotic regression of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Mary M— of Beverly, Massachusetts, Dr. Kernaghan embarks on a compelling exploration of Atlantean deep psychology, the historical origins of repressed sexuality, and the modern world’s potential for a return to a golden age.

“She’s written two other books too,” Eileen said.

“She’s a doctor?”

“Some honorary degree. Milton Friedman thinks it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard of, isn’t that right, Milton Friedman? Peter helped her a lot — got her on the radio and on TV a couple times. He has all kinds of connections and he’s only in it part-time. Eventually he had to tell her to get somebody else, though. For one thing she drinks an awful lot. She also talks about Grandpa like he’s alive and talks to her all the time. You don’t know whether you’re supposed to laugh or not.”

Louis didn’t mention that he’d made a date for drinks with this woman.

“But anyway, that’s how I met Peter. She’s got a beautiful estate, you probably don’t remember it. We stayed there for a week or something when we were little. You remember?”

Louis shook his head.

“Neither do I, really. Rita wasn’t on the scene yet. I mean, she was still Grandpa’s secretary. Sometimes I wonder what we’d think of him if he was still alive.”

For the rest of the evening Louis sat in various chairs and Eileen orbited. A plate of food was something towards which she showed no particular sense of responsibility; she left the table and came back; her food was at her mercy. When Louis put his coat on to leave, she awkwardly patted his arm and, still more awkwardly, embraced him. “Take care of yourself, huh?”

He tore himself away. “What do you mean take care of myself? Where do you think I’m going? I’m going two and a half miles.” She kept her hand on his shoulder until he was out the door. Moments later, as she turned the news on, there was a knock. Louis was standing in the hall, businesslike, looking aside with a frown. “I just remembered something,” he said. “I just remembered the place in Ipswich, Mom’s father’s place. We threw rocks—”

“Oh!” Eileen’s face lit up. “At the horses.”

“We threw rocks at the horses—”

“To save them!”

“To save them from dying. So you remember too. We thought they’d die if they stood still.”

“Yes.”

“That was all.” His round shoulders turned away from her. “See you later.”

In high school Louis had never become so disaffected that he apologized for loving radio. Radio was like a crippled pet or retarded sibling that he always made time for and didn’t mind — didn’t even notice — if people laughed at. When Eileen saw him out walking in distant wastelands he was generally in transit to or from an airconditioned and empty electronics-supply store in some weedy plaza where the only other going concern was a Chinese restaurant in the last of its nine lives, and maybe a depopulated pet store. From the wall of prepackaged ICs and RF connectors and micropots and gator clips and jumpers and variable capacitors he selected components from the top of his wish list and added up the prices in his head, guessing on the sales tax, and handed them to the sad mustached man who preferred to sell stereo systems, and paid for them with the small bills that neighbors had given him for doing low-caste work: wall-washing; brush-clearing; dog-related services. He was ten when he got a crystal diode set, twelve when he built his HeathKit shortwave radio, fourteen when he became WC9HDD, and sixteen when he got his general license. Radio was his thing, his interest. A kid derives a satisfaction that rivals sex or maybe instead connects with it along obscure mental byways when he puts together a few simple metal and ceramic objects — objects he knows to be simple because he has experimentally destroyed many of them with screwdriver and pliers — and connects them to a battery and hears distant voices in his bedroom. There were stray resistors on his bedspread, resistors whose color coding he’d known by heart a year before he learned about sperm and eggs, the afternoon he lost his virginity. “Ouch, what is this?” (It was a 220-ohm metal-film resistor with a gold tolerance band.) Louis also happened to be one of the few ham operators in greater Chicago willing to speak or encode in French, and so when the sunspots were heavy he could be kept busy half the night trading temperature readings and autobiographical data with operators in all the snowed-in corners of Quebec. Which didn’t make him talkative in French class, only bored, since anything he did really well he kept hidden.

He entered Rice University as a prospective double-E major and left it with a degree in French, having in the meantime managed KTRU, the campus station, for three semesters. A week after graduation he went to work for a local C&W station, attending to relatively attractive duties for the abrupt abandoning of which after only eight months he would give no more satisfactory account to Eileen than the question: “Why does anybody quit a job?”

The studios of WSNE, his new employer, were in the western suburb of Waltham, in an office building overlooking one corner of the forty acres devoted to the intersection of Route 128 (“America’s Technology Region”) and the Mass Pike. Louis’s job title was board operator, a peonic position that involved operating the cartridge player, cuing up records, and backtiming the AP network news, but he did this only from six to ten in the morning, because only the morning drive announcer, Dan Drexel, was considered irreplaceable enough to rate his own operator. Louis understood that the remainder of his workday, which ended at 3 p.m., was to be spent on exciting tasks like entering traffic data on a keyboard, transferring agency commercials from reel to cart, writing PSAs, and grading the contest entries with which the station’s dwindling listenership sought to win various worthless gifts. He understood that he would be paid the federal minimum wage.

One reason he had had little competition for the job was that WSNE’s bid for license renewal in June was expected not to be routine. Paychecks were issued with precise instructions about when and when not to attempt to cash them. The insatiable payroll had gotten into the main production studio and torn out the sound equipment and acoustical panels and everything else with resale value, leaving ragged empty rectangles with exposed particle board in the Formica consoles, and butterscotch-colored glue spots on the walls. A new FM college station had bought all of WSNE’s record collection except the juvenile section (the Care Bears’ entire LP oeuvre; the Muppets; the original Disney sound track of Winnie-the-Pooh; the Flintstones doing times tables) and the comedy recordings. The grooves of the latter were rapidly being worn smooth by WSNE’s morning News with a Twist programming, which interlarded news and comment with “the funniest routines of all time. ”

A man named Alec Bressler owned and operated WSNE. Alec was a Russian émigré of German extraction who in the mid-sixties had allegedly paddled from Kaliningrad to Sweden in a rubber dinghy. The only official duty he gave himself was to tape the daily broadcast editorial, but he was always hovering in the studios, observing with immense satisfaction that electricity was flowing through all the necessary circuits, that this station that belonged to him was actually functioning and transmitting his chosen programs. He was a moderately paunchy fifty, with East-bloc hair, devalued somehow and slow to grow, and skin grayed by a cigarette habit he resisted only to the extent of addicting himself to nicotine lozenges as well. He dressed in thin sweaters and faded, thigh-hugging, too-short pants, each pair of which looked old enough to have come along with him in the legendary dinghy.

Louis soon realized that one of the functions he was expected to serve was to be a private audience for Alec Bressler. “Do you like expressing opinions?” the owner asked him on his second day of work, when he was printing out affidavits for commercial sponsors. “I just expressed a really good one. I commented on a current event. Can you guess which one?”

Louis’s face became guarded, ready to be amused. “Tell me,” he said.

Alec seated himself on the air and groped backwards to pull a chair over. “This horrible plane crash on the weekend. I forget which midwestern state, it starts with ‘I.’ Two hundred nineteen dead, no survivors. Complete dis-in-te-gration of the fuselage. I questioned the nooseworthiness of this event. With all respect to the families of the dead, why do we have to see this on television? We see it last month, why see it again? If people want to see crashes, why don’t we look at Navy missiles and Air Force planes that crash any time we test them. If people want to see death, let’s take the cameras to the hospitals, eh? See how most people die. I told what we can watch instead of network noose which should be boycotted. There’s M*A*S*H, same time, also Cheers and Family Ties and Matt Houston. Better commercials too. Let’s watch these programs. Or let’s read a book, but I didn’t stress that. I say read a book too much.”

“Isn’t this kind of a lost cause?” Louis said.

Alec pressed on the armrests of his chair and slid his butt farther back, the better to lean forward and claim whatever tiny portion of Louis’s attention he hadn’t claimed already. “I bought this station eight years ago,” he said. “It had real strong local noose coverage, popular music, also Bruins games. For eight years I try to remove politics from WSNE. It’s my ‘American Dream’—a station where people talk all day long (no music — it’s cheat-ting!) and not a WORD about politics. This is my American Dream. Radio with talk all day and no ideology. Let’s talk about art, philosophy, humor, life. Let’s talk about being a human being. And closer I come to my goal — you can plot this on the graph, Louis — closer I come to my goal, fewer people listen to me! Now we have one hour of current events all total in the morning, and people listen for that one hour of noose. We all know Jack Benny is more fun than Geneva arm talks. But take away Geneva and they stop listening to Jack Benny. This is the way people are. I know this. I have it plotted on a graph.”

He grouped his fingers and tweezed a cigarette out of a Benson & Hedges pack. “Who’s the girl?” he asked, inclining his head towards a snapshot in a half-open drawer. The young woman in the picture had dark rings beneath her eyes and a shaved head.

“A person I knew in Houston,” Louis said.

Alec ducked, and ducked again as if to say: Fair enough. Then he ducked once more, very affirmatively, and left the office without another word.

After work on Friday Louis drove his six-year-old Civic down the Mass Pike into Boston and parked it on the top level of a garage with the dimensions and profile of an aircraft carrier. A wind from the east lent a forlorn sort of finality to his car-leaving procedure, which involved peering in through the driver-side window, slapping the keys in his pants pocket, lifting the handle of the locked driver-side door, slowly circling the car and checking the passenger-side door, slapping the keys again, and giving the machine a last, hard, worried look. He was due to meet Rita Kernaghan at the Ritz-Carlton in two hours.

An advancing warm front had begun to curdle the clear blue of the sky. In the North End, a slender neon boot named italia kicked a monstrous neon boulder named sicilia. It was impossible to escape the words meat market. The Italians who lived here — old women who stalled on the sidewalks like irrationally pausing insects, their print dresses gaping at the neck; young car owners with hairstyles resembling sable pelts — seemed harried by a wind the tourists and moneyed intruders couldn’t feel, a sociological wind laden with the dank dust of renovation, as cold as society’s interest in heavy red sauces with oregano and Frank Sinatra, as keen as Boston’s hunger for real estate in convenient white neighborhoods. meat market, meat market. Midwestern tourists surged up the hill. A pair of Japanese youths sprinted past Louis, their fingers in green Michelin guides, as he approached the Old North Church, whose actual cramped setting immediately and quietly obliterated the more wooded picture his mind had formed before he saw it. He skirted an ancient cemetery, thinking about Houston, where summer had already arrived, where the downtown streets smelled of cypress swamps and the live oaks shed green leaves, and remembering a conversation from a humid night there—You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. In the buildings facing the cemetery he saw white interiors, entertainment equipment as blatant as ICU technology, large toys in primary colors in the middle of barren rooms.

On Commercial Street there were a thousand windows, bleak and square unornamented windows reaching up as high as the eye cared to wander. Pale green, opaque, unblinking and excluding. There was no trash on the ground for the wind to disturb, nothing for the eye to rest on but new brick walls, new concrete pavement, and new windows. It seemed as if the only glue that kept these walls and streets from collapsing, the only force preserving these clean and impenetrable and uninspired surfaces, was deeds and rents.

Out of Faneuil Hall, haven of meaning and purpose for weary sightseers, there blew a smell of fat: of hamburgers and fried shellfish and fresh croissants and hot pizzas, and chocolate chip cookies and french fries and hot crab meat topped with melted cheese, and baked beans and stuffed peppers and quiches and crispy fried Oriental Nuggets with tamari. Louis slipped in and out of an arcade to appropriate a napkin and blow his nose. The walking and the cold air had numbed him to the point where the entire darkening city seemed like nothing but a hard projection of an individual’s loneliness, a loneliness so deep it muted sounds — secretarial exclamations, truck engines, even the straining woofers outside appliance stores — till he could hardly hear them.

On Tremont Street, under the gaze of windows now transparent enough to reveal unpopulated rooms full of wealth’s technology and wealth’s furnishings, he found himself bucking a heavy flow of anti-abortion demonstrators. They were spilling over the curb into the street as they marched towards the State House. Everybody seemed to be on the verge of angry tears. The women, who were dressed like stewardesses and gym teachers, held the stakes of their placards rigidly vertical, as if to shame the lightness with which other kinds of protesters carried placards. The few men in the crowd shuffled along empty-handed and empty-eyed, their very hair disoriented by the wind. From the way both the men and the women huddled together as they marched, sullenly dodging other pedestrians, it was clear that they’d come to the Common expecting active persecution, the modern equivalent of hungry lions and a jaded crowd of heathen spectators. Interesting, then, that this valley of the shadow was lined with restaurants, deluxe hotels, luggage stores, cold windows.

Louis emerged from the rear of the parade with his necktie on. He’d tied it while avoiding stop the slaughter signs.

It took him more than an hour, at a much-bumped table in the dusky Ritz bar, to realize that Rita Kernaghan had stood him up. The gin and tonic he’d ordered automatically turned his face a stoplight red, and the one conversation that kept surfacing in the sea of vying voices concerned eunuchs. He soon figured out that the word was UNIX, but he kept hearing eunuchs, the great thing about eunuchs, with eunuchs you can-do, I hated eunuchs, I resisted eunuchs, eunuch’s budding monopoly. “I feel very sick,” he murmured aloud every few minutes. “I feel very sick.” Finally he paid and went out through the lobby to find a telephone. He had to swerve around a trio of businessmen who might have been identical triplets. Their mouths moved like the mouths of latex dolls:

You feel it?

We couldn’t, here.

Are you calling me a liar?

The time was 7:10. Louis called directory assistance and to the question of what city, said: Ipswich. The instrument he was using was drenched with a cologne to which he might have been allergic, so denaturing was its effect on his nasal membranes. He let Rita Kernaghan’s number ring eight times and was about to hang up when a man answered and said in a dead, low, institutional voice: “Officer Dobbs.”

Louis asked to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan.

Eunuchs, cologne, fetus. Dobbs. “Who’s calling.”

“This is her grandson.”

Over the line came the wa-wa of palm on mouthpiece and a voice in the background, followed by silence. At length a different man spoke, one Sergeant Akins. “We’re going to need some information from you,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been an earthquake up here. And you’re not going to be able to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan, because Mrs. Kernaghan was found dead a few hours ago.”

At this point the synthetic operator began to insist on more coins, which Louis fumbled to supply.

2

Like Rome, Somerville was built on seven hills. The apartment in which Louis had found a share opportunity was on Clarendon Hill, the westernmost of the seven and, by default, the greenest. Elsewhere in the city, trees tended to be hidden behind houses or confined to square holes in the sidewalks, where children tore their limbs off.

Earlier in the century Somerville had been the most densely populated city in the country, a demographic feat achieved by spacing the streets narrowly and dispensing with parks and front lawns. Clapboard triple-deckers encrusted the topography. They had polygonal bays or rickety porches stacked three high, and they were painted in color combinations like blue and yellow, white and green, brown and brown.

The streets of Somerville were lined solidly with cars that were less like cars than like mateless shoes. They trudged off to work in the morning or shuffled back and forth across the pavement under the pressure of twice-monthly street sweeping. Even in the early 1980s, when the Massachusetts economy was experiencing a Miracle, with billions of dollars flowing from the Pentagon into former mill towns in the Commonwealth, Somerville continued to house mainly the lowlier members of the footwear hierarchy. There were salt-stained Hush Puppies and scuffed two-tone pumps in unfortunate colors parked near the doors of the Irish and Italian middle class; well-worn Adidases in the driveways of single women; bovver boots and Salvation Army specials near the spaces of those who found the town perversely chic; laceless Keds up on blocks in the back yards of the waning counterculture; wide untapering leisure shoes with soft crinkly uppers and soles of rubber foam marking the homes of realtors and retirees; battered student Wallabees under the eaves of battered student houses; a few tasseled Gucci loafers in the City Hall parking lot; and shiny stud boots and flimsy dancing slippers and Flash Gordon — style athletic footwear in the driveways of parents who still had eighteen- and twenty-year-olds in the house.

Towards the end of the eighties, just before the nation’s arms buildup slowed and Massachusetts banks began to fail and the Miracle was shown to be not so much a Miracle as an irony and fraud, a new breed of car invaded Somerville. The new breed looked intrusion-molded. For just as Reebok and its imitators had finally succeeded in making real leather look wholly artificial, Detroit and its foreign counterparts had managed to make real metal and real glass indistinguishable from plastic. The interesting thing about the new breed, however, was its newness. In a town where for decades, when a car came home for the first time, its price had more often than not been written in yellow crayon on the windshield, one suddenly began to see the remains of stickers in rear left windows. Not being stupid, local landlords began to double rents between leases; and Somerville, too close to Boston and Cambridge to remain a renter’s heaven forever, came of age.

Louis had a room in a two-bedroom apartment on Belknap Street that was leased by a graduate student of psychology at Tufts. The student, whose name was Toby, had promised Louis, “Our paths will never cross.” Toby’s bedroom door was open when Louis came home from work, still open when he went to bed, and closed when he left in the predawn darkness. The shelves in Toby’s refrigerator were bisected vertically by slotted pine-wood panels. The bathmat was also made of pinewood, good for fungus control and stubbing toes. The living room contained two broad-beamed armchairs and one sofa, all upholstered in beige, plus a beige wall unit that was empty except for phone books, a Scrabble set, a glossy beige bud vase made of genuine mount st. Helens volcanic ash in a plastic suspension, and receipts for the wall unit and the furniture totaling $1,758.88.

Louis kept to his bedroom. The thirtyish couple in the apartment opposite his window owned a piano and often sang arpeggios while he ate his evening meal of sandwiches, carrots, apples, cookies, and milk. Later the arpeggios stopped and he read the Globe or The Atlantic laboriously, front to back, skipping nothing. Or he sat cross-legged in front of his television set and frowned as intently at baseball — even at the beer commercials — as he would have at war news. Or he stood in the harsh light of the overhead fixture and studied the beige walls and tiled ceiling and wood floor of his bedroom from every possible angle. Or he did the same in Toby’s room.

On Friday night, once the Ipswich police had finished with him on the telephone and he’d driven back to Somerville, he called Eileen. “You won’t believe what I just saw on the news,” Eileen said. What she’d just seen via live minicam was the ambulance that held their step-grandmother’s body. Eileen thought she’d felt the earthquake without knowing it while she was studying. She’d thought it was trucks. She said it was the second little earthquake she’d felt in Boston in two years.

Louis said he hadn’t felt it.

Eileen said their parents were flying into town on Sunday, because of Rita’s death, and staying in a hotel.

Louis said, “They’re spending money on a hotel?”

In the morning he went to the corner drugstore to buy newspapers. It had been raining all night and the rain clouds looked unspent, but the sky had brightened for a moment and the fluorescent light inside the drugstore was the same color and intensity as the light outside. The Saturday Herald had printed on its cover:

The earthquake had also made the front page of the Globe (tremor rocks cape ann; one dead), which Louis began to read as he headed home again. Absorbed, he was late in noticing a tall old man in a cardigan and unbuckled rubber boots who was rubbing his four-door American-made brogue with a hand towel. Spotting Louis, he stepped out to block the sidewalk. “Reading the paper, are ya?”

Louis did not deny it.

“John,” the old man goggled. “John Mullins. I see you live next door here, I saw you movin’ in. I live on the first floor right here, lived here twenty-three years. I was born in Somerville. John’s the name. John Mullins.”

“Louis Holland.”

“Louis? Lou? You mind if I call you Lou? You reading about the earthquake there.” Suddenly the old man might have bitten a lemon or a rotten egg; he made a face like the damned. “Terrible about that old woman. Terrible. I felt it, you know. I was at the Foodmaster, you know, round the corner here, it’s a good store. You shop there? Good store, but what was I, what was I. I was sayin’ I felt it. I thought it was me. I thought it was nerves, you know. But I was watching the news and wooncha know, it was a temblor. That’s what they call it, you know, a temblor. Thank God it wasn’t any worse. Thank God. What are you, a student?”

“No,” Louis said slowly. “I’m in radio. I work for a radio station.”

“Lot of students live around here. Tuff students mainly. It’s right up the street. They’re not bad kids. What do you think? You like it around here? You like Somerville? I think you’ll like it. I tell you I felt that earthquake?”

John Mullins hit himself in the forehead. “Sure I did. Sure I did.” The encounter was evidently becoming too much for him. “All right, Lou.” He squeezed Louis’s shoulder and stumbled towards his car.

As Louis went inside he heard his soprano neighbor’s arpeggios commencing, the fundamentals being struck on the piano in a rising chromatic scale. He sat down on the bare floor of his room and opened the papers. “Drat it,” he distinctly heard John Mullins say to some other neighbor. “They said it wasn’t going to rain anymore.”

Neither the Globe nor the Herald could quite hide its delight at having a death — Rita Kernaghan’s — to justify big headlines for a small local temblor. The shock, with a magnitude of 4.7 and an epicenter just southeast of Ipswich, had occurred at 4:48 p.m. and lasted less than ten seconds. Property damage had been so insignificant that a photograph of an Ipswich man fingering a crack in his breakfast-room wall received a prominent enlargement in both papers. Being the higher-brow paper of the two, the Globe also ran boxed articles about the history of earthquakes in Boston, the history of earthquakes, and the history of Boston, including a special graphic time line revealing (among other things) that the last two significant tremors to shake the city had coincided with the end of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.’s second term as U.S. senator (1944) and the end of his third (1953).

Another box on page 16 contained an update on the doings of a Protestant minister by the name of Philip Stites, who according to the Globe had six months earlier moved his Church of Action in Christ up to Boston from Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the stated intention of “eliminating abortion in the Commonwealth.” Stites’s followers were attacking fetal murder by standing at the doors of clinics. On Friday evening people of conscience from thirty-one states and possessions had marched to the third in a series of protest rallies in downtown Boston; in a subsequent television interview Stites said the earthquake had come close to striking “the epicenter of butchery,” by which he meant the Massachusetts State House. God (he let it be inferred) was angry with the Commonwealth. Like the Church of Action in Christ, He would not rest until the slaughter of the unborn had ceased. “Look for me everywhere,” Stites said.

“I was at the Foodmaster,” John Mullins said above the rain and arpeggios. “I thought it was the old nerves.”

Rita Damiano Kernaghan, whose death was the only one reported in yesterday’s earthquake in Ipswich, was a popular lecturer on the local New Age circuit and the author of three books on inspirational topics. She was 68 years old.

Kernaghan was perhaps best known for the battle she and the Town of Ipswich had waged since 1986 concerning the pyramidal structure she erected on the roof of her home, a farmhouse built within the town limits of Ipswich in 1765 and enlarged in 1623 under the direction of George Stonemarsh, a leading post-Revolutionary era architect.

In 1987 the Ipswich Town Meeting conceded that a clerical error had resulted in the granting of a building permit for the pyramid, and acted to retroactively enforce the local landmarks-preservation code and ordered the removal of the pyramid. Kernaghan sued the town in 1988 and later refused an out-of-court settlement under which the town would have paid the cost of removing the pyramid and restoring the house to its original 1823 design.

Kernaghan maintained that her right to build the pyramid — a geometrical form held by some to exert healing and preservative influences — is a First Amendment issue, rooted in the separation of church and state. The case, still unresolved, has become a cause celebre in the north-suburban New Age community.

Kernaghan, whose printed works include “Beginning Life at 60,” “Star Children,” and the recently published “Princess of Italy,” was the widow of Boston attorney John Alfred Kernaghan. She is survived by a step-daughter, Melanie Holland of Cleveland.

Higher and higher the soprano’s fundamentals rose, a slow upward spiral of hysteria. Louis was frowning, his pinky on the bridge of his glasses, his fingertips on his hairline, his thumb on his jaw. The thing he couldn’t stop looking at was his mother’s name. Not because the Globe had stuck her in Cleveland but for the name’s sheer personal resonant presence in print on paper. Melanie Holland: this was his mother, peculiarly reduced. Two words in a Boston paper.

Still frowning, and also beginning now to shiver, as if when the raindrops hit the windowpanes behind him their chill came right on through, he looked again at the boxed article about the Reverend Philip Stites. “Up Tremont Street,” it said, “and across the Common to the steps of the State House.” The facts were consistent with what Louis himself had seen of the march — consistent in a deep way, because the article, like memory, like dreams, reduced the event to an idea, illuminated not by twilight and streetlight but by its own light, in the darkness of his head: he saw it because he knew that this was what had happened, because he knew that this was how things had been. And therefore it seemed to him that it could only be raining this morning. The rain had to be there to make this day different, to bar any return to yesterday afternoon and the particular conditions of atmosphere and light through which those marchers had been marching, the blue northern clarity of light in greater Boston when the earthquake struck. The rain made the morning real, so unshakably present that it was hard to believe there’d even been an earthquake; to believe the accidents had occurred anywhere but on paper.

Stacked against one wall of the bedroom were his cartons of radio equipment, which he’d faithfully shipped from Evanston to Houston and from Houston to Boston and never unpacked. He worked his fingernail under the duct tape holding the top carton closed. Strength failed him. He staggered to his futon, one foot slipping on the open Globe, crashed heavily and lay face down until long after the arpeggios had stopped.

Sunday night he had dinner with his family in a fish restaurant on the harbor. He was surprised to hear that his mother and Eileen took it for granted that Rita Kernaghan had fallen to her death less because an earthquake shoved her than because she was blind drunk at the time. Then again, they’d known her and he hadn’t. The word was she’d fallen off a barstool, which sounded like a joke in bad taste but was apparently the literal truth. She was being cremated privately on Wednesday morning, her ashes hurled from a pier in Rockport on the afternoon of same, and her life celebrated the next day at a memorial service that Louis was expected to take time off from work to attend. His mother, obviously impatient with the whole deceased-disposal process, referred to the service as “the thing on Thursday.”

It wasn’t until shortly before “the thing” that he saw his parents again. He’d done Dan Drexel’s board work until ten in the morning, and then, possibly a little hurt that his mother hadn’t planned any other get-togethers or shown any interest in where he lived and worked (“hurt,” however, maybe not the word for his feelings towards a family in which people rarely had the resources to take or fake a personal interest in anyone’s life but their own, “regret” or “bitterness” or “general sadness” maybe being more like it), drove straight to their hotel, a newish medium-rise by the river in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. It would later transpire that his mother had made his father spend two afternoons in Widener Library so they could write off his half of the trip. Outside their door, at the end of a hushed hallway, Louis raised his hand but didn’t knock. He lowered it again.

“Eileen, that’s not the point.”

“Well, what is the point.”

“The point is to show some consideration for my feelings and try to understand things from my side. This has been an extremely upsetting — Yes! Yes! — an extremely upsetting week! So you might at least have had the consideration to wait—”

“You’re happy she’s dead! You’re happy!”

“That’s a very muffle muffle muffle to any person, muffle your mother. A very un-Christian thing.”

“It’s true.”

“I have to get dressed now.”

“It’s true. You’re happy!”

“I must get dressed. Although I can’t help wondering — well, muffle muffle muffle a young man who would put his casual girlfriend—”

“His what?!” Eileen’s high voice went twice as high.

“His casual girlfriend up to—”

“His—!? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Peter. And for your information—”

“Oh Eileen.”

“For your information—”

Here Louis, with a gesture of disgust, threw his fist against the door a couple times. Eileen let him in. Tears had muddied her eyeliner.

“Who is it?” their mother said from behind the bathroom door.

“It’s Louis,” Eileen said grimly.

“Hi Louis, I’m dressing.”

Eileen retreated towards the window, which looked out over the river at her business school. She was wearing the same bulky sweater she’d had on the last time Louis saw her. Today it looked as if she’d been sleeping in it.

“Where’s Dad?” Louis said.

“He’s at the pool. What are you doing here so early?”

Louis thought a moment. “What are you doing here so early?” She made a ghastly teenaged face at him, tongue and gums showing, and turned to face the window. Louis scratched his ear thoughtfully. Then, shifting gears, he prowled, he snooped. On one of the hotel room’s many luggage surfaces, lying like junk mail amid car keys and open Trident packages, he found a pair of official-looking documents, a police report and a medical examiner’s report, the back sides of which his mother had been using to jot down names and phone numbers. He looked at the official sides while Eileen carefully rubbed the skin around her eyes and their mother punctuated long bathroom silences with dressing and grooming noises. The police report consisted principally of the testimony of Rita Kernaghan’s live-in Haitian maid, Thérèse Mougère.

At 15:45 on April 6 Mougère completed her afternoon duties and placed inside her reticule three oranges and a ladies novel in French. She was scheduled to drive the deceased to downtown Boston at 17:00. She stated that the novel was for reading in the parking garage. As Mougère was granted from 16:00 to 17:00 every afternoon to watch television she retired at approximately 15:50 to her room which is down a short hall to the rear of the kitchen. The deceased was speaking on the kitchen telephone when Mougère last saw her alive. Shortly before the end of her program (it was established that the program was “Star Trek” which ends at 16:58) the house began to shake. The windows of Mougère’s room rattled and one pane broke. Mougère heard “a booming.” The lights flickered and the television faded for a moment. Mougère went to the kitchen where vases had fallen from the table and the cabinet doors were open. In the dining room a plate and vases had fallen from the breakfront. Mougère went to the parlor. Small articles had fallen from tables and there was a smell of whiskey from behind the bar. Mougère went upstairs calling the deceased’s name. Hearing nothing she became alarmed and searched all the upstairs rooms. She searched the parlor again and encountered the body of the deceased behind the bar. Blood, broken glass and a large volume of whiskey were present. A barstool was on its side. Mougère called the police. Dobbs and Akins arrived at 17:35. It was established that Mougère had not disturbed the body. When it was surmised that the deceased had fallen from the barstool while taking down a bottle Mougère averred that she habitually placed the deceased’s favorite labels of whiskey on a high shelf to discourage consumption. Mougère volunteered that a familiar spirit named Jack inhabited the house and had caused the death and destruction. This and other supernatural theories were discounted. The death appears to have been accidental in nature, in all probability occasioned by the moderate earthquake at 16:48. Questions regarding Mougère’s illegal residence status and the manner in which she obtained a valid Mass. operator’s license were referred to USINS. USINS was advised that the Coroner no longer required Mougère’s presence in the Commonwealth.

More hurriedly, because his mother was now making pre-exit noises in the bathroom (cases snapping, the water tap turned briskly on and off), Louis read through the report of the Essex County medical examiner, which assigned “massive counter-coup trauma” as the cause of death and attributed this trauma to an accident wherein the deceased, who was 62" tall, had fallen from a 38" barstool, resulting in a total drop of 100 inches, a fall sufficient, in combination with the marble floor, to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity. Blood loss from lacerations caused by broken glass was dismissed as a factor. The blood-alcohol content of the deceased was 0.06 percent, equivalent to “moderate” intoxication.

Louis covered up the document with a paperback and turned around. His mother was emerging from the bathroom.

It was obvious that she’d been spending money. Spending money and (so it seemed to Louis) sleeping, for she looked approximately fifteen years younger than she’d looked at dinner on Sunday. The skin of her face was golden and glowing and so tautly attached to her jawline it seemed to pull her dark eyes open wide. She’d had her hair set in a short pageboy — and colored also? What Louis remembered as an even dark gray had been resolved into black and silver. She was wearing a pale "yellow linen dress with black velvet trim, the hem about an inch above the knee. The high collar was joined with a brooch that contained a nickel-sized pearl. At the mirror, nostrils flared in concentration, she touched invisible and possibly nonexistent hairs around her temples. Then she went to the closet and with the exact same fluidity of vertical motion that Eileen had inherited, dropped to her knees and drew a shoe box from a plastic Ferragamo bag.

“You’re lookin’ nice there, Mom.”

“Thank you, Louis. Isn’t your father back yet?”

With raised eyebrows he watched her remove a pair of shoes from a bed of crimson tissue paper. He turned to Eileen, wondering if she too might raise her eyebrows at this spectacle of a mom transformed by sudden spending power. But Eileen was no less transformed. With eyes pinkened by hurt and hate and a face in which every muscle had gone dead she watched their mother slip her small feet into a pair of shoes as sleek as Jaguars. No way Louis could catch her eye. She needed to have her sorrows noticed by their mother, not by him. So while she suffered by the window (cold rain falling between her and the business school) and their mother complacently fitted a pair of white roses into the black band of a floppy white hat, he sat down on the bed and opened the sports section of a handy Globe. It could almost as easily have been he and not his sister suffering by the window, but what is a pack dog thinking, what’s going on behind its yellow eyes, when it sees one of its fellows taken aside by a polar explorer to have its throat slit and be made into supper for its siblings?

“Your father’s going to have about three minutes to shower and dress,” their mother said. “Maybe one of you could—”

“No,” Eileen said.

“No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.

“Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”

There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.

“Like a million bucks,” Louis said.

“Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.

Their mother, without expression, began to reload a new-looking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”

“Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nestled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.

Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie at the wheel, the kids in back. The kids’ cars had stayed behind in the hotel lot because Bob Holland considered automobiles an abomination and had threatened to walk if they took more than one. Louis was folded together like a card table and incipiently carsick, with his under-insulated head against a cold fogged window and the taste of heavy rain and diesel exhaust in his throat. On his shins he held his mother’s hat. Someone who was not Louis and probably not Eileen was farting steadily. Bob, looking diminished in a thirty-year-old suit, was glaring out his window at overtaken drivers in the heavy midmoming traffic on Memorial Drive. He thought that driving a car was an act of personal immorality.

Louis pushed out the hinged rear window and put his nose and mouth against the flat surface of the cooler air outside. He was beginning to relate his carsickness to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity, the imagination of death having advanced covertly and autonomously, penetrating his consciousness only now. He managed to suck a fortifying breath of air in through the window. “Do you think she knew it was an earthquake?”

Eileen gave him an ugly, morose look and retreated within herself.

“Who?” Melanie said.

“You know. Rita. Do you think she knew the shaking was an earthquake?”

“It sounds,” Melanie said, “as if she was far too inebriated to think much of anything.”

“It’s kind of sad,” Louis said, “don’t you think?”

“There are worse ways to go. Better this than cirrhosis in a hospital bed.”

“She’s left you all this money. Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”

“She didn’t leave me any money. She didn’t leave me anything but a quarter of a million dollars in illegally secured debts, if you want to know the truth.”

“Oh come on, Mel.”

“Well, she did, Bob. She had a mortgage on a house that didn’t belong to her. The bank in Ipswich was unaware of this little fact, which—”

“Your mother’s father,” Bob said, “left everything he had in a trust—”

“Bob, this doesn’t interest Louis.”

“Sure it does,” Louis said.

“And it’s not particularly his business either.”

“Oh, well.”

“But the basic point,” Melanie continued, “is that by the time my father died he had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he’d taken for a second wife, and while he had a duty to leave her comfortable he also didn’t want her to fritter away an estate that he eventually wanted to go to his children—”

Bob barked with delight. “Meaning he didn’t leave your mother a cent! And not a cent to your Aunt Heidi either! He wrote exactly the kind of spiteful, arrogant, dead-handed, lawyer’s lawyer will you’d have expected from him. Everybody beggared, everybody bitter, and a committee of three lawyers from the Bank of Boston meeting twice a year to write themselves checks on the fund.”

“I like the way you honor the dead.”

“Could you open a window a little?”

“And Mel’s going to right a few wrongs now, isn’t she? See, Lou, after Heidi died it all came to devolve on your mother. It was supposed to go to the surviving daughters. Your mother’s in exactly the same position your grandfather was ten years ago. Only the rich have gotten richer, haven’t they? Your mother’s in a position to build some schools and clinics, maybe give a gym to Wellesley. Or help the homeless, huh, Mel?”

Melanie tilted her head back, removing herself from the discussion. Eileen smiled bitterly. Louis asked again to have a window opened.

The memorial service, which was to have been held in a meadow in Essex County if the sun had shone, had been shifted to the ballroom of the Royal Sonesta, a luxury hotel overlooking the mouth of the Charles at the extreme northeast corner of Cambridge. For a moment, when Louis followed his parents through the doorway, he thought they’d entered the wrong room; milling in sad social lumps were, it seemed to him, the very people he’d seen marching against abortion on Tremont Street a week earlier — the same inflexible middle-aged female faces, the same smattering of vacant-eyed men, the same curtain-colored clothing and sensible shoes. But then, alerted by the beeline Eileen was making, he saw Peter Stoorhuys.

Peter was standing slightly apart from a group of three uneasy-looking men in nice suits, three obvious executives or professionals. With his legs spread and his shoulders thrown back and his hands shallowly in his pockets, he looked like a person to whom the world may come if it really must. Eileen, colliding with him, pressed her ear against one of his houndstooth lapels and rested one hand on his stomach, the other on his shoulder.

Louis stopped in his tracks and stared at the embrace with his hands on his hips. Then, altering his trajectory as though a repulsive field now surrounded Eileen, he caught up with Bob and the two of them shuffled after Melanie, whose approach was causing the three gentlemen in suits to break into smiles of relief. She brushed cheeks with two of them, shook hands with the third. Peter freed himself from Eileen and came over to Melanie with his arm outstretched, but suddenly she was keeping her hands to herself. She smiled glacially. “Hello Peter.” Bob Holland, like a grateful second-stringer, claimed the unshaken hand and pumped it, but Melanie’s snub had not escaped Eileen’s attention; she glowered at Louis. Louis smiled back pleasantly. He was interested to see that at some point during the week his parents had made Peter’s acquaintance.

“This is our son, Louis,” Melanie said. “Louis, this is Mr. Aldren, Mr. Tabscott, Mr. Stoorhuys—”

Mr. Who, Mr. Who, Mr.—?

“Good to know you, Louis,” they chorused, pressing his flesh. The same courtesies were then extended to Eileen.

“Peter’s dad,” Mr. Stoorhuys added for Louis’s benefit, waving a hand at his son, to whom he bore a resemblance both unmistakable and unflattering to himself. Seen from close up, Mr. Stoorhuys did not actually match his two companions. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott appeared to be real Men, men with the beefy faces and inflamed-looking bull’s nostrils of frequent beefeaters, men who were emphatically not “young men” and even more emphatically not “women.” They had gold chains across their necktie knots and a hard red shrewdness in their eyes.

Mr. Stoorhuys was more nervous and lanky. Three inches of shirt cuff stuck out of his jacket sleeves on either wrist. His hair grew in half a dozen directions and half a dozen shades of gray; a long, seventies-style forelock rested on his dandruffy eyebrows. He had sunken pitted cheeks, teeth so large he seemed unable to keep his lips over them, and bright intelligent eyes that were engaged in looking over his shoulder even as he stood facing Louis, one hand raised to keep him on hold.

“Louis,” Melanie said. He turned to see her standing on one leg, leaning through bodies. “Maybe you’d like to get me a cup of coffee.”

“Actually—” Mr. Tabscott pinched the cuff of Louis’s jacket. “I think the, uh, service is going to start here in a minute.”

“Yes,” Mr. Aldren said. “We’re going to sit with your mother if you don’t mind.”

“Good to meet you, son.”

“Good to meet you, uh, Louis.”

Mr. Stoorhuys followed them, escaping his stillborn conversation with Louis the easy way: by just leaving.

The drab crowd was herding itself towards rows of function-room chairs set up facing a lectern and a grand piano on which a Japanese man with expressive shoulders and a ponytail had begun to play the Pachelbel Canon. Louis’s father, with his academic’s respect for lecterns, had already taken a seat. Eileen stood hugging Peter’s chest. And a tableau presented itself: Mr. Aldren leading Melanie away, his elbow linked with hers, and Melanie not needing to be led but walking with him as naturally as if they were sweethearts on a boardwalk; Mr. Stoorhuys following with a grip on her other arm, smiling his smile that was not a smile, lagging behind for a moment to look over his shoulder through the rough tufts of hair in his eyes; and Mr. Tabscott like a rear guard with his back squarely to the three of them, unambiguously warning off anyone foolish enough to pursue. A white hat and a yellow linen dress — a lady as little a man as at least two of these men were ladies — fenced in by dark pinstripe.

Louis, staring, extended one finger and rammed the tip of it into the bridge of his glasses.

The Canon had grown deafening. Melanie sat down between Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott with Mr. Stoorhuys crowding in from Mr. Aldren’s side, his thin arm almost long enough to reach behind all three of them, five inches of white shirt cuff showing now. Louis roughed up the pastel broadloom with a heavy shoe. Asking Eileen who and what these men were was not an option; she had her cheek against Peter’s necktie and was feeling around under the back of his jacket as if looking for the key one wound him up with. Their lips were moving: they were conversing inaudibly. They and Louis were now the only mourners not seated in the array of chairs. An ashen-faced woman in a caftan had stationed herself behind the lectern and was resting one elbow on it as she gravely watched the pianist. The pianist had begun to grapple visibly with the Canon, trying to enforce a ritardando while hurrying the ponderous chords to find a respectable point for breaking off. The Canon was showing its backbone and seemed far from surrendering.

Louis walked over to the young lovers in their invisible sphere of oblivion and stood, as it were, outside their door. “Hi, Peter,” he said.

Peter seemed to have a reflex problem. It was three or four seconds before he turned and said, “Hey, how’s it going.”

“Fine, thanks. Wonder if I could talk to my sister for a second.” Eileen removed herself from Peter and gave some attention to her hair. By almost but not quite meeting Louis’s eyes she managed to appear entirely absent.

“I didn’t do anything to you,” Louis said.

“Didn’t say you did.”

“Mom give you a hard time or what.”

“Let’s just not talk about it.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“I’m going to go sit with Peter, OK?”

She left him standing in the middle of the ballroom, ten paces behind the last row of chairs. The lights shone more brightly on him than on the fifty or so assembled mourners, more brightly even than on the ashen moderator, who, after a nod of appreciation to the sweating and victorious pianist, looked squarely at Louis and said, “We may be seated.”

Louis held his ground, arms crossed. The woman closed her eyes with raised eyebrows. Then she put on a pair of glasses that were chained to her neck.

“We’re assembled here today,” she said, reading from the lectern, “to honor the memory of Rita Damiano Kernaghan, a mentor unto many of us and a friend unto all. Can you hear me in the back row?”

The only person in the back row, Bob Holland, gave the woman a captain’s salute.

“My name is Geraldine Briggs. I was a friend of Rita Kernaghan. I knew her well. At times, we were as sisters unto one another. We laughed together, we wept together. We were as little girls, sometimes.”

The pallid mourners were listening raptly, their heads like so many compass needles pointing at the lectern. The men with Melanie, Mr. Stoorhuys included, sat with their fingers pressed into their foreheads.

“When first I met Rita at the Empowerment Center in Danvers in 1983, she had just penned a book entitled Beginning Life at 60, familiar to many of you, I’m sure, and seemed, she did, a perfect embodiment of the principles limned therein. Rita had learned that the soul is eternal and youthful, gay and joyous, filled with glad melodies. Age is no impediment unto the soul. Nay, death itself be no impediment. She had been a simple peasant girl, a gatherer of flowers and scented herbs, in Napoleonic times. Why should she not then make glad melodies even now when, a careworn widow, there was nought to be wrought of life but, nay, begin it again? Why should not we all? In her workshop, we hearkened unto her message. We learned. We grew. We laughed. We became as young again. We were healed, healed not as the modern world would have us healed, but spiritually. Nay. A new world was opened up unto us by her.”

Louis, standing rock-like, watched Mr. Tabscott bury his face in both hands. His jeweled watch gleamed.

“But nay, what is the new but that which is most ancient? And what. What is death but the beginning of new life? Another turn in the eternal cycle? A young babe born? Let us therefore tell glad stories today. Each one of us as so desires, let them stand and celebrate with glad stories the eternal life of Rita Damiano Kernaghan and, nay, of us all!”

Here Geraldine Briggs paused and a woman in the front row popped up from her seat. She immediately sat down again, withered by a look.

“I see among us,” Geraldine Briggs continued, reading, “friends of Rita’s. Family of Rita’s. Friends from her years of labor as a secretary. Friends and loved ones from all walks of her life. And so, friends, the Empowerment Center, which I’m proud to direct, has in accordance with Rita’s express wishes requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made in Rita’s name to the Empowerment Center. The name of the fund is the Rita Damiano Kernaghan Fund. This is fund number 1145. Envelopes for giving are still available by the coffee urn. But nay, nay, let us now. Let us now hear glad stories!”

The first glad story was delivered by Mr. Aldren, who rose halfway from his seat and spoke in a guarded monotone. “Rita Kernaghan was an employee with us at Sweeting-Aldren Industries for some twenty-four years and was the, uh, wife of the principal architect of what is known to be one of the Commonwealth’s high-tech and high-finance success stories of the, uh, last couple decades, and I and some fellow officers are here to, uh, pay our respects. She was a fine — fine woman.”

Mr. Aldren dropped back into his seat and Geraldine Briggs, eyes closed, slowly nodded. Then the eager woman in the front row popped up and faced the congregation. Once, she said, after a class at the Empowerment Center, Rita Kernaghan had given her a bronze amulet to wear on her neck. The amulet had cured a large wen that was on her chest. Out of gratitude the woman had sent Rita a box of Harry and David’s pears. Six months later, at a festival of the vernal equinox held at Rita’s estate, the woman was taken into Rita’s living room. For six months the box of Harry and David’s pears had been stored close to the focus of power of the Pyramid on Rita’s house. Rita and the woman pried the staples — the staples were copper and heavy-duty — pried the staples out of the box. The pears were not rotten. The woman and Rita shared a pear, trading bites. It was good. The woman sat down.

Geraldine Briggs smiled uncomfortably and coughed a little.

A man with dentures like carp teeth stood up and unfolded a clipping. It was an editorial from the Ipswich Chronicle. The editorial was a thanksgiving that explicitly invoked the Judeo-Christian god and thanked him that property damage in the recent earthquake had been minor. The editorial noted that Rita’s famous Pyramid, so much in the news in recent years, had not protected her when push came to shove; damage on the Kernaghan estate (still slight) had been among the most severe. The man folded up the clipping. He said that he had taken two of Rita’s workshops. He said Rita had never maintained that the Pyramid offered eternal life in the present existence. That was not the point. It was this man’s personal view that the Pyramid had in fact served to concentrate the earth forces in the neighborhood—

“Yes,” said Geraldine Briggs. “Yes perhaps. Other stories?” A woman rose to describe an occasion on which Rita had cried upon hearing of the death of a young person.

Another woman rose and told of Rita’s refusal to accept money from a person ill able to afford a workshop.

Another woman rose and spoke of her friendship with Rita during the Ming Dynasty.

It was not clear what sort of story besides Mr. Aldren’s would have pleased Geraldine Briggs; certainly few of these stories did. But having opened the door, she was powerless to close it. The anecdotes poured out, ranging from the sentimental to the borderline insane, and their accreting weight slowly unmanned Louis, uncrossing his arms and bowing his shoulders, until finally he went and sat down by his father. His father seemed to be having a grand time, tossing his head back in delight, feasting on the dismal confessions as though they were popcorn. He went so far as to frown at Geraldine Briggs when, for the third time, she said, “Well, if there are no more. ” She paused. It finally seemed as if there really might be no more. “If there are no more stories I think we’ll—” But yet again she was forced to stop, because Melanie had sprung to her feet.

Melanie smiled prettily, twisting her head around to meet as many eyes as possible, leaning back to catch a few more. The only ones she avoided were her family’s.

“I knew Rita Kernaghan, too,” she said. “And I wanted to tell you all that I firmly believe she’s already reincarnated! I believe she’s now. a parakeet! Isn’t that marvelous?” She clasped her hands in front of her and swung them like a happy girl. “I just wanted to tell you all how marvelous I think it is that she’s a parakeet now, how simply marvelous. That’s all I have to say!” With an unfortunate little wiggle of her bottom, and with one hand on her hat to keep it on, she dropped back down between her protectors, Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott. The protectors traded smirks. The drab crowd, with dawning outrage, turned to Geraldine Briggs for guidance, but she appeared to have something urgent to say to the pianist. Eileen and Peter were whispering and nodding, maturely pretending not to have particularly noticed what Melanie said. The crowd began to murmur: Honor the dead! Honor the dead!

Louis was looking at his father, who in turn was looking at his wife. Once the surprise had faded there was nothing ramused or affectionate or even angry in Bob’s expression. It was pure disappointed disapproval. And, as such, an expression that only love could sponsor. He would have looked exactly the same if Melanie had said, “I’m being unfaithful. That’s all I have to say!”

The pianist had struck up a New Age melody, cosmic and burbling. “PEOPLE!” Geraldine Briggs shouted. “People, people, people. We have now heard BOTH sides, the glad and the unenlightened. So let us now go forth into the world with GLADDENED HEARTS AND SOBERED MINDS. REMEMBER THE ENVELOPES. AMEN!”

The drab men and women rose. As they headed for the refreshments they slowed and walked in half circles around Melanie like sullen, beaten hounds. She smiled and nodded to them all as she chatted with Messrs. Tabscott and Aldren and Stoorhuys, these favored hounds crowding around her. Soon Louis and his father were the only people still sitting.

“Sweeting-Aldren?” Louis said.

“Nature’s helpers. Herbicides, pigments, textiles.”

“Mom has something to do with them now?”

“You could put it that way.”

“She was so rude.”

“Don’t judge her, Lou. There’s no reason for you to trust me on this, but please don’t judge her. Will you do me that favor?” Coquettish was the only word for the way in which Melanie was accepting an ordinary cup of coffee from Mr. Stoorhuys, pretending to be tempted against her better judgment. “I thought I was going to scream,” she went on to Mr. Aldren. For one brief moment, in the unblinking intentness of the smile Mr. Aldren had trained on her, the smiling wolf behind the smiling dog showed through, the cruel and hungry animal biding its time. He said, “You’re free for lunch, I assume.” To which Melanie replied, “I think I can squeeze you in.”

“Look at her,” Bob said. “Have you ever seen her so happy? You don’t know how long she’s had to wait. Hard to begrudge her a couple happy hours.”

“Yeah, although—”

Bob looked straight ahead at the empty lectern. “I’m asking you not to judge her.”

3

From the memorial service Louis drove his father to a cheap hamburger restaurant in Harvard Square, a place with the air of a selfconscious institution, and it was there, in a booth near the door, that he was introduced to a figure that took away what little appetite he had. His father named the figure while holding the top half of his hamburger bun in his palm like a calculator and spreading mustard on it. The figure was 22 million dollars. It corresponded to Louis’s mother’s new approximate net worth.

Scarves and coat sleeves were brushing his head as various lunch hours were exhausted and the restaurant emptied out. Cold air blew in through the busy doors. He asked what his mother was going to do with so much money.

His father looked a little bum-like in his ancient suit, with its narrow lapels overlapping as he hunched over his hamburger. “I don’t know,” he said.

Louis asked if they were going to stay in the house in Evanston.

“Where else would we go?” his father said.

Was he thinking of retiring?

“When I’m sixty-five,” his father said.

Unequal to the asking of more questions, Louis watched in silence as his father cleaned both their plates and paid the check with a ten-dollar bill, leaving a tip of dimes and quarters.

It was midaftemoon when he got back to WSNE. The clouds were darkening further, deepening and collecting themselves for serious nighttime rain, and in the studios it might already have been midnight. All the lights were burning, the building’s various circulatory systems humming audibly, the phones in the advertising department as silent as always. Through the Studio A window he could see the afternoon announcer, an alcoholic-looking veteran named Bud Evans whose few cobwebs of hair were painstakingly arranged over his chapped, bald scalp. He was gazing uneasily over the boom mike at his guest, a gentleman with golden shoulder-length locks and a Hawaiian shirt. For five or six seconds neither spoke. It was like a pensive lull in conversation, except that they were on the air and the lull was being broadcast. Still feeling carsick, Louis went to the men’s room and leaned over the urinal with his forehead pressing into tile. His urine broke up a tarry wad of tobacco shreds. Moving like a person with a hangover, he sat down at the terminal in his cubicle and began to enter commercial logs. He did this for three hours, which at the wage he earned netted him somewhat under twelve dollars, assuming he eventually got paid. When he left Waltham, rain was dropping out of a sky the color of a TV set’s afterglow. On Clarendon Hill he went straight to the bathroom and vomited a clear ropy liquid into the beige toilet.

Louis was, at twenty-three, a not entirely untroubled person. His relationship with money was particularly tortured. And yet what he realized, when the import of the figure began to sink in, was that up until the moment he’d sat down in the burger joint with his father, he’d basically been content with his life and its conditions. A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he’s lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them. Louis had been coming to appreciate the freedom a person gained by sacrificing money, and to pity or even outright despise the wealthy — a class represented in his mind, justly or not, by the various suntanned narrow-nosed boyfriends Eileen had sported over the years, up to and including Peter Stoorhuys. But now the joke was on Louis, because he was the son of a woman worth 22 million dollars.

That night he had a lucid and unpleasant dream. The setting was a paneled boardroom or club room furnished with red leather chairs. His mother had leaned back on one of them and, raising the hem of her yellow dress, allowed a fully clothed Mr. Aldren to stand between her legs and pump semen into her while Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys looked on. When Mr. Aldren was done, Mr. Stoorhuys mounted her, only Mr. Stoorhuys had become an Irish setter and had to strain and prance on his hind legs to maintain an effective mating position. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott stood watching as she reached around to steady the eager dog between her legs.

On Saturday Louis left two messages on Eileen’s machine. When she didn’t return them, he called his parents at their hotel and learned that they were driving to the Kernaghan estate the next morning, his mother to stay there for perhaps a week, his father only for the day, since classes at Northwestern resumed on Monday. “I’m going to be very busy,” his mother said. “But if you want to do something for me, you could take your father to the airport. The flight’s at seven.”

Ignoring the hint, he set out for Ipswich at ten on Sunday morning. A humidity and stasis lay on Somerville. The rain had finally stopped in the night, but eaves and fenders and budding trees were still pregnant with it, there being not a breath of wind. Where sight lines opened, down streets and through the narrow prisms between houses, the humidity added up to a paling of the distance, a blurring of edges that affected even the tolling of a distant church bell, the separate strokes of which were almost lost in the intervening resonance. Louis steered awkwardly around a pair of Somerville patrol cars that had stopped in the middle of an intersection, driver’s window to driver’s window, as if they were insects and this was how they coupled and their need was urgent. Through the portal of an empty, lighted church he glimpsed banks of Easter lilies.

The highways were deserted. From stretches of elevated grade, up through Chelsea and Revere and Saugus, he looked down on crabbed patchwork neighborhoods in which streets and driveways had hegemony. Many were half underwater now, with cars parked crookedly at their margins as if they’d been deposited by a flood.

A different flood, a receding flood of dollars, had left countless new condominiums stranded in fields that were muddy and barren and rutted with Caterpillar tracks. The town house condos differed only in location; every one of them, without exception, was faced with pastel clapboard and had postmodern semicircles and triangles interrupting the roof lines. The high-rises, on the other hand, came in two varieties: the kind with plywood on their windows, and the kind with banners draped from the roof advertising incredible deals on 1 & 2 BRS.

Thorn bushes and stunted trees filled the flat, exhausted land north of Danvers. In the mist outside Ipswich, near Ipswich Ford, Louis braked to let a shaggy drunk no older than thirty reel across Route 1A. He left the town on Argilla Road, passing widely spaced houses with BMWs and Volvos and tremendous oak trees planted outside them. Soon he came to a stone gate marked kernaghan. A driveway bordered with spruce trees wound up a hill through rolling unmown pastures. At the top of the hill was a gracious white house with symmetrical wings, a domed portico, and, squatting among its dormers, a pyramid made of white aluminum siding. It was easily fifteen feet tall. The effect was of a well-dressed woman wearing a plastic garbage pail on her head.

He stood for a moment on a hemp mat stenciled with a black yin and yang and peered in through a narrow window beside the front door. He saw a tiled entry hall and a living room that extended to the back of the house. In theory at least, since this house now belonged to his mother, it was a second home to him. He opened the door and walked in.

The dining-room table, to his left, was covered with folders and portfolios. A broad-shouldered man in a white shirt was seated with his back to the hall, and at the head of the table, reading a stapled document, sat Melanie.

“Hi Mom, how you doin’,’’ Louis said."

She looked up at him severely. Only the white tip of her long nose held her half glasses on. She was wearing a crimson silk dress, crimson lipstick, and earrings with large black stones. Her dark hair was pulled tightly behind her ears. “Hello Louis,” she said, returning her eyes to the document. “Happy Easter.”

Her companion had swung around, capturing the back of his chair in an armpit, and revealed a flushed and amiable face with chalky blue eyes and a bushy reddish mustache. His collar was open, his necktie loosened. He seemed so delighted to see Louis that Louis immediately shook his hand.

“Henry Rudman,” the man said. He almost but did not quite say Henwy Wudman. “You must be the son that lives in Sumyull. I think your mother said Belknap Street?”

“That’s right.”

Henry Rudman nodded vigorously. “Reason I ask is I grew up in Sumvull myself. You familiar with Vinal Avenue?”

“No, sorry,” Louis said. He leaned over his mother’s shoulder. “Whatcha reading there, Mom?”

Melanie turned a page in pointed silence.

“It’s an old brief,” Wudman answered, leaning back in his chair expansively. He waggled his pen like a drumstick. “We got a piece of architectural ornamentation upstairs that’s worn out its welcome. The town of Ipswich agreed a few years back to pay for its removal. Now it’s looking like they want to welsh.”

“That’s some ornament,” Louis said.

“Hey, to each his own. I know what you mean, though. I understand you moved up here from Texas. What do you think of the weather?”

“It stinks!”

“Yeah, wait’ll you see it do this in June. Tell me, you a Sox fan yet?”

“Not yet, no,” Louis said. He was appreciating the attention. “Cubs fan.”

With a big mitt the lawyer swatted his words back in his direction. “Same diff. You like the Cubs, you got everything it takes to be a Sox fan. I mean for instance, who lost us a Series in ’86, Bill Buckner. Who did us the favor of trading us Bill Buckner, Chicago Cubs. Like some kinda conspiracy there. What two teams played the most years without winning the ultimate cigar, you got it, Sox and Cubs. Listen, you want to see a game? Let me send you a couple tickets, I’m a nineteen-year subscriber. Unlikely you’ll get tickets like these through normal channels.”

Louis drew his head back in surprise, thoroughly disarmed now. “That would be great.”

Melanie cleared her throat like a starter motor.

“Hey, don’t mention it,” Rudman said. “I’m a corrupter o’ youth. You gotta excuse us, though, we’re looking at a snake’s nest here.”

Louis turned to his mother. “Where’s Dad?”

“Outside. Why don’t you look in the yard. As I told you on the phone, Mr. Rudman and I have a lot to discuss by ourselves.”

“Don’t let me. disturb you,” he told her in his Nembutal voice.

In the kitchen he found coffee cake, a party-sized urn of coffee, and, on a long counter, other bakery products in white boxes with the name “Holland” in blue crayon. His eyes widened when he opened the refrigerator. There were pâtés and seafood salads in transparent plastic cartons, jumbo fruits in decorated tissue paper, a tin of Russian caviar, half a smoked ham, whole foreign cheeses, premium yogurt in unusual berry flavors, fresh artichokes and asparagus, kosher dill pickles, an intriguing stack of wrapped deli items, German and Dutch beers, name-brand soft drinks, juices in glass bottles, and thirty-dollar-a-pop champagne—

“Louis.” His mother spoke from the dining room.

“Yeah, Mom.”

“What are you doing in there?”

“I’m looking at the food.”

Silence.

“No way you’re liable,” Henry Rudman said. “Guy pocks his Jag in the street, somebody else comes along secures a loan with it, no way on earth Guy A’s responsible. It’s straight fraud, doesn’t involve you whatsoever. Can’t really blame the bank either. She’s living in the house and the title she shows ’em’s a first-rate forgery, so good it makes you wonder if she did it all by herself, I bet not. It’s a slick trick. She gets a home-equity loan for two hundred K, spends seventy-two on this pyramid that she’s just gotta have, can’t live without, and puts the difference in a different bank. It’ll cover payments for another ten, fifteen years plus she can throw the occasional pahty on it. Slick trick. She dies, the bank’s screwed. I mean assuming the trustees still have the real title. Your pop must’ve known what he was doing. Four thousand a month tax-free plus a free house with groundskeeping fully paid and she still can’t quite make ends meet, not even paying the Haitian slave wages. I can’t say I like this dead-hand business (you understand this is just a professional opinion), but if I’d been married to a woman like that I wouldn’t let her near the capital myself. Next thing you know, we’d be looking at Mount Fuji in the back yod.”

“Louis.”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“Would it be possible for you not to be in the kitchen?”

“Yeah, just a sec.”

A dark, cold hall off the rear of the kitchen ended in three doors, one leading outside, the others into a bathroom and a bedroom. Louis sat down on the bed and slurped coffee and wolfed cake. All the hangers in the closet were bare. It was a while before he noticed that a pane was missing from the window. This was the only earthquake damage he saw all morning.

Out in the back yard he could find no sign of his father, although the air was so still and thick it almost seemed a person walking through it would leave a trail. He crossed a patio and tried one of the French doors at the rear end of the living room. It swung right open.

The living room was large enough to hold four separate clusters of furniture. Above the fireplace hung a large oil of Louis’s grandfather, a formal portrait painted in 1976, when John Kernaghan was seventy-five or so. His eyebrows had still been dark. With his near-perfect baldness and firm skin and elegant, compact skull he looked ageless. He was, Louis realized, the man responsible for his loss of hair. The painted image drew further life from the living daughter sitting across the hall in the dining room, reading documents with her father’s own glittering unapproachable dark eyes.

“When they meet on the thirtieth,” Henry Rudman said quietly, “they have to distribute the entire corpus. The entire corpus, it’s unambiguous, they have no choice. The full transfer may take another four to six weeks, but we’re looking at June 15 absolute latest.”

That the living room did not entirely belong to Melanie yet was clear from the New Age reading matter on the coffee tables, from the ugly phantasmagoric acrylics on the walls, and from the copies of Princess Itaray and Beginning Life at 60 and Star Children that filled the only bookcase. To say nothing of the smell emanating from the bar, a smell of spilled alcohol and bubblegum-scented disinfectant. The bar jutted out from the wall near the inner rear corner of the room and was made of the same blond wood as the two slender barstools in front of it. Shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling displayed several hundred different bottles — liqueurs and digestives with labels in foreign alphabets, a few with pictures of unlikely vegetables. Louis knelt by the gray marble floor behind the bar. There was plenty of room here for a small woman to lie dead, head smashed. It wasn’t hard to see the faint brownish fingers and ridgelines of splashed liquor on the wall. Nor was it hard to see blood. There were traces of it in the sutures between the squares of marble, hardly browned, the nail-polish redness especially visible where the edges of the squares were chipped. Who had cleaned things up? The maid, before her deportation? With his fingertips he pressed on the cold, unyielding marble, putting his body’s weight on it, hearing clearly the whock! of the splitting head.

“Louis. For God’s sake. What are you doing?”

He jumped to his feet. His mother was approaching the bar. “Dropped a coin,” he said.

“You have a morbid interest?”

“No, no, I just happened to come inside this way.”

“You came in—?” Melanie shook her head at the French doors as if they were a grievous disappointment to her. “This house,” she said, “has no security whatsoever. I suppose she expected the pyramid to protect against burglars too. That’s very logical and rational, don’t you think? That’s par for the course.”

Louis heard a faint tinkling in a toilet behind a wall.

“Well. You see where she died.” His mother crossed her arms and gazed up at the liquor bottles with satisfaction. “Personally, I can’t think of anything tackier than putting a full-sized bar like this in your living room. Or do you not agree. Maybe you think everyone should have a saloon in their living room. And a bee.”

She looked at Louis as if she actually expected him to reply. “The insult on the injury,” she continued, “is that she probably had it installed with money that didn’t belong to her. I don’t suppose you missed what Mr. Rudman was saying. That she forged a title to this house to borrow money on. What do you think of that, Louis? Do you think that’s proper? Do you think that’s OK?” With a beautifully shod toe she flipped up one end of a Chinese rug, tilted her head to read the label, and flipped the end down again. She sneered at a coffee table. “Harmonic Lifestyles. Phoenician Deities. Orgone Redux.” She made a gagging, dismissive face. “What do you think of all this, Louis?”

“I think I’m going to scream if you ask me another question like that.”

“Every single thing I see here makes me sick. Sick. She said this to the portrait above the fireplace."

“But it’s all yours now, right?”

“Effectively. Yes.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I have no idea. I came in here to tell you that you’re making Mr. Rudman and me very nervous lurking around like this. You couldn’t find your father?”

“No.”

“Well, if you want to stay, you can be in the back room, there’s a TV in there, maybe you can find a game on. There’s lots of food in the refrigerator, you can help yourself. Or you could sweep the patio for me, and I have a few other little jobs for someone, but I do not just want you lurking around. This isn’t your house, you know.”

Louis looked at her with neutral expectancy, as if she were a chess opponent who’d made a move he wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to change her mind about. Then, the arbitrary grace period expiring, he said, “You have a good lunch on Thursday?”

“It was a business lunch. I thought I explained that to you at the time.”

“What did you eat?”

“I don’t remember, Louis.”

“You don’t remember? That was three days ago! Piece of fish? Reuben sandwich?”

They could hear Mr. Rudman handling dishes in the kitchen now, whistling a show tune.

“What is it that you want?” Melanie asked levelly.

“I want to know what you had for lunch on Thursday.”

She took a deep breath, trying to contain her annoyance. “I don’t remember.”

He scrunched up his face. “You serious?”

“Louis—” She waved a hand, trying to suggest some generic entree, something not worth mentioning. “I don’t remember, a piece of fish, yes. Filet of sole. I’m extremely busy.”

“Filet of sole. Filet of sole.” He nodded so emphatically, it was like bowing. Then he froze, not even letting breath out. “Broiled? Poached?”

“I’m going back to the dining room now,” Melanie said, remaining rooted to the center of a Chinese rug. “I’ve had a very upsetting week—” She paused to let Louis challenge this. “A very upsetting week. I’m sure you understand that and can show some consideration.”

“Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys—” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.”

“I’m going back to the dining room now.”

“Just tell me, come on, is that what he had? Did he have rabbit?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t happen to notice—”

“You didn’t notice rabbit? Sort of stretched out on the plate? Maybe a little cranberry sauce with it? Or red cabbage? Potato pancakes? What kind of restaurant was it? Help me picture this, Mom. Was it really expensive?”

Melanie took another deep breath. “We went to a restaurant called La Côte Américaine. I had filet of sole and Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys had soup and grilled steaks or chops, I truly don’t recall exactly what—”

“But not rabbit. You’d recall that.”

“But no, not rabbit, Louis. You’re being quite a bit less funny than you seem to think you are.”

Louis’s eyes narrowed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to the twenty-two million, then. What are you going to do with it?”

“I have no idea.”

“How about a yacht? They make nice gifts.”

“This is not at all funny.”

“So it’s true?”

Melanie shook her head. “It’s not true.”

“Oh, it’s not true. Meaning it’s false. Meaning, what, twenty-one point nine? Twenty-two point one?”

“I mean it does not concern you.”

“Oh, I see, it doesn’t concern me. Let’s forget it, then, let’s drop it. Hey, people inherit twenty-two million dollars every day. What’d you do at work today? Oh, I inherited twenty-two million dollars, would you pass me the butter?”

“Please stop mentioning that figure.”

“Twenty-two million dollars? You want me to stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars? All right, I’ll stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars. Let’s call it alpha.” He began to pace around the rim of a rug. “Alpha equals twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars equals alpha, alpha being neither greater than twenty-two million dollars nor less than twenty-two million dollars.” He drew up. “How’d your father get so rich?”

“Please, Louis, I asked you to stop mentioning the figure and I meant it. It’s very painful to me.”

“Yeah, so I see. That’s why I suggested we call it alpha, although I’m afraid alpha doesn’t quite capture the impact. What a terrible painful thing, to inherit that much money. You know Dad says he’s not even going to quit teaching?”

“Why should he quit teaching?”

“Don’t tell me you need his salary when you’ve got twenty-two, oops.”

“I would be grateful if you did not try to tell me what I need and don’t need.”

“You’d be grateful if I just walked out of here and never mentioned this again.”

Melanie’s face lit up as if he were a student of hers who’d blurted truth. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly right. That is what I would most like from you.”

Louis’s eyes narrowed further. He said: “Twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars.” He said it faster and faster, until it twisted his tongue, becoming twollers, twollers. “What a huge amount of money. It means you’re rich, rich rich rich, rich.”

His mother had turned to face the mantel and covered her ears with her palms, applying such strong isometric pressure to her head that her arms trembled. This was as close to fighting as she and Louis ever got; and it wasn’t really fighting. It was like what a pair of bar magnets do when you try to force the north poles together. It had always been this way. Even when he was a boy of three or four and she had tried to smooth his hair or wipe food off his face, he had twisted his head away on his stout, stubborn neck. If he was sick in bed and she laid a cold hand on his forehead, he had tried to press himself into pillow and mattress with triple gravity, as blindly and determinedly resistant to her touch as the magnet to whose permanent invisible force field the relief of rupture or discharge can never come. Now she raised her head, her white fingers flat on her cheeks, her elbows on the mantel, and looked up at her father. From the rear of the house came the sound of television, amplified rumblings and collisions: bowling.

“I’m paying Mr. Rudman for his time, Louis.”

“Right. What’s a lawyer get, a couple hundred bucks an hour? Let’s say 220 an hour into twenty-two million (oh, I’m sorry, there I go again), ten to the second into ten to the seventh, that’s a hundred thousand hours, and assume ten-hour days, two hundred fifty days a year, my God, you’re right. That’s only forty years. I’ll try to be quick.”

“What is it that you want?”

“Well, let’s see, I’ve got a job and a cheap apartment and a car that’s paid for, I’m not married, I don’t have expensive habits, and in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t asked you and Dad for a single thing since I was sixteen years old, so it’s probably not money I want, is it, Mom?”

“I appreciate all that.”

“Don’t even mention it.”

“I will mention it. I never get to tell you how proud I am of your independence.”

“I said forget it.”

She turned around to face him. “I have an idea,” she said. “I suggested something like this to Eileen and she seemed to feel it was a good idea. I hope your father will go along with it too. I think we should all just act as if this never happened.”

“This twenty-two million dollars.”

“Please. Please, please, please. I think we should all just go on with our lives as if nothing is different. Now, it may be that as time goes by a few things will change, in small ways and perhaps in large ways too. For example, I’ll probably be able to make it very easy for you to go back to school if you should ever decide to. And I’m not promising anything, but it’s possible that if you or Eileen ever want to make a down payment on a home I could be of some help there too. But all these things are in the future, and I think the best thing for the four of us to do now is just put it out of our minds.”

Louis scratched his neck. “You say Eileen thought this was a good idea?”

“Oh yes.”

“Then what was she crying for on Thursday.”

“Because. ” A faraway look came into his mother’s eyes, and then they began to glisten, tears seeming to form directly on her dark brown irises, the way rock candy grows wet with itself. “Because, Louis, she had come to me to ask for money.”

He laughed. This was the Eileen who let cars roll into lakes. “So? Write her a check. Or don’t write her a check.”

“Oh!” His mother’s hands rose to her face again, her fingers bent hard at the knuckles. “Oh! I won’t have you talk like this!”

“Like what?”

“I’m not going to discuss this a moment longer. We must put this out of our minds. I want you to leave now. Do you understand? I have asked you and asked you not to joke about these things, and you will not listen to me. You are worse than your father, who I know you think is very funny. But it is not the least bit funny, it is simply inconsiderate— And don’t you roll your eyes at me! DON’T YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME! Do you understand? I want you to leave the house this minute.”

“All right, all right.” Louis walked into the front hall. “Just drop us a postcard from Monaco, OK?”

Melanie pursued him. The volume of the television had tactfully been increased. “Take that back!”

“All right. Don’t drop us a postcard from Monaco.”

“You really don’t understand how inconsiderate you’re being. Do you?”

When Louis got mad, as opposed to merely feeling righteous, he stuck his chest out and raised his chin and looked down his nose like a sailor or an ugly asking for a fight. He was completely unaware of doing this; the look on his face was dead serious. And as he faced his mother, who after all wasn’t likely to shove him or take a free swing, he looked so incongruously belligerent that her expression softened. “Are you going to punch me, Louis?”

He lowered his chin, angrier still to see he was only amusing her.

“Give me a hug,” his mother said. She laid a hand on his arm and held it firmly when he tried to pull away. She said, “I’m not selfish. Do you understand?”

“Sure.” His hand was on the doorknob. “You’re just upset.”

“That’s right. And it will be some time before I even see the money.”

“Sure.”

“And when I do, I don’t know how much it’s going to be. The figure you mentioned, which you must have gotten from your father — could change a great deal. It’s a very complicated and unfortunate situation. A very — very unfortunate situation.”

“Sure.”

“But no matter what, we’ll all be able to do some nice things.”

“Sure.”

Her irritation flared. “Stop saying that!”

A bowling ball struck pins. A crowd cheered. “Sure,” Louis said.

She dropped his arm. Without looking at her he walked out the door and closed it quietly behind him. Continuing to stare straight ahead, he marched past his car and down the drive, stiff-legged, letting gravity do the work, depressed the way he’d been when he read about the earthquake eight days earlier, depression an isotope of anger: slower and less fierce in its decay, but chemically identical. When his father came into view, at a bend near the bottom of the drive, he hardly noticed him.

“Howdy, Lou.” Bob’s head was aglow in a nest of Gore-Tex and plaid lining. He smelled like burnt marijuana.

“Hello,” Louis said, not breaking stride. Bob smiled as he watched him go and immediately forgot that he’d seen him.

East of the Kernaghan house the land became even more parklike, the yards giving way to estates with hurdles in the pastures and horse trailers in the driveways. A sleek Japanese-made ski boot whooshed past Louis. Pasted to a window was the face of a young girl in a pink church dress. The boot braked and turned and faded a little in the white air as it drove up a hill. The girl jumped from the sliding door running, carrying something in her hand, a book maybe, a Bible.

Between the ages of six and fifteen, Louis himself had returned from church on approximately 350 Sunday mornings. He’d emerged from the back seat with a light head and the sense of a morning’s worth of playtime lost, wasted in basement church-school rooms which had the accidental furniture arrangement and dank smell of places frequented only by transients. In the early years, of course, there were efforts made to cover up the swindle. There were jars of paste and rusty scissors, mimeographed leaves from a coloring book, and brown crayons with which to color the donkey on which Jesus sat. (These crayons were among the first contributors to his sense of the vastness of the past and the strangeness of history, their unfamiliar design and soiled and dried-out wrappers suggesting that this business of coloring donkeys had been going on significantly longer than his life had, longer than anything at real school, where supplies were always new.) There was music — in particular one song about how Jesus loved the little children of the world who came in crayon colors: red and yellow, black and white. There was cottage industry, the manufacture of styrofoam Advent wreaths, construction-paper palms, ceramic Mother’s Day items, and (one morning when Louis dislodged the front tooth of a boy who was using his blue tempera paint, and miraculously wasn’t punished for it) plaster crèche figurines. But he was no more fooled by this veneer of fun than he was fooled at the dentist by the sweetness of the tooth polish. And when he reached seventh grade, the veneer fell away entirely. He was issued a Bible with a red leatherette binding and his name in gilt capitals on the front: louis francis Holland, and spent the Sunday morning hour in an even smaller and more barren cubicle in a different wing of the church, the class size for some reason much diminished in the transfer, all his male friends having dropped out, able now to spend the morning watching the Sunday cartoons to which he himself had become attached during the summer, so that he occupied without challenge the very bottom of a mainly female class in which, there being no grades, he deduced his rank from the fact that unlike all the other Bibles, his had immediately and through no conscious fault of his own acquired a blackened and ragged spine and a back cover with a rip across one corner, to say nothing of the fact that he was called upon to read aloud from this Bible three times as often as anyone else and was forever being told, in a too-gentle voice by a parent named Mr. Hope, to speak up a little, to not be shy. On one occasion the class was asked to describe Jesus the man, and a girl offered that he had been frail and gentle — a characterization with which Mr. Hope took issue, reasoning that this carpenter’s son must have been physically powerful in order to overturn the money changers’ tables in the Temple; Louis thought that for once the frail and gentle Mr. Hope had a point.

Even though their own father used Sunday mornings for swimming rather than for worship, church school had never seemed optional to the Holland kids. Nine months a year Melanie herded them along in front of her, up the rear stairs of the church from the parking lot, and gave them a last push towards the classrooms while she proceeded into the sanctuary, there to occupy a pew close to the pulpit, not because such proximity made her a better Christian (that was for God to decide) but because she liked to have her clothing noticed. She kept going to church even after her children reached fifteen and proved unconfirmable — Eileen because girls with social lives needed to sleep late on Sunday, and Louis because he had a personality clash with every single person in the church. Despite ten years of Sunday school, the permanent escape from all further responsibility turned out to cost him no more than saying nope, I don’t buy it. It was the final proof that the Church’s authority could simply not be compared with the school district’s.

The horse farms now behind him, he was walking between swampy fields and dense black loaves of bramble. Abandoned among dead rushes, looking severe and prophetic, stood an entirely rusted bailer; as if they’d just picked the last flesh off its skeleton, two sea gulls wheeled away from it. Louis watched them until their wings dissolved in the whiteness and their bodies dwindled to the status of floaters in his vision.

The road to the beach seemed to rise and vaporize. It stretched out so long and straight that he started jogging, working the stiffness out of his legs, running faster. Soon, as he heard his breathing grow heavy, and as he watched the cordgrass and rockweed of the marshes bob up and down with the motion of his head, it began to seem as if he were watching a scene from a movie, a scene of a psychopath closing in on a girl in underthings, where the killer’s point of view is rendered with a moving handheld camera and heavy bronchial action on the sound track. This sensation became so powerful and disturbing and his breathing filled his ears so much that by and by, to reclaim himself, he began to chant aloud: “Ho! Ho! Hey! Me! Here! Here! Ho!” This did the trick, but something else must have been happening as he ran down this road, because when he passed a guardhouse and abruptly drew up and slowed to a walking pace, he felt as if he’d run not only out of the marshes but clear out of Sunday as well, ending up in the dunes of some eighth, nameless day of the week which he was the only person in the world to know about.

A siren was wailing in his head. The sky (if sky was the word for a thing commencing directly before his eyes) was still the same uniform white, but now it seemed as if the sun were hovering right beyond the threshold of visibility, an arrow’s flight away and single-serving-sized, and as if, when the mists blew off, the proximate borders of a miniature world would likewise be revealed, an unthreatening brook-like void now lapping behind him in the direction he’d come from, the direction of Sunday and his mother and her wealth.

He entered a parking lot. Its perimeter was guarded by a detachment of green barrels stenciled with a single word: PLEASE. Clumps of beach grass to the seaward side were suspended in the air, the supporting dunes invisible. Through his feet he thought he could feel the impact of waves, the faint shudder. The siren left his head and localized itself in a lone, clog-like Le Baron parked at the far end of the lot. Its theft alarm was ringing. Then the ringing stopped, but it had stretched something inside Louis’s head, some muscle-like apparatus that continued to throb after the sound was withdrawn from it.

He was still trying to figure out what kind of place he was in when a black animal came charging up from behind a trash barrel. It was a retriever, fully grown. She skidded past him and paused in a playful attitude, head lower than her tail. Then she jumped on him. He removed her paws from his chest but it was like dealing with a rubber ball, the paws bouncing back into his hands as soon as they’d hit the ground. One of her tags listed a 508 number and the name jackie. There was no owner in sight. She followed him companionably up a wooden walkway and onto the sand, sniffing his footprints as they formed.

The beach was rain-soaked and unpeopled. Brown waves were stopping in their tracks, each of them like a failed quarterback sneak, the opposing forces meshing and falling to little purpose. Well south of the parking lot, at a point where the beach widened and a creek carried iron-rich mud out from behind the dunes, the dog suddenly took off running. She turned her head hard to one side as though she wanted to look back at Louis but also did not want to slow down, and then without showing even this much regret she ran harder, far, far up the beach, and disappeared.

He felt a stab of real loneliness then. He sat down on a rock and propped his chin on one hand. The sea drew breath like a sick person; time stretched long between the impact of one wave and the reassurance of the next. The breakers were dark and rotten with suspended sand and organic matter. All Louis could see in the direction in which the dog had run was sand, water, mist.

Though he’d laughed, it hadn’t really surprised him to hear that Eileen had already tried to tap their mother’s new resources. Very early in her life Eileen had acquired the ability to beg from Melanie and live with herself afterward. In the years of their common adolescence, Louis would often pass her on the stairs and see her folding up one or more twenties, and then in the dining room he’d find further evidence of a transaction, the maternal purse occupying a new place on the table and its owner visibly composing herself, a message for him in her eyes: The wallet has been put away now, so don’t you be asking me, too. Which was interesting, because he never did ask, not even when he had a need more compelling than Eileen’s need for another lightweight Benetton item or another concert ticket. He never asked because it somehow always seemed that Eileen had beaten him to it. And this must not have been a matter of timing, since whenever it did occur to him to ask, he always felt he had to hold off for a while because Eileen had asked so recently, and while he held off she would go and ask again and receive again. It was clear that if she really had beaten Louis to their mother’s money, she’d done it long ago, once and for all.

The day was bound to come when they met in the hall and did not pass in silence. It came the same summer that Eileen put the car in the lake. Louis had returned from mowing grass, and in the hall upstairs he saw her with the usual twenties in her hand, twenties folded into quarters and held with the nonchalance of a victorious dog walking from a fray with a disputed scrap of pot roast in its teeth. Long-compounded resentment and the ugliness of the fingers clasping the twenties made Louis say, “How much do you have there?” She said, “How much do I have where?” He said, “In your hand. Maybe you’d like to give me twenty of that.” She stared at him as though he’d suggested she take her shirt off. “No way! Go ask for yourself. I asked for this for me.” He said, “Yeah, well, you just asked, so what am I supposed to do?” She said, “I asked for this for me. You can go ask for yourself.” And he said: “I don’t feel like asking. I like to earn my money.”

It was as if she’d known all her life that this moment would come. Her face boiled and she threw the poisoned bills at his feet and slammed the door of her room behind her. Later, from his own room, Louis heard his mother say, “Eileen? Eileen, honey, you dropped your money out here.”

In truth, Melanie might have preferred to be more evenhanded, especially if it hadn’t involved increased outlays. Certainly she took Eileen’s requests as opportunities to upbraid her for her selfishness and to make an example of Louis and his independent spirit. But with one of her children making no demands at all, it became not only financially feasible but personally more convenient just to give the other child everything she wanted. Eileen could be supernaturally silent and evil when something had been denied her. She sat at the dinner table and stared at Melanie’s clothes and her jewelry so long and so hard that she began to poison the simplest of her mother’s pleasures. She would not relent until money or its equivalent in goods was offered. It was joyless, this conspiracy between mother and daughter, but it worked. The end of the conspiracy was to keep the money unpoisoned, and to achieve this end only Louis had to be tiptoed around, since his father could satisfy his few personal wants through direct withdrawals and otherwise left everything to Melanie. Only Louis — odd, grumpy Louis — had the power to poison money. The others’ comfort depended on his restraint. And he exercised this restraint, and deliberately let Eileen be spoiled, and only once, when he confronted her in the upstairs hall, was there any hint of all the poison pooling up inside him.

Eileen went to Bennington College. It was the best school she’d gotten into and was the choice of Judd, her North Shore boyfriend. It was also the most expensive undergraduate institution in the country. She and Judd had broken up before they arrived for orientation.

Two years later Louis went off to Rice. Rice was cheap and had offered him a good aid package. He worked seventeen hours a week behind the circulation desk in the library, which had the strange effect of making his face widely recognized on campus. He also played poker avidly and kept records in a notebook; by the end of his junior year his three-year average weekly earnings were a very respectable $0.384. He was still accumulating debt, though, and so when an opportunity arose to cut expenses drastically during his senior year, he seized it first and questioned the wisdom of this only later, when his troubles had already begun.

His father had put him in touch with an old grad-school acquaintance of his, a man named Jerry Bowles who taught at Rice and lived with his wife in a house a few blocks west of campus, on Dryden Street, south of Shakespeare, north of Swift. Mr. Bowles had developed a heart condition and was looking for a student to do heavy yard work in the spring and fall in exchange for room and board. Louis appeared to be ideally suited for the job. When he returned to Houston in late August, the Bowleses picked him up at the airport.

During their interview with him the previous spring the Bowleses had been brisk and businesslike, but now that Louis had arrived, like a toy from a catalogue, they were like children scrambling to unwrap him and see if he worked the way they’d hoped he would. They had a toy of their own making, a daughter, an only child, but she was away at school and apparently no longer much fun to play with. Louis was their new enthusiasm. Over dinner the first night they kept editing each other:

“MaryAnn is more than happy to make lunch for you—”

“Jerry, there is no question of me not making lunch, we did offer him full—”

“Do you have some kind of tupperware container that you could—”

“Louis, I am always in the house. I am always in the house, so whenever you want to come home, it makes absolutely no difference—”

“We may be a trifle more particular about dinner—”

“Jerry, why, Jerry, why do you—”

Louis, between them at the table, ate his pork chop and minded his own business the way he used to on the El in Chicago, when a maniac had taken the floor. He’d made a mistake, he could see that. He’d stumbled into the wrong car. But he wasn’t riding for pleasure, he was riding to save money.

Mr. Bowles had a trim white beard and a pipe that he often chewed on and still sometimes smoked. When he wasn’t teaching linguistics, he patrolled his property for weeds and brown branches and crooked flagstones, for dripping faucets, squeaky floorboards, sticky doors, torn screens and dirty windows. His hammers and saws and clippers hung on pegboards with each tool outlined in black magic marker. He didn’t seem to have any friends or hobbies. He liked to explain to Louis how things were done in his house. He rationalized in detail every aspect of his wife’s cooking, relating how she had come to steam vegetables instead of boiling them, how a creamier mashed potato was achieved, and how, over the years, with his own input, she had reached the decision not to serve meat more than twice a day. He outlined ergonomic methods of stacking dishes and reading a newspaper. A recurrent theme was their water softener and its manifold virtues. Louis listened to these discourses with a compassion bordering on horror.

“Look at the look he’s giving you,” MaryAnn said. “Jerry. Look at the way Louis is looking at you.”

“Is something wrong?” asked a potentially miffed Mr. Bowles.

“Maybe he’s heard enough for now about soft water,” said MaryAnn.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said, shaking his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I was thinking about — something else.”

MaryAnn twinkled. “Like maybe some blueberry pie à la mode?”

MaryAnn was younger than her husband. She wore shawls and sandals and floral print dresses cut low to highlight her large and blue-veined bosom. She could often be found, silent, silent, in the corner of the gleaming laundry room where she ironed shirts and pillowcases and underpants. The house was full of places where she sat and rested. She kept books near all these places and could sometimes be seen setting one aside (Sigrid Undset, Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence), but the bookmarks never seemed to advance. The lunches she packed for Louis were heartbreaking: sandwiches on stone-ground wheat bread, carrot sticks, watermelon pickles, Bartlett pears, slabs of homemade yellow cake. The lunches he’d made himself in Evanston generally consisted of baloney on white bread, a banana, Twinkies when in stock, and a package of Del-Mark potato chips. In his entire life he’d never seen Del-Mark potato chips anywhere but in his mother’s kitchen.

He was tactful enough to wait four whole days before telling MaryAnn that he didn’t plan to be eating his dinners on Dryden Street. He said it would be best if he packed both lunch and dinner in a bag to take to campus.

MaryAnn had clearly been expecting this. “I’ll pack them,” she said sadly. “Although I can’t really feed you very well from a paper bag.”

It wasn’t, Louis said, that he wouldn’t enjoy eating dinner at home. But he had his senior thesis and his duties as station manager at KTRU to consider.

“Well,” said MaryAnn. “Maybe on Sundays you’ll have dinner here with us? And any other day you feel like it.”

This would not be the last time that he reviewed the logic: (1) he needed to be polite because (2) he was getting a good deal here and (3) thereby avoiding debt. “Sundays, sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

It had been fifteen years since anyone had regularly made breakfast for him, and he had never in his life seen anything like the breakfasts MaryAnn made. He got fresh biscuits, fresh oat-bran muffins, fresh corn muffins, slab bacon. He got berry pancakes, veal-and-fennel sausages, french toast and cheese souffles and steak and eggs. He got eggs scrambled with chives and sour cream, eggs Benedict, whole-grain hot cereals with cream and brown sugar, broiled grapefruit, homemade cinnamon-raisin bread, winter peaches topped with vanilla ice cream, honeydew quarters with strawberries in their hollows. After she had served the food, MaryAnn sat down and quietly drank coffee, showing him her profile, her jutting breasts. The terms of the moral problem were vivid to him each time he came to the table: It would be better not to accept this food. But he was hungry and the food looked very good. He continued to eat the breakfasts even when his pity for MaryAnn began to give way to something closer to alarm. It was a bad moment when he discovered that she’d been darning his socks. It was an even worse moment when a DJ at KTRU opened Louis’s sack dinner and found the tupperware pie-slice container which he’d repeatedly declined to carry, and a note from MaryAnn that read: Maybe you can buy some ice cream for the pie?

One Friday night in January he came home at midnight with a head full of tequila and found MaryAnn on her knees in the dining room, unpacking her collection of Wedgwood teacups and saucers from the breakfront. “How’s my acolyte?” she said. She thought his eternal white shirt and black pants made him look like an acolyte. She told him to sit down. He did so, his body leaning in the direction he wanted to go: upstairs. She took out piece after piece of china, murmuring that she ought to get rid of it all, sell it, what a stupid lot of cups, she’d had no idea how many there were. Finally she was kneeling in the midst of the entire collection, the tassels of her shawl fanned around her. “Take some,” she said angrily, dumping a cup and saucer on Louis’s lap. “Take a couple, take four. Who on earth would want these? You don’t want those.”

“Sure I do.” Louis was pale and perspiring. “They’re handsome.”

“You know,” she said, “I used to be in love with England. The whole country. I used to think I’d be considered pretty there, or prettiness wouldn’t matter. Like it was some wonderful old minor league I’d shine in.”

“You are pretty,” the tequila said.

MaryAnn shook her head. “When I got my master’s in English I was in New York. I went to work for the Duncan McGriff Agency, it was a big literary agency. I suppose we had some famous clients, but the way we really earned our money was by charging reading fees. I wasn’t a reader. I was the person who took the readers’ reports on manuscripts and turned them into personalized letters from Duncan himself. I had a sheet with about twenty different ways to personalize them, to say how he’d read the manuscript while he was sitting at home by his swimming pool where his three dear children were frolicking. Or how he’d read the manuscript on a mountaintop while watching a glorious sunset. This is literally what I had to write. But the sad thing was, no matter how bad a manuscript was, I always had to say that the work showed great promise but was not yet in commercially salable form. And there were various degrees to this, because there were people out there — innocent people out in Nebraska — who would send in their manuscripts again and again, and pay the full fee every time, and we could never say yes, and never say no. Which was also how Duncan was with me, although that’s a different story. I worked there for five years. I was still sitting there in my little chair at my little desk the day the Justice Department came and closed us down for an even worse thing we were doing. And Louis, I was twenty-eight then. It was like I’d been stabbed! It’s funny, twenty-eight still seems an old age to me, like I was never an older maid than I was that year. I couldn’t believe it, I mean, what had happened to those years. But so anyway, I married Jerry, and that’s when I really started to panic, because the feeling didn’t go away. The feeling that I’d missed my chance to have the life I wanted. Everything still eluded me, except now it was worse, because now I was married. It wasn’t so much that Jerry — well, you know him. It wasn’t his fault. I knew what he was like and I married him. It was my fault. And do you know, once you’ve started to think about something, once you’ve gotten it in your head that you have insomnia, it makes it all the harder to fall asleep?”

Louis was drifting in a slow spin towards the center of his empty teacup. MaryAnn gave him a glance full of hurt and worry, as though it were he, not she, whom she felt sorry for. “Well,” she said in a lower voice, “when I saw how nothing changed when I got married, I got it in my head that nothing ever would. I made Jerry hate me and then I said to myself: I have a husband who hates me. Do you see? There’s an aloneness you can catch like a disease and not get rid of. A wrongness — a wrongness you can never fix. And it was the same thing when we adopted Lauren. Like everything else, it was my idea. I wanted to stop the slide, and the one thing I knew was I’d never seen a woman who didn’t love her baby. But Louis—” Tears rushed into her face and voice and then receded. “I didn’t have faith! I didn’t have faith! The whole time we were dealing with the agency, I felt cold and dead inside. I tried to rationalize it. I said to myself, everything will change the instant I get to hold her (or him, we didn’t know). But in my heart, in my heart, all I thought was: Maybe this won’t work either. Maybe I’m the woman who even motherhood won’t change. This is what I felt, in my heart, and I still didn’t stop the process. Even though I was sick to my stomach every time we communicated with the agency. Sick for a week, from guilt and the strain of pretending to feel something I didn’t. And then when she came — well, it was already a bit of a disappointment that she was eight months old. You know, of course I’m the one who gets the eight-month-old baby.”

She pressed her crossed arms into her breasts and rocked a little. Louis dimly wondered what was so wrong with a baby being eight months old, but—

“But it was either that or nothing at all, and you know Jerry and I don’t discuss things, we just blame each other afterward. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that Lauren knew. Even when she was tiny she could feel me doubting myself. She could feel how I didn’t really believe I was her mother. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get us to believe in me. And how could I blame her then for all the things she did to me? For biting me like an animal? For the gutter language? For all the worry and the dread when she wouldn’t come home? How could I feel anything but guilt? Guilt, Louis, was the biggest thing of all. That this was our life, our only life, and this was what I’d done to it. I was not going to get another chance. Do you see?”

She looked up at him beseechingly, leaning forward, seeming to want to pour her breasts out at his feet. She must have forgotten who she was talking to. She must somehow have been thinking that when she looked up at him he would take her in his arms and rescue her. But all she saw was a drunken college boy swallowing a yawn. “Oh God.” She turned away, furious with herself. “Why, why, why do I ever speak?”

After that night, things were more straightforward between them, more like they were between Louis and his own mother, more realistic. MaryAnn didn’t watch him eat his breakfast anymore; having explained herself to him, she could afford to be anywhere in the house. He was part of the family now — family meaning action at a distance, invisible fields that pass through walls. He began to count the weeks until he was free of Dryden Street.

During Easter vacation the Bowleses urged him to bring someone over to dinner to help finish up the rack of arctic caribou a colleague of Mr. Bowles’s had brought them back from Elsemere Island. Louis invited a girl he was friends with, a DJ at KTRU from whom he’d been learning about Wagner and Richard Strauss and with whom, in a mutuality of opportunism, he’d been spending some afternoons in a dormitory bed. MaryAnn seemed to have intuited this circumstance. Over the braised caribou she patronized his friend relentlessly, harping in particular on the beauty of her hair, as if it were understood that lookswise her hair was all she had going for her. Afterward, as he walked her home, the friend said she didn’t think Mrs. Bowles was very nice. “She’s crazy,” Louis said. “They’re both crazy.” Nevertheless, the idea had been planted in his head that this friend wasn’t necessarily worthy of him, and he soon began to patronize her himself and then avoided her entirely.

The next morning he woke up very late with a queasiness he associated with the questionable taste of the caribou. When he stepped into the hall, in his gym shorts and gray T-shirt, it took him a moment to notice the girl standing against one wall of the alcove beyond the stairwell. It was like the moment when you realize there’s a bird inside your house which happens to be still now but could fly into your face at any second. The spot in the alcove where the girl stood was just the kind of meaningless random spot where a bird in its confusion lands, and where Louis himself, in Evanston, could frequently be found. The girl was wearing a tight black tank top and a gray-and-white plaid miniskirt; she had a bimboish cumulus of dark blond hair, long bare legs, green ankle socks, and shiny shoes. Her fists were clenched and her jaw was set. Her chest was heaving with what appeared to be rage. She gave Louis a white-hot look, and his heart jumped as violently as if suddenly wings were flapping along walls and claws and a beak veering past his eyes.

He escaped to the bathroom. He washed his hair in the shower but forgot to wash the rest of himself. He stood naked and stared at the Bowleses’ Water Pik for several minutes and then mechanically began to take another shower. He washed his hair again and again forgot to wash anything else. It was as if he’d suddenly found himself on the brink of a deep, dark pool marked lauren and said What the hell, and let himself fall in.

An hour later, at the bottom of the stairs, he exchanged hellos with another new face, a Texan youth with open, honest features and a military haircut who was reading the paper in the living room.

“Your lunch is on the table, Louis,” MaryAnn said quietly in the kitchen.

Louis stared at her. How could someone so irrelevant exist? Where was Lauren? Was he going to have to eat lunch with Lauren? He pointed vaguely east. “I need to get to the station,” he said.

“You want me to wrap it up for you? We were about to sit down.”

He felt a hand between his shoulder blades, Mr. Bowles propelling him towards the kitchen table. “You’ve got ten minutes, sit down a minute and prime that engine.”

“Aren’t you off the air this week?” said MaryAnn.

Cut in two diagonally, a caribou sandwich on a plate awaited him. The elder Bowleses attacked their own sandwiches with unusual appetite, ignoring the voices in the living room and the heavy footsteps on the stairs, gnawing at their food with tilted heads like starved and nervous animals driven into one corner of the house by a daughter who, with a loose gait and no apparent selfconsciousness, entered the kitchen just as a tough slab of gamey meat slid into the no man’s land between Louis’s sandwich and his mouth.

“Lauren, this is Louis. Louis, our daughter, Lauren.”

“Mumph,” Louis said.

“Hi nice to meet you,” Lauren said in a monotone. She was nothing like the mess or terror that MaryAnn had led him to expect. Her all-season tan, her turquoise earrings, her Mickey Mouse watch and the lazy way she turned one hip out all marked her as a mainstream good-times disaffected Texas college girl. She had smooth skin, a wide mouth, and permanent-looking bruises the color of iodine beneath her eyes. She’d written something in pen on the back of her hand. She told her parents that she and Emmett were driving to the beach at Galveston for the afternoon. Before she left the room she paused to take in Louis fully — his aviator frames, his thinning curls, his gutted sandwich, his searing blush. Her face became simply empty.

“We have a very open relationship with Lauren,” Mr. Bowles explained when she was gone.

“Emmett’s her fiancé,” Mr. Bowles added.

“We didn’t think she was coming down,” Mr. Bowles explained.

“She’s a wayward sprite,” Mr. Bowles said.

“God! Full of energy. Full of life,” Mr. Bowles reflected.

MaryAnn sank her teeth into her last piece of sandwich.

“I hope Emmett doesn’t let her drive,” Mr. Bowles concluded.

When Louis came home that night, the three Bowleses and Emmett were eating ice cream in the dining room. MaryAnn headed silently for the kitchen to get him dinner. “I’ve eaten,” he said, already on the stairs. At the top of them he stopped long enough to hear Lauren say:

“I guess he studies all the time, huh?”

“He’s a good worker,” Mr. Bowles affirmed.

“Gosh, that’s great,” Lauren said.

This was all he heard. Mouth wide open, eyes staring, he shut his door and dropped to the floor and stretched out on it. He didn’t get tired of being there. In his fever he heard Lauren and Emmett go out to a movie and return at twelve. He heard a Hide-A-Bed being opened for Emmett in Mr. Bowles’s study, and then a fever dream of voices, music, footsteps and opening and closing doors that seemed to last all night and involve dozens of people.

The next morning, at the Soundwaves branch on Main, he was rummaging through the Thelonious Monk LPs on station business when he became aware that Lauren Bowles was standing in the next aisle. She had her back to him. She was wearing a man’s shirt and was faintly pushing her head forward to the drum-machine-driven beat of optimistic British pop on the store stereo. She dropped a pair of CDs in their longboxes among jazz artists — b—, and flipped through Coleman, Coltrane, Corea. Then she leaned into the B’s again. Twice she made a short fierce movement with her shoulder, as if out of his sight she were wringing the necks of small animals, and then already she was leaving, glancing at crates of new releases near the cash registers.

Outside, Louis watched her drop to one knee and retie a sneaker between parked cars. Quarry seldom lets a hunter come as close as he came to her then. He was twenty feet behind her when she unbuttoned the lowest button of her shirt and gave birth to the pair of stolen CDs, which fell neatly into her purse. She flipped the flap down over them and crossed the street through traffic.

It was the Saturday before Easter. Everything at Rice was closed. Louis returned to Dryden Street with his purchases and found MaryAnn making toffee, a big soup pot of it that filled the house with a caustic smell of butter and sugar. Up in his room he opened Volume II of Flaubert’s collected letters on his desk. He hadn’t read a word of them when, some fifteen minutes later, the door behind him opened and closed.

Lauren was standing with one hand lingering on the doorknob, the lowest button of her shirt still unbuttoned, her eyes sweeping the room with a planning kind of thoughtfulness. After a moment she sat down on his desk and, shifting laterally, lowered herself onto Flaubert. The book’s spine broke audibly. “It’s Mister Dean’s List,” she said. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” For a moment she monitored Louis closely for a reaction.

“Where’s Emmett?” he said.

She leaned back on outstretched arms and knocked a jar of pens over. “He’s in Bay City visiting his grandfather. He asked me if I wanted to go, which was like real appealing when they keep talking about how his grandfather’s as yellow as a carrot. He’s got some disease.”

“Jaundice.”

“Wow. You must know everything.”

Louis kept his eyes on hers and hers avoided his.

“See my ring?” She dangled her left hand in his face. “It cost three thousand dollars. It’s a three-quarter-carat diamond. Do you like it?”

“No.”

“You don’t like it? What’s wrong with it?”

“The ugly little prongs here, to begin with.”

“Oh.” She took her hand back and breezily inspected the ring from various unilluminating angles. She had small, even spaces between her teeth. “They are, kind of, aren’t they. You’re pretty observant, I guess.”

Forgetting about the ring, she twisted around to take a book off a shelf, her knees rising for balance. “What’s this book?” She opened a critical study so far that its front and back covers touched and a chunk of pages fell on Louis’s lap. “Oops. Sorry. Hey, it’s French! You read French? Can you say something to me in French?”

“No.”

“Please?” The mockery in her voice had modulated into the tonal flatness of a girl who thinks a guy is being a jerk and who wants him to, like, stop? Please?

“Je ne veux pas parler français avec toi. Je veux commettre crimes avec toi.”

“God,” she said with deep sarcasm. “You’re good!”

The smell of toffee made his eyes and nose burn. His tiredness caught up with him in a rush. He had nothing to say. Lauren raised a leg and hopped lightly off the desk. “Do you like it here?” she asked. “Do you like my parents?”

“I guess you think I do, don’t you.”

She didn’t answer. Her shoulders had gone tense; she was looking at the door; she’d heard something in the hall. She touched Louis’s bed as if she were going to sit on it, but she changed her mind and ran on tiptoe to the door. She sat down on the carpeting and leaned her head against the keyhole, listening.

“Lauren?”

MaryAnn had spoken from halfway up the stairs. Lauren made her face stupid and mouthed her own name.

“Lauren?”

MaryAnn had climbed the remainder of the stairs and was coming up the hall. She stopped outside the door. This was the point at which Lauren closed her eyes and cried out sharply. She repeated it: a physical cry, a cry of pleasant surprise. Then she began to pant, and produce half-moaning coughs of fake transport, and drag her heels across the carpeting. She was glaring at Louis’s bed, and what she was doing with her feet was angry too.

Louis lowered his head over the broken Flaubert and laughed joylessly. MaryAnn was descending the stairs again. Lauren stood up and smiled cruelly at the floor, as if she had X-ray vision and could see her mother entering the dining room and slumping into one of the chairs along the wall. Then Louis’s bed attracted her attention. She stepped up onto it and started bouncing. Soon the springs were groaning and the one slightly shorter leg of the bed was tapping on the floor.

“Up — pan — down, up — pan — down,” she said. Her singsong words matched the rhythm of the springs. “In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout. Up — pan — down, up — pan — down. In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout—”

“Stop,” Louis said, more irritated than anything else. “She gets the message already.”

Lauren stopped. “Am I bothering you?”

“You’re fucked up,” he said without looking at her. “You’re really fucked up. And you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”

“But you like me, right?” she asked him from the doorway.

“Yeah, sure. I like you. I like you.”

Her new Eurythmies album was playing on her father’s audiophile-quality stereo when Louis slipped out and down the stairs and out the front door into air that didn’t smell like toffee. When he returned in the evening, from a long walk nowhere, he circled the house twice and didn’t see any sign of youth. Inside, Mr. Bowles told him that Lauren and Emmett had driven back to Beaumont to be with Emmett’s family for Easter Sunday. It was a full week before MaryAnn would speak to him again.

The retriever had come back. Louis, cold and stiff, watched her run arcs across the sand in front of him, nimble tangents along the retreating and advancing foam lines. He could hear voices from the direction of the parking lot. After a while the white air released three young or youngish figures who were fanned out on the beach and seemed to be combing it methodically. The one who passed right in front of him was a tall Oriental male in a down jacket and loose white yachting pants. He glanced gloomily at Louis, said, “Hey,” and scuffed on by, gouging divots in the sand out of disgust or some vandalistic impulse.

The person closest to the water was having a problem with the dog. He was a bearded Caucasian whose glasses were held on with a black elastic band. Jackie was snapping at his raised elbows. “Go! Go! Get away!” he commanded as she barked and tried to corner him between a pair of broken waves scissoring up onto the sand from two directions. He gave the air a vicious warning kick, and she retreated. Meanwhile the third person, a female with short black hair, had run on far ahead, her windbreaker and jeans fading into the whiteness. This was the person who, when the group returned in tighter formation a few minutes later, said, “I’m going to go ask this guy,” in a voice not low enough to escape Louis’s hearing. She came up the sand towards him. She had a small, pleasant face, with a short nose and pretty brown eyes. Her expression was fixed in an intense, frosty smileyness. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “We were wondering if you’d been here for a while.”

The bearded Caucasian drew up behind her shoulder, and the thought went through Louis’s head that these people were plainclothes cops; they seemed so purposeful.

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you looking for something?”

Before she could answer, Jackie jumped on the bearded Caucasian, hooking her front claws on his belt and getting dragged along on tiptoe as he tried to pull away. Hands high, he turned reproachfully to Louis.

“Not my dog,” Louis said.

“We’re looking for disturbances in the sand,” the smiley woman said. She held her arm out to one side and snapped her fingers and snapped them again, just casually getting the dog’s attention, her eyes not leaving Louis. She was a few inches shorter than he and at least a few years older; there was some gray in her dark hair. “We thought that if you were here during the earthquake you might have seen something.”

He looked at her blankly.

“We’re from Harvard Geophysics,” the bearded Caucasian explained in a grating, impatient voice. “We felt the earthquake and got a rough location. It was big enough, we thought there might be some surface effects on the sand.”

Louis frowned. “Which earthquake is this?”

The woman glanced at the Caucasian. The dog was licking her fingers. “The earthquake an hour and a half ago,” she said.

“There was an earthquake an hour and a half ago?”

“Yes.”

“Around here?”

“Yes.”

“That you felt, wherever, down in Cambridge?”

“Yes!” Her smile had become one of genuine amusement at his confusion.

“Shit.” Louis scrambled stiffly to his feet. “I missed it! Or but, wait a minute, maybe it was not that big?”

With a loud sigh the bearded Caucasian rolled his eyes and headed back up the beach.

“It wasn’t small,” the woman said. “The magnitude will probably be about 5.3. The city’s not in ruins or anything, but a 5.3, that registers around the world. Our colleague Howard”—she aimed some smileyness at the Oriental, who was skipping stones between waves—“is quite happy about that, as you can see. It means a lot of information.”

Louis thought of the car with its theft alarm ringing.

“And you didn’t feel anything at all?” the woman said.

“Nothing.”

“Too bad.” She smiled strangely, looking him right in the eye. “It was a nice earthquake.”

He looked around, still disoriented. “You expected the beach to be all torn up?”

“We were just curious. Sometimes the sand subsides and cracks. It can also liquefy and boil up to the surface. There was an event here about two hundred fifty years ago that did some serious damage. We were hoping we’d see something like that. But—” She clicked her tongue. “We didn’t.”

By the water’s edge her colleague Howard was playing with the dog, tapping her behind the ears with alternating hands while her head thrashed back and forth. Louis still didn’t believe there had really been an earthquake. “Would a house around here be wrecked?”

“Depends on what you mean by wrecked,” the woman said. “You have a house?”

“It’s my mother’s house. My ex-grandmother’s house, which you couldn’t possibly care less about, but she was the person who died in the earthquake last week.”

“No! Really?” Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”

“Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.

The woman indicated Louis. “This. person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”

“Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”

“Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.

Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.

“What about you?” Louis asked the woman.

She looked away and didn’t answer. Howard slapped the dog on the muzzle and fled, taking crazy evasive action as the dog pursued him. The woman backed away from Louis, her smileyness assuming a leave-taking chill. When she saw that he was following her, a flicker of alarm crossed her face and she began to walk very briskly. He buried his hands in his pockets and matched her footsteps with his own. He had a faint predatory interest in this small-boned female, but mainly he wanted information. “There really was an earthquake?”

“Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”

“How’d you know it was up here?”

“Oh. instruments plus an educated guess.”

“So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”

“Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”

“Are there going to be any more?”

She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”

“Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. I mean, of course it means something; but we don’t know what.”

She spoke as though she wanted to be precise for precision’s sake, not for his. “As a rule,” she said, “if you feel an earthquake around here, it’s happening on a fault that nobody even knew was there, at some peculiar depth, in the context of local stresses that are pretty much anybody’s guess. You have to be a fundamentalist minister to make predictions right now.”

The white hairs she had ran across the grain of the darker hair, lying on top of it rather than blending in. Her skin was cream-colored.

“How old are you?” Louis asked.

A pair of startled and unamused eyes came to rest on him. “I’m thirty, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” he said with a frown, as if a calculation had yielded an unexpected result. He asked her what her name was. “Renée,” she said grimly. “Seitchek. What about you?”

In the parking lot Howard was stepping on the belly of a delighted Jackie and the bearded Caucasian was leaning against a ridiculous automobile, a low-slung late-seventies sedan with a bleached and peeling vinyl roof and rippling white flanks, gray patches of reconstruction, and no hubcaps. It was an AMC Matador. The bearded Caucasian had a long face and red lips. The lenses of his glasses were shaped like TV screens, and the cuffs of his jeans were tucked into the tops of brown work boots. Simply because she had stopped by his side, the half-full glass of Renée’s attractiveness became half-empty.

The Matador apparently belonged to Howard. “You need a ride someplace?” he said to Louis.

“Sure, maybe to my house.”

“If I were you,” the bearded Caucasian said, “I’d go back right away and make sure everything’s OK.”

Renée pointed at Louis. “That’s what he’s doing, Terry. He’s going right back.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Renée looked away and made a face. Howard unlocked the car, and Louis and Terry got in the back seat, sinking ankle-deep into pizza cartons, Coke cans, and sportswear. The car radio came on with the engine. It was playing a Red Sox game.

“Where’s the dog?” Renée said.

Howard shrugged and put the car in reverse.

“Howard, wait, you’re going to run over it.”

They peered out their respective windows, trying to locate the dog. Louis took it upon himself to get out and look behind the car, the exhaust pipe of which was putting out blue-black clouds of the foulest smoke he’d ever smelled a car produce. It coated his respiratory tract like some poison sugar. He got back in the car, reporting no dog.

“This is Louis, incidentally,” Renée explained to Terry from the front seat. “Louis, this is Terry Snall and Howard Chun.”

“You’re all seismologists,” Louis said.

Terry shook his head. “Renée and Howard are the seismologists. They’re real high-powered.” There seemed to be a back-handed message here, Terry either not really believing the other two to be high-powered or else implying that to be high-powered was not the same as to be a worthwhile person. “Renée told me your grandmother died in last week’s earthquake,” he said. “That’s awful.”

“She was old.”

“Howard and Renée thought it was a nothing earthquake. They were saying it was no good. They wanted it to be bigger. That’s how seismologists think. I think it’s terrible about your grandmother.”

“Yeah, we don’t, Terry. We’re glad she died.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What do you think he is saying, Howard?”

Howard turned the steering wheel obliviously, the car chugging and rumbling like a ferry boat. Louis looked out the back window, expecting to see the dog, but the lot the trash barrels guarded was completely empty now.

. Two balls and two strikes, the baseball announcer said.

“Two balls and one strike,” Renée said.

. The two-two pitch.

“The two-one pitch,” Renée said.

Ball three, three and two. Roger had him oh and two and now he’s gone to a full count.

“One strike, airbrain. Three balls and one strike.”

. Scoreboard has it as three balls and one strike.

. Bob, the color man said, I think it is three and one.

Renée turned off the radio in disgust, and Terry remarked, ostensibly to Louis: “Nothing’s ever quite good enough for Renée.”

In the front seat Renée turned to Howard and made a gesture of utter bafflement.

“I wonder if they felt the earthquake at the ballpark,” Terry said.

“Yeah, I wonder,” Renée said. “They’re playing in Minnesota.”

“Left at the sign,” Louis told Howard. He hardly recognized the road they were on as the one down which he’d jogged.

“Where you wanna go next?” Howard asked generally. “Try Plum Island?”

“We better head back,” Terry said.

“What a drag,” Renée said.

“No death and destruction,” Terry said.

“No sand blows is all I meant. Although it’s true,” she said to Louis, “that we feel some ambivalence about destructive earthquakes. They’re like cadavers, full of information.”

Her articulateness was getting on Louis’s nerves. He pointed out the stone Kernaghan gate, and Howard hardly slowed the car as he started to turn. Then he slammed on the brakes and wheeled hard to the right, the car skidding almost sideways back onto the road. A black Mercedes swung out of the gate and swerved around them and sped off towards Ipswich. It was driven by a man Louis recognized as Mr. Aldren. Very belatedly, Howard applied the horn.

“See if you can kill me,” Renée said, pressing with one hand on the windshield and sliding back on the seat cushion she’d been thrown from.

A strange and new and not entirely unpleasant sensation came over Louis as they drove up the hill and he saw, as these students were seeing, the money the estate represented. It was a sensation of exposure but of satisfaction too. Money: it says: I’m not nobody. The awed silence in the car held until the house and its party hat came into view and Renée laughed. “Oh my God.”

“You ought to come inside,” Louis said on a wealthy man’s impulse. “Have some food, see some damage.”

Terry was quick to shake his head. “No thanks.”

“No, no,” Louis insisted. “Come in.” He was thinking how unwelcome his mother would find these visitors. “I mean, if you’re at all curious.”

“Oh, we’re curious,” Renée said. “Aren’t we, Howard? It’s our business to be curious.”

“I just hope no one’s hurt,” Terry said.

Not until Louis had opened the door and ushered everyone inside did he realize how little he’d believed there’d been an earthquake. And what he felt most strongly, as he stopped in the front hall, was that he was seeing the work of an angry hand. The minister who’d said that God was angry with the Commonwealth; the Haitian who’d believed there was an angry spirit in the house: he saw what they were getting at, for a force had entered the house while he was away and had attacked it, pulling a piece of plaster from the dining-room ceiling and flinging it onto the table, where water from broken vases had soaked the plaster brown. The force had thrown open the doors of the breakfront, toppled anything more upright than horizontal and scattered china polyhedra across the floor. It had yanked on paintings in the living room, trashed the bar and opened cracks across the walls and ceiling. The room smelled like a frat house on a Sunday morning.

“Do you really want us here?” Renée asked Louis.

“Of course.” He had his duties as a host to consider. “Let me show you the kitchen.”

Howard stood on one foot and leaned to look into the living room, his other leg hovering in the front hall for balance. Terry, very ill at ease, stuck close to Renée, who said quietly, “You see what living on the epicenter does.”

There was less evident damage in the kitchen: some broken jars, some paint chips and plaster on the floor. Louis’s father, standing by the sink, was delighted to meet the three students. He shook their hands and asked them to repeat their names.

“Where’s Mom?” Louis asked.

“You didn’t see her? She’s taking pictures for Prudential. I recommend you don’t try to clean anything up before she’s done. In fact, Lou,” Bob added in an undertone, “I don’t think she was even conscious of doing it, but I found her helping some stuff off the shelves in the living room. Ugly things, you know.”

“Of course,” Louis said. “Good idea.”

“But what a day!” his father continued in a louder voice. “What a day! You all felt it, right?” He addressed the four of them and all but Louis nodded. “I was in the back room, I thought it was the end of the WORLD. I clocked twelve seconds of strong shaking on my watch.” He pointed at his watch. “When it started, I felt the whole house tense, like it had got wind of something.” His hands flew and twisted in the air like wheeling pigeons. “Then I heard this booming, it felt like a freight train going by outside the windows. This feeling of weight, tremendous weight. I could hear all sorts of little things falling down inside the walls, and then while I sat there looking — in all modesty, I wasn’t the least bit afraid, I mean because it felt so natural, so inevitable — I sat there and I saw a window just shatter. And just when I thought it was over, it all intensified, wonderful, wonderful, this final climax — like she was coming! Like the whole earth was coming!”

Bob Holland looked at the faces around him. The three students were listening to him seriously. Louis was like a white statue staring at the floor.

“I guess you people must know,” Bob continued, “that there’s a whole history of earthquakes in New England. Were you aware that the Native Americans thought they caused epidemics? That made a lot of sense to me today, that idea of disease in the earth. They were scientists too, you know. Scientists in a very profound and different way. You want to hear about superstition, let me tell you there was a woman in these parts in 1755, her name was Elizabeth Burbage. Minister’s daughter, a spinster. The Godfearing citizens of Marblehead — he-he! Marblehead! — tried her as a witch and drove her out of town because three neighbors claimed she’d had foreknowledge of the great Cambridge earthquake of November 18. Sixty-three years after the Salem trials! Regarding an act of God! Marblehead! Wonderful!”

Louis was too mortified to keep track of people during the next few minutes. He opened the refrigerator and persuaded Renée and Howard to accept apples. His father began to repeat his story, and just to get him out of sight Louis followed him back to the room where his adventure had occurred. Here Bob reconstructed the twelve seconds of shaking second by second, insight by insight. He was as high as he ever got. The shattering windowpane in particular had seemed to him a quintessential moment, encapsulating the entire story of man and nature.

When Louis finally broke away, he found that Terry and Howard had gone outside, Terry to sit in the back seat of the car and Howard to sit on the hood, eating his apple smackingly. Renée? Howard shrugged. Still inside.

Louis found her in the living room, talking to his mother. She gave him her now familiar smiley smile, and his mother, who wore a camera on a strap, conveyed her now equally familiar unwillingness to be disturbed. “Maybe you can excuse us for a minute, Louis.”

He executed an ostentatious about-face and went and sat down halfway up the stairs. His mother and Renée spoke for nearly five more minutes. All he caught was the cadences — long hushed utterances from his mother, briefer and brighter repetitious noises from Renée. When the latter finally appeared in the front hall, she looked up the stairs. Louis was hunched and motionless, like a spider waiting for a fly to hit his web. “I guess we’re going now,” she said. “Thanks for having us in.”

She turned to leave, and Louis was down the stairs in a flash, homing in on the entangled fly. He put his hand on her arm and held it. “What did you just talk about with my mother?”

Renée’s eyes moved from the hand on her arm to the person it belonged to. She didn’t look happy about this hand.

“She’s worried about the earthquakes,” she said. “I told her what I know.”

“I’m going to call you.”

She gave him a ghost of a shrug. “OK.”

When he came inside, having seen the great fuming car off down the drive, his mother was photographing the dining room. She briefly lowered the camera from her face. “That Renée Seitchek,” she said. “Is an extremely impressive young woman.” She focused the camera on the ceiling and pressed a button, and for a moment the room went white.

4

Louis’s job at WSNE had come to him by way of a Rice friend of his, a woman named Beryl Slidowsky who’d had a popular show on KTRU playing music like the Dead Kennedys and Jane’s Addiction. In February, at a point when the résumés and demo tapes he’d been sending to stations in a dozen northern cities had netted him all of two responses, both flatly negative, Louis called Beryl and asked about the radio scene in Boston. She had been at WSNE for about three months; it so happened that she was about to quit. The owner, she hastened to say, was great, but the person who managed the station was literally giving her an ulcer. She was happy to put in a good word for Louis, however, if he wanted. Wasn’t he sort of, like, generally fairly tolerant? Hadn’t he survived an entire year with those ghastly Bowleses?

The cause of Beryl’s peptic distress turned out to be a female in her late thirties named Libby Quinn. Libby had come aboard as a receptionist eighteen years earlier, when the station was still located in Burlington, and although she’d never even finished high school she had made herself indispensable to WSNE. She did all the programming and much of the administration, wrote and recorded spots for local non-agency advertisers, and, with Alec Bressler, lined up guests for the talk shows. She had rosy Irish cheeks and dark blond hair that she wore in a braid or a bun. She favored the English Country look — heather-colored skirts and cardigans, knee socks, lace-up shoes — and was seldom seen without a mug of herbal tea. She seemed utterly innocuous to Louis.

At the beginning of his second week of work, Libby appeared at the door of his cubicle and beckoned to him with a single index finger. “Come to my office?”

He followed her up the corridor. In her office there were multiple photos of two blondes in their late teens; they were awfully old to be her daughters, but they looked just like her.

She handed Louis a dog-eared stack of printouts. “There’s an uncollected ninety-five thousand here. It’s only people who don’t do business with us anymore. How would you feel about trying to collect some of it?”

“Love to.”

“I’d do it myself, but it’s really more of a man’s job.”

“Oh.”

“It’s easy. You just call them up and say, ‘You owe us money, pay it.’ Will you do that for me?”

He took the printouts, and Libby smiled. “Thanks, Louis. One other thing, if you don’t mind — I’d like this to be our secret. Just you and me. All right?”

In radio, especially in a tough market like Boston, there is no such thing as an exciting or rewarding entry-level job. Even at a place like WSNE, Louis knew he’d have to do shit work for several years before he could hope to get any meaningful air time, and so he was grateful to Libby for asking him to do collections. The work was more fun by far than anything he’d done at KILT in Houston. It allowed him to be as obnoxious as he dared. He devoted every spare minute to it.

A few days after Easter, Alec Bressler dropped into his cubicle while he was generating threatening letters on his printer. The station owner frowned at the output through his generic eyeglasses. “What’s this?”

“Delinquent accounts,” Louis said.

Alec’s curiosity deepened into concern. “You’re trying to collect?”

“Trying, yes.”

“You’re not putting—pressure on them?”

“Actually, yes, I am.”

“Oh, don’t do that.”

“Libby’s orders.”

“You mustn’t do that.”

“I tried to keep it from you.”

Just then Libby herself passed by the cubicle. Alec arrested her. “Louis tells me he’s doing collections using pressure. I thought we didn’t do this.”

Libby lowered her chin contritely. “I’m sorry, Alec.”

“I thought we didn’t do this. Really, am I wrong?”

“No, of course, you’re right.” She gave Louis a conspirator’s wink. “We’ll have to stop.”

“If I can interject something,” Louis said. “It’s netted us like forty-five hundred dollars in the last ten days.”

“You men discuss it,” Libby said. “I’m on the air in ninety seconds.”

“What’s this? Where’s Bud?”

“Bud has a little problem with his paycheck, Alec, if you’ll excuse me.”

“A little problem? What? What?” Alec followed her into the hall. “What problem? What problem?” The studio door at the far end of the corridor was heard closing. Alec pushed all his fingers into his hair, rapidly achieving frenzy. “I pay this woman! And she won’t tell me what problem!”

He continued to stare down the empty corridor. Louis watched him locate and make sooty and finally ignite a Benson & Hedges entirely by feel. “So, yes,” he went on, capturing wayward pennants of smoke with deft, sharp inhalations, “you don’t do this with the pressure anymore. Why burn the bridges, eh? Put things away. Did you grade contest entries? Inez has hundreds. Think of it — hundreds!”

In Somerville, meanwhile, it was springtime. In one sunny day, while no one was looking, fully grown grass had appeared all over the seven hills, shaggy patches of it suddenly occupying every lawn and traffic island. It was like some garish chlorophyll-colored trash that had been dumped on top of the town’s more indigenous ground cover, which, around the time the last snow melted, reached its peak of richness and variety. As always, there were black leaves, cigarette butts, and dog logs. But on any block-long stretch of parking strip even the casual hiker could also expect to spot fabric-softener squares; snow-emergency cinders; Christmas pine needles and tinsel; solo mittens; bluish glass dice from vandalized car windows; compacted flyers from Johnny’s Foodmaster and the Assembly Square Mall; marvelously large wads of gum; non-returnable wine-cooler and premixed-cocktail bottles; sheets of gray ruled paper on which were copied crudely in pencil simple sentences containing backwards P’s and h’s; rotten Kleenexes resembling cottage cheese; rubber blades and choked filters; exhausted lighters; foody leakages from trash bags torn in transfer to garbage trucks, orange peels and tuna cans and ketchup-bottle lids set down on the ground by dwindling snowbanks; and maybe, if the hiker was lucky, some of Somerville’s more singular specimens as well, such as the magnificent wall unit that for many months had been lying face down on an island in the Alewife Brook Parkway, or the supply of Monopoly money that was spreading up side streets from its release point on College Avenue — yellow tens, blue fifties. This was the kind of congenial and ever-changing profusion of objects which Nature, “the great litterer,” had once again trashed up with stunted weeds and plasticky-looking daffodils and finally, in a moment when people’s backs were turned, a thousand cells of alien green grass. No foreign power could have been more sly and zealous than spring in its overnight infiltration of the city. The new plants stood out with a brazenness akin to that of the agent who, when his life is at stake, acts even more native than his native interrogators.

When Louis got home he found his neighbor John Mullins swabbing his car with a large brown bath sponge. The car never seemed to get driven past the end of the driveway, where Mullins washed it. It also never seemed dirty. Fleshy tulips now filled the bed below the porch of the triple-decker the old man lived in; their heavy purple and yellow heads leaned aside at various casual angles, as if specifically avoiding Louis’s eyes.

“Hey there, Louie boy,” Mullins said, leaving the sponge on the windshield and intercepting him. “How are things? You likin’ it here? You likin’ Somerville? What do you think of this weather? I don’t think it’s gonna last. I just listened to the weather, always listen at 5:35. Tell me something. You feel the earthquake there on Sunday?”

Louis had been shaking his head to this question for several days.

“Golly it scared me. You think we’re gonna get any more of these? I hope to God we don’t. I’ve got a little heart condition — a little heart condition. Little heart condition.” Mullins patted himself rapidly on the breast, calling Louis’s attention to the heart in there. “I’m not supposed to get scared like that.” He laughed hollowly, real fear in his eyes. “I tried to get outside and would you believe it I fell down right on my bum. I couldn’t get up! God if I wasn’t scared. Girl upstairs here, the one that sings — nice girl. She told me she didn’t even feel it.”

“If there’s another earthquake,” Louis said, “you should try to stand in a doorway.”

The old man grimaced deafly. “What’s that?”

“I said you should try to stand in an interior doorway, or get under a table. They say it’s the safest place to be.”

“Oh yeah, huh. All right, Louie boy.” Mullins tottered back to his sponge. “Allll right, Louie boy.”

There was an envelope in the mailbox from the law firm of Arger, Kummer & Rudman. It contained two Red Sox tickets and Henry Rudman’s business card. In the rear window of Louis’s room a flowering white bush had appeared and was startlingly ablaze with sunlight, the ecliptic having swung around far to the north since the sun’s last appearance at dinnertime. He made a fried-egg sandwich and watched Hogan’s Heroes. He made another fried-egg sandwich and watched the network news. Midway through this informative half hour, NBC took a trip to Boston and discovered, to its astonishment, that a pair of earthquakes had occurred outside the city. Footage was run of broken plate glass and of supermarket aisles where solitary employees mopped up juice and jelly from fallen bottles. The correspondent related facts that were actually consistent with what Louis had been hearing hourly at WSNE: the Easter earthquake, which had measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had been followed by several small aftershocks, had caused an estimated $12 million damage in three counties and resulted in fourteen injuries. (Almost all the injuries, as Louis had noted in the Globe, were due to panic, a surprising number of people having seriously bruised or cut themselves while fleeing their shaking homes, and one angler on a causeway north of Ipswich having put a fishhook in his eyelid during a dash to solid ground, and one motorist having steered his car into a ditch.) NBC viewers were then treated to a taste of history (“earthquakes are not unheard of in New England”) and an aerial glimpse of the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, followed by reassuring words from a power-company spokesman, an angry statement from a wine merchant (for him, apparently, nature was just another local with no appreciation of fine vintages), and finally a heartwarmingly inarticulate account of the earthquake from an Ipswich teenager, delivered with much incredulous head-shaking: “It started slow. Then bam!” The correspondent earned the right to say his own name in a low and earnest voice by first saying, in a low and earnest voice, that this earthquake “may not have been the last.” There was a brief, medium-distance shot of the NBC anchorman wearing a wry smirk (he was paid $34,000 a week not to yawn during these shots) before the scene changed to an old-time drugstore with an avuncular pharmacist behind the counter. America watched helplessly as the promotional drama unfolded. Not long ago, on late-night TV, Louis had seen this variety of commercial made fun of. The worried consumer returned to the drugstore and, instead of thanking the avuncular pharmacist for his advice, listed the grotesque disorders and hormonal imbalances induced by the recommended preparation, and ended up (a bit predictably maybe?) murdering him with a gun. This hard-hitting NBC satire had been followed by a real ad, for condoms.

After the news there was baseball, which Louis had been watching between nine and eighteen innings of per evening. While the Red Sox piled up an early 8–0 lead, he paged through the Globe, and for the second time in two weeks the paper gave him an uncanny feeling. It might have been a prank birthday issue with familiar names in it. The lead story in the business section was headlined Sweeting-Aldren Shares Take Another Beating. The woes suddenly besetting New England’s second-largest chemical producer were so numerous that a jump was required to page 67. The company’s latest quarterly report, released this morning, showed a sharp decline in profits, as sales remained flat and rising energy prices and a cyclical shortage of several key raw materials increased production costs. In light of this report, investors on Wall Street continued to react highly negatively to the news on Tuesday that Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody might have suffered significant damage in Sunday’s earthquake; the company’s price per share had already fallen by 4.875 to 64.5—the largest two-day point drop in the company’s 48-year history, and the largest two-day percentage drop since August 11, 1972. Sweeting-Aldren press officer Ridgely Holbine emphatically denied that any production lines had been damaged in the earthquake, but speculation continued to be fueled by the discovery late Monday of large quantities of a greenish effluent in a culvert running through a residential development four hundred yards from a Sweeting-Aldren installation. Holbine said the company was investigating the “extremely remote possibility” of a connection between the facility and the effluent; according to one analyst, these remarks were immediately interpreted on Wall Street as a “virtual mea culpa.” Holbine stressed that Sweeting-Aldren was known to have “perhaps the best environmental record of any player in the industry.” He explained that its energy costs were high because of its commitment to “recycling, not dumping, toxic waste,” and noted that as recently as January, Forbes magazine had cited Sweeting-Aldren’s “established track record as the most profitable chem concern in America.” Nevertheless, the price of a share of the company’s stock had yesterday fallen by more than a point in the last thirty minutes of trading on the NYSE. The fear of further damaging earthquake activity north of Boston, and no less important, the specter of lawsuits raised by the discovery of the effluent, were combining to—

Louis looked up at the TV screen to see a baseball sailing into the visitors’ bullpen at Fenway. The Sox lead had been cut in half. In the kitchen, the telephone rang.

It was Eileen. Nearly a week had passed since Louis had left a string of increasingly sarcastic messages on her machine, but she was not apologetic. She just wanted to say that she and Peter were having a big party at Peter’s on the twenty-eighth. “It’s a disaster-theme party” she said. “You have to wear a costume to get in, OK? You have to. And it has to have something to do with disasters. It won’t be any fun if people don’t dress up, so you really have to.”

Louis was looking down at yesterday’s Globe, which he’d dropped on the outgoing stack after relieving it of its comics. Plain as day the headline on page one: Quake Aftermath: Large Chemical Spill in Peabody.

“Just come, all right?” Eileen said. “You can bring people if you want to, but they have to have a costume too. Let me give you the address.”

Louis took the address. “Why do you want me at this party?”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“Oh, definitely maybe. Just I’m not sure why you happened to invite me.”

“’Cause it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of people are coming.”

“Are you saying you enjoy my company?”

“Look, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I have to get off now, OK? So I’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, maybe.”

According to the Globe, the greenish effluent had first been noticed by residents of a Peabody subdivision on Monday morning, eighteen hours after Sunday’s earthquake fourteen miles to the northeast. A four-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister were playing by a swale adjacent to the subdivision and returned home with “a substance resembling Prestone antifreeze” on their clothing. In the course of the afternoon, homeowners observed that the swale, still filled with runoff from recent heavy rains, was turning green. A cloying organic odor, “like magic marker,” was noticed. As of Wednesday evening the odor had largely dissipated. State environmental officials had so far not succeeded in isolating the source of the effluent but were focusing their investigation on a fenced and wooded property owned by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, and an adjacent five-acre wetland drained by the polluted swale. Ridgely Holbine of Sweeting-Aldren repeated his claim that the company had not discharged significant quantities of industrial waste in Peabody for nearly twenty years. He said the property in question housed a milling facility and a number of small holding tanks for “intermediate processes,” none of which showed any signs of earthquake damage. Meanwhile one Peabody resident, Doris Mulcahey, told reporters that her husband and eldest daughter had both died of leukemia within the last seven years, and that she had not been aware until now that the wooded property four hundred yards from her home belonged to Sweeting-Aldren. “I’m not saying they caused it,” Mulcahey said. “But I sure as heck don’t rule it out.”

The ball game ended sadly for Sox fans.

Early the next morning, moments before his alarm would have rung, Louis had his dream again. A door in the Bowleses’ house on Dryden Street had led him back into the room with the red leather chairs, and here he found that in all these days his mother had not gone anywhere. She was still perched on a chair, the hem of her yellow dress still raised almost to her hips. But now there was only one man in the room. Louis recognized him from the painting above the fireplace. The neat, bald skull, the lusting black eyes. Catching sight of Louis, he at once turned away and did something to his pants, adjusted something in front. This was when Louis realized that the entire room was slick with semen, greenish white semen deep enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and he woke up quaking violently. He succeeded in not examining this dream later on, though he did not quite forget it either.

Birds were awakening while he ate his Cheerios. As happened every morning, when he passed by his roommate Toby’s beige furniture ensembles — the big sofa and chairs emerging from the unpeopled night into another day of being stationary, of being big, of weighing a lot and occupying volume — his sense of the unreality of life hit a sharp peak.

The time it took him to drive to work, down the Alewife Brook Parkway and onto Route 2 past the Haiku Palace Chinese Restaurant and the Susse Chalet motel, up the mile-long grade which every day two or three unfit automobiles failed to make, and out through historical suburbs where the strengthening light made the headlights of eastbound cars and semis seem funereal, was the same amount of time his juice and coffee needed to percolate down through kidneys and bladder and send him straight to the men’s room at WSNE. Alec Bressler was shaving at the mirror, his decrepit kit bag balanced on the sink. “You spent the night here again,” Louis observed, peeing.

Alec palpated his blue neck. “Mm — hm!”

At the studio board Louis sat down with a chocolate cruller purchased from Dan Drexel and glanced over the log printout for the six-to-seven slot. Drexel, using his palm to ram a 150-degree arc of doughnut into his mouth, changed places in the booth with the night announcer and read through his copy of the printout. There would be powdered sugar in Drexel’s lumberjack beard until his bathroom break at eight. (To the listener, few radio announcers sound bearded. But many radio announcers are.) Louis loaded Cart 1 with a 30-second Cumberland Farms spot, let it roll at 5:59:30, and cued Drexel. Morning Rush Hour News with a Twist began.

They were in the midst of a Bob Newhart Festival. “We’re playing every comedy recording,” Drexel reminded the audience, “that the Button-Down Mind ever made and WSNE ever purchased. In just one moment we’ll hear what must be an all-time favorite Newhart act, but first a roundup of world news.”

Louis cued up the fourth cut on Side Two of Behind the Button-Down Mind while Davidson Chevy-Geo talked financing.

“You have sugar in your beard,” he told Drexel.

As always, Drexel brushed at the wrong spot. The ad was ending, and he cozied up to the boom mike with a lusting cat’s unconscious simper. “Nineteen sixty-three,” he crooned. “And the Button-Down Mind takes on the surprising world of children’s TV.” On the word “TV” his pointing finger came to rest on Louis, who removed his thumb from the turntable and let it spin.

Four hours later the talk-show announcer Kim Alexander took over the studio board. Outside in the midmoming sun, Louis sat down by a willow tree on part of the grassy expanse that made the Crossroads Office Park a park. The lawn was one of those familiar suburban places where the concrete of the enclosing curbs hasn’t lost its white film of lime yet, and the agreeably nose-curdling smell of junipers hangs heavy, and there’s no litter, not even cigarette filters (or maybe one single piece of artful litter, in the Japanese style), and no one, but no one, ever picnics. Louis didn’t understand these spaces. Why astroturf and plastic trees weren’t used instead.

He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.

It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.

He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.

Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to do that again when his back wasn’t turned, just daring it. But the only disturbance remaining was the marginal instability of his own body, the swaying of legs through which blood was being pumped with less than perfect smoothness (even great mimes and palace guards can’t be statues). The ground itself was still.

Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.

“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very good-looking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or dinner. But breakfast — is a very moral meal!”

“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”

“So? Last time we renewed—”

“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”

“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”

“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”

“So — blackmail! A very moral sing!”

“Face it. He wants a station.”

“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”

“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”

“People love Phyllis Diller!”

“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”

“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”

“Alec, there’s nobody to do the news, besides me.”

“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”

“You know very well what I think of that girl.”

“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”

“What can you sell?”

“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”

“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”

Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking. “Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.

Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”

She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”

“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”

“Yes. You feel it?”

“No. I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.

“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again — is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“They appear weak. Smokers.”

“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”

Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”

“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”

Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.

Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.

“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.

“Uh-huh. So did we.”

“Where was it? How big?”

“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”

“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”

He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.

“The twenty-eighth.”

“Yes.”

“Well — OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”

He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”

“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”

He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.

A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one-and two-and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.

More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.

“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence, and on page one they print the one coherent sentence! I guess they don’t want to offend retarded people by saying is bad to have a retarded President.

“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!

“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people — artists and intellectuals, the good reporters — must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with blackmail the big noose media buy writers and intellectuals. Personally the media don’t give a fuck, Louis, they don’t give a fuck about truth. They’re just businesses that must always be making money, never stop making money and never offend any group."

“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I will not say, ‘I disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically. ”

Though he was paid for only eight hours, Louis seldom left Waltham before six in the evening. He was surprised, one night at the end of the week, to find Libby Quinn sitting on the sofa in the TV room, breathing Alec’s smoke. Usually at this hour Libby was home with her daughters.

“Louis,” Alec said in greeting. “We have special programming tonight. A portrait of the man who—”

“Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” Libby said.

“I was just going to tell Louis—”

Louis ignored him. He was transfixed by the television. It drew him closer. He turned it up loud.

“We’re talking about a building,” the image of dr. renee seitchek said, “that was condemned three years ago by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”

“So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.

“You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”

“Dr. Axelrod at MIT told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”

“They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”

“I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”

As dr. renee seitchek struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.

“I don’t think a woman who terminates a pregnancy needs Philip Stites to tell her the significance of what she’s done.”

“Think again,” Libby murmured. “Think again.”

dr. renee seitchek blinked in the bright lights, her face still filling the screen, while the interviewer asked a final question: “If it’s not OK for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision about abortion, why is it OK to interfere with the church members’ decision to live in the Central Avenue apartment block?”

“Because Philip Stites made that decision for them.”

dr. renee seitchek’s reply had apparently continued from here, but the sound was cut off as the reporter brought viewers back to Central Avenue in Chelsea, where a female member of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ was leaving a bleak yellow-brick apartment complex that had sheets of weather-bleached plywood on its windows.

“The reason I live in this yere building,” the woman said. “Is that I trust in God more than I trust in scientists and engineers. This yere’s a building with NO PROTECTION. The unborn have NO PROTECTION. But if God will protect me here, I’ve got the power to protect the unborn.”

“One scientist I spoke to,” the reporter said, “claimed it was Reverend Stites’s persuasion that made you sign the waiver, rather than your own free will.”

The woman held up a placard reading THANKS MOM I LIFE. “The will that moves me,” she told the camera, “is the same will as moves the Reverend Stites, and that is the will of God.”

“How does it feel to go to bed at night knowing that even a small earthquake could send all these bricks down on top of you?”

“There’s no man in this world that wakes up in the morning but by the grace of our Lord.”

The television’s response to this avowal was a perfume ad. Libby Quinn shifted on the sofa, looking around the room selfconsciously, as if she thought Louis and Alec expected her to justify herself. She stood up suddenly. “I’m a mother, Louis. You know I have two girls in high school. And what that little Harvard girl doesn’t understand is that to a lot of these teenagers, an abortion’s like a trip to the dentist. I know for a fact that there’s no one out there telling kids that what they’re flushing into Boston Harbor is tiny babies.”

“Ah, yeah,” Louis said. “Although these pro-lifers aren’t just trying to educate some teenagers.”

“These pro-lifers,” Libby said pointedly, “think it’s important to take responsibility for your sexual behavior.”

“What do you sink, Louis?” Alec said. Libby might have been a controversial film they’d been watching. “You agree with her? Take your time! Your future at this station may be at stake.”

“Let me ask you this, Louis,” Libby said. “Why do you think the people who hate economic greed always want to be excusing sexual greed? Why do you think that is?”

Alec turned expectantly to Louis, sucking his lozenge of amusement, his eyebrows raised.

“Economic greed hurts other people,” Louis said.

Alec’s eyes followed the ball back into Libby’s court.

“Right,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Sexual greed doesn’t hurt anybody. Unless you happen to consider a fetus a victim.”

It was an exit line; she left the room.

“And what does Vanna have to say to that?” Alec asked, changing channels. “No, no, Vanna stands higher than such concerns.”

Louis was trembling. He didn’t understand what he’d done to make Libby turn against him.

Alec leaned back comfortably on the sofa to soak up Wheel-of-Fortune rays. “Libby,” he said, “is an unhappy person. You forgive her, eh? She raised two girls without a husband. The man was no good. He came back and married her when the older girl was two, then left again. Is a hard life for her, Louis. She made a mistake twice. One time, OK, but twice, is hard to live with.”

“She’s selling you out,” Louis said.

Alec shrugged. “I owe her back pay, she’s ambitious. She should have gone to college, but she had her babies. Is hard for her to see girls have abortions now. You forgive her.”

Louis shook his head. He went outside into the twilit parking lot. “Hey, Libby,” he said. She was getting in her car. “Libby!” he said again, but she had closed the door. He watched her drive away.

It may be that to understand is to forgive; but Louis was tired of understanding. Almost everyone he knew seemed to have good reasons for not being kind and polite to him, and he could see these reasons, and yet it didn’t seem fair that it was always him who had to understand and forgive and never them. It seemed like the world was set up so that the unhappy people who did rotten things — the abused child who became a child abuser, the injured Libby who injured Louis and Alec — could always be forgiven because they couldn’t help what they did, while the unhappy people who still refused to do rotten things got more and more hurt by the other people’s rottenness, until they’d been hurt so many times that they too stopped caring what they did to other people, and there was no way out.

“Why aren’t you speaking to me?” he’d asked MaryAnn Bowles, a week after the previous Easter. She was making pickled beets in a haze of vinegar.

“I’m surprised you have to ask that,” she said.

“Oh, I’ve got a theory. But I wanted to check.”

She stuck a fork into a purple chunk of beet. “Well, Louis,” she said. “I’m not blaming you. But I guess you must know that I am very, very hurt by what’s happened. I am very, very, very hurt.” The sound of her own words made her throat tighten and her face crumple up. “All I can say is this has nothing to do with you. She was only trying to hurt me. And I guess you can see”—her words continued to affect her violently—“that she succeeded very well indeed.”

Louis despised the woman. He loathed her powdered face, her heavy breasts, her naked misery. And the more he loathed her, the more he had the feeling — a caffeinated, weightless feeling — that Lauren really had seduced him on the floor of his bedroom. He had no desire to set the record straight. He became a bad son, subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and party food, crashing in people’s off-campus apartments and returning to Dryden Street only when he needed to sleep twelve hours. The Bowleses raised no objections; they didn’t like him anymore.

After his final exams he moved into a two-room apartment in a poor black neighborhood off Holman Street and started work at KILT-FM, doing the board during drive hours and otherwise punching keys. On the day after Commencement he returned to Dryden Street one final time, to collect his books. It was a trip he’d delayed in the hope of running into Lauren, and he was rewarded by the sight of a white VW Beetle in the driveway, with a U of Texas parking sticker on the windshield.

He went into the silent, airconditioned, sun-filled house. The door to the laundry room was ajar, MaryAnn probably ironing underwear in there. Upstairs he almost passed Lauren’s bedroom by, it seemed so much the way he’d seen it last. But today there was an extra element, a woman in a white sundress sitting cross-legged on the bed and reading. She looked up from her book, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. He braced himself for a blast of mockery, but as soon as Lauren recognized him she dropped her head again, biting her lip and scowling at the book.

“Yeah, surprise surprise,” he said.

The book on her lap was a Bible. She hunched over it determinedly and pretended to read it, evidently hoping he would leave. He remained in the doorway.

“I didn’t think you were still living here,” she murmured. “On my way out right now.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. Lucky you.”

Someone seemed to have pulled the plug on the electrified woman he’d met two months ago. Without makeup and without malice her face looked like an empty page. Her hair was pinned up with a barrette, in the style of a ten-year-old groomed for church. She said, “Is there something you want?”

He stepped inside the room and shut the door. “Can I talk to you?”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“No.”

Her head drooped several inches lower. “I thought you’d be mad at me. I guess you must be a nice person.” She extended her left arm, spreading her fingers as though admiring them. She’d tied a piece of thin white string around her wrist. “You see I gave Emmett his ring back. Emmett’s been thinking about you all the time. I think he wants to kill you.”

Louis looked at her steadily.

“Actually that’s a lie,” she conceded, her eyes still cast down. “But he didn’t seem to think too highly of you. He didn’t think too highly of me either. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. You know what MaryAnn did? She told me she thought I needed counseling. I just told her she was jealous. She acted like she didn’t know what I meant.” Lauren’s lip curled evilly.

“What are you doing this summer?” Louis said.

“I don’t know yet. Staying at home. Trying to be nice.”

“Can I see you?”

She looked up at him with something like terror. “What do you want to see me for?”

“Why does anybody want to see anybody?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I told Emmett I wasn’t going to see anybody. He’s working for his dad in Beaumont.”

“So you’re like engaged but not engaged. Fun arrangement.”

She shook her head. “It’s just I already made him so sick. He’s really a nice person, you know, not as smart as you.”

“Yeah, this is another thing. Where do you get the idea I’m so smart?”

“Well I only spent a whole vacation here at Christmas. I only heard how smart you are a couple hundred times. And you see how well I turned the other cheek.” She paused, appearing to consider her own history. “You know what, though? This semester, I got at least a B in every class. And I went swimming every day and I studied on Saturday night. I was on academic probation my whole sophomore year. It was like I’d go into the classroom and lie for an hour. Lie, lie, lie.” She looked up at Louis again and saw his skepticism; her eyes fell. “So anyway. I’m trying to read the Bible.”

“Congratulations?”

“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”

Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”

“What do you mean?”

“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”

She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”

“Lithium? Valium?”

His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?”

“You’re just very different,” he said.

“I’m the way I want to be. So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”

Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”

He laughed sadly.

“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”

Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.

Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”

He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.

She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.

“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”

She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”

As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”

“When you put it like that?”

“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”

“I only want to if you want to.”

“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”

“Well so I guess that means no.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”

On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.

At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory holiness church, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”

“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A subatomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”

“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I have a dictionary.”

“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”

“I’m sorry I asked. I am very sorry” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What is it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”

“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.

“I don’t understand what the thing is. I don’t understand what it looks like. What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”

“I can help you understand it.”

She sneered. “I bet you can.”

“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”

She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”

“Yeah, but. who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”

“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”

“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”

She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.

“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you anything.”

As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the answer. When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.

One night in late July he met her outside the chemistry lab, which smelled strongly of pickles, and he almost had to run to keep up with her as she marched to her car and yanked the door open. When they got to his apartment she ransacked his impoverished cabinets and opened his bottle of gin.

“You’re upset,” he hazarded from the kitchen doorway.

She burped rippingly and drank a glass of water. “We were supposed to make aspirin today.”

“I remember making aspirin.”

“I bet you do. But the Clown decided to have a little contest.” She wiped her mouth. “We all got certain amounts of chemicals and we were all going to weigh our yields at the end and whoever had the biggest yield would win. Just win, you know, whatever that means. These teachers, Louis, they set things up to be so good for people like you and so shitty for everybody else. The best person wins, and the people in the middle don’t, and the worst person loses. Well, Jorryn and me, we always finish last anyway. But we’re real careful to follow the recipe, even though we already know we’re going to be the worst because that’s what we’re there for. Meanwhile everybody else is bringing their aspirin up on filter paper — it’s this clump, like a potato after you chew it? And it gets weighed, and the Clown writes the names and percentages on his chalkboard, and things get louder and louder. The guys are all roaring, about, you know, a difference of half a percent: WO-HO! WO-HO!” Lauren savagely mocked the guys. “And there comes this point where you’re supposed to cool the stuff down and filter it, and there you have your aspirin. Well, we do this, Louis. We follow the instructions. And what happens is it all goes through the filter paper. There’s nothing there at all. And so then comes the Inquisition, like what did we do Wrong this time? Everybody’s staring at us, they’re standing there while the Clown reads my notebook. And he can’t figure it out! He goes, Did we observe this temperature rise? And we go, Yes! Yes! And did we scratch the flask to make it crystallize? And we go, Yes! Yes! And I’m thinking he’s going to say it’s all right, he’s going to tell us not to feel too bad. I’m feeling pretty bad already, although Jorryn’s standing there with her hand like this, you know, not my problem, man.” Lauren laughed at the thought of Jorryn. “But you know what he did? He got totally pissed off. He said we must have done something wrong. Because you cannot put these three things together and heat them up and cool them down and not, get, aspirin. And Jorryn and me throw our hands up in the air and we’re going, We did! We did! And there’s no aspirin! It just didn’t work this time! But the Clown he’s getting totally worked up and he goes, You’re going to get an F in this lab unless you redo the experiment and show me at least three grams of aspirin. He says he’s going to keep the lab open till midnight if that’s how long it takes us. Well, Jorryn starts shaking her head, like, fuck this shit — and she walks out. But I didn’t even have the heart to leave. I just sat there while everybody was writing up their final reports at the front, I sat there at the lab table all by myself, just sitting there all by myself being punished because I didn’t get any aspirin. And I followed the instructions. And there was NOTHING THERE.”

Lauren, leaning with both hands on Louis’s kitchen card table, began to cry more loudly than he’d known a person could. Fat staves of grief shuddered up through her chest and left her mouth. The voice was her own, voice the way it is before it becomes words: a bath of red sound. Louis put his arms around her and held her head against his shoulder. It fit in his hands. It was as if this were all there was to her, this crying head. He didn’t know why he loved her so much, he only knew he wanted admittance to her grief, to her whole damaged self, as he’d wanted it since the first time he saw her. He kissed her bristly hair and kissed behind her ear. For this liberty, she slapped him so hard that his glasses were bent and the plastic pad cut his nose and bruised the bone.

He stood there for a while trying to straighten the frames.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” she announced when she came back from his bathroom, her fist full of toilet paper. “But you said you weren’t going to do that. It’s not fair of you.”

She blew her nose.

At midnight they were still watching TV in his kitchen. When Lauren finally turned it off there was a delicious moment when he didn’t know what was going to happen next. What happened was she raised a window and said, “It’s cooled off.”

They went for a walk. Somehow a mild, damp Gulf breeze had banished summer to the north, restoring April. It seemed as if it were the breeze, not the hour, that had emptied the streets and sidewalks of everything but skidding leaves. The cars that did pass were less like cars than like waves breaking gently, like gusts of wind; the humidity sucked them back into itself as soon as they went by. In Houston, a city that accommodated nature, every patch of dirt could smell like beach or bayou. Louis loved the dense live oaks, where purple male grackles and tan female grackles sang irresponsible songs and mewed and moaned and laughed. He loved the squirrels, which were like Evanston squirrels wearing fake long ears; it was an insultingly transparent disguise.

In Hermann Park, he and Lauren climbed the man-made hill and circled the man-made lake with a railing around it. They sat down on some miniature railroad tracks running through a meadow. Lauren lit a cigarette, awakening a grackle that began to speak in tongues.

“Louis,” she said. “Do you really love me?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Just answer.”

“Yes, I really do.”

She bowed her head. “Is it that thing I did?”

“No. It’s just the way you are.”

“You mean the way I supposedly am. You think I’m some way that’s like you. But I’m not. I’m stupid.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You go to Rice and get A’s and I go to Austin and get D’s, but I’m not stupid. I’m exactly like you.”

“Yep.”

She shook her head. “’Cause I’m smarter than you are too. I’ve never really loved anybody, so I can’t put a whole lot of weight on love. What if it doesn’t let you see what’s best for me? Emmett loves me too, is one thing, and he doesn’t think I should see you at all. So it’s like love doesn’t necessarily tell the truth. I can’t trust anybody but myself. And the thing is, there are two ways to be.”

She stood up. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a total dipshit even to myself. I want to try real hard to explain this, Louis. Let’s say you had to study for a test, but you said before I study I’ll watch an inning of Cubs.”

He smiled. This was apt.

“Well, there are two ways. You either turn it off after an inning and a half, or you watch the whole game and feel terrible. But say you’re just very unhappy and you really love baseball. That means the two ways are either to watch the whole game, or none of it at all. Because you know you’re so unhappy you’ll watch it all if you watch any. And it’s very hard not to turn it on at all. Because you’re so unhappy, why shouldn’t you at least be allowed to watch baseball? But don’t you know, if you try hard even for five minutes not to watch it, you feel something good in you? And you can imagine, I’d feel really good if I could always say no. But you never can because you’re so unhappy you always end up saying what the hell. Or, I’ll stop watching baseball tomorrow. And the same thing happens the next day? Why can’t I explain this right?”

With rigid fingers she tried to wrench substance out of the air in front of her.

“Because, see, it seems so uncool to give something up. Other people don’t, so why should you? Or the people who do are disgusting and seem like they’ve only given something up because they didn’t like it to begin with. It seems like all the really interesting and attractive people in the world just go on doing whatever they want. It seems like this is how the world works. Plus, remember, it’s so hard to give something up. And that’s why you go all around today and it seems like there aren’t really two ways, there’s only one way. Maybe sometimes you still get little glimmering feelings of what it’s like to be a good person. But the BIG GLOWING THING just doesn’t seem like a real option. I used to do something good because I liked how it felt, but then the rest of me just wanted to use that good feeling as a ticket for getting wasted. It started feeling like feeling clean was just another useful feeling, the same as being drunk, or having money. But you know what? You know what I thought of one day? It was before Christmas, I was with these guys in Austin that I’d met, and I was noticing how instead of not drinking at all that day, like I’d promised myself the night before, I was having some Seagram’s for lunch. And it came to me: it was literally possible not to drink today. Or fuck, or even smoke.”

“Like Nancy Reagan,” Louis said. “Just say no.”

Lauren shook her head. “That’s just bullshit. That makes it sound easy, and it’s the hardest thing in the world. But that’s not the thing I figured out. What I figured out is: you have to have faith. That’s what I’d never understood before. That faith isn’t stupid buddhas, or stupid stained glass, or stupid Psalms. Faith is inside you! It’s white, and thin, it’s this thing—this thing—” She clutched the air. “That the miracle of doing something so impossible. would be so beautiful. would be so beautiful. The reason I can’t describe this, Louis, is because it’s so thin I keep losing sight of it. It’s that there’s no trick to giving up bad things. No method. You can’t use willpower, because not everybody has that, which means that if you do have some of it, you can’t really take credit for it, it’s just luck. The only way to truly give something up is to feel how totally impossible it is, and then hope. To feel how beautiful it would be, how much you could love God—if the miracle happened. But so you can guess how popular I was last semester, which is when— Hey! Hey! Oh shit, Louis, don’t walk away from me. Oh shit. ”

Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. Lauren caught up with Louis in a rush of slapping soles and heavy breaths, stopped, then ran some more because he wouldn’t stop. “Louis, just let me finish—”

“I already get the idea.”

“Oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. People hate you if you try to be good—”

“Yeah, hate, that’s the problem here.”

“I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I thought we could be friends. Louis. I thought we could be friends! And you said I wasn’t going to owe you anything! Why am I so stupid? Why did I do this to you? I shouldn’t have ever called you, I made everything so much worse. I’m so stupid, so stupid.”

“Not half as stupid as me.”

“And but you’re not being very nice either. You’re trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll do something I don’t want to do because I am trying to stop feeling like such shit. Can’t we just decide you were unlucky?”

“Yeah, great.”

“You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. Nobody’s such a mess like I am.” She was crying. “I am such garbage. I am not worth it.”

It did seem unfair that Louis, who wanted nothing more than to stay with her, was the one who had to shut up and walk away; that she was so neutral towards him that even the job of getting rid of him had to be done by him. But as a final act of kindness, and knowing he’d never get any thanks for it, he let her have the last word. He let her say she wasn’t worth it. They walked out of the park and into summer, which was regrouping as suddenly as it had retreated two hours earlier, and again bound together in its humid matrix the million voices of its airconditioners. Lauren got in her car and drove away. In the predawn silence Louis could hear the Beetle’s tweeting engine and the shifting gears for maybe twenty seconds before he lost it, and already in those twenty seconds he had difficulty comprehending that she was doing without him, that she was shifting the gears and working the pedals of a car and a life that didn’t include him; that she didn’t just stop existing when she drove out of sight.

As the days passed and he went to work at KILT and came home to baseball, he was conscious that every hour that passed for him was passing for her too somewhere; and as the days became weeks and he remained just as conscious of how the hours were mounting up, it began to seem more and more incredible that never in all these hundreds of hours, these millions of seconds, did she call him.

October came, November came, and he was still waking up in the morning looking for some loophole in the logic of his self-restraint that could justify his calling her. He wanted her terribly; he’d been good to her; how could she not want him? He felt like there was a rip in the fabric of the universe which it had been his misfortune to blunder through without possibility of return, as though even if he wanted to love somebody else now he wouldn’t be able to; as though love, like electricity, flowed in the direction of diminishing potential, and by coming into contact with Lauren’s deep neutrality he’d grounded himself permanently.

Christmas in Evanston was ridiculous. Eileen thought he was a computer scientist. As soon as he returned to Houston, he made a demo tape and began to send out query letters. This was the only thing he’d been able to think of doing when, among the mail that had accumulated in his absence, he’d found an announcement of a wedding, Jerome and MaryAnn Bowles formally sharing the news that on the Friday after Thanksgiving their daughter Lauren had married Emmett Andrew Osterlitz of Beaumont, and the sender appending a note in blue ink on the back of the card: Merry Christmas! Don’t make yourself a stranger. — MaryAnn B.

To reach Renée Seitchek’s apartment, he had to drive the entire length of Somerville’s east-west axis. In failing light he passed a bank that looked like a mausoleum, a hospital that looked like a bank, an armory that looked like a castle, and a high school that looked like a prison. He also passed the Panaché beauty salon and the Somerville City Hall. The most prominent breed of teenaged girl on the sidewalks had frizzed blond hair, a huge forehead, and a sixteen-inch waist; the other prominent breed was overweight and wore pastel or black knitwear resembling children’s pajamas. Twice Louis was honked at from behind for stopping to allow surprised and suspicious pedestrians to cross in front of him.

With the help of some recent Globes, he had brought himself up to date on the doings and sayings of the Reverend Philip Stites. Stites’s “actions” in Boston were attracting hundreds of concerned citizens from around the country, and to house those citizens who wished to participate in further “actions,” he had acquired (for the sum of $146,001.75) a forty-year-old apartment block in the town of Chelsea, directly north across the water from downtown Boston, on the Wonderland subway line. The building, which Stites immediately christened as world headquarters of his Church of Action in Christ, happened to have been condemned three years earlier, and soon after Stites’s flock had moved in and hung abortion is murder banners from the windows, the Chelsea police paid a visit. Stites claimed to have converted the officers on the spot; this was later disputed. Under murky circumstances, a compromise was reached whereby every church member who entered the building had to sign a three-page waiver to protect the town from lawsuits. (A Globe editorial suggested that the mayor of Chelsea was in fundamental(ist) sympathy with Stites.) The condemned building apparently had almost no lateral stability and was liable to collapse even without the help of an earthquake.

“What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”

A Globe cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.

Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.

“Hi,” Louis said.

She tilted her head. “Listen.”

“What?”

“The wind. Listen.”

Louis didn’t hear any wind at all. A Camaro spewing music approached and pushed its sonic fist into his face and turned a corner. He looked up the parked-up street, at the end of which, above the broken branches of lopsided trees, there was still some turquoise in the sky and a bright star, maybe Venus. Night had already settled on the intervening yards, which were small and filled with plastic toys and more cars and dark piles of things. This part of Somerville seemed both farther from the suburbs and closer to nature than Louis’s neighborhood. The trees were taller here, the houses in worse repair, and the stillness less neighborly and more wary and forbidding.

“Oh, come on,” Renée said to the reluctant wind.

It did come. Louis heard it first at the far end of the street and saw the branches there suddenly buck, and then he heard it glancing off the nearer roofs and whistling on the nearer eaves and aerials, approaching like some specific and discrete messenger or angel. Then it reached him, an invisible hand that spread his collar and set the honeysuckle heaving before the trees took it up and made it general. When it died away it left the street seeming closer to the sky.

“Well. That was it.” Renée stood up and spanked the seat of her dress. “Where’s your costume?”

“It’s in my pocket,” Louis said. He was wearing a loud tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt; from the neck down, he looked Sicilian. “Where’s yours?”

“This is it.”

“You’re in mourning.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Another quantum of wind came whistling down the street and flattened her hair, parting it above her ear. There was something bare about her, something she wasn’t wearing. A purse, Louis thought; but it was more than this. In his car, she pulled slack into her shoulder belt and moved away from him, leaning into the crook between seat and window. She rested her palms on the upholstery to either side of her legs, and it seemed to cost her an effort of will to hold her shoulders back, as if she were fighting the inclination to hunch over and cross her arms across her chest, as if she were in a doctor’s office, sitting naked on the paper-covered table and fighting that inclination. But of course she was fully clothed now. Louis said he’d seen her on TV.

“Oh yeah?” She raised her arm slowly, trying to rest her elbow on top of the bucket seat, but the seat was too high. More slowly yet, she lowered her hand to the cushion again. “Was it awful?”

“You didn’t watch it?”

“I don’t have a TV.”

“What makes you think it was awful?”

“Well, only that this jerk of a reporter started asking me questions about Philip Stites. Which I understand is what they put on the show.”

Her voice, which was strangely bright to begin with, became downright merry at words like “jerk” and “awful.”

“The regular department chairman where I work’s on leave in California, and of the other two seismologists you can talk to, one’s been in the hospital since February and the other’s kind of an amazing person, because he’s never available although he lives right in Cambridge and works all the time. But so when Channel 4 called up to arrange to get the Harvard view of things”—this with a merry stress—“I was the person to be talked to. They obviously had this angle which was going to be science versus religion, only it wasn’t so obvious at the time. Plus I was a woman, so it was a perfect setup. I’d never been in front of a camera before. It just didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to answer. The other seismologists he talked to not only actually know something about New England seismicity (which I don’t) but from what I hear were smart enough not to take the bait on Stites.”

“Somebody has to say these things,” Louis said, piloting the car onto I-93.

“It’s so disgusting. This idea of a single-purpose church, the Church of Hating Women, which typically it’s mostly women who’ve been joining. And they’re all nesting in that slime pit of a building in Chelsea, which as you probably know is kind of a slime pit itself.” She lowered her head and with a pensive sneer followed the movements of other cars changing lanes, eyeing them like enemies. A strong gust of wind made the Civic shy and a line of winter sand slide sideways through the headlight beams.

“I talked to your mother again,” Renée said, as if to change the subject.

Louis concentrated on the road. A pack of headlights had filled the rearview mirror and begun to pass him on the right; the car shied again in the wind. It took Renée a while to realize that he was ignoring what she’d said. Slowly, with one finger, she pulled a dark, pointed tongue of hair off her temple. “I said I talked to your mother again.”

“Yeah, I have no comment.”

“Oh. I see.” She made a face. “She called me, you know.”

“For professional advice.”

“Yes.”

“You should bill her.” He looked over his shoulder, pushing on the brake pedal. There was a car in his right-side blinid spot, cars passing him on the left and swerving in front of him, earn crowding and plunging like lemmings down a curved ramp. He played essentially no part in bringing the Civic through a rotary and onto Storrow Drive.

Renée asked him if he was a student or what. It transpired that she’d actually heard of WSNE and had even, on occasion, listened to it. She said it was like a college station that had gotten lost in the AM band. “That’s us,” he said.

“Do you like living in Boston?”

“I have a neighbor who keeps asking me that. Kind of a pathetic old guy. He’s very concerned about whether I like Somerville. Keeps asking me if I think I’m gonna like it here.”

“What do you tell him?”

“I tell him, Aw fuck you, old man. Ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha.”

“But what about you?” Louis said. “You like it? You like it here in Boston?”

“Sure.” Renée smiled at some hidden irony. “It’s where I always wanted to live. The east coast in general, Boston in particular.”

“This was during your childhood in Waco?”

“My childhood in Chicago. My childhood and adolescence.”

“Where in Chicago?”

“Lake Forest.”

“Ah, Lake Forest, Lake Forest.” The words had a Pavlovian effect on his blood pressure. “That’s where I wanted to live when I was a kid in Evanston. You have one of those places right on the lake?”

“You’re from Evanston?”

“Whether you had one of those places right on the lake, is what I asked.”

“No. We did not.”

“That’s what I call easy livin’. One of those places right on the lake. Did you have a boat?”

Renée crossed her arms and kept her mouth closed. She was clearly not enjoying Louis’s company.

“We were talking about Boston,” he said.

She looked out her window tiredly. It didn’t seem to be sociability that made her go on and say: “Squantum. Mashpee. Peebiddy. Athol. Braintree. Swumpscutt. Quinzee.”

“I’m hearing an issue with the place-names.”

“It’s cheap, I know. But there’s something about the place. a coldness, an ugliness. I mean every week there’s some incredibly twisted crime here. And somehow all the people who think Boston’s a center of culture and education manage to ignore it. They see this cute, manageable, safe city, you know, that’s not as scary as New York. It’s like New York, only better. But I look and I see overt racism and a rotten climate and elevated cancer rates and bad drivers and a harbor full of sewage, and I see all these young mothers with their Saabs in Cambridge blissing out on being in Cambridge, and who wouldn’t be revolted?”

Louis was laughing.

“You laugh,” Renée said. “It’s obviously a problem I have. I always wanted to live here. But then I found out that the part of me that made this place attractive, the part of me I shared with the other people who actively wanted to be here, was not a part of me that I liked anymore. And the fact that I’m still here after six years is this ghastly reminder of something about myself I wish I’d forgotten six years ago. I feel so implicated. People come here and soak up the experience for a few years and then they move away to real places, and all their lives they talk about this romantic time they had in a city they were too young to notice wasn’t much, and the whole country buys this image of Boston as a fun town, and what’s sickening is that Boston itself buys it more than anybody. And after six years it’s assumed that I buy it too.”

“Why don’t you get out of here?”

“I am, in September. First I had to get a degree, though.” Louis was looking up at house numbers on a street called Marlborough.

“Besides, I hate the idea of the place more than the place itself. And I don’t hate Somerville at all. Perversely. What’s the number we’re looking for?”

“This one here,” he said, pointing at a brick town house. He had only this moment realized that parking might be a problem. In the next twenty-five minutes he and Renée passed the Peter Stoorhuys residence eight times. Traffic was heavy and abnormal, the cars creeping through the gentrified grid in an inverse cakewalk, everyone waiting for a space to open up. Louis spiraled farther and farther away from Peter’s house. He ignored spaces that seemed too distant, and then when he returned to them with a more informed idea of their value, they were filled. (It was like learning the hard way how to time stock purchases.) He tried backing into spaces that he knew were too small. He slammed on the brakes for hydrants and then floored the gas pedal. He ran red lights. And when, closer to ten o’clock than to nine, he found an empty spot one block from Peter’s house, he was almost too suspicious to take it. Three cars ahead of him had passed it with the blitheness of insiders. There didn’t seem to be a hydrant or a driveway or a resident permit only sign, and the space must just have opened up, but somehow it didn’t seem fresh. He backed in, frowning warily, as a tiger in the forest might if it ran across a raw beef roast on a sheet of waxed paper. His hips were wet with runoff from his armpits.

“Looked like a nice party in there.”

“This sucks. This sucks.”

At the door of the first-floor apartment he put his costume on. It was the dust mask he’d worn in high school for cutting grass in dry weather. It had two protruding snout-like vents that he still had some paper filters for. “That’s very. off-putting,” Renée said.

“Thank you.”

Eileen came to the door with a bottle of beer. She had her hair pinned up and was wearing a man’s double-knit plaid suit and a fat pumpkin-colored necktie. Her cheeks were flushed. “Is that you, Louis?” From her tone you might have gathered he was six years old. She smiled tentatively at Renée.

“This is my sister, Eileen,” Louis huffed, pointing at her with his left-side snout. Renée finished the introduction herself, and Eileen turned on a frantic superficiality worthy of a woman twice her age. She hovered by the newcomers, explaining the party and pointing out the available pleasures. Louis noticed that Peter owned a sofa and a coffee table identical to the ones in her apartment. In the high-ceilinged living room, which had the stark soffits and smooth walls of a recent rehab, about half the guests were in costume. The prizewinner was an individual in a Mylar suit complete with a reflector visor, a hard hat, and a pendular air-filtration system that put Louis’s to shame. Surrounding this figure was a group of young men in weekend-wear. From the basking movements of its head it appeared to be receiving their ongoing congratulations. Good friends of hers from school, Eileen explained. Another good friend of hers sat by the stereo equipment with his arm draped over the top component, his fingers on a control knob, his head nodding to the beat of tinny reggae in a major key. His other arm was in a sling. In the center of the room, a herd of young women with execu-clipped hair were raising and lowering their feet in the kind of semiconscious dancing a person does on too-hot sand. Some wore bandages on various body parts; all wore drop-waisted dresses. “What’s your costume?” Louis asked Eileen.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Small businessman with heavy losses.”

She gave him an anguished look. “I’m an insurance adjusterrr-rrr! You see my tape measure, my notepad, my calculator—” She stopped. She looked just like a cat that had suddenly become aware of being watched. She retracted her head a little and her eyes moved back and forth between Louis and Renée, who were standing two feet apart and paying careful attention to her. One thing was she’d never seen her brother with a female escort.

There was an oddly compassionate note in Renée’s voice. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Eileen becoming flustered. “Just an adjuster, ’surance injuster. There’s lots and lots of food, so. Help yourself.”

Renée looked on with even more noticeable compassion as Eileen burrowed through the group of dancing women, who two by two glanced over their shoulders at the newcomers. Before they could venture further into the party, an ugly thing happened.

The figure in the Mylar suit was approaching them, doing a lunar-gravity thing. They tried to ignore it, but it stepped between them and peered up through its shiny visor into Louis’s face. He saw a masked, bronze-toned image of unamusement. The figure’s retinue of friends looked on in suspense and delight as it contorted its limbs in elaborate slow motion and peered up into Renée’s face. It touched Louis’s head with kinked rubber fingers. It touched Renée’s ear, robotic squeaks and clicks emerging from its vents. Its friends were cracking up. Louis was afraid Renée was going to joke along with it, be “weird” in return, but she remained stonefaced. When the figure again made so bold as to touch Louis’s head, he caught hold of its wrist and looked down his nose and squeezed through the rubber glove until he heard a squeal of pain inside the headgear.

“Shit!” the figure accused in a muted voice, retreating towards its friends. The friends weren’t laughing anymore. One forty-year-old twenty-two-year-old in green pants detached himself from the group. With terrible, paternal maturity he said to Louis, “We’re dealing with a rented suit here, dude.”

“We’re dealing with an asshole. Dude.”

“Yeah, and I kinda think it’s you.”

Louis smiled inside his mask, pleasantly out of control. “Wooo-ee.”

“Let’s not be stupid,” Renée interposed. “Your man in the suit here started this.”

The enemy had enough control of himself to generalize. “I guess some people can’t take a joke.”

I’m going to kill you, Louis thought. I’m going to smash your fucking nose.

“That’s right,” Renée said sweetly. “We have no sense of humor.”

The enemy looked at Louis, who thrust his head out invitingly. “I’m not going to fight with you,” he said.

Louis understood then that he was losing, had lost, in fact. “Love your pants,” he said futilely as the enemy walked away.

It appeared that Eileen hadn’t seen any of this. She was doing a little dance by one of the stereo speakers, her beer bottle swaying back and forth, her bottom wagging at the rest of the room. It was like a worker bee’s coded dance of good tidings, very self-absorbed and yet very public: significant honeysuckle to the north-northwest. Louis had the thought, as he and Renée passed by the bandaged females, that in her own circle Eileen was probably considered a free and quirky spirit.

“Charming fellow,” Renée said.

Louis lowered his shoulder and bumped her so hard that she had to take a step sideways for balance. She didn’t seem to appreciate this.

The apartment was huge. The only people in the room behind the living room were three extremely pretty girls, three jumbo girls, the kind with long legs and long arms and long hair. (In Homer’s world, a god among strangers could be recognized by its unusual beauty and unusual height.) Renée suddenly began to act as if she didn’t know where she was going; she almost went back into the living room. Evidently it hadn’t escaped her attention that one of the jumbos was in exquisite mourning, an ensemble that included a silk shawl, a pert little hat, and a sheer black veil. The girl looked Renée over with negligible interest and then buried her head in the consultations of her companions, who were methodically taking food from a well-stocked table and putting it in their perfect mouths.

The people in the kitchen were pretty clearly Peter’s friends. Pale nightclub arms were aiming cigarette ashes at various receptacles. Drinks were being raised to urban palimpsest faces — punk-yuppie hybrids, pixyish women in thematic costumes, a tank-topped Homo nautilus with slicked-back hair. Three middle-aged New Englanders with mustaches sat at the table drinking Jack Daniel’s, and Peter himself, in a faded Blondie T-shirt and the billed cap of a Boston city cop, was seated on the rim of the sink. His head had nodded onto his chest.

“Case in point,” he said, raising it with effort, “is my old man’s company, old Sweet-Ass Incorporated.” He glanced at the doorway. Seeing Louis in his dust mask, he rolled his eyes.

Louis blinked innocently. Renée offered him a dripping bottle of Popular Import, which he declined. He was pretty sure the table and chairs here were Eileen’s.

“For fifty years,” Peter went on, to an apparently appreciative audience, “they’ve been making their little contribution to the GNP and not incidentally doing some very dubious shit indeed to the environment. I could tell you a fact or two that you would not believe, repeat, not believe. And then suddenly it’s the nineties, and that environment which they’d always thought was this nice soft thing they could screw over any way they felt like turns around and does a little damage to their property in Lynn and also keeps the heat on so their stock price falls and they aren’t sure if they really ought to be operating that plant with all its nasty byproducts because what are they gonna do if one day it cracks wide open—” Peter gasped for breath. “And then it’s: Incredible outrage! Mother Nature, dearest Mother Nature dear, what’d we ever do to you to deserve a thing like this? I told my old man, Hey, maybe you had it coming, and he did not take kindly to that point of view. He told me: We are an asset to the Commonwealth. No lie, I’m telling you: an asset to the Commonwealth.”

There were joyful noises in the living room as the reggae gave way to a fifteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen recording. From behind Louis someone asked Peter in a loud, clear voice: “What are you talking about?”

It was Renée. Peter swung his head drunkenly and smiled as if to say, What have we here?

“Sweeting-Aldren,” a woman in a hard hat and a see-through chemise answered for him.

Renée’s mouth formed the word “oh.”

“That’s right,” Peter said. “The company from which all blessings flow. We are blessed with fruits and vegetables that don’t have brown spots. We’re blessed with Warning Orange price stickers, Warning Orange road cones, Warning Orange gym socks. We’re blessed with Asian jungles that don’t have foliage.” He snapped his fingers. “You — what’s your name?”

“Renée. What’s yours?”

“Renée.” Peter turned the name over in a toying tone. “Tell me, Renée. You buy a swimsuit in the last ten years? Be cool, I’m serious. You must have bought one. And right, you’re offended, OK, but chances are it was made of the miracle fabric, the one that doesn’t sag or pinch. Stuff called Silera.”

“Spandex,” an apocalyptic horseman said.

“Silera spandex,” Peter said. “The miracle bathing-suit fabric. It’s another of those Sweeting-Aldren blessings. You see, that’s what my dad means about their being an asset to the Commonwealth. No sag, no creep. And hey, really, I’m a little drunk, OK? It’s cool?” Renée stared at him with no expression at all.

“But listen,” Peter continued generally, “I’m telling you what I can’t wait for is the total blast, Richter magnitude nine point oh, that makes the whole company go belly up. And oh shit — I just had this flash — let me—” His aged face was lit by the brightness of the idea before his eyes. “I just had this flash of nude beaches, after the cruncher. No more Silera, no more swimsuits, no more buildings. Naked nature — can you feel it? Can anybody get at that?”

“I feel it,” said the horseman.

“Oh yeah. Yes indeed,” Peter said.

“They’ve gotta be insured to the gills, though, Peter,” one of the whiskey drinkers pointed out.

“What?” Peter suddenly became more reasonable. “No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about money. All these execs like my dad, they’re totally protected, they’d hardly feel it. And the stockholders, they lose a little, but it’s just a part of their portfolios, a good risk that didn’t pay, I mean everybody’s ass is double-covered. I’m talking about poetic justice. I’m talking about how pious these people are. You’ve got to believe me, there is nobody more pious than somebody in the chemical industry. Sure they’re rich as pigs, but that’s not what they’re in the business for. They’re in it as a public service. They’re making the world a better place to live. They’re doing all the nifty things that nature can’t do by herself. And who cares about a million gallons of toxic effluents annually if you never find a worm in your Boston lettuce? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I’m just waiting for the cruncher, just to shove all that shit back up their ass.” Peter turned to Louis, who had discovered Eileen’s dishes in a cupboard by the refrigerator. “You looking for something?”

“Found it,” Louis said. He took Renée by the shoulders and moved her out of his path. As he left the kitchen he heard Peter say, “Renée, yo. You’re not mad at me, are you? You understand.”

“Why should I be mad at you?”

“Hey, absolutely. What’s to be mad about. Absolutely.”

The jumbo girls had vanished, off to greener pastures. The bathroom door was closed, and when Louis failed to find Eileen in the living room he stationed himself by the food table to wait for her. The wall above the table was festooned with yellow-and-black not cross police line do tape. Some of the food didn’t seem intended for consumption. There was a map of greater Boston attached to a piece of cardboard and decorated with whole, white, upright mushrooms, the biggest ones — a Siamese-twin pair — rising from downtown. There was also a plate of raw vegetables selected for their deformities, tomatoes with lingual protuberances, cleft carrots, gnarled peppers. Also an iced flat cake with stylized barbed wire dribbled on in mocha. Also a crystal bowl full of punch the color of old radiator water, with an iridescent film on top and a sheet of self-adhesive notepaper saying love canal punch try some!! Also a bowl of chocolate-chip cookies broken and piled up like rubble, with a toy bulldozer on top and the arms and heads of plastic men sticking up through the crumbs. Also a dish of cinnamon ATOMIC FIREBALLS.

When the bathroom door began to open, Louis stepped over quickly to block Eileen’s escape. He found himself face to face with the person in the Mylar suit.

The door closed defensively. Louis turned a corner and found two bedrooms and another closed bathroom door. Suitcases were opened up like sandwiches on the floor of the larger bedroom. Perched on a rattan hamper, glittering in the streetlight the Levolors let in, was Milton Friedman’s cage.

Louis knocked on the bathroom door, air rasping hard in the vents of his mask. The door opened a crack and Eileen peered out anxiously. “Maybe you can help me?” She let him in and locked the door. “I can’t get the toilet unplugged.”

“You have a plunger?”

She pushed one eagerly into his hands. The tip of her necktie was wet. “You have to get a good seal,” he said, bearing down through the cloudy, pinkened water. It appeared to be a matter of a tampon. Eileen looked on with her fingers knit together, and when the water suddenly dropped and made the familiar flushing sound, she said, “Thank you so much,” and unlocked the door. He grabbed the knob.

“What?” she said, retreating from him.

“Talk time.”

It was interesting to see how her superficiality fell away, like a shell of dry Elmer’s glue coming loose, and exposed a tired, vacant face. She tried a smile. “You having a nice time?”

“Do you know what I just figured out?” He crossed his arms and put his back against the door. “I just figured out why you didn’t return my calls. You didn’t return my calls because you’re not living in your apartment. You’re living here.”

“Yeah, Louis,” she said in a different voice, “I don’t even have that apartment anymore. My machine’s right here. When was the last time you tried to call?”

“And you didn’t bother to tell me.”

“I knew you were coming tonight, I thought I’d tell you now.”

“But you didn’t tell me now. I had to come and ask.”

“Yeah, you had to come and ask.”

“So the idea is you’re living with him now.”

She laughed. “I guess so.”

“You guess so. You’re only sleeping in the same bed with him.”

“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? What bed I’m sleeping in?” She took a twisted towel off a rack and began to fold it and pet it. “My little brother wants to talk to me about who I’m sleeping with. I guess he thinks that’s what brothers are for.” She put the towel back on the rack. “Will you let me out now, please?”

“Eileen, the guy’s a snake.”

“Oh, is that so?” The pitch of her voice neared the upper range of human hearing. “My fiancé is a snake? That’s very nice of you, Louis. That’s very thoughtful.”

“Ah, fiancé, fiancé.” He couldn’t figure out these women and their “fiancés.” They wielded the word like a weapon; it didn’t seem natural. “You should have said so sooner. I meant to say, he is a prince!”

She reached and yanked the mask down below his chin. “You are so hateful. You never gave him a chance! You are so so hateful.”

“That’s what Mom tells me too.”

“And so cool too. You’ve always got an answer.”

“Can I help it if he’s a snake?”

“He is not a snake. He is a very, very vulnerable and sensitive person.”

“Who when I last saw him was making suggestive remarks to my — to the person I brought to your party.”

“Well, maybe he has less inhibitions than you do. Maybe he has less inhibitions than anybody in our family. I mean it, Louis, I know Peter and you don’t. I don’t see why you think you can just go calling somebody I care for a — a — a snake!”

“Ah, ‘care for.’ You ‘care for’ him and you’re—”

“YOU’RE a snake! YOU’RE a snake!”

“You ‘care for’ him and you’re going to marry him. Makes sense, I’m sure he cares for you too, Eileen. But I wonder if maybe you’re not being taken for a ride. Let me ask you a question, this little property here, do you guys rent or own?”

“That is none of your business.”

Louis threw his head back into the door. “Meaning you actually managed to do it. You actually kept after her until she couldn’t stand it anymore and she broke down and gave you whatever you needed to buy this place. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right? You were so ruthless you actually got her to cough up money she says she doesn’t even have yet. Isn’t that right?”

Eileen looked at him so furiously he was sure she was going to hit him. But instead she opened the glass shower door, stepped in, and shut the door behind her. Her voice echoed dully in the stall. “I’m not coming out till you’re gone.”

He was too close to tears to say anything for a moment. It was the money, the money. He thought of the transfer of those funds and felt a column of tears pushing on the inside of his head, from his throat to his eyes. Behind the shower door the shadowy outline of his sister had sunk to its knees. The wet, hollow sound of her crying was like something in the pipes. He wished he’d never left Houston.

“What do you think about when you think about me?” he asked her, looking into his eyes in the mirror. “Do you think of an enemy? Do you think of a person, who knows you and used to play with you? Or do you ever even think about me at all?”

Eileen sniffled and gasped. “He is not a snake.”

“Yeah, I don’t even have anything against him anymore. I mean, you’re right, I don’t know him. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to bother you anymore.”

In reply she only cried. Louis started to leave the bathroom, but something he’d seen in the mirror without seeing it now registered. He unfastened his fallen mask and put it in his pocket. The face he was looking at was both softer and older, more sensual, than the face he considered his own. He thought: I’m not such a bad-looking guy. For some reason the thought brought a rush of fear to his head and heart, the fear you feel when you fall in love; when you swing out to pass a car on a narrow road; when someone catches you in a lie.

Renée was standing in the kitchen doorway, her back arched a little so that her neck and shoulders rested against the jamb. Her beer bottle was empty. When Louis appeared, she gave him a weak, ironic smile, as if to indicate both boredom and a diminished faith in his ability to relieve it. He asked her: “Do you want to be here?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Do you not?”

“No, but you can stay if you want. Or we can go get something to eat or something.”

Neither alternative seemed to appeal to her much. “Let’s go,” she said.

The last they saw of the party was the man in the Mylar suit doing a gorilla dance for the amusement of the other guests.

Outside, there was a moon. The silver smoothness of the street was broken here and there by manhole covers and the furry remains of squirrels. “Is something wrong?” Renée said.

“Yeah, a bunch of stuff. Mainly I’m sorry I dragged you to this party.”

“Don’t be. It was interesting. Although. ”

“Although what a waste of a parking space.”

In the car he divided his attention equally between the road and his silent passenger. The more she didn’t look at him, the more he turned to look at her. Her upturned nose, her pale cheeks, her whole thirty-year-old head, of which the plain wedge of dark hair, with its overlay of individual and meandering white strands, seemed the truest part. Spillages of orange street light ran over and over down the front of her dress, turning it an orange that was black in the orange context.

“You have pretty hair,” he essayed.

She shifted sharply in the bucket seat, repositioning her legs and shoulders like a person with a stomach cramp.

“Fuck,” he said, “never mind. But I do like it.”

“So do I,” she said flatly, throwing him a quick, smiley glance.

When they reached Pleasant Avenue he set the brake and turned the engine off. Renée stared penetratingly at the rear window of the car in front of them, its corroded chrome frame and Celtics decal. On the sidewalk to the left of Louis lay a copper-tone range, the oven door uppermost and asterisked with guano. “This party totally depressed you, didn’t it.”

A gust of wind rocked the car.

“I was going to ask you,” she said, ignoring his question, “if you thought it was true what that person was saying about Sweeting-Aldren. The thing about a million gallons of effluent every year.”

“I was hardly listening.”

“Because that’s definitely not what they’re saying in the paper. In the paper they’re talking about zero gallons.”

“My sister wants to marry this guy.”

“He’s the boyfriend?” Another gust rocked the car. “I didn’t realize.”

“For richer and for poorer.”

“But I actually kind of liked him. He wouldn’t be my first choice as a brother-in-law, but he’s not stupid. Just a type.”

Louis leaned over the hand brake and kissed her.

She let him walk right into the warm vestibule of her mouth. It might have been a minute’s journey from the enamel rill between her front teeth to either of the elastic dead ends to which her lips came; an hour’s journey down her throat. He took her hair in his fists, pressing her head into the seatback with his lips.

Headlights turned up the street. She pulled away, flattening her offended hair with one hand. “I was just about to say I can’t stand sitting around in cars.”

Inside the house they were greeted by a baying from the large lungs of several dogs in the ground-floor apartment. “Dobermans,” Renée said. The air was hot and canine. It was fresher on the second-floor landing, and when she stopped to take a key down from a ledge, Louis kissed her again, backing her into a wall covered with paper that smelled like a used-book store. The baying downstairs subsided into frustrated gnashings, and she tried to pull away even as her mouth kept pressing into his. Suddenly a baby started crying, it seemed like right behind the door beside them. They went up a set of steeper stairs to her apartment.

It was a bare, clean place. There was nothing on the kitchen counter but a radio/cassette player, nothing in the dish rack but a plate, a glass, a knife, and a fork. That the light was warm and the four chairs around the table looked comfortable somehow made the kitchen all the more unwelcoming. It was like the kitchen of the kind of man who was careful to wash the dinner dishes and wipe the counters before he went into the bedroom and put a bullet in his brain.

A large room opposite the bathroom contained a bed and a desk. Another large room contained an armchair and bookshelves and many square yards of blond floorboards. When Renée came out of the bathroom she stood with her back to the woodwork between the doors to these two rooms and faced the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her. “Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

“Nice place,” Louis said simultaneously.

“I used to share it with a friend.”

She didn’t move, didn’t lean aside even a little bit, as he went into the bedroom. He put his feet down as quietly as he could. Everything about the place made him feel intrusive, as though even loud footsteps might disturb things. (When police detectives arrive at the scene of a crime, aren’t there often some respectful, meditative moments before attention is turned to the body on the floor?) The desk lamp had been left burning over a stack of 11 x 17 fanfold computer paper, on the top sheet of which a program in Fortran was being revised in black ink. (Until the moment of the crime, yes, work had been in progress, it had been an ordinary evening.) Above the desk hung a bathymetric map of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It was spattered with thousands of dots in different colors, many grouped in dense elongated swarms like army-ant columns; beneath them, barbed line-segments were applied like war paint to the ocean. Continuing to tread carefully, as he had when he first entered Rita Kernaghan’s living room, Louis returned to the kitchen. Renée was still standing with her hands behind her back. She might have been a missionary at a stake, with her hands tied, unable to cover her nakedness, unable to cross herself or shield her face from the flames that would soon be leaping up, but like that missionary she stared straight ahead. She did flinch discemibly when Louis touched her shoulders (even the greatest saints must have flinched when the first flames licked their skin), and despite the way she’d kissed him on the landing he was surprised by her unhidden look of need.

The wind whistled on the dormers in the bedroom. It rose without falling, consuming more and more of the roof, finding further timbers in the house to bend and further panes to rattle, further expanses of wall to lean on. It seemed to be doing the work for Louis as he parted and lifted the two sides of Renée’s cardigan, which slid easily off her shoulders and, falling to the floor, unbound her hands. She put her wrists around his neck.

It was still dark when he woke up. dr. renee seitchek, whose internal anatomy he imagined had been rearranged in the escalating violence of their union, and whose hands had proved no less articulate than the rest of her in showing his own hands how best to bring her the releases he couldn’t deliver otherwise (he liked and admired the silent and perspiring and possessed way she came), now lay next to him and slept so heavily that she looked like she’d been struck unconscious by a blow to the head. There were sparse flocks of freckles on her shoulders. Through a crack between a shade and a window frame Louis could see tree boughs, lit by streetlight from below and blanketed with blackness, rocking in the wind. This wind tonight, she’d told him during a lull, had reminded her of an earthquake she’d seen in the mountains once. She’d been hiking in the Sierra Nevada with a high-school group. “And all of a sudden there was something happening in the country to the east. We could see for forty or fifty miles, and what it was like was when you’re by a perfectly calm lake, and you can see the wind coming the way you could hear it on the street tonight, the way the leading edge roughs up the water when it comes. That’s exactly what this event was like. It was this thing coming across the mountains, this visible rolling wave, and then suddenly we were in it. We definitely knew we were in it because there were little rockslides and the ground shook. But it wasn’t like the other events I’ve felt, because there was this visual connection.” She had actually seen the wave they were feeling. It hadn’t come out of nowhere. It had looked like nothing on God’s earth. And he wanted then, again, to take possess have take possess possess the body in which this memory resided.

The alarm clock showed twenty to four. He slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he returned, Renée was kneeling in the center of the bed. He said, “Hi,” and she backed towards the bottom of the bed, dragging the sheet along with her. She looked terrified.

“What’s wrong?”

She backed off the bed and fled to the far corner of the room, one hand raised vaguely to ward him off. Standing up showed the complexity of her nakedness, how the legs had to connect with the torso, how peculiarly narrow the female waist, how much more delicate the shoulders than the hips, how detached and attention-demanding a woman’s breasts. “I don’t have it,” she said to him in a loud voice that wasn’t bright or merry.

He hardly noticed the erection he was rapidly and in full view of her reacquiring. “You’re dreaming,” he said.

“Leave me ALONE. Leave me ALONE.”

“Sh-sh-sh.” He sat down on the bed, showing her his empty palms. This seemed to scare her all the more. Without taking her eyes off him, she edged along the wall. Then she made a break for the door but curved towards him as she ran, her hands outstretched as if she were falling, and he saw how just before she reached him she seemed to crash through a sheet of glass or some similar planar discontinuity. She took hold of his shoulders and said, “Oh, I was having such a bad dream.”

The house swayed in the wind. She sat on his thighs and let herself be held. Strong, low-pH fumes rose from between them. Experimentally, he tried to put his penis back inside her.

She clutched his shoulders, pain cutting streaks into her face. “This is a little much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sore?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, well, in that case.” She used her whole weight to impale herself on him. His nerves were screaming harmful! harmful! She rolled her hips angrily. “Hurt?”

“Yes!”

After a while the pain diffused into a large zone of ache, a pool of melted sulfur with little blue flames of pleasure flickering across the surface. Then the flames became scarcer and then disappeared altogether, and the sulfur began to crystallize into a column of hard, dry, sharp chunks. He might have been rubbing against broken bone. Renée’s eyes and cheeks were wet, but she didn’t make any sound.

When they stopped he was bleeding enough to leave marks on the sheets. Renée sat on the edge of the bed and rocked with her knees pressed together. He just assumed he wouldn’t die because of this, a few years down the line.

5

He went to the house with the pyramid on top. The front lawn was a metallic green now and the grass lay down and shivered as if under a running tide, some large-scale flow of invisible matter related to the brilliant wrongness of the light, which was messing up the colors, throwing some of the black of the tree trunks into the blue heaven and some of the white of the clouds into the trees. For the person who hasn’t slept, what makes the new day strange and fills it with foreboding is that the setting sun is in the east and not setting; all day the light is like the light in dreams, which comes from no direction.

“Louis, my God,” Melanie said, clutching the lapels of her dressing gown and peering out over a new brass door chain. “It’s nine in the morning, I’m not even up. I have to catch a plane.”

“Unchain the door?”

“You didn’t call! If you’d come two hours later—”

“Unchain the door?”

An alarm-system number pad had been installed in the entryway. In the living and dining rooms the broken plaster had been repaired, and Rita Kernaghan’s books and decorative objects, including the portrait of Melanie’s father, had given way to a more standard opulence, suitable for a luxury hotel suite — Japanese lithographs, sheer curtains, gold brocade.

“I meant to call you,” Melanie said. “I just flew in on Thursday and there’s been so much to do.”

“I bet,” Louis said. He walked into the living room and stepped onto a silk-upholstered sofa and stamped from one end to the other, listening to the twangs of its internal injuries.

“Louis! For God’s sake!”

He crossed to the coffee table. In good soccer style, using his instep, he penalty-kicked a cut-glass bowl into the fireplace. “I understand you’re handing out money to your children,” he said, stepping back onto the sofa. “I’m here for my share.”

“Get down off the sofa. That is not your sofa.”

“You think I’d do this to a sofa that was mine?”

“I told you. I’m not going to talk about money. If you want to talk about something else, all right, but—”

“Two million.”

“But not money. I never expected I would have to—”

“Two million.”

Melanie placed her hand on the side of her head she got her headaches on.

“How much did you give Eileen?”

“Nothing, Louis. I gave her nothing.”

“So where’d she get the condo?”

“It’s a matter of a loan.”

“Oh, I see. How about you lend me two million?”

Melanie’s hand slid forward to cover her face, two fingertips pressing on her eyelids.

“I’ll never bother you again, Mom. Promise. Two million and we’re quits. I’d say that sounds like quite a deal. You know, maybe I’ll even pay you back.”

“I can no longer consider this a joke.”

“Who’s joking? I need the money. There’s this radio station I have to buy. Two million’s the figure I had in mind, but I could do a fair amount of good with two hundred thousand. That would stabilize things till you come through with the rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Philip Stites. You’ve heard of him, the antiabortion guy. I want to make him a present of two hundred thousand dollars. Just to aid his cause, you know. Ever since we all got so rich I’ve become a very Christian person, Mom, you’re not aware of this, of course, because you never call me or—”

“And you never call me!”

“Oh, and Eileen does, and that’s why she gets rewarded with cash gifts?” Louis stepped up onto the shoulders of the sofa and tipped it over backwards, alighting just before the thud. “Why is it that everybody but you can see she only calls you to get money out of you? You think she cares about you? She hates you till you give her money and then she rewards you by not hating you until she needs some more. Haven’t you ever noticed this? It’s called being spoiled.”

His mother turned away as if the conversation didn’t interest her. The sudden sharp tremor that made her whole body jerk and brought tears to her face seemed to take even her by surprise. She made a coughing, gulping noise. Louis might have had more sympathy if he hadn’t felt that her tears and Eileen’s tears always came at his expense, and if he hadn’t suspected that in his absence they were basically happy.

“I’m trying to do you a real favor here,” he said. “I mean, just think. You give me two million, and for the rest of your life you can consider me a selfish jerk. You’ll never have to feel guilty again. No more tears, no more evasions. Plus you’ll still have your twenty million to play games with Eileen with.”

His mother was shaking her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. I’ve lost—” A strong aftershock rocked her shoulders. “I’ve lost—” Another aftershock. “I’ve lost—”

“Money?”

She nodded.

“How much?”

She shook her head; she couldn’t say.

“So you’ve lost money. Amazing. Eileen gets to you in time to get an apartment out of this, but I’m a little late. Amazing the way these things work out.”

Still trembling, Melanie parted a sheer curtain and looked out at the false-color daylight, the fair-weather clouds grazing the top of the last hill before the ocean. “Your request is not reasonable.”

He tested the heft of a crystal objet from an end table. “You’re saying this place of hers cost substantially less than two hundred thousand dollars?”

“Your request,” she repeated, “is not reasonable. Eileen will be starting a very fine job at the Bank of Boston when she graduates in June. She’ll have an excellent income and she’ll pay me interest on the loan. This is not particularly your business, I’m only telling you so you understand. The condominium was a reasonable investment for both of us. There is simply no equating her financial position with yours.”

“Sure, if you’re a bank. But what about the social value of what she’s doing as opposed to what I’m doing? She’s going to help the grotesquely rich get grotesquely richer. You think she really needs your help? I’m trying to save a good radio station from some fanatics.”

“And what a polite way you have of asking. Walking on my sofa.”

“Oh, I get it. You would have come across if only I hadn’t walked on your sofa.”

Melanie spun around to face him. Her uncombed hair hung in the shape of a kaffiyeh. “The answer is no, Louis. No. I am not giving any more money to anyone, including Eileen. You can hate me, but I can’t. I am incapable of it. Do you understand? Please don’t make it any worse.”

She left him standing beneath the spot where his grandfather’s portrait had hung. He heard a door close upstairs. He covered his face with his hands and breathed in the smell of Renée Seitchek’s vagina.

On Monday morning Alec Bressler sold WSNE-AM to the Reverend Philip Stites’s Church of Action in Christ for a sum undisclosed by either party but rumored, in light of the station’s crippling debts, to be in the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars.

Louis was emptying his desk when Stites and his lawyers, a leather-faced duo with nice manicures, stopped in the doorway to assess his cubicle. Stites was roughly Louis’s height and no more than a couple of years older. He had one of those handsome, chubby Southern faces, round tortoiseshell glasses, and the lank, ultra-fine blond hair of a young child. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue blazer, and a striped tie knotted in a four-in-hand. “How’re you doin’?” he said to Louis in a warm Carolinian accent.

“Not bad, for the Antichrist.”

The young minister chuckled affably. “You already quit, did you.” He returned to the hallway. “Hi there, Libby, you got a second to show us around here? You met Mr. Hambree already. This here’s Mr. Niebling. This pretty lady’s name is Libby Quinn.”

Louis would sooner have not been paid for his last two weeks of work than go and bother Alec this morning. Fortunately for his finances, the ex-owner came to him. He had a sheaf of twenties and briskly counted out twenty-five of them.

“This is more than you owe me.”

“Is a gift from Social Security. You need a recommendation? I send it to you.”

“I can’t believe this happened.”

“Yes, I know, is a bad sing for you. You need a job. But the free market decides: not enough listeners. Meanwhile I broadcast 425 editorials. I have letters to show people listened. Maybe one person changes his mind because of me. Eight years to change one mind. But you can’t sink about results. You do what you have to do, regardless of results. Is a matter of faith.”

“Stites has the faith,” Louis said in an ugly voice.

“So other people live with nasty faith. This means you live without faith yourself? No hope for any sing? If everyone’s faith is same as yours, you don’t need faith.”

Louis drummed his fingers on his desk. “What are you going to do now?”

“Same as twenty years ago,” Alec said. “Make lots of money.”

Sometime between one and two in the afternoon he began to wait for an earthquake. He’d been sitting in his room doing nothing anyway; waiting didn’t take much extra effort. He tried to make himself as ready to feel the next tremor, should it come, as he wan to hear thunder when he’d seen a flash of lightning: to be on the edge, to have his consciousness flush with the instant. Unfortunately this involved keeping his eyes open, and his eyes kept sliding off smooth surfaces and catching on irregularities, for example the sheet of wallpaper whose edges had lifted away from the plaster, exposing some of the underlying streaks of glue. Eventually thin glue gave his optic nerve a kind of blister, and the blister tore open and began to bleed, and yet there was nothing else on the wall for his eyes to hold on to.

Just looking at his unopened cartons of radio equipment exhausted him. The cartons might all have been stacked on his chest, raising his gorge and stifling his breath.

The ceiling was covered with off-white tiles made of some sad paper product. He ascertained that all the tiles bore the identical pattern of little holes, the seeming differences due only to differing orientations. From five to roughly six in the afternoon he made perfectly sure that the offset between the rows of squares at one end of each row was the same as the offset at the other end. It occurred to him that if a team of people in the Boston area would do what he was doing, at all hours of the day and night, that is, if there were always at least one good guy waiting in full consciousness for the ground to shake, then there might never be another earthquake, so shy of human consciousness are the random events of nature. (This is the fundamental axiom of superstition.) But maybe nature, in her great need to relieve those underground stresses, would be driven to the radical, Old Testament — style expedient of bringing a supernatural sleep to the particular consciousness on duty when the moment came and the rupture could no longer be postponed. The boy whose finger had been in the dike later speaking of a golden and irresistible drowsiness? Obviously this fatal moment had not arrived yet, because Louis held off the seisms in perfect wakefulness until the Red Sox came on the air.

Tuesday was hot, the solar and convective furnaces already stoked and roaring at nine o’clock. The duct tape made a sound like tearing clothes as Louis unpacked his boxes. He handled everything. He took the top off the twelve-band receiver he’d built at fifteen and could hardly believe how well he’d soldered then. He had to look hard to find those spatters and botched cuts and crooked screws that at the time had caused him such self-hatred.

In the afternoon he listened to music on the FM band, spinning the dial to dodge commercials. When night fell on all the spectrums, visible and radio, he switched to shortwave. He heard the chirping of radio-teletype, rapid and cool and neutral in tone, as unstressed as spoken Swedish. The code sent by hand he got most of — in high school he’d been a twenty-four-word-a-minute man — but it was mainly numbers and abbreviations, more pleasing as noise than as communication. There was emphatic and tireless tooting from freighters and beacons in the Atlantic night. Birdies and blaring mystery tones the color of back pain. An inflamed Slavic commentator inveighing above heavy sonic surf and going under, seeming to protest more stridently that he was not going under, and going under for good.

The Voice of South Africa, calling from Johannesburg. Radio Habana. Radio Korea, the overseas service of the Korean Broadcast System, coming to you in English from Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale. Adventist World Radio offering program notes to far-flung believers, whistles faintly modulating through, like flies circling the pulpit. Injā Tehrān ast, sedā-ye jomhūri-ye eslāmi-ye Irān. The East is Red, the East is Red. Radio Baghdad reported that Zionist occupying forces had today murdered three Palestinian youths in south Lebanon; despite her Kensingtonian phonetics, this Voice of the Iraqi People’s Republic seemed not to understand what she was saying. “Reuters reported that on Sun. Day in the aftermath of the abor. Tive coup. Attempt in Mali three senior officers of the national air. Force had been executed in the square outside the.” But then the strings began to wail, and in her own tongue now the Voice, the same apprised female Voice, sang a ballad with a sexy and ironic slackness to the chorus, as though we all Know-ho-ho-ho ho-ho-ho this story well and have heard it many tiyee-yimes, and the strings agreed. Already the sun was rising on Islam. Jeeps and bundled women in the streets, another day’s devotions and atrocities under way. In Somerville, a night wind broke the dark shadow of a branch into several less dark shadows that bowed and crossed and canceled in the rhomboids of streetlight on the wallpaper.

“Hey there, Louie boy. Taking the day off?”

“Yes.”

“Hall right. Good for you.”

“I was fired from my job.”

John Mullins was aghast. “They fired you? What for?”

“I’m not sufficiently Christian.”

“You know for a second there I believed you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Ha. You had me fooled there for a second.”

By the time the post office closed, Louis was ready with eleven query letters. He had only two copies of his demo tape and he hoped he wouldn’t have to pay for more. His monthly expenses came to about $720, which included rent, food, utilities, car expenses, and payments on a college loan. With the $500 Alec had given him, his life savings came to $1,535.

In the evening he stood to one side of his window and looked out of it over his shoulder, like a man under siege. Couples in their early thirties were ringing the doorbell next door and emerging in the yellowly lit living room opposite his window. The soprano carried a frosty pitcher of water and wore a jumper with wide shoulder straps. She had auburn hair and matching freckles and fleshy white upper arms. Louis imagined he could see her vaccination mark, deep and annular, unpigmented. At the piano sat her husband, a blond, athletic frog with a crooning mouth. All the male visitors wore short-sleeved shirts with collars; all the females had bare calves and wore sandals or hard shoes. They began to sing hymns. It was like an old-time sing-along except that every voice was trained. They smiled as they sweated, eyes meeting across the room and glinting at each meeting like a distant photo flash or a diamond catching sunlight. Louis shut his window to keep the heat of all these bodies out.

Thursday night a serious amateur who’d advertised in the Globe came and took away all the radio equipment in a station wagon for $380 cash. Louis had initially asked six hundred.

On Saturday and Sunday, roughly every two hours, he dialed Renée’s home number and work number. There was no answer at either. He decided that she had no interest in seeing him again. The thought maddened him and he began to dislike her, because he wanted to use her body and was fully prepared to like her, if that was what using it required.

In the studios of WOLO-AM in downtown Boston, in a glass tower across the tracks from North Station, a sea-captain type wearing white dungarees and red kerchief was being ushered from the vestibule. Moments later the man was heard speaking on the house monitor, extolling a balloon race scheduled for the weekend.

WOLO’s receptionist returned to her desk behind the counter, warded Louis off with one arm, and pounded on her keyboard. She was a dark-haired jumbo girl, about the same age as he and ridiculously pretty. Her thighs were crossed and her tight skirt was bunched into exciting rills. At length she stopped typing, squinted at her screen, and delicately touched a function key. The screen went blank. She clapped her hands to her cheeks in horror and stared. She turned to Louis, eyes and mouth round. “I don’t know where it went! I don’t know where it went!”

“I’m supposed to see a Mr. Pincus?”

“He was in.” She put a finger on a new key and pulled it away as if stung. “But he went out.”

“Is he coming back?”

“You’re Holland, Louis, right? Why don’t you leave your name. I can’t deal with you. The manual for this printer was generated on the same printer for quote heuristic reasons unquote and the one sentence I could care less about ends with the phrase, I’ve got this memorized, ‘not to the not to.’ Ends with it.”

“I thought I had an eleven o’clock appointment.”

“Definitely not looking good in terms of seeing Mr. Pincus.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Why don’t we start with where did he go? Hey? He went to the airport. Unlikely thing that’s his final destination. What’s his final destination? ‘Not to the not to.’ You follow me?”

“Maybe I could make a new appointment.”

“I’d love to reschedule you, but for reasons of blankness of screen and total unresponsiveness to keyed commands that’s not possible. Why don’t you write your name and number down, and I’ll give him the message, Holland, Louis. I’ll tape it to His screen.”

She unrolled eight or ten inches of Scotch tape and stuck one end to Louis’s memo and the other to the doorway leading from her cubicle. From a drawer in her work station she removed a cantaloupe-sized red apple and made a tiny white notch in it with her teeth.

“Do you want to have lunch with me?” Louis said.

She held the apple up and wiggled it. “Not to the not to!”

“How about a drink after work?”

She shook her head and took a larger bite of apple and munched in a glum, blank-minded way, staring at an electrical outlet. Jackhammers rattled in the distance, at some unguessable compass point; cars honked plaintively, as though calling to their young. With a whack the girl bit a slab off the apple. Clearly it would take her another five minutes to reach the core (each bite reinforcing the superfluity of lunch) and another three minutes after that to suck her teeth clean and readjust her mouth, checking its perimeter with the tip of her tongue and then patting it with the back of her wrist. Her screen was still blank.

“Are you free on the weekend?” Louis said.

“This person,” she complained.

“We could have dinner.”

“Do I know this person? Why am I talking to this person?”

In the help-wanteds there were thousands of boring jobs and no interesting jobs. Until you opened the help-wanteds it was possible to forget the essence of the average person’s job, which was: you perform this soul-killing “data entry” or “telemarketing” or “word-processing” function and we will reluctantly give you money.

The help-wanteds were even sadder than the personals. “Very attractive benefits package,” some promised, (stunning blue-eyed SWF, fortyish but looks 25, seeks.) Was there anyone in the world who was independent, highly motivated, creative, and possessed of a minimum five yrs exp w/T-ls, SDLC, HDLC and 3270 BISYNC? And if such a dream candidate did exist, would it not be suspicious in the extreme if he or she were looking for a job? Ads like these seemed to have been placed as bitter ceremonial reminders, lest anybody think that corporations did not, like everyone else, have needs and desires that could not be satisfied.

At the other end of the scale were the laconic one-liners seeking watchmen or receptionists and mentioning no benefits or wages; ads like ugly prostitutes who, on the plus side, didn’t ask much.

Running a business was clearly nothing but unpleasant trouble. Companies wanted good employees and did not want bad employees. But the bad employees were eager to stay and take the companies’ money, while the good employees were eager to leave and work for competitors. To Louis all the thousands of jobs listed in the paper seemed like noxious effluents that the companies were trying to pay people to take off their hands. How they hated to have to pay so much and offer such juicy “benefits” to be rid of these noxious duties! How they wished it weren’t so! He could feel their anger at the expense of disposing of all this garbage. The top executives dumped the problem on the personnel department, and the people in personnel wore plastic suits easily mistaken for faces and personalities. Their job was to handle the poisonous but inevitable employment by-products without letting them come in contact with their skin. Their cordiality was guaranteed non-stick. It was 100 percent impermeable.

“What are you, on vacation, Lou?”

“No, I told you. I was fired.”

“You didn’t tell me you were fired.”

“Actually, I did.”

“Gee that’s tough, I can’t believe it. Seems like everybody’s getting laid off these days.”

“Yeah, although that obviously can’t be the case.”

“What I don’t understand is why would anybody want to fire a nice kid like you.”

“Well, because I don’t believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible.”

Mullins frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“The place where I worked was taken over by fundamentalist anti-abortionists and all non-Christians had to go.”

“Aw Lou. Aw Lou. You shouldn’t of done that.” Mullins shook his head. “Now you’re, whataya, whataya, lookin’ for a new job?”

“Right now I’m looking for a woman I saw ten days ago and want to see again.”

“You’re not married, are you.”

“No.”

“You gotta have a job, Lou.”

On Pleasant Avenue a ten-speed chained to a parking sign had been wrestled to the ground without relinquishing its hold on the signpost. The bumblebees bouncing off the honeysuckle were like coalescences of the day’s yellow, angry heat. The noise of hardwinged insects like the buzz of high-voltage transformers damaged, overloaded, by this heat; like the monotonous, depersonalized spirits of exterminated Indians made volatile by this heat.

Inside the front door, in a chamber filled with incredibly powerful and hot canine body odor and dog-food breath, Louis saw orange flowers bloom and had to fight his way up the stairs like a diver close to not making it. His glasses slid off his sweating head. No one answered his knocking, although Renée’s apartment was traitorous and welcomed his mind’s eye.

It was a twenty-five-minute walk to Harvard. With the help of some friendly strangers he managed to locate the Hoffman Laboratory of Geological Sciences, which was a quintuple-decker sandwich of brick and window on white concrete slabs. The interior was airconditioned and smelled like the sterile insides of computers. The office of Dr. Seitchek was situated on the ground floor, across from a computer room, and contained two desks. Howard Chun was sitting with his feet up on the one closer to the door, energetically firing a rubber band at the wall in front of him and shagging it on the fly. The other desk, by the window, was bare except for a stack of unopened mail.

“She’s not here.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Howard lurched forward to catch the rubber band before it fell between his sneakers. “What you want her for?”

“She’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Think she’s at home.”

“I was just there.”

Howard began to snap the rubber band viciously against his own fingers, frowning at the reddening skin. Suddenly he peered over an armrest at the floor. “Wanna see something?” He shot the rubber band at a piece of paper on the wall. “That’s the earthquakes we got since March.”

The circles appeared to be epicenters, scaled linearly to magnitude. “What are the dotted lines?” Louis said.

“Mapped faults near Ipswich. Dashed line, big aeromagnetic feature, may be old suture, may be nothing. Six miles deep, maybe four or five. Mapped faults are shallow. Only problem is, Ipswich cluster’s deep, more like five, six miles.”

“Meaning what?”

“Probably there’s other faults. Or faults aren’t mapped right. Doesn’t look right. Two unrelated swarms, so close in time and space. That’s low probability.”

“Like how low?”

Howard crossed his arms and wrinkled his nose. “Like really low. Never see it.”

“Huh.” Louis looked again at the pile of mail on Renée’s desk. Outside the window Japanese tourists were filing up an asphalt-topped path between oak trees.

Howard leaned dangerously far back in his swivel chair and retrieved his rubber band with outstretched fingers. “Wanna see something else?” Feet still on his desk, he rolled back and opened his top drawer and handed Louis a photograph, a 5 X 7 on yellowing, once-glossy paper. It was a picture of an adolescent girl in a marching-band uniform. She was clutching a clarinet to her chest. The jacket was Prussian blue with cream-colored trim and gold buttons; the cap had a black plastic bill and gold braid on the band. Long limp hair, mid-seventies hair, framed her face and did its best to conceal (but actually in effect extended and accentuated) the zones of acne on her cheeks and forehead. She was wearing the rigid, self-defeating smirk of teens who hate their face and for whom being photographed is an unspeakable cruelty, and was staring at an infinity somewhere to her left, as if by not meeting the camera’s eye she could make it overlook her. Pentagonal yellow leaves lay on the lawn between her and an out-of-focus station wagon and a double-door garage.

“You know who it is?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“It’s Renée.”

“Where’d you get it?”

Howard slammed his back into the vinyl backrest of his chair several times. Then he shoved off the desk with his feet and rolled halfway across the room. “Found it.”

“Where?”

“Just got it.”

Louis tried to give it back.

“Take it,” Howard said. “You want it?”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

Howard shrugged. He’d made his last offer.

“Did you steal it?”

“Just got it. You want it, take it. I don’t want it.”

In the twilight, through his open window, he heard John Mullins tell the soprano and her husband that that nice-looking fella next door here — just moved in, nice-looking kid — had gotten fired from his job. He told ’em he didn’t believe in Jesus, and they fired him.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Louis said.

Renée was eating seedless red grapes at her kitchen table. She held the glass bowl at chest level and used only her wrist, bending it back and forth efficiently, to convey them to her mouth. “Very bad week for that.”

“I got what’s-his-face, Terry, once, and he hung up on me.”

“People are a little angry with me, through no fault of my own.” Quiet in bare feet, she got up and put the grape bones in the sink. Sweat stuck her hair to her neck and forehead in narrow, curving blades. In the window behind Louis, a box fan hummed on Lo, dispensing comfort with its sound, not its draft. (While their dressings are being changed, burn patients would rather listen to white noise than to music.)

“I’ll just give you an idea of what things have been like.” She showed him the jack of her disconnected telephone, then plugged it in and upended a paper shopping bag from DeMoula’s Market Basket, dumping maybe sixty or eighty envelopes onto the kitchen table. “Here’s a nice one.” She handed him an envelope without a return address. It contained a typewritten note:

“Gets right to the point,” she said brightly. “Here’s another nice one.”

This had been typed on the back of an nth-generation Xerox reading:

has IMPACT but sometimes you cannot get through. Sometimes the number will be changed temporarily to an unlisted number. Sometimes you will get a busy signal or a no-answer or a machine. If a work number has been changed, get the new one from directory assistance (555-1212). Remember that clinics and private doctors cannot afford to be unlisted. Persistence is important — for a week, two weeks, even three. However it is also important to match EACH CALL with a first class letter. If the chain is not broken, it has been estimated that each pro-abortionist on the list will receive UPWARDS OF 1600 LETTERS by the time all nine boxes on page 1 are full. There is power in numbers! Imagine the impact of 1600 impassioned personal pleas! And 1600 telephone calls! But if you break the chain this number will be cut in half, and if another friend breaks the chain, it will be cut in half again.

Jesus fed 5000 with five loaves and two fishes. You can have the SAME POWER if you send out six copies of this letter. If this copy is too blurry, retype before sending.

Note: Long distance dialing is cheaper between 5pm and 8am (local time), but keep in mind most clinics keep regular working hours in their time zone (i.e. 9 to 5).

HOW TO CHOOSE

DO NOT choose names from the list at random. Start with the DAY OF THE MONTH you were born on — you will see there are 31 names on the list — and work forwards through the list if you were born in an odd-numbered month (e.g. January =1, February = 2 etc.), and backwards if you were born

“I’m going to eat some more grapes,” Renée said. “Do you want some?” Her refrigerator had round shoulders and a handle that latched. The chrome trademark on the door said fiat.

Louis was shaking his head in wonder. “This is so much worse than what happened to me.”

“You sure you don’t want any? Grapes?”

“Who put you on the list?”

“Stites or somebody else in his organization, I’m 95 percent sure. It’s all Boston-area addresses. The thing about ‘Hoffmann Laboratories’ is a nice touch. These people aren’t stupid.”

“You ought to complain to somebody.”

“I talked on the phone to this guy at the Globe. He asked me to send him some copies of the letters, which I did. I guess they want to see who else is getting them before they run anything. He said he’d call me back through the department office, but he hasn’t yet.”

“What about the post office. The phone company.”

“That just seemed hopeless somehow. I don’t care about getting these people prosecuted, I only care about the world knowing what incredible jerks they are.”

The telephone on the table began to ring. Louis put his hand on it and looked at Renée, who shrugged.

“Is, ah, Dr. Seechek there?”

“Speaking.”

“Oh, you’re a man, I didn’t—”

“No, sir,” Louis said. “I have a deep voice.”

Renée threw him a very doubtful look.

“My name is Joe. Uh, Doe. John Doe. I understand you’re employed at the Hoffman Laboratories and”—Mr. Doe’s voice became high and strangled—“that abortions are performed there?”

“Yeah, I understand you understand that.”

“I’d kinda like to talk to you about your work for a second, if I can, Dr. Seechek. Do you have a second?”

Louis was enjoying himself, but Renée unplugged the phone, took the handset from him, and said to the dead line, “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.” The DeMoula’s bag tore as she began to stuff her hate mail back inside it, faint shadows of words playing on her lips. He was surprised to notice areas of redness and roughness encroaching on her pale complexion. He wondered whether this was a recent development or whether, clued in by the old photograph, he was seeing things about her that until now her manner had concealed. Her pores had become evident. There was a patch of subdued but not eradicated acne high on one cheek, also blemishes around her mouth that made it seem to run. She struck him as younger and a little dirtier, more like the kind of girl it was easy to do whatever you wanted with — the kind with more passion than self-esteem.

“I hate it when women swear,” she said.

“Why?”

She stood at the head of the table. “I guess because there’s this idea that it’s sexy, in the popular imagination. The approved male popular imagination. Even when a woman says fuck in anger, even a radical feminist saying fuck, that’s a turn-on. Every time I hear a woman do it I get carried—” She addressed Louis directly. “I get carried to the subway station at Central Square. There’s an angry woman there, with her bags and her papers. It’s like her face is the face of All Women Saying Fuck. This insane anger towards everybody, which to me is especially ugly in a woman, although this is not politically correct of me and therefore makes me wonder what exactly my problem is. And I can’t help mentioning,” she went on, entirely to herself, “something else I forgot the other night, when you asked me what my problem is with Boston, I forgot to mention the way people call the subway the T. The people, I mean the implicating people, don’t say ‘I’m going to take the subway,’ they say ‘I’ll take the T.’ What’s sick — to me; what I consider sick — is that it’s like this code word, which every time I hear I become angry because I can hear the whole history, all these kids learning to say ‘T’ instead of ‘subway.’ They write home to their parents about taking the T. They explain that it’s called the T, which is kind of cute. Oh, listen to me.” She walked away, hitting herself in the head. “You wonder why I didn’t call you.”

Louis karate-chopped the tabletop impatiently. “Is there any beer or something?”

“It’s because I can’t control myself.”

“Or any kind of liquor or drug that we could do together here.”

The hum of the fan in the window, its quiet, oiled grinding, was the sound of all night hours in a heat wave. The hour of conversation wearing thin. The hour when a reflected piece of streetlight hovers at a certain point the blades pass through. The hour when dawn forces itself through the weary curtains. The hum and the hours all the same, the monotone of humid heat, and the burn patients say Don’t turn it up. Don’t turn it down. Let it stay right like it is.

“Do you have friends?” Louis asked, opening bottles. “People you can call up?”

“Sure. I mean, I used to.” Renée, across the table from him, showed no intention of drinking the beer he handed her. “I had a roommate, who I really liked, although she’s married now. I guess I was an improvident gardener. I made friends with people a couple of years older than me at work, people from the tail end of the sixties who didn’t like the front end of the eighties, which I didn’t either. I guess what I have now is an interesting correspondence, and some places to stay in Colorado and California.” With her thumbnails, she bunched up her sweating bottle’s neck wrapper like a cuticle, trying belatedly to gauge the angle of his question. “I see people, if that’s what you mean.” Her eyes followed her right index finger as she ran it along the edge of the table. She called her hand back and placed it palm-down to one side of her full bottle, and placed her other hand palm-down to the other side of the bottle. She sat perfectly still for a moment, staring at the bottle. Then, with violent decision, as though sitting like this had been a physical torment all along, she stood up without even pushing the chair away from the table. She had to stagger for balance on one leg and slide the chair back to extricate herself, and the chair stuck on the humid floor and tipped over.

She returned from her bedroom with several manila folders. “I’ve been staying in the library,” she said, righting the chair. “Two people came to my office last Friday to be nasty in person. I haven’t gone back since.”

“That’s what Howard said.”

She nodded, yawning. “I was thinking about what that boyfriend of your sister’s was saying. I remembered something, or I thought I did. I remembered it was on a right-hand page facing something else I’d looked at. And. I was right.” From the top folder she took a stapled sheaf of photocopies. “This is an article from the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, July ’69. You can just read the abstract and what I’ve underlined.”

“What for?” Louis said.

“Because it’s interesting.”

A. F. Krasner

Research Chemist, Sweeting-Aldren Industries

Abstract: Significant releases of methane and petroleum in non-fossiliferous regimes (Siljan, Wellingby Hills, Taylorsville) have called into question the assumption that subterranean hydrocarbon deposits derive principally from breakdown of trapped organic matter. Improved estimates of the chemical composition of comets and the major planets suggest levels of carbon within the Earth 10² — 10⁵ times larger than earlier estimates. A laboratory study demonstrates the possibility of synthesizing petroleum from elementary hydrocarbons under pressures approaching those in the Earth’s interior. A model of hydrocarbon capture during planetogenesis predicts the formation and accumulation of methane and more complex hydrocarbons at the upper boundary of the asthenosphere and explains the releases observed at Wellingby Hills. A program of deep drilling to further test the model is proposed.

The only underlined words Louis could find in the article were in the last paragraph. Renée had done her underlining with a straightedge, a work habit that had always given him the creeps. Advances in deep-well technology have for the first time made feasible narrow-bore holes to depths in excess of 25,000 feet. Two sites in the Berkshire Mountains Synclinorium, including the Brixwold Pluton (in the vicinity of which there is some evidence of slow methane release), have been chosen for a drilling program, initiated by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, which pending final funding will commence in December 1969 and, it is hoped, attain the critical depth of 25,000 feet in Spring of 1971. Significant quantities of methane or petroleum found at this depth, under a heavily metamorphosed granitic pluton overlaying pre-Cambrian schists, would provide strong confirmation of the trapped-layer model.

“Lot of big words here,” Louis said.

“Actually a seminal article in its way.” Renée, with unseemly possessiveness, kept a hand extended until he gave her back the article. “The evidence back then was so flimsy the paper should never have been published, but this is an idea that’s still around. That there’s this huge ocean of crude oil and natural gas pooling right below the earth’s crust, and that all this fuel is from the primordial gunk that went into making the planet, and that the total reserves of so-called fossil fuels are just a drop in the bucket compared to all this stuff farther down. The Swedish government fairly recently spent ten million dollars drilling an inconclusive well in this Siljan basin. The idea’s not dead. Not many people take it seriously, though.”

“Uh huh.”

“So then there’s this thing from Nature. January ’70.”

She’d neatly boxed in red ink a one-paragraph note in the News section to the effect that the American chemical concern Sweeting-Aldren had begun to sink a deep well at an undisclosed site in eastern Massachusetts, with a view to testing the hypothesis of chemist A. F. Krasner regarding the non-fossil origin of much of the world’s oil and natural gas. The drilling was proceeding at a rate of 100 feet per day and, allowing for the usual delays and equipment failures, was expected to reach 25,000 feet—“the critical depth, in Krasner’s view”—late the next spring.

“Do you notice anything there?”

Louis waved a hand tiredly. “These brain-teaser kind of things—”

“The Berkshires aren’t in eastern Massachusetts.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “I didn’t know that. So I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway. So it’s good you told me.”

Renée closed one folder and opened another. The handwriting on the tabs of the folders was as regimented as a draftsman’s. “February 25, 1987,” she said. “Boston Globe: Tremors in Essex County Persist..” She handed Louis a photocopied clipping. “April 12, 1987. Boston Globe, again. ‘Scientists Puzzled by Peabody Earthquake Swarm. ’” She took out a third article. “Earthquake Notes, 1988, number 2, The Peabody Microseisms of January-April 1987 and Their Tectonic Environment.’ Penultimate paragraph: ‘The spatial and temporal distribution of the microseisms bears a marked similarity to known instances of induced seismicity in the vicinity of injection wells.’ Emphasis added. ‘However, the relatively great depth of the Peabody tremors (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating within a 20-kilometer radius surrounding the site of activity. ’”

She looked her beer bottle in the face for a second, and then took a long pull. She was definitely able to control herself now.

“I remember when this swarm started up in Peabody. It happens in a couple other places in New England with some regularity. You get these tiny earthquakes, for the most part too small to feel. Anywhere from one to several hundred per day for days or weeks or months. Nobody really knows what causes them. The Peabody series was of interest because there’d never been anything like it there before.”

“Did I understand this right that injection wells cause earthquakes?”

“Yeah, it’s called induced seismicity. It happens after you’ve been pumping lots of liquid underground, and basically it’s as if the rock down there gets slippery from all the extra liquid. The classic example was in the early sixties, at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, outside Denver. The Army was making chemical weapons and generating millions of gallons of toxic liquid waste and pumping it down a 12,000-foot well. Denver had always been pretty quiet seismically, but about a month after the pumping started they started recording all these earthquakes. On average about one a day, none of them bigger than 4.5 or so. Wheneyer they stopped pumping, the earthquakes stopped too, and when they started again, so did the earthquakes. It was pretty open and shut. The GS did a study—”

“The what?”

Renée blinked. “Geological Survey. They pumped water into dry oil wells in western Colorado. Whenever the water pressure in the bedrock got above 3,700 pounds per square inch the earthquakes started up. If you have some kind of pre-existing strain underground, the water in the cracks lubricates things and disturbs the balance of forces. The same thing also happens when you build a dam and form a reservoir. The weight of the new lake forces water into the underlying rock. There was a long series of events in Nevada, behind the Hoover Dam, after it filled up. Same thing in Egypt, behind the Aswan Dam. Same thing in Zambia, and China, and India. I think the one in India was very good-sized. Killed a couple hundred people.”

“I get the feeling you don’t spend your nights watching baseball on TV.”

She opened a third folder, disregarding him. “Krasner disappears from the literature after one article. He’s not in any chemistry journal, not in any geophysics journal, and he was never in American Men and Women of Science. One full-length paper, one paragraph in Nature, and that’s it. His theory got reinvented independently in the late seventies by a guy named Gold, at Cornell. Gold cites Krasner once, calls him ‘prescient,’ in the papers I could find. And that’s it.”

“You’ve read all these things.”

“I’ve been stuck in the library.”

“And you underline them and put them in folders even when you’re not going to get graded on them.”

“That’s right.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Why?” The question seemed almost to offend her. “Because I’m curious.”

“You’re curious. You do all this stuff because you’re curious.”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing else in it for you.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Just simple curiosity.”

“How many times do I have to say it?”

Louis blew out air. He tapped on the tabletop. Blew out more air. “You’ve been talking to my mother again.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Only that she has a large financial interest in Sweeting-Aldren.”

“I didn’t know that. That’s actually very interesting. But I haven’t been talking to her, and I definitely did not know that.” She shuddered a little, trying to rid herself of his vague imputations.

“So go on,” he said.

“There’s nothing else, really. It’s just — You know. It’s just like you say. My little presentation.”

“I’m sorry. I want to hear the rest. Drink some beer. Tell me the rest.”

She took a deep breath and started speaking to the tabletop, full of body English, as though engaging him directly; but it was clearly beyond her power to sustain both articulateness and eye contact.

“In 1969 Sweeting-Aldren’s swimming in cash, mainly because of Vietnam. They have a bunch of scientists on the payroll, and this person Krasner comes up with a theory that Massachusetts is sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The company decides to fund a hole to see if he’s right, except something happens to make them change their mind about where to put it. Who knows what. Maybe they figure that if there’s a huge pool of crude oil under western Mass, it must be under eastern Mass too, where they own property. The only reason to drill at the site in western Mass is because the site’s geology is supposedly incompatible with petroleum deposits. But what do they care about Krasner’s theory? They’re worried about getting some money out of the hole, if it happens not to be a gusher. And one thing is in 1969 people are also starting to get nervous about the environment, especially water pollution, and what I think they decide is that if the deep well comes up dry, they’re going to pump industrial waste down it. And meanwhile Krasner retires, or dies, or opens an antiques store. Or was just a pseudonym to begin with.”

“And pump industrial waste down it. ”

“And then what your sister’s boyfriend was saying”—the sound of Louis’s voice caused her to concentrate all the more on the tabletop—“is that even now the company is dumping a million gallons of effluents every year. But in the paper, basically every day for the last two weeks”—she opened another folder, which he could see was full of clippings from the Globe—“both the company and the EPA say the company puts nothing in the Danvers River except clean, slightly oily hot water. The plant’s a model nonpolluter.”

He thought: And pump industrial waste down it.

“So where did they drill? Obviously they drilled within a couple miles of the plant in Peabody. And the thing is you can pump liquid into a hole for a long time before anything happens. It takes a lot of liquid to bring what’s called the pore pressure to the critical level where the rock starts to relieve its internal stresses by rupturing seismically. It’s not implausible that Sweeting-Aldren was injecting effluents from the early seventies all the way into the mideighties without anything happening. But suddenly they reach the critical level, say in January ’87, and they start having little earthquakes. The swarm goes on for four months and then stops, which to me suggests the company got scared and stopped pumping. And for a couple of years everything’s quiet, and then about two weeks after the first Ipswich event there suddenly start being these earthquakes in Peabody again — the papers talk about Lynn too, but the epicentral area is the same as in the ’87 series — which nobody can relate to the Ipswich events as anything but a low-probability coincidence. But what’s been happening to all these wastes that the company normally would have been pumping underground? They had to stop pumping in ’87, and so presumably they’ve had to store the liquid somewhere, which I’m sure they’re not happy about. And maybe what they’ve been waiting for is some good-sized local earthquake, so they could start pumping in Peabody again, full speed ahead, with the idea that any new earthquakes would be associated with the Ipswich events. Maybe what spilled on Easter was some of the backlog they’d been storing up since ’87. Maybe they decided they had to try to get as much of that stuff underground as soon as possible, no matter what happened. And sure enough, within a week or two, we start getting more tremors in Peabody.”

Finished at last, Renée pushed her hair off her forehead and took another long pull on her beer, withdrawing into herself, taking care not to expect any response. Louis was staring at the bottle of Joy by the faucet of her deep, white sink. The kitchen had grown brighter and smaller. He leaned back in his chair, filling the sweet spot of his field of vision with her image. “The thing about the stuff in 1987, how it can’t be from a well. Can you read that again?” Obediently she opened the proper folder. “‘However, the relatively great depth’?”

“Yes! Yes! That proves it, doesn’t it?”

“‘. (i.e., on average 3 kilometers deeper than the deepest commercial waste-disposal wells) would appear to rule out such a mechanism. Furthermore there are no licensed injection wells operating—.”

“Those slimes! Those slimes! This is great” Louis leaned over the table and put his hands on her ears and kissed her on the mouth. Then he started pacing the room, socking the palm of his hand.

“Do you know something about these people?” she said.

“They’re slimes!”

“You’ve met them.”

“I told you, my mom’s like this major stockholder all of a sudden. I met them at my grandmother’s funeral. They’re these totally classic corporate pigs.” He lifted Renée out of her chair by the armpits so he could squeeze her and kiss her again. “You’re amazing. I can’t believe you just sat down and figured this all out. You’re terrific.”

He lifted her off the floor and set her down. She looked at him as if she hoped he wouldn’t do this again.

“It’s illegal, right?” He pushed his glasses back up his sweaty nose. “To pump waste underground without a license?”

“I assume. Otherwise why have licenses?”

“Ha! And if these earthquakes cause damage, the company’s liable, right?”

“I don’t know. In theory, yes. At least for any damage near Peabody. It’s pretty gross negligence on their part. It would be a harder thing to prove, though, if it’s a matter of a large earthquake some distance away and you had to speculate about whether what they’d done in Peabody had triggered a more general release of strain.”

“You mean that’s possible? That can happen? You can trigger things like that? Boston gets wiped out and the company has to pay for it?” Louis was getting more euphoric by the second.

“It’s very unlikely that Boston’s going to get wiped out,” Renée said. “And although there’s a lot of talk about trigger events, it’s very hard to demonstrate strict causality. You can talk about the April 6 event in Ipswich having ‘triggered’ the Easter event, but if you don’t know what causes earthquakes to occur at the particular times they do, and we don’t know this, you might as well say ‘precede’ instead of ‘trigger. ”

“But if the first earthquake is caused by pumping, and then you have a major one. ”

“There’d be a case, yes. But not an airtight case.”

“But anything that happens right where they’re pumping, you’d have a good case there.”

“I think so. For a civil suit. Probably by insurance companies.”

“So the only question is, Do we stick it to ’em right now for breaking the law all these years, or do we maybe wait, and see if something worse happens, and then stick it to ’em for that too.”

“You mean wait and see if some people get killed?”

“Yeah!”

“Well.” Renée gathered up her folders and hugged them to her chest. “You seem to have a grudge against these people, which I of course don’t, although if I’m right about this I agree it’s pretty disgusting. But I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it.” The first-person singular spoke for itself. “The Peabody earthquakes are of general interest to the scientific community. I might do some more research and then talk to people at MIT and Boston College. The EPA should also be talked to, maybe the press too. If the company does induce a destructive earthquake I’d just as soon not have it on my conscience.”

“Why would it be on your conscience?”

“Because I might have been able to prevent it.”

Louis’s surprise was genuine. “You actually believe in this stuff? Service to mankind and all that?”

In the calm upper stories of Renée’s face a powerful furnace kicked on suddenly, a bank of white jets of anger. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”

“Yeah, but, like, who’s to say what’s a service to mankind? If we let the company off the hook before anything worse happens, maybe we save a few lives. But if we wait and something worse does happen and then we blow the whistle, then it becomes a message. Then maybe people finally see what kind of sharks we have running the country. Which might really be a service to mankind.”

“All right, Louis.” Her use of his name and her sudden smileyness sent a chill down his spine. This was a person whose disapproval he feared. She was pushing the stack of folders into his hands. “It’s all yours. I think you should show this to a man named Larry Axelrod at MIT; I think you should show it to the EPA. Are you listening? I’m telling you what the right thing to do is, and if you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem, not mine. All right?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He laughed defusingly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I slept with you, once.”

“And if we go broadcasting the news, what’s the company going to do? It’s going to deny everything. It’ll bulldoze everything over, and probably start doing something even worse with all this waste, and then you won’t have anything, not even the satisfaction of being right.”

“It’s your decision.”

“We make some inquiries. We talk to my good friend Peter. Drive up to Peabody and look around. Take some pictures maybe. Then we’ve got some hard proof to go to whoever with.”

“I did this work myself, you know. I didn’t necessarily mean for you to come over and make yourself an equal partner.”

“I tell you how terrific you are—?”

“Like a dog that’s been good? I can fetch?”

“Oh, all right, well.” He tossed the files into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, where Renée’s extra paper bags were carefully folded. “Keep it. And keep your little haircut too. And your little earrings, and your little smiles, and your neat little apartment. Your little folders. And your theories, and your scruples, and your old roommate, and your former friends. You know, this whole neat little perfect life. Just keep it.”

The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur. Time flowed along an axis through the center of the fan, and the tips of the blades traced unending spirals around this axis.

“I don’t even know you,” Renée said. “And you just hurt me. There was no reason to hurt me. I didn’t do a single thing to you, except not call you.”

“And tell me to get lost.”

“And tell you to get lost. That’s true. I did tell you to get lost. Everything you said is true. But it doesn’t mean you’re any better than I am. You’re just less exposed. And I’m so embarrassed.” She kept her shoulders rigid as she walked from the room, tottering slightly and repeating, “I’m so embarrassed.”

Louis drank another beer and listened to the fan. After about half an hour he knocked on the bedroom door. When she didn’t answer, he opened it and followed the wedge of light into the dark, stuffy room. She was nowhere in sight. Only after he’d looked behind her bed and desk and behind the drawn window shades did he see the light behind the closet door, powered by a cord leading over from a socket. He knocked.

“Yeah?”

She was cross-legged on the closet floor, bending over a lamp. The pages of The New York Times Magazine she was reading were strewn with big puckered dots of perspiration from her head. Her eyes rolled up and looked at him. “What do you want?”

Crouching, he took her hot, limp hands in his own. Birds were chirping angrily outside. “I don’t want to go,” he said. His stomach plummeted; he attributed this to the sick-making effort of sincerity. However, the real problem was the floor, which was moving. The panic that flashed through Renée’s face was so cartoonishly pure he almost laughed. Then the left side of the doorframe lurched closer to him, and he tried to rise out of his crouch, like a surfer who’d caught a wave, and the frame abandoned him on the left and the right side body-checked him and knocked him onto his butt. Renée was fighting with the clothes and hangers she’d stood up into. She stepped on Louis, who was not good footing, and stumbled free of the closet. Things had been falling during the interval, and now pencils and pens were rolling across the floor, roaming and vibrating and bouncing like drops of water in hot oil. There was also a deep sound that was less sound than an idea of sound, a drowning of the human in the physical. And then only the miniature rumble, clear and strangely personal, of a beer bottle crossing the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry I stepped on you,” Renée said.

“Did you step on me?”

They wandered around the disturbed apartment, oblivious to each other. The baby downstairs was crying, but the Dobermans on the first floor were either silent or out for the evening, eating prime rib somewhere. Louis picked up two beer bottles and, forgetting he’d meant to set them on the kitchen table, carried them from room to room and finally left them on the cushion of an armchair. He was dazed and without dignity, as if in the wake of a first kiss. Renée had a jar of pencils in her hand when he bumped into her in the hallway. “It’s like I’ve been tickled,” she said, dodging his encircling arm, “to the point where if you touch me—” she fought him off with her elbow—

The jar sailed down the hallway and the glass popped and the pencils bounced tunefully. Louis tickled her convulsing belly, and she slugged away at his arms and ribs, not hurting him at all and shouting pretty much constantly. Clothes were partially removed, body parts exposed, necks bent, the hard floor cursed. They kissed with their entire heads, like mountain goats. What was happening wasn’t so much sex as a kind of banging together, a clapping and clenching of hands the size of bodies, a re-creation of strong motion; something other than satisfaction wanted out. Louis came violently and hardly noticed, he was so intent on the way she pitched beneath him. It seemed like she was trying to shed him even as they kept colliding, and finally they collided so hard they did separate and, still vibrating like bells, sat up against opposing walls in obscene disarray, shackled at the ankles by twisted jeans and underpants. Farther up the hallway there was broken glass and a swollen tampon at the end of a bloody skid mark.

Renée frowned. “I cut my hand.”

Louis found his glasses and crawled over to look. On her palm was a semicircle of loosened skin, a bluish fish scale surrounded by crimson trickles and orange smears. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you OK otherwise?”

She looked down at her ankles. “I can’t imagine a more degrading position to be caught in. But otherwise.”

They took turns washing in the bathroom, which was in antiseptic condition apart from the fact that in patching her hand Renée had unaccountably left a Curad wrapper in the sink. Louis opened her medicine chest and found expensive facial cleansers, the basic drugs, nonoxynol jelly, some dental floss.

She was opening beers in the kitchen. The fan had fallen from the window, unplugging itself; it was still on the floor. Louis started to turn on the radio. “Don’t,” she said.

“What do you have for music?”

“The radio. But I don’t want to hear about the earthquake. Not even — not even anything.”

“You don’t have any tapes?”

She leaned against the table and drank. “I have. no tapes.”

“What’s this?” He held up a tape.

She regarded it soberly. “That’s a tape.”

“But it’s not music?”

She tried several times to say something, and stopped each time. “You’re kind of nosy.”

“Forget I asked.”

“It’s one song. Which I never listen to. There’s no significance to this, it’s just a song. Do you want me to embarrass myself?”

“Yes. Yes. More than anything.”

She sat cross-legged on a chair and hugged herself, covering the nakedness that went through clothes. “It’s only that when I was seventeen. ”

“I was ten!”

“Thank you for pointing that out.”

Louis wondered what the awful confession would be.

“I was a punk fan,” she said. “Or should I say new wave? These words.” She hugged herself more tightly. “I can hardly make myself say them. But I was very happy at the time. And I still want people to know I saw Elvis Costello four times in ’78 and ’79. But there’s so much to explain about how he was different and I was different. I want people to be impressed but it’s just not impressive. I was sprayed by David Byrne’s saliva before he got blissy. I was right up against the stage. I got a pick from Graham Parker, I took it right from his hand.”

“Are you serious? Can I see it?”

“Exciting. It really was. I saw the Clash and the Buzzcocks and the Gang Of Four. It embarrasses me to even say the names now, but I saw them and I knew their lyrics, and they were all so good until eventually they all got so bad.”

“They were great,” Louis said. “I was kind of a ham operator, in high school? I used to trade Nick Lowe lyrics with this person in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Morse code. "She was a winner / That became the doggie’s dinner’? Di-di-dit, di-di-di-dit.?”

Renée seemed to assume he was joking. “I liked the attitude,” she said. “But I wasn’t really a punk. The real punks scared the hell out of me. They were violent and sexist, and they hardly even listened to the music.”

“Did you have a biker’s jacket?”

“Suede,” she said bitterly. “Which I was very happy with then and which is now a source of shame that will never die. A suede jacket sums me up completely. There were a lot of people like me at the concerts, although I think a difference between me and the others was that I thought this was it. I loved the music. I applied it to my life, but in a, what’s the word, hermetic way. The place where it all happened was in dorm rooms, where I had the lyric sheets. It kills me to think about how innocent and happy I was, even though at the time what I thought the whole message was was black humor and anger and apocalypse. You can be very innocent and happy about that stuff too. And it seemed so much safer than sixties and seventies music, because it wasn’t really happy or innocent or hopeful at all. It was tough and simple. I kept all the records, and I liked the records better and better. I kept on dressing the way bands dressed in ’78. The same way I dress now, which is like nothing, you know, jeans and T-shirts. But it got to be 1985, and it started to seem pathetic that the only records I listened to were these old records. But I didn’t like the new music or at least I wasn’t finding out about the good things, because I wasn’t in college anymore.”

She took the last two beers from the refrigerator. Louis had been observing that every time he drank from his bottle, she drank from hers.

“Meanwhile I stopped listening to more than a song or two at a time. I guess partly I was trying not to get tired of the things I loved, and partly I was so affected that it was too distracting to play a whole album, I couldn’t do any work, I mean, because the music was designed to rev you up, to make you anxious and angry and excited, and so it was very bad music to move on in life with, because it’s one kind of music that simply won’t function as background. But the biggest thing was just how embarrassed I was to see myself still listening to it.”

“You like the Kinks?”

“Never much.”

“Lou Reed? Roxy Music? Waitresses? XTC? Banshees? Early Bowie? Warren Zevon?”

“Some of them, yeah. I never really bought that many records, because I stopped taking money from my parents. But—”

“But so.”

“I started to pare down. I got rid of the really old stuff, the stuff I had from high school, and I got rid of the records that only had one or two good songs on them. Then I started taping the medium-good records, and keeping the good part. Then I decided it was stupid to have a big stereo, because I could get the same effect from the little tape player — you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever really talked about this with. I just wanted to say that.”

They looked at each other. The refrigerator shuddered and fell silent. “I like you too,” Louis said.

She pushed her hair around, doing a good job of seeming not to care. “But so I was left with about twenty tapes which I listened to less and less, just one or two songs every once in a while, when I needed to feel better. It used to make me feel better because it made me feel tough, and angry and lonely in a good way. But then without my even really noticing, it started to make me feel better because it made me feel young, the way ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ makes forty-year-olds feel young. When I finally noticed this I was even less inclined to play the tapes. And did I really ever need to hear ‘Red Shoes’ again?”

“No argument on that one.”

“Or any of Give ’Em Enough Rope? Or even any Pretenders?”

“Fine records. Keep ’em.”

“I got rid of everything. I pared it down to one song, one more or less arbitrary song, which I haven’t listened to in at least six months, if not more like a year. I don’t listen to it. But I also can’t bring myself to throw it away.”

“Can I play it?”

She shook her head. “Sure. Just be decent to me. I know you’re a radio person.”

Out of the little tape machine came the opening guitar line on Television’s first record.

“Oh,” Louis said, increasing the volume. “Fine song. You dance?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Me neither.”

“I could when I was twenty.”

Iunderstandall. ISEENO.

destructiveurges. ISEENO.

Itseemssoperfect. ISEENO.

I SEE. I SEE NO. I SEE NO EVIL

“You can turn it off.”

“Wait, doesn’t Verlaine have like a perfect riff in here? It would have been good to hear these people before they broke up. Or did you?”

“No.”

“I hear they were very fine.”

“Everything became a competition. I stopped trying to get to concerts because it seemed like I was only trying to build credentials as a concertgoer. Which wasn’t working anyway. I ran into people who went to clubs every weekend. People who’d seen the Clash before I had. People who were friends with Tina Weymouth’s siblings. People who hung around at CBGB and could invest so much more time in being cool. Maybe it was just self-protection, but I started despising these people, and the way they all had to constantly be scrambling to discover something new. I decided this was just pathetic. But I was still afraid of these people. I was afraid they’d find out how much I loved the music I’d grown up with. It seemed like the only way to compete with all their originality, the only way to keep my love safe, was to hate music. Which wasn’t a particularly original solution either, but at least I was protected. And it really is pretty easy to hate rock and roll.”

“Less so jazz and classical.”

“No problem, for me. I just think about the personalities of the people who play it for brunch, and even worse the people who really love it. How good it makes them feel about themselves to know who played drums for Charlie Parker in nineteen-whatever, and how the songs in The Magic Flute go. I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes, and be known and defined by them. If you’re not artistic, which I’m not, at all, and you still have to make these aesthetic decisions. That’s why punk was so good for me. It was this style I picked up before I got too selfconscious about style. I didn’t have to apologize, in my own mind. But then I got older, and suddenly it started to define me anyway, in a very pathetic way. Plus suddenly everybody under the age of forty had a leather jacket and fifties sunglasses and punky clothes, and they all felt really cool. At which point jazz might have been a good thing to turn to, except it was art, and as soon as something becomes art, you get experts, and do I want to be one of these experts who’re all trying to be more knowledgeable than each other? But if you don’t become an expert, you might play something and like it and then find out it’s considered sentimental or unoriginal or something. And I know from experience that people are so insecure that they never hesitate to let you know that what they like is more original and better than what you like, or that they liked what you like years before you liked it. I don’t even have time. And it’s the same with African music, and Latin music. I’m terrified of being implicated by all the smarmy experts. Either that or finding out my tastes aren’t good, or aren’t original. Radio would be the perfect solution, except so much of what they play is bad.”

I’m running wild with the one I love

I see no evil—

I’m running wild with the one-eyed ones

I see no evil—

Pull down the future with the one you love

Louis turned off the tape player. “Let’s go get some stuff from my apartment.”

“Can you drive?”

“Spoken like a true punk.”

On the stairs Renée said, “The time to be a punk was fifteen years ago. It’s just utterly embarrassing to try to be one now.”

“Anarchy’s a very old idea,” he said, breathing through his mouth in the dog zone.

Outside, on Pleasant Avenue, it was no longer a holiday but a dead Thursday night. The night was cool, with a foretaste of dew in the air. Louis drove as fast as he dared and in his drunkenness caught only about one out of every three or four seconds as they passed. Distant, ghostly sirens in the night formed a cushion of noise on which the tires seemed to glide and bounce like water skis. Just east of Davis Square, the Civic plunged into a tunnel of powerlessness, deep inside which was visible the turning of blue flashers. Two figures lit only by glowing urban clouds were straining to hustle what appeared to be cartons of liquor up a side street.

“Looters! Were those looters? They were looters!”

Lights were burning in his apartment. The biggest pieces of furniture hadn’t budged, but the vase made of Mount St. Helens ash had fallen from the wall unit and broken in two, and some of the dining-room chairs had edged away from the table. Behind the closed door of Toby’s room a dot-matrix printer gulped and stridulated. Renée flopped in a U-shape on Louis’s futon. He had to set down the beer and gin and tapes he’d collected and pull her to her feet.

When they returned to her apartment she opened beer bottles briskly. “What’s your favorite kind of music?” she said.

“I don’t believe in favorites. I don’t have any. This is my favorite, just a second here.” He turned the machine up loud.

I love the sound of breaking glass.

Especially when I’m lonely.

I need the noises of destruction.

When there’s nothing new.

“This is good. Who is it?”

“This? My God. The great Nick Lowe? It’s a classic.”

“How old?”

“Bronze Age. Here.” Louis interrupted the song. “We’ll put in something almost as old as me. Everybody likes this record. It’s a classic. It never gets old. Isn’t that what a classic is?”

“I can’t think of anything more pathetic than radio stations that play ‘classic rock’. ”

“Is this pathetic?”

It was Exile on Main Street.

“No,” Renée said. “But I don’t think you understand me.”

“I could play you stuff from now until next Thursday that’s old but not pathetic.”

“That’s right. Because you’re one of those people. I mean, you’re in radio. It’s your business.”

“So don’t complain. I’ll take care of your music for you. Do I feel like an old fart when I listen to this? This is not James Taylor here. It’s sloppy, it’s basic, it’s good.”

“Good for you, maybe. For me it’s just retro. Which feels very sweet right now, but it won’t last. None of these feelings last.”

She continued to match him beer for beer. It was a little before three when “Soul Survivor” played and the tape finally ended. They drank gin and passed a mouthful back and forth until Louis lost it down his neck. A raccoon came to the window and pressed its rubber nose against the screen and stuck a paw through a hole in the screen. “My raccoon!” Renée exclaimed, stumbling towards the window. “It’s my raccoon, that comes and visits me. It comes. sometimes. Oh!” She cried out tragically. “It’s hurt! Look, it’s hurt. I’m saying look. It’s hurt. You can see, it cut its face. It comes up a drainpipe and comes to the window. It likes potatoes but I don’t have any. And it’s cute, but oh boy am I spinning.”

For five minutes Louis had been sitting at the table with his mouth open and his brow furrowed.

“It’s not my raccoon but it comes. frequently. It must live around here. I have an apple,” she told the animal, which had grabbed the top of the screen and was gingerly putting a hind foot through the hole in the mesh, its head wandering and sniffing, daunted by the sheemess of the wall above the window. “I’m coming with the apple,” Renée said, surging over with two quarters of a golden delicious on a saucer and raising the screen an inch. “It’s gone!” she said. “It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s. ”

Her face was gray. She threw herself against the sink and emptied her stomach into it and dropped to her knees, hands still hanging on the rim. Louis was similarly occupied in the bathroom. Sometime after this she was lying on the kitchen table and he was chasing an unrolling roll of paper towels towards a corner of the bedroom where he’d thrown up again. Sometime after this he was sleeping in the hallway, pillowing his head on the mud rug, and she was under her desk with her face against the wall and her legs sticking out. The reflector strips on her sneakers shone in the light from bulbs burning in the bathroom and kitchen. The toilet was motionless. The sink was motionless. The walls were motionless. The refrigerator fell silent, and the sphere of ambient sound swelled enormously, encompassing expressways from which a few low-frequency waves managed just barely to reach Pleasant Avenue before expiring, a stretch of train track in some northern suburb made to clack by passing tank cars, and the tiny aural remnant of a hot rod’s buzz in far eastern Somerville, on the McGrath Highway, heading out of Boston. The stove ticked, once. The lights dimmed by forty lumens, once. East wall stared at west wall and north at south, unblinking in the light. One manila folder had slipped down between paper bags and the others yawned; there was not a breath to stir the photocopies or the blade of the fan where it lay by the window. The table stood on the floor. A wineglass had shattered on the countertop. All the pieces still lay exactly where they’d first come to rest, as if the glass were still whole and could be seen whole again if only the break in time could be repaired. Books were scattered on the floor of the extra room. Two beer bottles nestled in the armchair. The armchair motionless. The motionless bookshelves silently bearing their load. The walls bearing the load of the ceiling. The ceiling motionless. Eleven beer bottles on the kitchen windowsill, green in the unsegmented incandescent light. Eleven bottles jiggling, clinking. They tumbled off the windowsill in a green shiny wave, some landing on the fan, some breaking. Thuds in the cabinets, the table rocking, a door turning on its hinge. A tower of cassettes collapsed. Crumbs danced behind the stove. Water in the toilet sloshed, panes buzzed.

The body in the hallway motionless. The body under the desk motionless. Everything motionless.

For fifteen days after the night of two earthquakes the files on Sweeting-Aldren and the Peabody microseisms lay untouched in the space by the refrigerator. It was something like superstition that prevented the otherwise orderly Renée from putting them away when she cleaned the apartment — superstition and maybe also a loathing like the one Louis felt when his eyes happened to fall on them, and the one he’d felt towards his radio equipment during those weeks before he sold it, and the one induced by the very thought of alcohol for several days after they got so drunk.

Renée set great store by the “fact” that although he recovered quickly and spent the next morning straightening the apartment, he’d thrown up before she had. He had doubts about this chronology and was surprised by the vehemence with which, still pale and unable to stay on her feet for long, she stuck to her version. It seemed like she was being rather mean about this.

On Saturday, awakened by the smell of toasted English muffins, he found an apartment key on the kitchen table. He twirled it and twirled it on its ring. He drove to his apartment and collected some supplies and appliances. In the afternoon he walked to the East Cambridge apartment of his friend Beryl Slidowsky and hung out with her. When the conversation turned to Thursday’s earthquakes, which he knew from the Globe had occurred in the neighborhood of Peabody, he not only managed to keep silent about Renée’s theory but also denied, absurdly, that he’d felt anything. Beryl was volunteering at WGBH now. She had no help to offer him employment-wise but was suitably outraged by Stites’s acquisition of WSNE. She blamed it on Libby Quinn. Libby — or someone — really had given Beryl an ulcer; she showed Louis her bottle of Tagamet.

He had a Sugar Cubes recording playing loudly when Renée came home from work with a bag of groceries. “Is that dinner?” he said.

She tossed him a fishy-looking package from DeMoula’s.

“Fish! Do I ever eat fish?” He watched her stock a cabinet. “I had some coquilles Saint-Jacques in mashed potatoes when my parents were here. I ordered them to impress my mother with my French skills. The place used insto-spuds, sort of summer-camp quality. It’s very famous.”

She broke her silence. “Do you want me to talk about well-known fish restaurants in Boston? I can do it if you’d like. I have a lot to say.”

“What kind of fish is this?”

“This is cod.”

“You bought this yourself?” He put his finger on one of the coarse-grained filets. “No one made you buy it? You decided, I’m going to eat cod tonight?”

“That’s right.”

“You felt like cod. You saw cod and were inclined to buy.”

She sniffed.

“Did you get us some liver for tomorrow?”

“Actually, I thought you might buy the food tomorrow.”

“Shit,” he apologized. “Of course. I will. I would have bought it today, but there was no way to reach you.”

“I said. You can buy it tomorrow. Did I complain?”

“No, you didn’t complain.”

She crouched to file vegetables in the yellowed plastic drawers of the Fiat refrigerator. “I’m not at all positive it’s a good idea for you to move in like this. At least not before we discuss a few things.”

“The age aspect. Our, uh, Memorial Day — Flag Day relationship.”

She laughed.

“You find me twerpy,” he said. “I don’t apply.”

“No, as a matter of fact, I find you very attractive and fun to be with. This is not what I’m talking about at all.” She frowned. “Is that how you see yourself? Why do you see yourself that way?”

Louis didn’t answer; he’d retreated up the hallway, swatting the air with his fist. No one as reliable as Dr. Seitchek had ever told him he was very attractive. He returned to the kitchen with a swagger in his step.

“So what’s to discuss?”

“Nothing. Everything. I feel like things are — out of control.” She looked him in the eye as though she wanted him to help her speak. Then she got scared and seemed to realize there was no one in the room but him and her. She vented her helplessness on the tape player, turning it off, unplugging it, and removing the cassette.

“If you want me to leave,” he said, “say leave.”

“I don’t want you to leave. That’s what I’m saying.”

He assumed the abstracted expression of a Frenchman listening to an American fail to express herself in French.

“I just want to have things clear,” she said.

“You don’t want me to leave; I don’t want me to leave; what could be clearer?”

“You’re right.” A smiley smile. She began to peel an onion. “It’s all very clear.”

Louis looked sadly at the silenced tape player. “What are you doing to that cod?”

“I’m cooking garlic and onion in olive oil and wine and saffron and tomatoes and olives and then putting the fish in and simmering it briefly.”

“Is there something I can do?”

“Do you know how to make rice?”

“No.”

“Maybe you could make a salad.”

“You could show me how to make rice.”

“Why don’t you just make a salad.”

“You mean, so I don’t fuck up the rice?”

“That’s right.” With slashing strokes she began to slice flesh from the pits of brown olives. He was sure she was going to cut herself, and when she suddenly dropped the knife he thought she’d done it, but she was only angry.

“Do I want you watching me make dinner? Older woman mothers younger man? Adorably inept younger man? Feeds him first good meal he’s had in months? Shows him how to make rice for himself? If you want to know how to make rice, look on the package, same as I did ten years ago.”

She attacked the olives again. He watched muscles and tendons come and go beneath the skin of her pale, thin arms.

“So where’s this package?”

“Where do most people keep their food?”

He sighed. In the third of her three cabinets he found a bag of Star Market rice. “No instructions here,” he said.

“Boil a cup and a half of water and half a teaspoon salt stir in one level cup rice cover and reduce to low flame check in seventeen minutes.”

She watched him spend nearly a minute trying to measure exactly half a cup of water, taking too much, pouring out too much, taking too much, pouring out too much. “Oh, come on.”

“I’m trying to follow your instructions.”

“You’re not making a bomb, you’re making rice.”

“I’m trying to do it right.”

“You’re trying to goad me. You’re trying to be cute.’”

“I am not!”

Later they lay on her bed and watched the Red Sox play the Rangers on Channel 38 and looked at the Globe. For a long time Louis studied a full-page ad that showed a businessman using IBM equipment in his office at home. “The books on the shelves in the background of these things. Like this one here. Is that Mein Kampf?” He turned his head. “It’s Mein Kampf! The guy’s got Mein Kampf on his shelf! With his ten-thousand-dollar computer. And these, I bet these are Hustler magazines.”

“Let me see that.” Renée scrutinized the photograph. “It’s Main Street.”

“It’s Mein Kampf!”

“This is an S. It’s Sinclair Lewis. It’s Main Street.”

“I bet he keeps his Hitler stuff in the file cabinet.”

“I noticed you reading about Sweeting-Aldren.”

“Hence my attitude? Yeah. It’s a probing news analysis. They’re comparing the company to an ant.” Louis paged back. “‘Wall Street looks on as the injured insect crawls slowly in a circle, trying to get its legs to work again. It is obviously injured, and yet it may be able to absorb the damage and begin moving again. Long minutes go by; it might be dead; it might be about to continue on its mission. No one knows what kind of pain it might be feeling. If too much time passes and Sweeting-Aldren still doesn’t move, it will be presumed dead. But Wall Street has seen a lot of injured ants over the years, and it knows not to give up on this one quite yet.’ Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Analyst David Blah of Blah-Blah Emerson attributes much of 17 percent drop in stock price since March blah to recognition that it was overvalued! Price-earnings blah blah. However, investors not encouraged by Dr. Axelrod’s statements on Friday that in light of continuing significant earthquake activity in neighborhood of Peabody ‘we just don’t know what to expect in the way of future earthquakes’— Who’s this Dr. Axelrod?”

“Seismologist at MIT. He’s good. He’s — fine.”

“Concern focusing on disruption of production lines. Company operating near capacity, blah blah. If all production shut down more than three weeks, losses in neighborhood of million dollars a day. Further worry regarding lawsuits arising from release of greenish effluent containing biphenyls and other halogenated hydrocarbons. suspicion that hazardous wastes are being stockpiled rather than incinerated as company claims. (Ha.) Fear also of spillage in event of large earthquake, includes chlorine, benzene, trichlorophenol, and other highly volatile and poisonous or carcinogenic substances. Company insured against damage to capital investments, is ‘looking into the details’ of its liability coverage, undoubtedly meaning coverage is insufficient. However, considering strong revenue history, moderate long-term debt burden, and relatively low risk of a major earthquake, three out of four analysts polled on Friday considered Sweeting-Aldren a good buy at Thursday’s closing price.”

Renée took his glasses off and joined him on the business section. As they kissed, he began to scratch the thick denim seam between her legs, below the zipper.

Two quick outs here in the seventh inning.

“I don’t know where you came from. You just crashed in.”

“I thought you were interesting. I pursued you.”

“Is that what happened?” She raised her head from his chest, a god’s face appearing in a cloud above the horizon of his rib cage. “What we did in the hall, after the earthquake. It was just like it’s supposed to be.”

“Lucky thing I came over, huh?”

“I love sex. It’s almost the only thing I’m not embarrassed to like.”

Good effort by Greenwell to hold him to a single.

“You make me want to be a woman,” Louis said.

After the weekend the heat gave way to weather from Canada. The air smelled washed and sweet and full of oxygen, and the trees on Pleasant Avenue drooped pregnantly in the sudden overfullness of their foliage. The public library, on the last hill of Somerville, was like the bridge of a sailing ship, the emptiness of ocean sky commencing directly beyond the parking lot; air flavored with the sound of hammers and forklifts flowed up and over Louis’s face as he and his girlfriend looked out over flat roofs and brick warehouses at the sky-blue span of the Tobin Bridge, and beyond it to the dusk-colored haze over Lynn and Peabody, and the prow of Cape Ann.

The music he’d been happy to eat sandwiches with and the TV he’d been happy to bury evenings under both began to seem shrill and irrelevant. There was a silence on Pleasant Avenue that belonged to Renée, and he wanted to be in it. One morning he borrowed her Harvard ID and for two hours assumed the identity of René Seitchek, visiting Frenchman. He returned from Widener Library with a backpack of Balzac and Gide. He felt like he’d been flung seismically out of a career in radio, a career he might very well have enjoyed and derived a sense of purpose or safety from, into a state where he not only didn’t know what to do with himself but also doubted that it mattered much. Similar upheavals and subsidences were occurring in the landscape of his memory, familiar landmarks dropping out of sight, replaced by remembered scenes of a nature so radically different that he was almost surprised to realize that these things, too, had had a place in his life. A kind, wry Rice alumnus delivering a Commencement address that Louis no less than the other graduates had had to sit through, and reminding the graduates of a thing called social justice. The entire semester he’d spent in Nantes, the couscous he’d eaten with a group of Algerian students there, the students telling him: things are really bad in the country we were born in, and we as French citizens feel torn. His fourteenth birthday, the buck knife in a sheath Eileen had bought and given him. Also Marcel Proust, for whom he’d held a mental door open long enough to be overjoyed by the discovery that Swann was married to Odette and that the wretched painter at the Verdurins’ had grown into the great artist Elstir; the door had fallen shut under the pressure of four five-page papers, each to be written in French, but not before a splinter of joy had slipped through, a splinter that it was evident now was still inside him, like a self-contained and frightening djinn.

Every evening as he listened to the real Seitchek’s footsteps on the stairs he felt a mounting anticipation and curiosity that were not, however, in any way satisfied by the person who after making some noises in the kitchen came into the room where he’d been reading. He saw her with a dreamlike clarity that was the same as a dreamlike inability to really see her. Instead of a face he saw a mask, a sign grasped directly: the image of the woman he slept with. She looked much the same whether his eyes were closed or open. Strangely or not, his presence in her apartment seemed to disturb her less and less. She listened to his tapes while she made dinner and hypnotized him with the precision and methodicality of her cooking, and afterward, while he washed the dishes, she watched his TV and read the paper and didn’t appear to notice any change in him, not even the way he dried all the dishes and put them away and swept the floor and then for another fifteen or twenty minutes stood in the kitchen doing absolutely nothing but avoiding going in to join her on the bed. It was as if, in nuclear terms, the configuration of forces had changed and he was no longer an oppositely charged particle attracted to her from a great distance but a particle with like charge, a proton repelled by this other proton until they were right next to each other and the strong nuclear force came into its own and bound them together.

“You can hurt me a little.”

“What?”

“You can slap me, or bite me. A little. You can pinch me. It’s something you could do, if you want.”

She lay on top of him, the field emanating from the large-eyed steadiness of her gaze bearing down. “Would you do it?”

He twisted his head away. “No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think a man should hit a woman.”

“Not even in bed, if the woman asks?”

“Better not to.”

“OK.”

Her voice was so small only the K was audible. She rolled away and stared at the wall; her shoulder threw his hand back when he touched it. There were silences. Demurrals and qualifications, silences. It took hours to turn the clock back thirty seconds. Long after the last car had driven down Pleasant Avenue, at a time of night when actions and sensations had the moral weightlessness of dreams, he finally let her have her way with him.

The next night, for the first time, she returned to work after dinner. He was allowed to come along. In the computer room, consoles with bubble-shaped chassis like the busts of moon walkers were arrayed in a double row on a Formica-topped bench swamped by equipment manuals and used paper. A plate-glass window gave into a bright room filled with dryer-sized pieces of hardware and a throbbing, all-night white noise of NORAD-style vigilance. Ocean maps like the one in Renée’s apartment hung on the walls, some with drooping corners tipped with squares of sticky stuff. The telephone, which sat on a radiator, had been unplugged, and the room’s atmosphere of transience or abandonment was heightened by a lack of things to sit on. Renée said she hadn’t been on hand when a shipment of new chairs arrived, and that students and assistant professors from the rest of the building had dropped in and helped themselves, and thrown their old chairs in a dumpster, because she hadn’t been on hand.

“I did most of my work in this room. The computer’s a Data General. We have a lot of Sims now too. They speak UNIX.”

Louis stood by a map of the South Atlantic Ocean. “All these dots, all these lines.”

“The dots are earthquakes.”

“There are millions.”

“Thousands every month, yes. The majority at sea.”

He found a map showing most of North America, a ponderous beige mass between seas teeming colorfully with geological life. Red dots were scattered sparsely down the eastern seaboard, sparsely across the northern Ozarks, more thickly in the Western mountains. There was a red-alert mass of them in California.

“The crust of the earth,” Renée said, “is broken into a dozen or so gigantic plates which for fairly well understood reasons related to the convection of molten rock beneath the crust are in constant motion. They bump and grind together, they spread apart. In some cases one plunges way down underneath another. Some of them move as much as a couple inches a year, which over the ages adds up. Ninety-five or so percent of all earthquakes happen near plate boundaries. You can see 011 the maps.”

“But in Arkansas, and what’s this, Wyoming? And New England.?”

“And New York and Quebec and the whole eastern seaboard and out in the middle of the ocean nowhere near plate boundaries? Partly, around here, it’s related to the fact that the Atlantic is getting wider, which puts a strain on the plates to either side of the central ridge. The rock in New England is very old and has a tortured history. There are faults running at all kinds of depths and in all different directions. But if you analyze the earthquakes that occur here—”

She rooted in the papers between a pair of consoles and found a map like the one Howard had shown Louis, with the addition of more epicenters and four balloons:

“Beach balls,” she said. “They represent what’s called the focal mechanism of the earthquake, which basically reflects the orientation of the faults and the direction of movement along them when they ruptured. You draw an imaginary sphere around the hypo-center. It’s black in the directions where the earth has been compressed toward an observer on the sphere. It’s white where the earth has been pulled away from an observer. And you can see here, all four of the events big enough to analyze had more or less the same mechanism.”

“You mean, they’re all black down the middle.”

“Right. And they’re reasonably consistent with a compressional stress on a fault running southwest to northeast, which is also true of most of the other events that have been analyzed in New England. Which indicates that the plate is being compressed by the spreading of the ocean.”

“H.C. That’s Howard.”

She yawned. “Right.”

“Is he good?”

“He’s fine. He doesn’t work enough. He also wasted a year playing around with strong motion.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what you felt on Thursday night. It’s a term for the ground shaking felt near an epicenter. As opposed to the very weak signals normally recorded by seismic instruments. You can make recordings of strong motion, though unfortunately everything’s so complicated by the local geological context that it’s hard to extract much information about the earthquake itself.” She yawned again. “Howard tried nobly.”

In the periphery of Louis’s vision, teeth sparkled in a beard; Terry Snall, quiet as a hunting brave, had appeared in the doorway and halted in his tracks. He looked at Louis. He looked at Renée. He looked at Louis.

“Oh,” he said loudly, as though everything were clear to him now. “Don’t let me disturb you.”

“No problem,” Renée said.

“I’m waiting for a print job.” Terry shook his head in total and radical self-exculpation. “I’m just going to be one second.”

“You can be five hours for all I care.”

“Just one second,” patting the top of the laser printer impatiently. “I’ll be right out of here.”

He waited pointedly for the printer to divulge his job. He inspected the feed end, inspected the excretory end, tapped on the feed tray, sighed hugely, put his hands on his hips, sighed hugely again, and surveyed the entire machine and shook his head. “Just one second,” he said. “Don’t want to disturb you guys.”

Louis had to catch up with Renée as she stalked up a ramp into the sanctum of the heavy machinery. It was refrigerated and was tiled with off-white squares, the absence of one of which, near the main unit, revealed a snake’s nest of cables underneath. On the long wall were racks holding thousands of rolls of magnetic tape. There were red-eyed modems, big tape drives loaded with tapes twitching anxiously, and several graphics screens.

“He is such a jerk,” Renée said, taking a pair of wire-frame glasses from her shirt pocket and sitting down at a console.

“He’s jealous,” Louis said.

“Maybe.”

“No, it’s obvious.”

“Well. If it’s true, it’s incredibly humiliating to me. It’s also a little strange, considering he seems to have decided it’s his mission in life to inform me that I’m full of myself.” She frowned at the screen and typed rapidly, by touch. Louis thought her glasses were very poignant and pretty-making. “He’s been involved with this local girl for about four years. You saw the window by the door? This woman is constantly appearing there and knocking on it, and if Terry’s around, he runs into the hall and out the outside door. He’s afraid somebody’s going to let her inside. He thinks we can’t see this.” On the graphics screen to her right a color image was forming. She glanced through the picture window to make sure Terry wasn’t somehow eavesdropping despite the noise. “Two years ago he got a new car and totaled it almost immediately. He wouldn’t talk about how it happened. His girlfriend came by here one night and Howard let her in. He asked her how the accident happened, and apparently what it was was Terry was driving by this store that had sold him a window airconditioner that he didn’t like and they’d been bad about, and he leaned across the passenger seat to give the store — the building—the finger, and while he was doing this he ran up over the curb and hit a tree. The girlfriend was amused, as were we — she’s actually kind of sweet. And ever since then Terry won’t let her anywhere near the computer room. Which makes you wonder what else she has to say about him.”

“Who takes care of all this equipment?”

“It’s supposed to be shared among everybody using it, but in practice—” Renée didn’t like what she saw on the color screen. Her fingers flew across the keyboard and a new color image began to form. “We’re missing two professors this semester, to begin with. And some people, like Terry, are conscientious objectors. He did a lot of work on the system in ’88, which he thinks absolves him from all further responsibility; he gets very righteous about this although as far as I can tell, all the work he was doing was to install things that would help him with his own projects. And then there are the people who strategically absent themselves when it becomes absolutely necessary to do something like a system dump, which takes all night, and finally also I guess some people I simply don’t trust—”

“Not to fuck it up.”

“That’s right.”

“People must dislike you.”

“Almost everybody, yes, to some extent. But I make up for it with self-love. Why don’t you pull a chair over.”

She loaded a camera on a tripod, turned out the lights, and began to shoot images while Terry’s few seconds with the laser printer stretched into an hour at a console just outside the picture window. Like any good chaperon, he pretended to mind his own business. Louis listened gamely to Renée’s explanations of the images, which were in rainbow colors and consisted mainly of reconstructed cross sections of a “slab” of rock 3,000 kilometers long and 650 kilometers wide and maybe 50 kilometers thick that was descending into the earth beneath a chain of islands running south from the Fijis through Tonga and the Kermadecs to a point not far above New Zealand. Earthquakes of all sizes and fault orientations accompanied the slab’s descent at every depth, and her thesis, she told Louis, had “advanced the study” of what happened to the brittle rock as it fell deeper and deeper into the molten, pressurized goo of the mantle, and what finally became of it at the depth of 670 kilometers, below which depth no earthquake had ever been recorded anywhere.

“Did you get to go to these islands?”

“I thought geophysics would get me outdoors, compared to math or something. Six years later I’ve hardly left this room.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“You think so.” She squeezed the cable release.

“You’ve got something you’re really good at, and it’s really interesting, and it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“When you look at it that way. I guess. It has its frustrations.”

“I wish I could be an academic.”

“Who said you can’t?”

“I wish I could be anything.”

“Who said you can’t?”

“I hate this country. I hate the piggishness. Everywhere I look I see pigs.”

The glance Renée gave Louis in the blue light was tentative, or sad; distanced, like a mother’s. “They’re not all pigs,” she said. “Think about the people who make the subways run. Think about nurses. Mailmen. Lobbyists for good causes. They’re not all pigs.”

“But I can’t be those people. They just seem pitiful to me. They seem like dupes. Things are so fucked up it seems pathetic to try to be a useful citizen. Like if you’re going to play the game why not go all the way and sell out completely. But if you’re too disgusted to sell out, the only other options are to escape or try to tear things down. And I can’t even escape into academics, because I had to watch my father be a professor. Every marxist I know has a life where it’s think by day and drink by night. How could I choose a thing like that? I watch your fingers and your eyes and I feel so envious. You’re in this position where you’re really good at what you do. But I’m here and I can’t imagine moving.”

“We’re going to have to do something about you.”

“An island. An island.”

Strong golden light lit the rooftops of Boston and formed a clear, free space in the air above them, an arena enclosed in the east by a shell of evening maritime mist and within which, to a distance of miles, were visible with perfect clarity billboards and green trees and overpasses on fire with the hour, and minor clouds the color and shape of moles. Jets above Nahant hung with no discernible movement in the blue-gray firmament to which their own engines bled contributions. On Lansdowne Street the faithful were entering the shadow of the temple, marching in a hush past carts selling icons and inspirational literature, past the worn façades of the shrines along the way, with their pre-game specials, their big dollar signs and tiny.95s.

Inside the gate Renée made a small green offering to the Jimmy Fund and its fight against cancer in children and showed no embarrassment when her more cynical companion reacted with a double take. A white charge of light was visible through the portal above them, and as they walked up the stairs the whiteness grew into a green field and thirty thousand fans, all with the skin tones of actors. Suited men were raking dirt. Royals and Red Sox in their dugouts. Keen smells of cigarettes and mustard. Henry Rudman’s seats, halfway up the third-base line and ten rows back, were more than adequate. On either side of them, Rudmanesque individuals exuding pleasure were folding back their scorecards. At seven-thirty, when everyone in Fenway stood, Renée’s eyes darted warily, and Louis, unable for once to change the channel, gritted his teeth and suffered through the hymn.

Few things bring happiness like good seats do. The Somervillians sat with their arms around each other’s shoulders, Renée as rapt and radiant as Louis had ever seen her. She’d brought her baseball glove and she kept her hand in it. Earlier in the day they’d played catch, and he’d learned that she could sting his fingers, right through leather, with her throws.

For five innings the score remained 1–1. There was a fatness, a fullness, a pleasing lack of abstractness to the motion of the ball as it sprang off a bat and hissed through the infield grass, found the center of the third baseman’s glove and received fresh kinetic energy and overtook the runner at first base. Louis later had no trouble understanding why he’d been so slow to see the other thing going on in front of him, the thing three rows down and a few seats to his left.

It was the hand he noticed first. A large, red male hand. With an intentness verging on urgency it was kneading a bare female shoulder, and the tanned neck above it, and the area behind her ear, and the ear itself, taking the skin and flesh in its fingers, taking for the purpose of having. Returning to the shoulder. Advancing in snake-like contractions under the narrow strap of her black dress, knuckles nudging the strap slowly out over the smooth globe of the shoulder and down the arm a little, palps of fingers indenting the skin there, palm molding and squeezing and possessing. Idly, with the hand she wasn’t using to hold her beer, the girl pulled the strap back onto her shoulder. She shook her dark mane back and twisted around in her seat, chancing to look straight at Louis. She was twenty and soft and tough, the kind of equine and unintrospective beauty that star outfielders go for. The hand gathered her in again, her hair and shoulders and attention, and dipped under the back of her dress and stayed there. Only then did Louis realize the hand belonged to a fifty-year-old man whose face he knew.

Renée was hunched forward, chewing a nail. The tag of her T-shirt stood up on her freckled neck. Apparently things were happening on the field, things good for the Royals and bad for the Sox. Louis followed the hand’s creeping progress under the black fabric and around under bimbo’s arm and saw the fingertips halt as close to her breast as propriety allowed, maybe even a centimeter closer. Bimbo whispered into her companion’s ear, mouth lingering, lips dragging across his cheek and meeting his. The obscene red hand squeezed her and released her. The plate umpire roared and punched a batter out. The pigs cheered. The organist noodled. Dimly Louis saw his graying girlfriend’s smile fade and her mouth open: “What’s wrong?

“Is something wrong?"

“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

He made his hand a pistol, braced his wrist and took a bead on the man’s head. “CEO of Sweeting-Aldren. Right there.”

Conceivably despite the cheering these words had carried into Mr. Aldren’s ears; he swung around and briefly scanned all the seats less good than his own, allowing his pouchy and inflamed face and narrow eyes to make their impression on Renée.

“Slime ball,” Louis said, his arm recoiling from the shot he’d let fly.

“I guess I see what you mean.”

“Check out his pinky ring.”

His own hands were cold and white, all his blood boxed up in his heart and temples. Not even a Sox rally and a screaming eighth inning could pry his eyes from the spectacle of fondlement unfolding three rows down. Maybe to her credit, maybe from dim-wittedness, the girl seemed oblivious to the liberties the hand was taking and to the confident, possessing leer that Aldren trained alternately on her and on the players at their feet. She was following the game. And it was not implausible, Louis thought, that she would retain partial possession of herself later on as well, when Aldren took her off to some overfurnished room to penetrate her warm orifices in privacy, the same privacy in which even now, in all probability, his other effluents were being pumped into the yielding earth.

“He sure can’t keep his hands off her,” Renée observed.

“It’s more like she can’t keep his hands off her.”

“But listen.” She touched Louis’s face and made him look at her. “Don’t be so angry. I don’t like it when you’re angry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I wish you’d try, if only for my sake.”

It was a declaration. Louis looked at the face of the person who had made it, the face with the pretty eyes and upturned nose and acne, and realized that this person had somehow become literally the only thing in the world he could even marginally count on.

“I love you,” he said unexpectedly, but meaning it. He didn’t see the fan behind him grin and wink at Renée and so didn’t entirely understand why she bounced back in her seat so abruptly and gave her attention to the game, which was ending.

6

There’s a specific damp and melancholy ancient smell that comes out in Boston after sunset, when the weather is cool and windless. Convection skims it off the ecologically disrupted water of the Mystic and the Charles and the lakes. The shuttered mills and mothballed plants in Waltham leak it. It’s the breath from the mouths of old tunnels, the spirit rising from piles of soot-dulled glass and the ballast of old railbeds, from all the silent places where cast iron has been rusting, concrete turning friable and rotten like inorganic Roquefort, petroleum distillates seeping back into the earth. In a city where there is no land that has not been changed, this is the smell that has come to be primordial, the smell of the nature that has taken nature’s place. Flowers still bloom, mown grass and falling leaves and fresh snow still alter the air periodically. But their smells are superimposed; sentimental; younger than those patiently outlasting emanations from the undersides of bridges and the rubble of a thousand embankments, the creosoted piers in oil-slicked waterways, the sheets of Globe and Herald wrapped around furry rocks in drainage creeks, and the inside of every blackened metal box still extant on deserted right-of-way, purpose and tokens of ownership effaced by weather, keyhole plugged by corrosion: the smell of infrastructure.

It was out in force when Louis and Renée came up Dartmouth Street from the Green Line stop at Copley Square. They walked in silence. The windy brake-lit night when they’d driven these streets searching for a parking place seemed buried in the past by much more than the month it actually had been. Again it was a weekend night, but this time the neighborhood was peaceful and sober and untrafficked, as though by some circadian coincidence all the residents had left town or were staying home with family. The twilight sky was like a painted blue backdrop hanging directly behind the row houses and their domestic yellow lights.

Eileen had been suspicious when Louis called. He’d found it necessary to fire a salvo of apologies at her, attributing his recent meanness to the fact that he’d lost his job. His remorse was just authentic enough to make her sentimental. She said it was “really tough luck” that he was unemployed. She expressed a vague interest in having him over sometime, to which non-invitation he insltantly responded: “Great! How about Friday night?” She said she’d check with Peter. He said he and Renée would plan to come around eight. She said, but she had to check with Peter. He said one thing he should mention was that Renée didn’t eat red meat or poultry. “Oh, that’s OK,” Eileen said, her voice brightening. “I’ll just make some vegetarian thing.”

Once the date had been set, the difficult task turned out to be persuading Renée to lie.

“A mathematician?” She’d gaped at him. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but what’s Peter going to think when a seismologist starts asking him about waste disposal? He’s going to think earthquakes. Do we want him thinking earthquakes? Mentioning to his dad that there’s this seismologist who’s curious about the company? You told me you were a math person, before you went into geophysics.”

“I’m not even going to discuss this with you.”

“Why? Why? All you have to do is say it. I mean assuming anyone’s polite enough to ask about your work, which I doubt they will. You just say, whatever, applied mathematics. Isn’t that what seismology is anyway?”

“It’s a lie. I blush when I lie.”

“Uh! You’re so exemplary I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, and I wonder if you appreciate that. I’m really beginning to wonder.”

“Lying is a social skill,” he said patiently. “Everybody has to lie. And this particular lie is like totally benign.”

“Misrepresenting myself, manipulating two people who’ve invited us to dinner in good faith, trying to get some time alone with one of them so I can extract information on the pretext of idle curiosity? This is a benign lie?”

It was in moments of frustration like this one that Louis thought of Lauren. He was convinced that Lauren would have lied for him. Lauren would have known what to do.

“Look,” Renée said. “If the subject comes up naturally, in the course of a conversation, and I don’t have to lie, fine. Otherwise, I know you’re angry at these people, I know you feel like you’ve been stepped on. But they’re still people, and to go there in total cynicism, which is what you’re doing — I find it very worrisome that you’d consider doing this.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. She was getting on his nerves. “Things aren’t so black-and-white. For one thing, I actually had a not-bad talk with Eileen. It’s not like I’m blaming her the way I blame my mother. You know, she’s a victim too. You think I’d go there in total cynicism?”

“I’m saying I can see you beginning to think you can treat people whatever way you want to, because you’re so angry. And the reason this matters to me is that I care about you.”

He filled his lungs with air. He let it out slowly. The idea that Renée so fully understood his shortcomings was almost more than he could stand.

“OK, OK, you’re right,” he said, more temperately. “But it’s like you’re killing everything by thinking too much. I’m not asking you to be diabolical. I’m just saying let’s go and have a good time and try to get what we want. It’s like you do so much thinking that it’s impossible for you to have dinner with people under any circumstances. The only way you can stay exemplary is to stay by yourself. Because you’re never going to really respect the people you’re with, and the music they like, and the food they eat, and the clothes they wear, and the less than totally intense thoughts they have—”

“I said I would go.”

“And that’s morally wrong, right? It’s deceptive. To act like you’re on the same level they are, when inside you feel more exemplary and aware and everything. It turns you into a false person, with a false smile and no friends, which is ultimately—”

“Fuck you, Louis. You really do abuse me.”

“Which is ultimately very sad. Because underneath you’re a very lovable person, and you want to be liked and have fun.”

He was perplexed by her stubbornness. He honestly believed that she’d be a happier person if she could loosen up a little; but all he got for his pains was the feeling that he was an odious Male. Of course, maybe he was an odious Male. The odious Male seeking control over a virtuous and difficult woman won’t scruple to exploit whatever weakness he can find in her — her age, her mannerisms, her insecurity, and her loneliness above all. He can be as cowardly and cruel as he wants to as long as logic is on his side. And the woman, yielding to his logic, can do no more to save her pride than demand his fidelity. She says, “You’ve humiliated me and won me now, so you’d better not hurt me.” But hurting her is precisely what the man is tempted to do, because now that she has yielded he feels contempt for her, and he also knows that if he hurts her she’ll become virtuous and difficult again. These archetypes forced entry to the apartment on Pleasant Avenue like vulgar relatives. Louis wanted to turn them away, but it’s not so easy to slam the door in your relatives’ faces.

In the brick house on Marlborough Street, at the door of the Stoorhuys-Holland residence, he watched stress do extreme and painful things to Eileen’s face and Renée’s face as they squeezed through the moment of hellos. Then he handed over a bag of beer. Eileen was wearing an oversized black karate outfit, with her hair fanned on her back and shoulders. The effect was stylish and reminded him of borzois, dogs which when he passed them on the street always seemed like they’d be happier running around in jeans and sneakers but couldn’t, because their owners were rich.

He figured Eileen was entertaining them tonight because she’d lacked the skills to escape his self-invitation, but it was possible that she was also curious about Renée. She led them into the living room — empty of partygoers, it had some dignity now, was less of a station, more of a room — and explained that Peter had been helping one of his little sisters set up a new computer and was due home at any minute. She asked “you guys” if they’d had trouble parking. She hoped “you guys” didn’t mind eating so late. She offered “you guys” beer or wine or beer or. whatever. She hoped “you guys” liked moussaka. Having thus exhausted the possibilities for addressing them collectively, she jumped out of her chair and said, “Where is my boy?”

They listened to her phoning in the kitchen, her voice getting higher, its girlish tone stretching thin as the irritation underneath it swelled. When she returned to the living room she slipped into her chair as though she didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. However, there was no conversation. Her guests merely looked at her, and at length she pretended to wake out of a trance. “He’s coming,” she averred.

Renée spoke. “You— You’re in business school?”

Eileen nodded rockingly, not looking at her. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

“You must be about done, though,” Louis said.

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded and rocked, some aspect of the stereo holding her attention. “I’m all done, actually.”

“Where will you be working?” Renée asked.

“Um.” She rocked. “Bank of Boston?”

There was a long silence. Shyness had paralyzed Eileen, shyness of the kind that makes a five-year-old bury her face in her mother’s arms when a stranger asks too many questions.

“What kind of thing will you be doing there?” Renée said gently.

“Um. commercial loans?”

“And. what kind of thing does that entail?”

Blank-eyed, Eileen turned to Louis, who frantically indicated that it was her question to answer, not his.

“Commercial lending,” she said. “It’s, you know, helping corporations finance things. Capital improvements. Acquisitions, takeovers. Development. It’s — really not very interesting.”

“It sounds like it would be very interesting,” Renée said.

“Oh, well, it is interesting. To me, it’s very interesting. But I think Louis said that you’re a scientist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yeah, well. It’s not interesting in that way. It’s more of a people kind of job, you know, where you have to deal with different kinds of people. That’s sort of where the interest is.”

Here Eileen ran out of gas. No matter how Renée tried to draw her out, she could think of nothing else to say about the work she would be doing. What puzzled Louis was that she didn’t take the obvious escape route, which would have been to ask Renée about her work, or him about his lack of it. She just squirmed and let the gruesome silences accrete.

It was almost nine when Peter breezed into the apartment, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and carrying two boxes of floppies. Instantly Eileen became voluble again and launched into a more detailed account of Peter’s day, beginning with his little sister’s visit to the Computer Factory. When he returned from the kitchen, a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand, she tried to rope him into the narrative by smiling up at him, this her boyfriend, the topic of her conversation, her very words made flesh. “Did you get everything set up?” she asked.

Peter let the question lie on the floor a few seconds before he squashed it with an impatient “Yeah.” To Louis he doled out a small and hollow “how’s it going.” Renée, however, he joined on the sofa and regaled with a long and thorough inspection of her head and arms and lap and head, smiling slyly all the while, as if they shared some secret. He dangled his whiskey glass between his knees and hunched over it like an ice fisherman peering through his hole. He said it was good to see her here again. He remembered she’d come to the party in mourning, very cool. He lamented that they hadn’t had a chance to talk more at the party. He focused on Renée, saying one thing after another to her, as if Louis and Eileen were conversing separately and not listening. Or as if he were the host of the Tonight Show, forgetting the audience in his fascination with this special guest, appropriating our fantasies of leaning close to her. Renée, thoroughly confused, began to smile at her knees the way you smile at a pretty good joke told by a person you’re not sure about. She gave no reply at all when Peter asked her if she’d seen yesterday’s Globe.

“You’re kidding,” he said, “you didn’t see it?”

She shook her head, still smiling. Peter looked over his shoulder at Eileen. “We still have that paper, don’t we?”

Eileen shrugged crossly.

“It’s gotta be in the kitchen,” he said. “You want to get it?” Louis was very sorry to see his sister unfold herself from her chair and silently obey the order. When she returned, Peter took the newspaper from her hands without looking at her.

“See this?” Peter let everything but the Metro/Region section slide to the floor. “Right here? Lead story? ‘Pro-Choice Advocates Decry Mail and Phone Harassment.’ And a fetching little picture of you? Courtesy of Channel 4 news. And here and here and here?” Inevitably, condescension had crept into his voice. “How about that? You’re all over the place.”

“We didn’t get a paper,” Renée vaguely said to Louis, as if this were his fault.

“Dr. Renée Seitchek, Harvard University seismologist—”

She turned again to Louis, with a dark and vindicated look. “This TV show, I didn’t see that. Sounds pretty wild.”

“It wasn’t wild. It was stupid.”

“Right.” Peter nodded as if he’d said it himself. “Like even worse than stupid. You express an opinion and next thing you know you’re getting hate mail and you can’t even use your own telephone. You know what?” He put his hand on his hip and leaned away so he could see her better. “I think you’re being very brave. To speak up like this. I think that’s awfully damn brave. Private citizen branded an abortionist for expressing an opinion on TV? It’s like the ultimate nightmare.”

She leaned over his lap and squinted at the paper. Louis was dismayed to see how readily she tolerated Peter’s attention, and how pretty her flushing cheeks had made her, and how close her neck and shoulders were to Peter’s face. Peter, for all his faults, appreciated what an interesting and sexy and brave person Renée was; odious, immature Louis only said unpleasant things to her and criticized her. How could she fail to notice the contrast? The worst of it was that Louis didn’t know himself which way he wanted things, whether it was better to have a sad and twisted girlfriend who needed him so much that he could say whatever he wanted to her, or to be involved with a real woman who could attract other men and fill him with anxiety and forget him.

Eileen looked even less pleased than Louis. While the two thirty-year-olds huddled on the sofa in their faded jeans, she sat in her goofy silk pajamas and leveled on Renée the same evil stare she’d been using for twenty years whenever something she felt was rightfully hers was being denied her, even momentarily.

“Need some help with dinner?” Louis asked her in a cartoon voice.

He followed her to the kitchen, where she continued to glance balefully in the direction of Renée and Peter.

“So,” he said. “You’re all done. You passed all your exams.”

“Yeah.” From the refrigerator she took Russian dressing and a green salad big enough for twelve. “You want to toss this?”

She put her head in the oven. Hearing nothing from the other room but a rustling paper, Louis imagined that Peter and Renée’s mouths had already found each other, Peter squeezing her breasts and stifling her cries. His feelings had acquired such a physical bite that he could hardly believe he’d ever been in bed with her before, had ever tasted or touched any more of her than the mere idea: a voice, a willingness, a head, an older person — anything but the woman he now imagined in the other room. And it was a great thing, jealousy. It was a drug that charged up the nerve endings and delivered a first-class rush. On the minus side, it damaged his control over the salad he was tossing, which goaded by fork and spoon was surging from the bowl, cucumber disks splatting on the counter; and underneath the rush (which was great) he suspected he did not feel well at all.

Hands in thermal mitts, Eileen gazed dispassionately at the mess he was making. “Did I tell you what happened the night we had our finals party?”

“No.”

She pulled her hair behind her ears with quilted paws. “It was so funny. It was so, so funny. My friend Sandi’s dad owns this limousine company, and he was supposed to let us use three stretch limos, as a graduation present, and we were going to have this road party and end up in Manhattan and have dinner and go dancing at the Rainbow Room?”

“Uh huh.”

“But so these limos come to pick us up, and we’re all dressed and it’s raining, but there are only two of them? And there are eighteen of us?” Briefly she doubled over with the funniness of her memories. But we all pile into these two limos and we start having champagne and caviar, and we’re watching this video that this other friend found in the library which what it’s about is management training in the dairy industry? It’s all these cows and milking machines and guys with clipboards and crew cuts talking to the guys who work the machines. And slapping the cows and looking at cheeses and lobbying in Washington? It’s totally fifties, there’s this long shot of the Capitol Building, where they’re going to be lobbying for milk subsidies?”

“Uh huh.”

“Hoo ha ha,” she laughed. “But so we’re somewhere in Connecticut, out in the middle of nowhere, and this horrible thing happens to the other limo — not the one I’m in, the other one — somehow all the radiator fluid ends up on the highway and none of it’s in the radiator, and the driver won’t drive it anymore? And there are eighteen of us and it’s pouring rain and we only have one limousine to get to New York in, and the driver says he won’t take more than ten, and of course nobody wants to volunteer not to go.”

“Of course.”

“But we can just barely see this truck stop, down in the valley, it’s this huge truck stop, with about a million trucks out in front of it and nothing else around, just woods. So we all decide, who needs Manhattan, we’re just going to have our party right here. So we all go in, and there are about a thousand of these big red-faced truckers, they’ve all got tattoos and they’re smoking and eating this greasy food. And we’re totally dressed up, the guys are all in black tie, and Sandi’s in this Oscar de la Renta dress that’s cut like—!” The neckline Eileen drew across her chest indicated nipple exposure on Sandi’s part. “But we all walk right in anyway, and of course everybody’s staring at us, we’re carrying our champagne glasses, the tall kind, and the guys are carrying the bottles—”

“Was Peter there?”

“No, this was just from our class, we had to limit it. But we went to this room that had a jukebox, and, well. It was so much fun. We were surrounded by all these truckers and making all these jokes and listening to all these oldies and country music. Sandi called her dad and had him send an extra limo, but it was like midnight before it came and by that point the other limo driver had gone to Hartford for more champagne. Sandi was dancing with this trucker that she linked arms with and drank champagne? Everybody was really getting into it. But it was so much fun. We got back about six in the morning, we were all totally plotzed. Everybody asked us how New York was, and when we said where we’d been, nobody would believe us. They just couldn’t believe we’d spent the night in a truck stop.”

“It is amazing,” Louis said.

She nodded, removing garlic bread from the oven. “You want to tell them we’re going to eat?”

He went to the living room. The look Renée gave him as she headed for the dining room was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was just miles away.

“Something smells very good,” she said to Eileen, encouragingly, when they’d all sat down. Louis grunted in agreement. This was right before he realized that the sauce oozing from his slab of moussaka was full of ground beef. Appalled, he looked across the table at Renée, but she was now leagues away and filling her plate with salad. Raising a slice of eggplant with his fork, he uncovered a veritable ants’ nest of beef granules.

“Did I tell you what happened the night of the last earthquake?” Eileen paused and with her eyes made an approval-seeking connection between Renée’s plate and Renée herself. Renée, however, was occupied with raising fortifications, handling her hands and flatware with such absorption and willed inconspicuousness that although she was as nakedly in view as the other three, Louis could look straight at her and still not see what was happening to her moussaka or how she felt about it. He understood this to mean he shouldn’t make an issue of it.

“It was so funny,” Eileen said. “Last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics gave a talk at school, and afterward this professor of mine had him over to dinner with some of his students. He’s got this gr-r-reat house in Nahant, with about three acres overlooking the water—”

“Nahant,” Peter said. “Major Mafia neighborhood.”

Renée nodded and smiled, her eyes on her napkin.

“It’s not all Mafia, Peter. Because Seton lives there, and he’s not Mafia.”

“You got some kind of proof of that?”

“He’s not! He’s not Mafia. He’s a — a Harvard professor!”

“Ohhhh,” Peter said, smirking for Renée’s benefit. “I see.”

“He’s not Mafia,” Eileen assured Louis. “He’s an adjunct professor. But the Nobel guy, he’s Japanese. I can never get his name right. I know it when I hear it but I can’t remember it. Do — you remember?”

Louis’s jaw dropped. “You’re asking me if I remember the name of last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics?”

“See, neither do I. But anyway, he’s this funny little guy with round glasses, and we were having cognac after dinner in Seton’s living room, and people were starting to leave, and suddenly there was this earthquake. I was standing by the fireplace and I started screaming, because it was really an earthquake, I mean it was really strong.” She blushed a little, realizing she had everyone’s attention now, even Peter’s. “Stuff was falling off the mantel, and the floor was — it was like being on the T. Peter, that’s what it was like. It was like standing up on the T, you had to hold on to something or you’d lose your balance. It only lasted a couple seconds, but everyone was shouting and glasses were breaking and the lights were flickering. But then it stopped, and like one after another we all started noticing — Hakasura? Haka—? Hakanaka? Shoot. But anyway, we started noticing that he was still sitting in his corner of the sofa and talking about econometric inversions. He hadn’t even noticed the earthquake! Or he’d noticed it but he’d kept right on talking. He was holding on to the girl’s arm to keep her from standing up, the girl he was talking to, and finally he sees that we’re all standing there looking at him. He finishes his sentence and he looks up and he asks, ‘Is someone hurt?’ (but in his accent which I can’t do), and we say, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘Well then. We have a saying in Japan—’”

She frowned. “Shoot. Shoot.” She looked at Peter. “Do you remember what it was?”

“You couldn’t remember when you told me either.”

“It was like, ‘If you— If you—.’” She looked around the table sheepishly. “I can’t remember. I thought I did but I don’t. It was something like—”

“They get the idea,” Peter said.

It began to seem to Louis that he was the only person at the table who did not belong. By and by Renée rose from behind her fortifications to answer questions about earthquakes, as usual sounding like a seminar leader; and it was Peter, not Louis, who seemed to possess what she said; it was Peter whose face shone with the reflected radiance of her expertise.

After ritual consumption of Hāagen-Dazs, Louis selflessly left the thirty-year-olds alone in the living room in case Renée needed more time to pry facts out of Peter.

“You seem kinda down,” Eileen told him in the kitchen, as he watched her load the dishwasher. “Is it your job?”

“What job? I don’t have a job.”

“So you haven’t found anything.”

“I’m not even looking.”

“But weren’t you like real interested in radio?”

He duly noted that she’d scored a point by “showing concern” for him like this. He laughed, briefly, at the idea he was interested in radio.

“Do you have money to pay your rent and stuff?” she said.

“Nah. But I’m moving in with Renée this week, so.”

Surprise muted her voice. “You are?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” She turned up the corners of her mouth. “That’s nice.”

“Yes.”

She made a strong second effort. “She’s really smart, isn’t she? She is so smart. And she’s like — your age?”

Louis stared at his sister. “Yeah. My age.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“I met her at the beach. She had a beach ball.”

“Uh huh. Be sure and give me your new address, OK?” She scraped Renée’s uneaten beef into the trash, where there were two Stouffer’s frozen moussaka boxes, and put the plate in the dishwasher. “And you know, if you’re really low on cash, you could probably ask Mom—”

“Hey. There’s a thought.”

“Well although she’s kind of upset right now. I don’t know if you heard, it’s this really terrible thing. She’s getting all this money, but about 90 percent of it’s in stock in Grandpa’s company, Sweeting-Aldren, you know, where Peter’s dad works?”

“Oh, yeah. Chemical company?”

“Right. Except she doesn’t get control of it until next month, and you probably haven’t been reading in the paper, but the company’s in really awful shape, because of the earthquakes and this chemical spill near their plant. Peter’s dad’s the operations vice president and he’s in charge of all this stuff. But so for a while the stock price was falling like a point a day, which is really terrible, and Mom’s sitting there with all this stock and she has to watch it fall like two million dollars in value without being able to do anything about it. Can you believe that? I mean, two million dollars? And she can’t do a thing about it. Plus most of the other stuff she has is real estate, I guess mainly Rita’s property, and there’s suddenly this depression in real estate up there, because of the earthquakes. So she’s really upset. She flies out here and then she can’t do anything, so she goes home but then she just sits around and worries, so she keeps flying back. She doesn’t even call me anymore, when she’s here, which is fine with me; she’s not herself. Does she call you?”

“I’m seldom near a phone, so I wouldn’t know.”

“I really feel sorry for her. I mean, sheesh! Two million dollars.”

“It’s a hard, cruel world,” Louis said.

Eileen activated the dishwasher and looked around to see what dishes hadn’t made the final cut. “Peter’s family was really lucky,” she said. “The last earthquake did a lot of damage to their house. We were out there and we saw. Part of the house sort of settled? They have this new addition which they’re going to have to tear it down, and put a new foundation in, and their doors don’t close anymore. They live in Lynnfield, they have this wonderful house, and it turns out they had earthquake insurance? It was just really lucky. You could get it as a rider, but nobody used to want it until this year. But I guess the Stoorhuyses just wanted to be completely insured, and so now they’re not going to have to pay anything. One of their neighbors, it’s going to cost like twenty thousand dollars to fix their house. And you can’t get the rider anymore unless you wait a year before it takes effect.”

Louis thought of Mr. Stoorhuys, his forelock, his too-short jacket sleeves. His bushy, wagging tail. “Do you see them a lot? Peter’s family?”

Eileen’s face darkened. “Peter and his dad don’t get along too well. His mom’s real nice, though, so we see them a little. He’s got four sisters and a brother. He’s the oldest.” She looked at Louis sideways; there was a clump of suds on her silk lapel. “You know, he’s really a nice person. He’s a great older brother. He’s always doing stuff for his sisters.”

Louis was at a loss. “I’ll make an effort.”

He was called upon to make that effort almost immediately. Eileen took him into the living room and asked Peter if he had any ideas for a job Louis could get. Peter scrutinized him as though his job qualifications were written on his body. Renée was also looking at him, flashing let’s leave signals. Peter asked what kind of minimum salary requirements we were looking at.

Louis spoke in his zombie voice. “I wouldn’t say no to five thousand a month plus benefits and paid sick leave. I type thirty-five words per minute.”

“Frankly,” Peter said, “with requirements like those I think you’re going to be looking for a lo-o-o-ng time. Now, what I was going to suggest is you look for the kind of arrangement I got into with Boston magazine a few years back. We’re probably the best publication you could be with at this stage. We’re a little labor-rich right now, so I would not get my hopes up, but, uh, I could put in a word for you, if you want.”

Eileen gave Louis a huge smile: here was a really good possibility for him! Peter might be able to do something for him right away!

Peter swirled the ruddy liquid in his snifter. “What they may do,” he said, “is start you off on a one hundred percent commission basis. Doesn’t sound so great, huh. But if you don’t let ’em set a ceiling, it can work in your favor. I started out that way myself, and you know what I made my first month?”

During the moment Louis was given to guess the figure, Renée listed illy on the sofa, overcome by the high voltage of misunderstanding in the room.

“Twenty-one hundred dollars,” Peter said. “And that was three years ago. Granted, I had some experience at that point, so these may not be equivalent situations. You may have to bust your butt for a couple of months. But if you can hack it, you’ll be pretty close to where I am now in two years max.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Louis said. “I’ll think it over and get back to you. Do you have a fax number?”

“Just give me a call,” Peter said.

“Think it over, huh, Louis?” Eileen earnestly touched his arm. “He can really help you.”

Renée had teletransported herself to the door. Again the grotesque distortion of faces as she and Eileen exchanged thanks and good wishes, squeezing through the moment of departure.

“Yo, Renée,” Peter said across the room. “Take care of yourself.”

Outside, the city made its rustling noises, its sighs and murmurs, its auditory offerings to the indifferent sky above it. Somewhere a subway wheel screeched on a rail, so far away the sound was dime-sized. The avengers walked up the street without speaking, doing three-on-two rhythms with their feet, Louis’s stride long, Renée’s more rapid. She was biting her lip and blinking as if resisting tears.

“You had a bad time,” Louis said.

“Yeah. I had a bad time. I had a very bad time, but it was my fault.”

“It’s your fault my sister gives you a plate of beef?”

“I can eat a little beef. It doesn’t kill me. I mean, yes it does kill me: I can’t eat it. But it’s not like it makes me sick. It’s only me. It’s only my problem with it.”

“I was the one,” he objected slowly, “who made you go. The whole thing was my idea.”

“Do you know why I stopped eating meat?” She was staring straight ahead. A damp breeze full of infrastructure dragged sickles of her hair across her forehead. “It’s not for — moral superiority. Just so you know that. It’s only because I don’t want to forget. I refuse to say OK, I’ll forget this is a cow. It’s nothing noble, it’s nothing compassionate. It’s only me and my problems.”

Across the street a Camry had found a parking place and was swinging in happily, rump first. Louis decided this was a good time to say nothing.

The trolley snaked and groaned beneath the center of the city. Riders spoke quietly, and flattered by their deference the enveloping silence grew glutted and despotic. They were nearly at Lechmere before Louis dared ask if Renée had gotten anything out of Peter.

She shook her head. “He was very cautious, when I brought it up. He seemed surprised when I told him what he’d said at the party. He said he must have been very drunk. I said it must be true, though, what he’d said. And he said, yeah, his dad says the company doesn’t do any dumping, but he’s pretty sure they do. I asked him why he thought so, and he said he’d heard some things, but it wasn’t anything he could prove. That was all I could get him to say, without seeming like I really cared.”

“Did he ask you what’s causing the earthquakes? I was noticing you—”

“Yes. I lied, exactly the way you wanted me to. I sat there and told him a lie.”

Louis collared her and pulled on her ear, but she was very unhappy. He waited until they’d crossed Cambridge Street and were in his car before he said, “Aren’t you going to ask what I found out from Eileen?”

“Did you find something out?”

“Nah. Only that Peter’s parents had earthquake insurance for their house. A special rider.”

He watched his words sink in. “You’re kidding,” she said.

“She volunteered it. I didn’t even ask.”

“Nobody. Nobody around here buys earthquake coverage.”

“So I gather.”

“Oh wow.” She pressed her head into the headrest. “Wow.” She took his hand and squeezed it hard, hitting her thigh with it. He gave her a kiss and she snapped it off like a grape from its stem.

“Are you mine?” he said.

“Yes!”

They drove home to Pleasant Avenue. On the kitchen table were the United Airlines tickets that had come in the mail that morning. Apparently Louis’s father had purchased a Boston-Chicago round trip in Louis’s name, without telling him, after a bad conversation they’d had on the previous weekend.

“These,” he said tiredly.

“I still don’t understand why he sent them.”

He drank a glass of water. “It’s this von Clausewitz side of him. We have this conversation where I basically hang up on him, and he turns around and buys me plane tickets. Because now it’s my fault if he loses three hundred bucks because I don’t go.”

“You could just say you have to work.”

“You mean, tell a lie? Funny you suggest it. Unfortunately, I already told him I’m unemployed. And the thing is, it’s a nice thing. I was totally rude to him, and he turns the other cheek and gives me three hundred bucks’ worth of tickets, because in his own pot-headed way he’s trying to hold the family together. I told you he called me because he’d found out about my little run-in with my mother, up in Ipswich. He’s like, You want to trash her sofa? That’s cool, Lou, but you should consider her feelings too. Which has only been his refrain for about twenty years, you know, that I should consider her feelings too. Which is exactly what he’s going to tell me if I go out there. And so, like, why go? I’ve already heard it.”

Renée put her chin on his shoulder and her hand on his crotch and squeezed him. “I won’t object if you don’t go.”

“The person who should go is you, not me. You and him would really hit it off.” He dropped into a chair, and she sat down on his lap. He slid his hands up under her T-shirt. “I guess we’ll just see how we feel next Sunday.”

“When are we going to move you in?”

“I don’t know. Sometime before then. Wednesday?”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime. ” He pulled her shirt up slowly, bunching it above her black bra.

“I have to do some work. Plus the system backup on Monday, which will take all night.”

He unhooked her bra and freed her breasts, these female things that it had seemed, tonight, that he had never seen before. They were soft and animate little scones. He was just beginning to take a good, hard look at them when—

“Mm!”

She jumped to her feet, pulling down her shirt, and crossed her arms and faced the wall. He thought she’d gotten tangled up in her selfconsciousness again. Once she’d fixed her bra though, she apologized and said it was only the raccoon, the raccoon at the window, it had been looking straight at her.

He hadn’t seen this raccoon yet. He went to the window, but with the kitchen lights on, all he could make out through the screen was some rear porch lights in the trees, and a length of white gutter at the bottom of the piece of roof outside the window.

“Listen,” Renée said.

There was a strange huffing, almost too faint to credit.

“He’s right around the corner,” she said. “He gets nervous and goes around the corner, but then he gets more interested and comes back. I say he, but I’m not sure about that. Which is interesting, how an animal without gender, I always say he. Default gender: male. We should get away from the window, though. It—”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“What?”

“It’s like an earthquake. It only comes if you’re not looking.”

“That’s right.”

“But it does come. I mean, there really is a raccoon.”

“Yes! You think I’m lying to you?”

They sat down at the table. Louis cheated, pretending not to watch the window but continually stealing peeks, and still it came as a complete surprise when he realized that the screen had stopped being blank. At what moment, exactly, had the dun-colored snout and perspicacious leather nose and shiny eyes appeared?

This time when he went to the window the raccoon retreated only as far as the gutter. From there it gave him a hurt look, over its shoulder, like a doubtful suicide on a ledge. It was a big animal, ring-tailed and bandit-eyed, larger than a cat. The moment Louis turned to glance at Renée, the raccoon returned to the window. It paced back and forth, a dark blur of fur for the most part, but now and again (and each time surprisingly) it pushed its nose against the screen and looked at Renée.

“Oh, it still has its sore,” she said, concerned.

“This is great. Do you feed it?”

“Sometimes I put stuff out. It usually doesn’t eat much. I don’t see it very often. Sometimes it comes two or three nights in a row, and then I won’t see it for a month. Three months, once. I thought it was gone. A dog got it, a car got it. Rabies.”

Louis watched it climb up a drainpipe, hunching its furry and powerful shoulders like a cat, extending an arm like a monkey and then, as it put its chin on the gutter and heaved itself onto the roof, looking more like a person than anything else. The ceiling creaked, once, under its weight. With a smile, he turned to make a comment to Renée; but the room was empty.

He found her naked in the sheets. Full of desire, he stripped and came to her, but even in the midst of his anticipation, even as he clambered into her arms and rested his weight on her volume and felt the uniform warmth of her skin and took her head in his hands, he wondered how she always worked it so he came to her, rather than vice versa. He wondered why he had to feel so alone when they made love, so alone with her pleasure as he propelled the long wave train that led to her satisfaction (on the green plotting screen in the computer room she’d shown him what a large and distant earthquake looked like as it registered on the department’s digital seismograph: a flat, bright line faintly rippled by the primary wave, settling down for a moment and then swinging more violently as the secondary wave arrived, and more violently still as more and more shock waves bounced off the earth’s outer core and inner core and crust, the sS and ScS and SS and PP and PKiKP, until finally the line went totally haywire in the grip of tremendous, rolling surface waves, the Love waves and Rayleigh waves that demolished bridges and leveled buildings and tore the earth up everywhere). It wasn’t that they didn’t fit together or come enough; it just seemed as if at no point, not even in this most typical of acts between sexes, did she ever present herself or give herself or even let him see her as a woman. Even before jealousy had sharpened his interest, he’d been telling himself to stop and look at this woman the next time they made love, and each time they made love he forgot, and remembered only afterward. There was something like an earthquake’s own shyness in the way she tricked his eye, so that he could be with her and feel the presence of everything but those very qualities his imagination called up when he was alone and pictured a Woman. Always it seemed to suit some obscure purpose of hers to have the two of them be the same sex, excitable through matching nerves and satiable through matching stimulation. Some principle of seduction, some acknowledgment of difference, was missing. And it seemed as if whenever she sensed that he felt an absence she started talking, in a voice orgasm-drunk and lulling — pro-him, pro-them, pro-sex.

So he turned the lights on. It was two in the morning. “I want to look at you,” he said.

She squinted in the brightness. “We don’t need all these on.”

He turned on one further light and stood by the bed looking down, intending, once and for all, to really see this woman. The game was up; she couldn’t hide; she didn’t try. In the glare of the lights, he saw: the blackness of hair and eyelids. The red smudge of mouth and nipples. Wry labia distended and flecked with foam. An ear with metal in it. The loll of untensed muscles beneath grayish skin. Dull, puckered areas of dried or drying semen. Dark fuzz on upper lip and wrists. The fetal mashedness of a tired face. All the qualities laid out like organs for sale in a French butcher’s meat case. This was the warm body he’d been holding? This was his girlfriend, Renée?

He’d been tricked yet again. He’d seen an angel floating on thermals high above him, and not believing in it had shot it down and found it to be nothing but a feathered and lumpy piece of meat. The report of the gun echoed off into space like the laughter of the angel that had escaped.

Suspiciously uncurious about what he was standing there for, Renée pulled the sheet over her shoulders. He supposed it was possible that she was just very sleepy. He crawled into bed, craving her desperately.

On Sunday the Globe ran an endless article on the recent earthquakes, the long columns flanked by the usual escort of photos and graphics and boxes. Renée wasn’t mentioned in the main text, but she did get quoted in a box headlined EARTHQUAKES: GOD’S WILL, EARTH SPIRITS, OR CHANCE PHENOMENA?

For Harvard University seismologist Renée Seitchek, the line between science and religion has proved particularly tortuous. Seitchek, who in the April 27 broadcast denounced efforts by Stites to link the abortion issue to the temblors, has become a target of illegal telephone and mail harassment directed at clinics and physicians who perform abortions and other pro-choice advocates in greater Boston.

Stites and other COAIC leaders deny responsibility for the harassment, but Seitchek believes the barrage of hate mail she has received constitutes an attempt by the religious right to stifle free and accurate expression of scientific views.

“The science of earthquakes is a science of uncertainties,” Seitchek said. “By admitting this uncertainty we run the risk of appearing to allow room for superstition, and yet if a scientist tries to forestall this and draw a sharp line between scientific debate and moral debate, she apparently is running the risk of being harassed by Philip Stites.”

According to the box, Stites’s “successful prediction” of the recent earthquakes had attracted dozens of new followers to his church, which was still housed in the shaky tenement in Chelsea. The church claimed to have suffered “no real damage” since moving in, though by now nearly every home north of Cambridge had had a few dishes broken or walls cracked.

Cumulative property damage, in fact, had reached an estimated $100 million, with more than 80 percent of it due to the most recent pair of quakes near Peabody. On a sheet of paper marked their fault, Louis wrote:

April 20, Peabody $3,400,000

May 10–11, Peabody $80,000,000 +

It gave him great satisfaction to carry all the zeroes out.

In her spare moments, Renée was continuing to develop the scientific case against Sweeting-Aldren, studying every documented instance of induced seismicity. Louis was glad to see her working, but he was in no hurry for her to finish. The longer they delayed taking action against the company, the more time the earth had to shudder again under Peabody and cause further damage and run the company’s tab to still more satisfying heights. In his view, Sweeting-Aldren’s management were slimes and enemies of nature, and he wanted to see them bankrupt, if not in jail. He felt suspense almost erotic in intensity as he waited, day after day, for the next large earthquake. To occupy himself, he began to read basic seismology texts while Renée was away at work.

Late in the afternoon on Wednesday she came back to the apartment with a new manila folder filled with photocopies. She’d been at Widener reading old newspapers.

“Some interesting things here,” she said.

He opened the folder greedily, but she stopped him. “Let’s get your stuff. I’ll tell you later.”

It was summer again. Heat coiled off car roofs in the no man’s land of Davis Square, the marquee of the Somerville Theater trembling in the giddy swirl of gas fumes. Louis and Renée had been going to the theater at night for cheap double features and free airconditioning.

On Belknap Street the soprano had her windows open and sounded near death. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It was a sound so wide that it didn’t seem capable of having issued from as narrow a thing as a human mouth. “I would like to make this person selfconscious,” Renée said. Louis put her to work in the kitchen, the room farthest from the hell of melodious torments. The soprano screamed and screamed. The tortured ear could not believe that no person of authority was coming with a needle or a gun to stop the misery, for humanity’s sake. Louis slid the catch down the front storm door’s piston and got some rope out of the Civic. The futon was going to ride on top.

“Hey, Lou. Lou! Where you been?” John Mullins came down his porch stairs angrily. He planted his feet in the driveway with his head thrust forward like a desert prophet’s. A cyst-like glob of sweat was hanging on his chin. “People been lookin’ for you, Lou,” he said, all opprobrium. “Where you been? Where you been? Oh my God, you’re not movin’ out, are you? Lou? You’re not movin’ out? Whatsa matter, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you like it around here?”

“I love it here,” Louis said above the aria. “I’m just making sure all my things fit in the car.”

“Heh, little Hondacivic. You like this car? Oh, hey, Lou, that girl that was here looking for you, she ever find you? You know who I’m talking about? Pretty girl.”

The instinctive part of Louis, the part connected to blood pressure and stomach, not the cognitive part, asked Mullins, “When was this?”

“This morning. About nine, nine-thirty. I was readin’ the paper. I told her you’re not around much in the day.”

“What did she look like?”

“Big girl. Said she was looking for you.”

“Fat girl with glasses?”

“No, no. Pretty girl. She had a suitcase.”

Louis went inside. Almost immediately he came back out and looked at the car, trying to remember what he had to do. He touched the car once, on the hood, and went inside directly to his room and walked in circles. Renée packed plangently in the kitchen, flatware hitting skillet, the carton grunting as its flaps were folded under one another. He was supposed to pick things up and carry them to the car. However, everything he looked at with a view to carrying it seemed to be the wrong thing to carry at that particular moment. He kept walking around the room. He was like the person whose house is on fire who can’t decide what possession is most precious and so can rescue nothing. The only thing he knew for sure he wanted was to murder the soprano voice, which had begun to hold long, high notes and exaggerate the tremolo. But this voice, its incessancy, now seemed to him a fundamental property of the world that he was powerless to alter. He stood by his window facing the soprano where she sang behind her opaque screens. He was not unhappy or happy. The wave front advanced across the mountains, changing the landscape as it came, and then he was in it, he was in it. That was all.

Sooner than he’d expected, he heard voices in the front of the apartment. Female voices. Footsteps. Renée appeared, the carton in her arms. She spoke like a fugitive’s imperfectly deceived mother, when the police are at the door.

“There’s somebody here to see you.”

She stepped aside, opening the way past her, pointedly recusing herself from the difficulty. When instead of leaving he looked at her and tried to say something, she was compelled to add: “It’s your friend Lauren.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt her eyes on him as he walked up the hall, felt tie whole weight of her possession of him, and so it was not entirely a surprise that the girl standing just inside the front door, by a small straw-colored suitcase with a black leather jacket draped over it, should strike him as a vision of liberation. Lauren was tan and fair-haired and taller than he remembered her. One glance made clear how busily his mind had been training itself to appreciate Renée — to see those parts of her that were cute and fresh and to overlook the larger fact, which was that she was thirty years old and not beautiful. He could recognize a bill of large denomination without reading the numbers on it, and he could recognize Lauren’s beauty without referring to her long, muscled twenty-two-year-old’s legs, her golden twenty-two-year-old’s skin, her silky twenty-two-year-old’s hair, now grown out nearly to her shoulders. She was wearing the same plaid ruffled miniskirt she’d had on the first time he saw her, similar black shoes and ankle socks, and a white tank top damp with sweat between her breasts.

The soprano, breaking off, had left an unwelcome stillness.

“Hi Louis,” Lauren said in a flat, unsteady voice, not looking at him.

“Hi, uh. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just came to see you.”

“Where’s Emmett?”

She gave no sign of having heard him.

“Not here, obviously,” Louis said.

She bit her lips, still not looking at him.

“Where is he, Lauren?”

She raised her chin and said, “We’re not together anymore."

“Oh, I see. You left him. He left you. You’re separated. You’re divorced.”

These words caused her great discomfort. She looked at her shoes, inspecting either side of one of them. “I don’t know. Can I come in?”

“Maybe not.”

“I made a terrible mistake, Louis, a terrible mistake. Can I come in?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know if I’m too late. If I’m too late I won’t come in. Can I come in?”

Renée was now standing in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. She and Lauren couldn’t see each other, but Louis could see them both.

“That was your girlfriend, wasn’t it,” Lauren said.

He turned to Renée as if he had to check about this. Renée’s face made it clear that she thought he ought to have been rid of the visitor by now. She gestured impatiently: Well? What are you waiting for! But as he continued not to speak, her impatience gave way to alarm, and then the alarm gave way to pain, and finally the pain gave way to an overwhelming disbelief, each of these stages visible and distinct.

“Oh, is she right there?” Lauren said with mock stupidity.

You can hurt me. A little. You can bite me, or—

He was aware of making a mistake, but he had no control. He was fascinated by the pain in Renée’s face. He was finally seeing her. She was finally naked, and he kept looking at her, thinking I am a rapist too. I am a sadist too as he hurt her for his pleasure, doing it with his silence and understanding now what people meant when they talked about how a penis can rule a man, because that was exactly how it felt. But she was a person, just a decent person, and not interested in taking this. With terrible dignity she walked through the dining room and living room. She stepped around Lauren, who leaned aside as if avoiding a stranger on the sidewalk. Renée knocked the leather jacket off the suitcase, barely managing not to trip on it as she hurried out the door.

“Oh boy,” Louis murmured, to the empty space she left behind. He couldn’t believe all the blood on his hands.

Lauren closed the door and hung her jacket on the knob. “She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she. You can tell me.”

“Oh boy,” he murmured again. He hadn’t quite been sober enough to realize that what he was doing to Renée was the worst thing anyone could do to her. But he knew her and he knew this was the worst thing. It was the very worst thing. And though he hadn’t “realized” this, he’d known it perfectly well.

“I figured you might have one,” Lauren said, slouching almost horizontal on the beige sofa. “It was a risk I was taking. But I knew I could always turn around and go right back.”

The fact that she would have to walk to her apartment now. The pride with which she’d walk the two and a half miles. And the dogs wouldn’t howl, and she’d take the stairs two at a time in her sneakers and jeans and T-shirt, and lock the door behind her, and would she cry? Only once had he seen her cry, and that was from physical pain, and as soon as she’d locked the door, in his mind’s eye, it became difficult to see her.

“You want me to go?” Lauren said. “She’ll forgive you if you explain things. Just tell her the truth and she’ll forgive you.” She spread her fingers and studied her nails. “You know, because I don’t want to butt in, if she’s your girlfriend. She is your girlfriend, isn’t she. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She’s your girlfriend.”

“Yeah.”

“So do you love her?” Lauren swung her head nervously, not wanting to hear the answer. “I can leave right now.”

“No! No. Just. let me lock my car.”

Renée wasn’t waiting by the car or anywhere close to it. He looked at the empty air above the sidewalk down which she necessarily had walked, since she was no longer in sight. Logic insisted that she’d traversed this distance even if no one had seen her do it. It further insisted that at this very moment she was somewhere between here and her apartment, not on just any block but on some particular block, walking forward, visible to all. It insisted that ail observer in a balloon could have followed every step she took between leaving here and arriving on Pleasant Avenue and climbing the four crumbling concrete stairs to the door of her house and disappearing inside it.

Louis thought: I hate her.

As soon as he was inside again, Lauren stood up, stretched her arms luxuriantly, and smiled as if it were morning and she’d slept divinely and she knew that he, of all people, would be happy to know this. Freed of the burden of seeing her through Renée’s eyes, he was now properly amazed to have in Toby’s beige apartment this pretty and complicated girl he’d loved so much. She came to him and put her face against his, bending back for a moment to snatch his glasses off. Not kissing him, but with her eyes staring into his with the astonishment and goofy emptiness that eyes take on at point-blank range, and with her nose pressed against his and her words making his lips vibrate, she said, “I am in love with you, I am in love with you, Louis, I’ve been thinking about you every minute of the day, I am in love with you, I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

She caught her breath, her pupils and milky gray-green irises still centered in his vision. She kissed him, placed his hands on various parts of herself, curled up her own hands and pressed her knuckles on his chest. She twisted her head back and forth beneath his mouth, as if he were a shower she was taking. Her perfume was so integrated with her sweaty face-smell that his nose couldn’t find the border between them, it was all one nice Laureny smell.

“I promise you,” she said. “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll stay, I’ll go away, I’ll stay with Emmett, I’ll leave Emmett, I’ll marry you, I’ll have babies for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll marry you, I’ll live with you without being married to you. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay for as long as you want me to and I’ll leave whenever you say, you can own me, you can throw me away or keep me, you can do anything but sell me, anything, anything, anything.”

He held her, remembering her specific dimensions and how her back had felt when she’d cried in his kitchen in Houston and he’d put his arms around her.

“Oh Louis,” she said, crying and smiling. “You were so good to me, and I was so bad to you. But I’m going to make it up to you. If you let me, I’ll make it up to you.”

“Although of course you’re married now.”

“Oh, that.” A familiar guilty, sullen look crossed her face. “You know, I’m still trying to be a good person. I’m trying to love God and be a Christian, and I’m here in Boston seeing you. Marriage is a holy sacrament and I’m here seeing you. It’s like I’m the same old person, right? Everything I touch turns into garbage. And the thing is you’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks I’m worth something. The only person. Remember when I told you I’d never really loved anybody?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was true. It was true. But it’s not true now, because as soon as I couldn’t see you anymore, I felt this thing. I guess I thought it was guilt or something, but I wanted to see you and talk to you, just to hear your voice a little, but I’d already told you we couldn’t, and I thought you must hate me, or that you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

She sat on the sofa and frowned as if something didn’t quite make sense. “You see,” she said, “but there was Emmett too, and I felt sorry for him because he’d always been so incredibly patient with me, plus his family really seemed to like me. They gave me all this stuff when we got engaged, his grandmother gave me these beautiful pearls and his mother gave me this inlaid box that was like a hundred and fifty years old and had been in the family forever. But then I slept with some other guys and I also said I’d slept with you that time, right under his nose, and I gave him his ring back but I never even had the courage to give the other stuff back. And then when we started to get back together they were all still incredibly nice to me. They treated me like I’d been sick but now I was well, and I just felt so sorry for them, and really grateful too, and I thought, you know, This is the sacrifice I’m going to make. Because all I wanted was to be a good person. And it’s so clear that if you want to be good you have to sacrifice things. Plus I thought, they’re all so nice to me, it’s not even that much of a sacrifice. And my parents wanted me to get married because they think Emmett’s really great, which he is, I guess, except I don’t love him. I only love you.”

Louis closed his eyes.

“But so. We got married.” Lauren chewed her lip, her eyes on some remembered scene or ceremony. He thought she was going to go on, but apparently this was all she had to say.

“So then what. It turns out he’s a brute.”

She shook her head.

“Yes? No?”

Perched on the edge of the sofa, she stared sullenly at a silver radiator. She tossed her head, flipping her hair off her shoulders. Her face was tough and uncaring. “I was unfaithful to him.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Aren’t I a great person, Louis? Aren’t I just the greatest? But there was this guy I knew from before, and it was like I had so much more in common with him than with Emmett, you know, he’d fuck anybody, you know that kind of person, and I just didn’t care. I could tell I’d made too big a sacrifice, and it was like I needed to do some rotten stuff to make up, you know, and balance things. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess what I finally realized was that I wanted him to throw me out again because there was this thing in me. And what the thing was, was that I was in love with another person who used to be in love with me until I hurt him, and I loved him so much, and I missed him.” Tears came to her eyes again and she lowered her chin, as though trying to burp, still staring at the radiator. “I mean, Emmett’s real nice and all. But he treats me like this sick baby, and after a while I can’t stand it, so I go and do this horrible shit to him, but that just makes it all the more clear that I’m this sick baby, you know. And finally I just don’t believe anymore that somewhere inside him behind all his niceness he doesn’t really just hate my guts and wish I was dead.”

There was a long silence. Louis felt panic at the thought of Renée, who during these minutes when he hadn’t been thinking about her had doubtless made it all the way back to her apartment. Time was passing in her life even as it was standing still in his. She was getting all this time to think while he was not.

A question in a low voice crossed the room: “What’s her name?”

“Who? Oh. Renée.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“She hates it.”

“She does?”

“So she says.”

“Is she in love with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you guys really boy- and girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think you might want to go out with me? I mean, right now?”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Yeah, but I want to go out with you. That’s what I’ve wanted all day. I just have to go to the bathroom.”

They were getting in his car when John Mullins came lurching and paddling down the driveway from behind his house. He aimed his ghastly face at Louis, his mouth like a gunshot wound, and stared without a trace of recognition.

“Have you ever been up here?” Louis said.

Lauren shook her head. “It’s nice. It’s so different. We’ve been hearing about all the earthquakes. Were you in them? Were you scared?”

“Nah.”

The polygons of dirt between the footpaths in Harvard Yard had been seeded and roped off to fatten up the grass for the trampling pleasure of graduates and parents and alumni, later in June. For some reason a handful of women from the Church of Action in Christ were picketing the Holyoke Center, carrying large photographs of aborted fetuses. The colors were garish and oily, like Korean pickles. The messages were topical: QUAKES ARE GOD’S WRATH. CAMBRIDGE = EPICENTER OF BUTCHERY. PSALM 139.

By the Red Line escalators, young punks were drinking vodka and kicking beanbags. Hare Krishnas in robes the color of orange sherbet drummed and juggled in front of the Coop. Lauren swung her shoulders as she walked, undaunted by the scene. The pedestrians in the side streets, the men with scrubbed faces and narrow little shoes, the women with thin hair and small mouths and ultra-sexy shades, posed no threat to her confidence. She put her hand in Louis’s back pocket. A year ago this had been all he wanted, just to walk down the street with her and be her man.

They stopped outside a slightly worn Tex-Mex establishment. He shied from the door — the clientele was what Renée would have called “the implicating people” and what he considered “the Eileen’s-friends kind of people”—but Lauren towed him in. She had them seated in the smoking section, explaining in a low voice that she still smoked and drank a little, because she’d realized that it was impossible to make yourself perfect all at once. “The only time I haven’t been a mess was last summer, when I was seeing you. That’s the only time in my whole life I haven’t felt like a mess. You helped me so much. And I was so bad to you.”

She leaned back to allow room on her lap for a menu. Louis asked what she was doing for money. She said she was using her American Express card, which Emmett’s parents paid the bills for. “It’s pretty rotten of me, isn’t it? To fly up here like that.”

“Are you going to pay them back?”

She shrugged. “They’re real well off.”

“You should pay them back as soon as you can.”

She nodded obediently. “OK.”

He cast a benign smile on the loud students at neighboring tables. What a convivial and pleasant thing it could be to be normal and eat in a cheerful restaurant surrounded by other young people doing the same, and how especially pleasant to do it in the company of a pretty girl who had just declared her love. His towering resentment of the likes of the all-befouling Mr. Aldren dwindled to an irritation he could take or leave. It was true that when Lauren left him and their fajita dinners alone even for one minute, while she went to the bathroom, the fires in him reignited, and he began to burn holes in the heads of a table of male and female law students who kept making their harried waitress banter with them. A cake with candles came, and, being very original, four of the five men sang harmony instead of melody. By the time they were singing Dear Nico-ole, the fifth man had decided to be creative and original too, and so only the females were left to do the melody. But when Lauren returned and said maybe they could go dancing, Louis calmed down immediately. He gave her credit card a wistful look. He was pretty close to broke.

Cool lawns and cigarette smoke, a warm June night. It had now been five hours since Renée walked away; she’d now had five hours to be thinking by herself. Louis bought a Phoenix and Lauren picked out a club across the river which, when they got there, he was amazed to think had been operating probably every night he’d been in Boston, providing fun for a crowd whose median age was roughly his own. They put their hands out to get them stamped, the buckles and wrist strap on Lauren’s jacket dangling. He didn’t mention that the only time in his life he’d ever consented to dance was at a May Day party in Nantes, among Algerians. Fortunately the club was already crowded and it was mostly a matter of bumping and clutching anyway, and except for some rap cuts the music was abhorrent and difficult to move to, the rhythm “shallow,” as restaurant reviewers sometimes say of spice in chili, it had a “searing, superficial heat” rather than the “deep burning heat” that comes from careful cooking and good ingredients. But with Lauren in his arms he could taste the joys of being uncritical.

They drove up Soldiers Field Road with the windows down and her hair billowing and migrating towards her inside shoulder, the river moving against the lights of MIT and Harvard, the lights moving against the six northern stars visible in the muggy night. That it was one-thirty meant Renée had now had nearly eight hours to be alone and think, but he computed the figure only out of habit, because he could no longer imagine her so well.

In his apartment they lay down in their clothes on his futon and Lauren tried his glasses on. “This is what you’re like,” she said, crawling over him, the glasses sliding down her nose and her hair hanging on his ears. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone as happy as she was. She was full of sport and it suited both their needs to be like teenagers, enjoying the clothes that kept them separate, taking very small steps down the carnal road, enjoying the countryside along the road, its season and smells, and remembering when a season was so long that you forgot that other seasons followed it, and a smell was a smell and a sound was a sound, sensations not yet clogged with memories. At length, when they heard his roommate Toby’s printer starting up, they took some clothes off. Lauren handed her breasts over casually, like surplus charms she was glad to donate to the needy. But when he put his hand in her underpants she stopped him, saying,

“Don’t.”

“Don’t you—?”

“I don’t need it,” she said, very hoarse.

He lay on his back, needing it very much.

“If we did that now,” she said, bending over him and tickling his chest with hers. “We’d just be pigs.”

He pictured Renée alone in her apartment and thought he might as well have been a pig already.

“Don’t you think?” Lauren whispered.

“Don’t you think we should just start right now trying to be strong and do the right thing? Don’t you think there are certain things we shouldn’t do if we’re not going to stay together? Can’t we just be happy like this?” Louis seriously doubted there was any way at all for him to be happy. He knew that if he promised to love her, she’d take off her underpants and let him come inside her, and that somehow it would be easy then for him to dump her and go back to Renée. What stopped him wasn’t the fear of hurting her. It was that he had always been good to her, and he believed she really loved him now, and he couldn’t stand the idea of killing her precarious faith in a human being’s goodness. All he could do was lie still and hope she’d fuck him anyway, faithlessly, out of a pity he didn’t deserve. Then he could be rid of her.

“Don’t you believe I love you?” She rested her chin on his thigh. “You have to. You have to give me time to show you how much I love you. You have to give me chances, because I do love you, Louis. I adore you. I adore you.” She kissed his penis through fabric; it rocked stormily. “I’ll do anything for you, if you just give me a chance. But if you really think you might still love me, but you’re not sure, you won’t ask me to do certain things yet.”

“Your ticket,” he said. “Do you have an open date of return?”

“I flew one-way.”

“God, the Osterlitzes will really love you for that.”

“No, I flew standby. I flew standby.”

“Well, I think you should try to get a flight back on Sunday.”

“And stay where?”

“You’ve got to have some friends you could stay with.”

“Can’t I go to Chicago with you?”

“No. I have to think.”

“But you’ll come back here, and she’ll be here. And even if you see her just to tell her you want to break up with her you’ll forget me and you’ll want to stay with her. And I’ll be hanging around in Austin waiting to hear from you, and then I’ll have to come up here again, but you’ll already have decided you love her more.”

He didn’t know what to say to this.

“But you’re right,” Lauren said. “You’re right, but you have to look me in the eye and swear to God you won’t forget about me. You have to promise you’re going to think about me.”

“Not a problem.”

“Because I don’t want you if you don’t really want me. I don’t want you to always be thinking you made the wrong decision, like I had to. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I’ll go, Louis. I’ll go to Austin, because I love you so much. But you have to promise me you’ll think about me.”

“That’s not going to be a problem.”

“I love you so much. I love you so much. I love you so much. ”

Over and over he dreamed that he was missing his flight. He was in waiting rooms with Lauren and she was cold to him; he had to beg her for a smile and a kind word. Over and over he realized that it was a day earlier than he’d thought and that he hadn’t missed the flight at all. But this proved to be a delusion every time. It was Sunday and he saw a wall clock and realized he had three seconds to get to the other end of the airport. He could already see the plane being pushed back from its gate.

They were awakened by the buzzing of afternoon insects. Summer days that you wake into the middle of are angry with you, branches and dusty leaves tossing in a hot southern wind, air-conditioners working hard. Louis was speaking to Toby on the phone when Lauren emerged from her shower. “It’s like Houston,” she said. “I thought it was supposed to be cold up here.”

Late in the evening they drove to Pleasant Avenue. Although he knew it was an evil thing, he let her brush aside his objections and come along with him. She waited in the car while he went inside. The Dobermans threw themselves against their door, but the lock held. Upstairs, taped to Renée’s door, he found an envelope with his first name written on it in her principled hand. It contained his plane tickets and nothing else. Two DeMoula’s bags were standing on the landing, his dirty clothes in one of them. The clean clothes had been folded and bagged with his tapes and miscellany. His TV set stood to one side.

Through the landing window he saw an immense white Matador parked across the street. It was Howard Chun’s. Cigarette smoke, ghostly in the cigarette-smoke-colored streetlight, was rising from Louis’s Civic.

He put his eye to the keyhole; the kitchen light was on. He put his ear against the door; there was no sound but the ear itself rustling against wood. Then the Civic’s horn honked, and he gathered up the bags and television and ran down the stairs, almost forgetting to drop his key into the mailbox.